Chapter 23

Jon was back on duty at the Mark. He was an ordinary looking man, a little under six feet, maybe two hundred-thirty pounds and round.  He had a full head of reddish blond hair and a belly, but didn’t look especially jolly, not at first.  Jack had seen him enjoy a broken foot once, not the pain, but the experience and telling the story.

“So this is the famous woman.  Jack has said nothing, but staff said he must have someone special in his life.  If I was twenty years younger, no fifteen, well maybe even ten.  I’m sure you are wise enough to understand how much better older men are.”

Jon took Lee’s arm and led her toward the elevator.  She laughed and hit him with a hip over something he whispered into her ear.

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Jon asked in the elevator, “Now what can I do to make your stay the best?”

Jack debated telling him about the employee who bugged the phone in his room.

“Do you know all your staff by sight?”

Jon looked a little embarrassed when he said, “By sight, yes, but not all their names. We have over two hundred employees.  We do have turnover.  Not as much as you’d think.  We are union, like all the hotels in the City.”

He gave Jon the description and the time “Sam,” entered the room and asked him to track Sam down so he could give him a tip.  When Jon made the call on the radio from his belt, he spoke in German.  He looked puzzled and repeated a few phrases. “Sam” was repeated often.

He seemed confused.  “We have two people named Sam working for us.  Both are very attractive young women and neither worked the shift you told me about.  Are you sure it was Sam?”

“I am distracted.  I could have misremembered.”  He didn’t think Jon bought it, but he didn’t push.

Jack didn’t know enough to know what kind of disinformation to plant. There was a possibility he hadn’t considered.  The hotel’s suites had been temporary homes to some of the most powerful people in the world.  Could someone bug the suites thinking any of them could yield information to sell?  The timing was suspicious, but it could be a coincidence.  He checked the place deep inside him where his sixth sense lived.

Sometimes his intuition wasn’t home.  Not often.  Occasionally his gift was so pervasive, so powerful, it made him dizzy until he listened.  Today was an in-the-middle day, with no brilliant intuitive leaps.  He was somehow certain the bug was connected to his sister and to ReWire, Inc.  He didn’t need to know why.  He just had to trust himself.

As he turned, Lee leaped onto him, wrapping her legs around him.  She held his ear in her strong white teeth as she said, “I will wash you and then we will make love-twice!”

JACK ALWAYS woke before civil twilight except for those few times where the medical types made sure he couldn’t.  It didn’t matter what time zone, how tired he was, or when he went to bed. He lay there and made as perfect a picture of the day he wanted as he could.  Then he slid his arm from under Lee and slipped quietly out of bed, from habit rather than need. He stood for a moment, his face turning grim as he thought about how he was going to kill the men who hurt his sister.  That was positive, wasn’t it?  Then he did his back stretches and warm-ups, as he had to do every day of his life since the mortar attack.  If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to walk.

Lee slept deeply, needing nearly two hours more sleep a night than he.  She required at least an hour to transition from sleep to awake-as a human.  She could do it in less time if he wanted her to wake up as the Alien, but that made for a bad first few hours of the day for her. And, an even worse few hours for those who couldn’t escape.

THE CAB ride to the office gave Jack no new insights, just a rich appreciation for the habit of hygiene.  Only six people were physically in the office.  Billy Jo liked to come in a few hours each day so whatever young stud she was living with at the time had a chance to rest up.

Billy Jo was fifty-nine.  With careful diet, a brutal gym schedule, a few tucks here and there, and a budget for personal decoration large enough to feed a third world village in perpetuity, she could pass for thirty-five.  Indoors and in kind light, of course.

Billy Jo slid up from her workstation, not bothering to smooth the leather miniskirt down over her long legs, jogged over and hugged him.  He grabbed her hand as she tried to pinch him on the ass.

“Alice said you could probably figure a way for me to write off one of the ferries she’s inspecting for the commute.”

Billy Jo’s eyes glazed over in her tax attorney trance for a few seconds.  She might look like a two-thousand-dollar–a-night call girl, but she knew more tax code than any other five tax-attorneys he knew.

“Sorry, Jack,” she said in her theatrically hoarse voice.  “We could write off some of the cost if we entertained on the boat, but nothing for a commute.”

Jack thought about telling her it was a joke.  The explanation wasn’t worth the effort.  He walked upstairs to the meeting room.  Most of DealMaker’s meetings were Webinars, and why not?  He had voted against leasing another eight hundred square feet at San Francisco real estate prices.  Billy Jo negotiated so well that the extra space lowered the price per square foot.  It was tough to turn the room down for $400 a month.

He had come in for the tactile thinking of the big eraser board.  He plotted share movements of stocks vertically and the timeline out horizontally.  Red for ReWire, blue for Genotopian, green for Life Plan, and so on.  Next to each big stock move he placed sticky notes with news stories that weren’t so-called acts of God.

Nearly an hour later, he stepped back.  If you had a very suspicious mind and allowed for Kentucky windage and the normal spill before any major corporate news, you could say maybe to insider trading.  Maybe.  His guts were trying to tell him something and his mind wouldn’t listen.

He stood and stretched his back, trying not to think, trying to let his brain tell him what was going on.  He was too tired or too worried to let it happen.  He’d almost forgotten dinner.  They stocked the larder, fridge and freezer at DealMaker with a siege mentality.

He nuked  eight egg whites along with one yolk for flavor and ladled them onto a couple of toasted sprouted wheat bagels.  A little blackberry jelly, some salt and pepper and he had four hundred clean calories, a bunch of fiber and almost forty grams of protein. He washed the whole thing down with a pint of cranberry juice and called the Mark.

Lee answered. “I just woke up.  You shouldn’t have let me sleep this long.  Where are you?”

“Has Seiji called?”

With no hesitation she said, “No he hasn’t.  Wouldn’t you think, with all the money he is going to make on this deal, he would be eager to return calls?”

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“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” He said as he rang off.  The disinformation campaign couldn’t be obvious.  If it was commercial espionage they’d given someone the scent.  Tomorrow evening Lee, he, and other coconspirators to be named later would chat about problems in a company with a thinly traded stock.  Then they’d watch the market like a mother watched a newborn. Any surge in short volume would lead them to the listener.

Chapter 22

The man went over his plans and notes again.  The organization provided him with plans for the house and yard.  It wasn’t a house and yard.  It looked like a mansion on an estate.  It was mostly a fortress. He felt sick thinking about how hard it was going to be to get into the place.  He thought about following the man and taking him down in a mugging.  There were too many chances for people with iPhones to take video.

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The man walked from one end of his room to the other and back.  He walked four paces and turned and back four paces and turned.  He did not bother to hide his limp, relaxing for a minute.  If he got lazy and limped outside the apartment it might be remembered.  Nothing about him could be remembered.  He sat back down and compared the plans the organization had given him to the plans he obtained from the city.  The plans matched.

The women’s apartment in the City had relied on a great alarm system, security cameras, and great locks.  The estate relied on an electrified fence as its first line of defense. No, that wasn’t right. The first line of defense was the community of Woodside itself, with its gates, walls, and security patrols. Security cameras and motion detectors covered the grounds.  He glanced down at the two sets of identical plans.  Wait! There was a note on the plans from the city.  It was something about a drainage problem.  There was a permit for a culvert with a French drain to help the run-off percolate into the rocky soil.  When they installed the drain they had to move the wall.

The man picked up a day labor job with a landscape contractor. He also worked as a waiter at a catered outdoor party. He had taken as many pictures of the walls and trees as he could.  He flipped quickly through the pictures.  Yes!  He would drive by and double-check, but it looked like a small chance to get in.  Praise the Lord.

His shoulders slumped.  Running around the left, right, and back of the house was a dog run.  Inside the dog run was a pair of cattle dogs.  His longest stretch on the outside had been as a shepherd.  The cattle dogs he worked with were smarter than a lot of men he’d worked alongside who earned good wages.  Those dogs treated him better than any people he had ever known.  The man thought the dogs might be an alien race.  They had good enough night vision to see the coyotes and were badass enough to run off a pack of them.

The dogs were brave. They would die before they let anything hurt the herd.  These people needed to be stopped, but he knew he couldn’t kill the dogs.  The Church said dogs had no souls.  He would never question the Church on important matters.  On this he was not so sure.  He would find a way in without killing the dogs.  He decided he would not tell his handler of his decision about the dogs.  The man needed at least one secret.  But, how would he get around the dogs?

The dogs had a great sense of smell to go with their hearing and vision.  The man would have to go in early in the morning.  There was no way to affect their hearing without hurting or killing the dogs.  It was the same with their vision or sense of smell. A thought crawled quickly across his mind like one of the cockroaches he kept as a pet while he was in solitary at Q.  When he tried to catch it, it ran away.

The man was so tired.  The cocktail of drugs was not keeping the virus away.  Most of the drugs were experimental, not available anywhere except to him and, he guessed, a few others like him.  He had to stay alive and strong a little while longer.  These people were evil and needed to be stopped and the Church would help him do it.  The thought crawled quickly back across his mind.  He would have to visit a veterinarian.

Thank you to all of you who gave me feedback on the chapters from the rough draft of ReWire that was posted on this website.  Your input helped!

Chapter 21

DealMaker had the best telecommunications equipment good money could buy.  Their equipment was better than private citizens could buy legally.  The people who acquired, set up, and ran this equipment and software were even better. Mistakes happened and protocol required Jack to check.  “I’m sorry to hear about Ms. Harding’s illness.  May I speak to Olga?”

He had let Mike know that he understood the line was tapped and asked Mike to confirm it.

“Ms. Boginskaya is also unavailable, I am afraid.  Shall I transfer you to her voicemail, Sir?”

“That’s okay, Mike. I’ll call a little later.”  He hung up and started to remove the bug. He stopped and thumped himself on the forehead with the heel of his left hand.  He must be getting simple.  Accurate information is the most valuable thing on the planet-except for one thing.  Disinformation planted and relied on is more valuable still. Somebody had given him a pipeline directly into their organization’s brain.  Even if he didn’t know who “they” were, he could still use the pipeline.  He could plant information, watch for reactions and figure out who “they” were.  Then he could use information to damage them.

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He had a window of a week, maybe.  Anyone in his business had their rooms swept at least once a week.  He could act real stupid because of his sister and maybe get ten days. Better count on seven or less.

So, Jack, who is it?  Maybe it was some overeager journalist.  This threat would be the easiest to deal with.  Most business journalists had journalism degrees.  They couldn’t tell a balance sheet from a percale sheet.  If it was the Feds, his life was going to become annoyingly boring.  He hardly ever broke laws, other than speed limits, that he was aware of.  But, there were so many laws and rules and regulations he was always in violation of something. Even if caught, most of the time it wasn’t so bad. He would pay some bullshit penalty or have to waste a few hours with the lawyers.

