The Mangrove Coast

by Randy Wayne White

  Which meant that the computer had recognized me as a person who had once had full security clearance but who was no longer operative, was no longer considered an asset, was, most likely, a potential liability but who might, just might, have a useful tidbit of information to offer.

  Without hesitating, I spoke a second four-digit identification code and then, after a series of beeps, I said, “Ford, Marion D. Secondary listing: North, Marion D. I’m calling for Bernard Objartel Yager. My telephone number is—” and I gave it.

  Four beeps later, the jolly farmer’s voice told me, “Sorry, neighbor. You mustuh got the wrong number. Nobody here by that name. Have yourself a great day!”

  I hung up the phone and began to futz around the lab, neatening this, straightening that. As always, I was annoyed by the high-tech game-playing and the Hollywood-style trappings that, to me, seemed an adolescent adjunct to a business I had once found as complex as it was dangerous.

  Why couldn’t they have a secretary like everyone else? Someone trained to screen calls? What was so compromising about a real, live human being who could decide to accept or refuse a telephone call?

  But no … they reveled in theatrics and their own little venues of power … and every year it seemed to get sillier. More tricks, more complicated electronic gags that suggested to me that the intelligence-gathering community was becoming a parody of its own excesses, and so probably was neither as powerful nor effective as it had once been.

  I kept reminding myself: Ford, aren’t you glad to be out of this business?

  I continued working in the lab, going over how I was going to ask Bernard Yager, a computer and electronics genius by all accounts, for his help in breaching the security of a housewife’s desktop computer. To even make such a request was embarrassing.

  It was Yager who had single-handedly unscrambled the Soviet/Soviet nuclear sub code progression. It was Yager who had invaded and compromised computer communications between Managua and Havana during the Sandinista wars in Nicaragua.

  His was not a name seen in the newspapers, nor would it ever be seen. Yet the man had been a legend in the business for more than a decade. By now, I suspected that his underlings looked upon him as some kind of wizened old electronics guru.

  About fifteen minutes later, when my phone rang, I answered to hear, “Hey Doc, you old so-and-so! It’s Bernie!”

  I began by saying, “Bernie, is it safe to talk?”

  “On my line? You’re making a joke, right? Such a funny man with the jokes. The president, he should be so confident in his phone security. What? You think I’m such a nebbish that I’ve gotten old and rusty like a certain Viking-sized field hand? Why do you waste our time with such questions?”

  “So I take it my side of the line is also fine.”

  “Marion, Marion, you are trying an old man’s patience. Is my line okay? he asks. Is your line okay? he asks. We’re having this conversation, you hear words coming from my lips, so of course the lines are okay. What else do you need to know already? Why don’t you just come out and ask me, ‘Bernie, my old friend, have you become old and senile and stupid?’ Because that’s what your questions say to me.”

  “Hey, that’s not what I’m saying, Bernie.”

  “To me, that’s exactly what you’re saying. You’re saying that you no longer have confidence in my expertise. This from the man whose ass I personally saved after he’d slept with a certain president’s wife in Masagua. Name another person in the business who could have electronically lifted information from the poor husband’s office and still had the good sense to telephone you in the bedroom of His Excellency’s beautiful wife? So what did you have to spare? Five minutes? Ten minutes, tops. The man’s elite guard hunting you like dogs, but you were warned in time. All thanks to the person you keep asking these offensive questions.”

  I was laughing. Everything he said was true. I said, “Well, I’ve got to risk offending you again.”

  When I told him what I needed, he feigned indignation. “Any teenage hack can do what you’re asking me to do. Such a waste of time and talent!”

  “It’s what I need, Bernie. I don’t think you ever met Bobby Richardson, but his wife is the lady in question.”

  “I’ve heard of Commander Richardson, so I don’t need to meet him. He’s a friend of yours, so he’s a friend of mine. The man was part of the old guard. One of the rare good men. So what else do I need to know?”

  “What you need to know is that Bobby and I went through some very heavy business together. You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about. I owe the man. He’s been dead a long time, but I still owe the man. His girl is in trouble and so is his daughter. I’m going to do whatever I can to help out.”

