Reckless (25 page)

“Until he was seen here, in the United States,” Hauck said, “under someone else’s name.”

“I checked with Interpol.” Naomi nodded. “Dieter Thibault was a Dutch national who was born in Rotterdam in 1964. He went to the University of Rotterdam and emigrated to Belgium, where he worked as an account manager for the NazionsBank in Anderlecht, outside of Brussels. In 2000, he disappeared while on a business trip to France and was never found.”

Hauck recalled the file he had given to Naomi and the information he had gotten from Snell.

“Yet not long after, not that anyone would have checked, there was a Dieter Thibault employed by the RezionsBank in Brussels. Then at the KronenBank in Lichtenstein, where he was a senior investment manager…”

Hauck leafed through the file. A hard lump the size of a rock stuck in his throat. Thibault was scum. He had likely overseen the killing of dozens of innocent victims. There was no telling how the real Dieter Thibault had disappeared. Hauck looked up and met Naomi’s level eyes. In them, he saw the same glint he knew was in his eyes. This had far eclipsed two dead traders. Far eclipsed April.

This was a guy they had to bring down.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

T
heir food arrived, but neither of them felt particularly hungry.

“He told Merrill he had been in the Kosovo War,” Hauck said. “He claimed he was Belgian and Dutch. We thought to look only among the NATO forces.”

Naomi nodded. “And he’s been hiding under the radar ever since. Ten years. Right in plain sight. Building a new life. Not so prominent a case that anyone was really looking for him. Christ, he was right there in the European gossip columns, clubbing around with cousins of Princess Beatrix of Belgium. But Donje Velke was just one of many such incidents in that war. He was never even a priority on the UN’s list. Bigger fish to fry. It would have gone on indefinitely if—”

“If Merrill Simons hadn’t come to us to look into him,” Hauck said, finishing her thought.

Naomi nodded with a smile. “Or until some midlevel magistrate in the Hague who happened to have a fetish for the party-hopping friends of the Belgian royals finally made it to the bottom of his open files. And even then, he barely looks the same and operates under a new ID.”

A surge of anger started to burn in Hauck’s chest. Merrill Simons’s instincts had been right from the start. Dani was never who he claimed, not the freewheeling financier, not the attentive boyfriend. But how for a second could even she have suspected this? A wave of sadness for her came over him.

“So now you have a reason to pick him up,” Hauck said. He dropped the UN report back in front of her. “I assume there’s a valid Interpol warrant outstanding against him?”

“There is,” Naomi said. She leaned forward and looked him firmly in the eye. “But I think you can understand how the people I work for aren’t altogether keen on cleaning up the files for some bureaucratic war-crimes commission in the Hague with all that’s going on. What’s pressing
today
”—she tapped her nail against Dani’s photo—“is to find out what Thibault’s role was in the deaths of Marc Glassman and James Donovan and, even more important, where that might lead. Later, we can always hand him off to the UN to answer for what he’s done.”

“So then pick him up.” Hauck shrugged. “You have sufficient cause. There’s nothing stopping you now.”

“Yes, there is.” Naomi looked at him directly. “Just one thing…”

Suddenly Hauck started to wonder why they were even meeting. Why she was sharing all this with him.

“Thibault’s missing.”

“Missing!”

Naomi nodded. “He’s gone underground. We were keeping tabs on him—loosely, until we could fill in the details. He went into work in his office two days ago. According to the agents tracking him, they haven’t seen him since.”

“Someone doesn’t just completely disappear!”

“That’s exactly what he did. He never came back out. According to his secretary, he told her he had a sudden trip that had come up and he’d be back in a few days. So far, he hasn’t called in. We executed a warrant and impounded his computer. We found a wall safe in his office, cleaned out. We think he may have kept alternate passports in there.”

“He knew you were onto him,” Hauck said, putting it all together. “He fled.”

