by Alan Brudner
"So you would kill your own grandson?"
"Sad, but irrelevant." Harry spoke in a cold slow monotone, barely resembling the animated motormouth I recalled describing Cindy and Mindy on the shuttle bus. "You tried to use that baby to blackmail Avery!"
"No I didn't! It was Avery's idea to give me the money, so I could take the baby out of the country and raise him and you'd never hear a peep from him or me again! I promised him that! But I need the money to do it right, to do it well."
"We don't have a million dollars to give away right now."
The big man with the gun quickly announced, "You better have the fucking hundred thousand we talked about, or I'll rip that fucking heart back out with my bare hands." His voice was gruff and vaguely familiar, although I couldn't quite place it.
"You already got the first half," Harry replied. "You still have to earn the rest." He was plainly trying to steady his voice and remain in control. "As for you, Miss Exner, I don't know what was between you and my son. But sooner or later, that child's going to want something. They always do. Or you will. Avery's going to have enough problems putting his public image back together without such issues. If he ever can. I can't take the chance that he will be ruined again someday."
"Be reasonable," I heard Schuyler say, his speech slurred as if he was drunk. "We'll all work something out."
"I already have worked it out," Harry said. "I'm not like my son, always relying on the high-tech stuff. Kid never learned his lesson. Life's not a game of chance. Sometimes you have to do things the old fashioned way."
"Or pay somebody else to," growled the other voice.
"Shut up," Harry yelled, agitated. "I'm too old to take much more shit from you."
There was no reply.
"Okay," Harry continued in his softer, sarcastic tone. "This'll all make great press, no? The deal is, Schuyler, you found out your girlfriend got pregnant by someone else. No question about that, just take a look at that big belly of hers! You got yourself good and drunk. Then you snapped and killed her. Her boyfriend too, that wino lying dead over there. After that, you took your own life. I'll leak a bit of your past history of depression and alcohol abuse just to be sure the papers get it right. And a lovey-dovey picture of the two of you. Maybe it's a couple years old, but so what? The recent problems at Cybronics and the fact your father has reported you missing won't hurt, either. And that little cult suicide thing some of your friends did out in San Francisco, that gave you some ideas, too. It all adds to the ring of truth, don't you think?"
"I didn't know any of those people," Schuyler slurred.
"Ah, but the world doesn't have to know that! And right now, Schuyler, your blood alcohol level's about three times the norm. Well past legally intoxicated. That's just about right for the medical examiner. If you'd like some more wine to help you deal with it, just ask Hank."
"How about it, kid?" laughed the crude voice I finally recognized as that of Hank Driver, the creep from my son's apartment in Portland. "You can never be too rich or too drunk! How about another funnel full?"
Schuyler started screaming, gurgling, and I imagined Driver was forcing more alcohol down my son's throat. Since that job required both hands, I figured Driver had probably put his gun down.
I didn't know what to do, how much time I had. I didn't think I had much. I grabbed the doorknob with one sweaty palm, grasped Giraffe's gun with the other. I wished I had tested it out.
I turned my wrist and felt the door handle give. I knew the door could be coaxed open. It creaked. Eno's horse, which I hadn't seen, neighed loudly from somewhere behind me.
"Somebody's here," Harry yelled.
I couldn't buy any more time. I thrust open the door with as much force as I could and bolted into the room. Bright light from the floodlamp streamed in. Harry lifted his hands to shield his eyes. So did Driver, but not before dropping a wine bottle near Schuyler and pulling his pistol out of his waistband. As I rushed in, Driver flailed around and sent a couple of shots in my direction. They missed, but shattered several bottles of wine on the table between us. Shards of glass and alcohol sprayed around the room. Streams of red and white wine showered the walls and decorated the tablecloth from one end to the other. A piece of glass shot into my left hand like shrapnel. I winced but tried to ignore the intense pain it sent up my forearm.
I ran to the wine tasting table and shoved it with all my might into Driver's gut. It was a heavy old oak piece, but my raging adrenaline helped me do some damage with it. Another blast from Driver's pistol grazed my shoulder and blasted open a wine barrel behind me. Red wine gushed out like a waterfall as Driver clutched his gut and I squeezed the trigger of my gun.
