by AC Fuller
"Is that the…the thing where…where you get a car that already has a tracking device in it?"
"You're welcome." I slowed until Quinn was a half-step ahead of me and gave her a slight nudge from behind. "We're gonna need to run faster."
The light show above had switched to a psychedelic scene of butterflies and flying horses with sweeping, Enya-like music. Some oohs and ahhs came from the crowd and someone screamed with excitement on the zip line overhead. I glanced behind us. Holly's eyes were locked on mine, like she'd been waiting for me to turn around. Kenny still appeared to be on the phone.
"Follow me," I said, cutting sharply to the right down a side street that led into an industrial area.
For two blocks we ran north, dodging occasional groups of tourists streaming toward Fremont Street. Every few seconds, I checked my phone to make sure we were on track. I was hoping we'd lost them with the quick cut down the side street, but I soon realized that we hadn't. About a block from the little green ZipCar icon on my phone, I shot a glance over my shoulder. Quinn was slowing down and Kenny and Holly were maintaining their pace behind us, no more than a block away. Kenny was no longer on the phone.
"Quinn," I yelled. "You have to sprint. We're almost there."
Her sweat had washed most of the dirt off her forehead and down her face, leaving a line of sweaty mud where her neck met her t-shirt. Looking like an eighteen-wheeler trying to accelerate up a steep hill, she picked up the pace.
I spotted the Corolla half a block ahead. I sped up and turned back at the same time. Quinn looked like she might pass out.
Meanwhile, Kenny and Holly looked fresh, like they were in a commercial for businesswear, so comfortable you can jog in it. I was pretty sure they could catch up with us if they wanted, but I wasn't going to wait around to find out.
I got to the Corolla and waved my phone across the sensor on the windshield, unlocking the doors. I threw my bags in the back and slid into the driver seat, slammed it all the way back to make room for my long legs, and leaned across the passenger seat to open the door for Quinn. When she was about ten yards away, I pulled the keys out from their spot under the gear shift and started the car. Quinn collapsed into the car, panting and cursing under her breath. Something about the CIA. Unintelligible.
I checked my rearview mirror as I peeled out and ran a stop sign at the corner. Holly was still running after us but Kenny had stopped. He seemed to be on his phone again. As relieved as I was to get away from them, I had to wonder what the hell they were doing. They hadn't seemed all that determined to catch us, and if Kenny was on his cellphone now, maybe it had been a cellphone before. But they had definitely followed me from the airport, and even the most aggressive corporate headhunter wouldn't do that.
I lost sight of them as I turned west toward the highway. We were both out of breath, but as I merged onto Highway 95, Quinn managed to say, "The first thing we do is get rid of this Lojack mobile."
As crazy as she was, I had to agree.
I was driving one of the world's most trackable cars.
Chapter 9
After five minutes, Quinn told me to exit the freeway. Part of me still wanted to get as far away from Las Vegas as possible, but this was her city and I decided to let her take the lead.
I turned onto a little street called Pico Drive, Quinn pointing at a cellphone tower disguised as a palm tree. "Good," she said, "pull up there."
I stopped the car abruptly, but left it running. "What?"
She held her hands on her head, pushing back her hair from her forehead, "You are holding a drive that formerly belonged to the CIA. You do know that, right?"
"I don't know what's on this thing."
"Okay, no, yes, I'm sorry. What I mean is that we have a long drive ahead of us and we can't do that in a car that's literally designed to be tracked by any idiot with a cellphone."
Her tone was somewhere between exasperation and condescension, but I decided not to let it get to me. I said, "Hang on. I know you say it is. But, no offense, I don't want to just take your word for that."
"Oh, no offense. Well, okay then. I'm glad you said that. I mean, the worst thing that could happen here is I might get offended, and that simply wouldn't do. But all right. You are holding. A drive. That someone wants very badly. Maybe it's not even the CIA. Could be annnnnnyone in the world. And that someone has sent at least two agents after us. Unless you think we weren't being chased just now?"
