Authors: Robert Kroese
I know what I need to do. I may be headed to death row, but I
’m not going until I’ve confronted David Carlyle. I’m going to find out where Tali is and what the hell Peregrine is up to.
I put on jeans and a black sweatshirt and hoist myself over the wall into the courtyard. A dull glow behind the building on the east side of the complex tells me the sun is about to rise
; the dim light and morning fog makes it impossible to see if there’s anyone in the courtyard. My shoes crunch on the frozen grass as I make my way toward the neighboring building. The building next to mine is set back from the road fifty yards or so; if I exit the courtyard on the far side of it and cut across the lawn to the road, it’s unlikely I’ll be seen by the occupants of the car. I skirt the edge of the building, open the metal gate and make my way to the road, sparing a glance for the car. Its lights are off and I see no movement in the car. I duck down a side street toward a strip mall. The sun is coming up, but I’m still freezing. I walk to a McDonald’s, get an Egg McMuffin and a coffee and take a seat. Peregrine’s offices won’t even open for another hour; I might as well sit and warm up a bit. After half an hour, I call for a cab.
I tell the drive
r to take me to the Peregrine building in the city. It’s rush hour so traffic is terrible, but an hour and a half later he lets me out on a circular drive in front of a high rise in the financial district. The ride costs me $93. I put it on my credit card. Why not? I’m probably not going to live to pay the bill.
I go inside and walk across the marbled lobby to the reception desk.
“I’m here to see David Carlyle,” I say.
“
And your name?” asks a pretty young receptionist.
“
Paul Bayes,” I say. It doesn’t seem to register with her. I guess she doesn’t watch the news.
“
Do you have an appointment, Mr. Bayes?”
“
Nope,” I say. “But he knows who I am.”
“
OK, hold on a moment.”
She
makes a quick call, speaking in hushed tones into the phone. “Fortieth floor,” she says to me with a smile. “Go on up.”
I smile back, nodding at her.
“Thank you,” I say. I walk through a metal detector staffed by a bored-looking security guard to the elevator and punch 40. The elevator shoots up, depositing me on the 40
th
floor. A stocky man with an earpiece meets me as I get off the elevator. He seems familiar to me, and after a moment I realize why: he’s the second man I saw with Tali at the mall. Carlyle’s right-hand thug. He goes over my body with a hand-held metal detector and gives me a thorough pat-down, then gestures toward a big wooden door with a metal plaque reading
David Carlyle, Vice President of Predictive Analytics
. I walk down the hall and open the door.
Carlyle, wearing
a precisely tailored dark blue suit, is staring out the floor-to ceiling window. It’s a breathtaking view: to the right is the Bay Bridge, connecting the peninsula to Oakland and the rest of the East Bay; to the left is the Golden Gate, leading toward Sausalito and the great redwood forests on the Northern California coast. In the middle of the Bay is a small island with a cluster of buildings, a lighthouse and a water tower: Alcatraz. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right … The office is tastefully, though sparsely decorated: On the built-in bookshelf behind me I notice books by Nietzsche, Machiavelli and Ayn Rand. Never a good sign. Next to
Atlas Shrugged
is a small marble figurine of a falcon.
He
turns, smiling. Not the vapid smile of the receptionist, though; more like the smile of a man watching a cat batting at a moth on the other side of a window pane. He’s of medium height, thin and compactly built, with closely cropped blond-silver hair. His movements are precise; he projects an air of certainty. He’s definitely the man who was with Tali in Alameda.
“
Mr. Bayes,” he says. “Good to meet you. My name is David Carlyle. You may call me David, if you like. Do you mind if I call you Paul?”
I shrug.
“I just want to know where Tali is.”
“
Have a seat, please,” he says. I remain standing. “Would you like something to drink? Water, Coke, scotch …”
“
Scotch,” I say. The hell with it. I sit down in the plush leather chair facing his desk. He pours two drinks and hands me one, taking a seat across from me. I notice a little black doodad on the desk.
“
Tali is fine,” he says. “And I can offer you proof of that. But before I do, I’d like to ask you a question. Does that sound fair, Paul?”
I shrug again and take a gulp of the scotch. It tickles my throat.
“Why did you do it?” he asks.
“
Do what?” I reply.
“
Come on, Paul. Why did you walk into Fairway Mall with a bomb?”
“
What does it matter to you?” I ask. “Is the mall one of your clients?”
He laughs.
“Fair question. Answer mine first, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“
My lawyer …” I start.
“
Your lawyer,” Carlyle says, “is an overpaid ambulance chaser who has already thrown in the towel on your case. Do you know how rarely insanity pleas work? But that’s neither here nor there. Peregrine has hundreds of lawyers on retainer, including several excellent criminal lawyers. If you tell me what happened, I can offer you an actual defense. No guarantees, of course – the evidence against you is pretty strong. But you’ll at least have a shot at avoiding death row. Maybe even an acquittal.”
I realize he could be lying. He might use whatever I say against me. But what would his angle be?
Anyway, how much worse could anything I tell him hurt me? My conviction is already a near-certainty. And maybe he really can answer some of my questions. Maybe he knows what happened to Tali.
“
Heller told me it was a ransom. Fifty thousand dollars.”
He claps his hands together.
“Of course! For the return of Miss Stern. I should have thought of that.”
“
So you do know something about Tali’s disappearance.”
He laughs.
“Well, of course I know. I was the one behind it.”
“
You son of a bitch!” I yell, getting to my feet. “You’re the reason I was arrested!” By the time I’m halfway around the desk, Carlyle has pulled a gun from his desk – a nine millimeter semi-automatic.
“
Let’s keep this civil,” says Carlyle, without a hint of irony.
