The Swap

by Nancy Boyarsky

  The branches on some of the trees were smoldering. Only when she reached the point on the hill where the trees began to thin was she able to get a good look at the burning yacht. Whatever explosives had been used, the charge must have been enormous. Portions of the ship’s hull had been blown away, and the wooden skeleton supporting it had collapsed. The fire was furiously consuming the remains.

  Nicole remembered what Reinhardt had told her. His team planned to wait until the cutter from customs arrived before boarding the yacht. The cutter was nowhere in sight. She hoped this meant that he and his cohorts were still hiding.

  Clearly, Muriel had been right. Customs wouldn’t have arrived in time to prevent Hayes’ escape. This seemed to confirm Nicole’s own view of the police, the haphazardness of their results, the random way some criminals were caught while others walked away, free to do the same thing all over again.

  If Muriel hadn’t taken the law into her own hands, Hayes would be heading onto the Sea of Hebrides and, from there, to the Atlantic. As Nicole thought about Muriel’s violent act, she could see a certain justice in it. Clearly, sabotaging the yacht wasn’t right, but it wasn’t right for Hayes and his goons to go free either.

  Nicole’s thoughts shifted to the small motorboat that had carried Muriel away. She pictured it reaching the shore, its occupant getting into a sleek, dark sedan and speeding away. She closed her eyes and sent up a prayer for Muriel’s safe passage.

  Someone touched Nicole’s shoulder, and she looked around to see Reinhardt standing beside her. “You all right, then?” he said. He put his arms around her and pulled her close, briefly resting his head against hers.

  “I’m fine. How about you?”

  Reinhardt gave her another squeeze and turned to stare at the burning ship. Although he didn’t speak, the anguish on his face showed what he was feeling. Even though Hayes and the drug ring had been destroyed, the explosion was anything but a victory for Reinhardt and his fellow officers. They were left without a case, all those months of work wasted. As Nicole considered her own complicity in Muriel’s escape, she wondered why she didn’t feel any regret. Perhaps it would make an appearance at some future date. For the moment, however, her conscience was clear and unclouded by doubt.

  Watching the fire, she began to wonder about the advance work required to blow up a yacht. How, for example, had Muriel managed to carry enough explosives on board to destroy it so completely? Then she remembered an item she’d read in The Times a few days before, about an incident off the coast of Japan. Radical environmentalists, enraged at the snaring of dolphins in tuna nets, had used a boat’s own fuel system to blow it up.

  So perhaps it wasn’t necessary for Muriel to carry a ton of explosives onboard. All she’d needed was the latest recipe for blowing up a large boat, no doubt easily available on the Internet.

  It was Reinhardt who broke the silence. “My God, what a waste,” he said. “That’s our evidence going up in flames, our whole case, and there must have been five or six men on board.” After a moment’s silence, he added, “Not that any of them were choir boys. But, bloody hell, the system had a right to try them and decide what price they should pay.”

  “What do you think happened to the ship?”

  He paused and shook his head. “These people don’t bother with licensed crew. You can bet the men they hire think nothing of using drugs. All it takes is a moment of carelessness. You know the kind of thing. Someone lights a cigarette too near the fuel tank …”

  “The boat from Customs,” she said. “Where is it?”

  “We had a message that it was delayed an hour or so, lending a hand in a rescue operation a bit south of here,” he said. “We thought we had time while Hayes’ people were busy unloading the ship.”

  “Don’t you think—” Nicole stopped, then began again, “I mean, I’m pretty sure I heard the engines on Hayes’ yacht start up.”

  “Yes, we heard it, too. It appears they were getting ready to make a run for it. They hadn’t finished unloading, so perhaps they’d gotten wind of something. But we were prepared. We have equipment that can shoot a tracking device into a ship’s hull. We had one of these in place and were poised to track them to their next port. Then we would have notified local drug authorities. Believe me, they would have been caught—if they hadn’t all been blown to kingdom come…”

  His voice trailed off as several men emerged from the shadows, all dressed in dark jump suits. Nicole could tell they were Reinhardt’s colleagues, for he hurried over to join them.

