by E. J. Simon
As soon as the gold cross icon appeared, Michael double-clicked on it. The geek leaned in even closer. No longer wanting to look up at the others and feeling nervous, Michael stared at the laptop screen. He could hear the sounds of throats being cleared, then a cough, then another throat clearing. It reminded him of business presentations when the technology wasn’t working and the PowerPoint slides from his laptop failed to show up on the boardroom’s screen. Each second of waiting—wondering if it was going to work and doubting it more as each second passed—felt like an eternity.
Where are you, damn it?
Chapter 31
Minutes passed, each second marked by the ticking of an antique clock that, until the room fell silent in anticipation, Michael had not heard before. He kept trying to summon Alex, retyping in the password, then old passwords, asking the tech guy to check the White House Wi-Fi connection, but Alex was a no-show.
He glanced over at President O’Brien, who was looking back at him and no longer smiling. He could feel the mood around the table turning against him.
Finally, a laughing General Sculley broke the silence. “Sometimes it helps if you turn the computer off and then on again.”
There was a burst of laughter, then several simultaneous conversations, none of which had anything to do with the subject at hand. He’d lost them and nothing he could say now would change things. Already, it seemed was as though he were no longer in the room.
It was time to pack up and go home. He should have known better than to expect Alex to show up, even though he’d told him about this possibility for the meeting.
President O’Brien stood. “I think it’s best to adjourn, we’ve all got busy calendars.” Then, looking at Michael, “I confess I’m baffled at what’s going on here. I love the French but sometimes their intelligence can get carried away. I need to regroup with our own intelligence folks here on this to see how things got this far. Clearly, they should have vetted the matter more thoroughly before bringing it to this level. I wish you the very best. Someone will escort you out. We’ll be in touch.”
Michael nodded, closed the lid on his laptop, and got up to leave. An aide appeared by his side and they both headed out. The room seemed to be in a controlled commotion, with several of the men cracking jokes while preparing to leave. There were thinly disguised recriminations going back and forth, “…So whose crazy idea was this?”
Michael looked over at President O’Brien, who seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, not angry like most of the others around him. If anything, Michael thought as he walked away, the president appeared confused. Michael thought of Samantha and how she’d react once he told her what had happened. Any chance of her believing in Alex—and perhaps Michael’s own psychological stability—had been dashed.
But just before Michael reached the door, Alex’s husky voice with its familiar Queens accent bellowed loudly from the closed computer’s speakers and throughout the room.
“Where the fuck are you?”
Chapter 32
Newark International Airport, New Jersey
Jonathan Goldstein loved being rich. It was who he was. More than his newborn and grown children and certainly more than any of his wives, money made him tick. He rarely found reason to bother reflecting upon it.
Recently, a lump under his armpit, and the resulting malignant tumor diagnosis brought into his psyche the harsh intrusion of his mortality. Briefly, he’d wondered if his priorities had been misplaced. But the most recent prognosis, assuring him of many more years of business as usual, had restored his faith in his…material world.
Several years ago, he’d dumped his wife of forty years to marry a young woman forty years his junior whom he’d met in a Chinese restaurant. The story was later reported in the business and social rags, how he’d slipped her his business card as she was leaving with her General Tso’s Chicken takeout, telling her, “Google me.”
As soon as she signed a generous prenup and not long after his latest facelift, and only two days after his divorce was finalized, they married.
As he drove out of the Newark airport parking lot in his new Talia, the latest model with an optional self-piloting feature, he glanced at his image in the rearview mirror and wondered if he’d overdone the facial surgery. Never handsome, he nevertheless barely recognized the face that looked back at him in the mirror. Was it better than it would have been if he’d left it alone? His deep-set, hollowed eyes and the dark circles from lack of sleep stared starkly back at him.
The long flight from Berlin had given him time to reflect. Perhaps too long, but he’d been unable to sleep. He longed to drive up to his Short Hills mansion and get into his own bed.
It had taken him fifty years to accumulate his first billion, hard work at major investment banks, setting the stage for his final triumphs as a takeover artist, buying distressed—and sometimes healthy—companies, then cutting out every last ounce of fat, plus muscle if not bone, in order to create a favorable bottom line before flipping those businesses to other investors, each time earning himself millions, often hundreds of millions in profit and fees. Who cared if the business was left crippled with debt and lost talent?
Yes, the trip from Berlin had given him time to think. He briefly engaged the autopilot switch, enabling the self-driving function of his car so he could open his iPhone. He clicked on the First Bank of Aruba app, pointed the screen to his face, allowing the facial recognition feature to recognize him, clicked on the balance in his account. $5,048,776, 222.70. Yes, that was five billion in his account. He laughed out loud, placing his hands on the steering wheel and regaining control over the sleek automobile.
