The Conflict Algorithm, Chapter 6
Leo power-walked out of the Advantech office building and hopped on the train. He wanted to get his box somewhere safe. He regretted telling Sean he was planning on taking a small vacation. What was he afraid of? It’s not like Advantech was going to hire goons to steal it from him. Still, he hadn’t really thought of the implications of the software in the hands of the unscrupulous.
He still hadn’t had coffee. He’d have time to stop by Sara’s coffee shop and maybe talk to her about things. The train was strangely crowded. On the platform, he’d had the weird sensation like he was in a spy movie and someone was shadowing him.
He got off the train on 169th Street and went to the closest fried chicken halal spot. He looked through the murky plexiglas to see if there was anyone behind him. His heart rate was through the roof and his head was hurting.
Satisfied that the coast was clear and aware of his growing paranoia, Leo crept out of the restaurant. He walked down the block to Sara’s coffee shop. She wasn’t there. Oh! He realized, it was after 3, she would be going to pick up Edwin from school.
Leo ended up walking home, his panic and his headache growing with each step. His apartment felt unfriendly and frightening. He did a quick inspection to make sure his desktop was still there, that the bathroom and the closets were empty.
He sat down, unscrewed the 5 hand-grip screws from the back of his box and realized he needed a real screwdriver to pop out the hard drive.
He walked across the room to the closet. In the bottom under a pile of other crap was a canvas bag he kept all his tools in. Was that a person walking past his front window? Heart rate ballooning, Leo scooted silently over to his desktop. He put the screwdriver into the first screw-head. The screwdriver was definitely too big. He pushed hard against the screw and turned it with slow-but-intense pressure.
The phillips head slipped out the groove and stripped the screw a bit. He heard a noise around the side of the house. It could be anything — a cat.
He switched to a different screw. The other 3 came out with no problem. He went back to the stripped one and proceeded to nurse it loose. His head was pounding and his vision was suffering. Almost there. Someone knocked on his door. The hard drive popped out in his hand with a loud clank. Leo cringed.
The person at the side door was banging on it with intent. Leo could use the front door, but he wouldn’t be able to lock it behind him. He stuffed the hard drive in his bag and sprinted for the hallway door that would lead him to the front door. Is it one or two guys? Is it guys? Is it Jehovah’s Witnesses? Am I being crazy?
Leo flew out the front door. He saw a double-parked black Chevy Tahoe in the street. There was a man on his porch in a suit. He said something. Leo ran. He had nowhere to go.
When Leo was a kid living in the commune, his favorite thing to do was running through the woods around the property. He liked to tell himself that his feet know what to do. And amazingly, they did. They could process rocks and branches and holes much better than he could if he was trying to consciously plot each footfall. This is how he had escaped the brothers many times. He would full-out run through the woods and no one could keep up with him.
There is an art to this, like he was discovering about fighting. The feeling of letting go, combined with maximum exertion made him feel more alive than sitting in a cube or meeting room.
There was another reason for his runs through the woods. On a rare trip to the supermarket near Hopewell Junction he had met a little girl.
He was supposed to stay near his mom, but he had wandered down the cereal aisle. He studied the bright packaging and the characters on them. His cereal came in bulk and he felt it was important to study what other people experienced. A freckled red-headed girl walked down the aisle right next to him. She looked like she was the same age as him.
Apparently, she was on a mission. She looked up at the shelf, taller than both of them, where the Captain Crunch boxes sat.
She looked over at him. “Help me.”
Young Leo felt an instant panic. He knew he would be in trouble for being away from his mom and even more in trouble for being seen talking to some girl from the world. He felt a strong urge to help, though, and a nihilism that said he was basically in trouble already so why not?
The girl reached up and lightly grabbed the highest shelf lip she could reach. Leo instinctively cupped his hands and squatted slightly to give her a boost. As she stepped up, the zipper of her jacket scraped painfully across his face, but he didn’t say a word. He stood there stoically, eyes closed, nose smooshed into the floral detergent of her neon pink spandex. No one used scented detergent on the commune.
“Thank you! I’m Jenny!”
“I’m Leo,” he half-whispered.
Jenny raised her hand for a high five. Leo stared at her in confusion. “High five!” she said.
Leo slowly and uncertainly placed his hand on hers. She giggled like he was making a joke. Sure he was out of time, he figured he’d stop while he was ahead. He waved and turned around.
He exited the aisle just as his mom exited the next one with an overloaded cart. “Brother” Michael stood close behind her. Leo couldn’t show his hatred of Brother Michael on his face.
His mom freaked when she saw him. “Leo, come here.” She gasped when she saw the mark on his cheek. “What is this, what happened to you?” She looked around as if to find a culprit who wandered around supermarkets to scratch little boys on the face. “Stay here, right next to me.”
Brother Michael lifted one finger and Leo knew what that meant. Spare the rod and spoil the child. At the end of the day he would get at least one dose of punishment. Everyone was allowed to punish the children, but Brother Michael seemed to enjoy it most. Leo had gone a max of 3 days without getting some form of punishment, usually a three or four finger level from Brother Michael, but sometimes from the Pastor himself, or the Pastor’s son, in his private room.
Still, Leo didn’t feel too bad. He saw Jenny out the corner of his eye, carrying more than she could handle to put it in her mom’s cart. He guessed it was her mom. She saw him looking, dumped the stuff in the cart, stood up on the side of the cart and stuck her tongue out at him. A chuckle popped out of him.
He felt his mom’s attention, felt her follow his gaze to the girl. He desperately hoped she wouldn’t connect the mark on his face to the friendly face of the girl 4 registers down.
