“Good. I need a hacker, or a surfer, or whatever they call themselves.”
Vangie laughed. “Cyber’s the best.”
“Good,” Sonny repeated.
“We’re here to help. Just tell us what you need,” Vangie said, and led them into a space reserved for computers. In the back of the narrow cubbyhole Sonny spotted a teenager, fifteen or so, hunched over a keyboard, mouse in hand as if he were hunting lions in deep Africa. Cyber was hunting on the network.
Vangie paused, and in a soft voice she called his name, “Cyber.”
She had to call three times before the boy turned to look at them. His dark shining eyes looked as if he were just awakening.
“Hi,” he murmured.
The thin boy wore a scruffy pair of Adidas, holes in the knees of his baggy jeans, a tattered cotton shirt, and a Cowboys football cap backward. His likewise tattered backpack and parka lay on the floor by his chair. His round glasses fell down on his flat nose. Sonny guessed Cyber was Chinese. But his complexion was dark.
“Cyber, this is Mr. Baca,” Vangie said, approaching.
“Call me Sonny.” Sonny held out his hand.
Cyber smiled. “Sonny,” he said. “Wow. I’ve heard about you. I never met a PI. You kinda look like that detective I see on the late, late shows. Perry Mason.”
“Oh, the chair.” Sonny smiled.
“Yeah, but you’re not as fat as that dude.”
“And this is my friend, Lorenza,” Vangie introduced Lorenza.
“Hi,” Cyber said shyly.
“Mr. Baca needs help.”
“Sure,” Cyber nodded eagerly.
“I need a guide. I’ve never been on the Internet.”
“Never?” Cyber asked, incredulous. “Don’t you have a computer?”
“Yeah, a small one. For a while I couldn’t talk, so my friends bought me a computer with a large keyboard. I could type in messages.”
“You couldn’t talk—” Cyber’s expression grew worried.
Vangie cleared her throat. “Well, here he is. I’ll leave you to get acquainted. You help Mr. Baca, okay.” She smiled and turned to leave. “Call me if I can help. There’s coffee and cookies in my office. Help yourselves.”
“Thanks for everything,” Sonny called after her. He turned back to Cyber. “I’m better now. But I’m kind of computer illiterate. So I need help.”
“You’re a detective, so you look for people, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s where they are.” Cyber pointed at the computer in front of him.
“In there?”
“Well, the information on just about everyone is in there.”
“You can find people in there?”
“Yes.”
“You’re an investigator, too, huh?”
“Kind of. The Net is just a bunch of networks tied together with telephone lines, cables, fiber-optic lines. If you have a modem and a computer, you can access it, buy stuff, talk to people. It’s awesome. I go in there and I feel I’m going to another reality. Sometimes I fall asleep and dream. Right here.”
Lorenza had pulled up a chair next to Sonny. They both looked at Cyber like willing students.
“What do you dream?” Lorenza asked.
“Scary stuff. There are body snatchers in the Net.”
“Body snatchers in cyberland?”
“Oh, yes,” Cyber said seriously. “The teachers keep telling us we’re in a new age. The cyber age. Techo-knowledge. Plug in, be in touch, know everything. What they forget to tell us is that sooner or later the body snatchers get you.”
“How do they get you?” Lorenza asked.
“They erase your file,” Cyber replied. “I suppose if there were good cybercops, they could take care of the body snatchers. But all the cops in cyberspace want to do is censor stuff. See, being on the Internet is like an addiction. I don’t do drugs on the streets like some of the kids, but I’m addicted all right. To this. When cyberspace crashes, the whole world will crash. Be like Adam and Eve getting tossed out of the garden and starting all over again.”
“Whoa,” Sonny said. “You’re going too fast for me. How can we start over?”
Cyber shrugged. “If we don’t have the technology, we won’t know what to do. We become like cavemen.”
“I see,” Sonny mused. He looked at Lorenza. “I could use some of that coffee Vangie promised.”
“Me, too.” She rose and went out.
