Reckless

by Andrew Gross

  Hauck smiled back. “I suppose I did, didn’t I? Look, my 401(k)’s in the shitter as much as the next guy’s, Agent Blum, but for me, this isn’t about the markets. It’s not about what happened to Wertheimer Grant. These people did what they did. But innocent people were killed to hide what they knew. One of them was a friend.”

  “I understand.” The Treasury agent nodded.

  “That said”—he shrugged—“I have been known to stumble into a well-concealed conspiracy every once in a while…”

  She nodded, pleased. “So I’ve heard.”

  “The first thing is to locate Thibault—Kostavic,” Hauck said, correcting himself. He looked at her.

  “I have my people tracing him out of Paris.”

  “Any luck so far?”

  “Not yet.” She shook her head. “It’s a big world.”

  “It is…” Hauck’s mind flashed back to something he remembered from weeks before. “Luckily for you, I think I know where he is.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The easy part was grabbing a few days from the office.

  He was owed that much. Foley had even suggested it. Not to mention he had just brought in a fat new account.

  The hard part was squaring what he was about to do with Annie.

  Not telling her the truth behind what he had let himself be drawn into. The reason her son had been attacked. About where he was about to go. And why.

  He’d wanted in all along, hadn’t he? If he was honest.

  From the start.

  Hauck sat on the deck in the dark with a beer, looking over the sound. He followed the flickering lights of planes descending into LaGuardia across the water. He put his moccasins up on the railing.

  It was one of those shifting lines in the sand where you had to make a call. What side you came down on. Who you fought for.

  Who you let down.

  April deserved that much, didn’t she? He thought back to the last time he had seen her and remembered her beaming face. This is Evan, Ty…

  Then the wind suddenly shifted and the line was gone all over again. He knew why he was doing it. Why he was putting it all at risk. His job. Everything he had grown comfortable with.

  Annie.

  He knew why, and if he was honest with himself he could say it now.

  It wasn’t all buried in the past.

  It was his last time there—at the group. Dr. Rose had given him the okay to leave. His obligation to the department was complete. For weeks, he’d been feeling restless, boxed in. Ready to get on with it again. He’d grown to accept that there were simply things that had happened. Events out of his control. An unguarded moment where fate had intervened.

  “I put my résumé out to a few places,” he told the doctor after the last session. “One in a town outside of Boston, where my sister lives. One in PA. I even sent one up to Greenwich.”

  Dr. Rose seemed pleased. “In the group you said you still blame yourself a little. For what happened…”

  Hauck shook his hand and smiled. “I guess I’ll always blame myself a little; I just figure I can do it with a paycheck coming in.”

  It bothered him that April hadn’t been there. They had grown close over these weeks. Their talks…He would miss her. And he wondered: when they saw each other again, in a different place and time, would it ever be the same? Life would interfere. It always seemed to. He wished he could tell her they would always be friends.

  He took the subway home, picked up something to eat at the Italian deli down the block. Went upstairs.

  Around eight, he was watching a game when his cell phone rang.

  April. Her voice sounded a little fuzzy. “Ty…”

  “Gee, you skipped out on me,” he said, pretending to be hurt, not fully realizing it then. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “I didn’t talk to Becca’s school,” she said, woozily. “I’m sorry, Ty. They won’t know on Monday…”

  Her words were garbled, her thoughts random and unclear. Alarm sprang up in him. His mind immediately flashed to her wrists. “Know what? April, are you alright?”

  “Yes, I’m alright, Ty, I told you, didn’t I…you were just passing through…”

  He bolted up. “April, listen to me, what have you done? You’re not sounding right. Have you taken something?”

  “Just to make me sleep, Ty…I really need to sleep. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you…”

  “Where’s Marc?” His blood rushed with alarm. “Where’s your husband, April? Where’s Becca?”

  “He’s away, Ty…Always away. In Hong Kong. Becca’s with her friend…” Her voice started trailing off.

  “Where are you, April? Where are you now?”

  “At our place. In the city. I’m sorry, Ty; you know that, don’t you? I so wanted to be there for you…I…”

  He knew the address. On East Sixty-fourth. He had dropped her off there once after one of their talks. “You keep it together, April! I’m coming. You hear me, April? I need you to stay awake. You hang on. I’ll be right there!”

  On his landline he dialed 911. Reported a possible suicide in progress. Gave the address. Her name. On his cell he tried to keep her on the line. Alert. Her voice kept growing woozy. It sounded bad.

  He ran downstairs and into his Bronco, talking to her all the time. He had an old rotating top hat from his department days and threw it on top.

  Lights flashing, he sped down the Van Wyck, to the LIE, to Queens Boulevard and the Queensboro Bridge. He kept pushing her to hang on, to stay awake. He felt like he was losing her.

  At some point, April’s voice fell off.

  “April!” He veered off the bridge onto Sixtieth, his heart racing at a hundred miles an hour. A minute later he was there.

  An EMT van and a police car with a flashing light were pulled up in front. Hauck screeched to a stop behind them. He talked his way up, flashing his old police ID at one of the cops. When he got there, they already had her on a gurney with an IV in her veins and were giving her oxygen. Her eyes were rolled back, her pupils small. He kneeled down and took her by the hand and squeezed. “I’m here, April. I’m here…”

  A glimmer of life flashed back into her eyes.

