Night Talk (2 page)

The night air in the City of Angels tasted like moist exhaust fumes recycled from tailpipes on the warm, dark, smoggy-foggy night.

It was late, just after three in the morning, long enough past midnight for few cars or people to be on the downtown street, but still not a safe place for a woman alone. Cops said nothing good happens on the streets after midnight.

Her right hand was in a side pocket of the overcoat gripping a can of wasp spray. The woman running a self-defense course she took had recommended it over pepper spray because it sprayed accurately up to thirty feet and would cause an attacker severe pain. The instructor also recommended that if she sprayed anyone that she should tell the cops she had been carrying it for a wasp problem and not to ward off a human attacker since it might damage the assailant's eyesight.

She was both practical and expedient. She didn't want to blind anyone, but if someone was going to get brutalized during a criminal act, she preferred it be the criminal. And she would follow her instructor's advice and tell the police the spray was for wasps.

She knew she was being filmed as she walked. Cameras on the street operated twenty-four/seven but they were CCTV units, closed-circuit television. Most likely she was being filmed but not observed because there was little chance security people were monitoring the images.

Her destination was a movie palace on the street. The movies were born in Los Angeles and no place showed it better than Broadway. There were still twelve movie palaces in six blocks, each a glittering work of art where the stars of yesteryear, like Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, walked—or danced—on red carpets to attend gala premieres while powerful searchlights on the street out front of the theaters sent beams of light into the night sky that could be seen for miles.

Not all the theaters were restored and some were being used as a flea market or church, but the Los Angeles, Million Dollar, Roxie and other surviving palaces were the tattered remains of grand dames from an elegant time before the center of the city had been abandoned by everyone who could afford the move, leaving the streets first to winos and the homeless and then to the undocumented immigrants who reclaimed it as the Hispanic outpost it had once been.

She was hurrying to the “newest” of the great movie palaces on the street, the Los Angeles
.
The theater opened in 1931 with a premiere of Charlie Chaplin's
City Lights
, a romantic comedy in which Chaplin's Tramp falls in love with a blind girl
.
Albert Einstein had been in the audience opening night.

When the location had been chosen for the rendezvous, she Googled the theater and found out it was on the National Register of Historical Places. The exterior of the building had tall Greco-Romanesque columns; the lavish interior had a crystal fountain that stood at the head of the grand staircase and was modeled after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

The theater hadn't been chosen because it was a historical landmark, however, but because it was convenient.

The
boom—boom—boom
of Latino rap rattled store windows as a black Cadillac Escalade low rider came down Broadway.

The woman picked up her speed and got under the marquee and back behind the box office as the low rider cruised by carrying four gangbangers. The hood of the SUV had a painting of a saucy senorita with bold dark eyes and incredibly large breasts riding a bull.

“Shitty neighborhood.”

She almost jumped out of her boots as someone behind her offered the observation.

A tall man, bony, with a buzz cut, an ebony complexion and a musical Jamaican accent, asked, “Alyssa Neal?”

She nodded.

“I'm Rohan,” he said.

She let out a breath she'd been holding and relaxed her finger on the wasp spray trigger.

He wore a rimless soft cloth pull-on cap with red, yellow and green bands, an olive-drab mesh wife beater and green running pants. The form-fitting shirt bulged from a protrusion of beer belly. He had facial hair that was too long and too frowzy for a fashionable two-day shadow.

The most significant impression he made on her was that he was frazzled. From fatigue and nervous exhaustion. And probably too many pills that wind you up and bring you back down, she thought.

“Ethan won't talk to me,” Rohan said. “He's been smoking so much glass his head is spinning.”

Glass was crystal meth.

“I can't get him to respond, either,” she said.

“He says he's going to see Greg Nowell,” Rohan said. “Wait for Nowell to come out of the building after the show. That's why I asked you to meet me. We better hurry.”

She gripped the wasp spray in her pocket tighter.

 

3

“Ethan sounds pretty wired.”

Soledad tried handing Greg the phone again.

“Tell Ethan I'm not available. Better yet, I've been beamed up and won't be back for a light-year.”

Ethan Shaw was a computer hacker. Caught hacking, he was given the choice of working for the government to test the security of systems or going to jail. But Ethan didn't come across to Greg as an antisocial tech whiz who wanted to shut down Wall Street or the government just to see if he could do it. Greg welcomed him on the show because he brought good ideas and insider information to the discussions. Like Greg, Ethan believed that information gathering and invasions of people's privacy by government and businesses were way over the top.

In his first call Ethan had spoken about how connecting common household devices onto the Internet for access was creating an “Internet of Things” that threw private lives open to hackers—like himself.

“From anywhere in the world you can control your home alarm system,” Ethan had said his first night on, “or use cameras to check on kids, baby-sitters and workers, set the temperature for the house and the fridge, turn on the sprinklers and open the garage door. Cars are getting electronic interconnections so you know how fast your kid's driving, check your tire pressure and brake fluid and even stop a car thief from getting away.

“But this Internet of Things is going to be the Internet of Everything Wrong because what you can do, a hacker can do. Someone with the fraction of the talent for hacking that I have can walk up to your house with their cell phone and turn off your alarm and open your door. Do you have a system that can turn off your engine remotely if the car's stolen? If you can, so can a hacker. The road rage incidents of the future are going to involve a hacker in the car behind you accessing your car's programming and ramping up the speed of your car while you're driving it or turning off its brakes or activating the anti-theft device that causes the car to come to a sudden stop.

