“Hey, man,” I said. “You caught me in the car. I’m on my way home.”
“I figured. I just tried you there but nobody answered.”
I tilted my head and searched again for our apartment windows. That was odd. I thought for sure Anita was home.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t speak too quickly. I’m about to ask you if I can bust in on your happy home life tonight, maybe get you to look at something for me.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got some incorporation papers here for a company that turned up in an investigation and something doesn’t look right to me. I’d like to run them by you.”
“I’m not sure how much I could tell you from looking at Thai incorporation papers.”
“It’s not a Thai company. It’s a BVI.”
The British Virgin Islands is a fairly respectable place to organize holding companies that are perfectly legal but still exist as nothing more than a few pieces of paper in some lawyer’s filing cabinet. There are hundreds of thousands of such companies in use around the world for all sorts of purposes, most of them perfectly ordinary, although no doubt some of those purposes are less ordinary than others. Still, you seldom encounter a BVI company in Thailand and Jello’s call tickled my curiosity.
“I guess Anita’s not home so my hopes of a romantic dinner for two are pretty much in the crapper anyway. What time were you thinking of?”
“A half hour from now?”
“No problem,” I said. “Come on around. amp;re odthdquo;
“Thanks, Jack. I appreciate this.”
As I closed the telephone, the traffic light changed to green, and the cop swiveled back toward me. I tossed the phone on the passenger seat, gave him a cheery wave, and drove away before he could hit me up for a contribution to his favorite charity.
The elevator opened on the eleventh floor of our apartment building and I crossed the small foyer and unlocked my front door. The only light inside was coming through the big windows in the living room and I had to turn on the lamps in the entrance hall as I walked through it. Wondering if Anita had gone to bed already, I stuck my head into the master bedroom, but it was empty.
I went into the kitchen and fished around in the refrigerator until I found a cold bottle of Corona and popped the top. Then I wandered into my study, turned on the lamps there, too, and flopped down in the big chair behind my desk.
After taking a long hit on the Corona, I pulled out my telephone and punched the speed dial for Anita’s studio. I listened to the number ringing for a while, then pushed the disconnect button and tried the speed dial for Anita’s cell phone. After two rings her voice mail kicked in and I hung up without leaving a message.
That was odd. Anita hadn’t said anything about going anywhere tonight, at least not that I could remember. And even if she had gone somewhere, I couldn’t imagine why her telephone would be off.
On top of that, something else was making me uneasy. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it wasn’t the surprise of Anita’s unexpected absence or even the residual effects of my meeting with Karsarkis that I was feeling. It was something completely different, something like a disturbance in the air around me.
I mulled it over while I sat there drinking my Corona, but I couldn’t grab onto anything solid. Finally, I put the bottle down, reached for my laptop, and swung my feet up onto the desk. After I lifted the lid to wake it from standby, I waited the usual couple of seconds for the screen to spring back to life, but it didn’t.
After the obligatory muttered curses, I took a closer look and almost immediately discovered the problem.
The laptop was shut down rather than in standby the way I usually left it. I pushed the power button and immediately heard the reassuring whir of the hard disk spinning up. I almost never shut the thing down and I couldn’t remember doing it when I last used it, but I supposed I must have. God, I sighed to myself as I watched the Windows logo flash up and then disappear again, I must be getting forgetful in my old age.
When the log-on screen came up, I had to stop and think for a moment since I’d just changed my password a few days before, but then I typed in the new password and waited for the desktop to appear. It didn’t. Instead of the usual display of colorful icons against a restful blue background, I found myself contemplating a dialog box with an angry-looking red border around it.
WARNING, it said in big letters across the top. Then below that, in somewhat more restrained type, it announced: THERE HAS BEEN AN ATTEMPT TO ACCESS THIS COMPUTER WITHOUT PASSWORD AUTHORIZATION. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CLICK
I clicked the button with
AT 1937h ON 23 APRIL AN UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT WAS MADE TO ACCESS THIS COMPUTER. AFTER THREE INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTRIES, IT WAS SHUT DOWN AND LOCKED. PRESS OK TO CONTINUE.
At least that explained why the laptop was shut down rather than in standby, but the explanation paled into insignificance next to the new question it raised.
I glanced at my watch. It was twenty minutes after nine. 1937h was 7:37 pm in actual people time. At 7:37 pm I had been with Tommy at Plato Karsarkis’ hideaway off Sukhumvit Road.
Had Anita been fiddling with my laptop? That seemed unlikely since she wasn’t in the apartment now. Would she have been here a couple of hours ago, tried to use my laptop, and then left again? Surely that couldn’t be right. Besides, Anita wasn’t very fond of computers and seldom even used her own. She had never touched mine at all as far as I knew. Why would she to start now?
On the other hand, if not Anita, then who? The maid was a sixty-four-year-old woman from a tiny village up on the Laotian border who left promptly at six every evening to go back to her daughter’s house across town. Even if she had still been here at 7:30, she wouldn’t have thought of trying to use a laptop computer anymore than she would have taken a whack at piloting the space shuttle.
I hit OK and the familiar Windows desktop filled my screen just as it always did.
I glanced through the files on my hard drive. Everything looked just as I had left it. Of course, that was the way it ought to look. The laptop had locked up when the password wasn’t entered correctly and no one could have accessed the hard drive anyway. Or could they?
What was going on here? Had someone been poking around in my study while I was out at Karsarkis’ hideaway? As improbable as that seemed, there didn’t appear to be any other explanation unless of course my security software had all of a sudden gone around the bend on its own, which I suppose was possible. The feeling of unease I’d had before, the sense of a disturbance in the air, was becoming distinctly more tangible.
Still, I asked myself, why would anyone have wanted to look at the files on my laptop? There really wasn’t much in them. I had the usual stuff most people did-some personal correspondence, a lot of pointless emails, a list of credit card numbers, some old tax returns, spreadsheets for my brokerage accounts, and a few other bits of personal information. It was hardly the sort of thing that would have held much interest for a cat burglar.
I looked closely at the surface of my desk, but nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Then I got up slowly and walked over to the lateral file cabinet on the opposite wall. I stood there a moment contemplating it warily.
When I pulled open the top drawer I guess I half expected to find a dead body inside. What I actually found, of course, were my files, and they looked pretty much the way they always looked. I ran my hand over the forest of manila tabs that stuck out above the dark green suspension folders. Then I pulled a couple out and glanced at their contents. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary, so I put them back and closed the drawer again.
I was still standing there wondering if I ought to check out the other drawers and closets around the house- and exactly how far I would get before sheer embarrassment at my own foolishness would cause me to abandon
