She sat up suddenly and he sensed a change in her concentration. "Then Tony asked about how the planning of the job was going. He told us there was only one truck, and that we had to take it straight into New York. Couldn't get two truckloads. I thought that was probably bullshit, because these container ships carry thousands and thousands of whatever it is-air conditioners, televisions, computers. I called the shipping agent and found out where the ship was stopping before it made its way to Newport News. It was stopping in a lot of places, but one of the places was Thailand. Lots of opium is grown in Thailand."
"I know-I lived there."
"You did?" she asked.
"As a pilot."
She mulled this over. "Did you kill a lot of people?"
"Don't ask me that."
"Why?"
"It's too painful."
"I guess you did."
How could she understand?
"But for your country," Christina said.
"At the time I believed that."
"What do you believe now?"
"I believe the Air Force is very good at picking people who believe in absolutes and can fly jets."
"Do they go together?"
"That's a hell of a question." Which he didn't want to answer. "You were saying about Thailand?"
"Okay, so actually I did not know about Tony, not yet. All I had was a coincidence. Then he happened to call up and say he knew somebody who was interested in buying a few of the air conditioners but that the guy was pretty nervous and wanted to be the first guy in, the first guy out. Okay, I said. See, Tony's setting it up and we pay him to do that, but we also pay him a cut. He's going to make maybe twenty thousand on the job, out of our eighty-three. So he tells me about this guy, whose name was Frankie, someone I didn't know. Then I find out he's a known heroin dealer."
"That's a problem." The conversation was starting to worry him.
"Sure is," agreed Christina. "I have to wonder if Tony is smuggling heroin into New York City using me and Rick as his mules. We think we're transporting air conditioners, which we are, but maybe we're also carrying heroin. First I was worried that Tony was trying to set us up. But that didn't make sense, because if we got caught it would've been easy to trace us to him. He really did want us to be successful. We would get the truck already packed. Tony's guy wanted the first ten boxes off of it. He would know which ones, I wouldn't. Each box weighed seventy pounds, as I said. If that's heroin, then it's a huge amount of money."
"Millions and millions," Charlie said, thinking about Sir Henry Lai.
"But probably they have a little bit of heroin inside each air conditioner," Christina went on. "Let's say twenty pounds in each box. Twenty pounds of pure heroin times ten boxes. I thought maybe Tony was trying to get around his Colombian people. If we somehow get arrested, then he can tell them it wasn't his fault. He sets it up to work but in a way that if it doesn't, he's okay. At least, this is what I came up with. I didn't know what was going on-the mob politics, the cartel politics, whatever." She coughed. "I was never privy to that whole set of people. The other problem was that Rick was pretty sure that we were under regular surveillance. Phone taps. Something was going on. He had a phone message drop that supposedly could not be traced to him or anyone, but he thought it was tapped."
"How does that work?" asked Charlie. "I'm in the telecom business, you know."
"I think it's simple from a mechanical point of view," she said. "You need three phones, one of them cellular, and two computers. The call comes in to the first phone, which is connected to a computer. It's a regular phone line. As soon as the call comes in, the computer autodials to a second number, using an attached cell phone. The origin of this second call is not traceable by exact location. Meanwhile, the computer takes a message from the first phone call and hangs up. You can have it do two things, and we did. You have it send a regular voice message, which is digitized, then toned like a fax through the cell phone to the third phone, which has the other computer, which takes the electronic transmission, records it, hangs up, undigitizes it, and plays the message back when you want. The first computer erases its memory after it transmits the call, and the second erases itself after it plays the call to the listener. Or-and this is the part I like-"
"Jesus," Charlie said, "who thought of this?"
"I did."
"You did?"
"Conceptually." She poked his back affectionately. "I don't know anything about electronics. They had a guy who did the programming stuff." She took his hand in hers and kissed the scar. "I wanted to do that the first time I saw you," she said, lips against his skin.
"What was the other option?" he asked.
"We had a bunch of messages, coded by number. Like, 'I'll be late' was a certain number, maybe the number three. So the computer at the first phone lets out a tone to leave a message and the caller punches in the number three. The computer takes this number three in and hangs up. Done. Then the computer uses its cell phone to dial the third phone. Or wherever you want to be reached. There was a way to remote-program the redial number, too. The idea is to make enough steps that it's a puzzle that can't be solved after the fact-while you could prove proximity of the receiving phone and the outgoing cellular, you could not prove, using phone logs, that the phones were adjacent, or causally related."
"Unless you got hold of the computers themselves."
"Right. So in this second scenario, the computer calls you wherever you want to be and generates a fax. What does it fax? It faxes an Italian takeout menu." She paused to light another cigarette. "Looks like nothing. You get it and you say, So what. But it's the number of times that the computer faxes it which is the message. You get the same fax three times and three is the message. Somebody grabs that piece of paper, what does it mean? Nothing."
"But you said that this Rick guy thought this wasn't working?"
"No, it was working fine, but they had tapped in somewhere," Christina said. "They were monitoring, probably through the first phone. They weren't catching the pass-along cell call. I don't think. Maybe they knew about the computer and the cell phone and were waiting, using it like a trap. Rick was worried. Had to cancel a couple of things. He got edgy about stuff. But he was right, as it turned out."
He wasn't sure how the phone trickery connected to her truck story. "So at this point you have a hell of a problem," Charlie summarized. "You've got the bad guy with the heroin. You want to get out of the relationship. Lot of stuff happening."
"Sure. I was angry that Tony was making such huge money off of my risk. But the other thing was that this was going to be my last job, forever. I was going to do this one very bad thing and then I was going to do nothing ever again. I wanted to just get free of Rick and the rest of them. And frankly, the best way I could think of to do that was to make the job get fucked up. Get the police to arrive and find and arrest people."
"Hang on." Charlie got up to go to the bathroom. It had a phone on the wall next to the toilet so guys like Sir Henry Lai could call for help as they crapped out on the crapper. Not me, thought Charlie, I'm still banging around. Ellie asleep, dreaming of rosebushes. He let loose a blissful stream, then in the light over the sink he looked at his penis. Pubic hair almost all gray, the flesh under it soft. It hung there, bent left, currently of no use. All those mysterious little veins, red and bluish, thin and thick. I've been staring at this thing my whole life, he thought, still don't know what it is, exactly. Gave her a pretty good shot, by the feel of it. A good shot for him, at least. Fucking substandard sperm sample. It was embarrassing, even if he only had one testicle. But how many guys who'd had an M-16 round hit their scrotums actually had sperm samples? You survive to prosper, you live so that you can fuck. Melissa-he meant Christina-was much more vigorous than Ellie, not even close. He was out of practice, by about twenty-five years. Admit it, he told himself, you like this girl, even though she is dishonest and scares you a little. He rubbed his finger against his penis, touched his nose, and smelled her. Life keeps surprising me, he thought.