One Night Burns (The Vampires of Livix, #1)

by J Gordon Smith

  “Non-disclosure for products I never see?” said Garin as he continued to sign.

  “I know,” said Yashar, “but I don’t make those rules.”

  Garin signed the lines on the bank accounts and for the other documents.

  Miss Shrapnel signed the bottom of the documents. Precisely manicured fingers in a floral pink polish held a fat Branks & Swanke ball point pen that glided around her swirly signature. She carefully placed and pressed her notary seal into the documents, only handing them over to Yashar after she touched her fingers along the impression and nodded satisfied that the paper took a sufficient profile.

  I asked, “You’ll be making or forwarding copies to Garin?”

  “Of course.” said Yashar, “We’ll send them over via courier after they are fully recorded and stamped.”

  -:- Seventeen -:-

  We took a taxi, the only one in Livix I think, to a block from The Bank of Draydon offices where Garin worked. While en-route, thinking of the radio frequency ID tags we returned at the plant, Garin removed the batteries from our phones. How deep might this go?

  “How about getting something to drink?” asked Garin, looking at his watch as the taxi drove away.

  “There will be people in the office still.”

  “That’s what I considered. We have a few hours to wait.”

  “I guess I should have put my Kindle in my purse,” but too much chasing lately. I didn’t laugh at my own thought.

  Garin looked along both directions of the street. “There’s a library that way and a coffee shop the other direction.”

  I suggested, “I’m getting pretty thirsty and coffee might help me stay awake later.” Garin wanted to hack into the data server and pour through financial records. I expected once we passed the initial excitement of the James Bond entry the rest could be dull.

  “This way.” Garin walked off.

  “Two large coffees,” Garin ordered and paid. We grabbed a pair of lounge chairs in the second floor balcony. The balcony platform hung off the main retail level suspended on bridge cables from the ceiling and cantilevered over the sidewalk making it easy to watch the street. We stayed hidden by the typical office building mirrored windows. No other customers huddled here like on the first floor. Scattered debris and misplaced chairs and tables askew indicated the coffee shop staff avoided or frequently forgot to round here. Garin angled his chair to see down the stretch of street in front of the bank office main entrance.

  “Is it like a regular bank with tellers and a big safe?”

  “No. It’s only an office suite. Nothing exciting like security traders since they are in New York. This office is a consulting resource for other business units under the bank’s umbrella. Corporate tax work and such too but I’m not involved with them unless an acquisition has tax implications or massive write-off carry-forwards that become material to the deal.”

  “Not Bonnie and Clyde then?”

  Garin laughed, “No, more like the Apple Dumpling Gang.”

  “I’m not sure I like that any better.”

  I sipped my coffee and we waited.

  Eventually hunger forced me to buy a bagel. It ended up having bitter Asiago cheese bits with garlic. I had some time to fiddle so I peeled off the outer skin and loaded cream cheese across the rest of it.

  In the summer it takes so long for the sun to go down. It’s great when you want to play but not when you’re waiting like this. We couldn’t really talk about much. The staff cleaned up the balcony as more people came in the store. Our current project and anything like vampires obviously off limits. What else did we have?

  “What do you think about this whole global warming thing?”

  “Which part?” Garin continued staring at the street.

  “Seems like we are having more severe weather now. Hotter summers and colder winters.”

  “How much is too hot and too cold? Statistics can be slippery things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Weather goes in cycles. Like a wave it transitions from summer through the fall into winter. A week of cold weather then a week of warmer weather.”

  “Like that one week of really nice weather in October? The last gasp of the summer?”

  “Yes. Now take a longer view. A wave of change from summer to winter within one year. What’s the average temperature over a whole year here in Michigan?”

  “Probably fifty degrees.”

  “That’s what I’d guess too. What would you wear on any given day if you knew the average should be fifty?”

  “A sweatshirt and a light jacket.”

  “Then you walk out and it’s either a hundred degrees because it’s July or it’s zero degrees because it’s January. And you’re unprepared.”

  “All these models for global warming put out are run on and report a lot of averages. Detailed work, massive computer-clusters running miles of code, but what are the base assumptions? Are they using the appropriate context and variation?”

  “I guess I don’t know. I’ve seen some amazing pictures of the planet heating up.”

  “Oh, we’ve been heating the planet. Every winter we burn fuel concentrated slowly over millions of years and we release it in one season. We drive around by burning things. We’re having an effect. But how much? How about this: Are we actually helping ourselves?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I agree we should be careful. That’s why I reuse when I can instead of creating from scratch.” He glanced at me, a slim smile on his face letting me know he played as we waited. He watched the street again. “When was the last ice age?”

  “About ten thousand years ago.”

  “What would happen if we started into another ice age?”

  “That would be chaos. The last ice age scooped out the great lakes surrounding Michigan. I think Ohio or Kentucky formed the Southern front edge of the ice sheet. The people over the entire globe compressed into a narrow band. Deserts could be tropical oasis. We might find Atlantis when the oceans recede, too. Geological research I saw once pointed to a cycle of ice ages. Like a long summer and long winter these ages last around ten thousand years each.”

