Cries of the Lost

by Chris Knopf

  Back at the computer, I downloaded the images, and after some enlargement, identified the coaxial cables from each camera, tracking where they joined together and dove down a conduit behind the southeast corner of the mews.

  Getting there involved several sorties down alleys and behind commercial buildings, and one risky clamber over a chain-link fence, but I eventually reached the spot. The conduit, strapped to the wall, ran into a grey metal box bolted to the side of the building. The box was secured by a type of simple keyed latch a child could pick. Pleased as I was by this, I felt a bit of resentment that the security company guarding my newly established home would be this sloppy.

  “Wankers,” I said under my breath, as I fiddled open the lock.

  Inside I found the switch box, and to my delight, a wireless router. In a few minutes, using the gear brought along in a light backpack, I’d hooked into the feed, sending the signal through the secondary router I’d brought along, which beamed it via the Internet directly to my computer.

  Back at my desk, I tested the connections and saw the five security cameras pop up on my screen. Using a network video recorder and surveillance software that allowed you to skip over long periods of inaction, I could efficiently track the comings and goings of the neighborhood.

  “OUR NEXT door neighbors are George and Mirabella McPherson,” said Natsumi. “He’s a financial guy and she’s an astronomer. How cool is that?”

  “How did you meet them?”

  “I knocked on the door and introduced myself. I didn’t actually meet George, but Mirabella was very friendly and welcoming, and we ended up chatting for quite some time. She’s French. I think I used up every bit of our backstory. You better study it again. How was your day?”

  “We’re now monitoring the complex. We’ll give it a few days and see what the software can tell us.”

  “We don’t have to wait that long for the McPhersons. They’ll be here in about an hour for tea. They’ve never been inside this house. Said the couple who owns it kept to themselves. Mirabella is beside herself with curiosity.”

  “Just don’t let them in the spare bedroom.”

  “Right. The surveillance array might take some explaining.”

  GEORGE MCPHERSON, about sixty-five, was much older than his wife. He had a large head lightly covered in very thin, white hair, and a thick neck—so at first he seemed overweight, but on closer inspection was reasonably trim. Mirabella was at the age, mid to late thirties, when the bloom of youth is still confidently in place. With high cheekbones, thick black hair contained by a headband and a flimsy knit dress over minimum underwear, sexual sparks flowed in with her and filled up the dowdy sitting room like a scattered handful of scintillations.

  “At last, we are here,” she proclaimed, with a big smile, as they entered the sitting room. “Ten years, but we finally made it.”

  George was less celebratory. “About what you’d expect, right?” he said, looking around. “Nothing all that amazing.”

  “Phooey to you,” she said.

  She began telling him about our situation, for which I was grateful, since—to support Natsumi’s point—manufactured memories are a lot harder to keep track of than genuine. The gist of the story had me writing a book on cyber security and Natsumi taking a year off from her psychotherapy practice. Fortunately, the McPhersons were polite enough not to press us for too much detail, being satisfied to dominate the conversation talking about themselves.

  “The chap who owns this place also works in the city,” said George. “I’d see him on the tube. Never said hello.”

  “What about the other neighbors,” said Natsumi. “Surely some are friendly?”

  They competed with each other to assure us many were, and not to believe that all Brits were a stuffy, dismissive lot.

  “We even have an Indian family,” said George.

  “The Malhotras,” said Mirabella. “Very sweet people.”

  “Don’t fancy the food. Smell it halfway down the block.”

  “But you never let it show,” she said, part compliment, part entreaty.

  We shared what the estate agent Hunley had to say about the mews, stretching his views a bit.

  “He said it was fully occupied,” said Natsumi.

  George turned in his chair and pointed toward the courtyard.

  “Number eight, on the corner across the way,” he said. “Haven’t seen a soul in five years.”

  Tea time flowed into dinner, for which Natsumi was prepared, and the desultory conversation made its way skyward, with Mirabella as our eager guide. Though my knowledge was very limited, I always enjoyed hearing about the cosmos; and with Mirabella’s French accent and extravagant use of superlatives and metaphors, we were thoroughly spellbound. I noticed she’d put away a full bottle of red wine, which likely added something to the presentation.

  I kept to tonic and lime, since my tolerance of alcohol rarely extended beyond a couple of beers. So when Natsumi rose to clear the table, with George’s help, I was able to provide Mirabella with a sturdy arm when she insisted I escort her to the courtyard for a quick look at the stars.

  “Of course, there is so much light pollution from London, but even so, the brighter stars and planets you can see.”

  She pointed out at least two little pinpricks that had played a role in her previous narrative, and emphasized how stars in a constellation had actually nothing in common.

  “They are so far away from one another, am I right?” she said.

  “I guess you are.”

  “So, quickly, I just want to tell you something,” she said, squeezing my arm. “You ask about friendly neighbors. George and I can be more than friendly with the right people. Never here in Spottsworthy, but you can be the first. It will be fun.”

