“To tell all the other scam artists working this state that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
Coleman raised a beer. “And I’m the deputy.”
Chapter Sixteen
SOUTH AMERICA
Toucans and parrots squawked from the edge of the jungle.
The mountains fell steeply before gently sloping into an apron of dense green foliage that ended in the sandy coastline along the unpatrolled border of Chile and Peru.
Surf rolled in from the Pacific, before an explosion of mist on the rocks. There was a piece of driftwood here and there, crabs darting out of holes, and a tiny beach villa pressed back against the jungle. It was the only sign of a human hand.
Curtains billowed out the living room window.
Inside the sparsely furnished bungalow, a tall, wiry man sat shirtless in dry swim trunks. He had ultra-short blond hair, a week’s growth after shaving his head. He was wearing the trunks because he was going for another mile swim in the ocean. That accounted for the muscular shoulders and pecs that were disproportionately developed for the rest of his torso. The swim, though, would have to wait.
The man’s job was to wait. Just live in the villa. The only task: Check in once a day on the Internet at precisely 2:35 P.M., like a nuclear submarine coming up to periscope depth and raising its antenna to get instructions from satellites. And like those subs, the vast majority of the time there were no instructions. The important thing was 2:35.
Because if a message did come, it would be dropped seconds before, to be read as quickly as possible and immediately deleted. Employing another espionage trick, the messages were never sent, so they could never be intercepted. Instead they were saved as drafts in an e-mail account, and the villa’s occupant had the password.
The villa’s previous occupant also had the password, and liked to take those ocean swims. But he was gone, at the hands of the current resident. Nothing personal. Orders. The earlier resident had received a message at 2:35 and went to Miami to handle a situation. But he got sloppy and became compromised. The person now at the villa’s computer had also been in Miami as backup, prepared to sanitize any mess that might develop, and there had been a big one. That’s how he inherited the bungalow.
It was a strange juxtaposition, the occupation and the house. The remote spot on the beach lent itself to decompression. Just the waves and the birds and your thoughts. It reminded the man of the assassin played by Max von Sydow in
2:34.
Fingers tapped the keyboard. An Internet account opened. Moments later, an e-mail popped up in the draft folder. He read it quickly. This time there was also a photo of the target, but he didn’t need to save it because he would be receiving a hard copy later that day in a briefcase exchange. He hit delete. The swim trunks would stay dry. Something had come up. Florida again. The flight left in two hours.
He went to a louvered closet. At the bottom was an already-packed carry-on of essentials for just such an occasion. Then he opened a round wall safe and thumbed through passports of various nationalities and names. He decided on Bolivia.
Dark clouds rolled in from the ocean, and wind carried the salt mist. He shuttered up the beach house and climbed into his Jeep, holding a mental image of the face he’d seen on the computer.
MEANWHILE . . .
“And here’s another thing about the people who don’t read.” Serge hit the gas when the light turned green. “They’re the same ones who think you’re a moron if you don’t text. I don’t text because of a philosophical code against the growing depersonalization predicted by Alvin Toffler and George Orwell.”
“I don’t text because my thumbs are too big,” said Coleman.
“But the non-readers are texting away like it’s the war effort,” said Serge. “They’d eliminate the debt if we could convert that energy to durable goods and stick it on cargo ships. It’s half the gross national product.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Car insurance,” said Serge. “Watch any channel on TV for any length of time, and every other commercial is a British lizard, an upwardly mobile caveman, a calcified chick named Flo, the anthropomorphic jerk named Mayhem who tricks you into accidents, the guy in a hard hat who hits cars with sledgehammers, the character who played the president in the show
“I like Mayhem,” said Coleman. “He makes me not feel so bad about breaking stuff.”
