Deception (20 page)

Daisy called back with six names, constituting the recipients of the most recent ten calls placed from the telephone in the apartment. Two of the names had local Chicago addresses; the others were in San Francisco, Atlanta, and London. Keyes scribbled them down on a pad by the Ludlow woman's telephone, then carefully removed the sheet beneath the one on which he had written.

The software had finished installing. He removed his disc, then went back to the e-mail account and searched for the names of the locals: a Mr. and Mrs. Fielding, and a Hannah Gray.

The Fieldings, he soon realized, were the woman's sister and brother-in-law. Hannah Gray was a friend. Her e-mails described the breakup of a relationship with a man called Frank. Judging from Victoria's helpful responses—along the lines of
plenty of fish in the sea, plenty of time to reel them in
—Hannah Gray was a fairly young woman.

A young woman, Keyes thought.

A young, single woman.

He scrolled back to an e-mail he had only skimmed the first time. It was possible, the man's law firm said in this correspondence, that Greg Gordon might be tapped at the last minute to travel to London, where he would oversee the merger of the publishing firms personally.

Assume that this had happened, Keyes thought. And so assume that the tickets for the cruise had suddenly been up for grabs. Assume Victoria Ludlow had offered them to her young, newly single friend, suggesting that a trip like this might help her get over the breakup with Frank.

Hannah Gray's high-rise, according to Daisy's information, was less than a half mile away.

Keyes shut down the computer, made sure he had left no evidence of his visit, and let himself out.

2.

He walked the short distance to Hannah Gray's apartment.

He was not the only one hobbling along the lakeside, this afternoon, with the help of a cane. The neighborhood appeared equally split between the wealthy elderly and young, successful professionals; Keyes, falling smack in the middle, fit in well.

He waited outside Hannah Gray's building until a group of six entered the lobby, then followed close behind them. The doorman wore a brass-buttoned coat; his desk was nearly lost beneath a stack of paperback books. He nodded at the group and then looked back down at the crossword puzzle in his lap.

Hannah Gray's apartment was on the fifth floor. Nobody had put a stop to newspaper delivery here; a stack had piled up outside the door. Keyes tried the knob. Locked. He set the cane aside carefully and reached again into his bag of tricks.

The electromechanical pick gun he withdrew looked like a slightly undersized power drill. He chose a stainless-steel needle, affixed it to the front of the gun, and slipped it into the lock. He pulled the gun's trigger. The small motor inside the device vibrated; the cylinder pins bounced into alignment; the lock opened with a soft click.

He stepped inside, closing the door behind himself.

Another empty apartment, abandoned for a trip. Air stale, plants shriveling. He made a cursory first pass. The walk-in closet was filled with Prada shoes and Hermès bags. The bathroom featured Chinese rose soap, bowls of potpourri, propolis, and myrrh toothpaste. More beautiful people, he thought. More people who believed that if they bought the right things, and lived the right way, then life would reward them.

He took fingerprints. He returned to the living room and glanced at a line of photographs neatly arranged on an étagère. The woman he had seen in the bazaar was here: clowning around with another young woman, receiving a diploma with a broad grin, standing arm in arm with an older man who might have been her father. As he looked at the woman's face, the flat expression he assumed when looking at the blackboards in the elevators of ADS crossed his face.

After a few moments, he reached out, took the graduation photo, removed it from the frame, and moved on.

There was a computer in the bedroom, beside a bed covered with pink lace. He switched it on. The motor whirred; then an error message came up. The hard drive had been reformatted, he realized. Someone had been covering her tracks.

He shut it down, wondering if it would be worthwhile to lug the whole thing back to Vermont so ADS technicians could have a go at it.

He found himself standing by the answering machine. A digital
3
blinked softly. He played the messages. The first was from an automated telemarketer, selling a phone plan. The second was from Frank—the ex-boyfriend—saying he hadn't heard from Hannah in a while, and just wanted to check in. Was there something urgent in the man's tone, something being left unsaid? It seemed that there was. But they had recently been a couple. There must have been issues there. It wouldn't do to read too much into the tone of the man's voice.

