The Patriots Club (23 page)

39

G
odforsaken machines.

Guilfoyle sat at the head of the conference table inside the Quiet Room, surrounded by four of the firm’s top information analysts. Scattered across the table was Thomas Bolden’s credit history, his medical records, school transcripts, credit-card bills, gas, electricity, and phone bills, banking and brokerage statements, a list of magazine subscriptions, travel records including his preferred seat assignment, driving record, insurance policies, tax returns, and voting record.

All of it had been fed into Cerberus, and Cerberus had spat out a predictive model of Thomas Bolden’s daily activities. The forty-page report, bound neatly and set on the table in front of Guilfoyle, was titled “Core Personality Profile.” It told Guilfoyle where Bolden liked to eat, how much he spent each year on clothing, in what month of the year he tended to have a physical, what kind of car he was likely to drive, his “must-watch” TV, and not incidentally, how he would vote. But it could not tell him where Thomas Bolden would be in an hour.

“We can ascertain, sir, that Bolden has a point-four probability of eating at one of three restaurants downtown,” one of the men was saying. “Also, that he has a point-one probability of going shopping after work and that he has a point-ninety-seven probability of visiting the Boys Club in Harlem tonight. I caution that the results maintain a bias of plus or minus two standard deviations. Regardless, I’d suggest stationing men at all three restaurants, as well as the Boys Club.”

“The man is on the run,” said Guilfoyle. “He is not behaving according to his regular daily patterns. He went shopping, but it was at ten
A.M.
in a store he’d never visited before. I can promise you that he will not be visiting the Boys Club tonight. If for no other reason than he knows that we’ll have a dozen men surrounding it.”

“If I might interject, sir,” said Hoover, a flaxen-haired giant with skin as fluorescent as the damnable lighting. “The acute psychological profile Cerberus provided shows that Bolden is aggressive, proactive, and that he tends to cope well with physical stress. . . .”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Guilfoyle said, his calm fraying by the minute. “The man is a cipher, as far as I’m concerned. He’s supposed to be an investment banker, yet he acts like a seasoned operative. Where does Cerberus tell me anything about that?”

“It’s his childhood, sir,” said Hoover. “Clearly, we don’t have a complete picture. If only we could input some relevant data pertaining to . . .”

Guilfoyle raised a hand, indicating that Hoover should contain himself. Hoover had spent too long with the machines. His answers always began with “If only . . .”
If only
we could improve this.
If only
we could get more of that. Like the mother of a mischievous child, he had become an apologist for the system’s shortcomings.

A picture window ran along one side of the Quiet Room, giving a clear view of the communications center. Guilfoyle slipped on a pair of glasses and directed his attention to the wall. Projected onto the screen was what was called a link map. A bright blue ball with the initials “TB” glowed at its center. Phone numbers belonging to his home, office, cell phone, and BlackBerry ran beneath it. Emanating from the ball, like rays from the sun, was a cluster of lines each leading to its own ball, some small, some large. Those balls, too, had initials, and below them tightly scripted phone numbers. Many of the balls were interconnected, lines running between them. The whole thing looked like a giant Tinkertoy.

Each ball represented a person with whom Bolden maintained contact. The larger balls represented those whom, according to his phone records, he spoke with most frequently. They included his girlfriend, Jennifer Dance (at last report, undergoing hospital treatment), several coworkers at Harrington Weiss, the Harlem Boys Club, and a dozen colleagues at other banks and private equity firms. The smaller balls included less frequently contacted coworkers, other colleagues, and a half dozen restaurants. In all there were approximately fifty balls in orbit around Bolden’s sun.

Guilfoyle had programmed Cerberus to monitor all the phone lines indicated on the link map on a real-time basis. Automatically, Cerberus would compare the parties speaking with a voiceprint of Thomas Bolden taken that morning. Guilfoyle didn’t have enough manpower to stake out all of Bolden’s acquaintances. With the link map, it didn’t matter. Should Bolden phone any of these numbers, Guilfoyle could listen in. More important, he could get a fix on Bolden’s location.

The problem was that Bolden was a sharp operator. He had learned firsthand that his phone had been bugged and that using a cell phone meant risking capture. The link map was therefore a waste of time.

Guilfoyle rubbed his eyes. Over a hundred monitors running floor to ceiling occupied another corner of the room. The monitors drew a live feed from exterior surveillance cameras around Midtown and lower Manhattan. The pictures switched rapidly from location to location. Software analyzed the faces of all pedestrians captured by the cameras and compared them to a composite of three photographs of Thomas Bolden. Simultaneously, it analyzed the gaits of the subjects, and using a sophisticated algorithm, compared them to a model established from the video of Bolden striding down the corridor at Harrington Weiss earlier that morning. It wasn’t the walk it was analyzing as the exact distance between his ankle and knee, knee and hip, and ankle and hip. The three ratios were added together to yield a composite number that was as unique for every man, woman, and child as their fingerprints.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that snow, rain, or any kind of moisture in the atmosphere degraded the picture enough to render the software program ineffective.

