Repairman Jack [02]-Legacies

by F. Paul Wilson

  BZZZZZZTl

  "In college I worked a job while I booked my butt off. I found summer work at resorts that offered room and board as part of the job. I got into med school. A full ride to med school is all but impossible, but people will loan money to doctors-to-be. So I borrowed up to my lower lip to cover the expenses, and I'll be paying those loans off for another ten years, at least. But I did it. I got through it. And the thing that kept me going was the determination not to allow myself to become a victim. There's that expression about living well being the best revenge? Well, I may not be living well, but I'm getting there. And on my own. This is my revenge. I refuse to be his victim. He had power over me once, but he'll never have it again."

  BZZZZZZT!

  "But it wasn't going to be my complete revenge. As the years passed I began to wonder about my mother's death… wondered if it was really an accident. I mean, I don't know if he inherited money from her or carried a large insurance policy on her, or anything about his finances, but I know he never could have indulged his perversion with Mom around. But with her gone, he was free to do what he wanted with Thomas and me. So that was my revenge fantasy: discover some evidence of foul play and send him to jail, where he'd have no power, and everyone would have power over him. But of course, that's impossible now."

  BZZZZZZT!

  Jack didn't want to know the answer, and yet he had to ask.

  "Did he ever… touch you?"

  She shook her head. "No, thank God—as if God has anything to do with this. No… he just liked to look, and our pictures were currency he could use to get more pictures to look at."

  BZZZZZZT!

  She looked up. "Got some more?"

  Jack shook his head. "Nope." He pointed to the huge tangle of shredded paper mounded around her feet and the shredder. "You got them all."

  "No," she said. "Not them all. Nowhere near them all."

  "It's a start," Jack said.

  All the steam seemed to be seeping out of her. She was deflating before his eyes.

  "Thomas has a set," she said softly. "He has what he calls the master collection."

  "What's that?"

  "That's what he calls that man's personal collection of—what did you call it?"

  "Pictures of children being sexually abused. Why would he want that?"

  "To blackmail me, I think. But I think he's bluffing. He's in so many of those pictures… exposing me means exposing himself. He's sunk pretty low, but not that low."

  "Yet," Jack said. He had an idea. "You know where he lives?"

  She nodded. "Not far from here. Why?"

  "I've got a few questions I want to ask your half brother. Want to come along? Can you face him?"

  She hesitated, then, "Yes. I can face him. I want to face him. Are we bringing the shredder?"

  "Nah. Too bulky. But I'm sure we can think of other ways to get the same results."

  Alicia stood and reached for her coat. She seemed really into this.

  "Let's go."

  13.

  They were waiting in the darkened, stuffy, slightly rotten-smelling front room of Thomas's apartment when he got home.

  Alicia had watched with amazement as Jack, using just a few little wirelike tools, got them through one door after another in Thomas's apartment building. They'd been waiting only twenty minutes or so before they heard the sound of a key in the lock. Jack sprang up and disappeared, leaving Alicia sitting alone.

  Thomas stepped in and turned on the light. He froze like a deer in headlights when he saw her.

  "Alicia? What are you—?"

  Jack moved from behind the door then and slammed it closed. Thomas jumped to his left and stared at Jack.

  Alicia saw the color leach from his pocked face.

  "Who?"

  "A friend of your sister's," Jack said, grabbing him by his collar and shoving his pear-shaped body across the room. "Sit!"

  Alicia was startled by the snarl on Jack's face. He looked so… feral. Not at all like the man she'd opened up to less than an hour ago. Which was the real Jack?

  Thomas stumbled and came up against a chair. He folded his ungainly body into it.

  "What do you want?"

  "Answers," Jack said. "And maybe to look at some pictures."

  "You can't do this," Thomas cried. "I'll call the police!"

  Suddenly Jack had a little pistol in his hand and was pointing at Thomas's left knee. Then he shifted his aim to the right.

  "Which knee first, Alicia? You choose."

