Cold Winter Rain

by Steven Gregory

  The planes could be ordered with or without armed ejection seats. I chose the disarmed variety. In a plane that touches down dead-stick at ninety-five knots, firing the nineteen-sixties-era ejection seat is probably quite a bit riskier than an engine-out forced landing.

  Outside, the lineman hooked a tow cart to the Albatros and deftly placed it in a space on the ramp.

  When an airplane has sat in a strange shop for several days, a thorough preflight inspection is never a bad idea.

  One of the instructors at Cold War Jets once took off in an Iskra that had just been pulled out of a hangar and lost the engine after climbing to three thousand feet. He was able to land on a road with no damage except to the engine. When the engine was torn down, inspectors found bits of painted aluminum metal inside the turbines.

  Speculation was that someone had set an empty soft drink can inside the engine nacelle, and the preflight had overlooked it.

  I drained and splashed fuel, opened the fuel caps to peer inside the fuel tanks, checked all the control surfaces, noted that the antennas were still in place.

  When I finished looking over the airframe and engine for things that might kill me, I climbed inside and strapped myself into the seat. Engine start and takeoff were normal, and I climbed out and headed south on a perfect day for flying, quiet and still, high cirrus clouds and not much wind.

  I remembered a flight in a National Guard F-4 on a training run flying I-R training routes over Mississippi and Arkansas, returning to Alabama late one afternoon, flying away from the setting sun and toward the rotation of the earth, when the air was smooth as butter and the aircraft seemed suspended in the velvety humid Mississippi air, while the Earth slipped slowly away beneath me.

  Meditating, watching the breath, is like standing on a river bank and watching the water flow by. Flying, meditation, watching the river slip by, can sometimes reveal the real you underneath the monkey-mind busy-ness zinging around in your brain.

  Jack Edwards Airport was in sight in a near-perfect half hour. I needed cases farther from home. Better if the clients stayed alive though.

  The Toyota wouldn’t start. The problem wasn’t the flywheel this time, because the engine would spin, but no cylinders were firing. I trudged over to the fancy new FBO office where the corporate jet pilots hung out and asked to borrow the courtesy car.

  The blonde at the desk reached behind her, and with inch-long red fingernails unhooked the keys to a Ford Escort. “Just fill it up,” she said.

  “No problem,” I told her.

  On the way to the marina, glancing to the right at the T-intersection of Alabama Highway 59 and Beach Boulevard, I could see my bar. Lost Lagoon. The sight felt like miles gone by. No time to stop in today.

  A few weeks after I closed on the Anna Grace, the medical school professor had accepted a permanent position at the medical school in Birmingham and made an offer on the house. I made a counteroffer, and we reached a deal.

  Two days after we’d closed, I’d walked into the Lost Lagoon Lounge and asked to see the owner. Another boat owner at the marina had told me he was moving back to New York and was looking for a buyer.

  Six weeks later we met in a Gulf Shores lawyer’s office, and the bar was mine.

  The moment I stepped onto the catwalk running alongside the Anna Grace, I could see she had been boarded.

  The starboard top lifeline was dangling near the waterline, and a life jacket lay straddling the helm.

  I dropped the gym bag and pulled the Glock out of the shoulder holster. There was no wind, and the water around the boat was still. Whoever had been on the boat had probably left. Nearing the stern, I stepped out of my shoes, stripped off my socks, crouched on the edge of the catwalk, the Glock in both hands, and leaped over the lower lifeline and into the stern well.

  I landed on my feet facing the bow, the gun straight in front. The boat rocked from the sudden shift in center of gravity. Anyone in the cabin would instantly have felt the presence of someone on deck.

  For thirty seconds, I didn’t move. I was partially concealed and protected from anyone coming out of the cabin – or firing from the top of the cabin steps – by the structures on deck. Slowly, keeping the pilothouse between me and the cabin, I eased forward, squatting on the balls of my feet like a baseball catcher, the gun held in front of me.

  I made it across the cockpit to the companionway without seeing or hearing anything below.

  “Slate!”

  My name boomed over the docks as though the speaker had shouted it through a bullhorn. It took all the discipline I had to avoid turning my head to search for the shouter. My eyes remained locked on the companionway exit.

  It helped, though, that I recognized the voice. In a moment, the speaker’s shadow fell across my face, and I knew that Moeller was standing on the catwalk above me.

  “Slate,” he said again, not much quieter. Moeller’s voice had two levels, loud and painful. “Yeah.” I said it without turning my head.

  “There’s nobody down there, man. You can stop the cops-and-robbers shtick. I know it’s fun, but, really, I already checked.” He jumped down and landed lightly on the deck, came around and opened the companionway door. “See? Nobody home.”

  I lowered the gun to my side, mostly because Moeller was now in the line of fire. “All right,” I said. “You checked. When?”

  “Early this morning. I had started out to get beignets and chicory coffee at Cafe Beignets, and I saw the lifeline was down. Tried to call you but your cell phone was off. Nobody there then either, but – well – you’ll see. They trashed the place.”

  I stepped down the companionway and peered inside.

  “Trashed” is part of the contemporary argot, but it was not quite an apt description. “Searched” would’ve been better.

  It looked as though every object in the place, including paper ones – especially including paper ones – had been picked up, looked at, then thrown to the cabin deck.

  I held onto the companionway rail to avoid having to set foot on the mess.

  Moeller’s face appeared in the rectangle of light above me. “Sorry, my friend. I didn’t want to touch anything until you had been here. Would you like some help cleaning up?”

  I swung myself back up on deck. “No. I appreciate it, but this is something I have to do. How about tomorrow morning? I need to talk to you. You going to be around?”

  Moeller stepped up onto the dock, did an about-face, and threw me a two-fingered salute. “You got it, Captain. See you in the morning.”

  Boats at anchorage are hardly the most secure homes. The marina during the day was full of good people, captains and boat hands and waitresses and fishermen and diesel mechanics who tried to watch out for each other, but most of the boats rode empty after sundown, and a sheriff’s patrol car managed to drive by only once a night.

  An unoccupied boat is an invitation to thieves. Boat owners know this. Smart boat owners keep little of value on their boats.

  I opened the companionway and got to work.

  One thing I knew for sure: the only important document on the boat was the ship’s log. A boat without a log was like an airplane without logbooks. Worth something, no doubt, but worth much less than a boat with intact logs.

  It was also pretty certain that the ship’s log was not what the unscheduled visitors were looking for. It was equally certain that they knew more about what they were looking for than I did.

  I started by picking up every single piece of paper off the cabin deck and laying them out in collated batches on the boat’s table.

  Warranties. Instructions for the ship’s radios. The GPS manual. A manual for the ancient but functioning Loran. A couple of dozen paperback novels.

  Down at the bottom of the pile, the ship’s log, lying face down as though someone had held it upside down to shake it, then dropped it on the floor.

  The surface of the log binder was leather and might take fingerprints. So might the companionway rail and other parts o
f the boat. But I didn’t have a pair of evidence gloves, and every assistant prosecutor in every DA’s office has had to explain to a jury, or have a witness do it, that finding identifiable fingerprints at a crime scene is rare, even when the perpetrators didn’t wear gloves.

  I put the logbook back in its place in the desk.

  In the front drawer of the desk, I kept an ancient marine-grade laptop computer. I was about to close the drawer when I noticed that the little green “on” light on the front of the case was glowing.

  I pulled the computer out of the drawer and opened the top. The screen was dark, the computer in sleep mode. I pushed the i/o button, and the screen came to life; on the right side was my name, and under it appeared the legend “1 document open.”

  I clicked the document button. A WordPerfect window opened to a document in which someone had typed in all caps: IF U KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR U STAY OUT OF THE OIL & GAS BUSNESS. The author had named the file YOU and saved it to the desktop.

