The next day I finished all the work I had by noon and spent the rest of the afternoon surfing the Web and playing foozball. There were a lot of people with time to play foozball. Not a good sign. Kevin reassured me that the Morgan Stanley project I was due to lead was just "hung up on the dotting the t's and crossing the i's stage." He sounded like he even believed it. If he hadn't I would have begun polishing my resume.
Just before I logged off and went home I got a crushingly disappointing email:
From: talenar@lonelyplanet. com
To: BalthazarWood@yahoo. com
Subject: Your proposal cc: editorial@lonelyplanet. com
Dear Mr. Wood,
We have considered all the information you have sent us and we regret to inform you that we have decided not to assist you in your investigation.
While we appreciate how serious your suspicions are, we feel it would be irresponsible of us to assist you without evidence that shows beyond any reasonable doubt that your theory is correct. While you have amassed an impressive collection of circumstantial evidence there remain unexplained holes in your timeline of events and there is no 'smoking gun'. Our stated Thorn Tree privacy policy is that we will never reveal information about a user without their consent, and any violation of this policy without being compelled by a subpoena could leave us open to damaging lawsuits. In short, so long as it is possible that you may be wrong, we do not wish to participate in what may be a wild-goose chase.
We do regret our lack of cooperation and hope that you understand our motivation. If you do acquire any new and compelling evidence, please let us know.
Sincerely,
Talena Radovich
Web Editor
Lonely Planet Publications
I restrained myself from punching my laptop. It wasn't the computer's fault. "Shit," I said. "Fuck. Shit fuck shit fuck shit fuck shit fuck." It didn't make me feel any better.
I went home to my apartment and turned on my TV and went up into Deep Cable to find the most brain-dead programming that I could. I was sick of thinking. I was beginning to think of lobotomies with longing.
About ten minutes into Married… With Children I got a phone call.
"Balthazar? Hi. It's Talena."
"Oh," I said. "Yeah. I got your email."
"Right. Let's pretend that you didn't."
I tried to figure out what she meant and failed. "What?"
"I talked it over with the board, and they're all very sympathetic and might even be willing to violate the privacy policy without a subpoena if you happen to get a videotape of the guy confessing his crimes."
"That's big of them."
"But first of all they don't want to violate their policy, and second of all they don't want to discourage people from traveling without hard evidence. Actually what they're scared of is that you'll go to the media. You can never tell what stories take off, and if yours does, we might be selling a lot fewer books for awhile."
"Well, you can tell them that their worst fears are about to come true," I said, trying to make it sound like a threat.
"I could. However. That's what the board thinks, and instructed me to tell you."
"I don't understand why you're calling me. And how did you get my number?"
She sighed patiently as if talking to a child. "The miracle of call display. And I'm calling you to tell you that the board and I think differently. That I think probably being onto something is good enough. So I'm personally going to help you."
"Really?"
"Yes, really."
"Help me how exactly?" I asked.
"What kind of help do you want?"
"I want the logs off your web server."
"Then I'll get them to you," she said.
"You could be fired."
"Only if you tell someone."
"I won't tell anyone."
"I know. Now tell me what you want me to get. WebTrends printouts or what? I'm computer-friendly but I'm not a techie so you'll have to give me explicit details."
I switched off the TV, sat down, and walked her through the details of where she could find the files that I needed. I heard her typing as I talked, presumably transcribing my instructions. She didn't ask any questions.
When I was finished, she said "Got it. I'll get them tomorrow. What's your address?"
"My address?"
"Your address. So I can bring you the floppy disk with the files. Like you said, I could get fired, so email's a wee bit too insecure for my liking."
I gave her my address.
"All right. Tomorrow at eight. Be there."
"I will," I said.
"Bye."
"Talena?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
"My pleasure," she said. "See you tomorrow."
After she hung up a thought occurred to me. I went to my study, sat down at my laptop, and logged on to the Thorn Tree. There were no new entries to my conversation, so I added my own:
PaulWood 11/06 19:45
BC088269: you think you're pretty smart, don't you?
With any luck I'd bait him into giving us new data.
