Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (31 page)

“Why?”

“I’d made him out of my pain, and it was his privilege to exist, to carry out my wishes. But he turned away from me. When I
create
something, Detective Saunders, I never stoop to trying to win its loyalty. It not my style. The clown is on his own now. I see him around from time to time.”

“You sound like a superstitious man, Zoomer,” said Clayton, echoing Ramos’s overly precise, measured delivery.

“Do I really?” asked Ramos, sounding almost pleased.

“Indeed you do. You impute human characteristics to nonhuman things. A collection of electronic commands isn’t exactly capable of betrayal. Can a man of your phenomenal intelligence not know that?”

“You miss the point, Detective Saunders,” Zoomer said, sounding pleased by Clayton’s verbal challenge. “I know it’s often considered a sign of ignorance and superstition to anthropomorphize mere things. But in an inhuman universe, it’s the only way I know of to make life palatable. Besides, I find it much more entertaining to think of him as independent than to assume someone merely rewrote his program.”

Clayton felt exhausted. He had no idea what tack to try with the hacker next. He looked at Nolan inquisitively, but his partner just shrugged.

“Zoomer, I appreciate your help,” Clayton said. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to phone you again sometime.”

“You have the number, Sergeant,” Zoomer said, then added, with a trace of wry humor, “I’ll he here.”

Then there was a click, and the dial tone buzzed in the ears of both detectives.

“I’m getting too old for this,” Clayton complained, as Nolan walked toward him.

“So what did we get out of him?” Nolan asked.

“Beats me,” Clayton said. “I didn’t understand half of what that fucker was talking about.”

“You
didn’t?”
Nolan exclaimed. “You sure as hell
acted
like you understood him. So what do you figure? Is he connected with the killer?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if
he
knows.”

“Well, he hasn’t been out of that wheelchair lately,” Nolan said, “because we know his disability squares with his DMV records. Still, he’s awfully smart. Do you think he’s a director of some kind of murder club—something like that?”

Clayton shook his head. “He wants too much for us to think he’s some evil genius—like that baldheaded what’s-his-name in the James Bond movies. But he ain’t quite as smart as he’d like to be. My guess is that this particular master hacker got out-hacked and that Auggie really
doesn’t
belong to him anymore. My guess is that we ain’t even glimpsed our bad guy yet.”

Nolan groaned. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” he said.

“Wish I could tell you otherwise.”

“Anyway, you handled him brilliantly,” Nolan said, sitting on the desk beside Clayton.

“You really think so?”

Nolan shook his head. “Hell, more than a few guys around this department wish they had your capacity to crawl inside people’s brains, understand what makes them tick. You’ve got a gift, man. You make me feel like a lumbering oaf a lot of the time—particularly on a bitch of a case like this.”

“This case is just following the usual pattern, buddy,” Clayton said reassuringly. “I make two or three good intuitive leaps, then you unravel the threads and follow them through the dark. It always takes your
brains
to bring us over the finish line.”

“I hope my brains get engaged pretty soon,” Nolan said with a sigh.

“Don’t worry. They will.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Nolan said. “We sure make one hell of a team, don’t we?” he added warmly.

“We sure do,” Clayton said. Then he felt swept by a wave of irrational sadness.

Nolan returned Clayton’s melancholy look.

“Did I ever tell you about Syd Harper, my mentor back at the academy?” Nolan asked.

Clayton laughed. “Sure. Crazy Sid. When we first started working together, you hardly ever talked about anything else. Syd taught you this, Syd told you to do that.”

“Well, for the last few years, Syd’s been sheriff up in a little town in Oregon. It’s a real cop’s delight up there—hardly any crimes to speak of except a little vandalism or a stolen bicycle now and then. Anyway, Syd’s getting ready to retire. And he got in touch with me not long ago, suggesting I take over his job.”

Clayton felt his throat choke up slightly.

“So have you made a decision yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Nolan said.

Both men were quiet for a moment.

“You know, the problem’s more than what happened to Louise,” Nolan said at last. “Sometimes I feel like a goddamn dinosaur hanging around this town, particularly when the criminals start using computers. It’s like my life here has ended, something here is all over. I’m tired, Clay. Really tired. I think I could use the change.”

“Can’t say I blame you,” Clayton said.

“What about you?” Nolan asked.

Clayton fell quiet. For a moment, he didn’t know what to say.

“This town really is hell sometimes,” he said at last. “So full of fear and bigotry and hate and all. Sometimes I can
hear
the hate, Nol. I can hear it even when no one’s saying anything. It doesn’t whisper, it yells at me from the streets and hallways. That’s when I just want to take Sheila and the kids and get the hell out of here.”

“It would be a poorer place if you did,” Nolan said gently.

Clayton felt a smile form slowly on his lips.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess. But I’d miss you like hell, buddy.”

