Bring Back Cerberus

by Phillip Gwynne

  But now Imogen, somehow, had given me permission.

  And the enormity of it – I wasn’t running at the nationals, for chrissakes! – was like somebody had rammed a hose down my throat and sucked all my insides up.

  I slumped into the chair and my eyes were wet.

  ‘Dom?’ said Imogen. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but my eyes were more than just wet now.

  They were fountains of wetness.

  I wasn’t running at the nationals, for chrissakes!

  Then Imogen was next to me and her arms were around me and I could smell her smell and feel the soft fabric of her flowery dress.

  My face was next to her face.

  And her lips were on my lips.

  We were kissing.

  And then she quickly drew away.

  Leaving me on another planet, in another solar system, light years away.

  ‘We need to talk, Dom,’ she said.

  The sound of her voice brought me back to earth, back to my room.

  But I couldn’t speak; all I could think of was that kiss, the taste of it as it lingered on my lips.

  ‘I said we need to talk, Dom,’ said Imogen, from where she had retreated, back under Sebastian Coe.

  Her voice managed to find a way through to my head.

  Actually, Im, I’ve been trying to talk to you for weeks. But I wasn’t going to bring that up right now.

  ‘About Tristan’s pool?’ I said tentatively.

  ‘About everything.’

  About everything?

  ‘There’s something going on with you, Dom,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, I’m fifteen. It’s when the test … the test … you know, that male hormone stuff totally kicks in.’

  Imogen just shook her head. ‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’

  It was my turn to shake my head. No, I’m not. No, I can’t.

  ‘But please still be my friend,’ I said. ‘Please, Imogen.’

  Behind her shoulder, another IM box popped up on ClamTop.

  This one was from Fred.

  I got it! he’d written.

  It has to be him, I thought, excitement mounting. This has to be LoverOfLinux.

  My eyes moved from the screen to Imogen in her dress of flowers. To the Imogen I had just kissed.

  She had this look on her face, like she wanted to understand, to help.

  My eyes were dragged back to the screen, to I got it!

  ‘Sorry, Imogen, but I really need to get this,’ I said, pointing to the computer.

  ‘You’re impossible!’ she said, and turned around and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

  I jumped back in front of ClamTop and typed in i saw the news.

  Fred answered meet tonight at usual place.

  Now I had a problem. Obviously I – Snake Hips – knew where the usual place was. Obviously I – Dom – wouldn’t have the foggiest.

  I typed in too dangerous let’s go somewhere else.

  When Fred took a while to answer I guessed that he – or she – was probably suspicious.

  When the reply was saw drops? I quit guessing: he – or she – was definitely suspicious.

  It took me no time to work out that saw drops? was password?

  Obviously they’d agreed on some sort of predetermined code when things got suspicious.

  But what could this password possibly be?

  Apple pie, I thought, remembering the conversation I’d had with Nitmick at the urinal. It just had to be apple pie.

  I typed in apple pie and Fred disappeared.

  I waited for a while, hoping that his phone had dropped out and he’d be back online soon.

  But my wait was in vain.

  I’d lost him.

  SATURDAY

  TRACE ELEMENTS

  ‘I’m out this morning, but Gus is coming across,’ said Mom the next day at breakfast.

  I hadn’t really slept last night. My mind had been like a stormwater drain. Ideas hadn’t stopped pouring into it: how to find LoverOfLinux. But they were cigarette butts, they were ice-cream sticks, they were twigs, they were leaves; these ideas were rubbish.

  And now it was Saturday, the day of Anna’s birthday. The clock was ticking, and ticking very loudly.

  To run or not to run? In the end I decided it wouldn’t be such a bad idea; maybe it would clear some of the detritus from my head.

  ‘I’m going for a run, I’ll be back soon,’ I told Mom.

  I took the usual route down Chirp Street, through Chevron Heights, up the Gut Buster, along the edge of Preacher’s Forest.

  As I passed the main entrance I slowed.

  I couldn’t really say that I liked Preacher’s Forest, that it was the sort of place I’d go for a picnic, but big things had happened to me there: it’s where I got tranquillised, it’s where I drowned the stolen scooter, it’s where the Zolt landed the plane.

  And right then I was feeling desperate.

  The third instalment, which had had so much momentum, had come to a standstill. I needed to kickstart it, and soon.

  I ran through the entrance, took the main path to the lake.

  Despite it being a beautiful morning, there weren’t many people around. And even those people were on mountain bikes.

  So when I caught sight of the back of two figures on my left, I probably paid them a little more attention than I usually would.

  And when I realised that I knew them – it was Brandon and his sister PJ – I paid them even more attention.

  What the hell were they doing here?

  They were street kids, not park kids.

  I wouldn’t say I was actually stalking them, but I did change my direction slightly so as to keep them in sight.

  And when, suddenly, they disappeared from sight, I was in equal parts surprised and intrigued.

  Had they known I was behind them, had they intentionally given me the slip?

  I kept running and it soon became obvious where they’d gone.

  A large metal grate had been removed, giving access to a stormwater pipe.

  Although the pipe was enormous, at least two metres in diameter, there was absolutely no sign of water.

