Buried At Sea (9 page)

"Those fat-assed old ladies aren't paying to race bikes, Jim."

"You always came at the off-hours. There're plenty of young suits looking for a challenge. Business types and lawyers and all, who want to push themselves. It's not just fat ladies. . . . What am I saying? She doesn't want to marry me."

"If I wanted to run a gym, I'd do it in a big city. Give me a lean-and-hungry clientele."

"I wouldn't live in a city?'

"Have you ever?"

"No"

"You really are a mall rat, aren't you?" Will chuckled. "Ever meet a black man?" Jim did not answer. He didn't feel like he had to justify himself to Will. But the fact was, at work Jim always took pride in making eye contact with the towel boys and lockerroom attendants, who were invariably black or Hispanic, and getting them to acknowledge his existence in return. It would often take months to bridge the divide of class and race, to make his face a recognizable island in a sea of white. But his reward, a friendly "Hey, buddy, how you doing?" made him feel he had made a place for himself in a world of blinding labels.

"Ever think of breaking out of the suburbs?'

"I got mugged in New York City."

Will laughed. "You're kidding. Nobody's been mugged there since Giuliani was mayor."

"Yeah, well, I was."

Will looked hard at him, suddenly serious. "What happened?"

"I was down there for the AIDS bike-a-thon. Guy flashed a knife: `Gimme your dough.' I threw my bike at him." "You're lucky he didn't have a gun."

"That's what Shannon said."

"A woman who continues to rise in my estimation." "She was screaming at me. 'You could have been killed.'

She was really freaking. 'What if he had a gun?' "

"That where you got that?" Will pointed at a thin white scar that formed a J down the front of Jim's thigh.

"Naw, that was a crash. I slugged him and he ran." "Sounds like you have a temper, young friend."

"I was so pumped I didn't even think."

Will looked out over the sea. "Do you ever think of going for the big time?"

"What do you mean?" Jim asked warily. There were moments when he felt mired in failure. He liked his work, but fitness training was a prescription for low earnings, unless you turned it into a business.

"Everyone else has gotten rich these days—why shouldn't you?"

"Join the 'new rich'? How? Are you backing a company I should know about?"

"My boy, we are sailing to the African coast. Who knows

what opportunities may come our way in the next few weeks." Jim felt a sudden thrill. Was Will inviting him to share in

some deal? He never could quite figure out what venture capitalists did, except that they got rich at it. Clients sometimes gave him stock tips, but he never capitalized on them because he didn't have any money to invest.

"A guy told me about AOL back in 1996. I put my money into a four-year-old Honda instead. I could be worth three million now."

" 'If only,' " Will said, "makes the stock market go round." "Are you going to give me stock tips in the middle of the ocean?"

"Why not? Trade on-line, and sail home to a fat bank account."

"What did you have in mind?" he asked.

"There's oil on the African coast, and where there's oil, there's money."

"Is that why you're going there?"

Will looked back at the wake and dashed his hopes of sudden wealth. "You know why I'

m going there."

"No, Will, I don't. And I'd be goddamned grateful if you'd tell me." Will sprang to his feet, took the helm, and overrode the autopilot. Like magic, Hustle felt suddenly livelier.

"I told you already: there are people who want my guts for garters. And I'll tell you something else, sonny: as long as there's water under this keel and wind in these sails, they're not going to get them."

Dear Shannon.

This is turning into a very strange trip.

Jim looked over his shoulder and glanced up the open hatch, where Will was standing watch in the cockpit. He would send this one in a quick Flash and Delete. The real reason we changed course is that Will got spooked when he saw a ship and convinced himself that the people on it wanted to kill him. I know that sounds crazy. I think he is. A little.

He stopped typing. What was the point of scaring Shannon?

But he's fine day to day. And sailing the boat beautifully. So what it comes down to is a longer trip for weird reasons. And a visit to Africa I'd never have experienced otherwise. In other words, a bigger adventure, but no big deal.

He checked his watch. The boat was one hour behind Greenwich Mean Time, four hours ahead of Connecticut. Shannon would be in her office, at her computer, when his message crawled across her screen.

He switched on the sat phone and flashmailed as Will.

