Enzi's hack of the SLAM network is discovered, and he wants to give the money back. The Aether and the Lie is a story of greed, loneliness, murders, and the motivations behind the crimes.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
Enzi's hack of the SLAM network is discovered, and he wants to give the money back. The Aether and the Lie is a story of greed, loneliness, murders, and the motivations behind the crimes.
Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.
The Weight of Snow. From The Aether and The Lie, by Steve S. Saroff
(c) 2021 Steve S. Saroff
I woke up. The sky was just starting to show light, and I felt the weight of snow pushing on me. The storm was over, but there was a foot and a half of snow on the ground, covering everything. The spruces and the ponderosas looked like Christmas cards. I broke off dry branches from underneath some of the spruces, and I dragged them back near the truck. I found matches on the dashboard, and by the time Pascal woke up, I had a fire going, the smoke rising straight in the calm air.
“Kind of expected a Fella would know how to warm himself,” Pascal said as he stood next to the fire, his hand’s palm out towards it, “Even a Fella with money.”
I asked, “Why do you say that?”
Pascal answered, “I deal with those who pretend to have what they ain’t never going to get. Shows in everything they can’t afford. Especially in their attitude.” He squatted down, picked up a stick and stirred the fire. The sun had come up over the ridge to the southeast, and in the sunlight the flames had disappeared. Pascal continued, “People I deal with mostly have always been taken care of. Ones who started out when they were nineteen saying, ‘I don’t need money,’ because they had never been without it. Then they hit twenty-five. They have a job that sucks, and they lose that. They’ve been booted out. Their circus nets are torn to crap from falling on them so many times.” He threw the stick into the fire. “Some get angry, like someone owes them something. I end up with those, the angry ones, the ones who get busted for selling meth, and other stupid things like shoplifting garbage from k-mart, writing bogus checks to pay for quarters for the gambling machines.
“But someone who has been busted broke, if they can take care of themselves from that point, they act different. They build their own fires.”
I asked Pascal if he was ever ‘busted broke,’ and he said, “When I first came here. Bought a house right off and lost it the next year. Poorest state in the country, Montana. Used to be Mississippi, but we whooped them when the Butte mines closed.”
He stood up, he stretched, “Could have gone somewhere else then, that would have been the easy way. But I figured it out ’cause I like it here. Place where we can drive thirty miles and get snowed in,” he smiled into the morning sun. “Fella ready for me to fix up a pot of coffee? Might as well relax a bit before we find out if we are going to be able to negotiate our way back.” He turned and walked back to the truck, the snow coming to his knees, and he said, without facing me, laughingly, “Looks like ‘Closed for season’ might be for real.”
Pascal had a spare radiator hose, three metal toolboxes, two buckets of spare parts, and a hundred-foot spool of half-inch steel cable. He had a shovel. He had a hand winch. He had an ax. He had a black plastic gun case that contained a Russian SKS, “Cheap, accurate, and legal,” he said. I saw all this because he kept handing me things to get out of his way as he dug through the back of his truck. Then he crawled out dragging a heavy bundle that clanked. “Here we be,” and it was a complete set of tire chains wrapped in a canvas tarp. He said, “Nine years I’ve had these, never used them.”
We shoveled away snow from the back of the truck, spread the chains out behind all four tires, and then backed the truck onto them. As I was helping him with the chains, I asked, “Had these nine years, but you didn’t use them that time you got stuck with the Norway girl?”
He winked and said, “There are times when getting stuck is a good thing.”
We made it to the highway. Pascal said, “Chains and a four-wheel drive can do.” Then we took the chains off and continued towards town, where there were only a few inches of snow on the roads.
Pascal dropped me off at my car in front of Kaori’s, where he said, “A Fella and I need to stay in touch,” and then he drove away.
I drove back to my house, showered, changed, and then went to the office. Things were routine. Suzzy looked at me and said, “What happened to you?” and touched her face. I told her I slipped in the hotel and hit my face on the shower fixture.
“Slick move,” she said, and then she asked about the trip to Seattle and the visit with Dave Cheat. She also handed me a stack of phone messages and told me there were several voice messages I should listen to on the main office number. So I went into my office, closed the door, and threw all the phone messages in the trash, and deleted the phone mail without listening. I then turned on my computer and erased all my emails without reading any of them.
“Kaori is gone,” I said to myself. I counted how many days I was near her. Almost nothing. My face hurt, and I couldn’t breathe through my swollen nose. I needed patterns and abstraction that would not push, punch, or hurt.
From a shelf, I took down a math book published in nineteen thirty-five. The binding was split leather. The author’s introduction described ten years spent working on the manuscript and the difficulty in representing the symbols necessary to convey his ideas with typography. It was a book I had bought when I was eighteen for a dollar. I had worked through the book several times. My notes lined the pages. Yet, there was nothing in the book that was confusing anymore, everything was comfortable, and it was a place where I was safe.
