by George Noory
Torn but determined she undid the front of her pants and reached down, pulling out a tiny transmitter taped to the inside of her thigh.
Closing her eyes, fighting back tears, she pressed the transmission button.
70
Greg stared at the closed bathroom door, sorry that he was adding to Ali’s hell, sorry that they were so close emotionally and so far apart intellectually in how they saw the world and the dangers surrounding them. He knew she was struggling and he wanted to comfort her. To protect her. Hold her in his arms.
He had never completely trusted her and he still didn’t, but trust was no longer an issue. She appeared ready to bolt. He just wondered what direction she would run—and what it would mean to him.
He shifted his weight in the chair and felt a bulge in his coat pocket that rubbed up against the side of the chair. It was the junk mail he had taken and shoved into his pocket at the front desk of his apartment building when he was still there. He took the envelopes and fliers out, merely glanced at them and tossed them in the trash can next to the desk.
His eye caught scribbled writing on a piece of mail and he reached back into the can and took the item out. It was the take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant. His name and address were handwritten in the otherwise blank address block with awkward block letters by someone who hadn’t spent too much time in school learning penmanship but whose fingers probably would fly across a keyboard.
Most important, the restaurant was the one below the apartment of Ethan’s girlfriend in Culver City.
Greg’s hands trembled as he tore open the folded advertisement, pulling the ends apart from the staple.
His name was not inside, nor was Ethan’s. There was no ordinary message, at least not one that he was capable of reading, but there was a set of numbers and letters and an Internet address, all scribbled in that awkward hand that had put his name in the address slot.
And he understood what Ethan was telling him—it was a link to a Web site and the key that would open a file. He recognized that the Web site was to a government agency.
He tried to hold back but couldn’t help himself—he started laughing, holding his hand over his mouth to keep from howling at the utter cleverness of it. Ethan had not lied. He had in fact given the file to Greg. Or more precisely, he had told Greg where to find the file and how to open it.
Incredible. Ethan, the computer whiz, geek, cracker, hacker, high-tech savant who played with computers when other boys were kicking balls or working on their car had fooled everyone. He had hidden the message in plain sight. On an advertising flier with a postage stamp.
Snail mail. No one on the planet—even those who had recently arrived—would suspect Ethan of using the slow and notoriously inept United States Postal Service to deliver something he could have sent to Greg in a flash, at the speed of bits and bytes. Instead the flier had been carried by small and big mail trucks, to and through processing centers, and back out onto the roads by another gas-burning, pollution-causing truck before ending up with a pizza parlor menu and store coupons, junk mail he and every other resident in the building received daily.
On top of that Ethan had hidden the actual electronics file at an Internet-accessible location of the government.
It was so simple, so deceptive, so unexpected from Ethan, beyond clever; it was a master stroke of genius. Yet sad. Ethan was dead. So were Rohan and Bob. Maybe others.
He hoped that revelation of what was in the file was worth the lives of innocent people.
Now he had to decide what to do next.
71
Ali stepped out of the bathroom after replacing the transmitter and repairing the damage to her makeup that tears had caused.
She knew from Greg’s face that something had happened.
“What is it?”
He held up an advertising leaflet. “This. Ethan did send me the file, at least the link to it. By snail mail, not e-mail. Ali, he wrote the information on a flier he’d probably received himself, put a stamp on it and sent it to me.”
She stood unmoving, stunned. “I don’t believe it.” She rushed to him and grabbed the leaflet and skimmed it, shaking her head. “Oh my God, he hid the file at the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission! What a joke; they regulate radio.”
“My show and everyone else’s.”
“He must have been laughing like crazy when he stuck it there.” She yelped. “I still can’t believe it. He really did send the file to you. No wonder no one could find it. Who would have ever thought he’d be so clever?”
“It was inspired on Ethan’s part,” Greg said. “We—they—all of us, had a mind-set that a guy like Ethan who teethed on a computer would use the tools he knew. The government has behind it thousands of analysts and a trillion dollars’ worth of incredibly complex computers at the NSA, NRO, FBI, CIA and those other capital-letter entities capable of tracking every move everyone on the planet makes. They know the number of times a terrorist in Afghanistan takes a piss, but Ethan put it over everyone by simply snail-mailing the information on a piece of common advertising.”
He threw up his hands. “You know what? I almost tossed it away. Hell, I did toss it and had to dig it out of the trash.”
“This is—it has to go to the Aarons. They’ll help for sure now.”
“I’m not giving it to the Aarons. I don’t trust them. They’re insiders working to keep the government from taking away our freedom. They came at me with threats, threatened to turn me into the people they’re supposed to oppose.”
“You didn’t give them what they wanted.”
“I didn’t have what they wanted, you know that. And who are these people? Wannabe whistleblowers? I think they’re hacking into the systems because that’s their obsession. And they’ll release secret information even if it hurts the country because they’re more interested in breaking open secret files and letting the world know they managed it than they are in our national security. Besides, we don’t know what’s in the file, whether there’s stuff in it that can hurt the country. They haven’t given me any reason to trust them. I’ll go to them if I think it’s the best route after we find out what we’re dealing with.”
