Night Talk

by George Noory

  “You heard it from a hacker’s mouth,” Greg told his audience.

  Unfortunately, besides having tech knowledge the young hacker also had a recreational drug habit that cranked him up. He had behaved himself on the radio until a week ago when he suddenly started dropping f-bombs. The show had an FCC-mandated seven-second delay that permitted the host or producer to keep broadcasting sins off the air and Greg used it to erase the profanity. If the show hadn’t taken action, the FCC would have levied a fine.

  Ethan was permanently barred from the show, but that didn’t keep him from calling and at first begging for another chance, and when it was refused, leaving messages for Greg that he was on to something big and needed Greg’s help. Not just big, but world shattering.

  Like Greg and so many of the show’s listeners, Ethan questioned the necessity and objective of government putting its own citizens under microscopes, invading every aspect of their lives. What was the necessity of the government gathering so much information about its citizens? To be able to identify everyone by their facial features or know and store everything a person has said or written on their phone, e-mail or social networking?

  Along with the government’s unnecessary intrusions into the lives of its people were corporations whose microscopes on people were even more powerful than the government’s. Businesses know what food we eat, books we read, movies we watch, clothes we wear, who we admire and who we hate—even the sex toys we buy and who we use them with.

  Everyone has been split apart, Ethan said, dissected in a thousand different ways so businesses can pinpoint exactly what our needs and desires are and dangle them before us. And all that information is available to the government.

  Despite his own computer expertise, Ethan was concerned by the dilemma and plight faced by living in a world that had become so high-tech and complex electronically that few could deal with it. He was wildly idealistic about how the world should be and darkly pessimistic about how he saw it. For Ethan, the glass wasn’t half full or half empty but filled with nitroglycerin.

  “Better talk to him, Greg. He’s not rational. He wants you to come to a window. He says he wants to show you something across the street.”

  “Show me what? That he can fly? We’re ten stories up. What’s to be gained by playing his game?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t have a good feeling about it. He’s even weirder than before. It scares me. He might be the type who would drop in with a gun to settle his grievances.”

  “The world is out of control when we have to worry that we’re going to be killed by some suicidal narcissistic bastard who thinks mass murder is his way to fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “Good line. Use it on the show sometime. In the meantime, let’s pacify the guy so he doesn’t go postal.”

  “I don’t think Ethan’s the gun type. He’d be more likely to attack an enemy by infesting their computer with a terminal virus. He probably got a bad dose of something he cooked up himself. Tell him I’m not talking to him and not to call again. He’s been eighty-sixed permanently.”

  “Greg … could you please talk to him? Just for a minute. He sounds really depressed. All we need is an angry hacker with a grudge to direct our broadcasts to Mars.”

  “Oh my God—so now we’re being held hostage to drugged-out crazies with computer skills? This guy can hold a computer program to our head and demand our money or our lives?”

  Soledad threw up her hands. “Welcome to the world you talk about five nights a week.”

  “If this is where technology has gotten us, I want to get off at the next digital exit. C’mon, I surrender; let’s get to a window. It’s showtime.”

  There were no exterior windows in the broadcasting room and he followed Soledad to the front office, where a large window provided a view of the building across the way and the street below. The glass was coated with dew. Greg slid the window open.

  There was nothing to see directly across the street except a building being renovated. It was two stories higher than the building they were in.

  Soledad spoke into the phone. “Ethan? I’m putting Greg on. Listen, we’re all tired around here. You have thirty seconds and then I’m cutting you off.”

  Greg took the phone and leaned out the window, peering down, trying to spot Ethan on the street ten stories below. The street was dark and deserted, as was most of the business area of downtown at this time of night.

  “All right, I’m here,” Greg said. “What do you want?”

  “You did this, you did it!” Ethan shouted. His voice was hoarse, panicked.

  “Did what?”

  “You killed me!”

  “What—”

  “Look at me!”

  Greg heard breaking glass and looked up. It came from a twelfth-story window of the building across the street. Glass exploded out, propelled by a body that came out behind it.

  In a rain of glass Ethan Shaw flew down a dozen stories to a concrete sidewalk.

  YOU ARE A SUSPECT

  Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a virtual, centralized grand database. To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you—passport application, driver’s license and toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the FBI, your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance—and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a Total Information Awareness about every U.S. citizen.

  This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario …

  William Safire, The New York Times (2002)

  The “Total Information Awareness” program capturing literally every movement of every US citizen was in fact put into effect by Congress as the Information Awareness Office (IAO) in 2002 and later defunded after objections were made. However, the 2013 NSA revelations revealed that major parts of this “mass surveillance” system of US citizens was kept funded and still operates in secret by changing the names of the programs.

  4

  You killed me.

