by Tod Goldberg
“No argument from me,” Fiona said.
“Not helping,” I said to her. I pulled the pillow off of Brent’s face. “Listen to me, Brent. You need to start at the beginning, don’t skip any details and try not to say the word ‘like’ in the process. And you need to do all of this while sitting upright or I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop Fiona from squeezing your neck again.”
Brent rubbed his forearm across his eyes, sniffled once and then ran his hands through his hair. My entire life I’ve tried to avoid crying in all its forms-crying women, crying children, crying animals-and now I had a teenage boy in my loft who couldn’t complete a sentence without spilling tears onto my comforter.
“So, okay,” Brent began. “I had this class project, okay? We were supposed to design realistic Web sites to go along with our game projects-like fully integrated sites that look like actual companies, you know?”
I told him I did. It was something the U.S. government had been doing for years. If you’re a covert operative working under a second identity in a foreign land as, say, the president of a tissue paper company, you need to have the same online corporate presence as any other tissue company might. The CIA was also especially fond of selecting people just like Brent Grayson to design them.
“My game, it’s pretty cool; it’s this world-building game where you’re basically trying to become the ultimate capitalist, but, like, do good things, too, so, you know, there’s like evil companies and stuff that want to exploit you. It’s pretty cool.”
Brent was excited, even if he wasn’t saying much of anything and even though the world was crumbling around him and he was now in a spy’s loft telling him his life story… or at least the story of his last few weeks.
“What is this game called?” Fiona asked.
“ Lifescape. ”
“Sounds like a birth control pill,” Fiona said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I never liked it, either. No one did. In workshop? They said it was too much like a self-improvement seminar or whatever.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “How do the Russians come into play?” Brent looked like he wanted to do that whole pillow-on-the-face thing again, so I took hold of his shoulder to let him know he had our support and that, if need be, I could grab him, too. “You need to keep it together.”
He bit into his bottom lip and soldiered forward. “I make this killer Web site for InterMacron, this super badass tech company that has developed new ways for delivering bandwidth, because like that’s the growth industry of the next twenty years, right? I mean, I do it up, because it was going to be thirty-three percent of my grade for the quarter and I’d really slacked off because of this girl who totally got into my head. It was crazy.”
Brent got a wistful look on his face and I couldn’t tell if he was feeling that way about the girl, the easier time or if that’s just how he looked because he hadn’t yet learned the joys of paying taxes and other adult activities.
“So InterMacron, the reason it’s so badass is that it’s come up with this way to increase bandwidth loads at a really low cost-fiber-optics, all that stuff? It’s like really expensive, so InterMacron has this device they are developing called the WieldXron, which will allow wireless use to expand using Kineoptic Transference.”
I looked at Fiona to see if she understood a single thing Brent said. Her mouth was agape and her eyes were a bit on the heavy-lidded side, which made me think she was about to curl up next to Brent to take a nap. I felt about the same way.
“What is Kineoptic Transference?” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t exist. It’s just this theoretical way of using the electricity found in wind to move data. It could probably only work on Mars.”
“Where did you learn of it?” I asked.
“I made it up,” he said.
I had a bad feeling about this, because what he said about bandwidth was absolutely true. Twenty-five years ago, it didn’t even exist, but today, with the world constantly wired (or, more accurately, wireless) and every day seeing an increased demand and a withering amount of supply. In America, it was managed by the conglomerates-the AT amp;Ts, the Verizons, the Sprints of the world-which means it is a managed resource and an untapped wealth because of the monopolization by the large telecommunications companies. If you want bandwidth, you need to deal with those who have created the infrastructure.
In a country like Russia, where the outlying former Soviet regions are still years behind the curve, so far back that the curve is still just a straight line, that demand for bandwidth is a gold rush for those with money to build-or influence the building of-the infrastructure. And the people with the most money in Russia often have ties to or are directly involved with organized crime.
Which was not a good thing if it meant what I feared.
I got up and grabbed one of Brent’s laptops. “Pull up your site,” I said.
He tapped it in and handed the laptop back to me. There, in vivid color, and including video, photos and graphs, I leaned all about the burgeoning field of Kin-eoptic Transference. I learned that the company was founded by Dr. Chester Palmetto, who, with a large grant from the Pinnacle Institute (which also had a linked Web site touting its desire to fund “the 22nd century in the 21st”), had embarked on a prototype of the Kin-eoptic Transference device to “high success” and that mass production was possible within the next five years, provided further research-and-development funds were secured.
There was a photo of Dr. Palmetto standing in front of an array of wind turbines in the California desert and the caption beneath it said: “Dr. Palmetto expects the deserts of the world, both the arid and the frozen, with their potential for wind harvestation and lack of architectural impediment to be ground zero for a new technological boom.” Other photos showed Dr. Palmetto in Paris, Dubai, New York and what appeared to be Antarctica.
There were other photos of scientists, various vice presidents and CFOs, men and women working diligently in front of computer screens and outdoors.
