by Derek Haas
“Can I get some water?” I ask.
The side of my head where Finnerich laid his boot is sore and swollen, and my lower lip is cracked, though the bleeding has stopped.
Peyton shakes her head.
I turn my eyes to Tweedledee, who has a red beard, and Tweedledum, who has narrow eyes. “Water?”
Peyton speaks up before they can answer. “Don’t talk to him.”
“Come on,” I say, and look back at her. “I could’ve shot you in the face but I didn’t. The least you can do is spare me some water.”
Her eyes harden and her lips stretch tight. “If it were up to me, you’d be dead right now,” she says flatly.
“Who would do it? You?”
“Maybe.”
I laugh and it cuts through the room like a gust of northern wind. “With what? Your taser? They didn’t even give you a gun.”
“I’d have managed.”
“Maybe you would have.”
I study her now, squinting. I’m starting to like Peyton. She looks to be the most competent of the bunch. She’s got some training . . . maybe military, maybe police.
“She your boss?” I say to the other two. The red-bearded one scoffs and says, “No.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m sure you should shut your fucking mouth until Mr. Finnerich gets back.”
Peyton snaps at him, “Hey, moron. Did I just tell you not to talk to him?”
Red Beard frowns, sulky.
I laugh again and get the reaction I’m hoping for.
“Oh, is that funny?” Red Beard says, anger coming off him in waves.
I nod vigorously. “It is. Pretty much. Yeah.”
Red Beard pulls out a Beretta from a shoulder holster and cocks it, crosses the ten feet that separate my head from his gun. Peyton jumps from her spot to get between us. “No, Carmichael. No.”
He brandishes his weapon like he’s going to use it as a sap, but Peyton stays in the way as the third dope keeps his spot holding up the wall.
“Get out of my way, Peyton,” Red Beard, or I guess Carmichael, roars, but Peyton has both hands on his chest, like she’s trying to hold a bullpen gate closed as Finnerich steps into the room.
“What is this?” he blasts from the doorway.
Carmichael stands upright and mutters, “Nothing,” his face now a brighter shade than his whiskers.
Peyton lowers her eyes and adds, “Yeah, nothing.”
I keep the smile on my face and train it on Finnerich, who has a butterfly bandage over the bridge of his nose and purple dashes under his eyes. Next to him stands a different man, one I haven’t met yet. He’s handsome, better dressed than anyone else, wearing tailored pants and an oxford shirt rolled up to the elbows. He’s a few years older than I am, I guess, and his emotions are right on the surface: concern, fear, sure, but also a sense of relief. This is Matthew Boone, and he thinks the threat hanging over him was neutralized by his crackerjack team.
“Is this him?” he asks. “Is this the guy?” His voice can’t mask his worry.
Finnerich holds up a protective hand, as though to say “I got this. Leave it to me.”
He snaps his fingers at Carmichael and the wall-holder-upper as though they’re trained German shepherds, and they step back to give him room.
“So,” Finnerich says, and slides a chair over so the legs scrape the floor. “We’re going to find a few things out about you, mister.”
I assume he thinks this way of speaking, of holding his eyes, is frightening and cold. I wonder if he practices in front of a mirror.
He turns to Matthew Boone to dramatize his point and adds, “If anyone gets easily squeamish and doesn’t want to look at what I’m about to do, then you should leave the room now.”
No one moves.
Finnerich tosses a look my way to see if his threat made an impression, but I return half-mast eyelids to provoke him.
He swallows. This is getting fun.
He stands up and makes a show of taking off his shirt, flexing his muscles. He rolls his neck and ripples his biceps, his forearms.
All I can look at is his kneaded-dough nose, the damage irreparable. The thought of it keeps the smile on my face. Maybe I’ll get another chance at it.
He threatens me again, something about what little is gonna be left of my face when he gets through with it, something about every bone in my body, and I really can’t listen to any more of his blather, so I turn to the man in the doorway and say, “I take it you’re Matthew Boone?”
