The Last Goodbye (14 page)

“I'm not sure. Anything that can lead us toward why Doug died.”

“Pretty vague.”

“There's something else.” I hesitated, choosing my words carefully. “We're trying to find someone. A missing person thing.”

Nightmare shrugged. “Well, we aren't gonna be finding anybody or anything, unless we can get in this damn computer.”

“Nothing fits.”

He shook his head. “Nada.”

Maybe it was the Spanish for “nothing” that made me think of it. “No word combinations in the
English
language, you said.”

“Yeah.”

“Not other languages.”

Nightmare scowled. “Well, you know, there's only about fifteen major languages in the world, not to mention five thousand dialects, so if you want to start running them down one by one, we can come back in a few months.”

“Doug was an opera freak,” I said. “Italian, French, that kind of thing.”

Nightmare looked up. “Opera? You gotta be kidding me.”

“No. Can you run any of those down?”

He shook his head. “Theoretically, if I downloaded dictionaries in those languages. I'd have to reconfigure Crack.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think we got shit now, so yeah, let's do it.”

I left again, unwilling to stare at Nightmare while he practiced his black art. I came back in an hour, and he was leaning back in my office chair, eyes closed, legs up on my desk. I kicked them off, waking him up. “You got it?” I asked.

He snorted derisively. “Don't be ridiculous. But I got an Italian dictionary in there. And I've got a nice slice of Tech's mainframe slammin' away. I should get a few hours out of it before they dump me.”

“Shouldn't you be doing something in the meantime?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know, something.” I pointed to the computer. “Is this the glamorous world of hacking? Sitting on your ass for hours while the computer does the work?”

Nightmare grinned. “Go get me some lunch.”

“You know, pal, I'm starting to wonder if jail wouldn't have done you some good.”

“Portobello mushroom sandwich at Cameli's. With the three-bean salad. I need some protein.” He waved me out the door like a Hollywood mogul. I stared a minute, considered the negative implications of picking him up by the scruff of his neck and throwing him out, and started walking out the door. Nightmare called me back. “Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“The spicy mustard, okay? Not the French's.”

Blu was already gone for lunch, and I walked back out the door without a word. I went to get Nightmare's sandwich; the traffic was hell, and it was nearly one-thirty before I got back. I tossed the sack of food onto my desk and said, “Well?”

Nightmare ignored the question and rummaged through the sack. He pulled out the sandwich, lifted up one side, and examined the mustard. Satisfied, he raised the sandwich to his mouth and took a bite. “A meat-based diet isn't sustainable anymore,” he said, his mouth full. “The amount of grain it takes to feed one cow . . .”

“I'm not in the mood for a PETA lecture, Michael.”

Nightmare shrugged and pointed to the screen. “Does that mean anything to you?”

I walked to the computer and looked. The words
L'amore non prevale sempre
flashed on the screen. I reeled. “You've got to be kidding.”

“What is it?”

“It's a line from an opera. Doug used to say it.”

“It's also the password to his computer.”

“You mean you're in?”

“I'm in.” Nightmare spun around in his chair and pressed “enter.” I heard the hard drive start to run, and we entered the secret world of Doug Townsend.

I believe that loneliness may be the natural state of mankind. We walk from street corner to office building, locked in isolation. I don't know how else to explain what lurked in the files of Doug's computer, his inner chaos turned into binary numbers and infinitesimal voltages. But the unquiet side of his mind was cataloged there, various in its perversity, individual in its bizarre self-expression. In cyberspace, his obsession with Michele was not limited by time or physical dimension. Inside his computer, it flowered into full, demented bloom.

To describe the heart of Doug's experience with Michele causes me pain, because it disturbs the quiet sense of false security that makes normal life possible. I admit that it's false. I know that it is. But I also know that it's essential. It's like ignoring the risks of flying. There is the mathematical possibility that you will crash. There is also no benefit to thinking about it. It's like that in life. If you consider what every apparently nice man or woman around you might be thinking, if only you could peel away their veneer of normalcy, you might never leave the house.

I had spent hours talking to Doug, and not one second was about Michele Sonnier. Many of those hours were enjoyable, the basis of a friendship. Certainly, while we were in college there was no hint of instability, just the lopsided social skills of a geek. Of course, I had to assume that every form of obsession has its beginning. But did this mean every moment between the two of us had been a lie? Even our talks, some as recent as two weeks ago, about his computer business? Had he been, with a titanic act of will, suppressing her name from his lips second by agonizing second? Had he, in the midst of a story about growing up in Kentucky, been longing to speak her name? Or was he split in two, each part of his brain independent, and what I saw was real but only a part of the whole?

There were no answers. Doug was gone. Lost in Michele's persona, he had created bizarre works of art, amalgams of her picture taken to unreal dimensions. Should I remember him by the pages where he had superimposed her face on a photograph of his own body, creating a kind of half-man, half-woman monster? Or what can I make of a church building composed entirely of her eyes?

Having been ushered into his madness, I was forced to admit that my opinions about how Doug died were nothing more than blind theories. It was all a question of which side of his brain was doing the choosing. The Doug Townsend I knew would never have killed himself. The Doug Townsend hidden in that computer was capable of things I couldn't imagine. But I was also convinced that the new, previously hidden, version was unlikely to vanish silently into the night. Surely, that energy would have found expression before its self-inflicted ending.

Nightmare shook his head, obviously shaken. “This stuff is whacked.”

I nodded. “I know. But ... I mean, there's nothing illegal about it.”

“If you say so.”

“So this is what all that security was about?” I asked.

Nightmare looked up, surprised. “No, dude.
This
is what the security is about.” Nightmare hunched over the keyboard; after a few seconds, the logo of Grayton Technical Laboratories appeared, followed by a long list of some kind.

