Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  11

  Karen tried to adopt a carefree, unaffected tone on the telephone. She had dialed the number for the Apple Store in a shopping mall some twenty-five miles away, and been connected to a young man at their “Genius Bar,” who had given his name as Kyle.

  “I have a computer question,” Karen said, keeping her words as short as possible.

  “Sure. Shoot,” Kyle replied, without pointing out the obvious, that there was no other reason for calling the store. In the background she could hear other responses from blue-shirted Apple “geniuses” answering questions about bits and bytes and downloads and memory.

  “Is it possible to post something on YouTube anonymously? We’re trying to do something special for my husband’s birthday, and the kids and I wanted to put up a video we made as a surprise for him—he’s in the service overseas, you see—and part of the surprise is doing it so he can’t trace it back, because we don’t want to give away the second surprise we have planned for him when he comes home . . .”

  She stopped her story there. It didn’t really make any sense, she knew, and it was a complete lie, but she imagined it would be enough to get Kyle the Genius to tell her what she needed to know.

  “Ah, sure. Posting anonymously? No problem. It’s not really any big deal,” he said.

  “I mean untraceable completely?”

  “Yep,” he replied.

  “So, like if I did want to trace something back to the poster, how would I do that?”

  “Easy to post. Hard to trace,” Kyle said simply.

  “Can you fill me in a little?” Karen asked. She hoped that none of the tension she felt within her was leaking into her voice.

  “Well, two different questions really,” he answered. “First, posting anonymously. That’s not too difficult. You need to take your laptop to just about any public server, like in a coffee shop or a library. Then you create a proxy account with a website like Tor, which will give you a program that guarantees anonymity. By the time you’re posting on YouTube, you’re using a server that can’t be traced to you and a site that hides all the rele­vant computer info, so that even if one were to get to the location, they’d be up against a wall.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “Not really. Just a short drive in the car, buy a cup of overpriced coffee, and make some discreet clicks. Use some alias that means nothing to nobody. Seems like a relatively small inconvenience for total secrecy.” Kyle seemed a little bored by the question.

  “But the cops—”

  “Nah,” he interrupted immediately, with significantly more enthusiasm, “no chance, no way. They just run into the same electronic walls. And, assuming the public server in the library or coffee shop doesn’t have any security cameras, well, there you have it. Your post is up and running, you cancel out of Tor or wherever, and no one knows the difference and you’ve disappeared.”

  The Big Bad Wolf, Karen thought, would know about security cameras. He had to. He would know about computers. He would know about websites that create anonymity. She suddenly imagined that he would know about everything.

  “And back tracing . . .”

  “You mean if someone posted something anonymously that you wanted to track down? Like someone did to you what you want to do to your husband?”

  Kyle’s reply had a slightly mocking tone, as if he understood she wasn’t really talking about a husband, but that he was willing to play along.

  This was what she truly wanted to know. She felt her insides constrict, as if someone were hugging her. She could feel sweat beneath her arms and she reminded herself to keep her own voice airy, light, and unconcerned, even if this was nearly impossible.

  From what she could hear, Kyle was young—probably in his early twenties, she thought—but in computer years he was significantly older than her. “Exactly,” she said.

  “Well, I think YouTube is required by law to keep as much of that information available as possible, in case the cops come calling, or some lawyer with a subpoena. They’re really sensitive to Internet bullying and intimidation because of all the cases that have come up all over the place. They get a whole lot of bad publicity when some high school creep posts something to humiliate or intimidate some ex-boyfriend or -girlfriend. Facebook is no different. But they’re just going to run into the same problems as they break it down. Now, I don’t know about the military or like the CIA—you know, spooks. They’ve got some pretty cool top-secret stuff for tracing bad guys, like in Iraq. But for everyone working for the feds with real expertise, there are a dozen or a million computer pros working to get around them. And the guys that aren’t collecting a government paycheck are really a whole lot more skilled.”

  Karen didn’t know what to ask next, but Kyle obligingly continued, his voice picking up some excited momentum.

  “It’s like you see in the movies and television,” Kyle said. “You know there’s always a scene where either the good guys or the bad guys hack this or that and come up with some killer piece of information about some guy or some plot or something cool that’s just floating about in cyberspace and it all seems to like make sense and you believe it?”

  “Yes?” Karen asked. Nothing she had heard from Kyle reassured her. Instead, she felt queasy.

  “Well, that’s because it usually does make sense.”

  “Thanks, Kyle,” Karen said. “I might have to call you again.”

  “Hey, anytime, Doctor,” he said as he hung up.

  It took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t identified herself. And she hadn’t told Kyle her profession. Caller ID on her phone, she thought. For a moment she stared at the black receiver she held in her hand. What else did it tell him? Home phone, landline, cell phone, office line. Where had her privacy disappeared? It frightened her.

  Then she turned back to her computer screen. It frightened her more.

  Sarah’s tears had dried.

