by Evans, Jon
But, really, what good would it do? Other than a meaningless moment of catharsis, what was the point in telling them what I had seen and discovered? What could they really find out that I couldn't? Why remind them of Laura's murder, and trouble them with this sick unsolvable mystery that seemed somehow connected to it? It didn't seem right to unleash it on their minds just because I couldn't stop it from preying on mine. All it would do was drag a bunch of horrible old memories out of the mud. I had gone through enough of that myself recently to want to wish it on others.
* * *
Talena showed up right on time, dressed in jeans and a purple sweater, a floppy disk in her hand. I took it from her and said "Thank you."
I expected her to turn around and walk away, and there was an awkward silence for a few seconds before she said "Aren't you going to invite me in?"
I blinked and said "Oh. Okay."
"I am risking my job for this," she reminded me. "Least you can do is let me shoulder-surf."
"Oh. Yeah, sure. No problem."
She followed me in.
"Nice apartment," she said.
"Yeah," I said, and then sheepishly "Sometimes it's a little cleaner… "
She laughed.
"Do you want a drink or something?" I asked.
"Let's just get to work."
"Right." I led the way into my study, where my laptop sat on the desk, connected to a cable modem. She sat next to me and I had to remind myself to focus on what I was doing. She was even prettier than I remembered, and she moved with athletic grace, and her jeans and sweater were both tighter than absolutely necessary, and she wore something that smelled like fresh strawberries, and I couldn't help but think that it had been four months, since a drunken encounter with a giggly blonde girl named Amy I had met at a party, since…
"So are we meditating before we begin or what?" she asked.
"Um, yeah. Just planning," I lied, inserting the disk. "I warn you, this could take a while and will probably be very boring."
"That's okay. Just keep me informed about what you're doing. And use English words and no acronyms."
"I see you have dealt with my kind before."
"More than the amount necessary to have a full and happy life."
"Very funny. Well, the first thing I'm doing is checking for the exact time that Mr. BC088269 posted to the Thorn Tree." I went on the Web, logged in to the Thorn Tree, scrolled down to his message. "6:01 on November 4. I'm going to assume that the web servers are using the same time zone as your database server —"
"They are," she said.
"Okay. Next we look at the log files." I opened them up in UltraEdit. Each one consisted of hundreds of thousands of rows of text, each row a long stream of data unintelligible to anyone uninitiated in the secrets of my field:
64.76.56.49, 11/4/00, 0:00:19, ARMSTRONG, 64.211.224.135, 2110, 438, 22573, 200, GET, /dest/
206.47.24.62, 11/4/00, 0:00:19, COOK, 64.211.224.135, 109, 502, 32090, 200, GET, /prop/booklist.html
129.82.46.82, 11/4/00, 0:00:21, MAGELLAN, 64.211.24.142, 78, 477, 11505, 200, GET, /cgi-bin/search
206.47.244.62, 11/4/00, 0:00:23, MAGELLAN, 64.211.224.135, 0, 567, 28072, 304, GET, /dest/europe/UK/London.html
… and so forth and so forth, one for every time anybody looked at a Lonely Planet web page that day.
"And this means something to you?" she asked.
"It does."
"What does it mean?"
"Well… each line represents one request. One page that some user out there wants served to them. And each line tells me the IP number of the user's computer, the date and time, the server computer name, the IP number served, how much time the whole request took, how many characters the user sent, how many characters the server sent, whether it all completed successfully, whether the user was getting or sending information, and the page they wanted."
"Uh-huh. And this is useful?"
"Maybe. First of all let's get all this into Excel. Text is hard to work with." I called up Microsoft Excel and ran its import wizard on the four log files, turning them into malleable spreadsheets, which I cut-and-pasted together into a single file. A very large file.
"You guys are popular," I observed. I sent an impressed look over my shoulder and met those electric blue eyes again.
"A million hits a day," she said proudly.
"Right," I said briskly, making my head swivel back towards the computer. "Yeah. One point two three million on November 4. Good thing I've got a monster machine here or this would take forever. Okay. Yeah. All right, first thing, let's get rid of everything that isn't within a two-minute window when that message appeared." I sorted the entries by date and wiped everything except those between 6:00 and 6:02. This reduced things to a manageable 2200 hits. "Next, let's get rid of everyone looking at your main site instead of the Thorn Tree." I pinged thorntree.lonelyplanet.com, found out that it was 64.211.24.142, and got rid of all requests to different servers.
"That's still two hundred-odd possibilities," she said. "I thought you'd actually be able to look at the messages they posted."
"No such luck. But we're not done yet. Anyone actually posting a message would use an HTTP POST method, not a GET, you use GET if you're just reading." I eliminated all the GETS, and this reduced the spreadsheet to only three rows:
116.64.39.4, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, MAGELLAN, 64.211.24.142, 3140, 9338, 32473, 200, POST, /cgi-bin/post
187.209.251.38, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, COOK, 64.211.24.142, 2596, 1802, 31090, 200, POST, /cgi-bin/post
109.64.109.187, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, HEYERDAHL, 64.211.24.142, 0, 2847, 72, 500, POST, /cgi-bin/post
"Easier than I thought," I said.
