“Even if everything Richter told me is true,” I said, “I doubt very much the U.S. government will be able to prove Lori’s involvement.”
Given the fact that Vince Sorkin was still missing, I had little reason to question whether Richter was being honest about Vince’s selling weapons technology to Tehran. But then, over the past ten years, I’d learned to question everything. And Vince’s guilt would be no exception.
Still, I thought it likely that in her hysteria, Lori had threatened to spill everything in the hopes that it might somehow help get Lindsay back. And that’s why Vince Sorkin had run.
“Do you think Vince will ever be found?” she said.
I didn’t reply.
Dr. Keith Richter was already in U.S. federal custody in California after being stopped at the Mexican border on his way to Tijuana for what he called a spontaneous vacation. In preparation for said vacation, Keith Richter had bleached his hair and beard blond and stuffed his pockets with wads of cash. He’d left behind his wife and children.
Stephen may well have been the mastermind but he couldn’t have done it without his brother. Keith Richter evidently tested hundreds of children, then supplied the information to Stephen for comparison. Lindsay Sorkin was the perfect donor for Mila Richter. Age, weight, blood type O, and, most incredibly, a six-antigen match—the best compatibility possible between a donor and a recipient who aren’t identical twins.
Lindsay’s heart was Mila’s only chance at life. Mila would never have survived a second transplant, so Stephen Richter couldn’t afford to try any heart but Lindsay’s. A rejection of the heart by Mila’s body would have made it all for naught. The Richter girl would have died.
After receiving the data, Stephen had used his significant resources—millions of dollars he’d raised for his Chernobyl charities from people and businesses all over the world—to discover as much about Vince and Lori Sorkin as he possibly could. He hired a private intelligence firm in the States. The firm, aptly named Third Eye, employed only top-notch intelligence vets from American, British, and German intelligence. It didn’t take them long to infiltrate Nepturn Technology and discover Vince’s plans to sell secrets to Tehran.
Of course, Stephen had justified his actions to me based on Vince’s treason, but I doubt that if he’d learned that the Sorkins were model citizens he would have done anything differently. He didn’t have time to be choosy; his daughter didn’t have time. Once the heart-valve procedure failed, there was a good chance Mila would die. Short of a transplant, nothing would have saved Stephen Richter’s little girl.
Davignon tapped on the open door and stepped inside.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “But Lori insists on thanking you personally, and of course, she’d like to take her daughter and leave France as soon as possible.”
“Did she say where they were going?” I said.
He looked at me strangely. “I assume back to the States.”
“Without her husband?”
Davignon took a step toward me, lowered his voice.
“Is there something you are not telling me, Simon?”
I hadn’t told anyone. Yet. Before I told anyone anything, I needed to get to the truth.
“Send her in, Lieutenant.” I turned to Ana. “If you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’d like to speak with Lori alone.”
“Of course,” she said.
Once Ana returned downstairs with Davignon, I folded my arms across my chest and walked to the window. The sky was gray, just as it had been when Davignon first brought me to this cottage ten days earlier. Strange, I thought, where my mind kept returning during these past twenty-fours hours. Back to Kiev. To that run-down apartment complex in the Podil district, Lower City. To Dorota Wojcik, the young girl who’d led us to the Podrova brothers. Dorota was the only innocent person to have admitted to seeing Lindsay since her parents had put her to bed in Paris. She deserved the credit, not me. Yet, Dorota remained in her unthinkable situation back in Ukraine.
I’d spoken to Martyn Rudnyk from the plane. With the Podrova brothers out of the way, he assured me, his and Kidman’s investigation would move forward with alacrity. I had no reason to doubt him. Bad people would be put away. But I couldn’t help but wonder what would become of the children. Because the Podrova brothers and their so-called modeling agency weren’t the only problems in these kids’ lives. Far from it. Fact was, they were surrounded by evil and they had no one in the world to protect them.
“Simon?” Lori’s voice remained hoarse but she sounded better than anytime I’d spoken to her over the phone these past several days. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” I said.
She stepped in slowly. She was alone; she’d left Lindsay downstairs with Ana and Davignon. I was surprised that she could let her daughter out of her sight so soon, but I supposed it was healthy.
“I really don’t know how to begin to thank you,” she said.
“Seeing Lindsay safe is thanks enough, I assure you.”
Lori walked up to me and put her arms around me and hugged me with everything she had. I let her rest her head against my chest as I warmly hugged her back.
“Lieutenant Davignon tells me you had an ultrasound,” I said, “and that the baby looks great.”
