The Here and Now (17 page)

FIFTEEN

In the hotel room after lunch we begin to put our strategy in place. Ethan calls the home number we found for Mona Ghali. He poses as a freelance IT guy, Jack Bonning, who works for her company. We’d sketched out the script in advance, during our drive down the coast.

“Ms. Ghali?” Ethan says. He lifts his eyebrows to tell me she’s picked up. He pitches his voice low so she won’t recognize him, and if I hadn’t been nervous I might have laughed.

He gives her his fake name and identity with impressive matter-of-factness. I nod at him encouragingly.

“We’ve had some reports of hacking into the company server,” he explains, “so we’re asking each of our employees to back up all files and temporarily move sensitive files to an alternate server.”

Ethan is a cool customer. I can’t hear her part of the conversation, but he doesn’t look troubled or stymied by any of what she says.

Ethan gives her the information for the alternate server. We’d figured on her uploading to a web server operated by her graduate department at MIT so she’d feel comfortable with it. It isn’t actually an MIT server. Ethan is a decent programmer and a respectable hacker, but not like that. It has the markers of an MIT server, whereas it actually goes to an account set up by Ethan.

Ethan glances at me, which seems to mean it’s working.

“And please do the same with all work files on your computer at home,” he adds before he hangs up.

I call Mona Ghali from our second phone forty-five minutes later, posing as a secretary from Human Resources. “You might have heard we’ve been having some security issues,” I say. “You’ve spoken to Mr. Bonning in IT?”

She replies that she has. I have the feeling she doesn’t want to talk to me for any longer than necessary, and I get that. I try not to think too much, not to spook myself with the knowledge of what tomorrow has in store for her and for us.

“Well, it appears there have been a few files—physical files—that have gone missing from our offices here in Braintree, and we’re concerned the same thing could be happening in the New Jersey office.”

“That’s disturbing. I hadn’t heard about that,” Mona Ghali says.

I go through the protocol Ethan and I invented, which involves locking her filing cabinets. I wait anxiously for her response.

“Yes, my files do have locks. I am not in the habit of using them, but I will start today,” she says.

For several minutes after I hang up my heart is still thumping. For a stretch there, I was really enjoying not lying.

That afternoon Ethan and I buy a cheap beach umbrella, change into proper bathing suits—or shorts in his case, which he had the forethought to pack in his duffel bag—steal a couple of towels from the hotel and sit under the umbrella, just a few yards up from the surf (and actually in the surf, at one point, when high tide catches us unawares).

We play cards. We play for a couple of hours, refining our next day’s strategy along the way. The procedure goes like this: Ethan teaches me a new game and then we play it until I beat him, at which point he figures I am good enough and we go on to the next one. He doesn’t like to get beaten, so we pass through Crazy Eights, Old Maid and Go Fish pretty quickly. It takes me five rounds to beat him at Spit, but it is extra sweet when I do. Bloody Knuckles involves several rounds of suffering, but when I finally win, he picks a queen, so I get to whack him on the knuckles with the deck of cards twelve times, and I do not hold back.

Ethan claims he is some kind of supergenius expert at Gin, so when I beat him in our second game, he is so beset by rage and disbelief that he makes us play three more times, and writhes in psychological pain as I beat him every time.

“I think I’m better at the skill games than the luck games,” I say.

“Oh, shut up,” he says. He shakes his head. “I’ve created a monster.”

Ethan says his ego isn’t up to teaching me Hearts quite yet, so we go swimming instead. The waves are getting big and I am not much of a swimmer. There was no voluntary swimming where I came from. For a million reasons, there
just wasn’t. I swam for the first time in a pool in a neighbor’s backyard when I was twelve. But I don’t want to be a chicken, so I follow Ethan out deep.

One wave takes me by surprise and almost steals my bathing suit bottoms. I turn away from Ethan, find the sand under my feet and walk a few steps toward the shore, trying to rearrange myself so the crucial parts of my body are covered.

I guess I should realize that the dramatic sucking of water behind me is going toward the assembly of an absolutely giant wave. I turn my head and see what is coming, but it is too late to go over or under it.

It hits me full in the back, tossing me forward and spinning me around like a sock in the washing machine. The spin cycle goes on for a long time.

I feel sand scratching along my back one moment and my cheek the next. I am so disoriented I can’t figure out which direction the air is in. I am thinking what a stupid and embarrassing way this is to go—in about four feet of water—when I feel a hand reaching around my upper arm and pulling me in some direction, hopefully airward.

I turn my head toward the hand, get one of my feet under my body and at last suck in a lungful of oxygen. I cough and choke and stagger as Ethan leads me toward the shore.

