by Jon Evans
“You say brilliant, I say fucking monstrous, let’s call the whole thing off.”
“I doubt it’s just Kishkinda,” Keiran muses. “They must have other sites. Africa, Bolivia, anywhere life is cheap. I wonder how many people are murdered for every month they add to Shadbold’s life. Probably hundreds.”
“We have to tell someone. We have to expose him.”
“Of course,” Keiran says. “Except, we can spread it as an ugly rumour, that’s a start, but it would certainly help if we had some actual evidence.”
“I’m sorry,” Jayalitha says. “I was very fortunate to escape only with my life. I had to bury the evidence.”
Keiran turns to stare at her. “Evidence? What evidence? Buried where?”
“Documents. I gained access to Justice International by subterfuge, and managed to abscond with documents that confirmed our suspicions. I could not take the evidence with me when I escaped. I buried them in Kishkinda.”
“Where?”
Jayalitha hesitates. “I do not think I can explain the location. I could only show you.”
Keiran nods. “How did you escape? How did you get here?”
“It was very difficult.” She pauses, remembering. “They burned down my house. With my family in it. The week after that I was like an animal. Somehow I made it to Bangalore. I had friends there. I had to flee, I was pursued by the police, the government, everyone. My friends took me to Calcutta. Then to China, across the mountains. That took a very long time. In China I had no more friends. I did not dare contact anyone. That was how they found us, my emails to Angus. I sent an email to him, telling him everything I had found, but I suppose they destroyed it before he read it. I thought in America I would be safe. I made my way to Shanghai. Then I had to find a way to cross the ocean. Then a way to pay. I speak only a very little Chinese. It was very difficult. It was such a long journey.”
“God,” Danielle says, inadequately. She cannot even imagine the perils and obstacles of a voyage like that, the constant terror of discovery, months of solitude in unthinkably alien places, struggling even to be understood, haunted by the burning memory of your murdered family, desperate to cross half the world so you might begin to be safe, and begin to have your revenge. But she hasn’t found safety in America. Quite the opposite. She stares at Jaya, only twenty-two, with mixed awe and pity.
“You’re hurt,” Keiran says to Danielle. “Your side.”
“Huh?” Danielle looks down at her pink Los Angeles T-shirt, through which a thin crescent of blood has seeped. “Oh. The rocks. It’s not so bad, it’s pretty shallow. Never mind that. What are we going to do? Can you rent a car here?”
Keiran considers a moment. “That’s chancy. P2 might get into immigration records and see I just landed. I’m going to ring a friend of mine who lives here. Fellow hacker. He’ll put us up while we work out what to do. I have some ideas about that, but we can talk those over once we’re secure.”
“Are you sure you can trust him?” Danielle asks.
“I’ve known Mulligan twelve years. I trust him absolutely. Eat up. I’ll buy a phone card and ring him from a pay phone. Until further notice, we are living the anonymous lifestyle.”
* * *
A taxi takes them north from LAX, along the 405 towards the San Fernando Valley where Mulligan lives.
“What’s Mulligan’s real name?” Danielle asks.
Keiran looks at her. “Why?”
“I just like knowing who I’m about to meet.”
“I don’t actually know his birth name. He just uses his handle.”
“What is a handle?” Jayalitha asks.
“Online name,” Keiran says. “Choosing your own clearly artificial handle for public use is part of hacker culture. Like leetspeak.”
Jayalitha looks bewildered. Danielle represses a sigh. Once again Keiran has entirely failed to understand his listener; Jaya has no idea that ‘leetspeak’ is what hackers call their dialect of slang. Neither would Danielle if she hadn’t once dated Keiran.
“Why did your friend pick Mulligan?” Danielle asks.
“Better ask him yourself.”
“What is your handle?” Jayalitha asks.
Keiran looks at her for a moment, then says, “Not many people know both my handle and my birth name. LoTek. Capital L, Capital T.”
“Why did you choose that?”
“If they think you’re technical, go crude. If they think you’re crude, go technical. I’m a very technical boy,” Keiran says cryptically. Any further explication is interrupted by a beeping that emerges from his windbreaker. He draws out something that looks like a slightly overgrown Palm Pilot.