When he checked ten minutes later, there was a letter from Shannon, titled "Learn!" and he wished right away he hadn't written.

Jim, I'm so sorry I got you involved with a crazy man. Promise you'll learn immediately how to sail that boat by yourself. *Immediately!* What if he freaks out and jumps overboard?

Jim clicked Reply.

Hey. don't worry. I didn't mean to upset you. I'm doing fine. I can take care of myself. I'

ve already started to learn to sail. And please don't apologize. Encouraging me to do this was a wonderful gift.

I'm having a ball. And I guarantee, Will is not the type to jump overboard. After he flashmailed it, he was scanning the spines of the sailing manuals in Will's bookcase when he noticed the flashmail status window. E-mail had come in for Will entitled "Do not send. . . Do not imagine your sins can be washed away by the sea. Na need to ask for whom the bell tolls, Will Spark, it tolls for the

thief. As the poet of the "sweet science.' warns, You can run but you cannot hide." Jim printed it.

It was early afternoon. The sun was blazing high overhead and the sea would intensify it like a million moving mirrors. He donned a long-sleeve cotton shirt, rubbed sun-block on his hands and legs and face, put on sunglasses, and tugged a sailing visor low over his eyes.

Will, stripped to his shorts, was sweating in the shade of the canvas Bimini awning, which spanned the cockpit on a pipe frame. He had disassembled one of the water makers and spread its pieces out on the starboard bench.

"What's up?"

"Another letter from John Donne. And it's got your name on it." Will read it in a glance and shook his head with a thin smile. "Frustrated English professor." He examined a gasket, picked through his green plumbing toolbox for a replacement, held them side by side to ensure they matched, and tossed the old one overboard.

"This guy knows you. He used your name. Is this the guy you disappointed? Is this the guy on the ship?"

"What if it is?"

"What do you mean, 'What if it is'? You're dragging me to Africa 'cause you think you saw a ship. Who's the poet? Come on, Will, you know the guy."

"I know the type. Beneath the veneer, he's a thug."

"You do know him! He calls you a thief, for Christ's sake. Did you rob him?"

"No!"

"Then why is he chasing you?"

Will sighed elaborately. "Okay, okay, I'll fill you in as best I can. . . . You know what perovskites are, right?" "What?"

"Perovskites."

"No. What are you talking about?"

Will fit the various parts of the water maker together and

said, "Give me a hand putting this back and I'll explain perovskites." Will spent an hour fiddling with the water maker in the stifling heat belowdecks. When at last it was turning seawater fresh again, he said, "Let's reserve the first five gallons for showers. I'll show you how to rig the sun bag to heat it."

"You were about to explain perovskites."

Will's answer started more circuitously than usual.

"Perovskites are a class of crystalline oxides that make better computer chip insulators than conventional silicon dioxides. You know about moletronics?"

"Little computers?"

"Molecular electronics. Chips as small as molecules. How about quantum computing?"

"Tiny, powerful computers?"

Will laughed. "If that ThinkPad"—he pointed down the companionway toward his laptop—"was represented as one inch tall, IBM's new Blue Gene supercomputer would stand twenty miles high. If they ever get it built. Do you know about electron tunneling?" Jim shook his head, thinking, I'm the young one, but he knows a lot more about this crap than I do.

"Think of electrons as prisoners. When you shrink computer circuitry down from 'micro'

to 'nano' you get a problem with electron tunneling; the insulators are so thin that electrons bore right through the transistor. Say you were to replace a penitentiary's stone walls with wallpaper—a lot of prisoners will escape.

"Looking ahead a few years, microscopic semiconductor circuitry technology is going to crash smack into its theoretical limits: in other words, there won't be a prison built that can hold those electrons.

"A related problem is that processor-to-memory delays are a drag on high-speed computers. So even as we get faster and faster processors it becomes crucial to move memory close to the processor. Like on this boat, instead of climbing out of the cockpit and running to the mast to raise a halyard, you can run the halyards right next to you in the cockpit."

"Will, what do electron tunneling and processor-to-memory delays have to do with that letter?"

