Antenna Syndrome Page 2

  Chinatown, recognizing an opportunity of a lifetime, had almost overnight created a market for traditional herbal medicines with a patch-based delivery. City buses carried posters showing a demographic array of New Yorkers wearing medicinal patches on their arms. Anxiety, bulimia, depression, diarrhea, incontinence, indigestion, insomnia, loss of libido, neuralgia, vertigo, etc, ad nauseam – There’s a patch for that! Unfortunately, there was no patch for chronic insolvency, from which I did suffer.

  I used my iFocals to plug everything Natalie Jordan had given me – name, phone numbers, CyberCall coordinates – into a search engine, then ran a few reverse lookups to fill in some blanks. After about fifteen minutes of surfing and sifting, I found something linking her to The Confidant, a national content provider of dubious repute based in LA. Just as The Huffington Post had become the aggregator of choice for liberal left-wing news and opinion, The Confidant apparently aspired to be its dumpster-diving cousin, feeding the public’s insatiable appetite for sex, scandal and sensationalism.

  I trolled through their website and discovered a staff writer named Natalie Dunning who looked just like my client. I gathered a few facts: Dartmouth graduate, brief stint at the Sacramento Bee, registered Democrat, Sierra Club life member, stock car driver, yoga enthusiast, NRA member – a girl of some contradictions. Not to mention, possibly, a liar.

  As for Harris Jordan, I already knew the public persona that had emerged in the run-up to the New York City mayoralty campaign. He was divorced, but no one really cared about that any more. His appeal lay in his simple platform – fight the tsunami of crime and corruption that had swamped the five boroughs, especially Brooklyn, in the aftermath of the Blast.

  Law and order were at their nadir. Upstanding citizens of means had fled the area by the millions, leaving bottom feeders in their wake. Street gangs ruled whole neighborhoods, their turf wars fought with automatic weapons. Drugs were sold openly, prostitution was epidemic. Property crime was through the roof, houses and buildings being pillaged on an industrial scale by teams of “day-strippers” who broke into properties and gutted their plumbing and wiring. Urban copper mining was the gold rush of the day.

  Bureaucratic corruption was rife. It cost a fortune in bribes to do anything legal, leaving rational people no choice but to circumvent laws and ordinances on a routine basis. Harris Jordan wanted to end all that, to pull New York back from the brink of a failed Soviet state, crush the criminal gangs that were bleeding the five boroughs, and give people hope in the form of honest administration and tough-love justice.

  Harris Jordan was especially vocal about the Russian mafia, which he’d characterized as “bedbugs of modern society”. They were sucking the blood out of everyone, and no district or level of society was immune. There was only one response to infestation, Jordan warned, and that was total extermination.

  He had my vote. But for the present, what really gave me hope for the future was cash in hand and the promise of a matching amount, maybe even a bonus, if I could find his missing daughter by the weekend.

  I rolled the fridge aside and stashed most of the money in my floor safe, keeping some on me for operating funds. I turned off the lights to save electricity and dialed the air scrubber down to a low whisper. Pocketing my pistol, I shouldered my tote bag and locked the office.

  These days, everyone carried a man-purse, because there was no telling when, where or why your foray into the city could take a wrong turn and leave you stranded with no resources but your own. In my bag I carried spare ammo, a knife, first aid kit, energy bars, water, vaporizer refills, flashlight, rope, pry-bar, DDT spray, hand-cranked generator, environmental protection and, of course, a roll of duct tape.

  As I rode the elevator down, a dazed cockroach the size of a small mouse fell out of the overhead vent. I stomped on it fast and hard, crushing it under my heel. I hated bugs, and now they were everywhere. Ever since the Brooklyn Blast, the little bastards seemed to have come forth and multiplied with a vengeance.

  Entomologists speculated that the low-level radiation which was causing neurological disorders and all kinds of cancers in humans had had almost the opposite effect on insects, stimulating both their activity, growth and reproductive cycle. We the people didn’t understand it and we sure as hell didn’t like it.

