Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  I heard the hoods slam shut and watched the whole crowd disappear back into the hotel. An hour later Hammon, 't Hooft, Jock and Pierre emerged wearing non-uniform paramilitary outfits, their shoulders bent into the wind. At the road, they split into pairs and went in opposite directions, 't Hooft and Jock up the hill toward the general store and Hammon and Pierre east-bound toward the country club.

  Of all the activities at which I'm grievously inadequate, waiting tops the list. Many times I've acted entirely contrary to my best interests just to end the tedium of a forced wait. Yet waiting was what the current situation demanded, and all I could do was endure it in grim silence.

  Fifteen minutes was all I could bear. I dragged the ditch bag with me out from under the bush and put it on my back. Then I walked across the road and up to the hotel, through the front door and up to the reception desk where Anika, still in her kimono, was shuffling things around, in the distracted way you do when activity is its own justification.

  "Got a room for the night?" I asked.

  Her eyes opened wide enough to show white around the pupils, and a sharp little intake of breath seemed to catch in her throat.

  "Oh, my God, are you crazy?"

  "Where's your father?"

  She turned around to look at the office door behind the counter just as Fey walked out. He wasn't an easy guy to read, so I couldn't tell if he was glad to see me or not.

  "Any word on my son?" was the first thing he said, to his credit.

  "He's safe and out of their reach. Now it's your turn."

  They stood staring at me.

  "We can do this if you move right now," I said. "Wear something warm and waterproof."

  Fey tried to interrogate me, but I took him by the arm and gently pushed him toward the stairway.

  "Bring the keys to the Mercedes," I said. "I don't know how much time we have."

  While they were upstairs, I stood at a window next to the front door and kept a lookout. It was another form of stressful waiting, worse for not being totally in my control. So I was happy to see Anika appear in a bright yellow poncho.

  She handed me the car keys.

  "Where's Fey?" I asked.

  She shook her head.

  "He won't leave. He says he can't," she said. "That's okay. He can take care of Eloise." She took my arm and pulled me toward the front door. I acquiesced, afraid to wait for more explanation. I handed Anika my backpack and she sat in the passenger seat while I shimmied under the car and hooked up the alligator clips, using another zip tie to hold the whole bundle to the chassis.

  I sat behind the wheel and started the car, feeling another involuntary wave of satisfaction passing through my mind. I backed up, looked down at the shifter to put it into drive, looked up again and saw 't Hooft several yards in front of the car with a rifle aimed at our windshield. Before I could calculate the odds of running him down before he got off a round, I heard a tap on the passenger side window. Jock had another gun, a vicious long-barreled semi-automatic with a folding stock nestled in his armpit. The muzzle was pointed at Anika's head.

  I put the transmission in neutral and watched 't Hooft come toward us. Jock opened Anika's door and told her to get out. I got out myself, so I was standing when 't Hooft dropped his weapon to the ground and threw a right jab at my face. I blocked it with my forearm, which immediately went numb from the power of the blow. I shook it out and danced to the left, away from the car. He tried the same punch again, but this one I just dodged, planting a left on the back of his head as he moved through the swing.

  Now my other hand was numb. I clenched and unclenched my fist and stayed up on my toes. 't Hooft glared at me and turned in place, flat-footed, his fists in a parody of a boxing pose. I moved in and gave him a combination to the gut, and a jab to the face as I backed out of range again. My broken right hand lit up in pain, but I could still move my fingers. 't Hooft held his stomach and squinted as if in vague discomfort, though still standing securely on his feet. Now I could tell where this was going. I was way out of my weight class. I'd just beat on him till I was exhausted, then he'd deliver one clear shot and put me away.

  I dropped my hands and called him a few rude names. He responded by charging. I ducked under a wild swing and punched him hard in the right kidney. He bellowed as I leaped for his rifle where it lay on the gravel.

