Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  "That was considerate," Feferman said. "How long did he make the reservation for?" Dicker asked. "It was open-ended. He sent us an adequate deposit by EFT. Electronic fund transfer."

  "Did you see him when he checked in?"

  "No. The boy checked in for both of them. Wrote a note and took both the room keys. Said... wrote that his father was at a meeting and would come later."

  "What name did he use?"

  "Bell, like the father. Wayne Bell."

  Wayne faithfully carrying out his instructions, secrecy, the made-up name, whatever came over the TDD. From this room his son could see Great America, although Andy was guessing because he had no desire to walk out onto an eighth-floor balcony. Wayne probably thought that his father had picked a pretty neat place for him to hide out. Andy felt a killing fury. "Didn't you think it was strange?"

  The manager glanced at him, looked back to Feferman. "Strange? Strange is when a guest wants the desk clerk to call and sing 'Rock-a-Bye Baby' every night."

  "Who brought this luggage?" Feferman swept a hand toward the closet.

  "It was left near the front desk, later in the day after the boy arrived. I didn't see who brought it. The cases were tagged with their names, Mr. Joseph Bell and Mr. Wayne Bell."

  "The boy's name is Wayne Faulkner." Andy started for the door, but Feferman blocked him.

  "Hold it a minute, Faulkner." Feferman turned to the manager. "Did you, or any of your staff, ever see Mr. Bell?"

  She flushed. "No. Not that I know of."

  "By God," said Dicker, "that's the first kidnapping I've ever heard of done entirely by telephone."

  "Kidnapping?" The manager took a step backward.

  Andy tried to shove around Feferman. "He's somewhere in the hotel." Assume that he's safe.

  Feferman held his ground. "Mr. Dicker, let's get our people asking about a kid named Bell."

  Dicker started for the telephone.

  "Mr. Dicker, the phones don't work."

  "Yeah. You just keep on expecting them to." The FBI agent changed direction and headed briskly out into the hallway.

  Feferman turned to the manager. "All right, the boy's been told not to leave the hotel, so where does he go?"

  She shrugged. "The pool."

  "His trunks are in the bathroom," Andy said.

  "Maybe the health club, on the third floor."

  "Health club, okay." Feferman held up one finger. "Where else? Where does he go to get a milkshake?"

  "If he doesn't get it from room service, he could go to the Caffe Milano. Off the lobby."

  Feferman snapped up another finger. "Where else?"

  "I don't know, he could have wandered all the way over to the convention center, we're all under one roof. We're really not geared to children, we're geared to the needs of executives and ... oh! I suppose he might have discovered Chips. Opposite the Caffe Milano. That's our high-tech club; it has audio and video entertainment and...."

  Andy came alert. "Computer games?"

  "No, a big screen, music and dancing, like MTV."

  "Okay, Faulkner, you're going to take Chips and the milkshake, I'm going to take the health club, and you"—he wagged a finger at the manager—"are going to wait here in case the boy shows up. If you would."

  Andy started down the hallway, breaking into a run with Feferman lumbering behind, bellowing, "Rendezvous at the front desk." The elevator was too slow, he found a door leading to a stairway and pounded down, taking it in his knees, every bone in his body hurting by now, spiraling down, getting a friction burn from the handrail, how many floors down was he? He'd lost count. He hit lobby level, yanked the door open, was stopped cold again by the lights and glass and mirrors. Men and women strolled by, he didn't see any cops or agents, where the hell was everybody? Then he spotted a Doubletree jumpsuit and grabbed the man's arm. "Chips?"

  To the right. He didn't wait for the rest of the directions, just sprinted across the lobby. Up ahead was a sign "Caffe Milano," why two Fs? Inside, bright checked red and white tiles, but it was midafternoon and the place was nearly empty. He came back out and saw the "Chips" sign opposite and spun in there.

