[Alex Vane 03.0] The Mockingbird Drive

by AC Fuller

  I tried to catch Tudayapi's eye, but she was staring at Quinn. "I should probably ask you to leave," Tudayapi said.

  "But you won't," Quinn said. "Because you're curious."

  "I don't want anything to do with those drives. If what you said is true, I don't want anything to do with them."

  "Please," Quinn said. "If you won't help us get the information off this antique data depository, at least tell us where you got them."

  Tudayapi thought for a moment, then said. "I'll tell you where I got them, but that's it."

  It was a start, I thought.

  "Before I made the transition, I was a private contractor, one of the best in the region. I got my start setting up computer networks for the tribe in the nineties. Word spread to other tribes in the area and as far as Washington State, so I started getting jobs all over. I never intended to go to school—I was already making a good living—but the tribe offered me a scholarship to get a degree. I specialized in data management, the storage of data. And, of course, the destruction of data. After college, I started getting more jobs, and I set up a real business. Ended up getting gigs switching out computer systems. In the early 2000s, before everyone was doing it, I was a hot commodity. Basically, if a big company wanted to overhaul their entire computer system, they called me. I'd handle everything. Backing up data, purchasing the new machines, installing software, everything. I even had partnerships with some trainers who would come in and teach the staff how to use all the new systems."

  "So how did you end up working for the gestapo?" Quinn asked.

  Tudayapi frowned.

  "Quinn means the CIA," I said. "The government."

  "I never worked for them. I once did work for them. Anyway, it was ten years ago or so. I'd done a job for McGregor Ham, a major regional distributor of—"

  "Ham?" I asked.

  Tudayapi looked up at me, stared into my eyes, and gave me a strange smile, the kind you'd give a child who is doing and saying ridiculous things but you love them anyway. "Yes," she said. "Ham. Anyway, they were down in Boise and I came in with a bid that was half of the local bigwigs. I did the job—nothing big, just installing a new system to track orders and shipping—but the CEO asked me to train him personally, so he could review the sales and shipping data himself. I did, and a couple weeks later, I got a call from a guy who said McGregor had personally referred me. Guy said he had a job for me."

  "Who was the guy?"

  "Yeah…don't remember his name, but he was with Allied Regional Data Security. ARDS. They were looking for contractors and, long story short, they hired me. And these guys had a ton of money. Too much money. They really didn't know what they were doing at all."

  "What kind of stuff did you do for them?" I asked.

  "Mostly swapping out systems, but over the second and third year, more sensitive stuff. Data destruction, encrypted backups, and so on."

  Quinn was walking her little square, listening intently. "So how did you end up with the drives?"

  "I was getting to that, honey." She nodded at me. "I thought he was supposed to be the impatient one." She closed her eyes. "It was my third year with ARDS. I got called in and told I had a job down in Bakersfield, California."

  Quinn stopped abruptly. "CIA western district headquarters."

  "That's right," Tudayapi said. "My boss said I'd earned bigger jobs. Said there'd be security clearance and a $10,000 bonus. I went down and it turned out I was there to destroy data for the CIA."

  "Why wouldn't the CIA have their own people to do that?" I asked. "I mean, you wouldn't think they'd be looking in the yellow pages for that."

  "Well, we weren't exactly in the yellow pages. ARDS was the biggest in the region and half of their contracts were government or intelligence. ARDS isn't one of them—they had a private sector business established beforehand. But after 9/11, billions of dollars started flowing in for all sorts of security projects. The stuff people know about—the war on terror, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—were just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the money actually went to expand the size of the security systems in the country. There was money to spend. You can bet that if I was going to get a $10,000 bonus, ARDS was charging them half a million for the job."

  Quinn asked, "Did they hook electrodes up to your balls when you got there?"

  "They were actually super nice. Just regular working folks. I flew down and met the guy. Brown or Butcher or something. He said he'd heard great things about me from McGregor, which I took to mean, 'We've studied your background extensively and we know what you ate for breakfast at the airport.' But I didn't care. As screwed up as America has treated us natives, it was after 9/11, so I was proud to serve my country."

