The Mockingbird Drive

by A. C. Fuller

  It was the opposite of what I'd expected. She was thinking clearly and speaking clearly. I'd expected the revelation of the recording to drive her further into one of her scarier head-spaces. But it had done the opposite. She was thinking a lot more quickly than I was, and though I still thought she was overestimating the physical danger we were in, I wasn't about to argue with her plan.

  I was already peeling out of the Tammen Temeeh Kahni parking lot.

  Chapter 17

  As it turned out, we didn't need to tell Tudayapi about the recording.

  When we returned to her house, Quinn marched right up to the door, the drive slung over her shoulder. I followed, and, moments later, we were back in our spots on the couch.

  Tudayapi had changed back into her aquamarine pantsuit and, before Quinn could say anything, she said, "Why didn't you tell me you were Alex from The Barker?"

  I looked at the floor, as I sometimes do when I want to avoid something negative that's about to come my way.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" she continued. "Oh my God, I love, love, love your site. It's like if TMZ, Slate, and the New York Times had a threesome when they were still young and hot."

  That was not what I expected. "Thanks," I said, looking up. "What were some of your favorite pieces?"

  "Oh there are so many. I follow the shallow gossip stuff, of course. Who doesn't? But I always feel a little dirty reading it. And your app is awesome. I only read you guys on the app." The app was a Bird innovation. We'd known we needed one by around 2011, and Bird had found the engineers to pull it off.

  Tudayapi got up from her chair and slid next to me on the couch. "But the essays on race and gender have been the most important to me. You guys were the first big site to hire a full-time columnist to blog about trans issues. That was huge."

  "Wow," I said, "that means a lot. I mean, I know we publish a lot of cheap crap, but—"

  "You have to. To pay the bills, right?"

  "That's right," I said, giving Quinn a look as if to say see, some people get it. I turned back to Tudayapi. "And we try to balance it out by doing some social good when we can."

  The truth was, we'd just partnered with a blog run by a guy named Thor Magnussen, who wrote about gender identity issues. He provided us content, we slapped The Barker brand on it. We increased his readership tenfold and split the revenue seventy-thirty. We kept the seventy.

  I was about to say something self-deprecating when I noticed tears in Tudayapi's eyes. "There was a period about two years ago, where Thor stopped writing about gender issues and just did a diary thing, chronicling like twenty first dates he went on in LA. Stuff like meeting out at a restaurant, getting stood up, meeting a shallow girl and ripping her to shreds, losing his lucky underwear and freaking out. Just normal stuff. I know LA is a lot different than here, but it gave me hope that normal life is possible, at least somewhere."

  She paused, and I didn't know what to say. I was actually surprised that anything we'd done at The Barker had touched anyone so deeply. And seeing her tears made me feel her pain. I could tell she'd gone through a lot, and I felt a tinge of pride that our site had helped. But I still didn't know what to say and, luckily, I didn't have to say anything.

  Tudayapi dried her eyes with a silk handkerchief that matched her pantsuit. "I know we need to talk about the drive," she said. "But I just wanted to tell you that those stories were a big deal to me. Out here, I can feel kind of hopeless sometimes, because, even though my tribe accepts me, this is not exactly a hotbed of cultural progressivism. That series gave me hope."

  Quinn had been surprisingly quiet for the last few minutes, and I could feel her itching to get back to business. It wasn't that she was insensitive, just hyper-focused on the recording, and the drive. "And all that made you want to help us, right?" I said, not expecting it to work.

  "Yes," Tudayapi said.

  And with that, she stood up and walked purposefully through the laundry room and into the garage. Quinn followed right on her heels, carrying the drive. "Let's keep the recording to ourselves," she whispered when I caught up to her in the hallway.

  I agreed. It made sense to keep the recording to ourselves if we didn't need to use it to convince Tudayapi to get the data off the drive.

  But reading the drive wasn't going to be as simple as I'd hoped. I knew Tudayapi couldn't just Airdrop the data onto Quinn's laptop, but I figured there was some solution that would take ten minutes, maybe half an hour at most. I realized that the parts that were needed to retrieve the data were rare, but Tudayapi had indicated that she had them, and I figured the task itself would be relatively easy.

  I was wrong.

  We spent the next four hours in Tudayapi's garage and, just like a well-structured story, the process of retrieving the data had three main parts. First, Tudayapi had to find the parts and assemble them. She poured through boxes, bins, and little jars, occasionally pulling out wires or clips or screws. She looked under and behind a few dozen other computers and monitors stored on her wide shelving. Each time she found a necessary part, she handed it to Quinn, whose job was to organize the parts on the large worktable near the garage door.

  When you run a business, you're faced with a thousand decisions each day. And in situations like this, I always have a decision to make. Do I try to understand the details, or do I just take orders and roll with it? Like a few days ago, when Bird decided to trade our DVD story for the off-the-record chat. I could have gotten into the details and tried to figure out the nuances of what he was thinking, and chances are that I would have agreed with him. But I'd dropped it, choosing just to trust him. Sometimes it's important for me to understand all the details, but that wasn't one of those times. And neither was this. It was clear from watching the way Quinn took the parts, and the way Tudayapi responded to her placement of them on the table, that I had little to add to this situation.

