by David Cole
“What am I doing here?”
“Going to help me. I hope.”
“How? Actually?”
“I saw you on CNN.”
“I saw you on CNN. So?”
“That reporter. Jo…whatever her name. What a pain in the ass, those reporters. Somebody in the Federales tipped them off. But, I want to talk to you about the incident at the border crossing.”
“Incident? You mean when people got killed. When my friend was taken?”
“Well…incident…I’m sorry, we get used to the language of writing reports. Perps, skells, scores, incidents.”
She smiled, pushing the pile of folders aside, selecting one from the middle of the stack, untying the yellow ribbon and opening the flap. When she pulled out a stack of papers almost two inches thick, I realized she had my complete dossier.
“From the Tucson U.S. Attorney’s Office,” she said. “From your late troubles. There are several new people up there. Some of them would like to reinstitute certain federal warrants, certain…arrest warrants. Others, actually—”
“Am I free to leave?”
“Of course,” she said, surprised.
“I’m not under arrest?”
“Why would you think that?”
“So.” I stood up. “I am free to leave?”
“Before you do, will you listen to me?”
“Not interested.”
“About your friend.”
“That TV reporter isn’t my friend.”
“Actually, I meant Meg Arizana.”
“What about her?”
“Will you listen to me?”
“No.”
“I know about your email message,” she said.
“What message?”
“‘One bitch down. One to go.’ Totally by accident. A surveillance intercept, just an hour ago.”
She stuck out her tongue, pressed the tip as far as it would go above her upper lip. Deciding what to tell me, I thought. Or what not to tell me, so I guessed.
“Through Carnivore?”
“There was an attachment,” she said finally. “A photo.”
“Of me?”
“Of your friend. Meg Arizana.”
“Show it to me.”
“In a minute. Actually, there were two different messages. Yes, all right, yes, I have to tell you that we used Carnivore to monitor the traffic to your business website, because messages there cross-correlated with other messages.”
“This is very confusing,” I said. “Just show me the picture.”
Stunned, my chair already pulled a few inches back from her desk so I could get up, I sat down again, tried to get over being so stunned. I wrenched at the chair’s arms, set it at an angle.
“What now?” I said finally.
“First, you agree to work with me.”
“No. First you tell me about whatever surveillance you set up on me.”
“What we have here,” she said, choosing her words very carefully, “is a lot of different people playing a lot of different angles.”
“Get to your bottom line. How can you help me find Meg? I don’t want to hear about somebody else’s angles. Just Meg…that’s the only person I care about.”
Rifling through the stack of papers, she selected three and laid them side by side, aligning their edges, leaving an inch of space between them.
“You’re a computer…expert? Hacker? Cracker? These three statements all say the same thing in different ways. An expert…I’ve got enough of those in INS. A cracker, people tell me they’re the white hats. But a hacker is a black hat? Actually, it might be the other way around.”
“Which side of the law are we talking about?” I asked.
“The dark side.”
Ah.
“Going from what’s legal to what’s not.”
Crossing over for the law again.
My life history.
Many times I’d crossed over to the dark side. Then come back, only to cross again. But I’d never, I mean never, really been conscious that I had a choice. Not about whether what I did was legal or not. I didn’t care, as long as I didn’t hurt the good people, as long as I did what I believed was right.
No, the revelation was about my anxieties, my panic attacks, my attention deficit, my hunger for Ritalin. I knew, if only for an instant, that I had a choice of moving beyond those things, of moving toward something healthier, something…
“I might be able to help find your friend.”
“Meg?”
“Yes. If you’ll help me, I’ll help you.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do I do?”
20
Somebody knocked on the door.
“Come,” Michelle said.
Another man entered quietly. Younger, with a buzz cut and five silver earrings. He carefully laid two sheets of fax paper on her desk, smiling to himself as she aligned them with all the other papers, then deliberately skewing one sheet sideways, just a tad.
“Bring me that computer.”
She reached out with her fist and they touched knuckles, like a gang sign, and he left without saying a word. Her eyes went briefly to the fax, but she didn’t read it.
“Do you think your friend Meg was kidnapped? Or is she a hostage?”
“What’s the difference? I just want her to come back.”
“Your old friend Rey Villaneuva. Ex Border Patrol, now teaches SWAT tactics. He doesn’t agree with Cruz.”
“Cruz thinks she’s dead. Cruz the crude. When I still had that woman’s blood all over me, Cruz told me to forget ever seeing Meg again.”
“You’ve met Cruz. Not much to like. But he’s a good cop. That’s what he thought at the time.”
“He didn’t have to be so crude.”
“He is what he is. A very, very good cop.”
My whiteboard, I thought of my whiteboard, of writing down my three categories. Killed, hostage, kidnap victim.
“They used to be married,” I said. “Did you know that?”
“Who?”
“Meg and Rey.”
She tilted her head, slightly, the third time she’d done that since I came into the room, and I realized it was a tell, that she’d just learned something new.
