The Oracle Year(45)

Cathy picked up her tablet again and pulled up an app. It was a search program of her own design, a spider, searching the web in all its flavors—light, dark, and deep—for mentions of a single man’s name.

John Bianco. Who was obviously not actually named John Bianco.

She thought back to the early days of their acquaintance, when he’d been fumbling around in the blackhat forums, trying to find someone to help him. Cathy had watched him for a while, trying to understand what he was really after—he hadn’t acted like a cop, or a Deep Web tourist. He’d acted . . . like a child. Defenseless, with no real understanding of the dangers inherent in the depths he’d somehow managed to find. He seemed to really need help, but the first people he had found—a group of truly brutal Slovakians—would eat him alive.

And so, GrandDame had stepped in, and here she was today, sipping coffee on her patio, seven figures richer.

But money alone wouldn’t buy off her curiosity, or her natural tendency to dig, and dig, and hack away until there were no secrets left in the world. That had always been the real reason she wanted to work with the Oracle. Secrets were Cathy Jenkins’ drug, the Oracle knew them all, and the path to the Oracle ran through John Bianco.

She didn’t know very much about the man. Just his name, and that he lived in New York. She’d only met him twice. Once when they finalized the deal for the Florida Ladies to work for the Oracle, and once when he gave them their bonuses. Bianco had been extremely cautious with personal information, too. He didn’t talk about himself, ever.

But a name and a city wasn’t nothing, and Cathy’s little digital spider was patient. There were plenty of John Biancos in New York City, but she’d been able to bring up photos of all of them, in time, and none of them looked like the man she’d met. John Bianco wasn’t John Bianco. He was someone else.

She set the spider to crawl through the web, looking for new mentions of John Bianco anywhere in the NYC area—news stories, account registrations, traffic tickets, tax payments. It had been working patiently and diligently for all these months since the Site had gone up, and every time it found something, it delivered a link to Cathy’s app. Her theory was that fake identities were complex to set up, and chances were good that if a false name was used as part of one transaction, it would be used somewhere else.

So far, all the spider’s hits were useless, unrelated to the man she was looking for. But you never knew, and so every time the app chimed, signaling that her software had found something new about one John Bianco or another, Cathy looked.

The latest find: a piece of video footage, locked away in the supposedly secure Dropbox cloud storage of a woman named Leigh Shore, who seemed to be some sort of reporter. The footage was labeled “Interview—John Bianco—Union Square—Oracle Riots,” with a date from last December.

Cathy tapped the clip, expecting to see one of the other John Biancos she’d encountered in her cataloging of the many New York City residents with that name.

But no. There he was.

John Bianco—her John Bianco, standing next to an irritated-looking Indian man, being interviewed by an attractive young black woman. Cathy tapped the footage again, freezing it, then scrolling it back until she found a decent headshot of the man, with his mouth closed, looking directly at the camera. She took a screenshot, then opened the headshot in her image editor, cropping it until it was just Bianco’s head.

Cathy opened another app and fed the new image into it, then activated the program, and waited.

The problem, all along, was that she didn’t have a photo of John Bianco, and there hadn’t been an easy way to get one in their limited set of interactions. Now, though, she had what she needed, and it was relatively simple to ask the web to kick back photos of people who looked similar to the image she’d fed into her app. Hell, even Google could do something along those lines.

These moments were always wonderful—when the secret was about to be revealed, when the vault was about to be breached. When she was about to learn something she wasn’t supposed to know.

A photo appeared, on a dating website, accompanied by a description that danced a fine line between wittily self-deprecating and enormously desperate.

The name attached to that photo was Will Dando.

Will Dando had John Bianco’s face. Or, most likely, vice versa.

Cathy grinned in triumph, feeling a rush of victory. She enlarged the photo so it filled the screen, then set it down, staring at it, wondering if she was looking at the Oracle.

The rush was already beginning to fade. Cathy frowned.

It was obvious that the Oracle’s identity was something the Oracle didn’t want anyone to know. Her knowing it, or even knowing more than he wanted her to, might very well screw up the deal he’d offered her. After all, this wasn’t really about money. It was about the Oracle giving her a prediction that would save her life. And Becky’s life.

It wasn’t necessarily a problem. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut.

But those two words—Will Dando—they felt a little like a ticking bomb.





Chapter 18




“As you from crimes would pardoned be,” the swarthy man intoned, one arm extended in supplication toward the audience, standing alone on a mostly darkened stage, “let your indulgence set me free.”

His eyes closed. His head dropped. The lights went out. The audience sat very still.