  Me? she thought, panic rising. Is he serious? What's he doing? And then she remembered what Jack had told her when they'd entered the apartment: I may have to get rough with him, but whatever I do, play along.

  Jack aimed the pistol at Thomas's crotch. "Or how about here?"

  Okay, she thought. I'll play along.

  "I'm thinking," she said.

  "Alicia!" Thomas wailed. "Don't let him! They told me about him! Please don't let him shoot me!"

  She noticed a dark wet stain spreading across the crotch of Thomas's slacks. He must have heard some real horror stories about Jack.

  "Then bring out 'the master collection' you told me about," Alicia said.

  "Okay! Okay! I'll do it. It's in the bedroom. I'll get it."

  He got up and hurried past Alicia with Jack trailing him.

  "'I'm thinking,' " Jack whispered with a wink as he passed. "Beautiful."

  And now that she was alone, she took a look around. This was the first chance she'd had to see the apartment in the light. The place was a mess, littered with dirty clothes and dirty dishes and food containers. And that smell… her best bet was that it came from a pizza box sitting on the windowsill near the radiator.

  The two men returned moments later, Thomas carrying two cardboard boxes, and Jack carrying a third… and another gun.

  "Look what Thomas has," Jack said. "A cute little .32."

  But Alicia had eyes for only the boxes.

  He has the collection, she thought with dismay. He really has it. Part of her had been hoping he'd been bluffing.

  "That's all of it?" Jack said.

  Thomas nodded vigorously. "Yes." Still standing, he turned to Alicia. "Yes, I swear."

  "Why, Thomas? Besides its blackmail value, why would you want to keep that filth? It's a catalog of degradation."

  "It wasn't so bad. I mean, what's the big deal. No one got hurt."

  Jack raised a fist and Alicia thought he was going to hit Thomas, but he glanced at her and she shook her head. All her life she'd wanted never to talk about this part of their childhoods—now she couldn't stop.

  "No one got hurt? What about you? What's your life been like? Have you had even one intimate relationship?"

  I know I haven't, she thought.

  "You think I don't know what a loser I am?" he said, narrowing his eyes as he looked at her. "I know. Believe me, I goddamn well know. And it's Dad's fault. That's why I deserve the house. I need it. You don't. You've done fine for yourself. You're a doctor."

  "You don't know a thing about me," Alicia said softly.

  That overcoming line she'd fed Jack was just that—a line. A mantra. Maybe if she kept repeating it, she'd come to believe it. Maybe it might even become the truth. But she had a long way to go.

  I may look "okay" on the outside, she thought, but inside I… I look like this apartment.

  "You 'deserve,' " Jack said, his voice acid. "You 'need.' You make me sick. You wouldn't know what to do with the windfall you'd get from broadcast power."

  Alicia caught her breath, wishing Jack hadn't let that slip, but then she saw Thomas's legs buckle. He dropped into the chair behind him. If his face had been white before at his first sight of Jack, it was even paler now. And when Thomas started babbling, she realized Jack's "slip" had been calculated.

  "You know? Oh, dear Christ! How'd you find out? It was last night, wasn't it." The words tumbled out. "God-damm it! We turned that house upside down and couldn't find shit! You two waltz
in and—wait—do you know where the transmitter is?"

  "Come on," Jack said, grabbing his arm and pulling him out of the chair. "We're going for a walk."

  "What?" Thomas's knees looked rubbery as he got to his feet. "Where?"

  "Outside."

  "Wh-why?"

  Alicia was asking herself that same question.

  "Because you don't have a fireplace here." He held up Thomas's .32. "I'll leave your training pistol here. But bring those boxes with you."

  14.

  "Give us about an hour with the fire, guys, and I promise you it'll be nice and hot when you get back."

  Alicia had followed Jack farther west, down the slope toward the Hudson River, as much in the dark as Thomas as to where he was going. He'd stopped at a trash can fire in the mouth of an alley and handed a twenty to each of the three men warming themselves by the flames.

  Now they laughed and grinned and low-fived each other as they hurried off.

