No Way Back: A Novel

by Andrew Gross

  “I’m sorry,” Elaine Kitchner said with a truly sympathetic shrug.

  “What was Curtis working on?” I put my hand on her knee. “What had he found out that the government needed to kill him? You told me you said that these people were dangerous. That it wasn’t like in Afghanistan. What people are you talking about? Please, tell me who would have wanted him dead? Who?”

  She stared at me. For a moment I thought we were done. That she was about to get up and leave. Then, “Please, take off your sunglasses,” she said. “I want to see your eyes.”

  I did. If I could’ve summoned every bit of the fear and helplessness I was feeling at that moment, it would have shown right back at her.

  She took out a Kleenex and handed it to me. I smiled in thanks and dabbed my eyes.

  “I wish I knew what he was working on, Ms. Gould. But I don’t. Curtis didn’t share his work with us.”

  “But you do know who he was trying to expose? You said you warned him that these people were dangerous.”

  She looked away. I could see she was thinking about what to say. Traffic rushed by us. She waited until a man walking his terrier went by.

  “Do you recall that private jet that was blown up at Westchester Airport?”

  I nodded. “Of course. A month or two ago.”

  It had happened in the county where I lived. I’d flown out of there dozens of times. The bomber, who had posed as a tarmac worker, was never apprehended. Four passengers were killed, including the wife of the lawyer who had chartered it.

  “Curtis insisted it was some sort of retribution. By Mexican drug enforcers. Against an informant, or someone who was on that plane. It was these people I told him he mustn’t mess with.”

  Mexican drug enforcers . . . A tremor rippled through me. No people to mess with at all. I thought back and recalled there was a housekeeper or a nanny on board who had survived.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What would all that have to do with the U.S. government? The person who shot your son worked for the Department of Homeland Security.”

  Elaine looked at me blankly. “All I know is what he was looking into when he went down to New York.”

  I felt something creepy and foreboding wrap its tentacles around my heart and squeeze. That explosion had been one of the ugliest acts of terror in recent years. The bomber had been able to infiltrate security at the private airport that was used by many hedge fund magnates and CEOs. Drug enforcers? The United States government rubbing Curtis out? Something between a shudder and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed passed through me. This was so far out of my league I didn’t know where to begin.

  That agent was right—what had I stepped into?

  I looked back at Elaine. I knew my face had taken on a worried cast. I reached into my pocket and brought out Curtis’s BlackBerry. I pushed the camera icon and scrolled to the photo of the pretty Latina-looking woman in the hospital gown.

  “Do you know who this woman is?”

  Elaine looked at it and shook her head. But suddenly, the hospital gown, the Latina features, combined with the story of the airport bombing, gave me the feeling I now knew.

  “This was your son’s,” I said.

  Elaine’s eyes grew glassy as she took it in her palm.

  “I took it. From his hotel room. I didn’t even know who he was. I just thought I might need something. Was there any place Curtis might have kept his notes? Or a record of what he was working on?”

  “Other than his computer?” Elaine shook her head. “Curtis’s laptop was basically his office. He had an apartment over in Boylston Street. Near Fenway Park. But it’s already been gone through by the police.”

  “The police?”

  “The police were with them. My husband went. I don’t know. Maybe other people too.”

  It wouldn’t be safe to go there. Not now. Plus I knew it was also too late. There wouldn’t be anything there for me to find.

  “You mind if I keep this for a while?” I asked, pointing to the cell phone in her hand. “I promise, I’ll make sure it gets back to you.”

  Elaine shrugged and handed it back. “It may be of more help to you at the moment than any comfort to me.”

  “Thank you.” I squeezed her shoulder warmly. “I appreciate everything you’ve told me.”

  “I wish it were more.”

  I stood up and gave her a heartfelt smile, the kind that maybe only another woman who had lost her deepest love might fully understand. “I know you took a risk in talking with me. I’ll get this back, I promise,” I said, tucking her son’s phone into my pocket.