Moments ago, Dietrich’s Nazi gold had just been converted to euros and then to dollars and then wired to his account. He had secretly promised the money to the Benjamin Solomon Center for Holocaust Victims, an organization he had donated to over the years in memory of his grandfather, who had died in the Sachsenhausen camp. An old family friend who represented the Solomon Center, Saul Silverberg, had been working in concert with him after Jonathan told him he’d met a prominent Vatican monsignor and suspected Nazi sympathizer who wanted him to convert his gold and invest it for him.
He pushed the button on his smooth polished mahogany steering wheel. “Call Saul Silverberg,” he said.
“Jonathan, do you have good news?”
“Yes, I’ve just received the funds and will be arranging the transfer into your bank this afternoon as soon as I arrive home.”
“Splendid, we are so grateful to you. You have done good work. Your grandfather would be so proud of you.”
“Thank you, I’m honored to be of help.”
“Jonathan…before you hang up, may I ask how much we will be receiving? I need to let our bankers know what to expect and I’m curious as to how much gold these people were able to hide all these years.”
“Yes, of course,” Jonathan said. “It came to just over a billion dollars.”
To Jonathan, that seemed more than fair.
“God bless you, my friend.”
Chapter 33
Washington, DC
Everyone in the room stopped, frozen in their places, some seated, others standing or, like Michael, heading for the door. It was like that game where, on a command, everyone has to stop what they’re doing and freeze.
They were all staring, their eyes fixated on Michael’s laptop still under his arm. He too stopped in his tracks, feeling a wave of relief and newfound confidence flow through him.
Alex’s gruff voice resounded once again through the laptop’s speakers. “There was a lot of traffic. Computer traffic, you know. Internet, not car traffic. I got delayed. I’m not big on meetings, either, in case my brother hasn’t told you.”
Michael turned around, returned to his seat and, after carefully placing his laptop on the antique conference table, opened the lid. The mood in the
room had changed.
The computer geek got up and, once again, looked over Michael’s shoulder at the laptop screen. His head jerked back slightly when he saw Alex, apparently live and well, whatever that meant.
“Can you flip that thing around so I can see?” President O’Brien said.
Michael turned the laptop away from him and toward the President so O’Brien and Alex could see each other.
“Harry O’Brien, huh? Who’d have thought?” Alex said. “I voted for you, by the way. Not sure why, though.”
Although O’Brien, apparently speechless, appeared somewhat surprised at what he was seeing and hearing, Michael could see that he—and others around the table—were not only confused but, once again, skeptical.
O’Brien looked up, first at the computer guy and then at Goodrich. “Jim, can you have someone take a close look at this? I mean, I see someone here on the screen that looks like the man in the photos you showed me a few days ago, Alex Nicholas, the late Alex Nicholas, I guess, right? But how do we know…? I mean, if it’s real, this is remarkable.”
“Listen,” Alex said, in his thick, throaty voice, “I didn’t want to be here in the first place. I’m here because my brother asked me to show up. I don’t like it when you guys talk as though I’m not in the room.”
O’Brien’s mouth dropped. The computer guy scrambled back to his own laptop and started furiously typing.
General Sculley laughed, loud and hard. “This is goddamned ridiculous, folks. Y’all can’t be serious about this.”
Michael knew that Alex was going to go nuts over Sculley’s comment. This was where their personalities differed, not so much in what they felt, but certainly in how they reacted to their emotions. Where Michael was usually easygoing, Alex could be brusque and blunt. Both had tempers, but Alex’s was lethal and hung on a hair trigger. Michael was more calculating. Alex was a risk-taker, defying the odds, acting on instinct.
Alex had no patience for subtlety, whereas Michael could dwell in the gray areas of life.
Even though Michael couldn’t see Alex’s face, he knew what was coming, and Alex didn’t disappoint him.
“Go fuck yourselves.”
The screen went dark.
Chapter 34
Washington, DC
CIA Director Goodrich looked to his computer geek. “Talk to me. What do we know?”
“Well, it could be good software, you know, some combination of AI, voice-duplication and recognition software; someone could have loaded in a lot of his personal history, done an algorithm to model his basic attitudes and decision-making or personality. But, assuming Michael here is being straight with us, it’s also true that no one has been ever able to duplicate a person in software.”
“What about IBM’s Watson?”
“Let me be more precise, no one has ever been able to duplicate a particular, actual person on a computer. It’s one thing to mimic human reasoning or thinking. It’s another to take an actual human being and literally recreate them, their look, their voice, their recognition capabilities, their memory, their beliefs and attitudes, their…very consciousness.”
“You must have been able to trace this to something?”
“No, sir…we haven’t.”
Goodrich cocked his head, reminding Michael of a confused puppy. “How’s that possible?” He looked over at the President, then back at Michael. “What in the world is going on here?”
The President also looked at Michael, his expression somber, serious. “I guess I didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect this. Was that really your brother? And, if it was, is he dead or…could he be alive? And I only ask if he could be alive because, other than Jesus Christ, I’ve never heard of someone who was dead ever coming back to this life and, at the risk of my political future, in the case of Christ, I’m not even convinced of that. So, help me out here.”
