Reckless

by Andrew Gross

  He had rehearsed this moment well.

  There was an alternate exit from Dani’s office building. It led straight to the Grand Central subway station. He had chosen the location for just such a situation as this. If the government was investigating him, they might be watching him as well.

  He called Air France himself and made a first-class reservation on the seven thirty flight to Paris in the name on the new passport he had chosen.

  Three hours. Dani’s blood grew heated. As he thought of how he had somehow been exposed, it irked him more. Merrill. How? Dani Thibault was dead. He had reinvented himself before. Now it was time to do it again.

  He just wished, in the time he had left, he could give that bitch one last lesson she would never forget.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Over the past few days Hauck had done his best to put what happened at the rink behind him.

  He put the finishing touches on a deal he’d been working on with the town of Milford police department. He gave a second deposition to the police, who were digging into James Merced’s contacts over the past weeks. He talked with Annie. She told him Jared was doing much better. That she might send him back to California to visit his grandparents until things settled down. He was still trying to figure out just how Tom Foley and Talon all fit in.

  Wednesday he was coming out of a meeting when his cell phone chimed. He noticed the caller. The United States Government. He went into his office and shut the door and plopped in the chair behind his desk. “So—you made a decision yet?”

  “On what?” Naomi Blum answered, acting coy.

  Hauck leaned back, knowing his gift of Thibault’s prints and DNA was a game changer. “On whether I’m in or out.”

  “In. Do you have lunch plans?” the agent asked totally out of the blue.

  “I was just gonna have a sandwich at my desk.”

  “Then how ’bout you have one with me?”

  “Where are you?” Hauck spun around, looking out the window at the harbor and waterfront estates of Glenhaven, as if somehow she was watching him.

  “In a car. Across the street from your office.” Her voice grew in excitement. “We know who Thibault is, Ty.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  They bagged the sandwich and drove to the Boxcar Cantina, a Mexican place. He figured it was the most inconspicuous place they could find.

  A few tables were filled with moms in yoga outfits and office types in casual business attire. He waved to the owner, Regina, who directed them over to a booth. Naomi was in a stylish brown pantsuit, her short, dark hair curled around her ears. And shades. She had a couple of freckles on her cheeks. Wide, gray eyes. Seemingly not an ounce of body fat on her. She wore a simple chain around her neck with some sort of pendant hidden under her top, which looked to Hauck like a military dog tag. There was something about her, her directness, her brains, that he couldn’t help but find attractive.

  The waitress came up. Naomi ordered the tortilla soup and an iced tea, Hauck a chicken enchilada and a Diet Coke. When the waitress left he leaned back against the wooden booth. “So what do you have?”

  “The prints you supplied us with came back. They were flagged by Interpol.” Naomi took out a file folder and placed two photos on the table. “You were right.” Her eyes twinkled. “He’s Serbian.”

  The large black and white photos were police mug shots. Thibault, maybe ten years younger, his wavy, dark hair sheared close, military style. His meaty face more gaunt, hungry looking. A dark intensity in his brooding eyes.

  The name underneath the photo wasn’t Thibault but Franko Kostavic.

  And there was a number underneath that: K43750. A prisoner number. And a date, August 23, 1999.

  “Kostavic?” Hauck said, studying the photo. The likeness was unmistakable. “These are mug shots?”

  “NATO.” Naomi nodded. “You see the date? He was a major in the Serbian Army during the Kosovo War. He was part of what they called the Scorpion Brigade. Apparently, Thibault—Kostavic,” Naomi corrected herself, “was taken into custody after the war trying to make his way through the Italian border.”

  “Make his way from what?”

  Naomi put another paper in front of him. A report. “The Scorpions were a secret paramilitary offshoot of the Serb army that operated freely during the war and was responsible for some of the most brutal genocidal atrocities.”

