by Ted Dekker
“You can’t. And once you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll see that it does not matter. If I am unsuccessful, you pay nothing. But you must ask yourself how I know what I know. No one knows the workings of electronic high finance like I do, Mr. Hiroshito. I am simply the best. Please take this message to your superiors immediately.”
“And how do I know—?”
“You know enough already,” Kent interrupted. “Play the tape for the main man. He’ll agree to my terms. Good day.”
Kent hung up to a stammering Hiroshito and exhaled slowly. His hands were trembling, and he pulled them into fists. Man, that had felt good! He took a long drink from his glass, slammed the tumbler onto the table, and pumped a fist in victory. “Yes!”
Of course it was not victory. Not yet. But it was the deed. It was the plan. The thrill of the hunt, as they say. Within the hour the whole snobby bunch of them would at least suspect that there existed a man who possessed the electronic wizardry to waltz into their systems and do what he willed. A lunatic who called himself Bob. Now there was power! Not just being able to do it, but being settled in the knowledge that others believed he could do it.
Kent made his way to the bathroom on shaky legs. In twelve hours he would have his answer. And if they said no? If they said no, he might very well go in there and take another million. Then call them back and ask them if they might reconsider. Ha!
Yes indeed. Now there was power!
KENT ATTENDED Doug’s party on the Marlin Mate later that night for lack of appealing alternatives. Actually, the thought of standing on a swaying boat with twenty people held little appeal itself. Never mind that there would be “dames.” Half-naked dames at that. Never mind that there would be booze. It was all sounding rather bleak now. But staying home alone drumming his fingers on the table held even less appeal, so he took the Jeep to the pier and boarded the swaying boat.
The Aussie knew how to party. It was perhaps the only skill he’d mastered aside from skippering. As promised, a dozen girls smelling of coconut oil slithered about the twin decks. At some point, Doug must have dropped the nugget that the blond-haired man sitting quietly on the upper deck was flush with cash, because the women began to mill about Kent with batting eyes and pouting lips.
For the first hour, Kent quite enjoyed the attention. It was sometime near midnight, however, that a thought dawned on him. He was not attracted to these bathing beauties. Maybe the booze had messed with his libido. Maybe the memory of Gloria was simply too fresh. Maybe the hole in his chest had sucked the life right out of him—neutered him. The realization fell over him like a wet blanket.
By the time he dragged himself back up the hill at two in the morning, the booze had robbed his ability to consider the matter any further. It was the last time he would party with Doug and his dames.
When Kent rejoined the land of the conscious it was to a relentless chirp sounding in his ear. A whistle blowing down the alley. He spun around, except that he couldn’t spin at all because Mr. Brinkley’s dead body was hanging off his shoulders, butt up, gray in the moonlight. He nearly capsized in his lumbering turn.
Tweep, tweep, tweep!
His heart pounded like a drum to that piercing alarm. They had found him! A figure ran through the shadows toward him, his hand extended accusingly, blowing his whistle.
Tweep, tweep, tweep!
He and Mr. Brinkley had been caught with their pants down behind the bank! At least Mr. Brinkley had. The rest of this nonsense about buying a villa and sailing on his yacht had been a dream. He was still back at the bank!
And then the whistle-blower’s face emerged from the shadows, and Kent’s heart slammed into his throat. It was the vagrant! And it wasn’t with a two-dollar tin whistle that he was sounding the alarm; it was with that long tongue of his, sticking out and curled like a bamboo reed.
Kent bolted up, sticky with sweat, breathing hard.
Tweep, tweep, tweep.
He reached over and smacked the alarm beside his bed.
Eight o’clock! He sprang from the bed and splashed cool water over his face. Hiroshito and company were waiting by the phone—at least he hoped they were. Ready to deal. And if not he would go ahead and rock their world a little. Sound his own wake-up call. Tweep, tweep! Maybe he’d take five million next time! That would put them on their seats. Of course he’d have to give it all back—this was not like taking twenty untraceable cents from millions of unsuspecting donors; this was plain old larceny. They’d be crawling over this like ants on honey. And they’d eventually find the link. Which was why he had to get on the phone and strike a deal to find their money his way before they found it their way. Kent to the rescue.
