by Jeff Abbott
“But I think I see what Janice is doing—giving Diana a clue to people she knew were destroyed by Belias, because that’s the key to finding out who else is in the network. If Diana ever needed insurance.”
“People where Janice had a direct hand in their ruin.”
“Yes. If we can reconstruct the names in the DOWNFALL file,” I said, “we can find, maybe, who are his people, and most importantly, who is he? We know that, we can own him.”
After a moment, she nodded.
We split up the eleven names we remembered from the file, opened laptops, and began to search for their stories. It wasn’t hard to reconstruct their sad histories. People on the rise who’d fallen, suddenly and horribly. A few had died—accidents, shot, or from a sudden heart attack. Others had been sent to prison, claiming they’d been wrongly framed. Others had lost everything. The printer whirred as we sent articles to it and began to post them on the wall, grouping them by name.
“If these two people died,” I said, “did Janice kill them? We know she tried to poison Dalton.”
“I’m thinking yes,” Felix said in a flat tone, and I went back to work. I knew what it was like to have someone you cared for be a complete liar. To use you in every way. Listening to me talk about a similar experience wouldn’t help him; there is no cure for that deep sting but time.
An hour into the work, Felix got up and stuck an index card next to one of the faces.
“Sam. Mila.” I could hear anxiety in his voice.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“A Los Angeles venture capitalist named Carl Standish.” He pointed at a picture of a confident, older man who looked polished and successful. “He was ruined in a series of start-ups that went sour. The last three companies he funded were all beaten in the market by companies backed by Glenn Marchbanks.”
“So the person who benefited here was Glenn,” I said. A thread, a connection, to prove our theory.
“In more than one way. Mr. Standish had three children. After he lost his fortune his two sons financed college through ROTC and went into the military. His youngest, a daughter, decided to go into acting. She got regular work on a cop show that shot a lot of exterior scenes here in San Francisco and she ended up meeting and marrying her dad’s former business rival.”
It felt like a punch. “Audrey Marchbanks.”
“Yes.”
I studied the photo of Mr. Standish. I’d only caught a glimpse of Audrey, but her father had been a handsome man and you could see the shadow of resemblance. “Belias ruined her dad to benefit Glenn Marchbanks…and years later Glenn Marchbanks left Holly and married her?”
“That’s my theory.”
“But…why would she have had anything to do with the man who took down her father?” Mila said.
And then a realization jelled. “But that’s the beauty of it. Under how we think Belias’s network works, Glenn Marchbanks never lifted a finger. It was the rest of the network—maybe just Janice, maybe others—but not Glenn. This list of people she had, I don’t yet see a way Janice profits from their downfall. But with Standish, Glenn does.”
I stood, ran a finger along the photos and the articles. “Like that Hitchcock movie where two strangers meet on a train and each decides to kill the other’s enemy. They’ll never be suspects, they don’t directly gain. But Glenn benefits, and then he does something else to help the network’s members in turn. They might not even know who benefits from what they do. Belias is the hub. The conductor. The central nervous system. The way Mila is ours.”
Felix and Mila were silent, studying the photos.
“But still he must have known.” I wondered, Did Glenn feel sorry for Audrey? Her father ruined, put out of business, his reputation lessened, his investments vastly reduced in value. It didn’t seem like the Standishes had turned into homeless people, though; I had no idea. But he’d married her. Maybe he’d thought he was saving her.
What if she knew the truth about her husband?
I wondered what would happen if I told her. I might need Audrey Standish Marchbanks to not stay so loyal to her husband. But I had no evidence.
“Could we find proof of this?” I asked.
“That’s the challenge—Glenn wouldn’t have been anywhere near her father’s ruin,” Felix said. “He’ll be clean.”
I knew Felix was right but it wasn’t the answer I wanted.
Felix gestured to the other photos. “It’s hard to know exactly who benefits from their falls. Some of them are easy to identify—a major rival in business, let’s say, but there’s never just one rival. Some it’s not nearly so cut and clear. If it’s a personal or a romantic rival, that would take much more time to find. And when you’re dealing with accomplished people, a downfall creates a lot of opportunity for others.”
I stared at the faces of the fallen, the people that had been ruined. An agony was on most of their expressions, a surprise—why has this happened to me? What have I done? It was so unfair—the unfairness of it in an unfair world stung me in my chest.
“So Audrey might be a point where we can get inside and find out more about this network. That information might be in Glenn’s house. I want us to think about how to get inside there.”
“If he wanted to take over, he had to assess the risk,” Felix said. “Not to mention consider insurance.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Put yourself in Glenn’s shoes. You’ve risen to the top of your field. You’re successful. But the price of that success is that you have to help others succeed, and you might have to break the law to do it. You get everything but you could easily lose everything. You might want some insurance. If you go down, you point at others. Maybe they can save you. Or by naming some really big names you save yourself with the cops. Or if you get enough names, you get rid of Belias. You don’t need him anymore.”
“Remind me not to form an alliance with you,” Mila said. “Oops, too late.”
