by James Conway
Elsewhere in Brazil the numbers are also good today. The Bovespa in Sao Paolo is up .09, and his hometown exchange, the Bolsa de Valores de Rio de Janeiro, is also up, .05. For this, Valverde thinks, you can thank the coming Olympics and World Cup, a mildly recovering U.S. economy, some good trade news out of Brazil’s largest partner, China, and a surge in the prices of Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista’s OGX oil conglomerate.
When he first graduated from Universidad Federal, Valverde wanted to be the next Batista. Now, so many recessions and crashes and recoveries later, he’s happy to have a paycheck, a house near the beach in the Botafogo district, and his beloved red 2010 Moto Guzzi Griso 1200, a picture of which sits on his desk beside a picture of his wife and two daughters.
Out of curiosity he checks the up-to-the-second trading status of three of the top advertising holding companies. Nothing dying there. In fact, they’re each up on the session, more than 2 percent.
When it’s apparent that the automatic program has matters in hand, he gathers his belongings and heads for the elevator. It’s only 2 P.M., but Valverde doesn’t care. It’s beautiful outside. His bike is waiting and he’s had a good day. Why not?
He rises out of the underground garage and lifts his head toward the brilliant sun hanging over the palaces of Avenue Rio Branca. Rather than turn for home, he decides to get out on the bike for a bit and heads toward Avenue Beira Mar. At a stoplight next to the Biblioteca Nacional he takes his cell phone out of his pants pocket and calls his wife to tell her he’ll be home early, and to put on a nice outfit, because he’d like to take her to dinner. Three years ago they dined out three, four nights a week. When the economy went bad, they cut back to once a week, and when the takeover rumors began to swirl, they cut back entirely.
“Are you sure?” asks his wife, Celina.
“Absolutely,” he answers. “It’s been a good day.”
When he reaches Beira Mar, he opens up the throttle and takes an exaggerated breath of the sea air that has been a part of so many memories in his thirty-four-year life. He drives along the crescent rim of the bay until traffic begins to build. At Praca Paris he angles to his right, away from the water, and loops back toward the Catedral de São Sebãstiao and one of his favorite landmarks in the city.
The Lapa Arches, also known as the Carioca Aqueduct, was built in the early eighteenth century. They span 270 meters and the forty-two soaring arches connect the hills of the Santa Teresa and Santo Antonio neighborhoods. They rise into view, ancient and spectacular in the afternoon sun. He gets off the bike in the shade of one of the lower arches and unwraps a piece of mango leftover from lunch. When he was a child, his father would take him here and tell him about the swamps that surrounded the old city and of a great-great-grandfather who worked on the aqueduct, which brought fresh water from the Carioca into neighborhoods and fountains throughout the city. He thinks about the old city and his father and the fathers that preceded him as he eats the fruit alone beneath the great structure.
While he is wiping the mango juice off his hands, a late 1990s model white Peugeot minivan pulls up in front of him and the driver rolls down his window. Valverde approaches the Peugeot, still wiping and smiling. “Are you lost?”
“No,” answers the driver, a man around the same age as Valverde, his eyes hidden behind dark lenses. “I was just looking at the aqueduct. How old?”
“Almost three hundred,” Valverde answers. “Still here, while all this twenty-first-century modernity crumbles all around us.”
The driver considers Valverde and the two arches directly overhead, and he smiles. “This is the truth, my friend. Today, nothing lasts as it was promised to us.”
Valverde nods, says, “Good luck,” and takes one last look at the aqueduct before turning back toward his motorcycle. As his fingers touch the handlebars and he is about to swing his right leg over the seat, he’s distracted by the roar of an engine and the crunch of gravel. He turns, sees the van bearing down on him, and lunges away from the motorcycle. The van’s right bumper hits the bike first and then the left clips Valverde in the hip. He’s lifted into the air and smashes into the concrete abutment more than ten feet away. The driver shifts into reverse, points the vehicle back toward Valverde, and races forward. Valverde hears the van shift gears and start to bear down on him, but he cannot stand to run or turn to see it. He begins to crawl toward the abutment through the dust and gravel with his arms only, dragging his shattered hips and slack legs.