  Quinn scoffed at this. "Did you ever do another job for the CIA?"

  "No, I told my boss I wanted to stay more local after that one. He was disappointed, but what was he going to do? I was the best they had and they'd rather have me local than nothing at all. The sense I got was that, if I'd wanted to, I could have worked there full time, some sort of partnership between ARDS and the CIA."

  "But you didn't want to work for them again?"

  "I didn't know if I wanted to leave the Rez, and, as flattered as I was, I didn't know if I wanted to work for the CIA. I had no problem backing up or destroying data, but part of me wondered whether I'd end up giving that speech that Matt Damon gives in Good Will Hunting, you know, the one about using his skills for evil."

  "So the drives were part of the data destruction, and you lifted them?" Quinn asked.

  "Basically, yeah. The job had four parts. Back up the old systems, install new, modern systems, then destroy the old systems. The fourth part was to render old data invisible and destroy what they told me to destroy. I destroyed over five hundred IBM 2314s that month. And all sorts of other hardware."

  "They didn't want to wipe them clean and sell them or anything?"

  Tudayapi chuckled. "They were paranoid, and they were right to be. Everyone knows that even after data has been erased, there are sometimes ways to recover it, or at least parts of it, like file headers and whatnot. So they wanted me to physically destroy the machines."

  "And you just couldn't bring yourself to do it?"

  Tudayapi smiled. "Those drives were works of art. And I did destroy all but two of them."

  I was growing impatient. As interesting as it was to hear how she'd stolen them, I couldn't forget that her theft a decade ago had landed me here, on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, with less than three days until my wedding anniversary.

  I tried to catch Tudayapi's eyes, but she was talking Quinn through the specs of the drives and occasionally going off on tangents about other drives. It was clear that, while Quinn did speak her language, Tudayapi knew much more about old computer hardware. But they still weren't getting to the point. "Excuse me, sorry. Tudayapi, please. Bottom line, do you have the equipment to get the data off this drive?"

  "I was just saying, it'll take—"

  "I know, it'll take a connecter systems interface module drive joystick, or whatever. I don't care. Do you have the stuff or not?" It sounds rude now, but it didn't come out that way. As meandering as Tudayapi's speaking style was, I could tell there was part of her that appreciated directness.

  She looked up and smiled, then whispered something under her breath.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Nothing. Just a digital storage joke. You wouldn't get it."

  Quinn smiled, "She said 'Five years, or whichever comes first.'"

  She was right. I didn't get it.

  "It's a saying in the data world," Tudayapi said. "'Digital information lasts forever, or five years. Whichever comes first.'" I had no idea what they were talking about, and Tudayapi knew it. "It's a riff on what everyone used to say. That digital data won't deteriorate. It's not like paper, that can burn, or stone tablets, that can break. In theory, data lasts forever."

  Quinn butted in, "But the technology changes so fast that storage devices are obs
olete within five years."

  "And if you can't actually get the data off a device, the data is, effectively, destroyed."

  "There are floppy disks all over the country that you'd have to go to a museum to read," Quinn said. "The information is there, but it's locked. Data never dies."

  "Okay," I said. "But this data isn't locked, and you can access it, right?"

  "I can," Tudayapi said. "But there's no way I'm helping you."

  "Why the hell not?" I asked. This time it sounded rude, and I meant it to. We were surrounded by wires, connectors, soldering irons, tins of tiny screws, panels of black and beige and silver metal and plastic, and maybe twenty old monitors and fifty old hard drives. She'd just spent fifteen minutes describing how she acquired the damn things, knowing the whole time that we'd want to know what was on them.

  "While I was telling you that story, I was thinking. About you two showing up here, about Baxter, about the drives, and about the day I took them, why I took them, and why I never cared to open them. I didn't really know Baxter, but I looked into him a little bit more when I saw that he was being named as the shooter. He was paranoid. He was—"

  "He was not paranoid," Quinn said. "He was a truth seeker."

