When the ceremony was complete, Dave’s mother turned and wept gently into her other son’s shoulder. Her remaining son. Between them they scattered feathers on the grave. As people started to leave, Jack felt that he should stay for a while and offer his condolences personally. One glance, however, told him that the family were not yet ready to accept.
His young scout had mentioned on occasion that his parents had never approved of his choice of career, his full blown entry into a world which held no clear respect for their traditions, and he could see now that they were probably looking for somebody to blame for the things that had happened to him. Jack would be the right man, in the right place, at precisely the wrong time.
He remembered Lara when they attended Elizabeth’s funeral, bright clear tears streaming down a disbelieving face. She did not understand why. Why such a wonderful woman had to be taken away so early. Her mother was too young to die, and Lara was too young to be without her. Jack had been similarly distraught, too upset to adequately console his child, but at least he had understood that it had been an accident; another horrific twist of fate presented by the world to demonstrate to its inhabitants just how erratic it could prove to be. How in control it would always be. There was no rhyme or reason and nobody on which the blame could be heaped. No outlet. So he had bottled his own grief and it had started to feast; gnawing away at him inside until there was nothing left to share.
That was where the weeds in the once-rosy garden Lara and her father shared had found their roots.
How quickly they had spread when left untended.
But Lara’s death had been different and it made Jack realise how Dave’s parents must be feeling now because there was rhyme and there was reason. Ultimately there was somebody to blame because Lara’s death, like Dave’s, had been no accident. It had been murder. It was just that nobody knew who the ‘somebody to blame’ was just yet, so instead they would lash out at whoever they could.
Jack would be the recipient; more worthy of their wrath than they would ever know. He did not want to face them when he felt more than his fair share of guilt pressing down on his shoulders already. He did not kill their son, but he could not shake the nagging feeling that it had somehow been instigated by his investigations into the postcards. If that was true, then in many ways Jack might just as well have walked into Dave’s apartment and opened the fridge door for him.
Managing only the most clichéd of comments he quickly made his excuses and headed back toward his car. By the time he reached it, Frank Warner had already walked to the base of the dusty hillside and was waiting for him. His jet black eyes were just itching for a fight.
“Well, Mr. Bernstein, looks like we have ourselves a situation here, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t see one,” Jack said, as disinterestedly as he could manage.
“Well, first there’s your little girl. See, she died at the hands of terrorists. Then we have young Mr. Clearwater here. Now he was blessed with a different M.O. but it’s most definitely a terrorist act, wouldn’t you say?” Hell, Warner thought, the boy even got a plaque to prove it. “So I get to wonderin’... perhaps there’s something you’d like to share with me?”
Jack walked straight past, his face creased in ignorance to the question as his mind span it around like a carousel. This was not the right time to confront his fears. If indeed such a time was ever going to come.
Warner probed deeper. “You guys doing anything out there in Glendale that I should be aware of? Working on any new gizmo that people might kill to get hold of, for example?”
Jack walked around to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door. Rather than get inside immediately he stopped, leaned on the roof and looked directly into the eyes of his inquisitor.
“Look, Agent Warner, my daughter was never anything to do with IntelliSoft, as you well know,” Warner looked back with an unconvinced raise of his eyebrows. “You know she wasn’t,” Jack reiterated. “As for Dave, I don’t know what he did and what he didn’t get up to. His private life was very much his own.”
“But he didn’t have a private life, did he, Mr. Bernstein? Least, not one to speak of. He spent nearly every hour of every day working for you. So much so that when he didn’t show up for work on time, somebody went out to see if he was alright. Tell me, did you suspect he might not be alright?”
“Jerry was passing.”
Warner shrugged and pushed the brim of the hat up his forehead. A sharp band of light fell across his ebony skin, starkly illuminating the tiny beads of sweat that had started to form in the desert heat. “Whatever,” he said as though he could not care less. “So, what had young Mr. Clearwater been doing for you recently?”
“Same thing he always did,” Jack scorned, “gathering information. And no, before you ask, it was not dangerous information that might get him killed. It was run-of-the-mill background material.” He knew he was lying. What he did not know, given his change through recent circumstances, was how visible it would now be on his face.
Warner looked to the ground. He watched his feet carving holes in the earth; digging the dirt. “And did this information have anything to do with your trip to Rome, Mr. Bernstein? You did return from Rome just after our native American friend grabbed a cold one, didn’t you?”
“It would appear that you already know that I did, but what of it?” He stroked his beard. Like he did. When he was edgy. “I travel regularly. It was a conventional business meeting, nothing more.”
“Yeah, of course, conventional business meeting,” Warner said, looking up. “I thought it would be. But you see, what gets me is that when my colleagues in Rome spoke to the gentleman at EuropCar he says that you asked for directions to, now then let me see....” He pulled out a small black notebook, one page marked with an elasticated holder, and read the detail he needed with slow effect. “...Montecastrilli. So what happened there? Decide to do a little sightseeing did you? Because, you see, Montecastrilli is not exactly what you’d call a business Mecca. I’m told it’s no more than a couple of cafés, an old monastery and a few grizzled old women selling fruit to each other until God gives them the grace to die. So what business were you conducting there exactly? IntelliSoft thinking of entering the lucrative olive market are they?”
