Viking Bay

by M. A. Lawson

  Before she left D.C., Callahan had given her a file on Finley. The most salient fact in the file, as it related to Kay’s current mission, was that Finley rarely left his apartment. The file said he spent an inordinate amount of time playing a fantasy role-playing game that only geniuses played. The other thing Finley had been doing the last three months was arguing with a mathematician in China.

  The Chinaman and Finley, according to the file, disagreed about something related to string theory. Kay had no idea what string theory was, but the file informed her that it was a theory attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and the only people who understood what that meant were physicists and mathematicians and other folk with oversized brains. The funny thing was—or at least Kay thought it was funny—was that Finley and the Chinaman had no common language and they were “arguing” by exchanging mathematical formulas. At any rate, Finley should have been at home, playing games, playing with numbers, playing with himself.

  Kay tried Finley’s doorknob and the door was locked, so she used the noisy lock picker to open the door. She then pulled out her Glock and pushed open the door with her foot. All the lights were on in the apartment, and she could see Finley from the doorway, sitting upright in a chair. He had blood running down the front of his shirt and a red-black hole in the center of his forehead. She walked over to him, and although she knew she was wasting her time, she touched his throat to feel for a pulse—and Finley fell out of the chair.

  —

  KAY WOKE UP Callahan in D.C. She didn’t know if he’d just gone to bed early or passed out from all the booze he’d consumed. “Finley’s dead,” she said.

  “Goddamnit,” Callahan muttered.

  “He was shot. His body is still warm, so this didn’t happen very long ago. What do you want me to do?”

  “Give me a minute,” Callahan said. “I gotta wake up.” She heard Callahan set the phone down, then heard disgusting noises as he hawked up whatever was in his throat. The next thing she thought she heard was water running as Callahan most likely splashed water on his face.

  Callahan picked up the phone again, and she heard a cigarette lighter click. “Do you see a computer in the place?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Kay said. “There are a dozen computers, and I have no idea what some of the other electronic shit in here does.”

  “Okay. I’m going to get some guys over there and have them box up all the machines. They’ll take them someplace and see if they can find anything useful, although I doubt they’ll find anything. While you’re waiting for the computer guys to get there, play detective. You know, look around and see if you can find a fuckin’ clue, anything that ties Finley to Mercer or Sterling or the op in Afghanistan. I don’t think you’ll find anything, but we gotta look. While you’re doing that, I’m going to have the guys I have following Mercer pick her up.”

  “Where is she right now?” Kay asked. Kay knew that Mercer had claimed her sister was having some sort of mental health problem and she was on her way to see her in Wilmington, North Carolina. When she saw Finley’s body, her first thought had been that Mercer was creating an alibi.

  In answer to Kay’s question, Callahan said, “She’s about fifty miles south of Raleigh. She’s been driving like an old lady. I told the guys following her to stick with her and to see if she’s really going to visit her schizoid sister like she said, but now I’m going to have them pull her over.” Callahan paused and said, “I have this horrible feeling that Mercer’s not going to be in the car they’re following. I’ll call you back.”

  Ten minutes later, Callahan called Kay back. “She wasn’t in the car. A Russian hooker who works for an escort service was driving. Mercer contacted her a month ago. She found her on the Internet and she looks a lot like Mercer, same height, same short hair, and Mercer paid her five grand to drive to North Carolina. The guys I had following Mercer said they saw Mercer’s Mercedes pull out of her garage about three, and since it was Mercer’s car and somebody who looked like Mercer was driving, they assumed it was her. I spoke to Mercer in my office about one this afternoon, and she stayed in her office until two. What she must have done was call the hooker and told her to go to her house, and as soon as Mercer got home, she had the gal get in her car and head south.

  “I’ve got people headed to Mercer’s place right now, but I know she won’t be there. I think while my guys were following the hooker, Mercer took a plane or a train to New York and killed Finley so we wouldn’t be able to question him. And now she’s going to disappear and it’s going to be almost impossible to find her.”