“Who are all of these people in the pictures?” I asked.
“Just photos I found online of people,” he said. “I doctored them up to suit my needs. I’m pretty much a master at Photoshop.”
“What about Dr. Palmetto?” Fiona asked. “You have dozens of photos of him.”
“Oh, no,” Brent said. “That’s my grandfather. He’s dead, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. Plus, he always wore a lab coat on account of being a pharmacist, so it was easy to make him look right. Pretty cool, huh? What do you think of the name-pretty cool, too, huh?”
“Chester Palmetto?” Fiona said. “Sounds like an English cigarette.”
“It’s the name of my dog and the street I grew up on,” Brent said proudly. “If you combine the two, it’s supposed to be a badass name for porn. I think it makes for a cool-sounding scientist, too.”
Fiona regarded Brent with something near disdain. “When do you study?” she asked.
“You know, it’s not about studying. You can totally game a lot of the classes if you’re smart.”
“And you’re smart?” she said.
He shrugged. It was his default body motion. A series of shrugs that stood for hundreds of emotions. “I got into the U. And I’m a pretty good game designer. You ever play any games?”
“No,” Fiona said.
“Not even like first-person shooter games?”
“Not for sport, no,” she said.
I kept clicking through the Web site until I got to the contact page. Each of the main players in the company had an e-mail address and there was a general phone number, too. “These e-mail and phone numbers actually work?” I asked.
Brent nodded. “That was part of the assignment. It’s what got me in trouble,” he said. “I used to get e-mail from people all the time asking for more information, or for scientific data, or for a quote-people doing stories on bandwidth for magazines and newspapers would contact the press agent e-mail at least twice
a month. And sometimes I’d get e-mail or phone calls from people interested in investing, which I thought was crazy, because I just made up all the science on here. I just thought ‘kineoptic’ was a cool word, you know, like combining ‘kinetic’ and ‘optic,’ so, like, there it was.”
“This phone number,” I said. “Where does it ring?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “It’s an Internet number. It just records voice mail online.”
“Smart,” I said.
“Yeah?” he said.
“You survive the next two weeks of your life,” I said, “you should look into whether or not Langley is hiring.”
“I’m pretty much a pacifist,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “too bad. So people would contact you and you’d do what?”
“I used to just say stuff like, you know, ‘A major announcement will be made next year in Zurich and we’ll be able to provide you with more information at that time.’ But then I kept getting messages from this Russian technology import-export company that was very persistent in their desire to help fund my venture. I mean, I did my Googling, so I knew they were legit. I went through and looked at the coding on their Web site and all that. Even had a friend of mine who reads Russian read all the foreign stuff on them and, like, it sounded like some big faceless company, you know? Like some big asshole company that would screw the little guy. I mean. Yeah. That’s what I thought, you know?”
“Even though you built a Web site just like theirs, but probably even more sophisticated, in your dorm room?” Fi said.
“Well,” he said, “yeah, but, you know, I’m an American, so, yeah. And for a long time, like, it was a big joke with my classmates. If someone needed rent money or couldn’t make their car payment or whatever, they’d be like, ‘Call the Russians!’ So when my dad disappeared and the bookies started leaning on me, that’s what I did.”
“When did your dad go missing?” I said.
“Two months ago,” Brent said.
“You have any idea where he might be?”
“No,” he said. “He’s left before, like when I was a kid, but then it was only for like a week. He’d go get money somewhere and come back. He’d hook up with a bookie in some other city who didn’t know him and then he’d show back up when he could pay off his debt. Stupid.”
“How much does he owe?” I asked.
“I’ve already paid off sixty-five thousand bucks,” Brent said, as if it was nothing. I didn’t say anything. “But he’s got big tabs with guys all over town. Every week, a new guy shows up asking for his money. I’m supposed to meet a guy named Big Lumpy tomorrow to pay off part of a debt my dad has to him for fifteen large.”
“ Fifteen large. Really.”
“That’s how they talk,” Brent said. “That’s how my dad talks. I’m just telling you everything.”
“How do you know you’re not getting shaken down?” Fiona asked. “I don’t want to be morbid, but your father could already be dead.”
“He’s not,” Brent said. “Because I know he’s still betting. He took money out of a shared account of ours a week ago. It’s this old Christmas club account my mom gave me when I was born. He drained it.”
The problem with degenerate gamblers is that it’s never about winning or losing; it’s about the rush of playing. It blinds your ability to make good decisions. It ends up putting everything you have in jeopardy… like your son’s life.
“Okay,” I said. “So these guys come and demand money or they’re going to kill you, am I correct?”
“Me,” he said, “and everyone in my family. They gave me MapQuest directions to my aunt Jill’s house in Austin, my cousin Matthew in San Francisco and they even showed me a picture of my mother’s grave. They said they’d dig her up and kill her again. And when they find my dad, they said they’d kill him, too, but they’d do it slowly.”
