by David Cole
Don had set it up, his index finger poised on the Enter key.
“You’re ready. Any time.”
He punched the key.
Lines and lines of data started rapidly scrolling on the monitor, moving too fast for us to make any sense of it. As quickly as it started, the data flow stopped and the screen went into a completely different menu.
“On your menu, at the top, hit Summary.”
After thirty seconds, the screen displayed a list of physical locations in a database with at least twenty fields, some of them blank, others filled in. Country, city, street, street address, phone number…and other categories of information…longitude, latitude, plus summaries of the specific owners, if known, of the location.
“Wow!” Don said.
I was trying to make sense of the data. So was Michelle.
“Guess it’s up to me to explain this,” Don said. We both nodded. “All along the Internet, everywhere in the world, traffic passes through hundreds of nodes. Like street intersections. Some are basic, like country roads, others like—”
“Not that simple,” Michelle said. “I do understand the difference between backcountry Arizona and midtown Manhattan.”
“Your Carnivore system, it can be programmed to go to any specified node on the entire Internet. Once that’s been set, Carnivore just sucks up all the traffic.”
“So it’s like video cameras at city intersections? For traffic violations?”
“Yup. So what we’re looking at is literally all the traffic that’s passed through a specific number of nodes that are connected, however remotely, to that address you gave me.”
“Okay,” Michelle said. “Somehow I feel like you’re not telling me the whole story, like, things really aren’t that simple. But. On your top menu, hit Bounce Back.”
“Shouldn’t I save this stuff?” Don said.
“Don’t bother. It’s all been analyzed, it means nothing. Bounce.”
He located the submenu with the Bounce command, clicked his mouse.
The screen switched to another database, this one showing how the data had bounced from one computer to another, around the world. The quantity of data was substantially reduced. Three different IP addresses had been used, but each of them connected to a routing path of at least ten jumps. All three ended at different places.
“Hacker stuff,” I said. “They use…we use this to disguise where we’re operating from.”
“Like in the movies,” Michelle said.
“You’ve seen it in a dozen technothrillers. Usually, they’ve got some hokey visual thing on a computer screen that shows a phone call bouncing all over the world. Here, you’re looking at computer data doing the same thing.”
“Now,” she said. “Last thing. Find the submenu command Bounce Forward.”
Don clicked his mouse on it.
Another screen of data.
The signals moved on from San Carlos to five different locations, but with fewer jumps.
“I don’t get it,” Michelle said. “Bounce forward, bounce back.”
“San Carlos is a hub,” I said. “A digital hub. Not necessarily a physical one. So wherever the kidnappers have set up the campo de sequestration, they’ve got line-of-sight satellite dishes that connect with San Carlos. At some house…some building, whatever…some place in San Carlos, there are computers and no people. Signals come in, they go out.”
“So I shouldn’t have the Mexican Federales do a door-to-door search in San Carlos for your missing friend?”
“Not yet. What’s the second program?”
We switched to the other monitor.
“You got anything to drink in here?” Michelle asked. “Something with caffeine in it? Lots of caffeine?”
“Mountain Dew?”
“Yuck.”
“You’ll never survive as a computer hacker.” Don chuckled. “But I’ve made some weapons-grade espresso. Laura? Bring in the thermos, bring some cups.”
Settled again with our caffeine, Michelle took out yet another piece of paper.
“Go here,” she said, showing Don another IP address. “You know, why you guys are bothering with the fake name, I can’t figure that one. Given how much secret access I’m giving you here, why use a fake name?”
“Tell me if I’ve got this wrong,” Don said, “but after you leave, will I be able to connect again to these Internet addresses you’re giving us?”
“No,” she answered immediately. “All right. You made your point. So enter that address, using that software.”
After two minutes, Don suddenly clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and bobbed his head up and down.
“Never seen this,” he said. “That whole software, it’s just a password.”
“Right.”
“It authenticates me to connect to something else. Which is…JWICS?”
“Right.”
“What is JWICS?” I asked.
“Military secure network for data, voice, and video.”
“Not connected to the Internet?”
“A completely separate Internet. But secure.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” I said, “before hackers get into it.”
“Not what DOJ tells me,” Michelle said.
“The Department of Justice, like everybody in government, just doesn’t understand that the only secure computer is one that’s not connected to anything. What are we going to look at now?”
“Black markets,” she said. “Selling body parts.”
Something beeping.
My Fujiyama, in the charging cradle.
Next to it, Don’s cradle was empty.
“Michelle,” he said. “Can you please excuse us for a moment?”
“Actually…with all this caffeine I’ve been drinking, I’ve got to pee.”
When she shut the bathroom door, Don took my Fujiyama from its cradle and pressed a button. Kyle’s face appeared on the screen.
“I gave him mine. I think he wants to talk with you.”
38
“I miss you,” he said, his face jerking on the screen at five frames a second. “Strange, that I miss you.”
What do I say to him?
“Where are you?”
The picture swiveled abruptly, unsteadily.
“Don’t move it so fast,” I said.
“Sorry.”
