The Broker

by Grisham, John

  But orders were orders, even though they kept changing.

  All roads led to Milano.

  The cab stopped a block away from the Milano central train station. Marco paid the driver, thanked him more than once, wished him well back home in Modena, then walked past a dozen more taxis that were waiting for arriving passengers. Inside the mammoth station, he drifted with the crowd, up the escalators, into the controlled frenzy of the platform area where a dozen tracks brought the trains. He found the departure board and studied his options. A train left for Stuttgart four times a day, and its seventh stop was Zurich. He picked up a schedule, bought a cheap city guide with a map, then found a table at a cafe among a row of shops. Time could not be wasted, but he needed to figure out where he was. He had two espressos and a pastry while his eyes watched the crowd. He loved the mob, the throng of people coming and going. There was safety in those numbers.

  His first plan was to take a walk, about thirty minutes, to the center of the city. Somewhere along the way he would find an inexpensive clothing store and change everything-jacket, shirt, pants, shoes. They had spotted him in Bologna. He couldn't risk it again.

  Surely, somewhere in the center of the city, near the Piazza del Duomo, there was an Internet cafe where he could rent a computer for fifteen minutes. He had little confidence in his ability to sit in front of

  a strange machine, turn the damn thing on, and not only survive the jungle of the Internet but get a message to Neal. It was 10:15 a.m. in Milan, 4:15 a.m. in Culpeper, Virginia. Neal would be checking in live at 7:50.

  Somehow he'd make the e-mail work. He had no choice.

  The second plan, the one that was looking better and better as he watched a thousand people casually hop on trains that would have them scattered throughout Europe in a matter of hours, was to run. Buy a ticket right now and get out of Milano and Italy as soon as possible. His new hair color and Giovanni his eyeglasses and old professor his jacket had not fooled them in Bologna. If they were that good, they would surely find him anywhere.

  He compromised with a walk around the block. The fresh air always helped, and after four blocks his blood was pumping again. As in Bologna, the streets of Milano fanned out in all directions like a spiderweb. The traffic was heavy and at times hardly moved. He loved the traffic, and he especially loved the crowded sidewalks that gave him cover.

  The shop was called Roberto's, a small haberdashery wedged between a jewelry store and a bakery. The two front windows were packed with clothing that would hold up for about a week, which fit Marco's time frame perfectly. A clerk from the Middle East spoke worse Italian than Marco, but he was fluent in pointing and grunting and he was determined to transform his customer. The blue jacket was replaced with a dark brown one. The new shirt was a white pullover with short sleeves. The slacks were low-grade wool, very dark navy. Alterations would take a week, so Marco asked the clerk for a pair of scissors. In the mildewy dressing room, he measured as best he could, then cut the pants off himself. When he walked out in his new ensemble, the clerk looked at the ragged edges where the cuffs should have been and almost cried.

  The shoes Marco tried on would have crippled him before he made it back to the train station, so he stayed with his hiking boots for the moment. The best purchase was a tan straw hat that Marco bought because he'd seen one just before entering the store.

  What did he care about fashion at this point?

  The new getup cost him almost four hundred euros, money he hated to part with, but he had no choice. He tried to swap Giovanni's

  briefcase, which was certainly worth more than everything he was wearing, but the clerk was too depressed over the butchered slacks. He was barely able to offer a weak thanks and goodbye. Marco left with the blue jacket, faded jeans, and the old shirt folded up in a red shopping bag; again, something different to carry around.

  He walked a few minutes and saw a shoe store. He bought a pair of what appeared to be slightly modified bowling shoes, without a doubt the ugliest items in what turned out to be a very nice store. They were black with some manner of burgundy striping, hopefully built for comfort and not attractiveness. He paid 150 euros for them, only because they were already broken in. It took two blocks before he could muster the courage to look down at them.

