The Body of David Hayes (30 page)

Again, husband and wife met eyes. Wasn’t this exactly what Lou was proposing to her? Wasn’t this the solution he had planned?

Again words left her mouth. “You’re saying it is
not
an option.” She made it a statement.

Matthews said delicately, “Thinking about it, focusing on it is not an option. They’ll pick up on it. Hostage situations require the abducted individual to loosen the hold of the keepers. One does this by
playing into
whatever it is they’ve asked of you. By cooperating, not disobeying. You surprise them by your willingness, your eagerness, to cooperate. This has been proven over and over again to be a hostage’s most effective way to gain enough physical freedom and emotional detachment to invoke a causal action that either reconnects with surveillance or provides an opportunity for intervention.”

“Taking a phone off the hook, for instance,” Riz said. “If we suspect a general area you’ve been taken to, we’ll
look for that kind of thing: a phone line left open for a minute or more.”

O’Brien added, “You can ‘accidentally’ turn a stereo or television on too loudly. If they’ve got you in a car, you might bump the emergency flashers, might even turn them off yourself, apologizing.”

Riz said, “Activate the rear wiper if it’s not raining. Toss litter from a window. All these things are potential helpers.”

“But what you don’t do,” Matthews said, “is try anything too overt: dialing the lieutenant’s number, or 911 from a telephone or mobile phone. That would put you at risk, even if you see the opportunity.”

“Check that,” Riz said, interrupting Matthews. “If you dial 911 from a land line, even if you hang up immediately, we’ve got you, so don’t rule that one out completely. Same with a pay phone, a car phone—a cell phone,” he said, glancing at Matthews, “anything you can get your hands on.”

Liz took note of the contradiction and sided with Matthews. Riz and O’Brien sounded more like they wanted her to keep the game going than to protect herself.

“Try to stand out of the crowd whenever possible,” O’Brien said. “If they’ve got you moving, and they very well may, then cross on the red lights, jaywalk, use the stairs, avoid the crowds. It’s the simple little things that allow us to stay with you better.”

“The computers,” Foreman said suddenly from his bench. He glanced at Liz. He had told her his and Geiser’s intentions—that she wire the money to a government account regardless of what people like Riz told her to do. “Yes!” Riz said. “Should you find yourself logging on to
the AS/400, about to gain access, first please type either Miles6 or Sarah4 as your password. The server won’t allow you access, but you’ll try again, using your correct password, and you’ll be in. By doing so, you drop a handkerchief for us to follow.”

“A handkerchief?” Liz inquired, not appreciating the analogy. It made her into a Victorian woman trying to garner attention.

“We could tell you more, but we’d have to kill you,” a smiling O’Brien joked before thinking. The comment sobered and silenced the room. O’Brien apologized and said, “We believe Hayes possesses some way to erase all record of whatever he has you do while inside the server. If you signal us ahead of time, using Miles6 or Sarah4, it greatly increases our chances of tracing whatever it is you initiate.” She fought herself to not look over at Lou. “It has to do with network IP addresses, and things I don’t even understand, but White Collar Crime made it clear that they need you to send us the smoke signal if they’re to have a chance.”

Riz said, “Miles6, Sarah4, spelled exactly as they sound with the numeral following. We thought they’d be easy to remember. You type in either password, and we’re piggybacked with you as you go in.”

“It’s like uncoiling a ball of string as you walk through a maze,” Foreman said, lifting his head again and meeting eyes with her. He didn’t want her giving them that string to follow. He wanted her doing this his way. Message received.

Liz found herself in a staring contest with Danny.

Matthews broke in. “You need your rest. We’re done here.”

Not long thereafter, everyone left the house. She and Lou rounded up the coffee mugs.

“So?” he asked.

“Ugh,” she said.

Lou put on some music—plaintive jazz—and gently steered her by the elbow to a dead space in the room that offered no clear line of sight through a window, despite all the shades being drawn. He whispered, and it caused her shivers.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through. They mean well, for what it’s worth.”

