Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  "You have any idea why they want Christina?"

  Paul gave him a long look, then shrugged. "They know she can do the job."

  "But there are all kinds of smart—"

  "You're forgetting something."

  "What?"

  "She didn't talk to the D.A.'s people."

  "So she's getting a reward from Tony?" asked Rick.

  "No, I don't think it's that."

  "What?"

  "If she gets caught again, he knows she'll be quiet. Or can be quiet."

  "That's not a good enough reason to want her to do it."

  "I know. I'm talking about factors. The other reason is that her system worked."

  "Somebody else could think of another system. You could think of a system, for God's sake."

  "I could, I suppose, but I wouldn't," Paul said. "It wouldn't be as good as hers, either. She has a gift for this kind of thing. I actually wish she had not had such a gift, because you exploited it, but it's true she has the ability. Anyway, you're forgetting about how Tony's mind works. He likes something, he stays with it. I heard he's got ten pairs of the same shoes, never wears anything else."

  "Those slip-on things, loafers, with a heel. Sort of a Cuban look."

  "Tony is not Cuban."

  "So he wants to stick with Christina?" Rick continued. "That makes me think he's got some kind of thing coming up."

  "Possible."

  "You know what?"

  "No."

  "Bullshit."

  "All I know is, he's sending stuff into JFK, not taking it out," said Paul. "They're all messed up over there. They're putting in a new terminal. Trucks everywhere."

  "He's not doing the air freight?"

  "No."

  "What?" Rick had been out of the game too long.

  "He's shipping stuff out, like I said."

  "So he's not setting up pickup points?"

  "Nah."

  "What's he need Christina for, then?"

  "When you do a big deal like this, the money goes into a numbered account."

  "So?"

  Paul took a breath. "The money gets put in by one party and another party takes it out. Simple. But there's one problem with that. You need a password or a key code number to take the money out. Both parties have to have it."

  "All right."

  "Tony is careful. You know he needs to get the key code number without being told it. And vice versa. The other guy, too. They don't want to meet or see each other. Nothing on paper."

  He understood now. Christina's old random number generator system could be applied to a new task. Originally the numbers corresponded to places and times. Now they were just numbers that became a sequence. "But the problem is that both parties still need a piece of paper that tells them where to go at what time. How are you going to know to show up?"

  "That's true," Paul agreed. "But it's one link farther away. It's not the number of the account, it's some other number. Plus, it's also destroyable."

  "I'm lost here."

  Paul adjusted the air-conditioner vent. "Let's say we've got a system to make a long number, maybe a number with eight or nine digits. It's a system that can be used anytime. We have it ready. We don't need to make a new number yet. In fact, we don't want a new number yet. That's no good. You're sitting somewhere with the piece of paper and so am I. On that piece of paper are a bunch of numerals, each one corresponding to a time and a place. Next Tuesday at 6:00 p.m.—something like that. So I call and say, 'Five.' You start with number five and maybe you do the next five places on the list. Whatever, you can change it around."

  "Then you start?" said Rick. "You start getting the digits for the new number from each place?"

  "Yeah, but you pick situations that change pretty often. Like every fifteen seconds. So that eighteen months from now, if the feds are investigating, they can't say that at 10:00 a.m. on October 5 the elevator was on the sixth floor, or whatever. You pick something that changes almost constantly, that's the key, almost constantly, and leaves no record."

  "Then you destroy the original piece of paper, since it was needed only once."

  "Right," said Paul. "Maybe you even had the two people memorize it and destroy it beforehand."

  "So that at this point, when the two people are done getting their number sequence, they each have the same number, but they have never met, never talked about the number, and do not have any piece of paper that came from the other party that tells them what the number was. In fact, if you went back to the same places again at the same time of day, you'd get a different number."

  Paul nodded.

  "Tony thinks he's going to get Christina to do this?"

  "Maybe."

  "She won't do it."

  "He just got her out of prison."

  "Somebody else could do this."

  "I agree," Paul said. "It's just what I heard."

  "She won't do it."

  "Yes, she will."

  "Why?"

  "Because if she doesn't, then they will injure her friend."

  "Who?" asked Rick.

  "You."

  "Me?" Rick laughed. "They don't have me."

  "Of course they have you."

  "They don't know where I am now."

  "Are you sure?"

  He thought about it. "No."

  "They put you into play," said Paul. "Or Peck put you into play. Who does Peck work for?"

  "Himself? Or at least not Tony."

  "Is Peck your friend? Your old pal? You know him?"

  "No."

  "Fact, he never liked you."

  "But Peck told me the D.A.'s Office did this against his will. He was all pissed off about it. He said his work was being ruined."

  "You can forget that. Bunch of bird food."

  "He's pretending?"

  "Yes, because he wants you to jump in."

  "Why?"

  "I'll get to that," Paul said. "I got some stuff on that."

  "So you're saying that if I get involved he doesn't mind."

  "Peck comes to you, says she's getting out, so go do the right thing. Go be a hero. And you can't resist."

  He nodded. "Okay, that's true."

  "They fucking put you into play, Rick. It's a game with a lot of different balls—some move fast, some slow, some you can barely even see. They tell you enough so that you got to go find Christina. They don't shove you together, they make it appear natural, they make you work a little for it. That gets you involved with her. Then they grab you and tell her. Then she will do what they say."

  "Only if she cares what they do to me."

  "She cares."

  "You can't be sure. I hope she cares, but you never know."

  "She cares. They'll find a way to be sure she cares."

  "There's a problem with this plan. They don't know where she is."

  "Are you sure?" asked Paul.

  "I don't know where she is and I'm looking for her."

  "That part I don't know about. Maybe they expect you to be the hound dog, to find her. Maybe they have been following her and nobody knows. Maybe they were following her when she got out of prison but lost her. I'm just trying out possibilities here. Maybe they expect Peck to find her."

  "If I walked out right now, then she wouldn't have to cooperate," Rick suggested.

  "Who is she going to go to, the police?"

  "No."

  "There's another problem. You walk out of the game, they'll come and find you."

  "I could go to South America, I could go—"

  "You have a current passport?"

  "No."

  "You think you could really abandon her at this point?"

  "No," Rick said. "I can't do that."

  "Right." Paul tapped his head. "These guys are smart, you got to understand that."

  "If I can tell Christina, and we both disappear, then I've made it."

  Paul nodded. "That might be true. If the two of you leave at the same time, and then Tony's deal still goes through, gets done s
ome other way, maybe it's better after. The problem, of course, is that she may not want to see you. Be with you."

  "She needs me."

  "She doesn't know that. She might not agree with that. You need her, actually." Paul raised his eyebrows. "The only way you get out of this thing is if you take her with you or if she just gives them what they want."

  Paul pulled the car into the driveway, past high spruce trees that hid the house completely. Five fat men in Santa Claus suits could get out of a fire engine and walk into the house and someone watching from the street would never know. Paul had these things worked out in advance.

  "You got the drive refinished?"

  "The oil stains bugged Mary."

  "What do you think?" Rick asked.

  "About how it will go? Not good."

  "Bad?"

  "Probably."

  "Why?"

  "You were an asshole, Rick. A complete asshole. You walked and she went to prison. I don't think it was much fun. I heard there was some incident with a guard up there, some kind of forced-sex thing."

  Anger kicked at his chest. "With Christina?"

  Paul nodded. They sat in the car outside the garage.

  "You're doing everything they expect of you. Everything is a pattern."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The money in Aunt Eva's place."

  He hadn't mentioned this to Paul. "That was only—"

  "The bar situation the other night."

  "You knew before I called you?" Rick asked.

