"Yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put my socks and shoes on, she muttered, "They'll say, that Angela, she was such a good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the back yard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet."
I laughed. "You don't know how easy you have it. There isno waymy folks would leave us alone in my bedroom until 11 o'clock."
"11:45," she said, checking her clock.
"Crap!" I yelped and tied my shoes.
"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road! Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not out of here by the count of ten, there's going to betrouble, mister. One. Two. Three."
I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down the stairs, my Xbox under my arm.
Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We'd only met a couple times. She looked like an older, taller version of Ange -- Ange said her father was the short one -- with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me as a good guy, and I appreciated it.
"Good night, Mrs Carvelli," I said.
"Good night, Mr Yallow," she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since I'd called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met.
I found myself standing awkwardly by the door.
"Yes?" she said.
"Um," I said. "Thanks for having me over."
"You're always welcome in our home, young man," she said.
"And thanks for Ange," I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. But she smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug.
"You're very welcome," she said.
The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press-conference, thought about Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thought about her mother smiling and showing me the door.
My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and I gave her the response I'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in theBay Guardian.
As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud of it. It had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on my lips.
#
I should have known better.
XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANE
DHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN
XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO
Those were thegoodheadlines. Everyone sent me the articles to blog, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.
I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our "criminal treason." Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found, was:
"They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's call these spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on the home front. When -- not if, but when -- California gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud."
Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit them.
The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they would double the security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid cloner they'd found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car-theft, and warned everyone to be on their alert for young people behaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight.
They weren't kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on a paper about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-war movement and the hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys who founded Ben and Jerry's -- old hippies themselves -- had founded a hippie museum in the Haight, and there were other archives and exhibits to see around town.
But it wasn't easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was getting frisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and questioned me about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from Chavez saying that I was suspended.
I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren't so lucky. Every night the DHS announced more arrests, "ringleaders" and "operatives" of Xnet, people I didn't know and had never heard of, paraded on TV along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that had been in their pockets. They announced that the people were "naming names," compromising the "Xnet network" and that more arrests were expected soon. The name "M1k3y" was often heard.
Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking away, quietly freaking out. "You should see the stuff they're going to use on these kids," Dad said. "I've seen it in action. They'll get a couple of these kids and check out their friends lists on IM and the speed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over, look for patterns, bringing in more kids. They're going to unravel them like an old sweater."
I canceled Ange's dinner at our place and started spending even more time there. Ange's little sister Tina started to call me "the house-guest," as in "is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" I liked Tina. All she cared about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but she was funny and utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing the dishes, she dried her hands and said, conversationally, "You know, you seem like a nice guy, Marcus. My sister's just crazy about you and I like you too. But I have to tell you something: if you break her heart, I will track you down and pull your scrotum over your head. It's not a pretty sight."
I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my head than break Ange's heart and she nodded. "So long as we're clear on that."
"Your sister is a nut," I said as we lay on Ange's bed again, looking at Xnet blogs. That is pretty much all we did: fool around and read Xnet.
"Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. She just loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. It's nothing personal."
I kissed her. We read some more.
"Listen to this," she said. "Police project four to sixhundredarrests this weekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnet dissidents to date."
I felt like throwing up.
"We've got to stop this," I said. "You know there are people who are doingmorejamming to show that they're not intimidated? Isn't that justcrazy?"
"I think it's brave," she said. "We can't let them scare us into submission."
"What? No, Ange, no. We can't let hundreds of people go tojail. You haven't been there. I have. It's worse than you think. It's worse than you can imagine."
"I have a pretty fertile imagination," she said.
"Stop it, OK? Be serious for a second. I won't do this. I won't send those people to jail. If I do, I'm the guy that Van thinks I am."
"Marcus, I'm being serious. You think that these people don't know they could go to jail? They believe in the cause. You believe in it too. Give them the credit to know what they're getting into. It's not up to you to decide what risks they can or can't take."
"It's my responsibility because if I tell them to stop, they'll stop."
"I thought you weren't the leader?"
