Stalking Moon Read online

  Cloning is much harder than it used to be. When you make a call on your cell phone, it sends out three discrete chunks of digital information—the serial number of the actual phone, your account number, and a randomly generated identifier code, something so encrypted that it was almost impossible to duplicate because it changed at random intervals. Of course, nothing about Internet or wireless security is absolute.

  Some hacker, somewhere, crunches decoding possibilities until security is breached. In my case, Bobby Guinness had purchased some cloning software from a contact in Kazakhstan. It currently worked with Pacific Bell cellular accounts. When PacBell got hit with too much illegal cell activity, it would switch its encryption scheme, and then Bobby would obtain another block of telephone company cellular frequencies.

  Seven minus four. Two plus three.

  Seventh number minus four, second number plus three.

  Bobby took care of the legitimacy of the phone numbers. I never used my phone to make calls, only to hear from him. Five minutes after I finished snapping the plastic case back together, it rang.

  “You think about what I asked?” he said abruptly, as though we were continuing the conversation from earlier, even though a whole day had passed.

  “I'm thinking. . . who was that girl in Vegas?”

  “Smart kid. She found them, by the way.”

  “Found who?”

  “The gambling hackers. You were right about Manitoba. These guys worked for a computer repair company. Not too smart covering their tracks.”

  “How did she find them? I sure couldn't.”

  “Does it really matter? Listen. This new contract's shaping up really quick.”

  “So?”

  “Chat rooms and message boards? You think about getting into them?”

  “Yeah. Well, it's really difficult.”

  “Isn't it like hacking into email servers?”

  “Not really. Two reasons. First, it's this peer-to-peer stuff. Doesn't use the standard Internet protocols, where everything has a designated location number. AOL Instant Messenger and Napster. Whole new world. People connect to each other in real time, but not through fixed computer locations. The only real way to track this stuff is to be online at the same exact time, plus know where the people are. Difficult.”

  “What else?” he asked.

  “There are just too many of these connections. Too many people. The AOL Instant Messenger system alone has thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of messages a day. Later today I'll see what more I can find out. But I've never used this stuff, so I can't say what the learning curve will be, how long it will take.”

  “What will you need?”

  Each of our scores had different technical problems, sometimes with hardware and software, sometimes with setting up illegal shell accounts on computers around the world so I could hack without leaving a substantial chase.

  “Minimum, half a dozen more computers. I'd have to hack into AOL computers to look at their log files, and AOL is really snooty about that. First I'll have to get the logfiles for a fixed period of time, then write a computer program to search them for whatever name you want. But I'll need to build a massive computer network handling all that data.”

  “How long to build it?”

  “Depends what the client wants and how soon it's wanted.”

  “Here's the wiggle. Funky. I've got two people wanting to pay for the same job.”

  “Bobby, I don't understand.”

  “Two different clients. Each approached me separately. I know they've got no idea somebody else is asking for the same information.”

  “That is funky. So?”

  “The first client, a package is coming your way.”

  “At my mail drop?”

  “The second client,” he continued, ignoring my question, “you're going to have to meet her.”

  “No. I don't personally meet clients.”

  “Not even for two hundred thousand?” He sucked in his breath, the sound rasping in my earpiece. “That's a minimum.”

  Well. Incredible. My biggest score ever. I could take months off work, I could retire for a year, I could bliss out in northern Thailand with that kind of money. The phone connection buzzed the way it does when somebody on a portable or wireless phone shifts body position and the uplink can't quite maintain the connection.

  “Okay. I'll meet. Where do I go? What state?”

  “No airplanes necessary. Your own neighborhood. Client's nearby. Meet her tomorrow night 4:22. She prefers Nogales. I told her you'd pick Tucson.”

  “Yes. Arizona Desert Museum.”

  He hesitated so long I thought there was a problem.

  “Just checking her cell phone, had to leave a message on her voice mail about the meet. Okay. Gotta go.”

  “Wait! What's the job?”

  “Something connected to that videotape on CNN. Today, when you get the package, you'll understand a lot more. Um, I've got to go.”

  “Um,” I said. “There you go again.”

  “Don't have time to talk.”

  “Whoa, Bobby. Whoa. What's the hurry here? I know you by now. I know when you've got something unpleasant to tell me about a score.”

  “What's the tell?” he asked after a while.

  “I'm not telling you anything. I'm asking.”

  “No. You know, um, like gamblers. Poker players. Get a good card, they lick their lips, sniff, hunch their shoulders, whatever. It gives away information to the other players so they can fold.”

  “That's called a tell?”

  “Yes. Look, I'm really curious. I need to know if I've got a tell, a giveaway on the phone. Nobody's ever said that to me before.”

  “When you're holding back something, you say 'um.' ”

  “Um,” Bobby Guinness said faintly.

  “See?”

  A long, long silence. But I waited, knowing he was trying to figure out just how much more data to give me.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Things here are getting complicated.”

  “Bad complicated? Or just. . . more difficult?”

  “Both. First off. There's a Mexican factor.”

  “Is there data about that in the package I'm getting?”

