Choice of Evil

evolved? That he was a perfect predator for the times, and he’d move along once his work was done?

“Which do you think?” I asked the kid.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you said it had characteristics of both birds and crocodiles, right? So it had to go in one of those directions if it was going to survive.”

“Birds,” the kid said, unhesitatingly.

“Why? Crocs are ancient. I mean, they go all the way back to. . .”

“They both build nests, right? Birds and crocodiles. But only birds take care of their babies when they’re born. When the baby crocs are born, they’re on their own.”

“And you think that’s the key to survival?”

“For the higher life-forms? Sure. It makes sense, right?”

“If it does,” I asked him, “what the fuck are we still doing on this planet?”

The kid—this kid whose bio-parents had sold him like a used car—looked at me for a long moment. Then he said: “We’re not all like. . . that.” And then he glanced toward the bunker where his real parents were being with each other.

I nodded, agreeing. But not believing. The human race is a race. And I’m not sure parents like Michelle and the Mole are winning it.

“Would anyone be likely to recognize this?” I asked the kid, showing him the icon again, working for a smooth transition, moving as far away from the other as I could get.

“Sure, if they knew anything about the subject. Like a paleontologist. But not from the name.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Velociraptor’ was the name they used in Jurassic Park. You know, the movie? But the ones there were nothing like the real ones. If you said ‘velociraptor’ to the average kid, he’d never think it looked anything like this.”

I lit another smoke. “You did great, Terry,” I told the kid. Thinking maybe I had something to make that polygraph key really sing, now that I had lyrics to go with the music.

Michelle was quiet on the drive back, and I knew better than to break the silence. She could dissect my sex life for hours without batting an eyelash, and she’d turned every kind of trick there was before she took herself off the streets and went to the phones to make a living, but even mentioning her and the Mole together was total taboo.

Terry was always a safe topic with her—she loved that kid way past her own life—and she would have been proud about how he’d helped me out. But she was so inside herself that I didn’t even tap on the door. Just took her absentminded kiss on the cheek before she slipped out in front of her place and then motored over to Mama’s.

Red-dragon tapestry in the front window. Maybe Lorraine had found Xyla already. Or maybe not. I pulled around the back, flat-handed the metal slab of a door, and waited. One of Mama’s crew opened the door, a guy I hadn’t seen before. I could swear his face was Korean, but I knew how Mama was about things like that, so I kept the thought to myself. He said something over his shoulder and one of the guys who knew me answered him. The new man stepped aside to let me pass, his right hand still in the pocket of his apron. Whatever was out front wasn’t that dangerous, anyway.

It was Xyla. Sitting in my booth, facing toward the back, working her way through a plate of dim sum someone had provided. Good sign. Mama served strangers toxic waste—her real customers never came for the food.

“What’s up?” she greeted me. “Lorraine said you were looking for me.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down. “Be with you in a minute.”

It was less than that before the tureen of hot-and-sour soup was placed before me. I filled the small bowl myself, drained it quickly. I glanced toward where Mama was working at her register, but I couldn’t risk it—had two more bowls before I waved at the waiter to take the rest away. I didn’t offer any to Xyla, and she seemed to understand. . . just sat there, chewing delicately on her own food, waiting.

“What kind of name is Xyla?” I said, my tone telling her I really was interested, not putting her down. I wanted to start cutting her out of the herd if I could, form my own relationship, just in case Lorraine’s old hostility flared up and she tried to cut me out first.

“My mom gave it to me,” she said, chuckling. “It comes from ‘Xylocaine.’. . . Mom said if it wasn’t for Xylocaine my old man never could’ve lasted long enough to get her pregnant.”

“Damn! That’s cold.”

“It was a joke,” she said, watching me carefully. “The kind you tell your daughter when she’s old enough to ask where her father is. . . and you don’t know the answer.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah,” she said, dismissing it—an old wound, healed. But it still throbbed when the weather was wrong.

I’d made a mistake. My specialty with women. So I switched subjects as smoothly as I could. “I got the word I want you to use,” I told her. It’s ‘velociraptor.’ Can you—?”

“Like in Jurassic Park? Sure. How do you spell that?” she asked me, pulling a little notebook from the pocket of her coat.

I did it, thinking how on the money Terry had been.

“Okay,” she said. “But why would he—?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “It’s just a word. One he’ll recognize. You got a secure address? For yourself, I mean. One he could go to with an answer if he wanted?”

“I can make one,” she said confidently. “Take about a minute. No problem. What do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Look, I’m no pro at this stuff. You said a couple of things, remember? One, people are looking for him on the Net, right? And two, he could be out there. . .”

“Lurking.”

“Yeah. Lurking. He could see the traffic. . . but without him banging in, nobody would know he was there?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. So I want to send him a message too. Only I don’t want to make it public. And I don’t have his address. You could post like a. . . I don’t know. . . general message for him, only put it into encryption, so he’d need a program to open it and read it?”

“I could do that. But if the message itself said it was encrypted, and I used one of the regular programs—to make it encrypted, see?—anyone could open the message if they had the same program.”

“And he’d know that?”

“Yes,” she said, in one of those elongated “Isn’t it obvious?” tones all young girls can do.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, maybe trying to convince myself. “I’ll be able to figure out who’s who.”

“Okay. So exactly what do you want to say? And is it context-sensitive?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Oh. Well, it just means, does it have to be exactly in a certain form. Like, if you wrote it like a regular sentence, you know, with capital letters and periods and all, and I just sent it in all lower-case, would that matter?”

“No. I don’t care. Here’s all I want to say, all right?”

She nodded, pencil poised.

“You just address it to him, right? To ‘Homo Erectus,’ yes?”

“Sure. And I’ll multi-post it. If he’s lurking on any of the newsgroups or on BBS stuff, he’ll see it.”

“Okay, say this: ‘I am the real thing, same as you. Here’s proof: “velociraptor.”’ Put that in quotes, okay? ‘I am not a cop. I have something you need.’ ”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. If he sends you a message. . .”

“Oh, I’ll get lots of messages,” she assured me. “Problem’ll be telling if any of them