The Oracle Year(30)

Franklin smiled, just a little.

“I don’t think it’ll go that way,” he said.

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Because I run the best investigative agency in the world, Leuchten. And the first thing I’m going to do when I get back is look up Annie Bridger. Unless you’d rather I put a team on it? I could absolutely do that. You’re the boss.”

Franklin put his hand on the door handle.

“I’ll wait inside while you call the president to go over the Coach’s offer,” he said. “It’s cold as hell out here.”

He pushed open the door.

“Don’t worry about the Coach, Tony. She always gets it done, and she looks after her own.”

Leuchten watched Franklin slip back inside, wondering how the hell he could have been outmaneuvered so utterly and completely. He felt dazed.

The White House chief of staff pulled a secure phone from his pocket and dialed.

“Mr. President,” Leuchten said.

A light snow had begun to fall, filling in the tracks created by the vehicles and the security staff. The scene was extremely peaceful. The conversation lasted for perhaps ten minutes. Once it was done, Leuchten stood and watched the snow for a moment, then turned and went back inside.





Chapter 11




Will lifted the slip of paper and looked at the computer screen, cross-checking the sequence of numbers and letters written on it—thirty-two characters long—against what he’d typed. It looked right.

Will extended his index finger over the enter key. One tap and that was it. No more Oracle.

He looked to either side. Most of the other terminals were occupied, mainly by European tourists checking e-mail and posting to various social networks. He’d spent a fair amount of time in places like this since the Oracle’s debut. The Florida Ladies called it a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem: hiding in plain sight by using public Internet access points—cyber cafés, coffee shops, libraries, parks. The sheer number of users online through the same IP address at once helped to disguise his own use, especially when combined with the anonymizing tools he used to access the Site. Most of the time when he used a terminal at an Internet café, his preferred apps—Tor, IRC, et cetera—were already installed on the machines. Clearly he wasn’t the only person using these machines for nefarious operations.

No one was looking at him. The end of the Oracle, and they had no idea. Too busy trying to score cheap Broadway tickets and Skyping back home.

The sequence of numbers and letters was a burn code; it would activate a series of programs the Florida Ladies had set up to erase the few bits of data out there that allowed the Site to run—the original pastebin with the predictions, and the e-mail address and its end point in New Jersey. They had designed the system so there wouldn’t be very much to connect the Oracle to Will Dando. Once he hit enter, there would be nothing at all.

Will’s hand hovered over the keyboard. He stared at the screen.

His finger moved two inches up to the delete key. He watched as the burn code vanished, character by character, from right to left. He closed the window, deleted the tools he’d downloaded at the beginning of his session, and stood up, grabbing his coat from over the back of his chair.

Coward, he thought.

Will paid—cash—and left the Internet café, stepping out onto the sidewalk on the northern end of Times Square.

He zipped up his coat and walked east, no particular destination in mind.

More than two hundred people had died in the Oracle riots, all over the world. Twelve had died at the Lucky Corner.

He could hear Hamza’s voice in his head, telling him that those things were not his fault. How people chose to use information the Oracle put out into the world was not his responsibility. He hadn’t killed anyone. He hadn’t hurt anyone.

All that was true. But it didn’t change the fact that if he hadn’t put up the Site, then those people would still be alive. Hamza didn’t get it, or chose to pretend he didn’t, and that was why Will hadn’t spoken to him since Union Square.

He continued east, weaving through the scrum of Times Square tourists without thinking about it, walking with that sidewalk autopilot longtime New Yorkers developed.

Will had gone to the Internet café with the idea—the hope—that if he shut down the Site and the Oracle went silent, maybe the world would just move the fuck on. The whole thing would just be one of those blips people barely remembered five years down the road, like the Chilean miners or the winner of the last World Cup.

No one else would get hurt. No one else would die.

And then the moment came, and all he’d needed to do was hit that enter key, and he hadn’t, and so the Site was still up.

Why? Money?

He considered, trying to come up with a single purchasable thing—anything at all—that he didn’t already have enough money to buy.

Hamza had finally figured out a way for them to access the Oracle funds safely from inside the United States. It involved Caribbean shell corporations, an ersatz Panamanian hedge fund that had hired them both as its sole, insanely highly paid employees while relying on automatic algorithmic trading to operate, and a thousand other things that ultimately meant they were hiding in plain sight.

It wasn’t too far from the methods the Florida Ladies used to handle their data security, even if Hamza would never admit it. The Oracle network of businesses paid every fee, every tax bill, on time and in full. Everyone got their cut, everyone was happy, so there was never a reason to look into things too closely.