I sat up again, my back sore from the broken springs. “You’re right, Ms. Breen: I shouldn’t poke fun. I’ve had a long day and a hideous week trying to find out what Martin is up to, so I’m not at my empathic best. Tell me what happened after your dad called to accuse you of shielding Martin.”
Mr. Contreras arrived with coffee and milk, for me, a glass of grappa for himself. Through some mysterious dog mathematics, Mitch and Peppy distributed themselves so that both were equidistant from all three of us. I gave the old man a quick précis of what Alison had told me so far.
“Someone from the FBI came to my computer lab looking for Martin,” Alison said. “Dad hadn’t warned me that he’d called them in, and when an agent of the U.S. government showed up, he got everyone at the lab totally terrified. Mexico kind of looks the other way if the FBI or DEA want to interrogate someone. But when I called my dad, to tell him he’d destroyed the trust the program people had in me, he started yelling at me about national security. He said Martin stole our software, Metargon’s software, I mean, and that the FBI is going to find him and I’d better stop being a bleeding heart if I’m ever going to be able to run the company.”
She picked at her cuticles, looking very young and vulnerable. “I couldn’t talk him out of it. I couldn’t make him see that Martin isn’t like that.”
“What is Martin like?” I asked. “I’ve never met him, and I can’t seem to talk to anyone who understands him as a person, except his high school physics instructor.”
“He’s a cactus,” Alison said. “Hard and prickly on the outside, sweet as honey on the inside.”
“Were you dating?” I asked. “Is that why you invited him to the barbecue at your folks’ place, even though he wasn’t in the summer program?”
She made an impatient gesture. “We slept together twice, but Martin backed away because I wouldn’t tell my parents. Martin said it was because I was ashamed of him, but it wasn’t that, it’s because my dad would have fired him on the spot. Martin belongs at Metargon in a way I never will. I’m a good computer engineer, but Martin, he’s special, he sees things in three-D that the rest of us only see linearly.”
“Kind of a hard secret to keep,” I said. “You sleeping together.”
“I see that now,” she said bitterly. “Someone who wanted to suck up to Dad gave him a hint. I hope it wasn’t Jari, he’s a good guy, but everyone at Metargon is so competitive, they’re always pushing each other out of the way even if they’re all on a project together! It could have been one of the other kids in the summer program. This one girl from MIT, she had a thing for Martin.
“Anyway, someone told Dad, and he said he didn’t want some overambitious school dropout taking advantage of me. Which was also unfair. Martin wasn’t a dropout, he just didn’t go to college. He’s taking courses part-time at Illinois-Circle, but really, he’s so brainy—do you know he got a perfect score on his math SAT and the top score on the physics C exam?”
“People keep telling me that,” I said. “His high school physics teacher tried to get him to apply to Caltech or MIT when she saw his scores, but his family were set against college for him.”
“Well, there you have it. He has a chip on his shoulder about my family being so rich, and me being at Harvard, but once you knocked off the chip, he was such a sweetheart. Do you know what he did for my birthday? He remembered I told him when I was little I used to beg my dog to talk to me: I was lonely, my dog was my best friend. For my birthday he found this toy dog that looked just like Lulu, and he programmed a chip that he put into her where she sings happy birthday, and says, ‘Alison, you’re my best friend, no one comes closer to my heart than you.’ He even got her tail to wag. He’s pretty amazing.”
Fatigue and unshed tears turned her honey-colored eyes red. Mr. Contreras nodded approvingly. He thinks Romeo and Juliet is a great story except that Shakespeare got it wrong at the end; if he, Mr. Contreras, had been there, he would have stayed in the tomb with Juliet so that Romeo knew she was just sleeping. That monk was a fool, in his opinion. “You don’t leave a girl in a drugged sleep and expect some high-strung boy like Romeo won’t overreact,” is his verdict on the Bard.
“You tell Vic here what you need her to do and she’ll take care of it for you,” he told Alison. “You did the right thing, flying all this way.”
I grinned wryly at the tribute. “Sure thing. I can handle the FBI with one hand behind my back, which is good, because Homeland Security is already tying it there.”
“Oh. I wasn’t really paying attention when you said they could be bugging your apartment. Why are they—is it because of my dad? Is it because of Martin?”