The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (19 page)

“I suppose,” she said.

“I'm a little confused on how people get into this so-called brotherhood,” I said, “if no one knows who they really are. Don't you have to have qualifications?”

“Of course you have to have qualifications.”

“And?”

“You have to have qualifications,” she said again.

“Hello?” Frank said. We had been ignoring him, and he didn't like it. I shut up.

“I hear you posted another one of your goofy theories, Brian,” he said.

“Not so goofy. I gave Marvin the scoop when I called the other night.”

“So, you think the guy's killing nerds who can't explain computer programs?”

“That's pretty much what he told me,” I said. “What was written on the body this time?”

“Lots of stuff,” Frank said. He took a paper from his inside coat pocket and tossed it across the desk to me. “Lots and lots of stuff.”

I took a look.

Quit, exit, stop, depart, flee, give up,

surrender, yield, abandon, cease,

discontinue, end, halt, belay, desist,

knock it off, kill, destroy, avast,

good-bye, farewell, #$@%@!, desert,

bolt, withdraw, abdicate, bye-bye, exodus,

egress, retreat, evacuate, leave, mosey,

pull out, vacate, so long, clear out, scram,

vamoose, decamp, stop it, just stop it, whoa!

“What was the arrangement?” I asked.

“From head to toe,” Frank said. “Over and over again.”

I leaned over and handed the list to Prudence.

“My computer weenies tell me that your theory is causing a panic in some circles,” Frank said.

“That's true,” Prudence said.

Frank and I both looked at her.

“The writers of
Inside Macintosh
are rumored to be hiding somewhere in the desert outside Las Vegas,” she said, “and the Microsoft campus is barricaded and microserfs are taking turns patrolling the grounds to protect the documentation staff. There's a rumor Bill might just let the killer have the designers of the Windows Help system. Locally, I hear, Symantec and SplashDown have boarded up the windows of their downtown buildings. Everyone is scared.”

“But as far as we can tell these are local murders,” Marvin said.

“True,” I said. “The problem is he may run out of local documentalists.”

“There are still a lot left,” Prudence said.

“What I mean is he may run out of bad documentalists,” I said, “or at least those who have pissed him off. I can't see him staying local.”

“Did you maybe say as much on-line?” Marvin asked.

I looked at Frank, who I could tell was following this on-line stuff just fine, which surprised me. I'd figured it would be some time in the middle of the next century before you would catch Frank net surfing.

“I may have,” I said.

“Great,” Frank said.

“It's only fair to tip people off,” I said. “Sure the nation of Microsoft is an entire state away up in Seattle or whatever, but just because lots of us never need to leave the house doesn't mean we can't. Don't you think the killer can get a map and trace his finger north up I-5? It's not like they're hiding.”

“Still it's all just a notion that's gotten lodged in your scrambled brain, Brian,” Frank said.

“Are we done here, Frank?” I asked.

He stood up. “Done here? I guess you could say we're done here. Get your coat. I want to ask the rest of my questions in more familiar surroundings.” He pushed away from my desk. “Cuff him and bring him along, Sergeant.”

“You can't do that, Frank.” Marvin put his coffee cup down on the desk and faced Frank. “Think about it, Lieutenant.”

Frank looked like he was working himself up to a really big explosion, but then he turned sharply and stomped off for the door. “Just bring him.”

So we went downtown.

So to speak. We were already downtown. My office is downtown. The police station is downtown. Most of the stuff in my life is downtown.

At the police station, Frank put me on a pink plastic bench and disappeared.

Ten minutes later, Marvin brought me a little paper cone of water. “This won't take long once he gets started.”

“I don't like the sound of that.”

“Relax, Brian,” he said.

Frank made me wait on that bench for over an hour.

At one point a guy with very short hair and a thin tie glanced at me as he walked by. Then he stopped and looked back over his shoulder at me. A little while later I saw him talking to Marvin. They both kept glancing my way, which made me very nervous.

