Black Swan

by Chris Knopf

  She took a pull from a bottle of water on the bar, then wiped her hands on her denim skirt. Then she left the bar area, waving me to follow, which I did through the lobby, around the reception desk and into a small office. It had the sour, faded feel of a room still to be updated and restored. The only evidence of the Feys was a small white board screwed into one wall covered with a checklist, most of the items unchecked, and a computer on a side table against the other wall. The screensaver was a crude animation of Albert Einstein and Socrates playing chess.

  She shut the door behind us.

  "Did I tell you that Derrick Hammon is a crypto-fascist, sociopathic fucking sick creep survivalist nut bag? Adventure man—climbing mountains, deep diving wrecks, high altitude parachuting. His ideal vacation is stripping down to his boxers, painting his body and living in the woods for a week, killing little bunnies and shit with his bare hands and eating them raw. Don't believe me? It's worse than that. His best friends are ex-Special Forces, the kind who go freelance after discharge. Nowadays we call them private contractors, like they're the same people who lay tile in your bathroom. He pays them to train him in counterinsurgency tactics, which really comes in handy in suburban Boston. What do

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  you think 't Hooft is, a database manager? Jesus Christ, for a so-called sophisticated person, you don't know shit."

  She said all this in a forced whisper, only a few inches from my ear. As she spoke, I could feel an atomized mist of saliva spray against my cheek. Her breath smelled of toothpaste and wine. When I turned to look at her, her face was slightly flushed, her eyes narrow, but glistening with stress and intelligence. Her broad mouth made more so by her lips, redder and more swollen than I'd remembered them.

  "No, you didn't tell me. Would've been good to know. So he's brought his A-team here to track down Axel. And you don't want them to," I said.

  "Duh."

  "So why do you let them stay here? Where's your father in all this?"

  She drew in a deep breath, held it, then let it out noisily. With all the intimate whispering, she'd moved close enough for me to feel the outside curves of her clothed body. I held my ground.

  "There's a pretty serious cop on the island now," I said. "I doubt he'll want paramilitary ops taking over his jurisdiction."

  "People can get themselves into really, really difficult situations, even when they think all they're doing is living their lives," said Anika, in the same full-throated whisper. "Especially when you're a wing nut family with far more curiosity than common sense. It just happens, one stupid step at a time, and before you know it, it's like an ultra cosmic nightmare to the nth power. Do you have any idea how powerful technology is becoming, and how few people actually know how to turn the knobs and pull the levers? We've got a society of teenagers out cruising in daddy's Maserati."

  "Okay, so what does that have to do with our situation?"

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  She shook her head violently enough to toss her hair into her face.

  "No cops."

  All my cop friends were devoted to Occam's Razor—that the explanation for any phenomenon was nearly always the most obvious. And its variant: if you think something's true, it probably is.

  "What did he do?" I asked.

  "Who?"

  "Your father. What do they have on him? What drove him out of the company? What's causing him to sit by passively while Hammon and his goons invade your family's home? He doesn't strike me as the kind of character who'd just roll over for nothing. What did he do?" I repeated.

  She pulled the chair out from under the computer station and sat down. She put her hands together and gripped them between her bare knees, as if to clench her secrets more tightly to her body.

  "I'm going to pretend you didn't ask that," she said.

  "You better answer if you want my help. You don't know how close I am to ditching you and this whole sorry mess. If you're as good a researcher as you say you are, you'll know I've been through some cosmic nightmares of my own in recent years. I don't need to play around in someone else's. It's one thing to go out on a limb for people you didn't know a week ago, it's another to be lied to, jerked around and kept in the dark. You're not the first person to think manipulation was a good strategy with me. It isn't."

  With her hands still held between her knees, she bowed her head, with only her nose showing between falling waves of hair.

  "It's not why I wanted to sleep with you," she said, softly.

  "And it's not why I didn't. What do they have on your father?"

  She shook her head.

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  "They have something on him," she said. "I can't tell you what it is. It's not my place. If that's a deal-breaker, then just go."

  The door to the office opened and a man walked in. He peered at me, then at his daughter, who looked up at him and smiled a weak smile.

  "Hi, Dad."

  chapter

  17

  Sorry," said Fey. "I didn't know you were in here. Is something wrong?"

  "Besides the obvious?" said Anika.

  He squeezed his lips together and stood silently, a vivid testament to my charge and Anika's partial admission. I wanted to put it to Fey right there, but that would have meant exposing Anika, the consequences of which I had no way of knowing. I didn't have to care, but something stopped me. Maybe she was a better manipulator than I gave her credit for.