“Don’t answer that,” Finnerich blurts, but apparently Boone isn’t the kind of man who likes orders barked at him from his hired help, so he answers, “Yes. That’s right.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Finnerich holds up a hand, reasserting himself.
I ignore the bodyguard, continue speaking directly to the boss: “Let me tell you all the ways your men fucked up today. One, I was allowed in the stairwell when I clearly had no reason to be in the building. Two, I was allowed access to the thirtieth floor, the one above your office. I could’ve easily gained entry to your ceiling from there. Three, your guards came at me with weapons but were not prepared to kill me or anyone else.”
Finnerich wheezes as though I slapped him in the face. “Four, they all gave me their names . . . she is Peyton, he’s Carmichael, he’s Finnerich.” I gesture at the narrow-eyed wall-holder-upper. “He’s not important. Five, they told me you were coming. Matthew Boone. The big boss.”
Boone steps toward me like he’s navigating a museum crowd in front of a fine painting, trying to get a better look at me. He speaks, and his voice sounds more confident, like we’re two friends trying to solve a math problem and he needs to correct my equation. “Okay, but here’s where you’re wrong—”
“Mr. Boone, don’t—”
Boone holds up a hand to Finnerich, but talks to me. “Here’s where you’re wrong, friend. I wasn’t in the building. I wasn’t in my office. Even though you gained access to the thirtieth floor, even though you could’ve cut a hole in my ceiling, the problem for you is I wasn’t there. You couldn’t have reached me. I was at home. So maybe . . . just maybe these guys did exactly what—”
“You’re here now.”
He stops, confused.
Everyone’s eyes circle at the same time.
With a speed no one in this room has ever witnessed, I shoot to my feet because they’ve zip-tied my wrists to the armrests but not my ankles to the legs, and this chair has a shallow seat with crossed legs for stability, which is fine when you’re sitting but not so stable when someone is breaking it, and I whip around with my hips, plowing the leg tips into Finnerich’s waist before he can mount a defense.
The legs snap and Finnerich reels and the plastic ties give or the armrests pop free or both, because all I have left dangling from my wrists are a couple of new plastic bracelets and my Glock is in my hand and pushed up against Matthew Boone’s nose.
“You’re here now,” I repeat. And then I add, “Ka-pow,” to bring it home.
3
I ride in the passenger seat of an Audi A8, the kind of car that usually has a professional driver in a blue sports coat behind the wheel, but Boone drives himself. He’s relaxed since I told him I’m not the one sent to kill him but the one his friend Curtis sent to keep him safe. The fear that marked his face since he stepped into the office retreats. His hands are steady on the wheel. He doesn’t wear a wedding band, I notice.
“You think I should fire everyone?” he asks casually.
“All I had on you was an address for your business and your home and a minimal description of your security detail. It took me less than an hour to have you up close and point blank at the end of my gun. I could have made the kill and gotten away with it. If this had been my assignment, if the name Matthew Boone had been at the top of my page, you would be dead right now. And here’s the thing . . . if this had been real, I would’ve had a file on you listing the best places, the best times t
o find you the most vulnerable with the least amount of resistance. In other words, it would’ve been easier. Five minutes instead of an hour. The men you had protecting you couldn’t do it even when I came at them directly. So, yeah, Max Finnerich isn’t doing you any favors.”
“Done,” he says immediately. “I never really liked the guy anyway. He always acted like he was the smart one in the room. That he knew secret things. But he’s a fraud so . . . done.”
“I assume he hired the rest of the men.”
Boone nods.
“Okay, they all have to go. You can’t have cross loyalties.”
“I understand.”
“Except the woman . . . Peyton. Peyton on her name tag. She might be worth a damn. I don’t know yet.”
“You want to keep her?”
“For now.”
