by Jim Beegle
I will only ask one favor of you. If you would not mind, now that you know where they are, please visit Vera and Little David and make sure someone is taking care of their place for me. I have not seen them in such a long time. Be careful Mark, and be wise. I trust you to do things with this money that I could not.
David Albert Cameron
October 26th, 2015
Chapter Four
Mark stared at the computer screen for several long minutes. He just sat there looking at the device, physically not knowing what else to do. He had heard people say that in times of great stress or trauma they were too stunned to even think. Mark had never believed that could happen. That is, until now. He sat, not thinking, not reading, not even moving his eyes. He just stared blankly at the computer’s color monitor. Finally, the screen on the computer went blank, the screensaver kicking in after more than fifteen minutes of inactivity; Mark began to stir.
He sat up and moved his finger on the track pad in order to reactivate the screen. Slowly he opened and looked at the additional files on the disk. Just as Cecil had promised, they were records of the money and the numbers for the accounts where it was parked. Most of it seemed to be right here in the Commonwealth International Bank. There were several other files on the disk, but he gave them only a brief glance. It appeared that most of the remaining files were an elaborate and detailed history of where the money had been in its previous incarnation. However, there was no other mention of its first trip from Houston, some twenty-three years ago. Not only had the original ten million plus dollars come to rest in one of these accounts but it had picked up some company on its way here. From the looks of it, it had picked up lots of company.
As he pondered the incredible amount of money Cecil had earned over the last decades, Mark glanced at the clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. It read 3:45 p.m. He sat up with a start. It was an hour earlier here, making it almost five o’clock local time. He had been in the bank for almost six hours. He had been sitting in the conference room for well over five of those hours and was beginning to think that maybe he should call it a day when there was a knock on his door. Mr. Roddy stuck his head in partway and spoke. “Doing all right, sir?”
“Yes, thank you Jonus” Mark said. His voice was thick, hoarse from the tobacco smoke and the fact that he had not spoken a word for several hours. “Yes, I’m fine. Am I right; you’d like to close the shop and go home?” Jonus just smiled.
“Mr. Lawrence said you were a very bright fellow. Are you through with this?” He pointed at the box. Mark nodded in reply.
“For the time being.” he answered.
“Would you mind helping me get it back to the vault then? And please call me Jon if you like.”
Mark said he didn’t mind at all and was grateful for the excuse to move around. He took the papers he had removed from the safety deposit box and put them in his briefcase. He powered down his computer, removed the disk, and put it in the briefcase before he moved to get the cart from the side of the room. They moved past the guard once again and into the vault replacing the box into its empty hole. This task complete, Jon walked ahead of Mark back to the small, airless room where he had spent the afternoon.
“Do you have any questions so far? Anything I can do for you?” Jon asked.
“I’m sure I will, Jon, but for the moment I’m tired and it’s hard to think when I get that way.” Mark told a half-truth. “I wonder if I could come back in the morning?”
“Most certainly,” Mr. Roddy said. “Unfortunately I will be detained with other matters. I tell you what you do, when you get here tomorrow, please ask for Qurral. She is my assistant. I will tell her you are coming and she will expect you.”
“Thank you, that is very kind of you.”
“Oh, it is entirely my pleasure. She will tell me when you are here and I will make some time to visit a bit more and see if you have any questions.”
“Again that is very kind of you,” Mark said. “By the way, thank you also for all your time today and for lunch. It was very considerate.” Jon smiled in acceptance of the compliment. They walked to the front of the building. Jonus asked Mark if he needed a ride or if he could get him a cab. Mark politely declined both offers.
He had tried to pay attention to the short route he had ridden that morning and decided to walk back to the hotel. He needed the movement and he needed to think. The two men shook hands and Mark walked out into the afternoon sun. Instantly he believed the young lady who had told him of the expected high temperature for the day. He had not walked far before he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. A few hundred feet more and he had removed the coat and it was thrown over his shoulder, holding it with his unoccupied hand. By the time he had gone a half a mile the shirt under his arms had turned dark with sweat. Mark was unaware of it all. He was lost in the narrative that he had just spent the last few hours reading. His mind was still trying to come to grips with what his departed friend had just revealed to him and what his friend had left for him before departing.
He finally made his way back to the hotel and wandered through the lobby/casino to the elevator bank. It wasn’t until the cool air from the room air conditioning system that had been pumping since he left hit him in the face that Mark realized that he was back where he had started that morning. The maid or maids had come and ministered to his room. It was now in the same condition that he had found it the day before when he checked in, with the exception of his shaving kit laying on the vanity of the sink. Mark laid his coat on a chair in the sitting room and put the briefcase on the round table near the bar. He went to the mini-bar and used the assigned key he fished from his pocket to unlock it and selected another locally brewed beer. He opened the twist-off top from the bottle as he walked through the bedroom to the window where he had stood to drink his beer from the evening before. He stood at the window for a long moment before once again he lifted the bottle in a salute to Cecil, and then just shook his head and took a long pull from the neck of the bottle.
