Terminal Value Part 16

"How long did you know Tony? How did you meet?"

"A mutual friend hooked us up. Five years ago. I liked talking shop with the kids. And Tony was one of the few who gets it. He had a feel for complex software. We'd get together every few months when he wanted to run something by me. Very advanced stuff."

"I know. A smartphone that converts into a virtual laptop."

Brandon laughed. "Yeah. And other things."

"Like what?"

Brandon shrugged.

"Look. I need to know what you helped him with before he died."

"Who said I was helping him with anything?"

"This drawing he sent to me." He pulled a copy of Tony's schematic from his jacket and handed it to Brandon. "Notice your name at the bottom?"

"Oh s.h.i.+t. Who else saw this? Just you-right? Jesus, I risked my life to go to that funeral, for a friend! And look what it gets me!" He grabbed a bottle of Scotch whisky from the bag, opened it, and took a long swig.

"I doubt anyone else noticed you were there."

"Are you kidding?" He leaped up and staggered to the window. "You did! Are the cops looking for me?"

Dylan found himself staring into the face of paranoia. "Not that I know of. They don't exactly confide in me." He took a deep breath. "I have to tell you something. But you really can't tell anyone else."

A slow grin broke out over Brandon's face. "You're asking me if I can keep a secret?"

"Well, yeah. Just for a while. Until-just for a while."

"Uh-huh. And if I don't agree, you'll rat me out to the IRS-right?"

Dylan raised his chin. This was Tony's friend. Tony's mentor. Paranoia personified, if Dylan was any judge of character. He shook his head. "Nope."

"But you could," insisted Brandon peevishly.

"Jesus." Dylan looked at him in disgust. "Tony was right. You are kinda crazy." He waited for a moment, then continued. "Tony was murdered."

Brandon stopped and stared at him. "What? Man!" His mouth dropped open, and he sat down again. "Murder? As in homicide?"

"Yeah."

"I got nothing to do with this!" He jumped up and paced back and forth, staring at the floor, running his fingers through his messy hair.

"I know that." Or probably knew it now, anyway. "But you know what Tony was working on-right? And maybe you know who was involved and who would have been negatively affected by his success."

"'Negatively affected.' I love the way you suits talk." He took another swig from the bottle. "You mean f.u.c.king jealous enough to want to kill him-right?"

"Yeah."

"Man. Ain't this a trip down memory lane for yours truly." He turned and took a few steps toward the bathroom, then turned back. "You ever received a death threat?"

"No."

"It's not fun. It makes you feel-small. I'm talking mouse small. It makes you decide you'll do anything you have to do so that you don't ever get a death threat again. And the funny thing is? Even when you pay the piper, his tune never really changes. You're always hearing it, always looking under the bed." He opened the laptop case and reached inside. "Checking the closet, the liquor cabinet, the-oh! Look what I found!"

Dylan found himself staring down the muzzle of a squat black gun. "s.h.i.+t," he whispered. His heart raced, shooting adrenaline through his veins. He backed up, his mind racing for a plausible exit.

"Yeah. I carry it with me wherever I go. Just for you. You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds chewed me up and spit me out, but even so, I'm kinda attached to what's left of my life." His eyes turned dark, his glance darted around the room. He licked his lips and started pacing.

"Ditto," Dylan whispered. Was there a way out of this? The door was five yards away. His phone was closer.

"I bet." Brandon staggered, then regained his balance.

"Brandon, you don't want to do this."

"I know I don't. But I will if I have to."

"I left a message telling the cops I'm here. If you kill me, they'll nail you for sure. They'll nail you for homicide. Tony's and mine!"

"Me?" His bleary eyes bugged out. "They think it was me that killed Tony?"

Dylan frowned. "Wasn't it?"

"No! Jesus, what do you take me for?"

"So you didn't do it?"

"No!"

"Then what the f.u.c.k are you pointing a gun at me for!"

"Because I thought it was you! Oh." Brandon put a hand over his mouth, then looked at the gun. "What the h.e.l.l am I doing?"

"I have no idea."

"Sorry." He dropped the gun back in the laptop case and fell into the chair. "I get a little crazy when people talk about technology in the same sentence as death."

Dylan had no idea what Brandon was talking about and considered it better to just slump into a chair. He picked up a napkin and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. "Sorry," he said.

"Me too."

For a moment, Brandon smiled sweetly, reminding Dylan for the first time of Tony. They sat for a while in silence, while the clock on the nightstand ticked. Dylan pondered what to do next. "If I can find out anything that will help the police, I want to do that. They don't seem to have much of an appreciation for the kind of life Tony led. Or what his work was about."

"Any leads?"

Dylan smiled and rested his head on the back of the chair. "Look, I've had a long day-"

"Hey, if you want to know, I was in Arizona at the time, communing with the Anasazi." He pulled a wad of receipts and ticket stubs from the outer pocket of his laptop case and spread them on the coffee table.

Dylan glanced through them. Hotel receipts in the name of Dunlop Prince, an airline ticket from Newark to Tempe, receipts for purchases from the Sonora Trading Post.

"Okay. You're off the hook."

"Nice to know, but I want more than that. You say Tony was a friend of yours. Well, he was a friend of mine too. How can I help? Fill me in. Who do you suspect?"

Dylan eyed Brandon. As crazy as he had seemed five minutes before, now he seemed terribly, terribly sane. "I don't have a good list. What I need is a solid motive."

"And how are you going to get that?"

