Qubit, page 22
Cairnes frowned. He looked toward the counter.
This was going to be easier than she’d expected. “You really are in over your head. You don’t even know who you’re working for.”
“This isn’t really helping,” he sneered.
Katya’s eyes widened. “Really? I’m pretty sure I just told you something you didn’t know.”
“I think I know who I’m working for. His name isn’t Vipul.”
“Oh, you mean Anand?” She had to suppress a smile—she’d stopped him short with that one. Placing her palms on the table, she looked at him intently. Finally, he raised his eyes to hers. Which she found unexpectedly distracting. Cairnes was handsome, smart, a father…how’d he gotten mixed up with someone like Vipul Rathod? “Listen, Lochan—do you mind if I call you Lochan?”
“Lock is fine.”
“Lock,” she repeated. “I guess your two friends in the elevator are Stock and Barrel.” She smiled. The humorous banter was a technique she’d learned years ago from Haruo, back in Hong Kong. The idea was to make sure the target understood that you weren’t worried. The rookie mistake was to act like you were taking things as seriously as the target was, but that only served to make them more anxious. Katya had further personalized it to help her relax. After all, her targets were usually scared with good reason.
When Lock didn’t react, she pressed on. “Anyway, Lock, I’m not your enemy here. And my—”
“All right, listen. The reason I didn’t talk to the FBI or the cops or whatever is because of my daughter. But since you’re here anyway…all I give a fuck about at this point is getting my daughter back. If you can help me do that, I’m all yours.”
Katya nodded. “Well, that sounds reasonable.” She’d been afraid of this. She’d used the daughter to get his attention. The downside was that getting his daughter back at this point was extremely unlikely. “I’ll tell you what. I will see what information we may have about her.”
Lock pursed his lips.
Katya went for the close. This was a rush job—normally, she’d have been more patient. She didn’t expect it to work, but then again, the first close rarely did. It merely planted the seed, helped the target understand how the process worked. “In exchange, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what’s going on. For example, how did you hack into all those brokerage accounts?”
“I’ll be happy to.”
Too easy. “Great.”
“When you get me that information about my daughter.”
Katya frowned. Strike one. She decided to reframe the problem. She needed him to focus on something she could actually help him with. In this case, that wasn’t much—leniency in sentencing, mostly. “Lock…I’m sure you realize you’ve pissed off some very powerful people. And you’re stealing a lot—”
“I haven’t stolen a damn thing. I haven’t made a dime from any of this.”
“Aren’t you kinda splitting hairs a bit, Lock?” Always important to keep using a familiar tone. “What I’m saying is, we don’t have a lot of time here. Right now, you’re probably the most wanted man on the planet. You and Vipul.” Katya shrugged. “If I was you, I might—”
“If you already know everything, what do you need me for?”
A buying signal! “Don’t misunderstand, Lock. I could shoot you in the head right now, and they’d give me a medal. But when you weed a garden, you have to make sure you pull the weeds up by the roots. The more we know, the better.”
Lock nodded. “All right. Since we’re being honest. I got one card to play. Which is that I know a lot. Obviously not everything. But a lot. I could tell you shit that would blow your mind. So that’s my card. But I gotta play it carefully. And maybe if I play it right, I can get my daughter the fuck home.” Katya noticed that he swallowed hard before looking away from her.
Katya smiled. Inwardly, she felt something seize up. She was empathizing with him. Boundaries, Katya. “You don’t have to tell me everything at once, Lock. Let’s start with something small. Something I can take back to my superiors and say, ‘Look, he’s cooperating. Let’s not kill him.’”
“What I ought to do is go find Anand. Or…what’s the other guy’s name?”
“You are so bad at this,” teased Katya, subtly reminding him that he was out of his depth. “Vipul Rathod.”
Lock didn’t flinch. “What I ought to do,” he blustered, “is go find Vipul Whatever-the-fuck and give him the heads up.”
“Because you think he’s going to help you get your daughter back?” Katya let the rebuke hang in the air between them.
Lock leaned forward with a sudden, hostile intensity. “Do you have any idea the risk I’m already taking, just talking to you? I’m gambling with my daughter’s life! Can you understand that? So, no, maybe they aren’t going to help me get her back. But right now, my cooperation is the thing that’s keeping her alive. I don’t have time to play your little spy games, Katya. Either you can help me, or you can’t.” Lock paused. Took a breath. Situated himself in his seat. Katya found herself increasingly fascinated by him. He seemed taken aback by his own outburst. He continued, more quietly: “Maybe if you could tell me where she is, I’d start to believe you can help. But…”
Katya nodded, realizing with a start that she was going to need to raise her game. They were going to need to do something about the situation with his daughter. She’d pushed hard, and he’d pushed back. “All right, Lock,” she agreed, mocking his intensity, trying to regain the initiative. “Tomorrow evening, meet me back here.”
Lock didn’t miss a beat. “What time?”
“Whenever you can.” She stood up. “With any luck, I’ll have something on your daughter. Sophia, that’s her name, right?” She knew her name, but wanted him to acknowledge it.
