“Oh my God,” I snapped. “It was a hug, not softcore porn.”
“Guys,” Brandon warned us.
“What are they talking about?” Susan asked Ray. He shrugged and kept eating potatoes like nothing was happening.
“It was inappropriate,” Eric retorted. “And embarrassing.”
“Kind of like this conversation?” I returned.
“Eric,” Skylar tried. “Jane. You guys, come on—”
“Maybe she wouldn’t have needed a hug if someone hadn’t made her cry,” Zola said.
I turned to him. “Oh, that’s not why I was—”
“Maybe she was crying because some fucking creep wouldn’t take his hands off her,” Eric rejoined.
“Language!” Sarah snapped, clapping her hands over Luis’s ears.
“Whoa,” Christoph muttered. He looked at his sister. “He sounds like your friends at school, Anna.”
“Which friends are these?” Brandon asked suspiciously.
“Eric!” I stood up and glared at him, ignoring the curious stares of the people all around the table. “Outside. Now.”
He swallowed and shook his head. “No. We can’t.”
I expelled a quick, frustrated sigh. “Then the lab again,” I said, ignoring our onlookers’ surprised, confused faces. “It’s quiet there. Brandon, would you mind letting us in?”
Eric stood and grabbed my arm. “Fine, let’s go.”
“Hey, can you not drag me?” I yanked my arm back, and when he didn’t release it, Zola and Brandon were both standing.
“Eric,” Brandon called. “Calm down, man. We’re already going.”
“Stop grabbing on me!” I batted his shoulder, but his hand didn’t move, so instead I dug my heels in and pulled him back.
“Hey, man. She said stop!” Zola reached across the table toward Eric. And it was the absolute wrong move.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” The words flew out of Eric’s mouth, and before I could stop him, his hand dropped my arm as the other went swinging across the table at Zola, who ducked away neatly.
Brandon hopped around the crowd and pinned Eric to the wall in exactly two seconds.
“Let me go!” Eric roared, hands pinwheeling outward. “Let me fucking go, Brandon!”
“Mommy,” Jenny whispered as she clung to Skylar. “Mommy, what’s wrong with Uncle Eric? He looks mad at Aunt Janey. And he said ‘fuck.’ A lot.”
“Don’t say that word, pea,” Brandon said between gritted teeth while he struggled to hold Eric still.
“But Uncle Eric said—”
“Skylar, can you get the kids out of here?” Brandon snapped as he twisted an arm around Eric’s shoulder, holding him captive in a tight half-nelson.
“What is wrong with you!” I hissed at Eric from where I had backed against the wall, holding Luis away from the nonsense. “You are acting crazy! It’s like having Thanksgiving with Jekyll and fucking Hyde!”
“Now Aunt Janey said ‘fuck’ too!” Jenny squealed.
“It’s just a word,” Annabelle remarked in a droll voice that somehow only thirteen-year-old girls can manage. “Anyone can say fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Everyone stop saying fuck!” Brandon shouted.
“Fuckin’ A,” Danny muttered in agreement.
“Dad!” Skylar snapped.
Sarah appeared next to me and swept Luis into her arms with more spryness than any octogenarian should have.
“I will take the kids upstairs,” she said, her thick Brooklyn accent more apparent than ever. “All of them. And let the big babies get their acts together.”
She gave her granddaughter a meaningful look, which she then directed at Annabelle and Christoph. Both children immediately rose, carrying their plates.
“Skylar. You get these boys under control, you hear? Or else they’ll have me to deal with.”
Every man in the kitchen—including her son, Danny—blanched at the idea of being on the receiving end of Sarah Crosby’s sharp tongue. She exited the room with everyone thirteen and under, followed soon by Susan, then Ray and Danny as they made excuses to watch the rest of the football game.
Skylar waited until their parents and kids were gone, then turned to face who was left with the same imperious expression that had won her a reputation as a shark in court.
“Get it together,” she ordered. “Otherwise, you can get the hell out of my house. All of you.”
