Buried At Sea (23 page)

Jim thrust it toward him. Will dropped it. Jim scooped it

off the cockpit sole, opened the nipple, and gently squirted some water between Will's lips. Will swallowed, moaned, and sagged to the cockpit bench, bent over like a halfempty laundry sack.

"Whew . . . Sorry. I can't breathe. . . . I'm trying to say—"

"Drink more water."

"Right. Thanks."

Jim watched Will fumble the bottle to his mouth. "Let me help you below. You've got to lie down in your bunk and sleep. And you have to eat something. I'll bring you some soup."

"In a minute. Just hang on a minute. . . . Look, I'll admit that I've been less than truthful with you, Jim."

"About little things like your name being Will Spark instead of Billy Cole?" Will blinked. "Where'd you learn that?"

Jim had blurted more than he had intended to. Keep it simple. Keep it simple. He said, "I broke into your desk." "You broke into—"

"I should have done it sooner. You would have:'

Will nodded. "Okay. I understand. Don't worry about it." "I found your watch? 'For Billy Cole'?"

"Oh, that." He shrugged. "It was not so much lying as just trying to keep it simple. Trust me, it doesn't mean anything."

"So what's your name?'

"Will Spark—do you recall Sentinel? My microprocessor?"

"Sentinel. Faster than a speeding bullet, years ahead of the competition. The one that's going to put all the chip factories out of business so they're going to kill you."

"Yes, it will put them out of business. But no, that's not who's going to kill me. You were right, of course. Legitimate businessmen aren't going to kill me. It's my business partners. My former partners. They want to kill me." Jim sighed. "If I listen to this, will you promise you'll go below and rest?"

"Shut up and listen," Will shot back fiercely. "listen!

There is a powerful foundation that believes I possess the prototype of a superminiature, ultrafast microprocessor."

"The McVay Foundation for Humane Science. I know. I read your file."

"They're the 'they.' What do you know about molecular diagnosis?"

"Only what I read in the New York Times and the Economist."

"Such speed on such a tiny scale—coupled with the Internet—offers a total revolution in medicine. A watchman of the body—which is why I named it Sentinel. Goddamned Sony already had Watchman. . ."

He stared at Jim. Jim, intrigued by the Sony aside, gave up for the moment on getting Will back in his bunk. "How?"

"Sentinel offers medicine's Holy Grail. Diagnostic sensors small enough to sail the human bloodstream."

"I rented the video. Fantastic Voyage."

"This is real! It's a diagnostician's wet dream. With Sentinel, a doctor—doctor, hell, a minimum-wage technician—can inject you with a molecular microprocessor that will cruise through your entire body and check it out for the earliest signs of anything wrong. Anything. The first cancer cell. The earliest chemical imbalance. The initial bulge of a stroke, the microscopic narrowing of an artery. Okay?"

"Okay," said Jim.

"Twice a year. Even once a month. It runs through you, reporting and cross-checking any problems against every data bank in the world via the Internet. Say you've got a parasite and there's one case of it in Africa—Sentinel's search engine makes the match. You've got an aneurysm forming in your brain—the software pinpoints exactly where. You've had a stroke—it shows what's got to be rewired. No problems? See you next month. Ten dollars, please. Okay?"

"Okay."

"I should have realized it. But I was so stupid—so anxious to swing a deal—that I didn't see it coming. . . . "See what coming?" asked Jim.

"You know, greed will make even the smartest man stupid. It never occurred to me until it was too late that what the

McVays really wanted was to use my breakthrough to destroy the entire medical establishment: doctors, hospitals,

HMOs, insurance companies." "why?"

Y•

"So they could build a new system and put themselves in the middle of it."

"But wasn't that your goal?"

"No. I wasn't thinking on such a cosmic scale. I just saw Sentinel as a major discovery that could make me very rich. Nor did it occur to me until after the several outfits I was underwriting had produced the various hardware and software components of a Sentinel prototype that my partners would

have to kill me."

"why?"

"I would be the one man who could blow their cover. They had to kill me to silence me."

"That doesn't make sense. You must have done something else." Will stared at him.

Jim stared back. There was a pattern to Will's e-mails that had led to his exultant " Jackpot!"

