by Jim Nelson
The insinuation made Max grow a tad sturdier. “We drink together." He added, "Most days. When his old Internet buddies show up with their money, then yeah, I help out. He takes them out on the water and I run the boat. But I'm not the 'help,' as you call it."
"Those days, you're his pilot."
"Pilot, steward, and mess cook."
"You carry his bags onto the boat?"
"Not his," he said. "I carry his buddy's bags on the boat."
"Make them their meals while you're on the water?"
"I told you I run the mess," he said.
"When his rich friends are around," I said, nodding. “Are you in his will?”
“George's will? Yeah. He’s a generous man—”
“I bet Gannon was in his will too."
"Of course he was." He shifted his weight. “Spit out what you're trying to say.”
I produced from my jacket pocket a balled handkerchief. I peeled back the corners to reveal a memex on a field of white cotton. I rested it on its side like a forgotten dreidel.
“It’s Gannon’s,” I told him. “It recorded the last hours of his life, right up to the last second.” I made one step closer. “When you pushed him over the cliff.”
Max stared at the limp fleshy thumbtack, jaw loose and shifted askew. To him, I was the amateur parlor magician who’d mysteriously produced the correct card.
“This memex tells a story,” I said. “Gannon lost his mind at the sight of Leigh with another man. This shiner is proof of that," I said, pointing at my face. "But Gannon didn’t go over the cliff by accident. Hands were on him. Someone from behind heaved him over.”
I wrapped up the memex and returned it to my pocket.
“Did you want Gannon’s girl?” I asked Max. “Or did you want Gannon’s share of one billion dollars?”
Max came at me with both hands out. He was young, he was strong, but he was directionless. I deflected him with a left to the throat and stepped aside. He fell to one knee heaving air, his cheek against a chintz padded chair armrest.
Steaming, I said to Max, “Get up. It's time for words with Ms. Chancellor. Then we make a call to George Drake.”
“You can’t,” Max managed to say.
His jaw was purpling. He talked now with a thick tongue. I felt no guilt.
“He’s out in his boat," Max lisped. "No one can reach him."
“When’s he scheduled to return?”
He spit blood-streaked spittle into his hand. "Three years he's been planning to take Gannon down the coast. Father-son boat trip, another one of his other goddamn fool plans to make good with his shitty brat. They were supposed to cruise down to Santa Barbara and spend a week fishing off the Channel Islands, just the two of them. And I would be pilot, steward, and mess cook.” Max shook his head in disgust. "Gannon didn't even know about it. Drake kept telling himself the day after next they'd patch things up for good. He could never screw up the courage to make the call. He kept waiting for Gannon to call him."
"You called Gannon," I said. "You told him Leigh and I were out at Lands End."
"Of course I did." His head hung loosely, bobbing like a float on the surface of a lake. "I wanted Leigh to see what a gorilla he was. I wanted her to see what kind of man she was getting ready to marry. A man with a wicked temper."
"But we were deep in a blue-out—"
"She remembers her blue-outs," he said. "Some of them, at least. I hoped she would remember Gannon blowing up in front of her."
"He might have attacked her."
"Well, she'd remember that even better," he said down to the rug. "Instead, he clocked you. She went to you and started apologizing for Gannon being impulsive. That's when I knew." He looked up at me. "Guys like Gannon never lose. People around Gannon will make all kinds of excuses for him, over and over." He hung his head again. "I got so worked up thinking about it, I rushed him. I was in the shadows. He didn't even see me coming."
"Were you trying to kill him?"
"I don't know," he said. He said it in such a way I believed him.
I crouched down to Max. I gave him a fresh handkerchief from my pocket. “And our boating trip? On the Edison? Why were you steering us away from Lands End?”
"Because it's dangerous to take a boat out there," he said. “Naw, I thought Gannon’s body would have floated out sea by then. I didn’t think we’d find him there.” He swallowed with the wadded kerchief pressed to his jaw.
I rose to full height. The room was in black shrouds. I weighed if this was really the right time. I'd run out of time, though.
"What now?" he said from the floor.