“The agents who were watching him claim there’s no way they could have been made. If he fled, it wasn’t under his own name. I don’t know if he got tipped off, but there’s no record of Thibault leaving the country. There is, however”—Naomi reached inside her case and pushed across a series of new black and white photos—
“this.”

The photos showed a bearded man in a black leather jacket with a baseball cap drawn over his eyes passing through an airport security station. “It’s at Newark international. Last Tuesday night. The same day he went missing. It could be him. We’ve interviewed various gate agents and they seem to recall someone similar boarding an Air France flight for Paris.”

Hauck stared closely at the photo. He felt a fist clench in his gut. “It
is
him.”

“How can you be sure?”

“That’s the same satchel he had with him the night I followed him to the restaurant and got his DNA.” He passed the photos back across to Naomi with a shrug. “That’s him.”

“Look, until we know for sure what the hell is going on, all of this—Thibault, Kostavic, whatever he may have done—is not to be shared, you understand?” She tapped her nail and it brushed against his hand. “Especially when it comes to other investigative arms of the government. Or Merrill Simons, for that matter. That’s clear, right?”

Hauck met her round, gray eyes. “It’s clear.”

He had known for a time this would lead somewhere. When he first had doubts about Talon. When he pressed Naomi to let him remain involved. Maybe that day when he first saw April Glassman’s face on that screen.

“You believe Thibault recruited these traders, don’t you? To go off the reservation, so to speak. To drive their firms under.”

“It all fits.” The Treasury agent’s eyes shone with the same intensity. “Both of them were used to earning millions; both were bonused largely in their own company stock, stock against which they had borrowed heavily to cover their lifestyles and that was now underwater. Both had margin calls against them just a few days away.”

“So where’s the money trail?” Hauck asked. “If Thibault bribed them, it had to be for something big.”

“It was something big.” She grinned. “Depending, of course, on your definition of big.” She reached back inside her case and this time came back with a photocopied, handwritten note. The stationery letterhead read
James Donovan
. She slipped it across the table to Hauck. “Leslie Donovan came to me. A couple of days after you went to see her. She didn’t know what to do with this. She had no idea what it meant, only that her husband was seemingly into something she couldn’t explain. She said you had asked her if she honestly thought he had taken his own life…”

Hauck read it. The note was written in an awkward, harried script.

Les, my love, I’ve asked Bill to give you this in the event anything should happen to me and I’m not there. Not being with you and Zach is the most painful thing I can ever imagine. Not seeing him grow into the person I know he will become. Not being there to take care of you. Listen—I’ve managed to put away some money. Money that can help take care of you, in the event I’m not around. It’s in an account that no one knows about at the Caribe Sun Trust on Grand Cayman Island. The account number is 4345672209. The account is in both of our names. You may remember, I had you sign something once. The pin code is Zachy. (Corny, I know!) Your signature is on file.

Whatever you do, this is money that must not be explained and cannot, cannot be brought back to this country. I can’t go into it other than to say it’s all a measure of my love for you. I’m hoping this is a letter you will never have to read, but if you do, don’t tell anyone. I’m not proud, but it’s to protect you when I’m not there.

The letter went on to talk about his love and it was signed
Jim
.

Hauck put it down. “So what’s your definition of big?”

Naomi pushed him another photocopy. This time, it was a bank statement, from the Caribe Sun Trust.

Hauck scanned down the list of deposits until he hit the bottom. It showed over eight million dollars in the account.

Hauck whistled. “Works for me…”

“It was probably only a down payment,” Naomi said. “This is a guy who was teetering on the edge financially. A guy with a six-thousand-a-month apartment in New York and two vacation homes who had leveraged himself heavily against his company stock, which in the near term had no prospect of ever coming back. A guy whose future earnings flow was up in the air. Why would I not be surprised to find a similar account somewhere when we dig into Marc Glassman?”

Hauck nodded. He would definitely believe it. “But you think there was a full-out conspiracy here. There’s more?”