He snatched up the phone and dialed the number. This time it took less than sixty seconds before Mr. Hiroshito’s sharp voice crackled in his ear.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Hiroshito. It is Bob. You remember me?”
“Yes. I have someone here who would like to speak to you.”
Kent sat on the deck chair facing the blue-green sea. “Sure.”
Another voice spoke into the phone, this one sly like a loan shark and definitely Caucasian. “Bob? Are you there, Bob?”
“Yes.” The man’s tone reminded Kent of a bossman smirking on some gangster movie.
“Okay, Bob. I don’t know who you are, and frankly, I don’t care. But you know who we are, and you should know that we don’t deal with extortionists and blackmailers. So why don’t you just cut the charades and talk to us straight instead of playing peekaboo, okay, pal?”
Kent ground his teeth, flooded with the sudden urge to hurl the phone over the railing. Maybe fly over to Tokyo and smack some sense into Mr. Cheese Whiz. He crossed his legs and breathed deliberately.
“I’m sorry, Mr. . . .”
A pause. “Call me Frank.”
“I’m sorry, Frank, but you have this all wrong. I apologize for the mix-up. You must have been out of the room when they played the tape. Nobody as bright as you sound would have the stomach to threaten a man in my position. Listen to the tape, Frankie. I’ll call back in ten minutes.” Kent hung up.
His chest was thumping. What was he doing? Frank had obviously listened to the tape already—it was why he had used the term extortion. Because frankly, when you got right down to it, this was as close to extortion as kidnapping. He had kidnapped their system, and they knew it. And what he was really proposing was that he would turn over the key to their system (that would be ROOSTER) in exchange for immunity. That and $250,000.
Kent retreated to the kitchen and poured a drink, a tequila sunrise minus the citrus and the ice. Cuervo Gold straight up. If ever there was a time he needed a drink, it was now.
When he called ten minutes later, they put him directly through.
“Bob?” It was Frank, and he was not sounding so slick.
“Did you listen to the tape, Frank?”
“Of course I listened to the tape!” the other man yelled. “Now, you listen to me . . .”
“No, you listen to me, Buckwheat! If you think for a minute that I cannot do what I claim I can do, then simply reject my terms. Don’t come at me with all this strong-arm baloney. Either you hire me for a 25 percent recovery fee and immunity, or you don’t. Is this too difficult to understand?”
“And how do we know that it wasn’t you who stole the money in the first place?”
“Not a bad idea, Frankie. Except this is no ransom. Or maybe you didn’t listen to the whole tape. I’ve agreed to turn the perpetrators over to you, and that wouldn’t be me. More important, your payment of this recovery fee is contingent upon my closing the security breach through which they were able to gain access to your million dollars. You obviously have a gaping hole somewhere in your system. It was one million this time. Who’s to say that it won’t be ten million the next?”
“I’m not sure whether to take that as a threat or a warning, Bob.”
“Take it as a warning. Don’t be a fool, Fra
nkie. I’m not your thief. Think of me as your cybercop. I don’t come cheap, granted, but then, I only charge if I deliver. Do we have a deal, or don’t we? I have other clients waiting.”
The phone hissed for a few long seconds. They were talking, and Kent let them talk.
When a voice spoke again, it was Hiroshito’s. “We will accept your terms, Mr. . . . Bob. You have two weeks to find the security breach and recover our money. Is there anything that you require of us at this time?”
“No. I will contact you Monday morning with a list of banks to which I need free access. Until then, rest well, my friends, you have chosen wisely.”
“I hope so, Bob. This is most unusual.”
“We no longer live in a world of stagecoach robbers slinging Winchesters, Mr. Hiroshito. Now it’s the keyboard we have to worry about.” The phone sat silently in his hand, and he wondered if the Japanese banking executive made any sense of the comparison.
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Kent dropped the phone on the table and breathed deep. He had done it! Hey, a life of crime might not be such a bad thing. Stick ’em up, baby!
