Terminated

by Ray Daniel

  Huey said, his voice barely audible, “I’m doing this for Carol. I liked her.”

  “I know, pal.”

  “I always thought this was a cool site because they didn’t use models. They have hidden cameras, you know?”

  The webpage had pictures to indicate the different types of hidden cameras. One picture showed young girls climbing out of their field hockey skirts. It was called LockerCam. Another showed a naked woman yawning on a bed, waiting for a fat guy in a business suit to get his pants off. It was PimpCam. Finally came a picture of a girl tied to a cross, face down. It was called DungeonCam. Huey clicked on DungeonCam. No wonder he was embarrassed.

  “I found this,” Huey said in a tiny whisper.

  Huey clicked around the DungeonCam area and then found what he was looking for.

  The camera focused on a bed, a twin-sized box spring and mattress on a cheap frame. The mattress had no sheets, no blankets, no pillow. Four ropes ran off the mattress and down to the bed’s legs. The ropes connected to a woman’s arms and legs. She was spread-eagle on the bed, struggling to get comfortable. The woman was Alice Barton.

  Bobby said, “Son of a bitch.”

  A naked man entered the picture. Alice looked at him with wide eyes. She tugged at her wrists as he ran his hands over her breasts and spoke to her in Russian. He forced her to kiss him as he climbed between her legs. She stiffened as if being examined.

  Huey said, “When I saw this, I thought that Alice must be doing porn, you know, for kicks. But she’s not. She doesn’t like it. You can see it.”

  Bobby said, “It’s a kind of sexual slavery the Russians came up with. They get their hooks into drug addicts and force them to make movies like this. They make more money from the movies than they would by turning them into prostitutes. This makes sense.”

  I said, “Makes sense? What makes sense about Russians having their hooks into Alice?”

  “Tell you later.”

  Drugs? Oh, Alice.

  The movie had kept running on the tablet; the guy had started humping Alice. She was crying. I felt sick. Then the door to the cubby opened and Dana looked in. Huey reacted like he’d been hit with a Taser. He held the tablet behind him and cowered. Crying and moaning sounds slipped from video.

  Dana said, “What’s up, boys? Porn party?”

  Huey said, “No! No! Why would you say that?”

  I stood up and shielded Huey. I said, “Can we help you?”

  “I need to talk to you. The people at the desk said you were in here with Huey.” She ignored Bobby, who ignored her in turn.

  “Is it important?”

  Dana said, “Yeah, it’s important. Meet me at that Starbucks on Newbury Street in a half hour.”

  Dana shut the door, and I turned to Huey. I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Thanks, man.”

  “That’s OK,” said Huey.

  “You should get out of that costume and go home.”

  “What about Roland? He told me to come here.”

  I said, “Tell him to fuck himself.”

  Bobby agreed. “Yeah. Tell Roland to fuck himself. That’s a direct order from the FBI.”

  Huey grinned. He was feeling better, but there was no way he’d go home. He was a wimp. He’d be here for the rest of the show in his ass-crack breeches, poor guy.

  Bobby continued. “And, Huey, I don’t care what you look at on the Internet, but stop paying these guys. It’s blood money.”

  Huey’s grin faded. “I will.”

  Bobby and I left the cubby. I shut the door and said to Bobby, “Alice was a drug addict? How did I not notice?”

  Bobby pointed back toward the cubby with his thumb and said, “People are real good at hiding their dirty laundry.”

  “Huey was a mess.”

  Bobby started walking and I followed. “You know, they teach us in school that there are two primary motives for murder: money and sex.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

  “But there’s a third one.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Shame. People will do anything to avoid shame. Including …”

  “Killing someone?”

  Bobby tapped me on the chest and said, “Exactly.” He gave me a little shove toward the exit and said, “Go find out what Dana wants. She wouldn’t have come near me if it wasn’t important.”

  forty-eight

  Water dripped down the sides of my Frappuccino, a result of the humidity that had overwhelmed the air-conditioning system in Starbucks. I was sitting at the table where I had first met Dana, dorking around on my Twitter account.

  Hot, sweaty Frappuccino. Oh yeahhh!

  I flipped through the messages that mentioned me, and saw a recent one from @rubabemaster:

  @tuckerinboston I am following you.

  I tweeted back:

  @rubabemaster Thanks for the follow. And I am not a babe master.

  “Oh, baby, you’re so cute when you’re geeking out.” Carol had appeared.

  I took out my cell headset and put it in my ear while Carol watched with amusement.

  I said, “Hello,” into my fake phone call.

  Carol said in a nasal voice, “Mr. Tucker, we have a collect call from beyond the grave. Do you accept the charges?”

  “Do I have a choice?” I said. Then, “Did you know that Alice was a drug addict?”

  Carol slipped out of her nasal voice. “I suspected.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “You mean you don’t remember that time I said, ‘I think there’s something wrong with Alice?’”

  “No.”

  “How about when I said that Alice seemed to get sick a lot?”

  “No.”

  “Or the time I said, ‘I think Alice has a drug problem’?”

  “Nope.”

