Kevin nodded. “Right, that’s what I thought. Okay, talk to you soon.”
“Wait. Kevin, what – ”
“I have to go, Sean. I’ll call you back.”
He hung up and tried another number. There weren’t too many old friends he kept in touch with, but surely he had called at least one of them during the last three months. They’d be able to tell him something. Where he’d been calling from, or what he’d been doing. Something.
But he quickly proved himself wrong.
“You were working pretty hard at that job,” his high school roommate reminded him.
“It was like you were underground,” said the former tight end for the UNH football team.
“You’re right,” Kevin was forced to keep saying.
He had come to 74th street now, and he could see the entrance to the school half a block down the street on his right. Danny was already there, manning one of the doors. He was shaking hands with each student coming in, giving the boys a serious welcome. He looked, Kevin thought, like an extraordinarily kind night club bouncer who just happened to enjoy teaching English composition and reading comprehension.
Kevin waited another minute before heading down the block to join him. He had one more idea first. Not an idea he had been eager to use, but he was growing desperate. His list of outside contacts was dwindling; soon there would be no one – no one anywhere – whom he could ask to give him information about the last three months of his life. And there was something very frightening about that.
Something very isolating.
He took a deep breath and dialed the main number for Tanner and Trevor. The pickup was immediate. “Reception.”
“Could I have Robert Warner, please?”
The receptionist did not bother responding to his request. The switch-over happened instantly. And then, a half-second later: “Warner.”
Kevin waited a beat before saying anything. Then he plowed ahead. “Rob, it’s Kevin. I know you’re not happy with me, but I just need to ask if – ”
“No,” Robert Warner said, without missing a beat. He was a 42-year old self-made billionaire with three separate hedge funds under his control, a seat on the board of five Fortune-100 companies, and two houses in the Hamptons. He had an ex-wife, five children spread out over fifteen years and with three different women (one of whom had never been acknowledged in any legal document associated with the Warner estate), two bad knees, and a severe case of tennis elbow. And this despite his hatred for tennis, a game he considered a bigger bore even than golf. He was not about to waste his time, his incalculably valuable time, listening to Kevin Brooks talk about what he needed.
“I’ll tell you what I need,” Warner said sharply. “I need to ask you who the fuck you think you are. Just because you’re good with a computer doesn’t mean you can act like an asshole.”
“I know, but – ”
“Shut up.” Ten seconds in, and Warner had already built up a full head of steam. Kevin almost felt nostalgic. His old boss had always been a force of nature. “I’m the one who started the fund,” Warner went on. “I’m the one who secured all the initial investments, and that means I’m the only one who gets to act like an asshole. Who do you think signed your checks for the last eight years? Who do you think secured that insane loan you apparently needed for that ridiculous new apartment of yours?”
“What?” Kevin tried to cut in. This was exactly the kind of thing he had been hoping for. “The apartment. When did I – ?”
But Warner was not going to let himself be interrupted. “No!” he said. “First you quit, you just take off with almost no warning whatsoever, which is bad enough. But then you say you’re going to come back, you get me to back you on a jumbo loan, and then you never even fucking show up for work? Are you shitting me?”
Now Kevin was genuinely excited. This was his first glimmer of hope. “Right, sorry,” he said quickly. “But do you remember exactly when I got that apartment?”
“Oh, yes,” Warner said, his voice full of spite. “I believe it was on the day right before you fucked me. Check that date on your calendar, I’m sure you have it marked. And then go fuck yourself.”
As quickly as he had started, Robert Warner came to an abrupt halt. He decided the conversation was at its end, and he hung up.
Shit.
Kevin held the phone away from his ear and looked at it again. It had already turned itself off, as though it had a specific algorithm for detecting violent hang-ups.
If user is told to go fuck himself
Power down device
Else
Maintain device power at standby level
Kevin sighed. He knew there would be no point in calling back. At this very moment, the secretary would likely be receiving instructions never to allow Kevin access to Mr. Warner again. For all he knew, the secretary was also going over audio tapes of Kevin’s voice, so that she could screen him no matter what phone he tried to use next.
I guess Warner wasn’t the one who wrote a reference for this job.
Kevin put the phone away and headed down the block toward the school entrance. He passed two large white vans at the curb a few feet before the door, but he barely noticed them. Men in blue coveralls – painting jumpsuits – were climbing out the back of the lead van.
Danny was at his post, still shaking hands and saying good morning to the students passing through the door. He looked up and saw Kevin coming. And then something in his face changed. His smile faded by a few degrees.
“What?”
“Rough night?” Danny asked. “You look a little tired.”
