Red Team Blues, page 20
I left messages for some of the best phys-sec and electronic countermeasures people I knew, and then when they returned my calls, I asked them obliquely about who they’d hire to sanitize the Unsalted Hash and confirm that it was free of cameras, implants, mics, malware, and other nasty surprises, including the kind of stuff that unspecified DHS agencies had access to.
The consensus was not to even bother trying. Sell it or scrap it, but don’t trust it. At a minimum, take it to a trustworthy security mechanic to have the firmware on every assembly and subassembly re-flashed, right down to the tire-pressure sensors and their integrated wireless interfaces. Even then …
I walked down to the DHS lot on Golden Gate Avenue. My lawyer had negotiated intensely for the Hash’s return, and the DHS lady who signed it out to me was impressed with what a cool piece of rolling stock it was.
The Hash’s exterior, mirrors, and windshield had accumulated a convincing coat of grime, and the air inside was compellingly stale, but still, driving it back was a spooky, jumpy experience, and there was a moment at a red light where the crashing sound from some nearby construction site convinced me that a bomb had just gone off in the bus and I was about to die. By the time I realized I was still alive, the light was green, and six drivers behind me were leaning on their horns. I pulled over.
When my hands stopped shaking, I got it the rest of the way to the Fairmont. The valet took the keys, and the concierge invited me into his office to discuss my needs. He assured me that it would be no problem to contract with some bonded packer-movers to attend the Hash at the Fairmont’s loading dock (it was too tall for the underground garage) and get everything aboard transferred to a nearby storage locker. He offered to get three competitive quotes. I passed him a $1,000 tip and said I’d trust his judgment, but I wanted it done fast. He pocketed the money with a straight face and calmly thanked me. I thanked him right back.
22
It took me three more days to work up the nerve to call Ruth. That said something about my internal weather. I tried to decide what, but I couldn’t.
“Hello, you,” she said. It came out cold.
I was suddenly very self-conscious, and not just about what I might say to her—I was convinced that Waterman Bates and maybe his Treasury rivals were listening in, recording, analyzing. As paranoid fantasies go, it was more plausible than most.
“My thing, the thing I couldn’t talk about? It’s over.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, I’m sure that’s a big load off your shoulders.”
“As a matter of fact, it is. It wasn’t pleasant, and the fact that I couldn’t see you or call you made it even more unpleasant.”
“You say the nicest things.” She didn’t sound like she meant it.
“You’ve got every right to be pissed.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Marty, I was just in the middle of something. Is there anything else?”
“No. Yes. Just … I’m going away for a while, but no mystery this time. I’m, uh, I’m going to go audit a freshman economics class at UMKC.”
She laughed. It was a merry sound, and hearing it was a balm. “That is either the weirdest lie you’ve ever told, or the weirdest truth.”
“The latter. I’m flying to Kansas City the day after tomorrow, through O’Hare.”
“Marty, why?”
“Ruth, I can’t say I can explain it. It’s a dear old friend’s last year teaching, and she’s giving it a lot of effort. But that’s not the whole story. I feel like I spent forty years cultivating a hell of a worm’s-eye view, and now that it’s over, I want to go and get the bird’s-eye view. Like finishing up a long hike by pulling up a map and seeing all that terrain you just covered.”
“When you put it that way, it almost makes sense.”
“Yeah,” I said. “On a good day, it makes sense to me, too.” I drew a breath, then let it out. “Like I said, my last job, the one for Danny Lazer, it set me up pretty well. I’m about to start a new phase of my life, and after the stuff that I just went through, I need some kind of formal terminus.”
“You make it sound like you’re in mourning. Marty, you’re rich, retired, good-looking, and you’ve got all your teeth and all your joints. There’s damned few people who can say the same.”
“That’s a good way to put it, Ruth. To be honest, that’s kind of what I was hoping for. I knew you’d be the friend who could tell it to me straight.”
