BETA - Project Avatar, page 8
“Karen Collins, huh? I’m not sure if I look like a Karen. And since when do you know people in Bangalore?”
“Everyone knows someone in Bangalore,” he muttered. The laptop’s screen blinked off and he flipped the computer upside down. He fished a little package of screwdrivers and a tiny soldering iron from his pocket. She watched him with some alarm as he began opening the bottom of her machine.
“Abe . . . what are you doing to my computer?” She pronounced the word with as much emotional resonance as if she had said “baby.”
“I’m going to modify your comm links.” He snapped a universal adapter onto the end of his soldering iron’s cord and plugged it into the wall. “I’ll disable your Wi-Fi. Then I’m going to put one of these into your network card.” He held up a spark-insulated baggie containing three or four small IC chips.
“What are those?” Dee asked in an ominous tone. She wasn’t at all sure she was going to allow this operation.
“Gated scramblers,” he told her. “Do you have a smartphone with you? Here, pass it over, I’ll put one in there, too. They use my best encryption package, and they pipeline all your outgoing signals to your very own dedicated Substructure comms line.”
“Wouldn’t that mean I can only call you?”
“No. That’s the beauty of it. You can browse the internet, download data, and accept incoming phone messages. But all outbound communication goes straight to the Substructure. Even if someone manages to plant malware in your electronics, they can’t trace you. I’ll analyze the signal log and tell you about anything suspicious.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, all right then. Thanks. That’s . . . a really nice thing for you to do,” she added, shaking her hands to dry the nail polish.
“You’re welcome.” He propped the warming soldering iron on the edge of the dresser beside him. He fished in his pockets and came up with a credit card, which he handed to her. It was imprinted with the name Karen Collins.
“Wow!”
“Along with your fake identity, you’ll need a credit account. If you have to stay underground for a long time, don’t worry. The account will be paid in full every month from an untraceable source in Hong Kong.”
“Whose money is it?” Dee asked suspiciously.
Abe leaned in close over her computer’s exposed motherboard with his hot soldering iron. “Well, it’s yours, eventually. When you come out of hiding, I’ll be handing you a big, fat bill. You can sort it out then.”
“Sure, that’s fine, but meanwhile, who am I borrowing it from?”
“None of your business.” He was speaking softly now, trying to avoid blowing on the integrated circuitry. “Some of the people involved in the Substructure have pretty deep pockets. So we’re able to deal with this sort of situation. We have a kind of blanket contingency plan.”
“You hang around with some strange people.”
He looked up from the electronics and gave her his goofy smile, showing a lot of teeth. “Case in point,” he said. “You may have just graduated to being the strangest person I know.” He put her computer aside and began unscrewing the back panel of her smartphone. “All right, now, think carefully. Have you left a paper trail?”
“I had to show my passport to leave the States, and again when I arrived here. So I guess that puts me in Bangalore.”
“Have you used a credit card since you arrived? Maybe for bookings, anything like that?”
“Not yet. Oh, but they wrote down my name and passport number in the guest register, downstairs.”
“Right, of course. . . . Not good.” He leaned close over his work again, and a faint smell of burnt resin wafted through the air. “My guess is, someone will be here looking for you within twenty-four hours.”
“If anyone really cares enough to chase me. Which is a big if.”
“They’ll chase you,” he said confidently. That didn’t make her very comfortable, but then again, Abe was a chronic paranoid. “Don’t sleep here. You’ve already paid for the room? All right, good. When you come back this evening, chat a little with the doorman, you know, make sure people see you. Then pack up your stuff and slip out through the trade door. Check into some other hotel—nothing fancy—under your new identity. Then switch hotels every day.”
Dee smiled at all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. “Hey! I’m impressed. Where did you learn the art of being an international fugitive?”
“Dad was a Weatherman.”
“Oh. That’s right. It kind of runs in the family.” She watched him put the finishing touches on her modified electronics, then lean back to let the solder cool. This was turning into the biggest favor she had ever asked of him. She pensively blew some hair away from her eyes and said, “This is all going to put you out a bit, isn’t it?”
Abe gave her the briefest of glances. “Not to worry. You and I go way back.”
Chapter 9
They did indeed go way back.
Ten years and a lifetime ago, Dee and Abe had been everyone’s pick for the smartest two kids in Stanford University’s Information Sciences program. Perhaps everyone had been wrong, at least in a certain sense: nowadays, two of their classmates were already billionaires. But back in those days, if anyone had been placing bets, the smart money would have been on Dee and Abe.
While Abe had also been notable as one of the campus’s most diehard wastrels, his notorious habits never seemed to cut into his grades or his productivity. To the law-abiding Dee, he always seemed to be getting into some kind of hair-raising peccadillo. In fact, she had first noticed Abe’s existence in sophomore year, when the FBI came to campus to arrest him for hacking the main server at the NASDAQ. The charges were eventually dropped, and the NASDAQ Regulatory Board offered him an advisory position with a jaw-dropping salary. He refused, saying he wanted to finish his studies. A semester later, when Dee asked him about it over a beer at the campus pub, he laughed and said he wasn’t pulling up stakes and moving to New York when he had such good drug connections at Stanford. She never did become a hundred percent sure he was kidding.