If the bug was standard commercial espionage they were also fine.  DealMaker’s niche was difficult for anyone else to fill. Yet.  The partnership pulled down deals too small to go public and too relationship-intensive for most venture capitalists to compete.

The big boys were now using DealMaker as a bird dog, spotting opportunities.  The partnership would do a small deal, proving a concept was workable, and public companies would steal the idea and try to scale up.

Jack’s brain felt as if it were made out of syrup.  That wasn’t right.  Syrup was sweet and his thoughts were far from sweet.  He kept thinking about his sister and her asshole boss.  His guts were telling him the tap was connected to them, maybe because he wanted the connection to be there.  The connection was too easy, too obvious. He didn’t believe in easy or obvious.  He needed to talk to someone smart.

Just then someone very smart walked out of the bathroom wearing a bathrobe.  Hong Lee looked very good in a bathrobe.  This one was a little too big, belted loosely, open all the way to the belt with nothing on underneath the bathrobe that he could see, except wonderful, soft skin.  She walked to where he was sitting and straddled him to reveal he was completely right about what was underneath the bathrobe.  He held her and reached over to the desk and picked up the note pad and pen.  He tore one sheet off the pad and placed it on the hard surface of the table in case he forgot to throw the next six sheets on the pad away.  He wrote:

the room is bugged

She pursed her lips, grabbed the pen and wrote so neatly that it looked like a penmanship lesson from long ago:  let’s give them something to listen to.  Fuck me. Now! 

It seemed like a wonderful idea then and even better a few minutes later.

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 JACK WALKED back to the hospital to check on Meghan.  According to one of the nurses, she was holding her own, and consolidating her gains.

“What gains?” he asked.

“She’s alive, isn’t she?” was the question he received as an answer.

If being alive was good, how close to dead had she been?  He walked into the room that he and Dvora were renting.  Dvora had crashed again.  When he checked his texts he saw that she wanted to talk. He set the text up to tell her to meet him at the office before dinner and didn’t send it, wanting to make sure the text didn’t wake her.

He walked into Meghan’s room and said hi to the nurse he first thought of as Attila.  His name was Cameron Morrison, RN, BSN.  The guy looked more like a bouncer than a nurse, with some interesting scars on his face and hands.  When Cameron touched Meghan, it was with such overwhelming tenderness that Jack couldn’t help be moved..

“How is she doing?”

Cameron looked down at Meghan, smoothing an invisible wrinkle in her blanket and smiled.  His voice said somewhere around South Carolina when he answered.  “We are all very proud of your sister and the job our team has done. She looks so delicate, but damn, she must be tough as an old boot.  She was beat as bad as I’ve ever seen anybody beat, and then ran into some bad luck with the allergy, and pneumonia and all.  Just look at her!”  The nurse glanced up at the machines. “Her vitals are great and she is healing about twice as fast as a normal person.  Do you have the same kind of genetics?”

Jack smiled, thinking Yes!  She is fixing herself! “Yeah, we have always been quick healers.  Good thing too because we both share clumsy.  Is there any way I could get just a few minutes alone with her?”

Cameron said, “Nope.  Hospital rules, union rules and, in this case, the rules make sense. Sorry.  I’ll sit and watch the monitor for five minutes.  But, I have to listen, and at the end of those five minutes I will have to check her thoroughly.  She is still very much at risk.  I hope you understand?”

“No worries.  Can I hold her hand?”

“That you can do, if you go over to that sink and wash your hands in water nearly too hot with more soap that you usually use for forty seconds.  Or, you can glove up.  I’ll show you how. And, keep your mask on.”

Jack did as he was told and then knelt next to the bed and held Meghan’s hand.  He hoped what he was doing looked a like praying.  He steadied his breathing, cleared his mind, and reached out with his inner touch.  They had never had telepathy like in science fiction, like words in their heads. But, they just knew things and when they touched it was always easier to know.  He reached out and she was there and she was scared and trying so hard to heal and come back and she hated the painkillers, but knew that she was really badly hurt and knew that the pain might be too much if she didn’t have them and HELP ME!”

I’m here sweetie, like always he thought over and over again.

You are doing so well, we are so proud.  Dvora loves you and I love you and you are doing so well, he said again, and again and again.

Cameron said, “I’ve got to check her again now.”

He told his sister that he was leaving, would be back soon and often.  He thanked Cameron for his care, and walked out thinking that when he found the men who’d nearly killed his sister, he was going make sure he didn’t botch the job.

It took him long minutes to control his anger on the walk.  He slipped in the side door and snuck into one of the offices, not wanting to talk with anyone face-to-face just yet.  He fired up his contact management software.  His first call was to a friend in the trust department of what used to be Merrill Lynch.

“Mary St. Clair’s office,” Greta said as she picked up Mary’s phone.

Greta had worked for him years before at Solomon.

“Jack, I was so sorry to hear about Meghan.  You got my card?”

“Yes, thank you.  Even though she is still unconscious, she is doing much, much better.  I will keep you posted.”

Greta patched him through to Mary St. Claire.

“Jack, my spies tell me Meghan is better, although still unconscious.  Is that true?”

“Yes, and thank you for the voicemail, and the flowers you sent to the children’s ward on her behalf.  I need to check up on ReWire.”

“You are checking ReWire to hedge her bets, or because you know something?”

No matter how much she cared she was a portfolio manager first.

“Hedging bets Mary.  You have to know that most of her wealth is in their stock.”

His questions made sense and, if he were she, he would still be suspicious. There was a small, measured silence before she answered.

“I don’t know much about ReWire, or any of the other smaller genetic engineering companies.  We have a sector fund in that area, but I don’t manage it.  Do you want me to talk to the fund manager and get back to you, or do you want to talk to him directly?”

Jack wanted to talk to her fund manager, but by the end of the day a whole bunch of people were going to connect him with ReWire.  If he were a betting man, he’d bet on at least double trading volume on ReWire no matter how quietly he worked.

“Would you talk to him, Mary?  Please, keep this as quiet as you can?  I’m going to be on the phone all day so the stock’s going to be in play.”

“I’ll be sneakier than sneaky.  You should talk to Harry Bernstein at Fidelity Select Small Cap Bio.  You want me to call him and ask him to call you?”

“Just check out ReWire as if it’s coming from you, please.”  They played catch-up for a while and then Mary invited him to a dinner party a month out and he agreed to attend.  He sent a text to Dvora and got on the phone. Thirty-five phone calls later, it was almost time to take Dvora to dinner.

He managed to talk to six people who made decisions, numerous administrative and personal assistants, secretaries, and mostly voice mail.  It was a part of the game he knew well and was very good at.  His early years as a grunt stockbroker made him immune to the drudgery of smiling and dialing. He stood with his Mac on a stand and made his calls.  Standing was way better on this back and made his voice more natural.

While he was making a call he’d slide to the window with his contact management software.  When he was on hold he would slide to his search engine or his floor-trading program.  Jack duplicated the work Alice and Bob were doing, but he had a big edge in connections.

He checked voice mail again while he was on hold.  Eleven messages were from politicians.  They were extremely sorry about Meghan. They would personally make sure the investigation had the priority it deserved.  The Lieutenant Governor called, former Mayor Willie, and current Mayor Idiot, all of whom he had voted against.

The assemblyman from his district in Tiburon finally maxed his gag reflex.  This man was an avowed communist.  His parents left the moron more than fifty million dollars.  The servant of the people had pissed all of it away except the ten million held in irrevocable trust.  The man could barely live on the $400K a year he received from that.

“Jack, Arturo Mendoza here.  I’m so sorry to hear about Meghan.  She’s quite a girl.  I’m going to personally see to it that the police do everything in their power to bring the men who did this to justice.  They obviously need intense counseling to help them out of denial and into recovery.  I have put three calls in to this Captain Yang.  He has returned none of them.  I am quite upset.”

At that point Jack could hear Mendoza ineffectively try to cover the mouthpiece of his phone, laughing at something said in the background. How smart could a man be if he couldn’t use a mute button?

Art started back in with a different tone.  “Oh, before I forget, we’re having a little fund raiser for the People’s Council on Executive Compensation.  That’s 5:00 PM Thursday, at the park in Petaluma.  Bring your checkbook.”

If Jack was getting this much crap, what must Yan’s life be like?  It took him ten minutes before he found someone with big enough balls to put him through to the Captain.  The station’s phone system played a loop on home security along with their pabulum hold music.

Professional burglars look for changes in routine. If you have a lawn that looks like a green at Pebble Beach and it turns into a rough, you raise a red flag.  Any evidence of neglect is like waving a sign that says, “Rob Me! Please!” Some of our citizens install alarm systems and do not use them.  Burglars watch as you come home from shopping.  If they see you open the door and immediately start to unload groceries without spending the time to disarm your alarm, the criminals know you do not use your system.

Captain Yan eventually answered, breaking him out of his surprised interest.  “What may I do for you, Mr. McDonald?”  His voice was tired, more than tired, without the usual inflection of friendliness.

Jack loaded his conversation with the same formal double-talk Yan usually used. “Captain Yan.  I know you are extremely busy.  I have been interrupted by calls from well-meaning political types who all assure me they are going to personally make sure the investigation goes as smoothly as possible.  Knowing these ladies and gentlemen as I do, I am quite certain their direct involvement in anything would cause it to run as un-smoothly as possible.  I am very seriously considering making my views on this transparent.  I will make it clear to everyone that any ‘help’ or interference from anyone outside your department will be taken as a personal affront to me, and Ms. Schacter.  I think we could make people understand that we would see this interference as unintentional attempts to sabotage your investigation.  I will let them know my fervent wish-which is for you to be left completely sovereign to conduct the investigation as you see fit.  My thoughts run along the lines of a press release to help deliver this message.  What do you think of my idea?”

Yan’s tone was appreciably warmer, but just as tired when he said, “Mr. McDonald, I want to commend you on your very clear thinking.  It is unusual for one so personally involved in a crime, as a victim or member of the family of a victim, to have this clarity of thought.  This will certainly help me spend more of my time doing what I do best, which is leading and managing investigations.”

Jack signed off and went back over the charts he’d assembled on the suspect stocks. If it were obvious, even the Feds would have spotted any insider trading. The database was complicated and he couldn’t grasp it clearly enough when he graphed it on his laptop.  He printed the graph and it told him nothing.  He knew it was old-school, but he needed a big white board, some colored dry erase markers and different colored sticky notes.

