S Huang - Zero Sum Game

He let out a low whistle. “You’re kidding.”

Finally someone who understood what this meant. “Nope.”

“I feel like a dead man walking just knowing that. Uh, irony not intended.”

“Irony?”

“I can’t walk.” Oh, right. I’d forgotten he used a wheelchair.

Frighteningly, he did have a point. Once Pithica found out what we’d discovered, we would rocket straight to the top of the hit list. “Well, we just have to use it before they get to us,” I said.

“How? Steal all their money?”

“They’d just come after us and steal it back,” I pointed out. And I was pretty sure they’d win. It wasn’t a good feeling, knowing someone else could beat me.

“What’s the plan, then?”

“Wait a sec, I’m putting you on speaker.” I hit a button and put the phone on the table so I could talk to Rio and Arthur and him all at once. “The advantage on our side is that they’re drawing from thousands and thousands of accounts,” I said, feeling my way through the logic as I spoke. “So if we cut them off everywhere at once, they won’t be able to recover fast. They’d have to rebuild their whole infrastructure.”

“Double-edged,” said Rio. “Such diversification also means we cannot take out their resources simultaneously. Too many targets.”

“I don’t know. I think we can,” I said.

“How? Bring the Feds in?” Arthur rubbed a palm against his chin as if he couldn’t believe he was entertaining the possibility the flash drive might contain viable information. “Could work. Feds are slick at taking down money laundering operations. You give ’em the evidence, they could bring ’em down.”

“No, that has the same problem as stealing the money ourselves—single fail point,” I said.

“Pithica eats criminal investigations for breakfast,” agreed Checker from the phone. “They could divert one without taking a breath. We saw that in Kingsley’s notes.”

“It’s down to us,” I said.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Checker.

“Chin up,” I told him. “We’re very smart.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Here’s what I’m thinking instead,” I plowed on. “With this many revenue sources, they can’t have brainwashed so many people. They must be…siphoning, or running front businesses, or fake charities, or whatever else huge criminal organizations do.” I raised my eyebrows at Rio. “Right?”

“A reasonable hypothesis.”

“So, here’s a thought. What if we can alert everyone they’re stealing from that the money isn’t going where they think it is? Then they slam the lids on the revenue streams. And we can potentially send a hundred thousand security alerts at once with the click of a button. What do you think? Is it doable?”

Checker took a moment to answer. Arthur was frowning and still rubbing his temple; I couldn’t read Rio any more than usual, but I got the impression he was thinking very intently. Their opinions didn’t matter, however—for sheer plausibility, I needed a computer expert’s assessment.

“Potentially,” Checker said at last. “Pulling it off isn’t as easy as you make it sound, especially if all the different fronts funnel money to them in different ways, but maybe we can build algorithms to sort those into rough categories of attack—”

“The sample space isn’t large on a computational level,” I reminded him.

“True. We won’t need to worry much about efficiency or scalability. Quick and dirty will do the job; the question is whether we have enough commonality here to make ‘quick and dirty’ work.”

“We do,” I said. I had an intuitive grasp of the math already; it was laying itself out in patterns in my brain like beautifully crafted knitwork. “I can tell we do. If you can write the code, I can do the math.”

“Well—we can try it. But no promises.”

His reply might not be the resounding enthusiasm I’d hoped for, but at least he’d said yes. “You’ll see. We can do this.”

Checker cleared his throat. “Cas, pick the phone back up, please.”

I avoided catching Arthur’s eye as I did so. I levered myself up off the bed, making a face as my wet clothes pulled against my skin and my chest wound twinged, and walked between Arthur and Rio to head over by the windows. “You’ve just got me now,” I said into the phone.

He came straight to the point. “I can’t trust you. Or Arthur.”

I didn’t blame him. “So we do this remotely,” I said. “So what?”

He made a hissing sound. “It’ll go a lot faster if we’re in the same room.” He was right. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say, though—I couldn’t give him any guarantees, as much as I would have liked to. “And, uh, one other problem. I think I’m going to need more processor power than I took with me, and I don’t have enough cash left—I can’t make a withdrawal while Pithica’s trying to track me down, and—”

“I got it,” I said. “Give me a shopping list. And let this be a lesson for your survival kit.”

“Yeah,” he said fervently. “I’m not nearly as prepared for the zombie apocalypse as I should be. Although zombies would probably mean chaos and looting and massive inflation, so cash wouldn’t necessarily—”

“Hey. Shopping list.”

“Right. I’m emailing it to you. Uh, thanks. I’ll get you back, assuming we survive all this.”

“Consider it payment for springing me from prison,” I said.

“That was nothing. I had backdoors built into those systems already. Just, you know, in case. Don’t tell Arthur,” he added as an afterthought.

“I already said I wouldn’t.” He might not be prepared for rebuilding computer clusters on the run, but Checker had some levels of paranoia I heartily approved of. I wondered what his history was. “So, what’s the verdict? You want me to dead drop the equipment?”

“Oh, I’m sending you after way too much for that,” he said. “We might as well do this in person. This is where I take the leap, I guess.” His voice had gone high and uncertain. “How can you be sure you’re…cured?”

I looked around the edges of the closed blinds. The traffic of Los Angeles buzzed by on the streets below, the cars splashing miserably through rain sheeting down from a soggy sky. My head still hurt, so I liked to think I was resisting something, but that was very far from a sure thing. “I’m not,” I admitted.

I heard Checker take a few shallow breaths. Then he said, “I can’t help wondering. How do we know this isn’t part of some elaborate Xanatos Gambit?”

I left off staring at the traffic. “Some elaborate what?”

“Some sort of complicated scheme. I mean, how do we know this isn’t all exactly what she wants us to do?”

It was an extremely legitimate question. “I don’t know.”

The conversation stalled into awkward silence. I had a pretty good idea what Checker might be thinking: Dawna hadn’t found him yet. He could continue to run, and run as fast and far as he could, instead of hooking back up with us and facing the real possibility of becoming another one of Pithica’s pawns.

“If it helps,” I said. “It feels like I’m fighting her. Plus, Rio really does seem to be immune, and he thinks I’m okay.” Checker still didn’t say anything. “Hello?”

“Who?” The word was slow and suspicious.

My chest started to cramp in a way that had nothing to do with the healing wound or the wet bandages, and my headache suddenly felt twice as bad. I leaned against the wall next to the window. “Arthur neglected to mention I work with Rio, didn’t he.”

“ That Rio?”

“I assume so.”

He made a choking sound. “Some of the things Arthur said make a lot more sense now. I’m going to kill him.”