“I’m going to be a long time. You go ahead and sleep. We’ll talk more later.” I opened the door to leave, and she said to me, “ça marche. J’attend ici.” Maybe she had had a few drinks after all. I closed the door quietly behind me, but the night table light stayed on.
I set the case on the coffee table between the sofas, and sat down on the one across from Terry. Ronnie was already making notes, comfortable in a large chair at the head of the sofas. Evie was still absorbed with their electronics at the other end of the couch I was sitting on. It looked like Ronnie and I were going to have the chat with Terry, the newest member of our merry little band of renegades. I decided to go first.
“You feel a bit better now Terry?”
He tilted his head down a bit to look at me as he answered.
“Yeah. Swell, thanks.” I could see that he wanted to add something to that, but had thought better of it.
I pulled a fresh pad and pencil out of my briefcase and placed them in front of him.
“You can use this to make notes and to help jog your memory, which appears to be somewhat faulty.”
He grudgingly muttered his thanks, and then checked to see if his nose was still in place and if it had stopped dribbling down his chin. It wasn’t. I told him to take an ice cube and rub it around on his face, and the hand mark on his face would fade faster. And to do it in the bathroom, where he wouldn’t irritate me. I got a reasonable look this time, and he went off to get himself cleaned up.
As soon as he had closed the door to the bathroom, Ronnie asked Evie, “Any chance we can tap into their comms?”
Evie looked up with a big grin on her face. “Yes, ma’am. Shouldn’t be a problem. We have three of these, courtesy of our hero here.” At that she gave me a look that left very little room for misinterpretation. Good grief. I’d been living in a desert for so long now I was actually used to it, and now here I was at the oasis. One in Toronto, that I wanted, I mean really wanted. One in my bed, that I was treating like a daughter—sort of—but who might just have some very odd ideas about how daughters acted with their dads. Maybe the dad thing was stretching it a bit. Now there was Evie. Unless I was going mad, the readings were plain enough. Then I was starting to get a softer friendship going with Ronnie. It never rains but it pours. Mission rules: the only one that was touchable was the one in Toronto that I couldn’t even call without potentially putting her in danger, and that wasn’t going to happen. It was going to be a long wait until I saw Cynthia again, even if it was only another week. Back to business.
“Ronnie, you keep your file on the robberies open, and I’ll try to get him to talk about everything he knows that’s even vaguely related. When we touch on something you want expanded, just butt in, Okay?”
“That suits me at the moment. I’m ready.”
Terry came out of the bathroom while Ronnie was talking. He’d taken the time to freshen up properly. He almost looked presentable. He’d washed the blood spots off of the shirt he was wearing as well as he could, but blood doesn’t come easily out of white cotton. His face was looking much better, though. It was obvious that he’d used the ice, the way I’d instructed him to.
I got up and went back into my room to get him a shirt. Keeping that one on would just build resentment and interfere with the talk I wanted to have with him. Therese was already sleeping, the covers pulled up close around her. I got the shirt and turned out the nightstand light. She never noticed as I left the room. Outside, in the sitting room, the food and drinks had come, and Evie had got the door and handled the table the way I’d done before. A quick once-over in the hall before being pulled into the room. I threw the shirt at Terry, and he caught it with his left hand. His left hand. That’s right, he was left-handed, but ambidextrous as well.
“Here, put this on. That one looks like hell. You can’t feel comfortable with your own blood all over yourself.”
“Thanks, Jeffry. I appreciate it.” He appreciated it. I’d made him bleed in the first place.
“Everybody help themselves to the tea and coffee, you might need it. The food and the orange juice are spoken for. I hope you don’t mind if I eat while we work.” I got myself set up, and tucked into the steak like I hadn’t eaten in weeks. I was hungry. The eggs went the same way as the steak within three or four minutes. I wiped the last juices from the plate with the last dinner roll. I could have eaten twice as much, but then I’d probably have been sick. I took both of the coffee pots and the tea pot as well, along with all the paraphernalia, cups, saucers, sugar, milk, cream, spoons, and put them all along the side bureau near the small dining table. The room service table went into the hall.
