A Billion Ways to Die (27 page)

“Who are you talking about?” she asked, clearly exasperated.

“Him. The hacker with the Asian woman.”

There was a longer silence this time.

“That’s impossible,” she finally said.

“The hell it is. Those fucking mercs double-crossed us. I never trusted those bastards.”

“They were your idea,” she said, in a tone that nearly froze the phone line.

“You didn’t have anything better,” he shot back, the stress building in his voice.

“Tell me more about this imposter,” she said evenly, pulling back from the impending argument.

“He was a researcher Gyawali picked up. I needed someone to run analytics out of this office. So I got this smart son-of-a-bitch, though kind of a loose cannon. He’s the right age, but had this big head of hair and thick glasses. ’Course you have wigs.”

“Chuck,” she said to him, the way you’d address a defiant teenager, “don’t you remember what our Basque friend said about this guy? He’s a world-class hacker, and he’s been inside your building, on your servers.”

It was his turn to pause in silence.

“Shit,” he said. “The phone.”

“Dammit,” she said, and hung up.

That was the last call he made. I tried to switch over to his company e-mail account, but it was gone. Not locked up, or defended by a new password. Gone, like it never existed. I switched again, this time to Andalusky’s home computer. Also gone.

I tried to slip into Fontaine’s servers with Brian’s administrative log-ins, with no luck. I checked the GPS monitors stuck to Chuck and Okayo’s cars, and they were gone. As were the video monitors I’d set up outside their house, though I knew that already, having checked on my circuitous route back home.

It was as if everything I’d done in the last few weeks was a hallucination. As if I’d been living inside a massive delusion.

Prompted by such thoughts, I checked in on our finances. The investment accounts were all there, but another two bank accounts had disappeared. About thirty-eight thousand dollars had evaporated.

“Fuck,” I yelled, slamming the top of the table with my open palm.

Natsumi, who’d drifted away as I worked at the computer, ran back down the stairs to the basement.

“What.”

I gave her the news.

“Have you heard from Strider?” she asked, reminding me I’d asked the young hacker to look into the original vanishing account.

“No. Now I’m afraid to contact her again.”

“What’s happening?” Natsumi asked, her voice nearly a register below normal.

“It’s coming apart.”

“What?”

“They’re breaching the outer perimeter. Eventually, they’ll get to the core.”

“Who are they?” she asked.

“I don’t know. And now I’ve lost Andalusky. Fontaine’s security is sweeping up after him. Very effectively. We’re cut off. Weeks of work gone poof.”

“But we’re smarter,” she said.

She was right. We’d identified Alberta as Albalita, confirmed her connection with Andalusky and acquired convincing evidence that they’d conspired to capture and do us great harm.

So we knew a lot more, but it was cold comfort, as our security seemed to erode faster than our awareness could increase.

“We can’t go backward,” I said. “It’s too late to stop.”

“I’ll start packing,” said Natsumi, leaving me again with exhilaration, terror and paranoia competing for purchase on my weary heart.

W
E
MADE
one stop at a big international bank where I’d consolidated all our remaining liquid funds, and then subsequently withdrew in fat stacks of traveler’s checks. It took awhile to complete the task, though no one at the bank seemed to think it out of the ordinary, testament to the type of clientele served at that level.

A few hours later we were at JFK airport, inching our way along a serpentine queue that terminated at a podium behind which a humorless TSA agent scrutinized passport photos and the matching human face there before her.

Passing the visual test was of little concern. It was all the other stuff—name, address, date of birth, place of birth, passport number, fraudulent all. The source of the passports came with impeccable credentials, though for all we knew he’d been turned by the authorities and was now in the business of setting snares for his unsuspecting customers.

I hoped we’d perfected a look of bored indifference laced with impatience, which pretty well captured the manner of most international travelers. There was a time when such attitudes mattered little, before the TSA ran software that could spot a possible terrorist by the mood state captured on a security camera.

So I was disappointed when the TSA agency at the podium looked at my passport, then at me, and then asked me to step out of the line. She asked the same of Natsumi.

I held firm to my insouciance and walked with my rolling bag over to where another TSA agent, this one looking very comfortable in a body about twice the size of the woman’s at the podium. While we stood there a third agent brought the large man our passports. He opened them, one in each hand, moving his head back and forth as he absorbed the information.

“You two travelin’ together?” he asked.

“We are.”

“Hm,” he said, nodding. “Married?”

I felt Natsumi stiffen. Our adopted personas by necessity had to be single. The degree of difficulty in obtaining a married pair was nearly insurmountable.

“No,” she said, with an edge of annoyance.

“Jes’ askin’,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the passports. “Stamp says you been to Martinique. Like it there?”

I never had, so I probably stiffened myself.

“On business,” I said.

“My people are from down that way. La Trinité.”

“Never left the resort,” I said. “Wish it weren’t so.”

Natsumi said something in Japanese. I replied with “Don’t worry,” in the same language, two of a handful of words I knew. She nodded, then bowed her head.

“Don’t speak English?” the agent said.

“Of course she does,” I said. “She’s just nervous we’ll miss our plane.”

He smiled.

