The 500: A Novel (16 page)

I didn’t feel great about conning Margaret. After all, it’s almost too easy when you’ve had months to gain people’s trust. But I needed to hear what was on that tape. You have to know your mark, and I knew that Margaret would follow Henry’s orders more or less to the death. Her task that evening was simple: protect that tape. That made my job difficult. I probably could have wrestled it away from her, but that didn’t really offer a graceful exit. I had to introduce some outside danger, something much scarier than me, so that for her to protect that tape she had to hand it over to the lesser threat: mild-mannered Mike.

Ramón was a local character, always prowling the beach in a ratty green-and-white soccer jersey. I made up the bit about those being gang colors to fool Margaret; they were actually for the Boyacá Chicó Fútbol Club. In the afternoons Ramón sold counterfeit Cuban cigars. After nightfall he peddled drugs and tried to get his hands on the backpacker girls. If you caught him late enough (and Ramón was usually in some sort of drug fugue by 2:00 p.m. anyway), he’d give you a hard beg about his starving kids. He was scary-looking, but harmless. Perfect for my purposes. I’d led us around to the beach to run into Ramón and scare Margaret into handing over the tape.

The memory card in the recorder was labeled
SUBJECT 23: LANDLINE PHONE
. It took thirty seconds to copy its contents onto my laptop, then I swung by Margaret’s room. “Don’t forget this,” I said, and handed over the recorder with the card inside.

“Thank you, Mike,” she said. “You couldn’t imagine the trouble if I let this out of my sight.”

I waited until the other guests were asleep then plugged earbuds into my laptop and listened to the recording.

“I’m close to getting the information I need,” a voice said. “I just hope I have enough time.”

The speaker was male, probably middle-aged, troubled now, but he also seemed confident, eloquent, used to speaking in public.

“Enough time?” the second speaker asked.

“They may know something about what I’m after. I don’t know how much. I think they’re watching me. Who knows what they’re capable of. Others have disappeared when they got this close to the truth.”

The second speaker sighed. “Who’s this they?”

“You’re the only one I trust, but I can’t tell you everything. Too many bad things have happened. If I tell you, I would be putting you in the same danger. I can’t put this burden on you.”

“Do you know how nuts you sound?”

“I do. I wish it were all paranoia. It’s not. The man with the information: I think I found him. I have to get him before they do. They’d do anything for the evidence. If they had it, I know, I just know, it would be the end of me.”

“You need to report this to your security. You could get killed—”

“Not a word, you understand? You have no idea what’s at stake.”

The second speaker hesitated, then finally said, “Yes.”

The first speaker took a deep breath. “If they come for me,” he said, “I’ll be ready.”

I was so wrapped up in the conversation on that tape, I didn’t register the knocking on my door the first time. It came again, three loud raps, followed by Marcus’s voice: “You in there, Mike?”

I scrambled, put my laptop and earbuds on a set of shelves on the side of the room, then opened the door.

“How’s it going?” I said, a bad attempt at playing it cool.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay with what happened back at Radomir’s.”

“Yeah. I understand.” I could feel my pulse in my throat. I hoped he wouldn’t notice.

“If you play your cards right, you’re going to be a partner someday, a big office up on three with me and Henry. But this case has too many moving pieces. It’s not right for a guy starting out. It’s just too dangerous.”

“I get it. You’re looking out for me.”

“Good.” He looked across the room at the laptop with the earbuds plugged in. The guy was a hawk.

“What are you listening to?”

“New Johnny Cash album,” I said.

“I thought he was dead.”

“Yeah, but they trot out some old recordings every year.”

“Like, uh, Tupac,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. Marcus wasn’t normally one for chitchat. Standing there with him watching me was excruciating. I couldn’t tell if he was onto me or if this was just his usual spy weirdness, poring over every detail, dragging out the conversation to see if he could sniff out anything on me.

“All right,” he said finally. “Change of plans. We’re heading back to DC tomorrow. The car will be downstairs at ten. Don’t be late.”

“Sure thing.”

He walked away, and I shut the door, threw the deadbolt, and slumped down on the bed like a sack of sand.

After I calmed down, I played the tape a second and a third time. The questions grew with each listen. Who was this man, Subject 23? Would Henry and Marcus really go so far as to tap his phones? Of course. I’d just listened to the results.

