The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Allie laughed. “Mayonnaise what—what kind of motherfuckers?”

  “Mayonnaise motherfuckers. White bread, you know? Easy marks.”

  Allie took my arm and put it around her shoulder. She cuddled in close. “You’re a strange, strange man, Radar Hoverlander. What’s your real name?”

  I waited a long time before I answered. “Radar Hoverlander,” I said. But Allie was already asleep. I could smell General Tso’s Chicken on the gingery exhalation of her breath.

  25.

  dead man’s switch

  W e already know why Willie Sutton robbed banks—’cause that’s where the money was. And we know why George Mallory climbed Mount Everest—because it was there. Of more interest to me is why Picasso kept painting or Dickens kept writing long after they got so rich that they could bathe in champagne every day and still endow a trust. I’m guessing they got hooked—not on the money but on the buzz of doing what they did so well. Maybe they just wanted to prove they could still do it; unless you’re Mallory, there’s always a higher mountain to climb. And some people climb even though they know they’re going to fall. Just ask Mallory, who vanished on Everest in 1924, or ask any air force test pilot who ends his last flight as a smudge on the desert floor.

  Or maybe just ask Billy and me as we zeroed in on our California Roll. It’s not like there’s a hall of fame for people like us, but if there were, then pulling off this snuke would make us lock admits. I only mention this because I don’t want it thought that financial edacity alone kept me in the game. The money was beside the point. I wasn’t robbing China to get rich. I was robbing China because it was there.

  I know, right? I’m a stupid, stubborn son of a bitch. That said, I wasn’t going to give Detective Constable Claire Scovil, or Special Agent (or whatever) Milval Hines the satisfaction of moving me off my snuke. Especially when it occurred to me that being a stupid, stubborn son of a bitch was actually the perfect card to play.

  So Monday morning I took a chance. I needed to know if Scovil or Hines or both were traveling dark with respect to their bosses and betters. I hoped so; I didn’t think that what I had in mind would work with headquarters peering over their shoulders. I figured that Hines was well and truly off the reservation since, as Allie put it, he was getting his beak wet at every opportunity, and that’s not a gag you can pull off without a lot of earned autonomy. Of Scovil I wouldn’t have suspected it up till now, but after last night’s conversation with Billy, and my own tranquil reflection on all my interactions with her, I became more and more convinced that she had likewise gone rogue. It wouldn’t take much—a leave of absence from work and the next flight to L.A. But I needed to know for sure, so I turned to the Hackmaster, not forgetting what Chuck said about the trail of electronic breadcrumbs it could leave.

  Conundrum! I had to shine a light in dark places without anyone tracing the beam back to me. So I settled down with the Hackmaster’s instruction manual to see if I could find a way. Hours later, apart from some grins at crimes against syntax—“for avioding of crinminal charge use a nony mouse relay protical”—I had nothing to show for my work. The device could do what it promised, but it couldn’t promise not to be seen. Okay, I thought, if I’m going to be seen, let’s make being seen not a problem.

  I first cooked up a new identity, that of a teenage hack hobbyist from—I picked an Eastern European country at random—Romania. I gave myself a name, Luca Durbaca, and a screen identity, Jokerman23. Then I established a loud presence on the kind of underground discussion boards routinely monitored by interested government officials. (Taking care first, of course, to launder my posts through three or four “a nony mouse relays.”) What I had in mind was to hide my efforts in plain sight. Posturing like a teenage hacker high on testosterone, I boasted that I had written slam code to breach law-enforcement databases all over the world and would post results of my work within twenty-four hours. Naturally, I had written no such code, but if the Hackmaster was everything it awkwardly expressed itself to be, that wouldn’t be a problem.

  I picked an international array of police departments, army intelligence bureaus, and national security agencies, including the German Bundespolizei, Tatmadaw (Burmese military), the defense intelligence services of Uruguay and Paraguay—and the Australian High Tech Crime Centre and Hines’s fraud task force. See what I was getting at? If anyone in those places noticed me snooping around, they’d trace me back to these discussion boards and decide that I was on a self-indulgent because-it’s-there teenage jag. They might worry about Luca Durbaca selling access to their secrets, but they wouldn’t worry about Radar Hoverlander looking for the goods on Scovil and Hines.

