The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Now all that had to happen was for Scovil and Hines not to compare notes. I knew they weren’t best buddies, but they were still at least notionally colleagues, and they would share such information as they could safely share without giving away their own backdoor plans. What I needed was a firewall between them, a barrier of mistrust that would make them unwilling to trade secrets. That’s where Allie came in. She already had Hines’s ear. She would need to persuade him—not that he’d need much persuading—that Scovil was not to be trusted and must be kept in the murk.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t similarly reach out to Scovil, for Scovil knew that Allie was Hines’s chattel and would naturally figure she was also his mouthpiece. Okay, then, whose word would Scovil take? Not mine, for what could I possibly know about the real Milval Hines? And not Billy’s—he and Scovil couldn’t meet until the endgame. Well, that just left …

  Vic Mirplo. The original blunt instrument.

  Time to sharpen it up.

  Allie and I stepped outside the restaurant and prepared to part company. She had to see Hines, to warn him off Scovil, and I had to go prep the world’s worst liar to sell a lie, which I could only do by making him think it was truth. And yes, that meant lying to Vic, whom hadn’t I brought into my confidence? But this I figured to be a necessary evil, as I rated myself more likely to lie convincingly to Vic than Vic likely to lie convincingly to a grade-schooler or a corpse. Anyway, it was for his own good. If I managed to finesse my way out of this bind, I’d be taking him with me.

  Of course, that was still a fairly jumbo-size if. Well, one thing at a time. Next on the agenda was kissing Allie good-bye.

  That makes it sound premeditated, but it wasn’t. I just knew that the deal needed sealing. If nothing else, it would confirm that we could kiss as two (reasonably) honest people. I guess Allie had arrived at the same unpremeditated meditation, for I found her lips waiting for mine.

  Kissing Allie this time was a totally different experience. Gone was the fierce erotica, replaced by the sacred grace of her chrismal tongue. Residual maple syrup lent a tacky, sweet overtone, but we really didn’t need it. We kissed like a movie kiss, and like a movie kiss, it was utterly authentic because we willingly suspended our disbelief. We kissed like bubble gum, like prom night, like the top of a Ferris wheel. We kissed for the benefit of the sad commuters who passed us by in their hapless transits from heavily mortgaged homes to soul-killing dead-end jobs. We kissed for our freedom. We kissed for our lives. And by the time we were done kissing, I was about 75 percent in love.

  23.

  value town

  I t no longer served my purpose to work on a compromised computer, so I drove over to Value Town, a pirate electronics store that operates out of the back of a boba tea shop in Monterey Park. Value Town carries a line of goods you’re not likely to find at Best Buy, such as weapons-grade tasers, DV descramblers, and the thing I was after, an aftermarket laptop tricked out with the latest anonymizers, cookie crunchers, RPGs (random password generators), and ISP baffles. I selected a hardware platform, then chose from a tasty menu of options, including something I’d never seen before, a fail-safe fingerprint sensor that would wipe the hard drive if it detected the wrong hands on the keyboard. Wow. The owner of Value Town was a sunny Thai illegal named Charoenrasamee—Chuck to her friends. As she spooled up the operating system on my new laptop, my thoughts turned back to the odd USB plug-in I’d seen at Allie’s “apartment.” I asked Chuck about it. At first it rang no bell, but when I described its size, shape, and functionality (according to Hines, it could do everything but slice bread), her eyes lit up and she said, “Ah, you mean Hackmaster 6000!”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “What else would I mean?”

  The Hackmaster 6000 turned out to be a daughter-of-necessity invention first thought up in some federal spook shop in the ugly early days after 9/11, but not actually brought online until late last year. Sort of the Swiss Army knife of wireless cards, it linked to the internet via proprietary government broadband frequencies and featured a most impressive array of AI spiders, password mimes, active and passive data traps, and inbound and outbound GPS. In the time it takes to call the play, the Hackmaster 6000 could search, cull, harvest, and rationalize every available bit or byte about you, from your high school test scores to that speeding ticket you got in Reno that time, and even the name of the hooker in the car with you when you got popped.