There was a tense minute where everyone left stared at each other with wide eyes, like they were waiting for someone to toss a grenade into the middle of all of it. But, as if by some telegraphed message that signaled the threat had passed, we all relaxed. Brandon released Eric in a slump against the wall, Zola heaved a big sigh, and I flopped back into my chair.
“I meant no harm,” Zola said. “And I have no motives with Jane, all right? We’re just friends. Anyone can see the two of you are—”
“Nothing,” Eric cut him off with another sharp look. “We’re nothing. It’s an arrangement at this point, as I’m sure she informed you over dinner.”
Zola blinked, his dark eyes sharp, but full of empathy. It occurred to me then that this was why Zola had come to the dinner. Like any good investigator, he couldn’t resist a solid lead. And as mortifying as this little altercation had been, it had at the very least convinced Zola that I was right. Eric was acting extremely out of character. Someone was forcing his hand.
The prosecutor’s gaze traveled over Eric’s sullen form, like he was looking for something. The bug, I realized. Of course. Zola was curious about how in the hell Eric was being tracked.
Zola believed me.
“Yeah,” he said finally as he picked up his glass of wine. “She did. Which, to be honest, is really why I’m here instead of breaking bread with my own family. I was wondering if I could help.”
Twenty
A few minutes later, we gathered around the kitchen island with full plates, refilled glasses of wine, and deep breaths.
“What do you mean, you can help?” Eric finally asked warily as he took a bite of turkey and cranberry.
He now looked a far sight from the normally poised, put together almost-chairman I knew. The buttons of his shirt had torn open, his hair was pitched to one side, and his face was flushed from exertion, a stark contrast to the circles underneath his dark gray eyes.
Some of that wasn’t just from the near-fight, I realized. The last several weeks had really taken their toll on him. He looked awful. Tired. Stressed.
Zola didn’t answer. Instead, he looked around the room for a second, and then, apparently not finding what he wanted, pulled out his phone, typed out a message, then turned it toward us.
Where’s the bug?
The meaning was clear. Everyone in this room was aware, on some level, that the Janus society was listening to Eric, and thus was listening to this conversation. It had to be done carefully.
Eric shrugged, and that glazed expression I was truly starting to loathe resumed its position. An expression of helplessness. Numbness.
I wanted to slap it out of him.
Zola frowned, then typed another message before turning the phone back.
Your phones?
Eric shook his head, and I did too.
Zola pressed his lips together, and it was clear that he was wondering if the bug was real to begin with. I understood—I’d wondered the same thing. But there was no other way Carson would have sent the message he had. Maybe he’d sent others too—I doubted Eric would have shown me.
“Can I see that?” Brandon said, gesturing at the medallion gleaming around Eric’s neck.
Almost protectively, Eric touched the coin I had come to loathe. “Why? Don’t you have one?”
“I was cut in the third round,” Brandon said, like he was talking about baseball tryouts, not initiation into a billionaire mafia. “Can I look at it?”
“Ah, sure,” Eric replied, then somewhat reluctantly unclasped the necklace and handed it to Brandon
.
Brandon set it carefully on the stone counter like he was going to take a close look. Then he reached a long arm behind Skylar like he was stretching, took a pewter mallet off the counter that Sarah had been using to crush walnuts, and brought it down on the gold coin with a smash that shook the house.
“Brandon!” Skylar shouted. “We just put in this granite!”
“Red, you had this counter done five years ago. And the kids have smashed it way harder than I just did.”
“What in the fuck, man,” Eric croaked—he had been too busy staring at the necklace to say anything at first. “That was my father’s! What did you just do?”
“I thought this might be it,” Brandon said, ignoring Eric completely. “Ray!” he called out for his father, who appeared so quickly from the living room that I wondered if he’d been lurking outside anyway, eager to return to the excitement.
