The iris algorithm, p.4
The IRIS Algorithm, page 4
“There’s no time for this petty bickering.” Obadiah quickly scanned and initialed several documents in a brown folder. “We have serious work to do and a short time to do it.” He tended to agree with Virtue’s dim view of her sister’s behavior. Patience’s compulsions were a security risk; one she must learn to control. Their world was filled with the constant threat of infiltration, subversion, and assassination. Growing up in the shadow of a great man without the nurturing embrace of a mother had been difficult for his girls. He supposed that kind of deficiency would lay bare the lesser nature of anyone, but Patience wasn’t anyone. She was the heir to leadership for an organization of world importance. He’d speak with her privately later.
“What do we do now, Father?” Patience struck a conciliatory, but unconvincing, tone. “We seem to be at a dead end.”
“Have I ever let you down?”
Both women rushed to speak.
“No, of course not,” Patience said.
“Never,” Virtue said at the same time.
He taught them to compete for what they wanted, but they must know by now that neither would get a prize. They must learn to work together or The Movement would fail after he was gone.
“When you were young, and your mother deserted us, I made a promise. I would prepare the way for both of you. I would train you to take over worldwide operations of The Movement. The time is soon when this mantle of leadership will pass. The great cause we serve, the very future of humanity, will rest in your hands. You are separately incompetent, but jointly sufficient. Unfortunately, I will not live forever.”
“Oh, father,” Virtue said, “you are the picture of health. You’ll live to be a hundred and ten. At least.” She smiled at him.
He knew she loved him. The warmth of her smile, the glistening gaze of her big brown eyes, the softness and respect in her voice, her unconditional love and adoration were as sweet and pure as rose nectar. Unfortunately, that kind of love was weakness, a flaw her older sister didn’t share. It was a weakness. Wasn’t it?
In the twilight of his life—the end so near he smelled death stalking—an old man wondered.
“Well, of course, if I were permitted to live out the natural span of my life that might be true, but my latest intelligence reports that the forces aligned against me are determined to have me killed. Sooner rather than later. They know how close I am to exposing the truth. They know this last piece of information we seek is the key that unlocks everything.”
“What about the man we paid to get it?” Patience did not look up from filing her nails. “I thought he was some sort of technical genius.”
“He’s an imbecile and irrelevant,” Obadiah said.
Virtue stepped forward and leaned against the desk, then stepped back. “I thought—”
Obadiah waved his hand and cut her off. “It’s not important. We have something far better.”
“The woman whose laptop we have?” Patience was tired of the game. “Has the laptop proved useful after all?”
Obadiah smiled over his steepled fingers. “Patience, my dear, thanks to your idea, we have something far more useful than her laptop. I need you to make a call.”
CHAPTER 8
HOUSTON, TEXAS – 8:34 A.M. CDT
This trip was a bad idea. I did not know why I came. Yes I did. Martin asked me. Martin Stafford: the big boss, the main man, the CEO, the number one employee, the man who hired me and pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. The fact that he asked me if I would not mind going, instead of telling me that I had to, made it worse. If he had ordered me to go, I could have quit. Jackass.
I certainly did not come to this goat rodeo because of Martin’s nonchalant comment about you-know-who living in Houston. Like I did not already know that. So here I am, counting my paces aloud in a Houston hotel room. Lost laptop. Chance of thunderstorms over 50 percent. I held Jason’s hand in public. Why did Rosalita not answer the phone? I considered hitting re-dial for the tenth time, but the doctor at Glenn Haven, the one with the strange blink sequence, said repetitive, compulsive behavior was not desirable. Truly, I think I had bigger problems at the time. I thought the doctor was sending me Morse code with her blinking eyes. The blinks had a repeating pattern that cycled every forty-seven seconds: 1311232311113121121121133. After the final triple blink in the sequence, she would breathe deeply and paste on her fake smile. I considered pointing out her little problems, but, hell, Dr. Blinky was not paying me.
