The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Read Free

today?”
    I walked my spy guy across the chat room and sat him down on the chair in front of Roger. Typing, I said, “A murder case has just been dumped in my lap.”
    Meanwhile, in another window, I popped on over to alt.dicks to see if maybe one of my colleagues had posted anything on the murder. It didn’t take me long to discover that the case had generated enough interest to spin off a new group of its own. The new group was called alt.dead.gerald. I popped over there to see what was what.
    Roger said, “And how does a murder case in your lap make you feel?”
    â€œI’m not sure I’m up to it, Roger.”
    â€œWhat makes you say you’re not sure you’re up to it?”
    â€œI mean, one of my other cases, for instance, is following that bozo Frank Wallace for his wife.”
    â€œGo on,” Roger said.
    â€œWell, the payoff for that one will be the look on Frank’s face when he finds out it was me who made his divorce so tasty.”
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œWell, the new case is, I guess you would call it serious.”
    And over on alt.dead.gerald, I learned that Gerald Moffitt was a well-known figure in the tech writing world. One post referred to him as a prominent “documentalist.” I liked that word so much, I began thinking of the people who burden the rest of us with instructions for computer programs as documentalists.
    â€œCan you elaborate on that?” Roger asked.
    â€œI get the feeling,” I said, “that conspiracy is in the air.”
    â€œWhy do you say conspiracy is in the air, Mr. Face?”
    â€œI can feel it, Roger.”
    â€œHow does it make you feel when you feel it?”
    â€œAnxious.”
    In the other window I scrolled through the nasty rumble-mumble of posts about how it was an open-and-shut case. Pablo Deerfield did it, of course. Jealousy. Money problems. Something to do with GP Ink. The damning fact being that Pablo was missing. There was a lot of talk about what might have been going on behind the scenes at GP Ink—drugs, prostitution, software pirating, bad grammar.
    Someone named COSMO pooh-poohed the talk as the ravings of conspiracy nuts. The weird thing about that post was the address: anon [email protected]. I didn’t recognize 4e4.com, but I was pretty sure I’d seen it before, and I noticed that several of the posts in alt.dead.gerald came from there. It’s like once something lodges in your mind, you see it everywhere.
    â€œTell me more about your anxiety, Mr. Face.”
    I thought about it, and as I pondered, I drifted away from the experience of Roger’s animated chat room and our multi-tasking and became aware of the computer screen and our conversation marching along above two animated characters, became aware of my fingers, my typing. I typed, “It’s not so well defined. I’m noticing, for example, that the fact there is an x in the word anxious is making me very nervous.”
    â€œI’m listening.”
    â€œI’m getting the feeling,” I said, “that everything is connected.”
    A beep. An answer to my query about 4e4 had arrived. It turned out 4e4.com was an anonymous remailing service based in Russia. I sat back and took a couple of deep breaths. If there was a conspiracy afoot, who better to be involved than the Russians?
    â€œDo you see the fact that everything is connected as a bad thing?”
    â€œNot necessarily.”
    â€œYou may be avoiding the main issue,” Roger said.
    Maybe he was right. “I think I may be losing myself in my disguises,” I said.
    â€œWhat would it mean if you lost yourself in your disguises?”
    â€œI sometimes have trouble telling who the real me is. And I’m having trouble remembering some things.”
    Hot on the heels of the Russians, I popped over to alt.anon. There I learned that 4e4 was a recently established company in the new Russia that provided absolute security on