Rough Draft (34 page)

“The boy's ill?”

The woman smiled graciously.

“I'll let you be the judge of that.”

Hannah followed Yoshia up a wide spiral stairway flanked by narrow slotted windows that looked out on the rose garden and pool and clay tennis court and a pool house that was a small replica of the main house.

Stevie Brockman's bedroom was as spacious as the lobby of a fine hotel. From what Hannah could see, the room occupied most of the third floor. A single bed was stashed in one corner of the room, but the rest of the space was taken up by long benches heaped with electronic paraphernalia. Several units with small screens filled by pulsing green lines like a dozen heart monitors lined up side by side. Meters and motherboards and soldering irons and pliers and screwdrivers were scattered across the workbenches. Two TVs sat in the far corner, both on, both tuned to the same channel. One was in black-and-white, the other color. Hovering in the background was an insistent hum that sounded like the drone of an overturned hive.

The boy sat in a black leather swivel chair in front of a sleek computer terminal. He was wearing khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt, like a prep-school uniform. He had curly black hair and round cheeks and chubby arms and his shoes didn't reach the floor. He glanced over his shoulder, nodded a quick hello, then went back to his screen.

Yoshia moved up beside him and stood with reverential
stillness as if the boy were performing the last difficult passages of a piano sonata.

Hannah stepped closer and leaned in to see the screen.

Stevie Brockman was using his mouse to scroll through columns of computer language. Line after line of hieroglyphs rolled past so quickly Hannah couldn't catch a single letter. She watched him click the mouse, apparently inserting lines of code into the streaming list.

“Hannah's a writer. She writes mystery novels,” Stevie explained to Yoshia. “They're good. A little gory in places, but I like all the whackos. My favorite was
Third Time Out
. Very lyrical nature descriptions. And I liked the baseball stuff. That Erin Barkley is one tough lady.”

“You seem a little young for my books.”

“I'm twelve, almost thirteen,” he said. And continued to speed through the column of runic symbols, adding here, subtracting there. “I'm allowed to read anything I want. Last week I read
Ulysses.
Do you know
Ulysses?
”

“I know it,” she said.

“I liked that woman. Molly Bloom. I liked how it ended, that long sentence, it went on for twenty pages or something. The sex was good, too. I like sex in a book.”

“Stevie's quite a reader,” Yoshia said.

“I'm very interested in sex,” he said. “Of course I'm too young for it in real life, but what the heck, I can read about it, can't I?”

Yoshia gave Hannah an indulgent smile.

“I'm trying to learn to write,” Stevie said. “But it's tough. Getting it all down, making sense. Something can be clear in my mind, but as I start to put it into words, it just seems to go away.”

“I know the feeling,” Hannah said. “It's like telling a dream. No matter how vivid it is when you wake up in the morning, as soon as you begin to tell it, the images seem to decay.”

“Yeah, yeah, that's good,” Stevie said. “Have you read Robert Frost?”

Hannah smiled. Grilled by a twelve-year-old.

The kid was clicking the mouse, using the pointer, cutting and pasting large sections of computer code, doing it all with effortless speed and certainty.

“Yes,” she said. “I know a little Frost.”

“What I like is how he can change tone so quickly, go from humorous banter to passionate expressions of tragic feelings.”

“You have a good English teacher.”

“I don't take English,” he said. “I just like to read. Books are old-fashioned, but they make me think about stuff I wouldn't otherwise. Like just recently I was thinking how there's a big difference between writing code and writing a book. If you write code all day, and you get it right, you can change how something works. Make it run smoother or quicker. But when you write a book, it's like you change yourself. Rewire your brain. It's weird. Like just by telling your story in a certain way, using
these
words instead of
those
words, you change how you feel. You understand things in a new way. You can change.”

“Unless you're one of those who tell the same story over and over,” Hannah said.

“Why should anyone do that?”

“Maybe it's the only story they know. And until they tell it right, they can't let go of it.”

