Long Way Down (10 page)

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll salute them as they go.” He opened the door, and still dressed only in his shirtsleeves, stepped out into the cold mist.

I followed reluctantly.

“That’s what I wanted you to see.” He began waving his hand wildly. A young man stepped out of the cabin door on the bridge and waved back—a bit more controlled in his enthusiasm. “My son. You see? Family. That’s who I am, what I am about. It’s all about family or it’s worth nothing.”

I knew from my research that Penn was thrice divorced, but I didn’t think that was the time to point this out.

“He’s going out to sea in December? Is that wise?” The boat looked to be eighty feet long or more and was very solid-looking—if you had to be on the water in winter, I supposed that was the way to do it, but I could not imagine what emergency would cause me to make the attempt.

Penn was still waving, his face alive with almost tearful pride. “He and three buddies are taking the boat to Belize. They were all in his marine biology program at university, and they’ll be doing research down there on the coral reefs.” He gave a short bark of a laugh that might have been scornful or not. “Saving the world.”

Two other young men came out on deck and waved to us. This time I joined in waving back.

“Four kids fresh out of college are taking that boat all the way down the East Coast and across the Caribbean in winter?” I thought I was allowed some incredulity.

“There’s a full crew on board. And they can do big chunks of the trip inside—the Intracoastal Waterway. They’re not babies. At their age I was running a copper mine in the mountains of Peru and fighting off Shining Path terrorists.”

I had read the accounts. If they were not exaggerated by time and publicists, he had been a very brave young man, and very handy with an M16. At that age I had been starting grad school and my biggest fear was being called on in Professor Dietch’s Advanced Accounting Seminar.

“So, is this scientific expedition connected with school?”

He gave me a look that held just a flash of anger. “No. You’re missing the point. It’s my gift to my son. The boat, the trip, the whole thing. The boat alone cost me eight mil. It’ll cruise at nine knots and has a range of about two thousand miles. Of course, it burns twenty gallons of fuel an hour. Marine diesel. It’s like burning a twenty-dollar bill every quarter of an hour. But it doesn’t matter. It’s family. I take care of my family. Do you have family, Jason?”

“I have a six-year-old son.” And he had enough challenges in his life to face every day—he wouldn’t need an eight-million-dollar boat.

“Then you understand. You can read all the stories about me and my wealth and how I got it and what I do with it, but if you don’t see that I’m all about family, you don’t know me. Clear?”

The boat continued past us and out between the jetties. Another young man joined the others and they all gave one final wave. There was a shift in the breeze, and the boat disappeared into the mist. Gray upon gray upon gray.

What was clear to me was that Charles Penn had enough money to buy his boy anything he wanted. I wasn’t jealous or appalled. Or impressed. It was also clear to me that other messages had been delivered. That though this man was powerful enough to move metals markets around the world with not much more than a raised eyebrow, he had to prove to me that he could make me waste five hours driving the length of Long Island twice for an all-too-brief opportunity for him to flash his wealth at me.

“You have two other sons, don’t you? What are they up to? Backpacking in Antarctica? Biking across the Sahara?”

Penn gave me a hard stare, giving nothing away, and then broke into a big grin. “I like you, Jason. We see life much the same way. We’ve both been on top and had to fight our way back up there after getting knocked down. We’re going to get along.” With that little speech he turned and walked quickly back to the car. He called back over his shoulder. “Set something up with my secretary for dinner sometime soon.” He paused before closing the door. “We’ll make it a long night. You ask me anything you want. We’ll talk.” He slammed the door and was gone, into the fog.

W
et snow mixed with rain—a wintry mix—was falling. The Kid had no hat, no gloves, and his black puffy jacket was open.

“Cold,” he said.

“So can I zip you up?”

“No.”

He took my hand and we crossed Broadway. He ran to the subway entrance. I thought about white sandy beaches and being so hot that I sweated while lying down.