  The government, of course, didn’t call it the Hackmaster 6000. That was its street name, for no sooner had it gone into production than clones started turning up as curios in places like Value Town. It was a tough tool to use well, Chuck told me, because for all its advanced stealth technology, it left a detectable trail of electronic breadcrumbs. If you assumed that someone was watching (and it’s always healthy to assume that someone is), it was likely only a matter of time before the fact of your fact-finding mission would surface somewhere. For someone on the inside, like Hines, that wouldn’t matter, but for me it made the Hackmaster only a hit-and-run tool at best.

  Still, a tool is a tool. “You don’t happen to have one?” I asked.

  “I have!” said Chuck. “This Valu’ Town!”

  She reached under the counter and pulled out a plastic bag containing a matte black cartridge similar to the one Hines had had—except that this one bore the logo of a smiling, dancing tiger.

  “What’s with the cat?” I asked.

  “Private brand,” she said. “Valu’ Town special. It do tricks!”

  “What kind of tricks?”

  “You read manual.” She opened the bag and took out a hand-Xeroxed, -folded, and -stapled instruction manual written in charmingly fractured English. I read the first sentence—“Hackmaster 6000 are first name on digital survalence, not for childrens”—and decided to save it for later. Chuck tapped the Hackmaster with her purple lacquered fingernail. “Last one,” she said brightly. “Bargain price.”

  Chuck’s idea of a bargain price could have kept her extended family in boba tea for a year, but she bundled it together with the new computer, rounded the whole thing up to an extravagant number, then discounted it back down to a reasonable sum, and sold me the whole package for that. This was how Chuck did business. She haggled with herself, and seemed to enjoy both sides of the negotiation. “Thank you for shopping Valu’ Town,” she intoned in her delightful singsong as I left. “Tell your friends.” This, I thought, is what makes America great.

  I didn’t go home. I needed to work awhile without interruption, and considering all the people who had lately made my joint their crossroads, I thought a Java Man would serve me better, so I selected the one closest to Value Town (a mere stone’s throw, like they all are) and set up shop there. It took me some time to get used to the new laptop. Though sleeker and faster than my old box, it lacked my familiar shortcuts, and I really didn’t feel comfortable until I had those all dialed in.

  After that, I checked on how the Merlin Game was paying off, and was gratified to see returns running ahead of projection, both in absolute numbers and average handle. To tell the truth, not having run a Merlin Game in a few years, I wasn’t altogether sure how it would play out. The pick trick brings them in, of course, but in the end, it’s all about the bafflegab, and you like to think your pitch is still sharp, even after a long layoff. Seeing the mooks rise so avidly to the bait gave me some confidence as I looked ahead to the Penny Skim, because there the sell would be a good deal harder. It’s not that you have to convince people to be greedy. The greedy ones are greedy by nature and need no convincing, and the others never even notice you, so it’s kind of self-selecting. Nor was it the prospect of working in Mandarin (not my strongest language, but I muddle through, ni hao). The thing is, my targets would be newbies, virgins, innocent to the grift, for IT professionals high up in the Chinese central banking system had likely never been approached by a Western-style scam artist before. And while you might think this would make them soft targets, in fact the oppos
ite was true. They wouldn’t naturally recognize the benefits being offered to them, and they’d need spoon-fed assurances that the yak was plausible, profitable, doable, and safe. They’d have to learn to believe in the magic of something for nothing.

  I’d have to get my teaching chops on. In Mandarin, no less.

  It occurred to me that Billy might have Mandarin (though this was by no means given—who knows what immigrants teach their kids at home?), and I shot him a quick IM to find out. I used one of our agreed-upon ghost accounts, but got no response, which was odd, because I knew he’d slaved his IM to his new cash-and-carry cell phone, and we’d kind of agreed to keep those phones always on. I tried him again a little while later, but still nothing, so I dialed him up.

