The Tsunami File (17 page)

“Police,” Rawson said. “This doesn't sound good.”

“Police types. Civilian guys, working for the police on the DVI operation over here.”

“That's slightly better,” Rawson said. “Not much better.”

“Horst Becker is the German's name. He's a pathologist attached to the German team here. Works usually at some military hospital in Frankfurt, apparently. And Stefan Zalm, who's a dental guy, a forensic dentist, working with the Dutch police over here.”

Delaney had been in the information and disinformation game long enough to be asking himself if he should be suspicious of Zalm having suddenly produced ten good-quality fingerprints for the
Deutschland
body. Sometimes in the informationgathering game it paid to be skeptical of good news when it came your way.

“What's up, Francis?” Rawson asked.

“Here's the question. Why would anyone want to prevent the body of a tsunami victim from being identified?”

“Hmm,” Rawson said. “Interesting. Not necessarily a CSIS matter, of course.”

“Probably not,” Delaney said. “Very unlikely. But something CSIS can help me with maybe.”

“This doesn't sound like your basic
International Geographic
hippos in the waterhole kind of story to me, Francis.”

“No, it doesn't to me either,” Delaney said.

“So who's your client for this? Editor or spook?”

“You know I report to only one spook, Jon.”

“I've never been too sure about that, Francis. As you get better and better at what you do. As word of your talent spreads.”

“I'm a one-spook kind of guy, Mr. Rawson.”

“Do I owe you any favours at this point?”

“Dozens, according to my calculations.”

“I see. And who's the third guy?”

“He's a dead guy. With his fingerprints surgically removed. Probably German. I thought for a while he might be a fat old pedophile type who made himself disappear. I don't know about that anymore. Doubtful now. I'd tell you his name but I don't have it. That's the problem at the moment. Or one of the problems. If I get a name I'll give that one to you as well.”

“I see,” Rawson said again. “Interesting. Not really an
International Geographic
sort of story at all.”

“Nope.”

“Disaster victim identification.”

“Yup.”

“What do you get out of this? Besides a story maybe?”

As usual at this stage of his journalistic and extrajournal-istic career, Delaney was not at all sure what use he would, or should, make of any information he set out to gather. That was his biggest problem, as Rawson, Kate, O'Keefe and any number of other freelance career counsellors never tired of telling him.

“Not sure yet,” Delaney said.

“What do I get out of this?” Rawson asked.

“Is that the kind of relationship we have? I thought you guys loved me for my brains and good looks.”

“Besides that.”

“I doubt you guys will get anything out of this, Jon. You'd be doing it for love. And future considerations.”

“It's the future considerations part that gets me, Francis. Every time you run into a little jam.”

“I'm not in a jam this time, Jon. I told you that.”

“Not so far.”

Tim Bishop called him from the house phone in the lobby. It was quite late in the evening for Bishop to be up and about. He usually retired to his room early, after a vegetarian dinner without wine, to work on his computer or watch TV.

“Can I come up?” Bishop said.

“Sure,” Delaney said. “Troubles?”

“Not really,” Bishop said.

It turned out that Bishop was bored. He was in a bad mood. He wanted more picture assignments or he would go back to Paris. He felt Delaney had been spinning his wheels on the DVI story and it had all become too boring. What, if anything, did Delaney want him to do next?

“Well, we've got the interview with the Canadian DNA man tomorrow, right?” Delaney said.

“Big deal,” Bishop said grumpily. “Head shots. If they make it into the magazine at all.”

“Tim, we can't always be jumping in and out of helicopters,” Delaney said. “That's a shame.”

“Can't you go out and get pissed and find a promiscuous Thai girl like photographers are supposed to? Kick back a little in a tropical setting?”

“I think I'll head back to Paris the day after tomorrow, Frank. Unless you need me for something else.”

Delaney thought a request for pictures of a corpse's mutilated finger pads might cheer Bishop up, but did not make such a request. Jonah Smith's little digital camera had done that job already, though almost certainly with far less panache than Bishop would have brought to it.

“Stand by for a bit, OK Tim? This might get more interesting soon,” Delaney said. “And maybe the magazine will send us to the Maldives to finish up. I hear Thai tsunami bodies are washing up on beaches way over there. That's thousands of kilometres away. Bodies in the water for weeks, bloated way beyond recognition.” “That sounds better,” Bishop said hopefully.

Delaney had only a few unshakeable rules at this stage of his professional and personal life. One of them was to never argue with wives or ex-wives or lovers on the telephone from an overseas location. He completely abandoned that rule in his phone call to Kate after Tim Bishop left.

Without understanding why, he dialed Kate's number in Montreal. In his heart, if he had looked there as required, he might have been trying to do a little relationship maintenance work, even if he knew, also deep in his heart, that this relationship was going nowhere and could go nowhere until he decided if he wanted this or any relationship at all. Or perhaps observing the Mr. and Mrs. Smith saga had simply stirred his unconscious somehow.

Natalia had been a psychologist. He had never felt closer to any woman anywhere, anytime in his life. Not long before she was murdered, when he had been getting all too comfortable with that closeness, she had pronounced him impossible to understand. How could he, therefore, a rank amateur in the introspection business, be expected to fully understand his actions and his motivations?

Kate, like Rawson, was all business when she answered telephones.

“Financial crime, Hunter,” she said.

“Kate, it's me, Frank,” Delaney said.

“Who?” she said. “I don't know anyone by that name. I once had a loverboy by that name but he has gone away and disappeared. He never calls, he never writes.”