“Yeah, me, too. But remember—the whole thing’s still up in the air.”

“I know,” Clayton said. “So. What about Marianne?”

Nolan gave Clayton a surprised look.

“What about her?”

“If you go up north, will she go, too? You two
are
an item, right?”

“How the hell did
you
know that?” Nolan asked.

Clayton laughed. “Are you kidding?” he said. “That night when I called about the DNA test—when Gauld’s killer turned out to he a woman—I knew. I knew right then. I could tell by your voice.”

“You uncanny son of a bitch,” Nolan said. Then he shrugged, “I don’t know what she’d do. I haven’t talked to her about it yet.” Then he looked at his watch. “I guess I’d better get on home,” he said. “That lady’s probably waiting for me right now.”

10101
TRAVELING HORSE

Marianne pressed her face against the glass in order to see the carousel inside. Three rows of brightly painted horses stood quietly in dappled light that filtered in through small panes of glass. One spot of strong sunlight fell directly on a sweet-faced white pony that had a flowing mane and a red bridle and saddle.

“I love this building,” Marianne said, standing back and looking up at the turreted, multi-windowed building on the Santa Monica pier. “It’s like a warp in time—a 1920s space that never changed. When the carousel is running, the horses dance around to calliope music. They always look so beautiful.”

Now the sun highlighted a wooden mane waving in the air, making it seem that the horse was prancing to tunes it undoubtedly knew by heart. Another sunlit animal reared with its head stuck up in the air, mouth open as though fighting the bit.
That
one looks a
little like Renee’s horse.

“Your friend had a carousel horse,” Nolan said, as though he had read her thoughts. “Not as pretty as these, though.”

“No. He was a traveling horse. A real explorer, from the look of him.”

“It did look like it had seen better days.”

“When she got her horse, I did some research on how it might have originally looked. I thought I’d help her restore it. The horses we’re looking at were carved for a carousel that would stay in one location. See how delicate some of the ears and manes and tails are? Renee’s horse was probably from a county fair carousel. He was made with small ears laid back tight against his head so they wouldn’t break off when he was taken down and moved around. He’s not as nice an example as these, but he’s probably just as old.”

“But she never got around to restoring it?”

“She refused to,” Marianne said, with a catch in her voice. “She said, ‘He’s no beauty, but oh, what a life he’s lived!’ She said she didn’t want to paint over a single one of the stories he could tell.”

Marianne felt tears spring into her eyes. She wrapped her arms around Nolan and leaned her head on his shoulder. They had spent a wonderful night together and a deliciously sensuous morning. After Nolan went in to the division, Marianne hooked up her computer to the rented monitor and went to work on her project. A few hours later, Nolan called and said he was going to take a long lunch—did she want to go out somewhere? Since he had worked all weekend and nothing new was breaking this morning, he wouldn’t have to rush back. When he picked her up, they decided on the pier. Snuggling close to him like this, she felt they could just as easily have gone back to bed.

*

After a few moments, Nolan said, “Let’s walk out on the pier.” He guided her gently away from the carousel. He felt disturbed and broody, and he wanted to talk to Marianne about some things. He decided to walk a little bit first.

The old pier was pleasant and not particularly crowded at this time of year. There were a only a few people fishing, armed with their rods and bait and buckets. Nolan watched Marianne as she stared out over the ocean. He wished she would release her hair and let it blow in the slight breeze.

She is beautiful.
He realized that he meant it in a very ordinary way—that she could easily grace the cover of a magazine. Her appearance had daunted him at first. He was not usually drawn to coolly beautiful women, not beyond the casual physical responses such looks aroused. Nolan had long since outgrown the notion that he should try to bed every woman who stirred his hormones. And, in his recent lonely years, he had rediscovered how easily his libido could lead him into disastrous entanglements or empty one-night stands with boring, tragic, or troublesome women.

But Marianne had also stirred him with her quick wit, her intelligence, her intensity, even her grief. With the bright sunlight falling on her face, he could see that she looked less like a porcelain doll than she sometimes did in muted indoor light. At the sight of those fine lines, those circles under the eyes, those signs of vulnerability, confidence stirred within Nolan again. Maybe they would find some basis for a life together.

He gazed out over the water. The ocean and the sky were both gray, turning silver wherever the sun broke through the cloud cover overhead and where the shafts of light touched the waves. It was as though some magician pointed a wand randomly here and there, lighting the surface of the water, but revealing nothing of what was below. The shafts of light on the water made Nolan think of the electronic magicians, Pritchard and Ramos, those intense young men who wielded such incomprehensible power in a world of their own making.

“I knew I was going to hate the computer age way back when I was still walking the beat,” he said.

Marianne laughed. “What could possibly have turned you off computers back then?”