  “Okay, okay, so maybe I owe you a favor or two myself. You ask, it’ll be done. What you need to do is tell the daughter to switch on her mother’s machine and modem. It’s a PC or a Mac? Of course, someone like you wouldn’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’ll have my equipment invade the poor little thing and install the software you’ll need in a program called … I think I’ll label the folder Pilar. “He had a curiously high-pitched giggle. “Will you be able to remember that? If remembering is such a problem, I’ll have everything on her screen changed to red, but the folder—the folder, I’ll make green. Or maybe interesting colors. Just so you can find it.”

  “You’re a bastard, Bernie Yager.”

  “A bastard I am not. And neither do I ever forget. When my poor sister, rest her soul, got herself in trouble in Boulder, you were the one, the only one, who went there and spoke with her and helped bring her home. Eve liked you, Doc, she really did. And she trusted you. You may have been the only person in her life that she truly trusted. I don’t know why she went back to the streets, but she did. God rest her soul and the souls of all who loved her. Her going back, that I will never make sense of.”

  I said, “She was a good woman, Bernie. And thanks a lot for your help.”

  “There isn’t something else you want to tell me, Doc?”

  I said, “No … I don’t think so.”

  Bernie Yager, the tough electronics guru, said, “The number, I need her mother’s phone number. And her E-mail address. I need to be able to access the machine if I’m going to upload software. What, I’ve got to take your hand and lead you through this?”

  10

  The Calloway family home was in the Lauderdale suburb of Coral Ridge south of Oakland Park and north of Plantation. Probably one of the original gated communities on the Intracoastal Waterway, built back in the fifties when dolphin-finned Cadillacs and pink stucco defined the sunrise coast.

  There were banyan vines and shadows on streets that never took the full heat of summer because of moss and filtered light. The brick gatehouse was unattended, but the neighborhood still had the solid look of corporate money, good benefits and upwardly mobile executives. Not old-time wealth, but high-salaried position players with plenty left over for pension plans and toys.

  Tomlinson was talcing it all in. “The people who first lived in these houses, I bet they voted for Eisenhower and bitched about Elvis back when they were built. Caddys, yeah. Can’t you picture great big land yachts sitting in the driveways?”

  We were in my Chevy pickup, windows down, driving through the shade of ficus trees. We’d crossed the saw-grass flats of Alligator Alley to I-595, then north on U.S. 1 past Freddy’s Anchor Inn, tattoo parlors and Comfort Suites, then through the Kinney Tunnel into a gray corridor of furniture stores, Burger Kings, Porsche and Ferrari dealerships, Chinese restaurants.

  Now we were looking at houses that were set back behind thick brick fences, the yards hedged with sea grape. Dominant colors were conch pink and Bermuda white. Not many Cadillacs in the driveways, though. Mostly sport utility vehicles in earth colors, but a few BMWs and Lexuses hitched up close to large ranch houses with red tile roofs showing through the trees.

  “Can you smell it?” Tomlinson said. “The Atlantic Coast, man. It … smells diffe
rent. Big ocean, big seas, lots of wind out there beyond the condos, even if you can’t feel it.”

  I was cruising at maybe ten miles per hour and the truck cab was filtering odors.

  I said, “Yeah, nice air. Not as dense.” Meaning not as heavy as the air on Sanibel Island.

  No matter where I’ve been in my life, I can get within ten miles of an ocean and feel it. Can sense the implied weight of the sea even if the horizon is blocked, fogged in, you name it. Thatch-roofed huts or trees or mountains or high rises, it didn’t matter what stood between us. The convexity of sky is always different. Brighter? No, but there is a distinctive sheen to it, as if rarefied by lightning or chemical reaction: saltwater, oxygen, wind, isolation. I always, always know if the sea is near.

