Jericho Iteration

by Allen Steele

  I found the plastic CD-OP filebox on a small shelf beneath the desk; the particular disk for which I was searching was contained in a scratched, often-opened case marked FAMILY. Marianne must have been looking at it often; it was at the front of the box, in front of the business disks. I pulled out the case and opened it, and after switching on the computer and opening the REVIEW window, I slipped the disk into the optical diskette drive.

  Starting shortly after we became engaged, Marianne and I had videoed almost everything we did, using a camcorder one of her relatives had given her at the bridal shower. Hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, summer scenes on Cape Cod, strange little home movies when we were both full of wine and creativity, the wedding day ceremonies, and the honeymoon trip to Ireland … we had recorded everything, and stored the bits and bytes on CD-OP for replay on our computer as an electronic family album.

  We had gotten bored of the novelty after a while, and thus there were large chronological gaps on the menu until Jamie was born, when we had rediscovered the camcorder and started making the inevitable baby pictures. As a result, the submenu screen showed a lot of filenames marked JAMIE.1, JAMIE.2, JAMIE.3, and so forth, one for each birthday he had passed. Yet there was one piece of footage in particular, lodged in JAMIE.6, that I now needed to see.

  After we had moved back to St. Louis, there had been a rash of kidnappings in the city. Children were vanishing from schoolbus stops and playgrounds and shopping malls, rarely to be seen again by their parents, and then sometimes not alive. The police never caught the evil bastards who had stolen these kids, and only God knows what happened to the ones who were not found, but Marianne and I did what the local authorities suggested parents should do: videotape their kids in advance, so that the footage could be used to identify lost children should the unthinkable happen to them.

  It had taken me a while, but something about the weird phone call I had received just before the ERA soldiers broke down the door of my apartment had jogged an old memory. After I opened the VIDEOVIEW window on the computer screen, I moused JAIME.6 and the REPLAY command; it took me only a couple of minutes to find the footage I remembered shooting of him, just a few weeks before he was killed.

  And now here was Jamie, very much alive and well, sitting in his child-size rocking chair in the living room. He was wearing blue jeans and his favorite St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt; just a cute little kid, both bored and embarrassed to have his dad making yet another video of him.

  My voice, off-camera: “Okay, kiddo, what’s your name?”

  Jamie, pouting, wishing to be anywhere but here: “Jamie …”

  Me again: “And what’s your last name?”

  Jamie looks down at the floor, his hands fidgeting restlessly on the armrests of his chair: “Jamie Rosen, and I’m six years old …”

  My voice, prodding him gently from behind the camera: “That’s good! Now what’s your mommy’s and daddy’s names?”

  His face scrunches up in earnest concentration, the child who has only recently learned that his folks have names besides Mommy and Daddy: “My daddy’s name is Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … and Mommy’s … my mommy’s name is Marianne Rosen …”

  Me, playing the proud papa: “That’s good, Jamie! That’s very good! Now, can you tell me what you’re supposed to do if a stranger comes up to you?”

  Jamie dutifully recites everything I had just told him: “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, even if they ask me if I want a present, and I can … I’m supposed to run and get a p’leaseman or another grownup and tell them to take me to you, and …”

  There. That was it.

  I froze the image and marked its endpoint, then I moved back to the beginning of the video. When I had reached that point and marked it, I opened the menu bar at the top of the screen and selected the EDIT function. Another command from the submenu caused a window to open at the bottom half of the screen, displaying a transcript of the conversation.

  I then began to work my way through the transcript, highlighting certain key words. It took me a few minutes, but when I was through I had a couple of lines I had pieced together from the videotape. I took a deep breath, then I moused the line and tapped in commands to verbalize those lines.

  Jamie’s voice reemerged from the computer, speaking something he had never said in life, but which I had heard over the phone earlier that night:

  “Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … can I talk to you, Daddy?”

  And on the computer screen, Jamie’s reedited face was exactly the same as I had seen it on the phone.

  “Gerry, what the hell are you doing?”

  Startled, I jerked away from the keyboard and spun around in the office chair to find Marianne standing in the doorway behind me.

  Her arms were crossed in front of her robe; she had a look of horror on her face, as if she had just caught me trying on a pair of her panties. Maybe reality was worse than that; after all, she had just discovered me in the act of editing one of the last tangible memories of our son.

  I lay back in the chair, letting out my breath as I rubbed my eyelids between my fingertips. “Part of the deal was that you wouldn’t ask me any questions,” I murmured. “And believe me, if I told you, you’d just think I was crazy.”

  “I already think you’re crazy,” she replied, her voice harsh with anger barely kept in check. “Leave Jamie’s video alone. I mean it …”

  Before I could do anything, she stalked across the room and began to reach for the computer. “Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands over the keyboard. “I’ll get out of this, so long as you answer one question for me.”

  She stopped and stared at me, not pulling her hands away. “What is it?”

  “Did you load this disk into the hard drive?” I asked. “This file in particular?”

  Marianne blinked, not quite comprehending the question at first. “Yes,” she said at last, “I did. I wanted to preserve the disk. This was the last video we made of him and—”

  “And do you still leave the computer on all day?”

