Authors: Peter Spiegelman
“I know who they are, boyo, and the last thing I need is a lecture on firefights. Not from you. I’m saying yer plan is riskier than it has to be because yer shy when it comes to heavy lifting—you always have been. You’re delicate, so to avoid the shootin’ you have us wastin’ time in that stairwell, while you sing and dance. Well, I say that’s a higher risk. I’d rather do the shootin’ than wait around fer someone to do it to me.”
“I’m talking about a series of flash-bangs on the other side of the building, to draw them off. I’m talking about a wait of a minute, ninety seconds tops. We make some noise, and then you leave, and if you do meet people on the way out, you’ll meet fewer of them.”
“So you say. But what’re you so worried about, boyo—you’ll be on the outside, out of harm’s way.”
“There are risks we can minimize, and risks we can’t. The exit plan falls in the first category. If I’m worried about anything, it’s that you don’t see that. I’m talking about a minute, Deke, a minute and a half tops.”
“You shy because they’re kids? Is that it?”
They went back and forth like that, until the sky grew pale and everyone but Latin Mike agreed with Carr, and Mike stayed silent. Finally—peevishly—Declan folded. And then, three nights later, as he and Bobby and Mike were on their way out of the Dudek Air Charter building, he changed his mind.
No one laughed after that. Not Bobby or Mike, who had taken a round through his right arm and who Carr had never seen so pale, and not Declan, who’d taken a round in his left thigh and killed three child soldiers along the way. The wound didn’t seem to bother Declan much on the drive west, from Managua to the Pacific coast, nor did it stop Carr.
“We had a plan,” Carr said.
Declan’s smile was thin and cold. “You know what they say about those, boyo: they don’t survive the first shot.”
“We all agreed on it.”
“And since when was this a feckin’ democracy?”
Carr stared for a long while, and then shook his head. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” he whispered. Declan stopped smiling, but had no other answer.
It’s nearly nightfall when Mike arrives, and there are clouds in the darkening sky, and approaching thunder. Mike has a six of Corona under one arm, and a bucket of fried chicken under the other.
“Howie’s still sleeping,” Carr says, as he passes Mike in the doorway. “Don’t hit him again.” Mike starts to say something, but Carr keeps walking.
Dennis is eating dinner when Carr arrives, a Cuban sandwich and a beer. He’s bent over a laptop, wearing headphones, and he doesn’t look up when Carr opens the door. Carr raps on the table, and Dennis starts and pulls the phones off.
“I’m looking at the latest from Chun’s place—the wires Vee laid down.”
Carr pulls a chair alongside Dennis’s. “And?” he asks.
Dennis colors. “It’s good,” he says. “Actually, it’s great.”
The image is clear, despite the low light: Amy Chun in her home office. The tiny camera is planted in a bookshelf behind her desk, and the view is over and above her right shoulder. She’s wearing a sleeveless white shirt,
and there’s a mug of tea steaming in a corner of her desk, next to her cell phone. She is pushing aside the keyboard of her home computer and opening up the laptop she carries every day to and from her office suite at the Spanish River Bank and Trust Company.
“Laptop keyboard is nice and clear,” Dennis says. “Vee did a good job with placement.”
Chun takes a fingerprint scanner from the desk drawer and plugs it into the laptop. From her purse she takes something like a keychain fob, with a tiny LCD strip down the center—an automatic password generator. A log-on window opens on the laptop, and she types in a password, one part of it from memory, and the rest from the screen of the password generator. Another window comes up, and Chun presses her thumb onto the fingerprint scanner. The laptop screen flickers and then her cell phone chimes. Chun picks it up, listens, picks up the password generator again, and keys a code from its screen into her cell phone. The laptop screen flickers again and she’s into the network shared by the Spanish River Bank and Trust, and the rest of the banks owned by Isla Privada.
Carr shakes his head. “We knew how all that worked, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.”
Dennis stiffens beside him. His tone is frosty. “It’s a virtual private network with multifactor authorization, including an out-of-band security feature, and I know exactly
how
it all works. What I’m missing is the checksum for Chun’s thumbprint, the algorithm her key fob is using to generate those one-time passwords, and the authentication chip inside her laptop. If I had all that,
and
Chun’s private password,
and
a phone on the network’s call-back list, then we wouldn’t need Vee in there at all, and I could log on to the Isla Privada network whenever I wanted. Give me Curtis Prager’s private password on top of that, and we could all go home right now. Now
that
would save us trouble.”
