There’s another silence, but this one is more because I’m shocked.
“He sells weapons, in the Middle East, Africa. Wherever a highly dubious government or would-be government can raise the money to buy them.” He sees my eyes go wide. “No, not like that. He works for an arms manufacturer. This is all legal. Legal, and highly profitable.” He pauses, and has another go with the salt.
“But yeah – I understand that look. Then you have pharmaceuticals – that’s my folks. And Jen. Her old man’s a defense attorney.” He shakes his head again. “No, nothing too exciting, but he represents rich folk who haven’t paid their taxes. He takes a huge chunk of their money but stops them going to jail.”
James takes a break for another swig of beer. Then he goes on.
“So. Arms. Chemicals, big pharma and law. All of us, the product of some pretty fucked up industries, and yet the four of us, we seem to have anything we want. Life is good. Only it isn’t, is it? Not really. Not if you don’t want to be a hypocrite.
“We used to go on and on about it. On ski vacations, yacht regattas. Around the pool in Lily’s folk’s place. And then one day, the opportunity came to do something about it.” He grins.
“What?”
“You pick things up, OK? Growing up like we did. People talk, say things they shouldn’t, thinking we’re just kids, spoiled kids who aren’t gonna bite the hand that feeds them. Oscar found out about a deal someone was doing, selling weapons to a country that was on the banned list. And we worked out we could stop it, just by leaking it. An anonymous email to a journalist, another to the regulator. They wouldn’t even get punished that much, they’d just – it just killed the deal. So we did it.
“That was the first. I guess we got a taste for it. We became these – I don’t know – secret crusaders. It tied us together, it made us stronger – I’m talking about Lily and me, Oscar and Jennifer – the four of us, it made us invincible. We were different from everyone else. We didn’t need anyone else.”
I’m completely silent. Listening, not really knowing what to think about all this. And now James is quiet too.
“What are you thinking, Billy?”
“I don’t know.”
He laughs. Sort of. “I guess this is hard to take in.” He half-smiles for a few seconds, then it fades and he’s left looking seriously at me.
“It didn’t happen at once. We didn’t decide to become – whatever we are. It was a gradual thing. You see Oscar was always into computers. Ever since I met him. He’s doing a computer science major now. And he’s – I don’t know, you know that Facebook was started here? At Harvard?”
I nod. Everyone knows that.
“Well he’s like one of those guys. He could invent the next Bitcoin or YouTube – probably will one of these days. But right now he’s into hacking. Big time. He breaks into the email servers of companies, searches for evidence where they’re breaking environmental rules, or where the rules need toughening… Sometimes we have to do a bit of covert operations – that’s my favorite part,” he grins. “It’s exciting. It’s nothing fully dangerous, but sometimes you have to take a risk or two.”
“What type of thing?” I hear my voice ask.
“The worst we’ve done? We broke into a guy’s apartment to get a letter from his bank. You need it sometimes to get someone’s identity, and break passwords.” He grins again. “He wasn’t there, but Oscar still had to disable the alarms, and it was a rush being in there.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask suddenly. I feel like I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to know this.
“Because you’re with Lily now. And you have to know. What binds us together. What we are.”
“Does Lily know about this?”
James grins again. “Yeah. Lily knows. That’s why everything went so fucking crazy when you came along. Suddenly it wasn’t just the five of us anymore, but six.”
I’m silent. Completely not hungry any more.
“You said five, when did Eric get involved?”
“That’s a good question. Lily was in a shared apartment in her freshman year. He was in the room across from her. He just attached himself. Inserted himself into our group, and eventually she told him about what we do. He loved it, you know what he’s like.”
I’m pretty stunned. I’ve heard of some crazy things in my time, but this is wild. Certainly not what I expected. And I try to make sense of it, try to understand James’ reason for telling me now. I think I know.
“Is this about me and Lily? The other night, you were trying to make me look bad, when we were playing Monopoly. Are you trying to get back together with her?”
James looks suddenly shocked. “Trying to make you look bad? That was just a game…. I was… Oh man, I was trying to help you.” He stops, and takes a deep breath. “I told you I started dating Lily when I was thirteen, we’ve been together ever since.” He hesitates, fixes me with his blue eyes again. “Until this month, she was the only girl I’d ever slept with.” His eyes don’t move. “Can you imagine what that’s like?” He looks away before me, reaching again for the salt cellar before finding it’s still empty.
“I promise you…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead he looks around, and sees the waitress from earlier, standing on her own a few tables away. Then he looks at me again, meaningfully. He gets up, still holding the salt cellar and, with a glance at me, walks over to her. I can’t hear what he says, but a minute later I see her laughing, and changing the salt for a full one from the counter. Then he says something else, and she gives him a long look, where she’s trying to make herself look more beautiful than she really is, then she scribbles something on her pad. She tears the sheet off and hands it to him. Then he comes back and sits down. He puts the paper on the table between us. It has a name, Clara, and a cellphone number.