  She shrugged. “Of course I do. My clients have to talk to the expert system when I’m gone. You know that.” She peered more closely at me. “What’s going on here, Gerard? Why were you editing the—?”

  “Never mind. Go ahead and restore the video.” I withdrew my hands from the keyboard and pushed the chair back from the desk. Marianne gave me one last look of distrustful confusion, then she bent over the keyboard, using the trackball to undo the work I had just done. It didn’t matter; I had all the answers I needed.

  Some of them, rather. Just as I had managed to piece together a message in Jamie’s own words, so had someone else. The video was stored on the computer’s hard drive and Marianne left the computer switched on during the day, so that her clients could ask questions of the computer’s expert system. It was therefore possible for a good hacker to access the JAMIE.6 file through the root directory and edit together the phone message I had heard earlier that night. By the same means, it was also possible for them to recreate my own voice; a good hacker with the right equipment would be able to mimic my voice, since my vocal tracks were recorded on this and many other CD-OP files Marianne had stored in the computer.

  But why go to such extremes? If the culprit had been trying to get my attention, why imitate the voice of my dead son … or my own, for that matter? If anything, it was a sick prank, tantamount to calling up a grieving widow and pretending to be the ghost of her late spouse. Yet this was the second time in as many days someone had used a computer to send mysterious messages to me, and the technical sophistication necessary to do this went far beyond the capability of some twisted little cyberpunk trying to spook me.

  In fact, now that I thought about it, how would some pimplehead even know to call into Marianne’s computer? Its modem line was listed under her company’s name, not hers or mine, and very few people were aware that Gerry Rosen even had an estranged wife.

  It ma
de no sense …

  Or it made perfect sense, but I was unable to perceive the logic.

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  Marianne’s question broke my concentration. She had finished saving the file and was exiting from the program. I looked at her as she switched off the computer, ejected the disk from its drive, and slipped it back in its box.

  “Yeah, I miss him.” I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets, suddenly feeling very old. “He was the best thing that happened to us … and I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” Marianne put the box away, then leaned against the shelf next to the desk. For the first time since she had let me into the house, she wasn’t playing the queen bitch of the universe; she was my wife, commiserating the passage of our son from our lives. “God, I’ve even kept his room the same, thinking somehow there’s just been some awful mistake, that he wasn’t on that train after all …”

  The train. Always the train …

  “He’s gone, Mari,” I said softly. “There’s no mistake. There was an accident, and he died … and that’s all there is to it.”

  She slowly nodded her head. “Yeah. That’s all there is to it.” She stared at the floor. “Tell me you just wanted to look at him again, Gerry. Tell me he isn’t mixed up in whatever trouble you’re in.”

  She raised her eyes and stared straight at me. “This isn’t part of some story, is it?”

  I knew what she meant. I had lost one newspaper job because I had been trying to stop kids from dying; I had thrown myself on the sword in order to save some youngsters I had never really known, the children of complete strangers, because that had been part of a story. Yet when the time had come for me to protect my own child, I had not been available. Jamie had perished without ever seeing his father’s face again because Daddy had been too busy with his career to do anything but buy him a train ticket to eternity.

  The accusation in her eyes wasn’t fair, but neither is the timing of earthquakes against MetroLink schedules. Or death itself, for that matter.

  When I didn’t answer her question, Marianne lowered her head and began to walk out of the office. “I’ve made up the living room couch and told the house to wake you up at eight,” she said. “That’s when the coffeemaker comes on. There’s some sweet rolls in the fridge, if you want ’em …”

  “Okay, babe. Thanks for everything.”

  She nodded again and began to head for the stairs. Then she stopped and turned back again. “And by the way … there’s nobody else upstairs, if that’s what you were wondering. G’night.”

  And then she left, heading back to her bedroom before I got a chance to ask her how she managed to pick up that mind-reading trick of hers.

  14

  (Friday, 8:00 A.M.)

  I AWAKENED TO THE faint sound of church bells striking eight times as if tolling from a distant country steeple, although neither of the two churches within a block of the house had bells.

  The sound came from the ceiling; Marianne had programmed the house to wake me at this time, just as she had instructed it to start brewing coffee in the kitchen. Although I could have used another hour of sleep, I was grateful that she hadn’t selected another noise from the alarm menu; if she had wanted to be a real bitch, she could have jolted me with an eight-gun salute, or worse.

  Nonetheless, I lay on the rattan couch for a couple of minutes, curled up in a lambswool blanket, caught somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. I heard the shower running in the upstairs bathroom, smelled the dark aroma of hot coffee brewing in the kitchen, heard songbirds just outside the windows. Everything was warm and comfortable and orderly, much as it had once been a long time ago when I had lived in this house …

  Then my mind’s eye flashed to John, the way I had seen him as he lay on the porch floor at Clancy’s with cops and paramedics standing all around him. Dead, with a hole burned through his forehead … and I knew that, if I didn’t find out why, I could never find any peace again, and all my mornings would be haunted for the rest of my life.

