The Garden of Betrayal (34 page)

“We have to put a stop to this,” she said, sounding on the ragged edge of control. “You could have been killed. Joe or Reggie could have been killed.”

“I know,” I said, trying to contain my own distress. “But we weren’t, and it’s in the hands of the police now.”

“It has to stop.”

I gazed down at my lap. My suit pants were torn at the knee where I’d caught them climbing through the bathroom window at the motel. I’d done a lot of things I hadn’t expected to do that day. I’d killed a man. No matter how I felt about it, I couldn’t walk away now until I was done.

“It will,” I said. “I promise. Everything’s going to be fine. You still got Joe’s nephew there?”

“And his partner. They’re playing cards with Kate.”

“Good. You and she should get your gear packed, okay? I don’t like the fact that Smith knew where we were staying. I want to change hotels, maybe move over to the Waldorf. They must have good security—they’ve always got diplomats staying.”

“Fine,” she agreed, still sounding upset. “When are you going to be home?”

“Maybe half an hour. Be ready to go. I don’t want to take any more chances.”

My phone rang forty-five minutes later, as I was getting out of the taxi in front of the Meridien. Crosstown traffic had been terrible. I checked the screen. The number was unfamiliar.

“Mark Wallace,” I answered.

“It’s Reggie.”

“How’s—”

“I’m on a taped line,” he interrupted immediately. “Joe and I are both all right, but everything went to hell at the motel after you climbed out the window. The detectives who caught the case want to talk to you.”

I pulled open the lobby door and entered the hotel.

“Of course. You got any idea yet who the guys in the parking lot were?”

“I can’t talk about that. The investigation’s being run out of One Police Plaza. Deputy Chief Ellison is supervising. He wants to send a car to get you.”

“Shit. Ellison the only senior guy you got in that department?”

“No. But he’s taken an interest.”

“Great.” I spent a moment thinking about everything I needed to get done in the interim. I had to wash up, ditch my shirt, and move my family. “Tell the chief that I’ve spent a lot of time at One Police Plaza. I can get myself there. Figure an hour, hour and a half, maybe.”

I heard a familiar voice in the background. It sounded like Lieutenant Wayland.

“Be better if we had a car pick you up,” Reggie said flatly. “Powers that be are anxious to chat.”

“Doesn’t work. I got a couple of things to get squared away first.”

The same voice spoke again, angrily. Reggie cleared his throat into the phone.

“You at your apartment?” he asked, suggesting the lie to me.

“Will be soon,” I replied, following his lead. It didn’t matter to me if Wayland dispatched a couple of cops to hang out in my lobby. “See you in an hour.”

“Right.”

I hung up and stepped into an available elevator, hoping like hell that Reggie was right about how his department was going to respond to everything. It hadn’t sounded like anyone wanted to give him a medal. I touched the button for my floor as two men boarded behind me. One pressed the button for the third floor. The other turned toward me, a gun in his hand.

“This is a good time for you to be very calm, Mr. Wallace,” the man holding the gun said. The weapon was small, but the opening looked like the mouth of a cannon. My heart was pounding, but my only thought was of Claire and Kate.

“You going to shoot me, shoot me now,” I said, the words coming out with surprising firmness. “I’m not taking you to my family.”

“We prefer not to shoot you,” the second man said. “And we’re not interested in your family. We want only a few minutes of your time. Our superior would like to speak to you.”

They were both big and swarthy—Italians maybe, or Greeks. The guy with the gun spoke like an American, but the second man had a familiar, nasal accent I couldn’t place.

“This superior of yours have a scar on his face?” I asked, thinking they might not have heard about the shoot-out. “Because if he does, you’re on a fool’s errand. He’s not going to be talking to anyone.”

“You can find out for yourself,” the man with the accent said. The elevator doors opened on the third floor. “Shall we?”

I didn’t see that I had any choice. He led me off the elevator and to the right, the man with the gun following. The floor was all function rooms, vacant in the pre-dinner interlude. Passing an open door, I saw a uniformed Hispanic man setting a banquet table with glassware and thought about yelling out for help. The guy behind me must have followed my gaze.