Kevin puffed his cheeks out, then exhaled slowly. It gave him a minute to think of an excuse. “Stayed up too late watching television,” he said.
Close enough to the truth.
Danny didn’t seem convinced. He looked worried, and Kevin resisted the urge to try explaining himself. You could try knocking me out with a haymaker to the jaw if you want, he thought. I wouldn’t mind. Promise.
Instead he put a reassuring hand on Danny’s broad shoulder. The students were still coming, more of them now as the start of school grew nearer, and the two men stood at either side of the entrance like sentries, splitting the duty.
“How was the kid?” Danny asked, nodding and shaking hands now on autopilot.
Kevin smiled, relieved that there would be no more questions about sleep. “Which one?”
“You know. The son of the big shot. Bee-o.”
“Right, Anselm Billaud. Very smart. Definitely his father’s son. Good kid.”
“You’re in love with that dad.”
Kevin nodded helplessly. “My degree is in computer science. Pascal Billaud is the man in that field. The rumor is that he might be close to an NP solution, and it doesn’t get any bigger than that.”
Danny looked skeptical. “I’ll have to take your word on that. Why would anyone else care?”
“Everyone else does care. You care, you just don’t know it yet.”
“Keep talking.”
Kevin hesitated. The stream of students was beginning to taper off now; it was almost time to head inside. He knew he only had a few minutes before he had to start teaching.
Three minutes to explain maybe the most important concept in next generation computing, he thought. Sure, no problem.
“NP means Non-Polynomial time,” Kevin said, speaking quickly now. “But never mind that. It’s just a way of describing a type of problem that computers can’t solve.”
“And why not?”
Kevin shrugged. “Some puzzles just have too many possible outcomes. No matter how fast the computer, it would take millions of years to work out one of these things by brute force. Speed doesn’t matter. You have to be smart.”
Danny shook his head. “Example, please.”
“Let’s say you’re a Fed-Ex truck driver in Manhattan, and you’ve got ten deliveries to make today. You want to go as quickly as you can, and drive the shortest distance possibl
e.”
“Good so far.”
“Well, that’s no big task for you – just get out a map and eyeball the thing, and you can probably work out the quickest route. Maybe not the absolute best route, but something pretty close.”
Danny nodded. “Yup, I could handle that.”
“Okay, but you’re actually doing something incredibly sophisticated. From a computer’s point of view, you’re a drop-dead genius. Because with ten destinations, there are 10-factorial possible routes.”
“Which means?”
Kevin smiled. “There are over 3.5 million different possible routes to deliver those packages. And even a fast computer will have to work for a bit to go through all those possibilities.”
Danny’s mouth dropped open. “3.5 million. Son of a – ”
“Exactly,” Kevin said. “And remember that having just 10 drop-offs would be unrealistically low. A real Fed-Ex guy probably has to deal with something like 30 or 40 deliveries on a busy day.”
Danny was still nodding. “That sounds right. And how many possible routes are there for a 40-delivery day?”
“It’s a number we don’t even have a name for. It’s an 8 with 47 zeros after it.”
Danny threw his hands up. “I’m an English teacher,” he protested. “I don’t work with numbers like that.”
“Neither do I. Put it this way: if the Fed Ex guy has to make 60 deliveries, then the number of possible routes is roughly the same as the number of atoms we think are in the universe.”
Danny let out a little laugh. “All right,” he said. “That seems like a lot.”
“I agree. And the larger point is that NP problems are all like this one. The complexity goes up too fast for any computer to handle it with raw speed. Only a human can solve – or even try to solve – problems of this kind. Computers have power, but they don’t have any real intelligence. They can’t see the big picture.”
Danny was silent for a minute. “So the kid’s dad, Billaud. He might be close to solving the Fed Ex problem?”
“Not the Fed Ex one in particular, but it doesn’t matter. All the NP problems are related. If you can solve one, you can solve them all.”
“How’s he going to do it?”
Kevin shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know how close he is. But even the possibility is huge. Because if you get a computer to solve an NP problem, all bets are off. Past NP, there’s theoretically no limit to what a computer could do. And then we hit the singularity, which would be absolutely incredible.”
Danny put his head down. He was getting tired. “Are you going to explain that last bit?”
Kevin frowned. “No way. I can’t squeeze the singularity into a two-minute lesson. I need to get to class.”
Danny nodded. “Fair enough. Talk to you later.”
They let in a few last straggling students, and then they let the door close behind them. They headed up the stairs.
Out on the street, the men in the blue painting jumpsuits climbed back into their van. They seemed to have left most of their painting supplies somewhere.
In the other van, perhaps.
