Yes, lady, it was a nightmare. That crash killed my wife and broke both my knees. That’s what I’d call a nightmare.
Chapter Seventeen
Ice Skater drove slowly toward New York City. He didn’t want to get too far too fast in case Teagarden turned up somewhere in the woods of the Catskills. But he doubted that would happen. He sensed his prey had escaped him a second time. First at the house, now from the woods surrounding his house. Maybe he’d stolen a car or hitched a ride with an ally. Either way, he was confident that Teagarden was headed for the big city where it would be easier for a fugitive to hide.
He smiled at the idea. This was fun. It’d be more fun in New York City.
In a short period of time he’d likely receive another communication from the DFC in Washington on his target’s whereabouts. When he did, he’d quickly be back on the trail. He’d eventually get this fox. But with this development, he’d get him his way. If it turned out that his way was not the bureau’s way—well, tough. What were they going to do? Arrest him?
Chapter Eighteen
The passing trees, cars, billboards, and guard rails had a hypnotic effect on Teagarden during the balance of the trip, allowing his intuition to kick in.
Just as when he’d awakened that morning in the bluestone alcove while looking at the opossum, a couple of insights bubbled to the surface. They came to him after a quick glance at the thirty-four printed pages. They contained rows and columns of numbers, encrypted messages written in hand, first with a fountain pen, then a ball point over a period of years, maybe decades. Before getting his Ph.D. in advanced mathematics at Columbia he’d been an entry level code analyst with the CIA long enough to know encryption when he saw it. Cryptanalysis had been a lifelong sideline. Over the years, he’d padded his income quite nicely with private consultation to companies looking to better encrypt their corporate secrets in the era of fifteen-year-old computer whiz kids, not to mention presidential campaign hacking by Russia.
What’s more, Stuart Shelbourn Jr. was right. With little more than gut instinct, Teagarden was confident he could decode the entire file. Those pages weren’t ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Neither were they the Nazi Enigma machine. On the surface, they appeared complicated, but there was something about the sequences that looked familiar to him, even simple. To help his instincts advance to the next step, however, required peace of mind, and a computer. So it would have to wait.
As for the pursuers who wanted him dead, several possibilities came to mind. He was dealing with an organized intelligence group whose principal motivation was the encoded file tucked inside the pocket of his Hasidic overcoat. That’s why they were at his house. They wanted the hardcopy snail-mailed to his P.O. Box. But if he was right, and they were as sophisticated as they seemed, he should not have been able to download the e-mailed copy. That message from Shelbourn should have been deleted as though it were the darkest secret of Beelzebub. He should have seen only utility bills in his inbox and unwanted sales pitches in his spam box. Whoever they were, they certainly had the capacity to delete e-mails with photocopied attachments.
The fact that he did download it could mean there was a bureaucratic screw-up. Or maybe it was because someone had a beef with their higher-ups. Teagarden tilted toward the latter. He guessed that Harry was pissed about something, so he allowed the download to take place as an act of insubordination. His countdown clock reinforced it. It revealed something freakish about Harry’s personality, which made Teagarden wonder if he could eventually make that “something” work to his benefit. If so, he might be able to make Harry become what people like him are typically called in news reports—“a disgruntled former employee.”
There was plenty to think about during the bus trip. He’d left his house with only his wallet, cellphone and the clothes on his back. He needed things like cash, a change of clothing, food, a toothbrush, a laptop, a new cellphone, and pain medication for his knees. Hell, he needed a whole new identity. Worse, he couldn’t pay for any of it with his MasterCard. Just one swipe with that magnetic strip at a clothing store, and police would likely be booking him for murder before he could get outside and hail a cab.
If that happened, he guessed that Harry would simply disappear. Teagarden’s emotional call with the 9-1-1 dispatcher and the body of eleven-year-old Billy Carney was all it would take for them to label him a paranoid schizophrenic and put him away for years. They’d probably say the snap with reality was caused by the recent death of his wife.
It was almost as though he were peering into the future. His future. And he did not like what he saw.
The bus glided into Port Authority in the late afternoon. It ascended an internal helix and came to a smooth stop as though programmed by a higher power.
Knees aching, Torah in hand, Teagarden headed off on foot, looking like nothing unusual. Dressed as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, he was as common to the teeming streets of New York City as were people talking into dangling phone wires, women with spiders tattooed on their legs, and kids with the waistline of their jeans sagging to mid-buttocks.
His first order of business was simple. Like everyone else, he needed money, but in his case, it had to be old-fashioned cash.
Chapter Nineteen
New York City
Teagarden couldn’t remember why he knew about fox hunting.
A smart fox will run a zig-zag pattern to throw off the dogs. A dumb fox will simply bolt hard in a straight line. Dogs prefer a dumb fox because it makes them look better when they quickly catch the prey. Hunters prefer a smart fox because it’s more fun.
He’d never been a hunter, and had no idea where this knowledge came from. Maybe he’d seen a documentary on PBS. But there was a flaw in the whole theory. It didn’t take into account what the prey wished for—which was survival. Smart or not, the fox will always trust to his luck and hope that he’s been paired with a pack of dogs as dumb as they come because it increases his odds of living another day.