I checked my email. There was a new message from Carmel, an Aussie girl from the truck, telling me how much she hated her new job in Sydney, and asking me how Nepal had been.
Good question, I thought. But are you sure you want to know the answer?
I wanted to answer. I wanted to send an email to all of the tribe of the truck, telling them everything I had found and everything I suspected. These were the people who would understand what I meant, and what it meant to me. Maybe some of them could even help me find out what was going on. Like Hallam and Nicole. He was an ex-paratrooper and a security consultant, and she had one of the keenest minds I had ever encountered. Or Steven, with his dubious past and host of shady connections. This was a job for people like them, not for a mild-mannered computer programmer.
But, really, what good would it do? Other than a meaningless moment of catharsis, what was the point in telling them what I had seen and discovered? What could they really find out that I couldn't? Why remind them of Laura's murder, and trouble them with this sick unsolvable mystery that seemed somehow connected to it? It didn't seem right to unleash it on their minds just because I couldn't stop it from preying on mine. All it would do was drag a bunch of horrible old memories out of the mud. I had gone through enough of that myself recently to want to wish it on others.
Talena showed up right on time, dressed in jeans and a purple sweater, a floppy disk in her hand. I took it from her and said "Thank you."
I expected her to turn around and walk away, and there was an awkward silence for a few seconds before she said "Aren't you going to invite me in?"
I blinked and said "Oh. Okay."
"I am risking my job for this," she reminded me. "Least you can do is let me shoulder-surf."
"Oh. Yeah, sure. No problem."
She followed me in.
"Nice apartment," she said.
"Yeah," I said, and then sheepishly "Sometimes it's a little cleaner… "
She laughed.
"Do you want a drink or something?" I asked.
"Let's just get to work."
"Right." I led the way into my study, where my laptop sat on the desk, connected to a cable modem. She sat next to me and I had to remind myself to focus on what I was doing. She was even prettier than I remembered, and she moved with athletic grace, and her jeans and sweater were both tighter than absolutely necessary, and she wore something that smelled like fresh strawberries, and I couldn't help but think that it had been four months, since a drunken encounter with a giggly blonde girl named Amy I had met at a party, since…
"So are we meditating before we begin or what?" she asked.
"Um, yeah. Just planning," I lied, inserting the disk. "I warn you, this could take a while and will probably be very boring."
"That's okay. Just keep me informed about what you're doing. And use English words and no acronyms."
"I see you have dealt with my kind before."
"More than the amount necessary to have a full and happy life."
"Very funny. Well, the first thing I'm doing is checking for the exact time that Mr. BC088269 posted to the Thorn Tree." I went on the Web, logged in to the Thorn Tree, scrolled down to his message. "6:01 on November 4. I'm going to assume that the web servers are using the same time zone as your database server — "
"They are," she said.
"Okay. Next we look at the log files." I opened them up in UltraEdit. Each one consisted of hundreds of thousands of rows of text, each row a long stream of data unintelligible to anyone uninitiated in the secrets of my field:
64.76.56.49, 11/4/00, 0:00:19, ARMSTRONG, 64.211.224.135, 2110,
438, 22573, 200, GET, /dest/
206.47.24.62, 11/4/00, 0:00:19, COOK, 64.211.224.135, 109, 502,
32090, 200, GET, /prop/booklist. html
129.82.46.82, 11/4/00, 0:00:21, MAGELLAN, 64.211.24.142, 78, 477,
11505, 200, GET, /cgi-bin/search
206.47.244.62, 11/4/00, 0:00:23, MAGELLAN, 64.211.224.135, 0, 567,
28072, 304, GET, /dest/europe/UK/London. html
… and so forth and so forth, one for every time anybody looked at a Lonely Planet web page that day.
"And this means something to you?" she asked.
"It does."
"What does it mean?"
"Well… each line represents one request. One page that some user out there wants served to them. And each line tells me the IP number of the user's computer, the date and time, the server computer name, the IP number served, how much time the whole request took, how many characters the user sent, how many characters the server sent, whether it all completed successfully, whether the user was getting or sending information, and the page they wanted."
"Uh-huh. And this is useful?"
