A Billion Ways to Die (13 page)

“We’ll be fine,” said Natsumi, slipping her arm through mine and moving me through the foyer.

Just inside was another room, in the center of which stood a blue-coated infantryman from the American Revolution. He was well equipped with a sturdy musket and turned out nicely in his uniform, his gaze appropriately steely, though with a touch of uncertainty about the whole thing. I started to read the explanatory placard, but Natsumi gently moved me along. In the subsequent rooms we breezed past glass cases filled with maps, weapons and accoutrements from the dismal march of armed conflicts through the centuries. It wasn’t until we’d surveyed most of the collection that we came to a large room reinforced with artillery where a small World War I field piece guarded a door with a sign that said, “Archives.”

Natsumi tried the door and it opened. I followed her.

The walls were lined with deep shelves and file cabinets, neatly arranged and carefully labeled. In the center of the room was a big metal worktable at which Shelly sat looking through a jewelers’ magnifier light at a ragged-edged sheet of paper.

He still had his full head of close-cropped white hair, clear pink face and erect posture. When he looked over the top of the light his expression stayed in neutral.

“We have video surveillance,” he said. “They’ll be here in about a minute.”

“Can you take a coffee break?” I asked.

“You’re still alive,” he said.

“So far,” I said. “I hope we can talk.”

“It’s better if you sit down,” he said, nodding toward the chairs facing him. As soon as we settled down, the door opened behind us and a young man in a khaki shirt and blue jeans walked in. Blue eyes set in a dark-skinned face lent him an air of cautious alert.

“Stand down, sergeant,” said Shelly. “These are associates.”

The young man backed out again and closed the door.

“You look well,” I said.

“I was well,” he said. “Now I’m feeling slightly ill.”

“Is the room bugged?” Natsumi asked.

“We’re not that nuts,” said Shelly, without humor. Then he added, “That was quite a mess you left for our people.”

“You took in Joselito,” I said, more a question.

“The FBI took him in. I’m permanently persona non grata. I only know because one of my last remaining friends in the bureau risked his career to tell me.”

“They should be giving you medals,” said Natsumi.

“That’s not how it works. My reward is I get to keep my pension. Orders are to stay retired this time. They mean it.”

“Can we tell you our story?” Natsumi asked.

He nodded slowly, reluctantly. So we did, leaving out details unessential to the narrative. He listened carefully, still holding the document we’d interrupted him examining. He asked no questions and showed no affect, even when we ended with our visit to Evelyn in the hospital.

“You’re blown,” he said.

“We were blown. Now we’re back in business,” I said. “For now.”

He shrugged, allowing the point.

“The world isn’t the same,” he said. “I don’t know anything anymore, and I really don’t want to know. After 9/11, everybody screamed about the operational firewalls between intelligence services. So they poked them full of holes, and now they got the Wild West. As bad as you think it is, it’s worse.”

“How could Fontaine know our passports were fraudulent when we cleared through the BVI?” Natsumi asked.

He shrugged again.

“Like I said, Wild West. Everybody thinks information is all tidily secured by these official bastards in blue suits and epaulets. It’s not. What we can do with data has gotten way ahead of anyone’s ability to control it. The best they can do is pretend they can. It’ll be at least a generation before they get it all cleaned up. I’ll be dead by then. Probably you’ll be, too. Sorry, but that’s the truth.”

I wished he’d looked sorrier.

“We need to speak to Joselito.”

“Good luck with that. They got him on a big list of terrorist activities. Maximum-security federal pen, secret location, protective custody. For all I know he’s in Gitmo.”

“He must have been a very bad boy,” said Natsumi.

“A foreign national, cybersecurity expert, in the service of terror groups,” said Shelly, ticking off the points on his fingers. “He’s never getting out.”

“So he’s not playing on his computer,” I said.

“No. And he never will again, even in his wildest dreams.”

He finally put down the yellowing paper he was holding. It was covered in the beautiful, flowing handwritten script of prior centuries, eighteenth or nineteenth, it was hard to tell from across the table. Shelly saw me look and said, “Captain Oliver Perry trying to convince his superior officers that he’d in fact conquered Lake Erie during the War of 1812. Even then the boneheads in Washington had a talent for fucking up from afar.”

