The Pandora Key (30 page)

“Did you convince him?”

“He thinks we’re in over our heads, but he’s in. Turns out he’s more in love with Rachel than committed to his principles.”

“Good. Have you made contact with Kraft?”

“Not yet, but I have figured out a way to get him to meet with me.”

“How will you do it?”

“By promising that the two of us together can make bad things happen to you.”

That produced a satisfied chuckle. I tried to say things to Cyrus that were true. He gave me the feeling that even over the phone, he could tell when I was lying.

“What about Hoffmeyer?” I asked. Maybe I could keep him on the defensive if I could make him have to lie to me. “Have you had any luck finding him?”

“We won’t find him. He’s been trained by the best. The only way we’ll get to him is through Kraft. Then we’ll have a shot at the big dog.”

“Look, what if I can’t get Kraft to come to Boston? Would your plane be available if I had to go to him?”

“Without hesitation. In fact, that might be preferable. When you’re close to locking in your final plans, call me with the details, and I’ll set the wheels in motion.”

“Okay, good. Look, it’s going to be a few days at least. Do you want me to call you, or do you want to check back with me? It’s probably better if I call you.” I waited. He said nothing, and I didn’t know how to interpret the silence. “Do you still have my client’s video?”

“It’s in a safe place. How many days will you need?”

“How about if I call you the day after tomorrow?”

29

HARVEY WAS BY HIMSELF IN HIS OFFICE WHEN I GOT TO HIS house. He had on another new shirt, this one short-sleeved. I could not get used to seeing him in casual clothes, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him wear something that bared his arms. I was surprised that his ex-wife wasn’t fused to one of them.

“Where’s Rachel?”

“I’m here.” She came in from the kitchen with a big bowl of microwave popcorn. I hadn’t noticed before, but the house was filled with the smell. With Rachel around, Harvey’s house was always filled with something new.

“We need to talk.” My preference would have been to talk things over with Harvey, but since the day’s events affected Rachel rather substantially, it wouldn’t have been fair to leave her out. The three of us sat down for a discussion. This time, I staked out the wingback. Rachel pushed Harvey up next to the couch.

“I just met with Drazen. The good news is, he wants the money, and if we can find it for him, we’ll all be free and clear.”

“Including me?” Rachel was barely able to contain her glee.

“Especially you. You’re not even on his radar screen.”

“Oh, thank God.” She set the popcorn on the coffee table and collapsed onto the couch. “I have been living with this death sentence hanging over my head for I don’t know how long.”

“Four years,” I said.

She looked at me. “What?”

“It’s been four years since you killed Vladi and the money disappeared.”

She sniffed. “It was—”

“Self-defense. You don’t have to keep reminding me. Also good news, I think I know where the money is. I think Kraft has it. I know he has Vladi’s computer. He’s willing to trade it for this.” I dug the heavy envelope from my backpack and dropped it onto the coffee table. The thud bounced the popcorn bowl. Rachel grabbed it and pulled it into her lap. “It’s Lyle’s story,” I said.

“Who’s Lyle?” She scooped out a handful of popcorn and passed the bowl to Harvey.

“Lyle Burquart. He was a local journalist who was trying to do what Kraft is doing. He wrote an article, an exposé on Blackthorne, four years ago. This must have been before the hijacking.” I hadn’t paid much attention to the dates. “Anyway, no one ever read it, because Thorne killed his son to keep him quiet.”

“My God.” Harvey reached for Rachel’s hand. He looked pale.

“I went back to talk to Lyle, and he’s gone. Packed up his family, left his job. But he left me all his notes.” I took the microcassettes and player from my backpack and threw them out there as exhibit two. “These are interview tapes. The interviewee was Tony Blackmon, Cyrus Thorne’s partner. I haven’t listened to everything, but from what I heard, he disagreed with the direction Thorne was taking and was ready to speak out about it.” A thought occurred to me as I was talking. “I wonder if Thorne killed Blackmon.”

“Why would he?” Harvey asked. “Is there an indication on the tapes that he was threatened?”

“The feeling comes more from Thorne. He told me Blackmon died on a mission. He had this incredible crystal eagle commissioned in his memory. It’s like protesting too much, you know? And it sounds as if Thorne is capable of anything. But listen to the tapes. See what you think.”

