by Andrew Gross
“I’m Issa,” Michel said. “What can I do for you?” He placed his left foot near the alarm behind the counter, noticing the taller man still hovering suspiciously by the door.
“I’d like you to take a look at something, Monsieur Issa,” the mustached man said. He reached inside his shirt pocket.
“Stones?” Issa sighed. “This late? I was just preparing to leave. Is it possible we can reschedule for tomorrow?”
“Not stones.” The mustached man shook his head. “Photographs.”
Photographs. Issa squinted at him. The mustached man placed a snapshot of a man in business attire on the counter. Short, gray-flecked hair. Glasses. The photo looked like it had been cut out of some corporate brochure.
Issa put on his wire reading glasses and stared. “No.”
The man leaned forward. “This was taken some time ago. He may look different today. His hair may be shorter. He may not wear glasses anymore. I have a suspicion he may have come through here at some point, seeking to make a transaction. This transaction you would remember, Monsieur Issa, I’m sure. It would have been a large sale.”
Michel didn’t answer right away. He was trying to gauge who his questioners were. He tried to brush it off with a modest smile.
The mustached man smiled knowingly at him. But there was something behind it that Issa didn’t like.
“Police?” he questioned. He had arrangements with most of them. The local ones, even Interpol. They left him alone. But these men didn’t look the type.
“No, not police.” The man smiled coolly. “Private. A personal affair.”
“I’m sorry.” Michel shrugged his shoulders. “I have not seen him here.”
“You’re quite sure? He would have paid in cash. Or perhaps with a wire transfer from the First Caribbean Bank or the MaartensBank here on the island. Say, five, six months ago. Who knows, he may even have come back.”
“I’m sorry,” Michel said again, the specifics starting to alarm him, “I don’t recognize him. And I would if he had been here, of course. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to—”
“Let me show you this one, then,” the mustached man said, firmer. “Another photo. You know how these things sometimes work. It may freshen everything up again.”
The man pulled a second photo out of his breast pocket and laid it on the counter next to the first.
Michel froze. His mouth went dry.
This second photo was of his own daughter.
Juliette, who lived in the States. In D.C. She had married a professor at George Washington University. They’d just had a baby, Danielle, Issa’s granddaughter, his first.
The man watched Issa’s composure begin to waver. He seemed to be enjoying it.
“I was wondering if that refreshed your memory.” He grinned. “If you knew this man now. She’s a pretty woman, your daughter. My friends tell me there’s a new baby, too. This is a cause for celebration, Monsieur Issa. No reason they should ever be involved in nasty business like this, if you know what I mean.”
Issa felt his stomach knot. He knew precisely what the man meant. Their eyes locked, Michel sinking back on his stool, the color gone from his face.
He nodded.
“He’s American.” Michel looked down, and wet his lips. “As you said, he doesn’t look the same now. His hair is closely shaved to his head. You know, the way young people wear it today. He wore sunglasses, no spectacles. He came here twice—both times with local bank contacts. As you said, maybe six or seven months ago.”
“And what was the nature of the business, Monsieur Issa?” the mustached man asked.
“He bought stones, high quality—both times. He seemed interested in converting cash into something more transportable. Large amounts, as you say. I don’t know where he is now. Or how to reach him. He called me on his cell phone once. I didn’t take an address. I think he mentioned a boat he was living on. It was just those two times.” Michel looked at him. “I’ve never seen him again.”
“Name?” the mustached man demanded, his dark pupils urgent and smiling at the same time.
“I don’t ask for names,” Michel said back.
“His name?” the man said again. This time his hand applied pressure to Michel’s forearm. “He had a bank check. It had to be made to someone. You did a large transaction. You had to have a record of it.”
Michel Issa shut his eyes. He didn’t like doing this. It violated every rule he lived by. Fifty years. He could see who these people were and what they wanted. And he could see, by the intensity in this man’s gaze, what was coming next. What choice did he have?
