Authors: John M. Green
Though Jax was currently visiting London from New York, where he rented an apartment, he really lived on the internet. He was a prolific contributor to WikiLeaks (though he’d never
actually met Julian Assange), as well as Anonymous and various conspiracy theory sites. His thick Coke-bottle glasses exaggerated his nerdiness and helped him suit the label of the typical young
math genius, though it was called maths where he was born, in Melbourne. His straggly brown hair was so greasy it looked black even in a good light, and his pasty skin was proof he was a night-owl,
especially with his skateboarding. Neither travel nor late nights troubled him. Jax was not big on mixing with other people and even dismissed “social networking” as an ironic misnomer.
His computer was his closest companion, closely followed by his skateboard. The only thing neat about him was his beard, a slightly ginger mouse-tail that made him look as though an amber
exclamation mark was pointing under his lip.
If the Silicon Valley environmental software firm that had flown him to the UK had bothered with a face-to-face interview, they would have had second thoughts. Instead, they hired him on the
strength of a single phone call after hearing of his reputation from his PhD work, even though it was unfinished. He’d dumped Princeton University and skipped to New York as a contractor,
mainly so he could work on his pet project away from the prying eyes of deceitful supervisors. Like the creep Jax had overheard in the hallway mocking his stutter.
His current employers had installed their patented software for running the environmental features of a new five-star-rated building at Canary Wharf, London’s modern financial district,
but due to a serious systems glitch the local authorities were refusing to hand over their completion certificate so none of the tenants could move in. Jax was over here to fix it.
“Don’t leave the building till it’s done,” was his simple brief, but it was one he ignored daily, stealing a few hours here and there to take in the sights since he
hadn’t been to London before.
He flicked back his hair but, from out here on the terrace across the empty blacked-out floor, all he could make out was the elevator’s flashing “14”. He squinted, and when the
doors shushed open, two occupants stepped out, not one. With the light behind them, he couldn’t glimpse their faces but neither of their body shapes was anything like the
nightwatchman’s. Jax’s smile dropped, sending a glint of reflected moonlight from his lenses to the visitors.
“Jax Mason, is that you over there?”
She was British, Jax decided, hardly surprised. He couldn’t make out the badge she seemed to be waving in front of her, but her confident strides toward him and her, but her confident
strides toward him and her stubby companion’s menacing swagger instantly made Jax’s skin crawl, and his head suddenly squirmed with the thought that 14th floors were usually 13ths.
A frosty wind blew up from the River Thames two hundred feet below, though he wondered if it was nerves.
“Jax Mason?” she insisted.
“Yeah, that’s m-me. Y-you?” Jax tried to calm the anxiety trembling out of him. He stammered at the best of times, though this didn’t seem like one of them. He took her
hand, but her sneer suggested he should have gripped it harder, or maybe first wiped the sweat off his own hand on his jeans. She was an eyeful, for sure, but that only increased Jax’s
edginess. He wasn’t good around women. Or men. But especially women.
“I’m Diana Hunter,” she lied and, tilting her head toward her slightly hunch-backed colleague, continued, “And this is Lucky.”
Even in this dim light, Jax noted that Lucky’s face looked like he shaved with a chisel, possibly why he had the chipped front tooth.
“We’re MI6,” Diana explained, brushing back a strand of her blonde hair, but not so far back that Jax could have guessed it was a wig, even in good light.
M
I6 WAS THE UK’s secret intelligence service; Jax knew that. When he’d goofed off on a River Thames tourist cruise three days earlier,
the loudspeaker commentary had specifically pointed out MI6’s building. Some secret service, he’d smirked at the time.
As Diana kept a grip on Jax’s hand, her piercing brown eyes bored into him so long he noticed that one of her contact lenses was askew. If the lights had been on, he might have detected
that her real eye-colour was blue.
He coughed as an excuse to remove his hand from hers. “Like, wh-what do you guys want?” he stuttered, mainly out of habit and not entirely from fear. Where, Jax sweated, was actor
Geoffrey Rush when he needed him, or better than Rush, a real speech therapist?