  “Callahan, can you think of anything to say—just one single thing—that might sound the tiniest bit optimistic?”

  “No. I think we’re fucked.”

  Kay didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking about the possibility of Anna Mercer getting away with what she’d done. “Are you sure Dolan is clean?”

  “Yeah. How many times do I have to tell you?” Callahan said.

  “Well, if you’re sure, then call him and tell him to get his ass over here. He can help me search. He knows a lot more about the Afghan operation than I do.”

  “I told you, he quit.”

  “Well, unquit him. Tell him to stop acting like a spoiled rich kid.”

  Callahan hesitated. “All right.”

  “What do I do about Finley?”

  “I don’t know. I gotta think about that,” Callahan said.

  —

  KAY, STILL WEARING GLOVES, wandered through Finley’s apartment, poking into those places she used to poke into when she was working for the DEA and looking for drugs. She probed the dark corners of closets, checked the pockets of coats and jackets, looked inside toilet bowl tanks, under mattresses, and inside the freezer for anything that wasn’t food. She tried not to make too much of a mess, because she knew at some point the NYPD was going to show up and do their own search. That is, the NYPD would show up if Callahan wanted Finley’s body to be discovered.

  She found very little paper in the place: no bills, no checkbook, no tax returns, no books, no newspapers. Finley apparently was one of those people who truly believed in a paperless world and did everything online. She assumed his iPad contained his library and his personal files were in one of his many computers—and she wasn’t about to touch any of the electronics. She could imagine steam hissing out of the computers if she touched a keyboard. She did find his passport, and as near as she could tell, Finley hadn’t left the country in five years. He made one trip to London when he was working for Goldman Sachs. She was thinking about removing the covers on the electrical outlets, when someone rapped softly on the door. She looked through the peephole. It was Eli Dolan.

  He was dressed similar to her—in jeans, a T-shirt, and a lightweight jacket. On his feet were battered Top-Siders, probably what he wore when he went yachting with his rich friends. He looked good, she had to admit, although he needed a shave. In fact, he looked fantastic, and she could feel the heat being generated someplace south of her heart.

  He looked over at Finley’s body, then looked at her, a grim set to his mouth.

  “Look, I’m . . .” Kay had been about to say she was sorry for having doubted him, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, Dolan said, “So I guess you finally decided I’m innocent.” Before she could respond, he continued. “You can’t even imagine how angry I was that you and Callahan suspected me of killing Ara Khan. I’ve worked for Callahan for years, and as for you . . . I thought we meant something to each other.”

  Then she couldn’t help herself, probably because he was acting so pissy and petulant. “Oh, grow up,” she said. “Fifty million bucks was stolen and five—”

  “What do you mean fifty million was stolen?”

  Judging by the look on his face, he apparently, genuinely, didn’t know the fifty million never made
it to Khan’s account. Kay wondered what Callahan had told him. She continued.

  “—and five people were killed. You were a viable suspect and we treated you like one. What else could we do?”

  “You could have trusted me,” Dolan said.

  “We don’t have time for this right now. Callahan is convinced Anna Mercer is the one who orchestrated the Khans’ deaths and stole the money.” Seeing again that he was confused, she quickly explained everything to him: how the money never made it to Sahid Khan’s bank account, Callahan’s logic for concluding Mercer and Sterling were the guilty parties, and how Callahan had locked in on Finley as Mercer’s helper.

  When she finished, he said, “I can’t believe Anna would do this.”

  “Well, Callahan’s sure she did, but he’d still like some proof. Some guys are going to be here soon to pick up all the computer equipment, but I thought, since you knew Finley and were intimately involved in the Afghan op, that maybe you’d be able to spot something searching the place.”

  “I didn’t know Finley,” Dolan said, and she could see him tightening up, thinking he was being accused of something else. God, he was sensitive.

