by Peter Church
“Oh, what the hell.” Terri stood up, making a token effort to shield her nudity. The jogger stooped down to his haunches and linked his hands as a foothold.
“No looking,” she said, as she stepped her right foot in, locking her legs and holding the top of his head for balance. With his averted face pressed in to her thigh, he slowly raised himself to full height.
“You OK?” she asked, holding on to his head.
He grunted.
She accepted an upturned hand as support, glancing below and behind her in a sudden flash of modesty and imagining how bizarre it must look—a bare-bottomed girl, balancing precariously on the shoulders of a stranger, like a circus trapeze artist preparing for a stunt. Thank god, no one was watching.
He edged under the branch and she reached up to unhitch the shorts.
“Got it.”
He crouched down for her to dismount and then turned away as she quickly pulled on her pants.
“My god,” she said, turning to him. “What just happened to me?”
“I don’t know. I was just running…”
The fear returned in an instant: “They may still be here!”
“Who?”
Her eyes darted in all directions.
“Look, just relax now. Tell me what happened?”
No answer.
“You’re safe, OK. What’s your name? I’m Alistair Morgan. Are you at UCT?”
UCT—University of Cape Town—familiar. A spark of composure returned. She looked at him. He, too, was vaguely familiar: good-looking, boyish features, friendly blue eyes. He wore a white T-shirt and black running shorts that looked shiny and new.
“We must get away, out of the forest. Maybe they’ll come back.” Terri’s gaze shifted nervously. Confused, irrational.
“Uh, who are they?”
No reply. She advanced a few steps and scanned the surroundings.
“What’re you looking for?”
She ran her hand across her chest and continued to glance around. “Nothing.”
Where was her bra?
She turned to him and gripped his wrist tightly. “Please stay with me. Promise you won’t leave me.”
“I won’t leave you, I promise.” He reached out to her and held her tightly against his chest; the shudder of her sobs sent a tremor through his body.
“Let’s get you back home. Where do you stay? In res?”
With his arm protectively draped over her shoulder, he shepherded her toward the path, and back down to the road.
Alistair Morgan escorted the frightened girl along the footpath adjacent to campus. They walked in silence for fifteen minutes across the empty UCT rugby fields, through the subway beneath Rhodes Drive and down Woolsack Drive toward the Kopano Men’s Residence. Eventually Alistair spoke.
“Did they steal anything?”
Terri shook her head and showed him her iPod. She stopped, sat down on the pavement and put her hand to her face, tears running between her fingers. Alistair lowered himself on his haunches and placed a consoling arm over her shoulder.
“You make it right, boy,” came a voice from across the road. They looked up to see a tall foreign student walking past in the other direction, another early riser; they ignored him.
“I feel so violated. As if someone has taken my most precious possession.”
Alistair patted her on the back, not knowing what to say.
“Come now, Terri!” she scolded herself.
“Did you get a look at them?”
“No. It happened so fast. I was looking down and ran into someone. He was wearing a red tracksuit top, hoodie up, I think. That’s all I saw. I didn’t see their faces. But I’ll remember the voice anywhere.”
“The voice?”
“Yes. English speaking with a slight accent, a Cape Town accent. Our age. Must’ve been a student.”
“Black or white?”
She shrugged.
“I think white.”
“And any others?”
“Two or three. The man who spoke, then someone who grabbed me from behind. And a third man, I think. Yes. He blindfolded me and helped them drag me from the path.”
“Jesus, that’s crazy stuff. What were they doing?”
Terri didn’t answer. She continued looking out in front of her, the experience too bizarre to contemplate. Here she was, sitting on the side of the road with a fellow student, unhurt, on a normal Sunday morning. She examined her swollen wrist; the red marks were already fading. Yet something strange and frightening had happened to her. Was it a practical joke? An act of revenge?
Alistair seemed to read her mind.
“Does someone want to make a fool of you?”
“Maybe.” She laughed, wiping tears from her eyes.
“That’s what it looks like to me. Friends of a jealous girlfriend?”
“Well, fuck them,” she said defiantly. “Next time I will run with pepper spray. Fuck them!”
Alistair felt the words like a slap in the face, their harshness in contrast to the girl’s gentle demeanor. Defiance. He was impressed.
Terri stood up and wiped her tears with the fabric of her vest. “Come on, let’s go.”
They continued down Woolsack, crossing the road and coming to Kopano, Alistair’s residence. The low fence around it was hardly an imposing reflection of its common nickname, Belsen.
“We need to report what happened at the police station,” said Alistair. “I’ll drive you.”
Terri stopped suddenly, leaving him to walk a pace or two before halting and looking back at her.
“I don’t want to do that. They didn’t do anything to me. They didn’t hurt me. They didn’t steal anything. I don’t understand what they wanted. I just want to forget about it and get back to my room.” She indicated Tugwell Residence, one of two dirty orange towers further down the road.
“I really don’t think you have a choice here, Terri. You’ve got to report it. They were probably planning to rape you or even worse, and something must’ve scared them off. I know it’s difficult. But if it happens to someone else, you’ll feel responsible.”