  “So the news reports about catastrophic weather events, floods and droughts, hurricanes splashed on the news … those are the leading edge of an ice age?”

  “As a race we are not smart enough to work at the global level yet and we may make unintentional mistakes. You don’t go into the Winter without some temperature swings in the Fall, right? The long summer fighting against the blizzards from the North?”

  “Then the news shows live for ratings and entertainment and advertising as much or more than journalistic insight.”

  “And the heating we are doing of the planet may keep us out of the next ice age that is naturally upon our doorstep and we don’t know it yet.”

  I asked, “Then how long before we approach the ability to reach the effects of the dinosaur asteroid? Or some of the explosive volcano problems of prior ages?”

  “That seems like a lot of energy that we can’t produce now unless we create a global nuclear war.” He looked at me, “As a global population we don’t know. So prudence is wise.”

  “Sure, let’s be prudent.”

  We walked through a parking structure into an alley behind the offices. The smell of a rotting dumpster cooking in the summer heat assaulted our noses. Empty pallets leaned against the wall. Bits of metal rusted in orange clumps in the corners.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back … and keep quiet when I do,” Garin pulled out his employee badge and walked up slowly to the employee entrance. He strolled ahead as if tired and limped at the apparent drudgery of going back into the office. He swiped his badge. I heard the loud click of the solenoid. He pushed the door forward in slow motion tipping his badge on its side to wedge the door slightly ajar. Then with his nearly infinite vampire speed he hooked his arm around me and wrapped me under his hunched over form and he zipped me back through the door. He could ha
ve told me this part of the plan. I knew I’d have some sort of bruising. The employee card dropped fluttering in the air as the door swung open. But Garin snatched it from the twirling air as we went through the door. He knew the locations of the cameras. He let me walk in the unobserved sections but the rapid runs still buffeted me like a rag doll. We took the stairs instead of the elevator.

  I clasped my hands over my mouth when he threw me up like a cheerleader at a pep rally. He sped up two loops of the stairs between the security camera frame rate and caught me before I fell back into the void, maybe glad now that I didn’t know the plan.

  He pushed through a metal fire door taking us into a sea of cubicles. He poked me at a desk full of papers that shielded me behind the high sound reducing wall separators, “Hold still.”

  Before I made my second nod he returned. A wind rustling papers on the desk. A really messy cube. A saver of any email on hard paper copies. Someone with a lot of fear and need to keep some sort of evidence. If they could ever find it when they needed it.

  “No one else is on the floor. I’ll be back.”

  The stairwell door clicked passed the jamb striker and with a slam the door return closed it tight. Garin leaped down the isle as if he then came out the door and sauntered away. I gritted my teeth in suspense.

  He returned and snapped me up. A blur smeared across my vision of desks, computer screens, plants, binders, papers, and pictures of kids through their twenty years of growth. A maze of drab putty colors and flickering florescent lighting. While familiar with this environment, even at this horrific speed, the oppressive weight of dullness and boredom and waiting infused the furniture and debris with these cubical soldier’s lives. We came to his office and he sat me down on a side chair. I received an uncomfortable static electricity shock from the hard plastic seat rubbing against my jeans. In that blur of movement I realized the office walls around his cubical rose a little taller than others and I could see an additional row of ceiling tiles.

  “I see you’re a big shot here.”

  “How’s that?” he turned on his computer.

  “More tiles and higher walls. The fortress of an office conqueror displaying his spoils in conspicuous consumption.”

  “That’s funny. I churn out so much work they wanted fewer distractions for me. Not like Harry in that first cube with the stacks of paper. He told me once he used to get stressed about interruptions until he realized his job filled the requirement as the guy that gets interrupted. That’s what they paid him for.”

  Garin flipped on the light switch under his overhead shelf. A little picture of the hood of his car looking out over the town of Livix late at night. The paint iridescent in the moonlight.

  “Only one picture?” I whispered.

  “I wanted to make it seem like home.”

  “The rest of your desk is empty. Not even stacks of paper.”

  “You travel light when you have a long journey.”

  “That’s cryptic. You’ve given it before?”

  “Sure. Piles of papers collect dust. You have to have a plan for them. Then it’s simply executing that plan.”

  Garin put a flash drive from his key chain into the computer and booted up.

  The machine faded into a mysterious theme. The words “Backtrack : the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear” slowly vanished into blackness. No boot up chime sounded. A black desktop wallpaper and a single shiny user bar stretched across the top of the screen. Garin’s speed on the keyboard matched his running into the building. Terminal text screens popped up and he typed in one box while data scrolled with maddening speed in another. Corporate logo security screens and login windows looked like they dissolved from electronic acid dumped on them, “What’s that?”

  “I’m pulling together the corporate server farm into a huge password cracking bot to compromise the main databases.”

  “Here,” he flipped the switch on the second monitor on his desk. A Midori web browser popped up and a page called “The Top500 Supercomputing Sites” loaded. Garin typed and scanned his first screen again.

