Stalking Moon

by Неизвестный

  Capitals. Punctuation. Grammar.

  MidnightChyna: > Wheatley. We already have the women's names.

  LUNA13: > yes, i did that, i sent names to CNN

  MidnightChyna: > How did you get the names? Did you know them?

  LUNA13: > not important

  Dance hurriedly scribbled a note and positioned it in front of me.

  MidnightChyna: > VERY important to us. Do you know who killed them?

  LUNA13: > not important

  MidnightChyna: > Where are they?

  LUNA13: > safe

  MidnightChyna: > what does that mean, safe?

  LUNA13: > out. . . free. . . not important

  MidnightChyna: > Who are you?

  LUNA13: > not important

  MidnightChyna: > Again, VERY important to us.

  LUNA13: > and who are you?

  MidnightChyna: > What do you mean?

  LUNA13: > you say wheatley, dance, nasso, you say you are wheatley but how do i trust all of you?

  MidnightChyna: > You CAN trust us.

  LUNA13: > you are police, you are prosecutors, you are la migra. . . you have never been in albania, what do you know about me trusting police?

  “La Migra,” Nasso said. “She's gotta be close to the border, using that term.”

  MidnightChyna: > WHERE are you? In Arizona? in Sonora?

  LUNA13: > not important, where i am. i send you documents, where i send them?

  MidnightChyna: > Why not email them?

  LUNA13: > not possible, give me address.

  MidnightChyna: > Bring them to our office

  LUNA13:>

  “What the hell does that mean?” Dance asked.

  “Very big grin. She's laughing at the idea of coming to your office.”

  MidnightChyna: > Who are you?

  LUNA13: > you, wheatley, you are a woman, no?

  MidnightChyna: > Yes.

  LUNA13: > what is meaning, name? Taá? what country?

  MidnightChyna: > I am Apache. Taá is my grandmother's name.

  LUNA13: > american indian?

  MidnightChyna: > Yes.

  LUNA13: > outsider, like me, like all of us

  MidnightChyna: > Please tell me, who are “all of us”?

  LUNA13: > documents coming, where, please?

  I turned to Dance and shrugged.

  “Should I have her send them to my home?” Taá said.

  Dance and Nasso exchanged glances, and Dance finally nodded. Taá wrote something on paper and showed it to me.

  MidnightChyna: > send docs to 295 east 32nd street, tucson

  Nothing happened for at least a minute. The cursor blinked, ticking off seconds.

  “Did she disconnect?” Dance said.

  “No,” I answered. “Look at the top of the window. She's still connected.”

  LUNA13: > who are you now?

  MidnightChyna: > What do you mean?

  LUNA13: > you change style, you use lower case, who are you now?

  MidnightChyna: > Jake nasso

  LUNA13: > i think. . . no, you are another woman.

  “She's guessing,” Dance said. I shook my head.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Michael,” Nasso said. “We're dealing with a pro here. You'd better be honest with her, or she's gone. Bye bye.”

  MidnightChyna: > i am laura. computer tech. these idiots, they don't know how to use computers, i'm sitting behind them in case they fuck up. wheatley just spilled coffee in her lap, nasso tried to take over, but he types with 2 thumbs.

  LUNA13: > you are police, also?

  MidnightChyna: > sergeant, us marshals service, computer division

  LUNA13: > see what i mean, this thing, trust? you fuck with me, too bad

  MidnightChyna: > don't leave

  LUNA13: > why not? how i know, how many other policia in room?

  “Policia!” Nasso said excitedly. “She's Mexican.”

  MidnightChyna: > none, i swear on my daughter

  LUNA13: > what is her name?

  MidnightChyna: > spider. I haven't seen her in twenty years

  LUNA13: > ahhhhhhhhhh. i believe you, laura, you answer quick, from the heart, i have son, seventeen, daughters, eleven and nine. i have not seen them forever, so, not important. i send documents, you get them tomorrow. now, enough

  MidnightChyna: > don't go

  LUNA13: > turn monitor so dance man, so he can see

  “Not a laptop,” Taá said. “She's got a regular computer setup, she's working from either her home or a safe house.”

