The Liar's Lullaby

by Meg Gardiner

  And the president of the United States.

  Muffin crumbs stuck to the tabletop. NMP brushed them away.

  The president was coming. And Searle Lecroix was confirmed to sing. “Confirmed”—like he was the headliner at this exclusive gig. He was going to perform “Amazing Grace” and a “very special song composed in Tasia’s memory,” titled “Angel, Flown.”

  Angel. As if she were one of the seraphim.

  And the president was going to sit in the front row and listen to that garbage. NMP couldn’t bear it.

  He had hoped this expedition would prove to be reconnaissance—a foray to reassure him. Precious love, hush, it’s dangerous, believe me, I love you. But NMP saw that it was, in fact, the final battle. All powers were arrayed against Archangel. He’d been betrayed, bayoneted in the gut. But he could still speak.

  NMP brushed crumbs from the keyboard. Logged on, and began to type.

  JO RAN UP the porch steps at the redbrick mansion. Ferd was waiting at the front door.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  “Online. Right now.”

  In the living room Ferd’s laptop was open on the coffee table. Afternoon sunlight fell through the tall windows. Jo stepped around an obstacle course, set up on the floor with books, boxes, and six-packs of root beer. The little robot, Ahnuld, had been stymied negotiating the course and crashed into a pile of World of Warcraft action figures.

  “Where is Archangel X right now in physical space?” Jo said.

  “Here in the city.”

  Ferd sat down on the sofa. His screen was covered with long columns of data.

  “Those e-mails you sent me—I checked his X-Originating header and did a traceroute to find out where they came from.”

  “Are you sure about this?” she said.

  “It’s not like GPS, but it’s a valid technique.”

  She peered at the impenetrable strings of data. “Where is he?”

  “Financial District. A Starbucks. I—”

  “You have the address?”

  “On Kearny.”

  “Let’s go. Bring the laptop.”

  “No need. I can get e-mail from my phone. But let me put Mr. Peebles in his crate.”

  He dodged the robot and ran down the hall. For a man who, as far as she could tell, had last gotten exercise in primary school, he was surprisingly quick on his feet.

  Five seconds later he sprinted up the stairs, carrying the monkey under one arm like a football. “Can’t leave him loose with Ahnuld. The ultrasonic navigation system drives him insane.”

  He dashed back down. “You think Archangel’s really a dangerous stalker?”

  She followed him down the front steps. “I’m worried enough that I think we should find him. We’ll take my truck.”

  “What about the police?”

  Jo pulled out her phone and dialed Amy Tang. “Already on it.”

  NMP TYPED FURIOUSLY. A table of jabbering secretaries stood up, scraping chairs on the tile, and pushed past, purses and fat asses swinging.

  “Watch it, Wide Load,” NMP said.

  One of the women turned, eyes round as saucers. “What did you say to me?”

  “Watch where you’re going, Double-wide. Some of us are working.”

  The woman’s face reddened. But her eyes went even rounder, as if she couldn’t match NMP’s voice to the person she saw sitting in front of her. As though she couldn’t absorb such brutally accurate, cutting wit coming from a Big Bad Bastard of the Tenderloin.

  One of her friends moved her along. “Ignore it. It’s just mindless bitching.”

  How dare she?

  No. Ignore it. That’s what everybody did. Ignored NMP. Everybody. The baristas here who wouldn’t clean the crumbs off the fucking table. Tasia.

  For a moment NMP’s vision pulsed. The unmitigated gall. Then he slid his glance around the Starbucks. It was packed, but a few people at nearby tables were shooting surreptitious glances at him. He put his head back down. Focused on the screen. Focused his wrath back where it belonged.

  Tasia had ignored NMP. So had people on the boards at all the Tasia fan sites, eventually. And people on the boards at Searle Lecroix fan sites too—they didn’t want to hear about Tasia’s treacheries, even though she had sunk her fat cow fangs into their hero. Even the government had ignored NMP. The e- mails—detailed, painstakingly documented messages—to the White House had been swallowed up or ignored, except for the first one: Dear Mr. President, Your ex-wife is a skank.

