by Wesley Cross
Jason said nothing as he stared across the room. I do sound like a jealous idiot, he thought. Instead, I should tell you what Max had found… if only what he’d found was tangible.
“First of all, I’m not going to be working directly for Mr. Rich and Famous here,” she said. “Asclepius is a quasi-independent company. Guardian still pays the bills, but can’t control what they research. But please be serious for a second.” She brushed her long, jet black hair out of her eyes.
“This is a real opportunity for me,” she continued. “What they do is cutting edge. Their lab in Brooklyn has done more in the last year than my company here for the entirety of its existence. I might never get a chance like this again.”
“And you don’t mind giving up Florida’s sun for a nasty New York winter?” Jason smiled and waved his hand at the window. King palms, colored by the dark orange of the setting sun, lazily swayed back and forth in a light breeze. “Seriously, though, I wouldn’t mind going back to the city. Besides, we still have the apartment.”
“I thought you didn’t want to live in that apartment, after, you know.” She trailed off softly, looking at her husband with sadness in her eyes.
“I didn’t,” Jason said, got up and went to the window where he stood for some time watching the trees.
“It’s been almost ten years,” he said at last. “I guess I’m finally Okay with the fact that what happened that night was just an accident.”
I wish I could actually believe it, he thought, mesmerized by the movement of the palms, I wish I could leave it behind. God damn you, Max! What the hell am I supposed to do now? And how do I even know what you had found is true?
He finally turned around and looked at Rachel with a smile.
“It would be great to see Max, though. I miss that guy.”
“I miss him, too,” she replied, “but what about your job?”
“I dunno. I guess I could try to get myself transferred to Manhattan’s office. But at the end of the day, even if I can’t, I’m pretty sure there’s a greater need for accountants in New York than in Fort Lauderdale.” He looked at his watch. “When are you supposed to find out?”
“Well, in about.” She glanced at the wall clock. “Two minutes I guess. I forgot to tell you; it’s pretty weird. This lady from HR tells me somebody’s going to deliver the offer at four. I tell her sure, I should be at home around four, and then she cuts me off and says the package will arrive at four o’clock sharp. She didn’t look like she was joking either.”
The doorbell rang.
“Wow, she wasn’t joking indeed.” Jason went to open the door and a few seconds later came back holding a large box with an emblem depicting a pair of stylized white wings. “What is this? This is heavy!”
They opened the box together to find a small booklet named “Terms of the Offer”, three large binders labeled “Non-Disclosure, Non-Compete Agreement part 1, 2, and 3”, and a smaller binder called “Personnel Security Questionnaire”.
“I’m a little confused,” half-jokingly said Jason, weighing the binders. “Are you going to be working for a small R&D company or the CIA?”
“I’m not sure I care at this moment.” Rachel turned around and opened the “Terms of the Offer” so Jason could see it and pointed at the top line. “Look at this number, mister.”
“Whoa…,” he looked at his wife, then back at the number, “I guess we’re going back to New York. I also think this offer calls for a little celebration.”
• • •
Sitting under a light tent in their favorite restaurant, La Buena Vida, Jason was watching the yachts moored at the pier, gently rocking back and forth. It was a balmy evening and the breeze coming from the water felt pleasant on his face. It smelled of sea and oiled wood. Soft sounds of bossa nova were flowing from the back of the restaurant.
“Being here makes it easy to forget how ugly the world has become in the last ten years,” he said, sipping his wine. “I’m sorry, but I’ll never understand why you think your company’s work is so important. People will never embrace anything more radical than the prosthetics for amputees and accident victims.”
“You think so?” Rachel cocked her head and looked at her husband with a crooked smile. “You sound like a husband who’s jealous that his wife will be making more than him.”
Jason laughed and tipped his wine glass, “I’ll drink to that.” He then turned back to the canal and creased his forehead.
“But do you think I’m wrong? I mean, look around. We’re the lucky few who are still able to enjoy this life. When we’re driving back, look at the shacks, just a few years ago there were nice condos. Do you think people who live there now would care for any enhancements that your company’s going to put on the market few years from now?”
“Maybe not in a few years,” she said, playing with her raven hair. “But eventually they will. Like any other advanced technology, before it’s available for the masses it’s expensive, and exclusive. The first tourist to go to space paid the Russians over twenty million dollars back in 2001. Now you can do the same thing for a quarter million! Yes, it’s still very expensive but it’s not even close to what it was back then.”
“A quarter million dollars is quite different from being available to the masses,” said Jason distractedly. Two muscular men wearing suits and ties entered the restaurant and squeezed into a booth on the other side of the room. One could mistake them for business types if not for the suits that were clearly off the rack. They looked around the room in a relaxed lazy manner just as any other patron would, trying to see if there were better seats, but Jason had a distinct feeling that it was just for show, and the suits were paying much more attention than they tried to let on.
Shady characters, he thought.
He watched them for a few seconds as they made themselves comfortable, then turned back to Rachel.
