Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  She laughed. "Yes. I do know it."

  "You have sort of an amazing capacity, miss."

  "Depends on who's on the other end." She climbed over his back and kissed his neck. He could feel her breasts, her warm belly.

  "Tell me the rest of the story."

  She lay next to him, talking into his ear. "Okay, so . . . we had five fences who were going to buy the stuff off the truck. The air conditioners retailed for eight hundred and forty-nine dollars. We were going to sell that same box for two hundred dollars to the fence, who would have no trouble selling it for four hundred. He's making fifty percent profit with no overhead, no taxes, nothing. And we're grossing two hundred dollars a box. You could fit four hundred and sixteen boxes in a forty-foot trailer. Each box was thirty-nine by twenty-six inches. Each weighed seventy pounds."

  "Pretty heavy."

  "Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's about fourteen tons of air conditioners. So four hundred and sixteen times two hundred dollars. That's our gross profit. Eighty-three thousand. A lot of costs come out of that, but it's not bad for two or three days' work. We had orders for five hundred air conditioners."

  "Why do you take a truckload of stolen stuff into a city that moves so slowly?" he asked. "If they're chasing you, you can't get away, especially with a tractor trailer."

  "That makes sense," she answered. "But the advantage of the city is its density. Dispersing four hundred and sixteen air conditioners in New York City is easy. They're there and then gone. You're never going to find them—half the stuff sold in Chinatown is stolen, right? It was a simple job . . . the problem was that I didn't want to do it. I wanted to get away. Just go sit by the ocean and read trashy magazines or something."

  "You felt a change in the season."

  She nodded against his back. "I kept telling Rick I wanted to get out, and he actually sent me to Tony, who runs a lot of businesses. He tried to keep me in, get me involved with a restaurant that laundered money, a numbers operations, things like that. Anyway, we went ahead with the air-conditioner job. They came in from Taiwan. The ship was coming in at Newport News and was off-loading something like two hundred containers."

  "You told me you didn't know anything about containerized shipping," Charlie remembered.

  "Because I wanted you to like me, okay?" she cried. "I'm not really so bad."

  I'm crazy to be here, he thought. "If you say so."

  "I do. So Rick was getting two containers—he had some deal with the shipping agent, they drop them and break them all the time. They call that 'dock overage.' Rick was going to end up with two truckloads that he and another guy would drive north. The first load they were going to sell in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. You just sell off the back of the truck in the black neighborhoods, North Philly . . . West Philly. Stuff just disappears. Cash, no questions asked."

  She sat up suddenly and he sensed a change in her concentration. "Then Tony asked about how the planning of the job was going. He told us there was only one truck, and that we had to take it straight into New York. Couldn't get two truckloads. I thought that was probably bullshit, because these container ships carry thousands and thousands of whatever it is—air conditioners, televisions, computers. I called the shipping agent and found out where the ship was stopping before it made its way to Newport News. It was stopping in a lot of places, but one of the places was Thailand. Lots of opium is grown in Thailand."

  "I know—I lived there."

  "You did?" she asked.

  "As a pilot."

  She mulled this over. "Did you kill a lot of people?"

  "Don't ask me that."

  "Why?"

  "It's too painful."

  "I guess you did."

  How could she understand?

  "But for your country," Christina said.

  "At the time I believed that."

  "What do you believe now?"

  "I believe the Air Force is very good at picking people who believe in absolutes and can fly jets."

  "Do they go together?"

  "That's a hell of a question." Which he didn't want to answer. "You were saying about Thailand?"

  "Okay, so actually I did not know about Tony, not yet. All I had was a coincidence. Then he happened to call up and say he knew somebody who was interested in buying a few of the air conditioners but that the guy was pretty nervous and wanted to be the first guy in, the first guy out. Okay, I said. See, Tony's setting it up and we pay him to do that, but we also pay him a cut. He's going to make maybe twenty thousand on the job, out of our eighty-three. So he tells me about this guy, whose name was Frankie, someone I didn't know. Then I find out he's a known heroin dealer."

