Antenna Syndrome (2 page)

“But we don’t know which. That’s why I want to hire
you.”

“Why me?” I gestured around my office. “I assume you
have money but let’s face it, I’m not exactly high end. There are
plenty of first class agencies out there.”

“I looked at their websites. But I liked your face.
You look like an honest guy. It’s that simple. I followed my gut
and here I am.”

Who was I to dispute her intuition? On most mornings
I liked my face too. And I was an honest guy. Desperate some times,
but honest all the time. And I liked her face too.

“Okay, tell me what happened.”

“Late Saturday morning a service repairman came to
the house. It wasn’t until later in the day that anyone noticed
Marielle was gone. We assume she left with him.”

“What repairman?”

“Air-conditioning. The property manager will give
you details.”

“Where’s your father in all this?”

“He doesn’t even know about it. He’s in the
Catskills, working on his campaign platform. We hope you can find
Marielle before he returns next weekend.”

“So, besides you, who else knows about this?”

“Only my father’s personal staff – a housekeeping
couple.”

“And they’re okay with keeping him in the dark?”

“She disappeared on their watch. Their jobs are at
stake.”

“And you care about them?”

“I’m just trying to help. My father can’t afford any
major distractions, never mind bad publicity, right now.”

“Where was Marielle living?”

“Long Island. My father’s main house in East
Massapequa.”

“Who else lives there?”

“Aside from my father and Marielle, just the
housekeepers.”

“Names, address, phone numbers...?”

“Jack and Vivien Randall.” She gave me all the
coordinates.

“You live on Long Island too?”

“No. I’m in between things. I took a job in LA six
months ago. I still haven’t decided if I’ll stick it out there or
not. My father wants me to come back here and work with him.
For
him, if he gets elected.”

“So you came back just to find your sister?”

“I came here Friday on separate business. But I
can’t stay. I’m due back in LA tonight.”

“So if and when I find her, I take her back to East
Massapequa and the Randalls?”

“No. Install her in a hotel with good security.
Don’t worry about expenses, you’ll be reimbursed.”

“Something wrong with the Randalls?”

“Let’s just say, I don’t totally trust them.”

“Because…?”

“Personal reasons.” Her lips tightened. “Go out
there and meet them, learn what you can to find Marielle. But you
don’t need to inform them of your progress. You work for me, and
report to me alone. Right?”

“Sure.” The client had the money, and the money was
always right.

“Just find her and keep her safe until I
return.”

“I’ll need a way to get in touch.”

She used her goggles to share her contact
coordinates.

“Do you have a picture of Marielle?”

She transferred me a couple of pictures. Marielle
was a pretty girl with dark hair in bangs, dimpled cheeks and a
cute nose. A nice figure filled out a cashmere sweater. But she had
the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. What did I know? Her photos
revealed nothing below the waist.

“Any data that might help in a search? Date of
birth, social insurance number, credit card numbers...?”

“Birth date is June 17, 2006. The housekeeper has
that other information.”

“What do you know about her routine?”

“Very little, but Vivien will tell you.” She paused.
“I left home five years ago. I don’t want to get into it, but let’s
just say it was no longer a healthy environment and I needed to
move on.”

“Lots of people left after the Brooklyn Blast.” An
understatement. A third of the five boroughs population had fled in
panic.

“True.” She didn’t offer any personal reason for
leaving New York, as if escaping a contaminated zone wasn’t
rationale enough.

“And you moved to LA?”

“Miami. Although we’re sisters, Marielle and I were
never that close. Truth is, we’re half sisters. Different mothers,
but that’s another story.”

“Could she be with her mother?”

“No. She died years ago.” She paused a moment,
gauging the gap between my need-to-know and my nice-to-know. “After
I left, we didn’t stay in touch the way we should have, and I blame
myself. That’s why I don’t know much about her day-to-day life.
She’s a talented artist but a recluse. Home-schooled, she’s had
virtually no friends. I think this is the first time she’s ever
left the house.”

“Excuse me for sounding judgmental, but that sounds
almost inhumane.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Your father’s idea?”

