Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  "Politics?" I asked.

  "All he ever cared about was code. The beauty, the sublime elegance of lines of alpha-numeric commands. He told me when I was a little girl that he could judge the quality of a programmer's work by the shapes his lines of code formed on the screen."

  "And he left running the business to Hammon and Sanderfreud," I said.

  "Are you suggesting that might have been an itty bit foolish?" she asked.

  I almost said, "Doesn't the guy who controls the product control the company?" But I already knew the answer to that. The powerful who don't make anything assume they can always find plenty of makers out there to replace the ones they have, and they'll be just as good. Maybe better.

  "But your father is set for life," I said. "He can afford to shake it off and move on."

  She smiled at me, with that weary, patronizing smile I got used to seeing on my daughter's face.

  "When they forced him out they may as well have murdered him. He'll never be the same."

  "Forced him out."

  "Hey, thanks for making us rich, buddy. Now get the hell out of here."

  She described how Hammon brought in a team of consultants to assess the viability of N-Spock 5.0, over Fey's adamant objections. They concluded that it was fully functional, and ready for release. A millisecond later, Hammon and Sanderfreud exercised a forgotten clause in the corporate agreement. Forgotten by Fey, anyway. The one that said at any time a two-thirds majority of the founding shareholders could purchase all the stock of the remaining third, at a value set at the end of the preceding fiscal year, which for Subversive Technologies had been suppressed as rumors about 5.0 circulated around the financial markets.

  They brought Fey into a conference room, and while corporate counsel explained what was going down, security packed up his office and the consultants installed new passwords on the development servers, locking him out of his own creation.

  "But they were wrong," she said. "Nobody'd bothered to fully test the data conversion from 4.0. Oopsies."

  Seemingly unfazed, they stuck to their deal with Fey. The consultants poured into the building and went to town on the application, secure in their belief that a fix was but a few keystrokes away. A month later, reality set in. The failure point was inside a small but critical region of the program that had gone missing. It was a black box, a black hole, a dense fortress that no external assault was able to breach.

  What happened was the unthinkable. The most powerful application ever written for its stated purpose was unworkable, unusable, worthless.

  "A lot of money was at stake, so you can imagine, people got upset," said Anika.

  A lot of money, for sure. Billions as it turned out. Oopsies is right.

  "So now they need your father to come back and fix things. He should be in the power seat."

  "He should be, that's right. But he's telling them what he's told me. Without the missing code, he'll have to start at the beginning and run through the entire application, stopping along the way for testing and QA, in order to isolate the glitch and allow him to write in a patch that will solve the problem. This will take most of next year, not the next three months, which Hammon doesn't want to hear, but that's the deal."

  "Why should he help them at all, after getting heaved out?" I asked.

  "You wonder that, too, eh?" she said, wagging a finger at me, but this time without the condescension. "Why was he so docile when they gobbled up his stock? Why was he so deferential when they all showed up unannounced on our doorstep? This should be his moment of triumph and he's acting more like a hopeful lover. What is up with that?" she asked, stringing out each word.

  The light on the bedside table came on. I reached down to the floor and dug my cell phone out of my jeans. I turned it on and saw that service had returned. For some reason, all this revival caused in me a craving to be outside in the morning air. I shared those feelings with Anika, who suggested we freshen up, get dressed and retire to the patio with sliced fruit and toasted bagels, which she'd happily prepare. Not a hard sell.

  Not long after we were out there, watching the sun warm up the island. Anika still wore the Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, though she'd added jeans and orange Crocs.

  "We keep talking about your father," I said, "but the real issue at this point is Axel."

  She sat back in her chair, mug in hand.

  "Fucking Axel," she said. "I love him with all my heart and he never stops driving me crazy."

  "No ideas?"

  She looked at a loss.

  "How can I explain this? Axel is a creature of habit. He's filled with inconceivable anxiety, and the only thing that keeps that in check is routine and familiar surroundings. So what do we do, leave our home in Newton, Massachusetts, where he's lived his entire life, and move into a brokendown hotel on Fishers Island, New York. All the professional people said this was a terrible idea, but it's actually gone pretty well. Until Derrick Hammon, Master of the Universe, shows up. And then Myron is, like, naked and dead. That was the straw. Flipped him out completely. You wouldn't have seen it, probably, but I knew."

  "So that's why he ran away?"

  "I don't know. Axel is a routine freak who can surprise the hell out of you by breaking routine. I admit this is a big break, but he's done stuff like this before."

  She bowed her head and used both hands to scratch her scalp, causing her long, shiny black hair to tumble over her face. When she threw back her head, it somehow knew how to fall into place. I didn't know how old she was, but likely younger than my own daughter. It was hard to think of her as the mother of an eighteen-year-old boy, but that's essentially what she was. Her father probably had even less interest than skill in being a parent, so the upbringing of an odd child had fallen to her, while still a child herself.

  "It must have been tough when he was little. Del Rey made it sound like you had some help from her and others at Subversive."

  Anika was one of those people who reacted to things you said as if you shared inside knowledge of the situation, even when there was no way you could.

  "You call that help? That's funny."