"I tell Ms. Chancellor what I know. She'll have to tell Drake herself. They can decide what to do with you."
He held a hand up to me. I helped him to his feet. He flopped into the chintz padded chair, defeated.
"So what were you after?" I asked him. “The girl? Or the billion dollars?”
Looking into the bloody wad of cloth, he muttered, “Why couldn’t it have been both?”
33.
It took the ferry crew and the Alcatraz dockworkers ten minutes to tame the bucking bronco. The storms had returned to San Francisco.
I stepped down the gangplank with gangly legs. I welcomed the firm solidity of the rock on the bay. Stevedores confirmed no cargo was aboard before retreating to the dry warmth of their lodge. I plodded up the hill to the asphalt strip where the road to the prison house began.
Standing at the head of the road was a familiar sight. Three gray men with gray beards waited for my arrival. All were protected from the elements by stiff London Fog overcoats and Dover Street umbrellas. A fourth shorter man stood behind them wearing a plum-colored suit and gripping a flimsy banana-cream umbrella. As I approached, I grew aware of the distinct weight I carried in my satchel. My fist clenched the satchel handle as though I was transporting my own soul.
“Mister Naroy,” Clift announced through the rain. “You’re here to fulfill our contract?” Clift stepped forward with a greedy impatience in his eyes. “Do you have it?”
I held up the satchel. "Right here."
Only then did I notice Clift holding a device in his free hand, a white plastic box the size of a deck of cards. A faint green light on its side indicated it was powered on. A quick mental check confirmed my memex was no longer connected to the Nexternet. If I had been broadcasting, the stream would have reached no one. His little white box smothered all signals in a sphere thirty feet in radius.
Clift motioned with his free hand. I turned about. The gangplank retracted and the mooring lines were cast off. The ferry began its ponderous return trip to San Francisco.
“That’s my ride home,” I said to Clift.
“The data brick,” Clift commanded.
“I want to talk about that first,” I said.
Brill tossed aside his banana-cream umbrella and lunged forward. He was on me like a dog. He wrestled me down to one knee in the mud, my back hunched over like a turtle's shell. With a steel paw on the back of my neck, he checked my pockets and patted me for ankle and belt holsters. I pushed him off and attempted to erect myself. He put his forearm under my chin, and with a quick pop, pushed my Adam’s apple to the back of my throat. I buckled and folded over and spurted out a long wet cough. Brill landed a left uppercut to the side of my abdomen for good measure. A ball of hot vomit came up and splashed into the mud.
“This will all be over soon enough,” Clift said to me.
Brill patted me down again, more thoroughly this time. Still buckled over from his cheap little move, he had easy access to the back of my neck. He put a surprisingly strong hand on my skull and held me in a ball. He took his goddamn sweet time prying out my memex. His thumbnail chewed up my skin like a Cub Scout training knife digging out wood chips from a hunk of particleboard. Satisfied, he retreated to Clift’s side with my memex in one fist and my equipment satchel in the other. Brill and I were both soaked by the storm, but only my hands were in a puddle of vomit. Only my
neck was dripping blood.
Brill accepted Clift’s umbrella, and in return, Clift accepted my memex. Brill stood on tiptoes to shelter his boss from the downpour. Clift turned over my memex in his fingers. “I believe this has been modified,” he said. “What say you?”
Dr. Marker adjusted his spectacles and peered over a scrunched liver-spotted nose. With a yellowed untended fingernail, he pointed at the chromium cap fitted atop the memex. “It’s a reversing neurotranmission multiplexer. I believe it’s known as ‘sidestreaming.’”
Clift slipped my memex into his breast pocket. He turned off the white dampening box and pocketed it as well. “Reading of minds is forbidden out here, Mr. Naroy."
I stared at Drs. Warwick and Marker. “You’re going to stand there and watch this?”
The two gray beards turned on their heels and tottered away under black umbrellas. They stepped in one of the waiting surreys, whose electric motor engaged and whisked them up the hill.
“Don’t complain about your treatment,” Clift said to me. “I could’ve held a gun on you while Brill checked you over.”