  Did they live down there? I’d heard of people sleeping in the drains. And I remembered those two kids who’d been washed out to sea, their bodies never found. There wasn’t much more to do except file that pretty useless piece of information away – Brandon and PJ possibly live in stormwater drain – and keep moving.

  When I came to the lake I sat down on a dilapidated bench seat. As I watched a duck make its way across the lake’s surface, its wake a perfect vee, I could hear the Preacher in the distance, ranting.

  Even when the Preacher and his ranting got closer I didn’t move.

  Even when I could see him shuffling towards me I didn’t move.

  I needed stuff to happen, I needed to kickstart this instalment.

  The Preacher stopped about a metre away from the bench, all tangled hair and crazy eyes and a smell that would drop a possum.

  ‘And everyone that was in distress, and everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him!’ he said, his voice like a wild animal straining at its leash.

  In distress? In debt? That was discontented?

  Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that he was saying this stuff to me?

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  He stared at me, and it was as though this was the first time I’d ever really seen him. I mean beyond the hair, and beyond the dirt, beyond all the Preacher craziness.

  When I saw him like this, he looked familiar. But more than that, he felt familiar. Almost like he was somebody I could trust.

  He kept staring, and he opened his mouth, and he was going to say something.

  But the mouth closed, no words came out, and he shuffled off.

  I watched him disappear, before turning my attention back to the lake. The duck had disappeared into some reeds, b
ut its wake was still visible, rippling outwards.

  I could understand why Fred had used IM to contact Snake.

  As its name suggested, it was instant, it was transitory, it was real time.

  But did that mean it left no trace?

  Of course not!

  As I was quickly learning, everything you do on a computer leaves a trace. A program will rearrange some bytes, but often, when it’s finished, it won’t bother putting them back again.

  And at the time Fred sent an IM to Snake’s phone, ClamTop was connected to the Network.

  Which meant it would’ve recorded the session.

  Which meant the trail hadn’t gone cold at all!

  Surely there would be the name of the IM client, the DNS, something which would help me to work out who Fred, lover of Linux, was.

  Excited, energised by this revelation, I bounced off the bench and ran at full clip all the way back to Halcyon Grove.

  As I entered through the gates, a yellow and blue courier van exited, turning onto the main road.

  Nothing unusual in that: the residents of Halcyon Grove were always getting stuff couriered to them, especially people like Mrs Havilland who weren’t that keen on going outside.

  Gus and Tristan were sitting at the dining table, setting up the chess pieces.

  ‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ I said to Tristan.

  Gus glared at me.

  But I was in no mood to be nice.

  Nice was before The Debt.

  ‘Oh yeah, bud,’ said Tristan. ‘A courier came to pick that stuff up.’

  ‘What stuff?’ I said, but already I could feel the dread: its bony fingers around my throat, it was already squeezing.

  Gus shrugged. ‘I was late getting here.’

  I took the stairs two at a time. Burst into my bedroom. Snake’s Charon had gone. So had the case. So had the screen.

  Fred, LoverOfLinux, had done exactly what I was going to do, but he’d done it first.

  I rushed downstairs, grabbed two great handfuls of Tristan’s T-shirt.

  ‘You let them go into my bedroom?’ I said, shaking him hard. ‘What were you thinking, you idiot?’

  Gus clamped me by the wrists, squeezed until I released my grip.

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Tristan. ‘It’s just that there were two of them, and they had these forms, and I didn’t see where they went.’

  ‘Two couriers!’ I yelled. ‘When are there ever two couriers?’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Gus. ‘It’s my fault.’

  I looked at him, at the it’s-my-fault look all over his face, and I realised that he was right – it wasn’t Tristan’s fault at all. If Gus had been here, like he was supposed to have been here, then none of this would’ve happened.

  Gus wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, and his stump poked out from the material of his shorts. Right then I hated Stumpy, hated this eyeless alien from a C-grade sci-fi movie more than I’d ever hated him.

  ‘No wonder you couldn’t repay The Debt,’ I said to my grandfather.

  As soon as the words were out I wanted them back.

  And I was about to say something to Gus, to apologise, when my phone rang.

  It was Hound.

  ‘If it isn’t the Puppy Dog,’ I said, feeling kind of reckless now. I mean, could it get any worse?

  ‘You’ve got until midnight,’ said Hound.

  ‘Midnight to do what?’

  ‘Get me that dirt on Guzman.’

  ‘Or what?’ I said. ‘What are you going to do to me, Puppy Dog?’

  It took Hound a while to answer and when he did there was ice in his voice.

  ‘Do you know what I think would be really really difficult?’

  ‘No,’ I said wearily.

  I just wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over my head and sleep until this was all over.

  ‘I reckon it would be really really difficult to make ice-cream if you had ten broken fingers,’ he said. ‘You know, with all that whisking they do.’

  There was ice in his voice and now there was ice in my guts.

  Hound continued. ‘Especially that green tea and lychee ice-cream. A helluva lot of whisking in something like that.’

  He hung up and it was like the terrible threat he’d made was still in the room, filling the room, squeezing me.

