Mixed Signals

by Cooper West

  “Deal.”

  They shook hands, and Frank felt something important shifting in his life, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

  Chapter Nine

  BENJAMIN SPENT the afternoon after making the deal with Frank Sheldon sorting through ancient hard drives he stored old projects on, looking at some of the games he had once fiddled with. None were impressive or original, but that hardly mattered. People continued to play Wolfenstein and Zelda, and the Sims was nearly twenty years old. World of Warcraft was fifteen years old. Minecraft was still popular, too, and that was not even delving into the smartphone app games. He had a lot of material to choose from. They needed something more involved, though, to justify the R & D budget Benjamin would claim. It wouldn’t be the first time a gaming start-up blew through a few million dollars for no damn good reason.

  Although to be fair, Benjamin was pressed for how he would even spend that much money short of buying a server farm and an IT staff to run it.

  His flying car project was hardly off the ground, pun intended, and he had been telling the truth when he told Frank that he was not ready to build prototypes or do experiments. In fact, his original plan had never been to get that far, but rather to develop a set of plans he could sell off to the highest bidder. His advancements would push the field forward faster than anyone would believe unless they saw what he was doing, and once they saw what he was doing—with appropriate nondisclosure agreements in place, of course—they would pay through the nose for his work. And also probably offer him a job, which he would refuse.

  He thought the whole video game cover was a bit silly, but Frank was married to it because, apparently, his father had started crushing on the idea once his granddaughter got him addicted to Minecraft. Or something. Frank had told him that part of the story before they left the coffee shop, looking awkward and confused, as if imagining his father playing a video game caused him physical pain.

  But Benjamin could understand it. If there was one thing he knew about the elder Sheldon, it was that Dr. Alexander Tobias Sheldon loved a challenge. The family was old money from a variety of industries over the generations, floating skillfully from one up-and-coming cash cow to another, but Dr. Sheldon had fallen in love with medicine and become a medical doctor, unexpectedly flipping the experience and degree to use his family money to invest in medical technology in the 1970s when the field was booming. He had built Grace Lifesciences Corporation—named for his wife—into an international juggernaut to match Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic. Dr. Sheldon was the very definition of a world builder, so of course he loved Minecraft, once someone showed him how to play it.

  But Frank did not seem aware of that. He was pushing the video game idea because his father liked it, because it was something his father would approve. Benjamin got the feeling that relations between father and son were not very close, that this was some kind of contest between them to prove something to each other.

  Either way it meant that Benjamin could pull a real salary from his R & D company, One True Light Incorporated, for a year or two. That was a financial bonus he did not take for granted and was happy to milk as long as he could. Not having to tweak his investments every ten minutes or beg for money on MudzNewz for a while would be nice.

  He finally found what he was looking for, a sandbox game that he had originally designed to help teach Rachel coding, back before she set her foot down on cosmetology. He toyed with it and decided it didn’t suck, so stuck it on one of his virtual servers and set about updating the framework. It was simple enough chore, and a couple of hours later, he was back to working on his flying car plans.

  Working on his Linux box, he didn’t notice the pop-up on his Windows machine at first. He kept Skype up there in order for the few friends he had and Rachel to reach him, and he had already forgotten that he gave his contact information to Frank, who had apparently been trying to reach him for fifteen minutes.

  Benjamin rolled over to that computer’s keyboard.

  Frank: Hey.

  Frank: Hey?

  Frank: You there?

  Dr.Kaplan: WHAT

  Frank: Just got off the phone with my father.

  Dr.Kaplan: okay?

  Frank: I guess we need a business plan?

  Dr.Kaplan: That just now occurred to you?

  Frank: I’m not a business guy.

  Dr.Kaplan: What a shocker.

  Frank: Shut up.

  Dr.Kaplan: Honestly we really don’t. It’s not like we have shareholders to impress.

  Frank: That won’t fly. Father wants to see a business plan.

  Dr.Kaplan: Did you ask him that?

  Frank: I don’t have to, I know.

  Dr.Kaplan: You seriously want a pretend business plan to show your dad for the video game we are not actually developing?

  Frank: He said, I quote: “Can’t wait to see what your working on, I’m sure Alexandra and I will be happy to be test subjects.”

  Frank: *you’re

  Dr.Kaplan: “test subjects”? Did he mean beta testers?

  Frank: Pretty sure, yah.

  Frank: *yeah

  Benjamin face-palmed for a moment before replying.

  Dr.Kaplan: Okay, I’ll draft something up.

  By which he meant he would blackmail Rachel into drafting something up, but same difference.

  Frank: Cool. Email it to me. I’ll set up a meeting for us to all meet.

  “What? No!” Benjamin shouted at the screen before typing furiously.

  Dr.Kaplan: Why? Can’t you just forward it to him?

  Frank: I’ll email you the day/time. Thanks!

  Frank’s icon showed him logging out before Benjamin could yell at him again.

  Banging his head on his desk a few times did not help his mood, and he was too annoyed to get back to his flying cars AI.

  It was the perfect mood for MudzNewz.

