White Bone

by Ridley Pearson

  “Thank you,” she said, tugging the door handle and pushing the door open. “You could be shot if you’re recognized. I’d keep my head down. Head south. Come around the city to the east. The gunfire has pulled our cars from those areas.”

  If she’d been hoping for a thank-you, she left disappointed.

  18

  Bishoppe led Knox on a fifteen-minute walk through the slum, which was still reeling from the stampede. People were already at work to restore walls, gather goods and look after the injured. To Knox it looked like a refugee camp recovering from a bombing.

  They arrived at a gleaming red tuk-tuk, a three-wheeled vehicle with an enclosed cab. Knox and the boy took the backseat.

  “The Sarova Stanley,” Knox said, imagining how the parking valets would greet such a vehicle.

  “It is a little more money than a matatu,” Bishoppe said, “but much better in traffic. And the police pay them no attention.”

  Knox grinned. Entrusting a fourteen-year-old street kid to look after his security? It was idiotic. And yet, it felt right.

  They drove. Knox quickly broke out in a sweat. The interior of the fiberglass cab was boiling, despite the windows and the open front; its progress through the heavy traffic slow.

  “Let me see your phone.”

  “Why?”

  “Your phone, please!” Knox demanded.

  “No. I come out to Kibera to help you, and you don’t trust me?”

  “You followed me out,” Knox said. “Why?”

  Bishoppe indignantly handed his phone over to Knox. It was a primitive flip model with basic texting. Knox stumbled through the menu navigation. His thumb was the size of three of its keys. All the texts were in Arabic.

  “These are to my friends,” Bishoppe said. “Do you read Arabic? I think not. I am Muslim. My friends are mostly Muslim. I speak and write three languages. How many do you? Why do you insult me like this?”

  The driver glanced back at them. Knox waved him on.

  “I’ve given you enough money by now that you do not need to work for the next few days. Weeks, months, maybe. Do you have friends, maybe family outside of Nairobi? Some place away from here?”

  “My sister lives in Korogocho. You know it?”

  “No, I don’t. You should go there.”

  The boy laughed. “What have I done but help you? You don’t like me, Mr. John?”

  “You can’t follow me around, Bishoppe. You could have been killed here today.”

  “My sister is nineteen. She has sex with men.” Bishoppe’s words swam in the space of the claustrophobic cab. “The men pay her for it. Most. Some do not. They hit her and refuse to pay. I send her money when I can. That’s all I can do. You have money, so I follow you. You’re a good client. You understand?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The boy shrugged. “It’s not her fault. Our uncle made her do it. She gives him the money. I’d rather buy a pair of Air Jordans. Have you ever had a pair of Air Jordans?”

  “No. Your parents?”

  Bishoppe pursed his lips and frowned. “The water sickness. Many years ago.”

  Knox leaned out the window for air. The street was loud with engines of all kinds.

  “I’m telling you, Mr. John, you get me a pair of Air Jordans and I will help you find your friend.”

  Knox had not mentioned Grace or her situation. He blinked. Realizing his mistake, Bishoppe flushed and said, “You spoke to the old reporter at the hotel. Your waitress is a cousin of mine.”

  “You bribed her!”

  “I run a business, Mr. John. Information is king.”

  “You read that off a cereal box?”

  The boy looked confused. Maybe not a big consumer of corn flakes.

  “What are you? Twelve? Fourteen?”

  “Air Jordans. Red. Do we have a deal?” Bishoppe offered his hand.

  “No, we don’t have a deal. You’re playing me.”

  “People talk, Mr. John.”

  “What kind of people?” Knox asked.

  “Red. The basketball shoes over the ankle.”

  “They cost a fortune! Forget it.”

  In the front seat, the driver—clearly eavesdropping—could barely keep his eyes on the road.

  “I can get them black market. Not all that much.”

  “I’ll decide after I hear what you have,” Knox said.

  “I’ll trust you.” The boy sounded about five. Fourteen had been a stretch. “There was this woman at the Sarova Stanley. Her reservation was also made by Eastland. Like yours. She also took the Kibera tour. Like you. You see? So many similarities.”

  Knox worked to control his temper. “You don’t work for Eastland. And how could you possibly know if she did or didn’t visit Kibera? You’re fishing.”

  “No.” Bishoppe shook his head vigorously. “I’m not. I told you, I hear things. My cousin. Maybe he works for the hotel, maybe not.”

  As in China, Knox thought, everyone is everyone’s cousin. Like the reference to the waitress, Knox took it to be meaningless. “Go on.”

  “Maybe he’s good with computers. Maybe he has a way inside the Internet at the hotel.”

  “He’s a hacker.”

  “He’s a businessman, like me. Sometimes he asks me to make a pickup for him.”

  “Blackmail. You’re a bagman.”

  “Sometimes my cousin borrows credit card information.”

  “Borrows! I like that.”

  “There are many such businessmen in Nairobi.”

  “I’ll bet there are. Tell me about the Eastland woman.”

  “She . . . my cousin said she has the kind of firewall only a spy or a thief would have.” He paused. “Are you a spy? Jason Bourne? Mission Impossible? Like that?”