  The place was a nightclub. Small round tables, chairs, a dance floor, a long bar with a "Happy Hour 5-7" sign, and not a soul in sight because it was midafternoon. No windows in Chips, the lights were off, and the place was dim. The big projection screen was blank, but he could imagine Wayne looking in here, he would have explored the whole place, drawn in by giant flashing MTV images. No sound, just giant flashing images in the crowded high-tech club and the press of anonymous bodies. Andy sagged into one of the chairs and prayed that his son had indeed thought this was a neat place to hide out.

  A phone started ringing. Andy stood, looked around. The ringing was coming from behind the bar. But the phones were dead. Then he remembered the first time, the five-E down and not processing calls, and none of them could bring it up, and then it simply fixed itself and Lloyd had said "fairy godmother." Not a fairy godmother, of course. The processor lived and died by the commands of the code hidden in its brain, and the code was under the command of Interrupt. The phones were no longer dead; Interrupt had brought them back to life.

  Andy answered the phone. It was the manager, calling from the room next to 810. "You'd better get up here, Mr. Faulkner. The light's flashing on that deaf phone machine in Mr. Bell's room, and I don't know how to work it. I think someone's trying to call."

  "Two hundred thousand," Agent Dicker said.

  Andy touched one of the bricks of fifty-dollar bills on the Doubletree's conference table. It had taken Buck and How-land under an hour to produce the bricks. "Are they marked?"

  Feferman turned to Dicker. Dicker was silent.

  "He asked for more," Andy said.

  "All we can do is advise the extorted party how much to pay," Dicker said, glancing at Feferman.

  "They know what they're doing," Feferman said to Andy.

  "This way," Dicker picked up, "we're showing good faith and we're tempting his greed, but we don't lose our bargaining position. You hand this clown two mil and you may not get your boy back."

  Assume he's safe. Andy picked up the closest brick. It smelled like real money. What the hell did counterfeit money smell like?

  Dicker opened a small case. "Please take off your shirt, Mr. Faulkner."

  "No," Andy said. "No mike."

  Dicker stopped with the transmitter in his hand. "We advise you to wear this."

  "What if he asks me to take off my shirt?" Andy said.

  Dicker was silent. Red-faced, but Andy couldn't tell whether he was burned at the question or whether it was his normal redhead coloring.

  "He told me to come alone," Andy said. Andy, rooted in apprehension in Wayne's empty hotel room, had obediently typed his reply on the TDD: yes. "Alone," Andy repeated. "You think someone who's bugged my house and spoofed the telephone network isn't going to think of the possibility that I'm wired for sound?"

  Dicker placed the transmitter on the table and turned to Feferman. "It's your company's money."

  Feferman snatched up the transmitter and tossed it back into the case. "My company owes him. Let him do it his way."

  CHAPTER 27

  Interrupt sighted through the ocular lens of the telescopic mount, his left eye squeezed shut and his right cheek pressed hard against the stock. He played with the focusing ring, working it back and forth in smaller and smaller oscillations until he had a sharp image. This was going to be a difficult shot.

  He had learned to shoot from Judy, and she was still the better of the two.

  The image in the lens blurred. His eyes were watering from the wind and the grasses, and a tremendous headache had built just above the bridge of his nose. He set the .22 down in fury to massage his forehead.

  Judy, he thought, rubbing hard against the bone, he really was going to miss her.

  Marksmanship was just one of the properties he had valued in Judy. The first, of course, was her Stanford ca
reer and the second was her membership on the D team. Interrupt was not superstitious, but he had to believe in serendipity, that state of grace when a great gift comes unsought, unexpected, and is valued all the more. It was serendipity that he had intersected with Judy at the telecom conference in Chicago, and if they had had to live much of their first year of marriage apart because he was in line for promotion at AT&T Lisle, Illinois, and she was working on the D language project in Morris-town, New Jersey, then that was the price paid for serendipity. He had existed in a state of grace throughout that year of exchanged visits, his mind soaring on the flights to New Jersey, first the conception like one of the great cumulus clouds forming on the horizon, then the refinement as the hum of his laptop kept tune with the rumble of the jet engines, his code taking wing. Finally, the execution in her Morristown apartment while she slept, exhausted from the grueling final push. The compiler was complete, debugged, it had passed its periodic code audits and its programmer peer reviews and was stored like a ripe plum in the D project mainframe; but she still had access, and with her user name and password and home terminal he logged in and planted his Trojan horse deep within the compiler. Then, with a final flick of the keyboard, he erased the listing of his entry from the access log.

