GREED Box Set (Books 1-4)

by John W. Mefford

“This has to be the place,” I said, then rapped three times on the thin, hollow door.

  Five minutes later, after knocking another twenty times or so, I wondered if my assumptions about Satish were incorrect. Andi was leaning against the brick façade, taking weight off her sore leg, while tapping her foot at the same time.

  "Ready to try the other house?'

  I looked across the street, then tried to paint a scenario where I could envision the sinewy computer nerd living in a dream home by age twenty-four. I made a step in that direction, bracing my hand just inside the beveled brick outlay to the right. I felt something, a plastic bubble, and instinctively pressed. Just as I lifted my hand to see what I'd pressed, a chorus of voices bellowed around us, sending Andi and I to our knees. I paused, perked my ears, and heard opera singers belting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Strange, even for Satish.

  The door swung open, and I first saw the neon glow of white teeth.

  “Satish is in the houuuuusssse!“ he said.

  Andi found his long, skinny arms and gave him a bear hug. I thought she might crush his ribs. He was still as thin as ever, but something was different.

  I extended my hand, and he gave me a firm handshake in return. He seemed older.

  I must have given him a puzzled look.

  He scratched his face. "You like Satish's new look?" he asked, turning and giving us a profile view while resting his hand under his chin.

  Not a fan of anyone speaking in the third person, I took a wild guess.

  “Nose job?”

  I was greeted with two stares. Then, Satish broke out in laughter.

  “Not with this hump,” he said, putting a finger on the bridge of his nose.

  Andi reached up and gently tapped both sides of his face. “It's the beard, huh?”

  “I think I look rather stately, don't you think, Michael?”

  “Stately. Hmmm.” I looked around the front room, and nothing stood out, just sparse, Ikea-like furniture.

  “Nice doorbell greeting, although I'm not sure many people ever hear it. Why do you have it hidden?” I asked as Satish walked backward.

  “We hate solicitors.” Satish looked like a serious-minded professor, wearing a stylish gray sweater, khakis, and loafers.

  “Preppy, Satish. Very preppy.” Andi said, swinging her finger toward his attire.

  Satish gave her a quick wink then turned to me. “We have headphones on most of the time, so we need a real noisemaker to break us away from our important work.”

  He opened his garage door, and we took two more steps. This garage looked more like a computer lab. Two guys waved from their workstations.

  “That's Bogi over there. He's a Die Hard movie buff. He pulled the song off the soundtrack and connected it to our doorbell.“

  I nodded.

  He pointed to the other guy. "YY doesn't say much. He's got mad skills. I call him my secret weapon," Satish said.

  Andi and I glanced at each other.

  “Did I say something wrong?” he asked, putting one arm around each of us.

  “We need to talk,” Andi said, patting his back.

  A few minutes later, after Satish had made us each a tea concoction of some sort, we sat in a triangle behind his computer workstation and dumped everything on the proverbial table. For once, he didn't utter a word, only wincing when we described the crazy fight in the back alley of Swan Massage Therapy and Andi being shot in the leg.

  “And that's when Jet drove us to our current place, Chao Town,” I said.

  “Our safe house, so to speak,” Andi said, looking at me.

  “Jet.” Satish's boney fingers rolled across his glass of tea. “Heard that name before.“

  Andi and I perked up, wondering if Satish knew our little buddy, the kid who saved our asses. Of course, that came after Jet had scared the shit out of us with his reckless driving.

  Satish snapped his fingers, the sound popping in my ears. “Kick-ass Mossad agent. Man, she's hot.”

  “She?” Andi's eyes bunched closer.

  “Jet, from the Russell Blake thrillers?” Satish said.

  I'd heard of the author, but it was obvious Satish had lost the direction of our story.

  “Satish, here's the abridged version. Man takes a cleaver in the back, falls dead at my feet in the Fairmount,” I said.

  “Michael's been arrested three times,” Andi added.

  I pointed at my head. “Skull bashed in.”

  “Concussion, twice,” she said.

  “Beaten up,” I added.

