by Chris Knopf
“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “We think about a billion.”
“Where is Joselito?” I asked her.
Her panicked confusion deepened.
“In prison somewhere, of course. You put him there.”
“When did you last have contact?” I asked.
“When your FBI arrested him. He sent me an e-mail through a friend on the outside. He told me the whole story, said to go to the accounts and look for myself. He wrote not to expect any more communication, that he was a dead man walking. He was afraid, I could tell.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with El Timador,” said Natsumi.
“Would you have let him poke out my eyes?” Albalita asked.
“Would you have forced him to watch me be tortured?”
Albalita put her eyes back on me.
“Joselito worked for me. He showed me how to take the money. I was going to use it for good, just not the good your government had in mind.” She shifted her eyes again toward Natsumi. I eased the grip on her head to make it easier. “Chuck was with me. We shared a vision. No one would ever have to know. And then you penetrated Joselito’s computer and discovered everything. What were we to do? We faced ruin, personal and professional. And all those wonderful things we could have done slipped away like ghosts in the night. You don’t know this?” she asked Natsumi, who stood silently.
“Then I pity you,” said Albalita.
“How did you find us in the Caribbean?” I asked, regaining Albalita’s attention.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That was all Chuck. Is he really dead?”
“Yes,” said Natsumi.
“That’s awful. He could be a brash man, but a good one.”
“We’re prepared to argue that,” said Natsumi.
“Of course,” said Albalita. “How would you know.”
Bernicia chose that moment to jump on the bed and walk across Albalita’s face. Albalita turned her head side to side to mitigate the effect.
“Bajar, tu gata loca!” Get off, you crazy cat.
I scooped Bernicia off the bed and handed her to Natsumi.
“I want a copy of that e-mail from Joselito,” I said.
“You can’t. I destroyed it,” said Albalita.
“What computer did it come in on?”
“The one in my office. I deleted it.”
I eased up off the supine form, though she made no effort to move. Bernicia popped back up on the bed, her little cat face filled with accusation. Albalita reached out and scratched under her chin.
I got all the way off the bed and Albalita quickly pulled herself up against the backboard, her bedclothes clutched to her chest. She shook as if recently dragged from a freezer. Bernicia made a grey ball of herself in the middle of the woman’s lap and looked at us with wary malevolence.
“What was the good you were going to do,” I asked Albalita, “with all that money.”
She shook her head, pulling a sheet all the way to her mouth.
“Oh, no. That’s not for you to know. Torture me if you want. I’ll never tell El Timador, the ruiner of dreams.”
We found her mobile phone and the junction box for the landlines, which I pulled off the wall. Before we left, I wrapped her wrists and ankles with duct tape. She took it with nearly listless resignation, the comparison with her treatment of us on the fishing boat floating around in the air, unsaid.
Halfway to Zurich, I sent a text to the cops in Küsnacht, telling them about the woman tied up in her house and asking for an immediate acknowledgment of the call. The second I got the message—demanding that I identify myself, describe my location, and wait in place for the authorities—I tossed the phone in Lake Zurich and drove north into the city.
Light was seeping up from the horizon as we pulled into the parking garage and replaced our black outfits with baseball caps, T-shirts, running shorts and shoes. The hotel’s security cameras would record a couple back from a predawn run, their faces obscured by the hats, their gait slightly diminished by recent exertion.
I slept well for the next few hours, on top of the covers and still dressed in the workout gear. Natsumi wasn’t as lucky, and as she reported, spent the time in a stuffed chair drinking wine and watching my chest calmly rise and fall.
CHAPTER 23
“How do you hide a billion dollars?” asked Natsumi, still sitting in the stuffed chair when I woke to the grey light settled over Zurich.
“With some difficulty,” I said, as I swam up into full consciousness. “Create a series of shell businesses, buy off corrupt government officials in some equally corrupt country—no shortage of those. Break it up among a lot of different banks, mostly in places like the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Bermuda, and Switzerland of course, though the rules governing tax havens are getting tighter all the time. It helps to be a criminal organization or kleptocracy with no aspirations of legitimacy.”
“But how does a person do it, a single regular person?”
“How regular?”
“I don’t know. As regular as me,” she said.
“You don’t. It’s too big a number. You hear the word ‘billion’ so much in the news you get inured to what it really means. To be a billionaire, you have to be a millionaire a thousand times over. That’s way too much money to bury in the backyard.”
She seemed to ponder that while sipping a cup of coffee that had taken the place of her wine of the night before.
“What about as regular as you,” she said.
“I think we’re getting rhetorical.”
“Because you’re not regular,” she said.
“If modesty permits, no. I can do things most regular people wouldn’t know how to do. On the other hand, even I can’t hide a billion dollars.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said, lightly. “I’m constantly astonished by what you can do. What you’re capable of.”
“In a good way?”
“Usually.”
I got off the bed and went into the bathroom, where I threw cold water on my face and over my bald head, and brushed my teeth. As always, whenever I was in front of a mirror, I focused on the dent in my upper forehead left by the assassin’s bullet. In addition to a general obsession with the old wound, I found it easier than looking myself in the eye.
