Read Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (15 page)
“We believed—or rather, our accounting system believed—we were missing a progress payment on the project and issued a second invoice. The client called Callista, saying he was sure it had been paid the first time. He even had an image of their cancelled check—” Schottlander turned over the pages in front of him. “—there. But when Callista looked in the system, there was no record of it.”
“Somebody stole the check and cashed it?” he suggested.
“Well, sir, there’s the problem. We’ve got no record the check was ever received—and that triggered the second invoice. But two days later we do have a log entry that shows the accounts receivable clerk stamped our endorsement on the check, and another entry a day afterward shows it was sent in a batch for bank clearing.”
“How can you have log entries for a check that doesn’t exist?”
She shook her head. “Different parts of the database, apparently. They just enter the project account number, invoice number, check number, and date. The system doesn’t bother to verify original receipt of the check because … well, they’ve already got it, haven’t they?”
“So, what are you telling me?” Richard pressed. “What’s the mystery?”
“If we had never received the art commission’s check in the first place,” Schottlander said, “and it was someone else who cashed it, we’d have no record of it in the system at all. But this looks like someone tried to
hide
the check and didn’t think the whole thing through.”
“That was clumsy of them,” he said dispassionately.
“Yes. And it suggests this was the work of a person, a human being, not a simple software glitch.”
“A glitch?” He tried to sound alarmed. “In my system? Is that possible?”
“Well, we’ve never seen one before. So we did an audit of the entire system. And guess what we found?”
“I hate guessing games. Just tell me.”
“A duplicate amount, forty-three point six million, showed up in another account entirely—in Callista Praxis’s personal retirement account. It was not a valid entry, of course, because there’s no corresponding line item or entry code, no paycheck against which it might have been drawn. The money just appears there.”
“Wouldn’t a transaction like that leave a trace—the perpetrator’s logon, or something?”
“Yes, it would. And no, it didn’t.” Schottlander shook her head. “It’s almost as if a ghost—or the software itself—made the transfer from project account to retirement account.”
“Well, now you can transfer the money right back out again,” Richard said. “We can’t ask the Denver people for another check, can we? Not when we know where their money went.”
“No, sir. But that’s a problem for us. You see, the system is not designed just to shovel money around. It needs the paper trail, the proper entries in the proper sequence. We’ll need authorization to make the restoration without explaining how the money was moved in the first place.”
“You’ve got it. I’ll sign whatever you need to square things.”
“And then … there’s the matter of Ms. Praxis’s account.”
“Oh? What does she say about it?” he asked casually.
“As I said, we haven’t told anyone. Not even her.”
“Well …” he waited three beats, as if considering. “If it really was a human being who made the transfer, and not a computer problem, then it’s a clear-cut case of attempted embezzlement. You should refer this to the Legal Department for their assessment before anyone talks to Callie.” He paused. “But I sure hope it’s just a system error. I’d hate to think that my sister …”
“I know, sir,” Schottlander said. “Everyone in the company likes her, too.”
* * *
“Hello, Auntie,” Suleiman Mkubwa said as he appeared at her office door. “You wanted to see me?”
“Oh, yes, Sully.” Wells put down her pen and put aside her notebook. “Yes, um … You may have noticed that things have slowed down around here lately.”
“Oh, indeed!” the young attorney said brightly.
“Our practice has reached a decision point.”
“And are you about to let me go, Auntie?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said gravely.
“Oh, thank God! I am so relieved!”
“No, Sully. We’re
laying
you
off.
”
“I understand,” he said. “Fully. I am released. But I am also
relieved.
I had feared you would let Carolyn go instead of me.”
“Oh, and why were you afraid for her?”
“Because this is her home, and she has no place else to go. I should not divulge a confidence, but she was afraid of losing her job. Whereas I have been thinking of going home to my family for a long time.”
“Your family is in … Baltimore, isn’t it?”
“Oh, no. That’s just my mother. I mean my whole family. I have an uncle in Nairobi who for years has been asking me to join his firm of barristers. I’ll have to practice a different kind of law, of course. And also wear a horsehair wig. But it will be better for me.”
“I’m sorry you want to leave America.”