He finished the first beer quickly, pouring it into himself more than actually drinking it. He found another and cringed when he thought about how much this was costing him. Beer from the mini-bars had two things in common: they were handy and they were very expensive. When this thought crossed his mind he laughed out loud when he remembered what he had discovered at the bank a few hours earlier. All of a sudden the beer was not as costly as it had been the night before. He consumed the second more slowly.
Mark pulled a chair from the table in the front room of his suite and sat in it, still working on the second beer.
He sat for several hours rereading the story and trying to understand the man he thought he knew. He wanted to bring reason to the actions Cecil had taken in his life. Why had he chosen him to leave the story and the money to? Had there been others Cecil had considered? Who else knew about all this? To the last question, he was sure that he knew the answer: There was no one that Cecil had told. Of this he was pretty sure. They had known each other for over a year and had seen each other almost every day. Cecil had managed to keep all of this a secret from him. Mark wanted to believe that it was to protect him. And part of him did believe that. Another part of him reasoned that for over twenty years Cecil had managed to keep all of this a secret, and continuing to do so had become second nature to him. It would have been almost impossible for Cecil to break his self-imposed rules of silence. It had become a way of life for the older man. And it was dangerous for all concerned.
Just as with the session in the bank time had ceased to exist; Mark realized that several hours had gone by while he pondered the story. It was almost midnight when he stopped to glance at the clock once again. It was late and, although he did not feel tired, it would be best if he went to bed anyway. He took a shower to help himself relax and then went straight to bed.
He tossed and turned for almost an hour. Sleep would not come to him no matter how hard he t
ried. Finally, in resignation, he got up out of bed and pulled on his pants. He walked to the window and looked out into the night. The sky was clear and the beach was lit by the moon and by the lights from the hotel. A thought passed through Mark’s mind and he went to the wardrobe, pulled on a shirt and laced up a pair of less than new Nikes. He made sure he had his room key and his wallet in his pocket before he walked out the door to the room and to the elevator. When it deposited him into the lobby, Mark walked to the patio and down a set of concrete stairs that lead directly to the beach. He paused only for a moment to orient himself before heading north, away from the hotel and into the darkness of the night.
Soon the noise and the light faded behind him. After walking several minutes the first thing he became aware of was he was not alone. Even at this time of night, or actually morning, he corrected himself, there were still people strolling the beaches. Young lovers who could not get enough of the beach or each other; older lovers who wanted so much to think that the night air and sea sounds held magic and arousal. He could hear a girl laugh in the darkness up ahead of him. After a point, he realized that he was the only one walking alone. That loneliness closed in around him like the darkness of the night. It surrounded him and assaulted him like the cold breeze coming off the water.
He had felt Cecil’s presence for most of the day and a good part of the evening. When he was reading his friend’s story, he had felt the older man with him. He could see Cecil planning all this out almost a month ago. Carefully putting the documents into the envelopes. Writing the long letter to him he had read twice that day. Trying to predict how Mark would act and react. Mark smiled to himself. Even from the grave Cecil was still playing chess with him and trying to hide his moves. Cecil had enjoyed himself preparing this surprise for him, Mark was sure of it.
At some point during the second reading of the letter Mark had made up his mind that he was going to be mad at his friend, but even now the resolve melted and drifted off with the out-going tide. It had been exciting to spend this one last day with his friend. Now, however, he was sorrowfully sure of one thing. Something that he had tried to pretend had not happened. Cecil or David or whoever he was, was now gone. He was gone for good and forever. Gone also was the question of who the man really was. He now knew exactly who that man had been: his friend. The knowledge of the fact that at last his friend was dead left Mark feeling very alone. He missed Amy.
He needed her. He wanted to hold her and just feel her contact with him. The final laying to rest of Cecil, the confusion in his mind, and the fact that he was over a thousand miles away from anyone he knew and places that were familiar to him, caused the loneliness to creep even closer. It would be fun to have her company and to enjoy being with her for a while. Especially now.
Where was she, he thought? Paris, Moscow, Germany? To be honest, he didn’t really know. As his mind dwelled on his wife, another reality began to take shape in his thinking. This one rooted more in the reality of the passing months than on the wistful desire of the moment. This new thought was just as painful as finally accepting that Cecil was gone. He knew, even as he stood in the darkness wishing for her company. Amy was drifting not closer to him but farther away. Actually, since he was being brutally honest with himself, he finally admitted they had already drifted very far apart. And there was nothing he could do about it anymore.
He began to wonder how much longer she would need him, or if she even still did? How much longer would she tolerate having him around before she decided that, just like their old house and his friend Cecil, he did not fit her lifestyle and image? In order to force his mind away from the subject of Amy and the decline of their marriage, he turned his thinking back to the problem of what lay in the safety deposit box at the bank just a few miles from where he stood. Finally, the engineer in him woke up and came to his rescue. He had a problem that needed a solution. He needed a plan, to deal with what to do next, and he now realized he needed one fast.
