Jack Be Nimble: Tyro Book 2

by Ben English

  “Thanks, Kyle,” said Jack.

  Kyle Dremel made a little quarter-turn away from the attention, set his coffee down, and hugged into himself. He’s afraid, Jack realized. He’s afraid of me. And he’s got a healthy respect for Mercedes, too.

  Sheriff Ross looked hard at the camera, and at the girl who held it. Blinked hard, wheels turning. “What do you want?”

  Mercedes spoke quickly now, loud enough for the entire room. “No consequences for Jack. You leave him alone. No charges, no consequences at all.”

  The sheriff smirked. “Every kid’s dream. Fine, done. Now just hand over—”

  “What makes you think I’m finished yet? Your men are going to clean this place up. You’re anxious to cover up what Merrick’s done, so start with this mess.”

  The building would be cleaned, but she was unable to get the sheriff to budge further on the subject of Merrick. “If he hurts anybody else—if he really hurt that Montgomery girl—you can’t let him go free, sheriff.”

  “You’ve got no proof of anything beyond what’s in your hot little hands, there,” replied Sheriff Ross.

  “Its okay, Mercedes,” said Jack. “Forge is a small town. Word gets around quickly. Somebody who was here tonight, or maybe someone at the hospital, will talk. Nothing this exciting ever happens in Forge.”

  The sheriff looked at them both, impatient. “Neither of you belong here. You’re both so bass ackwards you think that you’ve earned some kind of power, but you haven’t. You,” he pointed at Mercedes, “you will be on the next plane, car, bus, train, or boat out of town. And Jack, I never want to see you again, while you still live here. The town’s not right with you in it. You take your early graduation in the winter, take whatever scholarship a poor kid like you can get, but get the hell out of my town. You are done here.”

  He looked back at the girl. “Blackmail. You’re just a kid.”

  “Imagine,” said Jack. “Just imagine what she’ll be like as an adult.”

  The sheriff glared. “There will be no further contact between the two of you after tonight. I catch wind of the two of you together, I invoke the Interstate Compact on Juveniles and arrest you both for conspiracy. Or something better I can think of.”

  Lyons sneered. “Wouldn’t want to give them any more time to get their story straight, would you?”

  The sheriff ignored him. “Go get your ass on a plane.” He glared at the girl. “Unless there’s anything else?”

  Jack loved the sound of iron in her voice. “I want Merrick’s baseball bat. I know you have it. I want that damn bat.”

  And just like that, Sheriff Ross let them go. Jack gathered a few of his things—mostly books—that he didn’t trust the sheriff or his men to handle, and walked Mercedes out. They were followed closely by her grandfather and Sean Lyons.

  “Jack,” said her grandfather, “Take my keys. Mr. Lyons and I will stay behind awhile. We have some more details to work out with the sheriff. Go on, take my car. You told me you’d always get her safely home.” He smiled.

  “Yes sir.” The LeBaron had a bench front seat, and the two of them held hands.

  As they neared her grandparents’ home, Jack said, “I can’t believe it was that easy.”

  “What was easy about it?” One look at Mercedes’ incredulous expression, and Jack started laughing despite himself. Couldn’t stop for trying.

  Mercedes tried to look mad, then annoyed, and finally smiled. It was a gorgeous echo of her grandfather’s grin. “That’s really not funny, Jack. Not funny at all.” But she laughed as hard as he did.

  All the lights were on at the Bergstrom residence. Standing on the porch, they could see the two older cousins asleep on the couch, splayed. Irene snored softly. The youngest cousin, Alice, sat at the table with her grandmother and a preposterously large cinnamon roll, which she considered with a solemn expression. “I certainly hope they didn’t do anything stupid,” she said gravely, “Like go out to dinner or get married.”

  Her grandmother patted her hand and gave her a fork.

  Mercedes pushed back into Jack for a moment on the porch. Jack didn’t understand why she didn’t want to go in. That cinnamon roll looked fantastic.

