Gaslighting (DP, DIC03)
Page 39
A shark-like grin.
‘You can call me Hunter, Mister Fan.’ Piercing blue eyes drilled into his.
That unnerved Fan. It was a primeval, disquieting stare, and a blip of paranoia lit up the well-tuned radar in his mind. But the two hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, along with the prospect of many more to come, wiped the screen clear as quickly as the blip had appeared.
Fan shrugged and smiled his sickly smile as he joined the man in the boat.
***
‘Okay, this is what I’ve just found.’
Kate peered over her brother’s shoulder as he spoke, head to head with him, her eyes rapidly scanning the words cascading on to one of three large flatscreens arrayed on his desk top, greedily analysing the content.
‘Is this a news-site?’ Kate was always impressed by her brother’s talent with computers. He could find just about anything whenever she asked. For him computers were his life, almost as if they were a part of him. Not his brain, that was far better than any computer, but more like his blood. Yes, she thought, that’s computers for Johnny. They were his lifeblood.
Her brother’s eyes were red rimmed and tired from staring at the screens, yet she knew he needed little sleep, catnapping only when exhausted. Forty or fifty hours could pass with him leaving his station only to pee, and with barely any shuteye at all, oblivious to time – hence waking her in the middle of the night with the news on Simm.
Kate shook her head in despair as she glanced around the grotty bedsit that he called home. Discarded clothes littered the floor and there was a malodorous undertone that assaulted her nostrils from the moment she had arrived. The place was only ever clean for a brief period – always just after she had visited. He was such a nerd.
A genius nerd.
This she knew, and right now he was working his magic, internet fever pumping through his veins. She concentrated on the screen again as he spoke.
‘News-site? You insult the great Johnno. This,’ he brushed the backs of his fingers across a screen in a loving caress, ‘is the police report. It was transmitted from Bangkok not long after I phoned you.’ His face creased into a cheeky dimpled grin.
Uh-oh, thought Kate.
She was quick, gifted like her brother but in different ways. She could speed read – words were her forte. They tumbled and rolled around her conscious and subconscious mind, her brain sorting and sifting them, rapid fire, readying them for others to hear or see.
She also had intuition. Bundles of it. And right now a little klaxon was cutting through the barrage of verbiage inside her head.
Uh-oh.
‘The official police report?’ She started to relax as she said it, immediately realising it couldn’t be. It was in English. Not Thai, and therefore surely not the original file.
‘Yup. Kindly translated and posted for the whole world to read.’
The klaxon in her mind started wailing as he rabbited on.
‘When I say for the whole world to read, I actually mean my highly gifted Anonymous cyber-fiends – of whom I am the undoubted master!’
Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. The klaxon was on full alert.
‘And who exactly was it that kindly translated and posted this for your brilliance to access?’ Her sweet sisterly smile had faded.
‘Oh, come on Sis! It’s okay – ’
Kate interrupted, leaving no doubt who was boss, demanding to know, ‘Who, Johnny?’
He swiped a finger across the central screen and a new page appeared in its full glory.
Oh God, thought Kate. It was the official report all right. And she did not need to read anything to see who had kindly translated it.
She stared in mute horror at the CIA logo alongside the rather less impressive one belonging to the US embassy in Bangkok.
She stepped back from the screen, but physical distance was no help.
The klaxon was screaming. And so was Kate.
‘You idiot – for chrissakes! You will end up in prison!’
She was glaring at him now, and he physically shrank into his swivel chair. He suffered badly from nerves, a consequence of a troubled youth, and immediately folded himself in half, hugging his knees, grimacing. She knew his stomach would be cramping from stress, squirting acid, and she almost relented at the sight of his pain.
His breath rasped, his voice ragged as he said, ‘Sis. Please don’t be angry. I thought – ’
‘I’m not angry.’ Kate tried to calm herself, her voice quiet now. ‘I’m disappointed. I’m devastated. I’m worried sick for my little brother.’ She watched him writhe in real pain as her tirade tortured him even more, and her heart melted. After all, he was only trying to please her. ‘Oh Johnny. What am I to do with you?’
She brushed his hair with her fingertips and saw the colour begin to return to his cheeks. Poor kid. So smart. Yet so daft. And so easy to hurt.
He tugged open a drawer and swallowed some antacid from a bottle he found in there. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. But please listen. I’ve been really careful.’
‘What, like before?’ She pursed her lips and shook her head at him.
