Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

So for any cybersleuth to pry him out of his layers of fake shell would’ve meant the expenditure of considerable resources. He’d covered his trail well enough unless they’d known exactly where to look. Whoever it was would need to be very motivated.

He more or less ruled out Ristbones because what did he have on them that could mess them up if leaked? Voting machine hacking was an open secret, but though there was grumbling in the so-called press, nobody really wanted to go back to the old paper system, and the Corp that owned the machines, picked the winners, and took the kickbacks had done a lunar PR job, so anyone who objected too much was smeared as a twisted Commie bent on spoiling everyone’s fun, even the fun of those who weren’t having any fun. But spoiling the fun they might have later. Their fun-in-the-sky.

So he was no threat to Ristbones because even if he did try to rouse some sort of mouldy civil-society rabble, anyone who’d listen to him would be credited with a terminal case of brain herpes. If he’d been crazy, he might’ve tried to double-hack the machines — code in his own virtual senator or something — just as a demo project about how easy it was.

“But you weren’t crazy,” says Toby.

“I might have done it for the lulz, if I’d had the time. It would have been one of those ephemeral pranks by which sulky keyboard geniuses like me used to signal their ineffectual objections to the system.”

“So, not Ristbones, then,” says Toby. “Must have been Hacksaw?”

“They had a case for payback,” says Zeb. “I’d fishfooded their guard, pilfered their boat, robinhooded one of their maidens in distress; but worse, I’d made them look sloppy. I could see them wanting to stage-manage a public example of me — string me up in chains from a bridge or similar, minus a leg and all my blood; turn me into a gristle display. But in order to capitalize on the publicity they’d have to reveal what I’d done to them, so they’d still lose face.

“Anyway I couldn’t see them tracking me as far as Bearlift, way up there in Whitehorse. It was very far from Rio, and most likely they thought it was covered with snow and igloos, if they ever thought about it at all. But more than that, I couldn’t see a tightass like Chuck working for those guys. I couldn’t even picture them in the same bar together. The Hacksaw types needed to be in a bar with you before they’d take you on, and Chuck didn’t compute. He had the wrong wardrobe. None of the Hacksaw guys would be caught dead hiring a guy with such dorky pants.”

The more he thought about Chuck — about the yucky-clean Chuckiness of Chuck — the more he figured that was the key. The smarmy friendliness, the fake white-toothed geniality … He had to be Church of PetrOleum. But no way the Rev and his buds, even hired professional buds, could’ve tracked Zeb through all his twists and turns. Just no fucking way.

Then he figured he was looking at the whole thing backwards. The Rev, and the whole Church, and their religious joined-at-the-hippers like the Known Fruits, and their political pals — they were all death on ecofreaks. Their ads featured stuff like a cute little blond girl next to some particularly repellent threatened species, such as the Surinam toad or the great white shark, with a slogan saying: This? or This? Implying that all cute little blond girls were in danger of having their throats slit so the Surinam toads might prosper.

By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same. And Bearlift, despite its fuzzy reasoning and its clumsy delivery system, was in a geographical area where more oil might well be discovered, or through which it might well be piped, with the usual malfunctions, spills, and coverups.

So naturally the Rev and his circle would’ve tried to infiltrate Bearlift. Which was none too choosy about who it let in. Chuck must’ve been a true PetrOleum believer, sent there to keep an eye on the furfuckers and report on the evils they were concocting. He wouldn’t have been looking for Zeb in particular, though when he stumbled across him he would’ve recognized him. He’d been close to the Rev, then: family picture sharing. The ungrateful son. But you … The son I wish I’d had . Sigh. Wistful smile. Hand on shoulder. Gruff, manly pat-pat. Like that.

The rest would have followed: the snitch report by Chuck, the instructions from the Rev, the obtaining of the knockout needle, the failed attempt in the ’thopter. The flaming wreckage.

Which made Zeb feel angry all over again.

He put on all his clothes once more and sallied forth to send another batch of messages. This time he used the other net café in town, PrestoThumbs, a seedier place in a mini-mall. It was right next to a haptic-feedback remote-sex emporium called The Real Feel: “The Real Feel, The Real Deal! Keep It Safe! Thrills, Spills, No Microbes!” But he resisted nostalgia and walked past The Real Feel and logged on at Thumbs.

First he sent a message to the ranking Elder at the Church of PetrOleum, attaching the Rev’s embezzlement data and informing him that the actual cash would be found not in the Canary Islands Grand Cayman bank account, where it actually was, but in the form of stocks, in a metal box buried under Trudy’s rock garden. He advised the Elder to take not only six men with shovels but also a team of security minions armed with tasers, as the Rev was armed and could be dangerous. He signed the message “Argus.” The hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology, that was him: there were pictures of the guy on the same site that hosted The Birth of Venus . Not that having a hundred eyes made you attractive from an aesthetic point of view. There was a goddess on there with a hundred tits, yet another illustration of the fact that more is not always better.

Having ruined — he hoped — the Rev’s upcoming evening, he cleaned out the Rev’s secret Cayman account. He’d peeked at it from time to time during his travels to make sure the Rev had followed instructions and was leaving it alone. Yup, it was all still there. He transferred the whole works to an account he’d set up for Adam under the name of Rick Bartleby, for whom he’d also created a convincing identity: Rick was an undertaker in Christchurch, New Zealand. He left Adam a message saying he’d find an account number and a password and a big surprise via the right nipple of Venus. It did him good to picture Adam clicking — finally — on a nipple.

He felt it was only right to send a message to Bearlift as well: let them know they’d been infiltrated by Chuck, say maybe they should do more of a background check on smarmy rear-lickers who turned up out of the blue, especially in new clothes with too many pockets, and maybe alert them to the fact that not everyone found them and their furfucking ways as charming as they found themselves. He signed that message “Bigfoot,” which he regretted as soon as he’d hit Send: it was a little too close to a hint.

Then he went back to his crappy motel and sat in the bar where they had a flat-screen, and waited for results from the Rev-O-Rama Show. Sure enough, the discovery of the bones and shreds of Fenella made the evening TV news all over the country. There was the Rev, covering his face while being led away; there was Trudy, sweet as a milkshake, dabbing at her eyes, saying she’d had no idea, and how frightening to have been living all these years with a ruthless killer.

Smart play, points to Trudy: there was no way they could pin anything on her. By that time she must’ve known about the Rev’s secret stash of cash — the Elders would have questioned her about the embezzled funds — and guessed he’d been planning to ditch her. To head out to an offshore safe house, where he could do some basking, and some fondling of underage children, or some flaying of them, whichever appealed to him at the moment. Because of course she’d known, she’d known about his twistiness all along. But she’d chosen not to know.