  “I’ll bring the car back tomorrow morning,” he said, whispering into her hair.

  She placed the palm of her hand carefully over his heart, and Jack felt it thump under her touch.

  “Come in with me,” she said.

  Mercedes kissed him, and the world spun again.

  The goofy version of her smile did funny things to her face, like she was channeling the ghost of Stanley Laurel, the British-born comic.

  “Well, Stan, we seemed to have made it through another fine mess.”

  “Water off a duck’s back, Ollie, old man.”

  They quietly let themselves in, and made it two whole steps before happy noise erupted in the house. Jack stayed, not really feeling like he should. He was content to watch Mercedes in the small, bright circle of her family.

  He’d always remember her best this way, and took a good, long look, carefully fixing her beauty and poise and grace in his mind. He ate two cinnamon rolls and fell asleep on the couch, still holding her hand.

  Shell Game

  They were all present in the conference room when Jack arrived. Directly from the airport, by the looks of things. He travels light, thought the major, as Jack sloughed off his duffel bag at the door and attacked a spare white board.

  “I think I’ve got this figured out, guys,” he announced by way of introduction. “Here’s Raines’ corporate structure. I won’t show you the whole thing, suffice it to say that he’s got his thumbs in a lot of pies. Pretty compelling stuff. All together, they’ve got a market cap of just under $50 billion.” He jotted them quickly on the board, and circled each.

  “The main ones we need to know about are Raines Capital, an investment firm; PicoMorph—”

  “—the pharmaceutical brand?” asked Nicole.

  “Here’s another big one: Gyre Energy. Alternative fuels, oil, natural gas, solar. These are the guys who power the satellites remotely. Also the largest Big Energy player to contribute to saving the rainforest.

  “Then there’s a bunch of firms that specialize in contracting, engineering, and construction. They all tie back,” he drew as he spoke, “to RDynamics, a holding firm and a global research company that owns the patents to all kinds of new technologies.”

  It looked like a massive lattice graph. “That’s a lot of pie,” said Ian. “So which of these companies is actively working in Cuba?”

  “None of them. All of them.”

  “What?”

  Alonzo cleared his throat. “Shell companies.”

  “Exactly,” said Jack. “Around two-thirds of the companies involved in the rebuild of Cuba only exist on paper. They’re empty names, owned by other companies, which, in turn, are owned by other companies. It took me a few hours to figure it all out, but the big players in construction, pharmaceuticals, and energy can all be traced to PicoMorph and Raines Capital. And a lot of the smaller players, even some competing companies, eventually lead to Raines Dynamic.

  “A shell game,” said the major.

  “I can draw it all out, but this board isn’t big enough. When it’s my turn to stand watch tonight, I’ll use the big screen. Steve, can you digitize this,” he gestured at the whiteboard, “and turn it into a vector image, so I can mess with it?”

  Ian studied the board. “This helps. I’m still working the money angle. This helps.”

  Jack looked around abruptly, as if suddenly realizing he was in a hotel. “Hey, do I have a bed around here anywhere? I need a wardrobe change.”

  Beyond the Veil

  The night before the Cuban president’s inauguration, Major Allison Griffin realized she was only barely starting to comprehend the amplitude, elegance, and precision of the team’s operation. On the surface it resembled a classic military intelligence group, but the human element and the electron
ic aspect fell together with a synchronicity that would have seemed like serendipity had she not seen firsthand how hard they all worked.

  Her background told her she was observing a coherent paramilitary unit, operating the way it was intended, but there was something beyond the textbook here. Couldn’t yet put her finger on it.