The third message set his heart racing.

Hi, Hannah Banana. It's me. We're at the Savoy and it's just incredible. Greg is doing so well; we're so proud of him. And Maggie's having the time of her life. I know you're still on the cruise, but I just wanted to make sure you call the second you get back; I can't wait to hear all about it. Maggie and I should be home on the fifteenth. Talk to you soon. Love.

He listened to the message twice. Then he popped the tape from the machine, turned it over thoughtfully in his hand for a moment, and slipped it into his pocket beside the photograph.

3.

Six hours later, back in his office, he stared at the telephone, willing it to ring.

For the moment, he had taken all the action he could. Four DIA agents—the most he had felt he could request without raising too many eyebrows—were watching Dietz's contacts in New York. Casper was running down the Hannah Gray woman, looking for anything on her that might prove of value. Leonard was in Istanbul, ready to be of service. And so there was nothing to do, for the moment, but wait.

Time and again he found himself reaching for the phone, meaning to call Rachel. He would—what? Beg for a second chance? Ridiculous. Calling Rachel would be grasping at straws. It would be the last desperate act of a ruined man.

Yet he was a ruined man, beyond any doubt. The cane leaning against the wall drove the point home.

If only results would come in, Keyes thought, perhaps the cane would not be making him feel this way.

If results would come in, then perhaps, despite being crippled, he would find some hidden reservoir of strength. For the lame could still be strong. Hephaestus, the god of the smith, had been lame, thanks to his ignoble expulsion from Zeus's side. He had tumbled down to earth from Olympus, and his legs had been forever ruined by that tumble. Yet Hephaestus had become a powerful God nevertheless. In his great forge, he had built locks that were resistant even to immortals; he had crafted thunderbolts for use by Zeus himself. He had become the deity of destructive fire, and through activity his lameness had been conquered.

Keyes wondered what Hephaestus might have crafted, in his great smithy, to deal with something like the rat king. A mighty sword; an awesome hammer. He would not have sat back, defeated and hopeless, at the sight of such a horrible tangle. He would have broken that gruesome Gordian knot of tails with a single stroke …

He was losing his mind.

If only the damned telephone would ring.

He stared at the telephone; but it was silent.

The waiting was killing him.

He reached for a pencil and began to toy with it. Again, he felt the urge to call Rachel. If he didn't find someone to lean on, in the very near future, then he would pass a point within himself. And once he had passed that point, there would be no going back. A lone man was not meant to deal with this kind of stress. A man could not handle something like this by himself.

If results didn't come within a day, he would give up. He would call off the test, and confess everything to Dick Bierman. He would …

The phone rang.

4.

It was David Brown—part of the DIA team covering Dietz's associates from the COURTSHIP days in New York. Brown and his partner were watching, and listening to, a man named Andrei Yurchenko. Yurchenko had just received a rather interesting telephone call …

Keyes leaned forward. “Yes?”

“We're in business,” Brown said.

The pencil in Keyes's hand snapped in two.

PART THREE

NINETEEN

1.

Inside the Haydarpasa railway station, Leonard found himself faced with a nearly overwhelming amount of activity.

Travelers bustled beneath stained-glass windows, staggered landings, and elaborate foliage cartouches. There was a palpable thrill of tension in the air—thanks, Leonard supposed, to the current situation in the Mideast. Haydarpasa was the portal from Istanbul to the east; those traveling to or from the west used Sirkeci station, on the opposite side of the city. So these people surrounding him were heading into the hornet's nest. It made sense that they would be nervous.

He drifted to one wall, put his back against it, and tried to sift through the crowd.

If Dietz and the woman were here, he couldn't find them.

