The Merchant of Secrets (18 page)

Qureshi
was arrested as he was
backing his luxury car out of Sara’s driveway.

Joe was picked up at a coffee shop at the Skyline Mall,
coincidentally, within walking distance of the IRS office.  

 All three were delivered to jail at the federal
courthouse in Alexandria, and held without bail to await sentencing.  A
ruling against Jones would have significant implications for other contractors
who might also be embroiled in illicit activity while representing the United
States in a foreign
country,
and the Justice
Department didn’t want any mistakes.  

We had completed our work; the matter was now in the
hands of the federal prosecutors. We were both so exhausted. It had been a heck
of a
48 hours. I asked Mike if I could have a couple
of days of vacation, and he smiled and said “Take all the time you need.” “Hugo
and Jose want to hang out in Florida for another day,” he added, “to soak up a
little sun before heading back. So we’ll stay another night at the hotel and
fly back tomorrow.”  He was thoroughly satisfied with the way in which
this investigation had ended.

“I’m going back the U.K. to be with Colin,” I replied.

“Colin?” He asked, obviously surprised.

“Yea, it’s not going to be a problem is it?”

“No,” he said hesitantly. His face revealed a concern I
couldn’t understand.

“Okay, see you a few days,” I said. As I was walking away
I looked back to wave at Mike but he was standing still, frozen in the same
spot and seemed to be unable to mutter a syllable.  

One of the detectives drove me back to the Palm Beach
airport in his
car .
I sat in the passenger seat,
silently watching the setting sun hovering on the horizon. The sky was awash in
hues of yellow, lavender, and blue. It
  had
been
a perfect day, and the sky was perfect too.  At the airport, I rushed to
the ticket to counter to get my boarding pass. I was going to fly to Heathrow
Airport in London, connecting through Dulles airport in Virginia.  In the
passenger lounge I looked out  over the tarmac and placed a call to
Colin’s to let him know that I was on my way, and to give him my flight number
so he could pick me up at the airport, but his cell phone had been turned off.

Next, I called his parents’ house. “Hello?” a woman
answered.

“Hello. I was wondering if I might be able to speak with
Colin, is he there
please
?”

“No, he’s gone out with his parents.”

“Is this his sister?  I asked.

“No, it’s Sabrina. I’m his wife. Who’s this….?”

Her words hit with the subtlety of machine-gun fire. I
froze and
didn’t  have
a clue what to say
 to  this woman on the other end of the phone.  When she said
“wife,
”  the
word affronted my ignorance with
 vicious clarity,  and in a single instant shot down  all of my
hopes and dreams of a future with Colin.  After the initial blow had taken
effect, a raging barrage of images, one after the other
,
 started
to flash in my mind: the office, the bar, Colin’s
apartment, Chicago, London; all single moments in time strung together in a
single act of deceit. The
  word
  cut like a
knife through my life, separating the present from a past generously endowed
with ignorance.  I was unwilling to surrender my self-esteem to the
encroaching reality that I had tread the well-worn path of an unwitting
mistress to a married man, and struggled to find meaning in our relationship.

The call ended without me identifying myself, unsure if
it would be
  more
cruel or more kind to
alert  Colin’s  wife to his affair.  It was better to hold off
until I had a chance to talk with Bailey and Keisha and got their thoughts on
what I should do. There was no question that my judgment was momentarily
impaired and those kind of decisions should be made only after seriously
weighing the
effect  the
news might have on the
other person.   

Fragmented  memories
of
time spent with Colin  had invaded my brain and I couldn’t get rid of
them, so I headed in the direction of the nearest bar to drown them in alcohol.

Suddenly, movement in the corner of my eye distracted me
from my torment.  A handsome man with dirt all over his pants was rushing
down the terminal toward me, out of breath. As he drew closer I could see that
it was Mike.

“What are you doing here?” I asked in amazement.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you about Colin,” he
huffed.

“I know. He’s married.”

‘Yes, how did you find out?”

“I called his parents’ house and his wife picked up the
phone.”

‘I’m so sorry,” he said with an air of guilt as if it
were his fault.

“Is that why you’re here?” I gazed into his brown eyes,
astonished.  “You drove all the way here to the airport just to warn me?”

“Yea, I wanted to catch you before you flew to London and
found out on your own.”

Feeling the sorrow which must have been evident upon my
face, he wrapped his arms around me pulling me into him, and it felt at that
moment, just right.

“How about dinner?” he asked.

“Now?”
I asked.
“Looking like this?”

“You look great, just as you are,” he replied.  The
kindly lie was a good antidote to my distress.

We made our way back to the sheriff’s patrol car arm and
arm and drove back into Palm Beach as darkness was spilling across the sky. At
Mike’s direction the deputy dropped us off on Worth Avenue
;
 a
glittering road of elegant stores in the heart of Palm Beach. We
wandered along the sidewalk, looking in the display windows of  jewelry
stores and antiques stores with prices inflated to forbidding highs, then
turned down a small pathway, called a “via” and into a restaurant called
Renato’s. While sitting on the moonlit patio underneath palm trees swaying
softly in the ocean breezes I ordered a margarita first, then he ordered a
bottle of champagne.   

“If I could, I would push a rewind button on the last 6
months of my life,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “You’ve accomplished far too much to
wish it away. Forget about Colin.”

The candle light flickered across his blue cotton shirt
that had started the day crisp and clean but now was wrinkled and dirty and my
clothing too, had succumbed to the hazard of the job. I sat in the midst of
elegantly attired women, wearing my jeans and blouse. The shadow of unshaven
chin wrapped handsomely around Mike’s jawline as he spoke. Sitting there in the
relative darkness of the patio with Mike was magical. I watched the champagne
bubbles dance around in the glass while the light reflected in his brown eyes,
exposing an unexpected passion stewing underneath their surface. A lock of hair
had fallen onto his face so I reached over and gently lifted it back into
place.

