The Liar's Lullaby (16 page)

Tasia didn’t reply.

NMP wrote:
Did you get my message? Just checking.

That was followed by more silence on Tasia’s end. Then by a string of six dozen messages from NMP, sending Tasia links to cute videos. But underneath the lighthearted façade lay a hunger for connection and a growing presumption of intimacy. The first dozen cutesy messages were hopeful—as if NMP were trying to lure a puppy to take a treat. Then for a while they settled into a rhythm: NMP would send aphorisms and humorous links morning, noon, and evening.

Jo rubbed her eyes. A low- key dread was building to a stronger suspicion.

Archangel X, or NMP, seemed to be an adult. Sounded literate. Used full sentences and standard grammar. If Jo had to guess, she’d say NMP was a native English speaker, probably had some college education, and—given that all the musicians mentioned in the e- mails were white-bread Nashville stars—there was a good chance he was Caucasian.

Eventually, when his puppy biscuits failed to elicit a response from Tasia, he wrote:
I go by the handle Archangel because I’m named after the Archangel Michael. And I’m like him—a protector. Think of me as a guardian angel. You can trust me.

Tasia didn’t reply.

The next set of e- mails came in pulsing batches, twenty- five or thirty in a short time span. Their tone became intrusive and resentful.
I read online that you and Searle Lecroix hooked up. That’s not true, is it?

When, for the three hundredth time, Tasia didn’t reply, NMP wrote:
Who said you could date Searle?

Jo exhaled. Stalker, 100 percent lock on that.
Do you love Searle? Why are you doing this?

Until, finally:
Slut.

At that point, Tasia finally responded.
From now on all your e-mails will be deleted.

And Archangel’s response took a turn.
Well, well. You finally worked up the nerve to answer me. Took you long enough, you coward. I thought you were my friend, that you understood me. But this is what you do? You tell me I’m “deleted.” You slap me in the face. Are you ashamed? Are you embarrassed, you filthy SLUT?

The next message consisted of a list, comparing Tasia to Pol Pot, Lucretia Borgia, Cruella De Vil, and four hundred other villains.

Jo checked Tasia’s outbox. The
all your e-mails will be deleted
message was the last one she wrote. Jo wondered if she had paid the slightest bit of attention to the e-mail account after that, or even to the cell phone. She had eventually forgotten it at her sister’s place.

Did she know that Archangel X was hounding her?

Jo called Tang. “Archangel X was undoubtedly stalking Tasia. Perhaps only cyberstalking, but the most recent messages are alarming.”

“Any idea who it is?” Tang said.

“Not yet. No name. But this character says he’s named after the archangel Michael. And NMP could be initials.”

“Gender?”

“You mean, is Archangel really Irina Bendova, beautiful young girl from Novosibirsk, who wants to marry me?” Jo said.

“Can you run it through one of those programs that tells you whether it’s a man’s or woman’s writing style?”

“Those are useless. I come out as more macho than Steven Seagal,” Jo said. “I have Archangel X’s e- mail address. Can you track it down and get me a name?”

There was a heavy pause. “Maybe. It’ll take time.”

Jo turned back to the e- mail stream. “I don’t think Tasia saw some of these. Toward the end, long after she’d stopped replying, Archangel wrote, ‘Do you think you’re better than everybody else?’ ”

“Nice.”

“Archangel becomes increasingly concerned about the gossip magazines and the rumor that Tasia was seeing Searle Lecroix.”

“That was all over the entertainment news.”

“Here’s what worries me.” She ran her finger down the messages in the queue. “Probably the last five hundred messages focus on how awful it is for NMP that Tasia’s having an affair.”

“What kind of stuff?” Tang said.

“Jealousy. Ownership. I wouldn’t pin homicidal intent on Archangel based on these messages alone—they’re not openly threatening, but they’re aggressive and disturbing. Here’s one. ‘What are you doing to me? I can’t take this.’ ”

“I could interpret that as a threat.”

“Or as a plea. Here’s another. ‘It’s wrong. Why are you doing this? You have to take Searle? There are others out there for you. I’m out here, waiting. Selfish cow.’ ”

“Sounds like a snotty teenager.”

“Or a fan consumed with his idol. ‘You’re breaking my heart. You need to break up with Searle or NMP will do it for you.’ ”

Tang paused. “That’s a threat. And ‘NMP’? He refers to himself in the third person?”

“Yes,” Jo said. “NMP also sent photos. Porn. And they’re disturbing.”

All at once, Tang sounded weary. “Go on, tell me.”

“The message says, ‘Have you ever done this?’ The photo shows a naked man having intercourse with a giant scorpion. The scorpion’s tail is swinging up between the man’s legs, and it’s about to plunge its massive stinger into his back.”

Tang was quiet a moment. “You drawing any psychological conclusions from that?”

“A whole host,” Jo said. “Here’s the big thing, Amy. After all the hysterics, NMP wrote, ‘See you in San Fran. I already have my ticket.’ ”

“Beckett, that’s a solid lead.”

“Good.”

“Forty thousand people bought tickets. But it’s a thread.”

“Archangel X may have been at the concert. He may have caught up with her. Can you get the name of the person who owns that account?”

“It’ll probably take a subpoena. And before you say it, I’ll get on it.”

“How long?”

“No promises. Maybe days.”

“Any evidence that a stalker had been following Tasia? Complaints to police, requests for a restraining order, vandalism, break-ins at her—”

“At Tasia’s house?” Tang said.

“I’m way ahead of you. The man in the balaclava. The intruder.”

Tang was silent. “That would put an entirely new spin on this case.”

“Can you find out?”

