The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  “Short attention span, Radar?” mocked Hines. “That doesn’t seem like you.”

  I just glared at him. “Let’s start with your real name.”

  “Let’s start with yours.”

  “Radar Hoverlander,” I said evenly.

  “Milval Hines,” he replied, even more evenly.

  Okay, well, that didn’t go anywhere.

  I shut my yap. I’d done too much talking anyhow. Mostly when people prattle on, it’s a sign of nervousness. I’d been far too chatty for my own good. Plus, I reminded myself, this was Hines’s show. He’d tell me at his leisure what he wanted me to know. I could decide at mine what to believe.

  Silence took its toll. Mirplo was the first to get fidgety. He plucked a fake apple from the bowl and rolled it back and forth on the tabletop between his hands. Claire Scovil looked at her nails with studied disinterest. Allie and Hines again exchanged looks. I couldn’t tell from the exchange which of them had the power to change the talk/don’t talk signal from red to green, but it’s not uncommon in the grift for a team’s real authority to rest with someone who looks like a lackey. I’d played that role many times myself: the numbnuts in the background who’s really pulling the strings. I knew from adversarial experience that undercover law often worked the same way. Therefore, this could very possibly be her show, not his.

  Hines spoke. “I’m with a federal fraud task force.” Was there a hitch in his I’m, like it wanted to come out we’re, but caught itself in time? Or was I once again oversolving the problem? Hard to tell.

  “But that’s not your day job,” I said.

  “Normally I’m FBI.”

  “Fibbie,” I said. “Okay, well, everyone’s got to earn a living.” I looked at Allie and Mirplo. “Any other fibbers here?” They didn’t respond, and once again I chided myself for talking too much. Like the sign says, “It’s better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you’re a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

  Mouth shut, ears peeled, I finally got this gist: that Detective Scovil had followed the trail of some Aussie cyberperp to L.A., where said trail had then gone cold. In concert with the fibbies, and operating under the old takes-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief paradigm, she hoped to have me warm it up again.

  “In exchange,” said Hines, “we’re prepared to forgive your … transgressions up till now.”

  “Which transgressions are those? The ones you entrapped me into?”

  With a thin smile, Hines got up from the table and went into the bedroom for a moment. When he returned, he had a manila folder. This he slapped like a summons on the table before me. I opened it and skimmed its contents.

  Wow.

  Holy shit.

  There, in pleonastic detail, was a greatest hits version of every significant scam I’d run in the past five years. Anything that had had the slightest internet vector—and what didn’t these days?—had apparently been cracked like a coconut and stored in some devious database somewhere. Plus bank records, onshore and offshore transactions, and bogus documentation of every stripe. A whole damn damning (and highly indictable) paper trail wending back through Radar’s sordid adventures on what some call the wrong side of the law.

  Want to know how I felt? Violated, that’s how.

  But I didn’t let that show. Instead I just whistled a respectful low whistle. “I have to admit,” I said, “I didn’t think you fibbies had it in you.”

  “It’s easy when you have one of those,” said Hines, indicating the device still jacked into my computer. “You’d be surprised what this baby can do.” I would be surprised. It looked not much different from a normal data stick.

  “Why all the hanky-panky?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just call me into your field office or whatever, and make your pitch?”

  “As you said, you had to be vetted. People in your line of work talk a good game. They can’t always back up their claims.”

  I turned to Allie. “And you trying to pull the plug?”

  “For my benefit,” said Claire. “To see how much bottle you had.”

  “Enough?” I asked.

  She nodded. “You seem to have the requisite stick-to-itiveness.”

  “Do you talk like that at home? Do you compliment your boyfriend on his stick-to-itiveness?” I was pinging her again, on a more personal level. I didn’t get much of a hit, just a hint of rising color at her collarbone, but it was enough to know two things—no boyfriend, and she felt the lack.

  As for the rest of it, truth to tell, I had no idea. They could be who they said they were, or this could be just the next level of noise. Frankly, I was getting tired of shoveling such smoke. I needed some tangible facts.