"Well, yes, we were being chased, but that doesn't mean—"
"Please, please do not tell me you don't think it's connected to that drive. Just… please."
It did seem like the obvious explanation, and I nodded reluctantly.
"Okay then. So, given that people are after us and given that it's about that drive, and given that they are serious murderers, and given that we need to drive but can't drive another mile in a car any five-year-old could track, mayyyyyyyyyybe we should get into a different goddamn car before we get waterboarded!"
Ignoring most of what she'd said, I asked, "We need to drive where?"
"To where that damn CIA drive came from. Well, not originally, but where Baxter got it from. Who he got it from, I should say."
"You know where he got it?" I asked.
"From someone we both know. I don't know her real name. Weird collector, trades old tech. She's based out of—"
"Where?"
"I'd rather not say right now," Quinn said, gesturing meaningfully around us.
I stared blankly at her for a second, then I realized what she meant. "Are you saying you think this car is bugged?"
"Safe to assume it is, yeah. I probably shouldn't say another word in this damn car, but we're not exactly teeming with options right now."
"You think the CIA knew in advance I was going to pull up the ZipCar app and arranged to have this exact car pre-bugged and waiting for us?"
"No, I don't."
"So, what, every ZipCar is bugged? That's your theory?"
"I don't know for sure, but it's safe to assume. We know they're tracking them, why not get a little more info while they're installing things?"
I stared at her for a long moment, mouth hanging open a little. I was about to go off on her. Call her paranoid, crazy, and so on. But she started her rant first.
"Think about your comfortable world of dotcom douchebags back at The Barker," she began. "Has there ever been a time when you passed up a chance to collect and store information about your customers? No, there hasn't. You try to collect every speck of info you can on your customers—age, gender, location, education level, shopping habits."
She was right, of course. Most sites do that so they can serve ads based on the particular customer. It's really not all that nefarious. The average American consumes fewer commercials and ads now than ever before because of DVRs, streaming video services like Netflix, and pop-up blockers. The least a customer can do is let us customize the ads, seeing as how we give them millions of words of free content every month.
I was about to say this when Quinn said, "And you're a little shitty site. Now think about your friends at Google and Apple and Facebook, because I'm sure you have friends there. Have they been fully up-front about how much information they're filing away on their customers? Or what they're using it for? They're vampires. We're a damn food source for the bosses and their goal is to make us into herd animals. And—yes!—that means that their convenient little car-shares are bugged because somewhere in the terms and conditions that you didn't read, there's a little clause about how Conversations and vocal expressions conducted within a ZipCar vehicle become the property of ZipCar Incorporated. They like to have legal cover, some way to hide behind their own system, because the law is their system. It exists just to keep them safe from people like me. To them, I'm the dangerous one. And if you aren't willing to become dangerous, we're going to die."
I was beginning to get a sense of Quinn. She was smart, that much was clear. But, by her own admission, she was a little
bit crazy. The trick with her was going to be finding the line where the smart turned into crazy, and backing away slowly before crossing it. In this case, it was somewhere mid-rant. She'd taken facts known to most people—that all tech and web companies gather all sorts of data about us—and turned it into a crazy conspiracy that led to our Zip Car being bugged. Finally, I said, "Would you feel more comfortable if we got out of the car?"
We walked to a bus stop about twenty feet down the block, in front of a crummy apartment complex. Her eyes were darting from the street to the apartment complex, but, after a minute or two, she calmed down.
"What's the plan?" I asked.
She was staring at the plants alongside the walkway. They were some sort of shrub, but half dead, and the dirt they were in was half sand. Quinn shook her head. "I've never seen a city so hated by its natural environment. I swear, if you turned off the sprinklers, Las Vegas would be a desert again in forty-five minutes."
"Quinn, what—"
"I know where the drive came from."
"You said Baxter gave it to James."