  Part of the difference was an absence of ego. There was no opportunity for promotion or advancement here, so while each member had a definite sphere of expertise, one and all shared their information. Everyone’s duties overlapped, but none were redundant: Nicole Bonneville acted almost like a surrogate mother, making sure they all adhered to a schedule, scolding them when they failed to eat or sleep, and making sure everyone spent time on the shooting range and in the gym. She also assisted Ian as he put his professional skills to use working up a comprehensive profile of Raines and Miklos Nasim. Ian, in turn, while simultaneously corresponding with the Havana advance teams from the FBI, also conferred with one of the enormous Tanner brothers, who stopped in briefly to bring them all up to speed regarding current events on the island. The Tanners were front-line operators, as she saw firsthand on the shooting range. As part of their training schedule, Nicole arranged time for the team at a private indoor pistol gallery just outside of the city at a former gentleman’s club, probably a holdover from the pre-Castro years. They each shot four hundred rounds minimum, daily.

  Steve Fisbeck joined them on the range, though he brought along a computer to help pass the time. As he analyzed Raines’ hardware, Steve submerged further and further into some sort of deep Zen geek state-of-consciousness, acknowledging the presence of other humans when absolutely necessary, and even then communicating in the simplest binary positive-negative schema.

  Back at the crow’s nest, Alonzo opened a box of Pop Tarts and set it within reach of Steve.

  “Mmph.”

  In other aspects of their duties, everyone was highly compartmentalized, like a terrorist cell. Jack and Alonzo moved at the center, at the hub, aiding when they could, listening to everything. Everyone took a turn at a general duty shift.

  They issued her a new phone, a computer, and an email/IM address, then the major was off and running. She spent most of her first two days in the crow’s nest, watching the members of the team come and go, seeing the various small and large pieces of the intelligence gathering machine at work. There was always someone on duty, minding the intel feeds and situation reports from the various other clandestine organizations that the little team was plugged into. Ostensibly, the major was responsible for any new information gathered by the UK security team, but thanks to the intel overlap from all the other arms of Jack’s organization, she really had little new info to contribute.

  Alonzo sensed this immediately, and put her to work monitoring what he referred to as the Veil feed.

  There were large sections of their servers unavailable to her, but from the general architecture of the information, the major could tell the Veil system was set up to capture, tag, and index every single bit of correspondence between team members, then further index it with information outside the system, including coded diplomatic and military communications. At the very least, they were able to gather information from the major interception systems: Carnivore, ECHELON, and its Swiss counterpart, Onyx.

  Didn’t take long for Major Griffin to realize that her security clearance, at least while she made herself useful on Flynn’s team, now far exceeded her pay grade.

  They were running live information feeds from the local army and police webs, stopping just short of tracking all ongoing crime situations at a tactical level. Sophisticated algorithms combed thru the local databases of crime and military information, confirming facts, correlating names and dates, and comparing patterns in everything from tidal flow to the price of gasoline on Havana’s streets. The genius of the system was its set of adaptive filters—the team was able to keep track of a tremendous amount of information without becoming overwhelmed. The Veil functioned to focus their attention on the tasks at hand, while enabling them to learn as much as possible.

  Alonzo explained that the program itself had been conceived by Jack and authored by Steve and a group of early retirees, mad genius-nerds from Silicon Valley who’d cashed out of their startups and found themselves with time on their hands and a desire to make a positive difference. Proof that a childhood spent playing Dungeons and Dragons and formulating a deep and passionate understanding of the principles espoused by the Cryptonomicon prepared you well to contribute to world peace, and that you didn’t need to know how to fire a real gun to be a member of Jack’s team.

  None of the software designers were present in Havana, of course, and it was unlikely she’d ever meet them. Most eventually found their way back into the professional world again, Alonzo explained. Addicts, paddling hard to make the next tech wave. At any rate, aside from the occasional software tweak and periodic maintenance, the engineers’ involvement was designed to be a temporary partnership.

  “I doubt,” added Alonzo, “if any of them even got asked the Golden Questions.”

  That was the first Major Griffin heard anyone mention Golden Questions, and before she could think to ask Alonzo what it meant, he launched into a heated conversation with Ian about ammunition procurement and weapon replacement. He seemed to feel that everyone needed more time on the shooting range, Jack in particular.