“Whatever you want. You’re the boss. Just tell me what I have to do, and I’ll do it. I know there’s a price on my head, and I know . . .” His knuckles tighten on the steering wheel. “And I know I’ve been scared out of my gourd for the last week and a half, but I guess I’m supposed to act normally so my business will run normally? Still, I feel like a metal target on a shooting range. Just sitting out in the open and at any moment, plink, plink, plink, someone’s gonna knock me over.”
He pauses and loosens his fingers, flexes them to drive the circulation back into the digits. “Sorry. I . . . this has been hard.”
I know what it’s like to be hunted, so I could offer him some comfort, but I don’t know if he deserves it. The killer in me is accustomed to hating the target, finding something evil in him so I can exploit that evil when the time comes to kill him. That way, I can separate myself from the kill. Old habits die hard, I guess, because I’m already looking for things to hate about Matthew Boone, merited or not. I hate this ostentatious car. I hate that he’s rich and he speaks to his employees like he’s a class above.
This isn’t my job anymore, to hate the target. It’s not going to help me keep this man alive if I despise him. So why am I looking for these faults when I should be doing the opposite, finding reasons to support him?
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay, yeah,” he says, raising his eyebrows and letting them fall in waves. “My hometown is San Francisco. I was born into a family that . . .”
“I meant the beginning of someone wanting to kill you.”
“Oh. Right. Sure. That makes . . . that makes sense. Do you want the short version or the long version?”
“I got all night,” I say.
“I was a coder for Apple in the heyday of Steve Jobs and the black turtlenecks and the iPad and a new release every year and lines outside the Apple stores all over America. I was right out of college and had a head full of ideas and not enough sense and my parents were poor and my job was a good job. My team worked on digital photo-organizational software, an application that allowed the user to collect and arrange photos, except we didn’t call them applications at the time. We called them widgets then, but that name didn’t stick with Apple fans.
“My team grew, and I moved up from coding to management, but I still liked to get my fingers on a keyboard, get my hands dirty. Oh, I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right. Anyway, I liked to work. I didn’t see myself as management. I hated meetings and schedules and committees and sales figures and all the reasons I went to MIT and not Wharton.
“I remember it clearly, the day I quit. I was looking over the code of a young developer, I don’t remember his name, and his work was sloppy, full of errors, and I yelled at him. I said, ‘I’m supposed to present this in two days!’ I remember that. ‘In two days!’ And this kid looks at me like this.”
He makes a stern face, his eyebrows in a V.
“Like he’s pissed. Like I’m the enemy. You’re one of them. And I thought, Nope, no way. I’m not them. I’m us. It’s us versus them and I’m definitely on the us side.
“But I could see in this young coder’s eyes that was not true. So I put in my two weeks.
“Sorry, this was going to be the short version. Okay, yes. So I put in my two weeks and I took a freelance programming gig but I thought to myself, If I am them, then I might as well be them for me. Does that make sense? I might as well start my own business and own my own code. If you want to make money in Silicon Valley, and I’m not talking about a salary, I’m talking about a number with a lot of zeros on the end, then you have to own the intellectual property.
“I’d been staring at photographs the entire time I was at Apple, and one thing stood out to me about pictures more than anything else. People took lots of pictures of faces. It seems obvious, but it was like a revelation to me. Sure there were landscapes or pictures of food or pets or tourist attractions, but more than anything, there were faces, day in and day out. Clothes would change, hairstyles, makeup, age, sure, but what I noticed mostly was sameness. The distance between the eyes, the size of the lips, the broadness of the forehead, the shape of the chin.
“I started to think about a code that could take two pictures of ten people and tell you exactly who each one is. This is number one and this is number two and way over here is number three and so forth. And then I thought about it on a massive scale. What if you could match a face on video footage with a preestablished database, say, of mug shots? This is after Timothy McVeigh. I wasn’t even thinking about Muslim terrorists or anything like that. I had just reached a beta version of the software when 9/11 happened.
