The worm of anger was beginning to work in him again. He fought it back and went over to the BBC site.
Police in Wolverhampton raid terror suspects’ home…
Strangely, for there was usually no advertising on the BBC, a pop-up appeared, a very amateur-looking pop-up saying he’d “won £100!!!” Tad clicked on the close-window X button on its top right-hand corner, realizing he’d done the wrong thing when an unfamiliar web page appeared, succeeded by his Outlook Express address book. Then blood-colored letters from some paint program began to slowly write themselves across the screen. F…R…E…FREAKED!!!
He took the cursor to the Start button to close down Windows, but it was immobilized. The hourglass symbol appeared next to the traveling arrow. The computer was frozen solid. He had to turn off the power strip.
His first major virus. He’d never opened a suspicious attachment and was protected by a Norton firewall. The experience of watching the familiar screen turn suddenly, mockingly hostile on him was more unsettling than he could’ve imagined. It was like a spookily successful exercise in black magic — like seeing a domestic cat transformed into a toad. Five minutes later, hoping this was some momentary cyber aberration, he switched the power on again. The computer started up normally, then told him he was truly
FREAKED!!!
ON TUESDAY MORNING, Lucy dropped Alida off at school with just seconds to spare before the eight o’clock bell. When she switched on the NPR news, the lead story was about a Trojan horse named Freak, which had spread overnight through America, Europe, and Asia, burgling people’s address books and forwarding itself to unsuspecting millions. Sites like Amazon and eBay were temporarily down. A spokesman from Microsoft, who promised a patch within two hours, described Freak as “a malicious act of cyber terrorism,” which Lucy thought wildly overblown. Vandalism, certainly. Terrorism? Surely not. The cant word of the last few years was graying from repetition, decaying in a process of inevitable entropy — which, come to think of it, was another cant word from an earlier decade. Entropy itself had fallen victim to entropy.
The Microsoft man explained the virus in breezy technobabble. It was, he said, a “WMF exploit” by a hacker who’d uncovered a “Day Zero vulnerability” in the Internet Explorer system, blah, blah, blah. The important thing was that his geeks had been on the case since midnight, and a solution was imminent.
Senate committee hearings had begun on the appointment of another judge to the Supreme Court — a born-again guy whose views on Roe v. Wade were characterized by liberal Democrats as “beyond Neanderthal.” A threatened subway strike in New York, more bloody news from the Middle East…She switched off the radio to concentrate on her own, more pressing news from Thetford, Norfolk.
She neither believed nor disbelieved Marjorie Tillman, whose story was full of oddities that fit together badly. Lucy found it hard to imagine that Augie Vanags had ever been a “dim” or “moony” child. The boy in his book was instantly recognizable in Augie the man, while the boy of Marjorie’s memory was a total stranger. There was the business of the printers “touching up” the supposedly identical photo, which surely meant the two were not identical. The FedEx package should arrive tomorrow or the day after, by Friday at the latest, and until then any speculation about the pictures would be pointless.
What about the two names? If August Vanags had once been Juris Abeltins, why, reinventing himself in America, had he chosen another Latvian name? Had Lucy been called Juris Abeltins, then emigrated to the States, she would’ve gone for a more American-sounding moniker. Juris could have turned himself into Lowell Cabot, so why choose August Vanags? When the Freak virus was safely patched, she’d try Googling this Mr. Abeltins to see if he was leading a separate existence somewhere; there couldn’t be that many Juris Abeltinses in the world, and if she could locate one in England, the whole fabric of Marjorie’s tale would unravel.
Plus there was Marjorie’s voice. During their conversation, Lucy hadn’t warmed at all to her vengeful tone and absurdly snobby accent — though perhaps that was because Marjorie was so irresistibly reminiscent of Lucy’s mother at her worst, and “picking flarze” was exactly how her mom would say it.
For all these reasons, Marjorie Tillman was someone Lucy was inclined to take with a large pinch of salt, at least until the photograph arrived. If it really showed Augie on an English chicken farm, the GQ piece would raise a storm, not just in America but around the world. For a journalist, that would be an incredible windfall, yet even as Lucy allowed herself to savor this thought for a moment, she felt a wrench of alarm and pity for Minna. If Marjorie turned out to be right, she’d be destroyed. Augie, much as Lucy had learned to like him now, could be said to deserve whatever might be coming to him, but Minna was innocent, defenseless, and trusting, and no more deserved the hurricane in which she’d be engulfed than she deserved hanging, regardless of what Montaigne might have to say on the subject.
Lucy was impatient for Microsoft to sound the all-clear. Despite herself, she badly wanted to find an English Juris Abeltins.
TAD’S SECOND-TO-LAST rent check, returned to him with his most recent statement, was stamped on the back:
PAY TO THE ORDER OF UNITED SAVINGS & LOAN BANK SEATTLE, WA 98104 FOR DEPOSIT ONLY EXCELLENT HOLDINGS, INC. 125004587
The bank, on South Jackson, had a line of customers waiting for the four available tellers, which was fine by Tad as he scoped the place out. Most of the bank’s staff were Asian-looking, with Chinese names, but he spotted two Caucasians, one with the name tag Amy on her chest, the other — fortunately — a man. He’d do “Jeff,” though because the guy was in his twenties, the voice would be tricky: easy to play old, much harder to play young.
When Tad’s turn came, he cashed $100 on his Visa card to make himself a legit customer, then went to the courtesy phone. If that number, or the bank’s name, showed up on Lee’s cell phone, he’d have no cause for suspicion.
He was nervous as he always was when waiting in the wings for his cue. He checked the other Charles O. Lee’s Social Security number on the slip of paper in his hand, then dialed the landlord’s cell. One ring, and it was picked up.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, this is Jeff from United Savings and Loan, South Jackson branch.” Tad lifted his pitch to a height just short of falsetto, and tempered it with a butch Seahawks-fan accent. “I’m looking for Charles Lee.”
“Yeah, is me.” There was no hesitation in the voice at the other end.
“We got a minor problem here, nothing serious — this Freak virus hit us, I sure hope it didn’t hit you, Charles. Dang thing seems to have messed up some of our records. Just wanted to check your SSN. The number we have for you is 015-48-…”
“7816,” Lee said.
“Right — that’s what we’ve got. Thanks for your time. Have a great day!”
Bingo! Walking away from the bank, Tad trod on air. It was the law of averages, of course. He’d been wrong, and wrong, and wrong again — he had to turn out to be right sometime.
What he’d found would be his secret. He meant to tell no one, not even Lucy, at least not yet. That he could now prove the odious Lee was an illegal with a stolen ID was, Tad thought with giddy self-satisfaction, his nuclear option.