After all Martin did for me, I could not justify being too harsh with him. He was my only friend after my six-month vacation at Glenn Haven. I was seven months pregnant, broke, and at odds with the Creator. Not many people would sign up for that. Martin helped me check out of Glenn Haven and get a place of my own. Gave me a job. I could never say no to Martin. Thank God, he did not ask for much.
One, two and three, four…one, two. The irritating, whimsical knock on the door could only be Jason. I looked through the peephole and saw his dreamy blue eye staring back at me. Against my better judgment, I opened the door.
“Hey, hey, Rae,” Jason sang.
“You are persistent. I’ll give you that.”
“Hey, no worries. I came to check on you and see if you had any idea how we’re going to get a demo together, since we are, you know, sort of, laptopless.”
I was not wearing shoes and he had on his big-boy shoes, so I was only two inches taller. I have been five-feet-nine since the age of fifteen, so I am used to my height. At age thirty-two, Jason seemed to be waiting for a growth spurt. He was somewhat cute in a petite, feminine, non-attractive sort of way. I wanted to know how he groomed his eyebrows so perfectly. If I ever purchased a ventriloquist dummy, I wanted it to look just like him. I considered asking him to sit on my knee to try it out, but the fear that he would say yes stopped me.
Stress makes me think weird things. Weirder than usual.
“Actually, I haven’t thought about the demo at all,” I left him standing at the door. “Excuse me. I need to check on Samuel. For some reason, no one answered the phone. I’ll talk to you later.” I pressed re-dial on my cell phone and turned my back, which I thought was the international ‘Go Away I Need Privacy’ signal.
“No problem. I’ll just sit over here,” Jason shut the door and sat at the desk. “I brought the laptop with me. I suppose I’ll take a look, if you’re not going to.”
“I am not going to. Consider it yours. Want me to show you how to turn it on?”
Jason flashed a saccharine smile. “You really are a hoot. I know you miss me in engineering.”
He called me a hoot again. Maybe he was right. I needed to research that. My home phone rang seven times and went to the answering machine again. This was ridiculous. I paid for a fulltime, live-in nanny so things like this did not happen. Was Samuel sick? Did he have a bad asthma attack? Were they at the hospital?
There were five different ways to the nearest hospital from my house. Two were preferred routes, three alternates. The average travel times for the two preferred routes were within one standard deviation of each other, measured at two-hour intervals around the clock; therefore, they are not statistically significantly different. The three alternate routes should be avoided unless special circumstances existed on the primary routes: road closures, accidents, acts of war, social unrest, meteor strike. The alternates had too much variability in elapsed time even though one of them was a full 1.35 miles closer than either of the two preferred routes. You cannot win against the mathematics of entropy and chaos, unless, of course, you know a secret.
“Whoa! There’s that crazy encryption script again.” Jason turned the laptop toward me, raised his pretty eyebrows a couple of times, and gave me a pouty smirk.
Yep. Ventriloquist dummy. Got to get one.
“So, Rae Lo…oops. Sorry. Since you don’t seem to be concerned about what is probably the biggest deal of the year for VTI, I’m taking a shot at getting this laptop in condition for us to use. You know, for the benefit of the company. Just because I got my MBA doesn’t mean I forgot everything I learned from my BS in Computer Science.”
“Go ahead. Knock yourself out. It is probably some pervert’s computer filled with child porn. Better you than me.”
Jason was smart. Very smart in some ways, but he was sloppy. Sloppy was imprecise. It was lazy. It left equations out of balance. That was why I asked Martin to make sure Jason got the sales engineer job. I rarely asked Martin for anything, but Jason in engineering was like a round-off error that kept accumulating day after day. At some point, I could not ignore it anymore. I began to count how many times he said things like: “How the heck are ya?” and “What can I do ya for lunch?” and my favorite of his absurdities, “It’s called brainstorming, not blamestorming.” I knew Jason had to go when I had a nightmare that there was a verifiable correlation between the fifteen supersingular prime numbers, and the inverse square root of how many times he called me Rae Lo per week. I ran the numbers for a month just to make sure there was not actually a correlation.
