Flight of the Fox
Page 7
Teagarden opted for a plain-old laptop on sale for seven hundred dollars. Thankfully there was nothing memorable about this purchase. He fed eight one-hundred-dollar bills into the machine at his console position and received his change. Seven minutes later, the robotic automation gently lowered an attaché-shaped cardboard box to the countertop where he waited while sipping a complimentary cup of hot tea.
Zig and zag complete.
Chapter Twenty
Madison Park Euro Lodge
“I’m sorry, I simply don’t have it. As I’ve explained, I lost my driver’s license.”
He spoke to the lady at the front desk of Madison Park Euro Lodge in a sticky sweet southern accent. It was the third time he had told her that he didn’t have proper ID, yet she never looked up from her computer screen. She continued typing and mouse clicking as though it were vastly more important. His irritation index was growing.
The reception area was small. Besides her work alcove, there was a two-seater couch and two folding chairs. A large, flat-panel TV on the wall opposite the couch was tuned to a quasi-news program about the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival. The opening ceremony was just over seven days away. Once begun, the celebration was scheduled to last a full month, ending on the day that happened to be his fiftieth birthday. So far, no one from the media had contacted him for an interview as one of the “Woodstock babies.”
He decided on another tack.
“Actually, I didn’t lose it,” he said, drawing out the syllables with an oozing North Carolinian drawl. “They stole it. My bicycle, too.”
“Uh-oh,” she said, still not looking up from her screen. “Did they hurt you?”
He guessed she was about forty-seven or forty-eight. Judging from her appearance and accent, she was likely Eastern European, maybe from one of the Balkans, probably working the front desk at the hostel in exchange for free board. She wasn’t bad looking, but neither was she attractive. Her body was relatively slender, the face unnaturally round and plump, her breasts disproportionately large. The most unattractive thing about her was her curt manner. Teagarden reminded himself that in a post-9/11 world, hotel clerks were required to ask for proper ID.
“Could be worse,” he said. He rubbed one side of his head. “They knocked me off my bike on the New Jersey Palisades before I crossed into the city on the GW Bridge. I was outnumbered. One of me, three of them. They took my bike and wallet. Lucky for me I always keep my money in a separate compartment. I learned to do that on my last biking trip through Arizona.”
“I know that area up there. It is beautiful on those New Jersey cliffs above the Hudson River. I hear that some movie stars live there. But it is bad, too. There are many hidden places for the bad kids to hide.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve learned that the hard way. I had dismounted to look at the view of the Manhattan skyline. That’s when they came up from behind.”
She nodded absently.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I have your e-mail confirming my reservation. I booked it at the main library in Midtown. And I’ve requested a quick replacement of my driver’s license from Raleigh. I gave this address. They promised emergency delivery in a couple of days. Hope that’s okay.” She nodded again. “So I’d like to pay for three nights in advance.”
She glanced at the printed confirmation from Madison Park Euro Lodge and his handful of cash.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re okay.” She keyed in his registration on the desktop. “Did you bike all the way from…down there?”
“Down there?”
For the first time, she looked straight in his eyes.
“Is not Raleigh down there?” she asked. Her tone was defensive, as though he’d accused her of not knowing Raleigh’s geographic whereabouts.
“Oh—that—down there,” he said, trying to recover to a friendly footing. “Yes, yes,” he said, thinking his accent must be working. Having attended undergraduate school in Chapel Hill, he knew it really was the way locals talk—down there.
“So, you are biking with a church group?”
“No. This trip is solo. My wife recently passed away. It’s my way of getting out, remembering, honoring. You know, YOLO. I’m trying to be young again while I still have my health and the summer off. I’m a math teacher.”
She was instantly bored with his story.
“Okay, okay” she said. “Just sign this card. Here is your key. Room 412. It has a little bit view of Madison Square Park. There is no air conditioner and no bathroom. The bathroom is down the hall. Please give respect and help us keep it clean. No smoking in the rooms or loud music. If you need something I am here at the front desk or in my room, number 413, which is next to yours.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Encrypted Field Communication
NSA Apache Code Ofc Baltimore, MD/Washington, DC/CoinTelSatOrbit53/Bethel, NY
TO: ice skater
FROM: deep field cmdr
SUBJECT: operation dear john
deep field cmdr to ice skater: telsat alerted…fox’s bank accts tapped in nyc…
ice skater to deep field cmdr: great…just great…u told me all cards were canceled…
deep field cmdr to ice skater: screw-up at cointelsat desk…they killed mstcard…dri. lic…but missed cash bank card…must be new acct…
ice skater to deep field cmdr: great…and u tell me no more f/u’s…let’s fix probs on your end at hq…and release more drones to me…what u say?
deep field to ice skater: regarding screw-ups…how’d your fox get to nyc?…
ice skater to deep field cmdr: seems he dressed as heb…slipped through…
deep field cmdr to ice skater: and u complain about screw-ups at telsat desk???…eyes only on 10th floor getting just as worried about u as your fox…get to nyc…now…pick-up one surveil. drone model f-89 at javits fed bldg.…canvas all hotels from the waldorf to fleabags…now…and get your fox…now…
ice skater to deep field cmdr: already on way…out
Chapter Twenty-Two
Madison Park Euro Lodge
As hotels and hostels go, it was one level above flophouse, yet it was in the trendy Flatiron District, which was more trendy than SoHo.
