Randi pulled two guns from beneath her coat and tossed one to Smith. They were manufactured entirely from non-metal parts and worked a little like a semiautomatic flintlock rifle. A packet of gunpowder attached to a ceramic marble was projected into the back of the barrel by a carbon-fiber spring and then touched off by a spark when the trigger was pulled.

While entirely invisible to metal detectors, the design had significant drawbacks. The clip held only five rounds and the reload time hovered around fifteen minutes.

Zellerbach slipped past the Spaniard and took a seat in front of the terminal. “Can you get me in?”

De Galdiano entered his password and a graphic of a slowly spinning globe came on screen. Zellerbach pointed to the bright pinpoints of light dotted across it. “Are those the LayerCake server farms?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Hundreds.”

“No problem. No problem. I’m on it.”

De Galdiano walked across the room and sat behind the other terminal in the room. “Are you sending your Internet profile worm, Marty?”

“I’m connecting to the mainframe at my house now…Okay, it’s on its way to you.”

Zellerbach’s profile worm was an incredibly sophisticated web bot that he’d originally designed to constantly search for mentions of him on the ’net and alter the pages to portray him as a particularly attractive combination of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Fabio. Later, he realized that it could also be used to get revenge on the people who had tormented him in high school. In fact, Smith occasionally still searched the names of a few of his football teammates when he needed a laugh. Last time he’d looked up a guy who had once given Zellerbach a very public wedgie, the web was wall-to-wall with reports of his arrest for shoplifting a box of extra-absorbent tampons from a 7-Eleven.

“Got it,” de Galdiano said and then opened the program. A screen came up asking for the full name of the soon-to-be victim. He typed Christian Alphonse Dresner. A list of thirty-nine people by that name came up in the order of Google ranking. Not surprisingly, the man they were looking for was at the top.

“How does it work, Marty?”

Zellerbach was hammering away at his keyboard and it took a moment for him to answer. “There are a lot of different functions, but you just need the simplest. On the first screen, fill in the blank with words you want associated with him and the bot will start inserting them into web pages.”

“Okay. But what are we going to say?”

“Something that will make him unique,” Smith said.

“How about that he has a dachshund fetish?” Randi said, still gazing out the window into the cube farm beyond.

“Yeah, put that in,” Smith said. “But I doubt that’s going to make him completely unique. We need something else.”

“He tried to drown his mother in Vegemite,” Randi said.