I stared for a long time. I had expected something about Michele's daughter, not this. “Grayton Technical Laboratories?” I asked. “He was hacking them?”

“You could call it that.”

“Well, what would you call it?”

“I would call it a total obsession.”

“Why do you say that?'

Nightmare punched some keys. “Because there's roughly a terabyte of stuff in here.”

“You mean he was collecting a lot of information.”

“I mean a fly couldn't take a shit at that company without him knowing about it.” Nightmare pushed back from the desk. “Hacking is one thing, dude. It's about getting in. You look around, mess with their heads a little bit. But this ... he mirrored the entire company. It's just crazed.”

“Like an obsessive-compulsive thing?”

“Yeah, the world's biggest obsessive-compulsive was also a great hacker. Not as good as me, though.” Nightmare pushed back and stared at the screen. “Dude, this is so beautiful. Considering he was a freak, I mean.”

“What?”

“Just admiring the workmanship.” He pointed to the screen. “Right here, Killah gets shell access, so he looks local. That's key, because it means he blends into the background, so everybody puts down their guns. From that point on, it's just a matter of escalation.”

“Talk English.”

Nightmare gave a reverent look. “Killah had the Holy Grail, dude. I'm talking about root access. When you own the root, you can do anything. You can even change other people's passwords. You can set up a hidden entry for immediate access anytime you like. And my personal favorite, a keystroke logger. You hide out on any terminal in the system, and you can print out every stroke that person types. You rule the world.”

“And Doug had it.”

Nightmare nodded. “He
owned
this place. He could have devastated them. He could have melted them down, and locked their own administrators out, just to be mean. They would have had to watch, like the
Titanic.”
He laughed softly and said under his breath, “You freak.”

I was thrown; I had expected at a minimum to find out information about Michele's daughter. Instead, I learned that Doug had conducted a massive hack of a company of which I had never heard. “Who's Grayton Labs?”

“Got me.”

“Can we look around?” Nightmare shrugged an assent, then punched keys while we took a guided tour of the company. The public pages revealed the thrust of the business was medical research; there were a couple of pages devoted to various drug therapies the company was developing. Within minutes, however, we hit a long list of apparently meaningless letters and numbers. “How far in can we go?” I asked.

“We got the root, man. We can go anywhere, but that doesn't mean we're going to understand what we're looking at. Whatever it is, Killah wanted in there bad. No stone left unturned.”

“We already know he could be obsessive. Maybe it was just an expression of that kind of compulsion.”

“It's sure as hell some kind of compulsion.”

I stared at the screen. “Listen,” I said, “guys like you—”

“Hackers?”

“Yeah. I assume people . . . they try to hire you to do things for them? Things they wouldn't want anybody else to know about?”

Nightmare gave me a thin smile. “You mean like what you're doing?”

“I mean corporate types. Businesses.”

“It's a boom industry, if you're willing.”

“And Killah was good.”

“Very, very good.”

“Then it's possible Doug was working for someone else. Something off the record.” I looked at Nightmare. “New economy, in other words.”

“Yeah, that's a definite possibility. A job like that could be worth a lot of money.”

“Enough money to buy plane tickets all over the country to see Michele Sonnier.”

A look of comprehension spread over Nightmare's face. “Dude, you're on it. That totally clicks.”

I looked back at the screen.
So this is just business. He was paying bills. Helping Michele came later.
“Okay. So if Doug was working for somebody, the questions are pretty clear. We need to find out who was paying him, and why they wanted to know so much about Grayton Laboratories.”

“Whoever they were, they weren't kidding around. This is one serious hack.” Nightmare was sitting quietly, when suddenly I heard him exhale. I looked over at him; he was, if possible, even more pale than usual.

“Killah hacked these guys.”

“Right.”

“And now he's dead.” We both sat in silence, watching the words
Grayton Technical Laboratories
flash on the screen. I tried to think of the right thing to say so I wouldn't rattle Nightmare, but it was too late; the situation had unhinged him enough already. “Dude,” he said, “we gotta get off this site.”

“Don't panic, Michael.”

“Panic? Killah is
dead.”

“That's right. And that's why what we're doing is so important.”

“Are you nuts? I'm cutting this connection right now.” Nightmare moved toward the keyboard; I put my hand on his slender wrist, stopping him.

“Look,” I said quietly, “I want to find out what this is about. And I need you to help me.”

“You don't have enough money to get me to do that.”

Nightmare, my ass.
“I don't have any money, Michael. But I want you to help me anyway.” Nightmare's breathing was shallow, his concave chest moving up and down under his T-shirt. He looked like he'd seen a ghost. “I'm going to piss you off now,” I said quietly, “but it's in a good cause.”

“Start now, because the sooner you finish, the sooner I can get out of here.”

I turned his chair toward mine, facing him down. “You're a talented kid, Michael. Intelligent, resourceful, and in your weird-ass way, ambitious. But I'm going to tell you the unvarnished truth. So far, you haven't done a damn thing with it.” Nightmare started to rise; I pushed him back down. “Listen to me, Michael. Hacking a bunch of sites so you can brag to your buddies at some secret meeting where you don't even use your real names—it doesn't mean shit.”

“To you.”

“To use the vernacular, Michael, you and your hacker buddies spend all day jerking off. I'm offering you the chance to get laid.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can do something real instead of pretend. You're good at this, Michael.”

“Not good. Great.”

“All right. You're great. And your life story to date doesn't add up to a thing. For God's sake, I had to get you off a shoplifting charge.” Nightmare looked down; he was angry, but for the first time, his bravado couldn't cover his embarrassment. “Do something valuable with it, Michael. Do something important.” I shook my head in frustration. “Or just piss it away. Why not? It's what you've done with your life so far.”