The IRIS Algorithm, page 24
“I’ll…um…sleep on the couch in the other room.” Logan reached for his watch.
“We are still married.” I scooted over on top of the covers, making room for him. A real smile involuntarily spread across my face. If my lips had just stopped there. “If you are seeing someone, I certainly understand. I mean, it would be logical for you to have exercised other options over the past decade.”
Logan snatched up his watch. “I haven’t exercised other options as you so romantically put it. Once was quite enough for me.” He started toward the door.
In an act of desperation more than inspiration, I lurched for the back of his jeans, hoping for a belt loop. Off balance from the lurch, I rolled clumsily onto the floor. For a fleeting moment, I thought of acting like I was hurt, but I doubted Logan would buy it.
“Logan, wait.” I scrambled toward the door on all fours like a beagle before I managed to get to my feet. The folks in the second floor room below us probably thought we were having a lot more fun than we were. “I am sorry. I did not mean…. What I meant…. What I am trying to say is…” I sat down in the floor. “Hell, I do not know what I am trying to say.”
No matter how hard I tried, no matter what I intended, my single strongest talent was to grate on people’s last nerve at the worst possible time.
“Forget about it.” He lowered himself onto the couch, grimacing against his multitude of pains. “Get some rest.”
“I do not want to forget about it.”
“Well, I do. Just leave it alone.” He shifted trying to get comfortable. “We don’t need to get into this right now. It’s already tomorrow.”
It was undeniably true. It was already tomorrow. There wasn’t going to be any night before. Just a long, arduous, heartbreaking tomorrow. And no promise of a day after tomorrow.
That is why it had to be now.
I followed him to the couch. “Logan, we need to talk. At least, I need to talk, and I need you to listen.” He sat up and leaned back into the end of the cream-colored sofa. I sat cross-legged, facing him, knees touching his right thigh. That was the first test, to see if he recoiled at my touch. So far, so good.
“I never wanted it to be like this. I haven’t had a choice in how things since I was eight years old. I thought I could change it, but I was wrong.”
“We all have choices,” his voice was flat. “You made yours. I made mine. It was a choice, not a fate.”
I took a chance and put my hand on his. “I wonder.” Quick calculations put the chances of him leaving his hand there at less than 30 percent. It stayed. “I cannot unknow what I know, this curse of knowledge, and this whole secret of the universe thing. It is not a choice.”
“Then stop thinking about it. Put it away. I’ve had to do things. Questionable things. When it’s over, I put it away. It’s over. I go on.”
“I do not think about it. It’s just there all the time. Like breathing. Did you put away what happened to Ricky?” I was on thin ice, but I had to make him understand.
Logan drew a deep, ragged breath. “No. I suppose not.” I saw him pull at his painful memories, thorns in the side of his tired soul. “I never told you how my parents died. You never asked, so I supposed you didn’t want to know.” He managed a knowing smirk, as if to say it was okay.
I waited for him to go on, but he did not.
“The truth is, I did not want to know,” I said. “Not because I did not care. I was just so focused on guarding my own past, my own calamities. I was afraid that if I asked about yours, you would ask about mine.” I stared at his shirtless body, bruised and scraped, bandaged, and smelled peroxide and soap, felt the unrelenting passion in the heat of his hand. “I was wrong. I should have asked. I should have told you about my past. I am sorry.”
The faint hum of the old hotel, the trickling sounds of life and time passing filled the moment with a clarity that only comes in the small hours in a strange place.
“I encouraged them to do something with the money they had saved for my college tuition,” Logan said. “It was hard for them to put aside the money. When I got a football scholarship, it was suddenly extra. A luxury they never had. It wasn’t easy, but I talked them into doing something for the two of them for a change. Take a trip, go some place they always wanted to go. My parents weren’t very adventuresome. They decided to go to England. At least they could speak the language, sort of. Nothing could go wrong in England.” He paused for an eternity.
I gently squeezed his hand. “But something did go wrong.”
“A terrorist bomb on a double-decker bus. Thirty-one people died.” He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa but left his hand in reach. “It was my senior year in college. They didn’t see me graduate. They didn’t get a chance to retire after all those years of hard work. They didn’t get to be doting grandparents.” His voice trailed off.
“It was not your fault. You could not have known it would turn out that way.”
Logan looked me square in the eye: his eyes deep and dark, heavy with murderous resolve. “That’s the difference between me and you. I know it wasn’t my fault. It was the fault of two worthless mutts. They slipped out of England and slithered back to their masters in Syria, lived like heroes while they waited for their next assignment. I decided to do something about it.”
“Did you… I mean, were you able to…?”
“By the time I’d been in the military long enough to get into Special Ops, nobody ever heard of them. They were nobodies. Years later, after the rendition teams got into full swing after 9/11, we took care of a thousand scumbags just like them.”
“I do not understand how you hid that side of yourself from me. I can only imagine how you must have felt, but none of it showed.” I hesitated. “I could never have fallen in love with someone so full of hate, even if it was for a good reason.” I cringed at my own words, but Logan took it in stride.