But what was the evidence he was so close to finding? The secret dangerous enough to kill for? It must have had something to do with Radomir’s case, with me being pulled off it and told it was too dangerous for a rookie.

As I turned it over in my mind, I wondered if Subject 23 was just worried that some of his sins would be discovered and that he would be another Davies blackmail victim. Or was his life truly in danger? Was he paranoid? Violent? Crazy enough to attack anyone who got close to the information he was hiding?

This went way past business as usual, past hardball. I had to find out who this man was, what he knew, and what my bosses wanted with him. Part of it was professional pride: this was my case and I’d earned my part in it the hard way. But there was also something deeper. Dirty tricks were one thing, but I didn’t want blood on my hands.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I LOVE HEIST MOVIES,
especially the old stuff, anything with guys in turtlenecks, diamonds, Cary Grant. It’s all so smooth, so classy, so inevitable that they’ll get the goods, then wrap up each job with a little champagne on the French Riviera and a roll in the hay with Grace Kelly.

In reality, however, turtlenecks are a supremely bad idea; you wouldn’t believe the amount of sweating that goes on when you’re trying to steal something. And nothing ever goes your way. Usually you come out of a job with a smashed finger or two, a couple nice gashes from a screen or broken window, maybe some dog bites, and for all your efforts, half the time you head home with a grand total of twenty-seven bucks or a jar of quarters. You reek of terror sweat (even without the turtleneck), and the hourly wage, adjusted for prep and fencing and the number of times the whole thing falls apart, comes out to such a pitiful rate that you might as well work at McDonald’s.

My attempts to find out what Marcus and Henry Davies wanted with that tape were similarly ill-fated. I didn’t know what those two were up to, but they were doing it with such tight lips it might as well have been the Manhattan Project. Marcus was always out of the office for long lunches, and casual inquiries to his assistant—“Hey, you know where Marcus is? I need him to take a look at a write-up”—never got me anywhere. Peeking into his office? Nope. The door was always locked, not that it mattered. Marcus kept up the old security habits from his government days. Every lunch and every night his desk was bare. He locked up every paper, and even pulled his hard drive and put it in the safe. Trash went in the shredder or the incinerator. And nothing of substance was ever discussed in the open where someone might have a chance to eavesdrop.

Some of that physical security stuff he’d taught me himself, like you should always vary your routine. He told me a story about a Marine, a lieutenant colonel, at an outpost in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The guy never took the same route twice, standard practice in a war zone, and always varied his daily routines, except for one thing: he raised the colors every morning and lowered them every night, like clockwork. A sniper caught him one morning at dawn when the flag was halfway up the pole. Point taken. It seemed a little psycho in placid Washington, DC, but if you watched Marcus enough, you’d see it: him zigging and zagging on the way to sensitive meetings, taking long detours, and so on.

After a week or two, I was getting pretty frustrated trying to crack whatever they were working on. Marcus was out of the office more than he’d ever been. The amount of legwork he was putting in himself instead of delegating to humps like me confirmed it was a big-deal case. I couldn’t get the voice from the wiretap, the talk of killing and fighting back, out of my head. I’d been involved in Radomir’s case from the beginning, and I had to see where it was going, both to ease my conscience and to cover my ass.

The solution hit me when I heard Marcus talking in the break room about his kid’s soccer game and then complaining about the cost of private school. He may have been a spy once, but now he was a salaryman and a cheap suburban dad. That meant I might have some levers to work with, because you could be damn sure that wherever he went and whatever he did, he was getting reimbursed down to the last cup of coffee. The corporate spy’s motto: leave no trace, but save your receipts.

Expenses were due on the first and the fifteenth of the month. You reported them online, printed the report out, then put a hard copy of it with all of your receipts in an envelope and shipped it down to payroll on the first floor. Except I’d noticed that Marcus’s assistant actually walked the expenses down herself. That made things a little trickier than simply intercepting his envelope while it lay in the interoffice mailbox waiting to be picked up.

It was the fifteenth. I knew Marcus was heading off somewhere. I’d tried to schedule a phone call with him, and his assistant said he was out of the office from eleven a.m. until two p.m. She headed down to the first floor at 9:30 a.m. as usual to drop off his expense report. I took the stairs down a moment after she left, and once she’d dropped off the envelope, I headed over to the desk of Peg, our payroll lady.

