Carol (Carol Schmidt Series)

by Cook, Lori

  The girl said nothing, tapping away dutifully at her keyboard. Ms. Carol Schmidt had just booked the most expensive suite in the place, never asked the price, and said she didn’t know how many days she’d be. With this kind of customer, you don’t ask too many questions.

  “OK, can you have that taken up,” she said. “I’m going out front for a cigarette.”

  “There’s a smoking area around the side of the main building,” the receptionist added helpfully.

  “Out of harm’s way!” Carol said to herself as she rummaged in her purse for the pack of Camels that she always kept, but hardly ever smoked.

  Today was different, though. Today she needed one. Something was on her mind, but she didn’t know what.

  Back up in her room, the disgusting taste of the cigarette still in her mouth, she fixed herself a vodka and cranberry juice and grabbed her iPad Mini from her purse. She fiddled with the Wi-Fi, taking two or three goes to type in the password correctly. It always annoyed her that you paid so much for a room and they still charged you for Internet access.

  Five-star hotels invariably gave you free Wi-Fi if you asked for it. Problem was, she always forgot to ask. Not that it mattered. Money didn’t mean very much to Carol. Although she knew that the minute she decided to stop working for the Cardinal, access to this lifestyle and the infinite line of credit that went with it would immediately disappear.

  Slumping back on the bed she flicked through CNN and a couple of other news sites. Several times she thought about logging onto Bad Daddy’s site, watching him lying there suffering. But it didn’t appeal. For her the job was over, and even now she was beginning to put him completely out of her mind, just as she did with every other job that she and the Cardinal had done over the past nine years.

  “Nine?” she said to herself, realizing that in a couple of months she would be twenty-eight, and that would make it not nine but ten years since she’d left the convent in Mexico and joined the Cardinal in his work. A decade, most of it spent waiting for her next assignment, sometimes months at a time, visiting the greatest cities on Earth, and travelling in pampered luxury wherever she went.

  Yes, in a couple of months it would be a full ten years ago that she had gone to New York, straight from Mexico City, on the very day of her eighteenth birthday. And a day later, ensconced at the Marriot on Times Square, she had lost her virginity to one of the warmest and most remarkable men she had ever met.

  Jason had been sweet, innocent, and bursting with desire for her. She knew as soon as she saw him that he was the one. And when she felt him slowly enter her for the first time, it had seemed so natural she wanted desperately to tell him how perfect he was. Instead, she had simply held him close and whispered yes. It didn’t mean yes, this is good; it meant, yes, this is right, this is absolutely everything it should be.

  Over the years she’d kept in touch with Jason. He was a computer programmer, fresh out of Brown when they met. After a few years chasing the hi-tech dream in Silicon Valley, he’d become a technology teacher in an Oklahoma high school. He was always glad to hear from her, if sometimes a little distant, as if that chance meeting in New York was a world away, a dream that would fade if he were not coaxed into remembering it again each time Carol Schmidt mailed.

  That’s all it had been, too. Just the occasional e-mail, no meetings, no rekindling of the passion they had both felt in New York. He’d been willing, right from the outset, but she’d gotten herself a job with the Cardinal, and long-term relationships were not really compatible with her line of work.

  For ten years, then, she and Jason had never met again. But she knew what he looked like. The tech department at his school had a gallery on its website, and there are even a couple of videos of him on YouTube, taken a couple years earlier when a solar-powered car made by his students had won first prize at a county science fair.

  In the videos he looked tired and a bit saggy, as if the years had weighed down more heavily on his shoulders than had seemed possible back in New York, when he had been a fresh-faced graduate with a glittering career ahead of him. She knew that he’d had his disappointments, one of the many casualties of the tech market that people never see when they read about the success stories. In science classrooms the length and breadth of the country are men and women who came close to making it big, guys like Jason who had an idea, who pitched it, developed it, dreamed of the yachts and the helicopters... all for nothing.

  “Screw it,” she said, clicking Skype open and waiting for its familiar “pop” sound.

  She did a search and found seven people with his name in Oklahoma. Instantly she recognized his face.

  Her finger hovered over his face a while, wondering whether this was really fair. He had two kids, she knew, and a wife who rarely got much of a mention in his light, jokey e-mails. Did Jason really need this, to see her again, after all this time? And did she want to see him?

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked herself, pressing an index finger into the screen and waiting for the ring tone.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, as Skype told he was off-line.

  She’d have to add him as a contact and ring him later.

  Almost relieved, she tossed the iPad onto the pillow beside her and stretched out on the bed. There was chilled lobster on a trolley close by, but she didn’t fancy it yet. All she wanted to do was stare at the ceiling.

  Almost without noticing, her mind had begun to relive those two fantastic nights she spent with Jason in New York. Nights and days; the two of them had been inseparable, dashing from museums to theatres and restaurants, and leaping back into bed at every opportunity. He was twenty-three, and seemed to know everything there was to know about art, science, and politics; plus, he knew the location of every single place of interest in the city. He also knew how to make a woman feel as if she was the only person on the planet that he ever wanted to touch.