"Would it be safe to say," he asked, "that the thing you were trying to get money for succeeded in a much bigger way than you thought it would? And maybe you switched from trying to rip them off in a small way to ripping them off in a big way?" Will laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Not funny. I'm very impressed. You've been listening." For a long moment he regarded Jim with genuine pleasure. Then he dropped his eyes. "You're right. Of course I did."

"What?" For the first time, Jim thought he was going to hear the truth.

"I kept Sentinel for myself. I'm going to bring it to market myself."

"You cheated your partners."

"Before they could cheat me—I would have been lucky to see one percent out of it."

"So you stole it."

"Call it what you will. I was walking dead, Jim. The McVays wrote the book on ruthless."

"You wrote the book on larcenous."

"I don't kill people."

"They're not killers, they're scientists?'

"Where'd you get that idea?"

"You had the foundation's annual report in your files?'

Will rolled his eyes at Jim's naiveté. "Lloyd McVay is ex-CIA. His old man got rich bribing congressmen. He got richer bribing senators and generals, not to mention tin-pot dictators all around the world. They made their fortunes selling weapons. You sell weapons by bribing the buyers and destroying your competitors."

"I read they were high-tech."

"High-tech weapons. They know the military-industrial complex inside and out. They are the military-industrial complex. Or were. They know where the money is and where the bodies are buried. And when they shifted into consumer technology they bribed their computers into half the schools in the nation."

"But now all they have is a nonprofit foundation?'

Will turned red in the face. "It's a goddamned tax-dodge front for stealing new technology from gullible fools like me. Lloyd McVay is a poetry-quoting, Ivy League, white-shoe thug."

"You really don't like him."

"Not at all. He represents the worst of the unearned-privileged class."

"What about his daughter?"

"Val?" Will ran his hand through his hair. "Val's a somewhat different case. I sort of liked her, actually. She used to be a sailor—big time. Raced in the Southern Ocean. We talked boats at first. . . . Strange woman, pale as a vampire, smart as hell—Jesus, was she smart—smarter than the old man. I could never figure out how she could stand being under the thumb of that manipulative old bastard. . . . But Val's complex . . . full of contrasts—shy, arrogant, utterly sure of herself. And like all sailors ashore, you can sense that nagging in the back of her soul. Wondering."

"Wondering what?"

"Why aren't I out there, sailing under the Milky Way?' "Did you make it with her?"

"That's not a gentleman's question, Jim."

"Forgive me if I don't apologize, sir. I was hoping in my crude, ill-mannered way that we might have a friend in that `powerful foundation' that's trying to kill us." Will answered him seriously. "I suspect that Val is as vicious as her father. The difference is that old Lloyd is vicious for the fun of it—the power trip; he likes to feel superior. Val knows she's superior. She would be vicious just to get the job done."

"A thuggette?" Jim asked with a smile.

"No joke, Jim. Those two took a very public shellacking in the Internet market. They lost money, they lost status, they lost the kind of New Economy power—the billions—that had vaulted them above everyone, even the government. They were slapped back down to the level of 'old money.' These days, 'old money' has to scramble like the rest of us to hold on to it. The McVays will do anything to claw their way back on top.

"Thanks to me they are homing in like cruise missiles on the biggest, richest prize in the world. Three trillion dollars a year. That's how much Americans and Europeans alone spend on health care.

"Lloyd and Val McVay will kill for the power of Sentinel. And the glory, too. Starting with the Nobel Prize for Medicine. They've hired the worse gangster scum you could imagine to do their dirty work. And the smartest. That's who's hunting me." Will placed a trembling hand on Hustle's helm. Jim let him steer. The old man was about to collapse and the few miles he might eke out of his fantasy course wouldn't matter. SHANNON RILEY FOUND Billy Cole through the Connecticut State Interlibrary Nexis newspaper connection. But when the headline first leaped off the screen, Shannon got confused. It seemed like another World Wide Web wiggle where oblivious computers tossed out weird links to Yeats and William Tell.

"CanCure.com Medical Stock Fraud Will Spark Aggressive Prosecution" read the headline.

But she was searching for Billy Cole.

Then it hit her. Could this headline have given him a joke idea for a new name? Very funny. But when she read the article it was clear that he had needed one. Billy Cole's CanCure.com rip-off had taken Seattle investors for millions.

