The girl gave him an emo death stare before she said, ‘Do you know I could tweet saying I saw a cockroach in your coffee grinder and I guarantee you in an hour it would be on thousands of other tweets and furthermore just about everybody who read it would believe it?’
Wow! Why couldn’t I have come up with something like that?
And more wow! She was sounding more and more like a candidate for SheikSnap.
The man glared at her for a while before he said, ‘We have some lovely tea made with fresh mint. Would you like some of that?’
‘That’d be awesome, dude,’ said the girl.
‘Yes?’ he barked at me when it was my turn.
After all that practice, I still got it wrong.
‘The usual,’ I said.
He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.
What a tosser I am, I thought. I’ve only been here once before.
‘Triple espresso then?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘Take a seat, Snake’ll find you,’ he said before he called the order out to the barista.
I went outside, and found a seat near where emo girl was reading the newspaper. I did a quick head count. Besides her, there were twenty-two people spread along the pavement. And not one of them was obviously a nerd, let alone a criminal nerd, the sort of person who would be friends with Nitmick.
She had to be [email protected].
Snake arrived with my coffee.
‘The Triplicate Kid,’ he said, handing it to me.
His boots looked even pointier, his jeans even tighter than last time I was here. And he was wearing the same retro bumbag.
No caffeine now or I’ll be up all night, I decided, so I put the cup on a table in front of me.
But Snake just stood there, looking at me.
I felt I had no choice – I picked the coffee up, took a sip. Again that explosion in my mouth.
‘Wow!’ I said.
Satisfied, Snake moved on.
‘Sorry, do you have a pen?’
It was the emo girl.
‘Somewhere,’ I said, and patted my pockets until I found it.
I handed it to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’
She folded the paper over and started on the crossword. The cryptic.
Hand flying, she quickly filled in the blanks, but she seemed to get stumped on the last clue.
It has to be her. It just has to be!
The emo girl looked at her watch, brought out her Galaxy. She was about to make a call when she seemed to change her mind.
‘Can you mind my seat?’ she said. ‘I need to go to the ladies.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
I watched as she made her way back along the footpath, but instead of turning into the café where the ladies was, she kept walking until she came to a public phone box, one of the few left on the Coast. She fed the machine some money. Made a call. When she’d finished, she came back.
‘Thanks,’ she said as she sat back down in her seat.
I had no doubt now: it was her. Nitmick hadn’t turned up, so she’d tried to call him. And just like crims the world over, she’d resorted to the anonymity of the public phone. Still, it was better to make absolutely sure before I put my plan into action.
‘Must be contagious,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’
‘No problem,’ she said. ‘I’ve got your back.’
I walked back along the footpath. Because I wasn’t sure if she was looking at me or not, I turned into the café. Walked past the toilets and out through the back door and into an alley. Along the alley, out onto a cross-street. When I got to the intersection I had a peep around the corner. SheikSnap was engrossed in her Galaxy. I hurried over to the public phone, shoved a coin into the slot and hit redial.
The phone rang and then a man said, ‘Yeah?’
He didn’t sound like Nitmick, but who knew what voice-altering techno gadgetry somebody as paranoid as him would use?
So I said, ‘Nitmick?’
The man said, his voice a low rumble, ‘Look, you after something or not?’
‘What you got?’ I said.
‘Go-ey, e’s, oxies – the usual.’
I hung up.
SheikSnap wasn’t SheikSnap after all – she was just some soy-loving emo who was waiting for her drug dealer to turn up.
I went in through the back door of the café and out through the front.
‘Thanks,’ I said to her as I sat down.
She was still engrossed in the crossword.
Snake snaked past, empty coffee cups up each arm.
‘What’s the clue?’ he said to the former SheikSnap.
‘Returned beer, fit for king,’ said the former SheikSnap. ‘The last letter is –’
But before she had a chance to say what this last letter was Snake said, ‘Regal.’
‘Regal?’
‘Sure, beer is lager, and ‘lager’ returned is ‘regal’.
‘Very good,’ said the former SheikSnap, smiling, as she set about filling in the missing letters.
When she’d finished she handed me my pen.
Could Snake be SheikSnap?
The answer to that question came very soon afterwards.
‘Hey, Snake Hips!’ somebody nearby said.
So Snake’s full name was Snake Hips.
I wrote Snake Hips on my hand and crossed out the letters one by one. First s, then h then e then i and so on.
When I’d finished there were no spare letters – SheikSnap was an anagram of Snake Hips!
I took out my iPhone, sent a text.
Ten minutes later and a woman appeared. Her face hidden by a headscarf and a pair of enormous sunglasses, and she was trying to negotiate a pram through the jumble of stools and people towards where Snake was serving some customers.
Getting more and more frustrated, she gave the pram a shove, and somehow it toppled over, its swaddled contents rolling out onto the pavement.
Ohmigod!
I got to my feet.
But Snake had already put down the coffee he was serving and was rushing over.
He went to pick the baby up, but the mother screeched, ‘Don’t touch my baby,’ and pushed him over.
And then somebody else got involved, barrelling into Snake. Eventually the woman shoved the baby back into the pram, and she and the other person hurried off.
