FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four

by Zoe Sharp

  “My hide-out,” he said. “I keep a little place a few blocks from here.”

  I hesitated, but Trey was already opening the Corvette’s passenger door and climbing in. It was either drag him out of there by force or go along with it, even if allowing yourself to be taken from a relatively public place to a private one of someone else’s choosing was madness in these circumstances. It went against everything I’d ever taught or learned, but I reminded myself that I was the kid’s bodyguard. If he went, I went. It was as simple as that.

  With a sigh I climbed in with Trey, uncomfortably aware of his bony body pressing against me and the fact that I probably weighed more than he did.

  Henry eased his bulk behind the wheel and grinned at the way we were tangled together alongside him. I’d tried to keep the bag reachable but, even so, I doubted I could actually get to the gun to use it if I had to.

  That jolted me. In the course of a few days I’d gone from never carrying a gun to being unhappy to be parted from it.

  We set off, the poor old Corvette’s engine occasionally firing on all the cylinders it was supposed to. The inside of the car smelt of old cigarettes and damp. Henry drove sitting upright, hunched over the steering wheel. He glanced sideways at us a couple of times once we were out on the road, still smiling.

  “You’ve done a real good job on those disguises,” he said casually, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips. “I wouldn’t have recognised either of you from the pictures on the TV.”

  Either of you. My heart started to belt against my ribs. Maybe Henry wasn’t quite as dumb as he first appeared.

  When neither of us responded, Henry said, “You sure don’t look like a kidnapper – Charlie isn’t it?” I gave him the briefest nod. “So what’s your angle?”

  “I’m just supposed to be looking out for him,” I said. It was a compromise statement. I knew Trey would object to my saying I was looking after him.

  Henry nodded sagely. “You wanna tell me your side of the story?” he asked.

  I gave him the edited highlights in the sketchiest form possible, little more than the fact that someone was seriously out to get Trey and there was the possibility that the authorities were involved.

  “Well, they’re sure putting out a different story to yours,” Henry commented when I was done. He turned off the road into a dimly-lit residential street. “Ah, here we are. Home, sweet home.”

  The street was in a run-down district. I didn’t have to know much about the demographic of Daytona to guess it wasn’t exactly an up-and-coming area. Most people seemed to have a dead pickup truck on their front lawn and there weren’t enough wheels to go round.

  Henry swung left off the road and brought the Corvette to a halt in the dirt driveway of an ugly single-storey building with a covered porch along the front. The whole structure was raised a couple of feet off the ground, like a mobile home that’s had its wheels removed. A patchwork of trellis covered the gap between the base and the earth.

  The house itself looked like some of the worst council-owned dives I’ve seen in the UK. Trey and I struggled out of the passenger seat and followed him up the uneven steps onto the porch.

  “C’mon in,” he said when he finally managed to wrestle his own front door open. He went ahead, flicking on lights to illuminate a dingy little one-bedroomed house. There was no air conditioning inside and the wet heat clenched itself around me as soon as I stepped through the door. I swear I saw something that was the size and colour of a stoned date with legs skitter across the cracked floor tiles.

  Henry led the way through into what might once have been the living room, but was now packed with computer equipment. It looked like a complicated setup and, judging by the way the cases gleamed, most of it was fairly new. I couldn’t see anything staying spotless for long in that environment. Henry had set up a couple of fans that were stirring the turgid air around rather than actually cooling it.

  The lone battered-looking typist’s chair, its cushion repaired with silver duct tape, was the only place to sit down in the entire room if you discounted the floor, which I already had. Henry eased himself into it with a sigh of relief to be off his feet again and picked up part of a cold hamburger that was sitting congealing in its wrapper next to his keyboard.

  “So, any ideas who’s holding Keith Pelzner?” he asked, biting off a chunk and beginning to chew.

  Trey didn’t answer, so I said, “As far as we can tell, no-one’s holding him.”

  Henry’s jaws stopped working for a moment. He swallowed, then said, “You mean he’s gotten loose?”

  “No,” I said, “I mean it doesn’t appear he was ever kidnapped in the first place.”

  Henry put the remains of his hamburger down again, very slowly, and distractedly wiped his hands on the front of his shirt. It clearly wasn’t the first time he’d used his clothing as a napkin. And all the time his eyes skated from side to side as though he was scanning a document only he could see. One that brought him very bad news. His lips were moving but for a while no sound came out, then he muttered, “Crap in a hat,” very softly, under his breath.

  “Why do I get the feeling the fact that Keith Pelzner has apparently disappeared of his own accord is not exactly what you wanted to hear?”

  Henry jerked to his feet, hands to his face now. I thought of the residual hamburger grease on his fingers and tried not to squirm.

  “Why?” he echoed, faintly at first, then with growing vehemence. “Why? Because the only goddamn reason for him to run is if it doesn’t work, that’s why!”

