System shock subsided, his body recalibrated and came to appreciate the new discipline. His sweat no longer rank, headaches gone, bowel movements regular, like when he was a year-round athlete in high school. Something to be said for that. It was supremely, naturally satisfying shitting like clockwork.
Mental clarity followed. Like a bolt from the blue, neurons re-sparked. Pedantic routines used with moderate success, it was true, to plod his way through work, people, life, somnambulistic defense mechanisms ceased and he organically dismantled their defunct apparatus, torched what was left, scattered the ashes of what was once whirring and obstructive to the wind. His mind quieted. He became even more resolved.
And then there was the sleep. With more and more physical exertion and a forfeit of toxicity sleep transcended into a phenomenally satisfying nocturnal experience. It was sound and deep and above all restorative. When he awoke he was refreshed and invigorated. Even after his afternoon naps, which he took now on one of the ridiculously comfortable lounge chairs, Geronimo on another, the birds twittering and a light breeze lulling. As often was the case he half-dreamed half-fantasized about Mrs. Davis.
With restored health returned a robust libido; Mrs. Davis’s inquisitive eyebrow and probing tongue lustily gliding along her upper lip as they jogged past each other every morning were not lost upon him. It was impossible not to admire his neighbor’s wife’s well-kept physique. Not an uncommon experience of late, the admiring. Be it jogging, driving or just buying milk his eyes frequently found the summer’s scantily clad curves that had not been so interesting a few weeks ago and he reveled in that cloud-nine feeling of long-forgotten vigor of youth.
Not that he’d sleep with her. He’d been on the other end of that and it was an unkind end.
He awoke to a denim sky with the faint twinkle of the first early evening stars. Popping open a beer (his second) he grabbed up his laptop. He was resolved.
He loaded up an ancient messaging app, took a moment remembering the password, but he was in, browsing the list of contacts. There he was, online as always.
He double-clicked on “HAMMURABI,” stared at the blinking cursor awaiting inspiration. None came.
“Hey. How things?” he typed in the chat window. It wasn’t Shakespeare, rather lame and there was no immediate response. He set the laptop down, went inside and did the dishes, cleaned the Weber grill, the stars now bright, the night air not quite cool but getting there. When he returned the chat window was blinking.
“It lives. Been a while.”
McConnell typed “I’ve been busy.”
“For seven years?”
“You know how it is.”
“Not really.”
There was a pause. Then: “My condolences BTW. Anj, now your brother. Not your year, eh?” Another pause. “Sorry. Shitty of me. Serious, must be rough. Anything I can do and all that.”
“I’d like to see the farm.”
A longer pause. “You know the way.”
“When?”
“Like I won’t be here.”
“Tomorrow at three.”
“Three it is. L8r.”
Scrolling through the chat he didn’t know what to make of it but he would find out tomorrow. He stopped by the fridge for his last beer of the day and migrated to the La-Z-Boy. He took a long pull, then brought up what he had gleaned from the web on Alan Odom.
Not a lot out there on the heir apparent but Google kicked out over fourteen-thousand hits for the Odom dynasty and their vast holdings. The family owned a slew of ultra-conservative rags, four major newspapers, entertainment weeklies and some tabloids thrown in to make the company literarily respectable in its dying analog. Digitally there were television stations, radio, websites, a few satellites and a large stake in a major telecom. The grandfather had acquired the fortune, the later generations merely indulged in it. In acquisition mode the past few years, he’d gobbled up smaller magazines and papers and rebranded them, enthroning Odoms on their respective boards. There were several charitable affiliations. Seemed decent enough for aristocrats. Maybe Alan was just a bad seed. Happens in the best of families.
As he did every night he dragged the two JPEGs side by side. Anj and her rapist. The young woman just this side of being a girl, radiant in a flowery summer dress, long hair, no lines around the bright blue eyes, no fear in her smile. Her rapist in black tie on a red carpet, the picture from a function in Los Angeles a few years back, Odom’s smirk of conceit and decadent glance of contempt at the camera extremely vivid.