“Sophie. Yeah.” Lock’s gaze seemed to drift into another dimension. Katya’s throat tightened. Boundaries! In spite of herself, she placed her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her.
“We’ll figure something out,” she said gently.
Later, as she walked down the street, taking several turns to be sure she hadn’t been followed, she couldn’t decide if she was just trying to reassure a target or if she was becoming one.
Naubatpur (Bihar, India) • Rathod Apartment Building
Monday, May 7th
5:30 p.m. IST (India Standard Time)
Sophie was thrown back onto her cot, knocking it over in the process. Her face was damp with tears, and her ankle was screaming incessantly at her to stop moving. The man and the boy with the white T-shirt were gone now. The man facing her was the thin-mustached one. He stepped toward her and leaned down, shouting at her. She reflexively put her hands up in front of her face, but he slapped them away. He grabbed her chin and produced a black handgun and shoved it into her mouth. It was cold, and it tasted acrid. She could hear her own muffled screams and felt the spit from his mouth landing on her face. She saw the cut on his cheek. She saw the swelling around his eye. He blinked, and she saw the blood vessels that had burst in his eyeball.
Strangely, she felt the fear and the pain leave her body, her screams fell silent, and her arms went limp. Her mind emptied, save for one simple thought. I’m going to die. She blinked slowly, taking in air through her nose. She let her vision blur. This was not the escape she’d imagined, but it was an escape all the same.
Except the thin-mustached man did not pull the trigger. His fury spent, he shoved her backward into the cot, which now lay on its side, the sheets and blankets on the floor. He came at her again, only this time he was holding something else in his hand.
Ah, it was her old friend, the blue pill.
She refused to open her mouth. He slapped her across the face and things went sideways, sprinkled with little bursts of light. She felt his fingers pushing into her mouth, felt the pill lodge in her throat. She bit down, clenching her jaws, clamping down on his fingers like a vise. She tasted his blood just before she saw the palm of his hand from the corner of her eyes, and there was a flash of lightning, and everything went black.
Nariman Point, Mumbai • Kapoor Financial Planning Ltd
Monday, May 7th
7:00 p.m. IST (India Standard Time)
Swaran poured both himself and Brij, his new junior partner, refills of scotch. “I’m running low. All this big money is causing me to drink more.” He sat down heavily behind his desk
“At least it’s good scotch,” said Brij. He was trim and clean shaven and wore a pressed white dress shirt that was too large for him. “And you’ve plenty of money to buy more.”
“First, the markets were closed. Then there were no instructions this morning. Then I finally get instructions, but it’s all about a drop in the Turkish lira.”
“What happened to buying put options? That seemed to be working well.”
Swaran’s chest swelled. “I thought so! We made eleven million dollars in two days’ trading!”
Brij’s eyes widened. “So much?”
“But now I’m supposed to buy something called a forward contract.”
“Forex?”
“Yes. If I understand it correctly, it allows me to convert a billion dollars’ worth of Turkish lira into dollars in a week’s time.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
“I suppose because the Turkish lira is going to drop in value.”
“And you lock in the current exchange rate. But where are you going to get the money to buy a billion dollar contract?”
“A short-term billion dollar contract doesn’t typically move more than a few million dollars.”
“So you can buy a billion contract with eleven million dollars?”
Swaran shrugged. “It seems so.”
“But if the rate goes the wrong way before the contract is settled—”
“We’d lose everything.” Swaran took a large swallow of scotch. “But that’s the whole point of having access to this information. Leverage. This is what the big boys do.”
“Perhaps you should cash out now.”
“Yes. I’d make a million dollars, more or less.”
“How much do you stand to make with this Turkish lira deal?”
“He says he expects us to make a hundred million dollars.”
“And you would make?”
“Another ten million.”
“I suppose that makes it difficult to walk away.”
Swaran stared forlornly at the bottom of his now empty scotch glass. “I suppose it does.”
Singapore Financial District • The (New) Lab
Tuesday, May 8th
Noon SGT (Singapore Time)
“Now what?” asked Lock, staring up the green dots on the monitor. “Do we just wait here until the end of the day?”
“Yes,” said Sanjay. “Those are our instructions.”
“Anand wants us to be available at all hours,” explained Raj. “In the lab during business hours and in our hotel rooms otherwise.”
“This is stupid,” concluded Lock.
The three men sat in silence. “I am going to play chess online,” announced Raj, turning toward his laptop.
“Too bad we don’t have any video games,” said Sanjay.
“What are they up to?” asked Lock, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the monitor. Why exactly did they need him around if they weren’t making use of the Wave Nine? For that matter, at this point Raj was becoming pretty familiar with the intimate details of the machine himself. There were still a few things that Raj didn’t understand—Lock had been careful to be sure of that. But Raj had been very persistent in having Lock explain things. Was that just Raj’s natural curiosity or part of some larger plan?
Regardless, Lock had to assume the worst. Either they no longer needed the Wave Nine, or they were grooming Raj to replace him. Which meant that he was almost out of time. Assuming the worst, they would simply kill both him and Sophie once he was no longer useful to them. For all he knew, Anand was on his way over to kill him now.
