by Camilla Monk
In the mirror, March was observing us. I snatched my hand away with a faint blush and ignored Alex to focus on the traffic surrounding us, and Manhattan’s skyline stretching along the East River.
I’m gonna sound a little dramatic, but our arrival on Roosevelt Island struck me as a plunge into another world, the harsh red lines of the bridge a gate to quiet limbos where time had stopped. It probably had something to do with the dark clouds growing in the sky above our heads, and also it was only quarter to three, so everyone was either at work, school, or safely inside their apartments. There was something eerie about those deserted streets and parks, the lines of identical brick buildings. No passersby, not a sound except for an occasional birdcall echoing in the distance. The colors themselves seemed faded, blending into the ashen sky and giving me the impression that the entire place was shrouded in a gray veil. Granted, the fact that we were there to visit a dead man’s place didn’t help.
The Lexus glided down Main Street. I checked the numbers on each building. “465. March, it’s this one.”
He parked a little farther down the street, and the three of us stepped out. The spacious and brightly lit lobby was a sharp contrast with the dull external appearance of this soulless LEGO, with its white walls and wooden panels. Spotting Thom’s name on the intercom, I exchanged looks with March and Alex, silently asking for permission to ring. The jerk of Alex’s chin was my cue; I pressed the button and waited. In vain.
“They’re gone, you know—staying with the grandparents in Fort Lee.”
At the other end of the hall, the door to the super’s office had opened and a fiftysomething man with graying hair now stood in front of us. He scratched his beer belly absently through a brown plaid knit vest.
“Mr. Degraeves?” Alex asked with a friendly smile.
“The one and only.”
“You saw my colleagues yesterday.”
“You one of those Feds again?”
“I’m Agent Morgan—” He flashed his badge briefly, not long enough for the man to figure he wasn’t FBI, I thought. Then he pointed to March and me. “And these people are consultants working with me.”
There was some more scratching, and the super stared at us for a little while, cocking his head as if to better assess who he was dealing with. He pointed at the ceiling with his index finger. “You need to go up there again?”
“Yes,” Alex confirmed. “Can I ask you to open the apartment for us?”
“Sure. Come with me.”
Degraeves called the elevator, and we all joined him inside while he pressed the button for the tenth floor.
Now that I was standing so close to him, it was becoming obvious that the guy’s belly was, indeed, full of beer. From the corner of my eye, I registered March’s lips pressing in disapproval. “So, Emma and Tobias are staying with Thom’s parents?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s been tough. You know, all those cops, neighbors talking . . .”
“I understand,” I said.
The car stopped, its doors opening on a long white hallway lined with dark doors.
Degraeves pointed to the left. “This way.”
It was hard for me to place the feeling, but I experienced a sort of guilt when the super unlocked the door to Thom’s apartment. I had been there a few times, for dinner or the last-minute wrap-up of an important presentation. Now that he was gone, though, being there in his living room, surrounded by his son’s toys, his family pictures . . . it felt like invading his privacy, forcefully taking something he hadn’t offered this time. I looked around, filled by a sense of familiarity that was now laced with grief. Thom’s place reminded me of Joy’s and mine, only bigger. It was a heteroclite mix of styles and colors betraying a series of genuine attempts at interior design thwarted by the purchase of an eighties leather La-Z-Boy and Star Wars figurines.
Degraeves stood in the apartment’s doorway while March and Alex started examining the furniture, the lamps, the windowpanes, dissecting every detail of Thom’s life with practiced eyes. I left the living room in search of any computer or connected devices he might have kept at home. A pang of sadness tugged at my heart upon passing the door to little Tobias’s bedroom. It was slightly ajar, allowing me to glimpse a heap of stuffed toys and a few crayons on the floor. Next was a large bathroom with blue tiling, facing Thom’s bedroom—I didn’t enter either of them. There was something disturbingly intimate about touching anything in there while Emma and her son were away; I chose to leave that to March and Alex.