  The phone rang about five times before Billy answered. “Pronto,” he said—and I nearly sprained a finger stabbing end call, because pronto, while it’s how they answer a call in Italy or in certain pretentious circles of Eurotrash wannabes, was also one of our predetermined code words. In this case, the code meant can’t talk now—compromised situation.

  After a moment, my phone lit up, signaling an incoming call. Caller ID told me it was Billy calling back. Some instinct told me to just listen, and I did. Good thing, because Billy had surreptitiously managed to open the line, so that I could hear the conversation he was having. The voices were muffled—probably the phone was in his pocket—but I could easily make out the speakers. One was obviously Billy.

  The other?

  Sigh.

  Hines.

  “Are you certain you haven’t seen him?” asked Hines.

  “Not for a couple of days,” answered Billy, in a tone of such sincere helpfulness that even I bought it—for a moment I thought I was wrong about the guy. But then he added, “I’m sorry I can’t be more help, Mr. Thurston.”

  Mr. Thurston? Ah-ha! Hines was representing himself to Billy as Chad Thurston’s dad, and why not? I’d told Hines about the picture of filial conflict I’d painted for Yuan. No doubt he was playing the aggrieved father come to town in search of his wayward son. Billy, of course, knew there was no Chad Thurston III. Did he know this was Hines? Probably he could guess, but in any case he’d do nothing but play it safe and play along.

  “Give me your number,” said Billy. “I’ll call you if he gets in touch.”

  “You do that,” said Hines. Then I heard him jack up the tenor of threat in his voice as he added, “Listen carefully, young man. My son is very impressionable, and prone to bad decisions. Under no circumstances are you to accept money from him, do you understand?”

  “Why would he give me money?” asked Billy.

  Hines must have realized he’d overplayed his hand. He backed and filled quickly. “He’s … the boy’s deranged,” he stammered. “He likes to give money away.”

  I chuckled silently. What a lame cover. It showed that Hines wasn’t thinking things through. Indeed, I thought, Hines’s whole line of play was weak here, ill considered and rushed. How he’d managed to track down Yuan I don’t know, but he did have a Hackmaster, and he also had Allie, who couldn’t reasonably deny him information about Yuan without tipping her loyalty shift. Nor could I guess why Hines had decided to go this route in the first place. Did he see some hidden advantage in introducing Chad Thurston père into the mix, or was he just losing the plot? Either way, I knew I’d have to meet with him right away and chill him out. I didn’t want his anger peaking too soon. He was liable to just start busting people (or heads) and queer the deal for everyone.

  So I disconnected Billy’s call, grabbed my other phone and punched up Hines’s cell. He didn’t answer—I hadn’t expected him to—and the call went to voice mail. I left a message about a hiccup with the Merlin Game, something that would make it seem like the money had not gone where the money was supposed to go. I assured him that this was an accident, easily fixed, but that we should get together right away and discuss the ramifications.

  Next I phoned Mirplo and fed him the mislead that Hines wasn’t a bent cop after all. Rather, he was working an internal-affairs investigation on his own bureau, trying to uncover cops who were bent. I told Vic to contact Scovil and alert her to this. He didn’t ask why, which was good, because there was no way I could make the logic of that disinformation stand up. But that’s the beauty of a Mirplo: they act first and forget to ask questions later. As for Scovil, I doubted she’d fully take Mirplo’s word for this, but it might cause her to break stride, which was the best I could manage for now. At a certain point in the con, your lies are like ball bearings. You just throw them all out across the floor and hope that someone slips on something.

  Hines was waiting for me when I got home. I had a feeling he would be. I didn’t expect him to be in exactly a Little Mary Sunshine frame of mind, nor did he disappoint. While I calmly washed, changed clothes, and fixed myself a grilled cheese sandwich, he raged around my apartment calling me unspeakable names. But I thought his rage seemed a little theatrical. He must have realized that I had (A) his money, and (2) therefore him over a certain barrel. I tried to see myself from Hines’s point of view. Here was a con artist he thought he’d cowed and corralled, only to face some bullshit story about the money “accidentally” going astray. He didn’t buy it but probably wondered what he could do about it. Turning up the bluster wasn’t the only move that came to his mind, no doubt. He may have considered arresting me, shooting me, or just kicking my ass. But he had to save those moves for later. For now, he’d try to do the least he could do to regain control of the situation. Which meant hissing and posturing like a puff adder.

