Page 119 of Lethal Obsession

“Yes you have, motherfucker.” Lars clinks his glass to mine without looking up. “According to these media reports,” he goes on, scanning them, “Kristi Hunter has become the voice of a new generation.”

“Seriously?” I squint at her face onscreen. “She looks like she walked out of an eighties church revival.”

“Her boyfriend is even worse.” Lars turns his screen around. “Tyler Thorne.”

“Christ.” I take in the image on the screen, unsure whether to laugh or cry. “Did he get lost in a time machine? Is that an actual pocket watch he’s wearing?”

He nods, shaking with laughter. “And a pin-striped waistcoat, under a morning coat. All that’s missing is a top hat. Oh, wait.” He clicks through to another photograph with Thorne holding a brandy snifter and looking very self-important at some college gathering. “There it is.”

Despite his eccentric dress, Tyler Thorne’s face is utterly unsmiling, with the brittle facade of someone who’s studied how to look authoritative—and then somehow fucked it up entirely. Every hair is precisely placed, but around a soft, almost chubby face in which the deliberate seriousness of his clenched jaw is lost. His narrowed eyes hold the stubborn blankness of someone who has decided what he believes and closed the door to any other possibility. Although he leans close to Kristi in several photographs, he doesn’t actually touch her in any of them.

“Looks like another YouTube freak who’s never been laid to me.”

“He hasn’t.” Lars starts to laugh as he reads Thorne’s bio. “It’s a point of pride. Apparently he’s waiting for the right woman and a traditional marriage.”

I snort. “I’d say he’ll be waiting a while, with that kind of fashion sense.”

“Bro has some followers, though.” He scrolls through Tyler’s social media, which is filled with him posing at conventions with similarly eccentrically dressed acolytes, who all obviously revere him. “Our boy Thorne spends all his time screaming online about the moral degeneracy of the modern woman. He and Kristi aren’t actually going out. They just have a, quote, shared vision.”

Thorne. The name rings a bell somewhere in my memory, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

“I’ll lay my Maybach against your Ducati,” Lars is saying, “that Thorne’s got a hundred fuckboys on speed dial. Nobody dresses that well if they’re straight.”

“Not every well-dressed conservative man takes it up the ass, Lars.”

“If you say so.” He tilts his chin skeptically. “The annual crashout of gay dating apps during certain political conventions says otherwise. And I should know.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me over his laptop. “The big checkbooks hiding behind even bigger closets are how I fucked my way to investment in our first project, in case you’ve forgotten.”

I grin. “It wasn’t exactly a hardship, from memory.”

“Lord, no,” Lars says cheerfully. “I still buy that senator a whiskey every time I’m in Washington. He’s a sweet old duck, if you can overlook the blatant hypocrisy of his voting record. But this Tyler Thorne . . .” He shakes his head. “He’s the dangerous kind of closeted. Back in the Middle Ages, he’d have been wearing a hair shirt and flagellating himself for his impure thoughts.”

“Maybe. But he’s also packing out auditoriums from Tallahassee to Miami. Check this out.” I click on one of Thorne’s videos. “His event was so big the university couldn’t hold it, so he and Kristi sold out an entire stadium.”

I turn my laptop so Lars can see the video.

“Christ.” He shakes his head in amazement. “Who’d have thought a dweeb like Tyler Thorne could pull that kind of crowd? And don’t even try to tell me they’re not gay as fuck. Look at all those pinstripes, not to mention all the signs with that cock logo pointing upward.”

“You have a one-track mind. It’s a compass needle pointing north, idiot, like I said. And there are plenty of hot cheerleaders in there to balance up the muscle. They’re all Kristi fans, apparently.”

“Whatever,” Lars says dismissively, clicking out of the screen. “Enough closeted conservatives for one day. Why don’t we do something more interesting. Like, for example, talk about why I’ve just sent a horde of my best tech heads to Miami to build a server center?” He raises his eyebrows at me.

“It’s just an idea so far. I haven’t developed the concept properly.” I drum my fingers on the table in mock indecision, like I haven’t been waiting for this moment the entire time Lars has been here.

But the waiting is almost part of the excitement, like saving dessert until after the vegetable dish.

“Like that’s ever stopped us.” Lars is almost salivating with anticipation, and I’m enjoying this far more than I should be.

I meet his eyes. “Keep it to yourself?”

He mimes locking his lips and throwing away the key, which makes me smile.

“It occurred to me,” I say slowly, “that in an age where literally everyone is traceable, the most valuable commodity is anonymity. So this is what I’ve been working on.” I turn my old laptop around and pull up the basic structure I’ve built. “I want clients to be able to totally erase any trace of their online presence,” I say, “in real time. And to create a new identity on the fly, using their existing biometric data. Funnily enough, it was the John Owens thing that gave me the missing piece to fill in the idea. It’s the same sort of concept, only instead of transferring one ID to a host of different people, the people themselves become the fluid factor.”

Lars is clicking through it at the speed of light.

“Wait a minute.” He stops and looks at me. “Am I reading this right? You mean that if someone had access to this, they could literally become someone new every day if they chose? So if someone used facial recognition, for example, or fingerprints or even DNA testing, the results would only point to the latest identity you’d created for yourself?”

“Not only that.” I click into another part. “The platform would automatically erase any trace of previous identities and insert online evidence supporting the new one according to the information you input. And it would continue to crawl in the backend of the web to detect and erase anything that could give you away.”