The Y2 Kaper

by Jim CaJacob

  People always said that the thing about old friends was that you could start conversing after years like you’d never left. This wasn’t really true with his mom. Maybe because of their frequent phone calls and emails, there was always an uncomfortable period of a few minutes when he first got home. On the other hand, he thought, maybe they had never had that much to say to each other that didn’t involve school logistics. Val had always been squarely in the middle of the cohort of “good kids”. His worst transgressions had been frequent failure to complete homework and a single high school sophomore year self-introduction to substance abuse in the form of Buckeye Beer.

  “So, mom, the neighborhood looks the same.”

  “You think? Did you see Pawlak’s closed?” Pawlak’s was a family-owned grocery store that had been there as long as he could remember. Originally an all purpose single stop, it had been forced to adopt a bi-polar marketing strategy, selling convenience store items and Polish specialties, especially meats. “The old man died and none of his sons wanted to take over.”

  “How’s Mrs. Grogan?”

  “Fine. She asks about you every week at Confession.” Mrs. Grogan, Val’s mom’s best friend, was all Polish but had married an Irishman from Chicago after the war. “A drinker”, his mom invariably added. He had had the grace to die early and Mrs. Grogan was accepted back into the community, albeit with a faint whiff of scandal.

  “So where have you been?”

  “We’re working a project in Washington right now. I had a meeting in Columbus yesterday and decided to drive up.”

  “Washington now. Goodness.”

  “Mom, thousands of consultants work in Washington all the time. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Well, they must think you know what you’re doing.”

  “Don’t let on that I actually don’t, OK mom?”

  Toledo boasted of exactly two prominent cultural icons: its Zoo and its Art Museum. In each case young Toledoans were trained to recite the mantra “One of the best in the country” at the least provocation. His mom wasn’t really interested in either, but kept Val up to date with the press releases from each. Along the lines of “I heard they have a new pygmy hippo” or “I see that Pissaro show will be here”. Val had visited both in the past few years and had been pleasantly surprised at how well they still stood up to others he’d seen.

  When Val was in grade school the Toledo Police had a safety campaign for kids that featured Amber the Safety Elephant. Along the lines of “Amber the Safety Elephant says don’t run between parked cars.” Amber, an adult female at the zoo, lost her gig when she trampled a little girl. Unless that was an urban myth. Val was afraid to look into this just in case the grief-stricken parents would somehow be reminded. On one visit he actually went to the Zoo office and looked through the genealogical records of the elephants – there was a book! The record was clean. He wondered if there had been some covert redaction going on.

  Inevitably the afternoon obeyed the First Law of Thermodynamics and settled into watching TV. The choices of his childhood, available only on rare sick days or half-holidays like Columbus Day where school was out but life otherwise went on as usual, had been soap operas and game shows. These were now supplanted, at least on the channels his mom would watch, by a galaxy of talk shows, hosted by people famous for being famous. He didn’t think it was fair to ask his mom to check out ESPN, where they were probably showing semifinal lumberjack competitions. They settled on Oprah. At least she wasn’t doing her monthly fawning adulation of Maya Angelou today. Val’s mind wandered.

  Josh and his crew were definitely up to something. It seemed entirely plausible that they could and would take it all the way unless they were stopped. Jenny and Wilton would, he was sure, get the goods. Val believed Max when he said he would take care of business, but this was definitely more than embezzling. They would have to watch their backs on this one.

  Val had booked the last flight to DC out of Detroit, an hour’s drive north. He gracefully, he thought, declined his mom’s half-hearted invitation to stay for dinner, gave a quick hug and peck on the cheek, and drove off.

  He didn’t exactly wonder why he had come. It was probably something like the salmon and the Monarch butterflies. Home was home, mom was mom, and they were both parts of whatever the hell he was. He found a decent station out of Ann Arbor, glanced in the rearview mirror, gave himself a half smile and a shake of the head, and drove up 75. Michigan drivers were still maniacs.

  Chapter 28

  Wilton was asleep at ten-thirty in the morning when Jenny called. She and Val were back from Ohio and they had to talk. Wilton asked her to give him twenty minutes and to meet him in the breakfast area. He decided he could shower later and hurried down.

  Jenny was sitting at a table with her briefcase open. Wilton knew she could tell she had woken him up, but she and Val were both used to his irregular hours.

  “Good trip?”

  “The trip was fine. The meeting was very productive.”

  “This professor person knows his stuff?”

  “Cold.”

  “Cold? It was cold in Columbus?”

  “No. He knows his stuff cold. It’s an idiom.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing definite, of course, but he gave us some good suggestions for how our investigation might proceed. Do you remember the Consumer Price Index calculation in the statistics module?”

  “Of course.”

  “Professor Crawford thinks that the simplest plan is the most likely plan, especially if our assignments don’t suspect that they’re being followed. There are plenty of other indices, which might be manipulated, but the CPI is an obvious target. I want you to concentrate on it for a while, OK?”

  “Sounds like the best logical course.”

  “Any problem with security?”

  “Oh the usual. Pockets of fairly rigorous security in an ocean of sloppy short cuts. Once in a while I encounter something I have to hack around, but it’s pretty straightforward.”

