Pawnbroker: A Thriller (30 page)

Chapter 139

“S
hoot him!” I said, wondering if she spoke English at all, trying to think of how to repeat my instruction in Spanish, coming up blank. He was almost facing her now and she still hadn’t pulled the trigger. She just kept walking toward him, muttering.

I shouted, “Shoot him now!”

But she didn’t. She was young, a kid, really, and in shock. When I saw Teddy extending his gun arm, I lowered my shoulder and dove toward him. My right shoulder hit the small of his back just as he fired. He grunted and staggered forward. The girl fell backward, blood pouring from her neck. Teddy was standing over her now, getting ready to shoot her again. I rushed him again, but this time he was prepared. Just as I came within range, he spun around and clipped me square in the center of my forehead with the butt of his revolver.

The pain was intense and my vision blurred. I stumbled backward and tried to remain upright, but couldn’t. The next thing I remember was looking up to see Teddy standing over me, gun pointed at my face. This was it. I closed my eyes and waited. A second later, I heard a thunk. I opened my eyes just in time to see Teddy falling. He landed on top of me and lay still.

I squirmed out from under him and still he didn’t move. A hand reached down to help me up. I took it, pulled to my feet, and found myself standing face to face with a man whose name I didn’t know, though I had seen him around town on his bicycle a thousand times. What the hell? He had a hammer in his hand, its business end covered in blood and what looked like a small piece of bone. I looked down at Teddy and saw a matching hole in the back of his skull.

For perhaps five seconds, I was overjoyed with the realization that I had survived. Then I remembered that I had no idea where my girls were. Or my dad. Or Penny. I fumbled in my pocket and found my cell phone, then speed-dialed Jimmy. No answer. I was on my way into the building, hoping to find my radio on Docker, when I heard a rumbling noise.

I turned around and listened as it drew closer. It sounded like a boat. A big one. I tried to run toward the water but my head lit up in pain, so I slowed it down to a gentle trot. Just as I reached the water’s edge I saw bright lights coming around the bend. The boat’s air horn bellowed, and when it stopped I thought I heard someone shouting. It sounded almost like...

Now I could see the boat. It was the
Lady. And on her deck, right up front, waving and shouting, were Julie, Mandy, and Dad.

Chapter 140

I stood on the muddy bank and held my girls, one in each arm. Told them I loved them. I hugged my father, long and hard, then backed away and looked him in the eye. “I love you, Dad.”

He nodded, grabbed me in another hug, and in my ear said, “I love you, Grayson.”

“Save a hug for me?” a voice behind me said. I turned and saw Penny hobbling toward me with the assistance of the man who had hammered Teddy. Beside them was the girl—her neck was bandaged—escorted by yet another man I didn’t know. He was mid-thirties, with the rugged look of a rural Mississippian.

I went to Penny, gave her a gentle hug. She looked rough: bloodshot eyes, bruises around her throat. I could see what looked to be tiny burst blood vessels all over her face.

“What happened?” I said.

She dismissed the question with a flick of her hand. “Tell you later. Gray, this is Rocky Shackleford, and this is Ray Earl. They saved my life.”

I shook Shackleford’s hand. His grip was strong, his hand rough. “Gray Bolton,” I said. “I have no words to express my thanks, Rocky.”

“Ray Earl’s the hero, not me.”

I extended my hand and Ray Earl grabbed it in a crushing grip. “I’m Ray Earl Higgins,” he said, beaming.

Chapter 141

Thirty minutes after we dialed 911, an FBI helicopter landed in the narrow clearing behind the building. To my amazement, the first man out was Carlos. Wiry little Carlos from my brief jail stay, the one who lorded over the cell with unquestioned authority. He was still wearing a Montello Retention Center orange jumpsuit, along with a dark blue blazer with “FBI” on the back in huge yellow letters.

“Carlos?” I said.

He nodded politely. “Mr. Bolton.”

We talked for a few minutes. He went to examine the scene, and I boarded the
Lady to check on Penny. She was sitting on a sofa in the salon, looking out the window.

“Carlos, FBI?” she said. “No way!”

