Secretive (14 page)

“But I like the stars and the cold doesn’t bother me. Remember, I wanted to go somewhere where it felt like winter.”

“I do not understand this fondness for the cold. The sun, yes. Longing for warmth makes sense, but not this,” he said, raising her pink fingers. He chaffed his hands over hers, then said, “I had Ernesto build a fire in the drawing room. I will be back shortly.” She walked a few steps, but turned to him when he called her name.

His eyebrows lowered over his squinting eyes, he asked, “Michigan?”

“Not even close.” She threw him a flirty smile before she resumed walking. She knew better than to ask what he was going to do.

She entered the drawing room and warmed her hands at the fire for a moment, then reached in her pocket for a cigarette. She needed another one. Her plans had been smashed beyond repair, after all. She patted her coat pocket and realized she must have left her lighter on the stone parapet. She retraced her steps to the top of the castle, hurried through the door and onto the wall walk. Her lighter rested on the stone. She picked it up and turned to go, but a flicker of movement in the car park caught her attention.

She frowned. It was Costa, moving quickly through the cars. Was he leaving? He opened the trunk of the black Mercedes, removed a box, then closed the trunk and perched on the bumper as he opened the box and removed something. The lighting was too dim for Anna to see what it was, but after working with it a few moments, he transferred to the driver’s seat and turned on the lights to the car, but didn’t start the engine.

Anna leaned on the parapet and tried to quiet her breathing. He’d left the driver’s door open. One foot rested on the ground outside the car as he worked with whatever he’d taken out of the box. Because he was directly below her, she couldn’t see him. The roof of the car blocked him from her view, but his words floated up to her through the clear night air.

“I do not like phone calls,” he said, his tone matching the icy air. After a moment, he said, “Lost her?”

She couldn’t make out his next words, but she could tell he was angry. Finally, he said, “Leave it. Forget about her. Did you take care of the loose end? What about the package? Do you have it? Good. Then get back here. Tonight.” His voice had softened as he spoke, and Anna leaned over at the waist to hear him. Costa was one of those people who didn’t get louder when he got angry—he got quieter. She’d learned that it was best to avoid him when he spoke as he did now.

She swallowed, suddenly aware of her precarious position. She was careful not to bump any lose stone that might alert him. His words were barely a whisper as he said, “Do not lose anything else.”

The growl of the car engine filled the night. Costa got out of the car, placed the cell phone beneath the front tire, then backed over it. He threw the car into park. Before he’d turned the car off, Anna had pushed through the thick wooden door.

––––––––

Z
OE and Jack had enough cash to buy the night train tickets, but had to purchase one of the more expensive deluxe two-bed sleepers because it was all that was left. Once in their compartment, Zoe tossed her messenger bag on one of the two seats and took out Bent’s laptop. “So let me see these email accounts.”

He opened two windows that had been minimized.

The first account had a mix of emails with most addressed to Bent Consulting and only a few to Ares. “I don’t know much about what a computer expert in cyber security does, but these emails to Bent Consulting look fairly normal.” She skimmed through the subject lines, which contained an invitation to speak at a cyber security conference, an interview request from a London newspaper, and follow-up questions from an inspector about a case on which Bent had been consulted. One with the name Costa in the subject line caught her attention. In reply to a query on tracing an IP address, Bent had written, “Nothing—sorry. No go on addy. I’ll keep looking. Don’t hold out hope.”

Zoe switched to the emails addressed to Ares, the one with the address Nico had given her. She squinted at the email address, [email protected]. She looked up quickly. “Hey, I get it. Sera is Ares spelled backward.”

Jack tilted his head. “You’re right. I hadn’t noticed that.”

“That’s about all I can figure out about these.” Zoe couldn’t decipher the replies. They looked like gibberish—just numbers and letters without spaces. She supposed it could be some sort of code, or maybe the bodies of the emails were encrypted.

She switched to the other email account. After a few seconds of scrolling and clicking, she looked up. “There aren’t any emails in this account at all. Nothing sent or received.”

Jack put her small rolling suitcase in the rack above the door. “Check the drafts folder,” he said over his shoulder.

There were messages—plenty of messages.

“Why would someone compose draft emails, but never send them?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, but went back to reading the emails.

Jack leaned against the window. “Because someone else had the log-in info for the email account. That way, two people could each read and reply to the emails without actually sending them. It’s a common technique to avoid someone intercepting emails. Terror groups use it. Teenagers, too.” His face worried her. There had been a brief lull when they were getting the tickets and finding the train that he’d looked normal, but now he was back to being stressed. She could tell there was something bad in the rest of the emails.