"Maybe. First of all let's get all this into Excel. Text is hard to work with." I called up Microsoft Excel and ran its import wizard on the four log files, turning them into malleable spreadsheets, which I cut-and-pasted together into a single file. A very large file.
"You guys are popular," I observed. I sent an impressed look over my shoulder and met those electric blue eyes again.
"A million hits a day," she said proudly.
"Right," I said briskly, making my head swivel back towards the computer. "Yeah. One point two three million on November 4. Good thing I've got a monster machine here or this would take forever. Okay. Yeah. All right, first thing, let's get rid of everything that isn't within a two-minute window when that message appeared." I sorted the entries by date and wiped everything except those between 6:00 and 6:02. This reduced things to a manageable 2200 hits. "Next, let's get rid of everyone looking at your main site instead of the Thorn Tree." I pinged thorntree. lonelyplanet. com, found out that it was 64.211.24.142, and got rid of all requests to different servers.
"That's still two hundred-odd possibilities," she said. "I thought you'd actually be able to look at the messages they posted."
"No such luck. But we're not done yet. Anyone actually posting a message would use an HTTP POST method, not a GET, you use GET if you're just reading." I eliminated all the GETS, and this reduced the spreadsheet to only three rows:
116.64.39.4, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, MAGELLAN, 64.211.24.142, 3140,
9338, 32473, 200, POST, /cgi-bin/post
187.209.251.38, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, COOK, 64.211.24.142, 2596, 1802,
31090, 200, POST, /cgi-bin/post
109.64.109.187, 11/4/00, 0:06:01, HEYERDAHL, 64.211.24.142, 0,
2847, 72, 500, POST, /cgi-bin/post
"Easier than I thought," I said.
"So we've got three possibilities?"
"Actually, no. See that 500 on the last line?" I pointed it out. "This means that there was a server error, so whatever was sent never made up to the Thorn Tree."
"So it's one of the first two."
"Right. But see that 9338 in the first one, and 1802 in the second? That's how many bytes went from the client to the server. That means the first one was a pretty long message. And the message our friend sent was… "
"… pretty damn short."
"Exactly."
"Okay," she said. "So we found the right line. I still don't get what that gives us."
"That gives us the IP number of the computer he used to send it. One-eight-seven two-oh-nine two-five-one thirty-eight."
"And every computer on the Internet has its own number?"
"Well… no." I saved the spreadsheet, just in case, expelled the floppy and handed it back to her, avoiding her eyes. "That was the way it was originally supposed to work. But it's more complicated than that. Basically as a rule of thumb any computer that's permanently on the Net has its own IP number. Unless it's behind a proxy server, or… well, there's a lot of issues. So this still might all be useless. On the other hand it might take us right to him. I can get a look at the router chain we go through to get to that machine from here, that might give us some idea where it is." I opened up a telnet session to my Unix account, typed in traceroute 187.209.251.38 and examined the lines of cryptic gibberish the computer spat out in response.
"Shee-it," I said. "That, I was not expecting."
"What?"
"That message came from Indonesia."
"Really?"
"Looks like it." I pointed at the last few lines of the traceroute response.
17 Gateway-to-hosting. indo. net. id (187.209.251.31) 641.612 ms 587.980 ms 590.526 ms
18 Quick-Serial-b. indo. net. id (187.209.251.2) 869.458 ms 669.086 ms 608.886 ms
19 187.209.251.38 (187.209.251.38) 620.897 ms 643.124 ms 588.700 ms
"See that dot-ID at the end of those last few lines? Each country has its own code. CA for Canada, UK for the United Kingdom, and so forth. ID means Indonesia."
"Indonesia is a big place," she said doubtfully.
"So it is," I said. "Let's see if we can't zoom in a little." I typed in: whois 187.209.251.38 and the computer responded
IP Address: 187.209.251.38
Server Name: WWW.JUARAPARTEMA.COM
Whois Server: whois. domaindiscover. com
"What's that? Whois?" Talena asked.
"Basically it goes out and gets the name that goes with the IP number," I said. "If any."
"Computers have names?"
