Homeland (39 page)

My new phone rang at 2 A.M.. Like an idiot, I'd forgotten
again
to apply the setting that turned off the ringer after bedtime. I swiped at the answer button.

"Ange," I said. "It's the middle of the goddamned night. I love you and all --"

"We love you too, M1k3y." It was another one of those text-to-speech voices. This one was female and had a crappy Australian accent.

"Good-bye," I said.

"You haven't done anything about Carrie Johnstone," a different voice said. This one was male and sounded like Yoda.

"You called me to tell me that? I already knew that."

"Masha and Zeb are depending on you." The female voice this time. I wondered if there were really two people on the call. It could have been one guy. Or one woman. Or a hundred people typing into a group-edited page and firing off the results to a text-to-speech engine.

"I've done everything I told Masha I would do, and then some. If you want to save her, you should do it yourself."

"We sent you Johnstone's d0x," the male voice said.

"You did."

"Did you look at them?" This was a new voice, impossibly deep, like a cartoon bullfrog. It had a Texas accent.

"No," I lied.

"You should look at them. Johnstone's a very naughty girl. You could tell the world about it. You've got the platform. Especially now."

I sat up in bed. "Listen," I said. "I don't take advice from anonymous strangers. If you've got something to say to me, you can say it to my face. It's easy to sit there in your parents' basements telling me how I should be risking my life, but as far as I'm concerned, you're just another gang of creeps who get their kicks from spying on people."

"So much drama," the Australian voice said again. "We've handed you Johnstone on a platter. You've got the home addresses of everyone she loves, her Social Security number, her ex-husbands, her criminal record, the institution where her daddy is drying out from his latest Vicodin binge. You put all that online, you watch how fast she comes around to bargain."

"Why would she bargain with me
after
I put all her secrets online?"

"Oh," the Yoda voice said, "because she doesn't know what
else
you have. We told you, Ms Johnstone's been a
very
naughty girl. You remember what we did to your computer? You'd be amazed at how many other peoples' computers we've pwned."

I groaned and pulled my knees up to my chest. "If you guys are all so leet and badass, why don't you do this? Why aren't
you
destroying Carrie Johnstone?"

"We are, Marcus. But you are our instrument in this mission. You are the perfect weapon to use to destroy one of the worst people on Earth. You should feel special."

I hung up.

Look,
you
try to get to sleep after a call like that. I'd spent several mesmerized hours staring at Carrie Johnstone's d0x already, but being gassed, beaten, shackled, nearly kidnapped, taken into custody and then released to an insanely busy work situation had managed to drive the details out of my mind. And it wasn't as if I'd gotten through all of them. There were
thousands
of files in the Johnstone d0x. It was like a miniature ship-in-a-bottle version of the darknet docs, a mammoth library of sleaze and misery blended with a million irrelevant facts, cryptic files, and weird irrelevancies. I'd become a one-man version of the Department of Homeland Security, sitting on top of a haystack the size of the universe, trying to find the needles.

I dove back into the Johnstone d0x. The conversation with the freaky, computer-voiced anons had rattled me, but it had also intrigued me. I'd had nightmares about Johnstone, and there was something evilly attractive about giving her a nightmare for a change.

The conversation had equipped me with some search terms to use on the trove, and I saw that yup, her family was pretty screwed up, and that there were a bunch of phone numbers and addresses for relatives. Some of them were important people -- there was an uncle who was a judge in Texas -- and some were only noteworthy because they were in rehab or had some embarrassing criminal charge in their records. Once I started to search on
their
names, I saw that a lot of them had received "consulting" payments from Zyz, and while I didn't know enough about finance to know exactly what that meant, I assumed that it was either a way for Johnstone to rip off Zyz by sending a lot of money to her family, or some kind of slimy money-laundering. No reason it couldn't be both, either.

There were a few folders of photos. The most disturbing of these were clearly taken by the webcam on Johnstone's computer without her knowledge. In several, she wore pajamas or only a bra, and in one, she had a finger rammed up one nostril to the second knuckle. My first thought was how humiliating it would be to her if I released these pictures. My second thought was to feel sick at the number of pictures like this of me that there had to be floating around, and to wonder what all my robot-voiced "friends" might do with them if they decided I wasn't on their side.

A file called "searchterms.txt" turned out to be exactly what it sounded like: everything Carrie Johnstone had plugged into a search engine, harvested from her browser's cache of search queries. I started looking through it and quickly looked away. I hated Carrie Johnstone, but I didn't need to know what kind of breast cancer she was looking into, about her research into antidepressant drugs, or the names of the stars whose "nude photos" she was searching for.

I shook myself like a dog shaking off water, and retreated to the emotionally safer distance of all those payments from Zyz. Looking at several different files, I saw that everything that had to do with a payment used the string "IBAN," which stood for International Bank Account Number, and had to be specified for wire transfers. From there, it only took a few seconds to produce a list of every file that had to do with payments and start looking through them. I quickly saw that Johnstone controlled and moved a
lot
of Zyz money, and that her payments went to a lot of political action committees. I wondered if maybe her family was channeling the PAC money as well.

A few seconds on the Web and I saw that Johnstone's favorite PACs were big donors to politicians who supported easy debt-collection laws, and it clicked. The darknet docs might tell the story of the pressure to wipe out the families of kids with student debt, but here was the smoking gun, the money paid from Zyz to fronts that went on to fatten up politicians who went along with the deal.

It was 3 A.M.. I had work the next day. It was going to be a big day. There was a pretty good chance all our servers would be taken down by some scary lawyer-threat somewhere and I'd have to have a clear head to fix that. But who the hell could sleep under these circumstances? Who was I kidding? I was up for the count.