  “He worked at Goldman Sachs the same time you were there,” Kay said. “He was a quant.”

  “Goldman employed more than thirty thousand people, worldwide, when I was there. I didn’t work with all of them.”

  “He was in the New York office,” Kay said.

  “I didn’t know him,” Dolan said with an edge to his voice.

  “Okay. Fine. I believe you,” Kay said. “But Callahan thinks that one of the reasons Mercer picked Finley to help her was because there was a connection between you and him—namely, that you both had the same employer. That wouldn’t be proof that you worked with Finley to steal the money, but it would be another brick in the wall.”

  “All right,” Dolan said, but Kay wasn’t sure what that meant: All right, all is forgiven or All right, I’ll work with you for now?

  They searched together for another thirty minutes but had no more luck than Kay did searching alone. They were interrupted by a knock on the door, and Kay was praying it was the computer movers and not the police. It was.

  Two burly guys and one not-so-burly guy entered the loft carrying stacks of collapsed cardboard boxes. The not-so-burly one acted as if Kay and Dolan weren’t even in the room and started unhooking the cables and power cords from all the machines; when he was finished, his teammates loaded the boxes. After all the big items were loaded, he walked around picking up smaller things: flash drives, standalone hard drives, and discs. When those were collected, he did a lap around the apartment holding a black box in his hand.

  “What’s that?” Kay asked.

  “I’m looking for electronic noise signatures to see if there’s something not in plain sight.” Two minutes later, he said, “There’s nothing else. You’re to call Callahan when we’re gone.”

  Kay did. “We’re done here,” she told Callahan. “Dolan and I didn’t find anything, and all the machines are gone. What’s next?”

  “I don’t know,” Callahan said.

  “Did Mercer split like you thought?”

  “Yeah. She’s gone. She wasn’t at her house, and we can’t find her via the GPS chip in her cell phone, which means she’s ditched the phone. And there’s something else we found in her house, and I gotta tell you, this really freaked me out. We found Scarlett.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kay said. “So what if she left the cat?”

  “She didn’t leave it, she killed it. Mercer gave her an injection of pentobarbital, the same thing vets use to euthanize pets. I mean, talk about cold-blooded. I always thought she loved that animal. I guess she figured it would be too much of a hassle to take it with her if she was on the run, but instead of letting it go . . .”

  Kay had to admit she was shocked by what Mercer had done, but she didn’t have time to think about Scarlett. She wanted to get out of Finley’s apartment. “What do we do about Finley?” she asked.

  “Call the cops. An anonymous call. Do it on the way to the airport. I want you and Eli back here in D.C. I need you to help me figure out how to find Anna.”

  “What if he won’t come?”

  “Just ask him, Hamilton. If he says no, then tell him thanks for his help and come back by yourself. I’m not expecting you to kidnap the guy.”

  —

  EARLIER THAT EVENING—while Kay Hamilton and Eli Dolan were searching Rodger Finley’s apartment—a chubby-faced blond woman wearing red-framed glasses and sturdy shoes boarded an Air Canada flight to Geneva.

  She took a seat in first class, and as they were waiting for the lemmings in coach to board, a flight attendant asked, “Would you care for a glass of champagne, Ms. Murdock?”

  In an upper-class British accent, Ms. Murdock replied, “Yes, that would be lovely, dear.”

  36 | Kay and Eli didn’t speak during the cab ride to the charter jet terminal at JFK. They sat in the backseat, as far away from each other as they could get. She didn’t know what Eli was thinking about—and she didn’t feel like asking him. She figured he was sulking because she still hadn’t apologized for suspecting him. When she’d asked him to accompany her to D.C. to help Callahan, all he’d said was “Yeah, okay.”

