by David Cole
She scattered more papers on the work table, found two topo maps of Sonora.
“See how many mountains there are?”
“Yes…but…”
“Some of them don’t even have names.”
She swept both hands across the table, scattering the maps onto the floor.
I could tell that maps meant nothing to her.
“You think I know…for Christ’s sake, you think Kyle and I haven’t tried to figure it out?”
“What’s this red line?”
I pointed at a ragged line scratched with a ballpoint pen, starting about one hundred miles south of the border and crossing over into the U.S. just east of Organ Pipe National Monument.
“I think…maybe, I think that’s the last part.”
“How far from where you started?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long did you run?”
“I don’t know.”
She shook her head, violently, slapping her cheeks, breathing so quickly and shallowly I thought she was going to hyperventilate.
“Let me tell you,” she said quietly and distinctly. “Let me tell everything I know about being raped at the campo des sequestration.”
29
“How are the kidnappers supposed to contact you about the ransom for her crew?”
“By fax,” Kyle said. “Same as before.”
“Have they?”
“No.”
Jo had gone to bed. Kyle was drinking Foster’s lager, I was on my third martini.
He bit a knuckle, cracked another knuckle, scratched his sandy hair.
“You’ve got some basic questions about Jo. I can tell, you’re…unsettled about how to read her.”
“Only one question.”
“You want to know, is she a nutter.”
“Nuts?”
“Yeah. Nuts. Mad.”
“She’s whacked out of her head with Ritalin,” I said shortly.
“I’ve seen her bank account,” Kyle said. “She’s already paid me fifty thousand dollars. That’s my up-front fee. Another fifty on the back end.”
“So how much money is she willing to spend?”
“Spend? That, I don’t know. But she’s got something like two million saved. Rainy day, old maidenhood, island in the South Seas. I’ve verified the bank accounts. She says she’ll spend all of it, if she has to. To find that guy.”
“Has she told her story yet to CNN?”
“If you can believe this, she’s shopping her story around the networks.”
“I can believe anything about her.”
“ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, you name it, she’s called all of them.”
“How much money is she asking?”
“They keep upping the ante. Last offer, six figures, tell her story on camera.”
“A regular Diane Sawyer.”
“Too prissy, wrapped too tight. Other end of that, Baba Wawa. Ugh.”
“Katie Couric, then?”
“No. Jane Pauley,” he said with a smile. “She’s the one with the brains.”
“Fax,” I said.
And like magic, the machine behind him clanked up and began to whir.
“How do they know this number?”
He held up a palm, wait.
Two lines on the fax.
[email protected]
respond in next 30 minutes
He tripped on the office chair in front of the computer, kicked it aside, slapped the mouse with his palm. The screensaver came off and he started his modem dialup, and like that, blam, an explosion nearby, it was magic it was, like, surreal, everything went dark, pitch black in the room, a moment in time, one of those special moments that change everything, I tell you.
There’s a before. There’s an after. And scarcely a millisecond between the before and after moments when you cross over the line.
“Where’s the circuit breaker box?” I shouted.
“No idea.”
I started running to the back of the house, stopped at the window.
“Look,” I said, pointing down the hill toward Nogales.
Seven houses away, a power transformer was ablaze atop a power pole.
“That’ll never be fixed in half an hour,” Kyle said. “How quick can we get to another place to send an email?”
I took out my Fujiyama.
“Right here.”
I called up the master menu, found the satcom link, made connections.
“Give me that fax,” I said, typing the email address with the keypad.
“What is that thing?”
“Gadget. What do you want to say?”
“‘Contact. What next?’”
“That’s it?”
“You’ll get an email back. Then we’ll know what to do next.”
He went to get a beer, came back, lifted it to me.
“No thanks.” The martini was already making me woozy.
“Might as well. Power stays off all night, it’ll just get warm.”
“No. Thanks anyway.”
He sipped at the beer, sipped at something in the back of his mind.
“Ah,” he said. “Can you trace it? With your gadget?”
“Already thought of that.”
“And?”
“Wouldn’t do any good. Anybody using this technology would know how to create a fake email address, bounce it around the world—”
“Whoa. Bounce?”
“I thought your kind knew all about this business.”
“My kind?”
“I saw the movie. Russell Crowe, Meg Ryan. Used a radio…”
“Oh. That. Well. Radio, email, fax…technology, it’s a toolbox. Whatever they use, I answer. Not my job, is it? Know the technology? Get the…victim, er, person.”
“You were going to say, get the body.”
“Yeah. Habit.”
“So we wait, but I don’t trace because it’s useless.”
“But you could, if you wanted to? Trace?”
“That’s what I do.”
“You bounce around.”
Yeah, I thought. Something like that.
We waited seventeen minutes in the dark until the Fujiyama beeped.
