by Chris Knopf
Best,
Joselito
Bingo. I selected that address and hit the “From” button. A long list popped up.
Joselito:
Feelings are mutual. I regret that reassignment more than anything I’ve ever done. I hoped I would never see you again, so I wouldn’t have to relive the regret. But there you were, standing in that room with all those security wonks and I melted. Damn you beautiful hombre.
Eloise
This went on for more than a year, with exchanges like this typical:
Eloise:
Thank you for last night. It’s even better than before.
Joselito
Joselito:
Likewise. Come to DC.
Eloise
The correspondence took the expected path—more and more ardor ineffectively disguised by fumbling euphemism. Joselito was more circumspect, but his co-conspirator was too addled by passion to contain herself. I felt all the more the voyeur, but I’d stopped feeling bad about that. I just stayed in the moment. A moment that lasted another two hours, during which Natsumi brought in breakfast and a big vat of coffee.
Then the chain took an interesting turn:
Joselito:
Very cool case out of the Caymans. I can tell you all about it tomorrow when we’re doing you-know-what. It’s very exciting. I love exciting you.
Eloise
Eloise:
Don’t forget what I told you. I know about these people. You know what I do. We find that money, we can be together.
Joselito
I felt my face heat up. I must have also been making noises, because Natsumi stuck her head in.
“You’re making noises,” she said.
“That’s what a cyber-hound sounds like when he’s after a rabbit.”
“Nut case.”
Joselito:
Let’s talk about this on the phone. I’ll call your cell.
Eloise
The emails stopped after that for about a month, then another came through:
Eloise:
You do your part, I’ll do mine. Pick out a house. Anywhere in the world.
Joselito
P.S.—No more emails. Close your account and get a tech to wipe clean your hard drive.
I went to the FBI website and started poking around. The executive directors of each division were listed, along with a description of their backgrounds and types of past service. No Eloise. I used the search box, but nothing came up there. Then I realized I was on the wrong site, and pulled up a satellite site dedicated to the International Operations Division.
Personnel weren’t listed, but press releases were, going back a dozen years. That’s where I found Eloise.
Eloise Harmon named Special Agent for
Liaison with International Division
Director Robert S. Mueller III has named Eloise Harmon Special Agent for Liaison Affairs with the International Operations Division, reporting to the Assistant Director of that division, Steven Holt. After six years as Legal Attaché assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, Spain, Ms. Harmon brings back to Washington considerable firsthand knowledge of the challenges and opportunities of the international environment.
“I’m keen on putting to use my experience in Spain in the service of our Legal Attachés across the world. Each faces unique challenges, but all share the need for solid support here in DC, as well as smooth and productive relationships with other international law enforcement agencies.”
The release went on to describe her education and steady rise through the ranks of the FBI, most of which took place outside the country—in Spain, but also Latin America.
The last paragraph noted she was born in Chile to an American engineer named Lyle Harmon and a Chilean national, Isabella Morales.
That was it. For the first time in weeks, I felt the surge of adrenaline that came with clarity, with the first intimations of a solution to the problem I faced. I didn’t exactly know why, but I knew my own mind, damaged though it was.
“All you bastards who want to kill us,” I said out loud. “I’m coming after you.”
Natsumi stuck her head in the room again. “What did you just say?”
CHAPTER 22
I’ve discovered what’s at the center of everything we’ve been going through since we landed on Grand Cayman,” I said to Natsumi, as we lay fully clothed on the bed staring up at the ceiling, a habit I’d transferred to her. “The driving force behind everyone’s behavior, behind every action we’ve observed.”
“And that is?”
“Us.”
“Oh.”
We lay quietly for a while, Natsumi respectfully waiting for me to continue my story.
“As a researcher,” I said, “I’m trained to stay removed from my subject—aloof, unbiased, entirely objective. People like me are ill-prepared to consider our own influence on the study’s results. Even though Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, taught us long ago that the observer will always have an effect on the observed. We haven’t just affected the experiment, we are the experiment.”
“We decided on our own to go to Grand Cayman,” said Natsumi.
“We did. Does a lab rat know the scientist has placed a tasty pellet at the end of the maze? Does a fruit fly question the ready availability of another sexy fruit fly in a lab container? The lure was set, they knew we’d bite.”
“I had a bad feeling about that bank,” said Natsumi.
“You were right.”
“So what’s it all about?”
“The money. I took a little over ten million dollars out of that account. Even by today’s greedy standards, that’s real money. They didn’t know what was in the safe-deposit box, but they assumed it was worth a lot, and so just waited for the lab rat who emptied the liquid accounts to show up sniffing for more. And show up he did.”
“What’s he going to do now?”
“Tear down the lab.”
FINDING ELOISE Harmon’s home address wasn’t easy, but not as hard as it should have been. She was, after all, one of the top people in a division of the FBI critical to national security.
She was also on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. And an active supporter of her alma mater’s recruitment committee, and a frequent user of her local library, and the editor of her swim club’s seasonal newsletter. This exposed, a home address will always squirt out, you can’t stop it.
