Need You Now

by James Grippando

  “Lilly?” I said.

  She stopped and looked at me.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, then tried to do better. “I’m glad you’re with me.”

  There was warmth in her eyes, but she offered no words. She pushed open the front door, and I heard the loud slap of the metal storm door as she went inside. I was alone on the stoop, and the night felt colder without her. I started a mental list of perfect responses to Lilly’s question, but I fought off the second-guessing. It suddenly occurred to me why I was having so much trouble with the thrust of her question- What’s going to happen to us? It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Lilly and me, the relationship.

  I was more worried about Lilly. Really worried.

  46

  A ndie ducked under the yellow plastic tape in Evan Hunt’s doorway and reentered the apartment. Two hours of decoding Evan’s walls had left her bleary-eyed and in need of coffee. She was recaffeinated and rejuvenated, ready for the second leg of a Tour de France-like journey through the mind of a quant.

  Even though the body had been found in the Dumpster, the living space of Evan’s apartment was the focus of the crime scene investigation. Members of the team, some on hands and knees, aimed LED flashlights at anything of potential interest, bagging and tagging everything from suspicious hairs and fibers to traces of dirt that may have come from the killer’s shoes. A ballistics specialist scoured the walls for stray bullets that may have missed their target and buried themselves in the plasterboard. Two other investigators collected fingerprints. The investigation team was exclusively NYPD. The FBI’s investigation into BOS money laundering had officially ended, and homicide was technically outside the jurisdiction of the FBI. Technically. There was no doubt in Andie’s mind that Evan Hunt was caught up in a financial crime of federal proportions, and until she was on a jet flying back to Miami, she would spend every waking hour trying to prove it.

  “How long you staying?” the lead detective asked. He was a young guy, full of confidence, with eyes that roamed Andie’s body as he spoke.

  “Just wanted to take one more look at the wall for my final report,” Andie said.

  He glanced at the jumble of words and photographs on the only wall with a window-the window that Evan had covered with butcher paper in order to keep his flowchart continuous. “Good luck,” he said. “Looks like the work of a class-A nut job to me.”

  Andie shrugged and smiled, but the detective’s words struck a deeper cord. Indeed, he’d hit precisely on the reason she’d returned to Evan’s apartment. The suspicion was unavoidable that certain people in Washington-the powers who had abruptly shut down her BOS investigation-wanted the world to dismiss Evan’s analysis with similar disparagement.

  Just the work of a class-A nut job.

  The detective checked her out one more time as he started away, then stopped himself. “We’re ordering Chinese from the restaurant downstairs. You interested?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He handed her the menu. “If you change your mind, there’s a bit of a trick to reading this thing. The restaurant saves trees by making double-sided copies, but it’s all screwed up. Page four is page one, page two is page two, page three is page three, and page one is page four.”

  Andie gave it a look. “Wow, that is confusing.”

  “The hostess said it happens all the time. The busboy they send to the copy center to run off the takeout menus speaks no English and always forgets to hit the collate button. It’s become a running joke-kind of a signature of their takeout business. The regulars dig it.”

  Information you dug up, no doubt, while hitting on the hostess.

  “If you don’t want takeout,” he said, “maybe later you and I could-”

  “Four, two, three, one,” said Andie, noting the wedding ring on his finger. “I got it.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  Andie walked to the middle of the room, turning slowly to take in the 360 version of the Cushman world through the eyes of Evan Hunt. A photographer was on the scene to capture it in segments. A videographer recorded the panoramic version. They were working too fast to appreciate the details. Andie allowed herself a long, studied view.

