Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  “I’m coming with you. You’re going to meet him, aren’t you? You’re going to confront your father in Las Vegas.”

  She shook her head. “We can’t risk it. You’ve got to stay here.”

  I studied her face.

  “Look what he did to me. To us. I have a stake in this too.”

  “I know how you think, Nat. More than you can imagine. I know what I mean to you. What we mean to you. I understand you want to protect me. But he is not going to hurt me.”

  Annie put her arms around my waist.

  “Take your hands off of me,” I said, surprising myself.

  “Wait here for me.”

  Her lips touched my cheek. The way they had on our very first date. When we’d been at the Mexican restaurant and I’d told Annie my life story, she’d leaned over to me, kissed me, and said, “I’ve been looking for you.” I’d turned gummy bear.

  Annie pulled her arm away from me. She opened the door. I took a step forward, like I might follow, until I saw who greeted us both on the door’s other side.

  Erin.

  Blindfolded and bound.

  I looked at her mutely. “Thank God,” I finally said.

  “Nat?”

  She turned in my direction. So did Annie. The emotion in my voice probably caught them both off guard. Not Cynthia. She stood behind Erin, looking perfectly calm. I turned to Annie.

  “I’m going with you. I’m not letting you go again.” In response to my comment, Annie looked at Cynthia and shook her head.

  “Too dangerous. It’s for your safety,” Annie said, then cocked her head at Erin. “It’s for her safety. It’s for my safety. I don’t know who I can trust.”

  Cynthia nodded. She held a gun. It wasn’t necessarily pointed at Erin, nor was it necessarily pointed away. Annie stepped past them, toward the van. Cynthia walked forward, prodding Erin inside the condo.

  “I’m going with Annie,” I said.

  The blonde angel squinted at me.

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” I said to her.

  Annie said, “Please, Nathaniel. No.”

  I took another step forward. Nothing was going to stop me. Nothing, that is, until I heard a protest from an unexpected place.

  “Nathaniel. Please don’t leave me here,” Erin said.

  52

  I couldn’t believe I was watching Annie Kindle walk out of my life. But watch I did, or more like listen. I closed my eyes and heard her close the front door, and open a car door. The engine turned over, caught, and roared to life.

  The sounds were palpable. Her thin fingers gripping the steering wheel, turning it to toward Las Vegas. Only they weren’t her fingers. When I opened my eyes, I saw Erin had taken my hand. She was gently rubbing the skin between my thumb and forefinger.

  Blindfolded, she had found me. I lifted the cover from her eyes. She blinked. She looked tired and unkempt, and had a bruise around her eye. She took in the room.

  “I’m okay,” I said without conviction. “You?”

  She stopping rubbing my hand and squeezed.

  “I guess that was Annie.”

  Erin’s legs were tied together by a sturdy piece of nylon, the lines cutting into her Levi’s, as though she’d tried to wriggle free. She could walk, but it was more in the form of a shuffle.

  Her left eye was black and puffy around the edges, but not swollen shut. The other was red, bloodshot from exhaustion or tears. She gently touched the eye where she’d been struck, pushing in spongy flesh. She winced.

  Cynthia studied us in silence and then scanned the open area—from the doorway leading to the bathroom and bedrooms, to the dining room, kitchen, then back past Erin and me, to the couches and chairs, coffee table, and then fireplace.

  “Sit,” she said.

  She pushed Erin in the back with the nose of her gun. Erin stiffened and Cynthia pushed harder. Cynthia was capable of terrible violence, but against me—someone she’d killed to protect? If so, there was no way I was going to overpower her and her pistol, certainly not in sufficient enough time to spring both Erin and me. I felt a wellspring of violence inside of me, fight-or-flight, heightened by my twisted new set of neurochemicals. Cynthia probably wouldn’t listen to reason. Maybe she could be charmed.

  “Hey, who’s up for some blackjack? We can be in Vegas in a couple of hours. The prime rib is on me.”

  “She’ll be back soon,” Cynthia said. “Until then, we stay put. End of discussion.”