"Kind of," I said. "Between each other they just use the IP number, but they figured out a long time ago that that would be hard for people to remember, so there's a system called the Domain Name Service that matches names to numbers. So you can just type in lonelyplanet-dot-com instead of sixty-four dot two-eleven and so forth."
"How does that work?" she asked. "Is there a big white pages or something?"
"Pretty much," I said. "It's a complicated descending hierarchy, but basically there's thirteen really big computers that work as the master white pages. What this just told us is that the name we're looking for is juarapertama. com, and that it was registered by a company called domaindiscover. com. Registration's turned into this big complicated mess, but basically if we go there we should be able to find out more… "
I navigated to domaindiscover. com and searched for juarapartema. com: whois: juarapartema. com
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Mak Hwa Sen
Internet World Cafe
Kuta Beach, Bali, DKI 33620, ID
[82] 29 9210421 root@juarapartema. com
"Gotcha," I said. "Kuta Beach, Bali. Now what the hell are you doing there?"
"Let's take a break," she said. "I'll take that drink now."
"Okay," I said. She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and glanced in. "I've got beer and… um… water."
She laughed.
"I just got back from traveling," I said defensively.
"Yes," she said, "and you're a guy."
"I do have some Glenfiddich," I said, remembering that she drank Scotch.
"You do? Then you're playing my song."
I drizzled some nectar of the gods over ice for both of us and we sat down on the couch. I felt surprisingly comfortable next to her. I'd never been able to relax around beautiful women, every moment I spent near them felt like part of a high-stakes job interview, but with Talena I felt perfectly at ease.
"It's a little scary that you can do this," she said. "So everything everyone does on the Web can be tracked down?"
"It depends," I said. "Like, if you're using AOL you're actually probably pretty safe from this stuff, because everyone on AOL looks like they're on the same machine. On the other hand the AOL people know everything you do. Yeah, as a rule, most of the stuff you do can be watched."
"And when they tell you this is a secure connection, they're lying?"
"No, that's completely true, those are probably impossible to break into. But they'll still know what machine you're using to connect."
"Well. Call me freshly paranoid."
"If you really want to there's ways around it though," I said. "If he'd been careful, if he'd gone through Anonymizer or Zero-Knowledge or SafeWeb or something, we'd never be able to reach him."
"What are those?"
"Sites you go through that basically clean up everything you do so you're anonymous."
"But how do you know they're actually doing that?" she asked.
"You don't," I admitted. "I mean you can run tests and so on, but to a certain extent you have to take it on trust. Doesn't really bug me though. I mean, I've got nothing to hide."
"You've got everything to hide," she said, "believe you me."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning… " She visibly decided to avoid the subject and shook her head. "Meaning I don't trust the powers that be to know anything about me they don't have to, is all. So our friend The Bull is in Indonesia. What do you think that means?"
"I think it means he's still on the road," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "And you know what else it probably means?"
"I'm afraid I do."
"Means somebody else is going to wind up with knives in their eyes in a week or two. Unless we do something."
"Do something? Like what do you have in mind?"
"Beats the fuck outta me. That's the problem," she said, and emptied her Scotch. "Have you eaten? I'm starving."
"Me too," I lied.
We went to Crepes On Cole, just a couple blocks from where I lived. By unspoken mutual agreement we didn't talk about The Bull. Instead we talked about everything meaningless that either of us could think of. Favourite obscure movies. Most overrated rock stars. The decline and fall of the Great American Novel. Best long walks through San Francisco. What to do if you're pursued by rabid deer while biking through Marin County. Ten ways to spot a New Yorker on Market Street. Why the best neighbourhoods always have the worst neighbours.
I think we were both surprised by how well we got along — a lot of the laughter was of the "I can't believe you like that too!" variety. She wasn't near as stuck-up and snobbish as I expected. Maybe a little bit, but when you're young and beautiful and you have the world's coolest job in the world's coolest city, a little bit goes with the territory. She lived in Potrero Hill and suffered through an hour-long commute to and from work, torpedoing my initial guesses about her perfect apartment and moneyed family. "LP mostly pays you with fun and prestige," she said at one point. "The dollars are pretty fucking nominal."
