A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  “Do you need a table?” he asked.

  “Maybe later. I’m still wondering about that other bar.”

  He put both hands on the bar, one holding a wet rag.

  “We have a special dining area in the back. You must mean that.”

  “Probably.”

  “What part of Spain are you from, if you don’t mind me asking,” he said, burying any pretense I had about disguising my pretentious accent.

  “Madrid. Though I’ve lived in America for many years. It rubs off.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m traveling here on business. An associate told me I had to visit Tocororo Loco.”

  “They have excellent taste. They surely mentioned our moros y cristianos? People from Miami prefer it to their own.”

  “It sounds delicious, but my taste runs more toward armas y balas.” Guns and bullets.

  “A very dangerous diet,” he said. “Is your doctor aware?”

  “Yes. In fact, he sent me here to fill a prescription. Although perhaps you have limited supplies.”

  He might have smiled, though I might have imagined it. He made another superfluous wipe across the bar, dropped a menu in front of me, then left through a door behind the bar. I drank the Hatuey and pretended to read the menu. Fifteen minutes later he stuck his head through the door.

  “I might have the medicine you ordered, if you don’t mind following me,” he said, opening the door a bit more. I got up off my barstool, came around and followed him through the door into a dimly lit room barely the size of a walk-in closet. The door closed behind me and once again I was the helpless object of muscular hands.

  It was easy to imagine they were the same people who manhandled us in the Caribbean. They had the same irresistible strength and professional finesse. But this time a brief frisking was followed by an all-out strip search.

  “Whoa,” I said. “How ’bout it?”

  No one answered while they peeled off my shirt, patting around my exposed torso, then shucked my sandals one at a time, followed by my pants. In no time I was naked as a baby and feeling no less helpless.

  They were thorough if nothing else. I joked that few people had examined me that closely without asking for a copayment, but no one laughed. Or spoke, in any language, until I was given my clothes and had a chance to get dressed again.

  “You travel light, Señor Rana,” said the bartender, handing back my license and roll of bills.

  “Less to lose.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll tell us who suggested you visit our humble establishment.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he said, taking my arm and guiding me through another door out to a courtyard restaurant decorated in a style several socioeconomic strata above the storefront canteen that fronted the place. Palm trees and giant flowering shrubs were up lit from a hundred small lamps, as was a fountain in the center of the patio that would have made a good birdbath for condors. The tables were draped in woven fabric, topped with glass and surrounded by oversized wicker chairs heaped with pillows. We walked across the rough-tiled floor to a distant table where a large young man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over thick forearms sat with a blonde woman, also in white, wearing tiny sunglasses and smoking a pencil-shaped cigar.

  They stood as the bartender brought me up to the table.

  “Siéntate, Norberto. No formalidades necesarias,” the bartender told him. Sit down. No need to be formal.

  “Si, general. Lo que usted quieras,” said the young man, pulling the woman down with him.

  That marked the first time a general had served me a beer. He also pulled out a chair for me. Before sitting, I shook hands with the sturdy Norberto and his date, Fernanda. No last names.

  A waiter appeared seconds later and a round of Cuba Libres was ordered for the table. A whiff of panic hit me as I pondered the effects of a rum cocktail on my feeble capacity. I asked the water to bring me a hunk of bread with the drink.

  “Haven’t eaten all day,” I said to the table.

  “I thought you only ate guns and bullets,” said the general.

  “Mostly. Con mercenarios.”

  “Ah,” said the general.

  Norberto looked sideways at the older man. Fernanda took a long pull on her sleek cigarro and sighed out the smoke. Gloria Esteban started singing something from speakers hidden in the foliage. No one said much until the Cuba Libres showed up along with a long loaf of hot bread wrapped in a cotton napkin.

  “Such strange appetites, eh Norberto?” said the general, toasting the table.

  “We hear strange things every day, general. Can’t take them all seriously.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Being professional is a serious business.”

  The general reached over and took my right hand in both of his. He turned it over and ran his fingers across my palm. He paused to rub the meaty calluses that had built up over months raising, dousing and adjusting Detour’s restless sails.

  “Not all professionals live behind desks, am I right Señor Rana?”

  “There are many ways to earn money in this world,” I said.

  The general sat back and used his long, thin fingers to turn his Cuba Libre by the lip of the glass.