Jack sneered and started sliding into his car.
“What can you tell me about Manuel Deguerra?” Warner asked, deliberately changing tack.
It was enough to bring Jack’s head back above the roofline. “Never heard of him,” he replied. It was one of the first things he had said that was true.
If he was honest, which he was generally supposed to be, even Warner did not think Jack would recognise the name, but he loved to stir up some shit whenever he could. “Well see, I’ve done my research, Mr. Bernstein. Plane bombings and sarin attacks. Now sarin has been used very, very infrequently to say the least. Tokyo Subway hit the papers in March ninety-five, various leaks around Aum Supreme Truth’s makeshift headquarters a few weeks before that and some dumb ass called Dirk in Utah who tried making some in his dad’s shed back in eighty-three. Only one reported case that never got solved, though...”
“Manuel Deguerra?” Jack asked, shrugging his shoulders and widening his eyes with forced expectancy.
“Manuel Deguerra,” Warner agreed. “Mexican national. Worked for a toy importer in Veracruz. Couple of years back he and his wife decided to have an outdoor birthday party for one of the kids. Tacos, tortillas; all that shit. Fifteen minutes later all five family members plus three guests are dead and there’s quite a few people on his street needing medical attention. Now our Mr. Deguerra wasn’t the brightest of men, certainly not the kind who could mix himself some sarin gas, so it begs the question ‘who killed him’, and the further question... ‘why?’ Seeing as the only other unsolved of this nature we have on file now is your friend Clearwater, I thought you might be able to help me out. Give me two for one as it were.”
Jack stared the agent straight i
n the eye with contempt, his voice low to avoid the attentions of the mourners still voicing condolences to each other nearby. “Don’t play games with me, Agent Warner, because I’m very, very good at them.” Almost as soon as he had said that, he wished he hadn’t. “I do not know who killed my daughter and I do not know who killed Dave Clearwater. Now if you’ll excuse me...”
Frank Warner looked puzzled and scratched the back of his neck. “But you do know who killed your daughter. They’re in a German cell right now...”
Silence hung in the air a good deal longer than silence should be allowed to hang.
“Aren’t they?”
Jack chose not to answer but that was undoubtedly the wrong move. It spoke volumes.
Warner decided to leave it for now. He had done what he was best at, stirred things up a little to see what floated to the surface. “Well, if you think there’s anything I might need to know about how these two cases might be linked, you’ll be sure and let me know, won’t you?”
There was no reply. In an instant the car was heading back toward Glendale and Agent Warner was left to waft the dust from his face. Even so, he retained a smile bordering on victorious. He smiled because he knew something; and that was that there were some things that Mr. Jack Bernstein was not telling him. Soon, whether he wanted to or not, IntelliSoft’s notoriously careful chairman was going to start talking, and he would keep talking until he had told Agent Warner everything he wanted to know.
Jack, meanwhile, was taking deep warm breaths into his right hand. He had taken note of every one of Agent Warner’s insinuations and had already cranked up the air conditioning. It had no effect.
He was still sweating.
behold a well in the field
Genesis 29:2
There was no way Jack could face going back to his office. Not yet. The solitude it normally offered him seemed a cold prospect now; lonely and removed. All he would do was think, and primarily about the things he did not really want to think about. Better that he put some time into the launch, he told himself; the more controllable of his two futures. So he decided instead to visit the ‘moles’, well aware that he had been neglecting his duties, and similarly aware as to why. His staff, however, were not. They could not know anything about the true circumstances of Lara’s life and certainly not her death. Nor could they know anything about her child. Not yet.
The ideal scenario, that the FireWorX launch be placed on hold until he found the child, was not an option and despite her protests he had told MaryBeth as much. He could not broadcast his knowledge of a child publicly for fear of the people who were holding him suddenly harming him in some way, so any delay to the launch would have meant coming up with another excuse. A more banal one.
The thing was, that’s exactly what it would have been seen as in the eyes of a judgmental press; another banal excuse. It would also have offered the internet providers a little more time to formulate and hone their responses. If finding the child took too long it could even give them enough leeway to negate his own launch altogether. So everything had to go ahead as planned. The same day, the same hour and the same minute that Jack had announced to the world back in New York.
He looked up at the roof of the main offices and watched as the yellow letters on the board continued their countdown.
Twelve days; sixteen hours; thirty-two minutes.
It was getting closer.
He just wished, selfishly he knew, that his most important creation; Lara, had not been so desperate for his help at the same time as the one she thought was his most important; IntelliSoft.
Rather than head inside the main offices, he walked straight past - having left his car in the ‘Valley’ lot - and continued around the lake to ‘Mountain’. It was a fresh morning with a cold breeze coming in from the west and he lifted his shoulders slightly to prevent it biting at his neck.