“Hanson.” Issa moistened his lips again and exhaled. “Steven Hanson, something like that.”
“Something like that?” The man now wrapped his stocky fingers around Issa’s fist and squeezed. He was starting to hurt him. For the first time, Michel actually felt afraid.
“That’s what it is.” Michel looked at him. “Hanson. I don’t know how to contact him, I swear. I think he was living off his boat. I could look up the date. There must be a record of it at the harbor.”
The mustached man glanced back around to his friend. He winked, as if satisfied. “That would be good,” he said.
“So that makes everything okay, yes?” Michel asked nervously. “No reason to bother us again. Or my daughter?”
“Why would we want to do that?” The mustached man grinned to his partner. “All we came for was a name.”
STILL SHAKING, MICHEL closed up his shop and left shortly after. He locked the rear entrance to the store. That’s where he kept his small Renault, in a little private lot.
He opened the car door. He didn’t like what he’d just done. These rules had kept his family in business for generations. He had broken them. If word got out, everything they’d worked for all these years was shot.
As he stepped into the car and was about to shut the door, Michel felt a powerful force push at him from behind. He was thrown into the passenger seat. A strong hand pressed his face sharply into the leather.
“I gave you his name,” Michel whimpered, heart racing. “I told you what you wanted to know. You said you wouldn’t bother me anymore.”
A hard metal object pressed to the back of Issa’s head. The merchant heard the double click of a gun being cocked, and in his panic, his thoughts flashed to Marte, waiting for him at dinner. He shut his eyes.
“Please, I beg you, no….”
“Sorry, old man.” The pop of the gun going off was muffled by the Renault’s chugging engine. “Changed our minds.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
The first thing that came back was the data from Mustang World. The list of new subscribers Hauck had asked for.
Back at home, he glanced over the long list of names. One thousand six hundred and seventy-five of them. Several pages long. It was organized by mailing zip code, starting with Alabama. Mustang enthusiasts from every part of the globe.
From the bank trail he’d found at Dietz’s, it seemed a valid assumption Charles might be in the Caribbean or Central America. Karen told him they’d sailed around there. The bank manager on St. Kitts had told Hauck someone else had been looking for Charles. He’d also have to have access to these banks at some point.
But as he flipped through the long list, Hauck realized Charles could be anywhere. If he was even in here…
Slowly, he started to scan through.
THE NEXT THING that he got was a call from Joe Velko.
The Joint Inter-Agency Task Force agent caught Hauck on a Saturday morning just as he had put on a batch of pancakes for Jessie, who was up with him that weekend. When she asked about the red marks on his neck and the stiffness in his gait, Hauck told her he’d slipped on the boat.
“I pulled up some hits for you on that search,” Joe informed him. “Nothing great. I’ll fax it out to you if you want.”
Hauck went over to his desk. He sat in his shorts and T-shirt, holding a spatula as twelve pages of data came rolling in.
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br /> “Listen,” Joe told him, “no promises. Generally we might get a thousand positive hits for any one that could actually lead somewhere—and that means merely something we can pass along to an analyst’s desk. We call any correlations to key input ‘alerts’ and rank them by magnitude. From low to moderate to high. Most classify in the lower bracket. I’ve spared you most of the boilerplate and methodology. Why don’t you flip over to the third page?”
Hauck picked up a pen and found the spot. There was a shadowed box with the heading “Search AF12987543. ALERT.”
Joe explained, “These are random hits from some online newsletter the computer picked up. From something called the Carlyle Antique Car Auction in Pennsylvania.” He chuckled. “Real cloak-and-dagger stuff, Ty. You see how it says, ‘1966 Emberglow Mustang. Condition: Excellent. Low Mileage, 81.5. Shines! Frank Bottomly, Westport, Ct.’”
“I see it.”