  "Call it what you want, but it's not what I was. Those drives sat in here for ten years and I never once thought of figuring out what was on them. Honestly, I had too much respect for the CIA to do that. I think that's what allowed me to steal them in the first place. I had no intention of stealing secrets or seeking the truth. In my heart, I'm a preservationist. I want everything to remain exactly as it was made."

  I smiled, but it turned out she didn't mean this as a joke. She saw me smiling and rolled her eyes. "Well, almost everything. But, in any case, I won't help you because it wouldn't be morally right, and because it's too dangerous. I seriously doubt that this thing has anything interesting on it. I mean, do you know how little data these things have on them? And even if it does, it likely has nothing to do with the shooting." She paused and passed a little black screw between her hands a few times. "I'm sorry about your friend. I really am. But I'm a practical person. There's just nothing to gain from me helping you, and a lot to lose. I think you should leave."

  Chapter 15

  I was hungry and eager to have Quinn set up the call to Greta, as she'd promised. The place to go in Owyhee was the Tammen Temeeh Kahni, a grocery store attached to an ACE hardware, a deli, and a gas station. According to Tudayapi, it was the only place to go in Owyhee, both for food and for free Wi-Fi.

  I hadn't given up on getting Tudayapi's help, but, after a few minutes of listening to Quinn try to convince her, I'd gently suggested that we get a late breakfast and think about our next move. We needed a new approach, but first we needed to eat. And I needed Quinn to hold up her end of the bargain.

  I parked the car along the side of the bright blue building and hopped out. Quinn followed reluctantly, still sulking.

  "I know what you're thinking," she said, not looking at me as we walked in. "You want to make your damn call."

  "That was the deal, Quinn. How about you set it up on my laptop while I get us some food?"

  The Tammen Temeeh Kahni was a basic, medium-sized grocery store with four checkout counters and a special rack of dreamcatchers and carvings made by local artists. We walked to a little sandwich stand in the corner of the store and Quinn waved toward the food shelves as she slid into a booth. I handed her my laptop and turned to get the food, then I realized that we hadn't eaten since we left Vegas, and I had no idea what she ate. She could have been a meat eater, a vegetarian, or a paleo lady. She might have eaten only Hamburger Helper for the last six hundred meals. Nothing would have surprised me.

  "What do you want to eat?" I asked.

  "I'm a Freegan. Get me some snacks while I fix your machine." It was such a Quinn thing to say. She'd said "Freegan" like it was a common word. A word everyone should know. It isn't a common word, but it just so happened that we had a Freegan named Fern back at the office. Basically, he ate a vegan diet if he was paying for the food, but he'd also eat roadkill or pick meat out of the trash. He'd eat anything that was going to waste, or free. To him, this was the most environmentally friendly thing to do and the best way to stick it to the "industrial farming system."

  Anyway, it was lucky for Quinn that I knew what it meant because, if she'd had to explain it to me right there in the Tammen Temeeh Kahni, I think we both would have lost it.

  I was about to tell her this, but she was already opening my laptop, frowning, and leaning away from it like it might explode. I was running a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, which added a layer of security to my emails and Internet usage, but Quinn was not impressed. I knew she was constantly judging me in her head, and doing her best to keep it to herself, but the lack of security features on my laptop was too much for her to contain. Within a few clicks, her frown turned into violent head shaking, then into cursing. But at least she was doing it under her breath. I headed for the wall of fridges along the back wall, and, by the time I'd filled my hands with Red Bulls, iced coffees, and water, her face was red. Somewhere between rage and sorrow.

  I grabbed nuts, turkey jerky, granola bars, and some fruit, then paid, used the restroom, and slid cautiously into the booth across from Quinn.

