Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  No argument there.

  A few minutes later, the disposable Samsung trilled.

  “Danny?” It was Galvin. A number Danny didn’t recognize. “Everything okay?”

  “Use this number from now on.”

  “Understood. Same with this one.”

  “I asked Abby to go home with Jenna today.”

  “Right, Lina told me. Did something happen?”

  “Let’s talk later. Is your house safe?”

  Galvin sighed loudly. “As we agreed. I’ve hired private security.”

  “Just outside the house?”

  “The perimeter as well. The entire property. What happened?”

  “Later,” Danny said, and he disconnected the call.

  66

  He got to the South Bay Center twenty minutes early. The giant parking lot swarmed with cars pulling in and out and circling and jousting for spaces. It was rush hour, and this was a shopping center of big, busy chain stores: Bed Bath & Beyond, T.J.Maxx, OfficeMax, Old Navy, Marshalls, Target, Best Buy, Stop & Shop. Home Depot. The good old Home Despot. An Applebee’s and an Olive Garden. Pretty much Danny’s idea of hell. That and shopping at Whole Foods late on Sunday afternoon.

  He found a spot a few traffic aisles away from Home Depot, closer to Old Navy, fifteen rows back. He sat in his car and awaited further instructions: a call or a text. They’d said only the Home Depot parking lot. But it was a big parking lot and he had no idea whether they’d be on foot or in some vehicle.

  Under the front seat he’d stashed the Beretta Galvin had given him.

  In his pocket, his iPhone.

  He took a few deep breaths. Tried to steady his nerves. He’d asked for this meeting before he’d discovered the truth about them. Or if not the truth, at least he’d discovered the lie about them: that they weren’t working for the DEA.

  But who were they, and what were they after?

  The best theory was that they were ex-DEA agents running some sort of long con. They’d been fired in Mexico on grounds of corruption. Then maybe they’d tried to cash in. They’d run across the name of a cartel money man while working for the DEA, but instead of reeling Tom Galvin in, maybe they’d decided to scam him.

  Or maybe they were working for another cartel.

  Whatever they might be up to, there was only one way to shut them down: Bring the FBI down on them.

  Jay Poskanzer knew people at a high enough level to make this happen. But he needed something tangible, he’d said. “Get me something on them we can give the FBI,” Poskanzer said. “A place. A location where these two grifters can be confronted and questioned and apprehended by FBI. Once we’ve got something, we hand it over to the FBI and let them go to work.”

  He knew what he was about to do was risky. Maybe extremely so. He tried to relax, calm himself.

  What he was about to do required thinking and acting on a whole new level.

  He checked his phone for text messages, just in case he hadn’t heard the secure-text alert. Nothing. He switched off the ringer and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  He waited.

  Then it came, that unusual, electronic plinking sound of ChatSecure. Rear lot, row 5 white van, the message read.

  At the back of the parking lot, at the end of an aisle that ran perpendicular to Home Depot, he spotted a white van labeled INTERSTATE FOOD & BEVERAGE. Sitting behind the wheel was Slocum, the wiry rat-faced one with the shoe-polish-black hair. He glanced at Danny briefly, scowled, and glanced away. Danny heard a door open, and Yeager, the bald squat one, came around the hood of the van.

  He beckoned Danny to follow him, then went to the rear and opened the swing-out doors. Danny hopped up inside. Cargo racks lined the walls of the interior. Gray powder-coated steel modular shelves. Apart from a few toolboxes and an extension cord, most of the shelves were empty. It smelled of machine oil and old cigarettes.

  “All right,” Yeager said, “just stand still a moment.”

  He took some oblong black object from a shelf, the size of an old-model cell phone, switched it on, pulled out a telescoping antenna, and began waving the thing up and down against Danny’s sides. It emitted a tinny squeal like a metal detector, its high-pitched tone swooping low to high, soft to loud.

  This he hadn’t expected. Something had made them suspicious of him. Almost as if they knew, somehow, what he was up to. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

  “What’s this about?” Danny said.

