The King

by Rick Soper

  Having the geeks there to egg him on helped Billy hone his computer skills. It gave him an audience – a stage from which to be in the spotlight, and through his geek friends Billy realized that he liked to be in the spotlight, very much. It was very different from the attention he got at home, where his parents loved him as best they could in between the multiple jobs it took for them to afford their small apartment, barely working cars, and subsistence-level food. They never understood just how smart Billy was, and their ignorance filled Billy with a bitter, seething resentment.

  That resentment, combined with the adulation of his geek friends, was the fuel that pushed him deeper and deeper into a world down the rabbit hole, a world composed solely of himself, locked in his room with his computers, writing code for hours on end – but it still wasn’t enough: part of him wanted to reach out, to connect. That led him to the idea that would evolve into PushThrough.

  Chapter 6

  Russell and Amber became more and more excited as the birth of their daughter approached. They spent hours talking to Amber’s pregnant belly, telling their daughter-to-be about everything that she could look forward to. They talked about the trips they would take, about their differing political views and the opinions that ultimately she would have to decide for herself. They talked about what she would learn, who she would be, and the world of possibilities that lay ahead of her.

  With every passing moment, Russell fell more in love with his wife. He couldn’t remember how he’d been able to breath, move, or function without her. Even as she swelled up he couldn’t keep his hands off of her. She was everything to him, and when he looked into her eyes he could tell that he meant the same to her. He didn’t give it a second thought when she asked him to be there in the delivery room. He couldn’t think of a greater honor than to be there by his wife’s side as she gave birth to the living embodiment of their shared love.

  At first everything seemed fine. The contractions came, the water broke, they rushed to the delivery room. Amber was excited, Russell was scared, and the doctors seemed a little bored. And then Amber’s hand crushed Russell’s as she screamed in pain. The doctors came to life, and a flurry of activity clustered around Amber, as Russell stood by, stunned. He heard words like “breech,” and “umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck,” and “emergency caesarian,” but all he could see was the terror in Amber’s eyes.

  The doctors cut into Amber’s stomach to unwrap the umbilical cord and pull baby London to safety, but in the process a blood vessel was clipped and blood started shooting into the air. The nurses tried to push Russell away from the delivery table, but Amber’s hand was latched onto his and he wouldn’t let go – he couldn’t, and he couldn’t look away as her blood puddled, on the ground below the table. He couldn’t look away as horror filled her green eyes, or as the eyes that had always been so bright and full of life faded and grew dull.

  Amber’s hand lost its grip and the nurse finally pushed him away so the crash cart could be brought forward. Her body convulsed as they hit her with the defibrillator, but her dead eyes never left his face. They shoved an adrenaline needle into her heart. They did CPR. Nothing worked, and the woman that Russell had come to love more than anything else in the world was gone. She died right in front of him while he stood by helplessly.

  He fell back against the wall of the delivery room as his legs slid out from under him. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks and he screamed, tearing at his hair, wanting nothing more than to join his wife in death.

  A nurse was standing next to him and when she reached down towards him he started to strike out... and then baby London was in his arms, her large, green eyes staring up at him as she smiled. He could see Amber in her face, and a little of himself, too. Here she was: the embodiment of the love he and Amber...had shared. The world contracted to a smiling, cherubic face, ten fingers and ten toes. In his arms he held their daughter, London. She was everything.

  Chapter 7

  Jon Stevens followed Emory Thomas, through the brass-framed glass doors and into the grand lobby of the Ritz, where they approached a group of cops, drinking coffee.

  Emory held out his FBI ID. “What’s going on?”

  One of the cops shrugged. “Stone’s security has the witnesses locked up down the hall.”

  Stevens shook his head as he stalked for the corridor; private security firms could be a tremendous pain in the ass. When he got to the entrance to the hallway, a large man who had the look of hired security blocked him.

  “You can’t come down here.”

  Stevens ignored him, and when the man reached for him Stevens grabbed his thick wrist and kicked him in the knee, reaching up with his other hand and pulling the man’s head down. The guard’s legs shot out and his head hit the carpeted hallway floor. Stevens twisted the guard’s arm behind him as he ground his knee into the man’s back, pulled out his cuffs, and locked him down.

  “Was that completely necessary?” Emory said.

  Stevens shrugged. “He was impeding a federal investigation.”

  Emory shook his head. “You could have just showed him your ID.”

  “I was making a point.” Stevens threw open the door at the end of the hall. Inside, three men were talking to a woman at a conference table, two standing, and the other sitting beside her.

  The sitting man bolted upright. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  Emory put an arm across Stevens’ chest before he could do anything rash and pulled out his ID. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I’m doing my job.”

  Stevens stepped forcefully into the room. “And getting in the way of mine.”

  Emory stepped past him, putting himself between Stevens and the man at the table, still holding up his badge. “This is now a federal investigation. If you impede it in any way you will be arrested.”

