Death in the Cloud

by E. J. Simon

  Berlin, Germany

  Dietrich wasn’t paying close attention. Although Schlegelberger had given him the capability, eavesdropping on the Internet life of Alex Nicholas was, most times, incredibly boring. But this scene caught his eye, forcing Dietrich to sit down at his desk, pull his chair in, and lean in close to his computer screen. He recognized the naked woman on the bed, the legendary French actress Catherine Saint-Laurent. He felt a stirring, one that seldom visited him these days, and wished he could take the place of the tanned young woman with the stark white derriere, whose head of blond hair was slowly moving its way up Catherine Saint-Laurent’s thighs.

  Washington, DC

  The young man’s gaze had begun to wander as he looked around him at the room filled with other young men at their desks and computers. Following this older guy Dietrich was boring as hell, but then again, most such surveillance was. But he quickly focused back on his computer screen when he saw what reminded him of his pirated high school porn films, except none of them were ever filmed at the Paris Ritz.

  He watched, fascinated with the scene of the two attractive women, one old enough to be his mother yet unmistakably attractive, the other his contemporary and stunningly beautiful.

  It was the perfect porn flick but it wasn’t a movie, it was a live feed. How was Dietrich accessing this? Who had arranged for him to see it? He couldn’t break himself away from the screen as the older woman’s slender white legs wrapped themselves around the younger one’s face, her thighs seeming holding her, deeply, in place.

  Finally, he got up from his chair and signaled with his hands to get the attention of his supervisor, who immediately came running over.

  “Sir, you won’t believe this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Come take a look.”

  Chapter 57

  Astoria, Queens, New York

  Vito Colucci had seen all types of women during his long career. Nevertheless, his new client, Donna Nicholas, was truly a piece of work.

  “Ever notice how priests keep putting people in boxes?” Donna said. “First, Father Papadopoulos is blessing Alex’s mahogany coffin at the funeral—that costs me three grand. Then, this same Father Papageorge tries to hand me another box—a little one this time—and says Alex’s ashes are in it.”

  “Talk about Greeks bearing gifts,” Fat Lester said, interrupting Donna’s rant. “But they do know how to run restaurants.” He picked up his knife and fork.

  They were dining at Christos Steakhouse, an Astoria landmark that had been another of Alex’s favorites. A window table, dimmed lights, dark woods, a large fishbowl stocked with lobsters, it had the masculine look and feel of a steakhouse in an area known for tough characters.

  The Lesters, Donna, and their guest, Vito Colucci, were sharing a forty-eight-ounce Porterhouse steak, perfectly pink in the middle and charbroiled black on the outside, that had been neatly sliced and laid out on a platter in the center of the white table-clothed table. The table was strewn with baked potatoes, French fries, various accompanying steak sauces: blue cheese truffle, shallot and béarnaise. Plus, a two-pound broiled lobster.

  Donna, ignoring Lester, continued, “I don’t care how many boxes they bring me with Alex in it or his freakin’ ashes, there’s only one box with Alex in it—and I believe that’s a condominium. I just don’t know where it is, but it’s probably somewhere like Vegas or Costa Rica. I know he’s still alive and I’m going to find him. That’s why I’ve hired Mr. Colucci here.”

  Vito Colucci looked at the two Lesters and nodded. In his mid-sixties with a wiry build, salty hair, mustache, but a face that showed the toughness of the twenty-five-year veteran street cop and undercover detective who’d busted drug lords and Mafia kingpins while narrowly surviving their numerous attempts on his life. He was a legend in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, after having exposed corruption at the highest levels, including in his own police department. It was a miracle that he was still alive.

  “Listen,” Skinny Lester said, looking around and then at Vito, “there’s something I need to tell you. I swore I’d never tell anyone about this but, since you’re trying to find Alex, it’s probably okay.”

  “What is it?” Vito said.

  Skinny Lester looked hesitatingly at Donna.

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  “It was just a few weeks before he died, maybe three in the morning. We were in Alex’s den, at his house. Just the two of us. We’d polished off almost a whole bottle of Dewar’s when, all of a sudden, he tells me he wants to show me something he’s been working on. He says that he had hired a bunch of computer whizzes from Silicon Valley to create some special artificial intelligence thing and that they had made a breakthrough. He said he had paid them millions but they had to keep it quiet for like five years. Then he pulled out this laptop and opened it up—I thought he was going to show me the week’s results from the games or something. But he told me to look at it and—holy shit—it was him on the screen. But then it got crazy. Alex—the real Alex—then asked the computer Alex a question—and the Alex on the computer answered him. In Alex’s voice and with Alex’s expressions, you know, that classic sarcastic look. Not only that—but it was an answer only the real Alex could give.”

  “This is something,” Vito said. “Do you remember the actual question?”

  “Yes, it was like ‘How many home runs did Mickey Mantle hit in 1961?’”

  “So that was the actual, human Alex asking the computer Alex?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “And did the computer Alex answer it?”