  “So you heard him play?” Elaine Kitchner said, her eyes lighting up.

  “I did. He was brilliant.”

  She smiled. “I used to say he could charm the birds right out of the trees.”

  “He did that to me.” I smiled back and started to walk away.

  “Wendy,” Elaine called after me. I turned. “By the way, he’s alive.”

  “Who?” For a second I thought she was referring to Curtis.

  “Your friend. I just heard it on the news. He was hit twice. But he’s alive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The private room in the trauma wing at Bellevue wasn’t large, but it came with a view of the East River, which was the first thing Joe Esterhaus saw when he opened his eyes.

  The next thing was a black man in a tan suit sitting in the chair across from him.

  “Lucky man.” Alton Dokes smiled thinly.

  “And how’s that?” Esterhaus stared back at him. He had seen the man on the news before he’d been shot and knew exactly who he was.

  “Nothing vital hit. No infection. I hear you might be leaving as soon as tomorrow. An inch or two either way, no telling what the result would have been.”

  Esterhaus shifted. “The way I see it, I’m the one with a hole in my shoulder just trying to do my civic duty. We must have a different sense of the word.”

  “Civic duty?” Dokes smiled again. “Maybe I’m the one with a different sense of the word.”

  Esterhaus shifted, dragging across his IV, which an hour earlier had been delivering a morphine drip. The first shot had gone through his shoulder, a solid through-and-through. The second grazed his neck. Dokes was right—another inch in either direction, he’d be at the morgue, not in a private room. The first thing he had asked his daughter as he was coming out from under the anesthesia was if Wendy had gotten away. And finding out that she had, and that her whereabouts were still unknown, made him feel good he was still alive, and no doubt accounted for why this government agent was in front of him.

  “Alton Dokes.” The agent stood up and came over to the foot of the bed.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Then let’s not pretend, shall we? We’re going to get her, you know. Sooner than later. You can help make that easy. On her, I mean.”

  Esterhaus craned his bandaged neck and gazed around. “Can’t say I see her in here anywhere. You?”

  “At the same time”—Dokes put his hand on the railing—“maybe there’s a way to help each other out as well.” He picked up Esterhaus’s prescription from the bedside table. “Parkinson’s, correct? You lost your pension years ago when you were canned from the force. You’re going to become a burden to somebody soon. Your daughter? Her husband? Maybe we can see about getting it back.”

  “My pension?” Esterhaus chuckled. “You’d do all that for me? I’m touched.”

  “If you do your civic duty.” Dokes kept his eyes on him.

  “You mean give her up?”

  “I have every belief she’ll find a way to contact you. She’s got no one else.”

  “She didn’t do it.” Esterhaus stared back at him. “She watched your partner shoot a man in cold blood. But I guess I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  The agent put the medication back on the table. “That’s not how it appears to me. Or anyone else who’s taken a look at the eviden
ce. I know you have protective feelings for her. We know you were tight with her dad. But the woman meets a guy at a bar and an hour later ends up in his room. She takes off from a federal agent who directly ordered her to stop. She panics and shoots her husband, likely when she told him what had happened and he called her a whore. You can’t let a sense of duty to her father blind you to the facts. She’s bad. She can’t be trusted.”

  Esterhaus pushed back the urge to rip the tubes out of his arm and wrap them around this shit bag’s throat and strangle him.

  “There’s that angle,” the agent said. “Then there’s the angle of making this all come out for you.” Dokes dug through his jacket pocket. “Here. Instead of leaving a card.” He came out with a cell phone. Esterhaus’s phone. The one they’d taken from him after he was shot. “I think we got as much off it as we can use. Especially those calls to someplace called Waccabuc. I don’t have to remind you, do I, Joe, the wavy line that separates doing your civic duty, as you call it, and aiding and abetting a federal fugitive? That little shake of yours wouldn’t play so well in a federal prison, would it now?”