  It would have been easy to dismiss Evan’s walls as the work of a disturbed, paranoid genius. At first blush they were a jumble of unframed photographs connected by hand-drawn lines in a variety of colors. The rest of the story was told in words, a handwritten narrative in which each independent thought was expressed inside a separate oval, rectangle, or other seemingly random shape. It reminded Andie of a crude version of an LCD that was connected to a computer with no pop-up blocker. The arrows, however, were the key. If Andie followed the color sequence, she could follow the story. She couldn’t blame NYPD for not seeing it. Andie’s investigation of Lilly Scanlon and BOS/Singapore had given her at least a glimpse into Evan’s world. But these walls supplied pieces that even the FBI didn’t have. Until now.

  Evan Hunt was definitely no nut job.

  Andie stepped closer to the wall near the kitchenette. She was following a long yellow line that had puzzled her all night. It started near the bathroom, rose up and over the closet that held Evan’s collection of orange dress shirts, and continued down the other side of the wall. There were various forks in the line along the way, but the main thread ran to a small, hand-drawn rectangle just above the baseboard near the kitchenette. It was no bigger than a standard index card. Inside the rectangle was a list of dates, all from the same period of time: the last six months of Gerry Collins’ life.

  Andie stepped back again for a broader view. She knew the dates had to be important, falling so close to Collins’ murder and Cushman’s collapse. But the rectangle contained no other information, and the dates bore no apparent relationship to the surrounding clutter of information on the wall. The long yellow line that stretched halfway across the room also suggested that the dates were significant, but it connected the rectangle to nothing.

  “Last call for food,” the detective announced. “You change your mind yet, Henning?”

  “No, I’m okay,” she said.

  “One of us dumb locals can help you decode the menu, if that’s the problem.”

  Clearly, he fancied himself a smooth operator, and when all else failed, there was self-deprecation. “I got the sequence,” said Andie. “Four, two, three-”

  She stopped herself in midsentence, and she remembered what he had said earlier about the screwed-up menu.

  The hostess said it happens all the time. It’s become a running joke-kind of a signature of their takeout business. The regulars dig it.

  There were four pages in the “signature” menu. Four walls in Evan’s flowchart. Andie turned and faced the flowchart again. She’d studied that rectangle long enough, looked at it from enough different angles, to recall where it fell in the seemingly endless sequence of squares, rectangles, circles, ovals and other hand-drawn shapes in Evan’s narrative. It was a hunch, but Evan was a quant, and numbers were his entertainment. She counted again, just to make sure, and her hunch proved to be correct. The little rectangle that had seemed so randomly placed, that contained such an important list of dates, that was tethered to a long yellow line that led to nowhere, was indeed the fourth rectangle on the wall.

  Turning clockwise in the center of the room, Andie shifted her gaze to the next wall. Following the pattern-four, two, three, one-she located the second rectangle on the wall. This one, too, seemed out of context, though the information in it didn’t cry out for Andie’s attention the way the dates had. There was no reason to notice it, unless she was following the pattern. It contained the names of several business establishments-Precious Jewelry Exchange, Discount Diamonds, and the like. She jotted down the names on a notepad, then turned and faced the next wall.

  Andie found the third rectangle just above the baseboard. Like before, the information inside the rectangle bore no relationship to the information around it. Andy recognized it as a list of t
owns and regions in Singapore: Woodlands, Bedok, Hougang, Jurong West, and Bukit Merah. Andie scribbled them all into her notepad next to the dates and the list of businesses.

  Finally, Andie faced the fourth wall, which was the one with the papered-over window. The first rectangle-the last in the four, two, three, one sequence-was enormous in comparison to the others. The wall was basically a person-by-person profile of key players in the Cushman fraud.

  Rectangle number one was all about Gerry Collins.

  Andie reread her notes. Four, two, three, one. It only seemed logical that each date in rectangle number four marked a business transaction of some sort. She’d investigated enough financial crimes to sniff out bogus transactions, however, and she noted that each establishment identified by name in rectangle number three appeared to be in a line of business that lent itself to the creation (fabrication) of big invoices-tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Rectangle number two confirmed that the businesses operated in Singapore, not exactly a model state of tight financial regulation. And it all went back to rectangle number one in the cast of characters: Gerry Collins. Phony business transactions were one way to launder the fruits of criminal activity, and it was no leap of logic to conclude that jewelry invoices from Singapore that bore Gerry Collins’ fingerprints-actual or virtual-were probably fakes.

