Mob Psychology td-87

  Mob Psychology

  ( The Destroyer - 87 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Zap! You're dead!

  The Mafia had entered the computer age with a vengeance. The game they were playing went way beyond Pac-Man. They didn't make images vanish from a screen - they made human beings vanish from the earth. With the world's biggest computer company in their pocket, they had the world in their power - and only Remo and Chiun had a swiftly disappearing chance of pulling the plug on this megabyte menace and debugging its satanic system before it programmed the Destroyer himself for destruction...

  Destroyer 87: Mob Psychology

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Now that two men were holding him down on the soggy ground and a third had submerged his head in the cranberry bog, Wally Boyajian reluctantly concluded that it had all been too good to be true, after all.

  This must be a hazing ritual, Wally thought wildly as he held his breath, his lips compressed to keep out the brackish bog water that was already clogging his nostrils. It was the only explanation.

  He had showed up for the job interview bright and early at eight A. M. sharp. Wally had no more stepped up to the reception desk than the blue-blazered security guard immediately buzzed the vice-president in charge of systems outreach.

  "Your eight o'clock is here, Mr. Tollini," he said crisply.

  "Show him in, quick."

  "Mr. Tollini will see you now," the lobby guard had said, pointing down the luxuriously carpeted hallway. "South wing. Last door at the end of the hall."

  "Thank you," said Wally Boyajian, fresh out of the Darrigo Computer Institute on his first postgraduate job interview. He straightened his tie as his gray Hush Puppies gathered a charge of static electricity from the carpet.

  The door at the end of the south wing was marked

  "ANTONY TOLLINI, VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF SYSTEMS OUTREACH."

  Wally hesitated. He was a computer engineer. What was the VP in charge of systems outreach doing screening job applicants for customer service?

  But this was International Data Corporation, the Mamaro neck Monster, the company that put the frame in mainframe and a PC in every office. They never made mistakes.

  Steeling himself, Wally grasped the doorknob.

  "Ouch!" he said, withdrawing his static-stung hand.

  The door whipped open and the eager ferretlike face of Antony Tollini greeted him.

  "Mr. Boysenberry. Come in. So glad to meet you," Tollini was saying, pumping Wally's tingling hand with both of his. Tollini had a handshake like a cold tuna steak. Wally barely noticed this as he was ushered into the well-appointed office.

  "Sit down, sit down," Tollini was saying. His sparse, uneven mustache twitched and bristled as lie took his own seat. He wore Brooks Brothers gray. Everyone at IDC wore Brooks Brothers gray. Including the secretaries.

  Wally sat down. He cleared his throat. "I want to tell you, Mr. Tollini, that I'm very excited that IDC agreed to interview me for the senior technician job. After all, I just graduated. And I know how tight the job market is right now."

  "You're hired," Tollini said quickly.

  Wally's eyes jumped wide. His eyebrows retreated into the shaggy shelf of hair above them.

  "I am?" he said blankly.

  "Can you start today?"

  "Today?" blurted Wally, who was having trouble keeping up with the conversation. "Well, I guess so, if you really want"

  "Fantastic," said Antony Tollini, jumping out from behind his desk. He practically gathered Wally Boyajian out of his chair with a friendly arm around his shoulder and piloted him out into the corridor. "You start now."

  "Now?" Wally gulped.

  The fatherly hand fell away like a deadweight.

  "If you can't," Tollini said crisply, "there are other applicants. "

  No, no. Now is fine. I just assumed I'd have to be called back for a follow-up interview before-"

  "Here at IDC we take pride is recognizing talent early," Antony Tollini said, the warm arm returning to its place across Wally's shoulders like the waterlogged arm of an octopus slipping onto a coral shelf.

  "I guess . ." Wally said as he found himself pushed through a half-open door marked "CUSTOMER SERVICE."

  "Hey, everyone," Antony Tollini shouted out, "meet Wally Boysenberry--" ,

  "Boyajian. It's Armenian."

  "Wally's our new senior customer engineer," Tollini was saying.