Engineering, even the new branches of software engineering, was a study in failure. When an engineer designs a new type of bridge he or she has no real idea what complex series of events will come into play to bring destructive forces upon the thing. So as a hedge most engineers give it their best guess as to what may happen and then they simply double or in some cases triple their estimates—choosing to err on the side of caution. In short, the first of any new kind of bridge is vastly over-engineered for its purpose.
After the new structure is stretched across the water, the job of the engineer is to start shaving things off of the design, continually altering the matrix between what is cost-effective to build and at what point the thing is no longer safe. The next bridge of this new type will be built with fewer rivets, or not as many strands in the cables that hold it together. Most of the time the engineers know where to stop. But sometimes they don’t. When they don’t know, or when they guess wrong, things tend to literally fall apart. It’s just a simple law of physics.
The first thing an engineer needs to know before going forward with any project is what had driven the need for this project in the first place. So he/she starts at the beginning: why is a bridge even needed in this particular spot? The beginning of what the engineer’s mind has now conceded is simply the problem of applying the proper equations, is exactly where Mark found himself. In order for him to decide what to do from this point on, he needed to know what had happened up to this point. The why’s and how’s and who’s of this particular problem.
Mark knew the who, and he knew something about the how. The why was still a big question in his mind, but for the time being he was willing to accept Cecil’s/David’s explanation of things. It made for an easier thought process that way. He began reviewing what he knew of Cecil before this morning and what he knew now. He played and replayed the letter over in his mind. There was something about his description of the bank in Houston that caught his attention but for the life of him he could not figure out what it was. Patience, he told himself, don’t force it. Put it aside and sneak up on the answer. Besides, for the time being, it wasn’t important. Or was it? He had a niggling feeling somewhere in the back of his mind that it was important.
His mind, and more importantly his heart, had finally managed to shake off the shock of what he had learned the day before, as well as his own admission regarding his marriage to Amy. Now, despite the lateness of the hour, the engineer in him was fully awake. Detaching himself from the actual problem and looking at it from a distance allowed him to analyze it objectively. It gave him focus. A way to push Cecil’s death and the failing state of his marriage off into an area of his mind that would not interfere with his conscious thinking. It was now something that would keep his mind busy and off the heaviness of his heart … least for the moment. He now had problems to be considered and scenarios for solutions to be reviewed and examined. He had work to do and that was all he needed to pull himself out of the funk that had slowly descended on him.
Cecil was gone. No amount of wishing him back would change that. Amy was not gone but was slipping away and no amount of effort on his part, he finally admitted to himself, was going to change that either. It was time to move on. He had a problem and one that involved very real and tangible issues. Actually, he had millions of dollars’ worth of problems, plus interest. He had to decide what to do with it and then how to do it once he decided what to do. And hope he made the right decisions.
The digital alarm clock beside his bed told him it was two forty-five when he let himself back in his room and undressed for bed a second time. He called the front desk and asked for a wake-up call for seven thirty. He also informed the night manager that he would be checking out later that morning. He would finish what he had to do in the morning and head back to Dallas on the afternoon flight, changing once more in Miami.
Less than five hours later the phone beside his bed rang and Mark went through the same tortured motions he had the morning before to get it to stop. A young female
voice, he could not tell if it was the same woman as before, once again told him the time and temperature as if she worked for a bank. With an effort, borne of not getting more than four and a half hours of sleep, he shuffled off to the bathroom to make coffee and to take a shower. After a quick shave, he dressed in a compromise of clothes. Nice enough to go back to the bank later that morning but comfortable enough to endure being in them for the long series of flights and the trip back to his home in Dallas. Once dressed he repacked his suitcase, quickly looking around the room out of habit that came from the experience learned from frequent travels to make sure he was not leaving anything behind. Once satisfied he had all that was his, Mark carried his suitcase into the sitting room. Leaving the suitcase by the door, he parked himself in the chair he had worked from the night before and booted up his computer.
Immediately after starting the boot-up procedure the computer beeped loudly to announce that it was currently running on reserve battery power. Grumbling slightly Mark fished through his briefcase and extracted the AC power cord. He connected one end to the computer power port and the other end to a wall socket. The system now satisfied that it was being fed the necessary current, it let him proceed with his task.
He verified that he was still connected to the hotel wireless service. Once satisfied he was online, Mark pulled the thumb drive David had left him from his wallet, where he had placed it before leaving the bank and inserted it into the USB port on the laptop.
He decided the night before it would not be wise to leave a copy of it “laying” around either on the USB drive or on his hard drive. Instead, he would leave it in the “cloud.” It would sit relatively close by in cyberspace terms, in the memory of utility servers located literally all over the world. This way it would be easily accessible when he had time to review the files in more detail. In doing this he would have access to a copy of the file but not have to keep it with him at all times. Cecil’s warnings of the day before were beginning to sink in on him. He had to finally admit to himself that there was a lot of money involved and some considerable risk. He had to be careful with it until he decided what to do.
