by David Cole
“I’ve got that figured,” I said. “You know those old movies? Tiger-hunting in India? Where they stake out a goat, so when the rajah has his breakfast and gets his entourage on the move and the beaters do their thing, the tiger has taken the goat, but the rajah finds the tiger.”
“And which are you?” Don said carefully. “Tiger or goat?”
“Both.”
32
Somebody shaking me, gently, insistently.
“What?” I said.
A whack on my ribs, a poke. I opened one eye, saw Don’s wheelchair above me, his arm reaching down with a rolled-up sheaf of paper.
“What?” I said, groggy, looking toward the window. False dawn light.
“You’d better come look at this.”
“What…look at what?”
But he was already pivoting the wheelchair away. I sat up for a moment on the sleeping pad, pulling my knees to my chest, head back, yawning. I stood up, started out the door before I realized I was only wearing panties. I pulled on my jeans, a tanktop.
Don had set my Fujiyama in a charging cradle, next to the other prototype that belonged to him. The screen on mine was lit, a tiny picture.
I started to bend over to look at it.
“Don’t bother. I’ve already moved the file to this computer.”
A green insect. I had to rub the sleep from my eyes before I could focus enough to see that it was a scorpion. But not true-colored, not brownish. Jade green. Six legs extended in vivid, digital clarity, two long pincers longer than the head, the tail loosely coiled around itself, six different segments, each shorter than the previous one, and in the center of the coil, the scorpion’s stinger.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Who did you email yesterday from the Fujiyama?”
“I don’t…email? Yesterday?”
“Last night…ten-twelve.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well…I checked the log. The email address is [email protected].”
The kidnapper’s fax.
I told Don what I’d done, answering the fax to Kyle.
“Well, kid, this came for you. Not him, not that woman. For you.”
“A scorpion?” I asked.
“Actually, it’s a bark scorpion. The most deadly kind.”
“Who sent it?”
I told him about the email intercept Michelle Gilbert had showed me.
“Yup, I saw that email. This one’s different. Just the scorpion.”
“Why is it green?”
“It’s under an ultraviolet light. A blacklight. It glows because of some weird, unidentifiable substance in a thin layer in the scorpion’s skin. I looked it up, on the web. Ask a Biologist, Arizona State University. ‘Newly molted scorpions do not fluoresce right away, but they will glow after they have aged awhile.’”
“You’re sure it was sent to me?”
“It’s on your Fujiyama, to the email address you used.”
He suddenly snapped his fingers, rattled on the keyboard to call up a software program and import the picture.
“Not that one,” he said to himself. “Let’s try…”
“What are you doing?”
“You remember the kitten?”
Kitty, kitten…I was too sleepy to think straight.
“Steganography,” he said. “Why do I get this feeling that somebody’s sending you a special message?”
He ran through four different decoding programs, none of them working.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked.
“Ever play much with satcom imagery?”
“No.”
“Okay. Computer images. Pixels.”
“Don’t lecture, Don. Just explain it, quick.”
“Standard image size 640 by 480 pixels at 256 colors, about eight bits per pixel, image contains maybe 300 kilobits of data.”
“Nobody uses 256 colors anymore.”
It was the kind of computer resolution from several years ago, when monitors were thirteen or fifteen inches maximum.
“So. A twenty-four-bit image, at a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. Pretty typical resolution for satellite images, electronic astral photographs, all kinds of high-resolution graphics. But we’re still using the three primary colors. Red…green…blue. What’s so unusual about this graphic file is its size. Huge, almost three megabytes, because it’s in twenty-four-bit color.”
“Oh God, Don, get to the point.”
“It’s a container. That’s a steganography term. This picture ‘contains’ something. I mean…the picture is not all of the message.”
“Don’t give me a Zen koan. What does it mean?”
But he snapped his fingers again, expelled his breath noisily, ah ah ah, and called up one more steganography program.
“Of course. Twenty-four bits. Let’s run this sucker…let’s…whoa!”
The scorpion dissolved, pixels shredding away, leaving a single line of text.
Meg Arizana—is this bitch worth five million dollars?
I crossed both hands over my heart, mouth open, staggered back a step.
Don looked at me, his mouth open, hands unconsciously on the wheels of his chair, moving backward from the image just as the Fujiyama beeped and the second picture downloaded.
Meg. Naked from the waist up, hands tied behind her back, standing against an organ pipe cactus. Indistinctly, in the background, a sky island, slim on the horizon and maybe ten miles away.
Don ran the steganography program again, but there was no text.
Just the picture.
“Let’s play with the picture. I’ve got an idea.”
He connected his twenty-four-inch monitor, enhanced the picture file, and cropped Meg and the organ pipe cactus out of the frame. Reenhancing, he isolated the sky island until it was as digitally clear as he could make it. But he shook his head, even after he exported the file to another piece of software that rotated the sky island through all kinds of simulated angles.
“The problem…the picture…it’s from the side.”
“Say what?”
