Still, I address my uncle in Urdu, which the agents don't understand, swiping at what crumbs must be on my face. "Uncle, we must keep the café at all cost. It makes up our pride"
But Uncle Ahmer starts chuckling at the agents, and he sidles up to me, which means I am in danger of being pinched if I say the wrong thing.
"Shahzad, these USIC agents are confused" He laughs, too casually. "Did you know, Shahzad, that all this time, these men think you are sixteen? I tell them you are eighteen, and they want to see your birth certificate."
I cannot process so quickly his scheme. These agents know I am sixteen; they know everything about me from years of friendship with my father. They are looking at each other, not me, as if they are questioning how far they will carry an ill-begotten scheme of my uncle's.
"Please go over to the house and ask your aunt Hamera to find your birth certificate," Uncle says, nudging me sideways.
My real birth certificate will say I am sixteen. He means for me to go up the street to our less-than-honorable neighbor, Aman Somadi, pay him twenty American dollars, and have a birth certificate made to reflect eighteen years. I don't understand why Uncle would want me to lie about my age, or why the Americans are not objecting to this stupidness.
His suspicious behavior intensifies as he speaks very slowly, too casually. "Shahzad. Do you know what an internship is?"
I do. It means you work for a wealthy Karachi businessman for nothing. I already make money and don't see why I would give away my valuable skills for free.
"I don't know why these agents never mentioned to me before that you are eligible for an internship, Shahzad. I think it is because they perceived you have never attended high school. While you're at it, go dig up your latest report card."
So, I will need forty dollars. If I object, Uncle Ahmer will pinch me until I bruise, or stand on my foot until Drake's pie plasters the walls. But I don't want any USIC internship, especially since, gauging from the price Uncle Ahmer is holding to ... this internship is in New York and not Karachi.
My uncle is not bargaining for our café, I realize. He is bargaining for my life. I do not like this.
"Is anyone going to ask me what I will do? Being that I am in charge of my choices?" I ask. This is a very American argument, I have learned. Americans seem to back down if you imply they are infringing on your rights to choose.
Hodji does sigh but doesn't back down. "Shahzad, first and foremost, there is your health. You need American medicine—"
"I am healthy! I have bad asthma attacks maybe once a month!"
"You have them once a week! You only pass out once a month. That is not normal."
"A terrible thing, yes," says Uncle Ahmer with too much drama, since he is very accustomed to seeing me pass out. The sympathy behooves his position.
Hodji plops down in Uncle Ahmer's chair and looks weary tonight. "Look. You need an American hospital, American tests."
I shake my head. "You always say that if ever I go to America I can no longer be a v-spy. I don't suppose that has changed?"
They are quiet for such a long minute that I am stunned. The way American culture protects its young, I do not conceive of how this could change.
"If you're eighteen, there is one allowance for what Americans would consider work in ... the Hot Zone," Hodji stumbles. His fingers rake through his dark hair. "If it were Twain, the answer would be no, no, no. But Twain has my health benefits and a five-dollar co-pay for whatever might ail him"
Twain is Hodji's son, who is my age. He goes to private school in Manhattan and makes good marks. Sometimes Hodji slips and calls me Twain, usually when I am in the throes of asthma and he is panicking.
I realize the "Hot Zone" of which he speaks. I repeat my father's oft-spoken words: "Computers have blurred the line between child and adult, because in the land of computers, children are the men, and the men are the children."
"Correct," Hodji says, though he will not look at me. "But I'm out of my comfort zone here. It's one thing to pay a Pakistani kid for v-spying in his backyard. It's another to put him on an American payroll to do it on Long Island."
See, he knows my age to be sixteen. He is pretending he doesn't know, probably because this internship would get me some medical benefits. One reason for the start of USIC is that it can do faster work, because it will not take years to check credentials, as do the FBI and CIA. I now see Uncle's motivation for the false documents, though I do not have any such motivation myself. My father would not want huge buildings falling on me, or for me to accidentally drink the very poisoned water I seek out. Roger can think that Colony One is in Africa all he wants. I do not.
"Things have changed since my father spoke of his hopes for me to follow him," I remind them.
Roger ignores this fact. "It's actually a safer situation for you, Shahzad ... if we can make USIC see it that way. It's nothing you haven't done over here in Pakistan. It's actually the same thing, only in an Internet café on Long Island. If you are on the payroll, at least we could get you adequate protection, whereas over here, you're wide open. One mistake, and we could all be chopped liver."
"USIC owns this Internet café?" Uncle asks.
"No. We pay them not to ask questions," Roger says. "The managers know we've been using their intranet structure to capture the screens of several well-known subversives who chat from there regularly."
"Trinitron," I hear myself say.
Roger grins as if my guess is remarkable, though it is nothing. Trinitron is the Internet café on whose server I have just found VaporStrike. I often find VaporStrike using terminals with Trinitron's embedded codes. He has two friends who visit the café, also, known only to us as log-ins Catalyst and PiousKnight.
So ... Trinitron is serving as a spy trap for USIC, I realize. They want me to work there, doing very similar things to what I do here. Somehow, I do not think it will be as much the same as they are leading me to believe.
