The Beautiful and the Wicked

by Liv Spector

  “I promise to try,” Lila offered.

  “I guess that’s the best I’m ever going to get,” he said with a smile.

  Though she felt better that she’d patched things up with Teddy, Lila’s mind was focused on getting answers out of Jack. With Teddy looking on, she kept pacing up and down the hallways, desperate to talk to him, needing an explanation as to how—­and why—­he’d done what he’d done. But thanks to Teddy’s charm, and a few hundred bucks slipped to one of the sleepy police guards—­one bribe Lila was glad to see accepted—­they were finally able to stand face-­to-­face with Jack Warren.

  When they walked into his room, they were both taken aback by how small and withered he looked in his hospital bed. The man whom Lila considered the scourge of her sister’s life was just an old man now. He was propped up at a weird angle, as if the nurse had struggled to get him upright and just kind of left him where he was. His wrists were handcuffed to the bed. His neck was in a brace and a morphine IV was dripping painkillers slowly into his veins. The doctors had told Lila that Jack would make a full recovery. There were some broken ribs and a sprained neck, but the injuries weren’t too bad. Lila had been relieved. At least he’d be fit to stand trial.

  Neither Lila nor Teddy said anything for a minute or so. Jack was just lying there, blinking at them. But he kept staring at Lila. She returned his gaze defiantly.

  “I know you,” Jack finally said. His voice was raw sounding, and syrupy slow from the heavy narcotics.

  “You sure do. I’m the one you shot at yesterday.” Lila walked closer to him, leaning over his body. “I’m also Ava Day’s sister. Do you remember Ava?”

  Jack closed his eyes and nodded. “Of course. Of course I do.”

  “Do you also happen to remember that you framed her for your murder? Or did the car knock that straight out of your head?”

  “Mistakes were made. I’ll be the first to admit that. I am not a perfect man.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Lila said with an outraged laugh. “You call framing my sister and ruining our family a mistake?”

  “Lila,” Teddy said in a warning tone. She knew she had to fight to stay as professional as possible. Otherwise her rage would stop her from getting the answers she so desperately needed.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.” Jack stared out of the hospital window, which overlooked a brick wall. “I don’t expect anyone to understand. But I know that history will absolve me.”

  Teddy and Lila exchanged glances.

  Jack continued, “What I did, I did for my country. And every great patriot has to make sacrifices. Ava was a small sacrifice. Giving up my life was a much greater one.”

  He wasn’t making sense. Lila continued her questioning: “If history will absolve you, you must first explain yourself.”

  Jack turned toward Lila and gave her a conspiratorial smirk. “Ah, see! You understand me. Many times,” he said, lowering his voice, “great men are terribly misunderstood by their contemporaries.”

  “Yes,” Lila said, turning to Teddy with a shrug of her shoulders. Then Jack began to nod off as the morphine worked its magic. Teddy leaned over Jack, lightly tapping him on the cheek to bring him back to coherence.

  “You were telling us that you are a great patriot,” Lila said. “But you haven’t told us why.”

  “I was?” Jack said. He was confused, looking around the room as if he were seeing it for the first time.

  “Maybe we should wait,” Teddy said. “He’s totally out of it.”

  Lila shook her head. She knew this was the ideal time to get the old man talking. When the morphine drip was turned off, he might not be as chatty.

  She sat herself down on Jack’s bed, causing him to wince in pain as he held his hand against his ribs. Jack Warren trained his widened eyes on Lila. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” he rasped.

  “And which one are you?” she asked.

  “I told you, I’m a patriot.”

  “But you still haven’t told me why.”

  “Because I made the ultimate sacrifice that any freedom fighter can make. I died for my country.”

  “You seem pretty alive to me,” Lila said. “Banged up good, but still breathing.”

  Jack shook his head and a dry, wheezing cough overcame him. He picked up a cup of water, which dribbled over him as his shaky hand brought it to his lips. “It seemed like a decent bargain at first,” Jack said. “I didn’t have any money and his family had more than they needed.”

