by Dan Koontz
Dillon reached over and turned up the grinding, manic-depressive music pouring through his computer speakers. “Yeah, we can talk now,” he said nervously, just audible above the music.
“Do you know anything about me or am I just pissing away time here?” Annamaria hissed with the tone of a queen addressing one of her subjects, unable to get over the fact that she was relying on what appeared to be a middle school nerd.
“Yes I know something, and yes, you’re wasting your time here,” Dillon sneered, shaking his head in disgust.
“Look,” Annamaria shot back, her accent picking up. “If you think I need you, you are sorely mistaken, my little friend. All I need is a doctor to confirm what happened to me, and I’ll be on the front page of every paper in the country tomorrow.”
“What happened to you?” Dillon asked, with no idea what she was talking about.
She folded her waistband down, as Dillon stared at the small scars, equally embarrassed by their location and confused about their significance.
“Oh my God! You didn’t even know about it?” Annamaria sighed, rolling her eyes and turning for the door.
“I think Annamaria had a tubal ligation,” Ryan muttered quietly to Dillon, getting nothing but a blank look in return. “Tubes tied.”
“Whoa!” Dillon gasped, finally clued in. “Wait! Don’t go. We need to talk.”
“Annamaria, I think you should stay,” Ryan said softly. “You came all the way from New York for this.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force herself into a rational decision, when the only thing she wanted to do was run out of the room and never look back.
“Two things I want you to think about,” Ryan said. “And I’m not trying to cause you any more pain. One: there were other poor, orphaned teenage girls surreptitiously sterilized after the Panama disaster. I read a New York Times piece on it a couple of years ago. It’s happened in other developing countries after devastating natural disasters too. It was a terrible thing that happened to you, but it didn’t happen only to you. It might be harder than you think to pin that on Avillage, and I’m sure if they’re at the bottom of this, they’d be well aware of that.
“Two: Dillon does know what he’s doing. Yes, he’s a pain in the ass to work with, but you can’t question his commitment. He’s been as angry as you are right now for five straight years.”
Dillon didn’t exactly take it as a compliment, but he also couldn’t protest what was a pretty accurate characterization.
Annamaria’s face relaxed slightly, as she let out a long sigh and slowly sat down on the corner of Dillon’s bed.
“Here’s what I’ve got,” Dillon said, snuggling up to his computer. “Your ticker symbol is BUTY, which I’m sure you already knew, and your chairman is Aaron Bradford. He’s also the chairman of one of the Yankees’ top pitching prospects (also from Panama,) who he discovered on the same trip he met you. The only other kid of note he’s been chairman for was J’Quarius Jones, who, unfortunately, is dead.
“Prior to your going public, a partial ownership gift of 1.5% was transferred to a Carlos Villanueva...”
“I knew it!” Annamaria shouted, slamming her fist into the mattress.
“What? Who’s Carlos Villanueva?” Ryan asked.
“The headmaster at my orphanage,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “He sold me like a slave.”
“And he’s been making a lot of money off of you,” Dillon pointed out, trying to fan the flames.
“Maybe,” Ryan said. “You were adopted after Avillage started offering a 1.5% ownership stake to anyone who referred an orphan that went on to be successfully adopted. What he got would’ve been standard.”
“Still, he referred you, didn't he?” Dillon said, scowling at Ryan. “So when was your... uh... procedure done?”
“Fourteen days before I was adopted,” she said, biting down on the inside of her lower lip.
“So 12 days before her IPO,” Ryan added.
Dillon was typing and clicking and scrolling maniacally. “Hmm,” he said. “It doesn’t look like there’s any paper trail of any meeting in Panama at all around that time. Bradford’s travel plans were well documented, but he either doesn’t use computers or he covers his tracks so well that he leaves absolutely no record of what he’s been up to.”
“Well, he definitely wasn’t in Panama at the time of your surgery because that was the day J’Quarius died,” Ryan said, putting the dates together in his head.