The only awkward pause came when I asked her where she was from. She grimaced and said "All over" in a distinct let's-change-the-subject tone. But we somehow got from there to the topic of proposed new Ben amp; Jerry's flavours and the moment was quickly forgotten. When the waitress leaned over and politely told us that they were closing soon, both of us were surprised and glanced at our watches to double-check. Eleven o'clock had snuck up a lot faster than either of us had realized.
We split the check and walked to the corner of Rivoli and Cole, where her bike was parked.
"Well," I said, "I'm glad you came over. That was fun."
She flashed me a million-watt smile that made my spine wobble. "Yeah, it was."
"So… " I said, as always drawing a blank on what I should say or do at this point.
"Yeah. We should talk about the whole… thing. I don't know. I feel like we have to do something, but I don't know what."
"Me too. Me neither."
We looked at each other for a moment longer.
"Well," she said. "I should go. Long bike ride home. Let's sleep on it. I'll call you tomorrow night, okay?"
"Sure thing," I said, and I watched her bike away, reluctantly abandoning all the fantasies in the back of my brain which involved her staying. Well, abandoning them for tonight. I didn't really think we were ever going to happen, but that never stopped a guy from dreaming.
Evans, Jon
Dark Places
Chapter 12 Consolidation And Restructuring
I got to work, logged in, read my email, and realized I had absolutely nothing to do. Suited me fine. I pointed Internet Explorer to www.interpol.com and began to read.
About a half-hour later I had given up my hope in Interpol. They seemed like a fine enough organization, sharing information and police techniques around the world, but they didn't run from country to country chasing international terrorists the way the movies made it seem. More of a bureaucracy than anything else. They specifically said on their site: to report a crime, don't contact us, go to the National Contact Bureau for your country.
What the hell, couldn't hurt. I compiled all the information I already had, except for the bit about the Lonely Planet web logs — didn't want to get Talena in trouble — and sent it the USA's NCB. I figured it would get read once and forwarded to the email equivalent of the Dead Letter Office, or Psycho Conspiracy Theorist Office, but at least I had tried.
Just as I finished Kevin came over to my desk.
"Paul," he said, "can I see you in my office? Something's come up."
"Sure," I said, guessing that the Morgan Stanley contract was finally official. "Should we wait for Rob? I think he's at lunch." He was due to be the lead designer on the project. Actually I hadn't seen him all day, but that was typical, he was an Artiste and played up his impetuosity for all it was worth.
"No," he said, "this doesn't involve Rob."
I went into his office and sat down as he closed the door.
"All right," he said. "Well. Look, Paul, everyone knows you're a brilliant programmer."
"Thanks."
"So brilliant that we've allowed you continue with your rather unorthodox work schedule of, is it four months vacation a year?"
"Four months unpaid leave." Was this one of their biannual attempts to convince me to work all year?
"But as you know the company's been going through difficult times lately. The bottom's really dropped out of the market, and we've been burning money like water."
I was going to bring his attention to the amusing mixed metaphor but decided against it. Instead I switched to rah-rah-rah mode and said "But the Morgan Stanley contract is going to save our bacon, right?"
"Yesterday," Kevin said, "Morgan Stanley assigned the contract to Quidnunc."
"Ah." One of our competitors.
"This has left us in a bind where we simply have too many employees and very few billable projects. As this was not totally unexpected we have assembled a contingency plan which we are now putting in motion. As a result of losing this contract market forces are forcing us to significantly restructure the size of the organization. We predict that this is a temporary expedient, only lasting until this anomalous market downturn is corrected."
I began to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. "Kevin — "
"It's important to realize that our growth paradigm will not in the long run be affected by this and we view it as a hiccup. However in the interim we have been forced to make some very difficult decisions with a view towards consolidating our operations-"
"Kevin, are you laying me off?"
He tried to look me straight in the eye, I'll give him that, but at the last second he failed, and staring at the desk he said "Yes."
"Okay," I said.
"Paul, I'm really sorry, I fought as hard as I could for you, but the top brass — "
"I'm not just saying okay," I interrupted. "I actually mean it. In fact I'm happy to hear it." And I did too. In fact I realized I was smiling. I felt as if a huge weight was ballooning away from my head. Unemployment! I felt like I was being paroled.