  "Really," I said.

  "I wish I hadn't said that. Now you'll want to pry."

  "I do."

  She looked away, as if to organize her next thought.

  "Del Rey did a lot for us, that's true," she said. "It wouldn't be fair to say otherwise."

  "Not Myron?"

  "Let's just say Myron Sanderfreud had an interesting interpretation of the word help."

  I turned my attention back to the sunrise, which we couldn't see directly, but was doing its best to light up the eastern horizon. There was a sturdy breeze out of the northwest roughing up the surface of the water in the Inner Harbor. With the sun so low, the chop looked like molten metal, decorated with shards of light, some refracted into random evanescence. I'd seen a lot of mornings like this from an Adirondack chair that sat at the edge of a breakwater on the Little Peconic Bay, the outer limit of my backyard. The show was familiar, yet never exactly the same.

  I rubbed my face, the beard stubble coarse enough to abrade my palms. My eyes stung with interrupted sleep and the coffee burned on the way down, but I was getting ready to move out, impatient with inactivity.

  "What're the chances of borrowing your car again?" I asked.

  She studied me.

  "You're going to look for my brother. His own father has already given up. From what I read about you on-line, I wouldn't have taken you for a philanthropist."

  "I do things for my own reasons."

  "Am I one of those reasons?"

  "If you were, I wouldn't tell you," I said, and left her there at the table, with her plate of citrus fruit, her seeking eyes and fragile grin.

  1

  Before I drove out of the parking lot, I called Amanda.

  "Another country heard from," she said, answering the phone. "I guess the power's back on."

  "How was your night?"

  "Not bad. I kept b
usy, swimming with the dog, drinking martinis, cleaning the shotgun. How 'bout you?"

  I shared the high points of my conversation with Anika, keeping the setting entirely on the patio, seeing nothing gained by a more complete description.

  "So what are your plans?" she asked.

  Good question.

  "I'm going to hang around until they secure another cop, then dinghy out to you so we can get the hell out of here."

  "That's a good plan," she said.

  "Keep your powder dry."

  My first destination was an easy call. When I rang the bell at Gwyneth's place, she came out from the back wearing a trench coat and a towel on her head.

  "You're still here," she said.

  "Apparently. Do you know Desi Arness?"

  "Mediocre pool player who can afford to lose four out of five games. One of my better sources of revenue. Though only during the season when the Swan's open. Assuming your Swissie friends haven't ditched the pool table."

  I didn't have the heart to tell her they apparently had.

  "Do you know where he lives?"

  She went behind the counter and pulled out a worn map of the island.

  "We're here," she said, putting her finger on a spot just west of the entrance into the country club. She ran her finger along the route to the Arness estate, deep inside the reserve, on a cliff above Fishers Island Sound.

  "He's here. The folks in there aren't too keen on interlopers," she said, looking up at me. "Even off-season."

  "Maybe you could put a spell on me. Make me invisible."

  "Don't be so sure I can't," she said. "Here, take the map. I've got plenty more."

  "If you were a teenaged runaway this time of year, where would you hide on Fishers?"

  She used the finger that was still pointing at the Arness estate to circle the island.

  "A few thousand people in the summer turns into less than three hundred off-season. Plenty of room to hide," she said. "There're a lot of empty houses in the club. The only trick is knowing who's got an alarm system and who just relies on the club's security squad. Got any more questions? I need to get dressed."

  "Can you set up that thing so I can write some emails?" I said, pointing at the Mac.

  "That's what they're there for, buddy."

  I sent the first one to Jackie Swaitkowski. It took about a half an hour to detail my instructions on how to conclude the negotiations with my former company's lawyers, and then, assuming there were funds out of the settlement, how they should be handled. I sent her the email and copied Burton Lewis.

  Then I wrote Randall Dodge, the owner of a computer repair and help desk operation in Southampton Village. Randall had worked in digital security in the navy and had acquired skills and capabilities that far exceeded those of Jackie and Amanda, especially when traversing decidedly extra-legal territory.

  I put "This is Sam Acquillo. Are you awake?" in the subject line.

  "Yup," came back a few moments later.

  "I need to talk. What's a good number to call?"

  He sent me his cell phone number, which I called after I left Gwyneth's place and climbed back into the Mercedes.

  "What're you doing on Fishers Island?" he asked when he came on the line.

  "How did you know that?"

  "From your IP address."

  "That answers my first question. You can trace messages back to the originating computer."

  "Sure. The only serious security level is at the access provider. But I have ways around that."

  A Shinnecock Indian, Randall could be lyrical in describing his daring journeys through other people's networks and databases. The key, he'd tell me, was to look, but not touch, to pass like a ghost, silent and ephemeral. He acknowledged the pursuit had an intoxicating effect, even addictive if one indulged too much. And while he conceded to voyeuristic thrills, he said he never succumbed to outright theft, however easy it might have been.

  "What if you wanted to get into the development servers at a big software shop, say Subversive Technologies," I said.

  "Whoa, sharp right hand turn into no-no land. Tracking down IP addresses goes both ways. I'm good at evasion, but people in places like that are very good at security. One slip up and they catch me and put me in jail."