  “Yep, in Alex’s voice, exactly the way Alex would if, say, it was him on FaceTime or something like that. Mantle hit fifty-six home runs that year. Not only that, but he added that Roger Maris hit sixty-one, exactly what Alex would have said. Alex knew his sports stats—and so did the…computer Alex, or whatever the hell I was looking at.”

  He looked at the trio around the table.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. Alex talking to Alex. I couldn’t believe it. They had a conversation with each other. It was funny—no, actually it was scary. Very scary.”

  “What happened then?” Vito said. “Did Alex ever bring it up again?”

  “No, and I never thought much about it after a while myself.”

  “What was the point of it? Was it a game?” Vito asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Lester said. “I would have easily said yes except, all of a sudden, Alex got real quiet. He shut the computer down and said something about how he still had work to do on it. He said, ‘No matter what happens, I’ll always be around, in the cloud.’ I said, ‘You mean the clouds don’t you?’, and he said, ‘No, the cloud.’ I had no idea what he meant. His grammar wasn’t always the best. And then he looked at me with that real serious look he’d get and told me not to tell anyone.”

  “He said not to tell anyone?” Vito said.

  “He said, ‘Lester, I mean no one, ever.’ I remember thinking it was as though he’d had too much to drink that night and was sorry he’d shown it to me. That’s why I’m not sure it wasn’t just one of his computer games. Still, it was damned good. I mean this was really Alex on that computer.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone about what you saw that night?” asked Vito.

  “Not a soul until after Alex was murdered. Then I told Michael, of course.”

  “You told Michael about this—and he never told me?” Donna said, looking like she was ready to go ballistic. “That son of a bitch.”

  “Tell me,” Vito said, “how did Michael come to take over Alex’s business?”

  “Right after Alex was murdered,” Donna said, looking at the Lesters, “these guys came to me in a panic because they didn’t know what the hell to do. Alex had spoon-fed them like little kids—”

  Skinny Lester, obviously agitated, interrupted. “Y
es, we were worried. First of all, we didn’t know who was behind Alex’s murder so we were afraid of what might come next. But, even more concerning was that we owed out a lot of money—which was normal, you know, people who’d won their bets, whatever, but we also had a lot more that people owed us. Most of that was from some pretty powerful—uh, dangerous—guys, who, knowing Alex was dead, might decide not to pay up, and the way our cash flow worked, we needed the money owed to us to pay out what we owed.”

  “What he’s saying,” Donna said, “is they were afraid that without Alex they couldn’t collect most of the money that was supposed to come in. So, right after the funeral, I went to Michael and asked him to step in just long enough to help me make sure we got our money so I could take care of myself—and the rest of Alex’s guys.”

  “How did he react? He had no background in this; he’s a corporate type, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Donna said, “and still is. He’s the CEO of one of those financial services companies, Gibraltar Financial. How he does it, I don’t know. He didn’t want to get involved—he always kept his distance from Alex’s business—and Alex for that matter. They are…or were…very different. Then, after he stepped in, he never got out. He likes it now, so he paid me a bunch of cash and made me a silent partner with him.”

  “Michael’s done a good job,” Skinny Lester said. “He’s expanded the business, we even have an operation in Paris now. He relies on us,” pointing to his cousin, “to run the day-to-day operations. He’s not as involved in everything as Alex was because he’s still running that other company, but it works.”

  An increasingly angry Donna finished off the remainder of her vodka martini in one gulp, placed it back, hard, on the table, her face showing that red blush someone gets when they’ve had one or four too many. “It works too well if you ask me. These two were—are—Alex’s buddies, but there’s no way they could run this thing. Michael’s a business guy, he wears a suit every day. No bookie wears a suit.”

  Vito looked at her, puzzled. “So, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying Alex is still running Tartarus.”

  Vito, no longer a drinker, took a long sip of his club soda, placing the glass slowly back on the table. His eyes were somewhere else, calculating. He appeared to be trying to digest what he had heard, piecing together a puzzle he’d never seen before.

  “The question, then, is, if Alex is still running the business, is he doing it from his grave—or from his condo? Or, from the cloud.”

  Chapter 58

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  The soft light from the reading lamp cast a warm, soothing ambience over the room, and the president’s mood. Harry O’Brien gazed out the large window toward the twinkling night lights of the capital. He was enjoying a rare few minutes of quiet reading in the living room of the private living quarters before joining the First Lady, who was already asleep in the bedroom.

  His mood was interrupted when he heard the gentle shuffling movement outside his door, a familiar sound that usually preceded a knock on the door and, at this time of night, unwelcome news. The knock came, three swift taps signaling the end of his reprieve from the crises of the world. His eyes moved from the pages of the novel as the door opened and his evening aide entered.

  “Mr. President, there’s an urgent situation. You’ll want to come downstairs immediately, sir.”

  He could read the stress on his aide’s face as he grabbed his suit jacket and followed him out the door. They headed to the waiting elevator.

  “Sir, we’re heading to the Star Wars room.”

