Forgive Me: A Xanadu Marx Thriller

by Joshua Corin

  “So call it a leap of faith.”

  Chapter 38

  Konquist did have faith in Xana.

  But he insisted on accompanying her just the same.

  As he put it: “There’s faith…and then there’s the other thing.”

  “Negligence?” she offered.

  Konquist groaned. He wasn’t sure if that was what he meant to say, and he sure as hell didn’t like hearing that word out of her, especially as they were about to do what they were about to do.

  First, of course, they had to get there, but that was easy enough. Like most trips in Atlanta, they simply had to go from one parking garage to another. Once there, they meandered on foot toward their destination. They both knew the way.

  Suite 206 was as they remembered it: intentionally bland, forcefully anonymous.

  Xana went straight to the receptionist’s window.

  “Hi, there,” she said. “I need to speak with Aaron Solo.”

  With all the enthusiasm of a piece of Tupperware, the receptionist handed her a clipboard.

  Xana smiled, took the clipboard, and did not move. She held the clipboard in the window opening.

  The receptionist glanced up at her. She was blocking him from being able to shut his partition.

  “Please step back,” he said.

  “Make me,” she said.

  The receptionist glanced past her. At Detective Konquist.

  Then the receptionist picked up his phone and dialed an extension and with quiet desperation asked for assistance.

  Shortly thereafter, the office door swung open, and there stood Aaron Solo. Ta-da.

  “I’m afraid you’ll need to leave,” he said. He spoke with slightly more animation than his receptionist, although that might have been the small smile on his face, an expression which anyone over the age of two years old would have recognized as you-can’t-touch-me-and-I-know-it.

  Oh, Aaron. If only he knew that to some people—like, for example, Xanadu Marx—a look of smug overconfidence was not a threat. It was an invitation to dance.

  She took a step toward him. She brought the clipboard with her.

  “Do you see Detective Konquist behind me? He’s here to make sure I follow the spirit of the law. If he wasn’t here, I might take this clipboard and slap you with it repeatedly in the face.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Buddy, we visited a guy this morning that I hit so hard a while back that he needed a new nose.”

  “It’s true,” volunteered Konquist.

  “But here’s your problem, Aaron. You’re not playing nice with others. The police want to search your records so they can make sense of a double homicide and you said no. Now eventually, you’re going to lose in court. The law’s on our side.”

  “Then we wait for the judge.”

  “See,” Xana took another step forward, “by then, it might be too late. Someone might be out there right now, ready to commit future acts of violence, and you know they are, and you’re allowing it to happen. You’re aiding and abetting a felony. And here I am with this clipboard. Do you know what clipboards are made out of? Wood fibers that have been compressed so tightly that they have a density of fifty pounds per square foot. In other words, they don’t break. There’s a factory over near Augusta where they make them.”

  “You stop right there or I’ll—”

  “What? Call the cops? The cops are already here. But ask yourself this. You’re all about connections here, right? Two people are dead, and the connection between them is you. Plus, there’s the aiding and abetting. And the fact that you’re already on the record for being a dick to the police, making them go before a judge. So how confident are you that Detective Konquist is going to stop me from taking this high-density piece of wood and using it to see just how flat I can make your pretty, pretty face?”

  Aaron Solo’s small smug smile had long since left the premises. Now his eyes were darting, from Xana to Konquist to Xana to the clipboard to Konquist. He made a choice.

  He took a step back behind the threshold of the door and then tugged at the door to shut them out.

  Oh how he tugged. It was adorable. Too bad the door was pinioned, much like most doors in most offices, so it wouldn’t slam every time someone let go of its handle but instead gently, lazily closed with a hiss.

  Xana had plenty of time to close the distance between them.

  So Aaron let go of the door and he ran. They always ran. Aaron ran, predictably, toward his own office.

  Now others were peeking out from their cubicles and rooms. Xana paid them no mind. She stalked toward Aaron.

