Cold Winter Rain (9 page)

I landed on my feet facing the bow, the gun straight in front.  The boat rocked from the sudden shift in center of gravity.  Anyone in the cabin would instantly have felt the presence of someone on deck.

For thirty seconds, I didn’t move.  I was partially concealed and protected from anyone coming out of the cabin – or firing from the top of the cabin steps – by the structures on deck.  Slowly, keeping the pilothouse between me and the cabin, I eased forward, squatting on the balls of my feet like a baseball catcher, the gun held in front of me.

I made it across the cockpit to the companionway without seeing or hearing anything below.

“Slate!”

My name boomed over the docks as though the speaker had shouted it through a bullhorn.  It took all the discipline I had to avoid turning my head to search for the shouter.  My eyes remained locked on the companionway exit.

It helped, though, that I recognized the voice.  In a moment, the speaker’s shadow fell across my face, and I knew that Moeller was standing on the catwalk above me.

“
Slate,” he said again, not much quieter.  Moeller’s voice had two levels, loud and painful.  “Yeah.”  I said it without turning my head.

“
There’s nobody down there, man.  You can stop the cops-and-robbers shtick.  I know it’s fun, but, really, I already checked.”  He jumped down and landed lightly on the deck, came around and opened the companionway door.  “See?  Nobody home.”

I lowered the gun to my side, mostly because Moeller was now in the line of fire.  “All right,” I said.  “You checked.  When?”

“Early this morning.  I had started out to get beignets and chicory coffee at Cafe Beignets, and I saw the lifeline was down.  Tried to call you but your cell phone was off.  Nobody there then either, but – well – you’ll see.  They trashed the place.”

I stepped down the companionway and peered inside.

“Trashed” is part of the contemporary argot, but it was not quite an apt description.  “Searched” would've been better.

It looked as though every object in the place, including paper ones – especially including paper ones – had been picked up, looked at, then thrown to the cabin deck.

I held onto the companionway rail to avoid having to set foot on the mess.

Moeller’s face appeared in the rectangle of light above me.  “Sorry, my friend.  I didn’t want to touch anything until you had been here.  Would you like some help cleaning up?”

I swung myself back up on deck.  “No.  I appreciate it, but this is something I have to do.  How about tomorrow morning?  I need to talk to you.  You going to be around?”

Moeller stepped up onto the dock, did an about-face, and threw me a two-fingered salute. “You got it, Captain.  See you in the morning.”

Boats at anchorage are hardly the most secure homes.  The marina during the day was full of good people, captains and boat hands and waitresses and fishermen and diesel mechanics who tried to watch out for each other, but most of the boats rode empty after sundown, and a sheriff’s patrol car managed to drive by only once a night.

An unoccupied boat is an invitation to thieves.  Boat owners know this.  Smart boat owners keep little of value on their boats.

I opened the companionway and got to work.

One thing I knew for sure:  the only important document on the boat was the ship’s log.  A boat without a log was like an airplane without logbooks.  Worth something, no doubt, but worth much less than a boat with intact logs. 

It was also pretty certain that the ship’s log was not what the unscheduled visitors were looking for.  It was equally certain that they knew more about what they were looking for than I did.

I started by picking up every single piece of paper off the cabin deck and laying them out in collated batches on the boat’s table.

Warranties.  Instructions for the ship’s radios.  The GPS manual.  A manual for the ancient but functioning Loran.  A couple of dozen paperback novels.

Down at the bottom of the pile, the ship’s log, lying face down as though someone had held it upside down to shake it, then dropped it on the floor.

The surface of the log binder was leather and might take fingerprints.  So might the companionway rail and other parts of the boat.  But I didn’t have a pair of evidence gloves, and every assistant prosecutor in every DA’s office has had to explain to a jury, or have a witness do it, that finding identifiable fingerprints at a crime scene is rare, even when the perpetrators didn’t wear gloves.

I put the logbook back in its place in the desk.

In the front drawer of the desk, I kept an ancient marine-grade laptop computer.  I was about to close the drawer when I noticed that the little green “on” light on the front of the case was glowing.

I pulled the computer out of the drawer and opened the top.  The screen was dark, the computer in sleep mode.  I pushed the i/o button, and the screen came to life; on the right side was my name, and under it appeared the legend “1 document open.”

  I clicked the document button.  A WordPerfect window opened to a document in which someone had typed in all caps:  IF U KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR U STAY OUT OF THE OIL & GAS BUSNESS.  The author had named the file YOU and saved it to the desktop.