“The computer picked up the car and the connection to Connecticut. This communication took place last year—basically just someone making a random query into buying one. You can see the program assigned a rating of LOW against it. There’s a bunch of other stuff like that. Idle chatter. You can go on.”
Hauck flipped through the next few pages. Several e-mails. The program was monitoring private interactions. Tons of back-and-forth chatter on classic-car sites, blogs, eBay, Yahoo.com. Whatever it picked up using the reference points Hauck had provided. A few hits on the Web site of the Concours d’Elegance in Greenwich. All were assessed as LOW. There was even a rock group in Texas called Ember Glow that opened for the singer Kinky Friedman. The priority against that hit was labeled “ZERO.”
There were twelve whole pages of this. One e-mail was literally a guy talking about a girl named Amber, with the comment, “She glows like an angel.”
No Charles Friedman. Nothing from the Caribbean.
Hauck felt frustrated. Nothing to add to the list from Mustang World.
“Dad?” An acrid smell penetrated Hauck’s nostrils. Jessie was standing by the stove in the open kitchen, her pancakes going up in smoke.
“Oh shit! Joe, hold on.”
Hauck ran back into the open kitchen and flipped the black pancakes off the skillet and onto a plate. His daughter’s nose turned up in disappointment. “Thanks.”
“I’ll make more.”
“Emergency?” Joe inquired on the line.
“Yeah, a thirteen-year-old emergency. Dad screwed up breakfast.”
“That takes precedence. Look, go through it. It’s only a first pass. I just wanted you to know I was on it. I’ll call if anything else comes in.”
“Appreciate it, Joe.”
CHAPTERER SIXTY-ONE
Karen pulled her Lexus into the driveway. She stopped at the mailbox and rolled down her window to pick up the mail. Samantha was home. Her Acura MPV was parked in front of the garage.
Sam was in the last days of school, graduating in a week. Then she and Alex were heading to Africa on safari with Karen’s folks. Karen would have loved to be going along as well, but when the plans were made, months earlier, she had just started at the real-estate agency, and now, with all that was happening, how could she just walk away and abandon Ty? Anyhow, she rationalized, what was better than the kids going on that kind of adventure with their grandparents?
As the commercials said, Priceless!
Karen reached through the car window and pulled out the mail. The usual deadweight of publications and bills, credit-card solicitations. A couple of charity mailings. An invitation from the Bruce Museum was one of them. It had a fabulous collection of American and European paintings and was right in Greenwich. The year before, Charlie had been appointed to the board.
Staring at the envelope, Karen drifted back to an event there last year. She realized it was just two months before Charlie disappeared. It was black-tie, a carnival theme, and Charlie had gotten a table. They had invited Rick and Paula. Charlie’s mother, up from Pennsylvania. Saul and Mimi Lennick. (Charlie had harangued Saul into a considerable pledge.) Karen remembered he’d had to get up in his tux and make a speech that night. She’d been so very proud of him.
Someone else invaded her thoughts from that night, too. Some Russian guy from town, whom she’d never met before, but Charlie seemed to know well. Charles had gotten him to donate fifty thousand dollars.
A real charmer, Karen recalled, swarthy and bull-like with thick, dark hair. He patted Charlie on the face as if they were old friends, though Karen had never even heard his name. The man had remarked that if he’d known that Charles had such an attractive wife, he would have been happy to donate more. On the dance floor, Charlie mentioned that the guy owned the largest private sailboat in the world. A financial guy, of course, he said—a biggie—friend of Saul’s. The man’s wife had on a diamond the size of Karen’s watch. He had invited them all out to his house—in the backcountry. More of a palace, Charlie said, which struck Karen as strange. “You’ve been there?” she asked. “Just what I’ve heard.” He shrugged and kept dancing. Karen remembered thinking she didn’t even know where in the world he had known the guy from.
Afterward, at home, they took a walk down to the beach at around midnight, still in their tuxedo and gown. They brought along a half-filled bottle of champagne they’d taken from the table. Trading swigs like a couple of teenagers, they took off their shoes and Charles rolled up his pant legs, and they sat on the rocks, peering out at the faraway lights of Long Island, across the sound.