At the end of the hallway, a third door led to Thom’s office, with its shelves crammed full of programming books and, sitting majestically on the old black desk, an unfinished LEGO model of CERN’s large hadron collider—his latest magnum opus. I hoped Tobias would grow up knowing just how cool his dad had been.
I sank in the large blue gamer chair facing the desk. It was weird to see it empty like that. There would usually be at least two old Macs, Thom’s huge PC tower, several external hard drives, and an entire cardboard box of wires and mystery tech junk in a corner of the room. But I gathered Alex’s colleagues had taken all that stuff during their previous visit. I doubted they’d find anything, though, save for the most heavily modded install of Skyrim any mortal had ever witnessed.
My fingers played absently with the LEGO model in front of me. Something had happened in the past weeks, which had culminated last night, and led us here and now. Thom had been standing on the edge of a cliff, while I was too preoccupied about that stupid date to reach out to him.
I picked a blue LEGO plate to complete the dodecagonal barrel hosting the collider. What was I missing this time?
We’ve all been there: someone enters the kitchen, you’re standing near the oven with your sweatpants down, chocolate cake batter everywhere, a mixer in one hand, your stepmom’s cat in the other, and all you can say is “It’s not what it looks like.”
I kind of felt like this when March and Alex entered Thom’s office ten minutes later, followed by Degraeves, while I was sitting at Thom’s desk in front of several boxes of LEGOs, wires, batteries, and LEDs—I was almost done completing the circular particle tracker.
I looked up at them. Alex was scratching his chin, one eyebrow raised, while March’s hands had clenched into fists and his breath was getting a little short, like he was hyperventilating.
“It’s because it helps me think—” I whined, letting go of Thom’s LEGOs.
“Have you found anything yet?” March asked, scanning the mess on Thom’s desk with a frown.
I shrugged and shook my head. “No. Your colleagues took everything. If it’s not on his devices, I don’t think it’ll be anywhere in here.”
March pointed at the LEGOs scattered on the desk. “Do we still need these?”
“Not really, they’re—”
Before I had the time to finish, he had already moved, and the desk’s surface was being cleared at a surprising speed. Bricks were sorted by shape, size, and color, wires were untangled and coiled into neat bundles, and everything was stacked in the corresponding box. Once he was done, a contented smile stirred March’s lips.
Alex, on the other hand, seemed deflated; his “ace,” as he had called me, had ultimately proved useless. Well, almost, I thought, as I inserted a button cell in Thom’s LEGO model. The large hadron collider was complete.
“Check this,” I announced, watching the inside of the barrel light up thanks to an ingenious system of pink and orange LEDs. Very movie-like. I could tell March and Alex weren’t impressed yet, though.
I grabbed some small plastic pearls in one of the LEGO boxes and loaded them on each side of the barrel. “Then I think you press here to fire them against each other—haven’t tested it yet.”
While Alex watched with an expression of incredulity, March bent toward the LEGO model to press on the block I was pointing at. A small click resounded, and indeed the two plastic pearls were released and collided in the barrel. At the same time a small piece fell off.
“Is it broken already?” March asked anxiously.
“I don’t know,” I said, reaching inside the barrel to retrieve the piece. “It doesn’t look like a LEGO brick. I’m not sure where it goes.”
Once I held the tiny object in front of my eyes, I realized it wasn’t a LEGO, but rather a micro SD card.
“That’s MacGyver shit!”
The three of us turned to look at Degraeves, who had been watching the whole operation with undisguised interest.
March gave him the cold-killer look. “Can you wait in the living room, please?”
Degraeves padded away reluctantly. “You the boss, sir.”
Once the guy’s back was turned to us, March and Alex moved closer to examine the SD card.
“I’ll plug it in my phone and check what’s on it,” I said, hardly able to contain the excitement in my voice.