  The words, a wild, crazy accusation, had no meaning to Greg as he burst out of the building and ran out onto the street where death had happened. Soledad and the rest of the staff rushed out behind him.

  Ethan’s body was crumpled facedown on the Broadway sidewalk, his head in a pool of blood. There was no movement. The drop had been over a hundred feet onto concrete.

  Greg stopped short of the body. Gawking would dishonor the dead. Soledad and the others went by him. He said, “Don’t—” intending to tell them not to touch the body but stopped because someone should at least make sure the young man was dead.

  He was petrified and shivered, not from the cold, but from the tragedy. A life had ended. Suddenly. Violently. He had been in a serious car accident once as thousands of pounds of metal suddenly banged and crunched into each other. For moments afterward the accident had felt unreal to him, as if he were in a mental twilight coming out of a dream. That was how he felt now. The body and blood didn’t seem real. The horror did.

  Sudden death was a strange business. Nothing fit in place. It was all the more perplexing because he didn’t know Ethan well enough to understand what drove the young man to kill himself.

  You killed me.

  What the hell had he been talking about? Why would he say something so crazy? He tried to remember what else Ethan had said but his brain froze and wouldn’t back up.

  He looked up at the building that the hacker had burst out of. It was too dark to make out the broken window. But it was unbelievable. Incomprehensible. Ethan had spoken to him on the phone and then flung himself through the window. A dozen stories down. Propelled by what? Met
h? Coke? Some new street compound that fried brains?

  Soledad got on her cell phone as she walked back toward Greg. A good show runner, she was the one who called the police. There may have been other calls to 911 but it was after three in the morning and only a couple cars had passed. Greg didn’t see any pedestrians when he stepped out of the broadcast building. The only people at the body were staff members.

  A police car pulled up and officers shooed everyone back from the body and took a quick look. EMT arrived with a blaring siren and examined the body for life as officers taped off the area.

  Greg sent the staff home except for Soledad before the coroner and evidence teams arrived and went to work. The others had witnessed nothing. Soledad had seen the falling body but had not heard the accusation Ethan made over the phone to Greg.

  Plainclothes officers were the last on the scene. Greg gave his statement to a female sergeant while Soledad was taken aside and gave hers to the sergeant’s male partner.

  Ethan was identified by the contents of his wallet. None of the radio program’s staff had ever seen him.

  Greg had no explanation for Ethan’s wild accusation and had little to offer about the young man, period. “I never met him in person,” he told the officer. He cringed when he related what Ethan had said. “I have no clue as to what he was talking about. I never met him,” he said again. Ditto for having no clue as to whether Ethan had a spouse or family the police could contact.

  The sergeant had an explanation for Ethan’s dying words. “The guy was high on drugs, upset because he couldn’t get on a radio show. He wasn’t a virgin when it came to a needle. People with fried brains don’t need a rational basis to blame others for their problems or even to kill them or themselves—the dope provides all the hallucinations they need.”

  Soledad and Greg stayed and watched the coroner’s people and crime investigators prepare the body for transport and take pictures. The sergeant told him entry had been made through a back door that had been kicked in. Then up the service elevator to the top floor, which was vacant and gutted like the rest of the building.

  “That twelfth-floor suite had floor-to-ceiling windows,” she said. “They scare me just standing by them even when they’re not broken. I think the guy just took a run and crashed right into the window. Probably thought he could fly and went out flapping his arms.”

  The image shook Greg. He’d heard about a high-rise-building manager showing an office with big floor-to-ceiling windows that didn’t look like anything was holding them in place. When asked by the prospective tenant how safe the windows were, the manager showed off by hitting a window with his shoulder. The window gave and he fell through. When Greg heard the story, he wondered what the guy was thinking on his way down.

  Greg’s own high-rise apartment had floor-to-ceiling windows but ones that looked more anchored than those in the building Ethan crashed through.

  Soledad stayed closer to the body so she could hear what was being said by the crime scene techs. Greg hung back, leaning against the wall next to the door to the building that housed his broadcasting studio, watching the parade of officialdom come and go.

  He spotted someone in the entryway of a closed store across and half a block up the street. A woman wearing a dark, hooded overcoat. She was too far away for him to see her facial features or even tell her age. From her body language he was sure she realized that he was looking in her direction.

  She left the doorway and walked quickly in the direction opposite of the police activity and disappeared around a corner.

  When the police and other agencies wrapped up and the body was gone, the night was quiet, the street deserted again except for him and Soledad.

  Greg felt empty.

  Death was a lonely business even for the living.

  5

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” Greg told Soledad.

  Her car was in a secured lot down the street and they headed for it, walking slowly down Broadway. The only sign of life on the street this late except for an occasional passing car was the glow of a liquor store sign.

