Goliath Read online

  “Brilliant,” Henry said as he rose from his chair. “Congratulations,” he said, shaking Greg’s hand.

  As Henry walked down the hall toward his own office, he thought about how well Greg could read people. He was sure he would learn a lot by just knowing him.

  *** Chapter 8 ***

  “Hurry up Dad,” David yelled a few days later as he stood waiting for Henry at the front door. “Coach doesn’t tolerate anyone being late and I’m already running laps after practice as it is.”

  “Coming,” Henry said as he grabbed his keys from the bowl on the table near the front door.

  David threw his soccer bag in the back seat and Henry was just about to back out of the driveway when he saw Alan’s car pull in behind him. He jumped out of the car and waved for Alan to pull his car up beside his.

  “Hi Alan,” Henry said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to drive David to his soccer practice and we’re already late.”

  “Mind if I tag along?” Alan asked as he got out of his car.

  “Hop in,” Henry said, and Alan crawled into the back seat pushing David’s soccer bag to the side.

  “You’re looking much better,” Henry said.

  Alan certainly did. Gone were the gold chains and other bling from the pimp getup he was wearing the last time they had seen him. He was talking at a normal pace and volume and not displaying any of the hyper-activity they’d seen before.

  “Yeah, they released me from the hospital yesterday, although they don’t want me to go back to work until next week. They also want me to start on a regular exercise program. I just met with a personal trainer before coming out to see you.” Henry had noticed the track suit that Alan was wearing.

  “Hey David,” Alan said, reaching forward from the back seat and putting his hand on David’s shoulder. “How are things going with you?”

  “OK,” was all that David said. Henry could tell that David was still uneasy around his uncle. He bolted from the car almost before it had come to a stop when they got to the soccer field. Henry and Alan got out of the car and decided to stay a bit to watch the practice.

  “What’s up with him?” Alan asked.

  Henry hesitated before answering. “He was a little freaked out by your behaviour last week. I think he’s a little afraid of you. He’s also worried that he’s going to end up like you, because we all tell him he looks and acts like you when you were his age. Give him some time. He’ll come around.”

  Alan apologized again. It seemed that’s all he’d been doing lately.

  “I see you found your car,” Henry said. “Where was it?”

  “I’d left it at the place where I got the limousine, although I don’t remember taking it there. When I checked my voice-mail, there were about twenty voice-mail messages including three from the limousine company asking me to come pick up my car or they were going to have it towed. There were also a bunch of voice-mails from people I don’t even know.”

  Henry and Alan continued to talk. They hadn’t realized how long they had been talking until they saw the soccer players starting to gather up their gear as the practice was now over. They walked over towards David. “Ready to go David?”

  “Sorry Dad, but I still have to run some laps,” David replied as he shot a glance towards his coach.

  “Mind if I run with you?” Alan asked. “I’m supposed to start getting some regular exercise.”

  David shot his dad a nervous look. “It’ll be OK David,” Henry said, “as long as it’s OK with your coach.”

  “No problem,” said the coach.

  David and Alan started jogging around the track that circled the soccer pitch, although Henry noted that they seemed to be going much slower than normal. There were a couple of other players who were also running laps, but they were running at a much faster pace so they could get them over with as soon as possible.

  As Henry and the coach watched them, the coach came over to talk to Henry. “I didn’t really want to have to discipline him,” said the coach. “Hell, he won the game for us” he continued, referring to the last game where David had abandoned his normal right-defense position and scored the winning goal. “But I’ve got to be consistent with everyone on the team. If I let any of them think they can abandon the game plan whenever they feel like it, I’ll lose control of the team.”

  “I understand,” Henry said. “And I think he does too.”

  “I probably should have made some changes to our strategy at half-time. I think a few of the players realized we needed to make a change before I did.” The coach paused as he watched David continue around the track. “That’s a hell of a kid you got there,” he said as he smiled and put his hand on Henry’s shoulder. He picked up a large bag of soccer balls, threw them over his shoulder and carried them to his van.

  Henry watched David and Alan continue their laps around the track. He wasn’t sure how many laps David was supposed to run as part of his discipline, but he was sure they were doing more than necessary. The other kids had completed their laps and headed off quite a while ago. But Henry was pleased to see his son and brother continue to talk to each other. He didn’t want that relationship to fall apart.

  He watched as they changed from a jog to a sprint from the far side of the track as they raced the last half-lap. They were running neck and neck, although Henry was pretty sure that David was holding back. Sure enough, David kicked it into another gear with about 50 metres to go and left Alan in his dust. When Alan finally reached the finish line gasping for breath, he saw David waiting there for him. David gave his uncle a high-five and they walked off the track together towards Henry.

  “I hope you didn’t kill him,” Henry said as they approached.

  “He did OK for an old guy,” David said, smirking.