  “How do you earn yours, Señor Rana?” he asked.

  “I buy and sell something we all want.”

  “Love?” said Fernanda, surprising everyone, most of all Norberto.

  “Information,” I said to her. “Not as sweet, but more valuable.”

  “Not to me,” she said, tossing a false smile at Norberto in a challenge he chose to ignore.

  The general reached across the table and gripped Fernanda’s wrist. She sat back in her chair and flicked an ash off the end of her cigarro. Message received.

  I took a sip of the Cuba Libre, wondering why you’d want to louse up the flavor of a perfectly good soft drink with that sour rum.

  “What happened to your head?” the general asked.

  “Accident.”

  “Same one that put a bullet in your leg?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be more careful, especially with a diet like yours.”

  “Some diet,” said Fernanda. “The guy’s a bean.”

  The general told Norberto in French that she better be a good fuck. See for yourself, Norberto answered. Any time.

  “You won’t be surprised to learn that I am frequently approached by people wishing to claim my attention,” said the general. “The legitimate ones I listen to. The others I turn over to Norberto who is charged with discouraging further inquiry.”

  Norberto shrugged as if apologizing in advance for carrying out this responsibility. Fernanda moved closer and stroked his meaty arm. I wondered if she liked to watch him at his work.

  “Understood,” I said. I slipped the cocktail napkin out from under my Cuba Libre and took out a pen. “Go to your bank, or any bank, and open an account with a minimum balance. Use this e-mail address to send me the account number and the bank’s routing number, and I will deposit five thousand dollars as a show of good faith.” I wrote the address on the napkin. “Once you have the money secured, I will ask for the courtesy of a meeting where we can discuss the project I have in mind.”

  I dropped the napkin in front of him and stood up, gratefully leaving half my Cuba Libre undisturbed. The general ignored it, keeping his eyes locked on mine.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “Not before tonight,” I said. “But you don’t have to.”

  “That’s right. It doesn’t matter.”

  Norberto was also on his feet at this point, looking at his boss for the signal to stop me from leaving. He didn’t get it, so I left through the proper doorway to the inside restaurant and then through the tired little storefront joint and out into the night air, suddenly damp and heavy, too far away to catch an errant breeze from the sleepless Atlantic Ocean.

  CHAPTER 6

  It
took me three cab rides and a trip through the kitchen of another aromatic Cuban restaurant to shake the tails. Inconvenience aside, it was a fine showing of the general’s bona fides, a welcome assurance before dropping five grand into a wildly speculative venture. I shared that with Natsumi when I got back to the hotel room.

  “You have to start somewhere,” she said.

  Before we went to bed I checked my e-mail where the general had left a message moments before. It included the routing and account numbers, and evidence that bona fides were established on both sides of the pending transaction: “Nicely done, Sr. Rana,” he wrote. “You’ve embarrassed my team, a healthy antidote to overconfidence. And by the way, add another fifteen thousand. We’ll take it from there.”

  Natsumi went to bed alone, recognizing that sleep for me at this point was impossible. For my part, I went shopping.

  There are people in the world who stockpile illicitly acquired information the way others horde material things, whether mere trash or valuable collectibles. It isn’t so much the intrinsic value of their possessions, it’s the possessing itself that drives the behavior. So it’s possible you could read about some gross breach of security at a credit card company, wherein thousands of card numbers had been stolen, and yet not a single piece of merchandise was illegally purchased with the ill-gotten information.

  These hoarders worked alone, hacking the card companies themselves, or trading with others in their cohort. While common hackers were nearly always caught by counterforces at the banks or in government, collectors were more likely to be betrayed by their compulsions, or the irresistible urge to brag about their exploits.

  So they were people I generally avoided, for that exact reason. I could ill afford the possibility of getting swept up in some other outlaw’s clumsy transaction. There was one, however, who had been in operation as long as I’d been researching credit card fraud as a component of identity theft, which I was hired to do nearly ten years before.

  I once traded with him when I had something worth trading for. Now, I didn’t have much in the way of leverage but for the simple fact that I knew how to find him, and that was likely the most potent leverage of all.

  It wasn’t an easy or immediate form of communication. I couldn’t just type in an e-mail address and that was that. It started with a search of websites and discussion groups focused on the wildly perilous pursuit of stolen credit card data. These sites were always somewhere between formation, obliteration and reconstitution. So there was spadework even in identifying the authentic gathering places.