  South Broadway had three or four traffic lanes, depending on where you were standing, and a faded 1950s look: shopworn low-rise buildings selling shoes, clothing, booze, hamburgers, tacos; jewelry stores; bridal shops; and both pharmacies and farmacias.

  The street looked ready for urban revitalization or a wrecking ball. Greg was on a committee trying to keep wrecking balls off the street.

  “You have to call Liz,” Soledad said.

  He had already thought of that. Liz Tucker was the in-house attorney the network assigned to the show. She would have to be told that Ethan had called to announce he was going to kill himself and about the strange accusation.

  “Liz is in Aspen for her son’s wedding,” Greg said. “I’ll call her later.”

  Soledad wore her hair pulled back in a severe bun. In her fifties, she had dark hair with creeping gray she didn’t attempt to hide. She didn’t have the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes ironed away, either. She accepted and welcomed her age rather than trying to airbrush the years away.

  She ruled the studio staff with the stern but benevolent efficiency of a drill sergeant, leaving him free to focus on dealing with millions of listeners.

  “Why would he do such a thing?” she asked as they walked.

  The question of the day. “The cop had a good explanation. She said Ethan had an altered perception of reality from using too many drugs too often. Crystal meth was the likely candidate. Cheap and easy to get. Or to cook up yourself if you did an Internet search for a recipe and could get your hands on some cough syrup or cold pills with pseudoephedrine in them.”

  Feelings of panic and paranoia were common side effects and Ethan sounded on the phone as if he was experiencing both altered states. You killed me. Greg wondered what the hell he’d meant.

  With the pulsating lights and uniformed techs gone, the area had shut back down. Downtown L.A. in the wee hours was even more deserted than the center of many other great metro areas because the city-center streets were ones of faded glory—the city’s pulse had moved closer to the ocean to something called the West Side, with Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and West Hollywood thrown in, none of which was actually part of L.A. but rose like concrete islands as the city swept west to the coast.

  He chose downtown for his broadcasting studio over beach towns and the Valley because he liked the moody, darkly atmospheric, almost film noir atmosphere of the area, which had been too long forgotten but was haunted by the ghosts of movie palaces from the Golden Age of Hollywood and visions of grand days long gone.

  Tonight the street no longer felt like a fit for Greg. Ethan’s body would always be there, not on the ground but in his head each time he came and went into the building. It would take a while to get the studio moved, but he’d start thinking about a new location from which to broadcast.

  They walked under the marquee of the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway. The theater was nearly a hundred years old and was one of the first great movie palaces. He loved movies, and old classics were his favorites.

  “I wonder what he meant,” Soledad said.

  He knew what she was referring to. The last words from Ethan. A bizarre accusation.

  “I don’t know. Some thought generated by whatever chemical cocktail cooked his brain.”

  “He’d called earlier.”

  “Earlier this evening?”

  She shook her head. “No, the last couple of days. I didn’t pass on the calls because he was only a little crazy. Not threatening. He said they were trying to play God.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “He never said and I didn’t ask, but if you remember his hot point over the air to you was the overwhelming intrusion into our lives by the government and business. Not that I blame him. People used to worry whether having a social security number would permit the government to keep track of them. Today we can’t watch a movie, buy a loaf of bread, make a
phone call or send a text message without some governmental or business entity storing the information.”

  “Worse than that,” Greg said. He nodded at the bank across the street. “We’re being filmed right now not only by cameras at the ATM but by most of the businesses on this street. Getting to work in the morning in any big city means getting filmed dozens of times; I’ve heard as much as a couple hundred times when you add in all the traffic cams. A lot of people are bothered by it, but Ethan was particularly agitated.”

  “Angry,” Soledad said.

  “Maybe he was just more aware of it than the rest of us because he was aware of how intrusive electronics can be. Did he ever tell you which government agency he worked for?”

  She shook her head. “When I interviewed him for airtime he said he wasn’t allowed to disclose where he worked, but hinted it was secret stuff. I took it to be something to do with terrorism because everything secret today seems to head that way. He said he got caught hacking into someplace and got one of those get-out-of-jail-free cards by testing security systems for the good guys.”

  “He had a dark view of the future, like many of us. He talked about how mass surveillance created by the electronic tracking that is recording everything we do has paved our way to being controlled from birth to death, that we’re already there and just don’t know it. He mentioned 1984 the first night he was on. He said it was the only novel he read in school that stuck with him.”

  In Orwell’s 1984, a totalitarian regime ruled through mass surveillance. People in the dystopian book were constantly reminded that “Big Brother” was watching.

  “Ethan’s not the only one,” she said. “I can’t surf the Internet without ads targeting me because my buying history has been recorded and sold to businesses. I can’t get away from it no-how. When I go through a thirty-day supply of pills I get a message from my pharmacy. Remember the condoms?”