Crucible of Fear Read online

  “Still with me? Cross dissolve to the parents sitting comfortably downstairs at the dining room table, a live feed from the Teddy Cams displayed on their smart TV and on their phone app. But they’re doing something a bit strange in this day and age. They’re writing a letter. A handwritten letter with actual paper and ink. A Dear Baby letter.

  “The scene dissolves to a laughing toddler running through the morning sun, then a young boy dressed in his baseball uniform, the winning trophy held high overhead as his parents congratulate him with hugs and teary kisses. The scene changes again. It’s nighttime and the parents are sitting at that very same table with a young man in a cap and gown. He looks up from the letter his parents wrote all those years ago and smiles. An overlay appears that reads: Dear Baby. Products, for life.”

  Applause broke out and Dante let it wash over him. All these years later, he was still very proud of the campaign that had made his career. The applause waned and he spoke again.

  “So where were the sharks in that scenario? There were no sharks. The parents made sure there were none. But the takeaway is the same. The sharks are implied to exist outside the protective bubble and the lifeline was the entire Dear Baby product line. So here at Ellis media, we don’t sell fear. You can’t sell something that already exists at the very core of the human psyche. We identify the fear, but sell the lifeline.

  “So, what about fear in our own lives? Well, allow me to leave you with this. It has served me well, and hopefully it’ll serve you as well when you’re afraid of taking that irreversible leap.”

  Dante cleared his throat before he spoke again. “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ghosts

  Dante punched his code into the keypad next to his office door and the lock opened. He twisted the knob and pushed inside, feeling a little smugger than he cared to admit.

  He stopped short, his grin fading.

  “Nice speech,” said a slender man standing in the middle of his office.

  Colin Murray was still as tall Dante remembered, but he was even thinner now, almost skeletal. He grinned and blinked, causing his whole face to twitch as if the simple act caused him pain. Since Dante had known him, he’d had that facial tic and it had earned Colin the most obvious nickname when they were kids: Twitch.

  Dante extended his hand and they shook. Colin’s grip was firm, but when Dante pulled him into a half embrace and patted his back, he could feel his sharp shoulder blade through the thin fabric of his suit.

  Dante motioned for him to sit on the couch. Colin sat as far as he could at one end, eyes on the floor, barely making a dent in the cushion. He pushed a lock of pale blond hair away from his forehead as Dante joined him, the couch leather creaking as he sat. The silence stretched as neither man spoke.

  “Well, it’s good to see you, Colin. How long has it been? Three, four years?”

  “Five,” Colin said with a full-face blink. He turned and looked at Dante, eyes flicking upward. “Still got it I see.”

  Dante touched the scar at his hairline. “It helps me remember how hard things can get.”

  Colin’s face tightened and he looked away. “I don’t have any problems remembering how hard it can get.”

  “What can I do for you, Colin?” Dante said, an edge creeping into his voice.

  Colin shook his head and smiled. “Ah, shit, Dante, I’m sorry. I thought about what I was going to say for a long time, but I’m blowing it, aren’t I?” The thin man stood and trudged over to the corner where the floor to ceiling glass met. “Fuck,” he said under his breath, gazing out over the city below, muscles bunching in his jaw. He turned, eyes bright. “How’s Abigail?”

  “Smart and kind, like her mother,” Dante said. “Impatient, like me.”

  Colin shook his head and looked back down at the city. “Things didn’t go exactly how we planned, did they?”

  Dante sighed, got to his feet and stood next to Colin. “What happened to you?”

  “Just couldn’t get past it. Not like you anyway.” Colin turned and gazed at Dante. His eyes haunted. “After what happened, you know. At the Place,” he swallowed, motioning to Dante’s head.

  The Place was an old pumping station where they’d hung out during the summer as kids. It was much cooler out of the sun inside its cinderblock walls among the rusty, dripping pipes. Until that day when both their lives had changed there.

  Colin’s face brightened. “Hey, remember when we borrowed your dad’s car and T-boned that VW Bug?”

  Dante smiled at the memory. “I didn’t even know he was capable of that much passion. ‘That Porsche’s a classic! Now the bonnet’s all fucked up!’” Dante shook his head. “The bonnet. I tried to tell him that German cars don’t have bonnets, but he insisted.” Dante checked his watch. “Listen Colin, I’m swamped. I want to catch up, but can we get together some other time?”

  “This’ll be quick. I came with an offer. You deal with raw, uncompressed 24 K video streams, right?”

  Dante was taken aback by this sudden left turn into shop talk. “Uh, no. Nobody does. 24 K TV’s are barely on the horizon. I want to get ahead of the curve, sure, but it’s just too much data to deal with.”

  “Right,” Colin said. “I’m still at Kellerman Digital, of course, and I head up some of their big data compression projects. We’re looking into video streams too, on the fly compression and decompression but at data rates unheard of. We use machine learning software and it’s getting faster all the time. Video is much easier as the software can make educated predictions of the final image. It’s not perfect but to the human eye it won’t look any different.”

  “Sounds intriguing,” Dante said, a little disappointed. All these years without a word, then he suddenly shows up and it’s all business. “Your timing is perfect actually. The boy genius we contracted a while ago to do exactly that turned out to be a bust.”

