Alif the Unseen (43 page)

“Only as much time as it takes for that thing to get back to the Hand and the Hand to realize we’ve duped him and then get really, really mad.” Alif propped himself up on his
hands. “I’ve got to code. We still need a working uplink.”

“That’s the only thing I believe I can still manage,” said NewQuarter, walking stiff-legged toward a bedroom off the main hall. “Boot up your netbook and look for a
wireless network called CityState. I will presently recite the access code.”

Dina handed Alif his shredded backpack. He lifted out his netbook, shaking his head several times to clear the last of the spots dancing in front of his eyes.

“Are you sure this network is still up?” he called to NewQuarter. “It looked like the Hand managed to screw up every IP in the City.”

“It’s up.” NewQuarter’s soiled robe flew out the door of the bedroom and landed in a heap in the hall. “He can’t touch this one. Satellite.”

“He can if he has access to the land-based routing facility.”

“He can’t if I own the satellite.”

Alif gaped at NewQuarter as he came out of the bedroom wearing a fresh robe.

“You’re too young to own a flat as nice as this one,” said Alif, “much less a satellite.”

“How wrong you are. I could have bought a gold-plated Mercedes like that fat idiot Suleiman, number fourteen in line for the throne. You should be happy—the reason this City is so
rotten is because the other twenty-five princes have more money than they know what to do with. I, on the other hand, have exactly as much money as I know what to do with. In the information age,
he wins who has a clean and reliable Internet uplink. Censors be damned.”

“Your own
satellite
.”

“My own satellite. Now shut up and start typing.”

Alif ran his fingers up and down the home keys on his netbook. He tried to picture in his mind what he had to do. The memory of the great tower he had built on Sheikh Bilal’s computer
distracted him; he wondered if he would ever again create something so beautiful, flawed though it had been. The drudge work of ordinary coding seemed banal now. Without the
Alf Yeom,
he
was another gray hat toiling away line by line behind a bright screen, unwatched and unregarded.

“Out of curiosity,” said NewQuarter, “what do you plan to do?”

Alif pulled his flash drive out of the shredded backpack and held it up. It was undamaged; the blessing of the blind dervish had stuck.

“Give the Hand a tail,” he said. “One he can’t shake off.”

* * *

He worked with furious energy. As NewQuarter had promised, the cloud was intact. It contained chat logs full of hypotheses about his methods and techniques, diagnostics and
analyses, and entire file chains dedicated to records of the Hand’s attacks on their digital outposts. Alif cleaned the data and fed it to the Tin Sari botnet, muttering
bismillahs
every time he struck the
enter
key.

“Do you have a cold pack, or ice we could put into something dry?” he asked NewQuarter at one point. “The netbook is starting to run very hot.”

“How many motherboards do you melt on a weekly basis?” asked NewQuarter with a sigh. He picked his way across the room from the door, where he had been standing guard with a piece of
splintered wood.

“Not as many as you might think,” said Alif without taking his eyes from the screen. He put out his hand; Dina touched it with hers.

“How are you?” he whispered.

“I’ll be better when this is over,” she said. The pressure from her hand increased. Unwilling to draw away, Alif typed one-handed for several minutes, plugging in lines of code
one by one, creating a payload of malicious software that was, he hoped, primitive and toxic enough to turn any operating system into pixelated soup.

“I don’t get it,” said NewQuarter, swinging his stick at the air. “What’s so special about this profiler botnet of yours? The Hand isn’t some bucktoothed
thirteen-year-old running DOS attacks. He’s already got revolving IP addresses—you know how this goes, he’s so good that sometimes there’s never an origin IP at all. The man
is as close to untraceable as it gets.”

“Not to Tin Sari,” said Alif. “In order to avoid this, he’d have to become someone else.”

“I don’t follow.”

“There’s nothing to follow. I wrote this application and I have no idea what makes it work. But it does. That’s all.”

NewQuarter plunked down on the marble floor with his stick over one shoulder, looking impressed.

“That’s called mastery,” he said.

Alif sighed, finger hovering over the
enter
key.

“No. A master is someone who understands what he creates. I’m so stupid that I’ve overlooked something very simple,” he said. “Everyone say a prayer. I’m
going to execute this thing. And then we need to pray some more because it may simply shut down before it can profile the Hand, or after it profiles him and before it starts launching
bombs.”

