“More dirty pictures? No thanks. I think I’ll pass.”
Dickinson held out his iPhone, and for a second Jonathon didn’t register what was going on in the miniature video, all groans and pink flesh. But then he did, and saw a familiar dark brown ponytail bobbing up and down, a woman turning so her face was clearly visible to the camera. He snatched the phone away from Dickinson and threw it against the wall, shattering the plastic case. “You sick fuck. Where the hell did you get that crap?” He grabbed the man’s collar and slammed him against the wall. “Tell me.”
Dickinson cowered away. “Hurt me and that video will be all over the Internet, I promise you.”
Jonathon took a deep breath, trying to calm himself, knowing how easy it would be for the creep to carry out that threat. He let go and took a step back, emboldening Dickinson to stand a little straighter, puffing his chest out, straightening his jacket. A sneer returned to his face.
“How old is Julie now? Nineteen? Your little sister sure is pretty, isn’t she?”
“How much do you want?”
“Did you recognize the guy she was, er, well, sucking off? Not the others waiting around for their turn but the one in the hot seat, as they say. I think he’s a friend of your dad’s, a certain senator from the great state of—well, whatever. Julie with all her daddy issues liked him just fine, and the senator arranged that little powwow. Eye opening for her, I’m told, but she liked it.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Jonathon kept his voice level but his pulse was racing and rage pounded in his head. “Name your price. I heard you were hurting for money these days, dickhead, but I didn’t think you’d stoop to blackmail.”
“All a means to an end, buddy. And it isn’t money we want. Not yet anyway.”
“We? So I have you and whoever to thank for the emails I’ve been getting?”
“Just warming you up.”
“Get on with it then. I’ll give you the cash right now. How much do you want to make that tape of Julie disappear?”
“I said we don’t want money from you.”
Jonathon waited, his fingers itching to get around dickhead’s scrawny little neck. But he knew that wouldn’t help his sister.
“We want Altman’s program,” Dickinson finally said, “the one she’s working on for Lincoln. You know, the anti-piracy thing. And so we’re asking the best programmer we know—you—to steal it.”
“Asking.”
“Okay, more than asking. You figure out how to get that program and deliver it to us, and you don’t have to worry about your sister’s extracurricular activities making it onto TMZ. And don’t worry, it was just once. So far,” he added.
The phone, screen cracked and disgusting image frozen thereon, lay a few feet away, and purely for cathartic release, since he couldn’t figure out what the hell else to do, Jonathon stomped on it a few times, then ground it into the hardwood floor with the sole of his heavy leather boot.
“Don’t insult me, Crestwell. I obviously have backup for the video. It’s on a cloud that you’re never getting into unless I say so.”
“Julie’s just a kid,” he said between clenched teeth. A confused kid who had taken their mother’s death and their father’s relentless ambition hard. She had turned to drugs and eating disorders, both of which Jonathon thought she had beaten through therapy. Now he realized this video meant she must be experimenting with something else to feel loved, at least once. And dickhead and his friends had recorded it, had it primed and ready to be launched into cyberspace, never to be reeled back.
If Dickinson followed through with his threat, who knew what Julie’s reaction to the messy scandal would be, especially in view of their father’s predictable rage when he found out. “You set her up, I’m assuming?”
“Well, we couldn’t exactly incentivize you with money, could we?”
Dickinson looked pointedly around at Jonathon’s control room, the expensive computer equipment totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. And this retreat in the woods of upstate New York was just one of Jonathon’s houses. He was pretty good at keeping a low profile these days, but Rudy was no slouch at ferreting out information, as he’d just proven. He probably knew Jonathon’s net worth better than he did. Or at least everything outside of the Swiss bank accounts. Sometimes, Jonathon fantasized that he’d just disappear into the Swiss Alps and leave this fucked up society, and people like Rudy Dickinson, and his father, far behind.
But he could never leave Julie.