“Here’s the thing, Brent,” I said. “If they kill you, they won’t get any more money. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah. So, great, I’m paralyzed or something instead. I’d rather be dead.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the police in the first place, Brent?” I said.
He got up off of the bed and began to pace my loft, much like Sugar had, much like half a dozen other clients had when faced with the one question that should be the easiest to answer. It portended extenuating situations, which I presumed would lead to the Russians.
“They told me not to,” he said.
“Right. Of course,” I said. “But was this before or after you contacted the Russians and took their money for a device that doesn’t exist?”
“How did you know?” Brent asked.
“Because I’m a spy,” I said. “And because you’re smart and did the only thing you could to save your father’s life. And I don’t know any other way you’d be able to get your hands on sixty-five thousand bucks. That nugget of information didn’t elude me, Brent.”
“Thanks. For the smart part, I mean.”
“But being smart is also the one thing that could likely get you killed,” I said. “How much did they send you?”
“Which time?”
“ Which time? How many times have there been?”
“Well, they asked to invest in the project and so at first I kept shining them on, just like all the others, until this all happened and I said, okay, they could get in on the Angel level for seventy-five thousand.”
“And what happened next?” I asked.
“They asked where they could wire the money,” Brent said.
That got Fiona interested. Money does that to her. Especially money garnered as an ill-gotten gain. “How long,” she asked, “would it take you to build me a Web site like this one of yours?”
“Fi,” I said. “Still not helping.”
“Michael, if Russian gangsters are giving away their money, why shouldn’t we profit from it? We could clearly cover our tracks much better than a dumb college kid. No offense, Brent.”
“Some taken,” he said. “And anyway, I didn’t know they were gangsters, like I said. I thought I was dealing with an accountant somewhere in the Ural Mountains.”
“What did you do with that money?” I asked.
“I paid the bookies and I paid my tuition, or else I was going to get kicked out of school. Dad didn’t pay any of my school stuff for the last six months, which I didn’t realize, of course, until he was gone. They were going to lock me out of the dorms and everything.”
“Okay,” I said. “How much do you have left?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Or, well, nothing from the first payment. I had them send me another seventy-five thousand two weeks ago, which was supposed to facilitate delivery of the initial specs for the project, which, you know, don’t exist.”
I was silent for a moment while I tried to figure out all of the mistakes Brent Grayson had made, all of the terrible choices he was forced to make by his father, Henry, and then the likelihood that I could be killed while trying to help him out of this barbed-wire corner.
“When did the Russians figure out that there was no InterMacron?” I asked.
“A couple of days ago, I guess,” he said. “After I didn’t deliver the specs, I guess they started to investigate things a little further and that’s when they said they would be at my dad’s office to either get their money or get their information and that’s when I called Sugar. He’s the baddest guy I know, so, you know, I thought he could help me with this.”
“Except you lied to him,” Fiona said.
“You know Sugar,” Brent said. “I didn’t want him knowing all that stuff.”
The kid had a valid point.
“What time are you supposed to meet Big Lumpy?” I asked.
“Noon,” he said. “At someplace called the Hair of the Dog. I’ve never been there, because I’m not twenty-one.”
“You defraud Russian gangsters but you’ve never been to a bar?” Fiona said.
“This is the first time I’ve
broken the law,” Brent said. “I mean, other than buying stuff from Sugar. But that’s just because I have a hard time sleeping.”
It was no wonder.
“Tomorrow I’ll go meet with Big Lumpy. I’ll explain the situation to him and I’m sure he’ll understand,” I said. “And then we’ll get to work on the Russians.”
“What about my father?”
“We’ll find him, too,” I said.
“I can pay you with whatever is left after you pay off Big Lumpy,” he said.
“I’m not going to pay Big Lumpy. And you’re not going to touch the money in that account. Got it?”
Brent didn’t say anything. Not good.
“How much have you spent, Brent?”
“I lent a girl I know some money,” he said. “She wanted a boob job and her parents wouldn’t pay for it.”
“Noble,” Fiona said.
“How much?” I said.
“Five grand,” he said. “And I bought a scooter. To get around campus.”
“How much?”
“Another five grand.”
“Anything else?”
“I had a small party,” he said. “And I bought another computer.”
“Why don’t you tell me how much of that $75K is left?”
“$45K.”
“Must have been some party,” I said.
“It was off the chain,” he said. “So, yeah, I can pay you with whatever is left.”
“You’re not going to pay me,” I said. “Don’t lose any sleep over it. What I need from you is every single piece of information that went back and forth between you and the Russians. Do you have that?”
“It’s all on my computers,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “All right. Why don’t you try to take another nap while Fiona and I step outside. Okay?”
There was a sweetness in my voice that I found nauseating. I made a note to myself never to have children. Or at least not helpless children.
“I’m not tired.”
“Then just sit here quietly,” I said.
Fiona and I got up to walk outside but Brent stopped us. “Look, out of all of this? I just want to find my dad and know he’s okay. He’s made a lot of mistakes in his life, but he’s still my father and I love him. I did this all for him.”