  “If what doesn’t work?” I asked blankly. Henry spun to face me, checking out Trey’s reaction to all this on the way. I glanced at the kid myself but he’d hung his head like he’d retreated into himself. No clues there, then.

  “You mean you have no idea what Pelzner was working on?” Henry demanded, surprise making his voice rise and spraying me with flecks of half-chewed burger.

  I backed off a step and shook my head.

  Henry turned away and groped for the arm of his chair, lowering his bulk into it again. He took a moment to gather his thoughts.

  “OK,” he said. “Keith Pelzner’s a computer programmer, yeah?”

  “You can skip the part about the earth cooling and the fish learning to walk,” I said. “I know he’s a programmer and I know he was working on something to do with the financial markets. Take it from there.”

  He reached for the hamburger again, a reflex action, but when he got it to his mouth he suddenly seemed to realise what he’d done and plonked it back on the desktop. “This new program he’s been working on is dynamite.” He looked at me then, a little haughty. “I don’t s’pose you know the details, right?”

  I would have loved to have been able to tell him he was wrong but he wasn’t, so I had to take it on the chin and simply shake my head.

  “OK, there are a lot of financial programs out there that track the stock markets,” he said, “they’ve gotten to the stage now where they’re pretty sophisticated, yeah? They’re based on mathematical algorithms. They follow the trends and use stuff like Fibonacci fan lines and moving averages to try and indicate whether the stock price is going to rise or fall, so you know whether to buy or sell, yeah?”

  He glanced at me, checking I was with him so far. I nodded encouragingly to show him I was just about keeping up.

  “OK,” he went on, “but all these programs do is track. What Keith Pelzner was working on was a system that could take into account stuff like current affairs, financial reports from around the world, news, and could actually predict what was going to happen to the stock prices. Not guess – predict. We’re talking software that’s capable of learning from its mistakes, here. We’re talking artificial intelligence. I’m dumbing down, you understand?”

  “I understand,” I said, a little tartly. I paused. “So, this program – do you reckon it’s worth killing people over?”

  Henry sat back in his chair and looked at me with his mouth op
en. “I don’t think you’ve grasped the concept here, huh?” he said. “If you got a hold of this program you could trade the futures markets with absolute certainty, yeah?” He stopped, searching for the right way to penetrate my tiny little brain.

  “Look, say you were going to day-trade contracts on the futures market, like the S&P five hundred, yeah? You think the market’s gonna go up, you go into a long trade. You think it’s gonna go down, you go into a short trade, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. He was losing me but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

  “OK, so if you’re ahead of the game and you know when to go long and when to go short, then every time the market rises or falls in your favour, you make two hundred and fifty bucks a point, right? It don’t matter if it rises or falls, just so long as you’re in a trade heading in the right direction, you’re making dough.”

  “And how far is it likely to rise or fall in a day?” I said.

  “Hey, good question. You’re a bright cookie, Charlie, you know that?” he said, wagging a knowing finger at me. “The S&P will only maybe move five or ten points, but if you can jump on the back of every one of them you could be making fifty points a week, easy.”

  I did some fast mental arithmetic. “That’s twelve and a half grand a week,” I murmured. Even converting back out of dollars into sterling, that wasn’t a bad whack.

  “Sure it is,” Henry said. “And that’s on one contract, yeah? Supposing you were trading ten contracts, or a hundred? It’s a licence to print money and it’s perfectly legit. They can’t touch you for it.”

  He grinned slyly as he watched my face go blank with the realisation of just what was at stake here. “You asked if this program was worth killing someone for, yeah? Well, if it hada worked, I tell you, I woulda killed my own grandmother to get a hold of it. In a heartbeat!”

  For a second there was silence. I stood in Henry’s rank little living room and let the consequences of what he’d told me seep slowly into my brain like blood into the dirt.

  More than a million dollars a week.

  Every week.

  Legally.

  Holy shit.

  I looked up. “But the fact that Keith’s done a runner . . .” I murmured.

  “Yeah, you’re on it,” Henry said bitterly. “Why would he run unless he can’t get the bugs out of the system and he knows that he’s never gonna be able to make it work? Hell, the company he’s working for have banked every last cent on it. They’re practically bust. I been following this pretty close, y’know? When I heard he’d been kidnapped I thought he musta finally cracked it. But now—” he broke off, shaking his head. He sounded close to tears.

  And then, behind me, Trey cleared his throat.

  “It works,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken. “I know it works,” he repeated, more firmly this time. We both turned to stare at him and he muttered, “I know ‘cos I’ve, like, tried it out myself.”

  Twelve

  For a full five seconds after Trey made his announcement, nobody spoke, then Henry said faintly, “What do you mean, you’ve tried it?”