  Jock got there first, stepping on the barrel and hitting me with what must have been a punch, though I had no idea where it came from. Tears filled my eyes and a fuzzy roar went off inside my head. I backed off and watched him hand his gun to 't Hooft and then come at me with limbs twirling like a dervish. Seconds later I was on my back, an array of hurts springing up all over my body. Nearly blind, I still had no trouble seeing the barrel of a gun pointing down at my forehead.

  I remembered when Rene Ruiz broke my nose and effectively ended my boxing career. That night I also lay flat on my back, looking up at people standing over me-Rene, and the ref running through the count. All I had to do at that point was lie still while consciousness drained away, and feel the blood pour across my face and into my mouth, the acid taste of certain defeat.

  (

  It took my ex-wife Abby's family about a dozen generations to breed all generosity and good will out of their world view. The brute selfishness of the prior iterations had at least been rewarded by the kind of wealth unbridled avarice could often produce. But by the time Abby's father was at the family helm, a precious gentility and effortless entitlement had taken hold. So assured were they in their rightful predominance, that the steady decline of their family fortunes had proceeded unnoticed.

  I saw my father-in-law at the head of the table, asking me when I thought my salary would break through to sixfigures. The question made me nauseous and dizzy. His son, glassy-eyed and grinning through a fugue of amphetamines and endless folly, said anyone who didn't modify the exhaust systems on their Beamers should have their cars confiscated and re-distributed to the more worthy.

  Abby, though outwardly disdainful of the tenor of the conversation, nestled comfortably into her eighteenth-century Hepplewhite chair and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke in my face, taunting me.

  "I know you want one," she said. "And I don't even smoke."

  This made me even sicker, so sick the pain radiated out through my arms and into my hands. I looked down and saw my knuckles on fire.

  Abby's family members were speaking all at once, male and female voices intertwining or cancelling each other out, a mini-babble gathered around the dining room table.

  "His hands are cold. You've given him a concussion," said Abby's sister, a sexless scold in short-cropped hair and sensible shoes. "Nine out of ten people with concussions are schizophrenic within the year. And that's a fact, buster."

  "Schizo, cool," said her brother.

  The scene began to fade away, but the voices continued.

  "Good," said Derrick Hammon. "Makes us even."

  "My pleasure, boss," said Jock.

  "It's pleasant to hurt people?" asked Anika.

  "I don't know," said 't Hooft. "Ask diehard there. If he ever wakes up."

  "Men are idiots," she said.

  "Here, here," said Del Rey.

  I was lying on the floor, but it didn't prevent me from feeling I was about to topple over. Another concern was my digestive tract, which was nearly in open rebellion, the ache both inside and out. I focused what little mental power I had on talking things down, quieting the internal storm.

  I heard the last neurologist who examined me say, "No more concussions. The next one could have you drooling in your Wheaties."

  "Not yet," I told him.

  "Not yet, what?" said 't Hooft.

  I opened my eyes.

  Anika was rubbing my right hand. I was in the bar, lying in the middle of the room. Del Rey stood above Anika. I lifted my head to look around, and after another wave of vertigo cleared away, saw the rest of the jolly hotel denizens sitting around under the bloodless blue light of a
bout a dozen fluorescent lanterns distributed around the bar. Christian Fey leaned against the wall, his arms folded.

  "You win," I said to Jock.

  "Usually do," he said.

  "He likes to think," said Pierre.

  "So it's official, Hammon," I said to the ceiling, unwilling to bend my neck back far enough to look at him. "You're in a criminal enterprise. Big risk."

  "Calculated risk. And well worth it. What did you do with the boy?"

  "Don't tell him," said Fey.

  I gripped Anika's busy hand.

  "You think I could get into a chair?" I asked her.

  "That's up to you."

  She pulled me to a sitting position. Some of the floor came with me, and for a moment it was in slow rotation. I held both sides of my head.

  "Fuck me," I said.

  "I've been try-ing," she whispered in my ear.

