Sidney Sheldon's Reckless (14 page)

“I know you'll be resourceful.” Greg Walton handed her a written file with the word “Classified” printed on the cover. “Some light reading for the plane. Good luck, Tracy.”

“YOU SET ME UP!”

Alexis Argyros, aka Apollo, held the phone away from his ear. Althea was screaming at him, hissing and spitting with impotent fury like a snake beneath his foot. How the tables had turned!

It felt wonderful.

“Don't be ridiculous,” he answered, when she finally fell silent. “Our Swiss brothers organized this. I had nothing to do with it. I'm too busy hunting our friend, Hunter. Or had you forgotten about him?”

“You had everything to do with it! Are you saying it's just coincidence that this happened here, while I'm in the country?”

“Not everything revolves around you, Althea.”

A few months ago he would never have dared to speak so boldly. But now? Now he had the power.

Sensing his enjoyment, Althea fired back. “You're sick, Apollo. Everybody knows it. You had Henry Cranston murdered because it aroused you to see him die.”

“And watching Bob Daley's brains explode didn't arouse you?” Apollo scoffed.

To his delight, Althea sounded shaken when she answered. “Of course not. Bob Daley was different. You
know
why he had to die.”

“Do I?” Apollo teased, like a cat toying with a mouse.

“There were never meant to be others!”

“Oh, but there will be others, my dear. Many, many others. One percent of the world's population is a big number, you know. The righteous oppressed have tasted vengeance at last. And they want more!” His voice quivered with excitement. “Greedy, grasping, earth-raping bastards like Cranston deserve to die.”

Earth-raping.
It was an expression that Group 99's eco-warriors had long used to describe fracking. Althea had always found it laughable in the past, immature and melodramatic, something only a self-righteous student could have coined. There were sides to Group 99 that had always bothered her, but she'd stuck with them, for Daniel's sake. But hearing the term from Apollo's lips now, hijacked as a cause in which he could wrap his sadism and blood lust, chilled her to the bone.

Apollo started to laugh. “Just remember, Althea,” he sneered. “
You
opened the gates of hell. Not me.”

Is that what I did?
she thought, once the phone went dead, gazing out across the lake to the mighty Alps in the distance.
Did I open the gates of hell?

She pulled out her suitcase and hurriedly started to pack.

“SOMETHING TO DRINK, MA'AM?”

The flight attendant's voice jolted Tracy back to the present.

“Coffee, please. Black.”

She was going to need it. The file Greg Walton had given her—his idea of “light reading”—had turned out to be a practically impenetrable analysis, not only of Henry Cranston's business, but of the fracking industry in general. Group 99 had long been opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, believing the new techniques for extracting shale gas by pumping vast amounts of pressurized water deep underground to be deeply harmful to the environment.
Was this why Cranston had been murdered?

If so, it marked a departure from Group 99's prior MO. Prior attacks aimed at the fracking industry had all been both cyber and financial in nature. And indeed, only hours before Cranston's death, four million dollars were mysteriously siphoned out of two of his corporate accounts; accounts held at the same private bank in Zurich where Althea was believed to have had meetings. It was all suspiciously incestuous, especially as Tracy now knew that Hunter Drexel had been working on a story about the fracking business at the time of his kidnap. Drexel's past stories had all been very much of the exposé variety, as explosively controversial as they were riveting. In his checkered journalistic career, he'd tackled such taboo topics as child abuse in the Catholic Church, police brutality and rampant corruption in the world of international humanitarian aid.

So why would Group 99 kidnap a man who was about to write the equivalent of an op-ed piece on their behalf, taking down the fracking industry?

And why would they murder Henry Cranston when they'd already gone to the trouble of carrying out a brilliant and successful economic attack?

Captain Daley's brutal execution certainly seemed to have been a watershed moment in terms of Group 99's willingness to embrace violence. Overnight, it seemed, they'd made the leap from activists to terrorists.

Why?
Tracy wondered, as she worked her way through the material.
How does killing people advance their cause?

The last third of Greg Walton's file was devoted to a man he wanted her to meet on her return from Switzerland, an American billionaire oil and gas magnate by the name of Cameron Crewe.