  Before I left the elevator I put on my eMask, a micro-fiber balaclava fitted with goggles, nasal respirators and mouth filter. As I walked through the lobby, I tried not to kick up a dust storm of boric acid. It was still drizzling outside but, with both a gun and a fistful of dollars in my pocket, I felt better than I had in a long time. Nothing like a job to take a man’s mind off his worries, of which I had many.

  ~~~

  I walked down the block to a parking compound run by a Korean family. These days nobody left their car on the street, for fear it’d be towed, stripped or vandalized. My 2016 Dodge Charger was a beast for gas but I’d got it hybridized five years ago when gas rationing kicked in, so now it ran on electricity, hydrogen or compressed natural gas.

  Mr. Kim also had a sweet deal on some black market farm fuel, and kept my tank full in case I had to make a midnight run to some godforsaken place where service stations declined to operate. I banged on his door and raised the eMask so his security camera could see my face.

  “Good day, Mistuh Savage.” Mr. Kim buzzed me in. A pump shotgun stood propped behind his desk. He punched an intercom and barked something Korean, in the middle of which I heard “Charguh.”

  A minute later, my ride squealed to a halt in the passage outside his office. One of his sons got out and beckoned to me. I climbed into the Charger, locked the doors and headed up Tenth Avenue.

  I’d installed an air scrubber in the car so it was safe to remove my eMask so long as I kept the windows rolled up. Traffic was a fraction of what it used to be, but there were still people on the streets, most with face masks and respirators, some with radiation burns and twitchy limbs. Life went on, as it had in other times and places. Berlin, London, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had all pulled themselves out of the wreckage. Now it was New York’s turn.

  After the Brooklyn Blast, despite the panic, evacuations and radiation effects, some people had actually clung to their neighborhoods, refusing to let the city die. I passed a Greek restaurant with a terrace where some old guys were playing backgammon, wearing nothing more than cheap paper filters over their mouths. In an OTB saloon across the street, punters sipped drinks through straws inserted beneath their respirators, placing bets on long-odds fights, games and races, hoping to score the big win that might buy them a one-way ticket to a cleaner place.

  I turned onto 42nd Street, drove cross-town and joined a moving lane through the toll plaza for the Midtown Tunnel. Toll charges were so high I didn’t like to think about it, but the transponder took the hit in lieu of paying cash, and I’d only see the bill at month’s end. Transportation costs usually discouraged me from operating outside of Manhattan, but for the money I was getting for this gig, I would have driven to hell and back.

  Chapter 4

  I hadn’t been out to Long Island in ages so I took the Southern State Parkway for a change. With so many residents having fled the area, traffic was light. Mostly it was vans and trucks – day-strippers from outside the five boroughs – visiting the suburbs for a day of salvage. Armed with reciprocal saws, a crew could strip an abandoned house clean of its copper plumbing and wiring in a day. Scrap copper was worth a fortune. Urban strip miners, at least those who stayed one step ahead of the police, were the new entrepreneurs of the era.

  En route to Long Island, I kept the speedometer at a steady 60 mph, and not just for the sake of fuel economy. Every licensed vehicle was fitted with electronic VIN, and roadside transponders made it virtually impossible to speed without getting ticketed in real time. Progress sucked. Although new cars featured automatic road control, my 10-year-old Charger wasn’t one of them. I didn’t care to give up control to a cluster of chips and software anyway.


  I switched my iFocals to audio and ran a search on Harris Jordan to find anything else on him that I hadn’t already been spoon-fed by the media. I listened to a biography I found on Wikipedia. It was all squeaky clean, as perfect a curriculum vitae as any mayoral candidate could ask for, something his staffers had probably posted just before he’d declared his candidacy.

  After Harvard Law School, Jordan had worked his way through a series of mandates: non-profit organizations, municipal government, the state legislature in Albany, Wall Street, a stint in Iraq with the State Department, a few years in Washington, then back to municipal government and an increasingly public profile, first as a city councilor and then as financial controller.

