Eventually, his mind boggling, he pushed a stack of files to one side.
‘So you take ten percent of all profit, is that it?’ the boy asked.
‘That’s what I’ve been doing since the start,’ Kralinsky confirmed. ‘I ploughed it back into the company in the early days to give us working capital, but now I convert most of it to shares, apart from what I need to run my own project.’
‘That’s your technology college for the underprivileged—how’s it going?’
‘Great,’ Kralinsky said, ‘a lot of the guys from here put in free time and there’s plenty of junk equipment I can use. It becomes obsolete so quickly these days, but it’s still cutting edge for teaching. It’s the best dressed tech college in New York, and it’s completely free for those who qualify,’ he added, proudly.
The boy nodded, chewing on a pizza crust. His time on the streets had left him with a gnawing appetite as if his body still wasn’t sure where the next meal was coming from. He still couldn’t believe his enormous wealth, all down to Kralinsky’s skill, nerve and scrupulous honesty.
His former teacher had earlier asked him what he wanted to do, but he hadn’t been ready to answer. The business fascinated him, however his interest was more that of an end-user. He could see the use of the applications alright, but to involve himself in making them …?
‘Do I really need to get my head around all this stuff—do I have to be here?’ he asked.
Kralinsky laughed.
‘Not at all. You’re the boss. If you want to spend every minute of your time elsewhere, so be it. I’d rather you helped with the major decision making though. You know, the direction of the company, important financial matters, that sort of thing.’
‘You’ve managed well enough without me so far,’ the boy replied, shaking his head.
‘That’s true,’ Kralinsky agreed, ‘but I’d like to spread our wings a little further. I’ve been keeping my eye on some research into World Wide Web page searching by some young fellas over at Stanford and I’m keen for us to be involved. It’s exciting and it could make us a few bucks.’
The boy made his decision.
‘How about all this becomes yours,’ he said, watching Kralinsky’s eyes widen. ‘You deserve it. I’d like an option to buy enough shares to give you the cash flow to invest in new projects too. Would that work for you?’
Kralinsky nodded dumbly.
‘You’ve made me incredibly wealthy and given me the opportunity to fulfill a promise I made years ago. This morning I was totally down and out and I owe my change of fortune to only one person—you.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Kralinsky eventually asked.
‘Remember all those years ago when I left to go to the institute, I told you what my aim was.’
‘I remember,’ Kralinsky said, ‘you said you were going to find the people who killed your parents and make them suffer. Is that it still?’
‘It is,’ the boy said, without a smile, ‘and I think I know how to do it.’
The boy leaned forward and explained his plan. When he’d finished his former teacher stared at him.
‘You’re definitely going to need some of that money,’ he said.
‘And I’m going to need lots more of your help,’ the boy replied. ‘This will only work if my association with you is kept well away from public scrutiny. From now on I’m just an ordinary guy and we’ll both have to be very careful that we’re always one step ahead of whoever’s digging.’
‘You’re expecting some hard lookers?’
The boy nudged an empty pizza box, lining it up against the edge of the table.
‘Not to start with,’ he replied. ‘But, by the time I’m finished, there’ll be people ready to dissect me like a bug to find out what makes me tick.’
Kralinsky stared at the ceiling for a moment.
‘Well I’d better handle this myself,’ he said, meeting the boy’s steady gaze. ‘It sounds like far too much fun.’
16.
When threads unravel
Two funeral services were starting within an hour of each yet, in demographic terms, they were worlds apart.
In a lovely old chapel in NE Washington, Ben stood flanked by secret service agents. One or two of his and Juan’s former colleagues looked quizzically across the mass of mourners packed into the place to catch his eye. He shrugged, knowing they would take the gesture as one of resignation—they’d think it was all part of some mission he was on.
The fact that Cara was absent was painful. Every second since that night he’d wondered if she was still alive and if there was anything he could have done to prevent her abduction. They’d heard nothing. No demands, no threats. The blood had turned out to be from a pig and the note hadn’t revealed anything that helped. The listening devices in the house were sophisticated yet easily bought from a hundred shops in the US or straight off the Internet.
Juan’s family had looked to him for advice. Should they go ahead, or wait a while? After five days, Ben had given them the go-ahead. How could he not? Without progress or the slightest hint from the abductors, finding Cara dead or alive could take weeks. When, if, they found her, he would make it up.
He knew Sam wasn’t far away watching both him and the proceedings. They’d argued for hours after he’d informed her that he was going to Juan’s service. It was too dangerous, she told him. He was being foolhardy. She had good cause to be concerned. His apartment had been professionally entered and searched while they were meeting in the diner, so someone was very interested in him.
Going off the radar had been quite simple for him. He was the only person who knew the location of two of the company’s safe locations in Washington and he chose the apartment in Reston for good reason. One room was already equipped with the best ZZ-Zero encryption. From there he could bypass the office and safely run his entire communications from the powerful flexi-pad he carried in his coat. There were just too many ears out there for Ben’s liking.
