The strategy, once inside Julian’s office, was divide and conquer. There’s a reason why it’s the most dog-eared chapter in Machiavelli’s Art of War.
Julian was in charge of banking. He needed von Oehson for that. I was in charge of damage control. For that, I needed Landon Foxx.
“Call him on the blender,” said Julian, pointing me toward his communications room.
The blender was how you reach the CIA’s New York section chief on his personal cell in the middle of the night without ever having to worry that anyone was listening in. The dedicated satellite phone digitized the conversation on both ends, scrambling every word in transit more than a thousand times a second. Can’t be hacked, Julian has always maintained. He ought to know. He invented it.
So the good news was that I was talking to Foxx on the most secure line in the world. The bad news was what I had to tell him: the bad news.
No one likes a cover-up, but at least the agency is uniquely qualified to do the job. Only this couldn’t be the agency. Not officially. It had to be Foxx. He had to convince a local police chief in Darien that the Ferrari SF90 Stradale that was lying flipped over and totaled on one of his residents’ front lawns was a matter of national security and should be treated as if it never happened. This in a town where everybody knows everybody’s business. Also, never mind the report of gunshots. As for the neighbor—probably plural—who saw von Oehson on the scene, best if we stay with the stolen-car story that von Oehson already told. Planting an item in the police blotter of the local paper ought to do the trick.
You got all that? Good. Because that’s the easy part…
I needed Foxx to move on from a small town in Connecticut to an entire European country. Hungary, clearly bent on revenge in the aftermath, had taken out a contract on both von Oehson and Frank Brunetti. They were currently batting one for two, and surely looking for another crack at von Oehson. That is, unless Foxx could convince our NATO ally that such a move was seriously not in their best interest. Giving him a better chance to do that was what Julian was working on in the next room.
“When will he be done?” asked Foxx.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I’ll call you back as soon as he is, though.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll already know by then,” he said.
Of course. I’d originally gone to von Oehson’s house to bring him in, but Foxx was hardly waiting for that to happen. Time was of the essence, and as much as it made sense for me to be the go-between, Foxx knew there was no scenario in which von Oehson could keep the fifty billion. Any negotiating with Hungarian intelligence was predicated on the country’s getting its money back. Then, and only then, could Foxx focus on the only thing that mattered to him—keeping this whole clusterfuck from going public.
One way or the other, Landon Foxx was going to get Mathias von Oehson to cooperate. I was one way, and the other was any host of possibilities, although Foxx ultimately putting a gun to von Oehson’s head was undoubtedly near the top of the list.
In short, Foxx was already neck-deep in talks with Hungarian intelligence. He’d just told me as much without having to say the words. Classic Foxx.
“I understand,” I said.
“You always do, Reinhart.”
I never liked when Foxx paid me a compliment, few and far between as they were. It almost always meant he was hiding something from me.
Sure enough, he was.