"I used to be the police, Gideon," Max answered dubiously,
stroking his beard. "We ought to take a look for ourselves. And
there's one other thing..." He squinted, moving his fat frame
closer to the computer. "I'm picking up something else on this
disc. Something encrypted, and I mean but encrypted. It'd take a
while to unlock it, but--I'd swear it's there..."
"One step at a time," I advised. "If this isn't just some
special-effects genius' idea of fooling around, we've opened up
one very ugly can of worms already. We don't need two."
"Hey, you brought this crap to me, Sherlock." He belched once
and frowned as he went to work on his keyboard. "Damn it. I
should've known better than to let you get the food..."
That evening Max combed the sidewalk outside the Prices'
building on Central Park West while I went up to the penthouse
to see the recently bereaved. I found her huddled with her
daughter in a huge living room that overlooked the park and
informed her that, given what I'd seen on the disc, I did
understand her fears; but I still needed to know just who the
"they" she'd talked so insistently about that afternoon were.
She explained that her first move on finding the disc among her
husband's effects had been to go to the FBI: but they'd only
confiscated the disc immediately and hinted not so subtly that
any discussion of it on her part could prove very risky for both
her and her daughter. When Mrs. Price had found the backup copy,
she figured she had nowhere to turn, and was on the verge of
destroying it when she remembered the interview I'd done on
public television.
I asked her if she was aware that there was apparently a second
batch of information on the disc, to which she said that she
wasn't, but that it didn't surprise her; nor did her husband's
evident encryption of it. He'd apparently been doing a lot of
contract work for a private client lately, and although he'd kept
her in the dark about its nature, she had discovered that he was
being paid an astronomical fee for it. "Astronomical," for
somebody whose day job already brought down enough to pay for a
penthouse on Central Park West, a century-old mansion in L.A. and
one of the few waterfront houses in the Hamptons that had
survived the hurricanes of '05 obviously meant quite a bit; but,
though my curiosity was piqued, Mrs. Price ould tell me nothing
more. So I left the grieving wife and daughter, after receiving
the promise of a fee that, by my own humble standards, was itself
pretty damned astronomical.
As soon as I was back on the street, Max yoked my neck into one
of his heavy arms urgently. "Let's get the hell out of here," he
said, eyeing the building's doorman and then the darkened expanse
of Central Park across the street.
"Why?" I said, stumbling as he pulled me down the block toward a
free taxi.
"Because," he answered, opening the cab's door and shoving me in,
"you have gotten me involved in some very bizarre crap, Wolfe."
At that he jumped in beside me and ordered the Indonesian driver
to take us back to his office.
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