Turn of the Century (90 page)

George signs the man’s electronic clipboard, his imaginary paper, with his imaginary FedEx pen. The package, a small one, is from
C. PRIEVE
in Woodside, California, and addressed by hand. He doesn’t know C. Prieve. It’s a computer disk, one of the new fat gray ones that can contain the Library of Alexandria in half the size of a Pop-Tart. A purple Post-it is stuck to the front. In very neat handwriting it says, “An outreach from your friends at Mose Media’s unofficial ‘human resources’ dept.… Your personal real-time recording of
That’s No Lady
,
That’s My Wife!
Enjoy.” He looks inside the little cardboard packet, but there’s no letter.

Upstairs in their bedroom, he turns on her computer, slides the empty Krispy Kreme box off the Jaz drive, and inserts the mystery disk. An icon pops onto the screen, but not the regular, factory-installed picture. It is a red letter
M
over a bleeding heart.

A video image appears, looking like one of the nut-cams on the web. Except the room it shows is spare and handsome. And the person on camera is Harold Mose. He’s staring at a point just below the lens. His lips are slightly parted. He’s squinting, and has a dreamy, faraway look.

Fucking weird
, George thinks.
But kind of cool
. He wonders who C. Prieve is.

Then the image shakes and blurs, and for three seconds becomes unreadable, empty.

And then Harold Mose is back on screen. The closeup has changed to a medium shot—a two-shot, in a sense, now that Mose’s penis is out of his trousers, erect, and he is masturbating. The penis is uncircumcised.

Who is C. Prieve? And what on earth is George Mactier supposed to do with a video of Harold Mose jerking off?

It looks like Mose is whispering, “Yes.” And he has started an involuntary sort of Bob Fosse hip thrust that George finds extremely embarrassing to watch. He can’t not watch, of course.

A line of type appears, moving from right to left across the bottom of the screen.
HI! IT’S ME, ELIZABETH
, it says.

He is hallucinating. He’s been inside his own sweaty, malignant head too long.

But then he sees Mose whisper,
“Hello, Elizabeth.”

He is not hallucinating. Or if he is, George knows, it’s some kind of full-on psychotic break, and he’d better call 911. He keeps watching.

More type speeds across the screen.
OKAY, YOU CAN JUST
WATCH
WHILE SOME OF MY OTHER HOT FRIENDS ASK ME TO PUT ON A NASTY SHOW FOR THEM … YOU WANT ME TO FINGER MY HOT JUICY CUNT? … SHOULD I DO IT LIKE THIS?

There’s a pause in the type. But Mose continues. George can now hear Mose’s shallow, accelerating little intakes of breath, and, he thinks, a few grunted
yeah
s.

Mose disappears.
MMMMMMMMM! YES, SIR!!
Then the recording goes black.

C. Prieve must be one scurvy creep.

George is disgusted and appalled.

But he’s also grateful. Because now there isn’t any question. This is what he was after, wasn’t it, with the Jakarta cams?

C. Prieve may be a scurvy creep
, he thinks,
but he’s
my
scurvy creep
.

He clicks on the bar beneath the image, and slides the little button almost back to the beginning. He finds the frame with the words,
HI! IT’S ME, ELIZABETH!
and clicks to start playing it again.

He’s been up all night, but he feels fantastic, entirely calm and clearheaded for the first time in weeks. He feels light and clean, revived, purged of doubt. The last time he stayed up all night like this was at
Newsweek
, crashing a cover story on … well, he doesn’t recall the story now, probably Reagan and SDI, “Star Wars.” It was exciting like this is exciting, the same missionary sense of digging, reporting, analyzing, making sense of a sprawl of facts—piecing together the truth—all by himself on a tight deadline.

It’s interesting, he thinks, how he loathed reporting, the phoning of wary strangers to intrude on their dinners or their business or their grief, play on their vanities or anger or righteousness or whatever it took to get in and get over. Back in the eighties, none of this technology existed.

Lizzie said, whenever that was, days ago, that she’s returning home on Saturday. But is she flying straight to New York? She didn’t say. What time exactly, and which airport? She didn’t say.

But George knows. George knows because he’s been on a reporting bender since yesterday afternoon, nonstop. He dug out those snapshots Max took last winter of the jet, when the whole family flew to Minnesota for Edith Hope’s funeral.
Bingo:
Mose Media Holdings’ green Bombardier with its tail number visible, precisely the datum he needed to type into his favorite new web site. Now he knows what the FAA knows: it took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at four fifty-one
P.M.
, Jakarta time, eleven minutes late. He knows it’s scheduled to land in Los Angeles tonight at eight
P.M
. He knows it’s scheduled to land tomorrow afternoon in Teterboro at four
P.M
. sharp.
He knows how many pounds of aviation fuel they’re carrying. He knows the names of the pilots, Sam and Jerry. He knows the names of the passengers. (Who is Randy McCarthy? What does the
G
in Henry G. Saddler stand for?) He knows everything.

He stares at Max’s snapshot of the jet, imagining Mose and Lizzie naked inside. Maybe Randy pairs off with Gloria. What about Saddler?
Okay, you can just watch while some of my other hot friends ask me to put on a nasty show for them
. He remembers Saddler droning on about the avionics when they flew to Minneapolis, explaining how flight plans are digitized and loaded onto an onboard computer.
It can even be done wirelessly
, Hank said,
from a remote location
. George stares at the photo. He wonders if somebody like Fanny Taft could hack into the jet’s system and force it to land. Remote-controlled hijacking! Or force it to crash.

