“Yeah,” Arnulf said as the Elf and some others who’d been leaning on the wall by him headed down toward the Ring. “You too.”
The crowd around the Ring was already getting pretty thick. Rik relaxed against the wall for a few minutes longer, his gaze lingering on the huge shape of the battle mammoth, which had been standing down in the plaza all this while, and now was making its way slowly toward one of the portals of the Ring. Arnulf watched him—“him”? Well, the mammoth had been male, but that didn’t guarantee anything—until he passed through the portal and vanished into what from this distance looked like a mountainous landscape. That, Rik thought, watching the mammoth’s gait with satisfaction, was a nice piece of work. It was going to be interesting to go to the next Guild meeting and talk to some of his mage buddies about what he’d discovered about the anatomy of the mammoth. But in the meantime, he thought, I really should get along to Meruvelt. They’ll be waiting.
Arnulf dusted himself down again, made sure that his pouches were intact and his sword slung in a position where he could drop it to drawing level if he needed it. Then he headed down toward the Ring.
The post office box place sat in the middle of the forlorn little strip mall on Lake Mirror Road, with an orthodontist on one side and a falafel joint on the other. As far as Danny was concerned, though, the real jewel in that strip was the pizza place down at the end. He valued that maybe even more than the ATM between the pizza place and the dry cleaners. The crusts on the pizzas were pretty good in there; the guy behind the counter had a light touch. Those pizzas, and the beer from the pizza place’s cooler, kept Danny sane while he worked in the Hartfield branch of Post Boxes Unlimited. What was even better for his mental health, though, was the certain knowledge that the pizza place wouldn’t need to be part of his life’s landscape for very much longer. Two more days, he thought. Three, tops. After that—
Danny pulled the car headfirst into the parking place right in front of the PB Unlimited shop, got out, and slammed the driver’s side door with what was probably unnecessary force. This was the third of these runs he’d had to make today, but when his boss Ricardo got it into his head to restock on packing supplies, his enthusiasm tended to get out of hand. At such times, no trip to the wholesale cardboard box place ever meant less than a car absolutely stuffed full of bubble wrap, flat-pack boxes, strapping tape, folder tabs, and other junk that could surely have been bought in smaller quantities, or at least bought when it was actually needed. But that wasn’t Ricardo’s way. Ricardo tended to stock as if he expected a flood or tornado or some other natural disaster to descend on Big Joe’s Office Supply and Cash and Carry and blow it into the next state.
Danny went around the back of the car, pushed the button that popped up the hatchback’s rear door, reached in, and pulled out the first batch of flattened, unassembled boxes. This too shall pass, he said to himself. Only a few more days. Then Ricardo, and the pizza, and all these boxes, they’ll all be just memories. Saturday—Danny smiled to himself—Saturday, I quit.
He staggered up to the front door, paused, turned around, put his butt against the door, carefully pushed backward, and let himself in. As usual, Ricardo was too busy taking inventory, or wrapping something up, or just sitting behind his desk contemplating the cash register, to ever come over and actually open the door. If the boss hadn’t felt like doing it most of the time, even if he’d done it only very occasionally, Danny could’ve coped with that. But Ricardo never opened that damn door for his overburdened employee, not once. The man just does not give a good goddamn about his staff. Not that this was exactly news, either; Danny had known it since he first came down and applied for this job. The wage he was being paid was not the wage anybody paid to a valued employee. It was, in fact, just barely over the wage paid to the kids down at Mickey D.’s for asking people if they wanted fries with that. But never mind, Danny thought. Just keep saying it: “This too shall pass.” He turned around very carefully and let the door fall closed behind him.
For a moment he just stood there enjoying the air- conditioning. The temperature difference between outside and inside, this time of month, was considerable. And God knows what it’s gonna be like this time next month, Danny thought. Or rather, God might know, but Danny wasn’t going to. Danny was going to be somewhere else. Ideally, somewhere cooler.
