A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  Jersey held up his drink, a favorite in the Caribbean known as a painkiller. “Don’t be ruining the painkilling properties,” he said. “Which reminds me, I need another.”

  He tried to stand again, but Natsumi told him to stay put. I stood watch while she went below to rustle up another round for the two of them. Their level of consumption was a dubious achievement, though I couldn’t help being a little impressed. Were it me, I’d be on life support.

  “I get the feeling you guys saw a lot of action back in the day,” I said.

  “Don’t believe anything Angus tells you,” said Jersey. “Bullshit is the Scottish national pastime.”

  “Second only to shaggin’ Yanks.”

  Jersey responded in like terms and the back and forth escalated accordingly. Natsumi and I sat back and waited it out. Jersey was the first to run out of fuel, sliding effortlessly from fluent insult to a snore reminiscent of the cranky chain saw I once used in Connecticut.

  “Doesn’t sound safe, now does it?” Angus asked.

  “I’m wondering how we get him below,” said Natsumi. “He outweighs all three of us combined.”

  “Good of you to include me in that, lassie. But for movin’ Jersey, dinnae bother. He’s slept off more a good night’s drinking in the cockpit than anywhere else. Lord knows Desiree’ll be happier for it.”

  While Natsumi went below to get our cabin in order I dug up a safety tether to join Jersey’s sturdy leather belt to the helm. Three feet was enough play to let him roll around the cockpit without pitching himself over the coaming and into the sea.

  Angus endorsed the idea.

  “That’s thinkin’, Cornwall. Wouldn’t want the lad’s drownin’ to plague my conscience.”

  Angus himself was another matter. He made it to the stairway mostly on his own power, but the angle proved daunting. He asked for another tether, but instead I went below and offered support for the trip down. He took it and all went well, even though the stateroom seemed a formidable distance away in the V of the bow.

  Angus allowed me to help him to the head where I left him seated on the toilet lid, teetering but optimistic about prospects from there.

  He gripped my sleeve before I could withdraw.

  “Are you really writing a book on cybersecurity for small business?”

  “Have you really put people away?” I asked.

  He leaned back from me, as if trying to get my face in better focus.

  “Yes. As it turns out.”

  “Me, too.”

  He let go of me and I was able to escape to our tiny berth for the minimum night’s sleep.

  The next day Natsumi and I were able to perform our respective functions with distinction, a feat admired by our companions, for whom sprawled lounging seemed to be the only viable pursuit. I was just as glad, as I followed a leisurely, but fairly direct course around the top of the island and into San Juan, where a berth awaited That’s A Moray.

  We spent another night on board, then collected our belongings and two days’ pay, and gave our farewells. We walked out of the marina and back into the netherworld we’d inhabited before our fanciful diversion on the shimmering tropical seas.

  CHAPTER 5

  It wasn’t the first time I had to start from scratch. In the twenty-first century, the only way to live off the grid is to be dead. If you really want to live and move about, and not simply hide in a cave or a motel room somewhere deep in the Rockies, you need a real identity, and dead people are the best source of that.

  An American only needed two keys to establish a modern identity. Only two, both difficult to obtain: a driver’s license and a Social Security number.

  Popular myth would have you think such things are easy to get on the open criminal market. That’s partly true if your only purpose is to snag cash or consumer goods with a stolen credit card. My ambitions ran deeper than that. We needed to be flesh and blood people, not just strings of misbegotten numbers. We needed to be people you could talk to, do business with, be thoroughly deceived by.

  For that, we needed to be dead people. Not just any dead people, but ones with identities unencumbered by a history that would attract the interest of pervasive and unblinking digital surveillance.

  The process began with an Internet café. I paid cash, picked out a remote spot, and went to work. What once took me a few days, I could now manage in about four hours. Going directly to familiar databases, I was able to assemble a decent list of people fitting our general ethnic and morphological descriptions who’d had the misfortune of a recent and untimely departure from this earth.

  Thus equipped, I bought a disposable cell phone and parked myself on a bench in a quiet corner of the Castillo San Felipe del Morro. The scam from there was a simple one. I was from the IRS in the orphan payables department. I was charged with uncovering the family members of people who had never cashed prior tax refunds. If mom, or dad, or husband, wife, brother, sister, whoever, could simply provide the correct Social Security number, I would gladly forward the abandoned funds.

  The trick wasn’t necessarily in the credibility of the story, it was the delivery. After logging thousands of phone interviews, the vast majority being legal efforts to extract information from often unwilling respondents, this was something I was particularly good at doing. Good enough to have a half-dozen solid names and Social Security numbers for Natsumi and me before the sun set over the ancient fortification.

  We used cash again for a “used” laptop offered by an eager young entrepreneur on a corner in Puerto de Tierro. Then, before the night hardened into more forbidding hours, we used false, though unchallenged, names in the registry at a desperately crummy little hotel around the corner.

  The next day, I foraged farther afield, securing a fresh hard drive for the laptop and a toolkit to make the necessary modifications. I gave the red-eyed desk clerk at our hotel a hundred dollars to hold our mail and spent the rest of the day and most of the night setting up accounts in various banks around the country. Into these I flowed operating funds uncompromised by the busted identities left behind in the Virgins. I hoped.