  Of course the messages had been sent anonymously, as had the letters, with no return address—but somebody should have replied publicly. It was only decent.

  And now there was all this cacophony online.

  All this grief over Tasia, NMP wrote. Everybody’s crying over a lie. So let me write the truth here.

  NMP refused to be ignored any longer.

  Let me tell you about the angel, flown. And about martyrdom.

  31

  JO REVVED THE TACOMA THROUGH TRAFFIC IN THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT, heading toward Kearny. She swerved around a garbage truck like Ahnuld the robot on its obstacle course. Ferd grabbed the dashboard to steady himself. She tossed him her phone.

  “Call Tang again. If she’s still out, ask for her boss.”

  She accelerated over the lip of a hill. They strained against the seat belts. Ferd pushed a series of numbers and spoke to at least three people before finally reaching the captain’s office.

  “Yes, I’m calling on behalf of Dr. Johanna Beckett. It’s an emergency.”

  Jo shook her head at him. She couldn’t claim this was an emergency—yet. “Urgent.”

  “No, sorry, this isn’t an emergency, it’s urgent.” Ferd wiped his forehead. A moment later he straightened. “Yes, thanks, I’m calling for Dr. Johanna Beckett.”

  She swerved to the curb and stopped in a red zone. Took the phone. Chuck Bohr was on the line—the bald, bull-chested cop who had argued with Tang outside UCSF Medical Center.

  “I have a lead on the person who was stalking Tasia Mc Far-land.”

  “What kind of lead?” Bohr said.

  She explained as fast as she could. “He may still be at the Starbucks. Can you send somebody to meet us there?”

  Bohr paused only a second. “I’ll send a plainclothes officer. We’ll keep it quiet. What are you wearing?”

  She told him, and he said, “Fifteen minutes. If the stalker’s online, keep him talking.”

  “Thanks.”

  She pulled out again, and almost instantly braked to keep from rear-ending a Camry. She pointed at Ferd’s phone. “Is Archangel X still online?”

  “Can’t tell. Connection’s too slow.” Ferd turned the phone over and over in his hands. “Are we being legal here?”

  She glanced at him sharply. “If somebody online tells you where they are, no law against that. Unless there’s something you aren’t telling me.”

  He ran a hand across his hair. For once he hadn’t bothered to slick it down with Brylcreem, and it flopped in his eyes.

  “Ferd?” she said more pointedly. “How did you find Archangel X?”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I set out some candy, and he stopped by to pick it up.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I snooped around online for his footprints. He sent Tasia McFarland fourteen hundred e-mails—I figured maybe he sends messages to other people too, or maybe he comments online. You know, on blogs and news stories about her, on the boards at celebrity and music sites, or in chat rooms.”

  She cast him another glance. “And he does?”

  He nodded vigorously and his glasses slid down his nose. He pushed them back up. “A few music discussion boards, and some of the political sites that have been delving into conspiracy theories about Tasia’s death.”

  “You didn’t hack into the sites, did you?”

  “The term is cracking, not hacking, and what makes you think I know how to d
o that?”

  “Sorry. Did you worm your way into some site and uncover information about Archangel X?”

  “Sort of. I commented on a political site.”

  “How did that help you? Archangel X replied?”

  “He engaged me in debate.”

  She looked at him. “Ferd. My God.”

  “Then I set up my own blog. About politics and conspiracy theories and music. And sure enough, he came over to leave his comments there, on a post about Tasia.”

  She looked at him with increased interest.

  He raised his hands calmingly. “This is where it gets iffy. I wrote about twenty-five posts, and I altered the time stamps so it looked like I’d had the blog going for a couple of months. And I engaged in a bit of sock-puppetry in the comments section.”

  “You faked a bunch of comments?” Jo said.

  “I wrote comments myself, using a couple of dozen commenter IDs. ‘Mad as Hell,’ ‘John Galt,’ ‘Loverboy.’ ”

  As Loverboy escaped his mouth he turned bright red, from his collar to his hairline.

