by Chris Knopf
“So I need to get in touch with my feelings.”
“And what are you feeling?”
“Like a screw-up.”
“Besides the time in France, what other things do you feel you’ve screwed up?”
“The dates. I keep missing time-based correlations, even though they should be the most basic.”
“I know why,” she said. “You’re lightning brain tends to skip over the obvious, with the intention of going back later for more careful deliberation. But you never go back, you just race around from pretty flower to pretty flower like a honey bee on speed. And I mean that nicely, because you’re my friend.”
We were about three-quarters of the way through our walk when I turned us around and headed back to the house.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“1968,” I said.
Back at the keyboard, I looked up the first violent exchange between ETA and the Guardia Civil. It was a few miles inside the Spanish border with France, just beyond the city of Irun. A car carrying two ETA leaders was pulled over by two Guardia Civil, based on a tip, it was later suspected, from a Guardia agent inside ETA’s inner circle. The two ETA leaders refused to leave their car, causing the Guardias to pull their weapons and demand they do so. From somewhere inside the car a shot was fired that killed the Guardia at the driver’s side window. The Guardia on the passenger’s side managed to get the door open and drag the passenger out of the car. The Guardia pinned the ETA man to the ground, wrenched his gun from his hand, and began firing at the man driving the car, forcing him to race away, leaving the two adversaries in a wrestling match by the side of the road.
The ETA man managed to overpower the Guardia and get away on foot. The Guardia called in reinforcements, and a few hours later they trapped the ETA man in a barn and summarily executed him.
The Guardia killed that day was Eugenio Angel. The ETA man suspected to be at the wheel of the car was Miguel Zarandona, Florencia’s father.
I took my hands off the keyboard and placed a call to Professor Preciado-Cotto.
THE NEXT few days were consumed with installing security cameras at strategic locations around the property and inside the house. I eventually had two dozen cameras feeding a program that let me monitor any and all, in whatever combination I wanted, either on the laptop or smartphone. Each camera was also paired with a motion detector, which would set off alarms on the phone and computer.
Anything that moved would be captured on video recorders, and as a backup measure, saved to a data storage service in the cloud.
I kept the Dodge, but rented a Jeep Wrangler equipped with enhanced off-road capabilities and parked it in the woods on an old logging trail that led out to the street from the rear of the property. When I got back to the house, Natsumi was naturally curious.
“Do we have a plan?” she asked.
“No, but we have a few precautions, and the start of a plan.”
“What’s the end look like?”
“A good Buddhist would allow the future to be whatever the future wants it to be.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
Back in the computer room, I sat and stared at the main monitor, assessing the balance between security and the need to communicate. I’d always used proxy servers to put up at least a basic layer of anonymity. There were hundreds of these services with accompanying software available on the web. If my purpose had been to hide my web-browsing habits, most would be fine. Hiding from the FBI, and potentially from the NSA, was another story.
But there was another equation to consider—the time it would take for even those high-powered surveillance operations to follow the trail back to me, especially if I daisy-chained multiple proxies, all offshore and fiercely resistant to law enforcement inquiry. I decided that time would be far longer than I needed.
A few hours later, after freshening my knowledge of the proxy landscape, I felt secure enough to send my first email.
Sr. Gorrotxategi:
I am ready to discuss arrangements for meeting with Sr. Domingo Angel. I have chosen a location. We merely need to set a date and time. Obviously, we need to do this first. Please respond within 24 hours, or the offer is withdrawn.
El Timador
I hardly had to wait twenty-four hours. In less than ten minutes I had a reply:
El Timador:
I want to accept your offer, though you may well imagine that securing a visit with Sr. Angel in the U.S. is a tall order. Is there another way this transaction can be achieved?
Joselito
Joselito:
No. I have the means for contacting him directly. If you force me to do so, I will share with him your correspondence with Eloise and Mariñelarena.
El Timador
El Timador:
I understand. Please stand by while I discuss with Domingo.
Joselito
Joselito:
I will make this much easier for you. The information I have will provide the means for the total destruction of United Aquitania. This will achieve his lifelong mission and free me of a mortal threat.
El Timador
El Timador:
And free up their money for your own purposes.
Joselito
Joselito:
Yup.
El Timador
CHAPTER 23
I called Little Boy.
“Hey, Mr. G., what up?”
“Kresimir’s an impressive guy.”
“Impressive is our specialty.”
“How’s it going with Evelyn?”
“Nice lady. Very polite. Not as much fun as you two.”
“Do me a favor and tell her I’m fine and will contact her as soon as I can.”
“Okay. Should she believe you?” he asked.
I thanked him without answering, hung up, and went to tell Natsumi I was going for a ride.
“Where to?”
“Back to Rocky Hill. This time for a little exercise.”
