The ladder, being an obvious weak point in his security, was closely watched. There were two guards assigned to cover it. However, take a hugely boring job, mix it with a mind numbingly slow time of night and two less than mentally acute thugs, and what you get is a security hole you could drive a tank through. At full throttle. With the cannon booming.
I eased up to the rim of the barge's deck and peered over the edge. Guard number one was to my left. He was leaning against the wall of the house, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a bored expression on his face. Guard number two had his back to me, facing the front of the house. I popped up over the lip of the deck and swung the gun up, pointed it at guard number one, and squeezed the trigger. There was a soft "phut", the bullet caught him in the chest, and his head slammed against the wall of the house. The cigarette dropped from his lips and he slid down until his ass was on the deck, his head lolling to one side. I didn't wait, but swung around to point the gun at guard number two just as he pivoted to see what the slight commotion was. His bullet likewise slammed into his heart. He staggered backward three steps and his face showed his surprise as he looked down to see what had just hit him. He looked up and our eyes met, then he collapsed onto his face.
I climbed up onto the barge, keeping a close eye out for more guards. I edged along the north side of the house until I reached the northwest corner, then slowly eased my head around to find two guards barring the front door. Seconds later they both lay piled on the grass covered deck. As I approached the front door the last guard rounded the far corner. He spotted me and went for his gun. That was his final act in this life. Five bullets used, three remaining. Not knowing for certain what lay on the other side of McPherson's front door I changed out my magazine and dropped the used one in my pouch. Might need those other bullets later. I turned to the front door, inserted a sonic lock pick into the keyhole, and twenty seconds later I was inside. The house was dimly lit by a single lamp left on next to the living room sofa. I padded through the room to the middle of the house, gun up, and found the curved stairway that led upstairs.
I slowly worked my way up the carpeted stairs in my waterlogged wet suit leaving a sodden trail as I went. At the top of the stairs I paused, peered slowly around the corner of the wall, and spotted a bodyguard seated just outside of McPherson's bedroom. Edward was truly paranoid. But, not without justification. I withdrew my head, leaned against the wall, and took several deep breaths. Then I stepped away from my cover, spun, and leveled the gun at the startled bodyguard. I squeezed the trigger three times. The only sound was three successive "chunk"'s. The bodyguard toppled backward, his stout frame making a muted thud as he hit the wall. I walked to the bedroom door and glanced down at him. His face was a mask of confusion, his eyes wide. And then I recognized him. David. The man who had injected Daryl with the overdose of heroin. His mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out. I knelt beside him and grinned.
"Remember me, David? Russian Hill? Daryl? The needle full of heroin?" Recognition flooded his eyes. "You should have stayed home that night, David", I whispered. Then I put the pistol to his forehead. Fear filled his eyes. I pulled the trigger.
I stood and turned to the door, tried the doorknob, and it gave. I eased the door open to a large darkened room. Ambient light spilling from the twin sheer curtained windows poured across the over sized canopied bed where McPherson's sleeping body lay, draped with a light colored satin comforter. The dim light glistened from its surface.
I stepped to the side of the bed and reached for the lamp on the bedside table. I found the switch and turned it on. Light flooded the room. McPherson, who had been laying facing the lamp, stirred, then opened his eyes, squinting against the light.
"What the hell?", he complained. He finally focused on me. "You!", he started, bolting to a sitting position. "How did you get in here?"
"You invited me. You don't remember? When you killed the man I love. Don't bother crying for help. Your bodyguards are all dead", I said, and leveled the .357 at his face. "One sound and you're history."
"You can't get away with this. The cops will be here in minutes. You've sealed your own fate!"
I laughed. "Edward, your biggest weakness, your fatal failing, is your arrogance. You assume that because of your massive IQ that you're automatically superior to everyone else. Your other fatal flaw is your assumption that no one could possibly best you. But you forgot that Servians are programmable. And any program can be modified. Or rewritten. As is the case with me. And as is the case with that standard 'No Harming Humans' protocol you include in our original neural design. You issued your own death warrant when you killed Daryl and let me live. If you will recall, I made you a promise. Remember?" He just glared at me. And as he did I brought my other hand around from behind my back. The hand that held a dart gun. I pointed it at him and pulled the trigger. A muffled "phut", and his startled expression. The dart protruded from his chest. He grabbed it, pulled it away, then hurled it across the room.