  As they drove back to the house, Henry looked at his brother in the rear view mirror. It was good to see him healthy and happy again, albeit tired. When they got back to the house, Alan only stayed for a few minutes. He wanted to pop in to let everyone know he was out of the hospital and OK. He thanked them all for being there when he needed them, and apologized yet again.

  Henry stopped by David’s room later that night just before he went to bed. “I was glad to see you talking with Uncle Alan today when you were running laps. You were out there a long time. What were you talking about?”

  “A bunch of stuff,” David said. “He told me about his bipolar condition and the medications he has to take. He told me about his work and some other stuff he’s doing. He said he might need my help with some stuff and asked if he could work out with me sometime.”

  “It sounds like you’re not afraid of him anymore. I’m glad.”

  “He’s still a little weird,” David said, “but most old people are.”

  “I’ll try not to take that personally,” Henry said as he closed the door. “Goodnight.”

  *** Chapter 9 ***

  The computer screen flashed briefly as the laptop was turned on. “Please enter your password:” displayed on the screen and Alan entered the cryptic 24-character password. The usual series of messages displayed.

  “Negotiating protocol….”

  “Securing communications channel…”

  Finally, Alan saw the greeting he was waiting for.

  “Welcome, Goliath”

  “Retrieve instructions,” he typed at the simple “>” prompt.

  “No new instructions,” the computer displayed after a few seconds. Alan was pleased to see that he hadn’t missed anything over the last several days while he was out of commission. He hadn’t told Edward Bronson about his bipolar condition and wondered if he suspected anything. Alan knew he had been careless about not keeping up with his medications and he promised himself he wouldn’t let it happen again. Their work was too important to let one person mess things up.

  Alan remembered the first time he had met Edward Bronson, almost two years ago. Alan had stayed late at the menswear store to measure Mr. Bronson for a custom-tailore
d suit and they had immediately hit it off, even though they had entirely different backgrounds. Alan had expressed his frustration with the current politicians and Mr. Bronson shared his frustration.

  “I know a lot of these guys personally,” said Mr. Bronson. “If you talk to them individually, they have a lot of really good ideas. But as soon as the politics get involved, they become real jerks.”

  “Egos, money and political ambition have a habit of getting in the way,” Alan said.

  “I think you’re right,” said Mr. Bronson.

  It was a few weeks after that initial conversation that Mr. Bronson had come to him with an idea. “A few of my newspapers have been working on a story about finding a way to move oil from Canada to the southern U.S. that will have minimal environmental impact. The oil companies want to build a pipeline as that’s the cheapest solution but the environmentalists hate that solution because of the damage to the environment if there’s a break in the pipeline.”

  “You mean when there’s a break in the pipeline,” Alan said. “You know it’s just a matter of time until there’s a break somewhere.”

  “Precisely – the frustrating thing is that I think we can find a solution that makes everyone happy if we could just get them to work together. The key is that it has to be anonymous. No one gets to patent the solution. No one gets to take credit for coming up with the solution to get elected. We just have to get the smartest people working together on a solution.”

  “I’d like to help,” Alan said, “but I’m not an expert in anything.”

  “You don’t have to be. We’ll need a network of couriers to exchange information between those working on a solution. We don’t want environmentalists knowing that they’re working with engineers from oil companies, or Republicans knowing that they’re working with Democrats. As soon as they find out they’re working with their arch enemies, everything breaks down. I’ll be the only one who knows who’s in the network.”

  It was only a week after that conversation that Mr. Bronson had shown up with a specially modified laptop computer. It had a small device in it that allowed data to be written on tiny digital chips, the same kind used in cameras and cell phones. Mr. Bronson said they needed a way to secretly exchange the information.

  “Why don’t you just encrypt it and send it over the internet?” Alan asked.

  “The internet isn’t as anonymous as you think,” said Mr. Bronson. “The telecommunication companies can track almost anything these days and are regularly asked to provide their data to authorities. In the U.S., they don’t even need a warrant to get the data. All they have to do is say it’s a matter of national security.”

  It was Alan who noted that these chips were small enough to be sewn into clothes, or practically anything else for that matter. And thus, the network was born. It was also Alan who had suggested approaching Frenchie Bouchard to be one of their couriers. He knew that Frenchie travelled around the world on a regular basis as part of his job.

  “He might be a little too high profile for us,” Mr. Bronson said. “Normally, I’d like our couriers to be less conspicuous and blend into the background and Frenchie is anything but that.” But Mr. Bronson agreed to consider it and approached Frenchie a few weeks later after doing a complete background check.

  It surprised both of them how quickly their little network grew. It turns out there are lots of people who are willing to work on important problems for the common good with no promise of fame or fortune, almost like a network of “Secret Santa’s”.

  Unfortunately, they would find out that no good deed goes unpunished.