I went to get my phone in my bag and sank back in the gamer chair’s soft blue leather while March and Alex stood on each side, leaning against its back to better watch the screen. Two perfectly timed sighs of annoyance caressed my hair when a password prompt popped up on the screen. Of course the data was protected. But thanks to Colin’s efforts, I was pretty sure I knew what to type in that field.
My doom has come upon me.
“Is this that quote he used as a password to protect his files at EMT?” Alex asked as my fingers danced on the glass screen.
“Yes.” I pressed Enter, only to deflate instantly when a red window appeared on the screen. “Dammit. We don’t have time for this!”
“Twice the same password . . . that would have been too much luck,” Alex commented grimly.
My fingers rapped on the desk as I went through my options. We could just take the drive and abandon decrypting its content for now; there was no telling what sort of secondary protection protocol might start if I entered one too many wrong passwords. But just one last try—surely we could afford that. My eyes searched his desk for a hint, anything that might sound like the perfect password. No, Thom had probably stuck to using a full sentence; staring at his stapler wouldn’t help.
March, at least, had refrained from commenting on my failure. But, above me, his breath was a little unsteady. I didn’t want to disappoint him—to disappoint anyone. I didn’t want to lose. I stared at the screen. In my mind, flashes of conversations replayed, a kaleidoscope of words, memories I had with Thom, of Colin and me cracking his password.
This is taken from Homer’s Iliad. It’s the part where Hector is about to die.
“I want to make one last try,” I mumbled as I typed the sentence, praying my brain cells wouldn’t betray me. “But we’ll probably need Colin again.”
It wasn’t actual joy, but when on the screen the window’s fire-engine red faded to a welcoming green, I laughed. I watched my phone grant us access to the SD card’s content, a series of nervous chortles shaking my frame. It was so logical, so . . . beautiful, in a way.
“Sometimes I wish I had a flashlight and could take a trek in there,” March said in a tender, almost reverent tone, tapping his index finger against my skull gently. “What was it?”
I looked up. “Back at EMT, we found that Thom had used a famous line from The Iliad to encrypt his code: My doom has come upon me. I thought maybe I’d try the second part of that line: Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle.”
As it was, Thom’s choice of password didn’t leave much doubt regarding the circumstances of his involvement in the Ruby scheme, and the pictures he had scanned and stored on this card only drove this point home. They were a little grainy, likely taken with a telephoto lens: his wife and son at the park, the three of them in their living room, Thom leaving EMT’s building. Someone had threatened him and made it clear that he had nowhere to hide.
On my right shoulder, I felt a warm touch—Alex’s hand. “You were right. He was trapped, and he tried to leave bread crumbs.”
A little huff escaped March. “Island, is there anything else on the drive? What’s this file?” He pointed to a text file, among the images.
I tapped to open it. One line of code. A bit underwhelming, if you ask me.
RR extends coreLaunch {}
“What is that?” Alex inquired.
“No idea . . . coreLaunch is one of Ruby’s classes. It basically gathers all the necessary configuration info, checks that all the files are ready, and launches the program. But I’m pretty sure we don’t have any class called ‘RR’ extending this one. Maybe it’s something Thom added to the version of Ruby that was on the servers he destroyed?”
Alex’s hand finally slid away from my shoulder to point at the code. “You told Ellingham you were worried Ruby’s code might have been stolen. Do you think Thom could have added this ‘class’ to help find it?”
“I don’t know. Given what coreLaunch does, it’s more likely that it’s a set of hidden functions meant to tweak Ruby’s launch parameters. Perhaps even make it crash entirely.”
He winked at me. “I like the sound of that.”
“So do I,” March concurred. “Now what we need is to understand who recruited Roth. I’ll ask Phyllis to arrange a flight to Zürich. Mr. Morgan, please warn your superior that Struthio will bill his division for any expense made on your behalf. Processing fees will apply.”
A whiff of good-guy cologne reached my nose as Alex leaned forward. “Processing fees?”
“Yes.”
“Let me make sure I get this right: You ruined my tires, and now you’re going to bill the CIA ‘processing fees’ for the trip you’re already billing them?”
