“Relax,” she said. “I am now a tabloid cartoon character. I am Teen Beauty Brutally Buggered by Burly Blond Beasts in a secret Nazi bunker, and I only barely escaped being sold to space aliens as a sex slave by the NVA, in exchange for a death ray. Everyone agrees that I had a horrible and soul-rending experience, I am a pitiful little victim, and everyone wants to be my friend and give me a big hug, and then hear all the juicy details so they can call all their friends and talk about me. If anything, your being seen with me is good camouflage. After all, I would hardly be sitting down next to my heartless and cruel abductor, now would I?”
Cody twisted a non-existent, lengthy black moustache. “Ya ha ha! Give me the deed to your father’s ranch, little girl, or I shall tie you to the railroad tracks forthwith! But seriously, folks, to what do I owe the pleasure? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were a drama queen—wait, actually I did.”
“Hey, Emily, I heard about what happened!” said one of the girls in the class, sliding over to them in the row behind. “I am so upset and so glad you got out of it okay. It must have been terrifying!”
“Thanks, Betsy,” said Emily. “Look, I know everybody’s curious, so I’ll tell you guys all about it at lunch so I don’t have to be constantly repeating it over and over again. There’s not much you didn’t hear on TV, anyway. It was just a really shitty night.” She gave a slight sniff and a small, barely perceptible tremble. She used a voice that was at once shaky and slightly irritable, exactly right for a bitchy girl who knew perfectly well that all the cool girls considered her to be a skank, but who had just witnessed two murders, had narrowly escaped death herself, who was trying to pass it off as no big deal when everyone really knew it was, and yet who was unable to resist getting some brief attention from the cool girls as a kind of freak. It was perfect, in character, and convincing.
“Sure, I understand,” said Betsy, patting her shoulder sympathetically before moving back to her seat with the promise of lunchtime revelations for her friends.
“You’re good,” said Cody quietly.
“I have to be,” she said. “Joe wouldn’t have done anything to me. If he’d known he probably would have puked in fear and begged me to call it off. But Jake was a mean bastard, and sneaky. If he’d even suspected, he would have got me off somewhere alone and capped me, and collected the hundred grand for himself.”
“I don’t know,” said Cody. “You’re pretty quick with that blade. You ever use it?” She looked at him. “Sorry,” he said. She was right; it was none of his business, personally or NVA-wise. Nor was it any of his business what she had done to get close to Krajewski and Kaplan and convince them she was a Concussion groupie. Even a relatively new kid on the block like Cody knew better than to ask that. He reflected with amazement that this skinny and homely girl next to him, one class behind him and so about a year younger, was in fact an agent of the NVA’s dreaded Third Section and had quite possibly killed more men than his own measly single kosher corpse. “How did it go with the cops and FBI?” he asked. “I mean, obviously they bought it, or you wouldn’t be here. But did they give you a hard time?”
“I told them you were asking me all kinds of questions about Chris Brannigar, the Homeland Security agent we met that night. They figure you were really after him more than the other two,” she told him. “They believed that because Brannigar’s paranoid anyway. He left the Strawberry early because he didn’t want to go home after nightfall, if you can believe that. Big badass Fed, and he’s scared of the dark. Then when I showed them my scars that pretty much clinched it, and they believed me.”
“I didn’t hit you that hard!” protested Cody in a whisper.
She held up her right arm and Cody saw a livid red circular burn mark, and she surreptitiously lifted her blouse and showed another on her stomach. “There’s a couple more in places I can’t show you in public. I borrowed a cigar from Bobby Bells and did them on myself before I called the cops from the convenient store.”
“Oh Jesus!” whispered Cody, conscience-stricken. “You didn’t have to go that far!”
“Yes, comrade,” she returned irritably, “As a matter of fact I did have to go that far. The Feebs are vile, but they aren’t stupid and they’re not naïve. They wouldn’t have bought some poor little victimized girly act without proof, and it had to be the real McCoy. Yeah, it hurt like hell, but it was worth it. Those electrical thingies the FBI puts on you in the chair for their little intimate interrogations hurt a hell of a lot more.”
Cody sighed. “Look, I’ve told you I screwed up and I’m sorry. I don’t know what more I can do. Anyway, why are you here, in this class?”
“I’m going to be learning to express myself through the dramatic arts,” she told him. “My mom is always either at church getting saved for the four hundredth time, or else she’s down at a motel on the interstate screwing truck drivers, but she did kind of notice when the police brought me home at dawn with burn scars where I had been kidnapped and tortured by terrorists, and so she’s taking one of her intermittent spurts of interest in what happens to me. She insisted I get back into school so I’ll stay out of trouble and quit running around with rock and roll singers, yadda yadda yadda. That and I gotta quit the Ghoul scene and start going to church again, all her usual crap.”
“We all have our cross to bear,” Cody punned.
“Very funny,” she said. “You should come to some of her Young Life meetings. They’re a real laugh a minute. A bunch of us sit around drinking wine and talking about Jesus. Christ turned water to wine at the wedding of Cana, hence that’s Scripturally okay.”