"I'm not, of course I'm not. But I can't help it if they look to me for guidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help them stay safe. You see that, right?"
"All I see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. I think you're afraid they're going to figure out whoyouare. I think you're afraid foryou."
"That's not fair," I said, sitting up, pulling away from her.
"Really? Who's the guy who nearly had a heart attack when he thought that his secret identity was out?"
"That was different," I said. "This isn't about me. You know it isn't. Why are you being like this?"
"Why areyoulike this?" she said. "Why aren'tyouwilling to be the guy who was brave enough to get all this started?"
"This isn't brave, it's suicide."
"Cheap teenage melodrama, M1k3y."
"Don't call me that!"
"What, 'M1k3y'? Why not,M1k3y?"
I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I walked home.
#
> Why I'm not jamming
> I won't tell anyone else what to do, because I'm not anyone's leader, no matter what Fox News thinks.
> But I am going to tell you whatIplan on doing. If you think that's the right thing to do, maybe you'll do it too.
> I'm not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It's not because I'm scared. It's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm better free than in prison. They figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come up with a new tactic. I don't care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It'sstupidto get arrested. It's only jamming if you get away with it.
> There's another reason not to jam. If you get caught, they might use you to catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. They might bust your friends even if they're not on Xnet, because the DHS is like a maddened bull and they don't exactly worry if they've got the right guy.
> I'm not telling you what to do.
> But the DHS is dumb and we're smart. Jamming proves that they can't fight terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch of kids. If you get caught, it makes them look like they're smarter than us.
> THEY AREN'T SMARTER THAN US! We are smarter than them. Let's be smart. Let's figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goons they put on the streets of our city.
I posted it. I went to bed.
I missed Ange.
#
Ange and I didn't speak for the next four days, including the weekend, and then it was time to go back to school. I'd almost called her a million times, written a thousand unsent emails and IMs.
Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs Andersen greeted me with voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday" had been. I sat down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charles snicker.
She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americans were destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how she made it seem) and seemed to be trying to provoke me into saying something so she could throw me out.
I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and the people who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missed Ange.
I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on me. I don't think I said eight words.
Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid Mission and my pointless house.
I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was a young homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore a long, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers that looked like they'd been through a wood-chipper. His long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater.
I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he'd crashed into me while hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in magic-marker.
He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had hit his head.
"Sorry buddy," he said. "Didn't see you. You hurt?"
I sat up too. Nothing felt hurt.
"Um. No, it's OK."
He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and his grip was strong and firm.
"I'm really sorry." His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expected him to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk.
"It's no problem," I said.
He stuck out his hand again.
"Zeb," he said.
"Marcus," I said.
"A pleasure, Marcus," he said. "Hope to run into you again sometime!"
Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away.
#
I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at the kitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, before everything changed.
I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning before school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport.
I had three thousand projects I'd been in the middle of when it had all started. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I'd been playing with aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. I had a vacuum tube amp I'd been building into an ancient, rusted, dented olive-oil tin that looked like an archaeological find -- once it was done, I'd planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish cans.
I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera. Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed.
I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box I used for all the crap I load into my pockets and around my neck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder, change, batteries, retractable cables... I dumped it all out into the box, and found myself holding something I didn't remember putting in there in the first place.
It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It was covered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting I'd ever seen. I unfolded it and held it up. The writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side.
The signature read, simply: ZEB.
I picked it up and started to read.
> Dear Marcus
> You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave. Good on you.
> I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to let go.
> So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day. You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code (I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime).
> At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop them asking.
> Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things you learned.
> Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know? What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been in trouble at school? With the law?
> We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got out and I don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on the mainland.
> I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong hands. Maybe others will take my route.
> Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like last year. One way or another, I'm leaving this country. Screw America.
> Stay strong. They're scared of you. Kick them for me. Don't get caught.
> Zeb
There were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposable lighter somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires, and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed it to Zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might lead them back to him, wherever he was going.
I held the flame and the note, but I couldn't do it.
Darryl.
