by Tom Lytes
He’d done what he could, for the time being. It was time to destroy everything Leonard had touched and leave.
50
Officer Pincus grew bored watching the crews clean up after the Porsche incident, but he didn’t want to go home. What he really wanted to do, was march up the front steps of Leonard’s house and blow Peggy away. He almost did it when he saw her inside but knew it would be a stupid move to make. The Feds were back on the island, investigating the Porsche explosion in the context of the big fire out on the cargo ship. The pompous fools were making connections between the two events that didn’t exist.
Officer Pincus wanted to yell at them, “I did it, you stupid idiots. I blew up the Porsche with a rocket launcher. It has nothing to do with the ship fire.”
When he couldn’t take being there anymore, he went home. His wife was waiting for him.
She said, “Something’s going on. I haven’t seen you like this before, and I think you’ve been up to something. I can only guess, but I think it’s bad.” She burst into tears. “You just remember, you have an obligation to this family. To be here for your son, and for me. Don’t do something stupid and get yourself taken away from us, do you hear?”
“I—” Officer Pincus began to say.
Lisa Anne raised her finger up to her lips, and it silenced him. She gestured towards Middle Street where the Porsche incident occurred.
“You are a good man,” she said softly, “a good husband, and a good father. I trust that whatever you have going is for the betterment of our family.”
Officer Pincus listened and nodded slightly.
His wife said one more thing before wrapping up.
“And you remember right now who you are, and where you come from: good people. You can’t be if you can’t find your way through this. Once you’ve obliterated the line between good and bad, it’s hard to define it again. Remember that.”
She turned towards the house and entered without looking back. The screen door whacked against the doorframe as she went inside.
Officer Pincus cried, watching after her. He wiped his face, preparing himself for what had to be done. He went into his garage and opened the hidden compartment along the wall.
51
Vortmit closed his computer and pocketed his phone.
Bobby looked away from the news stories, making eye contact with Leonard, who he thought looked suspicious.
“So, what now, Leonard? Can we end this fucking thing?”
“I’ve released a virus into the coding that will track Clean down through Rube’s login,” Leonard said. “That should do it.”
Finley said, “… it might work… but—”
“It’ll take Clean out of commission? Entirely?” Bobby asked Finley. “That will stop Clean?”
“Like I said,” Leonard said definitively, “it should do it.”
“Seems too fucking easy,” Bobby said. “Why the fuck didn’t you do that a month ago.”
Leonard said, defensively. “Nobody thought of it, for one. Secondly, Rube didn’t sign in until, when, yesterday? That’s the earliest we could have done what I just did.”
“Oh.”
“That’s true,”” Finley said, not looking up.
“Bobby, you are free to go back to your life,” Leonard said.
“I can’t go back to my life,” Bobby said. “My life, as I knew it, is totally fucked, Leonard, because of your program.”
Leonard shrugged, and Peggy said, “What have we done to ourselves, all of us. Society—
Why do we put so many decisions into the hands of computers? To keep us safe? Make our decisions?”
The questions hung in the room like smog: dirty, invasive, man-made, and avoidable.
“Speaking of that, I’ve been staring at the computer all day,” Leonard said, breaking the silence. “I need to get outside.”
He picked up his computer and stepped out to the back deck overlooking the pool.
Bobby’s phone rang, and he picked it up right away. It was his driver.
“Hey, Bobby.”
“Yeah?”
“A Fed called me. A guy working the murders up here with Agent Finley.”
“What about him?” Bobby looked over to Finley, who again was engrossed in his work.
“Well, I don’t think he got the memo that you’re, uh, ya know, uh….”
“Fucked,” Bobby said.
“Right,” the driver said. “He doesn’t know Vito’s in charge now. So, he thinks it’s you he needs to report to still, if he wants extra cash. He just called me and gave me some information.”
“What is it?”
The driver sounded like he was shuffling paper in the background. Maybe reading from notes he took.
