The Garden of Betrayal (12 page)

“Agreed,” he said crisply. “Your work gives you access to information, as does mine. I suggest we collaborate.”

“Collaborate on what?” I asked uncertainly.

“On understanding precisely when the oil and gas are going to run out. I can bring information on Russia, Africa, and certain areas of the Middle East to the table.”

It was a fantasy offer, but I had to be straight with him.

“I’d love to collaborate. But we both know that it all comes down to Saudi Arabia.”

“The Saudis have employed a number of foreign workers in their oil fields over the years. Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Indians, and others. I’ve made a point of collecting as much information from these workers as possible. Fragmentary, of course, but voluminous nonetheless. Perhaps you have other fragments?”

The people he’d mentioned were all denizens of countries with strong governmental ties to Russia. It occurred to me to wonder how much of the information he was referencing had flowed to him directly and how much had come through intelligence contacts. Not that it particularly mattered to me who he associated with. Reliable fragments were exactly what I needed to spot-check the information I’d gotten from Alex’s friend.

“I do,” I said firmly. “Quite a few. And some OPEC contacts who might help me confirm the big picture, if we can put it together.”

“We’re agreed, then?” he asked gravely.

I felt a flush of professional excitement. Narimanov would be one of the biggest sources I’d ever reeled in, second only to Rashid.

“We are.”

He offered his hand again, and I shook it.

Narimanov and I parted after hashing out some details and exchanging contact numbers. It was going to take him a few days to assemble his data, which was fine by me. Assuming Alex could explain why Theresa had picked this particular moment in time to seek me out, and persuade me that she was a credible source, I’d likely need at least that much time to make a stab at parsing her information. I wondered if I was right to think Alex hadn’t been completely honest about her, and—if so—whether it had anything to do with how upset he’d been the previous day. One possibility was that Walter had leaned on Alex to further whatever agenda he had regarding Senator Simpson. I knew how vulnerable Alex was to Walter’s demands, but it still pissed me off to suspect that he might have tried to use me.

I found a sealed envelope in my center desk drawer when I arrived back at my office, and a note from Kate inside. She’d successfully transferred and encrypted the files from the iPod and written down the password for me. I refolded the note and stuck it in my shirt pocket, the professional buzz I’d felt in Narimanov’s car fading as I was reminded of my conversation with Kate. I rubbed my forehead with both hands, trying to decide what to do next. Claire was at Sloan-Kettering all afternoon, and would be attending a concert at Carnegie Hall with Kate later that evening. Better I get her by herself somewhere quiet than rush into a conversation when she was distracted. Maybe a night away this coming weekend. There was an inn we’d gone to in Connecticut a few times when the kids were little. And the delay would give me time to figure out what I was going to say to her. Fragments of my talk with Kate ricocheted
around my brain. What if Kate was wrong and Claire had a very specific plan mapped out? One that didn’t involve me?

My news screen beeped, and I glanced at the flashing headline. A German wire service was reporting that the French and Russians were mobilizing special forces troops. There wasn’t any detail, and no one else had reported it. The markets gapped lower on the story and began trading skittishly on light volume. I picked up my phone, tempted to call Narimanov and ask him if he’d heard anything. I tapped the handset against my palm, hesitant. I hated to call as a supplicant. Better I have something of value to share with him first—which brought me right back to the Saudi data. The French and the Russians would have to wait, I decided. There was nothing more important than figuring out exactly what Theresa had really given me.

“I’ll be in Alex’s office,” I told Amy, as I walked by her desk.

“You’ll be alone. I heard from Lynn that he called to say he was taking the afternoon off.” She lowered her voice meaningfully. “Evidently, he’s not feeling well.”

I sighed. Nothing shy of a kidney transplant was supposed to keep you out of the office when the market was moving. Holing up with a hangover was an invitation to an ass-kicking from Walter, or worse.

“Try him on his cell again, please.”

“Will do. You’ve been getting a lot of calls. Do you want me to start putting people through?”

The core dilemma of my business was that my clients paid me to be responsive, but the more time I spent talking to them, the less time I had to work, and hence the less I had to say of value.