The smartcom in his pocket vibrated once. He checked his watch and saw that the text message scrolling across its face was from Sam. Hey, good looking, nod if you’re OK. He smiled and moved his head twice. There was no point looking for her. She was too good—in more ways than one.
It was a problem, and they shouldn’t have let it happen. But in the sweet afterglow of their fierce lovemaking, they both knew they were hooked on each other and they’d have to deal with it somehow. In the first place it was foolish of him to ask her back to the apartment—an unacceptable lapse in security, and then for her to accept… He’d been planning simple cannelloni and a glass of cabernet as they drove in a companionable silence. And they had enjoyed the meal—four hours later.
As the door to the apartment closed behind them and Ben’s hand activated security, all thoughts of food were gone. Sam had been shocked at her total lack of control as she and Ben desperately tore at each other’s clothes. The last thing Ben heard Sam say before they tumbled onto the bed was, ‘Are you sure about this?’ He was then, still was now, and knew she felt the same.
‘What do you want to do?’ she asked him over the delayed cannelloni. It hadn’t suffered from the waiting at all.
‘Have another glass of wine,’ he’d replied teasing her. He knew exactly what she meant.
‘Seriously,’ he said, taking her hand, ‘I can’t believe this has happened. I never imagined I’d ever feel this way about anyone again. I’ve found you and I’m not letting you go—ever.’
Sam’s eyes swam with tears.
‘Sorry,’ she said, putting her napkin over her face for a moment. ‘I’m not used to this at all. Let me just say that I feel the same. In fact, if you try and get away, I’ll shoot you.’
Sam was quiet for a moment.
‘Look,’ she continued, ‘I’m not treating this lightly, or turning my back on it, but we have a job to do. Maybe we should enjoy tonight and then pick this back up when we’re in the clear?’
Ben agreed, unable to fa
ult the logic of it. But, of course, it never happened that way. Although they were back to business early next morning, examining the copies of the emails Cara had received from her friend Kristen in Sydney, when Sam picked up her purse and keys and turned to say goodnight at the end of the day, she never made it to the door.
The emails from Kristen worried them badly. It had been simple for one of Ben’s team to hack into her email account and download six month’s worth. The first ones to Cara were ranting and angry with Kristen despairing over her husband’s drinking and his inability to write. They read as she described him swinging from apathy to frustrated rage as pressure from his agent to deliver built up.
For Sam and Ben, the light bulb moment was Kristen’s gradual realisation that there was a frightening connection between Zach’s two books and the way people were behaving towards each other. They read, fascinated, as she picked up threads, conducted informal surveys among friends and began to tie the evidence together. In the last two weeks she’d become convinced that her premise was true and begun to research the psychology of subliminal messaging.
As Kristin delved into text and image stimulation and their effect on human behaviour and emotion, her emails became hurried and less coherent. She repeatedly expressed concern that she was running out of time.
At first Sam and Ben were skeptical. Both of them had covered subliminal messaging in various psych studies over the years and shared the common belief that no long-term effect had ever been achieved. Most of the work had been done on the effectiveness of advertising that operated below the threshold of consciousness and earlier claims of its extraordinary results had since proven to be grossly over-rated.
But clearly Kristen had been driven and the possibility that she was onto something substantial began to niggle at them. She believed that a powerful and irresistible psychological trigger that caused long-term anger and frustration had been buried in the text of Zack’s books, and she was convinced that her husband had no idea it was there. What ultimately brought her to that conclusion was realizing that Zack’s own mental deterioration hadn’t started until he was checking the galley proofs.
‘Galley proofs?’ Ben said. ‘That sounds a bit archaic.’
‘It’s an antiquated term they still use in publishing,’ Sam told him, ‘even if a book isn’t actually going to be physically printed and bound in the traditional sense, it must be checked after everyone’s made changes. In the old days of lead type and printing presses the type was set into wooden galleys. The impression taken of that was the galley proof.’
‘Aah,’ Ben said, ‘so there would be no changes made after that?’
‘No, not really,’ Sam said thoughtfully. ‘Of course in our electronic age, changes are easy to make right up to the last moment, especially if the book is only for flexi-readers. Normally the only people who would have access to the file, and the authority to change it, would be the editor and the author.’
‘Well, the editor’s out of the picture—I checked. He was killed in a car smash just after the second book came out. I’ve got an urgent query in with Australia’s traffic boys in New South Wales and they’re jumping. It makes all the diff when you have presidential authority, doesn’t it?’
Sam smiled as she highlighted another email on her flexi-pad.
‘Before these books, Corsfield was a caring and loving father and husband, not the cranky devil his wife ended up with,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t see him being a willing victim of his own finagling, can you?’
‘Definitely not,’ Ben said, ‘and the last email certainly makes it clear that Kristen thought the same. Fuck!’
‘What, right now?’ Sam laughed.
Then she saw the expression on his face.
‘Go on!’
Ben quickly finished reading and looked up.
‘According to that last email, she handcuffed him to the office desk to make him write a thanks but no thanks letter to his agent. She was forcing him to bow out of writing the last book.’
‘They would have sued the pants off him,’ Sam said.
