by Diane Castle
“Last chance,” suit man said.
The pliers tightened.
I felt them pull.
Just as I was about to be sick all down the front of my shirt, I heard a zip, zip! and saw suit man crumple to a heap on the ground in front of me.
I turned to look behind me and saw t-shirt man on the ground, too. Both men had bullet holes through their foreheads.
From out of nowhere, a red and brown mass of slobbering fur launched itself at me and started licking my face.
Lucy! My tears flowed faster than she could lick them away.
She was followed by a tall man with a shock of nearly white blonde hair and strikingly blue eyes.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Cameron Gilbert. I had the place under video surveillance and would have been here sooner, but there was a wreck on I-30. Is that your dog? She’s cute. I found her hiding under a car out back.”
CHAPTER 23
Cameron cut our ropes off and led us to his car, a Toyota Prius hybrid.
“Thought I had this place pretty well protected,” he said. “I wiped the address out of most of the commercial and government databases. How’d you get it?”
“FBI,” Nash answered.
A strange look passed across Cameron’s face.
“What?” I asked.
“Oh nothing,” Cameron said. “You just shouldn’t have been able to get it from them. But what’s done is done.”
Nash looked suspicious. “How come you didn’t pick up your phone when we called?”
“What number did you have?” Cameron asked.
Nash told him.
“I got rid of that number last week. Have to keep things fresh, you know.”
“Who the heck are you,” I asked, “and why is everyone out to get you?”
“I’m a computer programmer,” he said. “I used to work for PetroPlex. I’ll tell you everything, but first we’ve got to get out of here.”
A computer programmer who was also a crack shot with a gun? I supposed it was possible. This was Texas, after all. Still, I was a little spooked. He had killed those guys a little too cleanly—a little too easily—for your average white-collar Joe. “Where are we going?” I asked.
Cameron grinned. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
My stomach dropped.
Seeing the pallor in my face, Cameron said quickly, “I’m kidding! I’m kidding! Calm down.”
Nash scowled. “Is that some kind of computer geek humor? Knock it off!”
Undaunted, Cameron started whistling a tune. He sure was cheerful for a guy with some very bad dudes after him. His easy slouch and old beat up jeans made him come off like a dude who was comfortable in his skin, no matter the circumstances. If a bunch of dead assassins on his property didn’t get to him, I was guessing that not much would. But why would he be so nonchalant about it all? Did he kill people every day? Was it a smart move to actually get in the car with him?
He opened the car door for me. I eyed Nash, and Nash nodded. He seemed to be okay with Cameron. I supposed Cameron did save our lives after all, but why? If I didn’t get in the car, I guess I’d never know, so I slid into shotgun while the guys settled down in the back.
“What about the, um, bodies?” I asked. “Are we just going to leave them for people to find? Couldn’t that be. . . bad for you?”
“Did you notice the neighborhood?” Cameron said. “Three or four bodies aren’t going to seem that out of place. The police will assume gang violence and close the case without a lot of investigation.”
“But you just. . . shot them. Just like that,” I said.
“It’s amazing what you can learn to do in the name of self-preservation,” Cameron said.
I wasn’t so sure. I felt certain I’d be having nightmares about all the bodies that had piled up around me today for years to come.
“So you don’t stay here much then?” Nash asked.
“I’m staying at a hotel downtown.” Cameron put the car in gear and pulled away. “Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight.”
“So why do you have this place at all?” Miles asked.
“The virus is hidden on a jump drive disguised as a wrench,” Cameron said. “What better place to hide a wrench than at an old car garage in a neighborhood with virtually no computers? Even if anybody found the place, they’d never find the virus.”
The virus again. What on earth? “How come everyone seems to assume I know what this virus is? I mean, if it’s on a jump drive, I assume it’s a computer virus and not your common cold variety, but seriously. What is this about?”
“First, let’s get where we’re going,” Cameron said.
It didn’t take us long to get downtown. Cameron had a suite at the Adolphus, a hotel so swanky it had a one-point-two million dollar Steinway Art Case piano in the lobby and a five star restaurant on the first floor. He led us into a room with soft gray carpet, elaborately-framed mirrors, shiny black polished modern furniture, and richly-textured drapes. The place was littered with computers and networking equipment, making the already modern décor look downright space age.
Miles let out a low whistle. “Computer programmers make this kind of money? Honey, I picked the wrong profession.”
Cameron grinned. “Nah. My friend’s the manager. He’s been letting me crash.”
“Nice,” I said. I eyed the doors that led to the bedroom. I was tired and willing to bet this suite had one heck of a bed.
Forcing myself to wrest my attention away from the prospect of rest, I said, “So. About the virus.”
“The virus,” Cameron said, “is my personal insurance policy against PetroPlex.”
“Huh?” I asked.
“Yeah. You know. Against the plot to manipulate the energy market.”
“The what?” How come everyone assumed I knew so much information I didn’t?
“Schaeffer didn’t tell you? He said he was going to ask you for advice.”
“If he was, he didn’t get to it before somebody else got to him.”