Dvora dropped by the office for an update on ReWire.  He had one more call to make before they could leave. After listening to O’Hare’s second message, he scheduled his call back to O’Hare last just to pull the man’s chain.

Jack, Donald O’Hare, President of ReWire.  Thanks for the email updates on Meghan’s condition. We are all so concerned about her.  I am sorry to call at a time like this, but the company is at a very critical stage of development on one of our core projects.  Meghan has vital development data on our workstation in her home office that we must retrieve.  It is imperative you call me immediately so that we may arrange to pick up our data.

When Jack listened to O’Hare’s first message he was annoyed.  He was more annoyed when he listened to O’Hare’s second message.  Then he listened three more times to make sure.  O’Hare was concerned and a little annoyed.  Jack was sure a good voice stress analysis of the second message would show that O’Hare was lying.   But the man’s over-riding emotion was fear.

O’Hare’s admin kept him on hold for three minutes and thirty-six seconds before O’Hare answered.

“Sorry about the wait.  I was in one of the labs and it took my secretary a while to track me down.  Thanks for returning my call, Jack. How’s Meg doing?” he asked.

Jack told him and shut up, letting the silence work him.  The timer on his contact management software said Donald waited for twenty-one seconds before he asked, “Are you still there, Jack?”

Dvora came back in.  He muted the phone and quickly explained.  He made O’Hare ask him again before he answered, “Yes,” and waited some more.

He put O’Hare on speakerphone to piss him off even more.

“Jack, I need your help.  We are at a critical stage of level-three research.  I won’t bother you with details; hell, I hardly understand them myself. Meghan was going over this piece of research on our workstation at her home, as she often does.  We need the files.  I can have a few of our best people over to her place on Nob Hill first thing tomorrow morning.  When would be a good time for you to meet them, nine or nine-thirty?”

“Donald, is that your preference, or do you prefer Don or Donny?” Jack asked.

“I don’t care. Would later, perhaps ten or ten-thirty, be a better time?” O’Hare asked, hardly sounding pissed off.

“Well, Donny, you do have a problem.  I would be more than happy to go to my sister’s home to retrieve something for you, but it’s not my decision to make.  Why don’t you use your main files? Surely she has only a copy of the research.  The original notes would be archived and there would be copies of her staff’s working papers, wouldn’t there?”

There was another long silence.  “I’m embarrassed, Jack.  We had problems with our mainframe.  There is a chance, and this must remain confidential, that it is industrial sabotage.  We are reconstructing the files, but time is of the essence.  We need our files. They are company property.  I understand you are upset now, we all are, anyone would be, but it’s vital we have our files.”

Jack let silence work on Donald again before answering, “Donny, I’d like to help you with your problem, but I can’t.  When Meghan is well enough, I am sure she will agree to let you look at the files.  Oh, you could ask her partner, Dvora.  When I see her again, I’ll tell her you called.  I’m sorry, but I can’t really think about anything except Meghan’s health right now.  Take care.”

Dvora waited until he finally got O’Hare off the line and said, “I don’t get it. Meghan was very upset because the research was a sure dead-end.  She had harsh words about it with O’Hare just last week.”

He waited for her to work it through.  Dvora looked better.  She’d done a few dancer’s workouts in the room, using the bar in bathroom and made a couple of quick visits to the pool.  The whites of her eyes shone with the light-blue tint of perfect health.  She watched him watching her.

“You think O’Hare knows the research is a dead-end, but he’s pretending it isn’t to talk up the company, maybe to prop up the stock price?” she asked.

“Why else would he talk up a dead-end research project unless it was to cook the rumor mill on the stock?”

She didn’t answer the question, but did ask one of her own.  “Did Meghan talk to you about the research she had performed outside the company?”

Meghan read his blank look and continued.  “Meg had one of her ideas, you know the ones that even other brilliant people in her field can’t comprehend.  I sure as hell didn’t understand it.  She pitched it to Donald, expecting him to blank-check it like always because she is such a money machine for the company.  She waited a few days, thought she’d caught him in the right mood and asked again.  He said “no” again.”

“Meghan pointed to a clause in her contract that said ReWire had first right of refusal and after that she was free to pursue any line of research.  Donald got really pissed and tried to intimidate her. He talked lawyers.  You know Meghan.  She hates to be backed into a corner by anybody and especially hates people trying to play the lawyer card.  She told him to lawyer up.  He did and the lawyers told him he was SOL. She was very excited about the results from the independent lab’s trials.”

She looked puzzled again as she said, “She went back to O’Hare again, telling him that she had done research on the process and he still wasn’t interested.”

As she talked he kept his face free of expression.  He would bet US to Zimbabwe dollars that the research was on one of the missing laptops.

She paused, still puzzled and then asked, “If you blow the whistle, the share price is sure to drop, isn’t it?”

“The stock will get hammered.  I can hedge Meghan’s position.  It would be as illegal as what I think our boy Donny’s doing, but it would work.  I’ll short the stock through off-shore assigns before we rat Donny out, but my guess is, at best, Meghan’s only going to get fifty cents or so on the dollar.  And, what about her coworkers?  Most of the ones in upper management are, like her, working for slave-wages, waiting for their payoff in stock. If Donald is playing loose with the earnings, then he is screwing them too.  I can’t take care of everybody.  What about you? I know you took a big position in the stock a few years ago.”

Dvora smiled her Mona Lisa smile and said, “When ReWire made me too nervous, I started selling off.  I didn’t tell Meghan about it, didn’t want to start a fight.  She’d always insisted that we keep our finances separate, I think because my net worth was so much higher than hers, at least when we met.  I watched the results of the portfolio you insisted that Meghan put a good chunk of her money into.  You didn’t know it, but you made me a little bit richer over the last three years, in spite of the market.”

They walked back to the hospital to check on Meghan.  She now looked as if she just might live.  Her bruises had subsided to a dull yellow.  Her eyes were still black from the broken nose, but even that was starting to fade.  Meghan had always been too thin from forgetting to eat.  Her muscle tone was good from Tai Chi and Yoga, but she’d been stringy.  Now she was filling out.  Meghan’s presence, that mystical, playful spirit that surrounded her, was still asleep.  He hoped more than anything that Meghan’s lightning-bug mind would wake soon.  He missed talking to his super smart sister.

Meghan had moved quickly up the Glasgow Coma Scale.  She babbled as she came out of dreams.  The doc said there was no way of knowing when she’d progress further.  The doc said that physically, Meghan was stable and amazingly strong.  Jack still felt guilty moving the five blocks to the Mark.

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Chapter 20

Her Grace said, “Scroll down.”  The software program converted her voice to digital data and compared this to its files and found it similar in many respects to another file.  The program responded electronically and then converted a series of electronic pulses to sound.  This sound asked, in its monotone voice, “Do you wish to scroll down?”

“Yes,” she responded.

The cursor moved down to the next email.

“Open email,” she said.

Again the computer generated the same words in query and again she agreed.

Her failing vision forced her to use thirty-point type so she could only see a few lines of type on each page.  She strained to read.  Her blood pressure rose.

“Scroll down!”

Again the computer checked and she said, “Yes” and the screen scrolled.  She felt anger and frustration.  The blood pressure monitor sent its signals to her physician.  She knew her physician would read the numbers and come to check.  She could not allow a momentary weakness to cause an interruption.  She had no time for it.

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She willed herself to let the anger go and read dispassionately.  She forced herself to be patient with the computer, herself, and the new danger.

“Call my aide!”

The Church used email sparingly.  The Church chose this route not because they were uncomfortable with technology.  The Church had many masters of the web and superb programmers.  It was because of this very expertise that they used these resources sparingly.  The Church understood that no matter how good their experts in technology were, someone else’s experts would be better.

The Church defended against high tech with low tech.  Couriers memorized coded instructions and delivered their messages to others who decoded them.  These decoded messages were then scanned as images and stored in folders on portable drives.  These drives were physically destroyed after each use. And, the computer hard drives that this information flowed through were reformatted and filled completely with ones and zeros and then they were also destroyed.

When the information was even more important, the Church used more primitive methods.  Information was written on rice paper in a multiple source substitution code.  Their cryptographers used archaic religious treatises as source books.  They knew that even the PRCs cryptographers could not break the code.  Fanatical couriers carried these messages. They were instructed to eat the rice paper if there was any chance the information would be compromised.  When the message was especially important, the rice paper was impregnated with very powerful, fast-acting poison.  The courier would swallow the paper and the contents would reach their stomachs. Even after the poison that killed the courier stopped any chance of information compromise, the combination of saliva and stomach acids would make data recovery impossible.

“Acolyte Mary and guards are now entering the room,” the computer said.

Mary was new and trembled in her eagerness.  The young girl flipped the switch that physically disconnected Her Grace’s screen from the computer.  Mary then placed the first piece of rice paper on the image reader that made the computer screen a large screen picture viewer.  The acolyte curtseyed and left.  Her Grace made a mental note to move the acolyte to a different section.

She saw the guard’s attention focus for a moment on the lovely young acolyte.  For this brief second, the guard did not see Mary as a potential threat, but instead as an object of his desires. She could not afford to have any of the guards tempted by this young woman’s beauty.  The fact that Her Grace had never received any attention from men, never been pretty, had nothing to do with her decision to have the girl removed from her service.

Her Grace waited until the computerized voice told her the room was again empty.  She then directed her computer to scroll through the images on the screen, magnifying some for closer inspection.  Her servants reported that the brother was suspicious and starting to check.  She knew something like this would happen.  She and her minions already had plans in place.

“Call for my secretary,” she told the computer in an angelic voice so at odds with what she had planned.

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Chapter 19

Jack and Lee had fallen very easily into the habit of a long phone call each day.  She was sixteen hours ahead.  He would call her each night at 9:30, lunch time for her, for a half hour, before he fell asleep so her voice was the last thing he would hear.  She would call him at 0700 each morning his time, 2300 her time, so his voice would be the last thing she heard before she slept.  On that first call she had promised she would find a way to get to the States within a few days.  There was an airline strike and then the typhoon and then mechanical failure.  He wanted to pick her up and carry her around.

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They were right outside the hospital when his phone rang with John Barry’s James Bond theme.

“Ni Hao!” he said smiling.

“And hello to you, my lovely man.  Listen to me calling you my lovely man.  I am going to scare you away, aren’t I?”

“Not possible.  Which airport?”  He could hear flights and customs and immigration announcements in the background.

“Sek Si! Jhew Lun Dou!  I am in your wonderful San Francisco Airport.  I am sure it will take an hour to get through customs.  Will you please come get me?”

“I am on my way!”

Dvora asked, “I assume from that silly grin on your face, the call is from your new hottie?”

