“Unless it’s urgent,” she said, “go practice your standup on someone else. I’m ass deep with the payroll, or don’t you want to get paid?”
“Being paid is nice, but we actually do have a virus, Colleen. A couple of the secretaries have been complaining about it. It’s a bounce-back program that came at us through—”
“So… deal with it,” she interrupted. “We get fifty viruses a week.”
“Okay,” he said, and left her office.
He went back to the main office, where several secretaries were standing around the coffeemaker. Judah had told them to log off and they seemed to take that as a sign to do no work at all. He shrugged — it wasn’t his problem, and Colleen would be buried with her payroll for the rest of the day.
The virus hadn’t been overtly destructive, but it had been new and oddly configured enough to catch his attention, especially since it arrived as a bounce-back response to the CDC’s daily alert e-mail bulletin.
Judah sat at one of the workstations, opened his laptop on a wheeled side table, and logged onto both computers. Everything loaded normally all the way to the password screen. He used one of IT’s secure passwords that would open the system but reroute it to his laptop. Again the screens loaded normally. He ran several different spyware scans and came up with nothing.
He frowned. That was weird, because he had definitely seen the virus warning message pop-up. He tapped a few keys and did a different kind of search.
Nothing.
Very weird.
He logged into the office e-mail account and looked for the e-mail that had likely carried the virus. It was gone.
Without saying a word he got up and went to the adjoining desk and logged on. Same result — no trace of the e-mail, no trace of a virus. He repeated this four more times, but there was no trace of either the e-mail or the virus anywhere in the system.
Judah picked up the secretary’s phone and punched the number for Tom Ito, his assistant. When Ito answered, Judah said, “Did you do a system search on an e-mail virus this morning?”
“No, why — you need me to run one?”
Judah explained the situation.
“Got me, Jude. Do we have a problem?”
Judah thought about it. “Nah. Skip it. If it’s not there, then it’s not there. Nothing to worry about.”
He hung up and walked over to the secretaries. “Look, the system seems to be clear, but if you get anything else call me right away.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cyrus Jakoby received his children in a garden that was so beautifully designed that visitors could easily believe that they were out in the fresh air rather than half a mile under the heat-baked Arizona desert. Cyrus remained seated in a tropical cane rattan chair with a high fan back. He was cool and composed in tropical whites. The Twins bowed to him. They had never hugged their father and only rarely shook hands. Bowing had always been the custom among them. They bowed from the waist in the Chinese fashion, and Cyrus inclined his head like an Emperor and waved them to seats.
Their chairs were of the same style as his, though not as big, and from past experience Hecate knew that their chairs were built with slight and carefully planned imperfections. The seats were too deep, so that they had to either perch on the end or sit back and have the sharp edge of the seat cut into the tender flesh above the back of their knees. The legs were ever so slightly uneven, so that they sat off-angled in a way that cramps and aches would gradually form in the lower back and obliques. The chairs were also positioned lower on a slope whose incline was hidden by copious decorative shrubbery and a forced-perspective distraction mosaic made from multicolored tiles. The overall effect was of a lack of comfort and an imbalance that made one feel inferior to the person sitting higher and in obvious comfort in the big chair. And although the design of Cyrus’s chair was island rustic, he rode it like a throne.
Hecate had long ago found the most comfortable position, half-turned, with her knees together and feet braced to keep her from sliding to the wrong side of the chair. She approved of the chairs and long ago had stopped wondering why she didn’t share her insights with her brother.
“It’s good to see you, Father,” said Paris, uncomfortably crossing his legs and then uncrossing them.
Cyrus studied the hummingbirds flitting from one exotic flower to another.
“It’s good to see you, Alpha,” corrected Hecate.
Cyrus looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. “And how are my young gods today?”
“Well, Alpha,” said Hecate. “And you’re looking especially fit.”
Paris hid a sneer behind a cough and Cyrus affected not to notice.
Cyrus said, “I’m self-renewing, as you know.”
“Of course,” Hecate said, though she had no idea what that meant. She made herself look pleased and knowing.
“Before we discuss whatever it is that’s putting such troubled looks on your faces,” Cyrus said smoothly, “please let me have an update on the shipping.”
Hecate shrugged. “The entire distribution network is in place. We have three cargo ships of bottled water and bottled sparkling water en route to Africa and six shiploads already in the warehouse in Accra in Ghana, four in Calabar in Nigeria, and two each in Libreville, Gabon; Lomé, Togo; and Tangier. Two of our Brazilian ships will make stops in Callao, Peru, and Guayaquil, Ecuador. The shipments to Chile and Panama will go out next. And we can handle the domestic shipments to New York, Louisiana, and Mississippi by water or rail.”
For a moment Cyrus’s eyes seemed to lose focus and his skin flushed as if the news touched him on an almost erotic level. It was a reaction Hecate had noted before, but she let no expression show on her face.
Paris laughed and it broke the spell. “It’s kind of ironic that one of the world’s great criminal enterprises is largely financed by the sale of purified water.”
“Yes,” Cyrus said with a wolf’s smile. “Life is full of delightful ironies. But don’t forget that illegitimate business cannot succeed without legitimate business. Even those greaseballs in the Mafia understand that.”
They all chuckled over that, but Hecate’s laugh was as false and measured as her father’s and she knew it. She just did not know why Cyrus thought it was funny. She’d had toxicology screens done on random samples of every shipment of water, and as far as she could tell there was nothing in there but purified water and enough trace minerals to make the health club set think they were actually getting something for the money they spent on glorified tap water. Maybe it was time to run an entirely different set of tests on the water.
“Father,” began Paris, and then corrected himself with an irritable grunt, “ ‘Alpha’… we’re moving into Phase Three of the South African account. We’ve run the Berserkers through three field tests with variable results, the most recent of which was last night in Somalia. What we’d like is—”
“ ‘Variable’?” Cyrus interrupted.
“That’s really why we’re here, Alpha,” explained Hecate. “Our clients have some concerns about certain behavioral anomalies. Concerns that, unfortunately, are borne out by the test results.”
“What kind of anomalies?”
Hecate looked at Paris, who gave her a “well, you started this” wave of his hand. She took a breath and plunged ahead. “In the second and third field tests we’ve documented aggression increases in levels beyond what the computer models predicted. In short, the test subjects have become too violent.”