by David Archer
“Oh, I was thirty-eight when we met, Sam, and she was twenty-two. What’s that, sixteen years? She’d just be sixty now. And Michael was only a few years older than she, so he might be sixty-five or so. They could still be together.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “But where? I doubt they ever came back to the States, simply because she’d have almost certainly gone to see your grave, and when she didn’t find it...”
“It wouldn’t mean a thing, Sam,” Harry said. “There are always ways to explain something like that. I was buried under my mission identity as part of the plan to protect my family, or maybe I was lost on the mission, my body never recovered. Michael would have known how to handle such things.”
“Okay,” Indie said, “but what about the fact your name’s been in the news off and on? Wouldn’t she have noticed that? Wouldn’t she think it odd that there’s a Harry Winslow who’s the right age doing all the things you’ve done for the country?”
“Sweetie, my name has made it to the news stories maybe twice in the last ten years, and before that everything I did was classified to the point it could only be denied. It wouldn’t be hard to believe she would have missed it, even if she’s in the country. She had no family other than me and the kids. Her parents died in a car crash while she was in college, and she didn’t have any other relatives. That’s part of the reason she got such a high clearance; she wasn’t a potential extortion risk because there was no one who could be threatened in order to make her reveal a secret.”
“So she had no reason to come back,” Sam finished. “That means we need to start looking where she was last known to be, and that sounds like it was in Brazil.”
“Rio, in fact,” Harry said. “That’s where they were when they were married, and that’s where Michael took his retirement. I managed to get the address, an apartment on Rua Garibaldi, but there was a notation that mail sent there was being returned only a few weeks later. No forwarding address was ever received by our government.”
“Wait a minute,” Indie said. “You said he retired; didn’t he get a pension or something?”
“Took a lump settlement,” Harry said. “Because he only had eight years in, he was allowed to take his pension fund as a single lump payment of sixty-eight thousand dollars and change. In Brazil, that would have lasted a couple of years and let them live pretty well, or he might have put it into some kind of business venture that they could live on.” He sighed. “Listen, as much as it hurt to find out my best friend stole my wife and children, there’s no doubt in my mind that once he got them, he’d have been a good provider. Michael could blend in anywhere; he could always find a way to make people like him, no matter who they were. We went into Cuba once on an intel-gathering mission and he had the peasants risking their necks to help us. If he took that money and set himself up in business, he probably got rich at whatever it was.”
“Okay, that’s something to use in looking for them, then.” He looked at Harry, then turned to Indie. “What can Herman do to help on this, Babe?”
His wife smiled as she got up. “I was just working out the search parameters I want to feed him. Be right back.” She went out to the office and came back a minute later with her laptop and set it on the table. “I’m giving him the names we’ve got, Michael Watkins and Katherine Baker, and the address on Garibaldi...”
“It’s 422B Rua Garibaldi, number 4,” Harry said.
“Okay, and what was the last date you can establish him living there?”
“That would have been December 11th, 1986. The wedding was on November 10th.”
“Okay, so I’m also searching anything to do with weddings on November 10th, and any reference to Katherine Baker having children, checking on American children in schools in the area…That’s all I can think of for now, but more will occur to me as Herman runs.” She tapped a couple more keys and then hit the enter button, and the screen started displaying lines of code.
Harry leaned over and looked at it. “What’s it doing?” he asked.
Indie smiled sheepishly. “Things that will get me in trouble if he gets caught,” she said. “Right now, he’s searching for any web-connected databases that are likely to contain information about residents of Rio during 1986. Once he finds one, he uses a hacking routine to get into it and look for information related to the things I just fed him. It takes a little time, but he’s a lot more thorough than any human can be. He looks at almost everything that could possibly be relevant, and then checks it against what he knows to see if it’s important. The results come up when he’s made some progress, but the program keeps running until it either runs completely out of possible sources of data, or I tell it to stop.”
Harry shook his head. “Why is it I never recruited you, I wonder? You seem to be doing things our own computer geeks haven’t thought of.”
“You didn’t need me, you had Gary Stone, remember?” Indie asked. “The kid who helped us with the Grayson Chandler thing, in Rome? He’s every bit as good as me when it comes to code.”
“Yes, but you’re smarter than he when it comes to how to use the programs you’ve written. Never mind, let’s just figure out where we begin on this.”
Sam grinned at him. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to begin in Rio de Janeiro,” he said.
Harry nodded his agreement. “Yes, no doubt. You’ll need your passport, of course.”
“It’s good. Let’s see what Herman comes up with and we’ll figure out when and where to go from there.”
“Agreed,” Harry said, and the computer chose that moment to chime.
“Okay,” Indie said, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” The page that opened up on the screen held about a dozen links, each of them titled by a word or phrase that Herman had deemed relevant to the search he was conducting. The very first one read, “Watkins-Baker marriage.”
Indie clicked on it, and a web page appeared. It was on the Globo Daily News website, drawn from its archives, and showed a photo of the couple posed without the children.
