Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

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  Everybody knows that you can’t even scratch your privates anymore without some overhead satellite getting a shot of you. No doubt the area between Florida and Cuba had more cameras focused on it than a bra-less celebrity at a film premiere. Big Brother knew who was where, and when, and there were algorithms, patterns, and red flags that would set off alerts, and the Coast Guard would respond. The good guys, with the help of high-tech surveillance, were gaining ground on the bad guys. That was fine, though you also had to hold your breath and hope that this wasn’t the beginning of 1984, just a generation later than Orwell had predicted.

  But nobody would be paying attention to a sportfishing yacht that had casually crossed wakes with a patrol boat. A military ship was supposed to be the good guys, right?

  The drop had to be something else. Javier Pimentel could surely tell me, if I was able to get him alone and ask him nicely—while hooking him up to a car battery. But I doubted that I would be given the opportunity, and that wasn’t my style anyway. My best lead so far was the tablet computer that Chloe Heffernan had provided and that Roberto was now busy hacking. Once he got past the codes I had a feeling that the device would lay it all out for us, and that there would be a lot more to this than what I was being told.

  MONDAY

  I managed to slip off of the boat a few minutes after we docked. Javier and the Iturbes disembarked shortly after we’d returned to Key West, but they left lights on inside the main cabin of the boat, so I knew that at least one of them would be staying aboard for the remainder of the night. I watched them disappear down the walkway, and then I scooped up my knitting bag and wobbled unsteadily and not-so-stealthily down the dock toward my car, but no one saw me. The marina was dead quiet, the only sound being the metallic pinging of rigging wires against aluminum masts in the night wind. The BMW was where I’d left it, undisturbed except for a light coating of salt haze from the sea breeze. I was so glad to be back safe inside my nice little car I felt like kissing the steering wheel.

  The ride back to Vero Beach took less than five hours, as the road was clear of traffic. I stopped twice for coffee, and when I rolled into my driveway I knew that even though I was dirty, smelly, unshaven, sore, and completely exhausted from sailing to Cuba and back underneath a tarp, it would be a while before I was able to calm down enough to get to sleep. The caffeine would rob me of that.

  The drive had given me some time to process all the information that I had taken in during the previous twenty-four hours, and I had come up with something of a plan. First, get my exhausted ass to bed—until I was rested I would be useless. Second, work with Roberto to mine whatever information we could from the tablet computer. If our efforts came up empty, I would revisit Chloe Heffernan and ask for her help. If she had been Segundo Pimentel’s paralegal—not to mention his lover—for nine years, then she must know plenty about his secret ways. And finally, I would locate Javier Pimentel again, and we would have our little talk. If Roberto could crack the tablet’s defenses beforehand, I figured that I would have some leverage to make him open up.

  My plan also included a couple of things that I would not do. One was to involve the police. I could finger the Iturbes right now for my assault, and probably for Gustavo’s, and with their arrest record they would go directly to lock-up and would no longer be part of the equation. I decided that it could wait—the brothers could get their justice later, but for now it might be to my advantage to let them run free in case I wanted to follow their trail.

  The other thing on my not-to-do list was to deal with Barbara, or Megan. That could also wait, as I needed to be single-minded about my investigation if I wanted results. Barbara had finished her exams and was out of school until September. She could take care of Royal, run the household, and do all the things that I usually did for the family. Megan wouldn’t be expecting me for our next P.T. appointment because she had been fired. “Fired” was the wrong word; it was way too harsh, and I should never have said that to her. It was just that she had developed an inappropriate whatever-you-might-call-it, and it had gone well beyond the boundaries of a professional relationship. The obvious thing to do was to part ways and find a qualified replacement. Meanwhile, I felt terrible about the whole thing—Megan was a good kid, and she had worked miracles for me, and I owed her something more than you’re fired.

  I was so tired when I put my key into the door that I didn’t know if I would make it across the living room to my bedroom door. My worries about the coffee keeping me awake were unfounded. It was starting to get light out, and it was a school day, so Roberto would soon be up, and one of us would need to drop him off, but my eyelids were so heavy I could barely see to open the bedroom door. I turned the handle, careful not to wake my wife, but a female form sat up in the bed, holding the sheet to her chest.

  “Vince?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can you deal with Roberto? I’ve been driving all night. I have to get some sleep.” I took off my watch and began to unbutton my shirt.

  “Vince,” she said. “It’s not Barbara. Turn on the light.”

  I reached for the wall switched and flicked it on. Megan Rumsford was in my bed, naked except for the sheet. “Megan?”

  “She said I could use your bed,” she said, blinking in the light. “She’s in with your son. Let me get a shirt on and I’ll explain.”

  *

  Megan was making coffee in my kitchen as if she lived here. She had put on one of my T-shirts, a light-brown one that had a hole in one side that was flashing me peeks at the skin underneath. “You weren’t answering your phone,” she said.

  “The battery was dead.”

  “There are like, five texts from me. I gave up and called Barbara. I thought she might know where you were.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was so scared, Vince. I completely freaked out. I’m sorry. I had no idea that you had all these people here. Barbara told me to come over, and that I could stay.”