  Four, two, three, one.

  It happens all the time. It’s become a running joke-kind of a signature of their takeout business.

  Of all the ingenious codes that a math whiz could have devised to stop a stranger from breaking into his apartment and uncovering key information in his Cushman flowchart, Evan Hunt had simply borrowed the pattern established by the consistently screwed-up pagination of the takeout menu from the Chinese restaurant below him. Evan was one of the regulars who liked the “running joke.” It was as if he was making fun of every movie, every TV show, every book that had ever strained to find “codes” in meaningless number sequences. The quant had a sense of humor.

  Who knew?

  Andie stepped back from the wall, and the broader perspective confirmed her hunch: There was indeed no line of any color connecting these 4-2-3-1 boxes to Cushman. Andie was beginning to feel the excitement of a multibillion-dollar lead on missing investment funds-funds that, she suspected, Gerry Collins had never actually fed to Cushman.

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door, then dialed the number of a colleague she had worked with on another financial crimes investigation. He worked in the Office of Law Enforcement Support at FinCEN-the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network-and she didn’t have to remind him that he owed her a favor or two.

  “Andie, hey, it’s good to hear from you.”

  “Sorry to call so late,” she said.

  “No problem. How can I be of help?”

  “I’ve come across the names of a few business establishments in Singapore, and I was hoping that you could check to see if any have shown up on your radar screen.”

  “You mean in suspicious-activity reports?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Andie paused, knowing that she had to be careful, since the plug had been pulled on her investigation. What she wanted was some very specific information about the oldest informal banking system in Southeast Asia. One that often operated as a side business to jewelry stores, rug dealers, and other going concerns in local communities from New York to Karachi, from London to Dubai. A $300 billion-a-year system that relied on an unregulated global network of personal relationships and trust, and that involved no actual exchange of money or formal record keeping-definitely nothing electronic. Unrecorded conversations were king-conversations in Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, and Farsi.

  For Andie’s present needs, English would do, and it was perhaps best to speak in generalities.

  “I want to talk to you about hawalas ,” she said. “ Hawalas in Singapore.”

  47

  I couldn’t sleep. The air mattress was plenty comfortable, but my mind would not shut off. Scully’s snoring didn’t help.

  I got up quietly, tiptoed to the kitchen, and raided the refrigerator. There was one slice of pizza left over from dinner, and it had my name on it. I brought the Gino’s box to the table and pulled up a chair. Connie’s PC was humming on the counter, and the only light in the kitchen was the dim glow of the screen saver on the LCD. Snow monkeys.

  What else?

  The pizza wasn’t nearly as good cold, but Connie’s apartment was so small that I feared even the hum of a microwave would wake the others. I ate half of the remaining slice and decided it wasn’t worth the extra sit-ups I’d have to do in the morning. The rest went into the garbage. But I still wasn’t sleepy.

  I felt the urge to reach for my BlackBerry. Separation anxiety, I supposed. My BlackBerry was in the hands of Scully’s tech expert. Lilly’s phone had come back clean-no spyware-but it was taking longer to scan my BOS BlackBerry. In truth, I didn’t need a tech expert to confirm that Evan’s killer had eavesdropped on my last conversation with Evan and heard him say that he’d broken the encryption code. Not that any tech expert could tell us who was doing the eavesdropping. Good spyware was typically installed remotely, no way to trace it back to anyone.

