Nobody breathed. Jonah turned red as the juice in his glass. Brendan didn’t move, but something inside him coiled. “On my stepmother’s side,” he said evenly.
The two faced off “like rotts in a dog park,” the way Zac told it later.
“Skinny guy like you,” Buzz said, “you’d have to figure, catcher. It’s the same down south, right? You get butched in and shit?”
“Buzz …” Zac seemed about to step between the two, but Allison took his arm, gently holding him back.
“Stateside time is uglier. Except for the guys who get beaten to death. You wouldn’t want to hear about it,” Brendan said.
Buzz pushed off the wall, sneering. “I’ve heard plenty. Hey Jonah, let’s catch a Muni.”
Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Mom …”
“Jonah, you and I need to have a talk. You can see Buzz to the door. Be in my room in five minutes.”
“Mom—”
“In my room, in five minutes.”
Back bowed, Jonah slipped into the hall. Buzz followed, unflinching under Brendan’s stare. The adults listened until the boys were out of earshot.
“What was that?” Zac asked. Neither of the others answered. He glanced at the clock above the stove. “I’ll catch up with Buzz on my way to the café.”
“I’ll be in the front room,” Brendan said. He turned, then turned back. “Maybe it’s time for me to—”
“First things first,” Allison said. “Let’s figure out what kind of stories Jonah was telling.”
He nodded. Zac followed him toward the front of the flat.
“Don’t cut out on us,” Zac said. “Shit happens. He’s a teenager now.”
“I’m not hiding,” Brendan said. “But I’m not broadcasting that I’m here either. Rumors aren’t helpful.”
“It’s kid stuff, don’t make it into more than that. Let’s see what we find out.”
—
“Buzz!”
Already halfway up the block, Buzz didn’t look back. “What?” he asked, deadpan, when Zac caught up.
“What yourself? What’s with the hostility?”
“He’s an asshole. Never met an ex-con who’s not.”
“He isn’t …” Zac floundered. Actually, Brendan was an ex-con. And Zac couldn’t very well compound Jonah’s infraction by explaining how he’d landed in Tlaxitlán. “He’s not an asshole. But … why all that business about prisons? Why provoke somebody like that? When you don’t even know him?”
“Jonah doesn’t need a fucking convict living in his house. If that—” Buzz cut himself short. “Fuck this, I don’t owe you answers. I don’t like him, deal with it.”
Zac blanched at the boy’s intensity but didn’t back down. “You’re right,” he said. “You don’t owe me squat. But you’re wrong about Brendan. I don’t get it, but you’re way off the mark. Brendan is family to Jonah, same as I am.”
“Shit.”
“Hear me out! I want Jonah’s friends to be welcome in our house. If there’s a problem you know about, speak up. Tell me, tell Allison. But there’s no room at the Triangle for sneak attacks over secret grudges. That’s not what we’re about.”
Buzz didn’t respond. A low rumble from the tunnel under Buena Vista Park signaled the N-Judah’s approach. He glanced toward the tracks.
“Jonah likes you, Johnny Rotten, and that earns points. Don’t be a stranger to us.”
Buzz walked away, crossing to the Muni stop. Zac watched until he climbed aboard and the train pulled away from the platform.
—
“I don’t know why.” Jonah sat on the worn quilt at the foot of Allison’s bed. She leaned against the wall. He’d retreated behind a mask, his face closed tight as the fists clenched in his lap.
She studied him, this son of hers on the cusp between boyhood and sullen adolescence. “If you don’t know why Buzz acted that way, tell me how he knows Brendan was in prison.”
Silence.
“That wasn’t a very interesting question,” she said. “He knows because you told him. How about we put that on the table and go from there?”
Jonah didn’t look up, but he nodded.
“Did you think it was okay to tell stories about Brendan?”
“No.”
“Can you say why?”
A pause. “Because maybe the police’d put him back in jail even though Mexico let him go.”
“Bull’s eye,” Allison said. “We don’t quite know about Brendan’s legal status. So we don’t want to put him at risk.”
