Viking Bay

by M. A. Lawson

  The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question—actually, the fifty-million-dollar question—was this: Had Callahan lied to her so that she’d think she’d gotten away with what she’d done?

  “Did he lie to me, Scarlett? Did that bad man lie?” Scarlett didn’t answer.

  She thought back on everything Callahan had said in his office and finally decided. Callahan had lied; Callahan had overplayed his hand. And the reason she knew this was that he’d acted defeated and as if he didn’t know what to do next. Callahan always had a plan, and he’d never admit to defeat.

  She felt Scarlett’s claws rake the back of her right hand and she let out a yelp of surprise and pain. She dropped Scarlett to the ground and the cat immediately ran and hid under her desk. It was her fault Scarlett had scratched her: She’d been squeezing the poor thing too hard as she thought about Callahan’s deception. She’d almost cracked Scarlett’s tiny ribs.

  And now she was going to have to do what Scarlett had done: run for her life and hide.

  The good news was that she’d planned for this possibility.

  —

  MERCER LOOKED AT her watch. It was one p.m. She wanted to catch a train to New York that left at five. She picked up the phone, made a call, and a woman answered.

  “Hello,” the woman said in heavily accented English. She’d been born in Ukraine.

  “This is Anna Mercer. Where are you?”

  “Tysons Corner.”

  “Good. That means you can be at my house in less than an hour. I want you there before two. Do you understand?”

  “I’m meeting a client in fifteen minutes.”

  “I told you when I retained you that you might have to drop whatever you were doing. And I’m sure I’m paying you a lot more than your client. So call him, tell him to put his dick back in his pants, and that you’re not going to make it.”

  The woman didn’t respond.

  “If you don’t do what I want, I’m going to find someone else and you’re going to be out five grand,” Mercer said.

  “All right. I’ll be there by two.”

  “Before two,” Mercer said. “The key is on the back deck, under the red flowerpot. The code to the security alarm is S-C-A-R-L-E-T-T. Write that down. And once you’re inside my house, just take a seat, and don’t touch anything and don’t drink anything. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  —

  MERCER WAITED AN HOUR, wondering what that bastard, Callahan, was doing.

  At two, she left her office carrying Scarlett and stopped at Henry’s desk in the reception area.

  “Henry, can you tell Callahan that Scarlett and I have to go see my sister? She’s gone off her meds again. I’ll call later and let you know how soon I can be back.”

  “Ah, jeez,” Henry said, sounding genuinely concerned for her. “Family. What can you do?”

  Mercer’s sister was a schizophrenic who lived in Wilmington, North Carolina. Mercer had always been terrified she might inherit the disease. Half a dozen times during all the years she’d worked for Callahan, her sister had stopped taking her meds, gone berserk, and ended up in jail or a psych ward. Since Mercer’s mother was dead and her father had abandoned the family years before, Mercer usually dealt with her sibling’s situation by calling an aunt who lived in Raleigh and forcing her aunt to go deal with the crazy bitch. Fortunately, however, there had been times when she’d gone to Wilmington herself to take care of the psycho.

  As Mercer drove to her place in Arlington, she tried to see if anyone was following her. She couldn’t see anyone, but she was sure—if Callahan suspected her—that someone was tailing her. She entered her house and saw the Ukrainian sitting on the couch. The woman was wearing four-inch stiletto heels, and the hem of her skirt was about six inches above her knees. She had on so much makeup that she reminded Mercer of Liz Taylor playing Cleopatra.

  “Go scrub all that shit off your face,” Mercer said. “Just put on some lipstick.”

  Five minutes later, when the woman returned from the bathroom, Mercer handed her an envelope containing five thousand dollars and the keys to her Mercedes.

  —

  AFTER THE UKRAINIAN drove off, Mercer walked about her house, touching various pieces of furniture: the dining room table, a love seat in the living room, a vase she’d bought at an estate sale that was worth ten times more than she’d paid for it.

  She loved her home—and she was saying good-bye to it.

  She bought the place for four hundred and fifty thousand ten years ago. It wasn’t that big, only three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but property was expensive in Arlington—and she bought it before the bottom fell out of the real estate market. Then she spent ten years making it perfect: remodeling the kitchen, installing tile and gorgeous hardwood floors, selecting each painting and piece of furniture only after considerable thought. For a decade she went to estate sales and visited furniture showrooms and antiques stores, and consulted with interior designers who she discovered were no better than she was when it came to decorating. She knew she was never going to see her lovely home again, and she started crying. She just couldn’t help it.

  Five minutes later, she dried her tears, walked into her bedroom, and pulled her disappearing-forever suitcase out of the closet. Inside the suitcase—actually, a roll-on bag that could be stored in the overhead compartment of an airplane—were a couple of changes of clothes and a passport.

  The passport was made out to a British citizen named Amy Murdock, and the picture in the passport matched Mercer’s simple Amy Murdock disguise: a blond wig to cover her short dark hair, a couple of molded chunks of rubber to make her face look fatter, a bridge that fit over her teeth to give her an unattractive overbite—everyone knew how bad British dentistry was—and glasses with hideous red frames.

