by Ted Kosmatka
“You don’t say.”
“It’s true,” Paul said. “My reflexes are catlike. I may be the best player in this state.”
“Good for you.”
“Perhaps the world.”
They sat at the lunch table, eyeing each other across their half-eaten meals. Paul had heard about Makato and Ping-Pong.
“I’ve played a little Ping-Pong in my day,” Makato mentioned.
“Really?”
“Just a little,” Makato said.
“Are you good?”
“Who, me? No, I wouldn’t say I’m good. No. Below average. Far below average.”
“Perhaps we should play.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be any competition.”
“Still, it would be fun,” Paul said.
“I wouldn’t want to bore you.”
“You won’t bore me. Maybe I could give you a few pointers.”
“It’s true I could use some instruction.”
“So you’ll play?” he asked.
Makato, who Paul knew well enough not to believe for a single nanosecond, said, “Sure.”
They met at the Omni Sports Center on Victoria Street after work the next night. The Ping-Pong tables were on the second floor. Paul wore a T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Makato arrived in a red track suit. Makato stretched before they started.
Paul knew he was in trouble from the very first serve.
They played for ninety minutes. Makato scored at will.
Paul discovered two things while he played Makato. First, that he could produce no volley that Makato could not return and, second, that Makato had the ability to make the ball dance in a way that Paul was certain defied all forms of physics other than quantum mechanics. Paul suspected the ball reverted to wave form during his various eye blinks when momentarily freed from the constraints of objective observation. In ninety minutes, Makato gave up seven points.
After Ping-Pong, they hit the steam room. Makato barely seemed to sweat. They sat on the hot wood while the steam opaqued the room around them. The steam worked its way into Paul’s skin. “You played well,” Makato told him.
“Hardly.”
“No, for an American, very good.”
After the steam room, they grabbed towels for the showers.
It was a simple thing to do. To lift Makato’s wallet.
He allowed himself to undress more slowly, and then Makato was naked, heading for the showers, and Paul opened his locker. They had the change room to themselves, so there were no witnesses to the theft. Paul pulled the wallet from Makato’s pants pocket. He noted the address on the driver’s license and then slid out the Westing security card. He put Makato’s card in his pocket and replaced it with the broken blank he’d retrieved from his drawer.
The cards were cheap plastic, and they often broke. It would not be a strange thing to open your wallet one day and find your card cracked and useless. It happened all the time. The guards would have your new card ready within an hour.
Makato would think nothing of it.
Paul closed the wallet and put it back in Makato’s pants. Then he hit the showers.
* * *
Later that night, MapQuest found the address.
Paul waited for three A.M., then drove with the windows down. The air smelled like rain.
Thankfully, there were no dogs barking in Makato’s neighborhood, and very few streetlamps.
There were several different ways this could go. Paul knew from Google Maps that Makato’s house had a garage. If his car was inside the garage, this would be difficult. If the car was parked outside, it would be easier.
Paul parked two blocks from Makato’s address. He turned his engine off. The Matrix’s headlights stayed on for a full minute. Paul waited, hating this. Car manufacturers obviously didn’t have stealth in mind when they designed their vehicles. In the old days, a criminal could turn his headlights off immediately. Heck, Paul was old enough to remember cars that you could actually drive without your headlights on. Now choice had been removed. Everything was automatic. Even the seat belts conspired against him. After a trip to the market, Paul usually had to buckle in his groceries just to get his car to stop beeping at him. Finally, the lights went off. Paul climbed out.
He moved silently up the street, walking quickly. He saw Makato’s house, and he saw Makato’s car parked in the driveway. A sensible Honda.
Paul moved through the dewy grass and pulled out his knife. He crouched against the back wheel of Makato’s car. He slid the blade between the treads and into the tough rubber—exactly where a piece of road debris might be expected to pierce the tire. It was more difficult than he’d expected. He felt the tire give, and the blade slid in.
A quick hiss of escaping air.
“Sorry, Makato,” he whispered. “I owe you a tire.”
26
The wind blew from the west. Paul slid the kayak into the water, moving a few feet offshore. He put one foot in the bottom, then crouched low and sat, kicking with his other foot. He used the paddle to leverage himself off the bank, heaving with his shoulder as mud scraped along the bottom, until silence, and just like that he was away. The Chesapeake rocked gently around him.
He paddled slowly, keeping a rhythm, easing the kayak into deeper water.
The kayak was eight feet long, light and nimble. At 235 pounds, Paul was at the upper end of its capacity.
The lights from the opposite shore made trails on the water. Paul had never kayaked at night. To do so wasn’t safe. To do so on a body of water like the Chesapeake, with its tides and freight traffic, was downright stupid.
He paddled. He put his back into it. His shoulders. Right-left-right-left-right, pushing the water behind him.
Out on the bay, the only sound was the dip of his paddles as they entered the waves. There was no way to silence them, but total silence wasn’t required for what he needed to do.
Right-left-right-left-right-left.