She bit her lip. “You know that Facebook line about
relationships?
It’s complicated
.”

“I see.” This was going to be complicated too.

“Believe it or not, that’s all I know. The Randalls
will tell you more.”

“Okay.”

“So you’ll take the job?”

I made a shrug of helplessness. “There’s little here
to go on.”

“I’ll double your fee if you find her before next
weekend.”

That erased most doubts I had about the case.
“Alright, I’ll give it my best shot. But I need half up front.”

She opened her bag and gave me some operating
capital. A small wad of American bills. Some Canadian. A handful of
GoldChip cards, ranging in size from five to 10 grams. And an
electronic transfer of DollarCoin, the now-ubiquitous digital
currency of choice. I added it up and gave her a receipt.

She stood and pulled on her helmet. “I’ll be back on
Friday. If you find her before that, let me know immediately.”

“Wish me luck?” I watched her pull on her
gloves.

“Do this quickly, Mr. Savage, and you’ll get a
handsome bonus.” She closed her visor and left my office.

Chapter 3

I watched her on camera until she’d left the
building. In the office below me a piece of equipment – possibly a
money counter – rattled with machinegun intensity. Based on the
traffic to and from the second floor, I’d long suspected that
Pharma4U
sold FDA-unapproved drugs promising relief from
radiation sickness, for which there was a large black market. Thus
far I had no need for their product. But many sufferers did.

Chinatown, recognizing an opportunity of a lifetime,
had almost overnight created a market for traditional herbal
medicines with a patch-based delivery. City buses carried posters
showing a demographic array of New Yorkers wearing medicinal
patches on their arms. Anxiety, bulimia, depression, diarrhea,
incontinence, indigestion, insomnia, loss of libido, neuralgia,
vertigo, etc, ad nauseam –
There’s a patch for that!
Unfortunately, there was no patch for chronic insolvency, from
which I did suffer.

I used my iFocals to plug everything Natalie Jordan
had given me – name, phone numbers, CyberCall coordinates – into a
search engine, then ran a few reverse lookups to fill in some
blanks. After about fifteen minutes of surfing and sifting, I found
something linking her to
The Confidant
, a national content
provider of dubious repute based in LA. Just as
The Huffington
Post
had become the aggregator of choice for liberal left-wing
news and opinion,
The Confidant
apparently aspired to be its
dumpster-diving cousin, feeding the public’s insatiable appetite
for sex, scandal and sensationalism.

I trolled through their website and discovered a
staff writer named Natalie Dunning who looked just like my client.
I gathered a few facts: Dartmouth graduate, brief stint at the
Sacramento Bee
, registered Democrat, Sierra Club life
member, stock car driver, yoga enthusiast, NRA member – a girl of
some contradictions. Not to mention, possibly, a liar.

As for Harris Jordan, I already knew the public
persona that had emerged in the run-up to the New York City
mayoralty campaign. He was divorced, but no one really cared about
that any more. His appeal lay in his simple platform – fight the
tsunami of crime and corruption that had swamped the five boroughs,
especially Brooklyn, in the aftermath of the Blast.

Law and order were at their nadir. Upstanding
citizens of means had fled the area by the millions, leaving bottom
feeders in their wake. Street gangs ruled whole neighborhoods,
their turf wars fought with automatic weapons. Drugs were sold
openly, prostitution was epidemic. Property crime was through the
roof, houses and buildings being pillaged on an industrial scale by
teams of “day-strippers” who broke into properties and gutted their
plumbing and wiring. Urban copper mining was the gold rush of the
day.

Bureaucratic corruption was rife. It cost a fortune
in bribes to do anything legal, leaving rational people no choice
but to circumvent laws and ordinances on a routine basis. Harris
Jordan wanted to end all that, to pull New York back from the brink
of a failed Soviet state, crush the criminal gangs that were
bleeding the five boroughs, and give people hope in the form of
honest administration and tough-love justice.

