by Chris Knopf
At the exit, the only real option was the main road. I made the turn, then slipped into another parking lot, this one serving a restaurant and a low row of tidy shops. I slowed to a slightly less homicidal speed and looked in the rearview mirror in time to see the SUV pass behind me on the main road. I gunned it again and got back to the main road, heading in the opposite direction.
I pushed my way as hard as I could through the loping traffic, with a greater eye in the rearview than the road ahead of me. With good reason, as I saw the SUV reappear, many cars back, but gaining rapidly.
“Shit, shit,” I said.
“You never say shit,” said Natsumi.
“Have to start sometime. I wish this car was a little faster.”
“I think we wanted good gas mileage,” said Natsumi, through clenched teeth. “I’m getting seasick.”
In what felt like a few milliseconds, the SUV was back behind our Suzuki, bearing down like an enraged colossus. Soon the only thing in my rearview was a chrome grill flanked by giant headlights. I tried to push the accelerator through the floorboards, with little increase in speed.
We bent around a gentle corner and came up behind a dusty pickup with an open bed bearing bundles tied down with straining bungee cords. I whipped around to his left, managing to put the pickup between me and the SUV. Horns blared as the SUV tried to follow me along the curb, the now incensed pickup driver doing his best to block the maneuver.
I downshifted and pushed the Suzuki’s engine to its outer limits. The road in my rearview opened up, so I refocused my attention on the road ahead, swerving around cars and trucks, doing everything I could to put air between me and the SUV.
About a mile from our hotel, I thought I could let down, relax my tense shoulders and plan the next few moves, when there it was again, coming on impossibly fast. The gigantic chrome grill, the blacked-out windows, the relentless pursuit of hell’s own sport-utility vehicle.
I can’t outrun, I thought to myself, but maybe I can out-stop. There was a narrow shoulder to my left. I let off the gas and let the SUV come within a few feet of my bumper, then I jerked the wheel onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes.
Natsumi yelped as the SUV shot by, trying to restrain all that ballistic energy. The result was a loud squeal from the tires, a lot of smoke, and a symphony of angry horns from the startled drivers caught in the moment.
I slid back on the main road, and at the first opportunity swung right and shot down another side street, heading east away from the beach. Two blocks later, I was on the Esterley Tibbetts Highway that paralleled the crowded Seven Mile Beach area, where I could open up the Suzuki as much as I dared.
I craved a run to a safe place, but what was safe? We knew no one, had no legitimacy, even to the American diplomatic corps, since America had me officially categorized as a dead man. Having been in a coma for several months after surviving the attack that killed Florencia, it was relatively easy for my sister, a doctor, to declare me dead, after which I sneaked off the grid and lost myself in a crowd of fake identities.
Technically, Natsumi was merely missing. I frantically tried to invent a reason why. Eventually, an all-out car chase in broad daylight would attract the attention of the vigilant and well-equipped Royal Cayman Islands Police Service. Even if they saved us from the SUV, bad things would surely follow.
I tossed Natsumi my iPhone.
“Find the U.S. consular agent. I’m taking you there.”
“What about you?”
“You have to figure out a reason why you disappeared in Connecticut and ended up here. I’m too busy right now to come up with anything.”
“What about you?” she said again.
“I’ll come get you. Then we’ll pick up where we left off.”
“Just like that?” she asked.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
Natsumi found the address of the consulate, which was in George Town as I’d hoped, having headed back that way. It was little more than an office buried inside a complex of restaurants and jewelry stores, but it was all we had.
“We shouldn’t have gone to that bank,” she said.
“Too early for postmortems. When we get to the consulate, I’m going to stop and you’re going to run in the door.”
“I’m not happy about this.”
“Please trust me.”
“I trust you, Arthur. I’d rather not leave you.”
I kept up my speed, working hard to avoid killing pedestrians or colliding with the unhurried islanders, some in top-heavy panel trucks, others in gleaming European status symbols. If I were pulled over, I theorized, I could toss Natsumi to the cops and then make a getaway in the confusion. A very poor theory, but deliberation time was at a minimum.
For whatever reason, I managed to fly the Suzuki tight against the curb through the narrow streets of George Town unapprehended, following the iPhone’s GPS directly to the front door of the U.S. consulate to the Cayman Islands. I pulled up to the curb.
“Leave your identification and cell phone. Try to avoid getting photographed or fingerprinted. They can probably make you, but stall for time.”
“This is not what I want.”
“Me neither. But it’s our only way. Go.”
She turned away, opened the car door and jumped out. She was halfway to the consulate door when two large men tackled her at a full run. She disappeared beneath a rolling mound of dark skin, white shirts with epaulets and blue slacks with a wide red stripe down the leg. Another man appeared at the passenger side window. He stuck a gun into the Suzuki and yelled something I didn’t understand. I yelled back, words I don’t remember. Over all the noise I could hear Natsumi screaming invectives in Japanese.
I stomped on the gas and raised the passenger side window as the car accelerated. The man with the gun ran alongside, holding his position, only to find himself suddenly clipped to a speeding car. He fired off a few rounds, but his aim was compromised by the angle of his captured arm.
