A Billion Ways to Die (15 page)

We checked ourselves out in a full-length mirror.

“Effeminate punks?” I offered.

“Not the same people who were in that hotel.”

We left the boat house and walked along a path that followed the river bank up to a brick wall, forcing us to go back up to the streets. We made for Massachusetts Avenue, hoping to catch a cab.

What we got instead was a patrol car. It pulled up to the curb several feet ahead of us. Nothing happened, so we kept walking till we passed the car. Twenty feet down the street I gave in and looked back. One cop was on the sidewalk, the other in the passenger seat with the door open. They were talking to a big white guy in a jumpsuit and work boots. Maybe a utility worker. They didn’t look at us. We kept walking until a cab slowed at the curb. We took it.

I asked the cabbie to drive us to the nearest car rental place. He looked it up on his smartphone, then took off with the usual Boston cabdriver abandon, which is to say somewhere just shy of suicidal.

We had to wait until we were in the rented Honda headed west before we could speak freely.

“What do we know?” I asked.

“They called you Mr. Cornwall. The name we used with Jersey and Angus/Ian.”

“Ian dropped a dime on us,” I said.

“Not afraid of losing his wife?”

“Not afraid we’d actually follow through on our threat. He got to know us. Established empathetic connections. Did his psyche ops. He knew we wouldn’t do it.”

“We wouldn’t?”

“Not sure.”

“Were they real FBI?” she asked.

“Not sure there either. Very little backup. The Cambridge cops would have had us in five minutes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

I pondered the damage to our supplies and felt some satisfaction we’d gotten out of there with everything that really mattered. I was happy with myself and with Natsumi. For better or worse, we were becoming highly adept at spontaneous operations, with no words spoken and very little overlap in assumed responsibilities.

Despite what I feared, we hadn’t grown soft during those blessed months afloat in the Caribbean. In fact, our survival instincts had settled in, becoming woven into our natural way in the world.

When we reached Greenwich, the sun was all the way up and the crackle of busy commerce was already well underway. We found a diner with wireless access—an obvious necessity for any establishment in that town—and settled in a booth with eggs, ham and toast on the way.

“We need to be more careful,” I said, after the coffee arrived.

“We do. It’s my fault. I let myself get angry with that Latino mercenary.”

“Anger is human.”

“Fear and anger make you stupid,” she said. “All your life energy flows out of your brain and into your extremities. This so you can better knock someone on the head or run like hell. Nothing left for subtle cognition.”

“We should think more about our physical disposition. Not much room to maneuver on a sailboat or in a hotel room.”

“So let’s get a house,” she said.

I nodded and Natsumi started working on her iPad. Before we finished our meal she’d secured a year’s lease on a four-bedroom custom-built home a few miles from the Andaluskys. It was in the neighboring town of Pound Ridge and also in the woods, though much more remote, being adjacent to both a country club and a wildlife preserve.

“You’ll need to sign the papers and pick up the keys,” said Natsumi. “I say go as the blond hippie.”

I took her suggestion, tempering the look by pulling the fake hair into a ponytail. For no good reason, since the guy at the real estate office barely looked at me. He tossed the keys and rental agreement on the counter and returned my “thank you” with a “yeah.” As so often happened, our ability to slip unnoticed through the world was well served by the bored and resentful.

The house was at the end of a long driveway, and thus invisible from the road, even with the trees stripped down for the winter. It had a three-car attached garage that led into the basement. This at least gave a powerful illusion of security as we brought our bags into the finished basement rec room, complete with a huge couch, TV set, pool table, banners from the last decade’s Super Bowls and a bar. Most importantly for me, it also had two big tables with task lights and power strips. A craft area, I guessed, but ideally suited to a bank of computers and attendant gadgets.

“Shall we check out the rest of the house?” Natsumi asked.

“You go ahead. I’ll be staying here.”

“I’m taking a shower.”

W
HILE
SHE
was gone I used a cell card and my laptop to get online and begin to resupply. Before shopping, I ran a routine checkup on my liquid assets—bank accounts scattered around the country attached to credit and debit cards used for regular and extraordinary expenses. I had about two hundred thousand dollars distributed across these accounts. This was my working capital, fed by much larger amounts tucked away in secure, revenue-generating investments. The checkup was so habitual I could do it half asleep, which I was until a little window popped up on the sign-in screen for one of the accounts declaring, “Access Denied.”

Assuming I’d hit a wrong key, I signed in again and got the same response. I went to reset my user name and password and another message said, “Sorry, Incorrect Information. Please Try Again.” Which I did, to no avail.

So I was forced to take another approach, rarely employed. I called the bank.

