Chapter 8

We discussed trying to make it back to the Caribbean with the fake IDs we had, but kept coming back to the strong probability that security at the Panama Canal would be very tight. Our existing documents were not good enough for such use. Until we had solid IDs that would pass detailed scrutiny, we were vulnerable.

“We have to die”, I told my family.

“Die!”, they screamed, in unison. “Don’t say that, please.”

“Well, we three people don’t have to die, but we need for our identities to suffer a public death, with good evidence, but only after we have managed to secure acceptable documents for different personas.”

“Do you have a plan, Daddy?”, my newest daughter asked. My heart went out to her. After all these years of never having met her father, to meet under these circumstances must be extremely difficult for her, as well as for my granddaughter.

“Of course. Plans are a dime a dozen and I bought a dollar’s worth.”

“So, that gives us 120 plans. Right?” She could see that I was joshing. “What is it, really?”

“Gramps is just trying to lighten the mood a bit, aren’t you, Big Guy? I’ll bet he has thought of something because he wouldn’t start off the conversation with a downer like that if he didn’t have a way to bring us up later. Right, Big Guy?”

Her joshing about “Big Guy” was accompanied by her delicate hand delicately tracing the application of the real, “Big Guy”. She unzipped me and pulled him out. “I have read that sex helps increase mental activity, so why don’t I munch on this while you think, Gramps?”

That worked for me, so I began outlining my thoughts while my granddaughter swallowed me whole. Such a sweet child.

“It dawned on me that the three of us have at least the combined IQ of a room full of guvmint agents, so why not put our amalgamated intelligence to work to come up with a more permanent solution to our problem?”

“Oh, I get it. As long as they think we are alive, they will continue to search for us, regardless of the quality of our documents or how secure we might feel, so our only hope of living a reasonably normal life is to convince them that we are dead. Is that what you meant, Dad?”

“See what I told you? No moss growing on that brain. You are absolutely correct. First, we must work out a method of acquiring new documents that will survive scrutiny, then we need to fake our deaths in believable manner, leaving behind convincing evidence of our identities.”

“The first step is to get new documents. Let’s put our combined intellects together on this task and come up with a solid solution. You, Emily, are about to get a liquid solution, even as we speak.”

She merely smiled at me as I came through with my offering. It was no longer in the bragging category, but at least it was still liquid. No doubt I would begin spitting pebbles at some age, but we had not yet reached that point.

Emily turned out to be the one who came up with a solution. “Why can’t we use the same technique that has been reported as having been used by some very high profile people and has withstood Congressional investigation?”

Intrigued, both Daphne and I blurted in unison, “Who is that?”

She explained that it is very easy to identify someone who was born at around the same time as each of us, who matched us in general ways and had died after having been given a Social Security number and simply use the standard tricks to adopt that person’s identity. Everybody knows what they are because we are constantly being warned that it could happen to us.

Both Daphne and Emily were Internet whizzes and I had been known to take a whizz myself, from time to time, so it was only a matter of a couple of weeks until we had identified suitable targets, had applied for replacement birth certificates in their names, as well as replacement Social Security documents and driver’s licenses. We were now prepared to die.

“Daddy. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to transfer our nest egg to your new identity before we kill him?”

“Shit! I had not thought of that. She was right. We would be dead in the water without funds, especially since we sometimes needed to abandon expensive assets in order to escape detection. Hopefully, we would not need to do that so often any more, but still, without an income stream from some source, we were screwed.

It was a classic money laundering situation. We couldn’t simply transfer the funds to a new account without leaving an obvious trail.

“Could we return the original money to your friend, the one who paid for your patent rights, then have him pay you again under your new identity?”, Emily asked.

“It would be asking an awful lot of him, as well as making him an accessory to it”, I told her.

“It would also leave a connection between our old identities and the new ones”, noted Daphne.

After banging our heads together for a couple of days, the best we could come up with was to buy several high end cars and sell them to chop shops for cash. We could only hope to get a small percentage of the value this way, but a small percentage of a huge amount is still a good chunk of money and more untraceable money than we might otherwise end up with.

As Hector handed me the agreed on price for the Escalade, he couldn’t resist a little dig at the Gringo. “Hey, Gringo. How you know we don’t just take the money back when you leave? You don’t look like you know this part of the world very well. Maybe we just kick your ass and throw you in the street.”

“You could do that, mi amigo, but if you do, I won’t call my backup to tell them not to set off that bomb we put under your house last night.”

There followed a good bit of heated discussion between Hector and his associates. My limited Spanish was adequate to follow the gist of the discussion, which might have been possible with no knowledge of the language. It was very obvious that some of his group felt that we were bluffing and should merely be thrown into the dumpsters in back.

“Don’t take too long to decide, mi amigo. There is only one minute left before the first phase is to happen.”

A couple of the skeptics remained unconvinced, which was just as well. I had hoped to be able to make a statement and it appeared that the opportunity was approaching.

Right on time, the device that we had placed under Hector’s personal ride reached it’s critical time and his lovingly restored and maintained ‘76 Chevy convertible with the air shocks rose several feet in the air before returning in much worse shape that when it left the ground.

“What the fuck!!!???” (In Spanish, of course. [Actually, calling their language ‘Spanish’ is very inaccurate, based on what I was told by a good friend of mine who was a Cuban emigrant. He said he did not know what they were speaking when he arrived in L.A., but it sure as hell wasn’t Spanish.])