Something big is coming. Which meant someone powerful was joining the network, presumably. And did that have anything to do with Janice Keene’s file or her mysterious mission for Belias? I looked at the photos on the wall. Eleven people could mean dozens of rivals in business or politics or just life. This could take time. “You keep on the people in the file, Felix. I’m going to figure out who Belias is.”
“Sam,” Mila said. “I think that’s smart. He’s just like the people you used to hunt.”
And she was right. I’d worked for a division at CIA that targeted criminal elements who represented a threat to national security. I went after arms traffickers and smugglers who could sneak both weapons and terrorists across borders, along with contraband. Belias was exactly the kind of guy I used to hunt, used to go undercover to get close to and bring down. I could feel the heat of excitement warm my blood. “Okay. I’ll focus on him, you focus on the network.”
“Why did he do it? Belias? Build this network?” Mila said. “At some point in his life, he made this choice. That fascinates me.”
“Never mind the why,” Felix said. “How did he do it? Who is he that he could manage this?”
I ticked off what I guessed about him. “He’s an American who spent a lot of time in the UK, judging from his hybrid accent. He said he was a computer hacker who now hacked lives. He made a comment at Rostov’s that he dislikes Russians, but he spoke to me in Russian. He and Holly and Glenn wear a symbol, and I saw the same symbol in Janice’s office, with sixty-three others. And he knew a Special Forces soldier named Roger Metcalfe.”
Those were my starting points. I wished I still had access to CIA databases. It would make life easier.
“Show me this symbol,” Mila said.
I showed her the necklace I’d taken from Holly.
“And there were ones like this? Sixty-four, you said?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were exposed to other cultures in your nomadic childhood,” Mila said. “There are sixty-four symbols in the I Ching, the Chinese fo
rtune-telling system, also called the Book of Changes.”
“This doesn’t look Chinese,” I said.
“These are hexagrams. Solid line is yang, open space is yin. The balance between opposing forces.” She went to the laptop, opened a search window.
“It was in a bottom row of a whole series of them in Janice’s office.”
“Ah, here. Hexagram fifty-seven. Its modern interpretation is ‘subtle influence’ or ‘with cultivation comes influence.’”
“Subtle influence,” Felix said. “Behind the scenes, with no one knowing. Sounds like our guy with his promises and deals.”
“How’d you know this?” I asked.
Mila smiled. “Jimmy took me to a Chinese fortune-teller in London a few months ago. I liked it better than the museums.”
She would.
“After we have caught him and made him spill his secrets,” Mila said, “we will turn him over to a psychologist. It should be fun.”
“We catch him, we kill him,” Felix said.
“No. We find out who all is in this network,” she said. “But we don’t turn them over to the police.”
The silence in the room was sudden.
“Mila, I want to break up this network so it can’t threaten us. We’re not going to turn them into something useful to the Round Table,” I said. “Belias might want me, I don’t want him.”
“Yes, Sam, I do not mean that we keep his network alive. But innocent people—families, employees, and many investors—will all be hurt when they are exposed. And that exposing them might expose us, as well. How do we explain how we caught them? Why would they remain silent?”
“If Belias vanishes, the network dies,” Felix said. “That’s all we have to do.”
“Felix, you care for this Janice? You don’t want to see her in court or in jail, especially if she is dying,” Mila said.
Felix nodded slowly. “But she used me. She used me to get to Dalton. That implies they know about the Round Table.”
“It implies they know Dalton comes here for a drink every time he’s in San Francisco and that you are his friend, and you might be at his event. That’s rather different than knowing about the Round Table as a whole.”
Maybe she was right. And yet Belias seemed…surprised by me and my skills. If he knew about the Round Table, he shouldn’t be. Something didn’t fit. Something wasn’t right.
“Then we must take them over,” Mila said, “before they take us, to put an end to them. Is like a hostile takeover in movies, yes?” She almost sounded pleased.
Felix and I exchanged a look.
I watched Mila sit back down at her laptop and connect a fresh phone to her laptop. She connected to a database servicing the various cellular carriers and started looking for Glenn Marchbanks’s account.
“So we take them over and you’d be the new Belias,” I said. “I knew my earlier comparison was a bad idea.”
“Hardly. I’m not ruining other people for them. They have access to information, to cash, access to people. This is how they’re useful. We tell them we’ll expose them if they don’t cooperate.”
“They’re fakes.”
She laughed. “What do you mean, Sam?”
“They didn’t earn their success.”
“Okay, this is what I find amusing, and yes, it makes me a bad person. What if they were capable of success on their own? What if Belias has just made them feel like he is needed to be successful for them. He is like the—What is the American good luck thing that is gross? Ah. The rabbit’s foot.”
“I think it’s more than that.”
“Is it? Oh yes, perhaps there is a rival and he takes the rival out of the picture. How does the insecure fool in the network know he wouldn’t have won success on his own terms?”
I hesitated. “They don’t.”
“Yes. So they feel always Belias is a necessary part of their success. It is a psychological poison. Belias is their drug. I don’t want to destroy them. I want to free them from their addiction to him.”
