Free A Billion Ways to Die by Chris Knopf

ask. A lot of disruption.”
    “I’m not going for a big haul. Just one account. Precision strike.”
    “Okay, let’s talk compensation.”
    “You don’t want to know how I located you?” I asked.
    “I’m pretending that isn’t a threat.”
    “Consider it a security analysis.”
    I sent him the general’s account and bank routing numbers. He took longer than usual to respond. I was ready to hit the end conversation button when he wrote, “That’s too hot for this box. Await instructions.”
    “How so?”
    “You’ll know.”

    I STAYED off the beach the next day. And the day after that. The only thing I had to do was wait, and waiting was the thing I least liked to do. Especially when I could do nothing to hurry the process along. So I distracted myself the only way I knew how. I did research.
    Back in my old life, another side business was tracking down missing persons. I had one client, a law firm who paid me to uncover the recipients of class action settlements who were unaware of their windfall. It was great work, since it often involved travel, carried the romance of detective work, and no one was unhappy to be found.
    So with some relish, I started chasing a few of our more recent acquaintances. People like Alberta, Angus and Angela, and Jersey and Desiree Mitchell.
    Not surprisingly, after several hours I located no one named Alberta whose description fit the woman who’d interrogated me on the fishing boat. It didn’t mean I hadn’t found her, just that not all the Albertas were photographed or adequately described. I compiled a list of about a hundred candidate Albertas and stuck it away.
    The same was true for a married couple named Angus and Angela. We had good clear photos taken on the sly with our smartphones. Angus was a computer scientist, and a Scot, and Angela an American, so they should have been much easier to pin down, but I had little luck.
    “I don’t think they’re married,” said Natsumi, when I drew her into the hunt. “At least not to each other.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Wedding rings didn’t match.”
    “Very good,” I said.
    “And she asked me if I thought he was cute. Married women rarely seek that kind of validation. Usually the opposite.”
    “Opposite?”
    “ ‘Don’t you think he’s an idiot?’ ” she said, mimicking another woman.
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I said, absolutely, cute as all get-out.”
    “And no idiot.”
    Jersey Mitchell wasn’t even a challenge. Real name Lucien, born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, undergrad and law degree from Columbia, spent most of his career as an FBI agent attached to the US Attorney’s Office in New York City, etc. Everything he gladly told us. He had hundreds of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter contacts and not a one named Angus. Nor anyone who looked like Angus, or Angela.
    I was about to dive into more sophisticated search programs when a ping from one of my mailboxes alerted me the general had transferred the money I’d deposited, completing that portion of the transaction. He told me to wait at a corner in Hialeah later that afternoon and he’d take it from there.
    “Just like that?” Natsumi asked.
    “Same drill,” I said. We went over the codes I’d use if I ran into trouble—the type of trouble, whether things were fine, whether to come get me, or run for her life. These I would deliver by smartphone, if I could call. If I didn’t call by a certain time, we picked a place for her to go and what she should do next.
    It should have been a comfort to have this down to a routine, but it only reminded us of the anxieties and terrors of the past.
    And so it was that I stood there, dressed more or less like a native, packing my smartphone, fake ID and a few hundred dollars in cash. Natsumi was in a coffee shop across the street to see me off. She had a long-lens camera to capture what she could. We chatted through our Bluetooth earbuds while we waited, which was a comfort.
    A big SUV stopped