“Lily is amazing, Billy. She really is. I’m always going to be a part of her life, and she’s always going to be a part of mine. But the truth is she was holding me back. And I was holding her back. I promise you. I only want the best for Lily. And if she thinks that’s you, that’s good enough for me.”
Chapter Forty-One
I’m doubtful. I mean. It could be true, what he’s saying, but it might not be. It could be a trick.
“Does Lily know you’re here? Telling me this?”
James sits back. “No. She doesn’t.”
“So if I tell her about it, is she going to confirm it all – this stuff about you working – I don’t know what you call it, undercover, like some band of vigilantes?” I watch his face carefully, to see how he takes this idea. “Or is she going to ask what I’m on about?”
“I don’t know.” James looks like he finds the idea interesting, but not concerning. “She might admit it. Or she might not.”
I wait. I don’t know what he means by that.
“We swore to keep this secret. You can understand why. It was only the four of us who knew. And I’ve never told anyone else. Not until today. Lily was the only one who ever has. When she told Eric. So I don’t know what she’ll do, if you tell her you know. ”
“OK. I will then. I’ll ask her.”
James makes a face like he’s weighing that up. “It’s your choice Billy. But…”
“But what?”
He takes a deep breath. “If it was me, I’d wait until she tells you.”
“Why?”
“Because then you’ll know she really trusts you. That this isn’t just a fling – for her. That she thinks it’s going to last.”
There’s silence between us. I open my mouth to reply, but suddenly it’s too dry.
“And – you have to consider how it’s going to look. Remember I said she’s touchy about Fonchem?”
“Yeah?” I say. It’s about all I can manage.
“So, if you go to her wanting to know all about what we do… think how that’s going to look? When she knows you’re upset about what her family firm is doing?”
“I
don’t understand.”
“Think about it Billy, what is she going to think you’re really after? Her or…”
I try to do what he says, to think about it, but I don’t know what he means.
“She’s going to think you want something done. To Fonchem. For us to do what we do, to her company. And she’s not going to take that well.”
There’s another silence at our table. I really need time to take in everything James has said. To process it. But I don’t have time.
“How do you know?”
James waits a beat, then suddenly leans forwards. “Two reasons. One, because I know Lily. Probably better than anyone else, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful here Billy, but I know her better than you. That might change, when you’ve been through enough of her moods, the highs and the lows. But not yet.”
“What’s the other reason?”
James takes a long slow breath before answering. “Two, is we made a pact. That we wouldn’t ever target our own firms. Fonchem’s off limits for what we do.”
Chapter Forty-Two
I have to take a walk after everything I’ve heard. I end up by the river, watching the swirling water rolling past below me, and in a sudden flash I miss the beach. I miss the island, where I can get away from everyone on empty sands, where the water is right beside me, not channeled into a concrete-banked river, and the path that runs alongside flanked by a four-lane highway. I have to sidestep joggers, earbuds leaking tinned music, mom’s with prams, people taking their dogs for their walks.
One the one hand, everything that James has told me is ridiculous. Why would they do what he said? Why would anyone do it? But on the other, I did some stupid things when I was younger, so why wouldn’t anyone else? And it’s definitely true there is some strange bond between them all. I guess it’s why I was interested in them in the first place. Plus they have led unusual lives – the four of them at least. They’re all rich, in a way I’ve never experienced, so maybe that does lead you to do strange things.
If James was simply lying to me, and I ask Lily about it, then he’s going to look stupid. She’ll tell me the truth, and we’ll both know he’s trying this strange trick to break us up. It’ll backfire on James, and only make me and Lily stronger. But James isn’t stupid – he’s far from it – so he’d know that. Which kind of suggests it might be true.
The other possibility is that Lily would deny it, even though it is true. Which would mean… I guess it would mean she doesn’t trust me, like James said. Or at least, she doesn’t feel safe yet confiding in me. Or she doesn’t think I’ll be around long enough to risk letting me in on the secret. I don’t like the thought of that at all.
OK, how about if she does admit it. What then? I walk on, sidestepping a fat man jogging, with his headphone cables bouncing up and down. To lose the image, I look at the river, a goods barge coming down it now, the water dark in the dying afternoon light. An image hits my mind, unbidden – it’s me, under the water, that sunny summer afternoon, in the north of Lornea Island, when Dad and me were waiting to sneak through the restricted zone, by Lily’s family’s chemical plant. When I spent the whole afternoon in the warm water, diving amid the golden sands, the water pure and clear like liquid glass, all the way down to the seagrass beds below, with the pipefish and sea horses, and the Lornea Island sea-dragons.
If she does admit it – I drag myself back to reality. I don’t know, it’s all too confusing. But then another thought forms. Something I wished I’d thought to ask James earlier. Are they still doing it? What they do. Is Lily secretly doing all this stuff with James and Oscar and Jennifer and Eric, behind my back? The whole time I’ve known them?