He walked over to the far end of the shop, heading for the spot where the counter divided and left a path open toward the storeroom in the back. Ricardo, sitting on his high stool behind the register, threw a passing glance at Danny and then went back to making notes about something or other on one of the store’s lined pads. Then again, Danny thought as he went through the space between the counters as carefully as he could when his arms were piled high with flat- folded boxes, the heat itself isn’t really the problem. This same temperature might not be such a terrible thing, if you had a beach right in front of you. White sand, blue water, and a breeze. But if anybody in this part of greater Atlanta had seen or heard of a breeze recently, they were keeping that news to themselves. And the beach was a long, long way away. Lake Mirror Road might promise all kinds of things with its name, but the lake in question was lost among the big buildings of the local industrial estate, just a mucky little pond behind the FedEx depot and slightly offset from under the main approach paths for the airport.
Danny maneuvered his way into the back room and put down his pile of flat- fold boxes with great care next to the two other stacks already pushed up against the painted white concrete blocks of the back room wall. He lined them up carefully with the other two stacks, tucked them in snugly against the wall, and squared off the stack. Then Danny straightened up, examining them. There was no harm in being methodical and tidy. That approach worked in other parts of his life—and being tidy tended to distract the boss from other things that might be going on.
He glanced through the door to the front. As usual, Ricardo was so deeply sunk in the ins and outs of lower corporate management—a heavy bout of catalog reading at the moment—that he rarely noticed anything Danny did as long as it looked vaguely like something he’d told Danny to do. And every time Ricardo actually got off his butt long enough to check and see the work was actually getting done, it reinforced this impression of Danny as a willing—or at least uncomplaining—wage slave. That suited Danny fine. He headed out through the store, making his way to the car again. The customer area of the store was not much to look at—it was as desperately plain as most of its fellow PB Unlimiteds. One wall was loaded up with wire racks of commonplace office supplies—padded envelopes, twine, tape, packing labels, receipts, and air bills for all the major courier companies, and a long table to work on when getting a shipment ready. The other wall had the locked post boxes built into it, large and small. In front of it, by the window, was a long, high ledge to sort your mail on, with garbage cans underneath the ledge to take all those “You May Have Won A Million Dollars!” letters, the junk mail and catalogs and leaflets. Between the ledges and the counter and the register were the scales, and most important of all, two simple desks with very basic PCs on them, hooked up to the store’s broadband. Those were the meat of the matter for Danny: the main reason he was here and what made work here at least tolerable. Well, he thought, that and the air-conditioning . . .
He headed out the door into the humidity, making a face. It was astounding how fast you could go from being relatively cool and comfortable to being sticky and annoyed. It was as if the water in the air wrapped itself around you and clung like a badly wrung out wash-cloth. Danny wiped his brow as he went to the car, popped the back hatch open, and got out the last stack of cardboard boxes. He juggled them a little, getting them balanced in one arm so that he had the other arm free to close the hatch. Not that there was anyone here likely to take anything out of the back of the car. During the daytime, at least, this was the most boring, little-trafficked strip mall for miles around. But still, Danny thought, and shut the hatch. Let’s not take a chance that somethi
ng might happen now, just before it’s all over, to ruin everything. Be methodical.
He went through the maneuver with the store’s door again. His boss, sunk in the delights of the big fat stationery wholesalers’ catalog, never even bothered to look up. One more trip to the back room, the next stack placed neatly on top of the last one, squared off, straightened up. Danny rubbed the small of his back, wiped sweat away. Out in the front, Ricardo turned over yet another page of the catalog and sighed, a desperately tired noise for someone who had done so little actual physical work during the course of the day. It’s only a matter of time now, Danny thought. Fortunately today had been a slow business day, and now that it was so close to noon and Danny was back and finished with the supply run, the boss was feeling more imperative urges than that of work. Danny could hear the rustle as he turned over a few more pages in the catalog, each one more slowly than the last. You’d think they weighed tons, Danny thought, amused. Finally there came the sound he’d been waiting for: the creak of the legs of the behind-the-counter stool as Ricardo got up.
“Gonna go out and get a sandwich,” Ricardo said, hitting the ground with an audible thump. In the back room, Danny smiled; he knew that Ricardo’s lunch would not stop at a sandwich. There would be beer, probably a few beers; and if Danny gave any sign whatsoever of noticing this afterward, Ricardo would frown and growl and make “shut up, you should be grateful for your job” noises. Danny, however, had no plans of noticing, no matter how many beers the boss had. He planned to keep his head down and appear to be grateful for this job for exactly three days longer. Then . . .
