That would definitely get Zaqarwi’s attention. Of course, it had the risk of getting unwanted attention from Logan, as well. I sat back, thinking it through. I came out of my daydream when Logan came over and asked me how I had done with his assignment. We talked politely about my previous experience with computers, leaving out the spicier details, and then he went away.
The bell sounded, and people scattered. On the way out of class, I thanked Logan, and dawdled just long enough to get the manufacturer’s name and model of the whiteboard. I had never heard of the company, Research Machines, but I knew that I could look them up on the Internet. After biology class, I headed back to the 24
tiny library, and found an Internet terminal. The school and the FBI might be watching my Internet activity, but of course I was deputized for doing such work.
I surfed over to the website of Research Machines, and found that they made four models of whiteboards. I looked over the specifications for the one I wanted, and realized that it was nothing more than a glorified monitor with a network connection, and that it would be as difficult to hack into as a damp paper bag.
At lunchtime, I went to the cafeteria and got a sandwich, which seemed to be made mostly of wet bread with some tasteless white spread.
Around me, hormonal development unfolded in surround-sound. Boys were pretending to be cowboys, so as not to be Indians. Girls were pretending to be prickly thorns, so as not to be wallflowers.
On the far side of the room was a big, modern-style painting, attached to the wall. A ball of foil suddenly flew past my ear, hitting the boy on the table across from me. Perhaps, I thought, I had been a little too harsh in my judgment of jail after all.
After eating lunch, I walked around the campus, looking to see if I could spot any of the local players. I needed a computer and a phone of my own, but before I got them, I needed somewhere to keep them. It was obvious that whomever Philips had on the staff would be doing a nightly check of the locker that Stony had assigned me.
I wouldn’t be able to use it without Philips knowing in detail what I had stored in it.
But someone in the school would have a locker to rent, at the right price.
I made my way outside, and looked around all the places that provided blind-spots for the smokers and the hard cases—the future inmates of the prison system.
I walked around the perimeter of the grounds. A football flew across my path, nearly hitting me. I picked it up, and threw it back to a group of guys playing tag football.
At last I caught sight of two guys talking beside a garage. Whatever they were haggling about, it was no business of mine. But I watched them, and something changed hands. The guy doing the deal had a cigarette dangling from his lips, like some 1950s actor—too cool for school. He was neatly dressed, and his hair was styled in a trendy way. So he wasn’t exactly one of the slackers—more like an enterprising young businessman.
“Hey, man,” I said to him.
I put a bit of computer nerd in my voice; I didn’t want him to think that I would be storing anything but electronic gadgets in his locker. The guy looked at me like I was a tobacco beetle that was about to chow down on his cigarette.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Do I know you?”
No, he didn’t know me. But money talks, and it says, “Where there’s a bill, there’s a way.”
For twenty FBI dollars, he hooked me up with someone who knew someone else, who was willing to rent me his locker. That guy wanted fifty for only two weeks, but I negotiated up to a whole month. I think I did the taxpayers proud.
I walked back inside, to finish off my schooling for the day, feeling like at least I had made a start. All I needed was to get hold of a computer and a phone, and that could wait until the next day.
25
Chapter 7
I got off the bus early, partly because I always hated riding the school bus, and partly because I wanted to scout the local district. I was thinking about my ditch-kit again, about getting ready for whatever emergency came at me. I wanted to know how I could get away, and where I could hide, if it came to it. I didn’t think I’d have to run, but you never know.
I walked through the noisy sub-suburbs and into my own good-looking but boring neighborhood. I walked past wooden fences, holly bushes, elm trees, and garages the size of small houses. Somebody had left a bike out, propped up in their porch, obviously not concerned about it getting stolen.
I passed a house where a little girl dressed in a coat and scarf was playing on a swing. For some reason, I again found myself wondering why the FBI had chosen such an up-market place to conduct their latest sting. They could have found some other house in the school district, for a quarter of the price. Maybe it made them feel safe up here on the hill, driving round in an SUV. Or maybe there was some other reason. I got back to the house, went to my room, and lay down, listening to music, and thinking over the day.
When I went down an hour later, Richard was watching the news on TV from an easy chair. He didn’t pay any attention to me when I sat down. A few minutes later, Hannah came in and said hello.
“How was school?”
“It was okay, but boring.”
“Boring?”
“Nothing much happened.”
“What were the teachers like?”
“Just
teachers.”
“What did you have for lunch?”
“A
sandwich.”
When Richard went upstairs, I picked up the remote and flipped the TV over to the movie channel. I like movies. If I need to switch my brain off for a couple of hours, I just watch a movie.
