by Chris Knopf
“Aquitanos Unidos,” I said.
More dead air, then, “You piss me off in a very tangible and specific way,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”
He hung up.
“I’m becoming a serious liability,” said Natsumi. “It’s the Japanese thing. Can’t get away from it. You can slide in and out of these situations without notice because you look like everybody else. You’re Mr. Average Western Dude. Unless we can move this operation to Tokyo, I’ll always stick out like a sore thumb.”
“What are you saying?”
“It would be better for you if we split up,” she said.
“No, it wouldn’t. It would be the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
“Seeing your wife murdered, getting shot in the head and suffering through an agonizing recovery was the worst thing that ever happened to you.”
“Okay, it’s a tie.”
She smiled at me and cupped my chin in her hand.
“I love you, Arthur, but you’re not the beat-up mess of a man I first met. You’re so much better. You’re tougher and more energetic than ninety percent of the men in the world, even if you limp a little and occasionally bump into things. You have the most ferociously brilliant mind I’ve ever come close to knowing, even if you talk to yourself all the time. You probably have a touch of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but nobody’s perfect. Though I think you might be perfect for me. I mean, you’ve saved my life more times than I can count. But now I’m afraid I’m going to lose yours. I couldn’t survive that.”
She was speaking in her regular, slightly melodious lilt, but her eyes looked watery. It made my chest tighten and throat choke in a very unfamiliar way.
“No,” I said, “we end this now and go to ground. We still can, relatively easily. Go to Hawaii, the Big Island. Loads of whites and Asians all mushed up together. Get a little tan, they’ll all think you’re Polynesian. I’ll pack while you get the car. We can fly to the West Coast and figure it out from there.”
I jumped up, but she grabbed my shirt and dragged me back down.
“You don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Oh, yes I do. There is nothing more important in the world to me than you. You’re right, I’m OCD. More than a little. And you’re my number-one obsession. As long as you’ll have me, I will stick to you like epoxy.”
“Epoxy? That’s a lot stronger than glue,” she said.
“Unbreakable.”
A tear wandered out of her right eye. She briskly wiped her face with the back of her sleeve.
“I liked the life I had before,” she said. “I wasn’t unhappy, mostly because I didn’t know any better. Looking back, I was mostly asleep. Comfortably, blithely unaware. From the moment I fled into your mad orbit, I’ve been awake. Wide-eyed aware. Every sense engaged, every nerve attuned. You don’t understand. I want this. It’s a decision, not a consequence. We have to see this through.”
Then she got up and went back into the other room, leaving me and the lump in my throat alone in the near darkness.
CHAPTER 19
Joselito was a hard worker, I had to give him that.
As soon as he was back on the job, his email was filled with correspondence, all relating to his consulting business. Most of it involved nailing employees who were diverting revenue into their personal accounts or pumping up expense reports, or disguising bribes to foreign officials as legitimate fees.
Despite myself, I began to admire Joselito’s skills, both investigatory and diplomatic. Many of his quarries were family men and women on trysts, and otherwise competent executives only dabbling in petty corruption, the type that barely warrants mention. In most cases, he sold his clients on shutting down their employees’ illicit side projects without further recourse or penalty.
For certain clients, however, he suggested more corporal remedies, though in highly euphemistic terms. If I didn’t know Joselito better, I would have missed that interpretation. Likewise, there was nothing in the email record that showed how he executed these assignments, but I eventually found out through the audio bug.
“This is Joselito,” he said one evening, in English. There was quiet for a moment, then, “That’s right. I have a new gig for you.”
Aside from a few naughty chats with Mirsada, this was the first phone call I’d heard.
“Selma Lizaran. No, her husband’s the target. He had the chance to make his overdue contribution, with interest. Been dragging his feet. He’ll pick up the pace if she comes home from the gym with a few broken ribs and a pair of black eyes.” Pause. “No, nothing permanent. Just make sure she knows why. Should make for good dinner-time conversation.”
I’D LEARNED how to take control of Joselito’s computers by pulling off a similar trick at Florencia’s insurance agency after she’d been killed. I’d kept all the secret tunnels into her agency’s computers intact, seeing no reason not to.
On an educated whim, I went into Florencia’s financial management program and rummaged around the tax records. This took some fortitude, because even a data-wonk like me can be pummeled into submission by pages of Excel documents filled with long columns of double-entry accounting.
I realized, finally, that I was in the wrong application, and I kicked myself when I switched over and found the prize almost immediately, under the heading “Online Tax Filing Numbers, Federal and State.”
And there it was. The insurance agency’s corporate U.S. Federal Employer Identification Number. The same as United Aquitania.
I brought up the code from the Grand Cayman safe-deposit box and copied the coordinates for the safe house in New York City, then pasted them into the marine navigation program.
The pin landed on United Aquitania’s headquarters on Spring Street.
I called to Natsumi in the other room.
“It’s dinner time,” I said. “I’m thinking Soho.”