Terry had gone back to the bathroom to change, and even though the shirt was a bit on the large side, he looked better for it when he came back out. Ronnie had already started cross-referencing the data that Terry had supplied us with earlier, making headings under which she was adding questions. When I’d gotten myself settled again, I felt a whole hell of a lot better. I opened my briefcase and pulled out a pad and pen. Then I made the same sort of headings at the top as Ronnie had, but with some differences. Then I kicked the interrogation off.
“Alright now. Terry. You have some information that we’re interested in. So. This is how it’s going to work. I ask a question, and you answer to the best of your knowledge. The Colonel may interrupt for clarification on a specific point, or she may ask her own questions. Again, you’ll answer to the best of your ability. Based on your cooperative efforts here tonight you’ll be judged, for a fit into the witness protection program, or for nice new leg irons. You understand this so far?”
“Yeah, I understand. Look Jeffry, I’ll give you anything and everything that you want, as long as I know it. If I don’t know it, I’ll make an educated guess, and I’ll tell you that it’s an educated guess. That’s it. I’ll do the very best I can.”
Evie calmly produced a micro-sized tape deck out of nowhere and put it down on the table in front of us all. Running. I took that as my cue to start.
“Fine. First question. When did you first become involved with, or meet, any of the people that you now believe to be a part of this ‘Gang’, or ‘Operation’ or whatever else you may want to call it?”
“That would be… about eight months ago. As a matter of fact, it was on December 10th, 1995. I remember because at the time, I was actually in the field again. I had the honour of pushing paper while on the move, being assigned to Doherty case, that kidnapping that went down right here in Zurich, remember? We spent four nights in Geneva, then flew to New York for four more days. I got a two-day leave, and went to Montreal for a two-day bash, and that turned out amazingly. Saw the Habs and Leafs at the Montreal Forum. Two days later we were on a plane to Geneva, and I was back at my regular desk. Turned out Okay for me. I hadn’t had a break in ages at the time. That’s the way it goes. I must have had so much great food while I was there, I couldn’t remember it all.”
“I want you to understand me now Terry. Look into my eyes. Are you paying attention yet? Good. The next time you give me an answer like that, I’m going to have to ask the ladies to leave the room, because I don’t think it’s going to be a pretty thing. I don’t give a good god damn about what you thought, you understand, or what you ate. I’m interested in things you know to be true, by having participated in them, for example, or by having witnessed it in some first-hand manner. We can start there, maybe. Nice and easy.” By this time, I’ve got him looking me in the eye. Finally. “Now that you understand me, we’ll all get on better, won’t we?”
There was a discernible change of temperature in the room, and it was broken up into pockets of ‘comfortable’, which seemed to surround both of the women, and ‘chill’, which seemed to follow me, and then we had tropical, which was all around Terry, because he was sweating like a maniac.
“Yes, sir. I’ll start over.”
“That sounds fine.” I sat back and waited for Terry to give us what we wanted. I was willing to be pa
tient, for the next thirty minutes, then I would ask the women to leave the room. He took a deep breath, and started again.
“It was about eight months ago, on December 10th, 1995, when I was on a break in Montreal. I ran into this guy who was supposedly down from Toronto for the weekend to party it up. We started talking, and it turned out he was a major investment banker for Citecorp, and he started telling me about this sweet deal he had going. How he was goin’ to retire on this one and all that crap.
I started bragging on my work, too. I think we’d both had a bit too much of that Quebec beer, you know, that Brador stuff. Man, that’s strong stuff, and I was half nuts from losing out on trying to meet some nice babe,” He looked around the room. “no offense. This guy, well that night he got us two of the most beautiful women I’d ever been out with in my life. I was too impressed, and I talked too much about my work, and what I could do if I wanted.”
