Reckless (29 page)

“Okay.” Hauck turned back to the binoculars, suppressing a smile.

Naomi said, “I thought this was just about your friend. The one who was murdered. You don’t have to do this either. We found Thibault.”

“What can I tell you?” Hauck said. “I’m learning to multitask.”

Now she was the one hiding her smile.

They watched a little longer. Hauck’s cell phone began to vibrate. It was Steve Chrisafoulis, he noticed, relieved it wasn’t Annie.

“Steve.”

“Where am I catching you?” the detective asked. The reception made it sound as if he was a block away.

“Just doing a bit of house-hunting,” Hauck said, rolling a few yards down the rise. He’d have liked to hear the guy’s reaction if he divulged he was on a hilltop in frigging Serbia.

“House-hunting…? We got something interesting back on James Merced. You remember your skating partner?”

“Yeah, Steve, I recall. I’m listening.”

“Turns out he came back stateside after receiving a get-out-of-jail card from Iraq. Seemed he had a few social problems with the enlisted women over there. Harassment. Assault. Attempted rape…They gave him a less-than-honorable discharge.”

“You don’t have to try hard to convince me, Steve.”

“When he got home, he knocked around a bit in California and Michigan, digging pools. Then he tried to hook on as a private contractor with a security outfit back in Iraq. Global Threat Management. You familiar with that company, Ty?”

“Yeah, I’m familiar.”

“That’s part of your outfit, isn’t it, Ty? Talon?”

Hauck felt a tremor tighten in his chest. “It is.”

“Apparently they shipped his ass right back out, soon as they found out about his record. I spoke with the employment director there. Still, quite a little coincidence, don’t you think? You and he, tied to the same firm…”

“You think that’s why he was trying to kill me, Steve?”

Hauck thanked him, and Steve said he’d keep him posted. They signed off. House-hunting…
If he only knew…

Hauck crawled back up to the ridge.

“What was that?” Naomi asked.

“Real estate thing,” he said. She stared back at him. “Nothing…” He retook the binoculars. But it wasn’t
nothing
. It was the second time in a month he had doubts about his own firm, thought they might somehow be involved.

The sun was out. It was hot on this hilltop in Serbia. His brow was sweating. So why did he have the disturbing feeling that he was walking on thin ice?

“You know, I never handed out traffic tickets,” he said, focusing back on Thibault’s farmhouse. “Least not in Greenwich.”

“That’s okay,” Naomi said. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

They waited until almost dark. For a while, in the late afternoon, Thibault came out and walked around, smoking. He leaned against the wooden fence of the animal pen, staring up at the hills.

He had to have a plan.

Then he went back inside.

At the onset of dark, about seven, they went back down the hill. They’d come to a decision.

In the car, Hauck turned onto the main road and headed back toward town.

A gray delivery van pulled out on the road behind them, the driver waiting before they’d gone around a bend to turn on its lights. There were two men in the front who’d been sitting for most of the day. One had short, dark hair, long sideburns, and a heavy mustache.

“To je u njima,”
he said in Serbian.
That’s them.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

L
ook!”

It was the next day, Friday, in the late afternoon. Naomi pointed toward the farmhouse. They’d been watching it all day. The sun was just beginning to set and they were about to pack it up and head back into town.

Hauck took the glasses from her and zoomed in.

Thibault stepped outside. He was wearing a black leather jacket and tossed a duffel bag in the backseat of the Audi. He was heading somewhere. He locked the front door.

Hauck put down the binoculars and looked at Naomi. This was their chance.

They had talked it over for most of the day. They had already passed back the license number of the rented Audi, and they knew for certain what identity Thibault was traveling under. What name he used to rent the car. They’d decided that if he left, one of them would take their car and follow.

The other would go inside.

That would be her.

“You better get moving.” Naomi stood up and strapped on a pouch that held a Nikon digital SLR, a special computer flash drive, a pen flashlight.

Her gun.

Thibault got into the Audi and started it up.