‘No, really careful. I’ve created something. It’s taken years. A cyber-mask. No one can ever trace this.’ He smudged a greasy finger on the screen and then wiped the mark off with his sweatshirt sleeve as he explained. ‘I am so disguised, like all the computers in the US couldn’t find me if they joined together and spent the next ten years searching. This is the motherfucker mask. I’ve finally sussed the critical pathways and – ’
‘Enough!’
She recognised the fervent look in his eyes. The zealot’s glaze of a nerd about to explain the ‘deeetails’ of his latest glorious conquest of the cyber kingdom.
But Johnny had recovered, was animated again and starting to babble, ready to bask in the glow of sisterly approbation.
Kate just could not help herself from letting go a small smile. She loved her seventeen going on thirteen-year-old brother more than anybody or anything in the whole world. She cut him off in mid flow again.
‘A cyber-mask?’
‘My own creation. It’s the hackers’ holy grail. I based it on an original algorithm – ’
‘A mask. It stops people seeing you. Am I right?’
‘Sure... It’s well fat.’
‘And it’s unbreakable? No one can ever see who stole this?’
‘I did not steal it! I just borrowed it, for a quick peek. Like a library book... Cross my heart’ He dimple-grinned her and she had to laugh. He had finally got the message. Enough already.
‘Okay Supernerd. Let’s see what our friends at the CIA have given us.’ Kate’s easy optimism surfaced again.
Nothing bad will happen. It’s only a Thai police report after all. And anyway, she felt confident that if Johnny said no one could trace this to London he was right, even if the document was important.
Kate leaned over Johnny’s shoulder again as he punched the air, whooped, reached out his left hand – eyes still fixed on the middle screen, right mitt scrolling pages for his sister – and deftly popped a package into the microwave permanently sited at the end of his desk. He spun the timer without a glance and whispered into her ear, ‘We got fresh popcorn!’
***
Fan was having a terrible day. The very worst day of his miserable existence. And the very last day of his shabby junkie life.
He struggled in the bottom of the dinghy, feeling the bite of wire cutting into his flesh as he realised his hands and feet were bound together behind his back. His head thundered with pain, worse than even his most vicious drug hangover.
The blow he had received – the one he did not see or even really feel – had slammed part of his cranium against his brain. He was already dying, his skull fractured, soft brain tissue torn, with blood and vital cerebral fluid leaking gently from his right ear.
As he came fully conscious Fan experienced a totality of agony he could not have imagined. A thousand migraines crushed his fevered mind.
He vomited, a sickly sludge of spiced squid and beer pooling under his nose, the sweet acrid stench acting like smelling salts, dragging him back to incomprehensible reality.
‘I do nothing bad. I not hurt you.’ He struggled to speak, his swollen tongue waggling, rancid and sticky in his mouth. Sun scorched down and he longed for a return to unconsciousness.
The steady beat of the outboard stopped and Fan felt Hunter lift him. He was like a baby in a strong man’s arms. The gentle movement of the waves allowed Fan to drift towards the sanctuary of unconsciousness, and then he came screaming awake – a terrifying agonised wail wrenched from deep inside his tortured soul.
His body was suspended in the water. The man was holding a very large knife in one hand and Fan’s ponytail in his other.
The Thai’s body gently swung, twisting slightly as waves lapped against the bow of the boat. Despite the water supporting him below the waist, much of his body weight was hanging from his ponytail. Had his mind been coherent and able to think despite the explosive pain detonating inside his head, he would have realised the rasping noise he heard was the sound of fragments of his own skull grating together.
Slowly he was dipped deeper. The pain receded as the water took more of his bodyweight, and, for a brief glorious moment he lost consciousness.
Then the warm water splashed over his face, reviving him. Agony engulfed him, but he was lucid. The bloody fluid was flowing more freely from his deafened ear.
Hunter’s quiet words were almost crooned into Fan’s other one.
‘One question. One answer and no more pain. Where do you keep the children? The rent boys and girls? Where are they?’
Fan’s ponytail tightened and he screamed again, a long primitive howl that encompassed all the anguish he had felt or dealt in his twenty-four years.
He was able to whisper a few words, the pain in his skull such that he barely felt the knife slice his belly, spilling his guts into the sea.
At last, released by the stranger he drifted in the pink water, his tormented synapses fusing and sparking for one last coherent thought. As his bowels were ripped away he realised that the American’s teeth really looked nothing like a shark’s.
***
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