Cries of the Lost by Chris Knopf

flew us, our bags and boxes of gear to Miami.
    I spent most of the hop across the Caribbean quelling anxious thoughts about U.S. customs. My experience with international travel was thin, but even before the shooting, handing my passport to the American agents and watching them rummage through my belongings was decidedly creepy and ominous.
    In the end, the female agent barely looked at us before scanning our passports, secured with stolen identities, and waving us through. The same was true at baggage search, which was literally nothing, the agents without a flicker of suspicion buying my story of being a telecommunications distributor on a selling tour of the Caribbean.
    “Well, that was easy,” said Natsumi when we were well out of earshot.
    “I used the force.”
    I’d planned a day layover to go through everything, consolidating down to two carry-ons by stripping out excess gear, sending some of it to a storage facility I maintained in Connecticut, and a bit more to our final destination in France—the Villa Egretta Garzetta, pictured on the postcard in the safe-deposit box.
    Feeling that our good fortune getting into the country reduced the odds of an easy trip out, I was moderately tense until we were aloft in the Iberia Airbus A340 heading for our connection in Madrid. Over the Atlantic, Natsumi slept while I played around with the code, with no success.
    Still, I was convinced it was based on numeric substitution. Florencia was an MBA, a few courses shy of earning an actuarial degree, and her facility with numbers was nearly as good as mine. Maybe not with the more esoteric formulas, but she could usually see the significance of a complex spreadsheet at a single glance, absorbing the calculations in chunks, the way speed readers absorb whole paragraphs. It was more pattern recognition than anything, so it was likely she’d settled on some type of visual pattern, limiting the possible complexities.
    It was also possible she’d designed it with me specifically in mind, a thought that caused a little twist in my heart. She may have never wanted to reveal her deeply buried secrets, but knew realistically, if something happened to her, I’d find out anyway. She knew me, knew my predilections and persistence. I’d uncover the fraud and embezzlement, trace the money and secure the safe-deposit box. And she would have been right—only she couldn’t know that the message sent beyond the grave, if it was indeed a message, would be received by a very different Arthur Cathcart.
    I eventually exhausted myself, and managed to sleep the last hour of the flight to Madrid; and after a brief stay at the Madrid airport, we took the last leg of the trip to the Côte d’Azur.

    T HE BEST way to imagine Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is to picture a right hand, fingers together, with thumb out, jutting into the Mediterranean Sea from the southern coast of France. To the west, Nice is a fifteen-minute car ride. Monaco is about a half hour to the east.
    St. Jean is the thumb to Cap Ferrat’s hand. Contained within the two peninsulas is some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in the world, a fleet of super yachts extensive enough to mount a major invasion, and wealth beyond measure (partly because a lot of it resides in banks on Grand Cayman Island).
    We landed in Nice an hour before sunrise. By the time we secured our bags and checked through customs, the sun was beginning to light the sky from behind the southern reaches of the Alps. Though I usually strived for anonymity in rental cars, I’d chosen a 5-Series BMW, the roads of the Côte d’Azur notoriously serpentine, providing frequent opportunities for the ill-equipped and inexperienced to plunge down sharp embankments.
    Anyway, given how common BMWs were in that part of the world, there was little danger of standing out.
    Leaving the airport in Nice, we drove along the Promenade des Anglais, traveling east parallel to the crescent-shaped beach. Apparently the