A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  “Fuck him,” said Natsumi.

  “That’s not my department,” said Ian.

  “Let’s save it all,” I said, reaching over his hands and doing it myself.

  We spent another hour searching for Albertas, and came up with nothing. We agreed looking at every face of every Fontaine employee would take weeks. So I said the hell with it.

  “So now what?” Ian asked.

  “We call a cab and I wait with you in the lobby.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We can’t entertain you all night,” said Natsumi. “We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

  I gripped him by his two fleshy shoulders and gently encouraged him to stand. I marched him back to the bank of elevators and went down to the lobby. He was silent until we were at the curb waiting for the cab.

  “How do I know you won’t come back for more?” he asked.

  “You don’t.”

  “I’m not a bad man,” he said.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “You won’t hurt Jersey.”

  “I don’t want to hurt Jersey,” I said. “I want to crew on his boat.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Oh no, he is. Saved my miserable life. You either love or hate a man who does that. ’Course, I’ve known him nearly my whole life.”

  One of the tricks of market research is to put yourself in the place of the person you’re interviewing, establishing empathy, not unlike a psychotherapist or interrogator. You ask much better questions and get much closer to the bone. So when I thought about Ian’s comment, I tried to connect, but couldn’t. I didn’t have the experience.

  “I don’t have any lifelong friends,” I said. “Hardly any friends at all, when I think about it.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” he said, briefly touching my back.

  An expression of unambiguous kindness over one of my life’s failings, rarely recognized much less expressed, from a man whom I was cruelly extorting, who not an hour before thought I was going to put a bullet in his head.

  “Thanks, Ian. Life’s complicated, isn’t it.”

  “Aye, ’tis that.”

  I put him in the cab, gave the cabbie directions and two twenty dollar bills with strict admonishments regarding his fare’s well-being and safe delivery to his chosen destination.

  “No problem here, sir,” said the cabbie. “Forty dollars guarantees everything but armed escort.”

  “Fucking hell,” said Ian, as I shut the car door.

  CHAPTER 13

  Natsumi had already downloaded all the publicly accessible data on Chuck Andalusky when I got back to the room. So as not to break her flow, I used the iPad to boot up a few other applications handy for tracking people, none public and not all entirely legal. I lay down on the bed and composed myself after the rigors of nabbing and coercing Ian MacPhail.

  “He only has one testicle,” she told me about an hour later.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He had to confess an embarrassing fact as part of his initiation into a college fraternity. He lost it in a gymnastics accident in high school.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “His home and business address, office and cell phone numbers and those of his wife, Okayo Alphonsine. She’s Haitian. And a dermatologist.”

  “So he definitely works for Fontaine?”

  “Senior Vice President, Offshore Operations, Principal Contract Director for Economic Development and Assistance. I think I know what that means, but I’m not sure.”

  “It’s a big company,” I said.

  “Fontaine’s fundamentally an engineering outfit, but when the State Department is handing out grants to foreign governments, there’s often a social welfare component. You build a dam, but you also build a few schools or open a malaria clinic. Since Fontaine’s already sitting at the table, it’s easy to subcontract that sort of stuff to them along with the heavy engineering. And they can do anything, or at least claim they can.”

  Chuck and Okayo had a home in Rye, New York, an expensive suburb that wrapped around the western frontiers of Fairfield County, Connecticut, not far from my hometown of Stamford. According to Google Maps, it was in a wooded tract in the northern part of the town, on about two acres. A real estate website thought you could buy it for $1.2 million.

  Okayo was part of a dermatology practice in White Plains. They’d married three years before in Washington, DC. There were no kids.

  “I wonder if one ball has to work twice as hard,” said Natsumi.

  We spent another hour downloading as much information on Andalusky as we could, which I also saved on a flash drive I kept in my pocket. Natsumi went to sleep after that, and I sat up and diddled, knowing that sleep would be elusive until exhaustion had thoroughly bludgeoned my nervous system into submission.

  So it was about one in the morning and I was still awake when we heard a knock. Natsumi bolted upright. I put on my shoes and walked to the door.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “Mr. Cornwall?” a man asked.

  “Not me,” I said.

  “I think it is.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We need to talk to you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “FBI.”

  Natsumi was powering into her clothes. I put a jacket over my T-shirt and checked my pants for my wallet and keys.

  “I’ll need to see identification,” I said.

  “Open the door and we’ll show you.”

  “We need to get some clothes on,” I said.

  “Do it fast.”

  I went to the window. It was our habit to get a room as close to the ground as possible. This one was about a story above the roof that covered the main entrance. Undoubtedly it was being covered by other agents, but being trapped in the room was a sure thing. I wrapped the laptop and external hard drive in some clothes and stuffed it into one of our two duffle bags. Natsumi was shoving other things into the second.

  Another knock at the door.

  “We can make this easy or hard,” said the man. “Ten seconds to open up.”

  I tossed the duffles onto the roof below and then opened the door the few inches allowed by the safety hardware. I saw a man and a woman in suits and heavy overcoats. They looked at me closely through the crack of the door.

  “ID,” I said.

