by Alan Brudner
She shook her head. "I don't know, Cliff. The man recognizes Sky's a genius. Why not keep him designing profitable programs for the next forty years?"
"Because he knows too much, Lize. Especially about this program. And other things too."
Eliza nodded. "I'm just learning the ropes and can get around the system without too much difficulty. If Sky's half as smart as we think he is, and curious, he's already learned the ins and outs. And if that program works, hell, Kord will be able to use it to sell anything, do anything. Control anyone. Have the public eating off of his palmtop."
"I doubt that would sit too well with Congress or the Attorney General. But still, Lize, Sky seems so...irreplaceable."
"He's our son, Cliff. But he's also the best potential star witness for the prosecution. He can ruin Kord in the Congressional hearings. Look what the Clinton government put Microsoft through, and that was nothing compared to what's going on at Cybronics. So Sky's his worst nightmare. He knows which closets the skeletons are in. And I'll bet there are lots of them." My wife knitted her brow into the little ridged highways I remembered behind the top of her Canon as she tinkered with the shutter and aperture settings.
"There was Katie Wilnot."
"Another potential star witness who can bring the company down with her knowledge of the subliminal suggestion program."
"How do you know?"
"She and Sky were handpicked, Cliff. They tested out at the highest two IQ's at Cybronics. I've seen the files. I can only guess what happened to her."
"She's in a coma, Lize. She tried to kill herself. I don't know if some perverse test of the program caused her to do it or if she just couldn't deal with all the pressure he put her under. I heard her say she tried subliminal suggestion on a bunch of people at a seminar she taught in California. Implanted some kind of prototype of the program in their laptop computers to see if she could persuade them to change their negative opinions about Cybronics. She wanted to survey them in a few months. But Kord said that wasn't strong enough, he needed a more serious test."
"A life."
I nodded slowly. "Now Katie's 99 percent sure not to recover."
"That's one percent too much risk for Kord, Cliff. Trust me. At some point he's going to make his odds 100 percent."
I felt lightheaded and my heart hammered against my chest as I thought about the implications. I don't know how much time went by before I spoke again.
"Lize, I don't even know where Sky is. He's missing. The last time I was in his apartment, a guy named Hank was there. Henry Driver. Sky thought he was a suspect in the Justin Webb murder. When Kord found out that Sky was hacking around looking for more information, he went bonkers. I'm scared maybe Driver somehow found out what Sky was doing."
She stared at me, silent and as still as the day I was called in to identify her remains. Computer images don't breathe, I realized. You can't put your hand on the chest or your finger in front of the nose praying for the warmth of a breath, the way I did that day until the mortician pulled me away and let me wet his shoulder with my tears. For a moment, I wondered whether the screen had frozen. I tapped it lightly. The visual sensors above the monitor moved slightly and she nodded, blinked, chewed her lip.
"Just thinking, Cliff," she said.
"We don't have much to go on."
"Well, what clues do we have?"
"Cybronics has a few hundred locations."
"Not enough time to go to all of them." Her voice was edged with tension.
"There's Katie down in Tampa."
"I doubt he'd put Sky in the same location as Katie. Too risky."
"Well, there's that group Sky kept meeting with downtown. Katie was part of it. But I don't know anything about the others."
"Nothing?"
"Just that they rented a church basement. But the priests didn't know their names. Even Schuyler knows only their Net names. Some kind of secrecy thing."
"That's it?"
"They drank a few bottles of wine, Lize," I said.
"From France?"
I stared at the screen a bit before answering. Her eyes widened.
"Actually, from the Hudson Valley, Lize. Five Fingers Winery. I have a bottle of it."
Her eyes crinkled as she smiled. "Is it a nice day for a drive?"
I nodded.
"Hey," Eliza winked. "I have a lot of housework to do anyway. Just keep me posted." She was the woman I remembered, the positive, decisive one with a game plan. We had a problem, but we were going to take action. It was better than sitting on our hands.
