Heywood hesitated. “Not sure, Jaime. I know you kids love doing it, but I understand sometimes someone gets caught. Don’t think that’s for me.”
“Relax. It’s fun. We won’t do much, just go in somewhere, browse around, get back out. No one will know. Let’s do a police department? Always cute stuff to look at there. Pick a city.”
“Not sure, Jaime. Really. Playing Peeping Tom? On the police?”
“Hey, come on. We’ll open a few files. See what’s in them. Close them. No one will be the wiser.”
Peeking into files – the lure was strong. Jaime saw the Czar was wavering and so she picked a city. Dallas. A mouse clicked and a flurry of symbols appeared on a screen. Jaime made them come, then made them go away. The rapidity of it, a true visual assault, made the Czar feel giddy, and he decided to blink – as an antidote to hypnotism. His eyelids began going up and down, as regular as a sweeping lighthouse beacon, Jaime describing what she was doing. Heywood tried to grasp her flow, her account of how the records of the Dallas Police Department were being bared, but it sounded like a truckload of jargon which made no sense.
She’d done most of the preliminary work on her laptop at home, so it went fast. With Irv looking on she reviewed the steps. “Footprinting’s done.” Footprinting? “Sort of like casing a joint, Irv. The scanning’s been done too.” Scanning? “Well…before you go into a bank you want to know the positions of the doors and windows. So I did a ping sweep of all the IP addresses.” Behind the blinking lids, Heywood’s eyes were rolling. “And here comes an enumeration.”
Don’t tell me! screamed Heywood’s inner voice. I don’t want to know! But what he said was: “Sure. Gotcha. I know what an enumeration is.”
Jaime’s hacking fingers continued their keyboard dance. She announced they were now no longer visiting the DPD web site with its upstanding messages on recruitment, training and career advancement, but had slipped behind it, and had come up against the DPD system’s firewall. Heywood saw columns of signs and words with backslashes in front and behind, screens coming, screens going, and finally a window listing names. Jaime paused. This screen was tranquil for a moment. It didn’t move. They studied it, Jaime conspiratorially whispering that these were the names of the folks with PINs for accessing DPD databases. We’re gonna ride in with one. Jaime struck another key. In a lower corner a separate, inset screen appeared. It was blank. Patience, Irv, someone’s bound to come back from morning coffee soon. They lay in wait. Then a quiet, low-pitched sound and the inset window showed a name. DURHAMDL.
Lieutenant D.L. Durham back at his station was signing in.
Seven asterisks appeared below Durham’s name. The PIN. Jaime struck more keys. She told Heywood to observe the inset window. He was transfixed. Eyelids ceased blinking. The computer purred and there were three quick gong-like sounds. Jaime counted to five, her finger describing a broad arc in the air. On cue to a snapping of her fingers a script appeared: MYMUMMY.
She grinned. Wanna bet Mr. Durham is one big, mean, ugly man?
Password eavesdropping. Simple really. Heywood licked his lips when Jaime declared they had hitched a ride in on Lieutenant Durham’s strong back.
More pronouncements from Jaime. They were now inside the DPD network. To keep the demo straightforward she wouldn’t escalate the privilege they’d gained. After an exotic display of more rapidly fingered keys, Jaime concluded D.L. Durham was doing parking infractions. Maybe not a lieutenant. Maybe only a clerk. Some parts of the system, ongoing criminal investigations, for example, probably had more complicated access procedures; she wasn’t going to bother with them, since all this was just for fun. On the other hand, the database on closed cases containing the files of convicted criminals was available. And, as D.L. Durham began processing the sins of Dallas double parkers, his doppelgangers moved stealthily into the city’s registry of convicts. They perused the collection. So many files; so many failures, so much perversion, so much to study. It was enough to enliven Heywood. “I’ve always maintained,” he said perkily, “that it’s stimulating being a file clerk. I’ve given my share of pep talks on that.”