“So, you live here?” Sonny asked.
“Here? In the library?” Cyber laughed. “Just about. My mom’s got an apartment on Broadway, but—” He paused. “She has to support us, so she spends a lot of time making jewelry. She sells at Old Town, maybe you’ve seen her?”
“Maybe.”
“Merlinda Chen. She’s the best-looking vendor there.” Cyber beamed. He described his mother, the kind of jewelry she created, the place under the portal in Old Town where she sold. Then with a worried expression he finished: “I worry about her. It’s been hard since my dad disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?” Sonny asked, taking the cup of coffee Lorenza offered. “Gracias.” She placed a plate of Christmas cookies on the floor and sat. Cyber reached for one.
“He just disappeared. He was working at Sandia Labs, for Phillips really. One day he just didn’t come home. The lab director said he was drinking on the job, and things just got too hard so he split. But I know it ain’t true, ’cause he really loved me and my mom. He wouldn’t have gone without us. My mom took it so hard.”
“I see,” Sonny said, and sipped the strong coffee. He glanced at the monitor. Cyber found people on the Net; he was looking for his missing father.
“I’m looking for him.” Cyber nodded, biting into the biscochito. “I don’t believe the cops. I know he wouldn’t leave us.”
“Found anything?”
Cyber shook his head. “Not yet, but I found out other people have disappeared. They’re there, in the government files, then they just disappear. Deleted.”
“Deleted?”
“Yeah, like they fall off the edge. Like there’s a portion in the hard drive we don’t know is there. Like empty space. There’s weird things going on in the government. Things I don’t understand.”
“Yeah,” Sonny acknowledged. “Maybe I can help.”
“Would you?” Cyber said, his voice rising with hope.
“Well, that seems to be my current specialty, looking for missing persons.” Sonny nodded. “Yeah, I’ll help.”
“You don’t believe my dad just dropped out?”
“No.”
“You’re the first one to say that. Thanks.” Cyber smiled. “I got into the Mormons’ mainframe up in Salt Lake,” he continued, munching on his cookie and turning to pat the computer on the table, like a boy would pat a dog. “They have the family tree of everyone who ever lived on earth. Just about. My dad’s Chen. He’s Chinese from Shanghai, so he’s not listed in the Mormon file. But they have my mother’s family name in there. We’re Navajo. Diné. My great-grandfather had married a Mexican lady from Cebolleta. That was in the 1840s. So I’m part Navajo, part Mexican, part Chinese. One of these days I want to go back to the res. Soon as I find my dad. My mom wants to stay here. She keeps hoping some news of my father will turn up.”
So that’s it, Sonny thought. The kid was using the computer to look for his father, and in the process he ran into part of his family tree. He got into the Mormon genealogy files. Had he also gotten into the Sandia Labs files?
“Don’t lose hope,” Sonny said. “But tell me, if you know people have been deleted from government files, does that mean you’ve gotten into those files?”
Cyber remained silent, chewing slowly on his cookie.
“Look,” Sonny said softly. “I’m not here to find out what you’re doing. I need information on missing girls. Just like you need it on your father. I need help.”
“I can get into almost anything,” Cyber smiled. “But ther
e’s some government stuff that’s so coded, and if you happen to break the code, they set a cyberdetective on you. I have to go slow.”
“You’re what they call a hacker?” Sonny asked.
Cyber smiled. “I don’t mess with anyone’s files. I just want info on my dad.”
“That’s fair.” Sonny nodded. “But how do you do all this?”
“Easy.” Cyber smiled. “I’ve got a directory, a modem, and Circe.” Again he patted the computer.
“Circe?”
“That’s the name somebody scratched on the back of the computer. I found it when I was hooking up the phone line. I looked it up. Circe was a witch who lived on an island during Greek times. She turned Odysseus’ men into pigs.”