  Luigi got himself followed out of Bologna. The kid on the scooter saw him leave the apartment next to Backmans, and it was the manner in which he left that caught his attention. He was jogging, and gaining speed with each step. No one runs under the porticoes on Via Fondazza. The scooter hung back until Luigi stopped and quickly crawled into a red Fiat. He drove a few blocks, then slowed long enough for another man to jump into the car. They took off at breakneck speed, but in city traffic the scooter had no trouble keeping up. When they wheeled into the train station and parked illegally, the kid on the scooter saw it all and radioed Efraim again.

  Within fifteen minutes, two Mossad agents dressed as traffic policemen entered Luigi's apartment, setting off alarms-some silent, some barely audible. While three agents waited on the street, providing cover, the three inside kicked open the kitchen door and found the astounding collection of electronic surveillance equipment.

  When Luigi, Zellman, and a third agent stepped onto the Eurostar to Milano, the kid on the scooter had a ticket too. His name was Paul, the youngest member of the kidon and the most fluent speaker of Italian. Behind the bangs and baby face was a twenty-sbc-year-old veteran of half a dozen killings. When he radioed that he was on the train and it was moving, two more agents entered Luigi's apartment to help dissect the equipment. One alarm, though, could not be silenced. Its steady ring penetrated the walls just enough to attract attention from a few neighbors along the street.

  After ten minutes, Efraim called a halt to the break-in. The agents scattered, then regrouped in one of their safe houses. They had not been able to determine who Luigi was or who he worked for, but it was obvious he'd been spying on Backman around the clock.

  As the hours passed with no sign of Backman, they began to believe that he had fled. Could Luigi lead them to him?

  In central Milano, at the Piazza del Duomo, Marco gawked at the mammoth Gothic cathedral that took only three hundred years to complete. He strolled along the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the magnificent glass-domed gallery that Milano is famous for. Lined with cafes and bookshops, the gallery is the center of the city's life, its most popular meeting place. With the temperature approaching sixty degrees, Marco had a sandwich and a cola outdoors where the pigeons swarmed every wayward crumb. He watched elderly Milanesi stroll through the gallery, women arm in arm, men stopping to chat as if time was irrelevant. To be so lucky, he thought.

  Should he leave immediately, or should he lay low for a day or two? That was the new urgent question. In a crowded city of four million people, he could vanish for as long as he wanted. He'd get a map, learn the streets, spend hours hiding in his room and hours walking the alleys.

  But the bloodhounds behind him would have time to regroup.

  Shouldn't he leave now, while they were back there scrambling and scratching their heads?

  Yes he should, he decided. He paid the waiter and glanced down at his bowling shoes. They were indeed comfortable but he couldn't wait to burn them. On a city bus he saw an ad for an Internet cafe on Via Verri. Ten minutes later he entered the place. A sign on the wall gave the rates-ten euros per hour, minimum of thirty minutes. He ordered an orange juice and paid for half an hour. The clerk nodded in the general direction of a table where a bunch of computers were waiting. Three of the eight were being used by people who obviously knew what they were doing. Marco was already lost.

  But he faked it well. He sat down, grabbed a keyboard, stared at the monitor and wanted to pray, but plowed ahead as if he'd been hacking for years. It was surprisingly easy; he went to the KwyteMail

  site, typed his user name, t'Grinch456,“ then his pass phrase, ”post hoc ergo propter hoc," waited ten seconds, and there was the message from<
br />
  Neal:

  Marco: Mike/ Van Thiessen is still with Rhineland Bank, now the vice president of client services. Anything else? Grinch.

  At exactly 7:50 EST, Marco typed a message:

  Grinch: Marco here-live and in person. Are you there?

  He sipped his juice and stared at the screen. Come on, baby, make this thing work. Another sip. A lady across the table was talking to her monitor. Then the message:

  I'm here, loud and clear. What's up?

  Marco typed: They stole myAnkyo 850. There's a good chance the bad guys have it and they re picking it to pieces. Any chance they can discover you?

  Neal: Only if they have the user name and pass phrase. Do they?

  Marco: No, I destroyed them. There's no way they can get around a password?

  Neal: Not with KwyteMail. It's totally secure and encrypted. If they have the PC and nothing more, then they're out of luck.

