This morning when he’d gotten into the office, he’d spent the first few hours of his day making calls in an attempt to verify or refute some of the more incredible claims the manuscript had made in the couple of hundred pages he’d skimmed before hitting the sack late last night.
Over his forty years in the business, Abe had accumulated a lot of favors, so his inquiries to his contact base received serious attention. Nobody he reached could immediately offer any definitives, but all promised to investigate and get back to him with whatever they learned. This included two professors at Columbia University, the vice-chairman of one of the largest investment banks on Wall Street, and the head of an elite think-tank in D.C..
Abe had pondered the claims in the manuscript long and hard, and understood that if they could be corroborated, they represented an incredible exposé of a hidden reality not even the most jaded conspiracy theorists had dreamt of in their most paranoid moments. But in order to know whether he had a book, Abe needed to get some feeling of how much, if any of it, was true or could be verified. If he just got blank stares from his network, many of whom were as plugged-in as it was possible to be, he could safely assume it was all a waste of time and simply flush the document and get on with his life.
So he’d made the calls, reeling in favors and cajoling — and then he’d glanced at his watch and realized that he needed to attend to more mundane matters. He’d set the wheels in motion on doing his due diligence, and now he needed to give it some time and see what the tom toms came back with.
His brief stab at initial research concluded, he’d grabbed his coat and satchel and rushed out to meet one of his authors at a brunch launching the writer’s latest non-fiction tome on how to make millions from one’s home computer by working only three hours a day. That chore concluded, he’d next detoured and stopped downtown to chat with a publisher he’d been having a hard time getting on the phone. Many of the real deals were done on a face-to-face basis, and Abe understood you needed to pound the pavement sometimes if you wanted to get mindshare.
The day almost half gone by the time he returned to the office, his thoughts had returned to the manuscript, so he’d logged onto his private account to see what he could glean from the sender’s e-mail address.
Which was why Abe was now mystified.
There was no e-mail.
No attachment.
Abe wasn’t a complete Luddite, so he’d done a cursory diagnostic to figure out what had gone wrong with his system, but his grasp of the intricacies of the technology were limited, and thus doomed to failure. After half an hour, he’d exhausted his rudimentary repertoire of technical know-how, and with nothing to show for it but frustration, finally acceded that he was out of his depth.
His personal assistant and secretary, Mona, was somewhat better than he when it came to computers, so he’d had her come in to try to recover the missing message. After fifteen more minutes of effort, they still had nothing to show for their trouble, and the clock was ticking.
Abe stared vacantly through the window at the building across the street as he considered his situation. He needed to find out who’d written the manuscript so he could establish contact and begin the dance. There were about three hundred questions he wanted to ask, and he needed to understand whether the author was a prodigy, a loon or a charlatan — but the attachment had no phone or address on it, and no author name.
So the e-mail was the only contact mechanism.
And it was gone.
Hence his current predicament.
What Abe needed was someone who really understood computers and was internet savvy. The kid who’d hooked up their network was okay, but certainly no genius — a friend’s nephew, just out of college and doing PC consulting until he found a real job — so that option was unlikely to yield any results. Which meant that unless there was a follow-up e-mail from the mystery scribe, he was shit out of luck, and potentially sitting on the mother lode with no way to mine it. That was just great. He gets what could very well be solid gold dropped in his lap and he might as well put a message in a bottle and throw it into the sea to communicate with the author.
Abe was stymied. How could his day get any worse from here?
Then he had a flash of inspiration.
Moving to his ancient dusty credenza, he rummaged around in the chaos until he found his battered rolodex behind some reams of paper. His office resembled a pack rat’s lair more than a legendary literary agent’s, with piles of documents stacked helter-skelter, absent any apparent organization. But it was a system Abe was comfortable with, so that’s how things stayed. It drove Mona and his two associates crazy.
Another habit from a lifetime of dealing with hard copy, Abe eschewed any sort of electric organizers or phone books — the numbers in the rolodex never went missing, unlike the e-mail that apparently had. He fumbled around on his desk until he found his reading glasses, and perching them precariously on his nose, flipped through the handwritten cards in the rickety contrivance until he found the one he was looking for. He peered at the name and number, squinting a little. It seemed to Abe that the writing on the damned cards was getting smaller over the years, making it increasingly hard to read them. No matter; he’d found what he needed.
The phone answered on the third ring, and the muted sound of traffic and voices reverberated in the background.
“Michael Derrigan.”
Chapter 2
“Michael, it’s Abe Sarkins. It’s been a while since we talked. Are you super busy?”
Abe had liked the first few chapters of Michael’s debut novel, submitted through a mutual acquaintance, and they’d maintained contact ever since. He’d been interested enough in the book to tentatively agree to represent it once it was complete, however that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon — Michael wasn’t exactly prolific. But they still talked occasionally, usually with Michael checking in to let Abe know he was close to having more pages done, this time for real. Abe had developed a liking for him. He had a good heart and some real talent, capable of creating something special if he’d ever sit down and focus on writing the goddamned thing.
“Oh, right, Abe…I’m sorry, I’ve been meaning to send you more chapters, but it’s been really hectic and I haven’t had a chance to polish them yet.” Michael raised the privacy screen in the limo as he talked. He didn’t have any worries about Aldous listening in on his literary career’s non-trajectory, but the Turks in the back were engaged in a heated discussion and he couldn’t hear over the din of their jabber.
“Not a problem, Michael. Actually, I was hoping you could lend me a hand. I had some e-mail correspondence go missing and I need to find it, but nothing I’ve tried seems to be working. I know some of your security work involves technology, and I was wondering if this is the sort of thing you could help with?” Abe asked.
Abe was describing something that wasn’t even close to the sort of corporate espionage and countermeasures Michael handled, but given Abe’s standing in the literary world and Michael’s aspirations of becoming a player someday, Abe had just been promoted to the head of the line of people Michael was eager to assist.
“Of course, Abe. Give me the short version of the problem so I know who to bring with me, and I’ll see how soon I can stop by,” Michael said.
“Well, I got an anonymous e-mail yesterday with a manuscript attachment that it turns out I have an interest in, but when I got to the office this morning, it’s like it never existed. It’s nowhere in my e-mail logs. It’s the first time that’s ever happened…” Abe realized as he spoke that his account sounded as troubling as a hangnail.