The Storm Murders (29 page)

Dreher may have been surprised by the mercenary emphasis, but offered no resistance. “Of course,
É
mile. I’ll see that that is executed. You have received your first payment then? Good. You see, I was rooting for you all along. In a way, you could say that I counted on you succeeding.”

Just then, a cell phone jangled and both men checked their own. Cinq-Mars was the recipient of the call. “Excuse me a moment, Rand. I need to take this.”

“Take your time,” Dreher said. “I’m comfortable enough right here.”

Cinq-Mars went through to the TV room to take the call from Sergeant Dupree. He was debriefed on what Everardo Flores had revealed, that the Lanos family in New Orleans hailed from Nebraska, and that he had uncovered more but wanted to say it directly to Cinq-Mars. “All part of his insecurity. The man has character flaws coming out the wazoo,” Dupree touted. “I don’t mind the guy though. He’s growing on me.”

Cinq-Mars told him what Agent Sivak found out, about Flores not going home the night of the kidnapping.

Dupree swore a blue streak. Then asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Let me talk to him first, hear what he wants to say. Then we’ll decide on a course of action. Sivak wants a piece of him, but she’s lying low on that for now. I’m asking if you might do the same.”

“Yeah, for now. God, this guy, I can’t figure him.”

“You don’t have to, of course.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m asking you to lie low, just like I asked Agent Sivak to lie low, and I explained to you why, but I understand perfectly well that you don’t have to. I’m not in charge of anything here.”

“It’s okay,
É
mile. I’m willing.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“What?”

“Willing.”

“What? I’m not following y’all.”

Cinq-Mars let him mull it through silently.

“Oh.” Dupree said. “Okay.”

“I don’t want Flores to know what we know just yet but that doesn’t mean you have to agree with me.”

“In other words—”

“I think you got it.”

“I’ll talk to him before Sivak does.”

“I can’t stop you from doing what I don’t want you to do.”

“No, y’all can’t do that. Especially if ya’ll really want me to do it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Neither did I. So,
É
mile, playing favorites? Or just both ends against the middle?”

“I’m on everybody’s side here.”

The other man laughed.

“No, I am. But if you talk to Flores, you’ll talk to Flores. I know what that’s about. You’ll get back to me on what he says, it’ll be on the side. No documentation, no rap sheet, no lawyer involvement. But if the FBI talks to Flores, they’ll take him in, maybe arrest him, he’ll lawyer up, we’ll never get our own chance to have a direct word and we’ll never hear back on what Flores says even if by some miracle he does talk. Not verbatim anyway. Only a filtered version and only if we’re lucky.”

“That’s nothing but true,” Dupree concurred.

“Listen,” Cinq-Mars told him, “I’ve got the FBI in the other room.”

“Not Sivak!” He sounded shocked.

“No, not Sivak. She’s off to Alabama, I hear. I got Randolph Dreher. Know him?”

“To know him is not to like him so much.”

“I hear the feeling’s more or less mutual.”

“No surprises there.”

“I’ll let you go, Dupree. Thanks for this report.”

“Back at you,
É
mile. Talk soon.”

Realizing that their guest was left temporarily abandoned, Sandra had joined Agent Dreher in the living room in
É
mile’s absence. Their chitchat never passed beyond life on the farm, the dog, and of course the weather. She was pleased that her husband, upon his return, seemed unperturbed that she was engaging the agent in small-talk, but then he shocked her. “Rand, my good man!” he exclaimed. “My God, where’re my manners? Please, say that you’ll stay for dinner. I insist!”

Sandra might have fallen off her ottoman if she wasn’t suddenly paralyzed in place.

“
É
mile,” Dreher responded, a polite falseness inherent to his protest. “I can’t possibly impose.” He looked to Sandra, for he required her endorsement of the suggestion before acceptance.

“Please,” Sandra stammered. “I also insist. You must stay.”

“Rand, stay. I’ll pour my best Scotch.”

And so, it was agreed.