“Yessum!” he said with what he knew was a shit-eating grin.  “I am going to grab a cab and pick her up at the airport.”

“I will watch Meghan get well some more.  Have fun.”

The cab headed out to hit 101 down to the airport.  They were an hour early for the thick of rush hour. The trip south would take twenty-five minutes, barring a wreck.  By the time he picked Lee up it would be bumper-to-bumper and stop more than go for nearly an hour back the other way.  If he were on his own he would have done BART and people watched.  The cab ride back would give him time to cuddle with his baby and play catch up.

It felt like he and Lee had been together for years.  In many ways, they had been.  Lee told him she knew she was too young and he wasn’t even ready when they first met.  When he married that fucking gold-digging bitch as Lee so enthusiastically described his ex-wife, she said her heart broke.  The marriage finished breaking his.  Some hearts must be broken before they can open.  His was one of them.

Jack wanted to think about Lee.  He wanted to think about the way her hair smelled and how her neck tasted of sweet salt when they made love.  He wanted to think about the way her eyes seemed to turn to liquid, brown gold sometimes.  The way her eyes would draw him in.  Instead he used the time in the cab to think about market gyrations in the abstract and ReWire in particular. He thought about insider trading. There was a ton of short interest in the stock.  Was it too much?  Who knew?

Shorting stocks was a simple idea, but tough for laypeople to get. You “borrowed” stock and sold it.  If the stock price went down, you replaced the stock with stock you bought at a lower price.  If you guessed wrong and the stock went up, you had to replace the stock at a higher price.

People wondered how he had guessed right on the tech stock bubble.  The regulators figured his guesses were too good and suspended him.  He explained his reasoning.  They didn’t buy it.  He heard a radio interview with a man, not an investment professional, but a day trader, whatever that was.  This man said he was borrowing money on his house to day trade.  Because of the way the market was going the man said he couldn’t afford to miss out on the gains.  The so-called financial journalist who was interviewing him was just “Yeah, okay, uh huh.”

Then the same press invented “burn rate” to describe how fast a recently public company spent the money they raised selling stock.  The signs and portents had been there.  Jack knew the end of the bubble was near.  He rolled the dice and bought puts. What was he going to do, tell the regulators that he could see the future sometimes?  How could he tell them he could feel the fear and anger when tens of thousands of investors in the Bay started to bail on the bubble?  How could he explain that their fear and panic was a palpable wave over the City and even worse in Silicon Valley?  He felt their fear and bought puts.  He became middling wealthy very quickly.

Jack felt pain in his hands. He had clenched his fists so hard he almost pierced the skin on his palms with his nails.  He was thinking about ReWire so he wouldn’t think about his sister.  Meghan had saved his life. He was an adolescent when she was born.  Mom sobered up when she found out she was pregnant and stayed dry for almost two years.  Pop stopped gambling for eleven months.

By the time Meghan was born Jack already had a couple major run-ins with John Law. Without Meghan to care about, to keep safe, he would have probably killed somebody in a fight.  Or been shot or stabbed.  His probation officer “suggested” he try Judo. His anger and strength and size had been too much for all his partners, even before any training.  The Sensei had stopped him from sparring with the others and taken him to the middle of the mat.  Jack had worried he would break the old man.  He was a big old man, but he was in his sixties even then.

Jack had lunged for a single leg and gone to sleep.  Then he bullrushed the old man and flew through the air and landed so hard it took him seconds to catch his breath.  He tried harder and harder and got his ass whipped repeatedly.  Finally, he was in a hold on his elbow, knowing it was going to break any minute, but knowing he almost had the old man when the old man said, “Please stop before I break your arm.”

There was something in the old man’s voice, a sadness mixed with something Jack hadn’t heard much from other men, certainly not Pops-concern.  Jack stopped.  He hadn’t known it, but the old man had been the heavyweight grand master US champion.  He took Jack under his wing, in some ways becoming the father that his father could never be.  Sensei gave him focus.

The cabbie locked up his brakes to avoid a four-lane change by an Asian man driving a spec with a small rental sticker on the bumper.  The cabbie cut off two cars pulling into the only space on the curb at international drop off. He paid the man to circle for a while.

He loved airports.  They were full of hope.  SFO was getting better, but still way down his list. He stood at the arrival gate and checked the status of Lee’s flight.  She would use every trick to cut through red tape, but her flight was still in customs.

He watched a little girl, no more than four or five, duck under the tape and run shouting “Grandma!” “Grandma!”  Most everyone smiled, even the people exiting customs who were so jet-lagged they were as useful as crack addicts.  Travel makes you stupid.

Cathay Pacific was based in Hong Kong.  Jack was pretty sure Lee’s family owned points in the airline. How much they owned was hard to tell because accounting principles outside the US were creative at best.  Add that to the fact that the way her family protected secrets made the CIA seem like a PR department.  No, wait; the CIA was a PR department. Maybe the way the NSA kept secrets?  No, that was a terrible analogy.  He glanced up at the monitor again and then looked back toward the gate.  His sweetheart walked through.

How could anyone put in a full day’s work, get off a twelve-hour flight after having lost fourteen hours, and looked like she’d just stepped out of the shower?

Lee grabbed his hand and pulled him along until they were out of the way of the heaviest foot traffic.  She hugged him and held him before pushing him away, holding on to both of his hands and looking up into his eyes. She looked out through tears with a smile that came and went.

“I’m so sorry it took me so long.  I know now I should have found a way to come sooner.  I didn’t mean to…”

He put a finger to her lips. He looked down into those eyes, flecks of gold swimming in the warm brown and said, “Don’t be sorry, my sweetheart. You are here and I want you to be here and…”  He stopped himself from saying, “I love you.”  Neither had said the “L” word, both of them worried about scaring the other off, he thought, thinking it was too soon.

Lee said, “I am going to say it.”  He waited until she started and said, “I love you,” along with her.  They were such saps.

They were in the cab on their way back to the City, when he realized that they didn’t have a place to stay.  His house in Tiburon was too far from the hospital and right in the middle of a remodel.  And, the place had felt so empty lately.  He knew it wouldn’t feel empty with Lee in it, but not yet.

“I just realized we don’t have a place to stay. My stuff is still at the Mark.  Let me call and see if they can get us a room.”

Lee said, “I knew you liked the Mark and that it was close to the hospital.  My people have already reserved a suite for us.” She asked with a touch of anxiety that was damn cute, “Would you stay with me?”

“Yes!”  They talked in lover’s shorthand and finished each other’s sentences.  Mostly they sat with goofy grins staring into each other’s eyes.  He liked it.  A lot.

The manager at the Mark left a note, apologizing for not greeting them personally, and expressing his concern for Meghan.  The manager had been up all night for the last two nights talking to a long-term customer whose life expectancy had suddenly been diagnosed as short-term.  His new assistant manager greeted them.

She saw Jack reading her nametag.  “Yes, Suzie Quan, for real.  Parents!” she said, shaking her head.

“I am so sorry about Ms. McDonald.  Jon said to give you anything you asked for.  Our security staff is scheduled to sweep the room soon, and we have you on our anonymous list, is that right?”

Lee said, “Yes, I certainly don’t want news-vultures hounding him at a time like this.”

Suzie led them around the corner to the elevator and stayed with them to make sure they were satisfied with the room.  She showed them all the basic smart room features, heat, light, music, security and then took the smart room manual out of a drawer in the desk and handed it to Lee.

“I think the room is a little too smart.  If you run into any glitches, page me and I’ll come dial it in for you.”

Suzy Quan made sure the big, white, fluffy bathrobes were hanging where they were supposed to be on the inside doors of the bathrooms.  She glanced at the snack tray, and when she thought they weren’t looking, pushed the fruit through the stretch wrap, checking for freshness and then smoothed the plastic.  His luggage arrived just as she was leaving.  Suzie insisted upon making sure everything was put away, then, waving and smiling, left them on their own.

As Lee ducked into the bathroom, he checked voicemail.  Eight more people had returned the quick calls he’d made from the hospital about the stocks.  He couldn’t afford to leave the questions he wanted answered on voice mail or with an assistant, so he got no answers.  When he checked ReWire’s price, it was up more that its moving average.  Volume was fifty percent above its daily average.  He would have to wait until tomorrow to check on short interest.

Alice Stewart was in Seattle checking on a fleet of five retiring ferries.  The plan was to trade them straight across to an Indian firm for programming.  He and four of the other partners had thrown $20K at a Google pay-per-click campaign to check out market potential for a software program.  The hits and requests for information showed tremendous short-term potential.  As long as they could buy ten thousand hours of expert code writing in the next two months they would get a jump on the big boys.  If the IPO market came back they would take the idea public and sell out to one of the players.

His cell phone showed great signal and the connection was still terrible. Alice was as security conscious as Bob and encrypted everything.

Alice asked, “How is Meghan?”

“Better, steady, but a long way from conscious.”

“Cool, give her a big hug from me.  Hold on.”

“Alice, you’re not driving that thing, are you?”

She didn’t answer.  He had switched to a wired-headphone for security and nearly broke it pulling it out of his ear as a rock riff blasted out of the ship’s horn.

“You’ve got to get one of these for the commute!  They are way cool.  You ought to see the little boats get out of the way!  I’m betting Billy Jo could figure a way for us to write off most of it!”  He heard an attempt at Beethoven’s Fifth on the ship’s horn.

Alice said, “On the stocks, I’m looking, but not seeing.  I have one more favor to call in.  I’m catching the red-eye and will know either way by noon tomorrow.  How’s your end going?”  She helped herself to another pull on the ship’s horn.

“I’ve moved into a suite at the Mark.  So far there are no developments.”

Just as she hung up there was a knock at the door.  He opened the door to find a young man with the hotel’s security staff uniform and a nametag that said, “Tim.”  Tim looked like an MMA fighter should look, but made polite eye contact, plugged his laptop into the data jack and changed a few settings.  He then plugged his cell into the laptop and punched in a ton of numbers.

Tim waited for thirty seconds or so and then had a conversation on the speaker that was mostly, “huh?” followed by “yeah,” “no,”  “yes,” and ended in “thanks.”  He stood up, stretched his back and said.  “That’s it, Sir. Your room is as clean as I can make it.  I would still suggest doing everything encrypted, even on your cell.”

Jack had just sat down on the couch when there was another knock on the door.  He opened the door to find room service.

“I have the bottle of Prosecco you ordered, Sir.”

He started to close the door saying, “I ordered no Prosecco.”

The young man, “Sam,” according to his name tag said, “Excuse me, Sir, but I’m new and I’ve already messed up once today.  Could I please use your phone to check with room service?”