  She felt like she had walked headlong into some dark room and she knew that somewhere in the floor was a trapdoor that would drop her into some sort of endless oblivion. It made no difference how carefully and cautiously she felt her way forward, because the door yawned open in front of her and there was no way to avoid it.

  For a moment or two, she stared at her computer screen, watching the YouTube posting for the third or fourth time. Maybe it was the fifth time. She didn’t keep track.

  Suddenly, she reached out and seized her husband’s gun from the table beside her. Before she fully understood what she was doing, she clicked off the safety, rose from her chair, and stomped across the house, finally reaching the front door. Without hesitation, she flung the door open and stepped outside on the front stoop, swinging her gun right and left, sighting down the barrel, her finger tight on the trigger, ready to fire instantly.

  Come on! Goddammit! Come on! I’m ready for you!

  She thought she was shouting, but then she understood that her teeth were clenched tight, so tight that her jaw began to ache.

  She pivoted to the right a second time, then repeated the movement to the left, a little like a top spinning on a table.

  Finally, she lowered the weapon and flipped the safety switch back on. Sarah breathed out slowly, tasting fresh air and wondering whether she had been holding her breath for seconds, or a minute, or the entire day.

  The gun suddenly felt heavy, and it bounced against her hip.

  Sarah wanted to laugh.

  No one in sight. No one walking up or down the street in front of her house. No cars moving past slowly. No one within her view at all.

  They were all lucky, she thought. All the neighbors who never called on her anymore. All the strangers who might have taken that moment to amble past her house.

  They were all lucky to be alive.

  She told herself that she would have leveled th
e pistol and pulled the trigger and killed anyone she saw. It would have made no difference if one of them was the Big Bad Wolf or not. She had begun to think that everyone was the Big Bad Wolf.

  She sighed and stepped back inside. Sarah had the odd thought that she had been completely forgotten in her neighborhood. No one wanted to catch the virus of despair that she carried. So no one acknowledged her existence. Not anymore.

  I can stand naked in my window. I could walk naked down the street with my gun in my hand. I could dance naked in the center of the road firing shots wherever I liked and no one would pay any attention, she told herself. I have become invisible.

  She was tempted to try. But instead, she went back inside, locking the door behind her and rearranging her flimsy homemade alarm system of cans and bottles, and returned to her computer screen.

  A second thought slithered into her head: I’m invisible to everyone except one person. She could hear her breathing coming in short, tortured bursts. Sarah reached down and pressed the Play arrow with the barrel of her gun and began to watch what was posted another time.

  But as she did so, she raised her weapon and aimed it at the images in front of her.

  Red One’s YouTube video began in the same manner as Red Three’s—with the camera tracking rapidly through some anonymous stand of trees, like an animal moving quickly over familiar ground. When Red One saw this for the first time, she imagined that it was the woods behind her house. Had to be, she thought. A terrifying thought. Then the video dissolved into a long-distance shot of her in the back of the parking lot at the hospice, stealing one of her post-observed-death smokes, thinking naïvely that she was indulging in her dangerous vice alone and unobserved.

  Red Two’s YouTube entry mimicked the others with its fast-filmed forest beginning. But hers faded into a shot taken through a car window in the parking lot of a big discount liquor store. It was a local store that Red Two knew all too well. The camera held that position for what seemed an interminable moment, until Red Two emerged through the wide glass doors of the store, arms filled with paper parcels jammed with liquor bottles. It tracked her to the point when she got into her car and drove unsteadily away down a familiar street.

  Each minimovie had been taken at some time over the past months. The footage didn’t necessarily match the bleak early wintertime that trapped the three Reds. In the videos, trees were blanketed with leaves. The clothing spoke of a warmer season.

  Two of the videos lingered on the final image. Red One’s froze on the wisps of cigarette smoke rising above her head. Red Three’s ended with her disappearing into her dormitory, as if swallowed up by evening shadows. But Red Two’s video had a gratuitous cruelty added to the end. After her car had exited the liquor store parking lot, the image had dissolved into another picture, one that when she saw it for the first time caused Red Two to keen out loud with an unrecognizable sound of pain:

  A grave site. A headstone. Two names followed by the same date. Beloved husband. Beloved child. Dead.

  12

  It took great strength for Jordan to concentrate during the afternoon basketball practice. Every cut she made, every screen she set, every shot she took felt as if it was somehow misshapen or distorted. When she clanked an easy layup, rolling it off the front rim on a wide-open shot, there was the usual hooting from her teammates and a quick reprimand from an assistant admonishing her, “Take your time, Jordan, and finish!” But she imagined—even though the stands were completely empty—that someone else was watching her and that even the momentary lapse of a missed shot in the midst of a practice scrimmage meant something far bigger.

  She believed that she should display no outward flaw. None whatsoever. Not even a momentary failure. Any weakness might be the route that the Big Bad Wolf used to catch her. Somehow, she had to be perfect in all things, even when she knew she was far from it, in order to keep the Big Bad Wolf away. This might make no sense whatsoever, but it pressed on her shoulders like a weight. She wondered whether the Big Bad Wolf was preventing her from jumping for a rebound. Maybe he could hold her down when he wasn’t even nearby, just by making her think he was.

