Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Such were Brother’s more or less cheerful thoughts when he returned to his apartment in Kips Bay from an evening stroll along Second Avenue, holding a paper bag containing a six-pack of Corona Light, and dreaming, as he often did, about moving to Tribeca, perhaps into a loft conversion in the Gould Industries building, one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, which stood at the corner of Greenwich and Beach with the arrogance of its double affluence, the history of past industrial successes within its walls yoked to the two-thousand-dollars-per-square-foot eminence of its desirable present, and which was his fairy-tale residence of choice. When in Tribeca he always tried to walk past it even though it made him feel down at heel.

He shook off the fantasy and turned his key in his door, to be greeted in his darkened apartment by the bright light from the illuminated iMac screen, which he had left in Flurry screensaver mode, and which was password-protected, but which had somehow been opened. By the light of his hacked desktop he then perceived, seated in the Aeron office chair at the computer station, a large Japanese-American gentleman, who was probably six foot three, six foot four inches in his socks, Brother estimated, and his weight might be what? Two hundred and sixty, two hundred and seventy pounds. The Japanese-American gentleman was wearing an expensive dark blue silk suit with a pale blue silk pocket square, a white shirt with a high thread count, a red Hermès tie in which a small golden cat was chasing a smaller golden wind-up mouse, and a small button badge on his left lapel bearing a miniature image of the Great Seal of the United States. There was writing on the button badge which was too small to read. On his lap, just lying there, was a high-powered handgun, which looked to Brother (who had to be up on such matters because of the genre of fiction in which he had until recently specialized) like a Gen4 Glock 22. Apart from the presence of this gentleman the apartment looked undisturbed. There was no sign that either entry—into the apartment or into Brother’s computer—had been forced in any way.

“I apologize for alarming you, sir,” the Japanese-American gentleman said. “Let me reassure you that I mean you no harm.”

It was indeed alarming when one’s worst paranoid fantasies became reality. Brother’s interior life went through a series of stomach-churning somersaults in the course of a few seconds. He was about to be beaten up slash murdered slash burgled as well as beaten up and then murdered. The Glock was a bad sign. His eyes focused on the button badge and clung onto that. He was drowning and that was his only hope of a life buoy.

“You’re from which agency?” he finally managed to say, in an approximation of his normal speaking voice.

“If you wish, sir, I can show you ID,” the other replied. “But I really don’t think I have to spell out to you, of all Authors, which agency it is.”

“The weapon,” Brother said. “Why the weapon?”

“You know how it is, sir,” the visitor said respectfully. “A man enters his own home, sees the shape of a stranger seated in his chair, and in self-defense draws his personal weapon and opens fire. This is a plausible scenario. This is America, sir. I wished only to guard against unnecessary loss of life, including my own life, sir, yes.”

Brother set down the bag containing the six-pack. “I would feel a lot happier if you put the weapon away,” he said. He was trying not to faint, and his bowels were being troublesome.

The intruder did as he was asked, then stood and extended a hand. “Lance Makioka,” the Japanese-American gentleman introduced himself. “We met briefly on a previous occasion, which I’m certain you will not remember.”

“I’m pretty sure we have never met,” Brother said.

“Yes, sir, you were signing books at a store right on Sunset in Los Angeles,” Lance Makioka said. “At that time I was with President Reagan, post the conclusion of his term of office, and I asked you if you might agree to kindly autograph a book for the president. I believe you were skeptical, and said, ‘I thought President Reagan suffers from Alzheimer’s and is not reading many four-hundred-page spy novels these days.’ I remember your exact words, sir. And I replied, ‘Sir, Mrs. Reagan would also be glad of the signature,’ and then you very kindly signed the book.”

Brother did remember. He even remembered that that was where he had seen the blue suit before, or one like it. “I’m presuming you’re not here tonight to get a book signed,” he said, relaxing just a little.

“Ha ha, sir, no, sir,” Lance Makioka said. “At that period of my life I was on the protection side of things. Since then I have moved on.”

“To the house-break-in side of things,” Brother said. Heavy levity was his way of disguising his still-high level of foreboding, even of fear.

Lance Makioka did not laugh. “Nowadays I protect America in a different way, sir. That is why I am here tonight. Sir, there’s a story I’d like to tell you. May I tell you that story?”

“Auditioning for my job, then,” Brother said. The terrified comedian again.

“By way of a prologue,” unsmiling Lance Makioka replied, “may I ask if the name of Blind Joe Engressia means anything to you? A.k.a. Joybubble? Now deceased?”

Brother shook his head.

“In 1957,” said Lance Makioka, “a blind seven-year-old American boy accidentally discovered that whistling certain precise notes into his phone, at certain precise frequencies, could manipulate the system. The first note to work in this way was, I believe, the fourth E above middle C, having a frequency of 2637.02 hertz. This was the beginning of the practice known as phone phreaking, closely linked to the development of what afterwards became known as computer hacking, and at a certain point the phreaker community included such later luminaries as the computer entrepreneur Mr. Steve Jobs. The boy Engressia, as he grew, became a legend in this community. However, sir, in the end he got busted, he was maybe nineteen then, and he gave up phreaking. His subsequent life was not distinguished by great success. At one point he legally changed his name to Joybubble and announced that he was five years old and intended to remain five years old for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2007, aged either fifty-eight or five, as you prefer. The point of telling you this, sir, is that we, that is to say the appropriate agencies, wished to enlist Blind Joe in our battle against hacking, using the ‘set a thief to catch a thief’ principle. Like Cary Grant in the old Hitchcock movie. Some say he did work for us for a time but then ceased to do so. If he had done so, he would have had a secure income, health care, pension all the way to the end. But there it is. People make their choices.”

“But this is not the story you came to tell me,” Brother said.

“No, sir. It is a type of preliminary fable. You will see the point of its moral as I proceed.”

“I am not any kind of hacker,” Brother said. “Phone or computer. Just for the record. You, however, plainly are,” he added, gesturing to his iMac.

“Are you familiar,” Lance Makioka asked, ignoring Brother’s remark, “with the covert hacktivist organization using the name of Legion?”

That rang a bell. “Is it something like Anonymous?”

“Anonymous we believe to have entered into a possibly terminal decline,” Lance Makioka said. “Legion was potentially in a position to replace it, until recent actions by ourselves, which have put a damn great fist right into the middle of it .” His voice had risen dramatically, and he slammed his right fist into his left palm, the mask of calm courtesy slipping for a moment to reveal the man of action beneath. Brother found himself thinking of James Bond.