He let Sam in and fought off the urge to smother another one of the blueberry scones in butter while Sam made his call. He wandered back over in time to hear Sam say, “The Ambassador Suite!  Okay, okay, I’m on my way.”  Sam stood up, apologized for the interruption and left.

He called the office, thinking he was going to be able to make the weekly briefing in person for a change.  Mike was duty officer, answering from his cabin in the Trinity Alps.

“Hey, Mike.  May I speak to Billy Jo?”

“Mr. McDonald, I was so sorry to hear about your sister.  If there is anything I can do, don’t hesitate to ask.  I’m afraid Ms. Harding is not available at the moment.  May I connect you with Ms. Harding’s voice mail?”

Jack stared down at the phone in his hand.  Mike had given him the danger signal by addressing him formally.  By speaking to him formally, addressing Billy Jo formally and letting him know she was unavailable, Mike told him that the danger was on his end.  Jack was calling the office from an area where electronic communication was being captured.  Sam from room service had just bugged the fucking phone..

Chapter 18

Alvin Yan watched Dvora Schacter and Jack McDonald leave his office.  Both of them were trained athletes.  Dvora’s duck-footed walk would only be a giveaway to someone who knew dance.  Others might assume that Mr. McDonald was a little soft because of his size.  He moved in the special way of dangerous men that had nothing left to prove.  Jack McDonald was a trained and experienced killer.  He moved silently and stayed in perfect balance.  Much useful information can be discovered simply by watching people as they walk away.

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After watching and listening and interacting with the two, Captain Alvin Yan of the San Francisco Police was sure of two things.  One: Dvora Schacter was unaware of any motives other than robbery for the violent attack on Meghan McDonald. The only wild card was her concussion.  Two: Jack McDonald knew something that he thought was important to the case and he was not sharing this information.  Of the first, he was very certain.  Of the second, Alvin Yan was completely certain.  There was a third thing that he was certain of more than the first two.  The physical evidence in the case was bull pucky.

Yan put the third thought away for a few minutes and reviewed the summary of the intelligence report his team assembled.

McDonald: Troubled family, difficult youth with juvenile crimes, mostly property and battery related, that were legally sealed and are not supposed to be available to us.  He is a master Judo player, gives time and money to youth groups through Judo camps, is a decorated and combat wounded Special Forces soldier who left the Army to take care of his brilliant sister when their parents were killed in a car wreck.  He was censured and his broker’s license suspended for insider trading when his timing was too good as the tech bubble burst. The censure was later dropped. He is divorced, with a net worth of around $75 million. 

Part of the report didn’t ring true.  Alvin couldn’t picture this man violating insider-trading rules.  At least he couldn’t imagine him getting caught violating insider trading rules.  Yan himself had made a small fortune simply observing CEO’s press conferences.  When they lied to keep their stocks from being takeover targets he bought the stocks or calls on these stocks.  When they played cheerleader, glossing over risks and underestimating the downside, he sold short or bought puts.

Yan had asked people he knew in the competitive martial arts world about Jack McDonald’s character.  One learned so much observing someone being choked into submission.  Perhaps even more was learned when that person had the upper hand, as was Jack McDonald’s position almost all of the time. The three people that Captain Yan respected, two of whom he admired, all said that it was inconceivable that McDonald would have broken trading rules.  Two of the people had used the same phrase to describe the man.  Virtuous was not a word one heard often lately.  This was a good thing to hear.  It meant that Yan could appeal to his virtue and predict the outcome.

Ms. Schacter was just as remarkable in different ways.  Because he did not feel that these differences would give him ammunition in his investigation, he did not ponder them long.  Instead he pondered the physical evidence and wondered at the too-complex nature of the plan to deceive that needed this level of obfuscation. He then tried to deduce the reason for such a complicated plan.  He did not have enough data.  He did, however, have enough information to make arrests of the people who were designed to take the fall for the crime.  By doing this he would make it appear he had been taken in by this charade.

Chapter 17

The man walked back into the Tenderloin, careful not to make direct eye contact.  In San Quentin a look could get you jumped.  A stare that challenged might get a man killed in Folsom.  Here in the City, a look might invite conversation or curiosity.  A glance could create a memory.  A stare could generate fear.  But, refusal to make casual eye contact might be remembered as furtive. The man smiled with pride.  This was not sinful pride.  He did not even know what the word furtive meant until a few years ago.

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It was hard to fight old habits. He made himself relax, moving into a smooth, and confident, but not so confident as to be arrogant, stride.  He glanced up with an open brow-neither afraid nor challenging.  The man stopped and looked at his watch.  He had time to pray for a few hours before he needed to check email again.  He would pray for forgiveness and a second chance.  It was so important to be allowed to serve.  He found his calling so late.  He wasn’t even forty, but the ticking bomb that was the virus meant he didn’t have time.  He had so much to make up for.

The man’s knees hurt, not so badly this time, when he stood.  He crossed himself and left the church.  He took a different indirect route, and walked by two Internet cafés before choosing a third.  Most of the customers in this one were Hispanic.  The place smelled of hard work, refried beans, and fear.  He had to wait ten minutes for the booth in the back, the one in the security camera’s blind spot.  He glanced left and right before he sat.  The fellow in the booth to his left watched a baby held up to the video camera.

The fellow on the man’s right watched porn and rubbed his crotch.  Just after the man sat down, someone yelled “La Migra!”  The man knew his papers were good.  He didn’t look South American, Asian, or Eastern European. His accent was American.  He stayed where he was, surfing the net, reading unrelated news stories.  He made casual eye contact with the Immigration screws as they strutted into the café.  He did not reach for his ID.  Immigration stomped out of the store and minutes after that the patrons were back.

He logged on to one public email through another.  Then he logged into another and finally into his invisibletrail.net account.  There was a message!  The man closed his eyes and prayed quickly.  The man’s hands shook as he carefully deciphered the message. He took twenty minutes, most of the time to make sure, and some of the time to avoid knowing.

The man would have cried if he remembered how.  He was being given a second chance.  He would gladly spend time in purgatory to stop the sinners from interfering with his savior’s work.  If only they would know the truth.  He often wondered why the Church didn’t simply publicize the madness.

The man signed off.  He knew further instructions could be obtained at the next dead drop.  The man had no way of knowing where that was.  Not yet.  He glanced at his watch.  He had another hour before he would be able to find out.  He knew that he would need money to continue his mission, no matter what it was. He needed to collect.

The man walked back to where Manuel was still trying to ply his trade. The man’s legs were not as weary now.  Earlier in the day the effort of walking without a limp in the prosthetic built into his shoe had almost been too much for him.  Now, even with his weary legs, he walked with a little spring in his step.

The evening had turned cold, fog sliding in off the Bay.  A gold Toyota Avalon pulled up and Manuel pranced to the driver’s side window.  As sick as Manuel was, he occasionally found takers.  Not today.  The car screeched away across traffic to the sound of two horns and a curse.

The man watched for a few more minutes.  No other cars even slowed.  He sprinted across the street and came up on him from Manuel’s blind side.

“Got my money?” he asked, enjoying the sudden stiffening in Miguel’s back and the fear in the bitch’s eyes when he turned.  The man realized his joy was wrong, even as fear itself was necessary.  He would pray for forgiveness tonight.

Manuel fumbled in his jeans, pulling out a thick envelope. He held out the envelope and said, “They didn’t give me as much as you said they would.  They said the stuff was on a list. They said…”

The man grabbed the envelope and walked away, not bothering to listen to the rest.  He waited until he turned the corner before he stopped in the shadows to count the money.  The cash was warm and a little moist from Manuel’s pocket. The tennis bracelet and matching earrings brought almost $8K.  This was enough for the man to live on for a few months.  He wanted to live longer than that, but he didn’t need to.

The man glanced at his watch again.  It was time.  He took five twenty-dollar bills out of the envelope and moved the bills into his front, right pants pocket.  The rest he zipped into the hidden pocket inside his jacket.  He had already sussed out the cut-rate electronics store on the corner, two blocks down.  Sussed out.  His cellmate in Folsom had originally been from Liverpool.

He picked this store because he knew the security camera was a fake.  He also needed to use this store for the bag.  He paid the Sikh clerk cash for a phone with a hundred minutes of talk time.  The clerk began to stuff the phone into a small bag.

“I need to buy some food on the way home.  I’d like a middle-sized bag,” he said as he stood looking at the clerk until he got the right bag.  He then walked sixteen blocks to get to his room four blocks away.  He charged the phone for a half hour.

When the phone showed enough charge, he dialed the number he had memorized and punched in the code for voicemail he had learned a month ago.

The digitalized voice said. “You will get on the Muni at the stop nearest Golden Gate and Larkin at 9:25 PM.” He had plenty of time to destroy the phone, scatter the pieces, and make the bus.

Chapter 16

Dvora and Jack walked the eight blocks to the police station. He worked to keep up with her as those tireless dancer’s legs reached out.  He watched the bunch and flow of the Gluteus Maximus under her slacks as she slid through the crowd like an otter in a river.  He felt too big and too clumsy and uneasy as he watched her and thought about Lee.  Not uneasy enough to stop him from watching her ass, though.

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He slowed as they turned the corner to enter the station.  During his deformative years he had a number of run-ins with John Law, some quite heated.  He’d never killed anybody in his youth, but it had been a close thing and mostly luck. He did a conscious attitude adjustment before he started up the steps.

“What’s wrong?” She asked.

“You know I had what could be charitably described as a misguided youth.  Cops still make me nervous, even though I pay enough local taxes to fund a big chunk of this station.”

“It’s nice to know you can be nervous about something.”

He was still trying to figure out what that meant on the way up the steps.  The cop behind the raised bulletproof dais became very attentive when she realized who they were.

“Captain Yan is expecting you, Ms. Schacter, Mr. McDonald.  Please follow Sergeant Washington back.”

Jack turned to discover that a huge cop stood directly behind them.  No one ever snuck up on him.  Ever.  The guy was big, at least four inches taller than Jack and maybe forty pounds heavier.  It looked like most of the man was muscle, or maybe flexible mahogany.

“Ms. Schacter, Mr. McDonald, I am Sergeant Rudolph Washington.  I will take you to see Captain Yan. Follow me please.”  His voice was well-modulated, educated, and as calm as a Yoga instructor’s.  He managed to walk in front of them while keeping them completely in his vision the whole time.  They walked to the left of the dais, through a door marked staff only and down a narrow hallway.  The hallway narrowed even more because of pillars containing metal detectors.  They put keys, phones and such in the doggy dish.  He beeped when he walked through.

“It’s shrapnel from the war in my lower back.”

