Forty

“If you tell Carlos you killed me without consulting him, it will go badly for you,” Bryan said. “Eduardo will agree with this.”

Eduardo said nothing, but saying nothing felt a lot like agreement.

“You can send a message to Carlos that I am with you, helping you get rid of the traitor Eduardo. This way I get credit for the hit that should have been mine in the first place. Teresa will go back tonight. And I will go tomorrow with the McCabes at one o’clock to have coffee with Carlos at Tortoni’s.”

“She’s not going back to him,” Eduardo said.

Teresa’s eyes filled with tears. Hollis wondered if Bryan had made the suggestion, one he had to know they’d ignore, for the pleasure of seeing the fear in Eduardo and Teresa.

“Tell him you’re staying with your father,” Declan suggested to Teresa. “Text him now and say your father is ill. Carlos respects your father. He’ll leave you alone and it will buy us some time.”

“But if my father talks to Carlos …” she started, between tears.

“Once he has the passports, the plan is for him to wait at a bar for me to text that you’re leaving Buenos Aires,” Declan said. “I can tell him any plan we come up with and he’ll go along. He just wants you out of harm’s way.”

“And I want that for him,” she said.

“We’ll get your father out,” Peter suggested. “But Declan’s right. If your father backs us up, it gives us time to get you out of here without anyone raising alarm bells.”

“And tomorrow, we just let Bryan go back and tell Carlos the truth?” Hollis asked.

“What truth can he tell?” Peter asked. “He sat in a hotel room eating cookies and drinking tea with a couple of Dutch honeymooners, an Irish art thief, a South African spy, and two American college professors. All of whom were using the resources of an international spy ring to help a young couple in love? You think Carlos will believe that? I’m here and I don’t believe it.”

“Just a small point,” Declan interrupted. “Not really an art thief. I make and sell forgeries. I leave the real things where they are.”

“Van Goghs,” Hollis said.

“Not just Van Goghs.”

“You know what’s interesting,” she said, “my teaching assistant had Van Goghs in her apartment the other day. Pretty paintings but obvious fakes.”

Declan smiled.

It was a hunch, but his smile had confirmed it for her. “It bothered me when you said you’d paid someone to get the real Tim and Janet out of the way,” Hollis continued. “If you gave all your money away, what did you pay with? And just now it hit me, you paid with the fake Van Goghs.”

“Angela is a criminal?” Finn said. “Timid grad student, doesn’t say a dozen words without apologizing Angela? She’s a criminal?”

“No,” Declan said, “but her dad is. She just watched over you and reported back. And, okay, she did a quick look around for the address book.”

“She was the person who broke into our house?”

“A quick look. She didn’t take a thing.”

“It makes sense. She gave me the envelope from ‘her friend Tommy.’ There is no Tommy Silva. She made that up because you asked her to use that name. She knew we’d find the passports and the note you wrote pretending it came from Silva,” Hollis said. “Silva, the real Silva, wanted to see the note when he came to our house, but Peter had taken it. I’ll bet he didn’t know what it said, and he was worried.”

“She didn’t kill the guy that was put in our living room, though,” Finn said. “She couldn’t have. I don’t see her having the strength to move the body.”

“She didn’t kill anyone,” Declan told him. “I promise you, whoever was left in your house had nothing to do with me. I don’t know who he was or who put him there.”

“Silva must have put him there,” Hollis said. He was the only person left who could have, since neither Declan nor Peter would have reason to. Why, she didn’t know. And there was something else she couldn’t figure out. “So, Angela watched us, broke into our house, and delivered your message, and you paid her with two obviously fake Van Goghs? That’s getting away pretty cheap for all she did.”

“Actually, I paid her with a bit of the money Carlos paid Tim and Janet to kill me.” He smiled at his cleverness. “The paintings were just my way of saying thank you. Can’t sell them, so I’ve decided to give them to people who help me out. And in case you’re wondering, you both are worthy of a field of sunflowers for saving my life.”

Hollis, against her better judgement, smiled. “Stop being charming,” she scolded him. “We haven’t saved you yet.”

Bryan finished the coffee that Hollis had held to his lips. He seemed to relax. To Hollis, it seemed he was thinking it all through, and she hoped, realizing his life depended on getting in Peter’s good graces.

“Carlos has a meeting tomorrow to hand over the address book,” Bryan said. “He needs the plane to get to it. I know this meeting is late in the afternoon. Dusk. He didn’t like the time, he said he prefers complete darkness, but he did not have the influence to change it. He told me to have the plane ready at three p.m.”

“Where’s the meeting?” Finn asked.

“I don’t know.”

Finn looked at Eduardo, who shook his head. “He said nothing to me.”

“He told Silva,” Bryan said. “But of course that’s no use to us now.”

Peter began pacing. “Okay. So I get the book down here. Declan copies it. We put a tracker in it, follow Carlos to his meeting, see who the contact is, and track that person to your nonexistent guy.”

“You can’t put a tracker in it.” Declan poured himself a second cup of tea. The rest of the room waited for him to explain, but instead he grabbed a cookie and sat in the desk chair, enjoying it.

“That’s non-negotiable,” Peter said. “Once the professors hand over the address book, it’ll transmit even from the air.”

“Carlos will find it,” Declan said. “He’s paranoid. And as it turns out, rightly so. People keep betraying him.”

“I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years—” Peter started.

“And Carlos has been a criminal longer than you’ve been alive.”

Peter stopped pacing. “Then he takes the book and gets on a plane and we never see it again. Is that a better idea?”

“Or we find out where the meeting is,” Finn suggested. “If he told Silva, maybe he’ll tell us.”

“You know I admire your can-do spirit,” Peter said to Finn, “but there’s no way Carlos tells you where that plane is headed.”

“I’ll bet you a million dollars they get the information,” Declan said.

“Blue isn’t in the gambling business.”

“That’s good because I don’t happen to have a million to spare,” Declan said. “So how about you put me in prison if I’m wrong and let me go if I’m right.”

Peter spun around and faced Declan. “You know what, Murphy, I’ll take that bet.”