“Danger hiptop,” he explains. “I’m never without a processor. The beep means I have urgent email from a trusted source. Don’t worry, this can’t be traced to me.” He pokes at a few keys on the miniature computer. Then his eyes widen and his face grows grim.
“What is it?” Danielle asks.
Keiran looks up at the taxi driver and shakes his head. “It’s from Mulligan. Our situation has escalated. I’ll explain when we’re there.”
* * *
When the driver, who had only been told “the Valley”, turns off the freeway and asks for specific directions, Keiran tells him to go to Laurel Canyon and Victory Boulevard. Then he makes them walk a long block back to Coldwater Canyon.
“Why couldn’t we just get out where we were going?” Danielle asks, slightly exasperated; her legs are very tired, and her headache has been dimmed with Tylenol but her side still hurts.
“Security. I don’t like it either. I have to lug this backpack around.” Keiran’s possessions are jammed into a large Lowe Alpine backpack, and they are heavy enough that he is sweating by the time they arrive at the Starbucks which is their destination. He walks in, takes a table without even looking around, and puts his Danger ‘hiptop’ in the middle of the table.
“Is he here?” Jayalitha asks, as she and Danielle sit.
“I don’t know. I’ve never met him before. He’ll know us by my hiptop.”
“You’ve never met him?” Danielle asks incredulously. “How can you trust him?”
“Don’t get so hung up on meatspace,” Keiran says dismissively. “Mulligan is solid. I’d stake my life on that. In fact, I rather think I’m doing just that.”
“Not just your life.”
Keiran shrugs. Danielle decides resignedly that help from someone trusted by proxy is better than no help at all. As Keiran goes to the counter to order drinks, she opens the California section of the LA Times someone left on their table, and scans the headlines, looking for something interesting and diverting.
What she finds is appalling.
“Oh my God,” she breathes.
“What is it?” Jayalitha asks.
Danielle looks around, suddenly terrified, but no one is paying any attention to them. She slides the newspaper over to Jayalitha and indicates an article headlined “UK Bombing Suspects Reported In LA”. Above the headline are two photos, grainy and passport-sized, but recognizably of Keiran and Danielle.
“Oh my goodness,” Jayalitha says.
Danielle reads the article and learns that she is wanted not only for the London bombing, but for the murder of Kishkinda’s chief financial officer at a conference in San Francisco two months ago. Keiran returns. When he sees what she is reading he nearly spills the drinks.
“Fucking hell,” he says. “Turn that over. He didn’t tell me it was in the papers.”
“You knew?”
“That was the email in the taxi.”
“I’ve haven’t, this is crazy, I haven’t been to San Francisco in years. I didn’t even know their CFO was dead. How can they –”
“Shadbold,” Keiran says. “Trying to catch and discredit us simultaneously. Why hunt us down themselves when they can get the FBI to do it for them?”
As Danielle tries to absorb the information that she has suddenly become a felon wanted on federal charges
, a man rolls up to their table in a wheelchair. Goateed and near-spherical, with dark eyes hidden in his round head like marbles sunk in butter, he wears a tentlike black T-shirt two sizes too big even for his horselike girth. His legs emerge from black shorts and end at mid-thigh, in grotesque flipper-like protrusions of boneless flesh that Danielle has to look away from.
“LoTek?” he asks.
“Mulligan.” Keiran leaps to his feet, apparently entirely unfazed by the discovery that his friend is wheelchair-bound and legless. “We should move. Right now.”
Mulligan doesn’t argue. They follow him to his battered Ford Taurus. Fortunately no one in Starbucks seems to have registered their presence; or at least, no one is looking at the physically normal people. It takes Mulligan almost a minute to lever himself from his wheelchair into his car. He breaks out in a thick sweat, and wheezes with exhaustion, but waves off all offers of help.
* * *
Mulligan drives them through the vast, endless blocks of strip malls and suburbs that form the San Fernando Valley. He does not use the steering wheel at all; rather, he drives with what looks like a video-game controller, plugged into the steering column, held in his lap.
