The Gatekeeper's Son

by C. R. Fladmark

  I pulled binoculars from my pack, a pair of decent Nikons I’d grabbed from Dad’s camping gear. I studied the men and felt a knot tighten in my stomach: they were two of the men I’d fired this morning.

  “They found a new job pretty quick,” I muttered.

  I got a yawn in reply and I turned to Shoko. She sat cross-legged on the grass, looking bored.

  “Are we going to sit here all night?” she said. “My new pants are getting wet.”

  “There’re guards in the lobby,” I whispered. “We’ll have to be careful.”

  “Those men are nothing.”

  I sighed. Everything had been so clear back at home but out here, I was losing confidence fast and she wasn’t helping. “Can we travel straight up to his suite?”

  “Do you even know what awaits us inside? You want to be stealthy, but if I have to cut someone down—”

  “I don’t want you to kill anyone!”

  “Then do what you did in the dojo and see what’s up there. Do I need to explain everything?”

  “Look, I’m not very good at this.”

  “I know nothing about the limits you have placed on yourself.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. I thought of Walter’s apartment, thought of him, thought of where I wanted to land, but nothing came to me. I opened my eyes and glanced around. With the park, I’d had an image to get me started, the aerial and street views, but with the apartment, I had nothing.

  “I’m not getting anything. What should we do?”

  She shook her head. “Perhaps you can tell me what we are doing, besides going inside some computer thing.”

  I squatted on the grass beside her and she listened while I explained what I knew about Walter and what I intended to do. She nodded and occasionally grunted, all the while staring at me with those big dark eyes of hers. And then a smile spread across her face.

  “What?”

  She started to giggle. “You sound like my brother, Toro, planning an adventure in the forest. It is so cute!” She fell backward and lay there laughing.

  “Shhh.”

  She nodded and covered her mouth. “OK, we are going to go in there, sneaky like ninja. You are going to enter a computer and do … something.” She paused. “And I will kill anyone I see.” She started to laugh again.

  “Shoko, be serious.” I already felt like abandoning this crazy mission and going for pizza. I shook my head and tried to regain my focus. “Let’s travel to the balcony first. I’ll try to feel for Walter from there.”

  “Yes, sir.” She giggled.

  I glared at her.

  “OK, OK.” She put her wakizashi away.

  I took one more look at the top-floor balcony, imagining us there. She grasped my hand and I squeezed it, glad this was a necessary part of traveling. A moment later, we were on his balcony.

  I was peering into the dark suite when I noticed the change: the warmth and energy of the earth was gone. I glanced up at Shoko to see if she’d noticed, but she was cupping her hands against the glass, trying to see inside.

  “Um, Shoko … how far above the ground does the earth’s energy reach?”

  She turned to look at me and shrugged. “Its energy reaches through anything that is still a part of her. Why?”

  I touched the cold reinforced concrete, saw the steel and glass railing, the metal patio furniture. “Because I don’t feel her anymore.”

  She frowned. “That’s interesting,” she said and turned to look into the suite again.

  I peered through the railing, ten stories to the street below. “So we can’t travel in or back down?”

  “Perhaps we will find something inside that still has some of her energy left in it.”

  “I didn’t plan to break in,” I said as I dug into my backpack. There was nothing useful in there, only a small set of computer tools. What I needed was a hammer.

  Shoko grabbed the handle and slid the glass door open.

  Great. Next time I needed a hammer, I could just use my head—it wasn’t much good for anything else.

  A faint sound—three electronic beeps—registered in my brain.

  “Shoko, stop!” I froze, waiting for the wail of the alarm.

  “What is that?” she asked, her tone higher than usual now, sounding more than just curious. She was pointing at a red light on the wall.

  “Motion detector,” I whispered, feeling another shot of adrenaline. It was glowing red, sensing our movements and body temperature. I pulled myself together and ran to the front door. The alarm panel had to be there—and it was—but the lights were green.

  Shoko came up beside me and I pointed to the green LEDs.

  “It’s not turned on,” I said. Walter had only the door chime turned on.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s an alarm system. It detects intruders and rings a loud bell.”

  “There is a magic eye, too.”

  “Magic eye?” I peered over her shoulder. A small monitor displayed an alternating view of the elevator doors, the hallway outside and the lobby downstairs. The guards down there looked bored—one was lying on the sofa. Obviously no silent alarms were ringing.

  “Do you think he has other … things to see inside here, like in Edward’s study?”

  “I doubt it.”

  I looked around. I’d somehow imagined outdated furniture and yellowing wallpaper, maybe even a velvet painting of dogs playing poker. Now I wondered if I’d broken into the wrong apartment.

  The glow of the city lights illuminated the room enough to see his ultra-modern suite, minimalist with strange steel and leather furniture and chrome lighting. Several large paintings, abstracts with geometric shapes and bright colors—the kind that looked like a kid had painted them—hung in the hall and the living room. And the kitchen was right out of a magazine, sleek and commercial, with stainless steel counters and glossy red cabinets.