Differential equations --- predictive math that was needed before computers to calculate problems. The real-world problems of multiple variables with no exact solution. Like the wiggly lines on a sheet of paper that do not all cross at one single point. Where would the lines become closest to each other? Where is the center of gravity of confusion? With computers, it only takes a few lines of iterative code --- instructions that repeat themselves again and again, into the millions and billions --- nibbling away at the confusion to get the most balanced solution in milliseconds. But in 1935 it took something better: it took slow peace.
I turned off the computer by yanking its power plug from the wall. I turned off my phone. I found a blank notebook, and a pencil. I sharpened the pencil with a penknife. Then my hand moved, and my thoughts stopped racing.
When I came out of my office, there were more messages taped on my door. I left them there. I went home. I ate, I washed, I slept. The next day the weather had turned colder, and it was snowing again. On the way to the office, I stopped at Worden’s market and bought a Missoulian. The front-page story was about Kaori and the two murders. I started to read the article, but then I threw the entire newspaper away. There was nothing there that I wanted to read. I got to work, and Suzzy handed me more messages.
O’Neill also stopped me before I got to my office and wanted to know what happened in Seattle. He told me that he had a call from one of Dave Cheat’s engineers offering to help us set up any new hardware that we might want in Missoula. O’Neill said, “They’ve never offered us anything before. Now they are offering to send us fast machines. Ones with multiple GPUs. What gives?” I explained that they were pleased with the work we had been doing. I told O’Neill that Dave Cheat said, “the Seattle group wants to develop a closer working relationship with Missoula.” I summarized for O’Neill how we would be working closer with Seattle.
O’Neill likes fast computers with multiple monitors. He smiled and said, “Whatever you did, keep it up. This is great.”
Several days went by. I didn’t look at the newspaper. I didn’t look at any news, I didn’t talk with anyone. I went to the office each day, closed my door, and studied old math. I also went to the university library and found a book that had Plank’s and Heisenberg’s – the physicists – original papers, which were dense with math. I checked that book out and started working through the physicist’s math. Their way of imagining the distance and speeds of energy inside atoms and between stars and planets converged towards a truth that had no connection with control, money, or ambition. The irony was that their work became the foundation for the greatest of all controls: atomic bombs and power.
Then, a week after the murders, Suzzy knocked on my office door. She said, “There’s someone here, says he is a detective. Says you haven’t been returning his calls.” She looked at me worried but then smiled and added, “I told him you haven’t been returning anyone’s calls.”
I asked Suzzy to let him in. It was the thin detective. We shook hands, he sat down, and I closed the door. He asked me if I had been following the news, and I told him I hadn’t. He then said to me that Kaori had confessed but that there still might be a trial. From his briefcase, he took some stapled pages and handed them to me.
Thin said, “I want you to look at this, see if it jogs memories.” It was a printed transcript of what I had told him the night Pascal saw the bodies, a transcript of what was recorded. Thin asked me, “You told me that you and she went to New York after you bailed her out of jail. Did you meet with anyone else there?”
I said, “No. I just talked with several gallery and shop owners. “
Thin took a reporter’s notebook from his jacket pocket, paged through it, and then said, “This is what she said, ‘Had drinks with Enzi’s friend from Texas.’” Then he looked at me.
I shrugged and said, “Someone we shared a deli table with. He had a strong accent that she was curious about. I told Kaori that he was probably from Texas. She might have thought I knew the person.”
He asked, “Texas tell you his name?”
“I don’t remember if he did,” I answered.
Thin read from his notebook again, “Here it is. Tommy Tsai. That was his name,” and then the detective took a business card that he had in the briefcase and handed it to me.
It was Tsai’s card, embossed paper, raised ink. The Logo. The title, “Vice President of Broadband Networking.” I looked at it and handed the card back, and shrugged again.
The detective said, “Curious he would have given her his card. Seems close to the sort of work you do,” and he looked towards the row of monitors on my desk. Neither of us said anything else, and then Thin stood up, and he started to leave, but he turned and asked, “What was in the ‘case’ that he gave you?”
I didn’t say anything, and Thin sat back down in the chair, opened his notebook again, and read, “He gave Enzi a case, and then we went to bar in the top of a tall building. Why do you think she said that?”
I said, “I have no idea. Call the name on that card and ask.”
“Did that,” Thin said. “Mr. Tommy Tsai said he gives out business cards all the time, especially to women, and he told me the same story you did. That he happened to share a table with you two. Said he remembered her, but not you. Says he does not know who you are.” Thin looked at me and touched the bridge of his nose, tapped it twice, then said, “Looks like you’re healing.” When I didn’t respond, he went on, “Thing about this one is that everything she says is in the open, and parts are illustrated. Like those sketches, you said she showed you in Seattle.”