  *** Chapter 10 ***

  There were only a handful of players waiting in front of the school as the bus that was going to take them to Barrie for the provincial championships pulled up. It was about 7:15AM and the bus wasn’t scheduled to leave for another fifteen minutes. The first game for the girls’ team was at 10AM and the first game for the boys’ team was at noon. After that, it would depend on whether they won or lost the game.

  The coaches opened the luggage compartments on the side of the bus and started loading in their gear consisting of soccer balls, pylons, water bottles and medical kits. They told the players that the girls should load their stuff into the front compartment and the guys should load their stuff into the middle compartment. As more players arrived, they had to be told again and again how things were to be organized. Despite that, there were still a few who got it wrong.

  Although there was no assigned seating on the bus, it always seemed to follow the same pattern. The two coaches of the girls’ team always sat in the first seat, the girls took the seats near the front of the bus and the boys grouped together at the back of the bus. The coaches of the boys’ team always seemed to sit around the middle of the bus.

  Ashley was one of the first players to board the bus. It was her first year on the girls’ soccer team and she was a little smaller than the other girls on the team. Despite that, she was one of the better players on the team, although the other more popular girls seemed to get more credit for the team’s success. She had deliberately sat near the middle of the bus and was looking out the bus window when she saw David arrive and throw his gear into the luggage compartment. She flipped her light brown hair and glanced at her reflection in the bus window to make sure she looked her best. Although she knew it wouldn’t happen, she hoped that David would sit next to her for the bus ride.

  “I guess we’ve been assigned to room together,” Jessica said as she plopped herself down in the seat beside Ashley. “It should be fun.” Although Ashley and Jessica had always been friendly towards each other, they were hardly close. It appeared that the room assignments had been done by jersey number, as Jessica was number five and Ashley was number six. Ashley looked up as David was heading down the aisle towards the back of the bus and tried to give him her best smile.

  “Hi David,” she said as he approached, although Jessica said it at exactly the same time so it sounded like they’d planned it.

  “Hi Ashley, Jessica,” David said as he headed by them towards the back of the bus.

  The coaches were now going through the bus ticking off names to make sure all of the players were on board and the bus pulled out shortly thereafter.

  Ashley was starting to pull her iPod out of her coat pocket and was getting ready to put the ear buds in when Jessica leaned in and whispered to her. “Are you and David hooking up?”

  “Noooo,” she whispered back, feeling her face turn beet red as she said it.

  “Well, if you don’t have any objections, I’m going to try to hook up with him at the resort this weekend.”

  Ashley didn’t know what to say. “I’m not sure he’s your type,” she finally said, but even she didn’t believe that. Jessica was every guy’s type. She was tall, blonde and athletic. She could probably have any guy she wanted. Why had she set her sights on David, the only guy Ashley had ever been interested in?

  “Well, you never know until you try,” Jessica said. “If you see my hair bandana hooked over the door knob of the room tonight, don’t come a-knockin, if you know what I mean, just room with one of the other girls.”

  “OK, but I don’t think…” Ashley started to reply, but Jessica had already bolted from her seat to go sit with one of the other girls. Ashley could feel tears starting to pool in her eyes, so she put her ear buds in and closed her eyes pretending to be listening to music. She wouldn’t stand a chance competing against a girl like Jessica. She was still emotionally frayed when the bus got to the soccer fields in Barrie.

  The girls’ team lost their first game that morning and Ashley hadn’t played very well at all. She’d lost her focus and to be honest, she didn’t care. They’d have to win their next two matches to have any chance of winning the provincial championship.

  Ashley stayed around to watch the boys game and they had won their game quite easily, having taken a three-nothing lead in the first half and adding a fourth goal near the end of the game. J
essica had also stayed to watch the boys’ game and Ashley could see her down there on the sidelines flirting with David as they walked off the field at the end of the game.

  When they got to the resort later in the afternoon, there was general chaos as all of the players from all of the teams tried to find their rooms. The resort consisted of a main lodge which had the reception area, a large games room with video games, pool and ping pong tables, and a very large dining area that could accommodate all of the players from all of the teams. The main lodge had a few rooms, although most of the rooms were located in numerous lodges scattered throughout the property with the lodges named after the different types of trees. The boys’ team from their school were all located in the Birch lodge and David was pleased to see that he would be sharing his room with Alex. The rooms of the girls’ team were all located in the Oak lodge.

  It was great having all of the players from all of the teams together for meals. Although they were competing against each other, it was nice to get to know the other players off of the field. Most of the players congregated in the games room after supper and Ashley had gone there as well, but wasn’t feeling very sociable.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ashley’s coach said as she sat down beside her. She had noticed Ashley sitting by herself. “I’m sure you’ll play much better in the next game.” Ashley nodded, but didn’t really respond. “This is quite a nice facility,” the coach continued. “You should try out some of the games.”

  “I will,” Ashley said, giving a fake smile. Then the coach headed off to join a ping pong game with a few of the other coaches.