“Stay, Fido.” Serge dropped his pants to the deck and charged.
Sasha came at him with equal velocity. They crashed together in the middle of the boat and hit the hull hard. They smacked and kicked each other. Arousing profanity. Bruises, bloody lips. Their naked bodies slammed one side of the boat and then the other, over and over, fighting for the top position and making a racket like a flopping, just-caught marlin trying to get back in the sea.
It became so loud that lights came on in all the seawall mansions. But instead of grabbing the phone for the police, they grabbed binoculars and video equipment. The predatory lovers finally reached a quivering, simultaneous conclusion. Serge jumped up, grabbed his shorts and casually flicked a wrist as he walked away. “That’s what I’ll do to you.”
The still-nude Sasha sat up panting. “Will you call me?”
“Who knows?” Serge pulled Coleman aboard. “I got a nutty, nutty schedule.”
“But I’m a witness. You can’t just let me go.”
“That’s precisely what I’m going to do.” He steered the skiff back toward the boat ramp.
“No, you’re supposed to take me hostage and tie me up again,” said Sasha. “And stick a gag ball in my mouth, and do other unspeakable acts with the devices in my purse. I promise I won’t scream.”
“Jesus,” said Serge. “Okay, okay, maybe I’ll give you a call and we can go get some ice cream, but no promises.”
“Yes, ice cream. And then you’ll force me at gunpoint to lick it off your—”
“Enough!” Serge held his hands to the sky. “Out of the boat or I swear I won’t call.”
She reluctantly climbed over the side into three feet of water. “I’ll do anything for you.”
Serge threw her clothes in her face. “Now that has possibilities.”
Sasha slipped into her top. “Name it.”
“I’ve been hired to help some scam victims. And even though I’m starting to crack cases left and right, my boss has been getting on me just because I keep forgetting to retrieve the money.” He pointed back at a large metal tube standing on a shoal in the bay. “I’m easily distracted.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to the streets, and if I get a case I’m having trouble with, I might give you a call to see if you know anything.”
“So that’s the reason you’re deliberately freeing me?”
“No, that idea just popped in my head when we were cumming. I do some of my best thinking then.”
“So what’s the real reason?”
“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 Three Days of the Condor, who found tranquillity by meticulously painting tiny cast-iron soldiers from forgotten wars.
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 24 saying, ‘That’s Allstate’s stand,’ ‘Nationwide is on your side,’ ‘Fifteen minutes could save you some shit.’ ”
“I like Mayhem,” said Coleman. “He makes me not feel so bad about breaking stuff.”
“And yet we’re still not manufacturing anything you can hold in your hands,” said Serge. “There’s your downfall of a global superpower. When space aliens visit centuries from now, they’ll whisk the dust away and conclude that America was dominated by a race of tiny-thumbed people who drove badly.”
“We’re not?”
“You may have a point,” said Serge. “And think about this: the simultaneous rise of texting and car insurance. Coincidence?”