The Ghost Shipment, page 8
His ribs stung, but Jay was more worried about the state he’d find Bec in. She’d tried to kill him in India once, after he’d left her in a hotel room less than 30 minutes. That was when he found out about her borderline personality issues, how handling separation wasn’t one of her strong points.
He slipped through the back gate of the guesthouse, paused behind a jackfruit tree to check the lay of the land. Everything looked, sounded at peace. Water trickling in the fountain, the drooping tip of a pengor quivering in the breeze, the Balinese dawn symphony in rooster and dove.
The padlock was missing, but Jay could see through the narrow gap between the doors that the wooden slide bolt had been pulled across from the inside. He knocked, gently at first, then more forcefully. No response. Hopefully Bec was in a deep sleep.
He grabbed two teaspoons from the tray beside the water flask, slid the handles through the gap above and below the bolt, then tilted them to get enough purchase to shimmy the wood to the left, a fraction of an inch at a time.
When he felt the bolt give, he braced his arms for whatever might come at him, then nudged the door open with his foot. The first thing to smack him in the face was the temperature. The aircon had been wound down to sub-Antarctic. Then he saw the painting, or what was left of it.
Bec was on the floor beside the bed, cocooned under a blanket, peering up at him through eyes that had cried to exhaustion. Jay slumped down beside her, eased under the duvet, cradling her until she fell asleep.
*****
Mike’s first image of Bali, as the Emirates jet descended on its final approach, was a 400-foot hunk of copper and brass that made the Statue of Liberty look like a fourth grader dying to answer the teacher’s question.
The colossal Garuda Wisnu statue on a hill south of Ngurah Rai Airport was dedicated to the search for the elixir of life in Hindu mythology. Right now, Mike would settle for proof of life.
As soon as he’d heard Jay had been taken away by the police, his only concern was for Bec. The New Zealander could look after himself. Bec could be a mess. Fear of abandonment, a trademark of people with borderline personalities, would have triggered a downward spiral into an emotional – and potentially fatal – abyss.
Mike had been fearing the worst since leaving New York, and his anxiety notched up even further when he couldn’t get through to Bec during the brief layover in Dubai. Reading the opening chapters of Ped Garland’s book Straight Up, particularly the one detailing how drugs had driven a close friend of the candidate to commit suicide, didn’t help.
Mike expected Customs to show interest in some of the toys in his suitcase, but he sailed through the nothing to declare lane and into the arrival hall, where the heat whacked him. He felt every one of the 30 degrees difference from Manhattan.
He slowly scanned the line of signs being held by men wearing sarongs and pieces of cloth folded around their heads. There was no Mr. Bullard or Little Banana, but on his return sweep he noticed a printed sign on A4 paper edited with red scrawls. The B in Bullard had been changed to a P, an h inserted after the second l, and er added at the end. Pull Harder.
Jay’s face appeared over the top. He was smiling, but it looked like he’d been in a brawl. His right eye was almost closed, there were cuts on his forehead and arms, a bandage round one knee and he flinched as they shook hands.
‘What the hell happened? And how’s... where’s Bec?’
‘She’s fine. She’s gone to prison.’
*****
This was not what Bec was expecting.
After passing through tedious security checks, metal detectors, bag scanner, getting patted down in a windowless room and surrendering her phone and passport in return for a visitor’s pass stamped on her hand, she walked through an open steel door into a park-like space the size of half a football field.
Kids were running, skipping, laughing on the lawn, in and out and around family groups and couples sitting, hugging, kissing, chatting, sharing food in the shade of trees.
Family day inside Kerobokan was more festival than funeral, although Aristotle was glimmering gold in the dome of the mosque and yellow in the frangipani, reminding Bec not to be fooled by the once-in-a-month aberration from the brutal normality of life in Bali’s notorious prison.
Behind the smiles, she noticed a visitor absentmindedly playing with a wedding ring, laughter from an inmate that didn’t reach his eyes – tell-tale signs of strain, façades of happiness.
Bec recognized Seth Crichton’s face from a news photo of him being paraded in an orange jumpsuit after his arrest. He’d lost weight since then, but was still a bull of a man, dwarfing the prison guard he stood beside.
She introduced herself and Seth pointed to a table with a handwritten sign, Pendiam pergilah!
Bec asked for a translation as they sat on red plastic stools.
‘Reserved, so fuck off!’
‘Your sign?’
Seth nodded, his eyes straying over her breasts, reminding Bec he’d been inside two years.
‘The fuck you here for lady? You think this is some theme park peep show for fucking tourists?’
From comments posted on a crowdfunding site set up to provide materials and equipment for a jewelry workshop at Kerokoban, Bec knew how Seth spent most of his free time in the prison. She took the silversmithing magazine out of her bag, which brought a smile to his face, loosened his tongue.
Bec gradually moved the conversation to drug trafficking, their investigation into Charlie Scott’s death. Seth was more interested in complaining about inconsistencies in the police case against him, which Bec hinted she could investigate.
A group of Indonesian inmates started hovering nearby, showing too much interest, so Bec leaned across the table to keep the conversation private.
