A Billion Ways to Die (9 page)

I was about to dive into more sophisticated search programs when a ping from one of my mailboxes alerted me the general had transferred the money I’d deposited, completing that portion of the transaction. He told me to wait at a corner in Hialeah later that afternoon and he’d take it from there.

“Just like that?” Natsumi asked.

“Same drill,” I said. We went over the codes I’d use if I ran into trouble—the type of trouble, whether things were fine, whether to come get me, or run for her life. These I would deliver by smartphone, if I could call. If I didn’t call by a certain time, we picked a place for her to go and what she should do next.

It should have been a comfort to have this down to a routine, but it only reminded us of the anxieties and terrors of the past.

And so it was that I stood there, dressed more or less like a native, packing my smartphone, fake ID and a few hundred dollars in cash. Natsumi was in a coffee shop across the street to see me off. She had a long-lens camera to capture what she could. We chatted through our Bluetooth earbuds while we waited, which was a comfort.

A big SUV stopped in front of me and the rear door opened. I stepped in without hesitation and the truck sped off. The interior smelled new and it was appointed like a luxury car. The driver was a pale Anglo guy with a buzz cut and sunglasses. The guy in the passenger seat was thin, Hispanic, with long unkempt hair and an oily pretense of a beard. Also in sunglasses.

No one spoke.

Back in the coffee shop, Natsumi followed our progress on her iPad, linked up with the GPS in my smartphone. In her camera was a clear enough image of the SUV to make out the license plate. Nothing on the men, since the windows were tinted and highly reflective of the brilliant Floridian day.

Not long after we pulled into an alley. The Hispanic man got out and walked away, fast. I stayed in the backseat as we continued on. The driver was cautious and deliberate, his eyes constantly scanning the environments we moved through. In the face of the larger peril, it made me feel secure.

We crossed a bridge, drove into an affluent enclave and stopped at an iron gate. The driver punched a code into the keypad and the gate opened for us. The home inside the walls was all glass and steel. The driver frisked me with exceptional thoroughness, though I got to keep my clothes on. Then he brought me to a side entry that opened into a large space with twelve-foot, floor-to-ceiling window walls, an intimate seating area and a grand piano.

At the piano the general was improvising around a Duke Ellington classic. Quite artfully. The driver left me standing there to wait out the performance. I spent the time looking out the giant windows at the sailboats sliding across the blue water and the row of South Beach hotels rising like a citadel above the opposite shore.

He reached a logical break point in the song and turned to me.

“Do you play?” he asked, in English.

“Not a note.”

“The piano kept me alive when I first got here from Cuba. I stay in practice, just in case.”

“Seems prudent.”

He wore a collarless black linen shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, white linen pants tied at the waist and bare feet. His two-day growth of beard was silvery white, matching his hair. He stood up and pointed to a pair of love seats, the only seating in the room. We sat across from each other, the general with his feet tucked up beneath him in a modified Lotus position, mine firmly on the ground.

“Do you have a back-up plan?” he asked. “Should your career buying and selling information turn sour?”

“I crewed on a sailboat for a couple days recently. That could work.”

“My brother and I paddled here in a canoe. Destroyed any desire to be out on the open water.”

“Does he work with you?”

“He’s dead. The result of working with me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me, too. Most of what I do is perfectly legal, depending on how you read the law. Unfortunately, every country seems to have a different interpretation. Applied according to the interests of the moment.”

“I need to locate a Latino mercenary who was part of a specific operation on a specific date and time. I don’t know if it was legal.”

“That’s what you want to learn?”

“No. That’s important, to some degree, but I need more basic information.”

“Such as?” he asked.

“Who the mercenary was working for.”

“To what end?”

“That’s a private matter,” I said.

He put his fingertips together in a prayerful gesture, gazing off to the side, as if to better hear his internal dialogue. Though physically robust—slender and clear-eyed—he looked weary, as if warding off an irresistible lassitude.

“Of course,” he said. “Tell me what you know of this Latino mercenary, and I’ll see what I can learn.”

