Palm Sunday

by William R. Vitanyi Jr.

  Snelling was noncommittal. “The amount of input from the Net seems satisfactory, but it takes time to sift through the volumes we’re dealing with. A lot of what we get is unusable.”

  “The geek unit tells me the same thing.” Mason derided anyone who knew more than he did, and his computer people were eons ahead of him “I tried explaining that…hold on, my secretary’s buzzing me on the other line.”

  “That’s okay, I have to go,” said Snelling. “See you at the meeting Tuesday.”

  Mason pressed a button on his telephone’s control panel. “Yes, what is it?”

  “You have a call from Mr. Pampas,” said his secretary. “He says it’s urgent.”

  “I’ll take it.” The line briefly went dead, and a moment later George Pampas, the barrel-chested head of security, was put through.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Mason, but we have a situation with one of the implementers–Robert Slocum. Apparently he was mugged.”

  “Where is he now, is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. He’s in a phone booth near a burger joint.” Pampas paused for a moment. “He missed his appointment Thursday night.”

  Mason let a silent moment pass. “That’s not good, George. We pay him to keep appointments, not miss them.” He paused again. “We’ll just have to reschedule. Get him some money and whatever else he needs to replace what was lost. When can he meet with the client?”

  “Well, sir, that brings up another dilemma.” The grimace on Pampas’s face was almost audible.

  “Which is?”

  “It’s his palmtop. It’s missing.”

  A cold silence followed. When Mason responded, his voice was icy.

  “That’s not acceptable.”

  “Whoever cracked him over the head must have taken it. But don’t worry, it’s locked down in full secure mode.”

  “Don’t tell me what to worry about.” Mason could feel his neck getting hot with anger. “I don’t have the people available to clean up after him, so he’s going to have to do it himself. There will be no further appointments for Mr. Slocum for the time being. As of now, his only mission is to recover his palm unit. Do so, and he’s back on the team. Fail, and he’ll become someone else’s client. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, sir. Perfectly,” said Pampas.

  “Is he still on the other line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have him stay on while we back trace his location. Tell him a car will arrive within the hour.”

  ***

  It was Saturday morning. Stanley Whipple looked curiously at the palmtop. He had spent the better part of an hour trying to figure it out the night before, with no success. It didn’t seem to be broken, yet he was unable to access any data, or even get past the menu system. He only wanted a clue as to the owner’s identity so he could return the device, but the exercise was becoming intriguingly annoying. He turned it over yet again and examined the electronic interface on the back of the unit. Not a standard connection.

  “Hey Bobby.” He yelled loud enough for his son to hear him in his room. Within moments the sound of running feet echoed downstairs.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Wanna go to the mall? I have to buy a cable.”

  “Sure. Right now?”

  “I think so. On the way back we’ll stop for take out. Sound good?”

  “Yeah!”

  The two grabbed their jackets and piled into the Chevy. It was typical Stanley–functional, but not ostentatious, the perfect blend of dependability and obscurity. Before leaving, Stanley grabbed the palmtop and put it in his coat pocket. He wanted to make sure he got the right cable. Twenty minutes later they arrived at the mall and were walking towards the electronics boutique, situated in an alcove at the far end of a long corridor. Stanley thought he detected the faint sound of music.

  “You hear something?”

  “Yeah,” said Bobby. “Sounds like it’s coming from up ahead.” As they drew closer, the music grew louder. It was a bagpipe concert, one of the many functions put on by mall management to attract shoppers.

  “Let’s watch for a while,” suggested Stanley. He loved the pipes.

  They moved up close to the platform in the central pavilion where a group of eleven pipers in full Highland garb stood in a circle, belting out a series of Celtic tunes. Stanley was lost in the memories that came flooding back, of a different time, another place, when he and his future wife were in college. The school had boasted a large contingent of bagpipe players, and there had been frequent performances. The music was a bittersweet reminder. After several songs, Stanley motioned to Bobby, and the two continued on to the electronics store, the sound of the pipers fading behind them.

  The store was crowded, mostly with customers interested in cell phones. Stanley knew the store manager and showed him what he needed. It was a custom job, but the manager assured him that his technician could have a cable ready in about an hour, so Stanley left the palmtop at the store, and poked around the mall with Bobby. They returned a short while later and picked up the cable and palmtop. As they pulled out from the mall parking lot Stanley glanced at his son.

  “Shall we stick with burgers, or are tacos more to your liking this afternoon?”

  “Burgers.”

  “Drive thru okay with you?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  Five minutes later they pulled into a nearby fast food restaurant. Several cars waited at the drive thru ahead of them.

  “What’ll it be?” asked Stanley.

  “Cheeseburger, fries, chocolate shake.”

  “Same as always, huh?”

  “Yep.” Bobby smiled. He liked spending time with his dad, and the burgers were a bonus. The car moved as the line inched forward, and at last they paid for their order and pulled up to the pick up window. The familiar smell of fast food permeated the interior of the Chevy as they pulled out of the parking lot and turned right.