  He fired up his anonymous Tor account and checked for hot tips and updated the site. The news skimmer he used to pick up anything of interest had collected a few hundred headlines, but they were easy to filter and dump, leaving him with four stories worth linking to. The “Throw Some Mud!” email was bulging as always, but mostly with tin-hat conspiracy theories. It was also pretty easy to sort and trash most of those using very few keywords—conspiracy theorists were so predictable.

  But then there was one email that didn’t fit into any filters. Those were the emails that Benjamin looked for.

  It was a vague introduction, no name and no identifying info. The person who sent it had used some kind of proxy because the email’s digital envelope was useless. They were being careful, which was another red flag. Either it was another attempt by the NSA to catfish him (that got old fast) or it was the real deal. Benjamin hoped it was the real deal, though, because the subject of the email was exactly the thing he had been hoping would come in: “info on Paulson Teague’s secret double life—from an insider”

  Chapter Ten

  FRANK HAD a twelve-hour shift that started at 8:00 p.m., so he had napped after his meeting with Benjamin at the coffee shop. When he got up, he returned the call his father had made and then ended up skyping Benjamin with the request for a business plan. He shoved his guilt about lying to his father into a dark corner of his psyche and went to do his job. It was well into the following day before he had time to reassess the issue of the dating moratorium.

  Frank could just leave it be, take the deal Benjamin offered him, and instead go out and rustle up some one-night stands or even a regular side dish. He could do that with a clear conscience and very little effort. His father and his sister would disapprove, Geoff would not care with prejudice, and Beya would roll her eyes. The worst would be Alexandra, who was getting old enough to understand tragic things like “hookups” and “dating” and would be excited or horrified or, worse, both.

  But the actual worst would be not dating Benjamin.

  The worst would be never getting to fuck into him while staring into his gorgeous, de
ceptively light brown eyes, watching him come undone under Frank’s touches. The worst would be never kissing him deeply and making passionate, urgent love to him wherever they fell.

  Frank knew he had a problem. He usually did, at some level—he was not much of a “one and done” kind of guy, even when practicing it on the regular. No, he tended to get into a huge mess of feelings and cling to them despite all reason and self-preservation until the bitter end.

  Reference: Paulson Teague.

  Their affair had started at boarding school when they were both fifteen, although they had been circling each other like vultures in heat for years by that time. Paulie was smart, sarcastic, sometimes cruel, and a math geek. Frank—or Francis, as he could not escape back then—was smart, sarcastic, the class clown, and a jock. They were polar opposites yet too much alike, and when they finally were old enough to act on the raging boners they had been giving each other, it was messy, glorious, and dangerous. Neither one of them could afford to come out, Paulson because his family was strict Catholic and Frank because of his Air Force goals.

  For years, Frank thought Paulie took their on-again, off-again relationship lightly, that Frank was the only one who was head over heels in love. It wasn’t as if either of them could step up to the plate and make any dramatic statements, and even the most plebeian kind of commitment was off the table. They were not boyfriends or partners or spouses. They would never get married and never expected to be acknowledged publicly in any way. They were barely lovers, for the most part, but Frank made it work because Paulie was in his blood.

  When they were twenty-five and ten years into their secret affair, Paulie got married. It was 2008 and Frank’s star in the Air Force was on the rise. Paulie, who had gone to law school because that’s what his father wanted, got married because that’s what his mother wanted. Frank was caught off guard by how betrayed it made him feel and broke up with Paulie by text, a move he still felt ashamed of when he thought about it. But the fact was that Paulie waited six months to answer that text, and he was a married man when he showed up at Frank’s posting to “talk it out.”

  Not a lot of talking got done that night.

  They were “on” again insomuch as they ever were, but Paulie started acting jealous and demanding more and more of Frank’s nonexistent free time, which given the secrecy involved was stressful. That put them at odds again quickly, and Paulie started asking Frank to give up the Air Force to become his kept lover. By the time Frank realized that Paulie was, for a change, serious about him, things were different. Specifically, Frank’s feelings for the other man were different.

  He had never once believed he could fall out of love with the person who had helped shape him as a man and as a lover, but he had, and he let Paulie know. He broke up with him in person that time but far more permanently. Paulie begged and pleaded and, in the end, threatened.

  A year later, Frank was discharged.

  He had no proof, but he agreed with Nancy’s assumption that Paulie had put the wheels in motion. He had never bothered to ask, but he suspected that Paulie thought Frank would come begging once he was not in the Air Force anymore. Maybe he thought Frank would seek him out for solace. But Frank was not that naive, and the timing of his being outed was just too circumstantial for his tastes. Nancy had begged him to let her hire a private investigator, but Frank was too tired and depressed at that point to care.

  The warm sensation curling through his stomach, though, that was familiar. The feeling of loss whenever he had to end a conversation with Benjamin was familiar too. It was a rare and treasured feeling, something he thought he had lost in the mire of sadness and cynicism. He could not bring himself to abandon that.

  Instead, he decided that a long, discreet courtship was the answer.

