Fire Will Fall (19 page)

He pulled out a second phone, dialed the first, and once it rang, he hung up. "Now you have my number in your 'calls missed' box. Use it anytime you wish."

I thanked him, staring at the little phone in wonder. A dozen of the richer students in schools had had cell phones last year.

I jumped out of my skin as the phone rumbled in my palm.

"Answer it," he said. "Just pull it open."

I managed to pry it apart and put it to my ear. "Yes?"

"Henry, did you find Rain?" It was Marg.

"No. Not yet. Marg, this is Cora."

"Then I suppose Henry found you."

"He did. Here..." I handed the phone to him and continued to lean into his tall form in relief. He guided us down the path while laughing pleasantly, telling Marg the phone was now mine and it was the least he could do.

"It might rain before we get back to the house. She might come in drenched. Maybe you should run a hot bath or something."

When the phone was back in my grip, he said, "Tomorrow I'll come back here after I do some work in the morning, and I'll take you on a tour of the trails if you're up for it. They're not difficult to follow. In fact, I'm going to spray the trees with blue paint. As long as you can follow the blue circles on the trunks, you'll know you're not lost."

"Thank you," I said. "For everything."

"I'm happy to help." We walked along the main trail in silence, him moving at a slow enough pace to keep me from getting winded again. I was not uncomfortable in the silence. I spoke merely to try to recover the escape-from-reality feeling I'd had with him last time.

"Mrs. Starn ... she said you have a cabin out this way?"

"Yes. It actually belongs to the college, and, generally, more experienced researchers get them. But after I came up with the ten thousand in research grants, I think they looked at me a little more carefully." His laugh was uncomfortable, laced with humility. I liked it.

"Are you ... going to study the body of the one Kellerton children there after you exhume it?"

He squeezed my shoulder as if to say,
No bad thoughts allowed.
"Great heavens, no. I'll do that in the medical center's forensics or pathology lab with two dozen or so curious researchers looking on. I have to handle that one carefully, as it ought to bring some good press. Good press brings more research funds."

"Sounds so exciting."

"Right now, I'm actually helping a friend with his research, allowing him to use my cabin. He's in the geology department, interested in tsunamis—tidal waves. He believes one struck New Jersey sometime in the past thousand years."

I ceased to lean on him, devouring this news with interest. "You seem to have the most interesting life," I said. "I could just get lost in the stories you tell."

"Then I'll be sure to bring you plenty more. I'd love to invite you to visit the cabin. I'll find out if I can. The problem would be my partner's soil samples. They're being tested under various laboratory conditions. Do you know what spores are?"

I had heard the word. "Something in the air?"

"Actually, spores come from plants and soil. But they're not good for the lungs, and even I wear a mask around his samples." He proceeded to tell me how there were limestone tracings in all two hundred of his friend's soil samples, which had been taken from as far north as Sussex County, as far south as Cape May, and as far west as Cherry Hill. Limestone tracings indicate that the soil has been underwater, he explained, and the amount of limestone can reveal how long ago the submergence was.

"My associate keeps coming up with less than a thousand years," he said, "which is indicative of extreme trauma to the area."

"Wow. A tidal wave in the Atlantic?"

He went on about their theory, all the while comforting me over the impossibility of it happening again in our lifetime. No stress, just interesting imagery. It made the walk go quickly, and we were actually about two hundred feet from the house when Marg came out in running pants and shoes.

"I'll leave you in good hands and call tomorrow," he promised me.

As he turned to leave, Marg said, "Mr. Steckerman spotted Owen and Rain down on the flat rock by the pond. She had stopped crying, he said, and he didn't want to interrupt a conversation that
wasn't
making her cry by barging in as a visual reminder of what
had
made her cry."

"Smart thinking," I said.

"I'm going to tell them to come in, and then try to get a jog in before it rains."

I looked at the darkening sky. "You might have to make it a sprint." She looked like the athletic sort.