  Trey shrugged again, kicking at the curling edge of the mat with studied casualness. “Dad wanted to integrate a neural network into the program, which is, like, artificial intelligence,” he added to me, with that airily precocious tone I disliked so much. “He did all the setup on it, but he couldn’t get results that were, like, consistent enough and he gave up on it. So I’ve been kinda playing around with it some.”

  “And you’ve gotten it to work,” Henry said. It was a statement, not a question, with a touch of something in his tone that could have been wonder.

  “Not yet,” Trey admitted, colouring, “but I’m real close. I reckon Dad just expected it to learn real quick. He just kinda underestimated how long you gotta spend hitting the neural net with data before it learns the patterns, breaks it down into numbers. It just needed more time, that’s all.”

  “Your dad must be real proud of you,” Henry said. I glanced at him sharply but his face was as guarded as his voice.

  Trey flushed. “He doesn’t know,” he said. “Not how far I’ve gotten with it, anyhow. I’ve been kinda working on it someplace else – where he wouldn’t hang over my shoulder all the time, y’know?”

  “Bet that took some processor power,” Henry said, and Trey nodded.

  “So that’s why you were nicking stuff from that computer shop at the Galleria,” I put in and he flushed again.

  “Dad’s never believed I can do anything,” he threw back at me, and the old whiny note was back well in evidence. “Even when I was a kid, he’d buy me model aircraft and stuff, then he’d kinda take them off me and put them together himself. It was like he never trusted me to do it right.”

  “So nobody knows you’ve been working on this alongside your dad?” Henry said. There was something calculating about him now. “You’ve done this all by yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Trey said, defiant.

  Henry shook his head, smiling. “That is outstanding,” he said at last. “Absolutely outstanding. I would sure love to see some of what you’ve done.”

  Trey stared at him for a moment as the realisation of actual adult approval settled on him. “No problem,” he said, his enthusiasm bubbling over. “It’s all with—”

  “Hold it right there,” I cut in. I turned to Henry who quickly hid his flash of annoyance at my interruption. “You’re the one who told us to trust no-one. What makes you an exception to that rule?” I demanded. “Half the people we thought we could trust have been trying to kill us over the last twenty-four hours and now – finally – I think I know why.” I glared briefly at Trey. He dropped my gaze like a hot brick. “You said you could help us, Henry. Well before Trey goes handing over anything, I think you should show us how exactly you intend to do that.”

  Henry pulled a rueful face. “OK, OK, I can appreciate your caution. And you’re right, why should you trust me?” He leaned back in his chair. The frame creaked under the strain. For a moment he just smiled at us, spreading his palms wide. I could almost hear his brain turning over furiously while he tried to think up a good reason. At last, he said, “Let me just ask you this, Charlie – what other choices do you have, huh?”

  I didn’t answer. Silence is always the best course of action if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.

  “Face it, you need help,” he said. “I been watching the news. I know the kinda crap you’re in. You need to negotiate some kinda deal with the people who are after you, otherwise you’re gonna be running for the rest of your lives.” He sat forwards again, intent. The sweat prickled across his upper lip, forming a pale moustache of perspiration. “I can do that. I can negotiate that deal for you.”

  “How?”

  Henry indicated the array of computer equipment surrounding him. “Check it out,” he said with pride. “I can reach anyone with this setup, anywhere in the world.”

  “How are you going to find them? We don’t even know for sure who they are,” I said, ignoring Trey’s quick wriggle of dissent.

  Henry gave me a crafty look. “I got a few ideas where to start. I been following the story kinda closely and besides—” he tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger, “—I’ve kinda done this sorta work before.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve been told,” I said, cynical. “Desert Storm, wasn’t it? You must have been about twelve at the time.”

  He had the grace to colour, glancing at Trey. “Yeah, well,” he said, shrugging, “the kids go for that kinda thing. Sometimes you gotta embellish a little, y’know? Adds to the rep.”

  I regarded him for a moment with my head on one side. “So what’s your angle, Henry? Why are you offering to help us?”

  “Easy – I want a copy of that program,” he said, and his voice had hardened now. “Maybe a little startup capital, too – though I can round up enough to get me started,” he added hastily when he saw the warning glint in my eye.

  I r
aised an eyebrow at Trey. After all, he had more say over what happened to this program than I did.

  The kid shrugged. “OK,” he mumbled. “I guess.”

  “OK,” I said to Henry. “You’ve got a deal.” I gave him the number of Trey’s phone. “Call us when you have something to tell us, OK?”

  “No problemo,” he said, struggling to his feet. He was almost bouncing now, his glee almost uncontained. “You won’t regret this.”

  “I hope not,” I said, keeping my gaze flat and my voice cool. “I sincerely hope not.”

  ***

  I declined Henry’s offer of a return trip to the car park by the bridge in the ailing Corvette. Instead, we left on foot. Trey phoned Scott as soon as we were off the front porch and we walked to intercept him.