Alternative 3, p.11
Alternative 3, page 11
Curtis found a seedy coffee house with a couple of old Macs out back, doing its best to look like a place people would actually want to sit down and eat. The coffee was weak and lukewarm — nearly as bad as airline coffee. But for a dollar an hour he could surf the web and check his emails. He was glad he did. Just one new mail. From Terry. He’d received Curtis’s email about going on leave for a few days to attend the funeral of a close friend. Somehow Terry had found out it was Roly’s memorial — he dropped it into his reply ever-so-casually, but it hit home like a brick. Terry was still keeping a close eye on him, and this was a gentle reminder. Hell, it wouldn’t have surprised him if Terry had watched the service through some binos somewhere. It wasn’t that Terry was overly suspicious of Curtis. It was more of a paternal role. Maybe Terry wasn’t loved enough as a kid, and had taken Curtis under his wing as therapy. Hell knows.
But Curtis owed him for going in to bat for him when he was facing a prison sentence, and for helping him back onto the straight and narrow with the job at Trident. And Terry never let Curtis forget it. Maybe it was time to come clean. Well, semi-clean at least.
Curtis’s fingers punched the filthy keyboard hard. Most of the keys had a coating of what Curtis was hoping was just coffee, and they stuck like superglue . . .
Terry
So you heard about Roly. Thanks for the kind words. I need a few days to myself. I’ll stay in touch via email, same day return as agreed. Can’t understand things at the moment. Need to try and figure out why. Cut me some slack. I’m OK.
Curtis
Curtis hoped he sounded suitably cut up over the whole Roly thing for Terry to give him a few days’ grace. He figured the less Terry knew about where he was the better, and the web-based email would be virtually impossible to trace. He sat in front of the screen for a while, lost in thought. His mind kept turning back to Roly. He’d been a big part of his life. He was going to miss him. He remembered the envelope Turk had given him. He’d said his mother had wanted Curtis to have it. It must have been a mistake. But when he pulled the envelope open he found a CD ROM game with a label on it. The label said return to curtis hatch in thick red ink. It wasn’t his writing though. Not his game either.
It was an empire-building strategy game, the kind Curtis had been playing a lot online recently. He lifted the disk out of the container and shoved it into the D: drive. The auto-start kicked in and the game loaded. Up came the familiar load-up screenshots. The pre-game movie started, and Curtis clicked it through. But when the main menu screen came up, in the player-name space, the words didn’t say Player One as they were supposed to. Instead, it said: Welcome to the game — Enjoy the rules! — Gonad.
Curtis felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He was being played. This game had been out less than a year, and he hadn’t lain eyes on Roly for at least four. Something was going on here. If the game was Roly’s, then Roly was Gonad. He was sure it wasn’t coincidental. And if Roly was Gonad and he didn’t tell Curtis who he was, then Curtis wanted to know what the fuck was going on.
He started up the game. It ran normally. He played a few scenarios, using different combinations of civilisations and periods of history. It was just a game. A game. With rules. That got Curtis thinking. He clicked out of the game, and brought up the net browser. Then he did a search using an underground search engine he’d heard of a few years ago. It was still operating. Eventually he found what he was looking for. Cheat codes. He downloaded a screenshot and sent it to the printer. Curtis noticed that fat had soaked through onto both pages he’d printed out. Then he loaded up the game again, and started a single player.
When the game was underway, Curtis typed in the cheat code for more wood. Instantly the game froze. The screen went black, and suddenly a list in DOS appeared. Lists of ISP numbers, access codes, Federal and State computer network numbers, user names and passwords. It was hot property. Curtis realised why Roly had put his name on the CD, even though it wasn’t his. He knew Curtis would be able to recognise it as his blacklist and deal with it responsibly. Like destroying it as fast as possible. Curtis killed the disk and put the game back in his pocket.
Not here. Not now.
He logged off and searched for a toilet to wash the scum and grease off his fingers. When he discovered the state of the basin in the john he decided he risked less chance of infection by wiping his hands on his shirt. But he couldn’t help himself as he left the café. As he passed the counter he served one at the FUB’er behind the counter. That’s Fat Ugly Bastard for the uninitiated. The guy was smoking and reading a magazine, stopping now and then to wipe the ash off the page and wipe his brow with his stained apron.
‘You ever clean this place, man?’ said Curtis. The FUB’er looked up from his magazine, which Curtis noticed had a lot more pictures than words. He didn’t even bat an eyelid.
‘Not since the wife left. That was her job.’ Go figure. The flip side of Vegas. Don’t see that in the brochures.
Back at his hotel room, Curtis noticed with the pleasant surprise of someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time in hotels that his room had been made up. He made a mental note: top of the list after getting the money was a maid.
He changed shirts and washed his hands a dozen times to get the smell of the sticky keyboard off them, then packed a few essentials into his backpack — clean shirt and underwear, toothbrush, condoms — and made his way to Turk’s room. He thumped on the door a few times, but there was no sound of movement from the other side. Probably still comaed from the night before. Curtis figured he should at least check with reception. He knew he shouldn’t be expecting Turk to behave like a normal human being by leaving him a message somewhere, but he could at least give him the benefit of the doubt.
The woman at reception was no use. Polite, yes, but useful, no. No messages, not checked out, and hadn’t seen anyone resembling Mr Turk at all. Wonderful. But on his way out the revolving doors of the lobby one of the concierge dudes ran over with an expression of ‘man have I got some news for you’ on his face.
‘You looking for your friend? The guy with the blond hair and glasses?’
Curtis hesitated. ‘Yeah, you seen him?’ He could feel a tip coming on here.
The concierge nodded enthusiastically. ‘Try the roof. He’s been up there all night!’ The roof! What the hell?
Curtis nodded. ‘OK, thanks. How do I get up there?’
‘There’s a health spa and swimming pool up there. Just take the elevator to the top floor. You can’t miss him.’ Curtis folded a five-dollar note into the concierge’s pink little hand and headed for the elevators, shaking his head as he went. The roof?
‘Hey Turk! What the hell’s going on?’ Turk was mid-stroke, uncoiling the driver from behind his head, and he didn’t look up or register Curtis’s arrival as he sent the white ball screaming off the hotel roof in a wide arcing slice. He watched the ball disappear into a hotel carpark some 18 storeys below, before turning to Curtis.
‘Hey dude, look what you did! That was a 250-yard shot if you hadn’t put me off!’ He pulled another ball from his pocket, placed it on the tee and lined up another shot. Curtis noticed that the tee Turk was using was actually a woman’s bra, with the tip pushed in to hold the ball. He looked around for the owner of the bra, and found not one but three women, all in various states of undress, sleeping around the pool in the hotel deck chairs. Turk whacked another shot, watching the arc of the ball as it disappeared after bouncing off the roof of a laundry truck.
Curtis lost it. Big time. ‘What the fuck’s going on, Turk? You lost your fucking mind?’
Turk just lined up another shot. ‘Nice to see you too, man. Just having a little fun! I can’t seem to stop slicing my three wood. Maybe I’m moving my head too much.’
‘Maybe you’re losing your fucking head!’ Curtis grabbed the driver off Turk. ‘You could kill someone doing that! Think about that for a second!’ Turk wobbled on his feet. He was out of it.
‘Sure, man. Anything you say.’
‘What have you been doing? I tried ringing you. Did you get my message?’
Turk just smiled. Curtis could tell there was a connection problem here. He motioned towards the women. ‘And who are they?’
Turk’s mind meandered in slow motion. ‘Oh, yeah . . . they’re just some friends I met last night.’ Curtis wasn’t impressed.
‘You paying for friends now, Turk?’ Turk didn’t respond, and Curtis lost it again. ‘You fucking idiot, Turk. We’re not even supposed to be here, remember? And we didn’t pay for our rooms, remember? And in case you’ve forgotten, we’re both still on parole, remember?’