In those days Dee had an unfair reputation as a campus prude because she was forever turning away the varsity jocks who tried to pick her up at parties. Her status as an unattainable trophy girl infuriated pretty much every sorority on campus.
A year or so into their friendship, Abe asked her about the matter in his guileless way, and she told him, “I’m cursed with too much imagination. When some guy is trying to pick me up over a plastic cup of keg beer, I’m always wondering what on earth we would find to talk about after we put our clothes back on.”
Abe, of course, was also not her type. They made it all the way through to graduation without his ever having placed a tentative toe across the invisible line, and as a result had become lifelong friends and confidants.
There was something else, too: they shared a secret.
In senior year, they discovered their true talents as cryptographers. They had paired up to do a research project for Adolf Schmidt’s course in Advanced Nonlinear Algorithms, the most difficult undergraduate course at Stanford. Dee provided the inspiration for their project, starting from some unsolved conjectures in topology. Abe, who didn’t sleep much anyway, had advanced the ideas into uncharted terrain. The project soon leapfrogged out of bounds, and after a week or so, they were working on nothing else, missing meals and skipping classes, squeezed together in library carrels or sprawled among a litter of books, computers and papers in a grassy quad under the springtime sun.
Three days before deadline, they knew they were completely beyond the boundaries of known information theory. Their findings could easily be published in a professional journal—a surefire ticket into a top graduate program, or a fast-track entry position at any company they chose.
But both of them were nagged by the feeling they had stumbled onto something of even greater importance. It was as if they had been digging a hole in a backyard and had turned up a few ancient gold coins. So they just kept digging.
The day before deadline, red-eyed and exhausted, they were in possession of a single sheet of paper with a set of algorithms that opened the security of any public key infrastructure. They had cracked PKI.
PKI was the security protocol for corporate and financial encryption worldwide, and the linchpin of all modern economies. If the algorithms on their sheet of paper were ever published, no standard financial transaction could be safe: credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers—everything. Most alarming of all, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency infrastructure would be rendered useless. In the wrong hands, the algorithms they had developed would wreak economic and military chaos beyond imagining.
Abe, who hadn’t slept in two nights, nonetheless found enough energy to joke: “I suppose we can’t turn this in to Professor Schmidt.”
Dee gave him a demoralized moue. “Understatement of the century,” she said. “Let’s sit here and stare at it for an hour or so, okay? Because after that, we have to burn it. And then we have to figure out something else to turn in tomorrow for our term paper.”
“Yup. Unless we want to enter a life of crime.” He gave his unconvincing rendition of an evil smile. “But you gotta admit, that would be one lucrative life of crime!”
“Oh, shut up,” she grumbled. “It’s not funny.”
The next day they turned in an unimaginative splining algorithm and got a B minus. It was the worst grade either of them had received in their lives.
So they would always share a potent secret. She knew it was a major basis of the unlikely friendship-for-life they enjoyed. One thing was certain: knowledge of such a dangerous secret had helped launch Abe on his lifelong trajectory of paranoia, secrecy, and evasion. And from where Dee was sitting now, she could hardly blame him.
As soon as Abe had finished giving her secure lines of communication, she shooed him out of her hotel room and re-enabled her cell communications. It was the first time she had done so since Devil Flats, Arizona. After a bit of grumbling, he agreed to wait down in the lobby while she made a couple of quick phone calls.
“I’m serious, I have to leave town in just a few hours,” he reminded her.
“Ten minutes. I swear it.”
As soon as he was out the door, she dialed her friend Rosemary, in San Francisco. It was still Sunday afternoon on the West Coast, and Rosemary would be curled up with a murder mystery in her beautiful Noe Valley flat.
She picked up on the fourth ring, and said languorously into the telephone, “Roooooosemary . . .”
“I’m so glad I caught you! Are you alone?”
“Oh, hi, Dee. I was just thinking about you this morning. Or maybe it was last night? It’s all a bit of a blur. Anyway, I just had to tell you this story—it’s screamingly funny. Give me a couple of minutes . . . it’ll come back to me.”
“Sorry, Rose, it’ll have to wait. I’ve only got a second here, and I have to ask you the biggest favor ever. Are you going to get mad?”
“Never. Anything for you, darling. As long as it doesn’t involve champagne, because I’ve sworn off the stuff, at least until Friday.”
“Good. My business trip has been extended, and I’m not even sure for how long. But I’m definitely not flying back tomorrow. So could you get in touch with my cat sitter and make sure she’ll take care of Tyro, and water the plants, and all that?”
“Sure . . .” Rosemary extended the word for several seconds, as if she were thinking the matter over. “Now, not to be tactless or anything . . . but this must mean you’ve met somebody?”
Dee was unable to repress an aggravated long-suffering sigh at this predictable turn of conversation. Rosemary had been her best friend since second grade, and she had always been an incorrigible gossip and social snoop. Indeed, for the past five years she had made a living exploiting this unfortunate personality trait, working as a full-time reporter for the society pages of the San Francisco Examiner. Dee was about to respond when she heard the familiar beep of a voice-mail message on her smartphone.