We walked up to the head of the platform—I walked, he skipped—so that we could get the first car. The Kid liked riding in the first car with his face pressed up against the window of the door at the end, next to the engineer. He loved the exhilaration of watching the stations fly toward us and the sudden glimpses of the inside of the tunnels as we passed worklights. Sometimes we saw people down there. Track inspectors in their fluorescent vests or repair crews working under brilliant white lights.

“Still cold?”

He thought about it. “Yes.”

“Express or local?”

“’Spress!”

The express got up to higher speeds, bypassing the Seventy-ninth and Eighty-sixth Street stations.

“So if you’re cold, why don’t we go someplace warm?”

He sensed a trap. “Why?”

“I’m thinking of nice warm sand under our feet, a blue cloudless sky overhead, the sun shining on our backs as we look out over turquoise waters.”

A local train came out of the tunnel at the far end of the platform. The Kid covered his ears and opened his mouth in a silent scream. The train came to a stop and a young couple—German or Eastern European tourists, I judged by their bad haircuts—came out onto the platform. The Kid scurried over to my side. He did not trust having strangers close on the subway platform.

The young woman approached me, her companion hanging back with an expression of disdain on his face.

“Excuse me. We want to go to museum.” Her accent was very pronounced.

The Kid kept behind my leg while gripping my pants in an iron grasp.

“Which museum do you want?”

She spoke rapidly to the young man, who answered in a mumbled whisper before handing her a small colorful brochure. She opened it and pointed.

I recognized the picture. The Museum of the American Indian. They were Germans.

“Ah,” I said. “You are heading uptown. You need to go downtown.” All the way downtown. As this information was met with blank stares, I tried demonstrating with big gestures accompanied by overly loud simple words. “Over. There. Down. Town.”

The man was clueless. The woman got the gist of it, but pointed at the intervening sets of express tracks between the two platforms.

“Yes,” I said. I felt like I was playing charades—and losing. I pointed up the stairs and then walked my two fingers across the space between us.

There was a map upstairs by the turnstiles. I could show them the stairs to the downtown tracks.

“Oh shit,” I said, waving. “Follow me. Come on, Kid.”

The Kid did not want to leave. “’Spress!” he shouted at me.

“Yes, I know. We’ll be right back. Let’s go.”

“’Spress!” he wailed.

He was right. I could hear it. If we went upstairs and showed the tourists how to get down to Bowling Green, we would miss our uptown train.

The woman caught on. “Is okay. Is okay. Thank you, mister.” She turned to leave.

The young man was staring down the tracks, watching the flickering light of the approaching train reflect off the station walls. The Kid peeked out around him and for a moment they were less than two feet apart. I was two steps away.

The man turned to follow his partner, and as he did he reached over and patted the Kid on the head. It was the kind of thoughtless but well-meant gesture that makes any parent’s blood boil. It turned the Kid into a demon. He swung around and leaped forward—teeth-first.

Luck kept the man from a trip to the hospital. He was still turning when the Kid struck, and the Kid missed his target—the offending hand. I covered the two steps between us and lifted him up by the waist. He hated it. He kicked at me and scratched the back of my hand.

The young man turned and ran to the stairs where his
companion was already mounting to the station above. She had missed the incident entirely.

I put the Kid back down as our train pulled in. He forgot his anger with me immediately and covered his ears.

“Let’s go, my little tiger cub.” I would not reprimand my son for attempting to bite someone who had no business touching him in the first place. Let them sue.

I got on the train and held the door. The Kid looked at the two-inch gap between train and platform, sucked in a deep breath, and leaped over it.

“That’s my brave boy,” I said.

H
arvey Deeter called me from his private plane, en route to Dallas from Marathon, Ontario.

“And colder than my in-laws’ hearts, son. Kee-rist, ’bout froze my pecker off. What is it you want to know? My secretary tells me you are a very dogged individual. She didn’t say it quite so nicely, though.”

“I work for Virgil Becker. I handle certain things for him or for his clients. You’re on the board of one of those companies.”