  She lay right back and closed her eyes. She’d been young, inexperienced, and he made her feel so fabulous. The feeling of having him inside her had been crazy good, wonderful, and over the years that followed she’d had plenty of evidence that all men were not like him, and that all sex would not live up to the tingling, ecstatic peaks of pleasure she had felt there in the Marriot, high above Times Square with her young, slim lover.

  Now, almost out of a sense of nostalgia, she found her hand slipping down beneath the waistband of her pants and resting gently against her pubic hair. She recalled how he had kissed and toyed with it, softly and without any rush, until she had yearned for him to go further, to tease her apart with his lips and drink her up.

  Before long she was stroking herself, letting her fingers get sticky without them even moving inside her. She could stay like this for hours, toying calmly with herself, the delicate masturbation no more than an aide de memoir.

  Then the sound of Skype’s ringtone suddenly filled her ears.

  She turned onto her side and saw Jason’s photo.

  He’d called her.

  For a moment she paused. What was she going to say? Hi Jason, what a surprise! I was just jerking off over your memory!

  Propping herself up on the bed, she ran a hand through her hair, made herself half decent, and answered.

  “Hi, Jason! Good to see you, at last!”

  “Hiya!” Jason said. “Yeah, right... Where... I mean, how, where the fuck are ya!”

  Then the blurred image of him disappeared, replaced by what looked like the ceiling of a bar, the image spinning. Clearly he’d dropped his tablet or whatever device he was using.

  A few seconds he picked it up again, staring hard into the screen. His eyes were blue, just like they had been all those years ago. But now they were massively blood shot, enough to make him seem like a vagrant. And the bags beneath his eyes were ridiculous, so loose and voluminous he seemed fifty-three rather than the thirty-three she knew him to be.

  “Are you all right there, Jason?”

  “What? Me?”

 
; He looked around, as if trying to work out where he was. There were bottles behind him, a bar it looked like, and a big, old-fashioned jukebox to one side. A row of empty stools stood along the bar.

  “I’m just...” he said, unsure of himself, “it’s, I mean, it’s that just it’s... Dawn has the kids, and I... it’s school vacation. So...”

  So you’re alone and shit-faced in a bar at six in the evening, she refrained from saying.

  “How are the kids?” she asked.

  “Oh, they’re great. Don’t get to see ’em as much as I’d like, not now...”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Temporary thing. Couple of months, trial separation it’s called. You mighta heard of it.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “So, here I am, drinking a toast to Alex Strange. Hey!” he cried, as if something just struck him as incredibly important. “You remember that guy, don’t you? It was, ehm, y’know, in New York.”

  The words seemed to shock them both, as if New York was some unspeakable secret between them that he’d just blurted out.

  “I remember him,” she said, almost trying to change the subject. “Why? Has something happened?”

  Jason shook his head as if he could hardly remember, as if the whole thing had simply vanished from his mind.

  “Jason? What happened to Alex Strange?”

  “Ugh?”

  Strange was a tech guy, she told herself. Hadn’t he been in the news recently?

  “Jason? What is it?”

  Jason smiled. He seemed to gather his thoughts, but before he said anything he gestured to the young man behind the bar to line him up another beer.

  “Strange Tech. Remember the name? He floats his company in a couple mouths,” Jason said, as he waited for his glass to arrive, then held it up as he spoke. “Strange Tech goes public in exactly eight weeks. And that bastard becomes a billionaire over night.”

  With that he tilted the bottle and poured its contents down his throat.

  They agreed to speak later, when Jason got home. By that time he was drunker, but his speech was only partially slurred. Clearly, he had reached that plateau of drunken lucidity, the place you get to when drinking to excess is a daily occurrence.

  Indeed, he now spoke with surprising elegance. It sounded as if everything he told her had been running through his mind for weeks, hatred and regret balled up so tight inside him that he might explode at any moment. His wife must have seen it coming, escaping the family home and taking the kids with her before he blew.

  For about a quarter of an hour his narrative went on, taking them both right back to the Marriot on Times Square, and to a whole bunch of stuff that had happened back then that Carol had no idea about.

  The reason why a recent Brown graduate with no money was staying at the Marriot was that he had been invited there by Alex Strange. Jason was one of several young programmers who were pitching their ideas to the current wunderkind of the tech industry and his new company, Strange Tech.

  Carol remembered Jason taking about Strange with the hushed tones of religious reverence. The guy had also been staying at the Marriot. She remembered the name, and also seeing him in the lobby once. Alex Strange: very tall and slim with short, white hair. It looked dyed, but apparently it was natural.

  Strange wasn’t much older than Jason, but his foothold in the tech business was already assured. Strange Tech produced the kind of programs that end users never see. The tech behind the tech is how his business was described. And now, ten years later, the business was about to go public.

  “Streaming, you remember?” Jason said, waving an arm about as if to explain himself.

  Gradually she was remembering. Back at Brown, Jason had been working on the kind of code that made data streaming better and faster. She remembered him talking about priority-divining and stream-rationalization and protocols of one kind and another. It hadn’t much sense back then.