Sandra shot her husband a look as he seated himself and put his feet up on the ottoman she now abandoned. Whatever that phone call did to him, he had oscillated through a radical change of mood. He learned a few things that day, confirming that both the Lumens and the Lanos families were farmers who didn’t farm. Finally, a connection. What it could mean, he did not know, but for the first time in this whole sordid business a line was drawn, two dots were successfully connected, and after repeated failures and much floundering in the dark he inhaled the intoxicating whiff of progress. Indeed, the victims—the Lumens in Quebec and the Lanos couple in New Orleans—adopted secret identities concocted by the FBI. No matter how anybody swung this cat—multiple ways existed to skin a feline—the FBI knew stuff. No way was he going to allow an agent to just walk out of his house without first delving into the depths of the man’s being.

So let the games begin.

TWENTY TWO

Special Agent Vira Sivak believed herself wired to fail. Born that way. Part of her genetic code. Despite this, through oversight or some cosmic flub, she still managed to spend a significant portion of her life contradicting that innate impression. Never did success run in her family, nor was she gung-ho on dreaming, which in America was relentlessly touted as the principle ingredient toward achievement. This was the land where anyone and everyone was free to not only follow their dreams, but to rampage after them in manic pursuit, but where oh where did the person go who didn’t dream so much? Wither the dreamless light sleeper devoid of ambition? What on the green earth became of an individual who only fantasized in miniature? Her countrymen gave much tenor to the notion of the Great American Dream, and perhaps she was merely envious when she chose to decipher the rhetoric as meaning to get rich on the backs of others. She thought of it as the Great American Crapshoot, and not being a gambler, Vira was not particularly interested in that roll of the dice.

Nonetheless, contradicting her own expectations, she excelled.

Emerging from university, the brainy young woman was courted by IBM, Microsoft, and a pair of Fortune 500 companies she’d never previously heard mentioned which nonetheless held impressive balance sheets. The latter struck her, perhaps unfairly, as being remnants of an old world economy, to whom she conveyed her disinterest. She really wanted to be at Apple—in her shoes, who didn’t?—but Steve Jobs never called, not even after she submitted her r
é
sum
é
twice, something she did not need to do once for any other company. Her sense of failure properly restored, she chose to shuffle off to IBM, preferring the opportunity in product development they dangled over a generic pitch from Microsoft. Before signing—she liked the idea of keeping IBM on the hook if only to verify that their interest was genuine—Vira filtered through a few additional opportunities that were slowly drifting in. Cisco got her attention. Google, not so much. As she confided to a friend, her shilly-shally was not to determine if she could do better elsewhere, but to see if she could not find a way to screw the whole thing up.

By
the whole thing
, she meant her future. She meant
life.

FedEx delivered an inquiry from the FBI. Would she be interested?

A laughable notion, really.

Imagine,
packing a weapon. Shooting people! Me!

Hilarious. Downright ludicrous when you thought about it, and she thought about it, had a few drinks with pals and made jokes. And yet, upon quieter reflection, Vira grew curious, enough to at least check out what they had to say. A few days after an interview with the Bureau, FedEx rang her buzzer with another message in an envelope: the job at IBM had evaporated. Had she delayed too long? At least they were demonstrating that their level of interest was never all that strong and were courteous in saying so. Saddened, Vira did not dwell on her misfortune. She deserved it for procrastinating, and, as she perpetually anticipated and perhaps encouraged failure, this was a perfect example of how things were meant to be.
So it begins, the downhill slide. What a shambles.
She joined the FBI as if to put an exclamation mark on this blight she was obliged to call a career, which, given her sense of doom, she would also frame as being her pathetic life.

Only after she was hunkered down as an agent for eight months did the thought finally dawn on her that she’d been snookered. A colleague whispered the suggestion over lunch—IBM stepped aside from competing for her services only because they were asked to do so. By this time she was losing the shine off her innocence. She gleaned that the Bureau did not always play fair. Indeed, the Bureau played fair only when that strategy favored a positive outcome. Otherwise, the FBI did exactly what was necessary to achieve an objective.

She was an objective. They wanted her.

She got that now.