"Will you be okay until I get back? Are you symptomatic?" She laid the back of her hand to my face.

"No. I was coming a little unglued before Henry came to my rescue." I sighed. "I guess you could say I'm not a woods person."

I watched her jog off in the opposite direction from Henry, then I watched him walk down the trail as far as I could see before I turned to the house ... back to my sickness, my thoughts of Aleese, talk of USIC and medication, and everything that weighed so heavily on my shoulders.

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
3:42
P.M.
UPSTAIRS

I
AM GOOD AT THE WAITING GAME
, but my sense of urgency to hear from Miss Cora makes me impatient. I sit in Tyler's extra desk chair watching him swat at the corners of his ceiling with a long-stick feather duster when I hear the rooster crowing from my room.

I wander across the hall to my terminal. It seems too soon for Omar, but I remember HotKeys is trying to catch v-spies, which might be too tempting for him to stay away. It is Omar, and as only twenty-some minutes have passed, I feel he has simply left one Internet café and walked a quarter mile to another. He is off of a new server.

A few minutes later Tyler follows me and sits on the bed.

"Can't these guys get a life?" Tyler asks. "They're worse than we are. Haven't they heard of cell phones?"

"The charges leave too many trails, too much evidence," I remind him, reading a few lines that I know Tyler will not like. "You really don't want to know what Omar and VaporStrike are saying to one another."

"So long as they're not on Long Island and they're not bothering the Trinity Four, I really don't care," he says.

They are using several of the Egyptian languages, and I have scripted them so far as saying HotKeys has a Ph.D. in computer science, and there is a repeated mention that ShadowStrike has paid him a hundred thousand euros to find their v-spies.

Tyler notes this time, "That kinda puts a price on our heads. Doesn't it?"

That many euros is equivalent to even more dollars. We both believe that all information we have provided to Hodji since Omar turned up in Mexico has been exclusive to us.

"Shall we send USIC a bill for the same amount?" he asks, as I knew he would.

"It is a fat chance you will have of redeeming those funds, and now, stifle your fat complaints," I say. They are chatting again.

Omar0324:
Where is HotKeys? Taking a sauna?

VaporStrike:
He is running his little programs. Have patience.

Omar0324:
He had better be as smart as you promised, because he is surely not swift. I am walking about on an infected foot. You must tell him I don't like his constant wasting of my time.

Tyler aligns himself behind me, sees my script, and says something idiotic like, "Bring it on." I am back to the live chat and I copy and paste, trying to include all the little missing words in English, but my brain is distracted with Miss Cora and much fog. I want a blast from my inhaler, which increases my heart rate and, often, the blood flow to my head. But I left it downstairs and I don't want Tyler to leave right now. I simply plod on.

VaporStrike:
I think this time you will be pleased. His program to catch v-spies is quite involved. I do not understand computer language but have seen the program as an RTF. It is two hundred text pages long.

"We need to get our hands on that," I say.

Tyler laughs. "Dream on."

Omar0324:
It's about time he did something useful. What has he found?

VaporStrike:
It appears he picked up a v-spy on your other log-in, OmarLoggi.

Omar0324:
Impossible.

VaporStrike:
God knows how USIC collects their persistent v-spies. With the delivery of great riches, I suppose.

Tyler's disgusted laugh sounds like a trumpet blast. I lean instinctively away from the terminal.

Omar0324:
If that new log-in is unsafe, how can this old one possibly be safe? It is the very one I used in Colony One. Is he insane?

VaporStrike:
USIC has a saying: Dogs do not return to their vomit. Such would apply to log-ins as well, but he wants to be certain.

"We're not USIC," Tyler notes. "We think dogs sometimes
do
return to their vomit."

It suddenly occurs to me what I am forgetting. I had started to put a patch on the IP address at this terminal when Tyler called me in to help locate an e-mail address for Miss Cora. It entered my head as having been done. I try to remember if I actually finished it. I do not think so. But suddenly, I have no memory. HotKeys could be reading our IP address, and I raise the situation to Tyler.