“Who’s J’Quarius again?” Annamaria asked.
“He was another orphan chaired by Bradford,” Ryan said. “A lot of people thought he had the potential to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but he died just before he turned eighteen of a heart condition, which either was or should have been diagnosed a week beforehand, when he’d collapsed on the court during a game.
“After he died, Bradford sued the University of Chicago Children's Hospital, where he’d initially been treated, for failing to disclose the risks of the heart condition that had caused his death. The hospital ended up settling out of court.”
“The amount was never disclosed!” Dillon chimed in.
“Dillon thinks it was all a PR stunt on Bradford's part, and he might be right, but the day the court settlement was announced, Bradford did donate a million bucks in J’Quarius Jones’s name to a foundation that identifies and treats kids with the same kind of heart condition he had.”
“Get your head out of your ass!” Dillon blurted out. “That was his own money! He talked to the doctors the day J’Quarius passed out the first time. He got the whole story. And then he sat there in the stands with those rich Russian team owners and just watched him die.
“Bradford’s not an idiot. You know he had that kid’s life insured for more than a million dollars.” Then he softened his tone as he turned to Annamaria. “J’Quarius’s parents never forgave him. They actually tried to block the piece of shit from being allowed to use J’Quarius’s name for the foundation. They were very vocal.”
“So how did Bradford get out of that?” Annamaria asked.
“Oh, he was very apologetic publicly. Said he couldn’t even imagine what the adoptive parents were going through,” Dillon said disgustedly. “Then he kept bringing up that the one thing he could take solace in was that at least he’d been instrumental in picking them as the perfect parents for J’Quarius. The media bought it hook, line and sinker. He’s a scumbag. Probably the worst guy in the whole company.”
“But he’s not your chairman?” Dillon was kind of growing on her.
“Nope. Bradford’s second in command at Avillage. My chairman’s some mid-level yes-man who’s too stupid to be sinister. If he never showed up for work again, it’d probably take weeks for someone to notice.”
“What about you?” she asked Ryan.
“Him?” Dillon jumped in. “No, no. Ryan’s chairman is the head honcho. None other than James Prescott himself – the founder and CEO of Avillage. Prescott gets shares in all of us, but he’s only the chairman for one,” he said pointing a sideways thumb at Ryan. “And he’s been buying every time the golden boy’s price dips.”
“Really? What’s he like?” she asked Ryan hesitantly.
"I don’t know. He's not that bad,” Ryan shrugged. “He was a little tough on certain things. Probably a little too intent on making sure I learned that life isn’t fair, but nothing compared to what happened to you guys.
“I mean, he didn’t let me participate in certain activities or go on certain field trips growing up. Things like that. And the only college he let me to apply to was Harvard. But my life’s pretty good.
“He’s obviously not as benevolent as he claims to be, but he did set me up with good parents, I am getting a Harvard degree, and I probably am better off now than I would’ve been if Avillage hadn’t adopt me out of that orphanage. It's just...”
“When are you going to wake up?” Dillon butted in, physically sickened by what he’d just
heard.
“When are you?” Ryan shot back. “This is our life! Like it or not. Laws were changed – well before any of us were ever orphans. And you’ve got no proof of anything. You have suspicion built on suspicion that only leads to more suspicion. You hand-pick what information you choose to dole out, and it always supports your theories. Then you keep everything else hidden. Sorry, but I personally am not that bad off. She needs to hear the whole story.”
“Annamaria was sterilized! My dad was put away for life for what should have been a few years at most! J’Quarius Jones is dead! Your parents were murdered!” Dillon exclaimed, his voice rising as he spoke.
“That’s enough,” Ryan warned, his glare squarely back on Dillon.
But this time Dillon wasn't backing down. “And you’re padding the bank accounts of the people who murdered them!”
“My parents were killed in a head-on collision. I saw it,” Ryan insisted through gritted teeth.
