Public Secrets (Artificial Intelligence Book 1) (9 page)

The first thing Chad did when he went downstairs was to let the housekeeper know a guest would be arriving. She suggested he could use the library.

Upon checking out the lovely room, which had every electrical device imaginable, he hurried upstairs, quietly entered Carla’s room and, without waking her, carried her PC downstairs.

Sure enough, one of the myriad chargers worked once plugged into the proper power converter. Having solved Carla’s problem, he headed off to the kitchen to solve a problem of his own. He was always hungry.

The cook greeted him and insisted he sit and wait for a “proper breakfast”.

The moment he tasted the first bite of the omelet, he groaned. Never had he tasted anything half so good. His thoughts turned to Carla, certain she would love this as well. He considered waking her but decided against it. She didn’t appear to have gotten any sleep at all last night.

An angry female voice yelled from somewhere in the house. “Get away from that!”

Carla... A reporter must have snuck in wanting an interview. He hurried from the kitchen, planning to throw the bastard out. Damn it! He needed more time before their cruel games began.

As he burst into the library, he was almost relieved to discover Luke Gallagher holding both hands up in surrender.

Anna, the housekeeper, had followed him into the room. “I’m sorry, sir. He said he was Luke Gallagher, so I put the gentleman in the library. Shall I call security?”

“No, Anna. It’s all right. He’s the right guy.” Chad glanced at Luke. “Sorry, I hadn’t expected you so soon.”

Luke dropped his hands. “My hotel is only a few blocks down the road.”

Chad turned his attention to Carla, who stood in the corner of the room, hugging her PC.

“Carla, this is Luke Gallagher. He’s with the FBI. You don’t have to be afraid of him.”

“He was reading my laptop.” Fear and tension radiated from her body.

“Interesting reading, too,” Luke replied, not looking the least bit apologetic for his invasion of her privacy. “I’ll have to ask my colleagues in the States to look him up.”

She shivered as if cold. “He’s not in the States. He’s here.”

Luke tilted his head in interest. “You’ve seen him?”

“No. But he’s talked to people I know. He’s looking for me.”

“Is that why you’ve been hiding this last week?” he asked, his voice gentler now.

“I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t been hiding. I only found out he was looking for me last night.”

“Well, he’s not alone. We’ve been looking for you too. Didn’t Chad tell you?”

Chad wasn’t sure which of them was more surprised by the question, but he was the first to recover. “This isn’t Carla Simon. Her name is Carla Carrington. She’s a computer science student at Columbia.”

Luke’s eyebrows rose in challenge as he focused on Carla.

Carla, still hugging her laptop, moved a little closer to Chad. “Chad, I
am
Carla Simon. It’s a long story how I came to be Carla Carrington. I’ll explain later.”

Had she declared herself the Anti-Christ, Chad couldn’t have felt more repulsed and betrayed. “You? It’s not possible.” He turned to Luke. “You said she was dead!”

“A case of mistaken identity,” he explained to Chad, then turned to Carla. “The woman who stole your wallet paid for it with her life. She was run off a mountain road.”

***

Carla felt her knees about to buckle, but before she fell, Chad gripped her arms. But instead of the embrace she expected, he was shaking her in fury. “It was you? You made me think you were an innocent college girl, all the while getting more information for your damnable book. You bitch! You lying, whoring bitch!”

“That’s enough!” Luke ordered, pulling Chad away from her. “Back off and calm down!”

The rage in Chad’s face was frightening, but he backed off and vented his anger on the library wall instead.

***

Luke studied the woman. She did look more like a terrified co-ed than a middle-aged novelist. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?” he asked as he led her to a chair.

“I’m fine, but I don’t understand. Why is he so angry?”

“When we thought you were dead, I obtained a copy of the latest novel you were writing. I let him read it.”

Now Carla was even more confused. “Why?”

“To watch his expression, so I could determine if he already knew its content.” Luke could tell she still didn’t understand, so he tried again. “Your current novel made Chad Tyler our number one suspect for your murder.”

Carla shook her head. “Chad wouldn’t kill anybody. He’s incredibly kind and gentle. The man who wants me dead is Gary Eder.”

Luke didn’t think Chad had been very kind or gentle a minute ago. “A man can be driven to do desperate things when you’re destroying his life.”

“Destroying...” Finally, she seemed to understand. “You think my novel is about Chad Tyler.”

Luke stared at her in surprise. “Yes,” he finally replied.

“But it’s not. Jeremiah Taylor is a character I created. It’s not Chad Tyler.”

Chad turned around and approached her. “Is that how you live with yourself? You say it’s fiction because you’ve put an extra letter in a person’s name? Is that how you excuse the lives you destroy with your malicious words?”

“It wasn’t you. It was someone named Jeremiah,” she insisted, tears swelling in her eyes.

“I’m Jeremiah! Chad Jeremiah Tyler. All you did was add a goddamn A to my last name.”

“But the story, it’s not about you.”

“It is about me, but worse, it’s about my family—my sister, and my mother. Damn you! Damn you to hell! Do you have any idea what this story will do to them? My sister has tried to end her life three times because she cannot get past the shame of that rape. What chance do I have of keeping her from killing herself once you publish her story for all to see?”

Carla dropped the laptop onto the couch and ran to Chad, wrapping her arms around him. “I won’t publish it. I swear. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know.”

He pushed her away in disgust. “How can you lie with such an angel’s face? I don’t know how you got your information, but you obviously did extensive research. And you can’t do research without knowing the topic.”

“I don’t!” she screamed in frustration. She turned to Luke. “You said you searched my house. Did you find any information on this or any of my other books?”