The new wrinkle, obviously, was the CIA agent. He was skeptical that she was going to turn up anything on Sophie. But she had given him a name—Vipul Rathod—which he’d promptly googled on a computer at the hotel’s business center after their meeting. Unfortunately, there were apparently several Vipul Rathods, and none of them seemed particularly likely to be the one he was interested in.
Lock’s eyes wandered over to Raj, calmly playing chess on his laptop. Even from several feet away, Lock could see the correct move. It was a Classical Sicilian opening, with Black, Raj’s opponent, having just developed his king’s pawn. The continuation for White was to move to the queen to prepare for a queenside castle, but Raj seemed stuck. Lock forced himself to look away. He needed to keep working on the problem, no matter how hopeless it seemed.
What if Katya did turn up something on Sophie? Then he could bring Ray into play. He wouldn’t know anything until his meeting with Katya that night. But was there anything between now and then he could do to prepare?
Money. Wouldn’t Ray need money? He’d want to be paid. Maybe he’d have men he’d have to pay. And what if Sophie turned out to be in India? Or in Singapore? They’d have to travel and transport whatever weapons or other equipment they wanted to bring. And that would require chartering a jet or something, right?
At least this was a problem he could solve. He was sitting at the controls of the world’s most efficient money-making machine. Which, thanks to Anand’s threats, they’d just spent the better part of the last seventy-two hours bringing back online. Wall Street didn’t open for another nine hours. They’d only be stuck in the lab for another five. So the first thing to do was to create a backdoor into the system that he could access from the hotel business center.
He looked at Raj, who had managed to get to the queenside castle but then misplayed what Black had intended to be an exchange of queens. The game was over, but Raj didn’t realize it yet. In another ten minutes, he’d figure it out and would be looking for a new distraction. And Sanjay was just looking at YouTube videos. He needed a better way to keep them distracted while he created the backdoor. The last thing he needed was Raj poking his head in to see what Lock was doing.
“I know how we can kill some time,” Lock announced. Raj looked up, forlorn. Sanjay tore himself away from a video of what appeared to be someone falling off a riding lawn mower. “We’ve got this awesome video display and a nice, fat Internet connection—let’s watch some movies.”
ψ
The trio sat in the darkened lab. On the monitor, the Joker was recounting the tale of his scars to his would-be assassins. Why so serious? Lock looked over at Raj and Sanjay and decided that his plan was working—they weren’t paying any attention to him. Lock slid over to his laptop and opened a terminal screen. He looked back up at the others, double checking. He returned his gaze to the monitor and rubbed his chin before placing his hands above the keyboard. His fingers hit the keys in furious bursts. On the monitor in front of him, windows came and went. He stopped and looked up again. Raj looked over with a curious expression on his face.
Lock finished up and rolled his chair off to the side, pretending to watch the movie. Raj rolled over next to him. “What are you doing?” he whispered.
Lock whispered back. “Oh, I just want to automate the Torrents a bit. So you can just type the name of the movie you want to watch into IRC, and it will start downloading it for you.”
“Oh. Good idea!”
Lock smiled and looked back up at the monitor. The Joker was now asking the commissioner if it depressed him to know how alone he really was. Lock’s smiled faded. He thought of Sophie, who was truly alone.
But for the first time since she’d been taken, Lock had a plan.
25
* * *
Naubatpur (Bihar, India) • Rathod Apartment Building
Tuesday, May 8th
11:00 a.m. IST (India Standard Time)
Sophie’s mouth felt as though it was full of sandpaper. The glass of water was there on the table, along with her morning gruel. But there were three men between her and the table. She was on the cot, hugging her knees.
“Water,” she croaked, pointing to the table. She tried to swallow but simply gagged.
One of the men understood her and picked up the glass, mockingly offering it to her. She scooted forward and reached for it, but he pulled it away. He raised it to his lips and began to drink, making loud slurping noises and moaning with pleasure. The other men laughed.
Sophie reached for the glass again, and two of the men grabbed her while the third moved behind them. She felt their hands on her breasts and buttocks, and she tried to pull away. The laughing was gradually turning into grunted Hindi words. Occasionally, Sophie could hear the word pussy. The man who’d taken her water glass set it down on the table. He unzipped his jeans and pulled them down, exposing himself to her, which ignited another round of laughter.
Sophie looked away, trying to pull free from the men and their probing hands. Finally, she broke away and tumbled into the cot. She found herself between the wall and the cot, and she quickly repositioned herself so she could use the cot as a barrier. She grabbed one of the supports and raised the cot up in front of her. The men kept laughing.
The man who’d exposed himself came forward, his jeans pulled back up, offering her the glass of water. She put down the cot and reached for it and was suddenly drenched. Water dripped down her face and hair onto her shoulders and neck and onto the floor. She wiped it away from her eyes, and her tongue darted from her mouth, desperate to catch droplets as they cascaded down her face. The laughter reached a crescendo. She realized there was a fourth man now. She slid backward to the floor, holding up the cot that separated them from her.
