Fatal Error rj-13 Page 2

  Neat. Incredibly neat. The neatest ring in Jack's collection. Far more complex than his Buck Rogers Ring of Saturn, or his Shadow ring, or even his Kix Atomic Bomb Ring. It deserved auspicious display. But where? His front room was already jammed with radio premiums, cereal giveaways, comic strip tie-ins-crassly commercial tchotchkes from a time before he was born. He wasn't sure why he collected them, but knew when and where the addiction had started: in his teens when he'd worked at a store that specialized in junk. But he didn't know why. After years of accumulating his hoard, Jack still hadn't found the answer. So he kept buying. And buying.

  Old goodies and oddities littered every flat surface on the mismatched array of Victorian golden oak furniture crowding the room. Certificates proclaiming him an official member of The Shadow Society, the Doc Savage Club, the Nick Carter Club, Friends of the Phantom, the Green Hornet GJM Club, and other august organizations papered the walls.

  At least the place was his again. Weezy had moved out after Thanksgiving. She'd finally accepted that no one was looking for her anymore, and had found a sublet a few blocks away in a new high-rise. Still, she'd insisted on renting it under an assumed name.

  Jack glanced at the Shmoo clock on the wall above the hutch. Time for a brew or two. He placed the Sky King Magni-Glo Writing Ring next to his Captain Midnight radio decoder, pulled a worn red Lands' End Windbreaker over his flannel shirt, and headed for the door.

  Outside in the frigid darkness, he hurried through the Upper West Side, feeling kind of bummed that Gia and Vicky were leaving for Iowa tomorrow. Out of the blue she'd come up with this idea to visit her folks back home. She went back a couple of times a year to keep Vicky in touch with her grandparents-the little girl's paternal family, the Westphalens, had been scoured from the face of the Earth-but usually in warmer weather. If it was this cold in Manhattan, what the hell was it like in Ottumwa, Iowa?

  Didn't make sense, but since when did family need to make sense?

  He passed trendy boutiques and eateries that catered to the local yuppies and dinks. The economic downturn that started back in '09 had caused a few to close, but the effect here had been mere decimation rather than the holocaust elsewhere. They were coming back already.

  No recession at Julio's. Even on a Monday night, the drinkers stood three deep around the bar, two-hundred-dollar shirts and three-hundred-dollar sweaters wedged next to grease-monkey overalls. Julio's had somehow managed to hang on to its old clientele despite the invasion of the Ralph Lauren, Armani, and Donna Karan set. The yups and dinks had discovered Julio's a while back. Thought it had "rugged charm," found the bar food "authentic," and loved its "unpretentious atmosphere."

  They drove Julio up the wall.

  Julio stood behind the bar, under the FREE BEER TOMORROW… sign. Jack waved to let him know he was here. As Jack wandered the length of the bar he passed a blond dink in a gray Armani cashmere sweater that had to cost north of a grand. He must have been here before because he was pointing out the dead succulents and asparagus ferns hanging in the windows to a couple who were apparently newcomers.

  "Aren't they just fabulous?" he said between quaffs from a mug of draft beer.

  "Why doesn't he just get fresh ones?" the woman beside him asked.

  She was sipping white wine from a smudged tumbler. She grimaced as she swallowed. Julio made a point of stocking the sourest Chardonnay on the market.

  "I think he's making a statement," the guy said.

  "About what?"

  "I haven't the faintest. But don't you just love them?"

  Jack knew what the statement was: Callusless people go home. But they didn't see it. Julio was purposely rude to them, and he'd instructed his help to follow his lead, but it didn't work. The dinks thought it was a put-on, part of the ambience. They ate it up.

  Jack stepped over the length of rope that closed off the back half of the seating area and dropped into his usual booth in the darkened rear. As Julio came out from behind the bar, the blond dink flagged him down.

  "Can we get a table back there?"

  "No," Julio said.

  The muscular little man brushed by him and nodded to Jack on his way to bus the empty glasses. Jack signaled for a Yuengling.