  MidnightChyna: > he can see

  LUNA13: > warning, mister dancing man. i have NO trust

  MidnightChyna: > you can trust me

  LUNA13: > THEY HUNT ME, THEY WANT TO KILL ME

  “Jesus,” I murmured. “All caps. She's shouting at us, like we don't really understand the pressure she's under.” “Tell her we'll offer protection.”

  MidnightChyna: > come to us, we will protect you

  LUNA13: > documents arrive wheatley tomorrow. dancing man, you see this screen now?

  MidnightChyna: > he sees

  LUNA13: > yon read screen now?

  MidnightChyna: > he's reading

  LUNA13: > fuck you, dancer

  Her login name disappeared from the top of the window.

  “She's gone,” I said to Dance. “You sure know how to piss off a girl.”

  “Summarize,” Dance said to Nasso and Taá.

  “Living near the border, maybe Mexico, maybe here. But my guess is Mexico. She's so tuned into corruption that she doesn't trust us in any way.”

  “There's another possibility,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Dance asked.

  “You're not a computer person. So you invest some trust in what you read on the screen. But that could be anybody. Anywhere. Faking the grammar, faking anything. She could be anywhere in the world. It could even be a man.”

  “Laura's right,” Taá said.

  “So what now?” Dance asked.

  “I take only one thing as true,” Taá said. “That she's sending some kind of documents. FedEx, she said. Could be anywhere in the world, as Laura said. But when the package comes, if it comes, we'll be able to track where it's shipped from.”

  “So tell me,” I said. “Why did you have me talk with her?”

  “She originally contacted us by email. We want you to track her email message backward. Find out where it came from.”

  “Wheatley can do that,” Dance said.

  “No, I can't,” Taá said. “I do entirely different kinds of computer work.”

  “You see how you fell into our laps?” Nasso said. “You see why I told you that you'd remember the day I arrested you?”

  “Can you find the source of the email?” Dance asked impatiently.

  “Sure,” I lied. “When do my arrest warrants get written out of your records?”

  Dance looked at Nasso, who nodded. Dance motioned to Taá.

  “Do it. Now.”

  “How do I trust you?” I said.

  “Oh, you can trust him to get it done,” Nasso said. “But there's one thing he didn't tell you. Once he's deleted the arrest warrants, he can turn right around and get them reissued. He's kept his word, but he's kept you on his leash.”

  “Jake, for Christ's sake,” Dance complained, “why did you say that?”

  “Because I know that's what you'd do. You're so much a lawyer, excuse me, you're so much an attorney, you're locked into legal-think. You guys are like the feebs. Well, that's an exaggeration. The FBI has no equal when it comes to screwing people.”

  “I'll need a few things,” I said, to break the tension between the two men.

  “What?” Taá asked.

  “First, this chat was on Yahoo. But there are all kinds of major Internet portals. Yahoo. Netscape. Microsoft. AOL. Plus a few hundred smaller ones. I'm going to have to pay a hacker friend major money to get me data.”

  “Logfiles,” Taá said.

  “Right
. To start, I'd say, focus on those four major portals. I'll need twenty thousand dollars for each of them.”

  “Lady,” Nasso said. “My admiration for you just shot up two floors.”

  “I'm also going to need a dozen high-speed computers to process whatever information I get. Make that twenty computers. Multiple CPUs. Five twelve RAM.”

  Taá nodded, making notes.

  “And I'll need a place to set it up.”

  “I'll show you that right now,” Taá said.

  “Tucson Outfitters?”

  “Yes. It's really just a borrowed room in a very private electronic facility.”

  “Surveillance,” Dance said. “Input from cameras at the Nogales border crossing. Satellite imaging. All kinds of surveillance intel that I know nothing about.”