“It can’t be done in five minutes. Ethan was too clever for that. He’ll make it harder to access than you think.”
“I don’t think so. It looks like he’s given me a link and a password. Even I can manage that. Besides, we have all night. And so far you’ve proven to be pretty clever when it comes to hacking into programs.” He got up and headed for the bathroom. “Give me a minute and then let’s open the file and check it out.”
He went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.
She stood still, staring at the bathroom door and then at the flier in her hands, her heart pounding, emotion welling up in her as she hesitated, not knowing which way to turn.
When he came out of the bathroom, she was gone.
So was the flier he gave her.
72
Greg had expected it, knew before he left the bathroom that she would be gone, but it was still a blow. She had seemed more and more torn between two forces, between a growing attachment to him and loyalty to something else. The something else won out in the end.
He went out the door and stepped to the railing and looked down to the parking lot. She waited with her back to him as a car pulled up and stopped.
The front passenger door of the car opened and a big man whose flabby body was swollen by too much fast food and sugar drinks stepped out. Aaron 11—whatever—looked up at Greg. Ali showed the advertising flier to the Aaron and the man gave Greg a smirk.
Ali turned and looked up at him, too. He kept his features blank, but he felt a hot flush of anger, not at her but at the insane situation that had driven a wedge between them.
She held his gaze for only a second, her features frozen to control guilt and regret, before quickly getting into the car and shutting the door. The Aaron slipped into the passenger seat and the ca
r pulled away.
Greg watched until the car had left the parking lot and disappeared down the street.
He stayed at the railing for another moment, not wanting to go back inside, hating that his gut feeling from the very beginning had come true—he couldn’t trust her. Like the other Aarons, she was a hacker on a mission to crack open the government’s secrets. He wished she had trusted him, had accepted the fact that he would not back away from exposing wrongdoing but wouldn’t operate blindly.
He went into the room with the musties and shut and locked the door behind him before pulling out the Chinese restaurant menu.
He had given Ali a mailer from a pizza parlor. And wrote different but similar information on it. Ethan hadn’t hidden the file at the Federal Communications Commission, which supervised radio and television, but at the Department of Agriculture unit that dealt with brain-melting mad cow disease.
Ethan’s contemptuous poke at the world was telling. Sometimes the world was spinning so fast it did make a person’s brain feel like it was melting down.
Greg had newfound respect for the guy. He may have been wasted on drugs, but there was more depth about him than being just a hacker. Ethan lacked everyday common sense but had a deep understanding not about life in general, but about the esoteric world of electronics. He knew how dangerous the world had become as people were pushed aside and “intelligent” machines that worked faster and more efficiently than the human mind took over—at the same time people became so accustomed to the ease of technology that they stopped using their brains.
Machines could be made smarter than humans about most things, they could add and subtract quicker, beat masters at chess and even do surgery on people and other machines more efficiently, but Ethan understood that they didn’t have hearts or souls or comprehend pain or the joys of love.
Alone in the room, Greg wished Ali were there. He should have come clean with her and got her to stay and help him out. But he knew that was a daydream. She was one of them, whatever they were. And he knew he had deliberately driven her away out of fear for her, fear that the powers out to stop them would succeed.
Being with her on the run, facing real danger rather than the threats he only envisioned, made him realize that his problem with relationships wasn’t just being a workaholic with a job that kept him out all night, but fear that whoever he drew close to might fall victim to the hounds of hell that had dogged him.
That was how he thought of the entities that had taken him as a youth and again as a man. They were diabolical, relentless bastards. Yes, they were technologically advanced but the fact they kept hidden and pulled strings told him that their intentions were not honorable. They kidnapped people to examine them as if humans were lab rats. They didn’t accept the people of earth as equals.
So what was their game? He was certain that’s what Ethan had discovered. And why the young hacker was killed and why other deaths had followed.
No doubt Ethan didn’t just tell people that he was working with Greg, he actually thought he was. Despite his great insights into the world of electronics, Ethan didn’t seem to always have his feet firmly planted, even when reality to him wasn’t twisted by drugs. He may have wished he was teamed with Greg, a person who could broadcast his findings to the world. And that wishful thinking became an actuality to him, literally a virtual reality.
Greg had cut him off from the show—was that what Ethan meant when he said Greg killed him? That Greg had cut him off from the protection he thought he’d get from Greg after cracking open the God Project?
The money was transferred from his account right after that. Ethan may have deluded himself into thinking it was okay because he needed proof to the Aarons that he was legit and working with Greg in order to have a source to put it out to the world. And he would need money to get out of Dodge.
Working his way through Ethan’s mind, he was sure Ethan was naive enough to believe that all would be forgiven in the end because he was giving Greg something sensational.
Was it sensational? Ethan’s mind was often polluted with drugs but he had enough sense to cleverly hide the file and even more shrewdly get the information to Greg. If Ethan had that much of a grip on reality, Greg was sure the hacker wouldn’t have sent him something benign or even stupid.