Carr suppresses a laugh. “I stand corrected,” he says quietly. “We got Chun’s part, though, didn’t we?”
“We got it,” Dennis says. “We got her password and we got account numbers.”
“Nice job,” Carr says, and claps him on the shoulder. “What else is on the tape?”
“Vee comes on,” Dennis says, blushing. He fast-forwards several minutes, and a shadow crosses Amy Chun’s desk. A moment later, Valerie’s—Jill’s—hip
leans against Chun’s arm. She’s wearing a short white T-shirt and panties with lace trim, and she’s carrying a rocks glass. Carr can’t tell what’s in it, but he can hear the ice. Jill rests her arm on Chun’s back.
“I’ll miss you,” Jill says.
“It’s just a day,” Chun says, looking up at her. “New York and back. I’ll be home before eleven.”
“You’ll call me?”
“Why don’t you meet me here?” Chun says, and she slides her hand beneath Jill’s shirt.
Jill inhales sharply and her hips shift. Her voice is choked. “Hurry and finish,” she says, and she exits the frame to the tinkle of ice.
“Christ,” Dennis whispers.
Carr lets out a deep breath. “Is that it?”
Dennis blushes again. “There’s more … in the bedroom. The light is low, so the picture’s not great, and the AC is blowing, so the sound is—”
“Play it.”
Dennis clicks on another video file, and a dim, sepia-shadowed image appears: a heap of pillows, a tangle of dark blankets, two pale blurs on a paler, rectangular field. There is the faint shifting of sheets, the sound of someone drinking, someone sighing.
Amy Chun’s voice is a tentative whisper. “Have you been …
out
for a long time?”
Valerie—Jill—laughs. Her voice is sleepy and soft. “I never thought about it that way; I never was really
in
. I’ve known how I felt since grade school, and I’ve never pretended anything different.”
“Your parents?”
“They were too busy fighting with each other to pay much attention to me. I was in college before they noticed.”
“They didn’t care?”
“If they did, I didn’t notice, and pretty soon I was out of there.”
“My parents would notice,” Amy Chun whispers, “even from Vancouver. And they would care. So would my board of directors.”
“It’s your life, Amy, not theirs. Your one-and-only life, and your happiness.”
“Coming out is no guarantee of happiness.”
“Nope—I know plenty of unhappy couples—of all persuasions. But
not
coming out—that
is
a guarantee.”
Sheets rustle and someone exhales slowly. There’s a sound of ice in a glass. “I’m happy now,” Amy Chun says quietly. “Happier than I’ve been. Definitely happier than my parents are.”
“They don’t get along?”
“Never.”
“It doesn’t always have to be like that, you know—like my parents, and yours.”
There’s more shifting, and a giggle. “No?” Amy Chun asks.
“Maybe that’s what we should do, you and me,” she whispers. “Go away together and conduct a little research, to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists.”
There’s more sighing and rustling, and the clip ends. Dennis lets out a long breath and pushes back from the table. “She is good,” he says. “Sincere. Believable. Like scary good.”
Carr looks at the image frozen on the screen—two women, bare, clinging to each other in the wreckage of the bed. He nods but doesn’t speak.
All subtropical financial districts look alike, Carr thinks. The broad, divided boulevards; the lush foliage at street level; the towers soaring above; the German cars at curbside, each with tinted glass and a large, watchful driver; the overcaffeinated, expensively suited young men who stride along, mesmerized by their BlackBerrys and chattering maniacally into the ether; the young women—stylish, tanned, with impossible heels, impossible legs, impossible self-possession. It could be Avenida Paulista, Avenida Balboa, or a stretch of Reforma, but it’s not. It’s Brickell Avenue in Miami, and Carr is walking north, following Valerie.
He’s kept his distance all the way down 95, but now she’s out of her car and he’s out of his, and he needs to be careful. The lunchtime rush helps and hurts: Carr hides in the crowd, but so does Valerie, and he’s nearly lost her twice since she gave her car to the valet at the Four Seasons and set out on foot. It’s clear today, and cooler than it has been, but that just means it feels like ninety-something. Carr’s shirt is stuck to his back, but Valerie, when he catches a glimpse, looks cool and crisp in a pale gray skirt and sleeveless white blouse. She crosses Brickell and heads west on Tenth Street.
