Need You Now (24 page)

47

I
couldn’t sleep. The air mattress was plenty comfortable, but my mind would not shut off. Scully’s snoring didn’t help.

I got up quietly, tiptoed to the kitchen, and raided the refrigerator. There was one slice of pizza left over from dinner, and it had my name on it. I brought the Gino’s box to the table and pulled up a chair. Connie’s PC was humming on the counter, and the only light in the kitchen was the dim glow of the screen saver on the LCD. Snow monkeys.

What else?

The pizza wasn’t nearly as good cold, but Connie’s apartment was so small that I feared even the hum of a microwave would wake the others. I ate half of the remaining slice and decided it wasn’t worth the extra sit-ups I’d have to do in the morning. The rest went into the garbage. But I still wasn’t sleepy.

I felt the urge to reach for my BlackBerry. Separation anxiety, I supposed. My BlackBerry was in the hands of Scully’s tech expert. Lilly’s phone had come back clean—no spyware—but it was taking longer to scan my BOS BlackBerry. In truth, I didn’t need a tech expert to confirm that Evan’s killer had eavesdropped on my last conversation with Evan and heard him say that he’d broken the encryption code. Not that any tech expert could tell us who was doing the eavesdropping. Good spyware was typically installed remotely, no way to trace it back to anyone.

The snow monkeys called to me, in a manner of speaking, offering a quick e-mail fix to an addict without his “crackberry.” I’d already used Connie’s PC to log onto my e-mail server four times since dinner. I got up from the kitchen table and made it five. Dozens of messages loaded. I read the latest thread from my team leader, Jay Sussman. It was only my fourth day on the job since returning to New York, but that was more than long enough for slackers to get fired on Wall Street. Jay had breathed not a word about the Cushman money to me, which I took as a positive sign: the pressure I was getting from Barber truly was between him, me, and Lilly. Jay’s latest message was to confirm a meeting with a private equity group in Chicago that the bank needed me to attend. It was scheduled for Monday at ten
A.M
. That gave me three days, including the weekend, to pull my life together. I had no idea how to make that happen. I told Jay I’d be there, hit Send, and then did a double take. The next message in my in-box gave me chills.

It was from Evan. The time posted in the Sent block was 5:14
P.M
.—minutes before his death. It had apparently been floating around in cyberspace for the past seven hours, finally hitting my inbox at 11:55
P.M
. The reason for the delay was evident: the attached file was enormous. I clicked to open it. The hourglass started spinning. And spinning. Whatever was inside was going to take a while. I was beginning to wonder if Connie’s computer was actually powered by snow monkeys. I read the message while the file downloaded:

“Freaked. Someone is at the door. Very suspicious shoes.”

It took me a second, but then I remembered the second peephole on Evan’s door. I read on:

“I am getting the hell out of here as soon as he leaves. The work we talked about is attached. Really big file for e-mail. Hope it comes through.”

I checked the hourglass on the file download. Still spinning. The message continued:

“Be careful with Lilly. Can’t understand how T memo on BAQ got in her data.”

Evan’s message ended there.

Connie’s computer was still struggling, the hourglass spinning as it tried to open Evan’s file attachment. Like Evan, I, too, had no idea how a Treasury memo on Operation BAQ had ended up in Lilly’s data, but if I had to wait another ten seconds to read Evan’s decrypted version of it, I thought I would burst. The screen flickered, and my heart nearly stopped.

Do NOT crash!

Another flicker across the screen, and my e-mail program suddenly shut down.

“Shit!”

A message box popped up. Inside, the hourglass continued to spin round and round. Connie’s computer was still trying to open Evan’s file.

Please, God.

My hand shook as I waited on the work that Evan had died—literally—trying to send me.

“Is everything okay?” asked Lilly.

I turned as she entered the kitchen. My outburst had apparently woken her, or perhaps sleep had been equally elusive for her. I started talking, my tongue racing, but I couldn’t have made much sense to her.

“It’s from Evan, an e-mail, and the attachment is so ginormous that Connie’s computer is about to—”

I caught my breath as the computer screen flickered one more time. Another box popped before my eyes. It was a long message with some kind of code attached, but this code was not from Evan, it was from Microsoft. Two words caught my attention:

FILE CORRUPTED
.

