by Grady Ward
Feeling better after his shower and his freshly washed clothing, he had thought about how to begin to carry out the next step, which was to take the initiative away from his personal stalker. Zugzwang, big guy. He considered the potential implications of everything that had happened to him today. He was not recently used to thinking in a logical, orderly, linear way. He left that way behind him. But why not just run far away from this place?
It came down to a random stalker would likely not have a long gun, nor would have previously investigated him at the Commissary, nor a new car, and certainly not an armored SUV. Or enlisted the help of the police. Or tracked him to the forest. (How?) A random stalker would not have been able to track him at all. This implies that the stalker was following a plan and specifically after X baby. But why? And how could a professional killer miss despite taking several shots? But most critically: what in the universe of his personal downspin—qualities which were shared by thousands of others in better or more effective or more public ways—a stalker felt that must be extinguished in him? An undistinguished homeless bum on the street?
Joex could not think of a single reason why anyone would want to be his caput mortuum. What? Death’s head? Where had that phrase come from? “Bums don’t talk like that,” Joex whispered into the air, “that was another life.” He was considering the most likely ways of attracting his stalker to a place of his own choosing, but as if aligning to his thoughts, on the north side of the plaza across from the showers, he saw the silver GMC Suburban SUV with the sea-green windows slowly enter and park in a red zone.
“Joe X Baroco. ‘X’ marks the spot, old buddy, crosshairs, Christ on a cross,” he mumbled to himself. He wheeled around and walked widdershins to the traffic, away from the showers and behind the Suburban that would eventually wrap around to the rear of the SUV. He walked just fast enough so that his gait could still be described as shambling—looking into the storefronts, away from the massive SUV: “I just don’t have the fucking balls for this,” Joex said, loud enough to be specifically ignored by a passer-by.
Joex’s self-assessed half-assed plan was this. If the stalker left the Suburban, and left it unlocked, Joex was going to get behind the back of the broad cargo seat. He would wait for a surprise opportunity to get a story out of his stalker, by force. Use deadly force, if necessary. We are going to dance a deadly gavotte, you and I. Joex had no idea of this would work: was the stalker alone? Was the SUV vulnerable? Was there sufficient space to hide? Could he surprise someone who likely trained and practiced for his task? All of those objections became irrelevant as Joex settled into visualize each step of his plan. Rehearsing it with variations as fast as his sluggish brain would fire. “This doesn’t suit me, man,” Joex whispered. His left hand shook. Overall, Joex sought some kind of resolution to the end of his life, and it might as well happen now.
The tall man with the undecipherable complexion got out of the driver’s side and, as Joex, began to walk counter-clockwise around the edge of the plaza. The man kept his eyes on the building with the showers across the street through the palm trees and topiary of the plaza gardens. Again, he made the betraying brush of his hip.
“Time for a puff of sharav.” Joex gauged his ambling so that he would reach the SUV at the same time the wiry man—Joex decided to call him Mr. Brillo—reached the front of the shower building. “How in the hell did he know I was here? How in the hell?” As Joex had anticipated, Mr. Brillo reached the front of the building and immediately started around the side toward the back fronting the showers entrance, stepping up his pace. “I’ve got about half a minute now.”
Joex too jogged forward and quickly surveyed the empty SUV through its unfathomable windows. In one fluid motion as if he were taking home the weekly groceries, went to the driver side, opened the door, climbed in, and looked for the best way of concealing himself in the back. His eyes stopped when they saw the keys left in the ignition. Joex changed plans, settled into the driver’s seat, put on his seat belt, locked the door, started the Suburban with a satisfying visceral roar. He signaled his entry into traffic and merged with the autos leaving the plaza for the coastal highway. It was all magically easy.
While he had not driven for a very long time, Joex felt as if he were fifteen again and given the wheel of a car for the first time. As the powerful machine got up to speed, Joex loosened the silk tie coiled around his neck like a scarf and began a syncopated crooning to the air.
Chapter 9
Joex’s elation did not last long. He drove a few minutes heading north on 101 and began to glance obsessively in the SUV side-mirrors. “If Mr. Brillo has clout with the locals, then I got to let this puppy go.” He took the exit to the Mad Landing beach and parked in the day camping area. There were just a handful of other cars and no one obviously around. Joex re-wrapped his Paisley tie around his hand like a bandage and used it to paw through the car. In the back under a dark-green plastic tarp was a Pelican long gun case locked with its unpickable Abloy locks. He saw no key. “Well, I guess that is that,” Joex muttered into the air.
Nothing under the driver’s seat or under the visors or in the center console; but in the glove compartment Joex struck gold: a compact Glock pistol, a Federal Reserve bank-banded stack of new $100’s, and finally, the pinnacle of Joex’s search, the registration slip showing the registered owner as a “Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s” in Portland, Oregon. Every path has two directions, Joex thought.
He left everything—not even touching the pistol—except the money, which he put in the hip pocket of his worn trousers, trudged back along the sandy frontage road to the coastal highway, smiled as if he were pure sunshine, and stuck out his thumb.
Chapter 10
Mark Langley, Special Agent in Charge of the Portland office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation took the call from Assistant United States Attorney Jim Rauchmann.