  The man shook his head, clearly irritated but also resigned. “Okay, okay,” he said. “We all want the same thing, here.”

  Emory nodded over his shoulder towards the door and the men walked past them and out into the hall, leaving them alone with the woman.

  “Hey.” The man who had been in charge, called them out into the hall, where they saw him leaning over the guard, who was still cuffed on the floor. “Can you cut this guy loose?”

  Stevens frowned, but unlocked the cuffs and let the other man get to his feet. Emory held out his hand. “I’m Emory Thomas,” he said, “and this is Jon Stevens.”

  The man’s eyes immediately went to Stevens, as if he were seeing him for the first time. “Stevens,” he said, nodding. “I’ve heard of you.” Then he turned back to Thomas. “I’m Blake Fitzpatrick. Black Hawk Security.”

  Stevens’ frown deepened. “Black Hawk? As in huge government contracts, Afghanistan, Iraq, and South America Black Hawk?”

  “And corporate security Black Hawk, as well.”

  Stevens grinned. “Looks like your security had a few holes.”

  Fitzpatrick scowled. “Stone is what we call a difficult client.”

  “Meaning?” Emory said.

  “Meaning we were hired by PushThrough – the corporation – and Billy has never been happy about us protecting him.”

  “Why?” Stevens said.

  Fitzpatrick rolled his eyes. “He thinks we cramp his style. Make him look too ‘corporate.’” Fitzpatrick ticked his fingers up in air quotes.

  “So he’s done this before?” Stevens said.

  Fitzpatrick nodded. “Yes, but this is different.” He nodded towards the door to the room they’d just come out of. “They both got tasered, but she saw him go down.”

  Stevens nodded. “And he wouldn’t go as far as to make it look like he got hit with a Taser to get away from you?”

  “Nope. He would be more likely to hire a helicopter to meet him at the helipad on the top of the hotel, or have a luxury car dropped off in the hotel parking lot for him to sneak away in. That’s more his M.O.”

  Emory nodde
d. “And even Stone wouldn’t be stupid enough to miss a highly publicized congressional appearance.”

  Fitzpatrick shook his head. “He was looking forward to it. He knows he’s smarter than any congressman. He wanted to make fools of them.”

  “They do that on their own,” Stevens said.

  Emory tried to give Stevens a look that said that while he might agree with the sentiment, that wasn’t the kind of thing government agents should say in public. “Okay,” he said, turning back to Fitzpatrick, “what is your current threat level?”

  Fitzpatrick looked at his people for a second, as if considering how much he should divulge, then shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary. We get a number of crackpot threats every day, usually to the effect that they hate him because he’s rich, they think he’s spying on them with the PushThrough software, they don’t like the way he looks, and so forth. Pretty standard stuff for anybody in the public spotlight.”

  “What about corporate competition?” Emory said.

  “Tasering him? Unlikely.”

  “You think so?” Stevens said.

  “We work for Stone, but also some of the competition. They steal assets – employees – and they try to steal secrets, but the competition plays out in the media and feeds sales for both sides, and the possible scandal...it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “It’s like sports,” Emory said. “Without the opposing team, there’s nothing to watch.”

  “Okay,” Stevens said, “So what are you thinking here?”

  Fitzpatrick frowned. “If we knew, we’d already be pursuing it.”

  “And getting in our way.”

  Fitzpatrick looked at him defiantly. “Look. This is our ass here. We’re going to take a butt-kicking in the press when this gets out.”

  “And you could lose some of your government contracts.”

  Fitzpatrick gritted his teeth. “Maybe. We care about our reputation. What of it?”

  “What have you done, so far?”

  Once again, Fitzpatrick looked at his other men, clearly torn about how much to reveal and how much to hold back. After a few minutes he took a long, deep breath. “We have people working back from the hooker’s people and through Craigslist, trying to track down the IP address of whoever took out the ad.”

  “Okay,” Emory said, ignoring Stevens’ pointed look, “Give me what you’ve got so far. We can have warrants pulled within the hour.”

  “You’re cutting us out?” Fitzpatrick said, his lips tight.

  Emory shook his head. “It’ll be better if we work together as much as possible.”

  Emory knew that Stevens would have liked to have taken Fitzpatrick and thrown him through the glass doors, but there was more than one way to skin a cat. Keeping Fitzpatrick around meant keeping another channel open for information, and it was looking like they might need every shred of it they could get to find Stone.

  “I’m going to talk to the girl,” Stevens said as he turned on his heels, leaving Fitzpatrick and Emory to work out the details of tracking the IP.

  Inside, the girl was sobbing into her hands. Stevens came over and sat in the chair next to her and rested a hand on her shoulder.

  “Look,” he said, “you’re not in trouble.”

  “But I…I...”