  No one tried to stop her. After all, this woman was only carrying a clipboard. And in all likelihood very few of his day-to-day employees were even clued into their place of business’s darker dealings. They probably suspected they worked at one of the most wonderful companies in America.

  Aaron shoved at his own office door, but this amounted to the same sad outcome. When Xana was within ten feet, he retreated farther, now behind his glass desk.

  The door finally shut behind Xana. They were alone. Outside, Detective Konquist could be heard calmly implementing crowd control. He hadn’t rushed to be in the room with them. He did have faith in her.

  Aaron Solo picked up his succulent and raised it as a weapon of sorts.

  “If you throw that at me,” Xana said, “you’ll be unarmed. And I’ll still have this lovely clipboard.”

  “Go—away!”

  “Here’s the thing, Aaron. Remember how I said you were aiding and abetting future acts of violence? Well, I know that one of those acts of violence is meant to be against me. I know it and you know I know it. You knew when I, of all people, showed up here Wednesday morning. You knew it and you said nothing. And that pisses me off. So here’s the first thing I want you to do. I want you to apologize.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve been going around, all day, trying to make amends to everyone I might have wronged. Trying to figure out whom from my past you might be working with to come after me. Maybe even convince them to change their mind. But it occurred to me that, for all my bad shit, and it’s a long list, for everything I am guilty of, I am not a murderer. So you apologize to me. Then we can get to business.”

  Aaron frowned, then sighed, then put the succulent down on his desk, then folded himself into his chair, all the while shrinking inch by inch by inch.

  “It’s not me you want to talk to,” he told her.

  “That’s too bad, because it’s you who’s here.”

  “No…you don’t understand…there’s a Chinese wall! My wife and I…my ex-wife…”

  “You handle the legit side—and she handles the other stuff?”

  Aaron deflated to his smallest size. “I’m sorry.”

  “You must at least be able to access her files.”

  “If I had to, I could, but…”

  Oh.

  Damn it.

  Pride, once again, had led Xanadu to destruction. She just had to come with the detectives Wednesday morning, didn’t she? If it had only been the detectives, then the Serendipity Group would have been concerned, but they might not have panicked, but because she had been with them…

  “She wiped the server,” said Xana, “didn’t she?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “All this posturing with the lawyers…fighting the subpoena…it bought her just enough time to cover her tracks.”

  “I—”

  “Aaron.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s in my best interest not to know!”

  “You think that matters? You think that will save you from being charged as an accomplice?”

  Aaron shook his head, not in denial but in utter and complete helplessness.

  Whereupon Xana fed Aaron his succulent.

  First she set the clipboard on the desk. She waited until Aaron relaxed. She saw it in his eyes, in his shoulders. The easing of tension. In his jaw. His lips parted. That was w
hen she grabbed the succulent by its pot and shoved it, plant first, toward his open maw. She got it all the way to his uvula before he started making choking sounds. Whatever dirt didn’t tumble down into his throat tumbled down his immaculately pressed shirt. Xana retracted the succulent, placed it back on the desk, and then watched as Aaron continued to choke and cough. His hands went to his neck. He spat out gobs of wet dirt…

  Except not really.

  True, she wanted to shove that plant down his throat. Every instinct inside her screamed to attack this pathetic man. But she didn’t. Causing him pain would, at this point, accomplish nothing but give her a small amount of satisfaction, and then what was she? A sadist? It certainly would not have been acting within the spirit of the law.

  And so Xana shook her head in disgust, turned to walk away.

  “Wait,” said Aaron. “Please. There is something, I think. I know that some of the former…some of the people she has…chosen to receive…retribution…the people like you…they’ve begun to retaliate. They hacked our system. And that was before the server was wiped. She’s trying to find out who they are.”

  “How?”

  A knock on the door. Detective Konquist entered. He gave Aaron a once-over, probably to make sure the man was still in one piece, and then whispered into Xana’s ear, “You’re never going to believe what Chau just found on a computer at Ross Berman’s place of business.”

