by Needles, Dan
“Brooke’s dead? When did it happen?”
“An hour ago.”
She paused. “Steve, you’re still in shock and you’ve been drinking. Hand me the gun. You don’t really want to do this. Trust me.”
“How’d you get in here?”
“You shut down DAPRA’s link; they were monitoring your site. I used a paging program to punch a hole through the firewall. They’ll be here any minute. Please hand me the gun!”
He took a step toward Austin.
Austin backed up against the wall behind the desk. “Don’t, son.”
“Steve! I know this is hard,” she said.
He shot her an angry glance. “There is no way you can understand this! You’ve never had your wife and daughter taken away from you!” he snapped.
Allison became quiet for a moment. “Do you remember when I told you my father died last year?”
Steve kept silent.
“I didn’t say how he died. Our plane was hit. My father ended up clinging to the other end of a strap I held. As the plane went into a climb, I lost my grip. He literally slipped through my fingers.”
Steve glanced at her.
“I understand the guilt you must be feeling right now. You’re a dad who lost his daughter. I’m a daughter who lost my dad. Believe me, it’s no easier on the other side.”
Steve bowed his head, fighting back tears.
“Please, hand me the gun.”
“He needs to tell me where he hid the funds.”
“It’s in here.” Austin stood, opened the top drawer of the file cabinet, and pull out a thick file, dropping it on the desk. “It’s all in there, son. Everything. Take it; it’s yours.”
Steve bit his lip. Finally, he handed her the phaser through the window.
Austin sighed, slumping against the back wall.
Taking the papers, Steve paused to make eye contact with Allison. He mouthed the words, “Thank you,” opened the door, and exited the room. Once in the hallway he pressed the portal button on his wrist and whispered, “Verwaltungen bank.”
Allison stepped through the paging window and into Austin’s office. With a metallic clang, the window disappeared behind her.
Austin clapped his hands ceremoniously as he walked around the desk and sat down. “Bravo! You had me a bit worried for a time.”
“Did you give him the account information?” she asked, letting the weapon drop to her side.
Austin laughed, shaking his head. “In a way, but he won’t be able to use it, of course.”
“Austin, he’s right about the recall.”
“You know it is funny that you would mention that. Mr. Davis’ email said you would come calling, demanding a recall, but I noticed something unusual about his signature. You see, sometime in the not so distant past, he changed it from Edward T. Davis to plain old Ed Davis.”
Allison stepped toward him. “Davis’ signature has nothing …”
“Oh, believe me, Ms. Hwang, it has everything to do with it. See, the way I figure things, Ed does not know anything about this Syzygy character or about the defect for that matter. I reckon you are the one who sent me this memo, but you didn’t get the signature right. Davis doesn’t know any of this, does he?”
Allison gripped the phaser tightly. “Stop screwing with me, that recall needs to happen.”
A recall would stop the murders and Davis would never hear about Syzygy. Ed would explode upon learning about the defect, but that would pass. Syzygy was something else. Ed would see how the Chinese could utilize a Syzygy-like weapon to bring down Warscape through its Nexuses. And she had provided the Nexuses. Despite their history, Davis would have to let her go. It would destroy her career. She could not break her promise to her father. His death had to mean something.
Austin laughed, putting his hands up. “Don’t worry. I am not going to spoil your little charade. I just want to add to it. You see, I need you to find some way around this recall of yours. It will put too large of a dent in my checkbook, darlin’. Otherwise I am inclined to tell Steve and Ed everything about this charade.”
“I’m afraid you don’t understand.”
“No, it is you that are mistaken here. You don’t have a choice in the matter. I believe I hold all the cards.”
“Austin, I’m warning you …”
“Tell you what, Ms. Hwang. Why don’t I step outside and conference Mr. Davis in? I am sure he would love to hear all about this.” Austin stepped toward the door.
“Don’t!” She grabbed his arm.
“Let go!” He jerked his arm.
She held on. He pushed her hard, and she fell back toward the floor but hung onto Austin. Austin toppled on top of her. He punched her stomach. The gun was pinned between them.
“Austin, don’t!”
The phaser fired.
Blue light enveloped Austin’s body a second time.
She pushed him off and rolled him onto his back. “Austin, can you hear me?”
His body felt cold and rigid to her touch—unnaturally stopped. She grabbed his wrist and pressed the exit button. Nothing.
She sat next to him. Austin’s body convulsed somewhere back in reality. Vinnie’s team would bust through Austin’s front door and find him like that.
She put her face in her hands. Things had just become much more difficult.
33
Steve stood inside a perfect replica of the bank’s real lobby in Ticino, Switzerland. The windows lining the lobby displayed Mount San Giorloomedo. It loomed next to the Ticino River, which poured into Lake Maggiore. He stared vacantly into the water. The alcohol had worn off and the edge of his memories had returned. Shaking them off, he turned and approached the counter.
A woman teller smiled at him. “May I help you?”
“Yes, I have an account here that I need access to.” He heaped Austin’s second set of books, a pile of loose papers onto the counter.
The woman looked first at the stack of papers and then turned her attention back to Steve.