  All around the room, grave-faced technicians in white lab smocks perked up. The stony pallor dropped from their faces as if cracked loose by a sculptor's chisel. Smiles lit up the room. There was a smattering of polite applause.

  Wally Boyajian smiled weakly. He had never been applauded for his technical knowledge before.

  "Oh, when do you start, Wally?" asked a breathy-voiced redhead.

  "Wally starts right now, don't you, son?" Tollini said, clapping Wally on the back so hard his horn-rimmed glasses nearly jumped off his narrow-bridged nose.

  "That's right," gulped Wally, going with the flow. Going with the flow was very important at IDC, where it was said that when the CEO expired, the entire payroll was promoted and a global search for the perfect office boy was ?begun.

  This time everyone stood up. The applause was unanimous.

  They surged in his direction like groupies toward a rock star. Instantly Wally found himself besieged by white lab smocks.

  "Oh, that's wonderful, Wally."

  "You'll love it at IDC, Wally."

  "Here's your LANSCII documentation, Wally."

  Blinking, Wally accepted the heavy blue looseleaf notebook embossed with the IDC logo.

  "LANSCII?" he said. "That's a language I never heard of"

  "It's new," Antony Tollini was saying. "Pilot program stuff. You'll need it to debug our Boston client's system."

  "I will?"

  Suddenly the stony faces came back. Wounded eyes searched his perplexed face for signs of hope.

  The redhead drew close to him, treating Wally Boyajian to a whiff of some indescribably alluring perfume. Since. he was allergic to perfumes, he sneezed.

  "But," she said worriedly, "you are going to Boston, aren't you, Wally?"

  Wally sneezed again.

  "Oh, no!" a technician moaned. "He's sick!" The technician went three shades paler. "He can't go!"

  Stricken looks replaced the worried ones.

  "Of course he's going," shouted Antony Tollini, whipping a red travel-agency envelope from inside his coat and shoving it into the vent pocket of Wally's only suit. "We got him booked on a ten-o'clock flight."

  "Boston?" Wally said, blowing into a hastily extracted handkerchief.

  "First class."

  "Oh, you'll love Boston, Wally," a chipper voice said.

  "Yes, Boston is so . . . so historical."

  " I . . ." Wally sputtered.

  Antony Tollini said, "We're putting you in a first-class hotel. A limo will meet you at the airport. Naturally, since you won't have time to go home and pack, we've established a line of credit at the finest men's stores up there. And of course there's the three-hundred-dollar-a-day living allowance."

  This reminded Wally Boyajian that the subject of his salary had never come up. In these lean times he was lucky to even have a job, and decided that with a three-hundred-dollar-a-day living allowance, they could keep the damn salary.

  "Sounds good to me," said Wally, putting away his handkerchief.

  The ring of white lab smocks burst into a ripple of delighted applause. Wally thought of how nice it would be to work here once the Boston job was done. These looked like a super bunch to work with, even if the
y did go through mood swings pretty fast.

  "Okay," said Antony Tollini, "let's get you to the airport, Wally my boy."

  The octopus arms urged him around and back out the door.

  As he left the room, the calls of good luck rang in his ears.

  "Oh, good-bye, Wally."

  "Nice meeting you, Wally."

  "Good luck in Boston, Wally."

  "We can't wait to hear how it went, Wally."

  They really cared about him, thought Wally Boyajian, twenty-two years old, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, never to reach twenty-three, never to see Philadelphia again.

  As the company car whisked him away from IDC world headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York, Wally thought breathlessly that it was almost too good to be true. Techies like him dreamed of going to work at IDC the way schoolboys dreamed of pitching in the World Series.

  With a lot of passion but minimal expectation.

  The flight was short but very pleasant. Wally had never flown first class before. He was a teetotaler, so he passed up the complimentary drinks and settled for a bitter-tasting mineral water.

  The stewardess was unfailingly polite but reserved as she served Wally. That was, until he blurted out that he had just joined IDC.

  She practically sat in his lap the rest of the way.