I FIRST got to know Shelly Gross by filming his every move and following him around Rocky Hill and Wethersfield. I learned he was one of the most routinized people I ever knew. This methodical nature must have served him well when he led the FBI’s organized crime task force in Connecticut. And probably kept him in good mental and physical shape as a retired widower.
So catching him at the gym at four o’clock in the afternoon was a sure thing.
He knew at this point what I looked like without a disguise, but I wore one anyway, in case Eloise had him under surveillance. It was my favorite hippy look, with a long grey wig pulled into a ponytail, droopy moustache and wire-rim glasses.
The gym was called FutureFit, which I took as an unusually honest, yet aspirational name. I signed up for a trial membership at the desk, changed into workout clothes and went looking for Shelly.
I found him on the stationary bike, his eyes fixed on a bank of TVs high up on the opposite wall. I took the bike next to him and started to peddle.
“Hi, Shelly,” I said.
He looked over. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“You look like an old hippy.”
“I do?”
“I got your message. I’m going to need a lot more before going to Holt. I’m under strict orders to stay the fuck away.”
“I have the mole, and I can prove it.”
“Who?”
“I need a deal,” I said.
“Ah. The old catch-22. I need something substantial enough to bring to Holt, but anything of substance could give away your bargaining power.”
“Something like that.”
“Oh, well.”
“Isn’t the very fact that one of your people is colluding with a violent militant group good enough?”
“Good enough to go to people well below Holt’s pay grade. But not Holt.”
I noticed the peddling was bothering my bad leg, so I coasted for a while.
“What if
we combine that with information which could lead to the destruction of an international terrorist organization?”
“There’s no ‘we,’ and they hear that crap every day. Goes to special agents in charge of routine investigations.”
Frustration began to percolate up from somewhere in my midsection.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Believe what?”
“That there’s nothing you can do. You’re a highly decorated former field agent. Nothing garners more respect at the Bureau. You got chased away only because the mole wanted you out of there. You’ve got a moral responsibility here.”
“If you want to invoke morality, tell me the name,” he said.
“I want to come in, but I can’t go to prison.”
“No way around that.”
“There is if you want there to be.”
“It’s not my call,” he said.
I got down off the bike and moved closer to him. “If you don’t help me now, you’ll never get another chance. I can’t afford the faint of heart.”
He stopped peddling and glowered at me. “I’ll talk to Holt, but don’t blame me if it blows up in your face.”
I left him to finish his regimented exercise routine.
AN EMAIL was waiting for me when I got home.
El Timador:
Domingo has agreed to the meeting. He can be in New York anytime beginning two days from now. He tells me his men saved your life in Menaggio, Italy. Not on purpose. They didn’t know who you were. Now that they know, you will never have another day without the fear of death.
Joselito
Joselito:
This is why we’re meeting. Information in return for freedom from fear. A fair trade, I believe. Today is Tuesday. We will meet next Saturday at noon. I will send you the location at 9:00 A.M.
El Timador
“So you’re inviting them here,” said Natsumi, when I showed her the exchange.
“I am. Should be quite a party.”
“A party. What should I wear?”
“Kevlar.”
I WAS usually so engrossed in my web searches, digital escapades and local surveillance that I often ignored the general news media. Not so Natsumi, who listened to public radio nearly ’round the clock. So it was she who told me to click over to The New York Times breaking news.
Eloise Harmon, Special Agent for Liaison Affairs with the International Operations Division of the FBI, was gunned down today in her driveway as she left for work at FBI headquarters from her home in Georgetown. The forty-three-year old mother of two, wife of Edward Harmon, a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, had spent the bulk of her career overseas as an FBI Legal Attaché stationed at U.S. embassies in Latin America and Europe. In these positions, and in recent times as liaison between attachés around the world and Washington, Ms. Harmon was frequently involved in investigations into organized crime, drug and sex trafficking, money laundering and international terrorism. Officials at the FBI, and the Metropolitan Police Department in DC, refused to speculate on possible suspects or motives in the case. The investigation, they said, would take place on a local, national and international level.
I grabbed my disposable cell phone and called Little Boy.
“Mr. G., long time no hear.”
“Write this on a piece of paper.” I waited for him to get ready. “Harmon was the mole. I know who killed her. The terms of the deal just tightened up.”
“Okay,” said Little Boy. “Where to?”
I gave him a description of Shelly and when to find him at the Powder Keg Restaurant in Wethersfield, which was only about ten minutes from Little Boy’s house in the South End of Hartford.
“Powder Keg? You’re kidding. I go there all the time. Like all those guns.”
“Send someone who’s never been. Have him drop the note on the table and get out of there quick. Shelly’s ex-FBI with a dossier on you probably six inches thick. Don’t screw with him.”
“Screwing with cops another specialty. But I hear you.”
I got off the phone and realized that Natsumi was still standing in the room. Never an insistent person, her presence alone told me she needed to talk.
“Hi,” I said to her. “What’s up?”