“Mark. You free?” This was Jim’s catchphrase to ensure Mark was alone and a confidential conversation stayed that way.
“Shoot.”
“I need to move back the Rui Bao arrest.”
Mark paused and leaned back in his chair. “What’s cooking?”
“I’ve got a thread that needs pulling before the show begins,” Jim said in his cadenced diction that was to normal speech as a thin 7H pencil stroke was to a carpenter’s pencil. “I just need a few days. Can you tell your people to hold up?”
Langley wiped his shaven head with his palm. “Jim, I’ve known you since you were a Portland prosecutor; you need to leave the investigating to us and you just stick to subpoenas and press releases.”
“This is important. A week.”
“And what is the thread you need to pull?”
“If I could talk about that, then I wouldn’t need to ask you.”
“You are running up a bill here, Jim. It’s not a matter of mailing a traffic ticket to Bao for him to come in at his leisure. We have to arrange a media presentation and a perp walk for the press. This is the fashion catwalk of the season. Once you start arranging that crap with them, they never let you alone. Bao is big, not only the district but also the entire Western region. And he fits perfectly into the new get tough with foreign trade secret theft push, Computer theft and intrusion as acts of war and the Perpetual International Copyright Treaty that POTUS has the hots for before the election. This is national press.” Mark paused.
“But you know this. This is bigger for your career than mine, Jim. My retirement is not long now. Maybe I’ll set Bao as my capstone.”
The sound in the phone automatically cut off to total silence until Jim spoke again. “One week. Please, Mark. You’ll have plenty of time to catch salmon.”
This time Jim’s phone cut to silence until an instant before it became uncomfortable.
“Okay. You got it, Jim,” Mark said, “have a great day.”
There was dead air for a few seconds and then a click as the phone trunked back to an unsecured line.
Mark took out h
is fountain pen with its custom 25-year service livery and examined the chased iridium-gold nib. It was as uncorrupted and beautiful as when it came from the factory, Mark thought. “Unlike people,” he said aloud.
So Bao gets another week before he spends the rest of his life in prison for espionage and theft of trade secrets. Maybe Beijing will trade a democratic activist for him. Everybody makes deals. Mark looked around for his antacid.
Chapter 11
Mr. Brillo knew that he was dead when he saw that his Suburban was gone. And the person who was to carry out the execution, Principality Geedam, didn’t even know it yet. Failure of this magnitude had only one simple consequence. He might as well give the finger to a Seraph. He could run, but he had no resources whatsoever. The Crux knew his family as well as he knew them. Probably better. Every childhood friend, every enemy. Every lover, every pet and every friend of the family. The Crux knew them all. They would be required to pay if Mr. Brillo did not succeed.
The Church of the Crux demanded unwavering devotion and the suppression of self: this meant no savings, no personal property, friends only among the Angels, and time that was completely under discretion of the Choir. As a parichoner, he had no idea of the consequence of his volunteering to be an Angel. He knew he would do service to the Crux in exchange for training in all the arts and techniques of the Crux. He longed for the Games Machine. Perfection took all the life one had. Now, he knew the price of his entering the Choir of the Crux: his life has ended.
Strangely, though, Mr. Brillo became unburdened. He walked over to a café at the corner of the plaza where the cornflower and turquoise prayer banners fluttered in the on-shore breeze. It felt fresh to Mr. Brillo; it reminded him of his childhood in Sri Lanka, running on the beach, collecting exotic conches and debris winnowed from the incessant tide. Although he did not have any money, he ordered a Café au lait, took out his mobile phone, saw that Geedam had repeatedly been trying to reach him all morning. He thought about that and punched the numbers for the Portland Parich from memory. Geedam is one person who he would never call again.
“Throne Kingston,” he said to Angel who answered, “Angel Ruddy here with a new crux.” Though opaque to outsiders, Mr. Brillo knew that this phrase would get him through. Not a lot of delegation; the stakes are too high Mr. Brillo thought.
“Kingston.” the Security Throne answered.
Mr. Brillo began to cry.
Later that evening just before nightfall, a tall, thin but sinewy middle-eastern looking man, dressed in a dusty suit, looking very small against the setting sun and wide open Pacific Ocean that wavered in the breeze and shimmered in the rising moisture of the red-tipped tide, walked alone to the end of the northern jetty and into the boiling surf.
Chapter 12
Freetown was the largest city in Sierra Leone and was a magnet for everyone in the bush who dreamed of regularly eating more than Cassava and greens or fu-fu monthly and a chance at modest wealth and the small life—if not power—the city brought. As in Accra and Abidjan, employment divided itself into tribal affiliations. Tima, Mende, Kriol. You knew what language the police officer would speak, as well as the baker. And you held no hope to work in the field to which a competing tribe lay claim. Sam Lion-McNamara had no illusions that life would be anything but nasty, brutish and short. One the one hand he was glad that he was not laden with an ass-cart that in Freetown the boys hustled over avoiding gaping holes in the street, but that was in turn better than the vague classes of beggars and rent-boys that lined every road and clustered around the ex-pat bars for Europeans near the center of town. Sam considered the life of Sierra Romeo who had no arms or legs so constantly whistled for attention at his corner. Even he had to turn over most of his collections to his beggar-boss.
