MONEY TREE (31 page)

He shook his head in bafflement. He took one more good pull, coughed as it stung its way down, and recapped the bottle. He got to his feet and tucked the bottle away. He flicked some leaves out of his bedding, stripped to his underwear and tried a press-up on h
is sleeping bag. He managed eight before his arms quivered and gave way. That would have to change when – if - he got back. He got inside the bag but kept the zip down while the perspiration from his mild exertion dried in the warm night. He gazed up, and for the first time in way too long, felt engaged with life, with people. It scared and excited him all at once.

He woke the next morning disorientated, and as stiff as after a first day’s skiing. He had to lie and stretch his back and his side before he could sit up. His face felt swollen. He found mosquito bites all over his head and hands. The sun wasn’t over the horizon yet but a pale glow seeped across the landscape. Other rooftop dwellers were struggling awake and standing and stretching. Some were greeting the day in prayer, raising their hands with small vessels in them and pouring water as an offering to their gods. Ted thought he understood how that worked and tried to give himself a moment’s contemplation. But his bites itched and his arm muscles ached, and he was thinking about what a fool he’d made of himself last night. That and the trial, and pal Joey, crowded in on his morning.

His hosts were up and Hema was cooking a flat lump of bread on a griddle over the open fire glowing under the chimney in one wall. It smelled great. Before he ate he ran his little travel razor over the stubble, and managed to brush his teeth using water from the bottle Meera had supplied. They gave him a bowl of opaque water to bathe in, and he began to feel human again. A clean but creased shirt helped.

He asked about the toilet. Ranil led him to the backyard and gave him a battered shovel with a broken handle. Ted caught the drift and went back for his pack and took out the roll of toilet paper he’d borrowed from the hotel in Delhi. Ranil walked him out of the village to a field behind a few scrubby bushes and two trees. Other men were already there. Ranil indicated the process. Ted dug a small hole, grimacing and thinking of his army training. This wasn’t so hard, he kept telling himself.

‘What happens when the field is used up?’

‘The Dalits come and plough up the earth and we move to another place.’

‘The women?’
He meant Erin.

‘Over there.’ Ranil indicated an area just to their left delineated by a pair of bushes.

They went back to the hut and Ted washed as best he could. They had breakfast, Ted noticing that his gift of tinned fruit was being presented back to him. They saw his bites and were anxious. Hema fussed round him.

‘Did the leaves not work? We are very sorry. They always work for us.’

‘You mean the leaves in my bedding? The ones I threw away?’

She put her hand to her mouth to hide the laugh. ‘They are from one of our trees. They keep insects away.’

‘This wouldn’t be a tree called the neem would it?’

Hema shook her head in smiling agreement with him. She went to one of her shelves and produced a small tub of grease.

‘What’s this?’

Rajnish answered. ‘It is also from the neem. It is very good for insect bites. But it is best if you put it on before you get bitten.’ They all laughed with him.

‘This tree gets itself around,’ he answered as Hema indicated he should dip a finger into the pot.

She couldn’t touch him of course. He took a dollop. It smelled of sulphur but he gently dabbed the cream on the bites and rubbed it in. It had an immediate soothing effect. He was glad there was no mirror.

He thought he could find Erin’s hut again without help, and set off, causing chatter and diffident smiles wherever he went. He was amused to see the boy Ranil following him at a distance and hiding behind buildings as he twisted and turned through the alleys. As he got closer he found himself trying to shake off the sense that he was going into school the day after the Prom. Facing the girl – in a cordon of her giggling friends – after a fruitless fumbling behind the track-stand. Would she be mad or amused at him? Just spare me contempt, he silently pleaded. He found his feet dragging, and he slowed to make sure his hair was patted down and not sticking up like a clown’s. There was nothing he could do about the spots – acne as well, he thought. It figures.

He arrived at the hut with an
gaggle of kids wondering what new stories they’d get from him today. The scene that greeted him wasn’t so far from his remembered youth. Meera, Erin and little Aastha were sitting outside on wooden stools. Anila stood behind Erin brushing Erin’s hair. It was the first time he’d seen it down. It seemed thicker and wavier somehow. She looked better than she had in days. Erin coloured as he approached, but at least she smiled.

‘This wasn’t my idea. Anila wanted to do it. Honest.’

‘Girls are the same everywhere.’

He raised his eyebrows at Anila who smiled nervously back. Anila too looked different this morning. Still dark wedges under her eyes, but the tension had dropped from her frame. She’d switched from half empty to half full.

‘How’s the. . .?’ he rubbed his stomach at Erin.

‘Much
easier. I may be onto something. But just don’t ask about the restrooms, ok?’

‘Fine by me.’

‘What happened to your face?’

He touched the bites. They already felt less sore.

‘It seems at least the bugs are attracted.’ Then he wished he hadn’t said that. Like a rejected teen. ‘So, what’s the plan?’ he asked Erin and Meera.

Meera seemed more welcoming than usual.

‘Last night I called the police in Sagar to tell them about the theft. And then I called my father and asked him to put some pressure on them too. He said he would speak to the Inspector-General of Police for Madhya Pradesh. My father went to university with him. My father said the police would come today. We shall see.’

‘If they do, Meera, could we get a lift back to Bhopal first thing tomorrow morning? The world is catching up with us. We can get the train back to Delhi by ourselves. Ok with you,
Erin?’

‘Fine by me. I was thinking about sanctuary at the British consulate or taking the first flight back to the States or running for cover in Europe. Italy’s nice this time of year. Venice.
Any better ideas?’

She was blustering and knew it. He was thinking about gondolas and her.

‘What we need is time and evidence. The problem with the stuff that Oscar got hold of, is that he did it illegally. Stanstead’s lawyers would have a field day with us. We’d probably end up doing ten for wire tapping and hacking.’