Jaime asked him to pick a file and he chose one randomly. It was on a certain Dallas all-star banker, an oil-patch financier. It turned out he had suffocated his wife by grabbing her by the neck as she slept. Along with his latest male lover he had subsequently dismembered her, wrapped the body bits in tarpaulin, and stashed them in the hold of the company jet. The pair then flew off for a vacation in Acapulco. The pilot was requested to make a detour to the east, and over the Gulf of Mexico they discarded the woman piece by piece. The pilot was paid well and kept silent. However, a few months later, the lover sensed his role in the all-star banker’s life was fizzling, that he was slowly becoming just a piece of decoration. It caused him to seethe with frustration. The fateful evening came in a San Francisco club specializing in blond boys from eastern Europe. When the all-star banker looked them up and down with a strong glint in his eye, the lover flipped. He threatened blackmail. Too bad his voice was a few decibels too loud. Justice took its course. The all-star banker was meticulously coached for the trial and consistently assumed the role of victim, saying his lover had railroaded him into everything. He got a dozen years. The lover began his testimony unhelpfully. He described his métier as star-fucker. I do it for a living and it isn’t always easy. The statement was interpreted by the court as bringing clarity. It provided an economic motive for the murder. Right up to his end in the electric chair the lover maintained his métier was noble.
The file animated Heywood. “Pretty good story,” he said. Jaime wanted to know if the Service had any to match it. Heywood replied there were plenty with similar contours, but none with the same dramatic texture. No one, as far as he knew, had ended up in an electric chair. “No star-fuckers in the Service?” Jaime asked lightly. Heywood cleared his throat. “Heartthrobs, Jaime. That’s all we get.”
She was business-like again, saying files could be pilfered, amended, or destroyed. Pilferage was easy, but amendments required an exquisite touch. Care had to be taken to cover your tracks. She described another trick, building a secret entry portal. “You do that in some unlikely location in a network and use it to ride in any time. You don’t need to wait for the parking violations guy to go on-line.” They had a final peek at D.L. Durham who had finished administering the previous day’s double parkers and had just started the No-Parking-Zone infractions. Jaime initiated withdrawal from the DPD. With a final click their excursion to Dallas was history.
“Hope you had a blast, Irv. Don’t worry. No trace left. The point is, something like this happened to you. Someone studied your network, found a way in, established steady access, and when it pleased him, lit the cannon.”
“We’re gonna get that turkey,” the Czar muttered. “We’ll suffocate him by the neck, dismember him, throw the pieces into Hudson’s Bay.”
“Stay cool, Irv. He’s good. You don’t want to destroy that. You never know, you might decide to hire him. I’ll be looking for his entry point and once I’ve got that I’ll construct models of his logic paths. Once the back-up tapes are decoded, you’ll lay your mitts on him soon enough.”
“Forty million years from now,” the Czar sighed. “I look forward to the report.”
“Had a good talk with Ranjit about that,” Jaime replied. “Don’t feel too dished about what he said. Listen…”
More jargon filled the windowless chamber as Jaime reviewed Ranjit’s approach to decryption. She explained why she planned another way but the words were as dizzying as the fickle patterns on Jaime’s computer screens. Heywood started his blinking again. Somehow all he could see was tough files and frail humans. He tried to imagine the work that star-fuckers have to do to get by. He tried to focus on Jaime’s voice too, but he couldn’t consistently pick up its drift.
“…two weeks to get one message on one tape deciphered?” she was saying, “…not frankly something to get too hopped up about. My brot
her’s pioneered a new technique. Get this, Irv. Just the ticket for your generation. He calls it: Targeted Analysis of Binary Usage. TABU! Don’t you love it?”
Heywood repeated the word. Taboo. In the partial light of Jaime’s chamber, his eyes began moving from one monitor to the other, their bright colours changing, dancing, transforming. Brilliant displays, all of them – like the northern lights. He nodded at Jaime’s brother’s title for the new technique. He even made a little joke about working it into the title of his next report to Étienne des Étoiles. “Taboo and Progress, or, Network Resurrection through Taboo.” Jaime giggled lightly, adding her version: TABU Saves the Service.
Even so, questions gnawed at him. Where is this taking me? he asked silently, staring at the oscillating colours on the screens. What does this limitless peeping-tomism mean? So we get instant gratification from spying into files of bankers and their favourite fuckers. So taboos allow us to regain lost knowledge. Does that make things more perfect? In Jaime’s chamber, the Czar remained outwardly enthusiastic, but certain reflections began pressing in on him.
