The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  I’d never been to Cuba, and I was not entirely sure what I’d been imagining, but it struck me how immaculate everything was. I’d been to Miami a few times, and something about the air up there, and even down in the Keys, had a sort of, I don’t know, sweatiness to it. I felt like the whole area just had a bit of a film to it that you could never get off, no matter how much you scrubbed. Cuba had none of that. The air was warm but crisp. The streets were swept from curb to curb, and only very rarely did I spot even the tiniest bit of trash on the sidewalks or on the road. As we walked away from the dock and toward some shops, I noticed that while none of the buildings looked new by any stretch of the imagination, they had all been very well maintained, and the paint on the buildings, while never overly fresh, was also never chipping or in very much disrepair.

  The first few stores that had clothing for sale in them were all of the tourist variety. Pretty much every article of clothing in them had the word “Cuba” printed all over them. The farther we got away from the water, though, the more functional and less touristy things started to look. I think we’d gone maybe six or seven blocks when I finally spotted a little shop with some shirts on a rack outside that looked like they could actually be worn as clothing as opposed to a banner that said: I was in Cuba.

  I wasn’t going to be super picky. I just wanted something loose that might breathe a little bit. To be honest, I’d kinda pitted out the Trace shirt. I mean, things had been a little bit stressful since I got the thing, so, can you blame a guy for being a little extra sweaty?

  I found a pretty basic black cotton T-shirt that had a little bit of texture to it, which made it look like it had almost been woven instead of spit out by some big machine in China. Always the fan of yoga pants, Annie found herself a pair of dark gray ones and a long-sleeved white shirt that tied up along her chest and flared out at the bottom of the sleeves. It was cute, and I was just about to pay for everything when I realized that I’d completely lost track of whether or not our current identities were still safe to use. I’d been Alden Heath for so long that I just wasn’t used to keeping track of what Jake Kline and Randy James were up to. Just to be safe, I decided it would be a good idea to change them up yet again.

  Working on my own identity first, I passed on a number of different Spanish-sounding names and eventually found the identity of Michael Tully. Annie gave me her PCD, and I was able to give her the identity of one Lindsay King.

  That done, I paid for our new clothing as Mr. Tully with my PCD, tossed the Trace shirt into the nearest trash can, which, to her credit, only earned me a mildly upset look from Annie, and put on my new cotton tee. Next, we set off in search of a place to get some food, and where hopefully, Annie would be able to use their restroom to change into her new outfit.

  As much as I really wanted to go sit with Annie at a little table for two with our feet in the sand and a view of the ocean alongside us, I had to keep reminding myself that we were on the run, and sightseeing was for people not being accused of any capital offenses. So, we wound our way through a few more streets until we found a little restaurant with a covered patio out front, from which we could hear nothing but Spanish being spoken. I knew this would make ordering our meal a little tricky, but the more Spanish, the fewer dumb tourists. Or so I hoped.

  “Salud,” a woman with flowers in her hair and a very colorful floral-patterned dress said to us as we approached the restaurant.

  “Hola,” Annie replied. She knew just about as much Spanish as I did but was at least willing to make an effort.

  “Blabbidy blah blah blah,” Flower Lady said, to which Annie just kind of nodded, then mimed using a fork or spoon to bring food to her mouth and tentatively asked, “Dinner?”

  Flower Lady laughed and said in an accent, “Ah, yes. Of course.”

  Oh, thank God. She spoke English.

  She showed us to a little table near the far right side on the outside edge of the patio and handed us two menus. I looked at one of them, which was written in all Spanish, and Flower Lady, obviously reading the concern and confusion on my face, said, “I can tell you what we have. Let me get you some agua first.”

  Ha. Agua. I knew that one too.

  She came back with a couple glasses of agua and started listing off some of the menu items.

  Unfortunately, they all kind of seemed to be in this sort of Spanish-English mix, and I was not getting the whole picture. As politely as I could, I interrupted her and asked if they had tacos.

  She smiled. It was definitely one of those you-dumb-American-you kind of smiles, but not in a mean way. She actually seemed amused by us.

  “Yes,” she said. “Chicken, beef, or pork?”

  “Beef,” I said.

  “And you?” she asked Annie.

  “Can I have the uh-row con poyo?” Annie asked bravely.

  I think that was the first thing Flower Lady had said, but I had no idea what it was.

  “Arroz con pollo?” Flower Lady asked, just double-checking.

  Annie nodded her reply, and Flower Lady said, “That’s rice with chicken. Good?”

  “Yes, please,” Annie replied. “Thank you.”

  No way Annie knew what that was before the lady told her.

  “Oh,” I said with a start, before Flower Lady got too far away. “And, uh, dos cervezas, por favor.”

  The woman laughed again, nodded, and continued back into the little restaurant.

  “Tacos?” Annie asked, laughing at me once Flower Lady had disappeared through the doorway.

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” I replied. “I had no clue what she was saying and just had to take a guess at something I thought might be on the menu.”