White sand, blue sky, and a breeze in between. For the moment, all Danny had to do was look innocently industrious as Ricardo put his head through the door from the front, looking at him with a frown. “If the phone rings,” he said, “don’t you miss it.”
“No, sir,” Danny said. It was a laugh—the odds of any phone call over lunch hour were almost as low as the odds of one any other time of the day. Most of their customers were drive-ins, not given to calling ahead.
Ricardo lumbered toward the front door. “Be back in an hour,” Ricardo said. The door squeaked opened, squeaked shut.
For the look of the thing, Danny went out front and spent the next few minutes tidying the racks. It was just as well he did; Ricardo hadn’t been gone a minute and a half before he came back in that door, apparently for no other reason than to see if Danny was going through the cash register. Danny, then busy straightening out a wall display of rolls of Scotch tape, simply looked at Ricardo and didn’t say a word. Ricardo let out a long breath of annoyance, as if it were somehow Danny’s fault that he had not been stealing when Ricardo came in. Then out he went again, making his large, slow way down the strip mall.
Danny finished straightening the racks, then threw a last glance out the plate glass windows at the front. The air over the surface of the parking lot was wavering in the midday heat; out on the main road, sparse lunchtime traffic went by as usual. Danny turned away, making his way back to one of the computer desks, and sat down.
He slipped on the headset and wiggled the mouse to stop the screensaver. On the computer screen’s desktop were the usual icons—word processor, calculator, business suite, image editor, Web browser, and some document folders. Danny clicked on My Documents to open it, then went to a folder that simply read “New Folder,” as if it had nothing in it. He double-clicked on it. Password? said the text box that came up.
Danny gave it the combination of letters and numbers it was expecting. The folder opened to show what looked like a standard Web browser icon. Danny double clicked it, waited for the security window to pop up. After a few seconds, it appeared. Passphrase?
Danny glanced around, entirely out of reflex, then typed quickly. He paused at the third group of characters to think what day today was. The passphrase did not remain the same; it changed each day, the last six- character group expressing the day’s date in hex. Eighteenth, let’s see. . . He typed the six characters, hit enter.
A custom browser window popped up. It could’ve been mistaken for the machine’s own browser, and indeed was meant to be; but its pulldown menus were much different. Danny clicked on one of them, then clicked on the connect choice that was offered.
Another few moments’ wait. From here on in, things would slow up a little bit due to the encryption. Danny didn’t mind; he would sooner know that the communication was secure—especially considering who was on the other end of it. Not that he had any real idea who those people were. From the very start, when he had run across the masked figure in one of the clandestine hackers’ playrooms on Omnitopia, there had been no names mentioned, no hints given as to real identities. Once he understood what was going on, that secrecy had made perfect sense to him, and he was happy to cooperate. It meant that if something went wrong and the cops—whatever cops—descended on the operation, no one would be able to give away any of the others.
Danny drummed his fingers idly on the desktop, shooting a glance at the front windows. Nothing moving out there, which was a relief; it would be annoying to be interrupted in the middle of this—
Typically, the phone rang. Danny cursed under his breath. Is that Ricardo just calling to yank my chain? He pulled off the headset and hurried over to answer it. “Post Boxes Unlimited, this is Danny, how can I help you?”
“Hey, man, it’s Jackie.”
Danny relaxed a little. It was the guy behind the counter down at the pizza place, who he saw occasionally after work at one of the local bars near the airport. “Hey, man, what’s up?”
“Just wanted to let you know—” A pause, a clash of metal; it was the sound of an oven door being opened, then shut again. “The big guy’s in here for his lunch—”
“Yeah, he headed out a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, well, thought you might want to know he’s on his second beer already, and he’s ordered two pies. Don’t think he’s gonna be back anytime soon.”
Danny breathed out a small sigh of relief. “Thanks, man, I owe you one. Do me a favor? When he walks out the door, gimme a call?”