  Chapter 39

  Nanita Willard hated the word hacker.

  For one, it had the word hack in it, and Nanita was no hack. She was an artist. An infiltration artist. Could hacks slice into the county records and in five minutes erase the tax burden of every resident over the age of seventy-five? Well, maybe, but they’d do it out of personal gain. Nanita Willard did it to see if it could be done. She had been stuck at home with the flu. Her first major hack…er…infiltration. Not bad for a ten-year-old kid fighting a 102-degree fever, huh?

  And she had been smart about it too. Some hackers—ugh—boasted their accomplishments. Clever enough to breach an industrial firewall and then stupid enough to write about it on social media? No, thank you. She didn’t even tell any of her IRL friends. She loved them, but they were n00bs, and n00bs couldn’t be trusted. She did feel compelled to share her conquest with an assortment of infiltration artists she hung out with online, but there was little risk in that. They were all so paranoid that they wouldn’t even chat unless they were sure the room had no sniffers or trackers, and they employed a rigorous double-blind confirmation algorithm to keep The Man from infiltrating their infiltration clique.

  Nanita had covered her tracks so well…until a few days later, when her father borrowed her PC to surf for some porn. It was his turn with the flu, and he had waited until his wife had left with Nanita and her little brother to drive them to the bus stop, and then he’d crept into her room, even though he was the only one home, and positioned himself on Nanita’s tiny pink chair by her tiny pink writing desk, which he himself had built, or at least assembled from ready-made parts, and he had opened her browser and, on a whim, checked her history, not expecting to find anything unsavory—she was ten!—and besides, the PC had a child lock on it.

  His first unsettling discovery was that the child lock had been disabled.

  His second unsettling discovery was that her browser history had been cleared.

  Now inflamed by curiosity, Gary Willard probed his daughter’s computer further. He worked freelance IT (when he wasn’t flu-ridden). He knew exactly how to dig, and where. It didn’t take him long to find the hidden files and the software Nanita had used to breach Fulton County’s server network. He had no idea what his daughter had done with the software, but its very presence raised so many clanging alarms in his mind that he almost, right then and there, called his wife.

  But he didn’t call her.

  He did, however, erase Nanita’s hard disk and reinstall its operating system. When she came home from school and turned on her computer, she predictably confronted him.

  “Have you been messing with my computer?”

  By now, Gary was back in bed. This flu had rendered him into days-old shit—but not so much that he had lost his mental faculties. He was careful in his interrogation. He didn’t want to put her instantly on the defensive. He didn’t want to condemn her actions outright. Any condemnation of the child’s actions, whatever they were, would be misinterpreted as a condemnation of her as a human being. He had been a father long enough to know how to thread this needle. And so, they talked. And no, she was not forthcoming…at first. But when he confessed to her that he had done something similar a long time ago, she opened up. In the end, she promised never to do it again.

  He didn’t entirely believe her, but what were his options? She needed a PC for school. He could monitor and restrict her usage, but she would find a workaround. She had inherited his IQ—as well as his myopia—her eyeglass prescription at age ten was identical to the prescription he’d had at age ten—but at least she had her mother’s dark Brazilian hair and skin rather than his pasty, grungy package.

  Gary didn’t tell his wife about Nanita’s transgression. That had been part of the deal he’d struck with his daughter.

  How Ross Berman learned about it was roundabout. He and Gary had kept in touch online, and when Ross needed some IT work for the charity he administered, he’d called on Gary. They came in on a Sunday morning when everyone else was gone. Ross brought doughnuts and coffee. They worked on the networking issue and they talked and they had a good time. Ross was not quite as high-strung as Gary had remembered, and Gary was not as much of a stoner as he had been in high school—although he did offer to split a spliff after they were through. Talk migrated to the recent reunion Labor Day weekend and Gary updated Ross about who had doubled in weight, who had lost his hair, who was divorced, etc. and then, without really intending to, Gary added as coda to his recollection the exploits of his daughter, the infiltration artist.

