A/N: Chapter two of our Christmas tale.
Bite the Hand
Chapter 2: Silver and Gold
Los Angeles
December 23
Late Evening
Mandy began to flip the latches on the suitcase, to open it. It seemed to resist her efforts.
Chuck stepped closer to her but he was not looking at the suitcase. He was looking at her, openly, considering her as she had considered him; it felt dangerous, but he did it.
His fear of her had lessened ever since she had made the call about Morgan, and ever since she had let herself laugh. Her easy, unselfconscious laugh made him think of Bacall; so too did the exact gracefulness of her movements.
That little dance of Bacall's in the final scene of To Have and To Have Not, the laughing smile after it as Bogart takes her elbow.
Too bad I would never make anyone think of Bogart.
"So your name's not Mandy?"
She had acted above and beyond her promise where Morgan was concerned. She did not just text, she called.
Supererogation. Super. Superman. Mild-mannered?
Her hands were on the suitcase, pulling on the lid — when she stopped and welded those blue eyes to him, not so arctic now. She had been mantled in tension until they had entered the room, but the mantle seemed to have slipped from her, freeing her.
"Um, no, not Mandy. But it serves our purpose. Better for you if you don't know who I am. Honestly."
"Honestly?" he said, sounding as if he were parroting her, except for the difference in inflection, hers flat, discouraging, his rising sharply.
She continued to look at him; it seemed she winced internally. "Honestly." She shrugged and there was something apologetic in the shrug. "Honesty is probably not in long supply from kidnappers. You don't have to believe me, Chuck, but this'll go better for us both now if you trust me. This'll all go better for you, just you, later if you don't know anything about me, anything real, except that I'm your kidnapper."
Chuck nodded but held her arctic blue eyes, willing himself to do so. "But I know that your name is really not Mandy."
She stared at him, surprise breaking the surface of her gaze. She lifted an eyebrow high. "Your friend Morgan said you were smart. 'Fucking genius' — that was his phrase. He said it just before I pulled out the tranq gun and he…pissed himself."
Chuck shook his head without thinking about it, immediately pitying his bladder-challenged friend, fully understanding Morgan's fear even if his own had lessened.
Mandy kept staring at him. Her tone shifted. "I didn't intend to make your friend…do that. And I ignored that he had until the tranq sent him to sleep. I'm — "
She swallowed the rest of her sentence and let her gaze sink to the floor. The implicit apology seemed to Chuck to work backward, to what Mandy had done, but also forward, to what she would do. His heart rate increased. Then she frowned at herself, apparently reconciled to both her past and her future, and lifted the suitcase lid with both hands, a sudden decisive movement.
Opening the lid seemed a replacement for what was left unsaid.
Chuck studiously avoided looking into the open suitcase.
"Why will Morgan be foggy when he wakes up?"
She lifted her eyes much as she had lifted the lid. "Because the tranq I used has a twilight effect. A 'blackout chaser', we like to call it. Typically the last sixty minutes before the dose are lost. No memory but no other lasting after-effects. Just — pffft."
As she made the sound, she made an effervescing gesture with the long fingers of her elegant hands. Both the sound effect and the gesture were unexpected. Twinkling.
Her trailing, sheepish look made Chuck believe they were unexpected by her too. He had certainly not expected her to be…playful. He had no idea how to react, so he stayed on topic.
"But he's going to be okay?"
She composed her face, quickly herding the sheepish look away. "He won't remember me or the confrontation. But, yes, Chuck."
"Honestly?"
One end of her mouth lifted just a bit, the start of a smile that did not travel the length of her soft, red lips. "Yes, honestly." Strife between honesty and dishonesty seemed deeply familiar to her, a divide in her being, and she seemed to enjoy being on the honesty side.
Chuck held her eyes for a moment longer and then he finally looked into the suitcase.
Inside were two laptops, several phones, wires, and cords (all neatly wound). Other electronics were beneath the laptops. Several boxes of ammunition, a large hunting knife in a worn leather sheath — and a black gun that looked more like a squirt gun than anything else. The tranq gun? Another silver gun, like the one in her jacket, was next to it. Small canisters — explosives of some kind? — were also in the suitcase, everything held in place by a large piece of dark foam with holes into which the various weapons fit.
"You said this is mostly for me?"
"Yes, the electronics, the computers. The other stuff's for me."
Chuck swallowed hard. "Why do you need an arsenal?"
Her laughter tinkled in the room again but this time there was a twinge of self-mockery in the movement of her shoulders.
He was confused by their interactions, her changes of mood, his changes of mood.
She shook her head. "I did not expect to laugh tonight." She paused, then continued, her lips deliberately compressing into a stern line. A memory crossed her face but Chuck could not guess its content, beyond pain.
