“Is that better?”
“A little,” I said, still squinting. “Can I have one of those?”
“Sure.” He tossed me the pack and the book of matches.
“Thanks.” I lit up. I’m not a big smoker. Not sure why, since cancer has never been an issue for me. I think it’s how it makes my lungs feel. Granted, the odds of my needing to employ my long-distance running skills in this day and age are pretty slim, but still. “How’d you get in here?”
“Let myself in,” he replied.
“I gathered that. I’m . . .” I struggled for a minute to remember which name I should be giving him. I know I said I practice that sort of thing, but I’m not generally pressed to come up with it before a shower. “Jason. Jason Stargill.”
“Mike Lycos.” He stepped across the room to offer his hand, which I took. Big hands, hairy knuckles. I could have probably done something about the gun once he strayed close enough to touch, but I held back. Might have been because he hadn’t actually threatened me yet.
“So who do you work for, Mike?” I asked.
“Oh, I didn’t say?” he remarked, feigning surprise. He pulled out a wallet from his pants and held up an identification card. “I’m FBI.”
“Can I see that?” He handed it to me. It looked legit, but since it was only the second one I’d ever seen, I couldn’t be sure. The picture matched, except in the photo he was wearing a suit. I gave it back to him and returned to my water. “What does the FBI want with me?”
“We’re not sure yet,” he admitted. He returned to the chair, reached down under it, and pulled out a file folder. “Let’s start with this.” He stepped over and handed it to me. “Does this person look familiar?”
Inside was a collection of photographs, the very first of which was a woman I did indeed know. “She introduced herself as Ariadne . . . terrible photo,” I added, tapping my finger on it.
“It’s from her ID badge. Her government badge.”
“She works for you guys?”
He didn’t answer. I continued through the photographs and found various action shots of her, including one taken when she leaned in to whisper in my ear. “You look good in profile,” he commented. “That’s definitely your best side there.”
“So who were you following that night? Me or her?”
I didn’t get an answer for that either. He took back the portfolio. “Her name is Ariadne Papos. Up until about six months ago she was a systems analyst for the Bureau.”
“Was?”
“She walked off the job.” He dropped his cigarette butt into the bowl I’d been drinking from not so long ago.
“Uh-huh,” I said, rubbing my eyes and trying to figure out just where the hell this was going. “And systems analyst means what exactly?”
He smiled. “It doesn’t mean anything, Jason. That’s the point. If we called her a homeland security information gatherer, that would just be awkward.”
“ ‘Spy’ is pretty succinct.”
“It is,” he agreed. “But it’s not accurate. Ms. Papos wasn’t a field operative. She was just, well, a systems analyst, like I said. Besides, we’re the FBI. You’re thinking of a different agency.”
“Right.” I got up on my feet and disposed of my own cigarette. “Well this has been fun. Now I think I need a shower, maybe a shave. It was nice talking to you.”
“You never met her before?” he asked.
“Not before that night, no. Now unless you want to tell me why the FBI is so interested in the movements of a retired analyst that breaking and entering is considered a viable option, I think we’re done. Don’t you?”
“What if I told you the last file she accessed from her workstation was yours, Adam?”
That caught me a bit short. “My name is Jason,” I insisted.
“Sure, right now. You’ve had a whole bevy of names, haven’t you?”
Hard to argue with anybody willing to use bevy in a sentence. “What do you mean, ‘my file’?” We were standing nose-to-nose now, or more precisely, my nose to his forehead. He wasn’t all that tall.
“Just what I said. Now you can blow me off if you want, but I’ll have to keep following you until I’ve found out everything I need to know.”
I looked down at him. “What makes you think I can’t shake you?”
He just grinned. “C’mon. We can compare dick size all night.”
“Yeah, all right,” I acquiesced. I was beginning to like Mike, which is a difficult thing to admit, given he was armed and had camped out in my bedroom for goodness knows how many hours. Not to mention the fact he’d been following me before that. But he didn’t remind me of the Romans like most lawmen nowadays do, and I appreciated that.
I didn’t much care for the Romans, if you hadn’t guessed. And I was one.
I paced around to stretch my legs and tried to remind my muscles how to work properly just in case my assessment of Mike was suddenly proven very wrong. “So tell me about my supposed file.”
“What do you want to know?”
“How about what am I doing with a file in the first place?”
“Are you kidding? Your kind of money doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Attention-wise, you’re a very popular man.”
“That makes me feel a whole lot better.”
“It’s not supposed to. Let me explain how the world works nowadays. Thanks to 9/11, there are whole sections of the U.S. government that do nothing but follow money. And there is a lot to follow. If you’ve got more than $500,000 in your account somebody somewhere has a file on you.”
That made some sense. And I should have thought of it myself. “Okay, so, it’s not a big deal, this file?”
“Oh no, it’s a very big deal,” he disagreed. “Especially now.”
