بخش 03 - فصل 05

5

Are you Brady?

Felix Babineau, who sometimes calls himself Myron Zakim and sometimes Dr. Z, smiles at the question. It wrinkles his unshaven cheeks in a decidedly creepy way. Tonight he’s wearing a furry ushanka instead of his trilby, and his white hair kind of squishes out around the bottom. Freddi wishes she hadn’t asked the question, wishes she didn’t have to let him in, wishes she’d never heard of him. If he is Brady, he’s a walking haunted house.

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” he says.

She wants to let it go and can’t. “Because you sound like him. And that hack the other one brought me after the boxes came . . . that was a Brady hack if I ever saw one. Good as a signature.”

“Brady Hartsfield is a semi-catatonic who can barely walk, let alone write a hack to be used on a bunch of obsolete game consoles. Some of which have proved to be defective as well as obsolete. I did not get my money’s worth from those Sunrise Solutions motherfuckers, which pisses me off to the max.”

Pisses me off to the max. A phrase Brady used all the time back in their Cyber Patrol days, usually about their boss or some idiot customer who managed to spill a mocha latte into his CPU.

“You’ve been very well paid, Freddi, and you’re almost done. Why don’t we leave it at that?”

He brushes past her without waiting for a reply, puts his briefcase on the table, and snaps it open. He takes out an envelope with her initials, FL, printed on it. The letters slant backward. During her years on the Discount Electronix Cyber Patrol, she saw similar back-slanted printing on hundreds of work orders. Those were the ones Brady filled out.

“Ten thousand,” Dr. Z says. “Final payment. Now go to work.”

Freddi reaches for the envelope. “You don’t need to hang around if you don’t want to. The rest is basically automatic. It’s like setting an alarm clock.”

And if you’re really Brady, she thinks, you could do it yourself. I’m good at this stuff, but you were better.

He lets her fingers touch the envelope, then pulls it back. “I’ll stay. Not that I don’t trust you.”

Right, Freddi thinks. As if.

His cheeks once more wrinkle in that unsettling smile. “And who knows? We might get lucky and see the first hit.”

“I’ll bet most of the people who got those Zappits have already thrown them away. It’s a fucking toy, and some of them don’t even work. Like you said.”

“Let me worry about that,” says Dr. Z. Once again his cheeks wrinkle and pull back. His eyes are red, as if he’s been smoking the rock. She thinks of asking him what, exactly, they are doing, and what he hopes to accomplish . . . but she already has an idea, and does she want to be sure? Besides, if this is Brady, what harm can it do? He had hundreds of ideas, all of them crackpot.

Well.

Most of them.

She leads the way into what was meant to be a spare bedroom and has now become her workstation, the sort of electronic refuge she always dreamed of and could never afford—a hidey-hole that Gloria, with her good looks, infectious laugh, and “people skills,” could never understand. In here the baseboard heaters hardly work at all, and it’s five degrees colder than the rest of the apartment. The computers don’t mind. They like it.

“Go on,” he says. “Do it.”

She sits down at the top-of-the-line desktop Mac with its twenty-seven-inch screen, refreshes it, and types in her password—a random collection of numbers. There’s a file simply marked Z, which she opens with another password. The subfiles are marked Z-1 and Z-2. She uses a third password to open Z-2, then begins to rapidly click away at her keyboard. Dr. Z stands by her left shoulder. He’s a disturbing negative presence at first, but then she gets lost in what she’s doing, as she always does.

Not that it takes long; Dr. Z has given her the program, and executing it is child’s play. To the right of her computer, sitting on a high shelf, is a Motorola signal repeater. When she finishes by simultaneously hitting COMMAND and the Z key, the repeater comes to life. A single word appears in yellow dots: SEARCHING. It blinks like a traffic light at a deserted intersection.

They wait, and Freddi becomes aware that she’s holding her breath. She lets it go in a whoosh, momentarily puffing out her thin cheeks. She starts to get up, and Dr. Z puts a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s give it a little longer.”

They give it five minutes, the only sound the soft hum of her equipment and the keening of the wind off the frozen lake. SEARCHING blinks on and on.

“All right,” he says at last. “I knew it was too much to hope for. All things in good time, Freddi. Let’s go back into the other room. I’ll give you your final payment and then be on my wa—”

SEARCHING in yellow suddenly turns to FOUND in green.

“There!” he shouts, making her jump. “There, Freddi! There’s the first one!”

Her final doubts are swept away and she knows for sure. All it takes is that shout of triumph. It’s Brady, all right. He’s become a living Russian nesting doll, which goes perfectly with his furry Russian hat. Look inside Babineau and there’s Dr. Z. Look inside Dr. Z, and there, pulling all the levers, is Brady Hartsfield. God knows how it can be, but it is.

FOUND in green is replaced with LOADING in red. After mere seconds, LOADING is replaced with TASK COMPLETE. After that, the repeater begins to search again.

“All right,” he says, “I’m satisfied. Time for me to go. It’s been a busy night, and I’m not done yet.”

She follows him into the main room, shutting the door to her electronic hideaway behind her. She has come to a decision that’s probably long overdue. As soon as he’s gone, she’s going to kill the repeater and delete the final program. Once that’s done, she’ll pack a suitcase and go to a motel. Tomorrow she’s getting the fuck out of this city and heading south to Florida. She’s had it with Dr. Z, and his Z-Boy sidekick, and winter in the Midwest.

Dr. Z puts on his coat, but drifts to the window instead of going to the door. “Not much of a view. Too many highrises in the way.”

“Yeah, it sucks the big one.”

“Still, it’s better than mine,” he says, not turning. “All I’ve had to look at for the last five and a half years is a parking garage.”

Suddenly she’s at her limit. If he’s still in the same room with her sixty seconds from now, she’ll go into hysterics. “Give me my money. Give it to me and then get the fuck out. We’re done.”

He turns. In his hand is the short-barreled pistol he used on Babineau’s wife. “You’re right, Freddi. We are.”

She reacts instantly, knocking the pistol from his hand, kicking him in the groin, karate-chopping him like Lucy Liu when he doubles over, and running out the door while screaming her head off. This mental film-clip plays out in full color and Dolby sound as she stands rooted to the spot. The gun goes bang. She staggers back two steps, collides with the easy chair where she sits to watch TV, collapses across it, and rolls to the floor, coming down headfirst. The world begins to darken and draw away. Her last sensation is warmth above as she begins to bleed and below as her bladder lets loose.

“Final payment, as promised.” The words come from a great distance.

Blackness swallows the world. Freddi falls into it and is gone.