The Color Of Night (20 page)

“Who are you contacting first?”

“A Taiwan Chinese named Lu Kee. Lu is our best first meeting because he’s the most civilized of the four. Talking to him will give us a less jarring sample of the meetings to come. He’ll be like a wise old uncle. He personally dislikes harshness. He pays people to be harsh for him.

“I’ve given Lu three crucial bits of information. First, proof that I have inside knowledge of one of his failed enterprises, a scheme that cost him hundreds of millions of dollars when it fell apart. He never found out why it happened. Second, the fact that I’m a former U.S. intelligence officer. Third, a promise that I’ll reveal a traitor.

“The first of these three is going to shock him. That probably would be enough to get me the interview. The third bit of information will seem like a scam without the first. The second bit of information will be expected to be proven at the meeting.”

“This could take days, couldn’t it?” Mara asked.

“Could. But I doubt if it will. I suspect it’ll happen very quickly.”

“If he’s in Taiwan…”

“He’s not. Darras’s information puts him in Zurich now. He has a home there.”

They stopped at a turn of the street that gave them a wide view of the lake. The sun was well into the eastern sky, throwing shadows to the west along the shoreline and strewing a shatter of brilliance across the surface of the water. Farther to their left, on the western leg of the lake, a single sailboat was tacking back toward the villas of Tremezzo. Down on the waterfront a tour boat pulled away from the quay and headed out across the lake.

“We just have to wait.”

The back-and-forth with Lu’s intermediaries dragged on past lunch. Strand had received from them three e-mail messages that, through a series of precise questions, were intended to determine the legitimacy of his request. He was patient with this, having expected nothing less. He answered the queries as fully as possible, while being careful not to reveal more than the circumstances required. Midafternoon brought another delay, another long wait.

“He’s not going to do it,” Mara said. She had tried to sketch but couldn’t concentrate. She had stared at the glistening lake, but even the incredible beauty of Como could not distract her. Strand watched her and worried. The waiting, the slow pace of negotiations, was wearing on both of them. Time dragged.

“He’s just cautious.” Strand rubbed his face. “He’ll do it.” He looked out through the balcony doors at the sailboats on the lake, the geometric shapes of their white sails passing smoothly back and forth within the view framed by the French doors.

By four o’clock in the afternoon, as the light on the lake began to soften, Lu Kee was still silent.

Shortly after five o’clock, four beeps signaled a message, and the words appeared like magic writing on the screen.

JL wishes to speak to HS.
This is HS.
Sir, I would like to arrange a meeting. Where are you?
Europe.
I am in Zurich. Is that near you?
Relatively.
I would like to meet tomorrow night. Is that possible?

Strand quickly flipped through Lu’s file. He had a large French-made LaSalle jet. Strand hesitated and looked at Mara. He began typing.

May I suggest Lake Como. I can be there by eight o’clock in the evening.
Do you know Villa d’Este? I can arrange a suite there. Will you be alone?

Strand stared at the screen. He turned and looked at Mara. “I think it could help if you went along. How would you feel about it?”

Mara swallowed. “Well, you don’t think that’ll be just a little obvious? You bringing along your token Chinese to show him how simpatico you’ll be.”

“Maybe. But something tells me that a token Chinese is better than no Chinese at all.”

“I’ll do it if you want.” She hesitated. “I’m going to assume I don’t have to be ‘prepped’ for this. I go along; I look good, follow my instincts on the light conversation, and keep my mouth shut when the serious stuff starts.”

“That’s about it.”

“I can do that.”

Strand turned back to the computer screen.

No, there will be two of us.
Then I will see you both at eight o’clock.
Agreed.

Strand stood up from the computer. “That’s it,” he said. He turned his stiff neck to one side and then to the other and rolled his shoulders foreward. He stopped. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.

She shrugged and cocked her head. “Isn’t that just an extraordinary… coincidence, him being, of all the places on the globe, just a couple of hours away?”