“Uh … can you help me?”
She leafed through the stacks of papers and then paused and asked, “Do you have an account number? Maybe we could start there.”
“It should be in there, somewhere.” Steve grabbed the papers from her hands and shifted through them. After a few pages, he found the spreadsheet and pointed to the account number Austin had circled in black ink.
“Oh,” she said, smiling. She turned to her virtual terminal. After a moment she turned back to him. “Then you’re Steve Donovan?”
“Yes.”
“I assume you have your social security number and your password then?”
“Well, actually Austin Wheeler made the deposits on my behalf. We work for the same company, Nexus Corporation. My social security number is 261-85-564E, but I don’t know the password.” He laughed nervously.
She held his stare a moment longer. Without smiling, she glanced back at the screen. “I see. You’ll still need the password. It’s a secured account.”
He handed the file back to her. “Well, it’s in there, somewhere. I know I’m a bit scattered, but this is a big account. Can’t you help me?”
“That is the exact reason why I can’t help you. If you can come back with the proper codes, I will be more than glad to assist you.” With that, the teller turned back to her terminal and logged an entry on the account.
He crossed the lobby and sat down on a bench. Riffling through the file, he scattered papers across the bench’s surface. After several minutes, he realized Austin was not stupid enough to place the codes in the file itself. He obviously had hidden them somewhere, but where?
“Damn!” he exclaimed. The information had to be written down. Without it, Nexus Corporation’s wealth was but a string of electronic numbers locked away in a computer, in an untouchable account. Perhaps Ron could help—he was going through Austin’s books—but Steve had no idea where Ron was at the moment. Though he did not want to confront Austin again, he had no ot
her choice.
“Computer, duplicate the phaser.” A copy of the phaser materialized before him and he stuck it in his virtual pocket. Then opening a portal in the middle of the lobby, he stepped through, returning to Nexus Corporation.
He materialized at the end of a long table, its Formica surface flecking off at the edges and corners, exposing the particleboard beneath it. Disoriented, he gazed around the room. It had obviously fallen into disrepair. The paint was peeling from the walls and mildew stains spotted the roof, remnants of water leaks. This puzzled him.
He was in VR. Why would anyone design a room like this? Why was he here in any case? Had the Nexus malfunctioned? Steve walked to the one window in the room.
The window looked down onto a busy downtown street somewhere in the Orient. An endless stream of people paraded down the boulevard. Eddies of flesh clung to shopping windows while the ebbs and flows of the crowd carried its hapless occupants down the street.
He watched a lone man fight the current, trying to reach a shop upstream and just out of reach. After a minute, the man turned, resigned his will to the crowd, and followed the masses down the block. How often had he felt like that?
Steve saw the stages of his life recapitulated in the faces that floated by—a crying baby in a stroller, a boy with a lost expression as he looked for his mother, an angry teenager with his defiant orange hair. Yet even the teenager realized the uselessness of fighting the current of people. Then he saw an older man, bottle in hand, oblivious to those around him, drifting mindlessly down the center of the throng.
“Hello,” Vinnie said.
He turned from the window and found Vinnie grinning at the other end of the table. He had appeared out of nowhere.
“Please, take a seat,” Vinnie said.
Steve remained standing. “Why am I here?”
“Don’t get self-righteous. We know what you did.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you shut down the site, you cut off the surveillance. We figured Austin bolted, so we stormed his house. By the time we got to him, he was convulsing. At first, as you hoped, we thought Syzygy had struck again, but then I downloaded the System Log of Austin’s Nexus.”
Steve shook his head. It did not make sense. Austin had been fine when he left.
“You seem surprised! I viewed the same logs on Austin’s Nexus that you downloaded at the crime scene; that’s how I know you did it.”
Steve’s mind whirled. He remembered handing Allison the gun. Did she shoot him? But why?
Vinnie smiled. “You don’t believe me. Why don’t we go to the Nexus Corporation’s VR server and download its logs. I bet your authorization kicked us out of the server. What do you think?”
She must have killed him. Steve motioned to press the exit button on his Nexus.
“Go ahead. I sent a couple cars to your home a few minutes ago. They’re probably there by now.”
Steve’s shoulders slumped.
“Austin claimed he knew who the killer was.”
Steve shook his head. Austin didn’t know crap. None of them did. He stared vacantly out the window. What a mess he had made with his life.
“You don’t know who the killer is, do you?”
Steve continued to stare out the window, running through the events of the previous week. He had lost everything.
“Well, that’s just great! We no longer have a lead on this guy. So you managed to indirectly kill a few more people. You seem to be real good at that, indirectly killing people.”
Steve felt a pang of guilt. Just an hour ago he had blamed Austin for giving Syzygy the opportunity to kill Brooke. He would have killed Austin himself if Allison had not stepped in; but hadn’t he done the same thing? The Nexus was his invention. If he had stood up to Austin, Brooke would still be alive.
“The only question I have for you is, how’d you kill Austin? What did you use to kill him?” Vinnie asked.
