The Secret Agent (4 page)

“Is Asia important to Krane’s?”

The tawny gaze flicked over to hers. “It’s our bread and butter, darling. Every likely lad with tuppence in his pocket wants a piece of mainland China. Without Krane’s, they’d all be rooked inside of a fortnight. You can sell anything these days in Tiananmen Square-wireless phones, soda pop, a fresh-killed chicken or your
youngest sister. Commerce thrives, there’s no police force to speak of and the law is entirely theoretical. But I stray from the point.”

“Harry Leeds,” Stefani said gently.

Oliver sighed. “When I first learned of Max Roderick’s problem—the dead whore ’twixt the bedsheets—it was through one of my clients, Piste Ski, the French company for whom Roderick designs his pricey little boards. Piste Ski was keen to learn whether Max Roderick was framed for murder. They suspected blackmail—debts-some sort of extortion. Although Max was never charged, Piste Ski was afraid of bad press and wanted the truth about our Olympic boy before his golden touch turned to lead.”

“—Trust being a virtue the French hold in low esteem.” Stefani uncurled her legs from the chesterfield and crossed to the fruitwood commode where Oliver kept his single malts. “What did you discover?”

“I nosed around Geneva first. Put my Swiss ears to the ground and loosed my trained dogs. I covered the police’s tracks and searched for anyone who might have seen Roderick with the dead girl. It never occurred to me, I will confess, that the entire hit was Thai. But inside of twenty-four hours, I heard the faintest whisper that someone might have financed the job out of Bangkok. So I contacted Harry.”

Stefani turned and studied him intently. There was something in Oliver’s manner that suggested the confessional, as though all the blithe spirits and giddy talk of the past several weeks had been a type of mania designed to hold him back from the abyss. She remembered the elusive Catholic orphanage that had popped up in his background story. Had he often needed to invent a priest?

“Of course you called Harry,” she said evenly. “It was the obvious thing to do.”

Oliver was studying the flames with an absorption he usually reserved for golf magazines. “I sent Harry a report of the killing and subsequent investigation—
mine,
not the Swiss police’s—via secure fax. I know from the office logs that Harry received it. Four hours later he was lying dead under the front tires of a Kowloon taxi.”

“Jaywalking?”

Oliver’s caramel eyes skittered away from hers. “Harry never
walked
anywhere. His bloody great Jaguar was a point of pride. Symbol of Harry’s prestige. He was a Hong Kong
taipan
of the old order.”

The Scotch felt like crushed velvet on her tongue. “And what did the police say?”

“Something bland and polite and regretful and obscene,” Oliver muttered. “I do not accept it. I do not accept accident in my part of the world.”

She set down the glass. The rain had settled in over the gorse and the milling sheep; rain spat and fizzled in the darting hearth. The early northern dark was falling.

“You believe Harry was murdered because you queried him about Max Roderick? But he might have died for any number of reasons, Oliver. Gambling. Drugs. A man he shouldn’t have crossed. Or a woman. There must be things you didn’t know about him. There always are.”

“Harry was no fool. He’d lived in Asia most of his life and he understood the risks of our job. At Krane’s we’re paid a hell of a lot of money to walk around with bull’s-eyes on our backs. We’ve got the world’s nasties in our sights, and they mean to take us out before we take them down. But in thirteen years of adventure and high jinks, old thing, Harry never once faltered the course. He was sublime.”

And now the wind is whistling over your grave, Oliver Krane, and what worries you is your own fear.

But instead she asked: “Did Harry know Max Roderick? Or anyone in the Roderick family?”

“I have no idea. Harry’s lips, regrettably, are sealed.”

“Have you told Roderick about Harry’s death?”

“I chose,” Oliver replied with heavy emphasis, “to keep my cards close to my vest. The connection between the strangled whore and Harry’s hit-and-run exists, for the moment, only in my head.”

So Oliver did not quite trust Max Roderick either.

“Why was Harry in Kowloon that day?”

He ran a hand over the back of his sleek head—a restless, futile gesture. “God alone knows. Presumably there was someone he wanted to collar—an informant, a friend. I imagine he was asked to meet there, on foot— and that’s the sort of mistake a novice would make, never Harry. Harry knew that when someone hands you a meeting, first thing you do is turn it inside out.”