After a while, as always, he closed the laptop and closed his eyes and pictured Anj in that bleak hospital bed crying, her face bruised and scraped, her hair ripped out, eyes furtive and frightened as they darted between the shadows and the door. He heard her tremulous voice disintegrating over the phone as she described her ordeal, the shame, the anguished self-loathing, the timbre of recalled terror. Saw her floating in the monstrous bathtub, inky crimson in the water, her wrists cut, half-lidded, dead eyes gazing unseeingly up at him forever.
He breathed. Then he went to bed. Sleep would come and it would be profound.
Still unclear about his brother. Anj would be easy.
CHAPTER 15
JULY
Spokane, Washington
Had to make a stop before heading out to the farm. A gorgeous day but hot, the sun a solitary gem of fire in a field of azure, threatening to set aflame the insolent with blistering rays if they defied for long.
His savings was dwindling what with house payments and bills and child support taking large bites out of it every month. Down to a little over eleven thousand, maybe a thousand in checking. He had a rainy-day fund of forty-thousand in cash in a security box that he had saved up slowly over the years. Didn’t look like rain but wait twenty minutes, and the weather could change.
Dressed in a simple T-shirt and khaki shorts with too many pockets, it was just before noon when he walked through IPFusion’s front doors. As a kid he would have loved those pockets, now they were just an annoyance. Who could ever use them all? Damn waste of pockets.
The place was empty save a couple junior techs among the cubicles as he strode to Rich’s office in the back. One tech waved. The other said, “Dude!”
Rich was finger-pecking at his keyboard. He looked up. “John.”
McConnell sat in one of two chairs, put his hiking boots up on Rich’s desk. “Seems my last paycheck got lost in transit.”
Rich leaned way back in his chair trying hard to ignore McConnell’s size twelves, his hands locking behind his head, the airs of a man about to expound at great length to a subordinate. “You quit. Without notice. I know you’ve had some family issues but that was unprofessional, it really hurt the company, and we lost a lot of money. We had to dock you. You weren’t out billing, and management felt that paying for negligent work was unfair to the company.”
McConnell scratched at his hairless jaw. “Let’s not make this a thing. I just want what’s owed me.”
Rich sat forward, his fingers flat on the edge of his desk, his smirk rife with disappointment. “Truth is, John, we received some complaints. About shoddy work.” His eyes flicked to the sweat-dampened front of McConnell’s shirt, caught his leaner frame, his newly muscled arms. Took in the dark tan of his skin. He saw him for the first time since coming through the door and his mouth pursed.
“Shoddy? Really. Who complained?” Rich wasn’t more forthcoming. “Yeah. Look, it’s not my fault the rest of your monkeys can’t find their dicks to fuck a hole in the ground.”
Rich sighed regret. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
McConnell didn’t leave. He didn’t move at all. Just stared. Then he dug up and under the desk like an offensive lineman on fourth and nothing and pushed it over, the monitor sliding and crashing to the floor, pens and papers scattering as did a half-full (or half-empty, whatever was your habit) cup of coffee splattering all over Rich’s berry-colored Oxford. Rich’s chair wheeled backwards, smack
ed against the rear wall, and he let out a surprised squeak as he was pinned behind the desk.
“Get off! Get off me!” he screamed, creamed coffee dripping from his rat-faced nose.
McConnell pushed on the desk and glanced out the window.
“Aaah!” Rich screamed.
“My money.”
“You’re done! Through! You’re going to jail, asshole!”
He pressed the desk with his boot. A bit more heft than his hand.
“Aaah!”
“Jesus Christ!” said one of the techs from the doorway.
“Dude!”
McConnell ignored them. He looked down his nose at Rich.
“You direct deposit my money. Today. Try any bullshit I’ll tell all your clients to not to mention your wife about that weird-ass tranny porn you like to look at. What? You forget that you asked me to look into the proxy and check the cache to see who was looking for a new job a year ago? Yeah, that was me, and I may or may not have those logs on a flash drive somewhere.”