“Oh, America is fine. I am proud to be a citizen. But right now …”
“This is just an economic downturn,” she said. “A rough patch. We’ve been through them before.”
“Oh, yes? Well, frankly, I can buy more with a Kenyan shilling than I can with an American dollar. But that’s not why I want to go. We Kenyans have our revolution and civil war behind us. The country is good now. But you Americans have war ahead of you. It will not be so good.”
“I’m sure that’s all just newspaper talk,” Wells said. “Just politics.”
“Yes, ma’am. Von Clausewitz said war is politics by other means.”
“It won’t come to an actual war. Not here. I’d bet my life on it.”
“Not your life, Auntie. But bet your dollar against my shilling.”
* * *
Brandon Praxis figured he had heard wrong when Major Ruysdael said they were securing ‘nukes,’ because it turned out that all Camp Navajo had were the first-stage rocket engines for Minuteman III and Trident C4 and D5 missiles. And while those launch vehicles were designed to carry nuclear warheads, it would take a whole lot of tinkering, plus a truckload of parts, plus a factory—plus the warheads themselves—to turn the camp’s inventory into strategic weapons.
What Ruysdael had neglected to tell him at first was that Camp Navajo was also a training facility for all the service branches. At any one time it could accommodate a battalion of troops and train them in mountain and airmobile operations, land navigation, and proficiency with squad-level infantry weapons like M4 carbines, M249 light machine guns, and hand grenades. Where people trained, there the government tended also to stockpile large amounts of resupply. So Camp Navajo was a major arsenal for any military operations in the Southwest.
What Ruysdael—or the people who had sent him into Arizona with two Humvees, a Stryker armored car, and a dozen men—did
not
know, however, was that the camp, which was supposed to have finished its scheduled training with the North Dakota National Guard’s 2/285th Helicopter Assault Battalion, had extended their exercises by two days. The U.S. Army’s little task force had rolled up to the gate expecting to encounter a skeleton crew of clerks, contractors, and cooks but instead found the base swarming with more than 500 troops, technical support personnel, and helicopters.
The sentry on duty had passed Ruysdael and his men through and directed them down the road to the Administration Building. Because the major had told Praxis to stick close, Brandon followed his superior officer right into the commandant’s office, where together they saluted Lieutenant Colonel Darrell Young of the Arizona Army National Guard, removed their BDU caps, and stood at ease.
“I’m surprised to see you boys,” Colonel Young said. “You’re not on my list.”
“Yes, that’s because we’re in advance of an activation order,” Ruysdael said smoothly. “We’re here to secure this facility.” Then he added, “Sir,” just in time to keep it from being an insult.
“Really?” Young pulled his glasses forward on his nose and looked over them at Ruysdael and Praxis. “You’re acting under orders of the President? Is there a national emergency?”
“Near enough. My orders are to inform you and then put your facility under my command as part of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps.”
“I see,” the colonel said. “Is that just our industrial operations, which includes your strategic munitions, or the whole camp?”
“My orders aren’t that specific. I must assume the whole camp.”
“Of course. Well, Major … your men must be tired after a long flight. I’ll have my clerk see to a billet and get you tickets to the chow hall. You don’t mind eating on the State of Arizona’s dime, do you?” Colonel Young grinned.
“Not at all.” Major Ruysdael barely smiled.
It had all been very polite and almost friendly. Brandon Praxis was surprised how easily it had gone done.
The next day they toured warehouses and machine shops and even the strategic bunkers with their solid-fuel rocket motors, which were potentially dangerous enough to require a separate facility. Everywhere they went, various of the camp’s personnel went before and followed after them. Brandon didn’t have to take any notes, as Ruysdael had once suggested, because the staff handed him printouts of everything. It all seemed pretty complete and … secure.
On the second day, however, at ten o’clock in the morning, the atmosphere changed. Their unit was requested to return to the Administration Building for an urgent briefing. In the lobby, an armed detachment of North Dakota guardsmen met them with rifles leveled, relieved them of their personal weapons, and escorted them to a conference room. The television there was playing a national news channel, which they watched for half an hour. Ruysdael protested, but no one would answer him.
