King of Code

by CD Reiss

  She spun in her seat as if she couldn’t hold back another second. “It is different. I don’t steal. I don’t cheat. I do things fair and square.”

  “Are you fucking with me? What kind of moral gymnastics did you have to do to convince yourself hacking me was fair and square?”

  “You’d never do something for someone besides yourself. But you needed to get hacked. You’re a little shit. You’re every problem with the world.”

  “And now you’re no better. Do you miss the moral high ground? Because you left it as soon as you locked my system. Is the weather different down here? Or is it actually the damn fucking same?”

  “I am not you. I care about people. All you care about is you. Not even you. All you care about is what people think of you.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  Of course she didn’t. She had no idea what I was thinking or feeling. She’d just made a bunch of assumptions. The fact that all of them were right notwithstanding, she’d built a composite picture out of thin air. I was allowed to get pissed about that.

  “You targeted me because you don’t like me, but you didn’t make anything.” Percy’s barking got closer, but I had more to say. “You created nothing. You stole what someone else made, and you’re holding it for what? What do you want to give it back?”

  “I’ll give it back.” She let that sink in. “When I have what I want.”

  She crossed her arms, tapping her finger against her bicep. Her nails were naked, and she didn’t have a stitch of makeup over her freckled nose. The highlights in her hair had been kissed by the sun, not the salon. So easy to take for granted. So easy to underestimate.

  “How much do you want?” I tried to sound nonchalant. People had fraught relationships with wealth, so I never said “dollars,” “cash,” or even “money” during a negotiation.

  “If I was after money, you’d be broke already.”

  She spoke truth. She could have done something much simpler and more profitable. But she hadn’t. I still wasn’t sure what she wanted. She kept me on shaky ground, and I was starting to think it was on purpose. She was hacking me, and I didn’t have any defenses against her attack.

  XVII

  At one point, my mother had decided to clean my room down to the plaster. When I got home from school, all my shit was in the driveway, and she was painting the walls.

  Clearly, she was in a manic phase. Clearly, she couldn’t be reasoned with. I was supposed to let her do her thing and make sure she was safe.

  But yellow?

  I’d been powerless then too.

  When she spoke about yellow paint day, even years later, my mother said the look I gave her broke through the mania long enough for her to stop painting and move to the next project. It was the only thing she’d ever remembered mid-episode.

  “If I was after money, you’d be broke already.”

  After Harper said that, I must have given her the same look, and it must have come from the same place of powerlessness. Because I didn’t accept that I was ever helpless, and the existence of a situation where I didn’t have choices or options tasted like a mouthful of dimes dipped in shit. I spit it out.

  “When I’m through with you, you’re going to wish you’d killed me.”

  I’d broken through her tough-chick performance. She opened her car door and slipped out as if stomping toward the garage was proof of anger, not proof of a defensive position. I got out after her with every intention of driving home some point or another. I’d forgotten what we were talking about, but I was going to hurt her until she cried, and I wasn’t going to give the smallest fuck about her feelings.

  Which I did.

  But I didn’t.

  Maybe a little.

  Two steps in front of me, she turned toward me with her finger out as if she had a point to make and I gave a fuck what it was.

  Which I did.

  But I didn’t.

  Not even a little.

  “Do it,” I growled. “Sell off my code, and I will come after you until this town is a wasteland. Do you understand me?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Do you un—”

  “Hey, Harper.” Orrin’s voice cut the wind just as Percy got his nose under my hand.

  I petted him without thinking. Orrin pinched a lit cigarette between two grease-streaked fingers. Right behind him stood the guy in his fifties with the yellow polo, chinos, and clean hands. Despite the conservative costuming, he was tattooed with clock gears and pierced, his black hair whirling in the wind. His name, Johnny, and a corporate smile of a logo were embroidered over his left tit.

  “Hey, Orrin.” Harper was all perk and smiles, as if we hadn’t spent the last five minutes threatening everything we each held dear. “Hey, Johnny!”

  Johnny kissed her cheek, which was more than Orrin had done.

  “Mr. Harden,” Orrin said.

  “Thanks for working on the car.” I pointed at the Caddy sitting in the garage. “The hood’s still up. Is it working?”

  “Just fine.”

  “They call you Hard-on in school?” Johnny asked, proving that inside, he was more tattoo than polo.

  “Yes. Yes, they did.”

  “You punch ‘em? Or did you cry?”

  “I fucked their girlfriends.”

  With every circuit in my brain, I mustered up the will to not look at Harper to gauge her reaction to what I’d said. I had little to gain from knowing it and everything to gain by acting as if I didn’t care.

  Johnny, on the other hand, whooped a laugh of surprise and delight. He stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Same.” I shook his hand.

  “Welcome to the Capitol of Crap.” He swung his arms wide. “Citizens too stupid to leave, and those that left are too damn cowardly to stay.”

  Orrin shook his head. “Don’t mind him. He—”

  “We’re the salt of the earth’s what they say. Them in power, with the money. They stroke us. Jerk us off with some bullshit about how hardworking we are. Tell us we’re the real America. Like we’re stupid. Them fucks set man against man so we can feel like winners, but let me ask you.” He held out his arms and stepped back. “Do I look like a winner to you?”

