Cries of the Lost (4 page)

So I didn’t think about it, and instead concentrated on the task at hand.

T
HAT NIGHT
I called my sister Evelyn. The last time she’d heard from me we were in New York preparing to launch our trip to Chile, before getting sidetracked to the Caymans. Evelyn had been a co-conspirator in getting me declared dead and providing vital logistical support as I worked my way through solving Florencia’s murder. This had exposed her to a variety of potential prosecutions, which continued to be of concern. If things eventually blew up, it would be hard to contain the collateral damage, the primary victims being Evelyn and Natsumi.

So there were good reasons to limit what I told her, with the likely deluded assumption that I could limit her culpability. Running counter to this was Evelyn’s insistence I keep her informed of every single, solitary thing I did, on a daily basis. I knew why. She’d been more involved in my upbringing than my parents. Not that they were neglectful or abusive in any way, they just didn’t have the life skills to deal with their kids. My mother was a receptionist and data entry clerk at a community health center; and my father worked at whatever he could with a fifth grade education, including fork lift operator, cashier at a public parking lot, dishwasher, cab driver, home healthcare worker for the state-run hospice, and probably dozens of other part-time, put-together ways to keep the family fed and in our apartment above the dry cleaners in downtown Stamford, Connecticut.

What these resumes didn’t reveal were my mother’s goofball sense of humor and unrelenting optimism, and my dad’s sweetness and unconditional support for anything and everything we wanted to do.

My sister used to say, “I think if I wanted to be an axe murderer, Dad would say, that’s fine, sweetie. Just be the very best axe murderer you can be.”

So it was left to her, ten years older, to shepherd me through the thickets of scholarships, academic achievement and the vagaries of professional life. This made her something of a busybody, and I owed her too much to completely deny her that prerogative.

“Arthur, where the hell are you?”

“Grand Cayman Island.”

“Vacation! That’s wonderful, you really need it.”

“Not exactly. We came down to empty out the safe-deposit box attached to Florencia’s Caymans account.”

“Oh,” she said, a bit deflated. “What was in there?”

“I don’t know yet. It’s in code.”

“Really.”

“So what’s been happening up there? The last time we talked they hadn’t traced Florencia’s laundering operation.”

“We turned over all the agency’s internal records, but apparently, vital pieces of information that could have led to the missing money had been thoroughly scrubbed. I wonder how that happened.”

“Gee, I don’t know. Heck of a thing,” I said.

“They aren’t even sure how much was embezzled. That creep who stumbled on the scam said it was millions, but who knows? Since none of the insureds ever had a loss she couldn’t cover, how do you assess damages? Bruce Finger, who’s back running the place, told me it was a dead issue. And even if it was worth their trouble to pursue further, our own liability insurance would cover any loss.”

Not likely, I thought, knowing the actual tab.

“Bruce did say there was one guy, a retired FBI agent, who still has a bug up his ass about the whole thing and pesters him on a regular basis. But it hasn’t come to anything.”

“Shelly Gross. We haven’t heard the last of him.”

We exchanged the usual back and forth—her telling me to be careful and take care of myself, me assuring her with no success that I would. Before I hung up, she said, “You got the guys who killed Florencia. Why take all these crazy risks now?”

“I don’t know why she did the things that got her killed.”

“And you have to know.”

“Bullet through the brain or no bullet through the brain, I have to know.”

T
HE BOXES
arrived at the hotel the next morning. I met the delivery truck at the hotel loading dock. I showed the driver my ID, and then offered him a hundred dollars to hand the boxes over to me directly instead of going through the concierge.

“I probably woulda done it for free,” he said, “but since you’re offerin’.”

I took the service elevator up to my floor, and once inside my room, put the do not disturb sign on the doorknob and locked the door.

I slit open all the boxes and laid the equipment out on the bed, relieved that everything I’d ordered was there. I spent the day reading through instruction manuals and running demonstration programs, testing, configuring and integrating the components. Always agreeable work for me, even under extreme circumstances.

Out of their bulky packaging, I was able to carefully fit the field equipment into a large backpack. As darkness fell outside, I put on my black clothes and lay down on the bed to preserve my strength and calm my mind. I folded my arms across my chest and visualized the equipment configuration as a schematic diagram, with boxes and arrows, switches and connectors. For no good reason, this put me to sleep, delivering me five hours later to the chosen launch time.

I dragged myself out of bed, stuck my head in a sink full of water, toweled off, put on my black beanie, and struck out into the soft, hot air that perpetually caressed the summertime Caribbean archipelago.

At the police station, I repeated the prior operation, without hesitation. The hatch cover lifted off with less effort and minimum clamor. I wiggled out of the backpack and dropped it down the hole. Then I followed, sliding the heavy metal plate over my head when I was halfway down the ladder. I hooked two LED lanterns on the cable trays overhead, which lit up the crowded space like a birthday party.

The first task was to decouple the 50-pair cables and reattach the connectors to a switch block that gave me access to the voice information flowing through the lines. This caused the telephones served by each of the 50-pair cables to go dead for a few seconds, but I was reasonably sure no one would notice, even the cops.