WE LEFT the cab and walked into a cool rainy evening. I trod carefully, still not a hundred percent sure of my balance or the sturdiness of my wounded leg. Natsumi kept a grip on my arm, as she always did.
Spring Street was in transition mode, with people getting home from work uneasily sharing the sidewalk with the early dinner crowd. The first looked grim and eager, the second relieved and optimistic. Natsumi and I were our usual selves, watchful and contained.
I wasn’t surprised that the building that housed United Aquitania was impenetrable from the street. A brass plate filled with door buzzers gave away nothing. Looking through the glass outer doors, I could see mailboxes and a broad staircase and little else.
We went across the street to assess video surveillance options, but they were scarce. Unlike the cloistered warrens of a London mews, or the wild countryside around Lake Como, Soho was not a place a regular civilian could implant video cameras unnoticed.
We went back across the street and stood around waiting for someone to enter the building. The wait could have been forever, but fortunately less than an hour later, a very short woman with curly magenta hair wearing a leather jacket and sporting a very large diamond stud in her nose pushed between us and stuck a key in the glass door.
I asked her if she knew the people in the building. She whipped around with her hand still holding the key in the door and asked me what the fuck I wanted to know for.
“We want to find a fucking friend of ours,” said Natsumi. “He’s supposed to be working in this building, but we don’t see the name of the company.”
“What’s the company?” the woman asked.
“United Aquitania,” said Natsumi.
“Never heard of it. There’s somebody on the fifth floor, same as me,” said the woman, pointing to an unlabeled buzzer. “No name anywhere, but sometimes they have junk mail lying on the floor outside the door. Being a professional busybody, I notice that it gets cleared away by the next day,” she added.
“You ever see anyone coming or going?” I asked.
She looked at me a long
time with a flat-faced, steady stare. “You don’t have a friend,” she said. “You’re casing the place.”
I had to remind myself we were in New York, a city where bullshit better be gold plated, or forget about it.
“You like money?” Natsumi asked.
“Yeah. I do,” said the woman.
Natsumi wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it over. “If you see anyone go in or out of those offices, call this number. If it’s true, you get a thousand dollars.”
The woman studied the number, then looked up. “How do I know you’re good for this?” she asked.
“You don’t,” said Natsumi, “but why not make the call anyway and see what happens?”
The woman seemed to consider this seriously, and left us after sticking the number in the back pocket of her black denim jeans.
After that, we decided there was nothing left to do but find a restaurant and go eat, just like we were regular people. That we weren’t was proven by the dinner conversation.
“You think you’ll have to break in?” asked Natsumi, after the hors d’oeuvres arrived.
“I don’t know. I think Nose Stud might come through.”
“We know nothing about the building, or their offices. Or even if they have offices.”
“It could be another shell. An empty address.”
“Pretty expensive shell,” she said. “A million bucks gets you a studio apartment in this part of town.”
“No more than the other safe houses. Florencia had expensive tastes.”
“So what do we do now?” Natsumi asked.
“We need to shake the tree again. This time, let’s not be standing underneath.”
I WAITED until two in the morning, believing that Joselito would be off his computer and sound asleep. Using the mirroring software, I went into his email and wrote a letter.
Señor Mariñelarena:
I am in possession of information that would be of great value to you. It relates to a substantial amount of money belonging to your organization that was withdrawn from a bank in Grand Cayman. Regaining these funds would go a long way toward replenishing your real estate holdings recently compromised in London, Madrid and Menaggio.
As you can see, I know a great deal about you. I note this only to prove the legitimacy of my offer, and the potential consequences of a refusal. Understand that I could make the same offer to the VG, but I have come to abhor their motives, tactics and philosophy. You are, in a very real sense, the lesser of two evils.
Given the sensitivity of these matters, I will insist we meet face to face here in New York City.
Respond to this message and we will move forward with further arrangements.
Joselito Gorrotxategi
Before letting it go, I attached a sub-program to the email that would route the return message through Joselito’s computer, bypassing his inbox, and send it to one of my own.
“Shake, shake, shake,” I sang to myself as I hit the send button.
THE NEXT morning I got a call from Evelyn, who was still Down Under, but getting antsy.
“I do love it here, Arthur, but I have a cardiology practice to support back in Stamford,” she said.
“Any news on the sale of the agency?”
“The buyers are identified. We’re in due diligence now. Auditors are crawling all over the books. You can understand why they got out the fine-tooth comb, given what happened. It takes time.”
“Like what?”
“Like another month,” she said.
“What’s your position on Bosniak gangsters?”
I told her as much as I dared about Little Boy and his crew. Evelyn was a hard-nosed woman with a greater commitment to privacy than personal safety. I knew it would be a tough sell, and it was.
“No way.”
We argued, in the gentle, mostly good-natured way we always had, for nearly an hour. Then I pulled out my last card.
“Do it for me,” I said. “If you’re coming home, I’ll be constantly worried about your safety and won’t be able to concentrate. And that might mean I’ll make a mistake that’ll get us all killed.”