NewQuarter dutifully raised his hands to his face.

“I’m not sure I can pray for a computer program,” said Dina.

“Do it for me,” said Alif. She acquiesced, breathing into her palms. Alif cast his eyes down and made something between a prayer and a wish, aware of how close he was to ruin, how
many and various had been the unintended consequences of his actions. The noise in the square below grew louder.

“We need to keep moving,” said NewQuarter. “It looks like things are getting nastier down there.”

Alif nodded briskly.

“Can you put this in your pack?” he asked Dina, handing her the netbook. “Mine is pretty much kicked.” He dangled the shredded nylon husk from one finger.

“Sure.” She zippered the netbook into the messenger bag she’d brought from the
marid’s
house and hefted it over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They hurried across the living room. NewQuarter braced himself against the remains of the door and shoved; it came off its hinges and crashed into the outer hallway.

“There,” he said. “Now the revolutionaries can properly loot the place. They’ve left a lot behind.”

He led them down the hall toward the main stairwell, cutting a path through the glittering debris of his neighbors’ flats. They passed a bank of silent elevators, their doors jammed open to
reveal mirror-lined interiors. Alif was startled by a glimpse of his reflection and muffled a cry.

“Quiet,” hissed NewQuarter. “We have no idea what else might be lurking around this place.”

“What’s happened to the people who live here?” whispered Dina. “Where has everyone gone?”

NewQuarter glanced around with a blank expression.

“Dead or fled,” he said. “Most of my neighbors were foreign corporate types working for the oil companies. Their embassies have probably evacuated them.”

“I never thought it would come to this,” muttered Alif, kicking at the electronic guts of a flat-screen TV lying on the ground.

“Really?” said NewQuarter. “I thought this was what we wanted.”

Chastened, Alif fell silent. They left the hall through a glass door and crossed a rooftop courtyard lined with smashed pots of tuberose and hibiscus. From here, the riot in the square was a
muted, homogenous roar: a human sea at high tide. Alif did not stop to listen closely. They reentered the building at the far side of the courtyard, arriving at a lounge area furnished with
oversized leather armchairs and what had formerly been a wet bar, reduced now to an empty cabinet, its contents long since carried off.

“By process of elimination, we now know your place was not looted by Islamists,” Alif joked weakly.

“ We don’t know that,” said NewQuarter. “They could have taken the bottles away to smash them, or to turn them into Molotov cocktails. We’ve come into this uprising
in the middle. It’s like watching a half-melted ice cube—impossible to infer its original shape, or that of the puddle it will eventually become.”

“You’re so negative,” scolded Dina.

“No I’m not, I’m a student of history. Revolutions only get names after it’s clear who won.” NewQuarter hurried them along, pushing open a set of large,
brocade-paneled double doors that looked to Alif like they belonged in the lobby of an expensive hotel. On the other side, a grand marble staircase twisted down away from them toward the ground
floor.

It was covered in tarry black matter. At first, Alif thought the staircase had been befouled with the contents of several restrooms, but, to his horror, the dark things began to move and shift,
reaching out with froglike arms, turning eyeless faces toward the gallery at the top of the stairs where he stood with Dina and NewQuarter. There were too many to count.

“God save us,” whispered Dina. Alif struggled against the urge to hyperventilate. He stepped in front of her, reaching across her body with one protective arm.

“Run,” said NewQuarter hoarsely.

“What? No—”

“Run, you fools, run.”

A wriggling instinct overcame Alif’s self-control. He scrambled after the retreating white blotch of NewQuarter’s robe, towing Dina behind him. Hideous flapping noises pursued them,
curiously dry—the sounds of padded feet galloping up the stairs. They bolted back across the courtyard. Alif heard Dina cry out and turned to look: she had stumbled over a flower pot and lay
sprawled among hibiscus blossoms.

“Wait!” he called to NewQuarter. The dark things were pelting toward them on all fours, silent but for their uncanny footfall. Alif grabbed Dina’s arm and hauled her to her
feet. She took a step and cried out, favoring one leg. Alif cursed.

“Put your arm over my shoulder,” he told her.