“I’ll get back to you.”

“Amy, if this pans out, you’ll be a star. You’ll take the spotlight off the political machinations and put it on a straight-out stalker.”

“Good God, woman, you’re a Machiavellian. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

When Jo hung up, she felt pumped and antsy. She felt that, even after reading fourteen hundred messages from Archangel, she was missing something. Some inflection, some subtext, was eluding her. Something was burning beneath the surface of Archangel’s words, like a fire in a coal seam belowground.

She didn’t want to wait for more information about Archangel X. She grabbed her computer and went to find Ferd Bismuth.

P
AINE SHUT THE DOOR AND OPENED THE CURTAINS. DOWNTOWN SAN Francisco peered back, swathed in fog, dumb and unaware. Fatigued, pressed for time, he sat down at the computer and logged on to Tree of Liberty.

Disquiet vibrated like a wire along his arms. The government’s security machine was circling him. An intruder had broken into Tasia’s house. And he’d heard the news today, oh boy. Robert McFarland could not escape the consequences of Tasia’s death any longer. Things were coming to a head.

Fightback began now. He wrote:

A gray heat crisped the edges of his vision. The intruder’s incursion at Tasia’s house was, frankly, crazy. Camo and a balaclava, middle of the day? Bizarre. This was a dramatic escalation, a sign of imminent breakdown.

The gloves were coming off. And the Usurper’s minions would go for broke. They were after him: Paine-killers.

It was nothing new. The authorities always came after him. In the army, the military police had surrounded him in the barracks. They stood there in their shining helmets, holsters unsnapped, and took his weapon away.

Humiliation heated his skin. He’d never found out who pinned the rifle mishap on him. Garcia? That was the logical conclusion, though by then, Garcia had been swathed in bandages in the hospital, on a morphine drip, a freak with one eye and three fingers. Everybody fussing over
him
. Ignoring the conspiracy against Paine.

The gray heat crept up his neck, seemed to uncurl down his throat. Paine pecked at the keys. He couldn’t type fast enough.

Nobody had ever appreciated the threats against him. As a teenager, the jocks pushed him into the tiles in the shower. But when he shoved smaller kids into the nozzles and faucets, hard—did it when the jocks were watching, so they could see that he wasn’t a wimp—he was the one who got hauled to the principal’s office.

And then he heard the principal talking to his counselor, through the office door. “He complains of being bullied, but he’s so sarcastic and vindictive that he eggs others into mistreating him.”

The counselor claimed
he
was the bully. She taught him a lesson: People in authority want only to put their thumb on your neck.

Setting the counselor’s station wagon on fire had brought him a deep, if temporary, satisfaction. Shame that her old border collie had been asleep in the back, but she should never have left the dog in the car. That was on her shoulders.

And that was the start of his real career.

A salt breeze blew through the open window. He set his fingers on the keys.

Yeah. His counselor. And the English professor who called him out for plagiarism. And the sadistic drill sergeant who stuck him in a barracks full of homosexuals. All the gays, pretending to be his buddies, Garcia wanting to have a beer, play pool, talk. And the drill sergeant doing nothing, waiting for him to buckle.

He’d had to take matters into his own hands.

He posted the essay. Words were ammunition, and he was a semantic magician, a Houdini with words. But guns alone brought about real change.

That’s why he’d been kicked out of army with a psychiatric tag on his file—because he knew about guns. He’d acted in his own defense, protected himself from the filthy threat. Nobody had been able to prove that he’d rigged Garcia’s weapon to explode in his face. They had only suspected, and so they’d discharged him.

But Three-fingers Garcia had learned the power of a single person to wreak havoc. Paine had left a matchbook on his bunk as a message.
I smoked you.

He had sent many matchbooks to others in the years since.

The goddamned army. And who was now commander in chief? A former army major. Another Hispanic, a greaseball in everything but name. McFarland, the wetback foreign enemy on domestic soil. Garcia all over again, writ worse. Because he’d destroyed Tasia.

On-screen, the page refreshed.
I resist. Contact me off the board.

Paine smiled. Keyes had written to him.

Many people wanted to contact him off the board. Access to him boosted their egos. It should—he had spent fourteen months building Tree of Liberty into a digital war camp. He had fanned the winds of outrage like a maestro. And now Tom Paine was an icon. People tried to impress him. Some of them went beyond words into political stunt-jumping. They dumped truckloads of manure on their congressman’s doorstep or wrote death threats to senators or turned up at town hall meetings with firearms strapped to their thighs.

But Keyes, he knew, was serious. Keyes was a big data point in his files. They’d exchanged background information over the months, though Paine’s history was fictitious. Keyes had worked for an Xe-type contractor. He’d engaged in arms smuggling and money laundering—or as Keyes called it, “paperwork irregularities”—and gotten fired. He was an ideal operative.

Paine reviewed an early e-mail Keyes had sent him:

The man was a thief and a vigilante. And he had no criminal record. Some people played up their criminal convictions, like scars, giving them credibility in the fight against the all-devouring Gub. But Keyes played up his clean slate.

Paine had been waiting for him to write. Still, he played hard-to-get. He wrote:
Words are cheap, friend.

Four minutes later Keyes replied.
And blood is dear. It’s time to fuck up the Gub.

Paine went to a Web-based e-mail service and set up two new accounts. Using the first, he wrote to Keyes.

Keyes came back almost immediately.
Forgive me. I meant you no disrespect.

Paine replied.
We need warfighters. We need patriots
.
Wait ten minutes and then log in to a Webmail address I will give you.
He provided login information—a user name and password.
Check the outbox for a draft message. I will write to you there from now on.