  "Hey, Jack."

  Jack looked up to see Russ Tuit stepping over the cord and approaching.

  "Russ," he said, shaking his hand. "A little far from home, aren't you?" He lived over on Second Avenue.

  "Need to talk to you."

  Jack had his back against the wall and indicated a chair opposite him.

  "Looking for work?"

  Russ was Jack's go-to guy for all things cyber-legal or not so legal. He'd done time for hacking a bank and was still on probation.

  He smiled. "Believe it or not, I'm gainfully employed. Full time too. And you'll never guess by who."

  "The feds."

  Russ's face fell. "How… how…?"

  Jack had to laugh. "Well, you said I'd never guess, so I figured the least likely people to hire a federal felon would be the feds. What've they got you doing-hacking citizens?"

  "Close. This branch of the NRO hired-"

  "What's NRO?"

  "National Reconnaissance Office. They run all the satellites. Their research wing put me together with a bunch of other hackers to help tighten up their security. Seems their computers are under constant attack, especially from the Chinese. So what we do is pretty cool. One team sets up a security system, and the other team tries to break through it. If we get through, then we switch sides, shore up the breach, and now it's their turn to try to break through. We keep going back and forth, switching sides, and let me tell you, it's working. We've been building firewalls that are higher, wider, and smarter than anything else out there."

  Jack's mind wandered as Russ went on about viruses and worms and trojans. He noticed the blond guy in the sweater stopping Julio again as he returned to the bar. He pointed toward Jack and Russ.

  "How come they get to sit over there and we don't?"

  Julio swung on him and got in his face. He was a good head shorter than the blond guy but he was thickly muscled and had that air of barely restrained violence. He went into his Soup Nazi act.

  "You ask me one more time about those tables, meng, and you outta here. You hear me? You out and you never come back!"

  Julio loved to use "meng" whenever he could, especially with the yups and dinks.

  As Julio strutted away, the blond guy turned to his companions, grinning.

  "I just love this place."

  "So all in all," Russ was saying, "a pretty cool gig."

  "Sounds utterly fascinating."

  Russ grinned. "I can tell you'd rather stick pins in your eyes."

  "Not pins. Nails. Glowing, red-hot nails."

  "Hey, it's not bad being a white hat. It pays and they may go to bat for me and get me back on the Net." One of the terms of Russ's probation was banishment from the Internet, cruel and unusual for a guy like him. Of course, he'd found numerous ways around that. "But that's not why I'm here. Got a friend in trouble."

  "This 'friend' wouldn't be named Russ, would he?"

  "No. This is a buddy. We've been working on an MMO game hack-"

  "NRO… MMO… I don't speak acronymese."

  "Sorry. A massively multiplayer online game."

  "Sounds like bad English."

  "It's a big deal these days. WoW-I mean, Warcraft-has eleven million players, Habbo's got eight, and people average between twenty and thirty hours a week at it."

  Jack shook his head. He got game playing, but didn't get Russ. "And you want to hack it? Don't you ever learn?"

  He laughed. "Hack's an umbrella term. Me and Munir are working on a way to make MMOs play faster. If it works out the way we hope it will, we'll patent it and be sitting pretty."

  "And this Munir's got trouble? What kind?"

  Russ shrugged. "Don't know. Won't tell me. I think it involves his wife and kid."

  Jack remembered a voice mai
l that said, Jack, please save my family! He'd decided not to call back.

  "And he can't go to the cops," Russ added. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

  A kidnap, most likely. One of Jack's rules was to avoid kidnappings. They were the latest crime fad these days, usually over drugs. They attracted feds and Jack had less use for feds than he had for local cops.

  "Yeah." He leaned forward. "Look, Russ, kidnapping is best left to the big boys. They've got assets and manpower and teams specially trained-"

  "He's scared shitless to make that call. I told him I knew a guy who could look into it and keep it outside the system."

  "Sorry, Russ. No way."

  5

  "Drexler, I have a task for you."