“Why do we have to listen to anything?” Rachel had her feet on the table, her knees up, and the popcorn bowl in her lap. “Let’s just get this deal done and get on with it.”

“I’m trying to, Rachel. There’s just one problem. No one can access the files without the key. Kraft won’t show up until we have the key.”

“What key?”

“The key to accessing the money files. It’s also called a decryption token, and it looks like this.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the copy of the KryptoDisk page Felix had printed for me. “It’s the size of a credit card, only thicker. Here…” I unfolded the page and handed it to her. “It slides into a PMC slot on the side of the machine.”

Harvey leaned over from his chair to see the picture. Rachel handed it to him with barely a glance. “I didn’t know anything about a key or a token. How was I supposed to?”

“You stole the computer for the files. I have to think you knew what was needed to access them.”

She sat up straight and put her feet on the floor. “How many times do I have to say this? I didn’t steal the computer for the files. I didn’t even know about the files. I took it because Roger had said it was worth something.”

“When Roger came to take it from you, did he try to boot it up?”

“He tried, but—” Her eyes widened. “He couldn’t get it to work.” She reached over to snatch the page back from Harvey. “Let me see that.”

“Roger took it even though he knew he couldn’t get in?”

“Sure he did. He was on the run, especially after that fed got killed. He said he would find a hacker to crack it.”

“Felix told me there was no way to hack it. Roger probably had some hacker tell him he needed the key. You can’t access the files without the key or the password.”

“But we don’t have the key,” Rachel said, “which means we don’t have the money, which means we must be planning on handing the reporter over to those Blackthorne people.” She blinked up at me. “Right?”

“No, we can’t do that.”

“You just said if we can’t give him the money, then Drazen comes looking for whoever killed Vladi. If he gets the video, he knows who to come looking for. Am I right?”

She was right, and it started to sink in that I might have overstepped my bounds just a tad. “When I made the deal, I didn’t know I needed a key.”

“But you did make the deal, which means you gambled my life on finding some key that has been lost for four years.” She passed the bowl to Harvey and roared to her feet. “
How
in the
hell
do you make a deal like that?”

“Drazen has no idea you’re even involved.”

“If he gets the video, he’ll know.”

“Rachel, dear…” Harvey tried to calm her.

“How do you trade my life for something you don’t even have, and have no real chance of getting?”

I looked past her to Harvey. I could see him struggling, torn between Rachel and reason. He wanted to please us both. He cleared his throat. “It seems the strategy you chose is very high-risk.”

“Thorne will kill Kraft, and Hoffmeyer, too, if he can find him. We agreed we wouldn’t facilitate something like that.”

“But you’re happy to hand me over.”

“I didn’t say that.”

The room went quiet as we both waited for Harvey to answer. He stared down at the low coffee table and spoke slowly. “I am not disagreeing with the choice.” He glanced up at me, then away. “But it was a choice that affected us all. You could have discussed it with us first is all we are suggesting.”

All
we
are suggesting? Rachel could not have looked more smug. I got up and walked away from them, finding my way over to Harvey’s bookcase. Some of the titles had been put back in upside down. Having to deal with all the interpersonal stuff on top of all the life-and-death stuff was getting to be too much, but they were right. I had made a somewhat large decision for the three of us. Perhaps they should have had some say.

I flipped a few of the titles right side up and turned around. Harvey was blinking at me intently, but Rachel stood with her arms folded and her head cocked to one side. She would not be easily placated.

“I’m sorry, okay? I got going too fast, and I didn’t do things…right. You deserved more consideration than I gave you…both of you. We can talk about it now, but I still think a solution where no one gets killed is worth trying.”

“I accept your apology,” Harvey said. “And I agree with your reasoning.”

“You’re agreeing with her?” Rachel stood up and threw both hands in the air in disgust. “That’s great. Just great. I’m so glad you’re on my side.”

“Rachel…” Harvey maneuvered his chair so he was facing Rachel. She had moved to a spot across the room from me and behind him. “We will take care of you. You must believe that.”

