Jericho Iteration

10

(Thursday, 10:52 P.M.)

As soon as I crawled through my apartment window, I switched on my computer and booted up the mini-disk I had taken from John’s PT, and the first thing I did was make a backup copy.

Call it paranoia, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the cops discovered that the evidence bag had been unsealed; even though I had fooled Farrentino once, I wasn’t going to count on his remaining stupid. The police could be here by morning with a search warrant. When the copy was made, I slipped it into a plastic case and took it into the bathroom, where I hid it beneath the toilet tank with a strip of electrical tape.

Back at my desk again, I rebooted the original disk and copied it onto the hard drive; once it was loaded into my system, I tried to punch up the root directory, only to find that I needed a password to get in. No problem there; not long ago, shortly after I had gone to work at the Big Muddy, John and I had agreed to share our passwords with each other, in case I ever needed to hack into his PT or vice versa. Being a faithful University of Missouri alumnus, his password was “Mizzou”; mine was “chickenlegs,” for no other reason than I happened to be dining upon an Extra Crispy Recipe snack box from the Colonel at the time. I typed in “Mizzou,” the system cleared me through, and I got my first peek at whatever had been contained in Dingbat’s memory.

I let out a low whistle as the screen was immediately filled by a directory as long as a small-town phone book. A bar at the top of the screen told me that almost 100 megabytes of information had been copied into my system, leaving less than 50 kilobytes free on the disk. As I ran the cursor down the screen, a seemingly endless list of filenames scrolled upward, many of them suffixed as BAT or EXEC commands, none of them immediately recognizable.

An extremely complex program of some sort had been loaded into Dingbat’s floptical drive shortly before John’s death. Tiernan had no business carrying around something like this unless Beryl Hinckley had downloaded it into his PT during their encounter at the bar … but exactly what it was, I hadn’t the foggiest idea. Cyberpunk, I am not; my hacking skills were only those of the average computer-literate college grad, and I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to understand a program of this complexity.

One thing for damn sure: my best friend had been shot through the head with a laser beam shortly after receiving this program. And despite what Farrentino had said about his murder resembling the “Dark Jedi” killings, I had the gut feeling that John’s death had not been a random shooting.

What if John had been assassinated?

And, to take this supposition one step further: what if John had been assassinated because of the contents of this very disk?

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. Don’t get panicky. I leaned forward again and began to run further down the directory, trying to find something that looked like a main menu or even a README file. I was like a blind man thrown into a large and unfamiliar room, but if I could just get hold of something I could use as a white cane, I might be able to …

The phone buzzed.

The answering machine was switched on, but without thinking I snatched the receiver off the cradle and lifted it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

No voice from the other end of the line; the phonescreen remained blank. Figuring it for a wrong-number call, I was about to hang up when I heard, as if in the background, a brief, swift sequence of electronic snaps, chirps, and beeps.

“Hello?” I repeated. “Who’s there?”

As soon as I spoke again, the electronic noise ceased. There was a moment of silence, and I had almost hung up when I suddenly heard a toneless voice speak from the other end:

“Hello … hello … who’s there … hello …”

“Who is this?” I said, losing patience.

The screen flickered, then random fractals appeared, casting undulating images like electronic finger paintings. A couple more chirps and beeps, then there came a sound like an audiotape being replayed at high speed-high-pitched voices, as if Alvin and the Chipmunks were bleating nursery rhymes from an old NASA space probe lost out beyond Jupiter-as the fractals congealed and began to assume a vaguely human shape. Then:

“Hey, who is this? … hello … who’s there? … hello …”

It was my own voice.

Now the head and shoulders of a person appeared on the screen, but his/her features were in constant flux: eyes, nose, lips, brow, chin, cheekbones, hairline, all changing more rapidly than my eye could follow. Sometimes the face looked like my own, and then it would be me as a woman, then as a bearded woman, then as a black man with a beard, then as a new face entirely.