  “About my friends,” I said. “Meg Arizana. Rey Villaneuva. Don't violate our agreement about not harassing them. And I want to talk to Meg as soon as possible. If you know that she runs safe houses, you've probably got them staked out looking for foreign women who've escaped the smuggling ring. I'd like to talk to her about that. Chances are, if any of those women have gone through Meg's system, she'd never tell you about it.”

  “Granted,” Dance said. “You got any ideas we haven't talked about?”

  “Safe, she said. Safe and free.”

  “No,” Taá interrupted. “That's not quite what she said.”

  She opened another window on the laptop, and I saw that she'd saved the entire chat conversation. Scrolling down toward the end of the chat, Taá dragged the mouse across three lines to highlight them.

  LUNA13: > safe

  MidnightChyna: > what does that mean, safe?

  LUNA13: > out. . . free. . . not important

  “Out,” Taá said. “Not safe. Out”

  “Out of Mexico?” Nasso asked. “Out of the US?”

  “If these women are controlled by a smuggling ring,” I said, “then she's telling us that there's a way to get free of that control. Get free. Get out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Anywhere. West coast, east coast, anywhere. This workers' group you said my ex-husband worked with. Basta Ya. What if they were getting these women fake identities and helping them escape the smuggling ring?”

  “What if some Mexicans want to find him?” Nasso said. “Somebody down there has a good thing going, smuggling these women. This guy screws it up, so they kill two women to send a message to him and to all the other women.”

  “Good!” Dance said. “I like it. Take her to the center.”

  16

  All days should be bright, all skies so blue and clear, all freedom so desirable.

  “There.”

  Taá pointed at a windowless one-story building east of US 10, just south of the airport. We entered an industrial park, new buildings sprouting as far as I could see.

  “That's AZIC,” she said, turning into the parking lot.

  “Arizona Intel Center,” Nasso said.

  A fairly new building. No landscaping, no shrubs or flowers or cactus, just a black macadam parking lot with yellow spray-painted parking slots. The lot was half full of cars and trucks, all of them with private Arizona license plates.

  Nasso held the front door open, and the three of us walked into a small entryway. To the left, a small room, fronted by sliding glass windows. Like a doctor's office. But nobody was inside the room. Nasso punched codes into a digital keypad and looked up at a video camera above the door. Taá also punched in a code, and the inside door swung open to a passageway lined both left and right with steel doors. Stopping at one of them, Taá swiped a passcard through an elaborate locking panel and punched in a code. The door swung inward on hissing hydraulic arms, and Taá walked through it. Nasso stretched an arm across the doorway, stopping me. Beyond him I could see forty or fifty computer monitors and a lot of people in cubicles.

  “I leave you to all this technology,” he said. “Just remember. I leave you, but I'll never leave you. Think of running away, I'm already there to stop you. We clear?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  Raising his right index finger, he gently reached out to center it on my forehead.

  “I'm the whatever. You fiddle with another identity, you think about leaving us, I'm the wrath of God, and my finger carries the gift of death.”

  Taá led me through the door and it hissed shut.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “He's certifiable.”

  “He's BORTAC. SWAT. All those crazy Mel Gibson types, with guns. You seriously do not want him tracking you down.”

  “And you?”

  “I wouldn't hunt you down, if you decided to run. But I'd send him after you. We clear about that?”

  “What am I doing here?” I said, mostly to myself, as I looked around the intel center. The maze of cubicles stretched out for a hundred feet. I could see at least thirty or forty people, half of them grouped around a central pod of computers arranged like the action room of a stock trader. Each person had at least three monitors, and high above them, like the wall of a television producers' booth, I counted over thirty large television monitors in a grid. Taá saw me frowning at the pictures on them.

  “Satellite intel,” she said. She pointed at one grouping. “Border crossings in the Tucson Sector. Nogales, Marshall, and Agua Prieta. Plus the smaller ones. Plus random sections of the fence. This room is a totally state of the art intel processing center. But using top secret government stuff, so we keep it quiet.”

  “Tucson Outfitters?” I asked.

  “Why advertise? Better to be anonymous.”