“Son, I’m on the board of more companies than my daddy’s dogs’ got fleas. Virgil, now. He’s a bright young man. Not as smart as his daddy, but he’s a lot more honest, and that counts for something fierce with me. He did mention you’d be calling, now I think about it.”

Deeter impressed me as one of those men who need to be a bit slippery, no matter how inconsequential the subject. It kept them in practice for when it did matter. I decided to be as direct as possible. “What can you tell me about Arinna? Phil Haley?”

“Another bright boy, but he worries me time to time.”

“Does he?”

“I put forty-two million dollars into his company. You better believe I keep an eye on what goes on where. You ever try to raise a raccoon kit? I mean as a pet?”

I was nineteen when I saw my first raccoon taking apart a trash can in back of the dorm at Cornell. “No.”

“They’re cuddly and they’re smart. You put one in a cage and it will work at the latch until it figures out how to open it. You got two of them? One will teach the other. Put it back in the same cage a year later, and it will remember. It’ll have that door open in seconds. That’s no lie.”

Report from Animal Planet. “I didn’t know that.”

“But then one day it’ll turn on you. Biting, scratching. Don’t you leave one in a room with a baby in it. They can’t be trusted.”

“I see. This is an allegory. You believe that Phil Haley can’t be trusted. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m just saying, you try to domesticate a wild animal and you’ll get bit. He’s a southern boy, though you’d never know it. Low-country white trash, of course, but just like the Apostle Peter, he’ll deny it ’til the cock crows. Never trust a man who’s not comfortable with his roots, Mr. Stafford. You’re a New Yorker, aren’t you?”

“Born in Queens,” I said.

“Mets fan?”

“No. Yankees. Like my father.”

“Ho! I bet you got your share of ass-whuppin’s growing up.”

I ran, but I didn’t feel any need to share that information with him. “Do you invest in other alternative energy projects? Is this diversification for you?”

“Not many. There’s too many tree huggers out there looking to do something good for the world. If I want to do something for the family of man, I put a little extra in the collection box at church.”

“So why go with Arinna? If he wins, he means to put you out of business, doesn’t he?”

“Let me tell you something. There’s more awl under the ice in Antarctica than all the awl we’ve ever taken out of the ground. So why don’t we just go after it?”

“Isn’t there some international treaty about not exploiting the continent?”

“Oh, piss on that. You ask my great-great-granddaddy about treaties, son. He was a full-blood Choctaw. Treaties get
mah-dified
.” He stretched the word out to extract every drop of irony. “No. The reason is engineering. No engineer living has figured out a way to extract crude from underneath a mile-high pile of ice. Engineering. That’s what I invest in. Not awl. Engineering. That’s my business. This fella Haley is one smart engineer and he’s got a lot of other smart folks working with him. That’s where I put my money.”

“Do you think he shorted the company stock?”

“I do not. I think that what that’s about is someone taking him down a notch. The man is not tame, but neither is he stupid. He knows which way to run when the rabbit breaks.”

“Any thoughts on who would set him up that way?”

“I had a dog one time—a mutt. Part hound, maybe. He didn’t hunt, he didn’t fetch, he barely answered to his name. My older brother called him ‘Stupid.’ But no matter what room he was in, that dog would always find the warmest spot in winter, or the one spot with a nice draft in summer.”

If this was another allegory, it was well beyond my abilities to discern its meaning. He went on. “It’s a sneaky way of getting at Haley, isn’t it? He told me it was the Chinese government did it. Could be. Spies and secret codes and all that. Hackers. But, no. I’m not worried, though. Something’ll come along and make this all go away. I’d bet my last dollar on it.”

