by Chris Knopf
“Why else do you think I’d want to hack banks?” she’d written when I was back on the computer in the Yale study room. “It takes a crook to know a bunch of crooks.”
So I felt confident in where our joint inquiry eventually netted out. The books were clean as a whistle, and so was The People Project. Over the course of five years, a billion and a half dollars had flowed from the US Treasury through Fontaine to The People Project, which distributed the money in the form of microloans to thousands of tiny businesses throughout the world.
“Every penny’s accounted for,” Strider wrote.
“If you believe the audit.”
“We have to. The auditors are a giant accounting firm who’d be ruined if they screwed up anything attached to federal money.”
“Albalita said she and Joselito took a billion dollars. Which I then somehow stole out of the accounts.”
“Not a chance. You can’t just swipe a billion dollars.”
“That’s what I keep saying.”
“I need to get behind the numbers the auditing firm was using. It’ll take some pretty serious forensics. And time.”
“I understand.”
We confirmed our communications protocols and I watched her blink away, while ignoring, almost successfully, a faint pang of renewed loneliness. Which is probably why I leapt without hesitation into a role I’d played before, and had hoped to never repeat.
Bait.
IT WAS absurdly easy. I merely had to go to websites run by Black Hats and White Hats, hackers and those in the service of defeating hacking, and post this simple message:
“Yo bank robber. Catch me if you can. El Timador.”
Then I logged into a site run by market researchers, to kill time, and consume what amounted to intellectual comfort food, before jumping back into the world of cybersecurity.
The message was in Spanish: “El Timador. You’re a dead man.”
I wrote back: “I’ve heard that before.”
“This time it’s true. You ruin my life, I ruin yours.”
“Joselito?”
The man who’d served Spanish death squads, whom I helped put away in a federal prison so deep he’d likely never be heard from again. A man who was supposed to be banished from the Internet for the rest of his life.
“Si, El Timador. I’m coming.”
Having had a bullet smash through my skull, I was sensitive to the psychologist’s claim that the brain could be smarter than the mind. That there were thoughts going on in the background that your consciousness wasn’t privy to, but were nevertheless far more brilliant and perceptive. I don’t know about that, but I do know at the moment I read those lines from Joselito, I knew what had happened, and what I had to do about it.
“I’ll be waiting,” I wrote.
I forwarded the e-mail chain to Strider, then logged off the site and the computer, picked up my backpack and walked slowly back to my dorm bed at the Second Chance University.
CHAPTER 25
There were two packages wrapped like birthday presents on my bunk when I got to the open dorm. My next-door neighbor, Davis, the guy who tried to steal my meds, was sitting on his own bunk, waiting for me.
“They’re from me,” he said. “I bought them for you.”
“New strategy? More blessed to give than receive? By stealing?”
“If you insist on putting it that way, which happened a long time ago, by the way.”
“It did. Sorry.”
“Go ahead. Open them up, but don’t take anything out.” He looked around the room. I got the message. “Start with the one on the right.”
Inside the package was a slim knife handle, yellow, etched with the name “Stan.”
“It’s a switchblade. Ceramic. Almost weightless. I made it on the 3D printer. Open the other one.”
Inside that box was a tiny automatic pistol, bright red, with my name on the grip.
“Also ceramic,” Davis whispered. “It takes real .32-caliber rounds. Not a lot of range or accuracy, but close in, it’ll do the job. Kind of a chick gun, but fun, right?”
“How did you get this stuff in here?”
He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
“They’re ceramic. Go through any metal detector. But you knew that already. You’ll have to buy the bullets on the outside.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why?”
He laughed again, though more of a whinny.
“I wanted to prove a point. If I’d meant to kill you, you’d be dead by now. But I didn’t. I just wanted to steal your meds.”
“You’re still worryin’ about that?”
“Not worrying, obsessing. I’m a moral animal. I’m not a thief. It troubles me deeply that you’d think so.”
“I forgot about it long ago,” I said.
“I didn’t. So there you go. Now you can kill me if you want to.”
“When did you do this?”
“My clients have a prototyping business here in New Haven. I just had to hack into the CAD-CAM and download designs I pulled off the web. Ran it remotely over the weekend and broke through a window Sunday night to retrieve the goods. Easy peasy.”
I put the lids back on the boxes and put them in my backpack.
“Have you noticed our world has become exceedingly strange?” I asked him.
“Are you kidding me? I’m legally insane. Who knows better?”
I slept that night with both the ceramic gun and switchblade under my pillow. Though not so soundly.
I SPENT a good part of the next day in the tougher parts of New Haven scoring a handful of .32-caliber bullets, which I loaded in the ceramic gun and test-fired in a state park about an hour by bus north of the city. My hand and the gun came through intact, and true to Davis’s word, it wasn’t a straight shooter, but would put a hole in anything less than four feet away.
Easy peasy.