Harris Jordan was especially vocal about the Russian
mafia, which he’d characterized as “bedbugs of modern society”.
They were sucking the blood out of everyone, and no district or
level of society was immune. There was only one response to
infestation, Jordan warned, and that was total extermination.

He had my vote. But for the present, what really
gave me hope for the future was cash in hand and the promise of a
matching amount, maybe even a bonus, if I could find his missing
daughter by the weekend.

I rolled the fridge aside and stashed most of the
money in my floor safe, keeping some on me for operating funds. I
turned off the lights to save electricity and dialed the air
scrubber down to a low whisper. Pocketing my pistol, I shouldered
my tote bag and locked the office.

These days, everyone carried a man-purse, because
there was no telling when, where or why your foray into the city
could take a wrong turn and leave you stranded with no resources
but your own. In my bag I carried spare ammo, a knife, first aid
kit, energy bars, water, vaporizer refills, flashlight, rope,
pry-bar, DDT spray, hand-cranked generator, environmental
protection and, of course, a roll of duct tape.

As I rode the elevator down, a dazed cockroach the
size of a small mouse fell out of the overhead vent. I stomped on
it fast and hard, crushing it under my heel. I hated bugs, and now
they were everywhere. Ever since the Brooklyn Blast, the little
bastards seemed to have come forth and multiplied with a
vengeance.

Entomologists speculated that the low-level
radiation which was causing neurological disorders and all kinds of
cancers in humans had had almost the opposite effect on insects,
stimulating both their activity, growth and reproductive cycle. We
the people didn’t understand it and we sure as hell didn’t like
it.

Before I left the elevator I put on my eMask, a
micro-fiber balaclava fitted with goggles, nasal respirators and
mouth filter. As I walked through the lobby, I tried not to kick up
a dust storm of boric acid. It was still drizzling outside but,
with both a gun and a fistful of dollars in my pocket, I felt
better than I had in a long time. Nothing like a job to take a
man’s mind off his worries, of which I had many.

~~~

I walked down the block to a parking compound run by
a Korean family. These days nobody left their car on the street,
for fear it’d be towed, stripped or vandalized. My 2016 Dodge
Charger was a beast for gas but I’d got it hybridized five years
ago when gas rationing kicked in, so now it ran on electricity,
hydrogen or compressed natural gas.

Mr. Kim also had a sweet deal on some black market
farm fuel, and kept my tank full in case I had to make a midnight
run to some godforsaken place where service stations declined to
operate. I banged on his door and raised the eMask so his security
camera could see my face.

“Good day, Mistuh Savage.” Mr. Kim buzzed me in. A
pump shotgun stood propped behind his desk. He punched an intercom
and barked something Korean, in the middle of which I heard
“Charguh.”

A minute later, my ride squealed to a halt in the
passage outside his office. One of his sons got out and beckoned to
me. I climbed into the Charger, locked the doors and headed up
Tenth Avenue.

I’d installed an air scrubber in the car so it was
safe to remove my eMask so long as I kept the windows rolled up.
Traffic was a fraction of what it used to be, but there were still
people on the streets, most with face masks and respirators, some
with radiation burns and twitchy limbs. Life went on, as it had in
other times and places. Berlin, London, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had
all pulled themselves out of the wreckage. Now it was New York’s
turn.

After the Brooklyn Blast, despite the panic,
evacuations and radiation effects, some people had actually clung
to their neighborhoods, refusing to let the city die. I passed a
Greek restaurant with a terrace where some old guys were playing
backgammon, wearing nothing more than cheap paper filters over
their mouths. In an OTB saloon across the street, punters sipped
drinks through straws inserted beneath their respirators, placing
bets on long-odds fights, games and races, hoping to score the big
win that might buy them a one-way ticket to a cleaner place.

I turned onto 42nd Street, drove cross-town and
joined a moving lane through the toll plaza for the Midtown Tunnel.
Toll charges were so high I didn’t like to think about it, but the
transponder took the hit in lieu of paying cash, and I’d only see
the bill at month’s end. Transportation costs usually discouraged
me from operating outside of Manhattan, but for the money I was
getting for this gig, I would have driven to hell and back.