I nodded. “Deep undercover. Was in there for months. They made him a trusty and he landed the job of cleaning the offices up front. He planted bugs all over the place, which is how the Bureau closed in on the operation. He also learned a lot by plain old eavesdropping. Said Mitchell was a real idiot, ran his mouth constantly. Carlos really put himself on the line for me, too.”

Penny raised her eyebrows.

“He was the original RoboVoice,” I said.

“No!”

“Made the calls to me from Mitchell’s office. Said all of Teddy’s team had those electronic voice cloaks on their phones so their voices couldn’t be identified in sensitive conversations. At first he thought I might be in the web, which is why he kept asking me about it. He wanted to gauge my reaction.”

She shook her head. “Unreal.” A pause. “Gray, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“I—”

Dad and the girls walked in.

“It can wait,” she said.

Chapter 142

TWO WEEKS LATER

BOLTON RESIDENCE

I opened the door and welcomed in our dinner guests. Jimmy could not have been more different from what I pictured. I expected a nerd with a pierced nose and purple hair. He wore chinos and a white button-down. Short, corporate-looking blond hair, slim and fit.

“Jimmy?” I said when I opened the door.

“One and the same, dude.”

Penny was behind him, still weak looking but much better than she had been, carrying a large foil-covered dish.

Jimmy hooked a thumb toward her. “She wouldn’t let me carry it, got to prove she’s an unstoppable super-hero-woman or something.”

I took the dish, hugged Penny, then brought them in and made the requisite introductions. We all swapped details, put the whole story together as best we could.

We ate dinner, then retired to the patio. The night was clear and cool, the moon bright. The girls were in bed and Abby and Penny were chatting inside.

“Penny tells me you broadcast everything you were doing on the internet?”

“True. Got a couple fat job offers from it, too. Seems nobody ever hacked a yacht before.”

“Good for you,” I said. “You taking one of the jobs?”

“No way, I’m an indy, man. Hey, check this out: You hear about the report on FlameOut they released this morning?”

“Flame out?”

“FlameOut, the street name for the drug device. They called it ‘the most dangerous, most addictive mind-altering medium in the history of mankind.’”

“What about that fuel cell? You think it’s going to have a big effect on legitimate technology?”

“Have you kept up with anything that’s happened in the past two days, dude?”

“No. Once I finally got through answering the FBI’s questions, I came home and went to bed. Other than going to see my dad, I’ve done nothing but sleep.”

“Mercy me. Well, the official line is that the fuel cell is pretty much worthless. Puts out immense power, but only lasts for minutes, and the government techies claim that’s a barrier problem they can’t overcome.”

“You don’t believe them?”

“No way. That technology will surface again, or I’m a poxy monkey,” he said, and took a big swig of Mountain Dew.

I smiled, extended my good hand, and said, “Thank you, Jimmy. For everything.”

He gripped my hand with both hands, looked me in the eye. “De nada, mi amigo. Hey, Gray? Penny said they couldn’t find the device you guys had. Know anything about that? Sure would like to take a look at one.”

I shrugged. “Can’t help you there.”

*          *          *

At the door, I shook Jimmy’s hand and gave Penny a farewell hug. She whispered in my ear, “I love you.” Then she was gone.

After they left, Abby and I lay in bed and talked for hours. She apologized a lot, cried a lot, and as best I could tell, told me everything, including how her slide into unfaithfulness began. I told her a lot of things, too. I held her in my arms until she went to sleep. Then I switched off the light and went to sleep with forgiveness and redemption laying heavy on my heart.

EPILOGUE

THREE MONTHS LATER

“I wish he’d never told you where that thing was. It still makes me nervous.”

“Nonsense! The device was incredibly easy to duplicate once I figured out that it was just the frequency of the stray emissions from the fuel cell that produced the neural excitation. I’ve run the test three times. The necrotic effect has been eliminated.”

“Speak English, please.”

“It doesn’t cook the brain anymore. All the fun of the buzz, including the geometric increase in libido, but none of the dangerous side effects.”

