A Billion Ways to Die (35 page)

The implications, the cascade of eventualities, and likely a surge of faith that his shrewdness and determination would yet prevail, flew across his face. Or maybe it was the face of a cornered rat, if the rat had plenty of experience finding trapdoors.

“You won’t survive this,” he said. “You can’t.”

“I’ve noticed something about constant reminders of one’s mortality,” I said. “After a while, you stop caring.”

I
DIDN’T
see much point in going back to my room in Stamford, since everything of importance was in my backpack, so I just drove on from Greenwich through New York City and down the Jersey Turnpike, and eventually to Washington, DC, where I found another flophouse willing to take cash and waive the nuisance of identification.

But then I needed some computer time—there was no way around it. It was an obvious necessity, and anyway, the withdrawal from a laptop with wireless broadband Internet access had become unbearable.

I bought the equipment I needed with cash, so no credit card exposure. All I needed after that was a coffee shop with free wireless and a screen angled away from prying eyes.

Thus established, I eased into familiar applications with a joy akin to what a soldier might feel returning to the bosom of his loving family.

I loved everything about my old job as a researcher, but nothing compared to the sheer delight of tracking people down. It combined a lot of appealing elements—primary and secondary research, detective work online and in the field, even a bit of psychoanalysis as I divined the person’s location based on past behavior and known peccadillos. And it was, by definition, personal. The end of the search wasn’t just a hunk of data or executive summary, it was a flesh-and-blood human being.

Working in the coffee shop, I felt the familiar pull of the process, though I was still in the throes of hypervigilance. Little bolts of fear, like I’d felt with Joselito, struck at my nervous system. But they got easier to ignore as I reminded myself that if the next project failed, none of the exposure would matter.

There’d be nothing left to save.

T
HERE
ARE
places within commuting distance of Washington, DC, that remind you how southerly the capital’s location really is. It was meant as a compromise by the original colonies, an approximate midpoint to ease the burdens of travel to all, and the possibility of dominance by either region. In fact, the indigenous culture of the surrounding countryside was far more reminiscent of antebellum Kentucky than the industrial North.

I reflected on this as I drove past endless rows of white fencing enclosing thoroughbreds and established privilege, consumed as I was by upcoming timing and logistics. The usual mental movie reel of scenarios, what-ifs and possible outcomes.

In the midst of the analysis, however, I decided to just act without a lot of thought and see what happened. Given all that had come before, it seemed most appropriate for a last act.

The house was at the end of a long driveway shaded by big oaks to either side. A giant willow was in the front yard, its long feathery fronds swept haphazardly by the breeze. A silver Lexus was parked out front. I felt the hood as I walked past. It was warm.

I’d put on my business suit and carried the attaché, but left off the moustache, believing a pair of dark sunglasses was the better disguise and least likely to disturb the occupant of the house.

I put the attaché, open at the top, under my left arm and rang the doorbell. This way, when the door opened I was able to reach in and remove the ceramic pistol in a fairly fluid motion, sticking the end of the blunt barrel into the forehead of the tall man standing there in a dress shirt and loosened tie.

“Captain Perry, I presume?”

H
E SLOWLY
stepped backward into the house, prompted by the pressure of the gun at his head. His face was stern, but cautious, in keeping with a man who’d seen his share of perilous situations.

I maneuvered him into the living room and pushed him down into the sofa. I sat across from him in a stiff wooden chair, an antique reproduction that fit in perfectly with his sumptuous Colonial décor.

“Did you hire a decorator or do all this yourself?” I asked him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“My life back.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Stephen Holt, the FBI’s Assistant Director for International Operations. Though to me you’ll always be Captain Perry.”

“Then you know how serious it is to threaten me.”

“What makes you think this is a threat?”

He looked to be in his fifties, but clearly the type who shamed much younger men around the gym. He had all his hair, longer than you’d think for a federal man, and his face, while handsome, looked like it could take a punch.

“I have a wife and children.”

“I had a wife once. Yours works in New York, home on the weekends, am I right?”

He saw no advantage in answering, so he didn’t.

“What were you going to do with all of it?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The money. A billion dollars. How would you even spend it all?”

“If anything happens to me, they’ll know who did it. You’ll never get away.”

I wanted to smile at that, but I’m not sure I did.

