Levon's Night (6 page)

“And the coffee,” Levon said, meeting Lee’s eyes with his own as took his hand back and made to follow his daughter.

“Any time,” Lee said.

She went to the door to watch the two of them climb into the cab of the truck. He held the door for the little girl and secured it shut behind her. As he rounded the front of the Ram he looked toward the house once more and saw Lee standing in the door regarding him. He dipped his head in acknowledgment before he got behind the wheel.

There might just be more ways to kill time in this barn other than DVDs and Pilates, she thought as she watched the truck turn away down the drive for the road.

12

The two Fenton kids were out on the ice with Merry, showing her the finer points of cross-country skiing. Small, colorful shapes on the flat white dish of the lake. Levon stood by the bay window of the cabin watching them. The Fenton boy and girl moving easily over the bright snow in easy rhythm. Merry making more halting progress; getting hung up and leaning on the poles to get going again. The Fenton girl made a herringbone turn to glide back to Merry and offer advice. Levon couldn’t see their faces over the distance. Their body language told him they were laughing.

“Good kids,” he said to himself.

“What’s that, Mitch?” Danielle said from the kitchen.

“You have a good pair of kids. They’re being patient with my girl,” Levon said, turning to her.

“Moira’s so sweet. This is the first winter in a while they’ve had anyone near their age staying here.”

“Are those black-eyed peas?” Levon watched her stir a bubbling pot with a wooden spoon.

“Sure are. I read that greens and black-eyed peas are a Southern tradition for the New Year. Is that right? It’s a good luck thing?”

“All my life. But where’d you get greens way up here?”

“Cabbage will have to do. Hope you don’t mind a little Yankee food mixed in.” Danielle smiled, raising a lid on a large stock pot; a pork butt nestled steaming in chopped green and red cabbage.

“Damn Yankees.” Nate Fenton grinned as he entered the room from the rear of the cabin. His arms were loaded with neatly cut lengths of cord wood retrieved from the mud room. Levon helped him stack the split logs in a wrought iron cradle by the stove set in the stone fireplace.

“Warm fire. Cold beer. And football on the TV,” Nate said, crouching to poke a few logs atop the collapsing pile within the blazing stove.

Levon said nothing.

“You hunt much, Mitch?” Nate stood after closing the stove hatch, dogging it closed.

“When I was a kid. Not so much as I grew up,” Levon said.

“Me neither. Some small game with my dad. Birds mostly.”

“Uh huh,” Levon said. He watched the kids moving easy over the lake. He couldn’t pick Merry out for the three. She was moving like the Fenton kids, picking up skills.

“So you know guns, Mitch?”

“Some.”

In the kitchen, Danielle sighed.

“He wants to show you his rifle.” She smiled.

Nate grinned, coloring.

“Boys and their toys,” Danielle said as Nate led Levon from the room.

Nate drew the rifle from a canvas sleeve he pulled from the back of a closet in the largest bedroom. An SKS semi-auto rifle. Chinese manufacture. The yellow wood stock was heavy. The metal finished in a dull black. It was complete with the fold back bayonet with a wicked triangular blade secured beneath the barrel by a hinge. It was oiled and well-maintained.

“I have five hundred rounds for it. Picked it up at a gun show down in Augusta. Cleaning kit and everything,” Nate said.

“Not for hunting,” Levon said, running a hand over the smooth lacquered fore grip.

“For, you know, whatever. You never know, right?”

“You never know.” Levon handed it back.

“I mean, late at night, there’s only like eight state cops patrolling this whole state. From Moose Island to Portland. Eight cops.”

“You expecting trouble, Nate?”

“You must think I’m some kind of nut, right? I just feel better knowing this is here.” Nate shrugged and slid the rifle back into its sheath.

“You know how to shoot it?”

“I shot it some over the summer. I guess I’m good enough up close. You should think of getting something if you don’t already.” Nate closed the closet door.

“Maybe I will,” Levon said, following the other man back toward the smells from the kitchen.

13

Not a near-death experience. More like a near-sex experience.

From his place, naked and firmly strapped into an occasional chair with bands of plastic tape, he faced the two-meter wide screen with eyes wide.

There in radiant high definition was a video taken from a camera that had been obviously mounted in the ceiling of the master bedroom of this same hotel suite. Two slender young bodies, one a boy and one a girl, were gently touching the chubby body of a man tied by wrists and ankles to the bed posts by cording. The man was bathed in sweat and writhing; muted exclamations sounded from his nostrils since his mouth was securely fixed with a ball gag. The boy and girl worked over him using hands, lips and tongues with most extraordinary deftness.

The chubby man was Kosai. This was what he’d paid ten thousand Thai baht for just last night. About five hundred Euro. He had no regrets.

Not, at least, until he was wakened by two uninvited guests in his suite at the Bangkok Hilton.

One man, an enormous blond Viking bastard, plucked Kosai from the bed as if he was a child then placed him in the chair and wound tape about his torso, wrists and legs with practiced ease. The other man was smaller but frightened Kosai more. He was thinner with one milky, unmoving eye. The eye was a malignant, glittering jewel set on the plane of the man’s face that appeared to droop. It looked to Kosai like the flesh was wax and had been allowed to melt a bit and then set that way permanently.

