Chapter 50

He borrowed Aki from Finnigan, who was delighted to let the child out on loan. The rocker had run out of ideas for occupying his son, aside from having a tutor instruct him and letting him sit in front of a computer hour after hour.

Aki and Eric arrived at Westlake on Tuesday morning, the day after a twelve-inch snow. Now Eric fully understood the meaning of the expression, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ This winter was proving that you really couldn’t.

“This weather is kind of neat,” said Aki. “We don’t get anything like this in California.” He was wearing a pair of baggy jeans, which he bragged had been made by real prisoners in an Oregon state prison.

“Cool,” agreed Eric. “Real bad guys did actual work. I like it.”

He limped into the R&D section, Aki beside him. The child was excited to see where true-to-life engineers did their designing.

“What happened to you?” asked Chet, almost impressed by Eric’s apparent disability.

“I had a fight with some chick and jumped out of a speeding car. I landed wrong though and opened up my hip. They had to take me to the hospital and give me two pints of blood and twelve stitches.”

Chet gazed at him skeptically. “Sometimes I have a hard time believing you,” he admitted.

Eric looked him in the eyes and smiled. “I’m under-reporting,” he told Chet. “This is my nephew, Aki.”

Aki was standing there reading Chet’s screen. “I don’t think that gate array is going to fly,” he judged. “You could streamline it a little though.”

Chet gave him a friendly look. “I know you kids understand all about computers nowadays.”

“I do a lot of integrated circuit design myself,” said Aki, turning away. Eric was booting up his computer. “I thought you had a Sparcstation 2021 or something. That’s only a ‘classic.’” Aki seemed disappointed.

“Do I have a modem on this?” Eric asked. He let Aki take over at the controls.

They decided it wasn’t a bad time to call Tokyo. “Remember, you’re Jubei Kitani’s nephew,” coached Eric, as Aki dialed. Aki gave him a disdainful look. He remembered his lines.

Aki gave his spiel, although what it was Eric couldn’t be sure, since his only language other than English was some pitifully fractured Espaniol. Aki’s Japanese was fluent though and, as far as Eric could tell, he didn’t have an American accent.

Aki hung up. He began messing around with the computer.

“What happened?” Eric asked.

“She told me how to log onto the system.”

“She just told you how to get into the Moritomo system?”

Chet stood up in his cubicle and looked over the top at the two of them. Eric gave him his full-blown ‘make my day’ stare, which had chilled the blood, bones, and sinews of many a full-grown hardass. Chet sat back down.

“Yeah,” said Aki. “It’s called social engineering. Hackers do it.” He backed off from the notion. “I’m not a hacker though. I’m a computer expert. But I’ve read about it. I asked her to help me, then I threatened her a little bit that I’d complain to my uncle. That I’d tell him no one was cooperating when all I wanted was to leave him an email message. Now I’m already into their system, but I don’t have any passwords to enter the deeper level stuff.”

Eric could feel Chet’s tension growing on the other side of the wall.

“Okay, try the name Kita, try Hiroshi, try Sensei.” He stood beside the boy seated in the chair pecking away at the computer. His hip started to hurt, and he found another chair and dragged it over. “Try Kanto”—the name of the mountain range where Kitani’s village was. “Try Shigaia”—the name of the village.

“I’m in,” said Aki.

“I thought he’d be too smart to pick something so easy.” Eric grinned. “Do you think you can do this?”

“It’s really hard,” commented Aki. “But I think I can do it. I’m awfully good.”

Eric pulled the drawing of a chip from his pocket and showed it to Aki. It was Dr. Sommers’ machine tool chip. “That’s it,” said Eric. “Erase it wherever you find it in the system. Then plant the virus.” Aki nodded and began his adventure into the world of ‘on’ bits and ‘off’ bits, which flowed ceaselessly like the see-through well-integrated circuits, pouring into fiber optic telephone cable extending thousands of miles, from the Pacific Rim to Westchester County, New York State. The boy’s eyes sparkled and his fingers danced across the keyboard, the electronic warrior in combat.

Aki pulled his head away from the screen and looked at Eric with some calculation. “Can I get a Coke?” he asked, his voice veering into a childish whine. He knew Eric didn’t approve of caffeinated beverages. “I’m very thirsty.”

Eric, at the pre-teen’s mercy, could not say ‘no.’

On Thursday, an unexpected, but furious snowstorm descended on them all, which dumped another foot or so of the unwelcome white stuff. The Eric-Ryder-shoveling-machine was already back in operation. He ignored the pain in his hip, leaning on the shovel when he needed a moment’s support.

Metro North was running, despite the weather, and just about on time, too. Eric picked Helen up at the station after work and they drove back up the hill to the house. Katherine was on a main street that had been well plowed.

Around six-fifteen, Helen and Eric decided to dash out and bring back Chinese food for dinner. Eric tried to get David to go with them, but the child had slipped on some snow on Wednesday and refused to leave the house. “I hope this isn’t going to be a thing with him,” worried Eric, but he didn’t want to terrorize the kid by making an issue of it, either. He and Helen went out to the car.

He had opened the door for Helen—which she seemed to disdain—when a Mercedes pulled up and Kita hopped out. Eric knew trouble when he saw it. He was more or less trembling in his boots. He looked sideways at Helen.

