For Mayhem or Madness
8
Meeting the Missus
THERE’S A SECRET to maintaining a false identity. I had three complete sets of identification I kept in my wall safe in the attic of Mrs. Prior’s house. Jason Sanborn was my Vegas identity. An identity can’t lie dormant for a decade and then suddenly become an active person. Back twenty years ago when I got out of the Navy, I established my identity in Vegas. Lars had been my CO during my naval stint. He’d made sure each of us on his intelligence team had carefully established an alternate set of identity documents. Technically, he was supposed to collect those documents before we got our DD-214. Somehow mine got overlooked.
Jason Sanborn has legal residency in North Las Vegas, a driver’s license, and accounts at four different casinos. All his other banking is conducted online. The room I rented from an old woman, who happened to be the grandmother of a guy I served with, for fifty dollars a month. It was never occupied, but I always stopped by when I was in town to see how she was doing.
It had been ten days since I left San Francisco. I decided Vegas would be where my trail ended. It was an even bet that my apartment would be under surveillance by the time I got back to Seattle.
After a good night’s sleep, Maizie and I checked in at the Flamingo Hilton for two nights.
“Mr. Sanborn, it’s nice to see you again,” the cashier at the casino cage said. “I didn’t expect to see you until September.”
“I got a nice bonus for a job I picked up at the last convention and thought I’d see if I could increase it,” I said, handing her a fresh Amex card.
“Do you want this on your account?”
“Yes, please.” I entered my PIN when she swiped the card and she handed me a deposit ticket. “Would you mind adding this to the account as well?” I asked, giving her a matching $10,000 in cash.
“Of course. Good luck, Mr. Sanborn.” She handed me another receipt and I bought another $1,000 in chips.
Here’s another secret about casinos. Higher priced games have better payouts. For example, it’s not unusual for a casino to retain fifteen percent of bets placed in penny slot machines but only retain five percent of bets placed in five-dollar machines. You might think it’s not possible to get an advantage for higher bets at table games, but that’s not true either. Blackjack or ‘21’ rules are different at different tables. It’s not impossible to find a two-dollar blackjack game in Vegas, though more and more unusual. But the two-dollar game will be dealt from a six-deck shoe. You might find a five-dollar single deck game, but chances are it pays blackjack at six to five rather than three to two. If you sit at a hundred-dollar table, you might manage ‘liberal’ rules and get the three to two payout on a single-deck game, but only be able to double on ten or eleven.
I sat at a twenty-five-dollar table, varying my bets only according to whether I won or lost a hand. It was a predictable reverse Martingale scheme that was recognized at most casinos. Sometimes known as simple ‘money management.’ Casinos are watchful for card counters but most still call system players systematic losers.
I didn’t care if I lost five percent. It was the government’s money. I wanted to change it into mine.
I didn’t play exclusively at the Flamingo. I had accounts at three other casinos and deposited $20,000 at each. Nor did I exclusively play blackjack. If you don’t play any other games, it marks you as a professional or serious player. I played baccarat and roulette and even plugged my player’s card into a couple slot machines. Maizie was a great excuse for me to get up after two hours of playing and go walk her. She wasn’t quite as popular in Las Vegas as she was in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but she still got a lot of comments.
I was offered a free night at the Flamingo if I wanted to stay, and I did. After three nights, I moved back to the cheap room in Henderson and played only twice a day. When I checked out of the Flamingo, I was down two hundred seventy-five dollars. I got them to put the balance on a couple of Visa gift cards and walked out with twenty thousand dollars that was no longer connected to the government.
Through the rest of the week, I gradually cashed out of the other four casinos. Two had similar results as the Flamingo and I was averaging about a ten percent loss for the privilege of playing. On a whim, I dropped a hundred-dollar chip on number forty-three as I passed a roulette table at the Venetian and after tipping the dealer a hundred walked away with a chit for forty-two hundred dollars. This time, the Venetian had paid for all my losses, but I had to file a tax report for the winnings, so I didn’t walk away with as much as I wanted. Jason Sanborn filed a Form 1040 EZ each year on income that was typically less than ten grand, so I was pretty sure I’d get a refund at the end of the year.
Just another part of keeping the identity active.
Of course, being in Vegas wasn’t really about gambling. I found all the information about Leslie Whiteman I could dig up. Not just online. I went to the courthouse and checked the register of deeds for the house she lived in. I drove by the school her son had graduated from the year before. I scouted the entire neighborhood where she lived and followed her to her job at a casino restaurant on the south end of the strip. A casual conversation with a neighbor revealed that she had purchased the modest little home with cash from a life insurance policy on her husband. No one in the neighborhood had ever met her husband.
I was relatively certain she hadn’t seen me anyplace yet when I walked up to her door on Saturday morning. She had already been out for her morning run with two labradoodles towing her along. The dogs barked when I rang the doorbell and I hoped I’d given her enough time to shower and dress.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Whiteman, I’m Jason Sanborn. I’ll be quite straightforward with you. I’d like to speak to your husband,” I said. I figured the best way to handle this situation was to go straight for the meat. Even if she slammed the door in my face, it would tell me something.
