Red 1-2-3 (13 page)

Not, at least, before she had seen what it was the Wolf wanted her to see. She did not want to see it. She did not want to know what it was. But at the same time, she knew she had to.

She gripped the letter in her hand, and then, overcome suddenly by nausea, she pivoted to the toilet bowl and was violently ill.

Jordan Ellis first curled up on her bed as if stricken by an abrupt illness, the letter clutched in her hand. She remained locked in position for nearly fifteen minutes. She stared across her tiny dormitory room to the desk, and the laptop computer lying open there.

It took a great effort to push her legs off the mattress and onto the floor.

It took a second effort, equal to the first, to rise up and take a step toward the computer. And finally, as she dropped herself into the stiff-backed desk chair, it took a third effort even greater than the first pair to draw her hands above the computer keyboard and type in the first letters of the web address that BBW had sent her.

Each letter or number or backslash she typed was like a needle probing her flesh. When the entire address was completed, she hesitated before hitting the return key, which would send her electronically into whatever world the Wolf wanted her to be in.

Jordan paused. She tried to imagine what hitting that final key was doing to her and for him. She asked herself if she was helping her cause or hurt-ing it. She thought she was entering into some dangerous arena in which a deadly game was being played, but without being told the rules, and without being given the right equipment, so that she would be hamstrung from the beginning and winning was not only unlikely, but impossible.

I can play,
she thought, trying to fill herself with some sort of phony confidence.
I can play any game. Better than he knows.
Still she hesitated.

87

JOHN KATZENBACH

She bit down on her lower lip until it was nearly painful and then she said
Fuck it
to herself and punched the return key with a heady determination that astonished her.

The familiar logo of a YouTube page came up on the screen. In the frozen video in front of her, all she could see was a close-up of a barren tree, branches denuded, against an overcast sky.

She had no idea what it was and a confusing
what the fuck
series of thoughts crowded into her head. She moved the cursor over to the
Play
arrow and clicked. In the box on the screen, images leapt to life. She hunched forward, watching carefully.

At first the camera—held unsteadily and amateurishly—wobbled as it lingered over the tree. Then it swung about rapidly, and Jordan understood that it was a forest. She could see leaves collected on the floor, dark-stained tree trunks melding together in a tangled mess, bushes, and fallen logs. But the camera seemed light, almost at ease, at it effortlessly traveled through the dark woods. Shafts of weak sunlight occasionally interrupted the scene.

Jordan thought the footage was taken near the end of a gloomy day.

She watched, fascinated. The point of view suggested that whoever was behind the camera had no trouble following a designated path. But she recognized nothing. The footage could have been taken anywhere.

Suddenly, the camera stopped. A large flash of light washed out the view and Jordan rocked back as if she’d been slapped.

There was a moment of grainy, out-of-focus, hard-to-identify images, and then Jordan realized that she was watching a long-distance shot of someone walking through the late afternoon.

She saw the red hair.

She saw the school pathways.

She saw herself. Alone.

She thought she was about to scream. But her mouth opened wide and no sound came out.

The camera image lingered for an instant as she watched herself disappear into her dormitory. She saw the front door swing shut behind her.

Then the screen went black.

88

11

Karen tried to adopt a carefree, unaffected tone on the telephone. She had dialed the number for the Apple Store in a shopping mall some twenty-five miles away, and been connected to a young man at their “Genius Bar,”

who had given his name as Kyle.

“I have a computer question,” Karen said, keeping her words as short as possible.

“Sure. Shoot,” Kyle replied, without pointing out the obvious, that there was no other reason for calling the store. In the background she could hear other responses from blue-shirted Apple “geniuses” answering questions about bits and bytes and downloads and memory.

“Is it possible to post something on YouTube anonymously? We’re trying to do something special for my husband’s birthday, and the kids and I wanted to put up a video we made as a surprise for him—he’s in the service overseas, you see—and part of the surprise is doing it so he can’t trace it back, because we don’t want to give away the second surprise we have planned for him when he comes home . . .”