Tracy had seen profiles of Crewe from time to time. There'd been something in the
New York Times
a few years back, and a piece in
Newsweek
more recently, about his extensive charity work. If fracking had an “acceptable face,” Cameron Crewe was it. Crewe Oil was well known for its ecologically sensitive drilling practices, at least versus others in the industry, and for plowing back millions of dollars in aid and grants to the communities in which they worked. Crewe Oil had built schools in China, medical centers in Africa, and affordable housing projects in Greece, Poland and a number of impoverished former soviet republics, including Bratislava. They had created jobs, planted trees and endowed hospitals around the globe. Perhaps for this reason, uniquely among the big five fracking companies, they had never been targeted by Group 99.

Cameron Crewe himself had been touched by tragedy. His only son, Marcus, had died from leukemia at fourteen—the same age as Nicholas. Crewe's marriage had collapsed soon afterwards. Somehow these bald, sad facts served to humanize the billionaire in the public consciousness. People liked Cameron Crewe.

Ironically, Hunter Drexel had been en route to an interview with Crewe in Moscow when he was snatched off the streets by Group 99 heavies. And the links didn't end there. Henry Cranston was also a direct competitor of Cameron Crewe's. In fact, Tracy read now, Crewe Oil had been the under bidder on Cranston Eneregy Inc.'s latest landmark deal to begin fracking for shale gas in Poland. In the wake of Henry Cranston's death, they now looked likely to take over that contract. There were rumors that they'd already moved in behind the scenes on the original Greek deal that Henry had been working on, before Prince Achileas's unfortunate suicide at Sandhurst.

The lights in the cabin dimmed. Tracy's fellow passengers began to settle down to sleep. Switching on her reading light, Tracy sipped her coffee instead. Pressing her face against the window for a moment, she looked out into the blackness.

Thoughts of Nicholas came to her then. She could only ever hold them off for so long. Sleep was the worst. As soon as she let herself slip under, the dreams would begin. Strangely, they were never nightmares about the accident. They were always beautiful dreams, snapshots from the past. Blake was in some of them. Jeff was in others. But always there was Nicholas, smiling, laughing, his hand holding Tracy's, their fingers entwined in love. In Tracy's dreams she could hear her son, feel him, smell him. He was so real. So alive.

And then she would wake up and the loss would crush her again afresh, like an anvil being dropped onto her heart. She couldn't remember the last time she'd woken without screaming, or crying out, her hands grasping at the air in front of her as if she could somehow hold on to Nick, reach into her beautiful dreams and pull him back to her . . .

She thought about Jeff.

Did Jeff have dreams like that too?

Was he out there tonight somewhere, soul-dead and hopeless like she was, clawing at the void that Nicholas's death had left?

Tracy had felt guilty, running out on Jeff. She knew he must be hurting too, desperately. But the truth was she simply didn't have the strength to see him. Nick had looked so like him, had been so like him. It would be too hard. Besides, in Tracy's experience, a grief shared was never a grief halved. Human loss was not a team game. Each person dealt with tragedy differently.

Tracy Whitney dealt with it alone.

Turning back to the CIA files, Tracy forced Jeff's image out of her mind, along with dear Blake Carter's, and her darling Nick.

There would be time for tears later. A lifetime of tears.

Right now Tracy was going to find the woman who killed her son.

CHAPTER 11

T
RACY STORMED OUT ONTO
the Rue de la Croix Rouge in a white-hot fury.

A light dusting of new snow covered the sidewalk, and a bitter wind blew as Tracy stalked across the street towards the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre. But her blood was boiling so furiously, she barely felt the cold.

Arrogant asshole! How dare he?

Monsieur Gerald Le Doux, the managing partner of Ronde Suisse Private Bank, had been as sexist, condescending, superior and generally obnoxious as he possibly could be during Tracy's brief meeting in his office. He reminded her of a Swiss version of Clarence Desmond, the senior vice president at the Fiduciary Bank & Trust in Philadelphia where Tracy had once worked as a computer specialist, a hundred lifetimes ago. Desmond had been seen as a dinosaur even back then, with his constant innuendos and knee patting and “harmless” in-jokes that were very pointedly only for the boys. Yet here was Monsieur Le Doux, at the pinnacle of banking's new age of modernity and transparency, still flying the flag for entitled chauvinists everywhere.

