by Zoe Sharp
Henry led the way through into what might once have been the living room, but was now packed with computer equipment. It looked like a complicated setup and, judging by the way the cases gleamed, most of it was fairly new. I couldn’t see anything staying spotless for long in that environment. Henry had set up a couple of fans that were stirring the turgid air around rather than actually cooling it.
The lone battered-looking typist’s chair, its cushion repaired with silver duct tape, was the only place to sit down in the entire room if you discounted the floor, which I already had. Henry eased himself into it with a sigh of relief to be off his feet again and picked up part of a cold hamburger that was sitting congealing in its wrapper next to his keyboard.
“So, any ideas who’s holding Keith Pelzner?” he asked, biting off a chunk and beginning to chew.
Trey didn’t answer, so I said, “As far as we can tell, no-one’s holding him.”
Henry’s jaws stopped working for a moment. He swallowed, then said, “You mean he’s gotten loose?”
“No,” I said, “I mean it doesn’t appear he was ever kidnapped in the first place.”
Henry put the remains of his hamburger down again, very slowly, and distractedly wiped his hands on the front of his shirt. It clearly wasn’t the first time he’d used his clothing as a napkin. And all the time his eyes skated from side to side as though he was scanning a document only he could see. One that brought him very bad news. His lips were moving but for a while no sound came out, then he muttered, “Crap in a hat,” very softly, under his breath.
“Why do I get the feeling the fact that Keith Pelzner has apparently disappeared of his own accord is not exactly what you wanted to hear?”
Henry jerked to his feet, hands to his face now. I thought of the residual hamburger grease on his fingers and tried not to squirm.
“Why?” he echoed, faintly at first, then with growing vehemence. “Why? Because the only goddamn reason for him to run is if it doesn’t work, that’s why!”
“If what doesn’t work?” I asked blankly. Henry spun to face me, checking out Trey’s reaction to all this on the way. I glanced at the kid myself but he’d hung his head like he’d retreated into himself. No clues there, then.
“You mean you have no idea what Pelzner was working on?” Henry demanded, surprise making his voice rise and spraying me with flecks of half-chewed burger.
I backed off a step and shook my head.
Henry turned away and groped for the arm of his chair, lowering his bulk into it again. He took a moment to gather his thoughts.
“OK,” he said. “Keith Pelzner’s a computer programmer, yeah?”
“You can skip the part about the earth cooling and the fish learning to walk,” I said. “I know he’s a programmer and I know he was working on something to do with the financial markets. Take it from there.”
He reached for the hamburger again, a reflex action, but when he got it to his mouth he suddenly seemed to realise what he’d done and plonked it back on the desktop. “This new program he’s been working on is dynamite.” He looked at me then, a little haughty. “I don’t s’pose you know the details, right?”
I would have loved to have been able to tell him he was wrong but he wasn’t, so I had to take it on the chin and simply shake my head.
“OK, there are a lot of financial programs out there that track the stock markets,” he said, “they’ve gotten to the stage now where they’re pretty sophisticated, yeah? They’re based on mathematical algorithms. They follow the trends and use stuff like Fibonacci fan lines and moving averages to try and indicate whether the stock price is going to rise or fall, so you know whether to buy or sell, yeah?”
He glanced at me, checking I was with him so far. I nodded encouragingly to show him I was just about keeping up.
“OK,” he went on, “but all these programs do is track. What Keith Pelzner was working on was a system that could take into account stuff like current affairs, financial reports from around the world, news, and could actually predict what was going to happen to the stock prices. Not guess – predict. We’re talking software that’s capable of learning from its mistakes, here. We’re talking artificial intelligence. I’m dumbing down, you understand?”
“I understand,” I said, a little tartly. I paused. “So, this program – do you reckon it’s worth killing people over?”
Henry sat back in his chair and looked at me with his mouth open. “I don’t think you’ve grasped the concept here, huh?” he said. “If you got a hold of this program you could trade the futures markets with absolute certainty, yeah?” He stopped, searching for the right way to penetrate my tiny little brain.
“Look, say you were going to day-trade contracts on the futures market, like the S&P five hundred, yeah? You think the market’s gonna go up, you go into a long trade. You think it’s gonna go down, you go into a short trade, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. He was losing me but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
“OK, so if you’re ahead of the game and you know when to go long and when to go short, then every time the market rises or falls in your favour, you make two hundred and fifty bucks a point, right? It don’t matter if it rises or falls, just so long as you’re in a trade heading in the right direction, you’re making dough.”
“And how far is it likely to rise or fall in a day?” I said.
“Hey, good question. You’re a bright cookie, Charlie, you know that?” he said, wagging a knowing finger at me. “The S&P will only maybe move five or ten points, but if you can jump on the back of every one of them you could be making fifty points a week, easy.”
I did some fast mental arithmetic. “That’s twelve and a half grand a week,” I murmured. Even converting back out of dollars into sterling, that wasn’t a bad whack.
“Sure it is,” Henry said. “And that’s on one contract, yeah? Supposing you were trading ten contracts, or a hundred? It’s a licence to print money and it’s perfectly legit. They can’t touch you for it.”