“That’s what’s so great about this,” I said. “Nobody knows but you. This is your own private project. Joselito is probably halfway to Argentina by now, Andalusky is dead and Albalita is cowering in Zurich, waiting for a loud knock on the door. This gun is completely untraceable. I’m still officially a dead man. You might have pulled a few strings around the bureau to chase us around, and convinced Shelly Gross and Jersey Mitchell that you were working a legitimate case, but that won’t matter when they find out what you’ve been up to. Will they really want to get your killer? Why kick up a bunch of unwanted publicity when I’ve essentially solved their problem?”

He remained tense, but poised, calculating the odds.

“If you make the slightest move in my direction,” I said, “I will shoot you in the midsection. You won’t die right away, but it’ll be messy.”

He seemed to settle back a bit in the couch.

“You talk a lot about killing me, as if there’s no other way to work this out.”

“What, with the billion bucks? You’ll be interested to know Joselito had it all along. He pinned it on me as a bargaining chip to keep his ass out of enemy combatant no-man’s-land. But that’s been fixed. Now I’ve actually got it, well out of Joselito’s grasp. And all the bargaining chips are off the table. Any other ideas?”

He didn’t react as poorly as Joselito, but a trace of desperation managed to break free of his professional reserve.

“You said you wanted your life back.”

If a person’s life exists within his mind, I wondered if such a thing could still be possible for me, given what I’d become. As I weighed the possibilities, indulging for a moment a return to analysis and calculation, I couldn’t help observing myself taking more careful aim at Captain Perry’s head, focusing the bright red gun on a spot just above his right eye.

C
HAPTER
27

I
asked the cabbie if he could turn off the air conditioning and let me open the window. I’d barely left the canned air of the plane in from JFK, and keenly desired the embrace of hot, dense Caribbean air.

“Fine for me,” he said. “I was born breathin’ it.”

The cabbie, François-Marie, had also driven a cab in Manhattan for ten years before returning to his hometown of Port-au-Prince, so he represented a welcomed point of continuity. The cab was a model car I didn’t recognize, and he explained its provenance, beginning in France and arriving in Haiti after traveling through Trinidad and Guadeloupe, where it was turned into commercial transport.

Traffic was tight, but moving steadily. Lanes were less than precisely honored, though the greatest distractions were the hand-painted phantasmagoria that covered many of the vehicles, including impromptu buses. I was reminded of Ken Kesey by way of Vincent van Gogh.

Foot traffic was denser still, though it lessened as we rose and fell over the hills and through narrow streets lined with high concrete walls, many of which bore commentary in a French that resisted translation.

“Not all French,” said François-Marie, when I asked him what the writing meant. “Creole and warnings by NGOs after the earthquake of dangerous buildings. Not that anyone pays any attention.”

The Caribbean penchant for brilliant color was also on display at a market we passed, where the blast of the sun was blocked by umbrellas in every vivid hue. The fruits and vegetables in overflowing bins did their part as well, as did the shoppers and vendors’ T-shirts and occasional poster ad or giant billboard looming over the scene.

The color dimmed as we moved into the outer parts of the city, and the walls of laid-up cement block were less artistically festooned. The sidewalks, alleys and curbsides were still amply filled with people on their daily missions of survival. Behind the walls I began to see an occasional cluster of private villas, or a hillside covered in crisp-looking homes of identical composition, painted into a sun-bleached rainbow. Though not long after, we’d passed a residential warren formed from scavenged debris, corrugated metal and blue tarps.

Everywhere the rubble of the big earthquake lay strewn across open areas and in piles of masonry and twisted rebar. François-Marie, assuming I was too diplomatic to note it myself, said, “You don’t want to think what’s under there.”

We followed a pickup carrying several men in the bed and clinging to the tailgate through the last of the urban jumble and into the countryside. The land rolled to either side, covered in grey-green Caribbean scrub interrupted occasionally by a clump of masonry buildings fully intact, or in various stages of collapse, giving witness to the capricious nature of earthquake destruction.

François-Marie reached back for my smartphone GPS, as he had several times during the trip.

“Tell me again where you going?” he said.

“Don’t know how to pronounce it. I just have the latitude and longitude.”

T
HESE
WERE
written on a tattered piece of paper handed to me by an elderly Japanese woman who forked it over after I answered a series of questions that only a person deeply intimate with her daughter, Natsumi, could answer.