With an irritated look at everyone in the room, Ray nudged between Brandon and Zola. He picked up the coin, and it was only when he held it up in the light that we all saw what Brandon found so interesting. It wasn’t a coin at all.
To start, it was split completely in half. Not down the middle, but around the sides, like a tiny can of shoe polish with its crooked top now bent beyond repair. And from between its seams, something else green and metallic peeked from inside.
“Ah,” Ray said with academic interest as he peeled off one side to examine what was hidden there. “A miniaturized acoustic recording device.”
The rest of us stared at each other. Recording device, I got. But I didn’t understand what the rest meant.
“State of the art,” Ray remarked to his son. “John Rizzo was working on something like that in conjunction with the NSA, but I don’t think they were able to achieve operational capability.” He turned to Eric. “Where did you get this?”
But Eric couldn’t speak. His mouth was open as he stared at the coin. “Is that…is that the way…”
“The way John Carson has been stalking you?” Brandon finished for him. “Yeah, looks that way.” He took the coin back from his dad, and everyone in the room immediately clamored around the table as Brandon set it down on the counter to begin dissecting it.
“Red?” He beckoned to Skylar without looking up. “Baby, can you get me a glass of water, please?”
Skylar fetched the water quickly, but instead of drinking it, Brandon immediately dropped the coin into the liquid.
“Hey!” Eric snapped, as if being slapped across the face.
Brandon looked up impatiently. “I’m sorry. Did you want that sycophantic asshole to continue listening to this conversation? I might have broken the transmitter, but I won’t really know until we take a closer look.”
Eric swallowed. “He really was doing it that way?”
“Probably. But everyone should put their cell phones in the microwave just to be sure.” Brandon glanced around at the five other faces (minus Ray’s) that were staring at him in horror. “Don’t worry, I won’t actually cook them. The microwave blocks transmissions.” In response, he received more blank stares. “We’re just being safe.”
Ray snorted. “Just leave them here. We should go to the lab anyway. We won’t be able to see anything without a microscope.”
Brandon perked up at the mention of his new lab. Skylar just rolled her eyes and slid off her barstool.
“I’ll tell Bubbe we’ll be a while,” she said. “They can come back down and eat without us.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, we had all left our phones at the house and filed back into the underground lab. Eric glanced at me as I stumbled past the broken chair.
“Animals,” Brandon mumbled again—clearly he’d noticed, too.
“Send me the bill,” Eric said as he took a seat and pulled one out for me.
I sat down, and he rolled close to me, moving to take my hand. But I rolled right back away. Bug free or not, he wasn’t getting away with his bullshit at dinner. Not yet.
Ray had immediately taken the tiny chip over to a microscope on one of the steel worktables. “Good God,” he erupted a few minutes later. “Bran, come look at this.”
Brandon lumbered over and peered into the microscope. “Holy shit.”
“Do you see that? It’s an acoustic transducer nano-array circuit,” Ray said. “Using a solid-state memory unit.”
“And at that size,” Brandon added in awe. “I didn’t even think that was physically possible. How do you think they overcame the acoustic wavelength size discrepancy?”
“Ahem!”
Brandon turned to his wife, who had just cleared her throat.
“Translate, please,” she said pointedly.
“Yeah,” I added. “Not everyone here speaks Klingon.”
Brandon returned to the conference table while his father continued examining the coin. “Okay, how’s this? It’s the smallest wireless recording device that Ray, a circuitry specialist at MIT, has ever seen or heard of.” He jerked a thumb back at the microscope. “That’s definitely your bug, my friend. And it explains why Tony never detects anything when you’re waiting outside your place. You’ve been wearing it around your neck.”
Eric just stared numbly at the table. “I’ve been...it’s been…” He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, fuck. I’ve—goddammit, I’ve taken that thing everywhere with me. Every board meeting. Everywhere in the entire fucking company.” He looked up in horror. “It was in my grandfather’s study for…Jesus, since my dad died. Carson’s been listening in on my family for twenty years?”