When I came back to the bedroom, Natsumi was still in her chair, nursing her coffee.
“We have to split up,” she said.
“Haven’t we had this conversation before?”
“You’re a fine analytical thinker, Arthur, except when you’re so smart you miss the obvious.”
There was something in her tone, more than her words, that stirred a twinge of panic somewhere deep in my nether regions.
“I don’t think I’m going to like what you’re about to say.”
“Because you know it’s true,” she said. “We’re finished. We’re only here talking to each other because they want something from us. We can do things they can’t. Like we did last night. Our freedom’s an illusion. We’re actually tagged animals they can scoop up anytime they want.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“I am. Jersey was fine leaving us on our own. He knows our true status. We’re not dead anymore, we’re official living breathing fugitives, prominent data points in a global database of bad actors. Worse, we don’t know what they know. We don’t know which of our aliases and stolen identities are compromised. So we can’t trust anything digital—e-mail accounts, IP addresses, mobile phones, none of it. To say nothing of passports and driver’s licenses.”
“We still have clean identities in reserve.”
“Okay, but what are we going to live on? Our working assets are starting to disappear. It’s only a matter of time before they uncover the rest of our assets. You don’t know if they haven’t already, with the Feds just waiting around to snatch us up when it’s convenient.”
By training and temperament, I’d devoted my life to separating truth fr
om fiction, to following the facts wherever they led, no matter where. So I had little experience with denial and avoidance, which was a pity, since at that moment I truly wished I could run from the words coming out of Natsumi’s mouth.
Instead, I said, “I’m not giving up.”
“We can’t go on as a male Caucasian and female Asian. Way too easy to spot and track.”
“What are you proposing?” I asked.
“It’s no coincidence that TSA guy in New York asked me about blackjack. I’m a big, fat target. So I’m going to use the same passport to fly somewhere, and then do my best to shake the tail and disappear. You’re going to use one of your reserve identities to hopefully disappear as well, and then figure out what to do next. I don’t want to know what that is, because I can’t reveal what I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“When you really want something, you find a way,” she said.
I told her I’d think about it, and went to take a shower. I had the door nearly closed when she called out to me.
“I have another question.”
I leaned out the door, supporting myself on the doorknob.
“Okay.”
“How does a person bring himself to shoot another person through the head?”
I wanted to give her an honest answer, so it took a moment.
“Self-preservation?” I asked.
Reading Natsumi’s Asian countenance was never an easy thing, but she seemed satisfied with that answer. I went ahead and took my shower.
When I came back out of the bathroom, she was gone. The note on the dresser said, “My mother will know what to do.”
I sat on the bed, naked, with the towel in my lap, and stared at the door. I’m not sure for how long. I used the time to think, or more accurately, to not think in the calculating, analytical way I knew best. My mind would never go entirely blank, but I got close, until I knew it was time to start thinking again.
I used that day to buy makeup and prosthetics from a theatrical supply house and change the shape of my face. The nose was the easiest part to bulk up a little, though I also added some extra flesh around my eyes. I bleached all the color out of my eyebrows and configured a convincing thatch of thinning white hair over my bald head.
The next morning, after downloading a few indispensable files onto a flash drive, I packed my day-to-day laptop and big external hard drive in a shipping box and crammed it into the black backpack. I stuffed a complete change of clothes, including sneakers, in the remaining space.
I took the service elevators to the ground floor and exited via the loading dock. I found a DHL office and shipped off the computer and external hard drive to one of their self-storage units.
I took a long hike to an aging industrial area, found a narrow brick alleyway that led to a concealed space where I burned all the potentially corrupted IDs. Then I took a train to Paris, and after a few days changing hotels, and ducking in and out of stores and restaurants, caught a ride through the Chunnel with a chatty Brit I met in a café, who during the long trip to London exhausted my capacity for wholesale invention.
At Heathrow I used my remaining, as yet untested, passport and flew to JFK. Outside the terminal, behind a dumpster, I stripped off the white hair and cleaned the prosthetics off my face. I changed into worn jeans, sneakers and an old chambray shirt, and tossed my stylish traveling clothes into the dumpster.
From there, I used public transportation to get to New Haven, where I slept in the train station, then various outdoor spots around the city until my physical aspect took on the character of my apparent circumstances. In dire need of a shower, I tried to check into the YMCA. It was full, but I learned of an opening at “Second Chance University,” a shelter for homeless, mostly drug addicted and mentally ill men operating out of a rambling Victorian house a few blocks north of Yale.
In the attic was a big open room that served as a transient dorm for about twenty guys at a time. It wasn’t directly supervised, but you had to go through a metal detector at the base of the stairs and be in for the night by nine o’clock.
To take possession of the free bed I had to pass muster with the staff psychologist. For this I drew on another research project, this one focused on finding employment for people with long-term intellectual disabilities. I chose bipolar disorder, since the manic phase most closely matched my normal disposition.
