Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  "Maybe not if you care about the girl. She'd certainly rather her father not end up in jail."

  I saw the rough flow scheme I'd drawn that night in the woods on the way to snatch Axel Fey. The columns of knowns, and unknowns. I drew another box in my head, and connected it to the others with an imaginary arrow.

  "Fey made the bets," I said. "On his own, secretly, without approval. He had access to the funds through the corporate data systems, which he controlled. The money's tied up in investments that have lost all their value, but are still on the books, because neither the investment house nor the investors can afford the write down. The money's gone, but no one knows it, not yet, anyway."

  It took Hammon a while to respond, so accustomed was he to never uttering the fearsome truth.

  "Sanderfreud discovered the scheme. Fey would sweep all our available cash and working capital out of their normal accounts and put the money into auctions and overnights. Then he'd sweep it all back again, taking the earnings and covering the movement by altering the account records. One night, for some insane reason, he put everything in a fund that was already in free fall, though apparently he didn't know that. The next day it froze up completely and hasn't thawed since. Such a thing had never happened before, but we now know such things are more than possible, they're inevitable."

  The dominoes were all in place. If N-Spock didn't release when it was supposed to, the bank would call their loan, which they couldn't cover because all their assets were tied up in a worthless, illiquid fund.

  Then another thought occurred to me.

  "How did you buy out Fey? With what?" I asked.

  Hammon finally had something to feel happy about.

  "We didn't. We just said we did. Besides getting him to cough up the returns he made on our money, we have his name on a piece of paper releasing all his holdings back to the company, and a non-compete that banishes him from all software development for ten years. He won't starve, but any current or future equity he might have had in Subversive has gone poof. And rightly so, you'll have to agree."

  I did, on the face of it.

  "Okay, you've got Fey, though on the other hand, he's got you. He'll go to jail, but with the truth out, Subversive could still go down the tubes, release or no release."

  "No," he said, before my words were hardly out of my mouth. "5.0 is a game changer. The banks will line up to cover our capital needs. The stock will soar, easily replenishing our cash reserves."

  He may or may not have been right about that, but what mattered was he believed he was. Like all entrepreneurs, his focus was on the goal, and his powers of self-delusion were all-consuming. Like Fey, he wasn't afraid to place his bets and pretend there could never be a negative outcome.

  "You think I'll go along with all this to save Fey because of his daughter," I said.

  "That's your play, Acquillo. Any idiot can see you're banging her. There's no other reason for you to still be here. So here's your chance. Axel will do anything she tells him to, and she doesn't want her daddy to go down. That's the deal. Make it happen, or I'll stop trying to make this easy and just turn everything over to Jock and Pierre."

  I let that sit for a moment, deliberating. Then I said, "I can't contact him until we're back online. I need a phone or at least Internet access."

  Immediately his face lightened, a hint of triumph passing through those hungry eyes.

  "Wise decision," he said, moving his chair back out of my immediate space. I took the opportunity to attempt standing, which went far better than I thought it would. Even the floor seemed inclined to stay put.

  "Mind if I get a drink?" I asked. "They say it's the best thing for a concussion."

  "Knock yourself out," said Hammon, enjoying what he thought might have been a joke.

  I hobbled over to the bar while Hammon asked Jock and Pierre to come back into the room. Pierre glowered at me, my efforts to build on our common Gallic heritage apparently gone for naught. Jock, on the other hand, looked loose and at ease, almost bored. I asked if I could pour a drink for anyone and Jock said a beer would be great.

  "While it's still halfway cold."

  It was early even for me, but I had to start moving around to assess the damage and test my own faculties. I poured a long vodka on a handful of ice from the rapidly melting ice bins.

  I cracked Jock's beer and he came over to retrieve it. We clinked glasses.

  "Jesus Christ," said Pierre.

  I downed some of the vodka, which had a salubrious effect on my nerves, but did little for my shaky insides. I asked Hammon if I could go lie down. He said why not, and told Jock to bring me upstairs and put me with Anika in her attic room.

