The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (24 page)

I bent my knees and leaped straight up just before the gum-chewing, sweat-slinging cartoons and their grass-tossing machines came crashing together. Sparks and smoke and jagged yellow light below. The words “Kapow” and “Boom!”

A breeze moved me away from the carnage and I floated gently back to earth. Pablo appeared at my side.

“Skylight?” His voice had changed. His face blurred. His body became clay molded by invisible fingers, and when she was done shape-shifting, Prudence said, “I can't imagine how you came to be here. Since you've come in through Frank's port, you must be in his room in the Quack Inn. Is he there with you?”

“No,” I said.

“This can't be good,” she said. “I told Yuri if we didn't watch out, you'd find out more than you needed to know.”

Our voices seemed just right in the infinite plane of diminishing squares. Prudence had on the same shirt and jeans she'd been wearing when she was Pablo. I reached out and when our hands touched, I shuddered. Here was a real advance. The sensation of touch was deliciously real.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“Bells and whistles,” she said. “Welcome to the future.”

“You really do work for Evil Empire.”

“Why do you say that?”

“‘Welcome to the future' is a very corporate thing to say.” I hadn't let go of her hand. “And you didn't really answer my question.”

“An intruder alarm,” she said. “I'll clean up the mess.”

Mountains formed at the horizon. They grew impossibly high and then rushed across the plain like a tsunami and overtook us. They washed away the lawnmower carnage and grew up and under and around us, and I held onto her hand and we rode it out.

At first the meadow was merely sketched, but details soon appeared. Birds, grass, and the gurgling sounds of a creek, puffy white clouds, bugs, forested hills on all sides. The air grew cooler and thinner, and the sunlight felt good on my skin.

A Disney deer popped out of the trees, took a look at us, and darted away.

Prudence tossed a scrap of cloth onto the ground, and it multiplied in many colors and became a patchwork quilt. A bump struggled like a trapped puppy and then became a brown wicker picnic basket. Prudence got down on her knees beside the basket. “Sit down,” she said.

I sat down on the quilt. She opened up the basket and looked inside, then she looked up at me and smiled. “What would you like?”

“Pablo doesn't exist,” I said.

“Potato salad?”

“Prudence.”

“No, he doesn't exist,” she said. “At least not out there. Not the way you mean.”

“You have no brother? You're the P in GP Ink?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm the P. How about some juice? I know you've been drinking a lot of juice lately.”

“Sure,” I said. “Juice. Do you run the Pablo persona in here all the time?”

“What kind?”

“What kind of what?”

“Juice,” she said, “what kind of juice do you want?”

“How about kiwi, strawberries, and kumquat?”

“I don't know what a kumquat is exactly.”

“Me either,” I said. “Do something simple. Surprise me.”

She handed me a glass of red fluid and watched me closely while I tasted it. Bananas and strawberries. I swallowed but the liquid seemed to disappear before it reached the back of my throat.

“Good,” I said.

She smiled.

“Tell me about Pablo,” I said.

“Pablo was still pretty much on autopilot before you set off the alarm,” she said.

I thought the words “pretty much” were pretty important in that sentence. “Does that mean someone was monitoring? Pablo wasn't just a program running?

“Someone's always monitoring,” she said.

“You?”

“Not at first.”

“You're not always the one behind Pablo?”

“Are you always the one behind Brian Dobson?”

Definitely a trick question.

And she had another one. “Who do you suppose is behind Roger?”

“My therapist? You know about Roger?”

“We followed you there a couple of times,” she said. “Early on. When we were still unsure if you were our man.”

I may have seen one of them in the cyberhall outside of Roger's office. I remembered thinking that no one could spy on me there. I guess I was wrong about that.

She took my hand. “Who is behind Roger? Who do you think is talking when you're talking with him?”

“No one,” I said. I took my hand back. “Roger's a program. Dennis has a couple of degrees in this subject, you know.”

Her expression gave away nothing about what she was thinking. I've always thought total lack of reaction to what you're saying somehow breaks the conversation contract. I mean how are you supposed to know what to say next if you can't gauge the effect of what you've just said?

“Roger is like ELIZA,” I said, “which was written by a guy named Joseph Weizenbaum back in the sixties. The program is not artificial intelligence. All it does is construct utterances from your input. It doesn't really understand what you're saying.”

“So if you already know that, why do you use him … it, since it's really just you talking to yourself?”

“Me talking to myself is what therapy is all about,” I said.

I waited but she had nothing to say to that, so I said, “Let's get back to Pablo. What is
he
for?”

“If anyone should understand the value of disguise, it would be you,” she said.

I did know she hadn't really answered my question, but I thought I'd probably gotten all I was going to get on that subject. “What about Frank?” I asked.

“Frank is easy,” she said. “This is all to do with the net and control of the net and international and national meddling with the net. Dumb attempts to regulate that which cannot and should not be regulated. You'd do better to pass laws on how the wind should blow.”

“Not me,” I said.

“Frank is part of a secret organization called COFID,” she said. “Cops for Internet Decency. They pretty much agree with me on the difficulty of publicly regulating the net, so they're trying to do it secretly, behind the scenes, beyond the law. Frank doesn't know we're on to him. He imagines that at some critical moment, he'll reveal his secret identity as a COFID operative and bust us. He thinks that we think he's just having some virtual fun with his pal Pablo.”

“Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Yes,” she said, “if I'm right in thinking that you're thinking what I'm thinking.”

“Cops for Internet Decency,” I said, “sounds a little prudish to say the least.”

“The people Frank represents are frightened,” she said. “Information was hard enough for them but now they have to deal with sensation, too.”

“But isn't sensation just a kind of information?”

“Not the way they see it,” she said.

“How did Frank hook up with you in the first place?”