  "We were just talking about finding Axel," I said. "You haven't heard anything, I take it."

  He shook his head.

  "Nothing. Are you leaving us?" he asked, nodding at my backpack, which I'd slipped off my back and dropped on the floor.

  "Yeah," I said. "I gotta get back. Looks like you got plenty of support here."

  "Indeed," he said. "The forces are assembled."

  I picked up the backpack and put it on my back.

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  "Thanks again for letting us lay over. With all you got going on, it was a good deed."

  "You may thank my daughter," he said. "Good deeds are more her specialty."

  I did thank her and left, glancing into the bar as I went through the lobby. The gang was still in there, huddled around a round table. I walked out into the bright autumn day, went out to the street and looked both ways.

  One of the things I learned from twenty years of troubleshooting large, complex hydrocarbon processing systems was that in the absence of any logical, coherent, reasonably promising angle of attack, action was better than contemplation.

  I turned right, toward the ferry dock. I passed the yacht club and stopped in at the gas station. Track was at his post behind the grimy desk. He wasn't happy to see me, but I made him happier when I told him I was leaving.

  "It's sort of painful to leave after everyone's been so kind and welcoming," I said.

  "Then you'll have to hurry on back," he said. "We'll be waiting with the same greeting."

  "I had a nice chat with Desi," I said. "Turns out we have a lot of friends in common. Maybe I'll stay with him."

  He didn't look like he believed me, though a breath of doubt drifted across his face. I left him with that and headed up the road. In about twenty minutes I was at the general store. I stopped in and asked for directions to the ferry dock. The clerk and the lone shopper were all too happy to oblige, briefly contesting the best route, with the shopper sketching her preference on a napkin. I thanked them both and left.

  Not long after, I reached the ferry dock. The red-haired woman behind the ticket counter was at the ready.

  "When's the next ferry?" I asked.

  "Gettin' out of Dodge?"

  "I hear there's another storm coming."

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  "That is correct. A real hurricane this time," she said. "Headin' up the coast, and kissing Long Island on the way by. They're talking up to sixty knots steady. That's gale force at least."

  "When?"

  "Day after tomorrow. You
've got plenty of time. Unless you want to take the two," she turned around and looked at the big clock behind her, "which is in about a half-hour."

  "Give me a walk-on," I said. "I've got to look after my boat. She's anchored in New London."

  I bought the ticket and went back outside. I walked around the back of the ferry office, then cut through a parking lot of an adjacent building and took a narrow street, nearly an alley, out to the road that curved around the southern coast and headed back east. I took out Gwyneth's map and followed it to an old naval outpost on the southeast corner of the island. I went down the battered driveway, around an abandoned brick building, pulled off my backpack and sat on a rock facing out to sea. I took out my cell phone and called Randall Dodge.

  He answered the phone by saying, "Your theory's holding up."

  "How close can you get?"

  "A section of road in the hoity-toity part of town. Humboldt's Crossing, between Meadowland and Page."

  I studied the map.

  "I see it. Near the middle of the country club, close to the airport. Any chance of getting the exact house?"

  "Not without directly hacking the service provider," he said. "They could easily catch my ass."

  "I thought Indian hackers moved through cyberspace like ghosts on the wind."

  "It's been a while. I'm a little rusty on security protocols."

  "I truly appreciate what you've done."

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  "Happy to do it, Sam. You can tell Attorney Swaitkowski that you've cashed in the last of the favors I owe her."

  "Not a problem. I finally got her a paying gig."

  I hung up with Randall, and feeling like my luck with Native Americans was running strong, called Two Trees. When he answered, I told him where I was and asked if he could possibly come pick me up. When he said he could, I asked him to keep it to himself, that I'd explain when he got there.

  "You're trying to get somewhere undetected," he said.

  "Like a ghost on the wind."

  While I waited, I saw the ferry enter the mouth of the channel. There was no way to know if the lady in the ticket office would look to see if I got on, but the odds were she wouldn't. She had no reason to, and with no one else there to man the counter, had little wherewithal.

  I heard the sound of a car heading down the drive, so I got up and went around to meet Two Trees. He leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door for me. I sat down with my backpack in my lap.

  "Where you headed, Cap'?" he asked. I pointed to a spot on the map. He nodded. "I know what you got in mind."

  "How much more would you like to know?" I asked.

  "The more you tell me, the more I'd have to give up if the new cop puts it to me. What's your druthers?"

  "Here's what I'd like, and you tell me what's okay for you," I said.

