Night Talk (35 page)

“You think that a corporation that's going to lose a big NRO contract is behind the killings.”

“We're not talking about pocket change. Over seventy-five percent of the NRO's budget goes to the companies contracting with it. That's over ten billion dollars a year. I don't know how much goes to the contractor for the God Project, but we could be talking about a billion dollars or more.”

“People have killed for less,” he said.

She stopped pacing and faced him. “You're pacifying me. You don't believe a word I've said.”

“Actually, I believe everything you've said, even about a corporation hiring a killer to make sure its dirty work isn't exposed. Not only has it been done for money plenty of times, but murder has been committed by governments for what they call patriotic reasons and the employees of businesses to protect their company. But where we part ways is who is ultimately behind it.”

“You think it's your visitors.”

“I guess at this stage I'd use Inez Kaufman's ‘invaders' label since they've hung around now for decades.” He held up his hand to ward off another attack. “Let me finish. I've had two strange encounters in my life. In your eyes they never happened. So it comes back to me, personally. Am I lying? Maybe going around telling people I'd been abducted to get some attention. Am I crazy? Hallucinating during moments of extreme stress? It has to be one of those things. So tell me, am I lying or crazy?”

She went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

 

69

Inside the bathroom Ali leaned back against the door and took deep breaths to get her emotions and breathing in order. Her heart was pumping wildly, her eyes tearing. She'd almost completely lost her composure in front of Greg. She lost it now because she knew what she had to do and hated it. The worst possible thing had happened—she had bonded with Greg. More than bonded—had they met at the gym or at a party, there would have been chemistry between them.

She had lied to him from the beginning and it was getting harder and harder for her to keep up a front. Had even lied about the name she took, along with a car from another woman. She was no longer able to handle it. She felt horrible for lying to him and now betraying him, but the world was spinning out of control and she was being tossed in a vortex with it.

Ali still believed that in some mysterious way, Ethan had managed to send the stolen file to Greg, but she no longer believed that they would be able to find it. Time was running out. She was certain that the motel was their last stop, that she and Greg no longer had any options.

Torn but determined she undid the front of her pants and reached down, pulling out a tiny transmitter taped to the inside of her thigh.

Closing her eyes, fighting back tears, she pressed the transmission button.

 

70

Greg stared at the closed bathroom door, sorry that he was adding to Ali's hell, sorry that they were so close emotionally and so far apart intellectually in how they saw the world and the dangers surrounding them. He knew she was struggling and he wanted to comfort her. To protect her. Hold her in his arms.

He had never completely trusted her and he still didn't, but trust was no longer an issue. She appeared ready to bolt. He just wondered what direction she would run—and what it would mean to him.

He shifted his weight in the chair and felt a bulge in his coat pocket that rubbed up against the side of the chair. It was the junk mail he had taken and shoved into his pocket at the front desk of his apartment building when he was still there. He took the envelopes and fliers out, merely glanced at them and tossed them in the trash can next to the desk.

His eye caught scribbled writing on a piece of mail and he reached back into the can and took the item out. It was the take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant. His name and address were handwritten in the otherwise blank address block with awkward block letters by someone who hadn't spent too much time in school learning penmanship but whose fingers probably would fly across a keyboard.

Most important, the restaurant was the one below the apartment of Ethan's girlfriend in Culver City.

Greg's hands trembled as he tore open the folded advertisement, pulling the ends apart from the staple.

His name was not inside, nor was Ethan's. There was no ordinary message, at least not one that he was capable of reading, but there was a set of numbers and letters and an Internet address, all scribbled in that awkward hand that had put his name in the address slot.

And he understood what Ethan was telling him—it was a link to a Web site and the key that would open a file. He recognized that the Web site was to a government agency.

He tried to hold back but couldn't help himself—he started laughing, holding his hand over his mouth to keep from howling at the utter cleverness of it. Ethan had not lied. He had in fact given the file to Greg. Or more precisely, he had told Greg where to find the file and how to open it.

Incredible. Ethan, the computer whiz, geek, cracker, hacker, high-tech savant who played with computers when other boys were kicking balls or working on their car had fooled everyone. He had hidden the message in plain sight. On an advertising flier with a postage stamp.

Snail mail. No one on the planet—even those who had recently arrived—would suspect Ethan of using the slow and notoriously inept United States Postal Service to deliver something he could have sent to Greg in a flash, at the speed of bits and bytes. Instead the flier had been carried by small and big mail trucks, to and through processing centers, and back out onto the roads by another gas-burning, pollution-causing truck before ending up with a pizza parlor menu and store coupons, junk mail he and every other resident in the building received daily.

On top of that Ethan had hidden the actual electronics file at an Internet-accessible location of the government.

It was so simple, so deceptive, so unexpected from Ethan, beyond clever; it was a master stroke of genius. Yet sad. Ethan was dead. So were Rohan and Bob. Maybe others.

He hoped that revelation of what was in the file was worth the lives of innocent people.

Now he had to decide what to do next.

 

71

Ali stepped out of the bathroom after replacing the transmitter and repairing the damage to her makeup that tears had caused.

She knew from Greg's face that something had happened.

“What is it?”

He held up an advertising leaflet. “This. Ethan did send me the file, at least the link to it. By snail mail, not e-mail. Ali, he wrote the information on a flier he'd probably received himself, put a stamp on it and sent it to me.”

She stood unmoving, stunned. “I don't believe it.” She rushed to him and grabbed the leaflet and skimmed it, shaking her head. “Oh my God, he hid the file at the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission! What a joke; they regulate radio.”

“My show and everyone else's.”

