"When we got there, some guy immediately got out of a car parked across the street, and he came over to us. He asked what we were doing. He was obviously staking out the place. We bumbled some half-truth, and he told us to leave—in this very nice way. Nice and ... necktie-ish. I mean, he was in a polo shirt, but he had these city-slicker manners."
"And he was in a rental car," Tannis added. "Definitely USIC. They've been through that place with a fine-tooth comb, obviously."
"So ... Scott and Bob Dobbins were right in their suspicions," I muttered, feeling my hot flash turn cold. I wasn't sure if I was ready to think of what we had as anything but a sickness. Jumping to the term victim seemed inconceivable.
"Mr. Steckerman keeps insisting there's nothing going on. That is bullshit. They may not know if our water was poisoned yet, but if there's nothing going on, why are nine rental cars still parked at the Steckermans'? And what is that guy doing staking out a closed discount shoe store?" Jon asked.
Tannis went on. "Anyway, we helped Scott re-create his own scribble paper from his memory, and he keeps staring at it ... staring at this doodle thing he used to call a water goblet, but now he thinks is the water tower. There were eight lines coming from it that we think might represent, like, the main veins that send water throughout your section of town. One had a thick line crossing it, like ... crossing it off, or ... pointing out where something was."
"Is there any way to find out if the picture is of the water tower?" I asked. "Are there eight main veins?"
Tannis flashed a thumbs-up that went a little sideways. "At my house, we went to the Trinity Falls website. There used to be a Utilities Department page, and we clicked on the link, thinking it might give some info about how the towers flow, like a map or something. But now it leads to a PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION message. Very coincidental."
"Maybe it's just, you know, more post–9/11 dribble," Adrian muttered without pulling his eyes from the television. "History teacher said today that most every city in the country with info about water supplies or electrical plants or stuff like that has been taking all that off the Internet. I guess what used to be helpful to citizens is now a best-kept secret."
I just shook my head in wonder. You tend to think your country is never going to change—that it was and always will be the same.
Jon finally went on. "Yesterday in school, I caught Dobbins in the library, surfing for stuff. He's just not the 'library' sort. I sneaked up behind him and watched what he was up to."
"He was looking up some guy named Omar," Tannis continued. "He was looking for people in New Jersey named Omar Somebody."
"Omar..." I hazily remembered Scott using my computer to surf for the name a couple of days ago. But the sleuthing didn't help anyone else as much as it helped Scott, and I'd spent most of the last two days either dozing or listening to Rain.
"Hokiem." Jon shrugged. "Omar Hokiem. It was just a name that Scott had on that doodle sheet. So I just asked Dobbins what the sam hill he was doing in the library when we usually spend most of lunch shooting baskets in the gym. He asked me, 'You know any computer droids? I need someone way better at searching for stuff than me.' I blurted a couple of Napster freaks I know, but he didn't look satisfied."
"Wait." Tannis stopped him. "Cora, do you want to be hearing all this? If it amounts to just stupid Trinity gossip, we don't want to upset you with it."
I nodded for them to go on, though a sickening wave rolled through me. It was not the kind that indicates your body barometer is malfunctioning again. I'd had so many strange feelings over the past few days, I decided this was from hearing edgy news. And Jon's continuing story about Bob in the library worsened it.
"Bob just said he might have got very, very lucky is all. He couldn't find anything on Omar Hokiem, though he tried different spellings. And when he surfed for them separately, he got so much stuff that it would have taken days to click through. But the librarian was teaching a couple of sophomores down the row how to search for a site that was launched in the past few days. Dobbins thought, why not? Maybe it'll eliminate so much hogwash. When he finally surfed and plugged in 'Omar' and the four-digit number, he got this site. There were, like, six contact names at the bottom of this very-scary terror-cell document, and one of them was
[email protected]"
"What did it say?" I asked.
"I only saw it for a minute, but this terror cell wrote that its mission is to, like, 'stand strong against the devices of Satan, especially those in Europe and North America.' It called Americans 'mongrels,' I remember that. Something like 'The mongrels have replaced the richness of tradition with the seduction of materialism,' and 'We won't be ensnared by their ... their adoration of flesh and of trinkets that perish with the wind.' It was creepy."