The tiny room had an old picture tube TV dating to the late twentieth century. Made of dirty white plastic and shaped like a loaf of bread, it was mounted to a turntable bolted to an oversized bureau. He turned it on. There was no cable or DSL, so the video didn’t work, but it had a built-in radio that worked fine. He tuned-in the Yankee game.
The single bed was passably firm. Directly over the headboard hung a cheaply framed poster of Guernica, Picasso’s gray, black, and white masterpiece of Spanish farmers and livestock in the Basque country being blown up by bombs. For a moment, he wondered if he should worry about bed bugs, but let it go.
If Kendra were with me, she’d tear the bedding apart and scour every inch of the linens and mattress with the flashlight she always carried when traveling.
He dumped the contents of his backpack on the bed, including sandwiches and a bottle of beer purchased at a deli on his way to the hostel. He took what he needed and walked to the bathroom, lugging his boxed-up laptop with him. The last thing he needed was to have his room robbed while he was down the hall shaving.
When he tugged on the bathroom doorknob, he got a soprano-pitched earful.
“It’s occupied. Take it easy.”
Other guests came and went from their rooms while he waited his turn. They were mostly young people who trucked noisily down the staircase, happy to be heading out for a night of clubbing in New York City. When the bathroom door opened, it was the same curtly unpleasant woman who’d checked him in.
“Oh, sorry,” Teagarden said to the receptionist. “I must have chec
ked in just as your shift was ending. I hope I didn’t delay you.”
“It is no problem,” she said, “I had double-shift today. But my work is finally finished.”
She regarded him with a different demeanor, no longer borderline hostile, though she still spoke with a psychologically flat affect. It made him wonder if she wasn’t molded by something dreadful. If she was from the Balkans, she would have been a child or teenager during some of those war years in Bosnia and Kosovo where the list of nastiness included bombing, torture, rape, murder.
“Mr. Samuels, I was just going to have some wine in my room. If you would like to join me, you may be my guest. It is Sicilian red. Not bad.” She made the invitation without a beat of hesitation.
Teagarden was taken completely off guard.
“Oh, thank you,” he mumbled. “May I take a rain check?”
“Of course.”
Unruffled, she turned and walked back to her room.
Whatever the details, he felt confident that her personal story was ugly, which made him feel sorry for her.
In the bathroom, Teagarden clipped his beard with his new scissors, tossing handfuls of whiskers into the toilet. He lathered and shaved with the disposable blue plastic razor. After rinsing, his skin stung mightily, making him glad for the Old Spice aftershave.
He studied his face in the dirty mirror. It was the first time he’d been clean-shaven since he was a twenty-one-year-old graduate student at GW University. Having met his wife at Columbia where he got his Ph.D., she’d never seen him without facial hair. Near the end of her life, in teasing imitation of Billy Carney, she also took to calling him Old Abe. The thought of them both made him grieve all over again. It took all the strength he could summon to push off a double wave of sadness.
I don’t look so old. I may be moving in on fifty, but without the beard, heck—I look closer to forty-nine.
Back in his room, while eating his turkey-cheddar sandwich and sipping beer, he unboxed his new computer, hooked the cord to an outlet, booted up and registered the machine with the manufacturer as Tom Samuels of Raleigh, North Carolina. As with all trendy neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Flatiron District had nearly universal Wi-Fi.
He inserted his USB, clicked on the USB icon, and downloaded the contents labeled “launch.bat” which he’d run on the public desktop in the Main Midtown Library. He initiated the file, which immediately launched a menu of six identities and passwords that users had foolishly allowed the library computer to remember.
It wasn’t much. But Teagarden hoped it was enough. Odds were that none of them was overly tech savvy because they’d all left personal information on a public hard drive for anyone to steal. If he were interested, he could probably download bank account numbers and be transferring funds before the night was over. But all he wanted was a login ID that Harry, Sheriff Klumm and the New York State Police didn’t know about.
The first was a military man. No, thanks.
Number two looked like a hormone bursting teenage male who was probably a video-gamer. That meant he knew about computers, and the fact that his ID was left on a public hard drive was suspicious. That made him a big nope. As a fugitive, Teagarden didn’t need to be suckered into some other hacker’s sticky trap.
Next up was Ms. O’Malley, possibly a tourist from mid-America, maybe checking-in on her driveway security camera. She ought to be good.
He continued down the list.
The next one was clearly a football fan from Denver. She’d be okay, too.
Then there’s a lady from who-knows-where who either loves asparagus or hates asparagus.
Finally, Mr. Dan Jones with the password “yellow4submarine.” A Beatles fan.
He’s probably older than I am, and uses computers mostly for typing, so he ought to be safe too.
Teagarden keyed in the SolarRay web browser, downloaded the Orange Circle e-mail provider and logged on as danjones.
Beauteous.