  I must admit it felt good watching him go all Sturm und Drang around my apartment. What had he expected from me? Fair play? Come on—is it not my job to outthink guys like Hines? Should he not have realized that I’d have never caught his eye in the first place if I weren’t damn good at what I do? In other words, the mere fact that he knew of me meant he shouldn’t underestimate me.

  Yeah, but that’s the ego talking, isn’t it? I paused to remind myself (as I flipped the grilled cheese sandwich over in the pan) that this wasn’t in any sense a dick-measuring contest between us. After all, what good would it do to send him down in flames if his last, vengeful act was to take me down, too? Of this he was certainly capable, and I’d do well not to underestimate him. A puff adder might be a vicious, stupid, cowardly snake, but it’s a snake just the same.

  And what do you do with a snake?

  Charm it.

  “Grilled cheese?” I asked. Hines looked at me like I’d just landed from Mars. “Come on,” I encouraged. “A man’s got to eat, right?”

  “Fuck food,” he said. “Just tell me where’s my money.”

  “Ah, that,” I said. I didn’t see any point in bothering with an “I know you don’t trust me” preamble, and so instead launched straight into the bafflegab. “You understand that I couldn’t send the money straight to Liechtenstein, right?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Paper trail,” I said. “Think about the high rollers we’re dealing with here. You think none of them have been scammed before?” Judging by Hines’s reaction, I knew I’d pinged a true target—that he had, in fact, gathered his candidate list for the Merlin Game from prior victims of cons, perhaps even some of mine. “And some of those scams were likely tax dodges, no?” I could see Hines repress a nod. “Which puts at least some of our marks on IRS radar, who will then surely have sentinels monitoring their outbound transactions.” I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded good. “Well, look, the bank you gave me is a known offshore larder.” Again, pure fabricat, but I figured that Hines must’ve learned about that bank somewhere, and government lists of black banks seemed as likely a somewhere as any. “If I’d sent the money there,” I continued, “it would’ve rung alarm bells in half a dozen watchdog agencies, not just the IRS but the SEC and your friends at Hometown Buffet Security. Is that what you wanted?”

  I could see that this put him back on his heels,
so I pushed ahead. Once you get going on a good run of bafflegab, you just let momentum take over. “So I washed the money some. First I sent it to a folksy little ma-and-pa bank in Altoona. I’ve worked with them before. They have close ties to big mutual funds, so major money flowing through them doesn’t raise eyebrows.” Hines gave me this “go on” glare, and I knew he was on the hook for believing me. Which is remarkable because I was literally making this up as I went along. As I said, I like to improvise. “I let the money rest there for a day—that’s why you didn’t hear from me—then I cut it up into parcels.”

  “Why?”

  “To chop the trail.” I raised an eyebrow. “You never heard of trail chopping?” Not likely, since I’d just that instant invented it. “Next I bounced the parcels around. They passed through a Delaware shell corporation I own.” Well, in my imagination I do. “And then to a Texas credit union with a sister bank in Mexico. So … over the border, down to Costa Rica, then across the South Atlantic to Zimbabwe. Now the beauty of Zimbabwe is their inflation rate is so high that the banks—”

  “Just cut to the fucking chase, Hoverlander. Where did my money get lost?”

  “Ah. Well, that would be France. In the end it was a language problem.”

  “Language?”

  “Yeah, I wrote all the transaction orders in English, and apparently in France these days that’s a no-go. They did the same thing with Google. French only, some bullshit. So now all the funds are in impound while I get a language waiver, whatever that is.” I let disgust leak into my voice. “The fucking French, right? Anyway, it shouldn’t be more than a day or two. France is the final rinse. Next stop Liechtenstein, and your money, all five hundred grand of it, will be nice and clean and fresh.”