  To say I lacked sophistication in these matters was a gross understatement. A full-out geek from birth, my friends were all geeks, with social skills at best non-irritating. Until Florencia, I’d hardly had a date and knew nothing about women, much less the type of libertinism suggested here. So it took nearly a minute for what she was getting at to sink in. Then I started to babble something, but she saved me by giving my arm another squeeze.

  “Don’t say anything now. Just think about it.”

  “Okay. Hey, let’s see how they’re doing with the cleanup.”

  It was another hour before the McPhersons journeyed back to their house next door, awash in wine, beer and cognac, though hardly showing it.

  “Well, that was a lot more than I expected, but pleasant,” said Natsumi. “He’s a nice enough guy, but she couldn’t be more interesting.”

  “Oh yes, she could,” I said.

  “I mean all that wonderful astronomy.”

  “They’re swingers.”

  “Of course, they are. This is swinging London after all.”

  “No, I mean they’re actually swingers, you know, like, in the somewhat indiscriminate carnal sense.”

  She stared at me. I quickly described my conversation with Mirabella out in the courtyard under the stars. When I explained how long it took me to catch on, mirth lit up her face.

  “And you were worried about Edwina Firth, the cryptanalyst,” I said, squeezing a laugh out of her.

  “You know I’m willing to do anything for the cause, but honestly, George McPherson?” said Natsumi.

  The comparison with beautiful Mirabella being immediately obvious, I launched a string of reassurances, which she made me stop.

  “I don’t doubt you at all, Arthur, not one tiny little bit, about anything. I never have, and never will, and I’m sorry I teased you about Edwina Firth. It was unbecoming.”

  I was the last person to attribute the sort of good fortune that tossed Natsumi into my life—literally at a moment of life or death, in the middle of the night—to anything more than the mindless confluence of haphazard circumstances; but at moments like that, I wondered.

  WE RODE the tube to Tottenham Court Road station and walked from there to Edwin
a’s office on the campus of the University of London. It was in one of the mid-twentieth-century buildings the school surely regretted for their blocky, Soviet motif blandness, now made worse by an unflattering aging process. When I lived in London, I spent a lot of time hanging around the university, its libraries, little study cubbies and giant bookstore. It felt a bit like a homecoming.

  “I used to sit on that bench and eat peanuts and Cadbury Bournville Dark for lunch. I walked down here every day from Camden Town, which used to be a dump, but all I could afford. I was the thinnest I’d ever been. Until now,” I remarked to Natsumi as we neared the cryptanalyst’s office.

  Edwina was also on the thin side. Her very thick, dirty blond hair was pulled up away from her face and her eyes were round and bird-like, as if in a constant state of surprise. She was cordial, but wasted little time getting down to business.

  “Let’s see what you have,” she said, in her nasally Kiwi accent.

  I gave her the string of numbers absent the navigational bearings. And the letters I’d already been able to decipher.

  “I’m reasonably sure the text is in Spanish,” I said.

  She looked up at that and smiled.

  “¿Está tratando de hacer esto más difícil?” she asked.

  “Sí, Señora. Me han dicho que usted adora un desafío.”

  Natsumi looked at me inquiringly.

  “She thinks the Spanish was an attempt to amp up the challenge,” I said.

  Edwina was back studying the numbers, her long fingernails tapping out an arrhythmic beat on her desk.

  She drew in a deep breath and brought the paper up closer to her face.

  “Do you have this in digital form?” she asked.

  I gave her a flash drive. “Excel.”

  She spun around in her chair, after taking the drive, which she inserted into a slot on the side of a Mac laptop. I could see the screen, but nothing on it made any sense to me.

  “I’m thinking the Henniger-Rosen Table Cascade,” she said, after about twenty minutes of study.

  “Underwriters and actuaries are big on tables,” I said.

  “They are.”

  “My friend was one of those.”

  She went back to her screen, frowning. “It’s simply a matter of getting the rhythm of the cascade. Otherwise, the constantly shifting relationships can tie you up in knots. Very interesting.”

  We waited while Edwina worked for about a half hour at her computer, hunched over the keyboard as if she needed her body weight to control the calculations.

  “I have about a million if/then scenarios loaded in this little laptop, but it’ll take a solid day or more to run all of them,” she said, reluctantly looking away from her screen. “Not including about four hours of programming, so we’re sure we’re asking the right ifs and thens.”

  “That’s quite an imposition,” said Natsumi, breaking her silence.

  “No, dear,” said Edwina. “It’s what people like me do for fun. Which is why I’ll never be married. Unless you know someone of the male species who suffers from the same condition.”

  “I heard of one once, but I’m afraid he’s lost the facility,” said Natsumi.

  “Pity.”

  WHEN I had two workdays of video-recorded traffic within the mews under my belt, I called up the surveillance application and assessed the results. As the McPhersons would have predicted, no one arrived at or left number eight. Although the same was true for five and eleven. I did notice that after the man of the house at number six left for work, another bloke stopped by for a couple hours. I wondered what Mrs. McPherson might have thought of that.

  The only other thing I had to do was wait for Edwina’s results, so I spent the time searching for a post-1978 mention of the Zarandona family, with no success. I wondered how the only evidence of their existence at the time was the paper trail left by a hotel registry. Yet I reminded myself that as omniscient as the World Wide Web often seemed to be, it only held a fraction of total human knowledge. If only because there were lots of things humans didn’t want other humans to know.

