Alice’s voice floated out of her office. “I’ll take care of it.”
On the way out, I grabbed Tess’s backpack from the library where we’d left it. Fred was back on patrol, and when we emerged through the front door, he nodded at me and got on a cell phone. By the time we’d gotten in the rental sedan, Fred’s partner Barney had hoofed it over from the guesthouse and joined Fred in the SUV parked in the circle. They pulled out right behind us. I eyed the rearview mirror nervously. I wasn’t thrilled to have eyewitnesses to what Tess and I were planning. But I had a feeling that Flintstone and Rubble wouldn’t hassle us.
We drifted out onto the road, the gray car a ghost in the swirling mist. The SUV quickly disappeared in the fog behind us, the only sign of its presence two round, bright patches in the murk—its headlights. They must have been able to see spots of pink where our taillights rouged the gloom, because the lights maintained their distance.
Tess told me that Tad lived off the same main road she did, but about a mile closer to school. If he walked to school, he’d have to be on the road by now in order to get there on time. I drove slowly so we didn’t overtake anything too quickly. Nonetheless, the dark figure of a pedestrian alongside the road loomed out of the fog so fast that we passed it before I pulled the car over to the shoulder and braked to a stop. I jumped out and walked back past the trunk before the figure materialized out of the mist. Behind me, I heard Tess open her door and take tentative steps.
Stooped, with eyes downcast, Tad trudged toward me, weighed down by a backpack loaded with books. The glow of the car’s taillights caught his attention, and he raised his head, eyes moving from me to Tess and back.
He straightened and stopped. “What? You giving up your ride for me or something?”
“We just have a couple of questions,” I said.
Twin cones of light swung to the side of the road and straightened, illuminating him from behind. He glanced over his shoulder. When the headlights didn’t move and no one emerged, he faced me again and trudged forward.
“Hey, we want some answers,” I said.
“Blow me,” he said as he passed by.
I grabbed his arm and swung him into the side of the car. He folded over the trunk, and I quickly stepped next to him, grabbed the back of his neck, and bounced his face off the sheet metal. He squealed in protest. One hand flew to his nose and he used the other to try to lever himself off the trunk. I shoved his head down again, this time rapping his knuckles against the car. In turn, his nose was mashed into his palm. He screeched in pain. I grabbed his collar and pulled him up.
“Okay, okay! Stop!” he yelled. “No more.”
“Not so tough without the homeboys around, huh?” I said.
I spun him around and bent him back over the trunk lid with an arm across his chest. Tears sprang to his eyes and he gently felt around his nose with a thumb and three fingers. Tess placed her hands on the far side of the trunk and felt her way around the back end of the car. I snuck a glance behind us, but there was no movement in the fog, just the steady beam of the SUV’s lights weakly burrowing into the mist.
“My dad’s phone,” Tess said. “How’d you get it?”
Tad’s face went blank. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I called you. This morning.” Tess’s voice grew shrill. “You answered my father’s work phone. How’d you get it?”
“You are one crazy bitch,” Tad said. He sniffed and spat on the pavement. “I didn’t take anyone’s phone, and I sure as hell didn’t talk to you this morning. You must be high on something.”
I bent him back farther and pulled an arm back, fingers closed into a fist. His eyes grew wide.
“Jeez, wait! I’m telling you straight! I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Tess sighed. “Let him go, Oliver.”
I grabbed a fistful of fleece vest, hauled him upright, and gave him a shove in the direction he’d been walking. He stumbled a few steps. When he regained his balance, he straightened and turned, his mouth twisted into a snarl.
“You’re both dead meat,” he said. “I don’t care how long it takes—you’ll both pay for this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m shaking. Get out of here.”
I took a step toward him. He startled, turned, and hustled away, glancing once over his shoulder to see if I was following.
Tess had already found her way back to the passenger door and got in, slamming the door. I climbed in the driver’s seat. She faced forward as if staring out the windshield.
“I was sure it was Tad’s voice,” she murmured. “He doesn’t know anything, does he?”
“Not from what I saw.” I started the car and pulled out into the street. When I passed Tad, he glowered and gave us the finger. Lights flashed in the rearview mirror as the SUV pulled onto the road behind us. The fog thinned enough for a moment to see Tad stare at the SUV as it passed him.
“I know who it was . . .” Tess said quietly. “Tad’s father.”
I glanced at her. “You sure you want to go down this road again so soon?”
Her nostrils flared. “It makes sense. They sound almost exactly alike. And I could see why Mr. Cooper might have my dad’s phone—he’s head of security at MondoHard.”
I looked for a flaw in her reasoning but didn’t find one. “Okay, so the question is how you can get it back.”
She chewed on a fingernail for a moment.
“Uncle Travis,” she said.
CHAPTER 36
Travis swiped his key card and ducked into the stairwell. Besides needing the exercise climbing the stairs provided, he wanted to keep a low profile. The elevator was too busy this time of day. Then again, anyone who wanted to trace his movements could monitor the security cameras all over the building, or simply track his key card swipes. No sense getting paranoid about it. He took the stairs two at a time, wondering why no one else took advantage of the easy workout. A few flights up, his heart rate had increased to about 110 beats per minute and his breath came fast and raw in his throat. Too fast. He hadn’t been working out enough. His pulse should still be below a hundred, but it dropped quickly as he eased through a door into the hallway and slowed his pace. He checked his watch. Still early by office standards, but later than he usually made it in.
