Boldt wondered if by identifying himself, he marked himself for abduction and a “manicure,” or if the call were actually a call meant for him. Then it slammed home: He’d been led here like a dog in heat, the caller to the police department knowledgeable enough to know how Boldt would proceed, that he would request the caller-ID information and investigate. And if not, what then? he wondered, believing a second or third call would have been placed, and eventually contact would have been made. But the caller had wanted this on neutral ground, someplace Boldt could not easily or quickly trace, and that implied either a substantial conversation or a threat that one wouldn’t want recorded. The first name to pop into his head was Svengrad’s, the Sturgeon General. When he accepted the phone and heard the metallic, distorted sound of voice synthesis, he felt caught off-guard. The caller was using a voice-altering device, readily available from Radio Shack, that made his voice sound inhuman, like a robot.
“Well done, Lieutenant,” the Darth Vader voice said. It sounded vaguely comical, and had the circumstances been different, he might have experienced it as such. As it was, he suffered under the realization he’d been sucker-punched.
Not Svengrad, Boldt decided immediately. He couldn’t see the Russian wanting to obscure his identity-Svengrad’s power and authority came out of his personage. Why hide it?
Boldt resented his being so predictable, so easily baited.
“Why the cloak-and-dagger?”
“You have forty-five minutes to retrieve the software carried by Tony LaRossa when he collapsed in the bank lobby. I need your cell phone number. I’ll contact you.”
“I don’t think so.” Boldt hung up the call. The bartender flashed him an expression that asked if he was done with the phone. Boldt held up a finger, begging more time. He asked if this bar phone was used a lot by customers. The bartender replied that the one in the hall hadn’t worked in over a year.
“Anyone make a call from here about an hour ago?” Boldt asked.
“I don’t pay much attention.”
“You paid attention to me,” Boldt said.
“I don’t know you.”
“Know most of your customers, do you?”
“Part of the job.”
Boldt said, “Including the guy who used this phone about an hour ago?”
The bartender offered a smug look. Boldt flashed his shield, and the man’s composure wavered. He pulled out a twenty, and then another, and laid them both on the bar.
“Put it away,” the man said, somewhat apologetically. “I came on thirty minutes ago. I have no idea who used the phone an hour ago.”
“Someone we can check with?” Boldt inquired.
“Listen, it’s so damn busy in here between five and seven, there’s no way anyone’s going to be able to help you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Okay, listen… ” The bartender stood within inches of the bar and leaned toward Boldt. “Truth is, officer, the hall phone is kinda wired into the house line. It don’t ring there; it rings here. But customers dial out on the hall phone.”
“And the house pockets the money from the pay phone.”
“Something like that. Hey, I’m not the owner.”
“So unless you were in the hall, you wouldn’t know who used the phone.”
“That’s about it.”
The phone rang. The bartender reached for the receiver, but Boldt held him off. “This is for me.” Boldt yanked up the receiver. “Boldt.”
That same synthetic voice said, “Your wife has nice hands. You hang up again, she’s wearing gloves for the next six months, and her little pussy dance is on the evening news.”
“I don’t talk to robots,” Boldt said. Inside, he decided he’d gone too far. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to hang up the first time, to feign a lack of cooperation, except that it went so against his nature. This was, he decided, the call Liz had been expecting, except that the first step was apparently to collect the coveted software. Boldt had read two department e-mails on the analysis of the LaRossa disk. The first expressed optimism that the password cryptography on the disk could be “cracked.” The second explained in some detail the sophistication of the security protecting the software contained on the disk, and how it was never going to be compromised.
The bartender overheard Boldt’s comment, twisted his face, and walked away to service a customer.
“Forty-five minutes. Your cell number.”
Boldt repeated his cell number into the phone.
“You do this alone, or it all comes back on you and yours. Tomorrow, next week, next month-listen, you’d better keep looking over your shoulder if you bring others in on it, or do anything but what I say.”
“You don’t know me very well,” Boldt said, again wondering why his mouth got ahead of his brain.
The line went dead. Boldt hung up the receiver. The guy was smart, and that worried him.
He called Pahwan Riz, the Special Operations commander, before he even reached the Crown Vic. Hell if he was doing this alone. He could smell a trap a mile away.
Discovering himself the target of a surveillance operation left Boldt with mixed feelings. He couldn’t remember ever having been on the receiving end of such attentions, and he found it off-putting. The arrangements were made hastily, primarily because of the time restrictions imposed by his anonymous caller, but the brilliance of some of these guys never ceased to amaze him, and by the time he bumped the Crown Vic into the restricted parking garage attached to the Public Safety Building, the operation was already well under way.
Suspecting, but not quite willing to believe, that whoever had called him might have civilians paid off within the department-spies-he obeyed Pahwan Riz’s choreography to the letter. The Crown Vic was already equipped with GPS transmission equipment because, like patrol cruisers, it carried a Mobile Data Terminal on the dash-the equivalent of a built-in laptop computer that allowed text to be sent to and from the car. Limousine services and some taxis, parcel delivery and express delivery vans, all carried similar equipment-and all contained the satellite tracking device allowing dispatchers to locate any vehicle at a moment’s notice.