  “Jeeze, Johnny,” Harper interrupted. “Can you—”

  “If you want to win something,” I said, “we can get in a fistfight.”

  Johnny whooped another laugh, falling into a deep, wet coughing fit. Even Orrin chuckled as we walked back to the garage.

  “Well, not too many men alive can shut up old Johnny,” Orrin said. “This is a nice car.” He laid his hand on the chassis. “Regular battery doesn’t fit. I had to order one special, then I called the rental company because they’d shit themselves if they thought an unlicensed guy was touching the engine. Let them know what was happening.”

  I turned away from the car. Across the road sat a corrugated tin building with boarded windows and a Restaurant Supplies sign swinging in the wind.

  In the foreground, Harper leaned on her car with her arms crossed, talking to Johnny.

  “Did they say when the battery was coming?”

  “Tomorrow or next day.”

  Was that enough time to get Harper to release QI4? It was going to have to be.

  “Here.” I reached for my wallet, feeling the little red pebble in my pocket as Percy sniffed my balls.

  “Sit,” I said, and he did. “Good boy.”

  “Pay me when the work’s done.”

  We shook on it, and Percy trotted back to the garage behind Orrin. When I got back to Harper, Johnny was headed for his truck.

  “Am I taking you to the airport?” she asked.

  This was her way of getting me to go home and tell everyone about Barrington? That was the exact opposite of what I was going to do.

  “How do you know I won’t just call the FBI?”

  She crossed to the opposite side of the car. “What would all the hackers say if you narked on one of their own?”


  “GreyHatC0n’s in eleven days.” I leaned over the roof of the Chevy. “We have a challenge running on day one. It’s worth a lot to me to plug this hole. You could do a bunch of things with that money. Buy furniture for the house.” I squinted at her in the bright sun.

  “You think I went to all this trouble to buy a sofa?”

  “Get help for your sister.”

  Her jaw tightened, and her eyes narrowed. I’d hit a nerve. She went from pensive to sharp in a split second. Behind her, the big dog uhf uhffed.

  “Small business loans,” I continued, “scholarships for the kids you were talking about. Supplies for the school. Whatever.”

  She leaned over the other side of the roof, tapping the hollow metal. “I know you don’t come from money, Taylor. Not real money.”

  “So?”

  “Money, real money, is about maintenance.”

  “Are you blackmailing me or asking for a job?”

  Orrin watched from the office door. Harper gave him a dismissive jerk of her chin. He went inside.

  I placed the pebble from the rooftop code on the roof of her car. “This is the same color as what’s on the Caddy. You were with me when the car was vandalized. And maybe this is a town of coders, but it’s not. You wrote on the factory roof. So who fucked up the car?”

  “Maybe the hardware store’s got one shade of red.” She didn’t even believe that.

  “Sure, Harper. Whatever. Or you can tell me what you want? I’ll give it to you, and you give me my life back. But tell me something I’ll believe.”

  She laced her fingers together and tapped the pads of her thumbs. So much of her story was in her hands. The nails were cut short, and she’d taped her fingers again, but now I knew why they were wrapped like a hacker’s.

  “If you want me to take you to the airport, I will,” she said.

  “If I want you to unlock QI4 first?”

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  Progress. Too bad it didn’t matter. She was nuts, and I was walking a tightrope with her.

  XVIII

  My situation was precarious, unusual, unprecedented. I couldn’t tell if I was making a mountain out of a molehill or seeing the molehill from so close that it looked huge.

  Harper had wondered if I was going to cut her into little pieces because she was imagining me in sections.

  My phone was charged, and I got a moment of signal from the balcony overlooking the thorn bushes. Something was getting through the scrambler, or she’d turned it off.

  Fuck encrypted texts. I called Deeprak.

  “Dude,” he said without so much as a hello. “Where have you been?”

  “It’s her. Harper. The girl from MIT. She did it.”

  “Why?” His voice cracked. He was exhausted.

  “Plight of the working man. She wanted to draw attention to the recession. Whatever. I’m coming back.”

  “How did she do it?”

  Below me, the thorn bushes wove together like a square of steel wool. A bent and cracked white picket fence held the bed to shape.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you’re coming home?”

  I almost called him crazy before I told him I was coming home for shit sure, but he deserved an explanation. “There’s something off here. It’s like a cross between Children of the Corn and Wicker Man.”

  “Are those movies? I’m more of a Bollywood guy.”

  “Creepy. It’s creepy.”

  “Oh. Well. In that case, come back. We’ll just tell the guys to find another job. Our clients will understand—”

  “Deeprak—”

  “—why it’s so important for you not to be in a creepy place.”

  Was he shouting? It was hard to tell with his voice so shredded.

  “You don’t get it.”

  “I get it, my friend. I fucking get it.” He’d never taken this sharp a tone with me, and for that reason alone, I shut up. “You’re in a new place with someone who has it out for you. Taylor Harden is a target and feels bad. Boo-hoo. Now get over it. You’ve had it easy your whole life.”