  Lila didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then it clicked. “The Campos family,” she said. She translated for Teddy: “When Jack was just starting Warren Software, his college buddy Thiago convinced his dad, who was a Brazilian general, to pony up the seed money.”

  Teddy nodded, signaling that he understood.

  “Yes. Thiago Campos,” Jack answered. His eyes were closed, as if he had been transported back in time. “I needed investors for my company, but I was young . . . untested. Thiago said that his father was willing to give me what I needed. I knew about his family. I mean, everyone did. That’s why Thiago was so unpopular at Harvard. All those liberal twits didn’t want to be seen with the son of a right-­wing general. But I didn’t care.”

  “Why would you?” Lila said.

  “Exactly!” Jack exclaimed. “But let me tell you, now I know that the Campos clan deserved their terrible reputation. I should’ve seen it coming, but I was too anxious to build my own company. There was no way I was going to turn down that money.”

  A nurse walked in and put an anemic-­looking tray of food down in front of Jack. Lila delighted in watching this erstwhile gourmet who feasted on caviar and oysters be given a cold grilled cheese sandwich.

  Jack continued, “It was fine for a decade or so, but then everything fell apart. It was 1988. Warren Software was growing beyond my wildest dreams. I was a newlywed. And Elise had just found out she was pregnant. That same year Time magazine named me Man of the Year. I brought the personal computer to the world. It was around this time I heard from Thiago again. It had been over a decade. I figured he was calling to congratulate me on the whole Time magazine thing, but he sounded strange, saying he was in town and could I meet him that night. He said it was a matter of life or death. So I met him. Of course I did. He was acting totally nuts. Said his country was on the brink of a coup, that his father had been arrested and thrown in jail. It was crazy stuff. But you know how unstable third-­world countries can be.”

  “Sure do,” Lila said, willing to say anything to keep Jack talking.

  “Where was I?” Jack asked.

  “A coup in Brazil,” Teddy offered from his seat by the window. He gave Lila an encouraging wink.

  “Oh, right. Right. Well, Thiago asks me for a favor. And, looking back on it, this is where I made the one crucial error. This is the thing I wish I never did. By that time Warren Software was the default operating system in every personal computer on the planet. Thiago wanted to know if I could somehow hack into the computers of his father’s rivals. Then he could find out what information they might have on his dad. And I said absolutely not. But Thiago begged me. He had once been a good friend and I owed a lot of the success of the company to the Campos family. Plus, Thiago said these men were terrible thugs. And could kill his father. So I did it.”

  “Sometimes you have to do bad to do good,” Lila said.

  “Hacking into the system was remarkably easy. But of course it was for me. I designed it.” Even in these terrible circumstances, Jack was still vain about his talents. He continued, “I gave Thiago the information he needed, and he went away. But it didn’t last. He came back again, and this time his request was much worse. So I refused. I told him I wasn’t afraid of him or his father. Thiago said it was way bigger than that. These were dangerous men
that would ruin me in a second. They’d ruin me, and they’d murder my family. So I did what they asked. I didn’t think there was any other choice. Starting in 1995, I did whatever they wanted. Using a back door in the software, I was able to hack into the operating systems of the CIA, the FBI, British Petroleum, GE, you name it.”

  “Do you know what they did with the information?” Lila asked, amazed at what Jack was saying.

  “Never. I didn’t want to know anything.” He began to whimper slightly. “And then September eleventh happened. I remember it so clearly. That was the morning I knew I had to change everything. If I kept helping foreigners access secrets of my government, I was no better than the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.”

  “So you faked your own death?” Lila asked, still not seeing how the pieces fit together.

  “That wasn’t my first plan, let me tell you. I tried everything to sever my ties with those Brazilian scumbags. But nothing worked. That’s when I started palling around with Senator Baines. I had him sic the CIA on those South American bastards, but that only made them angrier. They started having me followed. Then I started spending more time on yachts.” He paused. “At least out there in the middle of the ocean, you know when you’re being tailed.”