“No, but let me know if anyone’s really insistent and I’ll try to get back to them. Were you able to get in touch with Rashid?”

“I just heard back. You’re on for breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel tomorrow morning. His room at eight-thirty.”

“Thanks.”

I headed back to my desk and sat down again, half wishing I could curl up in the knee space and hide. I had too much going on, and too much to worry about. The best cure for anxiety was to stay busy, I reminded myself. Pulling Kate’s note from my pocket, I set to work decrypting the files she’d copied from the iPod. Absent a conversation with Alex, my sole option was to slog through the information as best I could, and to hope like hell I wasn’t on a snipe hunt.

•  •  •

Seven hours later, I’d just about managed to assemble the data into an intelligible order. The sheer quantity was overwhelming, let alone the complexity, and a handful of the key technical reports were written in French. Alex hadn’t called back. It was lucky that Claire and Kate were out at the concert—it meant I could work through dinner without feeling guilty. Amy had ordered in some pizza for me before she left, and the cold remains were sitting in a box on my credenza.

Theresa had cautioned me not to believe any of the management information, and the raw data were way too granular for me to reach any off-the-cuff conclusions, so my next step was to employ a multivariate model of oil field decline that an acquaintance at the Colorado School of Mines had written a few years back. Loading the model was tricky, painstaking work that involved a number of easy-to-screw-up volume and density conversions. I was copying figures between spreadsheets when my cell phone rang, the caller ID blocked. I ignored it. My office phone flashed a few seconds later, and then the cell phone rang again. I picked up, thinking it might be Alex calling from the bar at Pagliacci.

“Mark Wallace.”

“It’s Reggie. How you doing?”

“Not bad,” I said, taking off my reading glasses and rubbing my eyes. Reggie Kinnard was the NYPD detective who’d been working with us on Kyle’s disappearance since day one. He checked in every couple of months to let me know that he’d updated this or that database, but mainly, I suspected, simply to let me know that he hadn’t forgotten. We usually had a drink somewhere, or a cup of coffee. I liked him, and was grateful to him for his continued efforts. It mattered to me that he was still trying. “How about you?”

“Hanging in there. Where are you?”

“At the office.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“I’m kind of busy.”

“Too busy for a beer?”

“I wish I could. I’m buried.”

I heard the sound of a match being lit, suggesting he’d already had at least one drink. Reggie had been a smoker for as long as I’d known him
and was always trying to quit. Liquor was his undoing. He exhaled loudly, and I imagined him enveloped by a blue cloud. Roughly the size of a Division 1 offensive lineman, Reggie was a dark-skinned black guy with a square, immobile face, a graying fade, and a permanently mournful expression.

“Joe Belko retired today,” he said.

Joe was Reggie’s partner, a twenty-year veteran of the major case squad. In the five years they’d been working together, I’d rarely heard Joe talk about anything except fishing. It didn’t surprise me to learn he’d pulled the pin. He and Reggie specialized in abductions and disappearances, usually working in concert with the FBI and the state police. I had the sense that Joe, like Reggie, had seen a lot more than he’d ever wanted to.

“That must be tough. They got someone new lined up for you?”

“Not yet. The guys upstairs want to talk to me about riding a desk. If I were going to sit around with my thumb up my ass all day I’d want to get paid some serious money, like that hot-rod crowd you hang around with.”

I gave him the laugh he was looking for.

“So, can I take a rain check and call you next week?”

He sucked on the cigarette again. I felt bad about letting him down. Childless and long divorced, Reggie didn’t seem to have much of a social life.

“It really would be better if we talked tonight.”

I felt a funny catch in my chest, abruptly aware of how still the office was. The only noise was the buzz of the fluorescent lights, a barely audible siren a dozen blocks away, and Reggie’s muted breathing through the receiver.

“You have something to tell me?”

“It may be nothing. Don’t get yourself too excited.”

I got to my feet and grabbed my suit jacket from the back of my chair.

“I’m coming to you,” I said. “Right now. Tell me where you are.”