S
aturday night. It had been a long day. The Kid had been offsides from the moment he woke up. Breakfast was a disaster because the last two eggs in the refrigerator had tiny dark dots in the yoke and were, therefore, inedible as far as the Kid was concerned. I took him across the street to the Greek coffee shop we frequented on Sunday mornings, and he had a meltdown. It took me ten minutes to persuade him that it was all right, we could have scrambled eggs there on Saturday, and still come back for French toast on Sunday. So we were late for his yoga class. Not by much, but just enough. Rather than simply join in with the rest of the class, the Kid had to start exactly the way he always did, progressing through the usual regimen. It was a little like watching a movie on a broken DVD player. He sped through some exercises and faltered through others, always a move or two behind the class. His anxiety crescendoed as they approached the newer movements—the ones he did not know as well. And though the teaching assistants did their best to help him relax, he did not trust them, so by the time the class reached the final point of total relaxation, the Kid was
fidgeting angrily and kicking his heels against the floor. He refused to get up off his mat when they were done and I had to rescue him.

“Let’s go, son. There’ll be other days.”

He whimpered, whispered something.

“Sorry, Kid. Say again?”

“Bed.”

“You want to go to bed?”

He nodded, rolled away, and hugged his knees to his chest.

“If that’s what you want, it’s okay by me. But one step at a time, okay? First we get up and get ready to leave. Let’s go. Roll up your mat.”

He got up, but he showed his defiance by not rolling up the mat. He walked toward the double gym doors with his head down, his shoulders hunched, and his feet dragging, looking just like A-Rod after getting picked off trying to steal second with one out and Gardner at the plate. I grabbed the mat and followed him out.

I let him get a few steps ahead of me as we negotiated the crowd in front of Fairway—when did double-wide strollers become the norm in my neighborhood?—and I was still catching up when he stepped off the curb onto Seventy-fourth Street.

“No!” I leaped across the intervening space, grabbed his hand, and jerked him back to the sidewalk.

He reacted predictably. He dug his fingernails into the back of my hand and clawed at me with the ferocity of a trapped wolverine. Though he failed to draw blood—Heather and I kept his fingernails well-trimmed for just such exigencies—his actions did draw the attention of a heavyset, white-haired man with a cane who told me, “If that were my boy, I’d put him right over my knee.”

I added this bit of advice to the mental file
STUPID THINGS PEOPLE SAY THAT I SIM
PLY NEED TO IGNORE
, and focused on the Kid. If I were ever foolish enough to resort to corporal punishment, I would lose
his trust forever. And I was afraid that if I ever tried “putting him over my knee,” he would bite a hole in my thigh.

“That was bad, Kid. You know that. No walking in the street alone. You need to take my hand.” He had not made that mistake in a very long time. Months. It scared me. He had come so far in such a short time. Could he slip back into his unresponsive, undisciplined shell of indifference just as easily?

He pulled his hand free of my grip. “’Kay,” he yelled at me.

I let him have his moment of defiant defeat. Behind him a woman pushed her stroller—a single—a bit too close to him. The passenger—a bundled-up toddler wearing ankle-high Timberland boots—was swinging his well-shod feet in a bored manner and managed to connect with the back of my son’s leg.

The Kid was a New Yorker. He was used to being jostled on the street at times. He hated it, as we all do, and a lot more than most of us. But he had learned to take it in stride. He attended a school where almost every student dealt with issues of physical coordination. He no longer blindly reacted when something like that happened.

But it was not a typical day. The Kid whirled around, his jaw snapping, teeth bared, growling like a much larger wild animal. The woman, an overdressed and over-accessorized young mother—and when did women under thirty in my neighborhood begin wearing full makeup to go grocery shopping on Saturday morning?—screamed and fell backward, tripping over her own three-inch-heeled boots. The toddler continued to kick desultorily, apparently unfazed by my son’s threats of attack. I grabbed the Kid by the collar of his jacket, lifted him off the ground, and swung him away.

“Home. Now!” I marched him into the street, simultaneously checking for traffic and calling “Sorry” over my shoulder, while the Kid tried unsuccessfully to twist his head around far enough to bite me.