  I also spent time fretting over, and cleaning up, the various digital trails I’d forged, nurtured, then sought to abandon. The bank and investment accounts, identities, credit cards, online purchases, hotel check-ins, airline tickets, car rentals, passports, drivers’ licenses, rental agreements, IP addresses, browsing histories, cell phone numbers—the list was a mile long and getting harder and harder to keep track of. I’d tossed enough breadcrumbs out there to open a bakery, which might have been the right strategy. Dazzle the opposition with complexity, with data paths so tangled they’d never be sorted out. But maybe this was now in the realm of offshore, national security operations, clandestine and untouchable.

  In which case, all bets were off.

  Mr. Freeman:

  I have your answer. Quite an interesting little project. Would you mind coming by tomorrow so we can discuss it?

  Edwina

  Natsumi and I had to wait a while in the hallway since one of Edwina’s students had gotten in ahead of us. We sat on the floor and talked about everything but the remaining contents of the code. When the door opened, a young woman was a little taken aback that we were sitting there, and Edwina somewhat charmed.

  She waved us in.

  “It had nothing to do with linear regressions. Just a nice simple substitution code my computer here particularly enjoys sorting out.” We settled into our places in the office and she slid a piece of paper across her desk. “The words are correct, and the sentiments quite clear.”

  Out of politeness, I held it so we could both read it, though I knew Natsumi’s Spanish wasn’t up to the task.

  “Es imposible describirte cuánto me llena el corazón cada vez que pienso en ti. Siempre apreciaré cada momento que hemos pasado juntos . . . te amaré siempre y nunca me olvidaré de todo lo que has significado para mi.”

  “Can you make it out?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. I wrote out the translation: “It is impossible to describe how full my heart is whenever I think of you. I will always treasure every moment we have spent together.”

  Then the string of coordinates, then the close: “I will always love you and will never forget what you have meant to me.”

  “Oh.”

  CHAPTER 6

  After recording another week’s activity within the Spottsworthy Mews, we confirmed that number eight was the only house apparently uninhabited. So that seemed like the easiest place to snoop. We played a game of Frisbee out in the courtyard, which offered ample opportunity for running up to the façade and sneaking a look through the windows. All Natsumi or I could see were closed curtains.

  I told Natsumi I was going to break in and have a look around.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s mildly frightening.”

  “By all appearances, it’s empty. Nothing to be frightened about.”

  “Everything is a reason to be frightened. What do I do if you don’t come back?”

  I didn’t have a ready answer, not having considered that possibility.

  “If I’m not back by three A.M., check into the Hilton next door to the place where we stayed on Hyde Park. Use a fresh ID. Bring along my laptop and backpack. Leave everything else. If I contact you and it’s a setup, I’ll ask you how your mother’s doing. Give it a couple weeks, then turn yourself into the American embassy. You can probably bargain your way out of a prison sentence by giving up the story. Just be careful how you meter it out. Save the best till last.”

  “Now I wish I hadn’t asked.”

  “No, you were right,” I said. “Foolish of me to leave you unprepared.”

  I waited until midnight, then dressed in my favored blacks and headed back to where I’d tapped into the video feed, which was attached to number nine, right next door.

  Between the two houses was a wall, which I hadn’t noticed before, having come in from the other direction. I dragged over a piece of garden furniture, wh
ich gave me just enough height to heave myself over.

  I was in the garden, which was about the same size as ours, and though untended, it felt bigger. As with ours, it backed up to a large building that faced the street. The building had a big double-hung window, locked. Instead of a set of French doors, this mews house had a single, glass-paned door, curtained off. The lock looked sturdy, and it was, resisting all my efforts to effect a breach. So I picked a loose brick off the ground, and after wrapping it in my jacket, busted out a pane of glass.

  I reached inside and opened the door, guiding my way with a small flashlight.

  Inside, the room was naked but for two cots, a TV on a small stand, and a card table with two folding chairs. On the table sat a lamp and two partially full ashtrays. The kitchen next door was equally spare, with lightly equipped cabinets, a coffeemaker on the counter and an open waste basket against one wall. The freezer held a few frozen meals, and the fridge was mostly filled with beer, along with some cheese, salami, fruit juice and a cantaloupe that felt and smelled reasonably fresh.

  The sitting room at the front of the house was empty. The curtains, made of heavy material, were pulled tightly across the windows. I went upstairs and found the bedrooms also empty, though the bathroom was well stocked with towels, toothbrushes and toothpaste, shampoo and antacids. The floor of the shower enclosure was moist.

  I started down the stairs, but only made it halfway before what felt like a metal rod smashed into my back.

  Losing my footing, I pitched forward, then fell down the stairs facedown, bouncing on my chest, my hands flailing around for a way to slow my fall. I hit the landing at the same time a heavy body fell on me, grabbing the collar of my jacket and slamming my face into the floor. I grunted, I think, but the only sound from my assailant was heavy breathing and partially formed Spanish words.