  He followed me to the second floor, then let me climb the narrow staircase to the attic on my own, closing the door behind me with an easy warning not to try anything stupid. When I reached the attic, Anika rushed over to me and grabbed my head, using her thumb to pull open my eyelid. She stared into my pupil.

  "Do you know what you're looking for?" I asked.

  "I want to see if you're still in there." I clinked the ice in my glass of vodka. "I guess you are," she said, looking down at the glass.

  I pulled free from her grasp and sat down on the bed next to Eloise. The cat got up and moved a few feet away, looking at me with unguarded apprehension.

  "I'm okay," I said to Anika. "Just a little wobbly. That kid can hit."

  "Derrick has really lost his mind," she said. "I'm getting frightened. I don't know what to do."

  She wore her Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, shorts and bare feet. With only two windows at opposite ends of the room to let in natural light, supplemented by a pair of electric lanterns, the attic felt cheerless and exhausted. She scooped up Eloise and sat down next to me on the bed, her legs straight out in front so her heels dangled over the edge. The cat looked wary, but eventually succumbed to Anika's gentle stroking and curled up in her lap.

  "You could start by telling me the truth once in a while. Just for a change of pace. See how it feels."

  "What a terrible thing for you to say to me," she said, less forcefully than her words would indicate.

  "If a man acts as if everything a woman tells him is true, even though he knows it isn't, mostly, does that still make him a chump?" I asked.

  "I don't like the word chump. Sounds passive, but it's really aggressive."

  "Hammon told me Subversive lost a lot of money on bad investments. The only way to get working capital was to put N-Spock 4.0 up for collateral, with the loan callable if 5.0 doesn't release when it's supposed to next year. Did you know that?"

  She looked into my eyes again, in a clinical way.

  "I guess your brain is still working all right," she said. "You must have a very hard head."

  "In a manner of speaking. So tell me."

  She leaned forward, gripping her legs at the knees, and spoke at the floor.

  "Do you believe everyone has a secret life?" she asked.

  "No. Most people don't."

  "Right. The ones who do are always the least likely. 'I can't believe it, he was such a quiet unassuming guy,' they say. Like, duh. When is conventional wisdom going to catch up with reality? It's always the quiet unassuming guys who go on shooting rampages. Or steal millions of dollars from their companies."

  "Your father. I know all about it. Hammon told me."

  She smiled an intense, manufactured smile. A dark frown would have been less disturbing.

  "So you know 5.0 wasn't the only thing he was working on in our basement."

  I almost felt a faint twinge of feeling for Derrick Hammon. He wakes up one morning to discover his billion-dollar company is broke, and though it's still a going concern, revealing its fragile condition could easily cause the whole thing to unravel. His only way out is a project controlled by the very guy responsible for the financial disaster, a project that should have successfully ridden to completion, but is now very much in doubt.

  "But why would your brother want to sa
botage 5.0? Why bring on the wrath of Derrick Hammon? What's in it for him and why did he think he'd get away with it?"

  She leaned back against the wall again and started raking her fingers through her jet black hair, pausing occasionally to check the ends, as I'd seen her do several times before.

  "He's weird. I don't know why he does what he does."

  "He told me your mother is still alive."

  She dropped the strand of hair and turned toward me.

  "He did? The dork. Okay, she's alive, but not to us. She left right after Axel was born and never looked back. I don't think my father noticed right away. 'Oh Daddy, Mommy's gone.' 'Don't you see Daddy's busy? Be a good little girl and bring me a sandwich.' It was easier to pretend she actually died. What difference does it make to you?"

  I'd been trying to ignore it, but the sound of the wind outside was gradually increasing along with its velocity. I got up and went over to the window. The trees were swirling in bursts of furious movement, steadily giving up the last of their autumn leaves. It was barely midday, but the cloud cover enshrouded the island in a dank and bloodless gloom.