“At least on mice. You still aren’t sure what it will be like for humans.”

“Only one way to find out,” he said with a smile. He donned one pair of headphones, placed the second set on her head, and pressed PLAY.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said, as a fiery red ring circled both irises. “This is incredible.”

“I’m taking you to bed, you old battle ax,” Doc said.

Also by Jerry Hatchett:
 
Seven Unholy Days,
a brand new thriller available at Amazon and most other retailers of fine fiction. Here’s what New York Times and international bestselling author James Rollins had to say after reading it:

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SEVEN UNHOLY DAYS

1

1:02 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

GREAT CENTRAL ELECTRIC

YELLOW CREEK COMPLEX

NEAR IUKA, MISSISSIPPI

             
I felt trouble in Jimmy Lee Tarkleton’s handshake. It was a little strong and a little long. This man liked pissing contests.

“The inspection is scheduled for next week, Decker,” he said.

“If you have a problem, take it up with headquarters. They dispatched me.”

“For what?” He was a bearish man, thick-chested and sturdy, and he showed no sign of moving.

“Three days of excessive grid fluctuations. I’m here to identify the problem and recommend a solution.”

He yanked the handset from a wall phone and dialed. “This is Tarkleton at Central. Put me through to the director, right now.” He paced back and forth, tethered by the cord.

I looked into the fifty-foot-square nerve center of Great Central Electric. Acoustic walls, subdued indirect lighting in a high ceiling, big air-conditioning ducts. Fiberoptic cables fanned out to a long bank of servers and a crescent-shaped console held two rows of flush-mounted displays.

A ten-foot transparent display dominated the front of the room. I drew a deep breath and smelled the thunderstorm redolence of ozone, ever present in a room full of computers. This was geek nirvana.

Tarkleton fired questions at someone on the other end now. Under different circumstances I might have admired, even liked him. He was the first manager in a long time who didn’t fall all over himself to suck up to me.

But after three weeks of flying around to inspect the four centers and reassure myself the facilities were up to par, along with a half-dozen useless meetings with government bureaucrats, I had no patience for Tarkleton’s brand of staunch integrity.

I missed watching the sun sizzle into the Pacific at the end of the day, looking at the stars through crisp mountain air. I missed my dog, Norman. I wanted to go home, spend some time reading, watch a few movies, binge on Netflix. Norman loves good movies. He hates the kennel. I hate hotels.

Tarkleton hung up the phone and turned back to me. “Mr. Decker, I just spoke with the director and she confirmed the dispatch. You’re welcome to proceed with your inspection, but like I told her, someone has bad information.”

“How’s that?”

“We haven’t had any abnormal grid conditions.”

“If that’s the case there’s something very odd going on with the reporting network, and it’s not affecting the other three centers.”

He shrugged and pulled a leather pouch from his pocket, from which he produced a pipe that he packed with tobacco and lit. “Inspect to your heart’s content,” he said through a cloud of aromatic smoke.

When the guy manning the code console looked my way and waved, I stepped into the control room.

“Mr. Decker. It is you!” He beamed. “I am Abdul Abidi, and I am pleasing to make your acquaintance.”

He looked like an Abdul Abidi, and he was pleasing to make my acquaintance. A wiry little fellow with dark skin, big brown eyes, and likely a stratospheric IQ. If the team was in order he was the super-geek of the bunch, the real codeslinger.

The second guy of the three-man team squinted at me through thick glasses that he pushed up every few seconds. “You sir, on the analysis station, what’s your name?”

“Harold Beeman.” He sounded like a kazoo. I smiled and nodded.

The final crew member, manning the main bank of system monitors, didn’t wait for me to ask. He turned in his chair and managed to look down at me without getting up. “Brett Fulton,” he said. “But you can call me Mr. Fulton.”

“Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.” Every tech crew has at least one.

I drifted over to Abidi and we talked shop while I kept an eye on the monitors. I was pleased to see that he and the others continued working while we chatted, each man focused on his station, occasionally keying in an adjustment. The big display showed the sixteen states of the Central region glowing a uniform, reassuring green. Normal operation.

