T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

Wynn passed through the dismal lobby and rejoined the tourist hordes, just another Washington suit. When Carter caught up Wynn demanded, “Exactly when were you planning on telling me about all this?”

His chief aide shot back, “You made a big mistake back there. And it cost us.”

“Would it be too much trouble to put me in the loop here?”

“Big mistake.” Carter stopped on a relatively quiet stretch of sidewalk and glared at his new boss. He was unattractive in a distinctly Florida cracker manner-piggy eyes, curly reddish hair going patchily bald, sizable gut. Utterly un-Washington in appearance, wearing a rumpled blue blazer, button-down Oxford shirt, stained tie, pressed chinos. “You missed out on a chance to score by asking for something in return.”

“That’s what was behind this, they wanted to size me up?” The slow burn intensified. “I’ll do better next time.”

Carter snorted and turned away. “That was your one and only. You’ve now been dismissed as somebody who’ll be gone before you matter.”

“I’m not through here,” Wynn said, his voice sharp enough to command Carter’s full attention. “What’s going on with this Jubilee Amendment?”

“What difference does it make? You’re just a caretaker, right?”

“I want to know.”

“Don’t bother. It’s totally over your head.” Carter’s sneer finally surfaced. “Eighteen months of embassy parties and scoring with the power groupies, and you’re extinct.”

Wynn watched in amazement as the man walked away, dismissing his own boss as he would a bad smell. Unbelievable. Wynn no longer cared whether the party chairman had an ulterior motive for wanting Carter Styles gone. The man was definitely history.

But before Wynn could call him back a second time, his cellphone sounded. He watched Carter’s departure as he said, “Bryant.”

“Good afternoon, Congressman. Might I please ask where you will be tonight?”

The voice was male, but lilting with softness and foreign vowels. And utterly unfamiliar. “Who is this?”

“Libretto is my name. Father Libretto. I bring very best wishes from your sister.” He had the brisk cheeriness of one utterly alien to Wynn’s new world. “A newly arrived man of power such as yourself, surely you were planning to join Washington society at one place or another this evening.”

“I don’t-”

“Consider it a request for information passed by your dear sister, Sybel.”

Wynn answered numbly, “The British embassy.”

“An excellent choice. Until tonight, then.” The phone clicked dead.

Wednesday

Colin Ready logged off his main computer, a final act that occurred only when he was leaving for the day or going upstairs. One dimension of reality suspended to make room for another. Points of convergence altered across space and time. Colin hesitated a long moment, then decided there was no alternative but forward motion. He left the safety of his cubicle, padded down the long line of fluorescent caves, waved his pass at the electronic doors, and entered the maelstrom.

Once strictly a magnet for kids hunting mouse ears and Sleeping Beauty dunce caps, Orlando was now enduring ravenous expansion and the fastest service-sector growth in the United States. Many large New York companies were either relocating south or sending down their peripheral operations. The lure of cheap land and hourly wage rates sixty percent below those in the Big Apple proved too hard to resist. Schwab was the latest Wall Street defector, now running a huge campuslike operation near Winter Park and employing over two thousand people, most of them techies.

Farther south, in the former no-man’s-land between the airport and the Kissimmee sprawl, another series of collegiate buildings housed the Hayek Funds Group. With fewer than nine hundred employees, Hayek was small by Schwab standards. Yet Hayek had moved not only its ops center but the whole shooting match-funds management, bonds, derivatives, foreign exchange, international corporates, everything. The move made Wall Street Journal headlines for over a month, because this was the first U.S.-based hedge fund that saw no need for a substantial Wall Street presence. Some called it an indication of Hayek’s personal power, a man so good at his job that the money would follow him to Patagonia if required. Whatever the reason, Hayek was now the largest hedge fund and currency trader based south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Orlando’s recent influx of computer-driven companies had resulted in a sudden dearth of specialists. High-tech headhunters swooped about like vultures over roadkill. Salaries had risen. The search had moved farther afield, then farther still. Which was how Colin came to be there at all.

The Hayek Group’s trading room floor was a windowless box, three-quarters of an acre in size. Three hundred desks. Two glassed-in balconies. The wall clocks now read a half hour past Wall Street’s closing bell, and the place stank of tension and money and deodorant-tainted sweat. Couriers scurried. Traders shouted and gestured and cursed and attacked their boards. The room was littered with paper shreds, remnants of that day’s kills. Normally Colin fed upon the floor’s energy. The buzz, as much as the money, was why he stayed around. The trading room was an incredible high, like working inside a war zone without the flak. At least, it had been so before his personal universe had tracked upon a dark and deadly orbit.

Eyes followed Colin’s progress along the back of the trading room floor. He was an enigma, the techie granted access both to the floor and the people upstairs. He was called upon whenever traders’ hardware glitched and was almost always able to offer a quick solution. He was known to be soft-spoken, almost apparition-like, and available when needed. One day he had simply appeared out of nowhere; the next he was indispensable. And that accent. One moment southern, the next foreign as warm red beer.

Colin entered the elevator and used his pass to access the penthouse. In truth, Hayek’s offer had rescued him from the dicey realm of gray-market e-theft, scamming money as a sometime game designer, but mostly living for the forbidden rush.

Colin Ready was a white-hat programmer, a former hacker now working for the people he had formerly sought to break and enter. Colin studied his reflection in the elevator’s polished brass doors, saw a man in his late twenties with a narrow build and smooth ageless features, a weak mouth, mousy brown hair, and the eyes of a corpse. No outward sign of techie mania. No pager, no palm-pilot, no bottle-bottom glasses. Trembling slightly now, but extreme nerves were standard in forays to the penthouse.

Colin entered Hayek’s outer office and squinted against the glare. His cubicle was two rows removed from a window, and here the afternoon light branded his eyeballs. The senior secretary knew him so well by now, she did not even ask if his errand was urgent. Nothing less would have brought Colin upstairs. He seated himself and waited with the suppressed tension of one who knew he was the bearer of vital data.

Colin’s father was British, his mother a true Georgia fireball. After years of legendary battles, they had finally split when Colin was eight. Which had left him spending summers in Leeds, winters wherever his mother happened to be wed that season. For years he had lived with the knowledge that he was born to solitude, his only friends fenced beyond electronic barriers of his own creation. Once there had been another, Lisa, a truly chaste woman so far as computers went. The impossible love. He had lost her earlier that spring, and now his heart lurched with a permanent limp.

“Mr. Ready?” The senior secretary was a narrow-faced woman turned old by her work, with eyes that only feigned feelings, and not well. “Mr. Hayek will see you.”