“We want to come in from the cold,” I said, “metaphorically. It’s actually been pretty warm for us lately.”

“Won’t happen. The best you can hope for is to enter custody with enough visibility that they can’t risk taking you out.”

“That’s not good enough,” I said.

Shelly balled his fists, but drew them into his body, as if to gain greater control of himself.

“You’ve got a remarkable brain and it’s gotten you farther than anyone could have predicted. But it doesn’t mean the rules of the world don’t apply to you. The smartest thing you did was to avoid drawing attention to yourself. It’s a lot easier to stay hidden when no one is looking for you. But that’s over. They don’t need your given name and Social Security number. They have your profile, a bunch of your aliases, your patterns, your modus operandi. So they think those mercs dumped you in the Caribbean. Big deal. As soon as some analytical software somewhere spots one of your tell tales, the alerts will fire, the wonks will send reports, operational control will click on orders and the hounds of hell will be racing down your trail. The only thing left to decide is how you end it. Bloody or not, it’s over, Arthur. You’re done.”

He’d long ago guessed, then undoubtedly confirmed in his own mind, who I really was. But this was the first time I heard him use my real name. It was no slip of the tongue.

“No reason to soft-pedal it,” said Natsumi. “We’re all adults here.”

He glowered at her.

“I gave you a chance to save yourself,” he said to her. “That deal’s gone forever.”

The quiet in the museum’s archives room rivaled the inside of a tomb, which in many ways, it was. We let it collect around us for a moment, then I said, “Okay, now that that’s out of the way, can you do us a favor?”

He shoved himself back in his chair and put his hands in his lap.

“Jesus Christ, I hate talking to myself,” he said.

“Since you’re spent goods, we need someone else with tentacles into the FBI, who can connect with an honest man high up on the food chain.”

“Honest person,” said Natsumi.

“Right. They don’t have to do anything. We’ll do all the work. We just need some place safe to go with it.”

“What makes you think any place is safe?” Shelly asked. “The higher you go, the uglier it gets.”

“You mentioned the rules of the world. There are other rules that exist no matter what the current state of human affairs. Take probability. It’s impossible that an entire institution the size and historical significance of the FBI is utterly and thoroughly corrupt. Somewhere, in positions of power, are people for whom fairness, decency, and legality are not alien concepts. Who will take at least half a second to consider the greater principle over the political, organizational expedient.”

Shelly grinned. Maybe underpinned with disenchantment and cynicism, but still a grin. He held up a faded photo of Oliver Perry, the focus of his research.

“If such a person exists, and I can find him. Let’s call him Captain Perry,” he said. “But don’t count on it. And don’t be too disappointed when you learn the most cynical guy in the room is overly optimistic.”

He went back to studying the old document, moving the magnifying lamp into place in a deliberate gesture of dismissal. So we left.

When we were back in the Jeep and nearly clear of the strip development jumble of Rocky Hill, Natsumi said, “I wonder if he knows you really believe what you said.”

It was late in the day by the time we got to Cambridge. The early darkness of March had relieved the season’s pallid gloom, leaving Harvard Square lit up with fast-moving, brilliant kids crowding the sidewalks with those there to teach or exploit, all besotted by the intensity of their unrestrained ambition. Foolish, maybe, all that unbridled optimism. Or maybe not.

C
HAPTER
12

A
fter years of living under false pretenses, drenched in deception and masquerade, consorting with murderous gangsters, fanatics and sociopathic opportunists, I was finally poised to sneak into one of the few gatherings where I naturally belonged.

An academic conference.

When I shared these thoughts with Natsumi, she said, “Doesn’t seem that much different to me.”

My only regret was having given away my old clothes. I’d lost about sixty pounds after spending a few months in a coma, and dumping all my former belongings at Goodwill bolstered my status as a dead man.

“Don’t worry. This is Cambridge, Massachusetts,” said Natsumi. “I think there’s an Effete and Pretentious Menswear right on Harvard Square.”