“I was stationed four years in Okinawa,” he said. “I know the lingo for ‘airplane.’ ”

“So, is there a problem?” I asked.

“Prob’ly not,” he said, then looked directly at Natsumi, and said, “Dealer’s holdin’ a king and a five. Player’s got an ace showin’. Who folds?”

Natsumi cocked her head, her face a torment of unease.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I do not understand. What is a king of a five?”

His laugh was more of a grunt. He handed us our passports.

“Have a nice flight,” he said. “And keep this kid out of the casinos, if they got ’em over there in Switzerland.”

“I have no idea,” I said, fussing with my passport and luggage and fawning over my timid Japanese girlfriend, who, once we were clear of the security, said, “Fucking asshole.”

I shook my head, warning her into silence, broken only when we were on the plane as it rumbled down the runway.

“What just happened?” Natsumi asked.

“They’re looking for a Caucasian male traveling with a female Japanese blackjack dealer,” I said.

“Why not just hold us till they’re sure?”

“We’re not the only mixed-race couple traveling today. They’d have to hold dozens for hours. The media would have a field day. He had to make a quick call. He’ll duly note the stop in his regular report. They’ll have video images. It’ll all be processed through a central database. We still have a seven-hour flight and have to get through Swiss customs. Plenty of time for things to go awry.”

So it was a less-than-relaxing trip over the Atlantic. Natsumi took full advantage of the beverage service in business class while I built and discarded scenarios. The prevailing stereotype of researchers is of coldly dispassionate, computer-like people bolted irrevocably to the available facts. That’s part of the story. But it doesn’t account for hypotheses. What-ifs and if-thens. This requires the ability to imagine, to extract, often out of pure ether, possibilities and potentials. Einstein famously claimed he began with an answer, a version of nature that to others would appear in utter conflict with observed reality. Then he’d backfill the math, the proof that his mad vision was in fact the true state of being.

And Einstein’s visions were nearly common sense when compared to the prophesies of the quantum physicists. Among their many incomprehensible theories was that every action, no matter how small, had an infinite number of possible outcomes. Even that each of these was actually realized in an infinite number of universes. Fine, I thought, mulling this. We don’t need infinite answers to the anguishing questions before us. Just one will do. The right one.

C
HAPTER
21

A
fter the aggressive brio of the New York TSA, the dignified Swiss almost made the airport gauntlet refreshing. I wasted mental energy studying the customs agents’ faces as they studied our passports, and then let us through without hesitation. It wasn’t until we were in the cab on the way into the city that I felt the grip on my nerves ease up a little.

“Hypervigilance,” said Natsumi, when I shared my feelings. “With physical exercise, repetitive stress on your body makes you stronger. Constant stress on your nervous system has the opposite effect. It’s why virtually no soldier will last more than a few months of steady combat without succumbing to some sort of psychological degradation, PTSD or what have you.”

“That doesn’t make me happy.”

“Shelly was right. You think the rules don’t apply to you. But no one can live as we’ve been living and stay the same. As your resilience decays, your sensory sensitivity is sharpened and your environmental awareness becomes far more acute than necessary. I’m seeing it happen to you, and feel it happening to me. But there’s no shame in it. We’re human after all.”

“I can’t have it fog up my brain.”

“I certainly haven’t seen that. Maybe the rules don’t apply to you.”

When we got to the hotel, I abandoned a long-held jet lag strategy by lying flat on my back and passing out. When consciousness eventually returned, it was slow going, weighed down by lingering fatigue and cluttered with the fractured remnants of frantic dreams. It took longer than usual to place where I was, but it all came back abruptly when I saw Natsumi come out of the bathroom wearing only a towel on her head.

She told me she’d sat in a chair and watched me until night fell, then she passed out, and both of us were gone to the world until the following day.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“You slept about eighteen hours. How do you feel?”

“Less vigilant.”

She joined me on the bed and helped complete the waking-up process. I knew I was merely freshened and hardly cured of my nervous exhaustion, but I took it as a gift and a warning that I probably wouldn’t get another one until the state of our lives was resolved, one way or another.

I
T
ONLY
took a few minutes to restore full computer operations using my laptop and a solid state, terabyte external hard drive. I didn’t bother trying to check on Chuck Andalusky’s home and office e-mail accounts, or his telephone conversations, knowing they were now securely locked up with new passwords, and fearing the possibility Fontaine’s security people had a way to detect and trace infiltrators.

I was about to check my own e-mail when a little window popped up, alerting me that a message had hit the mailbox I’d set up to communicate with Shelly Gross. With a mixture of pleasant anticipation and dread, I clicked on the window.

“Let’s meet on the
Quaibrücke
. Half hour from the time you respond.”

It was signed Captain Perry.

“Ah!” I yelled.

“What?” asked Natsumi, alarmed.

I felt heat spread across my chest and a bell literally ring in my ears. So much for a respite from hypervigilance.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck what?” she asked, looking over my shoulder. “Oh fuck.”

According to the GPS on my smartphone,
Quaibrücke
was a bridge in the city that crossed the head of the Limmat River where it poured out of Lake Zurich.

“What does this mean?” Natsumi asked.