“But instead Harry went to Kowloon,” Stefani mused, “which means he was off-guard. He didn’t see trouble coming. He believed in the friend he was meeting.”

“Right again.”

“And you heard no more whispers out of Thailand?”

“The trail, as they say in the best spaghetti westerns, has unaccountably gone cold.”

“Except that Max has come to Krane’s for help, and you’re sending me to France. Where all the trails begin?”

For the first time, Oliver smiled. “Bloody brilliant, Ms. Fogg. See why I wanted you for this job?”

T
hey said nothing more about Max Roderick that evening and avoided the subject of him entirely the next day, because time was short and Oliver had a great deal to teach. There were the obvious things, like Krane & Associates’ operations worldwide, which Oliver summarized between brisk gallops through the fields of Inverlaggan House that first misty, exhilarating morning. He sat his mount with the incalculable air of having been born to a life of privilege that Stefani admired and deeply suspected was chicanery. He talked incessantly but to the purpose—imparting so much information, in fact, that she was glad she had tucked a voice-activated tape recorder in the pocket of her field jacket. She made no mention of the device and had almost forgot it when, at the end of nearly two hours’ ramble amid the rowan-berries and the spear thistle, Oliver told her gently, “I’ll have that tape now, old thing, if you don’t mind. What you can’t remember don’t matter a fig; and homework
never was your style.” He tossed the tape, recorder and all, far out into the lake and led her back to the house for breakfast.

By lunch, she was swimming in detail. There were all the subtleties of forensic accounting and of hard-drive analysis and file retrieval—which she gathered were pet topics of Oliver’s and far too complex to master in a matter of hours. He threw them at her while they hunted for trout, adjusting the angle of her pole and advising her alternately on coarse fishing and sheltering assets.

“If you’re in debt to the world and the world wants payment,” he advised, “have your best friend sue for a shocking amount. Better yet, have your ex-husband throw the book at you. Fail to answer the suit, and he’ll get a healthy default judgment. Then you file bankruptcy and the bulk of your liquidated estate goes to your detested former spouse. A few weeks later he’ll hand it all back as per your previous arrangement—minus a bagatelle of a handling fee. You shelter the remainder offshore. Brilliant little game, because it’s simple and goes almost unnoticed—except by those of us who think like the crooks do.”

In between riding and fishing lay all the small matters Oliver was determined to teach her: how to search a room for bugs, a car for explosives or the exterior of a building for video surveillance. How to fire a handgun, which Stefani had never done in her life and hardly expected to enjoy so much; how to shoot a camera disguised as a cellular phone while poring over suspect documents. How to detect infrared barriers and circumvent the more predictable forms of electronic security systems. Over a smoky single malt in the fire-lit library one rainy afternoon, Oliver showed her how a hostile handshake could steal her identity across the Internet
waves, and how to prevent it from happening in the future. He gave her phone numbers, security numbers and names in code: mental keys to a whole series of Krane’s rooms she might never unlock, with no notion of what lay behind their doors.

He even taught her, during a stint in his cavernous subterranean gym, how to fall into the arms of a would-be attacker and flip him onto his back with a force that drove the breath from his body.

“We’ll have to leave switchblades for another time,” Oliver said regretfully as he picked himself off the mat with a lithe spring. “I’ve no one whose neck I can put to the knife at the moment. You’ll have to rely on the C-clamp.”

The C-clamp, she learned, was a rigid cupping of the fingers in the shape of the letter C. When jammed, hard, against an assailant’s Adam’s apple and shoved upward, it was capable of killing a man in three seconds. Oliver declined the experiment, however.

“Use the mannequin,” he instructed with an airy wave at a life-sized Ken doll dressed in the requisite black. The mannequin emitted a high-pitched, mind-grating signal akin to a triggered smoke detector, setting nerves on edge and adrenaline pumping. Just to shut the thing up, Stefani lunged, grappled and shoved for all she was worth. Ken toppled backward with a satisfying thud, her hand still dragging at his plastic windpipe. It was unfortunate, she thought, that she had been forced to silence the only other person she’d seen in days.

Inverlaggan House was empty of life except for themselves. This was technically impossible, of course— someone prepared Stefani’s meals and tidied her room. But except for a distant figure she once glimpsed raking leaves, the Highlands landscape was stripped of casual
acquaintance. Either Oliver preferred to live in the illusion that he was self-sufficient, or his staff was under strict orders to give her a wide berth. Was this for her safety—or theirs?

