The Dark River

3

The word zombie lingered in Nathan Boone’s mind like a whisper. It seemed out of place in the hospitality lounge of the private airport terminal near Phoenix, Arizona. The room was decorated with pastel-colored furniture and framed photographs of Hopi dancers. A cheerful young woman named Cheryl had just baked chocolate chip cookies and brewed fresh coffee for the small group of corporate passengers.

Boone sat down at a workstation and switched on his laptop computer. Outside the terminal it was an overcast, blustery day, and the wind sock on the tarmac kept snapping back and forth. His men had already loaded sealed bins containing weapons and body armor onto the chartered jet. Once the local ground crew finished fueling the plane, Boone and his team would fly east.

It had been easy to manipulate the police and media perception of what had happened at New Harmony. Technicians working for the Brethren had already hacked into government computers and registered a list of firearms to the names of Martin Greenwald and other members of the community. The ballistics evidence and Janet Wilkins’s video statement about messages from God convinced the authorities that New Harmony was a religious cult that had destroyed itself. The tragedy was tailor-made for the evening news, and none of the reporters were inspired to look any deeper. The story was over.

There was a report from one of the mercenaries about a child running near the containment perimeter, and Boone wondered if it was the same Asian girl he had seen at the community center. This could have been a problem, but the police hadn’t found anyone alive. If the girl had escaped the initial attack, she had either died of exposure out in the desert or had been hiding in one of the houses that burned to the ground.

He activated a coding system, went on the Internet, and began to check his e-mail. There was promising news about the search for Gabriel Corrigan in New York City, and Boone answered that immediately. As he scrolled through the other messages he also found three e-mails from Michael asking about the search for his father. Please send a progress report, Michael wrote. The Brethren would like immediate action on this matter.

“Pushy son of a bitch,” Boone muttered, and then glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had heard him. The Brethren’s head of security found it disturbing that a Traveler was giving him orders. Michael was now on their side, but as far as Boone was concerned he was still the enemy.

The only biometric data available for the father was a driver’s license photo taken twenty-six years ago and a single thumbprint placed next to a notarized signature. That meant it was a waste of time to check the usual government data banks. The Brethren’s search programs would have to monitor e-mail and phone calls for any kind of communication that mentioned Matthew Corrigan’s name or statements about Travelers.

In the last few months, the Brethren had finished building a new computer center in Berlin, but Boone wasn’t allowed to use it for his security operations. General Nash had been very mysterious about the executive board’s plans for the Berlin center, but it was clear that it was a major breakthrough in the Brethren’s goals. Apparently they were testing something called the Shadow Program, which was going to be the first step in the establishment of the Virtual Panopticon. When Boone complained about his lack of resources, the staff in Berlin had suggested a temporary solution: instead of using the computer center, they would bring in zombies to help with the search.

A zombie was the nickname for any computer infected by a virus or Trojan horse that allowed it to be secretly controlled by an outside user. Zombie masters directed the actions of computers all over the world, using them to send out spam or extort money from vulnerable Web sites. If the site owners refused to pay, their servers were overwhelmed by thousands of requests sent out at the same moment.

Networks of zombies called “bot nets” could be bought, stolen, or traded on the Internet black market. During the last year, the Brethren’s technical staff had purchased bot nets from different criminal groups and had developed new software that forced the captive computers to perform more elaborate tasks. Although this system wasn’t powerful enough to monitor all the computers in the world, it could handle a search for a specific target.

Boone began typing a command to the computer center in Berlin. If the auxiliary system is operational begin searching for Matthew Corrigan.

“Excuse me, Mr. Boone…”

Startled, he looked up from his work. The charter pilot-a clean-cut young man in a navy blue uniform-was standing a few feet away from the workstation.

“What’s the problem?”

“No problem. We’re fueled up and ready to go.”

“I’ve just received some new information,” Boone said. “Change our destination to Westchester County Airport and contact the transportation desk. Tell them I want enough vehicles to take my staff into New York City.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll call them right now.”

Boone waited until the pilot walked away, then resumed typing. Let the computers chase this ghost, he thought. I’ll find Gabriel in the next two days.

He finished his message a minute later and sent it off to Berlin. By the time he reached the tarmac, hidden software programs awoke within captured computers all over the world. Fragments of computer consciousness began to assemble like an army of zombies sitting quietly in an enormous room. They waited without resistance, without consciousness of time, until a command forced them to start searching.

In the suburbs of Madrid, a fourteen-year-old boy played an online fantasy game. In Toronto, a retired building inspector posted comments about his favorite team in a hockey forum. A few seconds later, both of their computers worked a little bit slower, but neither noticed the change. On the surface, everything was the same, but now the electronic servants obeyed a new master with a new command.

Find the Traveler.