Sergeant Washington didn’t bother to wand him.  Maybe he already had intelligence that confirmed Jack’s story. Maybe he figured that no weapon Jack could lift and carry would make him a threat. Maybe both.

The detectors in the pillars on either side of the cones passed Dvora without comment.

Sergeant Washington walked in front then, casually snapping the big button down on the holster of his H & K.  As they walked through the police station, Jack breathed calming breaths, visualizing green good air in and red toxins of fear and tension flowing out.  He asked his muscles to be smooth and loose, like well-used rubber.  His muscles listened.  He visualized a breeze stirring tall pines on a crisp late April day on the way to Feather Falls.

Then Jack was open enough to notice things.  The things he expected and that were missing stood out more than the things that were there.  The whores and pimps and dealers would throw out a  ‘Mother-fucking’ this or ‘Mother-fucking’ that.  The cops didn’t put up with it for long.  And, he didn’t hear so much as a “Shit!” from a cop.  Someone ran a very tight ship.  They walked into a big room, a hundred feet square maybe and full of low cubes.  Most of the men and women stared at them.  No-they mostly stared at Dvora.  He was a handsome, charismatic man and used to more than his share of looks.  This was more.

Jack knew the effect Dvora once had on him.  He hadn’t paid much attention to her power over others, until now.  A guy who looked more like a research assistant than a cop entered numbers into a spreadsheet.  The cop glanced up with the curiosity of peripheral vision.  Then he smiled the smile of someone who unexpectedly sees a flower blooming in winter or a good painting through a dirty shop window.  His look changed to longing and then resignation when he realized he couldn’t have the Mona Lisa.  Jack knew how he felt.

They stopped in front of an unassuming office at the back. Another huge cop stood and twisted his face into an uncomfortable looking expression that was probably supposed to be a smile.

“I am Sergeant Armando Gutierrez.  Captain Yan will be out shortly.  He asked me to apologize for the wait. Can I get you coffee, latte, tea, or perhaps juice?”

Sergeant Gutierrez, Mondo to his friends, made very good coffee.  The beans, probably Costa Rican, were fresh ground and the old-fashioned, highly polished pot held enough for refills.  They sat drinking the legal stimulant, hot enough to sip. Walls and cubes held diplomas and plaques.  There were the expected Bachelor’s from state colleges in Criminal Justice, and some unexpected degrees too.

Why would licensed clinical social workers work at a cop shop in the City?  In an alcove near the door, six awards occupied a place of honor.  The list included best squad, marksman, crime-scene team, and so on, for the City and County of San Francisco.  Above the six plaques a banner, red to stand out, big, but not big enough to overwhelm said: This is the year we take all seven.

Jack was still fighting his prejudices when the door behind him opened.  Many of the cops smiled.  The mood in the room, which had been professional and relaxed to start with, focused even more.  He turned to see what caused the change.

Captain Yan looked up at them over his half-glasses and asked in a clear, quiet voice, devoid of any accent Jack could hear, pitched higher in the scale, “Ms. Schacter, Mr. McDonald, would you come in, please?”

Yan motioned them toward his office.  Yan looked like a kindly college professor or a good psychologist, the kind where you feel good just knowing they are in the room.  His gray slacks broke across black loafers.  He had rolled the sleeves up on his powder-blue oxford shirt to reveal muscled forearms.  Even the knot on his rep tie, Irish Horse Guards, was somehow comforting.  The only thing missing was a pipe.

Yan’s office was elegantly furnished in a style more out of an English drawing room than an office in the City.  Jack sat in the leather, hunter green, wing-back chair to the right after Dvora sat in the one on the left.  Captain Yan smiled again. Yan’s handshake had been subtle, not weak or firm.  Jack wondered how many people noticed the callus pads on his knuckles or the old scars on his cheeks and in his brows.  Yan’s relaxed walk was an attempt to hide an athlete’s body.  When Yan held his half-glasses up to the light to clean them, Jack saw there was little, if any, correction.  He spotted a combat-shooting trophy in the far corner of the bookcase behind Yan.

“Mr. McDonald.  Ms. Schacter.  I am so sorry about Ms. McDonald.  I do not know Ms. McDonald personally, but we share associates and even a few friends.  These people tell me she is a fine young woman.  I have a daughter near her age. Rest assured, we will find the men who did this and bring them to trial,” he said.

“Thank you, Captain,” Dvora said.

Yan opened his mouth when his phone gently chirped.  He stared down at it like a judge observing a three-time loser.  He picked it up and answered the questions they couldn’t hear in monosyllables before saying, “Excuse me, Madam.  I know this story is very important to your readers. When we have any useful facts to report, our public relations department will send out a press release and schedule a press conference.” Yan paused and made a notation in his old-fashioned Franklin planner.  “I have made myself a note to see that you are invited.  Good day.”

Yan pushed the do-not-disturb button on his phone, apologized for the interruption, and started his interrogation.

“Now Ms. Schacter, have you remembered anything else about the attack?  Anything you could not remember to tell my detectives three days ago?” he asked gently.

“No.”

“I am going to ask you a number of questions that may not appear to have, at first blush, any bearing on the case.  My purpose is to help focus your memory of many seeming unrelated facts from that morning.  Many times we have found this to be useful in helping people remember facts that do have a bearing on the case.  Now, please remember how you were feeling that day, your mood. Had anything happened to lift your spirits?  Had anything depressed you?  Did you hear a bit of good news, perhaps?  Has someone you know had good or bad luck in business? Was someone you know ill?”

“Nothing unusual.  I just can’t remember the morning.  We were excited to have Jack over for breakfast.  It had been a while, and he always comes back from his trips with great stories.”

Next he asked, “What was the texture of your bag?  Was it leather?”

“That morning I was carrying my gym bag. It’s rip stop nylon, worn and black.”

Yan asked, “What about the feel of the clothes you were wearing that day. Were they new and stiff, or loose-fitting, comfortable and familiar?”

Dvora didn’t look happy about answering Yan’s questions, but she did. “I was wearing a leotard; Yoga clothes, really, comfortable, Lululemon brand because I sweat a lot and they wear forever, black again, with an old, gray sweat shirt, actually one Jack’s old sweatshirts, way too big, of course, more like a coat.”

“Was it dry or wet, cold or warm, was there a wind, and if so, from what direction?”

Jack watched in admiration.  Yan touched on all of her senses, pulled memories from deep within her mind, and never interrupted her answers.

“Ms. Schacter, I have talked to many people who have had similar injuries cause blocks to their memories.  This is a natural phenomenon.  Not remembering does not mean you are somehow bad, weak or afraid.  It simply is.  Now, let’s talk about what you heard.  Was there road construction outside that day, any loud mechanical noises such as a big truck’s low rumble, or the sound of a jet flying overhead? Did the door to your home open smoothly, or was there a squeak as if a hinge might need oil?”

Over and over, with patience Jack knew he could never match, Yan questioned, amplifying each detail.  Yan mirrored Dvora naturally, comforting, nurturing in tone, body language, and speech.  He hung on every word, as if he had nothing else in the world to think about and if he did, what she had to say was so much more important.

Jack had been on the receiving end of expert interrogation, or he thought he had, until this masterful performance.  Yan’s listening skills alone would have made him a great salesman. If his other cop skills were equal to this, then he must be, as Bob said, the best there was.  Then he realized Yan had a gift too.  He was a truth finder.

“Ms. Schacter, you were quite understandably not able to talk to my detectives earlier about which items were missing from your home.  If I were to show you a list of items we have compiled, do you think you could help us now?”

Yan placed the lists upside down on the clean desk slightly closer to Dvora than to Jack.  There were three lists.  The first was a list of contents alphabetically by room.  Under bathroom, master, the first listing was for Ampoule, anti-venom, bee.  This was followed by a description. Then Amulet, amber, mounted in beaten copper, with a braided copper chain.  Weight approximately 1.7 ounces.  Small brown spider trapped in amber.  The second list was strictly alphabetical and the last list was by function and alphabetical under that.  The number of man-hours committed to compiling the database was staggering.

“Are you all right, Ms. Schacter?” the Captain asked as she began to cry quietly.

Yan reached over and patted her hand.  She attempted a small smile.  It seemed his care comforted.  “I’ll be okay.  It’s just going over a list of our things, things we bought together, gifts we’d given each other… I’m sorry,” she said.

Yan smiled gently at her, nodding slowly, acting as if he understood completely.  Maybe he did. Dvora spent the next few minutes going over the lists and making one of her own. The Captain looked at the list she made and compared it to a fourth list, then checked each of the first six items on her list against the one he held.  The last three items on her list were not on his and he wrote them down.

Yan said, “We are fortunate that you and Ms. McDonald updated your insurance policies only seventeen days ago.  It is unusual to find an inventory of valuables as comprehensive and up to date as this. What caused you to update your insurance policies so recently?”

Jack managed not to look up or sit forward in his chair and kept his breathing as steady as he could.  Dvora didn’t seem to place any importance on the direction of the question and answered it. “We bought three paintings a few years ago by an American impressionist, Jackie Carroll.  Recently, we found they had appreciated nicely.  Also my grandmother’s estate finally cleared probate, and the jewelry she gave me arrived.”

Jack had been watching the Captain while Yan watched and listened to Dvora.  Before she had even finished her answer, Yan appeared to relax.

“Why do you ask that particular question, Captain Yan?” Jack asked.

Captain Yan focused his mild, brown eyes on him, registering and filing.  The look reminded Jack of another look.  It was years ago, when he still made time for such things. He had been stalking big, fat trout in Alaska, following along the bank of a stream.  He knew they were off to feed and he wanted to be there when they stopped.  He had his fly rod in his right hand, using his left hand to balance and grab as he walked along the rocky bank in the neoprene waders.  He didn’t see the bear until he was right on her.  She had managed to ambush a few of the biggest trout crossing shallows.  She stopped eating for a moment and looked at him with the same mild brown gaze from a distance of less than thirty feet.  In a microsecond she must have decided trout tasted better than he would and went back to feeding.

He retreated as calmly and quickly as he could, glad he wasn’t a trout.  He was glad he wasn’t one of the men Captain Yan was looking for.  He thought he would have had a better chance against the bear.

“As a matter of course, if insurance is recently increased or changed, and a robbery takes place, I ask these questions.  Would you like to look more closely at the lists, Mr. McDonald?”

He looked at the list of missing items first.  First were two laptop computers, one PowerBook, the other a Toshiba, replacement value $6,500, and two Apple AirPort Time Capsules, replacement value $1000.  Next was Silver antique flatware, a service for eight, serving utensils not taken, value $6,000.  Set of diamond dinner ring, earrings, pendant, and tennis bracelet, value $42,000, Gym bag, value $100, and Music CDs, various artists, value unknown.  It looked like a pretty good take for a thief.  Even if a fence only gave them fifteen cents on the dollar, they still had a good take.