“Everything is wheels within wheels,” she said. “Nothing is as it seems. Friends of friends of friends. His cover story goes several levels deep in several directions.”

“That's the trouble with this whole case,” I said. “There are too many people pulling strings behind the scenes. You supposedly came clean with me once, but I guess that was mostly a story, too.”

“If an organization is really secret, no one will have heard about it, don't you agree?”

“I suppose so,” I said, wondering if she'd changed the subject again.

“Okay, now I'm going to tell you what's really going on.”

That of course would be another lie.

“I am a member of the top level of secret societies,” she said. “The most secret of the secret. I am what you call a SMOTI.”

“Is this like a riddle?”

“Actually it's a lie,” she said. “I can't just tell you about the most secret thing or it would no longer be secret. On the other hand, maybe you can learn what you need to know from my story.”

“Okay,” I said, “so what's a SMOTI?”

Dark clouds gathered overhead. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. “A Secret Master of the Internet,” she said, and her god voice echoed from the sky and shook the landscape.

Then things got quiet except for her giggles.

“Hey, but hold on,” I said, ignoring the theatrics. “If this is the most secret of the secret, shouldn't it be old? The Internet hasn't been around that long.”

“We evolve,” she said. “Not so long ago I would have been a SMOPO.”

“Don't tell me.”

“That's right,” she said. “A Secret Master of the Post Office.”

“And before that you would have been a SMOM.”

“Well…”

“A Secret Master of Messengers?”

“Right,” she said. “Only I think carrier pigeons or ponies may have been between those two. Not to mention the telephone. You've got the main idea.”

“Don't take this the wrong way,” I said, “but I've noticed that you're a lot more … well, I don't know. Comprehensible? In here, I mean. Coherent?”

“I do better here,” she said. “In a way, I'm not really all there when you see me outside. I'm always groping for stuff that's just out of reach. Things are hard and sharp, and everything wants desperately to get down on the ground.” She pulled an apple from the basket and released it in the air and it didn't fall. “Here I have access to what I need exactly when I need it. The problem here is just knowing what to ask.”

“That story about you and Pablo coming from Russia as teenagers is also a lie.”

“Yes, a lie.”

“So, what are you up to?” I asked.

“That's the question, isn't it? Well, to begin with, we are responsible for forming the anonymous remailer. EES was a struggling start-up company in the new Russia, and we gave it a shot in the arm. Once we whispered in Yuri's ear, we just let him go. He poured the tremendous store of energy he'd bottled up by not dancing into the project, and it was a reality in a remarkably short time.”

“Does Yuri know there is another organization pulling the strings behind the Evil Empire?” I asked.

“People always know what they need to know.”

Which meant that I would probably never know the answer to that question.

“We expected certain sectors of business and government all over the world to be outraged,” she said. “We also expected that while they might be up in arms over the remailer, they would be at the same time using it. Yuri thinks EES will be the rerouter for the whole world forever. You heard him. We've always known that the Russian solution was temporary.”

“How temporary?”

“We've always expected a big showdown, but we thought we'd have a little time to get ready. Then we banged right into the problem of the killer hiding behind us. This is the wrong time for that.”

“Would there ever be a right time?”

“There's a lot of pressure from the American Congress on the Russian government to stomp on four-e-four. They don't seem to know about the Evil Empire connection.”

“Surely you expected that?”

“Yes, but not this soon,” she said. “Someday the net won't need remailers. Anonymity will be automatic.”

“I can't imagine how that could happen.”

“We're happy to hear that you can't imagine it,” she said. “But we do need the Russian government to hold out against the pressure a little longer. That would be a lot easier if it could be seen that an ordinary small town detective using tried-and-true methods could corner a killer even when the killer is hiding behind the anonymous remailer. Anonymity need not be sacrificed for safety.”

“So we're back to that?”

“Yes,” she said. “It's not going to be as easy as we thought. We thought we could guide you to the killer. We thought we knew who he was. We were wrong. We really do need you to find and stop him. What's your next move?”

I knew it would be foolish to imagine I now had all the facts. I probably did have all the facts I was going to get. I was pretty sure SOAPY/Dotes was a rogue element in all the scheming that was going on with the net and Evil Empire Software and Cops for Internet Decency and Secret Masters of the Internet.

I'd already been played for a sucker once. I could still just walk away from it.

But the truth was I wanted to nail the killer. It went beyond what Prudence wanted. I probably never would know what she was really up to. If I was going to do this, it would be, aside from the fact that she was still paying me, mostly for reasons of my own. Prudence was waiting to hear what I would do next.

“Can you bring up the BOD list from here?” I asked.

“Easy,” she said. She reached into the picnic basket and came out with a rolled-up paper like a small poster. She unrolled it and left it hanging open in the air in front of us. The BOD list, now pretty much complete. Oddly, of all the people hiding behind the Russian remailer, only Arthur Snow, CEO of SplashDown Software, and Nathan Ivanovich, dead, were local.

“How do I highlight things?”

“Touch them,” she said.

“Okay.” I scooted a little closer. “All of the locals.” I touched Gerald Moffitt's name and it became bright yellow. I did the other locals.

GERALD MOFFITT

RANDY CASEY

PRUDENCE DEERFIELD

LEO UNGER

ARTHUR SNOW

NATHAN IVANOVICH

LUCAS BETTY

BERNIE WATKINS

RAMONA SIMMONS

SADIE CAMPBELL

“Okay,” I said. “Let's look at a few facts. First, all the victims have been on this list.” I touched Gerald Moffitt's name again and it darkened. I did the same for Randy Casey, Nathan Ivanovich, and Sadie Campbell. “We also know that neither SOAPY nor J. Dotes is on the list using either of those names. Therefore we might conclude that the killer is not on the list, if it were not for one other thing.”