The Upright Man (13 page)

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, you are.” Connelly stood up, stretched. Bones cracked. “Soon. You want my advice?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Just be grateful you got away with it. Be happy you didn’t get attacked by that big ole bear, and that you didn’t die out there on the mountain. Leave it at that. Because here’s something else.”

He glanced out through the glass, and saw his deputy was putting his coat on at the door, ready, as instructed, to help Kozelek find somewhere in town to stay for one night only. Still, he lowered his voice a fraction. “On my way back here, I checked up on you.”

Tom stared at the man’s back, suddenly realizing that while His Time Away might have changed him, it had made no difference to the outside world. There’d been no
midseason culling of the parts of his life he didn’t like. Out here, the dreary, long-running series he lived was still going strong, despite the fact its primary audience—himself—believed it majorly sucked.

Connelly looked back at him. “I know what you did.”

A
PACKAGE FROM
N
INA WAS WAITING AT THE DESK
first thing. I told the restaurant to round up all the coffee they had and send it to my room, and headed back upstairs. I didn’t have a lot of optimism that I’d be able to do anything for her—both LAPD and the FBI would have grown-ups on the case—but it was something to do while waiting for John Zandt.

I laid my gear out on the table and got to it. When I opened the package I found a small, shiny, semitransparent plastic bag designed to combat static, which is the main way of screwing up delicate electronic equipment. Other than dropping it, of course. Inside was a small hard disk. Stuck to it was a note from Nina.

Be
very, very
careful with this,
it read.
It’s the original. Find something on it for me, then get it the hell back.

Before I did anything else, I rang Nina’s cell. She sounded hassled and distracted. “I’m glad it arrived,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s going to lead anywhere. LAPD just got done tracing the history. They found the guy who bought the original laptop, some movie industry bottom-feeder called Nic Golson, but he has a receipt proving he sold it to a secondhand store in Burbank in July of last year. He thought he was going to get some big script job but then
didn’t so he couldn’t afford to keep the machine. After that, someone bought it cash, then stripped this part and dumped the rest somewhere we’ll never find it. The store’s employees are being interviewed right now, but this killer strikes me as brighter than that.”

“So how come I’ve got the original disk?”

“I used my feminine wiles.”

“You have wiles?”

“You’d be surprised. Actually, so would I. Probably just rank.” She admitted she’d leaned on an LAPD lab rat after I’d made it clear a copy was only that. The guy was willing to cover for her, not least because they’d done everything they could with it. It had already been fingerprinted, so touching it was no problem. But . . .

I said I’d take good care of it.

Then I put the phone down, and looked at something I now knew had spent a while inside a dead woman’s face. It was hard to work out whether it was that, or the risk Nina had taken, that was the more unnerving.

Coffee arrived. I drank some with a cigarette. This had the usual result of making the world’s challenges seem more feasible. I pulled out a cable I owned that had a Firewire plug on one end and an Oxford bridge on the other. I carefully inserted the disk’s connectors into the latter and the plug into the back of Bobby’s laptop. The disk appeared on the desktop.

I opened it and confirmed what I’d been told. There were two files, a piece of music stored as an MP3 file and the message. Nina had told me that the quote at the beginning of the text had been nailed to a German writer called Heinrich Heine. The recording of the Fauré
Requiem
was from a well-respected issue of the early 1960s, which didn’t necessarily mean anything either. There’s a timelessness to classical music performance. Most recent is not necessarily best. The most I could take from the music was to note it had been digitized at 192 k/sec in joint stereo, a high-quality setting. Given that most people can’t hear the difference between 192 and 160, that
maybe
suggested either it had been designed to be played through a quality
audio system, which could reveal the deficiencies of the lower sample rate; or more simply—and more obviously—the music was of importance to the person who had put it there. So, big deal either way. I listened to it several times while getting on with the next part, and noted what sounded like a little channel hiss, and a fairly certain click or two. It was possible the MP3 had been recorded from a vinyl source. It seemed unlikely that someone computer literate would disdain CDs entirely, so this maybe suggested the person owned an LP of the music that had some kind of sentimental value. Big deal again.

I fired up a piece of industrial-strength scanning software and waited while it went about its business. A lot of people seem to think computers are just machines, like vacuums or VCRs. They’re wrong. Right from the start, from the jumped-up abacuses of the Amiga and Apple II, we’ve had a different relationship with computers. You knew right away that this was something that had rights. If your washing machine stops working or TV goes on the fritz then you get it repaired or take it to the dump. These are pieces of old, transparent tech. They have no magic anymore. If a computer messes you around, however, you’re never really sure whose fault it is. You’re implicated. You feel vulnerable. It’s like the difference between a pencil and a car. A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There’s only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model (too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rust bucket most of us got for our first ride, it’s more complex. There’s coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There’s that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None of it means it’s broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be
dealt with.
Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by the things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around
their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.

A computer comes in between: like a car, but magnified a thousandfold. It has fingernails wedged far deeper into your life. Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multilayered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin. If you spend an evening skating around the web looking at naked ladies, your trail is there in the browser’s history log and in the disk cache—not to mention stored by all the sites that logged your IP address as you passed through, so they can spam you until the end of time. If you exchange the occasional flirtatious email with a coworker but carefully throw them all away, you’ve still done wrong until you Hail Mary the command to actually
empty
your software’s trash.

Even if you think you’re being clever and throw everything away, emptying the trash or recycler, you aren’t out of the woods. All that happens when you “delete” a file is that the computer throws away the reference to it—like destroying the file card that refers to a library book on the shelves, telling the visitor where to go find it. The book itself is still there, and if you go looking you can come upon it or track it down. It’s like a man writing notes in pencil on a huge piece of paper. If you blind him, the notes are still there. He can’t put his finger on them, can’t show you where each one is, but they remain. If he keeps making notes (if you keep saving new files, in other words), he will start writing over the originals. His new notes, his new experiences, extend over sections of the original files; making it impossible to return to what once was, to understand or even remember what happened first, what made his life like it is. Sections of these files remain, however, hidden and lost, but real—the computer’s earlier experiences; severed from the outside world but still inhabiting portions of the disk like ghosts and memories, mixed up with the here and now. We’re like that.

It took half an hour for the software to do its pass. This
brought up nothing, and merely proved what Nina’s pet tech had already established: the disk had been very comprehensively wiped before the two files were copied onto it. Not only had the note-writing man been blinded, he’d then been taken out and shot.

The jug of coffee was cold. I set one of Bobby’s proprietary pieces of pattern-matching software working on the disk. This would trawl over the surface looking at the junk that had been written over it, checking for any irregularities—or unexpected regularities—in the binary stew. Short of physically taking it apart and going in with tweezers, this was as deep as man could go into the shadowy childhood echoes of the digital mind. The past resists intrusion, even among the silicon-based.

A dialog box popped up on the screen and told me the process would take a little over five hours. It’s not very exciting to watch. I made sure the power was plugged in, and went for a walk.

AT
THREE O
’
CLOCK
Z
ANDT CALLED FROM THE AIRPORT
. I gave him directions to L’Espresso and headed back over there to wait. Forty minutes later his cab pulled up. John got out, glared at the guy in costume in front of the hotel, and walked up the street to me. He came at a moderate pace and very steadily. I knew what that meant.

He told a passing waiter to bring him a beer, and sat down opposite me. “Hello, Ward. You’re looking kind of lived-in.”

“Me? You look like a crack house. How’s Nina?”

“She’s great,” he said.

He waited for his beer. The beard had gone. He didn’t ask me how I was or what I’d been doing. In my limited experience of Zandt, I’d learned he didn’t do small talk. He didn’t do tiny talk or big talk either. He just said what he had to say and then either stopped or went away. He was drunk. You’d have to have spent time with a drinker to know—as I did, for a year, once—because there were few external signs. The bags under his eyes were darker, and he
reached for his glass the moment it was put down; but his eyes were clear and his voice calm and measured.

“So what do you have on Yakima?”

“Like I said, not much. I went back to L.A. and told Nina what we’d found. She reported it, and nothing happened. I basically started looking into it because . . .”

He shrugged. I understood. There wasn’t much else. He had been involved in the investigation of the Delivery Boy murders, as a result of which his daughter, Karen, had been abducted and never seen alive again. His marriage fell apart. He quit the force. I believed he had been a very good detective: it was he who had worked out the Upright Man was running a procuring ring for well-heeled psychopaths up at The Halls, abducting people to order. But even if Zandt had wanted to go back to being a cop, which he didn’t, LAPD wasn’t likely to be in the market. So what else was he going to do? Become a security guard? Go into business? As what? Zandt was as unemployable as I was.

“We could join the feds.”

“Right. You were thrown out of the CIA. That’s always impressive. Anyway. Do you remember the word on the door of the cabin we found?”

“Not really,” I said. “I saw there were letters there, but they just looked like they were part of the general mess.”

He reached into a pocket and produced a small piece of glossy paper. “One of the pictures I took,” he said. “Printed at high contrast. You see it now?”

I looked closely. There certainly were letters hacked into the door. If you studied it hard, you could just make out the word or name “Croatoan.” It had been there a long while, too, and was partially obscured by later weathering and further marks. “Meaning?”

“I thought it might be an old mining company name or something. But I can’t find one. The only reference I could find to it is strange.”

He pushed a thick sheaf of paper toward me. I saw a lot of words in a variety of very small typefaces, divided into sections, underneath the overall title “Roanoke.”

“I’m hoping there’s a précis.”

“You’ve heard of Roanoke, right? The one on the east coast?”

“Yes,” I said. “Vaguely. Bunch of people disappeared a long time ago. Or something.”

“They disappeared twice, in fact. Roanoke was England’s first attempt to establish a colony in America. The Brit explorer Walter Raleigh was granted a stretch of land by Elizabeth I, as one of her charters to try to grab a chunk of this New World. In 1584 Raleigh sent an expedition to see what he’d gotten: specifically, they checked out an area called Roanoke Island, on the tidewater coast of what is now North Carolina. They took an initial look around, made contact with the local tribe—the Croatoan—and wound up heading back to England. In 1586 a second group of a hundred men went out. They didn’t have it so good. Didn’t take enough supplies, ran into trouble with the locals through not treating them well, and in the end all but fifteen were picked up by a passing ship and went home. But Raleigh was keen to establish a working colony, and so the next year a further party was sent to make sure this new ‘Virginia’ got consolidated. He appointed a man called John White to lead them and be their governor. One hundred and seventeen people went along. Men, women, children—the idea being that family groups would make it more permanent. They were specifically told not to head for Roanoke Island, but . . . that’s where they ended up. They found the fortifications the previous group had built, but no sign of the fifteen men who’d been left to guard it. Just gone. Vanished. White reestablished contact with the Croatoan, who said an ‘enemy tribe’ had attacked the fort and killed at least some of the soldiers. White was ticked, obviously, and when one of the new colonists was found dead he decided to attack the local bad-boy tribe, the Powhatans. Except his men screwed it up and managed to kill some Croatoans instead, presumably on the time-honored ‘they all look the same to me’ principle.”

I shook my head. “Nice going.”

“So of course the Croatoans suddenly and reasonably retract all previous goodwill—and refuse to supply them
with food. The colonists had arrived in summer, too late to plant crops, and what little they’d brought was going bad.”