Black Swan

by Chris Knopf

  "Ridiculous," said Fey.

  "I'd think it was you, Christian, but then I'd have to believe that you're pretending to be your son."

  "If you know where the hacker's been, why can't you fix what he's done?" I asked.

  Hammon looked unhappily familiar with that question.

  "If we could do that maybe we would have done that by now," he said, stringing out the words.

  "Well, better get back on it, Hammon," I said, "because Axel's off the island and out of your reach."

  He sat silently, looking at me.

  "Get Fey and the women out of here," he said to no one in particular. "Bring them upstairs."

  Anika didn't move.

  Jock walked over to her.

  "Don't touch me," she said, but left the room behind Del Rey and her father, followed by 't Hooft.

  Hammon continued to stare at me, trying to either read my mind or torture me to death with his devastating gaze.

  "The question isn't whether Jock and Pierre can extract the information we need from you. It's when, and how much unpleasantness will be involved," he said.

  "Who're you, Sidney Greenstreet? Where's your fez? You've got the facts. Axel's off the island in a place you can't get to. So that's that. Right now you're still ahead. Except for a little dustup, which you can blame on me, you haven't done anything illegal. That's provable, anyway. You can walk away from this clean. Go back and put a case together against Axel, if he's really the hacker, and see if the courts can compel him to give you the patch. Delay release and get a little egg on your face. So what?"

  Hammon didn't seem to be listening, or if he was, unable to fully process what I was saying. He put his fingers up to

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  his forehead as if calling on a higher power to instruct him on what next to do. It must have been forthcoming, because his change in tactic was nearly visible on his face. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees, took a deep breath and said, "There's a covenant. We have to release Q1 or we'll be in default. Revenue from 4.0 is the collateral. They'll take the company."

  As Anika made clear, people could go on the Internet and find old business articles that analyzed my fall from the heights. A favorite theme portrayed me as a technocrat with little head for business. They were right. I never cared at all about the numbers, and only dealt with financial stuff when I was trying to save my divisional budgets from the hyenas in other parts of the company. But even I found it hard to imagine Subversive would have bet the whole company on a risky venture like 5.0.

  He read that on my face.

  "It wasn't just the development costs," he said. "Other investments were made. There's an issue of liquidity."

  I chewed on that for a while. Then I thought to myself, aha. Then I laughed.

  "You bet the company's equity and it all went off a cliff. And nobody knows," I said. "It would kill the stock. You wouldn't be able to get credit from a loan shark. You're dead man walking."

  "No, mon ami, you are," said Pierre.

  "Would you mind muzzling that poodle?" I said to Hammon.

  Pierre shot a hand at my face, but this one I managed to dodge, which threw him off balance, causing him to fall against the wall. Jock was on his way over when Hammon stood up in front of me.

  "Cut the shit, boys. They'll be plenty of time for that," he said.

  For what? I thought.

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  Pierre tried to look like it was a trifling matter, but you could see embarrassment shadowing his face. I grinned, happy it was him and not Jock who'd thrown the punch. Now I knew who in the room was invincible and who wasn't.

  Hammon sat down again, pulling his chair closer to mine.

  "I'm telling you these things because I need you to understand how serious I am. I need the boy's patch. We've already been through the computer in his room. There's nothing there, so it's all on his laptop. He can send it to Subversive from anywhere. You need to tell him to do that. He needs to know that if he doesn't, when we're done with you, we'll move on to Anika."

  It was my turn to stare at him in silence. He didn't look too good. The shot to the face had added color here and there, but also taken it away. His eyes were red and watery, and dancing with zealous intensity. Anika was right. The man had been driven a little crazy, but not for the reason she thought. Greed can feel like a jolt of cocaine to the brain. Fear more like the insertion of a long, cold knife.

  "Was everyone in on the bad deals?" I asked.

  He licked his lips, lingering for a moment on the red split beneath his nose. He shook his head.

  "No," he said. "I've told you enough."

  "Come on, Hammon," I said. "You want me to cooperate, I need to know the whole story."

  "Wait outside," he said to his boys, without taking his eyes off me. They went out to the lobby, closing the heavy glass door to the bar behind them.

  "Removing the boy from the island was a very foolish thing to do," he said to me.

  "I don't know about that. If you had your hands on him I'd probably be dead by now. You've got a way to keep the Feys quiet, but not me."

  "Maybe not if you care about the girl. She'd certainly rather her father not end up in jail."

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  I saw the rough flow scheme I'd drawn that night in the woods on the way to snatch Axel Fey. The columns of knowns, and unknowns. I drew another box in my head, and connected it to the others with an imaginary arrow.

