The Bubble Match

by Merav Tuson Vardy

  He is clearly bewildered by the request, and I further bewilder him by asking that he tell no one about it.

  “Close the door behind you, please, and sit down,” I tell him when he enters the conference room, gesturing at the chair opposite me. “You must be wondering why I asked you here.”

  He nods.

  “I asked you here because I trust you.” I throw his ego a bone. “And I’ll further ask you that everything I say to you remains between us. Do you agree?”

  He swallows and nods again. “I didn’t tell anyone you called me here,” he says, as if to prove his loyalty.

  “Good,” I express my approval.

  “Mi-Ok, one of the programmers in your team, has not been to work in several days.” I state this rather than ask.

  “She’s been sick,” he attempts to speak on her behalf, and I smile crookedly.

  “She’s been kidnapped.” He gapes at me as I explain. “Long story short; she was kidnapped by a psychopath named Alan Beaker. He aims to take over Bubble’s core systems. In about thirty minutes he’ll send me a location where I’ll meet him to install a file with an extremely hazardous virus into the core. He’s agreed to release Mi-Ok while the file installs.”

  Mi-Ok’s team leader stares at me, horrified.

  “This woman means a lot to me. I would very much appreciate your help in this matter.”

  His head never seems to stop nodding. It is, frankly, getting on my nerves.

  “My appreciation will become even more evident when you check your bank account.”

  “Tell me what you need me to do.” Money. Effective like nothing else in achieving cooperation.

  “Just one thing,” I say. “I need you to ensure that he fails.”

  He makes a small gurgling sound of sheer anxiety.

  “I need you to create a dummy core. Something that looks and behaves exactly like the real thing but is completely disconnected from the actual Bubble systems. While the installer runs, I’ll get Mi-Ok somewhere safe, and by the time he spots the fake, she’ll be out of danger. Are you with me so far?”

  “No problem,” he says, sudden conviction filling his voice. “I can do it.”

  “You are very short on time. Get to work. Remember, this stays between us.”

  I get back to the office and find the members of my special team yelling at each other over the necessary course of action. I take a water bottle out of the fridge and guzzle it down. The noise they’re producing is slicing through my temples. I’m about to tell them to go fight somewhere else when my phone rings with an unidentified number on the screen.

  A blessed silence grabs the room.

  “Go ahead.” I’m torn between the need to stonewall him and the desire for all of this to be over.

  “Meet me at Gangwan in four hours. When you get closer, I’ll provide you with exact instructions to the meeting spot. I warn you – the roads are very narrow, and there’s virtually no traffic this time of year. Pray none of the locals decide to go on a drive, because if I see so much as a single car other than yours, I swear that Mi-Ok will pay with her life.”

  “I’ll come alone,” I say, as the other people in the room hold their collective breath.

  “Don’t even think of trying something. Your daddy tried to get clever with me and failed – remember that.”

  Einstein once said insanity is repeating the same actions over and over and expecting different results. But I’m not insane. And I won’t be repeating my father’s mistake.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I turn onto a narrow path, following the coordinates Beaker sent, and keep driving until I spot a small structure – a metal shed with a blue corrugated roof. The GPS lets me know I’ve reached my deserted shithole of a destination.

  I turn off the engine and get out of the car to stretch my legs. It’s been a long, draining drive up here; I should warm up in case I need to face his hired help in an actual fight. I move around and stretch the rigidity out of my limbs until the sound of his contemptible voice stops me.

  “Some warm-up calisthenics?” he jeers. “Don’t worry, my boys have been instructed to avoid a fist-fight at all costs. Who needs fists when you’ve got a gun?” he throws his head back, laughing.

  We’ll see who’s laughing by the end of this.

  “Shall we?” I say impatiently.

  He mutters something into his radio and five huge, burly guys saunter out of the shed, guns held in full view. The last to come out viciously shoves Mi-Ok in front of him.

  She’s alive. The relief is there, though it’s shadowed by anger about the way she’s being treated by this thug. She’s still wearing the skirt and blouse she wore when she slept at my place, though the blouse is now very dirty and wrinkled, and missing some buttons. She is blindfolded and gagged, and I am horrified, but I know she can hear me, she knows that I’m here. I hope it helps, to know I’ve come to save her.

  I quickly scan her body – she’s injured and covered in scraped and bruises. As far as I can see, none of her injuries are life-threatening. I note that she is able to walk by herself. I repeatedly remind myself of the only thing that matters: She is alive.

  “So.” He’s the one who seems restless, now. “Shall we?”

  I take my laptop out of my bag. “Where do I put this?”

  He nods toward the hood of my Mercedes. I shake my head and he raises an eyebrow. “Too hot,” I say, and gingerly touch the metal hood in illustration.

  “Bring a table,” Beaker orders his thugs, and two of them go to find one in the shed and return with a folding table. They put it down in front of me and go back to guard Mi-Ok. Beaker bumps the table to check that it’s steady.

  “Set it down here,” he says.

  I carefully place my laptop on the table, fire it up and pray that everything works. I only have one shot at this – I can’t afford mistakes.

