“I’m s-sort of busy. I’m here on a j-job,” Jax muttered, looking at his shoes and reminding himself he had been about to tie his lace.
“Six hours ago,” said Diana, shaking her head slowly, “we intercepted an encrypted satellite communication and only finished unscrambling it an hour ago. The point, sir, is that you are in immediate danger—from a terrorist cell here in London. We are not the only ones seeking your simulation model. We know these other people, Mr Mason, and they are not the types to let anything, or anyone, stand in their way. We need to get you, and your model, to safety. Now.”
That she whispered this only made Jax jumpier. “How l-long we g-got?” he said, not that he had a hectic day of meetings to reschedule.
Without answering, she pulled him inside, off the terrace. “Mr Mason. May I call you Jax?”
He nodded dumbly.
“Jax. Your software program? The simulation? Before we leave here, we must isolate and protect all copies in existence. We have people on standby.”
“Over th-there,” he said.
Her eyes followed his to where his laptop was on the floor, next to his backpack. “Show me,” she said, guiding him over to it.
Jax sat cross-legged in front of the screen, and she gripped his shoulder. On-screen, he clicked an icon and a menu popped up offering three choices: London, New York City and Washington.
“Trash it.”
He did.
“How many other copies are there?”
Jax hesitated, but her grip tightened.
“There’s o-one in my b-backpack.”
After ferreting inside the bag, Lucky handed a DVD box to Jax, who flicked through them and pulled out the relevant disk.
“Any others?”
Jax slowly shook his head and, as his situation sank in, so did the rest of his body.
“Jax! Surely, you’ve got a backup at home or on a server somewhere?”
He shook his head harder.
“Why don’t I believe you?” She held the disk up under his nose, cutting its edge into his septum until Jax’s tongue tasted the sharp copper tang of a drizzle of his own blood. “Mr Mason. Very bad people want this, and they’re on their way here. Right now. Unless you cooperate, immediately, millions could die. Our government can’t permit that.”
Diana watched Lucky loom up behind Jax. From the broken half-smile on his face she knew he’d enjoy this quivering wreck.
“Jax,” she reasoned, “think about it. If we found you, so will they...” She shifted her feet and nodded to Lucky whose own paw started to clamp onto Jax’s shoulder. He lent down and curled his left arm around Jax from behind, digging into his solar plexus until Jax bent forward, dry-retching.
Lucky released his grip and Jax, still twisted over, grunted, “I’ll sh-show you.” He quickly located the remote server and pulled up the program.
Diana knelt, her face close to his. She loved this work. Her cheeks were translucent, pearl-like, shimmering with a light tingly sheen, not that Jax noticed. What he did notice, lit up by his screen, were the soft pads covering each of Diana’s fingertips and a wisp of red hair creeping out from under her wig.
“Trash it,” she barked, giving him no time to freak over why someone claiming to be on his side needed to mask her fingerprints or her hair. He did as she demanded, careful not to press the wrong keys.
“Now, Jax. Last time I’ll ask. The other copies? Where are they? All of them.”
He looked at her blankly, but Lucky leant over again and burnt his breath into Jax’s ear.
“There’s j-just one,” said Jax. “In my a-p-partment… in New Y-York.” He explained it was taped inside the toilet cistern in his bathroom, in a waterproof Ziploc bag.
Lucky slipped a phone from his pocket and keyed in a number. Jax watched him walk toward the windows, the phone lighting up one side of his unyielding face.
All Jax could make out of Lucky’s conversation were two words: “TriBeCa” and “john.” Feeling like he was swirling in as much shit as a cesspool duck, he didn’t focus on the fact that in London toilets weren’t called “johns” or that he hadn’t yet mentioned his New York address, which was indeed in TriBeCa.
3
FUNDRAISING IS always centre-stage for presidential election campaigns, but with Isabel Diaz it was different. Not because she was personally worth a fortune, but more due to her struggle to achieve it.
She cast her eyes around the glitzy crowd—four hundred black tuxedos and an equal number of sparkly cocktail dresses—and mentally ticked off the tally: nearly $2 million raised, just tonight.