  “Good. Focus, Wilton. I have every confidence in you.”

  Wilton had to admit these rare compliments from Jenny meant a lot to him. Val was more the pat on the back type, but he too made it clear that he appreciated Wilton’s talent.

  By eleven-thirty he was back at work. He ordered a room service cheeseburger for breakfast. His first order of business was to tune his software tools to concentrate on the target Jenny had given him. This took about an hour and a half before he was satisfied. Next he plunged into the code. He made occasional notes in a school-style theme book. These, a combination of mathematical notation, ideograms and doodling, would have been unintelligible to anyone else. He turned on ESPN. A Seniors Tour golf tournament was on. Wilton loved the stately pace of TV golf, and the respect the announcers gave all the competitors.

  By dinnertime Wilton had a working hypothesis. He spent another hour and a half writing some provisional code to test it. He created what he called a “state machine”. This was a kind of simulated black box with all kinds of virtual dials and meters on the outside. He could input variables and see how the state changed. It was difficult, conceptually abstract work, but it was what needed to be done to really get at the bottom of a piece of code, especially something written in a low language like C or, God forbid, assembler.

  Programming any computer involved layers within layers of logic. Many of the programs existed in the hardware itself, beginning with the ones and zeros switched on and off by electricity flowing through the millions of transistors in the chip. A transistor is nothing more than a very small, very fast switch.

  Assembler language was the closest a programmer could get to manipulating the actual function of the computer. For example, an Assembler programmer could add one number to another and decide exactly where in the computer’s billions of storage locations to store the answer. Assembler looked like this:

&nbs
p; EEL: MOV AH,01

  INT 21h

  CMP AL,0Dh

  JNZ EEL

  MOV AH,2h

  MOV DL,AL

  INT 21h

  People didn’t program in assembler much anymore. The higher-level languages like COBOL and SQL looked more like English. But, theoretically, a well-written piece of assembler code should be the most efficient way to execute a given job. And in the days when these programs were written getting every bit of productivity out of the hardware was the name of the game.

  By the time prime time TV came on he was on a roll. The basic shell of the program was working. Then he got stuck. The guy was doing something with some local variables that didn’t make sense. If nothing else, computers were consistent, yet he was getting unpredictable results. He stood up, stretched his arms straight behind him, breathed deeply, and sat back down.

  The next time he noticed the time it was 1:15 in the morning. An infomercial about car wax was on now. Wilton made a mental note of what to buy if he suspected that his Land Rover was likely to be subjected to either flamethrower or ball bearing attack. He was still stuck.

  A half hour later Wilton was pushing open the door to a bowling alley. Even he knew he really shouldn’t be walking alone in DC at this hour but it was only a couple blocks and there was still a lot of foot traffic.

  While he was much too young to remember old-fashioned bowling alleys, with pin boys and grease pencils and the smell of cigarettes and beer, the modern version had a magic all its own. Pure Western unapologetic pop glitz culture. Wilton loved it.

  It was now quarter to two in the morning – Saturday morning. The lanes were about two thirds full, mostly with slightly inebriated couples on the down slope of dates. By this hour people were having a good time with one another. Wilton found the good spirits infectious.

  He wasn’t in the slightest sleepy. The more coding he did the more wired he got. While this mode was super productive if he was just churning out lines of code, it wasn’t the best for analysis.

  Wilton did not know how to sit back, relax and think. His way to relax was to engage in something that was more diverting and distracting than work. He let his subconscious handle the disengaging of mental gears. Bowling was a good choice. It required a fair degree of low intensity concentration. It was hard for a person to worry about a mental problem when the brain was managing the complicated mechanics involved in propelling a heavy ball in a predetermined direction.

  He rented shoes. There was a large selection of balls. He was not embarrassed to select a woman’s ball. Most of the men’s were much too large for his hands.

  He went to the bar. A cute blonde was cleaning glasses. She saw Wilton in the mirror and turned around with a friendly smile.

  “What’ll it be, amigo?”

  “Coors Light, please. No glass. Why ‘amigo’?

  “I call everybody amigo, ‘least until they give me some reason not to.” She tilted her head back and narrowed her eyes in mock appraisal. “You don’t look like a troublemaker, mister.”

  Wilton laughed. “What do I look like?”

  “One of those smart types who bowl to take their mind off nuclear physics or recombinant DNA or object-oriented programming or something. Am I close?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

  “Wilton, not Watson.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Did you guess that because I’m Asian?”

  “You are?” Wilton’s turn to narrow his eyes and check if she was trying to be funny.

  She said “Partly. Also because you’re young, don’t have a big beer gut, didn’t bring your own ball and shoes in a custom case, aren’t here for league, don’t have a date, should I go on?”

  “No. Got me pegged.”

  “That’s natural. I’ve got everybody pegged. Peg’s my name.”

  “Peg, let’s see, that’s a nickname for. . .”

  “Margaret. Mary Margaret. Catholic. Chicago suburbs. Moved out West to find myself. Moved back East to finish school. The pay’s OK and the hours are perfect here, if you don’t mind not having a life.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Guess. Don’t guess Art History.”

