Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (23 page)

“How so?”

“They can both make a guy look stupid.”

Martin turned to leave, but only got one step before his right hand started glowing and emitting a chime. Martin’s shoulders sagged as he lifted his hand, answering the call.

“What?” Martin said.

Phillip’s face appeared in Martin’s hand. He looked panicked. “Martin, is Gwen still with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You two come meet me at the doctor’s, now. There’s been another attack on Brit!”

Gwen heard. Martin hung up and a second later they both disappeared.

Across the street, Ampyx put down the brand new kilt he hadn’t really been considering buying, shook his head, and walked away.

23.

“Shut up, Jimmy! I’ve heard enough out of you! I wish I’d never met you! You’ve been nothing but trouble to my partner and me, and I curse the day you turned yourself in!”

Agent Miller shook his head, put his hand on Agent
Murphy’s
shoulder, and said, “Take it easy, Murph.”

Murphy’s calm façade was usually impenetrable, but a man can only take so much, and Jimmy had given them more than enough. In the short time they’d known Jimmy they’d gone from being federal agents, treated with fear and respect by the
civilians
, to being hobos, treated with scorn and contempt by railroad security, which was a clear demotion.

Then they’d gone from being hobos to being security guards at a warehouse full of old files, which, while less clear, they still saw as a demotion. At least hobos choose to do nothing.
Watchmen
are ordered to do nothing.

They’d been deprived of sleep, of their homes, of human interaction, and of their dignity. Miller had spent most of the time
yelling
, but Murphy allowed himself no such outlet, and instead kept it all bottled up. He’d remained good-natured and cheerful through the entire ordeal, including his trip to Florida. He even came back
laughing
about the flight home, in which he had the middle seat between two rather large people who both had raised their arm rests.

He had returned with Todd’s answer to Jimmy. Murphy didn’t have to read it; he’d had it dictated to him, and he knew it to be a string of tech gibberish. Arcane abbreviations,
directions
to do things that made no sense to him. Stuff like, “Type dir. Select menu item three. Use trumpet wind-sock.” He knew roughly what it all meant, but he was unsure that it would have any effect. He’d transcribed the instructions as best he could, and delivered them to Jimmy. Now, together, they were trying to follow them, and it was slow going, made worse by Jimmy. He was clearly
getting
frustrated, and it was making him bossy, which was the last straw for Agent Murphy.

After Murphy finally blew up, it fell to Miller to be the voice of reason.

“Now, now Murph,” he said. “Losing your temper won’t accomplish anything.”

Murphy sputtered, “But, but, you . . . you’re always losing your temper.”

“Yes, but I’m good at it. You’re not. Watch and learn.”

Miller looked at Jimmy, sitting there at the far end of the warehouse, holding his tin can and peering at them through his telescope.

Miller held his can up to his mouth, which Jimmy took as a cue to lift his can to his ear. The string pulled tight, and Miller spoke.

“Jimmy, I speak for both my partner, Agent Murphy, and myself when I say that we both deeply regret his outburst.”

“I’m certain you do,” Jimmy said, magnanimously.

“Yes. It wasn’t nearly harsh enough.”

With that, Agent Miller threw open the valve on a fire hose of profanities delivered at top volume, and with the occasional hint of vibrato that is the mark of a true virtuoso. Jimmy took the can away from his ear, then put it back, because due to the volume of Miller’s voice, and the acoustic qualities of the warehouse, the obscenities were actually quieter through the can.

When Agent Miller had finally run through the entire Urban Dictionary, and good portions of the thesaurus, and a rhyming dictionary, the torrent finally petered out.

Through the tin can Jimmy heard Agent Miller say, in a quiet voice heavy with menace, “Now you look, Jimmy. My partner Murph has shown the patience of a saint. He’s doing the best he can to follow those ridiculous directions, so you need to cool your jets, or I’m going to come over there and the last thing you’ll ever hear will be my tinny laughter as I strangle you with your own soup-can telephone.”

“Actually,” Jimmy said, “if the string was pulled tight around my neck, the sound vibrations wouldn’t carry through the string.” There was a long silence, then Jimmy added, “I
apologize
.
Correcting
you then was probably not the smart move. I know that working with me has not been pleasant for either of you, and that so far there’s been nothing to show for it, but I tell you, we’re very close to our goal.”