Good question. Steve’s hand brushed his pocket and he felt the phaser inside it. Vinnie didn’t know. He had figured they had stripped him of any virtual devices he was carrying when they kidnapped him to this site, but they had not.
Steve became calm. In the last twelve hours, he had lost his daughter, his company, and now his freedom. It seemed only appropriate that he lose his life. The alternative was to live with the guilt, the knowledge that he had killed Brooke.
In one movement, he leaped out of his seat and pulled the phaser. At first he pointed the phaser at Vinnie, but only for an instant. He then he pointed it at his head.
“Don’t, Steve! We need you to catch Syzygy! How else can we do it?”
Steve answered, “Allison Hwang.”
“The director of DARPA?” Vinnie asked with a puzzled stare.
“What?”
“She can’t do anything. Only you can stop him.”
The strength left his legs. Steve set down the phaser on the table and sank into a chair. Vinnie jumped and swatted the phaser. It skidded across the table and slammed into the wall.
Steve spoke in a daze. “Allison was there. She used some modified paging software. She must have shot Austin after I left.”
“What did you say?” Vinnie asked.
Steve ignored him. As the head of DARPA, she could have ordered the recall at anytime. She could have saved Brooke.
34
Goooooaaaaalllll! Goooooaaaaalllll! Goooooaaaaalllll!” The announcer screamed into the microphone. It was Friday night at the soccer match in Santiago, Chile.
Francil Alvarez shot a wry grin at Coach Mike Burns as he placated the crowd with a victory lap around the field, interrupting the game. The U.S.A. team had pulled ahead of the Chileans.
The coach regarded his recent recruit from Brazil. He was without a doubt the most prolific player on the field. Though gangly at six feet, he was strong and agile. However, his temperament and integrity were another matter. Mike Burns cringed at every antic on and off the field that Mr. Alvarez made.
Coach Burns heard a metallic clank on his virtual back as a player patted him in passing. Thanks to a robotic unit, despite pressing business duties, the coach was present at the game through VR.
“Uh, coach?” the assistant coach said.
The coach turned to see the assistant coach removing a ‘kick me’ sign from the back of the robot. The coach ripped the paper sign out of his hand and waved it like a trophy at the team lining the bench. “You think this is funny, don’t you? Damn it! Who did this?”
A couple of players bowed their heads, hiding their smiles while others turned and snickered. The coach turned back to the field in disgust. It was hard to appear menacing as a four-foot robot. Next time, he would get the Goliath robot model, then he could crush their balls if they looked at him sideways. Of course, working on the U.S.A. team, he had more limited funding than the Chileans. The board would never approve of such a large purchase.
The game continued. James Keegan, a Chilean, tripped up Francil on a routine slide tackle. Francil fell to the ground, writhing in pain and clutching his calf muscle.
“I don’t believe it! He’s trying to force a yellow card against Keegan!” The coach shook his head.
Two referees walked casually to Alvarez. They were growing tired of his antics. They stood over him as Francil screamed at them. He was not holding his calf anymore. They looked back and forth between Francil and the other player. Finally, after a minute, they brought out a stretcher. Francil rolled dramatically onto it, cursing and hollering. As they carried him off the field, the audience started booing. Francil decided to get up and walk to the sidelines where the medics were waiting. The cries from the crowd did not abate but grew louder. Francil made a slow three hundred and sixty degree turn, displaying an extended third finger to the entire stadium.
“Jesus, get off the field!” The coach screamed, but Francil was still too far away to hear. Finally, he limped to the sidelines.
“What happened this time, Francil?”
&n
bsp; “It’s my leg. I had a flash of pain shoot up my leg after he hit me!”
“Francil, he didn’t hit you, he tripped you. It must be shin splints. Why don’t you sit down?”
“I think I’m fine.”
The coach shook his head.
“Really Coach, the pain is gone.”
“No, it’s still standing here in front of me.”
“Huh?”
“We don’t want to take any chances. This is your third leg injury in this tournament alone.”
Francil looked at the assistant coach for support, but he just shook his head, letting him know that he had pushed too far this time. Francil glumly turned and plopped down on the bench.
The game resumed and the crowd roared to life. After five short minutes the Chilean crowd was rewarded when their team scored another goal, tying the game at three all.
The assistant coach approached coach Burns. “Coach, we’ve got to let him play.”
The coach grunted.
“We don’t have a chance without him.”
Francil got up. “Come on, Coach! You know I can do it!”
“Sit down, Mr. Alvarez!” the coach said.
“No!” Francil said, remaining standing.
The coach gestured to the assistant coach. He nodded and they walked a few feet, out of earshot. “Coach, he needs to play. The owner has made it clear what will happen if we keep losing games.”
The coach glanced back at the bench. Francil was not there. He had followed them over. Turning his back to Francil, Mike stared at the assistant coach and said, “Okay, Mr. Alvarez, don’t disappoint me.”
In response, while the coach’s head was still turned, Francil planted a foot in the robot’s back, toppling it over. Then he ran out onto the field. The coach’s world turned sideways as he fell.
The referee blew the whistle.
“Goddamn it! You idiot, Francil!” He was fuming. “Wait until we notify the ref!”