“Saint Paul said to take a little wine for your health,” Cody reminded her.
“Then we’re a really healthy bunch of believers,” she snorted.
He looked around; they were somewhat apart from the rest of the kids, waiting for class to begin, but still they might be overheard. He lowered his voice. “Look, I meant why are you sitting here next to me? Not that I don’t find you fascinating, but is it really a good idea for either of us?”
“A couple of reasons,” she said. “I want your help with some things. First off, you owe me for that little screwup the other night, and I want you to be my boyfriend for a while.”
“Uh…” said Cody, caught off guard. “Really?”
“No, not really!” she hissed. “Jeez, I’m not that desperate! Don’t worry, you can still make all the goo-goo eyes at Kelly Shipman you want and I won’t be the jealous type. I didn’t mean here at school. This is business. In a way it’s kind of worked out well that we met as Volunteers, even if it was through you being a dumb-ass, because I’ve got something coming up for the Section and I don’t want to go into it alone. You’d be ideal. You’re under cover already, we go to the same school and we’ve already officially met one another in Boland’s class, so it will be believable when we show up together. I already mentioned this to Bobby Bells the other night, before he dropped me off, and he said once I cleared it with my Section control it was okay with him. You can ask him.”
“I will. What’s the assignment?” asked Cody.
“Shh!” she said. Mitch Newman was striding across the stage and dropped down to the floor, standing in front of them to begin the class. “Good morning, kids,” he said, his voice unusually resonant and solemn. “Before we start, I want us to welcome a new student who’s joining us a bit late. Most of you know Emily Pastras, or if you don’t know her from other classes, then I don’t need to remind anyone that Emily was in the news recently, when she was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and like so many other innocent victims, she was caught up in the tragic and terrible racially motivated and hateful violence which has been going on in this part of the country for far too long. Emily was lucky enough to survive her close encounter with evil without death or injury, for which I know all of us are thankful. Unfortunately, two of her friends were not so lucky. I was never a really big Concussion fan myself. I admit that at this
time of life my musical tastes run to the older classics like Streisand and Harry Chapin. But it wasn’t always so. Like a lot of kids of my generation in Seattle, I grew up on Country Joe’s music, Primal Scream and Funkaholic CDs and so on. It saddens me and angers me to the depth of my soul that these filthy fascist bastards have deprived me and thousands like me of that part of our youth. Don’t worry, Emily, I know you’re trying to put this horror behind you, and this will be the last time I refer to it. I hope you’ll be able to really get into our class and our production and let our friendship and the world of theater be a part of your recovery.”
“Thanks, Mr. Newman,” said Emily in a small voice.
“In this class, it’s Mitch,” he told her warmly. “I would like all of the members of our group to stand for a moment of silence now, in memory of Country Joe Krajewski and his lifelong friend Jacob Kaplan, who were murdered in the night by the forces of darkness that seek to deprive us of all that is good and human.” The young people all dutifully stood and bowed their heads, and Emily sniffled again. Cody was surprised to see she was actually crying.
After they sat down again, Newman began briskly. “Right. Today I want to cast the one-acts and get the scripts distributed, then we’ll be breaking up into groups for the first read-throughs.”
“Maybe you can get to be the Holocaust victim doing her little impressionistic dance in front of the oven at Auschwitz,” whispered Cody.
“Oh, crap! He’s not making us do that shit, is he?” hissed back Emily in disgust. “I swear he’s a kike!”
“You really are good. How do you do that? Cry on cue, I mean?”
“I was thinking of someone else,” she whispered back. “The only boy who ever liked me. The one that son of a bitch Newman turned into the Hatecrime Hotline, because he made a nigger joke. That’s the second thing I want you to help me with. We’re going to get the evidence Bobby Bells needs to okay the hit, and then we’ll kill him.”
Cody gave her a wry smile. “A couple of high school kids, plotting to murder one of their teachers. God, what a great age we live in!”
“Yeah,” she replied with a giggle. “Ain’t it just?”
Once again, that afternoon before class broke up; Cody got a call on his cell and heard DiBella’s voice. “Caesar’s Palace,” he said briefly. “Bring your new girlfriend.” Caesar’s Palace was an apartment in Redmond that A Company used as a safe house; they had changed locations after the Eclectic Strawberry tickle as a standard precaution.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Cody, a little bit nettled. “She hits, and I do mean hits.”
“Yeah, well, get both your skinny asses in here.” Cody found Emily in her rehearsal group.
“Can I give a ride home?” he asked. He lowered his voice. “Bobby wants both of us at the house.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I had to pretend to be a robot and a duck-billed platypus to show I had acting ability. How the hell does Newman or that bitch Suzanne know how a duck-billed platypus acts?” They walked out to the school parking lot and got into Cody’s Nissan. “Okay, I’m wearing my Nightshade hat now,” she commanded.
“Doesn’t quit fit in the daylight, without the Ghoul makeup,” said Cody critically.