Cameron sighed. “Yeah, that’s a real shame. If I’d been able to get the tapes from him in time, we might have been able to prevent all this.”
Tapes? What tapes? More stuff I didn’t know about. Unbelievable! This time I didn’t even bother to say anything. I just gave Cameron a look.
He interpreted it correctly. “You don’t know about the tapes either? Sheesh, what do you know?”
I felt kind of offended. I am smart. I know a lot of stuff. Only lately, it’s just that I didn’t seem to know the right stuff. “We know that PetroPlex owns the Mayor of Kettle, the Police Chief, and at least one of the judges in town, but we don’t know how or why.”
“Hmmm,” Cameron said. “That’s news to me. The only conspiracies I know about are global. Tell me more.”
Global? Oh, was that all? Good grief.
Nash, Miles, and I filled Cameron in on the events of the last forty-eight hours.
“Well,” Cameron said, “I think it’s pretty safe to say that PetroPlex bought all your town officials in order to get to Schaeffer. It’s your bad luck that you picked him of all people as your expert, because now you’re involved. And it seems to me that everyone, including me, is assuming you know more than you actually do. That’s bad for you. Very bad.”
I felt exasperated by the sheer weight of everything I didn’t know but should. “Why? Why is it bad? What is this about? If somebody’s out to get me, I feel like I at least deserve to know why.”
Cameron settled into a sleek gray chair and interlaced his fingers. “Well, Schaeffer and I were working together to assemble evidence against PetroPlex. It was kind of funny how I met him. He was always nosing around the perimeters of the refinery taking air samples. The higher-ups kept trying to figure out a way to get rid of him, but he always stayed on public land, so there wasn’t a lot they could do.
“At the time, a lot of people at PetroPlex, myself included, were suffering from chronic
headaches and congestion. Watching Schaeffer snoop around made me start to wonder if maybe there was something in the air that PetroPlex wasn’t warning employees about. So I decided one day that I’d take my lunch break and go downstairs and talk to him.”
“And he talked to you?” I asked.
Cameron nodded.
I was surprised, knowing how reserved, academic, and secretive Schaeffer had been. On the other hand, Cameron didn’t come off as a threatening kind of guy. His cheerful manner and ease of conversation did a lot to put people at ease—which was saying something, considering that we’d just met over the barrel of a gun. Even in this short time, my reservations about him seemed to be melting away.
“We struck up a conversation,” Cameron continued, “and Schaeffer told me all about the dangers of benzene, toluene, and other chemicals that the refinery emitted every day. When I went back to my office, I decided I’d do a little cyber-snooping myself, just to see if I could find any evidence that the higher ups knew this stuff was floating around. Sure enough, I discovered that PetroPlex was willfully cutting corners and sacrificing safety for the sake of cutting costs and boosting profit margins.”
“And how’d you feel about that?” I asked.
“Well, I was mad, of course,” Cameron said, looking anything but. “I mean, here was this big company poisoning an entire community, and nobody seemed to know about it, or care. I decided I was going to do a large-scale media release that sent all our evidence digitally to all media outlets. I contacted Schaeffer to see if he wanted to pool his information with mine. He said yes, but urged me to wait until he had a complete set of data. He wanted the data to be as damning as possible before releasing it. He had a personal vendetta against PetroPlex because his father, who spent his life working at the Kettle refinery, died of benzene-induced cancer.”
I was flabbergasted. “He never told me that,” I said.
Cameron shrugged, as though it had been the most natural thing in the world for someone like Schaeffer to share his family secrets with him. “Anyway, at about that time, the refinery VP came to me and asked me to write a computer program that would disrupt trading on the energy market and artificially increase the price of oil. He said it was to be used only in the event of a financial emergency—but I knew better because I had been monitoring internal communications.”
Whoa. That was more big news, to say the least. “So you didn’t do it, right?” “Yeah, I did it, but only because I needed to buy time. I was getting a lot of inside information while working there, and the veep made it clear that I would get fired if I didn’t do it.
“Anyway, while I was writing the program, I also wrote a virus designed to counteract the program. By the time I was done with both, Schaeffer and I had gathered just about all the evidence we needed. When I turned the program over to PetroPlex, I made my escape. Then I threatened to release the virus if they used my program or came after me at all. The virus manipulates the market so that the price of oil drops dramatically, and it also makes it impossible for the original program I wrote to work. See this laptop right here?” Cameron pointed to a laptop on the end table. “It’s ready to go right now. All I have to do is hit ‘enter’ and the thing is loose.”
“I thought it was hidden on a jump drive in a wrench,” Nash said.
“That’s the backup,” Cameron explained. “The virus wouldn’t be much good with the safety off now, would it? I have to be ready to launch at a moment’s notice. But if something happened to me, Schaeffer knew where to find the backup.”
“Let me get this straight,” Miles said. “You’re just sitting around with the trigger cocked, right out here in the open?”
Cameron nodded. “Moment’s notice, like I said.”
Miles stood and walked toward Cameron’s laptop for a better look.
“Easy now,” Cameron said. “Too close, and you have no idea what you’d be unleashing.”