“Is that what I think it is?” Keiran asks.
“Yeah,” Mulligan says. “Built the interface myself. Can you believe there’s been no fundamental vehicle control improvements since Henry Ford? Fuckin’ cultural inertia, man, it’ll be the death of us all. The steering wheel is nineteenth century. But this PS2 controller, ergonomic geniuses put millions into its design, it’s the obvious choice.”
Danielle is unconvinced. Mulligan’s driving is highly erratic. “Is it legal?” she asks.
Mulligan shrugs. “I unplug it if I get pulled over, pretend I was using these.” He gestures at paddles attached to the steering column. After a moment Danielle realizes they are intended for use as brake and accelerator.
It takes them fifteen minutes to reach Mulligan’s large bungalow in the heart of Encino. His property smells of orange trees, reminding Danielle of family holidays in Florida when she was younger. From the ungroomed backyard, a sliding door opens automatically. Past the entryway, a hallway takes them past a filthy kitchen, then a filthier bathroom, to a sequence of several cavernous rooms full of metal racks and shelves, on which computer carcasses and the gutted remains of unidentifiable electrical devices are piled. It looks like a madman’s museum of dead machines. There are several workbenches, festooned with tools that range in size from microscopic screwdrivers to welding torches. There are also a half-dozen computers in working order, plus a dozen Microsoft XBoxes stacked atop one another, all wired together.
Everything is low, all the shelves and benches thigh-high so that Mulligan can easily access them; Danielle feels a little like she is visiting Lilliput. The whole building smells of metal, plastic, and chemicals. There are posters of implausibly endowed and gravity-resistant women, most of them from American and Japanese comic books, and a few foldouts of naked women, clearly from porn magazines considerably less classy than Playboy. Jayalitha looks shocked by these.
“Sorry,” Mulligan says, turning red and pulling the pornography from the walls as he wheels past. “I didn’t realize you were female. LoTek didn’t specify.” He glares at Keiran, who shrugs.
Danielle knows, from dating Keiran years ago, that hackers can generally be divided into two groups: lean, black-clad, tattooed and pierced counterculture-rebels, and social-outcast ultrageeks. Keiran floats somewhere between the two categories. Mulligan clearly belongs to the latter.
The only vaguely domestic part of the building is the far corner, where a large overstuffed leather couch and loveseat are arrayed around an Ikea table, and in front of a huge flat screen that hangs on the wall. The floor here is occupied by old pizza boxes, some of them empty, cans of Jolt cola, pyramids of books and magazines, crumpled papers and clothing, and a spaghetti tangle of wires, almost entirely obscuring the faux-Persian rugs which are a welcome change from the bare concrete of the rest of the place. A Sharper Image Ionic Breeze air purifier in the corner is coming out on the wrong end of its eternal battle.
“This is it,” Mulligan says. “I guess you’ll be staying here a while, huh?”
“Yes,” Keiran says firmly, despite Danielle’s doubtful expression.
“Where do you sleep?” Danielle asks.
“In here.” Mulligan opens a wooden door obscured by the shadow of the stack of XBoxes, and reveals what was once a wine cellar, now occupied by a futon illuminated by a single dangling light bulb. The sheets, blanket, and pillows are black. The concrete walls are unadorned save for a bar bolted to the wall that helps Mulligan get to and from the bed.
“That’s your bedroom?” Danielle asks, unable to disguise the horror in her voice.
“Sure. I go in and sleep, I get up and leave, why decorate?”
“Let’s play Changing Rooms later,” Keiran says. “We’ve got some big decisions to make.”
* * *
Danielle finds it hard to concentrate on what Keiran is saying. She is wanted by the FBI. The idea sounds too unreal to take seriously. She had nothing to do with that bomb, except for falling in love with the man who made it. She is completely innocent of the San Francisco murder. This has gone too far. She is sorry for Angus and Jayalitha’s family and everyone else, but her whole life could be ruined by this. She should walk to the nearest phone, call the police, and turn herself in. Surely the FBI will understand, the charges will be dropped, the truth will set her free.