Giraffe hadn't lied; it was heavy, but it was just a cigarette lighter.
A powerful one.
A line of fire raced down the wine-streaked tablecloth and rapidly became a swirling blaze. Blue and yellow flames surged upward, hit the ceiling and fanned out into the room. The old splintery pine of the floors and shelves, the oak and cardboard wine cases and the assorted business papers all erupted like fluid-soaked charcoal on a barbecue. Black smoke began to burn my eyes.
I lifted the lighter above shoulder height and hurled it at Driver as hard as I could. End over end. I heard a crack as the handle caught him squarely in the ribs. Then I grabbed a wine bottle and hurled it as he grasped at his rib cage. It hit him in the forearm and the gun flew out of his hand. He was doubled over but I did it again, this time with a jelly jar the size of a baseball. I pitched my third strike. It felt like my old fastball as it smashed into the bridge of his nose. He fell to the floor clutching his face in obvious pain, blood spurting out of his nostrils in every direction.
Holding his jacket collar up over his own nose and mouth, choking, Harry Cardinsky stooped down to pick up Driver's gun, then staggered toward the door.
"Fuck!" Driver yelled as his nylon Cybronics jacket caught fire and began to melt into his skin; I knew because the sickening stench of burning plastic and flesh on fire quickly began to overtake that of the burning wood, which itself was powerful.
Driver lay prostrate on the ground, screaming and writhing around in an effort to put himself out. A gunshot from the direction of the doorway quickly ended his efforts.
I ran over to my son and Scarlett. As I used a piece of broken bottle glass to cut through the ropes that tied their legs and arms, another gunshot rang out from just outside the door. Then a sound like a dropped sack of potatoes.
We made our way over to the door. Just past it, I saw Harry lying motionless on the ground. A growing red stain seeped into the old wooden plank walkway around his damaged head. Driver's gun had landed about a foot away from Harry's hand.
I pushed Sky and Scarlett outside over Harry's body. Then I dashed back inside. I felt Eno's neck with my hand and wasn't sure if there was a pulse. I was scared to take a deep breath in the acrid smoke although I desperately needed one. Still, I put my arms under Eno's and somehow managed to start dragging him outside. He was dead weight at first, but when I progressed about four feet, he suddenly began to feel lighter.
He was shuffling his feet, trying to walk on his own.
We made it outside, and in the brightness of the floodlight and the flames I could see that there were cuts and blood all over his face. But most of the crimson goo was red wine jelly. After a few minutes of leaning against a fence to catch his breath, Eno said he could walk. Holding one another tightly across the shoulders, Eno and Scarlett and Schuyler and I all staggered toward the gate like a drunk eight-legged monster. As we moved farther away from the house, the cool night air began to have a reviving effect on all of us.
"Jesus H. Christ," Eno said as he turned to look at his main building, or what was left of it. The outer walls were peeling apart, falling down, lit on fire in the few parts where they hadn't yet turned charcoal black. Orange and red flames higher than the roof engulfed the place and shot out of the windows. The raging conflagration illuminated the dark Hudson Valley mountainsid
e like a supernova.
Sky and I looked at each other, hugged, kissed, choked together. Then we embraced Scarlett and Eno, too.
We all got into my car and drove away from the vineyard. We passed Eno's horse, which had taken shelter in a shed down the road. I didn't want to leave Eno, but he insisted that we drop him off at a local hospital. He said he'd take care of himself and that we should get away before he had to call in the police and the firemen and they filled out their reports. He won a short argument and we left as he waved good-bye from the emergency room doorway.
My shoulder and the back of my hand hurt like hell, but I had my son back and felt as calm as a Block Island pond on a windless afternoon.
Chapter 42
"You should fix that window up front," Schuyler said when we finally got home. "You never know who could walk in."
We spent a day catching up, or a night, or both—I really don't recall.