  From there all we could do was wait and avoid getting mugged until collecting the incoming mail with credit and debit cards, and subsequently improved financial circumstances.

  It felt a little like a rebirth.

  ONCE BACK in the black, we flew to Miami. After the quick plane flight, a cab delivered us to a boutique hotel in the Art Deco district in South Beach. In addition to the allure of luxury accommodations after days in captivity, at sea, in the barrio and traveling from Puerto Rico, the eclectic American, Asian and European guest population offered fair camouflage, and the concierge services convenient logistical support.

  On the way into the city, we stopped at one of the retail outlets of a national transport service that was holding a package of mine. I told the guy at the desk that my driver’s license had been stolen in Puerto Rico, but perhaps a pair of hundred dollar bills would be enough to satisfy ID requirements. He thought that would do fine.

  Inside the package were a driver’s license, birth certificate and five years of tax returns confirming the bona fide existence of an entirely made-up person.

  For the rest of the week, Natsumi committed herself to lying on the windy beach while I hid away in the room assembling documents to support a new identity for her, mostly secured through legitimate channels, a few forged.

  I used some of that time to move money around. While I had given all of Florencia’s embezzled funds back to her insurance company victims, I still had plenty left over from selling the agency itself, along with whatever assets we owned together before she died. As a further backstop, I had a warehouse in Connecticut full of vintage guitars. With a ready market, I could peddle individual guitars as needed, providing a foolproof source of untraceable, tax-free liquidity.

  Every financial action comes with risk. But the biggest risk was being too static. The cyber bloodhounds who paid attention to these things looked fo
r too much activity or too little. It was best to convey the appearance of normal day-to-day commerce. Whether I’d followed a wise strategy, or success thus far had been a lucky illusion, I still had most of the money I’d accumulated since slipping into a shadow world of my own making.

  We were going to need it.

  “WHAT ARE you thinking?” Natsumi asked when she opened her eyes and saw me staring at the ceiling.

  “Our captors gave us a priceless lesson in asymmetrical conflict.”

  “Which is?”

  “The more powerful always win. You can’t hide from them forever. We’re tricky and resourceful, but their capabilities are overwhelming. Partly because they can do things we can’t even know and probably never will.”

  “That’s bleak.”

  “There’s good news. They confirmed that my dead guy status is still intact. For now.”

  “Which is why you’re worried?” she asked.

  “They have my fingerprints, DNA and crystal clear photos. It’s only dumb luck the fingerprints and DNA have never found their way into anyone’s database. As for the photos, I might think I look a lot different from how I used to look, but not to a computer loaded with facial recognition software.”

  “You’re saying they have all the dots, they just haven’t connected them to Arthur Cathcart,” she said.

  “And when they do, it’ll lead directly to fraud, embezzlement, extortion, international terrorism and murder.”

  “That’s all you’re worried about?”

  The open hotel window looked out over the broad beach and light green ocean beyond. Hot, dry, salt-soaked air blew in and mussed up the gauzy curtains. I had come to an agreeable accommodation with warm climates, at odds with a lifetime in cold, cranky places like Connecticut, Boston and Philadelphia. Being aware of any kind of weather—searing sun, mists, winds and willful cloudbursts—was a new thing for me, a person whose attention was once rarely diverted from the printed page, the computer screen or a legal pad covered with equations.

  I’d loved that world of the abstract and remote, the feast of facts, oceans of knowledge too vast ever to be entirely known. I hadn’t chosen to leave it; the impetus was a bullet passing through the outer neighborhoods of my brain’s frontal and parietal lobes. Somewhat mangled, I still managed to live, something the neurologists at the time said was incredibly lucky, a word I still had a hard time reconciling with the actual experience.

  Unless it was this newfound ability to notice the outdoors. To possess, however fleetingly, a Buddhist’s mindfulness in lieu of a state in which one is merely full of one’s own mind.

  But I knew life in the virtual world was no guarantee of survival in the material. And looking over at Natsumi, with the sheet pulled up to just below her eyes and waves of jet black hair spread out across the pillow, I also knew that simple survival was in itself a form of death sentence.

  “I want to go back,” I said. “All the way.”

  “To Connecticut?”

  “To being Arthur. My own name, with my own face and my own passport.”

  “What about your girl?”

  “With her, too.”

  “She was never in that world. She’s only of this one. The fake one.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll introduce you around. You and Omni.”

  “What you want is impossible,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “But you’re going to try anyway.”

  I sat up so that I could look her full in the face.

  “There’s no choice. That’s the lesson. We’ll never be truly safe until we’re truly free.”

  “You can’t be both. You know that. They’ll put you away forever,” she said.

  “The only way out is through.”

  “Uh?”

  “Robert Frost. Big with Vietnam vets and recovering addicts.”

  “And recovering fugitives?”

  “Right.”