The driver stops short of the abutment. Valverde is halfway around the corner, bleeding from the legs and now his mouth. The driver slams his hand on the dashboard. This is not how it was supposed to happen. He grabs a meter-long length of steel pipe and opens the door. Valverde looks up and sees a dark silhouette surrounded by powerful sunshine. The driver looks at Valverde and wonders if he needs to do more. Probably not, but probably is not acceptable. He turns to make sure no one is there to see him raise the pipe.
Valverde is already dead before it crashes down on him.
14
Berlin
Sobieski redials Michaud as she walks through the historic banking district in Berlin Mitte. The hotel doorman told her twenty minutes to the address listed for Siren Securities, but she aims to do it in ten.
She’s on Pariser Platz, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, near the new Dresdner Bank and the DZ Bank building, the sweeping steel-and-glass atrium that was designed by Frank Gehry, and that she knows also functions as the central bank for Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken.
“How was your sleep?”
“Nonexistent. Are you going to send some—”
“Already sending agents to seek out Mr. Jameson in Philly and, yes, INTERPOL and our people are still looking for Ms. Luhabe, presumably in the Johannesburg area.”
“What about . . .”
“In addition to Nasseem Al Mar dead in the trunk of a car outside Dubai City, in Rio, another broker was just found dead at the base of an aqueduct outside the city. Kleber Valverde.”
Sobieski stops. “Shit.” She wonders if there’s a way she could have prevented Valverde’s death if she hadn’t gone to the casino, or been preoccupied by her debts in Hong Kong, or was simply more dedicated, more skilled. “What kind of securities?”
“Advertising holding companies. World’s biggest. And yes, shorts. And yes, staggered.”
She’s in Gendarmenmarkt Square in front of one of the brownstone arches of KfW Banking Group, a well-preserved palace that is a rare remnant from the time of the kaisers. She doesn’t know what to say.
“So, what do you think?”
“Think?”
“For starters,” Michaud wonders, “I still don’t see why you kill them.”
“I think after Lau spoke out of school, the bad guys got spooked and wanted everyone associated with this killed. Sloppy? Yes. Unnecessary? Probably. But clearly whatever it is they’re up to takes precedence over everything else, and they don’t give a shit about who dies as long as they can’t talk.”
Michaud exhales. “Four trades in four distant parts of the world, all U.S.-based stocks, all shorts, all out of a trading account in Philadelphia with a German firm acting as some kind of middle man. But this one, in Rio, it still has a Berlin connection, but not Siren. It still originated from a Philly account, but a different one. Different name.”
“They must have sensed that they were being tracked.”
“Or thought they were bailing before anyone picked up on them,” Michaud answers.
“Jesus,” she says, slowing down to check the addresses on the passing buildings. “Do we have any kind of motive or hypothesis or clue to where this is all going, whom or what might be the next target?”
“Does it ramp up to giving us foreknowledge of something bigger?” responds Michaud. “I’m already modeling possible targets, ter
rorist connections, and the securities in question, but there’s not a whole lot connecting at this point. Additionally, the President and the head of every U.S. security agency have been briefed, and lots of smart people all around the world are trying to connect the same dots.”
“Advertising. Media. Tech,” Sobieski says. “All semi-related, but there’s so many variables, to be across-the-board shorting all of them.”
“Maybe he’s an evil genius Luddite.”
Sobieski smiles. “Tell that to the President. I’m sure he and the rest of the national security task force will be impressed.” She looks across the street. This is the place. A small, 1930s-era granite building just off the square. “Well,” she says, “this has been fun, as always, but I’ve gotta go.”
“Where?”
“Siren. I’m a stone’s throw away.”