‘My bag!’ said Snake, getting up from the ground, feeling around his waist. ‘Somebody took my bag!’
They were exactly where they said they’d be: in the alley behind the fire station, sharing a cigarette.
‘So you got it?’ I said.
PJ reached into the pram and brought out Snake’s bumbag.
‘Is the baby okay?’ I said.
‘Bubby’s okay?’ cooed Brandon, taking the baby from the pram and casually tossing it in my direction.
I went to catch it but I missed, and the baby bounced on the ground. I rushed over and picked it up. The baby had glassy eyes. Dirty pink skin. And a little hole for a mouth.
‘It’s a doll!’ I said.
This cracked Brandon up – he opened his mouth and laughter spilt out. But the laughter soon turned into a cough, and the cough turned into something that Brandon dredged out of his lungs and hoiked onto the ground.
‘Charming,’ I said, again thinking of that Neil Young song: ‘Needle and the Damage Done’.
PJ threw me an I’m sorry look as she handed me the bumbag.
I unzipped the bag. There was a Styxx Charon in there, and something else, wrapped in bubblewrap. I held it up to the light. It was a screen, and it looked exactly the right size for the housing.
I reached into my pocket, brought out a wad of notes and held it out to PJ.
‘Hey, half that’s mine!’ said Brandon, moving towards her, snatching at the money.
‘Your boyfriend’s got lovely manners,’ I said to PJ.
‘Look who’s talking,’ said PJ, eye
s flashing.
Okay, she had a point, and a pretty good one. Arranging to get somebody’s bag stolen probably wasn’t something they’d teach you at finishing school.
I shrugged my shoulders and got one of her trademark winks in return.
‘And he’s not my boyfriend,’ she said.
I’m not sure why I was pleased to hear this – what did I care if some street kid had a boyfriend or not? But I was.
But if he wasn’t her boyfriend, why did they hang out together?
My question wasn’t a question for long.
‘Come on, sis, give me my share,’ said Brandon.
‘Not until we see your doctor,’ said PJ, moving off, away from her brother.
He hurried after her.
And I moved away in the opposite direction.
FRIDAY
FIRE IN THE FACTORY
When a taxi approached, I put out my arm.
It stopped, and I took a quick look inside. Was it the same taxi that had kidnapped me and my testicles? Hard to tell; all taxis look pretty much the same.
‘Dominic,’ said the driver, but with the stress on the last syllable. Dom-i-NIC.
Taxi, accent: it’s Luiz Antonio, I thought. He must be driving for a different company now.
I looked closer at him.
No, it wasn’t Luiz Antonio. And although he appeared sort of familiar, I wasn’t sure who he was. He soon helped me with that, though.
‘I am father of Rashid,’ he said in faltering English.
‘Nice to meet you,’ I said.
‘I have watched you running many times,’ said Father of Rashid. ‘You are very fast.’
Now I had another dilemma: front seat or back seat? Front seat would mean that, inevitably, I’d have to engage with Father of Rashid. And after what I’d just been through, I didn’t want to engage with anybody. But if I got into the back seat, would Father of Rashid be insulted? I mean, he was the father of my schoolmate, my teammate. I knew that strategically it was a dumb thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself, I got into the front seat, and told Father of Rashid that I wanted to go to Halcyon Grove.
‘Do you mind if I have news radio on?’ he said. ‘Good for my English.’ Engleesh.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’
‘An extensive search is now underway for two teenagers caught by a flash flood in a stormwater drain and believed to be washed out to sea,’ said the news reader.
Poor buggers, I thought, as I slumped back, closing my eyes.
The taxi had barely started moving before Father of Rashid started engaging the hell out of me.
‘Your best time for race of fifteen hundred is four minute one seconds and forty,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, astonished that he knew this.
‘My son Rashid is four minute five second and twenty-two,’ he said.
‘That’s a great time.’
‘Good time, not great time,’ he said. ‘Rashid race with heart not head.’
He was right there because Rashid was a compulsive front-runner, he couldn’t wait to get out in the lead. Front-running was spectacular, front-running was exhilarating, but front-running seldom got gold.
Father of Rashid didn’t have very good English, but that didn’t mean he was reluctant to use it. He knew an amazing amount of stuff about running, the track team, about the school.
Then the newsreader said, ‘There was a fire in a factory in Little Silicon Valley this morning.’
‘Can you please turn the volume up?’ I asked Father of Rashid.
‘The factory, which supplied components for the electronics industry, was completely destroyed,’ said the newsreader.
Could it be the same factory? A possible scenario immediately came to mind: start a fire and in the ensuing confusion, with all that smoke, sneak in and steal a case. Crude but effective.
It had to be the same factory!
I thought of the owner, the marathoner. He didn’t deserve to have his factory destroyed like that.
When we pulled up at the entrance to Halcyon Grove Father of Rashid said, ‘That Bevan Milne, he’s perhaps a bit of a turd?’
I couldn’t help but agree. ‘Yes, perhaps a bit of a turd.’
When I walked into the house Gus and Tristan were sitting at the kitchen table, playing chess.
