Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“I’m talking about a series of flash-bangs on the other side of the building, to draw them off. I’m talking about a wait of a minute, ninety seconds tops. We make some noise, and then you leave, and if you do meet people on the way out, you’ll meet fewer of them.”

“So you say. But what’re you so worried about, boyo-you’ll be on the outside, out of harm’s way.”

“There are risks we can minimize, and risks we can’t. The exit plan falls in the first category. If I’m worried about anything, it’s that you don’t see that. I’m talking about a minute, Deke, a minute and a half tops.”

“You shy because they’re kids? Is that it?”

They went back and forth like that, until the sky grew pale and everyone but Latin Mike agreed with Carr, and Mike stayed silent. Finally-peevishly-Declan folded. And then, three nights later, as he and Bobby and Mike were on their way out of the Dudek Air Charter building, he changed his mind.

No one laughed after that. Not Bobby or Mike, who had taken a round through his right arm and who Carr had never seen so pale, and not Declan, who’d taken a round in his left thigh and killed three child soldiers along the way. The wound didn’t seem to bother Declan much on the drive west, from Managua to the Pacific coast, nor did it stop Carr.

“We had a plan,” Carr said.

Declan’s smile was thin and cold. “You know what they say about those, boyo: they don’t survive the first shot.”

“We all agreed on it.”

“And since when was this a feckin’ democracy?”

Carr stared for a long while, and then shook his head. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” he whispered. Declan stopped smiling, but had no other answer.

It’s nearly nightfall when Mike arrives, and there are clouds in the darkening sky, and approaching thunder. Mike has a six of Corona under one arm, and a bucket of fried chicken under the other.

“Howie’s still sleeping,” Carr says, as he passes Mike in the doorway. “Don’t hit him again.” Mike starts to say something, but Carr keeps walking.

Dennis is eating dinner when Carr arrives, a Cuban sandwich and a beer. He’s bent over a laptop, wearing headphones, and he doesn’t look up when Carr opens the door. Carr raps on the table, and Dennis starts and pulls the phones off.

“I’m looking at the latest from Chun’s place-the wires Vee laid down.”

Carr pulls a chair alongside Dennis’s. “And?” he asks.

Dennis colors. “It’s good,” he says. “Actually, it’s great.”

The image is clear, despite the low light: Amy Chun in her home office. The tiny camera is planted in a bookshelf behind her desk, and the view is over and above her right shoulder. She’s wearing a sleeveless white shirt, and there’s a mug of tea steaming in a corner of her desk, next to her cell phone. She is pushing aside the keyboard of her home computer and opening up the laptop she carries every day to and from her office suite at the Spanish River Bank and Trust Company.

“Laptop keyboard is nice and clear,” Dennis says. “Vee did a good job with placement.”

Chun takes a fingerprint scanner from the desk drawer and plugs it into the laptop. From her purse she takes something like a keychain fob, with a tiny LCD strip down the center-an automatic password generator. A log-on window opens on the laptop, and she types in a password, one part of it from memory, and the rest from the screen of the password generator. Another window comes up, and Chun presses her thumb onto the fingerprint scanner. The laptop screen flickers and then her cell phone chimes. Chun picks it up, listens, picks up the password generator again, and keys a code from its screen into her cell phone. The laptop screen flickers again and she’s into the network shared by the Spanish River Bank and Trust, and the rest of the banks owned by Isla Privada.

Carr shakes his head. “We knew how all that worked, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.”

Dennis stiffens beside him. His tone is frosty. “It’s a virtual private network with multifactor authorization, including an out-of-band security feature, and I know exactly how it all works. What I’m missing is the checksum for Chun’s thumbprint, the algorithm her key fob is using to generate those one-time passwords, and the authentication chip inside her laptop. If I had all that, and Chun’s private password, and a phone on the network’s call-back list, then we wouldn’t need Vee in there at all, and I could log on to the Isla Privada network whenever I wanted. Give me Curtis Prager’s private password on top of that, and we could all go home right now. Now that would save us trouble.”

Carr suppresses a laugh. “I stand corrected,” he says quietly. “We got Chun’s part, though, didn’t we?”

“We got it,” Dennis says. “We got her password and we got account numbers.”

“Nice job,” Carr says, and claps him on the shoulder. “What else is on the tape?”

“Vee comes on,” Dennis says, blushing. He fast-forwards several minutes, and a shadow crosses Amy Chun’s desk. A moment later, Valerie’s-Jill’s-hip leans against Chun’s arm. She’s wearing a short white T-shirt and panties with lace trim, and she’s carrying a rocks glass. Carr can’t tell what’s in it, but he can hear the ice. Jill rests her arm on Chun’s back.

“I’ll miss you,” Jill says.

“It’s just a day,” Chun says, looking up at her. “New York and back. I’ll be home before eleven.”

“You’ll call me?”

“Why don’t you meet me here?” Chun says, and she slides her hand beneath Jill’s shirt.

Jill inhales sharply and her hips shift. Her voice is choked. “Hurry and finish,” she says, and she exits the frame to the tinkle of ice.

“Christ,” Dennis whispers.

Carr lets out a deep breath. “Is that it?”

Dennis blushes again. “There’s more… in the bedroom. The light is low, so the picture’s not great, and the AC is blowing, so the sound is-”

“Play it.”

Dennis clicks on another video file, and a dim, sepia-shadowed image appears: a heap of pillows, a tangle of dark blankets, two pale blurs on a paler, rectangular field. There is the faint shifting of sheets, the sound of someone drinking, someone sighing.

Amy Chun’s voice is a tentative whisper. “Have you been… out for a long time?”

Valerie-Jill-laughs. Her voice is sleepy and soft. “I never thought about it that way; I never was really in. I’ve known how I felt since grade school, and I’ve never pretended anything different.”

“Your parents?”

“They were too busy fighting with each other to pay much attention to me. I was in college before they noticed.”

“They didn’t care?”

“If they did, I didn’t notice, and pretty soon I was out of there.”

“My parents would notice,” Amy Chun whispers, “even from Vancouver. And they would care. So would my board of directors.”

“It’s your life, Amy, not theirs. Your one-and-only life, and your happiness.”

“Coming out is no guarantee of happiness.”

“Nope-I know plenty of unhappy couples-of all persuasions. But not coming out-that is a guarantee.”

Sheets rustle and someone exhales slowly. There’s a sound of ice in a glass. “I’m happy now,” Amy Chun says quietly. “Happier than I’ve been. Definitely happier than my parents are.”

“They don’t get along?”

“Never.”

“It doesn’t always have to be like that, you know-like my parents, and yours.”

There’s more shifting, and a giggle. “No?” Amy Chun asks.

“Maybe that’s what we should do, you and me,” she whispers. “Go away together and conduct a little research, to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists.”