  So, what was my role? I got the iced tea. After she'd put on her overalls, Tudayapi told me to get her large McDonald's collectible cup and fill it with the sweet tea from the fridge. I'd done it, and she asked for a refill just as they finished the first part of the process. When I got back with the second iced tea, I panicked for a few seconds. The drive was in pieces, spread across the table. Each of the fourteen discs had been placed separately on a clean rag, in some order I couldn't discern. They looked like old vinyl records, and I hadn't even known they could be taken out of the large plastic case.

  "How long do you expect this to take?" I asked Tudayapi.

  "Another couple hours."

  I walked up and leaned on the table to get a better view. Next to the discs was an object about two-by-two feet with a thick granite base covered in knobs. Dozens of wires were coming off the thing from all directions and the top looked like a record player. Quinn saw me staring at it. She said, "It's a spin stand. When computers fail, it's a way to get the data off the hard drive."

  Tudayapi finished connecting wires and turned it on. A few red lights blinked. "First disc," she said to Quinn.

  Quinn carefully lifted the disc nearest to her, then placed it on the stand.

  Tudayapi pressed a button on the stand, and it began to spin.

  "What does it do?" I asked.

  "Well, normally I'd hook it up to another machine and it would essentially transfer the data from this hard drive to another. Like backing it up."

  "I assume there's a ‘but' coming."

  "There is," Tudayapi replied, excitedly.

  "Is that where this fax machine comes in?" Next to the spin stand, Tudayapi had placed a beige object that looked like an old fax machine, the kind with slick rolls of paper. The sort no one under thirty-five has ever seen.

  "Yes," Tudayapi said, "but it's not a fax machine. It's an old Telex. Kind of like the things Western Union used to use."

  "The issue," Quinn said, "is that IBM machines used a proprietary character encoding called EBCDIC."

  "And this particular drive used encoded eighty-column card images
," Tudayapi added.

  They'd lost me, but they both had that gleam in the eye that people get when they're talking about something they love. They couldn't wait to tell me how they'd done it.

  "Do I want to know what EBCDIC stands for?"

  Tudayapi said, "Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code."

  "So, no. In retrospect, I didn't."

  "It's really not that complicated," Tudayapi said. "I'm surprised you know so little about computers, given that you run a website."

  "You're not the first person to tell me that," I said, glancing at Quinn.

  "Oh, Alex spends most of his time schmoozing at the latte stand in his fancy-pants office. Right, Starbucks boy?"

  "I call it my coffice."

  Quinn continued to break it down. "The issue is—since she can't transfer the data onto any of her old machines, she has to print it straight from the drive. But this Telex is based on Baudot coding, not EBCDIC, which—"

  "Which is where this comes in," Tudayapi said. She had her finger on a thin, rectangular panel, about twelve inches square, covered in silver solder dots and little microchips connected by wires. Even I knew it was a logic board, but it looked older and more amateurish than any I'd seen.

  "It's a hand-soldered antique," Tudayapi said. "Bought it off a guy fifteen years ago who bought it off a guy fifteen years before that. Only logic board I've ever seen that converts EBCDIC to Baudot."

  I traced the wires from the logic board to the Telex device. "So the logic board will convert the data and send it to the Telex, which will convert it on the fly?"

  They both smiled. "Awesome, huh?" Quinn said.

  "Hold onto the paper," Tudayapi said.

  Quinn used both hands to cradle a roll of paper, which normally would have been enclosed in a case on a spool, but the spool was busted. About a minute later, the Telex began printing.

  As boring as I find computer stuff in general, I was impressed, and their excitement had rubbed off on me. I leaned in over Quinn's shoulder as the paper began coming out. She turned her head slightly and I think she may have even smiled.

  The first pages looked like gibberish. Random letters and numbers surrounded by large blank spaces.

  Tudayapi said, "One drawback of doing it this way is that you're going to get the raw data. It's going to be a mess."

  That was when we entered part two of the process: printing the contents of the drive. It took over two hours and required a changed ink cartridge, three re-starts of the spin-stand, replacing a frayed wire on the logic board, and two cups of iced tea for Tudayapi.

  While it was printing, I paced the garage. A couple times I tried to convince Quinn to hand me some of the pages, but she wasn't having it.

  "It's a rabbit hole," she said. "We'll pour over this, but for now we just need to finish the printing and get the hell out of here."

  I was bored, so I started a little game where I tried to walk every possible path around the five worktables. The whole time, I was nagged by a question about Innerva. The recording explained how she'd been certain James was dead when I met her at The Wynn on the evening of the shooting. But why hadn't she told me about the recording? And why had she sent the message without context or explanation?

  I could come up with only two theories. The first, and most plausible, was that the recording was all she knew, and was self-explanatory.