"Oh ... shit," he confirms, his hand landing on my pock-infested shoulder with a bang. "Exit. Now!"

As I put my fingers back to the keys, he pulls me back with a change of mind. "No, don't touch anything. Those homespun detection programs read activity, not presence—"

"But we created a trail of activity to find them! It is too late."

Our fingers wag helplessly on invisible keypads. We don't know what to do.

Omar0324:
We are being watched?

VaporStrike:
HotKeys does not believe we are being watched, but he will know more soon.

Omar0324:
I would have kept my comments to harmless gossip. I would have encrypted it in some language of the Congo.

VaporStrike:
HotKeys really is not expecting anything.

"Stupid," Tyler says anxiously. "If we're stupid, they're stupider. Right?"

I cannot answer. The game of computer chase has always been full of snags and blunders, as technology changes constantly, and without faces and bodily presences, human nature is inclined to taking many more risks. Whether we are blundering worse than they are, I cannot decide. But blundering is something I have accepted of myself in the past. However, I have never been caught so badly as this might turn out. And never without Hodji just a phone call away. We finally see, at the top of the screen,

HotKeys has entered the chat.

HotKeys:
I had better be smart because I am not swift? Is that what you said?

Omar0324:
My friend, if you are going to play God in your omnipresence, you must play Him in your forgiveness as well.

HotKeys:
Your heinous gossip is forgiven. I am a tolerant man. I cannot be in a chat while I am watching a chat. I can, however, watch you and those who are watching you at the same time.

Omar0324:
You have picked up a v-spy?

HotKeys:
On this log-in, yes.

Tyler curses more, which I am very tired of hearing. It does not help.

I find myself whispering. "Maybe he can detect the activity but not trace it."

"Maybe he wears bloomers to bed and sucks his thumb," Tyler replies.

Omar logs off and is gone. He is afraid to say anything, I sense, and I wonder if VaporStrike will share that fear and abruptly depart also. I see a tiny number at the bottom of the screen change. "Number of guests: 4" now drops to "3." With VaporStrike and HotKeys remaining as visible log-ins, the third party is us.

As VaporStrike and HotKeys idle, I grab the mouse and click
EXIT
.
The number will now change to "2."

Tyler grumbles that it is too late as we head swiftly back to his room, where his hard-drive technology allows us to watch without being numbered. I want to see how savvy these men are. Very few people are even aware of that little number, and those who see it suspect it is a floating chat manager patrolling for profanity. They are speaking in English, which may mean they are too panicked to endure the small complications of their translation programs. Unfortunately, my fear is thrown right into my face.

HotKeys:
He just logged off, the idiot. Do you see a little line, "Number of guests: 2" somewhere at the bottom of the window? It just changed from "3."

VaporStrike:
That was a v-spy? Often those numbers don't match up.

HotKeys:
If he had left it alone, we might have assumed it was a chat manager—which is not even a person. It is a roaming computer program, checking for keywords in English which are considered profane.

VaporStrike:
How do you know it wasn't such a program?

HotKeys:
Because, my electronically challenged friend ... he logged off as soon as I said there was a v-spy.

VaporStrike:
Too ironic, yes. Should we exit?

HotKeys:
He is gone. No one is watching us now.

Tyler nudges me but does not brag about our current invisibility to these men, his computers having been patched out years ago.

VaporStrike is idling, but I sense precisely what he is doing. He is trying to remember today's scripts to see what was revealed to us.

VaporStrike:
They cannot know about the swans.

HotKeys:
Guess again. USIC's computer labs are impossible to penetrate, but I hacked a few of their laptops.

VaporStrike:
I knew you would be worth your fee. Where is Omar when I need a witness? How did you do that?

HotKeys:
Don't weary me with your silly questions.