"But ... it didn't say they were going to murder people," I hoped aloud.
"Not outright. But I wouldn't put it past them to try something. ShadowStrike, that's what they called themselves. Or that's how the word translated. Their real name is in one of those Indian languages, you know..."
"Arabic?" Tannis asked and rolled his eyes in disgust when Jon nodded. "Arabic is not Indian, brainiac."
"Whatever. I gotta start paying more attention in history and quit fooling around with Rain. But it was one of those pages that gives you the option of reading it in either Arabic or English, and Dobbins had the English—"
"Did you give it to Scott?" Adrian asked.
"Dobbins did," Jon said. "I think Scott gave it to Mr. Steckerman, saying he found it himself or something. I don't think he wants Mr. Steckerman knowing that we're running around on his behalf."
"What did Mr. Steckerman say?" I wondered. "Was he grateful?"
"Dunno," Jon said. "I wasn't there. But Scott beefs as much about those guys being unrelenting in not telling him stuff as he does about his fears of the water. He probably got the 'Don't get yourself worked up, you're sick' speech."
"You okay with this, Cora?" Tannis repeated, and it brought all their eyes to me. Tannis looked at his watch—I saw him from the corner of my eye. I had to find some way to get them to leave or they would be here all night, waiting for some alleged family to arrive.
"I'm okay, but I'd like to see the nurse." I pushed the button, hoping it would send them from the room.
They did leave, but I heard Dempsey's voice echoing from the corridor. "...if you guys want to go, then go. Even if she hurls, I got a good stomach. I can handle this for Owen. D'you hear that disgusting story about when Scott picked up her mother, they accidentally left her alone in the house?"
My experiences lately let me know that muffled sounds become crystal clear when your body temperature rises. Half of me wanted to shut them out, but half wanted to hear what was flying around.
"...and so Scott thought Mr. Steckerman was looking out for her, and Mr. Steckerman thought Scott and the squad was. She was alone in that place, sick as a dog, with her mom's favorite couch still warm. You want to leave her alone again? Go ahead. I'm staying until her father gets here."
I rolled my eyes in turmoil as they all grunted in agreement. They planned to stay—until I confessed to lying. As the nurse came in, I complained about the headache. She fluffed up my pillow but gave a speech about no further medication being permitted.
"I think I'd just like to sleep," I said. "Can you tell those boys outside to leave?"
I thought she would agree without question, but to my shock she studied me. "I can tell them to leave the room, but I can't make them leave the floor. Where's your family? Is someone coming soon?"
I didn't answer, annoyed beyond reason at this habit of human beings flocking together in painful circumstances. They were nowhere in the corridor suddenly, and I thought maybe they'd changed their minds about staying. So I wanted to scream as they returned ten minutes later with chips and sodas from a vending machine. The nurse was gone, and I couldn't think of a polite way to tell them to leave again. The only noise was the crackle of snack bags as they watched TV, and I just pre
tended to sleep. At some point, they would realize I had lied about my father, and they would wonder about that, as well as this story flying around that I'd been alone when Aleese was taken away. Cora Holman has no friends ... The girl. Has. No friends.
I don't know if I was more awake than asleep when the phone rang. I played possum and let Jon Dempsey answer it, afraid that my head would burst if I sat up.
"She's asleep," he said.
I thought maybe some grand angel had whispered a deal silently in my ear: If I could manage to keep my chin up, he would give me some dignity—and a miracle. Because Jon leaned over the bed until I could see him. "Your father, is his name Jeremy Ireland?"
"Yes," I muttered, wondering if I should add, "but the truth is, he's dead."
Jon nudged me in the shoulder with the receiver. "Because, he's on the phone. He wants to talk to you."
TWENTY-EIGHT
TYLER PING
THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2002
9:35 P.M.