Her mention of Lompok was like flicking a switch. There was a sparkle of recognition in Seth’s eyes, an instant before two of the inmates lunged across the table.
There was a flash of yellow headscarves as Bec was squashed against the wall and passed out.
12. The Ciph
More than two centuries of political wisdom since the first Presidential election, and billions of dollars on campaign strategists and media consultants, had been reduced to this.
Numbers on a laptop.
When Jin Ly and Nadia Zapora had knocked on his door the morning after Super Tuesday, Ped had called security.
‘You need us,’ Jin had said. Calmly, with no hint of danger.
After throwing everything and more into campaigning in the week leading to the all-important first Tuesday in March – with fifteen states on the line including the monsters of California and Texas, Ped had ended up trailing Hunter by an embarrassing 122 delegates.
Some influential media were already calling the contest, and the talk had shifted to potential running mates for Hunter and when, not if, Garland would withdraw.
And there he was, standing in a white Beverly Hills Hotel bathrobe, confronted by a power-dressed Asian-American and a kid with half her head shaved, the other flowing in aquamarine, rods of steel through her nose and cheek, hugging a laptop. Like salt in a wound.
Three words made Ped send Mack, the security guard, back along the hall.
‘SpreadEagle on steroids.’
The state-of-the art voter engagement app that combined conventional campaigning techniques with the power of artificial intelligence was set to rewrite the electioneering landscape, and rumors were that Hunter’s campaign was experimenting with a prototype.
‘We’ve taken it to a whole new level.’
That got them into Ped’s backroom, where Jin did all the talking. She was the daughter of a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant, had a master’s degree in communications, PhD in social media marketing, and five years crafting social messaging for one of the biggest ad agencies in California.
Jin’s sidekick looked like she should have been at school, one with relaxed dress codes. But she possessed an extraordinary gift: an uncanny ability to sift through the vast sea of digital information and uncover hidden patterns. As well as an insatiable appetite for hacking.
Over the past few months she’d been refining a micro-targeting program that incorporated the most advanced features of SpreadEagle and its two main rivals.
Jin described the kid’s hybrid program as a digital masterpiece.
‘She can seamlessly weave together the intricate threads of social media posts, smartphone use, consumer behavior data, cross-referencing all the information with the latest polling analysis, creating a profiling engine that peers into the very souls of... whoever you want it to.’
‘From public or private sources?’
Jin inclined her head and smiled.
‘What’s the real question here, Mr. Garland?’
‘Is what she’s doing traceable?’
‘No. And what we are offering you is far more advanced than what your opponent is paying two hundred fifteen grand a week for.’
Ped was about to ask how she knew this, but figured if the kid could hack into the big platforms and private polling companies, Hunter’s firewall would be a piece of pie.
There was more.
‘The kid’s a prodigy. She’s cracked the code on using keyword combinations that go way beyond simple identification of individual targets. She’s dug deeper, unravelling what truly ignites people’s passions, discovering the precise times their guards are down, even deciphering the days of the week they’re most open to persuasion. And that’s not all. She’s found a way to double-tag them, subtly influencing their decisions by tapping into the people who hold sway over them.’
Jin paused, letting it sink in.
‘And here’s the kicker, Mr. Garland. She’s translated all this into an app that’s light years ahead of anything anyone else – including your opponents – are doing with peer-to-peer texting.’
‘Which does what, exactly?’
‘It allows us – you – to send anonymous text messages to target’s phones, without their permission.’
‘That’s gotta be illegal.’
‘Not yet Mr. Garland. We’ve found a loophole in the federal regulations.’
‘And the kid does this all by numbers and combinations and codes?’
‘Correct.’
‘Like one of those, what are they called, ciphers?’
‘Call it what you want.’
Which was where the nickname Ciph was born. For obvious reasons, the kid didn’t want her real identity known.
The odd couple had joined the backroom team under Carl Tyler and, in the fortnight between Super Tuesday and the bundle of primaries centered on Florida, refined and tested the software, resulting in the vein for a vein line. Ped had put his faith in the numbers and never looked back.
Until now.
They were four days out from a clutch of primaries in the north-east. The Ciph’s data pointed to a speed hump in Pennsylvania, the biggest prize of the day with 71 delegates.
Ped refused to believe what he was seeing on the Ciph’s laptop in the hotel backroom in Pittsburgh. Everything he was hearing, the vibe on the street, in the cafés, at rallies and factories throughout the Keystone state yelled slam-dunk. He doubted Hunter would score a single delegate.
His phone beeped. It was his campaign manager.
‘You’ve got to make the call now, Ped. The advance crews can’t wait any longer.’
‘Cancel Philly. We’re out of here. I’m shifting resources to Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island.’
‘We still staying clear of Maryland?’
‘Publicly, yes.’
*****
Mike looked at his phone in disbelief. Garland’s social media following had ballooned to forty million since the image of the roomful of journalists with their hands in the air at the Harrisburg press conference went viral. Mike had become follower number 32,574,002 after seeing the candidate in Harlem just four days ago.
He yawned as their driver turned sharp right before a statue of some Hindu god wrestling a dragon. Mike’s body clock was still ticking on eastern standard time.