I right-clicked the mouse pad to see if the writer of the note left any more electronic clues.  “Reveal Codes” revealed nothing.  “Properties” told me the document had been created at 4:14 a.m. on January 25.  This morning, probably not long before Moeller went out for coffee and doughnuts.

After cleaning up the boat and going dockside for a sandwich and a cup of gumbo, I returned to my desk and the laptop.

I saved the note to the hard drive in both Word Perfect and rich text format and put both versions in a new folder on the desktop.

I closed Word Perfect, pulled the memory stick Akilah had given me out of my pocket, and inserted it in the USB port on the side of the case.

I clicked on the “My Computer” icon.  The computer recognized the memory stick as a “removable disk” on the E-drive.  I clicked again.  The legend “PASSWORD:  -----------------” appeared on the monitor.

I tried Kramer.  Nothing.  Kris.  Still nothing.  I tried various combinations of the family’s names.  I tried the three initials of Kramer’s law firm:  WWW.  Then Woolf.

This was useless.  I couldn’t tell whether the files were encrypted because I couldn’t get past the password protection.  Did Akilah use the term encrypted when she meant password protected?  Most people who knew enough about computers to use the term “encrypted” wouldn’t confuse that with mere password protection.  Did Akilah know the password?  Had she simply forgotten to give it to me?

I realized I was staring into the depths of the notebook screen.  My eyeballs felt detached from their muscles.  The computer wasn’t going to tell me the password. 

I pulled the memory stick out of the USB port, capped it, and returned it to my pocket.

I drank a glass of water, visited the head, stripped to my underwear, then sat cross-legged on my bunk and meditated for ten minutes.  I stood, stretched the knots out of my legs, and lay down.

Before I started to get drowsy, I rolled over on my side, pulled the Glock out of its holster, and placed it on the floor next to the bunk.

In the old days when Anna and David were alive, I’d kept a loaded semi-automatic on a bedside table on my side of the big four-poster bed Anna and I had shared.  A loaded pistol kept in a house with a child present isn’t dangerous if the owner of the pistol applies knowledge and common sense.

Trigger locks are fashionable and politically correct – if anything associated with triggers is politically correct – but clumsy, slow, and dangerous if the gun is locked and the intruder is already in the house.

The pistol on my bedside table in my other life had been a Colt’s Government-model .45.  I’d never left it cocked in the house.

Without a round in the chamber, that fine old gun was less dangerous than the heavy brass lamp on the bedside table.  No young child – and for that matter, not so many women – possessed the grip strength to pull back the slide and cock the big Colt’s.  The only way a kid could hurt himself with it would have been to drop it on his toe.

And I had practiced enough to know that I could cock the gun, flip off the safety, and fire it in less than a second.

But I wasn’t lying on my bed beside my wife in our four-bedroom neo-Colonial anymore.  I was in a bunk on a small boat.  The distance between me and the companionway hatch could be measured in two heartbeats.

For this purpose, I’d take Gaston Glock’s design over Samuel Colt’s any day.  With a round in the chamber and no safety except the unique little pressure device on the trigger’s tip, holding a Glock in your hand is like having a gun barrel in your index finger.

I slept a pleasant sleep without dreams.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thursday January 26

Hans Moeller had grown up in Zurich.  Six-two, rangy, with close-cropped blond hair and scant white eyebrows, Moeller was graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology -- the same undergraduate school from which Albert Einstein was graduated sixty years earlier.  Moeller, however, by his account, had been a better student.  He had later invented some indispensable process or product for making clocks tick or computers compute or doodads do – he never had explained exactly what – and made a fortune or two and retired.

Now Moeller divided his time between Switzerland and his forty-three foot Cheoy Lee motor sailer.  The
Billy Tell
spent its winters on the Gulf Coast, sometimes hauling charter clients to the small islands the big cruise ships couldn’t touch, mostly serving as a live-aboard when Moeller wanted a break from the snow, as seemed to be the case now.

Late every April, Moeller would show up with a crew member or two or three he had collected on the slopes or in the shops of the Bahnhofstrasse – somehow always tan, female, and blonde – and they would sail around the Florida cape and slide down the Caribbean archipelago, sometimes as far as Caracas, before heading back north on the western side of the Windwards, around Cuba, and back up the intracoastal waterway or offshore, as the mood struck him, and back to Orange Beach.

