CALVIN WOULD HAVE looked more out of place on the flight had he not had a laptop. He supposed later in the afternoon most of the flights would be populated with tourist-gamblers, hollowed out and returning to wherever they called home. But this early morning bird was all about business people and their tools. Past the engine noise and slight air pressure hearing loss, the cabin was filled with the clockwork of busy fingers clicking resilient plastic keys.
He looked out the window and watched the patchwork desert slide by, dotted with disks of deep green: circular fields growing within the range of powerful rotating sprinklers that swept the arid sand like life-giving radar. He looked across the empty seats next to him. The flight was only about forty-percent full. Even after all this time, the airlines were still feeling the pinch from September 11th. With his personal knowledge of just how easy it was to smuggle weapons past airport security, Calvin couldn’t blame the fear-grounded public. If more people knew what he knew, the airlines would be out of business all together.
A woman, alone in her row like Calvin, sat across the aisle with her back against the shaded window, her legs stretched out on the empty seats, laptop across her thighs. She was in her early thirties, stark and serious in a dark suit, light makeup. Calvin could see the screen reflected in her glasses, some sort of bar graph. She’d taken off her shoes and he noted the silver glint of a toe ring. She caught Calvin smiling at her jewelry and tipped him a mischievous wink, quick as a keystroke, before going back to her computer.
Calvin’s cheeks flushed and he looked back out the window. Vow of celibacy indeed. He sighed and slid down the shade of his porthole, his computer screen crystallizing into detail. He’d already gone through the file on Frank Mason and his operations, the minutiae. Calvin stared at the screen, letting it fall out of focus as he organized the main points in his mind.
Francis Mason Jr. was Old Country Mafia, but ran his business from a new school of thought. He continued de-wopifying the family name. He had branched out from the penny-ante drug and protection rackets in limited territories, adopting a corporate model with international production and transportation. There were records of sex and slavery rings that went as far as Thailand and the former Soviet Bloc. Even Holy Mama Church didn’t have an accurate count of all the pies into which Mason had sunk his dirty little fingers. This guy had taken a small-time family tradition and gone global, becoming a key player in several major corporations and even the governments of a couple “developing” nations. In so doing, Mason had erased anyone with the lack of foresight to get in his way. Including, it seemed, his first and only wife, Theresa, mother of Jeremy.
When the boy was still a baby, mommy and daddy had taken him on a day-trip to sail the placid waters of lake Michigan. Mason radioed an SOS to the Coast Guard from his small yacht, Theresa’s Smile, relating the horrible tragedy. Apparently, Mrs. Mason’d had a few too many and fell overboard, hitting her head on the bow railing. She’d sunk like a stone and the body was never recovered. Mason had stayed single since the accident almost ten years ago. Calvin smirked at the screen. Poor bastard was still in mourning. Such a sensitive guy.
So Mason was higher on the food chain than the average Mafia errand boy. That explained how he had access to Neary and Calvin’s special branch of the Church. Not including himself and Neary, Calvin could count the number of people who knew of their operation on one hand. Out of those, only one man knew the actual name of their order. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Many people knew their name, but only that special man knew it as something other than an ecumenical blast from the past. Only “Grandpa” knew to link that name to him and Thom.
Calvin hit the PgDn key and pulsed through to the last page of Mason’s file. A recent picture of Jeremy pixeled up on screen. It was from some school function, the kid flanked by other boys in similar suit-jacket-short-pants-beat-me-up uniforms. He was holding up a brass trophy shaped like the old 1950’s visualization of an atom. The caption read:
Jeremy Mason, Junior Physicists Club, First Prize
He looked about nine or ten in this shot, so it would have been taken within the last year or so. The other boys in the image had at least two or three years on him.