Before I could find out what all of that was about, Frank poked his head out of his office and called me in. Once inside he left me standing in front of his desk while he sat down and riffled through some papers.

I wasn't willing to play that game. I took a seat and waited him out.

We went over everything one more time. The call. What Prudence Deerfield expected me to do. What I'd found out so far. Everything. It was all old stuff. I'd either said it all on-line or I'd told it to Marvin. From the way Frank kept checking out the papers in a file folder, I thought he knew it was old ground, too.

He was just hassling me.

Like old times.

Well, not just like old times. This time I kept my cool. I wouldn't be slouching home with a bloody nose today.

I learned a few things, too. Nathan Ivanovich, like the others, had been strangled with a cable you might use to hook your printer to your computer. The words on the body were written with a fine tip felt pen.

I decided Frank knew something about Pablo I didn't know. He danced around it, but he always came back to it—the big question was where was Pablo Deerfield?

I didn't know, and I finally convinced Frank I didn't know. He cut me loose.

I figured Prudence would be gone by the time I got back to the office, and I figured right.

At least she'd left a note. “Yuri called. Meet us at eight in The Rubber Room.”

fourteen

“We've decided to let the beans out of the bag,” Prudence said as soon as I'd settled into a chair at their table.

Yuri rolled his eyes at her.

“What?” she said.

“It's about time,” I said. I glanced around for someone to bring me a drink.

The Rubber Room, in spite of the many off-color remarks you could make about its name, was a posh lounge, dim but not smoky, hooked on to one of the best fish places in town. I've heard Herman Goodwin say that when he told his wife he was thinking of opening a fish restaurant, she said, “Better you should check yourself into a rubber room.” The restaurant itself was called Goodwin's Fish House.

I got the attention of a young woman with a tray, and she hurried over to get my drink order. Ordinarily this would not be a choice point. I'd just order a scotch (neat) and that would be that, but lately I'd been decreasing the alcohol and increasing the mix in my drinks. Mostly the mix was juice. I ordered a screwdriver.

“Does that mean you've been using the juice machine?” Yuri asked.

“You can't have it back,” I said.

“We brought it for you!” he said. “We're finding in Russia that drinking lots of juice helps with … er, well, with problems like ours. I have always meant to try it myself.”

“I do have a lot more energy,” I said, and it was true. The last few days of juice and megavitamins had left me feeling like I could jump over buildings.

“You look much better,” Prudence said.

She was still wearing the hippie dress she'd had on that afternoon, but she had done away with the straw hat. Yuri was wearing a dark suit and red tie. I'd never seen him in a suit. He looked official in his business attire, like someone you should pay attention to.

The server brought my drink and Yuri told her to put it on his tab and she smiled and went away. Yuri raised his own glass and spoke in Russian. I didn't ask, just raised my own glass, and the three of us toasted something and drank.

“So what about the beans?” I asked.

“First, Yuri should tell you about
chechyotka,
” Prudence said.

The Russian word for tap dancing.

“I'd sort of hoped you were going to tell me all the things you've been hiding from me.”

He pulled a small notebook out of his shirt pocket and wrote something. He ripped out the page, and pushed it across the table to me.

I took a look at the single word written on the page.

Y
e
Y
ë
TK
a

“That's the way we spell
chechyotka
in the Russian alphabet,” he said.

I saw the connection right away. The name of the Russian remailer was from the first three letters of the Russian word for tap dancing. “Why just the first three letters?”

“The committee claimed the whole word was too long,” Yuri said. “Besides they said everyone who reads Russian would want to know why we called it ‘tap dancing.' This way the joke is only for those in the know.”

“So, Evil Empire Software is a front for four-e-four-dot-com, the Russian remailer?”

“We don't say ‘front' in the new Russia,” Yuri said. “Following your lead, we say ‘parent.' EES is the parent corporation.”