With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I'd almost forgotten he existed. He'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd moved away or gone on an exchange program. All that time, they'd been questioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jammers. He'd been on Treasure Island, the abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the Bay Bridge. He'd been so close I could have swam to him.
I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, I was weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas.
"Marcus?"
My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with a worried look. How long had she been there?
I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. "Mom," I said. "Hi."
She came into my room and hugged me. "What is it? Do you need to talk?"
The note lay on the table.
"Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?"
She'd given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Ange and she'd leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just that, and then this came out:
"I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time."
The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.
Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.
I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.
Everything.
Well, most of it.
Chapter 16
This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith, ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when I lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- I have two from my own appearances there.
Booksmith: 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 863 8688
At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.
"Why --?"
In that single syllable, every recrimination I'd dealt myself in the night, every moment that I'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.
I sucked in a breath.
"They told me I'd go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days. Forever. I was -- I was scared."
Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, "What about Darryl's father?"
She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl's father. He must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead.
And wasn't he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months, would they ever let you go?
But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could help get Darryl out.
"I haven't told him," I said.
Now Mom was crying. She didn't cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear.
"You will tell him," she managed. "You will."
"I will."
"But first we have to tell your father."
#
Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting clients -- who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining startups on the peninsula -- and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6PM and midnight.
Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming homeright now. He said something and she just repeated it:right now.
When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note between us on the coffee table.
It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I didn't embellish, I didn't hide anything. I came clean.
I'd heard of coming clean before but I'd never understood what it meant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was.
Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully.
He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door.
"Where are you going?" Mom asked, alarmed.
"I need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking.
We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'd been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He'd come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy.
Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him.
Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken San Francisco's children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I'd been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from San Francisco?
When Dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life.
"You should have told me!" he roared.
Mom interposed herself between him and me. "You're blaming the wrong person," she said. "It wasn't Marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation."
He shook his head and stamped. "I'm not blaming Marcus. I knowexactlywho's to blame. Me. Me and the stupid DHS. Get your shoes on, grab your coats."
"Where are we going?"
"To see Darryl's father. Then we're going to Barbara Stratford's place."
#
I knew the name Barbara Stratford from somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but I couldn't exactly place her.
Meantime, I was headed for Darryl's father's place. I'd never really felt comfortable around the old man, who'd been a Navy radio operator and ran his household like a tight ship. He'd taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid, which I'd always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could trust Zeb's letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl's father had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove Darryl up the wall.
Darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back to her family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten -- Darryl spent his summers and Christmases there.
I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad's head as he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he ground his jaws.
Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. If only I could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the day was done.
"He must have buried his son in his mind," Dad said, as we whipped up through the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. Each time we swung around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist.
"Is this the one?"
"Yes," I said. "This is it." I hadn't been to Darryl's in months, but I'd spent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off.
The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me.
I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it again. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened.
"Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. He'd gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. His thin hair was wispy and disordered.
"Mr Glover," I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me.
"Hello, Ron," my mother said.
"Ron," my father said.
"You too? What's going on?"
"Can we come in?"
#
His living room looked like one of those news-segments they show about abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like a bus-station toilet.
The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look.
We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every other emotion. Darryl's father looked like he wanted to die.
Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor.
We sat gingerly in the places he'd cleared, and then he came back and sat down too.
"I'm sorry," he said vaguely. "I don't really have any coffee to offer you. I'm having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I'm running low --"
"Ron," my father said. "Listen to us. We have something to tell you, and it's not going to be easy to hear."
He sat like a statue as I talked. He glanced down at the note, read it without seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it back to me.
He was trembling.
"He's --"
"Darryl is alive," I said. "Darryl is alive and being held prisoner on Treasure Island."
He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound.
"We have a friend," my father said. "She writes for theBay Guardian. An investigative reporter."
That's where I knew the name from. The free weeklyGuardianoften lost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with her when I was a kid.
"We're going there now," my mother said. "Will you come with us, Ron? Will you tell her Darryl's story?"
He put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. Dad tried to put his hand on his shoulders, but Mr Glover shook it off violently.
"I need to clean myself up," he said. "Give me a minute."
Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He'd shaved and gelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of gestured at it.
"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. And this seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures."
He and Dad rode up front and I got in the back, behind him. Up close, he smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores.
#
It was midnight by the time we rolled into Barbara Stratford's driveway. She lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we sped down the 101, none of us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us.
This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the suburban America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical houses, towns where there weren't any homeless people pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk -- there weren't even sidewalks!
Mom had phoned Barbara Stratford while we were waiting for Mr Glover to come downstairs. The journalist had been sleeping, but Mom had been so wound up she forgot to be all British and embarrassed about waking her up. Instead, she just told her, tensely, that she had something to talk about and that it had to be in person.
When we rolled up to Barbara Stratford's house, my first thought was of the Brady Bunch place -- a low ranch house with a brick baffle in front of it and a neat, perfectly square lawn. There was a kind of abstract tile pattern on the baffle, and an old-fashioned UHF TV antenna rising from behind it. We wandered around to the entrance and saw that there were lights on inside already.
The writer opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. She was about my parents' age, a tall thin woman with a hawk-like nose and shrewd eyes with a lot of laugh-lines. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were hip enough to be seen at one of the boutiques on Valencia Street, and a loose Indian cotton blouse that hung down to her thighs. She had small round glasses that flashed in her hallway light.
She smiled a tight little smile at us.
"You brought the whole clan, I see," she said.
Mom nodded. "You'll understand why in a minute," she said. Mr Glover stepped from behind Dad.
"And you called in the Navy?"
"All in good time."
We were introduced one at a time to her. She had a firm handshake and long fingers.
Her place was furnished in Japanese minimalist style, just a few precisely proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboo that brushed the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of a diesel engine perched on top of a polished marble plinth. I decided I liked it. The floors were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, so you could see cracks and pits underneath the varnish. Ireallyliked that, especially as I walked over it in my stocking feet.
"I have coffee on," she said. "Who wants some?"
We all put up our hands. I glared defiantly at my parents.
"Right," she said.
She disappeared into another room and came back a moment later bearing a rough bamboo tray with a half-gallon thermos jug and six cups of precise design but with rough, sloppy decorations. I liked those too.
"Now," she said, once she'd poured and served. "It's very good to see you all again. Marcus, I think the last time I saw you, you were maybe seven years old. As I recall, you were very excited about your new video games, which you showed me."
I didn't remember it at all, but that sounded like what I'd been into at seven. I guessed it was my Sega Dreamcast.
She produced a tape-recorder and a yellow pad and a pen, and twirled the pen. "I'm here to listen to whatever you tell me, and I can promise you that I'll take it all in confidence. But I can't promise that I'll do anything with it, or that it's going to get published." The way she said it made me realize that my Mom had called in a pretty big favor getting this lady out of bed, friend or no friend. It must be kind of a pain in the ass to be a big-shot investigative reporter. There were probably a million people who would have liked her to take up their cause.
Mom nodded at me. Even though I'd told the story three times that night, I found myself tongue-tied. This was different from telling my parents. Different from telling Darryl's father. This -- this would start a new move in the game.
I started slowly, and watched Barbara take notes. I drank a whole cup of coffee just explaining what ARGing was and how I got out of school to play. Mom and Dad and Mr Glover all listened intently to this part. I poured myself another cup and drank it on the way to explaining how we were taken in. By the time I'd run through the whole story, I'd drained the pot and I needed a piss like a race-horse.
Her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, organic soap that smelled like clean mud. I came back in and found the adults quietly watching me.
Mr Glover told his story next. He didn't have anything to say about what had happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that his son was a good kid. He talked about what it felt like to believe that his son had died, about how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she found out and ended up in a hospital. He cried a little, unashamed, the tears streaming down his lined face and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform.
When it was all done, Barbara went into a different room and came back with a bottle of Irish whiskey. "It's a Bushmills 15 year old rum-cask aged blend," she said, setting down four small cups. None for me. "It hasn't been sold in ten years. I think this is probably an appropriate time to break it out."