  Paul nodded. "I hear things. People tell me, you know, and I can see a pattern. I got a brother living in a shack out near the fishing boats, goes to the city, gets his old money back, starts drinking and fucking around in Tony Verducci's bar, that's easy. That's a pattern. The pattern is, he's going to keep thrashing around. He's looking for action."

  Rick felt a sick sense of truth in these words.

  "All right," Paul said.

  "That's it?"

  "Yes, for now."

  "You got any more?"

  "Not now, the meal is going to be ready. I'll tell you Mary's point, though. Just a little common sense. I was talking with her about your situation and she pointed some things out."

  "Like what?"

  "Christina is a pretty girl."

  "Sexy. Not pretty exactly. Not a cheerleader."

  "Hey," argued Paul, "I don't remember you complaining about how she looked. We still have those shots of you guys on our boat that first time."

  "I was catching tuna, right." But what he remembered best was the way Christina showed Paul how she could play with numbers in her head. Perched on one of the boat's fishing chairs in a tiny black bikini, and oblivious to the Long Island shoreline whipping past, Christina had asked Paul about the speed, size, and shape of the school of tuna the boat was intersecting. Hard to say, he'd answered. Give me estimates, she'd said, and after he did, she told him that if he shifted the angle at which he cut across the school's path by twenty degrees, the bait would be in front of the fish "about one third longer in time." Paul, trained as an accountant, stared at Christina for a moment, then told Rick to take the wheel. After sitting with a paper and pencil for a few minutes below the deck, he'd come up with a grin on his face. I was off a little, Christina said. Not by much, Paul had answered, eyes thoughtful, not by much.

  Now Paul pulled the car up against the garage and touched a button on the dash, and the wide door slowly opened, revealing a well-lit space, rakes and shovels and lawn tools hung neatly along the walls, sports equipment for the boys on another, the tractor-mower parked to one side.

  "So what's the commonsense part?"

  "Oh, I was saying she's good-looking."

  "Right."

  "So other guys will think that, too."

  "I guess."

  "Then there's one more question. I think I know the answer, but for the purposes of the argument I have to ask it."

  "All right."

  "Christina like to, whatever, spend time in bed?" Paul opened his hands. "This is just my wife, another woman thinking out loud. So just answer the question."

  "Yeah, she likes to fuck," Rick said. "She likes it a lot and she's good at it, and she's picky about who it is, but she gets a lot of guys to pick from."

  Paul nodded at this, too. All his nodding was starting to bug Rick. "This means someone else."

  "Another guy?"

  "Just a matter of time before she finds a guy. Or a guy finds her. They'll hook up somehow, somewhere. It's human nature. You don't know who. You have no idea. He could be a nobody or he could be a problem. But he definitely complicates your situation, Rick, he fucking complicates your situation. I mean, he could have money, he could be a cop, he could be somebody with big friends, he could be anybody. Soon as she's involved with him, it's harder for her to care about you, it's harder for her to do things for Tony so easily, lot of things get messed up there."

  His brother opened his car door. Inside the house was a meal, a wife, two boys with their hair brushed. Civilization. The conversation had stayed outside the house. "So," Rick summarized, hoping for an indication of compassion from Paul, "I'm racing against Tony and I'm racing against Christina finding a guy she likes."

  "In a sense."

  "That's bad, I think."

  Paul's hand was on the door to the kitchen. He turned back and faced Rick, his eyes remote, all-seeing of patterns and numbers and what happened to people—other people, including his brother.