  She murmured, “Ty…I’m sorry, Ty. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. Your big day…I just didn’t want to feel so alone. Not anymore.”

  “You’re not alone, April.” They said they had to take her now. Her pulse was weak and they’d already called the hospital. He held her hand as they wheeled her out to the elevator. “Not anymore.”

  He stayed in the ICU while she slept until dawn. The doctors said she would recover. But if they’d been fifteen minutes later…She’d taken seven Sonestas along with some muscle relaxers.

  When she finally opened her eyes he was there.

  She turned her face and smiled foggily at him. “It would be you, wouldn’t it, Ty…”

  “I told you, didn’t I, I wasn’t just passing through.”

  “No, maybe you’re not.” Her pupils shined with a sparkle of green back in them. Then she looked away. “I’m a terrible mother, Ty. Marc wants more. I just—”

  “No.” He moved closer. “You’re not a terrible mother. Any more than I was a terrible dad. I called him. I found his number on your cell. He’s on his way back.”

  She shut her eyes, tears making their way down her cheeks, shaking her head. “I’m so ashamed…”

  “No, no, don’t…,” Hauck said. He winked. “You remember what they say about crazy…”

  She nodded with her hands over her face. A tear fell onto the sheet. “I know.” She looked at him. “I wish…” He knew what she wanted to say. What maybe they both were thinking. I wish it were you. Why couldn’t it be you? And in a way maybe he was feeling it too. Things just hadn’t worked that way.

  She smiled, sniffing back her tears. “What did you say? When you called him…Who you were.”

  “I just said I was a friend.”

  She smiled, looking back u
p, monitors beeping her vitals, IV pumping life back into her blood. She seemed to draw some comfort from the word. “You are, Ty.” She nodded. “You are.”

  They spoke once or twice after she was released and on her way to getting better.

  Then they didn’t see each other again for four years.

  See, you were wrong. Hauck smiled, staring out at the sound. You were always wrong. I wasn’t just passing through.

  He took hold of his cell and scrolled to the familiar number he was searching for. He pushed Send and waited for the call to connect.

  Annie answered on the third ring. “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself,” he said. “Busy?”

  “Swamped. Manuel’s out sick. I’m holding my end down and doubling on desserts too. Can’t really talk now. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” He stood up, leaned against the railing. The plane he had been following had disappeared. “I just wanted to let you know,” he said, “something’s come up. I’m going to be away for a while.”

  PART III

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The international airport at Belgrade in Serbia looked like any other modern European terminal—sweeping curves of glass and digital flight boards. Hauck barely dozed on the flight over, his anticipation running wild.

  He had told the people at Talon that he needed a couple of days off, and that ran into Memorial Day weekend. So he kept what he was doing to himself. All he told Annie was that he wouldn’t be around for a few days. And she only asked back, a little helplessly, What are you getting involved in, Ty?

  Thibault had fled through Paris. Hauck felt pretty certain that if Thibault needed to disappear, if he needed to blend into a backdrop where the outside world would never find him, he knew where he would be.

  Richard Snell had traced wire transfers every month from Thibault’s RBS account in the UK to a local branch of AstraBanca in a town called Novi Pazar in southern Serbia. The recipient’s name was Maria Radisovic. That had to be Thibault’s family back home, Hauck figured, a sister or his mother. It seemed right that no one would judge him where he had grown up in Serbia for what he had done in the war. He would have family to protect him. He could blend back into his roots.

  On the flight over, Naomi mapped out how tricky and sensitive this all was. He couldn’t help but notice how cute she looked out of work clothes, in slim-fitting jeans, a white T-shirt, and a loose lavender sweater. She explained that even if they were able to locate Thibault, the last people the government wanted to get involved were the Serbian police or their security arm, the BIA. First, there was no acting extradition treaty between the two countries. There was some Serbian basketball player who had assaulted a fellow student while in college in the U.S. The legal battle to get him back to stand trial had gone on for years. And if it got wrapped up in the fight to bring back someone who had been part of atrocities in the Kosovo War, the story would be in headlines all over the world. The Serbian government would never back down. The press there would go crazy if they let a suspected war criminal be ushered back to the U.S. for a lesser crime. Naomi’s team would lose whatever leverage they had against him.

  The plan, as she mapped it out, was first to simply see if they could locate him. The next step would be determined then. They might try to bargain with him. Use the threat of turning him over to the Serbian government to be prosecuted for war crimes as leverage.

  Then there was always the next option, which Naomi didn’t seem inclined to talk about. This was a U.S. government action. The stakes were high. This was looked at as a Homeland Security issue. Thibault was a vital person of interest. There were professionals who could be brought in—to interrogate him or to whisk him surreptitiously out of the country.

  But the first step was to see if he was even there.

  Upon landing, they passed through immigration on a diplomatic visa. They registered their firearms. Hauck was surprised and impressed that Naomi even carried one. They got their bags and rented a midsize Ford diesel. They got directions to the central highway south, the E75; plugged their hotel, the Vrbak in Novi Pazar, into the GPS; and drove past the industrial areas that ringed the city, into the flat Balkan countryside, which became picturesque green hills and small, rustic villages for the three-hour drive.