  On the personal side, he’d been married only once, in 1999 to Patricia Dunning, whom he’d met at Harvard. They’d had one daughter, Natalie, in 2001. They’d divorced in 2006, his ex-wife reclaiming her maiden name, taking custody of the daughter and moving to Florida. The Wiki article offered no other details of his personal life.

  However, thanks to an attempted character assassination by a political rival last year, I knew there’d been rumors of adultery at the tail end of his marriage. That rumor had later found its way into the digital news network, but Jordan had promptly slapped the publishers with libel suits, and the story had been withdrawn before gaining traction.

  But online, nothing ever really disappears. It just sinks into the background, waiting to be dug up by a search engine. Eventually I found what I was looking for. Rumor was, Jordan had formed a relationship with a state legislature intern named Jennifer Teale. Perhaps more than an affair, maybe more like the love of his life, he’d been with her almost two years during his stint in Albany. But for some reason, the relationship had come to an abrupt end.

  After more searching, I found an obituary notice. Jennifer Teale had died on June 17, 2006. The date rang a bell. Marielle’s birth date!

  Now it fell into place. Marielle’s mother had probably died giving birth to her. Because Jordan had loved Teale, and Marielle was their daughter, he’d adopted her. That probably hadn’t sat too well with his wife, hence the divorce.

  I closed the search engine and tuned into some hard rock on satellite radio, rewarding my research productivity with a few puffs on my personal vaporizer. Cigarettes were now outlawed everywhere in America, although a lively black market continued to service those still nostalgic for the good old days, when inhaling a burning cloud of carcinogens seemed a relatively romantic way to kick sand in Death’s face.

  But a combination of brutal fines and safer alternatives had convinced most people to switch to personal vaporizers for the chemical hit of choice. PV cartridges could be charged with nicotine, cannabis, alcohol or any combination of natural or homeopathic ingredients. Occasionally I enjoyed a blend of cannabis and gotu kola, which made me seem both hip and smart, or at least I thought so. Lately, however, I’d been troubled by recurring anxieties, and now favored something called KavaKat, which steadied my nerves with no side effects on the job.

  I exited at the Seaford Expressway, rode it south to the end and took Merrick Road into East Massapequa. I drove into an area of what used to be multi-million-dollar homes, until Hurricanes Sandy in 2012 and Boris in 2023 had had their way with some of them. They were large houses on double-size lots, but some lawns looked like feed lots, and a few properties were gated shut, looking like they’d been closed for more than a season. I found the address and drove through a stone portal and up a birch-shaded lane to a large house on a rise overlooking Oyster Bay.

  Chapter 5

  I parked between a white Volvo station wagon and a yellow Tesla plugged into a charging outlet. The house was grand, with pillars flanking the front door, and a giant brass knocker that I banged gently so as not to wake the dead. At the sound of the knocker, two Doberman Pinschers came over a three-foot hedge like jumpers in a horse show.

  I retreated to my car as they barked and bared their canines. A man came through a gap in the hedge and whistled sharply. The Dobermans stood down and hung their tongues out and looked at me as if to say, Had you worried there for a minute, huh?

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Keith Savage.” I extended my hand. “Natalie Jordan asked me to investigate Marielle’s disappearance.”

  “Jack Randall.” He gave me a dry hard squeeze. “These are Hansel and Gretel. They like to chase people, so don’t run.”

  Randall was about fifty, fit-looking with a touch of grey at the temples, average height. His eyes were blue but watery, as if he were fighting some allergy. He wore a nylon jacket, denim jeans and canvas shoes to which some grass trimmings were stuck.