She poured them each a small glass of the liquor, then raised hers and sipped at it, draining half the glass. The rest of the adults followed suit. They drank again, and finished the glasses. She poured them new shots.
"All right," she said. "Here's what I can tell you right now. I believe you. Not just because I know you, Lillian. The story sounds right, and it ties in with other rumors I've heard. But I'm not going to be able to just take your word for it. I'm going to have to investigate every aspect of this, and every element of your lives and stories. I need to know if there's anything you're not telling me, anything that could be used to discredit you after this comes to light. I need everything. It could take weeks before I'm ready to publish.
"You also need to think about your safety and this Darryl's safety. If he's really an 'un-person' then bringing pressure to bear on the DHS could cause them to move him somewhere much further away. Think Syria. They could also do something much worse." She let that hang in the air. I knew she meant that they might kill him.
"I'm going to take this letter and scan it now. I want pictures of the two of you, now and later -- we can send out a photographer, but I want to document this as thoroughly as I can tonight, too."
I went with her into her office to do the scan. I'd expected a stylish, low-powered computer that fit in with her decor, but instead, her spare-bedroom/office was crammed with top-of-the-line PCs, big flat-panel monitors, and a scanner big enough to lay a whole sheet of newsprint on. She was fast with it all, too. I noted with some approval that she was running ParanoidLinux. This lady took her job seriously.
The computers' fans set up an effective white-noise shield, but even so, I closed the door and moved in close to her.
"Um, Barbara?"
"Yes?"
"About what you said, about what might be used to discredit me?"
"Yes?"
"What I tell you, you can't be forced to tell anyone else, right?"
"In theory. Let me put it this way. I've gone to jail twice rather than rat out a source."
"OK, OK. Good. Wow. Jail. Wow. OK." I took a deep breath. "You've heard of Xnet? Of M1k3y?"
"Yes?"
"I'm M1k3y."
"Oh," she said. She worked the scanner and flipped the note over to get the reverse. She was scanning at some unbelievable resolution, 10,000 dots per inch or higher, and on-screen it was like the output of an electron-tunneling microscope.
"Well, that does put a different complexion on this."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess it does."
"Your parents don't know."
"Nope. And I don't know if I want them to."
"That's something you're going to have to work out. I need to think about this. Can you come by my office? I'd like to talk to you about what this means, exactly."
"Do you have an Xbox Universal? I could bring over an installer."
"Yes, I'm sure that can be arranged. When you come by, tell the receptionist that you're Mr Brown, to see me. They know what that means. No note will be taken of you coming, and all the security camera footage for the day will be automatically scrubbed and the cameras deactivated until you leave."
"Wow," I said. "You think like I do."
She smiled and socked me in the shoulder. "Kiddo, I've been at this game for a hell of a long time. So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend."
#
I was like a zombie the next day in school. I'd totaled about three hours of sleep, and even three cups of the Turk's caffeine mud failed to jump-start my brain. The problem with caffeine is that it's too easy to get acclimated to it, so you have to take higher and higher doses just to get above normal.
I'd spent the night thinking over what I had to do. It was like running though a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, every one leading to the same dead end. When I went to Barbara, it would be over for me. That was the outcome, no matter how I thought about it.
By the time the school day was over, all I wanted was to go home and crawl into bed. But I had an appointment at theBay Guardian, down on the waterfront. I kept my eyes on my feet as I wobbled out the gate, and as I turned into 24th Street, another pair of feet fell into step with me. I recognized the shoes and stopped.
"Ange?"
She looked like I felt. Sleep-deprived and raccoon-eyed, with sad brackets in the corners of her mouth.
"Hi there," she said. "Surprise. I gave myself French Leave from school. I couldn't concentrate anyway."
"Um," I said.
"Shut up and give me a hug, you idiot."
I did. It felt good. Better than good. It felt like I'd amputated part of myself and it had been reattached.
"I love you, Marcus Yallow."
"I love you, Angela Carvelli."
"OK," she said breaking it off. "I liked your post about why you're not jamming. I can respect it. What have you done about finding a way to jam them without getting caught?"
