Repairman Jack 04 - All the Rage

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Believe it," he said. "And worth every penny." Even if she hated the wine, she'd talk about the price tag.

  "Say, who's this?" she said. "He looks like you."

  Milos turned and saw her by the bookshelves, holding a framed photo—Milos's sole contribution to the room.

  "He should. He was my older brother."

  "Was?"

  "Yes. He died a few years ago."

  "Oh, I'm so sorry." She sounded as if she meant it. "Were you close?"

  "Very."

  Milos felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of Petar. They had done so well running guns to the HVO in Bosnia, but they fell out during the Kosovar meltdown. Peter hadn't wanted to sell to the KLA. He'd wanted to supply only the Serbs. Oh, how they fought, like only brothers can fight. He remembered Petar screaming that he would die before he supplied the KLA with the means to kill Serbs.

  How prophetic.

  To this day Milos could not understand his brother's idiotic posturing. They'd always sold to both sides when they could. And the KLA had had a blank check from the Arabs to buy anything they could get then-hands on—they'd been willing to pay multiples of the going rate. How could he turn his back on such an opportunity?

  But somehow, somewhere Petar had got it into his head that he was a Serb first and a businessman second. Fine. Milos would do the deal on his own. That was when Petar stepped over the line. Bad enough that he would have nothing to do with the KLA, but when he tried to sabotage Milos's deal…

  Milos still regretted shooting his brother. His only consolation was that Petar never knew what hit him and did not suffer an instant. The point-blank shotgun blast literally took his head off.

  Milos had killed before and since—Emil Corvo being the most recent. He'd been careless with Corvo and might have been sent up had he not iced one witness to chill the rest. Who was the one he'd ordered the hit-and-run on? Artie something… he couldn't even remember his name.

  That was the way it was. A death settled problems, cleared the air, and Milos believed in doing his own wetwork when he could. Not because it was personal—never personal. It simply kept everyone on their toes.

  But with Petar it had been personal, too personal to allow anyone else to do. He'd grieved for months, and to this day he missed his older brother.

  Ah, Petar, he thought looking at the photo in Cino's hands, if only I could have seen the future then. Had I known of Loki and the millions it would bring, I would not have bothered with the KLA deal, and you would be here with me today to share in the bounty.

  Milos's throat tightened as he lifted his glass to the photo. "To my beloved brother."

  Wishing to hell it was vodka, he forced the rest of the Petrus past the lump in his throat.

  16

  Nadia blinked and bolted upright to a sitting position. Dark. Where were her clothes? Where was she?

  She glanced out the window and saw the underside of the Manhattan Bridge and remembered. She was in Doug's bed—alone.

  God, what time was it? The red LED digits on the clock said it was late.

  Where was Doug? She called his name.

  "Is that Sleeping Beauty I hear?" he called back from somewhere in the apartment.

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm in the office. Come here. I want to show you something."

  She stretched, arching her back under the sheets. She and Doug had returned to his place with the intention of hacking into the GEM mainframe together, but made a detour to the bedroom on their way to the computer. She smiled at the memory. Doug hadn't been the least bit distracted during their lovemaking. She'd had his full attention then.

  And afterward, lying snuggled in his arms, she'd dozed off. She never did that. Well, almost never. But she hadn't been getting enough sleep lately.

  She slipped out of the bed, pulled on her clothes, and detoured to the kitchen where she found a Jolt Cola in the fridge. She preferred Diet Pepsi, but this would do. She carried it to the second bedroom that Doug had converted to an office.

  She found him, dressed only in his boxer shorts, munching cereal from a blue box as he stared at the monitor. She loved the broad wedge of his shoulders.

  "Eating something good?" she said, leaning against his back and watching the numbers run across the screen.

  He handed her the box without looking up. She was startled to see a familiar cross-eyed propeller-headed alien on the front.

  "Quisp?" She flashed back to the cute Quisp versus Quake commercials of her childhood. "I thought they stopped making this ages ago."