  “Twice in one night,” she said.

  “Found the girl, the sister of the murder victim.”

  “The Natural,” Andi used air quotes, rolled her eyes.

  “Saw her get kidnapped in broad daylight.”

  “We think. Michael caused a huge wreck chasing after the car.”

  “Then, we broke into her business, Swan Massage Therapy, found a computer setup that rivals yours.” I swept my arm outward, indicating Satish's garage/lab.

  “Not possible,” Satish said, a hint of jealously creeping into his voice.

  “And we found this.” I tried to flatten the note on my knee then held it up.

  “Shiiit, bitch,“ Satish said, slapping my other knee. “What kind of live wire have you touched?”

  He broke out into a nervous chuckle, and I managed to return a half-hearted laugh.

  “You didn't see what was written on the paper.” Andi snatched the paper off my knee and found a tall lamp and pulled the chain.

  “What am I looking at besides scribbled numbers and a sketch of the beach?”

  Andi adjusted the angle. “It was etched with a coin or fingernail. See?”

  “W-M-D. Mother fucker.”

  I popped a knuckle. “That's what Andi said.”

  Satish jumped up and started pacing, and I wondered if he'd picked up that habit from me. Didn't matter, I was just glad to have another person, one we knew, trusted, and who had a bit more of an unbiased perspective to think through this hairball.

  I added a couple of leading thoughts.

  “We need more data on this Franco character, for starters.”

  Satish snapped, pointed at me, but kept pacing.

  “Need to figure out where they're keeping Camila,” Andi added.

  “Somehow, there might be a kid involved,” I said.

  Satish touched the back of his mesh chair, swung it around, then snapped his knuckles, a rippling popping sound. I wasn't envious.

  “Tell me more about this computer lab at her business,” he said, logging into his system and clicking on a few icons, windows coming to life on three different monitors.

  I took out my phone, pulled up Google Maps, and found the physical address.

  “Okay, this will do for starters. Looking for an IP address,” he said to himself.

  Andi looked at me, her dark eyes showing a bit of fatigue.

  “You need your meds?”

  She bit her lip. “Didn't want to say anything.”

  We both looked over at Satish, who had slumped down in his chair, like a jockey settling into his ride.

  I dished out two pills to Andi, who swallowed them with a slurp of tea.

  “Interesting.” Satish scratched his chin. “I found the IP address associated with Internet traffic at Swan Massage Therapy.“

  “That's a good thing, right?” Andi asked.

  “No. Yes, but...I've gotten in, but only partially. The rest is blocked by a set of firewalls and possibly other security I can't penetrate. At least not yet.”

  Long fingers played the keys like Van Cliburn on his piano. A few more clicks, then Satish spoke human again.

  “Okay, I've set up network traces and a security scan, and it appears inbound and outbound traffic is all coming from these four IP addresses.” He swished the mouse right and they appeared on a monitor in front of Andi's chair.

  “Doesn't mean much to me,” she said.

  “Me neither really,” I said. �
�But, those four IPs represent something or someone.“

  “Exactly. I can wait on hack—” He stopped abruptly and coughed. “Excuse me, trouble-shooting this issue later. While the traces and security scan keep running, let's try to find out who's behind door number one. But first, let's enlist some help. Hey Bogi, YY, I'm sending each of you two IPs to research. See if you can hunt down the owner of each IP, what they do, everything about them. Kind of like we used to do for fun in college.“

  Fun? Sounded more like invading someone's privacy, but I wasn't about to squash this team-building exercise.

  Satish clicked his mouse a few times, then Bogi said, "Got it." He sounded Eastern European.

  I then glanced over at YY, who was huddled just inches above his keyboard, his round eyes rarely blinking. He lifted a finger for a brief second.

  “Okay, YY's working on his,” Satish said.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah, you got to know the signs with YY. Very subtle, although he needs to learn better posture. If he keeps that up, he'll be done in this business before he's thirty.”

  “Does he ever speak?”

  “I've heard him speaking on the phone to his parents. He still lives at home. It's just about five miles across town. Rides his bike here every morning then back home every night.”

