5
Got a Match?
It was early afternoon when Frank and Josette rolled slowly into Gerlach behind a 1960’s era VW bug. Parked ahead, they saw a forty foot long something that resembled a cross between a Viking long ship and a Mississippi river boat.
“Ah! An Art Car!” Josette exclaimed.
“Excuse me?” Frank asked, craning his neck to examine the outlandish contraption as they passed.
“Burning Man is famous for Art Cars! We should see many more, and each one is unique!”
Unique was a necessary but hardly sufficient word to describe what he was looking at. Its gargantuan strangeness partially made up for the bleak insignificance of the hamlet itself. That much, at least, was not a surprise. Josette had looked Gerlach up online an hour before and read him what she found. A typical description read:
Welcome to Gerlach, Nevada (pop. 450). In this thriving metropolis you will find one elementary school, one high school, one post office, one propane distributor, one gas station, one motel, 3 bars and that’s it.
Temporarily there was more, though, because the Festival was about to begin. Spread along the roadside and in the parking lots of the few dusty buildings that together comprised downtown Gerlach was a line of brightly hued, open wall tents selling water, food, balloons, happy face condoms, mountain bicycles, and almost anything else that you might (or might not) expect a festival-goer to want or need. Colorful pennants fluttered in the breeze above a throng that would blend in well in Key West on New Year’s Eve, only wearing even fewer clothes.
A few miles out of town, they reached the edge of a great salt playa that stretched for mile after heat-shimmering mile into the indeterminate distance. Towering over it on one side was Black Rock – the mountain that gave the local desert its name. Far out in the middle of the playa they saw a caravan of vehicles. Frank left the road and rolled off across the salt flat, eventually taking his place at the end of the long and slow-moving line of normal vehicles interspersed with the occasional hulking, impossible to categorize Art Car.
It was half an hour before they reached two small tents between which each vehicle was required to stop. A handmade sign proclaimed that it was the Festival Greeter Gate.
Frank rolled down his window and handed their tickets to a young man wearing khaki shorts, a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses. A rather magnificent series of hair spikes stuck up through holes in his hat, giving the impression that he had permitted a small but dapper stegosaurus to pause for a rest on his head.
“Howdy. Welcome home.”
“Uh, actually, I’ve never been here before.”
The young man let out a whoop.
“We got us some virgins!”
Instantly the rest of the greeter gate crew surrounded the camper, opening the doors and dragging them out. Josette cooperated, laughing, while Frank acquiesced, grumbling. Mortified, he followed Josette as they were led to a wooden tower inside which hung a large bell. Hair Spike Man handed Josette a pole, instructing her to bang the bell while proclaiming that she no longer bore the burden of being a virgin.
Happy to oblige, she gave the bell an enthusiastic whack while confidently announcing her altered status, after which her forehead was anointed with a dab of white playa dust. Frank was not released until he had suffered a similar, though significantly less enthusiastic fate.
Josette watched Frank as they drove away, trying not to laugh.
“Frank, you must try to join in the fun.”
“Fun? Where’s the fun part? All I see is a bunch of weirdos baking in 100 degree heat a million miles from nowhere. And what’s that?”
Ahead they could see what appeared to be a massive, openwork ziggurat, rising fifty feet into the air. Astride its apex stood an abstract, angular figure more than twice that tall, its legs slightly spread and arms outstretched high above its head.
“Why that is the Man, of course. What else would it be?”
But at this point, a sign directed them to the left, and they proceeded to trundle around the perimeter of the sprawling, semicircular city that was still erupting out of the alkaline lakebed. A week hence, it was destined to vanish like a mirage, as if spirited into the sky by the glittering waves of heat rippling upward from the desert floor.
Out of a dust swirl ahead, hundreds of bicycles began to emerge, each one propelled by a gaily painted rider, often topless, regardless of sex. A few moments later, the mobile mob engulfed them before leaving them just as quickly behind.
“Uh, can you tell me what exactly that was all about?” Frank asked.
Josette laughed. “Why must it be about anything?”
Frank was about to reply testily that everything was about something, but decided that at Black Rock Desert at this time of year he may have encountered an exception to that rule. The enormous triceratops made out of abandoned car parts that was trundling by them just then struck him as particularly relevant to that point.
It was almost dusk when at last they reached the area where vehicles were permitted to park. Only Art Cars and foot and bicycle traffic would be permitted into Black Rock City until the festival was over.
Frank was removing their bicycles from the rack when he heard Josette call out someone’s name. Turning, he saw a group of young men and women on bicycles come to a stop. And Josette was running into the arms of a bronzed young man in shorts and sandals. A red bandanna was tied around his neck, and a wide grin was spreading across his handsome, stubbled face.
Frank stood dumbly by the camper. Josette had said she hoped to rejoin the group she had been touring with before diverting alone to Las Vegas to visit friends. But he had assumed it would take time to find them amid so much confusion.
