A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  I gave her the news.

  “Have you heard from Strider?” she asked, reminding me I’d asked the young hacker to look into the original vanishing account.

  “No. Now I’m afraid to contact her again.”

  “What’s happening?” Natsumi asked, her voice nearly a register below normal.

  “It’s coming apart.”

  “What?”

  “They’re breaching the outer perimeter. Eventually, they’ll get to the core.”

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. And now I’ve lost Andalusky. Fontaine’s security is sweeping up after him. Very effectively. We’re cut off. Weeks of work gone poof.”

  “But we’re smarter,” she said.

  She was right. We’d identified Alberta as Albalita, confirmed her connection with Andalusky and acquired convincing evidence that they’d conspired to capture and do us great harm.

  So we knew a lot more, but it was cold comfort, as our security seemed to erode faster than our awareness could increase.

  “We can’t go backward,” I said. “It’s too late to stop.”

  “I’ll start packing,” said Natsumi, leaving me again with exhilaration, terror and paranoia competing for purchase on my weary heart.

  WE MADE one stop at a big international bank where I’d consolidated all our remaining liquid funds, and then subsequently withdrew in fat stacks of traveler’s checks. It took awhile to complete the task, though no one at the bank seemed to think it out of the ordinary, testament to the type of clientele served at that level.

  A few hours later we were at JFK airport, inching our way along a serpentine queue that terminated at a podium behind which a humorless TSA agent scrutinized passport photos and the matching human face there before her.

  Passing the visual test was of little concern. It was all the other stuff—name, address, date of birth, place of birth, passport number, fraudulent all. The source of the passports came with impeccable credentials, though for all we knew he’d been turned by the authorities and was now in the business of setting snares for his unsuspecting customers.

  I hoped we’d perfected a look of bored indifference laced with impatience, which pretty well captured the manner of most international travelers. There was a time when such attitudes mattered little, before the TSA ran software that could spot a possible terrorist by the mood state captured on a security camera.

  So I was disappointed when the TSA agency at the podium looked at my passport, then at me, and then asked me to step out of the line. She asked the same of Natsumi.

  I held firm to my insouciance and walked with my rolling bag over to where another TSA agent, this one looking very comfortable in a body about twice the size of the woman’s at the podium. While we stood there a third agent brought the large man our passports. He opened them, one in each hand, moving his head back and forth as he absorbed the information.

  “You two travelin’ together?” he asked.

  “We are.”

  “Hm,” he said, nodding. “Married?”

  I felt Natsumi stiffen. Our adopted personas by necessity had to be single. The degree of difficulty in obtaining a married pair was nearly insurmountable.

  “No,” she said, with an edge of annoyance.

  “Jes’ askin’,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the passports. “Stamp says you been to Martinique. Like it there?”

  I never had, so I probably stiffened myself.

  “On business,” I said.

  “My people are from down that way. La Trinité.”

  “Never left the resort,” I said. “Wish it weren’t so.”

  Natsumi said something in Japanese. I replied with “Don’t worry,” in the same language, two of a handful of words I knew. She nodded, then bowed her head.

  “Don’t speak English?” the agent said.

  “Of course she does,” I said. “She’s just nervous we’ll miss our plane.”

  He smiled.

  “I was stationed four years in Okinawa,” he said. “I know the lingo for ‘airplane.’ ”

  “So, is there a problem?” I asked.

  “Prob’ly not,” he said, then looked directly at Natsumi, and said, “Dealer’s holdin’ a king and a five. Player’s got an ace showin’. Who folds?”

  Natsumi cocked her head, her face a torment of unease.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I do not understand. What is a king of a five?”

  His laugh was more of a grunt. He handed us our passports.

  “Have a nice flight,” he said. “And keep this kid out of the casinos, if they got ’em over there in Switzerland.”

  “I have no idea,” I said, fussing with my passport and luggage and fawning over my timid Japanese girlfriend, who, once we were clear of the security, said, “Fucking asshole.”

  I shook my head, warning her into silence, broken only when we were on the plane as it rumbled down the runway.

  “What just happened?” Natsumi asked.

  “They’re looking for a Caucasian male traveling with a female Japanese blackjack dealer,” I said.

  “Why not just hold us till they’re sure?”

  “We’re not the only mixed-race couple traveling today. They’d have to hold dozens for hours. The media would have a field day. He had to make a quick call. He’ll duly note the stop in his regular report. They’ll have video images. It’ll all be processed through a central database. We still have a seven-hour flight and have to get through Swiss customs. Plenty of time for things to go awry.”

  So it was a less-than-relaxing trip over the Atlantic. Natsumi took full advantage of the beverage service in business class while I built and discarded scenarios. The prevailing stereotype of researchers is of coldly dispassionate, computer-like people bolted irrevocably to the available facts. That’s part of the story. But it doesn’t account for hypotheses. What-ifs and if-thens. This requires the ability to imagine, to extract, often out of pure ether, possibilities and potentials. Einstein famously claimed he began with an answer, a version of nature that to others would appear in utter conflict with observed reality. Then he’d backfill the math, the proof that his mad vision was in fact the true state of being.