I saw her reasoning and her logic irritated me. And if we took down Belias, would someone else simply take his place? Better us than a successor. “Perhaps.”
“I wonder,” Mila said. “Perhaps you are like these people who put their faith in Belias and his game.”
“How?” I glanced at her. “No one’s done me any special favors in a real long time.”
“No. But you see, they have a good life. They have all they want. Yet it is not enough.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Me, my life, I can never go back to Moldova. I would be found, killed. After what I have done, I cannot be a schoolteacher again and sit in a room full of children and mold young thoughts. I have seen too much and done far worse. But you. You could just run the bars, have your life with Daniel and”—here she made a face at the thought of Leonie—“have the forger nanny person. You could have the normal life. But you would choose to have the two lives, the public and the secret, like these people. You would be two Sams.”
“That’s not true.”
Mila didn’t reply.
My cell phone rang. I answered, hoping it wouldn’t be Belias. I didn’t like the question Mila now had rattling in my mind.
“This is Detective DeSoto.”
“Hello, Detective.”
“Our investigation finds you acted in self-defense, Mr. Capra. No charges will be filed.” Her voice sounded worn, dead.
“Oh. That’s great.” Belias made it happen. I felt the pit of my stomach shiver.
“I suppose you have heard that Mr. Rostov’s brother was killed at their home that same night.”
“They must have been dangerous men living dangerous lives,” I said.
“The sad tragedy of House Rostov continues.”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t act as if I already knew. But this was independent confirmation.
“There’s a dead Rostov in the Denver airport. He had a seat on a flight to San Francisco. Poisoned, they think, in a bathroom stall.” She made a small, silvery laugh. Not one of amusement.
Poison. I thought of Janice’s attempt on Dalton.
“Three dead Rostovs might eventually mean one dead Capra. Be careful.”
“I had nothing to do with any dead Rostovs except the first one.”
“I hope your powerful friends who warned me off will warn them off. I’m sure it will make a great difference to the Rostovs when they’re told, hands off you. They’ll run home and have their three funerals and count themselves lucky they were warned. Off. You.” She laughed again, bitter.
“Why?” I said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“If you’re truly on the side of the angels, then good luck to you. Give my regards to Mrs. Court.”
Mrs. Court? I started to ask who that was, but then I remembered she’d spoken with Mila. Odd. I’d never heard Mila use that pseudonym. “I will. Thank you, Detective.” I hung up.
I told Mila what happened. “Belias said he could turn off the heat.”
The idea that he could, and he had, made us all fall silent for a moment.
“He just proved to you his power. He’s gotten the police off your back.” She sounded slightly stunned. “He is trying to steal you away from me. Little poaching jerk.”
“This is a doorway for me to get in with him.”
She nodded. “We need to give him that reason. I have worked out the logic. It is very dangerous, Sam. Not just for you but for me.”
“What do you suggest?”
“The stumbling block to him recruiting you is me—that you have an ally. So. I must be disposable.”
I blinked, started to speak, and she smiled.
“Give me a few pieces of silver,” Mila said, “and I’ll betray you.”
Part Four
Saturday,
November 6
38
Saturday, November 6, morning
HOLLY RANG THE BELL and Belias came down and unlocked
the gate. He looked like he hadn’t slept well. She waited to speak until he had closed the house’s door behind her.
“I did what you asked,” she said. “The police in Tiburon don’t think it was aimed at me, just random. They asked about my ex-husband, obviously, because they asked if I had enemies, or any of my family did. I told them Glenn was out of town and would call them when he got back. So. I’ve sold your lies.” She sat down.
Belias poured her coffee. She was surprised he remembered how she took her sugar and cream. “Audrey hasn’t reported Glenn missing yet.”
“How do you know?”
“I have her phones, e-mails, and text messages tapped.”
“Of course you do.” Holly drank her coffee. “I sent my college roommate a long e-mail. Outlining how Glenn had come to the house, tore it up, fired a few shots, broken two windows. Then broke down and cried and begged me not to call the police or his wife. That he wanted time alone from her. That he was a man I didn’t know. That I fibbed to the police about it. She’ll keep it and have it when Glenn goes missing.”
“I’m sure,” Belias said, “that it was beautifully written. I wish I could write a eulogy for Roger. But it’s not like I can give a speech in front of lots of people.”
She didn’t want to hear about Roger. “I can’t be suspected in Glenn’s death,” she said. “Of course they’d look at me as the ex-wife. I can’t go to jail, can’t lose my kids.” She hadn’t been able to sleep last night, consumed by fear and panic and guilt.
“You won’t.”
“So I’ve done what you want and I want out.” She set down the coffee mug. “I’ve done what you asked. This is a huge risk for me. I consider my debt discharged.”
“We had a deal. You’ll be free when this…situation is resolved. When Sam Capra is under my control.”
“He killed Glenn. No room for him here.” She said it before she thought.
“We’re losing people. Glenn. Roger. Diana’s mother has cancer, she doesn’t have long. I need him.”
She clenched her hand into a fist, pressed it to her mouth.