Dillon cackled condescendingly. “A fatal car accident involving both of your parents exactly three months before the opening of Avillage? They were murdered!”
“Enough!” Ryan shouted, leaning in inches from Dillon’s face. Dillon matched his stare for a few seconds, and then tilted his head slightly, raising his eyebrows, tacitly questioning whose side Ryan was on.
Ryan took a couple of deep, slow breaths to collect himself and then turned toward Annamaria. “You see what I mean?
“I’ve gotta get out of here. Do you want to come with me?”
“Actually,” Annamaria waffled, holding her gaze to the floor, “I think I’m gonna stay here a little while longer.”
“Oh. Yeah, no problem,” Ryan said reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve got my number if you want to talk again. Just… don’t do anything rash.”
“But don’t do nothing,” Dillon added, looking directly at Ryan.
Ryan took one more sharp glance at Dillon, shook his head and started out the door, trying not to be offended that Annamaria had chosen to stay with Dillon. He did understand Dillon’s emotional appeal – especially in the short-term.
Feeling the need to clear his head and organize his thoughts, he headed west toward the Charles River to take the scenic route home.
The brilliant shades of red from the morning’s sunrise had been swallowed up by a monotonous gray that blanketed the sky with a single drab tone, neither portending a storm nor showing any sign of clearing. Perfect weather for introspection.
His dysfunctional team had increased in number by fifty percent, but they still didn’t have a viable face for their cause. He could acknowledge that Dillon genuinely loved his father, but Dillon was driven primarily by revenge and was in no way, shape or form a sympathetic figure. His dad was a felon, implicated in terror – and found guilty. No one would care why he was caught or how that had affected his son.
Ryan himself had started out a tragic figure, having lost both parents at such a young age, but it was hard to feel too sorry for him ten years down the road, nearing graduation from Harvard at seventeen with no debt and with a stable, happy homelife. To an outside observer, he appeared to be the prototypical Avillage success story – which had really been the only point he was planning to make before Dillon started in on his parents’ death.
Annamaria was beautiful, clearly preyed upon by a greedy corporation, and had a potentially heart-wrenching story, but she was so overexposed as a soulless socialite in the basest forms of media that most of the country probably would have been delighted to hear she wouldn’t be able to procreate.
J’Quarius, even in death, still seemed to be their best hope, Ryan thought. He’d tried reaching out to Hansford and Arlene Washington – and to Leonard Weinstien – after the game, but he’d never heard anything back. Maybe it had been too soon. Probably time to revisit that, he thought.
Dillon was right about one thing – Avillage was surrounded by smoke. But Annamaria’s scars were the first time he’d actually seen fire. It was time he personally started doing a little digging.
He quickened his pace to a jog as a light mist began to fall. A band of rapidly-rising black clouds on the horizon announced that the sky had finally committed. A storm was coming, and from the looks of it, he wouldn’t have much time to get home before it hit.
~~~
“What!” Aaron Bradford finally shouted after the third knock on his door. With the clock nearing midnight, he should have had the office to himself.
“Sorry, sir” Corbett Hermanson said, leaning in close to the door. “But I found something you may be interested in.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Bradford moaned.
“It’s up to you, sir, but I thought it was worth checking with you tonight.”
Tall and thin with close-cropped fire-red hair and perpetually tired eyes, Corbett wore the same pale blue short-sleeve Oxford shirt, black pants and nondescript black work shoes everyday, no matter the season. He was the first head of IT at Avillage that Bradford had actually approved of – someone as meticulous and paranoid as he was – and as part of his standard security protocol, he routinely monitored a few dozen randomly-chosen files a week for activity, always at different times on different days.
“Fine,” Bradford sighed. “Give me a second.”
Three minutes passed before Bradford gave Corbett the ok to come in.
“Will there be anything else Mr. Bradford?” his twenty-six-year-old assistant asked right on cue as the door opened, sitting conspicuously formally in an armchair several feet from her boss, cradling a completely blank notepad.