He took his time, showed me that he was underneath a mesquite ramada. Organ pipe cactus, flowering ocotillos, and off to the right, lit by the noonday sun, a flood of goldpoppies and purple lupins.
“Base camp.”
A voice sounded, offscreen. He jerked about, the small video lens focused on what I recognized as five AK-47s and a rocket grenade launcher.
“Settled in, we are. You want to meet them?”
“No.”
“They’re quite intrigued by this device. They see its possibilities.”
“Kyle,” I said, “we’re…we’re in the middle of something.”
“Right.” Abrupt, sincere, formal. “Sorry, and all that.”
“What’s your schedule?”
“Pack the Range Rovers. Fourteen hundred hours, drive to the first sky island. I have to tell you, I don’t quite remember the name. It’s one thing to look at them on a topo map, it’s quite another thing being here. On the ground.”
“Luck,” I said.
“Ryeght!”
“Be careful.”
“Aye. Cheerio, then. Later.”
“Alligator.”
“Say what?”
But I’d switched off the Fujiyama.
Don watched me carefully.
“Watch out, Laura.”
“For what?”
“You know bloody well what for. Listen to me, he’s hardly gone, I’m already mimicking him.”
“We ready?”
Michelle came out of the bathroom. She’d spent some time with her hair. All the spikes stood at careless attention.
“What do you use on that?” D
on asked. “I live with a teenager. She’s got a hundred different kinds of gel.”
“Paul Mitchell Freeze and Shine Spray. Not exotic but definitely effective. As a bonus…you can use your hair as a weapon if you need it.”
“Just lower your head,” I said, “and ram.”
“Got him!” Don shouted.
“Got who?” Michelle asked.
Don and I exchanged glances, he nodded, and I told her about the email messages. At first, she was livid I’d not kept her informed. But Don’s good information cheered her up quickly. Except, it wasn’t good information.
“I backtracked the AOL account of Stephen Dobbs,” Don explained. “It was first registered to somebody named Johnny Depp.”
“The actor?” I said.
“What actor?”
When neither Michelle nor I answered him, he said “ah-huh” and went ahead.
“Johnny Depp information traced to a woman named Debbie Purdy, in Baton Rouge. But Purdy died last year, never cancelled her AOL account. It’s all bogus.”
“We still know that Dobbs was a plastic surgeon, that he was disbarred because he worked the black market in body parts. Where did he go?”
“Mexico,” Michelle said. “But that’s not the real question. Who was he?”
Don just shook his head.
“I’ve run extensive checks on all of our clients over the past two years,” he said. “I can print out all of their names, plus their connections, but that will be like a small telephone book. Worst part of this, I ran the names Wheatley and Maxwell through the system. Wheatley was Apache, but there are no records in the Bureau of Indian Affairs about her family. Maxwell, as we know, had many names. But none of them work, all the way back to when she was Magda…something. Russian. Polish. I just don’t remember, but I’m working on it.”
“So what do we do now?” Michelle asked.
“Ready to be the goat?” Don asked me.
“How?”
“I’ve set up a chat room. You can talk to this guy there.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Michelle said. “Don’t do that.”
“I have to,” I said. “It’s the only way.”
laura
LAURA59A>waiting for you, buddy
Don hooked my digital recorder to the computer and also wired up a headset so all of our conversation would be recorded. Then he very carefully set up the AOL chat room, bouncing the connection through five different points around the world on the Internet. At first, he just made my chat room name to read “Laura” but I reminded him that there would be hundreds of Lauras in AOL, so he added the number and letter. Then he sent an email and we waited for nearly an hour.
Sdobbsmd> who is this
LAURA59A> you know it’s me
Sdobbsmd> anybody can be anybody
LAURA59A> laura winslow. What do you want?
Sdobbsmd> what do *you* want?
LAURA59A> my friend
Sdobbsmd> the arizana woman?
LAURA59A> yes
Sdobbsmd> come get her
“He’s good,” Don said. “I’m working a trace route program, but he’s already sent his signal through three jumps.”
“Where?” Michelle asked.
“Right now, I’m at a government computer in Albania. Laura, keep chatting.”
LAURA59A> where are you?
Sdobbsmd> can’t trace me, can you
LAURA59A> not trying, just want to know, where?
Sdobbsmd> naughty girl, I’m as good as you are
LAURA59A> as good at what?
Sdobbsmd> computers…come get her
LAURA59A> where are you?
Sdobbsmd> mexico, but you already know that
LAURA59A> I even know your name
Sdobbsmd> dobbs?
LAURA59A> yes
Sdobbsmd> he’s dead
LAURA59A> the name means nothing
Sdobbsmd> true…so, come get her
LAURA59A> you keep repeating yourself
Sdobbsmd> only waiting for you to get a trace
LAURA59A> why not just answer
Sdobbsmd> mexico…got to leave you now
LAURA59A> wait…do you want money?
Sdobbsmd> maybe
LAURA59A> how much, we’ll pay
Sdobbsmd> a lot, going, see you in an hour
LAURA59A> wait, WAIT!!!