“The video games,” Nolan replied with a tone of disgust. When Marianne just looked at him inquisitively, he continued. “I patrolled one of those video arcade places every night, and I got to watching kids play those games. My own kids loved them, too. I saw how good they all were at it, how fast and smart they were, how they could do just about anything with those damned machines. And I thought, ‘Jesus, these have got to be the smartest and fastest kids who ever lived.’ But then I realized something. They were in that place learning to be losers.”

“What do you mean?” Marianne asked.

“Don’t you get it? That’s what those games are all about. You get as many points as you can, and you get as many free games as you can, but eventually the machine always beats you. Those kids play till they lose. They play till they run out of quarters. That’s the object of the game. Losing and running out of quarters. They were the most terrific kids of all time, and they were already being trained to lose.”

“I never thought about it that way,” Marianne said. Then she added, grinning. “You were pretty engrossed in that casino card game.”

“You’re right, it was fun. But it’s a lot more fun to try and figure out whether real people are bluffing or not.” Nolan stared straight ahead for a moment, no longer seeing the water. Finally he said gruffly, “I guess my real gripe about this investigation is that I have to rely on people whose methods I don’t understand very well. And even they’re not coming up with anything useful.”

“You mean Maisie and Pritchard?” she asked.

“Yes. And now there’s Ramos. I don’t know if he’s guilty of anything or not, but I don’t get the feeling he’s on our side. I don’t even get the feeling he’s in our world. They’d all rather talk by computer. And on Insomnimania, you don’t even know
who
you’re talking to. That’s what I really hate about all this information age stuff. It pulls people farther and farther apart. It gives them more and more excuses not to look each other in the eye, not to make commitments. Because when you’re carrying on a relationship by computer, you’re not dealing with an actual person.”

“Sure you are,” Marianne replied. “What about the real person typing the words? Or manipulating the graphics?”

“Yes, but you don’t get the
whole
person. I mean, if you live with someone, or even next door to someone, sooner or later you have to deal with all their aspects—the bad temper, the prejudices, sometimes even hidden good qualities. A person doesn’t just consist of what they
choose
to show you. And why do normal people need to hide behind cartoons and fictitious names, anyhow? Judson was an international businessman. Your friend apparently was a real extrovert. Why did they get so interested in online games?”

“I think Renee liked Insomnimania because it gave her a place to play with no repercussions,” Marianne said. “She could make herself into whatever she wanted to be. She could be ordinary—even unattractive. One of the interesting things about the cartoon alters is that a lot of them are not good-looking. When people can be whatever they want, some of them prefer ugly—at least when the look is temporary.”

“So you think it gave her a chance to express herself?”

She nodded. “Parts of herself that even Renee wouldn’t express in real life. Her alter could say whatever she wanted to, do whatever she wanted to. It’s a world with no AIDS, no pregnancies, no spouses or bosses to keep happy.”

“Do any of them seem to form lasting relationships of any kind?”

“On sure. Of every kind. They display affection, friendship, jealousy—the whole range of things. They welcome old friends loudly, with hugs. Some alters become inseparable, just like real people. Some of them have major fights.” She hesitated, remembering. “In fact, Sapphire and Auggie used to argue all the time in Ernie’s Bar.”

“What did they argue about?”

“Oh, what she was wearing. What kind of drink she should have. Silly things. But Renee said that they were buddies.”

Nolan drew a deep sigh. Standing here, overlooking the ocean, smelling the salt air, it was hard to believe that something so removed as a little electronic box could affect people’s lives so deeply. “Sex that isn’t real,” he said. “Typed-out conversations between made-up characters. I still can’t see why it’s so engrossing.” He hesitated, then asked the question that was really on his mind. “Why does it appeal to
you?”

Marianne seemed to hesitate before answering. “For me, it’s that Insomnimania is there every night, anytime I want to log into it,” she said. “There’s always something going on. Sometimes it’s very entertaining.” She paused for several long moments, then said, “There are times when, just briefly, it begins to seem real. A couple of nights since I’ve had Elfie on as a participant, I’ve almost felt that I was
hearing
the other side of the conversation, instead of just seeing it on the screen. I’ve almost believed that I was sitting in that bar talking. Just for a few moments. That must happen to some of the others. And sometimes I—well, I seem to lose myself in those moments.”

Noland felt himself scowl at the idea of Marianne losing herself in that world. But he, too, remembered that moment in the casino when the voices had sounded real, when the typed lines had almost become aural, when he had almost felt like he was in a real space. At the time it had seemed like fun, but now the memory disturbed him deeply. And both Kim and Maisie had mentioned something else about Insomnimania that disturbed him, too.

“You’ve been using Elfie to talk to Auggie, haven’t you?” he asked Marianne.

“Yes. A couple of times.”

“Have you found out anything we didn’t know?”

“No. But he promises from time to time to let me—or rather Elfie—in on secrets. He refers to hidden places, to power.”

“I doubt that he’s going to give anything away.”