89

JOHN KATZENBACH

She stopped her story there. It didn’t really make any sense, she knew, and it was a complete lie, but she imagined it would be enough to get Kyle the Genius to tell her what she needed to know.

“Ah, sure. Posting anonymously? No problem. It’s not really any big deal,” he said.

“I mean untraceable completely?”

“Yep,” he replied.

“So, like if I did want to trace something back to the poster, how would I do that?”

“Easy to post. Hard to trace,” Kyle said simply.

“Can you fill me in a little?” Karen asked. She hoped that none of the tension she felt within her was leaking into her voice.

“Well, two different questions really,” he answered. “First, posting anonymously. That’s not too difficult. You need to take your laptop to just about any public server, like in a coffee shop or a library. Then you create a proxy account with a website like Tor, which will give you a program that guarantees anonymity. By the time you’re posting on YouTube, you’re using a server that can’t be traced to you and a site that hides all the relevant computer info, so that even if one were to get to the location, they’d be up against a wall.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“Not really. Just a short drive in the car, buy a cup of overpriced coffee, and make some discreet clicks. Use some alias that means nothing to nobody. Seems like a relatively small inconvenience for total secrecy.” Kyle seemed a little bored by the question.

“But the cops—”

“Nah,” he interrupted immediately, with significantly more enthusiasm, “no chance, no way. They just run into the same electronic walls.

And, assuming the public server in the library or coffee shop doesn’t have any security cameras, well, there you have it. Your post is up and running, you cancel out of Tor or wherever, and no one knows the difference and you’ve disappeared.”

90

RED 1–2–3

The Big Bad Wolf, Karen thought, would know about security cameras.

He had to. He would know about computers. He would know about websites that create anonymity. She suddenly imagined that he would know about
everything
.

“And back tracing . . .”

“You mean if someone posted something anonymously that you wanted to track down? Like someone did to you what you want to do to your husband?”

Kyle’s reply had a slightly mocking tone, as if he understood she wasn’t really talking about a husband, but that he was willing to play along.

This was what she truly wanted to know. She felt her insides constrict, as if someone were hugging her. She could feel sweat beneath her arms and she reminded herself to keep her own voice airy, light, and unconcerned, even if this was nearly impossible.

From what she could hear, Kyle was young—probably in his early twenties, she thought—but in computer years he was significantly older than her. “Exactly,” she said.

“Well, I think YouTube is required by law to keep as much of that information available as possible, in case the cops come calling, or some lawyer with a subpoena. They’re really sensitive to Internet bullying and intimidation because of all the cases that have come up all over the place.

They get a whole lot of bad publicity when some high school creep posts something to humiliate or intimidate some ex-boyfriend or -girlfriend.

Facebook is no different. But they’re just going to run into the same problems as they break it down. Now, I don’t know about the military or like the CIA—you know, spooks. They’ve got some pretty cool top-secret stuff for tracing bad guys, like in Iraq. But for everyone working for the feds with real expertise, there are a dozen or a million computer pros working to get around them. And the guys that aren’t collecting a government paycheck are really a whole lot more skilled.”

Karen didn’t know what to ask next, but Kyle obligingly continued, his voice picking up some excited momentum.

91

JOHN KATZENBACH

“It’s like you see in the movies and television,” Kyle said. “You know there’s always a scene where either the good guys or the bad guys hack this or that and come up with some killer piece of information about some guy or some plot or something cool that’s just floating about in cyberspace and it all seems to like make sense and you believe it?”

“Yes?” Karen asked. Nothing she had heard from Kyle reassured her.

Instead, she felt queasy.

“Well, that’s because it usually does make sense.”

“Thanks, Kyle,” Karen said. “I might have to call you again.”

“Hey, anytime, Doctor,” he said as he hung up.