  He was bluffing, he had to be. Besides, I had no time to snoop on Guzman, not with the instalment due today, that clock ticking so insistently.

  But what if he wasn’t, what if he really intended to break all my little brother’s fingers?

  I just couldn’t allow my brother’s life to be ruined because of me and my incompetence.

  Something else occurred to me as well: that Guzman was somehow involved with Nitmick and his scheme. On the day we nabbed Nitmick I had the sense that he and Guzman knew each other well. And I knew that Guzman frequented Cozzi’s, so there was the Snake connection.

  Hound was right, it was time to get the dirt on Guzman!

  ‘Everything okay?’ said Tristan. He was sitting there, a bewildered look on his face. And Gus had gone.

  ‘It’s not, actually,’ I said as I bolted for the stairs.

  I guess if there was one good thing that had come out of The Debt it was that I’d acquired a whole new skill set.

  Unfortunately, phone tapping wasn’t yet part of it.

  Good old ClamTop, I thought.

  ClamTop was going to come to my rescue yet again.

  Except it didn’t.

  With it, I could break into networks. With it, I could clone computers. But I couldn’t see any way to tap Guzman’s phone.

  How then?

  I did some googling but couldn’t find what I needed: a Dummy’s Guide to Phone Tapping.

  I tried Astalavista.

  There was some software called PhoneSpy that look pretty promising, but when I downloaded it, my anti-virus program went berserk; it was just one seething mass of Trojan viruses.

  I deleted it, and leant back in my chair.

  Where to from here?

  Where to from here?

  I was just about to go downstairs for some brain food when I had it, a moment that was half d’oh! – of course – and half derr! – why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  I’d already had my own phone tapped.

  Four times!

  By Zoe.

  By Hound.

  By the Federal Police.

  And by Cameron Jamison.

  All I had to do was exactly what they had done.

  Zoe had sent me a SMS which I’d unknowingly opened, inadvertently loading spyware onto my phone.

  Nice, but I just didn’t think that somebody as tech savvy as Guzman was going to be as dumb as I’d been. And if I tried this, and he found out I’d tried it, he’d be even more on his guard.

  No, that wouldn’t work.

  The Federal Police were part of the Federal Government, which meant that they obviously had a few more resources at their disposal than I did. Like the army. The navy. The SAS.

  So that left Hound and Cameron Jamison.

  According to Miranda Hound had used something called an ‘IMSI-catcher’ to monitor my calls.

  And I remembered that day on Reverie Island, all that hi-tech equipment he’d had in his Hummer.

  Easy, I thought, and I could feel the relief, like caffeine, hitting all the right places in my central nervous system.

  I’d just borrow Hound’s IMSI-catcher – how easy was that? I was working for him, after all.

  So I sent him a text: need to borrow imsi-catcher.

  The reply came back within seconds: don’t know what you’re talking about.

  That was weird, I thought, but when I pondered it a bit longer it didn’t seem so weird.

  Maybe Hound thought his text messages were being monitored.

  Maybe Hound didn’t even have an IMSI-catcher.

  Maybe Hound just wanted to test me.

  Maybe he was telling the truth!


  Whatever the answer, it seemed pretty obvious that I had to get my own IMSI-catcher.

  Some further googling revealed that, surprising enough, there were spy shops where you could actually buy one.

  There was a model called IMSI Snaffler.

  A model called the Tactical GSM Interceptor.

  And another one called Guardian Identity Catcher.

  All of them, as far as I could gather, would be perfect for what I wanted.

  But there was only one problem: all these spy shops that sold the IMSI-catchers were in the UK.

  And when I went to the site of an Australian spy shop and entered imsi-catcher or even just imsi into the site’s search field, I got absolutely no results.

  Obviously, it was illegal to sell an IMSI-catcher in Australia.

  Which sort of made sense.

  But did that mean that the spy shops didn’t sell them under the counter?

  There was only one way to find out.

  SATURDAY

  SPY SHOP

  Will Goodes and Matt Robertson, two kids at school, had been raving about this totally awesome new spy shop that had opened up in Surfers.

  ‘It’s got a camera in a Coke can!’ said Will Goodes.

  ‘It’s got a voice recorder in a watch!’ said Matt Robertson.

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said another kid. ‘And what possible use would you have for those?’

  Plenty of possible uses, I’d thought at the time.

  I’d promised myself that I’d go check it out, this totally awesome new spy shop, but I hadn’t got around to it yet.

  Not until now.

  Getting there involved two bus rides.

  The first was uneventful, the usual kid-takes-a-bus scenario: kid gets on bus, kid buys ticket, kid finds a seat, kid gets off bus.

  But on the second bus, as I sat near the back, further researching IMSI-catchers on my iPhone, two older kids sat in front of me.

  They were tough kids, tough-as kids, who had their tough-kid status written all over them: tough-kid clothes, tough-kid faces, and when the taller of the two talked, it was in a tough-kid voice.

  ‘Grammar boy,’ he said.

  ‘Actually, I’m currently on suspension from that particular institution,’ I said, eyes moving from my iPhone, looking the tough kid right in his tough-kid eyes.