Alistair was studying law, a top third-year student at UCT, persuasive and principled.
“Come on, I’ll go with you. My car’s just around the corner.”
The Rondebosch Police Station was quiet, a long wooden counter separating the law from the victims.
“We don’t have a female officer to examine her,” said the constable as he filled in the case docket. “I can call one in for her.”
Terri crossed her legs.
“She doesn’t need to be examined,” said Alistair. “She wasn’t raped.”
The constable put down his pen and surveyed the complainants. He checked back through his notes.
“She was sexually violated, you said.”
“But they didn’t actually rape her. And they didn’t…violate her either.”
“So attempted rape, then?”
“No. Er, maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“OK, son, let’s get this straight. They grabbed her, dragged her into the forest, made her remove her clothes and then left her.”
“That’s about right.”
The constable looked skeptically from Alistair to Terri. “This sounds like normal student behavior,” he muttered. He had manned the office the previous week during the Belsen Beer Race, the phones inundated with calls from irate residents complaining of public nudity and drunken behavior.
Terri started to cry again.
“Look,” said Alistair. “Why don’t you focus on taking the statement and giving us a case number?”
The constable returned to his script with a shake of the head. Alistair watched him closely as he continued his documentation.
“I can’t thank you enough,” said Terri, as Alistair turned his car into Rondebosch Main Road, escorting her back to her residence. He seemed as relieved as his passenger to be done with the police station, and he smiled as he drove.
“No sweat.”
They pulled up at the lights. He looked across to her, glancing down briefly and noticing the darkness of her nipples pressed against the thin white material of her vest. A moment’s silence before Terri shifted selfconsciously in her seat, obscuring his view with her shoulder.
“Sorry,” said Alistair, looking back at the road. But he couldn’t help himself. “Do you always run like that?”
She reddened. “No, of course not. It’s weird, I couldn’t find my bra. I guess I wasn’t exactly—with it.” She started to laugh. He looked over to her again and laughed with her. The shake of her mirth jiggled her free breasts; he felt a stirring in his pants. An unexpected development.
“What’s happening to me?” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “It’s a nightmare. Pinch me, wake me up.”
He gave her a mock pinch on the leg and shifted in his seat, grateful for his loose-fitting shorts. The morning’s events had suddenly shifted focus.
Terri leaned back in her seat. It smelled new.
“Nice car.”
“You like? She’s my baby.” Alistair parked his new Audi A3 adjacent to the bus station outside Tugwell. Terri hopped out and walked around to the driver’s window, shoulders hunched, arm across her chest.
“Please don’t tell anyone about this.” Her cap balanced strangely on her head.
He put his finger to his lips.
“Give me a shout if you need to talk. You know where Belsen is,” he said, gesturing up the road. “I’m on Green second.”
“Thank you.”
“What a start to the day!”
“I just can’t believe this happened to me.” She held a hand up to her face.
“You shouldn’t run on your own, I guess.”
“I don’t normally. I usually run with a friend. She didn’t pitch this morning and I thought…well, I need the exercise. Anyway.”
He watched her walk away; as she reached the Tugwell entrance, she turned around and looked back.
Alistair waved as he pulled away.
FIXING BUGS
The computer boffin battled bugs in the code; coffee mugs littered his desk, the ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts.
Four a.m. on a Sunday in Seattle, any twenty-five-year-old in his right mind would have been in bed with a throbbing head. Or, even better, still working on the headache.
But the Watchit help desk had called him at three o’clock the previous day—in the middle of a gaming session—to report that the new code, laid down on Friday, released Saturday morning, was crashing. It was his change. Luckily they’d phoned him directly. If he could solve it quickly no one else need know.
He’d tried a remote fix, logging in from his laptop and busting through a fortress of security and firewalls. But the noise from his pals’ computer warring, and the unseasonable heat, and the tiny issue of the glitch that just wouldn’t show itself, set him on the one hour drive to headquarters in Redmond.
In the humming sanity of an airconditioned computer room, he isolated the problem. But it didn’t make sense.
The changes he’d made the week before were gone. It seemed as if someone had rolled back the software to an earlier version, one that excluded the latest security fixes.
So there he sat, surrounded by monitors and coffee cups, trying to work out how the hell quality control had overwritten his code and allowed some fucking hacker to deface the Help screen with a recipe for making Molotov cocktails. Not the kind you drink.
If he didn’t solve the problem before escalation, his next few weeks would be snowed with post mortems, paper forests of reports, and flesh on flesh sessions with the supervisor. Ever since Watchit had started taking off, with volumes nearing five million downloads a day, they’d been flooded with creeps talking security and controls. The good old days in the back of the garage were a dream compared to this. Thank Christ he didn’t work for YouTube.
The fix he’d created patched up the vulnerability, but he couldn’t be sure something else hadn’t been inserted. It was like looking for a flea on a camel’s back. Better to bury it, no harm done, and avoid the scrutiny of the company’s security officer. Wouldn’t want them finding out about all his backdoor entries.