“That was the beauty of it.” He looked relieved. “When I met you, everything changed. I didn’t care about revenge anymore. I only cared about every minute of every day with you. It would take some time to unwind my involvement. They don’t let you just phone in and say I quit. From the day I met you, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Why did you not tell me?”
“I thought getting married was me saying I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Why did you not tell me about your career, your past, and your plans to get out?”
Logan paused for a long moment. “Like you said, you could never be in love with someone so full of hate, even if it was for a good reason. I don’t blame you. If you had known what I had done, what I was capable of, could you have looked at me the same way? Could you have ignored it and loved me?”
I put the numbers and words aside. They were in the way. I let my heart take control, like that night in Munich so many years ago. I straddled my beautiful beat up husband on a small sofa in a Bavarian hotel room, my jeans tight against his, and kissed him so passionately, I saw stars.
It is not tomorrow until the sun comes up.
CHAPTER 56
MOBILE, ALABAMA – 9:12 P.M. CDT
The performance at the Saenger Theater ended at nine o’clock with the usual cultured applause. Obadiah pushed through the brass, framed doors and onto the sidewalk’s cobblestone pavers. As usual, he pondered why the design of the ornate classic, French Renaissance, Saenger Theatre, recalling the mythology of ancient Greece, had been coupled with useless coastal lowlife, seahorses, mollusks, and starfish. The Saenger was older than Obadiah by a few years looked equally tired, pale, and sullen. He drew a deep breath of heavy, humid air and walked along South Joachim Street.
All glory is fleeting.
Momentarily separated by the well-heeled crowd, Virtue caught up with her father by the time he reached the first gas lamp, flickering warm light into the sultry night. Having never paid attention before, Obadiah stopped to stare at the gas lamp. The weak orange flame, hidden behind smoky panes of glass, avoided the random puffs of warm wind. He moved on.
At the next lamp, one pane was broken and the wind—gentle though it was—flirted cruelly with the flame. Transfixed, Obadiah watched until the flame winked closed.
A man near his end sees every, bitter irony that mocks his dwindling days.
“Did you enjoy the performance, Father?” His daughter’s inquiry was neither polite nor respectful. The provocation rang in his ear. He ignored her and crossed Dauphin Street, turned right, and walked into Bienville Square. The rundown park wooded by live oaks planted in the 1850’s, the overnight domain of Mobile’s winos and park bench campers, was the perfect place for assassins to strike.
Let it be over.
“I know how you love classical music,” Virtue said. “I thought you would enjoy the special performance of Schubert’s string quartet.”
Indeed. Franz Schubert’s string quartet #14 in D Minor, Der Tod und das Madchen. “Death and the Maiden.”
“Father, what was Mother really like?”
Insolent bitch.
Obadiah clenched his jaw and walked toward the darkest part of the park. Just like her mother.
With Fagon out of the country, it had been easier to have the security forces step back. Obadiah removed everyone from the main house, where his office was, and from his residence next door. As far as the well-trained, but mindless security personnel knew, or cared, he made separate security arrangements for those areas. The darkest part of a lonely park was the perfect spot. The CIA stalking horses had wanted him dead for decades. Now they had a clear shot. Why weren’t they taking it? A terrifying thought weakened him. What if they didn’t care anymore?
“Was she pretty, Father?” Virtue’s icy words chilled the warm summer night and choked the smell of sweet olive with the whiff of rancid meat. “I often wonder if it was my fault she left. Did I cry too much? Did I make her tired and desperate with my childish needs? If she would just come home, I would promise to do better.”
Exiting the park onto St. Joseph Street, regrettably unharmed, Obadiah had a thought worse than being irrelevant. What if there was a God?
“Do you know what Patience does to me, Father?” Virtue’s voice echoed in the deserted street, ringing with the clarity of undeniable truth. “What she has done to me since I was fourteen years old?”
As Virtue described, in vivid and disgusting detail, things no father should ever hear, Obadiah walked into the middle of the street and prayed for a shot to ring out.
No assassin replied. As they moved closer to home, Virtue, his good daughter, continued to cut him with a scalpel, blades sharp, assault precise, steady and unafraid. Each word carved at the little flesh he had left. He staggered up the steps of his antebellum residence, dark and desolate, uninviting. His youngest child called to him from the glow of a gas lamp.
“You knew Mother would never come back. You watched me hope day, knowing it would never happen. You made sure she was permanently gone. You were wrong, Father.”
He heard the trembling in her voice before she screamed with animal fury.
“You were wrong, you murdering bastard! She did come back! She came back for me!” Virtue slammed her fist into her chest. Hot tears flowed from flaming eyes: accusing, condemning, hating with visceral purity. “Her words came back for me! I have the tape. I have her last words, and she was thinking of me: “The children, Obadiah!” Virtue glared at her father with boundless hatred.
The good daughter definitely had her mother’s eyes.
CHAPTER 57
MUNICH, GERMANY – 10:03 A.M. CEST
I faced the unforgiving midmorning sun through the Euro-mod sunglasses Logan bought me at the cluttered shop next to Coffee Fellows. Thankfully, he had his wallet and credit cards. We crossed a busy street and paused on a curious triangular island of meticulously inset cobblestones.
