fifty-three

From the taste in my mouth, I expected to find myself in the gutter. My lips were stuck together, and my tongue felt as if I had dragged it through a pigpen. I opened my eyes and saw a blurry head. The head moved and I heard a voice.

I sat up, feeling like crap. I said, “Errrgh.”

Bobby’s bald head reflected the hospital lights. He said, “You lost a lot of blood. But the doc said that was a good thing. All the bleeding kept the duck shit out of your system.”

I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and my left arm was bandaged. It burned where the bullet had grazed me.

“Where’s my suit?”

“You mean the one with the bullet holes? They cut it off you. It looked expensive.”

Bobby surveyed me in the bed. In addition to the bandage around my biceps, I had another bandage on my ear where the bullet had nicked me, and real stitches in my side. I reached up and felt the stitches in my forehead. They were unchanged. My hands were scraped and I had skinned my knee.

Bobby said, “Jesus, you’re a fucking mess. What the hell happened?”

“Your plan worked. They tried to kill me, just like you said, and Jael saved me just like you said. You can arrest them now.”

“Who?”

“Roland, Margaret, and Dmitri—that Russian guy with the machine gun.”

“What are you talking about? Start at the beginning.”

So I did. I told them Roland had turned Margaret’s company into a sales channel for my code. How Margaret had recruited me to help her, and how the Russian guy not only made porn with Alice, but also loaned Margaret the money to save her business, and was planning to sell Rosetta to the Russians.

“It’s convergence,” I said.

Bobby said, “What?”

“Convergence. When different businesses get fused together.” I ticked businesses off on my fingers. “Dmitri has fused drug dealing, pornography, loan sharking, and prostitution into one big business. Then he put a legitimate front on it with programming services. The engineers who make his website probably also work in his consulting business.”

“So how do they get the code out of MantaSoft?” asked Bobby.

“Hell, the whole project fits on a single thumb drive. That’s all it takes to get the code out. The hard part was writing it so that other engineers could work on it. Usually, we have the designer around and we can ask questions. Otherwise the code needs to be very clear.”

“And you say it was all messed up?”

“Yeah, but Dana got me to fix it.”

“That’s why Margaret offered you a job?”

I said, “Yeah.”

Bobby crossed his arms. He breathed in through his nose, then blew it out through pursed lips. He seemed to be getting himself under control. He said, “But you fucked up.”

“How did I fuck up?”

“You should have taken the job.”

“I wasn’t going to help them. I told Margaret to go to hell.”

“Yeah, noble of you,” said Bobby. He pointed at my bandaged arm. “How did that work out? If you’d taken the job, they wouldn’t have tried to kill you. You could have gotten us some evidence. Now all we’ve got is he-said/she-said. I can’t arrest anybody based on that.”

Bobby stalked to the hospital window and looked out into the night. I sulked. He was right. If I’d just told Margaret that I’d take the job, Dmitri wouldn’t have tried to kill me. I’d have been able to package up the code to send to Bronte and then tipped off the FBI. He could have arrested them all even if the show had ended. I would have been in the inner circle.

There comes a time in the debug process where you give up on solving the puzzle intellectually. You’ve tried examining the problem; you’ve tried gathering data; you’ve tried theory after theory and had none of them work. When that time comes, you get desperate and start randomly making changes based on the barest of hunches. I wonder what this will do? I had reached that point. It was time to do something rash.

I told Bobby, “Get me out of here. Drive me back to my apartment.”

“What are you going to do?”

I told him. He wasn’t happy.