  He had loved her then, for she had given him much: access to the project, an insider's knowledge of Stanford, the details and the layout of the Center for Telecommunications. She had told him about the telecom lab and she had recited its phone number for him when he asked if Stanford grads would remember the number. She had assisted him unwittingly, true; she was little more than a flesh-and-blood Trojan horse, but he could not have achieved his state of grace without her.

  He remembered that time with a sweet nostalgia. It seemed to have eased his headache.

  Interrupt wiped his eyes clear, picked up the .22, and swung it around so that the barrel pointed directly down toward Stanford. He could not see the campus from here. The ridge-line interrupted his line of sight. But he knew where it was and he knew that Faulkner would be appearing from that direction.

  Everything was light. His legs, which had dragged like concrete in room 810 at the Doubletree, now felt light, almost weightless. He had heard runners talk about breaking through the wall, running close to exhaustion then breaking through to an untapped energy source and sprinting off light and easy.

  That was how he climbed, light and easy. He felt nothing.

  And the pack was light. His shirt was damp and warm where the pack rested on his back, but he felt no tugging on the padded shoulder straps.

  A man could carry six pounds on his back and barely notice it.

  That's what Agent Dicker had said, that the money weighed about six pounds, not counting the negligible weight of the nylon pack. The $200,000 six-pound pile of bricks was their bargaining chip. The bricks for release of his son and Interrupt's promise not to shut down any more switches, with the hint that more might be paid later if he kept the bargain. All of that in six pounds.

  He felt nothing but the sweat on his back.

  The breeze was light, rippling the calf-high grasses and drying the sweat from his face before he could wipe it away.

  There were still clumps of poppies in the grasses. A Bay Area spring, warm sunny days and cool nights. Some nights the coastal fog slipped this far inland and coated the hills.

  He stopped and looked back. No one in sight, but then he had not expected to see anyone. Access was limited; the land was part of a state game refuge. This particular slice of the foothills bulged up between Foothill Boulevard on one side and the 280 freeway on the other, at either end it was bounded by major roads, and the entire area was fenced to keep the grazing cows in. But the hills were in Stanford's backyard, and the cows and protected game had to share land use. On the Foothill side a couple of gates led to footpaths for runners and hikers, and a road wound up to the scattered radioscience outposts and satellite dishes of Stanford's Engineering Department. The road and the gates were blocked now by Feferman's and Dicker's people, and every car parked along the perimeter was being checked. Feferman and Dicker had to let him come alone, because there was no way to approach the ridge without being seen.

  He resumed the climb. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had climbed this path with Nell and Wayne.

  While he climbed he twisted a hand behind his back to heft the nylon bag, taking the six pounds in his palm. It wasn't much.

  Not when he thought about the fact that Interrupt had asked for two million. He calculated. Two million dollars in fifty-dollar denominations worked out to forty thousand fifty-dollar bills. If the four thousand fifty-dollar bills he was carrying weighed six pounds, then the forty thousand that Interrupt was expecting would weigh about sixty pounds. He wondered if Interrupt had figured that out when he asked for fifty-dollar bills. He would want small enough denominations to spend without trouble, but he would also want to be able to carry the payoff. Sixty pounds was a heavy load, but a man could carry that. A woman too, but Interrupt wasn't Judith Narver. Dicker's people had located Judith Narver at her mother's in Delaware.

  Still, coming up a hill with sixty pounds on his back, a man would not be climbing light and easy. His shoulders would hunch, he would trudge.

