No Way Back (30 page)

She looks at me with wide eyes, begging for some kind of forgiveness, some kind of mercy that I cannot give.

‘Do you think it makes someone evil,’ she asks, ‘if he has urges that are locked away, deep inside? If he never acts on them?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘That was Charles. There was someone else inside him. But he kept it locked away. And then one day that man came into our life. And he destroyed my husband.’

‘Who did?’

‘You know who I’m talking about. Why do you pretend that you don’t? The man who knew what was in Charles’s heart. He knew his secret. Who gave Charles what he wanted.
That’s what he does. He gives people what they want.’

‘Take these,’ I say, handing her the pictures.

‘Look at the next one.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Please,’ she insists.

I look at the next photo. Through the steam, I see a middle-aged man, balding, kissing a young boy’s naked chest.

‘That’s Charles,’ she says. I don’t have much doubt about which one. The one who’s not ten years old. ‘That was at the end. Once they had photographs, they
owned him. Charles had to do what he was told.’

‘Which was what? What was he told to do?’

‘To get things ready.’

‘Ready?’

‘For
you
, Mr Thane. He was told to get things ready for you.’

It occurs to me now, for the first time, standing in this steam-filled bathroom, that the woman beside me is bat-shit crazy. Which explains a lot. The frightened glances. The deadbolts on her
doors. The note she slipped into my hand.

Now I know. Now there can be no doubt. She is crazy.

‘I need to leave you now, Mrs Adams,’ I say gently, and hand her back the photographs. This time she accepts them.

‘He was going to turn himself in,’ she says. ‘We talked about it one night in the bedroom. We thought we were alone. That no one could hear us. We decided. Charles was going to
talk to the police. He was going to tell them everything. The photos. The money he was given. He was going to tell them about... ’ She stops. ‘About that man. He was going to tell them
everything he knew about that man.’

‘Did he?’

‘No. The man found out. He punished us.’

‘Punished you?’

‘He hears everything. He knows your thoughts. He knows your secrets. He is Satan.’

‘He killed your husband?’ I say.

‘No,’ she says. ‘He didn’t kill Charles. Not right away. That’s not what he does. First he makes you suffer.’ She looks into my eyes. She seems very sad, very
old. ‘You saw the picture downstairs,’ she says. ‘The one of my daughter?’

‘Your daughter... ’ I stop.

Now I remember what Joan Leggett told me, on that first day that I arrived at Tao, when I asked about Charles Adams.
There was a personal tragedy in his family
, she said. I didn’t
ask what she meant, but now, something clicks, and it fits: the quiet house. The dark hall. The empty bedroom, preserved like a mausoleum. No child’s footsteps. No child’s laughter.

She says: ‘I left my baby with Charles. My little girl. It was at night. Just for an hour. When I came home, I found Charles on the couch. Passed out.’

‘What happened to her?’ I say. I feel the dread rise within me.

‘Maybe he was drunk, or maybe he was high. Or maybe they
made
him sleep. He can do that, you know. And I found my baby here.’

‘Where?’

‘
Here
,’ she says. She turns to the bathtub, near overflowing. ‘They came into the house, and they took my baby. And they brought her here. They held her under the
water until she drowned. She was so blue when I found her. That’s the one thing I will never forget. How blue she was. And how her eyes were open. As if she was looking for me. And she
couldn’t find me. She was so blue. So blue.’

Later, I don’t remember running from her house.

But I must have fled. Whether I said goodbye, or just unlocked the door and ran, I do not know.

It’s not until I’m in my car, driving, with my foot hard on the gas, that I notice where I am, or how fast I’m going. Too fast – the speedometer bumping fifty, in a
thirty-five zone – and so I brake, and stay in the flow of traffic, whizzing past McDonald’s and Walgreens and Macaroni Grill.

She was crazy, of course; I see that now. Her husband was a paedophile, and he was being blackmailed by a Russian mobster.

His wife knew about me. She knew about Jim Thane. That much is clear. She obsessed about me. She read about me somewhere, researched me, uncovered my secret. She knew about Cole, about what
happened that night, in the bath. Maybe she read about me in the papers, that flurry of stories that appeared when the DA dropped the charges against me. Or maybe she heard it through the
grapevine. The tech community is small, and people talk, and I know that they still whisper, about what happened that night.
His son drowned
, they murmur, when I walk into a room, and they
think that I can’t hear.
He was high, and his son drowned
.

