It is a bracing morning in Southern California and I’m sitting in my dining room trying to do some writing. The sun is streaming through the sliding glass doors that lead onto the rear patio and the pool. Several of the rooms were open all night and the house is cool like I like it.
I closed the bedroom from the outside when I got up moments ago and noticed that my wife had cocooned herself in blankets that were not there last night.
The dining room table seats ten. The only thing on it is a large purple iris. A donut shaped crystal chandelier looms heavily above me. There is a small glass cadenza to one side that is fitted for serving drinks and there is a much larger ebony sideboard behind me that holds a lot of very expensive dishes. I have a new five by eight foot gray abstract sitting on the floor on the wall by the pool, but I haven’t put it up yet. Otherwise, there is nothing else on the walls. They’re just sheer white, like the rest of the room.
I like it like this. It’s quiet and I have the house to myself for a while. The promise of the day is balanced on the cool air. It is my most productive time of day, before the rush of normal activity hits. I stare out the back onto the pool, a cup of morning coffee in my hand, the thoughts of my writing project swirling in my head like cream in my coffee.
I launched into my work, pretty engrossed, when my screen suddenly changes and starts buzzing at me. The screen has been pre-empted by the feed from the front gate. A young couple in jackets and jeans with packs on their backs are standing around, staring at the squawk box. The young man bends.
“Hello, Mr. Sykes? We’re friends of Megan Palmer. Can we talk? It’s important.”
I see that the girl then leans in.
“I’m Kimberly Scott and this is Zachary Miller. We’d really appreciate it if we could speak to you. We’re from Stanford.”
I have no idea why two kids from Stanford are charging my gate at the crack of dawn, but I suppose that if they really are students from Stanford then the probability of they’re being serial killers on the loose or escaped lunatics does go down somewhat. I am generally open to the unexpected adventure. Why not? It feeds my imagination. For me that’s always a good thing. I click on an icon on the screen.
“Okay. But if you’re here to discuss the characters in my movies it’s going to be a short conversation. Got it?” I said with more than a hint of suspicion purposefully projected in my voice, and with a big red flag waving in my head.
“Got it,” they both parrot.
I hit another icon. It says ‘Gate’, so I actually get to watch on the monitor as it unlocks. I can’t hear it though, because the speaker system has gone off. I can however, watch as the couple pulls the gate open, enter, and then take the time and effort to carefully close it behind them. Nice kids I think to myself. On the other hand, I wonder how they got past the main gate just to get into this subdivision. That is in itself no mean feat.
I watch as two college kids amble up the driveway. It is lined with thick evergreens and tons of perfectly groomed under story, a veritable jungle, one that I happen to know, all too well, had cost a fortune. The fact that the driveway itself is all stamped concrete brick only seems to add to the impression of two people wandering about on some kind of alternative yellow brick road.
I lose track of them at that point but I know they’re heading to my back door and I don’t want them ringing it and waking my wife and daughter, so I head to the back door too. When I get there, they’re making their way up the incline to my back door, having just crossed in front of the double garage doors. There’s a big supporting pillar there and I can see them near it through the windows of the oversized teak door. I open the door, which swivels, as they begin to descend a set of concrete stairs.
“That’s okay,” I say to them as I step out.
“Let’s go around back, shall we?”
I let the door shut, which it does on its own.
They wait for me and as I climb up to the landing that they’re on, they shove their hands toward me. As I shake their hands, I re-state their names, for the record, and to make sure that, despite appearances, I am capable of doing so.
“Around here,” I say, leading them off the landing and to a separate stair that drops to the main level of the house and grounds.
We go around the end of a wall and past a large planter with a bunch of miniature palm trees, staying on the concrete sidewalk at the end of the house. This takes us along the edge of the very trim lawn to the house’s back corner, where there is a glass lawn table and some chairs. From here you can see the pool stretching along the back of the house and the broad expanse down the hill to the courts. It can be an impressive view.
As we all seat ourselves I look to the faces of the young couple to see if all this has had the desired effect, which is, of course, to place them in my thrall. It doesn’t.