  The passport and accompanying credit cards were, of course, flawless. One of the benefits of being in the businesses she’d been in most of her life was that she knew people who could make the documents she needed.

  The final item in her disappearing-forever suitcase was the Heckler & Koch P30. It was the same weapon she’d taken with her the day she met Sterling at Devil’s Backbone in Virginia.

  She tossed some clothes onto her bed and a few things on the floor near the closet, making it appear as if she’d packed in a hurry, then she dropped a cell phone onto the floor and kicked it under the bed.

  She found Scarlett sitting in a sunbeam on a window ledge in her living room and picked her up. She’d had a cat since she was eleven, and Scarlett was the fourth one she’d owned. All her cats had been named Scarlett. As she walked toward the bathroom, she said, “Oh, Scarlett, I promise you that one day Nathan Sterling will pay for what he did.”

  She called a cab and tried not to cry as she waited for it, but as she was closing her front door she looked at a painting hanging in her foyer. She’d found it in a tiny shop in Middleburg, and it showed an old man wearing a red beret, sitting on a chair, and he seemed to be contemplating the life he’d led, a life that was almost over. She’d always loved that painting—and she started crying again as she walked down the sidewalk to meet the cab.

  33 | The honey Callahan had been speaking to when Anna Mercer entered his office was Kay Hamilton. As promised, he met her at seven p.m. in the bar of a hotel called One Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom. The bar was so dark that Callahan could barely see the olives in his martini; it just looked like a place where people in Washington would meet to hatch conspiracies.

  Hamilton arrived right on time, dressed in a T-shirt, tight jeans, running shoes, and a brown leather bomber jacket. He was certain the jacket concealed a weapon. As she walked across the room toward his table, hips swaying, Callahan was impressed, as always, with how damn good-looking she was and he couldn’t help but regret that he was old and fat.

  When the waitress asked what Hamilton wanted, C
allahan said, “No booze for you, Missy. I want you to go see the computer guy tonight.”

  “You know who he is?”

  “Well, I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure.” Callahan sipped his drink. “There are only about a thousand people on this planet who could have downloaded the program onto Dolan’s computer that was used to snatch the money. About half of these people live overseas in places like China, Russia, Israel, and Iran. We don’t know a lot of these foreigners by name, but we know they exist because of shit they’ve pulled hacking into American systems. But I don’t think Anna or Sylvia—and I’m about ninety-nine percent sure it’s Anna—would have worked with some hacker in Russia or China. So I think the guy is here in the U.S.

  “I’ve also eliminated anyone that’s not within a fairly easy commute of Washington, because she’d want this person close enough to be able to talk face-to-face. Anyway, I’ve got half a dozen names that for one reason or another fit the bill. Like this one guy up at MIT who has to be the world’s oldest grad student. He hacked JPMorgan Chase one time just to prove he could steal their money if he really wanted to, and then called Jamie Dimon’s unlisted number to let him know what he did just to rattle Jamie.

  “There’s another guy at Princeton who’s basically trying to extort the New York Stock Exchange into buying a security upgrade from him. He says he’s found a flaw in one of their programs and could make the Dow drop three thousand points anytime he wants to, and he’s good enough that they believe him. There’s also a whack job in Baltimore who the NSA says is the most brilliant guy they ever hired when it came to cracking encrypted messages, but they fired him when he insisted on publishing a paper to show how smart he is. He didn’t like the fact that everything he worked on was classified.

  “Anyway, I found half a dozen people who fit the bill, all of them on the East Coast, but the guy I really like has a connection to Eli.”

  “I thought you thought Dolan was clean,” Kay said.

  “I do think he’s clean. But I also think that Mercer wants me to think that he isn’t clean, and if she could, she’d find somebody that has some link to him, somebody he went to school with or worked with in the past.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Rodger Finley. He was a quant at Goldman Sachs the same time Eli worked there, but Goldman fired him a couple of years ago because he’s a fruitcake. Since Goldman fired him, as near as anybody can tell, Finley’s been sitting in his apartment in New York playing video games and screwing around with math problems that nobody can solve. He’s a fucking nut. He’s also almost broke, because he hasn’t drawn a paycheck in two years. So I think he might be the guy.”

  “How would Anna or Sylvia have found him?”

  “The same way I did. The NSA, Homeland, the FBI, and the Pentagon all have files on dangerous hackers. They have the files, of course, because they’re worried about these people screwing up all kinds of things—defense networks, power grids, financial systems—and Mercer would have talked with her contacts in these agencies. You gotta remember, Anna Mercer has been around this town for a long time, almost as long as me, and she’s ex-CIA. Anyway, I found out that the Pentagon had a file on Finley.”

  “The Pentagon? Sylvia was the one who worked at the Pentagon.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’m giving Mercer too much credit for being devious, but I think that’s another reason she picked Finley. What I’m saying is if she’d picked someone in a CIA database, the evidence would—”

  “We have no evidence.”