  The men gathered for a talk, heads together like a football team discussing their next play. In this case, they were no doubt rehashing their failed raid. If Muriel hadn’t blown up the boat, Nicole wondered, would their tracking device have done its job, allowing them to find Hayes and arrest him? Considering the bad luck that had dogged the case so far, she had her doubts.

  As Nicole watched Reinhardt confer with his teammates, she was overcome with despair. She had the feeling that, once they left the island, she would never have another moment alone with him, perhaps she’d never even see him again. And it seemed to her that of all the things she’d had to endure since her plane set down at Heathrow, this was the cruelest.

  Thirty-One

  Nicole was filled with apprehension as the police cutter carried her away from the Isle of Benbarra and from Reinhardt who, with several members of his team, remained behind to finish the investigation.

  The day was gray with a thick mist that reflected her mood. As soon as they arrived on the mainland, she was handed a phone so she could let her family know she was all right.

  Knowing that Brad had been picked up by the police, Nicole didn’t bother to call his cell or the house in Chiswick. Instead, she called her sister in Los Angeles. “My God, Nicole,” Stephanie had said when she heard about her sister’s ordeal. “I’m going to drop everything and catch the next flight over. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

  “Please don’t do that,” Nicole said. “I’m fine. Besides, I’ll be coming home in a couple of days.” The truth was, she needed some time to herself so she could digest what had happened and try to make sense of it.

  Around 10:30 a.m., when she was delivered to the house, she was astonished to find Brad pacing anxiously in front. Only as she stepped out of the police car, did she realize she was no longer angry; she no longer felt much of anything at all for him.

  As soon as the police were gone and Nicole and Brad were alone, he confessed that the new business he’d said had belonged to his employer was, in fact, his own. He wasn’t entirely truthful, however, in that he made it sound more like an investment management firm than a money laundering service. “I got greedy and made some stupid mistakes,” he admitted. “And now I’m in trouble with the police. I might even lose my job.”

  Under Nicole’s questioning, he explained what had happened when the police picked him up. “They had a bunch of questions about this outside business I started. The truth of the matter is that some of the stuff we did was, well, pretty questionable, and they started making noises about money laundering charges. But then I volunteered to turn over my records and some other…” he paused and seemed to consider this, “assets and help them sort out information about my clients. So they released me. I’m on leave from work now, helping the police on several high-profile cases.”

  Brad continued, “Everything was going pretty well until this morning. I wake up and they’re out there banging on the front door. They show me a search warrant and say they’re looking for some package they claim you shipped to the house. I swear to God, Nick—I never saw it. Then, as they’re leaving, one of them says to me…”

  At this point he screwed up his face and affected an exaggerated British accent: “‘By the way, old chap, did you hear? Your wife has been released by those kidnappers who were holding her up in Scotland.’ I almost croaked. I didn’t even know you were missing. I mean, you never said when you were coming back, and I figured you were too
mad at me to answer when I tried reaching you on your cell.”

  Nicole nodded, waiting for Brad to finish speaking so she could retreat upstairs. He hadn’t mentioned Hayes, and she was too weary to pursue the point. Nor did she question him about the missing package. She knew he was telling the truth about this. Muriel had found it and disappeared with the money long before Brad arrived home from work. Or was that the day the police picked him up? Somehow these questions didn’t seem worth pursuing.

  “But you haven’t told me anything about what happened,” he said, as she started up the stairs. “Are you all right? Don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really,” Nicole said. All she wanted to do was wash up, change into a clean nightgown, and climb into bed. Brad had the good sense not to follow her.

  She had a shock when she reached into the bureau and found a hefty bundle of £50 notes nestled among her bras and panties. Tucked in with the bills was an unsigned note that said, “Buy something lovely for yourself, Nicole.”

  She recognized the handwriting, just as she knew the money, £5,000 in all, was a payoff for retrieving the drug loot from the storage locker. Her first reaction was indignation, a resolve to march it right down to the police.

