End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(90)

Every two or three days he sent Z-Boy to check the alert and report back. His instructions were to switch to the ESPN site if someone wandered over to see what he was surfing (they rarely did; the library was really not much more than a closet, and the few visitors were usually looking for the chapel next door).

The alerts were interesting and informative. It seemed a great many people had experienced either semi-hypnosis or actual seizure activity after looking at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen for too long. That effect was more powerful than Brady would have believed. There was even an article about it in the New York Times business section, and the company was in trouble because of it.

Trouble it didn’t need, because it was already tottering. You didn’t have to be a genius (which Brady believed he was) to know that Zappit, Inc. would soon either go bankrupt or be swallowed up by a larger company. Brady was betting on bankruptcy. What company would be stupid enough to pick up an outfit making game consoles that were hopelessly out of date and ridiculously expensive, especially when one of the games was dangerously defective?

Meanwhile, there was the problem of how to jigger the ones he had (they were stored in the closet of Z-Boy’s apartment, but Brady considered them his property) so that people would look at them longer. He was stuck on that when Freddi made her visit. When she was gone, her Christian duty done (not that Frederica Bimmel Linklatter was or ever had been a Christian), Brady thought long and hard.

Then, in late August of 2013, after a particularly aggravating visit from the Det-Ret, he sent Z-Boy to her apartment.

Freddi counted the money, then studied the old fellow in the green Dickies standing slump-shouldered in the middle of what passed for her living room. The money had come from Al Brooks’s account at Midwest Federal. The first withdrawal from his meager savings, but far from the last.

‘Two hundred bucks for a few questions? Yeah, I can do that. But if what you really came for is a blowjob, you need to go somewhere else, old-timer. I’m a dyke.’

‘Just questions,’ Z-Boy said. He handed her a Zappit and told her to look at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen. ‘But you shouldn’t look longer than thirty seconds or so. It’s, um, weird.’

‘Weird, huh?’ She gave him an indulgent smile and turned her attention to the swimming fish. Thirty seconds became forty. That was allowable according to the directives Brady had given him before sending him on this mission (he always called them missions, having discovered that Brooks associated the word with heroism). But after forty-five, he grabbed it back.

Freddi looked up, blinking. ‘Whoo. It messes with your brain, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah. It kinda does.’

‘I read in Gamer Programming that the Star Smash arcade game does something like that, but you have to play it for like, half an hour before the effect kicks in. This is a lot faster. Do people know about it?’

Z-Boy ignored the question. ‘My boss wants to know how you would fix this so people would look at the demo screen longer, and not go right to the game. Which doesn’t have the same effect.’

Freddi adopted her fake Russian accent for the first time. ‘Who is fearless leader, Z-Boy? You be good fellow and tell Comrade X, da?’

Z-Boy’s brow wrinkled. ‘Huh?’

Freddi sighed. ‘Who’s your boss, handsome?’

‘Dr Z.’ Brady had anticipated the question – he knew Freddi of old – and this was another directive. Brady had plans for Felix Babineau, but as yet they were vague. He was still feeling his way. Flying on instruments.

‘Dr Z and his sidekick Z-Boy,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘On the path to world domination. My, my. Does that make me Z-Girl?’

This wasn’t part of his directives, so he stayed silent.

‘Never mind, I get it,’ she said, chuffing out smoke. ‘Your boss wants an eye-trap. The way to do it is to turn the demo screen itself into a game. Gotta be simple, though. Can’t get bogged down in a lot of complex programming.’ She held up the Zappit, now turned off. ‘This thing is pretty brainless.’

‘What kind of game?’

‘Don’t ask me, bro. That’s the creative side. Never was my forte. Tell your boss to figure it out. Anyway, once this thing is powered up and getting a good WiFi signal, you need to install a root kit. Want me to write this down?’

‘No.’ Brady had allocated a bit of Al Brooks’s rapidly diminishing memory storage space for this very task. Besides, when the job needed to be done, Freddi would be the one doing it.

‘Once the kit’s in, source code can be downloaded from another computer.’ She adopted the Russian accent again. ‘From secret Base Zero under polar ice-kep.’

‘Should I tell him that part?’

‘No. Just tell him root kit plus source code. Got it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Brady Hartsfield wants you to come visit him again.’

Freddi’s eyebrows shot up almost to her crewcut. ‘He talks to you?’

‘Yes. It’s hard to understand him at first, but after awhile you can.’

Freddi looked around her living room – dim, cluttered, smelling of last night’s take-out Chinese – as if it interested her. She was finding this conversation increasingly creepy.

‘I don’t know, man. I did my good deed, and I was never even a Girl Scout.’