“Of course not,” Ray said from the microscope before the shock of the idea actually gave Eric a heart attack. “That kind of technology is brand new. There’s no way anyone has been capable of a transmitter this small for more than a year. Maybe two.”
“Was there any time he could have changed it for the old one?” Brandon asked. “Maybe when you weren’t, I don’t know, conscious? Sleeping, or…”
By the look on Eric’s face, it was obviously the “or.”
“He must have done it when I was passed out,” he said, staring ahead, but at nothing at all. “When I was…away.”
I swallowed thickly. What exactly happened that had caused Eric to pass out?
But before I could ask, he turned to me sadly. “Jane, he heard—”
“We were quiet that night,” I said, though I wasn’t sure myself that the noises we had made were completely silent.
Be careful, he had said. We were...weren’t we?
“Were you quiet down here?” Brandon asked pointedly.
I frowned. Eric flushed. Ray pretended not to hear us while Skylar rolled her eyes so hard they almost fell out of her head. Zola just looked amused.
“I thought you said the room was sealed,” Eric said.
“It is,” Brandon replied. “But this thing can record locally and then transmit once it’s out in the open.”
Eric and I exchanged twin expressions of horror. Yeah, the pervert could have heard every single scream. Fuck.
“You never thought to have Tony scan you for bugs?” Brandon wondered. “Not just your office or phones?”
“I never thought,” Eric said dazedly. “Fuck. Fuck, the bastard collared me. Tagged me like an animal, and like a fucking idiot, I had no clue!”
“It might not have mattered anyway if they scanned for it,” Ray pronounced as he prodded at the coin with some kind of long steel needles attached to a bunch of cords. “It has its a random noise, spread-spectrum countermeasure.” He removed the necklace from the microscope and examined the warped head of Janus with renewed respect, then put it back under the lens. “Remarkable.”
“More like disturbing,” Eric replied.
“So, who made it?”
We swung toward Zola, who had been listening to everything and taking assiduous notes on a legal pad he’d brought with him.
Ray frowned. “Well, it doesn’t have a manufacturer’s label,” he said. “Of course, it wouldn’t
for this kind of surveillance.” He looked up. “We could probably check for the patent, but this is so new, I bet it’s still being processed. Still, maybe three labs in the world could even approximate this kind of surveillance technology.” He pointed at the crushed metal and tiny chip inside. “As far as we know, the Chinese don’t have anything like it, and neither do the Russians.”
“Ray consults for DARPA,” Brandon clarified.
Ray shrugged. “Half of the MIT labs are military funded. But I’ve had clearance since 1978, you realize. All three labs that make this sort of thing that I know of are in the U.S. And they’re all private contractors. Lockheed, Gruber, and Chariot.”
Zola made a note. “Illegal surveillance,” he said to everyone. “So he did it himself. Everything stacks up.”
“Fuck,” Eric muttered. “He’s going to…when he finds out we know.”
Unable to stop myself, I set a hand on his shoulder. Before I could take it away again, Eric covered it with his and squeezed tightly before letting it go.
“It’s what I wanted to tell you when I came,” Zola continued. “I looked into this guy Carson after we met, Jane. Or tried to. It’s going to take some major investigative power to learn anything concrete, I’m afraid. The man is clean as a whistle, and he lives behind a wall of political and military protection.”
I nodded. “I thought that might be the case. I couldn’t find anything either.”
“You were looking into him?” Eric asked me.
I turned with a scowl. “Well, of course I was looking, you idiot. What do you think, I was sitting around playing on my sewing machine? Pretending like some bastard didn’t just march into my life, steal my childhood and my husband on the same day, and then proceed to blackmail the two of us? Obviously I’ve been trying to find out about him. But he’s basically the hardest man to catch on the planet. If I hadn’t met him in person, I’d assume he was a phantom.”
“Well, of course it’s the case,” Brandon said. “I could have told you that. I believe I did.”
The Kiss Plot: Book Two of the Quicksilver Trilogy Page 21
