Paranoia (42 page)

Damn it, it was time to let Wyatt know it was over. I wasn’t working for them anymore.

I unlocked my apartment door, switched on the lights, and headed right for the computer to send an e-mail.

But no.

Arnold Meacham was sitting at my computer, while a couple of tough-looking crew-cut guys were tearing the place apart. My stuff was everywhere. All my books had been taken off the shelves, my CD and DVD players had been taken apart, even the TV set. It looked like someone had gone on a rampage, throwing everything around, wrecking as much as possible, trying to cause maximum damage.

“What the fuck—?” I said.

Meacham looked up calmly from my computer screen. “Don’t you
ever
fucking ignore me,” he said.

I had to get the hell out of there. I spun around, bounded toward the door just as another of the crew-cut thugs slammed the door shut and stood in front of it, watching me warily.

There was no other exit, unless you counted the windows, a twenty-seven-story drop that didn’t seem like a very good idea.

“What do you want?” I said to Meacham, looking from him to the door.

“You think you can
hide
shit from me?” Meacham said. “I don’t think so. You don’t have a safe-deposit box or a
cubbyhole
that’s safe from us. I see you’ve been saving all my e-mails. I didn’t know you cared.”

“Of course I have,” I said, indignant. “I keep backups of everything.”

“That encryption program you’re using for your notes of meetings with Wyatt and Judith and me—you know, that was cracked over a year ago. There’s far stronger ones out there.”

“Good to know, thanks,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm. I tried to sound unfazed. “Now, why don’t you and your boys get the hell out of here before I call the police.”

Meacham snorted and made a hand signal that looked as if he was summoning me over.

“No.” I shook my head. “I said, you and your buddies—”

There was a sudden movement I could see out of the corner of my eye, lightning-fast, and something slammed into the back of my head. I sagged to my knees, tasting blood. Everything was tinged dark red. I flung my hand out to grab my attacker, but while my hand was flailing in back of me, a foot slammed into my right kidney. A jagged bolt of pain shot up and down my torso, knocking me flat on the Persian rug.

“No,” I gasped.

Another kick, this one to the back of my head, incredibly painful. Pinpoints of light sparkled before my eyes.

“Get ’em off me,” I moaned. “Make your—buddy—stop. If I get too woozy, I might get talkative.”

It was all I could think of. Meacham’s accomplices probably didn’t know much if anything of what Meacham and I were involved in. They were just muscle. Meacham wouldn’t have told them, wouldn’t have wanted them to know. Maybe they knew a little, just enough to know what to look for. But Meacham would want to keep them as much out of the loop as possible.

I cringed, braced myself for another kick to the back of my head, everything all white and sparkly, a metallic taste in my mouth. For a moment there was silence; it seemed that Meacham had signaled them to stop.

“What the hell do you want from me?” I asked.

“We’re going for a drive,” Meacham said.

76

Meacham and his goons hustled me out of my apartment, down the elevator to the garage, then out a service entrance to the street. I was scared out of my mind. A black Suburban with tinted windows was parked by the entrance. Meacham led the way, the three guys staying close to me, surrounding me, probably to make sure I didn’t run, or try to jump Meacham, or anything. One of the guys was carrying my laptop; another had my desktop computer.

My head throbbed, and my lower back and chest were in agony. I must have looked like a mess, all bruised and beaten up.

“We’re going for a drive” usually means, at least in Mafia movies, cement boots and a dunk in the East River. But if they’d wanted to kill me, why didn’t they do it back in my apartment?

The thugs were ex-cops, I figured out after a while, employed by Wyatt Corporate Security. They seem to have been hired purely for their brute strength. They were blunt instruments.

One of the guys drove, and Meacham sat in the front seat, separated from me by a bulletproof glass enclosure, talking on a phone the whole way.

He’d done his job, apparently. He’d scared the shit out of me, and he and his guys had found the evidence I was keeping on Wyatt.

Forty-five minutes later, the Suburban pulled into Nick Wyatt’s long stone driveway.

