Borderless Deceit (33 page)

“Darling,” Hannah called, “are you still searching? I began looking in archives for recent interesting editorial opinion on directions for the European Union in
The Spectator
. If you come across that sort of thing, do let me know.”

“Scrolling like mad, sweet. When you do this for a while, you actually start to feel like a spectator.”

“I know, darling. It's a remarkable sensation. Quite dizzying.”

Heywood took a deep breath before completing the last instruction to hijack the images parading across Gerry's screen. He pressed “Enter.” Hannah's screen flashed black, but when a millisecond later it broke back into life, Heywood could have sworn his heart stopped beating. In Hannah's sewing room, in shattering colours, he had before him a pornographic image, maybe the most pornographic image he'd ever seen. An orgy. An orgy far beyond his most tumultuous phantasies. Muscular men and curvaceous women, a dozen of each maybe, were coupling. The men were sweating, the women all moaning. Heywood's
eyes roamed from one couple to the next. Some were gyrating on Persian carpets on the floor, others on Victorian couches, several on ornate coffee tables, and a few were doing it standing up against French doors. It was the most visually vibrant, most dynamic, most superbly constructed scene of mass fornication of people of all races which Irving could ever have hoped to see. The camera zoomed in. Irving's mouth went dry. A lump formed in his throat and he felt his dick harden.
That son-of-a-gun Gerry. A cozy Saturday evening at home with Rita using high-speed access with Viagra doing all the cheering on the sidelines
.

Heywood watched awhile. The orgy clip ended. He saw Gerry called on another Internet site: Secret Lesbian Housewives. More clips and photos followed, mostly from the Middle East, Heywood judged, because the women were all veiled. They undressed each other, everything coming off except fragments of lace which covered their faces. Next the dildoes came out.

“Found anything, yet, darling,” came Hannah's renewed call.

“Couple of things, sweet. Editorial views on pornography on the Internet. Also, an opinion piece on modernising Islamic womanhood.”

“Don't waste your time on that,” Irving's wife declared from the sitting room. “Frightfully tedious subjects.”

“Guess you're right.” Irving suddenly had a wicked thought. He called to Hannah: “Sweet, why don't we invite Rita and Gerry over for tea.”

“What? This minute?”

“Why not? What's wrong with being social? Both our families are now computerised. We can compare notes on how life has become different.”

“Terribly short notice, darling. For them, I mean. I don't want to go to much bother either.”

But Irving said he'd make the tea and Hannah yielded. He picked up the phone. Five rings later Rita answered.

“Hi Rita, Irv here. How are you both? Saturday night on Ivy Crescent, right? Bored out of your skulls?…No?…Yeah, sure, I understand. It's like that here too. Always something to be done around the house. Gerry's at his workbench in the basement, I guess.
You know, Rita, we really do admire all that lovely work he does with his lathe…. No?…He's at his desk? Doing what?…Sorting the family photos?…Good. Good….Listen, come over for tea. Both of you…Yes, right now. Or maybe in twenty minutes…Sure, it's a bit sudden, but Hannah and I are sitting here and, you know, we've got high speed now, like you, which is a good thing, right? Hannah's found some interesting sites with lots of historical gems, and, you know, we can access the archives of all the editorial opinion
The New Statesman
has ever produced. And Hannah and I thought it would be fun to chat with you about what we've found and what you've found, what we use the Internet for, what you use it for, that kind of thing. Also, a cup of tea would prove computers promote sociability, not the opposite…Not tonight?…Sure…I understand, we all get tired a bit earlier these days…Tomorrow afternoon?…Yeah, we'd love to see you…Okay. Good night, Rita. Say hi to Gerry. Sweet dreams to you both.” Irving put down the phone. “Tea tomorrow,” he said to Hannah. “They plan to hit the sack early tonight. Guess they have to be fit for church tomorrow.”

“Such lovely neighbours.”

“God-fearing citizens. Icons of respectability.”

