Need You Now (25 page)

49

“W
ho ate the leftover pizza?” asked Connie.

I had no idea that the city that never sleeps extended all the way to New Jersey. Her kitchen was like an active crime scene, more like two o’clock in the afternoon than two in the morning. Before we’d gone to bed, Scully’s tech expert had called to confirm that there was indeed spyware on my BlackBerry, which would have allowed someone to overhear my conversation with Evan before he died. Scully called him in again after the computer crash, so there were five of us in a cramped kitchen trying to figure out what had happened to Connie’s outdated PC, though Connie’s immediate concern was the case of the missing slice.

“I ate it an hour ago,” I said.

Connie grumbled as she closed the refrigerator door, then pulled up a barstool next to Lilly. I stole a quick glance, and all that kept Lilly from doing a face-plant on the floor was her elbow on the Formica counter and her chin resting in her hand. All of us were exhausted, but Lilly especially was struggling to focus on what Scully’s friend was telling me.

“The attempted download completely fried the motherboard and the hard drive along with it,” he said.

Zach Epstein was the same former FBI tech expert whom Scully had called upon to find the spyware on my BlackBerry. Zach was definitely not “retired.” A good techie with as little as two years of “FBI” experience on his résumé could easily land a job in private security that paid ten times his former government salary.

“Exactly what does that mean?” I asked.

Zach said, “Ever see that old public service announcement on TV with the egg in the frying pan: This is your brain on drugs? That’s pretty much Connie’s hard drive.”

“Can we recover Evan’s file?”

“I’ve run every diagnostic test I can run,” said Zach. “The file is not there to recover, is what I’m telling you. The download failed, and in the process it fried the hard drive. I could recover Connie’s address book and probably 80 percent of whatever data was there when you attempted the download. But I can’t recover a file that never made it to the hard drive.”

“There has to be a way to recover that file,” said Scully. “People are always saying that e-mails never really go away.”

“Normally the surest route would be to access Evan’s e-mail account and retrieve his sent messages.”

“Then let’s do that,” said Scully.

“Already tried,” said Zach. “Not only has the account been shut down, but there’s a monster security wall around it. No doubt that’s part of the homicide investigation.”

“Or part of the continued cover-up of Operation BAQ,” I said. “There has to be another option.”

“Just to make sure we’re not overlooking the obvious, is there any way for me to get my hands on Evan’s actual computer?”

“Gone,” I said. “Whoever killed him took it.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Zach. “The other possibility is that even though the message is no longer in your in-box, we could recover it from the bank’s server. Do you think the bank’s IT people would work with us on that?”

“I wouldn’t even ask,” I said.

“I get paid to do things the hard way, but it would be a whole lot easier if I had the bank’s cooperation.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“Why not?” asked Zach.

I glanced at Scully, who gave me a little nod that said Zach was cool and that it was okay to share my theory with him. “You said before that the BlackBerry is a highly secure smartphone, less vulnerable to spyware than most. And my BlackBerry was made even more secure by enhancements from BOS security.”

“That’s right,” said Zach.

“Someone still managed to load spyware without ever having touched my phone. It was a remote implant, which makes me think it was the bank that put it there.”

Zach said, “That would be a likely source, at least from the standpoint of technical ease and opportunity. But ‘the bank’ is a big place.”

I didn’t see a reason to be more specific, but Scully overrode me.

“We think Joe Barber authorized the spyware,” said Scully.

Zach was like a walking computer, and I could almost see his mind working as he processed the various puzzle pieces we’d fed him: the phone call from Evan telling me that he’d decrypted the Treasury memo; the e-mail with his decrypted attachment sent minutes later; Evan’s body in the Dumpster minutes after he’d hit Send.

“You’re saying that Joe Barber killed your friend and stole his computer to stop you from getting a decrypted copy of the Treasury memo on Operation BAQ?”

“To keep
the world
from seeing that memo,” I said. “I’m not saying he physically pulled the trigger. But, yes, I believe he’s behind it.”

Zach glanced at Connie, as if he were suddenly interested in the family consensus. “You agree with him?”

“That depends,” said Connie. “I would need to know more about how that spyware you found on Patrick’s BlackBerry actually works. It’s just hard for me to imagine someone—especially someone like Joe Barber—eavesdropping on Patrick’s BlackBerry in real time, twenty-four hours a day, just in case something of interest came along.”