  “Why doesn't he just move in like Bogi?” Andi asked.

  “Apparently, he made a deal. He must stay at home until he's twenty-five so he can help tutor his younger brother, who isn't quite as gifted as YY academically. That allows YY to honor his family, which is very important in his culture,” Satish said.

  Satish sounded so...un-Satish like, almost like he'd developed a keen sense of awareness, a deeper understanding of what motivated certain responses from people. He nearly sounded like a man of the world. Well, maybe a grown-up boy.

  “What do you guys do here all day?” Andi asked as she eyed one monitor that looked a lot like one of those war-scenario video games.

  “We've formed a startup...” Satish cleared this throat. “...that allows online gamers to effectively and securely interact with other individuals without fear of being hacked while they're exposed to other gamers. Turns out a certain percentage of gamers tend to be online identity predators.“

  “Got a name for this idea, this company?” I asked, looking around the garage, fairly impressed.

  Satish raised a hand, his fingers inches apart. “We call it FailSafe. First major release is in one month. We're in beta right now,”

  Part of me wondered if I was looking at the next Bill Gates, maybe the Minecraft creator, Markus Perrson, or a just another computer nerd full of promise and innovative ideas who would spend the next fifteen years starting and failing umpteen businesses.

  Maybe Satish could sense my lack of confidence that he'd be anointed the next Steven Jobs.

  “Don't forget, plenty of companies start in garages. It's the American way,” he said, now leaning toward me. “We've studied the market like no one else. We understand gamers because we were gamers. We know how they think, what drives them, what concerns them. This is a niche no one has addressed, because... This will work. This will be the next big thing. Count on it.“

  He actually sounded convincing, whether it was his preppy attire, stately beard, or even the passion I heard behind his words. Back in my journalism days, I'd realized that work and passion only go hand in hand when your passion doesn't feel like work. But I'd let my passion eat me up, destroy my life to the point it didn't just feel like work; it felt like life dragging me under, drowning me, ultimately, in my own misery.

  Beam me up, Scottie. The familiar voice echoed out of a speaker on Satish's desk.

  “I think we've got our first responder.” Satish clapped his hands and spun around to face the bank of monitors. “Bogi's struck first,“ he said quietly. Three more clicks then a page of data swooped into view on the monitor closest to Andi.

  “We're looking at the man associated with the IP starting with 1-5-6,” he explained.

  We all stared at a mug shot of a man in his mid-thirties with brown-rimmed glasses, extra thick hair, and long sideburns. “Meet Diego Cruz, former head of sales for Hot Airlines," Satish said. "Currently a resident of San Jose. Season ticket holder to the 49ers, he has a wife, who teaches, and two boys, ages ten and thirteen.”

  “Nothing too abnormal there,” I said.

  “Who's to say at this point?” Satish said without turning his head. “Now, this quick rundown represents just part of their information. More will be coming in over the next few minutes, hours, maybe days, until we have a full profile.“

  I nodded and popped a knuckle. I felt a bit strange, wondering if we were unnecessarily invading people's lives, yet also realizing our objective was pure—to find Camila, to figure out why her brother was murdered.

  Beam me up, Scottie.

  “Lookie here. Person number two, please step into screen number three,” Satish said like a magician. “Here we have Rafael Lima. The man with the 1-4-3 IP address.“

  Rafael looked to be in his early thirties, brown hair cropped short, a tiny, well-kept goatee, and stylish glasses.

  “Mr. Lima has been a busy dude. He's been the CTO of six...yes, six Silicon Valley companies, including Oracle.“

  Andi raised an eyebrow while she rubbed the side of her leg.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. "Trying to minimize muscle atrophy." I released a light chuckle, recognizing her constant quest to recuperate and push herself to achieve more.

  “It appears Mr. Lima has been in trouble with the law,” Satish said.

  I scooted closer to the edge of my chair.

  “IRS trouble.”

  “Which is why he's a former Chief Technology Officer apparently,“ Andi said.

  “No doubt.”