Bessemer’s call to Curtis Prager that morning was anticlimactic. Sitting in his dim office, Carr at his side, Bessemer had phoned Prager’s private number, only to learn that Prager is away until tomorrow, and please try
again. And so an unexpected day off for Carr. He’d consigned Bessemer to Bobby’s care, driven down to Boca Raton, and phoned Valerie from a spot fifty yards from her apartment building. Where she’d lied to him.
“I could drive down,” he’d said, “and take a room. We could have lunch at the beach.”
Valerie had yawned loudly. “That sounds nice, baby—really nice—but I’ve got to get some rest. I’ve been up late every night this week, and I’m supposed to meet Amy again tonight. I’ve got the drapes closed, and I’m going back to sleep.”
Carr wasn’t sure why he hadn’t believed her, why he’d waited in his parked car after she’d hung up, why he’d followed her little Audi, half an hour later, when it pulled out of the building lot and made its way to 95. Maybe it was because her yawn had been too elaborate, or because he could see from his parking space that her drapes were wide open. Maybe it was the memory of her conversation with Amy Chun, the night before, and what she’d said to him back in Portland.
Maybe that’s what we should do, you and me—go away together and conduct a little research, to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists
.
She turns north again at First Avenue and passes beneath the elevated tracks of the light-rail. She crosses the street, to a compact shopping plaza in the shadow of the Metromover, and goes into a coffee bar. Carr keeps walking on Tenth Street, enters the plaza from Miami Avenue, and stands in the shade of a stunted, bushy palm tree. The coffee bar is busy, but through the wide front window Carr can see Valerie slipping through the crowd toward the back of the room. He edges closer and sees her settle on a bar stool at a narrow counter along the side wall, in front of a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor.
Carr can’t make out the screen from where he is, but Valerie reads for a while and then types. She’s at the computer for about three minutes, and then she pushes away from the counter and leaves through the back door.
Carr jogs into the coffee bar, shouldering past customers and ignoring the angry looks. A twenty-something man in linen pants, a Daddy Yankee T-shirt, and lots of body ink has a hand on Valerie’s bar-stool when Carr steps in front of him.
“Hey, I’m sitting here, man,” he says, and he puts his coffee cup on the counter.
“You definitely are,” Carr says softly, “in about thirty seconds.” Carr finds the browser icon on the desktop and clicks on it.
“I’m sitting here
now
, man,” the twenty-something says, “so get the hell out of my way.”
“Yep, absolutely,” Carr says, watching the browser open, “I’m out of here.”
“You talk, but you don’t move your ass.” The twenty-something puts a hand on Carr’s arm and pulls, and his face seizes up in a grimace. Carr has his hand around the man’s wrist and fingers and has bent them back at impossible angles. The twenty-something’s face is pale and his knees begin to buckle, and Carr eases up on the finger lock.
“Another second,” Carr whispers, and he opens the browser history. The screen is empty and Carr stares at it a moment and says: “Fuck.” Then he hits the back door at a run, leaving the twenty-something rubbing his wrist and gasping and the few patrons who’ve noticed anything shaking their heads.
She’s a block and a half down First Avenue, walking in the shade of the Metromover tracks, and Carr is just in time to see her turn east on Eighth Street, back toward Brickell Avenue. He sprints to close the gap.
She walks briskly down Eighth Street and crosses Brickell as the light changes. Carr waits on the other side of the street and watches Valerie disappear into a tower of white stone and green glass.
When Carr steps into the building, Valerie is nowhere in sight, and security is already eyeing him. And why not—no one else in the lobby is as rumpled as he is, or as damp with sweat. He walks over to the building directory and scans the list of tenants. Software companies, law firms, management consultants, but more than anything else banks and brokerages. And, Carr notices, mostly foreign firms.
“Can I help you, sir?” the guard asks. He’s big and uniformed, and so is his hovering partner.
“Think I got the wrong address,” Carr says, and he exits into the midday heat.
There’s a Starbucks next door to the building, and a wine bar on the opposite corner. Carr likes the sight lines from the wine bar better, though neither are perfect: there are too many ways out of the green tower. Still,
he takes a window seat and orders a bottle of soda water and a ham sandwich on a baguette.