A chuckle at the other end. “No problem, man,” said Jackie. Danny knew that Jackie wasn’t particularly fond of his own boss and almost certainly assumed—correctly—that Danny didn’t care much for his, either. Wage slaves knew each other on sight. “No point in having a good day interrupted by work.”
“You got that, man,” Danny said. “Thanks much.”
“I’ll be down with a bunch of the FedEx guys at the Smokestack on Sunday afternoon,” Jackie said, “if you wanna buy me that beer you owe me.”
Danny chuckled, mostly because he had no plans to be anywhere near here on Sunday. “We’ll see how it rolls, man,” he said. “Talk to you later.”
“You got it,” Jackie said, and hung up.
Danny hung up, made his way back to the desk, and sat down. The screen was still thinking about what to do next. Sometimes the cryptography took longer than usual for some reason or other—Ah, here we go. The browser window cleared, then went black. Danny waited for the text input window to come up. A few moments later, a word came up on the screen, all in caps. HI.
Hi there, he typed back. There were moments when it bothered him not to have even a handle to call the other guy by; it was strange, especially when your normal online-world dealings left you so used to having at least a fake name to grab hold of, if nothing else. But again, anonymity was key here. He’d sooner not have a name to use, especially if it meant making it harder for some cop here or in some other country to chase him down. Yes, they were all using anonymizers to conceal their locations—the address masker was built into this custom browser—but Danny knew that those could and would be broken by the people who’d eventually get onto their trail. By that time, Danny intended to be somewhere far away where he would never have to touch a computer again. He would be conducting his life on a cash-only basis in some country with friendly banking laws. In fact, he was still conductin
g the argument with himself about which country that would be. Switzerland was overrated, a spent force now, what with the new banking disclosure laws there that came along in the wake of the war against terror. But there were lots of other places to consider—newer, smaller, less cooperative. Some of them were in the Caribbean, some of them in sunny southern seas elsewhere.
GOT NEW TIMES FOR YOU, said the text on the screen.
Danny reached for one of the copy shop’s branded pads, tore a piece of paper off it—during one of the earlier security briefings, he had been warned about the readability of any notepad’s lower sheets—and started writing on the single piece of paper on the hard table. YOU READY? said the screen.
Danny put the pen aside. Go, he typed.
The screen spilled out a series of six letter and digit sequences, which Danny diligently and carefully began to copy. Each of these looked like one of the standard six letter and digit codes in hex that stood for a color that could be used in a Web page’s code to paint in a background or color a type font. But at home, Danny had a neatly-printed little codebook in which each of those 256 groups had been assigned a different meaning—most of them having to do with times. Each code group changed in meaning depending on which other code group it was near. Anybody who happened to be intercepting this message, and anyone trying to figure out later what it meant, would easily mistake it for a set of directions for the design of a loading Web page. But the codebook meanings were far different. Danny had laughed, just once, when he finished reading that little book through—a boring read, most of it—and came to the last group, the “#000000” code for the color black: it translated as “flee at once, all is discovered.”
At least there was no sign of that in this message. There was nothing else, either; the person typing at the other end was never chatty. When the code groups stopped, the only thing that came up on the next line was the single word: REPEAT. Danny typed in the six- digit sequences exactly as he had noted them down. He understood the other guy’s concern about making sure that it was right. The code sequence described the times when Danny and his many coconspirators in this hack would be hitting a lot of different servers worldwide, a lot of different player groups in Omnitopia, with the goal being to overwhelm them while accounts were being raided for money. This business would require split-second timing in acting as one character, dumping it, signing out, signing in as someone else, on some other server entirely, and then acting as that person. It had been four or five months ago now that Danny had been sent the software with which to do this work on his own home computer and various others. Those other computers—including the poor dim ones here at work—were now all latent zombies. They would be transformed into willing slaves of his own machine at home as soon as he activated the program there and sent them the necessary command down the broadband line. This was a technique that spammers had been using for years to confuse large systems, and even occasionally to break into military or other classified sites by the sheer weight of numbers overwhelming their gateways to the outer world. In this particular case, the group that Danny was working with had brought the concept of the distributed denial-of-service attack up to a whole new level.