  The Calloway house was several blocks from U.S. 1, just off Bayview at the corner of 8th Street and Middle River Drive, not far from Bayview Elementary and the Coral Ridge Yacht Club. Very solid-looking brick one-story painted key lime yellow with vines that trailed up the walls and framed the bay windows. Pie-shaped quarter-acre corner lot, old tropical vegetation, the weathervaned masts of sailboats showing above the roofs of neighboring homes.

  A yachting community. Each house with its own dock out back.

  I noticed a frayed rope hanging from an oak tree in the side lawn. Presumably it had once held a swing. I noticed the plywood remnants of a tree house in said oak and thought about Amanda with her tomboy attitude. Sometimes you can look at a house and read what’s gone on there. This had once been a child’s place; a family place. A little girl had once lived here with her mother and stepfather. Not now, though. The property had the sterile look of weekly yard maintenance and vacant bedrooms.

  You take one look at such a place and you guess that someone’s dream came unraveled here.

  The front door of the house was cracked open, though, as if to let stale air escape.

  Amanda’s little car was in the drive.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened to my mom’s computer?” Amanda, wearing gold wire-rimmed glasses, sat at a desk in a study just off the master bedroom, her face illuminated by the monitor screen.

  No T-shirt for her now. She was wearing pantyhose, a pale gray pleated cotton skirt, white blouse with pearl buttons and a navy blue blazer. The way she dressed, it not only changed the way she looked, it changed the way she handled herself. An athletic-looking redhead with some lanky size, maybe handsome but not pretty. Interesting face, with her mom’s great cheekbones but her dad’s tough-guy nose. Not a person to take lightly. She moved and spoke without hesitation, the modern businesswoman.

  The backseat of her car, I’d noticed, was crammed with boxes and folders and pieces of some kind of plastic shelving, maybe something that had to do with dispensing medications. Just a guess. It looked as if she’d been making the rounds, calling on her clients, and had interrupted a busy day to meet us at her old house.

  “What kind of friends do you have, Doc? A person who can do something like this to a stranger’s computer … my God! He changed all this through the telephone modem?”

  It was hard to tell if she was impressed or spooked. Bernie had recolored each and every screen icon in rainbow shades. They appeared to drift randomly, not unlike pinballs, on a fluorescent wallpaper backdrop of pink flamingos in flight.

  The exception was a folder labeled PILAR.

  It sat in the center of the screen, many times larger than any other icon, and it flashed as methodically as a smalltown caution light. One of his little jokes.

  “What’s pilar mean?”

  “It’s Spanish. It means, well … like a support or a column. Something that will hold up a building.”

  “But here he means like support for my computer program, right?”

  “For the computer … sure. That kind of support. What else could he mean?”

  “Is he some kind of drug freak or something? These colors, all the activity, just looking at the screen is giving me a headache.”

  “A drug user, you bet,” Tomlinson said, nodding. He was looking over Amanda’s shoulder, riveted. “This kind of genius, there almost has to be synthetics involved. Yes … yes, I’m sure of it. It’s a professional guess, but still a guess … yeah, I believe this whole scene demonstrates certain signature effects that I associate with what may have been the bitchingest acid ever produced. The Hitchcock Estate, Dutchess County, New York, nineteen sixty-seven. Dr. Leary had a hand in that one, God bless him.” He turned to me. “If this buddy of yours has a tab or two to spare, I’ll pay top dollar. I know you don’t approve, but I just got a nostalgia rush you wouldn’t believe. All I want is enough so I can go back and revisit some old friends. Maybe talk to the dead, visit my own karma in the afterlife. Nothing fancy. You don’t mind, why don’t we take a second and jot his number down—”

  Amanda said, “Hey, be quiet a minute.”

  Tomlinson said, “Huh?”

  “Look at this. There’s something wrong here.”

  I watched Tomlinson’s face as he looked at the screen. Maybe from his reaction I’d be able to read what was going on.

  She said, “I just tried to sign on to my mom’s account, but I get this damn thing.”

  There was a message corralled by a blue border: “Invalid Password. Please try again.”

  “I thought you said that her password still worked. That you’d tried it.”

  “It worked fine last night when I came over to turn on the computer.”

  “Maybe her bill hasn’t been paid and they’ve terminated her service.”