  I right-clicked the mouse pad to see if the writer of the note left any more electronic clues. “Reveal Codes” revealed nothing. “Properties” told me the document had been created at 4:14 a.m. on January 25. This morning, probably not long before Moeller went out for coffee and doughnuts.

  After cleaning up the boat and going dockside for a sandwich and a cup of gumbo, I returned to my desk and the laptop.

  I saved the note to the hard drive in both Word Perfect and rich text format and put both versions in a new folder on the desktop.

  I closed Word Perfect, pulled the memory stick Akilah had given me out of my pocket, and inserted it in the USB port on the side of the case.

  I clicked on the “My Computer” icon. The computer recognized the memory stick as a “removable disk” on the E-drive. I clicked again. The legend “PASSWORD: –––––—” appeared on the monitor.

  I tried Kramer. Nothing. Kris. Still nothing. I tried various combinations of the family’s names. I tried the three initials of Kramer’s law firm: WWW. Then Woolf.

  This was useless. I couldn’t tell whether the files were encrypted because I couldn’t get past the password protection. Did Akilah use the term encrypted when she meant password protected? Most people who knew enough about computers to use the term “encrypted” wouldn’t confuse that with mere password protection. Did Akilah know the password? Had she simply forgotten to give it to me?

  I realized I was staring into the depths of the notebook screen. My eyeballs felt detached from their muscles. The computer wasn’t going to tell me the password.

  I pulled the memory stick out of the USB port, capped it, and returned it to my pocket.

  I drank a glass of water, visited the head, stripped to my underwear, then sat cross-legged on my bunk and meditated for ten minutes. I stood, stretched the knots out of my legs, and lay down.

  Before I started to get drowsy, I rolled over on my side, pulled the Glock out of its holster, and placed it on the floor next to the bunk.

  In the old days when Anna and David were alive, I’d kept a loaded semi-automatic on a bedside table on my side of the big four-poster bed Anna and I had shared. A loaded pistol kept in a house with a child present isn’t dangerous if the owner of the pistol applies knowledge and common sense.

  Trigger locks are fashionable and politically correct – if anything associated with triggers is politically correct – but clumsy, slow, and dangerous if the gun is locked and the intruder is already in the house.

  The pistol on my bedside table in my other life had been a Colt’s Government-model .45. I’d never left it cocked in the house.

  Without a round in the chamber, that fine old gun was less dangerous than the heavy brass lamp on the bedside table. No young child – and for that matter, not so many women – possessed the grip strength to pull back the slide and cock the big Colt’s. The only way a kid could hurt himself with it would have been to drop it on his toe.

  And I had practiced enough to know that I could cock the gun, flip off the safety, and fire it in less than a second.

  But I wasn’t lying on my bed beside my wife in our four-bedroom neo-Colonial anymore. I was in a bunk on a small boat. The distance between me and the companionway hatch could be measured in two heartbeats.

  For this purpose, I’d take Gaston Glock’s design over Samuel Colt’s any day. With a round in the chamber and no safety except the unique little pressure device on the trigger’s tip, holding a Glock in your hand is like having a gun barrel in your index finger.

  I slept a pleasant sleep without dreams.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Thursday January 26

  Hans Moeller had grown up in Zurich. Six-two, rangy, with close-cropped blond hair and scant white eyebrows, Moeller was graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology — the same undergraduate school from which Albert Einstein was graduated sixty years earlier. Moeller, however, by his account, had been a better student. He had later invented some indispensable process or product for making clocks tick or computers compute or doodads do – he never had explained exactly what – and made a fortune or two and retired.

  Now Moeller divided his time between Switzerland and his forty-three foot Cheoy Lee motor sailer. The Billy Tell spent its winters on the Gulf Coast, sometimes hauling charter clients to the small islands the big cruise ships couldn’t touch, mostly serving as a live-aboard when Moeller wanted a break from the snow, as seemed to be the case now.