Of course he would not give Mr. Hiroshito a list of banks to which he needed access, because he had no intention of visiting a list of banks. He would make one stop, and one stop only. And that bank was located in Denver, Colorado.
On Monday he would step back into his old stomping grounds. Back to Stupid Street. The audacity of the plan struck Kent then as he gazed out to the lapping waves far below. It was lunacy! Terrifying, really. Like a killer returning to the scene of the crime just to see if the cops had found anything. “Hey guys! It’s me! So what do you think? Pretty clever, huh?”
Kent rose unsteadily and made for the bottle on the kitchen counter. This called for another drink. There was no way he was going to return to Stupid Street completely sober.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sunday
HELEN WALKED with Bill Madison under the swaying oaks, five miles from home and going strong. The park rustled with windblown leaves, yellowed in midfall. An overcast sky grayed the early afternoon, but the light was burning bright in her heart, she thought. Brighter by the day. Which meant that something was up.
“I really need to buy some new walking shoes,” she said.
Bill strutted by her side, dressed in green sweats and a pair of running shoes he’d purchased for his afternoon walks with her. That day in her living room had changed the pastor’s life. The heavens had torn open for him, and he’d become a new man. He’d announced the next morning that he would like to join her in the afternoons when his schedule permitted. In fact, he’d make sure his schedule did permit. The way he told it, if he joined her on the last leg of her journey, he’d be able to keep up just fine. And keep up he had, brimming with an enthusiasm that in fact spilled over to her.
“How many pair have you been through? How long have you been walking now, anyway? Two—three months?”
“Three. I’ve been walking three months, give or take. And I guess I’ve gone through about ten pairs of shoes. Same legs though. I haven’t traded those in yet.”
He chuckled. “No, I guess you haven’t.”
They walked on for a hundred feet before Helen told him what had been on her mind for the past few miles. “We are nearing the end, I think.”
He turned, surprised. “The end? As in the end of the walking?”
“Yes.” She smiled. “It’s quite something, you know—having the Spirit of God filling your bones like a miracle drug. It gives the notion of walking in the Spirit new meaning.”
“Yes, I can see that. You know, when I first saw that vision in your living room, I couldn’t get over how clear everything was. All the questions just evaporated. Poof, they were gone. God is obviously God, and heaven obviously exists, and every word spoken here on Earth turns a head up there. But I have to tell you, things are not always so clear down here, even after that kind of encounter. Time dims the memory, and what was so bright only a couple of weeks ago starts to cloud a little. That make sense?”
Helen nodded. “Crystal clear.”
“Well, if it wasn’t for your walking—this incredible thing God has done to your legs—I might honestly think you had lost your mind, praying every day for a dead man.”
“We’ve been over this, haven’t we?”
“Yes. But not lately. You still think he’s alive?”
“I’m past thinking too clearly, Pastor. There’s a word from God—‘Lean not on your own understanding, but trust in God’—you know it?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve learned what that means. My own mind tells me all kinds of things that would make a grown man want to climb into a hole. You think the idea of a sixty-four-year-old lady walking in tube socks and a dress, twenty miles a day, praying for a dead man, is not strange? It is quite absurd. So absurd that whole theologies have been constructed to push such events into a different time zone. As if God woke up one day and suddenly realized that the way he’d been doing things all along, with falling walls and talking donkeys and burning bushes, was really quite childish. Men have grown too smart for that, yes?” She chuckled. “So when I get to the end of my walk each day, I still have to pinch myself. Make sure it’s all real. Because my mind is not so different from yours, Bill. It wants to reject some things.”
“It’s good to know that you’re as human as I am. Maybe that’s one reason God has given you this physical sign. Helps you keep the faith.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“So you think Kent is still alive, then?”
“We’ve come back to that question, have we? Let’s put it this way, Pastor. Wherever Kent is, he needs my prayers. The impulse to pray has not dimmed.”
“Which basically means he must be alive.”
“So it seems.”
