For Mayhem or Madness
10
Enchanted Village
LESLIE WHITEMAN gave me more information than she knew. Leslie and Terry had a nineteen-year-old son at Tufts. From what I dug up, he seemed like a good kid, a natural athlete, and a smart cookie. He was studying for a BS in Decision Theory and Artificial Intelligence. Scary kid. I got that information while Leslie was showing me the folder of papers including birth and death certificates.
No matter how carefully they are raised and how smart they are, kids still feel invulnerable. Especially online. It was easier to get past the security at this major research institute than to break the WiFi password for Leslie’s computer. There’s always a priority regarding what is protected and students fall low on the ladder when compared to top secret research and university finances. Since I only wanted to read and not spoof his identity, it wasn’t difficult to take a look at his email.
As I suspected, a message had arrived from his mother soon after I left her. It was an innocuous message from mother to son except that my name was mentioned.
Bruce, your old friend Jason Sanborn stopped by to see how you are doing. He’s with some computer research company now. Wanted to know when he could visit. Expect him soon. Miss you and the old cat terribly. I love you both. Mom
Having protected his own identity, Terry Whitehead had used a classic cutout between himself and his wife. He used his son. No doubt he was also reading Bruce’s email. Bruce immediately posted a research paper that fit right in with the level a sophomore computer science student would write. The only thing that could alert a casual observer to the fact that it wasn’t one of his assignments was the fact that it listed Jason Sanborn as co-author.
A professor’s comment was attached to the paper in a few hours.
Time is getting short. We should retire this topic. I’ll take care of it.
Bruce sent an email back to his mother the next morning. It was automatically forwarded from his email account at the university to a dummy account I’d set up there.
Mom, Everything’s fine here. Research is hard but it has its rewards. It will be good to see Jason again. Hope he gets here soon. The cat’s been really sick and won’t last long. Love, Bruce.
I’d been set up. Terry Whiteman knew I was coming and expected me. The least he could have done was give me an address.
So, why all the subterfuge getting me to Thailand? I needed to get FinCEN and the FBI off my tail. I had Terry Whitehead’s digital DNA and could track him, but he was making it easy now. What I didn’t need was for the US government to swoop in and try to use him or his research. Terry had developed some pretty effective ways to erase a person from digital archives across the entire online world. In our age, erasing a person’s digital identity erased the person. Or the country. I could see how circumventing all security measures Terry could probably wipe North Korea off the map digitally. A nuclear arsenal is worthless without the guidance system and arming codes. Those things take a lot more time to rebuild than to erase.
And if Terry could do that to an enemy of the United States, he could do it to our country as well.
We already knew how interference by a foreign power could tilt the balance of American politics. Most people still didn’t believe it. But if what Jordan had told me about the Russians complaining their election was hacked by a lone wolf was true, finding Terry and protecting his secrets was even more important. The US wasn’t the only country out to get Terry. And most weren’t even as friendly as the two agents I’d spotted following me on the train. I needed to be sure Terry was safe.
Yeah. I’d been turned.
The U.S. Government had paid me to find and neutralize Hacker X. I knew the neutralizing part was being taken care of by a ravaging disease. Once I’d cracked his identity, it seemed I was being led rather than having to search. Somehow, I’d grown to suspect that Terry and I were on the same team.
I spent three days based at a little resort about five miles from the airport outside Bangkok. I’d purchased a SIM from a vendor for five hundred baht, about sixteen dollars. It gave me two hours of talk, unlimited text messaging, and a gig of data. The clerk had installed it in my new burner phone, connected it to the network, input my new phone number, and the number for English language support if I needed it. I didn’t expect to make many phone calls, but I immediately installed a map application and used the browser to search what to do in Bangkok.
My first day at the Vismaya Resort was spent mostly sleeping and trying to get past jet lag. By the time evening came, I elected to eat in the resort restaurant and spent two hundred baht on a meal so huge I couldn’t eat it all. And it was tasty. I’d always liked Thai food, but most of my experience in Seattle was with Pad Thai, a stir-fried noodle dish. Here, that was street vendor food. I ordered a spicy Thai salad with glass noodles and shrimp and a bowl of what I thought was a curry soup. Either one would have been enough food.
I took my time eating in front of the huge windows overlooking the pool. I’d been careful and didn’t think I’d been followed since Amsterdam, but I wanted to know who was around me. A couple spoke loudly at a table nearby in what I thought was German. Three older women were at a table in the corner, drinking some kind of colored liquid in a tall glass. I had to ask the waiter what it was and found it was a frozen green tea and vodka. I decided to take my Thai coffee out to the pool deck and sat to read while I observed the people taking advantage of the late evening sun on what had been a rainy day.
No one I recognized from Singapore.
The next morning, I established a routine of walking to the little store half a mile away and across from the train stop. I bought Pocky and the young woman cashier proposed to me. Of course, it wasn’t quite that easy. As I was attempting to get forty baht sorted out of my change, she talked in Thai.
“I’m sorry, I only speak English,” I said as I finally laid the coins down on the counter.
“She wants to marry you,” her equally young companion said.
“I don’t think that would work. She should find a rich American.”
“You not American?”
“No.”
“You not rich?”
“No.”
They talked between them. And I turned to leave.
“She still want to marry you.”
“Ah. No thanks.”
Rich is a relative term. I had enough money to buy Pocky. I was a farang, a white guy, and in Asia that simply meant I had money and could raise their standard of living.
