Strange Flesh (3 page)

“Exactly.”

“I suppose we have Phissure to thank for all this mischief?” This was a group of Vietnamese net scam artists with whom we occasionally did business.

“That’s what my new friends are telling me. The Brains are trying to confirm it.”

Functional roles at Red Rook are classified according to retro high school social stereotypes. The Brains practice traditional hacking like network recon and searching for useful software flaws. Our Greasers run groups of informants. Jocks do “physical” penetrations.

I’m a “Soshe,” a social engineer, one of the lazy reptiles who use the time-honored techniques of the confidence man to compromise our opponents. After all, why spend weeks snooping around trying to capture a password when almost anyone will just tell it to you if you ask the right way? We Socials believe that a bug in your firewall program, once discovered, can be patched in minutes, but the software running the human brain will stay broken forever.

Mercer says, “Well, that may get awkward. But I’m afraid the matter will no longer concern you.”

“Okay . . .” Surely wearing a turtleneck to the office isn’t grounds for a mental-health suspension.

“Tell me, James, what do you know about the Randall family?”

That gets my attention. While quieting the mental turmoil their name causes me, I stall. “The ones who own most of IMP?”

She nods slowly.

“Well, Integrated Media Properties controls enough of the mediascape to be considered, by some, a threat to American democracy. The Randalls have almost all the voting shares.”

“Correct. Anything else?”

“They’ve got newspapers, cable, film studios . . . I understand they’re picking up web start-ups like it’s ’99.”

She arches an eyebrow. “And?”

“And I went to school with them. The twins. At Harvard. They were two years older than me. I can’t say I really know them anymore, but we were in a club together.”

“Phi Beta Kappa, I presume?”

“Ah, no, ma’am.” Mercer is well aware of all of my affiliations, starting with the League City, Texas, Cub Scout pack number 678. The club in question was the Hasty Pudding Society, an ancient order of alcoholism.

A predatory smile. “Hmm . . . Though you claim only a passing acquaintance, apparently the Randalls remember you quite well. And have tracked you to our humble enterprise here. It’s very unusual, but you’ve been requested for a meeting with them by name. Or by a diminutive at least. Please tell me you don’t answer to ‘Jimmy Jacks’ anymore.”

That means it must have been Blake who called her.

No one ever calls me by my real name: James John Pryce. I’ve been called Slim for my build, Tex for my place of origin, JJ for brevity, and Thump for reasons that were never quite clear. That’s to say nothing of the brigades of online aliases marching around cyberspace on my behalf. In college what stuck were any of several variants of “Jack,” which is more or less appropriate given my middle name.

J-Jacks, Jackie, Jackalope, Jackamole, Sir Jax-a-Lot. “Jimmy Jacks” was the one in general use. I received that nickname the same night I met Blake Randall.

F
or a school perceived to host a driven and introverted population, the number of social clubs one can join at Harvard is surprising. They run the gamut from coed cocktail societies like the Hasty Pudding to artistic clans such as the Signet and the Lampoon.

In the fall of 2000, I’d accepted membership to the Bat, one of the college’s Final Clubs, our slightly refined version of fraternities. After the holidays, I began my pre-initiation “neophyte” period, wherein you serve as a party Sherpa to the senior members. On a bitter Tuesday evening, I was ordered to report to the club for my mandatory shift in the Texas Hold ’Em game we’d run continuously during the entire two-week reading period before exams.

Late that night, I found myself seated in our book-lined card room drinking neat bourbon and inhaling an atmosphere saturated with exotic smoke. I watched with wonder the massive pile of chips growing in front of me.

The state of my finances had been much on my mind. Like many of my classmates, my father had a blue-chip doctorate; in his case, aeronautical engineering from Stanford. I grew up within miles of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Unfortunately, his commitment to the nation’s space program was supplanted just after my mother’s death, when I was too young to have formed memories of her, by a far more zealous embrace of Jim Beam. By the time I received my heavy envelope from Harvard, he was going to work in a begrimed jumpsuit, and I was left with a complex financial aid package, now proving itself hopelessly inadequate. Despite a
grueling work-study job in my house’s cafeteria and moonlighting at Ravelin, a nearby network security start-up, I would likely be forced to take the next semester off to work full-time in order to pay off swelling credit card balances. As I turned over a Big Slick, I contemplated the fact that while poker may contribute to my academic undoing, it would provide a respite from the debt collectors, at least until next month.

The only other player at the table with any kind of stack was a senior named William Baldwin Coles III. The son of a notorious currency trader, he was the club’s vice president (in the Bat, this is the highest office) and had been playing in the game for almost four days without cease. Just as I began the theatrics to set up a devious double bluff, he looked down at his cell and grinned.

“Gentlemen, things are about to get a lot more interesting.”