I felt her nodding, felt her tears seeping through the cotton of my shirt.
“They saw boy parts,” she said.
“Vince must be elated.”
She was silent for a few moments, then said, “He doesn’t know yet. He left before I told him.”
I gently took her by the shoulders and held her away from me so that I could look into her eyes, the eyes that reminded me so much of Tasha’s.
“Do you know where your husband went?”
Lori shook her head.
I believed her. He wouldn’t have told her. If he was indeed a traitor to the United States, he wouldn’t have told anyone. The risk would have been too great.
“Do you expect him back?” I said.
She shook her head ever so slightly again as she cast her eyes on the floor.
Of course, she knew what Vince had been doing. If he hadn’t told her outright, she’d have suspected. She wasn’t dim; quite the contrary. Her husband would have been constantly nervous and she’d have noticed the changes in him. He could have supplied her with any story he could dream up and she might even have gone along with it, but deep down she would’ve known. It was why she’d ultimately blamed her husband for their daughter’s abduction.
Lori had threatened him; I was sure of it. It was why Vince had run.
Under the law, Lori would be culpable. But Lindsay was innocent. Children weren’t held responsible for their parents’ crimes, of course. But in the end, the children were usually the ones who suffered the consequences.
“Don’t let them take Lindsay from me,” Lori said softly as she buried her head in my chest. “I could never live through that again.”
Neither could Lindsay, I thought.
Epilogue
Two months after I returned to the States, I found myself back in Europe, searching for someone. I’d been to Lisbon before and had a good relationship with the Portuguese authorities. But this time around I did everything I could to avoid them. For this task, I needed to remain under the radar.
I booked a room at a lovely hotel in Estoril. Every night I was there I walked across the street to a quiet restaurant and ordered a shrimp cocktail and a small but delectable piece of beef. As I sat there, sipping port wine, I considered what I’d do after completing this assignment.
The plan was to rent a car and drive through Spain and France toward London. There, I would do everything I could to locate my sister and mother. Attempts to find Tuesday through the Internet had proved futile. I hoped that meant she had married and changed her name. Of course, I hoped the same would be true of my mother. When my father left her, she’d still been young and very beautiful. Perhaps she’d remarried and lived happily ever after.
/> After that I’d drive to Germany and pay a visit to Kurt Ostermann in Berlin. He’d been released in the deaths of Dietrich Braun and Karl Finster after a witness came forward. The witness was a young Turk who’d been good friends with Sidika. His name was Firat and he was the other man we’d seen at Tunnelbar in Kreuzberg with Sidika and Alim. He knew everything, apparently. Including where Alim had been hiding out since he returned to Berlin following his uncle Talik’s death in Poland. Alim was now in German custody, awaiting trial for murder.
After seeing Ostermann, I’d head east to Warsaw, where Ana was waiting for me. She wanted to show me more of Poland and feed me pierogi. How could I say no? Of course, I also owed her a trip to Hollywood, but she said that could wait a year. She’d started a new job as a prosecutor. Ana wouldn’t be prosecuting her former boss Mikolaj Dabrowski personally, of course. But she would have a front-row seat at his trial. In any event, she couldn’t take any considerable amount of time off just yet. No worries, I assured her. Whatever else happened in the United States, Hollywood would still be standing.
Once I left Ana, I would return to Ukraine. Specifically, to Lower City in Kiev. Martyn Rudnyk had invited me to meet with him and Kidman to discuss their progress in the worldwide child-pornography investigation. My priority lay in retaining lawyers to use the court system to extract the victims from their present situations—not just from the so-called modeling agency, but from the parents, guardians, older siblings, uncles and aunts who permitted them to be exploited in the first place.
After Ukraine, it would be on to Belarus. The death of Dr. Stephen Richter had left a serious vacuum in the medical services available to the continued victims of the Chernobyl disaster. There were other doctors devoted to the cause, of course, and it was with them that I would start. During my brief time back in the States, I’d driven from my home in D.C. north to Rhode Island. I visited with my father. He was much older than I remembered him, of course, and he seemed broken and lonely. I’d told him all about Lindsay Sorkin and the children of Belarus and asked him for his help in aiding the former Soviet state. I knew he wasn’t the type of man who’d ever set foot in Minsk, but he did have a hell of a lot of money. I didn’t expect him to part with it all now, just some. And to revise his will, making the Mila Richter Foundation his primary beneficiary. No one lives forever after all. Not even Alden Fisk.
