Shaman Winter (35 page)

So that's it, Sonny thought. The kid was using the computer to look for his father, and in the process he ran into part of his family tree. He got into the Mormon genealogy files. Had he also gotten into the Sandia Labs files?

“Don't lose hope,” Sonny said. “But tell me, if you know people have been deleted from government files, does that mean you've gotten into those files?”

Cyber remained silent, chewing slowly on his cookie.

“Look,” Sonny said softly. “I'm not here to find out what you're doing. I need information on missing girls. Just like you need it on your father. I need help.”

“I can get into almost anything,” Cyber smiled. “But there's some government stuff that's so coded, and if you happen to break the code, they set a cyberdetective on you. I have to go slow.”

“You're what they call a hacker?” Sonny asked.

Cyber smiled. “I don't mess with anyone's files. I just want info on my dad.”

“That's fair.” Sonny nodded. “But how do you do all this?”

“Easy.” Cyber smiled. “I've got a directory, a modem, and Circe.” Again he patted the computer.

“Circe?”

“That's the name somebody scratched on the back of the computer. I found it when I was hooking up the phone line. I looked it up. Circe was a witch who lived on an island during Greek times. She turned Odysseus' men into pigs.”

“Yeah.” Sonny nodded, recalling the story in
The Odyssey
. Odysseus landed on Circe's island, and the seductive witch turned his men into beasts while he loitered with her.
The Odyssey
was everyman's journey. Too much loitering on the island of desire turned one into a pig. One had to remember the goal: get home. Penelope was waiting. The son—what was his name?—was waiting. Cyber's father was on an odyssey.

“Maybe a scientist who reads books named the computer,” Sonny suggested.

“I guess,” Cyber nodded. “Circe was a witch who could tell the future. People went to her for answers. Now they go to the Internet. They surf all day long, all night.”

“Cyber escape,” Lorenza said.

“Yeah.” Cyber nodded. “In cyberspace you can be anything you want to be.”

“You get sucked in,” Sonny added.

“It's easy. Too easy.”

“But you've got to be connected. Who pays the phone bill?” Lorenza asked.

Cyber gulped. Crumbs of the cookie hung on his lower lip. His wide dark eyes looked from one to the other.

“Well?”

“You going to tell?” Cyber whispered.

“What's there to tell?”

“I ain't got no money. Vangie ain't got no money. So I—”

“What?”

“I kinda just charge the fee and the phone bill.”

“Charge the phone bill?”

“You know,” Cyber said softly. “To the labs.”

Damn. Sonny smiled. The kid was charging the phone bill to Sandia Labs. Looking for his father meant taking chances.

“Well,” Sonny leaned forward and whispered, “I heard the lab has a program that encourages kids like you to learn about computers. It's kind of an investment they're making in the future.”

Cyber smiled. “That's what I figure,” he said, and gave Sonny a high five. He turned to Lorenza. “Is it okay?”

“I didn't hear a thing.” She smiled, and Cyber gave her a high five.

“You've got a cool lady, Mr. Sonny.”

“I think so,” Sonny agreed.

“She drive you around?”

“Yup.”

“You been in a chair a long time?”

“A couple of months.”

“You hurt your legs?”

“Ran into some bad guys.”

“Same guys you want to catch on the Internet?”

“Yup.”

“I'll help.”

“Good.”

“I look into some of this stuff on the Net, and I see how people are using it. Some of the deals coming down are worse than the crime on the street.”

“True.” Sonny nodded. Cyberspace had already become the territory of the criminal. The Cyberspace Mafia was making deals, shaking down the world.
Anything
could be ordered over the wires. Money could be laundered and moved so fast that the IRS couldn't keep up with it. Deals to buy countries, or to bring down countries, all at the touch of a few keys. Virtual criminals were
real
criminals, and Cyber was beginning to run into them. Now there were missing persons, and cyberspace was beginning to look like any other dictatorship in the world. The dictatorship of cyberspace was coming. The disappeared. Deleted files. Cyber's missing dad. Others.

“How come you can do so much with Circe? Don't you need special programs?” Lorenza asked.