“Are you a medium? He’s been gone for two years.”
“Yes, I’m aware of his absence.” She looked me in the eye and I held her stare. A tear started to form in her left eye. She pushed the door open.
“Come in, Mr…?”
“Sanborn.”
“Ah, yes. Jason Sanborn. Very clever.”
“My parents had a strange sense of humor.”
“No doubt.”
“If you would have a seat please, I think I can clear this up quickly.” She gestured to the sofa and I sat while she left the room. The dogs sat in front of me, just too far away for me to pet them. I wondered if she was getting a weapon. A moment later, she reappeared with a manila folder. She sat and opened it on her lap. After shuffling through the papers, she sighed and simply handed me the folder.
Birth certificates. Marriage certificate. Death certificate. Driver’s license. Passport. Insurance policy and payout declaration. Deed to her home. A complete false identity to make a paper hanger proud.
“Ma’am, this looks complete and accurate. You are aware, I assume, that life insurance fraud is a felony in all fifty states?”
“Are you an insurance investigator? That would be novel.”
“No, ma’am. Like I said, I want to talk with your husband. I’m not concerned with who is represented in this folder. Can you help me reach Terry?”
“Has it come to that? How did you find me?”
“I talked to Ron Dorsey.”
“People’s memories are much harder to erase than digital records.”
“Believe me, the job of erasing Terry was masterfully done.”
“Are you prepared to exist in the same world he does, Mr. Sanborn?” she asked. It was clear that she was asking if I could survive being completely digitally erased.
“I’ve done my best to prepare for that if I can’t reach an agreement with him.”
“I hope the government is paying you really well.”
“What happened, Mrs. Whiteman? Why did Terry feel it was necessary for him to disappear—to erase himself so completely? Why did he leave you and your son?”
“He’s dead. We said our goodbyes. We wept and mourned. He said he wouldn’t let me watch the slow consumption of his body by disease or risk transmitting it to me or to our son. Bruce, our son, was devastated. They were always close in the way only two geek boys can be—playing games, challenging each other to mortal combat online, writing code, hacking into secure sites just to see how easy it was. Terry told Bruce he had to go to a sanitarium. Three months later we got an urn of ashes.”
“A sanitarium?”
“I suppose it will dawn on Bruce soon that there are no sanitariums operating at the moment. I just hope he never figures out what happened or that doctor will die.”
“What doctor?” I asked. My mind began to click. A banker, a CFO, a lawyer, a preacher, and a doctor.
“A few years ago, Terry had a growth on his pancreas. Our doctor here didn’t think it was too serious, but he referred Terry to a clinic in Minnesota where he could get the growth removed and make sure there was no remaining cancer. We went. The growth was removed and proved benign. No further treatment. Except that Terry got sick two weeks later. Flu that wouldn’t let go. The quick diagnosis from our local doctor in San Jose was that he had contracted HIV, apparently from the doctor who did the pancreatic surgery. I’m not sure if it was the doctor who was sick or if it was contaminated instruments. Terry knew. It was effectively treated with antiretroviral therapy for quite a while. We lived a normal life. Then he got sick again. This time we were told that his HIV had developed into AIDS.”
“People live long lives with HIV and AIDS under control these days,” I said.
“If it hadn’t been for the stress and upheaval at Xebar, that might have been the case. He was sick the week Xebar closed its doors. Shortly thereafter, we discovered that his 401k, which was all in Xebar stock, was worthless. Our life savings were diminished by the drugs we’d been buying for his treatment that weren’t covered by the company’s limited health insurance policy. Overnight, even that little coverage was gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what else I can say. I’m sorry.”
“That was when Terry told Bruce how sick he was and that he was going away. He never told Bruce that Xebar closed up.”
“Is he still alive? It’s very important that I talk to him soon.”
“I don’t know. The urn of ashes was the last we heard of him, and of course, I knew they weren’t his. He said, ‘Perhaps I can truly do some good for the world before I’m gone. All those papers arrived at the same time the ashes did, along with an insurance check large enough to buy a house and get Bruce through college.”
It looked like I had reached a dead end. I had the name of a man, but even the living witness had no idea what had happened to him. She showed me a few photographs. He looked older than I originally thought. “Forty-seven,” she said.
Damn. Same age as me.
I stood at the door, expressing my sympathy once again and she held my hand for a moment.
“Mr. Sanborn, if that is your name, my husband was a good man. He cared about people. He was devoted to his work and frustrated that no one took the need to go on the offensive seriously to make the Internet a safe place for people. He campaigned within his company to go on an all-out crusade to eliminate phishing sites. But the software industry is much like the pharmaceutical industry. They make far more money selling fixes than they do preventing the problem. He was a good man. I loved him.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Whiteman. If I should find him, I will give him that message.”
“I…” She glanced around as if suspicious that someone might overhear. “I scattered his ashes in northern Thailand.” She quickly released my hand and closed the door.
Thailand?
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