I described our capture and interrogation, including as much detail as I could remember, not knowing which particular would be the most useful in his search. I left out the substance of my conversations with Alberta and her colleague, which he surely noticed, but had the good form to ignore.

He listened carefully to the end, nodding along to show he was following the narrative. When I was finished, he sat back in the love seat, even more languidly composed.

“This is not difficult,” he said, “though you leave me curious. Not only about your tormentors, but about you. Why don’t I know who you are?”

“I can’t answer that,” I said. “But I can tell you, honoring my privacy will make me an ideal customer.”

He nodded, not necessarily in response to my comment.

“Do you know what I miss the most?” he asked me, after a long pause.

“About what?”

“The loss of innocence. What becomes of us after so many years of experience.”

“Trust,” I said. “You regret the assumption of betrayal.”

He nodded again, this time directly to me.

“Yes, Señor Rana. Precisely put.”

“Regrettable, but necessary,” I said, “when engaged in pursuits other than piano playing and Caribbean cruising.”

“How do I communicate?” he asked.

I asked if I could take something out of my shirt pocket. He said yes.

“My phone number,” I said, putting a slip of paper next to me on the love seat. “It’s good for a week. Then we’ll have to make other arrangements.”

“Your e-mail?”

“Already shut down.”

“Of course.”

We both stood up and he reached out his hand.

“Keep your phone within reach,” he said.

A door opened and the driver came into the room. I shook the general’s hand and turned to leave. He called to me before I cleared the door.

“Señor Rana,” he said. “You didn’t ask what happened to my brother.”

“I didn’t think it polite.”

“I killed him,” he said. “For betraying my trust.”

I shrugged, turned on my heel and followed the muscular gait of the driver through the house and out to his SUV where we once again rode in silence through the sultry streets of Miami.

C
HAPTER
7

I
was on the phone with Natsumi after an evasive zigzag trip back to our hotel, so I barely noticed the slim shape in a long summer raincoat and black Mary Janes fall in behind me. In the elevator, I saw it was a woman with straight brown hair nearly covering her face, much of which was also obscured by a Toronto Blue Jays hat. On her back was a lightweight leather backpack. She pushed my floor number then leaned up against the rear wall. I signed off with Natsumi before leaving the elevator.

The woman followed me. I walked past our room to the end of the hall, then turned to walk back, almost running into the woman who was following close behind. She stood back to let me pass, then fell in behind again. I ignored our room a second time and returned to the bank of elevators.

The woman waited with me at the elevators. She had her hands in her pockets and rocked back and forth, letting her toes lift off the floor. She rode the elevator with me to the lobby. I got out and went into the small bar that served the hotel and a restaurant that opened out onto the sidewalk. I sat down at the bar and she sat next to me, pulling off the backpack and setting it on her lap.

When the bartender approached, I said, “I’ll have whatever she’s having,” nodding my head toward the young woman.

“Give me a hurricane,” she said. “With bitters.”

I balked at that and ordered a beer. The woman turned on her stool and faced me, her arms wrapped around her backpack.

“I expected more in the adventurous department, Spanky,” she said.

“Strider?” I asked.

“You found me, sort of. So I found you. Like, for real.”

“Crap.”

“It’s not that hard anymore. You should know that.”

“I suppose I should.”

“I guessed at the visual ID. I had two false hits, if that makes you feel any better.”

The hurricane looked too big for her hands—fragile and white, with chipped fingernails and nicotine stains. She held up the glass and drank a third of it through the straw.

“I’ve been up for almost two days,” she said, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her raincoat. “So it’s not, like, automatic, but the tools are getting so fast. It’s the banks. They got billions to spend on this shit and you just can’t keep up.”

“You’re probably not going to tell me how you did it.”

She shook her head.

“It won’t do you any good,” she said. “Everything changes too fast. As soon as you think you’re an expert, an hour later you’ll be wrong.”

I didn’t want to think that. It was too frightening, too apocalyptic. I said as much.