Something to do with her outside-the-box, peculiar, yet spectacularly analytical and computer-savant mind intrigued them. As she advised a colleague at the time, “Either that or my retarded social skills, one of the two.”

Nonplussed. Her failure, as inevitable as she always supposed, someday would morph into dust around the heels of those who recruited her. Given that the FBI resorted to dirty tricks in acquiring her services, she took pleasure in knowing that her eventual comeuppance—their oversight, their error, her shortcomings and eventual failure—served them right.

Vira evaluated her professional life as she drove solo through the state of Alabama in a rented SUV. She had no need for a vehicle this large or anywhere near this luxurious, but landing at Birmingham International in a downpour she opted for an upgrade in case the roads were flooded. She wanted to ride above the slosh and an all-wheel drive might prove to be the ticket. More than a size upgrade, the Acura was the only such vehicle available and, what the hell, later she could explain to Agent Dreher that it was the last black car on the lot. He wouldn’t know if that was true. Neither did she. She presumed it was a lie. But Dreher suffered from a foible: he preferred his agents to drive black cars.

That was not his only peccadillo, although in all honesty she did not find the list of his peculiarities long. What intrigued her about him the most was that he reached out across a great breadth of humanity to bring her aboard his team. She was obliged to do a few years in the field before being eligible to move up through the ranks in D.C., at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he wanted her for that time. The Bureau wanted her at headquarters and, on the day her superiors found out that the CIA had their bloodhounds out and were taking an interest, rapid promotions were promised. Yet time in the field remained an obligation to fulfill, then up the ladder addressing national security and international crime issues through the use of technologies that in all likelihood had not been invented yet, possibly because she hadn’t imagined them yet. She was destined to foster a slew of high-tech developments, and in due course to administer their use. Still, a few years in the field came first, in part for the experience, in large measure to meet the requirements of a massive bureaucracy.

Dreher delved into the bounty of that bureaucracy to snag her. “Out of thin air.” She voiced that thought in that way to him. Secretly, a question.

He explained, “I take on the difficult tasks, Agent Sivak, the cases few can figure out. I’m not that bright myself so I put brilliant people to work and succeed that way.” Of course, he arranged things so that she had no choice. Being assigned to him over the chagrin and vocal objections of others, even from those who outranked him, demonstrated to Vira Sivak that he was neither “not that bright,” as he was fond of claiming, nor someone who failed to succeed on his own merit.

Despite the phony modesty, Dreher made no false assertion. He worked the difficult cases and very bright people stood dutifully in tow. She was happy to serve her apprenticeship under him and with his team. If the day came that she outranked him, which was everyone’s expectation, she might bring him onto her own team, who knew?

Driving, the young agent revelled in the Acura at speed out in the rain, appreciating the road clearance, the smooth acceleration, and having the whole of her ruffled life ahead of her. She laughed once to herself, thinking of how Dreher would fume on the day the invoice arrived. She was meant to be in Alabama semi-incognito—unknown to outsiders, scarcely known even to the FBI. Renting an Acura was not going to help that aspect once her expenses landed on a desk at HQ.

Poor Rand. She could hear him blustering already.

That was another of his peccadilloes: his adoration of budgetary restraint.

Torrential as the plane landed, the downpour persisted but was diminishing. Rain fell steadily and Vira enjoyed the rhythmic swish under her tires. Small town lights periodically reflected off the shimmering black asphalt, then all was dark again for long stretches. Vehicular traffic on the highway was not heavy, but constant, with an annoying number of tractor trailers. She was on her way to Marshall County, to the town of Albertville where she’d booked a room, then on to Geraldine in the morning. Marshall was one county over from DeKalb, which had its heart ripped out by a tornado two years earlier, but in Geraldine a couple had been murdered in the storm’s aftermath in similar fashion to the man and woman slaughtered in New Orleans. She had issues with her boss, but he consistently delivered on this one account—he drew down the complex assignments. Indeed, her boss reached across and steered the tough ones into his orbit as effectively as he selected her. Strange, that ability, yet Vira reveled in the challenges it provided.