A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  Joann was Angela’s opposite. Round faced and pale, with short, light brown hair and glasses. And a ready smile, if the two images I found of her were any indication.

  “I would have rather been wrong,” said Natsumi, thoroughly sodden from the bubble bath and half-buzzed, now reading on the bed behind me. I’d held the computer up for her to see.

  “I know.”

  “So what do we do with him?”

  “He’s speaking again this Monday at another conference. This time at Harvard in front of the American Academy of Physicists. That gives us time to get up to Cambridge with a stop in Connecticut along the way. I can pack while you book the flight. Do you think you’ll need the bikini?” I added, already dropping clothes into our carry-ons.

  “It’s the end of March.”

  “Right. So we rent something with four-wheel drive. We can buy warm clothes at the airport.”

  “We could get a hotel with an indoor pool,” she said.

  “Excellent idea,” I said, stuffing the bikini into a one-inch-square space in the suitcase.

  “I’m still not sure what you want with Angus.”

  “Ian.”

  I brought the computer all the way over to where she lay on top of the bed. I tapped on his LinkedIn page and scrolled down to his experience and turned the computer around so she could see. It was there between the end of his FBI career in New York City and his appointment as associate professor at Harvard:

  Senior Project Director, Cybersecurity,

  The Société Commerciale Fontaine

  ■Lead Task Force Charged with International Security Protocol Coordination

  ■Oversee Enterprise-wide Digital Security Policies

  ■Liaison with Appropriate Government Agencies

  ■As Directed by The Société Commerciale Fontaine CEO

  “Oh,” said Natsumi, putting the computer on her lap and clicking on her favorite travel site.

  CHAPTER 10

  As we rode the shuttle bus from the arrival gates at JFK to the car rental area it felt like God had sapped all the warmth and color from the world and replaced it with a permanent cloak of chilly grey gauze. The bus smelled of wet wool and illicit cigarettes and our fellow passengers wore the hollow expressions of the already damned and long ago consigned to the rocking, lumbering box van for all eternity.

  The only sounds came from the tires cutting through mounded curbs of grit-encrusted slush and the occasional incoherent bark from the driver’s radio. Outside, jets taking off and landing in close proximity produced a rolling thunder both heard and felt through the exhausted nylon-upholstered seats.

  It wasn’t until we were in the cushioned embrace of a Jeep Cherokee, inhaling the new-car fumes and fiddling the climate control into perfection, that our spirits began to lift. After some minor navigational confusion, we cleared the snarled confines of Queens and crossed the Throgs Neck Bridge on our way to New England.

  “We lived here, right?” said Natsumi.

  “Born and raised.”

  “I was born in Japan, though I was little when we left.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “The traffic.”

  The Jeep took well to the twisty Hutchinson Parkway that soon merged into the Merritt, equally blessed with hill and curve, which crossed the line into Connecticut. We took a detour into Stamford to buy more clothing and rugged footwear, and to startle my sister by sitting down across from her in the cafeteria at the hospital where she practiced cardiology.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, clearly stunned, a cheeseburger halfway to her mouth.

  “I thought heart doctors only ate tofu and sprouts.”

  “You’re not dead,” she said, or rather breathed in relief.

  “Depends on your definition.”

  “Hello, Natsumi,” she said.

  “Hello, Evelyn. I told him we should call ahead,” she added, aware and sympathetic over the shock we’d caused.

  “Phones aren’t safe,” I said.

  “You call this safe?” asked Evelyn.

  “Nobody’s watching,” I said. “Not at the moment.”

  “The last I heard you were in Europe,” said Evelyn. “According to Shelly.”

  Shelly Gross was a former FBI agent who’d spent his recent retirement years tangled up in severe approach-avoidance. It was my fault—I’d drawn him back into service when I needed a connection inside serious law enforcement. Though it was a little like coaxing a poisonous snake to be your proxy in a snake fight. One wrong move and you’re the one with the fangs in your throat.

  Still, he’d helped me when he didn’t have to, and kept quiet about me when he could have burnished an already illustrious career with a high-profile collar. It made it easier to forgive his declared desire that I spend the rest of my life in jail.

  “How is the old stiff?” I asked.

  “Still sore at you, but said I shouldn’t suffer because of that.”

  “I need to talk to him,” I said.

  She looked down and realized she was still holding her half-raised burger. She took a bite and wiped her face with the napkin.

  “So it’s not over yet,” she said.

  “Far from it,” I said.

  “The world’s a dangerous place,” said Natsumi, “and not what people think it is.”

  “How bad is it?” Evelyn asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought we were more or less in the clear. In exile, but comfortably so. But apparently we’d stumbled over something in the past that caught up to us.”

  “And you don’t know what?”

  “No. It has something to do with money, an imprisoned financial security consultant named Joselito Gorrotxategi and people connected to The Société Commerciale Fontaine, the big engineering firm working for the State Department.”

  “That doesn’t sound that serious,” said Evelyn.

