Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  “So you were on the flight?”

  “Yes, I told yo—”

  “And you are friends with Captain Hall.”

  “No.”

  “But you had coffee with her.”

  Lyle blew air out, wordlessly conceding the complexity. He hadn’t told Jerry about the note Eleanor found in her pocket with Lyle’s phone number. “I think I gave her my number in Steamboat,” Lyle finally said.

  “You think? You think?” Jerry laughed condescendingly. He leaned back in the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel of the parked car. Lyle could see it for a second from Jerry’s perspective, and it looked bad.

  “So how much do you remember about hacking into my e-mail?” Jerry asked.

  Lyle let the question roll around in his head.

  “I know who did that,” he said quietly. He was speaking mostly to himself. Some things falling into place. “Can you give me a lift to my place?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Tell me about the e-mails,” Lyle said, feeling and sounding clinical, distant.

  “Fuck you. Are you even a real doctor?”

  Lyle was no longer listening to this foulmouthed pedant. He said, “I think you and Eleanor and I need to meet.”

  “Tell me who wrote them or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Lyle didn’t doubt it. In fact, he flashed on an elusive memory of this faux cowboy firing his weapon at close range. Then it disappeared.

  “Maybe someone named Jackie Badger,” Lyle said. “Can I get a lift to my house? I’ll tell you as we go.”

  Jerry, feeling good about being in the driver’s seat—literally and, in his own mind, proverbially—softened a touch. He steered the Miata in light traffic and, through his accusatory questions, started to betray what had happened. Best as Lyle could put it together, Jerry couldn’t remember what happened, either. But when he got back to San Francisco, he’d been confronted, like Eleanor, by the airlines. Unlike with Eleanor, the airline had unearthed e-mails supposedly written by Jerry that expressed nearly violent anger at his employer and saying that he would take serious measures if he wasn’t treated more fairly. The e-mails had been sent to Eleanor in the days preceding the flight. The airline discovered them looking on its own server.

  “Even if I was pissed at the airline, which I am not, would I send e-mails on their server? How stupid do they think I am?”

  Lyle didn’t take the bait on that one. Besides, he was focused on more things falling into place for him, and more certainty that a woman named Jackie Badger somehow was in the middle of this. Her LinkedIn profile said she worked at Google, which suggested computer expertise and, just maybe, gave her access to the driverless car that had followed Lyle and that was three car lengths back from the Miata. Lyle kept one eye on the passenger-side mirror, watching the eerie bubble. He thought he knew what to do about that. It was why he was getting a ride home.

  Lyle now suspected that Jackie might’ve had the computer skills to hack into Jerry’s account. Why exactly was not clear. She was connected to Google.

  Another thing, Lyle suddenly realized, Jackie Badger had the initials J.B.; same as the initials of Jennifer Babcock, the mystery woman or fictional creation that had invited him to Steamboat.

  “She was on the flight,” Lyle said. “I think. Maybe.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “When we meet with Captain Hall, we’ll put it together.”

  Outside the apartment building, they paused, caught momentarily by an urgent-sounding back-and-forth on the cop scanner. “11-54,” said a woman’s voice on the scanner. “City Hall.”

  “Suspicious vehicle,” Jerry said and turned up the scanner. Then, suddenly, “11-99” and then shots. A flurry of audio traffic followed that became impossible for Lyle to follow. Jerry turned off the radio and stared at Lyle.

  “What the hell do they expect to happen?” Jerry said, which also made no sense to Lyle.

  “Who?”

  “They’re going to take our guns. But, then again, you just can’t go shooting the good guys, either.”

  Lyle realized that Jerry sounded as contradictory and, yet, certain of himself as a two-bit radio talk-show host. Then Lyle made a random connection that nearly left him laughing. He imagined that if Jerry were a virus, he’d be the common cold; mostly harmless but impossible to avoid and, if contracted during a period of frailty or bad timing, could turn to pneumonia and kill you. A simple creature, Lyle decided, but not simply dismissed.

