Need You Now

by James Grippando

  “There is,” said Zach. “More sophisticated spyware can be programmed to alert the master only when you communicate with certain phone numbers.”

  “So it’s possible that when Evan called to tell me about the decryption, the ‘master,’ as you call him, received an automatic alert that I was on the phone with Evan.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you tell by looking at my phone if that alert system was, in fact, part of the spyware?”

  “No. That would only be in the master’s equipment.”

  “Damn. Nothing’s ever easy,” I said.

  “You got a plan to deal with someone like Joe Barber?” Zach asked.

  “Is that spyware on my BlackBerry still active, even though you’ve analyzed it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Zach.

  “Then the answer to your question is yes,” I said. “I do have a plan.”

  50

  L illy didn’t like what she was hearing. Too much scheming, Too much at stake, too much former FBI involvement.

  Ex-FBI, ex-lover, ex-anything. They all have an ex to grind, pun intended.

  “Excuse me,” she said as she pushed away from the kitchen counter. Her smartphone was fully charged, so she unplugged the cord and took everything with her. Patrick didn’t even notice her get up. Scully and his tech buddy were talking over each other, and Patrick was in the middle.

  “You’re not going to bed, are you?” asked Connie, surprised.

  “Bathroom,” said Lilly. She left the kitchen, taking little steps. The official Boy Scouts of America 100th Anniversary sweatpants that Connie had loaned her for the night were long enough to cover her feet like footies. She was virtually sliding across the tile floor to the master bathroom off Connie’s bedroom. She could hear the strategizing in the kitchen right up until she switched on the light and closed the bathroom door.

  Lilly went to the sink and looked in the mirror. Frightful. Weeks of worry had left bags beneath her eyes that were way beyond the miracle of any concealer. But that was merely the superficial toll. The youthful gleam in her eyes, the sparkle from within, had completely vanished. Fear had replaced it, the fear of being trapped. It had been a while since she’d heard from her source-the ex-federal agent who wanted to protect her. Another ex. Another ax to grind. Lilly knew it was just a matter of time before he gave her another assignment.

  A sharp pain gripped her abdomen. It was her “funny tummy,” as she called it, but there was nothing funny about it. This episode was so bad that she doubled over, unable to stand, and sat on the tile floor. Leaning against the wall was the only way to hold herself up. She breathed in and out until the pain subsided.

  I can’t do this anymore.

  Lilly closed her eyes to consider her options. There weren’t many-and the really good ones totaled zero. She chose the least of the worst. She powered on her telephone: 2:13 A.M. That didn’t matter. The invitation had been to “call me anytime.” Lilly had committed the number to memory. She dialed and counted the rings until she heard the voice on the line. A sleepy voice that simply grunted out the word “hello.”

  “It’s Lilly Scanlon, please don’t hang up.”

  There was a pause on the line, perhaps a moment to check the clock on the nightstand and see what godforsaken time of day it was. “Lilly, is everything okay?” asked Agent Henning.

  “I’m sorry to call you at this hour, but I-I don’t know who else to turn to.”

  “It’s fine. I’m glad you reached out to me.”

  The pain cut through Lilly’s abdomen again. She gritted her teeth and struggled through it. “I can’t talk here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Still in New Jersey. Can we meet somewhere? Just you and me?”

  “Not Patrick?”

  “No. Not Patrick.”

  There was another pause, as if Agent Henning were thinking through the schism. “Okay, that’s fine,” Henning said. “I can meet you anywhere, anytime. Right now, if you want.”

  “No, not now. Patrick is going into the bank in the morning. I can’t get away until then.”

  Get away? Lilly wondered how that must have sounded to an FBI agent, but there was a light knock on the bathroom door before she could clarify.

  Connie asked, “Lilly, are you okay in there?”

  Lilly’s heart raced. She tightened her grip on the phone, whispered the meeting place she had decided upon prior to making the call-“Septuagesimo Uno Park, nine A.M.”-and quickly hung up.