  My finger hovers over one of the keys.

  “Before I enter the code, I want you to take off her blindfold. And the duct tape.”

  Beaker dismissively waves the hand holding the gun, signaling his agreement. One of the thugs nods back and pulls off the blindfold and violently tears the duct tape from her face. I wince when she cries out in pain and wonder how he’ll sound when I do the same thing to his ball sack. I notice that Beaker also seems displeased with his lackey’s behavior – he shoots a warning look in his direction.

  “I want her to walk toward me,” I demand. Beaker waves again at his head thug.

  “Go!” he commands her. She does not move. Her eyes are drilling into mine, wide open.

  “You heard him… move!” The thug jabs the muzzle of his gun into her back. She is standing there, unmoving, staring at me. I pray that she moves forward. It will be extremely unfortunate if my plan fails because she won’t cooperate.

  “You deaf or what?” the thug barks and kicks her. Mi-Ok still isn’t moving, and the next kick drops her to her knees on the frozen ground. I take a quick, irrepressible step toward her, my eyes murderous. Five guns immediately point in my direction but I’m still moving forward, unable to stop. Beaker lightly jogs past me and waves his gun in my face.

  “Get back there, I’ll handle this.” he points to the folding table with the laptop, and then lets out an annoyed huff, grabs his paid thug by the neck and shoves him hard against the wall of the shed.

  “When will you get it through your thick heads,” he yells, “that she is more important than all of you combined?!” He presses his gun against the thug’s temple and unceremoniously pulls the trigger. The rest of his lackeys take this in, terrified – they seem to have gotten the message.

  Beaker saunters back toward me. His clothes are covered in blood, but his lips are stretched in a wide smile.

  “Problem solved. Where were we?”

  I look at Mi-Ok and hope she sees the d
esperation in my eyes when I voicelessly mouth, Please, come.

  She starts moving, step by shuddering step. Beaker seems to be losing his patience as well – he exhales loudly and petulantly, but still waits for her to complete the fifteen steps separating her from me. Finally, she stops at my side.

  I type in the code and let Beaker do the rest. He pops in a thumb drive and seems thrilled when the installation’s progress bar slowly fills up.

  “Get in the car, please,” I open the passenger door and practically drag her inside. When I place my hand on the top of her head, so she doesn’t bump it against the frame, I touch a still bleeding wound beneath her hair. I buckle her in and walk around to the driver’s side. Beaker stares at me, his disbelief evident.

  “And just where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he hisses.

  “Home,” I tell him. “And, for the record, you’re going to fail.” The corner of my lip rises in a small smile as I get into the driver’s seat.

  He laughs viciously.

  “No,” he says. “I won’t. You trusted the wrong man. I know you think you’ve given me some clever little decoy-core you’ve devised. Guess what. He betrayed you. Right now I’m inside the core system of the actual Bubble. And it makes me happier than being inside the best pussy in the world.”

  He’s a monster. Plain and simple. How could I have ever considered him a friend?

  “I had to try,” I whisper, bitter disappointment contorting my face as I open the car door.

  “Honestly, I’d be a bit disappointed if you’d just given in with no resistance. Thanks for making this fun for me, buddy,” he says, clearly overjoyed at my defeat.

  “Guess you can keep the laptop at this point,” I say, just before I close the car door. “Consider it a goodbye gift.”

  The Mercedes’ engine lets out a growl when we speed away. Ten seconds later the deafening roar of a massive explosion rushes past us. When I check the mirror, I can still see the level of destruction packed into a military grade explosive device.

  That appears to be the end of this. Guess I should be laughing.

  About seven hours earlier…

  I’m standing on the roof, replaying my conversation with Alan Beaker in my head, over and over, word by word. I’ll let you in on a little something. I’m the genius who created the 142 virus. Get it? One user for two people. Your dad installed it – he thought he could contain it to a test environment, but once he let it out, he couldn’t get rid of it…

  Everything is about this file. This file was important enough that my father spend his final words to ensure that I destroy it. I already know that Beaker wrote it to access the records of other users. I know he connected me to Mi-Ok to provide himself with a target for extortion. I swear I could hear the smile in his voice when he said my father couldn’t get rid of it.

  But my father would never permit a leak between an isolated test environment and Bubble’s core system. The only way that could happen was if someone on the inside cooperated with Beaker. I assume, considering the ease with which he picked me up from the beach in Australia, that there’s no place his long arms cannot reach. The question now is how to locate the mole within the company in under an hour.

  If Beaker planted someone in the company, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that he did it around the time he “happened” to meet me on the beach in Cairns.

  I call HR and ask them to immediately send me the personnel files of every employee to join Bubble around the relevant time, about four and a half years ago.

  I decide not to return to my office, which is packed with the startled members of my special team. Too much ego in there for me to properly focus. Not to mention, I don’t trust anyone right now – not even my own people. Paranoid? Perhaps. But better safe than sorry. With that in mind I choose one of the abandoned conference rooms and lock the door behind me.