When I got back to the hotel, I looked up the train routes and schedules. All the trains connected at the airport where I could link to anywhere I wanted. I still wasn’t confident that I hadn’t been followed. In the afternoon, I walked back to the store and crossed to the train stop. I kept scanning for other non-Asians of which there were a few. If I planned to have someone followed here, I would hire an Asian to do it. Maybe the clerk at the little store. Unless a Euro-American has a direct interaction with a person of an unfamiliar race or that person has some highly identifiable characteristic, there is little chance that even the most observant—including me—can pick an individual out of a crowd. It’s true whether the race is African, Asian, Indian, or Arab. Most Euro-Americans can’t tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Spotting an Asian tailing me would be impossible.
I didn’t have that much confidence in the subtlety of the United States Government. Part of the culture of ethnic superiority is that we believe we don’t need the help of anyone inferior. We can do it on our own.
It took forty-five minutes to get connections into downtown Bangkok and ten minutes to walk to Siam Paragon. Of course, this was a center for shoppers of all cultures. I continued to scan my surroundings, paying more attention to the people than to the designer clothes. People shop there to say “I bought it in Bangkok,” rather than for a bargain. The prices were no better than buying in Seattle.
When I stopped for an early dinner at a popular café, I managed to position myself so that I could see the passing shoppers and most of the rest of the restaurant. I logged on to the coffee-host WiFi and began searching for Terry.
I’d recorded the system traffic from the server where his son posted the ‘research’ paper that included my name. Filtering and sorting through the IP addresses that had pinged the server between the time the paper was posted and when the professor’s response was added left me with only a few hundred addresses to identify.
Terry wasn’t making it easy on me, but he wasn’t really hiding from me, either. It was more like he wanted to make sure I was worthy to find him. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that he knew more about me than Uncle Sam did and I had to wonder if he’d even managed to manipulate Jordan into recruiting me.
By the time I’d finished my gai pad prik gaeng, a stir-fried red curry chicken dish, and drank my Thai coffee, I had an Air Asia reservation and a room booked in Chiang Mai for the next day.
It was just before sunrise and roosters were crowing when I slipped out of my room and away from the resort. I’d prepaid everything and nothing was charged to my room, so I dropped the key in the slot, shouldered my backpack, and walked away. For as beautiful as the little hotel and resort is, it is a quarter mile down a dirt road to get to the main highway where the store and train stop were. Along the road, chickens were pecking at the grass, dogs were sleeping in the road, and a couple of guys were getting into an old truck with cups of coffee.
I checked back toward the resort, pulled my hat down, and headed toward the train. I was really blending in, being just one more six-foot-two white guy amidst a sea of Asians who were six inches shorter than me. I scanned the group getting on the train and again getting off at the airport. From Suvarnabhumi, I caught a shuttle bus to Don Mueang. Bangkok has two airports and most of the regional flights leave from Don Mueang, an hour bus ride northwest of the international airport.
I slept most of the way there with my packs clutched in my lap. I needn’t have worried. There was only one other farang on the bus and we were left alone in seats by ourselves. I looked the guy over carefully when I boarded, but he’d already pillowed his head against the window.
The Coffee Club at the airport beckoned me. It’s part of an Australian chain of coffee shop cafés that is almost as old as Starbucks. I ate a full breakfast with two Americanos for four hundred baht, which was expensive, but worth every penny. I also logged onto their free Internet service which surprised me by requiring a passport number to log on. I had an email message letting me know that David from the Enchanted Village Digital Nomad Retreat would meet me at the airport. Now that was service. I was going to be paying less than twenty dollars a night for my room and they were picking me up at the airport.
I spent most of the morning in the café and then strolled around the airport shops. Don Mueang isn’t as large as the five floors of restaurants and duty free stores at Suvarnabhumi, but it’s bigger than a lot of major airports in US cities. It’s just hard to realize that even a relatively small country like Thailand has a population density of nearly three hundred fifty per square mile. Compare that to Wyoming’s five people per square mile.
I finally boarded after texting David that the flight had been delayed. Apparently, that wasn’t unusual. I didn’t recognize anyone else getting on the flight. David met my flight and presented a little lei kind of thing that fit on the wrist. As soon as we arrived at the retreat, the owner, Sujit, met me to show me my little bungalow. He immediately asked if I’d eaten and went to get me a kind of soup that I could assemble in my kitchen called khao soi. It was great and I determined that I needed to find some way to pay Sujit back for the meal. I couldn’t believe the service I was getting for twenty bucks a night.
After I’d eaten, I walked about the little village of bungalows set around a couple salt water pools and a garden with a waterfall. My first thought was that this would be a great place to retire to. When I caught a glimpse of the young women playing in the pool, I considered simply not leaving.
As promised, the Internet connection was fast and I scanned down the list of people who were connected. You can’t really tell anything about the people by the computer names attached to a network unless someone is foolish enough to name their computer ‘Darren Long’s Laptop.’ If I happened to meet that guy here at the retreat, I’d talk to him about his computer security. My computer was identified as 2317rqj. Just a meaningless sequence.
I spent most of my first night at the retreat just observing traffic on the network. I didn’t browse the Internet or check email. I wanted to see who would check me out just because I was here.
Digital nomads are a strange breed. Most have leveraged some kind of internet business into a steady passive income stream that leaves them free to travel wherever they want. Some, like me, have an active job. I investigate. Others ‘consult’ on web design, SEO, and graphics. A few have blogs people subscribe to just to travel vicariously. And some, like Terry, are just hiding—waiting for the moment to strike.
There was probably more computing power within two hundred feet of me than in most corporations.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at nathan@nathaneverett.com.