Moeller’s schedule seemed backwards to me until I’d visited him in Zurich and Gstaad one January.  After that it made perfect sense. 

We sat in the cockpit of the
Billy Tell
just before sunrise, steaming mugs of coffee in hand, watching the dockyard begin to come to life.  Moeller’s boat did not have a permanent home on the Redneck Riviera.  The marina considered him a seasonal visitor, and this year they had assigned him slip F-18.

“
So, Slate, aside from your latest intrigue, how are things with you?  Are you ready for the introductions?”

Every spring, Moeller offered to set me up with one or perhaps more of his active crew members.  Every spring I told him I would let him know.

“Have you ever seen the old Burt Reynolds movie called
Smokey and the Bandit
?”

“
Who is Burt Reynolds?”

“
I’ll accept that as a negative answer.”  Moeller has certain gaps in his familiarity with American popular culture.  “Anyway, in that movie, or maybe it’s in the sequel, the actor Burt Reynolds portrays a redneck character with a fast car who bedevils local law enforcement.  In one scene, the sheriff, having stopped the car for the umpteenth time, is asking the Reynolds character whether he has any fears.  ‘I ain’t afraid of but two things,’ Reynolds says.  ‘What’s that?’ says the sheriff.  ‘Women and the police.’”

Moeller just nodded.  Perhaps only rednecks – approximately eighteen per cent of the United States population, according to a study I read that called us “Anglo-Irish” – can appreciate this sort of humor.  “And what do you fear, Slate?”

“Those are a subset of the one set of entities in the universe worthy of anyone’s fear  –
homo sapiens
.”

“
Fearsome creatures.”

“
And you, my friend?”

He swept his arm about in a broad gesture that took in the entire marina.  “That it is all going to end badly in the none-too-distant future.”

“Not the asteroids again.”  Among Moeller’s hobbies was tracking near-earth objects using a rooftop observatory at his chalet in the Alps and a computer program he had written.

“
No, my friend.  The odds of a catastrophic strike are long except on a very distant time frame.  Earth is three-quarters water, and most of the land mass is uninhabited.  Though I’d feel better about my calculations if we had identified all the objects in the asteroid belt and if we didn’t keep losing track of the ones we’ve already found.  No, this scenario, I’m afraid, carries a much higher probability.”

He sipped his coffee.  “I came back to the States directly from a meeting with my bankers in Zurich.”

“That’s something I will never be able to say.”

“
No.  Not anymore, not after your government’s pursuit of UBS and enactment of a law requiring foreign banks to provide information to the IRS prompted the Swiss banks to cease offering accounts to U.S. citizens.  But you can still benefit from my bankers’ advice.”

“
Which is?”

“
Prepare.”

“
For?”

“
Economic collapse.  Financial Armageddon.  The coming New Dark Ages.”  Moeller smiled.  “Being Swiss bankers, of course they don’t use those terms.  Nevertheless, what they say is that this time, it really is different.  What’s happening in the Eurozone because of the debts run up by the peripheral economies is just the overture.  The larger economies, particularly the United States and Japan, have finally amassed so much debt that the Keynesian techniques the central bankers used during most of the twentieth century are no longer available.”

“
Well, Japan has that demographic problem.”

“
Yes, forty years from now Japan’s population will be thirty per cent smaller than it is now.  That problem for now is unique to Japan -- it comes later for China, but China will suffer from its own demographic bomb about mid-century --  but it’s still significant because Japan is the world’s third largest economy.  And it has the world’s largest sovereign debt.  But I digress.”

“
Go on then.”

“
In the past, reserve banks used money creation and low interest rates to accelerate growth out of a recession.  But this recession is the deepest since the Great Depression, and it’s not just a growth recession.  It’s an asset deflation recession.  In the United States, the Fed has expanded its balance sheet with risky assets and used what my bankers call ZIRP -- the Zero Interest Rate Policy.”

“
Bankers enjoy their acronyms almost as much as geeks do.”

“
Bankers are geeks.  At least, Swiss bankers are.  I don’t believe you could say that about, say, Atlanta bankers, or even the so-called investment bankers at the likes of Goldman Sachs.  The investment banks do keep a few pet geeks about, though.