Michael tried to come up with an explanation that would make sense. “Alex was gunned down in a Queens bar two years ago in front of a room full of off-duty New York cops. He was carried out of that place in a body bag and taken to the city morgue. At least this is what I’ve been told by the people who were there and, officially, by the NYPD. I happened to be in Paris when it all happened, actually speaking with Alex by phone when he was shot. I heard him die. After the morgue, his body was delivered to a funeral home, where he was embalmed, placed in a casket and, after his funeral three days later, buried at Saint Michael’s Cemetery in Astoria. If there is more to this than that, the burden, gentlemen, is now on you with all your resources to find it. I haven’t been able to uncover any other scenario, despite what Alex’s widow and some others seem to want to believe.”
“So,” the President said, “the person we saw and heard talking to you on your computer was…really…”
“That was Alex,” Michael said.
The President looked at his computer expert, who was typing away on his laptop while listening to someone through his earbuds. “Can we verify this?”
“The CIA techs are still analyzing it. I…I’m not sure yet. But this looks…legitimate. It’s a sophisticated program that appears to be running on artificial intelligence software but…it’s not just software…I don’t have the correct words for it…it’s more advanced than anything we or I have ever seen before. It’s almost…or is…real, a real independent entity or being…It may have been software once but now has taken on a life of its own…I’ve never seen anything like this before, except in the movies.”
Goodrich turned away and looked back at Michael. “Wasn’t your brother’s body exhumed a few months ago?”
“Yes, his widow Donna Finkelstein had his body exhumed. I was there, of course. But as the casket was brought out of the ground, a helicopter swooped down and…hijacked…the casket. It was later delivered to a church on the Lower East Side in New York City. When we opened the casket, there was another man’s body inside.”
“I must be living in a bubble,” the President said. “How is all this stuff happening around us and we don’t hear about it?”
“Well, then,” Goodrich said, speaking to Michael, “in the absence of a body, shouldn’t we first assume that Alex Nicholas is not dead and that his murder was an act of some sort, you know, blanks for bullets, ketchup for blood, Hollywood style, and that he is, in reality, hiding out somewhere watching baseball games in a Las Vegas condo—as, I understand, his wife suspects?”
“I don’t think so,” Michael said. “I think he’s dead, that his body was stolen by rogue priests inside the Catholic Church who felt threatened by what his reemergence could represent.”
“Oh, this is great.” Sculley said, as though he had just woken up again. “It just keeps getting better.”
“Can you prove this?” O’Brien said to Michael.
“Possibly, it depends what level of proof you’re looking for.”
Michael had a lot of information in the form of e-mails, much of it from Alex himself but not the type of proof he knew these people would be looking for. The truth of it was, only Alex himself, the virtual Alex, could prove any of it. And Alex didn’t appear to want to cooperate with this bunch.
“No, I can’t prove it with absolute certainty, at least not without my brother’s help.”
Michael could feel the tempo of the room shifting again.
The President lowered his head and placed his hand over his forehead. “This is…crazy. I don’t know what the hell to make of this.” He looked around the table. “Well, you guys are the experts here, what is this?”
Darryl MacPherson, the national security adviser spoke up for the first time. “Well, either we have a very clever, elusive man who is savoring his freedom somewhere in the world and laughing at us—or…”
“Or? Or what?” the President said.
“Or, we have a game changer…in which case we here at this table have wi
tnessed a monumental occurrence in the history of mankind. Right now, I have no idea which one we’re dealing with. But we need to remember why we asked Mr. Nicholas to be here in the first place. It was because we have a problem. A big one. And, if his brother really does exist in the Internet or cyberspace or whatever the hell it is, we need to know that because…well, we need his help.”
Everyone seemed to look now at the FBI director, Jesse Graham. “Mr. Nicholas, with all due respect, first of all, from what we’ve seen here today, we’re not convinced your brother actually exists in the form you’ve suggested—a human being recreated by artificial intelligence. Second, assuming that he does exist, that somehow your brother and his hired tech experts were truly able to crack the code of—let’s call it immortality through technology—he doesn’t appear willing to be of help or even to speak with us.”
The room fell silent. After an awkward pause, O’Brien spoke. “Michael, I appreciate what you’ve done to be here and share what you know with us. I don’t doubt your honesty but it appears that none of us—including yourself—are really sure what we have here. As I mentioned in our call the other night, we came upon this during our investigation of the airliner, that’s how we got to Schlegelberger and then you and…your brother.”
O’Brien looked around the table. The expressions on the faces of his advisers ranged from skeptical to confused. “Listen, I’m going to be as honest with you as I can. We believe that this Schlegelberger—whoever and whatever he or it is—was behind the hijacking and ultimate destruction of that airplane. But, there’s more to our concern than just that. Much more. I’m afraid that’s as far as I can go right now.”