Pushing his way through a door, he entered the large office shared by some of the game coders. As usual, the ambient light was dim, most of the illumination in the room coming from the glow of large monitors scattered around the room. The air was already warm from the heat of several computer towers, though Travis knew these guys spent most of their day accessing the servers over fiber-optic Ethernet cable. The office was empty save for Derek, who sat at his station, fingers flying over his keyboard. Travis let a hint of a smile pass his lips, pleased to have guessed right about the kid. He walked up behind Derek and put a hand on his shoulder. Derek jumped in his seat and jerked his head around.
“You!” He clutched his chest. “Jeez, man, don’t sneak up on people like that.”
“Good focus,” Travis said, “but you always want to keep part of your brain on alert.”
“Yeah, and how do you do that?”
Travis shrugged. “Practice.” For an instant, he thought of all the nights in Afghanistan that he’d slept with one eye open, hearing attuned to the slightest sounds. It didn’t make for very sound sleep, but it had saved his life on more than one occasion.
Derek swiveled the chair to face him. “What’s up?”
“You tell me.”
Derek reached behind him and grabbed a memory stick off his desk, fingers idly toying with it as he held it up.
“This is one fascinating little piece of work. I was able to recreate most of the missing file. It’s source code for some kind of program. Whoever wrote it is a freaking genius.”
“Why? What is it?”
“Hell if I know, man. I’d need to see a lot more code to begin to guess. But part of this is a logic tree t
hat boggles the mind. Whatever runs this program is likely to be as close to AI as anything I’ve seen.”
“Artificial intelligence?”
Derek’s head bobbed up and down, and his eyes glowed with excitement. “Dang straight. The coder wants something to think, analyze some sort of situation and make a decision based on input—sensory input.”
“You mean like visual and aural cues?” Travis said, his chest tightening. He kept his voice calm and hoped he looked nonchalant.
“Yeah, and I get the impression it could analyze even more data than that. Maybe temperature, humidity, spatial make-up, like the contours of the surroundings and air quality.”
Travis chewed the inside of his lip. “But you don’t know what the program actually does?”
Derek’s brows knit. “Well, no, not really. Like I said, I’d need to see a lot more code.”
Travis let out a breath, then reached for another chair. He pulled it close, spun it around, and plunked down in the seat, rolling it so close to Derek’s their knees nearly touched. Derek had traded one black T-shirt for another, this one imprinted with a graphic of the Ramones. His black jeans were clean, too, which led Travis to the conclusion that the artfully tousled hair and trimmed facial stubble were deliberate. He gestured at the memory stick still in Derek’s hand.
“You think this guy is good, huh? How’d you like to see if you’re just as good?”
Derek smiled. “I know I am. Well, I could be, given half the chance. Why?”
“You know what we do on the other side of the building?”
“Government contract work. Department of Defense, mostly.”
Travis nodded. “One of the projects we’ve been working on for a long time got screwed up. Software glitch. We haven’t been able to fix it.”
“A worm,” Derek said. His smile faltered. “Unless that’s urban legend.”
“No, it’s the real deal. Want to take a crack at it?”
“Hell, yes!” As fast as he leaned forward, Derek changed his eager expression to nonchalance and slouched deeper into his chair.
“Good. I’ll send you the background and the program so you can get started. You sure you have time for this?”
His brows flew up then drifted down like a fresh sheet onto a bed into a single line over his frown. “You mean this is the same deal as the memory stick—OMOT? On my own time?”
Travis nodded. “Sorry, but yes. I’ll find a way to make it up to you eventually. Stock options, maybe. In the meantime, I shouldn’t have to tell you—”
Derek quickly put a finger to his lips. “Yeah, mum’s the word. I got it.”
Travis inspected his face like a dermatologist looking for melanoma. “It’s no joke, kid. Unless you haven’t been paying attention, lives are at stake.”
Derek stared back, trying too hard to look indignant. He conceded a nod. “I said I get it.”
Travis held his eyes a second longer, then got up to leave. He took out a pen, tore a scrap of paper off a pad on Derek’s desk, and scribbled on it.
“One more thing,” he said, holding the paper in front of Derek’s gaze. “I want you to hack my niece’s e-mail account and retrieve copies of all the e-mails she’s sent and received in the past week. Can you do that?”
Derek’s mouth hung open. “Well, yeah, but are you sure you . . . ?”
Travis nodded. “It’s important. And she can’t find out she’s been hacked.”
Derek scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know, man. That seems like crossing a line to me.”
“Believe me,” he told Derek, “when it comes to protecting the people close to me, we’re not even close to the line yet. If I didn’t think it would save her life, I wouldn’t ask. Can you handle that?”
Derek drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Good. I’ll be in touch.”