  There was a knock at the door. Esterhaus’s daughter, Robin, came in, with an armful of newspapers and magazines. “Hey, Pop.” She looked at Dokes. “Sorry, didn’t know you had company. Good news,” she said. “They’re saying you’re not worth keeping here past tomorrow.”

  “That is good news,” Dokes said to Robin, smiling. “I was just trying to urge your father to rethink his civic duty . . .”

  Esterhaus pushed himself up. “And I was just telling the agent here to go fuck himself with a rusty nail.”

  Dokes placed the phone on the bedside table next to Esterhaus’s Parkinson’s pills. “Tell your dad what a shame it would be for things to have worked out so luckily for him, only to end up being a burden on the taxpayers for the rest of his years.

  “Have a speedy recovery,” he said, heading to the door and looking at Esterhaus with an icy smile. “And let me know if you get any calls. We’ll be watching too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I took Comm Ave. all the way out to Chestnut Hill and drove around Boston College, where twenty years ago I’d gone to school. It all seemed pretty familiar to me. Although HTM and Five Guys Burgers had replaced the Gap and Blockbuster.

  On a chilly fall afternoon, people were either in class or studying. Beacon Street was pretty quiet.

  I parked the Explorer near the reservoir and walked back, passing a coffeehouse with a sign on the window: INTERNET. GAMES. BEST COFFEE/CHEAPEST RATES. A high industrial ceiling and brick walls. There were only a couple of people in the place.

  I took a seat at a long wooden table in front of an old recycled Dell. The waiter instructed me how to log on. I ordered a coffee and a berry tart. Between my shortened, newly blond hair and my sunglasses, I wasn’t particularly worried I’d be recognized.

  I logged onto Google and typed in “Westchester Airport Bombing.” More than 6,700 hits sprang up. I started with one on the first page, from the local Westchester newspaper, the Journal News.

  FOUR DEAD IN PRIVATE JET BOMBING AT COUNTY AIRPORT. ONE SURVIVOR. BOMBER, POSING AS TARMAC WORKER, SOUGHT

  I started in, following the tragic story over several days. The eight-seat Citation 7, owned by an outfit called Globaljet, had been leased by a law office out of Stamford. Sifton, Sloan, and Rubin. The victims, all of whom were on board, included the pilot, the copilot, the one flight attendant, and a passenger, Roxanne Bachman, of Greenwich, the wife of a senior partner in the law firm. The one survivor, Lauritzia Velez, twenty-four, was a nanny traveling with Mrs. Bachman, her employer. A spokesperson at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla confirmed that Ms. Velez was in critical condition but was expected to survive.

  I took out Curtis’s cell phone and scrolled to the photo of the pretty girl in the hospital gown identified only by the initial L.

  Lauritzia Velez.

  The blast occurred just as the plane was preparing to roll back from its gate. The explosives were thought to have been in a suitcase on a mobile baggage carrier that had pulled up next to the plane. The suspect, “a man with Hispanic features, and wearing the uniform and carrying the ID of a tarmac worker,” managed to escape by a vehicle in the parking lot and still hadn’t been found. The blue Toyota he was seen escaping in was later discovered abandoned on Route 120 in nearby West Harrison, N.Y., suggesting there had been a change of cars. A motive for the bombing was yet to be established.

  I scrolled down to a follow-up article from the following day:

  The Citation’s final destination was Denver International Airport, where Roxanne Bachman had booked a rental car. A source at Harold Bachman’s law office confirmed that the couple owned a home in the resort community of Cordillera, Colorado, near Vail. Investigators speculated that Ms. Velez, a native of Mexico, might have been the actual target of the blast, the first of its kind at any major airport in the United States, as she and her family have been targets of a bloody retaliation from a Mexican drug cartel that left several of her siblings dead. It is not known whether Ms. Velez was currently acting as an informant or in the employ of any law enforcement agency.