I carried with me a stack of manila envelopes and a couple interoffice envelopes for good measure. Peg had a wire basket on her cubicle wall where you could drop the reports. It was about half full, and, having watched Marcus’s assistant leave, I knew his report was on top. The cubicles were jammed together, and the Davies Group had a ceiling-mounted black-dome security camera every twenty feet or so. I’d have to be sneaky.

There’s a trick cardsharpers use called the bottom change. Without your mark noticing, you swap the bottom card of the deck with one you’ve palmed. Usually you do it so you can make the mark’s card suddenly appear in your hand or jump out of the deck to oohs and aahs. It’s good with boring uncles and socially challenged middle-schoolers. More important for conning purposes, the bottom change is the reason the mark will never win at three-card monte. You know how the three-card-monte dealer will usually flip over the card the mark has chosen using another card? That’s a variation on the bottom change called the Mexican turnover, and he’s swapping in a losing card to take the guy’s money.

The bottom change also happened to be how I was going to get Marcus’s report. Misdirection is the key to getting away with anything. Peg was one of those aches-and-pains office-worker ladies. She had the footrest, the wrist pad, the RSI braces, the cat mug, and most conversations with her involved some sort of medical rundown on how she was doing (bad) and complaints about how long it was until Friday. I knew enough to get a patter going and keep her distracted.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Michael Ford will attempt a bottom change with—dramatic pause—a stack of interoffice mail!

I approached her cubicle, readied my stack of envelopes, and asked Peg how she was doing. She took the bait and went on about how her floaters were back as I checked to make sure that the envelope from Marcus’s assistant was on top. It was. So I asked her something extremely obscure about the next open-enrollment period for our group health-care plan.

“Great question. Let me check.”

As she turned to her computer and started clicking away, I brought my stack over to the wire basket. I pushed my expenses off the top of my stack with my thumb while I lifted the top envelope of the stack in the basket—Marcus’s expenses—with my pinkie and ring fingers, adding them neatly and invisibly to the underside of my stack. A perfect bottom change.

Except as I glanced down during the change, I noticed that the envelope
under
Marcus’s also had his assistant’s handwriting. It was identical:
From: Carolyn Green. To: Expenses. First Floor.

Shit. Did I grab the wrong envelope? Or not actually pick it up?

I looked away from the wire basket as Peg answered my question.

I needed another distraction. Time to scramble. “And while I’m down here, can I ask you a second question? How does the annual fee for the Contrafund stack up against the Dow Jones index fund in the 401(k)? I’m worried they’re eating me alive.”

This she knew off the top of her head. Shit. I pressed on. “And the Diversified International?”

“Well, let’s see,” she said, and started leafing through some files.

This time it wasn’t as pretty, but I managed without being completely obvious to fish the second envelope from Marcus’s assistant out from the wire basket. Peg turned back around just as I noticed a goddamned third envelope with the same exact handwriting. I was starting to feel like
I
was getting hustled at three-card monte.

For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a question to get Peg to turn around one more time. I was just standing there like a dolt, acting odd, sticking out, attracting suspicion, everything I didn’t want to do. I could tell she was losing patience. Finally, I looked at the mug and said, “Oh, is that your cat?”

“Yes, Isabelle!” She reached for the mug and I grabbed for the third envelope. By this point I was palming a four-inch stack of paper and any attempts at subtlety were gone. My whole forearm was burning when we finally wrapped up our chat about Isabelle’s hip problems. When I got back to my desk, I checked my stack, and there were three envelopes addressed identically by Carolyn. Maybe she handled some other people’s expenses too. One report was for a guy named Richard Matthews, and another for Daniel Lucas, neither of whom I had ever heard of. Maybe they were contractors, I thought, and I put theirs aside. I unwound the red string on the third envelope, and there it was, Marcus’s expenses, tracking him for the past two weeks better than a private eye. I scanned for restaurants, hotels, flights, names of the people he dined with, anything that would reveal what he’d been up to. The lunches drew my eye. It was what I expected from a cagey guy, no patterns, no routines, though he tended toward nicer places that required reservations. That might be handy.