Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  “We should talk to her NSA friend,” said Arthur.

  “How do we do that without giving Halliday away?” I asked.

  “Good point,” said Arthur. “I’ll think about it. Meantime, can you do a deep background on the friend?” he asked Checker. “And find out who might’ve had access to Sonya’s emails?”

  “Already on it.”

  “Hey, Checker,” I said, “If you had her proof—how long would it take you to make it start working for you?”

  “You mean, how long to code it into an algorithm?” Checker ruminated for a few seconds. “Oh, geez. Um…it sounds like it’s pretty long, so even if I managed to understand it—and there’s also the issue of figuring out the best way to attack—I’d say weeks, at least. Maybe longer.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Except not,” Checker contradicted. “Because, seriously, what’s our plan here? They have the data. They’ve probably made digital copies of all her notes by now, whether or not they understand the proof. Even if we get the original work back, we can’t ever be sure we’ve recovered the actual knowledge—in fact, we can be pretty sure we haven’t.”

  “One step at a time,” said Arthur. “Let’s figure out who has it.”

  “Well, Pilar’s on her way over here; we’re going to fine-tooth all the data we can get our hands on.” Pilar was Arthur and Checker’s office manager, and a damn good researcher, even if she didn’t tear through firewalls like tissue paper the way Checker did. “We’ll find out who’s behind this, Arthur. I promise.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Maybe you guys should go somewhere else. If they figured out who Arthur is, they might come after you.”

  “Unlikely,” said Checker after a heartbeat. “I’m not digitally connected to Arthur or the business at all. I keep that wiped clean.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “Yeah. Arthur has enough interactions with, uh, unsavory people that it just seemed best for all concerned. I mean, most people who know me personally know I work with Arthur, but anyone who can make the connection in the other direction is probably someone I’d have to go off the grid to be sure of avoiding, and unless we know there’s a danger I think it’s more important right now that I have access to all my equipment. And I doubt I’d be anyone’s first priority if they wanted to…uh…”

  “If they wanted to get to me,” said Arthur heavily.

  “I’m keeping tabs,” Checker assured him. “On everyone—uh—you know. I’m tracking Professor Sonya’s phone, too. She’s been staying put.”

  “Good. Thanks,” said Arthur.

  “I do absolutely promise I’ll run away if it looks like there’s going to be any danger to us, though—running away is an excellent and noble option that you two should try more often. Oh—Pilar’s here. Anything else? If not, we’ll get to it.”

  “Call us if you find anything,” I said.

  “Of course I will.” He hesitated. “Hey. Arthur.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but this might be a job for the authorities. Especially since the bad guys probably aren’t going to be able to make good on the note’s threat yet. I know you want to protect the professor and all, but an agency like the NSA would have resources we can only dream of, and they’d be able to start putting safeguards in place, at least for the most sensitive government systems. I might like to say I favor anarchy, but when actually faced with the prospect of an economic meltdown—”

  Arthur squeezed his eyes shut. “I know. I know.”

  “They’d probably be just as likely to recruit her as throw her in a cell, you know. Uh, sorry. I guess that doesn’t sound comforting.”

  “Sonya never wanted—” Arthur sucked in a breath. “I guess now it don’t make no difference. You’re right. But you said this would take weeks, right? For them to figure out her notes? Give us twenty-four hours. If we can’t contain it, I’ll make the call myself.”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Checker echoed. “Got it. Guess we’d better get cracking, then. Talk to you soon.”

  Checker hung up. Arthur ran a hand over his face and leaned back against the headrest.

  “Hey,” I said. “Chin up. We’re pretty damn smart.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Don’t like this. Don’t like none of it. We’ve got people trying to kill us, and Checker and Pilar, I worry—”

  “At least Pilar’s got a gun,” I said.