  Marco: And we're completely safe now?

  Neal: Yes, absolutely. But what are you using now?

  Marco: I'm in an Internet cafe', renting a computer, like a real hacker.

  Neal: Do you want another Ankyo smartphone?

  Marco: No, not now, maybe later. Here's the deal. Go see Carl Pratt. I know you don't like him, but at this point I need him. Pratt was very close to former senator Ira Clay burn from North Carolina. Clay burn ruled the Senate Intelligence Committee for many years. I need Clayburn now. Go through Pratt.

  Neal: Wheres Clayburn now?

  Marco: / don't know-I just hope he's still alive. He came from the Outer Banks ofNC, some pretty remote place. He retired the year after I went to federal camp. Pratt can find him.

  Neal: Sure, I'll do it as soon as I can sneak away. Marco: Please be careful. Watch your back. Neal: Are you okay?

  Marco: I'm on the run. I left Bologna early this morning. I'll try to check in the same time tomorrow. Okay?

  Neal: Keep your head down. Til be here tomorrow.

  Marco signed off with a smug look. Mission accomplished. Nothing to it. Welcome to the age of high-tech wizardry and gadgetry. He made sure his exit was clean from KwyteMail, then finished his orange juice and left the cafe. He headed in the direction of the train station, stopping first at a leather shop where he managed an even swap of Giovanni's fine briefcase for a black one of patently inferior quality; then at a cheap jewelry store where he paid eighteen euros for a large round-faced watch with a bright red plastic band, something else to distract anyone looking for Marco Lazzeri, formerly of Bologna; then at a used-book shop where he spent two euros on a well-worn hardback containing the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, all in Polish of course, anything to confuse the bloodhounds; and, finally, at a secondhand accessory store where he bought a pair of sunglasses and a wooden cane, which he began using immediately on the sidewalk.

  The cane reminded him of Francesca. It also slowed him down, changed his gait. With time to spare he shuffled into Milano Centrale and bought a ticket for Stuttgart.

  Whitaker got the urgent message from Langley that Luigi's safe house had been broken into, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. All the agents from Bologna were now in Milano, scrambling frantically. Two were at the train station, looking for the needle in the haystack. Two were at Malpensa airport, twenty-seven miles from downtown. Two were at Linate airport, which was much closer and handled primarily European flights. Luigi was at the central bus station, still arguing by cell phone that perhaps Marco wasn't even in Milano. Just because he took the bus from Bologna to Modena, and headed in the general direction of northwest, didn't necessarily mean he was going to Milano. But Luigi's credibility at the mo

  merit was somewhat diminished, at least in Whitaker's substantial opinion, so he was banished to the bus station where he watched ten thousand people come and go.

  Krater got closest to the needle.

  For sixty euros, Marco purchased a first-class ticket in hopes that he could avoid the exposure of traveling by coach. For the ride north, the first-class car was the last one, and Marco climbed aboard at five- thirty, forty-five minutes before departure. He settled into his seat, hid his face as much as possible behind the sunglasses and the tan straw hat, opened the book of Polish poetry, and gazed out at the platform where passengers walked by his train. Some were barely five feet away, all in a hurry.

  Except one. The guy on the bus was back; the face from Caffe Atene; probably the sticky-fingered thug who'd grabbed his blue Silvio bag; the same bloodhound who'd been a step too slow off the bus in Modena about eleven hours ago. He was walking but not going anywhere. His eyes were squinted, his forehead wrinkled in a deep frown. For a professional, he was much too obvious, thought Giovanni Ferro, who, unfortunately, now knew much more than he wanted to know about ducking and hiding and covering tracks.

  Krater had been told that Marco would probably head either south to Rome, where he had more options, or north to Switzerland, Germany, France-virtually the entire continent to choose from. For five hours Krater had been strolling along the twelve platforms, watching as the trains came and went, mixing with the crowds, not concerned at all with who was getting off but paying desperate attention to who was getting on. Every blue jacket of any shade or style got his attention, but he had yet to see one with the worn elbow patches.