Blood Began To Spill
Kevin was back in the classroom, and the teaching was easy. Laughably easy. He had gone through the whole Algebra book in the middle of the night, after all; he knew where he was headed. And his recall of fundamental mathematics had certainly not been affected by whatever had happened to him over the last three months. If anything, he seemed to remember those concepts even more clearly; he felt as if he could recall entire pages from the book, pages and examples and details he had only glanced at the night before. During his second class, one of the boys asked a question about isolating a variable. Without pausing in the middle of what he was writing on the board, Kevin simply told the boy to look at example 5 at the bottom of page 22.
The boy did. And in another moment, he silently nodded his understanding.
A different student raised his hand. “How’d you know he’d ask that?”
Kevin stopped writing. “What?” He hesitated. Turned to face the class. “Oh, that’s… I’ve been teaching this subject for a long time.”
“Okay.”
He turned back to the board and kept writing. The students kept working. Kevin wondered, in a detached, background part of his mind, when the moment would come that he would simply pass out. That moment had to be coming. He had not slept a single minute in the past twenty-four hours.
But there was no drowsiness, no lack of attention span. Nothing except a dull ache in his legs from that sprint around the park loop a few hours ago. Which had nothing to do with a lack of sleep.
How am I getting away with this?
Then again, maybe he wasn’t getting away with it. Because Danny had clearly noticed something when he first saw him this morning, something in the way Kevin looked, circles under his eyes or a sag at the corners of his mouth. So maybe there was some sort of drug in his system, some kind of amphetamine or steroid or who knew what else, something that was masking his fatigue, hiding it somehow, and all the while eating him up, consuming him from the inside. The thought made him sick to his stomach.
If that’s the answer, I’ll go down hard when this stuff wears off.
If it was a drug, then there was clearly still plenty of it left. He got through his two morning classes without feeling a thing. He didn’t need to sit down; his eyelids didn’t even feel heavy. He felt as if he could teach the whole course from scratch, no notes required. Not once had he even glanced at his lesson plans.
And already it was time for lunch.
In the cafeteria, Kevin filled his plate with as much food as he could carry, beans and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and salad and bread and a little plate of yellow custard. He felt as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He saw Jean, the biology teacher, waving to him to join them at one of the faculty tables, and he was about to go sit down when he heard a rising commotion coming from the far end of the cafeteria. He and all the other teachers looked.
It was easy to see why the students were in an uproar: Connor Feeney was hard at work.
Connor had put another much younger, much smaller student in a headlock, and he was dragging the student down one of the aisles as if presenting him for a public shaming in a town meeting. Which was precisely the point. Even from across the room, Kevin could recognize Connor’s victim: it was Elias Worth, the closely-shorn fourth grader who had briefly broken down crying in the computer lab the day before.
“You okay?” Connor was shouting, holding Elias’s head with one hand while delivering repeated jabs and blows with the other. “You all right?” A quick knock on top of Elias’s head with his knuckles. “Is it time to cry?” A slap on Elias’s face. Now another. As if Elias had fainted, and Connor were a doctor trying to revive him. “Every day’s a good day for some crying, right Worth?” A jab in Elias’s ribs. “It’s okay, Worth, let it out.”
Several teachers, Kevin included, got up from their lunch and began moving quickly to intervene. Not too quickly, because rescuing Elias would probably doom him to longer and more severe beatings after school. He needed help, but the hard truth (one that no teacher would have been willing to admit) was that Elias also probably needed time to endure, time to suffer through Connor’s abuse so that he could emerge, bruised but alive, as “a kid who had been beaten up by Feeney.” Because there were lots of kids who met that description. They were a group of their own. Not a proud group, but still a group. With a sort of quiet, hard-nosed honor.
And yet as the teachers approached, several of them noticed that there was something else going on. The other students were gathered now in a tight circle around the two boys, and that crowd was starting to make noise. It was an excited, root-him-on-noise.
Because Elias was doing more than enduring.
In fact, the smaller boy was putting up a very respectable struggle, especially considering his size. Which was the reason the other students were getting so excited. Abuse at the hands of Connor Fe
eney usually inspired only silence, or perhaps small winces of sympathetic pain. If you were in the vicinity of a Feeney beating, you simply put your head down and moved on, lest you were noticed as someone who might be deserving of a beating yourself. But Elias Worth was making things interesting. He was a quiet, small-for-his-age boy with few friends, and until yesterday he had been known only as that kid with the high forehead. He showed up after each vacation with tragically short hair, making him look as if he were about to enlist in the marines. And then at the end of the day yesterday, he had become “that kid who cried in the computer lab.”
Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) Page 9
