Is there any way I can break into the car without setting off the

alarm? I don’t need to steal the car, I just need to get into it!

Maria

FROM: Desi

SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

Maria,

This company sells custom lockpick sets for specific models of cars.

If the Phalanx has keyless entry, then of course this won’t work.

FROM: ReVerb

SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

Pity it’s not the late nineties, when GM cars had keys so

interchangeable that you could randomly insert your key into a strange

lock with a 50% chance it would open. Of course the Phalanx isn’t

GM, but I can’t resist an interesting bit of trivia!

You might try ordering some of these tools from this online catalog.

These are the tools used by professionals, legit and otherwise,

to break into cars.

The tools don’t seem to have names, just catalog numbers.

FROM: Atenveldt

SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

Maria, the Phalanx has keyless entry. There isn’t a conventional

lock anywhere on the vehicle. The driver carries a sort of seedpod-

shaped cartridge with an active (battery-operated) RFID tag that

scanners in the car will recognize. The car won’t start without the

RFID tag inside.

RFIDs, of course, have a well-known problem, which is that they

broadcast to all the wrong scanners as well as the right ones.

What I would do is this: I’d get an RFID scanner somewhere near

that car to record the signal the pod emits when it tells the Phalanx

to open its doors. Then you create an electronic duplicate of the

signal, and the car is yours!

And the car is mine, Dagmar thought.

Two players she’d never heard from had jumped out of the electronic world to answer Maria’s question. She could always count on the Group Mind.

It was time for another visit to the electronics store.

This Is Not Breakfast

It was typical of L.A. that the surveillance store was open till midnight-after all, one never knew at what hour one’s husband, or one’s banker, would choose to cheat. The clerk sold her a battery-powered RFID scanner and a device for cloning the captured signals. Both boxes were compact and idiotproof-stupid criminals, after all, used them every day, usually to steal someone’s identity when the victim swiped a credit card while making a purchase, or when they were carrying one of the new American passports, which the government had insisted could only be detected at a range of four inches, even in the face of objective tests that demonstrated their vulnerability at a range of ten meters or more.

The clerk gazed at her from sad, idiotproof eyes. “You must promise to use this only for good,” he told her.

She looked at him.

“I’m innocent as chocolate syrup,” she told him.

She drove to BJ’s apartment. She’d never been there before, but the address was available in the contract he’d signed with Great Big Idea.

It wasn’t in a good part of L.A. The small building, with clap-board walls and a shake roof, was ramshackle and contained no more than four apartments. Two vehicles sat in the parking lot on concrete blocks. In this district her Mercedes coupe glowed like a beacon.

Dagmar circled the apartment and saw neither the Phalanx nor BJ’s old Chevy. She parked half a block away, in a place where her car was shaded from the streetlight by an overgrown willow, and shifted to the passenger seat. She remembered reading somewhere that a person sitting in the passenger seat was less conspicuous than someone behind the wheel.

She reclined the seat as far as possible, pulled her panama hat partly down her face, and waited for the rumble of the Ford’s V-8. When BJ arrived and went to bed, she intended to slip out and put the RFID scanner beneath his car to catch the signals from his remote, then retrieve the scanner after he left.

The Phalanx didn’t come. She waited for hours, enduring the occasional scrutiny of young men walking past along the broken sidewalk. When they began to crowd the Mercedes, either to admire the car or to steal it, she raised her seat to make herself more visible and pretended to be talking on the phone. The young men, surprised and suddenly self-conscious, retreated. No one really bothered her.

Eventually even the drifting knots of young men went to bed. Dagmar drowsed and periodically scanned the apartment building with night binoculars. BJ hadn’t come home.

He was wherever he was building the bomb, she thought. Where he was carefully crafting the instrument that would kill her.

When dawn began to feather the leaves of the willow tree overhead, Dagmar got out of the car and stretched aching limbs. She retreated to her motel room for a shower and an hour’s jangled sleep, and the alarm function in her phone woke her promptly at seven.

Dagmar looked at the phone and dreaded what was going to happen next. She tasted stomach acid in the back of her throat.

She took a deep breath and pressed buttons for the speed dial.

When BJ answered, she said, “Let’s have breakfast. I need to talk to someone.”

He cleared his throat, and when his voice emerged it was thick with sleep.

“Dagmar? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

The morning news was about the continued attack on the yuan. The Chinese currency had lost at least half its value, neatly canceling half the value of the obsessive savings of hundreds of millions of people, most of them poor. Rioters had trashed a train station in Guangzhou and broken bank windows on the Shanghai Bund. The dollar was losing value as well, and the Chinese government was still uttering threats.

She wondered if anyone other than she and BJ had yet realized that the attacks were coming from a botnet.

Dagmar and BJ met near Koreatown, in the egg-themed restaurant where they’d dined before Charlie had been killed. BJ had been planning to kill Charlie then, Dagmar thought, because the twelve-billion-dollar figure had shown up on Our Reality Network earlier in the day, and BJ would have known at once what it meant.

Dagmar arrived at the restaurant first and sat with her back to the wall and ordered coffee. BJ arrived fifteen minutes later, heralded by the bass vibrato of the Ford. He was unshaven and dressed in worn jeans and a faded T. Apparently, she thought, tycoon wear and bomb factories did not mix.

Dagmar managed not to hurl the coffee in his face. Instead she steeled herself and rose to embrace him. She smelled the familiar lavender soap and her stomach turned over.

“What’s going on? ” he asked. “You look awful.”

She seated herself. “Three friends dead. Cops on my tail. No sleep. And the game updates tomorrow.”

This time BJ remembered he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.

“Three friends? ” he asked.

She told him about Siyed, and while she did, she watched him. The calculation behind his reactions seemed plain, the falsity enormous. There was a little delay behind every response, as he tried to decide how to react. He did everything but wave a placard saying “Murderous Sociopath.”

How, she wondered, had she not noticed any of this till now?

They had known each other for thirteen or fourteen years. They had been lovers for nine months of that. She had adored him at the start of the relationship, had been secretly relieved when he broke it off, and had been twisted enough by the rejection to marry a man she didn’t love.

She and BJ had been working together for weeks, and she’d sat opposite him at desks and tables and heard his stories of the fall of AvN Soft and seen his blue eyes glitter with anger at Charlie, and she hadn’t seen any of the mendacity, any of the self-interest, any of the plotting.