The communication was hard to follow because there were no names in the headings and the subject lines were often blank, but there was a definite feel of an exchange between two different people. One person sent short abrupt commands in full sentences with correct grammar and punctuation. The other person replied in short phrases and used abbreviations and punctuation haphazardly, a copy editor’s nightmare. “This one with the choppy phrases and abbreviations is probably Bent,” Zoe said. “The style is similar to his other emails, the ones he signed with his Bent Consulting email signature.”

“I agree,” Jack said.

“So who is the officious Mr. Proper Grammar?”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Who do you think?”

“No, not Costa.”

“The tone fits what I’ve seen of Costa’s business correspondence. The info I collected in Germany has a similar style.” The train pulled out of the station as he spoke, but neither one of them was interested in looking at the city lights as they left Paris.

“But lots of people use a formal tone in business. Aren’t you stretching a bit? Seeing Costa everywhere? Wouldn’t it be too much of a coincidence?”

“No, it would be a neat little circle that I can see Costa working to his advantage. Costa pays off the leading consultant who’s supposed to help the police track him. In his position, Bent could keep the investigation away from Costa, or if he couldn’t do that, then he could at least keep Costa appraised about how close the police were to him.”

“And that would allow Costa to stay one step ahead of the investigators,” Zoe acknowledged. “It would explain how he’s always just slipping out of their reach.”

“Keep reading. I think you’ll agree with me by the time you get to the end of the draft emails.”

She scanned the emails, working her way backward. Jack left the compartment, but she barely noticed. After an hour, she’d read nearly all the emails that went back over two years.

Jack returned to the compartment, and she said, “I don’t see any names of people, but these words like Evergreen and Silver Fox, they look like a code.”

“They are. I found the same thing in the data I have on Costa. Silver Fox was a scam involving retirement accounts.” Jack ran a hand along his jawline. “One that I haven’t seen until today is Evergreen. Take a closer look at those.”

“There’s quite a few,” she said as she clicked through the first ones. By the time she’d read the first twenty or so, she frowned. “These dates, and what they’re discussing. It almost sounds like they’re talking about GRS.” Zoe looked up. “You don’t think...Evergreen isn’t...?”

“Me? Afraid so. Well, actually I think it refers to GRS in particular. There’s a bank account number listed in one of the exchanges and it’s the account number for GRS’s business account.”

The porter arrived and folded away the seats then lowered the bed while Zoe read the next emails, skimming through the text, reading impatiently, but with a growing sense of unease. When he left, Zoe sat on the lower bed.

“Jack, these emails...” she trailed off, almost not believing what she’d read. But it was there in black and white, a neatly drafted plan to ruin a man’s life—Jack’s life. “I can see why you were angry. You were deceived.”

“I was stupid.” His voice had turned serious. He leaned against the wall and sighed with disappointment. “Those draft emails explain a lot of things I ignored or wrote off as coincidence. They fill in a lot of gaps.”

“But it says you were set up—from the very beginning.”

Jack shrugged. “It’s all there. Look at the emails—somehow Costa found out I was anxious to start the company, but had zero funds. He bet that I would barely need convincing to take Connor on as a partner. I’d be so glad that I had a backer that I wouldn’t look too closely at the capital. And he was right. I never wanted to delve too deeply into where Connor got it. I was just glad he had the money. You saw his place in Vegas last year. There’s no way he had that kind of seed money stashed somewhere for a business and lived in that pigsty.”

“I’ll give you that,” Zoe conceded, remembering Connor’s tiny, filthy apartment, “But the rest of it. It’s so unbelievable. You really think Costa set up this elaborate scheme? That he hired Connor to basically impersonate a businessman and gave him cash to run the company?”

“To run the
scam
,” Jack corrected. “It was a classic long con.”

“That’s...I don’t know...Machiavellian.”

“Look at the results,” Jack said. “In the end, after you strip away me and Connor, you’ve got a pump-and-dump stock scheme. The investors were the marks along with Connor and me. The investors put in money, Connor worked to inflate the price through all those phony posts on stock message boards, then the money was yanked when the stock was at the high point. After the stock tanked, Connor and I got blamed, and Mr. Anonymous had the Bent-slash-Ares guy manipulate the money so that it disappeared, leaving me as the scapegoat. If I weren’t in the middle of it, I’d have to admire it. It’s brilliant.”

“I wouldn’t call it brilliant. Devious. Cunning. Something along those lines.”

Zoe ran her finger along the edge of the laptop. “I wonder why Bent called me. And why would he take ‘my case’ in the first place? I’m sure he recognized your name and Costa’s.

“He probably saw an opportunity to fleece you—take your money, but give you no real information.”

“He said he’d only charge me if he found something, but it looks like he wasn’t the most honest guy on the planet.” Zoe sat up straighter. “I just thought of this—do you think he told Costa I hired him?”

Jack shook his head. “There was nothing about that in the emails, and those two seemed to communicate exclusively by email.”

