Devil's Plaything

by Matt Richtel

  He opens the passenger door, then closes the umbrella, slides in and sits in one smooth motion.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Why?”

  “I figured you’d want this.”

  He starts to hand me the folder, then pauses. “You can look, but you can’t take.”

  I nod.

  I open it, and feel a wave of nausea bubble through my caffeine-churning belly.

  The picture is of the hooded man. On his face are lacerations. He looks decidedly pale.

  “Apparent heart attack victim,” Chuck says.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Found near Sea Cliff.”

  The picture has no labeling on it, nothing to suggest this is an autopsy or other official photograph.

  “I didn’t read about it in the papers.”

  “Sometimes the deaths of foreign nationals don’t get reported.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Taco Bell and In-and-Out Burger.”

  “This stinks.”

  “Agreed. But there’s nothing more to be done about it.”

  “You think I’m going to just let this all go?”

  “As opposed to what?”

  “You’re a government agency and you’re involved with killing people, or at least their brains.”

  “We did everything in our power to stop this. Now we’ve shut down an unprofitable, unwise investment.”

  I’ve been down this road before. I need a new tack.

  “You seduced Vince and got him to use the Human Memory Crusade.”

  “Now you’re condemning me for having a fling with someone? You should be so lucky now that . . .”

  “What?”

  “Parenthood makes serious demands on a person.”

  “You’re a dangerous man.”

  Chuck says: “Let’s go over it again: we support a project that lets us record memories and that we hoped would stimulate recall. And you know what? For some people it did just that. They used the Memory Crusade to focus on great stories from the past and record them. But a few old folks saw their dementia accelerated. So we dismantled it. We put it behind us. Now you’re going to dredge all that up—make the families distraught. In the pantheon of conspiracies, this one won’t hold the attention of the blogosphere for more than five minutes.”

  Bullshit. I roll my eyes. “What about the precise nature of the questions—about people’s cars, and how they heard about Pearl Harbor, and whether they supported Kennedy?”

  He shrugs and sighs, like I’m an incorrigible child. But I see him momentarily glance away.

  “I didn’t get down to that level of detail.”

  “Why did you approach Medblog for an investment?”

  “So I could keep tabs on you.”

  It’s a stark admission that prompts a thought. I open the compartment between our seats and I extract the rubber bullet. I hold it up.

  “You arranged for us to be shot at by fake bullets.”

  He nods. “How’d you figure that out?”

  Chuck wouldn’t show me his wound. He never limped. I explain this.

  “You were trying to gain my trust.”

  “Guilty as charged. But I did really get nicked with the rubber bullet.”

  “But I found spent shell casings.”

  “I had to drop a few to throw you off.”

  “Why do all that?”

  “Nat, you know your own grandmother pushed for the retirement home to adopt the Human Memory Crusade?”

  “What does that have to do with the fake shooting, or with your interest in Medblog?”

  “When things went wrong, I didn’t know whom to trust. I saw that Adrianna was trying to reach out to you, maybe through your grandmother. I actually wondered if you might somehow be involved.”

  “Me?”

  “Your grandmother tries to get this put into the home, you’ve got a history of antagonizing the police, maybe you’re anti-authoritarian enough to experiment on people. As a businessperson, I needed to make sure I understood what was going on and who might be threatening my investment and the reputation of my limited partners, namely the U.S. Government.”

  His words have the feel of a closing argument in a trial.

  “You’re prepared to try to blame this on us?”

  “Not at all,” he says, and it sounds disingenuous. “I’m just saying it all looked murky.”

  I shake my head, and he continues.

  “There are no records indicating the military’s involvement. Biogen’s project was off the books. Pete Laramer has already suffered plenty for his poor judgments. And, besides, what difference does it ultimately make?”

  “How about that computers dull memory? Wouldn’t the world want to know that?”

  “Trade-offs. Human memories dull a little but computer memory is more than compensating. We’re recording everything. We’re backing ourselves up. I just mourn that the system is not a little more stable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Computers get hacked, data gets compromised. Witness the attack on the Pentagon servers. We’re in an arms race—cryptologists against data thieves, rogue foreign agents who threaten to compromise our military secrets and streams of commerce with keystrokes. But we’ll figure out how to better protect and safely communicate our data. We’ve always been a country that has risen to the challenge.”

  “Chuck, what’s happening in three weeks?”

  “Thanksgiving,” he says, without a beat.

  “Anything else?”

  He shrugs. But he looks away again.

  “Chuck, what if I don’t care about any of that stuff?”

  “Meaning?”

  “What if I forget about the whole ugly conspiracy—and you just tell me how to make my grandmother better?”

  “Wish I could. She’s aging, Nat. Get used to it.”

  We sit in silence for a moment. Then he glances at the Starbucks cup lying empty between us.

  “Careful with the high-octane shit. It’s powerful. Could give you a heart attack.”

  “Like Taco Bell or In-and-Out Burger.”

  “Such a vivid imagination.”

  He gets out of the car.

  Chapter 60

  It’s three in the morning and there are four creatures in my bed: me; Hippocrates; Polly; and a fledgling human being, cell-dividing at a frightening rate.

