The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “Not your usual suite,” Mr. Rewadee said now as he threw open the door, “but exactly like it in every particular. I’ve placed a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and several of tonic at the bar, along with some limes.”

  There were four rooms on two levels: a breakfast area near the pale green sofa, the bedroom and teak-lined bath up a short flight of stairs. Kumquats flushed orange in a porcelain bowl. She knew, now, that seven people could survive for days in a space eighty feet square. Maybe she should invite all of Bangkok in for a party.

  “Mr. Krane has called several times,” Rewadee observed delicately. “I would be happy to inform New York that you have arrived—”

  “I left two suitcases with the bellman over a month ago.”

  Mr. Rewadee bowed.

  “I’d like them brought up right away. Also a cheeseburger and a beer. And could you book me a massage for this afternoon?”

  One entire wall of the room was glass. Stefani tugged open the raw silk curtains, saw the long-tailed boats churning across the River of Kings—and leaned her forehead against the window. Just what she needed. A view of the water.

  “Welcome back to the Oriental, Ms. Fogg.” Her personal butler held out a silver tray with a glass of orange juice and a copy of The New York Times.

  Stefani Fogg was thirty-nine years old. She had a slight frame that encouraged most people to think she was frail. She was a pretty woman with the face of a pixie: like her body, it was a face calculated to deceive. Under the fringe of jet-black curls her brown eyes were assessing and shrewd.

  “Wharton School,” Oliver Krane had murmured over lunch at his corporate headquarters in Manhattan seven months before; “and prior to that, Stanford. I can see you in California, Stef—but Philadelphia?” He consulted no résumé; it was his habit to remember everything. The most secure intelligence network in the world, Oliver Krane liked to say, was the human brain—provided it was properly handled. “Iconoclast. You did the Lauder Program instead of a Harvard MBA. I like that about you; you never quite run to form. You speak German, I understand? Although you’re said to prefer Italian.”

  She shrugged. “Better wine.”

  “Pity you didn’t work up some Russian. Or Chinese.”

  “But then I wouldn’t be just another pretty face, Oliver.”

  “Balls,” he’d retorted sharply. “You don’t run a fund for a major investment house—and get a seventy-eight percent return over five years—with just another pretty face.”

  He peered at her forbiddingly through his tortoise-shell glasses.

  “I want you for Krane’s, Stefani, and I’m willing to bet I’ve an offer you won’t refuse.”

  “That’s your job, isn’t it?—predicting the level of risk?”

  Oliver had done his homework, of course; he knew the precise extent of Stefani’s personal holdings. Something under eleven million dollars in various funds; an eight-room co-op on Central Park; a summer place in Edgartown; a ski condo in Deer Valley. He would know that mere money wasn’t enough to scuttle her present job. She’d had money for years: she found it boring.

  The walls of the small dining room were lined with cobalt blue velvet. Only one table—theirs—was placed in the center of the maple floor. The view from the fifty-fourth story was blocked by sheer silk curtains that shifted under the eye like seawater; a screen, no doubt, for Oliver’s varied electronics.

  He had given her sushi, tempura prepared at the table, a fan of fresh vegetables and a glass of Screaming Eagle. When she had refused a passion-fruit flan, the head of the firm leaned across the table and ticked off his points in a voice that sounded pure BBC, though it was probably born in Brixton.

  “Point the First: Stefani Fogg when she’s at home. Likes to describe herself as bright but shallow. Raised comfortably in Larchmont, Princeton, Menlo Park. Father a chemical researcher and large-animal veterinarian. Mother rather determinedly hip. She’s a clever girl, our Stef, but gun-shy where commitment is concerned. No lover, no child, not so much as a small white dog for messing the carpet with. Appears to choose men by their shirt size rather than their IQs—the odd fitness instructor or bartender, a hapless musician. In the past seven years, no relationship longer than four months.

  “Frequently described by the admiring epithet of bitch. Roughly translated: she has committed all the sins available to a woman in a man’s world. Restless, impatient, ruthless, ambitious. Sole weakness a reckless streak you could drive a semi through. Two hundred years ago, she’d have been burned at the stake as a witch.