  They held up what looked like official ID cards, though, of course, who knows what they really look like. Though they seemed undeterred when I took photos of the IDs, and their faces, with my smartphone.

  “We have a few questions,” said the woman.

  “Okay,” I said. “My wife just needs another minute. She was asleep.”

  “A minute,” said the woman.

  I shut the door, turned around and saw Natsumi with one leg already out the window, prepared to squeeze through the narrow opening. She looked at me for the high sign, and I pointed to the right. Without hesitation, she dragged her other leg through and disappeared. I heard the sound of her hitting the gravel-covered roof and running across to the right.

  I was right behind her. Neither my spatial orientation nor basic agility could match Natsumi’s, so I hit hard, crumpling into a ragged heap. One ankle lit up in pain, but it took weight as I scooped up the duffle bag and ran across the roof and dropped to my stomach, looking over the brink. Natsumi was down in the bushes with the other duffle bag waving to me. I swiveled my legs around and dropped again, this time landing on my feet.

  “Hold it there,” said a woman’s voice to my left. I swung the duffle bag in the direction of the voice and felt the laptop inside crunch down on something hard. The woman made a startled little yelp, but that’s all we heard as we ran as quickly as my lousy ankle would let us behind a row of cars, around the hotel and down an embankment toward the Charles River.

  Natsumi didn’t hold me up so much as guide my progress, making little corrective shoves and pulls to k
eep me on my feet. This wasn’t the first time we’d done this, so we both knew what was required.

  We ran through a narrow park, then between beeping traffic across the four-lane Memorial Drive, which follows the curves of the Charles, then down nearly to the water’s edge, where we sat up against the east side of a boathouse behind some ragged rhododendrons and worked on catching our breath.

  “You’re hurt?” Natsumi whispered.

  “A little. Ankle.”

  I didn’t tell her about the burning sting coming from my knees and elbows, since that hurt, too, but wouldn’t debilitate.

  “Can you keep moving?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Stay here.”

  She scrambled on all fours along the side of the building and disappeared around the other side. I waited and listened, rewarded soon after by a metallic bang. Natsumi came back on two feet and helped me get on mine.

  “Follow me.”

  We went around to a big ramp the rowers used to slide their practice sculls into the water. A side door had been padlocked, which Natsumi took care of with a big rock dragged up from the river’s edge. We went inside and found a light.

  It was a storage area filled with oars, ways to clean and sand the oars, tank tops, gym bags, shoes, sweatshirts, and all the other detritus of an active sporting club. Natsumi started pulling things out of her duffle bag, including some of the makeup gear we’d recently acquired. She tucked her long hair up into a baseball cap and applied a small black moustache. She handed me a wig made of long, straight blond hair and a pair of heavy-framed glasses. We helped ourselves to some of the rowers’ shirts and hoodies, and one unfortunate guy’s backpack. I dumped out the contents and left fifty dollars in its place. The laptop housing was badly cracked, with one corner thoroughly crushed in, but it fit in the backpack along with the external hard drive and related cords and chargers, which all looked fine.

  We checked ourselves out in a full-length mirror.

  “Effeminate punks?” I offered.

  “Not the same people who were in that hotel.”

  We left the boat house and walked along a path that followed the river bank up to a brick wall, forcing us to go back up to the streets. We made for Massachusetts Avenue, hoping to catch a cab.

  What we got instead was a patrol car. It pulled up to the curb several feet ahead of us. Nothing happened, so we kept walking till we passed the car. Twenty feet down the street I gave in and looked back. One cop was on the sidewalk, the other in the passenger seat with the door open. They were talking to a big white guy in a jumpsuit and work boots. Maybe a utility worker. They didn’t look at us. We kept walking until a cab slowed at the curb. We took it.

  I asked the cabbie to drive us to the nearest car rental place. He looked it up on his smartphone, then took off with the usual Boston cabdriver abandon, which is to say somewhere just shy of suicidal.

  We had to wait until we were in the rented Honda headed west before we could speak freely.

  “What do we know?” I asked.

  “They called you Mr. Cornwall. The name we used with Jersey and Angus/Ian.”

  “Ian dropped a dime on us,” I said.

  “Not afraid of losing his wife?”

  “Not afraid we’d actually follow through on our threat. He got to know us. Established empathetic connections. Did his psyche ops. He knew we wouldn’t do it.”

  “We wouldn’t?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Were they real FBI?” she asked.

  “Not sure there either. Very little backup. The Cambridge cops would have had us in five minutes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I pondered the damage to our supplies and felt some satisfaction we’d gotten out of there with everything that really mattered. I was happy with myself and with Natsumi. For better or worse, we were becoming highly adept at spontaneous operations, with no words spoken and very little overlap in assumed responsibilities.

  Despite what I feared, we hadn’t grown soft during those blessed months afloat in the Caribbean. In fact, our survival instincts had settled in, becoming woven into our natural way in the world.

  When we reached Greenwich, the sun was all the way up and the crackle of busy commerce was already well underway. We found a diner with wireless access—an obvious necessity for any establishment in that town—and settled in a booth with eggs, ham and toast on the way.

