Body Work (37 page)

At my office, Tessa was working on some immense steel thing. While I went into my files, Mr. Contreras pulled up a stool to watch her. Tessa doesn’t usually tolerate an audience, but Mr. Contreras was a machinist in his working life, and she respects his advice on tools.

Chad had stuffed his girlie pix inside a copy of
Fortune,
and I’d left them bundled together when I put them into the file. The issue dated to before the economy’s collapse: there was an article on the high demand for luxury goods and the way you could make the middle class feel they were part of the hyper-wealthy elite. Another teaser claimed that
Fortune
had tested the iPhone against all comers. A third asked, “Will a change of owner change Achilles’ fortunes?”

I had removed the girlie magazines and was thumbing through them looking for Alexandra Guaman’s face, wondering if I would recognize it floating airbrushed above improbable breasts, when I did a double take on the Achilles headline. I had read it online when I was looking up background on Tintrey.

I went back to
Fortune
to reread the story. Tintrey had acquired Achilles, the maker of body armor, when it became obvious that the war in Iraq was going to last for a long time. Achilles had been developing nanotechnology, using particles I’d never heard of and wasn’t sure I could pronounce. Inorganic, fullerene-like nanostructures. They apparently were “gallium-based,” whatever that was, and stronger than steel. In a photograph of one of the particles blown up a few hundred times, the stuff looked pretty much like the cement they were pouring into potholes on the Kennedy Expressway.

Achilles had been losing money; R & D doesn’t come cheap.
Fortune
had a lot to say about shortsighted corporate policy that let Wall Street’s insatiable demand for current-quarter profits block long-term development strategies. Anyway, the long and the short of it was, Tintrey bought Achilles, which was bleeding red ink too fast to fight off a hostile takeover bid.

Jarvis MacLean’s first order of business was a campaign to sell Achilles shields to the Department of Defense. Some Achilles staffers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed concern that Tintrey was marketing a product that wasn’t ready for full-scale production. Yet the new owners had spent almost ten million dollars on building a PR campaign.

“When you’re making a new product, why worry about graphic design? Why not put the money into hiring a good science team?” asked one former member of the R & D staff.

Indeed, Tintrey has been downsizing the R & D division since acquiring Achilles. “They have a great product in place. We need to focus now on getting it into the hands of our troops, not on endlessly refining it,” said Gilbert Scalia.

As head of Tintrey’s Enduring Freedom Division, it’s Scalia’s job to outfit the nine thousand Tintrey employees in Iraq and to provide matériel to the U.S. Armed Forces deployed around the world.

A year after acquiring Achilles, Tintrey has already changed the profit picture at the division. Maybe the new publicity did the trick.

The magazine showed some of the PR materials, including the Achilles logo: a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis. This was the design on the black mitt I’d found in Chad Vishneski’s duffel. And it was the design Nadia Guaman had been painting on the Body Artist.

I read the article through carefully twice, curled up on the couch in my client corner with the dogs at my feet. I learned a bit about the structure of fullerene nanoparticles, at least, I learned they were named for Buckminster Fuller, but not much else.

The article had been important to Chad Vishneski, important enough that he kept it alongside his girlie magazines. And he’d cut holes in one of the armor mitts. But why he’d done it would have to wait until he regained consciousness—or Sanford Rieff at Cheviot labs found out a dramatic secret about the shield.

Neither John Vishneski nor Tim Radke had ever heard Chad talk about the armor. But Chad’s squad had been killed around him: that was when he lost the equilibrium that carried him through his first deployments. Maybe he blamed Tintrey for the failure of their armor in protecting his men and was savaging their equipment as a way to vent his feelings of helplessness.

I called Vishneski. He’d had to go to a jobsite, a building far enough along that they were working on the interior, but he said Chad’s status continued to improve.

“The docs are all pretty optimistic. He hasn’t been speaking anymore, at least, he hadn’t before I left this morning, but he’s restless in a good way, they say. The police have been around some, wanting to know if he’s well enough to go back to prison, but that Dr. Herschel, she’s a pistol, isn’t she? She told them where to get off.”

I silently blew Lotty a kiss. “No strangers have come around to try to see him?”

