Cries of the Lost (31 page)

Domingo:

Funds in question have been removed by an unauthorized and unidentified party. Checked with my friend, who obtained confirmation. Guidance, please.

Joselito

Part of me took pleasure in seeing my scenario validated, the rest was appalled at what those vapid, innocuous words actually described.

Joselito:

Learn more.

Domingo

Domingo:

Friend describes American male and Japanese female working for Rodrigo.

Joselito

This pissed off Domingo.

Joselito:

Not working for Rodrigo!

Domingo

Domingo:

Apologies. Friend claims otherwise. Please call.

Joselito

“Swell,” I said to myself.

Domingo:

Friend thanked me for new information. Has returned the favor. Please call.

Joselito

The subject line went dormant nearly up to the current time, when one last exchange occurred.

Domingo:

As discussed, have deployed friends to intercept American male and Japanese woman.

Joselito

I called Natsumi into the room and showed her the string.

“They don’t know where we are,” she said, getting right to the point.

“They don’t. But I’m feeling less invisible every day.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m going to call Shelly. Stick around.”

When he answered, I put him on speakerphone.

“Are we still on truce status?” I asked.

“As far as I’m concerned.”

“Can you tell me the Bureau’s theory on me?”

“Not without more from you.”

I took a deep breath and decided on the spot to put a lot of trust in a guy who had very little trust in me.

“There’s a Spanish corporate security expert living in New York named Joselito Gorrotxategi. He’s a forensic accountant and a veteran of Interpol and the Guardia Civil in Spain. He’s also working for what I believe is an underground element of that same organization called
Los Vengadores del Guardia,
The Guard’s Avengers. Probably with the help of your mole, he learned about Florencia Cathcart’s Grand Cayman account and traced the laundering scheme back to the agency. Ergo Damien Brandt.”

“You can prove all this,” he said.

“Don’t know. I have all the data on his computer, and I’ve installed monitoring software and a listening bug. Won’t be able to benefit from the last two until Joselito gets back from Connecticut. I think tomorrow.”

It took Shelly a few moments to respond.

“Inadmissible,” he said.

“Since when did you people care about that? Anyway, I’m asking you not to bust him until things play out a little more. And if possible, put a muzzle on that idiot at the Bureau.”

“What else do you have?” he asked.

“Your turn.”

He huffed into the phone, but gave me something anyway.

“Natsumi Fitzgerald was in the Cayman Islands with a male Caucasian, medium height, black hair and moustache—probably false—forty to fifty years old. They took possession of material left in a safe-deposit box that the foreign service of the FBI suspected had links to a European terrorist organization. A couple matching the same description was involved very recently in a shooting in the Lake Como region of Italy, where two members of that organization were killed.”

Natsumi took my shirt sleeve and squeezed. I patted her hand.

“What about those Chilean banks?” I asked.

“A pass-through to an account in Madrid is connected to that same organization. Shut down right before we got there, with all the funds withdrawn and untraceable. That’s all you get.”

“Not the name of the organization?”

He didn’t like that.

“There’s a very strong opinion around here that you’re the male Caucasian. You’re clever, but not invincible. Important people are getting very interested in you. You can’t imagine the shit storm I’m holding back. I can’t protect you when national security is involved.”

“Aquitanos Unidos,”
I said.

More dead air, then, “You piss me off in a very tangible and specific way,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”

He hung up.

“I’m becoming a serious liability,” said Natsumi. “It’s the Japanese thing. Can’t get away from it. You can slide in and out of these situations without notice because you look like everybody else. You’re Mr. Average Western Dude. Unless we can move this operation to Tokyo, I’ll always stick out like a sore thumb.”

“What are you saying?”

“It would be better for you if we split up,” she said.

“No, it wouldn’t. It would be the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

“Seeing your wife murdered, getting shot in the head and suffering through an agonizing recovery was the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

“Okay, it’s a tie.”

She smiled at me and cupped my chin in her hand.

“I love you, Arthur, but you’re not the beat-up mess of a man I first met. You’re so much better. You’re tougher and more energetic than ninety percent of the men in the world, even if you limp a little and occasionally bump into things. You have the most ferociously brilliant mind I’ve ever come close to knowing, even if you talk to yourself all the time. You probably have a touch of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but nobody’s perfect. Though I think you might be perfect for me. I mean, you’ve saved my life more times than I can count. But now I’m afraid I’m going to lose yours. I couldn’t survive that.”

She was speaking in her regular, slightly melodious lilt, but her eyes looked watery. It made my chest tighten and throat choke in a very unfamiliar way.

“No,” I said, “we end this now and go to ground. We still can, relatively easily. Go to Hawaii, the Big Island. Loads of whites and Asians all mushed up together. Get a little tan, they’ll all think you’re Polynesian. I’ll pack while you get the car. We can fly to the West Coast and figure it out from there.”

I jumped up, but she grabbed my shirt and dragged me back down.

“You don’t want to do this,” she said.