The trick was to get some of this same equipment-a small GPS and a voice-recording device-onto Boldt without him being descended upon by technicians. Riz’s solution was to leave the equipment in a men’s room stall, and to direct Boldt to visit the rest room upon his arrival at SPD, which he did. From the bathroom, now wearing the two devices, he proceeded directly to Property and signed out for the bright red disk that had been in the possession of Tony LaRossa as he’d collapsed from his heart attack. He took the man’s bank ID access card as well, already foreseeing its future use. With Boldt being lieutenant in charge of Crimes Against Persons, there wasn’t anything the Property sergeant was going to deny him. He signed the requisite forms, accepted the plastic bags bearing the chain of possession, all carefully detailed in indelible marker, and returned to the Crown Vic at a slow jog, moving a few uniformed officers out of his way while checking his watch on the fly. Ten minutes in which to reach the exit of I-5 north.
Whoever had planned this for him had timed it to within seconds. He knew immediately that the drop was to be just as perfectly timed, that he would be pushed right to the limit to accommodate the demands.
As it was, he hit the street with the pedal down, built-in grill and window lights pulsing the blinding blue light, clearing traffic.
Eight minutes to go. It would be a miracle, but he just might make it.
Several miles above him, in the cold black void of space, satellites tracked his every turn, and Pahwan Riz-in the steam-cleaning van, with a team of four unmarked vehicles-followed at a distance, never letting Boldt out of his sight.
SIXTEEN
THE KNOCK ON THE BACK door sounded like a gunshot as it banged off the walls of the kitchen and ran through Liz like a jolt of electricity.
“It’s okay,” said Bobbie Gaynes, a wire in her ear leading
from a walkie-talkie. “It’s Officer Foreman, BCI. I’ll get the door. You sit tight.”
Liz had made them both some Red Zinger tea, and she noticed the steam in the light of a lamp as it swirled and tried to follow Gaynes, dissipating a few inches from the cup. She felt this way too-her energy fading the longer Lou stayed away. First the kids, then Lou. She felt as if all the love in this home had lost its way. She blew on her own tea and took a sip and returned the mug to the coaster, noticing that it shook slightly in her grip and wondering how much more of this she could endure.
She heard Danny Foreman’s sonorous voice interspersed with the female chimes of Gaynes’s and, a moment later, the back door thump shut. Foreman entered the living room asking if she had a minute. He carried what looked like a silver Palm Pilot in hand, and kept it in his lap as he sat down. He looked tired and worn. He glanced over at Gaynes’s mug of tea, grabbed hold, and drank from it, savoring the taste. She found his brazenness disturbing and thought it some kind of sign, a signal that she should have interpreted more clearly.
“Where to start?” he asked, peering over the mug as he took a second noisy sip.
“Lou’s not here,” she said.
“I’m up to speed on that.”
“I’m not. Not exactly.”
“He’s busy.”
“Well, that certainly clarifies things.”
“It’s to our benefit he’s occupied.”
“Is it?”
“What I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential. I can only assume that a banker knows all about confidentiality, and I can only hope that despite what I presume to be your loyalty and devotion to your husband, you keep this confidential.”
“Message received.” She made no agreement, extremely careful of her word selection. Lou had warned her to expect such a meeting; how he anticipated such things was beyond her, but she was glad for it now.
“It affects us all, Liz, and is not to be taken lightly.”
“Do you think I’m taking any of this lightly?”
Foreman returned an unsympathetic stare.
“I know how painful the past is for you, Danny. We’re alike in that way, I think. We’re both stuck. And I’ll tell you something, I’m not going to help you, or Lou, or anyone with this investigation for the sake of the investigation. I want to get unstuck. That’s all I care about. So if you’re looking for a helping hand, you’ve picked the wrong time for me.”
“Paul Geiser and I were behind the disappearance of David Hayes.” He threw it out and let it wrap itself around her until she found it hard to breathe. He continued, “We had to get him off the radar of a major player, a guy you don’t need to know about. But it had to be done. Hayes wanted to cut a deal to turn state’s witness-and if you, or Lou, or anyone else questions Paul, I guarantee you he’ll pull a Sergeant Schultz on you. He’ll deny any knowledge of any of this, as well he should. Hayes has agreed to recover the missing money and to implicate the man whose money it was. We’re assuming that you’ve been compromised either by Hayes or this bigger player, and I don’t need you to answer that either way, but the reason Lou is not being included in on this is just that: because we believe you’ve been compromised. Lou is so by-the-book that we didn’t trust he’d agree to let you run this software for Hayes. I’m here to plead with you to do just that. In a very short time Hayes will have the software necessary to pull this off. Once he does, we can assign a government account as the destination account. You can wire that money over to the government instead of risking it disappearing again. Do so, and it’s done. Hayes gets his plea, the player goes away, and your life gets back to normal.” He paused to let her absorb the scenario. “Sunday night, before the reception, you will receive the instructions either here at your home or on your cell. You follow them to the letter, and it’s over.”