“In other words, playing yourself up. I understand that. What was the name of the ‘guy’, for starters.”
“Uh, Johnny… something. Downton, maybe? No, wait—Downton … Dawson! That was it, Dawson. Johnny Dawson. I’ve still got his business card somewhere in the pile of papers on my desk.”
Ronnie and Evie passed a look between themselves that I caught out of the corner of my eye, but I showed nothing to Terry. No name recognition, no looking away from his eyes, nothing. Meanwhile, I was preparing a short report in my own handwriting on the screen of my pocket micro, opened on the table. No other person I’d ever met could decipher the way I wrote when I wasn’t looking at the writing on the screen. It came in handy occasionally.
“What did this Johnny have to say about this big deal?”
“Oh, well, let’s see now.” Terry took his time and thought hard about that one. It showed on his face and that made him either an excellent actor, or a fair dummy. I voted for the latter.
“Okay—He said he had the ‘best deal of his life going down’, and ‘in about six months he’d be retiring early’, and ‘Not to A Florida Trailer Park Either’. Somewhere really nice, like ‘Rio’, right? So I said to him, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty leading line you got there, Johnny. Let’s just say I was interested. Can I get in on this, or is it a closed deal? Or maybe one open only to the right people?’ like that. Over the rest of the night, he says to me at different times, right?, ‘It’s Brazil. A Very Big Deal. Up in the Amazon. The biggest, and the richest, iron ore strike—the world’s ever seen.’ That made him laugh like hell, every time he said it. He was even worse off from the drinking than I was, looking back at it now, and I’m still pretty foggy about parts of it.
Anyway, bottom line: there was this way he’d come up with for getting himself into the deal, because he was the one that Citecorp assigned to work on it. He was raising the cash, I mean, the ‘Investment Capitol’, right?—From big rollers, financial institutions, like that. But, there was one company that was allowing some private money into it. That was his secret for getting in. Buying stock in this company, because they were going to provide a sizable amount of money for this upcoming project. They were going to put everything they could into it. As a shareholder in this company… they were called… MDG Holding Company, and AG, and all of that other Swiss cr… uh, Swiss bureaucracy.” He made a nervous glance at me to see if I’d been offended on the Ladies’ behalf. Personally, I thought either of these women had everything it took, and more, to answer for themselves, which meant that he didn’t realize the level of ‘muck’ that he was in. He was just afraid of me. I needed to change that perception for him, lest he get hurt when I wasn’t around to protect him. I knew Evie would just love to have go at him. But.
“Go on from there.”
“Right. So, if you were a shareholder in this MDG Holding Company, then you had the right to make personal investments that augmented a deal that MDG might be making. So, there was a window of opportunity there all right. I could see that, but he was talking about such huge returns on the original investment, it sounded strange, but I asked him if I could maybe buy a few shares of MDG, you know, like that.
Uh, he said he’d give me a number I could use when I got back to Switzerland, because this ‘Holding Company’ MDG, had an office in Geneva, but I had to have a million to play, no less.”
“Did you have a million?”
“What? Are you serious? I have about three hundred grands, that’s all. So I get a couple more investors to go in with me, you know?”
“What was the phone number?”
“That one, I have memorized. Two six, dash five eight six seven two. It’s in Geneva.”
“How long after you got back did you call the number?”
“About a month.”
“So, you believed this guy ‘Johnny’ that you met that night in Montreal?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. He was so sure of himself, so high on the whole thing. It had to be for real. After I thought about it some more, I decided to try and make a move on it, and so I got the additional cash committed, and made the call.”
“So you hit on some of your ex-spy pals, to invest with you. Maybe even some people that you knew, but had never spoken to otherwise, because it would have been against policy to do so.”
“Well, yeah. But it turned out to be how I got sucked down into this whole group of shady characters, to start with, anyway. Who knew that these guys were from Hell itself? I didn’t, that’s for sure. Not then, anyway.