  Jerry insisted on coming upstairs with Lyle. Inside, the flight officer made a show of checking the safety on his gun, making sure Lyle could see his nine millimeter.

  Lyle pulled his phone from his pocket and plugged it in at the kitchen counter where he kept his charger. He made sure the phone was on. Then he gave it a loving pat and left it there. This all went unnoticed by Jerry, which was neither here nor there. Lyle excused himself to the bathroom. He opened the medicine cabinet and fished around among the mostly empty bottles. He found the one he was looking for. He’d saved it for a rainy day, a really bad, really rainy day. That kind of day might have arrived. He put the two little white pills in his pocket.

  Absent his precious device, Lyle walked back down the stairs with Jerry behind him. Lyle led him the back way out.

  “I ask only one favor, Jerry.”

  “You’re not in a position to—”

  “Go around front and get the car and pick me up here.”

  “I’m not leaving you.” Jerry smirked.

  Lyle gave the first officer his wallet and keys as collateral. “I think we’re being followed,” Lyle said. “Let’s not take any chances.”

  For some reason, this conspiratorial logic appealed to Jerry. For Lyle’s part, this was conspiratorial but also likely: the driverless car, he thought, was tracking him via his cell phone and, possibly, taking video of him. Who knew? Anything was possible, given the improbability of everything that had already happened.

  Ten minutes later, Jerry appeared in the Miata in the alley behind Lyle’s apartment. Sweat beaded his forehead.

  “If anyone was following us, he’s not now,” Jerry said. Lyle climbed in. Jerry continued. “First in my class in evasive maneuvers in a workshop three years ago put on for gun-certified first officers.”

  “Would you mind turning off your phone?” Lyle asked.

  “Are you kidding me? You’re giving me orders?”

  “Phones can be tracked. Just a precaution.”

  “Screw you,” Jerry said. But he turned off his phone.

  Jerry stopped in front of a white house with a tall fence in a neighborhood Lyle couldn’t recall ever seeing. Less dense houses, bigger than flats, unattached, virtually suburban. So it was in San Francisco; the neighborhoods and architectural patches like the residents themselves, all over the map. It was called Forest Hill and aptly so, with trees and hills.

  Lyle got out of the car. “This one?” He gestured to the two-story white house.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Jerry said. He started walking up the hill without explanation as to why he hadn’t parked in front of the house they were evidently walking to. Maybe he was testing Lyle or maybe sneaking up on Eleanor or maybe, Lyle thought bemusedly, this was some trick he learned in first-officer-gun-carrying school. Lyle followed Jerry to the house.

  Lyle felt a rush of urgency. They were running out of time and he didn’t even know what the stakes were. It was like he was bedside with a patient with mysterious symptoms, nothing he’d ever seen before, but who most assuredly would die in hours if Lyle didn’t figure it out.

  “You knock,” Jerry said and nudged Lyle forward to a round-faced gray house on the corner. Stylish and deliberate, the house was not ordinary; clearly the work of someone who knew what they wanted. A window wrapped around the corner of the house, giving a glimpse inside at an equally fashionable living room. Eleanor answered the door with a mug in her hand. She blinked with surprise
when she saw Lyle, but then her face took on a warm look. Then she saw Jerry. She looked alarmed.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. You two?”

  With as much subtlety as Lyle could channel, he shook his head. No, we’re not in cahoots.

  “Hello, Eleanor,” Jerry said. “Your first officer has come to the rescue.”

  Lyle watched Eleanor’s jaw tense.

  “Jerry, you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Then let us in already so no one sees us.”

  Eleanor gestured them in. As Jerry passed, she touched him gently on the shoulder. “Are you carrying, Jerry?”

  “These are not ordinary times.”

  “Why don’t you leave it in the guest room? It’s down the hall.”

  “It’s not loaded.”

  “It would make me feel better.”

  He shrugged. He took the short hallway beside a set of stairs going up. He walked into the second door on the left. Eleanor touched Lyle’s elbow until he turned to face her. She mouthed, What is going on?