Irving trundled off to make tea. In the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, he hummed himself a tune and as he filled the teapot he nodded.
Knowing what others don't know that you know – it's like controlling an oracle. That Jaime. Before her, limits existed everywhere. Now the opportunities are boundless
.

Once Jaime finished schooling him, Heywood began to explore that vast, amorphous Service haystack which the shameless techies called an electronic filing system. From there he progressed to less accessible sources of information. He searched and searched, always with the same objective: me, my work, my product. And he found quite a bit, enough to form certain conclusions, which he then used to build his case against me. Never mind that it bore no resemblance to the truth. Were it not for his position, it would have stood no chance, but since our Service Czar – that huffer and puffer, that dotty, fuzzy, cockamamie man, that spinner absolute – convinced himself that his discoveries had national importance, it meant others would have to take them seriously too.

Jaime broke this news to me when I was still on the floor reviving from my blackout. Finally I propped myself up, rubbed my forehead, tried to gather my thoughts. She sat close by, cross-legged, energetic, reciting her
Heywood the Hacker
story. “Good old Irv,” she laughed. One of her hands rose, the baubles on the wrist chiming, before it threw non-existent confetti into my direction. “He became, like, obsessed, a honeymooner, you know, starting the hacking habit and right away getting hooked.”

“And you helped him?” I said with disbelief.

“Not much. He just poked away here and there, all the time,
picking up bits of junk. Then he said it came to him.
My intuition never fails me
…those were the words…
The facts are adding up
. Naturally they didn't. All of it was hokum. I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn't listen. So now, dude, you're in the soup. I think he's gonna sic the national security crowd on you. The same thing happened to my brother.”

She seemed to be thinking back to something in the past. Continuing to knead my forehead, I asked distantly, “What happened to your brother?”

Jaime shifted closer. I could have counted the tiny coloured stones adorning her earrings. Bemused, she searched my face. Tiny wrinkles of maturity spread from the corners of her eyes; her lips were pursed tight; the eyebrow rings stood out, perhaps symbolising the vow that life be treated as a game. I noticed that her skin was fresh and smooth, but her elvish stare unsettled me and I diverted my gaze. Then she said, “You want to know? Okay, I'll tell you about my brother.”

I wasn't convinced, neither then nor later, that Jaime really ever had a brother. I recall I vaguely wondered already then how much of what she said was true. Perhaps her brother was an invention which allowed her to enjoy a private form of fun. Or was her story a metaphor, something to explain what she couldn't otherwise account for, I mean the breezy genius that was always vibrantly springing out of her? Anyway, what Jaime told me as we sat on the cold floor of my cell sounded fabulous enough. It was as odd as her ability to sound like a young thing and an old hand almost in the same breath.

But if she had invented the story, or parts of it, she certainly made it seem that she had lived it. Jaime appeared totally convinced that she had grown up in a small northern town streaked with myopia. And if she never had a psychological father, she certainly provided details on the biological one – a man who drifted in, found a job working a chainsaw in the forests and got things going with a local woman who cleaned motel rooms. A son came along, some years later, the daughter, the father disappearing before the girl was born. The mother's profile in the story wasn't strong. Jaime and her older brother – always nameless – effectively lived as orphans. The brother was smart, strong and athletic, but when he discovered the school's computer he stopped doing sports. At every opportunity he was now at
it, hulking over the device, his loyal little sister looking on. Computer games quickly bored him and he moved on to more exhilarating entertainment. The little sister happily watched her big brother figure out how to develop bogus identities on-line; she gleefully observed fictitious citizens being supplied with excellent credit ratings; and she clapped her hands at the spontaneous formation of post office box addresses in other towns. After a few real world excursions to those places – to pick up mail sent out by trusting credit institutes – Jaime's brother became the proud possessor of plastic cards. Next came bus rides to more distant places – whole days on busses – because in larger cities bank machines are numerous and the users more anonymous. He made the rounds extracting money with Jaime dutifully tagging along. It was to be expected that before long the cards stopped working. But who cared about that? Jaime's brother left no traces, not of him, nor of where he lived, and new cards were arriving all the time. He was disciplined too. No conspicuous spending. The loot got stashed. When he believed he had enough he told his little sister they were on their way.
I'm taking Jaime south
, he reputedly wrote in a note to the mother.
I'll make sure she gets her schooling
.