“Sandia Labs donated this baby to the library,” Cyber replied.

“So?”

“So,” he whispered, “they left their programs in the hard drive.”

“Programs from Sandia Labs?”

“Yeah. I was surprised, too. I figured it was a mistake, a typical government snafu.”

“What's the program?”

“It's called Avenger 2000,” Cyber replied. “And it's bad, believe me.”

“How?” Sonny asked.

“For one thing, the government seems to be fighting itself. There are groups carrying on a war. Like war-simulation games, but not with tanks and airplanes. It's like a plot. People disappear. There are codes in here you wouldn't believe. That's how I found my dad's record.”

“But you said files are deleted.”

“The payroll and classification files are deleted, so he's not in the active file. He just never showed up for work, they told my mom. But I found his ‘deleted file' in their mainframe. It shows he was working one day and gone the next. His file just got pushed into the
disappeared
.”

“How can you get into their mainframe?”

Cyber smiled. “They have an internal fiber-optic system. Nobody can crash in from the outside, but I figured a way.”

“How?”

Cyber hesitated. “I work at the labs.”

“I don't get it,” Sonny replied.

“I composed a person, gave myself identification, classification, a code number, everything. They think I'm there, so I can access their system.”

“Too much,” Sonny whispered.

“For sure,” Lorenza said. She, too, was amused, and startled, by Cyber's revelation.

“Almost anything's possible on the Net.”

“Including people disappearing,” Sonny mused.

“Where are they?” Cyber asked. “Where's my dad? That's what I want to find out.”

“And you're the only one using this computer?” Lorenza asked.

“It's too complicated for the other kids. When the lab guys delivered Circe a few months ago, the kids couldn't get into the programs, so they couldn't play games on it. Even Vangie couldn't use it. She tried to get someone from the labs to come and fix it, but they never showed up. I began to fiddle with it, and I got in. That made her happy, so now I've got my own personal weapon. I just happened to hook into a phone line, and Vangie gets no bills, so that's cool.”

“And the rest is history,” Sonny said, glancing at Lorenza. They had come to the right place. The kid had the software to navigate the Net. How far could he go?

“So whatchu wanna look for?”

“I need to learn a lot about nuclear weapons, and I need to learn it today. I also have a list of people I need to research, but I don't want to get you into trouble.”

“Look, Sonny, I'm already in trouble. I got into the Sandia and Los Alamos systems. If they catch me, so what. I don't disturb files, I just look for info on my dad.”

“You've already been in the Los Alamos computers?” The kid kept astounding Sonny.

Cyber bowed his head. “Yes,” he said softly, then looked up. “Only because the work my dad was doing at Sandia had something to do with a project up there.”

“I need info from those computers,” Sonny thought aloud, weighing the possibility of getting Cyber into trouble against the alternative: Raven constructing the bomb, Raven killing the three missing girls, Raven
disappearing
Sonny. “It could be dangerous.”

“I'll help,” Cyber insisted.

Sonny took out the list he had written. “This man. Leif Eric. He's director of Los Alamos Labs. I need to know all I can about him. Everything. And I need to know how to build a nuclear bomb.”

Cyber whistled. “You wanna build a bomb? That's cool.”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“You bet.”

“I want to know
how
to build a nuclear bomb; I'm not really going to build one. If I had the plutonium pit ready to go, what other materials would I need? Where does Los Alamos buy such materials? Who are the suppliers? Do they manufacture components there, or do they buy from the outside? Are there names attached? And this guy.”

He wrote “Raven.”

“This man is known as Raven, but he has a dozen aliases. Anthony Pájaro, Antonio Cuervo, John Worthy, Worthy John, all these combinations.” He pointed at the list. “His name might be involved with a nuclear bomb project. He's probably in FBI and CIA files—” Sonny stopped and looked at Cyber. “But tell me, you haven't gotten into FBI files, have you?”

Cyber beamed.

“Lordy, Lordy,” Sonny chuckled. What could this kid not crack?

“Okay, Raven is being sought by the FBI. Where is he? I want to know anything about him that might be in—there.” He nodded at the computer.