  “Huh,” Colin said as he took out his phone, finger hovering over the screen. “Can I send you the deck? It has all the info.”

  Dante nodded but Colin just stood there, a muscle twitching at the corner of one eye.

  “Go ahead,” Dante said. “It’s okay.”

  Colin’s finger flicked across the screen. “You got it. Take a look and if you’re interested, let me know.” The thin man hurried over and pushed against the door, causing it to rattle.

  “There’s a knob,” Dante said.

  Colin glanced over his bony shoulder, face scrunching up with a nervous grin. “Oh yeah, I forgot.” He turned the knob and slipped out.

  Dante stared at the open doorway for a moment before he walked over and pulled the door shut again. A spiky slew of emotion swelled inside his chest, things he hadn’t felt in a long time. Guilt crossed with a sense of responsibility? Not exactly. More like a debt unpaid.

  One he could never repay.

  I don’t really owe Colin though, do I? He made a choice that day at The Place. I’ve learned to live with my own wounds, Dante thought as he touched the scar at his hairline. He sighed. Colin was just another one of those fractured, personal complications that he seemed to accumulate as he grew older, dropped in a box and filed on a shelf for another time. Sometimes forever.

  Until today.

  After sitting at his workstation, Dante wiggled the mouse to wake it up, then typed in his passcode. Scanning through his emails, he found the deck Colin had just sent him and opened the attached file. All the screens flashed and went dark. He reached out and moved the mouse again. An image appeared of a widescreen television with the caption: Machine learning aided compression for Large Data Sets.

  Dante sat a moment, brows knitted before he hit ESC on the keyboard, causing the image to vanish.

  CHAPTER 7

  Westfall

  A chime rang out and Dante glanced at the notice that popped up on the monitor. Half an hour until his meeting with Hinds & Younger.

  Naomi was right. He had to nail this one.

&nb
sp; Dante slipped a hand into his pocket. Shit, must have left my phone in the car again.

  Dante rode the elevator down to the parking garage and pushed open the double doors. The August heat had picked up and he tugged at his collar. Stark morning light shone through the barred windows that ran along the top edge of a concrete wall to his right. He hurried past the cars parked below to his assigned space.

  “Fuck!” Dante said, swatting at a large dragonfly that zoomed past his face. Its green body glittered as it swooped up and landed on a bundle of pipes. The orange wings flitted twice as it rested.

  Michelle loved dragonflies, Dante thought. Don’t think she’d like this one.

  Suppressing a shudder, he jogged over to the Mako and reached inside as the door eased open, retrieving his phone. He stood back as the door eased shut again. Someone was standing near the front of his car, silhouetted against the light.

  “Mr. Ellis.”

  It was Skylar Westfall. His boyish face was pinched with worry under meticulously parted hair. He wore flip flops, cargo shorts and a t-shirt with a cartoon image of a dog sitting in a burning kitchen saying: This is fine.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Dante said. “If you have anything more to say, talk to my lawyer.”

  “Wait, just hear me out.”

  “You screwed me, Skylar. I invested in your company for exclusive access to Cruncher then you go and upload it for free?” Dante turned to go. “We’re done.”

  “Mr. Ellis,” Skylar called after him. “Dante,” he said louder, holding up a sliver square about the size and thickness of a dime.

  Dante stopped and glanced over his shoulder.

  “This is better,” Skylar said, high voice dropping to a conspiratorial croak. “It’s called Bothrops Asper. Blows Cruncher out of the water. Install it and you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Bothrops what? Jesus, Skylar.” He shook his head and continued walking. “What the hell happened to you?” Dante noted that it was the second time he’d said that today.

  Skylar followed close behind. “I’m trying to help you. Please, you need to take this.”

  “Listen, it’s business, not personal,” Dante said over his shoulder, voice echoing off the concrete. He stopped in front of the glass doors leading to the elevators.

  Skylar stood behind him, reflected in the glass. His small hand was outstretched, the tiny silver square gleaming in his palm. He looked every inch of his five and half feet. Childlike. There was something about his eyes though. They were hard, like the eyes of a much older person who’d been changed by what they’d seen.

  Dante sighed. “Give it here,” he said, holding his hand out.

  Skylar put the tiny chip in his palm. “Plug this into any USB on your network and it’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Now get out of here,” Dante said, “you’re trespassing.”

  Sweat trickled down his back as he walked inside the air-conditioned lobby and stabbed the up arrow. A chime rang out and Dante stepped into the elevator.

  As the elevator hummed upward, he held the USB chip up to the light between a thumb and forefinger as if he could tell what was stored there. The elevator chimed and he stepped out, flicking the tiny chip into a trash can as he strode back to his office.

  CHAPTER 8

  Security

  Dante dropped into his office chair and checked his watch. Ten minutes until the meeting. He lifted the office phone and punched in a number.

  “Security, Officer Boyd speaking,” replied a bored voice.

  “My name is Dante Ellis and I was just in the parking structure downstairs. One of my ex-contractors was just down there but his security should’ve been revoked a long time ago.”

  “What was the name?”

  “Skylar Westfall,” Dante said.

