Harold and Jimmy shared the backseat while Iggy worked the big English sport ute through the drifts. The snowfall had ramped up along with the wind and the streets looked like the stage for an intergalactic conspiracy film — all that was missing was O.J. Simpson in a silver spacesuit.
Jimmy stared at the lawyer. “I have Tiny Rockatansky out there trying to find a chink in Poppa’s armor where he can put a spear.”
Harold kept his face turned to the window, more of that perfect posture again. “I understand that you want to unleash the dogs of war, but wait to see what your father thinks.”
“I know exactly what he’s going to think.”
Harold kept his face turned to the snowbound terrain slipping by the tinted window. “I’m not so sure about that.”
Harold had already gone into the room to see the old man but Jimmy hung back, nodding at his cell phone. Once Harold was inside, Jimmy called an associate in Ottawa — someone who owed him a lot of money. Without a greeting he asked the person at the other end to find out where the money in Rockatansky’s account had come from. There was a pause followed by, “Of course.” Jimmy hung up, turned off the phone, removed the battery, and dropped it into his pocket. He straightened his jacket and walked into Poppa’s room.
The old man looked like a patchwork cyborg Karloff but his knocks hadn’t come from the FX and makeup department; he had earned every scratch, dent, and stich honestly. Over the course of his not insignificant lifetime, fate or destiny or whatever other loose rubric one chose to classify happenstance under did its best to put him in the dirt. He had been visited by four car accidents, three shootings, two bombings, one poisoning, an attempted garroting, numerous cases of the clap, type-two diabetes, a heart attack, shingles, a fall in the shower, a bout of colon cancer, and, finally, a stroke. By this point one thing had become painfully clear to all concerned: you couldn’t kill Poppa, at least not with anything they’d tried so far. His refusal to display an expiration date had earned him the moniker of Old Man Bullseye in the Quebec press. But even the old man would have a hard time outrunning Rockatansky.
Poppa was in his chair — the only one he would occupy for however many more breaths the Intel-controlled machinery could coax out of his taxed mortal coil. But calling the contraption a chair was akin to calling an aircraft carrier a boat. The mobile life-support system had helped him jump levels from latter-day-de-facto-crime-boss-Rasputin to hard-core-computerized Franken-Don. The doctors said that with the assistance of his new self-contained health station, he’d outlive the cockroaches in Keith Richards’s drug chest.
An easy decade.
Maybe two.
Instead of the traditional wheelchair, the engineers had gone with an upright model based on Chuck Close’s famous device, supporting the old man in a manner that made his grandchildren think he resembled Han Solo on a bad carbonite trip. Most of the general components wouldn’t be available to anyone, corporate or government, for years. Some of the more specialized technology would likely never be available for mass consumption — it was simply too expensive. Being a billionaire helped knock down trade barriers and corporate secrets. And where money couldn’t do its evil little dance, Jimmy knew some people who could rob some people; anything was gettable.
There was more onboard computing power than NASA’s latest communications satellite. Pulse and respiratory functions were priority one — his heart was wired to a dime-sized computer that regulated its beat and his lungs were fed a better dose of air than most city dwellers got to smell in a lifetime. The setup monitored all major nervous functions, sending real-time readings to the specialized server at the Jewish General Hospital, where they were used to remotely optimize his OS.
The crown jewel in Poppa’s mechanized cocoon was the communications hardware. The stroke had pretty much wiped his organic motor-skill software clean, only leaving him the use of his eye muscles and two toes and two fingers on his left side. This diminished capacity was nonetheless a veritable treasure trove of digits for the tailored apparatus. The Bowers and Wilkens speakers delivered Poppa’s end of conversation in a slightly baritone Stephen Hawking that the software tinted with a digitized version of his old voice. This unsetting byproduct had been achieved by sampling his speech from more than ninety-one hours of heavily redacted recordings from surveillance files in the CSIS vault; Harold had subpoenaed the tapes under a medical-emergency umbrella, citing their access as the only viable way to replicate some of the sick old man’s identity. The judge agreed; it was obvious Poppa was pretty much out of the food chain.
It was not the first time someone had written the old bastard off.
Poppa operated his speech program via eye movement and the good digits on his hand- and foot-controlled cell phone and Internet, respectively. He could carry on silent phone conversations with his fingertips and send e-mail with his toes while blinking out speech at the same time, a practice he had quickly mastered. Cell phone was piped into his head via Grado headphones and the Internet was displayed on a pair of glasses that functioned in much the same way as a combat pilot’s heads-up display. Transcripts of any part of his conversations — including e-mail and cell phone — were printed up and spit into a tray. The combined capabilities of Internet, e-mail, text, cell phone, and voice enabled the old man to exercise a twenty-first-century level of control over the financial empire he had inherited more than half a century ago — a classic example of the Stone Age meeting the Space Age.
Allo Police had recently dubbed him Franken-Don. The Montreal Gazette had been less kind. But they were right. The old head of the family was gone and what was left in his place was a little unsettling.
Jimmy stood between Poppa and the big windows, and even in this near-taxidermied state, his father still had massive presence, like a regal oil portrait. The old man’s hunting collection, glazed eyeballs and frozen expressions of carnage grinning off the exotic mounts, peppered the walls. The rictus grins were not dissimilar to the old man in many ways.
Before the stroke, Poppa swore he never wanted to live like this — like a fucking space vegetable. Yet here he was — the only time he had stepped out of character in his life. Jimmy wasn’t sure if he saw his surrender to the Fates as his indomitable will to survive — no matter what the cost — or his failure to accept the inevitable. A newfound strength or a newfound weakness? Whatever the deep-rooted logic of the choice, he had trouble reconciling his old man’s life before the stroke with what he now saw before him.
But even like this, Poppa could read situations with Wicca clairvoyance and his digitized voice cut through the perfunctory greeting Harold was still trying to hand out. “Why are you... here?”
Jimmy stepped in front of the lawyer. “Tiny Rockatansky crossed the border at Champlain a little more than—” he dropped his eyes to his Rolex Daytona, “four and a half hours ago.”
For a few seconds Jimmy thought the old man was blinking out a long response behind his glasses and he shifted on his feet to see past the yellow glare of the lenses. Poppa was staring at him with avian concentration, unblinking. His fingers were still; he wasn’t carrying on a phone conversation.
Harold stepped forward. “Tiny Rockatansky is—”
Jimmy put a hand on Harold’s chest, his fingers splayed out over the silk tie. “He fucking remembers who he is.” Jimmy was used to people thinking that Poppa was in some kind of vegetative state, even those who knew him, and it pissed him off. More underestimation at work.