Before the guy could lose his footing, I jammed my foot on the brake pedal, rolled down the window, and opened the passenger side door with the help of a sharp kick. The guy disappeared, leaving his gun on the passenger seat. I floored it again, causing the door to slam shut, and the little Japanese car—in sole possession of all my well-laid, thwarted plans—sprang aimless into the sultry, imperturbable streets of Grand Cayman Island.
CHAPTER 2
The first time I met Natsumi, she dealt me a bad hand. She was a blackjack dealer at one of the giant casinos in Connecticut. Blackjack was a good game for me before i’d been shot. I was born with a knack for numbers, so card counting came naturally. The math part of my brain had been smashed into sauce by a bullet, so it should have eliminated all complex calculating ability. And yet I was still pretty good at blackjack.
A neuroscientist could maybe figure this out, if I ever stopped running long enough to have the necessary brain scans and evaluations.
So as my luck at Natsumi’s table quickly turned to the good, and even better, so did my luck with Natsumi. Her luck you could question, since knowing me put her in mortal danger, resulting in a spontaneous partnership that turned into love and a more devoted connection, and led to the current catastrophe in the cayman Islands.
Together we’d uncovered and dispensed with Florencia’s killers, in a decidedly extra-legal fashion. But far more questions than answers still lingered, leading us to the safe-deposit box in the First Australia Bank in George Town.
Florencia had owned an insurance agency in Connecticut. A bland, but highly profitable little operation that she’d used to embezzle millions of dollars from unwitting insurance companies. The wrong people discovered the scam before I did, which is what got her killed. What I didn’t know was, why embezzle all that money in the first place? We sure didn’t need it. Her company threw off plenty of legitimate revenue. And I did fine in my research business. it ma
de no sense.
My success in market research had been fueled by an irresistible curiosity. AS Natsumi liked to point out, i had a very hard time sharing the same planet with an unanswered question, especially one as big as this.
The very definition of a blessing and a curse.
UNLESS WE’D been tailed since arriving in the caymans, there was no reason the people who snatched Natsumi would know where we were staying. We’d used different names, different passports, different appearances. So I took a calculated risk and went back there to retrieve our belongings, which included some electronic gear that would be difficult to replace on short notice.
I parked the Suzuki, wiped it down and left the key in the driver’s side visor. In the room, I consolidated our stuff as well as I could, checked out and called a cab. He took me to another car rental place where I upgraded to an SUV of my own, a Ford Expedition. What it lacked in agility was made up for by a false sense of indestructibility.
Soon after, I had another hotel room closer to downtown George Town, with a view of the harbor and city beaches; though its main appeal was high-speed Internet access and lots of standard North American electrical outlets for my equipment.
I went online and immediately confirmed the obvious. The people who captured Natsumi were the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service. I had to assume, with no other data, that the SUV belonged to another group altogether, since there was no reason for the cops to take such radical action. They had regular Crown Vic and charger cop cars with lights and sirens, and no good reason to rear-end suspicious characters.
I thought, for now, I’d have to ignore the SUV and focus on the RCIPS, since they were the ones who had Natsumi.
And getting her back was the only worthwhile goal in the known universe.
I ONLY had to wait a day to get the package from my favorite theatrical makeup supplier. I’d learned over time how to alter my appearance very quickly with a minimum of effort. I didn’t know how well these improvised adjustments could fool emerging facial recognition software, though it seemed a risk worth taking.
So I chose one of my regular looks—a long, grey-haired guy with my real nose, bushy eyebrows and round sunglasses. And baseball cap. Essentially a combination of John Lennon and Bernie Madoff on his way in and out of court.
I drove to the Central Police Station, in a dense area of central George Town. It was a three-story, reasonably nice-looking building of recent vintage with a tropical hip roof and friendly facade. To proceed, if my farfetched operating theory was correct, I just needed the right manhole.
It looked as if regular traffic, like cops changing shifts, moved in and out of a parking lot in the front of the building. The rear was invisible behind a tall blue wall topped by closely coiled razor wire. My heart sank at that, assuming my objective was well guarded on the other side.
The area was way too congested and exposed to survey by car, so I parked a block away and did a ground level reconnoiter.
I strolled along the front of the building hoping to look like a witless, meandering tourist. Moving on foot, I could easily see that the back of the police station was a minor fortress bristling with radio towers, huge transformers and windowless sheds. There were a lot of important things back there the peaceful Caymanians went to a lot of trouble to protect. Surely phone service was one of them.
I kept walking, passing a grassy area between the HQ and another government building. Right next to the sidewalk were two large, temporary black and yellow signs. They read TELEPHONE LINES and FIBRE OPTIC CABLE, respectively. Narrow, freshly filled-in trenches connected the signs to a half dozen raised-access hatches loosely arrayed around the lawn.
I stopped and looked up at the sky wondering if there really were Greek Gods and if they were up there playing a practical joke on me.