“Rose, I honestly don’t have time for this right now.”
“Naturally not. So you just give me his name, rank, and serial number like a good girl, and I’ll take matters from there.”
“Name: Tyro. Weight: six pounds, six ounces. Species: Felis domesticus.”
Rosemary made tsk sounds with her tongue. “So that’s the way, is it? Well, you’ll see. Love’s roaring flame will die back to a more comfortable glow, and you’ll come crawling to me, your lifelong faithful friend. And, mark my words, you will dish up every sordid detail.”
“It’s not like that.”
A jaded chuckle. “No, darling, it never is.”
Dee gave Rosemary the contact information for the cat sitter, thanked her profusely, and hung up.
She immediately dialed again, putting through a call to her father’s number in San Diego. She always called her dad on Sundays. She had missed one Sunday about three years ago, and although he hadn’t said anything about it, she had the impression his feelings were devastated. She hadn’t missed a Sunday since.
He picked up on the first ring. “Dee?” he guessed.
“Hi, Dad.”
“I hit nine over par today.” He waited, apparently expecting a reaction.
She didn’t know anything about golf. “That’s . . . not too bad. Right?”
He remained silent for a few moments, then said, “If I could lose some weight, I could play better. The truth is, it’s getting hard to see the ball if I’m standing too close to it.”
Dee suppressed a laugh, as the image displayed itself all too clearly in her mind. A couple of years back, her father had taken early retirement from his position as a math professor. Since then, he had devoted himself to his two passions: fine food and golf. Unfortunately, his enthusiastic indulgence in the former was rapidly rendering the latter nearly impossible.
“That’s got to make the game challenging,” she said, trying to be sympathetic.
“My computer’s making a funny noise. What do you suppose it is?”
She was used to this kind of jagged sidetracking in her conversations with her father. He had always been the absentminded-professor type, and in recent years he seemed to have moved into a world all his own. She said, “You mean your really, really old Toshiba?”
“Yes. And sometimes it makes a little clattering sound, like there’s a gear slipping.”
“Computers don’t run on gears, Dad. It’s just crying out, begging you to let it retire.”
“Ha! That’s funny.”
“Let me send you a new computer. I’ll just order one, and it’ll show up in the mail.”
“No, don’t bother. I’ll never use it. I like my Toshiba. We understand each other.”
Dee shook her head and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Okay, if you’re sure.”
“I’d better go,” her father said abruptly. “My golf buddies are coming over to play cards tonight.”
“Okay, we’ll talk next week, then.”
“Thanks for calling, kid. I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
Dee shuddered, grabbed her things, and walked downstairs to meet Abe. She found him in the little restaurant adjoining the front lobby, stuffing down a big thali lunch. She ordered a small one and picked at it, just to keep him company. Rice and curried lentils, yogurt-cucumber sauce, and an eye-watering mustard chutney, all served up on a square of shiny green banana leaf the size of a platter.
“God, I love this country,” Abe said through a mouthful of food.
Their waitress weighed about eighty pounds and had dark Dravidian features and huge black eyes. She presented them with an embossed brass tray scattered with macaroons. “A selection of sweeties,” she announced.
Dee nibbled on the last of the tasty little macaroons as she signed the bill to her room account. A minute later, they were out on the street hailing an auto-rickshaw: a tiny vehicle with an egg-shaped body possessing about as much impact resistance as a biscuit tin, wrapped around a three-wheeled scooter. Its two-stroke engine screamed as they scurried through dense city traffic.
“You can’t beat these things for secure conversation,” he yelled in her ear. “Even if someone had planted a bug in here, they still couldn’t make out a word we’re saying.”
She nodded, not particularly inclined to yell a response.
“You asked me about Ed Haas,” Abe reminded her. “He’s at the Army hospital in Phoenix, in the ICU. He’s in a coma. Aha . . . you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“Thanks for checking. That was really sweet.”
He gave her a hard look. “Dee, we don’t have a lot of time. What’s your plan here? Are you going to stay in India? You should probably get out of Bangalore as quick as you can.”
“I know. But I have to check on some things while I’m here.”
They came to a halt in a dense logjam of stopped traffic on Palace Road, not far from the racecourse. The snarl of vehicles was dominated by scores of small panel trucks and flatbeds, rising above an ocean of auto-rickshaws and motor scooters. The howl of high-pitched little engines and the stink of burning motor oil were overpowering.
Their driver was an excitable little man, thin as a rake under his crisp long-sleeved shirt and trousers. As soon as they came to a halt in traffic, he began bouncing in his seat and chattering angrily to himself, as if he actually intended to do something about the situation. He interrupted his own rant to turn around and give his passengers an apologetic smile, waving a skinny hand at the stopped traffic around them.
“Incredible, is it not?”
They politely nodded their agreement, then leaned back into their tête-à-tête.
Dee said, “I know you must think I’m holding back some information, and you’ve been very thoughtful not to pry. But the truth is, I don’t know what this is all about. Something must have gone wrong after one of my old projects. I mean, why else would the hijackers mention me in their debriefing with UMBRA? And why would General Grimmer send commandos after me?”