“So you don’t think Costa had anything to do with Bent’s death and the fire?”

“Which we were so conveniently almost caught in? I don’t know. It could have been Costa, or it may have been someone else from the Ares side of his life. It looks like he dealt with a lot of shady characters.”

Zoe chewed on her lip for a moment. “Jack, there’s another thing about these emails.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve found another email account on that laptop.”

“No.” Zoe smiled feebly. “I’d almost take another email account over what I just realized.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Once the police find these draft emails, they’ll think we have an excellent motive for killing Bent.”

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A
NNA waited until after midnight to slip out of bed. Costa lay motionless beside her, his breathing heavy. He wouldn’t miss her.

She knew that Costa could not resist
panettone
, an Italian sweetbread dessert with raisins and candied fruits. That’s why she put the powder from the crushed decongestants in his slice of the cake. The few times she’d seen him sick with a cold, the medicine had made him so drowsy that he could barely open his eyes for several hours.

Wrapped in her thick robe, she took her cigarettes and walked down the chilly hallway into the offices. She went to his desk. He was keeping something from her and she wanted—no, she needed—to know what it was.

He didn’t think she knew his habits, but she was more observant than he realized. Always security conscious and wary of hackers and investigators, she knew Costa changed his passwords to his accounts each week. She also knew he made a note of his new passwords on an index card and kept it under his blotter, religiously shredding the old index card himself each Monday morning.

She consulted the index card, found the password for his computer and then for his private email account, and replaced the index card. The screen came to life, and she opened a special program on the computer that she had installed.

Costa shied away from using his computer, but he couldn’t avoid it completely. When he did use it, he consistently deleted his Internet browsing history each day, but the handy program she’d installed kept a history of every site visited and all search words entered. She skimmed through links to banks, financial sites, and news until she came to several unusual links about art.

She clicked on them, a smile growing as she read about a Monet oil painting called
Marine
. There was only one reason a man like Costa researched artwork. Either he was going to steal it, or he was going to buy it. Since the painting was already stolen, Anna was sure he intended to buy it. Probably with the money from the pump-and-dump stock scheme he’d engineered through Jack Andrews.

He’d wanted to set Jack up as the fall guy for the transaction. He had some sort of personal vendetta with Andrews; that was why he’d waited for Andrews to resurface, to make sure he was actually dead. If he had resurfaced, Anna didn’t doubt that Andrews would be the scapegoat. With Andrews dead, Costa intended to put the blame on Jack’s ex-wife. Costa was not a man you wanted to cross. His hatred extended to the families of his enemies.

She would have to be very careful, but she was sure the package Costa had mentioned on the phone tonight was this painting. She also found an order for a leather tube described as “perfect for transporting delicate oversized papers such as blueprints and artwork.”

She couldn’t find any new emails, even in the draft folders that she knew Costa used, so she opened the history on the print queue. A few changes to the preferences on the printer menu, and she had a record of every item that Costa printed. She clicked on the single item listed, “letter.doc,” and printed her own copy, then deleted it from the history. She knew it was odd when she spotted Costa alone in the village a few days ago, walking quickly away from a post box. He rarely ventured out of the castle alone, and he never went to the village on his own.

Anna took the document from the printer.
A letter, how antiquated
. No email trail and no phone record either to give away the connection between Costa and the recipient. She leaned back in the chair, little puffs of white air escaping as she breathed. There was a way out after all, and it was even simpler than her first plan.

––––––––

I
T was late Thursday afternoon by the time Zoe and Jack arrived in Lintzberg, and, with the early twilight of fall, the sun had slipped below the horizon leaving only the orange wash of sunset tinting the high points of the forested hills above the town. Situated in a hollow of land below a high precipice, the village was already in darkness, but lights shined from inside the windows of homes and shops. Glowing white Christmas lights hung across the main road, which curved through the town between rows of two-story stucco-faced buildings painted white, gray, and cream.

Zoe pushed her chilly hands deeper into her pockets, glad that she didn’t have to expose one hand to the cold to pull her suitcase. They’d left it in the luggage storage area at the train station. At least the buildings sheltered them from the icy wind that had sliced through the fibers of Zoe’s coat the moment they emerged from the train.

The little town was busy with activity as small cars zipped by them on the narrow road, and people moved along the sidewalk, some carrying baskets filled with the day’s shopping.

“How far is your car?” Zoe asked as they trudged along.

“Up there.” Jack pointed to the outcropping of rock, a dark black blob against the star-speckled sky. “I left it in the castle’s parking lot. I didn’t want to draw anyone’s attention. It’s been there for weeks. If it was suddenly gone, it might arouse suspicion,” Jack said, moving on through the crowd of people wearing heavy coats and scarves, their breath making little wispy clouds as they exhaled.