  The snow monkeys called to me, in a manner of speaking, offering a quick e-mail fix to an addict without his “crackberry.” I’d already used Connie’s PC to log onto my e-mail server four times since dinner. I got up from the kitchen table and made it five. Dozens of messages loaded. I read the latest thread from my team leader, Jay Sussman. It was only my fourth day on the job since returning to New York, but that was more than long enough for slackers to get fired on Wall Street. Jay had breathed not a word about the Cushman money to me, which I took as a positive sign: the pressure I was getting from Barber truly was between him, me, and Lilly. Jay’s latest message was to confirm a meeting with a private equity group in Chicago that the bank needed me to attend. It was scheduled for Monday at ten A.M. That gave me three days, including the weekend, to pull my life together. I had no idea how to make that happen. I told Jay I’d be there, hit Send, and then did a double take. The next message in my in-box gave me chills.

  It was from Evan. The time posted in the Sent block was 5:14 P.M.-minutes before his death. It had apparently been floating around in cyberspace for the past seven hours, finally hitting my inbox at 11:55 P.M. The reason for the delay was evident: the attached file was enormous. I clicked to open it. The hourglass started spinning. And spinning. Whatever was inside was going to take a while. I was beginning to wonder if Connie’s computer was actually powered by snow monkeys. I read the message while the file downloaded:

  “Freaked. Someone is at the door. Very suspicious shoes.”

  It took me a second, but then I remembered the second peephole on Evan’s door. I read on:

  “I am getting the hell out of here as soon as he leaves. The work we talked about is attached. Really big file for e-mail. Hope it comes through.”

  I checked the hourglass on the file download. Still spinning. The message continued:

  “Be careful with Lilly. Can’t understand how T memo on BAQ got in her data.”

  Evan’s message ended there.

  Connie’s computer was still struggling, the hourglass spinning as it tried to open Evan’s file attachment. Like Evan, I, too, had no idea how a Treasury memo on Operation BAQ had ended up in Lilly’s data, but if I had to wait another ten seconds to read Evan’s decrypted version of it, I thought I would burst. The screen flickered, and my heart nearly stopped.

  Do NOT crash!

  Another flicker across the screen, and my e-mail program suddenly shut down.

  “Shit!”

  A message box popped up. Inside, the hourglass continued to spin round and round. Connie’s computer was still trying to open Evan’s file.

  Please, God.

  My hand shook as I waited on the work that Evan had died-literally-trying to send me.

  “Is everything okay?”
asked Lilly.

  I turned as she entered the kitchen. My outburst had apparently woken her, or perhaps sleep had been equally elusive for her. I started talking, my tongue racing, but I couldn’t have made much sense to her.

  “It’s from Evan, an e-mail, and the attachment is so ginormous that Connie’s computer is about to-”

  I caught my breath as the computer screen flickered one more time. Another box popped before my eyes. It was a long message with some kind of code attached, but this code was not from Evan, it was from Microsoft. Two words caught my attention:

  FILE CORRUPTED.

  The screen went black, and the PC fell silent. I clicked the mouse, I tapped the keyboard, I pressed the main power button again and again. Nothing.

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “Patrick, what is going on?” asked Lilly.

  “Where’s your phone?”

  “Charging,” she said, “right over there.”

  I spotted it by the toaster, hurried over, powered it on, and went straight to the Internet, where I pulled up the remote access program for my e-mail account. I scrolled down the in-box to where Evan’s message had been. Then I tried the trash bin.

  “It’s gone,” I said, my heart sinking.

  “What’s gone?”

  I couldn’t believe it. The message and the e-mail-both were gone, wiped clean from the in-box and the trash bin.

  “Patrick, what is it?”

  I closed my eyes and then opened them slowly, hoping to wake up and find that this had all been a dream, a nightmare. It wasn’t.

  “Disaster,” I said. “A total disaster is what this is.”

  48

  Robledo’s twin engine Cessna landed at eleven thirty P.M. There were no runway lights. There was no runway. The unscheduled flight from São Paulo, Brazil, had touched down on an unofficial landing strip. Hundreds of such strips cut through the remote woods and grasslands of the Tri-Border region, a landlocked patch of jungle and rough country that lies along the Tropic of Capricorn, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet.