A Billion Ways to Die (14 page)

“That’s up to you.”

“I won’t betray my country,” he said, though not with the conviction you’d think the words warranted.

“Which country is that?” I asked.

“The UK,” he said, as if I were an idiot not to know that.

“Okay. Who are you willing to betray?”

He downed the rest of the drink and rocked back and forth in his seat.

“Just give it to me,” he said. “Give me a chance to settle it in my mind.”

“I need a name. An employee of The Société Commerciale Fontaine.” I showed him the photo of Chuck taken by the mercenary Rolando. “About fifty. Flat Midwestern American accent, corporate business casual clothes. Went by the name Chuck. Had a female colleague who called herself Alberta. They had the juice to hire a band of top mercs and charter a commercial fishing boat. But neither was operationally experienced. My guess is desk people doing a little field duty, not willingly. I need to know who they are. Names and contact info. Tell me and I go away.”

He moved the picture closer and used his fingertips to stroke the image, as if conjuring an accurate ID. He shook his head.

“Fontaine employs thousands of people. I’ve been gone for ten years. No chance.”

“You’re a global expert in cybersecurity. You know every back door, side door, trapdoor in every program in the world. You designed and installed Fontaine’s firewall. You can’t get all modest now. I heard your speech.”

“Modesty’s never been an issue for me. It’s more the matter of arrest and ruin. Bright lights, third degree from the filth, professional banishment, academic disgrace, that sort of thing.”

“Joann looks like a nice person.”

“She does. She isn’t.”

“How’s the 401(k)?” I asked.

“Insufficient.”

“You’re on the lecture circuit.”

“Not the A list. Maybe C plus. So yes, I’d be buggered by a divorce, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I am,” I said.

“That’s pretty harsh.”

“Depends on your perspective. What would Joann think?”

“Are you going to take this bloke out?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Honest answer,” he said. “I hope.”

“He tried to kill me and the Japanese woman. We’re not dealing with children here.”

“Children can be very cruel.”

“My offer has a shelf life,” I said.

“Your offer?”

“It’s due to run out in about thirty seconds.”

He got up from the booth and snagged the waitress. Moments later she brought over another double whisky. He took a sip.

“If this is a setup,” he said, placing the glass unsteadily on the table, “a test of my loyalty, or willingness to allow a foreign power to extort information out of me, I could be making the stupidest mistake of my life. If it’s the real thing, I could be committing treason. Or, I could be saving my arse by taking a practical step that hurts no one but some
eejit
in desperate need of getting hurt. Does that sum it up?”

“It does.”

“Fucking hell.”

“I called a cab,” I said, bringing my smartphone up above the table. “He’s going to take us back to my hotel. I’ve got a computer set up for you to use. I’ll be right there with you. You do this, and zip-zip, you’re back home before Joann hardly knows you’re late. Then you pretend it never happened, and everything is back to the way it was before.”

“But it never is, is it?”

“No. But you can convince yourself it is, and that’s just as good.”

I don’t think he entirely believed he was in the situation he was in until he was all the way up the elevator and standing in front of my hotel room door. It might have been the six double whiskies since leaving the faculty auditorium, or just the shock of the occasion, but something awoke in him when I slid the card reader through the door lock.

“You’re not shootin’ me in there, are you, lad?” he asked, a touch of sadness in his voice.

I opened the door and Natsumi stood there ready to receive.

“No,” I said, “though we might poison you with coffee.”

“I have hazelnut,” said Natsumi. “Do you take cream?”

We took our time getting him set up in front of the computer. With a mug of black coffee at hand and an invisible, but all too real, gun at his temple. He started to tap the keys.

I sat next to him to fortify his resolve, not to watch his hacker moves. For that I had software that would record every keystroke. He probably knew that, so there was little point in staring over his shoulder.

“You’re far too clever a lass to be mixed up with this lot,” he said to Natsumi.

“Thank you,” she said.

In about an hour he had a row of six head shots lined up across the screen. Some were formal portraits, others were decent candids taken at company events. We looked at about fifty sets before Natsumi stuck a forefinger on the screen, in the middle of one of the guys’ foreheads.

“Him,” she said.

Ian looked over at me and I nodded. He called up the supporting data.