“Who is this?” I demanded. “Who … hey, Jah, if this is you fucking around, I’m going to unscrew your head and shit down your-”

Throughout all the changes, the face’s lips moved, yet my voice coming from the speaker no longer sounded quite like my own. It had a scrambled, surreal quality: “Jah … if you’re fucking around … hey, Jah, I’m going to shit down your head and unscrew your … who is this? … Jah, I’m going to unscrew your shit and fuck down your …”

The face’s permutations began to slow down, becoming distinctly male, getting younger. Again there were beeps, chirps, and a sound like a tape being fast-forwarded, and then:

“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … Can I talk to you, Daddy?”

A new face appeared on the screen.

I slammed down the receiver.

The face stared at me for another instant, then vanished entirely, leaving behind only a blank screen.

For a long time I simply stared at the phone. A soft nocturnal wind whispered outside the window like a ghost asking to come in. I felt my heart pound against the inside of my rib cage, smelled the acrid tang of my sweat. After five minutes my computer’s screensaver switched itself on; bright, multicolored fractals began to undulate across the screen, Mandelbrot equations casting impermanent algorithmic sandpaintings, the black magic of higher mathematics.

And still I stared at the phone, unwilling to accept the face and voice I had just seen and heard.

God help me, it had been Jamie.

A sharp knock at the apartment door brought me back to the present.

“Who’s there?” I called out. No reply; I thought I had been hearing things when there came another knock, a little harder this time.

Probably Chevy Dick, coming over to see if I wanted a beer or something. He had a keycard and knew the codes to disable the front door alarms. I wasn’t in any mood for drinking, but I needed some company right now, so I stood up from the chair and headed for the door. “Okay, hold on,” I muttered. “I’ll be there in a-”

The door slammed open, its lock broken by the force of a violent kick, and four soldiers in riot gear swarmed into the loft.

“Freeze, asshole!” one of them yelled, crouching next to the door, his Heckler amp; Koch G-11 leveled straight at me. “ERA!”

A second later the fire-escape window was shattered by the impact of a rifle butt; I whipped around to see two more ERA troopers coming in through the window.

“Hey, what the fuck are-”

I didn’t get the chance to complete this line of inquiry, as one of the grunts who had charged the front door tackled me from behind. The air was punched out of my lungs as I hit the wood floor face-first; I gasped, fighting for breath, and tried to raise myself on my elbows, only to be forced down when a heavy boot landed against my back.

“Stay down, asshole …!”

I was about to twist out from under the boot when I felt the blunt muzzle of a G-11 press against the nape of my neck.

“I said, stay down!”

I managed to nod my head and lie still, choking on the dust from the floor as I gasped for air, while I heard a cacophony of voices around me:

“Okay, we got him.”

“Check the bathroom!”

“Somebody find a switch! Get some lights on in here!” A second later the room was flooded with light from the ceiling fixture.

“Bathroom’s clear, Sarge! He’s alone.”

“Bell, check the desk. Look and see if he’s got it.”

Sounds of papers been rifled through on my desk, then the snap of the disk drive being ejected. “Right here, Sarge. He’s got it on his screen now.”

“Good deal. You and Todd pack up the CPU. Take all the disks you can find … grab all those papers, too. Find a box or something.”

“Right, Sarge …”

“Romeo Charlie, this is Golf Bravo, do you copy, over …”

“Stay down, buddy. Just stay cool …”

My arms were yanked behind my back as, for the second time that night, a pair of plastic handcuffs were slipped around my wrists and tightened. The boot lifted from my back, but the rifle stayed in place.

“Man, this place smells like shit …”

“Belongs to a reporter, what do you expect?”

Laughter. “Shaddup, you guys … ten-four, Romeo Charlie. Premises secured, no one else present. Ten-fifteen-bravo, Charlie, over …”

I lay still on the floor, but I turned my head to see what was going on at my desk. A couple of troopers were dismantling my computer, one of them holding the CPU in his hands as the other disconnected the cables. A third soldier had found an empty carton and was shoving the manuscript of my novel into it; when he was done, he grabbed the cord of my telephone, ripped it straight out of the wall jack, and threw the phone into the box. Can’t be too careful about these subversive telephones.

“What are you guys doing here?” I demanded. “Why are you-?”

“Shut up,” the trooper behind me said.