“That’s a low blow.”
“I know, but it’s the truth.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“That’s not my job right now. What I really want to do is scare the crap out of you so you’ll do what I’m asking.”
“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “What’s his name again, Little John? Do I also get Friar Tuck?”
After I got off the phone with her, I called Shelly.
“A new number,” he said when he heard my voice. “What do you do, change these things every day?”
“Nearly. Cancel the request for protection for the insurance agency owner. Private services have been retained.”
“That’s good, because I couldn’t get it anyway. In fact, they’re politely asking me to go back to my retirement in Rocky Hill.”
“Really.”
“I can’t tell you anything more because it might compromise their investigation, which would be very bad for me and my pension. My advice to you is to come in. Now that they’re serious, there’s no way this can end well. New York is a big town, but you can’t hide there forever.”
How did he know we were in New York? I thought, then hit the end button and yelled to Natsumi that we were moving again. In a hurry.
Shortly after, we were in a hotel overlooking Central Park on the Upper West Side. My first impulse had been to fly to Cleveland or Patagonia, but Natsumi’s cooler head prevailed, voting strongly that we’d come too far to abandon everything now. And, ultimately, our safety would rely more on reaching some conclusion to this thing than constantly running around the world.
“We’ve already talked about this,” she said. “If you give up now, it’ll eat you to death, and that won’t be any fun for either of us.”
What I had to chew on, at that moment, was a new reality. Pissed at me as he may have been, Shelly had intentionally sent a clear message—they were tracking us down. There was a vulnerability somewhere in my systems, a breach. One likely suspect was the disposable phone. They couldn’t connect it to me directly, but they likely monitored my calls to Shelly, then traced the connection back to the city, maybe even to the repeater closest to the Remsenberg Hotel.
Everything I’d done on the computer since waking up from the coma was either obliterated or backed up on a pair of terabyte hard drives. I could spend a year searching around for digital spies and find nothing. Or, I could simply start all over again.
I told Natsumi my plan, which began with a new disposable phone and a few hours on a park bench verbally phishing for social security numbers from a list of dead people I’d been holding in reserve. This should have been very difficult, but I’d learned all the tricks from a project I once did for an insurance company that was designing identity theft coverage, so it wasn’t long before I had three strong numbers gladly provided by grief-addled family members.
Thus armed, I opened a new bank account so I could get a fresh credit card. I used the card to go shopping for a new laptop, wireless access via cell service, external hard drives and a few more disposable phones.
My first online purchase was space in a storage facility in Connecticut, where I sent all my old gear, with the exception of a terabyte drive containing the backed-up files. Bypassing the hotel’s wireless access, I imported over a few select files and applications, including the programs monitoring Joselito’s computer. I scrubbed all the documents, files and programs with antivirus and antimalware tools, which claimed everything was clean and safe—which I prayed was true, recognizing that the U.S. government could do things a hacker couldn’t dream of. Thus occupied, it was more than a day before I checked for Rodrigo’s response to Joselito’s email. I’d directed it to one of my fresh new email accounts.
Sr. Gorrotxategi:
You interest me. I have heard of you. Perhaps because we travel in the same universe, though within diffe
rent orbits. We will meet, though you understand security demands a great deal of caution. Preparations will need to be made.
Rodrigo Mariñelarena
I wrote him back:
Sr. Mariñelarena:
Thank you for your prompt and respectful response. I appreciate your caution, because I am also a very cautious man, which is why I am still here among the living. However, this is not a matter that will tolerate a long negotiation. I have other options and must take the course most advantageous to my interests. I am sure you understand.
Joselito Gorrotxategi
The next response was even more prompt and respectful.
Sr. Gorrotxategi:
I do understand and appreciate the position you are in. You will find I am both a swift and flexible negotiator. Arrangements are being made. Please stand by for further instructions.
Mariñelarena
“You think he’s chomped on the bait?” asked Natsumi, when I showed her the exchange.
“I do. It’s not just the money, it’s Joselito’s apparent operational awareness. That’s got to spook Rodrigo big-time.”
“He’ll come to New York?”
“I think he will. This is too important to sit on his hands in Europe.”
“So what do we do?” she asked.
“Take it to the street.”
I SPENT the next three days playing a homeless guy who’d taken up residence across the street from United Aquitania’s building. I had a grocery cart filled with empty bottles and cans, a sleeping bag, long greasy hair and beard and more ratty clothes than the temperature required.
A cardboard sign, next to an open cardboard box, said, THE EMPIRE HAS DESTROYED JEDI KNIGHT RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS. DONATIONS APPRECIATED.
I actually did pretty well with that, bringing in a little more than four hundred dollars during the three-day stint. Made me reconsider past career decisions.
The beat cops checked in with me on the first day, and I told them it was a temporary situation, that I was scheduled to start a program—meaning city-sponsored rehab—any minute now. One of the cops said fine, not believing me, then told me their neighborhood’s sidewalk housing statute of limitations was five days. Max.