"So we've got three possibilities?"
"Actually, no. See that 500 on the last line?" I pointed it out. "This means that there was a server error, so whatever was sent never made up to the Thorn Tree."
"So it's one of the first two."
"Right. But see that 9338 in the first one, and 1802 in the second? That's how many bytes went from the client to the server. That means the first one was a pretty long message. And the message our friend sent was… "
"… pretty damn short."
"Exactly."
"Okay," she said. "So we found the right line. I still don't get what that gives us."
"That gives us the IP number of the computer he used to send it. One-eight-seven two-oh-nine two-five-one thirty-eight."
"And every computer on the Internet has its own number?"
"Well… no." I saved the spreadsheet, just in case, expelled the floppy and handed it back to her, avoiding her eyes. "That was the way it was originally supposed to work. But it's more complicated than that. Basically as a rule of thumb any computer that's permanently on the Net has its own IP number. Unless it's behind a proxy server, or… well, there's a lot of issues. So this still might all be useless. On the other hand it might take us right to him. I can get a look at the router chain we go through to get to that machine from here, that might give us some idea where it is." I opened up a telnet session to my Unix account, typed in
traceroute 187.209.251.38
and examined the lines of cryptic gibberish the computer spat out in response.
"Shee-it," I said. "That, I was not expecting."
"What?"
"That message came from Indonesia."
"Really?"
"Looks like it." I pointed at the last few lines of the traceroute response.
17 Gateway-to-hosting.indo.net.id (187.209.251.31) 641.612 ms 587.980 ms 590.526 ms
18 Quick-Serial-b.indo.net.id (187.209.251.2) 869.458 ms 669.086 ms 608.886 ms
19 187.209.251.38 (187.209.251.38) 620.897 ms 643.124 ms 588.700 ms
"See that dot-ID at the end of those last few lines? Each country has its own code. CA for Canada, UK for the United Kingdom, and so forth. ID means Indonesia."
"Indonesia is a big place," she said doubtfully.
"So it is," I said. "Let's see if we can't zoom
in a little." I typed in:
whois 187.209.251.38
and the computer responded
IP Address: 187.209.251.38
Server Name: WWW.JUARAPARTEMA.COM
Whois Server: whois.domaindiscover.com
"What's that? Whois?" Talena asked.
"Basically it goes out and gets the name that goes with the IP number," I said. "If any."
"Computers have names?"
"Kind of," I said. "Between each other they just use the IP number, but they figured out a long time ago that that would be hard for people to remember, so there's a system called the Domain Name Service that matches names to numbers. So you can just type in lonelyplanet-dot-com instead of sixty-four dot two-eleven and so forth."
"How does that work?" she asked. "Is there a big white pages or something?"
"Pretty much," I said. "It's a complicated descending hierarchy, but basically there's thirteen really big computers that work as the master white pages. What this just told us is that the name we're looking for is juarapertama.com, and that it was registered by a company called domaindiscover.com. Registration's turned into this big complicated mess, but basically if we go there we should be able to find out more… "
I navigated to domaindiscover.com and searched for juarapartema.com:
whois: juarapartema.com
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Mak Hwa Sen
Internet World Cafe
Kuta Beach, Bali, DKI 33620, ID
[82] 29 9210421
[email protected]
"Gotcha," I said. "Kuta Beach, Bali. Now what the hell are you doing there?"
* * *
"Let's take a break," she said. "I'll take that drink now."
"Okay," I said. She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and glanced in. "I've got beer and… um… water."
She laughed.
"I just got back from traveling," I said defensively.
"Yes," she said, "and you're a guy."
"I do have some Glenfiddich," I said, remembering that she drank Scotch.
"You do? Then you're playing my song."
I drizzled some nectar of the gods over ice for both of us and we sat down on the couch. I felt surprisingly comfortable next to her. I'd never been able to relax around beautiful women, every moment I spent near them felt like part of a high-stakes job interview, but with Talena I felt perfectly at ease.
"It's a little scary that you can do this," she said. "So everything everyone does on the Web can be tracked down?"
"It depends," I said. "Like, if you're using AOL you're actually probably pretty safe from this stuff, because everyone on AOL looks like they're on the same machine. On the other hand the AOL people know everything you do. Yeah, as a rule, most of the stuff you do can be watched."
"And when they tell you this is a secure connection, they're lying?"
"No, that's completely true, those are probably impossible to break into. But they'll still know what machine you're using to connect."
"Well. Call me freshly paranoid."
"If you really want to there's ways around it though," I said. "If he'd been careful, if he'd gone through Anonymizer or Zero-Knowledge or SafeWeb or something, we'd never be able to reach him."
"What are those?"
"Sites you go through that basically clean up everything you do so you're anonymous."
"But how do you know they're actually doing that?" she asked.
"You don't," I admitted. "I mean you can run tests and so on, but to a certain extent you have to take it on trust. Doesn't really bug me though. I mean, I've got nothing to hide."
"You've got everything to hide," she said, "believe you me."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning… " She visibly decided to avoid the subject and shook her head. "Meaning I don't trust the powers that be to know anything about me they don't have to, is all. So our friend The Bull is in Indonesia. What do you think that means?"
"I think it means he's still on the road," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "And you know what else it probably means?"
"I'm afraid I do."
"Means somebody else is going to wind up with knives in their eyes in a week or two. Unless we do something."
"Do something? Like what do you have in mind?"
"Beats the fuck outta me. That's the problem," she said, and emptied her Scotch. "Have you eaten? I'm starving."
"Me too," I lied.
We went to Crepes On Cole, just a couple blocks from where I lived. By unspoken mutual agreement we didn't talk about The Bull. Instead we talked about everything meaningless that either of us could think of. Favourite obscure movies. Most overrated rock stars. The decline and fall of the Great American Novel. Best long walks through San Francisco. What to do if you're pursued by rabid deer while biking through Marin County. Ten ways to spot a New Yorker on Market Street. Why the best neighbourhoods always have the worst neighbours.
I think we were both surprised by how well we got along — a lot of the laughter was of the "I can't believe you like that too!" variety. She wasn't near as stuck-up and snobbish as I expected. Maybe a little bit, but when you're young and beautiful and you have the world's coolest job in the world's coolest city, a little bit goes with the territory. She lived in Potrero Hill and suffered through an hour-long commute to and from work, torpedoing my initial guesses about her perfect apartment and moneyed family. "LP mostly pays you with fun and prestige," she said at one point. "The dollars are pretty fucking nominal."
The only awkward pause came when I asked her where she was from. She grimaced and said "All over" in a distinct let's-change-the-subject tone. But we somehow got from there to the topic of proposed new Ben & Jerry's flavours and the moment was quickly forgotten. When the waitress leaned over and politely told us that they were closing soon, both of us were surprised and glanced at our watches to double-check. Eleven o'clock had snuck up a lot faster than either of us had realized.
We split the check and walked to the corner of Rivoli and Cole, where her bike was parked.
"Well," I said, "I'm glad you came over. That was fun."
She flashed me a million-watt smile that made my spine wobble. "Yeah, it was."
"So… " I said, as always drawing a blank on what I should say or do at this point.
"Yeah. We should talk about the whole… thing. I don't know. I feel like we have to do something, but I don't know what."
"Me too. Me neither."
We looked at each other for a moment longer.
"Well," she said. "I should go. Long bike ride home. Let's sleep on it. I'll call you tomorrow night, okay?"
"Sure thing," I said, and I watched her bike away, reluctantly abandoning all the fantasies in the back of my brain which involved her staying. Well, abandoning them for tonight. I didn't really think we were ever going to happen, but that never stopped a guy from dreaming.
Chapter 12 Consolidation And Restructuring
I got to work, logged in, read my email, and realized I had absolutely nothing to do. Suited me fine. I pointed Internet Explorer to www.interpol.com and began to read.
About a half-hour later I had given up my hope in Interpol. They seemed like a fine enough organization, sharing information and police techniques around the world, but they didn't run from country to country chasing international terrorists the way the movies made it seem. More of a bureaucracy than anything else. They specifically said on their site: to report a crime, don't contact us, go to the National Contact Bureau for your country.
What the hell, couldn't hurt. I compiled all the information I already had, except for the bit about the Lonely Planet web logs — didn't want to get Talena in trouble — and sent it the USA's NCB. I figured it would get read once and forwarded to the email equivalent of the Dead Letter Office, or Psycho Conspiracy Theorist Office, but at least I had tried.
Just as I finished Kevin came over to my desk.
"Paul,"
he said, "can I see you in my office? Something's come up."
"Sure," I said, guessing that the Morgan Stanley contract was finally official. "Should we wait for Rob? I think he's at lunch." He was due to be the lead designer on the project. Actually I hadn't seen him all day, but that was typical, he was an Artiste and played up his impetuosity for all it was worth.
"No," he said, "this doesn't involve Rob."
I went into his office and sat down as he closed the door.
"All right," he said. "Well. Look, Paul, everyone knows you're a brilliant programmer."
"Thanks."
"So brilliant that we've allowed you continue with your rather unorthodox work schedule of, is it four months vacation a year?"
"Four months unpaid leave." Was this one of their biannual attempts to convince me to work all year?
"But as you know the company's been going through difficult times lately. The bottom's really dropped out of the market, and we've been burning money like water."
I was going to bring his attention to the amusing mixed metaphor but decided against it. Instead I switched to rah-rah-rah mode and said "But the Morgan Stanley contract is going to save our bacon, right?"
"Yesterday," Kevin said, "Morgan Stanley assigned the contract to Quidnunc."
"Ah." One of our competitors.
"This has left us in a bind where we simply have too many employees and very few billable projects. As this was not totally unexpected we have assembled a contingency plan which we are now putting in motion. As a result of losing this contract market forces are forcing us to significantly restructure the size of the organization. We predict that this is a temporary expedient, only lasting until this anomalous market downturn is corrected."