Mike was giving me a headache on top of my hangover. “Why now?” I asked, rubbing my temple.
“Ariadne,” he stated, as if this had some special meaning. “Once she walked off her job, I was called in to figure out exactly what she had been up to before she decided to disappear. Based on what we were able to reconstruct from her home hard drive, she’s associated with an organization we believe has terrorist intentions.”
“Guess you don’t vet your employees all that well.” I walked over to the sink, which was actually outside of the bathroom, and splashed some water onto my face. The guy in the mirror looked like hell.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “someone dropped the ball on that one. Anyway, near as we can tell, she’s trying to contact you.”
“She already did,” I pointed out, using the hand towel to dry my face.
“But she didn’t say anything. Right?”
“No, but she did send some wine up.”
“Some of the guys think that was a signal. What do you think?”
I dropped the towel on the counter and sat back down on the bed. “I think she wanted me to have a bottle of wine. Why’s she trying to contact me?”
“That’s what we’d like to know. Based on what I’ve seen, she appears to have developed a profound interest in you. The running theory in the Bureau is that she wants to approach you for financing, which makes some sense.”
“Because I’m rich?” I offered.
“Aren’t you?”
“The hotel is full of rich people. Why me?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly an answer there, Mike.”
“Yeah, well I don’t know the answer. Hence the problem. You traveled here on cash?”
“I did.”
“And what was your thinking there? It’s harder to get things done without plastic. You must know that.”
“Maybe I didn’t want any government agency sticking its nose into my business by tracking my credit card activity.”
He grinned. “Yeah. Saw that in a movie, did you? Look, you’ve got about $87,000 in that suitcase under the bed.”
“I thought you didn’t know where the money was hidden.”
He shr
ugged. “I lied. And I had some time to kill while waiting for you to wake up. Let me explain how folks in my line of work think. There are only three types of people who travel with that much cash specifically because they think it can’t be tracked: crooks, tax evaders, terrorists, or financers of terrorist activities.”
“Gamblers?” I offered.
“Card-counters, maybe. You count cards?”
I shook my head. “How about people who just like looking at big piles of money?”
“Statistically, very unlikely,” he said. “Right now, the house money is on terrorism. And you meeting up with Ariadne Papos just about sealed it.”
“So supposedly I’m already financing her, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s what the thinking is. Not that it makes a ton of sense. She knows you’re under surveillance, or she should, so the way you two made contact doesn’t fit. Too clumsy. But nobody seems to be listening to me when I point that out.”
Now I was pacing. It’s a little tough discovering exactly how transparent your activities have been when you spend so much time trying to prevent exactly that.
“I’m confused,” I admitted. “Are FBI agents in the practice of waking up suspected terrorists in their hotel rooms and telling them they think they’re a terrorist?”
“Habitually no, not unless there’s torture involved, and again, that’s usually not in our charter. We have the CIA for that.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
“Sort of. I’m not here in an entirely official capacity.”
“You want to translate that for me?”
“They don’t know we’re talking,” he clarified.
“That’s fantastic.”
Mike lit another cigarette, and continued. “We’ve had someone on you since you left the Queen Charlottes. The idea was to monitor your activities and see who you contacted, that sort of thing. None of which I was a part of. Ariadne is my problem. But when she turned up next to you on a barstool, the cases dovetailed. Since they think you’re the bigger fish, their investigation ate mine and I ended up part of a team. I’m not fond of teams.”
“You picked a funny profession then,” I said.
“I guess. But every pack can tolerate one or two lone wolves.”
With all the talk of wolves, fish, and investigations being eaten, I suddenly realized how hungry I was.
“Anyway,” he said, “I am of the minority opinion that Ariadne is the one we should be worrying about, not you. So rather than bang my head against a wall, I handed over my case files and took a vacation. They think I’m in Maui.”
“Maybe you should be. It’s nice there.” I picked up the phone to order some food.
“I’m more of a hiker type. Who are you calling?”
“Room service. I’m starved.”
“Please don’t,” he said, somewhat urgently.
“Why not?” I asked, half-expecting him to put his hand on his gun.
“Because the guy who delivers it will be an agent. Probably Ralph, unless his shift is over. And it’ll be Linda who takes the order.”
“No shit?”
“I told you; you’re under constant surveillance.”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Since you got into town, except for maybe a few hours there when you switched hotels. Right now they’re trying to figure out how come none of the bugs they planted in here work anymore.”
“You removed them?”
“Yeah, while you were asleep.”
“I suppose there’s a camera in the hallway too?”
Mike blew out a puff of smoke. “There’s always a camera in the hallway. They just jacked into hotel surveillance. Cheaper. And good news for us; casinos can’t put cameras in the rooms.”
“Okay. So how’d you get in here without being seen?” I asked.
“Balcony.”
I stared at him for a long time because that was just about impossible. The room did have a small balcony, but it was separated from the balcony for the next room by about fifteen feet of air, and from the ground by three stories. Hard to believe he made either jump.