  “OK, I’ll guess. You probably assume I’ll guess something in Liberal Arts because you’re a woman. So, what’s the least Liberal Arts-like major I can think of? Economics? No, nobody can hide their true nature that well. How about Double-E?”

  “Amazing. Dead on. So how about you?”

  “Don’t you want to guess now?”

  “Well, at the risk of jeopardizing my reputation as a sleuth, I’d have to say Double-E as well.”

  “Bingo. Although I’m moonlighting as a coder.”

  “An Asian Double-E coder who bowls in the middle of the night?”

  “An Irish-Catholic female Double-E who works in a bowling alley bar?”

  “Double-E wannabe. And who said anything about Irish?”

  “Mary Margaret?”

  “My mother liked Princess Margaret.”

  “Who?”

  “The Queen of England’s sister. For some reason she was all the rage around Chicago when I was born. Are you named after anyone?”

  “Well, I have an English name that I picked out myself. Our Chinese first names usually mean something like ‘luck’. Not very imaginative.”

  Peg went to the other end of the bar to serve a bowler who had walked up. Wilton glanced at his watch. Peggy walked back.

  “So, how wide awake are you?" Peggy said.

  “Very. Why?”

  “Because I was hoping you would have a cup of coffee with me after I close up here.”

  The American women Wilton had met were, as he expected, much more forward than the women back home. Even so, he was still not quite used to it.

  “You were hoping?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry. The thought of a little intelligent conversation just sounds appealing right now, that’s all.”

  “It sure does.”

  “Oh, damn," she said. “You paid for your bowling already, didn’t you?”

  “That’s OK. This way you’ll have to guess whether I’m really a Double-E hacker or the bowling champion of China.”

  At that moment the structure of the seasonal adjustment module flashed in Wilton’s brain in a new way. He stared vacantly straight ahead for maybe three seconds and grunted approvingly. “Now I understand, you tricky man.”

  “Did you mention earlier that you hear voices?" Peg said.

  “I usually tune them out. This one was dying to be heard. Sorry. I’m back. Almost ready?”

  “Why ‘Wilton’?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you pick the name Wilton?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Bore me. Over coffee, OK?”

  He smiled and nodded. I love bowling, he thought.

  Chapter 29

  Val noticed that they had changed robot messages in the Atlanta airport train. For a while a synthesized six-shooter went off and the robot barked a stern Robocop scolding if someone kept the doors from closing. He realized that some consultant had come up with that bright idea and charged a small fortune for it. A small boy with a baseball cap and wide eyes stared at a speaker as they rumbled through the tunnel.

  Val thought there should be a special place in hell for airport architects. Why was it that O’Hare, Atlanta’s rival as busiest airport in the world, got people from their car to their gate, or between gates, more simply and efficiently than any of the modern, high-tech airports? You could ride a train at O’Hare if you absolutely insisted, but it certainly wasn’t a requirement.

  At Dulles you got off a plane, lined up, boarded a large bus known as a “mobile lounge” that raised and lowered itself for no reason (they were designed to dock with the planes – a non-starter), then rode five more minutes, got in
line again, walked to your actual gate, got back in line, and boarded. Apparently Saarinen didn’t want to clutter up his beautiful airport with ugly airplanes.

  Forty-three minutes later he was in his rental car, exiting the airport. Max had asked Val to make the trip to Atlanta to meet in person. Val had been in consulting for fourteen years. He was familiar with the layouts of most American cities. He tried not to think about the number of nights he had spent in garden spots like Clinton, Illinois, Lakeland, Florida and Painted Post, New York. The Painted Post Holiday Inn was the home of biker karaoke night. Once in a restaurant in Libertyville, Illinois he and a friend were having dinner when a fellow at a nearby table stood up and started speaking to the room at large about how Wisniewski Mortuary had started the year slow but once they hit their stride there was no stopping them. After a moment Val and his buddy realized that the motel had booked a bowling banquet in the main dining room, but felt no reason to chase away any other paying customers who showed up by telling them that they would be attending the banquet (no extra charge) while eating their cube steak.

  Val found the Buckhead Ritz with no trouble. There was a human being playing the piano in the lobby rather than a computer. The trend for lissome harpists in long dresses seemed to have crested. The ready smile and helpful attitude of the front desk clerk impressed Val, like it always did.

  Max had left a message: could they meet in the lobby at seven? Val took off his shoes, hooked up his laptop and checked email. He carried a multiple-purpose tool, complete with pliers and several kinds of screwdriver, but he rarely had to disassemble a hotel phone to get connected any more. He had 23 messages, including three from his mother. She wondered if he had gotten caught in the thunderstorms in Tulsa. (Why would she think he was in Tulsa?) She wondered if he saw the feature on 60 Minutes about the Y2K bug. She asked if he knew how she could download audio clips from a site specializing in polka music.

  Val debated about going down to the exercise room. He didn’t make up his mind, but thought it probably it made more sense to get up really early and have a workout in the morning, before his flight. After all, he reasoned, he was on East Coast time and it would feel like sleeping in anyway. He had a rich repertoire of such rationalizations that he employed with considerable expertise.