“Yeah.” Sonny nodded, recalling the story in The Odyssey. Odysseus landed on Circe’s island, and the seductive witch turned his men into beasts while he loitered with her. The Odyssey was everyman’s journey. Too much loitering on the island of desire turned one into a pig. One had to remember the goal: get home. Penelope was waiting. The son—what was his name?—was waiting. Cyber’s father was on an odyssey.
“Maybe a scientist who reads books named the computer,” Sonny suggested.
“I guess,” Cyber nodded. “Circe was a witch who could tell the future. People went to her for answers. Now they go to the Internet. They surf all day long, all night.”
“Cyber escape,” Lorenza said.
“Yeah.” Cyber nodded. “In cyberspace you can be anything you want to be.”
“You get sucked in,” Sonny added.
“It’s easy. Too easy.”
“But you’ve got to be connected. Who pays the phone bill?” Lorenza asked.
Cyber gulped. Crumbs of the cookie hung on his lower lip. His wide dark eyes looked from one to the other.
“Well?”
“You going to tell?” Cyber whispered.
“What’s there to tell?”
“I ain’t got no money. Vangie ain’t got no money. So I—”
“What?”
“I kinda just charge the fee and the phone bill.”
“Charge the phone bill?”
“You know,” Cyber said softly. “To the labs.”
Damn. Sonny smiled. The kid was charging the phone bill to Sandia Labs. Looking for his father meant taking chances.
“Well,” Sonny leaned forward and whispered, “I heard the lab has a program that encourages kids like you to learn about computers. It’s kind of an investment they’re making in the future.”
Cyber smiled. “That’s what I figure,” he said, and gave Sonny a high five. He turned to Lorenza. “Is it okay?”
“I didn’t hear a thing.” She smiled, and Cyber gave her a high five.
“You’ve got a cool lady, Mr. Sonny.”
“I think so,” Sonny agreed.
“She drive you around?”
“Yup.”
“You been in a chair a long time?”
“A couple of months.”
“You hurt your legs?”
“Ran into some bad guys.”
“Same guys you want to catch on the Internet?”
“Yup.”
“I’ll help.”
“Good.”
“I look into some of this stuff on the Net, and I see how people are using it. Some of the deals coming down are worse than the crime on the street.”
“True.” Sonny nodded. Cyberspace had already become the territory of the criminal. The Cyberspace Mafia was making deals, shaking down the world. Anything could be ordered over the wires. Money could be laundered and moved so fast that the IRS couldn’t keep up with it. Deals to buy countries, or to bring down countries, all at the touch of a few keys. Virtual criminals were real criminals, and Cyber was beginning to run into them. Now there were missing persons, and cyberspace was beginning to look like any other dictatorship in the world. The dictatorship of cyberspace was coming. The disappeared. Deleted files. Cyber’s missing dad. Others.
“How come you can do so much with Circe? Don’t you need special programs?” Lorenza asked.
“Sandia Labs donated this baby to the library,” Cyber replied.
“So?”
“So,” he whispered, “they left their programs in the hard drive.”
“Programs from Sandia Labs?”
“Yeah. I was surprised, too. I figured it was a mistake, a typical government snafu.”
“What’s the program?”
“It’s called Avenger 2000,” Cyber replied. “And it’s bad, believe me.”
“How?” Sonny asked.
“For one thing, the government seems to be fighting itself. There are groups carrying on a war. Like war-simulation games, but not with tanks and airplanes. It’s like a plot. People disappear. There are codes in here you wouldn’t believe. That’s how I found my dad’s record.”
“But you said files are deleted.”
“The payroll and classification files are deleted, so he’s not in the active file. He just never showed up for work, they told my mom. But I found his ‘deleted file’ in their mainframe. It shows he was working one day and gone the next. His file just got pushed into the disappeared.”
“How can you get into their mainframe?”
Cyber smiled. “They have an internal fiber-optic system. Nobody can crash in from the outside, but I figured a way.”
“How?”
Cyber hesitated. “I work at the labs.”
“I don’t get it,” Sonny replied.
“I composed a person, gave myself identification, classification, a code number, everything. They think I’m there, so I can access their system.”