‘Kristen didn’t care,’ Ben said, skimming through the email. ‘She saw the big picture and knew something very bad was going down. She realized that Corsfield was totally dumb to it all and decided to take the initiative. She says that she discussed the fact that his books were related to an international dis-ease before she handcuffed him. She went out leaving him with no alcohol and a bucket to pee in.’
‘And then she has an accident.’
‘Sam, what time was that accident in Sydney?’
She checked her flexi-pad.
‘Eleven thirty in the morning. Why?’
‘The last email that Kristen sent was at the time of the accident. I was trying to figure out what she’d written at the end of it—‘send, send, send’, and thought she was asking Cara to send her something. It’s not that at all. It’s Kristen, instructing her phone to send the email right up to the last moment before her car went over the cliff. Her smartcom thought she was dictating before it caught on and fired the message off.’
Sam lifted the phone.
‘Kristen Corsfield better have some heavy-duty protection, starting right now.’
‘And we better start looking real hard for her husband,’ Ben said, picking up another handset.’
*
Ben shifted his gaze around the throng, pausing briefly to note the President’s grief-drawn face. This was the end of the man’s second term and the weight of office was showing.
Last night, from the secure environment of Ben’s safe house, he and Sam had connected with the President in the White House image projection room. The President had looked stunned to see them sitting there next to him.
‘It feels so real,’ he said, extending his hand into the empty space where Ben sat shuffling through his papers.
‘Ouch,’ Ben said, making the President snatch his hand back, laughing.
‘Yes sir,’ Ben said, holocast is excellent, but it’s only as good as the secure encryption. Once that’s compromised, you might as well be sitting in Times Square.’
The President sighed.
‘Everything seems to be so temporary these days. You get used to something new and it changes or gets replaced. There’s no time left to actually be.’
Both Ben and Sam agreed silently.
‘Anyway, what have we got?’ he asked.
Sam briefed the President on the contents of Kristen Corsfield’s emails to her friend, Cara and listened to their conclusions.
‘This is very serious,’ he said, ‘how’s she doing?’ he asked.
‘She’s being guarded by Australia’s finest now, sir, although she’s still critical and in a coma,’ Sam said. ‘If the Aussies can get her stabilized, we’re ready to move her to one of our joint command military bases for additional security. And there’s still no trace of her husband,’ she added.
‘Anything on Cara?’
‘Nothing sir,’ Ben replied.
The President looked dejected.
‘We aren’t making any progress at all, are we? These people, whoever they are, seem to be running rings around us.’
The President ran his hand across his short, wiry hair and frowned.
‘What about the bombing in Chicago?’ he asked, ‘is it connected?’
‘We’ve been trying to work that out, sir,’ Ben said. ‘We’ve heard nothing from the usual militant groups. They’ve gone to ground and our informants tell us that nobody’s claiming responsibility and the group leaders aren’t at all happy about the public backlash. The carnage was too radical, even for them.’
‘It’s getting worse,’ the President said, miserably. ‘It’s making people very unhappy, and not just in the US. It’s everywhere.’
‘The violence seems to be ramping up doesn’t it, sir?’ Sam said, ‘almost as if it’s orchestrated and yet made to look random.’
The President looked shocked.
‘What, one group organizing all this
mayhem? Is that what you’re thinking?’
‘It does seem strange, sir. Bombs are going off everywhere and nobody’s putting their hand up for them. Add the possibility that this subliminal suggestion theory of Kristen’s is true, and the timing is spot on. It’s all very far-fetched, as you say, but too coincidental to ignore.’
‘But why, for what possible gain?’ the President asked.
‘I don’t know that, sir, Ben said. But they’ve brought in some pretty hard-hitters to do their dirty work. The guy that planted the bomb in Chicago …’
‘Yes, I know,’ the President said, ‘you and he go way back. What do you suggest we do?’
‘The focus seems to have shifted to Australia,’ Sam said, thoughtfully, ‘and that book has suddenly become very important to somebody.’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said the President, irritably, ‘but there is no book, is there? It appears that Corsfield, wherever he is, can’t write it.’
Ben looked at Sam and then at the President. An idea suddenly bloomed inside his mind.
‘What?’ Sam asked.
‘Something’s just occurred to me, but I’m not sure …’
‘Spit it out Ben,’ the President said, ‘this is brainstorming time and any idea helps.
‘Well,’ Ben said, ‘what would you do if the most important thing in your life was dependent on a book and the presumed author of that book had severe writers’ block? And then that author decided to dig his heels in and refuse to write it anyway. What’s the only thing you could do to make sure that book came out?’
‘Oh, God, it’s obvious, isn’t it,’ Sam breathed, a look of sheer surprise on her face.’
‘What’s obvious? Spill it you two, and that’s a presidential order.’
‘A ghostwriter, sir, they’d have to find a ghostwriter,’ Ben said.
The room was silent as the three of them digested Ben’s words. It was the President who spoke first.
‘If we find the ghostwriter, we can …?’
‘…find out who the contractor is and, maybe, we can discover the extent of
The Last Book. A Thriller Page 13