I went down to Geneva and made the call. I said I was a friend of Johnny’s, right?, and I wanted to invest some money, could we set up a meeting, blah, blah. This woman says ‘Call back in fifteen minutes.”
“You were talking about the investment with a woman?”
“Hey, I thought you knew a lot of this already, you know?”
I didn’t flicker an eyelid.
“We do. Her name is Heidi Meir. She runs the Geneva office with a staff of four. She’s the Boss. She also happens to be extremely dangerous. The Colonel here could tell you what Ms. Meir had for breakfast today. We know her.” That seemed to mollify Terry somewhat, and we continued.
“So what happened when you called back?”
“She said that I should keep the whole thing hush-hush, you know, and someone would be contacting me. Not to call them at that number again, for any reason. I mean, that was pretty specific, right?”
“Then?”
“Well, after about two weeks, I go into my favourite sandwich shop one lunchtime, Okay? But there’s this guy there. He comes straight over to me and says, ‘My name is Enrico. I work for Ms. Meir. I believe that you want to invest some money with us.”
“I was impressed with their security, that’s for sure. I hadn’t spotted a tail on me since the phone call. Really. And by that time I was starting to get a little jumpy, so I was watching.”
“Did this ‘Enrico’ have a last name?”
“The way this guy operated, I knew right away that he was heavy. If he wanted to give me a name, I figured he would. If not, I wasn’t going to ask. In the end, he didn’t.”
“Was this Enrico fellow associated with our Latin friends?”
“In the end, it looks like he runs them. But that took a while to figure out. He confirmed it this afternoon though, when he set this whole thing in motion. All of the ‘Latinos’ took their orders from him. He was also the one who supplied all of the gear. I mean everything. All of the armament, the body armour, the instructions. The ‘Plan’. That first meeting was mostly him explaining that the people that invested in this deal stood to make a large amount of money. So naturally, it was important that they be able to trust their partners. It was then that I realized this was no simple affair. These people were legit on top, but underneath, they were some new kind of crime affiliate.”
“All of that was just doing what you were told though. You had already ‘proved’ yourself to them and the ‘Company’. That would have been the arranging of an ‘accident’ for someone? Something on the side of the highway may
be, looking more like a twist of fate than a murder? Someone who turned out to be on the Board of Ms. Meir’s little company, perhaps?”
He hung his head then. The shame on him was like a bad smell, one you couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard you scrubbed.
“It wasn’t me that did it. I swear.”
“But you showed them how to do it right, if they were going to do it anyway, and what the hell! It was going to improve your personal bottom line, wasn’t it?” I stopped writing and stared at him until he was forced to look at me face to face.
“Yes.”
I think he was actually on the verge of tears. This man had needed saving before this. Which made me think of Mark. Why didn’t Mark know all about this? I would have, in his position. I forged on.
“You were forced into the situation because you hadn’t seen dollar one from the investment yet, and you couldn’t go to your fellow crime-busters and tell them ‘Sorry, I lost your money to a crime syndicate.’, you’d have been shipped out in chains on the next available flight out of town. That’s assuming, of course, that your friend ‘Enrico’ and his pals didn’t get you first.”
“Exactly, sir.”
Ronnie decided to put a few words into the mix. Something that might appeal to Terry’s original sense of loyalty to law enforcement. There was still some there, that was obvious from the way he related to us. The trick was to keep him convinced that we were his only friends and his only hope. Ronnie started her routine.
“Terry, I know this is hard for you, but now you have an opportunity to make some amends for the wrongs that you have perpetrated, and the wrongs you have participated in. That would mean something, even as far down the road as you’ve already gone. It’s possible to come back, Terry. We can help you do that. Remember, from here on in, until the trials, and there will be trials, we’re all you have. You’ve made a start by coming with us tonight, but you had no choice in that, really, so it can’t be counted for all that much.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 58