He said, “It’s about the electronic communication sent to the shooter in Louisiana. The one to hire him for the hit in New York. The FBI traced it to a guy they’ve been trying to catch for some time. It’s a guy named Vortmit, Boss, but he uses all kinds of aliases. He’s an old German spy who hires himself out for complicated mercenary work.”
“Okay,” Bobby said, thinking about it. “Does Finley know?”
“I asked,” said the driver. “Turns out Finley’s been hard to reach. Won’t answer his phone or emails. I don’t know what to say about that.”
Bobby glanced at the furrowed brow of the FBI agent, saw the mad typing, and the tussled hair.
“Agent Finley must be busy,” Bobby said, quietly.
“Guess so. You know, that smear you did in the paper, the one suggesting he was getting with the suspect from down south, that has people questioning his honesty up here. Nothing formal, just rumors.”
“Yeah, well, that was the point of it, remember? I’m sick of him being so close to Peggy.”
“I know, Boss, so it did good. Making some trouble for him.”
“Listen, if that hit with the Louisiana shooters was because of the program, it doesn’t matter. Could have been that the German guy, Vortmit was manipulated by Clean. Your information only matters if it was somebody who wanted to kill Doyle and Floyd for some other reason.”
“Just thought I’d tell you what I’d found out, boss.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah,” the driver said. “The communication from Vortmit came through a cell tower. They pinged it. I think he said pinged. Anyway, it came from a certain place. You’ll never guess where it is.”
“Just tell me, already,” Bobby said.
“A mile from where you are right now on Sullivan’s Island,” he said. “There’s a cell tower right there in the neighboring town, Mount Pleasant.”
“What?” Bobby said. “Something doesn’t seem right about that. Maybe those killings up in Hoosick had nothing to do with Clean. Or a couple did, but not whatever the Louisiana shooter had going.”
“Maybe,” the driver said. “I’m sending a picture of Vortmit to your phone. He was definitely the guy who ordered the Louisiana shooter to be up here.”
“Yeah, do that,” Bobby said, “Hey, you somewhere safe?”
“Yeah, the driver said. I’m good, Bobby, laying low,” he said, and disconnected the call.
Peggy asked Bobby, “What’s up?”
“Maybe nothing,” Bobby said.
He looked at his phone and waited while a condensed photo file opened, slowly. There, looking back at him was the unmistakable likeness of Leonard, a few years younger and with darker hair, but without a doubt, it was him.
“Oh man,” Bobby said. “Leonard’s a fake.”
He handed the phone to Peggy.
She looked at the photograph.
“Where’d that come from?” Peggy asked.
“My driver – he got it from the Feds. They’re saying it’s a picture of the guy who hired the Louisiana shooter. It�
�s Leonard, no question.”
Peggy spun on her toes, searching the decks outside for Leonard. Running across the room and down the short hallway, looking for a glimpse of him, she stopped short facing the wall in Leonard’s house where his prized Michelangelo sketch had hung. The sleek black frame looked as it always had, but the sketch was gone. After stepping onto the porch, Leonard must have come back in a different door to retrieve it.
Peggy sprinted back to the room where Bobby stood cursing at his phone. Finley seemed irritated to interrupt his work.
Peggy yelled, “We need to get out of here, now. We need to run.”
Training kicked in for Finley, and he jumped to his feet, picking up his laptop on the way to the porch doors. Peggy ran ahead of Bobby, hitting the door latch in stride, smacking her shoulder firmly against the door. She stumbled out of the opening as the door gave way. It slammed shut again. Peggy leapt down the stairwell, hitting as few steps as possible, and was soon out on the grass, with Finley running in front of her.