  “—the evidence would have pointed at her. I think she picked someone off a Pentagon database because that would point to Sylvia.”

  All the wheels-within-wheels shit was too much for Kay. She wanted something concrete, something more than Callahan’s guesses. “What do you want me to do?” she said.

  Callahan drained his martini glass, then raised it to signal the waitress he was ready for another.

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink? You look like the walking dead.”

  Callahan laughed. “I’m Irish, Hamilton. There’s no such thing as enough.”

  “What do you want me to do?” she said again, not in the mood for humor.

  “I want you to go to New York and confront Finley. I want you to scare the shit out of him and see if you can get him to admit he was working for Mercer. In other words, do what you used to do when you were a cop. Tell him you know he’s guilty and if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a cement room in a supermax, he’d better give up Mercer. If he tries to contact Mercer after you talk to him, I’ll know.”

  “How will you know?”

  “Because a certain agency will be monitoring any calls or e-mails he sends.”

  “Which agency?”

  “Never mind which agency.”

  “What if Finley’s not the one?”

  “Then you move on to the next-best guy on my list, the guy at MIT.”

  Hamilton shook her head, not enamored with his plan.

  “Hey, if you got a better idea,” Callahan said, “I’m all ears.”

  —

  KAY CALLED JESSICA and told her she had to take a trip out of town and had to leave immediately. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. And, hey! You and Brian behave yourselves. And make sure you set the alarm when you’re in the apartment and, well, you know, be careful.”

  “Have a nice trip, Kay,” her daughter said. “And you be careful. You’re the one who keeps coming home with black-and-blue marks on your face.”

  34 | At 7:45 p.m., Anna Mercer stepped off the Amtrak train in Penn Station. She had no idea that Kay Hamilton was in a jet on her way to New York.

  She went to the restroom, stepped into one of the stalls, and removed the Heckler & Koch P30 from her suitcase. She screwed on the silencer and placed the pistol in the right-hand pocket of her trench coat. Twenty minutes later, a cab dropped her off in front of Finley’s apartment building in Brooklyn.

  Finley was surprised to see her, of course.

  “What are you doing here?” he shrieked. “Once I moved the money, you said we were finished. You said you’d never contact me again. Go away.”

  “I need to talk to you, Rodger. It’s important. And I promise that after tonight you’ll never see me again.”

  “Fine. Come in. But make it quick. I’m busy.”

  Mercer sat down in the red recliner where Finley sat when he played his video games. Finley looked annoyed that she’d sat there. The recliner was his chair. He pulled over one of the armless rolling chairs near all his computers, took a seat, then raised his hands in a dramatic So what are we doing here? gesture.

  “I need to know something, Rodger. I need to know if there’s anything in this apartment—in any of your machines, on a flash drive, on a disc—that can be tied to the money we took. I need to know if there’s even a fragment of the program you downloaded onto Dolan’s computer.”

  “That’s why you came here? That’s why you’re wasting my time? I’ve told you about six times that I got rid of everything. There’s nothing here.”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she said, “The most important thing, Rodger, is I need to be one hundred percent certain that no one can trace any part of the money to my account.”

  “No! No one can! And it pisses me off that you keep asking this. There’s nobody on this planet that will be able to follow the money, and there’s nothing in this room that will lead them to it. Why are you asking me this again?”

  “I just need to be sure, Rodger.” She studied his face as he glared at her, trying to tell if he was lying, knowing it was hopeless. “Okay,” she said. “I believe you, Rodger. And I want to thank you again for everything you’ve done for me.”

  Then she took the silenced P30 from the pocket of her trench coat and shot Finley in the heart, and then shot him a second time i
n the forehead as he sat there in the rolling chair. She didn’t know why he didn’t fall off the chair, but he didn’t. That was odd.

  It had been mandatory to kill Finley; she had no choice. Finley was the one person who, if he talked, could ruin everything, because he would tell Callahan, under duress, where her money was. And the only way Callahan would be able to find her after she disappeared would be to follow the money to her hideaway.

  She was going to take care of Nathan Sterling, too, but Sterling didn’t concern her as much as Rodger Finley. Sterling had no idea where her money was.

  She picked up the shell casings ejected when she shot Finley. Her plan was to walk a couple of blocks before she caught a cab to the airport, and drop the gun and the casings into a sewer drain or a trash can someplace along the way.

  She took one last look around Finley’s smelly loft.

  Finley, to her amazement, was still sitting upright in his chair. That was so weird.

  35 | Had Kay arrived at Rodger Finley’s apartment building nineteen minutes earlier, she would have run into Anna Mercer, stepping out of the elevator, pulling her roll-along suitcase behind her. But she didn’t.

  Kay didn’t bother to buzz Finley’s apartment; she let herself in. She put on thin leather gloves and picked the lock on the front door of Finley’s building with an electric lock picker that made as much noise as ice being crushed in a blender. Not a tool she would have chosen had she been a cat burglar. She walked up the stairs to Finley’s third-floor apartment and knocked softly on the door. When no one answered, she knocked louder.