  "That'd be bad," I said. "I like having you around."

  "I like having me around, too."

  "Let's pretend you really wanted to hack into Subversive, how would you do it?"

  "I'd bribe one of their developers to give me an administrative user ID and password. Once in, I'd scramble to unlock their security measures, which would likely include rolling updates of user IDs and passwords. These are difficult things to do, but possible if you're on the inside."

  "So then let's pretend you're safely inside, can you look at whatever they're working on?"

  "Unless it's on a completely standalone box, unplugged from the net, yes. Probably. Though I wouldn't know what I was looking at. Programming is not my thing."

  "How about their emails?"

  "That I can do. If I'd lost my mind and all sense of selfpreservation. Do you really want to hack Subversive or are they just an example?"

  I told him what I could about the situation with N-Spock, including the unfortunate tendency of blowing itself up at critical junctures. I also told him about the Feys, Sanderfreud and Poole.

  "That's one creepy little island you got yourself stuck on there, Sam."

  "Don't say that to the Chamber of Commerce."

  "The problem with N-Spock could be like an immunological disorder. And because the application turns on itself, not in response to a virus that has commandeered the program, it's very hard to isolate."

  "How would you?"

  "Shy of starting over and rewriting the whole thing, if you knew what was happening you could write a subprogram, a patch, that nipped the destructive cycle in the bud."

  "An inoculation," I said.

  "Sort of, yeah, if we keep stretching the analogy. Though like I said, this ain't exactly my bailiwick."

  I hung up after thanking him and refocused on finding Desi's house. The gatehouse for the country club was empty as expected, as were the winding streets lined with trees and open fields, interrupted occasionally by unmarked driveways that disappeared into the foliage. I counted these off as I followed Gwyneth's map, which was well adorned with place names and landmarks, including the Arness mansion itself.

  Reasonably sure I'd found it, I drove down an unpaved drive that had an overgrown meadow on one side and a stand of hardwoods on the other. There were several curves, the last of which saw the driveway flow into an oval parking area in front of a three-story brick and stone house. Really, more like a central house, flanked by two smaller versions. At the far end of the circle it opened up in front of a freestanding five-car garage. I parked in front of the house and was about to get out of the Mercedes when the head of a giant black dog appeared at my window. It didn't bark or snarl, but neither did it blink. I heard a sound on the other side of the car and saw an identical head peering in the passenger side window.

  I reassessed the value of my visit to Desi.

  I lowered the window a crack and shared with the Great Danes my deep respect for all dogs, especially very large ones. This had little impact on their posture, which seemed poised for anything, including an attack. Since the path ahead was clear, I started the car and slowly moved forward. The dogs held their positions at the windows, but allowed me to proceed. I waved goodbye and was about to accelerate around the circle when a man stepped out in front of the car. I put on the brakes.

  He looked in his early forties, of medium build, though he carried extra weight in a face that was smiling broadly. He wore a red hunting shirt, tan vest and khakis that bunched up at the top of a pair of rubber boots. He walked over to the Mercedes, and bent down until his eyes were at the same level as the Great Danes'. I cracked open the window again.

  I see you've met Sacco and Vanzetti."

  "Cute
pups."

  "They're my security detail. Cheaper and more effective than the human variety."

  "Agreed. Sorry to bother you. I was just looking for some information."

  "Calling ahead would have been smarter," he said, though he still wore a jovial expression.

  "Did you know that Trooper Poole was assaulted a few days ago? They had to evacuate her and haven't replaced her yet."

  His face darkened.

  "I heard that. Damn awful thing."

  "This happened right after a man was murdered at the Swan."

  "I heard that, too."

  "You hear a lot. That's why I want to talk to you."

  "What are you, a cop?" he asked.

  "Engineer. No official standing, just happened to get mixed up in this."

  He flicked his hand in the air and the dogs moved away from the car. He backed away and they trotted over to him and lay down with haunches up in response to a second hand signal. He told me I could get out, but to keep at least ten feet between us.

  "Not a problem," I said. "I've got a mutt of my own, though the only hand signal he knows is when I reach for his bowl."

  "You can ask me what you want, but it doesn't mean I'm going to answer."

  The Arness place lived up to the designation "estate." In addition to the big house, the grounds featured a salad bowl of luxurious green growth-giant flowering bushes, viney wooden arches and moss-covered brick patios. At the center of the circle was a huge stone urn, looted I guessed from some ancient city by one of Desi's ancestors. It was filled with an assortment of unidentifiable plants continually freshened by a central fountain.

  "I heard you tried to buy the Black Swan. I was curious how the deal ended up with Christian Fey."

  "What's your name again?"

  "Sam Acquillo. A boat I was delivering was docked at the Swan while I made some repairs. I sent her on with the crew and now I'm staying at the hotel."

  I filled in some more detail, including news of the missing Axel.

  "So I was also wondering if one of the private security outfits around here could check on the houses in the club. The human kind," I added, looking down at Sacco and Vanzetti. "Though I don't want him frightened or hurt in any way.-