  She ignored me for a couple minutes, then looked up. "I didn't have much time," she said. "So I did the basics. First, I installed Tor." Even I'd heard of Tor. It's a piece of free software that anonymizes everything you do online by directing traffic through a worldwide network of more than seven-thousand relays. James had told me about it years ago, but it seemed like something only criminals or the paranoid would ever need. But if Quinn was happy, then fine.

  "Next, I installed TorFone," she continued. "I'm still not happy about you making calls, but, if you must, this is the only way to do it." I'd never heard of it, but Quinn explained that it was like Skype for "non-idiots."

  I asked her a few questions about it as she connected her headset to my computer. I didn't understand much of what she said, and I had to interrupt her rants about the technical specs and the Dark Web, but she seemed to know what she was talking about. Basically, TorFone was a way to make totally anonymous, Internet-based calls.

  She explained things directly and clearly, then stood and took my chin in her hands, turning me toward her. "Alex, as confidential as the call is from our end, it won't be from her end. Do not say where we are or anything about anything."

  I sat where she'd been sitting and put on the headset. "Enter the number here, then hit enter," she said, pointing at a little box on the screen. "And don't say anything."

  I started entering the number from memory, but Quinn interrupted me. Her face was in the bag of snacks. "You didn't get any dark chocolate?" She said it like I'd disobeyed a direct order.

  "No," I said casually. She sighed and walked away as I finished entering the number.

  The ring seemed slow, drawn out. I knew it was just my anticipation, but it didn't matter. After four rings, she answered. "Alex?"

  "How'd you know it was me?"

  "I'm actually surprised you didn't call sooner."

  "But how'd you know it was me?"

  She just let my question hang there. She did that sometimes. She liked me to think she could read my thoughts. And she often could. Not because she's psychic, but because she knows me better than anyone and because I'm pretty predictable. As the silence hung there, I figured she had been waiting for my call since the divorce story broke. I hadn't asked Quinn how the TorFone call would appear on her caller-ID, but I'm sure it was either "blocked" or gibberish. So when she saw a number she didn't recognize on her personal cellphone, she assumed it was me.

  "Did you hear that I was in Las Vegas?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Why aren't you calling me from your cell?"

  "Long story. How'd you hear I was in Vegas?"

  "I talked to Wesley yesterday." She was close with Bird, but Greta wasn't a nickname kin
d of person. "He said you were there to meet James."

  "You haven't heard?"

  "Heard what?"

  "James was killed."

  I think that, for a moment, she was wondering whether it was an attempt to get attention or sympathy, because it took her a while to say, "What? No! How?"

  "The shooting in Las Vegas."

  "I saw that go by on…something. Some screen or another. Tuesday morning? I haven't seen the news today."

  The combination of talking about James and speaking to Greta was getting to me, and I fought back tears. "James was there. He's dead, Greta."

  She didn't say anything, and I didn't know if I should say more. I looked around the store. A man in dirty jeans was paying for beer at the counter. A couple of matching blonds talked loudly about different brands of water in the back. The whole scene was surreal, like it had been back at Wynn.

  "Greta, did you hear me?"

  "I just looked it up on my phone. You're right. He's listed. I just can't believe it. Did you see Innerva?"

  It was the exact kind of question Quinn did not want me to answer. "No," I lied.

  "How are you?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "I wouldn't have filed if…if I'd known that—"

  "You couldn't have known. Plus, you must have filed days ago. A couple weeks ago."

  I pictured her crinkling her nose and moving her cheeks from side to side with subtle twitches of her facial muscles. I'd asked her about it once and she'd said something condescending like, "It's yoga for my face. You might want to try it sometime."

  I pressed the headset closer to my mouth. Whispered, "Why didn't you tell me you were going to file? Why'd you have to do it like that?"

  She didn't say anything and, in the silence, a phrase popped into my head: Don't Be Pushy. It was from another listicle I'd read on one of our blogs, The Guy Zone. And before you accuse me of sexism, we own The Lady Zone as well. Anyway, I rarely click on any of the crap on The Guy Zone, but the headline had called to me: