Dark Places

17. Ends, Tightened

By the time we docked  I had started to recover. I had drunk about a litre of fresh water, my legs were strong enough to walk or at least stagger, and my mind had more or less fallen back into place. The memories of my encounter on the beach, and my ninety minutes in the water, already seemed completely unreal. I felt very much like I had woken from a nightmare.
   Before getting off the boat that had saved me — a fair-sized boat, about forty feet, from the look of things a dive boat when not being used to rescue stupid tourists who went to the beach alone and got caught in the riptide — I thanked the Indonesian boatmen profusely and gave them most of the soggy wad of Indonesian cash in my travel wallet. Johann, Suzanne, Talena and I walked back to the Anda Cottages, only a few minutes from the dock. They led me into the common room, sat me down, and bought me a richly deserved bottle of Bintang.
   "You are very lucky," Johann said, "We warned you about the riptide."
   "If your friend hadn't come looking for you —" Suzanne shook her head.
   "Yeah," I said. "Well." I stared at Talena. I couldn't get over her presence.
   "We're glad you're all right," Suzanne said. "You must be very tired. So are we. See you in the morning?"
   "Sure," I said. I hugged them goodnight, as did Talena. I felt a brief and entirely unjustifiable spurt of jealousy when she hugged Johann.
   Talena and I sat back down and stared at one another for a moment.
   "What are you doing here?" I finally asked.
   "Saving your stupid, ignorant, pathetic, moronic, stubborn, bullheaded, perverse, idiotic, shit-for-brains, skinny little ass," she said. "What does it look like I'm doing?"
   "Oh." I considered what she had said and added "Thank you."
   "Since you so promptly broke your promise to email me every day —"
   "The rain knocked the phone lines out," I protested. "I couldn't."
   She gave me a skeptical look. "Yeah, and I'm sure you tried as hard as you possibly could. Anyways I took a couple days off and burned some frequent flier miles to see what kind of trouble you'd gotten yourself into. And then this morning I get this email from some freaky-ass address telling me that you've found the guy and you know his name. So then I figure you're really in trouble. And I have had the day from hell, believe you me. I got to Tetebatu about an hour and a half after you left, and it was hard enough getting there, never mind here. Lucky for you I bumped into your Dutch friends. We went down to the beach and found your sandals in the water. So we came back here and got the boat. Seems like it happens a lot. You're lucky they know exactly where the current takes people after the riptide gets them."
   "Yeah."
   "It wasn't just the riptide, was it."
   "No."
   "What happened?"
   I told her the whole story, omitting none of my stupidities.
   "Well," she said, when I had finished. "Well. Well, you're just very lucky to be alive, aren't you now?"
   "Yeah," I said. "I think you saved my life."
   She barked a laugh. "No shit, Sherlock."
   "Well. Jeez. No one's ever saved my life before. I guess… "
   "Stop," she said. "Don't get all maudlin on me. I hate that."
   "Oh. Okay."
   She finished her beer. "Also there's a theory that when you save someone's life you are then karmically responsible for everything that they do for the rest of their life. And no offense but considering your recent errors of judgement that sounds like a real Atlasesque weight on my shoulders so I'd really rather be reminded of the whole subject as infrequently as possible if you're okay with that."
   "Fine," I said.
   She stood up. "I think it's time for us to get the hell out of Dodge. Let's go."
   "Go? Where are we going?" I asked.
   "We're going to pack your things and leave town."
   "It's too late for the bus."
   "Bus?" She shook her head, amused. "You've been traveling on a shoestring too long. I hired a taxi for the day. Only twenty bucks, you know."
   "Oh," I said. She was right. That alternative had never even occurred to me.
   I packed quickly, thinking of Morgan following us to the Anda Cottages for a bloody denouement. Then we were in her taxi and she was talking to the driver in Indonesian as we pulled away.
   "You speak the language?" I asked, surprised.
   "I spent a couple months here researching the last-but-one edition," she said. "And it's the world's easiest language. No grammar, no tenses, no verb forms, no nothing. You wouldn't want to write poetry in it but it takes about two weeks to learn."
   "Oh," I said, feeling hopelessly incompetent next to her.
   About twenty minutes later I said "We have to go to Tetebatu."
   "What?"
   "Tetebatu."
   "What for?" she asked suspiciously.
   I had realized what it was that had nagged at me all day yesterday, was what for. "There might be a clue there. An important one."
   "Paul, listen to me," she said slowly, as if speaking to a child. "You almost died today. There is a bad man out there who wants you dead. We're getting you out of the country as soon as we can without making any detours."
   "I'm going to Tetebatu," I said. "You can come or not."
