The Last Goodbye (10 page)

I parked, got out, and let the peace of the place settle over me. It took a few minutes, but I was in no hurry. I walked out on the green grass, a warm wind on my face. This was familiar ground to me now, and I scanned the names on flat gravestones as I walked. They were a history lesson in southern Anglo heritage: Andrews, Sullivan, Franklin, Peery. Row after row, I passed a hundred and fifty years of southern blood. There was a time when midtown Atlanta was the center of the southern universe, and the rich and connected have been buried at Oakland since before the Civil War.

At a large mausoleum—built by a family wealthy enough to ensconce their dead in a fortress of solitude—I turned left for the short walk to my destination. I counted six gravestones up a short hill, stopped, and looked to my right. Inscribed into a pale marble headstone were these unlikely words:
Ramirez, Violeta. 1977–2001. La flor inocente. Bella como la luna y las estrellas.

That plot of earth and headstone had cost me nearly every cent I had when I left Carthy, Williams and Douglas. I didn't care. What mattered was that there, surrounded by Atlanta's moneyed elite, lay Violeta Ramirez, innocent flower, as beautiful as the moon and stars.

I laid tulips down across her gravestone, bright red as blood. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for her soul, and another for my own.

Back at the office, Blu had a list of messages waiting for me: one from the DA's office, wanting to set up a deposition; the usual distraught phone calls from clients, some rational, some not; a particularly irate call from the mother of somebody who had been convicted the week before. I had met her son thirty minutes before his trial, so it's theoretically possible he didn't receive everything he deserved in terms of legal representation. But of course, everybody in the room knew he was guilty, so that's academic.

I felt a little guilty about Blu; all that ruminating about ethics made me wonder if unleashing Sammy on her new boyfriend was the right thing. Stephens was cheating on his steady girlfriend, and that made him slime, of course. And God knew he could take care of himself. But Sammy was southern and Stephens wasn't, and that put Stephens at a disadvantage in the game they were about to play. If you ever find yourself the third wheel in a relationship, pray to God the other person is from Wyoming or somewhere. If they're from Georgia—or, God help you, Alabama, like Sammy was—it's time to assume a defensive posture.

I ignored them all and sat down to think. Rabbit's reference to pharmaceuticals was a definite curve. I knew of no reason why Doug would want them, legitimate or otherwise. There was nothing distinctive about Townsend's decline: he had started with ecstasy, which completely fit his personality, and then had become mixed up with coke because of the increasing tendency to blend X with it. That was the insidious thing about playing drug games; people get creative when they should leave things alone. There was smack-ecstasy, coke-ecstasy, speed-ecstasy, and God-knows-what-else ecstasy floating around Atlanta with cartoon names like Daffy Duck and X-Men. One thing led to another, and eventually Townsend decided that what he really liked was the coke, and he could do without the ecstasy. Which probably made him happy for a few months, until his life started to fall apart. At that point, the tragic arithmetic of addiction drove him downmarket. The fact was, Doug Townsend couldn't afford pure coke and he wasn't the type for crack, which is the poor man's alernative. So like a lot of geeks, Doug went for methamphetamine. It was cheap, and for people who like to stay up all night and write computer code, it has magical powers.

None of which connected him with Dilaudid Avenue and the Perry Homes projects. I seriously didn't want to go down there. For one thing, I didn't have any contacts, and just asking the wrong person the wrong question can dry up an entire segment of society. Word spreads through that kind of place so fast if you blink you miss it. But for now, at least, there was an alternative, and it made sense on a lot of levels to pursue it.

Townsend's computer was set up on a small table in my office. Inside it, I assumed, were a great many answers to my questions. And it occurred to me that the more information I found there, the more unlikely it was that he had killed himself. If he had known in advance the time of his death, he certainly would have deleted anything too horrifying. Even people on death row don't like the idea of being humiliated after the fact.

I picked up the phone and called Michael Harrod. An answering machine answered. Harrod's voice said, “Make it good, you're slowing down my data transfer.” Then there was a beep.

“Michael?” I said. “Listen, that favor I needed, it's time to collect.” Silence. “I know you're in there, Michael. You never go anywhere when you're not out ripping off Radio Shack.” More silence. “Nightmare?”

Harrod picked up. “Yeah,” he said. “What up?”

“Remember that little job I had for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it would probably go a lot better if you were here.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Let me refresh your memory. I saved you from being the pool boy at the Fulton County Country Club. It's time to pay up.”

More silence. After a long pause, Nightmare said, “Whose computer is this, anyway?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, because I don't want it to suck.”

“A former client of mine. You wouldn't know him.”

“What's his name?”

“His name is Doug Townsend.”

Dead silence, at least fifteen seconds. Then, “I can see where you're calling from,” followed by a dial tone.

I didn't have a chance to figure out what Nightmare's response meant. Before I could put the phone down, I heard Blu rummaging around on the other side of the open door. I hung up the phone and walked in, curious; she was pulling her stuff together, like she was preparing to leave. I looked down at my watch; there was nearly an hour left before closing. For all her faults, she was usually prompt, both coming and going. I walked in, flopping down in one of the waiting room chairs. I watched her push a magazine into her purse, thinking again about how different our lives were. What, I wondered, would it be like to possess such a limited set of assets, but to have those few in such spectacular abundance? What would it be like to be a woman like her, walk into a bar, and have every straight guy in the place check his pulse? And what, I especially wondered, would it be like to know that you had a handful of chances—moments of destiny—when your assets intersected with one of the small number of men with the legitimate power to fulfill all your dreams? Would it matter, strictly speaking, that the guy was an asshole of epic proportions? Blu raised her face to mine, giving me a smile. “Off early today, if that's not a problem,” she cooed. Even her voice was like compressed sex.

