by Mark Parragh
He could definitely afford to spend a few more days in Buenos Aires.
CHAPTER 15
When it was done, she returned to her room and pulled off the hated blonde wig, revealing close-cropped dark hair dyed bright blue. She tossed the wig into a chair, then took out her phone and dialed a number.
As she settled onto the foot of the bed, she heard the phone connect, the scrambler tones, and then a gruff male voice.
“Report.”
There was nothing to do but say it. “Tamarind is dead.”
A pause. “Is he? How?”
“He was injured during a polo match today. He took too many of the pain killers they gave him, then drank too much wine, lost consciousness, and drowned in his bath.” Then she added, “It was clean.”
There was a long silence on the line, then, “I’d say that goes well beyond the scope of evaluating his suitability to return to work for us.”
“It was necessary. He had two bird dogs on him, following close.”
“Two?”
“One is nothing, a petty annoyance. But the other…I’m not sure. I’ll find out.”
“You weren’t cleared to kill him.”
“He was no use to us,” she said. “He’d lost it. The prison time gave him…edges. The marks wouldn’t fall for him anymore. Not the ones we’re after.”
“It still wasn’t your decision to make. We might have simply kept him at a distance.”
“No. He knew things. Once he accepted that his charm couldn’t keep him in comfort anymore, he’d have realized his knowledge was the other thing he had to sell.”
There was another long pause. She listened carefully to the sound of his breathing. Finally, “As it happens, I concur. We’ll speak no more of it.”
“Of course.”
“But don’t make a habit of taking these actions on your own. Sooner or later, that will go badly for you.”
“I understand.”
He hung up, and she let out a long breath. That had been a gamble, but she’d made it pay off. She was getting him used to giving her a longer leash. One day, she would use that to her advantage.
She opened her phone’s photo app and scrolled through to a shot of the tall, dark-haired man on the polo field.
“Now then,” she murmured. “Bird dog number two. Who are you?”
The End
John Crane will return.
In the meantime, enjoy this John Crane short story,
Pendulums.
PENDULUMS
BY MARK PARRAGH
Yaoundé, Cameroon
The battered van carried six men through the crowded, dusty streets of the capital. There was the driver, a spotter in the passenger seat, and four men sitting on the floor in the back wearing bandanas around their necks and holding machetes. They’d been cruising the streets for three hours in the afternoon heat, and tempers were short.
The driver honked his horn and yelled in French as he swerved around a bright yellow taxi. This threw the men in the back to one side and provoked a half-hearted round of curses.
“Find one already,” one of the men snapped. “Shit, just someone who looks like one of them.”
The spotter ignored him. He held a scarred Kalashnikov in his lap and three photographs. The photos were of a middle-aged woman, a teenage girl, and a young man in a suit and tie. The spotter had studied the faces until he knew he could pick them out of a crowd. Now he searched for them among the pedestrians on the crumbling sidewalks and on the motor scooters weaving through traffic.
“Let’s try the market again,” he said to the driver. “Then back to Mimboman.”
The driver shrugged and took a right at the next intersection. They made their way to a makeshift neighborhood market spread out across a large roundabout. The streets here were even more clogged with carts, hawkers, and customers. They went once around slowly and saw nothing, then headed back up the hill toward the residential district of Mimboman. They wove around parked cars and passed houses surrounded by small, walled yards and the occasional tree.
“There!” the spotter said suddenly. “On the right. That’s her. The wife!”
This stirred up some movement among the sweating, lethargic men in the back.
“Are you sure?” said the driver.
The spotter pointed out a woman walking up the hill. She carried a pair of bright green plastic grocery bags stuffed with produce. “Of course I’m sure. It’s her!”
“All right,” said the driver, “all right.” He scanned the street. It was wide enough for a three-point turn in the van, but there was a steady line of traffic coming at them and a panel truck rumbling behind them.
“Get ready,” said the driver, and the men in the rear pulled their bandanas up over their faces. “Don’t forget behind us,” the driver said to the spotter.
The men in the back were keyed up now, ready to go. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the van’s side door flew open. The four men tumbled out, shouting and waving their machetes.
The spotter leapt out with his Kalashnikov and fired a long burst into the engine of an oncoming Renault sedan. It stopped short, steam erupted from the radiator, and the car behind it rear-ended it with a solid crunch.
The spotter ran around the van. He glimpsed machetes held high, gleaming in the sun. He heard screams. Behind the van, the truck driver was desperately trying to back away, to turn around and get out of there. He’d block the street the way he was going. The spotter emptied his clip into the cab, shattering the windshield and blowing out tires. Traffic was locked down in both directions now, and they had a clear path out.
“Let’s go!” the driver shouted, and they all piled back into the van. Even before the side door was closed, the van lurched backwards in a tight turn. It slammed into the front of the crippled Renault and pushed it out of the way. Then the driver shifted gears, and the van sped away down the hill, back toward the commercial district. It had been stopped for less than thirty seconds. It left behind wreckage, terrified bystanders, and a bloody heap lying half in the street.