“Doesn’t seem your style,” I said with a voice made scratchy by the vomit’s acid.
“You're in the back with Brill.”
The three of us climbed in the other waiting surrey. It was manned by the same driver I’d sat beside in my prior visits to the island. He'd sat behind the wheel of a heated surrey and watched me take the beating of a lifetime.
Warwick and Marker were waiting for us in the prison cell I'd seen in my last visit. They stood astride the mammoth monolithic server. Across its chest pulsed cool blue lights, each pulse a single moment of the Internet’s past being delivered across the planet to some waiting soul. The gaping wound of a rectangular hole was outlined in bright red.
Brill fumbled to unlatch my satchel. Clift set aside his walking stick. He dipped his hands inside the satchel and produced the brick of hardened neuro-mimetic gel doped with mercury flakes. Clift cradled the data brick in both hands the way a sommelier would a dusty bottle of ancient French appellation. Before now, he had always bore a confident, almost cocky smile. Now it was a toothy, greedy grin. His eyes gleamed with the rapacity of a miner who’d just bludgeoned another miner for his claim. He handed the brick to the diminutive Brill, who cradled it more like an infant than a bottle of wine. Brill did not take time to appreciate it. Rather, he carried it to Drs. Warwick and Marker, both of whom approved without touching it.
Brill offered the brick to the red-outlined slot in the server's chest. He pushed until the butt of the brick was flush with the face of the server. The red outline dimmed momentarily. A neon blue outline formed in its place.
Dr. Warwick leaned toward the touchscreen mounted on the side of the machine. He adjusted his spectacles and murmured beneath his breath.
"No change," he finally announced. He tapped the touchscreen. "This data brick is empty. Not a single byte is stored on it."
Clift turned his head gradually and glared at me.
Brill removed the brick and turned it over for Dr. Warwick. "This has our stamp and serial number," Warwick announced. "This is our property. This is what we've sought, but it's completely blank."
"Explain it," Clift commanded.
"That's your brick," I said.
"Did you attempt to access it? One of your greasy hack jobs to get to the data within?" Clift's voice thundered against the distant walls of the prison house.
"That's your brick," I said. "If it's been wiped, it's not my doing."
Clift looked as though I'd fed him a bad oyster. Exhaling, he wiped back his slick thin hair with the palm of his hand. He found his walking stick. He leaned all his weight on it with both hands gripping the brass elephant ball atop the stick.
“Someone tried to vandalize our collective memory," he said. "You were hired to prevent it from happening.”
“Not much was vandalized,” I said. “A stupid film about male emasculation. An amateurish revenge fantasy.”
“It’s not so much about the relevance of any one memory,” Clift said. “It’s more about the completeness.”
“Like collecting every copy of Superman save for one issue no one cares about,” Dr. Marker said. “Your collection requires you have that one issue.”
“Will you shut the hell up about Superman," I said.
That made Brill step forward. He was only going to menace me, not take a swing. I was ready. I jabbed with my left, a fake-out, and popped him in the eye socket with a quick right. A crisp klohk echoed against the cell walls. He staggered back, stunned. He righted himself and came at me.
“Please.” Clift leveled his cane between us. “What's done is done."
Drs. Marker and Warwick shuffled out of the cell. Clift stood askew, leaning on his cane. His hands quivered and his stick quivered with them.
"We’ll be more comfortable in the lounge,” he said. "We have other matters to attend to."
Brill—plum suit soaked through—led us down Michigan Avenue to the guards’ station holding his swollen eye socket. The lounge was the room we had imbibed after-lunch aperitifs during my first visit. Everything appeared much as I’d last seen it. A beech library table of old-fashioned computer workstations ran the length of the center of the room. Past the windows, the San Francisco skyline appeared in miniature leafy and green, like a scale model carpeted with Astroturf. Drs. Warwick and Marker were already enwombed in the twin overstuffed club chairs at the far end of the lounge. A fire in the hearth cackled and popped.