I nodded. He continued, “She’s been sitting in her cell, and she asked for a pen and a notebook, which we gave her, and she keeps filling pages with new drawings. Exact drawings. Drawings that match the crime scene. Accurate. But there are other drawings which she says are from the two trips you took together. You want to see?”
I asked, “See what?”
“The drawings.” He opened his briefcase again and brought out a cardboard-bound school notebook. The cheap kind with the speckled black and white. He thumbed through the pages. It had eight by eleven-inch lined paper, and each page was covered with detailed sketches made with a blue, felt-tip pen.
“Here we go,” he said, and he held the notebook open so I could see.
It was a drawing of Tsai and me in Katz’s. We were standing, facing each other, and it showed Tsai handing me the briefcase, with both of our hands holding it. There was a window behind us, and Kaori had sketched what was out there, parked cars with men in oversized pants slouching against them. She had also drawn the street sign, making it larger than the perspective, and she had penned in the sound of the street name, in English, ‘Hue Son.’ She had also drawn three Kanji characters underneath the briefcase.
Thin closed the notebook and put it back with his other papers, then snapped shut his case. He stood up and looked at me. His two eyes were different shades of color, one dark green, the other light blue. Both of his eyes seemed to be made of glass; he never blinked. He said, “I went over to the University before coming here. Japanese language professor. ‘He takes the money.’ That is what she wrote.”
I didn’t answer.
“She has other drawings of you,” Thin said, “with other Japanese words.” Then, thin left my office without waiting to see if I would respond.
I waited a few minutes, then I left, telling Suzzy that I was going to get some lunch on the way out.
I drove to the payphone in front of Worden’s market and called Tsai on his burner. There was a loud click, the phone had been answered, but all I heard were honking horns. I asked, “You driving?”
Tsai, after he heard my voice said, “London. It’s like New York here.” Then he asked if I was ready to have a ‘face-to-face’ again. He said he had ‘more’ for me. He said, “We can discuss methods that are less physical and more modern.” He said I should be able to set up a crypto wallet with a few presses of keys. “That stuff you do,” and he laughed with a sing-song Texas accent that made me remember foremen on the oil rigs, who yelled, “Get moving!” They all had Texas accents too.
I asked, “Why did you give her your card?”
He didn’t say anything, and I continued, “Did you hand it to her when I was spilling drinks in the Rainbow room?”
He paused for a bit, and then he said, “A bit of a mistake. But I’ve already had a short, pleasant talk about this. As you seem to know.”
I said, “She killed two people. She told the police that she was in New York with me. They asked what she and I were doing there --- unrelated to her crimes --- they asked because she was out on bail and was supposed to have stayed in Missoula. She told them about meeting you, and they found your business card, and now they know you, and I met.”
His voice turned hard. “Enzi, Enzi,” he said, “A small matter. But you are the one who started it by meeting her. Will talk again soon,” and then he hung up on me.
I was standing in front of Worden’s market. I looked across the street to Charlie’s bar. I was thinking about going in there to see if there might have been one of the mid-day drunks sitting on a barstool to talk with and help me feel like I was back on the honest side of life. Maybe one who would tell stories about working in the woods or highway crews. Someone I could swap some truths. But perhaps what would have helped me the most would have been to have looked for a drug dealer. Someone I could have secretly observed working his trade, watched how the exchange of palmed cash for little baggies of heroin transpired. Maybe that would have given me clues about how the more experienced criminals moved and breathed and managed to spend their non-sleeping hours without collapsing.
Instead, I went back to my office and tried to work, which meant going through the backlog of voice mail and messages.
Most were quickly deleted and discarded. A few I responded to with brief calls or emails. Approving purchases of software updates. Confirming that I had read monthly reports about several new hires. Calling back a coder in Seattle who wanted to put in a transfer to move to the Missoula office. All the details that rolled together to create the demands of a job of work that was not work but was bureaucracy and dust.
But then there was a voice mail from the day before, which got me to sit up straight and made my heart race. It was from Dave Cheat. He started by asking about the hardware that his engineers configured and sent to Missoula and then asked to let him know if I needed more. In the voicemail, he is said, “Hey. I looked more at the transport checksum you set up for us. I sped it up about one ten thousandth of one percent faster now.” He said this with pride in his voice, not gloating. He went on, “Found a small mistake. You had a de-referenced pointer that was causing a memory over-run once every thousand twenty-four packets. It wasn’t causing damage, but I changed the code so that the overrun doesn’t happen anymore.” He paused, and then the message continued, “I’ve checked in the changes. No biggy, but look at the fix, and then I’ll get it installed across the network. And give me a call. I want to talk about you coming back here for some more juggling.” Then the message ended.
