9
THE BROUHAHA over the Freak virus was over by lunchtime, when Lucy applied the patch and went onto the disinfected Internet. Googling Juris Abeltins, she found just one — a Latvian socialist politician, “dzimis 1947.” From the context, she guessed that “dzimis” must mean “born,” but just to make sure she Googled “dzimis + born,” and there, beside the name of some entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest, was “Dzimis Latvija (Born in Latvia).” A Latvian baby boomer clearly couldn’t be the same person as Marjorie Tillman’s wartime refugee. This was a setback, but by no means conclusive. There were still billions of people too obscure to show up on Google, and a dim and moony child might well have grown up to be one of them. Marjorie’s Juris could easily be working as somebody’s gardener, growing flowers now, not picking them, beyond the reach of any search engine.
When Lucy drove up to the school at 3:30, Alida ditched her friends with wholly uncharacteristic speed and came racing over to the Spider, her face pink and bulging with excitement.
“Oh my God! You won’t believe it!” she said, opening the car door. “You so won’t believe it!”
“What is it, Rabbit!”
“You won’t believe it.”
“Cool your jets! Won’t believe what?”
“Finn! It’s Finn!”
“Finn what?”
“Finn’s been arrested — by the FBI! We’re all getting counseling! It’s amazing!”
Lucy switched off the engine. “I’m lost. Can you just remember to breathe, please?”
“He wrote the virus! He was always signing himself ‘Freak’ in e-mails. Four FBI men came, in two cars. They caught his mom first and brought her to the school. They weren’t wearing uniforms or anything; they were in suits. Then the principal came and called Finn out of Humanities — this was this morning — and in the lunchroom there were these eighth-graders talking and they said Finn was going to get seven years. In jail! He wrote the virus! Finn wrote the virus!”
Holy shit! Lucy thought, but said, “Can I just say one thing?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“He won’t get seven years in jail.”
“He told me and Gail he was into horses. He meant Trojan horses! He wrote this Trojan horse thing and it did billions and billions of dollars of damage! The FBI came to our school!”
“How did they manage to find him so quickly?”
“The eighth-graders said he didn’t cover his tracks at all — because he wanted to get caught!”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“For the attention. Like, Finn’s famous. I mean, not famous like Tad’s famous — he’s famous famous! He’s so über-famous it’s unreal! Finn! I think his mom’s in jail, too.”
Lucy knew Finn’s mom slightly — a pallid blonde named Beth who worked for some online outfit but had once been a journalist. Despite that connection, they’d had an annoying conversation at the sixth-grade picnic in September and had barely spoken since.
“Rabbit, honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much about Finn. He won’t go to jail. They don’t jail eleven-year-olds for stuff like that. They’ll give him the fright of his life, confiscate his computer, and send him back to school. Either that or they’ll hire him as a consultant on cyber crime. But I don’t believe for one second that he’ll see the inside of a prison — him, or his mom.”
“Finn wrote the virus.” Alida’s face gave new meaning to the word boggle: there was no other term for it, her eyes were boggled.
“Holy moly.” Lucy switched on the ignition and pulled out of the parking space. “Jesus, what a day for you. I don’t suppose you managed to get any actual work done?”
“No, we had counseling. And there’s no homework.”
“So what did the counselor say?”
“Oh, you know. Stuff. I knew Finn was doing something. He’s always weird, but these last few days he’s been weirder than weird.”
“Funny — looking at him, I’d never have guessed he was smart enough to do something like this.”
“Finn’s a genius. He’s awesome.”
“Rabbit — you mustn’t think of him as some kind of hero…. He’s just a nerdy, fat, unhappy kid who wrote some code, and what he did was just plain wrong. It wasn’t cool.”
“You sound like the counselor.”
“‘Poor Finn’ is what I’m thinking. I wonder what drove him to it.”
“I think he misses his dad — I saw him writing an e-mail once. But now he’s famous.”
“So you said. Now, I thought for dinner I’d make some really special macaroni and cheese.”
“Cool.”
At five o’clock sharp, Alida, never normally a newshound, asked to watch the news. Finn was indeed famous, though not by name. He was “an eleven-year-old Seattle boy,” and the school, thankfully, wasn’t mentioned. Experts talked about the mechanics of the “vulnerability.” Then came the child psychologists.
Do you know what your child is doing on the Internet? Etc., etc. A solemn fellow in a bow tie advised parents to ensure that their kid’s computer was permanently located in a “family room,” where they could constantly “monitor” the screen.
“Parents today often fail to understand the growing computer literacy of the upcoming generation. Children as young as seven and eight are now performing complex operations far beyond the comprehension of moms and dads. Parents have a great deal of catching up to do. You have to ask yourself, ‘Do I understand what Junior’s doing here?’ And if you don’t, get Junior to explain it to you. If you’re not immediately satisfied with the explanation, you need to seek outside help. Do you have a tech-savvy friend? Who’s the IT teacher at your child’s school? This Freak virus is a wake-up call to parents everywhere.”
Pernicious nonsense, in Lucy’s view. Whenever she went into Alida’s room, Alida automatically closed the laptop on which she was instant-messaging with her friends, and Lucy respected that: just because she was a kid didn’t mean she had no right to privacy. What a lousy example to set, to snoop on your own child’s every move. Finn Janeway’s astonishing escapade was being used as an excuse for universal parental paranoia. And as for Mr. Bow Tie’s talk of “Junior,” that showed how hopelessly out of touch he was.
“Right,” she said. “Rabbit — laptop into the family room, screen facing me. And when you’re I.M.-ing, I need you to read me every word.”
Alida sniggered.
“Can you and Gail write HTML?”
“Nah, we leave all that stuff to Finn. Even the twelfth-graders go to Finn. You have to pay him with muffins.”
“I have a feeling Finn’s seen his last muffin, which won’t do him any harm at all. Better by a long shot than seven years in the pokey.”
“You really think he won’t go to jail?”
“I’m positive, Rabbit. He won’t be allowed near a computer, he’ll have to go muffinless, but he won’t go to jail. It was just a kid’s prank that went too far — way, way too far. And if I ever catch you writing a virus I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
“I’m cool with that,” Alida said, idly watching the weatherman gesture at his map.
“Now I need some help with dinner.”
The recipe, cut from a newspaper, had grown yellow but untried on the fridge door, where it shared a magnet with a sheaf of cards from take-out delivery joints. It began with the intimidating injunction to “Make a roux” and called for chopped ham, chopped green peppers, grated nutmeg, jalapeños, skinned and deseeded tomatoes, ricotta, and cheddar. It promised “tender elbows of pasta nestling in a complex and colorful cheese sauce.” Minna Vanags would no doubt have found it as easy as boiling an egg, but to Lucy it looked like the Everest of haute cuisine.