  Time to ping the whole joint.

  I closed the file and placed both hands on the cover. “Look,” I said, “this is crackerjack work, really. When I think of all the hours of research, the wiretaps, the passwords axed, well, it just puts me in awe of my mighty tax dollars at work. Either that or it’s not tax dollars. For all I know, you’re all on the razzle and just head and shoulders better at it than me.” I looked at Vic. “Except you, Mirplo. I’m guessing that you’ve been played like I’ve been played.” To Allie and Hines I said, “As for you two, you’ve fed me nothing but horseshit since the moment we met. Can you forgive me for not wanting to swallow some more?” Next I addressed the notional Aussie. “You I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m gonna go with ‘guilty by association.’ You look nice, though. Bet you look great in a wet T-shirt.” I don’t know why I said that. It was unnecessarily provocative. But something about the woman just rankled me, and I couldn’t resist rankling back. I was rewarded with a look sour enough to curdle milk.

  I stood up. Grabbed my computer. Popped out their peripheral and dropped it in the bowl of wax fruit. “Now then: If you’ve got uniformed Jakes downstairs waiting to arrest me, so be it. I’ve been busted before. It’s not the end of the world. But I have a feeling there are no waiting Jakes, just like I’ve got a feeling there’s no Australian High Tech Crime Centre, or federal fraud task force, and the closest you, Hines, have been to the FBI is a true-crime show you saw on the Discovery channel once. This is all just bogus bogosity, and I am out of here.”

  I can play ball with cops. I can. But you have to know it’s cops you’re dealing with, and there was just no way I could trust any answer I got from this crew. It was like Mirplo swearing by the authenticity of his Photoshop fakes. How are you going to believe the guy with the manifest reason to lie? So I forced their hand. I had to. If they did have Jakes downstairs, it would at least verify their bona fides, and then we could do business. If they were just a bunch of big lying liars, I figured they’d be so stunned by my declarative exit that I could get in the wind before they had a chance to react. I knew I’d be putting some things behind me, notably one lame friendship and one abortive love affair (and the Merlin Game, but that’s just money). Plus also I’d have to vacate L.A., which was a shame, but unavoidable. Part of successfully cutting your losses is knowing when to cut and run. Which you do without ego and without stopping to measure anyone’s dicks. Considering how well they’d played me so far, I had to tip my hat to their superior skill—a hat I intended to tip from the safe distant bunker of anonymity.

  Okay, I was wrong about one thing.

  The cops weren’t waiting downstairs.

  They were right outside the door.

  14.

  the grifter of oz

  T he Jakes hustled me back inside. They did it right, too: professionally, and with respect. No attitude or guns, just, “We’re going to need you to step back into the room, sir.” This is how you like your cops to behave. Just because you’re doing your job and they’re doing theirs, there’s no reason for everyone to get all hostile with each other. For the many times I’ve been busted, I’ve always admired the Jakes who had the common courtesy to treat me like a human being. All the same, though, I could see the steel in these two. I could tell I was only one gratuitous “Bit
e me” away from being facedown on the carpet with a knee in my back.

  More to the point, I could tell they were the real deal. Not fabricats, not even rent-a-cops. You can argue chicken and egg about cop attitude—does their hard-ass nature inform their career choice, or do they osmose it on the job?—but either way, true cop mojo is impossible to fake. Grifters can’t do it, except in circumstances like the after-party snuke, where you don’t have to be particularly convincing, just snarky and loud, less true cop than cop cartoon. I’m saying: See a man in officer kit, you can tell whether it’s a uniform or a costume. While I couldn’t completely discount the possibility of above-the-rim role playing, I felt I could trust that these Jakes were Jakes. On the present shifting sands of bafflegab, that wasn’t much, but at least it was something.

  In any case, a moment later, I found myself right back in the chair I’d vacated a moment before. While Hines walked the cops to the door, I picked up a wax apple and feinted it at Mirplo’s head. He flinched.