Fanny Taft’s number isn’t on Lizzie’s computer address database. He calls Jodie Taft in Edina, and asks if she has Fanny’s number for the summer in Brooklyn. Jodie sounds flummoxed by the call at first. But then she is so pleased that George is going to invite Fanny over for dinner and make sure she’s doing okay, and then, Jodie-ishly, so Jodie-ishly, wants to chat, and asks him if
Real Time
has been moved to a new time slot, and says she thinks Jess, the gay one, seems sharp as a tack, and he tells her thanks, but he has to get back to work, even though it’s Saturday.

He gets Fanny, who just this minute walked in, back from Def Con.

“What’s Def Con?”

“It’s this gathering of hackers from all over,” she says. “I mean,
wizards
. They were like, ‘Let me show you how to do this, and this, and this.’ It happens once a year. It’s insane. Really awesome.”

“Well,” George tells her, “that’s perfect, because the reason I called is that I need to pick your brain, if I can. I’m working on a project about computer security and things like that. Big Brother kinds of stuff.”

“Like for a new show or something?”

“It could become a show.”

“Cool. I should bring Willi, one of the German guys from Fine Tech. He is an awesome hacker.”

And so Fanny and Willibald will be over for dinner tonight.

George spends most of the rest of the afternoon cleaning up, although
he wonders if the havoc and trash might be a good thing, Daddy, to a goateed German hacker and a seventeen-year-old computer criminal. Fanny and Willi might think a sleepless, unshaven man alone in a house strewn with two weeks of old magazines and newspapers and piles of empty tuna cans and pink-lemonade jugs and celery ends and cookie-dough wrappers and Krispy Kreme boxes is, you know,
cool
.

But he takes a shower, goes grocery shopping for the first time in calendar year 2000, buys wine, and prepares a real dinner.

Willibald was completely uninterested in George’s time as a reporter in Bonn in the eighties. As soon as he tells him that he lost his hand in a contra mortar attack on his Sandinista jeep in Nicaragua during the counterrevolution, however, Willi becomes his comrade, and calls the cancellation of
Real Time
“a
Kulturkampf
.”

“You know,” Fanny says, “information does want to be free. No joke. What do you want to know?”

They tell him how they can read anything on almost anybody’s computer anywhere on earth from anywhere else on earth. If a target (Willi’s word) visits a web site that they’ve hacked or control, they can read the target’s cookies.

“ ‘Cookies’?” George asks.

“Such a newbie,” Fanny says. “It’s kind of amazing you’re married to Lizzie.”

And so they explain how the cookies on somebody’s web browser are a record of what he does in cyberspace, what he buys, which computer he uses at his company, who he is.

“Do the cookies keep records of e-mail?”

“No.”

“Well,” George says, “let’s say I want to read all the e-mails that an executive of some software company is writing and getting at home—a guy at Microsoft, let’s say.”

George doesn’t notice that Fanny and Willi both smile at his hypothetical.

“Simple,” Willi tells him.

He half understands their patois, translating on the fly from the context about as well, he thinks, as he can translate Spanish, or Elizabethan
English. They tell him about trojan programs (as in Trojan horse) like Back Orifice, and the plug-ins for Back Orifice, like Buttsniffer, which lets them “sniff” everything (e-mail, passwords, whatever) that a target computer sends or receives.

“Wouldn’t the executive encrypt his messages?” George asks. It’s like when he was a reporter, dropping just enough jargon about subjects he doesn’t really understand (
But Secretary Weinberger, how would SDI reduce the risks inherent in launch-on-warning?
) to stay in the conversation.

“Buttsniffer logs keystrokes,” Willi says.

Which George understands to mean that even if the encryption program turns a message into “9kz%ii&2 3#3xd3#fhd7u +/54R $*gny=p92$ id2sytq<8^,” the keystroke logger will see through the gibberish, and tell the hackers that the message actually typed was
HAROLD, MY DARLING: CANCEL REAL TIME ASAP–LIZZIE
.

They tell him how, with something called an emulation terminal, they can go into a target’s computer and look through every file on its hard drive. And during the third bottle of wine, they tell him lots of things he doesn’t even register, the Chaucerian English equivalents—getting port 139 open on an NT box, hijacking Kerberos tickets instead of swiping passwords, running nbstat commands and Red Button against the target computer …

“Or,” Willi says, “if the guy is using a cable modem, it would be completely easy to sniff everything going in and out. To sniff every computer in the neighborhood.”

“Bullshit!” George says, chuckling, standing to clear dishes. He figures they’re indulging in cyberhyperbole with the middle-aged newbie.

“
True
shit.”

“Willi is pretty good,” Fanny says. Following him into the kitchen, she asks, “George? Can I ask
you
some questions? About journalism?”

She wants to know how reporters in the field use computers, and wire services, and the jargon of that world she’s heard about,
stringers
and
bureau chiefs, running the rim
and
doing the sked
, how they decide which stories will move on the wire, and on and on. She’s full of curiosity. He feels like a dad.

“How’d you get so interested in journalism?” George asks.

She and Willi look at each other. They can’t suppress little wine-fueled grins.

“What?” George says, smiling.

“You know that prank on Microsoft that was in the newspapers?” Willi says. “The phreaking, with the pagers and phones going crazy at their big meeting?”

“Sure. In fact, we talked about doing something about that on the show, on
Real Time
.” One reason George passed on the story was because he’d heard Fifty-nine was in new discussions with Microsoft about a big deal. He thinks:
How apt and how just that my one little act of weaselly play-ball self-censorship was for shit
.