Back when I last studied similar switch blocks—used to set up large temporary phone banks for things like conventions and fund raising events—a row of little red lights indicated which lines were operating at any given time. And that’s all you knew. Now, a wireless interface sent a signal to an application on my laptop that displayed the phone activity on a dynamic graph. I could see which lines were in use, by 50-pair cable, and by individual line. And then with a click of the mouse, I could hear any conversation I wanted to.

Decoupling the two data cables was more problematic. Any interruption in service would likely trigger analytic software to trace the break to the source, in this case, my hatch. My hope was I could plug in the phone-tapping devices quickly enough to have it show up as a simple blip in the network.

The devices were designed to be installed in a rack system with other telephonic gear in a closet somewhere inside a building. So it took extra care handling the exposed circuitry, and sharp aluminum edges, though in less than twenty seconds I had both units securely linked into the T1 lines. If the operating manual was to be believed, no one would be the wiser.

I had to use a separate wireless unit to feed the T1 voice and data into my laptop, but it was simple enough to toggle back and forth between the legacy phone lines and the ultra-modern.

That was good, but just a start. Once I was sure I was capturing all the information from all the cables, I booted up another application, called a voice analyzer. Legal and freely available like the switch block and tapping gear, voice analyzers were programs used by call centers to direct incoming calls and determine the mood of the callers. It could judge subtle nuances in the caller’s tone of voice, as well as home in on key phrases, like, “fuck you and all your robot operators.”

I’d spent much of the day programming in cop language and words relevant to Natsumi, like “Japanese,” “American,” “casino,” “First Australia Bank” and “safe-deposit box.” The voice analyzer would look for these words, analyze the tone with which they were delivered, and through the wireless connection, beam it all into my laptop.

Once I identified whatever cables were associated with the police station, I’d kill the other feeds to preserve bandwidth and processing capacity.

It didn’t take long.

Apparently the Colonial governing authorities believed the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service was worthy of the most up-to-date communications technology, and had dedicated a pair of T1 cables to that purpose.

I felt a little wistful unplugging the big old 50-pair switch block, as if mourning another part of my life that had become obsolete.

I watched the computer screen for another hour for keywords related directly to Natsumi, though for naught. So I packed whatever gear couldn’t be left behind, including the brilliant LEDs, and climbed back up the ladder.

probably because I was so tired, or because of all the pent-up nervous energy, I pushed the hatch cover with too much force, causing it to clang against the cement mount. I whispered a curse at myself as I lunged up through the hole, and this time far more carefully, dragged the big metal disc into place.

I’d just made it to the side street where I’d parked the SUV when floodlights snapped on behind me. I continued to curse myself in silence as I started the truck and argued in my mind over what to do next. Then I stopped arguing, and drove around the corner and down the street directly in front of the police station.

Better to know.

The area surrounding the building and the grassy lawn next door was lit up like a night game at Shea Stadium, and a pair of RCIPS cops were out with flashlights and hands resting on the butt ends of the billy clubs stuffed in their belts. I drove by, and they barely looked at me, until I stopped and rolled down my window.

“Hey, sorry,” I said, “could you tell me how to get back to Seven Mile Beach?”

They seemed a little conflicted, looking both at me and up and down the street. Then one of the cops tapped the other on the shoulder and walked away, his flashlight scanning the sidewalk across the street from the station. His partner stayed with me to give directions.

I thanked him, then said, “What the hell’s going on here anyway? You guys are looking really intense.”

“Routine police business, sir,” he said, his speech graced with an Island lilt. “Best for you to just move along.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. No problem. Can I turn around?”

He nodded, so I moved slowly up the street, made a very careful and leisurely three-point turn, and drove past them. They waved as they went back into the police station, their equanimity restored and my hatch left behind, undisturbed.

I drove back to my hotel, filled with relief and the residue of nervous tension, defiant in the face of the capricious and unforgiving night.

C
HAPTER
3

I
was in my hotel room in the company of all the phone traffic going in and out of the RCIPS HQ. If I hadn’t had the voice analyzer, I’d have to listen to conversations one at a time, in real time, to uncover useful information. With the analyzer, it was more productive to let a few hours go by so the application could search for keywords, and subtleties, such as standard American versus Caymanian inflections.

Not that this was easy. It took every ounce of self-control to keep my suppressed anxiety from exploding out the top of my head. I ran a mantra in parallel with my regular inner monologue. Something like, “Stay calm. Don’t panic. Don’t get hyper. Concentrate.”

And stay occupied. So while the program ran in the background, I did a search of local news outlets for any hint of Natsumi’s capture, though nothing came up. That told me something, though I wasn’t sure what. I went to the American consulate’s website and read up on what to do in the event of arrest by local authorities. Since the first instruction was to alert the American consulate, which I couldn’t do, the rest was of little value.

To the best of my knowledge, no one knew I’d survived the bullet that was supposed to take me along with Florencia. Any revelation to the contrary would start a process that would likely end with me in jail for the rest of my life.