Mayhem and Madness

by J. A. Dauber

  That was another one of my dad’s old phrases, I remembered.

  Before I could say anything, she’d grabbed up the diamonds and dumped them straight into her purse. She hardly looked at them. It was like they were popcorn.

  “Wait,” I said. “You knew about the diamonds?”

  She just shook her head, like her son was an even bigger idiot than she’d imagined. “You robbed Tiffany’s,” she said. “On national television. You didn’t think I was going to search your room?”

  I considered whether this was the time to make an issue about her not respecting my privacy. It wasn’t.

  “Car,” she said, and walked out.

  I guess there’s no obvious day job for a techno-anarchist—my mom’s term, not mine…. I still don’t really know what that is. But if there was one, comic book shop owner and operator would not have been my first guess.

  And yet we were headed to a comic book shop, in a midsize city about three hours out of the Zone.

  I was worried about security at the Zone border, but Mom zipped us right through. She handed over her license and registration to the soldiers and looked kind of…Mom-ish. You know, bored and hassled, like she had to get me to soccer practice and then had a million errands to run before she picked me up, and was devoting all her mental energy to putting them all in the right order.

  Not that she said any of that to the border guard. That was just the impression she gave.

  I knew my mom had acted in college. But I was in awe of her performance.

  We didn’t talk much on the way there. Not that we didn’t have…well, everything to say to each other. But I think neither of us knew where to start.

  I tried to ask her a bit about Dad, about their life together. Their life of crime, I guess I should say now. And when I did, Mom got weird. I mean, weird in a new way.

  First she said she didn’t want to talk about it. And then she started telling me stories about Dad that had nothing to do with their secret life—funny little harmless stories, like the one where the two of them, back before I was born, went to New York City to try to see Shakespeare in the Park and ended up in the wrong park because they were staying in Brooklyn. I guess New York has a lot of big parks. So they ate street hot dogs and acted out the play they were supposed to be watching from the books they had brought to follow along.

  Eventually I was like, “What about Mayhem?”

  Mom leaned over in her seat and put a finger across my lips as she said in a bright and cheery voice, “Yes, wasn’t it terrible about that criminal, a thief and probably a terrorist, but I’m sure he’ll get caught eventually.”

  I was confused—I mean, I got what she was saying, the car was probably bugged, but Mr. Jones already knew about Mom and me being Mayhem. But then I figured it out. If Mr. Jones was taping this, somehow, and he was mad at us…who knew who he could turn it over to.

  Maybe that was it. Or maybe not. I bet Mom could have figured out some way of scrambling transmissions, or wiping the audio, or whatever. Maybe—I’m thinking this now, a little later—maybe Mom had her own ideas about what was going to happen next, and she didn’t want to share them with me. And this someone’s-listening thing was a convenient excuse.

  Not that I think she saw me as the enemy. But as an obstacle? Something to be dealt with? I don’t know. Either way, she didn’t say anything informative, and I stopped asking.

  I tried to be helpful, and offered to be the navigator. When she agreed and took an actual paper map out of the glove compartment, I kind of panicked. “Um, what about GPS?” I asked.

  She shook her head and pointed up—eyes in the sky, eyes everywhere, I guess—and I shut up again.

  She even made me take my phone’s SIM card and throw it out the window. Thankfully this thing records directly to the phone, otherwise my whole story would be gone.

  Of course, Mom knew exactly where we were going. The comic bookshop was called Masks ’n’ Mags, which was a pretty bad name, in my opinion, and the store wasn’t much better. Dark, dingy rows of Mylar-bagged comics in cartons and a few people pawing through them.

  I figured that Mom would have a prearranged signal to tell her friend she was here and needed to see him, like picking up an X-Men graphic novel and putting it in the Justice League section, or something. It didn’t look like it, though. She stood in the middle of the new-releases section looking lost, like it had taken a lot to get here and she didn’t know what to do. Or maybe she was just doing a good imitation of a suburban mom whose teenage son had made her drive him to the comic shop. I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t know what to do, either. After a while, I gave up and started paging through one of the Batman graphic novels. It wasn’t so much about Batman as it was about the bad guys. He has some crazy ones. This was the one who was half-normal, half-nuts, and decided which he was going to be from day to day. It wasn’t bad and despite everything, I got absorbed.

  After a while, the store owner tapped me on the shoulder. He was thin and had a full head of hair, even though he must have been forty, at least. He asked me—and not very politely, either—if I was going to read the whole thing in the store. I muttered something and looked over at my mom. And then he did, too.

  He looked at my mom for a long time. She looked back at him. Then he said, more to my mom than me, “You know, there’s a limited edition version of that, deluxe, that you might want to take a look at. But it’s pricey.”

  “It won’t be a problem, Kaz,” my mom said. Quietly. Kaz—I guess that was his name—didn’t look surprised. He didn’t react at all. He just turned around and walked toward the back of the store. We followed.

  I’d expected a high-tech security system, maybe one of those clean white rooms with tons of expensive high-end computers. But we ended up in a dingy storage area with five or six old Macs and a bunch of Dell monitors that had to have been ten years old at least. He saw my face. “The insides of things don’t always match their outsides,” he said. “Take you two, for example.”

