It could have been hours or days before something shifted inside me, some indistinct proprioceptive signal of deceleration and descent. Soon after the airplane wobbled as it became earthborne. We slowed so rapidly that I slewed forward and nearly off the chair.
They carried me out like a sack of rice. In the frenzy of activity my blindfold loosened a little, so I could see a sliver of the world with my left eye. I tried not to reveal this tiny victory with my body language, didn’t dare scan my surroundings, but as I was hoisted into a waiting van I caught a glimpse of a sign, written in Spanish. I understood only a single word: Mexico.
That was so unexpected it kicked my brain into speculative gear again. Sheer coincidence? Or had I been wrong about Colombia?
The van drove for a long time. I couldn’t make out our surroundings through its curtained windows except that we were in a city. Men sat beside and in front of me, chatting excitedly in Spanish, until someone ordered them to shut up.
We halted long enough for a gate to grind open, cruised into a kind of courtyard filled with vehicles, and stopped. I could barely feel my hands at all. They dragged me out of the van, laughed when I barked my head painfully against its roof. I was taken into a building, up stairs, along corridors, through what felt like an endless labyrinth. Strong hands untied my wrists and shoved me forward. I staggered and nearly fell.
With my numbed fingers it took me several attempts to pull off the blindfold and reveal a room full of whiteboards and server racks. Laptops sat on a few haphazardly arranged metal desks, accompanied by Aeron chairs. Bits of disassembled hardware lay clumped on the floor. Despite the white-noise hum of several air conditioners the air was warm with the heat from the dozens of blade servers. It felt like the nerve centre of a software startup with big aspirations. Most importantly, it did not seem like the kind of room in which people were tortured to death.
The man who had escorted me in was short but hugely muscled. His ropy arms were covered by demonic tattoos, and his shirt said MONSTER 666. The room’s other occupant sat behind a desk crowded untidily with papers. He looked Slavic, not Hispanic; tall and gangly, with lanky hair so blond and skin so pale that he was almost albino. He smiled with uneven teeth, and gestured at a chair. It took me a second to understand his meaning. I walked over and sat down.
“So you’re James Kowalski,” he said thoughtfully, examining me carefully, like I was a meal he might want to send back to the kitchen.
I nodded. Language seemed almost beyond me. I tried to control my trembling limbs. As feeling returned to my hands, they felt doused in flaming sulphuric acid.
“I’m Dmitri.” He stressed the name as if I should recognize it.
“Nice to meet you,” I muttered automatically, and ridiculously.
He chuckled. “I doubt that.”
I didn’t say anything. I was terrified that anything might condemn me.
“We are very disappointed in you, James.” His accent was Russian, but his English was so fluid that he had to have spent years in America. “Were you trying to cover your tracks? Or play both sides? Either way, it was a very stupid thing to do.”
He looked at me as if waiting for a response, but I couldn’t even make sense of his questions, much less find an answer.
“So many smart people are so very stupid outside their area of expertise. You know this, but you never imagined that you too might be one of them. And now that you know, it is too late.” Dmitri shook his head sadly, as if he had just intoned my epitaph. “Did you really believe nobody would ever find the money? The gnomes of Zurich and the Caymans, even they are not immune to pressure. We knew who you were all along. Soon after you first contacted us. Before you even received the first payment. You must have known that if the Americans found out, they would think you were ours all along. What were you going to tell them? You won seven million dollars playing bingo? You found it under your couch cushions?”
I stared at him with utter incomprehension.
“You should have spent it while you could, James. Your new salary will be little more than, let us say, a living wage.” He smiled thinly. “Think of me as a younger and more calorie-conscious version of Don Corleone. Now you have no choice but to become what they will have thought you were all along.”
He looked at me expectantly.
”I’m sorry,” I said, my voice barely louder than a whisper, beginning to wonder if he was confusing me with some other James Kowalski. “I don’t understand.”
He sighed. “Please. I am not fishing for confirmation. I
My head spun. “This is insane,” I croaked, as much to myself as to him.
“Really? It seems ordinary to me. Engineers everywhere make such transitions. From external consultant to internal employee. Yes, we were hoping for Dr. Sophie Warren, but Mr. James Kowalski is an acceptable consolation prize. You should be flattered.”
“Flattered,” I echoed, grasping at surreal straws. “By what exactly?”
“I would think our offer self-evident. You provide us technical assistance, and in exchange, we allow you to live. Think of it as a belated support contract for all that lovely technology you sold us.”
I stared bemused at Dmitri’s gap-toothed smile, my fear for my life half-erased by complete bewilderment. He wasn’t making any sense at all. I had not sold anyone any technology. I had never received any payments. I had no secret Swiss or Cayman Islands bank account -
– or did I?
Chapter 39
There was one possible way that Dmitri’s words might make a horrible kind of sense. Like a jigsaw puzzle that when assembled revealed a sanity-eating image straight out of H.P. Lovecraft.
To the best of my knowledge I had never opened an account at any Cayman Islands bank; but I had once signed a sheaf of papers to co-register a business there. Sophie had said our accountant had set it up for tax purposes, to receive payments from Convoy. Our lab was a complicated mix of university research and private enterprise, and the paperwork was always a nightmare. I had long ago given up on reading all our contracts in favour of just signing whatever she gave me. One of those signatures could easily have opened a bank account without my knowing it.
We had figured Sophie’s Axon neural networks had filtered to the drug cartels via Jesse and Anya’s Grassfire group. Now Dmitri was talking like I had sold it to them, and been richly rewarded.
The one way this all made sense was if they were both wrong; if Sophie had sold the drug gangs her technology herself, and funneled the money into a bank account she had opened for me.
She wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the proceeds, but then, she had never cared about money. What that bank account gave her was deniability. Everyone would think I had betrayed my girlfriend by selling the fruits of her genius behind her back.
It was unbelievable. But if true, it explained everything. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to tell me. Her tortured- soul, heavy-burden, trying-to-protect-you routine – all a lie. Our whole life together a betrayal.