  Late every April, Moeller would show up with a crew member or two or three he had collected on the slopes or in the shops of the Bahnhofstrasse – somehow always tan, female, and blonde – and they would sail around the Florida cape and slide down the Caribbean archipelago, sometimes as far as Caracas, before heading back north on the western side of the Windwards, around Cuba, and back up the intracoastal waterway or offshore, as the mood struck him, and back to Orange Beach.

  Moeller’s schedule seemed backwards to me until I’d visited him in Zurich and Gstaad one January. After that it made perfect sense.

  We sat in the cockpit of the Billy Tell just before sunrise, steaming mugs of coffee in hand, watching the dockyard begin to come to life. Moeller’s boat did not have a permanent home on the Redneck Riviera. The marina considered him a seasonal visitor, and this year they had assigned him slip F-18.

  “So, Slate, aside from your latest intrigue, how are things with you? Are you ready for the introductions?”

  Every spring, Moeller offered to set me up with one or perhaps more of his active crew members. Every spring I told him I would let him know.

  “Have you ever seen the old Burt Reynolds movie called Smokey and the Bandit?”

  “Who is Burt Reynolds?”

  “I’ll accept that as a negative answer.” Moeller has certain gaps in his familiarity with American popular culture. “Anyway, in that movie, or maybe it’s in the sequel, the actor Burt Reynolds portrays a redneck character with a fast car who bedevils local law enforcement. In one scene, the sheriff, having stopped the car for the umpteenth time, is asking the Reynolds character whether he has any fears. ‘I ain’t afraid of but two things,’ Reynolds says. ‘What’s that?’ says the sheriff. ‘Women and the police.’”

  Moeller just nodded. Perhaps only rednecks – approximately eighteen per cent of the United States population, according to a study I read that called us “Anglo-Irish” – can appreciate this sort of humor. “And what do you fear, Slate?”

  “Those are a subset of the one set of entities in the universe worthy of anyone’s fear – homo sapiens.”

  “Fearsome creatures.”

  “And you, my friend?”

  He swept his arm about in a broad gesture that took in the entire marina. “That it is all going to end badly in the none-too-distant future.”

  “Not the asteroids again.” Among Moeller’s hobbies was tracking near-earth objects using a rooftop observatory at his chalet in the Alps and a computer program he had written.

  “No, my f
riend. The odds of a catastrophic strike are long except on a very distant time frame. Earth is three-quarters water, and most of the land mass is uninhabited. Though I’d feel better about my calculations if we had identified all the objects in the asteroid belt and if we didn’t keep losing track of the ones we’ve already found. No, this scenario, I’m afraid, carries a much higher probability.”

  He sipped his coffee. “I came back to the States directly from a meeting with my bankers in Zurich.”

  “That’s something I will never be able to say.”

  “No. Not anymore, not after your government’s pursuit of UBS and enactment of a law requiring foreign banks to provide information to the IRS prompted the Swiss banks to cease offering accounts to U.S. citizens. But you can still benefit from my bankers’ advice.”

  “Which is?”

  “Prepare.”

  “For?”

  “Economic collapse. Financial Armageddon. The coming New Dark Ages.” Moeller smiled. “Being Swiss bankers, of course they don’t use those terms. Nevertheless, what they say is that this time, it really is different. What’s happening in the Eurozone because of the debts run up by the peripheral economies is just the overture. The larger economies, particularly the United States and Japan, have finally amassed so much debt that the Keynesian techniques the central bankers used during most of the twentieth century are no longer available.”

  “Well, Japan has that demographic problem.”

  “Yes, forty years from now Japan’s population will be thirty per cent smaller than it is now. That problem for now is unique to Japan — it comes later for China, but China will suffer from its own demographic bomb about mid-century — but it’s still significant because Japan is the world’s third largest economy. And it has the world’s largest sovereign debt. But I digress.”

  “Go on then.”

  “In the past, reserve banks used money creation and low interest rates to accelerate growth out of a recession. But this recession is the deepest since the Great Depression, and it’s not just a growth recession. It’s an asset deflation recession. In the United States, the Fed has expanded its balance sheet with risky assets and used what my bankers call ZIRP — the Zero Interest Rate Policy.”