  And then he launched into this long speech about running biometric scans on everyone who walked into the store. He had next-generation facial-recognition algorithms, but with kinetic profiling, too—movement matching or something like that.

  “So?” my mom said, but in a tone of voice I knew well. The one that meant I’m going to let you keep talking because I’m supposed to, but I know all this, and you’re wasting my time. I mostly—before—had heard her use it when she was on the phone to the cable company.

  He looked, not at my mom, but at me. “So you like Batman,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, here’s a riddle for you,” he said. “How does two become one?”

  I had no idea where he was going with that, and I guess it showed on my face. Meanwhile, my mom had reached the end of her rope. “Kaz, you’re no Penguin,” she said. “Let’s just finish up with the little show and move on.”

  “It’s the Riddler, not the—fine,” he said. “I’m not the one running around in some supervillain robot suit. You are.” He pointed to my mom. “And you are, too.”

  Neither of us said anything in response, which I think took the wind out of his sails. So he sat down at one of the keyboards, pressed a few buttons, and there we were on one of the monitors: split-screen images, side by side, walking through the aisles of the comic store. “And ta-da,” Kaz said, but without much enthusiasm, pressing a few more buttons. And now there were two pictures of Mayhem on the screen: one of them old CNN footage of a bank robbery from before my time, the other of me in Golden Gate Park.

  It was true. We didn’t move the same way. And Mayhem moved like both of us.

  It hadn’t been a great riddle, but it was a fair one.

  “Family business, I guess?” said Kaz.

  “That’s right,” my mom said, and handed over the hard drive.

  Kaz
looked it over. “Yeah, it’s a little beat-up, but I’m sure those guys at the Geek Squad could help you out with it,” he said.

  “I’ve had about enough with the jokes,” my mom said. “I hated them when we worked together before, and I’m not in the mood for them now.”

  Kaz spread his hands and said, “Sure.”

  Then he proceeded to nod intently as my mom unveiled a jaw-dropping laundry list of high-tech bad-guy things. Most of them were too technical for me to understand, but I got the gist of it. Decrypt the hard drive. Get the evidence she needed off it. Give it to her in a nice, easy form. Get Bailey to an air-gapped safe house, so far off the grid it couldn’t even see the grid, until she got back from where she had to go. And fix us up with something like digital witness protection.

  Kaz thought a minute and said he could do that.

  “And we’ll need three identities,” my mom said.

  “I’m a mathematical genius, too,” Kaz said. “I can count, and there are only two of you.”

  “For the time being,” my mom said, and I loved her more than I ever thought was possible.

  Kaz shrugged, like this was the sort of conversation he had every day. Which I guess it probably was. Then he asked when we needed all this by.

  “Now’s good,” my mom said.

  Kaz nodded again. Then he waited.

  My mom didn’t say anything as she dug into her bag, scooped out the diamonds—my lovely, lovely diamonds—and spilled them all over Kaz’s keyboard.

  The three of us looked at them for a minute. Finally Kaz said, “The Tiffany job.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Which was apparently the right approach, tough-guy-wise, because my mom also didn’t say anything. Just more definitively.

  “They’re gonna be difficult to unload,” Kaz said.

  My mom was silent.

  “They’ll lose forty percent of their value. At least,” he said.

  More silence.

  Kaz sighed, pulled a Mylar comic bag out from one of the desk drawers, and swept the diamonds in. A few bounced off the keyboard and rolled under the table. Kaz pointed to a broom and dustpan on the other side of the room. “Go get ’em,” he told me. I looked at my mom, who nodded.

  For about five seconds there, underneath the desk, I thought about trying to slip a few in my pocket. Then I thought again. Kaz had seemed pretty la-di-da about the whole thing, but that had been mostly in his tone of voice. I’d seen the way he watched the diamonds roll. He was counting every one.

  Once I’d crawled back out and handed the diamonds over, Kaz settled himself into his chair and started entering a series of long passwords into his computer. But then he stopped and said, “There’s just one last thing.”

  “Kaz—” my mom began. I knew that tone of voice, too. I did not like that tone of voice. The only thing that made me happy about it was that it was not currently pointed in my direction.

  “Just one last thing,” he repeated. “About the payment. I want to be able to tell my buyers that there are no loose ends out there from the heist. Nothing traceable. Nothing that might cause a problem. That this is the whole lot,” he said. “That’s the case. Isn’t it?”

  Kaz was looking at my mom when he said it. My mom was looking at me. I was looking anywhere else I could. And I was thinking about that old expression about honor among thieves.

  An old expression my dad used to use, as it happened. The dad who I was this close to seeing again.

  So I sort of nodded.

  I know. Maybe not the best thinking on my part. But if I had told them about Rebecca’s bracelet—I was pretty sure Mr. Jones’s cut was down a black hole somewhere and wasn’t the issue—maybe Kaz wouldn’t have taken the diamonds. And then he wouldn’t have started decrypting the hard drive to help us track down my dad.

  They huddled over a computer screen and started whispering, and my mom shooed me off to a corner to wait patiently. Don’t bother us, kid, the grown-ups are working.