At eleven o’clock, a breaking bulletin announced that twenty-six of the former United States had just seceded to form the “Federated Republic of America.” By voice vote of their legislatures, they adopted verbatim the U.S. Constitution and all 27 of its amendments, forming a new government in parallel with the old one. Sitting congressmen from those states were invited to form the new Senate and House of Representatives in Kansas City. Election of a president and vice president would follow within sixty days.
When the announcement was finished, Colonel Young came into the room flanked by armed camp personnel.
“I just got off the phone with the governor, Major. He rejects your presidential order and suggests I escort you off base. We’ve called a couple of taxis to take you and your men back to Flagstaff. The governor’s aides will arrange tickets with the Southwest check-in at Pulliam Airport to fly you wherever you want to go. I suggest you head back to California, as Southwest doesn’t have as much as coverage east of the Mississippi.”
“It doesn’t end here, you know,” Ruysdael warned.
“Oh, I hope it does, Major. For both our sakes.”
5. Total Loss of Control
John Praxis watched with a kind of clinical fascination—by turns mixed with frustration, anger, and horror—as the country came apart. He was eerily reminded of those film clips in biology class, where the cell divides, the nuclear spindles form, and invisible threads draw the chromosome pairs apart, like pulling down on a zipper. From everything he read in the papers, saw online, or heard on television, it seemed that the various states had simply lined up on different sides of the room, dividing over the question of the country’s political and economic future: Continued reliance on free markets and unfettered growth, or adoption of U.N.-imposed restrictions and sustainable limits? Cultivation of American exceptionalism, or adherence to a One World sameness? Sovereignty or submission?
He found hope in the fact that the newly announced republic created in the middle of the country had adopted the same form of representative democracy with the same founding documents as the old United States. It suggested that, once they could resolve these political and economic differences, the states could just pull up the zipper and knit the country back together.
So far, how any of this would affect PE&C’s day-to-day operations remained unclear.
Leonard thought the Federated Republic of America would adopt an entirely new regime of licensing, review, and legislation. “We’ll have to start all over again on every project,” he complained. “That will force wholesale rewrites of our energy and transportation contracts throughout the area. It will just destroy our accounts receivable.”
“At least we can hope that the new government will rethink a lot of the old regulations,” Praxis said. “The federal bureaucracies we’ve had to work under—EPA, Energy Department, Transportation Department, HUD, and HHS—will probably come in for critical review and resizing over there. In the meantime, pent-up demand for new infrastructure will begin calling for our engineering services.”
“If there’s any money to pay for them,” Richard warned.
“Well, with half the country repudiating the federal deficit,” Praxis replied, “I’d say they just bought themselves a brand-new credit card.”
“Maybe we should move to Texas?” Richard suggested.
“I thought you were against that,” Praxis said. “Probably too late now anyway.”
But in the midst of these external concerns, Praxis discovered he had bigger problems closer to home.
Adele had been showing a progressive deterioration that he could track practically from one day to the next. At their age, it was one thing to occasionally forget a word, lose the thread of a conversation, or misplace your glasses—which was why he kept pairs of drugstore reading glasses for himself all over the house. But Adele was becoming increasingly vague, muddled, hesitant, and fretful. It was as if the seizure she had experienced a couple of weeks earlier had set off an inexorable process. In the beginning, Praxis thought this confusion was the first sign of a more gradual and much longer slide into garden-variety dementia or Alzheimer’s. But when it became apparent she was rapidly falling apart, he discussed her symptoms with their family physician, Dr. Valone.
“Sure, I could run tests,” the doctor said. “But you saw the tox panel they did at Cal-Pacific. It suggests she’s suffering from brain poisoning because her liver is breaking down and pumping toxins into her blood.”
“Is the brain damage reversible?”
“Is she still drinking? The liver won’t heal so long as she keeps assaulting it with alcohol. We have to control that first.”
“I’ve tried to talk with her.” But any suggestion that Adele should stop or cut down she met with instant hostility. She dragged out every stupid, wrong, or hurtful thing Praxis had said or done in their long life together and used it to prove her sins paled in comparison. “Is there some program we can get her into?” he asked now.
“Sure. Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“I mean, one where she doesn’t have to … cooperate.”
“You mean, like a rehab or recovery center? She’d just call a cab and leave.”