After dinner on my sixth night in Lisbon I made a call to the U.S. embassy, then hopped into a taxi and asked to be taken to the Alfama district. The Alfama is a quaint area, which is to say that many of its buildings are ancient and in terrible disrepair. As the taxi continued deeper into the quarter, twisting and turning around old churches and crumbling structures, I reached into my jacket and checked my gun. The weapon was small, a .22, nothing like the Glock I’d borrowed from Davignon when I left Paris. But then, I doubted I’d need a weapon at all. I didn’t expect much resistance.
When I exited the taxi I took a deep breath, relieved that I could still smell the sea even from deep within the confining structures of the quarter. I walked several blocks until I reached a small cellarlike tavern with no name. I stepped slowly down the stairs and entered.
The tavern looked exactly as it had been described to me. It was a dank, dark place, the kind you always see in crime movies. Only about a half-dozen dark men sat around swilling Sagres cerveza, yet the place still felt cramped, almost claustrophobic. Everyone in the tavern eyeballed me with suspicion, except one man seated at the bar with his back to the door. He was wearing a short brown leather jacket and a fitted baseball cap with the MLB logo stitched in the back. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked to be Dodger blue.
I stepped up to the bar, a makeshift thing you’d expect to find deep in the belly of a college frat house. It was stained badly with port wine. Behind the bar stood a long-faced old man with little hair and few teeth. He took a long pull off his cigarette and ashed on the floor, then regarded me through the smoke as though I weren’t a customer but an intruder.
“Vinho du porto,” I said, indicating that one of the two glasses of port should be set in front of the man wearing the baseball cap.
The bartender sluggishly nodded his head, then tossed a worn dishrag over his shoulder and shuffled away to retrieve the glasses.
I sat on an open stool and leaned against the plywood. The man sitting next to me was indeed wearing a Dodgers baseball cap, the royal-blue brim pulled low over his eyes. He didn’t bother to glance my way. He’d heard my voice; he knew I was there.
The bartender set two cloudy wineglasses in front of us and poured from a new bottle.
“Obrigado,” I said, pushing a handful of euros across the bar.
“How did you find me?” Vince Sorkin said.
“It’s what I used to do for a living,” I told him. “Hunt down fugitives.”
He nodded without looking at me. Pushed his beer aside and picked up his glass of wine.
“How’s my family?” he said.
“I talked to your wife recently. She and your daughter are doing fine. Lindsay’s still recovering but she’s made a lot of progress already.”
All I could see was his profile, but I could tell he was smiling sadly. I watched a tear glide down the left side of his face.
“I suppose that’s the bright side of you being here,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask what he meant.
“You should finish your drink,” I said.
When he put the glass back to his lips, his hand was shaking.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“That’s understandable.”
Vince finally turned on his stool and looked me in the eyes.
“Thank you for finding my daughter, Simon.”
“It was never for you and Lori,” I told him. “It was always for the child.”
I heard at least two vehicles screeching to a stop outside and I thought of the day not so long ago when Davignon and his cadre of white Peugeots topped with flashing lightbars forced my taxi to the side of the road.
Vince lifted his wineglass and threw back the last of its contents before setting it down and carefully wiping his mouth. He looked nothing like the man I’d met a few months ago. His skin was bronzed and peeling behind the coarse hairs of an incomplete mustache and beard. His eyes were bloodshot and I could tell that this was not the first night he’d been crying. Nor, I suspected, would it be his last.
I heard footfalls tramping down the stairs and everyone in the bar turned their heads to stare at the entrance. Everyone except me and Vince. Only we knew what was coming.
Together we rose from our bar stools.
Vince lifted his hands high in the air just as the door flew open and uniformed men burst into the tavern, raising their weapons and shouting commands.
ALSO BY DOUGLAS CORLEONE
Kevin Corvelli Mysteries
Last Lawyer Standing
Night on Fire
One Man’s Paradise
About the Author
DOUGLAS CORLEONE is a former New York City defense attorney and winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. He now lives in the Hawaiian Islands with his wife and children. This is his fourth novel.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GOOD AS GONE. Copyright © 2013 by Douglas Corleone. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein Cover photographs: street © Charles Bowman/Getty Images; Eiffel Tower © Mikhail Zahranichny The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Corleone, Douglas.
Good as gone / Douglas Corleone. — First U.S. edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-01720-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-25001721-5 (e-book) 1. Private
investigators—Fiction. 2. Missing children—Fiction. 3. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.O763G84 2013
813’.6—dc23
2013009828
e-ISBN 9781250017215
First Edition: August 2013
Good As Gone (Simon Fisk Novels) Page 25