The man with the white eye operated the DVD player to replay the events of the night before. Watching the man’s hands tab keys on the remote, Kosai realized that both men were wearing latex gloves. He looked down to see that their shoes were covered in white covers such as he’d seen surgeons wear in hospitals.

Kosai lost control of his bladder. The spray splashed the Viking’s pants, earning Kosai a sharp slap across the back of the head.

“You are the vice president of operations for the Cambodian firm of Meas Phy Holdings headquartered in Phnom Penh.” A statement rather than a question. It was spoken in competent French with an accent Kosai did not recognize. Kosai had learned French at university and spoke like a Parisian.

“I am,” Kosai said. His voice was made feeble by fear. He fought to keep a smile of professional interest on his face. This was, after all, a business deal in the end. And it was quite clear to him what the stakes were.

“I am going to repeat a list of names. You will explain your relationship with these persons and organizations.”

“As best I can.” Helpful smile.

“Roostook Ltd.”

“Yes. A South African law firm we do business with on that continent.” A matter of public record.

“Scotiabank, Nassau.”

“Ah. Our accounts in the Bahamas.” Not a matter of public record.

“Banco Centro Internacional.”

“Caracas. We do transfer funds through them.” Funds no one but a handful of people know about.

“Standhope Securities.”

Kosai swallowed hard. He nodded.

“Courtland Ray Blanco.”

Kosai fought to keep the smile on his face. His face resembled that of a fish lying on ice at a market stall. Frozen and without joy.

“That. That is very privileged information,” Kosai managed.

“Which is why we come to you. You will allow us access to files on your network. Files that have so far defeated our efforts to decrypt them.” The man with the half-melted face held Kosai’s smart phone up to him in latex encased fingers.

“Or what?” Kosai regained some of his composure.

“Or this will be more than just a private show for the three of us,” the wax-faced man said, gesturing to the big screen where the naked and sweating Kosai was arched, straining against his bonds like a wild thing with the two wickedly inventive children bringing him to ecstasy.

Kosai laughed at that. His restored composure turned to confidence. The world was a board room. They were negotiating. He had what they wanted. And, even from the weak bargaining position of being helpless in the hands of rough men, he had the upper hand. He had the keys to the encryption they sought to break.

“Who will you show it to? Members of the board? They will laugh. They will see me as a stallion. You think that they do not know what a business trip to Bangkok really means? That they have not come here for just this sort of adventure?”

The not-French man’s functioning eye showed no more change than its dead white counterpart.

“Or my wife? You think she has a right to judge me? To embarrass me? Divorce me in Cambodian court?” Kosai spoke in a mocking tone. He would give these men nothing.

The man was poised before Kosai to tap the keyboard on the smart phone.

“Who will you show it to?” Kosai’s professional smile turned to a grin.

“Your mother.”

Kosai’s face fell.

Kosai’s body was not found for three days. He floated up onto the banks of a canal off the Chao Phraya. Hauled from the muddy water and placed at the morgue for a week before he was identified as a major player in the cutthroat world of business in Southeast Asia.

And that is precisely how he ended his career. His throat cut.

Official reports in the media blamed his death on the many dangerous street gangs that prowl Bangkok preying on tourists and visiting businessmen.

No mention was made of the shining DVD disc that hung from a piece of cording about his neck or the missing fingers and toes obviously removed by a mechanical device. And nothing in the reports mentioned the television remote found inserted deep in his rectum.

His mother burned joss sticks and prayed before his picture in the family shrine.

His wife salved her loss in the comfort of a luxury condo in Singapore, purchased with the insurance settlement left her by Kosai.

14

“Yeah. Treasury’s not going to spring for tickets either.” Nancy Valdez shrugged.

It was weeks since she’d woke him up with news of the break-in and murders in Fiji. They’d put their heads together and came up with the skeleton of a report using the evidence from both crime scenes to prove beyond any doubt that they were the work of the same crew. Nancy wrote hers up for her supervisor at Treasury, emphasizing the big boodle of stolen funds still lying out there somewhere forgotten and untaxed. Bill wrote up his own file, highlighting the heinous nature of the crime and even managed to put a national security spin on it for the Bureau.

Both reports drew scant interest and both agents were reassigned. The Costa Rica file was still active at the Bureau but in a kind of bureaucratic limbo, getting colder all the time. The Fiji crimes were treated as a non-incident because no American citizen was involved—conveniently ignoring the connection to Corey Blanco that Nancy firmly established.

Her digging established that the construction of the Fiji house was financed by the same Cambodian corporation as the house in Costa Rica. The land it sat on was leased in perpetuity by a corporation registered in Delaware through a post box in Amsterdam. The financing was handled by the same two banks involved in the Costa Rican house except this time it was the Bahamian bank that secured the loan and an account at the Venezuelan bank that made the pay off. And both accounts were held by Roostook Ltd in Johannesburg. Cute. The cards were reshuffled but it was the same deck of cards.

If that incredible flock of coincidences didn’t tie both places to Corey Ray then the personal items found at the Fiji house solidly confirmed the identity of the owner. Photos, a child’s crayon scribbles, and some sex tapes that featured the Blancos in happier days and were quite frankly boring.