  “We need to be more careful,” I said, after the coffee arrived.

  “We do. It’s my fault. I let myself get angry with that Latino mercenary.”

  “Anger is human.”

  “Fear and anger make you stupid,” she said. “All your life energy flows out of your brain and into your extremities. This so you can better knock someone on the head or run like hell. Nothing left for subtle cognition.”

  “We should think more about our physical disposition. Not much room to maneuver on a sailboat or in a hotel room.”

  “So let’s get a house,” she said.

  I nodded and Natsumi started working on her iPad. Before we finished our meal she’d secured a year’s lease on a four-bedroom custom-built home a few miles from the Andaluskys. It was in the neighboring town of Pound Ridge and also in the woods, though much more remote, being adjacent to both a country club and a wildlife preserve.

  “You’ll need to sign the papers and pick up the keys,” said Natsumi. “I say go as the blond hippie.”

  I took her suggestion, tempering the look by pulling the fake hair into a ponytail. For no good reason, since the guy at the real estate office barely looked at me. He tossed the keys and rental agreement on the counter and returned my “thank you” with a “yeah.” As so often happened, our ability to slip unnoticed through the world was well served by the bored and resentful.

  The house was at the end of a long driveway, and thus invisible from the road, even with the trees stripped down for the winter. It had a three-car attached garage that led into the basement. This at least gave a powerful illusion of security as we brought our bags into the finished basement rec room, complete with a huge couch, TV set, pool table, banners from the last decade’s Super Bowls and a bar. Most importantly for me, it also had two big tables with task lights and power strips. A craft area, I guessed, but ideally suited to a bank of computers and attendant gadgets.

  “Shall we check out the rest of the house?” Natsumi asked.

  “You go ahead. I’ll be staying here.”

  “I’m taking a shower.”

  WHILE SHE was gone I used a cell card and my laptop to get online and begin to resupply. Before shopping, I ran a routine checkup on my liquid assets—bank accounts scattered around the country attached to credit and debit cards used for regular and extraordinary expenses. I had about two hundred thousand dollars distributed across these accounts. This was my working capital, fed by much larger amounts tucked away in secure, revenue-generating investments. The checkup was so habitual I could do it half asleep, which I was until a little window popped up on the sign-in screen for one of the accounts declaring, “Access Denied.”

  Assuming I’d hit a wrong key, I signed in again and got the same response. I went to reset my user name and password and another message said, “Sorry, Incorrect Information. Please Try Again.” Which I did, to no avail.

  So I was forced to take another approach, rarely employed. I called the bank.

  The automated voice asked me to enter the account number followed by the PIN number that went with the account. I punched it all in and got another apology and request that I try again. After a second failure, I ran the gauntlet of automated phone support until I reached a living person. I gave her the name and address I’d used to open the account, and the account number.

  “I’m sorry, sir. The name and address are incorrect.”

  I stared at the Word document where I kept user names and passwords in a code only I could possibly know, since it relied heavily on certa
in distinct and highly personal memories.

  “Maybe the account number is wrong,” I told her.

  “There is a checking account with that number. It isn’t under the name you’ve provided.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Nothing, sir. You don’t appear to be a customer.”

  “I’ve been using this account for months. I’m definitely a customer.”

  She went silent for a few moments, then came back.

  “I’m sorry. Are you sure you have the right bank?”

  I didn’t need the cheat sheet to remember what I had in that account. Twenty-three thousand dollars. A modest percentage of the whole, but real money.

  I hung up the phone and spent the next hour sitting quietly in front of the computer in the basement of the big suburban house, listening for the silent sounds of existential threat.

  “WHAT DOES this mean?” asked Natsumi, when she returned from her shower.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think it might mean?”

  “The account has been compromised or I’ve lost my mind,” I told her.

  “I feel like we’re sprinting through a minefield.”

  “So what do we do? Stop running?”

  “Run faster.”

  It took about an hour to restore a secure connection with Strider, the girl hacker. She didn’t seem surprised.

  “I thought I’d hear from you again,” she wrote.

  “I need another favor.”

  “That’s why I thought I’d hear from you.”

  “One of my bank accounts has been hijacked,” I wrote.

  “Really? Not good.”

  “It’s troubling.”

  “Send the details and stay away from the bank. I’ll need a clear path.”

  “I owe you again,” I wrote.

  “And you’ll pay me back.”

  THE FEAR instilled by a sudden loss of money seemed to amplify the shopping impulse. I double-checked the other accounts, then went to town.

  First I bought a pair of cars: A silver Toyota Camry and a black Jeep Cherokee.

  Then I bought two more laptops, a pair of terabyte external hard drives, a printer, a scanner and wireless router. And a complete video security array that would augment the home security system that came with the house. After hacking a gun shop I knew in Connecticut to secure their FFL (allowing me to ship across state lines), I bought fully automatic M16s, military grade M9 Beretta pistols, Kevlar body armor, black fatigues, white fatigues, carrier vests, night vision, side arms with matching muzzle suppressors, military-grade GPS, and personal communications including radios and headsets.