SINCE I could think of no reason not to, I had both the knife and gun in my pocket the next time I went to the study room at Yale to work on the computer. Traffic through the building was always light, so it wasn’t that big an accomplishment to notice two sturdy-looking white guys with short hair in khakis and polo shirts hanging around the front door engaged in a nearly theatrically phony semblance of a conversation.
As I approached, one of them opened the door and welcomed me in Spanish. I acted befuddled and said, “Yes, of course. Whatever you say.”
I headed through the building and down the stairs to the study room, daring a few looks over my shoulder, but saw no one following. I went into the sterile study room and shut the door. I noticed for the first time there was no lock. I thought about that for a moment, and after examining the tiny window up near the ceiling, I left the room, just in time to hear the sound of footsteps descending the stairway at the end of the echoing basement corridor. I moved quickly in the opposite direction.
I’d never been in that part of the building, a lapse I mentally kicked myself for making. It was quite a warren of study rooms and comfortable seating areas, kitchenettes and open areas often filled with folding chairs set in a circle. But no exits, as far as I could see.
The footfalls I’d heard on the stairs started coming down the hall. I picked up the pace, though shy of a full run. The hallway was filled with angles, seemingly endless and utterly devoid of escape routes. I kept moving and looking.
The footsteps grew loud enough for me to steal another glance behind, but it was clear. I started to run in earnest, though that made it harder to try for unlocked doors, so I went back to a fast walk.
I found a stairwell and bounded up to the next floor. When I pushed open the door leading to the hallway I nearly bowled over a young woman who had her face stuck in a book as she walked. She pulled back, alarmed, and I apologized as I rushed by. Other students were moving down the hallway, through which I moved quickly until I came to a lounge where at least a half dozen of them were nestled into comfortable sofas and chairs, plugged into earphones, smartphones, laptops a
nd tablets. I sat on a sofa, put my hands in my lap and waited.
The two men I’d seen in front of the building stopped at the door, looked in the room, then moved on. The girl sitting next to me pulled her white earphones from her ears and looked at me curiously. As a bald man in his forties with no devices, I’m sure I presented a profound oddity. I smiled at her and left the room. More students were filling the hall. I went back outside and looked up and down the street, but my pursuers were nowhere in sight.
I headed back toward Second Chance. Before I got there, I saw a young man speaking on a smartphone. I stood there until he ended his call and offered him two hundred dollars if he let me use it.
“I’ll only be a couple minutes. You can stand there and watch me.”
“You’re shittin’ me, right?”
I handed him the two hundred dollar bills and he shrugged and gave me his phone. I used the browser to go into a website where I left a message for Strider:
“Keep looking. It’s there for sure.”
I FOUND Cary McNichol in his office. He seemed happy to see me.
“Stan the Man. Have a seat.”
I held my backpack in my lap when I sat down.
“Can you tell if a person’s insane, even if they don’t know themselves?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “It depends.”
“I had a serious traumatic brain injury.”
“I know. From the scars, I’m guessing a bullet. I did my residency at Yale New Haven in psychiatric emergency. We had a lot of that kind of thing.”
“Went straight through,” I said. “Skimmed the frontal and took out a piece of the parietal and somatosensory cortex.”
“You’ve retained considerable function.”
“Some of it rewiring. Most of it, I think. I’ve had a lot to keep my brain busy.”
“You’re to be commended,” he said.
“Not so sure. Is there a guy named Davis in the bunk next to me?”
He cocked his head and looked at me more closely.
“Davis Anderson. The man with two last names. Why do you ask?”
“I’m wondering about delusions.”
“You’re not bipolar, are you.”
“No,” I said. “But I did have a bad brain injury. I’m wondering how things might evolve after general recovery. That is, after you think you’re okay, can things start to go wrong?”
“Without diagnostic equipment and a rigorous workup, I’d be guessing, too.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I won’t hold you to anything.”
“Then I guess scar tissue,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Not the brain itself, but the skull and related material. It can harden and push down on the grey matter. Shows up over time. It can cause a cascade of mental abnormalities, though nobody exactly knows the process. It’s too rare to get much research attention, but back in the psych ER we saw it enough.”
“The symptoms come on gradually, as the pressure builds,” I suggested.
“Something like that. That scar in front looks very close to important executive functions. That’s where I’d start to look.”
“Personality?” I asked.
“That’s part of it.”
“Paranoid delusion?”
“Sometimes, sure.”
I thanked him and gave him two thousand dollars that I’d extracted from the money belt around my waist when I was in the bathroom a few moments before.
“Wow. Nice surprise,” he said.
“It’s to help out around here. Just don’t give any to The People Project,” I told him. “They’re fine.”
“You should know.”
“I should.”
I walked to the New Haven train station and caught Metro North into Grand Central. From there, I found another shelter specializing in homeless, anonymous men and crawled into another bunk with clean, white, stiff sheets and fell into a paranoia-free sleep for the next twelve hours.