  “Second off. The package is being hand-delivered.”

  I was stunned.

  “How do you know where I live?”

  “That's my business. To know all about people. But. . . um. . . ”

  Uncharacteristically, he was at a loss for words. I heard a swoosh of static as he shifted his head, a momentary buzzing, like a large moth at the screen door.

  “I'm going to freak you out here, I think. Tell you the truth, I'm freaked.”

  “What?”

  “You're going to find out anyway,” he said, “once the package arrives.”

  “Find out what?”

  “I'm not Bobby Guinness.”

  Where is this going? I thought, unable to think clearly at all.

  “Well. I am Bobby to you. But I'm just a voice, just a person who calls himself Bobby Guinness. Actually, I'm a cutout. I work for. . . for the real Bobby. Who's coming to see you in the next day or so. Bringing the package.”

  “A cutout? I don't think I like this contract at all.”

  “You will, once you hear the money that's involved. It's going to be a percentage, not a straight fee. Twenty percent of at least thirty million dollars.”

  “Jesus!”

  “So. You cool? You freaked? What?”

  “How will I recognize the real Bobby, or whatever his name is.”

  “You'll know. Listen, there's one more thing. Two more. One of the keys here is a person who uses chat rooms and AOL Instant Messenger. User name is LUNA13.”

  “Wait.” I grabbed a red Magic Marker pen. “Spell that out.”

  I wrote it on my palm.

  “The score depends on you tracking down the actual person.”

  He waited, silent. I heard the buzzing again and realized he was nervou
s, probably pacing back and forth, uncertain how I was taking all this. I turned my palm this way and that, as if by changing the angle of my hand I could somehow find meaning in the user name.

  “Nearly impossible,” I said finally, thinking of the permutations. “LUNA13. That could be anybody. Anywhere. It could even be a group of people.”

  “Yes. Well. You said nearly impossible. Second thing. Can you get some heavy-duty backup? Not muscle. But somebody you can trust to watch your back?”

  “If this is about drug smuggling, count me out.”

  “Drugs? No. You just need a good person for backup. Okay. There's one more wiggle here. Keep watching CNN.”

  “I've seen that desert thing ten times.”

  “You tape it?”

  “I did.”

  “There's going to be another videotape some time today.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Me neither. But my sources tell me there'll be a second videotape. That's all I know, but the client wants to make sure you watch it.”

  “Bobby. Tell me if you know the answer to this one.”

  “What's the question?”

  “Another batch of dead immigrants in the middle of somewhere. A videotape of nothing, in the middle of somewhere else. How are they connected?”

  “The client says you'll know why once you see the tape. Gotta go.”

  And just like that, he hung up.

  4

  The Internet is a chaotic, anarchic mess.

  Your identity is supposed to be protected.

  It's not.

  In the past few years, hundreds of public and private agencies have published intense amounts of personal information. $59.95 to check out the hot date you just met in a singles bar. $79.95 to run a credit check on that new plumber you were thinking of hiring. $35.00 for software to install on your kid's computer to see if they visit porn websites. Or install it on your wife's computer to privately capture her email, find out if she's got a boyfriend.

  If you use cash for everything, you're partially safe. Unless you've got a driver's license and a registered vehicle, a social security number, or even just an account at your supermarket where you can save on in-house items by swiping your store card. If you visit a doctor, dentist, even a veterinarian, they've got records that they may share—deliberately or innocently—with similar offices.

  But all of this information is based on the Internet as its method of exchanging digital information that has been codified. AOL and Napster changed all that.

  Instead of sending a message to a specific email address, which can be tracked, people use AOL Instant Messenger to “chat” with friends. Unlike your email connections, these chats have no specific digital identifier that leaves traces.

  Your friend pages you, you open a chat window, you can even move into a private chat room. Once you stop chatting, the connection is broken. Even if you start chatting again in ten seconds, the connection may be entirely different.

  Most websites have fixed addresses. Napster could have set up thousands of music files on a monster computer bank, but instead, Napster software circumvented the law requiring royalty payments by having people literally connect to somebody else's computer for however long it took to swap music files.

  Peer-to-peer connections. That's the term.

  God, I hated them. Anybody could be talking to anybody anywhere on the Internet, but the fixed digital locators no longer existed.

  So far, I'd avoided anything involving peer-to-peer connections. So far, I thought as I carefully set up AOL Instant Messenger software on one of my secret computer accounts on a Japanese corporate network in Osaka.

  I could have picked a hundred other chat room possibilities, but I figured the odds were enormous that LUNA13 used AOL. Instant Messenger was incredibly simple to use. You create your own “buddy” name, you set up chat possibilities with other buddies. All I needed to do was to add LUNA13 to my Buddy List.

  An hour later, having done many searches for that user name, I found nothing.

  I switched plans and launched a variety of probes at the AOL computers in Vienna, Virginia. AOL didn't like that.

  At least I found out the Internet Protocol addresses of some of the AOL computers. I emailed one of my hacker contacts to see if she had any information on installing a Trojan Horse program on AOL computers, so I could capture user login identities and passwords. I'd never had an Internet challenge I couldn't solve. But this was a whole new, surprising world for me. I wasn't sure I could do the job.

