“He may be talking about Javier de Galdiano,” Klein said. “He’s the main tech person behind LayerCake. He’s why Dresner’s search subsidiary is run out of a campus near Granada, Spain. De Galdiano doesn’t like to leave home.”

“Marty,” Smith said. “Look at me.”

He didn’t seem to hear and Smith reached out to force his head around. When their gazes met, Zellerbach came back from the brink a bit.

“We…We can’t stop him from triggering it, Jon. He’ll have too many fail-safes. But maybe we could change the way LayerCake judges people.”

“What do you mean?” Randi said.

“What if we could make it think everybody’s great? Then he can trigger it all he wants. It won’t do anything.”

“Can you hack in, Marty? Rewrite the parameters?”

“No. There’s no outside access. We’d have to be inside the building. And we’d have to have Javier’s password.”

“What do we know about him?” Randi said. “Dresner’s security is notorious but we might be able to get to him somewhere else. Can we find the address of his home and a schematic of any security systems he has installed? How does he get to work? Does he drive himself? Does he have family or friends he visits? What about hobbies that would take him outside? Biking and skiing are big in that area.”

“I can get that,” Klein said. “It’ll take some time, though.”

“Jon,” Zellerbach said, tugging on his sleeve.

“Just a second, Marty. We also need to start looking into the security at the campus. Even if we get to—”

“Jon!” Zellerbach repeated, this time grabbing Smith’s shoulder and shaking him.

“What is it, Marty?”

“I know him.”

“You know who?”

“Javier.”

“You’re friends? How close?”

Zellerbach’s words came out in a breathless jumble. “I’ve never actually met him. He’s an old hacker, like me. There are five of us who have a competition and we set up challenges and try to do them and get a trophy we pass around. Javier has it now. He broke into my system to get it. My system! He’s so smart, Jon. So smart.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“Yes. We have a private chat room. The five of us.”

“Tell him you’re coming to Spain and you want to meet.”

“Face-to-face? We don’t do that. He won’t want to do that.”

“You said he has the trophy right now,” Klein interjected. “What if you won it and said you wanted to pick it up personally?”

“Yeah. That’s in the rules. I could do that. But I haven’t won it. He knows I haven’t won it.”

“What’s the current challenge?” Randi said.

“To turn all the screensavers at the National Security Agency to gay porn.”