I GOT hold of Strider from a computer in the cathedral that is the New York Public Library. I was in a room with soaring, coffered ceilings, walls lined with real books and desks lit by brass lamps. There were a lot of people surrounding me, but the voices rarely rose above a murmur, even from the tourists passing through, their faces behind clicking smartphones.
“I found it,” she wrote.
“In plain sight,” I wrote back.
“Pretty much. You knew?”
“I had a theory.”
“You could have shared.”
“I needed you to get there on your own,” I wrote. “Did you document?”
“Of course.”
“Can you bar access?”
“Already done. I just had to change a single string of code. Incredibly elegant, but ultimately a little sloppy, if you ask me.”
“Any luck on the IP address of that e-mail string I sent you?”
“Haven’t really been concentrating on that.”
“Could you?”
“Come back in a half hour.”
I logged off and used the time to walk around the stacks and read book spines. I opened a few and enjoyed the typeset pages and aroma of aging paper. I recalled little of the subject matter, probably because I wasn’t really reading, just wandering aimlessly, the working part of my mind preoccupied with other things.
I gave Strider another forty-five minutes before logging back on.
“Didn’t you say you’re from Connecticut?” she wrote.
“I am. Stamford.”
“Greenwich is next door, right?”
“Yup.”
“That’s where the IP is. The e-mail came from somewhere in Downtown Greenwich.”
She gave me a physical address. It was a law firm—Calle, Cowles and Espinoza.
“What’s he doing there?” I asked.
“That’s where the e-mail came from. Don’t know if it’s a him, a her, or an it. To get any closer I’d have to hack their firewall, which is doable, but probably won’t give you a name.”
“That’s okay. Close enough. And nice work.”
“It wasn’t easy,” she wrote. “I’m half dead from lack of sleep and Red Bull overdose. And I had to call in a lot of favors. Exposed myself.”
“Secure the data, pack everything up and take a seriously offline vacation. On me.”
“You’re scary,” she wrote.
“I’m grateful,” I said.
“Is there an end to this?”
“Wait for my signal,” I wrote and signed off.
AMERICA ISN’T a kind place to a person without a car. Luckily, with an abundance of public transportation, not always the cleanest or easiest to navigate, the New York metro area was the least unkind. A string of cabs, trains and shuttle buses got me to La Guardia in Queens. From there, it was a simple matter of finding the sort of limousine service airport security stridently cautioned you to avoid.
Even as a law-abiding market researcher, it was a technique I often used: lurk around where the drivers dropped off their fares and look for the face of a bored, defiant or simply greedy individual. There was no lack of these at La Guardia.
It helped if the driver worked for himself and had a car with impenetrable windows. I profiled a guy with a gross belly, loosened tie and cigarette sticking out of an unkempt face. He told me to go fuck myself. So I tried another guy, slim and elegantly put together, who looked skeptical, but perked up at the roll of cash I flicked in front of him.
“Not here,” he said. “Go to the next terminal and wait at the crosswalk.”
I thought the odds were fifty-fifty, but he showed up and I jumped in.
“What’ll it take for the whole day?” I asked. “Up to Connecticut and back.”
He told me and I said okay, let’s do it.
It was so comfortable in the backseat of the impeccably preserved Crown Vic I almost slid into sleep. The driver, with whom I never exchanged names, felt no need for casual conversation. More likely, chose
reserve as the safer choice. He just nodded and punched the address I gave him into his dash-mounted GPS and we swept up through the urban majesty of New York and onto Connecticut’s narrow greenways.
When we got to Rocky Hill, I asked him to park at the diner a few buildings down from the Jason P. Fellingham Academy of the Military Arts. I gave him half the fee we’d agreed upon and expressed hope that he’d wait for me to earn the other half.
“For an hour. Tops,” he said.
“More than I need.”
The massive woman was at her station at the front entrance. She greeted me as if she’d never seen me before. I bought a ticket, but didn’t bother to ask for Colonel Gross. I knew where to find him.
The door to Archives was open, but Shelly wasn’t at the worktable. I stood and listened, and finally heard shuffling noises coming from inside the towering shelves. I cleared my throat and out he came, holding a stack of accordion folders with both hands.
“Like a bad penny,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too.”
He sat at the worktable and called security, telling them he had a rude, but approved visitor. He assured them he’d hit the alert should any concern arise.
“Will concerns arise?” he asked me, as he hung up the phone.
“That depends.”
“Where’s Miss Fitzgerald?”
“I don’t know. We split up.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It was after we got a visit from Jersey Mitchell. In Zurich. It was the only way to shake the tail. At least I hope we shook the tail.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said, patting his stack of folders, as if assuring them they’d have his attention back in a moment. “Nobody tells me anything.”
“Then how did you know Joselito Gorrotxategi was in an undisclosed maximum security prison?”
“Because they used to tell me things.”
“What if they’re lying?” I said.
“Not a chance. And it’s not a they, it’s a him. Cleanest possible source.”
“Captain Perry?”