  “Atrocities?” Hauck looked at the report. Thibault had boasted of how he had seen action in the war. Since he’d claimed to be Dutch, they had all assumed he was part of the NATO contingent there. Richard Snell had done the search, but his name was nowhere to be found. Now Hauck knew why. The scent of Dani Thibault’s secret past had just grown decidedly more rancid.

  “Yes.” Naomi nodded.

  Their drinks came and she passed over a new series of photos. What Hauck was looking at was completely stomach turning. A long maze of dead bodies strewn together in a deep ravine. Dozens. More than dozens. There was also a photocopied report from the UN War Crimes Commission.

  “Franko Kostavic was being held by the new Serbian government in connection with his role in events that took place on the night of August fourth, in the village of Donje Velke in Kosovo. Sixty-seven townspeople, mostly women and children, were massacred in a Serbian raid.”

  Hauck felt the moisture dry up in his mouth. He fixed on the grisly photos. Bullet-riddled bodies in nightclothes and traditional native garb, lying in a seemingly endless line at the bottom of a gorge. Old men and women. Kids. Painful as it was, it was hard to remove his eyes from them. It was one of the saddest things he had ever seen.

  “Donje Velke is in the Drenica valley,” Naomi explained, “a region that was home to much of the Kosovan resistance. On August fourth, Serbian forces came in after midnight. The Scorpion Brigade was an unmonitored military arm. Its commanders were said to take their orders directly from Milosevic himself. It was filled with violent thugs and common criminals and led by zealots who committed the most brutal acts in the name of ethnic cleansing. From what I’ve learned, the village, mostly ethnic Albanians, was rousted up in the night from sleep. The men who came in went door to door. Some were in uniforms, others wore civilian clothes. They concentrated on women and children. Some were raped and then lined up against the walls of their own homes and shot in the head, right where they stood. The rest were marched up the trail to the gorge and flung in. Machine-gunned. The troops forced the remaining townspeople to fill the ravine with dirt. Lye was spread over it. Because the village was isolated, for years it was just a rumor that anything like that even took place. As you know, there were many such atrocities. The townspeople claimed they always feared the men would come back. After the war, NATO got involved, the UN War Crimes Commission. Witnesses finally spoke up.”

  Hauck raised his eyes from the terrible photos. His blood was boiling. “Thibault?”

  Naomi nodded. “Never proven, of course. He was never brought to trial. It was his unit, the sixth regiment, that was proven to have been involved. According to the UN affidavits, he had boasted about leading the raid, along with several others. Some of the witnesses talked about a man who led the raid who matches up. He was being held in connection with it. In the aftermath of the war, with emotions still mixed on both sides and graft running high, he escaped from the local prison in Split where he was being held. That was 1999.” Naomi collected the photos. “Not a big fish,” she said with a shrug, “one of hundreds. According to the Council on War Crimes at the Hague, he was never seen since.”

  “Until he was seen here, in the United States,” Hauck said, “under someone else’s name.”

  “I checked with Interpol.” Naomi nodded. “Dieter Thibault was a Dutch national who was born in Rotterdam in 1964. He went to the University of Rotterdam and emigrated to Belgium, where he worked as an account manager for the NazionsBank in Anderlecht, outside of Brussels. In 2000, he disappeared while on a business trip to France and was never found.”
/>
  Hauck recalled the file he had given to Naomi and the information he had gotten from Snell.

  “Yet not long after, not that anyone would have checked, there was a Dieter Thibault employed by the RezionsBank in Brussels. Then at the KronenBank in Lichtenstein, where he was a senior investment manager…”

  Hauck leafed through the file. A hard lump the size of a rock stuck in his throat. Thibault was scum. He had likely overseen the killing of dozens of innocent victims. There was no telling how the real Dieter Thibault had disappeared. Hauck looked up and met Naomi’s level eyes. In them, he saw the same glint he knew was in his eyes. This had far eclipsed two dead traders. Far eclipsed April.

  This was a guy they had to bring down.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Their food arrived, but neither of them felt particularly hungry.