“What about one under lock and key?”
“Involuntary commitment is a legal issue. If she’s a danger to herself or others, then you can get the police to 5150 her. But that’s just a hold for observation, seventy-two hours. Hardly long enough for the detox to take effect.”
“But can’t
you
just—?”
“Not without a court order.”
The legal ramifications of a commitment were nothing he wanted to discuss with the family attorney, because the man was socially close with both of them—and maybe closer to Adele than to Praxis himself. And the matter really fell outside the competence of PE&C’s corporate lawyers. So he decided to give Antigone Wells a call.
After the polite exchanges—“How are you doing?” “Stronger every day!” “That’s good to hear!”—he broached the matter of Adele, her drinking, and the fearful cost of it that was now catching up with her.
“No, you can’t just get her committed,” Antigone said, confirming the doctor’s verdict. “If she tried to kill herself, or pulled a gun on you … Is she able to take care of herself?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “She dresses every morning—most days.”
“The law about involuntary commitment includes a person’s being gravely disabled. But she’d have to be living on the streets, eating out of dumpsters, unable to provide for basic needs like food, clothing, or shelter.”
“That’s never going to happen,” he said stoutly.
“Of course not. So are
you
taking care of her?”
“I try to help, but mostly I’m down at the office.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?”
“Well, there’s our cook, Miranda.”
“But no nurse or anything like it?”
“I hadn’t thought … Yes, I suppose it’s either that or put her in a nursing facility—which she’d never agree to in the first place. She’ll need someone on hand who can deal with her spells and help her stay—I don’t know—
focused.
But getting Adele to trust someone coming into her home is another matter.”
Antigone paused, then said slowly, “The woman who helped me when I first got out of the hospital is pretty good.”
“Is she available?” he asked.
“I know for a fact, she is.”
One day later, a woman in her forties showed up on his doorstep in the evening after dinner. She presented her own card—“Jeanne Hale” it read, from the MaxStaff Agency, but the agency name was crossed out—and one of Antigone Wells’s business cards as proof of the referral. “Miss Wells said you would be needing some help.”
Praxis noted the woman had two suitcases at her feet and a taxi waiting at the curb. Well, the house certainly had enough bedrooms—unless Adele screamed and threw her out, and in that case keeping the taxi waiting was a good idea. “Come on in, Ms. Hale.”
They found Adele in front of the television with the picture turned on but the sound muted. She wasn’t actually watching, and her hands lay in her lap like a pair of wounded crabs. Sensing a stranger coming into the room with her husband, Adele struggled upright, pulled her hands up on the arms of the chair, tried to stand, missed her balance, and plunked back down. Defeated by the effort, she quavered, “Who—who’re you?” She had tears in her eyes.
“My name is Jeanne, dear. I’m here to help you sort things out.”
“But I don’t need—” his wife began uncertainly.
“Sure you do! We’ll have a
good
time together.”
Adele looked confused at this, but then her manners took over and she gave a shy smile. “Jeanne,” she said by way of greeting. Then she looked at Praxis. “Is it all right?”
“Very all right,” he said jovially—and tried to mean it.
Hale turned to him and said quietly, “Why don’t you go pay off my taxi?”
* * *
As soon as Antigone Wells got home from karate class, she wanted to try out what she’d learned. That would help fix the precise muscle movements in what the instructors called “somatic memory,” which was another way of saying somewhere down there in her cerebellum.
After weeks of practicing the thirty basic exercises of Isshinryu—the isolated punches, kicks, and block-punch combinations, plus a half-dozen stretching exercises and hold breaks—Wells was feeling pretty confident about her moves. The black belts had been watching her, too, as they watched everyone. Tonight one of them, a young man named Eric, had taken her aside to begin teaching her the first of the
kata
s, or forms. These were mock fights with imaginary opponents and constituted the body of the Isshinryu style itself. This first one was called Seisan, named after the basic fighting stance, which featured in most of its movements.
Studying her living room, Wells thought she could make enough space available if she pushed the couch this way, the chairs and end tables that way, and backed the television into the corner. She took her place in the middle of the open area and performed first the formal bow—but with eyes directed upward, in case the opponent launched a sneak attack—then the traditional warning sign—“I don’t want to fight, but I can if I have to”—with a flat hand over a fist at groin level, and finally a ready stance with arms straight and fists aligned with her thighs.
