Crisscross

  Another result of the Great Sundering was that human flesh was no longer immortal. It aged and decayed while the xelton within, being a fragment of the Presence itself, remained immortal. Each xelton passes through a succession of humans, being reborn immediately into a new body after an old one dies.

  All the miseries that afflict humanity—war, pestilence, hunger, greed, hate, even death itself—are a direct result of our sleeping xelton and our loss of awareness and estrangement from our Hokano counterpart.

  All the miseries that afflict humanity—war, pestilence, hunger, greed, hate, even death itself—can be conquered by awakening the inner xelton, reestablishing its contact with its Hokano counterpart, and fusing with it.

  These Truths were unknown to Mankind until 1968 when they were revealed to Cooper Blascoe in the Black Rock desert of Nevada by a glowing Hokano traveler. The Hokano’s name was Noomri and he was sacrificing his life by crossing the Wall of Worlds to bring the Good News to our side: All the Hokano people have awakened their xeltons and are anxiously awaiting contact from their counterparts in this world.

  But Noomri said that strengthening contact across the Wall of Worlds requires effort on both sides. The Hokanos are alert and trying to fortify the links, but our Home world remains unaware. Without effort from our side, the links will remain attenuated.

  Noomri revealed that there are ten levels of contact that if diligently pursued will result in fusion of the sundered xelton halves. The human hosting a fused xelton will experience wondrous benefits—success, happiness, long life, contentment, fulfillment, and seemingly magical powers.

  But that is only a small part of the reward for fusion. Noomri foretold that once enough xeltons are reunited and fused with their missing half, once the two parts again become one, the Presence will be pleased and will remove the Wall of Worlds. Then will come the Great Fusion when the two halves of Creation will rejoin into an Eternal Paradise.

  Noomri warned that those beings on either side, flesh and xelton alike, who have not yet rejoined with their Hokano counterpart by the time of the Great Fusion, will be blasted from existence and will not partake of the Eternal Paradise.

  Noomri sadly added that over the millennia a certain number of xelton halves have deteriorated to a state from which they cannot be awakened. These unfortunate xeltons and the people housing them are called “nulls” and will never experience fusion. Noomri was a null, and since he would never see the Eternal Paradise, he was bravely sacrificing himself for his fellow Hokanos and the people of the Home world. His time was running out, for one cannot long survive after crossing the Wall of Worlds.

  Before he burst into flame and died, Noomri begged Cooper Blascoe to carry his words to all the people of the Home side.

  Cooper Blascoe has done exactly this, forsaking all his personal needs and goals to create the Dormentalist Church to carry out this sacred mission.

  Jack slumped in the chair and slowly shook his head. How could people—tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of them—fall for this line of bull? It read like bad science fiction.

  He knew he should read more but couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  Tomorrow…he’d try again tomorrow…

  Monday

  1

  Jack awoke early on Halloween with vague memories of a dream about xeltons and Hokanos…all of whom bore strange resemblances to Abe and Mama Amalia.

  He was heading for the door to grab a cup of coffee at the corner deli when his phone rang. The 305 area code on the caller ID told him who it was.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  They’d been in touch almost weekly since their Florida escapade. The bond they’d forged then had not attenuated despite the months and miles since they’d last seen each other.

  “Jack! I’d hoped to catch you before you went out.”

  “Good timing. Another thirty seconds and I’d have been gone. What’s up?”

  “I’m coming north to do some condo hunting next week.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  Jack closed his eyes. Please don’t say New York—please don’t say New York.

  As much as he enjoyed this renewed closeness with his dad, he did not want him living down the block, didn’t want him in any of the five boroughs in fact. He was a good guy but he tended to be too curious about his younger son’s lifestyle and how he earned his living.

  “I was thinking of Trenton.”

  Jack pumped a fist. Yes!

  “To be near Ron and the kids.”

  Ron Iverson was Jack’s sister Kate’s ex—but it hadn’t been a rancorous divorce and Dad had stayed close to his grandkids, Kevin and Lizzie, all along. Even closer since Kate’s death.

  “You’ve got it. And it puts me just an hour away from the city via Amtrak.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’ve got to get cracking on finding a new place. The sale of the place down here closes in less than a month.”

  “The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, right?”

  “Right. And I can’t wait to get back.”

  Jack could hear the anticipation in his voice.

  Dad added, “I thought maybe we could get together for dinner in Trenton. They’ve got some nice restaurants there. Kevin’s away at college but Lizzie is still around. Maybe—”

  “Might be better if you came up here, Dad. We’ve got the best restaurants in the world.”

  He didn’t think he could bear spending hours at a table with Lizzie. Since Jack had been the last family member to see Kate alive, she’d have all sorts of questions about her mother, questions he couldn’t answer honestly—for Kate’s sake.

  “You sound like you don’t want to see Lizzie. You’ve never known her, Jack. She’s a great kid and—”

  “She’ll remind me too much of Kate and I’m not ready for that. Not yet.”

  “Someday you’ll tell me what happened to Kate up there, won’t you.”

  “Someday, yeah. But I can only tell you what I know.” Which was everything. “Call me when you’re back in the good ol’ Garden State and we’ll set something up.”