The lights from shore slid by. He tried to mark the distance but soon gave up. He would know the spine of land when he came to it. It would be the last jut of rock before the bay opened up into a broad curve. If he saw the lights of Baltimore on the water, he’d have gone too far.
Water dripped onto his head as he paddled—flung from the upper paddle as he brought it forward in a high, quick arc. Moving on the water required muscles Paul didn’t often use. It had been months since he’d taken the boat out for a swim. After ten minutes, his shoulders started aching. Then his back. Then the thick trapezius muscles tightened across the tops of his shoulders and up his neck. He paused, letting the kayak coast. The silence of the bay was suddenly astounding. He was thirty yards from shore in one of the most densely populated places in the country, but in that moment the solitude was complete.
He started paddling again.
Right-left-right-left.
Paddling was digging, was the forceful displacement of water.
Up ahead, the curl of rock revealed itself as blackness. Flat black against the dark shine of the water. He pulled harder with his right arm, easing gradually closer to shore.
In ten minutes he was there, the black shore looming above him now—reeds and mud and rising gravel. He sensed the water shallowing beneath him and gave a last powerful thrust, then coasted.
The boat scraped bottom, its nose easing upward onto the muddy bank. Paul climbed out and slid the paddle into the hollow of the kayak. He dragged the boat into the bushes.
He crouched, breathing hard—the enormity of what he was doing sinking in. He was here. He was really going to do this.
He stood and checked his backpack, then made his way upward away from the water. He wore dark clothes: black sweatpants and a black hooded sweatshirt.
He moved quickly up the slope, out of the reeds and brush, and there was suddenly grass under his feet. He ran. The darkness was not absolute. There was a quarter moon out, and it lit the way toward the building, across an expanse of manicured landscape.
Breaking into
an unfamiliar building was difficult. Breaking into a building you’d worked in for four years was substantially easier. Particularly if you’d made the right preparations.
He ran toward the building and didn’t stop until he was against it. He stood, breathing, listening, his back pressed against the cold steel structure. The building rose above him. There was no sound.
He made his way around to the far corner and then slid toward the lower window. He sat. He leaned forward and pressed on the window. It swung inward. A hundred-thousand-dollar security system won’t help if somebody purposely disconnects the alarm on one window.
Paul dropped his backpack through the open window. The point of no return.
“Well, this is it,” he whispered to himself. He began to lower himself through the window and into the building. It was a tight fit; he squeezed through one shoulder at a time and dropped to the floor. He was in a storage room that contained paper towels, gloves, cleaning supplies, and a sink.
Standing upright, he took the flashlight from his backpack and slung the pack over one shoulder. He moved through the darkness. Here, like no time since the hospital, he felt the loss of his vision. He stopped. He calmed himself and started walking again. Once he was out of the storage room and away from the window, he dared the flashlight. White light made a circle on the floor.
He’d done some checking, and as far as he knew there were no motion detectors inside the main hallways. If there were, then he was fucked, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He didn’t trust the elevators, so he climbed the stairs.
Buildings seemed to have a different life at night. A secret life. Things are transformed by context. Like himself. During the day, he was a researcher. A respected scientist. But here, now, he was a criminal. A man in a hood who was trespassing on private property. If he was caught, then all the years of school—all the education, and the money, and his status as a scientist—it was all over.
He thought of James. He knew it could be worse. There were worse things to lose than your career.
He pushed out of the stairwell and onto the fourth floor. At the door, he pulled out Makato’s card. The door said GENE FREQ LAB in bold block letters.
Paul glanced at his watch. It was five forty-five A.M.—earlier than Makato usually arrived, but not unheard of. Makato was often the first person to arrive at the lab. If somebody looked at the entry logs several weeks from now, this five forty-five swipe might not jump out of the data set. It might not raise interest, might not present itself as a mystery that required an answer. Makato himself, if later asked, might not remember what time he’d come in on this particular day. He might not remember which day he’d gotten a flat tire and arrived late. He might not remember which day, exactly, his card had broken.
This five forty-five swipe was the kind of thing that might, just maybe, slide under the radar. But once Paul swiped through, there’d be no going back. He would have to hurry.
Paul took a deep breath, put the card into the reader, and swiped downward. The door beeped and opened.
He rushed inside, following the dark hall around the corner and sprinting past the door to the type lab where he and Janus worked. The lab he needed now was a little farther down the hall. Paul stopped at the door. ASSAYS was written on it in black letters. Paul placed the card in the reader and swiped downward. The light turned green and the door clicked open. He stepped inside and the lights came on automatically.
The room was large. Larger than the type lab by a dozen feet, with several broad desks and a stockpile of bulky equipment lining one wall. Gone was the wet lab setup—the sinks and the glassware and the centrifuge. Here the samples being studied were data. A pure data set. This was a math lab.