I ignored him. “What am I being charged with? What’s-”

“Shut up.” The boot returned to my back, pinning me flat against the floor. “When we want you to talk, we’ll tell you, okay? Now shut your mouth.”

“Ten-four, Romeo Charlie. Ten-twenty-four and we’ll be seeing you soon. Golf Bravo over and out … okay, guys, let’s get out of here before the neighbors catch on.”

The boot and the gun muzzle rose from my back, then two pairs of hands grabbed my arms and hauled me to my feet. “Okay, dickhead,” one of the troopers murmured, “let’s go catch a baseball game.”

If I had any doubts about where I was headed, they were laid to rest by that comment.

I remained silent as I let them march me out the front door of my apartment. Another ERA soldier was standing on the second-story landing, his rifle propped against his hip. The sheet-metal door leading into the newspaper office was still shut; whoever had ordered this raid had apparently drawn the line at breaking and entering the Big Muddy Inquirer. Afraid of the adverse publicity, I suppose.

I was still wondering how they had managed to enter the building without triggering the alarms when we got down to the first floor. Another trooper was standing next to the alarm panel, the PT in his hands hardwired to its innards. He had managed to decode and disable the security system. He barely glanced at me as I was pulled out onto the sidewalk.

Geyer Street was empty except for the two gray Piranhas idling at the curb, their turret-mounted water cannons rotated toward the sidewalks on either side of the street. If there’s anything more scary than seeing a couple of armored cars parked at your front door, I hope I never live to see it, but if the ERA had been anticipating a neighborhood riot over the arrest of a deadbeat reporter, they were disappointed. The sidewalks were empty, and no wonder; anyone with common sense was staying inside, peering through the slats of their window shades at what was going on.

A tow truck was parked in front of the two LAVs, its forklift gears whining as the front end of John’s Deimos was raised off the street. They were taking everything that mattered-computers, John’s car, telephones, even the manuscript of an unpublished book. No cops in sight, though, and that was a little puzzling. After all the local talent that had converged on Clancy’s after John’s murder, it was surprising to see that there were no police cruisers in sight, especially since I was apparently being busted for having stolen the micro-CD from the evidence bag …

A cold chill raced down my spine as the realization hit me: this was entirely an ERA operation. Keeping SLPD in the dark about this raid, in fact, was likely a top priority; the squad leader had probably been using a scrambled frequency when he had called back to headquarters to report his team’s success.

A soldier opened the rear hatches of the first Piranha, then the two grunts who had escorted me down the stairs pushed me into the armored car. Two more climbed in behind them; one of them went forward into the narrow driver’s compartment up front, while the other climbed a short ladder to the turret behind the water cannon.

The rear hatches were slammed shut again as the two soldiers sat me down on one of the fold-down seats. One of them sat next to me; the other took a seat directly across the narrow aisle. They rested their G-11s across their knees and said nothing; after a few moments, one of them found a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his flak vest.

“I guess it would be too much to ask if you wouldn’t smoke,” I said. “It’s kinda stuffy in here as it is.”

The two troopers stared at each other, then broke up laughing. Their name badges read B. MULLENS and B. HEFLER. Bob and Bob, the Gestapo Twins.

“No, it’s not too much to ask,” said Bob Mullens as he pulled out a cigarette and lit it off the bottom of the pack. From his voice, I recognized him as the guy who had stuck a gun against the back of my head. “Hell, you can ask for anything you want …”

How about a slow, painful death from lung cancer? I didn’t say anything; Mullens blew some smoke in my direction and favored me with a shit-eating grin, but when that didn’t get a rise out of me he settled back against the padded back of his seat.

“Son,” he drawled, “you are in a world of shit.”

Hefler gave a high-pitched laugh at his partner’s bit of wisdom. “Yeah, man,” he said, “you’re going to hell in a bucket.”

Ask a silly question, get some stupid clichés. I silently stared at the metal floor beneath my feet, trying to figure out what was happening to me. After a minute we heard the driver shift gears; the vehicle lurched forward on its tandem wheels, diesel engines growling as the Piranha began to trundle down the street.

I was going to hell in a bucket, and I can’t say I enjoyed the ride.