  She was looking around for a bag to pack the money in when she began to have second thoughts. She could see that returning the £5,000 might focus unwanted attention on the infinitely larger sum she’d taken from Lowry’s storage locker. True, she’d admitted this to Reinhardt. Apparently he’d handed the information on to the London police, who’d come banging on Brad’s door that morning. But she had a hunch that Reinhardt had minimized her role as Muriel’s messenger. With a closer look, the London police might take a dim view of this behavior.

  She also questioned the use British authorities were likely to make of the recovered money. No doubt it would be tossed into the general fund where most government revenues end up. Ultimately, it would be used for something really stupid, like the next coronation. The amount was too small to accomplish much.

  Nicole had a sudden urge to see the money used to undo some of the harm Hayes had done. For the rest of the day, she remained upstairs, napping and gazing out the bedroom window, deep in her own thoughts. She saw Brad leave and, much later, heard him come back. Around 7:00 p.m., when she went downstairs to fix something to eat, he was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper.

  “Take a look at the afternoon paper,” he said, holding up the front page. A huge headline across the top read, “Drug Yacht Blown to Kingdom Come”.

  Below that, in smaller letters, it said, “Search on for Missing Drug Lord”. Taking the paper from him, Nicole sat down at the table and quickly devoured the stories about Hayes, his operation, the failed drug raid, and the yacht’s explosion. As a sidebar, the paper even ran a body count.

  List of Dead and Missing in Hayes Drugs Case

  The following includes those dead or unaccounted for in connection with missing international drug lord Alexander Hayes. According to sources in West Scotland, the loch surrounding Hayes’ Isle of Benbarra compound is too deep to be dragged for bodies.

  Dead: Edgar McGiever, 67, retired manager of the maintenance department of the Greater London Council’s Board of Public Works; victim of the Chiswick car bombing, now believed to have been the work of Hayes’ operatives.

  Dead: Alice McConnehy, 30, the Lowrys’ tenant, whose body was found in the Thames. Police believe she was murdered by Hayes’ operatives.

  Dead: Frederick Lowry, 52, of gunshot wounds. Body discovered in a shallow grave in the Hayes compound on the Isle of Benbarra.

  Dead: Kevin Smithson, 28, of head injuries, also on Isle of Benbarra.

  Dead: Benjamin (Ben) Manning, 45, Hayes’ top enforcer, of injuries suffered during a struggle with police on Isle of Benbarra.

  Dead: Andrew Crump, 23, Greg Lawson, 25, and Colin Durfield, 28, crew members of Alexander Hayes’ yacht, the Summer Wind. They were killed when the vessel exploded as the result of an unexplained engine fire.

  Missing: Alexander Hayes, 55, believed to have been in the vicinity of his yacht, the Summer Wind, at the time of the explosion; body never recovered.

  Missing: Charles (Chazz) Reilly, 26, employee of Alexander Hayes, also in the vicinity of the yacht’s explosion. Body never recovered.

  Missing: Muriel Lowry, age unknown, wife of Frederick Lowry (see above). Police believe this woman may have fled the U.K.

  When she was done reading, she tore out the story, put it in the pocket of her robe and began to assemble ingredients for an omelet. Every once in a while, she’d pause, pull out the clipping, and consult it again, as if it could explain why so many whose lives had touched hers were now dead or missing. Perhaps the real issue was how she had managed to survive, a question that continued to mystify her. For here she was, unharmed (at least in any visible way), and perfectly able to function at normal daily tasks, like cooking.

  “Look, Nick,” Brad said while she looked through the cupboards for an eggbeater. “I want to tell you what happened, but I’m afraid— Well, why not just come out with it?” He gestured toward the newspaper. “This guy Hayes, the one who kidnapped you? Well, I was doing some, uh, business with him. That’s how I heard about Lowry and ended up getting us this house. What I mean to say is that I’m to blame for the whole thing, all that horrible stuff you went through. But I had no idea. I mean, if you only knew how bad I feel about it, you’d forgive me.”

  Nicole listened without comment while she finished the omelet, sprinkling it with cheese, and placing it under the broiler. Almost without thinking about it, she’d made enough for both of them.