It took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t identified herself. And she hadn’t told Kyle her profession. Caller ID on her phone, she thought.

For a moment she stared at the black receiver she held in her hand.
What
else did it tell him?
Home phone, landline, cell phone, office line. Where had her privacy disappeared? It frightened her.

Then she turned back to her computer screen. It frightened her more.

Sarah’s tears had dried.

She felt like she had walked headlong into some dark room and she knew that somewhere in the floor was a trapdoor that would drop her into some sort of endless oblivion. It made no difference how carefully and cautiously she felt her way forward, because the door yawned open in front of her and there was no way to avoid it.

For a moment or two, she stared at her computer screen, watching the YouTube posting for the third or fourth time. Maybe it was the fifth time.

She didn’t keep track.

Suddenly, she reached out and seized her husband’s gun from the table beside her. Before she fully understood what she was doing, she clicked off the safety, rose from her chair, and stomped across the house, finally reaching the front door. Without hesitation, she flung the door open and stepped outside on the front stoop, swinging her gun right and left, sighting down the barrel, her finger tight on the trigger, ready to fire instantly.

Come on! Goddammit! Come on! I’m ready for you!

92

RED 1–2–3

She thought she was shouting, but then she understood that her teeth were clenched tight, so tight that her jaw began to ache.

She pivoted to the right a second time, then repeated the movement to the left, a little like a top spinning on a table.

Finally, she lowered the weapon and flipped the safety switch back on. Sarah breathed out slowly, tasting fresh air and wondering whether she had been holding her breath for seconds, or a minute, or the entire day.

The gun suddenly felt heavy, and it bounced against her hip.

Sarah wanted to laugh.

No one in sight. No one walking up or down the street in front of her house. No cars moving past slowly. No one within her view at all.

They were all lucky, she thought. All the neighbors who never called on her anymore. All the strangers who might have taken that moment to amble past her house.

They were all lucky to be alive.

She told herself that she would have leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger and killed anyone she saw. It would have made no difference if one of them was the Big Bad Wolf or not. She had begun to think that
everyone
was the Big Bad Wolf.

She sighed and stepped back inside. Sarah had the odd thought that she had been completely forgotten in her neighborhood. No one wanted to catch the virus of despair that she carried. So no one acknowledged her existence. Not anymore.

I can stand naked in my window. I could walk naked down the street with
my gun in my hand. I could dance naked in the center of the road firing shots
wherever I liked and no one would pay any attention,
she told herself.
I have
become invisible.

She was tempted to try. But instead, she went back inside, locking the door behind her and rearranging her flimsy homemade alarm system of cans and bottles, and returned to her computer screen.

A second thought slithered into her head:
I’m invisible to everyone except
one person.
She could hear her breathing coming in short, tortured bursts.

93

JOHN KATZENBACH

Sarah reached down and pressed the
Play
arrow with the barrel of her gun and began to watch what was posted another time.

But as she did so, she raised her weapon and aimed it at the images in front of her.

Red One’s YouTube video began in the same manner as Red Three’s—

with the camera tracking rapidly through some anonymous stand of trees, like an animal moving quickly over familiar ground. When Red One saw this for the first time, she imagined that it was the woods behind her house.
Had to be,
she thought. A terrifying thought. Then the video dissolved into a long-distance shot of her in the back of the parking lot at the hospice, stealing one of her post-observed-death smokes, thinking naïvely that she was indulging in her dangerous vice alone and unobserved.

Red Two’s YouTube entry mimicked the others with its fast-filmed forest beginning. But hers faded into a shot taken through a car window in the parking lot of a big discount liquor store. It was a local store that Red Two knew all too well. The camera held that position for what seemed an interminable moment, until Red Two emerged through the wide glass doors of the store, arms filled with paper parcels jammed with liquor bottles. It tracked her to the point when she got into her car and drove unsteadily away down a familiar street.