“Nervous?”
Hauck asked. She was a desk agent, not a field agent. What she was putting herself into was definitely crossing that line.

“No,” she answered without hesitating. Then, blowing air through her cheeks, she shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“Me too. Be careful going in not to trip any wires or safeguards he may have set up. Take a mental picture of how everything looks as soon as you get in. And make sure you leave everything just as you found it.”

“You think you can manage to tail the guy without blowing your cover?” she asked, a little peeved. “But hey,” she betrayed a smile. “Thanks.”

Thibault backed the Audi around and started to make his way down the winding road.

Hauck said, “I better go. Whenever I get to where he’s going, I’ll check in with you.” He squeezed her on the arm. “You be careful in there, okay?”

“You too, Ty. No heroics. Remember, I’m responsible for you.”

With a last wink, Hauck headed down the steep embankment to where they had left the car. Thibault had a bit of a head start, but Hauck knew what he was driving and figured traffic would be light. He finally made it down to the road, hopped into the driver’s seat of their Ford, and did a U-ey in a clearing on the deserted road, starting after the Audi with his headlights off. As he passed through the woods heading back to the road to Novi Pazar, he finally caught sight of it.

Thibault had pulled up for a moment at the turnoff. He stopped too. Then the Audi turned left on the road toward town.

Hauck slowed, and when he got to the intersection, he put on his lights. The Audi was a minute or so ahead of him. But it was starting to get dark and they were the only ones on the road. As they climbed up over the pass, he saw the Audi’s taillights in the distance.

Heading to Novi Pazar.

It took about fifteen minutes to reach the outskirts of town. Hauck narrowed the distance as the main road fed into the town and traffic picked up. At a circle, he let a slower fuel truck and a minivan sneak in between them to conceal his pursuit. At an intersection, Thibault accelerated through a light that was about to change and Hauck had to zip around the truck so as not to lose him, then fell a few car lengths back.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t been spotted. The Audi wove through the main thoroughfare, turned down a side street near the river, and pulled to a stop, parking on the sidewalk. Hauck slowed, passing by, and eyed a brightly lit bar with a frosted glass façade and a sign with old-fashioned American lettering that said O’FLYNN’S CHICAGO-STYLE BAR, like some garish American sports bar. Probably the local hangout. Through his rearview mirror, Hauck saw Thibault climb out, flick the automatic lock of the car, and go inside.

Hauck continued on the narrow side street and squeezed into a spot in front of a brick building that had a yogurt billboard in Serbian with a photo of Ana Ivanovic, the pretty tennis player, on the side of it. He locked the car and stepped around the side to the main street. He pulled his cap down over his brow. In front, a man and woman came out, almost bumping into him, speaking loudly in Serbian.
“Izvinite,”
Hauck grunted under his breath.
Excuse me.
He peered inside the frosted windows. A Heineken beer sign. Inside, the bar was dark. And crowded. The din that escaped was loud.

There was always the chance he was walking into a trap.
No heroics…

He went around the side. There was a small deck overlooking the river. Six or seven tables on it, mostly young people drinking, eating, under beer umbrellas. Hauck followed a waitress through a rear door. A wave of noise hit him at the entrance.

He made his way inside.

The main bar was raucous and packed with people. Women crowded the wooden bar surrounded by local types. Everyone was smoking. Some looked like businessmen; others hunched over tables, drinking beer, smoking, gesturing at the large TV screen above. A soccer game was on that a lot of people seemed to be watching. When the ball went down one side, the bar seemed to erupt in cheers. The women were laughing, chattering, looking like secretaries out on the make. The local beer, Jemel, was flowing.

Hauck made his way up to the end of the bar and lost himself in a crowd. Just like in New York, he recalled. He looked around for Thibault, searching for his face through the haze of smoke and patrons.

He finally found him sitting alone at a table near the far end of the bar, sipping a beer.