“When we get back, where’re you going to live? I don’t think
your apartment is clean,” he meant in the electronic sense.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Why don’t you move in with
me ?”
He asked again, with uncharacteristic self-consciousness.

 I couldn’t conceal my astonishment. “Do you think
we’re ready for that?”

“I thought we were doing pretty well,”
 
he
replied with a smile.

“Okay,” I said “Before I agree to move in with you,
please promise me that you don’t have stray wives hiding out somewhere, say
Paris or London?” I teased.

Mike broke down in laughter like I’d never seen with him
before. Smile lines caused the skin around his eyes to fold and the corners of
his mouth to turn upward in a wide grin.   He put up his hand as if
blocking the thought and said “No wives, no fiancés,
no
girlfriend.
Just you.”

As we ate our way through three courses; salad, roast
salmon, then desert,  I was slipping into a state of bliss and ready to
relinquish all memories of Colin to let them fade away into the past. It was
hard to imagine a more perfect night; being there with Mike over drinks and a
good dinner was a complete intoxication of enchanted pleasures. Where Colin had
been disarmingly charming Mike was solid in a sophisticated way; he had lived
through the games that people play on one another and was beyond playing them
himself. He lacked the extreme passion and furious ambition that I had found
almost addicting in Colin, but after living through a hurricane I was glad to
spend time in calmer waters.

 After dinner we stumbled and swayed back to the car
arm-in-arm, and asked the deputy to drive us to the hotel where we planned to
continue savoring our victory, believing that the investigation had come to a
successful conclusion.

Half-way to the hotel the phone rang, and Jose jolted us
from our semi-hypnotic state.   

“Hey, Jose, what’d you find on the phones?” I asked,
thinking he’d provide a bunch of good news.  

“Nothing,” he quipped.

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’? Are you joking with me? Is
this supposed to be funny, because if you are
..”

“I’m serious,” he interjected.

“What are you saying? You couldn’t find the stolen data?
Or you couldn’t find the link?”

“I found NOTHING.”

“The phones were scrubbed?”

“Not scrubbed. They were completely empty. They were
unused.”

“Shit!!”

“What’s wrong?” Mike asked.

“There’s nothing on the phones!”

“How could that be? Why would Jones and
Qureshi
bother to hide cellphones on his boat with nothing
on them?” Mike asked.

“Okay thanks Jose. Just keep the phones locked up and
we’ll deal with it in the morning,” I said.

I pressed my speed dial for Keisha -not that I was
incapable of solving it myself, I had solved many mysteries on my own- but
there is something in the collaborative process which can lead to a more rapid
resolution of the investigation,
  and
mold a
friendship which will endure long past the conclusion of the present case,
serving us both well into the future.

‘Hey Boots. Walk me through something fast. Okay?

“Okay.”

“So the IRS agent picked up the lifejackets and there’s a
bunch of money and 4 or 5 cellphones stashed inside one of the jackets.”

“Okay,” she replied.

“The cellphones, so we thought, had stolen information on
them, or the link to the site where we’d find the stolen information. But the
phones were empty.”

“What? Why would he bother to hide phones that are
empty?” Keisha asked.

“I don’t know. That’s the big question. Mike’s here with
me, and we can’t figure it out.”

“Well if they’re on the boat, he was probably going to
load the phones with downloaded stolen data and then sail with them to some
location where he was going to meet his contact, and hand over the phones in
exchange for money,” Keisha said.

“Hm.
But the contacts are up in
Virginia.”

“Maybe he has more contacts,” she suggested.

“Then why would the mechanic travel all the way to Asia
to deliver goods if they’re being transferred by a contact here in Florida? And
why would the date of his arrival in China match the dates that money was wired
to
Qureshi’s
brother if there weren’t an exchange of
goods for money?” I countered.

“I’m coming down there,” Keisha insisted.
“Good. Let’s walk the property together.”

“See you first thing tomorrow morning. We can crack this
thing,” Keisha replied.  We were struggling to contain our emotions, faced
with the probable release of the trio in less than 24 hours.

Then it was time to call Bailey.

“Hey Queen, it’s me.
Just got off of
the phone with Boots.
The cell phones were empty.
Nothing
on them.
We don’t have the classified material that was stolen from the
aerospace company, and we don’t even have the method of delivery of stolen
material to Beijing. The cell phones…. ”

“Shit!” Bailey interrupted. “The State Department won’t
take the first step to help us, if we come- up empty handed.  The State
Department has to first persuade the authorities in the United Arab Emirates
that it’s an issue vital to our national security before the government of the
U.A.E. 
will
ask their banks in Abu Dhabi to turn
over the documentation so that we can file a claim against Jones on tax
evasion, and non-disclosure of foreign bank accounts. Figure this out Caroline,
or Jones will get-off.
Qureshi
too.
And the mechanic.
I did all
of the work on the money trail. This is your area. You’ve got to figure this
out!” 

“Gee thanks, Bailey.
Like I needed more
pressure.”

“I’m serious Caroline. We’ve got a lot of hours in on
this project, and my boss is looking to recover some serious money.
In the millions.
Get going!” Bailey was clearly unhappy.
 She needed assurance from me that all was going to be resolved but I couldn’t
provide that level of assurance just yet.

I looked back at Mike, whose stealth demeanor bore proof
that he was a veteran of more than a few mishaps like this and I appreciated
him now more than ever.

The taxi continued onward to the hotel.

The next day, at the break of dawn, when the sun was just
rising over the ocean,
  Keisha
called from the
lobby. True to her word, she had come to help.  I rolled out of bed,
exhausted from the day before, stepped under the shower and threw on the same
clothes.