'No walk there! No walk!' the soldier nearest us said loudly, anger and worry jostling for space on his face. He pointed to the trail the Jeep had followed. 'Road!' He pointed to the road behind us, the stretch of obvious road between Jeep and the convoy, the length of which we had just walked twice. 'No road!' he exclaimed. 'No road! Minefield!'
'Oh my God,' Laura said.
We stared at each other wide-eyed for a moment. Then, to the soldier's great disapproval, for no real reason, we both began to laugh.
'You could have died,' Robbie said, his voice faint with enormity, when we returned to the truck and told our story to the assembled masses.
Laura and I looked at each other. Then Laura turned back to Robbie.
'Believe me,' she assured him solemnly, 'those cookies were to die for.'
When I woke up I believed, for half an instant, that Laura was there, with me in Cole Valley, still alive. That hadn't happened for almost a year. But the moment of realization had lost none of its power to hurt.
I went to work. At work I checked the Thorn Tree. There was only one new entry.
BC088269 11/04 06:01
Ha ha ha
The Bull is real, I am The Bull and I'll stick knives in all your eyes
Random juvenilia by some mental twelve-year-old, I thought, and shut the window.
Then I sat bolt upright and opened it again.
Knives in all your eyes. Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody knew about the Swiss Army knives except myself, Gavin, and the Nepali police. Of course the LP article had mentioned mutilation. But still. I went back to the Thorn Tree and carefully reread that new entry.
What I saw the second time turned my spine into an icy river. The sender's name, an apparently random collection of characters. BC088269. I thought I had seen it before. And I thought I knew where.
I got up and walked out of work and took the N back home. So I missed an hour of work. Let them fire me. This was important.
I went into my house and dug into my stack of travel pictures, waiting to be filed into albums. Near the top was the picture I had taken in Muktinath, the picture of the false ledger entry the killer had made in Stanley Goebel's name. His name and his passport number.
His passport number was BC088269.
Of course it wasn't definite proof. It just meant there was someone who knew Stanley Goebel's passport number and the details of what had happened to him. But for me it was the straw that finally broke the skeptic's back. It was the final piece of inconclusive evidence which made me certain that there was more to this iceberg than just the tip. It made me certain that there was some kind of connection, that these deaths could not be coincidental one-off events. That there was somebody out there stalking and killing travelers on the Lonely Planet trail.
The Bull is real, I am The Bull.
It was such a relief to be certain.
But now that I was certain, what exactly was I supposed to do?
Chapter 9 Sniffing The Packets
I still didn't have any hard evidence. An overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence, sure, but no smoking gun. And even if I did, what was I supposed to do, go to the FBI? The State Department? Get them to issue a vague travel advisory telling Americans to be careful out there?
There was Interpol. Whatever they were. I would try to find out.
The media? The San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times or maybe even Larry King Live? That might work. I had enough for a pretty good story. I even had pictures, although no paper in the world was going to run a shot of a dead man with knives in his eyes. I wished I'd taken a picture at the ACAP office, of Stanley Goebel's original handwriting, for a before-and-after shot. Maybe they could get in touch with his next of kin and get a sample.
And yet. What good would that do? A story would run in a newspaper one day, and maybe a snippet on CNN. A bunch of people would read it and ooh and aah. And it would be a warning so vague that it was useless. 'Be careful if you go backpacking in the Third World because it looks like there's a serial killer somewhere on the planet.' Yeah, that would save lives, that would have The Bull shaking in his hooves.
However. It occurred to me that if BC088269 was in fact The Bull, then I knew one more thing about him. I knew that he was out there on the Net. And the Net was something I knew a great deal about. More than most people. More than most techies even. In fact I was an expert.
Maybe, just maybe, if he had been careless, I could find him.
I put off the most promising lead, partly so I wouldn't lose hope quickly and partly because I'd need to do some social engineering in order to follow it, and spent the rest of the day searching through that vast maelstrom of disordered information called the Internet.
You probably think there's a lot of stuff out there. You have no idea. There's the static Web, company web sites and online health databases and government reference materials and a zillion vanity pages and all the other stuff you already know about. Search engines such as Google and AltaVista track these pages reasonably well… if they know about them. Every search engine runs an automated 'spider', which goes to every page in its database, and then every page that those pages link to, and so on and so forth — but even so there's a huge amount of 'dark matter' out there, which have no links to them and consequently go unnoticed by the search engines.
Then there's the dynamic Web, sites which display different information with every passing day, or for every user, or depending on some kind of context. Newspapers are the most obvious example. The Thorn Tree is another. Spiders have a lot of trouble with the dynamic Web and capture only a small minority of what's available. Consider snapshots of Times Square, taken every ten minutes; they'd tell you everything about the billboards, but very little about what happened on the video screens. Spiders are like that. The huge Lexis-Nexis database stores every article from every Western periodical, but misses out on countless zines, pamphlets, and minor foreign papers, and charges a small fortune for access. Fortunately we had an account at work.
And that's just the Web. Most people think the Internet is what appears in their web browser. Us techies know better. Think of the Net as a 65,000-lane highway. The whole World Wide Web runs on but two lanes. Most of the lanes are nearly empty, or used only to keep the whole network running, but some of them are as busy as the Web; e-mail, obviously, but also Usenet, instant messaging like AIM and ICQ, IRC, MUDs, Napster, File Transfer Protocol, and even older protocols such as Gopher and Telnet, the dead languages of the Net, its Latin and Greek. There were even a few ancient BBS systems still out there, to which you actually had to dial directly.
Much of the data out there, probably most, simply cannot be searched, is effectively invisible except maybe to the FBI or National Security Agency. Most of that which can be searched is readily available through two or three sites, say Google and MetaCrawler and Lexis-Nexis. But there is a small fringe of information that is available only if you look very hard and very carefully, using exactly the right words, on one or two of the lesser-known search sites.
I did not intend to leave any stone unturned. I searched NorthernLight and Mamma and HotBot and AltaVista and Inktomi and GoTo and Ask and About and DejaNews. I searched Reuters and the Associated Press and Dow Jones and AfricaNews. I searched conspiracy sites and hacker sites and travel sites and serial-killer-fan-club sites and travel advisories and international-security companies. I searched for various combinations of: 'The Bull' and 'serial killer' and 'traveler' and 'backpacker' and 'Laura Mason' and 'Stanley Goebel' and 'Lonely Planet' and 'murder' and 'eye mutilation' and 'knives' and 'Swiss Army knives' and 'BC088269' and 'Malawi' and 'Cameroon' and 'South
