The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall

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      ‘Not if you give me some peanuts.’

      He got me some. He was a good barman, I decided. The place was free of corporate androids, and the only other guests were a very old foursome in the corner. They’d looked up at me grimly when I came in. I didn’t blame them. When I get to their age, I’ll resent young people, too. I resent them already, in fact, the slim little fresh-faced assholes. I don’t find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don’t even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they’ll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they’ll wind up married to a movie star. They’re out the other side of all that, onto a flat, grey plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about. I don’t blame them being a little out of sorts. I’m just surprised more oldsters don’t take to the streets in packs, swearing and raising hell and getting drunk. With demographics going the way they are, maybe that’s going to be the next big thing. Gangs of octogenarians, taking drugs and running amok. Though walking amok is more likely, I guess – with maybe an hour of dozing amok in the afternoon.

      After a while the group in the corner seemed to accept that I wasn’t going to start playing a new-fangled musical instrument or challenging conventional sexual mores. They got on with their business, and I got on with mine: we co-existed, two species warily sharing the same watering hole.

      Nearly two hours later, Bobby came striding in. He caught sight of me slumped in my booth, signalled to the barman for two more of whatever I was drinking, and came over to join me.

      ‘How shit-faced are you?’ He had an odd look on his face.

      ‘On a scale of one to ten,’ I said breezily, ‘I’d have to give myself an F.’

      ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve found something. Kind of.’

      Suddenly feeling tense, I sat up and saw that he was holding a small sheaf of paper.

      ‘Got reception to let me use their printer,’ he said. ‘Where the hell are the drinks?’

      At that moment the barman appeared with them. ‘Any more nuts?’ he asked.

      ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Just the two of us.’ Then I laughed for quite a long time. I’m pretty sure I was laughing. The barman went away. Bobby waited patiently for me to get a grip. It took a while. I think that for just a moment I was on the verge of losing it.

      ‘Okay,’ I said eventually. ‘Shoot.’

      ‘First thing is I had another look on the Net. Still no record of the Straw Men as an actual thing, but I found encyclopaedia references to other meanings of the term “straw man” – something about guys who in the last century would stand outside courts with straw in their shoes – didn’t really understand that part – indicating they’d give false testimony for money. And another reference regarding lack of conscience – I guess a straw versus flesh thing.’

      ‘In other words, dummy guys in illegalities,’ I said. ‘As discussed. So what?’

      ‘Then I looked right through the disk,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Ran a low-level media scan, checked for hidden files, partitions, the works. Nothing. Then I looked through the software, of which there ain’t much.’

      ‘Dad wasn’t a nerd,’ I said. ‘That’s why I didn’t bother to look through the computer in the house.’

      ‘Right. But he did use the Net.’

      I shrugged. ‘Email, occasionally. Plus he had a site for his business, though someone else maintained it. I used to go look at it once in a while.’ It had seemed easier, somehow, than calling them on the phone. Since I’d dropped out of college, they’d never really known what I was doing. They certainly didn’t know the reason I hadn’t finished the course, or who I’d gone on to work for. My parents never gave the impression of being political people, but they’d been there in the 1960s, as the video I’d found made more than clear. You were there in the Summer of Stupid Pants, then you took certain attitudes on board. Finding their son was working for the CIA would not have gone down big. I’d hidden this from them, not realizing this meant I was hiding everything else. Of course that now seemed a little bizarre, given what they’d been withholding from me.

      Bobby shook his head. ‘He had Explorer and Navigator on his disk, and he obviously used both a great deal. Huge cache, and about a zillion bookmarks in each.’

      ‘For what kind of thing?’

      ‘You name it. Reference. Online stores. Sports.’

      ‘No porn?’

      He smiled. ‘No.’

      ‘Thank God for that.’

      ‘I went through every single one. Even the ones that seemed like nothing, just in case he’d covered up by renaming the bookmark to cover what the link actually led to.’

      ‘You’re sneaky,’ I said. ‘I always said so.’

      ‘So was your father. He had renamed one, in fact, hidden in a folder of a hundred and sixty bookmarks for what I can only regard as the dullest facets of the realty business. It was called “Recently sold Mizner/Intercoastal lots”. Mean anything to you?’

      ‘Addison Mizner was an estate architect in the 1920s and ’30s. Built a bunch of prestige property in Miami, Palm Beach. Italian villa-style. Very sought-after and outlandishly expensive.’

      ‘You know some wacky stuff. Okay. But the link didn’t lead to a site to do with land or houses. It led to a blank page. So I thought shit, dead end. Took me a few minutes to realize that actually the page was covered with a transparent graphic that had a hidden image map. When I worked that out I got through to another set of pages, with some pretty odd links.’

      ‘Odd how?’

      He shook his head. ‘Just odd. Looked like the usual home pages, complete with excessive detail, bad punctuation and rancid colour use, but all the material seemed very anodyne. There was just something hinky about them, almost as if they were fakes.’

      ‘Why would someone put up fake home pages?’

      ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s what I wondered. I followed most of the links down into dead ends and 404s. But the line kept on going, through pages of links – and on each page only one of the links seemed to lead more than a couple of pages away. Then I started hitting passwords. At first, easy Java stuff that I could hack myself, using a few goodies I found stashed on your disk. Incidentally, you need more RAM. Fucker crashed on me about five times. Then – hope you don’t mind, there’s a few long-distance calls on your room – I got some help from specialist friends. I had to get down to wedge tracing and UNIX backdoors and shit. Someone who really knew what they were doing had set up a lot of obfuscation.’

      ‘But what’s the point?’ I said. ‘Surely anyone could just bookmark the end site, whatever it is, and go straight there the next time. Why screw around setting up a paper trail when the whole point of the Web is nonlinear access?’

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