Liz wasn’t sure what to make of Danny Foreman. She felt a wild pounding in her chest, like she’d run, or swum underwater a great distance, and only now stopped for a breath.
“We faked a bloody crime scene,” Foreman said.
“And called Lou out to it.”
“Had to be convincing. If it convinced Lou, and I think it did, then we’ve established a perimeter of protection.”
“And you’re telling me this because… ” She fished for the logic behind it, then answered the question herself. “Because regardless of the destination account number I’m given, you want the money wired back to this government account you set up.”
“That’s it exactly.”
“Would you have let Darlene do something like this?”
“If it put you at risk I wouldn’t ask you to do this. You must know that, Liz.”
She snorted involuntarily. “I don’t believe that. I believe you’d do anything necessary to get at this money, whatever your motivation.”
She watched his nostrils flare, saw the effort involved in holding himself in check. He could ill afford to allow his emotions to show, to raise his voice with her. This reserve in him had the odd effect in her of reversing her own sense of helplessness. He needed her. They all needed her. She and her access to the AS/400s were the key to the investigation. Danny Foreman would have tried every way possible to circumvent her participation and thereby risk Lou’s involvement. This was a desperate man in the midst of a desperate act. Liz had seen this situation a hundred times as an executive and had taken advantage of her position more often than not. Only as Foreman contained himself, did she regain her strength.
“Hayes believed you could be trusted. Maybe he was wrong.”
“You can do better than that, Danny.”
“What are you willing to do about this, Liz? How much are you willing to risk?”
His question cut her to the quick. Scandal. Embarrassment. Her job. Her family. She found it her turn to cover what she felt inside, and quickly realized the game of give and take that was under way. A tingling sensation raced up the back of her neck as she realized the power she held over this man, and also what was at stake: the survival of her marriage and her family.
“I don’t know to whom you’re referring. David?”
“It doesn’t matter who we’re talking about,” Foreman said. “It’s what we call ‘the juice’ that counts. What it is they have. The tape.” She felt herself blush. Danny Foreman had certainly viewed the tape, as it had once been in his possession. He’d seen her naked. Doing things. Somehow she’d blocked out this truth, and the sudden realization shook her, even frightened her in a weird kind of way. He had “the juice” on her too. How was he looking at her now? Without her clothes? Engaged? She felt sick to her stomach.
“Thing is,” Foreman continued, “would Lou risk his career to save you? I think he would.” As he said this she saw through cracks in the veneer. Danny Foreman resented Lou, whether because Danny had lost his own wife to cancer, or because Lou had achieved that rare reputation in law enforcement of being one of the best and a decent man at the same time. Danny’s own career had suffered following Darlene’s death.
Liz said, “Lou would never bend the rules, even for me, and you know it. That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? You can’t get to him.”
“This isn’t about Lou. It’s about you. You can handle it. You can put these people away. Paul Geiser and I are your answer, your only way out of this. I promise you. Think through whatever it is that Lou’s telling you, and you’ll come back to this time and time again. David Hayes is working for us, and as long as he’s working for us, we control it. Not Lou, not even Hayes himself.”
“And so you fool Lou with the cabin torture to… What? Keep the straight arrow out of your game?”
“It’s all about leaks,” Foreman said. “It’s hard enough to contain something like this with three people.”
“Do you actually think I won’t tell Lou?”
“I think you’ll do what you have to. Lou is a cop, a good cop, Liz. You give him this kind of information, he’s going to run with it. Will he let you do this? Finish this
? I doubt that. But if you do it without him-if you divert the funds into this government account, then it’s over. The player’s name is Yasmani Svengrad, Liz. A hard-core criminal who rolls over anyone and anything in his way. He’s a heartless son of a bitch. Just ask Beth LaRossa. You think you can work with him? What happens if you do? When you’re done getting him his money, do you think it will end then? You think that tape will get destroyed, that he’ll forget all about it? He’ll own you and Lou. He’ll know your weak spot because it worked once. Plus he’ll have evidence against you for helping him and he’ll use it against you to do another transfer, another wire, establish a fraudulent account. You roll a rock like that downhill and you will never stop it. But I can stop it for you. Me, Liz. Not Lou.”
“Do you think I can do anything without half of SPD knowing about it? How many layers did you have to pass through to see me tonight? They’ve built a wall around me. I’m not doing anything, going anywhere, without Lou knowing it. And Lou won’t have it. Even if I wanted to, Danny.” She tried to make it sound as if she did want to, but this was far from the truth. Lou had something going. She knew him well enough to know this. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” she muttered, more to herself than anything.
He checked that Palm Pilot in his lap, slipped a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. His cell phone number, he explained. Hayes was putting this together as they spoke. If he or Hayes contacted her, the account number given would be the government account. If anyone else directed her what to do, she was to call Foreman immediately.
Danny’s offer sounded tempting despite everything Lou had warned her about. Hide the money from the thugs; put everyone in jail. Wasn’t that what Lou wanted?
“Remember to call me,” Foreman said and let himself out.
SEVENTEEN
The Body of David Hayes Page 16