The old center of town, low, near the harbor, was where the Datatel cafes were as well, although “café” was a stretch given that the only respite from the battered keyboards and skipping mice was warm water in recycled red plastic cups, drawn from a nicked garden hose marked by skittish crowds of thirsty flies.
Sam did not give an instant of thought to the legality of his internet activity. He would have laughed if asked about it. “A starving man does not ask the price of the food,” he would have said. It did not matter. He just assumed it all was illlegal and, as everything else about his life, either someone would give him a beating or no one would care. One thing appealed to Sam about his work as an attendant at the café. The Chinese or Americans would come down for a few hours to look at politics (Chinese) or porn (Americans) and often leave Sam with random junk that were treasures to him. A Zippo lighter. A Fenix flashlight. A broken mobile phone with intact battery. Tips in Australian dollars with the plastic windows, or uneaten pizza or dim sum in greasy butcher paper.
When lunchtime came and he had a few Leones extra, he would go down to the piers and eat with the men at their long tables, their half-baguettes and bowls of hot sugar water to dip them in, flexing their explicit tattoos and swearing in languages that were distant lullabies to Sam.
On the way back to work, he would see the Chinese embassy employees walking en masse back to their fortress at the edge of town. They always wore red and big smiles; Sam had heard that they and the Americans coveted a new oil field in the waters off the coast and Sam had read that the Chinese themselves imported goods of leather and woven cloth from Sierra Leone. It had become too expensive for them to make in the even in the sweatshops of Kashgar or Chengdu. The Sierra Leonean was the Chinese to the Chinese.
However, it was in the night that Sam was the merchant and the master. He would spawn windows filling his ancient CRT with chat channels here and Darknet websites there. He, as Ouest, always paid the money and delivered the goods. He brokered deals for credit card details or phony PayPal accounts. He collected and traded numbers in dollars that would accumulate like a midnight thunderhead and then disappear into the glistening screen when transferred, stolen, or frozen by the authorities, or more likely, used to pay for more illicit transactions of data, goods, and street cred. This, not the Kissy docks, is where Sam was the beggar-boss.
Chapter 13
Joex’s first ride was all the way to Coos Bay, Oregon. His ride was a small U-Haul van with a right rear wheel making a whining sound. The driver was a man in his 20’s with dreadlocked hair and dirty bib overalls with copper buttons for the straps. He called himself Bafomet. He smiled a lot and his teeth were not too clean.
Joex ask to be dropped off at the bus station and, in the dark, Bafomet let him out on Broadway, near a huge log yard with the agreeable smell of wet cut fir. The Fireside & Woodshed lounge was closed, so Joex parked himself on the sidewalk leaning against the bus stop and waited for the 9:20 to Portland. He figured with nothing but a stack of hundreds that it would be better to travel in the least conspicuous way possible; a police stop at a minimum would earn an instant confiscation, if not indeterminate detention until those who sought him, found him. No. Until I can parameterize … parameterize? Another blast from the forgettable past. Until I can see the edges of what in the hell is going on, I am going to be Joe X Normal, hard-working, God-fearing man seeking a job and middle-class enlightenment. With that decision, he field stripped the double-fat blunt given to him as a parting gift by Bafomet and tossed the contents into the street.
He will unwind Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s and those behind it until they too were field stripped and lay in the gutter to wash away.
Joex arrived in Portland in the early afternoon. His first priority was to look the opposite of what a person does who has committed multiple counts of grand larceny who is running from his assassin. First, he needed something to eat, luggage, then, a place to stay, then, some budget clothing, toiletries, a way to get on the Internet and some time to do his homework. The grading for this homework promised to be a bit severe.
During the ride up to Portland, he had separated out a few of the hundreds from the different parts of the stack of bills and separately crumple
d and distressed them so that each when drawn out of a pocket would looks if that were the last money he had in the world. It would not do to pull out a stack of successive serially numbered crisp Franklins.
At the Target near highway 84 Joex purchased a deep-blue gym bag, a toothbrush, comb, razor, shaving cream, and deodorant. Then went in the bag with the underwear and socks, along with a couple of button down shirts and khaki trousers with a woven belt. The cheapest leather wallet. A store-branded windbreaker. His bag was getting full, but he needed one more thing. He wandered over to the electronics section and purchased the cheapest netbook he could. He added an external Wi-Fi adapter that would give double the range of the built-in wireless antenna. He paid for his purchases with several of his crumpled bills. This amount was pushing it, Joex thought. Most people pay with cards now. However, that would pop me up on the radar.
Outside the store, Joex assembled his bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked down toward Mt. Tabor and stopped for a coffee in a shop that had outside seating, despite the chilly overcast of the afternoon. His new netbook was partially charged and Joex searched for hostels in Portland. Most of them were not too scrupulous about requiring identification, especially if he paid for a bunk in advance. He found a hostel just a few blocks south of his café, put away his netbook, paid for his coffee and walked down to it.