The screen went black, and the PC fell silent. I clicked the mouse, I tapped the keyboard, I pressed the main power button again and again. Nothing.

“You can’t be serious!”

“Patrick, what is going on?” asked Lilly.

“Where’s your phone?”

“Charging,” she said, “right over there.”

I spotted it by the toaster, hurried over, powered it on, and went straight to the Internet, where I pulled up the remote access program for my e-mail account. I scrolled down the in-box to where Evan’s message had been. Then I tried the trash bin.

“It’s gone,” I said, my heart sinking.

“What’s gone?”

I couldn’t believe it. The message and the e-mail—both were gone, wiped clean from the in-box and the trash bin.

“Patrick, what is it?”

I closed my eyes and then opened them slowly, hoping to wake up and find that this had all been a dream, a nightmare. It wasn’t.

“Disaster,” I said. “A total disaster is what this is.”

48

R
obledo’s
twin engine Cessna landed at eleven thirty
P.M
.
There were no runway lights. There was no runway. The unscheduled flight from
São Paulo, Brazil, had touched down on an unofficial landing strip. Hundreds of
such strips cut through the remote woods and grasslands of the Tri-Border
region, a landlocked patch of jungle and rough country that lies along the
Tropic of Capricorn, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet.

Robledo was in the eleventh hour of a southward
journey that had started on a commercial jet out of JFK airport. Even though
he’d slept on the flight to São Paulo, and even though he’d lost only two hours
with the time change, he felt jet-lagged and was glad to have a driver. His name
was Oscar, and he spoke only Spanish.

By midnight the four-wheel-drive SUV was
approaching Friendship Bridge, a sixteen-hundred-foot span that connected Brazil
to Paraguay. A sign posted at the bridge’s entrance announced that crossers were
prohibited from throwing merchandise off the side. Midnight, however, was the
regular shift change for the customs officers. Crews on the Brazilian side were
thin, and as usual, bribes had been paid to the Paraguayan naval police at the
other end of the bridge. As Robledo’s SUV rolled across the bridge, smugglers by
the dozen worked fast and fluidly, taking advantage of the window of opportunity
that came three times daily with every shift change. Scrambling but still
drinking beer, working within a couple hundred meters of Brazil’s customs and
immigration outpost, smugglers harnessed boxes of goods to long nylon ropes that
dangled from the railing and lowered them onto the forested riverbank. Below,
teenage boys armed with flashlights sorted through the packages in
litter-strewn, knee-high grass.

“Bienvenido a la Ciudad del
Este
,
”
his driver said with a smile.
“Welcome to Ciudad del Este.”

Robledo knew the place well. The nightly commotion
on the bridge was business as usual in a city of two hundred thousand thieves,
swindlers, whores, hit men, gangsters, kidnappers, drug runners, drug addicts,
extortionists, smugglers, counterfeiters, terrorists, and well-armed
revolutionaries—some with causes, most without. Ciudad del Este was a veritable
festering urban sore in the jungle on the Paraguay side of the Paraná River. Not
even the pop and crack of semi-automatic weapons in the distance was cause for
alarm. More than likely, it was a test firing by just another buyer of AK-47
assault rifles from China or submachine guns stolen from the Mexican army.

“Which hotel?” the driver asked in Spanish.

“Hotel Hamburg.”

“Hamburg,
sí
,” he said,
chuckling. The German name was a bit of a running joke among some of the locals.
Ciudad del Este drew a wide range of Hispanics and native South Americans from
neighboring countries, and it was home to sizable Muslim, Japanese, Taiwanese,
and Korean communities. Few of them realized that the first Western settlers in
nearby Colonia Independencia were retired German military from World War I—which
explained the disproportionate number of places in the region with names like
“Hotel Hamburg” or “Restaurante de Munich.” Robledo understood that bit of
history, and not just because he’d grown up in the area. Café Berlin was where
he had first met Niklas Konig, the German investor who had later introduced him
to Gerry Collins.

I’d shoot him again if I
could.

The SUV stopped in front of the hotel, and Robledo
stepped out. His goal on every trip was to keep a low profile. A
thirty-dollar-per-night flophouse like Hotel Hamburg blended right in with the
fume-filled traffic jams and bazaarlike shops on Avenida Monseñor Rodríguez, the
main drag in the center of town. From there, another five thousand shops fanned
out in all directions for a twenty-block area.