The movie was about some guy working in the French resistance during WWII. I like those movies. I had vague memories of watching movies with my dad, when I was young. He would come home, stick his feet up after a hard day at work, and watch a movie. That’s about the clearest memory I have of him. That, and him and my mother arguing. When Richard came back, he picked up the remote and, without saying anything, turned back to the news.
“We were watching that,” Hannah said, staring at him coldly.
“I was in the middle of the news,” Richard said.
“It’s my fault,” I said. “Sorry.”
Hannah got up, and went into the kitchen. After the news finished, Richard followed Hannah, then they both came back in.
“We’re going into town for a quick look around before dinner,” Hannah said.
“You coming?”
I couldn’t say no. The car was our safe haven, and they wanted me there, to question me. How did that old wartime poster go? Loose lips sink ships. Remember!
The enemy may be listening. We were out of the neighborhood and rolling down the slope into the town, before Richard turned to me, and asked me what had gone on that 26
day. He was no longer my father; he was Special Agent Richard Johnson, of the anti-teenage cyber terrorist squad, or whatever they were calling themselves that week.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“What happened?”
“It’s my first day. Nothing happened.”
“You didn’t see Zaqarwi?”
“Yeah, I saw someone that probably is him, but I didn’t rush in and start saying hello. How would that look?”
“Drop the attitude, Ripley.”
I didn’t think I had an attitude. I was just telling him that nothing had happened.
“I didn’t agree to give you a nightly report.”
“You’re here to work with us. That means keeping us informed.”
“I agreed to work with Philips.”
“You think that you are going to keep us out of the loop?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Just tell us what happened today. You don’t need the attitude.”
“What did I just say? Nothing happened.”
“He’s right,” Hannah said to Richard. “It doesn’t make sense to waste time giving
reports, when there is nothing to report.”
Richard frowned at Hannah. “I thought you were working with me.”
“Now who’s got the attitude?” Hannah said.
“Look,” Richard said, “this isn’t a democracy. He’s the criminal, in case you forgot.”
“I will give you a report when anything happens,” I said. “Until then, you either leave me alone or I walk. That’s what we agreed.”
“You walk right back to the Pizza Hut, smart guy? I’ll bet you will.”
“Can we stop arguing?” interjected Hannah. “It’s getting us nowhere.”
Richard turned the car around, and began driving back to the house. But suddenly I spotted a bike shop, and said, “I want to get a bike.”
The store was surprisingly well stocked. I test-rode several bikes, and eventually chose a dual-suspension alloy mountain bike, which was overboard for trips to school, but I didn’t think that it would get stolen in my neighborhood.
Anyway, the FBI was paying.
This new bike was so light that I could lift it with two fingers. It was so smooth, it almost rode itself. My first mountain bike had been steel, and heavy. But it had been good for thousands of kilometers. I rode that piece of junk over half of Washington State.
Back at the house, I put the bike in the garage. I noticed that there were two his and hers bikes already in there. At the table, Richard looked tired and annoyed. He was drinking beer straight from the bottle. He’d been out all day, I figured, probably really working hard. The fatigue he was showing was probably real—the tiredness of a thirty-something who has to travel an hour to work and another hour back. I heard him burp quietly, from the beer, and he noticed me looking at him. He seemed slightly drunk.
After we had finished eating, he said, “That was good,” to Hannah.
“You’re welcome,” Hannah said coolly.
I seconded it. “It was great.”
“Chicken and vegetables. Not exactly adventurous cooking,” Hannah said.
“Do you want to go anywhere tonight?” Richard asked her.
27
“What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. A look around town, maybe?”
“Not tonight. Let’s go tomorrow instead.”
“Okay.”
Suddenly Richard started talking about how the police caught some criminals raiding a local bank, and Hannah nodded, adding the occasional comment.
“This guy,” Richard said, shaking his head as he demonstrated with his hand,
“came out of the bank and ran straight into the road, and got mowed down.”
I was surprised at how quickly Richard and Hannah had gotten over the argument. I sat, listening to the conversation, while I thought back over the argument.
Unlike the arguments I had seen between my real parents, no threats had been made, and nothing was thrown. Nobody slammed any doors, and nobody left, never to be seen again. My new parents just sat there, talking about local events. It was a perverse parody of the nuclear family that left me with the feeling that I had to be alone.
I went to my room, and sat with the light off, looking out at the pristine suburb, dimly lit in the autumn darkness. Everything was quiet and peaceful. Here, everything seemed to be in its place. Maybe I could just stay here for the rest of my life, I thought. David Johnson, space cadet from Elmwood High, rides bikes, and excels in computers, math, and science. Thinking about how my life had turned out, it seemed crazy to me. How had I got here?
