Critical Space (46 page)

"It will take a minute," he whispered.

I didn't say anything, knowing that he wanted me to. Beads of sweat formed at his hairline; I watched as they met the barrel of the Browning and broke to either side. The computer ground through its boot cycle, its internal fan not quite as loud as the rasp of Junot's frightened breathing.

When the monitor asked for his password he began typing, didn't even hesitate. The program he was after was marked on the desktop, and the interface window opened and I knew enough to know I was looking at what I was after.

Junot cleared his throat. "I... you understand, I cannot do it all from here... some money, yes... but... but in the morning, if we were to go to my bank, you see, it would be..."

So that was going to be his play, that was what he'd been thinking of as we'd crossed the hall. I grinned.

"How much money?"

"Only two, three million dollars, perhaps." He sounded apologetic.

I moved the gun from his neck down along his spine, until it was in the middle of his back.

"You're lying," I said. "I want all of it."

"No,
monsieur,
please under..."

"Shut up!" I shouted, and he did, and he cringed.

I waited a couple of seconds, letting him wonder if I was going to kill him. I let the silence build.

"How much?" I repeated.

"Maybe four or five..."

I punched him in the left side with my left hand, where I had kicked him, and he groaned and bent, and I pushed the gun harder into his spine.

"Listen to me, you soon-to-be-quadriplegic," I said. "Don't try to tell me that if you get a call at three in the morning from a man you fear more than Satan himself saying he needs twenty million dollars transferred to Bogota in ten minutes you can't do it, because we both know that's a fucking lie. You will transfer his money, all of it, to the account I tell you, or I'll start pulling the trigger and I won't stop until I hear the hammer go dry."

He had begun trembling halfway through my tirade, and when I finished he simply began typing. His voice was shaking like his body when he asked me for the account number, the name of the bank. I gave both to him, the account I'd established earlier that day, and he bent over the keyboard and his fingers fumbled on the keys, but I watched the monitor, and I saw the numbers moving, and I knew I had him.

It took him under three and a half minutes, and when he was done, I had twenty-seven million, three hundred and forty-two thousand, eight hundred and sixteen dollars and seventeen cents more in my account than when I'd arrived. I waited until he had logged out and shut down the computer before letting up on the gun in his back.

When the monitor was charcoal again, Laurent Junot lowered his head and said,
"Monsieur...
please, I do not want to die like this..."

I pulled him back from the desk, stepping away as I turned him to face me. "You tell him anything about me, that I was here, anything at all, and I'll come back and put so many holes in you, your body will whistle in a breeze."

The idiom seemed to confuse him, or perhaps he was too afraid to understand. The blood from his nose came in slow drops that broke free when he nodded.

"Please," he said again, and it was pitiful, and it made me sick.

For a moment I looked at him, wrecked and terrified, and felt the same burden of grief and power I'd had when I'd seen him asleep in his bed. Then I flipped the Browning in my hand and struck him with the butt. He saw the movement coming, but was too slow to do anything in his defense, and perhaps his hands were coming up to protect his temple.

The butt of the pistol cracked against his skull, the shudder of metal meeting bone, and he toppled to the floor, landing hard enough to rattle the case of watches on the wall.

I needed a moment before I could bring myself to crouch beside him, to check him for a pulse. Like the manservant below, he was still alive, and like the manservant below, I hoped the only thing I'd left Junot with was a rotten headache.

I switched off the lights before leaving, exited the villa through the same door by which I'd entered. When I got outside, my watch said it was three minutes past midnight.

The air was cold and I started shaking as soon as it hit me, and I felt giddy, almost drunk, and I nearly tripped twice as I made my way the short twenty feet to the edge of Lake Geneva. I threw the Browning into the water, followed it with the duct tape, then turned and made my way back to the car, half-jogging, half-walking. It was where I'd left it parked, and I started the engine and pulled out, and my foot felt heavy on the gas. The streets were mostly deserted, and I took them carefully, mindful of the posted limits.