“I didn’t think Buzz’d be like that.”
“I bet you asked him not to let on that he knew.” Allison understood she was putting Jonah in an excruciating place. “Did you tell because you’re angry at Brendan? Or at me?”
Now the tears. Jonah buried his face in his hands. He didn’t want to cry in front of his mother; she was grateful he still could. Allison sat beside him, wrapping her son in a gentle embrace.
“I don’t know,” he ground out.
“It’s okay … it’s okay, sweetheart.” She stroked his hair, losing herself in its golden river.
After a while Jonah straightened. “What should I do?”
“What do you think? Past, present, future?”
“It’s a told secret,” Jonah said, falling into the familiar drill. “It can’t be undone.”
“Okay.”
“Future is, I won’t do it again.”
“I believe you,” Allison said. What to do now, that was always the hardest for Jonah. She waited while he thought it through.
“I guess … the present is I have to apologize.”
“To whom?”
“Brendan.” He grimaced when he spoke the name.
“Are you still feeling weird around him?”
Jonah shrugged.
“Would you like me to be there with you?”
“I’m not scared, I told you. It’s just …” Jonah swallowed. “Will Brendan have to go away now?”
“I hope not. Was that your intention?”
Jonah didn’t answer. “I guess I’ll go find him.”
—
Edging just inside the doorway, Jonah stood with hands in his pockets. Brendan looked up from his book. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Jonah said back.
“I’m sorry about that thing with your friend.”
Jonah shook his head. “I’m sorry I opened my big mouth.” He glanced at the paperback Brendan was setting aside, a bright yellow cover against the dull blue of the sofa.
“It’s better for me to lie low for a while.”
“I know. I fucked up.”
“We all fuck up,” Brendan said. “Take me, for example. You spend a year in jail and all you can think about is that big, flashing ‘I’m a Fuckup!’ sign tied around your neck.” He gestured toward the other sofa, its lumpy decrepitude masked by a blanket. Jonah collapsed onto a beanbag pillow instead, nearer to the door. “What do you know about Buzz?” Brendan asked.
Jonah shrugged. “He’s a guy at my school.”
“Political? Tough guy? Is he into music? Sports? Nuclear physics? Has he got a sense of humor?”
“He’s my friend.”
“Fair enough,” Brendan said. “But he knows more about me than I’d like, so I was hoping to even things out a little.”
Jonah picked at a loose thread in the pillow’s seam. “He’s a little bit tough. Not so political. No sports.”
“Have you ever been to his house?”
“No.”
“But he’s been over here. A few times? Pretty often?”
“I didn’t count,” Jonah said. “I guess pretty often.”
“Do you know what his parents do for work?”
“No.”
“Any trouble with the police?”
“No way, we’re in seventh grade!”
“What about somebody else in his family?”
“I don’t like this conversation.”
>
“Me neither.” Brendan picked up his book and set it down again. “Look Jonah, it’s not my place to make judgments about your friends. But I get a bad feeling off that kid.”
“Because he acted like an asshole?”
“Lots of people act like assholes. That doesn’t worry me.”
“So?”
“I’m looking at two possibilities. One’s paranoid, the other’s treacherous.”
“I don’t get it.”
Brendan stood and moved to the window. He looked out for a few moments, then turned back toward the room. “The paranoid possibility is that the police are watching me, and connected me to you because I’m staying here, then through you they drew a line to Buzz. And maybe they have some leverage, something you don’t even suspect, that they used to get him to check me out. Or to stir me up. Whatever the cops are after.”
Jonah stared. “I’ve seen ‘freaked out’ around this house,” he said, “but that gets the lifetime achievement award.”
“Shit.” Brendan grinned. “Certified a lunatic by a thirteen-year-old shrink.”
“What’s the other possibility?” Jonah asked. “The so-called treacherous one?”
“Buzz knows more about prison than the fairy tales that pass for gangsta rap and gritty cop shows,” Brendan replied. “I’m guessing he spent time around somebody who’s been inside. That, and the fact he never invites you over to his house—the combination makes me nervous.”