“Too much,” Sonny whispered.
“For sure,” Lorenza said. She, too, was amused, and startled, by Cyber’s revelation.
“Almost anything’s possible on the Net.”
“Including people disappearing,” Sonny mused.
“Where are they?” Cyber asked. “Where’s my dad? That’s what I want to find out.”
“And you’re the only one using this computer?” Lorenza asked.
“It’s too complicated for the other kids. When the lab guys delivered Circe a few months ago, the kids couldn’t get into the programs, so they couldn’t play games on it. Even Vangie couldn’t use it. She tried to get someone from the labs to come and fix it, but they never showed up. I began to fiddle with it, and I got in. That made her happy, so now I’ve got my own personal weapon. I just happened to hook into a phone line, and Vangie gets no bills, so that’s cool.”
“And the rest is history,” Sonny said, glancing at Lorenza. They had come to the right place. The kid had the software to navigate the Net. How far could he go?
“So whatchu wanna look for?”
“I need to learn a lot about nuclear weapons, and I need to learn it today. I also have a list of people I need to research, but I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
“Look, Sonny, I’m already in trouble. I got into the Sandia and Los Alamos systems. If they catch me, so what. I don’t disturb files, I just look for info on my dad.”
“You’ve already been in the Los Alamos computers?” The kid kept astounding Sonny.
Cyber bowed his head. “Yes,” he said softly, then looked up. “Only because the work my dad was doing at Sandia had something to do with a project up there.”
“I need info from those computers,” Sonny thought aloud, weighing the possibility of getting Cyber into trouble against the alternative: Raven constructing the bomb, Raven killing the three missing girls, Raven disappearing Sonny. “It could be dangerous.”
“I’ll help,” Cyber insisted.
Sonny took out the list he had written. “This man. Leif Eric. He’s director of Los Alamos Labs. I need to know all I can about him. Everything. And I need to know how to build a nuclear bomb.”
Cyber whistled. “You wanna build a bomb? That’s cool.”
“Can you keep a secret?”
“You bet.”
“I want to know how to build a nuclear bomb; I’m not really going to build one. If I had the plutonium pit ready to go, what other materials would I need? Where does Los Alamos buy such materials? Who are the suppliers? Do they manufacture components there, or do they buy from the outside? Are there names attached? And this guy.”
He wrote “Raven.”
“This man is known as Raven, but he has a dozen aliases. Anthony Pájaro, Antonio Cuervo, John Worthy, Worthy John, all these combinations.” He pointed at the list. “His name might be involved with a nuclear bomb project. He’s probably in FBI and CIA files—” Sonny stopped and looked at Cyber. “But tell me, you haven’t gotten into FBI files, have you?”
Cyber beamed.
“Lordy, Lordy,” Sonny chuckled. What could this kid not crack?
“Okay, Raven is being sought by the FBI. Where is he? I want to know anything about him that might be in—there.” He nodded at the computer.
He gave Cyber the names of the missing girls, the names of their parents, and where they worked. Anything at all that might show up in the files Cyber could access. Anything that might create a pattern.
“I’ll get right on it,” Cyber said when Sonny was done. Something about Sonny’s urgency told him the task was not a game. Sonny was looking into government stuff, and that meant going into mainframes that had codes, encrypted stuff. There where the surf could turn ugly and drag a surfer down, Circe’s pit, the black hole of cyberspace that surfers feared. You cracked a code, and security could trace you if you didn’t move fast enough.
“When I find something, do I e-mail you?”
“I don’t have e-mail,” Sonny replied.
“You don’t have e-mail?” Cyber said in astonishment. Then as if apologizing, he added, “That’s okay, probably be read by others.”
“Call me,” Sonny replied, writing down his phone number.
“Your phone’s probably tapped.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve checked for bugs, so we’ll take a chance. You see, Cyber, I have to have all this figured out today.”
“Today? Today’s all the time we have?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Cyber said eagerly. “I’ll go to work right away, call you if I find anything.”