At the rental agency, I left the car in the lot and the keys in the slot, then stripped off my bloodied gloves and dumped them in a trash can on the corner before hailing a cab. The lobby of the Intercontinental was quiet and deserted but for the attendant at the desk, who greeted me in English as Mr.

Murphy, and who had to say it twice before I realized she was talking to me.

"Enjoying Geneva?" she asked.

"Time of my life," I assured her, and went up to my room.

It took me a while to fall asleep, staring at the ceiling, feeling the sorrow gnawing at my bones.

When the bank opened the next morning I withdrew twenty thousand in American dollars cash, the rest in a draft. Then I closed the account and went back to the Intercontinental, where I cleaned out my room and checked out of the hotel. At the Gare de Cornavin I stopped in the men's room long enough to dump the Beretta in a trash can, then got a second-class ticket on the next train to Austria. I found a pay phone and fed it a lot of coins for the privilege of speaking with Robert Moore.

"Klein," I said when he picked up.

"How's business, then, Mr. Klein?"

"Lucrative."

"Oh, well, I'm delighted to hear that." From his tone, I couldn't tell if he was lying or not.

"I'm looking to do some business in Vienna," I said.

"So you'd mentioned. I've got someone I think would be perfect for you. Her name's Sigrid Koller, and I've already told her all about you."

"Where can I meet her?"

"There's a bar on Stephansplatz called Onyx, opens early, nine in the morning in fact. Perfect for you business types. Ms. Koller will be there tomorrow at a quarter to ten, looking for you."

"What does she look like?"

Moore laughed. "Don't worry about that, mate. Shall I tell her it's on?"

"I'll be there."

"Right. Good luck with your business, Mr. Klein."

"Thanks," I said, but he'd already hung up.

I slept most of the way to Vienna, which was better than being awake, because awake I worried. By now, Junot had certainly contacted Oxford, or at least had tried to; it would take him time to reach his employer, to put the word in the right locations that they needed to talk. But assuming that Junot had regained his courage shortly after his consciousness, that meant that Oxford either knew he'd been robbed, or was soon to find out.

Then what? It wouldn't take long to track the account number, to find out that Dennis Murphy had received the twenty-seven-million-dollar deposit, and that Dennis Murphy had the next morning withdrawn the whole amount. With a little more legwork, some routine inquiries, Oxford would find out where I'd stayed, would get my description. Even assuming that he didn't know I was behind the theft when Junot contacted him, once he had a physical description, there wouldn't be any doubt.

The real question was: how long would it take him? I was operating on the theory that he was still in the United States, that he was in fact in New York, and perhaps even closing in on Mahwah. Would the theft be enough to delay him? Would he abandon the hunt long enough to fly to Geneva and have words with Junot, to investigate the theft? Or would he assume it had been me? And if he assumed it was me, would he assume Alena was with me?

That last potential gave me the most hope, because if he believed that Alena and I had done the robbery together, he would have to assume that we were in Europe together. That would bring him out of the country, and if I was very lucky, he'd be arriving in Geneva about the same time I was headed back to New York.

If I was lucky indeed.

That didn't seem likely. If Gracey and Bowles were still in contact with him, Oxford wouldn't have to leave the U.S. He'd simply have them look into it. With their resources, Oxford would know exactly who had done what with his fortune by the time I landed at Kennedy. In that case, we'd be pretty much back where we'd started, but with a slight advantage in my court.

After all, I had his money, and I didn't care how professional or committed Oxford was or said he was -- nearly thirty million dollars was enough incentive to make him change his tactics, if not his plans.

That gave me comfort, until I started thinking about Alena, and her timing herself up and down the stairs in Mahwah.

The Vienna Hilton was across the street from the train station, so I took a room there using the Klein I.D. The nonsmoking floor was booked up, and I ended up with a queen bed in a room that was surprisingly un-Hilton in terms of decor and style, but that reeked of cigarettes and heavy air freshener. I dropped off my bags and changed and headed down to the fitness center, where I killed four hours. My energy surprised me. I'd never imagined an adrenaline rush could last so long.