  But now, with on-line video and everything else coming down at you from the cloud, it made perfect sense that Strange Tech had achieved such market prominence. The credit crisis was behind them, tech was getting sexy once more, and the cloud was the future. Alex Strange had reached the high point of his career, and he was about to cash in, big time.

  “Your stuff, Jason?” she said, cutting him off before he veered too far down the road of nostalgia. “What happened, exactly?”

  Jason stopped, looked into the glass in his hand, which was empty. He had never really mentioned any of this to Carol before in their e-mails, ten years of putting a brave face on it. But not anymore. He was way gone, and it was all coming out tonight.

  “He stole it.”

  She shook her head in confusion.

  “How can you just steal someone else’s programs?”

  He laughed, as if the question was too stupid to answer. But she was curious. Just how did someone steal a computer program, so precise and exact, each line of code having been written carefully by the author, as recognizable as a line of poetry.

  “The ideas, he took the ideas. Strange was never much of a coder. Never claimed to be. He used to get people to pitch him new ideas, small stuff, but innovative, anything with a new approach. He’d look at the code, copy it, extract the core ideas, and pay someone to replicate it.”

  “But that’s easy to prove, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. But he took his time, more than a year in my case. You remember? He offered me a job over on the West Coast, pretty well paid. Deep in the contract there was something about any concepts I was working on were understood to be shared with Strange freely and as part of their development process, yada, yada...”

  “Jesus, no!”

  “Yep. After I realized what I’d done, I left. Used the money I’d saved to pay for a contract lawyer, who was pretty impressed with Strange’s setup, and could do nothing about it. Then I sold my car to pay a tech lawyer, who looked at my code and the stuff plagiarized by Strange Tech, and he advised me to walk away. So,” Jason said, “that’s what I did.”

  She couldn’t take it in. To her it sounded like theft, nothing more and nothing less.

  “Were there others like you?” she asked.

  “Sure! Some of them moved on and did well in tech, kind of forgave Strange, rolled with the punches. Most of us, though, we’re teaching, or designing websites, or pumping gas or whatever...”

  He got up, waddling off down a pigsty of a living room, and returned with not one but two bottles of beer in one hand and a family bag of Doritos in the other. Carol saw for the first time how he’d developed a flabby gut at the front, and wide, pudgy hips. Ten years of beer, disappointment, and junk food.

  He was a wreck.

  And it was Alex Strange’s fault.

  They said their good-byes, Jason already slumped on the sofa and getting ready for another evening of baseball.

  She turned off the iPad, poured herself a drink, and yanked a leg off the lobster, twisting it hard until it snapped clean away.

  Strange Tech, she told herself, as she cracked the leg open and sucked the white flesh out, was about to get one hell of a lot stranger.

  Chapter Five

  The street was noisy and congested. Every truck in the world seemed to be making its morning deliveries there, and taxi drivers wove fast and tight between them, riding their horns and swooping around each new obstacle with just inches to spare. Motorbikes and beat-up scooters buzzed in and out of the traffic, adding to the chaos, which seemed impossibly disorganized, yet clearly part of the daily routine.

  She looked at the long, pallid face of the Cardinal, his black hair shining in the sun, combed severely back over his scalp, not quite Dracula, but not far off. And she remembered how he had been a decade ago. Different? Not really. The complexion might have been a touch rosier, his features a little less drawn, but it was essentially the same dour, humorless face that had intrigued and unsettled her back in Mexico.

  Ah! Mexico! They were not all that far away now, hop on a plane an
d she could be there in little more than an hour. But she would not be going back to Mexico City any time soon. For Carol Schmidt, that was a lifetime away. For the last ten years, ever since her eighteenth birthday, she had travelled so far and wide, and seen so many unexpected places, that she sometimes wondered whether it was indeed a life, or simply a strange, achingly luxurious dream. It was real enough, though, and it had all been possible because of the man now sitting patiently in front of her.

  The Cardinal was concentrating, a cell pressed to his ear. He could barely hear himself think, never mind listen to someone speaking in another language.

  A moment later he slipped the phone into his pocket.

  “Nine o’clock this evening,” he said, then took a drink from a cup of iced tea in front of him. “They’ll be there at nine. And they don’t seem to speak English. You been keeping up your Spanish?”

  She drank from a glass of white wine.

  “My Spanish is fine, although I don’t think there’ll be much to talk about.”

  He nodded.

  “Good, good. I can leave the rest to you, then?”

  “Of course.”

  “A bad business, this. If you can deal with her, that would be excellent. Our information is that we will not have another opportunity soon. She’s preparing to leave. It has to be tonight.”

  “Everything will be ready this evening.”

  She drank some more wine, wishing she’d ordered iced tea as well. It was too hot for alcohol. Hot and dusty, the whole country loud and busy and somehow dispiriting. She’d only been here a couple of days, and already she was keen to leave. By midnight she’d be on a flight out of here. But before that there was business to take care of. Perhaps she could have some fun with that, at least.

  Yet she was still thinking about Jason, and the passion she had shared with him on her first trip to New York, all those years ago. The thought of what had happened to him since then gnawed at her, the sense of the injustice of it, such a beautiful person crushed almost to nothing, slumped in front of the television and blaming himself.