And that is another thing, God. Are dreams something conjured up in my mind or do you put them there? I have to believe that you put those sorts of bizarre things in there for some reason, because there is absolutely no reason for me to dream some of that crazy stuff. I have been trying to make myself dream about a nice secluded island, a hammock, a fruity drink, a suntanned cabana boy who…well, I guess you know, so I would prefer not to go into that right now. No disrespect, but could you be a bit more direct in your communication? Sorry. I know I should not think these things but I do, which means you already know it, which…oh, we have been through this a thousand times.
I was about to press re-dial again when my phone rang. I never answered calls from Unknown Caller, but my thumb was in the process of pressing the green send button when the call came in. “Hello?”
“Simone Dancing.” The deep voice articulated the name with inhuman contempt.
I slammed the phone down. “Shit!”
“What is it?”
The phone rang again. Unknown Caller. I could not move.
“Rachael? Are you all right?”
I heard Jason speak. I heard the phone ring. I heard my heart bang. I heard my real name, Simone Dancing. I heard a voice in my head: “Be sure your sins will find you out.”
Something was terribly wrong. Worse than all the wrongs, I ever imagined. The sick feeling in my stomach was not fear for myself.
Please, God. Not Samuel. He had nothing to do with it.
I forced myself to answer the phone.
“What do you want?” My voice quivered and cracked.
“You have what we want. We have what you want. We need to reach an understanding.” The sounds of other voices. Scuffling. A woman’s voice. Rosalita? Samuel’s voice, crying.
“Mom! Help me! Please! They’re hurting Rosalita!”
The phone went dead.
It happened so fast, a punch to the head from a stranger on the street. One cannot prepare for the delirious effect of a random blow. My molecules fought to reorder themselves, to make sense of what happened, to find an alternate explanation where none existed. The numbers churned relentlessly in my head, offering no sympathy, only mathematical certainty.
Hearing the echoes of my son crying out for help, the numbness in my limbs subsided, my heart liquefied in my chest. I tried to say his name, to call out to Samuel, to promise him I would sacrifice the whole world to save him. My only sound was the desperate, wheezing gasps of hyperventilation.
For Samuel’s sake, I had to focus.
I gave myself over to the sanctuary of numbers, God’s own secret temple, and the source of things knowable and the origin of my sin. Numbers do not hope or fear. They do not wish, or regret. Numbers precede outcomes.
I focused. The answer came to me. I changed.
In the place where my fears hid, something darker took root. I could not stop it if I wanted to. I did not want to. This was what it would take to save my son. Terrible, seething madness trembled through my shoulders, the heat of it melting in my veins, flowing to my arms and legs. I baptized myself in the consuming, holy flood.
Who better to kill a thing than the one who created it? Who better to tell the secret than the one who has kept it?
God and I knew it was always going to end this way.
CHAPTER 9
Jason watched in horror as the color drained from Rachael’s face: pale like sickness and despair and death come nigh. She hyperventilated. When her eyes fluttered, he jumped up, knocking the chair over, and caught her by the waist just as her knees buckled. A child’s ragdoll, Rachael slouched in his arms: lifeless, mute, soulless.
“Rachael? Rachael, what’s going on?”
A low guttural groan emerged from deep within Rachael, and she struggled to get her footing. Wobbly but upright, she grabbed his shoulders and squeezed until it felt like her fingers separated his muscle from tendon.
“Ow! Okay, you got your strength back, so, okay, ow, I’m going let you… ah.” Jason stepped back, rubbing his shoulder. “Nice grip.” He checked his Armani suit jacket for damage. “What just happened?”
“They have Samuel.” Her voice was raspy but resolved.
“Your son, Samuel?”
“Yes. They have him.”
“Who? Who has him?” Rachael’s phone buzzed on the floor where she’d dropped it. Unknown Caller. “I don’t understand. Who has your son?”