  "All right," Jack said, pointing to Thomas. "Get to work."

  Alicia looked around at the dark, empty, forbidding streets. But she didn't feel afraid. Jack seemed to be in his element, and in complete control.

  "You're not listening to me," Thomas said. He'd been talking nonstop since they'd left his apartment.

  "Start feeding the fire," Jack said. "And not too fast. We don't want to smother it."

  Thomas finally got the idea. He reached into one of the boxes he'd carried here and pulled out a fistful of photos. Alicia watched them flutter into the can, curling and blackening as the hungry flames consumed them, destroying forever the hideous images they bore. She was in there, with Thomas, but other children were there as well… forced or duped like her into performing an obscene dance…

  She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling almost giddy. She reminded herself that it was only a token, but still… now there would be one less set of prints in existence.

  But Thomas didn't seem to care about the photos, seemed only half aware of what he was doing. All he cared about was the transmitter.

  "The transmitter's the key, you know," he said, starting in again. "If you know its location, I can make us all wealthy beyond your wildest dreams."

  Jack appeared uninterested. "If we have the transmitter, why do we need you?"

  "Because your ownership of the technology will be challenged the instant you try to sell it."

  "And yours won't?"

  "Anybody trying to patent it will run into a wall. That's because…" He paused. "Let me back up and explain this. Then you'll know why you need me."

  "This oughta be good," Jack said, glancing at her.

  Alicia shrugged. "Just as long as you keep feeding the fire."

  Broadcast power was all fine and good. But first she wanted to see those photos reduced to ash.

  "I found out about Dad's invention when I stopped by to visit him one day."

  "You stayed in touch?" she said. She found that hard to believe.

  "Not really." He shrugged. "I was a little short, and he wasn't returning my calls. So I stopped by. Anyway, he left me cooling my heels while he talked on the phone, so I wandered around and noticed he'd left a couple of lamps burning here and there around the house. It being noon and all, and me being a good, ecologically minded son"—he grinned here, but Alicia wouldn't respond and Jack only stared at him—"I, uh, went to turn them off. But as I did, I noticed these little wires sticking up from the bases of their bulb sockets. I looked closer and realized that the damn lamps weren't plugged in. What was powering the bulbs? Had Dad developed some sort of battery-powered lamp? Out of curiosity, I began to tinker with one. By the time he finished his conference call, I'd figured it out."

  "I'll bet he was thrilled," Alicia said.

  "Hardly the word for it. Royally pissed was more like it. He started kicking me out, but then changed his mind. That mystified me then, but I understood why later. Dad wouldn't tell me anything about the technology itself, but he did explain why he didn't want word to get out about it just yet. You see, his invention isn't completely his. It utilizes a number of discoveries he made and technologies he developed while working for various universities and corporations over the years. Those organizations hold the patents on those technologies. They'd claim the lion's share—or possibly all—of the profits from his invention. So what he was doing was searching for a way to maintain ownership once he revealed it. He leant me the money I needed on the condition I kept mum."

  I wouldn't be surprised if it was the other way around, Alicia thought. You promising to keep mum in exchange for cash.

  "But I thought Dad's thinking was backward. If patent disputes were going to get in the way, he should come up with a way to make all those patents irrelevant. If going public with it meant losing all your profits, then find a way to profit from not bringing it to market. So I started asking myself: who stands to lose the most from broadcast power? And that gave me my answer: Sell the technology to OPEC."

  His head swiveled back and forth, looking for approval. Alicia wasn't going to give him any, and Jack's face might as well have been cast in bronze.

  "It's as brilliant as it is obvious, don't you think? I figured the Arabs'd be willing to pay billions to keep broadcast power off the market. So, without telling Dad, I 'borrowed' one of his lamps and booked a flight to Saudi Arabia. But I never got there. During the layover in Frankfurt, I discovered that the lamp didn't work. Panicked, I hurried back to the U.S.—where I found it did work. So there's a limit to how far the power can be broadcast."