  Most surprising, to me, was the total lack of anxiety about my not knowing what to do. A new feeling for me. No anxiety. No panic attack because I thought I'd fail.

  Cool.

  I turned on CNN again. The desert videotape story now ended with two pictures. The women looked vaguely European, perhaps from Eastern Europe. Names appeared underneath the pictures, and in a flash my entire simple life vanished. I stared at one of the women's pictures and her dyed reddish hair, and memories I had worked so hard to suppress came flooding back as bright as sunlight off a mirror, blindingly straight into your eyes.

  It was another videotape of the same desert. The quality was better, the camera angles different, and it wasn't shot through a windshield. More like the person was out on the hood of the vehicle, or actually standing on the desert floor. But I was transfixed and horrified by one of the photographs.

  Fumbling for the TV remote so I could turn it off fast enough, I couldn't get that red hair out of my sight. My mind went through one of those memory sequences where one thing triggers another and another and another.

  Dyed raspberry hair.

  Meg Arizana.

  Meg with the shotgun.

  The rattlesnake in Tuba City.

  Kimo Biakeddy. Me with the shotgun, walking to meet Kimo. Remembering exactly what I was thinking that late, terrifying night.

  I shut off the TV and unplugged the set. Totally irrational, I thought, can't unplug reality, so unplug the device. Totally stupid, but I knew myself so well, knew I'd have to turn on the TV to watch the pictures over and over. Somehow it was connected with my new contracts, and I'd already decided to turn them down.

  When the package arrived, I'd tell the delivery agent No Go!

  I'd cancel the meeting with the other client. Nobody was going to die again from something I set in motion. Goddamnit! Nobody!

  5

  And there she was, riding toward me.

  Meg Arizana.

  Eating a late breakfast, I saw three riders crest a rise and move through the line of oaks behind my stable. I recognized Meg's uneasy riding style and fought a wave of nausea, remembering her agony at killing Audrey Maxwell, who burst into my Tucson home only because I'd stripped away all her power and money.

  Never give voice to your demons, I tell you. They may come true.

  The other two riders also looked uncomfortable, bobbling around like beginners with the jerky uncertainty of trusting their bodies atop large animals. A woman and a young girl. Threading between three huge saguaros, they rode directly to where I sat under the ramada.

  The woman struggled with a boot caught in a stirrup, clasped the saddle horn, and vaulted off the horse. She wore a flowered scarf tied tightly around her head and knotted at the back, but as she landed and stumbled for a moment, the scarf flew off. Her head was totally bald. A portable radio flew out of her front shirt pocket, but she made no attempt to grab it. She grasped the scarf in her hand while running to the house.

  “Where's your TV set?”

  “Power's off,” I said with some irritation.

  “Turn it on.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it!” she demanded. “I'll explain. Just turn on the power. Now!”

  When I didn't move, she came outside and circled the house until she found the circuit breaker box. I heard her slam the main switch on. She was already in the living room before the screen door banged shut. Using the remote, she turned on the TV, but I'd run the
volume control all the way down and she burst outside, slamming the screen door with such force that one hinge cracked, the spring broke with a sharp twang, and the door fell halfway to the ground.

  “The sound,” she barked at me. “How do I turn up the fucking sound?”

  Not even waiting for an answer, she ran back inside and knelt inches from the TV screen and aimed the remote at the TV just as the raspberry hair jumped onto the screen. Flinging away the remote, she knelt in front of the TV and pressed a button until the anchorwoman's voice thundered out of the tinny speakers and set a small vase rattling somewhere in the kitchen. Immune to the volume, she sat with her face only inches from the TV and nodded with the story as she absentmindedly adjusted the scarf on her head.

  Meg couldn't settle the three horses, but I quickly realized they were skittish because she was skittish and translated the nervous energy to them.

  “How you doing?” I said.

  “Off my meds,” she answered in a high-pitched voice.

  “Why?”

  Meg was bipolar, although far more manic than depressive. The last time I'd stayed with her at one of her Tucson safe houses for abused women, I'd watched her swallow a ten-pill cocktail in the morning, another at supper.

  “Drinking, smoking weed. Peyote. Like that.”

  Her horse pawed the dirt, tugging the reins. She jerked in response and the horse wheeled around, wild-eyed. I saw a shotgun sheathed in a leather case.

  “Meg! What the hell is that?”

  “Part of my new look. Check this out.”

  She turned around, lifted her fluffy white blouse to show a holstered Glock at the small of her back, tucked underneath her skirt.

  “Why?” I asked again. “I never thought I'd see you with a gun. Ever.”

  “Part of the package. Since Columbine, I've been trying to understand these young kids.”

  “By going off your meds?”

  “Sure. Teenage girls are always depressed. I'm getting more of them in my safe houses, but it's a witch's brew. Teenage depression amped up by crossing the border illegally and then being robbed and raped by the coyotes. There's a lucky one.”

  She nodded her head at the teenage girl who sat cross-legged in the dirt with a video camera.