  "So did I, but apparently it's still sold in a couple of places around the country. I ordered some on the Net."

  She tried a few of the crunchy saucer-shaped pieces and nearly gagged. "I don't remember it being this sweet."

  "Gotta be ninety-nine percent sugar. But what's even better…" He held up his wrist. "Look what you can get."

  "A Quisp watch?"

  "But wait—there's more!" He handed her a little gold ring set with an image of the cereal's alien mascot. "Will this do until I can get you that diamond?"

  She laughed. "You've gone bonkers."

  "I think the term is qwazy"

  She pointed to the monitor screen. "What are you up to now?"

  "Trying to get into GEM's financial data. Not the cooked figures they publish in their annual reports, I want the real skinny."

  "My God, Doug! They'll trace you!"

  "Not to worry. I routed the call through a Chicago exchange."

  "Chicago? How—?"

  "Old hacker trick."

  "Please, Doug," Nadia said, riding a wave of foreboding, "don't do this. It'll only get you in trouble."

  He sighed. "You're probably right. But it's eating at me, Nadj. They're paying me commissions on sales that aren't there. The profits they've supposedly allocated for R and D should be enough to fill a ten-story building with researchers and equipment, yet we both know that the GEM Basic division occupies a single floor and that's sparsely populated. The money's going somewhere. If not to GEM Basic, then to what? Or whom?"

  "Where the money's going won't help you when you're going to jail."

  "I'm being careful."

  "Why don't we just say it's a mystery and leave it at that."

  He smiled. "You know, I remember in catechism class back in grammar school when I used to ask the nuns all sorts of questions about God and heaven and hell. Lots of times the nuns would say, 'It's a mystery,' and that would be that. Subject closed. That didn't satisfy me then, and it doesn't satisfy me now."

  Nadia remembered kids like Doug from her own years in Catholic school. There was always one in every class for whom pronouncements from On High and exhortations simply to "have faith" never cut it. They kept asking questions, kept probing and pushing. Everyone else in the class had already swallowed the latest bit of dogma and was ready to move on. But not these guys—they wanted an explanation. They had to know.

  "OK, try this: it's none of our business."

  "When both of our livelihoods depend on GEM, I think it's very much our business."

  Their livelihoods, Nadia knew, were only a small part of it. Even if Doug had won a multimillion-dollar lottery this afternoon, he'd still be picking away at GEM's computer defenses. It was an itch he had to scratch.

  She leaned around and kissed him on the lips. "Call me a cab. I've got to go."

  "What about your hacking lessons?" he said.

  "Some other time. I've got to be at the clinic bright and early."

  He picked up his cell phone and ordered her a cab. Doug's apartment was in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn; you could get old waiting under the Manhattan Bridge for a cab to cruise by.

  When he clicked off, he reached out and pulled her onto his lap. "If you lived here," he said, nuzzling her throat, "you'd already be home."

  Nadia puffed her cheeks as she let out a breath. "We're not going to get into this again, are we?"

  "You're going to be living here anyway when we'r
e married." His nuzzling was sending goose bumps down her back. "Why not just move it up a few months?"

  "It's over a year. And do you want to convince my mother?"

  He laughed. "No thanks!"

  She'd moved in with her mother during her residency. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. She'd been spending so much time at the hospital, it didn't make sense to rent a place when Mom's little two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on the upper border of Kip's Bay was just a few blocks from the medical center. Might as well pay the rent stipend to her rather than a stranger.

  Now she wished she hadn't. Not that they didn't get along. Just the opposite; they got along too well. Mom was seventy and a widow—Dad had died five years ago. She'd come over from Poland before the war. She might be an American citizen now, but she had never really let go of the Old Country. Her accent was thick, and pictures of Pope John Paul II papered her apartment walls.

  Except for religion—Nadia had stopped going to Sunday mass while Mom went daily—they got along fine. Well, maybe Mom was skeptical about her daughter the doctor taking a research job instead of practicing medicine like a "real doctor," but that was a minor point.