I logged into and ran the version control software and looked at the changes that Dave Cheat had described. It was my hacked backdoor, and he had changed it so that it would no longer run. He had also added several lines of comments in the code, detailing his change so that I could not just delete what he had done without bringing blatant attention back to my hack. I logged out of the version control system and called Dave Cheat. He answered.
I told him that I had looked at the changed code, and I said it was “cool” that he found a mistake and fixed it.
He said, “I almost didn’t notice it. It is so minor. I almost left it the way it was, but it was an easy fix. As soon as we hang up, I’ll check in the changes and get it live everywhere.” Then Dave suggested that I should come out to Seattle in the next week. Said that he would schedule a full day off site, and that maybe he and I could drive over to the Olympics, “Spend the day talking, you know, away from SLAM.”
I told him that sounded like a good idea.
Then he asked about Kaori, “How is that girlfriend of yours?”
This meant he didn’t know about the murders and had not read the Montana papers. I replied, “I haven’t seen her in a while. So it was kind of a transitory thing.”
He said, “Well if you do chance into her, she is more than welcome here too.”
I told him that was not likely, but I would check my schedule and probably come out on Monday. So I said I would get back to him that evening, and we ended the call.
The Thin detective had indicated that he was watching and wondering about me. Then, on the same day, Dave Cheat had let me know that he turned off the hack that I had managed to install. The backdoor for which Tsai had given me half a million dollars.
I was driving home now and thinking about how to tell Tsai about what Dave Cheat had done. I thought that I would tell Tsai that he could have back everything he had given me. For a few moments, I was thinking that he would enjoy following my treasure instructions. But I was also thinking how he would have to wait until the late spring for the snow to melt to be able to dig up the cash, and that his own buried treasure down in Texas --- the coins he has bragged to me about hiding almost as a hobby --- were easy desert treasure, not the snowed-in type that I’ve had to burry. But I already knew that he wouldn’t want the money back. I already knew what he would want.
I went to sleep, fighting to find a few hours where there are dreams that had no mistakes.
It was morning. I started to make coffee, and then my phone rang. I answered, and Tsai said, “Turn on that other phone.” Then he hung up.
I turned on the burner that I had gotten from Tsai when I was in New York. I was finishing making coffee when it rang.
“Your code stopped working last night.”
I started to tell him what Dave Cheat had told me the day before, but Tsai interrupted.
“We know he found it. We know he turned it off. He doesn’t have a clue what it was for, though. So, you figure something out and get something new in there. Fix it.”
“You in Seattle?” I asked, “How did you know that Cheat found and fixed the hack? You have someone else helping you there?”
Tsai answered, “It doesn’t matter where I am. Or who else I work with. You just need to fix things.” There was a threat in his voice. A sound I had not heard from him before.
I moved the phone from my ear and held it down by my knee. I looked out the window of my kitchen, up to the close by north hills. There was a trail there that zigzagged up the slope, and I could see two people walking up it, taking an early morning hike. I imagined these were happy people who would never have to answer mysterious calls ordering them to do illegal things. But I also now had more money buried in the nearby mountains than most people will ever have in their lifetime. I heard Tsai speaking from down by my knees, and I looked at the phone and thought about hanging up. Instead, I brought the phone back to my ear and said, “Sorry, didn’t hear what you were saying.”
He said, “Let me make this clear. We lose a fortune each day that the system stays down.”
I explained that it was complicated to reintroduce any discovered backdoor. I told Tsai that I didn’t think Dave Cheat had suspected anything improper. But I also said that he still had spent enough time studying the code that I had added so that additional changes to the system would now be apparent to him and that he would then realize what the code was really for.
Tsai said, “You won’t have a problem. That will be taken care of. Just start planning on getting things fixed.”
I responded, “You are not listening to me. You don’t understand that this is not easy, that a new change is not possible now unless you want it to be discovered and recognized as a backdoor and…”
Tsai interrupted, “No, you haven’t been listening to me. You do not have a choice in this matter now.”
Then Tsai said, “We have history. You and I. But it is like the history I have with a counterman at Katz’s. He and I talk. He gives me samples and asks about how my day is going. But I know he’s the counterman, and there is a counter in between us. He might be looking at me, thinking, ‘I hate selling this schlep matzo balls.’ Enzi, this has never been about you and I liking each other, and you do not want to hear my thoughts right now. You do not want to remove the counter between us. Go to Seattle. Get in again. Go push some buttons or whatever it is that you people do.”
I heard the click of Tsai hanging up on me for the second time in two days.
You've just listened to "The Weight of Snow," a chapter from The Aether and The Lie, here on Montana Voice.
Visit http://www.montanavoice.com for contact information.
Listen to Montana Voice anywhere you get your podcasts.