"I don't know. I'm just going to keep peeling things back until I find it. But I think Tony discovered something very serious. I got a voice-mail from him saying he was sending me a file, but I never got it."

"Really?"

"Of course, that would mean it's on one of his computers. But the police haven't been able to find anything on Tony's home computer, and Ivan, our chief of security-"

"No one ever will crack it."

Dylan tightened his lips, overwhelmed with disappointment.

"You said you don't believe I killed Tony. So what do you want me to do?"

"How about hacking into the hard drive of his computer at the office?"

Brandon leaned forward. "I'm sure anything that came or went to his hard drive is already in the hands of your chief of security."

"I doubt that. Tony would-"

"Tony would never have been stupid enough to put anything important on his office computer. He would have known everything that moves on the LAN is subject to company surveillance." Brandon smiled like a cynical cherub. "Every e-mail you type, every website you visit, every phone call you make, every file you download, share, or even store-h.e.l.l, every friggin' keystroke is accessible by the powers that be." He looked away and started humming "Every Breath You Take."

Brandon was right, of course. What if everything he had said to Tony, to Rob, to Heather, had been observed? Was this what Tony had sensed that day in his office when he knew something was not right? "Then we're f.u.c.ked," he said.

"Not necessarily. Lateral thinking, Mr. Johnson. It's true you'll never crack Tony's hard drive, but let's take another approach. Where did Tony get the files you are looking for?"

"How can I tell unless I've seen them?"

"Oh come on. He got them from Mantric, didn't he?"

"Maybe." Dylan frowned. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Obviously not. But, in fact, what you're probably talking about are records of some sort that Tony accessed and copied from some server or other at Mantric-right?"

"Yeah, probably." Dylan looked up. His mind became active again.

"Almost certainly." Brandon treated Dylan to a smug smirk. "So the only question remains: can you get access to the root directory of Mantric's administrative server?"

"What do you mean?"

"And you consider yourself a technologist?" Brandon cackled. "The root directory is like the root of a tree, and all branches stem from it. Get into it, and you can get into anything."

Dylan felt embarra.s.sed. "Actually, I depended on Tony to do the deep technology stuff. I primarily handle the client accounts."

"That explains it. A suit!"

Dylan ignored the insult as thoughts began to trip over themselves in his mind. Could he get into the administrative server without being discovered? That would certainly be easier than hacking into Tony's computer. "Say I can hack in," said Dylan. "What good does it do me, other than instantly getting me fired-or worse-the second I'm discovered? Which I will be, because, as you know, all of those directories are constantly monitored to make sure whoever is accessing them has the correct privileges."

"That's a piece of cake."

"For you, maybe." Dylan eyed him. "If you're willing to come to Mantric and hack into-"

Brandon laughed. "Oh, no-but I can give you a script to run that will allow you to hack in without being identified, and without being observed."

Excitement surged through Dylan. This guy was good-and could probably do anything. He might even be able to let Dylan have his way with the files for an hour or so. Dylan leaned back in his chair. Could this really work? Could he dig into Mantric and find incriminating evidence? Would he be caught? "I don't know, Brandon."

"I understand. But I'm going to send you a file-very anonymously, of course-with instructions on how to use it. If you want to, you can."

"Prometheus giving fire to humanity again? Aren't you afraid of the eagle?"

"Pfft. This is nothing, Mr. Johnson. Anyone with a proper understanding of root directories and sophisticated scripts who thought about it for an hour or two could come up with it."

Dylan eyed him carefully. Brandon sat wrapped in his stained tweed jacket, his s.h.a.ggy hair sticking out in all directions. In no way did he look like Dylan had envisioned. He was neither a mythological creature nor a multi-millionaire. And that, Dylan suddenly realized, was the point. This was a man who buried his true ident.i.ty deep.

"One more thing. I need you to tell me what Tony was working on." Dylan nodded toward the schematic on the table.

Brandon blinked at him. "Isn't it obvious? It's magical and wonderful at the same time. And it would have changed the world. It's a design for wireless electricity. Imagine a world where you could have all of your electronic devices constantly powered without being plugged in."

"Jesus! How do you know that?"

"Hah! I double-majored in computer science and electrical engineering in college. It wasn't all about the ones and zeros, you know! Anyway, this baby would sure shake up the mobile computing world, among other things. The ramifications are huge, not just for technology, but for everything in everyday life!" Brandon grabbed the sketch. "See this coil? It has a capacitor that resonates and pulses at alternating currencies. If you bring another device close enough to it, you can get them to couple and transfer magnetic energy between them. So it goes from electricity to magnetic fields and back to electricity."

"Sounds dangerous."

"That's what everyone says. But it's not a radiative technology. It's just a magnetic field that's basically the same as the earth's magnetic field. And it's converted back into electricity only by the devices, nothing else."

"Oh my G.o.d! So maybe someone did kill Tony for this!"

"Do you really think so, Dylan?" Brandon said with a smirk. "You may find out if you follow my script."

Dylan's mind was like a beehive of thoughts. What did all of this have to do with the file Tony sent him? Was it about this or Mantric? "I don't know," he muttered.

"If they murdered Tony for this, why would they have left the sketch behind?"

"That's just it. They didn't leave it behind. Tony mailed it to me."

"Very interesting indeed," Brandon said, eyeing the sketch. "Give me a day to cover my tracks, and I'll send you the script. To your private e-mail addy. We don't want security stumbling across it."

"You don't know my private e-mail."

Brandon smiled a secret, ironic smile.