Authors: Tod Goldberg
“What is his issue?” Fiona asked. We were in the kitchen, which is only a few feet from my bed, but with the amount of moaning and woe-is-me-ing Brent was doing, we both felt fairly comfortable speaking in our normal voices.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Have you asked him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Fi,” I said, “he’s curled up on my bed like a five-year-old. You know I have a hard time talking to kids.”
“What about in the car ride over?”
“It was enough for me to keep Sugar from speaking,” I said. “I might have killed them both.”
“So, what, you want me to coo him into telling you why the big mean bad guys blew up his daddy’s office?”
“Yes.”
“And then what? We both read him a story and put him to bed?”
“Fi,” I said, “he just needs a sweet voice in his ear right now. I’m afraid I might shake him to death if he continues to whine.”
“Fine,” she said. She walked over and sat down on the foot of the bed. “Brent, honey,” she said, “turn over. Let’s talk.”
“Oh,” he said, but didn’t move.
Fiona leaned over and rested her hand gently on the back of his neck. “Sweetheart,” she said, “we’re here to help you. Do you want our help?” She stroked his neck lightly. I know it was wise to bring her over.
“I guess,” he said.
“Then either turn over and stop babbling,” she said—and then I saw her squeeze his neck with a bit more force than a cougar does its young—“or I will break your neck. Okay, sweetie?”
Brent flipped over and stopped making noise.
“There,” Fiona said to me. “He’s all yours.”
“Thanks, Fiona,” I said. Sometimes I forget that Fiona isn’t really like other women, particularly as it relates to the care and concern of wounded animals and such.
I pulled a chair next to the bed and looked at Brent. He had brown hair that hung loosely over his eyes, a complexion that could use a bit of exfoliation but was otherwise fine and teeth that had benefited from what was probably very expensive orthodonture. His clothes were brand name and he didn’t have any obvious track marks on his arms and wasn’t constantly wiping the cocaine from his nose. So how was it he was mixed up with such bad people?
“Can I get you something to eat?” I asked.
“No, I’m fine. I ate, like, last night.”
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind a Yoo-hoo. Do you have any Yoo-hoo?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said. “How about water?”
“Water would be fine.”
“Fiona,” I said, “would you kindly get our young guest a glass of water?”
“I’d be happy to,” she said and got up.
“Is she going to hurt me anymore?” Brent asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
Fiona came back with a bottle of water, which Brent drank down quickly. He looked back and forth at me and Fi as if trying to determine who was in charge. He settled on me. “I guess things got bad today.”
“That would be correct,” I said. “Your father’s office was blown up.”
“Like with dynamite?”
“More likely with C-4,” I said. “But the result was the same.”
“What if Sugar had still been there?” he said.
“That’s a good question, Brent,” I said. “It’s why you’re now in my loft and not in your cozy bed on campus. Would you care to explain why you’ve got the Russian Mafia blowing up your father’s place of business?”
“How do I know I can trust you?” he asked.
“You don’t,” Fiona said.
This didn’t seem to reassure Brent much. “But you’re not, like, criminals, right?”
“I’m not, no,” I said.
He looked at Fiona, who said nothing.
“Why do you want to help me?” he asked.
“Because you’re in over your head,” I said. “If you didn’t know that before, you should now. And Sugar can’t help you. Trust me on that. He’s a good friend, but you don’t need friends right now. You need tactical support.” I let Brent process that bit of information for a moment. “Sugar told me that your father has a gambling problem and has disappeared. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Brent said.
“But those guys today—” I said. “That wasn’t about that, was it?”
“No,” he said. “No, that’s my problem.” Brent flopped back onto the bed and covered his face with a pillow. “I’m, like, so stupid.”
“No argument from me,” Fiona said.
“Not helping,” I said to her. I pulled the pillow off of Brent’s face. “Listen to me, Brent. You need to start at the beginning, don’t skip any details and try not to say the word ‘like’ in the process. And you need to do all of this while sitting upright or I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop Fiona from squeezing your neck again.”