  “Lilly?” called Connie.

  She kicked herself for having chosen a park with a Latin name, the pronunciation of which she’d mangled. No way Henning had understood. Lilly banged out a clarifying text message, adding for good measure that it was on Seventy-first Street at West End.

  Another knock. “Lilly?”

  Lilly pushed herself up from the floor, took a deep breath to calm her nerves, and opened the door. She was face-to-face with Connie.

  “Were you on the phone?”

  Lilly didn’t know whether to lie or tell her the truth. “No,” she lied.

  “Oh. I thought I heard you talking.”

  “No,” said Lilly-but it was a squeak, her nervous helium voice. She tried to cover with an explanation. “I was just checking my voice mail.”

  Connie gave her a funny look. “Whatever. Anyway, Patrick has a question for you. Can you join us?”

  Join us. Of all the simple questions Lilly had heard in her lifetime, that one had to be the most complicated.

  “Sure,” said Lilly, “whatever you need.”

  51

  M ongoose was on the move. He did his best work at four A.M.

  More than three years had passed since his last visit to Ciudad del Este. That one had been the capstone in a string of nine visits over a four-month period, all paid for by the U.S. government, all under the name Niklas Konig, a wealthy investor from Berlin. German was only one of five languages he spoke fluently, and on his first visit with Manu Robledo he’d spoken mostly Spanish. By their fifth meeting, he had befriended Robledo. By the eighth, they’d forged a business relationship. After the ninth, Robledo had traveled back to Miami with him to meet his Cushman connection, Gerry Collins. Collins had already been brought on board: Mongoose, personally, had sat him down, told him that Treasury was fully aware that he and Cushman were running a Ponzi scheme, and promised that Collins could get off with a prison sentence of ten years-as opposed to ten decades-if he cooperated. Operation BAQ had launched without a hitch. Manu Robledo and his highly suspect clientele would take a $2 billion loss without ever knowing that they’d been set up. A thing of beauty, and a perfectly acceptable result under a public policy cost-benefit analysis, if only Cushman’s scheme had, in fact, been worth the mere $6 billion that Treasury had estimated, not $60 billion.

  Morons.

  Mongoose climbed another step in the dark stairwell, then stopped. A bumpy puddle-jumper flight from São Paulo had left him with a nearly unbearable pain that radiated down his leg. Another painkiller would have been useless. After three years of living on pills, his system had built up a tolerance. Excruciating pain was a way of life, though sometimes it was so bad that it was impossible to stay on task. The pain-more specifically, the pills-had definitely made it impossible for him to remain with the agency. At least that was what the psychiatrists and pain-management specialists had told the bureaucrats on the disciplinary review panel. Shitheads, all of them.

  Focus, damn it!

  He closed his eyes and breathed in and out, slowly, letting his mind conquer this useless part of himself. After a minute or two, the pain lessened; it never completely went away. Pain was always somewhere, in his spine, in his lower back, in his hip. The worst was the pain down the back of his leg that felt as if some sadist had heated a knife with a blowtorch, jabbed him in the ass with the white-hot blade, and sliced him open from hip to heel. Pain on some level was with him every minute of every day, ever since he’d awakened i
n the hospital three years before and heard the doctor say that his motor function was unimpaired and that, in time, the pain could possibly go away. Possibly. The doc had been only half right. There were days when Mongoose would swear that there was something to be said for paralysis-for no feeling at all.

  Only the promise of revenge kept him going. Sweet revenge.

  Mongoose lifted his right foot, the less painful option under the current pain pattern, and took another step. He knew the Hotel Hamburg well. He had stayed there before, and he had climbed the back stairwell many times. The elevator would have been easier, but there was a security camera inside it, and the last thing he wanted was a digital recording of his visit. He knew the doors to the stairwell were never locked, knew that there were thirty-two steps from ground level to the second floor. He climbed the last eight slowly, then opened the door at the top of the stairway.

  The hallway was empty.

