Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) (5 page)

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.

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 and
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.

“I have a suggestion,” she said softly.

The Cardinal looked up from his thoughts, his head slightly to one
side, amused almost. Carol didn’t usually make suggestions. That was what he
liked about her; what she did, she did with utter dedication. But she never got
involved in his side of things.

“Are you sure it fits our criteria?” he asked, polite but wary.

“I think so.”

She explained the situation briefly, making sure not to stress her
own emotional involvement in the case. It was, on the contrary, a matter of
theft on a grand scale, of a person becoming not a millionaire but a
billionaire. It was about people having been duped, quite legally. All things
considered, it was exactly the kind of case that moved the Cardinal to action.

With his customary politeness, he let her finish, then pressed his
palms together and took a long time to think about it.

“How much of this is public knowledge?” he asked.

“Apparently, people tend not to mention it because it might reflect
badly on them. Plus, they might have difficulty finding work elsewhere if they
get a reputation for accusing employers of theft...”

“Especially when they themselves signed their rights away.”

She sighed. “Jason was young, innocent, and plagiarism of
programming code is hard to prove. He tried, but he didn’t have the resources
to do anything else about it.”

The Cardinal stood to leave. “Let me look into this.”

With that he gave her the briefest of nods.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. Their relationship was not one
of friendship. It was one of trust. He trusted her to get the job done. And now
he simply asked her to trust him. Within days he would know as much about
Strange Tech as any person on the planet. Of that Carol had no doubt.

A minute later the Cardinal disappeared down the sidewalk. She would
see nothing more of him until the next time he had a use for her, which might be
weeks, months away. Who knew, she might never see him again. Although she
somehow suspected that they would be working together again quite soon...

Her mind now drifted back to her first time in New York, after the
Cardinal had helped her escape from Mexico. Things had not changed much in
those ten years. When she’d first met the Cardinal, she had no idea who he was,
only that his modest black suit and white priest’s collar concealed something
deeper, more unnerving. This was no ordinary priest, swinging incense and
idling away the hours in the confessional. There was a natural authority to
him, a bearing of carefully wielded power in his tall, angular frame. She could
never have guessed what the Cardinal was, but a simple priest he most
definitely was not.

He had appeared at the convent school the day after Raúl died, out
of nowhere, like a dark cloud moving suddenly across the sky. It had been just
a few days before she turned eighteen, and he’d saved her from a cruel and
underserved fate. But whatever this man had wanted in return, she’d told
herself, back then, as she gazed into his narrow eyes for the first time, she
had no idea.

He had been slow and calculated, quite businesslike, as if Raúl’s
death was of merely passing interest. No; what the Cardinal required had been
far more complex than simply cleaning up after an untimely death. It would
require a great deal more than penance. It would require, indeed, total
dedication.

Did she have a choice? Back then, it seemed not. It seemed that her
destiny had been decided for her. The Cardinal was not like that, though. It
only seemed so. He had a mission, and it did not involve compelling anyone to
join him in his work. Carol Schmidt, on the verge of womanhood, had been given
the choice. And she had accepted. It was not a decision she had ever regretted.

She now stood up from the table, noticing that the Cardinal had left
twenty American dollars under his saucer for the two drinks, an enormous tip in
these parts. Money had never been an issue in their line of work. It would be
the same tonight, she knew, as she readied herself for another job; whatever the
financial settlement this evening, she would not be required to hand the money
back. From now on, she was on her own.

She looked at her watch. It was only noon, still seven hours to go
before her appointment with Father Hernández. After that there would be his
associate, the cool and slightly unnerving Ms. Lescheva. Carol had already met
her, and was keen to renew their acquaintance.

It had been late
yesterday evening when she knocked on the heavy door of the Social Center for
the first time. Behind her, across the road, was the modern brick building of San
Filipe Church, a large but not particularly impressive place, its bricks a dull
orange and its dark windows covered in steel grills. She hadn’t been inside it;
churches were not her thing, not since leaving the convent school. A childhood
of yawning through morning mass, her nose itching with the incense in the air,
had been more than enough time spent in churches for anyone.

Fortunately, her meeting was on the opposite side of the road, in the
church’s Social Center. And now, at almost eleven in the evening, it had closed
its doors to the public.

She knocked and waited, looking at the words
Centro Social
above the door. Several bolts clunked on the other side before it opened with a
low groan. The woman standing there was tall, with short dark hair and a fixed,
icy smile.

Even in her somber clothes, a dull gray blouse and a voluminous dark
blue skirt, the similarity was striking. She was perhaps a few years older than
Carol—thirty, thirty-two? Thereabouts. She was a little taller, too, and a
touch less curvy, with an aura of athleticism. But the two women were very
closely matched, right down to the hair.

“Carol?” she said.

“
Sí
,” said Carol, in perfect Spanish, forcing a flutter of
nerves into her voice. “
¿Usted es Irina?
”

A moment’s pause.

“I...” the other woman said.

“Oh, sorry! You don’t speak Spanish. Are you Irina? I’m Carol. I
spoke with Father Hernández on the phone earlier.”

“Yes,” she said. “Please, please, come inside.”

Carol tried to look reticent about entering, playing the part as
well as she could. It was as if now, having plucked up the courage to come to
the center and knock on the door, her confidence was on the verge of collapse.

Inside there was a ping pong table. A soda machine stood in one
corner and next to it a shelf crammed with books and magazines. In the middle
of the room were three ancient sofas, low-slung and sagging so badly that they
looked like distorted, indeterminate lumps of color.

“Please, take a seat,” Irina said.

