Internecine (24 page)

Third possibility, even weirder: Alicia had managed to spin this spiderweb all on her own, and
NORCO
had found out about it, and a deal had been cut with extra percentage points for initiative.

So, in the official story version, who was supposed to be the architect of Alicia Brandenberg’s failed assassination? Answer: Jenks
or
Ripkin—whomever
NORCO
chose to discredit. It was hermetically brilliant, in its way.

Which made Alicia Brandenberg herself the person who had hired Dandine, using enough stalking horses to cover her culpability. Hired Dandine for a murder attempt that was supposed to fail, thus nourishing her credibility.

But why had Dandine taken the gig, if he had already bailed out of
NORCO
? That was one I didn’t have an answer for, and now was the wrong time to ask. He was running his own playbook, and so far I hadn’t been killed.

But others had.

I felt bad. I felt responsible. I wanted to take it all back. I felt like a dry dog turd in a dirt yard. I sat down, heavily, all the starch gone from my legs.

“Where are you?” I said.

“I’ll make contact soon. I have to figure some things out, myself. You sit tight at Zetts’s. Don’t even look out the window.”

Click; he was gone, just like that.

Which meant Zetts’s assignment was to make sure I did nothing. Which meant that I was still a prisoner. The exterior doors of his home, I now noted, were deadbolted by keyed locks from the inside. The windows were barred. And Zetts probably had an equalizer or two in reserve, just in case I got rowdy.

Zetts was in the kitchen. “What’s the word, Thunderbird?”

“We wait,” I said.

“I got frozen pizza. Lots of stuff on the tube.”

“Yeah.” I felt hopelessly out of the loop—superceded, extracted, impotent, and pointless. This was what normal people called despair.

In the cramped corridor leading to Zetts’s bathroom, a hallway composed mostly of doorways, I saw one-by-six pine planks had been laid across the tops of the door moldings to form quick and dirty shelves that held wall-to-wall paperbacks. Zetts had every single
Doc Savage
book in print. The newest reprint was fifteen years old; the oldest, older than Zetts by a decade. Doc Savage, Promethean superhero of the thirties and forties. The Man of Bronze. By Lester Dent, and his cronies, writing under the house name Kenneth Robeson.

Nobody was who they said they were.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said, holding up a thin copy of one of the adventures (fans in the know called them “supersagas”) titled
Death in Silver.
“How do you even know about these?”

Zetts was pulling on another beer. “Got the whole set off eBay,” he said, rather pleased with himself. “I like ’em. They’re fun to read. They’re
easy
to read. And Doc always wins.”

Blackmail is such a vital industry in Mexico that they have hostage hotels. For five hundred dollars per night, faceless men will keep your kidnap victim in a locked room with no escape options, no weak links in the chain. Fed and watered, provisioned with a bed, bathroom, and TV set, bottled up beyond the reach of the world.

The hostage hotel is hermetically secure. Some are in remote locations, others, right in the middle of Mexico City. The police have been bribed into ignorance.
El Cañonazo
is an enormous part of the Mexican economy, so much so that without all the corruption, the state itself would collapse. Every week or so, some minor celebrity’s kid or politician’s grandpa is abducted; about half the time it is somebody vaguely newsworthy, which feeds the fever-pitch hysteria of tabloid reporters. Usually the victims (Dandine would call them
clients)
of such an exercise only lose two or three fingers before the targets stop fucking around and pony up the cash everyone knows they possess. A sense of general public resentment underlies the drama; sympathy for the plight, yet resentment toward the haves from the have-nots. How dare you have more money than me? See what it gets you? Regional TV news treats it all like a lurid game show, showcasing the returned victims, who invariably smile at the camera and display
their mutilated hands, often still bloody or mummified in soaked bandages.

You think: If Mexico has business-planned it so well on the entry-level, what would the whole enterprise be like with ready cash and resources? Americans still preferred to live in a fairyland where graft was publicly condemned as a backroom aberration, not an open, inevitable, necessary evil for doing business.

(Remember that country? The one whose flag flew every night when TV stations ended their broadcast day, back when freedom of speech was more vital than political correctitude? When the Berlin Wall was still standing, and there was no such word as
downsizing
? Yeah,
that
country . . . before it became East Berlin West.)

Dandine could have stashed you under the stewardship of Zetts two days ago, but did not. Why? You conclude that Dandine had: (1) been honest in his urge to unload secret stuff on some outsider, or, more likely (2) wanted to expose you to danger in order to convince you that his rattle about
NORCO
was real, so that (3) you’d buy his direction with less question, feeling unmoored and out of your element. The paradigm of the babe in the woods is supposed to engender sympathy and warn against naivete. The poor dupe in the hostage hotel is a depletable resource that can be quickly bartered for cash. So what is the lesson, here—what is the goal?

Your golden rule is make the customer sell himself, always advantaging their basic greed, weakness, or self-interest. You’re just there to help them get whatever they already want. You just make them more honest, and you are almost never disappointed. Greed, weakness, and self-interest are the baseline for all human behavior.

You let the hot water in Zetts’s adequate shower pound your scalp. It feels good to wash off the experience of jail and send it down to meet the sewer . . . even if you’re still somebody’s inmate, agenda unknown. You consider your fingers, and what it might take to keep them.

Dandine has not surfaced. He has not raced down to hold your hand because it was not necessary. Zetts has gotten you out, and that was all the news Dandine was interested in at this moment. You’ll see Dandine again when it is time to do something new, something further, either to compound an elaborate network of lies, or to bring the drama, real or
not, closer to its conclusion. Even though, right now, all you want to do is sleep for a week.