“Yes. Five percent fixed rate.” March typed something on his phone. “Would you like to subscribe to our options package? There’s a supplement.”
“What’s in it?” Alex asked warily.
“Seat, parachute, light meal. Drinks not included.”
I sprang up from the chair. “What the hell, March?”
“I’m sorry, Island, rates and packages are determined annually; this is out of my hands.”
A destitute childhood had left March a bit of a tightwad in some regards, and I remembered one of his friends once telling me that he negotiated his flights from Paulie, a rather nice mobster operating an illegal private airline in Pennsylvania. Squaring my shoulders, I glared at him. “What about the Paulie Airlines discount?”
March’s jaw ticked. “I don’t think Mr. Morgan qualifies for this program.”
“But I do?”
His features relaxed. “Of course.” He reached inside his jacket for a small leather wallet, from which he pulled a golden rectangular plastic chip with a little plane engraved on it. He placed it in my hand. “Free flights. Free drinks. It’s yours.”
I held the coupon in my hands for a few seconds, looking into March’s eyes, in that ocean of blue. And I wondered if he understood that I didn’t care about free flights, that I didn’t need him to make Alex miserable in order to assert some sort of virile superiority. Apparently not.
I handed him the golden chip back with a sigh. “I’m redeeming it; I want a seat for Alex. And a parachute.”
Ever a master of self-control, March took the chip with a curt nod, the rise of his chest and the tightening of his lips the only hints that he was, in fact, seething.
A cocky smile tugged at the corners of Alex’s lips, while March reached inside his jacket for a tube of extra-strong mints and poured a couple into his hand. Oh, I knew this posture, this face—the slanting of his eyes, the way his molars ground the candy with muted sounds. The last time March had looked at me like this, I had ended up in his trunk as retribution for a similar display of insubordination.
FIFTEEN
The Medal
“Book your tickets to hell.”
—Quasimodo d’El Paris, 1999
When we stepped out on Main Street, the sky had turned a dark gray, and a light drizzle had started to fall, the characteristic scent of rain on grass and asphalt permeating the air. I saw a coup
le of passersby in the park facing the waterfront, but other than that, the area was still as deserted as ever. Maybe it’d get a little better after five, when people would come home. Along the Queensboro Bridge, I could see the Roosevelt Tram approaching the island, its red car dangling from its cable a measly 250 feet above the East River. I had never taken it. Never needed to, for one, and, well, the idea of being trapped up there made me feel a little queasy. As one of my dad’s friends put it: “They had it renovated by the French. French cars. French cables. Cables that surrender! Would you ride in a tram that surrenders? I sure as hell wouldn’t!”
Alex’s palm on my chest took me by surprise. Don’t get ideas: he was merely blocking me, and I realized March had frozen as well. Both men’s jaws were set, their upper bodies imperceptibly leaning forward as they gazed at the Lexus twenty yards away.
“Not like you to litter, Mr. November,” Alex said in a low voice.
“Indeed, Mr. Morgan.”
I squinted at the car. Alex was right. I would never have noticed, but less than an inch away from March’s visible front tire lay some kind of discarded burger wrapper, which could have, indeed, been the result of a random act of littering, but, with the right amount of paranoia, it almost looked like it had been placed . . . with the clear intent for the car to drive on it. My eyes traveled back and forth between the two of them. “What is it? What’s wrong with the car?”
March stepped in front of me. “Island, stay back, please.”
A chill coursed through my body. My eyes never left his gloved hands as he pushed back his left sleeve to reveal a high-end black chronograph I knew. He pressed a button on the side, turning the glass into an LCD screen. Would he use it to text someone, like I had seen him do in Tokyo? He seemed busy rotating the bezel ring instead. Lights flashed twice in the distance. I refrained from applauding when the Lexus’s engine started, because judging from the looks on March and Alex’s faces, this was not the time to imitate a sea lion—I do it well, though.