  It was in the cheap black briefcase wedged between Marcos feet, in seat number seventy of the first-class car to Stuttgart. Marco watched Krater amble along the platform, paying very close attention to the train whose final destination was Stuttgart. He was holding what appeared to be a ticket, and as he walked out of sight Marco could swear that he got on the train.

  Marco fought the urge to get off. The door to his cabin opened, and Madame entered.

  Once it was determined that Backman had disappeared, and

  was not finally dead at the hands of someone else, a frenetic five hours passed before Julia Javier found the information that should've been close by. It was found in a file that had been locked away in the director's office, and once guarded by Teddy Maynard himself. If Julia had ever seen the information, she could not remember. And, in the chaos, she was certainly not going to admit anything.

  The information had come, reluctantly, from the FBI years earlier when Backman was being investigated. His financial dealings were under great scrutiny because the rumors were wild that he'd bilked a client and buried a fortune. So where was the money? In search of it, the FBI had been piecing together his travel history when he abruptly pled guilty and was sent away. The guilty plea didn't close the Backman file, but it certainly removed the pressure. With time, the travel research was completed, and eventually sent over to Langley.

  In the month before Backman was indicted, arrested, and released on a very restricted bail arrangement, he had made two quick trips to Europe. For the first one, he'd flown Air France business class with his favorite secretary to Paris, where they frolicked for a few days and saw the sights. She later told investigators that Backman had

  spent one long day dashing off to Berlin for some quick business, but made it back in time for dinner at Alain Ducasse. She did not accompany him.

  There were no records of Backman traveling by a commercial airliner to Berlin, or anywhere else within Europe, during that week. A passport would've been required, and the FBI was positive he had not used his. A passport would not have been required for a train ride. Geneva, Bern, Lausanne, and Zurich are all within four hours of Paris by train.

  The second trip was a seventy-two-hour sprint from Dulles, first class on Lufthansa to Frankfurt, again for business, though no business contacts had been discovered there. Backman had paid for two nights in a luxury hotel in Frankfurt, and there was no evidence that he had slept elsewhere. Like Paris, the banking centers of Switzerland are within a few hours' train ride from Frankfurt.

  When Julia Javier finally found the file and read the report, she immediately called Whitaker and said, “He's headed for Switzerland.”

  Madame had eno
ugh luggage for an affluent family of five. A harried porter helped her haul the heavy suitcases on board and into the first-class car, which she consumed with herself, her belongings, and her perfume. The cabin had six seats, at least four of which she laid claim to. She sat in one across from Marco and wiggled her ample rear as if to make it expand. She glanced at him, cowering against the window, and gushed over a sultry “Bonsoir.” French, he thought, and since it didn't seem right to respond in Italian, he relied on old faithful. “Hello.”

  “Ah, American.”

  With languages, identities, names, cultures, backgrounds, lies, lies, and more lies all swirling around, he managed to say with no conviction whatsoever, “No, Canadian.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, still arranging bags and settling in. Evidently American would've been more welcome than Canadian. Madame was a robust woman of sixty, with a tight red dress, thick calves, and stout black pumps that had traveled a million miles. Her heavily decorated eyes were puffy, and the reason was soon evident. Long before the train moved, she pulled out a large flask, unscrewed its top which became a

  cup, and knocked back a shot of something strong. She swallowed hard, then smiled at Marco and said, “Would you like a drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  “It's a very good brandy.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Very well.” She poured another one, drained it, then put away the flask.

  A long train ride just got longer.

  “Where are you going?” she asked in very good English.

  “Stuttgart. And you?”

  “Stuttgart, then on to Strasbourg. Can't stay too long in Stuttgart, you know.” Her nose wrinkled as if the entire city was swimming in raw sewage.

  “I love Stuttgart,” Marco said, just to watch it unwrinkle.

  "Oh, well.1' Her shoes caught her attention. She kicked them off with little regard as to where they might land. Marco braced for a jolt of foot odor but then realized it had little chance of competing with the cheap perfume.