He is shaking his head at me, but not completely without sympathy.

I push my hair out of my face and try to catch my breath.

As we stand in water ankle deep, Ethan puts both hands on my waist. When I look up at him, he leans his head down and kisses my salty lips.

That’s all it is. He drops his hands and we walk out of the water and up to our beach umbrella.

Thankfully, my bathing suit is mostly in the right vicinity. I straighten it. I touch the scratches on my cheek and rub the stinging backs of my hands. I still feel the kiss. I don’t know what to do.

“What’s the matter?” he asks, looking me over for injuries, challenging me to deny him that kiss. I can’t do it.

“My knuckles hurt,” I say.

Early that evening in our hotel room I lie on the rubbery bedspread, tapping various searches into the laptop Ethan brought along and watching the pink late-sunset light creep across the floor. This is the day I don’t want to end. Ethan is lying a foot or so away, looking through near-future newspapers.

I’ve spent a long time on Mona Ghali’s social networking pages, taking notes and memorizing details for tomorrow. Ethan was already her friend on Facebook, which makes things simpler.

Because Ethan’s computer is logged on to his Facebook page, I can’t help but notice all the hundreds of friends he has and the constant posts from happy, carefree teenagers. And I can’t help thinking,
What does he want with me? Why would he leave that to go on this mind-warping odyssey?

I rest my chin on my hand and look at him. “What are you missing to be here?”

He looks up from the papers. He lifts his eyebrows. “What am I missing? Nothing.”

I tip my head toward him. “You know. You’ve got a whole
life. You’re a normal person. What would you be doing if you weren’t here?”

“Well, let’s see.” I can tell by his face he’s humoring me. “Tonight is my mom’s book group. I am missing eight middle-aged ladies and a lot of chardonnay.”

“Really?” I laugh.

“I am missing some moping from my dad, who doesn’t enjoy ladies’ book group night, and greasy Chinese takeout. He’d try to get me to go see a violent and manly movie with him.”

“And would you?”

“Maybe. Jamie Webb invited me to a Yankees game. Veronique Lasser is having a party, I think.”

I can’t help but feel wistful. “That sounds nice.”

He shrugs. “I’m a Mets fan, and Veronique’s parties are never fun.” He reaches out and takes my bare foot in his hand. “You know where I want to be tonight?”

I’m like a starving person at a banquet. “Where?”

“Here.”

“Yeah?”

“Nowhere else.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

We get back to work.

I keep searching for Andrew Baltos on the Web and finding nothing. He seems like somebody who’s good at self-deleting. Finally I get off the bed and retrieve the red folder from the
safe. I flop back down. Ethan is still deep in the newspapers. I touch my toe to his knee, just because I can.

“Don’t get me started, Jamesie,” he warns me, not looking up from his paper.

“I know. Sorry. We’re working.” Even so, I feel his hand settle just inside the waistband of my shorts. We are not making it easy.

The first thing I do is go to Theresa Hunt’s Facebook profile page. It hasn’t been updated in a few months, and I wonder if she’s okay. Aimlessly I scroll through her pictures. I see pictures of her with her son, who seems like the right age to be Jason Hunt.

“You finding anything?” Ethan asks me.

“Not so far. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. You?”

“Just freaking myself out, mainly.”

I scroll down through her pictures to when Jason was a baby. Theresa looked young and happy then. I go back farther and then I stop. I take a breath. I click on a picture. I’m not sure I totally trust my eyes yet. I slide the computer toward Ethan. “Who does that look like to you? The man standing next to Theresa.”

He looks at it closely and then sizes it back down. “Do you think it’s Andrew Baltos?”

My heart is starting to thump. “Do you?”

He looks again. He scrolls down farther. “There’s another one of him. It’s tagged. It says Andrew.”

“I really think it’s him.”

“Who is she, though?” Ethan asks.

“She’s the first person documented in that red folder. He wrote ‘Patient Number One’ on her page with a question
mark. I think my father was trying to trace the earliest cases of what later became the blood plague. I cannot figure out what she could have to do with Andrew Baltos.”

Ethan keeps looking through the pictures. “I think they were a couple. That’s how it looks.”

“It does. Wow.” In one of the pictures they are in full PDA. “That’s not very complicated.” My mind is jumping around. “So what does it mean? Maybe she gave the illness to Andrew Baltos.” I’m trying to figure out the timing; in the early phases the disease had a much longer incubation period. “But what does that have to do with Mona Ghali? Does Mona Ghali get sick too? Does the murder have something to do with that? I thought she was targeted because of her energy research. All the stuff he took from her computer.”