Killfile (22 page)

I make my entrance
into OmniVore headquarters the next evening at 11:00
P.M
. I walk in through the front door.

Just for tonight, I'm part of the cleaning crew, which is mostly staffed by illegal immigrants. Their bosses squeeze the maximum square footage of clean office space out of each worker, so they usually end up alone and unsupervised, trying desperately to clean a whole floor before moving on to the next building on the night's schedule.

And each one of them has an all-access pass to every office in the building.

Most corporations already know about this glaringly obvious hole in their security. The guys who spend millions to protect their corporate secrets still can't resist cheaping out on their cleaning contracts, however. The worst they can imagine is one of the janitors going through a desk for valuables. Other than that, they don't think about it. The people in coveralls and uniforms barely register to the men who hire them; they hardly even exist.

I found my janitor the same way I found Max: hanging around outside the building and watching the crews as they emerged after work. I got a good look into their minds as they headed back to their van. Even at 1:00
A.M.
, most of them were on their way to a second job,
which meant they'd work more hours in a day than any programmer, and not while sitting down either. Most of them had families. That's why they were sweating all night: to put some cash away to give their sons and daughters a better life than they'd ever see. I could feel the hope and the exhaustion coming off them like steam.

They were useless. They had too much to lose.

Fortunately, there's always at least one guy who's looking for an excuse to get fired. That was Anthony.

Anthony left work every night in time to catch the last shift at the strip club. He was already planning ahead for the weekend, when he'd drive his rebuilt Camaro across the state line into Nevada and blow whatever was left of his paycheck at the craps tables.

I approached him with cash in hand, and rented his uniform and his place on the night shift for five hundred bucks.

The supervisor and all of Anthony's coworkers look right at me, but they don't see me. They see the picture I'm putting in their heads: Anthony, slouched behind his cleaning cart, filling out his uniform as usual.

This is my version of an invisibility cloak. The technical term is “inattentional blindness,” a kind of cognitive dead zone in your visual field. Your brain is constantly bombarded with more stimuli than it can possibly handle: about fourteen million bits of information a second, according to the guys who keep count of that sort of thing. It has to narrow all those millions of bits down to a manageable amount just so you aren't paralyzed by all the incoming data. So it takes shortcuts. It cheats.

Your vision, for instance. Over a third of your brain is dedicated to processing the details streaming in from your eyes, and it's still not enough. So your brain ignores most of what you see. The couch in the living room, the tree outside your office window, the people standing
with you in line for the ATM—your brain skims right over them to save time and energy. It fills in the gaps with the same images over and over, like the scenery behind the characters in one of those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. That's the reason that you don't see your missing car keys on the front table, even when you've looked there a dozen times. They faded into the background.

In other words, you really only see what you expect to see. And I can manage those expectations. Everyone here expects to see Anthony, and their minds supply all the details I need to hide in plain sight. To them, I'm as invisible as chewing gum on the sidewalk.

Unless they step in it, of course.

We push the carts into the elevators, past the security guards at the front desk. I'm subtly reinforcing their apathy by broadcasting

in every direction. Sure enough, they don't give me a second look.

I can't fool the cameras, though. They're everywhere now. I'm pretty sure my ball cap and three-day stubble are enough to beat any facial-recognition software that OmniVore might have, but it won't stand up when a real person checks the video tomorrow.

It won't matter. Tomorrow will be way too late.

I
BREAK AWAY
from the rest of the cleaning crew, taking my little cart up twenty-six stories to OmniVore's offices.

Anthony's key card opens the doors, and I walk inside. I remove a steering-wheel lock hidden in the cart and stick it through the door handles. The doors themselves are wood paneling over a fireproof steel core; the building code requires it. It would take a forklift to break them down, so I should have time to work.

OmniVore's space is set up along an open floor plan. It doesn't
have cubicles, let alone offices. The desks are arranged in some kind of fractal pattern, probably designed by an industrial consultant at $350 an hour to maximize efficiency and proper communication. The whole place hums with raw computing power: there's a rack of machines in one corner, hooked to the workstations, quietly processing terabytes of raw data. There's a kitchen area devoted to snacks, with espresso machines, Sub-Zero refrigerators, and smoothie makers. There's a gym area, including a climbing wall built into the concrete that goes all the way up to the ceiling. There are sofas with pillows for power naps. In another corner, there are foosball tables and classic arcade games—which should be a little too dot-com for a company like OmniVore, actually. The whole place is an adult version of a preschool, filled with soft corners and fun toys.

There's only one office with actual doors and walls: it's a huge, two-story atrium, like a glass rocket aimed at the ceiling. It surrounds a couch, table and chairs, and a desk cut from a massive slab of redwood. There's only one screen in the room, a giant HD display on the desk, with a tasteful little brushed-aluminum keyboard in front of it.

Preston's inner sanctum. Big glass windows so he can see out, but I have no doubt that the glass goes opaque at the push of a button whenever he decides he wants privacy.

There's a clear line from Preston's office to the fire exit. That's good. I use a metal wedge to jam that door shut so no one can sneak in behind me. Then I make a quick circuit of the rest of the area.

There's food on the floor, trash everywhere, and gum stuck to the desks. These guys are slobs. If I was actually here to do Anthony's job, I'd be in trouble.

Instead, I remove my packages from the cleaner's cart and place them close to any computer I find. The open floor plan helps. Walls might have seriously screwed up the range and impact.

I head back to Preston's office.

Unsurprisingly, Anthony's key card does not work on the reader on Preston's door. It blares loudly at me, a warning not to try it again. I'm sure the unauthorized entry was logged somewhere, but nobody's going to come running for an honest mistake by the janitor.