  Erin shuffled across the living room to take a seat. I scanned for a phone. Even if I didn’t have time to say anything, 911 would get the distress signal and show up. But then what? Would I lose my chance to catch Annie—forever? Besides, there was no phone visible. I walked into the kitchen.

  For a moment, I saw myself from the outside. Poor by choice, unlucky in love, crappy at picking out matching outfits, an occasional athlete, sappy about the cat, prone to making choices that disappointed, if not baffled, my family. And I’d never once blown up a bridge. Nothing said action hero. I just desperately wanted to be possessed by one.

  “Glass of water,” I said, opening a cupboard. “Do you go by henchperson?”

  Cynthia didn’t respond.

  “As opposed to henchman. I’m just wondering if your job title is gender specific.”

  I turned on the water. I glanced around the counter, unsure what I was looking for. A knife?

  “Did you kill those two policemen?” I said. “Water, Erin?”

  “Please.”

  “I owe you my life.”

  She didn’t engage. I asked her why she’d taken my picture outside the café. No answer. I opened up the cupboard to get another glass, and saw a glint. Strawberry air freshener in a spray can. I kept the cupboard open, blocking Cynthia’s view. I took out and set down the glass and the aerosol can, now blocked from Cynthia by the countertop.

  “You want ice?”

  “Where did you put the bodies?” I asked, filling up Erin’s glass with water and setting it on the counter. I walked to the refrigerator and pushed the ice dispenser. I scanned the counter to its right. Two cookbooks, salt and pepper shakers, and something shiny—reflecting light from the sun. A green lighter.

  “I can’t see how you carried Velarde. He was huge.”

  “You must be really annoying as a journalist.”

  I laughed.

  “My leg is cut,” Erin said.

  I snagged the lighter.

  “I’ll have a look at it,” I said. “Lie down and pull up your pant leg.”

  “Give me a break.” Cynthia stirred.

  “I spent four years in medical school,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’m still qualified to give people the once-over and then overcharge them.”

  Cynthia eyed Erin as she lay down. I opened the top two buttons on my jeans, shoving the freshener inside, and pulled my shirt over the top.

  I set the waters down on a tray and carried them into the living room, trying to block the view of the freshener stuffed in my pants.

  I set the tray down and sat next to Erin, leaning in close. She looked at me like my brain was still scrambled. I caught her gaze. I squinted and clenched my jaw. Silent Morse code.

  I prodded at the raw skin where rope and jeans had rubbed against skin. The jeans had been worn through. The skin was irritated but fine.

  “You’ve got to get her to a real doctor.”

  “Soon enough,” Cynthia said.

  “It’s infected and serious. You can’t mess around with something like this.”

  Cynthia walked warily toward us with her gun in her hand. She raised it and got within a foot, leaning over Erin.

  “Put it down, angel.”

  “Who?” She looked up.

  She was staring down a barrel of my jerry-rigged weapon. An air freshener one inch behind the flame from a lighter.

  “Put down the gun,” I said. “Please. Be reasonable. You know I have no choice but to go.”

  And suddenly, Cynthia
laughed. “Give me a break.”

  I pulled the trigger on the aerosol can. A stream of fire erupted. But Cynthia easily moved her head aside to avoid getting hit and, in virtually the same motion, swung the gun, sending a spray of fire toward the head of the couch, and then causing the whole contraption to fly from my hand.

  I said, “So much for action hero.”

  It took us all a second to realize my contraption hadn’t been totally ineffective. A pillow on the couch had ignited. Erin scrambled away from it. Cynthia sighed and we stood staring at the surreal outcome. Until I saw a flash of metal from the side. Erin hoisted the pot that Annie had used to clean my wounds and slammed it into the side of Cynthia’s head.

  Stunned, our captor wobbled and turned to Erin and raised her gun, and I dove. I tackled Cynthia to the ground as she pressed the trigger, spitting off three wild shots. With one hand, she covered her head to avoid another blow from Erin, with the other, she tried to hold on to the gun I was wresting from her grasp. Moments later, the angel was subdued.