“Not that I know of. But I’ll talk to Mona. Of course, we don’t know who his friends are, so they’d all be strangers to us. But, like I said, some of my buddies are hanging around. They’ll let me know if anyone comes calling.”

That was one less worry, at least for now. When he’d hung up, I started looking for Rodney Treffer. He wasn’t in the morgue, so I called around to the hospitals on the near North Side. I hadn’t heard back from Finchley or Milkova. And I wanted to find out how much time I had before Rodney was fit enough to come after me. I said I was Sunny Treffer, searching for my brother. He was supposed to meet me for breakfast this morning and never showed, and given his history of psychosis, I was worried whether he’d had some breakdown and been brought in.

I was lucky with the third place I called. The ER charge nurse told me Rodney had injured himself in a fall but didn’t seem to be having a psychotic episode when he was with them. They’d kept him overnight for observation and discharged him an hour ago. He’d had a concussion and some brain swelling, but they’d done a second CT scan before they released him; the swelling had gone down.

“You’re his sister? Make sure he rests for the next several days. He shouldn’t be out on this ice where he could slip and fall again.”

“I’ll do my best to keep him off the streets,” I promised. “Did Mr. Kystarnik pay his bill?”

The charge nurse transferred me to the billing department, where a service rep said someone had stopped by with Rodney and paid cash, all twenty-three thousand dollars that were owed for his emergency care.

I gave an embarrassed titter. “I need to know who paid for my brother. He . . . Well, he’s not good with bills, and I’m kind of responsible . . .”

The rep misunderstood me. “Don’t worry about that, honey. Our cashier looked at the money, it wasn’t counterfeit.”

“But who paid for him?”

I heard her clicking at her keyboard. “His friend said the receipt should be made out to your brother.”

“Did he give his own address?” I asked. “On Bobolink Road in Highland Park?”

She clicked her teeth. “No, he said he was at 1005 North Inscape Drive in Deerfield.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “That’s his ex-wife’s address. Well, it can’t be helped. Thanks for looking after him. He probably didn’t tell the doctors about his risperidone, either. You should add that to his chart.”

The helpful rep said she’d pass a note on to the doctor who’d treated my brother.

The address Rodney had given, on Inscape Drive, belonged to Anton Kystarnik and/or Owen Widermayer at Rest EZ. As his worried sister, I hoped Rodney would stay there, firmly put, for a month, but I was more afraid he might be looking for me and for Karen Buckley’s computer.

40

Karen, Revealed

M
r. Contreras and I were climbing into my Mustang when a strange truck pulled into the parking lot. I reached reflexively for my gun, but Petra bounded from the passenger seat, as lively as a new puppy. Mitch broke from me to rush to her side, while Staff Sergeant Jepson climbed down from the driver’s seat, followed by Tim Radke, who’d been squeezed into the back.

“Afternoon, ma’am, sir,” Jepson called to Mr. Contreras and me. “You on your way out? We spent the day on your gal’s computer, and Tim thinks he’s got a lot of it sorted out.”

I explained that I needed to get the dogs home for the dog walker but invited them to follow us north. Mr. Contreras enthusiastically seconded the motion, mentioning my chicken. “Big enough for five, right, doll, when we make some fettuccine.”

At home, Jepson helped me check around the building to make sure Rodney or his minions weren’t lurking.

“So, Vic, Tim totally hacked into this computer. He’s amazing. You should hire him!” Petra yelled as I made my painful way up the three flights of stairs.

“It wasn’t cheap,” Tim warned me. “I had to download some pretty expensive software to come up with her password—none of Chad’s dad’s ideas worked.”

“I told him to go for it,” Petra sang out cheerily.

“Out of curiosity, little chickadee, how much is expensive?”

“Uh, thirty-two hundred dollars,” Tim mumbled.

“Thirty-two hundred, hmm? So—at fifteen dollars an hour—well, rounding up to give you the benefit of the doubt—that would be two hundred free hours of work you can give me, Petra.”

“But, Vic,” her big eyes opening so wide her lashes brushed her brows, “I knew this was important. And I didn’t want to wake you up after you got injured.”