“Maybe not. But he and Elfie are developing kind of a relationship. He does talk to her a lot. She laughed and said teasingly, “They even went to the Pleasure Dome last time.”

“Elfie and Auggie had sex?”

“Yes. If you can call it that.”

Nolan was surprised at his sudden surge of annoyance. When he said nothing, Marianne asked, “Does it bother you? It’s only a cartoon. Nothing is really happening.”

He thought about it for a moment, trying to make sense of his feelings. “Yeah,” he admitted. “It bothers me a little. I mean, Elfie’s too good for him. I helped build that body, remember.”

“Actually, to have sex even the alters have to use alters—cartoons that have the appropriate equipment, you know. I had to make another alter for Elfie.”

“What’s she like?”

“You wouldn’t want to know,” Marianne said with a laugh. “You should see the one Auggie uses—almost featureless, no personality at all.”

“Well, there’s something that bothers me a lot more than cartoon sex. Something I wanted to talk to you about.” Marianne looked at him without comment and he continued, “This just came up this morning at work. Kim explained to me how a hacker could steal passwords on Insomnimania.”

“Do you mean that the Insomnimania files aren’t secure? I thought the passwords were encrypted.”

“They are. Do you understand exactly what that means?”

“I’ve read something about it. The computer scrambles the password according to some kind of formula. It only stores the scrambled version.”

“That’s pretty much what Kim said. But I don’t see why everybody assumes that’s safe, in the first place.”

“It uses a mathematical algorithm to change the word to the encrypted form. Supposedly, it can’t be reversed unless you have something like a Cray supercomputer. I remember seeing an example. A six-letter word was encrypted as a long string of letters and numbers mixed together, something like p-y-y-6-s-y-q-w-3-r. It’s not like a code that can be matched letter for letter.”

“Okay, so maybe it’s true that a hacker is unlikely to break encryption. But this morning Kim Pak said he knows of at least one way a hacker can get
around
it.”

“I guess any system can be beaten eventually.”

“The way I understand it, it’s simpler than that. The hacker just inserts a program of his own that intercepts passwords
before
they’re encrypted and keeps a list of them. The member gets a message that says, ‘Sorry, invalid password. Please try again’—as though he had typed it incorrectly. On the second try, he logs on as usual.”

He studied her face. Did she look worried for an instant? Did he imagine it or did she hesitate before she replied?

“That’s really clever,” she remarked. “Most people occasionally mistype a password, anyhow. I mean, even on bank machines you can get that kind of message and have to do it over. And the word you’re typing doesn’t show up on the screen, so you can’t
see
whether you made a mistake or not.”

“Kim finally got Maisie to admit that Auggie could have stolen a lot of passwords long ago—which means he could have some members’ names and addresses. He could still be stealing passwords. All he’d have to do is log on under a name that the Insomnimania detection gear doesn’t recognize. In other words, they can’t guarantee that
any
membership information hasn’t been read by Auggie.”

“I thought you were convinced that Renee and Judson both just told Auggie who they were.”

“I’d still rather think that than consider the implications of Kim’s theory.”

Marianne just looked at him for a long moment. Finally she said, “So you’re saying that it’s actually dangerous to associate with Auggie on the network?”

“It might be. I don’t know. I don’t want to take any chances on anything happening to you.”

Marianne reached out and took his hand, but she said nothing.

*

Hand in hand, they strolled back down the pier toward the shore. Marianne caught herself staring at a heavy woman’s back.
Someone like that?
In her mind she caught a glimpse of the woman in the silver dress turning toward her, of bright red lips opening, as if to tell her something.

Marianne shook her head. She didn’t want to think about murderers, female or male, and she didn’t want to think about computer hackers. She wanted to concentrate on her own contentment.
It feels like we’ve been together for years.
It was something she had missed since her divorce.

When you live with someone for a long time, everything becomes familiar—talents, weaknesses, manias, prejudices, delights, all become familiar—simply contained in that person’s presence. Whether you like what you know or not, you do know them well.

At one point, the absence of that familiarity had almost driven her back to Evan. Especially when she had moved to Santa Barbara, she had been keenly aware of being in a world full of strangers. Becoming accustomed to the new distance from the people around her had been slow and painful.

Stephen had never seemed familiar to her. He looked good, behaved well, was reasonably intelligent and entertaining. She wondered whether, if things had kept going without interruption, she would have married Stephen.
If I did, I would barely notice the change.
Life would continue. She would do her work, he would do his, they would appear together at social occasions. They would politely gloss over the rough edges and weak spots as they appeared.

In that sense, she thought, Nolan was going to be more like Evan—there was no ignoring his humanity, his maleness, his presence. When she glanced up at him, she saw the slight perspiration on his forehead. A stir deep in her body reminded her how his face had looked after they had made love last night, when he had turned on his back beside her and pulled her to him.