I wrote her a note and sent it by FedEx to her house.
Ms. Harmon:
Interesting reading: [email protected]
David Reinhart
I had a few more notes to send. The first to Joselito.
Sr. Gorrotxategi:
I want to meet with Domingo Angel here in America. I have information he will consider extremely valuable. I have things to ask in return, but will only deal face-to-face.
El Timador, the guy who hacked your computer (I know about Eloise)
Rodrigo:
I just saved your life once again, while you continue wanting to take mine. If you harm me you will never see a dime of that money. What is the sense of that?
El Timador
Evelyn:
How are things? Are you happy to be back in Connecticut? How’re the Bosniaks? It’s likely your phone and online activity are being monitored. Even the disposable is insecure. The return address on this FedEx is fake. I will try to drop you messages, but for the time being, I don’t know how you can safely return the favor. But I’ll figure it out.
BTW, burn this note and the envelope and sprinkle the ashes in the backyard.
Shelly:
As far as I know, we weren’t followed home. But I have to stay off electronic communications. I know the name of that little underground mammal, and it’s a juicier bugger than I thought. I need an introduction to Steven Holt, the Assistant Director of the International Operations Division. Nobody below him can be trusted.
“How can he make an introduction if he can’t talk to you or send email?” asked Natsumi, looki
ng over my shoulder.
“Working on that.”
I was also working on another venue change. We’d clearly overstayed our welcome in New York City.
After pondering the options, I said to Natsumi, “I’m homesick for Connecticut.”
“Stamford?” she asked.
“Litchfield County. As far from other houses as possible.”
“Should I start the search?”
“While I pack.”
FOR THE second time in recent days, Natsumi and I were traveling up the West Side Highway on the way out of the city and up to Connecticut. We’d cleared out of the hotel and traded our rental car for a Dodge SUV into which we piled all our gear, including some new stuff sourced in New York City, the world’s greatest source of all manner of stuff.
Natsumi had come up with a rental in the Connecticut town of Canaan, a low-density farming and vacation community in the far northwest corner of the state, not to be confused with the gold-plated New York City suburb of New Canaan down on the coast.
The property included more than two hundred acres of mixed forest and open uncultivated fields, several outbuildings and a farmhouse built in the mid-nineteenth century in the Empire style, which meant it was big and weird-looking, with a mansard roof and clock tower shooting two extra stories above the three-story building.
“I couldn’t find anything more remote,” said Natsumi. “In addition to the farm’s own acreage, state parks and watershed abut all four sides. The closest neighbor is two miles away, and he’s sort of a hermit living inside huge piles of newspapers and secondhand clothing. The agent thought he might be dead in there, in which case the next living person is a breeder of beagles a few miles further out. If you know beagles, you know why.”
“My parents loved dogs, but thought it was unfair to keep them in apartments. So I satisfied my dog needs playing with the Pomeranian living happily in the apartment next door.”
“My Japanese mother used to say, ‘Cats, dogs, what’s next, water buffalo?’ ”
“It’s a slippery slope.”
The traffic and capacity of the roadways diminished over the next two hours until we were riding over a road that conformed to every rise and fall, twist and turn of the topography.
Our SUV handled the increasing challenges with barely a wobble or sway.
We cracked our windows to let in cool, fresh air slightly tinged with the smell of manure.
Guided by my smartphone’s GPS, we eventually came to the head of the narrow, unpaved driveway that ran through stands of mature hardwoods and fluffy hemlocks, then open grassland spotted with conical red cedars, and finally up to the imposing farmhouse facade.
Though a modestly ornamented version of the Empire form, the house still looked like it had broken away from a pre-industrial, upper-class Parisian enclave and wandered off into the wilderness.
“If they’d exiled Napoleon in Litchfield County instead of Saint Helena,” said Natsumi.
“Lots of room to spread out.”
When Natsumi had rented the place online, she’d clicked on the “Will take as is, just leave the key under the mat,” and that’s where it was. The front foyer was impressively cavernous, even for a big house. A central staircase swooped up to a second-story balcony. The mahogany railing, stained the color of dark chocolate, was missing approximately every fifth spindle. The walls were painted a deep blue and the plaster ceiling had been haphazardly patched more than once, though nothing was currently falling.
The walls in the living room were covered with an expensive-looking woven material in a color Natsumi called pinky-beige. It was furnished in musty over-built and overstuffed Victoriana and eclectic salvage. The kitchen was clean and well equipped, all but one wall freshly sheet-rocked, though hooks and shelves screwed into the bare studs were well deployed as open storage.
The rest of the house followed suit, successfully avoiding the confines of a unifying decorative motif. We picked the bedroom with the best bed for sleeping and the biggest one for electronics. The other five were held in reserve.
While Natsumi went out for provisions, I set up the gear, opened a fresh IP relationship and dove out into the web.
