by Jeff Abbott
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes. You?’
‘I’m sad for Eric. I can’t help but feel that way.’
He said nothing.
‘But we… we can get out of this mess,’ she said. ‘Get our lives back.’
‘If we find who he made the deal with, where he hid the money.’
‘Where do we start?’
‘We start with his cell phone.’ He opened up the phone he’d taken from Eric’s pocket, searched the call log. Aubrey leaned over his shoulder. There was only one number listed on the log. An international number.
‘I know that international code is France,’ Aubrey said. ‘Eric and I went to Paris a couple of months back. He had business and I’d never been.’
‘Business,’ he said. ‘What kind?’
‘Banking stuff, I don’t know.’
Luke pressed the callback option under the number.
‘Um, is that smart?’
‘Let’s see,’ Luke said.
Four rings, and then: ‘Hello?’
He recognized the British woman’s voice. ‘Hello, Jane,’ Luke said.
She didn’t seem shocked at the use of her name. ‘This isn’t who I was expecting.’
‘No. Eric Lindoe’s dead.’
‘Sad. I thought he’d make it through the weekend, at least. Let me guess. Luke Dantry, running man?’
‘Why did you want me kidnapped? Why have you involved innocent people?’
‘Nothing personal, darling,’ she said.
‘Bitch, it’s personal,’ Luke said. ‘Why did you do it? What did I or Aubrey ever do to you?’
‘Nothing. Hence, not personal.’ Her voice was cool, crisp as breeze caught in linen. ‘You’re not going to find me. You can’t hurt me.’
‘I have a question for you. You knew about the fifty million. So who the hell’s giving it to the Night Road? Where’s this money coming from?’
‘Some secrets, sweetheart, go to the grave. My lips are sealed.’
‘This fifty million you want so badly? I’m going to find it before you do.’
‘That, darling, I seriously doubt.’ Then he heard a click, Jane hanging up.
He tried the number again. No response. ‘Why would a British woman in Paris be using us as pawns?’
‘Insulting her wasn’t exactly productive.’
‘Aubrey, this woman isn’t going to negotiate with us. Not until we find where he hid the money. Only then could we maybe lure her into the light.’ He shook his head. ‘I want to know where this money is coming from.’
Aubrey bit her lip. ‘I do have a thought about a potential hiding place for the money.’
‘Where?’
‘Eric’s childhood home. We stopped there on the way into Chicago after we ditched your car in Dallas. Eric was getting his stepfather’s gun. The house is empty; Eric’s stepfather died recently and he hasn’t sold it.’ She swallowed. ‘Maybe he did more than get the gun. Maybe he left something behind.’
The house was a few blocks off Cicero, not far from Midway airport; in a neighborhood that looked like its better days were more myth than memory. Narrow brick houses were jammed close together, as if sharing secrets. Some of the houses were maintained with pride and care; some were not. People idled in yards, on corners, bored, laughing, arguing. They drove past a trio of teenage boys who looked at them with a mix of calculation and studied disinterest. Luke parked in front of the old Lindoe house. The small yard needed a mow. Every window was darkened. The Lindoe house looked like the shy child on the block.
‘Eric paid off the house for his parents when he made real money,’ she said.
Luke thought if he made serious money he’d have bought his parents a nicer place but who knew the calculus of relationships in the Lindoe family. Maybe this had once been a happy home, one worth staying in for memories alone. Why would a wealthy, successful guy keep this house? Sentiment? Or maybe because he was involved in dirty dealings? After six months, had the will even been probated? The property would still be in his stepfather’s name. It was a perfect place to hide.
They used a key on Eric’s ring to get inside the house. The house smelled slightly musty.
‘He’s not here much,’ Luke said.
‘Yeah. His mom died of cancer two years back. His stepdad passed about six months ago – heart attack. Not long after we met. Eric said his stepdad didn’t want to live without Eric’s mom.’
‘Yeah. My own stepfather said the same thing after my mom died.’
‘I’m sorry, Luke. How…?’
‘Car accident. She was driving. Rainy night. They hit a skid, went through a guardrail, tumbled down an incline. She died, he lived.’
Aubrey opened her mouth and closed it. The silence grew heavy.
‘But because of what you know about your stepdad now…’
‘I wonder if it was really an accident.’ He shook his head. ‘Henry nearly died. It took him a long while to recover. I don’t know. I thought he adored my mom. But he’s the king of lies. Maybe I’ll never know.’
Aubrey took his hand, gave it a kind squeeze.
He switched on the kitchen lights.
‘He made me hot tea and told me to sit here and wait. I was still so rattled by what had happened and what we were facing, I don’t know what he did while I waited for him.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘In the back.’
They walked to the end of the hallway and found a master bedroom, the cheap furniture shrouded in plastic, as if trapping memories in a clear amber. Dust covered the plastic.
They backed up to the next bedroom. Eric’s bedroom. A flicking-on of the light showed a room little changed from when Eric had taken his scholarship money and headed off to the University of Illinois. Clippings of his achievements dotted the wall – from high school through college, and then after, a shrine of proud parental hopes. A son who’d made nothing but good choices and then made a very bad one.
