Lucky Town

by Peter Vonder Haar

  Shelving my suspicions about Roy for the moment, there were other considerations. The lack of geographically appropriate women at the raid site, for starters. I’d never known a Russian operation to traffic in non-Eastern hemisphere “merchandise,” for lack of a better term. The exception being Cubans, but the fall of the Soviet Union and the growing influence of regional cartels put an end to that.

  Really, the only Russian link was the “Boris” guy who called and threatened us. And as someone who thought the guy who played Stringer Bell on The Wire was American for about 15 years, I couldn’t really comment on the veracity of his accent.

  The waiting room was mostly empty. Waterway Hospital wasn’t a trauma center, so your usual Friday night ER traffic was going elsewhere. I also wasn’t sitting near the maternity ward, and since elective surgeries weren’t generally scheduled on weekends (wouldn’t want to interrupt your surgeon’s tee time), I had the place mostly to myself.

  The TV was playing a rerun of Law & Order, where Jack McCoy was berating someone wearing an Army uniform on the witness stand, but since the sound was off, it was easy to ignore.

  Watching their silent courtroom theatrics, I suddenly remembered a comment Charlie made earlier that day about pro bono work. It was in relation to the phone the guy she shot was carrying. I remembered arguing with her that the phone’s excessive price wasn’t necessarily proof the guy was bankrolled by the Russians, but hadn’t really known why.

  Idly, I looked at the TV again. McCoy was really letting this Army guy have it, and as I wondered what he was charged with (and why he wasn’t up before a military court), it struck me who else just might be able to afford to shell out for a constant supply of iPhones.

  My own phone rang. It was Don.

  “Talk to me, Goose.”

  “Get up here. Charlie figured it out.”

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  The uniform they’d assigned to watch the room barely gave me the once-over as I walked by. Hopefully this was because his keen eyes had already recorded my comings and goings and not due to his looking forward to the Hooters waitress he was going to hit on when his shift was over. I glanced at him as I entered and got a barely perceptible shrug in response.

  Charlie sat in bed, the annoying glow of self-satisfaction on her face. Her laptop was open but she wasn’t working on it. Instead, she was staring at her apparent handiwork and nodding to herself.

  “Well,” I said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  Don said, “Don’t look at me. Lisbeth Salander over there wanted to wait to spill the beans until you got here.”

  “A literary reference?” I said to Don. “I’m impressed.”

  “He saw the movie,” Charlie said. “Have a seat.” I did so.

  She continued, “I didn’t bother to ask for a projector, since it would probably be next week before they could track one down, so just lean forward and look at my screen.”

  She turned her laptop around on the bed and Don and I both awkwardly scooted our chairs forward.

  To me, she said, “Do you remember the characters at the top of the encrypted portion of Mike’s emails?”

  “Yes, and I remember there being a lot of garbage text after them.”

  “Do you remember what those characters were?”

  I shook my head. “Come on, sis. I can’t remember my own Gmail password.”

  She pressed a key and the screen displayed the characters I now remembered as “C2U0J9M7D.”

  I glanced at Don, who was starting to look annoyed. “Okay, I remember now. So?”

  She smiled, clearly having more fun than either of her brothers. “Look familiar?”

  “I think I guessed it was a license plate earlier, but I suppose that’s still not right,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  Don spoke up, “Excuse me, I know you assholes are big Sudoku fans and what not, but some of us would rather not spend the rest of the night jerking off in a hospital room. Figuratively.”

  “Literally is okay, I guess,” I offered.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Boys,” Charlie interrupted. “The answer was right there all along, and it didn’t even take … crackerjack timing to figure it out.”

  Don and I looked at each other. Maybe Charlie had sustained a head injury in the crash.

  “Okay, I give,” I said. “What the hell are you going on about?”

  “I’ll answer a question with a question,” she said. “Are you crazy? Is that your problem?”

  Don said, “Funny, we could ask you the same question.”

  She sighed. “Guys, you’re going about this all wrong. Put it this way: What are some Clarke family traditions?”

  “Bottling up our rage,” I said.

  “Disappointing our parents,” Don offered.

  “Passive aggression.”

  “Not picking up checks.”

  “Passive aggressively not picking up checks,” I said.

  “I didn’t intend for this to turn into an airing of grievances,” Charlie said. “What do we do every holiday season when we get together?”

  Don and I both opened our mouths to reply and Charlie said, “Throttle back the sarcasm for a second and think.”

  “We … watch movies?” Don said. It was funny watching a dude who had killed people with his bare hands answering questions with the timidity of a second grader.

  Charlie nodded. “Very good. But what movies, or should I say, what movie in particular?”

  I groaned. “Is that why you were quoting Big Trouble in Little China to us?”

  “Finally,” she said, “Yes, we watch Big Trouble in Little China every holiday season.”

  Don said, “Ugh, I hate that movie.”

  “We can argue about Kurt Russell’s charms or John Carpenter’s skills as a director another time,” she said. “The point is, Mike loved the movie, and knew there was a good chance one of us would pick up on the hint.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Don said. “What do those letters have to do with anything?