  “Will do.”

  Jack hung up and let out a deep breath. Sometimes he got sick of lying. It wasn’t so bad with strangers, but with family…

  And on the subject of lying…he was going to have to do some to Jamie Grant. He wondered if she’d be in her office this early. Wouldn’t hurt to try.

  He’d realized from his stint with The Book of Hokano that it wasn’t going to tell him about the inner workings of the Dormentalist Church. It was all doctrine. He needed someone who’d looked under the hood.

  He still had his copy of The Light from yesterday, so he looked up the number again. He dug out a business card from the secretary’s bottom drawer and dialed Grant on his Tracfone.

  After working through the phone tree he heard that same gruff voice say, “Grant.”

  She was in. Did she sleep there?

  Before she could hang up on him again he quickly explained that he was a private investigator who had been hired by the family of a missing Dormentalist to find their son.

  Hey—not much of a lie. Almost true.

  “Dormentalists go missing all the time,” Grant said. “They get sent away on ML—that’s ‘Missionary Leave’ to the uninitiated—and don’t tell their families where they’re going. Most of them pop up again a couple of years later.”

  “Most?”

  “Some are never seen again.”

  “This woman’s certain her son is still in New York. Said he was acting strange.”

  She snorted. “A Dormentalist acting strange—how ever could she tell?”

  “She said he’d started wanting to be called by another name and—”

  “Ah. That means he was getting into the top half of the FL situation.”

  “F—?”

  “Fusion Ladder.”

  “Yeah, well, look. I think I’m going to have to go inside and I’d like to ask you a few questions about the organization first.”

  “What
’s in it for me?”

  He’d figured it would come down to this.

  “I’ll feed you whatever I find inside. And if you want to know something specific, I’ll do my best to run it down for you.”

  She didn’t answer right away, but he could hear her puffing away on a cigarette.

  Finally, “What’s your name?”

  Jack glanced at the business card: “John Robertson.”

  He’d met Robertson years ago and had not only saved his card, but printed out a few copies of his own with a business card program.

  “You licensed?”

  “Of course.”

  Well, the real John Robertson was. Sort of. He was dead now but Jack kept renewing his state private investigator’s license.

  “You’d better be, because I’m going to check on that. Show up here at noon. If you’re legit, I’ll tell the front desk to let you come up.”

  “Great. Thanks a—”

  “You licensed to carry?”

  He wasn’t sure if the real Robertson was. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just fair warning: Leave the artillery home or else you’re gonna have to answer a lot of questions when you set off the metal detector.”

  “Okay. Sure. Thanks.”

  Metal detector? Did newspapers now use metal detectors?

  2

  It was almost ten A.M. when Jack arrived at Russell Tuit’s apartment. Jack had looked him up a few years ago—before his conviction—and had made the mistake of pronouncing his name Too-it. “Tweet,” Russ had told him. “As in Tweety Bird.”

  “Hey, Jack,” he said as he opened his door. Jack had called earlier, so Russ was expecting him. But apparently he wasn’t expecting how Jack would be dressed. “Wow. Look at you. You didn’t have to get all spiffed up for me.”

  Jack wore a blue blazer over gray slacks, a blue oxford shirt, and a striped tie—all for his meeting with Jamie Grant.

  “Oh, hell! I didn’t? You mean I could’ve worn jeans? Damn!”

  Russ laughed. “Come on in.”

  His tiny two-room, third-floor apartment overlooked Second Avenue in the East Nineties. His five-story building looked like a converted tenement, wrought-iron fire escape and all. Even though the Tex-Mex bar and grill next door had yet to open for the day, his front room was redolent of grilled meat and mesquite smoke. Rumbling traffic from the street below provided sub-woofer Muzak.

  Russ himself was the quintessential computer geek: a pear-shaped guy in his early thirties, big head, short bed-head red hair, and a blackhead-studded forehead; he wore an i-pipe T-shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty flip-flops. Looked like he’d been designed by Gary Larson.

  Jack glanced around the barely furnished front room and noticed a laptop on the desk in the far corner. He hadn’t asked during their brief and intentionally oblique phone conversation, but he’d been sure Russ would have some sort of computer.

  Jack nodded to it. “You’re not worried your parole officer will drop by and see that?”

  “No problem. My parole says I’m not to go online or consort with other hackers. But not to have a computer at all—that’d be cruel and unusual, man.”

  “Staying offline…knowing you, how’re you going to survive twenty-five years of that?”

  Russ had been caught hacking into a number of bank computers and coding them to transfer a fraction of a cent of each international transaction to his Swiss account. He’d been sitting back, collecting well into six figures a year until someone got wise and sicced the Treasury Department’s FinCEN unit on him. His lawyer pled him down to two years of soft time in a fed pen but the judge imposed a quarter-century ban on going online.

  He offered a sickly grin. “Only twenty-two-point-three-seven-six years to go.” The grin brightened. “But you’ve heard of cyber cafés, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. You’re not afraid they’ll catch you?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re monitoring my lines, but they don’t have the manpower to follow me every time I go out for a cuppa.” He rubbed his hands together. “So. Whatcha got for me?”

