by Sara Rosett
“The government thought it was my fault.”
“You know what bureaucracy is like, Jack. Someone had to go down. You were it—the lowest man on the totem pole, a perfect scapegoat. But you, of all people, should know that bureaucratic paperwork doesn’t mean crap.”
“She was my responsibility.” Jack’s voice was low and unyielding.
Roy’s sigh was audible even to Zoe standing several feet away. “Just don’t let it ruin your life, Jack. It happened, but it wasn’t your fault. Try to get your head around that.”
There was a long silence, and Zoe decided she’d probably eavesdropped long enough. She walked outside and Jack stood up immediately. “We should go,” he said to Roy, then turned to Zoe. “Roy says the cruise ships come in today, and the hotels will be packed. We’ve got to get into town and find a hotel before it gets too late.”
Roy offered to let them stay with him, but Jack turned him down, saying they were better off if they kept moving. Roy nodded his agreement.
“Thanks for the food and...well, everything,” Zoe said.
“You bet,” Roy said as the cat curled through his legs.
“Tomorrow?” Jack asked.
Roy nodded. “Piazza dei Martiri.”
Naples, Italy
Monday, 2:22 a.m.
ZOE rolled over and looked at the clock. Two in the morning. She checked her watch. No wonder she felt wide-awake. It was seven in the evening in Dallas. She pushed her pillow around and tried to relax. She could hear Jack’s shallow breathing, slow and steady, from the other twin bed. After the meeting with Roy, jet lag had hit her like an anvil. She’d dozed in the car as Jack navigated into Naples. She had been awake enough to haul herself up the two narrow flights of stairs to their hotel room, then she had collapsed onto her twin bed.
Jack had probably followed the recommendations for fighting jet lag listed in the in-flight magazine and stayed awake as long as he could in the new time zone to get his body acclimated. Either that or he’d taken a sleeping pill, but she knew he avoided taking even an aspirin, so she couldn’t really see him popping sleeping pills. He probably willed himself to sleep, Zoe thought sourly. He was so freakishly self-disciplined he probably could make himself drop off into REM whenever he wanted.
She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. The last few days replayed in an endless loop like a slideshow: the swiftly moving water of Deep Creek, Connor’s still body, the wide open sky during the drive to Vegas, the shock of realizing Jack was alive, the panic she’d felt when she saw their photo online. Were they still in the news? She thought of Roy’s house and Jack’s face—a picture of disappointment at the news this Costa guy was long gone.
What would they do now? She’d been so sleepy then that she couldn’t process what the news meant, but now as she stared at the ceiling, she realized they were at a dead end. Not that their plan was all that stellar to begin with. She’d been so worried about getting out of Vegas sans handcuffs that she hadn’t really questioned Jack about how Roy could help them.
Remembering Jack’s distressed expression when Roy told him about Costa, which he’d quickly managed to hide, she guessed that Jack had expected Roy to contact his buddies at the CIA and explain that Connor’s death was related to an old assignment. But it wasn’t. And Roy didn’t appear to have copious contacts that he could exploit to get them out of their situation.
What would they do now? Go back to the States? Her stomach clinched at the thought. She was sure that the FBI pair hadn’t stopped looking for them. And Mr. Stubby Guy, whoever he was, hadn’t seemed like the type to just give up and go away either. After about twenty minutes, she slid out of bed, picked up her messenger bag from where she’d dumped it on the floor, and slipped into the bathroom. They’d been on the move since the plane had landed and she’d fallen into bed without so much as washing her face. She took a quick shower, which felt heavenly, then wrapped herself in the cotton waffle-weave robe hanging on the back of the door.
The hotel wasn’t a deluxe, five-star hotel with fluffy bathrobes and fresh flowers. It was more low-key, a place in the busy area near the port with about twelve rooms. No room service or concierge, but Zoe didn’t care. Their room had crisp sheets, was sparkling clean, and they had plenty of hot water, which checked all the boxes for her.