The rest of the day was quiet. An uneasy truce kept the two of us from communicating in more than grunts and monosyllables. I was stretched just far enough that I had no wish for any further confrontation, and no energy to repair the rifts of the morning. Lunch came and went. The Kid didn’t eat. He decided that he didn’t want to take a nap, so he commandeered my seat—the sprung, torn leather easy chair facing the window and Broadway—where he looked at car books until he fell asleep just before Skeli was due for dinner. But Skeli called at the last minute to say that she was still downtown and would it be terrible if she canceled on me?

I bit back my disappointment, made sufficient soothing noises, and poured myself a tall vodka on the rocks. If I’d added a few olives, I could’ve called it dinner. An hour later I considered making another, and almost did so, stopping myself at the last minute and pouring a glass of water instead.

My laptop was sitting on the dining room table, humming contentedly, the Firefox main page open and empty. I stood over it, sipping the water, until I found myself typing
Deeter
into the search box.

Despite the down-home, aw-shucks accents and colloquialisms, Harvey Deeter was a Rhodes scholar who had graduated second in his class from UPenn with a degree in geological engineering. He spent his two years at Oxford studying chemistry, returning home to take a field management trainee position with his father’s wildcatting company. Eight years later, his father nearly died of a stroke and passed the reins to his son. The firm’s leases, holdings, and operations were then estimated to be worth somewhere in the high eight figures. He had grown the company and taken it public while maintaining a majority interest. His shares were now worth enough to keep him in the top twenty on
Forbes’
list of billionaires. The public persona of having raised himself up from West Texan hardscrabble was a carefully crafted fiction. His success in building one
of the world’s most profitable energy development companies was still impressive, you merely had to take into account that he’d had a ninety-million-dollar head start.

Beyond that, there were few surprises. He contributed to political campaigns on both sides of the aisle, as long as those public servants voted with Big Oil, but otherwise kept his political opinions to himself. He was also a very large donor to a high-profile, nonprofit research facility, whose sole purpose seemed to be to argue loudly whenever and wherever possible that global warming was unproven, and even if it did exist, it was not caused by man but by regular cycles in the planet’s climate. As the think tank’s list of donors included every major oil company in the world, I did not fault Deeter for this bit of scientific dishonesty. It was just part of the job.

I poured myself another glass of water and considered putting the Kid to bed. I wasn’t ready for another face-off, but it wasn’t going to get any better if I waited. On the other hand, it wasn’t going to be any worse. I went back to the computer.

NEQUISS

The screen went to black.

This had happened before. The power cord sometimes needed a hard push, or else the jack wouldn’t set in place correctly. I could run the machine until the battery gave out, but then it would shut down without warning.

I removed the jack and replaced it. Nothing happened. Again, this was not a surprise. If the battery was too depleted, I needed to charge it for a few minutes—or as much as ten minutes—before it reached liftoff. I took the battery out and put it back in. Sometimes that worked. It didn’t that time, but I felt good about following the ritual.

The Kid gave a long dreamy sigh. I set the laptop on the table and went over to him. He was still sound asleep, but his beautiful
face was twisting into various cartoonish expressions of unhappiness. I dreaded interfering with whatever demons had him at that moment—he was as likely to side with the demons as with me—but I knew that I could help. I got a spare sheet out of the linen closet and carefully wrapped it around him. With each wrap, I pulled it tighter. The pressure helped him for some reason. I didn’t understand it, I simply accepted that sometimes it worked. The grimaces went away and his face muscles went slack. I lifted him gently and put him in bed.

His features were all his mother’s, but I only saw the relationship when he was asleep. When he was awake, I was always fully aware that he was himself and entirely unique. Only in the middle of the night, sometimes after a drink or two, did I see her face in his. And the guilt and pain came back.

I poured another glass of vodka. It was late enough, it no longer mattered if I was in fighting trim. My computer was up again, the screen lit. Beneath the search window there was one line of script.

(0) results for NEQUISS

I tried a search on Bing. Same result. Google. The same. McKenna seemed to have created the greatest stealth company the world had ever known—or he was lying. I didn’t think he was lying. A third possibility occurred to me—that NEQUISS had ceased to exist. How difficult would it be for a government body to purge any mention of a company from the Internet? The fourth possibility only came to me later that night.