  Idly, Alicia wondered about the range, about what wave-form was used… but what she remembered from her one undergraduate physics course was woefully inadequate.

  "So I took the lamp to OPEC's UN mission but they refused to see me. Would you believe it? Here I was offering them a way to save their collective asses, and those idiots didn't want to listen. Fortunately I found another group, almost as wealthy—"

  "Iswid Nahr," Jack said.

  Thomas jerked as if he'd been slapped.

  "Who are you?" Thomas said, staring at him. "How do you know that?"

  "Keep talking," Jack said, pointing to the fire. "And keep feeding."

  "All right, all right. Anyway, Iswid Nahr must have taken that lamp apart and put it back together again about a hundred times, but finally they were convinced. They contacted Dad and made him a fabulous offer. But instead of being grateful, he pitched a fit, going on and on about how he wasn't going to let anybody bury his invention. Billions of dollars on the table and he's in a screaming rage. I couldn't believe it. I still can't."

  "I can," Alicia said. "I haven't spoken to the man since I was a teenager, and it couldn't be clearer."

  "Well, then, dear sister," Thomas said acidly. "Pray enlighten me."

  "Half sister," Alicia said. "And don't forget it. As for your father, he wanted more than money—he wanted glory. He wanted to go down in history as one of the great men of all time, someone whose genius had transformed the world. And more than that, he wanted to control his technology. What a power trip that would be: control the power that powers the world."

  "You could be right," Thomas said. Was that a note of grudging acquiescence in his voice?

  "But once his secret had been leaked, especially to people who wanted to suppress it, he had to move fast. The only way he could see to keep the credit and the riches was to take it to a country that had no oil, that would agree to almost anything to cut its oil imports. I'll bet Israel was his first choice, until he realized Japan had more money. And with a technology in hand that would not only reduce their dependence on oil, but give them something more valuable than oil to sell to the world, the Japanese government would dispute any patent claims that would arise. Ronald Clayton would be unimaginably rich, and guaranteed his precious place in history."

  "Except he never made it to Japan."

  "No," Jack said. "Your Iswid Nahr buddies saw to that."

  Alicia thought she saw Thomas flinch. Didn't he
know? Or had he merely suspected.

  "That was an accident," he told Jack.

  Jack shook his head. "The Japanese found explosive residues in the wreckage."

  "How do you know?"

  "Same way I know about Iswid Nahr."

  Alicia guessed Jack didn't want Thomas to know about the Japanese agent. She watched Thomas mull this new information a moment.

  Then he shrugged. "Oh, well. He never cared about me anyway."

  "Only about himself," Alicia said.

  "How can you say that? Look what he left you. Before he left for Japan he hid all his records and cut me out of the will. He left everything to you, dammit! Why?"

  "I couldn't tell you," Alicia said. "I wish he hadn't."

  "Then tell me what you know," Thomas said, leaning over the flames. The shadow of his large nose flickered back and forth across his forehead. "I'll cut you in with the Arabs."

  "No thought of releasing it and making the world a better place?"

  He looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues. "Trust me, when I have so much money that it'll take me a year to spend a day's worth of interest, the world will be a better place."

  "I recall an old saying about the distance an apple falls from a tree…"

  "You'll be rich, Alicia. You've always hated him, always wanted to get even—"

  "That's not true." But of course it was. She'd known times when it had been all she'd thought of.

  "Who're you kidding? The only person in this world you hate more than me is him. Now's your chance to settle the score. We sell the technology to the Arabs… and they bury it. Isn't it delicious? We get his money, and he gets no credit. His only claim to fame is that he was just another unfortunate passenger on JAL 27. You've got to love it, Alicia."

  She had to admit she found a certain sour appeal in Thomas's scheme… but the thought of conspiring with Thomas on anything…

  "Forget it."

  He leaned back, obviously frustrated. "Suit yourself. But it's only a matter of time before we find the transmitter, and then it'll be too late. You won't have anything to bargain with."