“No call to get any civilians involved,” he whispered, nudging me with his weapon.

We walked to the end of the corridor, passed through a metal fire door, and ended up on the landing of the emergency stairs. The man with the gun spun me around and pushed me against a wall, holding me by the collar while his companion searched me. The only thing he seemed interested in was my phone.

“A disposable,” he remarked, taking it from my pocket. “I would have expected something more high-end from someone in your income bracket. Any particular reason?”

Despite the weapon to my back, it struck me that neither man had been particularly threatening thus far. They sounded almost conversational, entirely unlike Smith. It made me wonder if I was dealing with another outfit altogether.

“I had something more high-end. Someone reprogrammed it as a listening device. You know anything about that?”

He shrugged, looking thoughtful.

“The man you’re meeting might. Let’s go.”

We walked down the stairs and exited the building onto Fifty-sixth Street. A white delivery truck was double-parked a few yards away, gold lettering on the side advertising an appliance dealership in the Bronx. I remembered Joe’s description of the vehicle at the motel and came to an abrupt halt on the sidewalk.

“You’re the guys who shot those men in the parking lot. You just changed the sign on the side of your truck.”

“Lot of trucks like ours in the city,” the man behind me said crisply. He pressed the gun into my side. “Keep moving, please.”

I glanced left and right as much as I could without turning my head. The sun had set, but the street was crowded with pedestrians, and I could see a police car on the corner across Sixth Avenue. It was the best opportunity I was going to get to make a break for it. An expression I’d heard once came back to me: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I took a deep breath and stayed close to the man in front as he edged between two parked cars and opened the passenger door to the truck. He tripped a lever to fold the seat forward, hoisted himself up, and ducked through a dark curtain into the cargo area. Fighting back my fear, I followed.

A hand gripped my arm and guided me as I stepped through the curtain. A sickly red light illuminated the area beyond, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The interior was partitioned, the rear
section hidden from view. The space I was standing in was about eight by ten. Three captain’s chairs were bolted to the floor in front of a counter that ran the length of the side wall, the space above filled with racked electronics. The center chair was occupied by a man with a shaved head who appeared to be in his early fifties. He was wearing an open-collared button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khaki pants. The red light made him look ghoulish.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing toward the chair to his right. “Please.”

He had the same accent as the man still holding my arm. The passenger door slammed behind the curtain, and the truck’s engine roared to life. Being in the truck seemed like a much worse idea than it had when I was on the sidewalk.

“I’d like to know who I’m talking to first.”

“Shimon,” the bald man said, indicating himself. He pointed to the man standing next to me. “And Ari.”

“You’re Israelis,” I said, the names helping me place the accents. “I don’t get it. What are you doing here?”

The vehicle jerked forward without warning, and I would have fallen if Ari hadn’t caught me.

“Sit,” Shimon repeated. “We’ll talk. I’d hate for you to get injured. A mutual friend of ours always spoke very highly of you.”

“What friend is that?”

“Sadly, a friend who isn’t with us anymore. The name you knew him by was Rashid al-Shaabi.”

Ari had to help buckle me into one of the captain’s chairs, the combination of movement and surprise making me clumsy. Shimon touched a button on the console over the counter; the red light winked out and a dim fluorescent came on. It was an improvement, but the entire situation still seemed surreal.

“Rashid was an agent of the Israeli government?”

“We don’t talk about things like that,” Shimon replied solemnly. “But I can tell you that he was an Israeli citizen. The medical examiner here just released his body to my government. His will stipulated that he be buried in Jerusalem.”

“At Har HaZeitim,” Ari added quietly. “The Mount of Olives.”

“I heard the State Department was involved,” I said, feeling stunned
by the magnitude of Rashid’s deception. He’d been a confidant of almost every influential Arab leader for the past thirty years. “The OPEC people must be going crazy.”

“They ripped his office in Vienna to pieces.” Ari snorted contemptuously. “And a team of Saudi security people tried to kidnap his secretary.”

“Helga?” Helga was an old friend. “Is she okay?”