Sky told me that following the spill in the Cybronics holography lab, he tried to make sure he hadn't damaged any of Cybronics' systems. So he checked them, one by one, for defects. When he finished late at night, Kord told him that they had to go on an immediate emergency trip. Sky called to tell me he'd be late, not realizing he was about to fly out of town.
Then they flew together to Tampa on Avery Kord's private jet. On the plane, Kord told Sky the original creator of the subliminal suggestion program couldn't finish it, she had some personal problems, so it was critical that Sky finish it instead. Kord wanted it to be functioning before his scheduled 60 Minutes guest appearance. He said that Sky's wine spill in the holography lab, while running an unauthorized program, coupled with Sky's recent hacking episode, required that Sky be placed under strict surveillance. Kord said that ordinarily, he would fire Sky for such transgressions of company policy, but that he needed to reassign him to finish the program. When Sky asked why Katie Wilnot couldn't finish it herself, Kord seemed surprised that Sky knew her identity. But he said Katie hadn't provided the code to enable him to use her version, there wasn't enough time left to decipher it, and she had suffered a debilitating brain hemorrhage and couldn't talk about it.
Sky and I figured either that Katie had actually tested her program out on herself—maybe intentionally, maybe by mistake—or that she tried to kill herself rather than revealing the codes to Kord. Either way, Kord still needed Sky to switch assignments and complete it. Since time was of the essence, Kord had no choice but to tell Sky his plan: to make the members of the Congressional committee vote against breaking up Cybronics or restricting its business. That was the primary subliminal suggestion Kord planned to deliver during the 60 Minutes show. If Sky's program could also be used to convince millions of people to buy Cybronics' products, so much the better. But as for squelching NanoSoft and fighting the Saddam Husseins of the world—well, those were longer-term matters. Or perhaps, as Sky now realized, fantasies. Or simply lies.
Sky spent most of his next few days alternating between a houseboat and the thirteenth floor of the Tampa Rey cigar factory—the unlucky floor Harry joked about and I naively decided to skip over. Sky was accompanied everywhere, guarded by Hank Driver or other men who made Driver appear undernourished. He was fitted with an irremovable electronic ankle bracelet that Kord used to track his whereabouts. He was forced to work on the subliminal seduction program in Tampa until they flew him back to New York and Hank Driver drove him for several hours, blindfolded, to an office with a Cybronics personal computer and a data storage unit linked to the company mainframes: Eno's office at the winery. Before Sky knew where he was, they had ripped out the telephone.
Driver told him that if he didn't finish the program by the time 60 Minutes aired, he would simply be killed. Sky complied because he didn't know what else to do. Driver and several other guys—including two hackers, one tall and one short with spiked hair—made Eno close down the business temporarily, but allowed him to send out any remaining mail orders so his customers wouldn't call or complain to anybody. One of them was a FedEx package addressed to a Mr. Clay Blacker.
Sky embedded the subliminal suggestions into Kord's digital gift packages, the E-mails he planned to send out. When opened, they would infiltrate the public's computer programs and convey the subliminal messages. Most contained harmless commercial messages, but in the case of the Congressional committee reviewing Cybronics, they were designed to influence the upcoming vote. One of the triggers for the messages was supposed to be released when the Mona Lisa image sang a children's song. She wasn't supposed to talk about Clue or Monopoly.
Sky doubted that Kord would really have planted a subliminal code aimed at trying to prompt him or anyone else to commit suicide, and he was sure he could resist in any event. But he was a lot less confident about his ability to overcome Hank Driver; Sky felt that monster surely must have killed Webb, and now planned to kill him for getting close to proving it. Sky tried to stall, to work slowly, to buy time to think, but he had a lot of trouble with his programming because someone—a hacker, he figured—had started to infect Cybronics' data systems with a powerful web of viruses. Eliza's plan had worked like a charm.
Sky watched 60 Minutes on Eno's computer monitor, which also functioned as a television screen. He couldn't figure out why the Mona Lisa image didn't sing the child's song, how it got infected by a virus that forced it to say other things. Cybronics' programs were so well protected by an arsenal of defense mechanisms that he had trouble believing anyone—certainly not his fuddy-duddy parents—could break through the labyrinth of firewalls and dead ends and encryptions.