  Lila couldn’t believe what she was hearing. For years she’d thought Jack had been killed by a jealous wife. The truth was a million times more complex.

  “Campos’s thugs threatened to kill me if I refused to cooperate. They threatened my daughter and my wife. That’s when I knew I had to really give it all up to be free of them. Including the company that I spent my life creating.”

  Lila and Teddy sat there, stunned. “The source code,” Lila whispered, figuring out the final piece. Jack realized that if his software had a weak spot that allowed hackers to access every user’s private data, he’d need to destroy every hard drive that was vulnerable.

  “I had it all planned. I was going to take myself out and destroy Warren Software, leaving that prick Seth Liss to clean up the carnage. I wrote a source code for a software update that should have destroyed the hundreds of millions of PCs with my operating system. But that didn’t make its way through the system as I had intended. My declaration that all manufacturing would be returned back to American soil knocked some of the stuffing out of the company’s share price, just as I had wanted, but it eventually rebounded. And our acquisition of Peregrine, which was a lousy-­piece-­of-­shit company that I thought might spell the end for Warren, also fell through. Seth, unfortunately, turned out to be less of an idiot than I had thought. He kept the company alive even after I was gone. All I managed to do was take care of myself, and my family. And now I haven’t even done that.” He laid his head back and closed his eyes.

  “But how did you do it?” Lila said, not feeling an ounce of pity for this pathetic man. “How’d you fake your own death?”

  A glimmer came to Jack’s eye. “That part was easier than I’d expected. Unlike my plans for destroying Warren Software, my own death was seamless. Once I decided that I had to die to be free, I started siphoning off money into a Swiss bank account with the help of my personal banker, Urs Hunziker. By September 2008, I had a billion dollars socked away under my new identity. But if I was going to die, I wanted it to be a spectacular event. The stuff the world would talk about forever. I wanted it to be legendary.”

  Lila looked at Teddy with disbelief. She couldn’t stand Jack’s grandiosity, even in defeat.

  “Walk me through what happened that night.”

  “I had pints of my own blood drawn over the last ­couple months, which I brought on board with me, of course. I brought my mistress on board and drugged her heavily for days, keeping her isolated. I knew she’d be the perfect patsy.”

  At Jack’s mention of Ava, Lila felt rage build inside her. She struggled to keep calm as he continued. “I threw a giant party that night to make sure that ­people on the ship were both inebriated and away from where I would stage my murder. I sedated my mistress, then brought her to the deck with me. When she awoke she found me covered in blood and her holding a knife. It wasn’t a bad plan.”

  At least Lila now understood why Ava had been so out of it that night.

  “But how’d you survive the water?” Lila asked, remembering the image of a bloodied Jack plunging a hundred and fifty feet into the dark ocean waters.

  “Yes,” he said with a smile. He seemed to be basking in his cleverness. “That was complicated. For that, I needed the help of a ­couple good men.”

  “Accomplices,” Lila said.

  “Call them what you will. Even great men need a helping hand or two.”

  “Asher and Ben,” Lila said. But it still didn’t make sense. “But those two men weren’t your friends. One made you a cuckold. While the other seduced your only daughter and tried to extort money from you.”

  “Yes, you’re right, but only about Asher. Ben was my friend. Is still my friend, even though it’ll mean jail time for him now. His affair with Elise was all my idea. Call it an insurance policy against a costly divorce. I thought it would temper her judgment about my own extracurricular activities. This, of course, was before I’d cooked up my plan to make a new life for myself. But Ben proved himself so competent, so loyal, that I knew he was the only one I could trust with a secret this big.”

  “And what about Asher?” Lila asked, amazed.

  “Sadly, he did take things too far with Josie. But I thought it was important for my daughter to know that ­people weren’t what they seemed. My little lamb needed to learn some difficult lessons, because she wouldn’t have me looking out for her in the future. Still, Asher acted in a way that left me greatly disappointed in him, in both of them.”

