A Billion Ways to Die (6 page)

Custom among the transients and escape artists in the Caribbean frowned on this kind of direct intrusion on personal history. It made Jersey uncomfortable, even though he’d gladly shared his own narrative the night before in the bar. Natsumi came to his rescue.

“Jonathan’s writing a book. I’m recovering from my psychotherapy practice,” she said. “I wish it was more romantic than that, but there you are.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Angus. “What’s more romantic than writing a book? Could never do it myself. No self-discipline. What’s the topic?”

“Safe computing,” I said. “For small business.”

During my career as a market researcher, I’d gained mastery over dozens of arcane disciplines, but after recent years of digital cat and mouse with various organizations—public, private and clandestine—cybersecurity was a subject on which I’d become painfully current. It became my favorite cover story, thus far unchallenged.

“So you’re in luck,” said Jersey. “That’s what Angus does.”

“Good gracious, please, no shop talk,” said Angus. “Unless Natalia wants to tell us about nutters. With Jersey’s permission, as the daftest one on the boat.”

“Everyone’s a little nuts, sir,” said Natsumi.

“Is that your clinical opinion? And call me Angus.”

“Yes it is, Angus. For all we know, you’re battier than a March hare. But if I find you out, I promise to be discreet.”

“And what do you think of Nanoscreen?” he asked me, whipping his head in my direction, his voice full of challenge.

“Tighter than a gnat’s butt, as the name implies, so it’s effective if you don’t mind what it does to load times,” I said. “The cryptography isn’t all that different from what the Unix guys developed thirty years ago. Just a lot of numbers to the right of the decimal. Breakable by brute force.”

“Agreed. What about quantum key distribution?”

“Fine for Bob and Alice as long as Ted and Carol aren’t eavesdropping,” I said, physics code for commentary that would fill a shelf of textbooks. “We all know what happens with those kinds of entanglements.”

Angus looked at me over the rim of a glass filled with the Bruichladdich whisky, half of which disappeared as he took a long pull.

“Pretty fancy stuff for a small business, though, wouldn’t you say?” he said. “Not too relevant for readers like yours.”

“Command of the irrelevant is one of Jonathan’s strong suits,” said Natsumi.

“Angus has a PhD in computer technology,” said Jersey. “Thinks women find it attractive.”

“Why else would Angela fuck my brains out?”

“Therapists never answer rhetorical questions,” said Natsumi.

“Where did you find these two?” Angus asked Jersey.

“In a bar. Where else?”

“Jersey and I did our bar time in the day,” said Angus.

“Still serving. I think it’s twenty years to life,” said Jersey.

“Show me a sober spook and I’ll give you a thousand pounds.”

Jersey didn’t like that.

“Angus thinks busting junior stockbrokers for buying on a tip from Uncle Billy makes you a spook.”

“Right. I always get Uncle Billy mixed up with Uncle Osama,” said Angus.

“I understand burnout’s pretty high for therapists,” Jersey said to Natsumi, still trying to change the subject.

Natsumi never actually had a psychotherapy practice, unless you count her years running a blackjack table. Patient outcomes weren’t trackable, but it did help her learn the trade.

“We don’t burn out. We simply examine our options, reorder our priorities and then make appropriate life choices.”

“I choose to have another single malt, thank you,” said Angus.

“Everyone has stress,” said Jersey. “The only difference is how you handle it.”

“You’re a good man, Jersey, that was the difference with you,” said Angus. “You have to be a heartless sot like me to enjoy putting people away.”

“You’re not supposed to enjoy that part,” said Jersey, though without censure.

“Like I said. Too good a man.”

Jersey went below to check on Desiree and retrieve outerwear against the cooling night. Angus waited until he was out of earshot to half whisper, half slur, “Putting people away means putting them away.” He used his hand to mimic firing a gun. “Permanent withdrawal from the field of action.”

“You’re kidding,” said Natsumi. “What the hell did you guys do?”

“Of course I’m kidding. No one kills anyone anymore over something as silly as national security. Anyway, Jersey’s retired. I’m the one still in harness. Can’t afford to give it up. Angela’s Pilates alone threatens bankruptcy.”

“But a good investment,” said Natsumi. “From your brain’s perspective.”

Angus looked at me.

“What did she specialize in, clever girls therapy?”

“Clever boys,” said Natsumi.

Jersey came topside with a handful of sweatshirts. Only Angus felt the need to grab one. Jersey dropped into his seat as if shoved there by an invisible hand and exhaled a cloud of vaporized rum.

“Fuck, the seas are runnin’ high tonight,” he said.

“Should I be puttin’ out the Mayday, Cap’n?” Angus asked.

“I could make coffee,” Natsumi said.

They looked like she’d offered them a bowl of live insects.

Jersey held up his drink, a favorite in the Caribbean known as a painkiller. “Don’t be ruining the painkilling properties,” he said. “Which reminds me, I need another.”

He tried to stand again, but Natsumi told him to stay put. I stood watch while she went below to rustle up another round for the two of them. Their level of consumption was a dubious achievement, though I couldn’t help being a little impressed. Were it me, I’d be on life support.

“I get the feeling you guys saw a lot of action back in the day,” I said.

“Don’t believe anything Angus tells you,” said Jersey. “Bullshit is the Scottish national pastime.”

“Second only to shaggin’ Yanks.”

Jersey responded in like terms and the back and forth escalated accordingly. Natsumi and I sat back and waited it out. Jersey was the first to run out of fuel, sliding effortlessly from fluent insult to a snore reminiscent of the cranky chain saw I once used in Connecticut.

“Doesn’t sound safe, now does it?” Angus asked.