  Of late, Polly has become a regular nighttime visitor, seemingly undaunted by my frayed sheets and towels. Or my restless imagination and the tossing and turning.

  I go into the living room and sit with my imagination. It (my imagination) has been pulsing about something Polly said before she went to sleep when I’d asked her how this baby would manage to squeeze out of her body.

  “First law of physics: What goes up must come down,” she explained.

  “Who said that? Copernicus or Obama?”

  “Newton.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “Sir Isaac Newton. Obama’s a different guy. He discovered the cures for cancer, global warming, and fatty foods.”

  Polly rolled over and fell asleep and my imagination kicked into gear.

  Now I’m sitting in front of my laptop computer waiting for it to boot up. I make a pot of coffee.

  It has been two-and-half weeks since I visited Chuck in the rain. I’m just a few days shy of the mysterious three-week deadline Pete gave me. And I’ve learned little of value that might make sense of any of it.

  I looked at the public records to see about the real-estate ownership of the dental office and imaging center. They both are leased by a property management company that hasn’t returned calls.

  I did finally manage to get a return call from the public relations director at Biogen. He said he’s never heard of the Human Memory Crusade or ADAM but says he’d love to take me out for coffee to talk about a new skin-softening lotion developed from biotech research. The lotion, he says, can “de-age” the derma. But he adds t
hat we can’t meet until the merger goes through with Falcon Corp. The companies are in a quiet period while they await anti-trust approval for the deal from the European Union.

  Pete, dismissed from the ICU, has gone away with his family on an extended recovery. His office won’t tell me where that is, and he isn’t returning my calls.

  Adrianna won’t have anything to do with me. I beg her to help me help Lane. She says she has no idea what Pete meant by “three weeks.”

  I’ve spent hours with Grandma, watching her and Harry interact with a peaceful tenderness that I’d somehow overlooked. I’m trying to accept her aging. I’m also preoccupied with Polly’s health and, for the first time, my own. I got my inaugural cholesterol test and signed up for a life-insurance policy.

  My bank account is solvent, the Visa is back working, and I’ve got a BlackBerry. Polly reminds me not to text and drive.

  If I will only allow it to, life would be back to relative normal.

  But I’ve been haunted by the idea that the document Pete gave me contains some important secret, and that key information remains buried in Lane’s head. It’s the one thing that I can’t make sense of or explain away with the collusive rationalizations I got from Chuck and Pete and Adrianna.

  I’m convinced that Adrianna intended to give me the key. But before she managed to do so she was either interrupted, intercepted, or convinced otherwise. Pete either absconded with the document or, maybe, he and Adrianna were lovers and she gave it to him to protect.

  The computer comes to life. I call up a site that is a “binary decoder.”

  Bullseye and I have tried repeatedly to decode Grandma’s interviews with the Human Memory Crusade. For instance, we’ve tried changing the order of her answers so that they generate a different series of ones and zeroes. If we start with “Purple Chevrolet” (which = 1) then we get a different answer than if we start with “No polio in the family” (which = 0).

  We’ve also gone over her transcripts for any other keywords we’ve missed.

  And we’ve also tried to determine the meaning of the commands that appear at the bottom of the piece of paper I took from Pete’s library. Those commands include such phrases as, “If union, then Yankees.”

  There are several possibilities that we infer from this “if-then” statement. One is that when we hit the keyword “union” we instead put the code for “Yankees.” Another possibility is that when we hit the word “union” the program is telling us to go back through Grandma’s story to the place where she said “Yankees” and begin decrypting from there. We have found that particular interpretation to be compelling because it allows us to create numerous strands of ones and zeroes by looping us through Grandma’s keywords over and over again.

  We have created dozens of strings of ones and zeroes, set apart in groups of eight per the binary language. But we failed to derive any meaning. When we put the strings of ones and zeroes into a binary decoder, we came up with random strings of numbers or letters. It’s all digital nonsense.

  Bullseye finally gave up and told me not to bother him anymore.

  Maybe Newton holds the key.

  Adrianna used her surrogate son as the basis for several passwords in her life.

  “What goes up, must come down,” I say.

  I open a file in which I’ve kept some of the futile work Bullseye and I have done. There are a half dozen clumps of ones and zeroes. I start cutting and pasting various batches into the binary decoder. For instance:

  00110010 00111001 00111000 00110100 00110111 00110010 00110110 01100011 00111001 00110011

  The decoder spits out: “2984726c93”

  Then I reverse the order of the strings of ones and zeroes and the decoder spits out: “39c6274892”

  In other words, I get the same nonsense in reverse order. I try this with string after string that we generated.

  Feeling tired and defeated I get up for some coffee. I take two swigs.

  I cut and paste another batch:

  01100001 01101110 01101001 01110010 01100001 010011010 0111001 00111000 00110010 00111000 00110110 00110101 00101101 00110100 00110010 00110001

  I enter it into the binary decoder. It spits out: “aniraM98 2865–412”

  Like a lot of my attempts, it seems to suggest some meaning, but nothing I can make sense of.