  Now that she was looking at events with Jack’s twisted logic, they began to make sense. He used the last weeks of his life on the boat to teach all of the ­people in his life lessons that he thought were important—­about loyalty, honor, and forgiveness.

  Jack continued, “Asher met me underwater with a submarine, and I went into hiding. The whole thing was very cloak-­and-­dagger. And went off without a hitch. I have to say I enjoyed it. And those men didn’t suffer too much. I made them rich and, today, I made them world champions.”

  “But what about Ava?” Lila asked. “Did she mean nothing to you?”

  “Ava,” Jack said, dragging out every syllable. “She was beautiful. That I do remember. Beautiful and willing. But not much more. She seemed trusting, vulnerable, just what I needed. It was nothing personal. She was just collateral damage.”

  Upon hearing this, Teddy looked at Lila nervously. True, Lila wanted to leap upon the old man and make him hurt. But she knew that wasn’t the best way to exact revenge. He already felt like a victim, and Lila wasn’t going to help him actually be one.

  Jack continued, “The truth is I’m glad it is all over now. I’m tired of hiding. It’s a hard thing watching the world go on without you, like you don’t matter at all. Nothing in the entire world has made me feel worse than that.”

  CHAPTER 31

  AN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA storm erupted when the news broke that Jack Warren had faked his own death. The story only became bigger when it was revealed that he did so in order to extricate himself from a software spying deal gone wrong. Once the shadowy group of Brazilian kleptocrats at the heart of the scandal were forced out of the darkness, the story became only more explosive. But despite Jack Warren’s predictions, he was never, ever labeled a patriot. Not once. None of the New York Times editorials, the Fox News segments, the mentions of him in a State of the Union speech, the congressional investigations, and the dozens of books written about the scandal called Jack Warren a hero to his most beloved country. History, it seemed, was still not on his side.

  Nor was it on the side of anyone connected to Jack Warren. The fallout was massive. Warren Software’s stock price went into free
fall, basically bankrupting the company overnight. What Seth Liss hadn’t lost in the market would surely go to lawyer’s fees for all the class-­action lawsuits and government inquiries he was facing for the foreseeable future.

  Thiago Campos and his lovely wife, Esperanza, had all their American assets seized and were extradited back to Brazil, where Thiago and his father would stand trial for spying and treason. After a quick divorce and a return to her maiden name, Esperanza recovered from the shame and shock of the whole affair on her family’s estate in Bali, where she dove into kundalini yoga and began toying with the idea of starting her own line of handbags.

  Clarence Baines was forced to resign, though he stuck by his story that he was one of the few forces of good in Jack Warren’s troubled life. Hoping to return to public office, he self-­published a memoir called The Confessions of a Conservative, detailing his innocence in the Warren scandal and his plan for creating a new American utopia based on the political principles of Barry Goldwater. It was unanimously declared to be one of the most delusional pieces of writing the world had ever known. After leaving her husband, Charity went on to marry a politically ambitious man who owned a small but profitable chain of barbecue restaurants in southern Florida. She helped him successfully run for the Florida State Senate in the 2022 elections, happy to be, once again, a politician’s wife.

  Ben Reynolds and Asher Lydon were convicted on several counts of conspiracy and insurance fraud. Officials from the America’s Cup officially expunged their names from all records. But Jack Warren’s design innovations forever changed the sport of sailing, though no one would admit it out loud.

  Daniel Poe dined out on his Jack Warren stories for the rest of his drug-­fueled days. The golden phallus went to auction again, this time resulting in a bidding war. It finally sold for $35 million to a buyer who asked to remain anonymous.

  Elise Herrera (formerly Stadtlander formerly Warren) leveraged the shocking revelation about Jack to land yet another wealthy husband. British betting firms were giving five-­to-­one odds that he wouldn’t make it to the year 2025. Edna, her faithful servant, remained by her side.