  “Point the Second: Stefani Fogg rumored to have turned down the chairmanship of FundMarket International last year, when it was offered her on a plate. Pundits confused.

  “Point the Third: Stefani Fogg supposedly in play for CFO of at least three major multinationals, none of which succeeded in bagging her. Pundits agog.

  “Point the Fourth: Galileo Emerging Tech—the fund Stefani Fogg manages at FundMarket—has lost nearly sixty-seven percent of its high-market value over the past three weeks. Rumors flying within FundMarket and without: Fogg is slipping, Fogg is asleep at the wheel, Fogg will be out on her arse next Tuesday. Pundits immensely gratified.”

  He sat back in his seat and stared at her with satisfaction. “Missed anything?”

  “About Galileo—” She toyed with the Screaming Eagle. “The tech market’s volatile, Oliver. You want big returns, you run major risk. Sometimes that means short-term loss.”

  “And you’ve generally defied the odds, haven’t you? So what’s gone wrong this month?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “I have a theory, old thing. I won’t bother to ask whether you’d like to hear it.”

  “Well, you did give me lunch. I can spare you a few more minutes.”

  “Stefani Fogg is bored off her nut and desperate for fun,” he suggested. “Galileo is sinking because Stefani no longer gives a diddly. I could offer the girl a spot of larceny or a fast plane to a desert island, and she’d snatch them both out of my moist little palm. Any sort of diversion would do, provided it were dangerous enough. She’s toyed with electronic fraud, with faking her own death, with ripping off Tiffany’s in a cat suit at midnight—but the payoff is never quite worth the risk. Our Stef knows that crime, however séduisante, can rather get one’s hair mussed. Crime carries with it a measure of annoyance. There’s the enforcement chappies, of course; there are turf battles between kingpins she doesn’t even know, potentates she could easily offend. There’s the possibility of maiming or a sordid public death. Our Stef’s looking for bigger game. A challenge to match her peculiar wits. Am I right? Have I hit the target bang-on?”

  She had gone quite still, watching him. He was a mild-looking man in his late forties: slim, loosely tailored in medium gray wool, his fair hair clipped short over the temples and rakishly long at the brow. The tortoise-shell glasses partially concealed caramel-colored eyes. Altogether a sleek kind of cat, his tail practically twitching as he surveyed her. He had done his homework.

  “So you have the antidote to boredom, Oliver. What could you possibly offer that I need or want?”

  “Fun, intrigue and high jinks on six continents,” he shot back promptly. “A floating bank account accessible at all times for expenses that will never be questioned. Counsel from the main office whenever you want it, but no handcuffs or second guesses or attempts to drive your car from the rear. An unwritten brief. A handful of clients. Stimulation. A direct line to my desk, night or day. Gut decisions. Unlimited spa time in exotic places. Power.”

  “To do what, exactly?”

  “Beat crooks at their own game. Much more exciting than joining them, I always think. Spy and seduce and manipulate empires—all in the name of defending commerce. With your talent and brains, Stef, you could write your dossier.”

  “But why me, Oliver? Why the bitch with the lousy returns?”

  “Because they’ll never see you coming, darling,” he answered softly. “You’re a bloody great gold m
ine. Smart and chic and too damn bored with your own wealth to be corruptible. You’ll have your teeth sunk into their jugulars before they even catch your scent.” His tawny eyes flicked across her face with brutal candor. “And there’s the added advantage that I can deny you, ducks. As far as the world of High Finance is concerned, we’ve never even traded so much as an air kiss. I’m not offering you a title and a desk with a plastic nameplate. I don’t want you on Wall Street. I want you bumming around the world on extended holiday.”

  “Anonymity and carte blanche,” she mused. “A high-wire act without a safety net. If I fail, I fail alone.”

  “Where would the challenge be, otherwise?”

  A silence fell between them.

  “Don’t refuse me before you’ve had ages to think,” Oliver suggested. “It wouldn’t be the first time a woman’s done that, I admit—but for you, I’m willing to wait.”

