Beating Ruby (30 page)

THIRTY-THREE

The Bonsai

“My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”

—Homer,
The Iliad

Once March had picked up Sahar, I followed him and Alex through the greenhouse, then the left wing of the house. There, an apocalyptic mess awaited, made of half-destroyed baroque furniture, tangled curtains, and dead bodies. At the end of the building, a stone staircase led to the manor’s second floor. There, too, among Renaissance tapestries, damask sofas, and classic paintings, shit had gotten very real, and I didn’t dare to ask why a pair of legs dangled from under the lid of that black grand piano. March’s nostrils flared at the sight of a shattered vase, and I gathered he’d need to sort a thousand Skittles to recover from this adventure.

We reached a vast bedroom with a view on the park. The two men who had been guarding its doors were dead, but here, at least, the furniture was untouched, suggesting that no brutality had occurred. March laid Sahar’s prone body on the bed, wrapping her in the comforter with careful gestures. She seemed to have finally passed out.

After Sahar had been taken care of, two details struck me: several laptops sat on a Napoleon III desk, along with a surprising number of chocolate milk cartons. A nerd had been here. The second point was that low, insistent moan coming from an antique Chinese wardrobe. Alex walked toward the source of the noise with a contented smile and opened the heavy wooden doors to reveal a quite young, chubby blond guy, who sat gagged, tied, and handcuffed. Tears streaked down his cheeks, and his expression was that of a man who had stared death in the face. Alex pulled him out, along with a camel cashmere coat, which he handed to me. He helped the hostage to his feet while I shrugged the coat on, shaking away the strange guilt I experienced upon wearing something that was obviously Sahar’s.

Much like me back in the cellar, the guy’s legs were shaking so badly he was having a hard time standing up. A blue
Avatar
shirt suggested that he was the troglodyte creature who had consumed all that chocolate milk. Also, one of his hands looked a little red . . . and weird.

March noticed the direction of my gaze. “It’s nothing, just the left hand. He still has his right one to type.”

The guy whimpered.

My hands flew to my mouth. “You
broke
his hand?”

“Just twisted a couple of fingers.”

“March, it looks like a bonsai!”

“Now you’re being dramatic! Mr. Morgan, hold him for me, please. We’ll put these back in place.”

The victim welcomed March’s treatment plan with a muted scream while Alex locked an arm around his shoulders with a good-natured smile.

“Hmm! Hmmggnnmm!”

My body jolted as the swollen articulations snapped back in place. Something halfway between a groan and a gurgling sound erupted from the guy’s throat.

March patted his back. “See? He’s just fine.”

My heart went out to this fellow IT enthusiast. “Can we at least remove his gag?”

Alex complied, untying the piece of fabric that had been used to silence the guy.

“Please! Don’t kill me!” he squeaked in a broken sob.

“Not if you help us, young man,” March said coolly.

“He’s the one who supervised the final transfers for Sahar. He can wire the money back,” Alex explained. “We were going to make him, but we heard Sahar’s screams, saw the lights on, and came to help you.”

March narrowed his eyes at the crying boy. “We have, however, returned to finish what we started.”

His victim cowered in fear. “I’ll do anything you want! But please don’t torture me again!”

“Then put that right hand to good use,” March instructed the guy, removing his handcuffs and the rest of his bonds before helping him sit on the chair.

Alex turned to me and pointed at the screens with his chin. “Can you check that he’s not playing us?”

“Yes.”

I think March’s abuse had made a lasting impression on the guy. He diligently went through a list of accounts located in every single tax haven you could think of—and some you wouldn’t think of—and got down to business. Soon the transfers were starting, and we all watched as $698,473,510.82 changed hands in less than a minute.

Once the young hacker was done, I placed a hand on his shoulder. “There’s one last thing I need to do. Can I use your laptop?”

Truth be told, there was no need to ask politely, because, had our victim refused,
March
would have asked. And we no longer needed that right hand. But I thought even the criminal underworld needs a little humanity. The guy nodded and left me his chair. I sat down and reveled in the simple luxury of a soft cushion under my butt and an untouched can of Cacolac waiting in a USB fridge. Heaven.

My eyes started scanning the endless stack of code lines in front of me. Sahar had told the truth—this guy had been performing various tests on his copy of Ruby in order to verify March’s claim. I browsed through the files and opened the coreLaunch class. Time to test Thom’s last trick.

“What are you doing?” Alex asked, moving closer to check the screen, while behind us, I could hear March’s low voice admonishing the young hacker about the risks of working for a criminal organization.

“I’m connecting to Ricardo to retrieve Thom’s code, and I’m updating this version of Ruby with it. We’ll see what it does.”

“Is it working yet?” March asked, simultaneously babysitting the young hacker and Sahar’s prone body.

“Wait a second, I’m committing. You’re worse than some of our clients.”

As soon as the code had been updated, I relaunched Ruby. The laptops’ screens turned black, before an animated ruby appeared, glowing and spinning to signal the application’s imminent launch.

Alex’s fingers curled around the back of my chair. March held his breath.

Frankly, after everything we had been through, when the first notes rose in the air I thought Alex and March wouldn’t take the joke well. But next to me, I heard Alex’s nervous chuckle, which turned into a genuine laugh as the laptop’s speaker blared Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” while files started disappearing from the young hacker’s servers at a surprising speed.

March tilted his head, blue eyes full of boyish wonderment. “It’s a very nice song, but what is that machine doing?”

“It’s . . . It’s destroying our entire install of Ruby,” chubby boy sniffed.

“No,” I corrected. “I think it’s also getting me fired.”

Alex cocked an eyebrow; March frowned.