  With the rope from Erin’s legs, we tied Cynthia’s hands behind her back. We gave her an ice pack. I finally located the phone, dialed 911, and left the phone off the hook.

  53

  She’s going to be okay,” I rationalized. “Maybe a concussion, maybe not. A decent amount of pain.”

  We were on the main drag—heading to the highway and Las Vegas.

  “Bullshit. We don’t need any excuse. Everyone has limits and boundaries. We’re allowed to protect ourselves, and the people we care about. She could have . . . We could have died there.”

  In the past two days, I’d had fisticuffs in a corporate law firm and set a woman on fire. I hoped Erin was right: Survival instinct had driven my attacks. But another part of me suspected something else was at work. Had my brain chemicals gotten so fried that I’d been inspired to bloodlust? And the adrenaline-drenched belief I could successfully mount an attack?

  Then I smiled, thinking about our fight with Cynthia, and Erin delivering the critical blow.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “When you hit Cynthia just then—was that something you learned in your dance troupe? That’s what I call a socially responsible karate chop.”

  On the way out of town, I pulled into a 7-Eleven. I paid cash for a mobile-phone-in-a-box and a prepaid calling plan. I called Bullseye, who answered after four rings. I could hear the bells and whistles of a casino in the background. He put Mike on the phone.

  “The laptop is on the move. I need to know where it’s going.”

  I hung up and asked Erin to fill me in on her previous twenty-four hours.

  She said she was waiting for me to get acupuncture when two cops showed up. She wasn’t sure whether to panic or if they were there to arrest her. One immediately grabbed her—the tall, stocky one with dark skin. Velarde. She pulled away and tried to run.

  “He used the nightstick. I watched it coming. I froze. I couldn’t move out of the way,” she said. “I woke up on the floor of the entryway.”

  She said she came to with her hands tied. Cynthia was there. She told Erin she’d help her and gave her a sedative. When Erin woke up again, she was traveling in a van, tied up and hot.

  Physically, she would be okay, but she needed a doctor. Though she wasn’t lethargic or slurring her speech, I had some concern she’d suffered a concussion, and her leg needed attention. Probably just a good clean, a tetanus booster, and some antibiotics, but it would have to be checked out.

  “I’m sorry, Erin.”

  The speedometer hit 90. Erin put her hand on my side—over my bandage.

  “What was it like?”

  “Getting smacked by a paperweight?”

  “You were hit?”

  I nodded.

  “I meant: What was it like seeing Annie?”

  I didn’t say anything at first. I blinked back a tear.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “I don’t see you two together,” she said quietly. “What am I missing here?”

  It sounded rhetorical.

  “So what happened to you?”

  I rubbed my bandage with my palm. “Sort of the same thing that happened to Andy.”

  I told her about Weller, Velarde, and the acupuncture needles, my saving by Cynthia, and the run-in with Dave Elliott. I told her about Bullseye and Mike’s assignment, which included putting a Global Positioning System on Andy’s laptop. I told her my theory that the computer was so interesting to everyone because it had been loaded with an experimental program, a program that might be very dangerous.

  “No, Nathaniel. No. It’s not possible. Please tell me they didn’t kill Andy that way. Please tell me there was some reason.”

  Twenty miles outside Las Vegas, I called Bullseye and Mike.

  “Bellagio,” Mike said. “You’ll be in good company.”

  “Glenn Kindle’s there?”

  “Andre Latzke and Helen Douglass are in the lobby.”

  The respective chief executives of Advanced Chip Devices and Sackerd Printer Corp., two of the world’s biggest technology companies.

  “Can you watch where they go?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What brings such royalty to this amusement park?”

  Five minutes later, I had a partial answer to Mike’s question. We were just outside of town when I saw a billboard. “Telecommunications Industry Association—July 20 to 25. Sands Convention Center. Get Connected!”

  But it didn’t explain the coincidence of their presence at the Bellagio.

  The phone rang. Mike said he and Bullseye were inside the hotel—on the fifteenth floor.

  “Your friends are inside room 1544.”