"Really?" he asked.
"Absolutely."
"Why?"
"Middle management like you will never understand." I meant it as a tease but I think he took it as an insult. Ah, well, he had after all just fired me, I could live with him thinking I'd taken a shot at him.
"What about Rob?" I asked.
"Him too."
"Severance package?"
"Four weeks pay and one month free COBRA health coverage. Here." He gave me a manila envelope from a frighteningly tall stack on his desk.
"That sounds fair. Am I supposed to sign a contract saying that I won't sue you or something?"
"Jeez. We never thought of that. Do you think you could… " he began.
"Kevin," I said. "I'm not suing you, but I'm not signing anything either. Anything else?"
"What about the Palm Pilot we gave you?"
"I threw it into the San Francisco Bay," I said. It was the truth.
"You — what?"
"Can't stand the things," I explained.
"Oh," he said. "Well. I guess we'll just write that one off. Your laptop's here?"
"It sure is," I said, very glad that all of my important notes and correspondence were backed up on my Yahoo account. "I'll just leave it."
"Okay. Well. Thanks for taking this so well."
"My pleasure. Are you supposed to escort me out of the building now?"
He looked miserable.
"Ah, jeez, you are, too." I shook my head. "Just watch your own back. I've heard that in some places the last guy to get the axe on a day like this is the guy who just fired everyone else. Spares the place a lot of bad blood, or something."
This was a total lie but it was worth it for the frightened expression that crawled over his face. I followed him out of the building feeling a little guilty about it. But only a little.
I walked out of the office, crossed Mission Street, took the little pathway that led to Market Street, intending to go down to the Muni station and go home. Just at the corner of Market and Montgomery I stopped dead in my tracks so abruptly that an Asian woman nearly collided with me. I barely noticed her furious look.
I stood there for what felt like a long time. I think maybe it really was a long time. Maybe half an hour. People gave me strange looks. Probably because I was dressed normally. Part of San Francisco's charm; if I had covered myself in silver paint or mummified myself in leather strips nobody would have paid me the least bit of attention, but a tranced-out yuppie like myself, that was man bites dog.
I guess I flipped out a little just then. It was a whole bunch of things. Partly it was being newly unemployed. It's something that rattles you, a lot, even if you have money in the bank, even if you know you can get a new job in a matter of days, even if you're actually happy about it. And I was happy about it. I was happier than I had been for months, but I didn't understand why. That rattled me too.
I had never been so free, not in my whole life. It was terrifying.
I don't know why, but I felt like there were an infinite number of roads leading from the corner of Market and Montgomery, and the one that I chose would define my entire life. That half hour felt pregnant with… whatever you want to call it. Doom. Fate. Destiny.
I could get another job. I could stay here. I liked Talena, and Talena liked me, and she hadn't said anything about a boyfriend. I thought there might be possibilities there. I could stay and try to teach myself how to be happy. It couldn't be that hard, could it? Lots of people seemed to manage it.
I could move to London. Move to my tribe, or at least find out once and for all whether they were in fact my tribe. Maybe a change of scenery was just what I needed. Maybe my problem was that I was never meant to live in America, and I could never be happy here.
I could go home to Canada. I could work for a year as a volunteer teacher in some godforsaken village in Chad or Suriname or Bangladesh. I could move down to L.A. and start writing screenplays. I could move to Zimbabwe and join my cousins on their farm. I could go to the South Bronx and begin a romantic Dostoevskyesque death spiral of drugs and violence and empty sex with crack whores. I could become an Antarctic explorer, or a professional scuba diver, or a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. I could enter the Shaolin Temple and become the baddest motherfucker in the whole wide world.
The man who killed Stanley Goebel was in Kuta Beach, Bali. He might be the same man who killed Laura.
I reflexively told myself to stop thinking about Laura. I had done enough thinking about Laura. I had done more deep wrenching thinking about Laura than I ever would have if she had not been murdered and we had gotten married and spent the rest of our lives together. I had to get on with my life. She was dead. A man had killed her. For a long time I had nursed a suspicion that her killer was someone I knew, someone on the truck. But I could let that suspicion go now. I was free of it at last. One thing this whole Stanley Goebel thing had made clear was that there was no way that someone on the truck could be The Bull. And that meant that Laura's murder had been nothing but a random act of senseless violence. It proved that her killer was John Doe, faceless, anonymous, unknown.