  Yeager ignored the question, tapped the outside of Danny’s left front pants pocket.

  “That a cell phone?”

  Danny felt his insides seize. He shrugged with feigned casualness. “Good guess.”

  Yeager lay his hand out flat. As in: Hand it over.

  But the iPhone had been set to record, a big fat red RECORD button on the home screen. As soon as Yeager saw it, Danny would be busted.

  There was nothing to do but give it to Yeager. Danny pulled the phone out and placed it, with an impatient sigh, facedown on Yeager’s beefy palm. When Yeager flipped it over, Danny’s heart clanged.

  The screen had gone dark.

  Without another thought, Yeager set it on a shelf next to a black plastic DeWalt drill case and resumed running the bug detector along Danny’s lower back, over the seat of his pants, down to his shoes, back up to his wristwatch. He nodded. There was nothing else.

  “You forget something?” he said.

  Danny just blinked.

  “The pictures from Aspen. Where the hell are they?”

  Danny shook his head. “I got nothing for you.”

  Yeager looked momentarily surprised, but his expression quickly turned into grim amusement. “That’s a real shame,” he said, beginning to massage the fist of his right hand.

  “That’s why I wanted to talk. They grabbed the camera.”

  “They? Who?”

  “How do I know? Whoever Galvin’s working with. His security guy.”

  “You didn’t make a backup?”

  “Did you not hear me? They took my camera. There wasn’t anything to back up. I didn’t have a chance. They caught me trying to take pictures on the mountain at Aspen.”

  “What do you mean, ‘caught’ you?”

  “Someone knocked me out. Literally, like”—Danny pantomimed a sap clocking his own head—“bam.”

  “And you couldn’t tell us this via e-mail?”

  “I got caught, you get it? That means Galvin’s onto me. They’re onto me.”

  Yeager stopped rubbing his knuckles. “How’d you play it?”

  “When I came to? Like I was just skiing.”

  “And the camera?”

  “No one said anything one way or another. It was just gone. I assume they took it.”

  Yeager shook his head. “With no questions, like why did you have a camera with you when you were skiing?”

  Danny shook his head. “Right. No questions, nothing.”

  “And you’re sure there weren’t any pictures on the camera?”

  “Like I told you.”

  “Then maybe you were just Wildlife Cameraman, taking artsy pictures of the snow and the trees. Well, we’re just going to have to figure out another way for you to get what we need—”

  “Actually,” Danny said, cutting him off, “no.”

  Yeager laughed. “No?” He cast a glance at Slocum, in the driver’s seat way up front. “You believe this guy? ‘No’?”

  “This turns out to be a dangerous job, and the rules are changing. Now I’m going to require hazard pay.”

  Yeager had opened his mouth to speak, maybe to scoff, but he stopped midsyllable. “You’re a funny guy.”

  Danny leaned back against the wall of the van. “No joke. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do, and the smart thing for me to do is to w
alk away. But I’m willing to try again. If I get compensated for my efforts.”

  “The DEA doesn’t pay informants.”

  Danny smiled. “Come on, Glenn, you think I don’t do research? You underestimate me. DEA pays, and sometimes you pay really well. I read about a Guatemalan drug dealer the US government paid nine million bucks as a source. But you’re in luck this morning. I’m willing to offer you a deal. A special low low price.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “Thing is, I have something you want pretty desperately. And I’m willing to get it for you. On my terms.”

  “Your . . . terms?” Yeager was looking at him differently. Was it a newfound respect?

  “An authorized payment. In writing. A million dollars in cash.”

  Yeager burst out laughing, a strange, hollow sound that rumbled from deep in his chest.

  “I’m willing to accept payment in four installments,” Danny said. “The first two hundred fifty thousand dollars is due no later than ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” He paused to let it sink in. Yeager didn’t reply. Stunned silence, perhaps. “Now, why don’t we discuss what you want from me.”