I looked over at Prudence. “What's your connection?”

“I facilitate operations in this part of the world for the remailing service,” Prudence said.

“So are you Russian, too?”

“Yes,” she said. She and Pablo had come to this country as teenagers. They'd taken the family name of their foster parents. It was a painful time. She didn't want to talk about it. Tears threatened her eyes when she even thought about it. Was I satisfied now?

Yuri gave her his handkerchief.

I couldn't believe it. How long would you have to carry a clean white handkerchief around before you got to offer it to a tearful woman?

I gave her some time to pull herself together, and then I got back on topic. “Why all the secrecy?”

“That's what this is all about,” she said. “The integrity of the net.”

“That's true,” Yuri said.

“How so?”

Yuri took a sip of his drink before he answered. “Our purpose at four-e-four-com, as it's called over here, is to maneuver ourselves into a position where we will be the anonymous rerouter for the whole world.”

“Why is it always world domination with you guys?”

“Again, we are just learning our lessons from you,” he said. “Your international corporations are the models. We saw that Russia was the perfect place for an absolutely free hub of information. It is deeply protected by the existing bureaucracy. The government is on our side. When you can say absolutely anything, you will say more interesting and significant things. Art and science will flourish. A new age of information exchange will dawn upon the Earth.”

“And you'll make a lot of money,” I said.

“Isn't that the idea?”

I thought this whole free info business was a little naive, but I didn't say so.

When I didn't reply he went on. “I don't want to make it sound too easy. You don't go from what we had to a functioning capitalistic system in one big jump.”

“No?”

“Factions have formed,” he said. “There is a power struggle between my faction, which wants the freedom business I just explained, and another faction that thinks we will have the world right where we want it when most information passes through our hands.”

“Which one of you is the Russian Mob?” I asked.

“We don't like to say ‘Mob,'” Prudence said.

“Basically there is an invisible battle going on over what the net will ultimately be,” Yuri said. “There are very big forces at work. Conspiracies inside conspiracies inside conspiracies. Someone always sniping at you from the cybertrees. Everyone is looking over his shoulder.”

“So, you're the good guys?” I asked.

“We think there should be an absolutely open net,” Prudence said. “It should be like a force of nature. Just what it is. A place. The fact that anything goes is simply a feature of that place. Information in an information age must flow freely.”

“The other side wants to control it,” Yuri said, “and the trouble with control is the trouble with the old Russia. You'd think we would have learned our lesson. You'd think the whole world would have learned our lesson. If we can convince people that nothing can break their anonymity on our system, we can begin to build that conduit for the free exchange of ideas.”

Yuri signaled for our server and ordered another round. I sat quietly while we waited for the drinks. Prudence gazed off into space. Yuri whistled a little tune softly until he saw me looking at him, and then he stopped. I knew he must be nervous to let a song come so close to the surface. For people like Yuri and me, humming a happy tune was dangerous. So was rhythmic finger tapping on the edge of the table. When I saw him return my pointed look with one of his own, I followed his eyes and saw my fingers drumming and folded my hands in my lap.

The new drinks arrived.

“It is a lot to ask for people just to trust you,” I said. “What you've just told me would make good ad copy but you'll have some trouble selling it.”

“So far selling it has been pretty easy,” he said.

“People see they can trust four-e-four,” Prudence said. “You can see it all over the newsgroups. People like the idea of the remailer being buried deep in Russia where the FBI for instance can't just pop in. Finland dropped the ball when their government busted up all the stuff going on over there a few years ago.”

“That won't happen in Russia,” Yuri said.

“What about that other faction?” I asked. “I bet you don't see a lot about them on the net.”

“One problem is that the attitudes and much of the structure and many of the people of the old KGB are still in place,” Yuri said. “This other faction I spoke of is almost entirely made up of people like that. And criminals. Many criminals. When the killer appeared on the net using our service, someone over there told someone over here to take care of it.”