A Billion Ways to Die (25 page)

I sat at her desk and attempted to breathe normally, steady breaths despite the pull of the duct tape, and compose myself for whatever would come next.

Which turned out to be a knock on the door.

C
HAPTER
19

I
actually opened the window the allowable few inches, proving the impossibility of fitting through. Even if I could, the four-story fall would surely kill me, and then there’d be no way to explain the skirt, heels and frothy wig.

So I sat down at Patricia’s small, round conference table and looked at the closed door, disappointed to hear another knock.

“Perdoname
¿
hay alguien en la sala?
Eez anybody here?” came the female voice from the other side of the door.

I got up and opened the door, again holding a wad of tissues to my face.

“Oh, sorry, I come back,” said the tiny woman in a grey uniform armed with an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

“
No, no es una molestia. Voy a salir pronto
,” I said, automatically, using my best version of a female voice, sounding more like a comic imitation of Julia Child than Patricia Cheerborg.

“
Señora, no sabía que hablaba español
.” Madame, I didn’t know you spoke Spanish, she’d said, clearly taken aback.

I kept the tissues firmly planted to my face and shook my head, not daring to risk another word. I pulled on my coat with one hand, grabbed a few files and fled the scene.

Rattled, I started to run down the stairwell to the garage, then forced myself into a more acceptable pace. The click of my heels on the cement stairs sounded like little muffled gunshots.

I made it to the car without encountering anyone. Before starting the engine, I ripped off the wig, took off the heels and tucked the coat around me. There was nothing to be done right then about the makeup, though I made a few feeble attempts with some napkins from the glove compartment, only achieving a few ugly smears across my forehead from the eyeliner and an unwelcome mouthful of lipstick.

You had to go through a gate on the way into the parking lot, but luckily, not on the way out, which I always found curious, but in this case highly convenient. I kept to a reasonable speed as I drove out of the complex, though once hitting the public road, I let myself give it a little extra gas on the way to the highway, and after that, the quick trip up to the blessed woods of Pound Ridge.

T
HE
NEXT
day, when Andalusky turned on his computer, the first thing it asked him for was his user name and password. When he typed these in, it unlocked his computer, giving him entrée to most of the corporation’s file servers and his e-mail account, which lived on the Internet up in the cloud. The user name and password were also transmitted through a mini network within his office group, and thus well inside the corporate firewall, to a common administrative file that had lain dormant since the system had been installed. A split second after this file received the information, the communications link disappeared and the app slid back into the cyber shadows.

Seconds after that, I opened the administrative file from my office desktop using Brian’s system administrator permissions. I copied the information, then deleted the file and purged all sign of its existence from the directories.

Using Andalusky’s e-mail address and password, I went to the e-mail provider in the cloud and created a duplicate of his account with its own login instructions. This I could access from anywhere at any time.

Although this contrivance was theoretically invisible to the company’s security measures, I thought it better to wait until I got home to start exploring.

So all that was left to do that day was to wait impatiently for it to end.

B
ACK
AT
my table full of computers in the house in Pound Ridge, I poured what I thought would be the final cup of coffee of the day and brought up Chuck’s e-mail. The first thing I did was type the name Alberta into the search box, though before I could type past “Alb” about a thousand e-mails appeared on the screen, the name Albalita highlighted in brilliant yellow.

Albalita Suarez, Executive Director, The People Project. The institution into which Okayo poured her zeal and devotion, where she sat on the board of directors.

I went to their website and in a few moments had a portrait of Albalita, in starkly professional suit and expression to match the gravity of her mission—to bring health and social well-being to the world’s poor through the opportunity to be financially independent and secure. To us, she was Alberta, the woman on the fishing boat in the Caribbean, whose mission was to abuse, terrify, interrogate and then condemn Natsumi and me to death.

I couldn’t help but note the apparent disconnect.

I
MANAGED
to read a few hundred of the e-mails between Chuck and Albalita, starting from the earliest dates and working forward in time, before falling asleep on the keyboard. The story they told was of the wealthiest power on Earth, the US Federal Government, in a complex dance with the planet’s poorest individuals.