  In keeping with Isaac Newton’s theory that what goes up must come down, I switch the order of the strings, and I get:

  00110001 00110010 00110100 00101101 00110101 00110110 00111000 00110010 00111001 00111000 01001101 01100001 01110010 01101001 01101110 01100001

  I enter this into the binary decoder, and it spits out: 124–5682 89Marina

  This is intriguing for a Bay Area resident. I pick up the decoded string (124–5682 89Marina) and I paste it into a Google search box. I hit enter. Google returns a response: “See results for: 89 Marina.”

  I feel a charge I’m pretty certain is unrelated to the coffee: 89 Marina is the address of the San Francisco Marina. It’s a modest dock under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge where people park their houseboats and yachts.

  I click on an image of the marina. It looks familiar—for obvious reasons. I’ve jogged there dozens of times, and stared at the female joggers and the setting sun twice that many. But there’s something else about the image that pulls at me. What is it?

  What’s down at the marina?

  I cut and paste into Google the random string of numbers (214–5682) generated by the binary decoder. Google spits back hundreds of thousands of hits. None of them has particular meaning.

  I shut my laptop and close my eyes to see if I can make sense of this puzzle.

  I get more coffee, drink it, and pace. A half mile of living-room exercise later, it hits me. I know where else I’ve seen an image of the marina houseboat docks. It was in Chuck’s house. In his father’s room, on the desk. I squint and clench my teeth and rattle my head trying to remember its name. And then my neuro-chemicals and caffeine gel and it comes to me: Surface to Air. The name of the boat.

  This can’t be all random.

  I walk into my bedroom and pick up a pair of Levis that I’d actually taken the time to fold, rather than pile on the floor on top of the other clothes. Folding, I’ve been telling myself, is a step toward becoming more organized and a better father. What about heading out to a marina at dawn to chase my imagination?

  “Where are you going?” Polly stirs.

  “Coffee, donut, and closure.”

  She smiles, and puts her head back down. She’s been feeling sick lately and not working fifteen-hour days.

  “Don’t get killed,” she mumbles innocently.

  I stand in chilly stillness. The marina is modest, and a throwback to a less-expensive time. Many of the boats seem to belong to bygone hippies. One boat is called Janis Joplin Floats, and another is Grateful Dirge.

  I don’t see another soul awake and walking these planks. Some are still asleep on their boats; others probably come only on weekends.

  I walk down the aisles until I come to it. The Surface to Air is a twenty-foot sailboat with a covered outboard motor. Beside the motor, beneath a ledge, stands a lonely pair of yellow rain boots on an otherwise clean-swept deck. In the center of the boat, a rectangular cabin protrudes from the deck, darkened windows on all four sides.

  I look around the marina. Seeing no one, I step over the edge of the pier and onto the boat. I walk to the cabin, and peer into a window. The dark tint makes it difficult to discern what is inside.

  I take a breath and hold it, and then reach for the handle on the cabin door. To my surprise, it turns.

  Inside, a modest cockpit; along the sides, a small refrigerator, fishing equipment, industrial-size food supplies, like two large plastic jugs of orange juice.

  It also seems ordinary. Except that there’s a table in the center with a laptop chained to it.

  Chapter 61

  My cell phone buzzes and, surprised and anxious, I nearly hit my head in the small
space. I pull my phone from my pocket. It is a text from Polly that reads: “Craving maple frostd.” I text back: “Cmng up.”

  I turn off my phone.

  The laptop is sleek, black, relatively new. I hit the space key. The monitor flickers to life. On the screen is an icon for a program I’ve never heard of: “InterneXt.” The word is enclosed in a graphic of the human brain. I click on it.

  Onto the screen pops a rectangular login box. The user name says: “LaneElizaIdle.” The password is blank.

  I stand. I walk to the door of the boat. I open it, and I poke out my head. I look around the dock. Halfway down the pier, a woman sweeps the deck of her boat. I duck back inside. I lock the door. I sit.

  Into the password section, I type: “NatIdle.” I hit “enter.” A message returns: “Your password is incorrect. After three incorrect attempts the program will be permanently locked out.”

  I stand. I clench my fingers together, hang my head, squint my eyes. I’m scouring my brain for connections, memories, mnemonics, cryptic references that only Lane Idle would know. Would she know anything at all?

  Twinsons, Lovesreading, doublelife, Voted4Kennedy, SnakePuker, Maverick, EnglishTeacher, Coloradan, DadwasBAKER.

  Can Grandma’s life be summed up with a phrase or word? What connection or concept or secret of hers has someone inserted as this password?

  I sit down at the computer. I put my hands on the keyboard and I type: “Pigeon.” I hit “enter.” The message returns: “Your password is incorrect. After three incorrect attempts the program will be permanently locked out.”

  Screw it. Screw all of it. What does it matter?

  One more password, then I will let this all go. I will return home with a maple donut and kiss Polly’s belly. I’ll take an editing position or a staff writing job at a magazine. I’ll put this behind me, the Chasing and the Coming Up Just Short. I’ll help raise a beautiful son or daughter or twins and I’ll let them use the computer all they want because it will hinder their ability to remember that their dad was a sometimes malcontent.

  Let the fates decide.