Holding down the left mouse key, Calvin moved the cursor and outlined a square around Jeremy’s face. He right-clicked and the boy’s face enlarged, lost resolution. The hard drive made a sound like sand grains passing through a funnel and the pixels resolved. Wow, fast. Calvin did it again, centering on the kid’s right eye. The computer zoomed in, cleaned up, and now Calvin had a crystal clear image of the muscles in the iris. Calvin took a second to look for a brand name on the top of the laptop, but there wasn’t one, just three letters in raised golf leaf. AEO.
“Cute,” he muttered to himself. “Probably real gold, too.”
In his peripheral, the woman with the toe ring glanced up, then back down at her machine.
Calvin zoomed out to the first close-up of Jeremy’s face. There was something important in this kid, something big. Jeremy himself might not know it, but it was all over him. Calvin had met a few people in his life who went beyond genius, transcending to a level where scientific knowledge and faith were one and the same. You could see it in pictures of Einstein and Hawking, hear it in the music of Beethoven and Bach: the understanding that God was in the numbers. The farther you went in, decoding the mystery, the closer you got to the Word. Jeremy had that look.
“Maybe that’s why it chose him,” Calvin said.
Twinkle-toe looked up again.
Calvin glanced over, smiled. “Sorry.”
“Must be interesting stuff.”
He sighed, his eyes opening wide. “Big time.”
She nodded at his laptop. “Nice ‘puter. Toshiba?”
Calvin looked down then back, his mouth pulled sideways. “Alpha Et Omega.”
“Huh,” she said. “Haven’t heard of that one.”
“Brand new.”
“Like it?”
Calvin thought of the computing power necessary to not only render a resolution clean-up at speed, but to extrapolate details that probably didn’t exist in the original image. He knew computers better than most, the tools to share and manipulate information being highly valuable to a man like him, but this little square of plastic and metal probably housed prototypical processors that would have a keyboard cowboy jacking-off for months. He’d bet a dollar this little gem was wired with some sort of new AI. “It’s decent,” he answered.
“Whatcha’ workin’ on?” She sat up straight, crossing her legs indian style, the toe ring winking. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
Calvin thought for a second. “A metaphysical quandary.”
Her eyes lit up, “That does sound interesting.” She leaned forward a little, curious about how one might crunch metaphysics with silicone and electricity. “I’m Sally Rosenthal,” she offered.
“Lucas Johnson,” Calvin said.
“So, what’s the quandary, Luke?”
He squinted down at the screen and thought of the demon slipping in and out of his body, controlling him. The picture of Jeremy stared back, that look of cosmic understanding seemed sad, too heavy for a child. Calvin looked up at his new friend and asked, “How do you keep the genie in the bottle and still get your wish?”
Sally closed her eyes behind her glasses and didn’t say anything for almost a minute. Calvin was just beginning to wonder if there was something a little wrong with Ms. Rosenthal, when she opened her eyes and bent her lips in an easy smile. Calvin raised his eyebrows.
“Keep the cork in the bottle,” she said. “And rub like hell.”
Calvin stared at her, his mouth open just enough for her to make out his lower teeth. Now it was her turn to wonder if something might be a little wrong with Mr. Johnson.
“You okay there, Lucas?”
Calvin shook it off, smiled. “Sorry, yeah.” His smiled widened. “I’m
really glad to have met, you Sally.”
She flushed.
“I think you may have given me an answer I can use, or at least,” Calvin scowled down at his machine, “a direction in which to travel.”
Sally smiled and, sensing that he needed to get back to his work, refocused on her own screen. “Glad I could be of help, Luke.” She tipped him another wink as she stretched her legs back out, her fingers resuming their dance over the keys. Without looking up or ceasing her typing, she said, “You let me know if you get that wish.”
“I will,” he said, fumbling with the internet connection in the seat back. He jacked the data line into the AEO and fired up an encrypted browser. For a minute, he just stared at the blinking cursor in the browser’s URL field. Keep the cork in the bottle.
“And rub like hell,” he muttered.
Sally smiled and whispered, “Use the force, Luke.”
Calvin pulled up a search engine available to a select few and typed in a single word.
Voodoo.