   "You ungrateful little shit!" she exclaimed, amazed. "What happened to thank you for saving my life?"
   "What happened to not reminding you about that?… okay, sorry, that was uncalled for. But I just need to go to Tetebatu for thirty minutes. To look at the computer he used there, that's it. Then we can leave."
   She gave me a long, level, unimpressed look. But then she leaned towards the driver and gave him new instructions, and not very long later — taxis really were a lot faster than traveling via bemo — we were back in Kotoraya.
   The taxi couldn't make it up the muddy road to Tetebatu, but I paid a small boy to go roust a cedak driver out of bed, and a hundred thousand rupiah convinced him to take us up there. Us because Talena wasn't letting me out of her sight. Several times the cedak got stuck and we had to get out and push, and we both slipped and fell more than once, and by the time we got to Tetebatu we were both covered with mud and Talena was furiously not speaking to me.
   I went straight for the Harmony Cafe. What had nagged at me was that when I had gone to see Morgan the morning before last, before he left for Kuta, he had been at the computer — even though the phone lines were down. What was he doing? My guess is, considering the comment he'd made the previous night about being more careful on the Internet, was that he was trying to wipe out traces of what he'd done on that computer. I wanted to check in case he'd left any trail. I sure hoped he had. I didn't want to tell Talena I'd brought her here and caked her in mud for the sake of a wild-goose chase.
   I bought a Coke and sat down at the Harmony Cafe's computer, Talena at my shoulder. First of all I checked the browser history, and then the Temporary Internet Files directory. As I'd suspected, all the files there had appeared within the last two-and-a-half days. He had wiped the directory and browser history clean before he left.
   "So we're here for nothing?" Talena said, ready to erupt.
   "Not necessarily," I said. "He got rid of the obvious things, that's all."
   "So what's not obvious?"
   "Cookies," I said, navigating through the Windows directory tree.
   "Come again?"
   "Cookies," I repeated. "I don't know who named them that. Some developer who watched too much Sesame Street I guess. They're files that your browser writes to your machine if sites request it."
   "Wait a minute. When you go to a web site it can put files on your computer?"
   "Not exactly. It asks your browser to store certain information in a safe location on your drive. It can't put a virus on your machine or anything. You can tell your browser not to save them, but that's generally a bad idea."
   "Sounds like a pretty good idea to me," she said. "What's the point of these… cookies?"
   "Basically they get around the problem that HTTP is a stateless protocol."
   "Paul. English."
   "Well. Basically there's no way of telling when you look at a page if you've looked at it, or other pages on the same site, any time recently, without using cookies. For example if you've already logged in or not. There's ways around this by messing with the URL… sorry, the page address… but cookies are basically easier."
   "Easier for who?"
   "Easier for people like me who build web sites."
   "And of course they're the ones who really matter," she said with heavy sarcasm. "So did Mr. Jackson leave any interesting cookies on this machine?"
   "Can't tell from here," I said, examining the cookies directory. "There's some that were modified while he was here, but I'll need time and a real connection to see if they're anything interesting." The phone lines were back up, so I didn't have to write all the information down, I just zipped up the relevant cookie files and uploaded them to my Yahoo Briefcase repository.
   "We're done," I said.
   "That's it? That's what we came for?"
   "That's it."
   "Paul," she said, "I would just like to remind you that thanks to that ride up here I have taken not one, not two, but three mud baths, and my entire ass feels like a giant oozing blister, and now we are about to ride back down that same road. My point being that if you don't find something useful in those I will punish you severely."
   "Is that a promise?" I asked mock-eagerly, and she cracked a smile despite herself.
   "I'd be happy to put it in writing. Now let's get moving. There's a warm bed waiting for me in Mataran, and if you're very good I'll let you sleep in the gutter outside."
   It was the Hotel Zihar, same one I had stayed in what felt like ages ago. We slept there, and in the morning we went to the port and hired a speedboat that took us back to Bali. It was a glorious morning ride. The sun had replaced yesterday's storm, and the sea was surprisingly calm, and the salt air made me feel alive. Everything made me feel alive after the last few days of dancing with death. Overcome with good feeling I turned to Talena when we were halfway there and gave her a bear hug and kissed her on the cheek. She laughed and pulled away… but not, I was pleased to notice, until after a few moments of returning the embrace, and not without pink cheeks. We didn't talk, but we exchanged smiles for the rest of the ride.
   In Denpasar we both managed to change our flights to that day, but I was flying Garuda Airlines, and she was flying Cathay Pacific. My flight left first. We hugged quick goodbyes and promised each other we'd meet the next night at the Horseshoe, and I boarded the plane. While Indonesia is a wonderful place I have never been quite so relieved to leave a country.