  “I might actually have an idea about that,” Lyle said quietly. He caught her eye and tried to reassure her. She pursed her lips.

  “I’ll make some coffee.”

  Ten minutes later, midafternoon, the three of them at the kitchen counter stared at Jackie Badger’s picture on Eleanor’s laptop. Lyle watched their reactions and could imagine what they were feeling. This person looked familiar to them but only in a dreamlike way. While they stared, Lyle told them his theory. He told them that he had three reasons for suspecting this woman: he’d written Melanie a text about a woman in his class and she had been in his class; he’d been followed by a Google car and she worked at Google; when he saw her picture, it sparked something inside him.

  “It’s pretty thin,” Lyle said. “I’m not even sure this is really Jackie Badger. Maybe the picture belongs to someone else.”

  Eleanor had her eyes closed. She grabbed Jerry’s forearm.

  “She was on the deck, Jerry.”

  “What?” Lyle said.

  “The flight deck. I remember her.” Eleanor still looked at Jerry.

  “You do?”

  “I thought I was going to die.”

  She tried to describe to them what she was experiencing. She couldn’t grasp most of it, and some of it she didn’t want to say aloud. Eleanor could see this woman standing in her flight deck as Eleanor had had the feeling she was going to be joining Frank, her ex-boyfriend, true love, who had died years earlier. It wasn’t Jackie Badger that Eleanor was remembering, not exactly. It was a powerful memory of loss and the prospect of death that Eleanor was experiencing. It was pushing through the miasma of lost memory.

  “What do we do about this?” she said.

  Lyle told them his plan.

  Forty-One

  Jackie opened the door to the Lantern headquarters in Nevada. The dull hum of servers strummed through the air. Jackie held a white bag with takeout. The heavy door closed behind her. She wore a tight black cap over her short hair.

  “Hello, Alex. How’re things?” She stepped inside. “I know you’re surprised to see me, just let me say something,” Jackie said. “First, at the risk of sounding insincere, it is good to see you. Really, it is. I owe you an apology. You were right, Alex, all along. So was Denny. I wasn’t being a team player. We weren’t on the same page, not aligned in our mission.”

  It sounded clichéd, bordering on the glib.

  “In my defense,” Jackie said, walking forward to Alex’s cubicle, “Denny never trusted me, as you rightly noted. Do you know that his distrust of me was so great, so profound, that he actually had a colleague attack me, feign an assault, a near-sexual assault. Ridiculous, right? Denny thought it would make me more beholden to him, trusting of him, so that I would follow his musty old sellout footsteps into another self-congratulatory, world-changing innovation he envisioned. Another liar, Alex, another fraud.” Jackie stopped and shook her head. “I’m rambling, I know it. I just thought I owed you some explanation.”

  Alex sat in her cubicle. Her head hung to the left side. A dull smile held her catatonic face. Drool pooled beside her lip.

  “Eh, who am I kidding,” Jackie said. “I don’t owe you shit.”

  Jackie walked beside Alex’s swivel chair and kicked it a few feet to the left. The chair flew and Alex with it, eventually sliding off the edge and falling to the ground with her dumb, absent stare and pasted smile. Jackie reached into her pocket and pulled out a gray rectangular device that looked very much like a cell phone. “I think you’d be proud of me, Alex,” she said. “I can now change the electrical pulses on your device with this little thing. It’s a remote control—for your brain.”

  She stared at Alex.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Jackie said in a happy singsong voice. “Yes, yes, yes. I did the whole Steamboat thing, and I took over Lantern, and covered my tracks, blah, blah, blah. And yes, I hacked into your computer and changed the video so that it looked like you were getting on the plane. Do you take me for an idiot? No, of course not. You took me for a genius.” She leaned over Alex. “But you treated me like I was too much of a child to trust!” She kicked the grounded woman in the ribs. Still, Alex smiled dumbly. “You took me for a weak, indecisive, helpless fool. For the last time, I might add. Jackie Badger will have plenty of time now to make smart, thoughtful decisions.

  “Thanks to Lantern.”