  He opened the door and I followed, trailed by Doberman escorts. We passed through the foyer and down a hallway, past a living room, library and dining room, all with twelve-foot ceilings and hardwood floors that gleamed like bowling lanes. Scattered throughout were enough paintings on the walls to open a small art gallery. We entered a large modern kitchen where a woman was standing at a counter.

  “Vivien, this is the investigator Natalie hired.”

  Mrs. Randall, who’d been working over a salad bowl, wiped her hands on her apron. She was a handsome woman, a tall blonde in her early forties, with Nordic cheekbones and excellent teeth. She offered a hand as cold as a North Atlantic herring, but maybe that was because she’d been rinsing lettuce.

  “How long have you folks worked for Mr. Jordan?”

  “Sixteen years and three months,” Jack said, making it sound like a prison sentence.

  “This is his primary residence?”

  “Yes. He also has a condo in Manhattan and a cottage in the Catskills. That’s where he is now – Hunter Mountain – with his campaign manager, developing his strategy.”

  “And your duties here?”

  “I take care of the property, vehicles, security,” Jack said. “Viv handles meals, housekeeping and Marielle’s personal needs.”

  “Tell me what happened here on Saturday.”

  “About ten in the morning a technician showed up to service an air conditioning unit,” Jack said. “It was a company I’d never dealt with before. Virtual Air.”

  “So you weren’t expecting him?”

  “No, but he had a work order for the second floor unit, saying it was an introductory offer. Usually I coordinate maintenance, but company CEOs sometimes offer Jordan freebies, hoping he’ll favor them for some government contract.”

  “You still got that work order?”

  “In my office. I’ll make a copy.”

  “Did you get the technician’s name?”

  “Buzz. It was on a stitched name patch above his breast pocket.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He was tall and skinny, wore khaki coveralls and wraparound sunglasses. Close-cropped blond hair, flattened nose, a long jaw with bulges halfway up his cheeks, like he had a hockey puck in his mouth. He didn’t say much, and his lips hardly moved when he talked, like a ventriloquist. Now that I think of it, I wonder if he had lips at all, or just a slit where the words came out.”

  “Sounds creepy. It’s a wonder you let him in.”

  “Well, I had the dogs here. Plus which, I used to be a bouncer in my younger years, so I can take care of myself.”

  I wondered if this was a hint for me, that he was more than just a handyman, a force to be reckoned with.

  “Anyway,” Jack continued, “soon as I let him in, the dogs went nuts. They usually act up for strangers but a sharp word from me always settles them down. But with this guy, if I hadn’t collared them, they would’ve torn him apart. I think he was already afraid of dogs, and they scared him bad. So I leashed them and put them in their pen. I took the guy up and showed him the second floor AC unit. He gave it a quick look and said he’d replace it. We went back downstairs and he loaded some stuff from the van onto a dolly.”

  “What did he bring into the house?”

  “Toolbox, gas canister and a new air conditi
oner in a box.” Jack held his hands out, measuring about six cubic feet.

  “How long was he here?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  “That’s pretty fast to change out an AC unit.”

  “Turns out he only needed to replace the compressor and recharge the gas.”

  “And where was Marielle during this time?”

  “Her third-floor suite,” Jack said.

  “And you?” I asked Vivien.

  “Doing my Saturday morning grocery run. Rule is, there’s someone in the house with Marielle at all times...”

  I turned back to Jack. “But you left a stranger on the second floor while Marielle was alone on the third?”

  “Yes, but it’s not like he could have gone up there. There’s no access between the second and third floors.”

  “Isn’t that in violation of fire code?”

  “Yes and no. You’ll understand when I show you the layout.”

  “Okay. Got any security video?”

  Jack took me downstairs. There was an entertainment room with a sectional sofa facing a huge screen. Audio spheres clung to the ceiling like wasp’s nests. There was a bathroom, laundry room, utility room and an office with a computer that displayed two exterior camera views, front door and back.

  On the way to the office I’d counted eight windows at grade level, all with iron bars mounted. “Ever have any break-ins?”

  “No. The place was vulnerable when I first arrived. But I advised Jordan to install barred windows, new locks and a security system.”

  “Can’t argue with due diligence.”