The rest of the article on Garland’s relationship with the mainstream media concluded he was doing just fine without it. By the time one of his updates was reposted or forwarded and pinballed through cyberspace, he was reaching seventy million. Audience numbers for the top-rating primetime TV news shows wavered round the three-million mark, and the weekday print-run for the New York Times had dipped below half a million. Influence over your audience was limited when the other guy’s bullhorn was 35 to 140-times louder.
It reminded Mike to get back to the social justice influencer who was warming to his messages about the devastating impact of drug trafficking on vulnerable communities in countries like Indonesia.
They were dropped off outside the BIMC Hospital, and Mike, still looking at his phone, followed Jay through the main entrance to the elevators.
Jay pushed the button for Bec’s floor.
‘Knew this guy who flushed his phone down the toilet when it told him he was spending more than an hour a day on the screen. Can you believe that? Sixty minutes. Every day.’
Mike tapped a few keys and held up the phone to the Neanderthal. Jay took in the numbers, shaking his head. It showed Mike’s screen time for the previous seven days averaged 5 hours 24 minutes. The biggest chunks, highlighted in orange, were on social media.
Bec was sitting up in bed, looking at her phone, and Mike could see Jay’s head shaking again. She looked up and smiled.
‘About time you showed up, Bullard. How you doin?’
‘How are you, more to the point? Jay tells me you were...’
‘I’m fine. Wrong place, wrong time, end of story. Now that you’re back, I’m thinking...’
‘But Jay...’
‘Wasn’t there. So is just guessing I was the target. Will you guys stop worrying about me and get with the program.’
Mike glanced across at Jay, who raised his palms in mock surrender.
‘Ok, so what did you learn at the prison, Bec?’
‘Don’t remember much. I was knocked out.’
‘I rest my case,’ said Jay. ‘According to the doctor, who was told by the ambulance driver, who heard it from a guard – so we’re talking a serious case of Chinese whispers here – Bec was knocked out when her head hit the wall. The guard couldn’t, more likely wouldn’t say whether the attacker was going for Bec or Seth, but it seems Seth shielded her from more serious injuries. Could have saved your life, Bec.’
Mike turned back to her.
‘Did Seth tell you anything about this Lompok dude before your head accidentally bumped into the wall?’
Bec gave him a filthy look. ‘He knew something. The way he reacted, his eyes when I mentioned Lompok’s name, just before...’
Mike knew nobody who could read a person like Bec Corelli. Her ability to decode the unspoken language of emotions – from the subtlest furrowing of a brow, tremble of a lip, twitch of a cheek – was freakish. And a double-edged trait of her borderline personality. Heightened empathy towards the feelings of others could also drag Bec down with the weight of their unspoken pain.
‘So where does this leave us? What’s our next move? How long will you be in here?’
‘The doc wants to keep me in for a few days. He thinks it was just a mild concussion but wants a scan to be sure.’
She sat up straighter, adjusting her pillows.
‘Seth is still our best option. Now you’re back Mike, you could go visit him, as a fellow American.’
‘Not a good career move.’ It was Jay, looking out the window with his back to them.
‘You got a better idea?’
‘Actually, I have.’
*****
Kerokoban Prison. A ten-acre hellhole made famous by the incarceration of a blue-eyed Australian girl-next-door caught with nine pounds of cannabis in her bodyboard bag.
Built to hold 300, the prison was currently home to more than five times that number of drug users, mules, sellers, traffickers, gangsters, murderers, rapists, pedos, pickpockets. And Lompok. Possibly.
A stack of books had been written about life in the joint, including the dog-eared paperback Jay held in his hands as he sat in the third-floor room of a guesthouse he’d rented near the prison.
From the window he looked through binoculars across a large open field, past scrawny cows grazing on waist-high weeds, garbage, bits of plastic and mounds of abandoned building material to the high whitewashed walls capped with corroded spirals of razor wire.
His vantage point was level with one of the prison’s four watchtowers, beside ten-foot gray doors with a tiny grilled window.
After scouting the main entrance building and exterior walls, Jay decided the side gate held the most promise.
13. Sheets to the wind
Ped had spent the morning of voting day in the shopping centers and strip malls of Wilmington, Delaware, then split the afternoon between Rhode Island and Connecticut before flying to Philly for the five-state victory party being set up in the Terrace Ballroom of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Several muck slingers, including the great Barry Cosgrove, had ridiculed him for not spending a minute of the previous three days in either Pennsylvania or Maryland, which between them had almost twice as many delegates as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Under the heading Opportunity lost to bury Hunter in home state, Cosgrove described Garland’s decision to bypass Maryland as his ‘biggest blunder’.
Ped’s public line, that Congresswoman Hunter was doing a fine job for the people of Maryland, and it didn’t feel right to campaign against her in her home patch, had been widely reported.
Privately, Jin and the Ciph had been carpet-bombing swinging voters and their reinforcers with under-the-radar third-party posts and texts in Hunter’s home patch for weeks. Carl had also been active in the dark recesses of Baltimore. Ped didn’t want to know the details.