A couple minutes later, three new players arrived, led by the Bat’s reigning carnal Achilles, Raffi Consuelo. The second was Matt Weeks, the president of the Spee Club, who spent more time at his family’s Las Vegas casino than he did on campus. And finally, Blake Randall stepped inside.

Blake resembled one of the better-looking busts of a young Julius Caesar. He had the same strong nose and penetrating eyes, and his pale skin was the white of new marble. He stood a couple inches taller than my six-two and had a full head of blond hair. His chiseled physique came from hours logged on the Charles River as captain of our heavyweight crew.

Though he was a notable presence in his own right, when I looked at Blake, all I could see was his twin sister, Blythe, the legendary beauty of her class. She was also intimidatingly tall and had the same snowy complexion as her brother, which prompted her inevitable female detractors to call her “that starving vampire bitch.” Of course, her rich-girl celebrity status and willowy elegance ensured all sorts of male admirers flocking to her banner.

I was utterly bewitched the first time I laid eyes on her.

The twins’ glamour alone would have been enough to stimulate gossip at school, but combined with their alien mirrored beauty, we really couldn’t keep ourselves from trotting out sensational fantasies, often making use of the delicious term “twincest.” Further inflaming such rumors were their matching crooked ring fingers. A congenital abnormality? Had a ten-year-old Blake broken his while skiing, causing Blythe to snap her
own in sympathy? Or maybe it was ritual mutilation: no wedding ring would ever pass over either finger to vitiate their perfect love.

As if to demonstrate contempt for our trifling opinions, Blythe and Blake did nothing to discourage such chatter. In a cocktail circle, her hand would seek his arm. They would clutch and whisper when they met. On formal occasions, they danced together splendidly.

Seeing these three arrive, a couple of the current players began packing up their chips. I followed suit, but Coles put his hand on my shoulder and said, “A little early for the money leader to cash in, don’t you think?”

The newcomers sat down as the others hustled out like the roof was on fire. I started counting out chips.

Blake smiled benignly at me. “Evening, James. What do you say we raise the stakes?”

I found it strange that Blake would want to disrupt the game right away—and even stranger that he knew my name. I looked to Coles for guidance.

My stomach turned over when the group agreed to increase the blinds by an order of magnitude. There was simply no way I could come up with a four-figure buy-in. But the words “I can’t play” wouldn’t quite come out of my mouth. I stacked plastic slowly as I imagined how I might get myself out of this situation.

Coles leaned over to grab the Wild Turkey bottle and whispered, “Just deal, man. I’ll cover you.”

A wispy rumor tickled my bourbon-fogged brain. Coles was dating Blythe Randall. Blake supposedly didn’t care for the match and did a poor job of concealing his feelings. I wanted to explain that there was no way I’d be able to pay him back. That I’d never played for that much. That it was impossible, because I’d have to drop out of school and live on the streets if I lost. But I didn’t say any of that.

I dealt.

I dealt myself seven hours’ worth of pocket pairs, flopped sets, and nut flush rivers. I was playing like a field mouse surrounded by hawks, and yet a mountain of valuable chips steadily accumulated under my chin.

But Blake held the chip lead all night with his unfailing instinct for the
jugular. Having folded a huge pot, Raffi got up in disgust after watching him flip over a garbage hand of two-seven unsuited. Matt passed out after writing his third five-digit chit to the bank.

“And then there were three,” said Coles.

My next cards were a pair of jacks, spades and clubs. I almost had to fold them in the maelstrom of pre-flop raising that went on between Blake and Coles. But with only three players, my jacks couldn’t be that bad.

True to form, I flopped myself a set. The center cards were:

The pot rocketed over two grand before it got to me. It was weak, but I just called.

Coles said, “Shit!” and folded his cards. That worried me. Something about the hand scared him off. I glanced over at Blake for any sign of what Coles had seen, but he was a mannequin. He made a courteous gesture for me to deal another card.

I did, and up turned the jack of hearts. Giving me four of a kind for the first time in my life.

Silently screaming at myself to stay cool, I kept staring at the card until I had it together and then slowly raised my head to meet Blake’s eye.

He betrayed nothing. “Thirty-five hundred.” His bet said a full house, probably kings.

“Up five,” I said, trying to lure him in.

Blake smiled cruelly. “Table,” he said, indicating that he bet everything I had in front of me. At the bottom of my innocent columns of colored discs, I had three obsidian placards. These were ten-thousand-dollar markers. He raised me confidently enough that I took a second to reexamine the board and realized he could be holding cards that already beat
even my fantastic hand. The ace of diamonds and queen of diamonds made a straight flush that would impoverish me utterly. I studied him, trying to evaluate whether the universe could be so unjust.

Blake had politely averted his gaze from someone wrestling with base monetary calculations. I started figuring odds but was interrupted by a voice inside me.

If you let this rich bastard muscle you off four of a kind, you might as well cash in your chips and prepare for a life of absolute mediocrity.

The black rectangles emerged. “It’s thirty-seven thousand five hundred. And I call.”