  It wasn’t until they’d finished the meal that Brad had talked himself out. At that point, Nicole told him their marriage was over. She was heading back to L.A. to file for divorce. “But there’s no reason you can’t stay here at the house in Chiswick,” she added. “The agreement we signed with the Lowrys gives us the house until mid-September.”

  Brad refused to accept her decision about the divorce as final. He did seem to understand, however, that he’d been evicted from the bedroom. Even so, Nicole took the precaution of locking the door.

  The next day, she arranged for the two of them to consult with the solicitor who was handling Brad’s case. She had no intention of getting involved in his defense. But with community property, her finances were entangled with his, and she thought it was important for her to have a clear picture of his legal problems.

  The solicitor explained that money laundering carried a fairly heavy maximum penalty in the U.K. — fourteen years. Although Brad was giving the police his full cooperation, the British courts had no formal system of plea bargaining. So there were no guarantees. “At the end of the day,” he added, “I think it’s very likely that Mr. Graves will be facing some prison time.”

  After they left the office, Brad shrugged off the solicitor’s assessment. “Talk about worst-case scenario,” he said. “What a total load of crap!”

  “I checked out his references, Brad,” Nicole said. “This guy knows what he’s talking about.”

  “He’s just trying to cover his ass,” Brad scoffed. “They’ll never send me to jail.”

  What surprised Nicole was the way Brad refused to accept the idea that he might have to pay some kind of penalty. He didn’t believe charges would be brought or, if brought, that they would stick. Nor did he seriously think he’d lose his job. In fact, he seemed to regard his predicament as a minor scrape that could, if he played his cards right, open some great opportunities. He mentioned the possibility of a book contract, or starting a brand new business to shepherd small investment companies through the thicket of laws governing international currency exchanges. He was so doggedly upbeat and optimistic that she realized this was no act. He was truly delusional.

  From the solicitor’s office, Brad took the tube to the police station, where he was spending long days helping investigators with cases related to his money laund
ering scheme. Nicole caught a cab back to the house. On her way inside, she stopped to chat with Mr. McGiever’s son and teenage grandson, who were working on the blackened shambles of his front yard. They’d already begun hacking up the charred skeleton of the hedge that had formerly stood between the two houses. Young McGiever explained that he was fixing up the house so he could sell it. He was terribly nice—thin and wispy like his father—and kept apologizing to Nicole about her ordeal, as if it had somehow been the old man’s fault.

  As he was talking, Nicole remembered her recent windfall and realized that Mr. McGiever’s garden was exactly the kind of project she had in mind. She’d spend the money helping them repair the damage, replant the garden, and replace the burnt hedge. It felt right: direct reparation, however small, of the harm Hayes and his men had done. After making some inquiries at a local nursery, she postponed her flight back to L.A.

  She bought herself some gardening gloves and hired McGiever’s grandson, Edgar III, to assist her. The two of them spent several days planting Mr. McGiever’s ravaged flowerbeds with roses and a bank of azaleas. She also followed the nurseryman’s suggestion of putting in a small ornamental pear by the front window. This done, Nicole gave the boy a box of scouring pads and put him to work removing the sooty splotches the blast had left on the house’s brick facade. Then they repainted the front door while a crew from the local nursery rolled down a carpet of thick green turf. She’d had to bribe the nurseryman to avoid the usual three-to-six-week wait. Since it wasn’t her money, she didn’t haggle.

  Until this moment, the neighbors had been peeking out from behind their curtains, but the sight of workmen laying down a ready-made lawn drew them outside to watch. Instant landscaping was taken for granted in Los Angeles, where a full botanical garden, complete with a grove of palm trees, could appear overnight. Clearly, this wasn’t the case in Chiswick.

  For Nicole, the most therapeutic part of the project was the moment each afternoon when Reinhardt arrived, and the two of them retreated inside to work on Nicole’s “debriefing.” For the most part, these sessions took the form of languid hours upstairs in the Lowrys’ double bed, getting better acquainted, talking, or not talking, as the mood struck them.