  Wally Boyajian decided that yessiree-bob, he was really, really going to enjoy working at IDC.

  At Logan Airport there was an honest-to-goodness chauffeur waiting for him. The chauffeur didn't wear livery, only a neat dark sharkskin suit and a cap. He stood nearly seven feet tall and was built like a library bookshelf. Somehow, he seemed more like a chauffeur than if he had worn a uniform, Wally decided.

  "You the guy from IDC?" the chauffeur had asked.

  "Yes, sir," Wally had said, at a loss for how to address so imposing an individual. Since the Gulf War, he was very respectful of anyone in uniform.

  "Come on, then. We're going for a ride."

  The limousine was no stretch model, just a long black Cadillac with tinted back windows. The chauffeur opened the door and clicked it shut after Wally had slid in.

  The car eased out of the congestion of the airport and into the tiled fluorescent paralysis of the Sumner Tunnel.

  "Ever been in Boston before?" the chauffeur called back.

  "No. I was reading about it on the plane, though. I hear this is where practically all the cranberries are grown."

  "Yeah, there are lots of cranberry bogs out in the sticks."

  "Maybe if I have the time, I might visit one. Cranberries remind me of the holidays coming up. This will be the first holiday season I've spent away from my folks. I miss them."

  "Pal," said the gruff chauffeur, "if you can fix my boss's computer, I guarantee you all the cranberry bogs you wanna splash around in."

  "It's a deal," said Wally Boyajian with the unbridled enthusiasm of a young man to whom all of life's rich possibilities beckoned.

  After twenty minutes of stop-and-go riding, Wally noticed they were still in the white-tiled tunnel.

  "Is Boston traffic always like this?" Wally asked at one point.

  "Only on good days."

  Thinking this was a local joke, Wally essayed a timid laugh. He swallowed it when the chauffeur failed to chime in.

  Finally they emerged in a section of narrow, twisted streets where the brick apartments crowded one another with suffocating closeness. Almost no sun peeped down past the rooftops.

  "By the way," Wally said suddenly, "this company you're taking me to-what is it's name?"

  " F and L Importing," the chauffeur said in a bored voice.

  "What's the F and L stand for?"

  "Fuck 'em and leave 'em," replied the chauffuer. This time he did laugh.

  Wally did not. He did not care for profanity or those who resorted to it.

  " I never heard of it," Wally admitted.

  "It's a wholly owned sub . . . sub . . ."

  "Subsidiary?" Wally offered.

  "Yeah. That. Of LCN."

  "I don't think I've ever heard of LCN. What does it make?"

  "Money," the chauffeur grunted. "It makes tons of money. "

  Before Wally knew it, the car purred to a stop.

  "We're here?" he said blankly, looking around. They had pulled into a tiny parking spot behind a dirty brick building.

  "This is the place," said the chauffeur.

  Wally waited for the door to be opened before stepping out. Almost immediately before him was a blank green-painted door. The air was thick with heavy food smells. Spicy, pleasant food smells. Wally assumed these enticing odors were wafting from the company cafeteria as the tall hulk of a chauffeur opened the blank green door for him.

  Wally had only a momentary-impression of a cool woodpaneled dimness before he passed through the alcove to a nearly bare room where three very husky men in business suits stood around a tacky Formica-topped card table on which an ordinary IDC-brand personal computer stood like a blind oracle.

  "A PC?" Wally said. "I expected a mainframe."

  The three husky men in suits tensed.

  "But you can fix it, right?"

  "Probably," Wally said, laying down his custom leather tool case and testing the cable connections in back of the PC. "What's wrong with it?"

  "The whatchcallit-hard-on disk-cracked up."

  "Hard disk. Don't you people know that?"

  "They're security," said the chauffeur from behind Wally's back.

  The room was small and Wally said, "I could use a little elbow room here. Why don't you fellows take a coffee break?"

  "We stay," said one of the husky men.