Jimmy took the silence as encouragement and continued. “It’s just these instructions of Todd’s. It’s been years since he’s done the things he’s telling us to do, and, well, as Agent Murphy told you, Todd’s not the brightest man. He’s shrewd enough to be
dangerous
to others, but dumb enough to be even more of a danger to
himself
.”

Miller finally broke his silence to ask, “So, do you think this is going to work or not, Jimmy?”

Jimmy said, “We are going to find the file, and when we do, I will prove that everything I’ve told you is true, but it’s going to be a frustrating process. I promise, I’ll be more patient. Please give Agent Murphy my apologies.”

The three men got back to work. Jimmy deciphered Todd’s instructions, and watched through his telescope as Agent
Murphy
attempted to follow them. Finally, they wound their way around the Internet and onto some sort of massive corporate database. Jimmy could tell from the address that it belonged to a large
gaming
company. After several more nonsensical blind alleys, they were looking at a directory with one file in it, a file called
repository1-c.txt.

Jimmy told Murphy to open the file remotely using the
terminal
, as they had tried several times before. Unlike all of the other times, this time the file opened.

Jimmy said, “Okay, gentlemen. Here comes your proof. Do a search for my full name, James Isadore Sadler.”

Agent Miller’s voice came back through the tin can. “It’s searching. How long will this take?”

“Usually about twenty minutes, but it depends on the speed of the server we’re accessing.”

Nine minutes later, the search returned a single match. Jimmy silently thanked his parents for giving him a ridiculous middle name, then instructed Murphy to pull up the entry that Jimmy knew defined him as a person. Jimmy didn’t need to work very hard to remember which number they were looking for. He had rehearsed this moment thousands of times in his mind. He led Agent Murphy to a specific set of digits, and instructed him to read them aloud.

Murphy took the can from Miller. His tinny voice said, “It says five, zero, zero.”

Yeesh, Phillip
, Jimmy thought.
That’s overkill.

Jimmy put the can to his mouth and said, “Change that to twelve.”

“Twelve?”

“Yes. Twelve.”

Murphy hesitated. “What’ll this do?”

Jimmy tried to sound calm as he explained, “If I’ve been
telling
you the truth, it’ll reset my magnetic field so I can use electronics again.”

“And if you’re not telling the truth?”

“Nothing,” Jimmy said. “I mean, it’s just some random file some game company is holding onto, right? If I’m lying, the worst that can happen is it’ll break some game and they’ll have to restore a backed-up copy of the file. Besides, the file has my name in it, right? So this is my entry, and I’m having you adjust the number down, not up, so I can’t possibly be stealing
anything
, can I?”

That seemed to satisfy Murphy. Jimmy couldn’t hear the clicking, but he watched through the telescope as Murphy made the change. Jimmy sat for a moment, concentrating on enjoying the moment. Eventually, Agent Miller yelled, “Hey, what next?” from the far end of the warehouse.

Jimmy stood up, straightened his rumpled, secondhand suit jacket, and walked toward the agents, never taking his eyes off of the computer monitor. He walked at a normal pace, but to him it felt agonizingly slow. With each step, the screen got closer, and with each step he became more certain that at any second it would flicker and go dead. He kept walking like that, each step expecting the screen to die, until he couldn’t walk any
further
without kicking the table on which the computer sat. Miller and Murphy both looked shocked, but Jimmy didn’t know it.
He couldn’t take
his eyes off of the screen. It was the first time he’d seen a video display of any kind from closer than fifteen feet in thirty years, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Murphy muttered several obscenities. Miller said, “Okay, so he can stand next to a computer. What’s that prove?”

Jimmy said, “It proves I was telling the truth.”

“Not about everything,” Agent Miller said. “We didn’t arrest the Banks kid for standing next to computers, we arrested him for producing money out of nothing. Frankly, I’m still not
convinced
this whole
magnetic field
thing hasn’t been a trick from day one.”

Agent Murphy rolled his eyes. “Miller, how could he possibly fake that?”

“If I could tell you that, it wouldn’t be much of a trick.”

Jimmy expected this. Circumstances had forced him to prove that what he was saying was true, but proof, as is often the case, wasn’t very convincing. Luckily for Jimmy, he was convincing, even when he had no proof.