  Hauck took the wheel, excitement fending off the jet lag. He prayed his instincts were right and that he hadn’t dragged both of them on a senseless wild-goose chase. But Naomi (and her superiors) agreed it was worth the bet. They got to know each other a little along the way. “Hauck” and “Agent Blum” turned into “Ty” and “Naomi.” She told him how she had first gotten involved in working for the Treasury. How she had started out studying music at Princeton.

  “Music theory,” she said, noticing his surprise, but brushed past it so as not to bore him. “Sort of academic stuff.”

  She told him how her brother had enlisted out of college after 9/11 and then had the training accident that had cost him his legs. She told him how she felt compelled to follow in his steps. How she had ended up in the investigative corps, worked the Nisoor Square and Tabitha shooting incidents, which ended up as army whitewashes. Fighting off sleep, she shared the story of how one of the convoys she had been riding in had been ambushed, a small child by the side of the road struck by shrapnel from the IED. How with small-arms fire raging all around, she had crawled over and had to bag the kid with a makeshift ventilator while the medics attended to their own. She told him how fire was whizzing back and forth pretty heavily, how she didn’t know if she was going to be hit. “I just blew and blew into the kid’s chest, everything going on around me, until reinforcements finally came, and then I stopped, sitting there on the dusty road, his blood all over me. I realized he had died.

  “His name was Ahmed. He had this Michael Jackson T-shirt on.” Naomi shrugged. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this.”

  “You did what you could,” Hauck replied, watching her gaze drift out the window. “What you did was brave. You can’t ask for more.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’m not into any more whitewashes, Ty; you understand that. You can always do more.” Then, switching subjects, she said, “What do you think, we have maybe another two hours?”

  Sixty kilometers south, they crossed back west, onto more local roads, cutting through steeper, mountainous valleys and through centuries-old hillside towns. The roofs were always red and clung to the slopes, the churches old and stone with Serbian Orthodox markings, and old men in caps towed goats or cattle out of the way of young people scooting by on mopeds. The local signs were generally in Serbian, but Hauck always recognized a “taverna” by its signs for Jemel beer, Pepsi, and Jugopetrol.

  It was around three in the afternoon when they finally made it to the outskirts of Novi Pazar. It was a larger commercial center of red roofs and white stucco houses clustered in the pit of a green, sloping valley. Spring flowers were just starting to bloom. The city was built on both sides of the narrow Raska River. Hauck got off and followed the GPS through narrow boulevards crowded with modern stores and Western brands to the city center. They were staying at the Vrbak, a drab four-story hotel, built in a style somewhere between quaint and industrial, that was probably the best in town. It straddled both sides of the flowing river.

  It was late afternoon by the time they reached the hotel and settled into adjoining rooms on the fourth floor. Too late to do anything. Hauck asked if she wanted to meet later for dinner.

  Naomi wasn’t sure if she was up to it. “I may just hang and make some calls, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, that’s fine.”

  He went inside. Hauck’s room was sixties modern and spartan, a minimalist style. It had a flat teak platform bed and a down bedspread with a matching teak desk and chair. Drab local art hung on the walls.

  He went to the window and opened the curtains. The red roofs of the town sprawled out, and in the distance there were green, rolling hills. Everything was quaint and friendly, but fifteen yea
rs ago, in this town set near the Kosovar border, the tensions between the Serbs and Muslims would have been running high.

  Every family might have had a Dani Thibault in it. And would do whatever they could to protect him.

  He looked out at the hills in the gray, dissolving light. He felt wired, too wound up to rest. Maybe he’d go for a run, try to locate the AstraBanca, which was near the city center. Or find the address they had for Maria Radisovic.

  His blood rushed with anticipation, like the river running below.

  He felt something, something in himself he recognized, like a familiar face. Something he hadn’t felt in months.

  Alive.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The next day Hauck was having breakfast around seven in the dining room overlooking the river when Naomi came in, in a tight tank and black running leggings, sweaty from a run.

  “Hey.” Hauck pushed out a chair for her. “I knocked on your door.”

  “Morning,” Naomi said, taking a seat. “I was up. Went out for an early run.”

  “You sleep okay?”

  “A little restless,” she admitted. She shook out her short ponytail. “I was up in the night doing some work.” She took out a city map from a fanny pack and unfolded it. “I checked out Market Street. Where the AstraBanca branch is. Then I was wired. I figured what the hell. I kept on going to Zinak Street.” Maria Radisovic’s street.

  “Small apartment house. Interior courtyard. Butcher across the street.”

  Naomi widened her eyes.

  Hauck grinned. “I did the same route last night. Pretty good distance.” He nodded admiringly. “Four miles.”

  “Usually get in six,” Naomi snapped defensively, as if trying not to be outdone.

  Hauck couldn’t help but notice that she looked pretty tight in her heather-gray T-back Under Armour top. On her right shoulder he spotted a small tattoo. A sword with a lightning bolt running through it. Underneath, the initial “J.”