  Moving out of Mom's and into her own place would not be a problem—Mom was independent and could handle living alone just fine. Moving in with Doug, on the other hand, would become an issue. She'd wail about her daughter living in sin and embark on a string of Novenas to try to save Nadia's soul.

  What was the point in putting the poor woman through that torment? She and Doug would be married before long. Until then she'd hang in with the current arrangement, which wasn't hard to take. They saw plenty of each other, and living apart certainly hadn't stunted their sex life.

  "Didn't want to start anything," Doug said.

  "I know," she sighed. Reluctantly she pulled free of his embrace and rose. "Gotta go."

  "Call me when you get in."

  He always had her call him after she left, just to let him know she got home safe.

  "How will I get through if your modem's got the line tied up?"

  He held up the cell phone from the desk and hit a button. "I'll leave this on." He blew her a kiss and renewed his attack on the keyboard.

  Another wave of apprehension eddied around her as she headed down to wait for her cab. Tonight she wished more than ever that she lived here.

  17

  Dressed in layers of rag shop clothing, Jack sat on a piece of cardboard in a shadowed doorway of Doyle's auctions across the street from Dr. Monnet's co-op building on East Eighty-seventh Street. He was keeping a low profile, not because he was afraid Monnet would spot him but because his current look wasn't exactly common in Carnegie Hill, especially just a few blocks up from the mayor's digs. The hour was late and traffic was light in this land of upscale shops and high-rise condos and co-ops.

  Business must be good in Pharmaceuticals, he thought as he checked out the front of Monnet's building. Eight stories—tall stories—the apartments inside had to have ten-, twelve-, maybe fifteen-foot ceilings—with some sort of turretlike superpenthouse or common area on the roof. Three different kinds of brick, and large balconies recessed in the face. Even a small apartment in that place probably had a seven-figure price tag.

  Since Dragovic was more secretive and harder to tail—and was probably already out in the Hamptons for the weekend anyway—Jack had decided to stick close to Monnet. Jack hadn't said anything to Nadia, but he wasn't ready just yet to buy into her idea that Dr. Monnet was a completely unwilling participant in any relationship he might have with the Slippery Serb. Guys like Dragovic did their fair share of arm-twisting, but lots of times the arm they were twisting had been offered to them. Jack was curious what else Monnet might be into.

  But where was the good doctor? Jack had called his number before coming over, and a couple of more times from the pay phone on the corner. All he'd got was the answering machine.

  That didn't necessarily mean the man wasn't home. Maybe he had caller ID and didn't pick up when the readout said "unknown caller." So Jack had parked himself here to keep an eye on the front entrance and see if Monnet showed—either coming or going.

  But he'd been at it since nine and here it was almost midnight with no sign of him. No sense in hanging here any longer. If Monnet was in, he'd most likely stay in; if he was out, Jack wasn't going to learn anything by watching him come home. Time to pack it in.

  Annoyed at the waste of time he could have better spent with Gia, he rose and folded his cardboard and headed west. He entered Central Park at Eighty-sixth Street and walked across the Great Lawn with his Semmerling in his hand in case some genius got the bright idea that a homeless guy might be an easy roll, but he reached the bright lights of Central Park West without incident.

  Back in his apartment he stripped, showered, then set up the projection TV for the start of his Moreau festival—not Jeanne… Dr. Moreau. Jack had the tapes set up in chronological order. Unfortunately that meant playing the best first. The Island of Lost Souls with Laughton, Lugosi, and Arien was one of his all-time favorites and certainly the best of the Moreaus. Despite the inexplicable Hungarian accent of his man-wolf character, Bela remained unmatched as Sayer of the Law.

  "Not to spill blood! That is the law! Are we not men?"