Senhor Michael Dale Watkins, an immigrant to Brazil from the United States who is now working as a security advisor to Mayor Saturnino Braga of Rio de Janeiro, will wed Dona Katherine Baker on 10 November. Dona Baker is the widowed mother of two children, Harold, aged 3 years, and Elizabeth, aged 2 years.
“That’s it,” Indie said, “just the announcement, but it tells us where Michael was working at the time. Let me add that to the parameters…And, while I’m at it, this gives me a good photo of their faces to work with, too.” She called up a program and used its tool to indicate the features of the two faces, and then entered a command.
She went back to looking through the links Herman had provided, most of which were only references to the one they’d already looked at. After seeing the same story appear for the fourth time, she skipped a couple links, and the next one that came up caused her to pause.
“Um, guys,” she said, “you might want to see this one.” Harry and Sam both leaned close and looked at the screen.
It was another news story on the same website, dated a month later, and showed a photo of Michael Watkins wearing a suit. “Security Supervisor and Family Killed in Crash,” the headline read.
Senhor M. Watkins, Security Supervisor for Mayor Saturnino Braga, was aboard the airplane that crashed at Roberto Marinho Airport on Monday, along with his wife Katherine and their children, Harold and Elizabeth, and the pilot, Jorge Mendes. The airplane suffered the loss of a wing and crashed into an empty hangar, where it exploded, killing all aboard.
Harry stared at the screen for a moment, but then shook his head. “That’s another fake death,” he said. “The date shows it has to be. We’ve got the photos of them all alive and healthy at least five or six years after that.” He glared at the computer. “What I want to know is why I didn’t find that story when I was looking. I was calling in favors from Company researchers who should be able to find anything at all, especially when it’s archived on the internet.”
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br /> “I can tell you that,” Indie said. “It’s because of relevance. I told Herman to search anything that contained the name Watkins in Rio for that time period. Your people probably searched for the entire name, Michael Watkins. This one didn’t use his first name.”
“Then they should know to do it your way. Idiots!”
The computer set off another chime just then, and Indie called up the latest page of search results. This time, there were more than fifty links, and she clicked on the first one.
The page was part of a business section of the same newspaper, and showed a slightly different Michael Watkins, with a different nose and darker hair, smiling into a camera and waving a hand toward a building in the background. The building was two stories high and boasted neo-Roman architecture. A sign over the front entrance proclaimed it to be ‘Roma de Angelina,’ while the story below described it as ‘the finest in Italian cuisine to be found in Leblon!’
Senhor Michael Reed is proud to announce the opening of his new restaurant, which he named for his mother. With his wife, Katherine, he hopes to entice the patrons of Leblon to enjoy a dining experience that can only be equaled, they say, by a journey to Rome.
Harry stared at the picture. “There’s nothing about Michael Watkins there,” he said. “How did you find it?”
Indie shrugged and winked at him. “Facial recognition program. I copied the four best pictures of them and made a few tweaks of my own. When I told Herman to run their faces through it and look for matches, he seems to have found quite a few.”
“I’d say so. Is that restaurant still in existence?”
A quick Google search found that it was not, although the building was still standing. It was now owned and occupied by a clothing retailer.
Harry nodded. “What else do we have?”
3
Across the city, a man sat at a folding table in the tiny room he considered his office. Thick fabric had been hung over the windows to prevent any light from escaping, but the only light in the room came from the bank of computer monitors he was facing.
A man’s voice coming through the speakers said, “There’s nothing about Michael Watkins there. How did you find it?”
A female voice replied. “Facial recognition program. I copied the four best pictures of them and made a few tweaks of my own. When I told Herman to run their faces through it and look for matches, he seems to have found quite a few.”
The man’s voice came once again. “I’d say so. Is that restaurant still in existence?”
The man at the table, another local private investigator named Frank Hornsby, was reading the transcript that was scrolling across the screen. The transcription program identified the male voice as “Voice 1,” a second male voice as “Voice 2,” and the female voice as “Voice 3.” When it was completed, Frank would use a simple word processor command to replace those labels with the names of the speakers. He knew Sam Prichard, though not well, and had identified the other two voices simply by listening in to their conversation. The woman’s name seemed to be Indie, but the other man was the one he was hired to watch for. That was Harry Winslow, and he was being paid quite well to keep tabs on him while he was at Prichard’s place, and to report regularly to his employer.
Frank was getting quite a kick out of this job. He was learning an awful lot about surveillance techniques he’d never even known existed before taking it, and one of them was letting him listen in on this particular conversation. A simple program, essentially a virus, had somehow been inserted into almost every electronic device in Prichard’s house. His cell phone, his wife’s, all of their computers, even their smart TV were transmitting every sound through the Internet into a server which then sent it to one of the computers on Frank’s table.
It was a beautiful system. Frank had made it a point of thanking his employer for providing him with them. He had been watching Prichard’s household this way for nearly two months already, following his instructions by copying the entire hard drive of Mrs. Prichard’s computer and sending daily transcripts of their conversations and activities. His employer had come to visit once during that time, but the money arrived in his bank account every week on schedule. As long as he was getting paid, Frank would continue to do the job.