  Yeager shook his head slowly. He gave a thin smile. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “You’re not in a position to negotiate. You’re out there all by yourself at the end of a limb, and you’re sawing away at it. Not smart, Danny. Not smart at all.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “Well,” Danny said, “you and your partner have a decision to make. You know how to reach me.” He turned around and yanked open the van’s rear doors and hopped out.

  Leaving his iPhone behind.

  Not by accident.

  67

  Danny sat in a groovy café on Newbury Street called Graffiti. The walls were lined with paintings for sale, done by students at the Museum of Fine Arts school. The ceiling was pressed tin, the floor was tiny white hex tiles, and the coffee was “single-source.” And expensive. A cappuccino cost six bucks. The baristas were clean-cut, with neatly trimmed beards, wearing white button-down shirts.

  No one at a table seemed dislodgeable, so Danny ordered a six-dollar cappuccino and sat at a banquette, placing his laptop on one of the shellacked tree stumps they provided for the tableless to set down their cups and plates.

  He signed into their Wi-Fi. No password required. He had to assume the phony DEA agents had found a way to tap into his Internet at home.

  He went to iCloud.com, Apple’s cloud storage and computing service, and entered his Apple ID. There he found a green radar-screen-looking icon for an application called Find My iPhone. It showed his iPhone. Up came a big Google map of Boston, centered on the Back Bay, where he was. Then the map swooped toward the western suburbs, and a tiny green pinhead appeared on an orange road marked I-90, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  The green pinhead was slowly moving westward along the turnpike.

  He was tracking his own iPhone, and with it, the bogus DEA guys, Yeager and Slocum. The idea had come to him while he was standing inside the van. His iPhone was more useful to him as a tracking device than a tape recorder.

  Maybe Yeager would realize Danny had left his iPhone behind. In fact, he probably would. But he’d assume Danny had forgotten it in the heat of the moment.

  Would he and Slocum toss it? Not likely. They’d want to mine whatever intelligence from it they could—call logs, text messages, phone numbers. Not that they’d find much of use; Danny had deleted quite a bit.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t even notice he’d left it. He’d turned off the ringer and the vibrate mode.

  Now the green glowing pinhead had turned off 90 and was headed north on Route 128.

  A couple of sips of bitter cappuccino later, the pinhead had turned off onto Third Avenue in the town of Waltham, heading south.

  Where they were going, and why, he hadn’t a clue.

  A few minutes later, the green glowing pinhead had stopped moving.

  He clicked the + button on the map to move in closer. Now he was in Google’s Street View. The green dot was in a parking lot behind a building that was marked AMBASSADOR SUITES.

  He Googled “Ambassador Suites” and “Waltham” and found a website for an extended-stay hotel for businessmen.

  Residentially inspired suites. One-week minimum occupancy. Fully furnished mini-kitchen, light housekeeping.

  The temporary home for two ex-DEA agents.

  Time to pay them an unannounced visit.

  68

  Half an hour later, Danny pulled into the parking lot of a generic-looking redbrick three-story motel-like structure.

  The Ambassador Suites Extended Stay Hotel of Waltham.

  No white van in sight.

  He parked and switched off the engine. In front of the hotel was a portcullis over a concrete T that led to the main entrance. The grand entrance. It was a dismal, antiseptic-looking place. It pulsed with loneliness and desperation and transience. Most of the guests here, he figured, were midlevel business executives from places like Oracle or Raytheon or Biogen Idec who’d just “relocated” to the Boston area and were searching for housing. Or maybe visiting “teams” from Google or Microsoft or Genzyme here on some short-term project for a couple of lonely weeks. Skilled construction engineers working on a job, here for a month or two, away from home.

  But what about a couple of ex-DEA agents running some sort of scam? Were they here?