Jimmy smiled and said, “Agent Miller has a valid point. None of the people you’ve been pursuing were wanted for damaging electronics. I can show you how all of the other things were done, but it will take a little time.”

Agent Miller laughed contemptuously, and said, “Yeah, I knew it. How long will it take, Jimmy? How much longer are you going to string us along?”

Jimmy said, “About fifteen minutes.” He walked lightly over to the camper and grabbed one of the folding lawn chairs they’d been using to augment the warehouse’s furnishings. He brought it back to the table and plunked it down in front of the keyboard. “In the meantime,” he said, “you gentlemen might want to turn on your cell phones and check your voicemail, since you
can now.”

Jimmy ran a search on the file for Agent Miller’s full name. While it ran, he pulled up the text editor and started typing out strings of code, largely from memory. Agent Murphy asked what he was doing, and Jimmy explained that he was writing a quick script that would automate the process of accessing the file in the future, so they wouldn’t have to repeat the whole process they’d just been through. There was a lot that Agent Murphy didn’t understand about computers, but neither he nor Miller wanted to go through all of that rigmarole ever again, so they let him proceed.

Jimmy checked on the search, and found that it had returned four people with the same full name as Agent Miller. He got the agent’s birthdate, and that allowed him to narrow it down
to one.

“Okay, gentlemen, for my next trick: Agent Miller, I’ll need you to tell me your current checking account balance, down to the penny.”

Miller shook his head. “If you think I’m going to give you my checking account number, you’re crazy.”

“I didn’t ask for your checking account number,” Jimmy said, “just the balance, as I said, down to the penny.”

Miller didn’t know his balance, but he was able to call the phone number on the back of his debit card to find out. He
carefully
guarded his keypad as he entered the number on his debit card, but he needn’t have bothered. Jimmy was occupied, putting the finishing touches on his script.

After navigating a phone tree, shouting at a phone tree that he didn’t want to open a new line of credit, talking to a human, then shouting at the human that he didn’t want to open a new line of credit, he got the number he’d wanted.

“Okay, my checking balance is $3,762.43”

Jimmy said, “Splendid. Now please hang up the phone.”

Jimmy did a quick search, typed few characters, then told Agent Miller, “Now call again and ask for your balance.”

“What? Aw, man, I had them on the phone. I could have just asked the guy to double-check it. Now I have to go through the whole phone tree again.”

Jimmy said, “Please, just call again.”

Miller had murder in his eyes, but he made the call, climbed the phone tree, and refused the credit line. Jimmy and Murphy watched with growing anticipation as he got closer and closer to his bank balance. Miller said, “Okay, for bank balance, it says to press one.” He’d opted to stick with the computer tree for this run, since it aggravated him automatically and impersonally, while the human had done so deliberately for his own
enjoyment
. He looked at his phone, pressed one, put the phone back up to his ear, and immediately went white as a sheet. He looked at his phone, pressed one again, and held it back to his ear a second time.

“What is it?” Murphy asked. “What does it say?”

Jimmy looked at the computer screen, and said, “It says that his balance is $5,003,762.43, doesn’t it, Agent Miller?”

“What did you do?!” Agent Miller shouted.

“Exactly what I said I would.”

“Whose money is it?”

Jimmy shrugged. “It’s in your account. I’d say it’s yours.”

Miller stood up, towering over Jimmy and bellowing down at him. “Don’t you give me that! Who did you take it from?”

“Nobody,” Jimmy said. “How could I have? All I did was type a number into the file. You’ve been sitting right here, and
Murphy’s
been watching me like a hawk the whole time. I haven’t pulled up any other systems, or accessed any other files. I haven’t even contacted your bank. I’ve been typing away in a text editor the whole time.”

“You better be able to take it back! Now!” Miller’s face was beet red. Spittle rained down on Jimmy.

“I will. But, first, a little credit please. I’ve lived up to my end here. I told you I’d show you how Martin and all the others got their money, and I have.”

“By making me a criminal?”

“I can change it back if that’s what you really want, but
gentlemen
, tell me, is this embezzling? Have we broken the law? We didn’t take the money from anywhere. We didn’t deprive
anyone
of anything. Are there laws against altering reality at a fundamental level?”