  “Megan, what happened?”

  “Two men were outside my place. In a van.”

  “A van? What color was it?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “You want some of this coffee?”

  “Yes, but I’d never sleep again. You saw the van, right?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “It was behind a big palmetto bush. But the men got out and were walking around my place. I was in bed, with all the lights off.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About eleven o’clock. I probably should have called the police, right?”

  “You can call me anytime, Megan. I was in Key West though.” And so were the Iturbe brothers, so whoever had been prowling around Megan’s house, it wasn’t them. But was it connected to me? Was someone trying to get at me, through Megan? The last thing that I needed now was more bad guys stirring things up.

  “Here,” she said as she put a cup down in front of me. Maybe I would just skip sleeping—I’d done that plenty of times when I’d been working, and I was working again. Megan raised her arms up and fussed with her hair, and the big T-shirt suddenly outlined her womanly shape. This was beyond awkward, and if Barbara came into the kitchen right now…Oh, hi honey! I was just having an innocent conversation with the young woman who was flossing my teeth with her tongue a couple of nights ago…

  Maybe I was delirious from the fatigue, or maybe this whole thing was nuts. My modest, three-bedroom house had turned into a full-fledged refugee camp, occupied by my wife, our baby, a teenager, a Russian literature professor, a retired dope dealer, and now my unpredictable physical therapist who was making coffee and busying herself around my kitchen wearing one of my T-shirts and nothing else.

  “Where is Sonny?” I asked Megan, looking away from her in case she tried to flash some more skin or perhaps moon me.

  “He and Susanna were going to take a beach walk,” she said. “Then they were going to drop Roberto at school. Nobody got much sleep last night.
I’m sorry, Vince, I really didn’t mean to lay this on you. I guess I should just call the police.”

  “Not yet. I’m going to leave them out of it for now. And you can stay here for the time being.”

  “OK.”

  I took a sip of the coffee and pushed it back toward her. “I really have to sleep.”

  “I’ll get my stuff and you can have your bed back.”

  Our master bedroom has heavy curtains that shut out all the light inside if everything is closed up, even in the middle of the day. I shucked off my clothes in the dark and slipped into the bed, which was still warm from where Megan had slept, and I could smell her scent lingering on the pillow.

  What was that I had said about not dealing with Barbara and Megan right now? It seemed that I wasn’t being given a choice.

  In less than a minute I was out cold.

  *

  Sonny was at the kitchen range making grilled cheese sandwiches while Susanna sat at the counter, adding spoonful upon spoonful of sugar to a cup of tea that she had just poured. I came out of my bedroom dressed in my bathrobe after the soundest sleep that I’d had in years. I took a stool next to Susanna, but it was like I wasn’t there. Neither of them acknowledged me because they were too busy arguing.

  “The man was gay,” Sonny was saying. “You can’t write shit like that and be straight.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Susanna protested. “Lermontov was a womanizer. He would meet them at a ball, seduce them, and then dump them. Gay? Not a chance. Lermontov was just nihilist melancholy at its best.”

  “Don’t you go using those big words on me, “Sonny said. “I ain’t got a problem with him being gay. But my boys will. They gonna be all over me about this. We goin’ back to Tolstoy, soon as we finish this one.”

  “A Hero of Our Time?” Susanna said, arching her eyebrows. “You must be joking. Lermontov practically invented the modern novel. And he was killed in a duel. What more could your boys want?”

  “Exactly what is going on here?” I asked, limping toward the coffee pot. “And why is there no more coffee?”

  “The coffee is gone because you just got your white ass out of bed at four in the afternoon,” Sonny said. “We were discussing literature. Shit you wouldn’t know nothin’ about.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your friend has a remarkable grasp of the Russian classics,” Susanna Pimentel said, “if a bit flawed.” She wore a shy smile, and when I met her gaze, she blushed.

  “Where’s Roberto?”

  “Out back,” Sonny said. “Working on that tablet thing. He’s been on it since he came home from school.”

  “And Barbara?”

  “I dropped her and the baby at her club. The red-haired woman, too. I got somebody in the parking lot, don’t you worry about it.”

  “What do you mean ‘somebody’?”

  “I know some people,” Sonny said, as he flipped over the sandwiches. “Backups. I can’t be everywhere at the same time.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m hoping that we won’t need them for long.”

  “I’ve already subbed out my classes for the rest of the term,” Susanna said. She was beaming a grin at me, like her captivity was a good thing.

  “I’m taking Susanna to my reading group tonight, if that’s OK with you,” Sonny said. “You going to be here?”

  “Probably.”

  “My kids are gonna freak when they meet a real live Russian professor,” Sonny said. “Long as she don’t say some dumbass bullshit about Lermontov being straight.”

  “What, gay people threaten you?” Susanna said, looking at Sonny.

  “I’ll be out back,” I said. “I don’t have a dog in this race.”

  *

  “The encryption is controlled from the other side,” Roberto had said. “Cuba.”