The alcohol started to hit, taking the rough edges off my world. I would worry about NEQUISS, Haley, Virgil, and all the rest of it another time. I typed in the words
Vacation Rentals Beachfront Costa Rica.
I
spent the next hour fantasizing about Skeli, the Kid, and me staying in one rain-forest, treetop, ocean-view, extravagant mansion after another. Vacation porn. It brought me no closer to actually booking somewhere for us to escape to over the next few weeks,
but for an hour I indulged myself with harmless waking dreams. I never finished the glass of vodka. I fell asleep in my chair, the last website still open, showing a place in Hawaii where children on the spectrum could swim with dolphins. Dolphin therapy. I heard myself chuckle as I drifted off. What the hell, even if it had no therapeutic value whatsoever, the Kid would have a ball.

—

There was someone
in the room with me. An intruder. Had I dreamt it? I opened my eyes. The computer was still lit, so I hadn’t slept long. The energy saver was set for fifteen minutes and the screen would have shut off. I got up and checked the Kid’s room. He was fast asleep, the sheet I had wrapped him in was partially kicked away. He looked like an angelic version of a mummy. There was no one else there.

I cased the rest of the apartment. I checked the lock on the front door. I opened closet doors and made sure that the windows were closed. Nothing was amiss. But still I could not shake the feeling.

The kitchen clock read 3:18. No wonder my back ached; I’d been asleep in that chair for almost five hours. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I turned off lights and went to bed. I had just placed one bare foot back on the floor and was about to remove the sock from the other when it hit me. My computer screen was still on. And it was active. After five hours.

I got up and went to the table. Images were flickering across the screen. Sites I had visited. Pictures and files from my documents folder. The cursor was jumping back and forth, clicking on buttons and opening new sites and private folders. The machine was possessed.

I was being hacked. Someone was inside my computer and examining every aspect of my life.

Scared. Vulnerable. Mad. Naked. Violated. Mad. Panicking. Mad. Mad. Mad.

I fought for control. The hacker was opening my bank account. I hit the power button. No response. I tried typing. Nothing. The drive was not responding to the board. I pushed my panic back down and tried to think.

The modem. I rushed across the living room to the space on the shelves where once there had been a television set. The cable wire was there with the modem and router. I pulled the power cord out, then detached all the wires, just for completeness, knowing that it was unnecessary, but unable to stop myself. I wanted to kill whatever it was that had entered my space. My digital space.

The computer screen was still. I moved the mouse. The cursor answered. I closed the Firefox window and a pop-up informed me that I was no longer accessing the Internet. I shut the whole thing down. A moment later, the screen went to black accompanied by the sound of someone popping their cheek with a finger.

The computer was no longer an evil entity, it was simply dirty, defiled. I’d buy a new one in the morning and begin the annoying and arduous business of re-creating the more organized aspects of my life. I made a mental list of calls I would need to make—to the bank, credit card companies, everyone in my address book.

McKenna. I needed to warn him. The number Spud had given me to contact him was compromised. He had to get rid of it.

“You have reached the offices of Information Studies outside of normal business hours. Please call back between ten and four, Monday through Friday. If you wish to leave a message for Lydia Sharp, please press one at the prompt.”

I pressed one.

“Ms. Sharp. This is Jason. This number is no longer safe. Please contact me when you can.”

McKenna would understand. So would anyone pursuing either of us. All I had really gained with being circumspect was a juvenile level of deniability. I tossed the phone across the room.

I sat and stared at the laptop, wishing it gone and out of my house. I could spend the day getting drive-wiping software, saving all my sensitive files to a CD, cleaning the computer, and reloading the entire operating system and still have a computer I would not be able to trust. Or, I could take a sturdy screwdriver and bust the thing up into component parts and feed them to the incinerator. There was a good screwdriver in one of the kitchen drawers.