Strand nodded. “You’re right to be suspicious,” he said, “but it’s not unusual for Lu to be in Zurich. He has a lot of money there. He keeps tabs on it. And he likes the city. It’s clean. It’s orderly. Sometimes Latin Europe frustrates him. I doubt if he’d ever set foot in Italy at all if he didn’t need Lodato’s organization to move his China white.”

“How do you know all this? Have you met him?”

“No. How about you? You feel okay about this?”

Mara swung around in the chair, holding her sketchpad in her lap. She thought a moment before answering.

“This is your business, Harry. You know what you’re doing. You know what I can do and can’t do. If you’re willing to have me do this, I’ll do it.”

“I honestly think it would help to have you with me,” Strand said. “You’ll be all right.”

He put one hand in his trousers pocket and walked toward the balcony but stopped before he got there. He looked out a moment, then turned and came back and reached for the chair sitting in front of the computer. He turned it around to face her and sat down.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll make arrangements for getting us there tomorrow night. Lu’s people may try to follow us afterward. I don’t want to take a car to the hotel because they’ll tag it while we’re talking. And we’re going to need it.” He paused. “Tomorrow night when we leave here for the Villa d’Este we have to leave here packed. Three days is long enough to stay in one spot.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’m still thinking about that.”

Mara frowned. “And this moving, we’re going to have to keep it up until… something happens, with Schrade.”

“We’ll know more after we talk to Lu.”

The old woman was seventy-four years old. Her left leg had been blown off just above the knee in a little town called Lijeska in Bosnia Herzegovina, late in the war. She was taken away to Gorazde to a grim little hospital, where she waited out the remainder of the fighting. Her husband had been killed early in the conflict, one daughter had disappeared, and the second daughter had fled to Split, where she had friends.

When the fighting had been over several months, her daughter from Split had shown up at the hospital one day and taken her away to live with her. Now, thanks to French doctors, she had had three operations on her leg and had been fitted with a prosthesis that she kept under her bed in her daughter’s house.

The mother and daughter waited patiently in line at the ferry quay. The daughter was very thin, with lifeless, dusty brown hair that hung to her shoulders. Her face portrayed no expression at all, and she seemed resigned to waiting, in silence. The old woman was sitting in a battery-powered wheelchair, also provided by French relief programs. Unfortunately the batteries had lost their charge a week earlier, and the daughter had not had the time—she worked the night shift in a small laundry—to have the battery recharged. During the last week the daughter had had to push the wheelchair wherever the old woman needed to go. The old woman was carrying a small suitcase in her lap. Her daughter was taking her to visit her sister, who had fled the former Yugoslavia well before the war and now lived in London.

The ferry left very early in the morning, passing through the Split channel and heading out into the open Adriatic. The old woman sat at the observation rail near the front of the ferry, staring across the hazy sea toward Italy. After an hour she opened her suitcase and took out a plastic bag from which she withdrew a loaf of bread, a large wedge of cheese, and a bundle of little green onions. The two women proceeded to eat, watching the blue gray coast of Italy grow larger in the approaching distance.

When the ferry arrived at Pescara, the two women disembarked and took a taxi to the Stazione Centrale, where they boarded a train for Rome. A bus would have been much quicker, but the wheelchair presented a problem. In silence they watched out the window of their compartment as the train wound across the middle of Italy from sea to sea, from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian.

The train finally pulled into the Stazione Termini near the center of Rome late in the afternoon. Tired now, the two women took another taxi to the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport. After half an hour of waiting in lines the daughter finally purchased two budget tickets to London. But the flight didn’t leave for two hours. They settled down in one of the terminals. Again the plastic bag came out of the old suitcase, and the rest of the bread and cheese and onions were consumed as the two women watched the milling crowds with the weary but fascinated eyes of two provincials waiting on the brink of the twenty-first century.