With nothing visible saying I couldn’t, I strode across the grass, and holding my smartphone to give me an excuse for looking at the ground, checked out the access hatches. They were elegant things cast in bronze, with an embossed design depicting a seabird, the words George Town, and a description of the function of the hole underneath. I read “sewer,” “drain water” and “electrical.” The two trenches terminated at the hatch labeled “communication.”
With nothing else to do but draw unwanted attention, I continued over the grass to a twisty little George Town side street, and after stopping for some more supplies and retrieving my truck, went back to my room to wait for nightfall.
I WAITED until two in the morning. Then I dressed all in black, including a black knit cap, and drove back to the police station. I brought a small flashlight wrapped in black duct tape so I could hold it with my teeth, and a long metal rod, one end of which I’d bent into a hook.
The sidewalk and parking lot in front of the building were well lit, but the grassy lawn next door was in deep shadow. Even so, I predicted about thirty seconds of profoundly dangerous exposure, though that couldn’t be helped. I had come to accept there was no such thing as absolute security, if your intention was to function in the world. Even the world’s shadowlands.
I used the metal hook to lift the hatch cover—a very heavy thing—and guided by the flashlight in my mouth, climbed the ladder down into the hole. I stopped partway to slide the hatch into place, then stepped down to the cool concrete floor.
As I’d hoped, I found myself in a small box that acted as an access closet for all the telecom lines running beneath the street. I’d been in similar places before, long ago, when I was doing field research for a company that made heavy-duty cable connectors for the phone business. Technology had changed a lot in the intervening years, but I thought it unlikely the government of the Cayman Islands would see any purpose in replacing those hardy, static couplers with modern electronic circuitry.
I was half right.
A bundle of standard copper cables, each with a familiar connector, ran parallel to a pair of digital lines, capable of handling both voice and data. I used wire cutters to cut the plastic bands that held the bundles together, and counted twelve separate cables. I disconnected one of the connectors to confirm they were in fact standard 50-pair cable, and they were. The digital Tls were joined by connectors I’d never seen before. I took a dozen pictures from all angles with my phone.
Then I climbed the ladder, pushed up the hatch cover and slid it clear enough to push my way through. The sound of the heavy bronze cover dragging across the cement base seemed horribly loud. My whole body clenched as I braced for the yell of a cop, a bright light in my face, the blow of a nightstick. But none of that happened, and a few moments later I was in the rented Ford heading back to the hotel, breathing heavily and wordlessly thanking those potential Greek Gods for saving my life, and possibly Natsumi’s, one far more deserving than mine.
DESPITE VERY strategic packing, I had almost nothing else I needed for the mission at hand. In my defense, there was no way I could have known any of it would be needed. I sat down at the computer and began to order, thinking through the various stages in the process, striving to consider every detail, to visualize every contingency. I was familiar with some of the necessary technology, another byproduct of the research I did for the telecommunications people. And though things had advanced considerably since then, the basics were still there.
As the sun was coming up, I downloaded the last application and hit the last submit button for the hardware order. The night-long effort had done its job of keeping the waves of anxiety I was feeling from overwhelming me. Now, thoroughly depleted, I was able to fall asleep, visions of the big cops piling on Natsumi only briefly flickering across my mind.
BY MIDAFTERNOON I was back out on the street, walking the neighborhood around the police station in a fresh outfit and hairdo, memorizing what I was afraid to record with the camera on my smartphone. There was little purpose to this, other than giving me something to do that kept my mind off my galloping fears.
Before Natsumi, I’d been in plenty of mortal peril of a type that would f
ill anyone with dread, even a person as indifferent to his own safety as I’d become. But this was another thing. It was about a person who trusted me, who had thrown her lot in with mine, foolishly no doubt. In ways more existential than purely physical, she’d saved my life. Losing her was a prospect beyond unbearable, beyond unthinkable.
So I didn’t think about it, and instead concentrated on the task at hand.
THAT NIGHT I called my sister Evelyn. The last time she’d heard from me we were in New York preparing to launch our trip to Chile, before getting sidetracked to the Caymans. Evelyn had been a co-conspirator in getting me declared dead and providing vital logistical support as I worked my way through solving Florencia’s murder. This had exposed her to a variety of potential prosecutions, which continued to be of concern. If things eventually blew up, it would be hard to contain the collateral damage, the primary victims being Evelyn and Natsumi.
So there were good reasons to limit what I told her, with the likely deluded assumption that I could limit her culpability. Running counter to this was Evelyn’s insistence I keep her informed of every single, solitary thing I did, on a daily basis. I knew why. She’d been more involved in my upbringing than my parents. Not that they were neglectful or abusive in any way, they just didn’t have the life skills to deal with their kids. My mother was a receptionist and data entry clerk at a community health center; and my father worked at whatever he could with a fifth grade education, including fork lift operator, cashier at a public parking lot, dishwasher, cab driver, home healthcare worker for the state-run hospice, and probably dozens of other part-time, put-together ways to keep the family fed and in our apartment above the dry cleaners in downtown Stamford, Connecticut.