“No. I didn’t know. Okay. So Meg, who is Rey’s ex-wife, Meg is a hostage. Somewhere in Nogales. Hostages have a quick sell-by date. So Cruz and Rey are working like crazy to find her quick. Before—”
She caught herself.
“Your new friend, Ms. Kanakaredes…”
“Not a friend.”
“Your new…how would you call her, what is your relationship?”
“We don’t have one.”
“Yet. I assume there’s an unsaid ‘yet’ in your thoughts.”
“Ryeght,” I said, confounded that I’d used Kyle’s pronunciation.
“So. You’ve met the man working with her. Kyle Callaghan.”
“You’re quick,” I said. “The way you picked up his accent.”
“Mmm. A kidnap and rescue specialist. Is he your friend? Do you have a relationship with him? Youngish. Good-looking. We know what he’s doing for his client. For Jo Kanakaredes. We’ve heard her revenge story.”
She started to say something, weighed it, changed her mind.
“Kanakaredes once did a story on Callaghan, so after her…kidnapping…”
“You make that sound as though it never happened.”
She ignored my comment.
“She brought him over from New Zealand. He’s good. He’s made some kind of contact with the Peraza cartel, we think, but we really don’t know much more than he does. Except he knows less than us, he doesn’t know—”
“That you’re monitoring his radio contacts? His computer contacts?”
“So he’s told you about it?” she said.
“I’ve been to their house. Yes. So what’s your point?”
I was getting frustrated. “They…Jo and Kyle, they believe that Meg was kidnapped. Jo thinks she recogn
ized one of the men at the border shootout.”
“Yes. So she says. Actually, I think she’s in this for either revenge, or…maybe, she’s in it for a story. Maybe she was never kidnapped and raped, but it’s news. She’s over forty years old, she’s being replaced on CNN by those younger types. You know, you see them, cute, I’d say, youngish, not too smart, maybe one or two of the blondes with some surgically enhanced features.”
She held down a button on her speakerphone.
“Bring the computer in.”
Less than a minute later, the man entered without knocking, carrying a Sony Vaio laptop, opened and running. He set it on her desk.
“Just push here,” he said, indicating a key.
“Where?”
He took her right index finger and laid it on a key. She kept her finger there, he didn’t move his, and I thought I saw her wiggle her finger just slightly, underneath, one of those hidden communications between people whose relationship is something more than just fellow workers.
“Thank you.”
He removed his finger. After he left, I studied her closely, saw her tilt her head again when she caught my eyes moving to her finger on the keyboard.
“So we both know young, good-looking men,” I said. “Why don’t you just show me what’s on that computer and let’s bring it on.”
“Bring it on!” she said. “I love that phrase. I use it in meetings, I use gang symbols, thug language. People think my hair is spiked. They heard this rumor, I threatened one really distasteful man that I’d lower my head and run him through with the spikes.”
She flicked the key on the computer and swiveled it so that I could see the screen. At first I thought it was a screensaver program. A picture taken of a marina, lots of moored boats, several hotels and what looked like condos, nestled into a small cove above which rose two craggy mountain peaks.
“Goat tits,” she said.
“Goat?”
“Tits. It’s a resort town in Mexico. San Carlos. These two…let’s call them mini-mountains, they overlook the marina. Teta Kawi, the locals call them. They also call them Tetes de Cabra.”
I pulled the laptop close to me, looked at everything again and again. I right-clicked on the picture, saw it was a file titled MESSAGE13.JPG.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does it signify?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are the other messages? One through—”
“I don’t—”
“—twelve?”
“—know. Really. Thirteen of thirteen? Thirteen of five hundred? I don’t know. It’s all we’ve got. We can’t figure out what this picture means.”
“How did you get it?”
“Carnivore. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
Carnivore. The secure, snooper secret government Internet snooper. She waited for me to ask the obvious question, waited to see if I would help her. I stood up.
“That’s how you know about my email,” I said. “There’s something in common between the email address to me and whatever tracking information you have about this photo.”
“Yes. We need you. We’d like to hire you. Hire your computer expertise, your hacking contacts. To help us find somebody.”
“I can’t help you,” I said. “I can put this out on contract, but it’s not anything I want to waste time with right now.”
“Meg was kidnapped,” she said instantly. “Whoever did it wants revenge.”
“What?”
“I believe your friend was kidnapped. I believe that the email sent to you is about revenge for something both you and Meg once did.”
“Revenge? Who?”
“We don’t know.”
“And Meg. If you believe that she was kidnapped…who? Why?”
“That’s an ugly story.”
“Ugly,” I said to myself. “Can you arrange for one of your men to get something from my car? Wherever it is?”
“We had it towed. Behind the building.”
“Can I go down there, can I get something to show you?”
She really thought I was trying to get away. I saw her start to shake her head no, and then she must have seen something in my eyes.