  Suddenly, several of the TV screens flickered with static, then reformed into a large grouping eight monitors wide and six high to display a large area of desert. Several people cheered; somebody sharpened the image. Another grid of monitors showed a fixed picture and I could see that the two pictures were of the same place.

  “Satcom images,” Taá said excitedly. “They've matched up with the video of the two murdered women.”

  “How would you do that by satellite?”

  “We digitized the entire video and mapped the terrain. Then we started comparing it with sections of the Sonoran Desert. And it looks like we have a match.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it's just desert.”

  “I know. Where are the bodies? Now that we've found the spot, somebody will chopper a forensics team down there.”

  “What's this got to do with me?”

  “Come on.”

  She led me to a large pod of cubicles near the back of the room.

  “This is my group.”

  Six people were studying various computer monitors. Only two of them looked up at me, briefly, and went back to the monitors. I could see that two of them were writing lines of programming code, the rest running some kind of software that seemed to be processing email messages and comparing text and photographs against databases. Taá brought me close to one of the monitors.

  “Every border crossing has digital video cameras that take single-frame shots of everybody who goes across. The frames are stored in a database, and we've got software that compares facial identity characteristics against known profiles stored in a database. You might remember the controversy at a Super Bowl two years ago in Florida. Everybody who entered the turnstiles at Tampa stadium had their faces shot, and the prototype of this software compared thousands of fans' photos against a database of known pickpockets, scam artists, whatever the Tampa police thought was relevant.”

  “I don't understand something,” I said. “Why am I in this room? Why are you showing me all of this?”

  “You're going to track LUNA13,” she said. “You're going to find how they're connected to Basta Ya. You're going to see if your ex-husband is part of this smuggling ring, and most important, you're going to find out where he is.”

  “He's in Mexico.”

  “Exactly.”

  ''You're asking me to go down into Mexico?“

  “O
h no,” Taá said. “You're not getting out of my sight. But you're going to track down his computer location. Where he logs onto the Internet. We'll coordinate that with GPS coordinates and use satcom to find out where he is.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then your job is over.”

  It suddenly came to me. I gasped with astonishment at her request.

  “You want me to rat out Jonathan Begay?”

  “Didn't you understand that?”

  “But why?” I protested. “If he's connected with Basta Ya, if he's involved in helping these women escape from the smuggling ring, that's a good thing.”

  “Sometimes,” Nasso said from behind me, “morality just doesn't pay.”

  “Do your job,” Taá said. “Find LUNA13. Find Begay.”

  “We'll take it from there,” Nasso added. “Now. It's been a long day. You're tired, you want to get settled.”

  “But I need clean clothes. I need. . . I need. . . ”

  I needed to get away from them. Nasso smiled.

  “Yeah. You just want to shuck us off your back.”

  “I've got clothes,” Taá said.

  “So,” Nasso said. “Winslow, get started.”

  “That's not my name.”

  “Winslow, Cabeza, Marana, I don't care what you want to call yourself.”

  “Call me Ishmaela,” I said with a smile, suddenly knowing how I would get out. “Let me get back to my house in Sonoita, let me get things started from there. I've got special software programs, all my hacker contacts.”

  “No. We let you off our leash, you'll get another set of identity papers and we'll never see you again. You're going to be living with Taá. She will babysit you twenty-four seven. ”I've already brought up your computers from Sonoita. They're at Wheatley's place. I figure, anything else you want from Sonoita, I'll get it right away.“

  Nasso took out his handcuffs and laid them on the table.

  “I like you,” he said. “Whatever name you want to use, I like you a lot. But if I have to, I'll hook you up again, and this time you'll be so deep inside a jail somewhere they'll have to send an overnight messenger out to find a pay phone. Comprende?”

  Yeah. I understood. Play the game.

  Wait for my chance.

  Women were smuggled from Mexico to the US by two different groups. One group treated them as sex slaves, the other group freed them from slavery. Who was who? I had no idea. Who was in the chat room? Who was LUNA13? I had no idea. Who were all of these law enforcement people that thought I was central to their investigation? I had no idea at all.