Wait.
Did it?
Or was there another possibility?
I turned away from the Muni station and walked back along Market Street. I entered the American Express travel office at the next corner.
"Hello," I said to the lady behind the desk. "I want to go to Bali."
"And when would you like to go?" she asked.
"Today," I said, living out a fantasy I had long had, and despite the emotions flickering and straining within me, a toxic maelstrom of suspicion and anger and confusion and loss and the need to do anything rather than nothing, I managed to enjoy the look of surprise on her face.
It all worked a charm. There was a flight from Los Angeles to Denpasar that left at 10PM. Shuttle flights went from SFO to LAX every half hour. It wasn't even that expensive, two thousand dollars return, not so bad for a last-minute ticket across the Pacific. I could afford it. I scheduled the return flight for three weeks later.
I went home. I packed. I called SuperShuttle. I wanted to check the Thorn Tree, but my laptop had been repossessed, so I went to the nearest copy center and checked from there. And indeed:
BC088269 11/07 08:02
As a matter of fact I am pretty smart, Mr. Wood. A lot smarter than you're going to look when I'm through with you.
I felt triumphant. I'd lured him into a conversation. I wrote back:
PaulWood 11/07 16:51
Spare us, OK? I'm talking about real murders here. I don't have time for a juvenile full-of-shit wannabe like you. You say you're the Bull? Then tell me this, what colour jacket were you wearing up on the trail? You know when I'm talking about. Or you would if you were for real.
Then I went back home and called Talena at work. She'd just left. I called her at home. She wasn't there yet. I left her a message telling her to call me right away. I waited in the study, for her phone call or the SuperShuttle van, whichever got there first.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
"I called my friend in Cape Town," she said. "The South Africans were the same as the others. Swiss Army knives in their eyes. He's reopening the case and he's going to talk to your friend Gavin and call Interpol."
"Great," I said. "I'm going to Indonesia."
"You're what?"
"I'm going to Indonesia."
"When?"
"Tonight," I said.
"Tonight? Are you crazy?"
"Maybe."
"What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you idiot?"
"Hey," I said, more than a little hurt. I was doing this, I suddenly realized, in part to impress Talena. "I got laid off today, I got nothing better to do, I'm going to go down there."
"And do what?"
"Find him," I said shortly.
"Yeah? Suppose you do. And then what?"
"And then I'll know who he is."
"No, you dumb shit, and then you'll be dead, because in case you've forgotten, you're a computer programmer, and you're chasing a fucking serial killer, and he already knows who you are, and he's going to fucking murder you if you find him. You're being the worst kind of macho moron. Cancel the tickets and stay here."
I chose to ignore her advice. "Listen," I said, "he sent another message today."
"I know. I saw."
"Could you try to check to see if it came from the same place? If you remember anything about what I did?"
"I remember fine, I already checked, it came from the same place," she said. "Now tell me you're going to cancel the tickets."
"I'm just going to go there and see what I can find out," I said.
"Balthazar," she said quietly. "You stupid shit. You think I want to find you with knives in your eyes?"
"Call me Paul."
"All right, Paul. Tell me this. Suppose you do find him. Then what exactly are you going to do?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You think you're going to kill him because he killed your friend?"
"I don't know," I repeated.
"Because I'm telling you now, you're not the type."
"How do you know what the type is?"
"I've seen a lot more murder victims than you ever have, you… Look." She abruptly switched from angry hectoring to pleading. "I grew up in Bosnia. I was there for the war. I've met enough nice guys who wound up dead for one lifetime. Take it from me, you're no killer. And I know you're a guy and that sounds like an insult, but it's not, I like you for it. And believe me, please believe me, chasing him down to Indonesia is the worst and stupidest thing you can do right now."
"I gotta go," I said. "SuperShuttle is here."
"No, Paul, don't be a total fucking — "
"Wish me luck," I said. "I'll be in touch."