But they were here. He had seen them board the ferry from Beşiktaş to Haydarpasa with his own eyes. Perhaps he should have made his move then, he thought. Perhaps he should have followed them onto the ferry and confronted the man there. But how could that have worked to his benefit? If things had turned violent, there would have been nowhere to run. Even if he'd been able to handle Dietz by himself—which he rather doubted—he would have been trapped on the ferry after it was finished, surrounded by locals, with blood on his hands. By now he would be under arrest.

Instead he had waited for the next ferry, fifteen minutes behind the first. Now he found himself doubting that decision. According to the call he'd received from Keyes—

—he'd been shaving at the time; an ironic piece of bad luck, for Leonard needed to shave only once a week, and when the phone had rung, the razor in his hand had jumped and nicked his throat—

—according to the call he'd received from Keyes, this was their last and best chance at regaining Dietz's trail. And by waiting for the next ferry, Leonard might have let it slip through their fingers.

Keyes had sounded very tense. No surprise there; he'd been sitting in his office in Vermont with three phone lines open and valuable seconds ticking away. A call, as expected, had been placed from Dietz to one of his old contacts in New York. The man in New York, called Yurchenko, had indeed provided a name for Dietz, someone to whom he might hawk the secrets he had stolen. But the name had been a code—“the vulture.” And so Keyes had been left with nothing concrete, except the results of the lock-in trace his men had placed on Yurchenko's phone.

The trace had given them the name of the hotel from which Dietz had placed his call. Keyes had immediately contacted Leonard, with instructions to get to the hotel and keep Dietz in sight.

Their best chance; their last chance. For if the man slipped away now, then he would vanish into a war-torn section of the world, where keeping on his trail would become difficult to the point of impossibility.

But Leonard would not let him slip away.

He touched the cut on his throat, gingerly.

He kept searching through the crowd, his eyes bright and hungry beneath the visor of his baseball cap.

2.

It was all a matter of timing.

Dietz had been careful about the timing. After hanging up with Yurchenko, he and the woman had gone to their waiting cab. And yet it seemed that Keyes was slow. There had been nobody watching the cab outside the Four Seasons. So Dietz had manufactured an excuse, and trotted back inside the lobby. He had stared out through the windows, waiting for the timing to be just right. At last, he had seen Leonard. He had rushed outside and into the back of the taxi as if he hadn't had a second to spare—

—and then, since Keyes had dutifully dispatched this pursuit, he had asked to be taken to the ferry to Haydarpasa.

Now more good timing was required. For if things went badly, and he was seen taking care of Leonard, there would be trouble with the local authorities. That was the last thing he needed.

He stood with the woman in a circular room in the southeast tower of the station, his eyes raking the crowd. A single American boy would not stand out in this crowd of Western-garbed travelers. Yet Leonard also would be looking for them. So he would be moving; he would show himself.

Patience. Timing.

Dietz's hand, inside his bag, worked at the Hush Puppy.

It was all a matter of timing.

3.

A train was being called.

The crowd jostled, separated. Leonard pushed off the wall and moved forward, still searching. Were Dietz and the woman in this crowd? The train was heading to the south, whereas he expected Dietz to head more directly east. His buyer for the secrets, of course, would be an Arab. The Russians these days were too weak, too scattered, to do anything except sell out to the highest bidder—and these days the highest bidders were Arabs.

But Dietz was a master of deception. He might head south initially, to mislead any possible pursuit, and then circle back around. Why, look how easily he had deceived Leonard—making him feel as if there was some special bond between them.

Perhaps Leonard had made too much of it. If so, he could forgive himself for the mistake. For the first time in longer than he could remember, perhaps for the first time ever, he had thought he had found someone on a similar wavelength to his own.

Even the other carnies, back from the days in the circus, had not made Leonard feel welcome. The alligator girl, the frog boy—people afflicted with ichthyosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, people with whom he should have fit in—had banded together to exclude him. Because every scapegoat needed a scapegoat, he thought now. Everyone who was made feel to worthless found someone even lower, on the societal scale, to abuse.