Mr. Jones’ inbox was ordinary. Much like his own, it was loaded with bills. There were debt notices from a power company in Missouri; a national-based cellphone company; two credit cards from banks in Canton, Missouri; a nursing home in Quincy, Illinois; and an auto insurance company in St. Louis. There were several e-mails from Sandy, one with a subject line reading: “Oh Dan, please let us hear from you.”
He couldn’t resist. He opened it.
From: sandyjones@orangecircle.com
To: danjones@orangecircle.com
Dear Dan,
We are all so worried. What are you doing in that New York City. I am very worried for your safety.
There are too many Muslims there. It’s a bad place. Whatever I did, I am sorry. Please let me hear from you again, so we can talk about it.
Your mother sends her love. It was her 90th birthday yesterday and the nurses gave her a cupcake with a candle & sang happy birthday.
Please call.
Love,
Your wife, Sandy.
Perfect. This man is definitely not worrying about the integrity of his passwords.
How ironic was this? Here he was, stealing the ID of a man who was also on the run in New York City, though for vastly different reasons. Whoever Dan Jones was, he wasn’t running for his life, more likely he was running from it. He was probably pissed, sick and tired, and, as they say, “just couldn’t take it anymore.” Maybe he got fired for the umpteenth time, or his sex life was lousy, or he just learned he had brain cancer. Whatever it was, Teagarden sensed that Dan Jones might be suicidal.
Hang in, Dan. My wife was killed on the New York State Thruway while sitting right next to me. My dog was killed. The neighbor’s boy was murdered and the police think I did it. Plus, a team of sociopaths is stalking me, trying to kill me with high-powered sniper rifles and poison-shooting drones. If I can endure all that, you can certainly endure the lyrics to the country music song playing inside your head.
The Yankees lost. When the station went back to all-news, there was no mention of Billy Carney, but then, he was in New York City now. He guessed it would take a while longer for his fugitive status to go statewide, then national.
In bed, he stared at the sequences of numbers on the thirty-four pages. Every entry was brief and written by the same masculine hand that inked each small, meticulously noted number. Teagarden had already guessed they were diary entries. He now saw from the uniform pressure of the pen that they were all written with attentive care, almost like a scribe from the Middle Ages.
Interestingly, each page was topped by a different eight-digit heading, and every passage under the page heading began with the same eight-number series. The heading on the first page was: 10906010.
It was followed by a dozen diary-type entries, all in numbers and each beginning with the same eight numbers: 44, 55, 11, 18, 99, 15, 77, 14.
He flipped forward. The eight digit heading on the second page was: 38124072.
It was followed by only half-a-dozen entries, each beginning with an identical paired number sequence, yet different from the previous page: 88, 51, 42, 17, 9, 5, 77, 91, 63.
The heading on the third page was followed by nearly two-dozen separate entries, each of them also began with a repetition of identical numbers.
It was a consistent pattern. There were repeated sequences within each page. Yet when comparing separate pages, the numbers were different.
Teagarden saw the meaning immediately. Each page was encoded with a different pre-set cipher. He was looking at thirty-four separate codes, each requiring its own formula for decryption. Though each page had a unique coding system, he sensed that all were drawn from a similar coding concept.
Too tired to begin transcribing numbers for letters, he speculated about what those repetitive headers might signify when decoded: attn staff, take note, desk memo, code name, eyes only.
Of course, it wasn’t guaranteed that each number corresponded to its own particular letter. Each repetitive sequence
could signify its own pre-set word, or pairs of letters, in which case the meaning could be: time sensitive, general order, undercover agent, field encrypted, begin communication.
He worked it until he drifted to sleep, his face staring into the illuminated screen of his new laptop, his head dreaming variously of his wife, Cynthia, Sheriff Klumm, Harry the bad man, Billy Carney, the Hasidim of Camp Summer Shevat, and Dan Jones. Each of them was surrounded by swarms of numbers that could spin, fly and hover. Amid the floating numbers, Coconut appeared sitting under a scripted banner flapping in the wind: “Kill a Man’s Dog, Break a Man’s Rules.”
It was not a pleasant dream.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Monday, July 22, 2019
He was shaken awake by raucous commotion during the wee hours.
It seemed to be happening on two fronts, in both adjacent rooms. At first he thought he’d awakened in the middle of some Roman orgy. The sounds of orgasmic copulation raged all around him, banging the walls, rocking his bed.
Oh, brother.
Teagarden rubbed his eyes and sat up on the side of the single bed. His newly shaved face still felt odd to the touch. The radio was on, tuned to an all-news station. He shut it off. The digital read-out glared the time: 2:43 a.m. The room was partially illuminated by the shadowy glow from street lights.
He got up and sat by the window. The orgy in the room next door was making the cheaply framed poster of Picasso’s Guernica vibrate.
Oh, brother.
Well, at least it’s not Sheriff Klumm or Harry the furnace and A/C repairman breaking down the door to capture or kill him. Outside, the lamps of Madison Square Park reflected in a misty fog. It must have rained while he was sleeping. The fog made the park look romantic, like a picture postcard on a steamy summer night.