Brent rubbed his forearm across his eyes, sniffled once and then ran his hands through his hair. My entire life I’ve tried to avoid crying in all its forms—crying women, crying children, crying animals—and now I had a teenage boy in my loft who couldn’t complete a sentence without spilling tears onto my comforter.
“So, okay,” Brent began. “I had this class project, okay? We were supposed to design realistic Web sites to go along with our game projects—like fully integrated sites that look like actual companies, you know?”
I told him I did. It was something the U.S. government had been doing for years. If you’re a covert operative working under a second identity in a foreign land as, say, the president of a tissue paper company, you need to have the same online corporate presence as any other tissue company might. The CIA was also especially fond of selecting people just like Brent Grayson to design them.
“My game, it’s pretty cool; it’s this world-building game where you’re basically trying to become the ultimate capitalist, but, like, do good things, too, so, you know, there’s like evil companies and stuff that want to exploit you. It’s pretty cool.”
Brent was excited, even if he wasn’t saying much of anything and even though the world was crumbling around him and he was now in a spy’s loft telling him his life story . . . or at least the story of his last few weeks.
“What is this game called?” Fiona asked.
“
Lifescape.
”
“Sounds like a birth control pill,” Fiona said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I never liked it, either. No one did. In workshop? They said it was too much like a self-improvement seminar or whatever.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “How do the Russians come into play?” Brent looked like he wanted to do that whole pillow-on-the-face thing again, so I took hold of his shoulder to let him know he had our support and that, if need be, I could grab him, too. “You need to keep it together.”
He bit into his bottom lip and soldiered forward. “I make this killer Web site for InterMacron, this super badass tech company that has developed new ways for delivering bandwidth, because like that’s the growth industry of the next twenty years, right? I mean, I do it up, because it was going to be thirty-three percent of my grade for the quarter and I’d really slacked off because of this girl who totally got into my head. It was crazy.”
Brent got a wistful look on his face and I couldn’t tell if he was feeling that way about the girl, the easier time or if that’s just how he looked because he hadn’t yet learned the joys of paying taxes and other adult activities.
“So InterMacron, the reason it’s so badass is that it’s come up with this way to increase bandwidth loads at a really low cost—fiber-optics, all that stuff? It’s like really expensive, so InterMacron has this device they are developing called the WieldXron, which will allow wireless use to expand using Kineoptic Transference.”
I looked at Fiona to see if she understood a single thing Brent said. Her mouth was agape and her eyes were a bit on the heavy-lidded side, which made me think she was about to curl up next to Brent to take a nap. I felt about the same way.
“What is Kineoptic Transference?” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t exist. It’s just this theoretical way of using the electricity found in wind to move data. It could probably only work on Mars.”
“Where did you learn of it?” I asked.
“I made it up,” he said.
I had a bad feeling about this, because what he said about bandwidth was absolutely true. Twenty-five years ago, it didn’t even exist, but today, with the world constantly wired (or, more accurately, wireless) and every day seeing an increased demand and a withering amount of supply. In America, it was managed by the conglomerates—the AT&Ts, the Verizons, the Sprints of the world—which means it is a managed resource and an untapped wealth because of the monopolization by the large telecommunications companies. If you want bandwidth, you need to deal with those who have created the infrastructure.
In a country like Russia, where the outlying former Soviet regions are still years behind the curve, so far back that the curve is still just a straight line, that demand for bandwidth is a gold rush for those with money to build—or influence the building of—the infrastructure. And the people with the most money in Russia often have ties to or are directly involved with organized crime.
Which was not a good thing if it meant what I feared.
I got up and grabbed one of Brent’s laptops. “Pull up your site,” I said.
He tapped it in and handed the laptop back to me. There, in vivid color, and including video, photos and graphs, I leaned all about the burgeoning field of Kin-eoptic Transference. I learned that the company was founded by Dr. Chester Palmetto, who, with a large grant from the Pinnacle Institute (which also had a linked Web site touting its desire to fund “the 22nd century in the 21st”), had embarked on a prototype of the Kin-eoptic Transference device to “high success” and that mass production was possible within the next five years, provided further research-and-development funds were secured.