  “Until Galileo craters?”

  He smiled, and pressed an invisible button under the table. A waiter appeared within seconds, on soundless feet.

  “You’ve had the glamorous turn, old thing.” Oliver’s voice was like a croon. “You’ve had the usual stiffs in the Wall Street clubs with their fast cars and limp members. Now you want to run with the wolves. Don’t you? Confess it.”

  Krane & Associates was the foremost practitioner of a singular discipline known as risk management. The ignorant called it a security firm; the desperate called when any form of shit hit the most delicate type of fan. Krane offered all the usual security measures available to corporate clients—bodyguards, armored cars, internal surveillance and Internet monitoring. But these were mere party favors Oliver Krane tossed to the unwitting. Krane’s true worth—the commodity that had brought the Forbes Five Hundred to their knees—was that he knew more about everything than anybody on earth. He had ears to the ground in Jakarta and Shanghai and Hampstead and Miami, he sold information to the highest bidders in Hong Kong and Dubai. Oliver screened private jets for sophisticated bugs, gave drug tests and polygraphs to suspect employees, retrieved information from computer drives that were supposed to have been erased, found fraud in the ledgers of the most venerable corporations.

  Oliver took pictures of remote deserts from private overhead platforms. Oliver tracked arms shipments through gray networks. He could listen to lovemaking at a distance of two thousand miles, and sometimes did. Give him thirty-six hours, and Oliver Krane could detail every secret your competitors had purchased from your most loyal employees, and exactly how much they had paid for them.

  His corporate motto was blunt: Krane. Because what you don’t know can kill you. What he ran, in essence, was a crackerjack intelligence organization publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

  He was persistent in his patience, as Stefani learned over the next few weeks. He sent her birds-of-paradise in art-glass vases with smart-ass cards that were never signed. He sent her manila envelopes stuffed with newspaper clippings and transcripts of cellular communications and internal financial audits. He sent photographs of dubious personalities and a few cryptic leads in the research campaign she was conducting into his private life. Tidbits and come-ons and clues she couldn’t resist-but he never sent them directly. They appeared on the seat of a taxi she had just flagged down, or folded into her morning paper. Once she was handed a spreadsheet with her oysters in the old bar at Grand Central Station. She knew she was being followed—surveillance was child’s play for Oliver Krane—and the knowledge aroused her. She liked the thought of moving under a watcher’s eye. She began to dress each morning with Oliver in mind.

  More important, she examined Krane’s stock as though it were under consideration for inclusion in Galileo, measuring its performance against those few risk-management competitors she could find in the marketplace. She researched Krane’s corporate hierarchy and its promotion record for female employees; gathered press pieces from online databases that recounted Krane’s most sensational cases; and checked to see what litigation the company currently battled. Her final gesture was to invite an old friend from Wharton for dinner. She respected Darryl Bainbridge—he ran a private investment firm for elite clients worth billions. He’d hired Krane the previous year to find an electronic embezzler among his handful of brokers.

  When she asked Bainbridge what he thought of Krane & Associates, he cocked his head at her before replying. “Best-kept secret in the United States, but not for long. Buy all the stock you can—and keep it for yourself.”

  Oliver Krane’s approach was unorthodox, and in a calmer frame of mind, she might have questioned why. Krane pursued her in the only way guaranteed to catch her interest: he titillated and teased, feinted and attacked. She began to test the city streets four times a day, smoking cigarettes she didn’t really want in the vast granite doorway of FundMarket International. Nothing she could find in the office was half so intriguing as what might appear in the hands of a street vendor.

  On the eleventh day following their private lunch, contact came in the form of an issue of Ski magazine and the Michelin guide to the French Alps. The section on Courchevel had been marked with a hot pink Post-it note.

  This one has your name all over it, ducks.

  Oliver’s cramped scrawl.

  A downhill racer tore across the glossy magazine cover, body crouched into the fall line. Above him rose a sheer headwall of black granite dusted with a filigree of white. Stefani frowned. She had skied enough—at Deer Valley and Gstaad and Kicking Horse—to know she was looking at a professional, and a rather famous one at that.