SO I GOT HOME from my Trinitron adventures around nine thirty and sat in front of my terminal, laughing my ass off. I opened e-mail after e-mail I'd sent myself of these cached screens Hamdani had been looking at. I'd been caching as fast as he had. Oh my god.
Not to sound like I'd been caught totally off guard—I do read intelligence news, mostly to see if my mother's spying is about to become public knowledge. So I know lots about the intelligence community. I also know lots about terrorists who make plans over the Internet, and this breed of creature called a v-spy who tries to catch them in the act and script them.
And I'd been in Trinitron several times this year, noticing something about the place—it has independent hard drives at more than half its terminals, which means evil people can upload their own hide-and-seek programs. After 9/11 and the anthrax saga, I used to laugh inside that café sometimes, all Jesus God, calling all terrorists.
And I thought my house was a three-ring circus.
About twenty files were open, all cached screens, and I was trying to figure out what I had here. Okay, so there's these two guys, Catalyst and PiousKnight, and they're making my mom look like a Girl Scout. I'd had a nice little chat with this Catalyst on the way to the train. He said his name is Raoul (uh-huh, cut me a break). I could probably find out who he really is, and who this PiousKnight is, no problem. But for the moment, I was sucked in by their chatter.
Catalyst's friend Omar is poisoning people's water somewhere, and their goose is cooked come April, though they don't know it yet. Whatever Red Vinegar is, it's about to be followed by "several new vinegars, from mutations with more fluency in water" USIC and the CDC are treading deep into it—but Catalyst doesn't know, ho ho, hey hey.
Inas Hamdani's cousin—Who would have ever goddamn thought? Call me a pig because I was not all falling off my desk chair, all upset about terrorist high jinks and people getting poisoned. As far as I'm concerned, it's a cruel world out there, and so long as my mother isn't exactly causing it, it's not my problem. Inas Hamdani's cousin, he was my problem. I couldn't believe a kid who's a junior in high school could get this sort of intelligence gig. How in hell did it happen?
I did a little hacking into the school's files, and I saw his records already typed in by the anal-retentive secretary crew. Arrived ... yesterday morning ... from a village that no one in their right minds could spell, in Pakistan. He's got straight As in high school, and he's eighteen. What the hell is the rush to get him into the American lifestyle? And how did he learn to gad about the Internet like Ghostbusters cleaning up a haunted city?
I backed out of the school's files and did some illegal searching around on my own. Hamdani is a very common name in Pakistan, but eventually I found the Shahzad Hamdani associated with this little village you can't hardly spell, and I saw that one of his several e-mail addresses aligns with an Internet café, of which there are also hundreds in Pakistan. But I saw that this particular Internet café has its own server, which is kind of weird, and it was now active. I wondered if I could break into this guy's former hard drive and see what was on it.
I tried, and hit a firewall. Computer gurus' hard drives aren't easy pickin's, but it was the nature of this firewall that made me sit up extra straight. Every firewall comes with a set of properties, and if you know how to find them, you'll see a registration number. Every business that pays for a firewall has a little sixteen-digit number. I remembered this particular number, because I'd seen it before—several times—when I tried to find out how much intelligence knows about my mom.
Just to be sure, I backed out and tried to hack into FBI headquarters in New York, and I hit the same firewall I always hit when trying to find out about her. It's the same registration number.
Shahzad Hamdani has an FBI-sponsored firewall on his server back in Pakistan. I'll be goddamned.
On that note, I just kind of floated out of my chair until I was staring at one of my many bulletin boards—this one hanging over my bed and titled "Einsteins à la Web." My jaw bobbed downward, and I said, "No way..."
One time I turned around in Bloomingdale's, and there in the ladies' scarves was Hillary Clinton. I've got this thing for sophisticated, upright, famous ladies and wishing they were my mom. And seeing her fall in love with this scarf, I got in line behind her to watch her pay. Then I ran home and had her Bloomie's charge erased from Citibank Visa. If you ever see Hillary Clinton in a blue and red scarf with little gold line-y things running through it, that's the scarf I gave her gratis from Bloomingdale's. But don't miss the point: There's famous people all over this world, and being that they don't live in a vacuum, some lucky devil gets next to them every waking hour, and every so often in your lifetime, you're it.
