A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  The general unfolded his chair and sat back down, this time facing me. Norberto stayed standing. The general took out his smartphone and poked at it for a few minutes before looking up at me.

  “You did this?” he asked.

  “It’s all still there. You can move it back if you want. I don’t recommend it, but it’s your money. For now, anyway.”

  “You’re a dead man,” he said in Spanish.

  Norberto held the towel in both hands, the muzzle of the silencer sticking out in plain view.

  “That dopey money market thing they talked you into,” I said. “Way too much cash sitting on the sidelines, if you ask me.”

  “You know I can’t let this stand,” he said. “Norberto, if you would.”

  Norberto squatted down in front of me and took a deep breath, letting the air out slowly.

  “I promise your money will go to a good cause,” I said.

  The general put his hand up. Norberto lowered the gun. The general held up his smartphone.

  “My money is here,” he said.

  I held up my own.

  “If I don’t send an all-clear signal in five minutes, it will all be withdrawn. Permanently.”

  Norberto started to raise his gun again, but the general stuck his foot out and lightly kicked the other man’s calf. “Bastante. How did you do this?” he asked me.

  “What’s Rolando’s address?”

  “I don’t know.” I sat there and stared at him through my own impenetrable sunglasses. “Palm Beach,” he said, finally. “I don’t remember the exact address. Gated community. I have his phone number.”

  He played around with the smartphone for a few moments, then took out the pad of paper to write on.

  “You knew I wouldn’t give you what you wanted,” he said, handing me the paper. “You were ready.”

  “Like you, I wish I could be more trustful.”

  “Am I going to have to worry about this forever?” he asked. “Are we about to have a war?”

  “No war. I have other things to do.” I stood up and adjusted my hat and sunglasses. “You can keep the chair. And the twenty K, but remember, it always feels better to give something freely than to have it taken away.”

  I kept my eyes toward the street as I walked across the beach, my attention undiverted by thoughts of Norberto’s suppressed firearm and otros jovenes Cubanos lurking among the umbrellas or the pull of subterranean forces, primordial or otherwise.

  CHAPTER 8

  The trip up the coast from Miami to Palm Beach is less than a hundred miles, but it felt longer because of our chosen route, hard up against the ocean and away from Interstate 95 where sensible people drove. I’d rented a convertible to gain a greater feeling of connectedness as we made our way along trackless strip development and through the occasional neighborhood, some poor, some ensconced behind thick shrubbery, stone walls and metal gates.

  It was behind such fortifications that we found Rolando’s house, though not immediately, since that would have taken either the proper access card or an M1 Abrams tank. I knew we had the right neighborhood, however, so now it was just a matter of getting inside the gates.

  “How’re we going to do that?” Natsumi asked.

  “Where there’s broadband, there’s a way.”

  Which we found quickly enough at the neighborhood Starbucks. I commandeered a corner seating area while Natsumi provisioned at the counter. We’d left Miami so abruptly, I hadn’t had a chance to note more than Rolando’s address, though I’d recorded a related list of URLs for further inquiry. It only took a few moments to get what I most wanted at that point. A photo.

  It was taken at the Palm Beach Rotary Club luncheon. He was standing at a podium, speaking to the group on the subject, “Financial Planning in the Age of the Underwater House.” He held a snorkel and face mask up to the microphone. He was smiling broadly. I could easily imagine the opening remarks.

  With dark black hair, goatee and wire-rim glasses, his topic could have been far more academic and he’d look the part. His skin was pale white and his wide smile showed a row of perfect teeth, and even under the suit you could detect the broad shoulders. A meaty fist gripped the snorkeling gear.

  I recognized the face, and still felt those large hands gripping my arms and pulling my wrists together, the rock hard body beneath the black Special Ops uniforms as the mercs jostled us in and out of the inflatable boat.

  “What do you think?” Natsumi asked.

  “The general could have used his help. Do a trade out.”

  “So we don’t have to storm the gates?” she asked.

  “Just the office suite. About two miles from here.”

  I showed it to her on the smartphone’s GPS.

  “So let’s go,” she said.

  “We can’t do that,” I said, a faint panic rising in my throat.

  “Why not?”

  I thought a moment.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Natsumi sat back in her overstuffed Starbucks couch and smiled at me with her eyes, a talent that seemed uniquely her own.

  “That happened too quickly,” she said. “You’re not ready.”

  “I’m not.”

  “The curse of the analytic mind. You haven’t crunched the numbers. Weighed the odds. Analyzed the regressions.”

  “I’m unarmed. I’ve got nothing.”

  “Yes you do. You’ve got me.”

  She stood up and left the Starbucks. I followed, slightly unnerved. She got in the driver’s seat.

  “You navigate,” she said.

  Which I did, not knowing what else to do. As promised, we were there in a few minutes. It was a new office building made of phony brownstone and reflective blue windows. The sign out front suggested a warren of small operations, though we quickly spotted Rolando Mosqueda, Certified Financial Planner, Hablamos Español.

  Natsumi parked near the exit, facing out. She shut off the car and turned to me.

