Hooked (17 page)

44

T
he operator gave me the phone number for Dave Elliott’s law firm and, when I asked sweetly, the address too. Elliott was in the Kindle inner circle. Maybe he could bring me inside the circle too.

I felt pulsing of my cranial veins. I recognized it now as the precursor to another set of dancing linebackers. My mysterious flulike symptoms, or a wave of exhaustion. When I’d sensed something wasn’t right with me, Annie had very nearly validated my intuition. Perhaps Dave Elliott could make it clearer still.

Sugar. Caffeine.

Somebody tell the FDA: The most powerful drugs in the world remain unregulated, and available cheap at 7-Eleven.

Moments later, I stood at the counter of just such a convenience store with a basket filled with the stuff of an eleven-year-old’s erotic fantasy. A box of Cocoa Puffs, a 44-ounce coffee, a half dozen Snickers, four Milky Ways, a six-pack of Jolt, twelve sugar doughnuts, and, for protein, Slim Jims and prepackaged peanut butter crackers. And various other assorted snack items that I’d always wanted but lacked the medical counsel to buy or ingest in good conscience.

I exited the convenience store, ignoring the curious gaze of an overqualified employee. I climbed into my car and looked around—for police, or other antagonists. I’d become a fugitive from the law—and my dentist. I devoured two candy bars and slugged a mouthful of muddy coffee. It pasted me with a surge of sugar and caffeine.

I headed downtown. With any luck Dave Elliott would be doing what lawyers did best. Working late.

As I drove, I flashed on my editor, Kevin. I still owed him the story about the impact of cell phone radiation on the brain. Was I so conditioned by school that I could think even at a time like this of my financial and work obligations? I almost laughed.

Finally I’d found a worthy excuse.
Kevin, I was planning to get my story in on time, but I was murdered
. If that didn’t buy me a few extra weeks, I didn’t know what would.

I called my attorney. “Dude,” he answered after the first ring. “What’s up?”

I had to hand it to Eric Rugger, attorney-at-law. He might not know how to connect with the common man on juries. But he did a great job speaking the language of the common teenager.

“Great news,” he said. “They have not reopened the Aravelo investigation. I talked to my sources; you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah, I figured that much out. Hey, here’s some more great news: I’m wanted for blowing up the Sunshine Café.”

“If you’re serious, we need to get off our mobile phones. They can tap these calls.”

“I’m innocent. I don’t give a shit who’s listening.”

“Nat, are you talking about the reports on the radio that the police are looking for two survivors of the café explosion?”

“Yep.”

He paused before he spoke again.

“That might just be a tactic. It might mean you’re wanted for questioning. It’s a way of making sure you cooperate. You need to turn yourself in immediately. And you need to get off this phone. Tell me where to meet you and we’ll go together.”

That seemed like a good idea on the order of pouring lemon juice down my back.

“You spent a year at Justice, right?” I said.

Eric had spent a grad-school summer at the Justice Department.

“Nat, I don’t see . . . ”

“I need a favor,” I said. “I need you to call any friends you might have at the SEC. Ask about a company called Vestige Technologies. V-E-S-T-I-G-E.” I told him it was in New York and had some problems several years ago.

I had barely hung up with Eric when I looked up to see the cross streets of Front and Mission and a gorgeous dusk view of the Bay Bridge. I didn’t pause for long. I needed to get into the building quickly if I had any chance of catching David Elliott.

I parked the car. One more call. I picked up my phone to dial, but stopped, remembering Eric’s admonition—
they can tap your calls
.

I put my phone down and picked up the blonde angel’s cell phone. I gathered that my use of the phone was a secret. Except to Annie, or whoever she was working with. I got out of the car and went to a pay phone to call Bullseye. No answer.

I called the Past Time bar. The phone was answered by Ally, who tended bar twice a week. She put Bullseye on the line.

“Is Sam with you?” he said. “I haven’t heard from her since I left her studio a couple of hours ago.”

“Bullseye. I need you to sit down.”

“As opposed to what?”

He was in his usual terse mood and probably wasn’t all that concerned about Samantha’s absence.

“Sam’s okay,” I said. “She’s gotten a little mixed up with the nonsense involving me and the waitress.”

“I’m standing, Nathaniel.”

I looked up the side of the building that was home to Dave Elliott’s office. Same joint I’d visited several years earlier, when I’d quizzed him about Vestige Technologies. Bullseye arrived within ten minutes. He looked at me: “Holy shit.”

Then he turned to Samantha. He leaned over, kissed her forehead, and stood looking at her in silence for a full two minutes.