Jonah didn’t say anything.
“I’m not your pops, okay? Neither one of us is confused on that point. But I’ve known you since you were a worm in diapers. I care about you. About your whole family, everybody who’s part of the Triangle.” Brendan paused, choosing his words. “There are some hard-ass people out there, Jonah. I’d hate to see you get too close to people like that.”
ELEVEN
November 2003
At twenty minutes to midnight, Romulus is wardriving through a quiet neighborhood some dozen miles east of his last access point, sampling airborne Ethernet. A few houses on each block show light through shaded windows. A laptop on the passenger seat chirps as his van approaches a small apartment building. He angles in to park beside a high-hedged yard.
Moving carefully to keep shocks and struts from creaking, Romulus squeezes his bulk between the front seats, setting the chirping laptop among a bank of its peers and muting its speaker. He pulls a thick, black curtain closed, hiding the glow of his screens from casual passersby. Data cascades down the LCD panels. He settles himself at the van’s makeshift workbench, and rolls his head to stretch tight shoulders.
Only one of the networks in range of the vehicle’s antennae is well encrypted. A weakly secured access point is carrying heavy traffic, downloading from a Grokster server at pipe-straining speed. Romulus won’t be the only party committing illegal acts tonight.
Two accessible routers are transmitting cleartext, broadcasting identifier beacons that invite all comers.
—
Much attention has been paid to the conceit that destruction is the soil from which creation springs. “Die Lust der Zerstörung ist zugleich eine schaffende Lust,” wrote revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1842. “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.” Śiva the Destroyer has ruled the Hindu pantheon for thousands of years, in equipoise with Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver. The Nobel Peace Prize was founded by a Swedish arms manufacturer, the inventor of dynamite.
Collegiate wanking in this vein has no hold over Romulus.
He sees no reason to dress up counterstrikes with weak rationalizations. Romulus came of age mucking through the backwash of sixties-era marches, rallies, sit-ins, and dropouts, a tumult that convinced baby boomer malcontents of their own moral purity but gained precious little else. Nixon didn’t nuke Hanoi. He’ll give them that, and a few other tantrums of empire restrained by mass protest. But only a fool could deny that power remains fundamentally intact, whatever its guises.
Opposition opposes. It’s a simple principle; Romulus holds it close. Symbolic mewling doesn’t qualify. Neither does unfocused rage. Yet he knows too well that his own disruptive effect is pitifully narrow. He stalks Leviathan with blow darts. Meanwhile, the planet heats up, the ecosphere is brutalized, and strength accrues to the strong.
For years Romulus has acted where he can, navigating a digital ocean of packets and frames, setting in-memory hacks, laying Unix haiku like driftnet across gigabit currents and binary streams. He operates from plain commercial vans, bought and sold for cash, transformed by faux company logos silk-screened on magnetic stock. One day he drives a fleet vehicle for a sewer-cleaning firm, the next a flower shop, then a small-time caterer. Inside an Econoline shell he’s invisible as manhole covers. Any halfwit can siphon bandwidth from suburban neighborhoods, as easily as hooking up a garden hose.
Spectral existence has its advantages, but there’s a flip side to the life he has chosen. No matter how cleverly Romulus cracks, hacks, spoofs, sniffs, decrypts, probes, hijacks, and munges, all he can touch are bits and bytes. And so, when he finally set out to find collaborators, he didn’t look for a twin. He sought a skill set complementary to his own.
Combing through the internet’s flood of constructed identities, lurking at the edges of chat rooms, filtering streams of e-mail tapped from poorly managed server farms, Romulus made tentative contact with dozens of candidates. His standards were exacting. At the first indiscretion, the slightest bluster, he dropped his discoveries. He unearthed and discarded hyperbolists whose polemic traced back to AOL accounts. He dismissed postings from anarcho-literati that led, through ineffective protection, to student co-ops in Madison, Berkeley, or Austin. Diehards on public terminals, advocating a socialist workers’ commonwealth, same old, same old since Lenin stormed the Winter Palace? He couldn’t be bothered.
