Black Hat Blues (47 page)

the surveillance, the security, the gas for those SUVs. Right?” Marsh

didn’t nod but she also didn’t deny it. “So this is just one more charge.

You pay off Isaiah with Clover’s money. Doesn’t cost you a dime. Now

wait! I know what you’re gonna say. You’re going to say you don’t give

in to threats and paying off Isaiah doesn’t do any good for Ken Clover.

But what if it did?”

Marsh kept staring at him. Paul felt himself flashing back to his

days in the video game business when he was giving pitches to venture

capitalists and publishers. The same dead, skeptical, bored look that

implied they’d heard it all before. Very few of those meetings had gone

well. In fact, none of them had.

“Here’s the deal I’m proposing. I’ll give you a confession. I’ll give you

solid, unimpeachable evidence that Ken Clover was in every possible

way framed. Server logs, original and then edited e-mails, bank records.

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I’ll give you all the details of what we did to him. That’s what you need

isn’t it? You need him off the hook so he can get back to his old life?

Well fine. I take all the blame. I’m a known criminal. Hell, I can even

give you stuff linking me back to the shit I pulled in San Jose a few years

back. You put me on that wanted list if you want. You bring in that kind

of evidence to get Clover off the hook, and he’ll gladly pay your normal

fee plus the money to pay off Isaiah. Everybody wins.”

“Everyone but you,” Marsh said.

Paul’s stomach did flips, he was so pleased to hear her say those

words. “I win because Chloe and I don’t get handed over to the FBI

tonight and you get them to let Sandee go down in Florida. We run

away. We go underground. We turn over a new leaf. At this point, that’s

all we want. We just want it to be over.”

Marsh didn’t say anything for a long time. Long enough that Chloe

jumped into the negotiations. “It’s a fair trade isn’t it? You get every-

thing you wanted in the beginning and it ends up costing your client a

little more than he might have paid otherwise. But he gets his life back

now instead of six months or a year from now or never. I’ve seen his

books. He’ll make back that much money in six months, easy.”

Marsh looked at Chloe. “Why pink?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your hair is that shockingly ugly shade of pink. Why?”

“I like it,” said Chloe. She pointed at Paul. “He likes it.”

“It’s awfully dangerous. Very recognizable, stands out in a crowd.

Which I suppose is why you always wear a wig. I guessed right about

the wig, but I never would have guessed pink.”

Paul and Chloe exchanged blank faced looks. What was this woman

going on about?

“The pair of you,” Marsh said. “You’re a couple?”

“Yes,” said Chloe.

“I see that. Interesting. You’ve picked a strange way to live. A stupid

way, really. I don’t think you’re quite cut-throat enough to be criminals,

not successful ones anyway. It’s your sentiment that’s gotten you in so

much trouble, that led me to you.” Paul started to say something and

then stopped, deciding it was better for him to wait and see where she

was going with this. “I don’t much care for your deal, but I’m not sure

I much care for any of the alternatives.”

“Can I just say what you probably can’t?” Chloe said.

Marsh nodded.

“We go to jail, we plead out to the feds, that helps Ken a little bit. But

you’re right, we’re sentimental, and maybe that makes us bad crooks, but

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it also means we didn’t choose Ken at random. We chose him because

he’s a bad guy who does bad things for even worse people. You know as

well as we do, that if the whole truth comes out about what we really did

to Ken, well, there’s no coming back for him. He’s fucked because, quite

frankly, he deserves to be fucked, and I think you know that.”

Paul thought, maybe just imagined, he saw a flicker of something

in Marsh’s eye. Maybe anger but, really, maybe delight? “That’s if we

have to cut a deal with the feds instead of you,” Paul said. “But we deal

with you and you get a custom tailored confession, one with plenty of

details that exonerate your client in ways an official FBI investigation

never would. Plus, from a purely selfish point of view, we don’t spend

the next twenty years in a federal penitentiary.”

“I’d need more than just your files. I’d need a confession from you. A

confession people can believe in. Not written, not something that could

have been faked. Something on video.”

That she was even talking about making a deal thrilled Paul. His

mind raced, thinking back over everything that they had done to see if

there might be something to win her over. The pieces started to come

together for him and he let the ideas pour out. “OK, I getcha. A believ-

able confession. Well, cynics and experts, they know that no confession

got under any form of duress is really believable. What you want is not

a confession but an admission.”

“Explain the difference in your eyes.”

“I make a video. We make a video. A video demanding more money

from Ken, extorting him, threatening him, saying we’re going to make

it seem like he’s done even more horrible things, or whatever. We can

back date it, say we’re going to make it look like he’s done the horrible

things that he has in fact actually done, right? And I use something to

blur my face and my voice. But here’s the deal. I use something that

can be reverse engineered. Those programs that swirl or blur faces?

There are algorithms out there to undo the swirling. They caught some

child molester that way from pics he posted online. So you’ll have this

video and you can get your experts to unblur me and then you’ll have

me admitting to trying to blackmail Ken. It will look like you’ve out-

smarted me, which, I think, the media and Ken’s clients will find a lot

more convincing then a straightforward confession. Plus, hey, it makes

you look pretty damn smart too, doesn’t it? That’s gotta be good for

business.”

“I’d have to see proof that this works.”

“Sure, yeah. Or we could just give you the unblurred video and you

could do the rest on your own however you want. Whichever way.”

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Marsh turned her back on them and walked a few steps away, look-

ing up at the ceiling as she did. She stood at the rear of her SUV for a

long while there, just staring at the ceiling. “I remain dissatisfied about

Isaiah’s threats towards my family,” she said to the ceiling. “Paying him

off galls me.”