“She’s been drugged, but she’s okay,” I said. “She needs rest, but I think she can do without a doctor for now.”

He brushed a wisp of her hair off her forehead and behind her ear.

“I’m going to kill somebody.” He took Samantha’s hand. “And I’m not nearly as ticked off as she’ll be. She hates ingesting any synthetic chemicals.”

“Did you call the cops?”

He lifted her gently into his car. “Dennis,” she said, stirring, using his given name. “You smell good.”

“No police. Please,” I said. “Do you still have the laptop?”

He climbed behind the wheel of his car.

“I hid it. On a table in my living room. Do you want me to do something with it?”

I nodded. I gave him Mike’s cell phone number. I told him to ask Mike to make a copy of the laptop’s hard drive, fit the computer with a tracking device. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I figured if anyone would know, it would be Mike. I begged Bullseye for discretion, a melodramatic and unnecessary request.

Moments later, I walked into Starbucks and bought two lattes and one individually wrapped, three-dollar butter cookie.

I entered Dave Elliott’s building and walked to the guard station.

“Badge,” demanded the guard, a portly fellow with a ham-sized fist dug into a bag of tortilla chips.

“Coming up.” I put down my snacks and dug into my pocket. “By the way, you want this extra latte and cookie? Johnson asks me to get it, then he calls to say he had to scamper home to his wife.”

“Serious?”

“Where the hell did I leave my badge?” I said, as if talking to myself.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said, snagging the latte.

I took the elevator to the eighteenth floor, where Elliott kept his office. The glass reception doors to the law firm were open too, and there didn’t appear to be a soul around. Inviting. What luck.

I made my way down a hallway, passing the photos hung on the wall of serious-looking law partners dressed in pinstripes. There was a light on inside when I arrived at Elliott’s office door. I had hardly begun to debate whether to knock when I heard a voice from inside.

“Nathaniel, what took you so long?”

45

D
ry cleaning,” Dave said. “That’s the key.”

He stuck out his hand.

“What the heck happened to you?” he said. “And to what do I owe this visit?”

“You tell me.”

He’d known I was coming. Was he tracking me?

I put out my hand and gave him an aggressive shake. His palm was slick. He turned away to face the room.

“Diane said you might be heading this direction.”

He leaned over his desk and squirted his hand with an industrial-strength bottle of Purell. I might have been offended if there wasn’t so much more on my mind, and if it didn’t happen so often these days. Especially interviewing medical professionals, or business executives; they immediately went into their pockets to disinfect. They did it not just with me, but with each other, with whomever. Sometimes they didn’t grip hands at all but just touched fists. Germophobia. The handshake had given way to the hosedown.

What I had was much worse than a cold.

I recognized the room. The big oak desk, beneath a built-in shelf—still virtually devoid of books. To the left of the desk, a window with a terrific view of the Bay Bridge, lit by car headlights and brake lights, and a nearly full moon. At the other side of the room, across from the window, a couch. In front of the couch, a reddish-colored coffee table, with an ice-filled bucket chilling bottled waters. Dave gestured toward the couch. I sat. I picked up a water, opened it, and took a slug.

Dave pulled up a chair. It belonged to a second desk, this one small, to the left of the window. On the desk sat a laptop. Dave wore a crisply pressed royal blue shirt tucked into gray slacks. He was just about as I’d left him after our last conversation, but with a bigger forehead. He’d lost a lot of hair.

He picked up a putter leaning against the small desk and started twirling it.

I’d have to navigate Dave carefully. I couldn’t guess what he knew, but I certainly couldn’t reveal anything about Annie, under the presumption that he and I weren’t allies.

“What can you tell me about Strawberry Labs?”

“Synthetic berry manufacturing plant?” he said, then paused. “Sorry, bad line. You look like you’ve got something pretty serious on your mind.”

“Are you still working for Glenn Kindle?”

He nodded. Sure, he was working for Kindle Investment Partners. He couldn’t really disclose whom he was working for, or specific cases. But he’d be happy to talk about some general legal matters if I wanted to come back during business hours. All boilerplate. It would have been mind-numbing even without the creeping headache and nausea. I reached into my pocket and popped an Oreo into my mouth.

“What about Vestige?”

“Vestige? Is that still on your mind? Listen, I’ll tell you there was a small settlement to the IRS. It’s public anyway. But I really can’t discuss any individual cases.”

I pulled out my cell phone.

“I’m going to call the police. I’m going to tell them to pay a visit to you and Glenn Kindle.”