Thibault was looking directly at him.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

N
aomi wound her way down to the farmhouse. She waited a few minutes to make certain Thibault wasn’t coming back. It had become dark, and the path down was treacherous with sliding rocks and false steps, even with her flashlight, causing her to stumble and almost fall several times along the way.

Thank God Ty was following Thibault.

As she watched the house her blood started to race. The dark silence of the unfamiliar valley and realizing just what she was about to get herself into gave her one of the deepest feelings of loneliness and isolation she had ever felt. She begged her heart to calm down. There was no one there, nothing to be afraid of. She kept telling herself that this was the right thing to do. Still, her heart wouldn’t quite respond. A thought passed through her that would have made her laugh if she wasn’t so afraid:
What’ve you gotten yourself involved in, Naomi?

She wasn’t a desk agent anymore.

When she was certain Thibault wasn’t returning, she darted across the mountain road, careful to avoid leaving imprints from her sneakers in the gravel. She moved over to the arched, wood-planked front door. The latch was locked.
Shit.
She poked her light through a crack in the shuttered window. She couldn’t see much. The lights inside were dimmed.

She hurried around the side. It was a stone and stucco cottage, could have been built a hundred years ago. The brush that crept up to the side of the house was sparse. Cautiously, she peered in through a cracked shutter. She could see an open kitchen with a large stone hearth. She tried the door off the kitchen. The iron latch didn’t budge either.
Damn.
She continued on around back.

She knew she had the time, the time to sort it all out and be careful, but her heart was thumping and she wanted to get this over with, and she didn’t want to take the chance that someone,
anyone,
might show up at the house. She peered into what looked like a bedroom window. She knew if she had to she could break the pane of glass. They knew where Thibault was. They knew what car he was driving, what name he was traveling under. They could always find him. Busting the window would blow their secrecy. But what was important was finding out what he knew.

She checked the shuttered windows along the back and, to her elation, saw that one of them was cracked.

She slid her fingers underneath the sill and jerked upward. To her relief, the window lifted. She wiggled a space just wide enough for her body to slip through and climbed inside. She was right; it was a bedroom. In fact, it seemed to be the one Thibault was using. His clothes were strewn haphazardly about a chair; the open suitcase she had seen Maria Radisovic bring in was on the floor. The bed was mussed.

She was in.

In the front room she spotted a breakfast table in a nook outside the kitchen that Thibault seemed to be using as his work space. There was a small TV that was hooked up to a satellite. There was a laptop set up on the table. Some books, papers stacked around. Naomi sat down and inserted a download flash drive in the USB port and tried to log on. Not surprisingly, the prompt came up for a password.

Damn.

Thibault had to have records. Records of who he communicated with. His financial interactions. The money flow. She was certain she’d find all that inside. The thought passed through her that maybe she ought to just take it. That it didn’t matter anymore, this cat-and-mouse. What was important was to track the trail to someone higher. Where this conspiracy led.

She tried to bypass the security but it proved to be futile. Pulse racing, she turned her attention to the papers scattered all over the table. She rifled through the files, mostly financial papers—partnership agreements, corporate documents, deal brochures. She had no idea if these were legitimate or part of Thibault’s illicit doings. But he’d brought them with him, so she assumed they must have some value. She laid them out on the table and snapped pictures of the cover pages, focusing on the corporate logos. There was a stack of business cards bound together by a rubber band. Naomi unfastened them and began to leaf through.

Most seemed like legitimate contacts from around the world. Thibault’s network. JP Morgan, Citi, Reynolds Reid. She even came upon James Donovan’s card and those of other securities traders from different firms, which made her wonder if they might have been more potential victims. She laid them all out on the table, snapping digital shots. She came across one that made her heart come to a stop.

The black, embossed logo of Ascot Capital.

Ascot was the investment partnership in Dubai that was linked to Crescent Bay in Toronto, the company that bought Donovan’s house.

The name on the card was Hassan ibn Hassani.

Her pulse rocketed. Hassani was the contact overheard on the phone with Marty al-Bashir in London. That had started the whole thing rolling.