This trip, Bowen brought the bottle back with him. “Yeah? Well get this — shut the hell up. No wants to hear your crap anymore, you religious prick. Bowen, chapter one, verse one.”
“We are being punished for our sins, Mr. Bowen.”
“I’ve got no sins, padre. My soul’s as lily white as a bedsheet.” Bowen lit up a cigar. “Besides, I could get used to this kind of hell.”
Cameron had taken a glass ornament from the Christmas tree. He threw it against the wall. “This is crazy. This is like Nero fiddling while he watched Rome burn. Shouldn’t we be doing something instead of just sitting here on our thumbs?”
Bowen blew a cloud of cigar smoke in his direction. “Like what?”
“Oh, right. I forgot. This is productive, isn’t it — getting drunk and smoking the president’s cigars?”
“I don’t think he’ll mind, boy, do you?”
“Cameron’s right.” Loeb put his glass down. “We can waste time later. Right now we should focus on finding the others. I need access to your computer center, your phones, the Internet, camp schematics, everything.”
“Sure, but I’m telling you there’s no one out there. I already tried.”
“There’s at least one other person out there. We’ll start with him.”
Cameron and Loeb left the others and went to the command center where Loeb again checked for messages, comments, posts, anything to indicate someone else was out there. The video counter was still a “1.” He tapped the keyboard: “Someone viewed the video, but they either can’t or won’t contact us. What do you make of that, Cameron?”
“How do you know the “1” isn’t you? Or maybe it’s a computer troll, or something like that.”
“Valid question. The software is supposed to filter me out by login, but I hadn’t considered the possibility of it being an automated program. Do we have access to the CIA from here, not the one the hackers play with on the Internet, I mean the secure connection?”
Cameron handed him a red folder marked “Top Secret.” “I found this in the camp commander’s office. It has the daily password from the twenty-first. Last I checked they hadn’t changed it. You’ll have to use the gray dinosaur over there. It’s the only one on the private network.”
Loeb clicked through a maze of screens on the isolated computer until he arrived at the CIA secure site.
“What are you doing?” Cameron asked.
“The CIA has access to every phone record, every Web transaction, every click, every view, everything we see or do electronically. And they store it all right here.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I missed that on CNN. They track everything we do? Without a warrant? Isn’t that somewhat illegal?”
“Don’t be naïve. Of course they do. I realized it about three years ago when the technology for ultra-massive storage became affordable even to people like you and I. It was only logical that the CIA had been using it when price was not an issue. Of course, I never went public with my beliefs. I have enough trouble with the media as it is and no desire to end up in a ditch in Rock Creek Park.”
“Yeah, that would suck.”
The page split into a double screen of Loeb’s video on the left and computer gibberish on the right. He ran his finger down the symbols and statements line by line. “There it is. The video was accessed from the backbone of the capital hub on this main trunk. And there is the IP address.”
“And that is helpful how?”
Loeb made a face.
“I’m not a geek,” Cameron said. “I’m a writer.”
“Every computer on the Web has an IP address. That’s what makes it possible to send and receive information between distinct individuals over the Internet. Think of it as a phone number. If you know someone’s phone number, you can call him. If you don’t, you can’t.”
“So call him.”
“He’s apparently not online now.”
“Who does the number belong to?”
“Therein lies the problem. What do you do when you know a phone number and need to know who it belongs to?”
“Is this a test? I hate tests.”
“Do you even own a cell phone, Cameron? You do a reverse lookup, obviously.”
“Silly me. Of course you do. Everyone knows that. It’s so obvious.”
Loeb entered several commands into the computer and waited. “The problem is that not everyone has a static IP address like they do a phone number. When they log into a service provider, that provider assigns them the first available address from the bank of numbers they’ve purchased. It can be different every time they log in, within the limits of their range of numbers, naturally. That makes it nearly impossible to trace someone who uses a large service provider, unless you also have access to that provider’s login records to connect the dots, and thanks to the CIA, we just happen to have that.”
“I’m going to nod and pretend I understand every word of what you just said, okay?”
Loeb swiveled the screen so Cameron could see it more clearly. “Whoever watched the video did so from inside the White House.”
The Watcher
Loeb raised his glass to the others around the table: “Here’s to the holidays: peace and good will to men, at least to what’s left of us. If only we had da Vinci to paint this last supper.”
He and Cameron had prepared Christmas dinner from the turkey and fixings set aside for the president, had the president chosen to celebrate the holiday there, and, more importantly, had he survived 12|21|12. Michael, bolstered by stronger meds from the dispensary, had been talking nonstop about heaven, hell, and redemption. The more he talked, the more Bowen drank. That was his idea of an anesthetic. Ferret ignored them all.
“What’s the matter, Ferret, we’re not good enough for you?” Bowen asked.
“You shot me, remember? And you don’t smell right.”
“I don’t smell right? You’ve had two showers, and you still stink like a skunk, you waste of a bullet.”
“I wish I had gone home for Christmas,” Cameron said, more to his cloth napkin than anyone in particular. “I miss my parents. I’ll never see them again, will I?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered, Cameron,” Loeb said. “They would still be gone.”
“I suppose they would, but then maybe I would, too.”
“So we’re not good enough for you either?” Bowen’s elbow slid off the table, knocking his water glass onto the floor.
“You drink too much, Bowen,” Loeb said.
“Yeah, and you talk too much.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” asked Cameron.
Bowen grunted and waved a thick finger, stirring the fog that had settled around his brain. “We’ll grow old and die. Or I’ll shoot you. One of the two. You pick.”
“No, I mean the human race. Is this it? Are we finished?”
“God has judged us, and found us guilty,” Michael coughed. “Repent while there’s still time.”
“Fine words for a man who’s told us he’s lost his faith, cheated on his wife, and robbed his church.”
“At least I had faith once, Mr. Bowen. What have you got? To you, life is nothing more than survival. The one who deserves to live is the one who’s better at taking what he wants from others.”
“Damn straight, padre. You see, that’s the difference between you and me. I know there’s nothing more than this crap, so I can deal with it. You think there’s got to be something else, something you’re going to miss out on because you screwed up, and you can’t handle it. Just remember, everyone goes the same way when they die and that’s six feet under. The sooner you realize it, the better off you’ll be.”
“God left the five of us here for a reason, Mr. Bowen. I believe that now. Everyone is here on Earth for a reason. I’d just lost sight of mine and, God forgive me, I’m sorry for that, but now it’s clear to me that the Almighty has left me here to tell you that it’s not too late to come to Him and confess your sins.”