“I like being with you. The life that comes with that is not terribly easy. Do you think it will always be like this?”
“Not sure.”
She nodded.
“Okay.”
“I’m trying to make it better,” I said.
“You are?”
“The only way out is through.”
“With me.”
“With you,” I said.
“I know. I just like to hear it once in a while.”
“Your wisdom sustains us. Propels us forward.”
“I thought it was my cooking,” she said.
“That, too.”
“Are we going to live through the next thing?”
“Not sure.”
“Less honesty, please,” she said.
“Then definitely,” I said. “Without a scratch.”
I SPENT the time leading up to Saturday sitting on a side porch drinking iced tea and watching birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and at dusk, the occasional fox, deer and raccoon move through the wilderness before me.
“You’re not on your computer,” said Natsumi, after the first day.
“I’m not.”
“How come?”
“No need.”
“You have the answers?”
“Most of them.”
I spent the next hour telling her what I thought I knew, and what I thought should happen. She listened without comment, until I was done, then said, “No wonder you’re out here sitting with the world.” She joined me and we looked at the colorless moonlit landscape until we both fell asleep, struck senseless by the deep and restless New England night.
ON SATURDAY at 9:00 A.M., I gave Joselito directions to the Empire house in Canaan and he acknowledged receipt.
Natsumi and I sat on the side porch where we’d spent the night and waited.
“Is there anywhere particular you’d like to live?” I asked her. “I mean for a longer duration. Not just a few weeks in a hotel or rented house.”
“What are the parameters? City, country, developed, remote?”
“Has to have broadband access and decent coffee,” I said.
“That narrows things considerably. Why do you ask?”
“We could be going there in a hurry.”
“And we can stay for a while?” she asked.
“As long as we want.”
“Long enough to get a dog?”
“I thought dogs led inexorably to water buffalos.”
“They enforce a settled life,” said Natsumi. “And I’m thinking warm. Do you know how to sail?”
“No.”
“Jimmy Fitzgerald had me on Long Island Sound every weekend in a rattle-trap, twenty-four-foot, wooden sloop. I can sail better than I can walk. I say we get a heavy-displacement, blue water cruiser and bop around the Caribbean. Blend in with the snow birds and beach bums.”
“With a dog?”
“Jimmy sailed with a scruffy little mutt. Shit on a piece of Astroturf. Eminently doable.”
“Okay.”
“Unless we die in the next few hours,” she said.
“Yeah. Then all bets are off.”
Around eleven thirty, the motion detector alarm went off on my cell phone. It was tied to one of the cameras on a distant edge of the property. I ran to the computer room as alarms went off at five more locations. The cameras showed men in rough hiking clothes moving through the woods and crossing into the fields holding assault rifles and lugging backpacks, presumably filled with ammunition.
We went back down to the front entrance of the house and waited, glancing compulsively at my smartphone as it fed video images of paramilitary ground troops encroaching on the property from all sides.
“I don’t think we have en
ough cold cuts,” said Natsumi, looking over my shoulder. “I was prepared for two.”
“No one RSVPs anymore.”
“Will they shoot us outright?” she asked.
“We’re good until they have the information.”
“And how do they get that?”
“They don’t.”
Another alarm on the smartphone drew my eye to a black Range Rover pulling into the main driveway and rumbling up toward the house. I put my arm around Natsumi’s waist and waited.
The Range Rover stopped a few feet away and a tall, thin man, somewhere in his seventies, stepped out. His hair, well receded from his forehead, was dyed black, and his nose was long and sharply defined. He wore sunglasses and a photographer’s vest over a red flannel shirt. He looked around the property like a potential buyer assessing the opportunity.
Joselito got out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the SUV. He was heavier and older than his LinkedIn photo, no surprise there. He was more or less the morphological opposite of Angel—slump-shouldered, pudgy and furtive.
“El Timador,” Angel said to me, in English, extending his hand. “You are indeed a clever trickster.”
I ignored his hand. “I assume you’re in contact with your forces,” I said. “Tell them to stand down, or they’ll all be killed.”
Angel dropped his hand and stepped backwards as if I were radioactive.
“What forces?” he asked.
I showed him a video feed on my smartphone of his men moving through the adjoining forest.
“I have snipers trained on each of your patrols. The guys in the woods have a slight chance of survival, but the ones in the fields will be as good as dead.”
“You bluff,” he said.
I used my thumb to toggle over to the cell phone and called Little Boy.
“See if you can shoot the hat off the lead guy moving through sector blue.”
I turned the phone toward Angel so he could see the result. Little Boy’s guy got the hat, but unfortunately took the head with it. Angel took out his phone and told his men to halt their advance.
“You and Joselito are personally in the cross hairs of our two best,” I said to Angel as I took two steps back. “If you make the slightest move toward me or Natsumi, a hand gesture will put you in hell before the thought leaves your mind.”