“Oh, yes I do. There is nothing more important in the world to me than you. You’re right, I’m OCD. More than a little. And you’re my number-one obsession. As long as you’ll have me, I will stick to you like epoxy.”

“Epoxy? That’s a lot stronger than glue,” she said.

“Unbreakable.”

A tear wandered out of her right eye. She briskly wiped her face with the back of her sleeve.

“I liked the life I had before,” she said. “I wasn’t unhappy, mostly because I didn’t know any better. Looking back, I was mostly asleep. Comfortably, blithely unaware. From the moment I fled into your mad orbit, I’ve been awake. Wide-eyed aware. Every sense engaged, every nerve attuned. You don’t understand. I want this. It’s a decision, not a consequence. We have to see this through.”

Then she got up and went back into the other room, leaving me and the lump in my throat alone in the near darkness.

C
HAPTER
19

J
oselito was a hard worker, I had to give him that.

As soon as he was back on the job, his email was filled with correspondence, all relating to his consulting business. Most of it involved nailing employees who were diverting revenue into their personal accounts or pumping up expense reports, or disguising bribes to foreign officials as legitimate fees.

Despite myself, I began to admire Joselito’s skills, both investigatory and diplomatic. Many of his quarries were family men and women on trysts, and otherwise competent executives only dabbling in petty corruption, the type that barely warrants mention. In most cases, he sold his clients on shutting down their employees’ illicit side projects without further recourse or penalty.

For certain clients, however, he suggested more corporal remedies, though in highly euphemistic terms. If I didn’t know Joselito better, I would have missed that interpretation. Likewise, there was nothing in the email record that showed how he executed these assignments, but I eventually found out through the audio bug.

“This is Joselito,” he said one evening, in English. There was quiet for a moment, then, “That’s right. I have a new gig for you.”

Aside from a few naughty chats with Mirsada, this was the first phone call I’d heard.

“Selma Lizaran. No, her husband’s the target. He had the chance to make his overdue contribution, with interest. Been dragging his feet. He’ll pick up the pace if she comes home from the gym with a few broken ribs and a pair of black eyes.” Pause. “No, nothing permanent. Just make sure she knows why. Should make for good dinner-time conversation.”

I’
D
LEARNED
how to take control of Joselito’s computers by pulling off a similar trick at Florencia’s insurance agency after she’d been killed. I’d kept all the secret tunnels into her agency’s computers intact, seeing no reason not to.

On an educated whim, I went into Florencia’s financial management program and rummaged around the tax records. This took some fortitude, because even a data-wonk like me can be pummeled into submission by pages of Excel documents filled with long columns of double-entry accounting.

I realized, finally, that I was in the wrong application, and I kicked myself when I switched over and found the prize almost immediately, under the heading “Online Tax Filing Numbers, Federal and State.”

And there it was. The insurance agency’s corporate U.S. Federal Employer Identification Number. The same as United Aquitania.

I brought up the code from the Grand Cayman safe-deposit box and copied the coordinates for the safe house in New York City, then pasted them into the marine navigation program.

The pin landed on United Aquitania’s headquarters on Spring Street.

I called to Natsumi in the other room.

“It’s dinner time,” I said. “I’m thinking Soho.”

W
E
LEFT
the cab and walked into a cool rainy evening. I trod carefully, still not a hundred percent sure of my balance or the sturdiness of my wounded leg. Natsumi kept a grip on my arm, as she always did.

Spring Street was in transition mode, with people getting home from work uneasily sharing the sidewalk with the early dinner crowd. The first looked grim and eager, the second relieved and optimistic. Natsumi and I were our usual selves, watchful and contained.

I wasn’t surprised that the building that housed United Aquitania was impenetrable from the street. A brass plate filled with door buzzers gave away nothing. Looking through the glass outer doors, I could see mailboxes and a broad staircase and little else.

We went across the street to assess video surveillance options, but they were scarce. Unlike the cloistered warrens of a London mews, or the wild countryside around Lake Como, Soho was not a place a regular civilian could implant video cameras unnoticed.

We went back across the street and stood around waiting for someone to enter the building. The wait could have been forever, but fortunately less than an hour later, a very short woman with curly magenta hair wearing a leather jacket and sporting a very large diamond stud in her nose pushed between us and stuck a key in the glass door.

I asked her if she knew the people in the building. She whipped around with her hand still holding the key in the door and asked me what the fuck I wanted to know for.

“We want to find a fucking friend of ours,” said Natsumi. “He’s supposed to be working in this building, but we don’t see the name of the company.”

“What’s the company?” the woman asked.

“United Aquitania,” said Natsumi.

“Never heard of it. There’s somebody on the fifth floor, same as me,” said the woman, pointing to an unlabeled buzzer. “No name anywhere, but sometimes they have junk mail lying on the floor outside the door. Being a professional busybody, I notice that it gets cleared away by the next day,” she added.

“You ever see anyone coming or going?” I asked.

She looked at me a long time with a flat-faced, steady stare. “You don’t have a friend,” she said. “You’re casing the place.”

I had to remind myself we were in New York, a city where bullshit better be gold plated, or forget about it.