"I wish I could touch you, Lize," I said, old emotions stirring out of hibernation. "I wish you were here to hold me."
"Close your eyes."
We were quiet for awhile as I moved into a dream, or a state that reminded me of one. My horror and trepidation about Kord and his plans for my son melted like hot liquid into a swirl of wonder and amazement at how real Eliza's animated reincarnation had become. I didn't feel silly at all as I closed my eyes, then opened them to see if hers were closed. They were. I quickly shut mine again, not wanting her to catch me cheating.
There were no fingers on the back of my neck, no arms around my shoulders, no fragrance of Chanel No. 5 sensualizing the air. Yet I felt calmer and reassured, recalling the warm feelings of her soft breasts and firm belly as they pressed flat against me through the texture of a knit cotton cardigan.
When I opened my eyes the cardigan was draped over her shoulders, and I wondered how she could have been programmed so accurately as to know which article of clothing I'd imagine her wearing. It had to be coincidence. But for an instant I was myself again, and she was Eliza in the flesh and blood.
"We're going to find him," she said, her tone serious.
I tried hard to smile. A lifetime of images of our son quickly began to scroll through my consciousness, paused frames on a VCR tape, a sobering pinch that woke me out of my hypnotic state. Superman lunch boxes and brown paper book covers and skinned knees and sunburns and tying up a baseball glove with oil in the pocket to break it in; a wrist broken in a fall from the top of the monkey bars; Eliza scrambling to make pancakes early enough to get him to school before the bell; winning science fair projects I never understood; a trio of fishing poles all being tugged at the same time: Sky's by a bluefish, mine by some seaweed and Eliza's by some unknown creature that snapped her line.
"No question, Cliff," she said, the confidence in her words betrayed by the worry in her tight expression. "We're his parents." The monitor's background had changed into a night scene, a starry blue sky, and Eliza shrunk into a small distant figure. She looked around in what appeared to be true amazement.
"There is a God, Cliff," she announced in a firm voice, with more certainty on the subject than I recalled either of us ever having.
I stared into the screen, allowing my eyes to unfocus they way they do when you look at those hidden 3-D image books, permitting myself to imagine I was walking under true starlight, her hand in mine. If there was a God, he was teasing me.
"We'll find Schuyler," she repeated.
She winked, and the display went blank and white as snow.
Chapter 24
"The name's Eno," the man behind the old wooden counter said, puka-shelled, tie-dyed, bell bottomed, looking eerily like the Sonny Bono tour guide at Cybronics and sounding like an old misplayed violin. A bright acrylic portrait of him smoking a fat cigar on a tropical beach hung on the wall behind him, doubling the psychedelic 1960's effect. It seemed incongruous in a dusty room composed of old random-width pine plank floors, an oak mantel, a couple of ancient wine barrels, and row after row of wooden shelves lined with wine bottles. "If you like a dry white, can I interest you in a taste of our best estate Riesling?"
"I'm not here to taste the wine, Mister Eno," I said, immediately on guard, wondering whether he was another copy of the Cybronics tour guide robot.
"Eno's the first name. Eno Loggia. But Eno's enough, so to speak. And 'scuse me for asking, but why come to a w
inery if not to taste the wine?"
I could see his point.
"I'm a private investigator, Eno." It felt only partly like a lie. I decided to use an investigative-sounding name rather than my own, just to be safe. "The name's Clay Blacker." I opened my wallet and quickly flipped it shut, as if he should have seen a badge or a license or whatever it is a P.I.'s supposed to carry.
"First investigator I ever met who didn't want to sniff the ol' bouquet, Blacker."
"I'm on the wagon."
"Too bad. A glass a day's good for the heart."
"It's the psyche I'm worried about."
"Well, we got some nice wine jellies, too. Help yourself on the way out." He pointed to a row of shelves lined with small glass jars filled with yellow and honey and deep red jellies with handwritten labels like Chardonnay and Merlot.