This can be the only explanation: she blames me for what happened to her husband. She wants to hurt me. For I am the man who replaced her husband.

A part of me understands. She may have been married to a sick man, but she loved him. And he was being tortured in front of her eyes – blackmailed by someone remote and unassailable. She
was unable to strike at the real perpetrator, the man who destroyed her husband – Ghol Gedrosian – and so instead she lashed out at the one man she could find. She saved her hatred for
that man, for me, Jimmy Thane.

That night, Libby and I watch television in the living room, stretched on the couch. I soon lose interest in her reality shows, and when I mutter that I wish we could change
the channel, she ignores me. I get up from the couch, and stretch, and wander to the sliding glass door leading to the patio.

‘Where are you going?’ she asks, noticing me at last.

‘Just getting some air.’

I walk outside before she can argue. I slide the door shut.

The swimming pool is lit from below, and in the dark night, it casts dancing yellow light on the palm fronds that shield us from our neighbour’s gaze.

The pool looks inviting, but I’m too lazy to go back upstairs for swim trunks. So I peel off my sweaty clothes right there, leaving them in a crumpled pile on the patio, and I dive, naked,
into the water. I swim five laps.

When I finish, I’m out of breath, but invigorated, and I pull myself from the pool and carry my clothes back into the house.

‘You’re dripping,’ Libby says, not even looking at me.

‘Am I?’

‘And you’re naked.’

I look down. ‘Hadn’t noticed.’ The carpet at my feet is turning dark with puddled water. ‘You’re acting very strange today, Jimmy.’

‘Am I?’ Maybe my meeting with Mrs Adams disturbed me more than I realized. ‘I’ll get dressed.’

I’m about to leave her, and head upstairs, when my cellphone rings. The trill is sharp and startling. I see the phone glowing on the desk nearby, next to my laptop computer.

I walk to the desk, still dripping. I open the phone, keep it an inch from my ear.

‘Hey, hotshot,’ says the voice, when I answer.

‘Tad?’

‘What are you doing right now?’

‘Just walking around naked.’

‘Good, good,’ he says, ignoring me. ‘I just got off the phone with someone interesting. Guess who.’

Ghol Gedrosian
, I want to say. But instead I say merely: ‘Who?’

‘Guess.’

‘Really, Tad, I can’t guess.’

‘Dan Yokelson.’ He says the name proudly, as if I ought to know who it is, and ought to be deeply impressed. The name
is
familiar, but I can’t quite place it.

‘Come on, Jimmy,’ he says, when I’m silent for too long. ‘You know who that is, right?’

‘No.’

‘White Rock.’

‘White Rock?’ I say. And then I remember. White Rock is one of the largest hedge funds on the West Coast. A firm that happens to be run by a friend of Tad’s. An old Harvard MBA
buddy, or so Tad has told me a dozen times. A billionaire. One of the Forbes Top 50 richest men in the world.

‘What’d you guys talk about?’ I ask.

‘You, partner.’

‘Me?’

‘Well, not you personally,’ he admits. ‘But Tao. He wants to do a deal.’

‘A deal?’

‘He’ll license your technology. What are you calling it nowadays? P-Scan?’

I’m puzzled by what Tad is telling me, because hedge funds have no conceivable use for Tao’s technology. Hedge funds deal with wealthy customers. They handle big money from big
institutions. They have meetings over lunch at the Four Seasons. They don’t operate retail branches, where strangers walk in from the street, requiring facial identification. There’s no
conceivable way that Tao’s technology could be of any use to a firm like White Rock.

‘But they’re a hedge fund,’ I say.

‘They are,’ Tad admits, reluctantly. ‘They are. But he wants to do it. And I have his personal guarantee. It’s a done deal, Jimmy. He’ll license it for five
million. How does that sound to you?’

‘How does that sound to me? It sounds...
crazy
.’

I glance at the couch, catch Libby looking at me. She looks away quickly.

I say to Tad, ‘What are they going to do with the technology?’

‘How the fuck should I know? Who do I look like, Carnac the Magnificent? He wants to pay you five million dollars. Take his money.’