  I spent the better part of the day happily crashing the inner sancta of the world’s law-enforcement agencies—and wittingly laying a breadcrumb trail back to the fictive Jokerman. I have to say that the Hackmaster worked a pip, and if I ever wanted to run, say, a friendly little blackmail game, I now knew that the finance minister for the government of Iceland favors sex-tourism excursions to Nicaragua. Merely out of hacker curiosity (or so it would appear to subsequent keystroke analysts), I checked out the operations files of both the Aussie crime center and the Fibbie task force, and found not a whisper in either place of Billy Yuan or yours most humbly truly. This indicated that Scovil and Hines were indeed running dark, so mission accomplished.

  Or maybe not. Unfortunately, absence of proof is not proof. I might have been looking in the wrong place, or they might be working with wink sanction. Ah, well. I’d done the best I could to establish that their activities didn’t officially exist. If I was wrong, I was wrong. I’d just have to improvise a new solution if it came to that.

  There was one last search I wanted to run, to get Hines’s real name, which of course I didn’t have, else his FBI affiliation would’ve surfaced back when I first searched Grandpa’s bona fides. I thought I might be able to flip that rock by running Allie through a general cross-reference matrix. I might also get independent evidence that Allie was, indeed, on board as a protected informant, which corroboration would certainly be a balm to my suspicious soul. In the end, though, I abjured the search, for going after so specific a target might belie my hacker holiday masquerade, and I couldn’t take that chance. I’d just have to keep calling Hines Hines, and keep taking Allie on faith.

  I had faith. Weirdly, I did. Confidence, too, steadying up again after its earlier wobble. After all, I held many interesting cards to play. I had half a million dirty dollars, with the prospect of a whole lot more on the way. I had friends—rare in this game. Most important, I had uncovered my adversaries’ hidden agendas, which is just huge in the grift. Knowing what the other guy wants is key to getting what you want, and that’s true whether you’re talking about negotiation, poker, or the rarefied art of the con.

  Also key is keeping the other guy off balance, which is why I arranged a meeting with Hines—and invited Scovil, too. This was in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel for no other reason than that I’d always wanted to check it out.

  You should have seen the look on each of their faces when the other arrived.

  I saw. I was watching from a service alcove by the kitchen, while the Salvadoran busboys looked at me like I was some kind of eccentric, though no shortage of those in Beverly Hills, right? Hines walked in first, went straight to the bar and ordered a big double something, straight up. He snarled when the bartender asked if he wanted a menu. Scovil entered a moment later, dressed as she thought a woman going to the Polo Lounge should dress—in a black cocktail thing that she absolutely couldn’t sell. When they caught sight of each other, they looked like televangelists look when the news crews are waiting outside the porno store. In this sense, I was pinging them: By their unvarnished surprise I knew that, at least, they weren’t updating each other’s Day Runner. In another sense, I was pinging myself, for in that instant, they both knew they’d been snuked in a minor way—two dates to the same dance, as it were. I imagine they were both qui
te pissed off at me, but neither could show it without raising the larger question of why each hadn’t bothered to fill the other in. So they both clamped down on their expressions with, to my practiced eye, only modest success, and started looking around for me. I ducked into the kitchen, went all the way around through the back-of-house, emerged in the lobby, and sailed into the lounge like the happiest little Radar on earth.

  Let’s pause and review for the folks in the back row. Scovil had told me she was chasing Hines as a bent cop, though I now believed her real target was moi. Meanwhile, my story for Scovil was that Billy Yuan had made me as a grifter and wouldn’t let me into his confidence, though we all know that wasn’t true. Hines, on the other hand, knew that Billy and I were working the Penny Skim and therefore saw the firm of Yuan and Hoverlander as his Super Lotto Jackpot. Was he worried about Scovil? Probably not. He figured he could take the money and give her us to hang on her Sydney gibbet.