“I’m too heavy!”

She was right. Alif tottered toward the glass door on the far side of the courtyard with Dina clinging awkwardly to his back, watching with a sinking sensation as NewQuarter’s face grew
paler and more frantic.

“Hurry!” he squealed, yanking open the door. Alif dragged himself through. Dina kicked the door closed behind them with her good foot. The glass shuddered as a dozen dark shapes hit
it at once, their spastic bodies struggling against the invisible barrier. They drew back as one, paused, and charged the door again. A crack snaked its way through the glass.

“Son of a dog!” NewQuarter scrambled away from the door on his hands and knees. Alif stared at the crack in the glass, suddenly unable to move.

“My bag.” Dina tugged at his sleeve. “In my bag.”

“What?”

“Tear gas.”

Alif fumbled with the zipper on her messenger bag. Inside, along with his netbook, were a length of thin rope, a pair of pliers, a lighter, and a half dozen other items, along with a small black
canister emblazoned with various health warnings in English.

“Things we might need?” said Alif, incredulous.

“Yes, yes, from the
marid’s
house. Don’t ask. Just get the gas.”

Alif pulled out the black canister. The dark things threw themselves against the cracked glass in a litany of thumps, creating an ever-wider radius of damage. The door began to bulge outward.
NewQuarter was screaming in earnest now, hands bunched around his face. Alif fumbled with the pull tab on the black canister, hands slippery with sweat. It slid out of his grasp and rolled on the
floor.

“For God’s sake!” Dina darted toward the tear gas and snatched it up as the glass finally splintered. Instinct made Alif double over to protect his face. There was a loud hiss;
an acrid white smoke filled the hall and burned through Alif’s sinuses. He stumbled away, choking. A chorus of amphibian pain and outrage was audible through the fog. Hands propelled Alif
forward, into the door-lined corridor where NewQuarter’s flat stood. His eyes smarted.

“Keep going,” came Dina’s voice behind him. He obeyed, weaving erratically on his feet, grinding the heels of his hands against his eyes. There was a cough and a moan to his
right: he fumbled blindly, caught NewQuarter’s collar, and pulled him along without a word. The barren door frame of NewQuarter’s flat appeared in front of him. He blundered through it
into the remains of the opulent living room, sucking fresh air into his lungs. Hacking vigorously, NewQuarter pulled free of his grasp and slumped to the floor. Alif looked around for Dina. She
limped through the door frame behind him.

“Thanks,” he rasped. “I sort of screwed that up.”

She shook her head and coughed, then gave a hiccupy, hysterical laugh.

“Well,” she said, “at least we’re back where we started, instead of somewhere worse.”

“Oh, not quite.”

Alif jumped, blinking, searching through the watery haze of his vision for the origin of the voice. It was familiar. So, too, was the smell of sulfur that permeated the room, which seemed too
dim for midday, and too stifling for winter. He was seized by dread.

“Hello again, Alif,” said the Hand. He was seated with his back to the window, dressed in a white robe; to Alif’s smarting eyes the sun behind him seemed to throw a perverse
halo around his figure. “And Abu Talib—who would have guessed that beneath such a puny, underdeveloped exterior there lurked a dangerous provocateur. You’ve caused me quite a bit
of unexpected trouble and expense. Does your mother know what you’ve been up to?”

NewQuarter merely whimpered in response. The Hand was seated in a desk chair rescued from a corner of the room, as calmly as if he were taking a meeting at his own office. He was flanked by two
twin voids, fissures of nothing that pulled the warmth from the air around them and moved like living beings. Alif glimpsed obscene hints of tooth, nail, and tongue in the writhing darkness, which,
though silent, spoke of carnage for which there were no words.

“Alif,” quavered NewQuarter, “I owe you an apology. I could never have believed—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, be a man,” said the Hand, lip curled in disdain. “I don’t like the idea of killing someone barely old enough to shave, any more than you like
the idea of dying. NewQuarter01 my ass cheek. I’ve been hunting you for years. You must have started up with this hooliganism at fourteen.”

“Thirteen,” said NewQuarter.

The dark things that had pursued them through the building began creeping into the room on dry toadish feet. Dina shrieked as one of them brushed past her leg.