‘Hey chill out, dude!’ Turk threw his ball over the side of the building. ‘I’m just having some fun. We used to do that too, remember?’
‘Yeah, right. Getting arrested by the FBI is great fun! I had a ball being interviewed for 48 hours straight and going to court and bankrupting my parents with lawyers’ fees. I know Roly had a great time in prison. Man, I was so disappointed when I only got parole and missed out on all the fun he had inside! So why don’t we just turn ourselves in now and really start enjoying ourselves. And maybe we won’t have to ‘cos if the hotel doesn’t, then one of your “friends” probably will!’ The angry silence between them was palpable. But Turk wasn’t backing down, so Curtis tried reason.
‘Listen, man! I’m onto something big. Really big. I’ll tell you more about it in a few days, but when it’s over I’ll buy you enough friends to screw yourself silly. But I need a low profile right now. That means you too. I don’t know how you paid for all this, and I don’t want to know. Just keep your head down. Please.’ Turk eyed him suspiciously, weighing up Curtis’s argument against his own. Slowly Turk’s face spread into the all-too-familiar mischievous grin.
‘Sure, man — you only had to ask.’ Curtis smiled too, in spite of himself.
‘It’s just for a few days. I might not be reachable for a while, but I’ll contact you as soon as I can.’
Turk suddenly looked interested. ‘Yeah? Where you going?’
Curtis shook his head. ‘I don’t know yet. Maybe nowhere. Just make sure you leave your cellphone on. I might need some help, and if I do, I’ll need you sober, OK?
‘OK, man.’ Turk shook Curtis’s hand like the homeboys in the movies, the way they used to do before the bust. ‘You got it.’
But Curtis still had his doubts. ‘I’m trusting you, man.’
Turk smiled back at him. ‘Hey, I need a few days’ sleep anyway. Besides, this game is impossible, it’s much easier on Playstation!’
By the time Curtis got back to the Oasis, he was hanging out for another dose of Gina. Soon he was bounding down the hotel corridors like a love-sick puppy, and knocking on Gina’s door with a stupid grin. Sickening really.
‘Honey, I’m home!’ he said, as Gina opened the door for him. Curtis laughed at his own joke, but it fell kinda flat when he noticed he was the only one who found it funny. She was wearing a hotel robe, with her hair wrapped up in a towel, but he could tell by the look on her face that she was in work mode, not play mode. Damn.
‘Hey, come and have a look at this,’ she said, turning back into the room. ‘This is the website Ollie was talking about. The stuff on here is incredible.’
Curtis followed her inside and closed the door. Gina had well and truly moved in. There was girl stuff all over the bathroom, and she was sitting at a computer set up on the desk. Curtis leant over her shoulder to look at the screen, as much to smell her freshly showered scent as to look at the website. He read out the name of the site.
‘ConspiracyWatch-dot-com,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Now that’s original. I hope we’re surfing anonymously, Prometheus?’
Gina nodded impatiently. ‘I’m using a modified version of FreeSurf. We’re undetectable. Even our local ISP can’t trace us.’
He read aloud the text immediately below the title.
The Truth is In Here. America has a long history of deceiving, manipulating and exploiting the mindstate of its own people. Information you need to know and will not be told about via the mainstream media can be found here.
Curtis threw his pack onto the bed, sat down and kicked his shoes off. ‘I don’t know how these guys sleep at night with all these conspiracies going on. Most of us call it collective paranoia. You don’t want to join me in the shower first? I’m sure ConspiracyWatch will still be there when we get back.’
But Gina wasn’t in the mood for romance. Or even a quickie for that matter. ‘Pick an event,’ she said excitedly. ‘You know, some major significant event of the last century. Don’t go for the obvious. Pick something really obscure — it’s got a take on everything in here!’ Curtis lay back on the bed and thought for a second.
OK, something obscure. ‘How about the sinking of the Lusitania?’
Gina turned back to him, looking confused. ‘The sinking of the what?’
