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4

Dan arrived at Bristol, New Hampshire a little after four thirty and still had a fifteen-minute drive over a dirt road to get to Joel’s sprawling ranch, which looked more like army barracks than a home. The building was an eyesore. Not that it mattered. Not too many people were ever going to look at it. Joel’s nearest neighbor lived six miles away.

Dan walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Joel bragged to him once that he had a steel reinforced front door installed and that no one, especially not the Feds, were ever going to kick it down. Within seconds of ringing the bell, the door opened and Joel popped out.

“Well, well, look who drove up all the way from
Taxachusetts
,” he said, a big shit-eating grin in place. “You’re twenty minutes late.”

“Nice to see you, too. If you didn’t live so far up in the boondocks—”

“Fuck you, don’t give me your excuses, and I’m happy right where I am. You can have your
Taxachusetts
with all that liberal scum.” Joel scrunched his face into an exaggerated display of disgust as he sniffed the air. “What’s that stench? Ah, yes, the smell of liberal scum all over you.”

He broke into a short laugh and held out his hand. “So how are you doing, pal?”

“Could be better.” Dan took the hand and felt like he was being squeezed in a vise.

Joel Kasner stood like a rooster with his chest puffed out. With big ears, small glassy eyes, and hair that was mostly thinning, he resembled an animated cartoon character more than anything else. He pointed to the briefcase Dan was carrying. “What you got there?” he asked. “All the money you’re going to be losing to me in backgammon?”

“I’ll show you later. So how things going?”

“How do you think? They suck. How ’bout you?”

“Probably suck even worse.”

“Yeah, I know,” Joel said, his shit-eating grin fading. “It’s got to be hard. I feel for you, pal. At least in my case I’ve got my expenses under control and I don’t have kids living at home like you. Mine are all over eighteen and I don’t have to support their lazy asses anymore. Come on in, I’ve got the ’gammon board set up. Time to take some money off you.”

Dan followed Joel into the house. The place looked like it had been decorated from garage sales. None of the furniture matched, and the individual pieces looked worn and tired. A couple of gun magazines lay scattered on the sofa.

“You beat off with those?” Dan asked, pointing at the magazines.

“Fuck you. Let’s get the game going.”

A backgammon board was set up on a small Formica table in the kitchen. Joel opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of Bud. “You want one?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“A buck,” Joel demanded, his hand held out.

“You’re gonna charge me for that?”

“Why not? That’s what it cost me. And you could’ve brought your own beer, asshole.”

Dan swallowed back a crack he wanted to make on what Joel could do with his beer, instead reminded himself what he was there for, handed Joel a dollar and took one of the bottles. They both sat at the table, each rolling a die to determine who would make the first move. Midway through the game Joel missed a roll he needed. He stared up at the ceiling and shook his fist. “
Motherfucking cunt
,” he swore. “You can’t give me one goddamn roll, can you?”

“Those are the breaks, Joel.”

“Fuck you and roll.”

Two rolls later, Joel hit a one in thirty-six shot that gave him an edge in the game. He leaned back in his chair, satisfied. “So what are we playing for, five bucks a point?”

“I don’t think so. A quarter as always. And if you’re feeling so goddamn confident give me the doubling cube, okay?”

“Maybe I will.” Joel’s hard smirk softened for a moment. “So level with me, how’s the job search going?”

“Not good.” Dan paused, his stare moving towards a corner of the room. When he looked back at Joel, he was grinning, but it was a lifeless grin. “My whole career there were always engineers older than me. Now when I interview there’s no one older than thirty-five. They spend their time grilling me over design patterns that didn’t even exist five years ago, and look at my twenty-six years’ experience as a joke because it was done in what they consider obsolete programming languages. These pricks are making me feel washed up at forty-eight. Who the fuck knows, maybe I am.”

“Defeatist talk, pal. Me, I’m halfway through my JAVA certification program, and I promise you when I’m done I’ll be working again.”

Dan started to say something, instead closed his mouth. They sat quietly and finished out the game. As they were setting up the board for the next one, Joel looked at his friend, a weariness in his eyes. “So how bad are things for you?” he asked.

“Bad,” Dan said. “I’ve already spent down my 401K, and what Carol’s bringing in just isn’t enough.”

“It’s your own fault! Who told you to buy a McMansion when you did? Chrissakes, I remember when you bought that house I asked you why the fuck anyone would need a thirty-eight hundred square foot home. Just sell the damn thing.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Then go back to school like I’m doing,” Joel said. “With all your project leadership experience, you get JAVA certified and you’ll be golden.”

Dan bit his tongue, almost telling him that it wouldn’t do any good, that by the time he finished any certification program he’d be blind. Instead he gave his friend a hard grin. “You’re living in a fantasy world, Joel,” he said. “You can have all the JAVA certificates you want, nobody’s going to hire you. Why hire a fifty-five-year-old guy when they can get a kid out of college who’s cheaper and who they’re more comfortable with?”

“Bullshit,” Joel looked away, his mouth weakening. “What the fuck else am I supposed to do? Just give up like you’re doing?”

“Who says I’m giving up? Maybe I’ve got something in the works. Could be something for you too.”

“Like what?”

“I might have a proposition for you.”

“You’re looking to start a company?”

“In a way.”

“Don’t be so fucking coy. Any investors lined up?”

“Joel, I’m not trying to be coy.”

“Okay, fine, speed it up, though, pal. Testing, coding, whatever you need I’ll do it for you.”

“It’s not like that.” Dan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I didn’t tell you this, but I had a three-month contract that finished a month ago.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you bring me in?”

