CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The news of what had happened in New York on Monday evening was relayed to Edward Brand first thing Tuesday morning. Brand listened as his contact inside the FBI gave him the crime scene details. Tony Stevens had taken one bullet in the center of his chest, and death was instantaneous. Alicia Walker was hit in the neck, but her cause of death was asphyxiation. She had drowned after severe blood loss had rendered her incapable of hauling herself out of the bathtub. Death was inevitable, as the bullet had pierced her carotid artery and without immediate medical attention, she would have bled to death. Best guess from the CSI crew was that Stevens and Walker had fired at exactly the same time. Brand thanked his contact and hung up.

Tony Stevens had fucked up. He’d fucked up big time. First off he’d allowed an FBI agent to get inside the scam. Then he’d gotten himself killed while taking her out. Edward Brand heard a cracking noise and glanced down at his hand. His cell phone had snapped in half at the hinge. He relaxed his grip on the phone. It was ruined. He dumped it in a garbage can and headed for the bedroom. Time to pack and get out of Vancouver. He’d planned on staying another day or two, but the FBI was going to ratchet up the NewPro investigation now, and he’d have to move faster than he had expected. The borders would get tighter. And quickly.

He called Air Canada and booked a flight to Hong Kong, departing Vancouver International at one-forty. Four hours. Plenty of time to pack and get to the airport. Brand didn’t care where the flight went, he just needed to get out of Canada. He opened the door to the walk-in bedroom closet and knelt in front of a line of shoes neatly tucked in a line of small wooden niches. He pushed a piece of wood and a section of the compartmentalized shelving popped out an inch. He gripped it and pulled. It slid out, shoes still intact. Behind the false front was a wall safe. Brand spun the dial three times and pushed the handle down. The safe opened. Inside were a number of Canadian passports bundled together with an elastic. He rifed through them until he found one he liked. Reginald Brewer. A native of Vancouver who traveled extensively on business. Half the passport pages were filled with stamps from various countries. They were as false as the passport itself. He withdrew a few thousand dollars in American twenties and fifties then closed the safe and replaced the shoes.

The picture inside the passport was his face, but with a mustache and glasses. The same fake mustache and glasses he had worn for the picture were in a drawer in the bathroom. He affixed the mustache with spirit gum and donned the glasses. A small toiletry bag sat on the vanity, and he filled it with the necessities, then returned to the bedroom and packed a suitcase. A quick call to a cab company and he was on his way to the airport.

Edward Brand was a chameleon. He could change his face in minutes and had a complete set of identification for each person he could become. It had been years since he had used his real name. Robert Zindler. Jesus, the name sounded foreign even to him. That was probably a good thing. He wondered if the FBI would manage to tie him back to his origins on this one. They would be looking really hard now that Alicia Walker was dead. He knew that would happen when he sent Tony Stevens to kill her. But risks were all to be measured and then taken if the upside outweighed the downside. Locking Tony Stevens in for life by having him kill Alicia Walker had been worth the price. He liked Tony and respected the man’s abilities as a con artist. But that whole end of things was gone. Tony was dead.

That was where things got dicey. Tony’s body gave the FBI some tangible evidence to work with. They had his fingerprints, his DNA, his clothes and his gun. When you give an organization like the FBI that much to work with, they’re going to come up with something. Still, tying Tony back to him was impossible. Every precaution had been taken to keep their lives completely separate. On this scam, Tony was New York. He was San Francisco. Brand was the man behind the entire operation, but once the con was under way, the cities were individual entities. No overlap. That way, if one operation went down, the others would still be viable long enough for them to get out before the cops came down on them. The only common factor was the name NewPro, and that was a necessity. Since NewPro wasn’t a public company, the different centers were all functioning below the radar. Anything less than a simultaneous raid on all cities would be fruitless. Well thought out. Well executed.

Two hundred and twelve million dollars worth of well executed.

His taxi arrived, and he watched Vancouver slip past his window on his trip to the airport. North of the Fraser River, where the mountains touched down to the water, the land was heavily wooded with estate homes tucked into quiet cul-de-sacs. West, across Georgia Strait and Vancouver Island, was the Pacific Ocean. The water this far north was cold, not good for swimming, but perfect for fishing. He liked Vancouver. It was one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Too bad he wouldn’t be back for a while. Maybe never. But that was the price you had to pay. Nothing without a price.

Despite the glitch caused by Tony’s incompetence at such a simple thing as killing one person, everything was fine. In fact, it was perfect. Everything moving along as it should.

Because the con was never over until it was over.