Like everything to do with Oliver Krane, the atmosphere of Inverlaggan House—part James Bond, part Bertie Wooster—intrigued and amused her in a way that nothing had for months.

Every evening she curled up in her massive four-poster bed with a daunting collection of facts about Max Roderick: one hundred forty-three pages of names, dates and events in a very public life. It was, she thought, like studying an issue of
People
magazine devoted entirely to one person. The researchers at Krane’s had included photographs and video stills: Max as a boy of ten, dressed in a blue blazer that looked two years too small for him, standing with bowed head by his mother’s open grave. There were few other mourners: but Joe DiGuardia, the eternal ski coach, had his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Max as a gawky teenager, his smile forced and his right knee in a massive brace. And finally, a much older version, the features of the face sharpened and intensified by years of discipline: Max looking vaguely hostile as he stared down the camera lens.

She glanced at the caption: 1999. The waning days of his World Cup career, after the failure to qualify for the Nagano Olympics. He was strolling through Gstaad, arm in arm with a spectacular blonde in a silver fox coat. Suzanne Muldoon.

Stefani flipped through the dossier and found the woman’s entry.
Muldoon, Suzanne—the
only real love in Max Roderick’s life. A downhill skier ten years his junior. She had shared his sport, his passion, his bed, for three years—and self-destructed in a bruising fall during a World Cup final at Innsbruck. Knee ligaments detached
in four places. She had been flown directly to the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Vail, where surgical miracles were routinely performed; and then—disappeared.

Muldoon parted from Roderick in an acrimonious and public battle over culpability for her injuries,
the Krane dossier noted.
She sued for damages, citing deliberate and reckless endangerment due to relentless pressure to train beyond her physical capabilities. The suit was settled out of court. Muldoon never skied competitively again.

Stefani reached for a pad of paper and pen she kept on her bedside table, and wrote in jarring red ink:
What else does S. Muldoon know about Max? Will she talk? Why has he been alone ever since?

The piercing gaze of a hawk haunted her dreams.

Krane had suggested,
back in New York, that Stefani’s Scottish interlude would be a sporting one, and despite the wealth of information he managed to impart, they spent most of each day outdoors, in the bracing chill of a Highlands March. The shooting box, as he called it, sat in the southern end of the Great Glen, a flooded rift valley that split the Central Highlands from northeast to southwest. The high lonely reaches above Loch Lochy were sparsely populated, barring the occasional hiker toiling through the glen. The place was as different from Manhattan as a place could be. Half of Oliver’s purpose in bringing her to Scotland, Stefani guessed, was disorientation.

Inverlaggan had been built on a rise above the loch, some five hundred feet from the shoreline, with a clipped green terrace and a field of boulders strewn in between. It was a pre-Elizabethan edifice that resembled a castle more than a house, with crenellated battlements and a moat that had long since been drained and
graveled. A tower house, Oliver told her, in Scottish parlance—a thirteenth-century keep that had grown wings during the Renaissance. It had witnessed the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, not forty miles to the north, and harbored Bonnie Prince Charlie during his flight to the Continent; and when the tartan and the bagpipe and the clans were banned as a result of that failed revolt, Inverlaggan passed to English owners. Allied soldiers were garrisoned in its fastness during the Second World War, but since then, the place had fallen into disrepair.

“This whole bit of country round about Loch Lochy was used for commando training in the last war,” Oliver said as he tramped down the wild western shore of the lake in his dark green Wellies. “There’s a memorial to them in bronze over at the foot of Spean Bridge. Parachute drops, live ammo, stealthy raids by night—assassins and decoder rings. Perfect setting for Krane and Associates’ corporate training center.”

“Walt Disney could not have done better,” Stefani agreed. “But why the Highlands? Are your people Scottish?”

“Good Lord, no!” he replied in tones of shock, and heaved her booted foot out of a boggy patch with one hand placed deftly at the elbow.

“The will,” he
said two nights later, as he handed her a few sheets of paper, “direct from Roderick’s lawyer, Jeffrey Knetsch.”

The first thing she noticed was the date: February 12, 1967. Jack Roderick had drafted his final testament a little over a month before he disappeared. She shuddered involuntarily. She had never written a will. She was certain she would die if she did.