“It’s . . . um . . . It’s also destroying what was left of Ruby on EMT’s servers,” I clarified.

March abandoned his wards to look at the screen. “It’s destroying it all?”

I shrugged in confirmation. “I thought Thom would have created this code to help us retrieve the money or something like that. But now that I think about it, that just wasn’t the way he functioned. He figured that what was happening to him would happen again to someone else, because you simply shouldn’t create a weapon like Ruby, even if it’s just for testing purposes and you think you’ve secured it perfectly. He meant to kill his chef d’œuvre; he just wasn’t given enough time to do so.”

March seemed thoughtful. “He was a wise man. And it takes courage to wipe out everything you’ve built without looking back.”

His words lingered in my mind. Did March feel the same? That he had, as Rudyard Kipling would say, watched the things he had given his life to being broken, and that he was now building a new life back up?

I bobbed my head to the rhythm of the music. Ellingham would fire me for this, no doubt. And if word got out—although I couldn’t imagine
who
might gossip about me destroying the entire Ruby program with Thom’s help—my career in IT at large was over, nipped in the bud. Would I have to find a new purpose in life as well?

The three of us stared at the screens for a while, allowing Rick’s mantra to slowly brainwash us, until all loading bars had reached 100 percent. The screens went black. I scrunched my nose at the smell of burned plastic, which I connected with the sparks and white smoke coming from the laptops.

March pulled me back.

Hacker boy wailed. “Oh shit! It’s killing all my stuff.”

“Don’t be sad. It’s a glorious death,” I told him, even though I knew he couldn’t understand.

Outside, the sky had turned a dark blue against which the gray clouds looked almost black. Dawn was coming. I heard the hum of a helicopter in the distance. Alex’s colleagues were finally here.

He moved to one of the windows to watch the aircraft approach. “
Shit!
It’s not ours!”

His gun was armed and ready in his right hand before he had even finished speaking the words, and my heart rate was speeding up again, the flutter in my temples increasing to a painful pounding.

Near hacker boy, March stood perfectly calm. “Calm down, Mr. Morgan. Everything will be all right.”

My gaze caught his. I saw the fleeting shadow in his eyes, the hint of a sad smile. I understood.

Alex didn’t. He pointed his gun at March, causing hacker boy to fall to his knees and resume his whimpering.

“What the fuck did you do?
Who
did you call?”

I shook my head in a silent plea. “Alex, it’s for Sahar.”

Anger darkened his eyes. “You
kne
w
?
”

I shook my head, fighting the stinging in my eyes. How could Alex understand? How could he fathom the reasons March had decided to free Sahar? Ten years. Thirty-six thousand and five hundred and thirty days. Almost a third of his life. That’s how long March had killed for the Board. Killed for the Queen. It had earned him his deepest scars, but also made him who he was. Even now that he had decided to tread a new path, this bond, he could never put behind him. I wondered how I had missed this—in a twisted, unconventional way, March and Guita were friends.

And so he had called the Board, to spare Guita the humiliation and the inextricable mess of seeing her sister fall into the CIA’s hands.

My lips parted to say something, to find the words to explain the situation to Alex, but March spoke first. “Call Mr. Erwin if you want—he would have done the same.” He said, looking at Alex wearily. “You and I know that the Board’s business with the Agency won’t allow otherwise. Sahar is a diplomatic asset.”

Alex lowered his gun, while through the window I watched the black helicopter blow leaves and dirt away as it landed softly on the lawn.

“What if I refuse?”

March’s eyes closed for an instant; Alex’s resistance was testing his patience. “Then it will merely be our collective loss. Yours. Erwin’s. Mine. Your colleagues’, a handful of whom will have to pay a hefty price for such an affront to Sahar’s sister.”

At last, Alex’s posture relaxed, and his lips quirked. “You really think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

One of March’s eyelids twitched.

Alex tucked the gun back in his waistline. “You could have just shown a minimum of courtesy and warned me of your decision, Mr. November.”

My eyes traveled back and forth between the two of them. A game. Alex had feigned outrage to test March. To prove what? Probably that March’s loyalty still went to the Board and the CIA would always come second.

March walked to the bed to pick up Sahar, and we all left the bedroom, Alex escorting the young hacker with a firm hand on his shoulder. On our way out of the manor, I couldn’t help stealing a glance at Alex, searching his tranquil expression for answers. I felt so stupid for having bought into his little indignation act. It was all he had been doing since the very first day, I realized. Testing, stirring, prodding, studying. Me, March, the inextricable knot tying us together with the Board, the Lions, Erwin. Because gathering intel was his job? Of course. But I was now certain it went deeper than that. Alex wanted something from us. I thought of my conversation with him back in the plane.

“Do you know who they were, the people who killed your parents?”

“No, but I’m close.”

I still didn’t believe March to be the one. There had been countless opportunities for Alex to try to get rid of him since their first encounter, but he hadn’t acted on any of those. One could even say Alex had teamed up with his nemesis with surprisingly good grace, given the tension between the three of us, going so far as to play along and cover for March after the tram incident, when he could have leaked Struthio’s name to the press and forced March back into the shadows.

No, much like me, March was just a means to an end for Agent Morgan, nothing more. Alex apparently knew the Board well, and I gathered he understood the depth and complexity of March’s ties to Guita, more than I had given him credit for. Was this why he had first gotten angry upon realizing March had arranged for Sahar to be extracted? Maybe Alex had been hoping that the “diplomatic asset” would remain his to use as he pleased. Against Guita?

When we reached the gardens, the helicopter had stopped, the rotor blades slowing down to a lazy spin while several men dressed in dark coveralls jumped out. For now, it seemed the Board had won.