“No,” Luke admitted.

She turned back to Chad. “It’s because there isn’t any. I just write what comes into my head. I used to think it was my imagination. No one was more surprised than me when my story about the religious sect turned out to be about the Temple and the events true.”

Chad raised his hand as if to slap her, but turned away and walked to the corner. “Stop lying! If you’re going to make a living from destroying people’s lives, then, at least, have the decency to own up to what you’re doing.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I am owning up. I am now convinced these characters are not from my imagination. They are real people with real lives. My editor kept telling me the lawsuits were just part of the business, something all novelists must endure. I let him convince me. But I knew. In my heart, I knew that my stories were real. And he knew as well. In our last meeting, he yelled at me for not changing the names...”

He remained untouched by her words, staring into the corner, his stance rigid with fury.

“Don’t you remember that I told you I hated my job and I wasn’t going to do it anymore? You thought I was talking about computer programming, but I was talking about writing. Now that I’ve accepted these are real people, I can’t continue. I won’t do it. I’ll destroy your story. Nor will I ever write again.”

Luke thought her dramatic plea intriguing. She would have been more persuasive, however, if her claim weren’t so absurd. “I’m curious, Ms. Simon. How do you actually get these real stories if not by research? Do you hold a séance?”

***

Carla didn’t miss the mocking disbelief in the FBI agent’s voice. “You want to know?” she asked, seething in rage. “Then let me show you.” She grabbed the laptop off the couch and sat down at the desk. After booting it up and logging in, she went into the character directory. “First I choose a main character from one of the characterizations I’ve created over the last twenty years. This one looks promising: Luke Gallagher.” She hit enter. “Now for a heroine: Julie Ogden.” Again she hit the key.

“That’s enough!” Luke snapped, slamming the lid of the computer down. “I don’t know how you—”

“No, you wanted to see how I write, so I’m going to show you. Carla pushed the screen back up. “Now we need secondary characters...” She randomly selected names from both the men and women lists, not even paying attention to the selection. “Finally, I’ll bring up a blank page and begin my story.”

***

Luke watched her fingers fly across the keyboard. On the screen, the story of his life began to unfold, starting in his senior year of college. He read the details of how he’d met and fallen in love with a junior named Julie Ogden. Carla’s description of his feelings the first time he’d seen her enter English lit was more precise than his own memories. She portrayed their breakup six months later with frightening exactness, except there were details about Julie he had never known. Reasons for her anger and unjust accusations. Re-living his responses to her questions, now knowing what she knew, he understood why she had called him a liar and struck him across the face. God, had he really been that stupid back then?

Then the story split: her in New York City and him in California. Both were successful in work but complete failures in love. No one was ever quite right. He watched the power struggle in his office from the perspective of a reader, and suddenly actions that had seemed incomprehensible now made sense. All these years he had thought George Scott was his friend when in fact the bastard had been playing him and Tom off against each other.

“Chad, come look at this,” Luke whispered, not wanting to disturb Carla’s flow but wanting a witness to the story unfolding before him.

With reluctance, Chad stood behind Luke and read over his shoulder. Carla described the scene between Chad and Luke in his room exactly as it had happened, except in her version, Davis was listening at the adjoining door between their rooms.

She followed Luke as he interviewed people at the bank, the jewelry store, the gas station and finally at River Rats. When Luke left River Rats, the action remained at the site and a new character entered. He was only referred to as “the man”, but Carla whispered his name as he forced the lock and entered the room.

“It’s Eder.”

He obtained Luke’s room number from the hotel desk and waited for Luke to go out. When Luke drove to the mansion, so did Eder. He stopped and watched in a red car half a block up the hill.

Luke moved away from the screen and looked out the window. A red car was parked halfway up the road with a single occupant sitting inside. “This is fucking weird,” he murmured.

“This is a fucking mind game.” Chad glared at Carla. “And I’m not buying it for a second. You and Davis are working this together, aren’t you? That’s how you got the information. That’s how you came to be seated next to me on the plane.”

Carla turned off the computer and closed it up. “I swear I didn’t know it was you.”

Luke turned around in a flash. “But you were working with Davis?”

“No, of course not.”

“But you just said you were,” Luke countered, swinging her chair around to face him. He leaned in, his hands resting on the arms of the chair. “Is that who’s in the car outside?”

“No. It’s Eder.” She sighed in frustration. “You have to believe me. You saw me write your story. How could I have done that? Where would I have gotten those details? I’d never met you until a half hour ago.”

“Impressive research, I’ll grant you that.”

Suddenly Chad threw a lamp across the room, smashing it directly in front of her, sending shards of porcelain upon their legs. “You lying, manipulative bitch!” Chad screamed. “You think with a flash of a tit and leg you can get whatever you want?”

Luke was confused by Chad’s outburst until he noticed that her robe had loosened and the view was rather alluring. His eyes had been locked on her face, looking hard for a sign of deception, so he had failed to notice her state of dress. “That’s enough, Mr. Tyler,” he warned as he brushed the legs of his pants free of the embedded shards of porcelain. “You need to step out of the room.”

“The hell I will. If I step out of here, she’ll have you eating out of her fucking little hands in no time at all. You’re ready to jump her bones now.”

Luke walked towards the pacing quarterback, hoping he wasn’t going to have to cuff the man because he was quite certain such an effort would not be easy. “I’m trying to cut you some slack here. I realize that you’re very emotional right now. And your anger is perfectly reasonable. However, I need to ask Ms. Simon some questions, and your current state of mind is impeding my investigation. So I’m asking you, once again, to step outside.” Luke held the door open.