He dropped his foot and the desk came down with a bang and with it Rich’s jaw soundlessly agape as his eyes darted to the techs in the doorway who made a big hole for McConnell as he whistled his way to the front door. He passed Steve, Burger King in hand.
Steve grinned. “Hey! Lost the beard! Looking good, John!”
He grinned back. Feeling good, Steve.”
CHAPTER 16
JULY
Elk, Washington
Most people would assume the cellar of a hundred-year-old farmhouse a poor place for a sixty-thousand BTU air-conditioning system roaring into the darkness. But then most people would be wrong.
The glow of three large LCD monitors illuminated his fingers as they glided over the keys like a piano virtuoso in a smoke-filled jazz bar, only he didn’t play the piano, didn’t smoke and didn’t care for jazz. The music here the harmony of the AC and hum of the server racks lining one wall. Dell, HP, Hitachi, Cisco, EMC; these were his bards, their fans and drives whirring and clicking, their green, yellow and alarm-red lights blinking and beeping in alien code. A fifty-inch plasma TV showed CNN on an adjacent wall, an angry orange “mute” burned into the upper right corner. Beneath the idiot box were tables laden with the fallen, still as death, cases removed, guts of wires and cables and PCBs exposed; servers, Xboxes, iPods, GPS devices, smartphones. Two relic Intellivision cadavers were in a state of autopsy on the coffee table before posh, leather furniture.
A doorway led to the stairs that led to the house above. Before, the entrance to the cellar was through the storm doors outside, but it was now sealed with cement. Azure painted sheetrock covered the unfinished walls and was layered with cascades of chicken wire. It was exceptionally clean. Not a mote of dust stirred in the cold air of what might be considered a lair. He simply called it home.
“The Force is strong with this one!” Darth Vader blasted from the surround sound hidden around the room and a bold reminder “TANSTAAFL!” scrolled in big cobalt letters across the LCDs on his worktable. Not a desk. He abhorred desks. Desks were for slaves. Like ties.
He sipped at his Mountain Dew, washed it down with water. Passing kidney stones six years ago had been hell but he couldn’t give up the Dew so he matched every glug of the sweet, emerald elixir with a swallow of water. He peed a lot, but peeing pee sure beat pissing gravel.
He verified the job; the crypto, hops, running procs, logs logged, logs marked for deletion. A quick transaction, erase the fingerprints, working backwards and twenty-two seconds and a disconnected, untraceable session later he was richer by eleven thousand euros. A paltry sum, but that was the point.
He had missed the golden era, when the esoteric art of sleight of binary hand was practiced by seminal if less gifted pirates plundering inconceivable booty, the best of them disappearing into wealthy obscurity, the miscalculating chaff fading into prison, or worse, an NSA gulag. That epoch of grand larceny had come and gone but the game, faster now and exponentially more complex, continued.
His preferred pilfering lay with dark accounts: ones and zeroes exchanged in secret between corporations, banks and governments, the lines often blurred. Transactions never posted in quarterlies; they would prove difficult to explain to a recession-drowning public so their raiding went unreported, too. This benefit of nondisclosure was offset by the measures intended to stop such theft. If mainstream corporate security was considered a hacker’s wet dream the dark side was a labyrinthine nightmare.
Four years ago they nearly had him. A pot of gold, ripe, just a faint whiff of security. It had been a little too easy, a bit too neat. That whiff had smelled rotten. He had stopped mid-transaction, wiping the logs and counterfeiting them with a foreign IP address he “borrowed” on occasion. Next day a baffled couple running a florist shop in Uppsala, Sweden, were arrested for hacking. They were of course released, but for sleepless weeks he waited for the rush of black-clad commandos to kick down his door. He had been fortunate; he had avoided location if not detection. After that he had stuck to the standard corporate playground—less swag but far less risk. He played the odds, took piecemeal, patient and plodding.
He wasn’t in a hurry.
