Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Read online

  “No,” said Mary. “I looked everywhere. It’s not there anymore. It’s not anywhere.”

  Bennett thrust his hand through the open window. “Please.”

  “No!” Mary recoiled and turned her body away from Bennett, clutching the phone against her body.

  Bennett withdrew his hand. He remained on his haunches, face-to-face with her. “Mary, this is a serious matter. There’re going to be a lot of questions about what happened to Joe out there. I’d be grateful for anything that might shed light on it.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I know how to use my phone. If I can’t find it, you can’t.”

  Bennett nodded, then smiled easily. It was his patronizing, “I’m in the FBI and know better than you” smile. Joe had one, too, and it drove her crazy when he flashed it. “Maybe if you let us take the phone to our lab,” he said, “we can get a closer look. Often something you think is deleted isn’t actually permanently erased.”

  “I already told you what Joe said. It was more a feeling than anything else.”

  “He didn’t say anything specific about what was wrong?”

  “He just said he didn’t like being out there, he thought it was a bad idea, and that he loved us.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything more—maybe something about who he was with or what exactly was troubling him?”

  “Don’t you know who he was with?”

  “I’m just wondering if he might have given you any details.”

  “No.”

  “Even so, I’d like to take a look. There might be something you missed.”

  “I said no.”

  “I could subpoena that fuckin’ thing,” said Bennett, eyes pulsing, his face flushed, seemingly a size larger.

  “What did you say?”

  Bennett eased back from the car. “I didn’t mean that. I’m upset about Joe’s death, too. I just want to do everything I can to find out what really happened.”

  Mary jumped on the words. “Don’t you know what really happened? You said the informant shot him. Who was Joe meeting?”

  “I can’t go into that. I’m sorry…” Bennett stood, shoulders slumped, hands upturned. “Sorry to trouble you. If there’s anything we can do—me, the office—anything…let us know.”

  Mary watched Bennett walk away. He might have asked to see the phone tomorrow, or even in a few days. What kind of a man threatens a grieving woman with a subpoena?

  It came to her that Bennett didn’t know what had happened to Joe. Or for that matter who Joe had been meeting. For some reason Don Bennett was frightened.

  As Mary started the car and eased it out of the garage, she could think of no other reason that he wanted the message so badly.

  Joe, she asked silently, whose business were you looking into?

  7

  Ian Prince stepped inside his race headquarters, a sixty-foot RV outfitted to his needs. Peter Briggs followed him inside, closing the door behind them.

  “That Mick has it in for you.” Briggs was a blunt-faced South African with heavy pouches beneath his eyes and blond hair shaved to a stubble. “Think he’ll make trouble?”

  “Gordon May is upset because his is the only company in Silicon Valley I never tried to buy.” Ian unzipped his flight suit, opened the fridge, and grabbed a plastic bottle filled with amber liquid. His recovery drink: water, glucose, guarana, and ginseng. “You see my pass?” he said after guzzling half the bottle. “Only thing I could do.”

  “You were in the right, boss,” said Briggs. “The stewards will see things your way. May’s just a bad loser.”

  “Maybe.” Ian never forgot a slight, and May’s words had come perilously close to slander.

  He finished the bottle and chucked it in the trash. An office occupied a compartment behind the driver’s bay. Personal quarters were to the rear and included a bedroom, bathroom, and rejuvenation center. He hit a switch on the wall, activating the anti-eavesdropping measures. The RV was now a SCIF, a “sensitive compartmented information facility.” Whatever he said in Reno stayed in Reno. “Any news?”

  “Problem resolved.”

  “Too bad it had to end that way.”

  “It had to end. Period.” Briggs had grown up deep in the veldt, and his English carried a thick Afrikaans accent.

  “Agreed,” said Ian. “So it’s all tied off?”

  “To the very top. Bank it.”

  “Banked,” said Ian.

  —

  After his shower, Ian Prince sat naked in the salon chair as a tall, muscular woman clad in tight black pants and a T went about her business. Her name was Dr. Katarina Fischer, and she was his private longevity consultant.