“Let me show you something.” Zetts beckoned from the dim recess of what I presumed was his bedroom. Toweled off and temporarily installed in one of my host’s black T-shirts (silkscreened with a pink pussycat and the logo
GAY MAFIA MEMBER
), barefoot, and wearing my jail trousers, I entered the aquarium glow of Zetts’s computer kingdom. The bed, shoved into a corner and perpetually unmade, was an afterthought. The real deal, here, was the monitors, keyboards, and hard drives. It figured.

He peered at my face. “You shave?”

“Yeah.” It had been another way to scrape off the past day. My chin was smooth again. “So?”

“You, uh, didn’t, like use the beard trimmer, I hope.”

“No.”

“I’m just saying . . . um, ’cos I tried using that thing to trim my pubes, and I, uh, kinda shredded my scrotum a little bit.” He opened up a metal folding chair for me. It had
FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH
written on the back in Magic Marker.

I closed my eyes, trying to picture his grooming regimen. “Why did you do that?”

His main monitor was opened up to an Internet browser. After a couple of load seconds, an adult homepage displayed itself, all facial come shots and glistening genitalia. “Because that’s what
she
likes,” Zetts said. He pointed.

A woman appeared on-screen. A naked hooter queen with that beach movie expression of sizzling intellect. She moaned in a repeat cycle as she jammed a gigantic cucumber in and out of her photo-real vagina, cadenced as a windup toy.

“That’s Rebecca,” said Zetts. “My virtual girlfriend.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Pause. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“Hey, it’s not like I get much of a chance to lounge at the coffee boutique and scope chicks with laptops, fuckin
poetry
books, brah. Look at the shit I do. Not much window there for work-related love affairs. No MOAS.”

“Mo’ ass?”

“No—
M-O-A-S
. Minimized Option Attraction Syndrome. Some chicks look better to you if they’re the only chicks you’re ever around, like, in a work environment.”

Like Katy Burgess, at Kroeger, for example. Moonstruck romantic that I am, I wondered if I would ever see her again.

“But compare them to the outside world product, and
whoooo
let the dogs out, ya hear that? Now, Beckah here, she can do things. She comes with a hardline voice person to, y’know, get your juices flowing, live, one-on-one.”

“On the phone, you mean.”

“Fuckin-A on the phone. Safe sex, dude. But anyway, that ain’t what I wanted to show you.”

“You tried to shave your pubic hair with a clipper because an animated Internet girl with a real, live phone voice
told
you to?”

He bounced a surly look off me. “This is the twenty-first century, blood. Never mind. You wanted to know about
NORCO
, right?”

“Oh, geez, I should have thought of that right away,” I said. “Just go to the
NORCO
Web site.”

“Even people who don’t advertise need a database,” said Zetts. “Now, check this out; you can’t do this on ordinary wireless or even a cable modem or DSL. Has to be a strong-ass digital signal, uplinked to a satellite.” He devoted his full attention to entering a URL, which popped up in the proper window:

http//:[email protected]/index/html

When he hit
RETURN
, the www part disappeared from the URL.

“That’s when it happened,” he said. “When they modified the uniform resource locator because people got tired of manually typing superlong addresses. Now you can just enter the domain name and it routes automatically. Systems always compress; it’s like an abbreviation of what’s already an abbreviation that sends the same information. One, two, three—protocol, domain name, and hierarchical file name.”

“That’s when
what
happened?”

“Clone system, based on mirrored signals.”

“Please,” I said. “My headache wants to come back and I don’t have time to run out and get a fucking nerd degree.”

“Just watch.” He blanked the URL from the window and typed:

h/t/t/p/:::access

The drive noodled for a bit—that “searching” sound which, for me, usually indicated the thing was about to crash. What displayed next was no surprise:

ERROR = 404 DOES NOT EXIST/NOT ON SERVER

Zetts checked his watch (a no-frills Seiko), counted off thirty seconds, then typed:

Route2access:::portal753690

The computer did not crash. It did not say
The Finder Needs Your Attention
or that anything had “unexpectedly quit.” Instead, there came a barber-pole roll bar and the legend:

. . . connecting . . .

The new URL that appeared was a complex string of characters, symbols, and numerals that ran right off the menu window. Zetts keyed to starboard to show it to me. “See? It’s like two feet long.”

“What is it?”

“Internets within the Internet,” he said. “Webs inside the Web, like a subterranean data network. The Internet is like a venetian blind—you twirl the thingie, and it looks like a solid barrier. Look at it at an angle, and all you see is cracks, provided by the illusion of solidity.”

I had thought of the venetian blind metaphor myself, a day earlier. It was disorienting, as though Zetts had been briefed on my inner musings.

“Ever get cable TV?” he said.

“Once.” Way back during the Bronze Age.

“Yeah, right, well, that co-ax they strung into your house is capable of carrying like a hundred times the signal needed for mere TV. The Internet is like that, too, but it would be like trying to see individual molecules in a solid object. A whole big gang of like untapped potential.” He pointed at the screen, which now showed a simple white box with a subwindow headed
SUBMIT INQUIRY
and blinked with the persistence of a tapping foot.

“So . . .” He scooted back from his berth, offering the keyboard to me.

I typed
NORCO
. The screen shot back
AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED/LOGIN.
“Strike One,” I said.

“Just wait, dude. Jesus.” Zetts leaned in and typed
NAKEDAPE21
, all caps. “Dandine got this from some guy on the inside.”