  “That was the problem, baby. You just didn’t want to hear it. You didn’t care.”

  “Of course I cared.”

  Carol evaporated as Dana sat in her seat holding a red iced tea, shaken not stirred. She was wearing a pink polo shirt with the MantaSoft logo over the left breast. Dana put her thumb and forefinger up to her ear, pantomiming a phone, and mouthed, “Who are you talking to?”

  I pocketed my headset and asked, “Did you know that Alice did cocaine?”

  Dana paused, looking at me and sipping her red drink. Then she said, “Her addiction is how I got here.”

  I stared. I had missed something again. I couldn’t get my bearings on this problem. My debugging skills usually got me through life’s puzzles, though I have to admit they were useless when it came to understanding Carol and they were failing me again now. I was out of my depth.

  Dana moved over to my side of the table and sat next to me, snuggling in as if we were on a date. She smelled of the shampoo from my shower. She crowded my mind. “Local cops arrested Alice for possession, and the narcotics guys wanted to roll up her dealer network. So they squeezed her. Instead of giving up the network, she gave up MantaSoft.” She gave my ear a little bite. I shuddered.

  I would have returned the ear bite, but Dana’s lobes were guarded by spiky earrings and I didn’t want my lip pierced. I whispered back, “What did Alice tell them?”

  “That someone in MantaSoft was selling Rosetta. That’s when Kevin and I got involved. We forced Alice to get one of us hired. Alice said that Roland liked cute girls, and, well—” Dana made a Vanna White gesture down her body. She got up, sat back on her side of the table, and sipped her red tea.

  I leaned forward and whispered, “I’ll give you a hint about that. Did you know that Alice was being forced to make porn?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just saw a video of Alice, tied to a bed, getting screwed by some Russian asshole. She didn’t look happy about it.�
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  “Sexual slavery.”

  “Yeah, at least that’s what Bobby said.”

  “She never told me. Dammit. I would have put her into the protection program faster if she had told me.” Dana paused and clicked her nail against her plastic cup. Her lips tightened; she closed her eyes and shook her head. “It was bad enough she was killed because of me, but now I hear she was tortured too.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t kill her or torture her.”

  “If I threw Alice in a lion’s den, I wouldn’t be the one who killed her, but I’d be responsible. Just like I’m responsible now. These people are killers. It was just that I needed her help with the code. Like you said, I’m not a real engineer.”

  “That didn’t work out, either.”

  “You mean because she’s dead?”

  “I mean because she wasn’t a real engineer either. She’s the one who broke that code, not you. Alice was randomly making changes trying to figure out what worked. It was a disaster.”

  “Well, it’s not broken anymore, thanks to you,” Dana said. “I think maybe you did too good a job.”

  “Why?”

  “I saved your changes into the central server last night. Roland called about an hour later. He was happy as hell, telling me I did a great job, and I was an asset to the team.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It was, except that I just saw Roland talking to Margaret Bronte at her booth, and neither one of them was happy. Then they looked at me and looked away again. Something was up, so I went over to see what was going on. That’s when Roland said to Margaret, ‘Here’s little Miss Fix-It.’”

  “What did Margaret say?”

  “Nothing, she just turned and left. Didn’t even acknowledge me.”

  My phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and said, “Speak of the devil.”

  Margaret was on the line. She said, “Tucker, do you have a suit?”

  I said, “Of course I have a suit.”

  I didn’t have a suit.

  Margaret said, “Well, wear one, dear. I’m taking you out to dinner at Mooo tonight. We need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Your future. Meet me there at seven.” She hung up. The phone switched back to the Twitter app. I saw another mention of my name. I clicked on it automatically. It was from @rubabemaster, replying to our thread.

  @tuckerinboston Enjoy your milkshake. It is your last.

  I frowned at my phone.

  Dana said, “What is it?”

  “Some asshole just tweeted me. He mentioned my drink. He’s watching us.”

  We looked out through the big Starbucks plate-glass window. A large black car parked across the street pulled into traffic. It drove off to my left toward Mass Ave. Dmitri was driving.

  Dana said, “Shit. He’s seen us together. That’s not good. How did he know you were here? Did he follow you?”

  “I’m pretty sure Jael would have warned me.”

  Dana crossed her arms and looked around. “It’s almost like he planted a GPS on you.”

  Then it hit me. I looked at the Twitter app on my BlackBerry and realized that I had just committed the worst kind of engineering error: the failure of imagination. The deadly fire on Apollo 1, the Challenger explosion, and the Columbia disintegration were all caused by failures of imagination. Whether it was oxygenated Velcro, cold O-rings, or Styrofoam punching a hole in the spaceship, all three disasters were caused by things that looked obvious in hindsight. In my case, it was the location finder on my Twitter app.

  In all these cases, somebody was shouting a warning before the disaster, a person who was ignored until later being considered a prophet. In my case, that was Kevin. He had warned me about the “creepy” feature, and that feature had gotten him killed.

  I said, “It’s my fault.”

  Dana asked, “How is it your fault?”

  “My tweets all had my location on them. Dmitri’s been following me on Twitter.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Tucker, how could you be so stupid?”

