The Gatekeeper's Son (34 page)

I began uploading a new version of his browser from my memory stick, a special altered copy I’d bought on the Internet from a guy in China.

“You are good with this … this computer?”

“Yeah,” I turned to look at her. “Sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing I’m good at.”

“You are better than you realize.” She bent to look at the screen and her cheek came close to mine. I breathed in her scent and had to close my eyes for a moment as butterflies began to spin in my stomach. When I turned toward her, my face brushed lightly against hers. She pulled away and stared at me, her eyebrows knitted together. The lighting wasn’t good, but I swear she was blushing. I realized I was, too.

“Uh … did you see anything interesting out there?” I said.

She hesitated a moment. “He has a huge bed and a whole room for his clothes. There are dark suits, white shirts and black shoes, all in rows along one wall. The other side has very fancy clothes, colorful and shiny like spring kimonos.”

I looked up at her. “Shiny clothes?”

She didn’t answer. She was staring at the screen again, squinting at the data cascading down the screen. She shook her head and looked outside at the panorama of twinkling lights of the city below us and far across the dark water to the lights of Sausalito. “I have no knowledge of what you are doing or why. I understand too little about this place, this city.”

“Can you start looking for a way to travel out of here?”

As I waited for the computer to reboot, allowing for the final installation of my software, I flipped the keyboard over and looked underneath it. Unlike Grandpa’s, there were no sticky notes with log-in passwords, but I figured he’d have them written down somewhere. Old people always wrote things down. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

A moment later, a string of letters and digits flooded my mind, too many to process, but I felt their source. I reached into the top drawer of the cabinet next to his desk. Inside was a red leather-bound book, and when I opened the page at the ribbon bookmark, I found six pages of user names and passwords, written neatly in blue ink.

“Gotcha.” I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo of each page. Then, with the book open on the desk, I opened the browser and went to his favorites. He had dozens of them, neatly organized, including a few porn sites. I considered opening one to see what his tastes were but clicked on “banking” instead.

I logged into his account and let out a low whistle. The jerk had one and a half million dollars in savings! Well, maybe that was about right for the workaholic CFO of a large corporation with no wife or kids. I scrolled through his other bookmarks, boring stuff like tax and finance sites. His browsing history wasn’t any better. I was about to shut the browser down when I noticed a link that said “Turks and Caicos.” He’d visited that one a dozen times in the past month. The site opened to a plain white page interrupted only by two gray rectangular input boxes—ID and password required.

I sat back and looked at the page. I knew Grandpa had a few accounts in the Turks and Caicos. His and thousands of other foreign companies had tax-exempt status there—after all, only poor people pay taxes.

I entered the log-in info, and while I waited I flipped a few pages of his book and laughed aloud. Almost all his passwords were the same.

I stopped laughing when his account opened. There was over fifty million dollars in there. I recounted the zeroes to make sure I wasn’t wrong—nope. And the bastard had deposited thirty million since Grandpa’s first heart attack. There was no way this was Walter’s money. I had to assume he’d been stealing from the company for years.

“Junya.”

I spun around.

“There is nothing natural here.” Shoko looked worried. “He does not even have a plant.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to kick some ass downstairs,” I said.

I opened his e-mail account. I’d only scanned a few lines when I saw a familiar name: Müller.

“Junya.” Shoko was by the doorway again. “I hear something, a rumbling sound.”

The elevator? “Damn,” I said, forgetting to whisper. “I’m not done yet.”

I scanned the latest e-mail from Mr. Müller. It was obviously a continuation of an ongoing conversation. His employer was getting impatient … Edward was old … maybe dead soon…

There—an e-mail from Mr. Müller asking Walter to locate Edward’s map.

“Someone is coming!”

“Stand guard while I finish.” As she moved away from the door, I called after her, “But don’t kill anyone.”

I started to clear the history. The hum of the hard drive was loud in the quiet room, but the sound of keys going into a lock was unmistakable. For the first time in a while, I started to panic. The front door squeaked opened, the alarm chimed three times, and I felt him.

Walter was home, and he wasn’t alone.

“Come on, come on, come on,” I whispered, my eyes glued to the screen.

“You don’t need to walk me in.” Walter’s voice shattered the stillness. “I’m not a child.”

“We have to make sure everything’s OK, Mr. Roacks,” a man said, his voice and energy slightly familiar. “That’s our job, sir.”

“I’ve been coming home alone for forty years,” Walter yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”

The door slammed, rattling the pictures on the walls.

“Idiots,” Walter grumbled and keys clattered onto something metal.

I turned off the monitors. That wasn’t how I’d found them, but they couldn’t be on when he came in here. Shoko appeared beside me, quiet as a spirit, and yanked me out of the office and into the room across the hall. We were sliding behind the half-open door when Walter came down the hall.

My heart thumped loud and fast. I was afraid Walter would discover my software before it had a chance to do its thing.

I stopped thinking about computers when I realized that Shoko’s body was pressed tight against me—there wasn’t much room behind the door. I peered past her, trying to distract myself. This looked like a guest bedroom, with contemporary furnishings and a queen-sized bed. Even in here the floor was polished concrete, with only a small rug near the bed. There wasn’t a piece of natural material in the room that I could see. Even the door looked synthetic.

I tried to squirm past Shoko to give her some room, but somehow we ended up face-to-face, so close that my nose was inches from that cute freckle under her right eye. She turned her face away and pulled back, as much as she could in the small space. I swallowed hard, suddenly uncomfortable—I’d started to sweat. I noticed she was biting her bottom lip, and when her eyes turned back to me, she blushed again.

A noise came from Walter’s office that brought reality crashing back.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I mouthed.