  Beam me up, Scottie.

  “We've got number three on the hook,” I said before Satish jumped in.

  “Hey, don't steal my thunder.”

  I put up both hands. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Just kidding, dude. Anyway...wait, let me look at this again.”

  Satish shifted higher in his seat.

  “This just got serious, if it wasn't before. The man associated with the 1-4-1 IP is none other than Andre Valmor, US congressman from the Eleventh District, the northern Bay Area. Member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

  “Which party?” I jumped in, my pulse hitting second gear.

  “Neither. Ran and won as an independent, but has ties to the Green party.”

  A few seconds clocked by. Andi bit the inside of her cheek while massaging her leg muscles. I popped at least two knuckles, and Satish scratched his new beard while twisting his chair back and forth.

  “What's their connection?” I asked.

  “Could be Camila's clients, for all we know,” Andi said.

  “These are only IPs. I didn't catch these folks inside her building playing poker. But the timing of the traffic, being limited to just four, seems strange,” Satish added.

  Andi motioned her hand and turned her head slightly, like I was supposed to read her mind. I had.

  “I know what you're thinking.” I caught myself fidgeting with a pen I'd picked up.

  “Just sayin',” she said.

  “After all this, you want me to believe Camila is really a call girl?”

  I noticed the whites of Satish's eyes double in size.

  “A very high-priced call girl, given her clientele,” Andi threw in.

  Lowering my head, I clicked the pen a few times, questioning my assessment of Camila from Day One. Was it possible the first night I saw her, when my heart had skipped a beat, she was waiting on a call from one of her so-called clients?

  Then I recalled our first normal interaction at Camila's business, talking about flowers and such. Her fingers and hands were strong. Her spirit seemed stronger. I remembered the research Ji had conducted on Camila and her brother, Gustavo. Born
in Rio, with no apparent reason to stay in their homeland, they'd moved to the United States, settled in northern California where they truly blossomed, each in their own way. A former technical leader, this girl had the intellect of a thousand people potentially. How could someone with everything turn to prostitution? What would be her motivation? Desperation?

  “My mind still can't go there. I just don't see how.” I shrugged one shoulder.

  “Girls in that profession have a million stories, some of them even true,” Andi said. “You know that, Michael. But I understand why you can't see it. You're too close. You only see the good in her.“

  I nodded, looking back down at my pen, clicking away.

  Beam me up, Scottie.

  Three heads turned to the bank of monitors.

  “Number four, our 1-2-1 IP address,” Satish said, as he looked to the right, where the mug shot appeared on the screen.

  A streak of energy zipped through my spine, ending at the base of my neck, where hot met cold and clammy.

  “I know that guy.” I pointed at the screen, my eyes narrowing, my chest thumping like a rabbit's foot.

  “Meet Mr. Franco Teixeria. Former Facebook exec.”

  I replayed the images, Franco grabbing Camila's wrist, like he had power over her. Was he her pimp? His smug expression, then it flipped to anger. I couldn't imagine what sweet Camila could have done to evoke that type of emotion.

  Unless it had something to do with jilted love.

  I mulled over that and a hundred other theories as Andi and I silently sat in a cab and rode back to Chao Town.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Tiny, shifting eyes glowed in the dark just to the left of her glorified cot. Camila could feel their stares, hear their sniffs as they moved about, constantly searching for food, water, a way out of their cages. The first couple of nights in captivity, she'd experienced bizarre dreams with rats and hamsters growing to the size of hogs, then bursting through their cages and rebelling against the human race. She recalled waking up, drenched in sweat, almost laughing at herself for allowing such a silly scenario to play out in her mind. She knew the dream was a metaphor on many levels. Would she rise up against her captors or fall victim to the fate she was destined to follow?

  Camila curled her stiff, scratchy blanket under her chin, knowing this fiasco wasn't as simple as her dream, metaphor or not. Her young son's life hung in the balance, and completing a project that no one had ever conceived before stood between her and her precious four-year-old boy. She took in a breath and imagined Juan's scent, the scent of purity, all that was good in the world.