Castle Kidnapped

Two Queens

Through the open window, Jeremy Hochstader heard the telltale sound of a police radio and knew he was about to get busted.

It wasn’t much of a sound, just the momentary blurt, the pop, of a transmitter being keyed, the kind of static that might come from, say, a CB radio. But it had come from directly below the window, in the narrow alley to the side of the apartment building where a vehicle could not squeeze. Therefore, the noise had probably come from a walkie-talkie; which meant, probably, plainclothes cops; which meant one was waiting at the bottom of the fire escape, blocking off Jeremy’s only avenue of retreat. Which meant that in a few short moments, there would come the pounding of heavy fists again his apartment door.

He was not normally paranoid. The sight of a squad car in front of the building would ordinarily be of no concern. But Jeremy knew that Mark DiFilippo had been arrested. DiFilippo was Jeremy’s drug connection, among other things. The charge had been simple possession, but Jeremy had heard that the arrest had been carried out by Federal agents, and he was suspicious. Obviously they had DiFilippo on bigger stuff. Obviously what had happened was this: DiFilippo had plea-bargained his way out of the drug-dealing counts and had been arraigned on charges of computer crime: illegal use of interstate telephone lines, diversion of monies from various bank accounts, illegal use of credit card numbers, and other state-of-the-art, high-tech offenses, all perpetrated on the clutter of computers and peripheral equipment that lay about Jeremy’s fourth-floor walkup apartment. They were willing to go relatively easy on DiFilippo to get the hacker. Him, Jeremy.

The evidence was everywhere. Floppy disks made precarious piles on desks, shelves, floors, even on the refrigerator. Recorded on the disks was program after illegal program, some of which Jeremy had written, some of which he had “downloaded” — stolen — and some of which he had copied with blithe disregard for U.S. copyright law. But copyright infringement — even “willful infringement,” which technically was a felony — was the least of his problems.

DiFilippo must have talked.

In fact, the pizza-faced little wop must have sung like Caruso. Told them everything. Handed over all the account numbers, spilled everything about all the scams, the Trojan horse programs, the money-market accounts — everything, all the dope.

Dope!

All this took a second to race through Jeremy’s mind when he heard the squawk from the plainclothesman’s walkie-talkie. Leaping out of the chair, he rummaged through the debris on the coffee table and came up with a small plastic bag half filled with white powder. He dashed to the bathroom, emptied the bag’s contents into the bowl, flushed the commode. Then he rinsed out the bag and threw it out the window.

At least there wouldn’t be any drug charges to load on top of the hacking rap….

Except for the marijuana. Which was …where?

Heart pounding, Jeremy rifled through the place but came up empty. It didn’t matter much; there was no end of contraband strewn all over the joint, pills hiding in the mildewed depths of the sofa, uppers on display in jars in the kitchen cabinets, downers clutched in the paws of dust bunnies under the bed. Anything they would find would go straight to the lab and come back inevitably tagged: Illegal. Even Jeremy didn’t know what all was lying about. He’d lived in this dump for two years and was the world’s worst housekeeper. With a sickening feeling, he sat back down in front of the Macintosh and stared into the blank, gray screen of the CRT. It looked as empty and as featureless as his life.

He did not pause to marvel at how he had arrived at the certain knowledge that cops would soon be beating down his door. He had no need to look out the window and see the cop covering the fire escape. Jeremy knew the cop was there.

A few floors below, heavy feet thumped up the stairs. There came the sound of gruff voices, and again the fartlike sputter of walkie-talkies.

So it all comes down to this, he thought. No matter how bright he was — and he was very, very bright, always had been — it’s come down to a major felony rap, probably a conviction … and jail.

Jeremy did not want to go to jail. That fate he feared more than any other. He was young — only twenty-three — slight of build, and possessed not one ounce of physical courage. In jail he would be dead meat. They’d use him and abuse him and throw him away like a candy wrapper. At the very least he’d get AIDS.

Jeremy didn’t think much of himself, for all that he knew he was one of the best hackers in the city. He had been on the verge of becoming a successful freelance microcomputer systems consultant. He had already done a few jobs for some small brokerage houses on Wall Street, mainly on the recommendation of his uncle George, an independent stock analyst. But his age was a handicap, and so were his looks. Jeremy looked about fifteen. He couldn’t go to work for a company. No sheepskin. He’d flunked out of Columbia two years ago.

So when money got tight — and when Jeremy was into heavy speedballing, money got really tight — he would fire up the Compaq (his favorite rig for modern work) and dump cash into his account with stolen credit card numbers. DiFilippo had finally wondered where all the green stuff was coming from, and threatened to shut Jeremy off if the information was not forthcoming.

“It’s gonna stop snowin’, Jeremy. Christmas ain’t gonna come this year. Unnerstand? Come on, tell Santa where you’re getting the cash to pay for this stuff.”