  Wally shrugged. "Okay," he said good-naturedly. "Let's see what we got." Wally got down to work. He tried to initialize the system but it refused to boot on. He next inserted a diagnostic floppy. That got him into the system, but the hard disk remained inaccessible. It was going to be a long first day, he realized. But he was almost happy. He had a job. At IDC. Life was sweet.

  By twelve o'clock he started to feel his stomach rumble. No wonder. The close air was redolent with the spicy tang of garlic and tomato sauce. He kept working until one o'clock, imagining that someone would tell him when it was time to break for lunch. Wally didn't want to give an important IDC client the impression that he was more concerned with his stomach than with their hardware problem.

  Finally, at one-fifteen, he stood up, stretched his aching back, and said, " I think I need to have a bite to eat."

  "Is it fixed?" asked the chauffeur.

  "It's a long way from being fixed," Wally said.

  "Then you get to eat when the box is fixed."

  Wally thought of his three-hundred-dollar-a-day living allowance and the fine dinner it would buy and said, "Okay."

  Maybe this was some kind of test, he thought. Getting into IDC entry-level was something. Being promoted to chief customer engineer on the first day was too good to risk rocking the boat.

  It was well past eight P. m. when Wally wearily finished his last diagnostic test. He had accomplished nothing more than to activate every error message in the system.

  Frowning, he removed his glasses, wiped them clean, and restored them to his thin face.

  He looked up to the husky chauffeur and said, "I'm sorry. The data in this system is irrecoverable."

  "Speak American," the chauffeur growled.

  " I can't fix it. Sorry. I tried."

  The chauffeur nodded and went to a door. He opened it a crack and called into the next room. "He said he tried."

  "They all fuggin' say that."

  "He said he was sorry."

  "Tell him not as sorry as he's going to be."

  Wally Boyajian felt his heart jump into his throat. The way the three husky security men were glowering at him, he was sure his failure to debug the hard disk meant his job.

  Silence. The husky men surrounding him looked at Wally Boyajian as if he had made a flatulent noise. Then the chauffeur asked, "What do we do with him?"r />
  The voice from the other room said, "Scroom."

  "Before, he said he wanted to see the cranberry bogs," the chauffeur reported.

  "Give him the fuggin' cook's tour," said the voice from the other room.

  "Actually," Wally said when the chauffeur had closed the door and was walking in his direction, "they can wait. I just need a decent meal and to be taken to my hotel."

  A hand grabbed him by the back of the neck. It was quite a big hand because the fingers and thumb actually met over his Adam's apple, restricting his ability to swallow.

  Surrounded by three big F and L security men, Wally was hustled out the side door to the waiting limousine.

  Again the chauffeur opened it for him. The trunk this time, not the rear door.

  Wally would have protested being stuffed into the car's ample trunk, but the meaty hand kept its inexorable grip on his throat, preventing any outcry louder than a mew.

  When the hand let go, Wally's leather tool case was flung in his face and the trunk lid slammed down on his head.

  He woke up to the sound of traffic and the limo's quietly humming engine. It sounded like a lion purring.

  This, thought Wally Boyajian with the wounded pride of a brand-new senior customer engineer, was not the way to treat an IDC employee.

  He informed the F and L security men of this unimpeachable fact of business life after the limo coasted to a stop and the trunk lid was raised.

  "Look," Wally had said in an agitated voice as he was bodily hauled out of the trunk and stood on his feet, "I happen to be a valued employee with International Data Corporation, and when I inform Mr. Tollini that you-mumph!"

  "Have some cranberries," said the chauffeur, jamming a fistful into Wally Boyajian's open, complaining mouth.

  Wally bit down. The cranberries were as hard as acorns. His teeth released bitter, acidic juices when they crushed the berries. The taste was not sweet. It was not sweet at all, Wally thought dispiritedly as they walked him, helpless and confused, over to the moon-washed expanse of an actual Massachusetts cranberry bog. It looked like a swamp into which a ton of reddish-brown Trix cereal had been dumped.

  None of this, Wally thought, made him think of the holidays at all. In fact, it was inexcusably foreboding.