  I got the good old eye roll, and a minute later Flower Lady returned with a couple pint glasses full of beer. I realized that for the second time today, I would be drinking a beer of completely unknown type and brand. I was guessing that when the dumb American asked for a “cerveza,” they just brought out the cheapest one and would charge you for the most expensive one. That was fine with me, though. Well, it was fine with me tonight.

  Annie excused herself to go to the bathroom. I knew that word too. I think it was baño. I took the opportunity to grab my PCD and do a little search for nearby hotels. It was a little tricky, of course, because I had no GPS and needed to work with an actual map. First thing I needed to do was find out what town we were in. Fortunately, at the top of the menu Flower Lady had dropped off at our table, it said “Villa Clara” beneath the name of the restaurant, so I ventured a guess that was the name of the town. Sure enough, when I downloaded the map for Villa Clara, I was able to zoom in to street level view and find the restaurant we were at.

  Eventually, as Annie was making her way back to the table, I had managed to find three very unflashy hotels nowhere near the beach that I was pretty sure would be nice and out of the way.

  “You like?” Annie asked as she stood in front of me for a moment, showing off her new outfit.

  “It’s cute,” I replied, as she smiled and took her seat.

  She was pleased with her new clothing purchase, and I was happy with my no-name beer, and we were both happy when the food came just a couple minutes later.

  My tacos were good, though admittedly, I’d been expecting crunchy shells like the ones you get at the fast-food places, and these ones were soft, but they were still good. Our conversation involved anything and everything that had nothing to do with the last couple of days. That was partly because of the whole you-never-know-who-is-listening thing, but mostly because we were in Cuba, having dinner at a restaurant, and despite the actual reason for us being here, it did feel really nice. In fact, after dinner, we found our way to the nearest little no-frills hotel I’d found before dinner and, despite Annie’s complaints about not having had access to a razor for far too long, I did manage to get her out of her new outfit and into our squeaky hotel bed.

  20

  The buzzing of my PCD woke me up a couple minutes past 5:00 AM. Check
ing it, I saw a “Good morning,” from Kevin, along with the address where he wanted to meet us.

  I put the PCD back on my nightstand, and as I started to rejoin the world of the living, I was instantly annoyed on two separate counts. First, just like when I had to find this little hotel, I realized I’d have to find that address by following an actual map, and who in the hell wanted to try to read a map first thing in the morning? Second point of annoyance was, why in the world didn’t I buy more than one shirt yesterday? For that matter, why didn’t I buy an extra pair of underpants, or a toothbrush, or deodorant? I found it unlikely any clothing or convenience stores would be open at this hour, so I resigned myself to showing up to our meeting with a stinky shirt and bad breath. I woke Annie up and at least got our bodies smelling better by hopping into the shower together.

  She was also slightly annoyed with our collective lack of foresight in the clothing and beauty care department yesterday, but with minimal grumbling we got out the door and went to return the room key to the front desk. Yeah, it was an actual metal key like they used to use when my dad was a kid.

  I called up my map, and after much zooming in and out to get a good idea of where we were in relation to the address, I determined that we’d need to go a little over a mile north and slightly west to find our way to the seaside marina. We only had about twenty-five minutes until 6:00 AM, so we’d have to walk briskly and hope we didn’t get turned around.

  My PCD buzzed in my pocket again. It was Kevin, telling me he was already at the spot and was wondering why the Tether he’d sent wasn’t connecting. A Tether was a way for any two people with PCDs to connect and find each other. Someone in spot A would mark their location and send a Tether to someone else in spot B, and automatically, the location and movement of each person could be seen on the screen with turn-by-turn directions being given to the person on the move. Deciding I didn’t exactly need to explain to Kevin the reason my GPS was off, I just thought-commanded a note to him saying we were close and would be there on time.

  We walked as far north as we could go and eventually ran into a street that ran right along the coast. I checked out my little map again, and, if I was reading it right, it looked like the marina should be just a little west of where we were.

  Sure enough, just as the sun was starting to creep up over the edge of the shoreline and the ocean behind us, bathing everything in a golden hue, the beach we were following ended, and a small dock could be seen just beyond it. As we got closer, it struck me that I could only see one boat tied up to the dock in front of the marina.

  “Wait,” Annie said, stopped in her tracks. “Isn’t that The Runner?”

  “Yeah,” I said, a little confused. “It is.”

  Why is that the only boat at the dock? We both thought it, but neither of us asked because neither of us knew the answer.

  About fifty yards before we arrived at the address, the road proper ended, and the rest of the way up to the building was more of a dirt path, with grooves worn in it by what I could only assume was years of vehicles coming and going from the structure. The building itself was much larger than I thought it was as we’d been approaching. It was laid out lengthwise along the water and had a number of large garage doors on the backside of it. This actually made me feel a little bit better because it looked like, if they wanted to, they could have stored a lot of boats inside the place. Maybe the reason The Runner was the only boat at the dock was because the rest of them were inside?

  There was no address on the building, and no sign either. Just to make sure we were in the right place, I grabbed my PCD and thought-commanded a message to Kevin, telling him that we were here. If he came out, well then, we were in the right place.

  “Be right out,” was the almost immediate response.