  The buzz of the telephone interrupted my train of thought. I almost got off the couch until I remembered that I had taken the handset and put it on the floor next to the couch before I had turned in for the night. Marianne was still in the shower, so I picked it up and thumbed the button. “Hello … um, Rosen residence,” I said self-consciously.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  Bailey. The son of a bitch had an innate talent for rude awakenings. “Well, Pearl,” I said as I sat up on the couch, “if you called here, then you must already know where I am.”

  “Process of elimination. If you’re not in your apartment, then you must be somewhere else.”

  “Hey, give the man a kewpie doll—”

  “Don’t gimme no shit, Rosen. We just found out John’s been killed and that you were seen at Clancy’s with the cops, and when I go upstairs to get you, I find the place ransacked. Word on the street is that a couple of ERA tanks were here last night. Now what the fuck’s going on?”

  “Earl—”

  “This is a helluva time for you to go shacking up with your old lady. Now you tell me what the …”

  I sighed as I peered out the living room window. There were no cars parked on the street in front of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. “Look, Earl—”

  “I ain’t looking at anything, Rosen, except for a pink slip with your name written on it unless you tell me right now what the—”

  “Earl, shut the fuck up.”

  That did the trick, at least for a moment. I took a deep breath. “I know what’s going on,” I continued, “but this phone isn’t plugged in, y’know what I mean?”

  There was silence from the other end of the line. Pearl had a bad temper, and he sometimes ate more brains than he seemed to carry between his ears, but he knew how to take a hint. He knew that anyone with a two-bit scanner could eavesdrop on a conversation carried out on a cordless phone. Even if my neighbors didn’t indulge in such skulduggery, there was no guarantee that the police or ERA would not.

  “I know what’s going on,” I repeated. “We can’t talk about it right now, but a big load of shit hit the fan last night. John’s getting killed is only part of it.”

  I heard a slow exhalation. “Are you serious?”

  “Like a heart attack,” I said as another thought occurred to me. “Have you heard from Sandy Tiernan yet?”

  “Yeah. She’s pretty shook. She called me at around six, said that she got the call from some guy at homicide—”

  “Mike Farrentino?”

  “Yeah, that’s him, and when I phoned his office, he said that he’d seen you last night at Clancy’s.” His tone of voice had changed from belligerence to confusion. “What’s the scoop here, Ger?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get downtown,” I said. “I’ll be there soon as I can swing a ride. But for right now …”

  I hesitated, trying to think of a way I could phrase the notion that had just occurred to me. “Umm … you think you could call an exterminator this morning?”

  “Huh? An exterminator?”

  “Yeah.” I rubbed at the knot left in the back of my neck from sleeping on the narrow couch. I could no longer hear running water from the upstairs bathroom. “Those roaches up in the loft are getting pretty hairy, pal. Might have crawled downstairs into the office. I think you should check it out real soon.”

  Another long silence, then: “Yeah, I think so too. Maybe it’s time to call Orkin, see if they can send someone down here this morning.”

  Bailey had gotten the hint. Cockroaches in the loft, bugs in the office: he knew what I was talking about. If anyone was indeed eavesdropping on our conversation, it would be painfully obvious what we were discussing, but it was better that he was forewarned of the threat before he made any more phone calls or put anything sensitive into the office computers.

  The only misunderstanding between us was that he thought I was hinting at the feds or the pol
ice as being the prime suspects. I wasn’t so sure if ERA or the SLPD were the only ones we had to worry about. Somebody out there was capable of hacking into even encrypted PTs like Joker; they had put the voodoo on me with that faux Jamie phone call last night. Until I had a clue as to who they were, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Good deal,” I said. “I’ll get downtown as soon as I can.”

  I clicked off, pushed away the blanket, and swung my legs off the couch. No time for sweet rolls and coffee; all I wanted to do now was get dressed and get out of here. I was reaching for where I had dumped my trousers on the floor when I heard the familiar creak of the stairs.

  I looked up to see Marianne sitting on the landing, wearing her robe again, her hair pulled up in a damp towel. No telling how long she had been there, listening to my side of the conversation.

  “Hi,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

  Lame question. She didn’t bother to answer. Mari simply stared at me, her chin cupped in her hands. “You’re going to want a ride downtown, right?”

  I hesitated, then slowly nodded my head. It was a long walk from here to the nearest MetroLink station, and despite last night’s promise to call a cab first thing in the morning, she knew I didn’t have enough cash on me to cover the fare all the way down to Soulard.

  She briefly closed her eyes. “And you’re going to want money, too, right?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say—”

  “I can spare you fifty dollars,” she replied, “and if you’ll let me get dressed, I can get you down to the paper in about a half-hour. Okay?”

  I nodded again. We gazed at each other for a few moments, each of us remembering all the shit we had put the other through during our years as a couple. Moving in together for the first time. Burned breakfasts, forgotten dinners. Underwear on the floor, unpaid bills. Two or three lost jobs, bouts of morning sickness announcing the arrival of a child neither of us had planned on raising but decided to have anyway. Engagement and marriage. Death and insecurity. Separation on its way to becoming formalized as a divorce.