  Hines came back and sat down. He leafed through my file, then set it aside. “So far,” he said in measured tones, “nothing has happened that can’t unhappen. But I need to know you’re on board.”

  I sighed—a real sigh this time. “Appreciate my position,” I said. “If you’re who you say you are, then of course I’m happy to help the cause of international law and order, homeland security, save the whales, what have you. Not to mention my personal passionate cause of staying before bars. But if you’re not who you say you are, then I’m just a chump who’s getting rechumped. How’m I supposed to know which?”

  “The officers didn’t convince you?”

  “They convinced me a little,” I granted. “But you need to convince me a lot.”

  Hines and Scovil took their time and did it right: a thorough and plausible job of introducing me to the Grifter of Oz and the threat he posed. If they were to be believed, he was quite an extraordinary dude.

  If they were to be believed.

  William Yuan was born in Sydney of Chinese parents at roughly the same time I was born wherever of whomever. Like me, Yuan was a young achiever who got admitted to, and kicked out of, college at a precociously early age. Also like me, he found it pleasing to work on the fringes of legitimacy. He made much of the internet heyday by launching websites that had great commercial promise—though no particular basis in fact—and then gulling private-equity guys into hefty buys. Really, who wouldn’t take a flier on www.unearthme.com, once they learned of Billy Yuan’s revolutionary new technique for scanning satellite photos of Earth to locate previously hidden mineral deposits? Gold! Silver! Rhodium! Too good to be true?

  Of course!

  Any knowledgeable grifter would have instantly recognized the scam as an updated version of dowsing or water witching. But the PE guys weren’t that knowledgeable, and Yuan made a killing. Only, he tried to sell his vaporware to the government, and that bought him eighteen months in Mount Gambier, Australia’s first privately run prison. By the time he finished his bid, he was consulting to prison management on how to make much more money by selling prisons they had no intent to build. Really, the kid had a cat’s knack for landing on his feet.

  And what was he up to now? Why did he beat cheeks out of Australia, and why was Australia going to such lengths to hunt him down? Here the story starts to get a little murky. In gist, Yuan had been caught sniffing around the software of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Or not caught, exactly: detected; surprised in the act of the hack. But apparently in pinging him, the authorities had pinged themselves as well. Yuan shut down his operation and hopped the first Qantas out of town.

  “Our concern,” said Scovil, “is that Yuan has found a way to compromise the bank’s security and will, at a later time, attempt penetration.”

  “I love it when you say penetration,” I said, again yielding to the urge to provoke her. Some people you just don’t like. Her eyes clouded over in anger, but she swiftly regained her dark poise. It was clear that she wouldn’t let herself be baited by the likes of little me. Which, of course, just made the likes of little me want to bait her all the more.

  And don’t think I wasn’t mentally looking over my shoulder at Allie during all this. I had no idea what I was to her just then, although the word tool, in all its manifestations, sprang to mind. In any case, I wanted her to know that as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t the only woman in the room, and I hoped that pissed her off. I also wanted very much to know what her role was here, but that wasn’t the sort of question I could just come right out and ask. I’d have to nibble away at its edges, just like Billy Yuan had, seemingly, nibbled away at the bank.

  “How did he get so good?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” asked Hines.

  “You’re telling me he’s a top-flight grifter and a world-class hacker? That’s a rare combination.”

  “He’s a man of many talents, Radar. Just like you.”

  “Not like me. I can guess a password in a pinch, but I couldn’t hack bank security. Hell, I can’t hack a piggy bank without a hammer. So I ask again: How did he get so good?”

  Scovil looked unhappy. “We trained him,” she said at last.

  I laughed. “You what?”

  “After he got out of prison, we, ah, persuaded him that there was more benefit in working with us than against us.”

  “So you taught him everything he needed to know to go after your own national bank. That is rich.” No one else seemed to find it particularly rich. Mirplo had gone all mopey, perhaps feeling overlooked, his ego underfed. Hines seemed worried that I wasn’t buying all of this. Allie was where Allie was. And Scovil had just made an embarrassing admission. So, yeah, everyone in the room was unhappy but me. In the spirit of Schadenfreude, I decided to turn the screw. “So what’s his real name?” I asked.

