'Hard on the case, McCallum?' Michaelson had asked.
She said something noncommittal. He studied her shrewdly.
'You don’t have to be evasive with me. I know what’s going on.'
Tennant brought you in? she almost asked, but of course no one had brought him in. He was fishing for information.
'Going on?' she said innocently.
'The other squad. You know.'
Yes, she thought. I do know. And you don’t.
'The other squad’s not talking to me.' The lie came easily to her. 'If they’ve opened up to you, I’d like to hear about it.'
He stood there, frustrated, evidently pondering several possible comebacks before settling on 'Never mind.'
She watched him walk away. His shoulders, she noticed, seemed to be sagging a little. He was out of the loop, and he knew it. She would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t such a jerk.
She’d found an empty squad room, commandeered a computer, and set to work.
'Wipe Out' was the song title. It had to mean something to Mobius. Maybe she could find out what. But it wouldn’t be easy.
The idea that there was a vast searchable computerized archive of crimes and criminals, and that anyone with a badge could type a few keywords into a search box and obtain instant results, was unfortunately a myth. The reality was that most law enforcement databases were useful only for a fingerprint search, in which case the FBI’s NCIC system was the best bet, or a search by the suspect’s name. There was no nationwide archive at all, merely a variety of more or less inclusive databases run by states and counties, accessible only by dedicated terminals within courthouses and halls of records.
Tess, of course, had neither a fingerprint nor a suspect’s name. She had the name of a song that might or might not be connected to a crime Mobius had committed early in his career-perhaps in his youth, even before he was Mobius.
The only official database that might be of help was VICAP, short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. VICAP listed crimes by modus operandi, including any signatures-distinctive peculiarities of the crime scene, such as notes or messages left by the perpetrator. But when she typed in the Boolean search term 'wipeout OR wipe out,' she got no hits.
This meant she would have to try other databases not specifically designed for law enforcement. LexisNexis, a repository of newspaper articles, was her first stop. Her initial search yielded a number of hits, too many to peruse. When she narrowed the search to eliminate irrelevant articles, she came up dry.
The same thing happened when she visited the major Web search engines. There were thousands of Web pages containing the term 'wipeout' or 'wipe out,' but nothing that seemed relevant to her needs.
So what now? She had to conduct a more focused search, and she had to cover the entire Web.
Most people didn’t realize it, but even the most popular search engines scratched only the surface of the vast pool of material available online. There were millions-actually billions-of Web pages that had never been collected and indexed by any standard search engine. This mass of material was sometimes known as 'the deep Web.'
There were ways of accessing the deep Web. Just as it was possible to send a robot probe into ocean trenches, exploring realms off-limits to human beings, so it was possible to launch a software robot-a bot, in computerese-into the deep Web. A bot was a program that searched for specific keywords in specific contexts. The search could be as narrow or as broad as the user desired. It could take a long time-hours, even-because the bot was simply set free to follow link after link, collecting any data that matched the search criteria, crawling automatically and unsupervised through myriad uncharted Web pages.
Tess had downloaded a bot program in Denver for use on a case last year. It had spidered across the Web for twenty hours before finally returning the hit she needed, a site unlisted in any of the brand-name search engines. She decided to try it again.
Since this wasn’t her own computer, she had to find the shareware site where she had obtained the bot, then download the software and install it. This took only ten minutes, thanks to a high-speed connection. Next she set the search parameters, trying to include only pages in which 'wipe out' was mentioned in conjunction with criminal activity. If she set the parameters too wide, she would haul up a mass of junk she could never sift through. Too narrow, and she might miss what she was looking for.
Before initiating the search, she instructed the program to place any Web links that it found in an online storage service she used, rather than on the desktop’s hard drive. That way she could access the search results from her laptop or any other computer.
When she was ready, she launched the bot. Nothing to do now but wait, maybe get some coffee or something to eat. It occurred to her with a touch of surprise that she had eaten absolutely nothing all day, and it was now nearly seven o’clock. She was about to go in search of a vending machine when the squad room door opened and Andrus walked in.
'Gerry,' she said with a smile. 'You get the evidence from Larkin okay?'
'I got it,' he said, but he looked strangely unsettled, and there was a coldness in his tone she hadn’t heard before.
She frowned. 'There a problem?'
'Problem?' He took a chair near her desk and swiveled restlessly. 'No problem. What could possibly be a problem?'
Sarcasm was a blunt instrument in his hands. He rarely wielded it.
She shut off the monitor on her computer, leaving the machine at work without a display, and pushed her chair away from her desk. She looked at him, saying nothing. Whatever was on his mind, he would give voice to it soon enough.
'You always have to do things your way,' he said, 'don’t you, Tess?'
This was so unexpected, so incomprehensible, that she had no answer.
'No one else can be right if they disagree with you. It’s your judgment and only yours that counts. Why is that? Is it because you’re so much smarter than all the rest of us, or do you just think you’re the only one whose intentions are sufficiently pure?'
'I…I don’t know what-'
'You’ve always had this, I don’t know, cowboy streak in you. Black Tiger, for instance. Sometimes I think you actually wanted to go mano a mano with that scumbag. You wanted to be Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral. And last night when you said you were looking for a chance to take down Mobius-you weren’t kidding, were you? You want to be judge, jury, and executioner. You want to make all the rules.'
'Gerry-'
'You basically blackmailed me into including you in the EOC briefing. Said you’d investigate on your own if I didn’t go along. You forced my hand, made me tangle with Tennant-and my relations with him were none too friendly to begin with. And after all that, you still weren’t satisfied. You had to start freelancing. You had to go behind my back, behind everybody’s back. Thanks a lot, Tess. Thanks for fucking me over, big time.'
'Gerry, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.'
'Don’t you? Okay then, I’ll explain.' He leaned forward, the chair creaking on its casters. 'A half hour ago the mayor of Los Angeles got a call from the news director at KPTI-TV, Channel Eight. The station’s getting set to run with an exclusive report on, quote, ‘a city under siege. Deadly nerve gas in the hands of a psychotic serial killer.’ Does the mayor have any comment?'
'So it got out,' Tess said softly, still not seeing what this had to do with her.
'Yes, it got out. And yes, the mayor did have a comment. He spent fifteen minutes begging the station to kill the story. Mayors don’t like to beg, Tess. They like it even less when they beg and come away empty-handed. The story is set to run as a special report in about half an hour. Be sure to tune in. You can admire your handiwork.'
' My handiwork?' Suddenly things were coming together.
'We told you we didn’t want the story out there. You put it out anyway. Tell the people-that’s your mantra, right? The people need to know the truth, they can handle it, they won’t panic. Well, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Thanks to you, now we’ll all get to find out.'