“Can you pull up a three-day flux graph, hourly intervals, please?” I said to Abidi. Seconds later, he had it on his monitor. I leaned down and examined it. To my surprise, Tarkleton was right. It was perfect. So was every other check I ran.

I straightened up, puzzled by the inconsistency, but satisfied that the problem wasn’t here. “You’re running a smooth operation.”

“Very smooth,” Abidi said with a big grin.

“Keep it up.” I shook his hand and headed for the door. The reporting glitch could be diagnosed remotely, so I needed maybe fifteen minutes to wrap up my review and I’d be homeward bound. Tonight, I’d finally sleep in my own bed again. I was almost to the door when the room exploded in a hellish cacophony of light and sound.

“Alert! Grid failure! Alert! Grid failure!” The synthesized contralto voice blared in sterile monotone as an ear-splitting Klaxon wailed through its cycles.

What the hell? The steady stream of cool air from the vents slowed, then died, as the control center switched to standby power from an onsite generator. Display screens all over the room scrolled in sync to the alarm that still screamed: “Alert! Grid failure!”

On the big screen, the reassuring glow of seconds ago was faltering. I watched in stunned silence as Mississippi flickered and went black.

Tarkleton blew back into the room, a gray-haired twister looking for a place to touch down. “Decker, I didn’t authorize any drills!”

I ignored him and started back to the console.

He put a heavy paw on my arm. “Where do you think you’re going? I’m not letting you anywhere near the controls!”

“Alert! Grid failure! Alert!” The voice was relentless.

“Will somebody please turn that dang thing off?” Tarkleton bellowed. The alarms died and the twister focused on me again. He was still holding on to my arm. “Mr. Decker, I suggest you tell me exactly what you’ve been up to in my control room.”

“And I suggest you let go of my arm,” I said. “This is no drill, man. You just lost a state.”

His hand dropped. He stood motionless, a spent twister. The room was unnaturally quiet in the aftermath of the alarms.

“Alert! Grid failure! Alert! Grid failure!” Hell broke loose again. This could not be happening. I looked up, unwilling to believe my eyes. On the screen, Alabama winked out.

I pushed past Tarkleton and returned to the console, where Abidi was already typing away, his fingers flying over the keyboard with uncanny speed. I leaned over, scanning the monitors. Grids don’t fail without a damn good reason. I directed Abidi’s search, telling him where to look.

Tarkleton’s massive presence loomed over me. “It’s a hundred and four degrees outside and a lot of air conditioners just quit. If we don’t get the power back up, we’ve got a problem.”

“Since we’re exchanging suggestions, I suggest you let me do my thing,” I said without looking up. I already had a problem of un-frigging-believable proportion. My company had designed every system in the room.

“You know what happened?”

“Not yet, but I intend to find out.”

He was silent for a moment, relighting his pipe while he mulled this over. “Very well, then. Gentlemen! Mr. Decker has the floor. Give him your cooperation.” He paused, and I felt the weight of his eyes on me. “It’s your system, Decker. Fix it.”

A secretary stuck her head through the doorway. “Mr. Tarkleton, North Mississippi Medical Center on the blue line. They have people in surgery and their generator failed. What do I tell them?”

“Lord Almighty. Tell them we’re on it, but get that generator back up.” He turned to me. “That’s the largest hospital in the state. Stop twiddling your thumbs and get that grid back up.”

“I need your station,” I said to Harold Beeman. The room was heating up and he was already covered in sweat. He looked right at me, his eyes the size of golf balls through the glasses, but he didn’t move. I motioned for him to get up and still he sat. I looked to Tarkleton for help.

“Harold, move your butt!” he said.

Beeman got up slowly, still staring at me. A big bead of sweat rolled off the tip of his oily nose. He finally cleared the chair and I slid into it.

I typed and clicked my way through analysis screens and grid models, looking for answers, finding none. Everything was normal, except for the two entire states that—

“Alert! Grid failure! Alert! Grid failure!”

