“Dude, like he’s in the harbor, swimming!”
Bogdan Cerny at his apartment, the one he shares in Palo Alto, is talking to Gilly and Sofie, who are at the beach while on a cruise.
“The hell you say!” responds Gilly, salty Pacific Ocean water dripping off the end of his nose, his dark hair plastered to his head, his sleek striped surf board propped against a darkly tanned shoulder. Behind him rises a rocky cliff hundreds of feet high, but devoid of human activity.
Also within sight of the viewfinder on Sofie’s tablet is Sofie herself, in a big orange, floppy beach hat, her face tanned and moist from the heat, beads of sweat at her temples slowly descending to the curves of her prominent cheeks.
“Did you say Hong Kong, Bog?” Sofie asks.
Bog is sitting in the common game room that is shared among the apartments in this off campus residence. It has dark gray, post-industrial ventilation ducts running below fully exposed floor joists and rows of polished nickel, pendant lights hanging from the ceiling, fixed low over the game tables. A young man shoots pool by himself late in the afternoon.
Bog sits near a wall of glass. It separates the game room from the hall. Perched on a modernist lime green sofa, he leans forward to view the screen of his laptop. It’s stationed on a white, plastic blob coffee table. There are also a couple curved back polystyrene chairs, one grey, one red, another modernist sofa to match the one he’s on, white, also lined up against the wall, a foosball game, and a soft drink machine.
“Yeah. I was just wondering how they’re doing. Zak’s always got his phone, so I checked his location. That’s when I saw they are actually in Hong Kong.”
A Sofie eyebrow arches upward. She knows Bog used to have a thing with Kim. She also suspects he has never completely let it go. Sofie loves any drama that might play out in their circle, so she is relishing this. He just “happened” to check. Yeah, sure.
Sofie and Gilly are on a cruise to Ensenada. Being released for the day at the port, they found a couple with a Sloop heading to the Isla Santos Todos, which can only be reached by boat. The island has the biggest waves in North America and lies just two hours from the coast of Mexico. Gilly surfs. Sofie takes the sun with her store bought coffee, writing the equivalent of cards and letters from her tablet. Her cup of coffee cup, prominently displayed and catching rays near her feet, she keeps constantly swirled as its contents slowly disappear.
“I thought they were in Beijing,” says Gilly, wiping strands of wet hair from his forehead.
“I know, right? But you’re not the only one spending time in the drink. I mean, this is Hong Kong harbor. And he is like in the middle of it according to this.”
“How do you figure? Is he swimming?”
“Let’s hope so. He’s either that or he’s drowning. But I doubt he’s drowning because, according to my estimates, he’s doing about a mile per hour.”
“Wow that’s slow,” says Gilly. It would sound slow to Gilly. He regularly surfs at over 30 miles per hour.
“That’s how I know he must be swimming.”
“Could be a really slow boat.”
“But the GPS is below the surface. There’s even a regular motion to it.”
“Whoa, dude! It’s weird that you can know that.”
“Yeah right?”
Bogd per usual has a pair of anodized glasses sitting on the back of his head, perched precariously on his thick mop of surfer dude blonde hair. He and Gilly often surf together when the opportunity arises, but Bog is Eastern European, a Czech from Prague, so his lightened hair is entirely of his own invention. He is skillful with a computer, with hacking and cryptography, legal and not so legal. He whips the glasses around and peers at the corner of his screen where a graphic shows Zak’s progress.
“What about Kim?” asks Sofie, not so innocently.
Bog sighs audibly.
“I don’t have a way to track her.”
Sofie immediately deduces that this means he has never had access to any of her electronics. But he wouldn’t want any kind of access, would he? Keeping track of old girlfriends is too much like cyber stalking. And that can be recorded, if necessary, by authorities.
Bog’s phone, in the pocket of his white shorts, rumbles against his skin. He grabs it and taps it a couple times and the call comes up on another corner of his PC screen, accompanied first by a photo of a face and then the real thing. Kina Alana is furrowing her brow.