“If the lieutenant wants to talk to us about that first thing I mentioned this morning, it will fit even less.” She would say no more. As he drove towards Redmond Cody debated whether or not to ask Emily about the crack she’d made regarding his goo-goo eyes directed at Kelly Shipman. He wondered if he was that transparent. Instead he asked,
“You got any ideas on how to get the goods on Newman?”
Nightshade nodded. “The Hatecrime Hotline people aren’t dumb. They know we’re watching and they try to hide their money trail. They know that checks can be traced. In their early days, Threesec was able to identify some of their informers that way, the rats got a visit, and word got out. Now they pay their blood money online, direct into a PayMate e-bank account that they set up for the informer. When someone calls the Hatecrime Hotline, they speak to a Homeland Security agent. The agent assigns the caller a PIN number. Then there’s two ways they can go. If it’s a once-off thing, the caller rats out whoever he wants to rat out as an evil racist, and hangs up. He waits a week or so. If the call pans out, and DHS busts somebody for saying nigger or having a copy of a banned book or whatever, and pays the reward, then the caller goes to the post office or any one of fifty other places around town and gets one of those shitty little cardboard cards with a magnetic strip the FBI and DHS have set out in those little dispensers. They go to an ATM, insert the card, key in the PIN number they were given, and bingo, there’s their rat money. They draw on it, five hundred dollars per day or whatever that bank’s machine limit is, until the money is gone and they find somebody else to rat out. Threesec has some good computer hackers and of course we can get into bank records, but even if we can locate and identify those Hatecrime Hotline transactions, there’s no way to tell who’s actually drawing on the money, so that way is pretty much a dead end.”
“You said there was a second method of payment?” asked Cody keenly. As he spoke he was performing all his standard checks in his mirrors, scanning the surrounding traffic to make sure they weren’t being followed.
“Yeah, the second method is the one generally used by professional free-lance bounty hunters who have discovered you can make a small fortune doing this shit,” said Nightshade in disgust. “The DHS has a Hatecrime Hotline website, where you can actually run a kind of internet business in human lives. That PIN number they give you gives you access to the site. You log in with your PIN number the first time, then you choose a username and password, and you’ve got your own little internet office where you can type and save long rat-outs, keep a file on each victim, get feedback from your DHS or FBI handler, and above all keep track of all that lovely bounty money. You can actually run a numbered e-bank account and do the same withdrawal number with the little disposable ATM cards from the post office, or you can transfer money to other bank accounts, or you can get certified checks sent to any name and address you want. Some of these creeps have made hundreds of thousands of dollars acting as informants against the white population of the Northwest in general, because they almost never correctly identify any actual Volunteers. But they do have a chilling effect on the people who might support us if they could stand up and say what’s in their minds.”
“It’s the Federal government who practices the real terrorism, by making people afraid to say what they really feel,” agreed Cody.
“And these rats are completely off the board,” she went on. “They’re not FBI agents or cops, they’re not Federal employees as such, the Feds don’t even know who they are. Zero accountability, total deniability. It’s kind of like a medieval witch hunt. I never heard of anyone who successfully talked their way out of a Hatecrime Hotline rat-out without at least having to go and be denazified.”
“Beautiful!” snarled Cody.
“Oh, they don’t have it all their way,” said Nightshade with a smile. “Not by a long shot. Threesec has gummed up the works pretty good. It’s simple. We started calling and logging in, and denouncing race-mixers, liberals, leftists, Jews, cops, and politicians as NVA Volunteers and racists. It didn’t stop the rat machine completely, but it slowed down considerably, since the Feds have to sit down and sort out our disinformation from the real rat-outs. Plus in the normal course of things, they get a lot of people calling in and denouncing their personal enemies, spurned lovers, landlords, bosses, teachers and people who just piss them off. But our main concern is to see if we can prove Mitch Newman has been ratting out kids at Hillside so we can put him on the spot marked X.”
“And you think you have a way to do that?” asked Cody. “I still don’t see how, unless we can hack in to the system and see if he’s been dumb enough to do a direct transfer of the bounty money into his own bank account.”
“If Newman has been using the website, yeah, I think
we can,” she said. “You ever hear of Doctor Doom?”
“Yeah, sure, he’s in our brigade,” said Cody. “Science geek kid, a year or so older than me. I met him a couple of times, and I’ve carried and placed some his ordnance. Blows up real good!”
“Yeah, well, he’s also a super-duper computer brain, and he’s worked up a program that he thinks we can use to crack into the Hatecrime Hotline website,” she explained.
“Mmm, okay, but even if we get in, according to what you told me, all we’d get would be usernames and passwords of the informers,” replied Cody.
“Yeah, but DD thinks he’s spotted a weak link they didn’t think of,” said Nightshade. “Something they intended as a security measure against hackers, ironically. You took computer science class, didn’t you? You know what an IP address is?”
“Sure,” said Cody. “Any time a computer is logged into the internet it has an IP address, either the same one all the time, which is called a static IP, or a different one that’s assigned by the internet service provider, a dynamic IP. The Feds don’t demand a static IP address to get into their rat site, do they? That would be pretty dumb, almost like putting up a neon arrow pointing right to the informer’s computer!”
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