That the notion of winning hearts and minds has become easily lampoonable doesn’t mean it isn’t essential if any largescale military power hopes to succeed in a conflict with a weaker, yet culturally cohesive local population. So the central planners in huge, air-conditioned concrete buildings in Washington, eager to find a supplement to the tanks, drones and infantrymen to hurl into foreign communities, saw a lot of merit in The People Project’s approach to hurling money at their constituencies.

Not hurling so much as scattering, as one does when hand-seeding a garden. As a concept, microfinancing is relatively simple. Rather than lending large amounts to big institutions which are then charged with providing services to the general population, you lend tiny amounts to thousands of individuals directly so they can put the money to work in the most effective and efficient way possible. At the same time, you foster personal responsibility and a sense of self-reliance on the part of the borrowers, teaching them the particulars of good money management while bringing them into the larger financial universe.

Those in the federal government who thought this was a good idea also knew executing such a program was well beyond the logistical capability of the State Department or the Pentagon, or any other government agency, even the United Nations. In an unusual moment of thoughtfulness and clarity, someone decided this was a job for specialists, people who understood the staggering administrative challenges to qualifying applicants, then lending to and collecting from people who often lived on dirt floors and whose greatest financial asset might be a single goat.

So even the selection of the right subcontractor in this case fell to another organization that had proven its talent for sourcing anything and everything, worldwide.

The Société Commerciale Fontaine.

As it turned out, the man in charge of dispensing these contracts had only to travel the width of the marital bed to find the perfect enterprise. To circumvent conflict-of-interest charges, he put the assignment out to bid. Okayo publicly recused herself from the decision making and The People Project mounted a robust and ultimately successful campaign to win the contract, led by their executive director, Albalita Suarez.

Thus began a fruitful relationship between the dispensers of US foreign aid, their fiduciary—contractor Fontaine—and The People Project as the NGO specialist in the field. In the process, a billion and a half dollars found its way into the hands of millions of impoverished people throughout the world striving to build more financially secure, self-sustaining lives.

Out of this success came a strong mutual regard between Chuck and Albalita. It grew more intense and demonstrative with every milestone achieved, every triumph celebrated. As I concentrated on the messages there was nothing that would reconcile the reality expressed in these e-mails and what had happened to Natsumi and me.

No wonder I succumbed to exhaustion.

I
DROVE
into work the next day, resisting the urge to go deeper into Andalusky’s e-mail. I was fairly bludgeoned by lack of sleep, my late night in front of the computer made worse by waking up early to brief Natsumi. She took it all in, made coffee and entreated me to be careful.

“I know you always are,” she said. “It just makes me feel better saying it.”

Everything else about the morning was routine. I pulled into my usual parking spot, used my ID badge to get through the employee entrance turnstile and said hello to the guard, carrying my briefcase and coffee mug freshened at a deli along the way. Everything routine but for the security guy standing outside my office and the other one suddenly walking behind me.

“Good morning, Mr. Goldman,” said the guy at the door. “Could you come with us please?”

He moved away from the door and I felt a gentle herding vibe from the other man, so I followed along compliantly, feeling a brief urge to dive down a passing stairwell, though I knew I’d be pinned to the floor before I had a chance to take half a step.

As we walked I took out my smartphone and speed-dialed Natsumi’s panic phone. I let it ring three times, then hung up and put the phone away before the security people decided they should stop me.

We went through an unmarked door into an area that housed the security detail. Faces looked up from desks as we walked through to a conference room, where Ansell Andersen sat with a laptop computer facing away from him, as if prepared to give a presentation. Which he was.

They stood behind me while I sat in front of the computer. Ansell looked either jubilant or argumentative, which for him was likely one and the same.

“Hello, Ansell,” I said to him. “What’s up?”

“The jig, if you can call it that,” he said.

He stood up and tapped on the computer’s space bar, typed in the code to unlock it, and up popped a video of Martin Goldman, my old classmate, being interviewed by an Asian woman on what looked like a television newscast. I noticed Marty looked pretty good, and not much like me despite my effort at disguise. I didn’t follow the content of the interview very well, distracted as I was by a nearly overwhelming surge of fight/flight.