Then he looked at the list of what was not taken.  He knew he had kept his expression blank and not changed his body language or breathing.  And, he could feel Captain Yan’s laser-sharp attention focus even more.  Yan was indeed a reader, and a superb one.

Not taken were a coin collection and two very small gold replica Mayan statues. The coin collection had been in the display case in an alcove near the entry door.  The replica statues had been on display in the sitting room.  The sitting room was the room in the house closest to the entry door.

“Did you see something that piqued your interest Mr. McDonald?”

“Why would a thief bother with Music CDs, value unknown, and walk by a Coin collection, 1788 Spanish Gold Escudos, (Doubloons) eleven in total, insured value $21,500 not to mention the gold statues? Is there anything else you haven’t told us that would pique my interest Captain Yan?”

Yan sat back in his chair.  He switched his pencil to a drummer’s grip, grabbed another from the jar on his desk and laid down a rock beat.  Then he put the pencils down, clasped his hands in front of him and said, “There are questions for which I do not have answers. These questions make me uneasy. First, how was the very good security system of the building breached?  Second, how was the even better security system your friend Robert E. Lee White installed in Ms. McDonald’s and Ms. Schacter’s home bypassed?  Third, why was the beating of Ms. McDonald so severe, so at odds with the professionalism of the break-in?  Fourth, why was such a careful robbery the site of so much physical evidence in the form of hair, fiber and skin?  And, finally, why have my informants given me no information in so many days?”

“What the fuck is going on here?” Dvora asked, springing to her feet to stand leaning forward over the desk, towering above the still seated Captain.

Captain Yan stood, too and said, “I myself would also like to know what is going on here.  I have committed a huge part of our available resources to this case.  I do not need my department politicized.  If these questions had not come up, the resources would not have been committed, no matter the ‘suggestions’ of my boss.  Now if you will please sit down, we may continue.”

Dvora sat, still visibly upset.

“What can we do to help?” Jack asked.

Yan considered his question for a few moments before he said, “First, please do not share anything I tell you about the investigation with anyone.  I have talked to people I know and respect about both of you and you share many attributes.  One of them is a very old-fashioned regard for the truth. I do not know how familiar you are with police work.  It is nothing like the sentimental, action-filled entertainment you see on television, films, or for that matter, read in books. Police work is detail and time.  It is hundreds of hours of questions.  More questions are asked after answers are collected and compared.  Most crimes are solved with the aid of informants.  Informants are paid either in favors or in cash.  This police department has limited resources.  Sometimes private citizens will ask to help defray costs associated with acquiring information and, as a result, speed the resolution of a case.”

Dvora tossed a black American Express card on the table and asked, “How fast would information flow if defrayed at $500K?”

Yan smiled gently.  “$500K would cause such a surplus of information we would have great difficulty separating the wheat from the chaff.  Perhaps ten thousand dollars would be more useful as a start, and you could post a reward for any information leading to arrest of these criminals.  Perhaps, $200K?”  He wrote briefly on the back of a card and then handed it over the table to them.

San Francisco Police Department: Witness Assistance Program.

The card listed bank account, including web site, branch name, address, telephone, routing numbers, and instructions for mail payment.  The card also stated that contributions could be made on any major credit card, PayPal, or by electronic check.

Yan said, “The number I have written on the back is the case number.  Make sure you note this number in your communication with us.  We will make sure every penny goes to this case, give you an accounting of your fund’s use, less any information that would put our informants at risk of course, and return any moneys not used.”

Soon after, Yan politely dismissed them.  They walked back to the hospital, lost in thought.  He hadn’t met intelligence like Captain Yan’s in a long time.  He’d never met anyone as smart as Yan who wasn’t in the private sector.  Not quite true.  Jack had met brilliant politicians, and savants like physicists, but never civil servants, leaders or managers with his brain power-until today.

“Damn, he’s smart,” Dvora said.

“It’s been a long time since I met anybody who made me feel thick.”  Jack walked on, but had to stop when he realized she wasn’t following.

“What?” he asked.

“I knew you were smart.  I wouldn’t have been attracted to you if you weren’t.  I always thought you were a little over-billed by Meghan, hero worship for big brother and all that, but the last few days opened my eyes.  You thought something was wrong about the robbery right away didn’t you?”

“Yeah.  Something wasn’t right and I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I had heard from Hong Lee, she’s my…” He had to stop.  She’s my what? He thought. Is she the woman of my dreams, the woman who replaced you in my dreams, the woman who completes me?

“Well, I can’t quite describe what she is right now, but she shared rumors about trades in high-tech stocks, biotech and more specifically genetic engineering, that might be worth looking at.”  He told her about his original conversation with Lee, back in Hong Kong.  Only four days ago! It felt like months.

“I don’t know why, but my intuition bell was ringing so I asked my friend Bob White, who is the name in corporate security, to have his people guard Meghan while we check things out.”

Dvora listened calmly, nodding occasionally or asking him to repeat something, as they walked and stopped and dodged the crowd.  When he was done she said, “Wait a minute,” and motioned him to bend his head down.

She whispered so he had to listen.  “I know you care about Meghan.  I care about her too.  Don’t keep anything else from me.  Do you understand?”

He had hurt her by trying to shield her.  It was the wrong approach.

“How far do you want in?”  He asked.

“All the way.”

He nodded, looking as contrite as he knew how, and said, “okay” with what he hoped was tremendous conviction. He needed her to believe that he would do as she asked.  They walked back to the hospital.

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Chapter 15

Meghan hurt.  She had hurt worse when she dislocated her shoulder and they tried to put it back in.  But, she knew she was hurt really bad.  So, why didn’t she hurt worse?  Where was the pain?  She couldn’t really see, just some glow through her eyelids.  She tried to open her eyes and couldn’t.  JACK, HELP! she shouted.  Well, she tried to shout.  She couldn’t talk and she couldn’t see.  And, what the fuck is this?  She wasn’t really hearing either. She didn’t have imaginary friends so she knew she wasn’t dead.  What happened?  Was it a car wreck?  Where was she?  How long had she been this way?  Meghan McDonald reached out with her inside senses, those senses that allowed her to see, if that was the right word and it wasn’t, down to an almost molecular level.

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JACK HELP!  She meant to scream. She didn’t think that she even moaned.  Hmmm.  She was so confused, and so tired, and she knew she was badly hurt.  Maybe she would rest for a moment.  When injured the body needs to focus all of its resources on healing.  She decided to sleep for a day and then fix herself.

JACK WAIT!  She knew he would come.  She knew it.  He always came.  He protected her from Mom and Pops and bullies in school and she knew he would come.  JACK, I’M IN HERE!

He told her all those things that he always told her and they had always been true before and he never, ever lied to her.  He told her to want to live like nothing she had ever wanted to do before.  What a silly boy!  Of course she wanted to live.  She had too many neat problems to solve to die.  So many puzzles to solve.  Some of the solutions would help lots of people.  And, she couldn’t leave Dvora and she couldn’t leave Jack.  They wouldn’t be okay without her.  Jack wanted her to rest so she could heal.  He was going to keep her safe while she rested and mended.  So rest today and maybe tomorrow and then get to work healing.  She knew how to work.  She was so very, very tired.  She knew how to rest when rest was what was needed.  She would just go to sleep…now.

Chapter 14

Jack was a kid again.  He had a bedroom of his own in a house.  In his dream he didn’t sleep on a sagging couch in the aluminum shack on wheels that his parents called home.  He had to sleep with a blanket because it was so cool at night.  And, quiet!  He heard laughter from the living room. He listened, trying to figure out what was different.  The laughter was from his parents.  Little Jack was sure of that.  This night his parents’ laughter sounded like other kids’ parents.

Their laughter wasn’t too loud and it wasn’t mean and when his parents spoke they didn’t slur their words.  How could that be?  His parents always had cocktails, or beer, or wine.  Pop always, always when he came home and Mom had her first glass of wine or a beer around 10:00-to calm her nerves. 

He smiled in his sleep.  He’d wrapped his forearms with towels, just in case, ‘cause when he came home they had been drinking for quite a while.  If they decided to beat him and ended up hurting themselves pounding on him, then the beatings would be worse.  So he wrapped the towels around just to be safe.  It had been three weeks since payday.  Pops had gone to the races.  And, he heard Pops calling the pawnshop. 

The chilled hospital air woke him from his dream.  His watch said it was nearly six in the morning, on the eighth day of November.  He knew that wasn’t right but when he walked over and looked at Dvora’s watch it said the same.  He had slept over eight hours.

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Dvora slept on her left side with hands between her legs.  She’d showered and her hair glowed shiny black.  He could see the pulse in her throat.  Pump, one thousand and two thousand and pump, one thousand and two thousand and pump.  He timed her pulse.  Her heartbeat at rest was fifty.

He wanted to wake her so they could watch Meghan get better.  He left her sleeping.  Meghan looked worse but was getting better.  Her bruises were as dark and ugly as they’d get before they yellowed away.  Her skin looked more like skin now, less like parchment, and not as likely to crack.

He centered and reached out to connect with her. He had done this so many times when she was sleeping as a child that he knew what it should feel like.  Was she sleeping or something worse?  At first he couldn’t feel her.  Fear shrank his touch. He pushed the fear away and reached out again with as much love as he owned.  He went deeper.  She was in there.  He told her to be calm, that she was broken and needed to fix herself.  He hoped she understood.

There was a glimmer.  He was sure there was.  He told her he was by her side and she was safe and she needed to rest and believe in herself and fix herself.  He told her he would protect her like he always had and that she was safe.  He told her to hold on.  He told her he knew she could do it, just like she had always done everything she really wanted to do.  He told her to want to live.  He told her to want to live like nothing she had every wanted before.  He told her she had to live because he didn’t want to face life without her.

He heard Dvora’s duck-footed, dancer’s step behind him and turned smiling.  He wondered whether to tell her about his connection with Meghan.

She smiled back until she saw Meghan.

“The bruises are as bad as they’ll get…”

She got that pissed-off look between her eyes, “You don’t have to explain bruises to a dancer,” she said.

Over her shoulder he saw a man dry-mopping the hall.  Jack moved in front of Dvora.  The man did a fine job on the floor, using steady sweeps, letting the inertia of the mop-head do most of the work.  When the man turned to wring the mop in the bucket, he bent over.  Latissimus dorsi jumped out in his back.  The man turned toward them again and Jack saw what had set off his alarm.  Under the man’s long sleeve sweat shirt, on the inside of his left forearm, what could have been the outline of a knife in a sheath stood out for part of a second before it was gone.