She was Russian, and had a light but perceptible Slavic accent,
lending her words a tantalizing, far-off quality. And there was something
deliberate about her movements, thoughtful and unhurried. Around her neck hung
a small silver crucifix on a fine silver chain. It caught the light
continually, set against the skin of her neck, which was very pale for someone
with such dark hair.

Carol sat down on one of the sofas. It was large and remarkably
comfortable, its old, deep cushions so soft that as she sank down into them it
felt like she was being cupped from underneath by an enormous hand.

“Have you thought about what the father told you on the phone?”
Irina said, lowering herself down next to Carol.

Between them on the sofa, she placed a plastic folder.

Carol nodded.

“Please,” Irina said, patting the folder. “Take a look. Tell me what
you think.”

Carol took the folder, laid it across her thighs, and opened it. A
photograph took up the whole of the first page. It showed a collection of large
wooden cabins in what looked like a mountain paradise. Way up behind them was a
ridge of purple peaks, the sun peeping over them tantalizingly.

There might have been fifty or sixty dwellings of various sizes.
Outside many of them bicycles were leaning against the verandas. Others had sun
shades extending out from the eves of their sloping roofs. There were several
larger buildings, and a kids’ playground, full of sturdy, wood-built swings and
climbing frames.

The village itself was snuggled in a lush green valley surrounded by
forest. To one side a stream meandered, with several little wooden bridges over
it, like miniature Monet bridges, real picture book stuff.

“Call it our little Eden,” Irina said, encouraging Carol to turn the
pages.

Each new photograph showed the place in more detail, or showcased
the breath-taking views out across the valley. There were a couple of dozen
shots, and Carol looked at them all, pausing to ask the odd question here and
there, admiring this or that about the settlement, visibly impressed, it
seemed, taking it all in with awe.

And it
was
impressive, a whole community constructed out in
the wilderness. Each of the wooden dwellings looked warm and welcoming. The
interiors of the houses were also pictured. They were sumptuously decorated,
all mod-cons and soft furnishings. There was nothing remotely basic about this
mountain life.

Carol recognized some of the photos. She’d seen them before, just a
couple of days ago. They were publicity shots for a high-end vacation resort in
rural Brazil, the kind of place rich business people from Saõ Paulo and
Brazilia go for a week’s retreat into nature, surrounded by servants and cooks,
pampered like rare parakeets in a zoo and drinking mango daiquiris as the sun
goes down.

Yes, Carol knew exactly what the place was. She also knew exactly
what it wasn’t: it was not
New Dawn Pueblo
, a self-sufficient spiritual
community run by volunteers.
New Dawn Pueblo
did not exist, other than
briefly, in the minds of a few young women who were unlucky enough to have seen
this folder, who had dreamed of waking up there and breathing the crisp
mountain air, of striding joyously through the forests, their new lives just
beginning.

“Do you like?” Irina said, at a whisper but pretty business-like.
“Tell me, Carol, what do you think? Is it for you?”

“Will you be there?” she asked shyly, glancing fleetingly at Irina,
then down at the floor.

“I’m going back tomorrow night. You can come with me if you like. If
you’re ready.”

Carol’s head moved, just fractionally, as if she hardly dared to
nod.

“I want to be ready,” she said.

Irina reached across and squeezed her hand. She looked right into
Carol’s eyes and smiled.

“Are you sure?” she said. “Do you want me to explain?”

She gripped Carol’s hand, their fingers interlocking.

Then Irina pulled her hand away and jumped up, standing in front of
Carol, hands on hips, before moving back a ways and perching on the edge of the
sofa opposite.

“Everyone in the
Pueblo
chooses their own way of life. Whatever
else, you must understand that.”

“I do.”

“There are no rules. Just respect and tolerance. We are a community
of love and forgiveness. We are free. Free to choose. Free to live exactly as
we feel. To love exactly as we feel. There are no boundaries other than respect
and tolerance.”

“I understand.”

“Those who come to live among us taste the ultimate freedom. They
choose to be free of the confines of society, especially the emotional and
sensual rules of normal life. Some of those in the
Pueblo
express this
through celibacy. Others through monogamy. For others, and this includes me, the
freedom leads to something more open, more of a perpetual exploration.”

She stopped, but she wasn’t finished. She simply wanted the picture
she was painting to emerge in all its splendor in Carol’s mind.

“The path you take,” Irina continued, “is yours alone to decide. No
one will question its fitness for you, Carol, whatever you chose. No one will
force or compel or persuade you that one way of life is better than another. All
that is required, and this is a great deal to ask, is that you demonstrate to
us that you are willing to commit to the ultimate freedoms that we cherish.”

“And how can I demonstrate that I am willing?”

Irina ran her hands through her own hair. Her smile disappeared.

“It is not easy. You must deliver yourself up, show us that you
embrace true freedom, that the desire truly exists in your soul. You must offer
up your whole being, your body, show us that you are willing to free yourself
from the physical realm and all that governs it.”

“And if I do that?”

“If you do that, Carol, you will be free. Forever.”

Carol’s expression changed. It became more intense.

“Tell me how. I’m ready.”

Irina took Carol’s hands in hers. They both stood up, and embraced.

“Tomorrow evening,” she whispered, her face pressed into Carol’s
neck, her lips touching the soft skin there as she talked. “Father Hernández
will speak to you, and if he agrees, you will offer yourself up to me.”

“Anything,” Carol said. “I will do anything.”

That was yesterday. And since then, all Carol could do was wait in
her hotel room, and imagine what Irina had in store for her.