  "That's a problem." The conversation was starting to worry him.

  "Sure is," agreed Christina. "I have to wonder if Tony is smuggling heroin into New York City using me and Rick as his mules. We think we're transporting air conditioners, which we are, but maybe we're also carrying heroin. First I was worried that Tony was trying to set us up. But that didn't make sense, because if we got caught it would've been easy to trace us to him. He really did want us to be successful. We would get the truck already packed. Tony's guy wanted the first ten boxes off of it. He would know which ones, I wouldn't. Each box weighed seventy pounds, as I said. If that's heroin, then it's a huge amount of money."

  "Millions and millions," Charlie said, thinking about Sir Henry Lai.

  "But probably they have a little bit of heroin inside each air conditioner," Christina went on. "Let's say twenty pounds in each box. Twenty pounds of pure heroin times ten boxes. I thought maybe Tony was trying to get around his Colombian people. If we somehow get arrested, then he can tell them it wasn't his fault. He sets it up to work but in a way that if it doesn't, he's okay. At least, this is what I came up with. I didn't know what was going on—the mob politics, the cartel politics, whatever." She coughed. "I was never privy to that whole set of people. The other problem was that Rick was pretty sure that we were under regular surveillance. Phone taps. Something was going on. He had a phone message drop that supposedly could not be traced to him or anyone, but he thought it was tapped."

  "How does that work?" asked Charlie. "I'm in the telecom business, you know."

  "I think it's simple from a mechanical point of view," she said. "You need three phones, one of them cellular, and two computers. The call comes in to the first phone, which is connected to a computer. It's a regular phone line. As soon as the call comes in, the computer autodials to a second number, using an attached cell phone. The origin of this second call is not traceable by exact location. Meanwhile, the computer takes a message from the first phone call and hangs up. You can have it do two things, and we did. You have it send a regular voice message, which is digitized, then toned like a fax through the cell phone to the third phone, which has the other computer, which takes the electronic transmission, records it, hangs up, undigitizes it, and plays the message back when you want. The first computer erases its memory after it transmits the call, and the second erases itself after it plays the call to the listener. Or—and this is the part I like—"

  "Jesus," Charlie said, "who thought of this?"

  "I did."

  "You did?"

  "Conceptually." She poked his back affectionately. "I don't know anything about electronics. They had a guy who did the programming stuff." She took his hand in hers and kissed the scar. "I wanted to do that the first time I saw you," she said, lips against his skin.

  "What was the other option?" he asked.

  "We had a bunch of messages, coded by number. Like, 'I'll be late' was a certain number, maybe the number three. So the computer at the first phone lets out a tone to leave a message and the caller punches in the number three. The computer takes this number three in and hangs up. Done. Then the computer uses its cell phone to dial the third phone. Or wherever you want to be reached. There was a way to remote-program the redial number, too. The idea is to make enough steps that it's a puzzle that
can't be solved after the fact—while you could prove proximity of the receiving phone and the outgoing cellular, you could not prove, using phone logs, that the phones were adjacent, or causally related."

  "Unless you got hold of the computers themselves."

  "Right. So in this second scenario, the computer calls you wherever you want to be and generates a fax. What does it fax? It faxes an Italian takeout menu." She paused to light another cigarette. "Looks like nothing. You get it and you say, So what. But it's the number of times that the computer faxes it which is the message. You get the same fax three times and three is the message. Somebody grabs that piece of paper, what does it mean? Nothing."

  "But you said that this Rick guy thought this wasn't working?"

  "No, it was working fine, but they had tapped in somewhere," Christina said. "They were monitoring, probably through the first phone. They weren't catching the pass-along cell call. I don't think. Maybe they knew about the computer and the cell phone and were waiting, using it like a trap. Rick was worried. Had to cancel a couple of things. He got edgy about stuff. But he was right, as it turned out."

  He wasn't sure how the phone trickery connected to her truck story. "So at this point you have a hell of a problem," Charlie summarized. "You've got the bad guy with the heroin. You want to get out of the relationship. Lot of stuff happening."

  "Sure. I was angry that Tony was making such huge money off of my risk. But the other thing was that this was going to be my last job, forever. I was going to do this one very bad thing and then I was going to do nothing ever again. I wanted to just get free of Rick and the rest of them. And frankly, the best way I could think of to do that was to make the job get fucked up. Get the police to arrive and find and arrest people."

  "Hang on." Charlie got up to go to the bathroom. It had a phone on the wall next to the toilet so guys like Sir Henry Lai could call for help as they crapped out on the crapper. Not me, thought Charlie, I'm still banging around. Ellie asleep, dreaming of rosebushes. He let loose a blissful stream, then in the light over the sink he looked at his penis. Pubic hair almost all gray, the flesh under it soft. It hung there, bent left, currently of no use. All those mysterious little veins, red and bluish, thin and thick. I've been staring at this thing my whole life, he thought, still don't know what it is, exactly. Gave her a pretty good shot, by the feel of it. A good shot for him, at least. Fucking substandard sperm sample. It was embarrassing, even if he only had one testicle. But how many guys who'd had an M-16 round hit their scrotums actually had sperm samples? You survive to prosper, you live so that you can fuck. Melissa—he meant Christina—was much more vigorous than Ellie, not even close. He was out of practice, by about twenty-five years. Admit it, he told himself, you like this girl, even though she is dishonest and scares you a little. He rubbed his finger against his penis, touched his nose, and smelled her. Life keeps surprising me, he thought.

  "Go on," he called, as her cigarette smoke reached the bathroom. He looked in the mirror at the gray hair on his chest and stomach, drank a glass of water, then filled it again. "I'm listening."

  "So I was meeting Rick outside Philadelphia at a mall and we were going to drive into New York," she continued from the bedroom. "If I couldn't get out of driving those boxes, then at least I wanted to see them, see what it was that I was carrying. It bugged me that I didn't know. There were two chances to get at them. One was on the drive up, and one was when we arrived in New York at the loading dock in Chelsea. I thought it'd be better if I could get at the boxes before we arrived in New York. My mother and father used to live outside Philadelphia, in Chester County. I know all the roads out there. It was farmland when I was growing up . . ." Her voice sounded sad. "Anyway, I planned it with Rick that we would stop for lunch. Just pull the truck in."

  He handed her the glass. "Wouldn't that be sort of suspicious for the neighbors?"

  "No, not really." She sipped the water. "It wasn't exactly the high-rent district, you know, sort of the edge of the suburbs. A big rig pulled up next to their place was nothing special. My mom and dad were going to move soon anyway—someone could think it was a moving truck. So we pulled into their house and they gave Rick a big welcome. My mother made a big meal for us and everything. Afterward I told Rick that I wanted to have sex, so we went in my old bedroom and had sex, and then he wanted to sleep, which is what I expected. I told him I'd wake him in a little while. My dad was watching television. He wasn't feeling great. He was worried about money and moving down to Florida. He'd just retired. So then I went out to the truck and unlocked it. We had the keys in case we got stopped by the police. Less suspicious if they can look at the load and compare it to the paperwork. The truck was parked so that the back faced into our yard. I jumped up and took a look. The air conditioner boxes were all the same, of course. I hadn't seen how they'd packed the truck. Frankie would expect his ten boxes to be in a certain spot, but they wouldn't necessarily be the first ten boxes you'd naturally take out." She sat up and pulled on Charlie's button-down shirt, the tie still threaded through the collar. "I couldn't find the pattern, so I just started opening boxes. What the hell, right? I opened about eight or nine and then I found one of the special boxes."

  "And?" Charlie asked. "Drugs?"

  She looked at him. "It wasn't heroin."

  "What was it?"

  "Cash."

  "Cash?"

  "Old hundreds and fifties. Two-inch stacks with red rubber bands. Kind of smelled. I carried my mom's bathroom scales out and weighed a box and one of the regular boxes with an air conditioner in it. They weighed the same."

  "What did you do then?" Charlie asked, beginning to worry.

  "I totally freaked out, what do you expect?" Christina said. "I thought about my dad sitting in there, worrying about how they were going to make it on his pension in Florida. He was sick and had worked his whole life and all he had to show for it was me, who'd dropped out of Columbia University, for God's sake, against his wishes, against his hopes, you know, and I thought I could just do something for him for once."

  Suddenly she was crying, and despite his wariness, he pulled her toward him. "Oh, Charlie, it was so stupid, so incredibly stupid. I sort of panicked, which isn't like me! I just thought how much I'd disappointed them. I mean, I was the girl who got a five on her goddamn AP history test, and now I have some boyfriend in there with huge arms and an earring, you know?" She coughed, voice thick. "My mother didn't care, she liked Rick, she made a puddle whenever a man smiled at her, she's probably the orgasm queen of all time, but my father was actually sort of classy in his quiet way. He used to sit in his old chair and read books on the Civil War and everything and I—"

  "Okay, now," Charlie said.

  "—I was his only child, his only daughter, and I'd already disappointed him so much. And I was so afraid that he was dying and that he wouldn't have—I haven't told anyone this, I just couldn't—it took me a long time in prison to understand what I did—I was so, so stupid. I didn't want to cause any trouble. . . I've just always had this streak of something, anger and defiance and feeling that I would do everything my way, and my father was always so gentle with me, like you, so caring, he never got angry, he let my mother be the one who got angry, I guess. So all these things were in my head, and I was standing there with this big box of cash and not thinking like I should have been."

  "What'd you do?"

  She stood up nervously and edged toward the window. "I found another box with cash in it and put the two of them down on the driveway. Then I arranged the outer rows of boxes in the truck to make it look like nothing had been disturbed. You wouldn't be able to tell there was a problem until you removed a complete row of boxes. Then there was a gap."

  "You were out of your mind."

  "I know," Christina said, touching a fingertip to the glass. "I carried the boxes to the garage. My father had this old Mustang convertible that he fixed up. The upholstery was still original, with the thin steering wheel. My mother wrote me in pr
ison that after my father died her boyfriends wanted to fix it up but she'd never let them."

  "Like a shrine." Ellie's closet for Ben.

  "Sort of, yes. I knew they were planning to have it taken down to Florida with them. I knew they'd just roll it into the garage down there and leave it. My father was going to be too sick to actually fix it up again. The back was full of spare engine parts. I took them out and put in the two boxes. I don't know how much was there."

  "Could be a million bucks," Charlie said, thinking of the forty thousand he'd given Lo in Shanghai, how he'd been able to slip that into his breast pocket. "Easily, in fact."

  "Could be more," she said. "I think it is."

  "You never counted it?"

  "No, I never had the chance. We had to go, we had to deliver the truck. Rick woke up, said we'd be late . . . so on the way back to New York I'm worrying about what to do. If Tony finds out, then—I don't know, we're in trouble. The delivery was going as planned, though. I could have the truck arrive, but this guy Frankie was going to be the first to unload and would figure out two boxes were missing within a few minutes. First thing he's going to do is call Tony, right? So I'm thinking about it and smoking a million cigarettes and looking out the window and thinking, How am I going to do this? I have to get out of this somehow . . . I realized that if the police arrive, then Tony can't do anything to me. I actually want the police to arrive. I want us to get busted, but I don't want myself to get arrested. I want to get away at the right moment. The problem with that is that there would be other guys from the crew there, and if they get arrested and I don't, one of them will talk. The police will come right after me. I'm not controlling the situation that way."

  He was listening anxiously now. "You wanted it the other way?"

  "Exactly," Christina said. "I realized that I had to get myself arrested, not the other way around. I get myself arrested and the others go free. And if I don't talk, at all, maybe Tony calls the whole thing square. Maybe I'm okay. I could wait a few years if I knew I was safe from Tony and my parents would have the money. It seemed like an okay trade-off. I mean, it was stupid to think that, but I was desperate. We were going to drive in there and everything was going to be fucked up. I'd rather deal with the police than with Tony. He has a sadistic streak."