Miles backed off, but tripped over the laptop cord in the process.
Cameron’s computer went crashing to the ground, along with the desk lamp, which landed on the “Enter” key and set off a shrill alarm.
Miles and Cameron both swore simultaneously.
“What did I do?” Miles said, backing himself all the way up against the opposite wall, as far from the offending machine as possible. “Can you undo it?”
For the first time since I’d met him, Cameron seemed perturbed. I couldn’t believe he could so calmly shoot two guys in cold blood but freak out at the press of a mere button. And yet there it was, happening right in front of me.
“No, I can’t undo it!” he said. “Once a virus is loose, it’s loose!”
“Whatsamatter with you?” Miles said. “Leaving a thing like that out in the open! It’s not my fault! I take no responsibility.”
Cameron ignored him. He was rushing around the room, shutting laptops and dismantling wires. “Get your stuff! We have to get out of here!”
“Why?” Nash asked.
Cameron didn’t give him a second glance. “Because PetroPlex will be able to trace the originating IP address of the virus to this location, and when they do, we don’t want to be here, believe me. You’ve already been treated to the hospitality of their private security team once. You want to go there again?”
I knew I sure didn’t.
“Everybody grab a computer and get to the car!” Cameron said.
Everybody grabbed a machine except for me. I grabbed Lucy instead, and we raced down to the parking garage and piled back into Cameron’s Prius.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Cameron said. “Away. Out of town.”
“What happens now?” Miles wanted to know.
“You don’t want to know. The markets crash. The price of gasoline drops.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Miles asked. “Let’s fill ’er up!”
“It’s good up to a point,” Cameron said. “PetroPlex will probably do something desperate to try to recover and prevent bankruptcy. I didn’t intend to use this virus unless PetroPlex released my original program. The virus was designed to counteract the effects of the original program, not to destroy a functioning market.”
“Bankruptcy?” Nash asked. He sounded skeptical.
“I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what this thing will do. The financial markets are a very delicate balancing act that isn’t that hard to disrupt.”
Cameron peeled out of the parking garage. He drove fast—a little too fast. The buildings of downtown Dallas whipped past us.
“Dude!” Miles said. “Pedestrian!”
Cameron swerved around an idiot who was standing in the middle of Elm Street on the X that marked the spot where JFK had been assassinated. “Moron,” he said, before pulling onto the freeway.
I was worried he was going to attract unwanted attention. I had an uneasy feeling in my chest.
“Slow it down some,” I said. But it wasn’t just Cameron’s speed that was bothering me. All this stuff about the financial markets didn’t make any sense. “If it’s so easy to manipulate the energy market, how come someone hasn’t done it already?”
“Who says they haven’t?” Cameron asked. “Remember when the stock market lost a trillion dollars in a matter of minutes in May 2010 because of a computer glitch?”
I didn’t, as I had long since pulled all the money I had in the stock market out and converted it to cash. And spent it. On Ramen. Ugh.
“I remember,” Nash said.
“How is that possible?” Miles said. “I don’t understand the financial markets.”
Cameron eased his foot off the gas pedal some. “If you did, you’d be rich. If everybody knew what the people on Wall Street know, the country would look a whole lot different than it does today, I suspect.”
“But you get it, right?” Miles asked. “Otherwise you couldn’t have written the program.”
“I know enough to be dangerous,” Cameron said. “Th
e energy market is a little different than the stock market. It works kind of like this. Oil is a commodity, right? So it’s not traded on the stock market. It’s historically been traded on the NYMEX, the New York Mercantile Exchange, which is the market where businesses buy and sell energy, metals and other commodities that people use every day. Trading is fast and furious. About a thousand transactions take place every minute. But when it comes to oil, the traders are not buying and selling actual oil. They are buying and selling contracts called futures contracts, which are agreements to accept delivery of oil in the future at a price set in the present.”
“That sounds simple enough,” Miles said.
I glanced at Nash. He was uneasily scanning the horizon, presumably looking for pursuers, cops, or anyone else we wanted to steer clear of.
Cameron glanced back at Miles. “It’s not too complicated. It’s basically just a bet on the future price of oil. Where it gets complicated is when all these other traders, called speculators, jump in. They’re not interested in the actual oil. They’re only interested in making bets on other people’s bets. There are so many of them that less than one percent of crude oil and gasoline physically changes hands as a result of the buying and selling of all these contracts. The speculators could care less about the actual oil. They’re just interested in betting on which direction the market will go. They buy the futures contracts intending to sell them before the actual oil gets delivered. They hope that if they bet right, they can cash out on the deal. Buy low, sell high. See?”
“I guess,” Miles said.
“Theoretically,” Cameron continued, “speculators are good for the market because they inject a lot of dough into it. A lot of cash keeps the market healthy. The problem is, excessive speculation can really inflate the price of oil. So if I release a program that makes it look like a lot of speculation is happening, the market would react and the price of oil would go up.”
“Is that what your virus did?” I asked.
Cameron nodded. “Kind of. Only in reverse.”