Two of the guys searched me for weapons or whatever, as if somehow between my apartment and here I could have picked up a Glock. They took my cell phone and shoved me into the house. I passed through the metal detector, which went off. They took my watch, belt, and keys.

Wyatt was sitting in front of a huge flat-panel TV in a spacious, sparely furnished room, watching CNBC with the sound muted, and talking on a cell phone. I glanced at myself in a mirror as I entered with my crew-cut escorts. I looked pretty bad.

We all stood there.

After a few minutes Wyatt ended his call, put the phone down, looked over at me. “Long time no see,” he said.

“Yeah, well,” I said.

“Look at you. Walk into a door? Fall down a flight of stairs?”

“Something like that.”

“Sorry to hear about your dad. But Christ, breathing through a tube, oxygen tanks, all that shit—I mean, shoot me if I ever get like that.”

“Be my pleasure,” I murmured, but I don’t think he heard me.

“Just as well he’s dead, huh? Put him out of his fucking misery?”

I wanted to lunge at him, throttle him. “Thanks for your concern,” I said.

“I want to thank
you
,” he said, “for the information on Delphos.”

“Sounds like you had to empty your piggy bank to buy it.”

“Always gotta think three moves ahead. How do you think I got to where I am now? When we announce
we’ve
got the optical chip, our stock’s gonna go into orbit.”

“Nice,” I said. “You’ve got it all figured out. You don’t need me anymore.”

“Oh, you’re far from done, friend. Not until you get me the specs on the chip itself. And the prototype.”

“No,” I said, very quietly. “I’m done now.”

“You think you’re
done?
Man, are you hallucinating.” He laughed.

I took a deep breath. I could feel my pulse throbbing at the base of my throat. My head ached. “The law’s clear on this,” I said, clearing my throat. I’d looked at a bunch of legal Web sites. “You’re actually in a lot deeper than me, because you oversaw this whole scheme. I was just the pawn. You ran it.”

“The
law
,” Wyatt said with an incredulous smile. “You’re talking to me about the fucking
law? That’s
why you’ve been saving up e-mails and memos and shit, trying to build a
legal
case against
me?
Oh, man, I almost feel sorry for you. I think you truly don’t get it, do you? You think I’m going to let you walk away before you’re finished?”

“You got all sorts of valuable intelligence from me,” I said. “Your plan worked. It’s over. From now on, you don’t contact me anymore. End of transaction. As far as anyone’s concerned, this never happened.”

Sheer terror gave way to a kind of delirious confidence: I’d finally crossed the line. I’d jumped off the cliff and I was soaring in the air, and I was going to enjoy the ride until I hit ground.

“Think about it,” I went on. “You’ve got a whole lot more to lose than I do. Your company. And your fortune. Me, I’m diddlyshit. I’m a small fish. No, I’m plankton.”

His smile broadened. “What are you going to do, go to ‘Jock’ Goddard and tell him you’re nothing but a shitty little snoop whose brilliant ‘ideas’ were spoon-fed him by his chief competitor? And then what do you think he’s going to do? Thank you, take you to lunch at his little
diner
and toast you with a glass of Ovaltine? I don’t think so.”

I shook my head, my heart racing. “You really don’t want Goddard to know how you learned all the details of their negotiations with Delphos.”

“Or maybe you think you can go to the FBI, is that it? Tell them you were a spy-for-hire for Wyatt? Oh, they’ll love that. You know how
understanding
the FBI can be, right? They will squeeze you like a fucking cockroach, and I will deny fucking
everything
and they’ll have no choice but to believe me, and do you know why? Because you are a fucking little con man. You’re on
record
as a hustler, my friend. I fired you from my company when you embezzled from me, and
everything’s
documented.”

“Then you’re going to have a hard time explaining why everyone at Wyatt recommended me so enthusiastically.”

“But no one did, get it? We’d never give a recommendation to a hustler like you.
You
, compulsive liar that you are, you counterfeited our letterhead to forge your own recommendations when you applied to Trion. Those letters didn’t come from us. Paper analysis and forensic document examination will establish that without a doubt. You used a different computer printer, different ink cartridges. You forged signatures, you sick fuck.” A pause. “You really think we weren’t going to cover our asses?”