  “Well, it’s what you’re going to get for me.”

  “Long as it’s not an online thing, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Okay. I need to find a way to erase a hard drive and make it look like an accident.”

  Russ dropped into the swivel chair by his computer. “Windows?”

  Jack tried to envision the computer he’d seen in Cordova’s attic back in September. It hadn’t looked like a Mac.

  “Yeah. Pretty sure.”

  “Well, you could reformat it and reinstall Windows, but that doesn’t happen by accident. He’ll know.” He leaned forward. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you want done.”

  Jack hesitated on baring the specifics, then realized he didn’t have to.

  “This guy’s got certain files on his computer I want to wipe out, but if just those files disappear, he’ll know who’s behind it. So I want to wipe all his files.”

  “What about backups?”

  “My gut tells me he stashes those someplace where, say, a fire wouldn’t hurt them.”

  Russ grinned. “And you want to follow him to the backup.”

  “You got it.”

  Not exactly, but why waste time explaining it to someone who didn’t need to know.

  Russ thought a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Got it! HYRTBU!”

  “Her taboo? I don’t need voodoo, I—”

  Russ laughed and spelled it for him. “It’s a mischief virus. Deletes all kinds of files—docs, jpegs, waves, mpegs, gifs, pdfs, and just about every other suffix you’ve ever seen—without harming the programs. In fact, it doesn’t just delete the files, it overwrites them.”

  Jack was relatively new to computers. He’d bought his first about a year ago and was still feeling his way.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “When something is deleted, it’s still there on the disk. You can’t get to it through the operating system because its references are gone from the system tables, but it isn’t gone until it’s erased or overwritten with another file.”

  “But if you can’t get to it—”

  Russ was shaking his head. “You can get to it. All you need is a data recovery program, and there are dozens of them.”

  A scary thought, that.

  “But HYRTBU overwrites every file and leaves a doc with the same name in its place.”

  “Doc?”

  “Yeah. A document file, each with the same message: ‘Hope You Remembered To Back Up!’ Get it? It’s an—”

  “An acronym, yeah.” Jack was baffled. “You mean someone sat down and spent all that time writing the code for this HYRTBU thing, just so he can screw up strangers’ hard drives?” He shook his head. “Some people have way too much time on their hands.”

  “Guy probably justifies it by telling himself he’s teaching his victims a valuable lesson: Always back up your files. I bet once you’ve been hit by HYRTBU you become a compulsive backer-upper.”

  “But still…”

  “Hey, it’s like Everest, man. You do it because it’s there. Back when I was a kid, in my phreaking days, I used to break into the phone company’s computers just to see if I could. And then I’d push it to see how far I could go, you know, seeking system mastery. Of course later I figured how to get myself free long distance, but that wasn’t how it started.”

  “All right, Sir Hillary, how do we get HYRTBU into this computer?”

  “Easiest way is to send it with an e-mail. Guy opens the attached file and, if he’s doesn’t have his AV setup to screen e-mail, kablooey—he’s toast.”

  “Audio visual?”

  “Antivirus software.”

  “I don’t know the guy’s e-mail address, don’t even know if he goes online.”

  Russ looked glum. “Everybody goes online. Everybody but me.” He sighed. “Well then, you’ve got to get to his computer and physically slip the virus into his system
.”

  “I’m planning to visit his office.”

  “Perfect. What’s his rig like? New? Old?”

  “Unless he’s replaced it, I’d say it has a few miles on it.”

  “Great. A floppy should do it. For a very reasonable fee I can put together a special boot disk that’ll get you past any password and AV protection he’s got and infect his hard drive.”

  “How reasonable?”

  “How’s a half K sound?”

  “Sounds like a lot.”

  “Hey, I got expenses.”

  Jack made a show of looking around. “Yeah. I can see.”

  He spotted a variety of blank invoice forms on Russ’s desk. He picked one up. Yellow Pages was printed across the top next to the walking-fingers logo in the upper-left corner.

  “Oh, no. The invoice game?”

  Russ shrugged. “Hey, I gotta make ends meet.”

  Phony invoices…a small-time, hit-or-miss scam. A guy like Russ would invoice medium-to large-size companies for services that hadn’t been rendered. Unless someone was watchdogging it, more often than not the invoices got passed to the accounting or bookkeeping department where they were paid.

  “You’re on parole, Russ. You get caught, you’re back inside, and most likely not in a country club like last time.”

  “Yeah, but they gotta catch me first. And then they gotta convict me. You see, nobody ever bothered to trademark ‘Yellow Pages’ or the walking fingers. They’re public domain. Now, check out the lower-left corner.”

  Jack squinted at the tiny print. “‘This is a solicitation’?”

  “Right. As long as I’ve got that there, I’m within the law—at least the letter of the law.”

  “So you go through the Yellow Pages and bill companies for their listings.”

  He grinned. “The bigger ones with the display ads are the best. They advertise in so many places they expect lots of invoices and don’t look too closely. Works like a charm.”

  Jack tossed the invoice blank onto the desk and shook his head. “Still…you’re on parole…”