  And Einstein’s visions were nearly common sense when compared to the prophesies of the quantum physicists. Among their many incomprehensible theories was that every action, no matter how small, had an infinite number of possible outcomes. Even that each of these was actually realized in an infinite number of universes. Fine, I thought, mulling this. We don’t need infinite answers to the anguishing questions before us. Just one will do. The right one.

  CHAPTER 21

  After the aggressive brio of the New York TSA, the dignified Swiss almost made the airport gauntlet refreshing. I wasted mental energy studying the customs agents’ faces as they studied our passports, and then let us through without hesitation. It wasn’t until we were in the cab on the way into the city that I felt the grip on my nerves ease up a little.

  “Hypervigilance,” said Natsumi, when I shared my feelings. “With physical exercise, repetitive stress on your body makes you stronger. Constant stress on your nervous system has the opposite effect. It’s why virtually no soldier will last more than a few months of steady combat without succumbing to some sort of psychological degradation, PTSD or what have you.”

  “That doesn’t make me happy.”

  “Shelly was right. You think the rules don’t apply to you. But no one can live as we’ve been living and stay the same. As your resilience decays, your sensory sensitivity is sharpened and your environmental awareness becomes far more acute than necessary. I’m seeing it happen to you, and feel it happening to me. But there’s no shame in it. We’re human after all.”

  “I can’t have it fog up my brain.”

  “I certainly haven’t seen that. Maybe the rules don’t apply to you.”

  When we got to the hotel, I abandoned a long-held jet lag strategy by lying flat on my back and pas
sing out. When consciousness eventually returned, it was slow going, weighed down by lingering fatigue and cluttered with the fractured remnants of frantic dreams. It took longer than usual to place where I was, but it all came back abruptly when I saw Natsumi come out of the bathroom wearing only a towel on her head.

  She told me she’d sat in a chair and watched me until night fell, then she passed out, and both of us were gone to the world until the following day.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “You slept about eighteen hours. How do you feel?”

  “Less vigilant.”

  She joined me on the bed and helped complete the waking-up process. I knew I was merely freshened and hardly cured of my nervous exhaustion, but I took it as a gift and a warning that I probably wouldn’t get another one until the state of our lives was resolved, one way or another.

  IT ONLY took a few minutes to restore full computer operations using my laptop and a solid state, terabyte external hard drive. I didn’t bother trying to check on Chuck Andalusky’s home and office e-mail accounts, or his telephone conversations, knowing they were now securely locked up with new passwords, and fearing the possibility Fontaine’s security people had a way to detect and trace infiltrators.

  I was about to check my own e-mail when a little window popped up, alerting me that a message had hit the mailbox I’d set up to communicate with Shelly Gross. With a mixture of pleasant anticipation and dread, I clicked on the window.

  “Let’s meet on the Quaibrücke. Half hour from the time you respond.”

  It was signed Captain Perry.

  “Ah!” I yelled.

  “What?” asked Natsumi, alarmed.

  I felt heat spread across my chest and a bell literally ring in my ears. So much for a respite from hypervigilance.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Fuck what?” she asked, looking over my shoulder. “Oh fuck.”

  According to the GPS on my smartphone, Quaibrücke was a bridge in the city that crossed the head of the Limmat River where it poured out of Lake Zurich.

  “What does this mean?” Natsumi asked.

  “It’s very good or very bad.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I looked around at her.

  “Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge,” I told her. “I could analyze the facts at hand for the rest of my life and not make a better decision than you’ll make in the next ten seconds by simply getting in touch with your feelings.”

  “I’m feeling sick,” she said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Write him back and tell him to expect a bald Caucasian and stylish Japanese woman. But in an hour. Style like mine doesn’t come quickly.” I started to object, but she shut me up with the obvious. “You don’t let me decide then second-guess the decision.”

  And that’s how we were walking along the River Limmat, arm in arm. The morning air was cool, even though spring had nearly surrendered to summer and there were flowers aplenty in the parks, planters and window boxes around the city. I was in a light fleece and Natsumi had fulfilled on her promise by wearing a skirt, scarf and suede jacket. I watched men of all ages watch her as she passed by.

  We actually managed to be a little early, so we detoured up into the Old Town to use up the extra time.

  “What are you thinking?” Natsumi asked as we wove our way through the narrow, ancient streets.

  “Nothing. I’m done with all that.”

  “Intuition only from now on?”

  “You got it.”

  “Maybe you should see how this next bit turns out before you decide,” she said.

  “If that’s what your intuition is telling you.”

  We walked the last block along the river and turned off onto the busy Quaibrücke. Captain Perry hadn’t specified which of the two broad sidewalks to meet on, so Natsumi picked the south side, facing the lake.

  A few minutes later, her impulse was validated when a tall man who’d been leaning on the railing, looking out over the lake, turned around just as we were approaching. His ball of steel-wool hair might have been a little shorter, and his face a little less tan, but it was unmistakably Jersey Mitchell, former FBI agent, late of the good ship That’s a Moray.