Zach smiled, as if the statement were naïve. “That’s not the way it works. Virtually all spyware is programmed to alert the master when the target—in this case, Patrick—is actually using his telephone.”

“But I use my phone a lot,” I said. “Someone would have to listen to hours and hours of crap in the hope of getting ten seconds of meat, unless there’s a way to refine it further.”

“There is,” said Zach. “More sophisticated spyware can be programmed to alert the master only when you communicate with certain phone numbers.”

“So it’s possible that when Evan called to tell me about the decryption, the ‘master,’ as you call him, received an automatic alert that I was on the phone with Evan.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell by looking at my phone if that alert system was, in fact, part of the spyware?”

“No. That would only be in the master’s equipment.”

“Damn. Nothing’s ever easy,” I said.

“You got a plan to deal with someone like Joe Barber?” Zach asked.

“Is that spyware on my BlackBerry still active, even though you’ve analyzed it?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” said Zach.

“Then the answer to your question is yes,” I said. “I do have a plan.”

50

L
illy didn’t like what she was hearing. Too much scheming, Too much at stake, too much
former
FBI involvement.

Ex-FBI, ex-lover, ex-anything. They all have an ex to grind, pun intended.

“Excuse me,” she said as she pushed away from the kitchen counter. Her smartphone was fully charged, so she unplugged the cord and took everything with her. Patrick didn’t even notice her get up. Scully and his tech buddy were talking over each other, and Patrick was in the middle.

“You’re not going to bed, are you?” asked Connie, surprised.

“Bathroom,” said Lilly. She left the kitchen, taking little steps. The official Boy Scouts of America 100th Anniversary sweatpants that Connie had loaned her for the night were long enough to cover her feet like footies. She was virtually sliding across the tile floor to the master bathroom off Connie’s bedroom. She could hear the strategizing in the kitchen right up until she switched on the light and closed the bathroom door.

Lilly went to the sink and looked in the mirror.
Frightful.
Weeks of worry had left bags beneath her eyes that were way beyond the miracle of any concealer. But that was merely the superficial toll. The youthful gleam in her eyes, the sparkle from within, had completely vanished. Fear had replaced it, the fear of being trapped. It had been a while since she’d heard from her source—the ex–federal agent who wanted to protect her. Another ex. Another ax to grind. Lilly knew it was just a matter of time before he gave her another assignment.

A sharp pain gripped her abdomen. It was her “funny tummy,” as she called it, but there was nothing funny about it. This episode was so bad that she doubled over, unable to stand, and sat on the tile floor. Leaning against the wall was the only way to hold herself up. She breathed in and out until the pain subsided.

I can’t do this anymore.

Lilly closed her eyes to consider her options. There weren’t many—and the really good ones totaled zero. She chose the least of the worst. She powered on her telephone: 2:13
A.M
. That didn’t matter. The invitation had been to “call me anytime.” Lilly had committed the number to memory. She dialed and counted the rings until she heard the voice on the line. A sleepy voice that simply grunted out the word “hello.”

“It’s Lilly Scanlon, please don’t hang up.”

There was a pause on the line, perhaps a moment to check the clock on the nightstand and see what godforsaken time of day it was. “Lilly, is everything okay?” asked Agent Henning.

“I’m sorry to call you at this hour, but I—I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“It’s fine. I’m glad you reached out to me.”

The pain cut through Lilly’s abdomen again. She gritted her teeth and struggled through it. “I can’t talk here.”

“Where are you?”

“Still in New Jersey. Can we meet somewhere? Just you and me?”

“Not Patrick?”

“No. Not Patrick.”

There was another pause, as if Agent Henning were thinking through the schism. “Okay, that’s fine,” Henning said. “I can meet you anywhere, anytime. Right now, if you want.”

“No, not now. Patrick is going into the bank in the morning. I can’t get away until then.”

Get away?
Lilly wondered how that must have sounded to an FBI agent, but there was a light knock on the bathroom door before she could clarify.

Connie asked, “Lilly, are you okay in there?”

Lilly’s heart raced. She tightened her grip on the phone, whispered the meeting place she had decided upon prior to making the call—“Septuagesimo Uno Park, nine
A.M
.”—and quickly hung up.