By the time they’d loaded up the old community Buick, Jenny had gotten into her mom’s white pickup and driven out the parking lot.
Brother Michael swerved out of the gravel parking lot and over the adult’s shoulders in the backseat, Leo followed Jenny’s pickup ahead of them. He could barely contain the excitement he felt knowing that there was a Jenny in the world and that she potentially lived somewhere in driving distance from him.
He lost sight of the pickup around a bend, and lamented until he saw the pickup stopped. Jenny’s mom was getting back in the drivers’ seat after having opened the driveway gate. His heart leaped in his chest and he forced himself not to turn his head and track the pickup as they drove past. He knew exactly where they were in relation to the commune. It was less than a mile.
The next day, in between the early afternoon service and the night service, the time when all the kids played, Leo did his best to provoke the brothers. They didn’t need much of an excuse to pick on him, but when he did the lewd gesture with his hand and his crotch to Scott, he didn’t expect that level of backlash.
Theo held Leo (unusual) while Scott kicked him in the nuts. Leo puked all over the grass. “Fuck you, he coughed out. He leaned his head forward and whipped it back into Theo’s nose. It crunched like an empanada. He broke free from the brothers and sprinted to the woods. He headed in the direction of Jenny’s house.
There was no way he was going to put Sara or Edwin in danger by heading to the dojo, but he thought of how helpful Chickie’s skillset would be in his predicament. He one hand hopped a fence across the street and plotted a loose course that would buy him some room from the men pursuing him. He knew not to look back.
He trusted his feet, ran through 3 backyards, randomly plotted a course that would maximize the chances he could lose them. He knew if he could get across Jamaica Avenue and across Hillside avenue they’d never find him.
He had made it to Hillside, and decided to take the risk to cross slowly so as to not leave ripples that someone who ran across 4 lanes of busy traffic would create. He saw the Tahoe swerve onto Hillside a block away. He had just made it to the opposite curb when his pursuers ran a light and headed straight for him.
He realized belatedly that they must be tracking him. He needed his phone, but he might still be able to lose them in the Hollis hills where the roads curved and the terrain was steep and there were way more trees.
10 year old Leo reached the road across from Jenny’s gate and heard no sound of the brothers behind him. They’d never been good at stealth anyway, and they typically gave up if they didn’t catch him in under a minute.
He crossed the cracked two-lane and stood outside the gate. He could barely see the house through the trees. He hopped the fence and walked towards the house under the cover of the woods. He was aware he only had a few minutes. He went into stealth mode.
Leo had maybe a 10 second lead that was eroding rapidly. He ran up the hill and into the yards again. There were more options here, he cut across cul-de-sacs that would eat precious time for a driver. He didn’t have a goal in mind, and realized that when he got to the Grand Central Parkway. The roadway was roaring two stories down, and there was a chain link fence separating the raised service-road from the highway. A sheer brick wall led down to the three lanes of racing cars heading East.
Leo glanced back and saw nothing, but knew they’d be on him in a second. If he could get down to the highway, that would buy him at least a few minutes since there was no way to get there in a car. He hopped up on the fence.
The metal ripped at his fingers as he lowered himself down the other side and saw the Tahoe racing down at him. There was no way he could survive the drop if he just let go. He spotted an external pipe bolted to the wall with brackets 20 feet to his right. He got his toes on the thin concrete lip, ass hanging over the highway, and shimmied over as the two men hopped out of the car.
They had completely blocked the service road with the Tahoe. Leo thought how bold that was that they wouldn’t even care about driving like maniacs. As he speed-shimmied, he got a good look at the well-built, suited men running toward him. They looked like secret service guys, though obviously, they weren’t. Goons for hire?
He crouched and grabbed a hold of the pipe. It was awkward and precarious. He forced himself to breathe, just trust his body. His backpack felt like it wanted to yank him to his death, or at this height, just really bad injury.
“Stop!” one of the men yelled.
Leo kept going. It was slow, but he was pretty sure they weren’t going to shoot him or follow him on this suicidal climb. His fingers ached and his leg spasmed, but he made it about a basketball hoop height to the bottom before he let go and dropped.
The small cobblestone shoulder was peppered with broken glass and his palms came up bloody. He ran down toward the underpass and yanked out his phone. The only person he could think of calling was Sara.
It rang and rang. He looked up at the men, who stood high above him, talking on their own phones.
“Hello?” it was Sara.
“Sara, oh my god, this is crazy, but I’m in serious trouble.” He was yelling over the noise of the cars zooming by.
“Leo? Hold on one second.”
Leo waited. He kept his eyes on the men up on the service road. They disappeared from sight.
Sara came back, talking softly, “I’m sorry, this really isn’t a good time. You got beat up again?”
“No, some men are coming after me, I’m going to have to get rid of this phone. They know where I live. They want the program I wrote.”
“The program? What?”
“Is it okay if I go by the dojo?”
“What, no! It’s really not a good time.” There was the sound of a little scuffle, “Edwin, you have to leave. Chickie, no!”
“I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’m going to Chickie’s.”
“No, Leo, some shit is going down with my baby daddy. I don’t want you here!”
“I have nowhere else to go!” Leo choked on a sob. He felt the minutes flying by and his only chance of getting away evaporating. “I’ll be there in about a half hour.”
He heard her yell no as he hung up and smashed the phone on the cobblestones. He did a stomp dance on the phone, picked it up and threw it down again for good measure. Then he spotted a drainage grate on the edge of the road. He walked over to it and dropped his phone in. There was no sound.