As Jim had known it would, the effort to steer the big sloop proved exhausting. Will soon slumped to the cockpit bench and let the auto-helm do the work. But he refused to go below. Jim brought him some soup and saltines, which he devoured hungrily. That should put him to sleep, Jim figured, at which point he would return Hustle to her proper course. But Will started

talking again. "I had to stall finishing Sentinel until I could get away from the McVays."

"If they're that ruthless and that smart, how'd you get away?"

"I got lucky." Will dipped his good shoulder in a weary shrug.

"Their hitter—the chief of security, a fixer named Andrew Nickels—was a really twisted hypochondriac. I got to know him pretty well—drinking together—and learned he was a total nutcase, afraid he'd catch germs by shaking hands, like Howard Hughes. With an extremely paranoid imagination. But a truly cruel bastard. He gives me a deadline to turn over Sentinel and he tells me to have another drink. And while we're drinking, he flips on a video he had made of one of his victims being tortured."

"Tortured?"

"With electricity. Hooked electrodes to this poor guy's sensitive parts. Top-quality video, crisp picture, professional sound. The guy was screaming for mercy. It went on forever.

. . . Near the end, he was just begging to be killed."

"It could have been a snuff film they downloaded off the Web?'

"I had reason to believe it was absolutely real."

'What reason?"

"The guy being tortured was one of my software engineers?'

"What? One of your cavemen?"

"Somehow they'd got their hooks into him. Spirited him out of China. God knows how they pulled that off. Anyhow, the poor devil didn't know much—not enough to save him..

. . A very effective demonstration, Jim. That was going to happen to me next if I didn't finish Sentinel and hand it over. I was in a fix. I had no guarantee when or if we'd finish it?'

Jim's attention shifted to the empty horizons and the sails. He eased the jib a hair. It stopped luffing. Will was still talking.

"How'd you get away?" Jim interrupted.

"Like I said—I got lucky. Andrew Nickels' Achilles' heel

was his hypochondria. Do you remember how Sentinel works?"

"You're going to inject microscopic minicomputers inside patients to examine their bodies and teach them French?'

Will Spark was deaf to irony. He said, "I told Nickels that I spiked his malt whiskey when he wasn't looking and that hundred and hundreds of tiny Sentinel computers were streaming though his veins and gathering in his head."

"You're kidding." Jim shivered.

"Grisly thought, isn't it?"

"Gross."

"I told him that if anything happened to me that my people would activate the minicomputers to avenge me." "How?"

"By cell phone signal. If they didn't get regular check-in calls from me, they could dial Nickels's brain from anywhere in the world."

Jim shivered again. "Then what?"

"I told him that when the phone rang the computers would be programmed to congregate in one part of his brain—the part that controls motor movement—clog his blood vessels, and give him a stroke that would leave him paralyzed forever." Will looked up with a dry chuckle. "Know what the man did?"

"What?"

"He stuck his finger down his throat and threw up all over his shoes. Speaking of gross . .

. Wipes his mouth with a silk handkerchief and tells me he's got the electric machine in the next room and he's going to hook me up right now—one tough, smart son of a bitch."

"What happened?"

"I told him he was too late. Throwing up wouldn't do him any good. The computers had already entered his bloodstream through his esophagus. Like champagne bubbles?'

Will laughed again.

"Son of a bitch fell for it. I was home free. Pretty good

story off the cuff, staring down a gun barrel, don't you think?"

"So why are they still chasing you?"

Will sighed. "My luck ran out. Apparently it tipped the crazy loon over the edge. One day he started smashing his head against a wall, trying to get them out. Eventually, well, he died."

"If Andrew Nickels died, who's chasing you?"

"His nephew. Young Andy."

"Nephew? What for? Revenge?"

"No doubt. But the main reason is, he took up his uncle's fixer duties at the McVay Foundation and now he's leading the charge to recover the Sentinel prototype. Jim, anyone would look at this man and think, this is an animal. A brute in the deepest, most primitive, oldest sense of the word. A mindless destroyer. I made the deadly mistake of thinking that was all he was. He almost nailed me with your tracking device—what are you staring at?"