  I let another few moments go by, then with Anika's help, got to my feet and then literally fell into one of the low upholstered barroom chairs. Del Rey handed me a glass of water.

  "Here, drink. Cures all ills."

  I did as she asked, though the only ill cured was a dry mouth. I thanked her anyway. Hammon brought another chair over and the others followed suit. Anika knelt at my feet and held my hand. I didn't like it, but was too wobbly to resist. Del Rey went behind the bar and busied herself. Both 't Hooft and Hammon watched her without comment, the silence in the room drawing everyone's attention to the wind noise outside. A shutter clattered somewhere, as if to give the moment a theatrical effect.

  Hammon turned his gaze back to me. I was pleased to see black shadows beneath his eyes and a bright red line running perpendicular to his upper lip.

  "Where's the boy?"

  "Fuck you," I said.

  "Very well," said Hammon. "The negotiating positions are established."

  "You're right. Here's the deal. Let everybody go and I'll forget the whole thing happened," I said.

  "Hah," said Pierre. "Funny guy."

  I said something to him in French that roughly described an unnatural joining between himself and a particular family member. He lurched up, but once again, 't Hooft was the moderating influence, pulling him back into his chair.

  "You trying to die, Acquillo?" he asked in his Dutchinflected English.

  "I'm already dead," I said. "But who's counting?"

  "I can't believe you're talking about killing people," said Anika. "You're sick, Derrick. Greed has driven you insane. You can't spend all the money you already have. What difference does it make if N-Spock 5.0 releases on time or not?"

  Hammon's swollen eyes spat red.

  "The difference, my dark little angel, is your brother deliberately put me in this position," he said. "Clever, clever techie, he poisoned N-Spock in order to poison me. I want that antidote and I shall have it," he added with a grandiose toss of his head.

  "What a dick," said Anika.

  Hammon sat back in his chair and smiled indulgently.

  "Let me lay out the situation," he said, "just so everyone's on the same page. We have a simple transaction on the table. All your side needs to do is deliver Axel Fey, and all he has to do is deliver the patch. And that will be the end of it. N-Spock 5.0 will release as planned, it will regain dominance in the marketplace, and the Fey family will begin receiving its five percent royalties as per the buyout and stock transfer agreement."

  "You're a fucking gangster, Hammon," I said. "Don't try papering over that miserable fact with a bunch of corporate bullshit. I've heard it all and more from smarter and more evil people than you."

  The room was quiet for a moment.

  "Permission to kill this old bastard," said Pierre.

  Hammon looked like permission would soon be on the table.

  "For a guy in your position, you display a remarkably feeble sense of self-preservation," he said to me.

  A sudden brilliant flash of light burst in through the door to the lobby, and a millisecond later a clap of thunder shuddered the building.

  "Mercy," said Del Rey.

  "It's just a storm," said Hammon.

  "Not yet it isn't," I said.

  "What you suggest is preposterous," said Fey to Hammon. "I keep telling you. Axel has never even seen the core of 5.0. This is lunatic fantasy."

  Hammon whipped his head around to look at Fey.

  "We have the analytics, Christian. His signature's all over it."

  Fey threw up his hands. Pierre leaned forward in his chair.

  "You think you have proof," I said.

  "Analytics don't lie," Hammon said to me. "Once you know what you're looking for. It took security months, but they established profiles of every developer on the 5.0 team. Their coding styles, or signatures. Then they aligned signatures with known users and traced their paths in and out of the application, isolating the interloper and determining how he was getting in. When we found the back door, we waited for him to log in, then followed him home. To the Black Swan as it turned out."

  "Ridiculous," said Fey.

  "I'd think it was you, Christian, but then I'd have to believe that you're pretending to be your son."

  "If you know where the hacker's been, why can't you fix what he's done?" I asked.

  Hammon looked unhappily familiar with that question.

  "If we could do that maybe we would have done that by now," he said, stringing out the words.

  "Well, better get back on it, Hammon," I said, "because Axel's off the island and out of your reach."