He gave Cyber the names of the missing girls, the names of their parents, and where they worked. Anything at all that might show up in the files Cyber could access. Anything that might create a pattern.

“I'll get right on it,” Cyber said when Sonny was done. Something about Sonny's urgency told him the task was not a game. Sonny was looking into government stuff, and that meant going into mainframes that had codes, encrypted stuff. There where the surf could turn ugly and drag a surfer down, Circe's pit, the black hole of cyberspace that surfers feared. You cracked a code, and security could trace you if you didn't move fast enough.

“When I find something, do I e-mail you?”

“I don't have e-mail,” Sonny replied.

“You don't have e-mail?” Cyber said in astonishment. Then as if apologizing, he added, “That's okay, probably be read by others.”

“Call me,” Sonny replied, writing down his phone number.

“Your phone's probably tapped.”

“I don't think so. I've checked for bugs, so we'll take a chance. You see, Cyber, I have to have all this figured out today.”

“Today? Today's all the time we have?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Cyber said eagerly. “I'll go to work right away, call you if I find anything.”

“Thanks, Cyber. You're a real trooper.”

Cyber smiled and gave Sonny a high five.

21

While Lorenza drove, Sonny read and made notes. Set the stage, don Eliseo had said. That's exactly what the red-haired woman in the cantina had done. She set the stage for Billy's play, and it was on that stage that Sonny finally faced Raven. But she made Sonny sit—she didn't want him to be an actor. She was Raven's helper.

The three missing girls had been in Christmas plays.

To enter your own dream, you had to set the stage, like in a movie or a play. Make yourself the principal actor. And it didn't have to be Shakespeare, any damned stage would do.

“Ah, here,” he murmured, and found the entry on plays.

The Oñate colonists brought many plays to La Nueva México, he read, dramas put on by talented soldiers and friars to entertain the troops in the field. One such play, still reenacted in some of the small villages of the state, was
Los Moros y los Cristianos
. It illustrated the ferocity of the Spanish knights defeating the Moors in Spain.

Shouting their battle cry, “Santiago,” the Spanish forces called on St. James to defeat the enemy, sweeping the Moors south, out of Granada, and finally back to Africa. Winning against the entrenched Moorish civilization and its warriors convinced the Spaniards that God and St. James were on their side, for many a story was told of miraculous appearances of the patron saint on the field of battle. Santiago rode alongside them as a shining knight, riding a white stallion, encouraging the knights of Aragón in their struggle against the infidel. When this happened, the Spanish troops responded and the battle was won.

The appearance of the saint in battle regalia was also documented in the legends of La Nueva México, during the early battles against the Pueblo Indians.

Good odds to have in your corner, Sonny thought. A saint on horseback dropping from the clouds in armor, charging and cleaving the enemy like a scythe cuts down wheat. It emboldened the faithful, made them courageous and ferocious. A ferocity and faith that helped them conquer the New World. Faith and ferocity. A terrible combination.

But in 1492 not all the Jewish and Muslim outcasts from the Iberian peninsula disappeared into thin air. Some made the sign of the cross and journeyed to México; newly converted into the Catholic fold, the conversos joined others in the dream of the New World. Of course the civil and church authorities knew who these conversos were, marranos they were called, and as more and more of México was conquered, the marranos were often pushed to the more dangerous northern frontier. Rich men like Oñate paid for the outfitting of the expedition, but the common people who were recruited were those who had nothing, and so a few of the crypto Jews and Moors joined the Oñate expedition.

Centuries later, in a few of the adobe hovels of New Mexico, the prayers the children heard were not the Hail Marys of the rosary, but chants in a foreign language. Jewish and Muslim prayers on days that had nothing to do with the calendar of saints' days.

Sonny paused. You had to read the fine print in the history books to find things like this. For example, Tlaxcalan Indians, over five hundred strong, the backbone of the expedition, those who would build the first chapel in Santa Fé, also came with Oñate. History barely noted the contribution of the Tlaxcalans, and their progeny hardly remembered them.