“No, Ms. Williams. That will be all. Good night,” Bradford intoned robotically.
“Good night,” the assistant whispered as she hurried out of the room, keeping her head down to avoid making eye contact with the IT manager.
“Now what is it, Corbett?” Bradford huffed.
“Well sir, it’s just that I didn’t think that you’d been traveling recently, have you?”
“You’ve seen me here every day this week! What do you think? Get to the point,” Bradford demanded, wishing he’d continued to ignore the knocking at his door.
“I actually didn’t think you had been traveling, which is why I found it odd that a few of your files had been accessed by an IP address in Indianapolis earlier today.”
“What?” Bradford gasped, his attention now undivided. “Which files?”
“Some of the old J files and a some of the BUTY ones off the intranet. My guess is that whoever this is probably isn’t in Indiana but is disguising their IP address. And of course I’ll look into it further with your permission. You wouldn’t have shared any of your passwords with anyone by chance, would you have?” Corbett asked.
“No!” Bradford shot back, insulted at the suggestion. “Now listen. I want you to look into this and find out who’s been snooping around, and I want you to report back directly to me! Do you understand?”
“Yes sir. Of course, sir. I’ll start immediately. In the meantime, I’d strongly suggest that you change all of your passwords.”
“I’ll keep my passwords, thank you,” Bradford said, wondering just who in the hell Corbett thought he was “strongly suggesting” anything to his boss’s boss’s boss. “I’ve got nothing to hide on our intranet – I’ve never trusted it – and I don’t want this low-life hacker to know we’re on to him until we’re ready to nail him. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” Corbett said, backing out of Bradford’s office.
~~~
Ryan stared blankly out the window waiting for his laptop to finish booting up, as the persistent pattering of the steady rainfall on the roof filled his dimly-lit top floor dorm room with a hypnotic white noise that beckoned him back to the night of his parents’ death. He consciously shook it off; now wasn’t the time.
A brief scan of his email’s inbox revealed the typical swath of junk – offshore pharmacies, lurid invitations to meet singles in the Boston area, and plenty of the popular “(no su
bject)” emails from hacked accounts he hadn’t yet removed from his contact list.
But as he scrolled down the page, selecting messages to mark as spam, something jumped out at him. One of the junk mails with the “(no subject)” subject line had been sent by [email protected], J.R.’s old email account from his time at the Cleveland Clinic.
Ryan still used the same account that had been opened for him at age seven, and J.R. had been his first contact. But he hadn’t heard anything from him in years, and J.R.’s Cleveland Clinic account should’ve been deactivated a decade ago. Was it possible he was back there? Ryan knew he wasn’t in Boston any more. A search for Dr. Ralston on The Cleveland Clinic’s website returned no matches.
Suddenly a light bulb went off in Ryan’s head. He went right back to his email and fired off a message to [email protected], which he inferred from J.R.’s address would’ve been his mother’s old email address. No sooner than the message had been sent did he receive an “undeliverable message” reply in his inbox.
For good measure he then sent another email to [email protected]. This time nothing returned. After a quick reload of the page, still nothing. With his heart now racing, he closed his browser and reopened it.
Hovering his cursor over the bookmark to his email, he closed his eyes and hesitantly clicked the left mouse button. After a long, slow, deep breath, he reopened his eyes. Once again there was only one return message – from his mom’s old account.
He immediately grabbed his walkie-talkie and began shouting for Dillon to come in.
While he waited, he searched the Cleveland Clinic website for a Dr. Ryan Tyler, on the off chance someone with the same name now worked there. No match.
“What do you want?” Dillon eventually groaned, bracing for another argument.
“I might have found something,” Ryan started, ignoring Dillon’s sour tone. “I was gonna try emailing Leonard Weinstien again about what he knew about J’Quarius Jones’s biological father when...”