Signwave (7 page)

“But this Benton guy, he must have heard something, right?”

“Not from us. There was this piece in
Undercurrents
, though. That's how we found out one single corporation was buying up all that property.”

“How
you
found out. So you weren't their source?”

“Well…I guess I was. I mean, we had a message sent to them. Just an e-mail. We wanted people to start thinking about…You know, just like you said: why would one owner want that land? But I told you, this wasn't like a formal meeting or anything. Benton just came up to me in the coffee shop.”

“Doing you a favor, huh?”

“That's how he made it sound.”

“Okay.”

“Dell…”

“Don't fuss, Dolly. I just need to find out some things. And, me, I won't make
any
sound.”

—

I
'm no private detective.

In a village like the one Dolly and I live in, the phone book is where you look for names and addresses. The little book even has a separate section for businesses. Every kind of business you could imagine, from boatbuilding to aroma therapy.
Debt-collection agencies are listed, too—probably the closest thing to “investigators” around here.

I thought about that. Maybe there wasn't much need for private detectives anywhere—not anymore, not with the Internet offering all kinds of services, from skip tracing to “background.” But local phone books will always exist, if only for advertising—a person looking for a lawyer will try the lawyer who took out the full-page ad first.

“It's like your own Web site?” I asked, trying to understand.

“No,” Dolly said. “Your own Web site, it's called a ‘domain' for a reason. You actually own it. Which means you have to pay for it. First you register the name, then you pay to
keep
the name. There's been a ton of lawsuits over people trying to use a celebrity's name for themselves. Tova says there's even a special court to decide who has the right to a domain name.”

“So this Facebook, the whole thing is one domain?”

“Sure.”

“Then nobody actually owns their own Facebook page?”

“What difference does that make?” one of her girls said. “It's not like they
charge
you for having a Facebook page. It's free.”

How would these kids understand jungle law?
I thought.
Nothing's “for free.” And it's only yours for as long as you can hold it
. But I just shrugged, as if I had no answer to her question. Then I covered up by asking the girl, “Couldn't people just make up whatever they wanted?”

“Well, of
course
,” she said, looking to the other girls for confirmation. “There's a whole TV show about that.”

I just walked away before I asked any more stupid questions. I knew I'd never understand why all these people walked around glued to their cell phones, or texting madly about every tiny thing in their tiny lives, or carrying tablets so they'd be able to have a “conversation” with someone they didn't even know.

Some of their phones could actually do
all
of that. Like Dolly said, they had to be “connected” all the time. When I asked her how they could be connected to people who maybe didn't even exist, she gave me one of those Parisian shrugs that could mean anything, from “It doesn't matter” to “Who cares?”

“What if someone stuck a GPS chip in those phones? They'd know every place anybody was, anytime they wanted to know.”

“They
all
have those chips, Dell.”

“But…”

“Oh, they don't mind. And it's supposed to be a safety feature.”

“Like if they're injured? Or even kidnapped?”

“No.” My wife chuckled. “In case they lose their phone.”

—

A
jungle doesn't have to mean palm trees—it could be anything from a desert to a housing project.

A jungle is a place where your life is worth no more than your ability to protect it.

Even in this beautiful little village, jungle rules might apply—especially when privacy and self-protection were always at risk, thanks to the mania of some people to “stay connected.”

This seemed insane to me. When I was still a child, I learned one thing that would never change:
all
secrets have value…to someone, somewhere.

—

I
've never been arrested.

I don't ever expect to be. My fingerprints have never been taken, and the lump of scar tissue on my left wrist could
look like anything from an industrial accident to a botched tattoo-removal.

In truth, that scar was from a branding iron. Yes, I've never been arrested. Not by the police. But I have been captured, and my captors knew mercenaries don't take prisoners.

They liked their work so much they prolonged it. My screams excited them as a woman might excite a man. All it took was tolerating the pain a little longer than they thought I could. Passing out came easily to me, but not as easily as the confidence of my captors came to them.

One of them, I knew, would return on his own. And that his death would be noiseless.

Torture isn't for information; it's for enjoyment. That had been part of my early training with La Légion, that knowledge. Within that knowledge was the certain truth—no torture victim is ever allowed to outlive his value. When death is the only possible outcome of any encounter, the most valuable knowledge of all is that it doesn't have to be
your
death.

I knew what Luc's work had been after the Nazis occupied France. I always heard his voice in French—
“Les Boches ont fait de certains d'entre nous des putains ou des assassins, à moins qu'ils n'aient fait que révéler ce que nous portions déjà en nous”
—but it always turned to English, as if I knew his native language should never leave my mouth: “The Nazis made some of us into whores, and some into murderers…or maybe they just brought out what had always been within some of us.”

Dolly was quite a few years younger than me—a gap that seemed to widen every year. But she'd learned the truth of torture at a very young age, working in war zones where there were no sides, just enemies. Working with a rape bomb always attached to her belt, under her bloodstained white smock.

I don't know why my mind went to that place as soon as I walked in our back door that afternoon. The big TV screen was
showing the sentencing of some creature who had captured women and kept them prisoner for years. Usually, the sound was muted, because Dolly wanted to follow world events in real time, and most of the “news” stations had scrolls running along the bottom of the picture. But this time, the sound was on—I could hear some woman reciting the details of the horrors perpetrated upon her, as if what she said would affect the sentence the creature was about to receive.