I still didn't buy it, but, like any decent journalist, I knew it was smart to get your source's version of the story, no matter how crazy it was. Quinn was quiet for a moment, like she was deciding whether she wanted to tell me. I said, "You already decided I'm not with the CIA, remember?"
"The Duck Valley Indian Reservation. That's where Baxter got it."
"Never heard of it."
"Well, of course you haven't," she snapped. "The whole point of Indian reservations is to move the genocide survivors someplace folks like you don't have to see them or think about them!" I started to object, but she held up a hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "Sorry. That's not the problem we're trying to deal with right now. I get distracted sometimes. Sorry."
I shrugged.
"Anyway, there's a…a specialist there. She runs a server farm, goes by the handle Tudayapi. Paiute, someone told me. She collects old tech, trades it sometimes, you know how it goes."
I didn't, but I said, "Sure."
"Baxter got the drive from her. I don't know where she got it. But she walks with God-as-she-perceives-him, and I know she's not CIA, so I want to talk to her. I think…I think we should both talk to her."
"How far away is it?"
"Not far."
I was racking my brain for a different solution, a better solution. In that moment, I came up blank and couldn't bring myself to argue with her. "Got it. Okay then, you're right. We can't keep the ZipCar. What do you suggest?"
She sat on the wooden bench and set her duffle bag on her lap.
"We can just use my phone," I said.
She looked at me like I was the crazy one. "You haven't powered down your phone?"
"Why would I—"
"You know it has GPS on it, right? That it's even more trackable than that stupid car?"
I decided to humor her. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and powered it down, holding it right up to her face so she could watch the screen go black. "But how will your laptop be any better?"
"My laptop runs a proprietary OS, designed to keep out snoopers."
I watched over her shoulder as she opened her laptop, a small black one encased in a dented plastic shell. She talked as she connected a little black box and various wires. "It's a little clunky, but it's as secure as anything's reasonably going to get. The black box I put together functions as a wireless modem, piggybacking on cellphone signals and running multiple layers of encryption in and out. It's not as fast or convenient as the Wi-Fi you take as your birthright when you're in a Starbucks, but it does let me transmit and receive information without immediately sending the NSA a transcript of the whole thing. I mention this so you'll understand that when I hop onto Craigslist, it's not without precaution."
By the time she'd finished talking, she was on the site, searching for used cars under $500. "We're not getting a five-hundred-dollar car," I said.
"I've got eleven-hundred and four dollars in this bag," she said. "That's it."
"Well, I've got at around four hundred in my wallet."
"The hell are you carrying four hundred bucks around for?"
"Tips," I said. "Also, I think we can safely get some more."
"Oh, you think so? You're an expert on living underground now? Hey, enlighten me."
I'd already thought this through. "Listen. Assuming that people with serious information access are tracking us, they know I'm in Las Vegas someplace. Like, we can agree on that, right?" She nodded. "So, I can hit an ATM and get cash out and advances on a couple of my cards, and all that tells them is I was in Las Vegas today, which they already knew. Right?"
She gave me the second grunt. "As long as you don't hit any ATMs after this time and place."
"So that's another nine hundred, giving us a total of twenty-four hundred bucks, give or take. I think we'll get further in a thousand-dollar car than a five-hundred-dollar one. That's all I'm saying."
She nodded slowly and changed the search parameters.
We'd passed a little bodega on the corner when we'd turned onto Pico Drive, and I could see a red and white ATM sign between the beer and cigarette posters in the window. I pointed at it and Quinn nodded before turning back to her computer.
I jogged down and pulled out the max of $200 from my checking account, along with $200 from each of three credit cards.
When I returned, Quinn was talking into her computer. "We'll need to see it first," she was saying.
A man's voice came through the computer speakers, tinny and a little distorted. "How soon can you be here?"