  I told him that the Fey boy had gone missing soon after one of Fey's former business partners was found hanging in the shower. His other former partner was not only looking for the kid, he'd brought in two serious hard cases to help with the search. Anika Fey made it clear this assistance was unwelcome, but there was nothing she could do about it for reasons that were hers alone. Nobody wanted the cop involved, including Anika, so for the time being, I was going

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  to honor that. I had a bead on where the kid might be, through sources I preferred to keep to myself.

  "You can tell Kinuei any or all of that if he asks," I said. "Or even if he doesn't, though I'd like it if you held off. None of this constitutes a crime that I'm aware of, so there's no compelling obligation."

  "Other than potentially pissing off our local fuzz," said Two Trees.

  "Other than that."

  We drove silently for a few minutes, then I said, "Since you're already part way in, how about aiding and abetting a bit."

  He looked over at me.

  "That depends."

  I pointed to another section of the map.

  "Which of these houses do you know for sure are empty?"

  He leaned over for a quick look.

  "All of 'em," he said. "And they'll be that way till Memorial Day. I know because I drive 'em to and from the airport every year."

  "If you were a precocious kid with a laptop, which one would you pick to hide out in?"

  I'd yet to see him smile, but the equivalent brightened his face.

  "Ah," he said.

  He waited until we arrived at the spot I'd showed him on the map. I thanked him and was about to get out of the car when he said, "I was a precocious kid myself, in some ways. For my money, I'd pick the Hillman place. They've got signs posted all over that warn of surveillance cameras and electronic alarm systems. Only the alarm company, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't exist. I've checked. Since I know what a cheapskate Gene Hillman is, wouldn't surprise me if he just bought the signs. They still have Sound Security

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  checking up on the place, though that's a club thing. They check on everybody."

  "Blue and white cars?" I asked.

  "That's them. Nasty bastards from off island. They have their own little house in the club and everything's brought in for them, so they don't have to fraternize with the rest of us."

  I pulled out the map again. He pointed to the Hillman's.

  "If Kinuei asks me if I told you this, I'm saying no way. Just so you know," he said.

  When the car was out of sight, I crossed the road and started down a path under a canopy of neon leaves, lit by the sun blasting in from the western sky. According to Gwyneth's map, the path crossed into the club, continued on under tree cover, and then opened up on a field. Although several estates backed up on the field, there was a right of way up to the road. To reach the Hillman's from there meant about a mile of exposure if I stuck to the road. I decided to figure that out when I got there.

  It took about fifteen minutes to breach the border of the country club. The gate was a white metal bar, a symbolic gesture at best, since there was no fence on either side. A sign proclaimed the seriousness of violating the line, unless you were a member of the club, in which case, welcome! I ducked under the bar and proceeded for another half-hour, until I reached the field.

  By now it was about four in the afternoon with plenty of light left in the day. I walked back up the path, then moved into the woods, eventually finding a clear spot invisible to passers by. I sat down, opened my backpack and took out a small handheld compass. I'd taken it from the boat's ditch bag, a pre-packaged, watertight sack you were supposed to toss in a lifeboat as you abandoned your sinking ship. I used the compass to get my bearings in relation to Gwyneth's map. I marked the key compass points on the

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  map, along with approximate distances calculated by the time it had taken me to reach my present position. I realized most twelve-year-olds could pull up a GPS on their cell phones, but I wasn't that lucky, and anyway, what did they know about dead reckoning?

  I restowed the map and the compass and lay down on the ground, using my backpack as a pillow. It was unlikely that I'd sleep, but I could at least husband my strength while waiting for the sun to go down.

  This lasted until I became too twitchy to lie still, so I just sat cross-legged on the ground and busied myself with a pen and pad of paper, writing notes and jotting down observations about the Feys and their associates. Then I started making boxes and connecting them with arrows along which I noted certain actions taken by the different players. I'd always found making schematics very soothing. One of my greatest assets as an engineer was the willingness to veer from orthodoxy and speculate on the unheard-of. Like a lab rat who jumps the wall of a maze, this often yielded unexpected results. But then again, I never lost touch with what lay at the heart of engineering: logic and order, efficient interconnections and optimized process flow. Boxes and arrows not only reminded me of that, they revealed the beauty and elegance of the machine world itself.

  After drawing a schematic tit
led "Black Swan," I went to a fresh sheet and made two columns, with the headings, "knowns" and "unknowns." Next to the knowns, I put question marks if I didn't trust the source, which meant a lot of question marks. The unknowns stretched to another page. Some of these I decided were irrelevant, and crossed them out. But it was still a long list.