I took my laptop down into the kitchen and made myself cheese on toast -- always my favorite midnight feast -- and dithered in front of the coffee machine for ten minutes, trying to decide whether I should or shouldn't have a cup. If I drank coffee now, I really
would
be up for the rest of the night. But even if I didn't, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going back to bed, and a little of the old bean-juice would sure help sharpen my wits.

Who was I kidding? I loaded up the AeroPress and made myself a double, and then made another to keep it company. I sat down at the kitchen table with the machine and kept on reading. I even went back to the pictures.

A chat request popped up on my screen. That didn't happen often. Ever since I'd gotten the job with Joe, I'd kept my main ID logged out, and the only handle I left logged in was one that almost no one knew about.

> hey jolu

> hey mr nite owl - good to see im not the only one awake at o-dark-hunnerd

> why are you up?

> fight with kylie

> oh

I paused.

> you mean you two are...

> kinda. its complicated

I had no idea that Jolu had any kind of romantic life, though it stood to reason. But Kylie? She was old! Oh, chronologically she was only a couple years older than us. But she was such a grown-up. She'd run that meeting like a boss.

> listen you want to get a slice of pie?

It was the first sensible suggestion anyone had made to me all night.

> hell yeah

> ill be there in 15

San Francisco isn't a bad place to get a slice of pie at three in the morning. I'm willing to believe that New York might be better, but it's not like we lacked for choice in any event. We ended up in the Tenderloin at one of those 50s-retro places that stayed open twenty-four hours and catered to a weird blend of jetlagged tourists, hookers, off-duty cops, homeless people and night-shifters. And us.

"I think you should do something really
lateral
," Jolu said, after I had him up to speed. "I mean, you've got these two groups of weird-ass crooks hoping to make you jump one way or the other, and they're both calculating your next move to see if they can get inside it, steer it. They're smart, nuts, and totally lacking in ethics. The only way you're going to get ahead of them is by doing something totally, absolutely whacked out. Move to Albania. Rappel off the Golden Gate Bridge. Become a Trappist Monk."

"That's really helpful, thanks."

"Oh, come on, it's a major advance on 'When in trouble or in doubt...'"

"Again, this is less than helpful."

"It's four in the morning, cut me a break."

This wasn't the first time I'd found myself in an all-night diner with Jolu, and all the nights we'd passed in this kind of place had a certain sameness to them -- I'd swear that some of the skeezy drunks and cracked-out weirdos holding down the booths around us were there the last time we'd been here. It's funny how comforting it was to inhabit the sheer weirdness of eating a slice of bad blueberry pie and good ice cream in the middle of the night sitting next to a guy with a face full of broken veins like a map of the California state highway system, a crooked nose, and a pink ballerina's tutu around his prodigious middle. Especially when that guy is trading unintelligible drunken remarks with a skinny one-armed guy with a heavily tattooed scalp, bare feet, and long fingernails painted with glitter polish.

"Marcus," Jolu said, "seriously. This is some bad stuff you've gotten involved with, and you're letting yourself be driven by what other people are doing, instead of choosing a path and making other people decide what to do about
you
. There's no reason for that. Look at it this way: all these people -- the weirdos who rooted your computer, these mercenaries -- have a lot of advantages over you. They're organized, they have money, they have technical expertise you lack."

"Gee, thanks, Jolu."

"Wait for it. They also all have to have meetings to decide what to do next.
You
can just decide on your own. That means that you can do something, force them to all sit down and figure out their next course of action, and while they're doing that, you can
change direction
, so that by the time they've worked out their response, it no longer applies. They have lots of advantages, but this is
your
advantage, and you've more or less surrendered it."

I thought about it. I couldn't think of anything wrong with his logic. And yet... "Okay, but there's only one problem:
I don't know what to do
."

"The first step to solving the problem is framing the problem," Jolu said with a wise smile. "What if you put together a bunch of possible courses of action, all more or less independent of one another, and had them in your pocket, metaphorically, so that you could just jump and jive and zig and zag on a moment's notice."

"Again," I said, "it's a nice theory, but it requires me to think up not just one, but
several
courses of action."

"That's not so hard," Jolu said. "You could publish everything on the Joe Noss for Senate website -- explain what happened, put up Johnstone's d0x, and hit 'save.'"

I winced. "Jesus, Jolu, that'd be --"

"-- Unexpected," he said. "And weird. And a little destructive, though I'd bet that Joe would forgive you. You could dump it all on Barbara Stratford. You could hit your Anon pals up for Carrie Johnstone's passwords and pastebin them, make her life busy as hell for a while, put her on the back foot. You could surrender yourself at the closest Zyz office, demand that they kidnap you, freak them right the hell out. Or call the FBI and report a kidnapping. Any and all of the above, and more."

Each one of these gave me a little shiver of excitement and fear. It was just the sort of thing Jolu excelled at -- coming up with scary, smart, dumb ideas. I needed to change the subject before he got me too freaked out.

"So, you and Kylie, huh?"

He banged his forehead on the table. Twice. "I'm an idiot. First of all, I was dumb enough to date someone from work, and second of all, I was dumb enough to date someone a hundred times smarter than me. She's already figured out that there's only two ways this can go if we let it get any more serious: either we break up and one of us has to leave the company, or we stay together forever. And she wants to know which one it's going to be,
right now
, because she says it's stupid to pretend that this isn't the case, and to be forced into some big emotional scene that we can see coming from here."

I boggled. This was so totally different from what Ange and I were like. I mean, she was my
girlfriend
, but we lived at our parents' houses, she didn't have a job, much less a job working with me, and we were more worried about hacking justice forcibly into American politics than we were about what The Future of The Relationship might hold. Somehow, while I was off being a debt-stricken college dropout, Jolu had turned into an adult.