  "Fey made the bets," I said. "On his own, secretly, without approval. He had access to the funds through the corporate data systems, which he controlled. The money's tied up in investments that have lost all their value, but are still on the books, because neither the investment house nor the investors can afford the write down. The money's gone, but no one knows it, not yet, anyway."

  It took Hammon a while to respond, so accustomed was he to never uttering the fearsome truth.

  "Sanderfreud discovered the scheme. Fey would sweep all our available cash and working capital out of their normal accounts and put the money into auctions and overnights. Then he'd sweep it all back again, taking the earnings and covering the movement by altering the account records. One night, for some insane reason, he put everything in a fund that was already in free fall, though apparently he didn't know that. The next day it froze up completely and hasn't thawed since. Such a thing had never happened before, but we now know such things are more than possible, they're inevitable."

  The dominoes were all in place. If N-Spock didn't release when it was supposed to, the bank would call their loan, which they couldn't cover because all their assets were tied up in a worthless, illiquid fund.

  Then another thought occurred to me.

  "How did you buy out Fey? With what?" I asked.

  Hammon finally had something to feel happy about.

  "We didn't. We just said we did. Besides getting him to cough up the returns he made on our money, we have his name on a piece of paper releasing all his holdings back to the company, and a non-compete that banishes him from

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  all software development for ten years. He won't starve, but any current or future equity he might have had in Subversive has gone poof. And rightly so, you'll have to agree."

  I did, on the face of it.

  "Okay, you've got Fey, though on the other hand, he's got you. He'll go to jail, but with the truth out, Subversive could still go down the tubes, release or no release."

  "No," he said, before my words were hardly out of my mouth. "5.0 is a game changer. The banks will line up to cover our capital needs. The stock will soar, easily replenishing our cash reserves."

  He may or may not have been right about that, but what mattered was he believed he was. Like all entrepreneurs, his focus was on the goal, and his powers of self-delusion were all-consuming. Like Fey, he wasn't afraid to place his bets and pretend there could never be a negative outcome.

  "You think I'll go along with all this to save Fey becaus
e of his daughter," I said.

  "That's your play, Acquillo. Any idiot can see you're banging her. There's no other reason for you to still be here. So here's your chance. Axel will do anything she tells him to, and she doesn't want her daddy to go down. That's the deal. Make it happen, or I'll stop trying to make this easy and just turn everything over to Jock and Pierre."

  I let that sit for a moment, deliberating. Then I said, "I can't contact him until we're back online. I need a phone or at least Internet access."

  Immediately his face lightened, a hint of triumph passing through those hungry eyes.

  "Wise decision," he said, moving his chair back out of my immediate space. I took the opportunity to attempt standing, which went far better than I thought it would. Even the floor seemed inclined to stay put.

  "Mind if I get a drink?" I asked. "They say it's the best thing for a concussion."

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  "Knock yourself out," said Hammon, enjoying what he thought might have been a joke.

  I hobbled over to the bar while Hammon asked Jock and Pierre to come back into the room. Pierre glowered at me, my efforts to build on our common Gallic heritage apparently gone for naught. Jock, on the other hand, looked loose and at ease, almost bored. I asked if I could pour a drink for anyone and Jock said a beer would be great.

  "While it's still halfway cold."

  It was early even for me, but I had to start moving around to assess the damage and test my own faculties. I poured a long vodka on a handful of ice from the rapidly melting ice bins.

  I cracked Jock's beer and he came over to retrieve it. We clinked glasses.

  "Jesus Christ," said Pierre.

  I downed some of the vodka, which had a salubrious effect on my nerves, but did little for my shaky insides. I asked Hammon if I could go lie down. He said why not, and told Jock to bring me upstairs and put me with Anika in her attic room.

  He followed me to the second floor, then let me climb the narrow staircase to the attic on my own, closing the door behind me with an easy warning not to try anything stupid. When I reached the attic, Anika rushed over to me and grabbed my head, using her thumb to pull open my eyelid. She stared into my pupil.

  "Do you know what you're looking for?" I asked.

  "I want to see if you're still in there." I clinked the ice in my glass of vodka. "I guess you are," she said, looking down at the glass.

  I pulled free from her grasp and sat down on the bed next to Eloise. The cat got up and moved a few feet away, looking at me with unguarded apprehension.

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  "I'm okay," I said to Anika. "Just a little wobbly. That kid can hit."

  "Derrick has really lost his mind," she said. "I'm getting frightened. I don't know what to do."

