“You’ve done a real good job on those disguises,” he said casually, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips. “I wouldn’t have recognised either of you from the pictures on the TV.”
Either of you. My heart started to belt against my ribs. Maybe Henry wasn’t quite as dumb as he first appeared.
When neither of us responded, Henry said, “You sure don’t look like a kidnapper – Charlie isn’t it?” I gave him the briefest nod. “So what’s your angle?”
“I’m just supposed to be looking out for him,” I said. It was a compromise statement. I knew Trey would object to my saying I was looking after him.
Henry nodded sagely. “You wanna tell me your side of the story?” he asked.
I gave him the edited highlights in the sketchiest form possible, little more than the fact that someone was seriously out to get Trey and there was the possibility that the authorities were involved.
“Well, they’re sure putting out a different story to yours,” Henry commented when I was done. He turned off the road into a dimly-lit residential street. “Ah, here we are. Home, sweet home.”
The street was in a run-down district. I didn’t have to know much about the demographic of Daytona to guess it wasn’t exactly an up-and-coming area. Most people seemed to have a dead pickup truck on their front lawn and there weren’t enough wheels to go round.
Henry swung left off the road and brought the Corvette to a halt in the dirt driveway of an ugly single-storey building with a covered porch along the front. The whole structure was raised a couple of feet off the ground, like a mobile home that’s had its wheels removed. A patchwork of trellis covered the gap between the base and the earth.
The house itself looked like some of the worst council-owned dives I’ve seen in the UK. Trey and I struggled out of the passenger seat and followed him up the uneven steps onto the porch.
“C’mon in,” he said when he finally managed to wrestle his own front door open. He went ahead, flicking on lights to illuminate a dingy little one-bedroomed house. There was no air conditioning inside and the wet heat clenched itself around me as soon as I stepped through the door. I swear I saw something that was the size and colour of a stoned date with legs skitter across the cracked floor tiles.
Henry led the way through into what might once have been the living room, but was now packed with computer equipment. It looked like a complicated setup and, judging by the way the cases gleamed, most of it was fairly new. I couldn’t see anything staying spotless for long in that environment. Henry had set up a couple of fans that were stirring the turgid air around rather than actually cooling it.
The lone battered-looking typist’s chair, its cushion repaired with silver duct tape, was the only place to sit down in the entire room if you discounted the floor, which I already had. Henry eased himself into it with a sigh of relief to be off his feet again and picked up part of a cold hamburger that was sitting congealing in its wrapper next to his keyboard.
“So, any ideas who’s holding Keith Pelzner?” he asked, biting off a chunk and beginning to chew.
Trey didn’t answer, so I said, “As far as we can tell, no-one’s holding him.”
Henry’s jaws stopped working for a moment. He swallowed, then said, “You mean he’s gotten loose?”
“No,” I said, “I mean it doesn’t appear he was ever kidnapped in the first place.”
Henry put the remains of his hamburger down again, very slowly, and distractedly wiped his hands on the front of his shirt. It clearly wasn’t the first time he’d used his clothing as a napkin. And all the time his eyes skated from side to side as though he was scanning a document only he could see. One that brought him very bad news. His lips were moving but for a while no sound came out, then he muttered, “Crap in a hat,” very softly, under his breath.
“Why do I get the feeling the fact that Keith Pelzner has apparently disappeared of his own accord is not exactly what you wanted to hear?”
Henry jerked to his feet, hands to his face now. I thought of the residual hamburger grease on his fingers and tried not to squirm.
“Why?” he echoed, faintly at first, then with growing vehemence. “Why? Because the only goddamn reason for him to run is if it doesn’t work, that’s why!”
“If what doesn’t work?” I asked blankly. Henry spun to face me, checking out Trey’s reaction to all this on the way. I glanced at the kid myself but he’d hung his head like he’d retreated into himself. No clues there, then.
“You mean you have no idea what Pelzner was working on?” Henry demanded, surprise making his voice rise and spraying me with flecks of half-chewed burger.
I backed off a step and shook my head.
Henry turned away and groped for the arm of his chair, lowering his bulk into it again. He took a moment to gather his thoughts.
“OK,” he said. “Keith Pelzner’s a computer programmer, yeah?”
“You can skip the part about the earth cooling and the fish learning to walk,” I said. “I know he’s a programmer and I know he was working on something to do with the financial markets. Take it from there.”
He reached for the hamburger again, a reflex action, but when he got it to his mouth he suddenly seemed to realise what he’d done and plonked it back on the desktop. “This new program he’s been working on is dynamite.” He looked at me then, a little haughty. “I don’t s’pose you know the details, right?”
I would have loved to have been able to tell him he was wrong but he wasn’t, so I had to take it on the chin and simply shake my head.
“OK, there are a lot of financial programs out there that track the stock markets,” he said, “they’ve gotten to the stage now where they’re pretty sophisticated, yeah? They’re based on mathematical algorithms. They follow the trends and use stuff like Fibonacci fan lines and moving averages to try and indicate whether the stock price is going to rise or fall, so you know whether to buy or sell, yeah?”
He glanced at me, checking I was with him so far. I nodded encouragingly to show him I was just about keeping up.
“OK,” he went on, “but all these programs do is track. What Keith Pelzner was working on was a system that could take into account stuff like current affairs, financial reports from around the world, news, and could actually predict what was going to happen to the stock prices. Not guess – predict. We’re talking software that’s capable of learning from its mistakes, here. We’re talking artificial intelligence. I’m dumbing down, you understand?”
“I understand,” I said, a little tartly. I paused. “So, this program – do you reckon it’s worth killing people over?”
Henry sat back in his chair and looked at me with his mouth open. “I don’t think you’ve grasped the concept here, huh?” he said. “If you got a hold of this program you could trade the futures markets with absolute certainty, yeah?” He stopped, searching for the right way to penetrate my tiny little brain.
“Look, say you were going to day-trade contracts on the futures market, like the S&P five hundred, yeah? You think the market’s gonna go up, you go into a long trade. You think it’s gonna go down, you go into a short trade, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. He was losing me but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
“OK, so if you’re ahead of the game and you know when to go long and when to go short, then every time the market rises or falls in your favour, you make two hundred and fifty bucks a point, right? It don’t matter if it rises or falls, just so long as you’re in a trade heading in the right direction, you’re making dough.”
“And how far is it likely to rise or fall in a day?” I said.
“Hey, good question. You’re a bright cookie, Charlie, you know that?” he said, wagging a knowing finger at me. “The S&P will only maybe move five or ten points, but if you can jump on the back of every one of them you could be making fifty points a week, easy.”