She slowly, deliberately picked up the phone. What was that look? Fear and concern, but something else. The dangerous madness of a mother’s rage. Jason took a cautious step backward.
“This is Simone Dancing. What the fuck do you want?”
His brow creased into deep folds as he listened in stunned silence. Simone Dancing? Sounds like a stripper.
Rachael’s voice was low, husky, acidic. Rage exploded like bullets from her glowing eyes. Maybe she had finally gone around the bend. He listened carefully to her side of the conversation.
“I don’t know what you mean…. Do you not think I would tell you? I do not give a damn about them…. If it is money you want, just tell me…. I have no intention of going to the police…. Listen, you have the wrong person. I have been away from that for ten years.… There is no such thing…. I’m listening.” Rachael listened for a long time. Every few seconds her left eye twitched.
Jason’s stomach lurched as he watched her face change. She stared through him, through the wall, through eternity to some cold and lonely place where only the dead and unforgiven endure. What were they telling her? Had someone kidnapped Samuel?
“Now you listen to me,” Rachel’s lips quivered her voice a grated whisper. “If you hurt him, I’ll find you. Do you hear me? I will find you. God will not help you.” She hung up the phone and closed her eyes, drawing deep, ragged breaths.
Should he hold her? Was this somehow his fault? That made no sense, but deep down he knew. He had done this to her. “Rachael, what’s going on?” He wasn’t sure she could hear him. “Rachael, should we, you know, call somebody or something.” Jason hated feeling so insufficient. The situation required somebody, and he was nobody.
Rachael picked up a rectangular pine box from the nightstand, a miniature coffin. She carefully opened the box and took out a rough tubular object about eight inches long. It looked like part glass and part rock, bent and twisted along its axis. She held it up to the light, and he could see it was hollow and smooth. She handled it like a talisman that she was inextricably bound to, revered, and hated.
He moved cautiously toward her. “Who is Simone Dancing?”
“This is fulgurite. Petrified lightning.”
“Who is Simone Dancing?”
“There are one hundred lightning strikes every second on Earth. Thirty-two percent make it to the ground. Occasionally, when God is in a particularly whimsical mood, he creates one of these.” She held the fulgurite up to the light and squinted through the tube. “I have to confess, I do not get God’s sense of humor.”
“Are you okay? Who was that on the phone? Who is Simone Dancing?” He thought back to what Dave told him at breakfast. Freaking backwards writing, dude.
“I need to contact my husband.”
Now he knew Rachael had lost it. “You mean…your deceased husband?”
She gave him a puzzled look. “Who said my husband was dead?”
“Uh…that would be you. You made it pretty clear to everyone at VTI that you lost your husband in a tragic accident, and you didn’t care to talk about it.”
“I did lose my husband in a tragic accident. I never said he was dead.” She shook her head with a dismissive frown. “The numbers do not lie, Jason. I am the numbers. I do not lie.”
“Simone Dancing?”
“My name was legally changed ten years ago. Not a lie.”
Jason was dizzy. He had big enough problems without finding himself in the middle of a kidnapping. The biggest deal of his entire career was right at his fingertips. Perhaps, more accurately, at her fingertips. It would be so easy for her and so impossible for anyone else. It was all so close.
Selfish bitch.
Jason closed his eyes. To stop now was suicide, going forward could be worse.
CHAPTER 10
From the look on his face, I knew he was trying to decide if I was totally crazy or just mostly crazy. That was logical.
“Who was that on the phone?” Jason straightened himself up to full height, such as it was. “Am I to understand your son was kidnapped? This isn’t some kind of bad joke, is it?”
“Some woman. Yes. And no.” I was processing data hard and fast, which did not leave much for bystander questions.
“What? Oh, you’re answering my questions,” Jason struggled to look in control. “Some woman? Did she say who she was?”
“Yes, Jason. She gave me all her particulars including her GPS coordinates. She’s going to email me her photograph and social security number later today.”
What a smuck!