  “He told Merrill he had been in the Kosovo War,” Hauck said. “He claimed he was Belgian and Dutch. We thought to look only among the NATO forces.”

  Naomi nodded. “And he’s been hiding under the radar ever since. Ten years. Right in plain sight. Building a new life. Not so prominent a case that anyone was really looking for him. Christ, he was right there in the European gossip columns, clubbing around with cousins of Princess Beatrix of Belgium. But Donje Velke was just one of many such incidents in that war. He was never even a priority on the UN’s list. Bigger fish to fry. It would have gone on indefinitely if—”

  “If Merrill Simons hadn’t come to us to look into him,” Hauck said, finishing her thought.

  Naomi nodded with a smile. “Or until some midlevel magistrate in the Hague who happened to have a fetish for the party-hopping friends of the Belgian royals finally made it to the bottom of his open files. And even then, he barely looks the same and operates under a new ID.”

  A surge of anger started to burn in Hauck’s chest. Merrill Simons’s instincts had been right from the start. Dani was never who he claimed, not the freewheeling financier, not the attentive boyfriend. But how for a second could even she have suspected this? A wave of sadness for her came over him.

  “So now you have a reason to pick him up,” Hauck said. He dropped the UN report back in front of her. “I assume there’s a valid Interpol warrant outstanding against him?”

  “There is,” Naomi said. She leaned forward and looked him firmly in the eye. “But I think you can understand how the people I work for aren’t altogether keen on cleaning up the files for some bureaucratic war-crimes commission in the Hague with all that’s going on. What’s pressing today”—she tapped her nail against Dani’s photo—“is to find out what Thibault’s role was in the deaths of Marc Glassman and James Donovan and, even more important, where that might lead. Later, we can always hand him off to the UN to answer for what he’s done.”

  “So then pick him up.” Hauck shrugged. “You have sufficient cause. There’s nothing stopping you now.”

  “Yes, there is.” Naomi looked at him directly. “Just one thing…”

  Suddenly Hauck started to wonder why they were even meeting. Why she was sharing all this with him.

  “Thibault’s missing.”

  “Missing!”

  Naomi nodded. “He’s gone underground. We were keeping tabs on him—loosely, until we could fill in the details. He went into work in his office two days ago. According to the agents tracking him, they haven’t seen him since.”

  “Someone doesn’t just completely disappear!”

  “That’s exactly what he did. He never came back out. According to his secretary, he told her he had a sudden trip that had come up and he’d be back in a few days. So far, he hasn’t called in. We executed a warrant and impounded his computer. We found a wall safe in his office, cleaned out. We think he may have kept alternate passports in there.”

  “He knew you were onto him,” Hauck said, putting it all together. “He fled.”

  “The agents who were watching him claim there’s no way they could have been made. If he fled, it wasn’t under his own name. I don’t know if he got tipped off, but there’s no record of Thibault leaving the country. There is, however”—Naomi reached inside her case and pushed across a series of new black and white photos—“this.”

  The photos showed a bearded man in a black leather jacket with a baseball cap drawn over his eyes passing through an airport security station. “It’s at Newark international. Last Tuesday night. The same day he went missing. It could be him. We’ve interviewed various gate agents and they seem to recall someone similar boarding an Air France flight for Paris.”

  Hauck stared closely at the photo. He felt a fist clench in his gut. “It is him.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “That’s the same satchel he had with him the night I followed him to the restaurant and got his DNA.” He passed the photos back across to Naomi with a shrug. “That’s him.”

  “Look, until we know for sure what the hell is going on, all of this—Thibault, Kostavic, whatever he may have done—is not to be shared, you understand?” She tapped her nail and it brushed against his hand. “Especially when it comes to other investigative arms of the government. Or Merrill Simons, for that matter. That’s clear, right?”

  Hauck met her round, gray eyes. “It’s clear.”