“Honey, I’m so proud of you,” Karen had said, a little tipsy from all the champagne and wine, but clearheaded on this. She placed her arm around his neck and gave him a deep, loving kiss, their bare feet touching in the sand.
“Another year or two, I can get out of this,” he replied, his tie hanging open. “We can go somewhere.”
“I’ll believe that when it happens,” Karen said laughingly. “C’mon, Charlie, you love this shit. Besides…”
“No, I mean it,” he said. When he turned, his face was suddenly drawn and haggard. A submission in his eyes Karen had never seen before. “You don’t understand….”
She moved close to him and brushed his hair off his forehead. “Understand what, Charlie?” She kissed him again.
A month later he was gone in the blast.
Karen put the car into park and sat there in front of her house, suddenly trying to hold back an inexplicable rush of tears.
Understand what, Charlie?
That you withheld things from me all our lives, who you really were? That while you went in to the office every day, drove to Costco with me on weekends, rooted for Alex and Sam at their games, you were always planning a way to leave? That you may have even had a hand in killing innocent people? For what, Charlie? When did it start? When did the person I devoted myself to, slept next to all those years, made love with, loved with all my heart—when did I have to become afraid of you, Charlie? When did it change?
Understand what?
Wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands, Karen gathered the stack of letters and magazines on her lap. She put the car back into gear and coasted down to the garage. It was then that she noticed something standing out in the pile—a large gray envelope addressed to her. She stopped in front of the garage and slit it open before she climbed out.
It was from Tufts, Samantha’s college, where she was headed in August. No identifying logo on the envelope, just a brochure, the kind they had received early in the application process, introducing them to the school.
A couple of words had been written on the front. In pen.
As she read them, Karen’s heart crashed to a stop.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
A day later Hauck and Karen arranged to meet. They decided on the Arcadia Coffee House on a side street in town, not far away. Hauck was already at one of the tables when she arrived. Karen waved, then went to the counter and ordered herself a latte. She joined him by the window in the back.
“How’s the side?�
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He lifted his arm. “No harm, no foul. You did a good job.”
She smiled at the compliment, but at the same time looked at him reprovingly. “You still should let someone take a look at it, Ty.”
“I got a few things back,” he said, changing the subject. He pushed across a copy of the list of Mustang World subscribers. Karen turned through a couple of pages and blew out her cheeks, daunted at the size.
“I was able to narrow it down. I think it’s a good bet to assume that Charles is out of the country. If he has funds kept in the Caribbean, at some point he’d have to access those banks. There’s sixty-five new names in Florida alone, another sixty-eight international. Thirty of them are in Canada, four in Europe, two in Asia, four in South America, so let’s forget them. Twenty-eight of them were in Mexico, the Caribbean, or Central America.”
Hauck had highlighted them with a yellow marker.
Karen cupped her hands around her coffee. “Okay.”
“I have a friend who’s a private investigator. I went to him for the information I showed you on Charles’s offshore company in Tortola. We eliminated four of the names right away. Spanish. Six others were commercial—auto dealerships, parts suppliers. I had him do a quick financial search on the rest.”
“So what did you find?”
“We scratched off six more because of issues like length of stay at their residence and stuff we could glean from credit cards. Five others listed themselves as married, so unless Charles has been really very busy in the past year, I think we’re safe to can them, too.”
Karen nodded and smiled.
“That leaves eleven.” He had highlighted them page by page. Robert Hopewell, who lived on Shady Lane, in the Bahamas. An F. March—in Costa Rica. Karen paused over him. She and Charles and Paula and Rick had once been there. A Dennis Camp, who lived in Caracas, Venezuela. A Steven Hanson, who was listed at a post-office box in St. Kitts. Alan O’Shea, from Honduras.