  “They kidnapped us in the middle of the night, put us through psychological torture and threatened to make it physical. Then they tried to kill us,” said Natsumi.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s possible we could be in even worse trouble than before, we just didn’t realize it,” I said.

  “What do the French have to do with all this?” Evelyn asked.

  “Fontaine is only nominally French,” I told her. “They rolled up a bunch of American engineering and defense contractors. Enough to clear domestic political hurdles. Besides building oil refineries and petrochemical plants, they specialize in big public works following disasters, natural and man-made. And they’re also woven into the international security community, which means everything deep, dark and nasty anywhere in the world.”

  “I might have read that.”

  “You read about them losing the security part of the contract with the State Department. Apparently, not really.”

  “Then who is the Spanish guy with the unpronounceable name?” Evelyn asked.

  “Joselito Gorrotxategi. He’s a forensic accountant who worked IT security for lots of big organizations, public and private, including the Guardia Civil, the national police force of Spain, and relevant to us, a Guardia spin-off group of vigilantes who were after Florencia’s embezzled money.”

  “Which they didn’t get,” said Evelyn.

  “Suffice it to say, Arthur upset their plans,” said Natsumi.

  “Badly enough that Joselito is now in federal prison. What really put him there wasn’t just playing footsie with the vigilantes. He’d also managed to get inside the FBI’s international operations and caused enough mischief to attract the full wrath of our country’s counterterrorism forces.”

  “That’s where Shelly came in,” said Natsumi.

  “Who thought the problems inside the FBI had been corrected,” I said. “But now I’m not so sure. Shelly got around resistance inside the bureau by going directly to Stephen Holt, the assistant director in charge of international operations. At great risk to his retirement standing, along with
his pension.”

  “And now you want Shelly’s help again,” said Evelyn.

  “I do. I can’t say he’s a friend, but he’s the only honest guy I know in the federal government. And what’s with the first-name basis?”

  Evelyn would have blushed if she’d possessed the requisite physiological equipment.

  “He’s been taking me out to dinner.”

  “No way,” said Natsumi.

  I laughed, a solid laugh from deep in the belly. A scowl or a curse might have been easier for Evelyn to hear.

  “He’s a widower. We go to a restaurant and talk about horticulture and breeding honey bees. Sometimes a little bioscience or predictive meteorology. Never about you or his job or any of that. It’s innocent.”

  I imagined that the dryness of that discourse was enough to desiccate neighboring restaurant-goers.

  I also thought to myself, “So Evelyn, you’re also keeping your own occasional obstruction of justice, accessory to murder and insurance fraud off the topic list?” But I didn’t say it, because I loved my sister and was happy enough she was actually dating, a thing I’d rarely known her to do.

  “Please don’t tell him we’re in town,” I said. “We need to be careful here. Maintain some reasonable separation.”

  “Like church and state,” said Natsumi.

  “More like nitro and glycerin.”

  Evelyn put both hands in the air.

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  We caught up on some mundane family business, which Natsumi patiently waited through. Before we left I gave Evelyn a disposable phone and a number she could call in an emergency. Otherwise, I told her radio silence would probably have to prevail for the foreseeable future.

  “You need to figure a way out of this, Arthur,” Evelyn said. “It’s no way to live.”

  I hoped there was a way to live, I thought as we walked out of the hospital, because there sure seemed to be plenty of ways to die.

  CHAPTER 11

  There was a time when I could have written out the equations for Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity from memory and been able to discuss the more subtle nuances of the great work with a fellow mathematician. The portion of my brain designed to handle that task was now pulpy, though current neuroscience doctrine and my own experience indicated slight remediation of my dyscalculia as the brain established new wiring, compensating for the loss of parietal lobe function.

  I didn’t need the language of math, however, to appreciate the interwoven nature of space and time. Sitting with Natsumi in the Jeep parked across the street from the house I’d shared with Florencia, I felt myself filling a space that time had warped out of recognition.

  It wasn’t just the passage of time, it was what had occurred in the nearly four years from when a man in a baggy trench coat had sat in our living room and complimented my wife on her decorating talents, had her write down a few things on a slip of paper, then shot us both through the head.

  I wasn’t looking at my old house to contemplate the magnitude of the changes I’d experienced, nor mourn the loss of my past life, now as foreign and remote as any distant place we’d traveled through, often pursued, while in constant pursuit ourselves of salvation. Rather, I needed a visual to orient my perceptions. I had to see that the house still existed. I had to share the proximate air with the place where the course of my life had made a violent pivot away from the benighted bliss in which I once dwelled into another region, formerly unknown and vastly more dark and complex.

  There was no point in wanting to go home again, because home as I knew it no longer existed. Even if it did, I didn’t want it back. Looking at the house in Stamford, I was now sure of that. What I wanted was something that was still to be decided upon. I wanted the privilege of discovering what time might further conceive for me, but not while so furtive and constrained.

  Our capture and confinement, however brief, had taught me a lesson as potent and powerful as the one bestowed by the man in the trench coat. I didn’t know where it would all end up, but I knew one thing for certain: I’d rather be truly dead than go back to that room on Chuck and Alberta’s fishing scow—caged, degraded and alone.