  “What do you mean ‘real name’?” asked Scovil. “It’s William Yuan.” I snickered. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

  “The yuan is the currency of China, yeah?”

  “So? It’s also a very common name.”

  “Yes, it is. And how does it translate into English?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Dollar,’ I suppose.”

  “There you go,” I said. “Billy Yuan. Dollar Bill. A grifter’s inside joke to himself if ever there was one. He might as well have called himself Billy the Kid.”

  Hines looked altogether too pleased with this. “You see?” he told the others. “This is why we need Radar. He thinks just like Yuan, or whatever his name is. They’re going to get along great.”

  “Yeah, we will,” I said. “Once I find him. Anyone know how I should go about that?”

  “Oh, we know where he is,” said Hines. “That is, Allie does.”

  “Well, if she knows,” I couldn’t help asking, “why doesn’t just she go after him? I’m sure they’ll get along famously, too.”

  “Not so much,” said Allie, and I thought I heard a piece of her past in her voice. What was there? Wistfulness? Regret?

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “You dated him.” I didn’t know if this was true or not, but looking at Allie, I could see that she didn’t much like being the object of my inspection. Okay, I thought, that’s a card I can probably play again. But save it. Don’t overuse it.

  They told me where I could find Yuan and gave me a generous forty-eight hours to make contact. With that, the meeting started to wind down. I could tell that from Hines’s and Scovil’s point of view, it was all mission accomplished. Allie looked less smug—in fact, it seemed to me that her smug was at its lowest ebb since the moment we’d met. Clearly the notion of me hooking up with Billy Yuan was stirring some ambivalence in her. And that only left …

  “Mirplo,” I said. “How do you figure in?”

  “Mr. Mirplo,” said Hines, “has worked for our organization on a … contract basis for some time.”

  “In other words, he’s a snitch.”

  “Eyes and ears, Radar,” protested Vic. “Come on.
”

  “Why is he here now?” I asked. “Haven’t you sort of blown his cover?”

  “We don’t need him undercover anymore. As of today, he’s your partner.”

  “My what, now?”

  “Radar,” said Hines, “I know how much you love puzzles, and I have every confidence that you’ll help us unravel this one. However, having confidence in a confidence man is a bit like … well, the metaphor escapes me. The point is, we need to make sure you don’t wander off the path. With Vic at your side,” he said with a smile, “you’ll never walk alone.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “The world’s greatest fuckwit is my chaperone.”

  So the meeting broke up. Vic was now my appendage, like a prehensile tail I could neither hang from a tree with nor wag at pretty girls. I had been co-opted into law enforcement. It wasn’t the first time, but still it was a suit that didn’t hang well on my frame. Some people don’t look good in plaid; I don’t look good in narc.

  A question nagged at me like a sore tooth, and that was one of motivation. If these good citizens were just out to bust Dollar Bill, then fine. Let them have their bust, and I’ll be on my way. But why all the levels of subterfuge? Why not just use the same tools on him that they’d used on me: surveillance and bugs, tracks, hacks, and password cracks? Certainly that would produce enough hard evidence to present in a court of law. But perhaps a court of law was not to be the final disposition of this case. After all, they’d manipulated me to serve certain ends. Who’s to say they wouldn’t manipulate him the same way, once I’d helped them catch and compromise him? Even with all the what and where of things being handed out like Easter treats, I still didn’t have a firm handle on the why. And without the why, I was just as lost as I’d been going in. I was, I suddenly realized, still playing the same game, just at a different level. And in order to figure out what was really going on, I’d have to keep playing, keep riding the levels, adapting to circumstances as circumstances demanded or allowed. I’m here to tell you that this is no way to run a respectable snuke. A grifter likes to be holding all the cards—or at least marking the ones he’s not holding. Here my hand was limited to, well, my skill set and my healthy skepticism. I really didn’t have anything else going for me: no insight, no hidden tricks, no trustworthy chums, no exit strategy.