Twenty-one
Sarah Trevor pulled up a chair beside Richard Welk as
he switched on a computer and evoked a communications program from its
hard disk. About them, corporate headquarters of Trevor Industries was
dark and quiet. The wall clocks read close to midnight. Richard typed in
the eleven digits that would open an electronic portal between Boston and
Silver Ridge and pecked the key marked Enter.
Sarah watched the screen at work, her face
highlighted by the flicker and color of the monitor. “What’s it doing?”
“Waiting for a connection to be made. We rang the
number. Someone’s got to be home to pick up the receiver.”
“Richard, he has no phone.”
“He has God only knows how many computers to answer.
We’re not talking about phones.”
The screen flashed a message of success. The graphic
vanished leaving a flashing white cursor in the upper right hand corner.
“Now what?”
Richard placed his fingers on the keyboard. ANYONE
HOME? he typed.
A second row of text appeared. NAME PLEASE.
Sarah pushed Richard aside. She pecked out a
response with two fingers. THIS IS YOUR MOTHER.
“Sarah, I think you’re talking to a computer
program.”
HI, MOM!
Richard sighed in relief.
BILLY, I WANT TO SPEAK WITH YOU OVER A TELEPHONE.
YOU MUST HAVE A CELL PHONE TUCKED AWAY SOMEWHERE.
An image flashed on the screen. It took Richard a
moment to identify it as a complex mechanical blueprint of some kind.
“What the hell.” He hit two hot keys to capture the screen’s content and
store it to disk.
Another graphic appeared.
“Richard, what are you doing?”
“Saving this stuff,” he said, suppressing his
excitement. “A few years back, give or take a decade, I was an
engineering student for a summer and a half. This is some of Billy’s
work. Or Corin’s. It’s incredibly intricate.”
Sarah’s jaw fell open. “How can you be so naive?
Richard, he’s toying with you! He programmed his computer to feed you
this mind candy, just so he wouldn’t have to deal with you
himself!”
Richard had sensed that for himself. He reached to
one side and switched on a laser printer, fearful the graphics he was
receiving would fill the modest memory capacity of the desk top. “Maybe
monkeys know what people are up to when they throw peanuts, but they still
like peanuts.”
“Richard! I refuse to be patronized by my own son!”
“Let me get some of this to engineering,” he said,
fighting to avoid losing the images flashing across the screen. “He knows
he can’t put us off indefinitely.”
“You he possibly could, but not his own mother! Stop
this foolishness this instant, or I’ll call security and send my own
people to Silver Ridge!”
Richard glanced at her. “If you’re smart, you’ll
give me a hand getting some of this stuff down for posterity. This Corin
phenomenon is a reflection of that boy’s genius, Sarah. We have to go
through it to get to Billy.”
Sarah hugged herself, her eyes wrinkled with worry.
“Nobody had better dare lay a hand on my son. I swear, I’ll spend every
penny of Howard’s empire to protect him.”
Richard glanced at the woman with concern. If
anything happened to Billy Trevor, she’d be equally capable of spending
the Trevor fortune on revenge.
