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.