  So I excused myself to use the bathroom.

  And that’s where I’ve been. Just catching this up.

  I guess I’m out of the action for now. End with a whimper, not a bang.

  I better get back there, though. See what’s happening.

  NOW. SATURDAY. 5:08 P.M.

  Okay. Let’s do this.

  Although I don’t know why I’m still doing it. This. This talking. I guess it’s just that…I mean, I have to tell the end of the story, don’t I? See where it was going, all along?

  I’d never have guessed here.

  You know, it’s funny when being trapped in flaming wreckage beneath a collapsing building feels like the preferable situation.

  But that’s where I am now.

  Well, I mean, not where I am physically. Physically, I’m back at my house. Waiting. Waiting for my dad to come home.

  And not like waiting-for-the-past-five-years-and-maybe-he’ll-turn-up waiting. It’s more like he’s-supposed-to-arrive-in-two-hours-by-private-helicopter waiting.

  But my mom…

  Let me try to tell this the right way, in the right order. Get my thoughts straight. A lot has happened in the past three hours. Three hours? Is that even possible? Yeah, that’s what the phone says. Man.

  THREE HOURS AGO

  So. Back of the comic book shop.

  When I got back from the bathroom, I saw that Kaz had connected the hard drive to one of his computers and I could see he was accessing it. I creeped over to take a peek.

  I’d assumed there’d be a lot of furious typing with letters and numbers flashing on the screen superfast. But it was…cuter than that.

  I guess Kaz had designed a visual interface that looked a lot like a manga. The home screen was like a little map of the world, and as he moved his mouse around, parts got bigger or smaller. All sorts of characters were popping up: rows of impossibly proportioned Valkyries break dancing in skimpy bikinis, for example. A monkey holding an ice cream cone tap dancing on top of the Eiffel Tower. A lightsaber skewering a cheeseburger wearing a tutu.

  Kaz looked up for a second and saw me staring. I guess he was happy to have a bigger audience, so he waved me even closer. “To provide an additional level of security, I’ve transformed most of the data outputs into a series of visual images that will stick in my mind,” he said. “For example, 1010 is a picture of the Roger Moore James Bond, while 1001 is the original, great Sean Connery. And since a banana is a different kind of data, say, a file type, Connery holding a banana is a file type coded 1001. But since I’m a genius, it’s about a hundred times more complicated than that.” He leaned back, twirled around on his chair, scrolling and clicking. “This way no one but me can see what I’m seeing.”

  Behind him, my mom looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  He patted the hard drive. “So what do you need off this thing?” he said.

  “Anything that links to Gerry,” Mom said. “On the drive itself or down any trail the drive information leads to.”

  She didn’t ask about Mr. Jones’s plan. I guess that would have come next.

  “Right-a-roonie,” Kaz said, and kept typing, no pause, no break.

  Pictures of my dad—from the Internet, I guess, or maybe other, more secret places—started flashing on the screen one after another. Pictures of my dad as a kid, wearing overalls and a little cowboy hat. Pictures of my dad and my mom, one onstage in that play, a few in Paris and somewhere else I didn’t recognize, one at their wedding…they came and went, faster and faster, and just as I thought I was going to lose it, just start bawling or something, the pictures disappeared and were replaced with a bunch of animated mushroom houses with frowny faces on them, like in those old video games.

  I’d already gotten the impression Kaz was laid-back. He didn’t actually look like a surfer, but he gave the impression of surfer
ness, if you know what I mean. But something had thrown him. I know because he stopped typing to look at us.

  “Where’d you get this hard drive?” he asked. “I don’t like where these trails are heading…”

  “If you’re as good as you used to be back in the day—or half as good as you say you are now—it won’t matter,” my mom told him.

  This was the kind of fourth-grade psychology that I would have been legitimately embarrassed to let get to me, but geniuses don’t have to be emotionally mature, I guess. He grunted and got back to work.

  For about another minute. And then he pulled at his hair and said, “Tell me you didn’t do what I think you did to me.”

  I blinked, because my mom wasn’t standing there anymore. It was Mayhem.

  She had gotten into the armor fast. I mean, fast. Like I didn’t think I wasn’t looking, but I must have looked away, and there she was. Tall and metal. “YOU’RE IN IT NOW, KAZ,” she said. “THERE’S JONES, AND THERE’S ME. AND I’M THE ONE STANDING NEXT TO YOU WITH ROCKET LAUNCHERS.”

  Kaz started cursing.

  “LANGUAGE,” Mom said, which was about the most ridiculous thing I’d heard in months. She put a hand on his shoulder, and Kaz yelped. I don’t think she turned on the thermals. I hope not. Because that would have been, well, torture, wouldn’t it? I don’t think she would have done that.

  Whatever she did or didn’t do, though, it worked. Kaz started typing faster and faster. “My security protocols are only going to hold so long,” I remember him saying, and my mom told him he’d better make sure he was out, and out clean, before they fell.

  Even though Kaz had claimed his interface was impossible to crack and all that, I was pretty sure the rows of purple death’s heads and mushroom clouds that started marching across the screen two minutes later meant different.