Michaud pauses.
“Boss?”
“I don’t want you to go in until we get you some backup.”
“Backup? When?”
“This has become quite the thing, Sobes. Give me a few to pull together a team to do it right, and safely. This has taken on some scale.”
She looks at her watch and wonders how much time Michaud is talking about. She thinks of the time she wasted last night and what it may have cost Sawa Luhabe and this guy in Rio, and she wonders whose life or lives may be at the mercy of her next act of selfishness.
“This isn’t just a numbers investigation anymore, Sobi. It’s a serial, potentially mass homicide event.”
“Which means that every second counts, right?”
“Just sit tight. Keep an eye on the building and I’ll get back to you in ten.”
* * *
He doesn’t get back to her in ten. She thinks of what a ten-minute warning might have done for Luhabe, or Lau, or the guys in Dubai and Rio.
And since Michaud has broken his end of the promise for a rapid response, and she can’t bear to think about how she’d feel if her failure to act on this led to another death, or something larger, she snaps closed her phone and strides across the street and up the short flight of steps and into the once and former home of Siren Securities.
A guard sitting behind a black laminate counter looks away from his computer screen, briefly considers her, and then turns away as she strides across the empty lobby. Inside the elevator she presses nine, then closes her eyes.
The ninth floor hallway is silent and empty. There’s no sign or arrow pointing her toward the offices of Siren Securities. First she walks to her left, past doors for a photographer’s studio, a literary agency, and an accountant, before hitting the dead end of the emergency stairway exit.
Heading back the other way, she passes signs for an attorney and a psychic before stopping in front of the door with no words on it. Just an illustration of a godlike woman hanging high on the mast of an ancient sailing ship. The Sirens, from Homer’s Odyssey. And also, she realizes, the exact illustration that she and Mo saw on the killer’s briefcase in the lobby surveillance video of Patrick Lau’s Hong Kong condo. Sloppy.
With an ear against the fake wood door, she takes a breath and listens. She hears nothing but the electric hum of the surrounding offices, the clicks and whirring of elevator cables rising and falling through the building’s spine. But nothing on the other side of the door. No chattering people, easy listening music, or shuffling feet. No ringing phones, churning copy machines, or clattering keyboards this morning at Siren Securities.
She doesn’t knock. She twists the brass knob, and to her amazement it turns. The door floats open and she takes three steps inside the small twenty – by twenty-foot unpartitioned space. It’s obvious that the office has been abandoned and that no half-respectable financial services client has ever set foot here.
Despite this, as a formality, she calls, “Hello?”
Nothing.
Slowly she walks across the chipped and stained white Formica floor, looking left and right, then up at the exposed steel beams of the ceiling. All that is left of whatever operation existed here are two gray metal desks. One is against the window facing the Gate, accessorized by an open, empty one-drawer metal filing cabinet and a large, empty gray plastic garbage pail. The other desk, also stripped bare, is pressed into a corner near the door.
She swipes her foot at a clump of loose wires, one of several clusters of phone and USB lines and T1 cables snaking out of wall sockets and piled on the floor throughout the room. On the window desk, a heavy gray aluminum number that looks like a remnant of the Communist East Berlin era, sits a half-finished cup of cold coffee and yesterday’s edition of the Financial Times Deutschland.
What tipped them off? she wonders, thumbing through the paper. Somehow they became spooked between yesterday and now, and they decided to close up the entire operation and move on. She turns the pages, looking for anything, perhaps a circled security in an agate column or news piece, or for a ripped out article the absence of which would provide a clue. But nothing.
The only way they could have found out, she surmises, is to have picked up on the fact that someone was tracking them online, perhaps Michaud or one of the agents he’s placed to the case, or perhaps her. And to be able to do that, she thinks, their software must be far more sophisticated than anything we have.