“Mr Mason. Recently you posted a blog about your subway shockwave simulation.” Jax had posted several blogs on the web about his intricate computer model, boasting it was
mathematical proof that terrorists could build up and hurtle a shockwave through a city’s subway system that was so ferocious it could suck down and destroy the entire metropolis above it.
All they needed to know was precisely on which platforms to set off a hair-trigger-timed series of relatively small explosions.
As Jax gripped the terrace railing, the cold metal drew the remaining heat out of him. Months ago, he had contacted the US government about his computer model, a radical step for an anarchist
like him. But Homeland Security flicked him straight into crackpot corner. He tried to tell them: if Jax Mason working alone could create something like this, what could more malign parties do? But
if the US government wouldn’t listen, why was MI6 popping up out of the blue?
As if she could read his mind, Diana answered his question, “The Prime Minister is acutely sensitive after the bombings over here. He wants you to help us design baffles for London’s
Tube to prevent one of these shockwaves. For a considerable retainer, of course.”
They
were going to pay
him
? Working
for
the government? Normally that would be against his principles, but this wasn’t
his
government, nor even his adopted
government… and then there was the money.
He shifted his gaze from Diana to the other spook, but only for a second, chilled by the stare penetrating him from Lucky’s pencil-points. Lucky usually didn’t say much, words not
being his preferred tools of persuasion. While Jax didn’t know that, he somehow sensed that any hand big enough to crush his skull by itself would do Lucky’s speaking for him.
“I’m s-sort of busy. I’m here on a j-job,” Jax muttered, looking at his shoes and reminding himself he had been about to tie his lace.
“Six hours ago,” said Diana, shaking her head slowly, “we intercepted an encrypted satellite communication and only finished unscrambling it an hour ago. The point, sir, is
that you are in immediate danger—from a terrorist cell here in London. We are not the only ones seeking your simulation model. We know these other people, Mr Mason, and they are not the types
to let anything, or anyone, stand in their way. We need to get you, and your model, to safety. Now.”
That she whispered this only made Jax jumpier. “How l-long we g-got?” he said, not that he had a hectic day of meetings to reschedule.
Without answering, she pulled him inside, off the terrace. “Mr Mason. May I call you Jax?”
He nodded dumbly.
“Jax. Your software program? The simulation? Before we leave here, we must isolate and protect all copies in existence. We have people on standby.”
“Over th-there,” he said.
Her eyes followed his to where his laptop was on the floor, next to his backpack. “Show me,” she said, guiding him over to it.
Jax sat cross-legged in front of the screen, and she gripped his shoulder. On-screen, he clicked an icon and a menu popped up offering three choices: London, New York City and Washington.
“Trash it.”
He did.
“How many other copies are there?”
Jax hesitated, but her grip tightened.
“There’s o-one in my b-backpack.”
After ferreting inside the bag, Lucky handed a DVD box to Jax, who flicked through them and pulled out the relevant disk.
“Any others?”
Jax slowly shook his head and, as his situation sank in, so did the rest of his body.
“Jax! Surely, you’ve got a backup at home or on a server somewhere?”
He shook his head harder.
“Why don’t I believe you?” She held the disk up under his nose, cutting its edge into his septum until Jax’s tongue tasted the sharp copper tang of a drizzle of his own
blood. “Mr Mason. Very bad people want this, and they’re on their way here. Right now. Unless you cooperate, immediately, millions could die. Our government can’t permit
that.”
Diana watched Lucky loom up behind Jax. From the broken half-smile on his face she knew he’d enjoy this quivering wreck.
“Jax,” she reasoned, “think about it. If
we
found you, so will they...” She shifted her feet and nodded to Lucky whose own paw started to clamp onto Jax’s
shoulder. He lent down and curled his left arm around Jax from behind, digging into his solar plexus until Jax bent forward, dry-retching.
Lucky released his grip and Jax, still twisted over, grunted, “I’ll sh-show you.” He quickly located the remote server and pulled up the program.
Diana knelt, her face close to his. She loved this work. Her cheeks were translucent, pearl-like, shimmering with a light tingly sheen, not that Jax noticed. What he did notice, lit up by his
screen, were the soft pads covering each of Diana’s fingertips and a wisp of red hair creeping out from under her wig.
