Cries of the Lost (3 page)

Together we’d uncovered and dispensed with Florencia’s killers, in a decidedly extra-legal fashion. But far more questions than answers still lingered, leading us to the safe-deposit box in the First Australia Bank in George Town.

Florencia had owned an insurance agency in Connecticut. A bland, but highly profitable little operation that she’d used to embezzle millions of dollars from unwitting insurance companies. The wrong people discovered the scam before I did, which is what got her killed. What I didn’t know was, why embezzle all that money in the first place? We sure didn’t need it. Her company threw off plenty of legitimate revenue. And I did fine in my research business. it made no sense.

My success in market research had been fueled by an irresistible curiosity. A
S
Natsumi liked to point out, i had a very hard time sharing the same planet with an unanswered question, especially one as big as this.

The very definition of a blessing and a curse.

U
NLESS WE’D
been tailed since arriving in the caymans, there was no reason the people who snatched Natsumi would know where we were staying. We’d used different names, different passports, different appearances. So I took a calculated risk and went back there to retrieve our belongings, which included some electronic gear that would be difficult to replace on short notice.

I parked the Suzuki, wiped it down and left the key in the driver’s side visor. In the room, I consolidated our stuff as well as I could, checked out and called a cab. He took me to another car rental place where I upgraded to an SUV of my own, a Ford Expedition. What it lacked in agility was made up for by a false sense of indestructibility.

Soon after, I had another hotel room closer to downtown George Town, with a view of the harbor and city beaches; though its main appeal was high-speed Internet access and lots of standard North American electrical outlets for my equipment.

I went online and immediately confirmed the obvious. The people who captured Natsumi were the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service. I had to assume, with no other data, that the SUV belonged to another group altogether, since there was no reason for the cops to take such radical action. They had regular Crown Vic and charger cop cars with lights and sirens, and no good reason to rear-end suspicious characters.

I thought, for now, I’d have to ignore the SUV and focus on the RCIPS, since they were the ones who had Natsumi.

And getting her back was the only worthwhile goal in the known universe.

I
ONLY
had to wait a day to get the package from my favorite theatrical makeup supplier. I’d learned over time how to alter my appearance very quickly with a minimum of effort. I didn’t know how well these improvised adjustments could fool emerging facial recognition software, though it seemed a risk worth taking.

So I chose one of my regular looks—a long, grey-haired guy with my real nose, bushy eyebrows and round sunglasses. And baseball cap. Essentially a combination of John Lennon and Bernie Madoff on his way in and out of court.

I drove to the Central Police Station, in a dense area of central George Town. It was a three-story, reasonably nice-looking building of recent vintage with a tropical hip roof and friendly facade. To proceed, if my farfetched operating theory was correct, I just needed the right manhole.

It looked as if regular traffic, like cops changing shifts, moved in and out of a parking lot in the front of the building. The rear was invisible behind a tall blue wall topped by closely coiled razor wire. My heart sank at that, assuming my objective was well guarded on the other side.

The area was way too congested and exposed to survey by car, so I parked a block away and did a ground level reconnoiter.

I strolled along the front of the building hoping to look like a witless, meandering tourist. Moving on foot, I could easily see that the back of the police station was a minor fortress bristling with radio towers, huge transformers and windowless sheds. There were a lot of important things back there the peaceful Caymanians went to a lot of trouble to protect. Surely phone service was one of them.

I kept walking, passing a grassy area between the HQ and another government building. Right next to the sidewalk were two large, temporary black and yellow signs. They read
TELEPHONE
LINES
and
FIBRE
OPTIC
CABLE
, respectively. Narrow, freshly filled-in trenches connected the signs to a half dozen raised-access hatches loosely arrayed around the lawn.

I stopped and looked up at the sky wondering if there really were Greek Gods and if they were up there playing a practical joke on me.

With nothing visible saying I couldn’t, I strode across the grass, and holding my smartphone to give me an excuse for looking at the ground, checked out the access hatches. They were elegant things cast in bronze, with an embossed design depicting a seabird, the words George Town, and a description of the function of the hole underneath. I read “sewer,” “drain water” and “electrical.” The two trenches terminated at the hatch labeled “communication.”

With nothing else to do but draw unwanted attention, I continued over the grass to a twisty little George Town side street, and after stopping for some more supplies and retrieving my truck, went back to my room to wait for nightfall.

I
WAITED
until two in the morning. Then I dressed all in black, including a black knit cap, and drove back to the police station. I brought a small flashlight wrapped in black duct tape so I could hold it with my teeth, and a long metal rod, one end of which I’d bent into a hook.

The sidewalk and parking lot in front of the building were well lit, but the grassy lawn next door was in deep shadow. Even so, I predicted about thirty seconds of profoundly dangerous exposure, though that couldn’t be helped. I had come to accept there was no such thing as absolute security, if your intention was to function in the world. Even the world’s shadowlands.

I used the metal hook to lift the hatch cover—a very heavy thing—and guided by the flashlight in my mouth, climbed the ladder down into the hole. I stopped partway to slide the hatch into place, then stepped down to the cool concrete floor.

As I’d hoped, I found myself in a small box that acted as an access closet for all the telecom lines running beneath the street. I’d been in similar places before, long ago, when I was doing field research for a company that made heavy-duty cable connectors for the phone business. Technology had changed a lot in the intervening years, but I thought it unlikely the government of the Cayman Islands would see any purpose in replacing those hardy, static couplers with modern electronic circuitry.

I was half right.

A bundle of standard copper cables, each with a familiar connector, ran parallel to a pair of digital lines, capable of handling both voice and data. I used wire cutters to cut the plastic bands that held the bundles together, and counted twelve separate cables. I disconnected one of the connectors to confirm they were in fact standard 50-pair cable, and they were. The digital Tls were joined by connectors I’d never seen before. I took a dozen pictures from all angles with my phone.

Then I climbed the ladder, pushed up the hatch cover and slid it clear enough to push my way through. The sound of the heavy bronze cover dragging across the cement base seemed horribly loud. My whole body clenched as I braced for the yell of a cop, a bright light in my face, the blow of a nightstick. But none of that happened, and a few moments later I was in the rented Ford heading back to the hotel, breathing heavily and wordlessly thanking those potential Greek Gods for saving my life, and possibly Natsumi’s, one far more deserving than mine.

D
ESPITE VERY
strategic packing, I had almost nothing else I needed for the mission at hand. In my defense, there was no way I could have known any of it would be needed. I sat down at the computer and began to order, thinking through the various stages in the process, striving to consider every detail, to visualize every contingency. I was familiar with some of the necessary technology, another byproduct of the research I did for the telecommunications people. And though things had advanced considerably since then, the basics were still there.

As the sun was coming up, I downloaded the last application and hit the last submit button for the hardware order. The night-long effort had done its job of keeping the waves of anxiety I was feeling from overwhelming me. Now, thoroughly depleted, I was able to fall asleep, visions of the big cops piling on Natsumi only briefly flickering across my mind.

B
Y MIDAFTERNOON
I was back out on the street, walking the neighborhood around the police station in a fresh outfit and hairdo, memorizing what I was afraid to record with the camera on my smartphone. There was little purpose to this, other than giving me something to do that kept my mind off my galloping fears.

Before Natsumi, I’d been in plenty of mortal peril of a type that would fill anyone with dread, even a person as indifferent to his own safety as I’d become. But this was another thing. It was about a person who trusted me, who had thrown her lot in with mine, foolishly no doubt. In ways more existential than purely physical, she’d saved my life. Losing her was a prospect beyond unbearable, beyond unthinkable.