The Starving Years (22 page)

“Some problem with a base station, according to the news.”

“Is that possible?” Randy asked. “I thought cell phones went through satellites.”

“Yeah, for the transmission,” Nelson said. “But they need the base stations to connect the signals to the frequencies.”

Marianne said, “And then they claimed the cellular service being down overloaded the land lines and caused the outages.”

“They claimed,” Randy repeated. “You sound exactly like the Voice of Reason.”

Not
exactly
. Nelson quelled a grin.

“You’re not really going to make me wear duct tape shoes,” Marianne said, “are you?”

“Not until we figure out where we’re going.”

Randy sat down hard on one of the sofas and said, “A day off and no way to enjoy it. I wish we had a TV.”

Marianne added wistfully, “Or at least a deck of cards.”

Luckily, when Bobby was a restless eight-year-old, the weather was too crappy to go outside, and the only employed person in the apartment brought home minimum wage, Nelson had devised at least twenty ways to keep the kid amused for hours with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper. He raided the credenza and came up with half a ream of copy paper, some blank legal pads, and a handful of pens with the DLR Construction logo on the barrel. “Hangman,” he said. “Tick tack toe. Twenty questions. And if you get really desperate, then draw yourself that deck of cards.”

Marianne and Randy stared at their yellow legal pads for a moment, and eventually Marianne said, “I haven’t played hangman in years. I’m not even sure I remember how it goes.”

“Think of a word,” Randy said. He pulled a chair out from the conference table for her, and she sat down and began drawing blank lines on her legal pad. He sat beside her and said, “Right, now put the gallows here. I start guessing letters, and when I get one wrong, you draw the head….”

Head?
Nelson quelled another grin. His jaw was still aching.

Chapter 20

“Check the computer,” Javier told Tim.

Tim sat down in front of the desktop, stared at it for a moment, then said, “It’s in Spanish. All the menus. Everything. I’ve never…uh…I took French in high school. Is there a preference I can change, or something?”

Javier stared at the office door as if he might see through it and out into the conference room—and there, analyze Marianne and see if she was acting suspicious. But no. If she were something other than a fellow Canaan Products hopeful, she possessed quite a bit of acting talent, enough to make it this far without any of them noticing that she was a company girl. She wouldn’t give herself away now by looking shifty-eyed and reading over their shoulders. She’d be acting…well, like a typical person. Opinionated without being too terribly radical. Helpful, and yet helpless. And, of course, very petite and innocuous-looking.

Javier pinched the bridge of his nose and wondered what it would be like to trust someone readily again, without stockpiling for a blackmail contingency. Had life ever been so simple? Maybe another life.

“Javier?”

“There is no magic button. If the menus are Spanish, it means the operating system is Spanish.”

“Oh. I should have known that,” Tim said. “It seems like a pretty basic—”

“Have you ever lived outside the United States?”

“N-no.”

“Well, then.” Javier leaned over Tim’s back and took the mouse from his unprotesting hand. “It’s not so different. The browser’s icon looks the same.” He opened the browser.

“Historia. Right. I guess I could’ve figured it out. I just didn’t expect….”

Javier hardly heard him. He was staring at the back of his neck, where his hair parted to reveal the paleness of his skin. It was so tempting to bury his face in Tim’s hair, to rake his teeth over that vulnerable spot. Surprisingly tempting, considering they’d gotten that initial awkwardness out of the way the night before, and the urges should have been slaked, at least for the moment. But, no. That would have been too easy.

“Oh,” Tim said. “All the page names are in English, too. This isn’t so bad. According to the history, she checked her email, did a search on ‘Manhattan Riot’ and ‘Canaan Products’…and then, ‘Canaan Products sucks donkey balls.’”

“And then she visited the Voice of Reason.”

“Yeah.”

Javier looked at the time listed for each item. It did seem innocent enough. “Could she have been doing anything other than checking to see if you’d updated?”

“Nothing, not from a browser. She would need to be playing in the command line.” He scrolled through the short history again. “I think it was just my own safeguards that set it off. That’s all.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Nelson said.
 

Nelson?
 