She sighed. “My dear old friend Martin Hench, I will always tell it to you straight. Text me your address in Missouri and I’ll send you a postcard and maybe you can send me one back, and maybe when you’ve finished your postgraduate economic studies in the frozen Midwest, you and I can get together and celebrate your liberation from toil.”
I felt a pang so sharp I couldn’t talk for a moment. I was entirely certain that by the time I got back from UMKC, Ruth Schwartzburg would be romantically spoken for. How could she not? I almost canceled the trip right then. But I didn’t. Instead, I told her how much I was looking forward to our correspondence, and after I hung up the phone, I texted her the address of the house that Raza had found for me and that the KPMG kid had rented for me.
* * *
The guy who worked on the Hash was an ex–Cult of the Dead Cow hacker who’d done a turn in the NSA before starting his own consultancy, recruiting about twenty of the brightest kids he could find at DEF CON and HOPE. His name was Hamish, but he insisted on calling himself Baron Von Rijsttafel and painstakingly correcting people’s pronunciation so they’d be sure to get the pun. You’d think a fifty-year-old man would have gotten tired of that joke, but you’d be wrong.
The Baron’s kids had worked on the Hash at NIMBY, an East Bay hackerspace that was the winter home to a couple of dozen large Burning Man mutant vehicles and art cars. They were still swarming it when I pulled up in the Leaf. They reluctantly dismounted her, slid their mechanics’ crawlers out from beneath her, and used cordless power drivers to rivet the access hatches back into place, disconnecting funny-looking cables from networking and diagnostic ports whose existence I’d only dimly suspected.
The Baron himself came out to give me a tour, detailing all the different subsystems they’d triple-checked and restored to factory defaults. They’d added up the power consumption of every component and then painstakingly checked to make sure that every microwatt was accounted for, and they’d done a close EMF and physical sweep.
“If there’s anything bad in there, it’s small, independently powered, and intermittent,” he said.
One of his kids, a Black girl with Afro-puffs and a ripped Palantir T-shirt, added, “Course, there’s plenty of bad stuff that fits that description.” I assumed the T-shirt was ironic.
The Baron nodded solemnly. “There are,” he said. “There certainly are. That’s the problem with blue teaming it—you need to be perfect, while—”
“The red team only has to find a single error,” I finished. “Yeah. Send me an invoice?”
“Course,” he said. “Net sixty, but I’ll knock two percent off if you pay in fourteen.”
“I’ll pay you today, you send me the invoice now.”
“Sold,” he said. I shook hands with each of the kids who’d worked on the Hash, and then aimed it across the Bay Bridge.
* * *
I unhitched the Leaf back at the Fairmont and handed the keys to the valet and then drove the Hash into the Tenderloin. Parking it was hard, but after a half hour’s circling, I found a spot only a couple of blocks away from the empty lot on Eddy. Before I debarked, I walked its length. Empty and freshly stripped and reassembled, it was revealed as the ridiculous rock star’s confection it had always been—an overpriced toy, finished in marble, mirrors, and tropical hardwood. I should have called it the White Elephant. It was still worth mid–six figures, on paper, but what kind of idiot would pay that?
I stood at the edge of the empty lot for a moment. I’d been half convinced that the tents would be gone, had wondered whether a private eye could find three homeless people on the streets of San Francisco with nothing more to go on than their first names.
But the tents were there, the carts, too. I drew up on the tents and called out: “Martín? Tonya? Laquan?”
“Gimme a minute,” came Martín’s rasp from deep inside the tent.
He got out and stretched painfully, then limped over to me. He saw me watching him limp and grimaced. “Fucked my leg up,” he said. He looked me over. “You look like your troubles are over.”
I started to say, Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, and then I stopped myself and said, “Yeah, I guess they are.”
“Congratulations.”