  Shoko rubbed her shoe on the floor and took a tentative step toward the windows. “It is like walking on a pond,” she whispered as she tiptoed across the smooth, polished concrete.

  We found an office down the hallway, past the kitchen—a spacious corner room with large windows and the same polished concrete floors. The desk was a thick slab of glass, nearly invisible in front of the windows, held up by steel legs. The two large flat-screen monitors and the keyboard, the only things on the desk, appeared to float above the floor. The walls were stark white and blank except for two things: a large flat-screen TV on one wall and a framed illustration on the opposite wall. The TV didn’t interest me, but the illustration did. I moved closer. It was a caricature, a cartoon portrait of a laughing man with an enlarged head, standing on top of a huge pile of money shaped like the hills of San Francisco. There was no mistaking the subject. It was Walter.

  I decided two things right then: I was definitely in the right apartment, and I knew nothing about Walter Roacks.

  Shoko stood watching me, looking curious, but when I sat on Walter’s weird clear plastic chair and slipped on a pair of latex gloves, she wandered away. I took a deep breath and tapped a key. Both screens flashed to life, flooding the room with light. One monitor opened to a stock-market page. Real-time quotes from the European and Asian markets glided across the screen, a steady flow of letters and numbers. The other screen opened to a Web browser, with the search screen waiting. And the Internet was connected.

  I got to work.

  Shoko came back a few minutes later. I’d sensed her so I wasn’t startled when she came up behind me.

  “This place is huge,” she whispered. “And so high up. It is like the shrine at Izumo, a house fit for a god. Only one man lives here?”

  “Yup, the whole top floor of the building.” I was concentrating on the boot sequence. He didn’t have any security software or virus scanners. I could have sent him an infected e-mail and saved us all this trouble.

  I began uploading a new version of his browser from my memory stick, a special altered copy I’d bought on the Internet f
rom a guy in China.

  “You are good with this … this computer?”

  “Yeah,” I turned to look at her. “Sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing I’m good at.”

  “You are better than you realize.” She bent to look at the screen and her cheek came close to mine. I breathed in her scent and had to close my eyes for a moment as butterflies began to spin in my stomach. When I turned toward her, my face brushed lightly against hers. She pulled away and stared at me, her eyebrows knitted together. The lighting wasn’t good, but I swear she was blushing. I realized I was, too.

  “Uh … did you see anything interesting out there?” I said.

  She hesitated a moment. “He has a huge bed and a whole room for his clothes. There are dark suits, white shirts and black shoes, all in rows along one wall. The other side has very fancy clothes, colorful and shiny like spring kimonos.”

  I looked up at her. “Shiny clothes?”

  She didn’t answer. She was staring at the screen again, squinting at the data cascading down the screen. She shook her head and looked outside at the panorama of twinkling lights of the city below us and far across the dark water to the lights of Sausalito. “I have no knowledge of what you are doing or why. I understand too little about this place, this city.”

  “Can you start looking for a way to travel out of here?”

  As I waited for the computer to reboot, allowing for the final installation of my software, I flipped the keyboard over and looked underneath it. Unlike Grandpa’s, there were no sticky notes with log-in passwords, but I figured he’d have them written down somewhere. Old people always wrote things down. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  A moment later, a string of letters and digits flooded my mind, too many to process, but I felt their source. I reached into the top drawer of the cabinet next to his desk. Inside was a red leather-bound book, and when I opened the page at the ribbon bookmark, I found six pages of user names and passwords, written neatly in blue ink.

  “Gotcha.” I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo of each page. Then, with the book open on the desk, I opened the browser and went to his favorites. He had dozens of them, neatly organized, including a few porn sites. I considered opening one to see what his tastes were but clicked on “banking” instead.

  I logged into his account and let out a low whistle. The jerk had one and a half million dollars in savings! Well, maybe that was about right for the workaholic CFO of a large corporation with no wife or kids. I scrolled through his other bookmarks, boring stuff like tax and finance sites. His browsing history wasn’t any better. I was about to shut the browser down when I noticed a link that said “Turks and Caicos.” He’d visited that one a dozen times in the past month. The site opened to a plain white page interrupted only by two gray rectangular input boxes—ID and password required.

  I sat back and looked at the page. I knew Grandpa had a few accounts in the Turks and Caicos. His and thousands of other foreign companies had tax-exempt status there—after all, only poor people pay taxes.

  I entered the log-in info, and while I waited I flipped a few pages of his book and laughed aloud. Almost all his passwords were the same.

  I stopped laughing when his account opened. There was over fifty million dollars in there. I recounted the zeroes to make sure I wasn’t wrong—nope. And the bastard had deposited thirty million since Grandpa’s first heart attack. There was no way this was Walter’s money. I had to assume he’d been stealing from the company for years.

  “Junya.”

  I spun around.

  “There is nothing natural here.” Shoko looked worried. “He does not even have a plant.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to kick some ass downstairs,” I said.

  I opened his e-mail account. I’d only scanned a few lines when I saw a familiar name: Müller.

  “Junya.” Shoko was by the doorway again. “I hear something, a rumbling sound.”