“They farmed out the development to India. If I could’ve brought you in, I would’ve.”

“So what does this have to do with your proposition?”

“I’ll get to that. The contract was with a bank. They hired me to architect a new security system for them. When a silent alarm is hit, they want it to go through a computer system that will simultaneously call the local police, FBI, and a private security service that they’re using. It will also trigger-lock their vault and several other doors. Because of this system they got rid of their on-site security guards.”

“Okay, so?”

“Their old system had the silent alarm tied directly to the local police. Now you’ve got a computer in the middle.”

“So… if the computer goes down, the silent alarm doesn’t work.”

“That’s right.”

“Is there a backup?”

“Yeah, if the computer goes down the alarm signal switches over to a backup system. Both systems are on battery backup power supplies.”

“Pretty stupid if you ask me. They should’ve maintained the direct line.”

“No kidding. Now this is where it gets interesting. The Indian contract house they used did a shitty job. I inspected the code and it’s a mess. The system is supposed to go through a two-point-eight-second self-test at random intervals to verify everything’s working fine. They screwed up, and instead it goes through a twenty-eight-minute self-test.”

“So they wrote crappy code. So what? You want to point it out to the bank and have them hire us to fix it?”

“Not exactly. I modified the code a little myself. Now when it goes through its self-test the silent alarm signal is disabled.”

“Can that get back to you?”

“Why would it?”

“Why? Because you architected the system, putz!”

“So what? As far as the bank is concerned, I never even breathed near the software. I made my changes to look like bad code, just like all the other crap those Indian contractors delivered. And I left no fingerprints.”

“Again, so what?”

Dan paused for a moment, a sickish grin breaking over his face. “The algorithm the Indian contractors came up with to calculate random time intervals isn’t random,” he said. “It’s predictable. In fact, I can tell you exactly when in a week that bank’s alarm system is going to be disabled. For twenty-eight minutes.”

Joel’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Dan. “Don’t even say it,” he warned.

“I’ve got every detail worked out, Joel. This is something we can do.”

“Schmuck!” Joel exploded, showing teeth. “I told you not to say it! You’re going to be a bank robber now, is that it? Here’s some advice, forget your own little fantasy and let’s play some more ’gammon.”

“Joel, we can do this. And we fucking deserve to do this.” Dan wet his lips, edged closer to his friend. “You know how many years I worked eighty-hour weeks at startups trying to make some real money, only to see them all go out of business? I know you did the same. This is our chance to cash in.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Just hear me out.”

“Stand up.”

“What?”

“I said stand up.”

Dan held his hands up to signal what the fuck, pushed his chair back, and started to stand. He only made it halfway up when Joel popped out of his chair and hit him with a hard jab under his left eye. The punch stunned him. He staggered back a few steps before catching his balance. Grabbing his cheek, he could feel that it had already started to swell.

“What the fuck!”

“Hey, schmuck, you’re a bank robber right? You should be prepared for shit like that.”

“You asshole.”

“
I’m
the asshole? You come here trying to convince me to join you in a bank robbery? Look at you, you’re not even prepared to take a punch and you’re going to rob a bank?”

“Try it again.”

“I don’t think so. You’re ready for it now. But that’s the thing, you try doing something stupid like what you’re thinking and anything can happen. And as you just showed, you don’t have the instincts to handle what might come your way. Let me get you some ice.”

Joel filled a plastic bag with ice from the freezer and returned to the table. Dan sat back down and stewed silently as he took the bag and held it against his cheek. Thoughts of how dire his situation had become kept him frozen in his chair.

“So did I knock some sense into you?”

“You could’ve pulled your punch. I think you broke something.”

“Quit your whining. I didn’t break anything. And quit daydreaming about robbing banks. You’re a software engineer, remember?”

Shifting his eyes upward to meet Joel’s, Dan shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. “Neither are you. Maybe we used to be, but we’re not any more. And they’ve locked the doors shut on us.”

“Go ahead and believe that all you want. I don’t.” Joel absent-mindedly moved his hand to his jaw and started massaging it.

“You know damn well it’s true. Any JAVA certificate you get might as well be printed on toilet paper for all the good it’s going to do you.”

“If you really believe that, go back to school for something else!”

Again Dan had to bite his tongue to keep from yelling out:
What good would that do? I’m going blind!
Instead, very calmly, he said, “For what? Even if I had the money for that, which I don’t, tell me what I can get a degree in where they’ll hire me out of school when I’m in my fifties.”

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

“Joel, you’ve worked on projects with me. Have I ever screwed up?”

“This is not the same thing.”

“I beg to differ. How about hearing me out and then making up your mind?”

Joel opened his mouth to argue but instead blew out a lungful of air. He leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. Very softly, “Go ahead.”

Dan took the ice away from his face and placed it on the table. He opened his briefcase and methodically went over his plan. As Joel listened his attitude shifted from reluctant humoring to a grudging respect. At the end a glint of interest shone in his eyes, his tongue darting across his lips as he thought it over. “I have to admit it could work,” he said. “You sure as fuck did your homework. Everything you told me is on the level?”

“Yep.”

Joel leaned further back in his chair, his eyes glazing while he rubbed a thumb across his lips. He sat like that for a minute mulling over what Dan had told him, and all at once straightened in his seat, his eyes hard on Dan, his face flushing a deep red. “You stupid schmuck,” he swore, his voice barely a rasp. “You’re planning to bring Gordon into this, aren’t you? Are you out of your mind?”