When Sky saw Kord's car accident on television, he feared Kord would think he was responsible. He realized Kord wouldn't want him to testify in Congress about the subliminal suggestion program or the company, and that Kord had been concerned about his research into the Webb killing. He didn't know what Kord might do to him, how far he'd go, but he didn't want to find out. Either Kord or Driver would certainly finish him off. He was trying to figure out an escape plan when Harry Cardinsky turned up at the vineyard office with Scarlett. That was the first time Sky learned of a plan to kill both of them and make it look like a murder/suicide. It would have been the last time, too, if I hadn't shown up.
I told Sky about the large wire transfers into Driver's account. I figured Kord was behind them, that he had paid Driver to get rid of Justin Webb. Maybe he made the payoff through Harry. Yet despite everything, Sky remained skeptical. Part of him still wanted to believe his fallen bespectacled idol was just a misguided kid who had never grown up, and that there was some still-hidden explanation for the Webb murder.
I sketched out what Eliza and I did to best Cybronics' systems, but I didn't go into great detail. Not that I wanted to hide anything from my son. But I wasn't at all sure I understood what the Eliza avatar had done.
I did find out one of Sky's secrets, though. His screen name was Bluefish. His address was [email protected]. Eliza and I had zapped his computer in our first hour of amateur hacking.
I asked Sky whether there was any realistic danger, even a slight one, that he might yet be subliminally prompted to do something rash.
"I'm not sure what subliminal prompts Avery Kord put into the programs," my son said with a smile. "But just to be safe, Dad, don't ever dress up like the Mona Lisa and sing Rock-a-Bye Baby."
Chapter 43
Several months passed. Sky and Scarlett and I were never placed at the winery or questioned about it by the police. Eno sent me a card to tell me he received a nice insurance settlement and was rebuilding his office. The grape crop wasn't completely destroyed but the computers were, which was just fine with him. He invited me up for a future visit and a non-alcoholic tasting. The card was addressed to me as Cliff Lightman.
Sky was questioned by the authorities about his whereabouts during the period he was a Missing Person; after all, his name and image had been widely disseminated. Although he felt abused by Avery Kord, he also believed that events had more than fully punished Kor
d and there was no sense piling on. Sky also wanted to put this chapter of his life behind him. So he explained simply and honestly that he was working on developing computer programs at a top secret Cybronics facility down in Tampa and that he wasn't permitted outside contact for security reasons. He couldn't recreate his programs for the police because Cybronics' systems were no longer operational, but they involved trade secrets related to advertising and public relations. He wasn't asked or pressured to explain more, and his link to that dying corporation became little more than a footnote to the media frenzy that engulfed whatever was left of Avery Kord and his empire.
The charred body inside the vineyard office was eventually identified by dental records as Henry Driver, wanted for the sale of child pornography in Oregon and over the Internet. According to the Oregon police, they were also closing in on Driver in connection with an old murder investigation: the killing of Justin Webb, one of the two original founders of Cybronics.
But Driver was a witness in that old case, not a suspect.
A witness who sat in some bushes about a hundred yards away from the murder, hanging around Forest Park in the hope of finding young boys to meet, maybe to photograph. Prepared. His camera was equipped with a zoom lens.
The Times reported that Tammy Wood was cooperating with the authorities in Portland and had told them that Driver once bragged to her that he had a photograph of the man who killed Justin Webb. Driver also told her he was blackmailing the killer. The photo turned up in Driver's safe deposit box. I never saw it, but it must have been a clear enough picture of Harry Cardinsky to convince the old man to part with a lot of money over the years to protect himself.
The link between Hank Driver and the Webb killing also helped quicken the police identification of the other body at the vineyard as Harry's. The police theorized that with all of Cybronics' recent problems, Harry must have refused to keep meeting Driver's monetary demands. They speculated that Harry killed Driver because he feared Driver was enough of a loose cannon that he'd get into trouble, sooner or later—particularly with Tammy Wood cooperating—and would seek to trade his information about the Webb murder (and his photograph of Harry) for leniency.