"Solving these `small-and-fast' problems will completely reinvent computer design. Moletronics would throw out the current size and speed limits."

"How small?"

"As small as a single cell. You could pop a data chip into a hypodermic needle and inject it into your brain. Voila! Now you speak French."

"How fast?"

"A billion times faster than anything on the shelf. I can see you're beginning to get the picture."

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"I am—or I was—what you could call a proactive investment banker. Part venture capitalist, part conceptualizer, part cheerleader. For the last big deal I was running, I rounded up a bunch of hotshot engineers who were out beyond the leading edge of code-morphing and perovskite chips. Indian software writers, Chinese engineers—real cowboys."

"I'm having a hard time picturing you bossing geeks in T-shirts."

"So you think computer geeks are some kind of rebels? Nonsense. Ninety-nine out of a hundred suffer the same herd mentality as the old-fashioned NASA ten-percenters who wore white shirts and ties. Herds of sheep. My guys are wolves, guys who couldn't get along. Ever hear about engineers starting labs in their garage? My guys lived in caves.

"I found them. I backed them. And I organized a breakthrough that paid off. Big time."

"Congratulations."

"I named it Sentinel. I've got Sentinel chips—right now—that outperform anything on the market by a thousand times. A hundred thousand times. Nothing stays new long, but a one-year lead in moletronics is like a century of the Industrial Revolution. Right now my cavemen are two years ahead of the biggest shops in Silicon Valley."

"Why are you sailing to Africa when you should be cheerleading your engineers?"

"Because you'll never buy Sentinel at Radio Shack. . . . Are you beginning to see the problem?"

• "It doesn't sound like a problem. It sounds like you won."

"I'll put every billion-dollar chip factory in the world out of business overnight—you better believe there are people who don't want this to happen."

"I'll bet"

"That's who's chasing me."

"What do you mean?"

"They intend to stop me."

Suddenly, as if a plug had been pulled, the enthusiasm drained from his voice and the light dulled in his eyes. "How?" Jim asked.

"They'll do to me whatever it takes."

Will's switch of emotions caught Jim completely off guard again. A moment ago the old man was relating his great victory in molecular electronics; now he was sinking into another depression, caught in the net of his paranoia.

"Sounds a bit Oliver Stone, Will."

"What do you mean?"

"A little heavy on the conspiracy theory, maybe? Sounds like you're saying that legitimate corporations would try to murder a competitor?'

"Do you remember what happened in Barbados? Was I at the airport like I promised?"

"No. You sent some taxi driver who couldn't speak English. Next thing I knew I thought I was going to drown on a fishing boat."

"Don't you realize, now, why I had to leave before you?" "Weather."

"No. Ordinarily I would have waited for the front to move on. But I got word they'd come to the island."

Back to "they?' Jim despaired, as 'Will triggered another of his avalanches of words.

"I'm waltzing blithely around Bridgetown shopping for fresh vegetables to freeze for our trip. Fortunately, the market—damned good one, too, the best in the eastern Caribbean—

is in a tough neighborhood and some boys I

know warned me that a big Italian motor yacht had just dropped anchor in Deep Water Harbor." Will mimicked a Barbadian, " 'Say ol' mon, Mr. Spark, dere's folks askin' 'bout ya.' " He barked a rueful laugh. "What a way to go: a shiv in the ribs while haggling for imported parsnips."

As usual, a slew of details jacked up the likelihood of Will's story. But who was Will trying to convince, Jim wondered. Me or himself?

"On the other hand, what civilized man would roast a chicken without parsnips?"

"Will! . . . Who was on the Italian yacht?"

"Luckily, I was ready to split. I'd been shopping and cooking for days, stocking the freezers. The boat was fueled and at that moment they were just finishing watering her at the Careenage. I arranged for a taxi to meet your plane at Seawell and hired your fishing boat. Then I pretended to sail back to Deep Water Harbor. Instead, I just kept going. Wind was blowing up a gale and night fell dark as a bear's belly, so the Port Authority didn't notice me leave without clearance. I thought I was home free. Till you brought them down on us with that phony heart-rate monitor."

"Bullshit, Will."

"Thank God and your good eyes we spotted that ship." "Bullshit."