It was a ridiculous bluff, given that I was wanted for questioning. But I needed to know what Dave knew, and he caught on just a second too late.

He said, “Do you really think that’s the wisest thing to do—given your predicament?”

He paused, gears grinding.

“You’re going to look pretty silly just calling the cops for no apparent reason. You seem tired, Nat. My professional advice—and please don’t take this the wrong way—is you’re acting a little strange.”

If I was reading him right, he had just admitted that he knew much more than he was letting on, and now he was trying to cover. “Predicament”: Did he mean the café? Or my illness? Or Annie? And why wasn’t Dave calling the cops himself? I couldn’t focus.

“Let me tell you my theory,” I said.

“I really do need to be getting home.”

“Someone associated with Glenn Kindle—maybe Glenn Kindle—is loading computers with . . . a program. Some dangerous program. It causes people to . . . to get sick.”

He started laughing.

“The program acts like speed somehow. It affects the attention span, like . . . focus . . . It involves serotonin. The dopamine receptors. It makes computer use more compelling. You get a buzz. You get”—and then I found the word I was looking for—“addicted.”

Me, Andy, maybe Simon Anderson. We’d been buzzing. Something was frying our brains. I’d had trouble pulling myself away from my laptop; the endless late-night surfing, the excitability, then withdrawal—nightmares, exhaustion, tremors, aggression, irritability. Hadn’t that been Andy’s problem? And Annie said I could be calmed with Ritalin, a kind of stimulant, the medication used to treat attention deficit disorder. Maybe that’s how the rat test fit in—an experiment to see whether the rodents would choose a certain kind of electrical brain stimulation over food.

“I see what you’re talking about.”

Was it revelation time?

Dave said he didn’t know anything about a dangerous program, and launched into a monologue about the addictive power of computers. When people get an e-mail or a phone call, they get a little jolt of adrenaline—a burst of excitement from the sound and image and also the prospect of receiving something new. The absence of that activity creates a vacuum, and boredom. That’s why people feel compelled to place a phone call whenever they’re driving along in a car; because they’ve gotten so accustomed to the burst of brain activity that they feel bored when not stimulated.

It hit me. “And you’re trying to perfect this?”

“Jesus, Nat.” He laughed. “I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.”

“But you just . . . ”

“I thought we were talking about modern life. We get conditioned to use our gadgets, right? What do they call it—a Crackberry?”

He was playing me, giving me a nugget, something to think about, then acting like it was an innocuous observation. I extracted a powdered sugar doughnut from my jacket.

“Nathaniel, I’ll be honest. You’ve always been a little dramatic. I thought so when you were with Annie. You romanticized that thing. She wasn’t near what you cracked her up to be. Now you’re talking this computer nonsense. Next you’ll be saying people installed some mythical dangerous program on
your
computer, or that they’ve been tracking your whereabouts on your cell phone, and listening to your calls. C’mon; do you really think a computer can do what you’re describing?”

He sat down in front of the laptop on his desk and started clacking the keys. He couldn’t imagine how such a thing as I was describing could work, he said. Could I show him what I was talking about?

Indeed, how could such a thing work? I watched him tap away on the keys. The screen couldn’t communicate directly with the brain, could it? He stood. “Show me,” he said.

I approached warily. He had put the putter down, and it didn’t look like he would attack me.

I looked at the computer and saw the Web page he’d called up. It was a story in the
Chronicle
about the café. A big text box denoted “breaking news.” It reported: Local pair sought
in café explosion
.

“What the fuck? Why this story?”

“Why not, buddy?”

I sat at the computer. I clicked on the link and started reading. And suddenly, a buzz. A painful pulsing in my fingertips, like I’d been shocked. A humming in my ears. That headache. My gut—I shook my head. I fought for air. I turned to the side and threw up. More like projectile vomited.

“Spare me.” Dave, looking at his shoes. “These are Allen-Edmonds.”

I’d never had a migraine. I’d treated them, though. It’s like a vise around the brain. The slightest movement, or light, radiates pain.

My gut seized. I fought to inhale—to satisfy primordial urges. This can’t be happening. A computer can’t do this. I slammed the laptop shut. I gripped its sides, tried to lift my head. I raised it an inch. I threw up again.

“It’s on this thing,” I coughed.

“You’ve got the flu, buddy.”

“What’s on this fucking computer?”

I felt a wave of fury. I pulled myself up and steadied myself on the table’s edge. I stepped toward Dave. The corner of my eye saw him pick up a rock paperweight. Was it to defend, or attack?

He cocked the paperweight and swung.