Rascal could protect Dolly from a lot of people, but not once they had been allowed inside the house. That had happened, years before. Dolly never knew why that foul young man had been so “disturbed” that he'd blown himself up with a rudimentary pipe bomb he had been building in his bedroom. Some of her girls even cried when the news got out.

Dolly wouldn't have expected tears from me. My wife had no respect for my knowledge in some areas of life—every not-for-work piece of clothing I owned was something she'd bought for me. But she knew I'd seen that young man in our house, more than once. She knew I'd lied, cheated, stolen, burned, killed. All in my past, but not erased from my skill set.

Dolly knew I didn't do any of that work for fun. And she knew that if a roomful of people contained one person who
might
harm her, and I was short on time, blowing the whole place up would have been my solution.

I knew she was already kicking herself for just saying the name “Benton” to me.

—

T
here's always more to any town than its image on a tourist's postcard.

Who would advertise that the underbelly of their little village is no different from that of any big city? Clean air, pure
water, no traffic congestion, friendly people, sights to see
—that
was the picture they wanted to paint.

But if you were tuned to the right frequencies, you'd know that picture wasn't so much altered as it was selective—what it would never show was what every spot on this planet has in common: predators and prey.

I don't mean “crime.” If you read the local newspaper, you'd be so confident of your own safety that you'd never close your windows or lock your doors. But nobody with functioning brain cells would confuse promotional swill with what Parisians would call
reportage
.

The collective who put
Undercurrents
on the Internet had built a reputation for telling the truth, and anyone who cared about “news” went there for it. That's probably one of the reasons for its reputation: not just that it was free, but that it wouldn't run ads or endorse candidates. “It doesn't even demand you feed it cookies,” I once heard one of Dolly's girls say, amazement in her voice.

Later, when I asked Dolly what that meant, she told me that all these “free” Web sites always got something in return, some little packet of information that was worth money to someone. “Data mining,” she called it. “Most kids are so used to it that they set their browsers to accept cookies and run Java scripts, so they don't have to wait to log on to some site.”

I just nodded.

“Why are you asking me, Dell? I know you have…I mean, you know all about this stuff, don't you?”

“Only secondhand,” I told her. And that was the truth: Once I'd answered his coded questions, the cyber-ghost who prowled through “secure” networks undetected had helped me many times. First, he told me I would be getting something in the mail.

Not mail at the house: I had to drive almost three hours
to pick up a key hidden exactly where the instructions said it would be waiting. I used that key to open a box in a little post office that stayed open around the clock. Not to sell stamps or anything: the only part that stayed open was the area where the boxes were.

Inside that box was an envelope with four more keys. Each one opened a different box—the largest size they had—in that same place. When I was finished, I had four sealed packets, each bubble-wrapped inside one of those Priority Mail cardboard boxes.

Back in my basement, I put all five keys in my little hydraulic press, and waited until they were fused into a single lump. Careful work with a scalpel opened each of the boxes. The four pieces inside snapped together like one of those Lego sets, then became two halves. There was no way to make a mistake; every connector was color-coded. Still, I worked slowly and carefully.

When I was done, I had some kind of little computer. Besides a keyboard, it only had two buttons: an orange disk at top left, and a yellow one at bottom right. Like some kind of fax machine that could only dial one number.

The first time I pushed the orange disk, the screen lit up.

||

I typed in one letter.

|>Y<|

And hit the yellow button. The response was instant; the instruction explicit.

||

As before, I just typed:

|>Y<|

Then I saw:

||

I had to read that a couple of times before I understood that the ghost could send messages to me through our local cable network, but any attempt to trace the source of what I'd receive would be futile.

As soon as I typed in
|>Y<|
the little screen went dead.

I disassembled the machine. The fused-together post-office keys went into an acid bath. When it cooled, I pulled the container out of its housing by the handle. After dark, I put it into a channel I'd cut into a big rock in the woods behind our house, then poured metal-eating liquid over the whole thing.

—

I
would never waste the ghost's time on anything I could do for myself.

Apparently, this guy who'd said something to Dolly was considered a great catch for the village, a big fish they'd lured in. There'd been plenty of newspaper coverage a few years back. George B. (Byron) Benton was born in 1969, to John and Barbara Benton of Bethesda, Maryland. Graduated from Princeton 1988, then an M.B.A. at the Wharton School in 1990. Worked at Thackery & Associates in New York City until 1999, when he moved to Portland and founded PNW Upstream, a hedge fund.

According to the newspaper's back files, he had a waterfront house on Lake Oswego—about as upscale as it gets—but he'd visited this place a few times and “fallen in love with life on the Coast.” Permanently relocated here in 2006.

The photograph they ran with the story wouldn't be what he looked like today. A studio shot, white male, late thirties, stylish haircut, carefully trimmed mustache, very nice suit. Whatever he looked like now, he wouldn't have that mustache—nobody around here wears one unless he also has a beard in a matching color.

All I could find out about Thackery & Associates was that it was an investment bank with a long, unsullied history. Never had to be “bailed out,” like some with bigger names.

Typing “PNW Upstream” and “Hedge Fund” into the search engine got me the simplest Web site imaginable—the equivalent of a listing in the phone book. But it confirmed the date it was opened, its managing director—Benton—and a street address in downtown Portland. There seemed to be no way to invest, or even to ask about investing.

That was as far as I could go on my own. I activated the machine in the basement, typed in everything I already knew, then: