Off the Edge (The Associates) (28 page)

She sat on the bed, feet up, eating. “What’s our plan, Devilwell?”

“I’m going to work out this problem.” He started copying over his spectrogram software and unwrapped the earbuds Rio had purchased for him. He didn’t need her hearing Rolly’s voice over and over. Though most of his work would be on the screen.

“What do I do?”

“Just stay away from the windows.”

She stretched out on the bed and opened a package of crackers. “Maybe this is a stupid question, but why not just arrest him or kill him or something?”

“Because he’s an army of one with that weapon, and if he dies, somebody else will control the weapon and be an army of one, and the plans will probably be sent all over. We need the whole package. Just taking Rolly out doesn’t cut it.”

“And you’re going to try to get control of the weapon? With that phone?”

He nodded. He’d sure the hell try.

“How?”

“I’m going to use Rolly’s voice to break the security on the control system. It uses biometric security. It’s a type of voiceprinting.”

She narrowed her eyes. “And it’s easy to break?”

“Normal voiceprinting is. It’s a discredited technology, but this is kind of an advanced form, so it’s a little tougher.”

“And you can beat it.”

He could hear the smile in her voice.
Don’t look up,
he told himself. Getting lost in her again was the last thing he needed. “Yes.”

“A linguist secret agent. Did you grow up thinking, I want to be so goddamn cool someday?”

He bit back a smile. “No,” he said.

She grinned. “You sure about that? Because a linguist secret agent. It’s so Indiana Jones.” She stuffed another cracker into her mouth. “You don’t want any?”

“No thanks.” Even food could dull that crystal-clear space of intellect he needed to be in. They didn’t have much time.

“I’ll shut up. You just let me know if I can help.” Her cheeks and forehead shone with sweat and he wanted badly to go to her, to fall into her, to tell her more about the horror of the hand. But that Peter stuff wouldn’t serve her now.

“I need you to make a list of everywhere you think has a voice recording of Rolly. Anything. Phone messages, mp3 clips.”

“Got it.” He felt the hairs on his arms raise as she moved close to him, as if she brought her own electricity.

“What?”

“Paper and a pen.”

He opened the little drawer and produced a notepad and paper.

“I love hotel pads.” She ran her thumbnail over the edge of the pad making a soft
thwick
. “And then you use a recording of his voice to fool the computer?” she asked.

“Yes, after a lot of doctoring to make him say what I want him to say.”

She returned to the bed.

Getting Rolly’s password would be the easy part. Rio’s phone had just enough CPU to throw at a brute force attack, though he’d have to run it concurrently with the spectrogram processing. So it would take a while.

The really hard part would be the challenge question—the program would ask a random question, like,
what is three plus four?
And he’d have to answer
seven
in Rolly’s voice within a short amount of time.

He’d use his software to create a library of Rolly’s speech, sliced into the smallest building blocks of language

First he’d separate individual phonemes, consonants, and vowels. Then he’d have to identify the transitions between sounds. The plosives—P and T and K and their counterparts—would be easiest because they were typically preceded by a few milliseconds of silence—that pause where the flow of air was blocked. He could put any phoneme he wanted before a plosive. The other sounds would be trickier. He’d have to picture how the lips and tongue moved. Tedious work, but necessary for “Rolly” to sound like a person and not a computer.

Once he had the library set up, he’d integrate it with his home-cooked voice recognition application to help automate things. He’d trained it well—it could understand him whether he was whispering or shouting. He’d say the challenge word in his own voice and it would assemble the sounds for him, synthesizing Rolly’s voice on the other end.

She finished her list quickly, and it wasn’t much. Phone threats she’d made digital copies of for the divorce case and “asshole things he said while I was recording songs,” as she put it. “Mostly wanting me to be more country western. He always thought I should change my music. I’ve got hours of music with his voice in between songs.”

“Everybody’s a critic.”

Laney snorted. “You got that right. So you can pull that stuff off my computer?”