The bequests were brief and to the point. A few minor monetary gifts to persons of multisyllabic Thai names that meant nothing to Stefani—a collection of Bencharong porcelain to
“my houseboy, Chanat Surian, in recognition of his faithful service”—and
three hundred shares of privately held stock in the Jack Roderick Silk Company to
“my beloved friends, the Galayanapong family.”
Midway through the first page, the document came to the point.

I, John Pierpont Roderick, being of sound mind and body, leave the residue of my estate and all my worldly goods and chattels, including thirty percent of total shares in the Jack Roderick Silk Company (“the Estate”) to my son, Richard Pierce Roderick. In the event that Richard Pierce Roderick predeceases me, the Estate shall go in equal parts to his heirs and assigns.

She glanced over at Oliver Krane. “Richard Pierce, I presume, was nicknamed Rory?”

“The traditional diminutive of Roderick. Correct.”

“I thought he died
after
his father.”

Oliver shrugged. “Who’s to say? Jack Roderick wasn’t declared dead until a full seven years after his disappearance. No one can fix the time or place our Jack slipped this mortal coil. But Rory’s death was witnessed—by rather a lot of his flying buddies. So the Estate ought to have passed directly to Max.”

“I see.” Stefani frowned over the document in her hands. “But this will was lost for more than thirty years? And then just … resurfaced?”

“Jack Roderick’s sister Alice, who must have been ninety if she was a day, died quietly in Delaware last year. Her grandchildren subsequently cleaned out the matriarchal attic. In an old mailing tube—the sort that’s used for rolled pictures—they found the blueprints of a house. Jack’s house in Bangkok. The will had been slipped between two elevation renderings. He must have dropped
it on the pile of blueprints by mistake, and sent it on to his sister.”

“He doesn’t sound like the sort of man to do anything by mistake.”

“He was the soul of deliberate cunning. A.B., Princeton Class of ’28, then University of Pennsylvania for graduate work in architecture.” Oliver would know Jack Roderick’s date of birth, his Social Security number, lifetime traffic violations and each specific of his Decree of Divorce—no matter how long ago they had occurred. “Our Jack was something of a Brahmin. A trust-fund boy. Spent the Great Depression squiring socialites around the New York party circuit, then dove into the war and the OSS. Given the funds he started out with and his success in Bangkok, there should have been a tidy little sum awaiting his heirs. But at his death, there was exactly three hundred and twenty-seven dollars in his bank account, plus or minus a few cents. Odd, what?”

“Think he had an account offshore?”

“He left no instructions to that effect.”

“Maybe they were lost, too.” Frowning, she flipped to the will’s final page, where the signatures stood out in bold black ink. Jack Roderick had got his witnesses, at least. In that respect the will looked valid. “Who are these people? George and Richard Spencer?”

“Pair of Englishmen. Father and son. Roderick hired George in the early fifties to man the Bangkok store, and the Spencers gradually acquired twenty percent of the shares.”

“Who owns the rest?” Shares—the trading power of percentages—was something she understood.

“The weavers,” Oliver told her.

“The Weavers?” she repeated blankly.

“Silk weavers. Entire families, usually, who produced
the hand-loomed goods. Jack Roderick Silk is a cottage industry, you know—or was. That was Roderick’s brainstorm: place the power of production into the hands of the artisans. Pay them for whatever they produced. Offer them shares in the total profits. Give them incentive to control their own industry. They called him the Silk King in Bangkok but he’s a Bloody Pinko Communist to you, and don’t you forget it.”

“How is the stock presently disposed?”

“Most of the original weavers made fortunes, sold their shares and set up in direct competition with Jack Roderick Silk; the cottage system is defunct; the company is centrally organized. George Spencer is dead; son Dickie is President and Chairman of the Board of Directors and holds fifty-one percent of stock. Spencer
is
Jack Roderick Silk.”

“Never gone public?”

“Too small-time.”

She waved the papers in her hand. “So how much is this legacy worth to Max?”

“Zero,” Oliver answered cheerfully. “The three-hundred-odd dollars is long gone. When the Thai government declared Jack Roderick dead in 1974, his silk shares reverted to the company. Old Man Spencer snapped them up. To tell you the truth—with the house and the art collection in the hands of the Thais, and the silk company in Spencer’s control—I’m not sure what Max is fighting for.”