  “Do you think he’s already done the negotiating?” Annie asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Well, the whole point of him doing the talking and negotiating for us was so that they wouldn’t take advantage of the dumb Americans,” Annie said.

  “Right,” I replied, following her train of thought.

  “If he’s ready for us to come in now, then he must be done negotiating already.”

  “Well, I hope not,” I said. “I mean, he didn’t even ask me how much I was willing to spend.”

  Price wasn’t exactly concern number one for me at the moment, but Annie did make a good point, which immediately put me right back on the skeptical road about this whole thing.

  “Randy! Melissa!” Kevin called as a rickety wooden door near the middle of the building swung open. Those weren’t the names on our PCDs anymore, but they were the ones we’d given him yesterday. “Come on in,” he said, waving an arm toward an open door.

  We made our way across the rest of the dirt path and toward Kevin. I wasn’t really concerned about getting mugged. Mugging wasn’t actually a thing anymore. No one carried any money, and the PCDs had safeguards in them about trying to transfer money while you were exhibiting signs of fear or distress, such as irregular brainwave patterns or an elevated heart rate. You always had to keep your thumb on the PCD when you were doing a money transfer, and if, when measuring your vitals, it detected anything out of the norm, it would temporarily lock you out of your money accounts and create a log of anyone with a PCD within your immediate vicinity. That way, even if they somehow forced or coerced you to make the transfer, there would be an instant record of where the money went and who got it. The only issue I’d ever heard concerning this security system was for people in casinos. More often than not, they were frequently trying to access their money while in states of high duress. I’d heard more than a few people sitting at the blackjack table cussing out the PCD security people who were just calling to make sure everything was okay.

  So obviously, I wasn’t worried about getting mugged. Killed maybe, but probably not. This seemed like a lot of effort to go through just to kill some random people. Beat up for some reason? I doubted it. Annie, though . . . I was worried about Annie. As the two of us drew closer to Kevin and the entrance to the building, I was on high alert for her safety. A number of like, I don’t know, Kung Fu moves went flying through my mind as we crossed the threshold and entered the building. I was ready to fight back, or at least try to fight back any kind of a sudden surprise attack. I’m guessing that, along with his weapon’s training, Frank had passed some form of martial arts skill along to me, as well.

  Cool, I thought.

  No one jumped us at the doorway. In fact, it was quite the opposite. From deep within the building, we heard sounds of laughter. The structure was evidently built on top of the water, and my guess about boats being inside was correct, as I could see a number of boats all lined up in their own little slips. Huge cut-outs in the ocean side wall of the building would allow the boats to come and go and stay covered when docked.

  That was cool too.

  What was not cool was the next thing I saw.

  “Oh no. No way,” Annie said as she saw it too.

  At first glance I thought that most of the boats in the slips were in some sort of disrepair or maybe in disassemble. As my eyes were adjusting from the still-rising sun outside to the relative darkness of this building, I could see that different groups of men working on different boats were all bringing small cases of metal ingots into each boat and storing them in odd places within each craft.

  “Yeah, no way,” I said in echo of Annie.

  Pretty much everyone the whole world over handled their money via PCD. The money had to be backed by something, though, something tangible. That something, was precious metal. I’d never seen it in person, but you’d see it on TV and in the movies all the time. Super rich dudes buying super rich-dude stuff would oftentimes make their purchases with ingots of platinum, gold, or silver, and super-bad dudes doing super-illegal stuff would hoard all of their money in the form of ingots.

  Ingots. Stupid ingots . . . and I was looking at thousands of them. One guy seemed to b
e placing them just under the deck of a boat. Another man was carrying a case of them below deck on another boat, and one guy not too far from me had apparently sewn a large number of ingots into a chair and was about to have it carried onto another one of the boats.

  “What the hell, Kevin?” I asked him, as I realized what was going on.

  “You know how much one of the boats costs?” Kevin asked.

  “I do, actually,” I replied.

  “Yeah, well, my pal Domingo over there,” he said, while pointing at a rather large man with a tight red T-shirt, “he’ll let you take one of these down to Colombia for free.”

  First of all, how the hell did he know we were going to Colombia? Second of all, no way. I said that second part out loud. “No way.”

  “You don’t really have a choice here, Alden,” he said to me.

  Oh. Whoa. Did he just called me Alden? I looked at Annie, and her saucer eyes looking back at me were proof enough that I had indeed heard him right.

  “I know exactly who you are. I know exactly what you’ve done. I know exactly where you’re running, and you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to do.”

  Ah, crap.

  “How do you—” Annie started to say, but I cut her off with a “Shhh.”

  It wasn’t exactly super tactful of me to shush her, and it earned me one heck of a stink-eye, but I didn’t want her volunteering any information to these people that they might not already know.

  “We’ve known who you two are since the moment you sat down in the Oyster Hut,” Kevin said.

  “Oyster Hut?” I asked.

  “The little place you had burgers and beer at before finding my marina,” he said by way of clarification.

  “Oh. The Beer Shack,” I replied. Damn it. I knew it. It must have been Biker Guy.