She put the toilet seat down and perched there, using the small counter surrounding the sink for a desk as she removed everything from her messenger bag. Since it didn’t look like Roy would be able to help, their only option was to go back to Connor’s death and figure out why he’d been targeted.
She put the spreadsheets they’d salvaged from Connor’s apartment, his black journal, and the photos in one pile. Her meager stash of emergency repair makeup went in another. If she’d known how long she would be gone, she certainly would have brought more than mascara, concealer, and lip-gloss. Heck, she’d even have thrown in a few changes of clothes or at least underwear she thought, throwing a glance at the underwear she’d washed out before her shower and hung to dry on the bathroom’s small radiator.
Sunglasses, breath mints, a few crumpled tissues, a hair clip, and her wallet with her true identity went on the other side of the sink along with the Irena passport. The rolls of money that had been so fat when she first pulled them from their hiding places were looking a little depleted.
She flattened the bills and counted the money. Four hundred seventeen euros. She folded the bills in half length-wise and bit her lower lip. That wasn’t much. She hoped Jack had pre-paid for the hotel room with the euros they’d already exchanged.
What were they going to do when they were out of cash? It wasn’t as if they could waltz up to an ATM and withdraw cash from their checking accounts back in the US and, even if they could do that, she didn’t have that much in her checking account to begin with. Maybe two hundred dollars. On a good day.
She had already cashed the check from Kiki, but she’d used most of it, paying for gas to get to Vegas, then for food, and supplies for their makeover session. Except for fourteen cents and a single petrified stick of gum, that was it—all her resources.
She took a deep breath and pulled the stack of papers they’d lifted from Connor’s house toward her. First, she looked through Connor’s black journal page by page. She didn’t have any spare paper, so she made notes on toilet paper. Fortunately, the hotel had provided toilet paper with less than Charmin-like qualities. It was more like tissue paper. She listed all Connor’s travel, arranging it by date and noting city airport codes. LVS had to be Las Vegas. It was always his first stop. He’d spend a few days, sometimes only one day, before leaving for other cities. There were a smattering of places he’d visited, and she recognized most of them, like Atlanta and Chicago. There were a few she could distinguish from the hotel info that was included with each listing.
Thank goodness Connor didn’t embrace new technologies. Of course, he probably didn’t want to risk keeping his travel reservations on his office computer in case Jack or even Sharon used it for some reason. He could have used the old computer in the apartment in Las Vegas to make his travel reservations or some anonymous Internet café to plan his travel. Didn’t matter, Zoe thought as she jotted the last of the airport codes and dates. She recognized or was able to work out almost all of the codes, except for one. Where was VCE?
It was his most frequent destination in the last few months, and there was only one address associated with it, a street called Calle delle Botteghe, which sounded Italian or Spanish to her. She tapped her pen against the toilet paper. They’d have to find an Internet café of their own to look up the city codes and the street name. There were a few names associated with the cities, but none with the VCE notations. There were also a few random lists of mundane household things like milk, cereal, and plastic spoons. She skipped over those, but paused at one of the last lists.
Contacts
Wig/hair die
Fake tan
Other than the fact that Connor hadn’t paid at
tention during the homophone lesson at school, Zoe noticed that the first two items on the list were written in blue ink and the slant of the letters were more pronounced that the letters of the last item on the list, which was written in pencil. It looked like he’d written the first two items, then added the last item later. Was he planning some sort of disguise? She shook her head. All their slouching through airport security and worry about the Internet video had her paranoid. She had disguises on the brain. Why would he plan to change his appearance?
There was a set of numbers scrunched on the last line, 13.4.75.1.6.10. Zoe frowned at them. More numbers. She was beginning to hate numbers, and she’d never had an aversion to them before. She hadn’t disliked math in school like some of her friends, but all these numbers floating around without a code or key or some way to explain them...well, they were beginning to annoy her. She supposed that if you took out the periods they might be a phone number? Not an amount of money—there were too many periods. Not an address. Maybe an account number? GPS coordinates? Lock combinations? She sighed. There were too many possibilities.
