Free Blood Money by Thomas Perry

wasn’t even Italian—ineligible by accident of birth. My parents were Polish. Besides, you think they needed to give me a blood oath to convince me I’d get killed if I talked?”
    “So you were a mercenary.”
    “Haven’t you been listening to me? What the hell did I need with money? I couldn’t leave the house to buy a loaf of bread. In the forties I got salaries for phony jobs. Even then, all I could do was invest it. After that, people gave me presents once in a while, that’s all.”
    Jane’s breath caught in her throat. She had never taken money for her services. When someone had insisted, she had answered, “A year from now, or maybe two, when you’re living your new life and haven’t felt afraid for a while, think back on the way you felt tonight. Then, if you still feel like it,send me a present.” She waited a few seconds, then tried to simulate idle curiosity. “What kind of presents?”
    “All kinds. Mostly money. But I couldn’t keep it lying around, any more than I could leave their money lying around. So I invested it, and kept the account numbers in my head. In the sixties, I flat refused to take even the presents. They were dangerous. I was handling a lot of money for these people. If they knew that I had millions of dollars of my own, what would it mean to them? Where could it have come from except out of their pockets? Even if they somehow got the records from my brokers, and found out I had invested it before they were born, they would have assumed I had stolen it from their fathers or grandfathers.”
    Jane said, “When did you realize you were forgetting things?”
    “About a year ago,” he said. “It was a new experience for me, so at first I wasn’t sure that was what it was. I would try to take an inventory, and my mind would feel … tired. I could kind of see the words and numbers like before, but it was an effort to pick one out.”
    “Do they know?”
    “No,” he said. “I figure I’ve lost maybe five or ten percent of what was in here.” He pointed at his head. “Most of the investments have gone up that much in the past six months. There was never any reason to tell anybody. What got them nervous was that I was getting old. They started talking about computers.”
    “You were going to be replaced?”
    “A little delegation came to me and we had a talk. They were polite and sympathetic and careful the way those guys never are except when they’re conning somebody. They had it all figured out. Everything in my head could fit on a three-and-a-half-inch disk.”
    “Having a disk like that could be a dangerous thing.”
    “There are ways around that. The world is full of expert consultants. There’s a system that the government uses called ‘strong encryption.’ Nobody else is supposed to, but a lot of people know how. Each code is different, so if the FBI getsthe disk, they still can’t read it. And nothing gets lost, because you can make copies: hide one under a penguin’s nest at the South Pole, shove one up a camel’s ass in Saudi Arabia, tape one in a kid’s lunch box in Peoria. They even explained how my memory would get into the computer.”
    “How?”
    “I would start writing things down, one page at a time. Then I hand the computer guy the paper. He types it in and encodes it. Another guy shreds the paper, and another guy burns the shreds. There would be two other guys with nothing to do but watch to be sure nobody pockets a paper with an account number on it and burns an empty sheet.”
    Jane raised an eyebrow. “It sounds a bit ornate for them.”
    “This will show you the mentality. The shredder and burner are going to be guys they bring in specially from other countries—one from Central Europe and one from Asia, because they use different alphabets and can’t read letters in English. They won’t know where they are, or who the rest of us are. The phones will be cut off, and everybody stays until the job is done. When it’s over,