The screen monitoring incoming submissions beeped. He wheeled his chair across to the large screen that monitored incoming videos: 1,775 new postings since last release on Saturday evening. The censorship guys would be in at eight tomorrow to publish the new submissions. Everything had to be checked. The buzz words were “subversive” and “offensive.” The video of the two women eating shit out of a cup had changed the game forever.
He rolled the cursor down the screen, curious as to the identity of the four a.m. sender, a fellow sufferer, beholden to the night. Or perhaps he was attached to his screen in the middle of the day on the other side of the world…
And that’s when he saw it. A little black box that danced across the screen so quickly that he nearly missed it. If he’d blinked, he might have missed the flashing title: Dark Video. And when he looked for the new submission, it was gone. He shook his head to restart his brain.
“I must be imagining things.”
The whirring of the machines and the air conditioning seemed to intensify. He felt as though he was aboard a giant spaceship.
“Coffee, I need coffee!” he said, as he dragged himself off to the kitchen.
THE TROJAN
Not far from Redmond—less than a shimmy to the left with a Google Earth cursor—Carlos De Palma, not his real name, was also awake, in his five million dollar Yarrow Point mansion.
He sat in his blue and white pajamas in front of a widescreen terminal, tapping his toes and waiting to confirm that the new Trojan Horse planted on www.watchit.com was operational. Ever since the Feds had shut down his Dark Video site, he’d been looking for an alternate input channel.
Watchit was vulnerable, ballistic growth in volumes, too many youngsters battling with complex security features; his hackers hadn’t raised a sweat. After the OK had come from Redmond on Saturday morning, he’d emailed his agents to confirm the news: Dark Video was back in business.
Carlos caressed the keyboard with manicured fingers. He couldn’t wait to see the videos bubbling under; it had been more than a month since his last channel was closed.
His screen flashed as the first submission appeared before him. “Nigeria stoning” read the title. He’d been expecting it. The grainy video came to light on his screen in jerky motions.
A furious crowd on the rampage, the backs of their heads bobbing, fists raised, violent movements; then a young woman stripped to her underwear, lying prone in the dirt, arms at her head, legs kicking in desperation, rocks and stones bouncing off her body. A full twenty minutes passes, the camera shaking, panning to wild faces and angry gestures, then back to the girl, more and more battered, before she eventually lies unmoving in the dirt, a collection of rocks and cement blocks surrounding her crumpled body.
Not bad. Too long, he’d have to edit it down—but not bad. Streets ahead of the low quality cellphone footage of the Kurdish stoning that had done the rounds some time back.
A noise startled him and he quickly muted the sound. No way his wife would be awake; she’d been up with the baby until midnight. He rubbed his face as he listened. Stubble already; he shaved twice a day but the growth was relentless. He could almost hear the hair growing on his body.
Nothing. Perhaps his senses were playing tricks on him again.
Carlos restarted the video and watched it frame by frame, cutting and pasting squares from the image and then magnifying them in a separate window.
It was real, he was sure. He’d already received the newspaper story and confirmation from the source. After ten years in the business, he had a feel for authenticity. But he’d double check tomorrow, let the tech boys inspect it.
He scanned his email box: sixteen out of seventeen agents replied and confirmed. All except Cape Town. He frowned and texted a remind
er.
Hey I know its Africa but r u guys with it??
u get the msg?
It had taken a decade to build up the list of agents. Quality, not quantity. The Cape Town connection was one of his more recent acquisitions. Nothing marketable yet, but they’d shown promise; their next submission would hopefully make the grade.
He shook his head thinking about the shit floating about: bland reality bloating the bandwidth, poorly filmed, missing the point. Show the fear! It’s what his clients demanded. And it’s what he gave them.
Carlos kicked back his chair and stretched, looking through the window of his study into the black night. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was out there, a lush, verdant green lawn that sloped downwards, lined by rows of tall pines placed like sentries along the perimeter, to the water, and views of Carillon Point and Lake Washington. His wife loved Yarrow Point; a few hundred houses, a cultured social mix of well-to-do families. Tomorrow he’d walk the preserve, socialize with the old money, and cough up a generous donation. Hopefully, this one would secure him membership to the Yacht Club. When the neighbors asked, he told them he’d made his money in the dotcom boom. Not entirely untruthful. Even his wife believed it. And as long as she was happy…
He watched the Nigerian frenzy again, freezing on an image of the anguished woman, her face etched with the expression of a sacrificed animal.
“They’re going to love this,” he said out loud.
Carlos didn’t keep a physical list of clients. Everything was committed to memory. He mentally scanned for possible clients, the keywords “snuff” and “violence.” Then he would need to get phone numbers, locations and time zones.
“Let’s start with Asia.”
ALL THE TIME
Darkness in Washington, daylight in Cape Town.
The man in the black polo neck received a text message on his cellphone. He glanced at the screen, frowned, considered the time zone.
“You must relax,” said the man opposite, behind a large yellowwood desk. He sat slightly side on, adjusting his glasses and looking down at a yellow manila file in his lap.