  I looked over the page. The list included the global installations of the largest high performance computing centers. Governments, defense companies, and university research facilities tabulated the size of their installations and their capable sprints in computing processing achieved. Garin clicked on a link on the page and a table flipped up while he worked. Listing installations by the number of CPU cores and max performance in Tera flops and which countries and organizations ran the largest on the planet. The United States represented half the top ten but China and Japan held the top three key positions – held those positions by exponential margins of performance.

  “The Bank of Draydon has a system larger than the top six combined – unpublished of course. And I have almost twenty five percent of the bank’s resources cracking its database security.”

  “Isn’t someone going to notice that amount of power drag? I can tell when an Internet video is making my computer crawl.”

  “I distributed my cycles behind their stock market trades. Stock markets are running non-stop around the globe. So I piggyback the CPU cycles. I’d use more but I don’t want to get greedy.” He looked at his watch, “Should only be a few minutes.”

  We waited.

  The scrolling stopped in the one panel and the cursor returned to blinking in another. “I’ll run the decoder now.” He typed another line of text and the icon spun while letters and numbers ticked off onto a line. He highlighted the text and copied it to another panel and filled in some prompts. “And this should do it.”

  A screen popped up on the monitor near me over top of the web browser. It looked eerily like another map I knew, “I’ve seen this before. Fillian’s Book Store. He has some new gadget to recommend books.”

  “Fillian does some contract research work on user interfaces. I think the book store is his hobby as much as anything. Or it could be the other way around. Programming could be his hobby. He gets paid well for it by Draydon.”

  I see faces and financial data zip by as Garin works the controls, “Let’s see what our friends are up to.”

  Yashar and Sandro came up. “A lot of money in accounts and property.”

  “They are executives of a major company.”

  “Doing some quick math, knowing about the range for the typical executive, they’ve accumulated more than five careers worth of funds. Their IRS data doesn’t reflect it. We’re pulling in global accounts. And those two are still only first generation vampires.”

  “First generation?”

  “Still within their first human lifespan. Obviously not aging but also not benefiting from centuries of compounding interest.”

  “What about Mr. Branoc?”

  “Cops salary – regular in/out expenses. Hardly any accumulation given his age.”

  The star-field zoomed around. “Wait a minute. Uncle Tremper’s account is active. He’s apparently alive … or at least his accounts are.” Garin’s brows furrowed. “But we’re looking for some other things. Here,” he dug out the list from Mr. Branoc, “Several bodies found at the warehouse – a lot of ins and outs but nothing sitting. Including our too friendly cowboy.”

  “Wait,” I said, “go back to that LLC linked to the cowboy. I recognize it from somewhere. Put me in the web browser and slide me the keyboard.”

  Garin pushed the keyboard to me.

  “The State of Michigan keeps Limited Liability Company records.” I typed away and clicked through the link trail of data screens. “And look, that LLC is a throwaway company, but it’s tied to Yashar as a named active investor.”

  Garin leaned back in his chair, “You’re good.”

  “Oh, it’s small stuff you can do without a law degree.”

  He leaned over, “You can be so focused and intent. That’s why I’m falling for you,” he kissed my cheek ever so lightly. Like butterflies. And then butterflies blossomed through my stomach. “I like someone who can
keep up with me or challenge me.”

  “Not many guys like that.”

  “It’s my secret,” his voice gravely, “It’s very sexy.” Then of course he wiggled his eyebrows at me like a silent movie comic and took the keyboard away. I wanted to punch him.

  “The militia team has several large investor members but most of them are pretty poor. Living from manufacturing plant jobs or farming or a couple of small retail and service businesses. The theme I see is a mostly independent group of members.” Garin looked at his watch. “Ok we need to get out.”

  He brought up another panel full of text and he typed in ./run-me after the little dollar sign prompt. The screen scrolled and the other panels and browser windows collapsed and winked out. He had his hand on the flash drive until the pale LED stopped flashing and he pulled and pocketed it. He reached for my hand so I could stand.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” said one of a pair of IT guys.

  Garin said, “Checking on results of a study due at the group report tomorrow morning.”

  “But she’s not employed here.”

  “I’m doing extra work on unpaid hours and we had been downtown together.”

  One of the IT guys grabbed at Garin while the other called security on his phone.

  In a rapid motion Garin spun and put me on his back while kicking the two IT guys in a flying spin. They bounded back down the long isle and flipped over and over and over. When they finally hit the far wall the drywall and steel wall studs billowed dust and arced electrical cables around them. They growled and ran at us. I saw vampire teeth flash from the growls and sniffing of the air like hell-hounds.

  Garin ran for the stairwell. He leaped over the banister and we slipped through the air down passed the floors of the building. I would have fallen off if he hadn’t held me tight with both arms as his legs absorbed the shock of landing. Because of the building construction he had to run up a pair of flights out of the sub-basement to return us to ground level and exit the building. Garin burst through the steel fire exit door igniting alarms throughout the building. The bank’s security guards revealed themselves as vampires when they joined the frantic pace of the IT vampires behind us.