  Instead of sitting back on the bed, I rolled the office chair over from the workstation.

  "What did you do with my backpack?" I asked.

  She looked puzzled.

  "It must still be in the car," she said. I probably looked disappointed. "It isn't?"

  "I saw you open the passenger side door while I was getting my ass kicked. Jock was doing the kicking and 't Hooft was enjoying the show. You had plenty of cover."

  She looked away with what might have been a pout, it was hard to see in the dim light and through that veil of black hair.

  "It's in the bushes along the front of the house. Near the corner," she said. "You should be thanking me."

  "I should be doing something. I'm not sure what."

  "I know what you should be doing, but you keep turning me down."

  I finished off my drink and discovered what I most wanted to do was lie down on the floor and go to sleep. Though a murmur of fear still cycled through a remote region of my nervous system, it wasn't enough to counter an aching exhaustion that pulled on my limbs and jammed up my brain. I slid off the chair and sprawled out across the Persian rug that covered the attic floor. I asked Anika if I could borrow a pillow.

  "Kick me in about two hours," I said.

  "What happens then?" she asked.

  Eloise jumped down off the bed and walked up to my face, brushed my cheek with her whiskered muzzle, then strolled away. I wondered what she thought of my odds. I knew what the neurologist would say. Not good. He'd shown me an fMRI of my brain, which was a beautifully colorful thing, though not to him. He'd point out all sorts of blotches and patterns in shades he didn't like. I'd barely try to follow what he was saying. It wasn't worth it, since there wasn't anything I could do about it. Instead, I'd just looked at how pretty my brain looked all lit up like a psychedelic Rorschach test, or one of my daughter's art projects.

  What did Axel call Anika, the artist? Color head.

  I pushed off the bottom of my consciousness and swam back to the surface. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at Anika, still sitting on the bed, playing with her hair and bouncing her feet on the edge of the mattress. I willed my recalcitrant limbs to put me back on my feet and walk me into the center of the room where I could get a good look at her painting.

  "What happens if the roof blows off?" I asked her.

  "It'll be ruined."

  "That'd be a pity."

  "I took photos," she said, pulling a flash drive strung on a slim cord around her neck out from under her sweatshirt. "The re-creation would take a while, but nothing would be lost."

  "Color corrected?" I asked.

  "Perfectly," she said. "Why wouldn't I? It's a painting."

  "Of course it is."

  I got my two hours of sleep, and an hour after that, since Anika failed to wake me when I asked her to. Since I'd not suffered a brain hemorrhage while sleeping, and did actually wake up, it was easy to forgive the lapse.

  Waking up was one thing. Getting up was another. There might have been a part of me not tender to the touch, or not stiff as the tin man after a night in the rain, but it would have been lonely. I knew from those years in the ring that if you could move any body part without passing out from pain, it wasn't broken, and if it wasn't broken, then moving was simply a matter of will and existential resolve.

  I swore a little on the way to my feet, but I got there. Anika steadied me and rubbed my shoulders. She had strong hands, stronger than Amanda's, though geared more toward function than caress. I thanked her anyway.

  By this time it was dark outside and the wind was howling like a medieval chorus on a tour from hell. The frame of the Swan was tensioned under the load and I could hear the vertical members and sheathing creak and groan with lateral stresses, and feel the structural tie-ins straining to fulfill their purpose.

  I told Anika it was time to leave the attic with anything whose survival she hoped to ensure.

  "Like your cat," I said. "Too late for the painting. How about the hard drive on your computer?"

  She got Eloise into the cat carrier, gathered up a handful of clothes, and after employing a few deft maneuvers with my Swiss Army knife, removed the hard drive from the CPU. Thus burdened, we descended the stairs and opened the attic door, nearly bashing into Jock, who was standing in the hallway talking to Christian Fey and Del Rey. He told us he was ordered to keep us in the attic, but was moved by the argument that the order should be contingent on the roof staying put. He went downstairs to check with Hammon.