Curtis rolled over on one elbow to face her. ‘The Lusitania. It was a passenger liner sunk just before we got into World War I. Sunk off the coast of Ireland, I think, by a German U-boat. It basically turned the tide of public opinion in the States and led to us declaring war on the Kaiser a couple of years later.’ Gina was already entering Lusitania into the keyword search engine on the website.
‘How do you spell Lusit —’
‘L-U-S-I-T-A-N-I-A’ Curtis was guessing, but he wasn’t letting that on to Gina.
‘Here we go . . . got it! Check this out!’ She’d found something. Curtis got up and leant over her again to look at the screen. His face was just inches from Gina’s ear lobe. A dozen thoughts crossed his mind, but Gina’s curiosity was infectious. He focused on the web article — the story looked convincing. And its detail was disturbing. It alleged that the Lusitania was carrying a large cargo of munitions that was the ultimate cause of her demise. It said that the British Admiralty, and in particular First Lord Winston Churchill, had deliberately put the ship in harm’s way to encourage an incident that might bring the United States into the war, even though the German government had taken out advertisements in all its newspapers advising Germans not to sail on her.
It claimed that the Lusitania was sent at a considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting, and her escorts withdrawn, despite the fact that the liner received a series of warnings in the two days before her sinking — warnings which were ignored. According to supposed eyewitnesses, several messages between the Lusitania and the British Admiralty were missing from the official investigation records, and they included urgent requests from the captain to divert from the planned route. The requests were refused, and the Lusitania steamed on into the annals of history, with the loss of over 1000 lives, and significantly (according to the author), 123 Americans. The rest, as they say, is history.
Curtis shook his head in disbelief. Sure it made for convincing reading. But he’d seen enough crackpot websites not to take a story like this without a large grain of salt. But one thing he found really interesting was that soon after the ship went down, actors were hired to portray drowning passengers for a newsreel, which was shown repeatedly around the US for the following two years. According to the story, the newsreel was presented to the public as authentic. The real enchilada. No one at the time questioned how a cameraman had been able to film a sinking passenger liner in the middle of the ocean. Curtis decided he’d read enough.
‘Come on, Gina, we’re here to crack this site, not read it. We’ve got better things to do, like planning how we’re gonna spend a million dollars, right?’ He nudged Gina’s ear with his nose for effect.
‘Come on, stop fooling around.’ Gina wasn’t having any of it. ‘You might get offers like this every day, but I sure as hell don’t. Why don’t you try keeping it in your pants long enough to finish the job, and then you’ll have the rest of your life to seduce me.’ Sounded like a fair deal.
‘That a promise?’ He might as well get some commitment while the going was good.
But Gina’s mind was already back on the screen. ‘Look, there’s some stuff here about Pearl Harbor.’ Curtis did his best to focus, and pulled a face. He could see his chances of some nookie fading rapidly.
‘I saw the movie. Think I prefer Hollywood’s version of history, but what’s ConspiracyWatch got to say for itself on that one?’ Gina clicked through to the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy Page. Yes, it had its own page, can you believe it, and Gina was right into it.
‘It’s called the Mother of all Conspiracies!’
Oh shit. Here we go. And the list of so-called evidence was exhaustive, claiming to prove that F.D.R. had planned the attack.
Maybe exhausting would be a better description. Talk about paranoia run wild. F.D.R. provoked the attack, so the story went. He knew about it in advance and covered up his failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders. He needed the attack to sucker America into declaring war, since the public and Congress were overwhelmingly against entering the war in Europe. It was his backdoor to war. So he blinded the commanders at Pearl Harbor by denying them any intelligence reports, suckering them into thinking negotiations with Japan were continuing to prevent them from realising a war was on the cards. To the point of having false information sent to Hawaii about the location of the Japanese carrier fleet. Of course it listed not one, or two or three, but 61 separate occasions that could have constituted an early warning. From the message from the Peruvian envoy in Tokyo 11 months before the fateful day, right up to the morning of the attack, when warnings from both the British Admiralty, and the Navy’s own Japanese code breakers were ignored, and all evidence of the messages deleted.