Robledo’s only luggage was an overnight bag, which
must have seemed odd to the late-night attendant behind the registration desk.
Guests often checked into the hotel with a half dozen or more empty suitcases,
leaving the next day with their take. Cheap electronics equipment and cigarettes
were popular items, but only for the casual buyer. Little or no luggage was a
sign of a serious player with a serious agenda—cash for weapons, sex, sex
slaves, pirated software, counterfeit goods, cocaine by the ton, murder for
hire, and just about everything else illegal—from phony passports to human body
parts for medical transplants. Delivery could be arranged for all of it. For a
price.

Robledo picked up a room key, which came with a
handwritten message: his contact was waiting across the street at the bar. He
dropped his bag in his room and then followed the directions in his message to
the Fugaki Bar.

Late January was the height of the summer rainy
season. Even after midnight, the potholes in the street remained filled with the
muddy remnants of the afternoon downpour. Some of the puddles were like
sinkholes, seemingly big enough to swallow up everything from an unsuspecting
tourist to a truckload of counterfeit Mont Blanc pens. Robledo stepped around
them, passing a restaurant called Lebanon. It was a reminder that the Tri-Border
Area was home to an estimated twenty-five thousand residents of Arab descent.
Born and raised in Argentina, Robledo was often taken for Hispanic, and his
Spanish was perfect. Not many people were aware that Robledo’s first language
was actually Arabic.

Ironically, coming off as Hispanic had actually
worked to his advantage in cultivating Lebanese wealth. Robledo was the golden
boy who had found a way around Abe Cushman’s unspoken refusal to take Arab
money. Robledo and his contact, Gerry Collins, had found a way to slide under
Cushman’s radar and bring Saudis to the Cushman trough—investors with whom
Cushman could never have done business without jeopardizing his stature in the
Jewish American community, and without alienating the Jewish charities that
would become his unwitting principal victims. For a time, Robledo’s Arab clients
loved him.

Lately, not so much.

“I don’t like to be kept waiting,” said Fahid.

He spoke in English, their common tongue, as
Fahid’s Arabic and Robledo’s Lebanese were not a perfect mesh. Fahid was a
badass—in any language, any culture, any country. He was the spokesman for
Robledo’s largest consortium of angry Saudi investors.

“I’m very sorry,” Robledo said as he took a seat on
the barstool beside Fahid. “We had some difficulties getting over the bridge.
The usual midnight chaos.”

Fahid tapped the rim of his shot glass. The
bartender poured him a refill and also brought one for Robledo. They belted them
back in unison. Robledo’s throat burned, and his eyes hurt. He wasn’t sure
exactly what it was, but it must have been the drink of choice for the guy who
had coined the word
firewater
. It was bad enough
that the Fugaki had no air-conditioning. The liquor had Robledo’s face
glistening with sweat, and the conversation had not even started.

Fahid said, “That ‘chaos,’ as you call it, pays the
light bill.”

“My apologies,” Robledo said. “Chaos was a poor
choice of words. I meant ‘business.’ ”

Big business.
The
official GDP of Paraguay was about $17 billion. The money moved illegally
through banks in Ciudad del Este on an annual basis was estimated to be at least
double that amount, much of it connected to
hawalas
.
There was another $14 billion in black market trading of goods, from cigarettes
to counterfeit designer watches. Fahid and his consortium held a 10 percent
share, mostly in smuggling. Simple math dictated that the $2 billion Robledo had
lost in the Cushman Ponzi scheme—the pipeline from Gerry Collins in Miami,
through Lilly Scanlon at BOS/Singapore, to Cushman Investment in New York—was
the financial equivalent of flushing months of profit down the toilet.

“I reviewed your latest videotape from the church,”
said Fahid. “Very impressive operation you are building.”

“Thank you. Our computers should be targeting
potential recruits by the end of the month.”

“Not much good if there’s no money to train
them.”

“I hear you.”

“No. You’re still hearing the message I delivered
six months ago—that our patience is coming to an end. The message is different
now: our patience has ended.”

“You’re putting me in an impossible situation.”

“You put yourself there.”