Glancing his way, Josette saw him watching. She waved him towards her, but when he showed no sign of doing so, she took the young man’s hand and led him over to the camper.
“Frank, this is Alexandre. Alexandre, Frank is the one who rescued me after I hit a pothole with my bike. My front wheel – it was such a mess! And then he drove me the rest of the way from Silverlode so I would not be late.”
“It is good to meet you, Frank.”
“Hi. You too.”
Josette took both of the young man’s hands in hers. “I will join you in just a minute Alexandre! Let me get my bike and bags.” With a nod and a smile to Frank, he turned and walked off to rejoin his friends.
Frank took one of the bikes leaning against the camper and held it upright. “Well, here you go. Enjoy the festival.”
“But of course you will stay, yes?” It had not escaped her notice that Frank had unloaded his bicycle as well as hers before she spied her friends.
He had already turned to reattach his bike to the rack. “No, no, my book, you know.” When his bike was tied down, he turned around and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Got to get back to work. Not likely I’d get anything done here.”
She looked momentarily uncertain, but then she turned to look towards her friends. They were standing by their bicycles, waiting.
“Well, if you must. But I will miss you.” She pulled his head down and gave him a quick kiss on each cheek. “You must promise to email me!” And then she was off, speeding away on her bike in a cloud of dust.
He walked slowly around to the other side of his camper where he could unobtrusively watch the young adventurers pedal towards the unworldly, ephemeral skyline of Black Rock City, above which the sacrificial Man’s arms stretched upwards in a temporarily triumphant V. Before Frank, everything was young and frivolous and alive. Behind him was the empty desert.
“Enjoy it while you can, Big Guy,” he said to the Man. “It doesn’t last.”
He climbed into the camper and turned the key in the ignition. Then he headed north.
* * *
6<
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Report of the Marvinites
Frank gazed out over the immeasurably vast canyon that stretched away for miles before him, bedazzled by the silent, bright sunlight of an early autumn morning. The enormity of the view was so overwhelming that the infinitely crenellated details of mesa, cliff and spire became dimensionless and unreal.
It was not like him to sit so placidly for so long. Usually an internal flaw of logic or syntax in a random thought would interrupt his musing, setting his brain to work analyzing the offending bit of idle mental processing. Only when the incongruity had been straightened out would his thoughts be free to wander once again. Or some inscrutable object or action would catch his eye, presenting a puzzle that demanded a solution before his musings could resume.
But not today. Barely a breath of wind stirred, and almost the only sound discernible was the distant twittering of swallows curveting in the void that yawned a few feet from where he sat in his trusty folding chair. Sometimes, their cheeps were joined by the wind-borne whisper of the river as it carved away at the base of the sheer wall thousands of feet below.
Normally, the motivation behind the actions of the birds would have piqued his interest. It would not have taken long for him to conclude they must be feasting on insects wafting upwards on air currents forming as the rising sun warmed the vaulting wall of the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
But the sensation of the sun on his face was wonderfully warm, providing the perfect, sensual counterpoint to the crisp morning air. Beneath the brilliant blue arc of the sky, the vista extending below and beyond was too varied and colorful, and the details too delightful and precise, to risk diminishment by pettifoggery. Better to submit to the near-narcotic sense of tranquility that view and sun so generously offered.
At some level Frank was aware that more than the perfection of the moment was urging his normally overactive mind to chill. Procrastination was also at play. He had not yet begun to delve seriously into the perplexing poll results he had agreed to investigate. If he was going to earn his keep on this project he would need to buckle down and get started. But he knew that once he did the riddle would torment him until he had an answer. Until then, there would be no more pleasant reveries like this. But I really should get to work, he mused.
He noticed a solitary little cloud on the horizon, drifting from west to east, and toyed with the thought of committing to get up and get to work if the cloud passed between him and the sun. It seemed like a safe bet. The sky was vast, the cloud was small, and the sun was also in motion. The courses of sun and cloud seemed just likely enough to intersect to make the promise not entirely bogus, but not so sure as to present a clear and present danger of imminent labor. Deciding that his virtue could be established at an acceptably low risk, he accepted his own bet and went back to basking in the warmth of the sun.
But it soon became clear that he might have wagered unwisely. Out of the entirety of the vast blue vault spread above him, the sun and the tiny cloud seemed intent on occupying the same spot at the same time. He felt his pleasant languor begin to evaporate. And then, far away, he saw it − the sinister shadow of the cloud itself, gliding slowly but inexorably up cliffs, across mesas, and down canyons. It was headed directly for him.
By the time his face turned cool in the sudden shade of the offending cumulus, he was resigned to the inevitable. The implacable spirits of the canyon had obviously determined that it was time for him to quit goofing off and get to work.
With a sigh he opened the computer that had been sitting idle in his lap and pressed the start button. Then he stared out across the canyon one last time, seeking inspiration in the erosional order that explained the seeming chaos that stretched before him. Winding somewhere amid the welter of electronic data he must now analyze there would be a slender stream of clues he would need to find and follow. Likely enough he would need to intuit what was afoot rather than see it, just as he could infer but not visually confirm the existence of the Colorado River weaving through the canyon below.