But how was he going to open the file? He needed a computer with access to the Internet. He could buy a computer and take the risk of being captured soon after his credit card was scanned. It was too late anyway—malls and electronics stores were closed.
Internet cafés were still in existence even though most people now used their cell phones for access. He went to the scarred desk in the room and found a phone book in the top drawer.
He sat back down on the bed to leaf through the book and glanced back at the desk as he thought about driving to an Internet café.
The car keys weren’t there.
He made a quick search of the room and bathroom. Nada. She had taken the keys. Why? To strand him. So he could be caught? No, he didn’t think she would do that. Didn’t want to think that she would do that. More likely she took the keys so he wouldn’t be able to pursue them to get the flier back. That had to be it. He could understand her taking access to the file out of her own sense of justice in terms of what information to release, but he refused to believe that she had deliberately stranded him to make it easier for the killer or the government to find him.
He also needed to make a decision about which newsperson to contact. He needed someone with guts and enough pull to get the entire news organization behind him. He knew several news media people from rubbing shoulders with them at events but not on a personal basis.
He heard a noise at the room door and looked over. Someone was trying the door handle. He got to his feet as the door crashed open.
73
The man in a utility company uniform stood in the doorway with his “meter reader” in hand. God’s warrior had arrived, with fire, brimstone and a sardonic grin.
“Gas leak?” Leon asked.
As Greg froze in surprise the self-appointed avenging angel pushed the trigger on the weapon.
A green laser beam traveling at the speed of light flashed across the room and exploded in Greg’s eyes, sending a shockwave through his brain. He staggered back, blinded and disoriented. It felt like acid had just been thrown into his eyes.
He dropped to his knees, his hands clawing at his eyes as if he was trying to pull the pain from them.
The weapon Leon used was not a stun gun, though it also had the effect of stunning the person—it was a dazzler, a laser weapon developed for the military to temporarily disable a person with a blow to the eyes.
The handheld one he carried walloped and disoriented a person with a blast of directed radiated energy that temporarily caused blindness.
In Iraq and other war zones, dazzlers larger than Leon’s handheld weapon were mounted on rifles used to disorient drivers who didn’t heed warnings to reduce their speed as they approached military checkpoints. Larger versions of dazzlers were mounted on warships and battle tanks.
The stunning, blinding effect lasted only a few minutes. Greg’s vision was blurred by a changing array of movement and colors melting into each other in kaleidoscopic patterns.
Leon entered the room and closed the door behind him.
Greg knew the man was coming for him but he only saw a hazy dark figure. He struggled to his feet to meet an attack.
Leon sidestepped Greg and whacked him on the side of the head with the weapon, sending Greg back down to his knees.
“You caused me a lot of trouble,” Leon said. “God wasn’t happy that you got off that mountain.”
He kicked Greg in the ribs, knocking him sideways to the floor.
“Before that you got my balls kicked because you made me try to run you down on the street.”
He walked around Greg and kicked him in the face.
“You destroyed my perfect record. That caused me a lot of pain.”
He reached down and grabbed a handful of Greg’s hair and jerked his head back. “You took something from my master and he wants it back.” He let go of Greg’s hair and slipped the laser gun into a leather holster strapped to his hip.
He checked the two outside pockets to Greg’s coat. Not finding what he was looking for, he jerked the coat open and checked an inside breast pocket and pulled Greg’s wallet out. He went through the wallet, took out the money and tossed the billfold aside. He knew he shouldn’t take the money, but this time he wouldn’t let the Voice know he had it.
Greg’s eyes poured tears but he had enough vision to see the man’s form. He reared back and threw a punch but he was still disoriented and clumsy. Leon easily blocked the blow and punched him in the face.
“I’m not supposed to cut your throat but if you do that again I’ll take the pain for disobeying an order just for the pleasure of seeing you bleed out like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”
Greg knew not getting his throat cut wasn’t an act of mercy—his death would be a clean kill, another suicide.
Leon straightened up and started pacing, his anger rising from his frustration. He pulled out a knife hidden inside his shirt. “Where is it?” As he was losing his control from rising rage, he suddenly felt a jolt of medication. He quivered for a moment and then stood very still, feeling warmth and a calm as his violent impulse faded. Erasing rage didn’t make him a nicer person—it simply kept him on the straight-and-narrow murderous track he had been put on.
Leon put away the knife and began to move around the room, muttering to himself, “Computer stuff, that’s what it would be. On a computer, a tablet or one of those little gadgets no bigger than a finger.”
Greg concentrated, trying to get control of his own body. His vision was no longer kaleidoscopic but it was still too blurred to see detail. He tried to form in his mind’s eye what his eyes couldn’t make out. The man was not much bigger than him. Heavier, but some of that was blubber. They were about the same height. The man had stunned him with a blast of light, probably a laser that hit him in the eyes. He had felt the weapon on the man’s hip when they brushed against each other, but wouldn’t know how to operate it even if he got his hands on it.