  He scanned the hill above him. If Interrupt was concealed in the oaks up there, watching Andy now, watching through binoculars, would he be able to tell that the pack on Andy's back was fifty-four pounds too light? Shit.

  The headache had eased to a dull pressure. He yawned; he had been up since 4:00 a.m. He had set the alarm, but he hadn't needed it. Ten years of anticipation had wakened him with a pounding heartbeat.

  He had wakened alone, having surprised Judy two days before with a plane ticket back east to surprise her mother for Mother's Day.

  At 5:12 a.m. he had been in his car, cruising slowly through the darkened eucalyptus groves leading into the Stanford campus. Helpnet was on the radio, with some distraught caller telling the psychologist host that she was afraid of people in hats, and the psychologist was asking was she afraid that there was something under the hats, and Interrupt was listening hard. He cared nothing about the hat problem, he cared only that the discussion was being broadcast live from New York, that the host was in a studio talking on the telephone to a telephone caller. He was listening so hard that he no longer heard what was being said, just the rising and falling of voices coming over his radio. He watched the digital numbers glowing on the clockface, and when the 2 was replaced by a 3, when 5:12 turned to 5:13, he knew it was 8:13 eastern time, and he whispered very softly, almost reverently, "Bingo."

  But the voices continued uninterrupted.

  He had slammed on the brakes, fishtailing the car and nearly throttling himself on the shoulder harness.

  It was 8:13 a.m. eastern time on Mother's Day and every Trojan horse in that time zone should have triggered. The telephone lines on Helpnet were switched through a number five, he had checked, and the Helpnet phones should have died, several million voice and video and data links should have-crashed and kicked the communications of the Eastern seaboard back to the nineteenth century.

  But they had not.

  Faulkner. Faulkner had interfered.

  The voices kept on chattering over his radio, and in the background phones rang in the New York studio. He had pulled over and shoved the gearshift into park. He had snapped off the radio, his chest beginning to constrict. He had snapped the radio back on, and the voices were still there. He had made himself wait, minutes, thinking the trigger could still fire, anytime after eight-thirteen it could fire, it should have fired. Calls kept drilling into the radio studio and the psychologist kept on jabbering. His head felt like it was going to explode. He had grabbed the screwdriver out of the glove box tool set and pried off the panel under the dash. He had felt for the radio wires, found them, and ripped them out. The radio died, the voices died for good, the phones ringing in the background died, and he was left in darkness and silence with a handful of twisted wir
es still warm to the touch and a pressure amplifying inside his skull until he thought it would kill him.

  By the time the wires were quite cold his mind burned with a new conception.

  He refined it as he drove, and when he located the van with the E.T. bumper sticker in the Pac Bell lot, he knew it would work. He had been prepared to break a window or force a door but it wasn't necessary. The van was unlocked. The ease of it made him cautious, and he incorporated into his plans the variable that his identity was known. There was no pleasure this time, no state of grace, but he was sustained over the following hours of preparation by a steady state of rage.

  Finally, in the Doubletree, after calling the boy on the TDD, giving him the instructions, watching him leave the hotel and head for the bus stop, he had experienced a moment of doubt. What if they'd done more than find the trigger? What if they'd found his code and cleaned it out? No, they wouldn't have had time. He had waited in an unobtrusive place, the darkened nightclub, looking at his watch and giving the boy enough time before he could dial the numbers and find out that he still had a channel into the switch.

  Now, with the .22 trigger beneath his finger, he waited again. Candace had said to him once that he waited well. The joke about his tie: he was calm and steady and he knew how to wait. She had no idea how right she was. Or perhaps she did have an idea, at the end.

  But the wait had been for nothing.

  Andy followed the trail into the grove of oaks, their branches knotted and hanging low like an old man's arms. He paused, knowing he was concealed by the screen of oak leaves. Go to the picnic spot, Interrupt had instructed over the TDD. Above Stanford? Andy had typed back. You understand? Interrupt asked. Yes, Andy had typed.