Jack appeared to lean on a chair.  As he did, he hefted it for weight.  It was designed to comfort and hold for a long vigil.  It was a sturdy, useful chair, maybe a few pounds heavier than a big plate at the gym.  He knew he could hammer-throw fifty pounds hard enough to savage a knife-fighter.

Jack visualized the windup. Best to start with his back to the man and release at half a turn.  Just like a hip throw.  He walked around the chair with his back to the mopping man, bent his knees, lifted the chair slightly, stopped and stepped away from the chair.

The mop man’s left shoelace was tied long down to the top of his work shoe.  The other was tied up high.  His right sleeve was rolled way up.  He was a bad boy, but he was one of Bob’s bad boys. Jack examined everyone in range.  One of the nurse’s aides was a huge woman with heavy scar pads on her knuckles.  The electrician changing a fixture down the hall wore a flack vest under his work shirt.  Bob said he’d send three people for a surprise party. All three wore the required recognition codes.  There would be others he didn’t know about.  Bob was a sneaky son-of-a-gun and would hide some of them from him, knowing Jack might give away Bob’s boys and girls.

He and Dvora watched Meghan get better.  They watched nurses.  The big, sloppy looking brunette twitched and muttered, but never took her eyes off Meghan the whole time she was there.  The tiny one with the extensions in her hair moved like she was on Quaaludes, but turned as quick as a lizard when Meghan’s hand twitched enough to rustle the sheet.  Later, he couldn’t remember who started it.  They told each other Meghan stories.  He told his version of Meghan winning the science fair in high school.  He was sure Dvora had heard his sister’s version.

“Meghan was twelve, not yet used to becoming a woman, and a year from high school graduation.  She stood on stage, her voice quivering with fright, making her presentation.  One of the judges, the one from Stanford who liked the sound of his own voice, questioned her on a correlation.  Meghan looked at him with what could only be pity and said, ’If you have your calculator with you, I could walk you through the math.’  The judge colored and shut up, but Meghan was certain he was the one who ‘misplaced’ the scholarship application so she ended up going to Cal.”

Dvora brought up the bicycle story.  “It was a Sunday morning about a year ago.  We’d gone for a run.  There was a storm.  We waited out the rain, standing under an awning for a long time.  By the time we returned home, Meghan cramped up.  She lay on her back with her left leg bent so I could dig hard into her calf.  I asked again about the little scars on her knees.  Meghan said she’d had them since she learned how to ride a bike.”

Dvora stretched, yawning and then laughed a little, “Meghan said you worked hard trying to teach her, but that it was slow going until she made the deal with the bike.  I teased her, but she wouldn’t tell me what the deal was. She said it was a secret.  That was part of the deal.”

He had tried to teach Meghan to ride a bike.  It was as clear in his mind as if it were hours ago, not years. She was five.  No, she would have been six.  It was one of those frying-pan hot, Central Valley days.  The only wild things moving were birds.  The sound of freeway traffic snarled, carrying a long way on the convection-oven wind.  For a change the big shady place in the park wasn’t full of sleeping drunks and junkies.  The ground was baked hard like dusty concrete.

Meghan had fallen for the fifteenth or twentieth time. Her face under the dirt was bright red from the heat with a streak of darker red where she’d wiped her chin with a cut hand.  Both knees were gone in her brand new little 501s.

“Come on Meg, let’s call it a day.  We’ll take it up again in the morning before I leave,” he said.

Meghan was determined, if that mild of a word could describe her focus.  She’d been that way since birth.

“I want to do it now, Jack,” she said frustrated to tears.  “If this bike would only understand.  I don’t want to hurt this bike.  I just want to ride it.  This bike keeps throwing me off.”

He didn’t smile when he asked, “Why do you think it’s trying to throw you off?”

“I don’t know.  I’m going to have a talk with this bike.  I know I can make this bike understand,” she said.

“Okay, Meg.  I’ll wait under that biggest tree in the shade.”

He sat with his back to the rough bark of the huge Valley Oak.  Meghan leaned the bike against a tree across the clearing and talked.  She talked for a long time, waving her arms and then holding them out like she was riding.  She stopped and stood, as if listening.  She talked more.  Finally he heard her say, very clearly, and so much like the way Pops said it that it made him clench his jaw, “It’s a deal!”

She sat on the seat, steadied herself and shoved off, slow and wobbly.  She gained speed and confidence, riding in a circle.  He stood, wanting to run and help, knowing he had to stay back.  Meghan went round and round, then rode in a figure eight for circuit after circuit.  Finally she straightened and pedaled over to him, stopping only a little roughly.

“Neat, huh?” She asked, smiling the biggest smile-bigger than her birthday smile.

“Real neat!  What are you doing differently?” He asked.

She looked puzzled. “I’m not doing nothing different.  I made this bike understand.  We made a deal.”

“Why don’t you ride home?  I’ll run by your side.”

She took off, yelling, “Okay!” over her shoulder as he ran to catch up.  She had to pedal around their block three times before she’d stop.  He could hear Mom and Pops yelling at each other inside the house all the way from the sidewalk.  Meghan never seemed to hear them, even when they were yelling at her.  On their way up the driveway, he asked her about the deal she’d made with the bike.  She said she couldn’t tell him, ‘cause that was part of the deal.

Over the years that followed, when they were close and not fighting about this or that, he’d occasionally ask her about the deal with the bike.  She’d get that far away look and say, with that little girl smile, “I can’t tell you Jack.  That’s part of the deal.”

One of the orderlies pushed the dinner cart past the room.  He hadn’t eaten anything besides snacks in three days.  He turned to Dvora and said, “I’m starving,” just as she said it.  He waited for her to speak. She waited for him.  They both opened their mouths and said, “Do you want to get a bite?”

The corners of Dvora’s mouth turned up just as he grinned.  He said, “What’s so funny?” right as she said it.

“Cut it out!” they both said at exactly the same time.  They couldn’t stop laughing.  They staggered out of the room and down the hall toward the little pray-and-fall-apart-in-room and collapsed on the sofa.  When she could catch her breath, she turned to him and said, “Stop it!” just as he said it.  He laughed so hard he farted.

Her laugh was mostly lyrical, but  every few laughs she would laugh like a donkey’s bray and start him up again.  They laughed themselves out.  He hadn’t laughed like that since his prenuptial agreement held up under appeal.

AFTER bread and soup and salad and a huge piece of salmon with perfect pasta, he excused himself from the table.  He walked outside to call Alice Stewart from the sidewalk.  Alice was CTO for DealMaker and second only to him in capital.  Part of her job was to translate the grunts, clicks, whistles, and glottal stops programmers used as language into human speech.  Then she had to translate human speech back into programmerese.

“Jack, it’s so good to hear your voice.  You got my messages?”

“Yes, thank you so much.”

“My heart goes out to you.  Olga has been keeping us up to date.”

He explained his twitch about ReWire’s stock and a few of the others in the field.  He didn’t explain who his source was in Hong Kong.  The list of stocks he gave Alice included the ones Lee had given him plus a few he thought had to be clean to act as controls.

“I’m going to ask Bob to help out too.”

The phone seemed to grow cold in his hand.  After a few seconds Alice asked, “By Bob do you mean Robert E. Lee White?”

“Yes.”

Any other time and he would have been on the receiving end of her legendary temper. “Well just fuck me, Jack.  Please don’t ask me to work closely with him.  I know he’s your best friend and all, but the cold-fish, son-of-a-bitch flat pisses me off.”  Jack told her he’d try his best to keep their interaction to a minimum.

Then he called Bob.

“ I’m sure you spotted the first team I put in.  Other teams will check in on the shift change.”

“Will you have all of them check in?”

Bob laughed his high-pitched country laugh and said, “You think in straight lines.  I can’t have you giving my best operatives away, can I?”

“I’d hate to break one of your people by mistake,” Jack said.

Talking to Bob White was a lesson in patience.  Bob employed a man who had suffered a head injury in an automobile accident.  Bob used this man in roles where patience and meticulous attention to detail were more important than reaction time and deductive reasoning.  This man followed people.  He sat in cars for hours on stakeouts.  This man finished Bob’s sentences for him.

“If you start to hurt one of them, they are instructed to say, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”  Bob was, in his own quiet way, preaching to him again.

“I’ve asked Alice to help me look into ReWire and the other stocks.”

Again there was a long silence, even for Bob.  “Please don’t ask me to work too close with that Alice.  I understand she’s a great friend to you and your partner and all, but I’m a God fearing man and the way she talks sets me on edge.”

“I’ll try Bob.”

Jack walked back to the table in time to give in to a piece of cheesecake.  He told Dvora about the conversations and his twitch.  “I knew there was something wrong with that damned company, but you know Meghan.  She’s intensely loyal and hates to be wrong.”  Dvora sat silently for a minute making soup out of her Gelato with her spoon.

Finally she shook her head and laughed.  “Alice and Bob are so freaking funny. It’s like junior high.  We should just cut out the suspense and set them up on a date.”

She saw his confused look and asked, “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?”

He hadn’t and now it was obvious. Bob and Alice were warm for each other’s forms.  She went for dark, small, quiet men, and you couldn’t get much darker, smaller, and quieter than Bob.  Bob used to say that’s why he was such a good night fighter.  With his mouth closed and eye hidden behind the scope, he was invisible.  He liked big, strong women.  Alice’s power lifting records had been in the open class.  And, they were two of the toughest and most decent people he had ever met.

He said, “I never saw it.  Make sure you tell me any other insights you have.  My brain seems to have turned to porridge.  I’m not even sure ReWire’s dirty.  It’s just a hunch.”

She shrugged her shoulders to ease the tension of days sitting and waiting, before she leaned forward and said.  “Meghan told me about one of your so called hunches.  You were home on leave before going to the Gulf.  You left for a run and then came sprinting back to the house.  You wouldn’t let Meghan go to school that day.  She said she hated missing school, hated being at home with your parents. I didn’t believe the story.  She showed me the newspaper clippings about the riot at the high-school across the field.”

He didn’t remember when he knew he had a gift.  By the time he was an adult, he had come to trust it.  And one day, without realizing it, he came to rely on it.  Sometimes it wasn’t there, but it was never wrong. In the war he’d kept his A-team out of three ambushes with it.  Six days after his hardship discharge, because he needed to take care of Meghan after Mom and Pops were killed in the car wreck, his A-team walked into one.  Two men lived.  Either his parent’s death had saved his life, or he’d killed most of his brothers. Dvora’s private cell line rang.  It was Captain Yan, ordering them to appear in only twenty minutes.