Kill Process (45 page)

He pulls the tape off slowly, purposely lengthening the experience.

Even when the tape is off, I can’t draw a breath around the cloth packed tightly into my mouth. He pulls out the cloth and air, precious air, floods my lungs. My stomach heaves and all I can do is gasp until the spots leave my vision.

Still, my jaw aches, and my mouth is dry. I try and fail to form words. I distantly recognize the cloth as one of the dish towels Emily bought me for my birthday, and somehow my hatred for Daly grows for taking something valued and using it against me.

“Now we can talk like civilized people,” Daly says. “Here’s what I want. I want to know what you’ve done to my records, how you did it, and how to undo it. Before you even ask, of course I’m not going to give you a computer. I’m not even going to let you within sight of one. I’m not an idiot. You could probably kill me with my electric shaver if you had a computer.”

My eyes refocus on Daly when he mentions the electric shaver.

He catches my look, and he’s momentarily startled. “Really? An electric shaver. I’m curious, I am, though not as curious as I am about what you’ve done to me. Talk. In exchange for you talking, I’m not going to torture you. That’s a good deal, right?”

I look away from Daly, toward my bedroom, and try to work some moisture into my mouth, then turn back to him. “Who hired you?” It’s the only question that really matters.

He laughs. “You want me to fess up, catch me on camera naming names, and bring that to the police? It doesn’t matter. The video cameras are recording to the hard drive hidden in your bed frame. Thought you were clever, right? That if we never saw the video streaming over your network connection, we wouldn’t know about the cameras. We know everything. We’ll wipe the hard drives.”

“How much is Lewis Rasmussen paying you? Whatever it is, I’ll double it.”

Daly leans close. “You’re broke, Angie. You’ve got nothing and your company is falling apart. It’s not going to last the month. You can’t match even a small fraction of what Lewis paid.”

Daly shakes his head. “You turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected. Thankfully, there are escalator clauses for that sort of thing. A powerful man owes me favors now. You don’t have anything of comparable value.”

He leans back. “Tell me what you did to me.”

“I froze your bank accounts with automated fraud detection. The
money—”
I break off, coughing, my throat dry from being gagged. I continue in a lower voice. “The money is still there. I didn’t touch a dime.”

“How do I regain access?”

“Call your banks. I changed your address and secret questions, too. You’ll need to know the new info or they won’t let you restore access.”

“What’s the new address?”

“9800” I stop to cough. “9800 Savage Road, suite 6248.”

“Very cute. The NSA.”

“Can I get a drink of water? Please?”

“I don’t know, Angie. How do I know you’re not going to attack me when my back is turned?”

I stare at him dumbfounded.

“Oh, yeah, the tape. I guess I can leave you for a second. If you do anything you shouldn’t, it’ll cost you a finger.”

As soon as he turns his back, I use every fiber of my body to pull against the tape. My legs, the strongest muscles in the human body, I can’t budge them. My arm, I try tugging, twisting, pulling, bending. I ignore the pain of my hair being pulled, and strain every muscle in my neck trying to raise my head off the table.

Nothing.

I give up, breathing hard from my attempted exertion.

Daly comes back into view, and perches on the table next to me. “Well that was fun to watch. I went over there,” and he points to a spot outside my field of view, “to see how hard you would work to free yourself.” He nods his head. “You tried pretty hard. Good job, Angie.” He leans close. “No, I’m not getting you any water. I don’t care if you’re thirsty. Keep talking.”

I purse my lips, but my mouth is desert dry, not even the slightest speck of moisture. “Please, anything,” I say, my voice hoarse.

“You want water?” Daly says. “Open your mouth.”

I open, afraid of what’s coming, yet willing to do anything to moisten my lips.

Daly spits in my mouth. “There’s your water.” He turns sideways and punches me in the stomach. All the air rushes out of me, and my body strains against the tape, trying to protect itself.

“That’s for trying to get loose. Now quit stalling. What happened at the airport? Why did DHS come after me?”

I put my lips together, my mouth ever so slightly moistened by Daly’s spit, and I remember Repard, the early days, before it all got so terribly complicated, and I whistle.