As it turned out, he could. Laney went off to shower while Macmillan separated and prepared the new samples. The voicemail threats featuring Rolly claiming ownership over her were chilling.
You’re mine—forever.

Macmillan bristled at the words. And then there were the bits of Rolly bellyaching between songs.
Bellyaching
. Her term.

Rolly’s passwords were starting to fall. Sports teams combined with 437.
Gotcha
, Macmillan thought.

The bellyaches were as short as the threats, unfortunately.
Can’t you get a more country-western effect?
It was ridiculous, like asking an apple why it doesn’t taste more like an orange.

But then, he, too, had been hard on her songs.

It felt good to parse Rolly’s utterances into senseless bits. Still, he needed more recordings of Rolly speaking. There were certain sounds he’d kill to have, like the
zh
sound borrowed from French—the last
g
in garage. A voiced post-alveolar fricative, rare in English. Garage as a challenge word would sink him unless he could get that.

His email icon flashed. His contact had hit a roadblock getting recordings of Rolly’s prison phone calls.

His heart sank. He would fail this mission without those recordings.

She came out of the bathroom wearing the blue dress and stockings she’d had on before, her wet hair the only clue she’d showered.

He wanted nothing more than to go to her and kiss her lips and her warm, clean neck, and confess things to her; it was as if he’d opened a floodgate, telling her about the hand. He wanted to connect with her and unspool with her. Just be with her. He was so tired.

Dangerous.

She needed him grim and focused. He examined the differences between two different
uh
sounds. People thought there were just seven or ten vowel sounds.
If only.

She took up her perch on the bed. “What will you do once you have control of it?”

“It depends. The general idea is to shut down the weapon, shut down the auction, then worry about the schematics.”

“No, but, what will you make it do? Will you shoot him with it?”

“Probably not,” he said.

“But you could.”

“That’s a level of control I don’t need. I only have to make it look like it doesn’t work. That’s enough to break up the auction.” He looked up and was struck again by her, just sitting there on the bed with the
Bangkok Post
spread out on her lap, fanning herself with the hotel pad.

“But if you shot him with his own weapon, think how poetic it would be,” she said. “Tell me you at least could, so I can enjoy imagining it.”

He remembered that sort of revenge fantasy—he’d had it with Merodeador. “With the right commands in hand, yes,” he said. “But look, we
are
using Rolly’s weapons against him. Every word he said on those harassing calls, and every criticism he made of your songs, all of that’s like gold to me.”

“How long?”

“We’re far from it.”

“How far?”

“Far. And I’m afraid it will be boring for you.”

“I got a project.” She grabbed her pad and paper.

He kept on separating sounds, inspecting them and listening to them, one earbud in. He didn’t like to cut off his hearing entirely. In truth, he was starting to feel a bit desperate. Things were taking too long. Eventually, he became aware of her humming, like a soft splash of heaven right onto his hell.

Working on a song, he realized. Her dusky, breathy voice was evident even in whisper singing.

She looked up, as if she’d felt his gaze. “I’m sorry, am I distracting you?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. She was, yet he needed her to keep going. Her stockings were distracting him, too, but he wouldn’t have her take them off for the world.

“Devilwell?” she whispered. “I was just working out a tune, but…”

“It’s no distraction.”

She hummed on, but more softly now. He picked up his pace. Being near her buoyed him.

But why wasn’t Rolly’s TZ password falling? He tried something new and the phone froze. He was running too much at once. He needed something more than a phone.

“What is it?”

“Does Rolly watch anything but pro sports? Does he have a favorite city or community team?”

“No. Maybe a titch of college football. Texas A&M.”

“Does he play on a team?”

“Why?” she asked.

“He uses a password system for his accounts. Lakers437, Dolphins437, Jazz437.”

“We had a garage door password like that. Packers437. I forgot. Wow.”

“Rolly wouldn’t abandon his system. He’s been systematic with everything.”

She looked off to the side. “Mmm.”

“What?”

“A weapon like this, and he uses a password like he uses on the garage?” She shook her head. “No.”

“People rarely go out of their systems. Especially Rolly’s demographic.”