“How may I help such a beautiful lady?”

“You ladies have your secrets, Miss Whitney, and so must we.”

“I daresay you're not familiar with our banking laws here in Switzerland, young lady. But I'm under no obligation whatsoever to provide you information about our private clients, still less with video footage.”

“I assume you'll be shopping while you're in our beautiful city?”

Hateful little man.

Tracy might have felt better about this fruitless meeting had the rest of her encounters in Geneva been more productive. Her visits to Henry Cranston's widow, mistress and secretary had all contributed to a picture of a man so thoroughly unpleasant, it was a wonder no one had blown him to smithereens years ago. Between the women he'd betrayed, business partners he'd double crossed and employees he'd bullied, Henry Cranston had a list of enemies as long as both Tracy's arms. And yet there was nothing, beyond the general nature of his business, to tie him to Althea or Group 99.

However, the latter had now formally claimed responsibility online for his murder, although Althea herself had remained pointedly silent. No cryptic messages had been sent to the CIA, or to Swiss Intelligence. Tracy had done her usual trawl of hotels and guesthouses and a comprehensive computer search of airline, train and car rental records. But Althea, like Henry Cranston's missing $4 million, had vanished into thin air.

With Greg Walton's words about “being resourceful” ringing in her ears, Tracy had reached out to two old contacts from her con artist days. Pierre Bonsin was an ex-banker turned occasional thief, although Pierre himself would never have used that word. A wizard with financial models of all kinds and a demon cracker of algorithms, Pierre saw himself as a sort of rogue chess player, outsmarting the machine that was the international banking system. Tracy had asked him to see if he could find any evidence of Althea having been in Ronde's systems.

She'd asked her other old friend, Jim Cage, a yacht broker and safe-blower by night, whether any of his contacts knew anything about a woman sourcing explosives in the weeks leading up to Cranston's death.

“She'd be American, educated, attractive and wealthy. Tall, with brown hair, although she may well have disguised her appearance.”

To Tracy's intense disappointment, both had drawn a blank. Ronde's systems had indeed been attacked, and potentially compromised.

“Unfortunately it happened four times in the last six weeks,” Pierre Bonsin explained. “Any one of them could have been your girl, but we've no way of knowing. This is the age of the hacker, Tracy. You know that. These kinds of cyberattacks are a part of daily life now, for all the big banks.”

Jim Cage was equally downbeat.

“No female of the description you gave me has been sourcing bomb-making equipment here,” Jim told Tracy, in his luxurious, modernist office overlooking the lake. “No female of any description come to that.”

Jim Cage was handsome in a classic, aging matinee idol sort of way, tall and dark with a little too much tan and extremely white teeth. He'd always fancied Tracy, and was pleased to see how well she'd held up over the years. She was a bit too thin these days. The bottle-green cashmere dress she was wearing today showed her ribs, a look that some men liked but that was a bit too much for Jim. But Tracy was still a knockout. It was those emerald eyes that really did it. Or were they jade? Either way they were looking at him reproachfully now. She'd hoped for better news.

“The thing is, Tracy, you and I are old school. We still like to do things in person. Talk to the experts, the artists. Group 99's not like that, are they? They're kids. Anything they need to build a bomb they can get online. There's no romance anymore.”

Althea's not a kid,
Tracy thought.
And there was precious little romance in Henry Cranston's death.
But she took the point. Althea was too smart to risk being seen or leaving evidence when she didn't need to.

Now, drawing her fur coat more tightly around her as she approached the bridge towards Saint-Gervais Les Bergues, Tracy did something she hated doing: she admitted defeat. If either Althea or Henry Cranston's missing $4 million were still in Geneva, or even in Europe, she'd be very surprised. Monsieur Le Doux's patronizing stonewalling back at the bank had been the bitter cherry on the top of an already thoroughly disappointing cake. Tracy's entire trip had been a total waste of time.