I'm talking about Hamdani now, and a little Newsweek story I had taped to my bulletin board, because I was so jealous of the kid in the story that I'd have to gouge his eyes out if I ever met him. My eyes floated to it, and I could feel my heart banging. It was a one-column story amid news about the formation of USIC. The words glared back about an unnamed sixteen-year-old guy from somewhere in Asia: "...' The Kid is such a proficient v-spy that he could turn any day of the week into Christmas for American intelligence,' said an unnamed source."
I scanned, though I knew the article by heart. He had been the talk of my fave hacker chat room for a couple weeks. Every hacker in the country was jealous as shit of this guy. The article didn't say the Kid was from Pakistan, only that his ability to v-spy had prevented two bombings in 2000, one in London and one in Nepal. It had said that his value to our government was not only his programming skills but his skills with many Asian languages, and these languages are a problem with the American intelligence community. It had even been thought that they move people like that around all the time to keep them safe.
If I could run into Hillary Clinton in Bloomie's, could I run into the Kid in a Long Island high school?
No, I told myself. I'm a realist. I thought maybe this was some transmutation of the Real Guy, some wannabe who wasn't doing too bad. However, what I'd been watching all night was this Shahzad cache screens written in hieroglyphics of god-knows-what, and he would type out the Arabic, translate it to English, and send it to god-knows-who called Tim. How many people like that could there be in the universe?
I could never hope to work as a spy. I'd flunk a polygraph as soon as they got to the part "Is your mother an assistant researcher at KTD BioLabs?" But whoever he was—the Kid or a wannabe—maybe I could lend him a hand. In light of my mother's embarrassing escapades, I owed this country something.
But what could I do that would be most helpful? I opened all the cached screens and read them again.
Omar says this, Omar hopes that, Omar's the devil fucking incarnate, what with his red and upcoming vinaigrettes, yeah, puke. I knew enough to bet money that Catalyst knew something USIC didn't, or he wouldn't still be walking the streets, telling me his name was Raoul. Maybe it's the contents of this water poison that he's going to spew his next time online, or
maybe it's the whereabouts of this Omar creep.
And here is something that's even better than drugs for me. I do stuff like this, and it makes up almost all the hours when I'm not in lust for yet another Xanax: I bet that I can find out who this Omar guy is, knowing nothing more than Catalyst's e-mail address.
It would take a few days, but I sat back down, put my fingers to the keypad. I headed off to places that could get me five to ten years in a federal prison if the government found out.
But they wouldn't. And besides: Jail would have to be a less deplorable address than the one I've got now.
TWENTY-NINE
CORA HOLMAN
THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2002
9:35 P.M.
"CORA, YOU HAVEN'T met me, but I'm a friend of your mum's. My name is Jeremy."
I sat up slowly, actually forgetting my headache and jitters for a moment. Adrian and Tannis turned to the television, completely unaware that I was hitting some cosmic lottery. The man's British accent hummed so beautifully. I wanted to ask how he wasn't dead, after what I'd seen in Aleese's journal. September 10, 1996. I'd assumed it was a death date, but could it be the date they left each other? My instincts were still strapped to appearances and how not to look quite so unlovable.
The best I could do to meet both situations was give an awkwardly loud "Hi!"
He was nicer than Aleese. He laughed. "Oh dear. You know of me. What in hell did your mum tell you?"
It didn't sound like a fatherly introduction, but what made sense in my life? I tried not to let my smile fade as he went on.
"I just this morning heard of her passing. I surf online for her name every month or so. I always come up with nothing, but this time I came up with the Atlantic City Press's obituary. I'm too late for the service, I suppose, but I wanted to at least see you, give you a hug, and extend my condolences."
"That's ... great," I struggled happily. I needed him here, for superficial reasons, and very deep ones that I couldn't put into words. I came up with a shy and trembling "I ... am excited to see you."