There was a photo of Dr. Palmetto standing in front of an array of wind turbines in the California desert and the caption beneath it said: “Dr. Palmetto expects the deserts of the world, both the arid and the frozen, with their potential for wind harvestation and lack of architectural impediment to be ground zero for a new technological boom.” Other photos showed Dr. Palmetto in Paris, Dubai, New York and what appeared to be Antarctica.
There were other photos of scientists, various vice presidents and CFOs, men and women working diligently in front of computer screens and outdoors.
“Who are all of these people in the pictures?” I asked.
“Just photos I found online of people,” he said. “I doctored them up to suit my needs. I’m pretty much a master at Photoshop.”
“What about Dr. Palmetto?” Fiona asked. “You have dozens of photos of him.”
“Oh, no,” Brent said. “That’s my grandfather. He’s dead, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. Plus, he always wore a lab coat on account of being a pharmacist, so it was easy to make him look right. Pretty cool, huh? What do you think of the name—pretty cool, too, huh?”
“Chester Palmetto?” Fiona said. “Sounds like an English cigarette.”
“It’s the name of my dog and the street I grew up on,” Brent said proudly. “If you combine the two, it’s supposed to be a badass name for porn. I think it makes for a cool-sounding scientist, too.”
Fiona regarded Brent with something near disdain. “When do you study?” she asked.
“You know, it’s not about studying. You can totally game a lot of the classes if you’re smart.”
“And you’re smart?” she said.
He shrugged. It was his default body motion. A series of shrugs that stood for hundreds of emotions. “I got into the U. And I’m a pretty good game designer. You ever play any games?”
“No,” Fiona said.
“Not even like first-person shooter games?”
“Not for sport, no,” she said.
I kept clicking through the Web site until I got to the contact page. Each of the main players in the company had an e-mail address and there was a general phone number, too. “These e-mail and phone numbers actually work?” I asked.
Brent nodded. “That was part of the assignment. It’s what got me in trouble,” he said. “I used to get e-mail from people all the time asking for more information, or for scientific data, or for a quote—people doing stories on bandwidth for magazines and newspapers would contact the press agent e-mail at least twice a month. And sometimes I’d get e-mail or phone calls from people interested in investing, which I thought was crazy, because I just made up all the science on here. I just thought ‘kineoptic’ was a cool word, you know, like combining ‘kinetic’ and ‘optic,’ so, like, there it was.”
“This phone number,” I said. “Where does it ring?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “It’s an Internet number. It just records voice mail online.”
“Smart,” I said.
“Yeah?” he said.
“You survive the next two weeks of your life,” I said, “you should look into whether or not Langley is hiring.”
“I’m pretty much a pacifist,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “too bad. So people would contact you and you’d do what?”
“I used to just say stuff like, you know, ‘A major announcement will be made next year in Zurich and we’ll be able to provide you with more information at that time.’ But then I kept getting messages from this Russian technology import-export company that was very persistent in their desire to help fund my venture. I mean, I did my Googling, so I knew they were legit. I went through and looked at the coding on their Web site and all that. Even had a friend of mine who reads Russian read all the foreign stuff on them and, like, it sounded like some big faceless company, you know? Like some big asshole company that would screw the little guy. I mean. Yeah. That’s what I thought, you know?”
“Even though you built a Web site just like theirs, but probably even more sophisticated, in your dorm room?” Fi said.
“Well,” he said, “yeah, but, you know, I’m an American, so, yeah. And for a long time, like, it was a big joke with my classmates. If someone needed rent money or couldn’t make their car payment or whatever, they’d be like, ‘Call the Russians!’ So when my dad disappeared and the bookies started leaning on me, that’s what I did.”
“When did your dad go missing?” I said.
“Two months ago,” Brent said.
“You have any idea where he might be?”