Stevie processed that for a moment. Flicking his mouse, flicking, flicking.

“Stevie's trying to write a book about his run-in with the law,” Yoshia said. “The law and the FAA, Federal Aviation Administration.”

“You hacked into their computers?”

Stevie stopped. He lifted his hand from the mouse and sat for a moment staring at the screen.

“I don't hack,” he said finally. “Hacking is for morons. Time wasters.”

He turned his head and looked back at her with a disappointed frown.

“A year ago,” Yoshia said, “when Stevie and the Brockmans
flew into LaGuardia, they wound up having to circle the airport for half an hour. A backup on the ground. That's what got him started. Isn't that right, Stevie?”

The boy went back to work. Once again the script flew past.

“It's a stupid waste of time, all those people just waiting to land, flying in circles. It doesn't make any sense.”

“So when Stevie got back home, he went into their computers and fixed things.”

“Their timetables were completely wrong,” Stevie said. “Paths of descent too moderate. Their tolerances were ten degrees off all the systems they were running. I just streamlined a few things. Cut out the waste, the garbage. Their programmers were like high school dropouts or something. They had absolutely like zero security.”

“No one even knew he'd been there,” Yoshia said. “Things ran smoothly for a day or two, planes coming in early, getting out right on time, no stack-ups, nothing. Until LaGuardia started to throw things off downstream. Other airports were using the same old systems, a certain percentage of planes leaving late, so eventually LaGuardia started causing synchronization problems all down the line. At one point Denver almost had to shut down.”

“The unintended effect,” Stevie said. “It's hard to debug a system so totally botched up.”

“I'm sure it is.”

“So they undid everything,” said Stevie. “Put it all back the way it was. Instead of looking at what I did, seeing how they might apply it to other airports.”

“People in Washington wanted to talk to him.”

“I would think so,” said Hannah.

“Oh, I'm used to it,” Stevie said. “You think you're doing somebody a favor, the Secret Service gets all bent out of shape because I didn't use the right protocol. Didn't say please and thank you. Supposedly I violated Section 1030 of Title 18. An act of computer intrusion.”

“So Stevie,” said Hannah. “Did you get a chance to look at that thing I told you about?”

“
Deathwatch dot com
,” he said. “Yeah, I looked at it.”

“Can you tell me anything?”

“Tell me what you want to know, I'll tell you if I know it.”

Hannah said, “I need to know where the broadcast is originating from.”

“The thing about the Internet,” Stevie said, still pruning the moving lines of code, “it's just all these billions of connections. It doesn't really exist as one single unit. Not like the plumbing in your house or something. When somebody ships something over the Internet, it isn't like water coming through a pipe. You turn on your tap, the water finds the one and only way to fill the vacuum. Point A to Point B.

“But the Net has a billion ways the water can get from the source to tap. It could've come through Asia or Guam or zigzag from one side of America to the other and back again. You send something across the street, it might travel five thousand miles to get there. Whatever works. Whatever's fastest. The Pentagon designed it that way because they wanted the Net to survive a nuclear war, for people in the military to still be able to communicate even when large parts of the system were down. But it's a lot more than that now.”

“So what're you saying, Stevie, it's not possible to locate the source?”

“Sure it's possible. Every data packet that goes across the Net has a history. An IP return address. Hackers disguise their IPs, or they'll route them through Australia or China, some country that has no reciprocal agreements with the FBI. So if someone's backtracking the trail, it'll stop right there. That foreign country won't help them.

“And even if you're able to finally nail down the service provider, most of the time it's still a big step to figure out where the personal computer is that's sending the message in the first place. Someone really paranoid will use cell phones to bounce their signals around, before it gets to the service provider, or multiple modems set up at different locations, or they'll Telnet to another host, log in there, and
then access the Internet from that other host location. That's a trick called looping and weaving. It can completely confuse anyone trying to get a hard-line trace back to the point of origin.”