Luke studied the clippings. ‘He was president of an honor society, and he ends up a killer and kidnapper and a money man for extremists.’ He ran a finger along the frames: Eric’s first letter offering him a banking job, in the operations division of a national bank; Eric in the sands of the Middle East, at a construction site, shaking hands with an older, elegant Arab businessman; in London, standing stiffly with other bankers; on a windswept beach, a borderline between desert and sea, watching the skeleton of a resort take hold.
‘He really did spend a lot of time overseas. Did he ever talk about it?’
‘No.’ She paused for a moment, looking at the smiling Eric beaming in the desert sun. ‘At my import company, I bought these really unusual pots from Papua New Guinea. There’s a face on each side, like a totem. Eric thought they were cool. Maybe he liked them because they were two-faced, just like him.’
‘He’s like Henry, in some ways. Henry loves his photos of himself at work, surrounded by powerful people. I don’t understand why Eric and Henry got involved in this. Why? Why risk it all?’
‘Some men can never have enough – money, pride, power,’ Aubrey said. ‘Name your poison and it will have an addict.’
He peered inside the closet. ‘Help me look.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘What shouldn’t be here.’
She found the laptop three minutes later, tucked behind a stack of worn paperbacks on the top shelf. An old, cheap subnotebook, paired with a power cord.
Luke plugged in the system, started it up. It presented a password prompt.
‘Any ideas?’ Luke asked.
Aubrey rubbed a finger against her lip. ‘Let me try.’ She sat and tapped words on the keyboard. ‘I’ll try words that meant something in his life.’ Luke continued searching the room. He found two guns; Glocks with ammunition. The serial numbers had been filed away. Both were hidden in a box under the bed, camouflaged by a scattering of old Hardy Boys paperbacks. And money. Five thousand in cash.
Not fifty million, which would take up a considerable amount of room.
Luke put the money and the weapons on the bed.
‘Nothing is working,’ she said.
‘Stop and think for a minute. You said he set up your bank accounts. Did he set up your passwords at first?’
‘I kept the passwords he used,’ she said. ‘They were more secure than what I would have conjured up. I would have used my name or my phone number or my first cat’s name. He came up with passwords you could remember but that were hard to break.’
‘How?’
‘Well, he always said to use words with letters you could easily replace with numbers and it would look kind of the same in your head. Like a word with Es, replace the Es with 3s. Or Ls, replace with 1s. He said it was much more secure than the word itself, and still easy to remember.’
‘What did you choose for your passwords?’
‘Aubrey, but with a 3 replacing the E. And another one, for an account he set up for me after we got back from Paris, was Paris, but with a 5 instead of the S.’
‘Where did you go in France?’
‘Mostly around Paris. Montmartre, Saint Germain, the Louvre. All the tourist spots. We also went to Versailles and we went to Strasbourg for a couple of days.’
‘Did you go on any other trips with him?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s write down every shared interest you had, every place you went together.’
‘Just because he gave me passwords that meant something to him doesn’t mean his passwords will also tie back to me.’
‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But you were his priority. He put everything on the line for you, Aubrey. I am willing to bet you were in the fore-front of his mind when he was hiding this money. It was a ticket for the both of you.’
He found a piece of paper and wrote down all the various neighborhoods and sites they had seen, all the common threads she could think of – their gentle rivalry of Cubs and White Sox, his obsession with Bulls basketball, his few favorite music groups and TV shows and movies, their preferred restaurants, a wine they drank on special occasions, the places they’d traveled together. Luke felt as if they were conducting an autopsy on the happier moments in Eric’s life. Then they started playing with the words, replacing letters with numbers in Eric’s style, turning Es and Bs to 3s, Ls into 1s, Gs into 8s, Ss and Ps into 5s. The list grew into dozens of permutations.
He became conscious as he scribbled with the pencil that time was passing. Maybe a neighbor would knock on the door, wondering who was parked in front of the empty house. Maybe the police would come, looking for evidence as to why Eric was murdered. Sweat formed along his lip. He pushed a piece of paper at her. ‘Start entering these, please.’
She typed, fingers pistoning on the keyboard, working through each possibility. ‘No. No. No.’
After the tenth no he said, ‘You’re being negative.’
She hit it on the forty-second try. ‘This laptop,’ Aubrey said, ‘is officially our pet bitch.’ She turned the screen toward him. Unlocked, it showed a normal desktop.
‘Which word?’
‘It was versailles, except with 1s instead of Ls. I should have guessed. We had a really nice day in Versailles. He wondered aloud if you could get married there.’
An awkward silence filled the room and Luke broke it. ‘Thank God for the consistency of bankers.’
She got up and he leaned over the laptop. He started to search through its files. A few text files, an email program and a web browser, nothing else installed. Luke opened one of the text files; inside were listed the same accounts on the piece of paper. Beside each account was a regional bank and a password, and a business name. The companies carried names that spoke of vague occupations – Lionhead Consulting; Three Brothers Partners; Jester, Inc. – nothing that hinted at what exactly they did. He counted a dozen of them. ‘He established a bunch of accounts for different companies.’