Tristan!
What was he doing in my house? And what was he doing playing chess with my grandfather?
‘Your gramps sure is one smart old dude,’ said Tristan.
‘Not so sure about that,’ said Gus, looking up from the game, his eyes travelling from one end of my body to the other, as if he was doing some sort of mental inventory: head – tick; both arms – tick; both legs – tick.
Look, chess isn’t exactly my thing, but it looked like Tristan was giving my gramps a run for his money.
‘I’ll leave you two to your game,’ I said. ‘I’m going for a run on Dad’s treadmill.’
Actually, I wanted to watch Fox News, see if there was any more information about the fire in Little Silicon Valley, but I also wanted to go for a run – okay, I wasn’t going to Rome but I was still a runner.
The treadmill was, as usual, annoyingly familiar.
‘Hi, Champ! Ready for a great workout?’
‘Whatever, Treadmill,’ I said.
It was business news, all Hang Seng and Dow Jones and FTSE.
It was so boring and I wondered how Dad could possibly get excited by this stuff, how he’d gone from paying back The Debt to the All Ordinaries.
But then it occurred to me: maybe he had no choice. By the time he’d paid that sixth instalment he’d used up his quota of excitement and boring was all that he had left.
Finally Fox News got around to the fire in Little Silicon Valley.
There was a factory and there was billowing smoke and there was helmeted firefighters with hoses spurting arcs of water.
‘This factory on Griffin Avenue manufactured specialised circuit boards,’ said the reporter. ‘Which means that the smoke you see behind me is potentially toxic.’
It’s not my factory, it’s not Case Logic! I told myself.
I felt a sense of relief – so the marathoner hadn’t had his factory destroyed. Then it took me a while to sort the rest of this out in my head.
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
I remembered the emails the three of them had exchanged, how they were each going to get a component.
If Nitmick had been assigned the case, and if Snake aka SheikSnap had been assigned the screen, then it followed that LoverOfLinux must have been assigned the circuit board.
Not only that, he – or she – now had the circuit board, the third ingredient!
I had the other two.
So all I needed to do now was get the circuit board off him – or her – and I had Nitmick’s apple pie, I had the Cerberus.
Excitement rising, I jumped off the treadmill.
‘Great running, Champ! But you have not yet reached your programmed goals!’
‘Love to stay and, like, chat, Treadmill. But some of us have work to do.’
FRIDAY
A PHISHING TRIP
Back in my room, both ClamTop and my laptop open on my desk, I powered up Snake’s Charon.
The screen flashed to life.
And then it wanted a password.
Good, I thought. I couldn’t get into it.
Good, I thought, I’d work out another way to find out who LoverOfLinux was that didn’t involve breaking into somebody’s phone, most probably stealing their identity.
That particular line would remain uncrossed.
Seriously, who was I kidding?
I’d phished Snake, I’d gone for daytrips into Imogen’s laptop, I’d already crossed that line over and over again.
But here I was getting all cyber-moral – what was going on?
I stuck a microUSB cable in the Charon and plugged it into the USB port on my laptop.
The usual Please wait
while drivers are being installed … appeared on the screen, but then – hey presto! – my machine recognised the Charon.
I powered up ClamTop.
Brought up all the local networks.
I didn’t feel so guilty hacking into SILVAGNINET – I mean, it was our network at home.
But as I watched ClamTop run a series of commands, as I watched it crack the password on Snake’s phone like a walnut, I could feel it, the guilt, creeping up on me.
Get over it, Dom! I told myself. We live in the age of identity theft: it’s no big deal.
I cloned the Charon’s home screen.
I didn’t know that much about Styxx phones, but when five minutes later a little window popped up I figured it was from some sort of IM app.
Hi Snake Hips, where you been? somebody by the name of Angie had written.
I thought about replying, attempting to extract some information from Angie, but I was interrupted by a knock on my door.
‘Go away,’ I said.
‘There’s somebody here to see you,’ said Miranda.
‘Then you can tell them to go away too,’ I said.
‘It’s me,’ came a voice, Imogen’s voice.
I jumped up and opened the door and she was standing there, wearing a dress with flowers all over it.
‘Imogen,’ I said, the three syllables slipping off my tongue.
Miranda melted away so it was just the two of us.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure.’ I took a quick glance at the ClamTop’s screen, at the cloned Charon. ‘Your mum …?’ I said, stumbling over my words.
‘I’m getting pretty good at sneaking out,’ she said.
Imogen had been in my room countless times, playing on the computer, doing homework, just hanging out, but now I felt so awkward, like in the whole room there weren’t two spots where we could be comfortable with each other.
So I stood near the desk and Imogen stood under the poster of Sebastian Coe winning Olympic gold.
Imogen looked at me. I looked at Imogen. There was a whole lot of looking but not much talking going on.
Until Imogen eventually said, ‘I heard you’re not allowed to run at the nationals.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry about that, Dom.’
‘So am I,’ I said.
I realised that I’d been so busy with The Debt that I hadn’t allowed myself time to think how sorry I was.
Bring Back Cerberus Page 12