  “She what?” Arthur whipped around to face me, so fast he tangled himself against the seatbelt. “Where the hell did she—”

  “I gave her one,” I said. “She didn’t tell you? She begged me to teach her to shoot when you wouldn’t—thanks so much for sticking me with that, by the way.”

  “I ain’t said I wouldn’t, I said—” He cut himself off with a curse. “I told her I would!”

  “Yeah, well, she said you were all reluctant about it or something. Your office manager really should be armed, you know.”

  He swore again. “That ain’t the world I want to live in!”

  How beautifully hypocritical of the man with a carry permit. “Well, when you get around to fixing the world, you let me know.”

  “At least tell me you taught her to be safe with it, taught her muzzle and trigger discipline—”

  “I told her to point it at the thing she wants dead,” I said. “She’s a smart girl. She’s not going to shoot herself.”

  “What the—shit, Russell! That ain’t no way to teach someone firearms. The safety of it’s gotta be second-nature!”

  “Then you start taking her,” I said. Excellent. Teaching Pilar marksmanship hadn’t been as tooth-jarringly painful as I’d expected, but I still wasn’t going to pass up a chance to get out of the obligation. “Now will you let me watch the road?” The concussion was making my vision fuzzy around the edges, but I wasn’t going to admit it.

  We made good time to Pasadena. Dr. Martinez’s condo was in a pleasant, modern building full of wide windows and balconies. I had my hand under my jacket on my Colt as we got out of the car, just in case.

  Arthur pulled out his mobile as we climbed the steps. “Better let her know we’re here so they’re not surprised.” He dialed.

  And listened, worry overtaking his features. She hadn’t picked up.

  “Maybe her phone ran out of battery,” I said. “Or, I don’t know, maybe she’s taking a nap.” I inched my Colt halfway out of my belt.

  “Maybe,” said Arthur, but he put his phone back in his pocket and slid one hand against his holster.

  We stepped up onto the porch and I leaned on the bell.

  No answer.

  “Shit,” Arthur said softly.

  I drew my gun, keeping it hidden from the street behind my body. “You got your lockpicks on you?”

  “Cover me,” he said, pulling them out.

  He slid the picks in and turned the knob. “Behind me,” I said as he pushed the door open, and I crept in crosshairs-first. Arthur dropped back so I could take point and eased the door shut behind us with a click.

  The entryway led into an earth-toned living room in a jumble of disorder. The coffee table and several chairs were knocked off-kilter, with some needlepoint and photographs dangling askew and scattered across the floor. A set of shelves had fallen to lean precariously against the back of the couch, books and papers strewn across the furniture.

  The disarray wasn’t too bad—just enough to tell the story of a struggle.

  “Oh,” said a weak voice.

  Arthur swore and slipped past me into the kitchen, holstering his Glock. I followed and saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile, attached to a woman slumped against the refrigerator—a woman who was not Sonya Halliday. She was a very tiny older lady, with copper-toned skin and a face so creased with wrinkles she reminded me of a walnut. A cap of gray hair still shot with black gave her a few years back, though right now the hair was wet and matted, and the ice-filled washcloth
she held against it was being dyed a deep red.

  “Hey. Here. Let me help you,” Arthur said, crouching beside her. “Arthur Tresting. I’m a friend of Sonya’s.”

  “I know,” said the woman. I couldn’t tell if it was pain or age that made her voice hoarse. “She told me to expect you. But not the other men. Five of them. They took her. I couldn’t stop it.” She lifted a pair of enormous Coke-bottle glasses from the floor beside her and perched them on her nose; they gave her the look of an enormous insect. “Humanity is Incomplete, you know. Even more than mathematics. Sometimes we strive for correctness and we find ourselves outside the axioms, independent, cut free to blow in the wind. Then we define new axioms, or we acknowledge the evil within ourselves. I can’t say which is the better path. She told me what happened between you.”

  Arthur stiffened slightly but didn’t answer. He was carefully probing her scalp wound with the wet washcloth. “I ain’t think it’s too bad. Russell, clear the house and find me whatever first-aid supplies she got.”