  “Can’t you hurry things, Kat?” Ian asked the Berlin-born physician. “Copter’s coming in an hour. Back to home base. The big test’s tomorrow. Titan. It’s what’s made me such a grump these last months.”

  “You are like an impatient little boy. First your vitamins.” Katarina handed him a tray filled with thirty vitamins and other supplements. There were the usual: B12, D, E, Omega-3s, antioxidants. And there were more exotic ones: alpha-lipoic acid, chromium, selenium, CoQ10. Ian swallowed them five at a time.

  “Now you will live forever,” said Katarina. She was more handsome than beautiful, her thick white-blond hair cut above the ears, blue eyes couched behind rimless glasses, a broad jaw and broader shoulders.

  Ian extended his arm. “Do your worst.”

  Katarina drew a vial of blood for analysis. He knew his good cholesterol and his bad, his lipids and his liver function. Recently he’d had his exome sequenced, the portion of his DNA that contained his protein coding. It showed markers for Parkinson’s disease and diabetes, meaning that he was at greater risk than others of contracting them. He had a lesser chance of cancer. And still less of heart disease. The results of today’s blood work would be uploaded to his mailbox in an hour.

  “And now your magic potion,” she said, capping the vial.

  “Not magic,” said Ian. “Science. Keeps the cells new. Key to aging is the telomere. My ‘magic potion’ stops the ends from chipping off. Like shoelaces. Keep the tips intact and you can live forever.”

  “Quatsch,” said Katarina, who knew about these things. Nonsense.

  Ian laughed. When Katarina was an eighty-year-old Hanseatic hag with boobs drooping to her buckled knees, he would be climbing mountains, flying his P-51D, and preparing for his next eighty years.

  Katarina wheeled the IV stand closer. She swabbed rubbing alcohol on his arm, then slipped the needle into his forearm and slapped on surgical tape to keep it in place. “No moving,” she said. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”

  “Zum Befehl.”

  Ian looked at the clear solution seeping into his system. His “magic potion” was a substance called phosphatidylcholine and it was a primary ingredient found in human cells, more specifically cell walls. It took the human body one year to regenerate all its cells. Ian wanted each and every one as healthy and robust as an adolescent male’s. One liter of phosphatidylcholine twice a week did the trick. To that he added his daily regime of ninety supplements, four liters of alkaline water, and a Mediterranean diet high in fish oils, nuts, and fruit.

  His thoughts turned to Gordon May and his public accusations of Ian’s having a hand in John Merriweather’s death. By all accounts Merriweather’s plane had gone down in bad weather over the Owens Valley near Lone Pine, California, an area notorious for wind shear and turbulence. No evidence of foul play or tampering was ever uncovered. Ian reviewed his actions in the affair from inception to closure. He had nothing to worry about. Everything was tied off. “Banked,” in Briggs’s word.

  Ian combated his anxiety by turning his attention to business. Work: the universal healer.

  “Pending,” he said, and a list of topics appeared in outline form superimposed on his vision: 1. Titan 2. Bluffdale 3. Clarus.

  In his right eye he wore a prototype of an augmented-reality contact lens integrated with newly i
nvented optoelectronic components, including LEDs, microlasers, and the smallest antenna ever created.

  He focused on Titan. The font darkened and grew larger. He blinked. The file opened. There, hovering in the middle distance in crisp three-dimensional form, stood the design of John Merriweather’s creation: the Titan supercomputer.

  Ian and his team had shrunk the machine as much as possible, yet it was still the size of a refrigerator. Size, however, wasn’t the problem. Heat was. After an hour of operation, temperatures inside the machine surpassed 200° Fahrenheit, wreaking havoc on the circuitry. To solve the problem, Ian had written a software patch to reprogram the cooling system. The first test of the Titan supercomputer under maximum operating conditions was set for the next morning at ten o’clock. By this time tomorrow he would know if the cooling system worked.

  Ian noticed that he was picking at his fingernails. He stopped immediately. Thirteen all over again. Well, not quite. The fat was gone, as were the overbite and the Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He had a bit more money in his wallet, too.