  “Sometimes it’s better not to think so much,” she said.

  “Thinking keeps us alive.”

  “There’s different kinds of thinking. You never heard of Gestalt?”

  “They wouldn’t let mathematicians into psych courses.”

  She opened the car door.

  “Come on,” she said, “before the moment’s lost.”

  I followed her into the building and up the elevator to Rolando’s office. Inside was a tight reception area with a pink-faced young guy manning the desk. He had thinning red hair and a scar that started in the center of his cheek and sliced straight back through the ear. I forced my eyes away, but it wasn’t necessary. All his attention was on Natsumi.

  “We’re here to see Señor Mosqueda,” she said before the guy’s “Can I help you?” was halfway out. He looked down at something on his desk.

  “No, we don’t have an appointment,” said Natsumi. “Tell him what we look like. He’ll see us.”

  The guy stood up and went through the door behind his desk. Natsumi watched him go from where she was leaning forward, both hands flat on the desk. We didn’t have long to wait. The door opened and out walked Rolando, looking just as handsome as he did in the Rotary photo, only three inches taller and that much broader across the chest. His sleeves were rolled up over thick forearms and he had an old-fashioned pencil in one of his hands.

  He didn’t offer to shake and neither did we.

  “The general has some explaining to do,” he said.

  “Not as much as you,” said Natsumi.

  He used both hands to twirl the pencil. His face seemed under the strain of careful thought. The red-haired scar face looked like he wanted to squeeze back into the reception area. Rolando stood aside and waved to us to follow him. We went back into another open area off of which were three enclosed offices and a conference room, into which he guided us. It was well lit by a bank of windows. A coffee machine was in the corner and a white board covered in figures and acronyms filled the other wall.

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nbsp; “Sit,” he said. “Please. Can I get you anything?” he added, then immediately said, “No, of course not.”

  He sat across from us.

  “Do they know what you really do?” Natsumi asked. “Your colleagues? Your family?”

  He touched his wedding ring.

  “This is what I really do,” he said, and then, “What do you want?”

  “Information,” she said.

  He nodded, looking down at the table.

  “I may not be able to do that,” he said. “Not because I don’t want to.” He looked up again. “I only know what I know.”

  “What do you know?” she asked.

  “That the world is a dangerous place. That it isn’t what people think it is. That sometimes it’s better to just let things be. To walk away while you still can.”

  “We can’t,” said Natsumi.

  Something akin to a smile lightened his face.

  “I’m not surprised. You two are a handful.”

  He sat back in the office chair, which surprised him by tipping back even farther. He caught the edge of the table and pulled himself back up, Latin dignity slightly akilter.

  “We’re not here to threaten you, or expose your extracurricular activities,” said Natsumi. “All we want are answers.”

  “That’s good, because threats don’t work so well with me.”

  “Who hired you?” I asked.

  He looked at me, his gentle amusement deepening.

  “So, he talks. Not so easy for people to get you to do, from what I remember.”

  “What else do you remember?” asked Natsumi.

  He looked out the windows as if to assist his memory.

  “Bush league. The contact had clearance. Our team leader had worked for him before. But some other dick from the same outfit met us at the dock before shipping out. Civilian puke. No operational sense. Our team leader had to run the thing.”

  “What thing?” asked Natsumi.

  “The snatch. You two.”

  We let the silence sit there so long it nearly crowded us out of the room. He finally relented.

  “All we had were the coordinates of a boat at anchor and a description of the two targets. The job was to bring you in undamaged and to provide security on the ship.”

  “The fishing scow,” said Natsumi.

  “That’s what it looked like, yeah. I don’t know why they wanted you and I don’t care. Not part of my contract. So I don’t know what went on in the interrogation rooms, what you said or didn’t say. I just know the civilians were very unhappy with the results.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Screaming and cursing? Unprofessional, as I said. Usually clients never let you see them sweat.”

  “Who was your contact?” I asked.

  That irritated him, though he tried not to show it.

  “You don’t know who’s fighting our wars these days? You never read the paper?”

  “You said they worked for the same outfit. What outfit?” Natsumi asked.

  “You know, one of you is supposed to be the good cop. I learned that in interrogation school.”

  “You don’t have to tell us anything, I know that,” I said. “In fact, I’m a little surprised you’re telling us anything at all. We don’t have much in the way of leverage. We could make your life unpleasant for a while, probably, but not without great risk to ourselves. And to be honest, I don’t have another fight in me right now. So I’m asking you, please, just tell us whatever you can about the people who hired you to do this to us. And then we’ll go away and you’ll never hear from us again.”

  I realized he still held the pencil when he started tapping it on the conference room table. He stopped when he saw me look, as if unaware himself.

  “The Société Commerciale Fontaine,” he said. “Big engineering company, originally. Now expanded to a general services contractor for our nation-building-happy federal government. Provides everything from road construction to desalinization plants to delivering yogurt and hometown papers to the officers’ mess. Got into trouble when their security people mistook a family outing for an insurgents’ attack, how I don’t know, but the bad PR lost them that contract. Officially. Still all tangled up in black ops, which won’t come as a surprise. These things take infrastructure that’s too hard to hide inside the regular military.”