Make that three. Tennessee faded. My career was disintegrating. I pictured a room full of reporters in bloodlust frenzy, jackals closing in on wounded prey. Mr. Decker, what went wrong? Did you cut security corners when you designed this system? Was Decker Digital not ready for the challenge of such a project? Exactly how vulnerable are your systems, Mr. Decker?

Someone killed the alarms.

“I’ll have to call Washington if we don’t get them back up in a hurry,” Tarkleton said. “Any chance these states went down independently?”

“Didn’t happen,” I said, working my way deeper into the system.

“I agree,” Brett Fulton said. “The problem is here. With Decker’s system.”

I vowed to wipe the smug smile off his face as soon as I had the grids back up. And to fire the Decker Digital employee responsible for this gaffe.

The secretary was back. “Mr. Tarkleton, blue line again, Memphis International, they’re screaming and cursing, demanding to talk to you.”

Tarkleton grabbed a telephone handset and punched a large blue button on the base. “Tarkleton here ... Yes ma’am ... I’m sorry, I don’t have a time frame for you ... I understand ... it won’t help, but call him if you want to.” He slammed the handset back into its cradle. “Decker, I’m in a world of hurt here.”

“Perhaps it is not trouble with Matt Decker’s system.” Abidi looked up from his monitor. “I am seeing something most unusual in my lines of code. I am thinking cyber-bomb.”

I leaned over and peered at the screen. “You’re saying the server ordered all three shutdowns? You can’t be serious. Too much redundancy, too many safeguards.”

“It has happened. I am showing you here, and here, and here.” He pointed to three lines of code. “These are the exact times Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee became dark. I assure you I am most correct.”

“Fulton, run me a printout of the core system activity log,” I said. “STAT, man, three states are down!”

He glared at me, then typed and clicked. Nerd Beeman waited across the room by the printer, ripped the sheet out as soon as it finished, and brought it to me. I found the three bold lines of print that marked the events in question and told Abdul to call out the times he had found buried in the program code.

“Eighteen-sixteen and thirty-seven seconds, eighteen-eighteen and fifty-three seconds, and eighteen-twenty-one and nine seconds, all Zulu times.”

Yellow Creek was five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, also known as Zulu, the world standard for matters technical. Abidi was right. The times the states went down perfectly matched the cryptic numbers he had found. “There’s nothing wrong with my systems.” I slapped the printout down on the counter.

“Come again?” Tarkleton said.

“Somebody tampered with the code.” My code. Code engineered to be unbreakable.

Abidi cast me a worried glance. I could see he was already processing the implications, and he didn’t like them. Neither did I.

“Can’t we just do a manual override to switch this first grid back on and then deal with the others?” Fulton said.

This moron had obviously spent all of fifteen minutes studying the systems.

“Oh no no no,” Beeman said. “CEPOCS is not designed for manual overrides. A stunt like that could cause terrible damage.”

He was right. The grid switches were designed for precise machine control, not manual.

“Up until sixteen minutes after one, everything was fine, right?” I said.

“Sixteen minutes plus thirty-seven seconds after one,” Abidi said.

“Whatever. My point is that the shutdowns were rigged to occur at that particular time on the system clock. There’s no reason we can’t turn the main system clock back twenty-four hours until we can figure out what’s going on here.”

“I understand precisely to where you are traveling,” Abidi said. “CEPOCS will return all parameters to the pre-trigger state. You are a computer hero.”

Fulton snorted.

“I don’t know about hero, Decker,” Tarkleton said, “But if this works, you can call me Tark.”

Swell.

Two minutes later we watched Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee sequence back to life on the display. Tarkleton wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Abidi was jubilant. Fulton dumped a BC powder onto his tongue and swallowed it dry. Beeman was too wired to stand still; he kept walking around peering at readouts. I watched him circle the room.

All states were back online and I could restore the CEPOCS code to its original state. Some P.R. damage control lay ahead, but I had friends in the media—along with a few vulnerable non-friends. I’d gotten off easy. Lurking in the rear chambers of my mind, however, was a nagging buzz: CEPOCS was Decker Digital’s flagship project, and until I could find the hole and plug it, the system was vulnerable.