I think about it. Something doesn’t feel right. But then again, nothing about my job at Tao feels right any more.

I give up my effort of keeping the phone dry, and I shove it between my ear and my shoulder. I lean across the desk, dripping onto the surface, and wake my laptop computer with a flick of a
finger. I type a name into Google: ‘DAN YOKELSON’.

The search returns an avalanche of results for Dan Yokelson.

At the top, I see a section that says: ‘Recent news for Dan Yokelson’ and a collection of headlines.

Now I understand why the name is so familiar: Dan Yokelson
has
been in the news a lot lately, and not just in the financial press.

The bottom headlines give the backstory: ‘White Rock Executive Served With Wells Notice for Fraud’ and then ‘Possible Jail Time for Yokelson in Insider Trading
Probe’.

Those stories are dated four months ago.

I see more recent stories at the top of the page, dated a mere ‘23 hours ago’: ‘Key Government Witness in White Rock Case Disappears’ and ‘SEC Likely to Drop
Yokelson Prosecution’.

Tad’s voice on the telephone brings me back. ‘Jimmy? Are you there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘You don’t sound very grateful. You know what I had to do to convince him?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘What did you have to do?’

‘A case of Latour. A
case
, Jimmy. Do you know how much that stuff costs?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither,’ he says, and laughs. ‘I probably should have asked before I told them to charge it on my card. But the point is: that’s what a Board of Directors does. We
get you the deal. No matter what it takes. Remember that.’

‘I will, Tad. I’ll remember.’

August passes.

Agent Mitchell doesn’t call again, and I almost forget about the FBI man, and his search for the Russian meth dealer. I almost forget about Charles Adams, too, and his lunatic wife.

I have pushed these things from my mind. Now they are just tiny dark smudges on the distant horizon – still there, but barely perceptible.

It has been surprisingly easy to forget them, too. Surprisingly easy to focus on my own success.

Success.

What a strange feeling, to be successful. I’ve spent so many years failing, so many years stumbling from one disaster to the next, that I almost forgot what it’s like.

To be a success.

When I arrived at Tao, things seemed hopeless, the company’s problems insurmountable. Now, despite the odds, I’ve turned the company around. I was ruthless, it’s true –
reducing headcount, cutting costs, changing direction. But my actions, while they hurt some people, saved the company for everyone else.

And, while it’s not a sure thing, yet – not by a long shot – I can feel triumph within my grasp.

The trade magazine
Banking Times
runs a small news item about Tao’s beta-test with Old Dominion, and the nearly simultaneous deal with White Rock. This one-two punch is the
validation we’ve been waiting for. The floodgates open. Now, every day, I receive new phone calls – from Wells Fargo, Chase, HSBC; it seems that everyone wants to work with Tao, wants
to start their own pilot programme, using Tao’s amazing P-Scan technology in their own retail banking branches. No one wants to be the last financial institution without state-of-the-art
biometrics.

My answer to each request from breathless executives is the same. I explain how difficult it will be to arrange another deal, since Old Dominion bought exclusivity in the south-eastern United
States. Oh, what’s that? Can we structure a deal that excludes the south-east? Well, I never thought of that. I suppose we can.

The only thing keeping me from laughing aloud, joyously, into the telephone, during each of these calls, is the flickering memory of Stan Pontin, the can-do technologist at Old Dominion, whose
untimely death preceded the signing of that very first deal.

But that disturbing thought never lasts long – not when everything else is going so right.

With the money coming into Tao’s bank account, no one really cares about the money going out. Joan Leggett stops asking about the cash that vanished under Charles Adams’s watch
– which is a comfort to me, since it is surely the same cash sitting in my own personal bank account, the same cash that I’m living off, the same cash that I use to pay for our house
rental, or the restaurant meals with Libby, or the increasingly preposterous gifts that I buy her: the Mercedes, the diamond earrings, the gold necklace, the Cartier watch, the David Yurman
rings.

Tad Billups’s weekly telephone calls are always the same – pep talks, really: Keep up the good work, Jimmy; Keep things calm, Jimmy; My partners are watching you, Jimmy, and boy are
they impressed. I never ask
which
partners – the Silicon Valley VCs, or the Eastern European meth dealers with the foreign-sounding names. I don’t want to know.