  Without a sound, Mongoose let the door close behind him, and he started toward Room 217. Carpeting muffled his footfalls. He needed to go only as far as the fifth door on the right. His stealth was merely a precaution to prevent any light sleepers from checking out a noise in the hallway and laying eyes upon him.

  He stopped outside the fifth door. The rooms on either side of 217 were vacant. Mongoose had paid the desk clerk to make sure of it. He had the key to 215, which was an adjoining room to 217. He also had Room 219-just to make sure no one would overhear what was about to happen in 217.

  He entered Room 215 and locked the door behind him. He did not switch on the lights. The glow of the moon between the parted draperies, through the window that overlooked a parking lot, was the only light in the room. He closed the drapes and waited for his eyes to adjust. Then he stepped farther into the room and laid his bag on the bed. It was his tool kit. He unzipped it and found the serrated diver’s knife. Just enough moonlight shone through the crack between drapery panels for the blade to glisten. He fastened his tool kit to his belt and stepped closer to the door to the adjoining room-the door to Room 217.

  He took a deep breath, adjusting his mind-set, reminding himself that his actions were justified by more than just revenge. His old “friend” Robledo had shared much about himself-about his grandparents coming to the Tri-Border Area in the major wave of Lebanese-Muslim immigration that followed the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948; about his father, though an Argentine citizen, returning to battle the Israelis in the 1982 Lebanese War, only to fall alongside another 17,000 Lebanese killed. The war was considered an Israeli victory, with one major footnote: Hezbollah took control of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. Mongoose was quite familiar with rumors that it also controlled the Tri-Border Area. One of many unsettling rumors. He’d also heard that the homicide rate in Ciudad del Este was more than five times that of New York City.

  Mongoose wondered how many men had boosted the rate in both cities in the same week.

  Mongoose threw his weight against the door and busted through to the adjoining room. Before Robledo could move, before he was even fully awake, Mongoose grabbed him, cuffed his hands behind his back, and threw him down onto the floor. He drove his knees into Robledo’s spine, shoved one side of his face against the carpet, and put the knife to his neck.

  “Don’t move,” said Mongoose.

  “Please, don’t!”

  “Quiet!” he said, making sure that Robledo felt the cold steel of the knife as he reached into his bag with his other hand and removed his tool of choice. Not the garrote. This time, it was the same class of tool that had been used on Gerry Collins.

  “I can make you a rich man, I promise,” said Robledo, his voice shaking. “Just don’t do this, please!”

  “Begging already, Manu?”

  Robledo’s body stiffened, as if perhaps there were a spark of recognition. “Do I know you?”

  Mongoose leaned closer and hissed into his ear. “Don’t you remember me, Manu? It’s your old friend, Niklas Konig.”

  “No, no way! Konig is dead.”

  It was the one thing the Central Intelligence Agency had done right after his shooting-the certificate of death issued for Niklas Konig.

  His hands a blur, Mongoose dropped the knife and, with the speed of a trained assassin, wrapped the wire saw around Robledo’s neck. With enough back and forth, it was fully capable of beheading a man. Eventually.

  Dead, you thought?

  “You wish,” said Mongoose as he jerked the wire saw.

  “Please, stop! Please! ”

  Another jerk of the wire deepened the flesh wound, enough to reveal that Robledo was a screamer.

  “Stop!”

  His begging made it all the more satisfying for Mongoose, but clearly a gag was essential. He quickly taped Robledo’s mouth shut, but as he tucked the roll away in his bag, Robledo squirmed and managed to kick over the cocktail table. Mongoose brought him under control with a tug on the wire, taking care not to inflict fatal injury, the tape muting Robledo’s cries of pain.

  The upended cocktail table lay a few feet away, the four legs pointing upward like a dead animal with rigor mortis. For demonstrative effect, Mongoose went to work on one of the table legs, the saw cutting through solid pine in seconds. It dropped to the floor just inches from Robledo’s eyes, which were wide with fright, as big as saucers. Mongoose leaned closer to his prey, adding a touch of poetry to his sense of justice: “NATO-approved commando wire saw, Manu. Purchased right here in Ciudad del Este. Just like the one you used on Gerry Collins.”

