by BRM Stewart
I sat and looked out over the hotel gardens, the big pool, then the town, the ocean hidden by the high rises near the beach. I sipped at my water.
My mood of optimism from earlier had wilted as I realised that there was a crack in my plan, a crack in my life – a fault line that ran all the way back to that day in Glasgow, the party twenty-five years ago, when everything had changed.
I needed to get clear, get away. Do this ‘wee job’ and get out. It felt more urgent somehow.
*
I found the street easily enough, but was past the pub before seeing the sign: I don’t drive much abroad, so I really have to concentrate. I managed to find somewhere to turn, and then drove past the pub again and squeezed into a line of cars at the side of the road.
It was another fantastic day, temperature in the high twenties, a clear blue sky. Helen was back at the hotel pool, sulking, having refused to go down to the beach on her own. She’d quizzed me again about what I was doing and why she couldn’t come, and was either seriously pissed off at me or was pretending to be seriously pissed off. It didn’t matter either way, I reflected, as I headed under the sign at the entrance to the pub, deciding to sit out of the sun. The place was smaller inside than it looked, with small round metal-legged tables and wooden chairs. I took off my baseball cap and sunglasses, and sat down near the door. The aircon was turned up high, and I almost shivered in my shorts and T-shirt.
‘Bom die,’ I said to the waitress.
‘Good afternoon,’ she replied. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Just a coffee – Americano. Please. No milk.’
The place was almost empty. There were four old men who looked like locals huddled over small glasses of beer at the bar, and a family of tourists at a table - a couple and their two young children, poring over maps, drinking cokes, chatting about their day.
My coffee came. ‘Obrigado.’ ‘You’re welcome.’
One o’clock came… and went.
At one thirty I ordered another coffee, with a corresponding trip to the toilet. The family left amidst excited chatter, and were replaced by two young clean-cut couples in shorts and T-shirts, sunglasses tucked in their hair, studying maps, drinking beers, speculating about their day in loud middle-class voices. I began to think that no one was coming for me.
And suddenly there was a figure sitting beside me, calling for a beer from the waitress and placing a wide, battered straw hat on the table. He reached to shake my hand. ‘Mr McGregor?’ He sounded local.
I nodded. He was shorter than me, with longish thick black hair shot with grey, and dark leathered skin that had spent its life in bright sunshine. He wore jeans cut off at the knee, a loose, dark polo shirt, and old sandals. His dark arms showed muscle and sinews like steel wire as he lifted his beer glass, and conversed with the waitress. She laughed, and reached to rest her hand on his arm as she turned away.
He drank quickly. ‘Please, we have to hurry.’ He dropped some coins on the table, and I left a five Euro note.
A moment later we were back out in the full blaze of the day. I followed him into an old, battered, open-top short wheelbase Land Rover; he crunched the gears as he pulled into traffic to a blast of car horns, picking up speed. Without slowing down or seeming to look around, we cut left past modern apartment blocks, right at the roundabout – oblivious to the other traffic – and along a wide avenue with olive trees scattered on either side, the estuary and the ocean away to our left. We raced down the avenue, swung round another roundabout, and then were bouncing across rough ground to skid to a halt at the end of a line of parked cars in front of the marina. He let the engine stall, and climbed out.
I followed, putting my baseball cap back on, and grateful to get away from the stench of diesel.
‘Come.’
He climbed over the short wall that bordered the marina, and walked, almost stooped, along the path by its side, with me just behind him.
The marina was huge, split by a complex of apartments. There were boats of all sizes, from small cabin cruisers to enormous, fully-crewed vessels. I couldn’t begin to guess at the amount of money I was looking at.
He unlocked a gate to a pontoon; we stepped onto it, and walked out for about fifty yards to a relatively small fishing boat, painted bright blue. It had a small wheelhouse, a narrow metal drum winch at the front for fishing nets, and it looked incongruous amongst all this display of money. He leapt down with practised ease onto the afterdeck, went straight for the wheelhouse, and fired up the inboard engine, letting it idle. Once again I felt the smell of diesel as I cautiously stepped aboard, amongst the lobster pots and buckets half full of water.
He turned to me, looking back along the pontoon. ‘Please, sit down.’ He reached into a locker and pulled out two bottles of Cristal beer, knocking the caps off on the edge of a wooden locker, and handed one to me. He stood beside me, the engine running, drinking from the bottle and looking along the pontoon. ‘Ah, this weather,’ he said. ‘Is like July, not October.’
‘Good for tourists,’ I said, sitting, feeling the condensation on the beer bottle. He bobbed his head ambivalently. Then he gave a wave to someone, and I turned my head to look, hearing him go to the bow.
A short, slim woman was walking towards us, along the pontoon, carrying a rucksack. She had on a baseball cap and big sunglasses, a T-shirt, and jeans cut off as high as they anatomically could be. I half-recognised the confident – arrogant – walk, but it was a minute or two before I identified her as Charlene from the day before. I watched her approach, and the man untied the rope at the front of the boat then went back into the shade of the wheelhouse, looking over his shoulder at her.
She pulled the aft mooring rope from its bollard, and stepped past me onto the deck, letting her rucksack down gently and tidying the mooring rope into a neat coil beside it. She sat on the bench opposite me as the engine was revved and we pulled away from the pontoon. She didn’t look at me, but I found myself examining her perfect profile: every time I turned away, my eyes were drawn back to her. She bent to pull a bottle of water from her rucksack, the neck of her T-shirt falling open. I sipped at my beer. I assumed her husband Jimmy would meet us at the other end of the trip.
We steered into the main exit channel, past the end of the harbour wall, and round into the ocean, but almost doubling back immediately, heading diagonally across the estuary. There was more of a swell here, the breeze cooler, refreshing.
On the west bank was an ancient wooden tall-ship flying the Portuguese flag, and further on was another marina. Further on still was the road bridge, and beyond that the arcs of the railway bridge, and then the bridge carrying the motorway, chaotic storks’ nests on top of its towers. I’d first come here, on the way up to Silves, with the woman I’d loved – and still did, if I was honest – and then again with the woman I thought I had loved. I had been looking forward to sharing the experience with Helen, and wasn’t enjoying the feeling that it was being hijacked for some other purpose.
We headed towards the east bank, to a tight collection of villas with their white walls and red tiled roofs. There was a sandy bay, and another inlet busy with small boats. We rounded a breakwater, and made for a modern concrete pier. As we neared it, Charlene stood up and stumbled, almost falling onto me. I held her arms to help her get her balance, feeling her smooth skin, sensing her body, looking into her eyes. She smiled and sat down again. It was the first display of any emotion I’d seen on her face, but I couldn’t understand what she’d been trying to do.
We glided to a perfect turn and stopped by a flight of concrete steps. Charlene tossed the rope up onto the wall, swung her legs onto the steps, and raced up them to tie us up. The skipper threw up the forward mooring rope, and she tied us off with that too. I looked around, not sure what to do. The skipper helped himself to another beer; as he opened it, he gestured me away, up to Charlene. She stood on the sea wall, arms akimbo, and watched while I tentatively climbed from the boat onto the steps –the first few cove
red with seaweed – and up to her.
She shouldered her rucksack, and headed off into the network of narrow streets and modern villas, me following. After a couple of dead-ends and circuits, after which I’d completely lost my bearings, we stopped at one particular villa. It wasn’t one of the largest ones. It looked to be very new, with closed freshly-painted blue shutters, a couple of satellite dishes on the roof pointing to slightly different parts of the sky, containers of shrubs arranged on the gravel front garden.
Charlene was at the door, trying to turn a key in the deadlock. It seemed to take some effort, but then it was open and I followed her in, taking off my sunglasses and tucking them in the neck of my shirt – gradually my eyes got used to the darkness of the interior, where the only light was sunshine leaking round the edges of shutters. We were in the main part of the open-plan house. There was a leather sofa, a large TV set with a Sky box and another satellite decoder underneath, a glass table. The place felt empty, as if only occasionally used. Charlene looked around, and then she took the rucksack off her shoulder and moved towards what looked like a small cubbyhole.
The cubbyhole was actually a tiny study. There was a closed laptop and docking station, with a 27” screen on the desk, piles of papers beside it. Shelves were covered with books, all in English, roughly half-in-half thrillers and books on travel. Charlene switched the laptop on, and the monitor, and we watched as we were asked for a password.
Here we go, I thought. She expects me to somehow guess the password, or bypass it, the way they do in the movies or on TV. I wondered how I might break it to her that this just didn’t happen. At the same time I felt relief: the trip was pointless, the ‘wee job’ couldn’t be done. I could get back to my holiday.
Charlene pulled her iPhone out of a pocket in her shorts – god knows how there was room for it there – and her thumbs moved rapidly across the screen. She bent over the computer keyboard and typed in characters. The screen opened up to the standard Windows desktop screen, showing two columns of icons. I watched, mildly impressed. But the sense of relief had evaporated: this was deeper than I had thought, and I was going to have to do the wee job after all.
She stood back and turned to me. ‘We need you to do two things.’ I was taken aback by her voice: it was soft, polite English with something either Welsh or Northumberland in there – not what I expected, but I couldn’t have said what I did expect; I’d begun to believe she didn’t speak English at all. Her face was still expressionless. ‘We want you install a keylogger, and we want you to find some files.’
‘I don’t…’
She bent from the waist, the T-shirt falling open again, and reached into the rucksack, standing up with a USB stick in her hand. ‘There’s one on here.’
OK, but she could have done that herself, I was sure. ‘What sort of files?’ She was clearly not a computer illiterate, so why did she need me?
‘He does financial transactions, and hides them. That’s why you’re here. You know where to look and what to look for. You’re familiar with the kind of thing he’s doing – moving money around, laundering it.’ She checked her phone. ‘You have two hours.’ And she stepped away from the computer chair.
I sat down – no choice. I swallowed, and then the old work instinct just kicked in, because I had to do what she asked, and it wasn’t outwith my field of expertise. ‘I’ll do the keylogger last – no point logging my own keystrokes. Let me know when I have fifteen minutes left.’
As I started to work, she placed a bottle of cold water on the desk beside me.
I started by looking at all the documents on the hard drive, and how they were organised, and what he stored in the cloud. It took a long time of searching – I could hear an imaginary clock ticking beside me, but I stayed with a systematic search, resisting the urge to panic and just search frenetically and fruitlessly, all too aware how working at a computer can just suck all of time away. I kept looking, leaving windows open and parked so that I knew where I’d been and could work up and down the trees of folders. The owner of the machine had actually structured his files fairly logically, and that helped me: it helped me find the anomalies, because he wouldn’t have put folders accidentally in the wrong place – he’d have done it deliberately. I found a spreadsheet which unlocked with the same password that the computer used, and opened to reveal a list of other passwords; I scanned them and continued working.
‘One hour,’ Charlene said at one point. Her voice was calm. She was sitting on the big leather couch, fingers tapping and stroking the screen of her phone.
I finally found something promising – a folder buried several deep within ‘family photos’ but not containing photos. There were four documents, and three spreadsheets. They all needed a password, but they were in the password file, clearly identified.
‘Think this is it,’ I said. It hadn’t been that difficult after all.
I opened the files and had a cursory look: names, addresses, dates, lists of people and money, bank account numbers and sort codes. Charlene came over and stood by me, leaning to look at the screen. I could smell the light scent of her perfume, feel her left breast pressing against my shoulder.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Store them on the USB stick. I’ve got another if you need it. Forty minutes,’ she added.
I copied the files across, spending the time continuing my search of the hard drive and the synchronised cloud folders, watching the painfully slow copying process. Then a last look for any other files that might be important, and finally it was done. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘ready for the keylogger. What have you got on here?’ I opened the folder on the USB stick and looked at the two files with the meaningless names.