I stayed in that night, dining in the room and watching Austrian television, which I found bewildering and vaguely disturbing for no reason that I could articulate. I fell asleep early, but woke once during the night, in the darkness, certain I wasn't alone in my room. I lay on my back, motionless, trying to control my breathing, to sound like I was still nursing my dreams, listening for any sound, any indication of where the intruder might be. The noise of the hotel was a muted rustle, and from the corner, by the window, I was sure I heard carpet crushing under someone's feet as they pitched their balance, trying to stay steady and still.

There was nothing more, no other noise, and the fear slipped over my skin until I was fighting to stay calm, and when I couldn't take it any longer I pushed into motion with a frantic rush, tumbling out of the bed and putting it between myself and the intruder. I yanked the clock radio from the nightstand and threw it at the intruder, ducking low, coming up again, finally getting a good look.

I was alone.

I turned on the light, saw the clock, broken, resting between the television cabinet and the window. I looked at the curtain, checked behind it, found the window closed and locked, and I was up too high for anyone to have come in that way, anyway. I picked up the clock and tried to plug it back in, found that I'd snapped the cord, too. I dropped it in the trash, feeling foolish and embarrassed and deeply frightened.

I filled a glass of water at the bathroom sink, drained it, filled another, drained that, and climbed back into bed, feeling my heart racing.

No wonder Alena had nightmares.

The Onyx was an American bar, meaning it was an Austrian version of what an American bar should be, which I suppose explained why it opened at nine in the morning. It was on the sixth floor of the Haas Haus, one level below Do & Co., which turned out to be a sushi restaurant, so I figured the whole building was basically a cross-culture experiment gone terribly, horribly awry. Out the windows was a nice view of St. Stephen's Cathedral, and when I arrived at twenty to ten, I was surprised to see a number of very well-dressed men and women already enjoying their first martinis and Bloody Marys of the day.

I got myself an orange juice from the bartender and took a seat at a table, and hadn't been there for more than a minute when a woman took the chair opposite me, and the moment she sat I knew why Moore had told me not to worry. She was in her mid- to late thirties, skin as dark as Moore's, and lovely. She wore black leather pants, the kind that, whenever I see women in them, I wonder how they pull them on and never doubt that they have to peel them off. Her turtleneck was the color of dried blood, and she wore a man's tweed jacket.

"Mr. Klein?" she asked as she sat, the Austrian accent tripping over an upper-class English one.

"Ms. Koller," I said. "Nice to meet you."

"Robert says that you want to pay me a lot of money to do something very small."

"I need to do some banking."

"Perhaps you'd rather be in Switzerland, then?"

"I've been there, they don't have what I need. I want to open a
Sparbuch
account."

"Passbook, you mean."

"This is a very specific kind of account."

Sigrid Koller reached across the table and took my untouched orange juice, sipping it. Her eyes ran over me, then to the bar, then to the view. She set the orange juice back down.

"I know the account you mean," she replied. "It won't take long."

"I'm glad to hear it."

She rose, adjusting her tweed jacket, and smiled at me, so I got up too, and we left the bar together. A couple of the Bloody Mary pioneers watched us go. When we got to the elevator, I took two envelopes from my coat and handed them to her. She put them in the pockets of her jacket, one on either side.

"Each has ten thousand dollars in it," I said. "One is for the account. The other one is yours."

"You're paying me all up front?" Koller asked.

"Robert's word carries a lot of weight."

"It does for me, as well. Give me until noon. Where shall I meet you?"

"I'll be in the lobby of the Hilton across from the train station."

The elevator stopped, the doors sliding apart.

"Noon," she repeated, and we each went our separate ways.

I made reservations for a five o'clock flight to Heathrow, and then a connection from there back to JFK. Then I checked out of the room and left my bag with the bell captain and went for a short walk around Vienna. It was colder here than it had been in Geneva, and almost as clean. I did some window-shopping, and at an antique store picked up a fountain pen that I thought Erika might like as a present. I was back in the lobby of the Hilton by five of twelve, and Sigrid Koller was there waiting, reading what I assumed was a local newspaper at one of the chairs in the lobby. I went to the bell captain and got my bag, then headed out again, and she followed me onto the street and into the train station.