That’s what he was naturally hoping, to be a smart fox running from dumb hunters. Outsmarting Harry meant zig-zagging around New York City to get the things he needed, the basic creature comforts of life. Except for summers and weekends at their house in Bethel, he and Kendra called Manhattan home for two decades. He knew the city well and loved the wonderful, mad streets of America’s biggest city.
He considered going uptown to their one-bedroom co-op near Columbia University which he still owned. He hadn’t been back since shortly after Kendra was killed when he needed to retrieve her last will and testament. During that visit, he was only in the apartment ten minutes to avoid breaking into heavy sobbing. Besides, the apartment was now sublet to a pair of graduate students and it was certain to be under surveillance by whoever wanted him dead.
Forget it, the risk is too great. I have to figure another way without going uptown.
He walked north through Times Square, looking to make his first move. A giant sign on the façade of the Marriott Marquis Hotel portrayed Mick Jagger in neon and screamed details of an upcoming Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden.
Wow, Jagger must be pushing eighty.
The first time he saw The Stones was at age six when his parents took him to the same venue. They were huge rock fans, which explained his birth on the final night of the Woodstock Music Festival. His parents loved The Stones and his wife loved them just as much. He first saw them with Kendra during the Steel Wheels tour in ’89 when Jagger was forty-six, three years younger than Teagarden was now.
The year 1989—wow. Thirty years and a lifetime ago. How did I get to be this old? And yet I’m not really that old. It’s more than a mystery of numbers. Mere numbers and the passage of time do not suffice as explanation. As a Ph.D. in advanced mathematics, I ought to know. But I don’t. Neither did Einstein.
Between Times Square and Central Park, he selected a four-block stretch of Broadway that had a dozen storefront mini-banks. Keeping his wide-brimmed black
hat pulled low to cover his eyes, he entered one after the other to pump cash from the ATMs. At each, he withdrew a thousand dollars, the maximum allowed per ATM, per branch, on his new Gold Customer card with Downstate Regional Bank of New York which had the best CD rates at a time when all rates were laughably poor.
While watching the slot spit money like playing cards, he held cautious vigil in the security mirror over each ATM. The reflection of the convex lens made everything behind him appear distorted, like the past twenty-four hours of his life. Before departing each cash machine, he carefully folded the money and tucked it inside the breast pocket of his Hasidic coat where it lived with the thirty-four pages of coded numbers printed at Camp Summer Shevat.
He’d intentionally chosen a particular bank as the twelfth and last because it had an internal stairway to the IRT Subway line. Before entering the subway, he snapped his ATM card in half, then into quarters and dropped the pieces into the trash bin. He removed his MasterCard and did the same, letting the security camera see his hands as they made a showy display of it, like the hands of a magician performing a card trick.
That was the first zig. Now for the first zag.
He took a downtown subway to the trendy SoHo neighborhood and wandered until he found one of those large clothing store chains that occupy a big chunk of real estate at every mall in America. Typically, the men’s clothing was stacked on tables to the right; women’s clothing on tables to the left. There was no need to try on anything. His size hadn’t changed in years. Besides, going into the dressing room to try on ordinary street clothes while dressed as a Hasid would draw unwanted curiosity. He selected one pair of jeans, one shirt, one pair of socks, one pair of boxers, and a plain army green baseball cap.
Everything went smoothly until he encountered the young lady at the checkout counter with a ridiculous tattoo of concentric black-and-white circles on her neck. The bull’s eye of the target was halfway between her left earlobe and clavicle. Except for that, she was quite attractive. While ringing him up, she couldn’t restrain her impulses.
“Why, Rabbi, you’ve made some way cool choices here,” she said with a sexy smile. “My boyfriend couldn’t have done better. You’re not going undercover to do anything naughty are you?”
He was ready for her.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
“Ohh,” she teased. “Well, I’ll never tell. I hope it’s something really fun for you.”
Her eyes lit up with phony enthusiasm. Her breasts jiggled at him as she leaned over the counter to fold the jeans and shirt. He nodded appreciation of her innuendo and vigorously rubbed his beard.
Is this some kind of smarty-pants anti-Semitism?
He decided to play along.
“It’s like this. I have tickets to see The Stones next month at Madison Square Garden. Do you have any idea how much trouble there would be if someone from my synagogue saw me there?”
“Oh well, in that case,” she said, her voice shifting from sexy to sarcasm, “you’ll need a pair of these.” She reached into a cabinet on the counter and withdrew a pair of military style wrap-around sunglasses. “These will help conceal your secret identity while you’re undercover watching those old guys trying to be hip.”
Wow! Who’s this twit to make fun of Mick’s age? Okay, so she’s not an anti-Semite. She’s just a twenty-something, know-it-all.
“I’ll take them,” Teagarden said.
After paying, he put on his new sunglasses and took his bag filled with new clothing.
“By the way,” he said to the lady with the bull’s eye on her neck, “when I’m undercover watching The Stones, I’ll still be a smart man doing God’s work. You, on the other hand, will be a dumb shiksa with a dumb neck tattoo who works in a dumb store and spends all her spare time schtupping her equally dumb goyim boyfriend.”