  Charlie looked at me. I rolled my eyes and peered even closer at her screen.

  “Any time now,” she said.

  “Kiss my ass.” I looked at the characters again. “Shit, now I see it: Mike just shifted the initials in the title and the year of release up one. “B1T9I8L6C’ becomes ‘C2U0J9M7D.’”

  “You got it.”

  Don said, “And?”

  Charlie said, “What you have here is a classic running key cipher. It’s polyalphabetic, and uses text from a book or something to create the substitution key. In this case, the movie provided the text, I just had to figure out what quote to use to backward translate the ciphertext.”

  Don stared at me and I held my hands up. “I generally only comprehend about a quarter of what she’s telling me, but if I’m understanding this correctly, Mike used a quote from Big Trouble to encrypt the message he wanted us to see.”

  “That’s right,” Charlie said.

  “How did you figure out the quote?” Don asked.

  “You never paid attention at Christmas,” Charlie admonished him.

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked. “He was always quoting the opening scene, when Jack Burton is talking on the CB.”

  “And one line in particular,” She began.

  “‘It’s all in the reflexes,’” Don and I both finished.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, “Was that really it?”

  Charlie nodded. “Sure was.”

  “And running the ciphertext whatsis through that key gave you the message?” I said, vaguely proud of myself that I’d followed along to this point.

  “Oh, no,” Charlie said. “The decrypted text is actually Morse code”

  Don said, “You’re shitting me.”

  She smiled. “I shit you not. And it was actually Cy’s phone call that gave me the clue I needed to solve it.”

  I frowned. “I did what in the what now?”

  “You were tal
king about Steranko’s two guys, whining about two on one and all that.”

  “That was hardly ‘whining,’” I said. “I just remember you losing your shit when I told you that.”

  “It’s called inspiration, you meathead. Archimedes? ‘Eureka’? Any of that ring a bell?”

  It did, but never give your opponent the upper hand. “That’s why you were talking about beats and pulses,” I said instead.

  Charlie said, “The ciphertext had too many repeat characters to be anything but a series of dual characters.”

  “Dots and dashes,” Don said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Once I decrypted the Morse code, the rest was easy.”

  “So what does it say?” All this technical gobbledygook was giving me a headache, to go with all the other aches I’d earned this evening.

  “That’s the weird thing,” she said. “It isn’t really a straight message so much as it’s a series of — I think — movie titles.”

  I perked up. This was my bag, baby. “Are you sure?”

  She turned her laptop back around and started typing. “Not one hundred percent, but I figured you’d be the one to ask.”

  Charlie typed some more, hit Enter with authority, then turned the laptop back around so Don and I could once again look at the monitor.

  “What do you think?”

  I looked at the screen, where the same four coded phrases were repeated over and over:

  WHEN A STRANGER CALLS

  48 HRS

  MY BLUE HEAVEN

  ENEMY AT THE GATES

  They were all movie titles all right. And they were sending a lot of mixed messages.

  Charlie looked at me. “Well, can you make anything out of this?”

  “I think so,” I said, ticking off salient plot points to each of them in my head.

  Don looked like he wanted to gnaw through my forehead. “And?”

  “And I think Mike is alive.”

  Chapter TWENTY-NINE

  “How the hell can you possibly know that?” Don asked.

  I said, “Call it an early hunch, based solely on what I know about these particular movies.”

  He coughed in a way that told me he was having difficulty believing me. The truth of the matter was, Mike and I were the movie fans in the family, so the contents of the email made a certain amount of sense. And if he didn’t get that, tough shit.

  Charlie whistled low.

  “What?” I said.

  “He knew,” she said. “He knew you’d start sniffing around into this. That’s why he used titles of movies instead of just leaving a regular message.”

  “Like a sane person,” Don added.

  “But he encrypted it,” I pointed out. “Because he knew you and I would be working together on the case.”

  Don snickered again. “He sure as hell knew you wouldn’t be able to figure that shit out, Cy. Hell, we trained on field encryption in the Rangers and I don’t think I could’ve picked up on this.”

  I said, “If he wanted to send the message to you, he would’ve wrapped it in a meat loaf,” I said.

  Don flipped me the bird. It was good to know the stress wasn’t getting to him.

  “If we can set aside this meeting of the mutual admiration society,” he said, “what is it about these movies that makes you think Mike’s alive?”

  I looked at the list again, letting the images play out in my head. I’d seen all of them, multiple times in the case of all but the last one.

  “He’s trying to give us clues based on various plot points is my guess,” I said.

  Charlie said, “Fine, let’s start with the first one.”

  “When a Stranger Calls.” I nodded. “Classic 1979 horror movie starring Carol Kane.”

  “Where do I know that name?” Don asked.

  “Scrooged, The Princess Bride,” I said absently. “Annie Hall, Addams Family Values, uh, Joe vs the Volcano, but only in a bit part …”

  Don raised his hands in defeat. “Enough, I bow to your movie nerd superiority. Jesus.”