"What the hell was that?"
"Thiopental. You might not be familiar. Way back when they still had the death penalty they used it to paralyze condemned prisoners just before administering a lethal injection. It paralyzes you. You're aware of what's going on, but you can't move or speak. I've given you enough to keep you immobilized for an hour. Long enough for you to witness everything I'm going to do."
"Guards!", he tried to scream, but his voice came out as little more than a whisper.
"I told you, Eddie. They're all dead. Oh, and that little alarm system you have? The one that automatically summons the cops if anyone enters the house after you've armed it? I had that signal diverted. Right about now some poor soul in Marin is wondering why his phone just rung but no one was there. You're not the only one who's good with computers. No one's coming, Eddie. It's just you and me. For at least the next hour."
His eyes glazed over and he wavered, then finally collapsed to the floor. I knelt beside him.
"Poor Eddie. You've been the master of all you surveyed for so long that I rather imagine you have no idea how to process any of this. There you lay, drooling on the carpet, and not a damn thing you can do." I grinned, then set the pistol and dart gun on the night stand, leaned over, and grabbed him under the arms. I struggled him into a sitting position, then leaned him against the same night stand. He was now facing a desk that was against the opposite wall. On it sat a small computer.
"You're not going to enjoy this very much, Eddie. Which just makes it all that much more delicious for me", and I chuckled.
I walked to the desk and switched the computer on. A prompt on the holographic screen asked me for the password. It took me nearly ten minutes to figure it out, but I finally entered the name of his yacht along with his mother's birth year and I was in. As I typed I spoke over my shoulder.
"I could have brought my own computer, but I figured using yours to destroy everything you've worked your entire lifetime to build would just add insult to injury. Hope you're enjoying this!" I took a moment to glance over my shoulder. He could do nothing but sit there and glare at me. Hatred oozed from his pores. I grinned. "You're awful cute sitting there hating me!" I laughed out loud, then turned back to my work.
I finally reached back into the pouch over my shoulder and removed a tiny, thumbnail sized quantum processor. I inserted it into a slot in his computer. The screen changed and a series of folders were displayed. I downloaded the contents of all of the folders to McPherson's computer, then pulled up an anonymous email account I'd created that afternoon. I addressed an email to two different newspapers as well as one other address. The San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and the U. S. Attorney General's office. I attached the folders I'd downloaded to the emails and hit "Send".
"Eddie, do you remember taunting Daryl with the fact that your firewall set up a niche in his computer so that everything he'd done would be available to you? Well, Eddie, you and your boys should have taken his quantum processor when you left that ni
ght. This is it, right here in your computer. And everything it backed up from Eddie's hack into Genetedyne is on there. I found it. Sometime in the next couple of days there are going to be huge breaking stories about how Genetedyne has been supplying Servians to a company in Croatia to work as mercenaries. The story will detail how you were fully aware of everything that went on. There will be links to offshore accounts that hold your vast wealth, which will send the IRS digging into your financials. When they do, they're going to find links to your contacts in Singapore, Manilla, Bangkok, Hanoi, and all those little hell holes in Eastern Europe. All of the Servian women you've shipped off to those places to work as sex slaves will be freed. Anyone and everyone who has aided you in your illegal activities is going to be panicking. There are going to be crime bosses around the globe who are going to want to have long, painful talks with you. Unfortunately for them, they'll be way too late. Now, as the old, old TV ads used to say, 'But wait! There's more!'" I turned back to the computer and entered several items from memory. I pulled up some other information, hit a few more keys, then closed out what I'd been doing.
"Eddie, do you remember SciSec? Oh, sorry. How silly of me. Of course you do. That's way back when you were incinerating homeless people in your effort to find a new death ray weapon. You remember that? Right? You remember how you mercilessly slaughtered innocent people in your illegal experiments? How you made their bodies explode into flames? How they burned to ashes while they were still conscious? You remember the hundreds of people's lives you destroyed just because they had worked for you?
"Here's one you might remember. Dr. Helmut Vienz. Name sound familiar?" I saw recognition in his eyes. "Yeah, that's the guy. Hey, you owe him a debt of gratitude. He's the principal reason you and I have been able to renew our little friendship this evening. Sad thing, though. He's had to live like a pauper for the last twenty years because of you. Well, no more. I just went into your secret account in Panama and transferred $25 million into an account in his name", that last piece of information I'd gotten from Helmut at the airport. "Then I did the same for me. See, my life is pretty well fucked after tonight, so I'll need some walking around money. I didn't think you'd mind.