One wide window faced the parking lot. On the opposite wall were maps of chromosomes—large blowups of karyotypes and complex three-dimensional graphs that he didn’t understand. There were computers and filing cabinets and a single oversized photocopy machine. In the corner sat a circular computer terminus with four big flat-screen monitors arrayed in surround to a black leather swivel chair. This was where Makato sat.
Paul stepped over to the desk and sank into the leather. He looked at the screens. It was like sitting at a drum set, everything within reach. He ran his hand along the central keyboard.
He turned on the machine and the screen flashed to life. Blue light.
After a moment, the screen prompt:
Username:
Password:
Passwords had to be changed weekly, and the last user had to pick the new word. Tradition in the lab required you to sticky note the password to the side of the monitor, so that the next user could find it. The username was always the name of the instrument.
Paul felt along the side. There. He pulled the sticky note off the monitor. He stared at it. He stared at it for a long, long time.
He typed “assay” for the username.
For the password, he keyed in what was written on the sticky note. He typed the word “Flores.”
The screen flashed, went dark, and then an input screen popped up. The system had been designed by the same people who’d designed the type lab’s system, so Paul knew what to do.
Paul took the flash drive from his pocket and uploaded the file.
The screen changed.
Run analysis?
Paul typed “Yes.”
The screen flashed again, and a white box popped up. Paul hesitated. He wasn’t sure what to type. Finally, he typed “all.” Then he hit Enter.
The computer chirped, running the cross-reference.
Outside the window, dawn was breaking. There was a sudden wash of light. The first headlights came into the parking lot. Paul was out of time.
The computer continued to chirp for several seconds, and the screen changed.
No matches. Run bootstrap comparison?
Paul hit Yes.
The machine chirped.
Security pass required.
Paul’s hands bunched into fists. Why was there another security code?
He typed “Flores” again and then hit Enter.
Password fail.
Another car pulled into the parking lot. And, with it, Paul knew, another employee, who would soon climb out of his vehicle and head up to the building. Paul imagined the men entering the building. Imagined them taking the elevator up to the fourth floor. He had two minutes, maybe three.
He typed “Flores” in again, being sure to hit every letter perfectly.
Password fail.
“Fuck,” Paul muttered.
Three failures would lock the system down, triggering a series of security protocols that would lead directly into deep shit. This was not the time to be playing the password guessing game.
He stood and reached his arm around the side of the computer, feeling for more sticky notes. There were none. He opened the desk drawer. Again nothing.
“Fuck,” he said again.
Paul hit No, then Exit, then Log off.
The machine groaned as the hard drive worked.
Paul pulled the black sweatshirt over his head and stuffed it into his backpack. Underneath he wore a white shirt and tie, his usual laboratory attire. He tugged his sweatpants down and pulled them off over his shoes, revealing gray slacks.
The computer chirped again.
Log off complete.
Paul yanked the flashdrive from the port and clicked Shut down.
The machine chirped.
Shutting down.
Three seconds passed. Five seconds. “Jesus. Seriously?” Paul glanced at the doorway. “Come on.”
Nothing was happening.
“Fuck it,” Paul said and hit the power button. Cold shutdown.
He sprinted across the room and out the door. He crossed the hall in five long strides and was at his own door, card in hand. He swiped into the type lab just as the elevator doors dinged.
Janus stepped into the hall.
27
That nig
ht, Paul walked inside his apartment building with the flash drive in his pocket.
He took the stairs up and on the third floor passed two men in the short hall leading up to his apartment. This seemed strange to him, two large men he did not recognize. Men who didn’t make eye contact as he passed. Paul turned and watched them disappear down the stairs. When they were gone, he continued to his apartment. There were only two doors at the end of the hall. There wasn’t a lot of places they could have been coming from. Paranoia, he told himself.
Still, he knocked on his neighbor’s door. The old woman, Mrs. Anderson, answered.
“Did you just get visited by two men?” he asked her.
“What two men?”
“Visitors. Did you just receive visitors?”
“I have visitors? She stuck her head out into the hall.
“No, I was asking if you’d just had visitors.”
“No, no visitors in a while.”
“Thank you,” Paul said.
The old woman eyed him suspiciously and shut her door.
He opened his apartment door and stepped inside. Nothing looked different. The same random chaos. Papers on the table. A few dishes in the sink. A cup sitting out on the counter. If they’d been inside, they’d left no evidence.
The next day, Paul arrived early to work. He nodded to the guard and took the elevator up.
He smiled when he realized that he’d beaten the secretaries in. On impulse, as he reached Charles’s empty office, Paul looked both ways, then slipped inside.
This time the room looked different.
The office had been ransacked. Gone were the stacks of papers and neatly ordered binders. The desk drawers were open, their contents gutted, scattered across the floor. Anything resembling a work in progress had been taken away. Paul stared at the whiteboard where the formulas had been. Everything had been erased.
There were so many Charles stories.
The time Paul had overheard him talking to Leonard, the two of them in the hall, arguing like an old married couple.
“Don’t you remember?” Charles asked.
“No,” Leonard said.
“You said it was slide two fifty-three.”