She tore off her toilet paper list, which resembled more of a scroll at this point, and tucked it into the black journal.
She moved to the printouts of spreadsheets. She’d tried to make sense of them on the airplane, but the print was so tiny and she’d been so jumpy that she hadn’t made much progress. Instead of reading everything straight through, she tried a new approach and sorted them by date. Although the columns weren’t headed with titles, she’d worked out that the first column in each spreadsheet was a date. After about twenty minutes, she felt as if her eyes were beginning to cross. There were some duplicate pages, which kept throwing her off. She sorted those into stacks, blinking and opening her eyes wide, fighting off a returning wave of sleepiness. She checked her watch. Only three a.m. She could still get a couple more hours sleep, but the stack was almost sorted, so she pressed on. If she ever had insomnia, she now knew reading spreadsheets would put her out in a couple of minutes flat. She struggled through the last pages, tossing them in the correct piles and then quietly tiptoed back to bed.
BURROWED deep in the covers, it was the aroma of coffee that woke her. She pried one eye open—it still felt like the middle of the night, despite the sun blazing through the parted curtain—and focused on a paper cup on the nightstand. She struggled into a sitting position and consulted her watch. No wonder she felt like it was the middle of the night—it was the middle of the night back in the Midwest. She took a cautious sip of the coffee and noticed Jack sitting on the end of the matching twin bed, his head bent over the spreadsheets.
“Hey, you kept those in order, didn’t you?” she asked. “I worked hard on that last night.”
He shot a look at her over his shoulder. “You always were cranky in the morning,” he said in a neutral tone. “Have some more coffee. Yes, I kept everything in order. There’s food in the bag, too.” He went back to the spreadsheets.
Zoe opened the bag on the nightstand and found a warm chocolate croissant. Light and flaky and rich with dark chocolate, she decided it was the best breakfast she’d ever had. When she emerged from the bathroom, dressed in her freshly hand-washed clothes, Jack was flipping back and forth through the pages at a frantic pace. “What is it?”
He ignored her. Pages fluttered through his fingers until he stopped abruptly, his hands going slack. Zoe caught the stacks before they slid to the ground. “Watch it.”
“Two sets. He had two sets, the bastard.”
Zoe tapped the edges of the sheets to straighten them. “What?”
“Connor. He had two sets of books.” He strode away, then back. “The number and letter codes were abbreviations for our clients.”
Zoe slowly sat down across from him on her bed. “Of course. The two sets of dates. I thought he’d printed the same spreadsheet twice.”
Jack rubbed his hand down over his face and stopped when it covered his mouth as if to keep his words internalized. Zoe scanned down the two top sheets, comparing columns of numbers. The differences weren’t huge, but they were there. “Subtle enough that you wouldn’t catch it.”
“I couldn’t catch it if I never saw the real numbers,” Jack said as he stood and paced to the window. “No wonder he was always doing the books on his laptop and the files were never available.” He hit the window frame with the open palm of his hand. “I should have seen it. I should have picked up on it. I should have done more than just glance at the accounts.”
“I don’t see how you could have. Connor handled all the money and the accounts, right?”
“I should have realized something was up when Sharon offered to update the accounts receivable, and Connor brushed her off. He never passed up the opportunity to avoid work.”
“You can’t beat yourself up about not realizing Connor wasn’t honest with you. Most people don’t assume their business partner is embezzling money.”
“But he did,” Jack said, pushing away from the window. “And there’s nothing in there that shows where the millions came from. Even his second account didn’t have that kind of money in it.”
Zoe didn’t have an answer for that, so she said, “Did you see this?” She held up her toilet paper list, which unfurled down to her feet.
The frustration and self-recrimination was still there in his expression, but it went down a notch. “No, I thought it was your list to Santa, and I didn’t want to peek.”
