A screen displaying Merge networks came up and showed that the military’s satellite links had all gone down simultaneously. There was little question that Smith was to blame, but why? Only about nineteen percent of America’s soldiers were served by that network—mostly young, low-level infantry who wouldn’t have been targeted by LayerCake anyway. What could he possibly hope to accomplish that would justify the risk he was taking?

The alarm varied in pitch and another window sprang to life on his monitor—this one showing some kind of virus attacking the servers in Canada. The system was rerouting traffic through excess capacity in Mexico but there was still a two percent slowdown worldwide. How could a virus have worked its way that deep into his system?

Another change in alarm pitch was accompanied by a screen showing a T-Mobile network in Southern Europe crashing, along with a number of independent Internet service providers throughout North America.

System security would be tracking the source of the disturbances and he pulled up the list, staring at it for a moment in disbelief. This wasn’t a coordinated effort by the NSA and their foreign counterparts—the entire assault was coming from two terminals in Javier de Galdiano’s office.

Dresner tried to shut them down, but found himself locked out as disturbances kept appearing all over the globe. Two cable companies went down in California, increasing the slowdown to twelve percent and disconnecting more than forty thousand users. A server farm in Kansas went offline as the power grid began pulsing beyond the capacity of its surge protectors. The temperature of a critical switch in Arizona suddenly went outside of parameters and began its shutdown sequence.

Dresner closed the windows on his monitor and brought up the videoconference software that connected him to de Galdiano. He didn’t expect it to work and was surprised when the screen was immediately filled with the image of the man’s office. In its center was Jon Smith, standing directly behind the Spaniard as he typed furiously on his keyboard. At the other terminal, working even more manically, was a bearded man whom he suspected was Martin Zellerbach. Standing at the nearly opaque glass wall was Randi Russell.

“Javier! What are you doing?”

He expected to see fear in the man’s face—some hint that he was acting under threat—but there was none in evidence when he looked up at the camera. He was doing this voluntarily.

“They told me you’re going to use my algorithm to kill people, Christian.”

“And you believed them?”

“If they’re lying then I’ve made a bad mistake and you should fire me. But they’re not lying, are they?”