Chagall was a different animal.
Romulus found him lurking on the edge of a moderately encrypted chat. Both of them were monitoring the exchange silently as other participants analyzed a recent spate of political arson against housing developments outside Boston. Chagall was scrambled by the same server used by an entity Romulus had seen picking through the website of a commercial demolition outfit several weeks before. He couldn’t be sure this was the same cyberphantom, a point in the lurker’s favor. Romulus adopted another identity, camouflaged through Vancouver, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok. He entered the discussion from a new terminal window.
“Who’s looking for the next big bang?” Romulus typed into the chat, and the packets carrying his keystrokes bounced across three continents before arriving on a server in Kraków, where the chat had convened.
The lurker withdrew immediately. Romulus smiled approvingly in the thin radiance of his monitors, and set loose a host of sniffers to seek the anonymous avatar wherever he might surface next.
—
What’s a responsible actor to do? When the world’s going to hell and transformation is laughably unlikely, what direction is forward?
Romulus has tried turning a blind eye, cashing in on his natural talents. But he had a tough time choking down the corporate Kool-Aid.
Early in elementary school, his class took a field trip to Round Acre Ranch, a local organic dairy. He doesn’t remember the bus ride out, or the tour of the grounds. He has no memory of how other seven-year-olds responded to the sickly sour smell that permeated the milking shed, or the dusty stink of the barnyard. What he can’t forget is the narrowness of the lives they’d been ferried out to witness. Round Acre’s sad-eyed bovines set an inchoate horror creeping through Romulus’s emergent sense of self. “What do they do?” he asked Ms. Ferris. His teacher coughed up a distressingly short list. Eat grass. Give milk.
His dread was not allayed.
Fat salaries, burgeoning investments, bonuses, freebies, perks. For Romulus, material wealth adds up to eating and excreting. He has no more desire now to live like a dairy cow than he did in the second grade.
—
Direct contact with the lurking demolitionist came weeks later.
ROMULUS: Don’t run, I can’t see who you are and I’m not trying to find out. I can prove myself. I think we have common interests … philosophical discourse first. PGP encryption key below. Send secure contact info to [email protected], account dies in 10 days. Learn why I thought I should contact you. If you’re the type I’m looking for, you’ll want to know. Pseudo-sender of this message no longer exists.
Chagall could not have been glad to draw notice, and wouldn’t see how or why he’d been contacted under a freshly minted, well-cloaked identity. Romulus hoped uncertainty might keep him interested. With two and a half hours left on the clock, Chagall replied on a Saturday afternoon.
CHAGALL: Have we met? Are you a police officer or an agent of any government entity? Answer directly. Proof required. Public key attached. Post response to [email protected] within 12 hours or don’t contact me again.
Romulus approved. No one Chagall wanted to hear from took weekends off. An FBI hack idly trolling for terrorists might have missed the window while mowing a lawn in Reston, or firing up a barbecue in Silver Spring. Chagall would have figured it unlikely that anyone could rustle up a subpoena for a Yahoo account in twelve hours on a Saturday.
ROMULUS: Categorically no to both questions. Proof is on my agenda. Think of me as a white hat hacker for the other side. I seek a synergy of skills to further common goals.
Early on, Chagall sent Romulus a reading list. The presumption annoyed him. Perhaps he should have pushed back against his recruit’s curt and controlling manner, but he cut Chagall a measure of slack. After all, he was asking the demolitionist to sublimate his gifts to the broader reach of a propaganda campaign. And Chagall’s presumption seemed less egregious when he turned out to be pushing their collaboration even further. The saboteur saw the limits of his craft as clearly as Romulus viewed his own handicaps. Chagall insisted he put aside the fallacy that physical effect translates into political results, that explosions win a war. By way of example, Chagall referred him to the writings of a Latin American guerrilla, a man the Mexican government identified as a philosophy professor:
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