  He had known for a time this would lead somewhere. When he first had doubts about Talon. When he pressed Naomi to let him remain involved. Maybe that day when he first saw April Glassman’s face on that screen.

  “You believe Thibault recruited these traders, don’t you? To go off the reservation, so to speak. To drive their firms under.”

  “It all fits.” The Treasury agent’s eyes shone with the same intensity. “Both of them were used to earning millions; both were bonused largely in their own company stock, stock against which they had borrowed heavily to cover their lifestyles and that was now underwater. Both had margin calls against them just a few days away.”

  “So where’s the money trail?” Hauck asked. “If Thibault bribed them, it had to be for something big.”

  “It was something big.” She grinned. “Depending, of course, on your definition of big.” She reached back inside her case and this time came back with a photocopied, handwritten note. The stationery letterhead read James Donovan. She slipped it across the table to Hauck. “Leslie Donovan came to me. A couple of days after you went to see her. She didn’t know what to do with this. She had no idea what it meant, only that her husband was seemingly into something she couldn’t explain. She said you had asked her if she honestly thought he had taken his own life…”

  Hauck read it. The note was written in an awkward, harried script.

  Les, my love, I’ve asked Bill to give you this in the event anything should happen to me and I’m not there. Not being with you and Zach is the most painful thing I can ever imagine. Not seeing him grow into the person I know he will become. Not being there to take care of you. Listen—I’ve managed to put away some money. Money that can help take care of you, in the event I’m not around. It’s in an account that no one knows about at the Caribe Sun Trust on Grand Cayman Island. The account number is 4345672209. The account is in both of our names. You may remember, I had you sign something once. The pin code is Zachy. (Corny, I know!) Your signature is on file.

  Whatever you do, this is money that must not be explained and cannot, cannot be brought back to this country. I can’t go into it other than to say it’s all a measure of my love for you. I’m hoping this is a letter you will never have to read, but if you do, don’t tell anyone. I’m not proud, but it’s to protect you when I’m not there.

  The letter went on to talk about his love and it was signed Jim.

  Hauck put it down. “So what’s your definition of big?”

  Naomi pushed him another photocopy. This time, it was a bank statement, from the Caribe Sun Trust.

  Hauck scanned down the list of deposits until he hit the bottom. It showed over eight million dollars in the account.

  Hauck whis
tled. “Works for me…”

  “It was probably only a down payment,” Naomi said. “This is a guy who was teetering on the edge financially. A guy with a six-thousand-a-month apartment in New York and two vacation homes who had leveraged himself heavily against his company stock, which in the near term had no prospect of ever coming back. A guy whose future earnings flow was up in the air. Why would I not be surprised to find a similar account somewhere when we dig into Marc Glassman?”

  Hauck nodded. He would definitely believe it. “But you think there was a full-out conspiracy here. There’s more?”

  Naomi looked at him. “Yeah, there’s more. But now we’re getting into things that someone like me shouldn’t be telling someone like you. You understand?”

  He nodded. “I understand.”

  She told him about the call intercepted from Hassan ibn Hassani to Marty al-Bashir in London. The sudden shift of one of the largest investment funds in the world, which started the plunge of the financial markets the very next day, building on the mortgage debacle, fears of Fannie and Freddie failing, the world creeping to the edge.

  Glassman and Donovan just gave it the final, invisible nudge.

  “Someone was paying them off. Someone used them to start the slide in motion. You want to hazard a guess, when we fully dig into Thibault’s accounts, where the flow of all that money originated from?”

  It was huge. If this was an organized, plotted attack, it was terrorism. Poor April, he thought…How could she have known the forces behind what happened? Her family never had a chance.

  “So why me?” Hauck asked finally.

  “My people don’t want an interagency thing on this until we know more. If any of this leaks, it’s the sort of thing that would only create more chaos in the markets. Plus”—the agent’s gaze softened and for the first time she didn’t try to hold back her smile—“you seemed to desperately want in.”