I peeked around the door. The only sounds were the occasional squeak of Walter’s office chair and the sound of Walter typing, oblivious to the fact that my software was transferring the contents of his hard drive a trickle at a time.

We tiptoed down the hall toward the living room. Shoko walked backward, watching his door. We’d made it to the kitchen when Walter’s chair rolled back with a sudden squawk. I pushed Shoko toward the front door and dived behind the sofa. I landed as softly as I could on the concrete floor.

From under the sofa, I watched Walter’s sock feet shuffle down the hall and turn in to the kitchen. The sound of ice hitting glass came next, then liquid pouring. He let out a loud fart, and I put a hand to my mouth to stop a laugh. I shot a glance at Shoko. She squatted near the front door, her back pressed up against the wall, a strand of hair falling across her expressionless face.

I didn’t want him to find me lying there like some scared dog, but I had nowhere to go. He took a slurp of his drink, the ice cubes tinkling. I looked at Shoko again. She hadn’t moved. I made up my mind. If he found me, I’d confront him. If he walked away, we’d slip out—somehow.

I closed my eyes, relaxed, and extended my energy.

I saw Walter leave the kitchen, his body glowing bright orange against the cool blue walls. The shape moved back toward the office and I looked at Shoko again. She was looking at me. I opened my eyes and the colors vanished. As I started to get up, the telephone rang, a jangling electronic bell that sent me back to the floor.

Walter stopped, swore, and came back to the kitchen and picked up the handset.

“What?” A short pause. “Anthony? Where the hell have you been?” A longer pause. His left foot tapped the concrete. “Don’t worry about that. Nothing’s changed.” There was another pause. “Tell the sergeant to stand down for now but to stay ready. I might need them to take care of any
problems
.”

I assumed that meant me.

“No! Do it now, you idiot. Save your celebrating for after this is done!” The phone slammed down and Walter shuffled back to his office, the ice tinkling in his glass.

Shoko stood up and looked toward me. “Junya, get over here,” she said inside my head, startling me. Her hand was on the front door. “I think it is wood. Come see.”

I started toward her, moving through the open space like a ghost, invisible and silent—until I struck a lamp with my shoulder and it made a metallic clang as it rocked back into the wall. I caught it, but a loud “Damn it!” escaped me.

Walter’s chair groaned. “Who’s there?” he called out.

I felt a subtle suggestion of wood grain followed by the wonderful feeling of the earth’s energy surging through me.

“Anthony, is that you?” He was in the hallway now.

Shoko and I put our hands on the door at the same time.

“Take us back to the park outside,” Shoko whispered. She squeezed my hand and the apartment began to disappear, lost in the swirl of color.

The last thing I saw was Walter coming around the corner, his eyes wide. I have no idea what he saw.

CHAPTER

32

Okaasan and Shoko sat at the kitchen table across from me, drinking tea. They were looking at a fashion magazine, pointing at the pictures, sometimes laughing. For the first time in days, Okaasan looked relaxed.

They’d become a bit too close as far as I was concerned.

I’d given Okaasan a brief rundown of what I’d found at Walter’s. She was as surprised as I’d been. You never know people like you think you do.

As I worked on my laptop, Okaasan looked up from the magazine. “What if he notices you’re on his computer?”

“I’m not on his computer. I’m using a copy of his hard drive that I moved to a server I have in …” I looked up at her. I’d been about to say “Panama,” where I rented two servers, a cheap and easy thing to do anonymously. But somehow, I was reluctant to tell her that. She was still my mother, after all.

“Panama?” she asked.

I glared at her.

“You leave a sentence like that hanging
and
leave your mind open, I’m going to look.” She lifted her teacup and traced her finger around the ring it had left on the table. “Tell me what you’ve found.”

“More bank accounts in the Turks and Caicos.” I paused to take a bite of a cookie. “They’ve been open for about twenty years, but they’re definitely not company accounts, and there’s no way all this is Walter’s money.” I spun the screen toward them. “Look at these routine deposits, all in amounts of three to five thousand dollars.” I pointed to a deposit in Walter’s account and then tabbed back to the general account for the Thompson Hotel Group. “There’s a withdrawal for the same amount on the same day. And there’s been a withdrawal once a month for years, starting with two thousand dollars and gradually increasing to five thousand dollars. The hotel managers must think it’s some kind of regular bill or something, and they’ll do whatever Walter says, right? He’s the chief financial officer. And by the looks of these other deposits, he’s doing the same thing with a bunch of Grandpa’s companies, over a dozen.” I did a quick tally in my head. “He’s transferring over seventy grand a month.”

“That would add up fast.” Okaasan started to do the math on her fingers.

“Look at this!” I spun the computer around again to show her another account I’d found.

Shoko looked, too, but her face was blank, like a cat staring at a wall.

“This is an actual Thompson Group account but linked to Walter’s. He opened this account about two months before the Bayview project started having trouble.”

“And?”

“Look at the balance!” I said, louder than I intended.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at!” Okaasan yelled back.

I pointed at the bottom line. “There’s over eight hundred million in there!”

“Holy crap!” Okaasan yelled and slapped her hand over her mouth. I started laughing before she did.

Shoko looked curious. “Is that a lot of money?”

“Yes, Shoko, that’s a lot of money.” Okaasan turned to her. “You could buy … a nice meal for every person in Japan.”

Shoko frowned. “Why would I do that?”

I leaned back. “Mark Smith and Grandpa can’t understand why they’re in financial trouble when all the divisions are doing well. Walter’s telling them it’s the Bayview project that’s sinking the company, but he’s the one emptying the Bayview accounts.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Maybe Walter knew this would stress Grandpa out … Maybe he hoped he’d have a heart attack.” My eyes widened. “Bartholomew can’t cause heart attacks, can he?”