Tah-dah!
He departed the store to the sound of sniggers from customers standing behind him in the checkout line. He was immediately sorry. It meant they’d all remember him. But hell, sometimes you’ve just got to give it back when they deserve it. You especially have to give it back to the twenty-somethings who believe chatspeak is the height of Western civilization and constitutes all you need to know about anything.
He took a crosstown bus to a drugstore near the Lower East Side where he purchased a pack of disposable razors, shaving foam, aftershave, toothpaste and toothbrush, scissors, and a large container of the strongest over-the-counter NSAID medication he could find. From the back-to-school aisle, he selected a spiral notebook, pens, a Post-it pad and a backpack.
Once again, there was difficulty at the checkout counter. This time, it had to do with the populace of the Lower East Side. Though the neighborhood had morphed into mostly hipsters, the elderly man at the cash-register was a holdover from earlier times who wanted to converse in Yiddish. When Teagarden waved him off as though he were in a hurry or a bad mood, the old man became offended. Unfortunately, he too would remember his encounter with the oddly behaving Hasid. Teagarden was trying hard to be forgettable, if not invisible, but his disguise was working against him.
Next up, he needed an internet login, and a laptop.
He took the East Side subway back to Midtown. In a private stall in the men’s room of the Midtown Manhattan Library, he popped two NSAID tablets for his knee pain, then shed the heavy outfit. Using the pen knife on his key chain, he removed the store tags and put on his new clothing. He stashed his cellphone, toiletries, newly purchased writing pads, and thirty-four-page document in the backpack. He ditched his old clothing and stolen Hasidic exterior in the bathroom trash bin, pushing the garments down so they sank below the soft topping of paper towels flooding the bin’s edge.
Much changed in appearance, he patrolled the rows of publicly available computers, selecting one that had been abandoned while the latest user was still logged on. He inserted his USB, also attached to his keychain, into a port on the back of the machine and began loading encryption software.
launch.txt
quicklaunch.txt
initiate webpass.exe/view/etext/extract
download files
start.exepass.ifile.password/zebra-override
start.exepass.ifile.password/selectfiles
start.exepass.ifile.password/usernames
start.exepass.ifile.password/logins
save as launch.bat
download to usb drive: port2
Being an independent consultant on computer encryption and decryption, he was competent on the ins and outs of basic software. It looks complicated, but the little-known secret was that it’s not really very mysterious. Like a foreign language, once you get the basics, you know enough for elementary communication.
He extracted his USB from the port for later use.
Still using the active login left by the prior computer user, he researched tourist hostels in Manhattan where he hoped to secure a room without a credit card or proper identification. He found one that might work called Madison Park Euro Lodge in the Flatiron District, which seemed to be for tourists on a budget. He made a reservation online as Tom Samuels from North Carolina who’d be paying cash and printed the confirmation.
Now it was time to get a message to his daughter. The idea came to him during the bus ride to the city. Her favorite movie as a kid had been Dogfight Girl, about a female F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot, which first made her want to go into the U.S. Navy. As a child, she was so smitten with the idea that he and Kendra nicknamed her Dogfight Daughter. She responded by enthusiastically naming her parents Dogfight Dad and Dogfight Mom.
He typed the message.
To: Eva Ghent
Subject: Dogfight Girl Sequel/Advance Planning
Dear Major Ghent Tactical Combat Training Team, NAS Key West:
As assistant to the producers for the planned sequel to the movie, Dogfight Girl, I am contacting you to arrange future advice and assistance. The working title is Still a Dogfig
hter Pilot.
Do not be concerned with advance negative publicity.
Thank you, we look forward to your response.
Best Regards
Sr. Assistant Producer
He knew the e-mail would land in her Junk box. He knew too that she would open it because of the subject line. She would figure its true meaning when she saw her father’s image splashed on national news. She would also understand that his reference to negative publicity meant his present dilemma.
Now for a new computer.
A block away, was a store informally known by New Yorkers as “The Big BM,” the nickname for the brick-and-mortar outlet owned by the king of online retail. It was a huge open-floored space where customers sat at computer consoles to research, order, and buy just about anything that existed. The unique attraction of the brick-and-mortar version was that instead of waiting for delivery by snail-mail, your purchase was handled by robots, and delivered to your position in minutes—also by robots.
Computers, books, and clothing arrived from massive underground warehouses. When the item was stored at a warehouse in Queens, high speed drones took to the air, landing on the roof of The Big BM building, which functioned as a landing strip. There, an army of robots received and unloaded the drone, swept the bar code, and sent the item flowing downward through the building to the position of the purchaser on the main sales floor.
Before ordering, Teagarden browsed what was available. Among the new showcased offerings was the much buzzed about “PC Packets,” or “Flexi-Flats,” as they were called in television ads. It was a package of ten sheets of thin plastic that could be adhered to any surface and, when activated, perform all the functions of a personal computer. Each square was about the size of a paper-towel, with the life-expectancy of six months. But at a price of twenty thousand dollars for a pack of four, most consumers stayed away.
Flight of the Fox Page 6