“Does he at least email?”

“No,” she said. “Not a word.”

“Not a nice man. You're better off without a guy like that, maybe.”

“I've been thinking along those lines,” she said.

“Can you talk?”

“I can take a moment away from fighting terrorism, yes,” she said. “Can you talk? That's more to the point.”

The signs were not good for this call. Delaney began to very much regret that he had telephoned the Mounted Police.

“I'm sorry I'm so bad at staying in touch, Kate.”

“When you are away or when you are in Montreal, Francis?” “Both,” he said.

“So go and sin no more. Or whatever,” she said. “Whatever the priests are supposed to say in confession. Or was that Jesus who said that?”

“I'm on a story.”

“You are always on a story. Always. How is this new?”

“Come on, Kate,” he said lamely. “Don't be in a bad mood.”

“OK, I'll cheer up. I'm a single woman cop, never married. I've just clicked over forty on life's little odometer. I've been in love with this nice journalist guy since quite some time after the real love of his life got killed and we've had some very nice times together. For a while it seemed really, really good, in fact. But now he's on the road all the time and he's busy even when he's in Montreal and he doesn't seem to know what he wants anymore. It's all a bit classic, really.”

“Come on, Kate.”

“You still on that disaster victim identification story? Where are you, Thailand still?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do something for me, OK Francis. While you're over there, try to find out who you are too. Make a firm identification. Will the real Francis Delaney please stand up.”

Delaney said nothing. Kate filled in the blanks.

“How many years have you been trying to figure out who you are, Francis? Approximately. Hotshot journalist? Maybe a spy guy? No, hang on, part-time spy. No, that's right, no comment on that one. Right? Maybe it's Kate Hunter's loverboy. No, that was last week, last month, I forget. No, I remember, you're the guy who's not sure he wants to get really and truly involved. The guy who can never get over Natalia.”

“I'm over her, Kate. For God's sake. That's a very old story. That's a long, long time ago now.”

“I suppose you must be over her, yes. Your sailboat isn't named after her anymore.”

“I'm over her, Kate. Really.”

“Are you over me, too?” Delaney knew that in such conversations a millisecond of hesitation after a question like that was too long, far too long.

“No,” he said.

“Was that a slight hesitation I heard just then, Francis?”

“Kate, this is starting to piss me off.”

“Good,” Kate said.

“Look, seeing we're talking about it, who are you these days?” Delaney said. His adrenaline was rising, more than he subsequently thought justified. “Any idea?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You're a Mountie, right? RCMP financial crime fighter? Foot soldier in the war on terror, so called. Tough girl. Or, no, maybe a career woman, going places in the RCMP. First woman commissioner one day, maybe. No, wait. That's not right. You're a jealous girlfriend. You're jealous of a dead woman you never met. No, wait, this is it, you're the marrying kind, is that it? You want more. Police work is not enough. Delaney the boyfriend is not enough. You're not the girlfriend type, is that it? You're the marrying kind. Is that who you are now?” “Fuck you, Francis,” Officer Hunter said.

Delaney had never seen Smith so excited. They were in Delaney's hotel room again, the next afternoon. Zalm was with them again too. Smith and Zalm had rushed in to the Metropole lobby just as Delaney was getting back from his interview with the DNA man. Tim Bishop's fears had proved justified; it was a boring interview indeed. But Smith's news was anything but boring.

Delaney watched, and marvelled at, the enthusiasm with which this underweight, bespectacled Scotland Yard fingerprint man with an incongruously large and reportedly very new mustache approached his identification work. Delaney had observed that in their first meetings, and again in the formal interview he had conducted with Smith about the post-tsunami DVI challenges. He had observed that when they broke into the mortuary compound together. And he saw it clearly again now.

As Smith himself once told him, the time that any good fingerprint man likes best is the short period after a definite match has been made. For that very short time, he believes he is the only person in the world to know a suspect's true identity.

Smith insisted on telling Delaney and Zalm in great detail how he made the
Deutschland
match. Delaney was willing to acknowledge that Smith was surely allowed these few moments of delight, before the even harder work began.

Smith had worked for hours at his desk in the management centre, he told them, using the AFIS system to check for hits against the steadily growing database of antemortem missing persons' prints taken in countries across the globe and sent by police to Phuket. There was nothing of any interest.

Not even any possibles.

Delaney could imagine Smith at work, an island of intense concentration in a sea of DVI movement, quietly hunched over fingerprint cards and then peering up at his twin computer screens, flicking back and forth through possible matches the system had thrown up for examination. Oblivious to police and civilians rushing around him as he worked, oblivious to the telephones ringing, fax machines humming, keyboards clacking, two-way radios crackling.

The Phuket databases having yielded nothing, Smith said, he then interrogated the Interpol database, using the I-24/7 police communications system the new Secretary-General had hurriedly put in place, at great cost and amidst great commotion after the September 11 attacks. It was aimed at bringing Interpol urgently into the 21st century and, for fingerprint examiners like Jonah Smith, it meant now being able to transmit to Lyon heavily encrypted emails with high-resolution fingerprint images attached for checking from the field.

The Interpol fingerprint databases were relatively small, Smith said, tiny when compared to the FBI's collection, for example, or even the New York Police Department's. But the collection at Interpol contained a fascinating mix of international criminals, members of organized crime gangs, major fraudsters, big-time car thieves, convicted and suspected pedophiles, and other particularly nasty ne'erdo-wells. And now there was of course an evergrowing file of terrorist suspects.