  He had explained that he’d gotten into the email exchanges by remotely hacking into Segundo Pimentel’s office computer in Coral Gables. The computer was poorly protected, and Segundo had kept a master list of usernames and passwords on it, in a “secure” password-keeping program that my young techie friend had penetrated with his usual aplomb.

  There were pages upon pages of correspondence between Segundo and the other side—the one who called himself Pescador—but the body of the text was gibberish. Roberto said that the messages were set up so that they could be read only once after logging in, and then they would be scrambled. The only way to unscramble them would be to gain access to the program via the sender’s computer, which had an IP address originating from Havana and was tightly protected. Roberto confessed that he might have already tipped someone off because of his activity, if they were paying attention.

  So, we weren’t getting very far, despite Roberto’s expertise. Were we missing something? Chloe Heffernan had seemed to imply that the tablet held something more than a bunch of racy photos of her—something that would lead us to Lilian. If so, it wasn’t telling us.

  “How do you look up a ship’s registration?” I asked him. He still had his school uniform on, and was seated next to me at the patio table, under an awning that shielded us from the hot afternoon sun.

  “What kind of ship?”

  I told him about my stowaway trip on his uncle’s sportfishing boat. His eyes widened when I got to the part about the package drop-off, and the retrieval by a military boat. “Describe it,” he said.

  “Over a hundred feet, a single gun on the foredeck, lots of communication gear on the tower. It had a number on it: 202. It looked old, but it was pretty dark out.”

  Roberto tapped at my MacBook, which was strung together with the tablet. “This was on my uncle’s computer. The one at his office. I saved the image, because somebody in Cuba had sent it to him. Not Pescador.”

  He showed me a photograph of the same boat that I had seen the night before. The number 202 was clearly visible on the hull.

  “I already looked it up,” Roberto said. “It’s called a Pauk-class Corvette. Given to Cuba by the Soviets in 1977, and it’s still in use.”

  “This is the boat that picked up Javier’s package.”

  “OK,” he said. “There was a tag on the file. It said Ministerio de Finanzas y Precios. That’s the Ministry of Finance. They control all the money and prices in the country.”

  “Why was a picture of a naval ship tagged by the finance ministry? Don’t tell me they’re in the cocaine trade?”

  “My dad says that Cuba is about to change. Castro is like, ninety or something. My dad says that once he and his brother are gone, the socialism part will go away too.”

  “And?”

  “People will be allowed to have money again. Some of them already do. There’s a lot of corruption.”

  “I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

  “My Uncle Javier’s box,” Roberto said. “How much money could you fit in that box?”

  “In bills? If it was in hundreds, they don’t take up a lot of space. We dug up four million bucks in somebody’s backyard once, when I was with the Sheriff’s Department, and the box was about half the size of Javier’s.”

  “So, eight million dollars.”

  “Possibly,” I said. “But why?”

  “If you’re rich and corrupt, and you live in Cuba, you want to own dollars. Especially if the whole economy is about to change.”

  “Maybe. But I’m guessing that there’s more to it.”

  “Me too,” he said. “And you’re going to have to go there to find out.”

  “To Cuba?”

  “Yes. You need to find Pescador. Then maybe we can find my mom.”

  *

  I had made a big batch of chili for my refugee camp residents. Sonny and Susanna were out at Sonny’s book group, Roberto was in my study watching a documentary, Megan was rocking Royal to sleep in his nursery, and Barbara and I were outside on the patio at the table, drinking mojitos. I poured an extra shot, hoping that it would give me the courage to bring up a certain subject with Ba
rbara, and would also loosen her tongue enough to give me an honest answer. We had already talked about Gustavo, and my investigation so far, and how long everybody might be staying here, and why I had decided that I needed to go to Cuba. I took a big swig of the drink and blurted out what was on my mind.

  “So, you’re having an affair, right?”

  The first few seconds after a salvo like that are the most telling. People only get a tiny sliver of reaction time to let me know if they’re going to start lying, or if they will come clean. I call it the Eyeball Test—you watch, and they blink, or they don’t.

  “An affair?” she said. “Vince, what are you talking about?”

  She was stalling. Throwing the question back to me.

  “I’m talking about a guy named Angelo. You might want to speak with him. He’s told anyone who would listen that he’s screwing you.”

  A wave of relief seemed to come over her, and she smiled. “Angelo? That’s ludicrous. Have you met him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s—oh my god, Vince, how could you even think that? He’s black, for one.”

  “White people have been known to sleep with black people.”

  “It’s not that. He’s just—a nice guy. He trains people at my club.”

  “I know.”

  “So who told you this?”

  “Like I said, he’s telling everyone in Gifford.”

  “It was Sonny, right? He can’t stand me.”

  “Barbara—”

  “It was Sonny then,” she said. “What an asshole.” She was angry now, having quickly made the transition from shock to indignation.

  “You have to admit—you and I—”

  “What? You mean we hardly sleep together anymore? We have a nine-month old baby, Vince. He nurses three times a night. I don’t see you being able to help there.”

  “Barbara—”

  “You have no idea what I’ve been going through, do you? I just finished working my ass off at nursing school, and by the way, I got my exam results back, and it was straight A’s.”