‘Try them. See if the fifty million is in those accounts.’ He could hear the urgency in her voice.
Luke surfed to each regional bank’s website, entered in the account info and the password. He could hear Aubrey holding her breath, her mouth close to his ear.
But each account only held a hundred dollars, probably the minimum to stay open.
‘These must be accounts he set up for the Night Road,’ she said. ‘For them to access money.’ Her sigh tickled his shoulder.
‘He hid the money somewhere else. He could have tucked it into an idle account at Marolt Gold, changed passwords, opened up new accounts under false names. He started in bank operations, I saw it on his bio. Which means he’s technically adept. We may never find it.’ A wave of despair washed across him.
Luke did online searches for the various company names. They did not have web pages. ‘These are all dummy corporations. Another dead end.’
‘Luke, we have to find this money.’ Frustration filled her voice.
‘Let’s see where else he went the last time he was online.’ Luke looked in the browser’s history window, which told him every site Eric visited. Aside from the banking pages, Eric had visited only one other place on the internet: a website about TV shows.
‘That’s odd.’ He clicked to the website. A password page opened for him to log in.
‘Why would you need a login?’ Aubrey asked.
‘I don’t know. Was he a big TV fan?’
‘Sports, mostly. The Bulls games.’
Luke remembered the toy basketball on Eric’s key ring, with the Bulls logo. ‘In the middle of hiding millions from killers, he goes to a foreign-based television fan site. It’s like getting a haircut in the middle of a funeral; it makes no sense.’
‘Log on, see what happens,’ Aubrey suggested.
He tried the versai11es password but it didn’t work. He pulled the password worksheet close to him and began to work through the possibilities again. None of them worked.
‘I can’t take another dead end.’
‘If it’s not a password that connects to his life with you… what else in his life?’
‘Well, his secret life.’
‘The Night Road.’ He entered the term, plain. It failed. He entered in variants, using the same number-replacement key as before.
The first few variants didn’t work, then he tried Ni8htRoad. The password was accepted.
The dark world opened before him.
He scanned the newly loaded page and saw a long list of postings. Some of the posters used the same login names they had used on the websites where he had found them weeks ago. Their postings inside the Night Road were calmer. Offers for advice on cleaning funds through cheap insurance policies, requests for help on how to use automatic rifles, suggestions on how shrapnel could make a real difference in civilian deaths. Trade in murder, in secrets, in stolen identities and credit cards. Celebrations over the bombing of the rail yard in Texas, the pipeline in Canada, the E. coli food scare that had spread from Tennessee across the nation.
A bazaar for violence, a marketplace for twisted ideas. Horror braided his guts. He had found these people, given them to Henry as abstract bits of psychological profiling, and now they were a community. Worse. A secret army, readying for battle at home.
‘Oh, my God,’ Aubrey said.
He did a search on the discussion forum for Henry Shawcross. For Mouser. For Snow. Nothing.
Then on Hellfire.
Nothing.
‘They’re celebrating the recent attacks, but they’re not talking about this Hellfire thing,’ he said. ‘Hellfire must be separate and distinct from the current attacks.’
‘Maybe they canceled Hellfire, if they don’t have the money.’
‘They don’t seem like the cancelling type. Or maybe the whole group’s not involved. Only a few.’ Luke logged out from the discussion group.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘They could have software recording every account that enters, every address, every password.
I don’t want them to know that I’m here.’ He wiped his mouth. ‘I read about another community like this, set up in the Mideast by a weapons dealer to move explosives around the region. They could shut down, move their database and server, and the authorities couldn’t find them again.’
‘So take it to the cops.’
‘I will. When we know where to find a member who will talk. Otherwise they’ll just vanish into smoke.’
He opened the email program. Everything had been cleaned out, except one email. It read: Your kind offer is accepted and protection is extended. Meet LAP, 23rd at 7 PM for your getaway. – Drummond.
‘Do you know this Drummond?’ he asked. The message had been sent from a common online email provider, the kind of account you could set up in thirty seconds. The twenty-third was today; the rendezvous was in two hours.
‘No,’ she said.
‘ Protection is extended. This is the deal he told you about, for protection to save you two,’ Luke said. ‘We have to find out who this Drummond is.’
‘So we can make the same deal?’
‘Absolutely. I would very much like some protection now. Maybe Drummond can help us. We figure out who or what LAP is and get there in the next two hours.’
Luke accessed the internet, searched on LAP CHICAGO. He found references to a lawyers’ assistance program, lap dancers and a Lakefront Air Park. A private air park for general aviation.
Luke said, ‘This is the answer.’
‘He’s meeting someone at an air park?’
‘If he made the deal, part one is an escape route. Let’s go.’
She got up, touched the photos of Eric Lindoe, the bright-eyed boy with a wide smile and brilliant future awaiting him. She kissed her fingertips, pressed them to the photo, and then turned away.
They took the laptop, the money and the guns, and headed north toward Lake Michigan.
29
The Lakefront Air Park’s office was small, low, and sleek. The chrome and glass gleamed. They’d had to drive through long stretches of Chicago rush hour traffic, and the setting sun burned the sky orange. The light reflected hard off the mirrored glasses.