  Two minutes later, I had cleared all the rooms and double-checked they were free of Sonya Halliday and her kidnappers, and Arthur had ensconced Dr. Martinez on her couch and was dressing her shallow scalp wound. He kept gently suggesting she let him take her to the hospital, or at least call up his doctor friend to come check if she needed stitches.

  “I don’t need stitches. They tell us we need so many things in hospitals, but they’re wrong.” Martinez had picked up a pen and was fiddling with it, but not the way most people fiddled; she was unscrewing the pieces and taking it completely apart, then laying the bits out on her lap in an orderly array before picking them back up and putting them together again. After which she started the whole process over. “I’m fine. Sonya’s the one who needs help. She told me you’d agreed to help her. It’s my fault, you know.”

  “Course it ain’t,” Arthur tried to assure her, at the same time I said, “Why? Did you tell someone what she was working on?”

  “Me? No. But she wouldn’t have been working on it if it wasn’t for me. I led her into catastrophe. To the end of things. All the way from the beginning—I recruited her, you know. She reminded me too much of myself. Oh. I talk too much.” She screwed the pen back together, clicked it open, clicked it closed, then began unscrewing it again. Every so often her gaze behind the enormous glasses would skitter across Arthur or me, but never long enough to make eye contact.

  Arthur pulled his phone from his pocket and tossed it to me. “Get Checker on security cams. See if he can track whoever snatched her. Dr. Martinez, let’s get a doctor to look at you, okay? It’s safer.”

  “‘Safer’ is a funny word. Not well-defined. Since the certainty is that we will all die, ‘safer’ does not, to me, seem to have very great meaning.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped, paying more attention to punching the phone buttons than to her. “You can define it as per probability of death or injury in the immediate moment or near future.” God, if there was one thing I hated it was people trying to make math fuzzy.

  A smile bloomed on Dr. Martinez’s face. “You’re right, of course. She’s right,” she added to Arthur. “Though I would argue that the degree in meaning becomes less according to the probability distribution for one’s remaining time. If one is old, and near death…”

  I tuned her out as Checker picked up, and I gave him as rapid a rundown of the situation as I knew how.

  “Searching now,” he said immediately. “How long ago? Ballpark?”

  “Hey. Martinez,” I called. “How long ago did they bust in?”

  She paused, as if calculating.

  “Estimate, Professor,” I ordered.

  “I have no bounds,” she said helplessly. “No, that’s incorrect. Not hours, surely. Yes, that’s right. And I was out here when they left. Where they left me. So more than the time I used to move from here to the kitchen afterward.”

  Christ save me from literalists. “Sometime between ten minutes and two hours ago,” I translated into the phone, with a good helping of sarcasm. “But I bet I can narrow that down for you.” I strode back into the kitchen and surveyed the bloody washcloth filled with melting ice that Arthur had dumped in the sink. Enthalpy of fusion, the likely heat flow from Martinez’s body temperature to the ice cubes—if she’d come straight to the kitchen after the kidnappers left—“I’m guessing we missed them by twenty minutes to half an hour.”

  “Got it,” said Checker. “Okay, I’m hitting pay dirt. Five men, and they’ve got Professor Sonya. They’re taking her to a van—God, what a cliché. I’m tracking it. Call you back.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up and headed back into the living room. Arthur was trying to get a bandaged-up Martinez to sit down, but she was moving obliviously around the living room picking things up and setting them straight.

  “Doc, you just got your head split open—”

  “Material things shouldn’t make a difference,” she murmured as she reshelved her books. “One should be able to isolate oneself from outside stimuli. But it’s never so simple, is it? Healing surroundings for healing physicality.”

  “Not when you got the injury fifteen minutes ago,” said Arthur. “Sit down, Doc. I’ll pick up a bit, if it’s that important to you—”

  “You’ll just get it wrong,” she said serenely, retrieving some small stone carvings of animals and placing them carefully in front of the books. “My mother believed these would watch over me. Protect me. I think she was both right and wrong about that.”