“I’m wondering how we get him below,” said Natsumi. “He outweighs all three of us combined.”

“Good of you to include me in that, lassie. But for movin’ Jersey,
dinnae
bother. He’s slept off more a good night’s drinking in the cockpit than anywhere else. Lord knows Desiree’ll be happier for it.”

While Natsumi went below to get our cabin in order I dug up a safety tether to join Jersey’s sturdy leather belt to the helm. Three feet was enough play to let him roll around the cockpit without pitching himself over the coaming and into the sea.

Angus endorsed the idea.

“That’s thinkin’, Cornwall. Wouldn’t want the lad’s drownin’ to plague my conscience.”

Angus himself was another matter. He made it to the stairway mostly on his own power, but the angle proved daunting. He asked for another tether, but instead I went below and offered support for the trip down. He took it and all went well, even though the stateroom seemed a formidable distance away in the V of the bow.

Angus allowed me to help him to the head where I left him seated on the toilet lid, teetering but optimistic about prospects from there.

He gripped my sleeve before I could withdraw.

“Are you really writing a book on cybersecurity for small business?”

“Have you really put people away?” I asked.

He leaned back from me, as if trying to get my face in better focus.

“Yes. As it turns out.”

“Me, too.”

He let go of me and I was able to escape to our tiny berth for the minimum night’s sleep.

The next day Natsumi and I were able to perform our respective functions with distinction, a feat admired by our companions, for whom sprawled lounging seemed to be the only viable pursuit. I was just as glad, as I followed a leisurely, but fairly direct course around the top of the island and into San Juan, where a berth awaited
That’s A Moray
.

We spent another night on board, then collected our belongings and two days’ pay, and gave our farewells. We walked out of the marina and back into the netherworld we’d inhabited before our fanciful diversion on the shimmering tropical seas.

C
HAPTER
5

I
t wasn’t the first time I had to start from scratch. In the twenty-first century, the only way to live off the grid is to be dead. If you really want to live and move about, and not simply hide in a cave or a motel room somewhere deep in the Rockies, you need a real identity, and dead people are the best source of that.

An American only needed two keys to establish a modern identity. Only two, both difficult to obtain: a driver’s license and a Social Security number.

Popular myth would have you think such things are easy to get on the open criminal market. That’s partly true if your only purpose is to snag cash or consumer goods with a stolen credit card. My ambitions ran deeper than that. We needed to be flesh and blood people, not just strings of misbegotten numbers. We needed to be people you could talk to, do business with, be thoroughly deceived by.

For that, we needed to be dead people. Not just any dead people, but ones with identities unencumbered by a history that would attract the interest of pervasive and unblinking digital surveillance.

The process began with an Internet café. I paid cash, picked out a remote spot, and went to work. What once took me a few days, I could now manage in about four hours. Going directly to familiar databases, I was able to assemble a decent list of people fitting our general ethnic and morphological descriptions who’d had the misfortune of a recent and untimely departure from this earth.

Thus equipped, I bought a disposable cell phone and parked myself on a bench in a quiet corner of the Castillo San Felipe del Morro. The scam from there was a simple one. I was from the IRS in the orphan payables department. I was charged with uncovering the family members of people who had never cashed prior tax refunds. If mom, or dad, or husband, wife, brother, sister, whoever, could simply provide the correct Social Security number, I would gladly forward the abandoned funds.

The trick wasn’t necessarily in the credibility of the story, it was the delivery. After logging thousands of phone interviews, the vast majority being legal efforts to extract information from often unwilling respondents, this was something I was particularly good at doing. Good enough to have a half-dozen solid names and Social Security numbers for Natsumi and me before the sun set over the ancient fortification.

We used cash again for a “used” laptop offered by an eager young entrepreneur on a corner in Puerto de Tierro. Then, before the night hardened into more forbidding hours, we used false, though unchallenged, names in the registry at a desperately crummy little hotel around the corner.

The next day, I foraged farther afield, securing a fresh hard drive for the laptop and a toolkit to make the necessary modifications. I gave the red-eyed desk clerk at our hotel a hundred dollars to hold our mail and spent the rest of the day and most of the night setting up accounts in various banks around the country. Into these I flowed operating funds uncompromised by the busted identities left behind in the Virgins. I hoped.

From there all we could do was wait and avoid getting mugged until collecting the incoming mail with credit and debit cards, and subsequently improved financial circumstances.

It felt a little like a rebirth.

O
NCE
BACK
in the black, we flew to Miami. After the quick plane flight, a cab delivered us to a boutique hotel in the Art Deco district in South Beach. In addition to the allure of luxury accommodations after days in captivity, at sea, in the barrio and traveling from Puerto Rico, the eclectic American, Asian and European guest population offered fair camouflage, and the concierge services convenient logistical support.

On the way into the city, we stopped at one of the retail outlets of a national transport service that was holding a package of mine. I told the guy at the desk that my driver’s license had been stolen in Puerto Rico, but perhaps a pair of hundred dollar bills would be enough to satisfy ID requirements. He thought that would do fine.

Inside the package were a driver’s license, birth certificate and five years of tax returns confirming the bona fide existence of an entirely made-up person.

For the rest of the week, Natsumi committed herself to lying on the windy beach while I hid away in the room assembling documents to support a new identity for her, mostly secured through legitimate channels, a few forged.

I used some of that time to move money around. While I had given all of Florencia’s embezzled funds back to her insurance company victims, I still had plenty left over from selling the agency itself, along with whatever assets we owned together before she died. As a further backstop, I had a warehouse in Connecticut full of vintage guitars. With a ready market, I could peddle individual guitars as needed, providing a foolproof source of untraceable, tax-free liquidity.