Chapter Twelve

As luck would have it, Eddy had a hacker in her apartment when the Secret Service kicked the door down.

His name was Stefan, better known on Zach's beloved pirate boards as “Phoetus, ” and he was one of the few local computer outlaws who knew Zach's real name and where he lived. Even if Zach hadn't wanted him to have this information, Phoetus could easily have chivied it out of the vast grid of data kept under electronic lock and key by the phone company. Zach said he was very good.

He ran with a local gang of hackers who called themselves “The 0rder 0f Dag0n. ” (Hackers, Zach had explained to her, often employed a unique spelling system in which f's were replaced with ph's, plural s's with z's, and ordinary o's with zeroes. ) It amused Eddy to picture Lovecraft's blasphemous fish-frogs of nameless design flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating, and surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight all the way from Innsmouth to New Orleans and the surrounding swamps, where they had presumably set themselves up with the latest technology and started tapping phone lines and cracking databanks.

He came knocking at her door early Tuesday morning, sometime around eleven. Eddy had spent all day Sunday and most of Monday trundling her stuff from her old apartment over to Madison Street in a little red wagon she usually used for shopping and laundry. It didn't dawn on her until she was making the second-to-last trip that she could have hired a moving van. Having thousands of dollars in the bank was difficult to get used to. She kept expecting someone to stop her on the street and tell her there had been a mistake.

Which of course there had been-but with luck, They wouldn't find out about it.

By Monday night she was sore and exhausted. She had collapsed on Zach's bed, thinking she would just rest for a few minutes, then get up and go to the corner liquor store for a flask of rotgut. She could drink if she wanted to; she didn't have to get up and drag herself to the Pink Diamond tomorrow afternoon; she could call that hairy failed rock star Loup and tell him to blow.

Of course, she would do no such thing. She would inform him politely that she was taking some time off, and she hoped it wasn't too inconvenient, and he could call her if he needed a dancer to fill in sometime. Then, if he called, she would have to search madly for excuses not to.

Sometimes the leftover shreds of her upbringing could be a real bitch. In Korean etiquette there was no such thing as a flat no. You left all possibilities open, no matter how ambiguous. You never caused the other person to lose face. Not even if he was a sexist, coke-snorting asshole.

She took one last look at the twenty-five wagonloads of her stuff strewn around the room along with everything Zach had left. It was a mess. Eddy decided to rest her eyes for a few minutes.

When she opened them again sunlight was streaming through the open window, a green lizard was poised on the ceiling spearing her with its jeweled gaze, and someone was knocking lightly but rapidly at the door.

She opened it and Phoetus slipped through the crack. He was perhaps seventeen, very thin, tall, and loosejointed. Something about his posture and gait reminded Eddy of those posters of Evolving Man. Phoetus was somewhere around the midpoint, where the head and muscle structure were more human than ape, but the arms still dangled a bit too low. His curly brown hair looked as if it might lighten two or three shades if he washed it, and his eyes were nearly hidden behind lenses as thick and swirly as the bottoms of Coke bottles.

He looked blankly at her. “You're not Zach. ”

“No, Stefan. I'm Eddy, remember? We met at the Cafe du Monde once. ” She had been having coffee and beignets while Zach nibbled the Thai bird peppers he'd just bought in the Market and chased them with a cold glass of milk. They had a table by the railing, and Zach hailed the nervous, pasty-skinned boy as he skulked by, dodging street performers, avoiding the eyes of tourists.

When introduced, the guy stared at Eddy as if petrified by the sight of her, leaned over the railing to mumble something to Zach-it sounded like “the eunuchs' holes are wide open”-and sidled quickly away toward the river.

“Who was that? ” Eddy inquired.

“That was one of the most brilliant phone-systems guys on the planet. He's also the sysop of a pirate board called 'The Lurking Fear' and a member of the 0rder 0f Dag0n. He's way underground. Sociable type, isn't he? ”

As usual when Zach talked about his hacker buddies, Eddy understood about half of it, but she always looked at her telephone a bit more warily afterward. Who knew what unspeakable presences waited within those wires like swollen silver spiders clinging to a fiber-optic web?

Stefan stood by the door wringing his hands and staring at her in sweaty panic. Eddy realized with something like awe that he might never have been alone in a room with a girl before. The thought was oddly touching. She would have to remember not to make any sudden moves, otherwise she might frighten him clean away.

“Zach's not here, ” she told him. “He doesn't actually live in New Orleans anymore. ”

“I heard he might have gotten busted. ”

“Who said so? ”

“I hear things. ”

That much she didn't doubt. “He wasn't busted. He got away. But he's okay-I got a message from him. ”

The hacker looked aghast. “He didn't call you here! ”

“No. He put a message in the paper, in secret code. ” She showed him the folded page of yesterday's Times-Picayune. Goddess in a bowl of gumbo, indeed. “See, I think this means he's in North Carolina, maybe heading for New York next. ”

He scowled at the paper. “Secret code? This is kid stuff! ”

“I suppose shutting down the 911 system is mature, ” Eddy said coolly. Zach had told her how Phoetus bragged on the boards that he could overload every emergency telephone circuit in the city if he wanted to.