“I know this won’t mean much coming from me,” Chloe said, “But

Isaiah is a man of his word. And he knows full well how connected you

are. He doesn’t want a war with you, he really doesn’t. If he says he’ll

leave you alone when he gets paid, I promise you he will.”

“Yet still it galls me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Paul, “But I don’t know what else to say.”

Marsh stared up for a few more seconds before turning and calmly

walking back towards them. “I’ll need some other reassurance. A form

of probation.”

“What does that mean?”

“For one year, I want to know where the two of you are at all times.

I want to be able to snatch you up again and drag you to that building

across the street if any of this goes wrong. Should one piece of misfor-

tune befall my family, I shall blame Isaiah and, by proxy, you.”

“We’d better hope they live charmed lives then,” said Chloe.

“So far, they have,” Marsh said with a smile. “My call to them an

hour ago might well have been the first time in their adult lives they’ve

been truly frightened. I don’t want that to happen again.”

“Just me and Paul,” said Chloe. “Sandee and anyone else, they go

free.” Marsh nodded. “And how do you propose to keep tabs on us. We

don’t want to go to jail.”

“Jail would be easiest. Some petty larceny charge? But no, it couldn’t

work. Mr. Reynolds can’t be the total scapegoat if he’s already in police

custody on some other charge. We’ll have to work out some arrange-

ment. I’m sure my security experts can think of something. Assuming

the details all work out as you suggest they will, do we have a deal?”

Paul looked at Chloe. She pursed her lips slightly, no doubt wonder-

ing if they’d made some mistake, forgotten something. Paul couldn’t

think of anything. He nodded, she nodded back. “Deal,” said Chloe,

holding out her hand.

Marsh stepped forward and shook it, then shook Paul’s. “All your

effort, for naught,” she said to Paul. “You’re left only with your freedom,

something that never would have been at risk at all had you but focused

your attention on legal achievements instead of criminal ones.”

Paul just shook her hand. She had no idea what had really just

happened.

Chloe didn’t get to see Sacco again for two weeks, when they were

back in Florida to celebrate Sandee’s release and help plan Paul’s

funeral.

Going back to Key West at first seemed like a crazy idea. Too small,

too few exits, they were too well known. But that was kind of the point

wasn’t it? Marsh wanted to know where they were all the time. Going

back to the last place they’d called home would put her at ease. Now

the old house, that was out of the question. The feds had torn it apart

looking for evidence, and had probably found a ton of it too. They’d

also gone through the Keys Condos and Estates records with a fine

toothed comb, meaning the Crew’s primary hook up for free housing

was no longer an option. Chloe called one of their few contacts on the

island who hadn’t been questioned by the feds, and she hooked them

up with a houseboat that hadn’t left the marina in seven years. They

did have to actually pay for it though, which sucked.

Sandee regaled them with tales of life behind bars the whole way

down from Miami. There were at least three fellow federal felons

with broken wrists and one with a cracked pelvis and a guard who

had a crush on him. He played it off in his typical joking style, but

Sandee was clearly happy to be free. He looked tired, worn, and, for

the first time ever, Chloe thought she saw wrinkles around his eyes.

Not that she said anything. Bee filled Sandee in on everything else,

from c1sman’s chickening out, “he never was cut out for this,” she’d

said, to the final chase and negotiation with Marsh that resulted in

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Sandee’s release. The two of them joked and teased in the back seat,

sucking in the sea air as Chloe raced south over the water with the

windows down.

The houseboat smelled a little too much like the sea, the fishy part

of the sea to be precise, but it was home for the moment anyway. Once

they were inside, Chloe showed off the GPS ankle bracelet that was

locked to her left leg and then checked in with Marsh’s security goon

over the Web cam, proving she was where she said she was. Bee had

figured out within the first few hours that the thing not only had a GPS

in it, but a hidden microphone as well. Basically a whole phone set up.

Chloe had suspected as much. The really shitty part was that its battery

only lasted 72 hours, which meant every three days she had to plug her

leg into an outlet for a couple hours while it recharged. Well, not much

longer, she thought.

Having checked in as ordered and knowing by now that the Marsh

goons never did their random spot checks within the next couple of

hours, she motioned to Bee. Her techno-savvy best bud pulled out the

cloned unit from under the couch and orchestrated the careful swi-

tchover from the live one on her leg to the fake one that would cover

for her. The first time they’d tried the trick, they almost got caught

and had used every ready-made excuse they’d prepared ahead of time

to convince Marsh it wasn’t their fault. Sunspots, electrical storms,

lead paint in the walls, everything. A week later Bee had perfected the

process and they could come and go as they pleased. Chloe removed

her slave bracelet and placed it on the table behind the computer next

to Paul’s, its microphone safely muted.

“Did she really think you wouldn’t be able to find a work around for

those?” Sandee asked.

“I don’t think she did,” said Bee. “She can’t have thought we were

that stupid.”

“I just think she didn’t realize you were that smart,” said Chloe. “It’s

a subject of running debate.”

They opened up a bottle of champagne and drank out of Dixie cups

for the next hour. They were halfway through their third when Chloe

heard familiar footsteps on the dock outside the door. A moment later

Paul came in, with Sacco right behind him.

“You piece of shit,” said Chloe.

“I’m sorry,” said Sacco.

“You said you’d be here yesterday.”

“I got hung up.”

“Was it a girl?”

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259

Sacco actually blushed a little. “Maybe. But it was a girl at a bank in

Belize, so it’s not like I wasn’t working.”