“Not to worry,” Shimon assured me, leaning forward to pat my knee. “Someone tipped off the Austrian police. She’s fine.”

“It’s hard to believe. Rashid always seemed completely dedicated to OPEC.”

“Rashid was dedicated to moderate pricing and production policies that promoted stable economic growth,” Shimon said, shrugging. “Policies that are good for everyone, producers and consumers alike. You of all people should understand that.”

“Until there are shortages,” I said, thinking of the Saudi production data that Rashid hadn’t had time to discuss with me. “Then it’s every man for himself, with each drop being auctioned or allocated for political purposes.”

“True.”

I wanted to ask what Rashid had thought of the Saudi data, but the shoot-out at the motor court was still foremost in my mind. There was only one reason for Shimon and his men to have been there.

“You were at the motel because you were following Smith. You killed his men to avenge Rashid’s death.”

Shimon squinted at me. I felt a flicker of the menace he’d projected earlier, mixed with something I couldn’t identify.

“Mohler went to the motel to meet with you. Why?”

“I barely knew him,” I said, realizing why Ari had grabbed me at gunpoint. Rashid had died in my presence, and I’d been seen meeting covertly with a man linked to his killers. Shimon wanted to make sure I wasn’t secretly in league with Mohler and Smith. “I’d broken into Mohler’s computer system and learned he was committing financial fraud. I threatened to blackmail him, because I wanted to learn who he was working for. The only name he gave me was Smith’s. I’ll tell you everything, but first I have to know: Who was Smith working for?”

Shimon glanced at Ari, face impassive, but it was enough for me to
place the undercurrent I’d sensed a moment earlier. Confusion. Shimon didn’t know what I was talking about.

“The man with the scar,” I explained. “He was using the name Smith.” My words seemed to fall into a vacuum. I looked from one to the other. “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“We’d never seen him before today.” He pointed to the electronic equipment over his head. “It’s your good luck that we were monitoring local radio communications and overheard him talking to his men. And that we travel prepared.”

I was suddenly equally confused. If the Israelis hadn’t been hunting Rashid’s killers, then what had they been doing at the motel? The facts shuffled and reassembled in my head, the answer unexpected.

“Mohler. You went to the motor court because you were following Mohler. Why are you interested in him?”

“I’d prefer you answer the same question for me,” Shimon said curtly. “Why did you break into Mohler’s computer? And what makes you believe this man Smith was involved in Rashid’s murder?”

We both knew something the other didn’t. Regardless of his civility thus far, I was willing to bet Shimon didn’t play well with others and that he wouldn’t think twice about pumping me dry of information and then dumping me.

“Terms first. I tell you what I know, and you tell me what you know.”

Ari produced a gun. Shimon was silent for a moment, eyes fixed on me. I was almost positive he’d negotiate, but uncertainty wears poorly when you’re looking into a loaded weapon. I hoped I looked calmer than I felt.

“No,” Shimon said eventually, waving Ari’s gun away. “I accept Mark’s proposal. This is a complicated situation, and we’re more likely to get to the bottom of it if we pool our knowledge.” He reached out to pat my knee again. “I don’t believe Mark would betray us. Rashid trusted him. And after all, he knows what kind of people we are.”

It felt like the umpteenth time I’d explained it all, the only advantage being that I had enough of a handle on the various threads at this point to be concise. I separated my narrative into twinned tales: Petronuevo,
Munoz, and Kyle on the one hand, and the Saudi data and Rashid on the other. Neither Shimon nor Ari took notes, so I assumed I was being recorded.

“There are two links between what happened seven years ago and what’s happening now: First, Theresa Roxas. She was Munoz’s girlfriend, and she was the one who gave me the Saudi information. Second, Smith. He instructed Mohler to set up Petronuevo, and he was at the hotel when Rashid was killed. We figure out who either of them are working for, and we know who’s behind this whole thing.”

Shimon swung gently from side to side in his chair, looking preoccupied. The truck had parked, which was good, because the movement in the windowless space had been making me seasick.

“And the motive for Rashid’s murder?”

“Maybe he knew something about the Petronuevo transaction, or maybe he was going to tell me something about the Saudi data.”