He tried to read the small screen, had to get out some reading glasses.
“Let me,” I said. “I’m used to it.”
US$2,500,000
contact u in thirty-seven hours
“You must be making a mistake,” he said. “Read it again.”
He listened carefully.
“Something’s wrong here,” he said.
“What?”
“The money.”
He got up to walk, bumping into things in the dark.
“T-bone. He’s not worth that money. Two hundred, large, two and a half. But not over a million. It’s almost as though…almost…”
“What?”
“Can’t figure it. First offer, usually high. You saw the movie?”
“Proof of Life?”
“Yeah.”
“Russell Crowe. He negotiated. On the radio, he negotiated the price.”
“Got them way down to something reasonable. But even the starting figure wasn’t that high. Like this one. I’ve got to figure, almost as though…”
“They didn’t expect Jo to pay it?”
His head silhouetted against the window, I could see him nodding.
“But why?” he said, mostly to himself.
I thought of Michelle Gilbert. About the black market in body parts.
About Meg, about the CNN story on the border shooting, about Jo being identified with the story. If Jo were tied to me and Meg…
“I think I might know the answer,” I said.
“But you’re not sure to tell me?”
“It’s a matter of trust,” I said. “I don’t know who to trust.”
“Including yourself?”
“Yes. Including trusting myself.”
“You want to run.”
“Yes.”
“Natural, that. Normal. Fight or flight. What are you going to do?”
“Find somebody I trust.”
“Try me,” he said gently.
“Not yet,” I answered after a while. “First, I have two other people in mind.”
30
North on 19. Out of Nogales, out of the heart of the Tucson Border Patrol Sector.
I was leaving the border, I was going over the border.
Kyle drove down the hill in the old pickup that had been parked in the carport. Cruz studied the cab closely, looked back at the house, saw my car still there, and didn’t follow. At the bottom of the hill, Kyle slid out of the pickup and left me.
I’d decided I would trust Don, whenever he arrived in Tucson. I might trust Michelle Gilbert after I talked to her one more time.
Strange enough, I trusted my fear more than anything. I’d faced situations like this before, I’d not backed away as much as I’d wanted to just leave. But this time, I had to live with my promise. Whatever it took to get Meg back, however it would change my life, whatever violence I’d have to do to others, or to myself…I would do it, I would go there.
Rising slightly on US 19 as I headed out of Nogales, I could see the lights of the border in my mirrors. I watched them for five minutes, until I dropped over the other side of the hill and the sky went Arizona dark.
I was driving away from the border, but I was crossing over into a new place.
laura
Passing Green Valley, I remembered driving the other way, south, toward Nogales, with Meg and LynnMay, I remembered how I’d been so wound up I’d recorded the names of the exits.
I haven’t taken a single Ritalin in hours. I can not remember the last time this happened, but as I fumbled for my stash of pills, given to me by Jo, I upended the plastic baggie and the tiny white pills spilled all over the front seat and onto the floorboards and I automatically reached for them, frantic, but just for the moment.
I can do this, I can stop taking them.
Before I could change my mind, I swerved off US 10 onto the shoulder, but since I’m traveling at eighty miles an hour, I fishtailed the car, omigod…okay, I finally stopped, it was exactly the kind of thing that would make me gobble those pills, but there I was, on the shoulder, cars and heavy trucks from Mexico roaring past me, as I cleaned out every white pill I could find and threw them into the gravel, I mean, every pill, under the seats, under the accelerator, under the floor mats, I got rid of them all.
Later in Tucson, Don is here, on my way to where he’s staying, I need his clarity, his calm, this whole business of revenge really has taken over my head.
Because now I’m out there. I’ve emailed somebody from two separate accounts; if he’s any good with computers and the Internet, he’s now tracking me.
31
“Does the money ever bother you?”
“What money?” Don asked, occupied with three different computers.
“Our clients’ money.”
“So?”
“We work for people with a lot of money.”
“Your point?”
“Learjet to Tucson. Penthouse suite, unlimited resources…”
“Nope.”
“Well. It bothers me. Sometimes, it really bothers me.”
“They’re clients.”
He swiveled his chair around to look at me.
“Most of the people we find are criminals, Laura. Our clients, most of them, are trying to recover embezzled or stolen funds. Laundered money. We do that. It’s a hard job. We know how to do this particular kind of hard job.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Oh get over it,” he said, turning back to his computers.
Once I’d made sure Don was in town, I’d called Kyle and Jo, and they were headed north to Tucson. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to work with them, but until I talked with Michelle Gilbert, I had to hold on to every option.
Don was in the penthouse suite of a very new luxury building on the far eastern edge of Tucson, so far east that two years before it would have been nothing but desert. Only half of the condos had sold, and the sales office had been more than willing to rent out the penthouse suite for a month. Fourteen stories high, it was a tall building for Tucson, which was pretty much a one-story town.