For all the money the Organization had poured into Cerberus, for all the millions of man-hours the brightest brains in the nation—in the world, dammit—had spent developing the software to run it, Cerberus was still a machine. It could gather. It could hunt. But it could not intuit. It could not guess.

Guilfoyle removed his glasses and set them delicately on the table. The discipline that had governed his entire life fell round him like a cloak, smothering his irritation, dampening his anger. Still, it was only by the utmost self-control that he did not shout. Only Hoover noticed the tick pulling at the corner of his mouth.

Machines.

Wolf Ramirez sat quietly in a dark corner of his hotel room, drawing the blade of his K-Bar knife across the sharpening stone. A clusterfuck was what it was, he thought, as he reversed direction and drew the blade toward him. Too many people running in too many directions trying to get the simplest thing done. Well, what did they expect? You didn’t send a pack of hounds to do a wolf’s work.

Wolf’s eyes lifted to the cell phone he had set on the table in front of him.

After a moment, he concentrated on the knife again. To hone the blade as sharp as he liked, he needed to work on it for a solid hour. Only then would it be truly razor sharp. Sharp enough to slip into the skin as easily as a needle and cleanly separate the dermis from the sheath of fat below it. Only then could he lift the six layers of tissue off a man as neatly as if he were filleting a trout. Straight, unfrayed lines. That’s what he liked. Precision.

Wolf didn’t like to leave a man messy. When he was finished with the bad guys, he wanted their souvenir of their time with him to be a work of art, geometric in its precision. The pain would soon pass. But the scars would be with them forever. Wolf was proud of his skills.

He stared at the phone.

This time it rang.

He smiled. Sooner or later Guilfoyle always came back to him.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Can you find him?”

“Maybe. But you have to level with me.”

“What do you need?”

“Just one thing. Tell me what you don’t want him to discover.”

40

Bolden walked past the entrance to Harrington Weiss’s world headquarters. Tall glass windows allowed him an unobstructed view inside. At one-thirty, the lobby was moderately busy, a thin but steady stream of people flowing in and out of the building. By now, Weiss’s body had been removed, the office cordoned off, and hopefully cleaned, witnesses interviewed, and reports taken. Other than the usual building security, he didn’t see a single police officer.

Like a messenger who’d overshot his address, Bolden turned right back around and walked inside. A white marble floor, high ceilings, and stout granite piers gave the lobby the look and feel of a train station. He presented himself to the reception desk.

“Ray’s Pizza. Delivery for Althea Jackson. HW. Forty-second floor.” He plopped the brown paper bag holding the pizza and soft drink on the counter, and slipped a business card he’d taken from Ray’s along next to it.

“Let me make that call,” said the security guard. “Althea on forty-two?”

Bolden nodded, and looked around.

Less than ten feet away, a dozen uniformed police officers stood huddled around two plainclothes officers, listening intently to their instructions. He kept his face turned away from them.

After seeing his picture on TV, he’d spent the last of his money on a cheap baseball cap and some even cheaper sunglasses. He had no doubt that Althea was in the office. Any normal place of business you’d get the day off after seeing a man’s brains blown out. The whole firm might be expected to shut down, if for no other reason than to show respect for the boss, a founder no less. But investment banks were anything but normal. No nine-to-fivers need apply. Currencies did not halt trading when a country defaulted on its loans. Deals didn’t fall out of bed if a principal dropped dead. The march of finance was unsympathetic and unstoppable.

Bolden was point man on the Trendrite deal. He might be MIA, but the deal had a momentum of its own. He was certain that Jake Flannagan, his immediate boss, had taken up the reins, as he had on a past occasion when a senior partner had suffered a heart attack and been put out of commission for a week. Jake would be all over Althea to supply him with the proper paperwork and phone numbers, and generally to bring him up to speed.

“I don’t care if you didn’t order pizza,” the security man was bellowing into the phone. “Someone ordered it. Now, come and get it, or I’ll eat it myself. Smells good, hear what I’m saying?” He lowered the phone and looked at Bolden. “What kind?”

“Pepperoni.”

The guard repeated the words. “Darned right you’ll be right down.” He hung up. “She’s coming.”

