City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(67)
With a click, her voice was cut off. Harriman realized that, involuntarily, his fingers had curled into fists, ending the call.
A moment later, it rang again. After rolling over to voice mail, it rang again. And then again.
And then came the chirrup of a text message being received. With the slow, strange movements of a bad dream, Harriman looked down at the screen of his phone.
The text was from Anton Ozmian.
Almost against his will, Harriman opened the messages pane of his phone and Ozmian’s text sprang onto the screen:
Idiot. Proud pillar of the fourth estate, indeed. In your smug satisfaction at uncovering this story, you never thought to ask yourself the most germane question of all: why I beat up that priest. Here’s the answer you should have dug up yourself. When I was an altar boy at Our Lady, Father Anselm abused me. I was serially raped. Years later, I returned to that church to make sure he never preyed on his charges again. Here’s another good question: why was I charged only with a misdemeanor, which was quickly dropped? Sure, there was a courtesy payment, but the church refused to cooperate with any criminal investigation because they knew what damaging information would come out if they did. Now, ask yourself: if you publish this story, where is the public’s sympathy going to lie? With the priest? Or me? Even more germane, what will DigiFlood’s board of directors do? What will the world think of you for exposing my youthful abuse and its predictable psychical aftermath, which I overcame to found one of the most successful companies in the world? So go ahead and publish your story.
A. O.
P.S. Enjoy prison.
But even as he read the text with mounting horror, the lines began to shimmer and grow faint. A second later, they were gone, replaced by a black screen. Harriman frantically tried to take a screen shot, but it was too late—Ozmian’s message had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
He looked up from his phone with a groan of disbelief and panic. This was a nightmare, it had to be. And sure enough—just as would happen in a nightmare—he saw, about half a block down West Street, two uniformed NYPD officers looking in his direction. One of them pointed at him. And then—as he stood rooted to the spot, unable to move—they began running toward him, releasing the thumb breaks on their holsters as they did so.
46
LONGSTREET, WITH PENDERGAST a silent shadow at his side, stood at the door to the garage of Robert Hightower’s row house on Gerritsen Avenue in Marine Park, Brooklyn. The door was open, allowing a chill wind to blow in—the short driveway was covered in a dusting of snow that had fallen late the night before—but Hightower seemed not to mind. The space was filled with beat-up worktables; personal computers of varying degrees of obsolescence; circuit boards spewing rivers of cabling; old CRT monitors missing their glass tubes; battered tools hanging from pegboard walls; band saws and compression crimpers and table vises; an assortment of soldering guns; half a dozen small-parts organizers, most of their drawers open, spilling screws and nails and resistors. Hightower, fussing over a worktable, was in his late fifties, solidly built, with short but thick iron-gray hair covering the dome of his skull.
He picked up a tin of soldering flux, pressed the cap onto it, and tossed it toward the back of one of the tables. “So of all the people he screwed, destroyed, ruined, or otherwise fucked over, Ozmian claims I’m the one who hates him the most.”
“That’s correct,” said Longstreet.
Hightower barked a sarcastic, mirthless laugh. “What a distinction.”
“Is it true?” Longstreet asked.
“Consider a man who had everything to live for,” he said, busying himself at the worktable, “nice home, beautiful wife, great career, happiness, success and prosperity—and then the bastard ripped all that away. So do I win first prize in the hatred category? Yeah, I probably do. Guess I’m your man.”
“This algorithm you devised,” Longstreet said. “The audio codec for compressing and streaming files simultaneously. I can’t pretend to understand it, but according to Ozmian it was original and quite valuable.”
“It was my life’s work,” Hightower said. “I didn’t realize just how much of my own self was wrapped up into every line of that code until it was stolen from me.” He paused, surveying the benches. “My dad was a beat cop, just like his dad and his dad. Money was tight. But he had enough to buy the parts for a ham radio set. Just the parts. I built it myself. And that’s how I learned the basics about electrical engineering, telephony, audio synthesis. Got a college scholarship on the strength of that. And then my interests turned from hardware to software. Same melody, different instrument.” Finally, he rose from his fussing and turned toward them, looking from one to the other with eyes that Longstreet could only describe as haunted.
“Ozmian took it away from me. All of it. And here I am.” He swept a hand around the garage, laughing bitterly. “No money. No family. Parents dead. And what am I doing? Living in their house. It’s like the last decade never happened—except that I’m a dozen years older, with nothing to show for it. And I have one cocksucker to thank for all that.”
“It’s our understanding,” Longstreet said, “that during and after the takeover, you harassed Mr. Ozmian. You sent him threatening messages, said you were going to kill him and his family—to the point where he had to get a restraining order.”