  And then the guttural response from dozens of coarse throats not designed for human speech… "Are we not men? …"

  But fatigue got the best of him. He dozed off with Charles Laughton complaining through his prissy little mustache and goatee about "the stubborn beast flesh creeping back…"

  Somewhere in Jack's dreams Sal Vituolo became the Sayer of the Law, crying over and over, "Are we not men?… Are we not men?…"

  FRIDAY

  1

  "Jesus H. Christ!"

  It had changed.

  Nadia sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the printout in her vibrating hands.

  The diagram of the Loki molecule's structure—it looked different, was different. She couldn't say how, exactly, but she knew that some of the side chains present yesterday afternoon were missing this morning. For the life of her, though, she couldn't remember what they were.

  She'd meant to check the printout last night when she came home but forgot. Probably because she hadn't thought it worth the effort, or maybe she'd subconsciously believed that Dr. Monnet had been kidding her. In Nadia's world, diagrams did not alter themselves.

  Until now.

  No-no-no. Don't go there. This is impossible.

  Wait. She'd also printed out the empirical formula and memorized it. She pulled the sheet from her shoulder bag and unfolded it. It read "€24113404." But that was wrong. She was sure it had been C27H40O3. Or had there been six oxygen atoms? Damn! She couldn't be sure. And that wasn't like her.

  She checked the empirical formula against the molecular structure—they tallied perfectly.

  She closed her eyes against the queasy, dizzy feeling stealing over her. This can't be happening. It's some sort of trick. Has to be.

  Somehow someone had got into her shoulder bag and switched the printouts. But who? And when? She'd made the printouts just before she'd left GEM yesterday, and her bag hadn't been out of her sight since. And why the hell would someone go to all that trouble?

  But a switch didn't explain her memory lapse. Even on a bad day she'd be able to remember at least one of the missing side chains, but this morning she was drawing a complete blank.

  A strange mixture of unease and excitement started buzzing through her. Something very strange was going on here. That molecule—Loki—was some sort of singularity. It had properties she could not explain but not unfathomable properties; over at GEM she had tools that could help her unravel its mysteries. This would be ground breaking work. She thought of all the papers she could publish about Loki, all the lectures she would give. Barely thirty and she'd be world famous.

  Well, famous among molecular biologists.

  And best of all, she was getting paid t
o do what she'd be willing to do for free.

  Nadia started pulling on her clothes. She wanted to be in the dry lab right now, but she had to stop by the diabetes clinic first. She'd do a fly-through there, then run straight over to GEM.

  As she hurried down the hall toward the front door, passing various portraits of Pope John Paul and loops of dried palm fronds tacked to the walls, she heard her mother's voice call out from the other side of her bedroom door.

  "I heard you, Nadj!"

  "Heard me what, Mom?" she said, still moving.

  "Take the Lord's name in vain. You shouldn't do that. It's a sin."

  When did I do that? she wondered. But she had no time and less inclination to discuss it right now.

  "Sorry, Mom."

  Doug's right, she thought as she swung into the hallway. Got to move out. And soon.

  2

  Doug's eyes burned from staring at the monitor. He leaned back and rubbed them. He'd spent the whole night chipping away at the defenses in the GEM mainframe. Some he'd overcome—the partners' expense account records, for instance. He'd tooled through those and wasted a lot of time without finding anything unusual or even interesting.

  But the defenses around the finances of GEM Basic were giving him fits. He could follow the money trail to the R & D division, but there it stopped. Details of where, when, and how that money was spent were locked in a cyber safe, and he didn't have the combination.

  Not yet, anyway. He was making headway, but at a glacial pace.

  "Need a break," he muttered as he rose and rotated his aching back.

  He walked around the study, stretching, punching at the air to loosen up. He felt tired but wired. He was getting the hang of the GEM security codes. Whoever had set them up was good, but Doug was pretty good too. He'd pulled his share of all-nighters with the computer nerds back in college, hacking into various corporate and academic systems and leaving prank messages in the sysops' mailboxes. Nothing vicious, more like the cyber equivalent of water paint graffiti.