  Perhaps it was the smell of the food that distracted him, or the riddle of the palmtop that occupied his mind. In any event, Stanley nearly pulled out in front of a car, causing its brakes to squeal and its driver to salute him with a most unkind gesture.

  Across the street, next to a phone booth, Robert Slocum saw the entire incident. Bony-nosed Stanley Whipple, with his dark-rimmed glasses, would stand out in any crowd. To a man who prided himself on his ability to recall detail, it was a photograph. Without thinking about it, Slocum took a mental snapshot. Then both cars were gone, and one more small drama in a world filled with big events had passed.

  Chapter Two

  Stanley had no problem connecting the palmtop to his PC, but now he stared into the display at something that baffled him. The handheld device had successfully linked up with his computer, but the numbers and symbols that flashed by weren’t in any file format that he was familiar with. He checked the cable connections both at the palmtop and the back of his computer. Everything seemed fine. The data stream from the palm unit was intact–it just didn’t make sense. Then the screen suddenly stopped displaying the cryptic symbols; end of file.

  “Hmm…”

  Stanley opened an edit session on his computer and scanned the lines one by one. Guessing that it was an encrypted text file, he opened a command window and launched a program to process the downloaded file. It ran for about ten minutes, applying a substitution algorithm to the jumbled characters. In the end, two words were displayed. One of them was nonsense, evidence of an apparently confused spell-checking subroutine.

  The second was at least recognizable–florida, all in lower case. Stanley looked again at the first word. Pascua. Pascua florida. Was it a place, a town in Florida? He quickly logged on to the Internet and brought up an interactive map. The name Pascua, in Florida, returned nothing. That left him with Florida, a big state, and pretty far away, and he still had no name to put with it. A name! That was it! Pascua must be the name of a person. He switched to an Internet person finder utility and entered the name Pascua, locatio
n, Florida. The browser hesitated, refreshed, and displayed the first of over two hundred names. He tried his own city. Three names. He printed out the list and was about to disconnect the palmtop when Bobby walked into the room.

  “Hey, kiddo. I Think I have a clue who might own this.” Stanley nodded towards the black device.

  “Great, Dad. I’ll be outside.”

  “Don’t go far. I’m going to call around and see if any of the people on my list lost the palmtop. We may be taking a ride.” Stanley was caught up in the excitement of the chase, and failed to note Bobby’s lack of enthusiasm.

  The boy simply nodded and went outside to loaf around the yard while his father made the phone calls. Ten minutes later Stanley called out the back door.

  “Never mind, Bobby. Total dead end. I’m not giving up though.” He smiled at his son.

  “Yeah, that’s nice.” Bobby looked at the ground as he trudged around the yard. He wished he’d never found the stupid palm thing. He stopped and looked up, a smile forming on his face as an idea came to him. He glanced at the house, then towards the highway where he had found the palmtop. He knew what he had to do.

  ***

  It was Monday, so the bar was nearly empty when Robert Slocum sauntered up to the counter and ordered a beer. The bartender drew a mug from the tap and placed it in front of him.

  Slocum took a sip before speaking. “I was in here late Thursday night, around midnight.”

  The bartender wiped off the counter top and put away some glasses. “Lots of people were in that night.” He didn’t look up.

  “Yeah, but most of them didn’t get mugged when they walked out the front door.”

  The bartender stopped wiping. “You got mugged?”

  “Whacked on the back of the head and robbed. I guess you’d call that a mugging.”

  “Sorry to hear that. You tell the cops?”

  Slocum shook his head. “Didn’t want to involve them. But I do want to find out who did it.” He looked meaningfully at the bartender.

  “Oh, I see. Well mister, I don’t have a clue. This ain’t the Taj Mahal, if you know what I mean. The class of customer we get, could have been anyone.” He went back to wiping.

  “I think there were two of them, maybe Latino. Ring any bells?”

  The bartender looked towards the door, and at the two other customers, who seemed to be minding their own business. He lowered his voice. “What’s it worth to you?”

  “You tell me who did it, and where I can find them, I’ll give you fifty.”

  The bartender paused, considering. “All right, but don’t let on that you got it from me.”

  “Deal.” Slocum threw two twenties and a ten on the counter, momentarily placing his hand over the bills. “The fifty keeps your mouth shut, too.”

  The bartender nodded, picking up the bills as Slocum slowly removed his hand.

  “The two guys are named Chico and Bobo. They’re inseparable, and they’re bad news. If they mugged you here they won’t be around for a while, but you can probably find them hanging out at the old projects. You know where I mean?”

  “Yeah, I know where the projects are. What do they drive?”

  “A ratty old Buick. The paint is flaking off all over, makes it look almost two-tone. Three tone if you count the rust. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.” Slocum got up and started for the door, then turned back. “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you tell them I’m looking for them, I’ll be back. And you won’t like that.” Slocum was smiling, but it was without warmth, and the venomous look in his eyes spoke volumes. This was a dangerous man. The bartender knew the type.

  “I’m happy with my fifty. I’m not looking to buy trouble.”

  Satisfied that he had made his point, Slocum nodded and left the bar.