“So you tried and couldn't do it?”

“Oh, no, I did it. Took me an hour. I had to get into a couple of phone-company systems, some billing files, check their switching stations, their routing records, but I didn't leave any trace I was there, so I don't think Jesse's going to come looking for me.”

“Jesse's his parole officer,” Yoshia said.

“He's not the smartest guy,” said Stevie. “But we have a good time.”

“So where is it, Stevie? Where's it coming from?”

“Washington, D.C. Our nation's capital.”

“Fielding is in D.C.?”

“Well, it's more complicated than that.”

Hannah could take it no longer, talking to the back of a twelve-year-old's head.

“Would you mind,” she said, “taking a little break from the computer, turn around, talk to me face-to-face?”

“Oh,” Stevie said. “Sorry. Was I being impolite again?”

“Only slightly,” Yoshia said, and patted the boy on the shoulder.

He let go of his mouse, swiveled around, and looked at Hannah.

She drew a hard breath.

The boy's bare legs were covered with sores. The flesh reddened and peeling off in damp welts. Dark blisters the size of pennies covered his thighs like ticks fattening on his blood.

“It's a viral thing,” Stevie said. “I got it when I was a baby, they had to do a blood transfusion and it was tainted. But don't worry, it's not contagious.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't know.”

“Oh, it's okay, Ms. Keller, don't worry. It doesn't hurt that much. You'd think something fatal would hurt like hell.
But this doesn't. I stopped taking the drugs, the painkillers, 'cause they make me dopey, so sometimes it flares up at night, but otherwise, basically I'm fine.”

“No medicine, no cure?”

“Oh, they're working on it,” Stevie said. “Some experimental drugs in the pipeline. Going to do some trials pretty soon. But you know, it looks like it'll be a little too late for me.”

“God, I'm sorry.”

“At least my brain works fine. The virus just makes me push a little harder, you know, before I have to check out.”

Hannah looked out the wide window, a view of the lawn, the sprinklers shooting high, glistening arcs. Beyond the high wall she could see the wrinkled crawl of the bay. Out on the street a stream of cars drove slowly past, people at their windows, trying to peer into the perfect kingdoms beyond the shrubs.

“So is Fielding in Washington or not?”

“The signal is originating in D.C. But the whole thing looks hokey to me.”

“Hokey?”

“You ever heard of dithering?” Stevie said. “I have an example over here, all set up so you can see.”

Stevie got down from his chair and walked over to one of the far benches. His stride was bowlegged and labored as if even the touch of moving air across his legs was torment.

“What I did, I looked at Fielding's site like you asked, and something didn't seem right. Oh, it's a pretty sophisticated attempt, but there was just something a little off, so I grabbed a single frame of the broadcast and checked it out on another system. You freeze on a frame, like on your VCR, you zoom it out, then you have to eyeball it to be sure. Kind of old-fashioned, really.”

Stevie touched a finger to the monitor screen that was perched on a long work table. The image was scrambled and to Hannah it was as unreadable as a photo enlarged a dozen times too many.

“See what I'm talking about?”

Hannah said no, she didn't see anything but a row of specks.

“Yeah, that's right. A row. But what's wrong with the row?”

“I don't see anything wrong.”

“Those are pixels,” Stevie said. “Those are the building blocks of the image. This is a shot of a magazine cover on the nightstand next to Fielding's bed.”

“People
magazine,” Hannah said. “Yes, I noticed it.”

“Yeah, well, this is the edge of the cover as it merges with the wall. See that, right there.”

He touched his finger to a slight zag in the row of pixels.

“That's dithering. The horizontal rows don't mesh, and the tints of gray don't match either. Which means the pixels didn't transition correctly across the screen. Which means this magazine was inserted into the frame. Like they do with movies, virtual-reality stuff. Pretty sophisticated programming, you don't see it much outside of Hollywood. So what they did, they wrote the magazine cover into the packet of information they sent over the Internet.”