  A moment went by. The faint clack of a keyboard could be heard. “Yeah, revoked on March 7th, no further entry detected. You said he was in the parking structure?”

  “Yeah. Which is strange because he’s never parked here.”

  “Huh. That is strange.”

  The silence grew and Dante cleared his throat.

  “Was there anything else, uh, sir?” Boyd said.

  “Yes. Check the video feeds from ten minutes ago. Maybe you can see how he got in.”

  Boyd sighed and typed some more. It sounded like a baby elephant pounding on the keys.

  “Take your time, Officer Boyd,” Dante said.

  The typing stopped and the silence stretched before Boyd spoke again. “That’s weird.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I see you. Blue shirt, white collar?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  Boyd chuckled. “That big bug scared you.”

  “More like a pterodactyl,” Dante said defensively.

  “Oh, shit, you got a Mako? That thing must move.”

  “Focus, Boyd.”

  “Sorry. So, yeah, I see you. Looks like you’re talking to somebody.”

  “Any audio?”

  “No. Privacy reasons.”

  “You see Westfall?”

  “Who? Oh, the other guy. Nope, just you.”

  “What? How can that be?”

  “Dunno,” Boyd said. “You walk over to your car, looks like you’re talking to somebody, you walk back to the lobby doors, you stand there, holding your hand out, then you go back inside. All by yourself.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dante said. “You don’t see anyone else at all?”

  “You sure this guy was down there?”

  Dante sat for a moment, staring at the desktop. “Can you send me a copy of that video? From all the cameras you have down there?”

  “Yeah, you swatting at that bug was funny as shit.”

  “No, not that. I want to have a look for myself.”

  “I’ll have to ask my supervisor, but he already left for the day. I can ask him tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Do it. And get an exterminator down there before that pterodactyl takes somebody’s head off.”

  “I’ll let facilities know.” The phone went dead.

  Dante leaned back and gazed up at the ceiling. Skylar Westfall was not in the video. What the hell?

  His phone chimed. Five minutes.

  Dante went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, going over the pitch in his head. Toweling off, he grinned at his reflection with a confidence he didn’t quite feel.

  CHAPTER 9

  Fishbowl

  Naomi had set the meeting up in their largest conference room, the fishbowl. It was situated at the southwest corner so clients could see the busy studio floor through the glass panels and the valley outside the floor to ceiling windows. A large oak table dominated the center with high backed leather chairs.

  A highlight reel from Ellis Media’s most successful campaigns played out on a drop-down screen from the ceiling. Dante watched Raj Vikal of Hinds & Younger Foods across the table out of the corner of his eye. Megan Zhou sat next to the older man, fingers clutching her phone. She shot Dante a quick glance, biting at her lip. He winked at her then glanced back at Vikal. The old man’s lips twitched as images from the Dear Baby campaign played across the screen. Dante saw his in. He pressed a button on the table and the screen went dark.

  “I could quote ROI numbers, click throughs, percentages watched of all our ad campaigns. We have all that data available and it speaks for itself. But I think the most important thing to point out is the core of what makes our approach successful. Emotion. We feel that’s the most important part of any campaign,” Dante said.

  Vikal’s lips tightened before he spoke. “My grandson was two weeks old when I first saw one of your commercials. It had a great effect on me, even though it was a manipulation.”

  Dante opened his mouth to speak but Vikal held up a hand.

  “I mean that as a compliment.” He dropped his hand then turned to Megan. “They have our updated l
ogo, specs on the new product lines?”

  Megan nodded. “They’ve already begun ideation on a few pitches, right Dante?”

  “That’s right.”

  Megan’s phone erupted with a blast of screeching guitar riffs and she silenced it as Vikal glared at her. “Sorry,” she said, eyes wide.

  The older man’s phone rang as well and he pulled out the device, silenced it, then dropped it on the table with a clatter. “I apologize. My people know better than to interrupt while I’m in a meeting.”

  “Not a problem. I can send over what we’ve come up with so far…” Dante’s voice trailed off.

  Something was happening out on the studio floor.

  People were clustered together in tight groups, hunched over their phones while others sat in their cubicles, faces slack. Some leered, lopsided grins on their faces. An intern ran past the conference room to the restrooms in the lobby, hands clamped over her mouth. Then, as if on cue, everyone on the studio floor turned to peer through the transparent walls of the fishbowl.

  They were staring at Dante.

  He rose slowly to his feet, a knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

  “Oh my god,” Megan said, eyes locked on the phone clutched in her hand.

  Vikal snatched it from her and glared down at the screen. Dante could see the flicker of video reflected in his eyes, something that made the man’s dark complexion go pale. He pushed the phone back at Megan and turned away.

  Naomi rushed in, the door ringing as it struck the floor stopper. She hurried over and spoke in hushed tones into Dante’s ear. “They sent it to all our clients.”

  “Sent what?” Dante said, gazing around.

  A few people had returned to their workstations but most still stood in shock, staring, or looking away as Dante’s eyes scanned over them. He turned his attention back to the conference room. Vikal glowered at him. Megan bit her lip, refusing to meet his gaze.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Dante asked, voice strained.