  All other things being equal, I preferred to remain unhung.

  In the five seconds before I made my presence known, I could see it occur to both of them that I might not show up at all—that I’d just called this meeting as a goof. While I’m certainly capable of such random acts of whimsy, that wasn’t what I was about here. I was working a variation of a con called the Dead Man’s Switch, which is basically just taking the other guy’s opportunity and turning it into his problem.

  I sauntered over, all smiles, handshakes and pats on backs. “I suppose you’re both wondering why I asked you here,” I said. I knew I couldn’t sound more clichéd—exactly the tone I was going for. “I think it’s time we cleared the air.

  “Milval … Claire …” I said. “Do you mind if I call you Claire?” Scovil glared at me like I’d asked to sniff her panties. “You two haven’t been entirely honest with each other.” Both of their faces contorted as they essayed the impossible task of conveying devil-may-care calm and shut-your-mouth menace at the same time.

  I addressed Hines first. “Milval,” I said, “Claire told you she came here after Billy Yuan, right?” Hines nodded warily, wondering just how liturgically loose this canon was going to get. “She didn’t. She’s after …” Scovil took the extraordinary step of grabbing my arm. I don’t think Hines saw, for he was pretty well steeped in his own dread just then. “… me,” I finished, with a broad, cocky smile. Scovil relaxed her grip. This was interesting, because if Hines wasn’t on Scovil’s agenda, then why would she hate to have him think he was? I filed that contemplation for later. Time to put the fear on Hines, too.

  “And Claire,” I said, “Milval’s not really interested in Billy either. He just wants to take …” the money and run? Was that what I was about to say?

  Nah. “… me down, too.” I saw Hines clench, then unclench. “I think you two are going to have a jurisdictional issue.”

  “You think we care about that?” growled Hines.

  “No, probably not,” I said. “But the fact remains that the two of you, in your ardor, have given the fox the key to the henhouse, and you’d better start figuring out what you’re going to do about that, because Billy and I are about to do something that could …” I paused for effect “… kinda wreck the world’s economy. And if that happens and all you have to show for it is one busted Hoverlander, * I don’t think your bosses are going to be too damn pleased.”

  “What do you mean you and Billy?” asked Scovil. “I thought he didn’t trust you.”

  “This may come as a shock to you, Constable, but people don’t always tell the truth.” Here was a new problem for Scovil, for she’d threatened me with death if I lied to her and must now be wondering why that threat had lost its clout.

  That was just part of her emerging emotional stew which, like Hines’s, was reaching a stage of redolent roil. In the few minutes since they’d arrived, they’d experienced the shock of each other’s presence, the fear of being outed, and the relief of me pulling back from that brink. Now they were tied up in a snarl of feelings, including resentment, confusion, anxiety and, considering the way Hines knocked back his drink and ordered another, the first stage of spifflication. Judging them sufficiently softened up, I pushed ahead.

  I gave them a full brief on the Penny Skim, noting with some amusement how hard Hines tried to make it all look like news to him. I told them it was a done deal, with confederates already in place all over the People’s Bank’s IT structure. For a price—a percentage of the skim—these worthies were already providing Billy and me with password hacks to their own security systems. I told them that Billy had written, and was ready to release, the go commands that would automate the process of clipping virtually every transaction into, out of, or through the Chinese banking system. What’s more, the thing was designed to spread virally, so that every skim opened the door to another, geometrically. By my (admittedly impromptu) math, it would take about six hours for the bank’s watchdog software to catch on, and who knows how long after that before someone in the chain of command had sufficient spine to call all engines stop. By the time China slammed the door, the skim would have spread to other hubs of national finance, including the Bank of England, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, and of course the Reserve Bank of Australia and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

  You may be thinking that there’s no way a skim can “spread” magically past the passwords and firewalls of other nations’ banking systems. Know what? You’re right. But you’re not under the sort of pressure that Scovil and Hines were under, and when it comes to selling bafflegab, pressure is a grifter’s best friend.