  “Russell,” said Arthur with relief as he saw me. “What’d Checker say?”

  “He’s tracking the van. He’ll call.”

  “Good. That’s good.” He turned between Martinez and me, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, and I could practically see him trying to weigh all the options, wondering if we should call in the authorities, wondering if they’d only slow us down.

  I stepped closer to him, passing him back the burner cell. “You call this one; I’ll follow your lead. But I’m better than a tac team, and you won’t have to wait for a warrant.”

  He looked down at me for a second and then nodded. “Hey, Doc.” He cleared his throat. “Can you tell us any more about who would have known about Sonya’s proof? ’S not like she was palling around with criminals. How’d this get out?”

  “It’s easy to listen to us, you know,” said Martinez, still concentrating on arranging her stone animals. “Phones, email. You could write a program that scans for keywords quite easily, I think. It’s not paranoia, it’s just fact; you accept it and live in the modern world or you don’t.”

  Arthur had stepped over next to her while she talked. “Doc. Are some of your books missing?” He gestured at the lower shelves. Martinez had picked up most of the books, but the bottom shelves were still bare, a light outline of dust showing where their contents had sat.

  “‘Missing’ is such a poorly-defined word,” said Martinez after a slight hesitation. “Nothing is missing if I say it isn’t, or everything is missing if I say it is. I’ve been reorganizing.”

  “Doc,” said Arthur inexorably. “The men who took Sonya. Did they take some of your work, too?”

  “No. Except in my friend’s head.” She pressed her palms against her reshelved books, and her voice shook. “Mathematics makes me a god. I understand the secrets of the universe. But I couldn’t stop them.”

  I couldn’t say I didn’t know how she felt.

  Chapter 5

  “Arthur,” I said. “Call it.”

  His face tightened for a long moment, then he nodded and strode over to the landline. He picked up the cordless handset and turned to press it into Martinez’s hands. She looked at it bewildered, as if she didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Call the cops,” said Arthur. “Tell ’em what happened. Tell ’em I was here and left. Did you touch anything?” he added to me.

  I thought back. “No.”

  “Leave her out of it, okay?” Arthur sa
id to Martinez, pointing at me. “Tell them it was just me, and that I came to help you, and I’m investigating it myself now, too. If I stay, they’ll want to ask questions, keep me here, and there ain’t nothing I can tell them that you can’t.” His jaw bunched, and I heard what he wasn’t saying—that he needed, needed to be out there tracking Halliday’s kidnappers, and not tied up with the police for hours answering an interrogation. “Got it, Professor?”

  “Police rarely have the best interests of the individual citizen at heart,” rambled Martinez. “Contradiction, isn’t it? But I rather think they view themselves as being in the interests of the State instead. The goals of the collective are not always the goals of any person within it. And competence is often predicated on desire.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re gonna have desire in this case, ain’t they?” said Arthur impatiently. “They’ll want the proof enough to help find Sonya.”

  “Her safety is the only axiom,” said Martinez. “It’s astounding, how confusing that can make things.”

  “It ain’t confusing,” said Arthur. “It ain’t confusing at all. Sonya’s in danger, Professor. Make the damned call.”

  She fingered the handset. “I don’t like talking to people.”

  I suspected at that moment that Arthur was showing superb control in not letting loose on a little old lady with a string of profanities.

  “But I shall,” said Martinez. “It’s for Sonya. For Sonya. Her safety.”

  “Yes,” said Arthur, taking a deep breath. “Yes.” He waved at me to follow him and strode toward the door, already dialing his mobile.

  “Martinez is about to call the cops,” he said to Checker as we headed down the steps. “Make sure she does it, please.” He listened for a moment and then glanced back at me. “He’s scrubbing you from the security footage outside here.”