  Jackie pulled a different chair to Alex’s computer. She started clacking away. A few minutes later, she had three windows open. One belonged to the Lantern dashboard. A second showed a list of major telecommunications towers.

  Then she pulled out her phone and pursed her lips. Someone was looking at her LinkedIn picture. From the IP address, she could tell that whoever was scrutinizing her picture was located in the house belonging to Captain Eleanor Hall.

  “Wrinkle,” she said. “I doubt you got there on your own.”

  Eleanor Hall had had nothing to connect to Jackie Badger. Most certainly, Jackie thought, this is Lyle’s doing. But Lyle’s phone was still at his apartment. No, he must have left it there and he must be with her now.

  Good man, Lyle, she thought. Rising to the occasion. Me too, Jackie thought. Me too. And soon to be together. She turned to a screen that showed a map of major radio towers around the world. She enlarged the map to focus on the western United States. She hovered her cursor over Northern California until it brought up a box with information for Sutro Radio Tower. It stood tall across Twin Peaks over San Francisco. It was a radio tower, true, but many of these were in the control of Lantern partners, so she had access. Just as powerful as cell towers, but with wider distribution. She clicked to open the box and inserted a string of code from a save key.

  She sipped coffee. Tedious work. She looked down at Alex, whom she’d now put into a sitting position, fixing her eyes on her phone.

  “Time to get you six billion fellow travelers.”

  Jackie focused her attention on a small rectangular box within the larger box she’d been interacting with. She clicked onto a new window on the monitor and called up CNN. It was continuing wall-to-wall coverage of the impending Million Gun March. It was a little less than a day away. Gawkers and participants had begun gathering at the Washington Mall. So far, just one person had been seen with a gun and had been arrested by twenty members of the National Guard in a clip being shown again and again. Ominously, a growing number of mobile homes had streamed into the capital. Permitted gun owners in their “homes.” Would they march?

  Jackie clicked away and then returned to the small rectangular box on the Lantern dashboard, inserting her cursor on a command line. She typed: 18:00, and then hit enter.

  17:59:59 it read. Seventeen hours and fifty-nine minutes.

  17:59:58

  One day and counting. Lots of work to do. She clicked on the Mount Wilson radio tower in Los Angeles. The easier stuff she’d save until later, using the back door she’d created into t
he major telecom providers, like Verizon and Comcast, China Telecom, Vodafone, Nippon Telegraph, and on. New modems and routers for everyone or most people around the globe. All with the power to hit the human pause button.

  17:59:56

  17:59:55

  17:59:54

  Forty-Two

  With Jerry behind the wheel of the Miata, Eleanor in the passenger seat, and Lyle squeezed painfully into what passed for a backseat, the threesome stared at a greenish-brown-colored flat located near the western edge of San Francisco, not far from the beach. Salty wet air clung to these attached flats, the colors so worn they took on the dull flavor of the fog itself.

  “You think she’s in there?” Eleanor asked.

  Lyle didn’t answer. His eyes settled on a shaggy-looking mat lying before the front door. Something elevated the mat slightly, a box or package hidden beneath. Lyle pushed his way out of the Miata.

  Jerry reached around and felt for his gun. Watching Lyle wander off without warning reminded Jerry of something, a memory he couldn’t quite grasp. “I don’t trust this guy for a second, Eleanor.”

  She exhaled loudly, a tacit agreement, but not a direct confirmation. She didn’t want to give Jerry permission to do anything stupid. They watched Lyle knock on the door. Wait, knock again. Lean down and look and move the mat aside with his toe and stare at what looked to be a package. Lyle seemed satisfied and loped back to the car.

  “Package postmarked a week ago,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is around.”

  “Who’s the package addressed to?”

  “Jackie Badger,” Lyle said.

  They’d found the address in minutes with the help of a friend of Jerry’s in the police department. They also discovered Jackie worked on Google’s campus in Mountain View, at least that’s what it said on a CV they found online. But they figured they’d never get in there and Lyle’s plan had been to try to visit her place while she was gone.