Before I get anywhere near making sense of it, I get a call from Lily. She’s just back from her classes and she’s obviously in a good mood. And I know she’s going to suggest I come round to her house, or maybe even that we go out somewhere, but before she does she starts telling me about a funny thing that happened in her lecture. It wasn’t that funny, it was something about how the lecturer broke the projector. But when she’s finished I can’t bring myself to laugh, and I guess she picks up that I’m not in a good mood. But instead of asking what’s wrong with me, she gets uptight, and suddenly the conversation is going about as badly as it can. And then even though I knew she was going to invite me round, suddenly she doesn’t. She tells me she’s going to hang up now, and I know I should say something, to stop her, to undo this moment that doesn’t define what we have, but I don’t have the words to do it. I stay silent. She tells me again she’s going to hang up, and she sounds distant and upset, but I just let her go. And the feeling it leaves me with, it’s like actual pain. It’s like my stomach has been punched.
Chapter Forty-Three
I decide not to ask Lily anything about it in the end. James is right, if she told Eric, then eventually she should tell me, and I need to give her the chance to do so. In the meantime, it sort of goes back to how it was before. We meet, in the downstairs coffee shop with the comfy couches. We go to play pool, we have dinner at Lily’s house.
But then I get an odd text from James. He invites me to his dorm room. It’s odd, because I haven’t been there before, in fact I’d never even thought about where he lives. But I say yes, because I suppose this is just his way of us getting to know each other better. And then he sends a second text, asking me not to say anything to Lily or Eric. Which seems even weirder.
He lives in a kind of shared set of dorm rooms. It’s sort of similar to where I live, only it’s a lot nicer. Instead of only having one room to himself, like I’ve got, he has a set of rooms – there’s a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom – so it’s more like a proper apartment. When I get there, Oscar is cooking in the kitchen. He gives me a fist bump to say hi, then tells me to grab a beer from the refrigerator, and goes back to a recipe he’s following.
“What is that?” I ask, looking at what he’s making.
“Pot roast.”
“No, not that, that.” I point at what he’s cooking it in. A massive saucepan, but different somehow too.
He turns around, looking confused. “Oh. That. It’s a pressure cooker. My mom uses them a lot. It’s the only way I know how to cook.” He watches me a moment, then goes back to chopping up carrots.
We talk about nothing much for a while, then James asks me to lay the table for him, which I do, but a bit confused, since I still don’t really know why I’m here, nor why it had to be a secret. It is true I’ve been getting on better with James and Oscar recently, but I’m still closer to Eric, and to Lily of course.
I finish with the plates and cutlery, and then Oscar gives me a shout and asks me to bring his pressure cooker in. So I do. I go to pick it up with the cloth so it doesn’t burn my hands but he stops me, saying he’s already let it cool.
“I need the cloth,” he tells me, when I look confused. He takes it from me and uses it to open the oven door. I shrug, and do what he asks, carrying it through and putting it on the table. I think how it’s probably good Lily isn’t here, she makes the table look much nicer than this.
“What’s this all about?” I ask, when – a few minutes later – the three of us are sitting down and eating Oscar’s pot roast. It tastes OK, but nothing amazing.
“I love Billy’s directness, don’t you?” James says to Oscar, who gives a bit of a laugh.
“Billy, you remember you asked me if we’re still – operating?”
I nod.
“And I said we might be. Well, we just might be.”
I wait for him to go on, and he does, but on another tack.
“Did Lily ever get back to you about those dead sea horses, by the Fonchem site on Lornea Island?”
I look from one to the other. “No.”
“Do you think she even told her dad?” James’ eyes are level on mine.
“I…” I shrug. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Do you even care?”
“What? Of course I
care.”
Neither of them speak. But then James nods his head. “Good. Good. Because Oscar’s come up with something.” He turns to Oscar, who puts down his fork.
“There’s a public meeting on Lornea Island next month, where they’ll decide whether to grant the extension of the Fonchem site. It’ll go through, it’s guaranteed to, because Fonchem has spent a ton of money on the idea that it’ll create much needed jobs, and there’s no risk. It’s how they operate – not just Fonchem, every firm like it. Except…” He glances at James. “Except, there’s your campaign, about the sea horses.” Oscar stops.
“No one’s paying any attention to my campaign, in fact I haven’t even paid it…”
“But that’s because you have no evidence.” James cuts me off.
I don’t reply.
“I told Oscar about those photographs you showed me, and he did a little digging into the Fonchem mail servers. He found…” James stops. “Actually Oscar, could you explain this? I’ve never understood what it is you do.”
Oscar’s eyes narrow in the way they do when he smiles.
“OK. This is complicated. But I’ll do my best. They run a virtual box with a Kali Linux instance, and when you boot it with the mail server ISO you can see that...”
“Woah there!” James interrupts again. “This is gonna be easier if you use plain English. So that Billy can understand?” James shoots an apologetic smile in my direction. But I just watch him a second then turn back to Oscar.
“Where do you get the server ISO?”
Oscar’s eyes widen slightly. Just for a second. He glances at James, then turns back to me.
“I queried it from DNS records.”
“What? They had them open?”
Oscar hesitates, he seems to be thinking hard. Finally he goes on. “Yeah. That’s the point. It was all open, which is why I figured they must be using a third party app, with end-to-end encryption.”
The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4) Page 21