She stepped off into a
seisan
with left foot forward while doing a brief crossover with her arms that brought her left fist up in guard position and right fist back to her hip. She retracted her left fist to her hip as she punched an imaginary opponent with her right, then pulled it back into guard. That was one. She stepped into right
seisan,
retracted her right fist and punched with her left, pulled it into guard. That was two. Then left step, right punch, and guard. Three. She brought both fists together down at navel level, made a step-slide, and brought them up in a double head block against two imaginary chops to her collarbones. Then she spun on her left foot and came down facing in the other direction with both hands chopping downward and backward against imaginary attackers who were coming up behind her on either side. That ended the first series of movements. She stepped forward into the next series, consisting of blocks, chops, and grapples with a pair of imaginary attackers … and so on, through twenty or thirty more movement combinations to the final ready stance and bow.
Wells never did get a count of the total number of moves in Seisan
kata,
because some of combinations blurred one into another. And the instructor, Eric, told her not to think of
kata
as separate bits, like the basic exercises strung together, but as a flow, a rhythm, supporting a melody of blocks and punches. Like music.
“What if one of the attackers doesn’t come in on time?” she had asked. “Or nobody comes in from behind? How do you know the fight is going to follow this exact pattern?”
“
Kata
teaches you combinations and sequences,” Eric had said. “Block-and-strike, block-and-kick. It’s the most compact way to learn, practice, and perfect your technique. When an actual fight comes to you, your brain will be programmed with these sequences and will know instinctively what to do.”
Wells thought about it a moment. “So … is that a ‘yes’?”
For giving him sass, Eric made her drop and do ten pushups on her knuckles. Black belts were as touchy as hawks and did not take smart-mouth from white belts. But for all of her skepticism, Wells could sense the beauty of the
kata,
the precision, the complexity within simplicity.
In past weeks, she had also begun working on close order drill with various partners in class, a kind of proto-sparring. Two long lines of students faced each other across a three-foot gap. On command, one would step forward and throw a punch, lightly brushing the opposing student’s solar plexus without actually landing the blow. The other would step back, try to block it accurately, deflect it, and throw a countering punch. In these exercises, Wells was always slow, awkward, fumbling. Her brain had not yet assimilated the sequence, its range and timing, and her execution. She could not turn the series of individual movements into a single response. But if Eric was right, if she could believe in this mystical reliance on “somatic memory,” then
kata
would be the way to acquire speed and grace.
And even if she never got into a real fight, it was pretty good exercise.
* * *
The charge was serious enough that John Praxis called his daughter back to San Francisco: drop whatever she was doing on the Mile High project, turn over all her notes and instructions to an assistant, and catch the next flight out.
Praxis could not actually believe that Callie would be stupid enough to steal forty million out of a project account and then try to hide it within the system in her own retirement account. The point of embezzlement was to get the money safely out of the company, divert it to invoices from bogus suppliers or consultants, and then invest it in diamonds or Swiss francs, far away and preferably offshore. But an exhaustive diagnostic of the company’s accounting system had shown that the transfer was neither a software glitch nor a random event. Someone had moved the money deliberately, and the only person who could possibly benefit, or would have enough detail about the Denver Arts Commission’s progress payment to begin with, was Callie. The PE&C Legal Department was already drawing up a case against her.
“What’s all this about, Dad?” she said when Ivy ushered her into his office.
“Sit down, please,” he said, waving to the chairs in front of his desk. “The Accounting Department has uncovered an anomaly—at least, I hope it’s just that—which they think you can explain.”
He passed her the folder containing copies of her faxes from Harold Cromwell at the Denver Art Commission, her note to Julia Schottlander, and highlighted extracts from the accounting system. Also included were printouts of software diagnostics, the paper trail of scheduled project milestones and Callie’s authorization to issue the missing invoice, and the company’s telephone logs showing the date and time of all calls among Cromwell, Schottlander, and Callie. “These are certified copies of everything,” he explained. “The Legal Department is keeping the originals for now.”