"I'm on my way to meet an investigative journalist who's going to publish a story about how I got sent to jail, how I started Xnet, and how Darryl is being illegally held by the DHS at a secret prison on Treasure Island."
"Oh." She looked around for a moment. "Couldn't you think of anything, you know, ambitious?"
"Want to come?"
"I am coming, yes. And I would like you to explain this in detail if you don't mind."
After all the re-tellings, this one, told as we walked to Potrero Avenue and down to 15th Street, was the easiest. She held my hand and squeezed it often.
We took the stairs up to theBay Guardian's offices two at a time. My heart was pounding. I got to the reception desk and told the bored girl behind it, "I'm here to see Barbara Stratford. My name is Mr Green."
"I think you mean Mr Brown?"
"Yeah," I said, and blushed. "Mr Brown."
She did something at her computer, then said, "Have a seat. Barbara will be out in a minute. Can I get you anything?"
"Coffee," we both said in unison. Another reason to love Ange: we were addicted to the same drug.
The receptionist -- a pretty latina woman only a few years older than us, dressed in Gap styles so old they were actually kind of hipster-retro -- nodded and stepped out and came back with a couple of cups bearing the newspaper's masthead.
We sipped in silence, watching visitors and reporters come and go. Finally, Barbara came to get us. She was wearing practically the same thing as the night before. It suited her. She quirked an eyebrow at me when she saw that I'd brought a date.
"Hello," I said. "Um, this is --"
"Ms Brown," Ange said, extending a hand. Oh, yeah, right, our identities were supposed to be a secret. "I work with Mr Green." She elbowed me lightly.
"Let's go then," Barbara said, and led us back to a board-room with long glass walls with their blinds drawn shut. She set down a tray of Whole Foods organic Oreo clones, a digital recorder, and another yellow pad.
"Do you want to record this too?" she asked.
Hadn't actually thought of that. I could see why it would be useful if I wanted to dispute what Barbara printed, though. Still, if I couldn't trust her to do right by me, I was doomed anyway.
"No, that's OK," I said.
"Right, let's go. Young lady, my name is Barbara Stratford and I'm an investigative reporter. I gather you know why I'm here, and I'm curious to know why you're here."
"I work with Marcus on the Xnet," she said. "Do you need to know my name?"
"Not right now, I don't," Barbara said. "You can be anonymous if you'd like. Marcus, I asked you to tell me this story because I need to know how it plays with the story you told me about your friend Darryl and the note you showed me. I can see how it would be a good adjunct; I could pitch this as the origin of the Xnet. 'They made an enemy they'll never forget,' that sort of thing. But to be honest, I'd rather not have to tell that story if I don't have to.
"I'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our doorstep, without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are the sort of people likely to walk out the doors and establish an underground movement bent on destabilizing the federal government. I'm sure you can understand that."
I did. If the Xnet was part of the story, some people would say, see, they need to put guys like that in jail or they'll start a riot.
"This is your show," I said. "I think you need to tell the world about Darryl. When you do that, it's going to tell the DHS that I've gone public and they're going to go after me. Maybe they'll figure out then that I'm involved with the Xnet. Maybe they'll connect me to M1k3y. I guess what I'm saying is, once you publish about Darryl, it's all over for me no matter what. I've made my peace with that."
"As good be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," she said. "Right. Well, that's settled. I want the two of you to tell me everything you can about the founding and operation of the Xnet, and then I want a demonstration. What do you use it for? Who else uses it? How did it spread? Who wrote the software? Everything."
"This'll take a while," Ange said.
"I've got a while," Barbara said. She drank some coffee and ate a fake Oreo. "This could be the most important story of the War on Terror. This could be the story that topples the government. When you have a story like this, you take it very carefully."
Chapter 17
This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK bookselling chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff.
Waterstones
So we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how to use technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure out how the technology around them can be used to make their lives better. Ange was great too -- we made an excellent team. We'd trade off explaining how it all worked. Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to begin with, of course.
It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the early nineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knew about that period, but Barbara explained it in a way that made me get goose-pimples.