She looks up and considers the clear blue Berlin sky, which is something she hadn’t expected. She’d expected skies a hundred shades of gray, filled with factory particulate and drizzle. Grim men and women in trench coats traipsing through caverns of Cold War architecture. But she was wrong. The city, she thinks, is quite lovely. Of course, the fact that Marco Nello is still in it adds to its allure. For a moment she considers calling Michaud and telling him not to rush, that the place is empty. But they’ll want to come anyway and take a more thorough look, and why piss him off? Why bother telling him that she’s defied his orders?
What else? she thinks. What else can I do or look for in this office? This city? She’s in the middle of this thought when a man’s arms begin to wrap around her.
She reacts as if electrocuted. She ducks and squirms, flails her arms, and stomps hard with her left heel on the toes of his left foot before spinning to face him. Mid-twenties, blond, high cheekbones, tall, and model-thin. Not very strong or skilled at this sort of thing.
She attacks without hesitation, snapping off a left-left-right jab combination all aimed at his head, and that he manages to block. Then comes a spinning right leg kick aimed at his temple, that he does not see or block. The impact of the kick sends him careering sideways against the metal desk and onto the floor.
For an instant her survival instinct introduces the thought of running, but her competitive and responsible nature overrides and she knows that she must punish and subdue and arrest whoever this is.
He rolls twice on the floor and manages to rise to a sitting position. But she pursues, closing in on him and straight kicking him flush on the clavicle with the heel of her left foot, driving him back to the floor. Without hesitating she stabilizes her feet, regains her fighting balance, and rears back with her right foot. He rolls again and begins to rapidly crawl toward the door, this time thinking about escaping from this crazy woman rather than capturing her. But she pursues him again.
She’s faster.
Her left foot connects with his right kidney and lifts him off the ground. He’s collapsing face-first onto the floor, hands and legs sliding out in a palsied splay, as she sweeps her right foot around with the accumulated rage of twenty-nine frustrating years. A guttural, primal grunt accompanies the kick, directed at the young man’s temple. But the instant before it lands, his right arm rises and does more than parry or deflect her foot. Through sheer luck he manages to grab her ankle as it whistles toward him. His fingers wrap tightly around the base of her shin and he rips and twists and yanks it toward his chest.
Cara Sobieski did not expect this. As her right leg is jerked away, her left comes out from under her. She’s already planning her post-fall movements and the furious retaliatory combination of strikes and blocks she’ll unleash upon him, when the back of her twenty-first-century head strikes the hard edge of the Cold War desk, rendering her unconscious before she hits the floor.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19 P.M.
1
Berlin
Days, hours, or minutes.
Sobieski doesn’t know. She’s on her stomach on the cold linoleum floor of what’s left of Siren Securities. Her hands are tied behind her back with what? A belt? No. She wriggles her fingers and feels the soft, pliable plastic coating of wire and cables. The metallic edge of a USB slot. She sees more wires in a clump on the floor near a surge protector. It’s starting to come back.
She closes and opens her eyes three, four times. Full minutes pass between each transition from dark to light. Unconsciousness and whatever this is. Pain and . . . more pain. Mumbling. A man’s voice. She listens with her eyes closed. A man speaking in German. The man speaking in German. “Ich bin Shultz.” Ich bin. She thinks of Kennedy at the wall. Ich bin ein Berliner.
When the thin blond man materializes and sees that she is coming to, he pulls a chair closer, but not too close, sits and leans forward. In his right hand is a section of aluminum window blind rolled up tightly, grasped like a club.
“Don’t try to escape.”
“You’re lucky I slipped.”
“I am. Considering you fancy yourself some kind of cage fighter.” The man speaks in perfect formal British-tinged English. As a second language, Sobieski notes, but perfect.
“You know, you’re in an insane amount of trouble.”
The man laughs nervously and tilts his head back. “Me?”
All at once she jerks and twists, trying to rise up to her feet. Though she’s not successful, the man lurches back and scrambles away from her, holding the blinds in front of his chest in self-defense.