  Again, the boy trying so hard struck Knox as so young.

  “There’s no way he could have hacked her,” Knox said. Racing through Knox’s mind was an image, an emoji of a bomb, followed by a question mark. Had it been some punk kid who’d scared Grace off? Had he traveled halfway around the world because of some kid hacker?

  “That’s the point. The police offer my cousin payment to learn about such foreigners.”

  Knox had to let it register, worked to keep the incredulity from his voice. “The police pay local hackers to know who can’t be hacked.” Grace would have taken immediate action if she’d suspected someone had discovered her. But he wasn’t sure what those actions would have been, didn’t know what Kamat and the others at Rutherford Risk had taught her to do.

  “My cousin says this woman was possibly with the ministry.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The government ministry.”

  “Why would he say that?” Knox asked.

  “Look, I don’t understand computers. He said she might lead him to a prize . . . you see? So I get my prize, right?” Bishoppe stood up, grabbed the rail behind the driver and started shaking the tuk-tuk side to side. The driver reached back and slapped out for the boy. Bishoppe sat down again. “I love that,” he said. “Have you ever surfed, Mr. John?”

  Knox was in a brain freeze, unable to allow himself to see Grace’s work from the perspective of corrupt police, hotel hackers and desperate street urchins. “Call this cousin now. Right now! Pull over!” he shouted to the driver.

  The tuk-tuk weaved artfully through the traffic, but there was nowhere to pull off the road. Mobs of pedestrians and bicycles formed an undulating wall on all sides. Knox struggled to tune out the noise and confusion.

  This “cousin” of Bishoppe’s had clearly gotten close enough to Grace to panic her. Think! What did it all mean?

  Finally, the driver pulled off and stopped. Knox already had his phone out. He awoke Vinay Kamat, in Hong Kong, from a deep sleep. Knox allowed the sound of his voice to introduce
him.

  “Say Grace thought she’d been caught. She’s online, inside someplace she doesn’t belong. What’s her first response?”

  “John?”

  “Quickly. What’s the training?”

  “Abort. Back up your assets. Physical drive, nothing online. Then zero the hard drive. Boot and nuke. Full wipe.”

  “How long for that?”

  “Depends on the amount of data. An hour. Two, to do it right.”

  “What physical drive? An external? A thumb drive? What?”

  “I told you: it depends on the amount of data. John, I was dead asleep. You can Google this.”

  “Google didn’t teach Grace how to handle a breach.”

  “No one breached Grace, John. Now, if she thought they were trying—that’s another story. She carries multiple thumb drives. There are some very cool SD chips out there that can hold two hundred gigs. Smaller profile, easy to hide. But the upload is slow. I might do one of each. One comes with me, one stays behind.”

  “Hidden.”

  “No, I’d leave it on the table with some arrows drawn to it. Yes, John: hidden.”

  “What could a hacker know if he couldn’t actually breach Grace, which I’m assuming is basically impossible?”

  “Basically? John, the CIA can’t breach us. Not without a week or two on a Cray. No one hacked Grace if she didn’t want it. The raider might get the router log, some metadata. But she’d be in stealth mode, John. Proxies. Ghosting. Someone skilled could determine the general area of her target, narrow it down to a neighborhood. Nothing past that.”

  “An area within a city? Chinatown. Capitol Hill.” He was thinking: the Ministry?

  “Sure. But only if this person is very, very good.”

  “Does she leave a signature, something he can keep watch for?”

  “Not Grace. Not on her end.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We’re talking Snowden shit here, John. Not some Detroit hacker. Okay? Think of it like this. You see a person on a bus. You follow the bus, but you never get a look at the face. So you take a chance. You drive to the neighborhood where you think the bus is headed. You get in front of it. Wait by the side of the road. Maybe you recognize the bus or the face, maybe you miss it. Depends on traffic.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “John?”

  “Thanks.” Knox hung up and reached toward Bishoppe, who backed away. “Your cousin. Right now. Give me your phone.”

  The back of the tuk-tuk was no bigger than a can of tuna and still Knox couldn’t get his hands on the kid. Bishoppe moved like a wraith—under his arms, around his back. He was a cat in kid clothing. The driver never twitched.

  “You’ll get the shoes!”

  The boy stopped, out of breath.

  “No texts, no calls,” Knox said, holding up the flip phone.

  “You touch me, I’m gone. You never see me again.”

  “You take me to him. No games. No false leads. Do it, or so help me, I will out you and your cousin to the police, national security, hotel security, airport security.”

  The boy was clearly considering his options, including the door.

  “Now, Bishoppe. We go straight there. Right now.”

  The two connected in a long staring contest. The boy was tough to read. Knox blinked first. Time was of the essence.

  “The shoes for you. Twenty thousand shillings to your friend if I’m pleased with the information.”

  The driver sat up sharply, eyes straight ahead.

  “Sixty,” Bishoppe said calmly.

  The driver coughed.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Fifty. This is a very great risk for me. He won’t like it.”

  “Twenty-five is final.”

  Bishoppe folded his arms across his chest. “You treat me like shit.”

  “Don’t swear.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “The shoes, and twenty-five.”