  Jack would occasionally vanish from the crow’s nest and reappear on one or more of the news feeds, attending a celebrity bachelor party or a pre-inaugural fete. It was novel the first time it happened. By the time Jack left in order to be seen driving a drunk starlet back to her hotel from a beachside bonfire, the major allowed him his privacy. She’d never been particularly entertained by the lives of actors offscreen; it was such a moveable feast of empty calories. And Jack played vapid and brainless well, cruising the periphery of the celebrity world, noticed by the paparazzi just enough to be seen but never really observed.

  Thanks to the video feed from a traffic camera, the major had her eye on Jack as he made his way back from one such “assignment” when Steve suddenly sighed, loudly.

  He rubbed his eyes, stood up, sat down, and as soon as everyone was looking his way, crowed with delight. “I know how it works,” he announced proudly. “The array. How Raines sends messages and makes lightning or whatever from that big disk on the top of the Tower.” He stood again.

  “I can even crack it.”

  Everyone stopped long enough to watch the chubby man reward himself with a small, jiggly dance. “Where’s Jack? Where’s Alonzo? Where’s my raise?” he chortled, attempting to juggle pens and Pop-Tarts.

  “Whoa, settle down,” said Ian, whose glasses had been knocked askew. “Watch the crumbs.”

  “Alonzo went to meet Jack at the night market,” said the major. “They’re bringing back dinner, I suppose.” She’d gotten the hang of the indexed video feeds for the local neighborhood, and brought up a tourist webcam showing a live feed of the entrance to the Mercado Nocturno. The stream did not include audio, so they couldn’t hear the music, but they could clearly see the three trovadores standing next to the entrance. One violin, two guitars.

  Mrs. Dumont Visits the Mercado Nocturno

  Alonzo carefully set money in the open guitar case, balancing three full bags of food. The trovadores pretended not to see him, and continued to play to the crowd moving into and out of the night market. Alonzo hadn’t gone in himself; he didn’t have the patience for a crushing mob, and there was a perfectly serviceable restaurant across the street that knew him well enough to have his take-out order actually ready at the hour they promised.

  The narrow streets were choked. Movement by car was a hilarious concept, and Alonzo found himself wondering how many tourists were currently in Havana, and if there was some compulsive religious obligation which brought them all to the Mercado Nocturno. It was a tourist trap in nearly a literal sense; the maze of aisles and stalls that night boasted authentic cr
eations from all over the island. Jack was in there somewhere, shopping for silverware. No, not silverware: a single spoon, for crying out loud.

  Alonzo would give him exactly one more minute.

  The last-minute tourist crush wasn’t unexpected. With the exception of some of the bars and theaters, all the businesses were closing two hours early in honor of the inauguration early the following day. Shortened hours of operation were barely an inconvenience to the night’s souvenir hunters.

  The police were out in force; it seemed like every fourth or fifth person on the street wore grey and blue, and a cluster of uniforms stood not far from Alonzo, keeping a careful eye on the tide of tourists ebbing in and out of the night market.

  His phone shook. It was probably ringing too, but with all this noise who the hell could hear it?

  What’s in the white bags? We’re all starving, read the text message. He looked around for the camera and found it, mounted above the restaurant he’d just come out of. Shifting the bags so he could type with both thumbs (and backing up against a wall, covering his wallet pocket, and edging close to the police) Alonzo tapped out a quick reply. Then, something new on the screen caught his eye. A red RF icon, blinking in the row of other symbols. He’d never seen it before.

  “You get drinks?” Jack asked, materializing at his elbow.

  “No, the hotel will bring in more coffee,” Al replied, “Hey, what do you make of this?”

  “That’s for scanning an RFID tag. All our new phones have the scanners. You know, walk into a store, everything in the store is tagged with an RFID chip, you walk out of the store and the scanner at the door checks your purchases wirelessly. You don’t even need a cashier.”

  “Golly thanks, Mr. Wizard. I caught the Popular Science article about twenty years ago. Can you tell me why it’s blinking?”