“So we moved into this mega-marvy dive in Toronto. Nothing much in it except for a big computer. My brother wanted me to go to school, but I learned more from him at home when he was hacking. What a show, holed up in a back-alley apartment but owning the world.”

The story turned. Jaime's brother was too clever to continue with on-line fraud forever and landed a job with an Internet security firm. The bosses were astounded with what he did. “Barrels of moolah, Carson, legal lettuce, coin to put in the bank. Too much good news, though, I mean him being red hot. He said our pad wasn't right anymore and we moved to a fancy condo. I didn't like it. Not my type, you know, the middle class. They're so into swank. It was freaky.”

Jaime had a way of rendering the melancholy humorous and the humdrum racy. Sometimes she was pensive and a soft purr rose from her throat. “Picture what I'm saying, Carson. Me in school, the scene, can you see it, me trying to be a proper little bubble-gummer like the rest, and them treating me as the class freak? I didn't knock 'em,
though. Still don't. I mean, could I expect them to understand from where I've come?”

It dawned on me that there was more to Jaime than metallic ornaments and on-line chicanery. She possessed deeper dimensions. She didn't judge. She wasn't spiteful. She lacked self-pity and was as self-contained as any outsider. I began to sense an affinity to her then.

I didn't want the story to end. Hardship, vice, redemption – a brother and a sister, two underdogs making good. So they had pulled themselves up, but then what? Did the wheel turn? Was there a fall? I prompted Jaime to go on. “You said the national security crowd went after your brother. How did that happen?” Jaime's eyes grew bright. Admiring her look, I suddenly began comparing myself to her. If she was fun-filled and effervescent, what was I? A melancholy hermit? A peevish wretch? Compared to her eyes, mine were gloomy, two bleak signposts to a spirit that was as good as dead.

With a grin Jaime put a hand on my knee and squeezed. “The national security bozos? You wanna know? Okay, I'll tell you. When my brother went straight, I got bored. I didn't want the hacking fun to stop. So I began to do my own silly on-line stuff.”

The pranks she described were outlandish. Had they really happened? Well, they could have.

The prime minister's schedule. She accessed it to play around with his appointments. “I tampered with it so that the great man was scheduled to meet socialists every day, plus the homeless. Imagine what happened to the heavy hitters responsible for the PM's time. Man, they ran scared, like a flock of turkeys gobbling to high heaven.” I grinned when Jaime said this, because I could picture it.

If I liked that one, she had another. It involved cracking the military's secure communication network. Jaime arranged a string of e-mails, purportedly from a navy frigate in the middle of the Pacific, to hit the screens –
splash!
– in central command. “They freaked!” A ship in typhoon season out of fuel with an abject captain admitting that during the last refuelling he confused litres and gallons? “Central command sends him orders: power down, conserve batteries for bad weather, bring out candles, wait for arrangements to be made with nearby Vietnamese fishing boats to tow the frigate into port. Can you
imagine the captain's reaction when he got those orders?” Yes, I could. I could hear the expletives on board. Was there ever a frigate captain not convinced that central command is staffed by dummies? I suspect the captain may have done the opposite of what he was ordered. He probably powered up and steamed for the fishing boats, to ram them, just to teach someone a lesson.

Then came the time Jaime rejigged the computers transferring pension payments to Newfoundland. “I reset them ten per cent higher. What a scream, I mean, a few months later when some government dingbat finally discovered it. Letters went to the pensioners advising them there had been an administrative error.” Jaime stopped and studied me with her steady grin. “What happened next? What's your guess?”

I winked. “Guess the feds never got a penny back, not from Newfoundland.”

She punched my knee. “Right on.”

“So the national security crowd? Did they wake up to you after the frigate, or after Newfoundland.”

“Neither. It took the Supreme Court to wake up the bozos. I got careless that one time. I didn't seal over my entry point.”