She rolled her eyes, but was glad to see his mood lighten a bit. “The only thing I want from Santa is to not be one of the most interesting people to the FBI. Or to be shot at again,” she added. “It was the only paper I had. Do you know if Connor traveled to these places?”
Jack took the list. “Most of these are legit, as far as I know,” he said with a flare of an eyebrow. “I think we have contacts and accounts in these cities, but maybe that was all a smoke screen, too.”
“What about VCE?”
“That one I don’t know, but we can find out.”
Chapter Seventeen
Naples
Monday, 10:25 a.m.
AS Zoe and Jack emerged from the hotel into the narrow cobblestoned street, the desk clerk, who was washing down the front steps called, “Ciao.” Jack replied, then took her hand and led her down the steeply declining street. Zoe had been so tired when they’d arrived that she hadn’t taken in much about their surroundings.
Buildings painted pale lemon, light tan, even salmon pink towered five, six, sometimes seven stories high on each side of the street, creating a dim, canyon-like feel. Laundry dangled from balconies, and wires crisscrossed the tiny band of blue sky above. Peeling advertisement flyers pasted to the walls warred with graffiti and street signs for attention. Car horns, the buzz of mopeds, and the steady drone of some sort of drill filled the air.
“This goes to the Via Chiaia, a pedestrian shopping street,” Jack said as a small car approached. Her knowledge of Italy centered on tourist highlights of the major cities, mostly Rome, Florence, and Venice along with information on the easiest ways to get around the country. While the guidebooks she worked on had sections about Naples and other cities, they were brief. Jack had lived here. This was his territory, and she was glad to let him take the lead.
They shrunk toward a pink building, and Zoe found herself nose to nose with—inexplicably—an image of Yoda on an advertising poster plastered to the wall as the car edged passed them. A second later, a moped whipped around the corner and buzzed by them. The driver of the moped held a kid of about three braced between his arms. Under the pink helmet, the kid had a pacifier in her mouth.
They resumed walking, and a few blocks later, Jack said, “Here we are.” He pushed open the door to a shop with the words “Internet Point” above it. Zoe blinked, adjusting to the dimness of the room then headed for an open computer, climbing up on a tall barstool positioned under a high counter. Jack paid at another counter, then joined her. She quickly logged on and brought up a searc
h engine, selected English as the language, then typed in the airport code.
“Marco Polo Airport in Venice,” Jack read, his voice baffled.
Zoe sat back, her chin in her hand. “You didn’t know he went there?”
“No. No clue at all. My standard answer lately it seems,” he said bitterly.
“What do you think he was doing?”
“I don’t know. Venice is a tourist town. We didn’t have business prospects there.”
“This isn’t the first time Venice has come up. The glass paperweights are from there.”
“But we ordered those online. There was no need to go there. It must have been personal.”
“Let’s see if this street is in Venice.” She typed in Calle delle Botteghe along with the word “Venice” and hit enter. Zoe clicked on one of the results, and a map popped up with the street pinpointed near the sinuous curve of the Grand Canal. “Street of Shops,” Zoe read the translation then pointed to a hotel icon near the pinpoint. “I bet that’s where he stayed, Hotel Art Deco. I remember that name from his journal.”
Zoe’s fingers did a gentle tap dance on the keys, but she didn’t push any buttons. “It’s got to be important. Should we go there?”
“Not until I hear from Roy.”
Zoe swiveled on the barstool, and her knees bumped against Jack’s thighs. He shifted back an inch. “Sorry,” Zoe said and forcefully ignored the thoughts shooting through her mind about how weird it was that she was hyper aware that her legs were so close to his. She’d lived in the same house with this man and never once thought about his thighs during the last year.
Mentally, she told herself to focus. “Jack,” she said, looking up into his face, “I don’t know if Roy is going to be able to help us. He didn’t seem very...confident.”
“I know,” Jack said, “but he might surprise us. He’s done it before. We’ll meet him tonight and then decide what to do next.”