I raise my hands and back away.
“Please, sit,” he says. “Allow me to explain.”
I sit down. My hands are shaking with anger. I throw the rest of the scotch down my throat and cough a few times.
“Is she all right?”
“
As I already said, she’s perfectly fine,” says Carlyle, dropping the gun to his lap.
“
Why did you kidnap her? What do you want?”
“
I didn’t kidnap her,” he says. “And what I wanted is exactly what I got.”
“
Mass murder?”
He shakes his head.
“No. Not killing for its own sake; the bombing was important because of what it represented.”
“
Which is?”
“
Proof. Proof that Heller could predict future events.”
“
He already had proof. They’ve known for over a year.”
He nods.
“Yes, but
I
didn’t know. I can’t run this division on theories. I need actual information.”
“
So that’s all this is to you?” I snarl. “Mass murder is just business to you?”
“
Look,” says Carlyle. “I didn’t make those people die. I didn’t
want
them to die. And if Heller is to be believed, what I did or didn’t want doesn’t particularly matter anyway.”
“
Heller was a fucking sociopath.”
“
Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe he just had the sort of clarity that comes with an expanded perspective. Think of it this way, Paul. Do you believe in God?”
“
I don’t know,” I say. “I suppose. What does that have to do with anything?”
“
Well,” replies Heller, “if there is a God, and He’s really omnipotent, then apparently he allowed you to walk into that mall with a bomb and kill all those people. God intentionally let those people die. So is God a sociopath? Or does God see a big picture that we can’t?”
“
Yeah, I get it. But Heller isn’t God.”
“
Of course not. But you have to admit that predicting the future put him solidly on God’s turf. In the end, it was too much for him to take.”
“
And that doesn’t send a shiver up your spine? The guy who invented the technology put a bullet in his brain, and that doesn’t make you wonder whether you should rethink your business plan?”
Carlyle shrugs.
“Heller was trying to reconcile his notions of morality with his knowledge of the future. He was trying to figure out what it all
means
. I’m not. I don’t give a shit what it
means
. To me, Tyche is just a tool.”
“
A moneymaking tool, you mean.”
“
Sure, and why not? If these events are going to happen anyway, why not make money off them?”
“
So how does it work? You find out a building is going to burn down and cancel their policy the day before the fire?”
He smiles.
“The idea would be to fine-tune the system a bit so that we don’t have to be so obvious about it, but yes, that’s the general idea. I mean, imagine the possibilities, Paul. What if we could charge our clients for information on future plane crashes? What if we could stop selling homeowner’s insurance policies a month before a massive earthquake? We’re talking
billions
of dollars here. Maybe
trillions
. The opportunities are almost unimaginable.”
“
And this all started because of an accident in Heller’s shop?”
He looks surprised for a moment.
“I had a conversation with one of your ex-employees. A guy named Peter Girell.”
“
Ah,” he says, nodding. “I should have known. Yes, that’s how it started. I sent Girell to investigate the accident but the poor guy wouldn’t know a quark from a Cuisinart. It seemed like it would be a straightforward case, so I decided I’d look into it myself. After interviewing Heller I realized the problem: his work revolved around what appeared to be a patently absurd hypothesis. Two of them, actually: first, that it was possible to predict violent events occurring in the near future; and second, that the future actively resisted being changed. If I rejected those hypotheses, I’d have to conclude that Heller was a harmless eccentric puttering around with a soldering iron, which meant that I’d have to pay his claim. If, on the other hand, I accepted that it was possible that Heller could predict the future and that the future resisted being changed, I could classify his experiments as ‘inherently dangerous.’ Heller was completely up front about everything; partly I think he was still in shock about the accident, but I also think he saw the dilemma I faced and was somewhat amused by it. I asked him to give me a list of colleagues who could give an expert opinion on his hypotheses, and he refused, saying that he didn’t know of anyone who was qualified, and if he did, he wouldn’t give me their names because it was ‘too dangerous.’ I asked him what he meant by that, and he told me that talking to anyone in the scientific community about his work would put their lives at risk. I thanked him for his time and denied the claim.
“
All in a day’s work, but that case haunted me for weeks. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t an ethical issue: the matter really could have gone either way, and it’s not like Heller went bankrupt as a result of the claim being denied. In any case, as you may have surmised, I’m not exactly a fountain of empathy. I’ve seen children die because our company – because
I
denied an experimental treatment. It’s part of the business. So what was the problem?
“
I realized that what I couldn’t get out of my mind was the possibility that Heller was right. What if he
could
predict future tragedies? Can you imagine how much that knowledge would be worth to a company like Peregrine?
“
I sent Girell back to Heller’s house with some dummied up documents for him to sign. The documents basically said that Peregrine would be canceling his policy based on the fact that we believed, as a result of our investigation, that his work was a fraud. Heller’s no dummy, of course; he realized that the document stating that his work was a fraud directly contradicted our own stated reason for denying his claim. His work couldn’t be both completely bogus
and
inherently dangerous. A week later I was notified that Heller was suing us for two million dollars. I fired Girell and denied knowing anything about the documents. Then I went to Peregrine’s board of directors and informed them of the problem. I suggested that we could buy Heller off by paying him a million dollars to produce proof that he could predict violent future events. If he succeeded, the results would be worth billions. If he failed, we’d be out a million dollars. If we went to trial, the court costs alone could easily exceed that. They agreed. I lobbied to be made the director of a new division, Predictive Analytics, which would manage Heller and act on any information he gave us. That was a tougher sell, but they went along with it. I think close to half of the board members saw it as a chance to give me enough rope to hang myself. If Heller failed, the division would be shut down and I’d be fired. I was willing to take the risk because I really did think Heller was on to something.