But he was gone.
“Not enough time,” Don said.
“Time for what?” I asked. “Why is he doing this? And according to Rey, Meg is with two of the Peraza cartel members. There’s a disconnect here.”
39
I ran down and up the exit stairs twelve times, one for each of the twelve stories in the building. Every half hour, I did one hundred sit-ups, fifteen push-ups.
My manic energy drove Don and Michelle crazy, but they stayed away from me, letting me fly about the rooms, out of the suite, interrupt them constantly, check the database downloads to see if they were complete.
Freaked out that I had no idea where Kyle was going, Michelle ordered large-scale topo maps. Kyle called one more time, I had him go over exactly where he was driving cross-country on dirt tracks, where he’d projected being in an hour. Two hours. I marked up my maps as he told me.
The third workstation arrived. Don set it up, rigged transfer cables and software so that he could quickly move one of the databases to it. Michelle had a government agent go to Tucson Map & Flag and bring back everything they had about Sonora, especially about the roads and off-road trails where a Range Rover could go. I plotted out possibilities, guesses, hunches, in between running down and up the stairway.
“I need to get out of here,” I said for the fiftieth time. “I need to be there.”
“What did Kyle say, the last time you talked with him?”
“Nothing…I mean, he found nothing.”
“Then you can wait.”
“I can’t wait.”
“I’m ordering a helicopter to stand by at Montham Air Force Base,” Michelle said. “When we know what we’re doing…where we might be going, then the chopper will take us to meet Kyle. Or wherever else we need to go.”
The left side of my head throbbed. I’d rarely had migraines, but I was beginning to get image crystallization. Don’s face broke up into a million pixels, he was…he was, no, I was imagining it, just had a monster headache.
Got to find Meg.
Going to find Meg. Yes. Not got to but going to find Meg.
I used it as a mantra. Every time I ran the staircase, every time I checked the downloads, I recited my mantra.
Going to find Meg.
Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
The Fujiyama chimed. I thought it was Kyle again.
An email, with an attached digital image.
The jade scorpion.
A single message.
i don’t think i want money—come find her
A second message followed, with another picture attachment. Meg’s face, bloodied on the left side, her lips swollen, the lower lip torn open. Her right eye swollen almost shut, black and purple. This image was taken indoors.
better hurry—call me
“Where are you, motherfucker?” I screamed.
“This isn’t business,” Don said slowly, nodding his head, thinking it through. “This isn’t business at all. It’s personal.”
“Yes,” Michelle said. “If this is the Peraza cartel…if this is any kidnapping cartel, why aren’t they asking for money? Why do they want you?”
“But why?” I said. “Who?”
I started packing my bags.
“Let’s not lose sight of what we’re doing,” Michelle said.
“You do it. I’m going to join Kyle.”
“We still need you,” Don said.
“What for? Analyzing data?”
“You’re getting manic,” he answered carefully. “Like you’ve been without sleep for two days, you’re existing on caffeine and power bars, you’re total
ly wired. You’ve got no ability to analyze things, but you’ve got your intuitive powers about as sharp as they can be.”
“Besides,” Michelle said. “If Jack can isolate specific geography, you’ll save time by going directly there.”
They were right.
I tried calling Rey, but the connection was abysmally poor.
“…can’t…”
“Rey!” I shouted into my cell phone.
“…Magdalena…two…Jesus, Ramon, watch…”
His signal started breaking up.
“…”
No voices, but I heard a quick burst from some automatic weapon, and then his signal went totally dead silent.
“Michelle. What connections do you have with the Mexican police?”
“Who do you want me to call?”
“Anybody. Find out what happened with Rey…is there still a hostage situation, what is happening down there?”
She worked her contacts for half an hour, kept getting shunted from one person to another and finally wound up with a tactical commander of the Mexican Federales. Michelle’s Spanish wasn’t very good, but she slowed the man’s machine-gun speech down enough to get something before she hung up. She read from the note fragments she made on a napkin.
“Two cars…five men…Meg probably identified, no…that was possibly identified, in one of the cars. Shot their way through a police roadblock at Magdalena de Kino. Where is that?”
“About sixty miles south of the border. On the main road to Hermosillo.”
“That’s it.” She turned the napkin over to look at the other side. “Possible identification that Meg was hostage in one of the cars.”
Don hadn’t spoken at all for the past half hour. He rolled his wheelchair across the room, back and forth, I knew he wanted to get up and walk, run, do anything active. He’d turned on the TV, cranked the volume down to zero, and surfed a hundred channels, watching an old game show, an auction of Calista Flockhart dresses, bits and pieces of fifty different movies in color and black and white.
He finally stopped rolling surfing, turned his chair ninety degrees to look out the window wall and the afternoon sun in the west.
“You’ve got to get out of here, Laura. This suite is like…like, a desert up here, like you’re stranded in the desert, you’re going nowhere. I’m used to being in a room, twenty-four hours a day. I’m used to sitting, working computers. You’ve got to get out of here, Laura.”