One of my graduate professors would describe research as a methodical progression, searching for hidden pathways that would allow you to move along from phase to phase. I hated that idea. To me, there was nothing linear about it. Where he saw chain links, I saw a wild, gnarly bush. There was no gleaming, singular truth at the end of the journey. Only a jumble of approximate facts and assumptions, leading to a set of probabilities.
Not that I couldn’t arrive at a workable solution to a problem, a repeatable answer to a question, but I was never free of that queasy element of doubt, that persistent itch of uncertainty.
This frequently drove me back to the roots of the inquiry, where it all began. In this case, it had to be the Basque region of Spain, circa 1960. I opened Google España and started the search with the University of Bilbao. Not surprisingly, the university seethed with political turmoil during this period. Though Basque nationalism was certainly an ingredient, most of the commentary involved the fundamental divide between the fascistic central government and the Marxist underpinnings of the separatists that had persisted since the civil war.
I’d already made the connection between the Zarandonas and the leftist movements at the university. That was public record in the form of speeches and essays in academic journals. Though somewhat bland by the standards of left-wing demagoguery, it was still brave stuff for the times. I was able to add to my records, but nothing new emerged.
I remembered the two professors arrived in Chile in 1968, but realized I’d never linked back to their departure. I dumped all the material I had on their time at Bilbao into a single document, then searched for dates. The spread was 1951 to 1962, but nothing after that. There was a six-year gap.
I went back to my Chilean database. The core reference was an article in the student newspaper of the University of Chile, heralding the arrival of the two distinguished professors. During my original research, I’d picked up the highlights, then zoomed on. This time I read the whole article, and as frequently happens, the most important fact lived in the last paragraph.
“Last May, professors Sylvia and Miguel Zarandona were greeted at the airport by President Allende, Mrs. Zarandona’s third cousin. They were then honored with a week’s stay as the president’s guests, which they were grateful for after the long flight in from Paris.”
“Paris?” I said out loud.
Once Google has managed to capture all the information on earth, you will theoretically be able to capture it all as well. Assuming you know every language.
I switched to Google France and started anew. Switching between languages and constantly adjusting for the dialects made me dizzy. And my French fluency was not nearly as strong as my Spanish. Luckily, Natsumi was back at the house, and helped fill in the gaps. After a few hours, we hit it.
The first recorded assembly of ETA was in the French Basque city of Bayonne, in 1962. One of the featured speakers was Miguel Zarandona. A local Marxist newspaper, covering the event, had a photograph of the young Zarandona, his wife and two-year-old son. According to the story, Zarandona had exhorted the gathering, demanding they use all necessary means to overthrow the fascist yoke of Madrid, including armed resistance.
“Not just the mild-mannered professor,” said Natsumi.
The militant rhetoric inflamed commentators throughout ETA, until then a strictly political and cultural organization. Whether regarded as a hero or provocateur, all were certain Zarandona could never return to Spain.
So the next task was the ugly slog through census data to find out where they actually ended up. It wasn’t until the next day, after a brief sleep, when we saw through reddened eyes the names Miguel and Sylvia Zarandona listed as apartment dwellers living with their son, identified only as “male, age five,” in the resort town of Biarritz in 1965.
The
n the trail was lost again, and after another day of effort, I put that channel of inquiry on hold.
“Where are you going now?” asked Natsumi.
“To bed.”
Which I did, sleeping nearly twelve hours, during which I dreamt of men in dark, baggy clothes and berets, shaking their fists and painting huge, heroic murals of men with rifles and slogans of the revolution. Through all the swirling images and phantasms, my dreaming mind kept coming back to the family portrait of the Zarandonas, their unsmiling, determined pose contrasting oddly with their physical beauty.
Moments before waking the answer was there, until the dream state resolved into full consciousness, and it floated away into the random mist of probabilities.
“HOW ABOUT some fresh air,” Natsumi asked me, two days later. Two days spent nonstop in front of the computer.
“Are you suggesting the air in here isn’t fresh?”
“I am. And neither are the residents.”
“Okay.”
I needed to get a finer sense of the layout of the property anyway, so it made for a long and pleasant walk.
“Can you tell me what you’ve been up to?” she asked.
“Going back to the roots of the matter. I was annoyed at myself for missing that period the Zarandonas spent in France. I feel it means more than it seems, but I can’t figure out why. The Basque people were used to moving back and forth between the French and Spanish sides with relative ease, even back then. So it probably didn’t feel that much like an exile. But that changed for Zarandona who fouled his nest in Spain by addressing the ETA conference the way he did. ”
“Then why bolt to Chile?”
Some very wise people I’ve known insist that purging one’s mind of the problem one is facing is the surest route to a solution. So I actually tried to stop thinking about it while we walked, instead trying to focus on the abundant pastoral beauty surrounding us. While it’s nearly impossible for me to do this, I often tried anyway.
“Do you ever feel you already know something you’re trying to figure out?” I asked Natsumi.
“Of course. Much of what amounts to thought happens at the subconscious level, and the subconscious is often the smartest part of the brain. I like to say the conscious part talks and the subconscious feels. But it’s all thought.”