  The Star Wars Room, also known as the Big Board Room for its huge electronic displays of the skies all over the world, had been secretly created after the Cuban Missile Crisis, several stories below the main level of the White House. O’Brien had visited it only once in his three years in office, on his first day. He remembered his predecessor saying that the only time he had ever been in it was on his initial tour. “Let’s hope you have never have to come down here again, Harry,” he said, “because, nothing good will ever go on down there.”

  As he exited the elevator, he saw the uniformed guard, standing at attention, expressionless, outside the heavy steel door to the room. The door was opened for him and, as he entered the huge control room, he was awed by the scene before him.

  The room was literally a duplicate of the main air defense control room located under the mountains of Colorado. It reminded him of something out of a science fiction movie or the war room in the classic nuclear war spoof Dr. Strangelove. Except, tonight, this was no spoof, no cult classic of science fiction. The height of the room was at least two stories, and giant screens dominated the room, covering the walls, electronic maps of the world with many little lights of various colors. It was here that, in the event of an attack or war, the decisions would be made, while in Colorado those decisions—his decisions—would be carried out.

  His eyes immediately went to the several flashing red lights. But before he could focus on them, he was guided to his white leather seat, slightly larger than the twenty or so others surrounding the giant circular polished black table. Several feet above him was a similar circle, the same size as the table, of LED lights illuminating everything below, casting the single legal pad in front of him in sharp relief. Already seated around the table, among others, were CIA Director Jim Goodrich, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Sculley and Darryl MacPherson, the national security adviser.

  “Okay,” O’Brien said, firmly, “what’s the situation?”

  “NORAD has detected missiles in flight,” General Sculley said, his scowl more pronounced than ever.

  “Jesus,” O’Brien said. “Where are they headed?”

  “Moscow.”

  “How long until they get there?

  Sculley looked to another uniform at the table.

  “Depending on the precise location of each missile, thirty minutes, sir.”

  O’Brien, his mind spinning, wasn’t sure who answered. He looked at Sculley. “Whose missiles are they?”

  “Ours, sir.”

  Chapter 59

  Astoria, Queens, New York

  “I have your answer, Donna,” Vito Colucci said as soon as he sat down. “I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what happened to Alex Nicholas.”

  “Oh my God, finally. I knew you were the right guy.”

  As Colucci started to speak, the server arrived with a round of drinks, a bottle of red Greek wine for the Lesters and a vodka Martini for Donna.

  “Just club soda for me,” Vito said.

  “We have pizzas coming, too,” Fat Lester said. “Pepperoni and a meatball one. They’re great here. We know the owner, Joe Sal.”

  “He was a close friend of Alex’s,” Skinny Lester said. “He also owns the big auto body shop across the street.”

  “Really? Auto body?” Vito said. “And a bar…or restaurant.” The detective looked around, taking in the millennials and old-time Astorians pouring in through the front door and settling in at the tables or the bar.

  “Yeah, Joe Sal’s kind of a genius. I mean he was already here,” Fat Lester pointed to the auto body shop across the street, visible through the bar’s windows. “It’s a natural progression, body shop, bar.”

  “Can we cut the shit and get to the point?” Donna said, impatient. “Vito, have you actually found Alex?”

  “Yes, I know what happened and I know where he is.”

  “Wow, you’re kidding me,” Skinny Lester said, sitting upright almost at attention.

  “Oh shit,” Fat Lester said.

  “Alex is—”

  But just as he began, the server, once again, arrived at the table, this time with Vito’s club soda and two pizzas. No one said a word as she placed them on the table. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  F
at Lester started, “Yeah, maybe another—” before Donna cut him off. “No,” she said, “nothing right now.”

  “Where is he?” she demanded as soon as the waitress turned to leave.

  Vito paused, deliberate, taking his time as though he knew the delay, if not the news, would upset Donna.

  “Alex Nicholas is dead. He was indeed murdered in that restaurant. His remains were, at first, buried at Saint Michael’s Cemetery just down the street here. Yes, his remains were stolen by those characters from the Catholic Church, who were afraid he’d stumbled onto some artificial intelligence breakthrough that might threaten their hold on the afterlife. But, once they realized that he hadn’t discovered anything but a fancy piece of software, they returned his body to Father Papageorge. Those ashes he gave to you, or I guess Michael, now…those are Alex’s ashes. That’s all there is. That’s all that’s left of Alex.”

  Donna looked stunned. She stared at Vito for what felt like minutes while the Lesters simply watched, careful not to move a fork or glass until Donna had spoken so they could hear her reaction and gauge her mood.

  Finally, she spoke, “You’re shitting me.”

  “No, I wish I was. This has certainly been a fascinating case. I mean, who doesn’t want to find a guy like Alex hiding out somewhere with a bunch of money and chicks.”

  “All that’s left of him are those ashes?” she said.

  “Yes, that’s it. He’s gone. Forever.”

  Donna looked stunned. As though in shock, she stared right at Vito, not letting her gaze move off him. No one said a word. Vito and the Lesters, perhaps more to keep busy in front of the paralyzed Donna than out of hunger, each reached for a slice of pizza. But as he did, Skinny Lester, looking closely at Donna, was sure he saw a tear in her eye.

  Chapter 60

  The White House

  Washington, DC