  The elevator? “Damn,” I said, forgetting to whisper. “I’m not done yet.”

  I scanned the latest e-mail from Mr. Müller. It was obviously a continuation of an ongoing conversation. His employer was getting impatient … Edward was old … maybe dead soon…

  There—an e-mail from Mr. Müller asking Walter to locate Edward’s map.

  “Someone is coming!”

  “Stand guard while I finish.” As she moved away from the door, I called after her, “But don’t kill anyone.”

  I started to clear the history. The hum of the hard drive was loud in the quiet room, but the sound of keys going into a lock was unmistakable. For the first time in a while, I started to panic. The front door squeaked opened, the alarm chimed three times, and I felt him.

  Walter was home, and he wasn’t alone.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” I whispered, my eyes glued to the screen.

  “You don’t need to walk me in.” Walter’s voice shattered the stillness. “I’m not a child.”

  “We have to make sure everything’s OK, Mr. Roacks,” a man said, his voice and energy slightly familiar. “That’s our job, sir.”

  “I’ve been coming home alone for forty years,” Walter yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”

  The door slammed, rattling the pictures on the walls.

  “Idiots,” Walter grumbled and keys clattered onto something metal.

  I turned off the monitors. That wasn’t how I’d found them, but they couldn’t be on when he came in here. Shoko appeared beside me, quiet as a spirit, and yanked me out of the office and into the room across the hall. We were sliding behind the half-open door when Walter came down the hall.

  My heart thumped loud and fast. I was afraid Walter would discover my software before it had a chance to do its thing.

  I stopped thinking about computers when I realized that Shoko’s body was pressed tight against me—there wasn’t much room behind the door. I peered past her, trying to distract myself. This looked like a guest bedroom, with contemporary furnishings and a queen-sized bed. Even in here the floor was polished concrete, with only a small rug near the bed. There wasn’t a piece of natural material in the room that I could see. Even the door looked synthetic.

  I tried to squirm past Shoko to give her some room, but somehow we ended up face-to-face, so close that my nose was inches from that cute freckle under her right eye. She turned her face away and pulled back, as much as she could in the small space. I swallowed hard, suddenly uncomfortable—I’d started to sweat. I noticed she was biting her bottom lip, and when her eyes turned back to me, she blushed again.

  A noise came from Walter’s office that brought reality crashing back.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I mouthed.

  I peeked around the door. The only sounds were the occasional squeak of Walter’s office chair and the sound of Walter typing, oblivious to the fact that my software was transferring the contents of his hard drive a trickle at a time.

  We tiptoed down the hall toward the living room. Shoko walked backward, watching his door. We’d made it to the kitchen when Walter’s chair rolled back with a sudden squawk. I pushed Shoko toward the front door and dived behind the sofa. I landed as softly as I could on the concrete floor.

  From under the sofa, I watched Walter’s sock feet shuffle down the hall and turn in to the kitchen. The sound of ice hitting glass came next, then liquid pouring. He let out a loud fart, and I put a hand to my mouth to stop a laugh. I shot a glance at Shoko. She squatted near the front door, her back pressed up against the wall, a strand of hair falling across her expressionless face.

  I didn’t want him to find me lying there like some scared dog, but I had nowhere to go. He took a slurp of his drink, the ice cubes tinkling. I looked at Shoko again. She hadn’t moved. I made up my mind. If he found me, I’d confront him. If he walked away, we’d slip out—somehow.

  I closed my eyes, relaxed, and extended my energy.

  I saw Walter leave the kitchen, his body glowing bright orange against the co
ol blue walls. The shape moved back toward the office and I looked at Shoko again. She was looking at me. I opened my eyes and the colors vanished. As I started to get up, the telephone rang, a jangling electronic bell that sent me back to the floor.

  Walter stopped, swore, and came back to the kitchen and picked up the handset.

  “What?” A short pause. “Anthony? Where the hell have you been?” A longer pause. His left foot tapped the concrete. “Don’t worry about that. Nothing’s changed.” There was another pause. “Tell the sergeant to stand down for now but to stay ready. I might need them to take care of any problems.”

  I assumed that meant me.

  “No! Do it now, you idiot. Save your celebrating for after this is done!” The phone slammed down and Walter shuffled back to his office, the ice tinkling in his glass.

  Shoko stood up and looked toward me. “Junya, get over here,” she said inside my head, startling me. Her hand was on the front door. “I think it is wood. Come see.”

  I started toward her, moving through the open space like a ghost, invisible and silent—until I struck a lamp with my shoulder and it made a metallic clang as it rocked back into the wall. I caught it, but a loud “Damn it!” escaped me.

  Walter’s chair groaned. “Who’s there?” he called out.

  I felt a subtle suggestion of wood grain followed by the wonderful feeling of the earth’s energy surging through me.

  “Anthony, is that you?” He was in the hallway now.

  Shoko and I put our hands on the door at the same time.

  “Take us back to the park outside,” Shoko whispered. She squeezed my hand and the apartment began to disappear, lost in the swirl of color.

  The last thing I saw was Walter coming around the corner, his eyes wide. I have no idea what he saw.