Erin
dropped the cooperative façade. ‘Then what was the point of getting Oscar to do all this?!’

‘Well for one thing it probably saved your skin. For another? Well, I’m still thinking through the other. But I’m going to let Stan Coleman have a look at what we’ve got and ask the Trib’s legal beagles to sniff around and see if there’s anything we can use.’

‘Sounds good to me. So, we go on the run until something turns up? Is that about it?’ The irony was softened by her eyes.

‘Not quite. I want you to make a pers
onal call to Mr Stanstead when we get back to civilisation.’

O
scar and Albert had been working flat out for the best part of three days, subsisting on a diet of cola, pizza and 1000mg of brain-enhancing, sleep-denying Modanifil per day.

As well as his trusty side-kick, Oscar had rounded up a team of five others. He had never met any of them except in cyber
space. Never spoken to them. Even after he’d swapped the black hat for a white, Oscar had distanced himself from DefCon, the annual hackers convention in Las Vegas. There was something sullying about net warriors meeting in the flesh. Made them mortal. And sillier. The only contact he’d had over the last fifteen years, had been through carefully chosen direct channels on  darknets.

D
arknets, or the Deep Web, was where all the main search engines couldn’t or wouldn’t operate. Oscar’s start point was to create a virtual pc within his hardware array and drop into Onionland within the TOR anonymity-protecting network. Sure, it was peopled by gun runners, drug cartels, sexual deviants, Islamist terrorists, scammers and organised crime using encryption software and constantly changing URLs. But it was also the communication method of choice for Wikileaks, freedom fighters in China, Russia, the entire Middle East and North Korea. Hell, even the establishment magazine The New Yorker had set up a Tor based Strongbox to receive secure and anonymous leaks from whistle-blowers.

He shot his first question out to Mighty Thor, whom Oscar suspected was a girl. There was just a certain way Thor went about constructing his/her web site for heavy metal fans. But, hey, Oscar was the last boy on the street to care about such things. Thor’s sexual proclivities didn’t stop her/him from cutting some mean code. And her/his access to an impossible number of interesting web sites on a web-master basis was a valuable addition to Oscar’s team.

Mighty Thor, we have need of your thunderbolt. The forces of darkness are riding again. I need a team of heroes to defend the little people against a global menace. Fancy some fun? - Lone Ranger-

The reply was instant. Thor was 24/7. Oscar also wondered if Thor was a gang.

hammer ready and at your disposal. Say who when how - Mighty Thor-

Oscar rounded up the other four over the next 24 hours. There was
Slick Willy, an old cracker like himself, who’d switched sides after the turmoil of the late 90’s when hacking had gone from a demonstration of teenage rebellion and power, to criminal acts. Slick Willy was out of Mexico and once took over the entire cable network of CNN via their own web sites to advertise the plight of the ‘wetback’ hackers. Kids who’d been imprisoned both sides of the border for repeated crashing of the surveillance systems.

There was
Switchblade. Now retired from hacking at the age of 22 and working as a ‘fireman’ for the Seventh Day Adventists out of Utah. Switchblade was using his remarkable gift for slicing through the best software defences in corporate America to maintain and protect the computer systems of his church. Oscar appealed to Switchblade’s new found saintliness by offering him a crusade.

Then came an enthusiastic confirmation from
Magus, a new script-kid Oscar had seen in action recently. Magus had splashed on the scene with some of the most vibrant new music delivered over the net. He’d composited tracks from some of the finest musicians in the last fifty years – anyone from Buddy Holly through to Hard Wired Brush. But instead of producing a simple mish-mash of sliced up tracks, Magus had created something entirely new. It was as though he’d stripped the music right back to the base notes and then built it up again into haunting and compulsive sounds. It was the music of the Internet itself. The big music companies had posted offers of mega-millions on the net to buy Magus’s stuff. But he wasn’t for sale. He did it for the sheer spiritual beauty of it. He gave the same reason for throwing in his lot with Oscar.

Oscar had one last handle to secure to make up the seven. It had to be seven because that’s how Karma worked.
It guaranteed they’d be magnificent. And it had to be Worm though there was a high chance he was in jail somewhere. It was a risk. Worm wore a black hat and a white one when it suited him. He was just as likely to be breaking into NASA as helping track down the clowns who’d knocked over half the ISP’s in the Southern Hemisphere with a killer virus. The job needed to interest him and to suit his very finely nuanced moral code.

Worm. We’ve got an A team up to do something mighty. Its
small people war against big biz. Better than dragons or kill-zone. This is Thermopylae! Interested? - Lone Ranger-

is there money?
- Worm-

only glory-

how do you spend glory?-

you trade it. This will shake the net. Legends will be made
-

I’m already a name
-

that’s why we need you. You’re the best. This is the A+ team. This is Gunfight at the OK Corral, the Alamo, Butch and Sundance, Apocalypse Now! -

whos the team? -

Mighty Thor, Slick Willy, Switchblade, Magus, Tonto, me
-

a
harsh crew! But it’s not enough -

How clean is your line? Just you and me…

A while later Oscar set up a web conference with the whole team
in a particularly dark and secure corner of the TOR network. He described the work of the People’s Bank and told them about the trial and what could happen if the bank was closed. Then he told them of the dark dealings of Global American and the mass attacks on the Delhi hub. He set up a private chat room to bring his team together with Vikram Vajpayee and Shivani Jaffrey. He let them fire questions at each other until one by one he was receiving private emails from each of his band offering total commitment to the cause
.

Oscar wound up the discussions,

I have it on best that another attack is due in 48 hours. this is the biggie, the full rush. timed with the start of the trial on Monday. Global America’s going for broke to bring down the house. Here’s the plan…-