He grinned slyly as he watched my face go blank with the realisation of just what was at stake here. “You asked if this program was worth killing someone for, yeah? Well, if it hada worked, I tell you, I woulda killed my own grandmother to get a hold of it. In a heartbeat!”
For a second there was silence. I stood in Henry’s rank little living room and let the consequences of what he’d told me seep slowly into my brain like blood into the dirt.
More than a million dollars a week.
Every week.
Legally.
Holy shit.
I looked up. “But the fact that Keith’s done a runner . . .” I murmured.
“Yeah, you’re on it,” Henry said bitterly. “Why would he run unless he can’t get the bugs out of the system and he knows that he’s never gonna be able to make it work? Hell, the company he’s working for have banked every last cent on it. They’re practically bust. I been following this pretty close, y’know? When I heard he’d been kidnapped I thought he musta finally cracked it. But now—” he broke off, shaking his head. He sounded close to tears.
And then, behind me, Trey cleared his throat.
“It works,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken. “I know it works,” he repeated, more firmly this time. We both turned to stare at him and he muttered, “I know ‘cos I’ve, like, tried it out myself.”
Twelve
For a full five seconds after Trey made his announcement, nobody spoke, then Henry said faintly, “What do you mean, you’ve tried it?”
Trey shrugged again, kicking at the curling edge of the mat with studied casualness. “Dad wanted to integrate a neural network into the program, which is, like, artificial intelligence,” he added to me, with that airily precocious tone I disliked so much. “He did all the setup on it, but he couldn’t get results that were, like, consistent enough and he gave up on it. So I’ve been kinda playing around with it some.”
“And you’ve gotten
it to work,” Henry said. It was a statement, not a question, with a touch of something in his tone that could have been wonder.
“Not yet,” Trey admitted, colouring, “but I’m real close. I reckon Dad just expected it to learn real quick. He just kinda underestimated how long you gotta spend hitting the neural net with data before it learns the patterns, breaks it down into numbers. It just needed more time, that’s all.”
“Your dad must be real proud of you,” Henry said. I glanced at him sharply but his face was as guarded as his voice.
Trey flushed. “He doesn’t know,” he said. “Not how far I’ve gotten with it, anyhow. I’ve been kinda working on it someplace else – where he wouldn’t hang over my shoulder all the time, y’know?”
“Bet that took some processor power,” Henry said, and Trey nodded.
“So that’s why you were nicking stuff from that computer shop at the Galleria,” I put in and he flushed again.
“Dad’s never believed I can do anything,” he threw back at me, and the old whiny note was back well in evidence. “Even when I was a kid, he’d buy me model aircraft and stuff, then he’d kinda take them off me and put them together himself. It was like he never trusted me to do it right.”
“So nobody knows you’ve been working on this alongside your dad?” Henry said. There was something calculating about him now. “You’ve done this all by yourself?”
“Yeah,” Trey said, defiant.
Henry shook his head, smiling. “That is outstanding,” he said at last. “Absolutely outstanding. I would sure love to see some of what you’ve done.”
Trey stared at him for a moment as the realisation of actual adult approval settled on him. “No problem,” he said, his enthusiasm bubbling over. “It’s all with—”
“Hold it right there,” I cut in. I turned to Henry who quickly hid his flash of annoyance at my interruption. “You’re the one who told us to trust no-one. What makes you an exception to that rule?” I demanded. “Half the people we thought we could trust have been trying to kill us over the last twenty-four hours and now – finally – I think I know why.” I glared briefly at Trey. He dropped my gaze like a hot brick. “You said you could help us, Henry. Well before Trey goes handing over anything, I think you should show us how exactly you intend to do that.”
Henry pulled a rueful face. “OK, OK, I can appreciate your caution. And you’re right, why should you trust me?” He leaned back in his chair. The frame creaked under the strain. For a moment he just smiled at us, spreading his palms wide. I could almost hear his brain turning over furiously while he tried to think up a good reason. At last, he said, “Let me just ask you this, Charlie – what other choices do you have, huh?”
I didn’t answer. Silence is always the best course of action if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
“Face it, you need help,” he said. “I been watching the news. I know the kinda crap you’re in. You need to negotiate some kinda deal with the people who are after you, otherwise you’re gonna be running for the rest of your lives.” He sat forwards again, intent. The sweat prickled across his upper lip, forming a pale moustache of perspiration. “I can do that. I can negotiate that deal for you.”
“How?”
Henry indicated the array of computer equipment surrounding him. “Check it out,” he said with pride. “I can reach anyone with this setup, anywhere in the world.”
“How are you going to find them? We don’t even know for sure who they are,” I said, ignoring Trey’s quick wriggle of dissent.
Henry gave me a crafty look. “I got a few ideas where to start. I been following the story kinda closely and besides—” he tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger, “—I’ve kinda done this sorta work before.”
“Yeah, so I’ve been told,” I said, cynical. “Desert Storm, wasn’t it? You must have been about twelve at the time.”