  “Wait a minute. I worked my ass off.”

  “But your head’s buried in it. Creepy is working your ass off for nothing. You worked your ass off for something.”

  I could have argued, but I couldn’t have argued with his intensity. We were going to have a long, hard talk over beers when I got back.

  “Fuck you, Deeprak.” That was as close to capitulation as I intended to get.

  “You too, baby.”

  The line of the factory roof was solid brown against the horizon. A V of birds headed south along it. If I showed my face in the office without QI4 in one piece, I was going to be a laughingstock. Distance insulated me.

  “I’m coming back as soon as I figure this out, and I’m not playing into what she wants. Make sure no one talks about where I am.”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Not a word to the press. No exposure. Nothing. My whereabouts are unknown.”

  “Agreed.”

  I peered into my room. Empty. Door closed. I did the same with the master suite. Empty.

  “Can anyone hear you?” I whispered.

  “I just got home. I live alone.”

  Just got home? He’d probably combed through hardware and code for twenty-four hours or more.

  “You’re working hard for something.”

  “Make sure of it.”

  I ended the call just as Harper came onto the balcony from the master suite. She had a disturbingly self-satisfied look that I wanted to kiss right off.

  “How’s everything back home?” She leaned her hip on the railing, arms crossed, indicating the phone I’d left facedown on the railing with a quick twirl of her finger.

  “About as wonderful as you’d expect. I left a full complement of guys with their limp dicks in their hands.”

  She smirked. “That imagery is so appealing.”

  “Does it make you nervous, at all? Being out here with me? The guy you’re in the process of fucking over? I could pick you up and throw you off this balcony right now. Leave you in the fucking thorn bushes.” I’d never threatened a woman with violence before, and the threats came out of my mouth so easily I scared myself a little.

  Harper didn’t seem half as nervous about it as I did. “Who would unlock your system then?”

  “I’ve cracked harder cases than you, miss.”

  I was a little closer, my finger pointed right at her like a punctuation mark. She looked away. Now she was nervous. The idea of violence didn’t faze her, but the idea of being outwitted went right to the core.

  “I didn’t think you’d actually come.” She touched my elbow, just brushing along it.

  The normal reaction to being touched by an enemy would have been to pull away, but her electrical current didn’t throw me back. It created a closed circuit between us.

  Luckily, my right hand knew what my left was doing.

  I grabbed her arm with my other hand and held it there. “What do you want?”

  “A lot.”

  “What?”

  “In five years? A house on the lake and a kid or two. Short term?” She put my hand to her chest. I was never going to get a straight answer. She was crazy and fucking gorgeous and too smart for her own good. All those things at once.

  I was trying to put all the pieces together. She tilted her head, and I tilted mine. She leaned in a little, and I leaned with her as if I could hear her better. I was curious what she wanted short term because a clue to my fate was there.

  “Short term I’d just like to—”

  I leaned a little too far, brushing my phone off the railing. I grabbed for it. It bounced off my fingers, twisting in the air, off the back-porch overhang, spinning faster and away into the thorn bushes below.

  “Fuck!”

  I wanted to choke her, but it wasn’t her fault. It had been my elbow leaning too far left.

  I ran downstairs, past Catherine p
uttering in the kitchen, and stood at the edge of the thorn bed. It was bordered by a two-foot-high white picket fence. The thorns went to the top of it and not an inch past it.

  When I tried to part the brambles where it looked like the phone had fallen, I was rewarded with blood from two slashes.

  Harper was right behind me. “Let me call you!”

  “You know my number?”

  She slid her finger over the glass. Of course she knew my number. I leaned over the bed.

  “Is it ringing?” she asked.

  “Fuck!” It wasn’t ringing. There was no light. No buzz. No nothing. “Is it ringing on your end?”

  She put the speaker on. Half a ring then a cut to voicemail.

  “Shit.” It had hit the wall and the ground from the second story, but the way it had smacked the porch overhang had probably had an impact.

  “Maybe it just shut off when it fell?”

  Her optimism was fucking touching. I didn’t hold out much hope that it would ever work again.

  “I’m gonna hack the shit out of whoever stole my laptop,” I grumbled, scanning the bushes for an opening. “They won’t be able to buy a pack of gum again.” I walked around the perimeter, cursing myself for leaving it in the trunk.

  Having circumnavigated the entire area, I crouched, trying to catch a glimpse of my lifeline to my world. The branches were so thick I could barely see an inch into the depths.

  “Can we get in there?” I asked.

  “I guess I can see if one of the guys can come by?”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, probably?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was sincere. Couldn’t read her. Didn’t know if she was full of shit or if “the guys” weren’t available in the morning because no one did anything in a hurry. Didn’t matter. Every word out of her mouth was a lie.

  Fuck it.

  Wasn’t like it could ring anyway.

  “Tomorrow, phone or no phone, you tell me what you want. I’m not staying around here without clarity on what I have to do to get my code back. If you won’t give it to me, well, they can all laugh at me. I don’t care. I will walk right out onto the interstate if I think you’re wasting my time.”