Bobby dropped his phone as he ran into the edge of a couch, trying to follow Peggy and Finley’s hasty exit. He fumbled briefly with the door handle trying to leave the house. By the time he was moving off the stairs to the backyard, he was suddenly blown back by the gust from the blades of a helicopter. Up ahead, Leonard, a.k.a. Vortmit, stood on the beach as a ladder lowered from the hovering helicopter. Bobby could see Peggy up ahead, swiveling her head back and forth to watch the house and Vortmit’s escape. Bobby ran as fast as he could across the yard. After cresting the small dune that led to the beach, he slowed way down. The helicopter rose quickly and banked a hard turn to the north.
Leonard, the computer geek guy who was known to the FBI as Vortmit, made his escape.
Bobby looked after the helicopter. Peggy joined him when it was clear there wasn’t present danger on the beach. Finley straggled after them, adjusting the brightness on his open laptop.
“I’ve been set up and played, badly,” Bobby said to her. He beat his fist into his other hand. “Clean distracted me from Leonard, who was tooling me, messing with my life.”
“I can’t believe it,” Peggy said. “What happens now? What does this mean? Clean is over, right, or not? How do we know?”
Bobby said. “I’ve lost everything I worked for my whole life up in New York. Leonard—
” Bobby paused, ripped Leonard’s sweatshirt off and stamped on it. “Leonard told me everything about the program that night I drank with him. Got me paranoid.”
“Clean is real, Bobby. He used it to manipulate you, maybe, but Clean could have killed you if you stayed in New York,” Peggy said.
She thought to herself, I’m legally dead, I killed my brother, and I can’t be a police officer anymore. All that happened because of Clean, all because of Leonard.
When they turned back towards the house, they heard a whirring sound, like air getting sucked through a tremendously large straw. Bobby instinctually pulled Peggy down behind the shelter of the small dune. There was another strange, unnatural booming sound that dropped Finley too, and a few seconds later, the sky lit up like a supernova.
Leonard’s house exploded.
Glass blew out of every window, the roof collapsed, and the walls gave way until the building fell sideways off the support piers that elevated it. The entire structure was on fire, and it looked like pieces of the house were vaporizing as steam and smoke billowed from everywhere. Pieces ceased to exist, and others were landing all over the place.
“Holy—” Finley said.
“Whoa,” Bobby yelled. “How did you know we needed to get out of there?”
“The sketch by Michelangelo,” Peggy yelled over the roar of the structure’s fire. “He took it out of the frame. He was never coming back, and it seemed like if he took it with him he might cover his tracks.”
“You have natural instincts, Peg. You can’t teach people what you just do. You and I were meant to be together.”
Peggy wasn’t willing to agree, but Bobby wasn’t all wrong either.
She yelled over the sounds of the fire, so Finley could hear too, “We’re lucky we weren’t inside the house.”
“You’re right about that,” Bobby said. “If you hadn’t freaked out and gotten us out, we’d be dead.”
Peggy nodded.
Bobby smiled just a little, “I’m not sure why Leonard blew the fucking house up though.”
“That might have been Pincus,” Finley said, now joining them.
“Yeah, maybe,” Bobby said as another portion of Leonard’s house crashed to the ground. “Maybe. And maybe me and Carson Miller were his targets. Miller’s dead and Vito took my action over. I’m done.”
“There’s a lot more at stake than that,” Finley said. “Clean is still working away, randomly killing, and the death toll is rising.”
Bobby folded his arms at his chest and glared.
“So, what now? I’ve had enough with computers,” Bobby said.
Finley nodded. “I’ve tracked Clean to a huge mainframe. Assuming it doesn’t move, I should be able to isolate it and eliminate it.”
“How, Fin?” Peggy asked.
“It’s in a mainframe, using it, like I said.” He looked at the burning house. “I’ve got to go. If I can persuade the local field office to help me, Clean could become stranded in this big mainframe. I’ve got to seek permission to cut off its internet access. That way Clean can’t leave, jump to another host through internet bandwidth.”
“So, you isolate it by cutting its internet connection—”
“—if the FBI will go along with it.”