“Did Megan contact you?” the guy named Zak asks.
I’m stupefied and no doubt look it. The two college kids give each other a look of their own.
“Megan sent you a message about us,” says the young woman. She has a look that reminds me a bit of an actress I know.
I have brought my tablet with me, you never know what you’re going to need in one of these unpredictable situations, and so I open it to my email. Sure enough, in the last day or two of messages there she is, a message from a Miss Megan Palmer. Of course I haven’t opened it, because I get a lot of messages and focus on those from just the few people that I know well. Megan Palmer’s message wasn’t one of those. But I open it now and sure enough it does refer to the two people in front of me.
“You know, I barely remember this girl. She worked as an actress for me years ago.”
It dawns on me that Megan has included a few vague references to a topic that really does put my teeth on edge. Suddenly, I am glad that I steered these two around my house and away from anything inside, especially away from anything electronic. As it is, I’m going to have to reset the security camera tape on the house after they leave. In the meantime, I flip my tablet over and proceed to render it without benefit of its battery.
“Please,” I say, “Please join me.”
They get the idea and have their phones out and disabled before I can put down my reading glasses. But they wait for me to say something. I find this cute.
“So?” I ask, leaning back in my cushion.
The girl Kim takes the lead and I’m beginning to see a pattern here. These two are organized and the way they’ve got it organized is that he’s the informative one and she’s the persuasive one.
“Well, Megan believes that you may be able to help us contact UNK.”
“Yeah, I gathered that from her message. Like is there any way I would know such a thing!” I tell them.
It’s time for the other side of the tag team. The guy Zak pulls out a tiny flash drive to show it to me.
“People have been trying to kill us for this. A journalist in China died giving it to me, telling me to get it to UNK,” he says in an obvious attempt to impress me.
Running through my mind is the thought, “Do I dare look at this. Will it leave a trace in some way that, if discovered, could lead its way back to me?”
“Okay, give it to me. I know I’m going to regret this.”
I take the thumb drive and plug it in. Then I have to replace the battery in my pad, turn it on and look for the files on the thumb. I start pulling the stuff up and wow, the encryption is nuts. So Zak shows me other folders that I can look at. The drone stuff seems pretty cool, so I copy it for later viewing. Finally, I shut the pad down, give him back his drive, and yank the battery, again. At that moment, I decide the battery and I are getting too familiar and I’m going to change it out the first chance that I get. I just don’t trust. Anything.
I like to think I’m a reasonably careful man, and I like to think I know people. I see nothing false about these two.
“You’re both from Stanford?” I ask.
/> “Graduate students in engineering,” Zak replies.
“On a student program to Tsinghua University in Beijing,” Kim adds.
Things like this they know I can verify. Some journalist dies in Beijing and an American is involved. This will leave a trail, inside and outside the Middle Kingdom.
I stare at them, baffled by a couple college kids showing up at my gate early in the morning, mentioning the name of someone I hardly know. I was about to say, hey I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t know whoever, but they had a pretty determined look about them, a preternatural and youthful self-assurance that was hard not to buy into.
I’m trying to recall that sense of young certainty, what it was like, because with every additional minute in their presence I can feel a tad more of it. It’s nice, it feels good, and it connects me to my much younger self, a piece of me I hope never to completely abandon.
“Okay, okay, I think I get it. But let me see. Some journalist misspends a significant part of his life online pulling together a list of his government’s worst sins, with the nefarious intention of sharing all of it with the world? Am I getting it so far?”
Zak looks at Kim.
“We think so,” he says.
This is where I involuntarily cringe.
They had to know how dangerous it was to spill a nation’s dirty laundry, its secret history of deliberate oppression and subversion of its own people, into the public sphere at such a time as this. Kadin would know what to do. He’d better.
“You should try to get this to a man in the Middle East named Kadin Sa’d. Sa’d is high profile and one of the richest men on the planet. His opinions on investment and international politics are widely reported in both the financial press and the mainstream media. He’s based in Dubai. He’s made himself a presence in world media. I’m not saying he’s UNK and I’m not saying he’s not.”
Chapter 42