Invisible Armies

Chapter 34

Danielle has driven from Los Angeles to Vegas several times before, in the Crazy Years, but she is always amazed by the raw isolation of the desert between. Once out of LA – and so sprawling is that city that it takes them ninety minutes to escape it – the only town they pass is Barstow, halfway. Two enormous casinos stand like Scylla and Charybdis at the Nevada border, for those gamblers who can't be bothered to drive the remaining hour to Vegas. The highway itself is wide and busy, a long smooth strand of civilization that occasionally knots itself into little roadside clusters of buildings that provide, as the signs say, GAS FOOD LODGING. But mostly the road traverses a vast trackless wasteland, the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, occupied only by cacti, Joshua trees, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and the occasional desert hermit. Danielle wonders how many lives this pitiless desert swallowed before the age of the automobile. Surely thousands.

Las Vegas would be surreal anywhere. After a five-hour desert drive, their drive up the neon canyon wonderland called the Strip is nearly overwhelming. They pass a pyramid, a compressed New York City, a fantasyland castle, a gigantic green cube, an Eiffel Tower, a Roman coliseum, an erupting volcano, a pirate ship, all of them larger than life. Huge crowds flood the Strip like army ants. Traffic moves slower than pedestrians. The sun is setting as they arrive, but its shine is soon replaced by multicoloured neon that will dazzle the throngs of drivers and pedestrians until dawn. Vegas never sleeps.

"I never imagined a place like this could exist," Jayalitha says, eyes wide.

"Read the subtext before you get excited," Keiran warns her. "All hail the great god Mammon. Thou shalt have no other god before me. Sell thy father and thy mother. Covet thy neighbour's wife and donkey."

"Don't be so cynical," Danielle says. "It's just a playground. Disneyland for adults."

"More like a carnival of lost souls. Gambling is just a means of relieving the statistically incompetent of their money. The house always wins."

DefCon is hosted by the Alexis Park Resort, a large hotel east of the Strip, across from the Hard Rock Café. It is almost unique in Vegas in that it has no gambling, not even slot machines. They originally claimed to be full when Danielle called, but Danielle knows that hotels always keep a few rooms in reserve in case of disaster or a VIP appearance. By the simple expedient of claiming that she was verifying a reservation, rather than arranging a new one, and then flying into feigned outrage when they reported they had no record of her previous booking, she managed to annex a superior suite for a standard price.

The heat hits Danielle like a slap in the face when she gets out of the car. It is night, but it is also July in the desert. It reminds her of India. She hurries into the plush and air-conditioned lobby. The lobby's ATM machines have already been hacked to display DefCon's happy-face-and-crossbones logo and cartoon pictures of geeks at computers. She makes a mental note not to use them.

There is a crowd around the check-in desk. Their most common features are thinness, paleness, multicoloured hair, black clothing, tattoos, laptop cases, and a large number of flashy electrical accessories. There are more men than women, but the disparity isn't as great as Danielle expected, and the men aren't as social-outcast geeky as Mulligan. It is a subculture of anarchists more than rejects.

She and Jayalitha get the keys, return to parking, and escort Keiran to the room. He wears a black hood that conceals his face; Keiran is well enough known in the hacker community that the odds of being recognized are good, and Danielle is sure a few of his fellow hackers would be rather pleased by the prospect of reporting him to the FBI. As a result, he will have to spend almost all of DefCon in their room, and wear a hood if and when it is necessary for him to emerge.

The Alexis Park occupies nearly a square mile of space. Past the main building on Harmon Street that contains the lobby, restaurant, and conference rooms, a walkway weaves its way through an outdoor common area a hundred feet wide and a quarter-mile long, decorated with swimming pools, palm trees, and fake rocks. The guest rooms are found on either side of this central corridor, in two arrays of long, low, motel-ish buildings. Their perfectly adequate suite is near the third and last swimming pool. Danielle and Jayalitha go out again, to get food from a Subway down the street. By the time they return Keiran has assembled the laptops and other gear loaned by Mulligan: computers, screens, antennae, black boxes, and less comprehensible electronica, all interconnected by a spaghetti chaos of cables. The resulting nexus of computing power looks like the control center for a mid-sized NASA mission.