“Smart, Fin, I’d think they would,” Peggy said. “What mainframe does Clean call home right now?”
“Southwest Airlines,” Finley said. “Gonna take the power of the government to make them cut internet access. Peggy, I’ve been thinking about how to broach the subject. Come with me and we’ll go to the regional FBI office together. We’ll explain how your death couldn’t be disputed in order to fool the program. We’ll get everything back on track. Get us back together.”
Peggy took in the eager anticipation of Finley’s hope-filled eyes. She longed to go with him, to believe everything could indeed work out and end happily. But she’d killed Doyle. At this very moment, a shred of evidence might be getting processed from the crime scene implicating her in her own brother’s death. If Finley only knew.
Bobby said, “Don’t go running off with him, Peg. You’re too good for that guy.”
Peggy closed her eyes, feeling the opposite – not good enough for Finley.
“I’ll catch up with you there, Fin,” she said as convincingly as possible. “Maybe I’ll be needed here, first.” She pointed at Leonard’s torched house. “You going to a Bureau office in Mount Pleasant?”
“Closest one I can find, Peg,” Finley said. “Wish me luck.”
He winked at Peggy and ran awkwardly away, down the beach, looking at his laptop every half dozen steps. Peggy watched after him, mourning old choices that dictated her current life.
Bobby commented, “It’s a good idea, staying with me, Peg.”
“What do we do now?” Peggy asked, ignoring his comment, not wanting to acknowledge her action. “I’m betting that Officer Pincus is going to think we’re dead for sure, after that, if he’s behind it.”
She motioned over to the wreckage. Bobby nodded and pointed to the side yard. Officer Pincus worked his way to the beach side of the house, but he focused intently on the fire as he stared into the rapidly disappearing remains of Leonard’s house. There looked to be a fireman with him, and somebody else too.
“Duck down, maybe we oughta stay dead for a while,” Bobby said. “I don’t trust that Pincus one little bit.”
Peggy nodded and watched the officer peer into the wreckage, his search focused. Looking for bodies?
&nbs
p; Bobby asked, “Do you wonder who put Leonard up to all this?”
“Yeah, but I have no idea,” Peggy said.
“Maybe we oughta find that out.”
Peggy nodded, “And I definitely want to get out of here.”
Bobby nodded, “Me too.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“There’s a marina on the Isle of Palms,” Bobby said. “We could take my truck down there and maybe charter a boat to take us up north. I have a farm tucked away up there. I go when there’s trouble.”
Peggy shivered. Exhaustion seemed to overcome her. Her head throbbed. Her heart ached for Finley, and her own loss.
“You know, Peg,” Bobby said, interrupting her thoughts, “I haven’t had people think I’m dead before.”
“I’ve been living the dead lifestyle for a few days,” Peggy said. “It’s an awful lot like being alive.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t been trying to do anything except stop a killing program, so your time so far doesn’t count.”
“That may be true,” Peggy said. “What did you have in mind.”
“You’ll see,” he said. “Come on, walk with me down the beach and we’ll circle around to the Sumter parking lot.”
“Do we have to worry about Leonard?”
“Oh yeah,” Bobby said, “That guy, I’m worried about.”
“I still can’t believe everything that happened.”
“Insane computer stuff.”
“Maybe you’re right about Leonard,” Peggy said. “Officer Pincus and him are dangerous, even if Finley succeeds in stopping Clean.”
“Finley’s plan will work,” Bobby said. “That, I’m not worried about. And you know, Officer Pincus, maybe he’s done his thing.”
Peggy thought about that. “Maybe you’re right, if he thinks we died. What should we do about Leonard, or should I call him Vormit?”
“Doesn’t matter what we call him, Peg,” Bobby said.
“I guess you’re right, it’s just so shocking that Leonard is somebody else.”
“Yeah, and he’s pretty smart. You know, though, where we’re from - it’s gonna be all about payback.”