“I read his manifesto,” I tell Toto. “You’re right. He sounds like a real asshole.”
“I was worried. At first, he sounded kinda like you when you would talk about Snowden, how the whistleblowers and leakers were genuine heroes. You know, how it’s bullshit that the hacker who exposed the Steubenville rapists is being charged with more jail time than the actual rapists? This guy seems cut from darker shit, though.”
“Yeah.”
Norton Haswell. Born in California. Nice, sunny suburbs. School with a nice computer lab. Honor student. Rich parents. His choice of colleges. Companies lined up to show off their pool tables and “alternate” working environments.
“You’d think, the sort of life he had,” Toto says, “that he’d relax and enjoy it.”
I snort. “He thinks he’s an original thinker, but the stuff he posts is all the usual techno-libertarian talking points. Until he invested in that offshore floating haven cruise ship—some kind of techno-utopia away from ‘interference and regulation’—he was safe and comfy in his nice offices. But after he lost all his money, he blamed anything else but his own dumb decisions.”
“Well, he didn’t have to bother mixing with riffraff like me on public transportation. Had a company shuttle pick him up at his sidewalk every day so he could code on his way to work.” Toto sounds bitter. “Someone like
me
says the things he does with a drawl—drives a pickup and stocks up too many guns—you get raided. For sure. But you nerd up and say the same anti-government shit, and people toss venture capital at you.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s probably a mirror image of me if I hadn’t grown up in the cold.” Shivering away with a mother who literally drank herself to death one winter when we couldn’t seal the gaps to keep its icy fingers out. A lot of free lunch and foster care later and here I was. No vested stock options. “There’s a lot of stuff in his manifesto I could have written.”
“You’re not Norton Haswell. You’re not trying to kill people you disagree with,” Toto says.
“Point,” I say. I had never hacked the lane-keeping and pre-crash emergency functions of a senator’s luxury car to try and kill him. Haswell, though, had. It was the act that led to him getting tagged with that fat, juicy FBI reward.
Toto points at the road ahead. “It’s all politics and bullshit, and we all have the right to get as worked up as we want. This is fucking America. It’s what we
do
, man. But ain’t nothing worth killing people over until people’s being killed on your side. You make the first move, it ain’t disagreement, it ain’t the mess of democracy—you’re a fucking traitor. A terrorist. And that always leads to the response coming back in kind. And then, basically, you’ve just shit your own bed.”
I grunt. “Okay. Let’s find the mealy little fucker before he does something really newsworthy like actually killing a senator.”
And Toto’s right. I’m feeling kinda righteous about this hunt.
• • • •
The Jitters Cafe in a small town in Nebraska offers free WiFi with purchase. They print a temporary, one-hour password out on the receipt, which I have to squint at as I type the long string into my laptop because the nines and sixes, zeros and Os, all look the same.
This gets me onto their internal network.
Toto sits over by the door, carefully eating a ham and cheese breakfast bagel (no bagel please) with knife and fork, an oversized never-ending mug of coffee steaming behind it.
“You really think he’s posting anonymous rage-comments on news articles from a coffee shop in Nebraska?” he’d asked earlier as we’d eased down the small main street, huddled against the plains like a modern version of some old west movie set.
“The linguistic fingerprints match up.”
It’s the little, stupid things that get us, isn’t it? Haswell ranting away in his free time. He could be holed up in any of the small apartments on the second story of the old brick buildings. Or in one of the trailers on the edge of town. He was coming into town to use the free internet to argue.
And maybe other things.
He’d only been here a couple days. Probably moving soon. Toto’d gotten us here faster than we could have flown, with the connections and delays.
Packet sniffer up and running
, I texted Toto.
After a casual minute, Toto checks his phone and taps a reply.
Don’t need it
.
I look up from my screen at Toto, and he nods toward the bathroom at the end of a hallway. Someone’s just come out and sat back down at a laptop. I frown. Really? It doesn’t look like our guy, but Toto nods at him again.
Go on
, Toto texts.
I walk over to our quarry, who is thoroughly glued to his screen. He’s grown out his hair, has a Huskers cap skewed off to the side, and is sporting a green flannel shirt under dirty overalls that belong to a local utility company. Apparently his bathroom break has dammed up a flurry of thoughts, because he’s typing at top speed, face scrunched up, attacking the keyboard.
“Norton Haswell, I’m—”
I never really get too far along introducing myself. He rabbits quicker than I would have thought for a fellow keyboarder, slamming his shoulder into my stomach to get around me.
Coughing, my lungs flattened, I stagger half-heartedly along the hallway after him. People stand up, concerned. This is open carry territory, and I don’t figure Toto wants to get shot, so I shout “Bounty hunters! He’s wanted for skipping bail and is on the wanted list.”
As I shout—more like wheeze—all that, Toto steps up and clotheslines Haswell in the chest, then, just as expertly, catches him on the way down like a dancer doing a romantic dip. He casually bear hugs the man to him so I can put the cuffs on.
Toto leads him to the back of the car while I leave my card with the baristas. We don’t need the local cops coming in hot and bothered.
“Got lucky,” I murmur as we tear out of town.
“We were due,” Toto says.
“Still think we should dump him off with the locals.” I look up the mirror, where Haswell glowers at us but says nothing.
“No.” Toto shakes his head. “You know they’ll just as likely lose our processing paperwork and try to hand the claim over to a buddy. Trust me.”
“Just because you grew up in one good-ole-boy small town doesn’t mean you know how they all work,” I tell him.
But he doesn’t answer. He’s done hashing this one out. We argued about this on the way: Toto doesn’t trust the feds to give us the reward in a timely manner. Haswell’s a double win. He’s got the FBI reward on him, but he has a substantial bond as well. When he tried to kill that senator by hacking his car, he was jailed. Got out on bond, then skipped.
If we return him to the county he skipped out from, then no matter how long the FBI paperwork takes, no matter what actually happens, we get the percentage of the bond we’re due.
Toto settles into his comfortable altered driving state while I sit and fidget. My work is done. There’s nothing to do but wait for the long drive to pass. I load up an old, favored RPG on the laptop and start working through a side quest.
After hours of frosty silence, interrupted only by the wail of my vanquished enemies from the laptop, Haswell finally breaks the car’s quiet. His voice is guttural, laced with rage, and a little confusion. “How’d you find me?”
I smile and pause the game.
One master to another. But as I open my mouth, Toto looks over, his eyes ungluing as he comes out of his drive trance, and he shakes his head. Don’t reveal our methods. Don’t offer anything.