“No, Peetie, that was thoughtful. That’s why I’m rounding your salary up as a thank-you. You see, you’re working for me. I’m paying the bills. And I probably know a vendor who could get me a better deal on software than you can.”

Petra glowered at me. “You’re not serious. I can’t afford—”

“Then you need to learn to think twice, or even three times, before committing me to debt, Petra.”

I looked at her seriously for a beat. “I will let you off the hook this time. But if you do such a thing again, I will hold you responsible for paying for it. Clear?”

“I told you I wasn’t a robot—”

“Clear?”

“Oh, all right!” She stomped back down the stairs.

Tim Radke, who’d been standing by uncomfortably while we argued, said he thought he should pay for the software, since he was the one who talked Petra into buying it.

“No, we’re cool on this. Petra just needs help curbing her magnanimous impulses.” I headed on up the stairs and left Radke to follow Petra back to Mr. Contreras’s place.

Jake Thibaut was on his way out as I reached the third floor. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, and he was surprised by my painful progress upward.

“Your hand bothering you?” For a bass player, an injured hand was worrying enough to cause a limp.

“Not so much. I’m just tired. See you before you fly out?”

“Not if it means looking at something gruesome stuck into your body.”

To my surprise, I found myself fighting back tears. “I’ll wrap myself in gauze, head to foot, so that only my eyes and mouth show.”

“Hey, hey, just teasing, V.I., just teasing.” He brushed my wet eyes with a callused fingertip. “I’m a bass player, nothing grosses me out. Except blood. Can’t explain that one. We have one last rehearsal tonight, and I’m just on my way to buy food for the group. Are you free tomorrow, four-ish? They’re not picking me up until six.”

He pulled me to him and kissed me, and I tried to translate the pain in my abdomen into passion on my lips. As he held me, I heard the dog walker arrive, the dogs’ yelps of pleasure, and then my neighbor start up the stairs with Tim, Staff Sergeant Jepson, and Petra.

Jake murmured that he’d leave me to cope with my circus on my own and went on his way.

Inside my apartment, Tim opened up Karen’s computer. He showed me what happened when he logged on to her site. We got the message that the site was down. Then he typed commands onto the screen itself. Lines of equations began to scroll downward.

“Here’s the command to block content from the site,” he froze the screen and pointed to a line of text. I could see the words “respect,” “for,” “the,” and “dead” separated by strings of code.

“Now, watch this.” He typed another set of commands. Green text scrolled down the screen once more. He typed another command line, and suddenly the Body Artist’s website was on the computer in front of us.

I forgot my sore belly. “How’d you do that?”

“It’s a clone.” Tim tried not to grin, tried to be casual—Aramis Ramírez quickly doffing his hat after back-to-back homers. “That way, whoever is blocking the original site doesn’t know we can access it.”

“But who is blocking it?”

He shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. The server is in Olathe, Kansas. When I talked to one of their techies this afternoon, the best he could tell me is that the commands weren’t coming from
this
machine. They’re coming from Baghdad. But whether they start there or just are being bounced through there, whoever is doing it is pretty sophisticated.”

“Your old buddies?” Jepson asked.

“USAC-NOEW?” Radke grimaced. “They could, but why would they? I didn’t see anything pertaining to military ops in here.”

“USAC-NOEW?” I said. “Sounds like a cat in pain.”

Tim laughed.

“U.S. Army Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare,” he translated. “You know the Army. It’s all alphabet soup.”

“Of course, they’re not the only big outfit in Baghdad,” I said. “There’s also Tintrey.”

“Them and a hundred other jackals.” Marty Jepson was suddenly angry. “I’m so sick of those damned contractors, those private armies! I lost two good buddies who had to go out shotgun to protect one of their farking CEOs.”

“Yeah, man, they’re total scum,” Radke agreed. “But why would they care about this stripper’s website?”

“She’s not a stripper.” Petra started to protest, then looked doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t be sticking up for her if she really is, like, a drug dealer or something.”

I scrolled carefully through the images looking for Nadia’s paintings. “We know what the codes that Rodney was using mean, but what was Nadia trying to tell us about Alexandra?”