"I've carried — or worn — an arsenal for a decade. My normal substitute for jewelry."
That sounds like something real, Chuck thought. So too was the pang of memory, even if he did not know what she'd remembered.
"That's how long you've been doing…whatever you do? Government work? With other people who use phrases like 'blackout chaser' and carry arsenals?"
It was as though her expression was chalk on a blackboard and as though Chuck's words had erased it, the hard line of her lips decompressing, her eyes emptying, her face going automatically slack.
She was on guard again, as in the car.
Tension.
"Look, you should want to get tonight finished. Not prolong it." She seemed to be speaking for herself too. "Can you hack through the hotel's internet?"
Chuck gave her a supercilious look, drawing himself to his full height. "Just get me online, and then the world's my oyster, um, your oyster."
She stared for a moment again. "Um, okay, well, take one of the computers and do what you need to do. I'll tell you about the target…the plan…once you're prepared."
Chuck's fear rocketed again.
Target?
Mandy put her hand in her pocket, the one with the gun in it, and she took it out. He was not sure if she was showing it to him strategically, to remind him, motivate him, or if she just wanted it out of her pocket. She placed it underneath the small tree on the desk, the one she had shoved aside so that she could station the suitcase there.
They both stared at the silver gun under the red and green tree. Chuck eventually lifted his eyes to Mandy's face. She seemed struck by the incongruous pairing too.
Chuck grinned, in an attempt to combat his fear and her tension. "There's never a Bond villain around when you need one."
"What?"
Chuck shrugged. "The Man with the Golden Gun. He could put his gun beside yours and then we could all sing…" and Chuck began to sing:
Silver and gold, silver and gold
Everyone wishes for silver and gold
How do you measure its worth?
Just by the pleasure it gives here on earth.
Silver and gold, silver and gold
Mean so much more when I see
Silver and gold decorations
On ev'ry Christmas tree
Mandy was wide-eyed, disbelieving, her mouth an 'O'. "What's that?"
"A Christmas song. A carol, I guess, although maybe it's never become part of the canon. Burl Ives sings it in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. You know, the one that's always on TV this time of year. I watched it yesterday after work. Ives is the singing snowman."
She looked confused, self-conscious, and shook her head. "Oh, I never saw that, I guess."
Now Chuck was wide-eyed. "How's that possible? It's like not knowing It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown."
She shook her head at the pumpkin as she had at the snowman. "Misspent youth. — Do you often segue from Bond villains to singing snowmen?"
Chuck laughed. "No. Well, maybe. I'm a wayward fountain of references. Misspent youth."
She blushed at that and he heard her intake of breath. For a moment, she seemed like a snowwoman, frozen, but then she bit her lower lip and took one of the computers out of the suitcase. "Here. Is this up to the task?"
He took it from her, only then paying enough attention to it individually to realize what he held.
It was the latest Roark computer, one he had read about but that was not yet available commercially. Even Buy More Corporate had not been able to secure a prototype, nothing.
"A Roark Elite-X? How did you get this? No one's seen one of these outside Roark Precision Instruments, except in photographs or videos. New processor…new everything…State of the art." His voice had dropped to a whisper, awe.
"The people I work for — worked for — they have reach. So, it'll do?"
Chuck nodded absentmindedly, still turning the laptop in his hands. "If it won't, nothing will."
Mandy closed the suitcase and stood it on the floor. She picked up her gun from beneath the small tree and waved Chuck to the desk.
He placed the computer on it and turned it on. As he waited for it to start, he sat down, then glanced up nervously at Mandy. She was holding her gun but not on him. She was watching him closely. When the computer screen lit up, it showed the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency.
"What the…?" Chuck muttered, glancing up again at Mandy.
She just looked at him as if daring him to continue with his question. "Like I said — reach."
"Is this thing linked to the…CIA?"
She shook her head. "It can be — but not it's not automatic. This computer and the other are both bug-free. For sure." A fierceness crept into her voice and she paused, "I wanted the best, and I was told these computers are the best."
Chuck looked back at the screen, nodding. "That's what they say." The CIA? Shit, shit. What am I mixed up in? "How did you get them?"
Mandy's eyes narrowed as did her voice. "Look, Chuck, we're now through with the getting-to-know-you portion of our date; it's time to get serious."
Chuck ducked his head and nodded. "Give me a minute. I need to get onto the internet and prepare to hack." He glanced up, but out of the corner of his eye.
She gave him one nod and then gestured for him to go ahead with her gun hand, the silver metal flashing in the light. He bent his head toward the screen, trying to ignore the shiny gun.