  He blinked twice, closing the file.

  The bag of his magic solution was only half depleted. Ian visualized the substance cleansing his cells, buffing his telomeres to a spit shine. He imagined himself in fifty years and he looked more or less the same as today, save a gray hair here and there. He didn’t want to be a freak, after all.

  He opened his eyes and stared at his figure in the mirror. Here is what he saw:

  Hair: black, thick, combed back from his forehead. Eyes: one brown, one hazel. Ethnicity: Cosmopolitan. His father was British, an Oxonian by way of Newcastle, tall, square-jawed, blue-eyed, hair black as a raven, skin pale as a day-old corpse. His mother was a platinum-haired beauty from Kiev, her Mongol blood evident in her sloe eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones. Ian wasn’t sure what that made him. His skin was the color of honey, his nose as aquiline as a Roman emperor’s. Other parts had long since been replaced or improved, and as such were no help either.

  Ian had given up a flag to claim as his own long ago. Born in London, he’d spent his childhood skipping across Europe as his father advanced rung by rung up the endless hierarchy that was the British Foreign Office. It was a tour of second-rate diplomatic backwaters, with Sofia, Tallinn, and Leipzig the shining lights among them. Still, until he was fifteen, he had considered himself the Queen’s proudest subject, as loyal as John Bull himself.

  And then, in an instant, everything changed.

  It was a rain-soaked Monday morning in Bruges, no different from any of the dismal January days preceding it. A family breakfast of eggs, beans, and sausage, or as close to a “fry-up” as his Russian mother could manage. Looking back thirty-odd years later, Ian saw the scene as if he were living it. There was the usual banter about football matches the day before. And then it was time for goodbyes. Peter Prince left first, as work demanded. Father and son rose from the table. It was their daily ritual. A handshake and a kiss on the cheek. His father was dressed no differently than on any other day. Navy pinstripe suit. Maroon silk tie. Hair parted with a razor-straight slash. Satchel in his left hand.

  “ ’Bye, son.”

  A last look over his shoulder. A door closed. And he was gone.

  Never to be seen or heard from by any living being again.

  Not dead. Not imprisoned. Not kidnapped. Not any one of a thousand explainable disappearances.

  Peter St. John Prince simply vanished into thin air.

  And so began the second half of Ian’s life.

  The unknowing.

  All this Ian saw when he looked into his own eyes.

  He’d never stopped searching for his father. And now—if the cooling system worked—he had the tool to help find him. Titan.

  Ian snapped back to the present. He focused on the second topic. Bluffdale. He blinked and the file opened. He drew up the latest photographs of the massive facility. It was alternately called the Utah Data Center, and it belonged to the National Security Agency, the United States’ most secretive intelligence organization.

  Sitting on 240 acres of land above the Jordan River in the northernmost part of the state, the Utah Data Center had one goal and one goal only: to collect the combined traffic of everything that passed through the Internet: e-mails, cell-phone calls, web searches. Everything.

  The NSA had chosen the world’s most powerful supercomputer for the task.

  In two days Ian was set to fly to the East Coast for a meeting with Titan’s most important client. The meeting was at Fort Meade, Maryland. The client was the National Security Agency. The United States government would not be pleased to learn that it had purchased a supercomputer that had a tendency to melt when operating at full capacity.

  Ian closed the file.

  The bag of his magic potion was empty.

  He pulled the needle from his arm and stood, making sure to place a wad of gauze over the puncture.

  He looked at himself in the mirror.

  So who was he, then?

  In the end, Ian preferred to think of himself in terms of numbers. Height: Five feet ten inches. Weight: 175 pounds. Body fat: 16%. IQ: 156.

  There was a last number he liked best: 58.

  As of this unpleasantly hot day in July, Ian Prince was worth $58 billion.

  8

  It was a quiet night in Pedro’s Especiale Bar and Grill in Austin, Texas.