“I can go on and on about what low-level hackers can do but check out this. You don't like people getting access to your computer and your money? Guess what, hacking into your house isn't that complicated. How are you going to like it when a neighbor hacks into that camera system you set up in your house to check on your kids and turns your family into reality show stars? And puts it online with you wandering around in your underwear.”

“You heard it from a hacker's mouth,” Greg told his audience.

Unfortunately, besides having tech knowledge the young hacker also had a recreational drug habit that cranked him up. He had behaved himself on the radio until a week ago when he suddenly started dropping f-bombs. The show had an FCC-mandated seven-second delay that permitted the host or producer to keep broadcasting sins off the air and Greg used it to erase the profanity. If the show hadn't taken action, the FCC would have levied a fine.

Ethan was permanently barred from the show, but that didn't keep him from calling and at first begging for another chance, and when it was refused, leaving messages for Greg that he was on to something big and needed Greg's help. Not just big, but world shattering.

Like Greg and so many of the show's listeners, Ethan questioned the necessity and objective of government putting its own citizens under microscopes, invading every aspect of their lives. What was the necessity of the government gathering so much information about its citizens? To be able to identify everyone by their facial features or know and store everything a person has said or written on their phone, e-mail or social networking?

Along with the government's unnecessary intrusions into the lives of its people were corporations whose microscopes on people were even more powerful than the government's. Businesses know what food we eat, books we read, movies we watch, clothes we wear, who we admire and who we hate—even the sex toys we buy and who we use them with.

Everyone has been split apart, Ethan said, dissected in a thousand different ways so businesses can pinpoint exactly what our needs and desires are and dangle them before us. And all that information is available to the government.

Despite his own computer expertise, Ethan was concerned by the dilemma and plight faced by living in a world that had become so high-tech and complex electronically that few could deal with it. He was wildly idealistic about how the world should be and darkly pessimistic about how he saw it. For Ethan, the glass wasn't half full or half empty but filled with nitroglycerin.

“Better talk to him, Greg. He's not rational. He wants you to come to a window. He says he wants to show you something across the street.”

“Show me what? That he can fly? We're ten stories up. What's to be gained by playing his game?”

She hesitated. “I don't have a good feeling about it. He's even weirder than before. It scares me. He might be the type who would drop in with a gun to settle his grievances.”

“The world is out of control when we have to worry that we're going to be killed by some suicidal narcissistic bastard who thinks mass murder is his way to fifteen minutes of fame.”

“Good line. Use it on the show sometime. In the meantime, let's pacify the guy so he doesn't go postal.”

“I don't think Ethan's the gun type. He'd be more likely to attack an enemy by infesting their computer with a terminal virus. He probably got a bad dose of something he cooked up himself. Tell him I'm not talking to him and not to call again. He's been eighty-sixed permanently.”

“Greg … could you please talk to him? Just for a minute. He sounds really depressed. All we need is an angry hacker with a grudge to direct our broadcasts to Mars.”

“Oh my God—so now we're being held hostage to drugged-out crazies with computer skills? This guy can hold a computer program to our head and demand our money or our lives?”

Soledad threw up her hands. “Welcome to the world you talk about five nights a week.”

“If this is where technology has gotten us, I want to get off at the next digital exit. C'mon, I surrender; let's get to a window. It's showtime.”

There were no exterior windows in the broadcasting room and he followed Soledad to the front office, where a large window provided a view of the building across the way and the street below. The glass was coated with dew. Greg slid the window open.

There was nothing to see directly across the street except a building being renovated. It was two stories higher than the building they were in.

Soledad spoke into the phone. “Ethan? I'm putting Greg on. Listen, we're all tired around here. You have thirty seconds and then I'm cutting you off.”

Greg took the phone and leaned out the window, peering down, trying to spot Ethan on the street ten stories below. The street was dark and deserted, as was most of the business area of downtown at this time of night.

“All right, I'm here,” Greg said. “What do you want?”

“You did this, you did it!” Ethan shouted. His voice was hoarse, panicked.

“Did what?”

“You killed me!”

“What—”

“Look at me!”

Greg heard breaking glass and looked up. It came from a twelfth-story window of the building across the street. Glass exploded out, propelled by a body that came out behind it.

In a rain of glass Ethan Shaw flew down a dozen stories to a concrete sidewalk.

 

YOU ARE A SUSPECT

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a virtual, centralized grand database. To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you—passport application, driver's license and toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the FBI, your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance—and you have the supersnoop's dream: a Total Information Awareness about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario …

William Safire,
The New York Times
(2002)

The “Total Information Awareness” program capturing literally
every movement of every US citizen
was in fact put into effect by Congress as the Information Awareness Office (IAO) in 2002 and later defunded after objections were made. However, the 2013 NSA revelations revealed that major parts of this “mass surveillance” system of US citizens was kept funded and still operates in secret by changing the names of the programs.

 

4

You killed me.

The words, a wild, crazy accusation, had no meaning to Greg as he burst out of the building and ran out onto the street where death had happened. Soledad and the rest of the staff rushed out behind him.

Ethan's body was crumpled facedown on the Broadway sidewalk, his head in a pool of blood. There was no movement. The drop had been over a hundred feet onto concrete.