"I always thought jelly just came in flavors like grape and strawberry." The musty odor of all the old wood seemed to blend into the sweet smell of fermenting grapes. I breathed deeply, tried to relax. I waited until a customer left, so Eno and I were the only people in the room. A fan whirred faintly from somewhere out of eyeshot. A large oak table surrounded by old wooden chairs was littered with half-open wine bottles, unpacked crackers and a cheddar cheese bar on a board with a slicer sticking out of it. I pulled over one of the chairs and sat across the counter from where Eno stood.
"So what can I do for you?" he asked, his eye contact direct, his eyes seeming too wet to be Animatronic likenesses.
I pulled two pictures of Schuyler from my shirt pocket. Eliza had taken the first, up at Yale, and she somehow managed to capture a naivete in my son's face that you'd never believe if you had seen his resume or knew his IQ. The second was a wallet-size black-and-white that had that cold quality of a mug shot or a passport photo.
I stared at Eno's hands as he took the pictures from me. Perfect blue veins lined their backs, which were hairless and a bit pudgy for a thin guy. I wondered whether they housed electronic and mechanical devices that made them move. He had a Band-Aid on the back of one.
He glanced at the photos and shook his head.
"Never seen the guy," he said, handing them back. "What's his name?"
"Schuyler Lightman. He's missing."
Eno shrugged his shoulders. "You want to go out and see the grapes?"
"What the heck."
"Come on."
The pine planks creaked as we walked to the door. When we got outside he closed it behind us, locked it with a key and wrote "15" in chalk on a little blackboard on the door that now read:
HOLD YOUR HORSES. WE WILL BE BACK IN 15 MINUTES.
"We usually show the place by wagon," he said, tilting his head toward an old wooden carriage with a big old horse eating grass in front of it. "We get 50,000 visitors a year. But you can see more on foot."
I followed him along the rows and rows of vines that snaked around tall wooden stakes, red and green grapes of various varieties clustered on most. I listened to him tout the temperate climate and nutrient-rich soil of the Hudson Valley. But what I noticed most in the ancient-looking vineyard was the little, almost inconspicuous LED display on the ground at the end of each row, red numerals barely showing from dirt-covered little black boxes half the size of the electrical outlets on your wall.
"What're these?" I asked, pointing at one of the boxes.
"Ah, the miracles of computer science."
"In a vineyard?"
Eno smiled. "These are attached to a central computer that contains all the codes that track how old the vines are, what the temperature's been throughout their lives, the rainfall and precipitation, soil moisture, and other factors. Some kind of formula then tells us the optimal time to pick and crush the grapes."
"A computer tells you that?"
"We got it for free, Mister Blacker."
"From where?"
"From some guys that wanted to test out their winemaking software. So they could work out the bugs and then begin selling it to vineyards. Ben and Jerry, I think they said were their names. They looked more like Mutt and Jeff. Little guy had hair like a porcupine. Anyway, we let them try it up here for free, and they left the prototype behind. Huge computer, I gotta tell you. Takes up too much space. I use it mostly for inventory purposes, to keep track of customers. Mailing lists. Scheduling, like when we last manured the place. It can also do real sophisticated stuff like run the pressers, monitor the temperature in the fermenting tanks, measure the chlorophyll content of the grapes to tell me when they're ripe. But I try not to overuse it. When it comes to the wine it wants to make, to tell you the truth—" he lowered his voice as if he didn't want the computer to hear—"we don't always do what the software tells us to do. Sometimes the old nose and taste buds work better. You've never seen a drunk computer, I bet."
"Where'd these two guys come from?"
"Somewhere in the northwest, I think. Used to wear these white running suits all the time. Funny thing, 'cause the most exercise they ever got was lifting their smelly cigars to their mouths. They hung out up here a couple a months, installing the equipment and testing it out. Maybe three years ago. Came back a year later to taste the wine they had programmed us to pick. One of 'em was an artist, too. Took a lot of pictures, some video. Drew a lot more. Of the place. Still lifes, bunches of grapes and stuff. And painted one of me."
"The one on the wall in your office?"