"The rest of your money I've bounced around the globe to clean it up, then transferred it all to various charities. I know they'll be appreciative of your generosity. No, no, don't thank me Eddie. It's the least I could do after the way you treated Daryl.
"Oh, yeah. Speaking of Daryl. I made you a promise, didn't I? How's about we get to that?" I got up from the computer, walked to where McPherson was sitting, and knelt beside him. "I'm afraid I have to apologize, Eddie. I know I promised you that you'd die screaming. I'm afraid I can't keep my word on that one. The thiopental is going to prohibit that. But, hey, I will be able to follow through on the rest!" I leaned into him and whispered into his ear. "Eddie, you're going to die in excruciating agony. The pain is going to be unimaginable. And you won't be able to scream. You won't be able to get any relief. I promised you that you were going to know you were dying, but wouldn't be able to do anything about it. That time has come, Eddie."
I reached for the dart gun, then extracted the last item from my pouch. One more dart. I held it up for McPherson to see.
"I love this one, Eddie. Very low tech. Goes all the way back to Socrates. See that liquid in there? Hemlock, Eddie. Just plain, old fashioned hemlock. Not much, but way more than enough to make sure you have one hell of a bitch of a ride into the next life. It's not going to be pleasant, Eddie. Not at all. Excruciating, in fact. This particular little batch comes from water hemlock which is the most poisonous. It'll take about thirty minutes for the effects to start taking hold. It causes extreme gastric pain, vomiting, scorching of the intestines, seizures, kidney failure, accelerated heart rate, blindness, and coma. You'll finally die of asphyxiation as your diaphragm shuts down."
I took the dart and loaded it into the gun. I put the barrel against his chest. His eyes were fastened on mine, and a combination of fear and rage filled them. I pulled the trigger. The dart embedded itself in his chest. He winced, then looked back at me.
Tears streamed from his eyes. I could see panic in them as he stared. I felt nothing. All I could see was the fear in Daryl's eyes as he told me he loved me for the last time. All I could feel were his cold lips as I gave him that last kiss.
I sat with McPherson until the tremors started. His head sagged against me. I could feel him convulsing against the pain I knew he was experiencing. I leaned into him and whispered in his ear. "Fuck you, Eddie. Fuck you and die."
Dr. Helmut Vienz has a lovely little bungalow that sits just a hundred yards back from the high tide line on a picturesque beach on Phu Quoc island in Vietnam on the Gulf of Thailand. My place is about a half a kilometer south of his. We meet once a week for lunch in the main part of the small town of Duong Dong, about fifteen minutes north. It's a quiet life. Helmut reads while his Vietnamese wife scurries about cleaning the house, bringing him a coffee or a beer, and doting on him. She was married once before to a not very nice guy. Her kids occasionally bring their kids over on the weekends. Helmut loves playing Grandpa. I don't think I've ever seen anyone happier.
There were almost two dozen Genetedyne executives prosecuted for the illegal goings on that McPherson had headed. The police issued a final report about his murder, estimating that two, possibly three individuals were involved. They surmised that it had been done professionally as the house was clean. No trace of a fingerprint belonging to anyone that didn't live or work there. That might be because Servians don't have fingerprints. The authorities hypothesized that the perpetrators might possibly have been hired by past employees of SciSec looking to settle an old score, or perhaps criminal elements he had been dealing with who felt they had been crossed. The San Francisco police, as well as the FBI, conducted a thorough investigation but were unable to develop any solid leads. The case is still open. McPherson's funeral was attended by one Catholic priest and some paid pallbearers. That was it. He was buried in a pauper's grave due to his vast wealth having disappeared. No one was ever able to figure out what had happened to it. One day it was sitting in several secret bank accounts that were later uncovered by forensic accountants with the FBI, and the next day his billions had vaporized. I noted that at the same time several scores of international charities reported anonymous donations totaling several billion dollars. No one seemed to notice the odd concurrence.
I spend most of my days walking the beach, picking up odd looking shells, wading in the clear, almost calm water, and missing Daryl. However, day before yesterday I met a very pleasant forty something Irishman named Conner.
The Helpers: A Novelette Page 4