  ***

  Stanley was about to disconnect the palmtop from his PC when both suddenly came to life. He could hear his hard drive whir as data was downloaded. At least, he hoped it was downloading. He activated a software utility to monitor his computer’s internal data connection. It verified that the communication was one way, onto his hard drive, and produced an output file for analysis.

  What Stanley didn’t know was that the palmtop had already used its own wireless communication capability to tap into the Internet and search for data relating to Stanley Whipple–the name it had extracted from his PC. The process concluded, and Stanley glanced ponderously at the palm unit.

  “Let’s see what you’ve done.”

  He was about to run his decryption software against the new file when he noticed that it was not encrypted at all. But what appeared on his screen stunned him.

  It was biographical data–his biographical data. It was incomplete, as if certain pieces of information, mostly of a more sensitive nature, could not be isolated. The rest of it was so generic it could have been culled from any number of sources, but still, it was there, and it was his. How could this be?

  He opened the log file created earlier. It revealed that data had passed between the palmtop and his PC, and that it had originated from the Internet. As he looked closer, however, his attention was drawn to the header information that accompanied the file. It was blank. He knew that files that traveled across the Internet contained the computer address of both the sender and the recipient. In this case, however, that information was not present. How then, he wondered, had this file been transported? The palmtop seemed to have some unusual capabilities.

  “What are you?” He stared at it for a full minute before shutting down his PC.

  ***

  Robert Slocum had been sitting in his car, in the dark, for over an hour. The two Latinos, Chico and Bobo, or Chico and The Man, as he liked to think of them, had earlier left the Buick for a run-down apartment building, no doubt to get high with their friends. This was the night he was getting his palmtop back, thought Slocum. He checked his pistol, a silenced thirty-eight, making sure a round was chambered. This was a dangerous neighborhood. If these guys had been doing weed, they would probably be pretty mellow, easy to deal with. If they were coked up, though, they might go nuts. Either way, they would certainly require some persuasion.

  He saw them–just the two of them–emerge from the apartment building. They were walking slowly and laughing loudly. Weed and beer, no doubt. Good sign. Slocum hid the handgun under his coat and moved to intercept the duo.

  They staggered up to the Buick just as Slocum arrived. The timing was perfect. He loomed as a sudden shadow out of the darkness, but they were too far-gone to take heed.

  “Hey guys, can you help me?”

  They pulled up short, and one of them instinctively reached behind his back, as if grabbing for a weapon. Slocum pulled out his gun and shot him in the leg–a disabling, but not fatal wound.

  The wounded man let out a grunt, and fell to the ground, writhing in agony. His companion stared wild-eyed as Slocum retrieved the fallen man’s weapon, then turned to face him.

  “Are you Chico?” asked Slocum.

  He covered his head with his arms. “Don’t kill me, man!”

  Slocum repeated his question. “Are you Chico?”

  “No. He’s Chico. I’m Bobo. Don’t shoot me, man. I didn’t do nothing to you.”

  “Just give me back what you took,” said Slocum.

  “I got nothing of yours, man. I don’t even know who you are.”

  Slocum smiled. “I know it’s hard for you to remember.” He casually pointed the pistol at Bobo’s groin, which he covered by oafishly dropping his hands.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “You and Chico hit a man on the back of the head and robbed him at a certain downtown watering hole.” Noting the blank stare, he added, “a bar. You two mugged me last Thursday, just after midnight.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Bobo paused, remembering. “That was you? Sorry, man.”

  “Thanks. But what I really want, and what you’d better still ha
ve, is the device you took from my pocket.”

  “Huh?”

  “Think hard, now, Bobo. This information is important to you. It was black, about three inches wide, maybe five inches long. Looked like a calculator.”

  Bobo’s face lit up in recollection. “Oh yeah, the calculator. I remember now.”

  “Very good, Bobo. Give it to me.”

  “I can’t. We don’t have it.”

  “Bad answer. What did you do with it?”

  Bobo looked at the gun. He was scared now. Too scared to lie. “We threw it out the window.”

  “What window?”

  “The car window.”

  “Stupid…never mind. Where you were when you threw it out?”

  Bobo had to dig down deep for this one, but then he had it. “I remember. It was on the highway next to that strip mall, you know, on the west side–a couple miles north of the bar. We just tossed it.”

  “Which side of the road?”

  “Same side as the mall.”

  “Was that the same night that you stole it from me?”

  “Uh, yeah, right after.”

  Slocum sighed. What should he do with these two? Chico had stopped whimpering and seemed to be unconscious. Whether from drugs or his injury or both, Slocum couldn’t tell. He was loath to attract the attention of local authorities.

  “I should kill you for what you did, but I’m feeling generous today. How much money do you have?”

  “Nada.”

  “That’s too bad. Give me your pants.”

  “What?”

  “Your pants, Bobo; Chico’s, too. Hurry up.”

  Bobo did as instructed and tossed the two men’s pants on the ground in front of Slocum.

  “Now your shirts.”

  Bobo looked at the gun, and at Slocum’s face, then slowly removed his shirt. It was a struggle, but he managed to get Chico’s off as well. He threw them on the ground in front of Slocum.

  “Anything else, man?”