Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

She finished a page, mashed the save button, got up, stretched. A reward was due, a fresh cup of coffee and a cigarette. Everyone in the house smoked like coke furnaces, and she had taken up the habit in a desultory way, more for self-protection than because she enjoyed it. Although the taste of tobacco, the first toasty puff, was delicious, she could do without the trays full of butts and the constant acrid stench. She went into the kitchen and stood for a moment at the sink, enjoying the ticking silence of the house. She filled the coffeemaker, poked in the refrigerator, ate a couple of cold spring rolls, licking fish sauce from her fingers afterward. The smell of coffee filled the room, and something other than coffee, a sweetish, heavy odor, something burning. She sniffed; it was coming from the door that led to the finished basement that Tran used as his office. She sniffed again. Burning insulation? She opened the door, walked down a couple of stairs. The smell was overpowering. She trotted down the rest of the flight and came into the room.

The overhead lights were off, and the room was lit only by a tiny blue flame that hovered like Tinker Bell near the far wall. Something flashed copper-colored in the glow, a pipe of some kind. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that Tran was lying on his side on the brown leather couch, holding a long, brass, small-bowled pipe. His eyes were closed, and his face was more peaceful than she had ever seen it. He looked ten years younger. His eyes opened. She felt a flush of embarrassment.

"I'm sorry, Uncle. I thought something was on fire."

He smiled and beckoned. She walked over and sat next to him on the couch.

"Now you know my secret vice. Are you shocked?"

"I am scandalized, Uncle. Why do you do it?"

"Take opium? To assuage my grief. It is very effective." He spoke slowly, with long pauses between the phrases, as if each one required substantial consideration. "Have you finished your work? It is very late."

"It is. I can't imagine how you are up every morning so early."

"Oh, I don't sleep. Perhaps a short nap in the afternoons. And the work…?"

"I think I have the math and science down. The history paper is done, as you know." She had written about the effect of the battle of An Loc on American and Vietcong diplomatic and military policy, including some insights not at that time known to the CIA, much less the American-history teacher at Sacred Heart. "Also, I'm almost finished with the Claudel paper. I intend to work through the night."

He smiled and nodded and upended the bowl of the pipe over the flame of the alcohol lamp. He took a deep breath of the fumes, released it, and sighed. Raising his eyebrow, grinning, he offered Lucy the mouthpiece, which she could now see was made of amber.

She giggled. "Maybe later."

A deep chuckle. "An excellent, virtuous answer. Also, it avoids my being shot by your mother or put in jail for a hundred years by your father. I believe it is time for us to return."

"Us?"

"Yes, I am coming with you. Your mother requires more service."

"You talked to her?"

Another long puff and a longer silence. "Of course. I talk to her almost every day. It is a benefit of the telephone."

Lucy gaped, she grinned.

"Surely, you did not imagine she was unconcerned about your welfare, or that I was in any sense helping you to hide from your family."

Lucy was offended and felt betrayed. She was, on another and more genuine level, delighted and relieved. She was silent for a while as these feelings fought among each other, with the latter gradually triumphing.

Tran inspected the bowl of his pipe, scratched at it with a fingernail. "I am going to prepare another pipe. You may watch and see how it is done. Perhaps one day you will be the mistress of an Asian warlord, and the skill will be a useful addition to your many other talents."

"Do you think that is at all likely, Uncle?"

"With you, one cannot tell. Life is full of surprises, which is why I am not teaching French literature at the Lycee Chasseloup Laubat in Saigon, as my father planned."

So she watched as he manipulated the yen-hok needles, twirling and roasting the tarry ball over the flame, and carefully placed the fuming pellet into the pipe. He drew heavily and lay back. She was dying to ask him about the service her mother wanted, but he looked so relaxed and peaceful that instead she kissed him quickly on the cheek and returned to Claudel.

It cost Marlene a nice lunch and a lot of guilt, of which she could afford the former a good deal more than the latter, but Wayne Segovia seemed genuinely happy, and that might count for something in the halls of purgatory. He had lost twenty-five pounds, and his normally olive skin was the color of old dishwater. She watched him eat a whole lobster, a dozen cherrystones, a scoop of garlic mashed potatoes half the size of his head, and a dark brown dessert made entirely of unblended calories. She picked at a Cobb salad and drank most of a pricey bottle of Meursault.

"Lobster for lunch," he said wonderingly when he was finished. "I don't know, Marlene. I don't think I better tell my wife about this. She might think you got designs on me."

"Oh, your virtue's safe. A couple years ago maybe not, but I'm a reformed old lady now." Marlene sipped from her glass. "Actually, there was one little favor."

"Oh, ho. See, women take me to two-hundred-dollar lunches at the Palm all the time just to look at my face, so, frankly, this comes as quite a shock." He laughed, which was pleasant to see. "So what can I do for you?"

"I want to change my password."

He looked puzzled. "Marlene, that's not worth a hot dog and a Coke. You press the change-password button when you log on and just do it."

"Yes, but you have to know your old password before you can do that."

"You forgot your password?"

"Yes, this is so embarrassing. They sent a memo around the other day that everyone should change their password, and since I'm such a good girl, I did, and I used the little program that generates a random password and changed it, and then something came up, and I forgot to write it down, and when I turned my machine on this morning, it wouldn't let me."

"Yes, that's how computers make our lives easier. Okay, no problemo-we'll go back to my joint after and fix you up."

They did. Segovia sat at his chair in his tiny cube, and Marlene stood behind him. Segovia got into the root level of the Osborne system, found Marlene's password, decrypted it, and wrote it on a slip of paper.

"Tape it to your monitor," he said, handing it over.

She laughed dutifully and pulled a notebook from her bag. "I'm going to write it down right now in a safe place," she said, and did, and also wrote down the system administrator password he had tapped out several times, which she had read and memorized from over his shoulder.

She waited until the end of the day and slipped into an unused office and logged in as a system administrator using Segovia's password. It let her into any file in the Osborne system, and she was able to bring up Sirmenkov's phone records, hundreds of neatly ranked, compressed, and encrypted WAV files with the phone numbers they represented, and the time and charges. She selected a subset of these and with a few strokes dumped them all into a Zip disc, added Sirmenkov's decrypt key, logged off, and went back to her office, where she unpacked them, decrypted them, and burned them into a rewritable compact disk. She connected a headset to the machine and brought up a conversation of some length that had occurred in the right time frame. In Russian, of course. He would be talking to Uncle Fred in Minsk, or ordering a fur hat… or doing something extremely naughty. Marlene did not speak Russian, but that, of course, was not going to be a problem.