  The question, of course, was how. Given the nature of their ruse, they would not need to meet often. The heart of the deal was Benjamin doing Frank a favor, because it wasn’t as if throwing a few million dollars at anything was much of a sacrifice for Frank. So it stood to reason, what could Frank do for Benjamin? Aside from the obvious sexual favors he would be too happy to grant and Benjamin had already turned down, he was stumped.

  Sitting in his condo, which he mostly used as a way station between job shifts and visits to the family estate, he sipped his “reward” beer for a shift well flown and gazed at his belongings, hoping for an answer.

  He laughed when that answer practically hit him in the face.

  He had various art featuring planes on his walls, some of which were small, fancy, artistic photographs and the majority being old travel posters from the thirties and forties. They were the real things, not reproductions, and they all featured gorgeous artistic renditions of “exotic” locales with planes flying over them. Most of those planes were the classic Ford Trimotor, fondly referred to as the “tin goose,” or the infamous DC-3, both of which were planes Frank had managed to fly at some point due to family friends who were collectors.

  Looking at those old posters made him think about how Benjamin would never get a chance to fly anything, much less a classic lady of the air, except as a strapped-in passenger.

  That was when it hit him: flying lessons.

  Falling out of his chair, he grabbed his phone and called Charanjit to let him know he was going to be spending some money, and also asked him to pull together a portfolio for a five-million-dollar investment. Sighing heavily, Charanjit made him promise to come by his office the following day and then hung up on him.

  He made a few more calls, throwing his family name around more than usual to get the kind of service he normally didn’t care about. That was about the time his phone beeped with a reminder that he was supposed to have lunch with his father, who would probably not approve of Frank drinking before noon, even if he had just come off a twelve-hour flight shift. Cursing, he quickly showered, dressed nicely, and called down for a cab, figuring drinking and driving was an even worse sin than drinking and being late.

  His father liked a particular restaurant that saved him a table on Tuesdays and Thursdays and served “light European fare” that was mostly Spanish-inspired. His father was already seated with tapas choices of pimientos de padron and jamón, favorites of Frank’s, and that should have been a blaring red warning flare, but he was still buzzed from slamming the last third of his beer before leaving and did not register it at first. After taking a thin slice of ham and putting it on a similarly thin slice of bread, he chewed for a moment before it all hit him.

  “What did you want to talk about?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I can’t just want to eat lunch with my youngest child?”

  At that point the alarm was ringing in his head. “Out with it, Pops.”

  His father wrinkled his nose. “I hate it when you call me that.”

  “And I hate it when you beat around the bush.”

  Sighing, his father popped one of the small fried peppers into his mouth. “I hear you bought a plane.”

  Frank had, in fact, bought a plane—about an hour earlier. He palmed his face. “Charanjit called you.”

  “Texted me, actually.” His father held up his phone. “Also mentioned your business investment.”

  “Right.”

  “Does the plane have anything to do with the business investment?” his father asked, tone far too casual, as he ate another pepper.

  “Father—”

  “Hmm?”

  Frank cleared his throat. “I decided I want something fun to fly on my weekends.” Frank piled up more ham on his plate. “Helicopters are one thing, but fixed wing….” Frank could not stop himself from smiling dreamily.

  His father nodded, clearly not believing anything he said. “It’s good to have a hobby. Just don’t crash it.”

  It was his way of saying, “I love you, play safe,” so Frank smiled. “I won’t. I promise.”

  “Any more news on the video game?”

  Frank nodded, relieved. “Kaplan is fine-tuning the business plan.
I had Sally put a meeting on your calendar for next week.”

  “Kaplan?”

  “Dr. Benjamin Kaplan.”

  His father’s eyebrows shot up, and he sat forward, waiting for clarification.

  “His degree is in computer science, some kind of genius I think. Family circumstances kept him out of MIT, so he got his PhD here and is doing some consulting work.”

  “Hardly seems like the kind to go into video game development.”

  “No offense, but do you know any geeks? Because they all love video games.”

  “And I love golf. You don’t see me designing any golf courses.”

  Frank nodded in agreement. “Okay, true enough. But apparently he does. Design games, I mean.” Frank thought back to some of the chitchat he had with Benjamin the other day. “He developed some during his grad program for fun and thinks he can make some money off of it. Honestly? I think he’s trying to find a way to fund his younger sister’s business plans.”

  “And you met him… how?”

  Frank was shocked to realize he had not prepared for this question at all. He blinked a few times at his father, whose expression went from piercing to curious to all too knowing.

  “Ah” was all he said, showing neither disappointment nor approval, simply waiting for an explanation.

  Frank decided at the last moment to stick with a version of the truth. “It’s going to sound weird, but we met at my hair salon.”

  “Why you don’t just use Travis—”

  “Father, we’ve had this discussion. I like my hair stylist. Travis is a barber, and he only ever gives me flat tops because he refuses to concede defeat to my cowlicks.”

  His father waved a hand at him to go on with the story.

  “His younger sister works there, and he was hanging out. I don’t know, they had plans for later or something, and we struck up a conversation.”

  “About video games?”