“Shite,” he said, looking back at the screen. “Don’t know him personally, but you’re right about the Chuck bit. Charles Andalusky. Senior Vice President, Global Operations, Economic and Cultural Development Department. BS, Mechanical Engineering, Caltech. Winner, Simon Wasserman Achievement in Science Award, 2002. Westchester County Rotary.”

“Fuck him,” said Natsumi.

“That’s not my department,” said Ian.

“Let’s save it all,” I said, reaching over his hands and doing it myself.

We spent another hour searching for Albertas, and came up with nothing. We agreed looking at every face of every Fontaine employee would take weeks. So I said the hell with it.

“So now what?” Ian asked.

“We call a cab and I wait with you in the lobby.”

“That’s it?”

“We can’t entertain you all night,” said Natsumi. “We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

I gripped him by his two fleshy shoulders and gently encouraged him to stand. I marched him back to the bank of elevators and went down to the lobby. He was silent until we were at the curb waiting for the cab.

“How do I know you won’t come back for more?” he asked.

“You don’t.”

“I’m not a bad man,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said.

“You won’t hurt Jersey.”

“I don’t want to hurt Jersey,” I said. “I want to crew on his boat.”

“He’s a good man.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Oh no, he is. Saved my miserable life. You either love or hate a man who does that. ’Course, I’ve known him nearly my whole life.”

One of the tricks of market research is to put yourself in the place of the person you’re interviewing, establishing empathy, not unlike a psychotherapist or interrogator. You ask much better questions and get much closer to the bone. So when I thought about Ian’s comment, I tried to connect, but couldn’t. I didn’t have the experience.

“I don’t have any lifelong friends,” I said. “Hardly any friends at all, when I think about it.”

“I’m sorry for you,” he said, briefly touching my back.

An expression of unambiguous kindness over one of my life’s failings, rarely recognized much less expressed, from a man whom I was cruelly extorting, who not an hour before thought I was going to put a bullet in his head.

“Thanks, Ian. Life’s complicated, isn’t it.”

“Aye, ’tis that.”

I put him in the cab, gave the cabbie directions and two twenty dollar bills with strict admonishments regarding his fare’s well-being and safe delivery to his chosen destination.

“No problem here, sir,” said the cabbie. “Forty dollars guarantees everything but armed escort.”

“Fucking hell,” said Ian, as I shut the car door.

C
HAPTER
13

N
atsumi had already downloaded all the publicly accessible data on Chuck Andalusky when I got back to the room. So as not to break her flow, I used the iPad to boot up a few other applications handy for tracking people, none public and not all entirely legal. I lay down on the bed and composed myself after the rigors of nabbing and coercing Ian MacPhail.

“He only has one testicle,” she told me about an hour later.

“How do you know that?”

“He had to confess an embarrassing fact as part of his initiation into a college fraternity. He lost it in a gymnastics accident in high school.”

“What else do you know?”

“His home and business address, office and cell phone numbers and those of his wife, Okayo Alphonsine. She’s Haitian. And a dermatologist.”

“So he definitely works for Fontaine?”

“Senior Vice President, Offshore Operations, Principal Contract Director for Economic Development and Assistance. I think I know what that means, but I’m not sure.”

“It’s a big company,” I said.

“Fontaine’s fundamentally an engineering outfit, but when the State Department is handing out grants to foreign governments, there’s often a social welfare component. You build a dam, but you also build a few schools or open a malaria clinic. Since Fontaine’s already sitting at the table, it’s easy to subcontract that sort of stuff to them along with the heavy engineering. And they can do anything, or at least claim they can.”

Chuck and Okayo had a home in Rye, New York, an expensive suburb that wrapped around the western frontiers of Fairfield County, Connecticut, not far from my hometown of Stamford. According to Google Maps, it was in a wooded tract in the northern part of the town, on about two acres. A real estate website thought you could buy it for $1.2 million.

Okayo was part of a dermatology practice in White Plains. They’d married three years before in Washington, DC. There were no kids.

“I wonder if one ball has to work twice as hard,” said Natsumi.

We spent another hour downloading as much information on Andalusky as we could, which I also saved on a flash drive I kept in my pocket. Natsumi went to sleep after that, and I sat up and diddled, knowing that sleep would be elusive until exhaustion had thoroughly bludgeoned my nervous system into submission.