Jeremy had told him, and DiFilippo wanted in. The rest was history.

I’m just another goddamn drug-abuse statistic, Jeremy thought ruefully. Just like in the TV public-service spots. How dumb. How unoriginal.

I did drugs, and I lost my job, my wife, my kids….

Jeremy liked coke. The subject here is not soda pop. He had a pronounced affinity for the crystalline alkaloid commonly processed from the dried leaves of the coca plant: cocaine. Coke, snow, nose candy … (plug in the current sobriquet). He’d started out packing his beak with the stuff, snorting it, then had graduated to freebasing and shooting the gunk into his veins along with some heroin to lubricate the pipes. Speedballing made you feel loose and smooth and good — damn good. Speedballing was fun, as long as you took it easy, watched your chemistry, and didn’t pull a John Belushi.

Well, he hadn’t, but he hadn’t been able to avoid one of the … like, real obvious pitfalls. The money thing. Feeding the habit. No, he’d blundered into that one like a baby.

He was a baby, he guessed. Never grew up.

Tell it to the judge.

Pushing its way past the numbness, panic finally welled up inside him. Deep voices and ponderous footfalls came from the landing one floor down.

Jeremy jumped up and ran to the door. On the way, almost as a reflex action, he snagged the Toshiba laptop. Throwing the door open, he dashed out and ran up the stairs, carrying the small computer like his grade school lunch bucket.

Behind him he heard a confusion of voices, footsteps, pounding, and then shouts.

“He’s flown!”

“He didn’t go out the window!”

“Maybe up on the roof?”

“What’s he think he’s gonna do, fly?”

It was four flights to the roof. Jeremy didn’t think at all on the way up. There was nothing in him but blind fear. But when he banged through the door and ran out onto the black tar expanse of the roof, he finally wondered where he was running to.

But of course there was nowhere to run to. He knew that, and he knew that he could never face arrest and jail.

He went to the edge of the roof and looked over the low tile-capped wall. Someone was climbing the sooty cage of the fire escape. All Jeremy could see was the top of an incipiently bald head and the flash of a yellow T-shirt, but he knew who it was: the cop. The guy was shouting into his walkie-talkie. The alley below was empty. Jeremy saw no squad cars in the alley behind the building, nor any in the part of the street that he could see. But how many cops does it take to bust one skinny nerd of a twenty-three-year-old in the thrall of arrested adolescence?

Three. Two to hold the nerd and the other to beat the living shit out of him. Just for the sheer joy of it.

It was clear what he had to do. He didn’t think he could get out of it. They had him dead to rights. All the money in his many accounts would be impounded, so it would be a public shyster for him, no fancy hired-gun lawyer who might be able to get him off or at least get him probation or maybe even into a halfway house or something. No, he was going to do hard time. The best he could hope for was minimum security. But even that would be hard to face.

Jeremy was scared. So deeply scared that he would do anything …anything to get out of this. Out. He wanted out.

He realized that he was already standing on the slippery terra-cotta tile of the wall, staring down into the alley, the hard, unforgiving bricks of which lay eight full stories below. He teetered forward. Could he do it?

He could, if he closed his eyes. Doing so, he stepped off the roof into thinnest air, still holding the computer.

He hit immediately, and he didn’t understand. He hit hard, but not as hard as he should have. He should have been a sack of shit and bones lying in the alley. But here he was … somewhere else.

Where the hell was he? He sat up and looked around. He was in a hallway, in a building, somewhere. Not his apartment building. He was sitting on a gray flagstone floor, the tan case of the little Toshiba lying upside down about two feet from his right hand. The corridor walls were of dark stone. He craned his head around. Behind him, the corridor ran in semidarkness to its vanishing point. What was in front of him was the problem: the top of the apartment building, only he couldn’t figure out how it could be there. Beyond his out-stretched legs the corridor extended a few more feet to a stone arch. But through the arch … well, there was the roof of the apartment building. Only it was canted kind of crazily, tilting to the right and sort of away. The angle was goofy. So, where the hell was this place?

The yellow-shirted cop appeared, peering over the wall. He seemed to be searching the alley below. Jeremy stared at him, but the cop didn’t see him at first. Then the cop did. He looked, then squinted. He blinked a few times, then looked again, right at Jeremy.

“What in the name of —?”

Then the roof and the building and the cop were gone, replaced by a view of a long, dim corridor.

Silence.

Jeremy rubbed his eyes and looked again. Nothing changed. Here he was in a place that looked like a church, or maybe a castle. And he had no idea of how he had got here. None.

His mind a total blank, he sat for a long spell before reaching for the computer and slowly getting to his feet. His rear end hurt, but it wasn’t bad. He hadn’t hit his head, he was pretty sure. Wherever he was, it was very quiet. He listened. Nothing. No voices, no heavy policemen’s footsteps. Nothing.

He turned away from the stone arch and began walking very slowly down the long, dark hallway.