“Hi Bog! Thank god you’re there. You won’t believe who I just got a call from! Oh! Hi, Sofie. Is that you Gill?”
“In the flesh,” responds Gilly.
“Let me guess. You got a call from Kim?” asks Bog. He looks over at the guy at the pool table, who now seems to be listening and this irks Bog. He gets up, flip flopping his way noisily into the hallway.
“Geez, what’s going on? Yeah, sort of. It was Kim’s phone anyway,” says Kina.
“Kina!” exclaims Sofie, automatically assuming something bad would have to have happened to Kim for someone else to be using her phone.
“Yeah I know.”
“What happened to her?” asks Bog. He is walking into the high foyer of the house, his flip flops smacking loudly on the terrazzo floor. Colorful abstract oils rise over the doorways to adjacent rooms. Rectangular corner windows on the second story fling sunlight onto the paintings. Bog heads for the front door.
“It was some guy who said he was Yuan something. I don’t know, I don’t remember what his last name was. He had a big accent. Chinese I think, maybe. He said he was in Hong Kong.” Kina explains.
“My God!” says Sofie.
“So I say: where’s Kim? And he goes: I am sorry about your friend. She fell off a boat and is swimming to shore with her boyfriend. We are arranging a rescue as fast as we can. Are you a relative?”
“So I tell him: no, I am not a relative. I am a friend. But I will contact her parents and let them know. Just tell her that she has to text me that she is ok. And he says ok.”
Sofie is suspicious.
“What does he mean: she fell off a boat? I mean really! He makes it sound like an accident. I don’t think so.”
Bog enters the front garden, which is full of low shrubs and flower beds. He finds a low stone bench, puts a foot up on it and balances his laptop on his knee, angling it to shelter the screen from the onslaught of the sun. A stone wall next to the sidewalk partially screens the garden from the street. The modernist house behind him is sided in wide boards of dark walnut hardwood. The large windows are black metal framed, differing in size and shape. There are separate roofs over different parts of the house. They extend awnings over a sidewalk that runs around the outside of the house. One of these awnings cantilevers over the tall glass front door.
“The guy uses her phone?” Bog asks. “He had to be pretty concerned to do that. But it makes sense if he was trying to reach her parents.”
“Don’t any of you guys have her parents’ number?” asks Kina.
There is a collective pause. Bog would be the logical person. He actually got to know Kim’s parents once upon a time. On the other hand, since he and Kim broke up why would he keep her parent’s number? He checks to see if he still has it.
“Bingo!”
He gives the number to Kina. Even on his laptop Bog can watch as Kina bends to write it down. She wears one of her signature tops, which makes it hard not to notice.
Kina wastes no time.
“Well, I need to call them. Bye guys.”
Kina disappears.
“I’m afraid Kim is not a huge swimmer,” interjects Gilly.
“Well, neither am I,” interjects Sofie.
Gilly pats her on the shoulder.
“You don’t need to be,” Gilly observes.
Sophie’s hat flips in a gust of wind and she tries to constrain it as she looks up at Gilly.
“Zak,” she says.
“Oh sure. He’s a good swimmer. He�
�ll see to her,” Gilly says, patting her some more.
Bog looks up, into the sun, and squints. It must be dawn over there, he thinks, tomorrow already.
“Look guys. They’ll be fine,” he says, even though he is not entirely sure about that.
There is a pause in the conversation. This leads Bog to ask, “How’s the surfing?”
Gilly, sun drenched and still dripping, warms instantly to the subject.
“Crazy. This island has a wicked point break.”
Bog remembers the times they’ve surfed together and now he envies Gilly.
“Cool.”
Sofie, however, is not to be left out.
“There’s even an old lighthouse,” she says, while pointing back up the cliff.
Bog, who cannot dispel his worry over Kim and Zak, nods agreeably and smiles back into the laptop’s tiny camera.
“Awesome. It really is guys.”
Kim, Zak and an ocean of water in a busy harbor is not such a great place to be. He’s going to keep the tracker running.
Chapter 20
On Fire Page 19