  Next I had to search through long rows of comments, using an application to isolate key words or phrases my target frequently used. It wasn’t inconceivable that another commentator, on either side of the law, had intentionally adopted his signature style as a way to entice or entrap data trollers. For that I hoped my usual precautions were good to the task, but there was no way to be sure.

  Even with the software assist, I had to read hundreds of lines of commentary, most coarse or banal, at best, before I thought I had a match. It was a feeling, a gut reaction no algorithm had yet learned to emulate.

  The commentator’s handle was Strider, further support for the hunch. The Tolkien character was a brave loner, a seeker of the key that could thwart the evil power. It fit my amateur psych-op of the elusive, arrogant data thief.

  Things went much faster after that. I merely had to find a site where Strider was engaged in an active discussion. I took off as fast as the keyboard and mouse would let me. If search programs were bloodhounds, I would have been baying down the trail.

  An hour later I saw a comment from Strider appear in close to real time. I jumped on the response: “I know where you are,” I wrote, signing on as Spanky, a handle he would likely remember.

  A few minutes later, he wrote, “Same box?”

  He meant the message service we’d used in past transactions, one that claimed to destroy all record of your exchange five seconds after it was concluded. Again, no way to know if that was really true, or if my address hadn’t been compromised along the way. I had to risk it, and I hoped Strider felt the same way.

  “Yes,” I wrote, and switched over to the service. Ten minutes later he was there.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I need something,” I wrote, and waited through the two minutes delay.

  “Don’t we all. You want pro quo, I need a few quid. You want tit, I need a little tat. I love writing that.”

  “We dealt successfully in the past. And honorably.”

  “Yeah, yeah, true enough.”

  “I need a doorway,” I wrote. “Just one and I’ll leave you alone.”

  I sent him the routing number for the general’s bank. Strider would know what that meant.

  “That’s a pretty big ask. A lot of disruption.”

  “I’m not going for a big haul. Just one account. Precision strike.”

  “Okay, let’s talk compensation.”

  “You don’t want to know how I located you?” I asked.

  “I’m pretending that isn’t a threat.”

  “Consider it a security analysis.”

  I sent him the general’s account and bank routing numbers. He took longer than usual to respond. I was ready to hit the end conversation button when he wrote, “That’s too hot for this box. Await instructions.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ll know.”

  I STAYED off the beach the next day. And the day after that. The only thing I had to do was wait, and waiting was the thing I least liked to do. Especially when I could do nothing to hurry the process along. So I distracted myself the only way I knew how. I did research.

  Back in my old life, another side business was tracking down missing persons. I had one client, a law firm who paid me to uncover the recipients of class action settlements who were unaware of their windfall. It was great work, since it often involved travel, carried the romance of detective work, and no one was unhappy to be found.

  So with some relish, I started chasing a few of our more recent acquaintances. People like Alberta, Angus and Angela, and Jersey and Desiree Mitchell.

  Not surprisingly, after several hours I located no one named Alberta whose description fit the woman who’d interrogated me on the fishing boat. It didn’t mean I hadn’t found her, just that not all the Albertas were photographed or adequately described. I compiled a list of about a hundred candidate Albertas and stuck it away.

  The same was true for a married couple named Angus and Angela. We had good clear photos taken on the sly with our smartphones. Angus was a computer scientist, and a Scot, and Angela an American, so they should have been much easier to pin down, but I had little luck.

  “I don’t think they’re married,” said Natsumi, when I drew her into the hunt. “At least not to each other.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Wedding rings didn’t match.”

  “Very good,” I said.

  “And she asked me if I thought he was cute. Married women rarely seek that kind of validation. Usually the opposite.”

  “Opposite?”

  “ ‘Don’t you think he’s an idiot?’ ” she said, mimicking another woman.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said, absolutely, cute as all get-out.”

  “And no idiot.”

  Jersey Mitchell wasn’t even a challenge. Real name Lucien, born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, undergrad and law degree from Columbia, spent most of his career as an FBI agent attached to the US Attorney’s Office in New York City, etc. Everything he gladly told us. He had hundreds of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter contacts and not a one named Angus. Nor anyone who looked like Angus, or Angela.

  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.