When he reached the doorway, the sign above announcing it as the entrance to ‘IntelliSoft Technical’, he leaned close to facilitate the retina scanner and went inside. On the three floors above him was probably one of the most complex telephone networks in the country, last year’s figures demonstrating that this area of the campus alone had handled over eight hundred thousand calls from users, beta-testers and a huge array of journalists. Jack was not sure exactly how many languages were currently spoken on the face of the earth at present, but he did know that over ninety-two percent of them were spoken by at least one member of his HelpDesk team.
He stepped into the elevator and pressed for ‘down’ but, unlike the routine had he pressed for ‘up’, a flashing message above the internal scanner flashed; ‘
When the descent was over and the door opened he was greeting by a long corridor, three offices and a press-room at either side, and a door at the furthest end. The door. The one behind which lay the brain of the launch; the FireWorX mainframe.
Eric Lacy, white coat and clipboard in hand, wandered blindly along the corridor toward him, his head lowered and his mind quite clearly on other things. Eric was chief ‘mole’, a title derived from the fact that, as one of those responsible for the FireWorX system, he barely seemed to show his face above ground. From the waist up he looked like the perfect scientist; white coat, short cropped blonde hair and neat round spectacles, but from the waist down...?
Jack called out in advance. “What the hell have you got on your feet, Eric?”
Eric looked up with a smile. Bright orange Reeboks is what he had on his feet. He liked the orange ones; he felt they complemented his purple trousers perfectly.
“Blimey,” he said, feigning shock. “What brings you down here... stranger? Are you lost? Do you want me to help you find your mummy?” He laughed openly.
“It’s a good job you’re good at what you do,” Jack replied with a smile.
“Yeah, I know,” Eric said. “Else you’d fire my ass.”
“I might anyway.” He was already walking toward Eric and glancing through the glass walls of the offices along the way, waving acknowledgements to the other moles. “I just thought I’d come and check on my baby.”
“She misses you,” Eric said, turning one-eighty. “She keeps saying to me; ‘Eric, when’s daddy coming down to see me?’”
They walked to the end of the corridor and arrived at the door labelled, quite simply; ‘FireWorX’. At least it would have been had somebody not added a Post-it note saying ‘Light the Blue Touchpaper... then retire! With benefits.’
Eric performed the scan; ‘<3027>E.Lacy’, and they went inside.
Jack could not contain his smile, because something had been added to the mainframe. Something he had not been expecting. Something clever. Above the huge computer system was a huge tinted glass sphere.
Inside, hovering in the centre with no visible means of support, was a spinning IntelliSoft triangle; the corporate logo. A hologram.
“Wow,” Jack said, allowing a sparkle to race across his features. A sparkle that had been missing for too many days.
Eric smiled. “Do you know, that’s exactly what Case said you’d say when we asked him if his guys would put one in. There’s one on every site now.”
Jack walked closer and moved his head from side to side, as though testing some theory. “I thought you had to have pressure mats so that it knew where to project the image?”
“That’s the beauty of the prisma-glass,” Eric explained. “It’s completely… well, prismatic. It bends light like the glass used in 3D specs. Wherever you stand it focuses your vision to a controlled point. Clever, yeah?”
“It’s gonna look damn good on the day,” Jack said. He could already picture the selected journalists gathered and the strobe-like flashing of cameras.
Eric laughed and walked over to a grey box bolted to the side of the struc
ture. Five feet high, three feet wide and three feet deep it did not possess one flashing light on its plain surface.
“Do you know something,” he asked. “This is where your money is. This is the main CPU and the complete hard drive for the entire system. This one little box is the complete well of knowledge for every terminal in the world. And I’ll bet you five bucks that without that logo not one journalist would even take a picture.”
“Because it doesn’t look goooood,” Jack said, deliberately exaggerating the word. He gestured to the main body of the machine, knowing that only sixty percent of what he could see was functional and the rest had been added to create better photo opportunities. “This...? Now this looks goood!”
“That it does, my man. That it does.”
“What’s that over there?” Jack asked. In the corner of the room was a large industrial-looking unit. It looked like a large engine on wheels.
Eric suddenly looked perturbed. “We had another shutdown last night,” he said.
Jack looked annoyed. “I thought you were going to close all the doors.”
Eric nodded. “I did. But they didn’t shut us down.”
“How do you mean?”
“They shut our feed from Western Power. From inside their computer system.”
“Shit. Same message?” Jack asked. He had seen a lot of clever hacks in his time but to shut down the power company because the system you intended to target was too heavily protected. Had it not been directed at his own pride and joy he would have labelled a stunt like that as sheer class.
“Similar,” Eric said. “We’re nearing the hour, so I’ve stolen your power. If you close off your doors I’ll use those that aren’t yours. It’s simple.” His words were slow and laboured, as though he was truly tired of hearing the phrases.
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