  The other, darker theory, was that the recording had been a Dead Man's Switch, a message she'd set up to send only if something happened, or didn't happen. Hackers use them all the time. Some program their machines to automatically erase all data if the owner doesn't log in for three days. Some connect their computers to their phone's GPS and set up their systems to lock down if the phone doesn't move for twelve hours. Others set their computers to encrypt certain data on their computers if an unauthorized user gains access. So, my second theory was that Innerva had been researching the recording and set it up to send to me as a contingency plan. "Send to Alex if X, Y, or Z happens." I hoped this theory was wrong, and didn't want to think about what X, Y, or Z were.

  All my wondering, and the fact that Quinn and Tudayapi were only halfway through the pile of disks, made me want to get back to the recording, especially the second part, which we hadn't listened to as we rushed back to Tudayapi's.

  "Tudayapi, where's your restroom?" I asked.

  "Off the kitchen. You'll see it."

  I grabbed my laptop out of the car, then locked myself in her pastel pink and blue bathroom, sitting on a small wicker bench in the corner.

  The first part of the recording didn't reveal any new clues during the second listen, but I did notice a few more details. The fact that my mental picture of the shooting had adjusted allowed me to hear the whole recording in a different way. On this, Quinn was right that it was like the Zapruder film. People can see many different versions of the assassination in the footage. If you believe that JFK was killed by a lone gunman, that's what you see. And if you believe he was shot from the front, by two or more gunmen, that's what you see. Hearing the recording for the second time, I realized that the first time, I'd heard it through the prism of believing for sure that the official media account was correct. But the voices at the end had proved that wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  The second time, I heard it differently.

  The first voice we heard from outside the office, the man's voice, had been muffled on the first listen. I thought I could make out the words now: "Call the police." The first time I'd heard it, I'd assumed it was the voice of the shooter, Baxter, but the second time I thought it must be Gil Kazinsky, who was found dead in the back of the office. He was the only man other than James and Huang, and this further confirmed the idea that the shooters had come in through the back door.

  Another detail I'd missed on the first listen was the sound of Holly's voice before she entered the office, which I'd heard as background noise the first time around. About five seconds before she came into the office, she said something like, "Almond was right," or "Damon was right," or possibly "Amanda was right." I held the computer speaker right up to my ear, but it was impossible to know for sure. I figured that with good headphones or amplifying software, Quinn and I would be able to figure it out.

  Hearing Holly's voice, I was struck by a wave of shame and anger. Not only had I fallen for her and Kenny's act, I'd lead them straight to Quinn's doorstep. In retrospect, their act had been amazing. How had they managed to tailor their routine to me, my interests and background so quickly? They couldn't have. Not unless they'd been tracking me, had prepped for me. But I'd met them only twenty-four hours after receiving Innerva's email. And I hadn't been in touch with either James or Innerva for nearly a year before that.

  Then there was the second half of the recording.

  Captain Shonda Payton's first words came about eighteen minutes in. After that, there were about six minutes of silence, punctuated only by a few beeps from her radio. She'd walked to another room to call in the shooting, so I couldn't hear exactly what she was saying, but the beeps were loud enough to be picked up. After the six minutes, I heard two male voices discussing the scene. Then a woman saying something about blood splatter patterns.

  No one seemed shocked or disturbed. Just another crime scene.

  There were only two interesting moments.

  The first came with about two minutes left on the recording. A man's voice, growing louder like he was walking into the office, getting closer to the phone, "Lived on Desert Road. I got called out there twice. Bastard played Clash records too loud and refused to turn them down. Should I Stay or Should I Go, London Calling. Neighbors complained constantly. I love the Clash, so I used to rock out in the parking lot for a minute before making him turn it down."

  Then the voice of the first officer, the woman. "He has a sheet?"

  "Yeah, nothing serious."

  "They never do until they do something like this."

  "Tell me about it. This one's gonna be a no-braine
r."

  They were talking about Baxter.

  They were interrupted about a minute later by multiple other people arriving, and the last thing I heard was a new voice, which sounded like a young man. "Should I bag the phone?"

  Then the recording ended.

  I couldn't tell if Innerva had chosen that moment to end the call, or if the man who'd bagged the phone had ended the call. I guessed that if he'd noticed the phone was live he wouldn't have ended the call. Or, at least, he would have discussed ending it with the people in the room before doing so. I also guessed that Innerva wouldn't have ended the call. She was all about transparency, about data becoming public. There's no way she would have wanted to end a call that had a chance to give her more data to work with. I figured the man must have pressed "end" by accident while bagging the phone.

  There was a bang on the bathroom door and I sat up, frozen. "Alex, are you okay?"

  It was Quinn's voice. She needed to use the bathroom.

  Back in the garage, I continued walking laps around the worktables, and noticed something I hadn't seen earlier. Above the garage door we'd come through, there was a little loft. I'd missed it before because the wall, the door, and the loft itself were all painted white, and a white cloth hung down, blocking the view into the loft. There was a wooden ladder leaning on the wall next to it.

  "What's that?" I called to Tudayapi, who was feeding more paper into the Telex machine.

  "A loft," she said, looking up briefly.

  I walked across the garage and stood next to her. Quinn was cutting the pages with a large pair of scissors and placing them in what I hoped was the correct order. I could tell how hard it was for her to resist the urge to sit down and read them.

  "What's up there?" I asked Tudayapi.