  Max Roderick.

  He’d won gold and acclaim at three different Olympics during the past two decades. He was known for hurling himself down World Cup courses with what looked like total disregard for his own neck and was in fact a calculated assault with a hairsbreadth margin of error. The press loved the way he clipped slalom gates so deliberately with his rigid shoulders and set his edges in a curve that would snap a lesser man in half. The media played up his effortless grace and tried to crown him king. But Roderick made it politely clear he didn’t give a damn whether the cameras followed him or not. He abandoned Beaver Creek and the U.S. Ski Team for Austria; he trained alone. He granted few interviews. If he chased any women on either continent, he did it in places the press couldn’t reach. He rarely drank and he went to bed early. Eventually the press got tired of Max Roderick—of a silence and a discipline they could not understand—and Roderick went on winning.

  Stefani flipped through the magazine. A skier’s skier brings his knowledge to bear on the tools of the downhill trade…. Roderick was retired, now, and living in Courchevel, where he’d won Olympic gold at Albertville in ’92. He designed high-performance boards for a famed French manufacturer.

  She glanced for a moment at the shot of his face, taken in the flat gray light of February, all color leached to monochrome and the angle of bone and landscape sharper for it. A palpable impression of intensity: eyes piercing and clear, with deep creases at the corners from years of staring at the sun. White-blond hair tousled by a ski helmet. The skin tanned and tough. It was a handsome face—one that had known pain, found it irrelevant, and pushed on.

  Of course the press loved him. But he was not her usual type, Max Roderick. Loners made her nervous.

  … appears to choose men by their shirt size rather than their IQs …

  She tossed the magazine into the trash.

  Two hours later, she called Oliver Krane on his private line and demanded dinner.

  Alone now in her elegant room at the Oriental, Stefani Fogg slid her filthy body into water so hot she winced. The first bath in nearly a week. She closed her eyes against the steam and the sharp bite of eucalyptus. And allowed herself, all her careful defenses down, to remember.

  2

  So what’s wrong with Max Roderick, Oliver?” Dinner that early spring evening six months ago was Indonesian takeout served on a linen-draped wrought-iron table in the walled garden of a five-story town
house somewhere in the East Sixties. Stefani doubted that Oliver actually lived there—the place was devoid of such personal betrayals as photographs or magazines with address labels—but he moved from kitchen to terrace with such confident ease that it was clear he knew the house well. She imagined he kept a shifting roster of private haunts, visiting them as a lesser man might visit a series of mistresses; and indeed, wives and entire families could furnish the most obvious of them, without having any clear connection to Oliver at all.

  In the past five days, she had determined that Oliver Krane’s life was deliberately elusive and all but indistinguishable from his attractive camouflage. The background checks and financial histories she’d run had turned up conflicting story lines. One suggested he had been born in London and educated at a lesser British public school before reading law at Oxford; another, that he had once been named Czenowski and was pursued in his salad days by KGB recruiters; her favorite, that he was a foundling left at a Catholic orphanage who graduated from picking pockets in Bombay to dealing heroin in Hong Kong. In Oliver’s fiction Stefani caught the scent of his fears and dreams.

  “Max Roderick found himself smack in the middle of a sordid little murder a few weeks ago,” Oliver informed her over a slice of pickled mango. “Our Max trotted off to Geneva to talk up the Swiss on the matter of skis, and damn if he doesn’t find a pretty young thing sprawled in his bed one morning, strangled and no mistake. She was a Thai bar girl from the red-light district and all of fifteen. Max maintains that he had never set eyes on the girl and has no idea how her corpse ended up in his room.”

  “But she was in his bed.”

  “In a sequined thong, no less,” Krane agreed complacently as he set out satay skewers like burnt offerings on a celadon plate. “When Roderick stepped into the bath at six-ten that morning, no strangled young thing where she ought not to be. When he appeared in his towel nine minutes later, there was the dead girl in the altogether. Superb skin and hair. I’ve seen the photos. Tragic.”