“The military came a-calling. They tried to buy me out but I learned from Steve Jobs to hold firm. Before I knew it, I had contracts with every acronym in the government—CIA, FBI, DHS, NSA—and when they decide they want something, they don’t negotiate, they just pay. That’s how I got rich.
“Facebook then came along and tried to buy me out, but I didn’t back down from the FBI, so I wasn’t gonna back down from Mark Zuckerberg. Apple eventually licensed some of my code and tried to improve on it, but their iPhoto software still sucks if you ask me.
“Okay, I’m going to wrap this up. I built Popinjay to about 200 coders and fifty project managers and another hundred support staff, and I kept it private and I run the big-picture macrobusiness side of it, but what I still really love doing is coding. It’s like puzzle pieces inside a puzzle inside a puzzle inside another puzzle and the key to all of it is in an undiscovered foreign language. Okay, okay. Yes. You get it. I love it.
“So I shut myself in my office for hours at a time and I work on new software, and I came up with code that can scan millions of faces and find two alike in a nanosecond, from any angle, from any media, including a large swath of the web. I mentioned it to a reporter from Wired and he tweeted about it, and the next day all the alphabets were back on my doorstep plus representatives from ninety foreign governments on five continents, including some very eager buyers in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. You see—no covert intelligence officer would be able to hide his identity. In a matter of seconds, you would know if he or she were photographed at Harvard in 2002, Germany in 2004, Saudi Arabia in 2015. Lies checked. Surgeries necessary.
“It’s only in beta, I tell everyone. It’s not finished. But they want it anyway. They try to hack into my servers, at the office, at home. If I won’t sell it, they’ll try to steal it. But even if they got their hands on it, it would be meaningless to them. I’ve used symmetric encryption with a key system . . . anyway, the code would be gibberish.
“So I shut down any kind of negotiations until I knew what I had. Someone did not take kindly to that, apparently, because the FBI informed me that chatter indicates some foreign entity has ordered me killed. If they can’t have it . . . they want no one to have it. And that’s my story.”
The boyish smile he keeps on his face as he tells it falls when he gets to the end of it, like a dog dropping its tail when he realizes his owner is calling for a bath rather than a walk. “Anyway, that’s all I know. I have a friend who works in some dark
places, Curtis, you know, and so I asked his advice and he made contact with you.”
“What was the FBI’s advice?”
“Witness protection.”
“Why didn’t you take it?”
“I don’t trust them.” He gives me a sideways look. “They want the software, too. I’ve seen the way they behave and I don’t like it.”
I nod. So have I but I don’t need to tell him that. We’re heading away from the city toward the suburbs and everything is green with houses set back from the roads. You only catch glimpses of wood and brick between the red alders, maples, and pines.
We turn onto a driveway and he punches a simple code into a keypad. An iron gate that looks like it wouldn’t be much barrier to an SUV or light truck swings open. A dirt path disappears into a wooded rise, and we snake forward over it.
“Also,” he says as he turns up a smooth drive, “I can’t make them move.”
The car twists around a cluster of firs and I see two boys tossing a football in lazy arcs. Their faces light up when they see the car and a cold hand grabs my stomach and twists it into a knot.
I sit in an armchair in the foyer, seething.
Boone is upstairs, talking on his phone in hushed tones, so I hear a low hum but can’t make out the words. The intermittent sounds of laughter, squeals, thumps, and whistles reach me through a window as the boys, ignorant of danger, play toss in the yard.
The dirty bastard.
The dirty, foul-playing, son-of-a-bitch bastard.
I’m going to snap Archie’s neck like a twig next time I see him.
He knew. He knew this idiot had a death threat on him and two boys at home that he hasn’t even bothered to protect. He told me nothing about the boys. Nothing.
I stand as Matthew Boone returns from upstairs. “Sorry. Trying to steer a ship by remote is not what—”
I cut him off. “I can’t help you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I can’t take the job.”