Clift circled around to the serving side of the wet bar. From below, he produced a teardrop-shaped bottle of blue liquid. “Pharjé?” he said, managing a playful grin.
It was the kind of day where the offer of the Blue sounded like the only good word I was going to hear. Still, I don’t like being mocked to my face, and Clift was mocking me.
Brill busied himself about the other two gray beards already slumbering in the club chairs. With deft efficiency, he pulled down thick Indian blankets from a side hutch and spread them over the sleeping men. He hurried from one to the other, ensuring they were covered from chin to toe. He removed their shoes and neatly arranged them aside their chairs.
“I want my memories back,” I told Clift. "Your men stole them from my office."
He opened an ice bucket and took the miniature cubes by the handful, like a beer drinker pawing at a bowl of complimentary salted peanuts. He filled a crystal Old Fashioned glass with ice and poured a healthy slug of bourbon. I refused. He sipped from it.
“And what makes you think I have your memories?” he said, amused.
“My retention server also held my Wiki,” I said. “My whole life was on that machine.”
“Your ‘whole life,’” he said, again, mockingly. “You speak like you have only one."
Brill appeared with a platter of cheese wedges, wine crackers, dried fruits, and tree nuts, and half a baguette sliced into perfect disks. I’d not noticed him step out. He’d combed his hair in the interim as well. His damp black mop gripped his head like he’d plastered it down with bacon grease. His eye was beginning to purple. He set out the refreshments on the long table along with a bottle of port wine and thimble-sized crystal stemware. Clift whispered instructions to him. He briskly exited the room the way we’d entered.
It was lunchtime. I snacked on cheese and the nuts. I needed the energy.
“Cat’s got his tongue,” I said in Brill's absence.
“Actually, a Russian oilman has it,” Clift said. “Years ago, he and another hacker broke into the Russian's private network and stole some valuable data. Financials, drilling plans, pay-outs and pay-offs, and so on.” He heaved a deep theatrical sigh. “The Russian hounded them down, cut out their tongues, and poured hot solder into their memex sockets. Their punishment was perpetual silence, both in the physical and digital worlds. I purchased their services when I purchased the Russian oligarch’s collection of archived web pages.”
"You mean when
Drake purchased them," I said.
Clift halted. He gritted his teeth for a perceptible moment. "I purchased those archived web pages as an agent of George Drake," he said. "I used the transaction as an opportunity to purchase Brill and his brother's freedom on the side."
“Brother?”
“Thierry. My chef de cuisine.”
With a full mouth, I said, “Handy when the help can’t speak a word.”
"Although tragic when your chef can't taste his own fine cooking." He looked toward the door. “Ah, here we go.”
Brill returned to the room carrying an object wrapped in oilcloth. He flipped the ends aside to reveal an azure data brick, one much like the brick I'd dropped in the bay an hour earlier.
"Your memories," Clift announced with a flourish of his hand. "Transferred and preserved, intact down to the last neura."
The brick was damn cold. A dozen years of memories were frozen within its neuro-mimetic gel. It is not often a man has the chance to feel the heft and weight of his soul.
“When I saw you after tennis lessons, you'd already stolen this,” I said. “You knew everything I knew. You knew I was talking with Leigh Blessing and Gannon Chancellor. You knew Ellis Lotte had approached me to crack the safe in Dr. Lund’s office. You had all my memories on tap. When I was asking you questions—”
“I knew exactly what questions you were going to ask,” Clift said. "Of course, I was surprised to see you. Brill led me to think the rabbithole was going to leave you lobotomized. I thought all we would have to show for our efforts was what you had uncovered so far in your investigations. We learned something far more important from your retention server, Mr. Naroy: We learned who you really are.”
Clift produced a pocket notepad from his jacket pocket. He flipped to a page and read aloud.
“Dwight Legion Hamel,” he announced. “Born 1983 to Henry and Sayers Hamel. Raised in San Leandro, California. Enrolled at San Francisco State University as a computer science major. Dropped out at the end of his second year of undergraduate studies. Employee at a long list of Internet startups, all of which failed due to a lack of funding.”