According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.”
“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”
“At random.”
“At pseudorandom.”
To which the guys have also added designer linkrot to camouflage healthy pathways nobody wants revealed. “It’s really just another maze, only invisible. You’re dowsing for transparent links, each measuring one pixel by one, each link vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on… an invisible self-recoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”
“But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?”
“Click your heels three times,” Lucas sez, “and… no wait, that’s something else…”
8
Reg’s paranoia has the side effect of warping his judgment about places to eat. Maxine finds him in the strange crowded neighborhood around the Queensboro Bridge, sitting by the street window of something called Bagel Quest, eyeballing the foot traffic for undue interest in himself, behind him a dark, perhaps vast, interior from which no sound or light seems to emerge, and waitstaff rarely.
“So,” Maxine sez.
There’s a look on his face. “I’m being followed.”
“You’re sure?”
“Worse, they’ve been in my apartment too. Maybe on my computer.” Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.
“You could just let this go.”
“I could.” Beat. “You think I’m crazy.”
“I know you’re crazy,” sez Maxine, “which doesn’t mean you’re wrong about this. Somebody’s been showing some interest in me too.”
“Let’s see. I start looking under the surface at Ice’s company, next thing I know, I’m being followed, now they’re following you? You want to tell me there’s no connection? I shouldn’t be freaking out in fear of my life or anything.” With a suspended chord also, about to resolve.
“There’s something else,” she noodges. “Any of my business?”
A rhetorical question Reg ignores. “You know what a hawala is?”
“Sure… yeah, uh, in the movie Picnic (1956), right, Kim Novak comes floating down the river, all these local people put their hands up in the air and go—”
“No, no, Maxi please, it’s… they tell me it’s a way to move money around the world without SWIFT numbers or bank fees or any of the hassle you’d get from Chase and them. A hundred percent reliable, eight hours max. No paper trail, no regulation, no surveillance.”
“How is this possible?”
“Mysteries of the Third World. Family-type operations usually. All depending on trust and personal honor.”
“Gee, I wonder why I never ran across this in New York.”
“Hawaladars around here tend to be in import-export, they take their fees in the form of discounts on prices and stuff. They’re like good bookies, keep it all in their heads, something Westerners can’t seem to do, so at hashslingrz somebody has been hiding a lot of major transaction history down behind multiple passwords and unlinked directories and so forth.”
“You heard about this from Eric?”
“He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.”
“Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?”
“It’s, actually it’s a Furby.”
“Excuse me, a—”
“Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—”
“Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours hacks Furbys?”
“Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerance there for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.”
“Such as this hawala that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.”
“Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular hawala is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”
This is true. An offshore angle, with more dimensions than angles are supposed to have, has not escaped Maxine’s attention. She has found herself consulting current updates of the always useful Bribe Payers Index and its companion list the Corrupt Perceptions Index, which rank countries around the world for their likelihood of bent behavior, and hashslingrz seems to have dodgy linkages all over the map, particularly in the Mideast. Lately she’s been picking up certain tells for the well-known Islamic allergy to anything interest-bearing. Bond activity is rare to nonexistent. Instead of selling short, there is a tendency to go to elaborate sharia-compliant workarounds like arboon auctions. Why the concern for Muslim phobias about charging interest, unless…?
Unless Ice stands to make a bundle in the region, what else?
Convection currents in Maxine’s coffee keep bringing something to the surface just long enough for her to mutter “Hey, wait…” before submerging again too quickly to ID it. She isn’t about to put her finger in and explore. “Reg, say your guy cracks all the encryption. What are you planning to do with what you find?”
“Something’s up,” impatient, also anxious. “Maybe even something that’s got to be stopped.”
“Which you think is more serious than simple fraud. What could be that big of a deal?”
“You’re the expert, Maxine. If it was a classic fraud haven, Grand Cayman or whatever, it’d be one thing. But this is the Mideast, and somebody’s going to way too much trouble to keep secrets, as if Ice or somebody in his shop ain’t just squirreling it away but bankrolling something, something big and invisible—”
“And… funneling sums over to the Emirates in the Hefty Smurf range can’t be for some totally innocent reason, because…?”
“Because I keep trying to come up with innocent reasons and can’t. Can you?”
“I don’t do international intrigue, remember? Well, maybe Nigerian e-mails, but usually I’m down here with the bent baristas and the pigeon-drop artists.”
They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.
“Keepin that Tomcat in your purse there, I hope.”
“Oh, Reg. Maybe it’s you that should be carrying.”
“Maybe I should be finalizing travel plans, like, far, far away. Eric needless to say keeps getting more spooked the further into this he goes. Insists now on rendezvousing down in the Deep Web instead of in the subway, and frankly I’m a little reluctant.”
“What’s to be reluctant about?”
“Were you ever down there?”
“Not long ago. Seems like a nice secure place to meet.”
“You’re so comfortable with it, maybe you should be the one to go down there and talk to Eric. Cut out the middleman here.”