“But it’s all coming to an end, you say.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and considered the lightness of her spirit. Although she had not had any visions for over a week now, there was an expectancy riding in the air. A lightness. A brightness, hovering just beyond the clouds. How she knew it was all going somewhere rather quickly remained a small mystery. But she did.
“I think so, yes. How it will end, I have no clue. My spirit is light, but that may be for my sake rather than his. I just don’t know. One thing I do know, however. When these legs begin to wobble with fatigue, it is the end.”
The pastor did what he had often taken to doing these days. He broke into a prayer. “Jesus, we love you. Father, you are sovereign, your ways beyond finding out. Thank you for choosing to dwell in us. You are mighty, you are holy, you are awesome in your power.”
No matter how this ended, Helen thought, the little Community Church on the corner of Main and Hornberry was in for a little jolt. Which was not so bad. Not so bad at all.
KENT PEERED through the oval window to the darkness. A strobe on the airliner’s wingtip lit the fuselage every three seconds, and he half expected to see the vagrant clinging to the silver wing on one of those flashes. Welcome to the Twilight Zone. The engine’s steady drone dropped in pitch as the lumbering jet descended through the black skies. A sea of pinpricks sparkled ten thousand feet below them. Denver was lit up like a Christmas tree in October.
Kent rattled the ice in his glass and sipped at the tequila. He’d lost count of the little bottles Sally, the first-class bombshell stewardess, had brought him over the last few hours—enough to ease the sense of dread that had lodged itself in his chest somewhere over the Atlantic. It had felt akin to being trapped between a brood of vipers and a cliff overlooking a black void. Denver would be the coiling snakes, of course. They would be hissing and snapping at his heels if he was not careful.
But it was the cliff at his back that had him calling for the small liquor bottles. The dread he’d wrestled with back there on the island, staring at the blue seas those last two days while awaiting his flight stateside. The truth be t
old, he was growing tired of paradise on the hill before he’d really had a chance to live the good life. A gloom had settled over the villa by midday Friday, and it had refused to budge.
The problem was quite simple, actually: Kent could find nothing that captured his fancy, sitting high on the hill, nestled in his own private Shangri-la. It was all feeling like day-old soda. No matter how often he told himself that he ought to be thrilled with the new yacht—it was a lifelong dream, for heaven’s sake—he could not bring himself to crawl down the hill to take her out again. The realization prompted a slowly moving panic that had gnawed at him with building persistence. The kind of panic you might expect after reaching a coveted destination for which you had sold your firstborn only to discover that the condo on the beach was really a roach-infested shack on a muddy river.
By Saturday the villa felt more like a prison than a resort. The tropical sun seemed like a relentless blast furnace, the quiet like a desperate solitude. And all the while he could not find release, a situation that only served to fuel the growing panic. Madness. Madness in paradise: human nature’s grand joke. When you finally arrive, my friends, you will find the Joker, wearing a frown.
In the end he’d washed it away with tequila. Lots of tequila.
Sunday came slowly, but it came. Kent packed a million dollars in cash about his body and luggage and boarded his flight, indirectly bound for Denver.
The airliner settled onto the asphalt with a squeal of rubber, and Kent closed his eyes. He was Kevin, now. Kevin Stillman. Remember that, Buckwheat. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. His passport said he was Kevin, his business card said he was Kevin, and a dozen accounts scattered to the four corners, each stuffed with cash, all said he was Kevin. Except at the bank—there he would be Bob.
The huge tower clock in Denver International Airport said it was ten o’clock by the time Kent left the rental desk to collect his Lincoln Towncar. It was black, fittingly. An hour later he took a room in the downtown Hyatt Regency ten blocks from the bank, walking through the lobby on pins and needles, fighting off the fear that someone might recognize him. The sentiment was thoroughly unfounded, of course. He looked nothing like the Kent of old. In fact he was not the Kent of old. He was Kevin Stillman, and Kevin Stillman had a new face— broader and well tanned, topped with brown hair. He was not the lanky blond some had once known as Kent Anthony. Goodness, if the prospect of being caught in this remote hotel lobby brought sweat to his forehead, what would a walk through the bank do?