  She wore her Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, shorts and bare feet. With only two windows at opposite ends of the room to let in natural light, supplemented by a pair of electric lanterns, the attic felt cheerless and exhausted. She scooped up Eloise and sat down next to me on the bed, her legs straight out in front so her heels dangled over the edge. The cat looked wary, but eventually succumbed to Anika's gentle stroking and curled up in her lap.

  "You could start by telling me the truth once in a while. Just for a change of pace. See how it feels."

  "What a terrible thing for you to say to me," she said, less forcefully than her words would indicate.

  "If a man acts as if everything a woman tells him is true, even though he knows it isn't, mostly, does that still make him a chump?" I asked.

  "I don't like the word chump. Sounds passive, but it's really aggressive."

  "Hammon told me Subversive lost a lot of money on bad investments. The only way to get working capital was to put N-Spock 4.0 up for collateral, with the loan callable if

  5.0 doesn't release when it's supposed to next year. Did you know that?" She looked into my eyes again, in a clinical way. "I guess your brain is still working all right," she said. "You must have a very hard head."

  "In a manner of speaking. So tell me."

  She leaned forward, gripping her legs at the knees, and spoke at the floor.

  "Do you believe everyone has a secret life?" she asked.

  "No. Most people don't."

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  "Right. The ones who do are always the least likely. 'I can't believe it, he was such a quiet unassuming guy,' they say. Like, duh. When is conventional wisdom going to catch up with reality? It's always the quiet unassuming guys who go on shooting rampages. Or steal millions of dollars from their companies."

  "Your father. I know all about it. Hammon told me."

  She smiled an intense, manufactured smile. A dark frown would have been less disturbing.

  "So you know 5.0 wasn't the only thing he was working on in our basement."

  I almost felt a faint twinge of feeling for Derrick Hammon. He wakes up one morning to discover his billion-dollar company is broke, and though it's still a going concern, revealing its fragile condition could easily cause the whole thing to unravel. His only way out is a project controlled by the very guy responsible for the financial disaster, a project that should have successfully ridden to completion, but is now very much in doubt.

  "But why would your brother want to sabotage 5.0? Why bring on the wrath of Derrick Hammon? What's in it for him and why did he think he'd get away with it?"

  She leaned back against the wall again and started raking her fingers through her jet black hair, pausing occasionally to check the ends, as I'd seen her do several times before.

  "He's weird. I don't know why he does what he does."

  "He told me your mother is still alive."

  She dropped the strand of hair and turned toward me.

  "He did? The dork. Okay, she's alive, but not to us. She left right after Axel was born and never looked back. I don't think my father noticed right away. 'Oh Daddy, Mommy's gone.' 'Don't you see Daddy's busy? Be a good little girl and bring me a sandwich.' It was easier to pretend she actually died. What difference does it make to you?"

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  I'd been trying to ignore it, but the sound of the wind outside was gradually increasing along with its velocity. I got up and went over to the window. The trees were swirling in bursts of furious movement, steadily giving up the last of their autumn leaves. It was barely midday, but the cloud cover enshrouded the island in a dank and blood- less gloom.

  Instead of sitting back on the bed, I rolled the office chair over from the workstation.

  "What did you do with my backpack?" I asked.

  She looked puzzled.

  "It must still be in the car," she said. I probably looked disappointed. "It isn't?"

  "I saw you open the passenger side door while I was getting my ass kicked. Jock was doing the kicking and 't Hooft was enjoying the show. You had plenty of cover."

  She looked away with what might have been a pout, it was hard to see in the dim light and through that veil of black hair.

  "It's in the bushes along the front of the house. Near the corner," she said. "You should be thanking me."

  "I should be doing something. I'm not sure what."

  "I know what you should be doing, but you keep turning me down."

  I finished off my drink and discovered what I most wanted to do was lie down on the floor and go to sleep. Though a murmur of fear still cycled through a remote region of my nervous system, it wasn't enough to counter an aching exhaustion that pulled on my limbs and jammed up my brain. I slid off the chair and sprawled out across the Persian rug that covered the attic floor. I asked Anika if I could borrow a pillow.

  "Kick me in about two hours," I said.

  "What happens then?" she asked.

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  Eloise jumped down off the bed and walked up to my face, brushed my cheek with her whiskered muzzle, then strolled away. I wondered what she thought of my odds. I knew what the neurologist would say. Not good. He'd shown me an fMRI of my brain, which was a beau
tifully colorful thing, though not to him. He'd point out all sorts of blotches and patterns in shades he didn't like. I'd barely try to follow what he was saying. It wasn't worth it, since there wasn't anything I could do about it. Instead, I'd just looked at how pretty my brain looked all lit up like a psychedelic Rorschach test, or one of my daughter's art projects.