Bleeding Edge

8

Reg’s paranoia has the side effect of warping his judgment about places to eat. Maxine finds him in the strange crowded neighborhood around the Queensboro Bridge, sitting by the street window of something called Bagel Quest, eyeballing the foot traffic for undue interest in himself, behind him a dark, perhaps vast, interior from which no sound or light seems to emerge, and waitstaff rarely.

“So,” Maxine sez.

There’s a look on his face. “I’m being followed.”

“You’re sure?”

“Worse, they’ve been in my apartment too. Maybe on my computer.” Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.

“You could just let this go.”

“I could.” Beat. “You think I’m crazy.”

“I know you’re crazy,” sez Maxine, “which doesn’t mean you’re wrong about this. Somebody’s been showing some interest in me too.”

“Let’s see. I start looking under the surface at Ice’s company, next thing I know, I’m being followed, now they’re following you? You want to tell me there’s no connection? I shouldn’t be freaking out in fear of my life or anything.” With a suspended chord also, about to resolve.

“There’s something else,” she noodges. “Any of my business?”

A rhetorical question Reg ignores. “You know what a hawala is?”

“Sure… yeah, uh, in the movie Picnic (1956), right, Kim Novak comes floating down the river, all these local people put their hands up in the air and go—”

“No, no, Maxi please, it’s… they tell me it’s a way to move money around the world without SWIFT numbers or bank fees or any of the hassle you’d get from Chase and them. A hundred percent reliable, eight hours max. No paper trail, no regulation, no surveillance.”

“How is this possible?”

“Mysteries of the Third World. Family-type operations usually. All depending on trust and personal honor.”

“Gee, I wonder why I never ran across this in New York.”

“Hawaladars around here tend to be in import-export, they take their fees in the form of discounts on prices and stuff. They’re like good bookies, keep it all in their heads, something Westerners can’t seem to do, so at hashslingrz somebody has been hiding a lot of major transaction history down behind multiple passwords and unlinked directories and so forth.”

“You heard about this from Eric?”

“He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.”

“Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?”

“It’s, actually it’s a Furby.”

“Excuse me, a—”

“Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—”

“Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours hacks Furbys?”

“Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerance there for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.”

“Such as this hawala that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.”

“Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular hawala is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”

This is true. An offshore angle, with more dimensions than angles are supposed to have, has not escaped Maxine’s attention. She has found herself consulting current updates of the always useful Bribe Payers Index and its companion list the Corrupt Perceptions Index, which rank countries around the world for their likelihood of bent behavior, and hashslingrz seems to have dodgy linkages all over the map, particularly in the Mideast. Lately she’s been picking up certain tells for the well-known Islamic allergy to anything interest-bearing. Bond activity is rare to nonexistent. Instead of selling short, there is a tendency to go to elaborate sharia-compliant workarounds like arboon auctions. Why the concern for Muslim phobias about charging interest, unless…?

Unless Ice stands to make a bundle in the region, what else?

Convection currents in Maxine’s coffee keep bringing something to the surface just long enough for her to mutter “Hey, wait…” before submerging again too quickly to ID it. She isn’t about to put her finger in and explore. “Reg, say your guy cracks all the encryption. What are you planning to do with what you find?”

“Something’s up,” impatient, also anxious. “Maybe even something that’s got to be stopped.”

“Which you think is more serious than simple fraud. What could be that big of a deal?”

“You’re the expert, Maxine. If it was a classic fraud haven, Grand Cayman or whatever, it’d be one thing. But this is the Mideast, and somebody’s going to way too much trouble to keep secrets, as if Ice or somebody in his shop ain’t just squirreling it away but bankrolling something, something big and invisible—”

“And… funneling sums over to the Emirates in the Hefty Smurf range can’t be for some totally innocent reason, because…?”

“Because I keep trying to come up with innocent reasons and can’t. Can you?”

“I don’t do international intrigue, remember? Well, maybe Nigerian e-mails, but usually I’m down here with the bent baristas and the pigeon-drop artists.”

They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.

“Keepin that Tomcat in your purse there, I hope.”

“Oh, Reg. Maybe it’s you that should be carrying.”

“Maybe I should be finalizing travel plans, like, far, far away. Eric needless to say keeps getting more spooked the further into this he goes. Insists now on rendezvousing down in the Deep Web instead of in the subway, and frankly I’m a little reluctant.”

“What’s to be reluctant about?”

“Were you ever down there?”

“Not long ago. Seems like a nice secure place to meet.”

“You’re so comfortable with it, maybe you should be the one to go down there and talk to Eric. Cut out the middleman here.”