The automated voice asked me to enter the account number followed by the PIN number that went with the account. I punched it all in and got another apology and request that I try again. After a second failure, I ran the gauntlet of automated phone support until I reached a living person. I gave her the name and address I’d used to open the account, and the account number.

“I’m sorry, sir. The name and address are incorrect.”

I stared at the Word document where I kept user names and passwords in a code only I could possibly know, since it relied heavily on certain distinct and highly personal memories.

“Maybe the account number is wrong,” I told her.

“There is a checking account with that number. It isn’t under the name you’ve provided.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Nothing, sir. You don’t appear to be a customer.”

“I’ve been using this account for months. I’m definitely a customer.”

She went silent for a few moments, then came back.

“I’m sorry. Are you sure you have the right bank?”

I didn’t need the cheat sheet to remember what I had in that account. Twenty-three thousand dollars. A modest percentage of the whole, but real money.

I hung up the phone and spent the next hour sitting quietly in front of the computer in the basement of the big suburban house, listening for the silent sounds of existential threat.

“W
HAT
DOES
this mean?” asked Natsumi, when she returned from her shower.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think it
might
mean?”

“The account has been compromised or I’ve lost my mind,” I told her.

“I feel like we’re sprinting through a minefield.”

“So what do we do? Stop running?”

“Run faster.”

It took about an hour to restore a secure connection with Strider, the girl hacker. She didn’t seem surprised.

“I thought I’d hear from you again,” she wrote.

“I need another favor.”

“That’s why I thought I’d hear from you.”

“One of my bank accounts has been hijacked,” I wrote.

“Really? Not good.”

“It’s troubling.”

“Send the details and stay away from the bank. I’ll need a clear path.”

“I owe you again,” I wrote.

“And you’ll pay me back.”

T
HE
FEAR
instilled by a sudden loss of money seemed to amplify the shopping impulse. I double-checked the other accounts, then went to town.

First I bought a pair of cars: A silver Toyota Camry and a black Jeep Cherokee.

Then I bought two more laptops, a pair of terabyte external hard drives, a printer, a scanner and wireless router. And a complete video security array that would augment the home security system that came with the house. After hacking a gun shop I knew in Connecticut to secure their FFL (allowing me to ship across state lines), I bought fully automatic M16s, military grade M9 Beretta pistols, Kevlar body armor, black fatigues, white fatigues, carrier vests, night vision, side arms with matching muzzle suppressors, military-grade GPS, and personal communications including radios and headsets.

I was putting the finishing touches on that order when Natsumi came up behind me smelling like soap and moisturizing lotion.

“You shouldn’t go to the grocery store when you’re hungry,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Your feelings of vulnerability are expressing themselves through your credit card.”

I kept reviewing the order.

“Apparently you can’t buy grenades on the open market.”

“Do you actually know how to shoot an assault rifle?”

“No. But you can learn online.”

“Don’t forget food. We’ll need some of that, too.”

The last thing I did that night was send the names and images of the FBI people who knocked on our door in Cambridge to Shelly Gross. I didn’t know if Shelly would help us, protective as he was toward his former employer, no matter what they did to him. Though I knew these feelings were complicated and emotionally convoluted, thus worth testing.

Natsumi talked me into getting a few hours sleep before we went to drop off the rental and pick up the new cars. Since the house had no bedding, we slept on the couch in the basement, the electric heat turned up to compensate for the lack of blankets. Neither of us cared. In fact, we nearly slept through the next day and had to hustle to get our vehicles sorted out and home supplies secured before all the stores closed.

That night we slept in a master bedroom that was bigger than the apartment I grew up in over the storefront in Stamford. It actually echoed. But we were too tired to move and quickly fell into about nine hours of oblivion.

C
HAPTER
14

I
t took the better part of two days to install the video array around the property, load the software and set up the monitors, including an alarm app on my smartphone. In between, I checked on our bank accounts and searched for Alberta using applications that hummed away in the background. We also took a short road trip up to Danbury to pick up our survival gear.

Given the nature of the shipment, having it delivered to the logistics company added an attractive layer of security. It reduced unwanted attention on our new rental and the people who worked there were so robotic the boxes could have been labeled “Parts for Quick Assembly Thermonuclear Device” without raising much curiosity.

I’d contracted with the place during the first few months off the grid, using an exclusive identity now the oldest in my repertoire. In one of their temperature- and humidity-controlled warehouses I’d stored several hundred thousand dollars worth of vintage guitars—my untraceable, easily liquidated source of backup funding. I left the cache undisturbed on that trip, though I made a mental note to establish current value by checking the inventory against advertised comparables. I did learn, however, when thinking out loud about this, that Natsumi knew how to play acoustic guitar.