  She didn’t look like prostitutes that he’d dealt with in the past. This woman was stunningly beautiful. She had soft green eyes, perfectly cut blond hair, and was dressed like she was going to attend the Governor’s Ball. She was crying too hard. Most prostitutes were jaded – nothing could faze them. She was either new to the game, or she’d been shielded from the darker side of the life.

  He imagined the men who had just left, strong-arming her, and gently cupped her shoulder. “Look,” he said softly, “we don’t care about what you were doing there. You’re not going to be arrested for prostitution. In fact, we’ll go out of our way to keep you out of the public eye.”

  “Really?” She looked up at him with a stunned expression, as if he’d thrown her a lifeline.

  Stevens nodded. “No matter what those other men told you, the main thing they want to avoid is for it to be publicly known that their client was taken on their watch because they let him take off with someone – a woman – they didn’t know.”

  She fell onto his shoulder, crying with relief. “Thank you,” she said, “oh...thank you, thank you...” Her touch made him feel uncomfortable, but he resisted the urge to push her away.

  “All right,” he said, still using the same, gentle voice. “Now that that’s out of the way, I need you to answer some questions for me. Do you think you can do that?”

  She sat up straight and started to pull herself together. “Okay,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me what happened in that room.”

  She sniffled, bit down on her lip, and shifted in her seat. “We walked into the room and I heard this pop, and then he started...shaking. I turned towards him and then I heard another pop, and everything went black.”

  “Did you see where the pops came from?”

  She shook her head, as if afraid to disappoint him. “I didn’t see...”

  Before she could start crying again he reached out and touched her arm. “What did you hear?”

  She put her hand to her forehead as she struggled for control, hesitated, as if remembering. “They came from behind us.”

  “Describe the room as you walked in.”

  “I don’t know...it was like any hotel room...”

  “There were details,” Stevens said. “Just tell me anything you remember.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know...there was a door, and then a hallway with a bathroom and then it opened up into this–”

  “How far down the hallway did you get?”

  “Not very far–” she stopped suddenly “–he was in the bathroom!”

  Stevens nodded and smiled. “Well done!”

  The realization of how close she’d been to the man who had taken Stone overwhelmed her and she started to cry again. Stevens reached out and patted her shoulder. “You did good,” he said as he stood up and headed for the door. Emory Thomas was still outside, and turned to him as he closed the door gently behind him.

  “What did you get?” Thomas said.

  Stevens pointed up. “We need to get a forensic team up into the bathroom.” He nodded at Fitzpatrick, standing behind Emory. “Then we need to find out who Billy Stone has hurt badly enough to warrant this kind of revenge.”

  “Revenge?” Fitzpatrick said, his face showing his disbelief.

  Stevens frowned. “The girl. The handyman. The Taser. It’s all very specific, very personal. This is someone – a person or persons – wanting to get their hands on Stone.”

  “For what?” Fitzpatrick said.

  Stevens looked up at him, wondering how much he was still holding back. “Nothing good.”

  Chapter 8

  Billy Stone was accepted to Stanford when he was sixteen years old, and he could have been accepted earlier. At fifteen he took the GED, just to be finished with high school and to get away from the bullying, but his family couldn’t afford the equipment – the computers – he needed to move forward. He didn’t want to cut lawns with his father and he’d aced the SATs, but what really got him noticed was hacking into the top ten tech teachers’ computers and displaying the message BILLY STONE SHOULD BE IN YOUR CLASS SOON. His bravado – and the irritation and fascination it engendered – got him personal interviews, composed in no small part of Billy being grilled by potential future instructors on what he had done, and how. It was after one such interview that he got accepted – with a full ride – to Stanford.

  It was the kind of attention that Billy had craved all of his life.

  But Stanford was a shocking experience to Billy. In his hometown, he’d been a big fish in a small pond – the smartest kid in any class he ever took – but at Stanford, he was surrounded by people who were just as smart, if not smarter than he was
. At first, he was intimidated, until one of his fellow students – Josh Bond – outed him by asking if he was the student that had broken into the professor’s computer. He was, and the notoriety that that gave him provided the ego boost he needed, as well as an in with the other, older students.

  In college, Billy was introduced to drinking and sex. Billy had always been interested in girls, but when every kid around him was spending every moment chasing women, that interest became a need. Unfortunately, most of the girls at Stanford weren’t interested in a skinny little sixteen year old. Billy needed a solution, and he came up with it the only way he knew how: with computers.

  Billy wrote PushThrough based on an algorithm he had developed that cross-referenced the information on the web about purchases, searches, and downloads, and correlated it within a geographical area to create logical groups within which connections could be made. His initial intention in creating the program was to impress other guys while simultaneously introducing himself to girls – to foster a connection before they knew what he looked like.

  At least, that had been the plan...

  What he didn’t count on was that in creating PushThrough, he had created a continually growing organism that required his constant attention. Instead of meeting girls, he was spending the majority of his time in his darkened dorm room, weaving code, fixing problems, and building improvements to the servers needed to support the program.