“You’re fucked,” she said. “I’m fucked, too. We’re all fucked. Get used to it. It’s the ineluctable modality of the calculable. Warps folded into warps. Syncopated algorithms. I’m only sitting here because they haven’t gotten around to killing me yet.” She finished off the drink and set it down gently on the bar. “Wow, I better eat something. If you’re still buying.”

While she ordered a meal and another hurricane, I texted Natsumi that I was delayed, not to worry, but to stay away from the hotel bar and keep the phone handy.

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Wife?” Strider asked me, glancing down at my phone.

“Spiritual adviser.”

She took off her raincoat and dropped it at her feet. Underneath was a white T-shirt with the words “Starship Hijacker” in a bold, blocky font written across her surprisingly prominent breasts.

“It’s my favorite,” she said, following my eyes. “My lucky traveling shirt.”

She looked down and pulled out the fabric, as if trying to read the familiar words. I caught a whiff of body odor.

“Should I forget about getting my backdoor?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I didn’t say that. I just didn’t want you to think extortion works on me. And I wanted to meet you. You’re so fucking polite. I’m not surprised you’re bald. It’s a compensation thing.”

Her shoulders were narrow, but her posture almost unnaturally erect as she used both hands to consume her cheeseburger. I was relieved to see her dab her face frequently with the cloth napkin, staying ahead of errant globs of catsup and relish juice.

“Do you actually think people want to kill you?” I asked.

She nodded and pulled her hair back away from her face, trying to keep the thin strands from brushing against her burger.

“Oh, yeah. What’s the worst they can do to me for data theft? A few years in jail? Banishment from the Internet? I’ve got a photographic memory. I could just do this,” she made a writing motion in the air, “to unlock the vaults of half the banks in the world.”

“You implied you were losing the hacker arms race.”

She frowned into her drink and shook her little balled fists.

“Don’t get all debatey on me, Spanky. You know what I mean.”

“I do. Sorry.”

“The thing is, there’s no such thing as money anymore. It’s all data. Bits and bytes. It only becomes what we used to think of as money when you have a chunk of cash in your hand. There are physicists who think nothing is real unless it’s observed. It’s like that with money. It doesn’t exist until you hit the ATM machine. Not even then, if you want to talk gold standard and all that currency crap. But you get the idea.”

“I do.”

“So, if you fuck around with their data, you’re essentially running your hands through their money, like Scrooge McDuck in his vault swimming around in dollar bills. They can’t let that happen. And they can’t stop addicts like me forever, so the only way to deal with us is to purge the gene pool. Makes me want to have a baby. Almost.”

I watched her finish her meal, including a giant order of french fries. Throughout, she worried at her backpack, occasionally adjusting where she supported it on her thighs.

“I still hope you’re wrong,” I added.

“Rationalization and denial are excellent survival mechanisms,” she said. “Until they get you killed. But then you don’t care, right?”

“Your loved ones care.”

“I’m done with that crap since my parents died. Except for my cat, and he’d love anyone who fed him.”

“Sorry.”

She rolled her eyes like an annoyed teenager.

“Oh Christ, that wasn’t a pity play. Not interested in the lovey-dovey thing. Don’t like all that genital entanglement. It’s not an abuse thing, no matter what the shrinks tell you. Why am I telling you all this? You’re not a shrink are you?”

“No, but people like to tell me things.”

“I’ll bet they do.”

“I only steal when I have to,” I said. “And never for money.”

“And junkies do heroin to get those cool needle marks.”

She opened her backpack and pulled out a slip of yellow paper covered with a pencil scrawl of alphanumeric code. She handed it to me.

“I hate it when people try to take from me something I’d gladly give away if they’d just ask,” she said. “But here it is anyway. Just don’t threaten me again. I want to like you.”

When I went to take the paper, she gripped my hand, kneading it like a piece of dough. Then she used her other hand to pat around my face, like you’d do with wet modeling clay.

“Real is still real,” she said, before zipping up the backpack, sliding off the bar stool, slipping on her raincoat, and disappearing out the door, her back straight, her feet in a slight shuffle, the backpack nearly dragging on the floor.