  What Gary didn’t know was that Ross, just that week, had been requisitioned by Jessabelle to lure Phillip Wilkerson. Ross did not share this information, but he did ask, hypothetically, if it was possible to hack into a private business such as the Serendipity Group.

  Possible? Sure.

  How much would it cost?

  In jail time? Five to ten years.

  Then Ross stated a hypothetical dollar amount. And it was a very attractive number. And Nanita’s college fund sure could use an infusion of cash.

  Three days after Nanita had quite excitedly copied the requisite files off the Serendipity Group’s server—after negotiating that 10 percent of the fee go toward a new computer—Gary once again found himself wandering into his daughter’s bedroom to surf for some porn. Her new computer was scheduled to arrive in a few hours anyway. He wished he didn’t have to do what he wanted to do in her bedroom, but he had made a promise not ever again to watch anything dirty on his computer, and technically this wasn’t his computer…

  Marriage could make people exhibit such unsavory behavior.

  This time, Gary did not run a search on Nanita’s browser history. Why bother? He knew his daughter had been frequenting her old illegitimate haunts. He was the one who had enticed her back into her life of crime. Truth be told, after Ross made his proposal, Gary had first tried to do the deed himself. He knew computers. In his salad days, he’d even done a little minor hacking himself, although cracking the DRM on software and e-books, which he still remembered how to do, was several levels below what was required for this. Thus he had involved Nanita.

  As he sat there in his daughter’s tiny pink chair at her tiny pink desk, he wondered not for the first time if he was a bad father.

  He hadn’t even stopped to ask Ross what had been so special about the files he requested. Just what exactly had he—and Nanita—helped him accomplish?

  And so, once again, rather than porn-surf, he clicked through his daughter’s PC. He found the files in a folder marked STANFORD. College fund
, indeed. At least Nanita was ambitious. He delved into the documents and spreadsheets and by mid-afternoon, he’d figured most of it out. The Serendipity Group’s side projects. What Ross had done to Walker Berno. What Ross was intending to do to Phillip Wilkerson.

  In retrospect, that last part Gary got wrong, but he got so much else right.

  This was criminal. This was beyond criminal. And what was worse was that he couldn’t go to the police without implicating himself and his ten-year-old daughter in cyber-espionage.

  No Stanford.

  He couldn’t go to the police. He dared not tell Nanita. Or his wife.

  He never wanted to speak to Ross again. But he had to tell someone.

  “And that’s why I got in touch with Walker Berno,” Gary explained, exhaling a plume of pot smoke. He and Jessabelle and Ross were drinking sweet tea on his back porch. Well, Jessabelle and Ross were drinking sweet tea. He was drinking Bacardi from a stainless-steel flask. “We met at Mick’s over on Peachtree. At first I didn’t recognize him.”

  Ross was rigid in his folding chair. Very reminiscent of himself in high school. Plus, he looked like he hadn’t shaved or slept in a few days.

  “So you gave him the files,” said Jessabelle.

  “I figured he had a right to know. I’d want to know, if it happened to me. You got to understand. I have a family.”

  Jessabelle nodded. “I have two children myself. I understand completely.”

  “Did you tell Walker that you helped me out?” Ross asked.

  “No. I didn’t want to make it seem as if I was connected to you in any way. Not after…well, not after seeing what you did to him.”

  “What about what Walker did to Ross,” muttered Jessabelle. “All through school. Where was your conscience then?”

  “Look, I’m not saying I’m blameless here. Nobody’s blameless here.”

  “Didn’t he ask you where you got the files?”

  Gary took another hit off his bong. “I spun him a few lines of tech-speak. It sounded good. He didn’t push. And I walked away and figured that was the end of it.”