“Lilly?” called Connie.

She kicked herself for having chosen a park with a Latin name, the pronunciation of which she’d mangled. No way Henning had understood. Lilly banged out a clarifying text message, adding for good measure that it was on Seventy-first Street at West End.

Another knock. “Lilly?”

Lilly pushed herself up from the floor, took a deep breath to calm her nerves, and opened the door. She was face-to-face with Connie.

“Were you on the phone?”

Lilly didn’t know whether to lie or tell her the truth. “No,” she lied.

“Oh. I thought I heard you talking.”

“No,” said Lilly—but it was a squeak, her nervous helium voice. She tried to cover with an explanation. “I was just checking my voice mail.”

Connie gave her a funny look. “Whatever. Anyway, Patrick has a question for you. Can you join us?”

Join us.
Of all the simple questions Lilly had heard in her lifetime, that one had to be the most complicated.

“Sure,” said Lilly, “whatever you need.”

51

M
ongoose was on the move. He did his best work at four
A.M
.

More than three years had passed since his last visit to Ciudad del Este. That one had been the capstone in a string of nine visits over a four-month period, all paid for by the U.S. government, all under the name Niklas Konig, a wealthy investor from Berlin. German was only one of five languages he spoke fluently, and on his first visit with Manu Robledo he’d spoken mostly Spanish. By their fifth meeting, he had befriended Robledo. By the eighth, they’d forged a business relationship. After the ninth, Robledo had traveled back to Miami with him to meet his Cushman connection, Gerry Collins. Collins had already been brought on board: Mongoose, personally, had sat him down, told him that Treasury was fully aware that he and Cushman were running a Ponzi scheme, and promised that Collins could get off with a prison sentence of ten years—as opposed to ten decades—if he cooperated. Operation BAQ had launched without a hitch. Manu Robledo and his highly suspect clientele would take a $2 billion loss without ever knowing that they’d been set up. A thing of beauty, and a perfectly acceptable result under a public policy cost-benefit analysis, if only Cushman’s scheme had, in fact, been worth the mere $6 billion that Treasury had estimated, not $60 billion.

Morons.

Mongoose climbed another step in the dark stairwell, then stopped. A bumpy puddle-jumper flight from São Paulo had left him with a nearly unbearable pain that radiated down his leg. Another painkiller would have been useless. After three years of living on pills, his system had built up a tolerance. Excruciating pain was a way of life, though sometimes it was so bad that it was impossible to stay on task. The pain—more specifically, the pills—had definitely made it impossible for him to remain with the agency. At least that was what the psychiatrists and pain-management specialists had told the bureaucrats on the disciplinary review panel. Shitheads, all of them.

Focus, damn it!

He closed his eyes and breathed in and out, slowly, letting his mind conquer this useless part of himself. After a minute or two, the pain lessened; it never completely went away. Pain was always somewhere, in his spine, in his lower back, in his hip. The worst was the pain down the back of his leg that felt as if some sadist had heated a knife with a blowtorch, jabbed him in the ass with the white-hot blade, and sliced him open from hip to heel. Pain on some level was with him every minute of every day, ever since he’d awakened in the hospital three years before and heard the doctor say that his motor function was unimpaired and that, in time, the pain could possibly go away. Possibly. The doc had been only half right. There were days when Mongoose would swear that there was something to be said for paralysis—for no feeling at all.

Only the promise of revenge kept him going. Sweet revenge.

Mongoose lifted his right foot, the less painful option under the current pain pattern, and took another step. He knew the Hotel Hamburg well. He had stayed there before, and he had climbed the back stairwell many times. The elevator would have been easier, but there was a security camera inside it, and the last thing he wanted was a digital recording of his visit. He knew the doors to the stairwell were never locked, knew that there were thirty-two steps from ground level to the second floor. He climbed the last eight slowly, then opened the door at the top of the stairway.

The hallway was empty.

Without a sound, Mongoose let the door close behind him, and he started toward Room 217. Carpeting muffled his footfalls. He needed to go only as far as the fifth door on the right. His stealth was merely a precaution to prevent any light sleepers from checking out a noise in the hallway and laying eyes upon him.