The living room had wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows, looking west. Since we’d rented the suite totally unfurnished, there were no drapes, and the glare from Tucson night lights was too bright for Don. He’d rented a dozen king-size bed sets, and we’d tacked some sheets over the windows. An office equipment rental company had moved in tables, chairs, computers, monitors, lights, printers, everything on Don’s list. We set up three of the computers along one wall, the other two on the opposite wall.
We sat on office swivel chairs.
“About the money,” he said. “I heard a funny story. Back east. You remember the movie Fargo?”
“Sure.”
“Well. Seems there was this Japanese woman. Twenty-eight years old. Saw the movie a hundred times or more, living in Tokyo, and next thing her friends knew, she was flying to the U.S. To Minneapolis. She took a bus from there to Bismarck.”
“What’s this got to do with us?”
“Us? Nothing.”
“So?”
“Money. All about what money does to you. How it drives you crazy. So, anyway. She gets to Bismarck, rents a motel room, and next morning one of the guys who’s driving by the city dump sees her walking around. She doesn’t speak much English, he thinks she’s from the moon or some weird place, so he takes her to the police station. She’s got this map, it comes out. A highway, a tree, a spot marked with an X. And…?”
“Where are we going with this?”
“Money.”
“I thought she was going to wind up in a woodchipper.”
“Money. She says the map shows where the money was buried.”
“But…it was movie. Fargo was just a movie.”
“Hey. Japanese woman. Map. Has plenty of money, as the story goes. It’s March. It’s still cold up there. So she’s seen at the Bismarck bus station, bought a ticket to Fargo. A week later, a deer hunter, guy who hunts with a bow and arrow, he finds her body. Frozen. Middle of nowhere. No marks on her, no foul play suspected. End of story.”
“What’s the moral?”
“I don’t have a moral,” Don said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t spend much time worrying about people who’ve got money and do crazy things with it.”
Once Don got the computers going, I inserted the floppy disk with the JPG file.
“Scenery,” Don said. “So?”
“So. That’s the question.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Think Carnivore. Think JWICS. Think…intercepted email attachment.”
“Steganography,” Don said immediately.
“What’s that?”
“Basic encryption. Kids use it to pass notes back and forth. Parents look at their email, see a picture attachment of a cuddly kitten. Like this one. Here.”
He called up a digital photo of his own.
“What do you all see?”
“Pretty kitty,” I answered.
“A very young Siamese. Got them huge Dumbo ears. Cartoon elephant cat.”
“Just tell me what it means.”
“Kitty means nothing. He’s just a picture. It’s what’s hiding underneath.”
I looked at the picture again, traced its outline on the monitor.
“Hiding what?” I asked. “Something digitally encoded. What?”
“Text. Usually.”
“Don’t see any words.”
“Comes from the Greek.”
Don started another software program.
“Literally, ‘steganography’ means ‘covered writing.’ In olden days, messengers would have their head shaven, messages tattooed on their scalps, and in a few days’ travel the tattoo would be covered by stubble. Like that scar on your head.”
&nb
sp; Don squinted, lifted the hair off my right temple.
“Nasty scars. Are they from the border incident?”
“Don’t.” I pulled his hand away from my temple, smoothed my short hair over the scars. “So you’ve got software that decodes this image?”
“I get two messages from what you just showed me about the scars,” Don said. “Number one, good example of exactly what I was talking about. Scarification with coded meaning. Number two—”
“Forget it,” I said. “Run your software.”
He thought better of what he was going to say.
“Okay. Steganograph. Hide a message. Scars, invisible ink, those microdots from old spy movies, in more modern times, digital signatures, using email security encryption programs. Cutting edge, using covert channels and spread spectrum communications. And like all that stuff, the trick is figuring out how to decode whatever is hidden.”
“Ciphers? Codes?”
“No. That’s cryptology. This is just covering up a message with a picture.”
He imported the picture into his software program, hit some keystrokes, and the kitten slowly dissolved to be replaced by a single word.
kitten
“Cool. But what’s behind my picture? Run that through your program. Let’s find out what’s behind the desert flowers.”
“Ahh,” Don sighed. “Not so easy. You just saw me use my own steganography program. It does the work at both ends. Codes. Decodes. But there are a lot of them. The trick here is to find just the right program, since they’re different. It’ll take some work.”
The phone rang, the desk clerk announced that we had visitors.
I put my hand over the monitor. Don cleared the JPG picture, copied the file, and handed me the disk.
“I’ll work on it,” he said. “There aren’t that many different programs. I can set up a program script, run the picture tomorrow. I’m more concerned about Meg, about where she’s being held.”