The analogy pleased more than helped him. He knew where he should begin looking for clues, but what sort of clues should he be looking for? He drummed the fingers of his right hand lightly on his thigh and pondered that question.
After the icons on his laptop screen flashed and settled down, he opened the investigation report he had received from the anonymous agency he had decided to call “Marvin.” He spent an hour reading and rereading the report, searching for something the security experts at Marvin might have missed. But no luck. He closed the report. It was time to go to the source, or at least the next best thing, and perform his own investigation.
He logged onto his Wi-Fi network and called up the directory of one of the servers he had installed inside his camper. The hard drive of each server had been divided up into a number of “virtual machines,” each one comprising an independent computer system. Some of these VMs were clean and ready to be configured however he wished. Others were exact clones of pollster systems already in use. Together, they would provide the lab bench on which he would perform his research and experiments.
He started by calling up a clone of a system that had already been compromised. Hopefully whatever had happened on the original computer would be reflected in the duplicate system he was now exploring.
His approach would necessarily be tentative at first. He’d need to make assumptions, and then test them to see whether he was on the right track. The first question requiring an assumption was this: had the polling data been altered before it entered the machine, or afterwards? The Marvin investigators had concluded that the data was still clean when it arrived. Frank wasn’t prepared to believe anything from that source until he could confirm it himself, but for the time being he decided to adopt that assumption as well.
If they were right, the next step should be to determine what someone could do to a system to alter data without leaving any breadcrumbs. The Marvinites had explored this by entering data into both a compromised system from the field and a clean system straight from the supplier. When they input the same data into each system and then ran a report, both systems yielded the same inaccurate results.
He leaned back, hands laced behind his head. If he was the bad guy, how many different exploits could he design that could produce that outcome?
Well, most obviously, he could infiltrate the software provider and tamper with the code of the software before it was delivered. That could explain a lot, since all the major pollsters used the same program. Or, given how old some of the systems in use were, more likely he would corrupt an otherwise legitimate software update before the vendor sent it to its customers. He already knew from the report that each installed system had received software updates of all kinds − bug fixes, security patches and so on. All of this new input had been carefully tabulated, indexed and compared by Marvin’s nameless minions.
The last way would be to hack into the installed units as well as any new ones awaiting delivery and infect all of them with some sort of malware. He reopened the report to see if the new units had been connected to the Internet for testing prior to delivery and couldn’t find the answer to that question. If that was typical of Marvinite work, no wonder they hadn’t made any progress yet.
By now, Frank had broken through his procrastination barrier and was beginning to warm to his quest. He set his laptop aside and began pacing back and forth on the edge of the canyon, his hands plunged into his pockets. Sun and view were now forgotten. So was lunch.
Had he looked upward, he would have seen a rare sight, one of the small number of California condors reintroduced to the Grand Canyon in an effort to reestablish a breeding population. Hideous to behold at close range but majestic in flight with its nine foot wingspan, the great vulture soared ever higher on a thermal, idly noting a small figure below that by turns paced, sat, and returned to pacing once again.
When the
soaring bird sensed that its column of rising air was beginning to dissipate, it tilted its wings slightly and set a course for the opposite side of the canyon, miles distant. Partway across, it detected a tantalizing odor, and adjusted its course appropriately. When it reached the far side of the canyon, its hopes were rewarded: a freshly killed deer inadequately hidden by a mountain lion was located conveniently near the edge of a mesa.
Two hours later, the now bloated scavenger hopped awkwardly to the mesa’s edge and launched itself into the air. Soon it was rising effortlessly on a new thermal, keeping its wings canted ever so slightly to one side so that it corkscrewed ever higher into the sky.
But as the bird rose, the sun sank. Soon the shadow of the canyon’s rim began to cross the spires and plateaus below, and the upward rise of the thermal began to fail. Time to head back across the canyon, back to the limestone alcove in the canyon’s wall where it made its nest.
Reaching the North Rim, the great bird lowered its right wing, and pivoted to the east. As it did, it noted that the small figure next to the camper was still pacing back and forth, back and forth as the shadows lengthened around him far below.
* * *
7
Me Client, You Server
Frank was only a couple hundred yards from his camper, but already he was gasping for breath. He wanted to blame the 8,500 foot elevation of the North Rim, but suspected he couldn’t pin all of his distress on the thin air. After all, he hadn’t engaged in anything more strenuous than a fast walk since high school.
He lurched to a halt and leaned forward, hands on his knees, gulping in the cold, clear air of the morning. Surely this was hopeless. What had he been thinking?
Well, that part was easy. The morning after dropping off Josette at Burning Man, he had taken stock of himself in front of the mirror in the camper. What he saw wasn’t pretty. Why had he allowed himself to gain so much weight over the years? How had gravity taken such a grievous toll?
The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Page 4