The address Reggie gave me was a Second Avenue dive in the low sixties, near the Roosevelt Island tram. I entered the small bar beneath a green neon sign with a flashing shamrock. It was a drinker’s place—no jukebox,
no cutesy decorations, no waitresses. Just bare walls, a linoleum floor, and a battered tin ceiling. Half a dozen guys were crowded together near the door, watching a silent hockey game on a flyspecked, undersized television. Reggie stood alone at the far end of the room, wearing a gray three-piece suit and a pale yellow tie. He tapped a knuckle on the scuffed counter as I approached and attracted the attention of a tubercular-looking barman.

“Jimmy and Guinney,” he said. “Times two.”

I pulled out my wallet and dropped a twenty on top of the small pile of money in front of him. The barman served up the whiskey and made change, waiting for the heads to settle on the Guinness. Reggie clinked his glass to mine and we both threw back the shots in a single go.

“So, tell me,” I said, feeling the whiskey smolder in my gut.

Reaching into his breast pocket, Reggie extracted a folded sheet of paper.

“An e-mail,” he said. “Sent directly to me. It came in last night.”

I unfolded the page with shaking fingers and scanned past the detailed header information, hunting for the body of the message. It was only two sentences long:

My hands sank to the bar, the page suddenly too heavy to support.

“Jimmys again,” Reggie said, as the barman served up the Guinness. He touched his pint glass to mine, and I automatically lifted the black liquid and took a sip.

“We’ve had tips before,” I said, choking slightly on the bitter beer. “Dozens of them. They never amounted to anything. What makes this different?”

“Maybe nothing,” Reggie said, extracting his Marlboros and lighter from a jacket pocket. He shook out a cigarette and began tapping the filter against the top of the box as the barman poured more whiskey.

“You can’t smoke those in here,” the barman protested with a soft Irish lilt. “It’s against the law.”

Reggie flipped open his jacket and exposed his gold badge.

“We’ll have a right fecking riot, we will,” the barman said, glancing over his shoulder toward the men watching the TV.

“Give it a rest,” Reggie told him, lighting up. “Nobody’s here to get healthy.”

The barman looked as if he might argue and then walked away, muttering beneath his breath.

“Maybe nothing, but maybe something,” I said, keeping my eyes on his face.

He nodded slightly, turning his head to blow smoke away from me.

“Let me explain. The police get tips from four kinds of people.” He stuck the cigarette in a corner of his mouth and began counting on his fingers. “First, the vindictive types. The neighbor’s got a barking dog and they want to get even, so they make up some bullshit story and try to get him in trouble. That doesn’t fit here, because there isn’t any accusation. Second, the wackos. The wackos want attention, so they call on the phone and show up in person and claim that they’re the real Son of Sam, or that they did whatever’s on the front cover of the
New York Post
. A lot of them we know already, because they keep coming back. But their tips are never anonymous—they want the attention. Third,” he continued, moving on to another finger, “you got your sick bastards. The sick bastards are in it for the fun. They want to confuse the cops or torment the families. Their tips are anonymous, but there’s never anything you can really check out. It’s always that they saw the person you’re looking for on a bus in France, or—”

“You can check out the car,” I interrupted. “There can’t be that many red BMWs with diplomatic plates.”

“Correct.” He flicked some ash to the floor and took another sip of beer. “First thing I did. Makes it easier that it’s an M5—that’s a high-end, limited-production car. Seven years ago, there were exactly four M5s in the entire country with diplomatic plates—three black and one red. The red one was registered right here in the city, out in Queens. It was stolen the same night that Kyle vanished.”

I swayed slightly, my knees weak, and felt Reggie’s arm around my shoulders.

“Steady,” he said. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I straightened and took a deep breath. Everyone in the room except the barman was smoking now, and the air already seemed
impossibly close. I’d wanted closure for years, but the possibility of finally learning the truth terrified me. The truth meant the end of illusions.

“The car was registered to a Venezuelan diplomat named Mariano Gallegos,” Reggie continued. “I got a request out for the case file. There might be something in it. And I’d like to talk to him if he’s still in the country, but that could be tricky. Dealing with diplomats is a real pain in the ass.”