Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

His paranoia is still in evidence however: the windows are bulletproof and there are high-yield explosives knitted into every wall. After many years of therapy Bug had figured out that living under a perceived state of siege was why he had ballooned up to three hundred eighty-five pounds.

“But I’d rather exercise four hours a day and eat protein powder than give up my guns and bombs,” he told me the day after he stopped going to his analyst.

Twill pulled my Pontiac into Bug’s attached parking garage.

Bug opened the front door to admit us at a few minutes past 7:00 a.m. He was wearing a plush burgundy robe and bright yellow slippers. He usually slept late but I figured that he’d want to see us as much as we wanted him.

The caramel-colored young man was a shade under six feet with the physical conditioning of a young heavyweight. He’d lost so much weight that even his face had changed shape.

“I got breakfast in the kitchen,” he said.

“We already hit Cecil’s,” Twill told him.

Bug’s living room had been designed by Zephyra. The pine floor had been replaced by bamboo and the furniture was original eighteenth-century French Provincial. I think Z just liked being able to spend two hundred thousand on settees, chairs, and tables.

“We need to find somebody in Jones’s system,” Twill said when we were seated.

“You told LT about the location devices?” Bug asked.

“The question is,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Twill’s a man,” Bug said gravely.

I wanted to argue about blood, a father’s duty, and the chain of command but there were more important things to concentrate on. Anyway Bug left the room.

He came back in a few minutes with an oversized laptop under his arm. He summoned us to an ornate table set in the bay windows. We pulled chairs next to him while he unfolded and switched on the computer. He spent a few minutes answering security questions and setting us up among the dozens of projects, operating systems, and external systems that his machines straddled.

Finally he got to a screen where each of the pages had an electronic watermark — JONESDOWN.

“Explain to me how this system works,” I said.

“It’s pretty rudimentary,” Bug began, leaning forward hungrily. “But really efficient. The units are always on, always transmitting to a satellite system that a trucking transport company uses.”

“How did he get wired into that?” I asked.

“From what Twill tells me he probably had something on one of the controllers, maybe even the CEO... Anyway, I was able to isolate the pulse and then piggyback into the system. I downloaded the virtual addresses of eight hundred ninety-six units implanted in the people he keeps track of.”

“Eight ninety-six?” Twill and I both said.

“Yeah. It’s probably more than that but that’s the people active today. I just mapped it out last night after you called,” Bug said to Twill. “I can track or derail any monitoring of the eight ninety-six. Right now I have Twill sleeping in an apartment building up in Washington Heights.”

“What about Fortune?” Twill asked.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “These devices identify themselves?”

“No,” Bug answered. “They just have four-byte hexadecimal addresses, but the Jones system associates those addresses to files. I’m tied in there so it’s easy to put a name to a pulse. The only problem is that the devices can’t be monitored underground. The last time I have a reading on your friend is him down around Wall Street.”

“Shit,” Twill said. “How long ago?”

“Six hours.”

“And he hasn’t showed up since then?”

Slowly Bug wagged his head from side to side. For a moment I remembered him as a fat man gazing through semiopaque rainbow-colored glasses at a dozen monitors hanging from a ceiling in a hole in the ground.

“I know where he is,” Twill said to me. “Problem is he been down there with half the girls on Jones’s crew. It’s this subbasement room in a construction project that’s been stalled. Fortune snipped off all the padlocks and replaced them with his own.”

“So he thinks he’s safe?” I asked.

“Prob’ly so.”

“We should be going,” I said. Then to Bug, “Do you mind if we leave our car in your garage for a bit?”

“Sure you can.”

“And turn off Fortune’s tracker,” Twill said.

“You got it.”

At the door Twill said that he had to retrieve something from the car. As soon as he was down the front stairs Bug put a hand on my shoulder.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said.

“About Zephyra?”

“How’d you know?”

“Because you only ever want advice on exercise or her.”

“I hear she went away with some guy, some prince, to South Africa.” There was a vein standing out in the middle of Bug’s forehead. It throbbed, resembling an earthworm undulating just under the surface of wet sand.

“How many women you been with in the last three months?” I asked the math genius.

“She said she wanted an open relationship,” he protested.

“That don’t mean she wants you to rub her nose in it.”

“What does she expect me to do? I asked her to marry me. She said no.”

“In my line of work, David,” I said, uttering his rarely used given name, “I find that what people say and what they mean are often quite different entities.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Twill waved at me from the curb.

“You’re a smart guy,” I said. “Work it out.”

The construction site was on Rector Street not far from Trinity Place. It was a half-block lot surrounded by a high pine-board wall. On one side there was a slender corridor that separated the site from the brown brick wall of its neighbor. Twill led me down there about thirty feet or so until we came to a jury-rigged door that had been secured by a padlock threaded through the raised eyes of two metal slats. I say “had been” because the slats had been ripped free and the door hung open.

“I thought you said he had a key,” I said.

“He does.”

I took out my.38 and Twill pushed the door open.

We entered a long pine passageway that ended at another door with the lock ripped off. The inner sanctum of the building was a broad concrete floor with the seventeen-story metal frame of the would-be office building hovering above us like the reconstructed bones of some long-extinct dinosaur.

There was a chill in the air that I hadn’t felt outside.

“This way,” Twill whispered.

On the southeast side of the site stood a box tent made of heavy brown canvas. Its door was just a slit that flapped around a bit.

“There a guard in there?” I asked my son.

“No. I mean if there was somebody he would have found out about the locks, right?”

I was about to say that maybe a guard had come and ripped off the locks but just then five men came through the slit in the canvas tent, disproving my unspoken speculation.

Five men, all of them under the age of twenty-five. Four were what must have passed for muscle in Jones’s army, and one, bleeding from the mouth and nearly unconscious, was being held up by the arms between the two largest volunteer soldiers.

We were, all seven of us, surprised.

There was no more than a few feet between us.

“Stop right there,” I said, expecting my words to become their actions because of the gun in my hand — but I was wrong.

The men holding the prisoner dropped him and lunged at me, completely ignoring the potential for death. There was a split second for me to choose — death or bruises.

My greatest weakness is that I’m not afraid of a fight and I am always confident that I will emerge the victor. The guy on the left was a light brown hue, like some chicken eggs. He reached me first. Flipping on the safety with my thumb, I slammed him in the temple and then moved to the far side of his falling body to block his compatriot while I shoved the pistol in my right-front pants pocket.