The CIA logo disappeared. He spent a few minutes making sure that he understood the computer in front of him, and then he joined the hotel's internet. It only took him a few moments to set things up, and then to access the computer he had at home, connect to it, and display its screen on the Roark Elite's screen.
"What's that?" Mandy asked, pointing to the screen with the muzzle of her gun; it entered his peripheral vision chillingly.
Chuck did not turn to her but he addressed her. "Mandy, this would be easier if you weren't waving that thing around like a laser pointer."
The muzzle disappeared from his periphery. "Sorry, I'm too damned comfortable with this thing." She tried to say it as a joke but it sounded like a regret. "If you promise not to do anything stupid, I will stow it away. For now."
"Promise. I've hooked up to my home computer. All my hacking stuff's on it and usable from here. It's been masked and remasked, routed and rerouted. A maze that the Minotaur could not follow. No one will find their way to it, and this computer's now, well, hidden behind an encrypted VPN and hidden behind mine, as it were. The combined power is impressive. Now, what am I doing?"
She walked to the couch and put the gun down on it then came back to stand beside his chair. "I'm lucky you still do the finger exercises, huh? — First, I need to see the plans for an apartment building near here, The Marmoreal. In particular, I need the floor plan for the penthouse apartment."
"Ooookay. Give me a minute. Those plans shouldn't be hard to find." He interlocked his fingers and stretched his arms toward the screen, palms facing it. His knuckles cracked. And then he shook both hands in the air, before putting them on the keyboard.
From then on, his fingers were a blur. He vaguely heard Mandy's astonished, hushed Wow as he slipped into the hyperfocused, self-hypnotic state he always entered when hacking, his consciousness shaping itself to the rectangular screen. Beyond its edges were only silence and emptiness. His pulse slowed as if it were a blinking cursor and his breathing deepened. It felt like he entered the computer. Tron.
It did not take him long to get past the security of city hall and into the city records. That was the kind of thing he'd learned to do around the time he finished junior high. Child's play. A moment later, the building plans were on the screen.
He made himself remember why they were there, and he noticed he was singing Silver and Gold again but below his breath. "There's the building plan."
"Send it to my phone." She told him the number. A moment later, her phone vibrated and she took it out of her pocket. "Good. Excellent. Now the penthouse."
He went to work again, and this time he sent the plans as soon as he found them. Her phone vibrated again and she looked at it. "Good, again."
"Can you make much of the plans on the phone?" He asked.
"Plenty." She paused. "How sure are you that you can't be traced back to this room?"
"Plenty," he said, looking up into her eyes.
As she looked down at him, he could see the twinkling lights from the balcony reflected in her eyes, yellow flecks in the blue. She seemed to be making a decision and then she spoke.
"Maybe you're as good as your friend thinks, as good as you seem. If you are, you can give me an advantage I didn't expect. But we'll see about that last. Now I need you to get into this bank account." She reached into the front pocket of her pants and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Chuck watched as she unfolded it.
It was a piece of lined notebook paper, with a ragged edge, torn from a wire-bound notebook. The page was not complete, maybe three-quarters of a page, crookedly torn across the bottom, and wrinkled all over, like it had once been balled up..
Mandy stared at the paper, frowning, and then handed it to him reluctantly. He took it.
On it was a bank account number and a routing number, as well as the name of a bank. The information was handwritten, ink, slapdash but legible, and unmistakably, or so Chuck thought, in a man's hand. Above the information was a thumbprint, red-brown, and several stains, drops, a deeper red-brown. Blood.
Chuck flicked his eyes up from the paper to Mandy.
She had retreated into cool inexpressiveness again and Chuck knew he would get nothing from her if he asked, be granted nothing if he protested. He put the paper down, trying not to contact the red-brown stains, and he went back to work, quickly submerging himself in hyperfocus.
His hyperfocus was one of the mysteries of his life, his strange capacity to feel akin to computers, to inhabit them or to be inhabited by them. Sometimes it felt like one, sometimes the other.
From the time he was a boy, eight or nine, it was just something he could do, a skill, apparently innate, that had awakened in him when his father began to teach him about computers, just before they began to watch Tron together obsessively.
Or, rather, Chuck watched Tron and his father obsessively watched him watch it.
The stars and computers. His father's legacy to him: space and cyberspace, the world beyond his world and the world inside his world, stars and pixels. It was all a mystery but one he had long ago stopped trying to solve.
Almost without realizing it, Chuck had managed to get past the bank's security. He glanced again at the account number and called it up. He froze.
"There're millions of dollars in here." He turned to find Mandy across the room, standing at the doors to the balcony, staring at the twinkle lights. Chuck realized he had lost all track of time; it had taken him more than an hour to get to the account.
