James Grippando - Need You Now

What else?

The pizza wasn’t nearly as good cold, but Connie’s apartment was so small that I feared even the hum of a microwave would wake the others. I ate half of the remaining slice and decided it wasn’t worth the extra sit-ups I’d have to do in the morning. The rest went into the garbage. But I still wasn’t sleepy.

I felt the urge to reach for my BlackBerry. Separation anxiety, I supposed. My BlackBerry was in the hands of Scully’s tech expert. Lilly’s phone had come back clean-no spyware-but it was taking longer to scan my BOS BlackBerry. In truth, I didn’t need a tech expert to confirm that Evan’s killer had eavesdropped on my last conversation with Evan and heard him say that he’d broken the encryption code. Not that any tech expert could tell us who was doing the eavesdropping. Good spyware was typically installed remotely, no way to trace it back to anyone.

The snow monkeys called to me, in a manner of speaking, offering a quick e-mail fix to an addict without his “crackberry.” I’d already used Connie’s PC to log onto my e-mail server four times since dinner. I got up from the kitchen table and made it five. Dozens of messages loaded. I read the latest thread from my team leader, Jay Sussman. It was only my fourth day on the job since returning to New York, but that was more than long enough for slackers to get fired on Wall Street. Jay had breathed not a word about the Cushman money to me, which I took as a positive sign: the pressure I was getting from Barber truly was between him, me, and Lilly. Jay’s latest message was to confirm a meeting with a private equity group in Chicago that the bank needed me to attend. It was scheduled for Monday at ten A.M. That gave me three days, including the weekend, to pull my life together. I had no idea how to make that happen. I told Jay I’d be there, hit Send, and then did a double take. The next message in my in-box gave me chills.

It was from Evan. The time posted in the Sent block was 5:14 P.M.-minutes before his death. It had apparently been floating around in cyberspace for the past seven hours, finally hitting my inbox at 11:55 P.M. The reason for the delay was evident: the attached file was enormous. I clicked to open it. The hourglass started spinning. And spinning. Whatever was inside was going to take a while. I was beginning to wonder if Connie’s computer was actually powered by snow monkeys. I read the message while the file downloaded:

“Freaked. Someone is at the door. Very suspicious shoes.”

It took me a second, but then I remembered the second peephole on Evan’s door. I read on:

“I am getting the hell out of here as soon as he leaves. The work we talked about is attached. Really big file for e-mail. Hope it comes through.”

I checked the hourglass on the file download. Still spinning. The message continued:

“Be careful with Lilly. Can’t understand how T memo on BAQ got in her data.”

Evan’s message ended there.

Connie’s computer was still struggling, the hourglass spinning as it tried to open Evan’s file attachment. Like Evan, I, too, had no idea how a Treasury memo on Operation BAQ had ended up in Lilly’s data, but if I had to wait another ten seconds to read Evan’s decrypted version of it, I thought I would burst. The screen flickered, and my heart nearly stopped.

Do NOT crash!

Another flicker across the screen, and my e-mail program suddenly shut down.

“Shit!”

A message box popped up. Inside, the hourglass continued to spin round and round. Connie’s computer was still trying to open Evan’s file.

Please, God.

My hand shook as I waited on the work that Evan had died-literally-trying to send me.

“Is everything okay?” asked Lilly.

I turned as she entered the kitchen. My outburst had apparently woken her, or perhaps sleep had been equally elusive for her. I started talking, my tongue racing, but I couldn’t have made much sense to her.

“It’s from Evan, an e-mail, and the attachment is so ginormous that Connie’s computer is about to-”

I caught my breath as the computer screen flickered one more time. Another box popped before my eyes. It was a long message with some kind of code attached, but this code was not from Evan, it was from Microsoft. Two words caught my attention:

FILE CORRUPTED.

The screen went black, and the PC fell silent. I clicked the mouse, I tapped the keyboard, I pressed the main power button again and again. Nothing.

“You can’t be serious!”

“Patrick, what is going on?” asked Lilly.

“Where’s your phone?”

“Charging,” she said, “right over there.”

I spotted it by the toaster, hurried over, powered it on, and went straight to the Internet, where I pulled up the remote access program for my e-mail account. I scrolled down the in-box to where Evan’s message had been. Then I tried the trash bin.

“It’s gone,” I said, my heart sinking.

“What’s gone?”

I couldn’t believe it. The message and the e-mail-both were gone, wiped clean from the in-box and the trash bin.

“Patrick, what is it?”

I closed my eyes and then opened them slowly, hoping to wake up and find that this had all been a dream, a nightmare. It wasn’t.

“Disaster,” I said. “A total disaster is what this is.”

Robledo’s twin engine Cessna landed at eleven thirty P.M. There were no runway lights. There was no runway. The unscheduled flight from São Paulo, Brazil, had touched down on an unofficial landing strip. Hundreds of such strips cut through the remote woods and grasslands of the Tri-Border region, a landlocked patch of jungle and rough country that lies along the Tropic of Capricorn, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet.

Robledo was in the eleventh hour of a southward journey that had started on a commercial jet out of JFK airport. Even though he’d slept on the flight to São Paulo, and even though he’d lost only two hours with the time change, he felt jet-lagged and was glad to have a driver. His name was Oscar, and he spoke only Spanish.

By midnight the four-wheel-drive SUV was approaching Friendship Bridge, a sixteen-hundred-foot span that connected Brazil to Paraguay. A sign posted at the bridge’s entrance announced that crossers were prohibited from throwing merchandise off the side. Midnight, however, was the regular shift change for the customs officers. Crews on the Brazilian side were thin, and as usual, bribes had been paid to the Paraguayan naval police at the other end of the bridge. As Robledo’s SUV rolled across the bridge, smugglers by the dozen worked fast and fluidly, taking advantage of the window of opportunity that came three times daily with every shift change. Scrambling but still drinking beer, working within a couple hundred meters of Brazil’s customs and immigration outpost, smugglers harnessed boxes of goods to long nylon ropes that dangled from the railing and lowered them onto the forested riverbank. Below, teenage boys armed with flashlights sorted through the packages in litter-strewn, knee-high grass.

“Bienvenido a la Ciudad del Este , ” his driver said with a smile. “Welcome to Ciudad del Este.”

Robledo knew the place well. The nightly commotion on the bridge was business as usual in a city of two hundred thousand thieves, swindlers, whores, hit men, gangsters, kidnappers, drug runners, drug addicts, extortionists, smugglers, counterfeiters, terrorists, and well-armed revolutionaries-some with causes, most without. Ciudad del Este was a veritable festering urban sore in the jungle on the Paraguay side of the Paraná River. Not even the pop and crack of semi-automatic weapons in the distance was cause for alarm. More than likely, it was a test firing by just another buyer of AK-47 assault rifles from China or submachine guns stolen from the Mexican army.