  I wrote down Lauritzia’s name, underlining “retaliation” and “drug cartel,” and flashed back to what Elaine Kitchner had said about Curtis messing with the wrong kind of people. I continued past several follow-up articles. SECURITY AT PRIVATE AIRFIELD SAID TO BE LAX. HANGAR E HOME TO GLITZY A-LISTERS FROM AROUND THE REGION. Finally I opened one from the New York Times: REVENGE LIKELY MOTIVE OF WESTCHESTER AIRPORT BLAST. SURVIVOR HAD SUED TO REMAIN IN U.S. A WEEK BEFORE.

  I read how only days before, the same Lauritzia Velez’s petition for permanent U.S. asylum through the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas was turned down.

  The logic of the ruling was difficult to follow, even with a year of law school under my belt. But what came out was that Ms. Velez and her family had previously been denied asylum, even though a Mexican drug enforcer, Eduardo Cano, had carried out what amounted to a reign of terror against her and her family, the result of Ms. Velez’s father having turned government witness against Mr. Cano and his intent to testify against him at a murder trial.

  The article went on to say that Ms. Velez’s brother and three sisters had all been murdered, in both Mexico and the U.S., but that to date, no one had been brought to trial.

  I looked again at the young woman in Curtis’s photo, my stomach feeling a little hollow.

  Elaine Kitchner said that her son had been looking into the Westchester Airport bombing. He had visited Lauritzia Velez in the hospital and taken her photograph just days before he was killed. What was it he needed to find her for? Information on Eduardo Cano? The cartels? Ms. Velez’s father? And how did the United States government fit into this? The agent who had killed Curtis worked for Homeland Security, not some drug cartel.

  And finally, who was Gillian? The name Ray Hruseff had uttered before he shot Curtis. The name that was nowhere to be found in any of the articles related to the bombing.

  Frustrated, I typed in “Lauritzia Velez.” Pages of hits came back, more than 2,100 of them, but all focused on her connection to the airport bombing.

  There was nothing about Eduardo Cano, or any vendetta against her family.

  Nothing about her father, or what he may have testified about to incur Eduardo Cano’s wrath.

  Yet Curtis’s interest in that bombing had been enough to attract the attention of two Homeland Security agents bent on keeping him quiet. Enough to get him killed.

  I scrolled further down, filtering through the numerous articles on Lauritzia Velez’s involvement in the bombing.

  Something struck my eye.

  It wasn’t connected to the bombing, but to the appeals court’s ruling on her petition for asylum, literally the week before.

  Velez vs. United States/usappealscourt.justice.gov.

  At that point, this would likely have been the only thing that came up against he
r name, but after the bombing, it was buried among a thousand AP wire pickups.

  I skimmed the court’s 2–1 decision. It mostly mirrored the article I had just read about a possible motive for the bombing.

  But then I got to the summation of the one dissenting judge. Judge Marilyn Vickers wrote:

  Denying Ms. Velez’s claim is a repudiation of the basis for encouraging anyone with a criminal history to testify against their co-conspirators without fear of whether the U.S. government will stand behind them. Mr. Cano, having allegedly masterminded the ambush in Culiacán, Mexico, that cost two distinguished DEA agents their lives, as well as three completely innocent U.S. college students, seems the only one the United States appears interested in protecting. Mr. Velez’s decision to turn on Cano resulted in the deaths of his son and three daughters. At the very least, this government owes Ms. Velez the same rights that were extended to her father.

  The ambush in Culiacán. Two DEA agents murdered. Lauritzia’s father turning state’s evidence against Cano.

  I read it again. I was sure that had to be what was behind the attempt to kill her at the airport.

  What Curtis had been looking into at the time he was killed.

  For the first time I actually felt that I was on to something. I punched “Culiacán drug shooting” into the computer. I took another sip of coffee and a bite of my tart.

  That feeling only became more real when I read over what I found.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  On a quiet Sunday morning in March almost four years before, two decorated DEA agents out of the agency’s El Paso, Texas, office were shot dead in their car while stopped in a square in the remote town of Culiacán, in northwestern Mexico.