Tim’s head snapped up as if he’d been found guilty of something, but Javier just gave Nelson a cool stare. Nelson slouched in the doorframe with an ease born out of a lifetime of carefully affected nonchalance. He pried his shoulder away from the wall, closed the door behind him, and scuffed his way over to the desk. “So after last night’s big initiation, are you guys gonna let me into the inner circle, or what? ’Cos whatever cloak-and-dagger game you’re playing at, this whole Voice of Reason deal…I’m not gonna lie. I’ve got a total boner for it.”

Of course he did. Javier considered how best to buy them a bit of time, to give Tim some time to weigh the pros and cons of bringing another stranger into his confidence….

“Yeah,” Tim said defiantly. “It’s my site.”

Well. So much for verifying Nelson’s character references.
 

“I kinda figured,” Nelson said as he fit himself against Tim’s opposite shoulder—and no, the “boner” wasn’t literal, although knowing him, it wouldn’t take more than a wayward breeze to stir one up. “But what’s the point? You make money off it?”

Tim shook his head.

“You’re not taking any credit for it, either,” Nelson observed. “So it must be something else.” He reached around Tim, clasped his hand over Javier’s on the mouse, navigated to the Voice of Reason homepage, and read aloud, “
Canaan Products recruitment fair in the Pamoda Building—coincidence?
Pointing fingers at not only the region’s biggest manna producer, but the company with the most politicians in its pockets—someone might think you’re a Leftist.”

“I’m not a—”

“Leftists, however, are sloppy. They poison batches of manna. They chain themselves to semi-trucks and throw unprocessed alfalfa slime at senators. You? You publish your anonymous website.” Nelson drew his finger up the back of Javier’s hand, and Javier’s arm broke out in gooseflesh. “You go through a lot of trouble to get your info from primary sources rather than regurgitating rumor and hearsay. And then, when all hell breaks loose, you show up with your truck and make sure your buddy on the inside doesn’t get trampled in a riot.”

“I…guess.”

With his hand still clasped atop Javier’s, Nelson pressed his mouth into the very spot on the back of Tim’s neck that Javier had been fantasizing about, and said right against his skin, “What do you get out of it, then? Not cash. Not fame. Not prestige.”

Tim’s voice sounded thick when he replied, “It’s the right thing to do.”

Nelson smiled into the back of Tim’s neck. “Someone might pay good money to make sure all that dirt you’re digging up stays buried.”

“It’s not about that. The point isn’t to keep things covered up. It’s to make sure people know—”

“I love how impractical you are. I’m the very same way.” Nelson turned his head so that his cheek was still nestled in Tim’s hair, and he caught Javier’s gaze, squeezed his hand and said, “What about you?”

“A paragon of impracticality.” Javier said it so dryly, it could have been taken for sarcasm. Best to keep Nelson guessing. Tim might hand his whole heart on a platter to someone he’d spent a single night with, but Javier knew better than to trust someone for sentimental reasons.

If Nelson sensed as much, he didn’t seem particularly concerned. He shifted and peered over Tim’s shoulder at the site. “So what now? Do you really think it wasn’t a coincidence that the rioting started at Canaan? ’Cos it seems a lot bigger than that now. And then there’s the cell service blackout.”

Tim looked to Javier, who was nowhere near as eager to share any more of his secrets than was absolutely necessary. “It started at Canaan,” Javier confirmed.

Nelson stroked his hand again, more suggestively now, teasing between his fingers, but Javier didn’t elaborate.

Nelson cracked an exasperated smile, and said, “Because…?”

It was difficult to resist answering him. The last time Javier had been betrayed by a lover, the clues, in retrospect, had been obvious enough. Ambition. Cunning. Not to say that Nelson wasn’t intelligent…but ambitious? Only when it came to getting laid. Unable to entirely resist that naughty twinkle in Nelson’s eye, Javier extended a bit more trust, and said, “Why do you think?”
 

“Me? Hell, I can think of a dozen reasons. Crappy offshore working conditions, like Marianne said. Weaseling out of keeping up with whatever environmental standards they’re supposed to meet. Hiring a big raft of people like they were at that job fair…why? So they can cut the employees who’ve been there for thirty years and replace them with someone at half their age and half their salary?” He pressed his fingertip deeper between Javier’s middle and ring fingers as if to hint at something he’d rather be doing, and then followed with one of his typical double entendres. “Do you need me to keep going? ’Cos I can.”