  Tank Potter sat atop his favorite stool, elbows on the bar, eyes glued to the envelope placed in front of him. Pedro kept the joint as dark as a Brownsville cathouse, and Tank had to squint to read the words typed across its face: Henry Thaddeus Potter. Personal and Confidential.

  Only a few of the regulars were in. Dotty and Sam, the swinging septuagenarians, were swilling margaritas at one end. French and Bobby had taken claim of the TV and were cursing at ESPN at the other. Tank’s stool was in the middle. He called it his “umpire’s post,” because from it he was able to adjudicate any disagreements that might break out. He was hard to miss no matter where he sat. At forty-two years of age, he went six-four, two-fifty, with forty-six-inch shoulders. There was also the matter of his hair, which was thick, brown, and unruly and defied the best efforts of his brush. To combat any impression of carelessness, he made a point to dress neatly. This evening his khakis were pressed, his Oxford button-down starched so that it could stand on its own. As always, he wore Nocona ropers to remind him that he was a Texas boy, born and bred.

  “Pedrito,” he called, raising a hand to give the place a little excitement. “Uno más, por favor.”

  A chubby middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and a Pancho Villa mustache poured him a shot of Hornitos in a clean glass. “Good news or bad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You been staring at that envelope for the last hour. You going to open it or what?”

  “Already did.” Tank tapped the envelope on the bar, feeling the single sheet of paper slide from side to side. He was a journalist by profession, and he was hard put to come up with ninety-six words that more concisely conveyed the message on that page.

  “And?”

  “Buggy whip,” said Tank.

  Pedro opened a Tecate and placed the bottle next to the tequila. “What is a leather crop used to hit a horse to make it pull a carriage or one of them hansom cabs in Central Park? Buggy whip.”

  “Wrong,” said Tank, with a polite tilt of the bottle before he took a swig. “And you don’t have to repeat the word at the end. This isn’t a spelling bee.”

  “What do you mean, wrong? What do you think a buggy whip is?”

  “Technically, you’re correct,” Tank conceded. “But it wasn’t a question.”

  “You trying to make some kind of point?”

  “You asked about the envelope.”

  Pedro leaned against the bar. “Okay, then. Shoot.”

  And so Tank told Pedro the story.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, everyone rode horses to get around. Wagons and carriages were
the most popular means of transport for groups of people traveling any kind of distance. You couldn’t have a carriage without a buggy whip. Buggy whips were everywhere, and so were the companies that made them.

  Then one day automobiles appeared. They were regarded as marvels and quickly became objects of envy. But for many years they were too expensive for regular folk. Still, little by little the price of this newfangled invention fell. Each year more people bought automobiles and fewer people rode in horse-drawn carriages.

  “What do you think happened to buggy whips?” asked Tank in conclusion.

  Pedro drew a finger across his throat.

  “Exactly. The second cars got cheap, demand for the buggy whip collapsed. The buggy-whip manufacturers tried everything to improve their products and make them less expensive, but it didn’t matter. People couldn’t care less whether a buggy whip looked sharper or lasted longer. They were driving Model T’s, Chryslers, and Chevrolets. No one needed a buggy whip, no matter how nifty it was. Until finally one day no one was riding in a carriage at all.” Tank downed his shot and banged the glass on the bar as a fitting endnote. “Goodbye, buggy whip.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked Pedro.

  “Because you’re looking at one,” said Tank.

  “A buggy whip? I thought you were a reporter.”

  “Same thing. You’re looking at a living, breathing example of technical obsolescence. A walking anachronism. Like the abacus or the typewriter or the fax…and now the newspaper.”

  “How’s a buggy whip like a newspaper?”

  “It’s like this: a reporter is to a newspaper as a buggy whip is to a horse-drawn carriage. Follow?”

  Pedro’s face lit up. “Now I know what’s in the envelope.”

  “Well, you don’t have to look so stinkin’ happy about it.”

  Pedro frowned and retreated to the end of the bar as Tank finished his beer. He put down the empty and swiveled on his stool, looking at the piñatas hanging from the ceiling and the velvet black-light paintings of Selena and Jennifer Lopez.