“I know. I’m just…” She’d lost some of her self-righteous rage. She came over to him and encircled him from behind, hooking her hands together at his sternum. He pulled her hands close to his heart. She leaned down and laid her head on his shoulder. “I’m scared, Harvey. So many things could go wrong.”

He turned back to me. “Are you sure this Kraft has the files?”

“No. That’s why I think we should get Rachel out of town.”

Harvey actually beat Rachel to the punch. “What? Why? Because you object to her?”

“Because you’re right. Both of you. This is a very risky way to go. There are too many assumptions, and any one of them could be wrong. Even though Drazen has agreed to take the money and call it even, the biggest assumption of all is that he will keep his word. I think she’s in danger if she stays here.”

Harvey turned to Rachel, but a moment too late. She had already disengaged and moved away from him. She was across the room, plucking her tooth with that right thumbnail, working out the odds in her head. I knew what would happen next, and I didn’t want to see.

“You two decide, but first, I need you to tell me where you buried Vladi.”

Harvey was aghast. “For what?”

“I think Vladi took the key to his grave.”

“How could you possibly know?”

“Roger didn’t have it. Rachel here says she doesn’t have it. I saw the video, and I never saw her take it off the body. I assume you didn’t take it. We know Roger was looking for the body. It can’t be the corpse he wanted. It has to be the key.”

“How would he know?”

“He’s the one who knew about the money to begin with. Of all of us, he would have had the best information. If he thought Vladi had it on him, then that’s where I need to look.”

“Dear God, there must be another way.”

“There is. We could go and ask Drazen for his key. Presumably, he has a way to get in. Personally, I’d rather deal with the Tishchenko who’s dead. Now, unless anyone else has a better idea, I need to know. Where is the body?”

30

DAN’S SHOVEL RIPPED INTO THE SHALLOW HOLE WE’D managed to scoop out over the course of three long hours. He dug up a dead body the same way he did everything else, with ferocious impatience.

“It goes without saying, Shanahan, that this is the creepiest fucking thing I’ve ever done.”

“Digging up a four-year-old corpse in the woods would probably make most people’s top ten.”

We had waited until it was dark before striking out on our morbid mission, when the night was cool and the air thick as velvet with the smell of moss and fungus and decay. Harvey had buried Vladi in the forests overlooking the Quabbin Reservoir, thirty miles outside Boston, where it was very dark and very quiet.

I tried not to think too much about what we were doing. There was the whole physical aspect of having to handle the remains of a man long dead and buried. Then there were the spiritual implications. Was it not ignoble enough that Vladi had been dispatched with violence and disposed of with such indifference? Now he had to be disturbed for the purpose of retrieving the key to a fortune. They say you can’t take it with you, but Vladi had, and now we were digging him up to wrench it back.

Dan stopped and dragged the back of his hand across his forehead. It wasn’t that hot, but the work was arduous. “Are you sure this is the spot?”

“This is where Harvey’s map said. We won’t be sure until we hit something.”

“Leave it to fucking Harvey to save the map to where he buried a dead man.”

I stabbed the ground again with my shovel. The work was serving as a good anger management tool for me. I thought about Rachel with every rip and slice.

“And you’re telling me this kryptonite thing will work after being buried for four years.”

“It’s a cryptographic token, and I can only go by what Felix told me. He says if it’s in its protective case, it should be fine. It’s fireproof and waterproof and every other kind of proof. According to him, you could run over it with a Humvee, and it would be fine, because if something happens to it, you’re kind of screwed.”

“Yeah.” He leaned over to start shoveling again. “Instead of like we are now.”

Two and a half backbreaking, arm-wearying hours later, my shovel cracked against something hard. Hard like a bone in the cod. Hard like an eggshell in the custard. I dropped my shovel and scrambled out of the pit, because I knew I was standing on the body of Vladislav Tishchenko.

I tried to walk it off, pacing among the trees, but every time I tried to get back in that hole, I wanted to vomit. Then I did. I leaned against a tree and puked my guts out. All this just at the thought of pulling the remains out of that hole. I hadn’t seen anything yet. Oh, for a glass of cool water to splash in my face and rinse the taste of death from my mouth. I straightened up and looked to the sky. It was clear. There were stars in the universe, twinkling down on us as we dug a man from his grave. Some things just shouldn’t be.