It was because he knew about taboos. On his first posting in Lagos, he arrived with a New Brunswick barn full of them. In the steamy West Africa climate, after a quick marriage to a lively secretary at the British Council, he found himself in a partnership with a young wife who had none. She taught him to drop his taboos one by one. A night came when she was lying on her stomach and he was massaging two porcelain-white buttocks and she whispered in her lovely British accent: Be a darling, Irving, use your imagination. Dark fear, excitement, pleasure. A taboo confronted and swept away. It crowded in on Heywood. Were he and Hannah that different from the banker and his star-fucker? He visualised her…and them…and in Jaime’s chamber, the Czar grew very calm coping with a strong sensation in his groin. “Maybe we could continue this tomorrow,” he suggested, trying to sound saintly.
“Only take a sec, Irv. Hang on.”
The Czar, powerless, slouched forward on the stool. The screen-saver before him showed swirling interstellar gasses forming, dissolving and reforming, great swirls of nebulae. Jaime’s rhythmic voice was that of a priestess chanting.
Take an encrypted message. Separate the binary building blocks. List them. Carry out a statistical analysis of their frequency. Assign a letter of the alphabet to each block using linguistic probability data.
Heywood heard words recited in monotone, but was unable to lift meaning from them. A mental block, he thought. Must be a mechanism that prevents you from getting converted to religion.
Next he was being questioned.
What’s the probability of the letter ‘a’ being used, say 20 times, in a message of, for example, 100 words? What’s the probability of the letter ‘q’ being used 5 times in the same message? What’s the probability of each respectively being used, for example, 30 times and 3 times?
I don’t know, Heywood droned silently to himself at each of Jaime’s questions. I don’t know. I don’t know. And I don’t care.
Yet the monosyllabic chant caressed his ears and was in harmony with the swirling colours on the screens. The combined effect tickled a deep centre of sensation in his brain. How pleasurable, he thought, when he felt his great mass was beginning to free itself from gravity.
TABU matches the countless probabilities of meaning with the binary blocks.
Oh yes, Heywood thought from high up. Hannah and I, we were hotly binary when we searched out boundaries and when we found them we dared cross them and beyond them, we found still richer binary meaning.
Matching, rematching, thousands of times a second, TABU distills kernels of meaning out of an unintelligible mix.
Heywood stopped listening. He was rising fast and reached an altitude from which he gazed back over a terrain of forty years. He saw himself beginning his epoch of free sex with Hannah. With pristine clarity he saw how with each of their innumerable copulations they distilled meaning out of a world that was truly an unintelligible mix.
Little by little, as the first letters are deciphered with a steadily higher probability that they are correct, the remaining letters emerge and because the probabilities are reduced, they start to come quicker.
Come quicker? Or come lazily? Heywood, from far away, sensed Jaime was scrutinizing him. It forced him to lose altitude fast. When she said, “Irv, you okay?” he hit earth with a thud.
He realized in that same moment that hidden under his protruding gut was a good old-fashioned rock-hard dick. He shifted on the stool. “Fine,” he said, looking aside like a guilty child caught in some act.
“For a sec I thought you were swooning.”
“Blood sugar, Jaime. Probably a bit low. Need a doughnut. Thanks for the explanation. Dynamite stuff. Guess you have all the hardware here to get it done.”
“Yeah. Getting the first five letters may take an hour or two, but the last five only a minute. Depending on punctuation marks, use of numbers in a message, the complexity can be higher, but a message can get cracked in three, four hours. I’d like to invite Ranjit in here when I’ve got it done. That okay with you?”
“Invite the world, Jaime. Sure. Sexy stuff, this taboo. Some brother you’ve got.”
“Once I’ve found the server the bug used for entry, I’ll start the decryption full speed. Couple of days and you’ll see first results.”
“Let’s hope taboo delivers.”
“It will, Irv. What my brother tosses together always does.”