“Most important, you forget the main issue with the technologies you and companies like yours are working on. It’s one thing to get an artificial arm, if you don’t have one. But why on earth would you give up a perfectly healthy limb for an artificial one?”
Rachel looked her husband in the eye.
“Maybe you’ll find a handful of freaks who are willing,” he continued. “You know, those who tattoo their faces and implant fake horns on their foreheads. But there’s no way you’ll convince someone like me to give up my body parts.”
“Perhaps right now I wouldn’t be able to convince you,” Rachel said, seemingly annoyed at his lack of vision.
“But what if the artificial arm that you’re describing was better than your real one? What if it was faster, stronger, more precise, never got tired and when you hit it with the hammer instead of a nail, you would not feel pain?”
“But pain isn’t the only thing that I wouldn’t feel. I’d feel nothing,” he said.
“But what if you could? What if you could feel the heat and the cold and the smoothness or the roughness of the surface? And what if you could do it just as well or even better than with your real hand? What then?”
Jason stayed silent for a few moments, contemplating. There was some truth to what she was saying, but the idea still rubbed him the wrong way.
“I dunno, that sounds just too—”
“Too what? Improbable? Crazy?” Rachel scoffed and set her glass on the table a little too quickly. Red wine sloshed out, staining the white table cloth. It looked to Jason like a spreading blood stain.
“The idea that the world wasn’t flat also sounded crazy at some point. And yet, here we are, content with the fact that the world is round and we aren’t the center of the universe.” She chuckled. “I guess I was wrong, it isn’t the jealous husband, it’s the hippy underneath that fancy suit of yours who’s talking.”
“A hippy?” Jason laughed incredulously. “Since when did I become a hippy? Me, of all people?”
“Yes, you. Just take one look at that scraggly beard of yours and that awful long hair.” She gave him
a playful kiss on a cheek. Jason made a show of playing with his shoulder-length hair and laughed. “In that case maybe we should move to some commune instead of New York. Love, peace and all that jazz.”
CHAPTER 3
The sounds came back to Jason, but the gunshots had already stopped. The limousine flew over the bridge at what seemed a hundred miles an hour, blew through the red light at Delancey Street, and came to a halt next to a fire hydrant in front of a Chinese take-out.
“Everyone okay?” Mike, no longer smiling, was studying their faces from the front seat.
Rachel climbed out from under Jason and cautiously peeked through the broken rear window.
“They’re gone,” said the driver. “They got a little overzealous and overshot us, and I was able to push them off the highway.”
“What the hell happened?” Rachel coughed and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Did we just get shot at?”
The driver opened the front door and calmly walked around the car. He squatted next to the trunk and poked one of the holes with a key, producing a deformed bullet. The look on his face was of incredulity.
“I never thought I’d see these in New York.”
Rubbing the back of his head, Jason got out of the car. Curiosity had begun to overshadow his growing panic,at least for now. “What is it?”
“This,” Mike held the deformed bullet up so Jason could see it. “Is what they call in the military an M855A1. Which, judging by the sounds, came from an HK416 with a suppressor.”
“HK with a suppressor? What the hell is that?” Rachel got out of the car and looked at the bullet-ridden vehicle. She looked angry, rather than scared. “And where are the police? We get shot at and,” she trailed off going into a new bout of coughing. She waved Jason off when he tried to take her arm for support. “I’m fine.”
“HK416 is a Heckler and Koch assault rifle, mainly used by Special Forces,” said the driver grimly. “Like I said, I never thought I’d see these in use on American soil, let alone in New York.”
He paused for a second, then looked at Jason and Rachel with a hard stare.
“Who are you guys?”
“Who are we? Are you kidding me?” Rachel was furious. For a second she looked like she was going to slap him. “It must be you, whom they’re after. We just landed half an hour ago.”
“Rach, Rach hold on,” Jason tried to stop an escalating fight before it became something they couldn’t control.
“Mike, we’re nobodies. I’m an accountant, temporarily out of job, and she’s a scientist. We’re the last people you’d send Special Forces after. This has got to be some kind of mix-up. We need to call the police.”
“Alright,” Mike got his emotions under control with an ease of a person who had seen a lot of stressful situations.
“It doesn’t matter right now. The police have seen it already,” he pointed at the small disc of a video feed cameras above the street sign.
“If they wanted to get involved, somebody would have been here by now. I guess it didn’t pose what they call it nowadays a public safety concern. But we gotta get outta here. Whoever those guys were, they might have friends.”
They got back to the car and back on the road. In the back seat it was cold and damp despite the fact that the driver put the heater on full. Jason hugged Rachel trying to keep her warm and to calm her down. The traffic was light and they got to their destination on Broome Street in less than five minutes.
When they stopped, Mike got out of the car to help the Hunts, but then he stopped in his tracks looking at his car and shaking his head as in disbelief.
“Apparently adding insurance that covers assault with a deadly weapon wasn’t a waste of money after all.” He turned to Jason and extended a small card. “If you’re in trouble, call me. I know a few guys who might be able to help.”
Jason thanked the driver and offered to pay for the damages done to the car. Mike waved off the gesture.