“No. This was not my fault.”

“Are you suggesting it was
my
fault?”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t blame this on Abe Cushman and Gerry Collins.
You
were the one who put our money with
them.”

“I accept that,” said Robledo. “But, please, listen
to me. I have scoured the earth for our money. I have applied force at every
conceivable pressure point. After three years, I am convinced that there is more
at work here than Cushman’s Ponzi scheme. There is a much bigger reason for our
losses. I beg you to make the consortium understand that this was not within my
control.”

Fahid looked at him like a judge about to pronounce
sentence. Finally, he gave another tap to the rim of his shot glass. The
bartender poured refills, which Robledo took to mean that he had another minute
or two of Fahid’s time.

“This may sound crazy,” said Robledo, “but it is my
firm conclusion that we lost our money because the U.S. government
wanted
us to lose it.”

Fahid stared at him for a moment. Then he burst out
in laughter. Laughed so hard that he nearly fell off his stool.

“I’m serious,” said Robledo. He removed Evan Hunt’s
report from the inside pocket of his blazer and laid it on the bar, which
brought Fahid’s laughter under control.

“What’s this?” asked Fahid.

“An analysis of thirty-eight reasons why Abe
Cushman was a fraud. A friend of Tony Mandretti prepared it years before Cushman
blew up. Mandretti gave it to me before I met with Collins.”

“Does Mandretti’s friend work for the
government?”

“No. But if some quant in Chinatown was able to
come up with this, can anyone seriously believe that the federal regulators were
unaware?”

Fahid took a moment to absorb what was said. “So
they knew.”

“Yes, they knew,” said Robledo. “It’s my belief
that they took that knowledge and cut a deal with Gerry Collins. They could have
promised him anything from a reduced sentence to better food in the federal
penitentiary he was headed for. I don’t know what he got. But it’s clear to me
what Collins gave them:
us
. Collins and his friend
with the boat in Miami—Mr. Konig, whom I took care of personally—lured me into
the scheme just in time for us to lose two billion dollars.”

Fahid belted back another Paraguayan firewater.
“Mandretti gave you this three years ago. Why am I hearing this government
conspiracy theory just now?”

Robledo reached into his pocket and removed another
document. “Do you remember the Treasury Department memo I told you about?”

“Of course.”

Robledo laid the memo on the bar, then read the key
language: “ ‘Treasury’s most promising lead as to concealment of proceeds from
the Cushman fraud remains Gerry Collins’ banking activities at BOS/Singapore,
and the key person of interest at BOS has been identified as Lilly Scanlon.’
”

“Yes, I remember. This memo is what put that girl
Scanlon and her boyfriend in the crosshairs.”

“I think this memo is part of the government’s
plan,” Robledo said.

“How?”

“It came to me so out of the blue, like a gift from
Allah. Now I know it was no gift. It was leaked to me to keep me chasing after
the money.”

“Why would the U.S. government want you to keep
looking?”

“Because it was one thing to lose my clients’ money
in the Ponzi scheme. It is quite another for the U.S. government to actually
find out the names of my clients.”

Fahid studied the Treasury memo, took another look
at Evan Hunt’s analysis, and then shook his head. “This troubles me,” he
said.

“It should.”

“My concern is that if the U.S. government wanted
us to lose our money, then they must have known the true identity of your
investors.”

Robledo paused. He knew the consequences of any
breach of client confidentiality. “No, you are jumping ahead. It has to be the
case that the Americans simply had suspicions about my investors. That’s why
they are using this girl Scanlon. She’s the bait they want me to chase. The
longer I chase, the more chances they have to find out who I represent.”

“That may be. But I’m sure you will agree with me
that if that information did get out, neither Gerry Collins nor the U.S.
government is to blame.”

Robledo swallowed hard, but he knew there was only
one correct response. “I wouldn’t blame anyone but myself for that.”

“Nor would I,” Fahid said, his stare cutting right
through him. He took Robledo’s shot glass, tipped it back, and slammed the empty
glass on the bar. Then he left a hundred-dollar bill and said good night.

Robledo was alone at the bar, watching through the
Fugaki’s plate glass window as Fahid made his way out, crossed the street, and
passed another busload of Brazilians checking in at the Hotel Hamburg.