When it came time for their departure, the old woman was told that she would have to be taken out of her personal wheelchair and put into one of the airline’s wheelchairs to be boarded. She panicked. That wheelchair was the only way she could move. The French doctors had given it to her. It was hers to keep. She could not leave her wheelchair, no, under no circumstances could she leave it. Where would she get another one in England? The French doctors…

She was assured that her wheelchair would be folded up and put in the cargo bins in the belly of the plane, and she would be able to return to it in London. To placate her, they let her watch them put a tag on the chair that said it belonged to her and put it on the conveyor belt that would take it to the luggage carts that would carry it to the plane.

She boarded first, was installed in the first row in the cabin—there were no first-class seats on this economy flight—and her daughter showed her out the window how the little electric carts were loading the baggage into the plane. Strangest of luck, they even saw her very own wheelchair itself being loaded into the plane. The old woman settled back restlessly, leaned forward several times to check the progress of the loading, and, finally, resigned herself to having to trust the blind promises of absolute strangers.

There was a thunderstorm on the flight to London. Twice the passengers all gasped in unison as the plane dropped suddenly into the rainy darkness. The old woman and her daughter grasped each other’s hands in the dim cabin gloom, staring unblinkingly at the flight attendants, who had strapped themselves into their tiny seats against the back wall of the cockpit.

The Alitalia flight finally landed at London Heathrow, the last flight from Italy for the night. The daughter followed meekly as the old woman was wheeled off the plane and was put on one of the courtesy trams. Together they rode swiftly through the concourse, the tram beeping to part the crowds as they sped past the fluorescent-lighted gift shops, through the invisible but distinct odors of the quick-food eateries, past the lounges and the pubs and the gateway waiting areas filled with bleary-eyed travelers.

The tram waited until their wheelchair arrived on the conveyor, and the old woman was helped into it and her daughter pushed her along the way to the customs stations. Their papers were examined, and they were questioned. Two customs officers came out of a back room and told the daughter, who spoke a modest amount of heavily accented English, that they would have to ask her mother to sit in the waiting area for a few moments while they examined her wheelchair.

Once again she was helped into one of the chairs to one side in the waiting area. She watched as the two customs officers examined her wheelchair in detail, using an odd kind of metal rod to tap-tap-tap on every inch of the tubular steel frame. They pulled off the cushions and put them through the X-ray machines. They unscrewed the black plastic armrests, looked at them, and put them back again.

They tested the wheelchair’s motor. Why wouldn’t it work?

The daughter explained.

The two officers unscrewed the battery from its brackets and took it off the wheelchair. They told the daughter they were sorry, but they would have to keep the battery. Her eyes grew large, and the old woman began to protest.

Please, please understand, the officer said. Electrical batteries were lined with lead and could not be X-rayed to check for explosives. To make sure there was nothing in it, they would have to dismantle it, which would ruin it. The old woman began to tell them that the French doctor had given it to her. She said she would not be able to get around, couldn’t shop, couldn’t go to the market without her wheelchair. She waved her arms, protesting vociferously to her daughter.

The daughter tried to placate her, but she began to wail. The English were ruining her French wheelchair. Finally one of the officers left and returned with a piece of paper that he called a voucher, a check for the approximate amount of the cost of a new battery. They were sorry, but this would have to do. It would be quite easy to get a new battery in the morning.

The daughter comforted the old woman and helped her back into her French wheelchair. The customs officers put the battery on a cart and took it away to be dismantled.

The old woman was finally able to lie down on a lumpy, swaybacked bed in a dowdy flat on the outer edges of Basildon on London’s east side. She was asleep in moments. Her daughter made a telephone call.

At two o’clock the old woman was awakened. Her daughter told her that the people had come for the package.

The old woman pulled herself up on one elbow and looked at the young woman with wiry red hair who was standing at the foot of the bed.

“We’ll just have a look, ma’am,” the girl said.