  THE HOUSE in Stamford was about an hour from Shelly Gross’s subdivision in Rocky Hill. It was built in the early sixties, though decades of weekend toil by earnest and determined homeowners had overcome the neighborhood’s innate suburban dullness. Shelly’s house itself, prim and contained as its owner, was a triumph of domestic artistry.

  Even in early spring, there were things to admire about the place, which must have distracted my attention from Shelly pulling out of his driveway in a Toyota Prius the color of the overcast sky.

  The plan, still formative, called for a quick drive-by, followed by a carefully plotted surprise encounter, the particulars of which had yet to be worked out. Colliding with the target wasn’t part of the concept.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, veering away from Shelly’s rear fender and trying to look invisible. I suggested Natsumi do the same.

  “I’m wearing a baseball cap. That’s the best I can do for now,” she said.

  Aside from an angry honk of the horn, Shelly seemed to take little notice of the event, to my relief. I was able to drive at a normal, even unhurried pace around the block and still be able to fall in behind the Prius when he pulled out onto the strip highway that anchored this swath of Central Connecticut.

  I’d followed Shelly before. He was considered the most skillful and experienced federal agent in the state, retired or otherwise. I’d learned this reputation had been built partly on a preternatural ability to focus on the objective at hand, clearing from his vision any surrounding distraction. It made him a great agent and an easy guy to sneak up on.

  Nevertheless, I wasn’t about to push it, assuming I’d have to turn off before even Shelly’s blunted suspicions were roused. Instead, he quickly arrived at his destination, pulling through two stone pillars into a parking lot. The sign on one of the pillars read “Jason P. Fellingham Academy of the Military Arts.” We rolled by and I caught a glimpse of a sturdy old brick mansion of the type whose ultimate state was either an office complex or a museum or a mountain of used brick in the salvage yard.

  At the next chance, we turned into another parking lot, this one serving a shabby row of low-slung storefronts. I parked the Jeep and asked Natsumi how she thought we ought to proceed.

  “Through the front door,” she said.

  “You really like the frontal assault.”

  “Only when called for.”

  “Shelly is not to be trifled with.”

  She brushed that off.

  “He’s sleeping with your sister.”

  “He’s dating her.”

  “He had plenty of opportunities before that to turn us in. He never did it. He really doesn’t want to. And now, he really can’t. Let’s enjoy a little normalcy and only worry about the things we need to worry about, which is a lot.”

  I almost started lecturing on the benefits of paranoia in the pursuit of personal security, which she would have listened to patiently and with great understanding. But I knew she was right. If you try to stay on maximum alert all the time, it begins to erode, becoming less available when you really need it.

  “I’ll follow you,” I said, as I watched her slip out of the Jeep.

  The entrance to the museum was a cramped foyer with a desk behind which sat a woman who looked too large to ever rise from the seat again. Her smile was wide and friendly and she held two tickets in both hands as if prepared to make an offering.

  “Ten dollars for the two of you unless you’re members. Then it’s free. Except for the membership dues, which is a bargain in my opinion.”

  While Natsumi paid, I picked a slim museum guide off a stack on the woman’s desk which I leafed through until I came to a list of volunteer docents. As suspected, Shelly was on the list. I asked about him.

  “Colonel Gross, retired army reserves, is usually in the d
ocument room for part of the morning. Captain Wolfson, also retired, should be here momentarily. He can take you around.”

  “We’ll be fine,” said Natsumi, slipping her arm through mine and moving me through the foyer.

  Just inside was another room, in the center of which stood a blue-coated infantryman from the American Revolution. He was well equipped with a sturdy musket and turned out nicely in his uniform, his gaze appropriately steely, though with a touch of uncertainty about the whole thing. I started to read the explanatory placard, but Natsumi gently moved me along. In the subsequent rooms we breezed past glass cases filled with maps, weapons and accoutrements from the dismal march of armed conflicts through the centuries. It wasn’t until we’d surveyed most of the collection that we came to a large room reinforced with artillery where a small World War I field piece guarded a door with a sign that said, “Archives.”

  Natsumi tried the door and it opened. I followed her.

  The walls were lined with deep shelves and file cabinets, neatly arranged and carefully labeled. In the center of the room was a big metal worktable at which Shelly sat looking through a jewelers’ magnifier light at a ragged-edged sheet of paper.

  He still had his full head of close-cropped white hair, clear pink face and erect posture. When he looked over the top of the light his expression stayed in neutral.

  “We have video surveillance,” he said. “They’ll be here in about a minute.”

  “Can you take a coffee break?” I asked.

  “You’re still alive,” he said.

  “So far,” I said. “I hope we can talk.”

  “It’s better if you sit down,” he said, nodding toward the chairs facing him. As soon as we settled down, the door opened behind us and a young man in a khaki shirt and blue jeans walked in. Blue eyes set in a dark-skinned face lent him an air of cautious alert.