‘One is a packet analyser, the other is a form grabber,’ she said.
I nodded. Between the two, they would pick up Internet transactions, catching passwords before they were encrypted and sent over the internet, and sending them on to an FTP server or an email address. I installed them, telling the anti-virus program and the firewall that this was all perfectly safe. Whatever it was that the owner of this computer did, Charlene would be able to monitor it and then do it herself on another computer.
I finished everything, ejected the USB stick, and stood back to let Charlene shut down the machine and finish off. Silently, she put the empty water bottles in the rucksack, and wiped the keyboard clean of our fingerprints, along with the surface of the desk and the door-handles – and we went out to the sunshine, putting on our sunglasses but still screwing our eyes up against the light.
We went back to the harbour through deserted streets – siesta time – and I awkwardly went down the steps and into the boat, Charlene waited till the skipper started the engine then cast us off, threw the rope down, and nimbly climbed down and aboard. The skipper opened three beers and the throttle, and Charlene and I settled on the bench in the stern while he steered us back across the estuary. I drank the beer slowly, trying to stay calm but realising my heart was beating fast. What now? She’d cleaned our fingerprints away, but there would be traces that we’d used the computer: the files would show when they’d last been accessed, if anyone cared to look – unlikely maybe, because the owner would assume that password-protection kept him secure. I wondered how Charlene had got her hands on the password.
We reached the marina, and slowly made our way back to our berth. Charlene leapt out, tied us off, then shouldered the rucksack and started walking away quickly along the pontoon. I looked at the skipper questioningly, and he shrugged. ‘I drive you back.’
We stepped off the boat and followed Charlene along the pontoon. By the time we got out of the marina and up to the rough ground where he’d parked the Land Rover, there was no sign of her. The skipper drove me back to the Kingfisher, with rattling engine, diesel fumes and no regard for any other traffic – occasionally he blasted his horn as some tourist dithered in his path, and he lifted his hands in despair: ‘Rental!’ he hissed.
I found my car, gave the skipper a wav
e as he let out the clutch and did a U-turn in the road in front of other cars, and I drove back to the hotel and went up to our empty room. From the balcony I could see Helen by the pool, so I changed into swim-shorts and went down to join her, ordering two large rum and cokes on my way through the bar to the outside decking, indicating to the waiter where I’d be.
She was lying back wearing only a bikini bottom, sunglasses, and her baseball cap. I crouched beside her and tugged one white bud from her ear as I leaned over to kiss her lips and then her left nipple.
‘Are you going to tell me what the fuck that was all about?’ she asked, not looking at me. I knew now that she was seriously pissed off with me – this was not pretence. I also remembered that she’d said, early in our relationship: ‘Never lie to me, Martin. I won’t stand for that.’
Well, a large part of my life had always been a lie, but it was coming to a head, even without the appearance of Charlene. ‘Honestly, darling, it was just a wee computer job some old friends wanted me to do. Forgive me?’
The waiter arrived with our drinks, and she sat up and moved her legs aside so I could sit by her on the lounger. ‘We’ll see. We’ll drink these and then you can be very nice to me.’ There was no warmth in her voice.
‘Oh yes, I promise.’
*
Three evenings later, when we had been in town for dinner and were wandering back to the hotel, we stopped at the last café on the very edge of the old town, as we usually did, for what Scottish pals would call a ‘ditcher’. The place was by the main road, and had no view, but the drink was very cheap, and locals drank there. We sat inside, because the evening was dark and cool, a sign that the summer really was about end, that the last hot week had been an anomaly.
As we sipped our rum and cokes, I looked up at the TV news channel, and felt a shock as I saw the house I had been in with Charlene: I recognised the double satellite dishes. There were police cars and an ambulance, and a picture of a man: in his fifties, in a suit, balding and chubby-faced, a moustache. I watched, horrified, as the captions came up, my mind decoding them: assassinado, comerciante, milionário, crime organizado – with a question mark.