  Bishoppe tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Drive.”

  19

  The car carrying Knox and Bishoppe arrived at a strip mall, the central occupant of which was a 24-hour department store. The sidewalk out front was littered with cigarette packs and candy wrappers. Groups of young men in shorts and T-shirts loitered. Customers came and went in the relative darkness of the dirt parking lot.

  Knox entered with Bishoppe, moving through a grocery section at the front of the store, followed by cosmetics and a pharmacy, hand tools, office supplies and paper products. Down a set of steps into clothes and kitchenware. The shelves were mostly vacant, their ragged contents haphazardly presented. Several dozen Kenyans wandered the aisles, from mothers with strollers to well-dressed businessmen.

  Bishoppe navigated with ease, making it clear to Knox that this wasn’t the boy’s first visit. They pushed through a swinging door into an unboxing-and-storage area, dodged a few dollies and stacks of flattened cardboard, and entered the third door in a string of four.

  “Yeah? Hang on, I said I’d do it!” a young kid said angrily, not bothering to turn around. Cigarette smoke wafted between his head and the computer screen.

  “It’s me,” Bishoppe said.

  The hacker looked over his shoulder. His youth shocked Knox. He was lighter-skinned than most Kenyans; he might have had some Arabic blood, or Mediterranean. He was not pleased to see someone like Knox.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Twenty thousand to answer a few questions,” Bishoppe explained. “Just the questions. No problems.”

  “Get out! You are in trouble now, kid!”

  Knox pulled out the money.

  “Fuck off. Keep your twenty thousand.”

  “There’s a life at stake,” Knox said. He could do this his way, but he wanted to show Bishoppe some respect. Bishoppe would get pulverized if Knox took over the way he wanted to. His adrenaline was itching for release.

  “A white life. What do I care?”

  “Chinese.”

  That interested the guy. Or scared him. Knox tested his theory. “You don’t want to be connected to a Chinese getting killed.”

  “I am not connected to nothing.”

  “You already are. You just don’t know it yet. That’s why you need me as much as I need you.”

  “I said, fuck off.”

  “I heard you, and I’m still here.”

  The hacker looked him up and down. More frightened than before.

  “Okay.”

  “You . . . visited . . . someone online. You identified her as a woman. You told the boy something about the Ministry.”

  The hacker boiled. Said nothing.

  “You know what I’m talking about?”

  The boy nodded.

  “How did you know it was a woman?”

  He turned back around. For a moment Knox thought he’d blown him off. But he was typing; the screen before him jumped through hoops for several long seconds, and then he read from what looked like a lengthy file. “Sarova Stanley. Room six-two-four, registered to a Grace Chu.”

  According to Vinay Kamat, the boy couldn’t possibly know that. Knox wasn’t about to say anything, though.

  “You doubt me.”

  “No.”

  “She is something.”

  “Yes.”

  “The work is beautiful. Impossible. Highly . . . suffocated.”

  “Sophisticated. Yes.”

  “I have never seen such a thing. Not our own government, even. I am telling you, a thing of beauty.”

  “How many times?”

  “You’re asking what, exactly?”

  “How many times were you with her online?”

  “I was never with her. I watched her. I am Peeping Tom.” He smiled. “But not pervert. Only joking! I worked hard to get inside her.”
Knox didn’t appreciate the sexual overtones; hacker speak, he figured. Still, he wanted to smack the boy. “Kryptonite, I’m telling you. No way I could do nothing.”

  Knox took a chance. “You worked the metadata. You got in front of her and waited.”

  “Shit, man! Who are you?” The guy’s eyes were bloodshot.

  “Tell me what you found.”

  “If I am to guess? She sailed through the firewall and into the Ministry. I have no proof. First time was most probably a probe. I was lucky to see her that time, because the next, she was in. She was offline only maybe one hour and one half. The same work for me? Twelve hours. Twenty, maybe. I admire this woman.”

  “How many times?”

  “After this first time, two more.” The hacker sounded tentative now, worried he was in too deep.

  “Was she detected?”

  “No. The English say, ‘A knife through butter.’ Like that. She is this smooth, this Grace Chu.”

  “Did she know you were there? Is that possible?”

  “Fuck you. I’m good, mister.”

  “Yes, but we both know she is better.”

  No comeback.

  “Which ministry?”

  The guy smiled self-confidently. “Take off,” he said to Bishoppe. Bishoppe left without a word.

  “How much did you offer?”

  “He told you: twenty thousand to you.”

  “You just got your twenty thousand, mister. Two hundred U.S. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “Someone with his pretty face intact. Someone with no broken bones and his equipment in one piece. An additional twenty thousand. No more discussion of money, and if I suspect you’re holding out on me, I’m not going to ask again. Just so you know who you’re talking to.”

  The hacker and Knox could see one another in the reflection off the glass of the monitor and Knox liked what he saw. The guy looked away, suggesting the terms were accepted.

  “I think it is the Ministry of Public Works. I cannot prove this.”

  “Seriously?” It slipped out. Knox had expected something sexier. “Public Works.”

  The boy spun around on the wooden stool. “I believe so.”

  “Did you determine a department? A particular office?”