  “Can you see where I’m going with this?” I asked. “In the space of a day, the global economy will come up short to the tune of …” I paused to pull a number out of my ass “… some one and a half trillion dollars. And that’s not all, because every bank in the world will have to lock down to stop the process. Know what happens then? Panic. Runs on banks. Chaos. Riots. Total economic collapse.”

  “Bullshit,” spat Hines.

  “Is it?” I asked, utterly rhetorically. I then gave them a quick primer on coin clipping, how it had repeatedly devalued and destroyed strong economies down through history. Byzantium. Persia’s Safavid Dynasty. I even laid the fall of the Roman Empire at the feet of unscrupulous solidus shavers. This was more than bafflegab; it was pure whole cloth invention. But they bought it completely.

  I guess I was just on my game.

  “And,” I added, “that’s back when they measured economic change in centuries. You know how it is these days: Someone pets a monkey in Uganda, flies to Chicago, you have Marburg all over the Midwest by midweek. Same thing with public monetary confidence. By the time it hits CNN, it’ll be too late to stop.

  “Like I said, your bosses aren’t going to like that. Especially since your bosses have no idea what you’re up to, do they?”

  Hines and Scovil exchanged unhappy looks. Now to administer a tincture of panic and beat a hasty retreat. “Here’s the deal,” I said, “Two million dollars in twenty-four hours stops this thing in its tracks. And gives you Billy Yuan as a kind of a consolation prize.”

  “You’d sell out your partner?” asked Scovil.

  “What partner? I’ve known the dude two weeks.” I turned to Hines. “But Allie’s mine. She walks.”

  “Why?” asked Scovil, which suggested that Hines hadn’t clued her in on the latest state of l’affaire Allie.

  So I jerked a thumb at Hines. “Ask him.”

  Hines opened and closed his mouth. More for cover than anything else, he said, “What about Mirplo?”

  I smirked. “If you think you can put this all on his scrawny shoulders, be my guest. For the record, he’s not as loyal a servant as you think he is.” I turned to walk away, then paused, as if something very important had just occurred to me. “By the way,” I said, “if you’re considering some sort of preemptive strike, either legal or …” I fixed them both with meaningful looks “… extralegal, I suggest you look up �
��Dead Man’s Switch’ on Wikipedia.” Then I walked out, leaving the Polo Lounge to its standard olio of dealmakers, heartbreakers, and, I predicted, two morose cops who would run up a hefty bar tab before they stumbled out into perfect Beverly Hills.

  I stopped by the Blue Magoon on the way home. The place was creepy, but somebody there had something I thought I might need.

  * * *

  *“The Sky Crane will fly off and crash-land a short distance away.”

  * * *

  26.

  event horizon

  “Y ou what?!” shouted Vic. “You fucking sold me out?”

  Unable to stomach yet another Java Man, we were hanging at one of its one-off competitors, Sheik of Arabica, located way down Slauson and situated, we hoped, well off Hines and Scovil’s map. Allie, Billy, and I were quaffing cappuccinos. Vic was throwing a bit of a fit.

  “Relax, Vic,” I said. “Nobody sold anybody out. It’s all part of the snuke.”

  “Well, I like your part better than mine. Two million bucks. You’d better fucking cut me in.”

  “Vic, use your head. They couldn’t possibly pay, even if they wanted to, which, trust me, they don’t. Hines has a theoretical half million from the Merlin Game, but, what? He’s gonna pry it out of me to give it back to me? And Scovil, what’s she going to do? Hit an ATM for a million-dollar advance on her credit card?”

  “Well, if they’re not gonna pay,” he asked, “what are they gonna do?”

  “Probably try to kill me.”

  Allie flinched at this but recovered quickly, realizing, “That’s part of the snuke, too?”

  “Of course. First they’ll make a separate peace with Billy, and once they’ve got him tucked in, they’ll finish the unfinished business of me.”

  “That would satisfy Scovil,” said Billy, “but Hines still needs a payday, yeh?”