  Ernst straightened in his chair as he recognized the voice: the One.

  His office seemed to shrink around him. Contact with the One never failed to make him feel like a frightened child. He grabbed a pen and poised it over the legal pad before him.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do you remember the woman who created such a nuisance last summer?"

  "Louise Myers? The woman posting on the nine/eleven sites?"

  "Yes. Her."

  Everyone Ernst had sent against that woman had ended up dead. A bit more than a nuisance. Quite a bit more.

  "Did you ever find her?"

  "No, sir. We gave up on the search some months ago. She's stopped posting and there didn't seem much hope-"

  "Resume the search. Widen it. Find her."

  "Is there something I should know?"

  "Merely a contingency plan. She has a book I may have use for. She's in the city. I could find her myself if I were there, but I am in the middle of something else at the moment."

  "I'll get on it right away."

  "Also, a package shall be arriving for your safekeeping. As for the woman, remember this: I want no contact. Locate her, but do not contact her."

  "No contact? But-"

  He was gone.

  The One had said to widen the search. Ernst assumed that meant mobilizing more than just the Order. He called his right-hand man, Kristof Szeto, and told him to fax a copy of her picture to the head of security for the Dormentalists-their Grand Paladin-as well as get it out to the members of the Order.

  "The Myers woman," Szeto said in Eastern Europe-flavored English. "Yes, this is good. This time we will find her. I have score to settle-"

  "No settling anything." Ernst knew he was still bridling from losing so many men to her. "No contact."

  "But-"

  "A personal directive from the One."

  A pause, then, "Well, in that case…"

  Hank Thompson had strolled in-as usual, without knocking-toward the end of the conversation.

  "Her again?" he said when Ernst hung up. He was tall and trim, with a dark, shaggy mane. "Didn't you track her to Wyoming?"

  Ernst nodded. "We did. But that was as close as we came. It turned out to be a dead end."

  "I thought we gave up on her."

  "The One, apparently, has not."

  He dropped his lanky form into a chair. "He says 'boo' and your bosses drop everything, right?"

  Ernst sighed. "The Ancient Fraternal Septimus Order-"

  "Is this where you remind me once more that you and your Order have loaned this building to me and my guys? I know that. And we're grateful."

  Thompson's posturing could be entertaining at times, tiring at others.

  "The Order is devoted to the One's cause. I am an Actuator for the Order. It is my duty to carry out his wishes. It is to your benefit to do the same."

  "Says who?"

  "The One." Ernst pointed to the corner behind Thompson. "Why don't you ask him yourself."

  It gave him enormous satisfaction to watch the color drain from the man's face as he did a slow turn, then flush with anger when he realized he'd been had.

  "You son of a bitch!"

  Ernst allowed a smile. Thompson was an odd case. A combustible farrago of intelligence and animal cunning. An ex-con who'd had the drive to write an internationally bestselling… how to classify his book? Kick was a manifesto and a memoir and a call to arms. A Mein Kampf without the racism. His call to kick down the doors that penned you in and evolve into something new cut through racial, religious, and ethnic barriers.

  It is time to separate yourselves from the herd. You know who you are. You know who I'm talking to. You don't belong with the herd. Come out of hiding. Step away from the crowd. Let the dissimilation begin!

  People everywhere-mostly males, an unusually high percentage of whom came with criminal records-answered the call and began thinking of themselves as "Kickers," even going so far as to have the Kicker Man, the symbol of what Thompson called "the Kicker Evolution," tattooed on their hands.

  The strange thing was, Thompson had gathered this huge, worldwide following that cut across all national and cultural boundaries, with no idea of what to do with them.

  Ernst had solved that problem, but the key was to let Thompson think it was all his idea.

  "Speaking of sons of bitches and looking for people," Thompson said, "what about that guy we were after?"

  Although Ernst knew exactly who he meant, he said, "And what 'guy' would that be?"

  "The one who tasered us."

  "Oh, him. I've gotten past that."