  Robledo groaned, but, again, the duct tape did its work.

  Mongoose checked the thickness of the carpeting. Things would surely get messy, and his mind flashed with thoughts of sleeping guests in the room below waking to the steady drip, drip of blood seeping through the ceiling.

  The bathtub.

  With one hand Mongoose drew the wire tighter, and with the other, he grabbed Robledo’s shirt and dragged him across the floor to the bathroom.

  “Be a good boy, Manu. Do exactly as I say, and I promise to make this quick.”

  As quick as paint drying .

  52

  I was in the BOS Midtown office before nine A.M. I didn’t have to pretend to be busy. My team leader had reams of financials for me to review in preparation for Monday’s meeting with the private equity group in Chicago-the one I had promised to attend, no problem, “my plate is clear.” Not until after lunch did things settle down enough for me to make my move, which was okay. Joe Barber was out of the office most of the day and couldn’t see me until four forty-five. It was clear that his assistant had penciled me in only because she thought it was adorable that a junior FA thought he could ring the executive suite and schedule a meeting with the head of private wealth management. There was definite surprise in her voice when she called me back at four thirty.

  “This is to confirm your four forty-five meeting with Mr. Barber,” she said.

  “I know. I have an appointment.”

  “I mean, he really is going to see you.”

  I thanked her and rode the elevator upstairs. As the doors opened and I stepped out onto the polished marble floor, it occurred to me that I was probably setting a bank record for the number of times a junior FA had set foot in the executive suite in a single week.

  Amazing what the inside track on $2 billion will do for you.

  Barber’s assistant offered me coffee or a soda, which I declined, and then she led me down the hall to Barber’s office. He was behind his desk, pacing as he spoke into his headset on a phone call, and he waved us in. His assistant directed me to the armchair, and then she tiptoed out of the office and closed the door.

  “We need to hit the links again soon,” Barber said into his headset, about to wrap up his call.

  My focus was on my plan-not just what I would tell him, but how I would deliver it. I’d been doing dry runs in my head since dawn, however, and I was starting to fear that it would come across as too rehearsed. I allowed my eyes to wander across the ch
erry-paneled walls, a quick survey of the trappings of Wall Street success. Some would have regarded the shrine that Barber had erected to himself as clutter, but there was indeed order to the plaques and mementos encased in glass and gold-leaf frames. His early days at Saxton Silvers. His service at Treasury. His elbow rubbing with the right politicians. I’d noticed much of it on my last visit, but this time I was struck by the contrast to what I’d seen in Evan’s apartment. If Evan’s walls told the story of Wall Street thievery, Barber’s walls told the story of… well, maybe it wasn’t such a contrast.

  Barber ended his phone call and laid his headset atop his desk. It had been a pleasant call, judging from his expression, but all sign of pleasantries faded as he came around to the front of his desk, leaned against the edge, and faced me.

  “I assume this is about Lilly Scanlon’s banking files,” he said.

  Less than forty-eight hours had passed since his Wednesday-evening meeting with Lilly and me, when I had sat in this very armchair, when Lilly and I had received each other’s data with the challenge to find the missing $2 billion.

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  He folded his arms, a smug smile creasing his lips. “I feel it’s only fair to tell you that I’ve already received Lilly’s report on your data. Very interesting.”

  It was a weak bluff. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Of course you don’t. But that doesn’t surprise me.”

  There was a light knock on the door, and Barber’s assistant poked her head into the office.

  “I’m very sorry to interrupt, but Mr. Lloyd has a family emergency.”

  Even Barber was taken aback, and it wasn’t his emergency. “What is it?” asked Barber.

  “I have a doctor on the line from Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston.” Then she looked at me with sadness in her eyes and said, “It’s about your father.”