Not seeming to register the insult-or perhaps not considering it an insult-Stefan edged past her into the room. “Where's the phone? ”

She pointed to Zach's desk, which was still piled high with books and papers but looked rather forlorn without the computer and boxes of floppy disks. Zach had left his printer behind, though; Eddy guessed she would drag it out and hock it sometime soon.

Stefan took the receiver from the hook and pried off the plastic earpiece before Eddy could protest. He removed a small black box from his pocket and clipped some wires running from it to something inside the phone, then peered owlishly at the box. “Well, nobody else has a tap on this line, but the government might. They can tap straight from the phone company if they've got a warrant. Assume it's bugged. ”

“What did you do to it? ”

He held up the black box. “This is called a multitester. It reads your standard off-hook voltage. If ifs too low, there's probably another device sucking volts off your line. ”

“Oh. ”

Stefan had become briefly animated. Now he seemed to sink back into his sniffling, nervous fugue. “Look, I've got people after me too. Why, if They knew I was here—”

Eddy had closed the door as Stefan entered but had not yet bothered to lock it. There was an iron security gate at the street entrance that led up to the apartment, and while French Quarter residents were generally careful about locking all their doors, the gate offered some semblance of privacy, some illusion of safety.

This illusion was shattered as the door flew open and banged against the wall, making a dent in the soft plaster. All the policemen in the world seemed to come pouring into her tiny apartment. Eddy had no idea how many there actually were. All she saw was the guns, great oily insectile things unholstered and dripping death, pointed straight at her.

Eddy crouched and wrapped her arms around her head and screamed “NO! NO! ” She couldn't help it. She had always had an instinctive terror of guns; perhaps in another life she had been a revolutionary sentenced to the firing squad or a gangster cut down in a street battle.

Behind her, she heard one of the most brilliant phone systems guys on the planet burst into tears.

The raid team totaled fifteen men: Secret Service agents, BellSouth phone-security experts, and curious New Orleans cops along for the ride. Most of them faltered at the sight of the two cowering kids. Several guns went back into their holsters.

The German machine pistol carried by Agent Absalom Cover wasn't one of them. He kept it trained on the suspects and watched them writhe. Either of these two could be Zachary Bosch, or the person hiding behind that name.

Agent Cover had wanted Bosch for a long time. Other hackers goaded him unmercifully, threatened his credit and disrupted his phone service, left taunting messages in his E-mail, had done all but beard him in his New Orleans field office. But Bosch was smarter than ten such crooks, and far more dangerous. He didn't brag much. He didn't leave cute little clues in his wake. He just breezed through systems nobody should be able to get into, stealing information and wreaking havoc, and he covered his tracks like an Indian.

Finally a fifteen-year-old software pirate under interrogation had given them the keys they needed to trace him. Scratch a hacker and find a rat; ask him the right questions, marvel a little at his amazing technical feats, and turn him into an eager rat. Some of these kids were terrifyingly smart, but they were still kids. And Agent Cover believed all kids were basically amoral.

He got his warrant and moved in fast. Bosch couldn't have had time to slip between his fingers.

Still, once the first flush of adrenaline began to wear off, he found himself looking doubtfully at the two bawling kids. He hadn't expected Bosch to fold so easily. Most of these teenage whiz kids turned to jelly when they saw a few guns and badges, but then most of them had only broken into a system or two and browsed through sensitive files, maybe used a stolen phone code here and there or downloaded some software they shouldn't have. Most of them weren't brazen enough or criminally inclined enough to rip shit off on the scale that Zachary Bosch had.

Cover took one last loving look at his Heckler & Koch and tucked it back into the holster inside his jacket. He hadn't needed a gun on a hacker raid yet. These kids loved to brag on the boards about how they would go down shooting, but the deadliest weapon Agent Cover had found in a hacker's possession was a dental probe the kid used for jimmying phone jacks.

As he approached the suspects, the punked-out Asian girl lifted her head and stared at him in teary defiance, like a gut-shot deer watching a hunter loom over her in the bloody snow. She had enough crap dangling from her earlobes to set off a metal detector, and her hair looked like she'd cut it with a weed-eater in the dark. Cover always wondered what had been done to these kids in early childhood to make them want to look the way they did. He'd busted one hacker who had a blue mohawk and scorpions tattooed on the shaved sides of his skull. Scorpions!

The tall, sickly-looking boy bolted for the bathroom. Two of the cops were right behind him. Cover heard the toilet lid bang up, the thick liquid sound of vomiting.

“Hey! ” One of the cops stuck his head back in, an expression of dismay plastered across his broad shiny face. “He just chunked his wallet an' keys in the crapper! ”

“Fish 'em out. ”

“But they're floatin' in a puddle of puke—”

“Fish 'em out, ” Cover repeated. The girl was watching him with a mixture of terror and loathing. The rush of forced intrusion left him and he felt suddenly weary. From the bathroom he heard “Awright, you little crook, fish 'em out, ” followed by another round of puking.

The U. S. Secret Service was charged with all manner of important duties and missions, any of which Ab Cover might have been assigned to upon his graduation from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia. He could have protected the President from freaks and commies and assassins. He could have guarded the precious metals in Treasury vaults, or fought the clearcut war on counterfeiting and forgery of U. S. currency.

Instead, he was part of an ongoing crackdown on computer crime that had begun with Operation Sundevil in 1990. Based in Arizona, Sundevil had targeted hacker abuse of credit card numbers and phone codes. More than forty computers and twenty-three thousand floppy disks had been seized from private citizens across the country. Since then, the Secret Service had acquired a taste for the slippery little anarchists who loved to hide behind their keyboards in their dark dens of iniquity, but could be so rewarding once they were dragged out into the sun.

So instead of guarding the President, Cover busted funny-looking misfit geniuses who weren't usually old enough to go to prison for crimes that nine tenths of the American public didn't understand.

In Washington they told him it was an honor. At any rate, it was a living. But sometimes he wondered if it was a good one.

Eddy clutched her copy of the search warrant and watched the cops swarm over the apartment. Now that the guns had been put away-though she was very conscious of the filthy things bulging under jackets and dangling from carelessly snapped holsters, looking as if they might crash to the floor and go off at any moment-she was able to take a look at the men behind them.

The Secret Service drones were sleek and broad-shouldered and well dressed, with razor-cut hair combed severely back from feral faces, with clean square jawlines and hard glittering eyes. They all seemed to be wearing expensive leather tassel loafers, and Eddy was hardly surprised to see that several even sported mirrorshades. She assumed that the guys in the cheaper jackets and plain loafers were lower-echelon agents, though in fact they were from the telephone company.

And of course she recognized the New Orleans cops. She had a long and bitter acquaintance with them, from her bust for a joint's worth of marijuana at sixteen (which Zach had since wiped from her record) to the clumsy attempts at entrapment she had been subjected to at the Pink Diamond (“How much wouldja charge to show a little more? ” they'd leer, tugging at the crotches of their tacky plainclothes slacks).

After the agent in charge had examined her driver's license and realized that there was no computer equipment left in the place except the printer, he seemed to view Eddy as a minor threat at best. She still saw his mean, handsome face glowering in her direction from time to time as he snapped out orders, but she had mostly been forgotten. The printer quickly disappeared out the door in the arms of another sharp-dressed, eerily efficient Secret Service man.

“Zach moved out months ago, ” she said. “I think he left the country. ” No one paid any attention. A suit with a camera clicked off shot after shot of the desk, the bookshelves, the towering stacks of paper. Two others busily sorted and packed computer printouts, smudgily printed zines, cassettes and CDs. With a sinking heart she saw the folded page from the Times-Picayune going into one of their goodie boxes, along with a copy of the science fiction novel Neuromancer. That had been one of Zach's favorite books. The main character plugged his computer directly into a jack in his brain and entered the matrix, where he stole information from huge, faceless corporations. To Zach, William Gibson's seamy world must have read like the paradise of his wildest dreams. To these guys it was just more proof of sedition.

They unplugged the phone and the answering machine and took those too. They took poor Stefan; Eddy saw him being hustled, out the door between two broad blue backs, a thin string of puke still dripping from his chin. She wondered what they'd gotten him for. Tampering with evidence, probably, for throwing his ID in the toilet. Eddy thought it had been a pretty good trick; too bad he hadn't managed to flush and send them fishing in the sewers.

New Orleans' finest, busting pitiful teenage geeks while old ladies visiting their husbands' graves stood a good chance of getting robbed or raped in the cemetery. Real heroes. And robbed and raped was how she felt right about now, watching these cookie-cutter robots swarm over her home and sift through her belongings and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

As soon as this nightmare was over, Eddy decided, she would go to the bank and withdraw part of the ten thousand dollars. Not all of it, that might look suspicious, but enough to have around in case. . . what? In case she needed to leave in a hurry?

Goddammit, she thought, I haven't even broken the law yet and I'm already as paranoid as Zach was. Is this any way to live? Is it worth the gnawing in your stomach, the constant urge to look over your shoulder? For Zach she supposed it had been; he was addicted to the thrill, the risk. But for her, this state of affairs would not do for long.

She didn't know if she should go anywhere near that money, and wished she had been able to ask Stefan if it was safe. But Eddy thought she would feel more secure with wads of cold cash sewn into her mattress than with illegitimate funds lurking in any electronically accessible part of her life. She wished she had never seen a computer.

Right now, if she was to be perfectly honest, she wished she had never met Zach. He was the best friend she had ever had, he was generous and brilliant, he had introduced her to all manner of exotic things she might never have found on her own. But he was also confusion and trouble and heartache.

And, on top of all that, she missed him so badly she thought it might kill her.