The occasion also called for an actual disguise, my least favorite thing, though necessity had made us both fairly proficient makeup artists. On the ride up from Connecticut I ordered what I needed from a theatrical supply company, which came the next day. I opted for a big ball of loosely curled hair and a droopy moustache.

“You look like Kurt Vonnegut,” said Natsumi. “Or maybe Saddam Hussein.”

We decided this would be a solo mission for me, acknowledging silently, for the hundredth time, that a Caucasian man with an Asian woman was the first thing hostile forces would be looking for. It was unseasonably warm, so I walked the mile or so to the university. MacPhail’s bit was scheduled to cap off the first day of the conference, right before a cocktail reception. So the timing was good. The only issue was crashing a room filled with the smartest people in the world.

“Strictly book smart,” Natsumi had assured me. “Einstein couldn’t even find his socks.”

The GPS in my smartphone got me to the right campus, but not the specific red brick building. For that I had the help of a chubby, but sprightly, coed who literally took me by the arm and brought me to the front door. She obviously shared Natsumi’s view of physicists’ practical skills.

Inside was a gate-crasher’s dream—a long table with a number of unclaimed name badges. I picked up Israel Finestein’s and told the lady behind the table that they’d spelled it wrong. She handed me a Sharpie and an unmarked sticker on which I wrote “Glen Carlson” and stuck it on my new tweed jacket.

I sat in the back as Ian MacPhail walked up to the podium. A striped shirt covered an ample gut shoved well past the opening of his blue blazer. A bow tie and worn Topsiders completed the look of a preppy yachtsman long gone to seed.

I might have followed his talk if I hadn’t been shot in the head, since it was mostly a tour of long mathematical formulas that somehow described a strategy for tying a super computer into calculational knots. Though it was easy to glean his central premise, which he summarized often throughout the presentation: the weird probabilities underlying quantum physics are the key to unbreakable cryptography. You just have to get used to being less than 100 percent sure you’ve properly interpreted any given code.

“It’s not called the Heisenberg Sure Thing Principle,” he said, his Scottish brogue thickening for added emphasis. “Yet only in approximation can we ever gain a true understanding of fundamental truths.”

With that he rapped the top of the podium, sharpening the attention of any whose attention might have drifted, and stalked off the stage. The applause was generous, though probably less than hoped for. I followed him and the rest of the physicists out to the large hallway where the bar and obligatory cheese table were set up. First served, Ian found a corner to receive the few from the audience who wished to continue the discussion.

I stood in the little pack and listened, waiting for the others to weary of Ian’s self-referential commentary and drift away, as they eventually did. I fixed him in place with another open-ended question regarding quantum code, occupying him until we were alone. Then I said, “And you still don’t see the relevance to small business?”

“Small business?”

“And I was wondering how the Pilates were going.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Pilates. Angela’s Pilates.”

He cocked his head and squinted at me.

“I don’t know any Angela.”

“Might not be her name, but you know her, Angus.”

A deeper red flooded his already florid face.

“You’re not that guy. No way.” He snapped his fingers in the air. “The writer with the Japanese bird.”

“I am that guy. I need a conversation,” I told him.

“Bloody fucking hell.”

“I just need some information.”

“You’re one of ours?” he nearly whispered, not really a question.

“I’m serious, if that’s what you mean.”

“Don’t tell me Jersey gave me up.”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what you want?”

“I told you. I want to talk,” I said. “And now would be a good time.”

I touched his arm as if preparing to haul him physically from the room, which got him going. I followed him to the coat check, and stayed with him when he went to the restroom. I pissed in the next urinal. He told a guy at the front door that he had an urgent consult, with apologies for leaving early, though the guy didn’t seem to care. I guided him out of the campus and onto Cambridge Street, where I’d spied a tavern on the way in. I let him lead the way into the small, dark, beery place and also let him choose an uncomfortable wooden booth. He ordered a double Glenfiddich. I got club soda with a twist of lime.

“So I take it you’re here to fuck up my life,” he said, after downing half the drink.