The ancient, gothic structure rising from the island was out of place even in old Munich. An appropriately ancient man knelt beside a wheelbarrow containing a dozen or so cobblestones and a bag of sand. He carefully tapped a replacement stone into place and poured white sand into the cracks. Despite the random dimensions of the stones, he created a pattern of repeating arches with stones in threes and fives. The old man in dusty blue coveralls was an unwitting geometer, obliviously going about God’s work. If you know what to look for, the shapes of primes are everywhere.
Holding a large, paper coffee cup, wrapped with a ridiculous cardboard collar, I wondered whose bright idea it was to put scalding hot coffee in a paper cup when Styrofoam worked just fine. I wondered if I looked as blurry to people walking by as they looked to me. Logan leaned in the spade shaped archway of the pitted ancient structure and pretended to read the morning newspaper while we waited for Günter.
During an earlier call with Farki, I was jittery and a little nauseous, woefully out of sorts. Farki reminded me my body thought it was two in the morning not nine, and I immediately felt worse. Knowledge is often like that.
I felt weirdly spacey, on the verge of either giggling or crying. My mind had definitely separated from my aching body.
“This is the Isartor. One of the four main gates of the medieval city wall.” I glanced at Logan to see how impressed he was. “Built in 1337. There’s a humor museum inside.” With a smirk, he looked up from his newspaper. He glanced from me to the plaque I read. I shrugged. “You said act like tourists.”
He nodded and smiled. It was the first time I had seen him smile since I dragged him into all this. Last night did not count. To be honest, I did not notice if he smiled last night. I was too busy discovering that thankfully, even if you do not use it, you do not lose it.
“Let’s stroll down to the river Isar,” Logan said. “The museum of Science and Technology is just across the river. Lots of people. We’ll walk right past the apartment and AEM.”
Summertime in Munich. Tourists with beer hall, oompah bands echoing in their ears, wandered in packs, walking off beer and weisswurst. A middle-aged man in lederhosen stood across the street. His pale round wife and two, plump, teenage boys completed the Bavarian set. The traffic light changed, and the lederhosen man, along with a herd of fifty other pedestrians, proceeded in orderly, German fashion across the meticulously marked pathway: fat, dumb, and happy in their own way. Next week I would be the one they thanked for ruining their lives.
God, I understand why you told me if I shared this knowledge I would surely die. I just do not understand how you expect me to do anything different to save my son. I know you gave your son to save the world, but honestly, I am not willing to do that. Not even close. The world is not worth it.
“Logan, if Farki can isolate AEM’s data center and give me a path to their servers, I can get in, then it is a matter of locating IRIS and destroying it. But I do not understand how we are going to rescue Samuel with anything short of a small army.”
“The small army will come tomorrow, after Stafford informs the authorities. At that point, our hands will be tied. Most likely, literally.”
“By then, IRIS could be propagated to a thousand hacker servers around the globe. We’ll never be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
“I hope Fagon and AEM have more important things on their minds than considering whether we will do something as stupid and desperate as… well, what I mean….”
“I ran the numbers. I understand. This definitely qualifies as stupid and desperate. Specifically, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to keep it as simple as possible.” Logan automatically scanned the busy street. “Farki said he needed a couple of hours. We’ll use that time to recon the AEM facility and the apartment building. Günter has had surveillance going since last night. Hopefully, security is not that tight on the apartment. Samuel’s a kid. They won’t worry about him trying anything bold. Maybe they’ll move him. I don’t know. There’s always some weakness to exploit. We just have to find out what it is.”
The painfully bright, Bavarian sun went behind a cloud, and I reached to remove my new sunglasses before I realized it was just Günter approaching. A sleek and lanky, blonde fraulein, who, in her own way, looked more dangerous than Günter accompanied him. A German sports car, definitely high performance in everything she did. Her straight blonde hair followed orders and spilled over her tanned bare shoulders. It was ridiculous, but my mind went to last night.
I needed to step up my game. If I only have sex once every ten years, I have plenty of time to practice. I imagined Fraulein Lanky had tattoos under those perfectly fitted hip-hugger jeans. Probably under her backless, black halter-top slung loosely over her braless 36 C’s. Fraulein Lanky’s arsenal was in plain view. No concealed weapons. It was disturbing, but I knew if she offered to show me her tattoos like Marcy once did, I would have to look, if for research purposes only.
“Guten tag, Logan.” Günter’s eyes were obscured by black wrap around shades, making it impossible to tell exactly where he was looking. From Günter’s vantage point, Fraulein Lanky’s backside would have been the logical direction. “Meet Helga. Don’t let her looks fool you. She has much operational experience.”
I never doubted that. She did not offer a hand. Her sultry, brown eyes and little pouty smile said she would happily offer more at the right time. I wanted to find her instantly annoying, but I could not stop looking at her long enough.
Apparently unaffected by five-feet-ten-inches of raw sultriness, Logan sounded too casual. I did a quick scan and was gratified to see his eyes were on the newspaper.
“Great. I need to see the layout around the AEM facility and the apartment. Can we get close enough without being spotted?”