Tonya emerged from the tents then, followed by Laquan. She looked like she’d aged a decade since I’d last seen her, grief still etched into her features. Laquan didn’t look more haunted than he had before, but he’d been plenty haunted then.
“Hi, folks,” I said.
“Hello, Milt,” Tonya said.
Laquan managed a shy nod.
“Look,” I said, “it’s like this. I’m leaving town, and one of the things I need to deal with before I go is this mobile home I’d been living in, a bus. And, well … I thought you folks could help with that, if I was to turn it over to you.”
“You want to sell us your bus?” Martín said.
“No,” I said. “I just want to sign it over to you.”
“Why do you want to give us a bus, Milt?” Martín’s suspicion was palpable. I hadn’t really considered the possibility that this would come up.
“I guess it’s because you did me a kindness, and you have things pretty rough, and I don’t need the bus anymore.”
“Don’t be rude, Martín,” Tonya said. “That’s very nice of you, Milt.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “The bus is a couple of blocks away.”
“Let’s go see it,” Tonya said. She was pretty when she smiled. It took ten years off her.
* * *
They toured the Hash in solemn silence, and I encouraged them to open the cupboards and fold out the beds. “It’s supposed to sleep eight,” I said. “Three should be fine. You can divide it up with these—”
Martín waved me silent and stared at me. “Milt, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I told you,” I said. “I’m leaving town and parting ways with this monstrosity. I tried to figure out what I could do with it, and I decided I wanted you three to have it. If you want it, that is. I, uh, well, this is a prepaid gas card that should keep it on the road for a year, depending on how many miles you put on it.”
I held it out to him, but he didn’t take it, so I put it on my—his—kitchenette table, next to the title slip that I’d laid out before I’d gone to find him.
The three of them were staring at me now.
“You a rich guy, Milt?” Martín asked.
“Yeah, Martín. I guess I am, now. There was some bad stuff that I had to get past, but now that that’s done, I’m a rich guy.”
“Congratulations,” Tonya said. She said it quietly, like someone talking to herself.
“Anyway, I’m a rich guy who doesn’t need this bus. I don’t care what you do with it. Live in it, sell it, abandon it. And if you don’t want it—”
“We want it,” Tonya said. “Don’t we, Martín?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“We take this bus, anyone going to show up looking for it?”
“No, nothing like that. Here’s the papers, and here’s my ID.” I dug out my driver’s license.
“Martin Hench?” Martín said.
I hadn’t thought about this part, either. “Yeah,” I said. “Milt was a name I used so that the trouble I had wouldn’t come for you. But now I’m Martin again.”
That made him laugh. “Pleased to meet you, Martin,” he said and held out his hand. We shook. His grip was strong, his hand callused.
“Pleased to meet you, Martín.”
“One problem,” Martín said. “I don’t have a driver’s license.”
“I do,” Tonya said.
“And then there’s insurance—”
“Paid two years in advance. After that—” I shrugged.
Laquan spoke up, startling all of us. “Come on. Sign the paper. I like this bus.”
We did it.
As I turned to walk away from the bus, Martín leaned out. “Hey, Martin!”
“Yeah?”
“What the fuck’s an Unsalted Hash? That some kind of drug thing?”
“No,” I said. “A math thing. You can change it, if you want.”
“Naw,” he said. “I like it. Sounds like one of those fucking yuppie ice cream flavors.”
23
The taxi from the Kansas City airport dropped me off at my rental house. Raza had wanted to meet me at the airport, but I told her not to be silly, I’d see her for breakfast.
I slept between a stranger’s sheets that night without bothering to unpack my toothbrush. The next morning, as I was digging through my suitcase for it, my doorbell rang. I pulled on last night’s pants and tee and descended the unfamiliar stairs.
I pulled back the curtain on the living room door to see who it was, but the house had a mudroom vestibule and the front door was a couple of feet away and its windows were fogged over, so I braved the ice-cold tiles in my bare feet and opened the door.