Bolden threw an elbow onto the counter. On one of the napkins, he’d written Althea a note. It read, “Don’t believe a thing you hear or SEE. I need a favor. Do a LexisNexis search on Scanlon Corporation and Russell Kuykendahl. 1945–Present. Meet me in front of the kiosk at the southwest corner of the WTC subway station in an hour. I need $$$!!! Believe in me!” He signed it “Tom.” As much as he wanted to leave the bag and the pizza inside with the security guard, he had to stay to get paid and collect his tip.

Behind the counter, a ten-inch television was tuned to the news. The station was showing the footage of Sol Weiss’s murder over and over, with short breaks to discuss it with an analyst. A few guards gathered, watching with something between enchantment and horror. Someone tapped on Bolden’s shoulder. “Hey.”

Bolden turned and looked at the policeman.

“Got any extra slices? Outside on your bike or something?”

Bolden shook his head. “No, Officer. I’m sorry. You want to place an order, here’s the number.” He handed the business card to the cop.

The policeman pulled Althea’s bag toward him and opened it. “Smells good,” he said, rooting around inside the bag. “Sure she don’t want to split it?”

“Ask her. I’m just the delivery guy.”

“Jesus!” shouted the cop. “It’s him. It’s the fuckin’ doer. Guys, check this out. Got the doer cold.”

Bolden froze, then realized a moment later that the cop had just gotten sight of the television. Another cop ambled over. When he figured out just what he was watching, he whistled and yelled for his buddy to get his ass over there. Pretty soon all ten police officers were crowded in a horseshoe around Bolden watching the television.

“Guess he didn’t get the bonus he expected,” said one.

“Naw, he wanted that corner office.”

“Hey, boss, here’s what you can do with that evaluation form.”

The laughs grew louder with every comment, the policemen pressing him against the reception desk. The tape ended, and was replaced by a full-screen photograph of the suspect. Trapped, Bolden stared at himself. He kept his face down. He didn’t look around him. At any moment, he expected one of the officers to nudge him in the shoulder and say, “Hey, pal, isn’t that you?”

Glancing to his side, he caught Althea doing her power walk, barreling across the lobby. He couldn’t risk her reaction when she recognized him. Any attention could prove disastrous. “Excuse me, Officer,” he said, grabbing the bag and trying to shoulder his way through the policemen. It was like wading through concrete. The cops stood firm, their eyes locked on the television, waiting for the promised replay.

And then it was too late.

Althea placed her elbows on the far side of the desk. “Who placed this order?” she asked the security guard. “Wasn’t me. I didn’t order any pizza.”

“Ask him,” said the guard, a finger pointed at Bolden.

“I said, who placed the order? I most certainly did—” Althea’s words dropped as cleanly as if they’d been chopped off by the guillotine. “Oh yeah,” she added. “That’s me, all right.”

Fighting clear of the swarm of policemen, Bolden handed her the bag holding the slice of pizza and soft drink. “That’ll be four-fifty. Plus a dollar delivery charge. Five-fifty total, ma’am. Something in there from the manager.”

Althea opened the bag and cocked her head to get a look inside. Slipping in a finger, she freed the napkin and read the note. One of the cops had good radar. Sensing something wasn’t kosher, he walked over and looked at both of them. “Everything all right, here?”

“Just fine, Officer,” said Althea, closing the paper bag. “Boy messed up my order, that’s all. Sometimes I’m surprised they can even find the building.” She fished inside her purse for her wallet and handed Bolden a twenty. “Got change?”

Bolden looked at the bill. He’d spent his last dime on the hat and sunglasses. He reached for his wallet, anyway, aware of the policeman’s intent gaze. “Just for a ten,” he said, lying. “Slow day.”

“No sweat,” said the cop, reaching into his hip pocket and pulling out a gambler’s wad. He ripped off two tens from the middle of the stack and traded them for Althea’s twenty. “And you,” he said, yanking down Bolden’s sunglasses with a finger and shooting him a do-not-fuck-with-me look in the eye. “Pay closer attention next time. Don’t go screwin’ up the lady’s order.”

Not caring to wait for a response, he sauntered back to the others.

Althea handed Bolden a ten.

“Jenny’s hurt,” he whispered. “She’s being treated at a hospital somewhere in lower Manhattan. I can’t explain, but I need you to check on her.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Find out!”

Althea nodded her head, but said nothing.

“Get my list?” He was referring to the list he’d asked Althea to compile of all companies that his clients had bought and sold over the past ten years. It was the only place he might find a clue to who might have been involved with a military contractor. Althea frowned. “It slipped my mind.”

“I really need it. And your phone.”

Althea dug into her purse and handed him her cell phone. “Don’t be calling Australia,” she whispered. “I’m on a budget.”

“One hour,” said Bolden. “Get my list!”

Before he could thank her, she had turned and begun her march back to the elevator. Nobody needed to teach Althea Jackson how to act in front of the police.