Roger continues, "Thanks to Trinitron, other v-spies have picked up quite a bit of intelligence. Still, we can't arrest VaporStrike or either of his friends. We can't even bring them in for questioning."
"Why not?" Uncle asks.
"If we alert them to our interest in them by arresting one, we'll end up shutting their mouths tighter than a steel drum," Roger says. "Better to give them enough freedom so that they don't know they're on a leash. We've found out a lot about VaporStrike, Catalyst, and PiousKnight since you first started sending us chatter, Shahzad."
I don't allow my eyes to jerk to his. While I have been unable to turn up any information on their identities, I have sensed that USIC had some luck via other sources. I pretend only mild interest as Roger reveals some intelligence.
"We know their names, aliases, travels, educations, criminal histories—all that good stuff. We know they were not involved in the 9/11 attacks, at least not directly. But VaporStrike and PiousKnight were in Yemen in 2000 when the USS Cole was bombed, and Catalyst was in Kenya in '98 when the U.S. Embassy was bombed. Now they're all together online, sending god knows what around the Internet on a daily basis. Coincidence? We don't think so. Of course, we could arrest any of them tomorrow, based on the chatter you captured." He jerks his head toward me but turns his eyes to Uncle, who makes an emphatic statement.
"Get out a hacksaw. Start taking off their heads. They'd do the same to us soon enough, if they'd any clue what we're up to." He strikes a match hard and lights one of his foul-smelling Pall Malls. Fortunately, he turns to gaze into the crack of fading light between the shade and the window and sends his smoke away from me.
I see fire smoldering behind Roger's restless eyes. "If I loved living outside the law and had the stomach for inflicting pain, I'd have gone CIA instead of FBI. Nah. God made me to uphold the law."
"Me, too," Hodji agrees, as if they have talked about this many times.
"You're stuck with us." Roger sighs, but there is resolve in it. "As far as we're concerned, these things have to be handled delica
tely. We're not pulling them in yet—especially considering that we're not going to drill healthy teeth to try to get information or set fires under their chairs. We're going to wait and watch them until they tell us some critical things. First: Who are they working for and what are they about? We can't find an association to any known terror cell. Second: What kind of poison is in Red Vinegar? Is it really infecting people, or is it a hoax? And finally: Who is Omar? Where is Omar? I think if we can find Omar, we'll find Colony One, we'll find the exact nature of Red Vinegar, and we'll find a sleeper cell that wants to kill lots of innocent people."
After my thoughtful silence, I return us to the point of the conversation. "It doesn't take a genius to capture their screens and script their chatter," I remind them. "I can continue doing that from here."
"The chatter won't script." Roger smiles knowingly. My story to him about disappearing chatter made more sense than he was letting on. "USIC had an agent in Trinitron last night, trying to script VaporStrike and a crony. He says they're using some homemade program that has a double whammy. First, it makes chatter disappear. He saw it himself. The chatter appears, and within thirty seconds the monitor blinks. Then the page reads like it was never there."
So he believes my story of VaporStrike and Omar0324.
Hodji continues, "Apparently, all the publicity of the 9/11 terrorists making their plans on the Internet has scared them. The terror cell has this one way to continue communicating without detection."
I examine the concept of disappearing chatter, frantically searching my head for the programming sequences that could bring this to pass. It is like Internet disappearing ink. I think of a few possible lines of programming, but is the command with the sender or the server or both?
Even virtual chat rooms create a temporary script that lasts until the speakers exit. I can capture much of that with my searches, which I run up to twenty minutes apart. To capture chatter that erases from the script as soon as the intended eyes behold it? I would have to be everywhere at once, constantly.
"All chatter about Colony One appeared to cease the second week in February," I mutter. "But it hasn't ceased at all, if this is true."
Hodji chuckles without smiling. "It's true. We're being outsmarted."
Roger continues, "That's only problem number one. I said they've got a program with a double whammy. The chatter that's posting and disappearing is not usually in either English or Arabic. The other v-spy said that sometimes what they post is in our alphabet, sometimes in ... god knows what alphabets. It looks like they're sharing a massive translation program."
"Of some lesser-known languages," I mutter in awe. "Probably translating to lesser-known alphabets ... which makes a keyword search of chat rooms impossible."
"That's what we think. Because we can't script it, we need somebody on-site who can look at any number of languages and get the gist of what these guys are saying on the spot."
I groan, thinking of people somewhere in this world drinking the water about which VaporStrike brags with such audacity. I ought to be willing to do anything.
Uncle Ahmer tries to pull me aside, but I shake loose from him in a panic. "Tell Trinitron to just send me the hard drive. I will find the stupid program! Even if they ran it off a disk, the evidence of its behavior will be in the activity. What have you over there? A smattering of idiots?"
This time Uncle Ahmer is not so gentle. He tosses me into the now-dim café, though he fans his hand in front of my face, as if this will help at all. He whispers in a gentle tone.
"Shahzad, listen to me. Get rid of your asthma before you give your aunt Hamera a heart attack and I suffer another loss. Get the American education that your father wanted you to have. You can live with your aunt Alika and cousin Inas, go to school with Inas, and work at night, when the extremists come out of their holes. I will send you money regularly."