  “They hired you,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “The contact came through e-mail. Then this civilian appears. Nonconventional, but he shows us the money. Literally. Cash up front, bonus at the end. What the hell. So, no, I’m not really sure he was Fontaine, but that’s what he said.”

  “There was a woman,” said Natsumi.

  “The screamer,” he said. “Scary chica, if you pardon me for saying.”

  “I pardon you,” said Natsumi.

  “They were working together, but she wasn’t working for him, I don’t think. I heard her refer to Fontaine as ‘your people.’ Not always in a complimentary way.”

  “You never heard what they wanted to learn from us,” I said.

  “I tried, but even these imbéciles knew better than to talk too much in front of us.”

  “You said your job was to capture us, then provide security during the interrogation,” said Natsumi. “What about after?”

  He caught himself tapping the pencil again. Annoyed, he tossed it into a nearby trash can with a quick flip of the wrist. Then he leaned forward on his elbows, his hands clasped almost prayerfully.

  “There was no after. Not for you. They told our team leader to snap your necks on the way back to your boat, which we were ordered to burn at anchor with you in it.”

  Another silence gathered in the spare conference room. Rolando sat there and looked at us and we looked back at him. Then, as before, he answered the question hanging in the air.

  “No way were we doing that,” he said. “What, do they think we’re murderers? It’s insulting.”

  “You towed our boat to Virgin Gorda and dropped us on the beach,” I said, “to make sure no one fell overboard in a drug-induced haze.”

  “Our team leader was a little embarrassed for getting us into this shit operation, though we all got paid pretty well at the end of the day. And you can be as mad at me as you want, but we did save your lives.”

  “So the Fontaine people think we’re dead,” said Natsumi.

  “Sure,” said Rolando. “That’s how we got the bonus. Felt good to stick it to those amateurs. Feels good to talk about it.”

  After a few more probing questions, it was clear he was finished sharing, and there wasn’t much left to share. Natsumi also looked ready to let it go, so like a pair of reasonably satisfied financial clients, we stood up from the table and this time shook his hand, thanking him for his time and candor. He gave a little bow when he thanked us in return for understanding that business was business, and offered his apologies for any inconvenience.

  We just returned the bow and headed for the door, though on the way I had one more question.

  “You didn’t happen to get their names, did you?” I asked him. “The Fontaine guy and the woman?”

  “They called themselves Chuck and Alberta, but that doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “But, when they weren’t looking, I did snap their pictures.”

  He thumbed around his smartphone, then held it up. On the screen was a clear image of the two of them in conversation.

  “I have some good individual shots, too,” he said. “You want them?”

  Back out in the parking lot, I forwarded the photos from my text mailbox to a secure e-mail address. I checked the time. We’d been in Rolando’s office for less than an hour, yet it felt like months had passed.

  “Often,” said Natsumi, “if you simply ask someone for something, they’ll just give it to you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  We were back in our hotel room in South Beach. Natsumi was in the bathtub. I sat on a desk chair dragged in from the bedroom.
The bathroom was all white and she was beneath a white-bubble quilt. In fact, the prevailing whiteness of the scene turned the red wine in the glass a bloody red.

  The air in the bathroom was not unlike the Miami air outside—hot and humid. I slumped down in the rolling chair and put my feet up on the edge of the tub.

  “Score one for Gestalt.”

  “Gestalt’s not a person. It’s a thing.”

  “You knew the mercenaries had let us go,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “No. I knew we needed to talk to him right away. That we’d learn something important. I didn’t know what.”

  “What are you thinking now?” I asked.

  “That Rolando or the general will drop a dime on us.”

  “Not a chance. They’re not that mercenary.”

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “You keep soaking. I’ll go deliberate.”

  “Check on me once in a while. I could drown in here.”

  I left her for my computer, waiting in the other room, untethered and eager to fly.

  AFTER HOURS of fruitless searching using every legal and extra-legal people-finder program I had, I stumbled over Angus the computer scientist. As it turned out, he was neither a computer scientist nor a guy named Angus, though he was a PhD in particle physics with credentials in a branch of mathematics favored by the makers and breakers of exotic code.

  I found him at a science fiction writers’ conference where he’d delivered a talk on the future of cryptography. He was dressed up like Ray Bradbury at an end-of-the-conference party. I only knew he was playing Ray Bradbury because a caption under the photo said he was. I knew it was Angus because it looked just like him, and his real name, according to the caption, was Ian MacPhail, and if that wasn’t Scottish, I didn’t know what the hell was.

  I was on the site looking around for Strider the Data Thief, who once told me she wrote science fiction and frequented writers conferences as her only social engagement. In the photo, MacPhail was chatting with a Jawa trader from the planet Tatooine, who for all I knew was Strider herself. Armed with the right search parameters, I also learned that MacPhail was a Harvard professor married to a woman named Joann, with a daughter and a son who’d contributed three grandchildren to the family. His prior work experience included consulting for the FBI in their New York City office and extensive work in private enterprise.