“It's not actually closing time,” I said. “Strictly speaking.”

She smiled. “You don't mind, do you, Jack? The phone hasn't rung in an hour.” That, I had to admit, was true. “Anyway, I have a date.” She pushed a foot into a navy blue, strapped pump. I hadn't noticed she had been barefoot.

“You seeing that guy Stephens?”

Her smile deepened. Time stood still, as I waited for the pronouncement. Four words told me everything I needed to know. “Such a nice man.” She picked up her bag and moved toward the door. “If there's nothing else, I'll see you tomorrow, okay? Good-bye, Jack.” With that, she floated out the door. I was alone in my office, left with thoughts of Blu being whisked away on the Horizn corporate jet to New York for a no-expenses shopping excursion.

I paced around in my office until Nightmare showed up. He had, against all odds, changed his shirt. The new one had a picture of a surprised-looking sheep, with the logo,
Dolly Lama—Our Spiritual Leader.
His expression was changed, too: I could feel his excitement the moment he walked in the door. “Where is it?” he asked, without saying hello.

I nodded toward my office. “Apparently I said the magic words.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you saying you knew Doug Townsend?”

“I never met him. But I can give Killah his props.”

“Killah?”

“Doug.”

“Doug Townsend went by Killah?”

“Look, man, this is an alternative universe. Goin' by Killah doesn't mean he owned a gun. It means
file killer.”

“But you're saying that Townsend had a reputation in the hacker community.”

Nightmare smiled. “What hacker community?”

I stared at him a moment, then said, “Computer's this way.”

Nightmare followed me into my office, where I had Townsend's computer set up on a small table. Nightmare took a seat, then opened up a valise containing dozens of zip disks. It only took about five minutes for him to discover that the trip inside my former client's computer was no walk in the park. “Shit,” Nightmare said.

“Problem?”

“There's hardly anything here. He was working through someone else's mainframe. From the looks of it, Georgia Tech.”

“Why them?”

“Because they're huge, and they have a relaxed attitude. The grad students manage the mainframes.”

“Are we screwed?”

Nightmare smiled. “All it takes is time.”

“Can I get you something?” I asked. “A Coke?”

“Got any spring water?”

“Nope.”

“See you when you get back.” Apparently, Nightmare was a health nut when it came to beverages. I rose and headed for the little store on the corner near my building. By the time I got back, Nightmare's smirk had faded.

“This is some serious shit,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning this is some serious motherfucking shit.”

“That clears things up. Thanks.” Nightmare scowled, and I asked, “Are you saying that whoever he was hacking had massive defenses or something?”

“I have no idea who he was hacking,” he answered. “But whoever it was, Killah was taking
them
seriously. The defenses are the other way around.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he definitely didn't want them crawling back up his DSL lines and identifying him. This stuff is protected. It's passwords, which I figured, since Killah wouldn't have had the resources for a hardware lock, like hand or iris recognition. But whatever it is, it's the shit, man. Most passwords are six characters, maybe eight. This one is
twenty-six.
It's just crazed.”

“Twenty-six?”

“Yeah. It gets worse, though.”

“Great.”

“Killah was using the new 4096-bit encryption. So the number of possibilities is like ... I don't think calculators go that high. Like a billion billion.”

“Wonderful.”

“Or maybe more. It's so mind-boggling, I can't actually imagine it.”

I stared at him, trying to believe in whatever magic guys like him possessed. “So what do we do?'

Nightmare paused, thinking. “I could set up a brute force program,” he said, “the kind that just tries everything. But there's a downside.”

“Which is?”

“It would take about six hundred years to run.”

“How about all that stuff in the movies, where the guy just pushes a few buttons and it's, bam, we're in?”

Nightmare's face showed pure derision. “Pure Hollywood. You work for
weeks
to break something like this down. To get into this we have to aim better, not waste our efforts. I'm running the latest version of Crack right now, but it's probably futile.” Nightmare didn't give me a chance to ask. “Automated dictionary attack. It's got every word in the English language in it, so it just hammers away with word combinations. But this encryption is over the top, even with my computer at home working simultaneously.”

“You can do that?”

“Yeah, you can spread Crack across multiple platforms, and you get an exponential increase in power. Maybe if I could get the mainframe at Tech working on it, we'd have a shot.”

“Can we?”

“Umm, maybe.”

“Look, Michael, is this going to work?”

Nightmare shrugged. “You're makin' too much noise, man. Lemme think.”

Four hours later, it was almost nine-thirty. Nightmare said he was hungry. I said I would call a pizza delivery company. He said, and I'm quoting him now, “Fuck this shit, I'm going home.”

“You're giving up?”

Nightmare stood and began pacing back and forth in front of Townsend's computer. It seemed best not to disturb him, so I just let him do it. “Look,” he said after a couple of minutes, “I need to think this out. I'll meet you here in the morning.”

“To do what?”

Nightmare looked at me. “Killah was good,” he said. “But he ain't Nightmare.”

IF YOU WANT TO ROMANTICIZE ATLANTA—
and most of us who live here do—see it at sunset. In the dim half-light of dusk—those precious few minutes—it teeters among its various personalities, sublime and untouchable. It is a city built in a forest, its hard edges softened by the tips of hickories, sweetgums, white oaks, and red maples. There is a fragility to the loveliness of it, particularly for those of us who spend our days and nights with the undergrowth that lurks beneath its surface. But as night grows, its sense of history becomes murkier; the tone becomes more urban, less distinctively southern. It is a city caught between sunlight and dark, between history and tomorrow.