  Anika told her father we were taking over one of the rooms, then left to drop off her stuff. I asked Fey about his insurance.

  "Adequate, but you don't honestly think it will come to that, do you?" he asked.

  "Maybe. Probably not. Do you have any plywood? It's a little late to board up windows, but we might need some in case of a breach."

  "A breach? I have ply in the shed. Maybe two four-byeight sheets. And a battery-powered drill and some screws."

  "By the way, you two, you're scaring me," said Del Rey, holding a cocktail with a healthy charge of ice, something I took note of.

  "Do you have a handheld VHF radio?" I asked him. Mine was in my backpack, safely stowed under the bushes in front of the house. I hoped.

  "I do."

  He went down to the first floor to retrieve it. I was left alone in the dark hallway with Del Rey, who looked unsettled by the sudden intimacy.

  "What happened with Sanderfreud and the Fey kids?" I asked. "You tried to tell me before, but I wasn't listening. I am now."

  "I don't know. They had a falling out. Nobody would talk about it."

  "We only have a couple minutes."

  "It doesn't matter," she said, her tongue thickened by drink. "I looked after them when they needed me. Not that anybody cares."

  "Hammon's headed over a cliff. Don't let him take you with him."

  "What do you know about it?" she asked, her chin up and her eyelids at half-mast. "You don't get to pick the people you end up with. Fate picks them for you. I could have done more at the company if they'd let me," she added, in a neckwrenching right turn. "I was one of the original N-Spock developers, I'll have you know. Smartest damn chicky in the building. Only it's hard to join the boy's club when you're not a boy. I was good, though. You'd be a-mazed."

  She fell into me, stopping herself with a thin hand that clutched at my shirtsleeve. I supported her while she reestablished equilibrium.

  "Sorry," she said. "Tee many martoonies."

  Fey arrived with a handheld VHF, a modern, lightweight, waterproof model, fresh out of the catalog. I took it and went into the bathroom and tuned in the clearest NOAA weather channel I could get.

  The news wasn't good. The storm, defying all predictions, had made a sudden eastward jog, putting all of the New England coast and parts of Long Island in the path of sixty to eighty kn
ot winds. Up to a hundred, if you counted the gusts. They predicted with confidence both the velocity and wind direction based on the highly organized nature of the storm.

  I checked my watch and took note.

  When I got back to the hall, Anika was there with Jock, Fey and Del Rey.

  I think we should keep heading toward the lower levels," I told them. "Just to be on the safe side."

  "I don't believe anything's safe," said Del Rey. "But lead on, MacDuff."

  The storm did me a favor by picking that moment to slam a gust into the side of the hotel, causing a tremor everyone felt from the feet up. Without comment, Jock herded us down the stairs.

  't Hooft was there to greet us. He helped Del Rey negotiate the final steps, then led us all to the restaurant area at the back of the hotel. The French doors that comprised the outside wall facing the docks shuddered in the wind, though precautions had been taken: the doors were latched and tied off at the doorknobs with clothesline and wedged shut with the dining room chairs. There was still plenty of seating for everyone, some of which was occupied by Hammon and his crew. They were drinking and eating cheese and sliced meats off a large tray. Pierre held a lit cigarette between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. As the smoke found my nostrils, envy caught at my heart.

  I went behind the service bar and found the fixings for a vodka on the rocks, netting a handful of ice from the slosh at the bottom of the ice chest. Then I sat down, staying a healthy distance from Jock and Pierre, just outside earshot and the swing of an ambitious fist.

  Anika joined me, banging a chair up to mine into which she dropped like a sack of sand. A tiny splash of wine from the glass she held dropped on my thigh, creating a cool spot as it rapidly evaporated. She put her lips conspicuously and uncomfortably close to my ear.

  "What's your plan with the backpack?" she asked.

  "Lean back and act like we're talking about the World Series," I whispered, hoping my irritation showed.

  She did as I asked.

  "Okay, Mr. Paranoid, what do you have in mind?"