“You seem a little agitated,” said the young man with a fine-haired beard and caring eyes. “Are you okay to talk?”
The office where we sat in the old house had ultrahigh ceilings, overpainted woodwork and the smell of decades without a deep cleaning. The psychologist sat in an ancient, wooden swivel chair and I was nearly swallowed up by an exhausted leather couch.
“Sure, talking’s entirely cool with me,” I said, tapping out a loose rhythm on the top of my knee.
“They tell me you have no identification.”
“They tell you right. I got rolled sleepin’ under a bridge in Wilmington, Delaware. Took my wallet, my pen knife, my meds and my lucky airplane.”
“Airplane?”
“Little plastic airplane on a key ring. Had it since I was a kid.”
“I’m sorry. What sort of meds?”
“I had the lithium and the aripiprazole. Olé!” I added, waving an invisible red cape.
“Who is your physician?”
“Now, that’d be hard to say since I was in a loony bin outside Phoenix, and the truth is, I stole about a six months supply of those pills out of an unlocked closet, for which they’d be more’n happy to throw my sorry ass in jail, so I’d rather not tell you anymore’n that. And I’m not particularly concerned with them meds so much as havin’ a place to sleep where I’m not gonna get my ass kicked just for breathin’ some other asshole’s air.”
“So you’re feeling pretty good?” he asked me.
“Good? I’m feeling fan-fucking-tastic,” I said. “Would feel even better if I got some sleep as it’s goin’ on three days of being scared to shut my eyes. TV would be nice, too. I used to steal TVs out of the dorm rooms at Michigan State, the big console ones, not as a living exactly, just ’cause it was so easy to do that in those days. Those TVs can pile up, though, big as they are. Too old to do that now. Can’t handle the weight, though that’s not as big a problem with the new flat screens. Just harder to get off the wall. You think Yale has a lot of flat screens?”
“I imagine they do, but I wouldn’t advise stealing any of them,” said the psychologist.
“Why not? Jail’s one way to get three hots and a cot. Man, am I a poet or what?”
I got the cot anyway, and three hot meals, with no more questions asked. I felt reasonably safe, given the metal detector and brawny staff only one story away, but as a further precaution I bought a cheap plastic toothbrush and used my Swiss Army knife to whittle a sharp point out of the handle. I kept it in the back pocket of my jeans and kept my jeans on when I slept. The Swiss Army knife had to stay with the guys running the metal detector.
They also gave me a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, and fortunately didn’t insist on watching me wash them down every day with my morning coffee. I told them I’d worked as a systems administrator back when I could still hold down a regular job, so I was able to be useful upgrading their software and troubleshooting hardware and network issues. In return I was left alone to wander about the little city and poke around Yale until I found what I wanted most. Secure broadband access.
It was in the basement of a satellite library supporting the anthropology department. A postdoc working on a paper took to me in a bookstore cum coffee shop across from the campus after I’d told her the story of my fall from social grace into mad vagrancy. I apparently fit into her thesis, which she tried to explain, though it made no more sense to me than it would have to an authentic street person.
Most importantly, she slipped me the password to the computer the university had given her to use over the course of her research
, which provided me at least one tidy level of security.
The study room was little bigger than a closet—windowless, all white, with a black office chair and a silver Mac. A kind of academic tomb. Perfect for my state of mind.
I invested my first two online hours tracking down Strider.
“Long time, no hear,” she wrote, once we snuck into a private chat room. “I have things for you.”
“Good. I need things.”
“Has to be a sit-down,” she wrote, in other words, the web wasn’t safe enough. “Shouldn’t be hard for you, Spankman. It’s, like, reality. The Final Frontier.”
Then she signed off.
“Great,” I told the stark, white room.
SECOND CHANCE UNIVERSITY didn’t mind listing me as John Doe on their resident register. I wasn’t the only one there with that name. They allowed us a week’s anonymous stay under a type of rescue status. But if I wanted longer than that, I needed to fork over a name, some type of history, and financial capability.
I had taped to my torso enough money to buy their building, but it was more useful to appear broke. So I offered the psychologist, whose name was Cary McNichol, a form of community service.
“Here’s the deal,” I said, after pulling him into a private room. “If I volunteer my time to one of the do-gooder operations you got around this town, can I stick here for like another month or so? If things go well, I’ll get a credential I can use to get a regular job. Then I’m out of your hair.”
“You’re not in our hair,” said Cary, with a kind smile. “Not yet, anyway. I suppose it’s worth a try. How’re you feeling?”
He meant, are you in control of your mania.
“Right as rain. Seriously.” I held up my hand to show how steady it was. “Totally in control.”
“Okay, have any organization in mind?”
“Yeah, in fact I have. The People Project. You just gotta tell ’em I’m a resident in good standing and a great man to have around a computer. Everybody’s got computer issues. Look at yourselves.”
He didn’t argue that.
“I know the director, Sylvan,” he said. “It’s only a satellite office focused on fund-raising. Their headquarters are in Switzerland. Why them?”