There's a keypad. Just for fun, I try the passcode I fished out of Max's head.

The door alarm blares again, louder this time. Two strikes. Now I'm sure that another attempt will bring security.

I didn't really expect the passcodes and key card to work. Just like he's the only one in the office with a door that locks, Preston's the sort of guy who has to have control of his own secrets.

I wasn't able to snag any of his passwords or security codes when I went on my raid inside his head. Even if I had, it would be stupid to expect that they remain the same from day to day. A guy like Preston understands security. He knows you need a constantly shifting passcode, keyed to an authentication token, like a chip on a smartcard. Or, even better, something like retinal scanning.

I don't have that. I have a short-handled sledgehammer. It breaks the lock on the door with one swing.

Alarms immediately begin shrieking. It's annoying, but I've worked with gunfire going past my head, so it's not enough to distract me. I drop the sledge and wheel the cart through the door, then get behind Preston's desk.

I pick up the desk phone and dial a number I've been saving in the back of my memory.

A voice on the other end. “Hello?”

He sounds groggy. Well, even boy billionaires need their sleep.

“Hello, Preston,” I say.

I didn't get passwords, but I did manage to retain Preston's personal
cell number. I know he keeps it with him constantly—he's got the same complicated, needy relationship with his toys as any other geek—and he'll always pick up for a call coming from work, even at three in the morning.

“I thought you'd want to know that in less than five minutes, you're going to get a call from security, letting you know that someone has broken into your office,” I tell him.

Preston knows this isn't the protocol. This isn't how he should be alerted to a security breach. And that wakes him up fast.

“What? Who is this?” he demands. His voice is instantly alert.

“I'm the guy who broke into your office, genius,” I say. “It's John Smith. It's time we had another talk.”

“
Y
OU'RE A FUCKING
dead man,” Preston says.

I'll be honest. I didn't have to make this call. But it's worth it just to hear the rage.

“Yeah, I've heard that before,” I say. I follow the cords from the monitor into a hole in the big slab of the desk.

“I mean it,” he snarls. “You're so fucking dead. I didn't think you were smart, but this is just stupid. What are you going to do? You're stuck in my office.”

“I might surprise you,” I say.

“You can't surprise me,” he snaps. “I know all about you now.”

“Really? What's my favorite ice cream flavor?”

“Fuck you.”

“So close. It's strawberry.”

There it is. The computer's hard drive is located underneath the big slab of wood behind a hidden door. It's big—industrial-server size—and custom built.

“I know about you,” he repeats. “You're supposed to be some kind of psychic.”

That is interesting. His CIA contacts have decided to bring him into the loop about my talents. Which tells me that they've decided he's more valuable than whatever secrets I used to hold.

“I don't like that term,” I say as I drag the hard drive out from under the desk. “See, what we call the mind is actually a metaphor for all the different processes—memories, physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and reflexes—running inside your head, and what I do is—”

“Spare me,” he says. “I've read your file. Whatever it is you do, I know you're not bulletproof. That's all that matters.”

“Come on, Preston,” I say. “Do you really think I'd call you up without a good reason?”

He takes a deep breath. I can almost hear him trying to regain control.

“All right,” he says. “Tell me. What do you want?”

“I'm giving you one last chance to end this peacefully,” I tell him. “You give me what I want, and I go away.”

“I assume you've got a list of demands.”

Now he's stalling. He wants to give his security team plenty of time to reach me. If I had to guess, I'd say he was talking to me on his personal phone, and frantically texting on another device, telling his goons to get here as fast as possible.

Doesn't matter. They'll be too late.

“Nothing too difficult for a guy like you,” I say. “Call off the hit on me and Kelsey. Restore my house and my bank accounts. And then add one million dollars for the inconvenience.”

“And if I don't?”

I use my Batman voice. “Then I'll destroy everything you've built. Starting right here, right now.”

He laughs at me. Remember what I said about the essence of a good threat? The target has to believe you can carry it out. And Preston clearly does not believe me. “Well, that sounds reasonable. Thing is, I don't have that kind of cash on me. Will you take a check?”

“You know, Eli, you are not coming across as completely sincere.”

“And they said you couldn't do your little mind-reading act over the phone.”

Fine. I didn't really expect him to fold. We'll do it the hard way.

While pulling the hard drive out from the desk, I accidentally bump the keyboard, and the giant HD screen flares to life. There's a simple password prompt over the OmniVore logo.

That's not what I need. I already know it's a waste of time to try Max's passwords and logins. Like the door, there's only one wizard with the magic words to open this gate.

And he's not sounding very cooperative.

Fortunately, I have another, more reliable method to get what I want out of the computer.

I take my last tool from the cart: a high-speed, handheld rotary zip saw. Slices through sheet metal quicker than a knife through a beer can in those infomercials.

I put the phone on speaker and turn on the saw. “Just remember,” I say, “I tried to negotiate.”

I fire up the saw and cut into the computer's casing. Then I carve the hard drive out of the machine.

I can hear Preston yelling, even over the sirens and the metal-on-metal shriek of the saw.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” he yells over the speaker as I turn off the saw.

“I'm sure you've got a link to the cameras in your office. You should be able to see.”

The drive is huge, at least compared to the off-the-shelf units you can buy at Staples. It still fits easily into a small messenger bag, however.

I look up and find the camera. I smile, and hold up the bag.

“I know what you keep in here,” I tell him.

The source code for Cutter. The core of his business. The engine to his Ferrari.

Maybe it's just a huge coincidence that both Sloan and Preston came up with software that can sift so brilliantly through trillions of bytes of raw data. I've got a theory about that. Maybe I'll get to test it someday. Maybe I'll never know.