She looked into the distance, as if channeling something. “It would be something ultimate. No numbers to sully it.”

“The probability of that—”

“Listen, he’d want it pure,” she said. “This weapon, it’s his big play, right? He becomes rich, he gets me back. It’s the big kahuna. The password would be like that. Big kahuna. But not
that
.”

He was about to tell her why that wasn’t logical, but then he paused. “You think you can guess his password?”

She still had that faraway look. “It would be a different class of password. Dramatic, mean, maybe even jokey.” She was a poet who got to the heart of things, a type of hacker in her own way.

A poet was a hacker of the heart.

She stared off into the distance, lips pursed in a pale rose, brown hair showing red highlights as it dried, as though her natural color was crackling through. All that hidden voltage.

He couldn’t imagine the world without her.

She smiled. Triumph.

“Good stuff?” he asked.

“Only the best, Devilwell.” She straightened, made a humorous face, as if to signal how ridiculous Rolly was, how predictable. “My little friend. But spelled
leetle
or
leedle
.”

“My
leedle
friend?”

“From the movie Scarface. Al Pacino comes onto some stairs with a machine gun and says,
Say hello to my leedle friend
, and then he shoots the place up. God, Rolly loved that fucking scene. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rolly got the super weapon just for a chance to use that password.”

He tried the different versions. “Bingo.”

She smiled. “Now you’re in?”

“I need him to say it, just to be safe. I heard a
my
somewhere.” They went back through the recording together. There was both an
fr
and the word
end,
too.

“We get this and we’re in?”

“Not quite. Before it lets me in, it will ask me a challenge question. It could be a request to repeat a word like
sunshine
, or a question—
what’s the opposite of day?
That word has to be in Rolly’s voice. I need a complete library of building blocks to work with, spoken in his voice. That’s what I’m making over here.”

“You can’t, I don’t know, just talk like Rolly?”

“The size and shape of my vocal tract is too different from his. The software will know; that’s the whole point of biometrics. Try to think of anywhere else I could get samples of Rolly’s voice.”

“I can’t.”

“Keep trying.”

She whispered, “Don’t let me go back.”

“I won’t.” He went back to work, cobbling different elements together and half listening to her humming. He thought about that night when she’d hummed
You Are My Sunshine
as he laid his cheek on her chest, and how strangely soothing the vibrations were. He’d hated the feeling, like it was too much.

It seemed like another world, him hating something like that.

Even with the curtains closed, he could tell dusk was falling; the blue lights from the nearby sign shone through the filmy fabric, bathing the room in a blue glow.

Another diphthong dead end. He wanted to smash the phone. The drone of the air condition seemed to be growing louder. Was it even cooling the room? He felt hot. Trapped in a dead end.

He needed to step away from the problem. In normal life he’d go for a walk. He couldn’t do that.

She hummed softly, sitting there against the headboard, one leg out at a haphazard angle, the other bent, forehead furrowed, trying desperately to remember.

He went back to his project. He was missing nine sounds. He simply didn’t have the parts he needed. Insufficient data.

The mobile vibrated. A text. Another delay on the prison calls.
Sit tight,
the text said.

Sit tight.

He couldn’t sit tight. He was out of usable samples. He needed to get the TZ away from a madman.

It was then he realized that Laney had been silent for a while. He looked up to see her sitting forlornly on the side of the bed, tears streaming down her face.

He stood. “What’s wrong?”

She lifted Amy’s coffee mug. The anemic little plant was bent over, its stem broken nearly in half.

He closed the distance between them and stopped at her knees, unsure what to do.

“She’s gone,” Laney whispered, cradling the cup.

He touched her hair, a stroke of his finger, then his whole hand. “Maybe we can put her in a little water,” he tried.

“This kind doesn’t root.” She tipped the stem up but it just fell again. She bent her head into her hand as silent sobs convulsed her back.

“Hey.” He sat next to her, unsure what to do.

“She’s just
dead
. I must’ve smashed her coming up here or something, and then I just forgot about her...”