  Kay didn’t know what to do about him. She was still attracted to him. And now that she was sure that he hadn’t killed Ara Khan, she knew if she wanted to rekindle what they once had she was going to have to apologize for ever having doubted him. And maybe a simple apology wouldn’t be enough. But right now wasn’t the right time to decide anything. They didn’t speak on the short flight on the chartered jet to D.C., either. Kay was asleep before the jet taxied out onto the runway.

  Callahan was waiting for them in his office. He wasn’t dressed in one of his wrinkled gray suits, but instead wore baggy blue jeans and a Notre Dame sweatshirt so faded from repeated washings you could barely read the name of the school. He was, however, wearing the same battered loafers he usually wore with his suits, this time sans socks. His ankles were the color of skim milk and looked like they might be swollen.

  “Well, we really fucked this up” were his first words to Eli and Kay after they took a seat on the brown couch in front of his desk.

  Kay almost said: What do you mean we, white man—but didn’t see the point.

  “I now have all the proof I need that Anna and Nathan Sterling conspired to kill the Khans, so now it’s just a matter of finding Anna and taking care of Sterling.”

  “What proof do you have?” Kay said. “All we found in New York was Finley’s corpse, and we didn’t find any connection to Mercer.”

  Callahan lit a cigarette, ignoring the look of displeasure on Hamilton’s face. “Mercer ditching her surveillance team was all the proof I needed. The fact that Finley, one of the few people who could have helped her pull this off, is killed at the same time she disappears . . . Well, I don’t need anything else. I told you before that I wasn’t looking for evidence that would stand up in court.”

  “But we don’t know that she personally killed Finley,” Kay said. “Maybe she has someone helping her.”

  “I don’t think so. Anna wouldn’t have wanted any more partners, and she was in New York tonight.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve been busy while you were in New York not finding anything. I had Homeland check flights to see if she flew to New York, and also asked them to check surveillance cameras in Penn Station in case she took the train.”

  “How did you get Homeland to do that for you?” Kay asked.

  “Don’t ask me questions like that, Hamilton. Anyway, Mercer took the five o’clock Amtrak to New York and arrived there at seven forty-five. She didn’t buy the ticket under her own name, so I don’t know what name she’s using, but the cameras in Penn Station saw her getting
off the train. Which means she was in New York before you found Finley’s body.”

  “Do you have any idea where she might be right now?” Kay asked.

  “No. I had Homeland check passenger manifests for flights leaving New York, and she wasn’t on any of them—at least, not using her own name. The problem is, she could easily get a fake ID. TSA has her photo and is looking at surveillance footage in the New York airports, but it’s probably going to be hours before I hear back from them. And for all I know, she didn’t take a plane out of New York. Maybe she rented a car and drove into Canada. She could be anywhere.”

  “And the proof that she was working with Sterling?” Kay said.

  “Like I told you, after Mercer’s surveillance team discovered they were following the wrong woman, I sent guys over to her house. One of the first things they found, in addition to Scarlett’s corpse—I still can’t believe she did that—was a burner cell phone under her bed. Now, her bedroom was a mess, clothes strewn all over the place, like she went home and rushed around like crazy, packing as fast as she could to get away, and while she was doing all this rushing around, the phone fell out of a pocket or something and got kicked under the bed.

  “But I know that’s bullshit. I know she didn’t panic. She sat in her office for an hour after I last talked to her, and she made the arrangement with the hooker to drive her car south a month ago. I think she left the phone there on purpose.”

  “So what’s the significance of the phone?” Kay asked.

  “There was only one number in the contacts list, and according to the cell phone provider, that phone is currently in Fairmount, West Virginia, where Sterling lives. That’s good enough for me.”

  “The phone could belong to someone working for Sterling,” Kay said. “You know, someone else who lives in Fairmount.” She was starting to sound like a defense lawyer, which wasn’t a role she normally assumed.

  “It’s Sterling’s,” Callahan said.

  “Well, you could prove that by calling the phone number. If Sterling answers, you say you dialed the wrong number. But that way you’ll know for sure it’s Sterling.”