“Trash it,” she barked, giving him no time to freak over why someone claiming to be on his side needed to mask her fingerprints or her hair. He did as she demanded, careful not to
press the wrong keys.
“Now, Jax. Last time I’ll ask. The other copies? Where are they? All of them.”
He looked at her blankly, but Lucky leant over again and burnt his breath into Jax’s ear.
“There’s j-just one,” said Jax. “In my a-p-partment… in New Y-York.” He explained it was taped inside the toilet cistern in his bathroom, in a waterproof
Ziploc bag.
Lucky slipped a phone from his pocket and keyed in a number. Jax watched him walk toward the windows, the phone lighting up one side of his unyielding face.
All Jax could make out of Lucky’s conversation were two words: “TriBeCa” and “john.” Feeling like he was swirling in as much shit as a cesspool duck, he
didn’t focus on the fact that in London toilets weren’t called “johns” or that he hadn’t yet mentioned his New York address, which was indeed in TriBeCa.
F
UND-RAISING IS always centre-stage for presidential election campaigns, but with Isabel Diaz it was different. Not because she was personally
worth a fortune, but more due to her struggle to achieve it.
She cast her eyes around the glitzy crowd—four hundred black tuxedos and an equal number of sparkly cocktail dresses—and mentally ticked off the tally: nearly $2 million raised, just
tonight.
Her eyes settled briefly at Table Four, where her campaign director was staring at her, quietly fuming. He’d obviously done the calculations too. “Every dollar you pull in for
Triple-B is one less for the campaign,” Gregory Samson had whined to her earlier in the evening. And he ran the same script at last week’s fundraiser, and last month’s.
But to Isabel this wasn’t a zero-sum game. Running for president certainly gave her foundation a boost, but it was hardly to her campaign’s detriment, as she’d insisted
countless times to Gregory, reminding him that it wasn’t just her policies that had shot her popularity to record levels, nor even his masterful campaign strategies. It was also her
rags-to-riches success story and the philanthropy it had inspired: her charitable foundation for runaway kids.
A Triple-B graduate always delivered the after-dinner speech at these events, and as Mary Dimitri drove to her emotive conclusion up at the lectern, Isabel guessed tonight’s might possibly
squeeze out an extra half-million in donations.
“Without Triple-B,” said Mary, her dark eyes scanning the crowd, “I wouldn’t be here tonight. I wouldn’t be a pediatrician either. Simply, I’d be dead…
from drugs, from disease, from a bullet.”
A hush smothered the crowd as they tried to absorb what she’d just said.
“But Triple-B is not just a get-out-of-jail card,” she continued. “It’s not just counselling or financial support through college and med school. As you’ve heard
tonight, it’s also Isabel Diaz. She is an extraordinary role model, a runaway herself who through hard work achieved so much yet is giving, and has already given, so much back. Ladies and
gentlemen, your generosity tonight will help Triple-B continue this amazing woman’s work and get even more kids off the streets and into productive lives. Like mine. And like hers.”
As Isabel mouthed Mary a thankyou from her table just below the lectern, a yawn insisted itself on her and she quickly covered it with her table napkin. The months of relentless campaigning day
and night were catching up.
Tonight, she’d spent the entire evening conjuring up her stock of old-style diner service tricks. Pasting on her best smile, she’d popped around to most of the taffeta pink tables,
thanking as many of the guests as she could for coming, lightly touching an arm, pressing a bejewelled hand, squeezing a shoulder or just picking lint off it as a dear friend would. Flattery worked
when raising money, especially if it came from someone who could be sitting in the Oval Office in a few short months.
No matter how beat she was, she knew she’d keep the formula going right up to the finale. She pushed back her chair to continue her rounds, and as she straightened out the wrinkles in her
snug black sequined dress, the band struck up
Bésame Mucho
, stupidly dedicating the old favourite to her.
It was a bad omen.
A few minutes later, only two tables away, a waiter tripped on a diamante-studded handbag strap and crashed a tray of wine glasses to the floor. Isabel was mid-sentence with a stockbroker when
she heard the glass shattering behind her. And with her being so tired… and with that damn song playing… the darkness started flooding back.