  Moments later, I was on the Strip. I parked in the Bellagio complex, and found Bullseye and Mike playing sudoku in the lobby.

  “What’s the plan?” Bullseye asked, without looking up.

  “Fifteen fourty-four. Guerrilla style. That’s how I get answers.”

  And Annie.

  I asked Bullseye to take Erin to see if there was a medical center on the premises. I told Erin not to use her name and to say she’d lost her wallet. I doubted the cops would have been looking for her here, but who knew.

  “What if . . . ” she said, swallowing her thought. “Anger is dangerous. Be careful.”

  My anger. Their anger? Hers? Erin put her hand on my arm, almost as if to slow me down. I took a pen from Mike and wrote down the name and location of the houseboat I’d found in Annie’s suitcase. The Monkey, in Callville Bay Marina. I folded it in half and tucked it into Erin’s hand. I leaned in close to her and tried not to sound too dramatic.

  “If something bad happens, check out this boat,” I said.

  She winced.

  “Mike, can you continue to track the laptop?”

  He nodded. “In the hotel, yes, not in the casino. None of it will work in the casino. Not the other stuff either. Too much interference.”

  He reached into a duffel bag.

  “I replaced the batteries in the laptop with a tiny GPS unit. If they turn it on, they’ll realize there’s a problem. The computer has got to be plugged in to work. Even then, it’s got a broadcast radius of about twenty-five feet. You’ll need this.”

  He handed me an electrical cord and power pack. Nothing fancy. An ordinary power jack for a low-tech kind of guy.

  From outside the door, room 1544 didn’t look unusual. I knocked. No answer, but the door was cracked open. Then a voice. “It’s open, Ira.”

  “I’m with the Kindles,” I said, gently pushing open the door.

  I looked up, and tried to mask my surprise. My reality had become virtual.

  54

  I was staring at a living room. To the left was a circular couch facing a wall-mounted flat-panel TV. In the near-right corner, a bar counter. In the middle-right, a conference table, and around it was what set this room apart: the company. Two of the most influential technology executives in the world: Andre Latzke and Helen Douglass
. But it was the head of the table that was of the most interest—to me. At the front, sitting apart from each other by the table’s width, were the Kindles—Annie and Glenn. I was in a casino. I took a gamble. I spoke to Annie, interrupting two seconds of uncomfortable silence.

  “I brought the rest of the GNet data.”

  Glenn finally said, “This isn’t a good time.”

  All eyes studied me. I was a mess.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late, Mr. Kindle. And sorry for my . . . state of disrepair. I got into a car accident. Rear-ended stopping short at a light. I’ve got to learn to stop making stock trades while I drive.”

  Glenn stood and took a step toward me, for an instant looking bewildered.

  “He helped with some of the tests,” Annie said, composed, but deferential. Was she working with her father? Were they at odds?

  Glenn turned to the group.

  “Will you excuse us all for a moment? Tara and I need to have a private word.” He smiled. He was slick. “I know—we’re supposed to iron these things out before the company arrives.”

  Helen Douglass chuckled.

  In this company, Annie went by Tara.

  She offered her father a gentle rejoinder. “Should we leave our guests alone?”

  Glenn clenched his teeth. If I hadn’t known better, I wouldn’t have picked up Annie’s implicit threat—best not leave me here with this group to get to chatting. The extent of the father-daughter tension was apparently lost on the executives. Or maybe the extent of their cooperation was lost on me.

  “True enough,” Glenn stuttered.

  Latzke, a man with a full head of wavy hair and strong hands who appeared to be assuming a lead role, looked at his watch. “Now where do you think Ira is?” He forced a smile. The good executives never publicly betrayed real feelings.

  Douglass leaned forward. “Well, let’s get on with it.”

  I settled onto the couch. I knew little about the two executives. I remembered that Douglass was considered to be more charismatic than substantive, a reputation she often derided in speeches as sexist. Latzke was the consummate salesman. He believed in his company with religious fervor. I couldn’t believe either of them was mixed up with the recent dark events, not knowingly. Something else had to be going on.