He scratched at the old calico cat that lay beside the keyboard. Sometimes he poked her in the side to make sure she wasn’t dead. Ms. Kitty and Ollie, his graying lab, boon companions. His parents long gone, moved to Utah to be closer to his normal siblings, all happily married with children, or so they said, but truth was they had moved away from their one weird, mutant offspring who wouldn’t leave the cellar unless it was on fire and if he did wouldn’t leave the farm even if it was engulfed in flames. The cat and dog filled their void quite well considering the last couple years before his parents left they had barely spoken to him. But he had survived. And life went on.
The farm hadn’t. He tended a respectable organic garden but the Bullock property hadn’t been commercially viable for years. His father had sold most of it off leaving only twenty-four acres deeded in the family name but it was plenty for him. More than plenty.
He was content being out here alone. People by design were unpredictable; selfish, corruptible, amuck with vagaries and the cream of the crop often predisposed to brutal savagery.
Now code…code was logical, routines methodical, results predictive. Code was soothing. Code was safe.
He was delightfully poring over a snippet from S8Nt8_Sp3rM right now. Their version of email chess, an ongoing battle of algorithm and syntax, they’d been at for a few years now. S8Nt8_Sp3rM was likely eastern European, knew his code, loved Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. That’s all he knew about him, if he was a him. He didn’t care to know more.
He had foreseen this move, a bit of polymorphic, an impredicative parametric, and had already strung together his retaliating feint, a looping false System F variable. He replied with a snicker. If a friend had been around he might have raised his palm for a high-five.
That made him push up his glasses with a finger and glance at the clock. It was close to three.
He poked the cat. “I’m going up top,” he announced.
She stirred in feline irritation, rolled over and faced the other way.
The basement opened like a dark mouth onto the kitchen upstairs. He did his customary walk through the house, checking rooms and doors and windows. Ollie was good about guarding the place but the dog had yet to tell him if a latch was unlatched or a door unlocked. Old dogs, new tricks.
He served himself up some fresh lemonade and sat in one of the weathered Adirondacks on the porch. The heat was pervasive; it saturated deep into his bones, most pleasant after the chill of the basement. The overhang kept the sun off his pale skin.
Ollie did his business by the old pine near the barn then plopped down in the shade beside the beat-up Chevy Cavalier where he had sat in his pre-Windows 98 navy suit that was too snug against his belly, his hands shaking, his throat dry, sat there until Angela Flynn’s funeral service was well over, granting him a guilty
reprieve.
Her suicide made no sense. He had weathered suicidal thoughts, a recurring pattern throughout much of his own life but he had never imagined her buoyant cheeriness could succumb to such dark clouds. It just made no sense. A marine’s death made sense. That’s what marines did, they died. It wasn’t unexpected.
He closed his eyes and thought of something else. Of Angela alive. Of the man who was coming to see him. Of them all together. Good memories had become unburied.
Oh God…
But the bad ones had been unearthed, too.
They were beyond his control now. In the wild, free radicals in the system. They were consuming the idle cycles of his mind.
His mouth went dry. His heart thundered in his chest as he shivered in the chair and oh God here he went. Horrified, he willed his half-lidded gaze open and scanned the yard, the barn, on down the drive between and where it turned right onto the private lane and then left down the main road.
No one there but Ollie dozing in the dirty shade.
Please. God.
He licked at the sweat on his upper lip. He could not stop the remembering.
CHAPTER 17
FEBRUARY 1988
Spokane, Washington
“Hey, retard!”
He kept his anxious gaze on the wintry dusk outside the double glass doors. It was snowing. Thick powdery dander touching down where the school buses pulled in. He wished there was one there now.
“Yo! Faggot!”
Shifting his rump on the hard tile he dug into his book, all the more evident he couldn’t hear them.
“Mitchy-bitchy?” followed by laughter.
He sighed and turned. Scott Boucher, Aaron Desmitt and Ronnie Mangiano leaned against the lockers down the hall.
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