  “And Archangel X joined in the discussion?” Jo said.

  “Indeed he did.” He exhaled, trying to get over his embarrassment. “And because I’m the administrator of the site, I captured all kinds of details about his IP address. I set up the blog with a bit of extra software that displays all the raw information that routes the message from sender to recipient. So I could see who his ISP is, who all the intermediate hosts are, and it’s apparent that he’s been logging on through a Bay Area service provider.”

  “You sure he’s not faking that?”

  “No. But he doesn’t seem interested in digital fakery. He’s more interested in making his points and hiding personal information emotionally than technically.”

  Jo shot him a look of surprise. Ferd Bismuth, emotionally astute?

  He reached over and turned on the air-conditioning. “Awfully hot in here. I think I’m getting a fever.”

  “Explain how you pinpointed him downtown,” Jo said.

  “I’ll show you.”

  From the corner of her eye she watched his thumbs jump around his phone. Ahead, the skyscrapers of the Financial District were fading from sunlight into an engulfing wall of fog.

  “Need to keep him engaged,” Ferd said.

  “You’ve been—what have you been doing?” she said.

  His thumbs tapped the phone. “Provoking him into commenting at a memorial site for Tasia. I didn’t want him to get up and leave the Starbucks.”

  “Sharp thinking. But back to how you know he’s at this particular coffee place.”

  “I know how to read the runes. The raw source headers in the blog-Web interface. They show that he’s sending from a site being run by the phone company, under contract to a local provider. That tells me it’s at Starbucks—they use the phone company for their Wi-Fi network. And I have a friend with some oomph, who helped me read the interior marking data—it specifies the particular Starbucks Wi-Fi the customer is using. Useful little utility to have.”

  “Which gave you the one on Kearny.”

  “Hey.” He squinted at the phone. “I just managed to get online. Archangel replied to one of my comments. Let me poke him some more.”

  He went back to the thumbs. “I’m telling him Tasia was too pure to stay in our world. She’s gone to a higher plane, and she’ll be watching over all of us. The president especially. Like a guardian angel. That’ll rile him up.”

  “Not too much, I hope.” Jo circled the block to wend her way through the one-way streets.

  “So, are we legal here?” Ferd said.

  “You bet we are. But I want law enforcement to back us up.”

  “How are we going to figure out what this stalker looks like?” he said.

  “We’re going to start with big men online in the Starbucks. I think Archangel is the man who broke into Tasia’s house.”

  The Starbucks was a red-painted corner location, with big plate-glass windows, in an old brick building covered with fire escapes. Jo circled the block twice but found no parking spaces.

  “Don’t you have special dispensation to park here for emergencies?” Ferd said.

  “Not even if you burst out with bubonic plague.”

  Ahead, a delivery truck pulled out from the curb. Jo floored it and snatched the spot. She and Ferd jumped out and strode across Kearny toward the Starbucks.

  “Look for somebody who’s online,” she said.

  They walked in, and stopped. It was one of the biggest, busiest Starbucks she’d ever seen—hot, noisy, and jammed with people.

  All of them were online.

  At tables, in corners, behind newspapers, from all angles, even waiting in line at the counter, everywhere she looked, people hunched over computers or had their eyes pinned on cell phones. At one table a mom peered at a laptop. In the stroller beside her, a baby waved a muffin in one hand and an iPhone in the other.

  “Oh, dear,” Ferd said.

  “Get a table. I’ll get coffee and try to narrow down the possibilities.”

  She got in the line. If Archangel X was the hefty intruder who had tackled her in Tasia’s house, she’d have to extrapolate. Nobody in the Starbucks was wearing camo and a balaclava. Plenty of the men looked like they would shop at the Big ’n’ Tall. Ferd found a table and sat down, clutching his phone like a phaser.

  She took a longer look at the various people who were engaged with their computers and phones.