It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegalmathin this country.
The National Security Agency were the real movers behind the ban. They had a crypto standard that they said was strong enough for bankers and their customers to use, but not so strong that the mafia would be able to keep its books secret from them. The standard, DES-56, was said to be practically unbreakable. Then one of EFF's millionaire co-founders built a $250,000 DES-56 cracker that could break the cipher in two hours.
Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizens from possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its death-blow. In 1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad student called Dan Bernstein in court. Bernstein had written a crypto tutorial that contained computer code that could be used to make a cipher stronger than DES-56. Millions of times stronger. As far as the NSA was concerned, that made his article into a weapon, and therefore unpublishable.
Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what it means, but it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't real enthusiastic about telling grad students what kind of articles they're allowed to write. The crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guys when the 9th Circuit Appellate Division Court ruled that code was a form of expression protected under the First Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." If you've ever bought something on the Internet, or sent a secret message, or checked your bank-balance, you used crypto that EFF legalized. Good thing, too: the NSA just isn't that smart. Anything they know how to crack, you can be sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too.
Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputation from covering the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of the civil rights movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the similarity between the fight for the Constitution in the real world and the fight in cyberspace.
So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my parents, but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about our cryptographic protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuff I didn't know the answer to -- sometimes pointing out potential breaks in our procedure.
We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFi nodes visible from the board room and I told it to change between them at random intervals. She got this too -- once you were actually plugged into the Xnet, it was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff was a little slower, and it was all anonymous and unsniffable.
"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and I had a terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezing my hand under the table in a way that made me want to break away and find somewhere private to finish making up for our first fight.
"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the things you've told me and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll let you see what I'm going to publish and I'll let you know when it's going to go live. I'd prefer that younottalk about this with anyone else now, because I want the scoop and because I want to make sure that I get the story before it goes all muddy from press speculation and DHS spin.
"Iwillhave to call the DHS for comment before I go to press, but I'll do that in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. I'll also be sure to let you know before that happens.
"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It's mine. You were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay the gift, but you don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or to stop me. This is now in motion and it won't stop. Do you understand that?"
I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was obvious. It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall the rocket. It was going to fall where it was aimed, or it would go off course, but it was in the air and couldn't be changed now. Sometime in the near future, I would stop being Marcus -- I would be a public figure. I'd be the guy who blew the whistle on the DHS.
I'd be a dead man walking.
I guess Ange was thinking along the same lines, because she'd gone a color between white and green.
"Let's get out of here," she said.
#
Ange's mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decide where we were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but my parents had known that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't give me any grief if I came home late.
When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about was Ange, Ange, Ange. Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry with me. Ange never going to talk to me again. Ange never going to kiss me again.
She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, like you'd hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd thirst for a glass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight.
Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before. I wanted to eat her whole, devour her.
Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let her set and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to havehergrabmeand take off my shirt, drag my face to hers.
But tonight I couldn't hold back. I wouldn't hold back.
The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came loose.
Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears.
I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than anything I'd ever felt before.
She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled back and I opened the box.
#
I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day I'd imagined it. Some days, I'd thought of practically nothing else.
It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye.
Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed between us.
It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can.
When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.
"Thanks," I said.
She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.
I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good man, Marcus Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you."
I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted. She wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling.
She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. I picked it up and plugged it in and logged in.
Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I read streamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox was repeatedly "joe-jobbed" -- used as the return address for spams sent to hundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces and angry messages came back to me. I didn't know who was behind it. Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm my mailbox. Maybe it was just people pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so I wasn't likely to be drowned any time soon.
I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mailbox for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that was likely to be Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't figured out that using public keys would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this worked well.
There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of trust. I skimmed them -- links to videos and pics of new abuses from the DHS, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'd blogged. The usual.
Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. That meant that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who had written it. It said it came from Masha, which could either be a handle or a name -- I couldn't tell which.
> M1k3y
> You don't know me, but I know you.
> I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. They decided I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down the terrorists who'd killed my neighbors.
> It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my actual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city being turned into a police state.