“He must have been laughing like crazy when he stuck it there.” She yelped. “I still can't believe it. He really did send the file to you. No wonder no one could find it. Who would have ever thought he'd be so clever?”

“It was inspired on Ethan's part,” Greg said. “We—they—all of us, had a mind-set that a guy like Ethan who teethed on a computer would use the tools he knew. The government has behind it thousands of analysts and a trillion dollars' worth of incredibly complex computers at the NSA, NRO, FBI, CIA and those other capital-letter entities capable of tracking every move everyone on the planet makes. They know the number of times a terrorist in Afghanistan takes a piss, but Ethan put it over everyone by simply snail-mailing the information on a piece of common advertising.”

He threw up his hands. “You know what? I almost tossed it away. Hell, I did toss it and had to dig it out of the trash.”

“This is—it has to go to the Aarons. They'll help for sure now.”

“I'm not giving it to the Aarons. I don't trust them. They're insiders working to keep the government from taking away our freedom. They came at me with threats, threatened to turn me into the people they're supposed to oppose.”

“You didn't give them what they wanted.”

“I didn't have what they wanted, you know that. And who are these people? Wannabe whistleblowers? I think they're hacking into the systems because that's their obsession. And they'll release secret information even if it hurts the country because they're more interested in breaking open secret files and letting the world know they managed it than they are in our national security. Besides, we don't know what's in the file, whether there's stuff in it that can hurt the country. They haven't given me any reason to trust them. I'll go to them if I think it's the best route after we find out what we're dealing with.”

“It can't be done in five minutes. Ethan was too clever for that. He'll make it harder to access than you think.”

“I don't think so. It looks like he's given me a link and a password. Even I can manage that. Besides, we have all night. And so far you've proven to be pretty clever when it comes to hacking into programs.” He got up and headed for the bathroom. “Give me a minute and then let's open the file and check it out.”

He went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

She stood still, staring at the bathroom door and then at the flier in her hands, her heart pounding, emotion welling up in her as she hesitated, not knowing which way to turn.

When he came out of the bathroom, she was gone.

So was the flier he gave her.

 

72

Greg had expected it, knew before he left the bathroom that she would be gone, but it was still a blow. She had seemed more and more torn between two forces, between a growing attachment to him and loyalty to something else. The something else won out in the end.

He went out the door and stepped to the railing and looked down to the parking lot. She waited with her back to him as a car pulled up and stopped.

The front passenger door of the car opened and a big man whose flabby body was swollen by too much fast food and sugar drinks stepped out. Aaron 11—whatever—looked up at Greg. Ali showed the advertising flier to the Aaron and the man gave Greg a smirk.

Ali turned and looked up at him, too. He kept his features blank, but he felt a hot flush of anger, not at her but at the insane situation that had driven a wedge between them.

She held his gaze for only a second, her features frozen to control guilt and regret, before quickly getting into the car and shutting the door. The Aaron slipped into the passenger seat and the car pulled away.

Greg watched until the car had left the parking lot and disappeared down the street.

He stayed at the railing for another moment, not wanting to go back inside, hating that his gut feeling from the very beginning had come true—he couldn't trust her. Like the other Aarons, she was a hacker on a mission to crack open the government's secrets. He wished she had trusted him, had accepted the fact that he would not back away from exposing wrongdoing but wouldn't operate blindly.

He went into the room with the musties and shut and locked the door behind him before pulling out the Chinese restaurant menu.

He had given Ali a mailer from a pizza parlor. And wrote different but similar information on it. Ethan hadn't hidden the file at the Federal Communications Commission, which supervised radio and television, but at the Department of Agriculture unit that dealt with brain-melting mad cow disease.

Ethan's contemptuous poke at the world was telling. Sometimes the world was spinning so fast it did make a person's brain feel like it was melting down.

Greg had newfound respect for the guy. He may have been wasted on drugs, but there was more depth about him than being just a hacker. Ethan lacked everyday common sense but had a deep understanding not about life in general, but about the esoteric world of electronics. He knew how dangerous the world had become as people were pushed aside and “intelligent” machines that worked faster and more efficiently than the human mind took over—at the same time people became so accustomed to the ease of technology that they stopped using their brains.

Machines could be made smarter than humans about most things, they could add and subtract quicker, beat masters at chess and even do surgery on people and other machines more efficiently, but Ethan understood that they didn't have hearts or souls or comprehend pain or the joys of love.

Alone in the room, Greg wished Ali were there. He should have come clean with her and got her to stay and help him out. But he knew that was a daydream. She was one of them, whatever they were. And he knew he had deliberately driven her away out of fear for her, fear that the powers out to stop them would succeed.

Being with her on the run, facing real danger rather than the threats he only envisioned, made him realize that his problem with relationships wasn't just being a workaholic with a job that kept him out all night, but fear that whoever he drew close to might fall victim to the hounds of hell that had dogged him.

That was how he thought of the entities that had taken him as a youth and again as a man. They were diabolical, relentless bastards. Yes, they were technologically advanced but the fact they kept hidden and pulled strings told him that their intentions were not honorable. They kidnapped people to examine them as if humans were lab rats. They didn't accept the people of earth as equals.

So what was their game? He was certain that's what Ethan had discovered. And why the young hacker was killed and why other deaths had followed.

No doubt Ethan didn't just tell people that he was working with Greg, he actually thought he was. Despite his great insights into the world of electronics, Ethan didn't seem to always have his feet firmly planted, even when reality to him wasn't twisted by drugs. He may have wished he was teamed with Greg, a person who could broadcast his findings to the world. And that wishful thinking became an actuality to him, literally a virtual reality.