Except. Maybe she isn’t, technically, innocent. She knew that a bomb was being made; she thought it was never intended to go off, true, but she was still an accessory, to that and to the Paris break-in. And turning herself in must be exactly what Shadbold wants. He’s responsible for this, that’s obvious, he and Laurent must have leaked evidence pointing to herself and Keiran. If he can’t silence them by killing them, he can destroy their credibility, and ensure they get locked up. And continue to murder thousands of people. He wants her arrested, and by itself that’s a good enough reason to run as long as she can. Because it means they are dangerous to him, somehow, while they are free.
But if she won’t turn herself in, what can she do? Her bank accounts and credit cards will be frozen. Her picture will be studied by police officers across the country, and by newspaper readers, maybe even television watchers – the UK bombing made headlines around the world, and wanted criminals always make for a juicy news segment. And who can she trust? She suspects her friends and family would all turn her in, telling themselves it’s for her own safety, for her own good, no matter what Danielle might say. She can’t trust anyone not in this room.
Part of her is terrified. The prospect of being pursued by both a vengeful billionaire and the FBI is overwhelming. Part of her just wants to flee, go home, escape by any means necessary, fly back to New York or her parents in Boston and take her chances there. But the more Danielle considers her situation, the angrier she gets. Shadbold and Laurent already used and discarded her like a rag. Now they are hounding her again. In the last twenty-four hours of terror and misery she has been pursued, bruised, bloodied, nearly drowned and frozen, and now falsely accused of mass murder in the eyes of all the world – all for nothing more than the sin of knowing too much, trusting too much, and wanting to help people. She is sick of running. She wants revenge.
“Let’s face it,” Keiran is saying. “If we run and hide, we’re doomed. We could own every police computer in America and still just delay the inevitable. We have to go with the Napoleon doctrine. Our only defense is a good offense. We have to show that Shadbold was behind that bomb. And incidentally the murder of several thousand Indian peasants. Not that I expect the world to much care about that part.”
“I can try to take you to the evidence I buried,” Jayalitha says doubtfully, “but surely returning to India will be disastrous for us all?”
Keiran nods. “Quite right. We can’t risk that while their cyber
space superman P2 is out there tracking our every move. But I’m wondering now if he might actually be their weakness. If we can get to him, find out how he can do what he does, maybe we can use that to break them open.”
“Get to him how?”
“With luck we can get the men who chased you at the beach to tell us where he is.”
Danielle stares at him. “The men at the – are you crazy? Those were cops. What do you want to do, go to their homes, knock on their door and ask them questions? That’s insane. Our pictures are in the newspaper. If we go outside, we’ll be arrested.”
Keiran and Mulligan exchange a look.
“I think you underestimate our capabilities,” Keiran says.
“What capabilities?”
“Don’t wanna brag,” Mulligan says unconvincingly, “but if there are twenty better hackers in the world than LoTek and me, I’d be real surprised. I don’t think you quite grok what we can do. Believe me, your buddy Shadbold has fucked with the wrong hombres. Never mind the feds. It’s not like TV. They’re not really that scary. Actually they’re pretty dumb. I guess LoTek’s right, if you just ducked off the grid they’d get you in the end, but we can keep them off your back for, I don’t know, months at least. They’ve wanted me for ten years now, and they still don’t even know my name.”
“They know mine already,” Danielle says.
“That’s okay. We’ll get you a new one.”
She blinks. “What?”
“LoTek and me both got a few spare identities on the shelf. No females, but I’m sure we can make one up for you. You’ll have to change your look in case they eyeball you.”
Keiran runs his fingers through his hair. “Not just you. I intend to develop the world’s most sudden case of male pattern baldness.”
Danielle looks from one of them to the other, trying to work out if they’re serious. Both of them are smiling.
“Are you enjoying this?” she asks, incredulously.
“Well,” Keiran says cautiously, “don’t misunderstand, I wish it hadn’t happened. But given that it has, I have to admit, on the run from the FBI, it does have a certain ring to it.”