For once I see in his face something like affection. He does not often show this. I would think this was about the vast fortune USIC is implying he will get, except for this rare look in his eyes.
But I have not seen my aunt Alika or my cousin Inas since I was three. And I am mindful of one of Uncle's favorite sayings: The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. I am familiar with my uncle, with my daily routines, with asthma, even with entertaining dangerous extremists under my own roof.
Yet America is something quite different. I read online once that Americans see Vietnam as a war and not a place. Well, I see America as falling buildings and broken gas lines. It is a series of terrible news photos that have haunted my home page for months and remind me constantly of my family's loss.
Roger comes to me. He reads my eyes and tries to keep our thoughts focused. "It's been the tradition for subversives to speak in code and make only vague allusions to their schemes online, Shahzad. But with them sharing some weird software and feeling this much protection, who knows what they're talking about. What we're missing."
I try to swallow, but I have no spit. Only a sore and rattling chest.
"We've been fruitlessly searching Africa for Colony One and have turned up nothing. You still think VaporStrike's Dark Continent is America and not Africa? I don't believe that, but would you like to prove us wrong? Here's your chance."
"So I can go there and die myself?" I turn from them to glimpse the setting sun.
Uncle says in Urdu, so they won't understand, "You're being a small boy with a wild imagination. Go get a birth certificate before I kick a second crack into your ass. Get a transcript also that makes you to be in high school. Take two twenty-dollar bills from the coffee can in the house. Go."
So, I am to go to school and do this internship at night. VaporStrike, PiousKnight, and Catalyst have been called by Hodji "night crawlers" who only chat after dark, so it would work out—for USIC. My heart is troubled.
I decide to argue this out later when my head is clear. I go to pay for false documents, but only so I can enjoy taking deep breaths under the cover of night. I don't like having to watch the Americans gloat.
NINE
CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
1:15 P.M.
I SAT IN MR. GLENN'S law office, watching him shuffle through paper after paper. I was glad to be out of the house again, having spent four nights by myself. That isn't to say I had spent three days utterly alone. Neighbors, teachers, and coworkers who heard the news rang the doorbell, dropping off food and offering kind words.
I'd ask them in but would find myself sitting at the edge of my chair, though I was far more comfortable than I would have been if I hadn't scrubbed the entire house from top to bottom after I got better. The mysterious flu finally left me at dawn the day after Aleese died, but I would use tiredness as an excuse if visitors started staying too long. People left after ten minutes or so, probably mystified that I wasn't completely falling apart.
"Again, Cora, let me say that you don't have to sell the house yet if you're not ready." Mr. Glenn gathered the papers into a stack that I was supposed to sign.
I still felt oddly at peace. Maybe it was the fact that I had on stockings and a black suit, with my hair twisted up in the French knot I usually save for concert choir. Maybe those things helped me finally feel older, more ready to make decisions.
"It's all right, Mr. Glenn. Really."
I had overheard the words "the wrecking-ball house" and "that Holman eyesore" a few times around town. It totally stung. I wanted it torn down as badly as the next person, and I'd had no idea how much the property alone was worth until Mr. Blumberg, my next-door neighbor, had mentioned it when he and Mrs. Blumberg stopped over the morning after Aleese passed, putting homemade ice cream in the freezer.
It had not been a tactless conversation with the Blumbergs, by any means. In fact, I had brought up selling the house, stating a longtime fantasy of owning one of the little condos down in the meadows. We ended with Mr. Blumberg saying that when I was ready, he would buy the property and add twelve thousand d
ollars to the market value to make sure I would "have enough." He was a stockbroker, ridiculously wealthy, Oma had always said. And the fact that he couldn't wait to get our little ranch shoveled away to extend his property didn't seem offensive to me. I understood.
I signed for Mr. Glenn. Paper after paper. First and foremost, I signed emancipation papers proclaiming me an independent for the three months until I was eighteen, so I could legally make decisions concerning Aleese's cremation, my finances, and the future. I read the fine print of most of the documents and understood more than I thought I would.
"Mr. Blumberg says to make sure you understand you can stay and finish the school year. Take your time. Find a condo or something you really like. I will help you. He will help you."
I watched Mr. Glenn, curious about his doe-eyed look. I noticed that all the people who stopped in for brief visits at the house had had this same gaze, as if they were feeling something I couldn't quite understand.
"I'll ... um ... keep in touch about my search. I'm definitely staying in Trinity Falls, so...," I babbled, signing the last page. I could imagine the little condos quite clearly because I'd dreamed about having one all to myself since I was about eight years old. I took long walks to watch the construction and the young couples move into them. They were probably expensive with their view of the islands, but our property value was more than enough to buy a condo, even if all a new owner wanted to do was knock down the "eyesore."
I could go to college, too, at Astor College, fifteen minutes away. All the while, I could be a part of this Trinity Falls I had attached myself to through a lens. I could do it as a person with a clean house, as a respectable person. No matter who was to hear stories about Aleese from the police or the paramedics, I could prove I was different. That had become important while I was cleaning.
"Great. Well, let's go to the service," he said, standing up and looking at his watch.