I closed my eyes, and thought back over my life. I had once lived in a house like this when my parents were married. I had little memory of it, but I recalled a large house in a quiet suburb in Washington State. I also remembered an argument, and waiting for my father to return. I waited, and waited, always trusting that he would come back. But he never did.
After that, I moved with my mother to an apartment. She got a job at a casino.
When her new friends came around, they would party and play music and dance. She worked the late shift, and in the evenings I stayed with a neighbor, Mrs. Robinson, until I was ten, and no longer needed a babysitter.
I made my own breakfast and dinner, and watched television on my own. It was around that time that my unusual fascination started. I remember the first time.
I had been sitting in a bank one day, waiting while my mother smiled through her teeth at a bank clerk.
She was taking care of some grown-up business that she had refused to discuss with me, and I was bored and absent-mindedly gazing at an oversized display check that was hung on the bank wall. In those days, people still used paper checks instead of credit cards, and that big cardboard check reminded me of a TV program on bank fraud that I had seen a few nights before.
In the TV special, a convicted fraudster described how he had made millions of dollars by altering bank checks. All paper checks came with a unique serial number printed on the bottom, written in magnetic ink that both computers and people could read.
This number indicated which branch the check got sent to for processing. By changing one of those numbers, the criminal had prevented the check from being properly routed. The computer would try to read the number, would flag it as unreadable and hence unroutable. A bank teller would have to manually examine it.
He’d see that all the numbers were visible, with no tears or flaws in the check, and would put it back into the automatic processing pile, to circle through the computer once again.
28
The fraud was only discovered when the check was so worn out that it wouldn’t go through the machine anymore. By that time, the forger had passed check after check, and had escaped to the Bahamas with the loot. I remember waiting in that bank, looking up at that huge check and being disappointed that I couldn’t come up with my own scam. I was really beaten up about it, because I wasn’t smart enough, even though I was still only eleven.
Months later, I saw a movie about a bank heist. The next day, while I was waiting in the bank once again, and looking at that oversized check in a bored haze once again, I suddenly got an idea for my own scam. I devised a totally new type of check fraud. What if I did it the other way around? What if I changed one of the computer-read magnetic numbers on the check, leaving the visible ink numbers intact?
The teller who manually examined the numbers would still be able to look up the branch code, and send the check to the right branch.
But again, the computer wouldn’t be able to process it, and it might be rerouted or returned once again. That would require maybe two extra journeys, which meant that the bogus check might take longer to discover than the standard number scam. That might mean extra time for the con man to pass his bogus paper, and make his getaway.
I didn’t know for sure whether my ruse would work, and obviously I would have had to get my hands on some magnetic ink. But if it did work, I would potentially have an even better check dodge than the standard routing scam.
I tried to think back to the TV program. Had they already discussed that method for bank robbery? I didn’t know, and I never found out.
But, original or not, workable or not, I was immensely happy that I had persisted until I had come up with my own way of subverting the system.
I was young, and of course I never actually put the idea into action, but I always remembered that happy eureka moment. Best of all, I had, for a few weeks at least, found an outlet for my curiosity and my energies.
Every boy watches movies and thinks how glamorous it would be to be a master criminal. But it wasn’t the profits of crime that I was interested in. I got fired up with the same curiosity and enthusiasm whenever I saw a documentary on the space shuttle or a big engineering project—something that was so difficult that it took years to complete. These engineering achievements required planning and ingenuity. I used to imagine myself standing on the site, looking over plans, arranging the work, organizing the workers, and making a blueprint into a reality. What difference did it make if it was a ban
k heist or a 200-story bank building organization that I was working on?
More and more, I began looking around for things that I could devote my enthusiasm to. But, of course, living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, there was literally nothing to do except crime.
One boring day, I noticed that baby strollers set off security alarms in stores, and almost without meaning to, I put together a method for shoplifting. I found a way of scamming the library into issuing me with two cards, though I hardly used the one I already had. I’d read stuff, remember it, and then stick the book back on the shelf.
One time, I talked two cops into giving me a lift home from the city, because I wanted to see what it was like in a cop car, and what the cops were really like. Another time, I found out that the local video rental store had policies that could be exploited, such as the one where if they didn’t have a title in, you’d get it free next time. There I was, an eleven-year-old kid, hated by all of the clerks, because I was making a game out of 29
it—trying to figure out when the most in-demand titles would be unavailable, which was the opposite of what everyone else was doing.
It was all kid’s stuff. But looking back, it seems to me that these trivial misdemeanors were a foundation for a more important life—a life that I didn’t yet know about but felt was waiting for me. My mother’s attempts to involve me emotionally in her struggle for existence were obliterated by my constant struggle to find an outlet for my energies, by learning more and more about the world around me.
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