Satisfied they were on the same page, Travis stepped out into the hall and checked both directions before quickly striding to the fire door and pushing through the door into the stairwell. He went back down to the first floor and wriggled his way through the tide of employees streaming toward the bank of elevators. He nodded at the few faces he recognized and murmured a “good morning” to each. He waved his key card in front of the reader next to the door behind the reception desk and slipped through. A few short steps took him to the security office. He scanned his card again and heard the faint click of the lock. He opened the door and stepped inside.
One of the guards sitting in front of the monitors briefly turned his head and noted his entrance with bored eyes, a stifled yawn, and a short nod before turning his attention back to the screens. The staff was long overdue for a simulation drill. Fire, B&E, earthquake, terrorist attack—Travis made sure Cooper mixed it up and ran each one as if it was a real emergency, not a drill. Travis insisted on staging them as realistically as possible, even using actors, stunt people, and movie props and makeup. But now was not the time.
He crossed the room quickly, knocked on Cooper’s door, and walked in without waiting for a reply. Cooper looked up, startled. Travis didn’t give him time to recover.
“You have James’s business phone.” Travis made it a statement, not a question. “I’d like it back, please.”
A cloud of confusion scudded across Cooper’s face before he grunted assent. He leaned over, opened a drawer in his desk, and took out a cell phone. He held it out.
“Why do you have it, Cyrus?”
“It’s protocol,” Cooper said without hesitation. “You know that, Travis. Whenever anyone leaves this company, in whatever fashion—a better job offer, termination, even death—we immediately retrieve all electronic devices assigned to that person and comb through the contents before destroying the memory. Computers, phones, tablets—doesn’t matter.”
Travis could detect no prevarication there, but he wondered if Cooper’s answer wasn’t a little too slick, offered a tad too quickly.
“How did you get it?”
Cooper tipped his head slightly before answering. “My men went through the Range Rover after the crash, before it was towed back to the house. I thought you were aware of this. Why all the questions now?”
Travis shrugged and lightened his expression with an easy smile. “Sorry. Tess called me and said some of her favorite photos are on that phone. I must have forgotten that a team went through James’s things back then. Shock, I guess.”
“I suppose,” Cyrus said. “James’s death hit us all pretty hard at the time. Well, you’re certainly welcome to take it. We’ve had plenty of time to look through it.”
Travis stepped to the desk and took the phone out of Cooper’s outstretched hand.
“Thanks, Cyrus. Sorry to have barged in like this. Seems to be one of those days.”
“Take a deep breath. Start over.”
“Right. Well, thanks again.” Travis turned for the door.
“One more piece of advice before you go, Travis. Cut back on the caffeine. You seem wound a little tight.”
Cooper smiled at him, but Travis saw no mirth behind it. He forced a smile of his own and left, annoyed with himself for letting his emotions go unchecked. Cooper should not have been able to read him so easily.
Back in his office, he went through the motions—returning phone calls, attending a couple of meetings, reviewing contract terms for a couple of vendors, and reading through a marketing plan for a proposed new video game. But he found he couldn’t concentrate. He was caught more than once with his mind elsewhere, putting a crimp in the contract negotiations for a while and forcing the marketing team to go over portions of their presentation twice.
The distractedness disturbed him. He’d never found it difficult to focus before. It was one of the reasons he’d been so good at his job in Afghanistan. His focus was so intense that he was hypersensitive to sights and sounds and smells around him, able to analyze, interpret, and act on that sensory input in fractions of a second. His innate skills had not only k
ept him alive all those years, but had made him one of the army’s most effective antiterrorist weapons, its best assassin. He wasn’t proud of the number of men he’d killed. Some of them, the ones that haunted his dreams occasionally, had been mere boys. But he was proud of how many people he’d saved as a result. Even most of those “boys” had been programmed to kill, to sacrifice themselves for their cause—as long as they could take several people with them.
This new feeling of inertia was like being encased in one of those padded sumo wrestler costumes, and as close as he’d ever felt to being helpless. He didn’t know if it was because the rules of civilian life were so different than those he’d known most of his adult life, or because he was different.
All the hard edges honed to razor sharpness by combat and living under the radar had been dulled, softened by his new roles as guardian, surrogate parent, boss. Even his budding friendships with some of his teammates, and especially with Robyn, had awakened in him emotions long suppressed. The job in Afghanistan had been almost exclusively black and white, the gray shaded well enough usually to be easily discernible. Now he saw so many colors that he sometimes couldn’t see the composition of the picture itself, let alone tell the good guys from the bad guys. This life was more dangerous, fraught with more ambiguity, than his life as a soldier. He had to find a way to adapt.
The problem was Tess. He’d never felt so responsible before, never carried so much weight on his shoulders—not even when he’d had to decide when and how to take a life. That was nothing compared to protecting a life, to keeping someone from harm, even from the smallest slights from mean kids at school. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t protect Tess, not from everything. But he knew he had to try.
He gave up trying to work at around four o’clock, and stopped at Robyn’s desk on his way out. She stopped typing and tipped her head up expectantly.
“Taking off?” she said.
“I think I’ve made enough of a mess for one day.”
She gave him an encouraging smile. “We all have days like that. And it wasn’t so bad. We got a lot accomplished.”
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