“Maybe, long as you don’t mind.” Is she thinking about hawalas, hashslingrz, even Reg’s personal safety, actually no, it’s that deco-derivative shuttle terminal of Lucas and Justin’s that might or might not get her access to DeepArcher. Whatever that turns out to be. She isn’t quite ready to admit it, but she’s already entertaining the first draft of a fantasy in which Eric, sherpa of the Deep Web, faithful and maybe even cute, helps her find her way through the maze. Nancy fuckin Drew, here. “Maybe if I made a realworld approach first. Face-to-face. See how much we trust each other.”

“Good luck. You think I’m paranoid? These days you even go near this guy, he freaks.”

“I can make it an accidental meeting. Pretty standard maneuver. Can you give me a list of his hangouts?”

“I’ll e-mail something to you.” And soon Reg, taking a quick gander around at the street, has gone sidling off in the direction of downtown, miles away in the springtime shimmer.

AMONG MAXINE’S MORE USEFUL SENSORS is her bladder. When she’s out of range of information she needs, she can go whole days without any particular interest in pissing, but when phone numbers, koans, or stock tips from which she’s likely to profit are close by, the gotta-go alarm has reliably steered her to enough significant restroom walls that she’s learned to pay attention.

This time she’s down in the Flatiron District when the alarm goes off. Against her better judgment, she steps into the dimly lit grease- and cigarette-smoke interior of Wall of Silence, once a tech-bubble hot spot, since fallen into greasyspoondom. The way to the restrooms is not as clearly marked as it could be. She finds herself wandering among customers at tables, who seem to be either unhappy couples or single men, possibly help-line candidates. One of whom, actually, now seems to be calling her name, with some urgency. Well, there’s urgency and there’s urgency. She squints through the gloom.

“Lucas?” Yep, and signs of seedy personal disarray even in this light. “You happen to know where they keep the toilet around here?”

“Hi, Maxi, listen, while you’re in there could you do me a favor—”

“You just broke up with somebody,” this being the kind of place you’d naturally choose for that, “and want to know how she’s doing. Sure. What’s her name?”

“Cassidy, but how did you—”

“And where is it?”

Back through the kitchen, down some stairs, around a couple of corners. Lit no more brightly than upstairs, and some would call this being considerate. There is a smell of cannabis purposefully alight. Maxine scans the short row of stalls. No blood coming from under the doors, no sounds of uncontrollable sobbing, good, good… “Yo Cassidy?”

“Who’s that?” from inside one of the stalls. “The bitch he’s dumping me for, no doubt.”

“Nah, thanks for the guess, but I’m in enough trouble already. Just gonna go in here for a minute,” stepping into the stall next to Cassidy’s.

“I should have known what was up the minute I saw this place,” Cassidy sez. “Better if we’d handled everything out in the street.”

“Lucas is having a little guilt, wants to know if you’re OK.”

“Not a problem, I came in here to piss, not open a vein. Lucas who?”

“Oh.”

“Figures, these fuckin clubs I keep ending up in. He told me Kyle.”

They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale, announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances, unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought about making. Meantime Cassidy is outlining some unsold pilot about dysfunctional dating south of 14th Street in which Lucas, near as Maxine can tell, only gets a walk-on. That’s until, inexplicably though only so for a moment, Cassidy is on to the topic of DeepArcher.

“Yeah, that splash screen,” Maxine kvells, “it’s awesome.”

“I designed it. Like that chick who did the tarot deck. Awesome and don’t forget hip,” half, but only half, ironic.

“Wait, awesome and hip, where have I heard that.”

Yep, turns out when she first met Lucas, Cassidy was working for hwgaahwgh.com.

“Did you have any kind of a contract with Lucas, Kyle, whatever?”

“No and I wasn’t doing it out of love, either. Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with, wrote the file, did the Java, didn’t look at it again. Next thing I remember is one of them saying holy shit it’s the edge of the world, but frankly I can’t see a way they’re going to build any traffic. If I was a new user, coming to it cold, I’d be like, Public Void Close in a real hurry and try to forget about it. Better if they go for the single customer, Gabriel Ice or somebody.”

Presently, through strange toilet ESP, the ladies emerge at the same moment from their stalls and have a look at each other. Maxine is not too surprised to find tats, piercings, hair of an orchid shade not on any map of the human genome, an age somewhat south of legal for anything. The way Cassidy’s looking back meanwhile makes Maxine feel like Hillary Clinton or something.

“Can you check upstairs and see if he’s still there?”

“Happy to.” She ascends into the murky bummersphere again. Yes he’s still there.

“Startin to get worried about both of you.”

“Lucas, she’s twelve. And you better start paying her royalties.”