“Desert level. Whoever took the picture is standing on the desert floor. I can manipulate the background a lot of ways. But, what we really need…from the top.”
“Do you know anybody who can simulate this?” I asked, getting desperate to do something, do anything.
“We need a picture that’s taken from above.”
“Satcom,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Who do you know that has access to satcom photos of the Sonoran desert?”
“Nobody. There are different satellites that do stuff like that. Ikonos. EOS. But they’re all government controlled.”
“Gilbert!” I said. “Maybe she can tie us into GOV-NET or JWICS. Maybe she can get us some aerial shots.”
“When can we meet with her?”
I didn’t have a watch, looked all over the room for some kind of clock.
“What time is it?”
He took a gold pocket watch from his shirt pocket.
“Nearly six.”
The watch read three-thirty. He saw my puzzled look.
“Belonged to my grandfather. I never met him. This came to me when my father passed away. A Hamilton. Made in eighteen hundred ninety-eight.”
He held it out to me. The back was delicately etched in a pattern of tulips and flowering lace, the front had small and delicate hour and minute hands, with seconds numbered around the outer edge of the dial, plus a smaller dial that had a second hand. A linked chain, about four inches, ran from the watch fob to a tiny silver penknife. I turned the winding bezel, tried to pull it out to reset the watch.
“Won’t set the time,” he said. “But I know almost to the second how to read it. No matter what time zone I’m in.”
I called Michelle, talked only for a moment.
“She’ll be at the coffee shop at seven-thirty.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Let’s try to see if whoe
ver sent this email is half as clever as we are about covering their footprints.”
But they were. Don succeeded in tracking the IP addresses back at least a dozen steps, but as usually happened, he wound up with a computer in Japan.
“What about Gilbert again?” I said excitedly.
“Carnivore?”
“If she can get us access…there must be a database out there, somewhere. A database of large money transferals in and out of the U.S.”
“A long shot,” he said. “Really, really long. I can try to set it up. But…I’ve got another idea, using government satellites. When you meet Gilbert, ask her about satcom surveillance photos of the Sonoran desert. Ask her about orthorectifying.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Rubbersheeting.”
“Don…what is it?”
“Just ask her if she knows about it. If we can get satcom photos from one of the government surveillance cameras…I know a person in Phoenix. Trust me.”
“What do we tell Kyle and Jo?”
“Nothing. When they get here, I’ll keep them occupied until you get back from your meeting.”
He rubbed his eyes, cricked his neck. Pushing both hands against the arms of the wheelchair, he raised and lowered himself ten times, twisting his shoulders.
“I wish Alex were here.”
“You miss her already?”
“Ha. I miss what she could be doing while I took a nap. I miss what you used to do with me, Laura.”
“Other times.”
“Other days.”
He wound the watch as tight as it would go, put it back into his pocket.
33
“Is she telling the truth? That’s all I want to know.”
My therapist wiggled in her chair, a sure sign she didn’t want to answer. I’d called her at six, wakened her, but she recognized the urgency in my voice and said she’d talk to me in an hour.
“I know who she is. I know she’s famous, at least her reporting from the Middle East and Afghanistan. I assume her base salary per year is seven figures.”
“Not what I mean,” I said.
“Yes, it’s all a part. Jo Kanakaredes is famous. But she hasn’t always been famous, she didn’t always draw a crowd when she walked into a room. My guess is that she’s also got a ton of assistants. Publicists. Lawyers. Accountants. Hair stylists. And hangers-on. Groupies, fans, whatever. She’s used to being the center.”
“So?”
“You know how dark Tucson is at night?”
“Oh please,” I said. “Don’t get philosophical.”
“No. Again, it’s relevant. It’s dark because of the astronomers. The city planners knew there were going to be many telescopes, and city lights prevent the stargazers from seeing things at night. So think of going out into your backyard, in Tucson, looking up, and seeing a star. That’s what it’s like for people like Jo. They’re used to having people around them. There’s a new psychiatric term for it. ‘Acquired situational narcissism.’ Doesn’t manifest itself until the person gets really famous, then they’re full-blown narcissists. These are not normal people. You can’t expect them to be normal. They often abuse drugs, alcohol, sexual partners. They’re usually depressed, and they don’t believe any of those things are happening to them.”
“Can I trust her?”
“She said she was raped?”
“Repeatedly.”
“Would your friend Meg trust her?
I’d never thought of it quite that way.
“Kinda,” I said finally. “Meg wouldn’t care if they were narcissists, drunks, coke-sniffers, battered wives, whatever. Meg would get them to a safe house, try to get them to a better life. If the person failed, it wasn’t because Meg didn’t try.”
“Then that’s your answer.”
“So I should trust the map she made? Trust that she was held in Mexico?”
“Laura, Laura, you haven’t been listening. Would Meg trust her?”
“No.”
“But…would Meg help her?”
“Yes.”
And that was my answer.
laura
Sitting in my car in traffic, I realized I didn’t even tell her that I was keeping this journal. More important, I didn’t tell her that I’d not taken any Ritalin in almost twenty-four hours.
I raised both hands an inch off the steering wheel, held them in front of me, looking at all my fingers.
Rock solid. Just the way I felt. Calm, with a purpose. Even thinking how I was going to be bait for the emailer, even then I felt the same calmness, the same sense of purpose.
I don’t think I’ll need to keep making these notes…
34
Raging Sage was a small coffee shop on Campbell, just north of Grant. Customers came to the front of what was an old house. The owners baked scones, croissants, cookies, and various delicious breads. They also roasted their own coffee beans, and sold them by the pound.
Michelle Gilbert stood outside, a hand on the rooftop of a silver Mercedes SL-600 Roadster. When I looked at it with some humor, she seemed apologetic.
“Just a lease. Believe it or not, this was the only car they had at the time.”
“Believe it or not, I once pretended to be a Mercedes saleswoman. From Scottsdale.”
“It’s awfully crowded in there,” she said. “You sure you want to talk here?”
“Not here. We’re going to get some coffee, lots of espresso for me. I’m parked out back, and I figured you’d come for a ride.”
“While you made sure nobody was following?”
“Something like that.”
“Sounds like a tired movie plot.”
“I don’t know you,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re capable of, so I don’t know if you’re really alone.”
“Same about you,” she said.
“Oh. I trust myself. And I’m all alone this morning.”
Fifteen minutes later I’d taken her inside Tohono Chul botanical gardens. I actually walked her to the bench where I’d first met Ana Maria Juarez, the pharmacist I’d tried to help a year before. I’d helped enough to prove she wasn’t guilty of electronic fraud, but that didn’t stop Meg from…I pushed away the memory of Audrey Maxwell’s death.
“This is a beautiful place,” Michelle said. “It’s so…peaceful. I’ve never spent time in the desert before. Never been in the Southwest. What kind of…I guess you’d call it landscaping…what is this called?”
“Riparian.”
“Nice. Peaceful.”
She looked at her wristwatch, a Minnie Mouse Timex. Finished her espresso.
“But we didn’t come here to talk about cactus.”
“No,” I said. “What do you know about satcom intelligence photos?”
“Satellites? Government satellites?”
“IKONOS satellites. EOS.”
She held the espresso container to her lips, tilted it to get the last drops. Lowering the container, she licked her lips, building what she wanted to say.
“I’ll need to know why you’re asking,” she said finally.
Opening my laptop case, I took out the Sony Vaio and booted it up to show her the picture of Meg. She gasped, one hand to her breast, looked at it closely.
“That’s your friend, isn’t it. Arizana.”
“Meg.”
“Meg. That’s her.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the desert.”
She’d shifted from dismay at seeing Meg’s naked upper body and tied hands to an analytic awareness of the image. She put out her hand to the screen, used a fingernail to trace the sky island in the background. I switched to several different images that Don had cropped and enhanced.
“You want to see this from the sky.”
“Yes.”
She nodded, took out a cell phone, flicked it open, turned it on, started to punch in a number, but stopped after three digits.
“You think…do you really think that we’re looking a
t the campo?”
“Campo de…” She fumbled with the Spanish.
“Sequestration. Campo de sequestration.”
“Jo Kanakaredes said that it was halfway up the side of a sky island.”
“And that’s how you found it?”
“No,” she said. “One of the factors, but there are a lot of other things. At first, I couldn’t see why they’d stay in the same place, especially after Jo escaped. I’ve seen the movie Proof of Life. They moved around. But the traditions of all these campos, going back to their origination in Columbia, is that they’re always fixed. Always in the same place.”
“There are hundreds of these dinky mountain ranges. How did you find it?”
“I’ve looked at all the maps,” she said. “I’ve had GIS people looking at the maps. There are dozens of little bumps and hills that somebody who’s half out of their mind would think was a mountain.”
“She was certain it was several hundred feet high.”
“Certain?”
“So she says.”
“And you trust her?”
“That’s a whole other matter. She’s a real piece of work.”
“But you trust her enough to believe the part about the sky island?”
“Yes.”
“And you think…you think that this could be it?”
“How do I know, lady?”
She recoiled at my anger.
“You’ve had too much espresso this morning.”
“Well. I’m sorry, I don’t seem to have many other ideas except this one.”
“Excuse me.”
She walked away from the circular-roofed ramada, made her phone call. I tried to remember sitting on the concrete benches with Ana Maria and…what was her name? Rhoda, no Rhonda. Rhonda Lopes. I stopped thinking about them. Michelle made several more calls. Ana Maria. Against my will, I followed the thread of what happened, from Ana Maria to Jeffrey Becker to Meg and her shotgun.
Actually, it was remarkable that I felt comfortable enough to even be in Tohono Chul. To be in that area of Tucson. I’d come a long way, I realized.
“Okay. Let’s go see Jack.”
“Jack who?” I asked.
“Jack Zea. A computer nut, kinda like you, I guess. Does GIS work, something called ortho…”