  Definitely a failure of imagination. Dmitri had found me at the Apple Store, on the bridge, and in the hotel all because I had tweeted my location to him. No wonder he was a step ahead of me. I was my own spy.

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry’s not going to help when he machine-guns you.”

  “I mean I’m sorry that he’s seen us together. It’s going to expose you.”

  “No it won’t. As far as he or anyone else knows, I’m just the programmer who fixed Rosetta and screwed up the deal. Whatever that means.”

  “You should quit,” I said.

  “This from the guy with the stitches on his forehead and the garrote mark on his neck.”

  I pulled up my shirt, exposing my seeping butterfly bandages. “You forgot the knifing.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “This morning.”

  “You have got to leave town.”

  I fiddled with my phone and deleted the Twitter app. I was tired of being stupid.

  Dana reached out and touched the cut. I winced.

  “Seriously,” she said. “Run.”

  I gave her a quick kiss on the lips and then stood up.

  Dana asked, “Where are you going?”

  “To buy a suit,” I said. “I hear Mooo is a pretty classy joint.”

  forty-nine

  I had always wanted to buy an expensive suit. I stood in a three-way mirror in a men’s clothing store on Newbury Street that was so trendy it didn’t have a sign. Instead it had suits displayed in a second-story window. A gray Belvest jacket draped over my shoulders. Its sleeves reached that perfect spot just below my wrist and above my thumb, and its collar ran into my back as smoothly as a seal’s pelt.

  “Baby, it’s perfect,” said Carol. She was standing next to me in the changing area.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You look hot.”

  “Wow. You haven’t said that in years. I should have bought a suit earlier.”

  “You would never have worn it. Still, you do look hot.”

  Carol’s plum funeral dress hugged her hips. My hands wanted to cradle those hips, and my fingers wanted to rest on the small of her back. Instead I said, “I always loved that dress.”

  Carol plucked at the purple fabric and said, “What, this old thing? I only wear it when I don’t care how I look.”

  “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I said. Memories of popcorn and snuggling crowded into my mind.

  Carol asked, “Remember how we’d watch that movie every year?”

  “It always made you cry.”

  “It always made you cry, you big softie.”

  I smiled and Carol sniffed, wiping a tear from her cheek. I can look at the most complex software in the world and tease out the one thing that breaks it, but I was never able to debug my marriage. Carol and I had birthed a fiery relationship, then watched in horror as it took on a life of its own, grabbed us by the throats, and dragged us down into unhappiness.

  I went back to adjusting the blue-and-gray striped tie.

  Carol said, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” I had decided to go with a four-in-hand knot.

  Carol paused, looking at me in my suit. In the mirror, she reached up to touch me on my shoulder, but withdrew.

  “I’m sorry that you’re wasting your life over me.”

  I turned. “I’m not wasting my life. We need to know what happened. You deserve it.”

  “No, I don’t deserve it. Nobody does. I’d give anything to be with you again. I love you. But we can’t be together again, even when you die.”

  “I’m not going to die,” I said.

  “You’re going to have dinner with Margaret Bronte, aren’t you?”
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br />   “Yeah.”

  “Then you’re going to die.”

  fifty

  The sommelier’s nose was long, hooked, and tucked deeply into a snifter of thirty-year-old Glenlivet Scotch. He breathed deeply, sucking in the essence of the drink. Margaret had bought the Scotch and had asked him to analyze it as after-dinner entertainment.

  We had just finished our meal in Mooo, a fancy steakhouse next to the golden dome on Boston’s Beacon Hill. Margaret and I sat in plush seats in the corner of a plush room. The restaurant was quiet, as if the mundane sounds of clanking silverware would not be tolerated within its rarified environment. Square columns held up a high ceiling, and I kept looking for John Kerry to come in with Teresa Heinz on his arm.

  “Complex sherry. I’m getting spice and ginger, some fruit in there, fresh fruit, and some wood—oh, and there is a hint of dried fruit as well. Peach?”

  I sniffed my own thirty-year-old Glenlivet. It smelled like Scotch.

  He sipped his drink and pronounced, “Light mouth feel. Vanilla hints.”

  I sipped mine. It tasted exactly like Scotch. A little lighter than I liked.

  The sommelier knocked the whole drink back as if he was doing a shot, but he didn’t swallow. The Scotch sat in his mouth as he closed his eyes and put his head back, then breathed out through that nose. Finally, he swallowed it and proclaimed his verdict.

  “An explosion of spices, fresh fruit, and oak. Well crafted.”

  I knocked mine back. It tasted like more Scotch, and now my glass was empty.

  “Would you like another, dear?” Margaret asked. She motioned to the server, who was standing by and refilled my glass.

  “Try the next one with an ice cube, sir,” said the sommelier.“It will fully expose the complexity.”

  “Thanks,” I said. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Margaret Bronte was trying to get me drunk—again.

  “This is the life that wealth affords us,” said Margaret, as the sommelier and server dissolved into the background.

  “It’s good to be the king,” I said.

  “Yes. Or queen.”