When the Czar departed Jaime’s chamber she was humming quietly, beginning her voyage of discovery. Millisecond differentials had to be found between the digital humps on four dozen tapes. She seemed productive and at peace.
Returning slowly to his office some floors up, Irving stuck his hand into his trouser pocket to adjust a dick erect for the first time in many weeks. On the empty staircase, feeling nostalgic, he fondled it a bit.
6 CHAPTER SIX
An exchange of rucksacks at Herridge Cabin.
Of course, there were easier ways to get the Exocet file to Hugh-S, but on the phone he treated the missile plot so casually. Hugh-S often sounded that way – bored by humanity’s sins. So much moral failure, he would shrug through the line that scrambled all our conversations. So many shitheads in queue. It takes time to clean them up, to get around to them one by one. His world, different from the silent observing at which we the watchers excelled, was about blood flowing free, guts spilling out, brutal counter-counter plots and pre-planned pin-point death. Knowing this, I couldn’t help but respond to his nonchalance with irony and so proposed the file drop in a place so remote that not even cell phones work. But operational secrecy, absurd or otherwise, always struck Hugh-S as a wise investment and he hadn’t noticed that I’d spoken tongue-in-cheek.
And so the arrangement stood.
Except the weather that Saturday was foul. The temperature had dropped all night. By morning it was minus thirty with a sharp wind gusting from the north. When I started out on the trail foreboding sat in me like a dead weight. Who had been assigned to meet me? Would Hugh-S’s courier come prepared for extreme conditions? If not, what then? Had I unwittingly become the architect of an operational fiasco?
I skied into the wind, the cold assailing me. It pierced the layers of my high-tech thermal wear, chilling the flesh, biting my face, turning my fingers into stumps that ached. No matter how hard I poled, I could generate no warmth. Racing through savage snow squalls, balaclava clad, in a body-hugging suit, my back covered by a small blue pack vaingloriously adorned with a bright maple leaf flag (held in place by safety-pins), I was a bizarre figure on the winding track. It climbed and fell like a roller coaster, crossed frozen bays and dissected swamps hard as granite. Had someone observed my ten kilometre contest into the wind they would have questioned the purpose. But the forest was deserted. On that bitter day the arctic wind in the trees howled out a dirge; the hostile hills cried out for sacrifice; and the trail with all its icy beauty underlined the fragility of
life.
To my relief, at the cabin, another backpack (maple leaf neatly stitched on) was resting on the snow next to a pair of skis. Hugh-S’s man hadn’t wasted time. I undid my bindings and dropped my pack next to the one there. Immediately, a thick-set figure with the muscular gait of a fullback came out. He wore a black tuque, purple goggles and a baggy, white, military-issue winter coverall. His breath came out in short athletic puffs. The pre-arranged greeting ritual began. Nothing like the great outdoors! He said this in a loud, hail-fellow-well-met voice. As forcefully I answered: Had a good run in? Then he: Oh fine. Fine. Mighty fine. This pre-agreed ridiculous exchange established our bona fides.
Reaching down to take my rucksack he growled, “Bitch of a day. Mother-raping cold wind. Damn near froze my balls off.”
I apologised, saying it turned out to be colder than forecast.
“Bitch of a country too. Who the fuck lives up here?”
Hardy, well-meaning people, I ought to have replied. Instead, I asked what he thought of the trail. He said he liked the uphill parts, and it wasn’t long before I knew he’d been an army colonel who had done NATO survival training in northern Norway. He chatted away for some minutes. “So I thought when they asked, well, here’s a helluva chance to see snow again. But the cold up here…flying fucking Jesus!” He nodded towards the cabin. “No warmer in there.” Taking my pack with the Exocet dossier, he slung it over his shoulders, stepped into his skis and poled off with the momentum of the college football all-star he probably once was. A pole high in the air delivered a last triumphant wave before he disappeared behind a clump of spruce. The great forest had consumed him. I took his pack into the empty cabin, opened it and found the wafer thin, ultra-powerful, special access laptop Hugh-S said he would be issuing me, to make me independent of the still defunct Service network and allow me quicker access to his data products. Digging deeper in the rucksack I also hauled out a frozen banana and some cans of solid Coke.
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