“You seem to have gone through a whole lot of trouble just to find out I don’t know anything about Ariadne Papos.”
He smiled. “I already knew that.”
I fell back onto the bed and surrendered to the notion that none of this was going to be making any sense anytime soon. “You risked your job to enter the room of a guy who your bosses think is a terrorist to ask him a question you already knew the answer to? Tell you what; how about I go back to sleep, you jump out the window, and we’ll pretend this never happened, okay?”
“I think we can help each other,” he said.
“Really? What sort of help did you have in mind?”
“I’m guessing you don’t much care to be under a government eyeball. I know the protocols; I can help you disappear.”
“I can disappear on my own just fine,” I said.
“Bet that’s what you thought when you left the island with all that cash,” he said, flicking his cigarette and letting the ashes fall on the floor.
He had a point. “What can I do for you?”
“Ariadne is interested in you, so I am too. I think you can help me find her.”
This had to be one of the more preposterous conversations I’d had in my very, very long life. Mike was either completely lying to me, or he was keeping significant portions of the story to himself, and I wasn’t sure which. All I knew for certain was that the man standing in my bedroom was willing to risk a great deal to find a woman I’d spent all of two minutes with. I mean okay, she was pretty, but really. It just didn’t add up.
I got up from the bed. “I’m going to take a shower. Then I’m going to order some room service and have a nice, big meal. After that, I’m going to check myself out of this hotel and go on a long vacation somewhere. You can do whatever you want.”
He stood up as well. “I think you’re underestimating the persistence of a coordinated FBI surveillance team.”
“And I think they’re underestimating me . . . as are you.”
“Maybe so. You’re still making a mistake.” He tilted his head at me in a way not dissimilar to that of a dog who thinks he might have heard his master’s voice but isn’t entirely sure. “What did Ariadne say to you? Aside from her name.”
“She told me I was being followed.”
“Why do you think she warned you?”
“I don’t know. Why did you?”
“To gain your confidence.”
“There you go.” I offered him my hand, which he took. “It’s been weird,” I admitted. “Call ahead next time.”
“Can’t guarantee that.” He smiled. He obviously thought there was going to be a next time.
“Guess not,” I said. “I take it you can show yourself out?”
He glanced over to the balcony. “Sure; not a problem.”
* * *
In the shower, I reflected on the foolishness of what I’d just done, meaning specifically that I had left an armed man in my hotel room with a large supply of cash while I stood naked with nothing to protect me other than a flimsy—and certainly not bullet-proof—shower curtain. Either this meant that something about Mike made me want to trust him, or my low blood-sugar level was affecting my judgment.
Anyway, it was a pretty quick shower. And when I emerged from the bathroom, I found Mike had indeed let himself out. My money was exactly where it was supposed to be. And on the bed was a small pile of silver disks; he’d left me the electronic bugs.
The balcony door was open. I stuck my head outside and looked around, but there was nothing to see except a parking lot.
Of course he couldn’t have actually left that way. It wasn’t possible.
DION. TRULY, I HAVE HAD MANY THINGS. BUT POSSESSIONS ONLY BRING HAPPINESS IF EMPLOYED CORRECTLY. TO HAVE IS NOT A REASON UNTO ITSELF.
From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text c
orrected and translated by Ariadne
The funny thing about knowing you’re being followed because someone thinks you’re suspicious, is that once you know that, you really can’t help but act suspicious.
I spent the next few days taking little trips out of the hotel, and since I hadn’t been doing that before, it had to have gotten some attention. Likewise, my tendency to break into an occasional sprint probably raised a few eyebrows.
I know a little bit about surveillance. In the mid-seventeen hundreds, a French duke hired me to find out which of his friends was plotting to kill him. Since he was a high functioning paranoid with a lot of friends and an impressive imagination, this took a long time and plenty of extra staff, and was helped along by the fact that none of his friends were actually plotting anything against him. I think I could have held the position for a few decades had he not been poisoned by his own wife. We never checked her. I almost feel bad about this.
Anyway, I left the casino because then the people following my movements couldn’t use casino cameras and had to actually walk around with me, and that made my prior experience mildly useful.
With a little effort, I was able to identify between three and four agents rotating on me. I could shake three or four people if this were still the mid-seventeen hundreds. It wasn’t, so I couldn’t be positive I was accounting for everything.
Fortunately, I know a better class of criminal than myself.
* * *
“Please say that again,” Tchekhy urged. The discontent in his voice was palpable. I could have opened with telling him I was on a prepaid cell phone I had just bought and was standing outside the casino, before telling him about the whole government-watching-everything-I-do thing, but I wanted to make him a little nervous because it was his own fault I was in Las Vegas in the first place. An immortal man who hates official attention shouldn’t be anywhere near this many private surveillance cameras, FBI or no. I expected better from him.
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