“For God’s sake, Georges, stop fretting!” Professor Bona straightened Georges’ lapels and smiled. “Trust me, they’ll be impressed!”
Georges nodded and stared down the long hallway of the École Nationale Polytechnique, at the double doors that opened onto the campus green. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his limbs. No matter how he held them, the suit jacket felt awkward. He kept shifting his weight and repositioning his arms, but it was never quite right.
“I’ll do my best, sir,” he said. He knew this was a big deal for Professor Bona and for the college. So he let his teacher assume he was simply nervous about the presentation. He didn’t know how to tell this man, who had done so much to bring him to this day, that the panel of dignitaries waiting inside wasn’t what worried him.
He shouldn’t have come here, he thought. With his father away, his place was at home, watching over his mother and sister. But his mother had insisted this opportunity was too important to miss. “This is where your future begins!” she had said that morning. “No one takes this from us. You go and make us proud!”
In the end, she shooed him out the door and watched him walk stiffly in his new suit all the way to the corner where the mini-buses picked up passengers headed downtown. He looked back once, and she stepped out onto the porch and waved, her face glowing with pride.
“It’s time,” said Professor Bona. “I’ll introduce you. Just tell them what you’ve done. And smile, Georges! Confidence!”
Then Georges was alone in the hall. His thoughts raced in all directions. It seemed only a few seconds before he heard Professor Bona saying, “…young man we’re very proud of, and I think he will make all Cameroon proud. Allow me to introduce third year student, Georges Benly Akema!”
Then his hand was on the doorknob. He was entering the room. It was as if he was watching it happen. There they were; a half dozen men in suits and a pair of women at the end. Geor
ges had seen the list. They represented the Education and Trade Ministries, the Cameroon Development Bank, a couple of NGOs. He recognized the youngest of them as the CEO of Yaoundé’s biggest Internet startup.
All here to see him. It was incredible.
Georges stumbled through his introduction, but he began to feel more comfortable as he got past that and into the nature of his project.
“A supercomputing analysis architecture, based on the work of Joshua Sulenski,” he said. “You may know that, in America, Sulenski built a tool that captured the data outputs of the New York Stock Exchange. Every trade, every change in price. It looked for patterns in the numbers and projected trends into the future. Eventually, he was able to predict the movement of the overall market several seconds in advance.”
Some of them knew what Sulenski had done. Others knew him only as another rich, young American on television. But that got their attention.
“Are you saying you can do this, too?” one of them said, leaning forward.
“I’m afraid not, sir,” Georges said with a wan smile. “Eventually, my system might be able to do what his did, but that would be very expensive. Also, his techniques are now in use across the developed world. They’ll always have more computing power than we have here in Cameroon. Even if we could look ahead, they will look still further.”
The man nodded and sat back in his chair.
He went on to explain how he’d built a less sophisticated version of Sulenski’s computer out of leftover PCs and open source software. And then he’d created a much simpler system for his computers to study: a dozen pendulums of different weights and lengths. He gave his system cameras to track the position of the pendulums and sensors that detected the forces applied to them. When it was ready, Georges had set his pendulums swinging, and the computers watched them. For days they recorded the state of the system many times a second, and churned through the mountain of information.
“Eventually, they figured out how a pendulum works,” Georges said. “They were able to derive Newton’s laws of motion independently, just by observing the behavior of the pendulums.”
He could see that some of them were impressed, mostly the business people who understood the computing implications. One of the older men waved a hand for his attention.
“What applications do you see for this, if not in finance?” he asked.
“Oh, there are financial applications, sir,” Georges replied, “on a smaller scale. But the general principles could apply to many fields. Anywhere there are large volumes of data to mine for patterns. For example, medical research, for isolating and measuring the effects of a virus or a new drug in a large study population. Or geological applications, like interpreting seismic data to make oil exploration quicker and reduce the risk of test wells.”
They were starting to get it. One of the ministers was furiously scribbling on a notepad.
“Of course, Sulenski’s system was a general purpose architecture, while I designed mine around the specific problem I wanted it to study,” he said. “But the principles are easily adapted. A similar design could be created for any of the examples I mentioned, or many other applications.” He grinned. “And of course this is much cheaper than the American system.”
That got a laugh, and then they started talking among themselves. He heard a woman say, “Just 20 years old.” Two of the technical people were talking about analyzing Internet traffic. In the back of the room, Professor Bona smiled and gave him a quick thumbs-up. He had gotten through to them. He had done it.
Then the door opened and a grim-faced policeman entered. The conversation suddenly ceased.
“Georges Benly Akema?” the policeman asked.
The whole room looked to Georges. He felt the ground falling away beneath his feet.
“Please come with me, sir,” the policeman said. He paused, then added, “There’s been an incident involving your mother. I’m to take you to the hospital.”