  The personnel files I asked for start pouring in from HR – eighty-six of them. I was hoping for a shorter list of suspects, but it could’ve been a lot worse. After I filter out the less relevant employees – admin, marketing, sales, etc. – I am left with a severely shorter list of only nine people employed in programming, security and network administration. If Beaker hired them, the money would’ve been well hidden – by now I have only thirty minutes, not enough to painstakingly sift through the financial histories of nine separate people. I flip through the files and manage to find a potential motive to become Beaker’s mole for each and every one of them. They all have families – which means they could all be threatened and extorted with relative ease into practically anything. Of all people, I know how persuasive this psychopath can be, and how inhuman.

  I go all the way back to their university records, finding that, though they were all first-rate students, one of them had far surpassed his peers – curious, I check again, and raise an eyebrow to find that said prodigy is no other but Mi-Ok’s team leader.

  Come to think about it, back when I was trying to keep my distance from her, this guy bent over backwards to prevent me from doing so. The chance encounters in the elevator. The fact that everyone in the company seemed to know he was taking her to Busan for three nights. The more I think about it, the more it feels like he was trying to make me jealous.

  I take a closer look at his file. He’s a native English speaker. Born… where is it… Australia. Bingo.

  This could just be a huge coincidence. If it is, I’m fucked – I no longer have any choice but to bet everything on this. Mi-Ok once told me that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Anonymous or not, I just pray this works.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Would you like some water?” I offer Mi-Ok what’s left in my bottle.

  “I need something stronger. Do you have any beer? Or soju?” her asking for liquor is akin to me asking someone to blow a cloud of cigarette smoke into my face.

  “Sorry, I don’t keep alcohol in the car,” I slant a worried look at her direction.

  “Oh, well,” she whispers hoarsely.

  “Maybe try and rest until we get there,” I suggest, I reach over to gently slide away a lock her hair, revealing the huge bruise on her forehead. She flinches away from me and tilts back her head. It isn’t pain – she clearly doesn’t want me to touch her.

  It guts me.

  “I want you to know I’ll be tendering my resignation as soon as possible.” She speaks sharply, unexpectedly startling me.

  “Will you please tell me what happened to you back there? Have they done something to you?”

  She shakes her head and says only, “You did.” She presses her nose against the cold window pane, avoiding my gaze.

  The road is dark, and I can barely make out the shoulders, but eventually I manage to pull over. I get out of the car and circle around to lift her out of the passenger seat and wrap my arms around her, embracing her tightly.

  “You can’t imagine how worried I was. I thought I was losing my mind,” I breathe out, finally beginning to feel calmer now that she’s in my arms.

  She suddenly places her hand on my chest and tries to push me away. I keep my arms around her, holding her as she struggles and twists.

  “Please don’t run away from me. I don’t know what I’ve done to push you away like this, but I’m sorry, however I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry—”

  “How long have you been watching my Bubble records?” her eyes probe my face, looking for my reaction.

  Fuck. She found out. I have no idea what I can possibly say to make this right.

  “And please, don’t bother trying to deny it. I heard Beaker talking to you.”

  I swear inwardly and at length.

  “Look,” I begin, grasping for literally any excuse I can think of, but before I get the chance to say anything she says, “Just tell me, if it were the other way around, how would you feel?”

  “Honestl
y, I’d be furious.”

  I try to put myself in her shoes. What I’ve done, I realize, is beyond fucked up. I invaded her privacy. I destroyed her trust in me.

  “I hate you,” she seethes, her eyes burning a hole through me. I submissively drop my arms to my sides and take it.

  “That’s no reason for you to leave the company,” I suggest as meekly as I can. “It shouldn’t be a problem – I estimate that I’m emphatically hated by more than 99.9 percent of Bubble employees. Of course, there are also the days when I hate myself – on those, the percentage rises to a full 100.”

  I manage to extract the sad remnant of a smile from her lips.

  “I can’t stay at Bubble. Too hard to see you there every day.” She looks at the ground and kicks at some rocks. I suppose at this point she no longer minds admitting her feelings toward me.

  “If you leave it’ll be too hard not to see you every day,” I say bluntly. It’ll be full disclosure from here on. I’m done with games. I place my hands on her shoulders and she shifts her weight around uncomfortably.

  “Look at me,” I plead, but her eyes won’t leave the ground. I gently tilt up her chin, try to find her eyes with mine.

  “Don’t leave me,” I beg.

  “Do you know what it’s called? This thing between us?”

  “Love?” I venture, and she shoots me a miserable look and shakes her head.

  “It’s called the 142 virus. Everything we feel for each other is founded on a sad lie constructed by an insane criminal. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that it’s all fake?”

  “You’re wrong. What we have is real.”

  I cup her face in my hands and caress her bottom lip with the tip of my thumb. Her pulse rises and when I lean closer her lips part expectantly. I crack a smile – very small, yet victorious.

  “And now that your pupils are dilated and you’re panting like I was enough of an asshole to let you run all the way up here, what are you saying? That you’re faking it?”

  She seems annoyed, but I was just trying to prove a point – she wants me just as much as I want her.