Thinking of following instructions, he reached over and picked up his cell phone. He tapped the icon that dialed directly to his employer and smiled when the line was answered. “You were right, sir,” he said. “Mr. Winslow showed up this morning.”
“Of course,” his employer said. “And what do you think brought him to Denver?”
“Well, personally I think he’s nuts. He’s been telling the Prichards this really wild story about how his best friend up and stole his wife thirty years ago by convincing her he was dead. You don’t think there’s any truth to it, do you?”
“Of course not. This is why we hired you, Mr. Hornsby. When a former espionage asset like Mr. Winslow reaches such an advanced age, the risk of dementia causing him to release classified information is too high to ignore. He’s been telling some unusual stories like this off and on for some time now, which is what alerted us to his condition. Just keep me posted on any new developments, especially if Prichard decides to involve himself in any of it.”
“Yes, sir,” Frank said. “Happy to oblige.”
He cut off the call and laid the phone back on the table, then allowed himself a moment to gloat. Everybody knew that Prichard had worked for the Feds a few times, and it seemed like he was some sort of superstar among the PIs in the area. Well, just wait till they found out that the National Security Agency had hired none other than Frank Hornsby to watch Prichard. According to the agent he was working under, there was a lot of suspicion in Washington that Prichard had been manipulating old Winslow for some time. Naturally, that would be a pretty major crime, and required that they find a man of Frank’s skills and character to come up with a solution.
Besides, Prichard had only been in the PI game for a couple of years, if that. Frank had been at it for more than three decades, paying his dues by chasing the cheaters and doing the skip traces that were the bread-and-butter of the business. He had come up the hard way, and it was rewarding to know that Uncle Sam had finally noticed just what he was capable of.
Prichard, on the other hand, had blundered into something high-profile in his very first case, finding a missing child and bringing her home safely, and then busting a pretty large drug ring as a result. He’d gotten a lot of good press, something that didn’t usually happen to a private eye. That was the reason he got tapped for some of those government jobs, Frank figured. It certainly didn’t have anything to do with experience or skills.
That was all right. Now that Frank was working with NSA, the country would be a whole lot safer.
* * * * *
The man who had answered Frank’s call tucked his own phone back into a pocket and kept his eyes on the street in front of him. He’d been working on this plan, or at least thinking about it, for more than a year now, and it was all about to come together. Using Frank had been a stroke of genius, he thought. There were a number of private investigators in the Denver area, but he had specifically sought out the one who seemed to be the most disreputable gumshoe of them all.
Frank had given him a sales pitch, claiming to have solved a number of major cases in his career, but the truth was a lot simpler. He was the guy people called on when they thought their spouses were cheating, the one men called when the wife they had abused for so long finally got fed up and ran away. He would tail or track down anyone as long as he was getting paid, and he never let himself be bothered with wondering what might happen after his report was made and delivered. In two cases, women he located for angry husbands had ended up dead, but Frank never felt any remorse. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t up to him to worry about what the clients did with the information they received. His job was just to report it. After all, they didn’t hold the carmakers responsible when a drunk driver killed
somebody, right?
He was definitely making money on this job. His current client was paying him nearly three times his usual daily rate, and all he really had to do was sit in front of a computer. The machine was doing all the work, but the client considered it well worth the money. When the job was over, hopefully soon, Frank was also the kind of PI whose death wouldn’t be considered too great a surprise. Arrangements for his elimination had already been made and paid for, and he thought that they might be implemented rather soon, now. Frank had outlived his usefulness, or he would as soon as Harry made his next move.
He put those thoughts out of his mind and made the turn into the apartment complex that was his destination, then got out of the car and walked into Building A. There weren’t any elevators in the old structure, but he took the stairs two at a time and quickly found himself in front of Apartment 214. He knocked twice, then once more, and the door was opened by a man who seemed rather glad to see him.
“I was wondering when you’d turn up again,” the man in the apartment said. “We’re getting pretty close, so if this is going to happen…”
“It is,” said his visitor. “Everything’s in place now, should all come to a head in the next few days. I can’t say exactly when just yet, but keep yourself at the ready. And, Ron, I want you to know how much I appreciate this.”
Ron chuckled, but there was a sarcasm to it. “You don’t appreciate it nearly as much as my family does,” he said. “As crazy as your little scheme might be, it’s been a godsend for us. The worst part of this whole ordeal has been worrying about my kids going hungry, but now they never will.”
The visitor watched his eyes for a moment. “You haven’t told them anything, have you? I told you, no one can know anything about our arrangement.”
Ron shook his head and grinned. “No, no, they don’t know anything. In fact, whenever I go to visit them, the wife keeps telling me how much better I look, how well I’m handling it all. It’s amazing how much stress you’ve taken off of me, and I mean that. You’ve been like a miracle to us. To me.”