He had the grace to colour, glancing at Trey. “Yeah, well,” he said, shrugging, “the kids go for that kinda thing. Sometimes you gotta embellish a little, y’know? Adds to the rep.”
I regarded him for a moment with my head on one side. “So what’s your angle, Henry? Why are you offering to help us?”
“Easy – I want a copy of that program,” he said, and his voice had hardened now. “Maybe a little startup capital, too – though I can round up enough to get me started,” he added hastily when he saw the warning glint in my eye.
I raised an eyebrow at Trey. After all, he had more say over what happened to this program than I did.
The kid shrugged. “OK,” he mumbled. “I guess.”
“OK,” I said to Henry. “You’ve got a deal.” I gave him the number of Trey’s phone. “Call us when you have something to tell us, OK?”
“No problemo,” he said, struggling to his feet. He was almost bouncing now, his glee almost uncontained. “You won’t regret this.”
“I hope not,” I said, keeping my gaze flat and my voice cool. “I sincerely hope not.”
***
I declined Henry’s offer of a return trip to the car park by the bridge in the ailing Corvette. Instead, we left on foot. Trey phoned Scott as soon as we were off the front porch and we walked to intercept him.
Apart from that brief call, Trey trudged along in silence with his head bowed and his hands deep into his pockets. I left him to ferment his thoughts for half a block or so before I butted in.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the program?” I said quietly. “Why all that bullshit about your dad working for the government, hmm?”
He didn’t answer right away. In fact, he took so long I nearly repeated the question. Finally, he looked over and regarded me gravely.
“I guess I was scared to, like, tell you the truth,” he said at last and his voice sounded raw, teetering on the edge of tears.
“Scared?” I echoed, nonplussed. “Scared I’d do what?”
He hunched his shoulders. “Want it for yourself, I guess,” he said.
I thought of Henry’s greedy face and nodded slowly. It was a reasonable fear, I supposed.
“Trey,” I said. “My first duty is to protect you. Everything else comes after that.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Whatever.”
Stung, I grabbed his arm and yanked him to face me. “No, I’m serious,” I snapped, “Don’t just dismiss me like that. This is what I do. It’s what I am.”
Trey met my eyes for a moment, his face stubborn with his disbelief. “Yeah,” he said. “Just like Ms Raybourn and Mr Whitmarsh and Chris, huh?”
For a moment I didn’t reply. What could I say to him?
He pulled out of my grasp and spun away so I wouldn’t see him crying. I let him weep. I suppose, in the circumstances, I would have felt pretty gutted, too.
***
Scott picked us up two blocks away from Henry’s place. His shiny Dodge looked too cool and too new in the shabby neighbourhood where all the cars had a two-tone thing going between the paint and the rust.
Scott clearly wasn’t prepared to wait until we got back to the house before hearing all about the meet. He jumped straight in with a hundred questions. Aimee and Xander had shifted to the back to let Trey and me have the seats in the cab, but it didn’t stop them chiming in through the small sliding window behind us. They were too full of themselves to notice that Trey wasn’t contributing much to the general conversation.
I took my lead from the boy, giving brief answers that were as vague and noncommittal as I could get away with.
Eventually, Scott shook his head in exasperation.
“I swear to God, man, that Henry must be some piece of work,” he said, and I could still hear the excitement running through his voice, just under the surface. “One meeting and you’re even giving us the whole Big Secret thing, huh?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “He promised to help.” But I was watching Trey as I said it and I couldn’t help wondering – if Henry was the answer to all our prayers – why the kid
suddenly looked set to cut his own throat.
***
It was late by the time we got back to Scott’s place. The opportunity to sleep somewhere clean and comfortable, and relatively safe, was too tempting to pass up on. I left the kids sprawled in front of the TV and turned in.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to unravel the beaded bits in my ridiculous pink hair, but felt stupid asking so I left them as they were but I dropped the necklace Aimee had provided in a heap on the bedside table. I took the SIG out of the little backpack and shoved it under the pillow, just in case.
I undressed slowly, weary beyond words. The guest room had mirrors on the wall behind the double bed headboard. The sight of my strange reflection kept catching me out, like someone else was in the room with me.
I climbed into bed and was just reaching for the light switch when there was a hurried tap on the door. Before I could speak it opened and Aimee stuck her head round.
“Oh hi,” she said. “I was kinda hoping I’d catch you. Can we talk?”
I sat up, trying not to hug the bedclothes around me too prudishly.
“Help yourself,” I said, waving a hand towards the end of the bed.
She came in, closing the door behind her. Instead of sitting down she came and stood by the bed with her hands in her back pockets. It made her shoulders hunch forwards awkwardly. Her eyes kept dropping down past my chin, then popping back up again, nervous.
I sighed. “What’s on your mind, Aimee?”
“I was just wondering what—” she broke off, thought some and tried again. “How did you get that scar?”
I was silent for a moment, mentally arguing over whether to tell her the truth, a convenient lie, or simply to tell her to mind her own bloody business.
“Someone jumped me,” I said at last, watching her face. “They tried to cut my throat.”