Naomi looked at him. “Yeah, there’s more. But now we’re getting into things that someone like me shouldn’t be telling someone like you. You understand?”

He nodded. “I understand.”

She told him about the call intercepted from Hassan ibn Hassani to Marty al-Bashir in London. The sudden shift of one of the largest investment funds in the world, which started the plunge of the financial markets the very next day, building on the mortgage debacle, fears of Fannie and Freddie failing, the world creeping to the edge.

Glassman and Donovan just gave it the final, invisible nudge.

“Someone was paying them off. Someone used them to start the slide in motion. You want to hazard a guess, when we fully dig into Thibault’s accounts, where the flow of all that money originated from?”

It
was
huge. If this was an organized, plotted attack, it was terrorism.
Poor April
, he thought…How could she have known the forces behind what happened? Her family never had a chance.

“So why me?” Hauck asked finally.

“My people don’t want an interagency thing on this until we know more. If any of this leaks, it’s the sort of thing that would only create more chaos in the markets. Plus”—the agent’s gaze softened and for the first time she didn’t try to hold back her smile—“you seemed to desperately want in.”

Hauck smiled back. “I suppose I did, didn’t I? Look, my 401(k)’s in the shitter as much as the next guy’s, Agent Blum, but for me, this isn’t about the markets. It’s not about what happened to Wertheimer Grant. These people did what they did. But innocent people were killed to hide what they knew. One of them was a friend.”

“I understand.” The Treasury agent nodded.

“That said”—he shrugged—“I have been known to stumble into a well-concealed conspiracy every once in a while…”

She nodded, pleased. “So I’ve heard.”

“The first thing is to locate Thibault—
Kostavic,
” Hauck said, correcting himself. He looked at her.

“I have my people tracing him out of Paris.”

“Any luck so far?”

“Not yet.” She shook her head. “It’s a big world.”

“It is…” Hauck’s mind flashed back to something he remembered from weeks before. “Luckily for you, I think I know where he is.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

T
he easy part was grabbing a few days from the office.

He was owed that much. Foley had even suggested it. Not to mention he had just brought in a fat new account.

The hard part was squaring what he was about to do with Annie.

Not telling her the truth behind what he had let himself be drawn into. The reason her son had been attacked. About where he was about to go. And why.

He’d wanted in all along, hadn’t he? If he was honest.

From the start.

Hauck sat on the deck in the dark with a beer, looking over the sound. He followed the flickering lights of planes descending into LaGuardia across the water. He put his moccasins up on the railing.

It was one of those shifting lines in the sand where you had to make a call. What side you came down on. Who you fought for.

Who you let down.

April deserved that much, didn’t she? He thought back to the last time he had seen her and remembered her beaming face.
This is Evan
,
Ty
…

Then the wind suddenly shifted and the line was gone all over again. He knew why he was doing it. Why he was putting it all at risk. His job. Everything he had grown comfortable with.

Annie.

He knew why, and if he was honest with himself he could say it now.

It wasn’t all buried in the past.

It was his last time there—at the group. Dr. Rose had given him the okay to leave. His obligation to the department was complete. For weeks, he’d been feeling restless, boxed in. Ready to get on with it again. He’d grown to accept that there were simply things that had happened. Events out of his control. An unguarded moment where fate had intervened.

“I put my résumé out to a few places,” he told the doctor after the last session. “One in a town outside of Boston, where my sister lives. One in PA. I even sent one up to Greenwich.”

Dr. Rose seemed pleased. “In the group you said you still blame yourself a little. For what happened…”

Hauck shook his hand and smiled. “I guess I’ll always blame myself a little; I just figure I can do it with a paycheck coming in.”

It bothered him that April hadn’t been there. They had grown close over these weeks. Their talks…He would miss her. And he wondered: when they saw each other again, in a different place and time, would it ever be the same? Life would interfere. It always seemed to. He wished he could tell her they would always be friends.

He took the subway home, picked up something to eat at the Italian deli down the block. Went upstairs.