• • •
The apartment was just like Hunt remembered, a minimalistic duplex on the tenth floor, spacious and ultramodern.
“I love this place,” Rachel put down the bag and looked around the sunlit apartment. “I forgot how amazing it is.”
“I love this place, too.” Jason sat on the sofa. “But at the moment the only thing I can think of is the fact that someone was shooting at us. Do you think…?” He paused, looking for words. “It could be because of your work?”
“Why?” Rachel looked confused. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know for sure, obviously,” Jason said. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just thinking out loud. You get this phenomenal offer that comes with a million disclosures and a questionnaire that’s normally filled out by people handling classified data. Then the next thing I know we’re being chased by black SUVs and shot at. It’s a little more than a coincidence, don’t you think? They can’t be after an accountant who just quit his job!”
“Well, but you aren’t a simple accountant, babe.” Rachel waved her hand around the apartment. “Maybe they’re after your money. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Not really. That wouldn’t make any sense,” Jason leaned back on the sofa trying to think. “What would they gain if I got killed? The logical thing to do would be to kidnap one of us and demand a ransom.”
“You’re right,” Rachel sat next to her husband. She stayed quiet for a few seconds, then put her head on Jason’s shoulder. Jason hugged her and held her close for a long time. Finally, she broke his embrace.
“We need to call Max.” She looked pale but determined. “Maybe he’ll be able to find something out.”
Jason picked up the house smart control and dialed his friend. After a few ringtones Max picked up, and a picture of a thin face with a bright pair of blue eyes and a mischievous smile appeared on the screen above the Hunts’ fireplace.
“Look at that! What have we got here? The Hunts! In the flesh! Well, sort of, anyway. When? Why? And why did nobody tell me?”
He looked at them for a few seconds, then sensing something being off behind the friendly smiles, his own smile turned into a frown.
“Is everything alright? I’m sure as hell happy to see you but you both look terrible, and that’s hard for me to say about you, girl.”
“Hey Max,” she said, “we’re happy to see you too, but something weird happened to us on the way from the airport. We just.” She paused and held her hand to her chest, fighting a cough, then succumbing to it anyway. Finally she gained control of herself. “What on earth is wrong with me?”
“Listen Max,” said Jason, “this is probably something we shouldn’t discuss on public airways. This is serious. Is there any way you could swing by?”
The color drained from Max’s face. At one point it looked like he was going to ask some questions, but decided against it.
“Sit tight,” he said looking somewhere behind his shoulder, “I’ll be right over.”
• • •
A Princeton drop-out, Max Schlager was the opposite of a stereotypical lonely hacker. A successful free-lancer, he officially made over a half million dollars a year testing firewalls for big corporations. That figure didn’t include a number of private donations that he received from slightly less legitimate sources. His luxurious SoHo loft, located just a few blocks away from Hunt’s penthouse, had seen its fair share of extravagant parties, and Max’s skinny frame seemed to be permanently attached to one or another beautiful woman.
By the time Max had made his way over to Hunts’ place, Jason and Rachel had already unpacked and were having drinks in the kitchen. Somehow the huge formal dining room didn’t seem to be the right place to be. He gave a bear hug to Jason and kissed Rachel on both cheeks.
“It’s great to see you both, despite the fact that I’m angry at you at the moment for not letting me know that you were coming.”
“Missed you brother,” said Jason.
“If you missed me, wh
y didn’t you call me? Enough with this suspense already. What the hell happened?”
“Well, we just got into a taxi and were heading to our place when we got attacked by somebody in a black SUV,” Jason said.
“Attacked? What do you mean, attacked?”
“We got shot at,” Jason continued. “Somebody shot at us with assault rifles with silencers. If it hadn’t been for the driving skills of our cabbie, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.”
Ex-military or not, the driver was remarkably calm, he thought, reflecting back on the car chase. I must be missing something here.
“I’m actually happy that you didn’t pick us up,” added Rachel, holding her drink with both hands. “The cabbie was just out of the military, and if not for his skills—”
“Just out of the military? That’s quite a coincidence.” Max mixed himself a drink and leaned on the counter for support. “I’ll check him out for sure. What about the police?”
“Never showed up.”
“Ah, of course. Then tell me from the beginning.”
Jason told the story, starting with his wife’s job offer and culminating with the highway chase and automatic fire.
“Suppressed rifles, you say.” Max continued to be sipping on his drink as he gave Jason a hard stare. “I’ll see if I can pull surveillance footage from the traffic cameras. Maybe we can figure out who was chasing you.”
“As long as you don’t get in trouble yourself,” said Rachel. “The last thing we would want is to get you into this mess.”
“Don’t you worry about me. I’m not going to knock on people’s front doors. I’m a sneaky bastard,” he said and took another swig of his drink again.
“But what are you two going to do? Maybe you should stay in my place until the dust settles?”
“Thank you, man, but I don’t think we can,” said Jason. “Rachel starts the new job on Monday, and I should start looking for a job. Not the best time to go into hiding. Besides, I don’t think Rach would let me try to hide her anyway.”