It was a delivery kid, wearing a big down parka, heavy boots, a woolen hat. One of his gloves was tucked under an armpit, and his blue, bare hand was holding a pen. “Morning,” he said and passed me a clipboard and the pen.
“What am I signing for?” I asked.
“These,” he said, pointing to an odd-shaped paper-wrapped parcel at his feet. I gave him the clipboard back, and he carefully picked up the parcel and handed it to me. It sloshed. It was a vase of flowers, carefully wrapped against the cold.
I thanked him and brought it inside and cleared the binder full of household instructions, rules, and tips off the scuffed coffee table and set down the parcel and unwrapped it. Two dozen very large, very red roses, with a card:
Now you’ve got something to write about in your first postcard.
—Ruth
And an address in Half Moon Bay.
* * *
Raza asked me about the flowers halfway through breakfast. I played it coy at first, but then spilled, and for the whole semester, she took every private opportunity to grill me on the process of my postcard-based romance. I got up to six postcards per week, at the end.
Raza was brilliant, by the way. I knew she would be. How many times had she explained something to me that I’d never understood, in a way that was so clear that I understood it forever, so clear that it seemed obvious in retrospect.
But these were her Feynman Lectures, the last big job she’d spent her whole life preparing for. She started with the origin of money, Roman emperors, and their conquering armies, and worked her way forward.
At first, the kids in that class were the ones who had to be there. Econ 101 was a prerequisite for several UMKC majors. But word got around, and by midsemester, I was getting filthy looks from undergrads who tramped into the hall in their snow boots and parkas and saw some weird old dude taking up a seat in the front row. They moved Raza to a bigger hall. Then they set up an overflow room. As victory laps went, it was a hell of a success, and her YouTube numbers started in the hundreds of thousands and quickly went to the millions.
Her last lecture was more triumphant party than seminar, with cake and tears and a song from her TAs. She kept a straight face through most of it, but by the end, she was beaming, just the biggest and most radiant smile I’d ever seen on her.
And with all that, and the karaoke they took her to, and the late night, she still drove me to the airport the next morning, with a stack of postcards in Ruth’s handwriting in my carry-on. I wanted to reread them on the flight, and more importantly, I didn’t trust the airline not to lose them if I checked them.
I was antsy after the long flight, but the hour-long cab ride down the peninsula to Menlo Park was a kind of meditation. The cab driver was an older Black man, and he’d actually grown up in the area, in Oakland, and with a little prodding, I was able to get him to point out the ghosts of landmarks long torn down to make way for the new, the newer than new, and the newer still.
Raymond recited the names of the departed places, and it gave me comfort, because if all those places could vanish into the murky depths of history, then all the places I was seeing now might likewise slip beneath the wash and sink out of all human recollection.
The KPMG guy booked me a room in a boutique hotel near Stanford. It was a cross between a B and B and staying with a gracious old friend, and the landlady made me feel very welcome, brought me a little plate of local cheeses and rustic crackers and port, and wished me a good night.
* * *
I rang the buzzer on Ira Hermann’s storefront office at ten o’clock the next morning, full of the delicious breakfast of berries and yogurt and a very flaky croissant and drinking a six-dollar coffee from a place two doors over where they prepared it in a fancy, showy siphon.
Zoe answered, and I could tell it took her a moment to recognize me, then she did, then she did some kind of mnemonic trick that let her fish my name out of the recesses of her memory. “Mr. Hench! Marty. What a lovely surprise. Come in, come in.”
The office was different, somehow, the furniture rearranged, different prints on the walls, a striking abstract bronze on a plinth in the corner. I didn’t think it was Ira Hermann’s style.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call, Zoe, but I just got back into town, and there was something I wanted to discuss with Ira in person.”
She got a serious look and clasped her hands in front of her. “Ira retired a few months ago,” she said, “and I’m sorry to say that his health has been poorly since, and has just taken a bad turn for the worse.”