Daly hits me, pain blossoming across my face, but I don’t stop. I whistle again. He hits me again. I keep whistling.

After the third time, I don’t have it in me to fight anymore. Any will to resist Daly has left. The pain is vanishing, too, replaced by numbness. This is someone else’s body. I’m not here. This flesh isn’t me.

“Why did you whistle?” Daly yells. “What the hell was that for?”

He’s loud, and I’m glad he’s loud. I hope he keeps being loud.

He glances around, suspicious now. He lifts a length of steel gray pipe up over my legs, and there’s an explosion of pain.

*     *     *

A robotic home vacuum cleaner, even a top of the line model, is not fast. Yes, there are great open source libraries. Yes, you can build features on top of the mobile chassis completely unrelated to vacuuming. Still, speed is not one of its best attributes, and this particular robotic vacuum is heavily laden and driving all the way from the bedroom.

It’s also not the best driver in the world. This one is both sound and motion sensitive, and at some point its primitive visual sensors will detect active movement and its path will become more focused, but at the moment it’s trying to follow a 1300 Hz audio signal.

It bounces off the bed, reverses direction. It hits the dresser, backs up, angles off in a random direction. A particularly astute observer might wonder why the bedroom door doesn’t close properly, why it tends to swing open and won’t latch properly no matter how hard you try. It wouldn’t take much to notice the top hinge is not in its original location, and the door has no choice other than to swing open when it leans that way. Fortunately, Daly wasn’t interested in construction, and so the door remains open as it has been designed to be.

The vacuum passes through the doorway. The 1300 Hz signal is gone; however, once the robot is activated, it will continue its programming using only motion and sound detection. There’s a lot of sound coming from the direction of the dining room, and so the vacuum heads that way after a false start toward the couch and a brief entanglement with the legs of the coffee table.

Eventually the visual sensors detect motion. This is a very exciting time for the program running on its little CPU. The robot switches modes, stops moving forward, and turns in a circle. It will stop when it reaches the point of maximum detected motion.

But these are very simple algorithms and the current programming is designed to turn only one way: clockwise. This it does, and after turning 360 degrees it figures out exactly where the most motion is occurring, and then it turns 330 degrees more, almost a complete second circle, and sends an electrical signal to the trigger actuator on the Glock mounted to its weighted top, firing once. The Roomba turns another five degrees, fires again, and repeats this sequence twice more, exhausting four of the ten rounds of ammunition.

After the code completes, the algorithm repeats again, first detecting motion, then firing four rounds at five-degree intervals around the center of motion.

With two rounds left in the magazine, the algorithm would run an abbreviated iteration, but when the motion detector runs for the third time, it fails to find any movement.

The vacuum waits. There is no activity. The algorithms tell the robot to recharge. It plays a short happy tune, and returns to its charging station.

D
ALY HITS ME
across the thighs and agony shoots through me. With every fiber of my being, I force myself not to scream. I need to be silent. I pray he hasn’t broken my legs.

Daly does a double-take at my lack of a scream or reaction. He raises the pipe back up to hit me again. Please, God, no.

Then he glances toward the living room, his eyes searching. I know what to listen for, and I barely make out the whine of little electric motors over the waves of pain coursing through me.

The shot, when it comes, even though I expect it, is deafening, and my bowels clench. More are coming, and I try, fruitlessly, to shrink smaller, knowing I’m close to Daly and could easily be hit. If a round strikes me, even a glancing wound, I’ll bleed to death strapped to this table.

Daly’s attention snaps to the robot with the first shot, and at first he’s still, as though trying to come to terms with what he’s seeing. There’s a second shot, and from the way he jerks around, I know he’s been hit.

“Fuck!”

He dives left, out of my field of vision, and for a brief moment my heart surges, because he’s moved in the same direction as the robot turns, clockwise. It fires again, and there’s another curse as he’s presumably hit again. I can’t see him now.

The fourth shot comes, and then there’s silence. I know the robot’s spinning around, crunching video data to find motion, computationally eliminating its own spinning motion from the equation. The fear comes again, because the next shot, the left-most one, is the one most likely to hit me.