  “When a Stranger Calls is the one about a babysitter who starts getting threatening phone calls while she’s watching some kids. She calls the cops, who trace the calls and …”

  “Oh, I remember!” Charlie said. “They’re coming from inside the house!”

  I nodded. “Right, that’s pretty much the whole thing that movie’s known for.”

  Don said, “So what’s the point?”

  “It was an inside job,” Charlie said.

  I said, “There’s no way to know for sure, but given the choice of movie, it’d be a safe bet there’s something rotten in the DHS. Maybe Mike was onto it.”

  “Hamlet,” Don said.

  Charlie and I simultaneously: “What?”

  “Something rotten in Denmark. Hamlet.”

  “Okay.”

  Don tapped his head. “I know stuff.”

  Charlie ignored him. “Okay, we think Mike was onto something dirty going on at DHS. What else?”

  “I can’t be sure,” I said, “but I think the news about his gun is bullshit.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The second movie on the list,” I said. “48 Hrs.”

  Don said, “I think I remember that one. Eddie Murphy, right?”

  “And Nick Nolte,” I replied. “Probably the first ‘buddy cop’ movie. Eddie Murphy plays a convicted bank robber that Nolte’s character springs from prison so he can help him track down Murphy’s old partner.”

  Charlie looked at me. “I’m not seeing the connection.”

  “One of the reasons Nolte’s character is after Murphy’s partner is because he stole his gun.”

  Charlie and Don looked at each other.

  “That’s a hell of a stretch,” Don said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Mike could’ve used any movie in that genre. Lethal Weapon, Tango and Cash, Beverly Hills Cop. There are dozens. I think he picked this one precisely because of the missing gun subplot.”

  “So what we’ve extrapolated,” Charlie said, “is that dirty deeds are afoot at the DHS, and somebody has Mike’s gun?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “One thing I’d bet on: Mike’s gun isn’t the one that shot Ramirez.”

  “Is this what private detectives really do all day?” Don asked. “Because I’m thinking y’all charge way too much if that’s the case.”

  “Relax, bro,” Charlie said. “When we need somebody to punch a hole in a wall, we’ll call you.”

  “That was one time.”

  “Only if we’re limiting the definition of ‘wall’ to interior partition,” she said. “I can throw in a few car doors, a couple of fences, and at least one live oak.”

  “Live oak?” I said. “You punched a tree? Let me guess: it barked at you one too many times?”

  “It wouldn’t leaf him alone,” Charlie offered.

  “I think we’ve found the root of his personality problem,” I said.

  “Stop!” Don said. “Jesus, this is why I don’t visit you assholes.”

  “Where the hell was I when this happened?”

  “You were still in the Academy,” Charlie said. “Mom didn’t want to embarrass him.”

  Don sat up. “And you’re both going to hell for going against a mother’s wishes.” To me: “Can we get on with it?”

  Charlie said, “The next one is My Blue Heaven.”

  “Anyone?” I said.

  Charlie shook her head. Don raised an eyebrow. “You serious?”

  “Film from 1990. Steve Martin plays a mobster in witness protection. Rick Moranis plays the cop assigned to monitor him.”

  “And?” Don asked.

  “And that’s it. It’s a comedy, in case you hadn’t guessed from the cast. One interesting thing: both it and Goodfellas are based on the life of Henry Hill, and both came out the same year.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Don said, though the tone of his voice indicated it was anything but.

  Charlie sai
d, “There’s nothing in the official raid reports or Mike’s emails about WITSEC.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know exactly where he’s going with this one.”

  “That leaves Enemy at the Gates,” Don said.

  “Came out in 2001,” I said. “Takes place during the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.”

  “Sounds cheerful,” Don said.

  “Jude Law plays a Soviet sniper named Vasily Zaitsev, based on a real guy, who racked up over two hundred kills during the Nazi siege.”

  Now it was Don’s turn to whistle. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And Zaitsev wasn’t even one of the top twenty Soviet snipers of the war.”

  Charlie said, “I don’t get it. Those other movies at least were somewhat contemporary. A World War II flick? How does that relate?”

  “Maybe Mike was trying to tell us Nazis are bad,” Don said.

  “He didn’t need to send an encrypted email for that,” I said.

  Charlie snapped her fingers. “Maybe there really is a Russian gunning for us.”

  “I was just on a Russian’s boat, in the middle of Galveston Bay.” I shook my head. “No, we’ve been over this. Whatever Steranko is, he’s not our enemy. Not directly.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Don said.

  “What?”

  “Maybe Mike knew whoever was behind all this would try to finger the Russians, and he chose this movie because it has the Russians as good guys.”

  “I don’t know,” I began.

  Charlie said, “It fits. Mike would be guessing the future based on our expected reaction to events, without knowing who’d contact us, and only a vague idea of how things would play out.”

  Don said, “And he was always a good chess player.”

  “I guess it makes sense,” I said. “But that still leaves the big problem.”

  “Where’s Mike?” Don said.

  “And where’s Garcia?” Charlie added.

  As if in answer, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was a local area code. And at least it didn’t say “unknown caller.”