  Most of them were reading while they drank their coffee. Every now and then, leisurely, they’d scroll down a page. A few others were flitting around the keyboard. At the counter a woman in a green hat held her laptop against her chest, screen open, typing with one finger while holding out her mug to the barista for a refill. Only a minority of people were typing furiously, as if engaged in an online flame war. But that still left around twenty people. Jo edged up to the counter and ordered two large coffees.

  When she set Ferd’s coffee on the table, he said, “Archangel X’s last comment was ten minutes ago. If he’s gone, I wouldn’t know it yet. I’ve provoked him with a really snide reply to his last comment, so we’ll see.”

  He looked around, blinking rapidly, and wiped his upper lip. He couldn’t have looked shiftier if he’d had a bomb strapped to his chest. Jo took a swallow of her coffee and panned the place. This was San Francisco, supposedly the center of laid-back California. And 90 percent of the people in sight had nervous tics and compulsive behavior.

  Ferd sat up straight. “He just posted. Oh, dear.”

  He showed Jo the phone. “Angel”? Tasia was a COW. She trampled everybody’s dreams. She deserved to die.

  Oh, dear, indeed. “It’s too hard to tell who’s replying to you. There’s a lag in the timing.”

  Ferd frowned and his eyes zigged back and forth, as though he was computing something. “I have an idea. Maybe I can kick him offline.”

  “How?”

  He got his wallet and took out a Starbucks prepaid wireless access card. “Fire up your laptop.”

  She got it from her satchel. “What are you going to do?”

  He took the laptop. “You sure this isn’t illegal?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do. And I’m a doctor, not a lawyer.”

  He brought up a browser. Using the wireless access card, he logged on to the Starbucks network from Jo’s computer.

  He took a theatrically deep breath. “I’m going to call Customer Service. Here goes.”

  He called the number on the back of the wireless card. After a moment he said, “Hope you can help me. I’m sitting in a Starbucks in San Francisco and I can’t get online.” He listened for a moment. “Tried that.” Nodding. “And that. Ran through everything, did a self-diagnostic. I’m having no luck.”

  He flicked a look at Jo and nodded like a rabid beaver. “My e- mail address, sure. It’s Archangel X, no space, at Hotmail,” he said.

  Jo smiled at his audacity. Fo
r the next minute she listened to him answer questions. Customer service was running him through a drill to find out what the problem was. Ferd, to her surprise, was charming and persistent.

  Finally he looked up, bright-eyed. “Let me put you on speaker so I can type.” He set the phone on the table. “Could you repeat that?”

  A youngish voice echoed from the phone. “I’m accessing real-time information for your location. My information shows that you are online.”

  Bingo. Jo balled her hands and pressed them against her knees. Archangel X was there.

  Ferd cleared his throat. “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re on—I see you here on my screen. Your machine is transmitting data, and it’s logged in under the Archangel X address.”

  Jo was amazed. AT&T and Starbucks were doing the dirty work for Ferd.

  Ferd put a note of innocent desperation in his voice. “Please, could you help me? I know you say I’m online but I’m sitting here with an access denied message, wasting the money I paid for this wireless card, feeling my ulcer act up. Can you reset my connection?”

  After a pause, the customer service voice said, “Okay. Hold on.”

  Jo was impressed. Ferd, by being ballsy and smart, was going to force customer service to break Archangel X’s connection.

  Ferd picked up the phone and covered the mouthpiece. “When Archangel X gets knocked off, look around to see who gets upset.”

  They waited. Ferd, still covering the mouthpiece, said, “How far do you want to take this? If I can get customer service to help ‘log me in again,’ I might be able to hijack Archangel X’s connection with log-in info. He won’t be able to get back on. That’ll really tick him off.”

  Jo checked her watch. It had been six minutes since Bohr told her a plainclothes cop was on the way.

  “Okay.”

  “But we have to be fast.”

  Customer service came back. “Sir, I’m now going to reset your connection. Wait sixty seconds and log in again.”

  “Thank you,” Ferd said.

  He hung up. They looked around, trying not to be obvious.

  People continued to drink coffee and fiddle with their electronic toys. The baby in the stroller threw the iPhone to the floor.