  Close, but not too close. Near, but not too near.

  Jordan clenched her fists.

  An idea came to her. She was running down the court, doing obligatory “suicides” at the end of the session: baseline to foul line and back, baseline to mid-court and back, baseline to far foul line and back, baseline to baseline and finish strong. Everyone hated the conditioning runs and everyone knew the value they held. Jordan typically finished first and prided herself on being able to make that extra effort. Her mind should have been cleared of everything except the pain and short-breath of exertion, but as she bent down to touch the far foul line, she realized that she had to find a way to contact the other two Reds, even if that just might be exactly what the Big Bad Wolf wanted. And she thought she knew how to do it.

  She did not know if there was truth to the cliché Strength in numbers. She doubted it.

  Jordan waited until late that evening before she opened up the YouTube video showing her walking to her dormitory. She had ignored most of her homework, spending hours staring at the computer’s background screen—a picture of the Earth taken from space—letting the minutes flow toward midnight. She told herself that even the Big Bad Wolf had to sleep sometime, and besides, what did he have to worry about? She and the other two Reds were the sleepless ones. The wolf probably slept soundly each night.

  In one corner of the screen that displayed her video, there was the views counter. It seemed stuck on 5—which indicated the number of times she had watched it. She kept her eyes on that number. “Five five five,” she repeated to herself.

  With a deep breath and the sensation that she was stepping into something unknown, Jordan reached for the keyboard and started typing rapidly.

  First, she did a quick search using the keyword Red and ordering them by date. A menu arrived on her computer screen, a series of frozen images and a YouTube address. There was a punk leather-and-tattoo rock group and what she guessed was a family vacation and an avant-garde and probably pretentious artist in front of a vibrant red painting that was of something but she couldn’t tell what. But in the stack of potential answers to her search were two videos that showed nothing except a forest—like the beginning of hers.

  The first opened in the trees, and then blended into a woman wearing a physician’s long white lab coat smoking in a corner of some anonymous parking lot at some distance. The woman looked to be about her mother’s age. Jordan waited until the video ended. It was short, as short as hers was. Then she clicked on the second and saw the same rush through the woods blurring into a younger woman coming out of a liquor store. This woman seemed to be distracted. She watched the woman get into her car. Jordan’s fingers were hovering over the keyboard, about to stop the video, when she saw a new image pop up in the box screen. It was slightly out of focus, but she saw two names on a headstone.

  She grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down everything she could before the picture faded away. Then she replayed the video a second and a third time, to make sure she had all the information from the grave.

  Two names. One date.

  Then she went back and watched the white-jacketed woman a second time, trying to make out a street sign or a business, anything that might tell her something. But a white-coated woman smoking in a parking lot could be anyone and anywhere. She did not have to read the web address to know she was looking at Red One and Red Two.

  The red hair told her that.

  Her first instinct was to whisper to the screen, “I’m here! I’m right here!”

  She hesitated.

  For the first time, she really understood: I am not alone.

  Before, it had seemed abstract. Two other women? Where? Who? But now she could see them. And they could see her, if they tried.

/>   She tried to control her thoughts. For a moment she imagined that everything in her life was whirling about out of her grasp but that this one thing was the only important thing, and if she couldn’t do anything about everything else, she knew she had to be disciplined and smart about what she did in this single arena. There is only one school, one family, one world, she told herself. The Big Bad Wolf and you and you and me. He will know what we are all doing. He’s watching. You can count on that.

  She minimized the YouTube window and opened up Gmail. It took her a few minutes to create a new account with a new electronic address: Red3@gmail.com.

  Then she returned to YouTube and posted the same message beneath each video:

  It’s Red Three. We must talk.

  She posted a link to her video and hoped that Red One and Red Two would see what she had done and mimic her. She tried to send mental waves of thought out to the two other women: The Big Bad Wolf will see this. Don’t imagine for an instant that he hasn’t tapped into these videos and isn’t monitoring them every minute, expecting you to do what you’ve done.

  She tried to encourage herself but wondered whether she was opening up some door that she did not want to see inside. A world of shadows, she thought.

  She did not have to wait long for an answer. The counter on her video suddenly clicked to 6.

  She held her breath counting the seconds it would take for someone to watch her video.

  Then her computer pinged with her “new mail” sound.

  Karen Jayson watched.

  She gasped as the shaky camera left the forest and focused on a distant figure. She whispered out loud, “But she’s just a child!” as if there was something inherently unfair in the age of Red Three.

  She told herself to be cautious, that it could all be a trap. But even as she warned herself, her fingers were flying across the keyboard, tapping out a message on the computer she used for her comedy. It wasn’t as if she really imagined that switching computers afforded her any new security, but she was happy enough with the illusion that this side of her might still be secret from the Big Bad Wolf.