Javier looked down at Nelson’s hand. His index finger. Stroking. Probing. And if he claimed Nelson didn’t turn him on despite his efforts to control himself, it would be a lie. “What about…a recall?” Javier said quietly. “A recall no one knew about?”

Nelson’s finger stopped its stroking. “Like a spoiled batch?”

“Maybe.”

Nelson considered the idea. “But you’d hear about that. It would be public record.” His other hand, Javier saw, had worked its way around Tim, caressing his stomach absently while Nelson leaned into the back of Tim’s head. Tim was blushing.

Javier watched Nelson’s eyes track side to side in thought. Maybe he really wasn’t aware he was seducing them, both of them, with every casual move. Throwing himself at men came as naturally to him as breathing.
 

Javier decided to press further. “What other reasons could they have for swapping huge amounts of manna from store shelves and calling it a stock rotation?”

“Quality control? A new flavor? You’ll need to give me more to go on than that. I could think of about a million reasons.”

Tim opened his netbook. All three watched the monitor scroll through some startup scripts, and then a plain, utilitarian screen appeared. Tim navigated to a text document and opened it. Javier took the strings of symbols for some sort of programming language, until Tim held up the tiny computer and said, “You tell me. This formula was locked up tighter than anything else on the server. Does it have to do with a flavor?”

Rather than simply taking the netbook, Nelson used the opportunity to slide his hand up Tim’s chest and press his entire upper body into Tim’s back to read over his shoulder—and scowl at the screen. Javier expected a glib answer, but none came. “Nope, not a flavor, that’s for sure. But there is something here—something to do with the process. It’s not shorter, though. It’s longer—which makes no sense at all, because the more steps you add, the more expensive it is to make, and if they were doing something that cost them money, they’d advertise it as a big, fancy feature. Can you print it out for me?”

Tim extricated himself from the huddle, which finally pulled Nelson’s hand from Javier’s, and figured out where to plug his netbook into the office’s printer. “And you’ll be able to tell what it is just by reading the formula?” Javier said skeptically.

“Some supporting documentation would be nice, but yeah. I can read it. Ten years ago, when the whole ‘more protein’ formulation was the buzzword in the industry? That was me. I figured out how to bind another amino acid to the chain when I was twenty-four friggin’ years old.”

He should be wealthy, if not famous. That much was obvious. Javier thought it was best not to pry, but Tim couldn’t seem to resist. “What happened?”

“I was in grad school…so technically, my advisor owned the idea. Bought himself a condo in Miami with the patent, or that’s what I think they told me. Something like that. I don’t know for sure. I was on a wicked bender at the time.”

“Wasn’t there anything you could do about it?” Tim said.

“He slid me ten grand to not make a big stink. I had a two-year-old at home. I took it.”

The sound of the formula printing out was a welcome diversion. As was the case with everything Alejandro de la Rosa owned, the printer was the top of the line, and the pages slipped into the tray with a mere whisper. Even that subtle sound was enough to put an end to the conversation that none of them wished to take part in any longer.

Nelson took the first few sheets from the printer and curled up with them on the sofabed, chewing on the end of a pen, with his knees drawn up to his chest and the formula resting on his thighs. Javier caught another sheet as it fed from the printer. Gibberish, to him. But obviously Nelson saw something there.

“What’s with that?” he said, mostly to himself, though both Javier and Tim hung on the statement until he began circling parts of the formula, and it became clear he wasn’t going to expound on it.

Javier turned to Tim. “You were updating your site. Why don’t you finish—from this computer, if it’s more secure. And link to that video, if you want to. If you could pause on that sign….”

“I can’t, not without video editing software. Maybe I can grab a screenshot, though.” Tim sat down at Alejandro’s desk and began keying in some commands. Javier stood and watched over his shoulder as he downloaded the video, paused it at the point where the
Child Killers
sign was as clear as it was going to get, and took a shot. “What should I put in the caption?” he asked Javier.

What, indeed? Was manna killing children now? That would be a hell of an accusation to make without any proof. Besides, hadn’t Javier seen the county morgue himself? There were no children’s bodies on those bloody tables. Not a single one. “Forget the caption. Just post the image on your front page.”