Georges had spent hours watching pendulums, just as his computers had. They swung upward, upward, as if they would keep going forever. But they always reached a point where they could go no higher. They stopped, hung there for an instant, but then all that remained for them was to fall down again, back to the very bottom of their arc.
The policeman took a tentative step toward Georges. “We should go,” he said softly.
Without a word, Georges followed him out of the room and down the long, empty hallway. His future receded behind him with each echoing footstep.
As they drove through the packed streets, the officer didn’t want to tell Georges what had happened. Finally, he admitted that his mother had been attacked in the street on her way home from the market. They knew nothing yet. The investigation was still ongoing.
“She’s going to make it,” the officer said to Georges as he sat in shocked silence in the back seat.
At the hospital, they took Georges through a crowded waiting room loud with misery, back to a small alcove. Men and women in scrubs hurried past as a nurse filled in forms and asked Georges questions: his mother’s full name, age, address, questions about her medical history that he had no way of answering.
“I want to see her,” he snapped finally. “Take me to my mother now!”
The nurse led him down a hall to where a doctor stood outside a closed door. He was a young man, and handsome. He could have been a model, Georges thought. That seemed wrong to him. Doctors should be old, compassionate, and wise. Nothing here was as it should be.
“The son,” the nurse said to the doctor, and left him there.
“She’s lucky,” the doctor said, incongruously. Georges was having trouble connecting one thing to another. What was lucky about this? “It could have been much worse. There was no saving the right hand. But we were able to save all but one finger on the left. We reattached the scalp flap, saved both eyes, I think. We’ll know more when she wakes up. But there will be significant scarring. And we don’t know yet about long-term damage. There have to be some severed nerves. I’m sorry.”
Georges let the words wash over him. He could only take in the briefest flashes. All of it at once was too much for him.
“I want to see her,” he said.
“She’s unconscious,” the doctor said. “We’ll need to keep her that way for a few days.”
“I want to see her.”
The doctor shrugged. He opened the door and stood aside. Georges stepped into the doorway, but found he could go no further. A shape lay in the bed, completely swathed in bandages, faint red stains already starting to seep through. He saw nothing of his mother. It could have been anyone. For a moment he was seized by the fantasy that this was someone else entirely. There’d been some ghastly mistake, and his mother was still safe at home wondering how his presentation had gone, how many companies wanted to hire him straight away, what government minister would take him under his wing.
But he knew none of that mattered now. The figure began to tremble. Then it let out an inhuman wail, punctuated by sharp, gasping cries.
The doctor pulled him aside, strode into the room, and closed the door behind him. After a few moments the noise ceased, and Georges took a deep breath.
The police officer appeared and led Georges back to the waiting room. Near the door, a man in a wheelchair moaned in pain, and Georges started as if pricked by a pin.
“Come,” the officer said gently. “Sit here. Sit down. You’re going to be okay.”
Georges sat, and the officer took the seat opposite him. Georges looked straight ahead, into the man’s uniform shirt with its neat creases and polished badge that said his last name was Makoun.
“Can you think of anyone who would want to do this?” Officer Makoun asked.
Georges looked up at his face. It was not unkind, but he was a man with work to do. Georges considered the question. He knew what had caused this, but he didn’t know enough to tell the officer anything useful.
“Where is your father?”
“He’s in America, at an academic conference. He works at University.”
“Can you reach him there?”
“Men came to our house,” Georges said. “About a month ago. It was late. My sister was in bed already, but I was up. My father sent my mother and me upstairs. I knew something was wrong.” He recalled the look on his father’s face. It had unsettled him even then.
“I couldn’t hear much, but I understood they wanted my father to do something for them, and that he refused. I remember he raised his voice. He said it was wrong, what they asked of him, and he wouldn’t do it.”
“But you didn’t hear what they wanted?”
“No. Something to do with his job; it had to be. I don’t know what such men would want from an Academic Department Administrator. But there’s nothing else to him. Just his job and his family.”
Officer Makoun made some quick notes on a pad.
“After that, there were threats,” said Georges. “People watching the house. An envelope left on the door. My father kept it from us; I don’t know what it said. I knew my parents were nervous. But when I asked what I could do, they said it was nothing. We thought, when my father went to America, it would stop. We thought we were safe. At least while he was there.”
Georges looked around the room, at the rows of people suffering with their personal, individual pains. He felt himself growing ashamed, then angry. It welled up from within him and he could feel it washing over him, changing him.
“Who did this?” he asked Officer Makoun. “How do I find these men?”
“What do you mean to do?”
“I’m going to make them pay,” he said, trembling uncontrollably.
“That’s my job, you know. You should let me do it.”
“No!” Georges snapped. “It’s my fault. I wasn’t there. I should have stayed with her.”
The officer put his notepad away and carefully snapped the flap of his shirt pocket closed. Then he leaned forward and looked into Georges’ eyes.