  He stuck out his hand and Natsumi took it.

  “Captain,” she said.

  “I almost bought the Jonathan Cornwall routine,” he said to her. “But you never seemed like a Natalie. Ian says hello,” he said to me as we also shook hands. “Or maybe it was ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Can’t remember which.”

  “He brought you in,” I said.

  “He did. After a fifth of whisky and a serious bout of conscience.”

  “Over Angela?”

  “Over selling out his former employer. He damn near ate a gun over that one.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He’s in rehab and finally free of that harpy of a wife, so maybe you saved his life.”

  “I thought you were retired,” said Natsumi.

  He smiled.

  “Are you accusing me of deception? Come on, let’s walk and talk,” he said, moving down the sidewalk.

  Without going into detail, Jersey told us he was only semiretired, staying in the game by being eyes and ears for the FBI in the Caribbean. That’s why, when Ian contacted him, he was able to pull agents from the Boston field office to pay us a call. No one expected us to dodge the interview.

  “A less impressive evasion would have aroused less interest,” he said.

  The report from Boston made its way to Washington, which resulted in Jersey being ordered on a plane north. Again, without revealing the FBI’s inner workings, he let us know a very important person wanted Jersey to brief him and only him.

  “He’s the real Captain Perry. I just got to borrow the name to get your attention.”

  “So you’re not here to arrest us and bring us back to the States,” said Natsumi.

  I didn’t like it that he took his time answering.

  “That depends,” he said, eventually.

  “On what?” I asked.

  “How the rest of this conversation goes. Who’s in the mood for coffee and a snack?”

  By that time we were well west of the river in an area that was new to me. Jersey seemed to know his way around, however, and we were soon in a booth inside a dark little joint run by a husband and wife. Jersey ordered in German.

  “They claim not to speak a lick of English, but everybody in Switzerland speaks a leetle,” he said, using the standard Swiss pronunciation.

  “You’ll forgive us if we aren’t into small talk,” said Natsumi, “since our lives depend on the quality of the conversation.”

  “Not afraid of the quality,” said Jersey. “It’s more about the content.”

  “This feels like a game,” she said. “Only we don’t know the rules.”

  “The only rule is honesty,” he said.

  “Now that we have a table,” said Natsumi, “it would help if we got all the cards out.”

  “Spoken like a blackjack dealer,” said Jersey.

  “What did Shelly tell you?” I asked.

  “Shelly Gross isn’t part of this conversation,” he said. “I’m here as Captain Perry’s proxy. He’s keenly interested in an organization that seems to interest you. There may be a way to work something out that could help you, while helping us, which is why we’re sitting here today.”

  “The Société Commerciale Fontaine,” I said.

  He nodded, and said, “In particular, Charles Andalusky.”

  “He’s dirty,” said Natsumi.

  “Is that a question or a statement?” asked Jersey.

  “Why the interest in Andalusky?” I asked.

  “That’s one of our questions for you.”

  Natsumi told him how we’d been woken up on our boat, trussed up and shipped blindfolded to the old fishing scow. How we’d been held in grim metal rooms, then interrogated by Andalusky, drugged, and han
ded over to mercenaries who ignored his order to kill us. She told a reasonably complete story, while leaving out a lot, including our encounters with the Cuban mercenaries, my brief tenure as a research analyst with Fontaine, Albalita Suarez and Joselito Gorrotxategi, the financial IT wizard I’d helped the FBI ship off to penitentiary oblivion, and thus far the only connection between our past lives and the whole inexplicable swirl that had come since.

  “And you have no idea why Andalusky, a man of serious international prestige, would behave in such a way?” he asked.

  “We’re hoping you could ask him,” said Natsumi.

  The set of Jersey’s shoulders seemed to relax slightly and he sat back in his seat. He took a long sip of his coffee, then said, “That’d be difficult.”

  “The FBI’s afraid to talk to some corporate poo-bah?” she asked.

  “It’s not that,” he said. “Nobody’s talking to him, now or ever again.”

  Which is when I realized the true reason we were having this chat with Jersey Mitchell in the dim little coffee shop in Zurich, Switzerland, and not in a brightly lit, windowless room in some nameless location, or on an official plane on its way back to Washington, DC.

  It’s when I saw, among a nearly infinite number of possibilities, one likelihood emerge, one sure outcome coalesce out of the fog of uncertainty. Although I hadn’t thought out all the details. In fact, I hadn’t thought at all. I’d merely felt.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  Jersey nodded.

  “Shot through the head, sitting in his car in the garage. Not a suicide, unless he figured out how to make the weapon, bullet and shell casing miraculously disappear.”

  Natsumi broke the resulting silence during which Jersey’s usually friendly, jovial face seemed to assume a harder set.

  “And you know who did this?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “The guy sitting next to you. Arthur Cathcart.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Sometimes an event can alter a person’s life so dramatically that the versions of himself, before and after, are best described as two people. For me, it wasn’t just the bullet in the brain, with all the attendant physical and psychological consequences, it was why it happened, and how. The horror and the violence of it all.