“
Anyway, the ZIRP and the bond purchases have done little good except for the beginnings of a stock market bubble and the continuation of the Treasury bond bubble.  Banks don’t want to make risky loans, and the contraction of real estate prices reduced loan demand.  But at some point, one of two things will happen.  The Fed will decide it has to end its bond purchases and the ZIRP policy, or the markets, fearing inflation caused by all the money the Fed has printed, or maybe in the face of actual inflation, will take the ZIRP out of the Fed’s hands.  Either way, interest rates will rise.”

“
Okay.  So what happens then?”

“
Game over, my friend.  In the past, the Fed could subdue inflation by raising interest rates.  Paul Volcker, when he was Fed chairman back in the eighties, is the meta-example.  He raised the federal funds rate up to twenty per cent.  My bankers think that without Volcker the United States might have shot into hyperinflation back then.

“
But now the huge U.S. debt creates a ceiling on the Fed’s ability to raise interest rates. At some point on the interest rate curve, neither the United States nor Japan will be able to pay the interest on their debt.  So if the Fed fails to raise interest rates as Volcker did, they risk hyperinflation.  And if the Fed were to raise interest rates Volcker-style, at some point the U.S. and Japan will be unable to afford interest payments.

“
Either way, the dollar and the yen will collapse, the world will have to invent a new reserve currency, and the United States will no longer be a worldwide empire.”

“
There’s a silver lining in there somewhere.”

“
Yes, Slate, but not for most U.S. citizens.  For them a standard of living maybe eighty per cent lower is their destiny sometime in this century.”

“
What’s the solution?”

“
For me?  No dollar or yen-denominated assets.  Not a problem for a Swiss.  For you?  Not so easy.  If you can, own other currencies and hard assets.  Gold.”

“
Somehow I knew you’d eventually utter that four-letter word.”

He shrugged.  “I’m Swiss. The Swiss appreciate gold because it’s politically neutral.  Like us.”

The sun began to peek over the horizon toward the Perdido Pass, where the Perdido bridge connected Alabama Point to Florida Point and divided the panhandle between Alabama to the west and Florida to the east.  The rising sun streaked the sky in oranges and yellows and seemed to mock the apocalyptic vision of the gloomy Bahnhofstrasse bankers Moeller had related.  See?  I’m still rising every morning, it said.

“So, what’s this business with your boat all about?” Moeller asked.

“
Not sure yet.  If I gave you some encrypted files on a computer disk, could you decrypt them?”

“
Depends.  What type of encryption?  How robust?”

“
I don’t know.  I don’t even know for sure that they’re encrypted.  The files are on a thumb drive.  You can’t get to the files without a password.”

“
You don’t have the password?”

“
No.”

“
Then why do you think the files are encrypted?”

“
The person who gave me the memory stick said so.”

“
Does this have anything do to with the visit to your boat?”

I nodded.  “Probably.”  I gave Moeller a sketch of the Kramer case.  I left out the message typed on my laptop.

Moeller was silent for a couple of minutes.  A gull flew over the boat and settled on top of a light pole at the end of the catwalk that ran alongside Moeller’s boat slip.

The bird regarded us sleepily.  Hoping to steal some food, no doubt, but not energetic enough to try.

“How did the soccer goalie – Akilah? – how did she know the files were encrypted if they are password-protected?”

“
I don’t know.  I don’t even know whether she mixed up the terms.”

“
The possibilities are:  first, the Kramer girl told her the files were encrypted.  Second, the Kramer girl told her the password, and she opened the folder but discovered the files were encrypted.”

“
She told me the files were encrypted.”

Moeller ignored me.  “Third, Akilah knows the decryption code and the password.  Fourth. . . .”

“She knows what’s in the files.”

“
Right you are, Mr. Slate.  And they say people from Alabama are dumb.”

“
Sometimes that observation is correct.”

Moeller squinted across the rim of his coffee cup.  A slice of the sun had just appeared over the horizon in his line of sight through the forest of masts in the docks.  “Slate.”

“Yes.”

“
Give me the thumb drive.  I will run the password prompt through a brute-force password cracker I have on my computer here in the boat.  If we get lucky, that will give us access to the files, but they may still have to be decrypted.”

The thumb drive was in my pants pocket.  I handed it to Moeller and returned to my boat. 

I spent the rest of the morning doing a few of the endless chores of sailboat maintenance and second-guessing my decision to ask Moeller to spend time with the thumb drive.  I needed to get back to Birmingham.  And I needed a long talk with the goalkeeper for the Alabama Southern women’s soccer team.