I could hear the beep-beep of my telephone’s call-waiting alert as she added, “On the bright side, he has to leave the country. They’re flying him out, probably this afternoon. So he shouldn’t give you any more trouble.”
I thought: Unless he decides to return illegally.
She paused, listening. “Are you getting another call?”
I said, “Yeah, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to take it. Can we talk another time?”
The lady sounded professional, even chilly when she said, “You’re a busy man, Dr. Ford. Such unusual business hours. Give Bernie my best.”
It wasn’t Bernie.
I touched the flash button, answered with a more restrained, “Hello?” and heard the voice of Merlin T. Starkey say, “Ford? Tell me you don’t know why I’m callin’.”
I said, “Detective Gartone just hung up. I know how disappointed you must be. So why don’t you have a glass of warm milk and crawl back into bed?”
The old man didn’t sound the least bit sleepy for 2:20 in the morning. “Not before I’m finished tellin’ you what I got to say. The guy you framed so he’d get jailed? Turns out he’s some big, important foreign diplomat. Someone like him, he ain’t gonna let it slide. You really hung Miz Tamara out there on a limb all by her lonesome, didn’t you, sonny boy?”
Ransom was sitting in the reading chair, the marina’s black cat, Crunch amp; Des, curled in her lap. With a mortar and pestle she’d been grinding bits of blue rock, powder, leaves, occasionally pausing to add a few drops of turpentine. But she now stopped. She seemed to know that someone hostile was on the other end of the line. Her intuition was good that way.
Ransom was watching me closely as I said, “He’s not going to blame her, so stop worrying. And she’s not going to hear any more about what happened on the Loop Road.”
“That’s what you keep sayin.’ But here’s what I want you to know. I think something real dirty’s goin’ on between you and them foreigners. And it ain’t done yet. So what I’m thinkin’ is, someone needs to keep a real tight eye on you, Ford. I still got a few connections in Tallahassee. I can get Florida Department of Law Enforcement to assign me temporary duty. They’ll let me roam all over the state with my nose on your butt. In fact, I think I will do that. You and those Latinos, I got the feeling something real bad’s gonna happen soon.”
I said quickly, “Starkey, don’t do that. Believe me, you don’t understand the situation.”
My sudden eagerness pleased him-he was back in control. “See there, I knew I was right. I’m gonna call my friends tomorrow and get me assigned TDY.”
One nasty old bastard.
Because I could tell he was ready to hang up, and because I was too pissed off to think it out, I said in a rush, “Hey, Merlin? That story you told me about how Tucker Gatrell ruined your career. I thought it was funny as hell.”
The man who never used foul language said, “Fuck you, sonny boy,” and slammed the phone in my ear.
I was in the midst of explaining to Ransom how and why the old man had infuriated me, when the phone rang again.
She returned to mixing her powders, saying, “I’ll put that ol’ fool on my juju list, too,” as I picked up the phone and said carefully, “Hello…?”
Bernie had Pilar’s password, said it was no problem. Passwords, actually. She had two Internet accounts. Her personal account was through Hotmail. com, which was free and the most commonly used server in Central America. Her other account was used mostly for business and more formal correspondence. It was through the Masaguan government and a thing called ISTMO Communication Group.
“It’s an Internet presence provider,” he explained, adding that it offered hosting services and domain registration, with headquarters in Panama, and offices in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Miami.
Bernie told me the big international accounts were the easiest for someone like him to hack. “At AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, even stuff that’s deleted-passwords, name it-is stored on the archived Internet service provider’s hard drive. That’s in case the FBI or someone like me wants to come looking.”
This early in the morning, I wasn’t certain I wanted to hear all the details, but did my best to sound interested. Like most great artists, the man took joy in the intricacies of his craft.
“I downloaded all her files and sent them to you as an attachment. I don’t know if you’re worried about being caught spending time online by the real subscriber or not. They gonna send the Internet police up from Central America to slap you on the wrist? I know, I know-so why should we care?”
The note Pilar had received telling us to meet the tattooed giant in Miami was from xyxq37@nicarado. org. Bernie referred to that person as “X.” Retrieving X’s password wasn’t so easy, he said.
“Nicarado’s the server used by libraries and schools in Nicaragua and Masagua,” he said. “All the accounts are free, and there’s an unlimited number of accounts a person can set up. If this person’s smart, doesn’t want to be tracked, doesn’t want his e-mails hacked, he can just keep changing names and accounts, traveling all over Central America. Sure, I can get you passwords. But that’s not going to help if the account address keeps changing.”
I said, “You couldn’t get his password?”
Bernie sounded hurt. “He asks me such a question. A man I’ve known so many years, he asks a question like that. Yes, Marion, I do have X’s password. Yes, it took me all of twenty minutes, but I got it. It’s a strange one, too. It doesn’t sound Spanish, but you speak the language so well, you maybe know it. The password is Bozark. ”
I said, “Bozark? No… not Spanish. Maybe Tlaxclen Maya, but nothing I know in Spanish. It sounds American. Regional.”
Which made sense. Lourdes spoke with an American accent, plus a hint of something else.
Bernie said, “I did a web search on it. Ran it backward, rearranged the letters. Bozark’s a common family name. Nothing else came up. Same thing I found in X’s files. Nothing. Which is what I was telling you. The password may be worthless because X left nothing to read. Nothing that I can access without physically going to the main computer, anyway. There’s a history of one transmission to her address, and that’s it. So I think we’re dealing with someone who knows the system, who keeps changing accounts to hide his tracks.”
I asked, “Bernie, is there any way you can narrow down where in Central America the e-mails are originating?”
What I’d been considering was grabbing a plane to Masagua and hunting for Prax Lourdes while Pilar and Tomlinson took care of the ransom demands here in Florida. I liked the thought of that; moving in on him while he thought I was still back in the States, hustling drugs for some wounded revolutionary.
In a singsong voice, Bernie answered, “Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe. Which I was just about to tell you if you’d show a little patience. Every e-mail has a routing code. How it reads depends on the server, but internationally, it’s a mess. It’s not like zip codes or telephone routing numbers. It varies with the place and the server. Take… well, for instance, if you send me something over the Internet, I can tell it’s from Florida in the United States. But Nicarado, it’s a mess with a capital M.”
Even so, he explained, there was still enough routing information for him to have a pretty good idea, geographically, where it came from. I listened closely as he added, “But I noticed something very fishy in the coding,” he said. “A little time delay indicator almost no one in the world would have caught but me-excuse me for bragging, but true. The person who sent this e-mail? I’d bet he or she was in the country of Masagua. Almost definitely on a public computer. A library; a school. But the person who wrote the e-mail, the place where the e-mail originated, I’d say he’s probably not in Masagua. Maybe not even in Central America.”
I said, “What?”
“I think he sent the e-mail to a confederate in Masagua who then forwarded it on under the Nicarado address. Maybe the confederate copied it, maybe retyped it. I can’t say; I’m going simply on an anomaly in the routing code.”