The bank's firewalls had been impressive. She turned, still standing by the doors, and her face betrayed no surprise; she had expected the millions.
"Transfer it all, every last red cent, into this account." She named a bank, Swiss, and rattled off an account and routing number from memory. Chuck typed the numbers in and then stopped. He shook his head, trying to dispel the self-hypnosis. "I don't steal."
"No, and you're not. I am. You're doing all this under duress, remember." She looked toward the couch, the silver gun. "I'm compelling you at gunpoint." She said the words distinctly, as if she were etching them into Chuck's mind. "Remember."
Although she had looked at the gun, she did not move toward it, and she was now staring at Chuck.
He wasn't sure why, but something about her, about the whole evening, the kidnapping, something about it all did not make sense, or not the sense he thought it made. She was elusive, the whole situation was elusive.
"What're you going to do with so much money?" He asked the question rhetorically, trying to laugh, not intending to pry but to underscore the size of the amount: it was over ten million dollars.
"Nothing," she said, and the severity of her inflection of the two syllables made Chuck clamp his lips together.
He hit the Return key and the money was transferred.
The account he had hacked was empty. He studied the screen for a moment. His focus on the security and the account numbers had been so total that he had not noticed the name on the account: Winston Rhodes.
"Who's Winston Rhodes?" The questions were probably a bad idea, rhetorical or non-rhetorical, but Chuck's blurting problem reasserted itself.
Mandy wheeled around; she had turned again to look at the lights. Her eyes narrowed. "No one. No one."
Chuck nodded and his stomach rumbled, rumbled so loudly that Mandy heard it. "You're hungry?"
"Um, yeah, but it's no big thing. Long day, only a couple of blueberry Pop-Tarts for lunch."
"Pop-Tarts? Do you always eat junk?"
"No, not at home. I…um…I live with my sister," Why am I embarrassed to admit that to my kidnapper, "I live with her and her boyfriend. They're both doctors and he's fitness-obsessed, so I get fed a lot of green things. Sometimes I even have to drink green things." He made a face. "My sister tries to keep me healthy. But when I'm at work, I avoid green things like the plague. And, hey, Pop-Tarts have iron — and blueberries are rich in antioxidants."
"But blueberry Pop-Tarts aren't rich in blueberries."
Chuck opened his mouth but was not quite sure what to say to that. After a second, he shut his mouth.
"We can order from room service," Mandy said, and she walked toward the couch. Chuck thought she might be retrieving her gun, but she instead picked up a booklet from the end table. "There's a menu in here. I could eat, and your stomach has declared you can. What do you like?"
"Anything, I guess. What do you like?"
She lifted her face to him, surprise again showing on her face. Her cheeks reddening. "I like burgers and fries. But I never let myself have them. Maybe tonight…"
Chuck did not let himself linger on the curiosity of the kidnapper and the kidnapped ordering dinner together, although he was aware of it. "Burgers would be great. But don't you have some other hacking you want me to do?"
"Yes, but it can wait." She checked her watch. "We're well ahead of schedule. And you probably need to get your strength up for what comes next." Chuck thought he heard her add and so do I sotto-voce, but he wasn't sure.
She took the booklet into the bedroom and used the hotel phone to place an order for two burgers, two servings of fries, extra pickles, and a side salad. While she was on the phone, Chuck thought about the distance from his chair to the door, and his distance from her gun. Her distance from her gun. But he did not move; he stayed in the chair.
When she returned, he asked: "Extra pickles and a side salad?"
She smiled a quick, genuine smile. "The pickles are for me, the salad's for you — but for your sister's sake."
She returned to her spot by the balcony doors, renewing her fascination with the lights. Chuck stood up and stretched, rubbing his eyes. He realized she could see him in the glass doors, and a shift in her posture told him she had changed focus from the twinkle lights to his reflection. He pointed to her gun. "You might want to hide that before room service arrives."
She nodded. "I'll answer the door when they do. Why don't you lie down for a few minutes, and rest your eyes?"
Chuck walked into the bedroom and stretched out supine on the bed, sighing aloud as his body relaxed. Mandy stepped to the couch and picked up her gun. Chuck was exhausted; he had been exhausted before all this happened, exhausted with his life. And the hyperfocus required for hacking made the exhaustion so much worse.
Chuck closed his eyes, then cracked them open a moment later. Mandy was standing near the foot of the bed, her gun in her hand but her arms crossed, looking at him, obviously wondering about him.
He closed his eyes again and wondered about her — until his wondering ushered him into sleep and dreams: singing snowmen and snowwomen and twinkling Christmas trees decorated in silver and gold.
A/N: Next time, we switch to Mandy's POV.