“Is this really necessary?” she asked.
“Just let me show it to you.”
21
The finger lay in the middle of her desk.
I’d opened the box carefully. She looked inside and recoiled. Her shoulders slumped in fatigue, rejection, resignation. She licked her lips, weighing something.
“Don’t go back to your house,” she said finally.
“What! You know something you’re not telling me. What?”
“Not released to the public. When we dug up Margaret Admiral’s hand…”
“It was missing a finger,” I said.
The young man came in. He studied the finger, very objectively, without horror or disgust. Taking a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, he carefully lifted the finger and held it upright in front of his eyes, rotating it entirely around.
“A weekend in Cabo San Lucas,” he said to Michelle. “You owe me. I was right.”
“It’s hers?”
“I’ve been looking at the hand for hours, I know every finger, and this is a solid match. I’ll run prints, but…”
He shrugged. He left. Michelle and I avoided looking at each other.
“I’ve got this awful feeling,” I said, “that there’s a whole other side to this.”
“You know how Carnivore works?”
“Sure. You set up a secret monitoring station on the Internet. At a specific place, to monitor all the traffic through that place. Like Tucson. On the Internet nodes that run through Tucson.”
“Yes.” She started to work the laptop, tucked her hands in her lap.
“But that doesn’t explain how you correlated the picture you showed me with the one you’ve not shown me.”
“You haven’t seen it?” She was astonished.
“No. I’ve been away from email access for a while. Show me.”
She fiddled with the laptop.
“We know what you do for a living. You’re the leading computer forensics person in southern Arizona. We like to…how do I say this, keep tabs on you?”
“The fucking government,” I said angrily.
“Laura, you keep ‘tabs’ on all kinds of people’s personal information. Don’t get righteous with me, okay?”
She had a point. I nodded.
“So our computer experts found this picture of the goat tits purely by accident, but we correlated it with a lot of other traffic from Sonora. We’re trying to isolate Internet usage as it relates to all these kidnappings.”
“Show me the other picture.”
“It’s been doctored with software. PhotoShop, probably. The picture has been altered, you can’t necessarily take the photo as being something real.”
“Just show me.”
She quickly opened a second file.
Meg, facing the camera. Seated on the desert floor in front of several teddy-bear cholla cactus. Her left arm had been hacked off at the elbow, the arm lying in front of her in a patch of desert wildflowers. Stupidly, I saw they were purple lupines.
“Doctored picture,” Michelle said. “We’ve had people all over it.”
I shoved the laptop so I didn’t have to look at the screen.
“There’s something I never understood,” I said. “About this finger. I thought it was Meg’s finger. You’re saying it’s not. Then…whose finger?”
“Margaret Admiral’s.”
“Did you ever find the rest of her body?”
“No.”
“What’s the story here? Why are you using Carnivore? Why are you so intensely interested in these kidnappings?”
“Kidneys,” she said cryptically. “Do want to hear the rest?”
22
“It all started with kidneys.”
Pulling the laptop to her, she played the keyboard like a piano, entering three successive passwords. We waited for yet another prompt.
“Law and Order. The TV show. The first episode I ever saw, this guy wakes up on a bench in Central Park, he’s missing a kidney…here.”
A simple screen, a blank search box, brief instructions on typing search requests and a Go button.
“Not much in the way of user-friendly graphics,” Michelle said, “but it’s only used by a few hundred people. Okay.”
She typed “Kidney” and clicked on the Go button.
A long list of database entries scrolled down the screen. Twenty data fields in all. Cities, countries, dates, hospitals, doctors’ names, recipients, donors, other fields about which I couldn’t make sense. But one field stood out starkly.
Price.
“What are we looking at?”
“You have to bear with me for a while, Laura, until I can explain all of this. There aren’t just kidnappings going on, I mean, kidnappings for ransom.”
“You’re freaking me out here. What is this database? Before you clicked on KIDNEY, I saw categories for HEART, LUNGS, LIVER…I mean, what is this?”
“The trade in human body parts.”
“Jesus, Jesus…I can’t deal with this.”
“Listen, just for a bit. A lot of this is legal. Tissue banks, organ banks, bones, skin, teeth, skulls…”
“Skulls?”
“Teaching hospitals always need skeletons. Some anthropology departments need display items for classes in physical anthropology.”
“A kidney is worth up to two hundred thousand dollars?” I said in amazement. “Is that the legal price?”
“No. Donor kidneys are matched to candidates, who pay operation costs, doctors’ fees, whatever. This column toward the right side of the database, it shows either an ‘L’ or an ‘I’ meaning legal or illegal. If you match across, you can see that the kidneys marked with an ‘I’ have the six-figure prices.”
“Can you sort this database?” I asked. “We don’t have time to fiddle with all these entries.”
“I can only do queries.”
She clicked on a top menu item that read New Search. The single box came up, and she typed “Arizona.” Another long list scrolled on and on for three minutes.