"Ten minutes," Quinn said, rotating the computer so I could see the Craigslist ad. It was a 1997 Ford Thunderbird, its faded blue paint cracked and speckled like it had a rare and deadly skin disease. Once blue, now it was blue-and-scabies. It had 194,000 miles and was listed at $1,000. The ad said that the guy was moving out of state and needed to sell ASAP. And, like all Craigslist ads for cheap cars, it said, "Runs Great!"
"It really is a steal at this price," the guy was saying.
"We can talk price when we get there," Quinn said. I held up the money. "And we're bringing cash."
The car was about five minutes away, in a part of Vegas you'd prefer not to visit. It's called D Street and it's on every list of America's worst neighborhoods. Not that I knew that at the time. I was one of those guys who flew first class, stayed in a posh room, then flew home. For me, slumming it in Vegas meant hitting the buffet at the MGM Grand after a concert. Before this trip, I'd never even considered what the rest of Vegas was like.
I'd gotten a hint of it when I arrived at Quinn's house, but her place looked like a suite in the Bellagio compared to the Sunset Vista Apartments on D Street. As I pulled up across the street and turned off the engine, I could see that the building was six or eight stories of beige stucco, with a couple internal stairwells that opened onto a concrete patio. The patio had a couple of vending machines in metal cages and led to a large patch of dry grass. On the grass, a group of men and women sat on milk crates and an old sofa. They were passing a couple joints around and laughing raucously.
Quinn reached for the door.
"Wait," I said. "I want to scope it out before we just walk up."
"Then you're a fool. We sit across the street from the apartment with our lights off, you know what they'll think?"
"That we're here to shoot them?"
"You're catching on, Internet Boy." She opened the passenger door and stepped onto the curb, then walked around and opened my door. I have to admit, I was scared, but Quinn wasn't going to let me sit in the car. I held onto her arm once I got out, giving myself a minute to scan the area.
So, as I held Quinn's arm and pretended to be fumbling with the keys, I did a quick scan. Eleven people total, seven men, four women. Facial expressions all looked friendly, no one seemed to be excluded from the group, no one seemed to be dominating. The sun was on its way down and the temperature had cooled to the low eighties, s
o they seemed like a group of friends just hanging out on the grass. A casual get-together on a Wednesday evening.
Quinn tugged me forward and called out when we were still a hundred feet away from the group. "Any of you guys Hector?"
"You seem awfully friendly for a paranoid recluse," I said to Quinn.
"I'm paranoid about guys like you, not folks like this."
As we approached, a girl called out from an old blue recliner. "Who's asking for Hector?"
"I'm Moira. I just spoke with him about an old Thunderbird he's selling."
The girl stood and stepped to within a few feet of Quinn and pointed at me. "What the hell kind of name is Moira? And who's the white dude?"
"Moira is a Dutch-African-German name, and this is Abraham."
The girl stared at me, then at Quinn, then glanced back at her friends and broke out laughing. "Hector went up to get the keys and title."
A minute later, a short guy with bushy black hair and a black goatee came out from the stairwell in between the apartments and walked right up to me. "You here for Baby Blue?"
"Yes, I mean, I guess. Is that what you call the Thunderbird?"
"More like Baby Trash," Quinn said. I nudged her in a let-me-do-the-talking way, but she ignored me. "We'll pay $500 for it."
"Five?" Hector wasn't having it. "The parts alone are worth two grand. Things got eighteen-inch G6 rims, and a NT-5 Wing Lid Trunk Spoiler."
"It looked like a fine car in the ad," I lied. "Can we see it?"
"It's a piece of crap," Quinn said.
Hector looked at me as if to say, "Can you shut her up?"
Quinn had probably watched enough cop movies to feel right at home in the "bad cop" role—or maybe it just came naturally to her—but I wasn't going to try to stop her. I shrugged at Hector and he led us around the perimeter of the apartments to the car. It looked just like the picture, except that now it was covered by a thin layer of dust, like it hadn't been driven in a few months.
"Looks like the picture," I said.
"Looks worse," Quinn said. "Four hundred cash right now if it starts."