He stopped outside the fifth door. The rooms on either side of 217 were vacant. Mongoose had paid the desk clerk to make sure of it. He had the key to 215, which was an adjoining room to 217. He also had Room 219—just to make sure no one would overhear what was about to happen in 217.

He entered Room 215 and locked the door behind him. He did not switch on the lights. The glow of the moon between the parted draperies, through the window that overlooked a parking lot, was the only light in the room. He closed the drapes and waited for his eyes to adjust. Then he stepped farther into the room and laid his bag on the bed. It was his tool kit. He unzipped it and found the serrated diver’s knife. Just enough moonlight shone through the crack between drapery panels for the blade to glisten. He fastened his tool kit to his belt and stepped closer to the door to the adjoining room—the door to Room 217.

He took a deep breath, adjusting his mind-set, reminding himself that his actions were justified by more than just revenge. His old “friend” Robledo had shared much about himself—about his grandparents coming to the Tri-Border Area in the major wave of Lebanese-Muslim immigration that followed the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948; about his father, though an Argentine citizen, returning to battle the Israelis in the 1982 Lebanese War, only to fall alongside another 17,000 Lebanese killed. The war was considered an Israeli victory, with one major footnote: Hezbollah took control of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. Mongoose was quite familiar with rumors that it also controlled the Tri-Border Area. One of many unsettling rumors. He’d also heard that the homicide rate in Ciudad del Este was more than five times that of New York City.

Mongoose wondered how many men had boosted the rate in both cities in the same week.

Mongoose threw his weight against the door and busted through to the adjoining room. Before Robledo could move, before he was even fully awake, Mongoose grabbed him, cuffed his hands behind his back, and threw him down onto the floor. He drove his knees into Robledo’s spine, shoved one side of his face against the carpet, and put the knife to his neck.

“Don’t move,” said Mongoose.

“Please, don’t!”

“Quiet!” he said, making sure that Robledo felt the cold steel of the knife as he reached into his bag with his other hand and removed his tool of choice. Not the garrote. This time, it was the same class of tool that had been used on Gerry Collins.

“I can make you a rich man, I promise,” said Robledo, his voice shaking. “Just don’t do this, please!”

“Begging already, Manu?”

Robledo’s body stiffened, as if perhaps there were a spark of recognition. “Do I know you?”

Mongoose leaned closer and hissed into his ear. “Don’t you remember me, Manu? It’s your old friend, Niklas Konig.”

“No, no way! Konig is dead.”

It was the one thing the Central Intelligence Agency had done right after his shooting—the certificate of death issued for Niklas Konig.

His hands a blur, Mongoose dropped the knife and, with the speed of a trained assassin, wrapped the wire saw around Robledo’s neck. With enough back and forth, it was fully capable of beheading a man. Eventually.

Dead, you thought?

“You wish,” said Mongoose as he jerked the wire saw.

“Please, stop!
Please!
”

Another jerk of the wire deepened the flesh wound, enough to reveal that Robledo was a screamer.

“Stop!”

His begging made it all the more satisfying for Mongoose, but clearly a gag was essential. He quickly taped Robledo’s mouth shut, but as he tucked the roll away in his bag, Robledo squirmed and managed to kick over the cocktail table. Mongoose brought him under control with a tug on the wire, taking care not to inflict fatal injury, the tape muting Robledo’s cries of pain.

The upended cocktail table lay a few feet away, the four legs pointing upward like a dead animal with rigor mortis. For demonstrative effect, Mongoose went to work on one of the table legs, the saw cutting through solid pine in seconds. It dropped to the floor just inches from Robledo’s eyes, which were wide with fright, as big as saucers. Mongoose leaned closer to his prey, adding a touch of poetry to his sense of justice: “NATO-approved commando wire saw, Manu. Purchased right here in Ciudad del Este. Just like the one you used on Gerry Collins.”

Robledo groaned, but, again, the duct tape did its work.

Mongoose checked the thickness of the carpeting. Things would surely get messy, and his mind flashed with thoughts of sleeping guests in the room below waking to the steady drip, drip of blood seeping through the ceiling.

The bathtub.

With one hand Mongoose drew the wire tighter, and with the other, he grabbed Robledo’s shirt and dragged him across the floor to the bathroom.

“Be a good boy, Manu. Do exactly as I say, and I promise to make this quick.”

As quick as paint drying
.