"If you call that an office." He nodded. "The guy made a lot of others of me, too. It was weird, how I'd be talking to him and he'd always have a sketch pad out. Made it hard to converse. It ain't exactly like I'm Tom Cruise or Paul Newman or anything."
"You have the pictures?"
"Nah. Just the painting. They took the others with them. Said they were to remember me by. Actually, they asked for permission to use my likeness as a model of some kind."
"You said okay?"
"Hey, I'll take my fifteen minutes any way I can get it. Life's too short to worry about it."
"What company were they with?"
"Cyber something, I think they said."
"Cybronics?"
He curled his lips. "Something like that. Their jackets had a big letter 'C' on the back, now that I think about it."
"That's where Schuyler Lightman used to work."
"The kid in the photographs?"
I nodded.
"So you made some progress, Mister Blacker."
"I wish. Can I see the central computer?"
We walked back to the office. The horse was still in the same place, still bent down and eating grass. As Eno fumbled with the key I asked what he had done to his hand.
"Sharp glass," he said. "If you ever break a wine bottle, be real careful when you pick up the pieces."
Once inside, he opened a door behind the counter and I followed him to a white personal computer. "That's just a small part of what they built here," he said, pointing behind him with an outstretched thumb like a hitchhiker. My eyes traced his thumbline to a white electronic machine that looked about the size of a double refrigerator. It had glass doors with a lock on them.
"I don't even have a key to it," Eno said. "Can't imagine what I'll do if it breaks. Of course, I'm not sure I'd know, given I don't even know exactly what it does."
He focused back on the personal computer keyboard and hit "Enter." A spreadsheet appeared on the screen. Its headings listed types of grapes, locations where planted, various temperature and moisture readings, and some dates.
"That's it?" I asked, expecting something more elaborate.
"Yup."
"Is there a title page or something?"
He moved the mouse and clicked.
VINEYARD OPTIMIZER 3.0 appeared, followed by a Cybronics logo.
"The guy who painted you," I asked, "when's the last time he came in here?"
"Jerry? Maybe a year ago."
We walked back out to the main room. I looked at the painting. The paint was too bright, like one of those cheap things you can buy at a
ll too many art festivals on the street. But Eno's face and body had a realistic quality to them, an exactness that made them seem almost like a photograph. Probably done with the help of computer imaging or something, I thought.
I stared at the painting.
It took me a few seconds, but I realized what the problem was.
"If he painted the portrait up here at the vineyard, why palm trees and sand rather than grapevines and horse-drawn wagons?"
Eno smiled, the whiteness of his teeth contrasting against his dark mustache. He handed me a bottle of alcohol-free Merlot and a small jar of Chardonnay jelly.
"He had already painted the background, he told me. Before he got here, down in Tampa. Come to think of it, that's where he got his stinky cigars."
I glanced up at the painting again.
"Don't you smoke 'em?" I asked. "Like in the portrait?"
He shook his head from side to side. "Guess they took some artistic license." He smiled and his teeth sparkled. "Smoke's no good for either the crop or the taste buds. The only two things of any importance around here."
I began to reach for my wallet.
"They're on the house," he said, looking at the gifts he had given me.
"Thanks a lot," I said.
"Hey wait, Blacker" he said, walking back over to the terminal. "I gotta put you on our mailing list. I know you're on the wagon, so I'll try not to tempt you." He clicked the mouse a few times, then asked for my address.
As I answered, I realized I liked the guy. "My real name's Clifford Lightman," I said, embarrassed about having made one up. "It's my son I'm looking for."
"Sorry," he said, obviously correcting his input and adding the address I gave him. "I kind of thought the kid looks like you. That's L-I-G-H-T-M-A-N, right?"
I nodded.
"I'll let you know if anything turns up, Lightman."
I smiled as Eno licked a teaspoonful of Chardonnay jelly he took from an open jar.
Chapter 25
"We're going to Florida, Eliza," I said. "Tampa."
"You struck out at the winery?"
"Not completely."
"Why don't I wait up here?"