Kita approached. “You’ve been a bad boy.” she chided.

“That doesn’t sound like me,” he protested weakly. He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Is this your sister?”

“No, this is my fiancé, Helen Robbins.”

“Until a minute ago,” Helen said.

“Helen, this is Kita. I don’t know your last name.”

Kita looked Helen over, then seemed to dismiss her. “We’ve had a terrible computer problem at Moritomo. We lost one of our designs from everywhere in the system. Then when we tried to reinstall it from a backup tape, the reinstalled data was completely erased. We’re very upset.” She waited for an answer.

“We’ll, that’s really too bad.” He injected a drop of regret into his tone.

“We’re very disturbed. We worked extremely hard creating this particular chip. It represents a lot of man hours.”

“I’ll bet,” he said.

Kita looked at him suspiciously. “I simply happened to be in the neighborhood.” She smiled. “We don’t want to lose track of you. You ought to come down to the dojo and work out. That is, if you’re recovered from your gunshot wound,” she added politely.

“Sure,” he agreed. The idea of being taken under the Kitani/Moritomo wing was rather tempting. He could become another Hiroshi, running unnamed errands for Kitani’s spy network—if that’s what it was. It could actually be a way to earn a living. He shook his head unconsciously. Kitani might say that black was white was grey, but that didn’t make it so.

He looked up. Kita had glanced at Helen again and was smiling. “Bring your fiancé along, if she’s a fighter.” He had a vision of the two of them fighting over him, an embarrassing/exciting thought.

Kita backed away. “I’ve got to get going,” she said. “I have a flight to Tokyo later tonight and the airports are still socked in due to the snow.” She gave Eric a look of enticement, then hopped back into the Mercedes and drove off.

“You have been a bad boy,” commented Helen. Her tone dripped acid.

“Let’s get a couple of tubs of mixed vegetables,” he suggested. “And whatever else you guys want. No tofu” The temperature was cold, but he was starting to sweat.

On Friday, he traveled down to the city and returned the bugging equipment that the NYPD had loaned him. Really, he wanted to see Steinberg, who he had asked to do him a favor.

“I talked to Frazier. The trial is set for next Wednesday,” Steinberg said. “She was pissed that you had to cancel after getting shot. I understand you’re also going to the grand jury later this week when they try to get a murder indictment for the guys who did the job at Pamela’s.”

Eric acknowledged the truth of that. “Yeah, the People of New York, then I have to run over for a federal grand jury on Morgan and Andrews.”

“That about sums it up?” asked Steinberg.

“Some Miami cops are coming up to talk to Morgan—and to me. He told me he killed the guy down there, Sherba. But he might have simply been bragging. I didn’t see it.”

“I’m glad to hear you actually didn’t do the deed,” said Steinberg, “but I was informed that Morgan and Andrews are already out on bail.”

Eric was disgusted. “Those scumbags. I don’t doubt that they already flew the coop.”

“I think there’s a bond for half-a-million each.”

“That’s a pittance to vultures like that,” responded Eric. He was getting used to the felons getting away with…whatever—in this case, maybe murder.

“I checked on what you asked me about,” Steinberg went on after a pause. “About that guy your sister’s dating—Jubei Kitani.”

Eric nodded. “You met him in my house. Nice guy, polished guy, right?”

“I spoke to someone on the Tokyo police force. An Inspector Akao. He knows Kitani. In fact, they all do. He’s very well known in Japan, very high up in that company he’s with, which is a big conglomerate, run by a very powerful corporate CEO.”

“So he’s considered respectable,” Eric concluded.

“Yes and no. The inspector I talked to isn’t an admirer of his. Off the record, he thinks Kitani killed a couple of men there, a number of years back. They were gangsters, actually, so no one pushed the investigation real hard, but for the most part he personally is sure it was Kitani. He also said that everyone knows that Kitani is head of an organized industrial spy ring. Again, Kitani has a lot of friends with influence, so there’s never been an investigation. Actually, this man seemed to hate Kitani for some second agenda of his. He said he was glad we were investigating him and he’d be happy if we arrested Kitani for something. Of course, we’re conducting no investigation, unless you’re going to try to force me to undertake one.” Steinberg seemed resigned to the possibility.

Eric shrugged. “I only wanted to know if I was right or wrong about the guy. I guess I was right, but I’m sorry to hear it.” He had still been hoping that Kitani would be exonerated in the end, that maybe some Westlake dork like Walter Damon had actually stolen the Moritomo information. But every time he came to that inspired version of reality, he stumbled across a mental image of Sommers explaining that he had created the design with blood, sweat, and tears. Sommers, he would swear, was a real straight shooter. And now this from the Japanese cop.

“I owe you a couple of things, Steinberg,” Eric said. He reached out to shake the man’s hand. “I’ll invite you to my wedding.”

“Okay, I’ll call in the first favor, Ryder. Skip the invitation. I don’t do weddings. I’ll think of a gift and send it, but weddings make me itch.” In fact, an expression of pain had come over the older man’s face.

“Forget the gift, Steinberg. But now you owe me bigtime.” He grinned. He’d collect. He was sure of that.