I hear something crash against the wall, and Daly rushes by, his arm overhead as though he’s going to toss the pipe at the little robot.

Then another four shots ring out, one after another. Metal clangs as the pipe bounces off the tile floor, and a few seconds later, Daly crashes to the ground with a thud.

A few seconds later the vacuum beeps and plays the returning-to-base sound.

I take inventory of my body. My thighs are in raging agony where Daly hit me with the pipe, and my stomach and face ache from repeated punches. There’s so much pain, I’m not even sure if I’m shot. I’m as stuck as before. I make a feeble attempt to move, but I have no energy left.

I pray the robot sent its emails.

*     *     *

I’m startled awake by pounding on the door. Someone yells, but I lack the strength to respond.

The front door opens with a crash, followed by booted feet running, and a bunch of radio talk that makes no sense to me. Soon two police officers in heavy combat gear are freeing me from the dining room table, while others secure the house and check on Chris Daly.

The police and paramedics are fighting over me, and I end up on a stretcher, being questioned as I’m strapped down.

“What happened?”

I can’t tell which of the officers asks me. Only one thing matters.

“Is he dead?”

The officer nearest me nods.

“He forced himself in, attacked me. He says he was paid to do it, by Lewis Rasmussen.”

“The CEO of Tomo?”

I nod. “I have a recording of him saying it, on a hard drive.”

“A recording?” The officer looks puzzled.

A paramedic’s arm passes into my field of view, and I flinch, trying to pull away. They’re strapping me down, and I try to resist further panic.

“Surveillance cameras.”

The officer raises an eyebrow and shakes his head, before he yells, “Sergeant, call the techs down here pronto. She’s got the whole thing recorded.”

The paramedics are in the midst of lifting me when Danger and Igloo rush in, trailed by yet another police officer.

“You knew!” Igloo’s face is dark and accusing, then her eyes go wide at my appearance. “Jesus. Uh, are you okay?” She catches sight of the body on the floor and recoils.

“Bruised, mostly,” I say, although the truth is my whole body is one mass of hurt. I hope there are strong painkillers in my immediate future. “If you’d been here, he would’ve killed you. He didn’t need either of you, only me. He confessed. Lewis Rasmussen hired him.”

“That bastard,” Igloo says.

“The police will take care of him.”

“Here we go, ma’am,” one of the paramedics says, and they carry me towards the door.

“Thomas will call from a payphone,” I say, on my way out. “Let him know it’s okay to come back.”

Igloo nods.

“Wait, please.”

The paramedic facing me rolls his eyes.

“Come close,” I say to Igloo.

She bends down, a few inches from my face.

“There’s a second copy of the video on an SSD in the freezer. Leak it tonight to social media, BitTorrent. There’s no telling how long the police will sit on it.”

I
’
M BLISSED OUT
on pharmaceuticals when Thomas and Emily arrive at the hospital. I don’t remember much, other than professing my undying love for them. Later they’ll tell me it was four o’clock in the morning when they arrived, driving back to Portland in a rental. Apparently, I mumbled lots of incoherent things at them before falling back asleep.

When I wake, the intense pain of the night before has been replaced by the dull agony of aches everywhere. I touch my face and immediately regret it. My cry wakes Thomas, who was sleeping in a chair next to the bed.

“Angie.” He snaps erect. “Are you in pain?”

I nod.

He presses a button next to me, and I hear a distant chime.

“The nurse will be back with another dose of pain relievers. Are you okay?”

What do I say to that? He probably knows better than I the extent of my injuries.

He reaches toward me, and I flinch. He withdraws his hand. “Okay to touch your arm?” he asks.

I try to speak, but can’t open my mouth without choking up.

“You’re going to be okay,” he says. “The doctors say nothing is broken. Just a moderate concussion and severe bruising, especially on your legs, where . . .” Thomas’s voice breaks. “I’m so sorry, Angie. I should’ve been there for you.”

I swallow and take a few breaths. “You couldn’t have done anything.” Talking makes me realize how foggy I am. I vaguely wonder what drugs I’m on and how much more pain I’d be in without them. “It had to happen exactly that way.”