“Not much,” she said.

“Is it possible, what they said about tracking you inside the bank servers?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “If key tracking is present, then every time I touch a key they’ll followit.”

He considered this for a long moment. “Then whatever you do, you mustn’t enter those passwords they gave you. You mustn’t turn on the key tracking.”

“They don’t know David,” she said, immediately regretting the intimacy that implied on her part.

He glanced up into her eyes. She saw disguised hurt.

She explained, “He’s far too sophisticated a programmer to leave any of this up to human error. Yes, anyone using the AS/400 would have to log on to do so, and to move the money out will require routing information and an account number, and it’s possible, though not certain, that account data will have to be manually input. But would he allow a key-tracking program to run? Absolutely not. My value to him is that I can get past the physical security to reach the AS/400
and
I have a password that will allow access into it. But do you think he would allow their software
to record whatever account numbers are input? He’s smarter than that, Lou. Even if I type one of those passwords, David will have already thought of a way to defeat it. Trust me, they’re not in his league, Lou.” She added, “I don’t mean for that to be hurtful.”

“It’s good information,” he said, though his voice cracked, belying his true emotions.

“Danny gave me this look,” she said. “He’s still expecting me to transfer this money where he says to transfer it.”

“It’s not Danny I’m worried about. It’s the idea that
whoever
gives you an account number risks your remembering it. By phone, by note, it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered—it’s your recalling it later they can’t afford.”

“They are typically enormously long strings,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lou returned. “You’re a banker. They can’t rule out that you have a head for such numbers. And if you memorize the destination account, the money can then be traced and found, right?”

She nodded, understanding immediately the subtext and why her husband was reluctant to say it aloud. “If I’m around to repeat it,” she said.

Lou did not look at her, nor did he speak directly to her comment. Instead, he backed away and mumbled something about needing a cup of tea.

This, she realized, had been his fear all along.

“Are we going to talk about this plan of yours?” she asked, the two of them eating ham sandwiches at the kitchen table. Lou had stayed at the house following the meeting, something
she hadn’t expected but found comforting. At first she’d thought him exhausted and in need of the rest, but she amended that opinion as he then spent two hours working over a yellow legal pad.

He said, “It’s occurred to everyone that you’d be at extreme risk. We know for a fact that my guys will expect me to insist you use a stand-in. I will demand it, of course. I have already. They will never, in a million years, believe I would arrange for you to double-cross them.”

“So they’ll expect an undercover woman to play my part, and we’ll go along with that.”

“We’ll go along with it on the surface. Anything else would be out of character.”

“So it’s kind of a race,” she said.

“If we play it right, that’s exactly what it comes down to, yes. The real Liz beats the fake Liz to the AS/400s.”

“And we accomplish that, how?” she added.

“We beat them off the starting line. We deliver the unexpected—something they didn’t plan for. It’s not easy to fool the fooler. Not when they have as many as a dozen undercover officers watching our every move. But I know their training. I know the contingencies they plan for. Our bigger concern is Svengrad. He lost Hayes
and
the software; he lost everything. He knows that you are needed to accomplish this. It’s inevitable that he comes after you. Remember that none of the people here this afternoon, except LaMoia, knows I have Hayes locked away.”

“Gaynes does,” she said, playing devil’s advocate and immediately regretting it, for she saw the consternation it caused.

“She wasn’t here for the meeting, and she’s on our side anyway.”

She wasn’t sure why she corrected him this way, as she so often did. To gain the upper hand? To show him who the clearer thinker was? To be noticed? In the short term it felt good to correct him, but within a few seconds she typically wanted to crawl and hide, knowing her timing was terrible. She apologized to him, saying, “I do that all the time and I’m not sure why.”

Lou winced, stung perhaps by her sincerity. “We’re going to make it through this.”

“You think?”