  A HOUSE OF SMELLS: laundry detergent, the pink soap in the bathroom, the roast of lamb in the kitchen, Paul's two boys panting and sweaty and eager, the wet football cleats on the counter, the modest perfumery of Mary's neck and arms as she bent close to serve Rick his dinner, the pencil shavings and cigars in Paul's study—which, Rick noticed, had no fewer than five phone lines and what appeared to be a substantial recording device on the desk, as well as a small personal safe behind the woodwork, tucked between the duck decoys, hunting in Mexico having become Paul's newest pastime, which, when you thought of it, was a pretty good way to meet drug dealers, if that was your inclination, which with Paul was not necessarily the case. Not necessarily. You didn't know, almost no one knew, and that was the way he wanted it. Paul was masked and hedged and operating at a double-blind level, not to mention the Cayman Island account and untraceable and no return address and calling number blocked and encrypted private mail drop and forget you heard this and attorney-client privilege and high-speed shredder—yes, right there under the desk, Rick noticed, the spaghetti of paper not carried away in the house trash and entrusted to the New York City Department of Sanitation but, if he knew Paul, which he did, burned in the fireplace three steps away, where a yellow can of starter fluid and a large box of wooden matches sat on the mantel ready to smoke numbers and words into invisibility.

  AFTER DINNER, Paul drove Rick back to the ferry.

  "We've got fifteen minutes," he said, switching off the headlights but keeping the car running. "My boys loved seeing you. So did Mary."

  Rick nodded. Paul's sons had climbed all over him, wrestling, pummeling him.

  "All right," Paul said. "I found out some other things I wanted to save for after dinner so you wouldn't be too upset. After you called me, I was on the phone for two hours. In fact, that's what I was working on when your ferry came in. I had to talk to some people I usually don't like to talk with." Paul paused, looked at Rick, then back out the window. "When Peck put Christina away, he was still trying to catch up with his father, who was a captain, too. Used to come into my bar. Okay, so the little Peck got his gold shield maybe a year ago and somehow got in with the D.A.'s squad in Manhattan."

  "They're good."

  "Yes, they are. They certainly are that. Fellows you would prefer to have avoided. I mean, it's amazing for this guy to make the Manhattan squad in his late twenties. There's a little respect for his old man in that. But that can create a problem, too. The other guys don't impress very easily. And nobody's cutting hi
m any slack. He's not making good cases as often as he should. He's not desperate, he's just on the ropes. He's a frustrated guy. We know that. I know people who know that. He's working hard, too. Extra hours. But there's something funny about him, Rick. They don't know what it is. Something is edgewise about him. It's not that he's not smart. He is. Now, how do I know this? I know this because Tony has, in fact, approached Peck. They have an arrangement."

  The food felt heavy in Rick's stomach. "What kind of arrangement?"

  "Tony goes to Peck and says, I can give you a couple of great cases, no problem, I'll get Mickey Simms to sing his song. But you got to get me Christina. This is what he says to Peck."

  "A young detective is not going to go for that."

  "Not at first."

  "But then he thinks about it."

  Paul nodded. "He thinks and thinks and thinks about it, and Tony can tell he is thinking about it because he has a few guys watching Peck's house, just for the hell of it, just to get a vibe off of the situation. Check out the drinking, the wife, whatever. So Peck and Tony meet again. Tony already knows how it can be done. The detective has to figure out a way to change his original testimony against Christina, without being a liar in the first place."

  "But wait," said Rick. "He was the one who ID'd her in the truck. He sat up there and said she's the one."

  "Correct. That is correct. Now he has to say it was someone else. He has to say he was wrong. That he saw someone else, another woman on a current case who was the real one."

  "That's just a lot of bullshit."

  "Of course, but identity is a mysterious fucking thing," Paul agreed softly. "How do I know you are you? I mean, I haven't seen you in almost like four years. Here you are, older, with a beard, with a little gray, you weigh thirty pounds less, hair different, glasses, the whole nine yards, and I know it's you. Right? I know it because I just know it. People've put their faith in this for all of recorded time. So Peck has to think this thing through very carefully. He can't just go to the prosecutor who handled the case and say, I woke up this morning and realized it wasn't her. No, that won't do. He has to pin it on somebody. That's the only way to convince the D.A.'s Office. So, as you remember, your whole crew had what, twelve, thirteen people?"