I nod as if I agree, but if I were in his place I’d have chosen a safe house in Los Angeles.
The trip takes less than ten minutes including stops for traffic lights. The safe house is more modest than Lenz’s home but easily worth over a hundred thousand in the Mississippi market. God knows what it appraised at here. As the automatic garage door whirs down behind the Mercedes, I decide the FBI chose well. A woman who could afford the fees for EROS wouldn’t live in a house less expensive than this.
Inside, I am surprised again. I expected stern FBI agents pacing around drinking coffee, but all I find is pristine cream carpeting, functional furniture, and framed watercolors that look like they were bought from a hotel chain. The place feels like a model home in a tract development.
“Doctor Lenz?” calls a woman’s voice.
From a hallway that must lead to the first-floor bedrooms steps a woman in her late twenties. She has auburn hair a little coarser than Drewe’s, green eyes, fair skin, and a slim but athletic figure. All in all, she’s a slightly harder version of my wife. She takes three steps into the room before I notice the holster and pistol slung tight under her left arm.
“Sherry’s in the back,” she tells Lenz. “And the guy from Engineering Research is in the spare bedroom upstairs.” Her eyes move to me. “Who’s this?”
“Special Agent Margie Ressler, meet Harper Cole. He’s one of the sysops for EROS. He’s going to help me get started tonight. How’s trade so far?”
“All I’ve done so far is send out for pizza. I ordered enough for everybody.” Agent Ressler cannot conceal the excitement in her eyes. “I figured since you haven’t gone on-line yet, nobody could be surveiling the house, right?”
When Lenz merely sighs, she adds, “I got supremes. Told them to leave off the anchovies, just in case. You want me to nuke a few slices for you?”
“Not hungry,” Lenz says distractedly. “Cole?”
“I’ll take some.”
“Diet Coke okay?”
“Great.”
“Bring it upstairs,” Lenz instructs her.
At the bottom of the carpeted staircase, he stops and calls back over his shoulder, “I didn’t see a car in the garage!”
Margie Ressler hurries back into the living room. “They’re delivering it tonight. Should be here anytime. It’s an Acura Legend, ninety-two model confiscated in a drug raid. Is that okay?”
“Fine. Make sure Sherry shows you everything you need to know.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the top of the stairs Lenz steps into what must have been designed as a bedroom. Now it sports a wall- size computer cabinet, a Dell desktop PC, a Toshiba subnote-book computer with PCMCIA modem slotted in and connected, a bank of wire telephones, a fax machine, a cellular phone, and a Sony television. Near the bathroom stands a refrigerator-freezer with a microwave oven on top, and against the far wall a twin bed.
“Planning to stay awhile?” I ask as Lenz deposits his suit bag in a closet half filled with men’s clothing.
He turns to face me, his gaze eerily intense. “This is where I live until Hostage Rescue carries Mr. Strobekker out in chains.”
He stares at me until I break eye contact. “What do you want me to do?” I ask.
“Show me the highways and byways of EROS. I want you to establish my bona fides.” He motions to one of two swivel chairs. “You take the Toshiba.”
“Have you logged on yet?”
“I didn’t want to risk doing anything stupid.”
“Lurked any on other services?”
“Lurked?”
“Lurking is logging on but not interacting with anyone. Watching the conversations of other people.”
“No.”
“But you’ve installed the EROS software.”
“The kid in the spare bedroom did.”
“Okay, sit.”
Lenz obeys without demur, taking the chair before the Dell.
“Got EROS’s eight hundred number entered into both systems?”
“Ready to go.”
“Password chosen?”
“Done.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Touchy. Okay, press ENTER and let the system make the connection. It’s all automatic, just like CompuServe or AOL.”
After checking the Toshiba for a keystroke-recording program (which would allow FBI technicians to replay everything I type on this computer)-and disabling the one I find-I log on and enter my password. “What does your status line say, Doctor?”
“Checking password… logging onto EROS at 14,400 bps. Welcome, Lilith.”
“Lilith? That’s your great alias?”
“Just wait. Where am I?”
“The main page.”
“Now it says ‘Downloading Image.’ That’s… the bust of Nefertiti. My God, the color and resolution are wonderful.”
“She’ll start spinning 3-D in a second. See? Okay, hit ENTER and she’ll go away. Look at the right side of the main page. See those little icons? That’s how you decide where you want to go. Into a live-chat area or forum, maybe the EROS library. You just move your mouse onto the icon you want and click.”
“I know how to use a mouse, Cole.”
“Congratulations. Look at the top line over the page. That’s your menu bar. See the choices? That’s where you decide what you want to do in those different locations-again, with your mouse. You can post messages to forums, compose and send e-mail, download files from the library, access the Internet, anything you want. You can even query the system to ask who’s in a given room at a given time. Of course, it will only give you their user names in answer.”
“You mean we can query the system to ask whether or not Strobekker is on-line?”
“Not exactly. First of all, you’re not supposed to know his legal name-if Strobekker
“But I can search using his on-line aliases?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s query for Shiva and Kali right now.”
“You can only search for one alias at a time. The system will tell you whether the person using that name is on-line, but not where he or she is. Then you can send the person a message, but there’s no guarantee he’ll answer. The other way is to enter various chat rooms and ask ‘Who’s Here?’ ”
“Will the other people in the room see you ask that?”
“The minute you enter a room, they see your name pop up on a list in a little window on their screen.”
“How many rooms are there in the system?”
“Theoretically, an infinite number.”
Lenz groans. “I need Strobekker to find me as if by accident. How can we search an infinite number of rooms?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. The number of active rooms fluctuates anywhere from a couple of dozen on a Monday morning to eight or nine hundred on a Friday night. That includes so-called private rooms that hold only two people at a given time.”
“Nine