  He sat silently, looking at me.

  "Get Fey and the women out of here," he said to no one in particular. "Bring them upstairs."

  Anika didn't move.

  Jock walked over to her.

  "Don't touch me," she said, but left the room behind Del Rey and her father, followed by 't Hooft.

  Hammon continued to stare at me, trying to either read my mind or torture me to death with his devastating gaze.

  "The question isn't whether Jock and Pierre can extract the information we need from you. It's when, and how much unpleasantness will be involved," he said.

  "Who're you, Sidney Greenstreet? Where's your fez? You've got the facts. Axel's off the island in a place you can't get to. So that's that. Right now you're still ahead. Except for a little dustup, which you can blame on me, you haven't done anything illegal. That's provable, anyway. You can walk away from this clean. Go back and put a case together against Axel, if he's really the hacker, and see if the courts can compel him to give you the patch. Delay release and get a little egg on your face. So what?"

  Hammon didn't seem to be listening, or if he was, unable to fully process what I was saying. He put his fingers up to his forehead as if calling on a higher power to instruct him on what next to do. It must have been forthcoming, because his change in tactic was nearly visible on his face. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees, took a deep breath and said, "There's a covenant. We have to release Q1 or we'll be in default. Revenue from 4.0 is the collateral. They'll take the company."

  As Anika made clear, people could go on the Internet and find old business articles that analyzed my fall from the heights. A favorite theme portrayed me as a technocrat with little head for business. They were right. I never cared at all about the numbers, and only dealt with financial stuff when I was trying to save my divisional budgets from the hyenas in other parts of the company. But even I found it hard to imagine Subversive would have bet the whole company on a risky venture like 5.0.

  He read that on my face.

  "It wasn't just the development costs," he said. "Other investments were made. There's an issue of liquidity."

  I chewed on that for a while. Then I thought to myself, aha. Then I laughed.

  "You bet the company's equity and it all went off a cliff. And nobody knows," I said. "It would kill the stock. You wouldn't be able to get credit from a loan shark. You're dead man walking."

  "No, mon ami, you are," said Pierre.

  "Would you m
ind muzzling that poodle?" I said to Hammon.

  Pierre shot a hand at my face, but this one I managed to dodge, which threw him off balance, causing him to fall against the wall. Jock was on his way over when Hammon stood up in front of me.

  "Cut the shit, boys. They'll be plenty of time for that," he said.

  For what? I thought.

  Pierre tried to look like it was a trifling matter, but you could see embarrassment shadowing his face. I grinned, happy it was him and not Jock who'd thrown the punch. Now I knew who in the room was invincible and who wasn't.

  Hammon sat down again, pulling his chair closer to mine.

  "I'm telling you these things because I need you to understand how serious I am. I need the boy's patch. We've already been through the computer in his room. There's nothing there, so it's all on his laptop. He can send it to Subversive from anywhere. You need to tell him to do that. He needs to know that if he doesn't, when we're done with you, we'll move on to Anika."

  It was my turn to stare at him in silence. He didn't look too good. The shot to the face had added color here and there, but also taken it away. His eyes were red and watery, and dancing with zealous intensity. Anika was right. The man had been driven a little crazy, but not for the reason she thought. Greed can feel like a jolt of cocaine to the brain. Fear more like the insertion of a long, cold knife.

  "Was everyone in on the bad deals?" I asked.

  He licked his lips, lingering for a moment on the red split beneath his nose. He shook his head.

  "No," he said. "I've told you enough."

  "Come on, Hammon," I said. "You want me to cooperate, I need to know the whole story."

  "Wait outside," he said to his boys, without taking his eyes off me. They went out to the lobby, closing the heavy glass door to the bar behind them.

  "Removing the boy from the island was a very foolish thing to do," he said to me.

  "I don't know about that. If you had your hands on him I'd probably be dead by now. You've got a way to keep the Feys quiet, but not me."