I tried to smile back, but I couldn’t get the trembling muscles of my mouth to cooperate. “Sorry, that doesn’t explain the phone calls from Wyatt executives to Trion,” I said. “Anyway, Goddard’ll see through it. He knows me.”

Wyatt’s laugh was more like a bark. “He
knows
you! That’s a scream. Man, you really don’t know who you’re dealing with, do you? You are in so far over your fucking head. You think anyone’s going to believe that our HR department called Trion with glowing recommendations, after we bounced you out on your ass? Well, do a little investigative work, dickwad, and you’ll see that every single phone call from our HR department was rerouted. Phone records show they all came from your own apartment. You made all the HR calls yourself, asshole, impersonating your supervisors at Wyatt, making up all those enthusiastic recommendations. You’re a sick fuck, man. You’re pathological. You made up a whole fucking story about being some big honcho on the Lucid project, which is provably false. You see, asshole, my security people and theirs will get together and compare notes.”

My head was spinning slowly, and I felt nauseated.

“And maybe you should check out that secret bank account you’re so proud of—the one where you’re so sure we’ve been depositing funds from some offshore account? Why don’t you track down the real source of those funds?”

I stared at him.

“That money,” Wyatt explained, “was routed directly from several discretionary accounts at Trion. With your goddamned digital fingerprints on it. You stole money from them, same way you stole from us.” His eyes bulged. “Your fucking head is in a goddamned jaw trap, you pathetic sack of shit. Next time I see you, you’d better have all the technical specs for Jock Goddard’s optical chip, or your life is fucking
over
. Now get the
fuck
out of my house.”

PART EIGHT
B
LACK
B
AG

Black Bag Job
: Slang for surreptitious entry into an office or home to obtain files or materials illegally.

—Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage

77

“This better be important, buddy,” Seth said. “It’s like after midnight.”

“This is. I promise.”

“Yeah, you only call when you want something anymore. Or death of a parent, that kinda thing.”

He was joking, and he wasn’t. Truth is, he had a right to be pissed off at me. I hadn’t exactly been in touch with him since I’d started at Trion. And he’d been there when Dad died, through the funeral. He’d been a much better friend than I’d been.

We met an hour later at an all-night Dunkin’ Donuts near Seth’s apartment. The place was almost deserted, except for a few bums. He was wearing his same old Diesel jeans and a Dr. Dre World Tour T-shirt.

He stared at me. “What the hell happened to you?”

I didn’t keep any of the grisly details from him—what was the point anymore?

At first he thought I was making it up, but gradually he saw that I was telling the truth, and his expression changed from amused skepticism to horrified fascination to outright sympathy.

“Oh, man,” he said when I’d wound up my story, “you are so lost.”

I smiled sadly, nodded. “I’m screwed,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean.” He sounded testy. “You fucking went along with this.”

“I didn’t ‘go along with this.’”

“No, asshole. You fucking had a
choice.
”

“A choice?” I said. “Like what choice? Prison?”

“You took the deal they offered, man. They got your balls in a vise, and you caved.”

“What other option did I have?”

“That’s what lawyers are for, asshole. You could have told me, I could have gotten one of the guys I work for to help out.”

“Help out
how?
I took the money in the first place.”

“You could have brought in one of the lawyers at the firm, scare the shit out of them, threaten to go public.”

I was silent for a moment. Somehow I doubted it really would have been that simple. “Yeah, well, it’s too late for that now. Anyway, they would have denied everything. Even if one of your firm’s lawyers agreed to represent me, Wyatt would have set the whole goddamned American Bar Association after me.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he would have wanted the whole thing to stay quiet. You might have been able to make it go away.”

“I don’t think so.”

“
I
see,” Seth said, oozing sarcasm. “So instead, you bent over and took it. You went along with their illegal scheme, agreed to become a spy, pretty much guaranteed yourself a prison sentence—”