  THE FIRST thing I did that morning was e-mail a ninety-nine-year-old man. Raul Preciado-Cotto was professor emeritus of European history at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. His command of twentieth-century history was enhanced by having seen most of it, as an undercover investigator, journalist and intellectual bon vivant. His specialty was Spanish political movements and all things expressed with a Spanish accent.

  “I know nothing about Latin American mercenaries,” he wrote back in response to my inquiry. “But I know a person who may.”

  I thanked him and promised to provide the vintage French brandy as requisite compensation. He demurred, citing a new regimen of healthy consumption and regular aerobic exercise.

  “I’ve been advised you’re never too young to attend to your physical fitness,” he wrote.

  In the time it took Natsumi and me to eat breakfast on the narrow balcony above the Atlantic glare, he’d made the connection and written back.

  “I am told the person most likely to know the people you seek frequents the Tocororo Loco in Hialeah. I am further advised that only gringos with faint regard for personal safety would venture there. Tenga cuidado.”

  With the rest of the day to spend before heading for the mercenary saloon, I started up the computer and began charting out the next digital passage. Natsumi had other plans.

  “You’re wearing a bikini,” I said.

  “We’re in Miami. What else should I wear?”

  “Does this mean you’re going to the beach?”

  “It’s right outside the door. You should come with me.”

  “To do what?”

  I grew up not far from the public beaches of Stamford, Connecticut, though I’d never sat on the sand. Having seen people from a distance lounging, passed out and pretending to enjoy the temperature shock from abrupt immersion in the icy Long Island Sound, I could merely surmise the purpose. My parents were too harried by the need to earn money in an expensive place with few marketable skills to attend to their children’s recreational needs. Fortunately, my sister and I needed nothing more than access to the Stamford public library and the astonishing freedom made possible by our parents’ benign neglect.

  “You could read a book,” said Natsumi. “Or examine the local fauna and flora.”

  She really didn’t expect me to go, so I surprised her by printing out a stack of reading material, dressing up in appropriate beach-going apparel and sticking a rolled-up bath towel under my arm.

  “Into the fray,” I said to her.

  I survived the day reasonably well. It occurred to me, as I tried to read through the loose printouts fluttering in the wind, that Natsumi wanted to keep me close without appearing to. She was worried about the Tocororo Loco.

  That was confirmed when we got back to the room, sunbaked and windblown.

  “I’m concerned about tonight,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “You should have backup.”

  “No time to set that up. I’ll have my smartphone ready to ping you at a tap on the screen.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Swell.”

  She knew the truth. There was nothing we could do if things went wrong. All I could do was stay alert and all she could do was stay in the hotel and worry.

  As the day drifted into dinnertime, I dressed in khakis and a simple guayabera shirt, and put on a Miami Marlins baseball cap. I brought along the driver’s license that matched the name on our hotel registration, Frascuelo Rana, and a roll of cash. As promised, I had my smartphone preset to three options: A speed dial to her phone that meant call the cops. An e-mail that said, “Everything A-Okay.” And a text that read, “Run like hell.”

  I kissed her on the lips and took a cab over to Hialeah. As we drove, I practiced my Spanish with the cabdriver. He’d been an orthopedic surgeon in Havana before an indiscreet blog posting had prompted a midnight boat trip to Port-au-Prince and subsequent slide into Miami, so he had little trouble with my fancy Castilian syntax and word choice. I’d taught mysel
f Spanish before meeting Florencia, something that greatly helped to cement the relationship, but I was never able to conform to her native-born vernacular.

  Consequently, it was clear I’d go about as unnoticed at Tocororo Loco as Sir Laurence Olivier riding one of Gilley’s mechanical bulls.

  The cabby noted as much when we pulled up to the curb.

  “I can show you other restaurants where you might be more comfortable,” he said, helpfully.

  “Can I call you when I’m ready to leave?” I asked.

  He looked noncommittal, but gave me his card and said, “Sure. Call and we’ll see what we can do.”

  Inside, Tocororo Loco looked like it had been assembled from a collection of disparate parts. Near the storefront window was a long counter, like you find in any mid-twentieth-century American greasy spoon, though with freshly upholstered swivel stools, paintings of Cuban street scenes on the wall and a gigantic espresso machine towering in the rear corner. A few old men were at the counter crouched over plates of rice, beans and chicken, cortaditos coffee and ashtrays emitting smoke plumes. Jazz was on the jukebox and a scrawny woman with dyed hair tied at the top of her head held the command position behind the counter. She saw me come in and without hesitation pointed to a double door at the back of the place that opened into a dark bar. I didn’t know whether to take this as a good sign or bad, but walked through the doors anyway.

  This section was much darker, filled with rattan tables and chairs and younger, far noisier people. There was a small service bar in one corner, though the principal purpose here was eating from large plates filled with pan con bistec and ropa vieja. There were only two stools set up at the bar. I sat in one.

  “I was told there was another bar here,” I said in Spanish. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.”

  “Mistakes happen,” said the bartender. “But I am certain I can help with your thirst.”

  He was a tall man with cool, blue eyes, receding silver hairline and thin, delicate hands. He reminded me more of a priest than a bartender, though to many that’s a slight distinction. He showed me a Hatuey from a cooler behind the bar and I nodded.