So it was about one in the morning and I was still awake when we heard a knock. Natsumi bolted upright. I put on my shoes and walked to the door.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

“Mr. Cornwall?” a man asked.

“Not me,” I said.

“I think it is.”

“What do you want?”

“We need to talk to you.”

“Who are you?”

“FBI.”

Natsumi was powering into her clothes. I put a jacket over my T-shirt and checked my pants for my wallet and keys.

“I’ll need to see identification,” I said.

“Open the door and we’ll show you.”

“We need to get some clothes on,” I said.

“Do it fast.”

I went to the window. It was our habit to get a room as close to the ground as possible. This one was about a story above the roof that covered the main entrance. Undoubtedly it was being covered by other agents, but being trapped in the room was a sure thing. I wrapped the laptop and external hard drive in some clothes and stuffed it into one of our two duffle bags. Natsumi was shoving other things into the second.

Another knock at the door.

“We can make this easy or hard,” said the man. “Ten seconds to open up.”

I tossed the duffles onto the roof below and then opened the door the few inches allowed by the safety hardware. I saw a man and a woman in suits and heavy overcoats. They looked at me closely through the crack of the door.

“ID,” I said.

They held up what looked like official ID cards, though, of course, who knows what they really look like. Though they seemed undeterred when I took photos of the IDs, and their faces, with my smartphone.

“We have a few questions,” said the woman.

“Okay,” I said. “My wife just needs another minute. She was asleep.”

“A minute,” said the woman.

I shut the door, turned around and saw Natsumi with one leg already out the window, prepared to squeeze through the narrow opening. She looked at me for the high sign, and I pointed to the right. Without hesitation, she dragged her other leg through and disappeared. I heard the sound of her hitting the gravel-covered roof and running across to the right.

I was right behind her. Neither my spatial orientation nor basic agility could match Natsumi’s, so I hit hard, crumpling into a ragged heap. One ankle lit up in pain, but it took weight as I scooped up the duffle bag and ran across the roof and dropped to my stomach, looking over the brink. Natsumi was down in the bushes with the other duffle bag waving to me. I swiveled my legs around and dropped again, this time landing on my feet.

“Hold it there,” said a woman’s voice to my left. I swung the duffle bag in the direction of the voice and felt the laptop inside crunch down on something hard. The woman made a startled little yelp, but that’s all we heard as we ran as quickly as my lousy ankle would let us behind a row of cars, around the hotel and down an embankment toward the Charles River.

Natsumi didn’t hold me up so much as guide my progress, making little corrective shoves and pulls to keep me on my feet. This wasn’t the first time we’d done this, so we both knew what was required.

We ran through a narrow park, then between beeping traffic across the four-lane Memorial Drive, which follows the curves of the Charles, then down nearly to the water’s edge, where we sat up against the east side of a boathouse behind some ragged rhododendrons and worked on catching our breath.

“You’re hurt?” Natsumi whispered.

“A little. Ankle.”

I didn’t tell her about the burning sting coming from my knees and elbows, since that hurt, too, but wouldn’t debilitate.

“Can you keep moving?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Stay here.”

She scrambled on all fours along the side of the building and disappeared around the other side. I waited and listened, rewarded soon after by a metallic bang. Natsumi came back on two feet and helped me get on mine.

“Follow me.”

We went around to a big ramp the rowers used to slide their practice sculls into the water. A side door had been padlocked, which Natsumi took care of with a big rock dragged up from the river’s edge. We went inside and found a light.

It was a storage area filled with oars, ways to clean and sand the oars, tank tops, gym bags, shoes, sweatshirts, and all the other detritus of an active sporting club. Natsumi started pulling things out of her duffle bag, including some of the makeup gear we’d recently acquired. She tucked her long hair up into a baseball cap and applied a small black moustache. She handed me a wig made of long, straight blond hair and a pair of heavy-framed glasses. We helped ourselves to some of the rowers’ shirts and hoodies, and one unfortunate guy’s backpack. I dumped out the contents and left fifty dollars in its place. The laptop housing was badly cracked, with one corner thoroughly crushed in, but it fit in the backpack along with the external hard drive and related cords and chargers, which all looked fine.