  “Nope, it’s a credit card thing and the money’s taken out of her account just like everything else. She’s got plenty of money left for stuff like this.”

  “Try signing on again.”

  She did.

  The response was the same: Invalid password.

  “Someone’s changed it,” she said. “That’s the only explanation. Someone had to. Which means it had to be my mom.” Her voice gathered a little energy. “So that’s good, right? It means that she’s near a computer and she’s still … that she’s still okay.”

  Tomlinson was patting her shoulder, comforting her but also asking her to move. “Tell you what, let me dig into the folder that Doc’s hipster friend sent. Maybe it’s got the juice to find the password, recover the old files, the whole works.” He glanced at me. “Your buddy said everything would be self-explanatory, right?”

  I had my arms crossed; stood there trying to picture someone with a computer on a sailboat in Colombia. But yeah, why not? There were phone lines and notebook computers everywhere. I said, “I told him you’d done some of your own programming, that you knew all the basics. He said no problem then.”

  To kill time while Tomlinson worked, Amanda walked me through the house. The furniture was draped with white sheets. Her old bedroom was pink with flowers, neat as a museum. There were trophies on the shelves: tennis and softball. An athlete. One big window looked out onto the screened pool and the canal beyond.

  “See all those Australian pines across the Intracoastal? That’s Birch State Park. At night, when I was, like, a sophomore or something, I used to sneak out and paddle our canoe across. I’d have the beach all to myself. Not too far from here, you look across and you can’t see anything but condos. Bahia Mar, where Frank and his little soulmate moved. Places like that, there’s no skyline, just buildings. The people there, you got these old men the color of bagels, plus all the yachties and the beach bunnies.”

  Playing tour guide while Tomlinson worked.

  I noticed that the closet door was wide and the boxes therein were open, scattered, as if someone had recently ransacked them. She replied to my quizzical expression: “I was looking for more photographs. While I was waiting for you guys to get here.”

  “Why? You already sent the ones of your mom and Merlot. That’s all I wanted.”

  “I know, but I started wondering after you asked me. The pictures of me when I was a little girl? I thought I’d piled th
em all in the same box. Now I can’t find the box. My mom must have put them somewhere, someplace she thought was safe.”

  “You can’t find them.”

  “No, but it’s okay. Mom probably hid them. She knows how sensitive I am about how … about, you know. How my eyes looked.”

  Like she was kidding, Amanda said, “Mom was probably worried I might burn the whole bunch.”

  It took Tomlinson slightly less than three hours to nail the password and recover the lost correspondence between Gail and her E-mail friends. Three intense nonstop hours,

  during which he shouted orders and updates to us from the study:

  “Beer! Bring me beer! My fluids have been sapped. I need to rehydrate!”

  “This fucking computer can kiss my ass on the county fucking square! Killing’s too good for it! Burning this noxious bitch would be a kindness. Where’d your mom GET this piece of junk?”

  “Amanda, dear? Ahum-m-m. Oh-h-h-h-h Aman-N-N-N-da? Would you mind very much if I, uh, have a smoke in your mom’s study? Now … before you even answer, I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong: It’s not tobacco, so you’ll hardly even notice the smell.”

  She said yeah, sure, he could smoke a joint.

  That surprised me.

  Dressed in her power clothes, she was still coming across as a much different person than she’d been at Dinkin’s Bay Marina. We were the guests here and she was comfortable with being in charge. Wasn’t self-conscious, not at all reluctant to show little bits and pieces of herself.

  Every now and then, she’d flip open her cell phone like it was some kind of Star Trek communicator. I’d listened to her say, “Larry … Larry, I realize the woman’s a pain in the ass and I realize what she’s asking is unfair. But it’s her hospital and it’s a major account and I want you to do whatever it takes to make her happy….” I listened to her say, “Kath? Amanda. Look, girlfriend, about dinner tonight … I’m up to my ass in work and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get away.” She gave me a sly glance before she added, “Yeah, I’ve got company, but they’re a couple of gorgeous hunks, so it’s okay.”