“Taking him into custody humanized him for me.” There was no asking about whom he was speaking. He went on for a moment, talking himself out of any feelings of superiority that his abducting Hayes accounted for, discrediting any moral supremacy—that he worked the side of good and David the side of evil. He was telling her that he’d overcome some hurdle, and she was listening.

She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t risk his career by pulling a sting on his own people, but in many ways it seemed too late for that. If the tape was released, his career and his family would suffer; but if he were caught tricking his own people, he might lose his pension as well. With her actions she had put him squarely into unworkable options, and now she forced him to look for some way out. She told him as much, expressing her remorse as sincerely as possible. She said, “I don’t think this kind of thing can be undone using legal pads.”

“You’d be surprised. Legal pads come in very handy.”

“We’re going to joke about this?”

“What choice do we have?”

“A woman is going to take my place out there. You realize the danger we put her in?” she asked, allowing her
real anger to surface now. “Never mind all the secret codes that
I
can use to leave crumbs for your people to follow. What about her? What codes is she going to use when these people—very nasty people according to you and yours—realize they’ve got the wrong Liz Boldt?”

Lou held up the pad of legal paper. She saw inked handwriting and boxes and arrows—a complicated diagram resulting from a conflicted mind. He said, “The best defense is a good offense.”

“You can’t be oblique right now. I’m not up to it.”

“It never gets that far.”

“Never gets how far?”

“Your surrogate. I agree. We can’t let that happen.”

“You can stop it?”

“Timing,” he said.

“But they’re ready right now. They’ve got some stand-in ready around the clock to take my place. That’s what they said, right? Did I miss something?”

“They’re expecting you to receive a call. Everything hinges on them listening in to our land line and both our mobiles. You get the call and a clock starts. A substitution is planned—here at the house, if possible; in the field, if not.”

“But how has that changed?” she asked, still puzzled.

“You arranged for the costume to be delivered to my office, did you not?”

“I did.” It took her a moment to realize he intended that as his explanation, not a question for her to answer. “The costume,” she said.

Lou pointed to the top of his yellow pad and a box there so heavily outlined the ink had smeared. “It all starts with the costume.”

She didn’t know what that meant, not exactly, but resolved herself to the fact he was now calling the shots. He saw some way out of this, however dim. No matter that she struggled to have faith in him and his yellow pad, she was bound to him body and soul. He ran the early part of the show, and she committed herself to doing exactly as he instructed, even if it struck her as an exercise in futility, which it currently did. The later part of the show, inside the bank, was all hers.

“I’m never going to sleep tonight,” she said.

“Yeah,” Lou agreed. “I know.”

LIZ WENT TO CHURCH SUNDAY
morning, and Boldt went with her both out of a longing to be near her and a desire to protect her. Over her objection, she carried her mobile phone, set to vibrate if called, and the two sat on the aisle so that she could jump up if it rang. Boldt didn’t mind the services, appreciated that there were two readers instead of a minister, that the sermon derived from the Bible and an interpretive work, not the pulpit and preaching. The hymns, sung robustly, often ran gooseflesh down his arms, praising love and promising hope. Of all things dear to Boldt, hope was perhaps the greatest. He reflected on his motivations for becoming a cop all those years ago, aware that hope factored into it, a belief in a moral code and the knowledge that someone had to uphold that code. Other cops had brothers who had been shot, sisters raped, homes vandalized, all valid reasons for signing up. But for Boldt it had amounted to something far less visceral: a cause, a calling. The church and its parishioners represented the community he felt he was there to protect. And so the service was filled with irony for him, as the person who needed the
most protection was his own wife, and for reasons of adultery and what the church would call sin. In the past few days he had worked his way to a form of understanding that made their time together tolerable. He felt forgiveness a long way off, a firefly at the end of a very long tunnel, but a necessary step toward a full healing between them. Whether he and Liz made it fully back to sharing love or not, there was no abandoning the family.