  A gray Mini Cooper came around the side of the hotel and pulled out into the street. And he realized there was more parking behind the hotel. He started up the car again and moved around to the back. Two rows of parked cars, broken in the middle by the rear entrance to the hotel and a lane perpendicular to the cars that led to a street. Directly across the street from the hotel was a big concrete and steel parking garage, almost a block long.

  In the back row of cars on the left, nestled among the rented-looking economy sedans, was a white panel van with INTERSTATE FOOD & BEVERAGE on the side.

  They were staying here, at this hotel, and they were probably in their room. This wasn’t an area where anyone walked anywhere. There were no sidewalks, and the distances were too great. If they’d gone out, they’d have taken the car.

  They were here.

  He parked, slung his laptop bag over one shoulder, and walked under the portico into the main entrance. The lobby was small and dimly lit and smelled of burnt coffee and fast food. The reception desk was small, with a marble-topped counter. Fluorescent light flickered. No one seemed to be behind the counter.

  There was a bell, the kind you hit to make it go ding. No one, not even Pavlov’s dogs, likes being summoned by a bell. He called out, “Hello?”

  A bulky young man, midtwenties, trundled out. His name badge said MATT.

  “Can I get a room just for the night, Matt?” Danny asked. Maybe the one-week-minimum policy was flexible. He shifted the bag on his shoulder. It bulged on one side with the mass of Galvin’s pistol, but the shape wasn’t obvious. Still, he couldn’t help feeling self-conscious.

  “Sure,” the clerk said. Simple as that. Plenty of vacancies and the policy goes out the window.

  “Got anything at the back of the hotel?” Where the white van was parked, he thought.

  The clerk hunched over a keyboard that was a little too low for comfort. Tappa tappa tap tap tappa.

  Danny’s chest felt tight. He was on the verge of doing something pretty damned dangerous. But it was better not to dwell on the odds.

  It was like a Wile E. Coyote moment where you fall if you look down: the cartoon laws of physics.

  So don’t look down.

  “That’ll be one hundred four ninety-nine.”

  Danny handed him a credit card, held his breath. After a moment, he saw the charge had gone through okay. This one he’d paid down. There was ro
om on the credit line. He exhaled.

  The clerk took a sheet of paper from the printer and slid it across the counter. Danny signed it.

  “Help you with your bags, sir?”

  “I’ll bring them up later.”

  • • •

  His room was on the second floor. It was entirely possible that he’d bump into Slocum or Yeager or both, and he had no explanation prepared.

  If they saw him, he was pretty well screwed.

  The room was small and efficient. A queen-size bed, a desk, and a chair. A kitchen area with a dishwasher, refrigerator, coffeemaker, two electric burners. Everything a relocating executive could need to make his lonely little home for a few weeks.

  The window looked out over the back of the hotel and the double rows of cars.

  The white van was still there.

  Slocum and Yeager were in the hotel. But where? In which room? There were ways to find out. Pretexting, it was called. Pretending to be someone you’re not, or pretending that something had happened.

  But maybe he didn’t need to go that far.

  He unzipped his laptop bag and took out his PowerBook, and plugged it in, and he signed on to the free Wi-Fi service.

  He took out the prepaid Samsung TracFone. Then he took out Galvin’s Beretta and a box of ammo and set it on the desk next to the laptop.

  The Beretta smelled of gun oil. It didn’t smell like it had ever been fired, or at least not recently. It was new-looking and unscratched. He popped the magazine release and pulled out the magazine. It was still loaded with fifteen rounds. He picked it up and held it in a two-hand grip the way his father had taught him and sighted on the right bedside sconce. Then he turned and aimed it out the window at a blue Prius. A traditional dot-and-post system, a half-moon rear sight with a red dot, and a front post with a red dot.

  The pistol felt substantial in his hands, heavy yet balanced. It was a serious gun—was there such a thing as an unserious gun?—and his aim had always been decent. Nothing great—he was no sniper—but not bad for a guy who fired a gun no more often than every couple of years. At most. And that was standing in the range at the Nauset gun club with his dad. In controlled, artificial, ideal circumstances.