David Koepp - Cold Storage

“Phil, I’m fucking with you. It’s probably nothing. I’ll check it out and go home. And by the way, you’re welcome. I’m not exactly on the clock anymore.”

Jerabek took a moment, deciding whether or not to trust him, and opted for some of both. “I know that. Thank you for making yourself available.”

“You should probably take me off the file.”

“I will do that. Keep in touch.”

The phone went dead. Roberto held it for a moment, thinking. He looked out the window, at the lights of Charlotte down below, off to his right. Broken thermistor my ass.

Fuck that guy. Off the books was exactly where he was going.

He’d be on the ground in Kansas in less than two hours. That would make it tight, but if Trini answered he had an outside shot at it. The trick would be coding the call, and he certainly couldn’t do it on the plane’s phone. He reached into his flight bag, took out the MacBook Air his son, Alexander, had given him for Christmas (too much, makes everybody uncomfortable, tone it down, Alexander), and turned it on. The plane’s Wi-Fi signal was half-decent, and he called up Tor2web without hitting a DoD net nanny, first stroke of luck. JonDonym and the two or three other .onion rerouters he knew were already dead. The dark net had pretty fast-moving currents, and he wasn’t surprised to see he was already out of date. He was trying to think of next steps when something in his jacket pocket buzzed.

It was the satellite phone, the one he’d taken out of the safe back in his kitchen. He looked at the screen, didn’t recognize the number. He made an educated guess.

“Abigail?”

“I can talk for two minutes.” It was her. Roberto was genuinely delighted.

“I think you have the wrong number,” he replied, and hung up the satellite phone, which was most certainly monitored. He tapped a few keys on the laptop, accessed a DeepBeep site he trusted—thank God that one was still there—and leached into the first number with at least ten nodes of encryption that scrolled by. He called her back and she picked up on the first ring.

“I’m on my personal cell in the ladies’ room.” He could hear the echo of her voice off the tile.

“I take it you read my white paper.”

“I did,” she said.

“And you believed it.”

“What do you need me to—” She stopped, and he could hear that the door to the bathroom had just opened. Someone had come in.

Roberto took over. “Okay, I’ll talk, you listen. Even with encryption, airplane Wi-Fi won’t be secure enough for the conversations I need to have, so you’ll have to make the calls for me. Find a reason to get yourself out of there on the double, go buy a burner, and call a former agent named Trini Romano. I’ll repeat that name before I hang up. When she answers, tell her ‘Margo is under the weather.’”

“Margo is under the weather? I’m sorry to hear that.” Still with the stilted voice—she wasn’t alone in the bathroom.

“That’s it. Then tell her what you know, she’ll help you with the list. Even number seven. Especially number seven. We’re under two hours, so you have to move fast.”

In the background, he heard a toilet flush. He continued.

“Text your burner number to me through a Mixmaster and I’ll call you when I’m rolling.”

Water ran in the bathroom. Someone was washing her hands.

Abigail sighed. “I understand, Mom, I just think it’s kind of soon after your knee replacement.”

Roberto smiled. She was pretty good, all things considered. “I’m dying to know why you decided to believe me, but that can wait. Doesn’t matter, I guess.” He could hear the bathroom door open and close again.

Abigail’s tone changed. “Is it as bad as what you wrote in the report?”

“Every bit. And none of the people who understand that are in power anymore. Jerabek is not going to bed, he’ll keep an eye on things, and he will not be helpful. But believe it or not, I’ve done all this before.”

“Including item seven?”

He didn’t answer that. “Trini Romano.”

He hung up.

When Teacake was fourteen, he fell in love for the first time. Patti Wisniewski was seventeen and he never really had much of a shot with her, but he’d started hanging around with seniors when he was a freshman, thanks to his overpowering sex drive. Like any fourteen-year-old boy, Teacake had powerful erections and he followed his dick wherever it led him. One day it dragged him to auditions for the school play, of all places. It was the last thing a frankly thuggish kid like Teacake would have done under normal circumstances, but he had an angle to work. The whole school had to watch the fall musical one afternoon, and he would have been blind not to have noticed that there was an inordinately high percentage of attractive young women up there onstage, almost entirely surrounded by losers. Three weeks later, he went to auditions for the new play.

Because he was a human male and alive on the planet, he was cast immediately. It was some shitty old play about a bunch of actresses sitting around a New York City apartment waiting for their big break. He barely knew the name of it then and certainly couldn’t remember it now. He’d played Frank the Butler and had exactly two lines:

“Shall I call a taxi, Miss Louise?”

And, in the second act, the kicker—

“Taxi’s waiting, Miss Louise.”

One night he screwed them up and switched the order around, which should have brought the play to a crashing halt, but nobody really noticed. He never talked loud enough anyway. The other two shows he managed to deliver both lines at the right times and without laughing.

But his real accomplishment was getting himself accepted into the sex-and-drug-filled paradise of seventeen-year-old life. He was kind of cute for his age, smart enough from hanging around his older brother to know what to say and what not to say, and the seniors took him under their wing as a sort of mascot. He wasn’t fully developed, so his sexuality wasn’t particularly threatening, and that gave him all sorts of access to older women. He worked it as hard as he’d ever worked anything in his life, and at the cast party on opening night, Patti Wisniewski gave him a mercy hand job in the bathroom of Kres Peckham’s stepdad’s house. The only shame was that he was too drunk to remember it.

That was the thing. If asked, Teacake would be hard-pressed to come up with a single sexual encounter or romantic overture in high school that wasn’t fueled by booze or drugs. He started smoking weed in seventh grade, like most people he knew, but that was the sort of thing you did with your buddies, when you didn’t care how stupid you came off. With women you wanted to be drunk. Coke was nice if you could get it, but there was such an ugly price to pay for it, some creepy twentysomething asshole you’d have to hang around with, or cash that had to be scooped out of the till at work or stolen from somebody’s parents. Too much hassle involved. Rock was cheaper, for sure, but you didn’t have to be a genius to see that smoking that shit would take you no place good. That kind of high had nothing to do with getting off, anyway; you lost interest in sex almost immediately.

Things in his romantic life didn’t change all that much after high school, when he got the job at the asphalt place. By that time his moms had split, and his dad was enjoying his own intimate relationship with the sauce. He’d always drunk a lot, his old man, but Teacake didn’t think much of it, because everyone around here drank too much. Atchison was fucking bleak in the winter, dark side of the moon, there wasn’t anything else to do besides get loaded, and then it’s not like you’re going to give it up for the spring and summer. At best, his dad’s drinking became a little more joyful as the weather improved; he could at least hide it under the cover of celebration.