  True, at least as far as being tasered. But he hadn't gotten past what the man had said to him. He'd known things he shouldn't have. And something about him had been hauntingly familiar.

  "Well, I haven't. Shave off that beard and I bet he'd have been the same guy who stole the Compendium from me." His hands knotted into fists. "If I ever get hold of that fuck…"

  Another thing about Thompson, he held grudges. Ernst couldn't resist rubbing salt in the wound.

  "Ironic that he was within reach so many times, right under your nose here in the Lodge, posing as one of your followers. Why, you might even have spoken to him on occasion."

  Thompson spoke through his teeth. "Don't think I haven't thought about that." He shook himself. "What's the latest on the virus?"

  Thompson appeared to want a change of subject.

  "The virus is perfected, but we're working on adding one last feature to the payload."

  Thompson grunted. "You've been working on this since last summer. When are we going to get it done?"

  Valez was in charge of a crucial feature of the virus that everyone hoped would complete the coding, but he was experiencing odd delays.

  "Good question. I'll make a call right now."

  He punched in Valez's number. The man picked up right away.

  "Yes, Mister D."

  "Where are we with the code?"

  "As I mentioned earlier, I had trouble with the, um, setup, but everything is in line now."

  "How long?"

  "Two days, tops."

  "Very good." Ernst ended the call and looked at Thompson. "Two days. Then we have to incorporate it into the virus and make sure it works the way we wish. Then we release the virus. It should take it only a couple of days to replicate and spread globally."

  "So we're talking the weekend." He rubbed his hands together. "About fucking time."

  "What did you expect? Bringing down the Internet is hardly child's play."

  6

  Jack was feeling a little annoyed with himself as he knocked on the door to Munir Habib's apartment in the Turtle Bay high-rise. He'd pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves downstairs, worn his Mets cap with the brim low over his face, and had kept his head down in the foyer and during the elevator ride. Good chance this mess was going to end up in the hands of officialdom and he didn't want to leave behind anything that belonged to him, not fingerprints, and especially not a face on a security camera.

  Still didn't know how he'd let Russ talk him into this. Had to hand it to the guy, he was persistent. Pulled out all the stops:

  Munir was one of his few friends, a good guy who didn't deserve this and was an emotional wreck
over it, and had Russ ever asked Jack for a favor, no, and hadn't he always come through every time Jack needed something, yes, so couldn't Jack do this for him, because he wasn't asking for a freebie, the guy would pay, just go and listen to him, please-please-please?

  Jack had agreed, just to shut him up.

  He'd called, but Russ's pal wouldn't discuss it on the phone. Too scared. Had to be face-to-face. Normally Jack would never do a first meet in the customer's place, but Russ had vouched for him, so…

  The door was opened by a short, stocky, fortyish man with milk-chocolate skin, a square face, and bright eyes as black as the stiff, straight hair on his head. His clothes were badly wrinkled, like he'd slept in them, and he looked halfway to zombie.

  "You're the one who called?" he said in barely accented English.

  Jack nodded and extended his hand. "Mister Habib, I assume."

  They shook, followed by a few beats of silence as he stared at Jack. Jack knew that look.

  Here it comes… here it comes…

  "I was expecting…"

  "Someone different? You and everybody else."

  They all expected someone bigger, someone darker, someone meaner looking. Not the deliberately average-looking Joe before them.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Yeah, well, this is the guy you get. Mind if I come in?"

  Habib stuck his head out the door and cast furtive looks up and down the hall.

  "Don't worry," Jack said. "No one's seen me. And I took the elevator up an extra two floors and walked down. But if you keep me standing out here, pretty soon-"

  "Yes-yes. Come in. Please."

  Jack stepped inside and let Habib close the door behind him.

  "You've got the down payment?"

  He nodded. "Yes. I was afraid I could not get so much cash on such short notice."

  "Keep it for now. I haven't decided yet whether we'll be doing business. What's the story? Russ thinks your wife and son have been kidnapped. Is that it?"