Lewis paced his room after Jamieson left. Message received. Nothing remotely resembling a revolt was going to occur on this director’s watch. Suzanna Oxenburg would be easy to write off. Even Gerald, if necessary, would be sacrificed. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the letter’s effect. Everybody knew Gerald had been crippled in Brazil on a job gone bad. They would read his indictment in his own words: my fault, I loved her, she sold us. Guilty. Case closed.
Forget Gerald’s forty years of brilliance, successful projects on every continent. Forget Gerald’s loyalty, dedication, leadership. Take your choice, Lewis: Gerald or a woman you don’t even know. He dropped his head back carefully and rolled it left and right. The throbbing in the center of his forehead refused to budge.
He gave up fighting the headache and put Jamieson’s view of his options on hold. Christine had updated the job status overnight and he had fifteen minutes to review it before his scheduled call to her. He’d have time after that to deal with the director’s plans for sanitizing the Arizona facility.
His own job was on a steady path for now, although as always, everything could change at any minute.
The job had started a year ago, in Bonn, Germany. His contract was with the BMF, the German ministry of finance. They had a shrinkage problem, a steady bleed of foreign balance of payments they’d been investigating without success for three decades. They’d managed to hide the problem so far but the estimated value was approaching a billion euros and they were under pressure to explain the hocus-pocus, recover the funds and do it quietly. Lewis had negotiated a contract that gave him cover to place two forensic accountants inside the ministry, with full access and authority to look under every rock, as long as they were discrete and kept a low profile. He’d chosen those resources carefully from the group’s resource pool, two women with deep experience, tracking instincts of blood hounds and nerves of titanium. He’d carved out a very specific set of objectives for them and a fixed block of time during which they were to spend exactly zero time looking at the ministry’s bank accounts. Instead, they had taken a deep dive into the ministry’s human resource files cross-referenced to data security levels, travel authorizations and personal career progression and life style. He expected them to identify no more than a handful of long-term, high-level actors who were polyglots with apparently stalled careers and whitewashed personal lives. He’d added a resource from Arnold’s team to analyze the personnel identified by his accountants and within the first few months they’d found two candidates. The accountants then narrowed their focus to looking closely at the level of access enjoyed by these individuals within the ministry’s financial systems while the outside team examined their personal lives. They’d studied both and within a month eliminated one. At that point, Lewis had turned the full focus of the team to the one man who checked all the boxes.
Their target was a German politician, formerly an East German trade minister. In his fifty-year career he had helped himself from all the pots—Soviet, West German, British, American, Chinese, even Russian. In his role as official outreach agent and moneyman he had initially made semi-annual visits to all the Eastern Bloc capitals, gradually expanding his role to global credibility. In Prague, London and Riyadh he’d exchanged his pilfered marks, euros, rubles and yen for cleaner currency: blue diamonds, Burmese rubies, and Columbian emeralds. To maximize value and minimize bulk, he purchased only finished gems, cut and polished but unset. They were the rarest of the rare, perfect stones with murky provenance that only enhanced their desirability in the worldwide market where tokens of ego and wealth were always in demand. Over the years he had accumulated a personal treasure chest of staggering proportions and an understanding of the aspects of the gem trade that never bothered with storefronts or advertising.
Lewis’s team maintained constant surveillance of the German including his weekends at his Black Forest cottage, villa retreats on Mallorca and what would ultimately be his undoing, short visits to cities that coincided with auctions by Sotheby, Christies and others that specialized in the rare and collectible. Many bidders would be unsuccessful in the public auctions but their wealth and cravings attracted backroom sellers to fill the gap.
Reports from Lewis’s undercover team while observing the German as he toured the pre-auction displays, engaging in knowledgeable discourse with experts yet never making a bid all added up to a cloaked passion. The ease of his inclusion was a red flag, rare in gatherings of the wealthy and snobbish, even for a lifelong politician with an upright aura of probity behind his congeniality. The public auctions were for introductions and referrals; invitation-only hotel suites with armed guards in attendance were for viewing and purchasing; cash and carry. On two occasions, the German was followed and his dinner drugged so his room could be searched while he slept. His newly acquired gems were found and photographed. Lewis drew the line after two such interventions due to the German’s age and heart condition. Drugs were dangerous. The Beige contract stipulated no harm to any German citizen.
The sophisticated global-oriented German power structure wanted and needed restoration of the funds. They were also motivated to arrest and prosecute the thief, both as a warning and as proof of responsible governance and transparency, an attribute Lewis considered laughable after thirty years but on par with governments worldwide.
Six months into the job, their target, a man of seventy-three had received a phone call at his home late on a Tuesday night. Within half an hour he’d left the house in a government car destined for the Koln-Bonn military air base where he’d escorted a diplomatic bag on an official German Luftwaffe CL-601 Challenger to Egypt. Caught by surprise, Lewis could do little but watch as their target left the country and their job seemed to take a completely unexpected turn his team was unprepared to follow and observe.
The German had a large, close-knit extended family with sisters, brothers and cousins in England, Switzerland and Italy, all carefully documented and researched. Every foreign relative had to be considered a potential accomplice because the valuables Lewis was positive, were not in Germany. All of his instincts told him the loot was safely secreted far from the powerful grasp of the German government.
Sure that something important was happening in Egypt, Lewis and Christine had spent a desperate twelve hours double-checking the research, searching for some connection in Cairo. Then the job reinvented itself, when the Challenger returned the next day, bringing the German, empty-handed except for a satchel of diplomatic papers that he handed over to the young staffer who met the flight and shared his official car back into the city. By the time the young man with the bag had been deposited at the federal ministry, Lewis’s team had picked up three other surveillance teams following the black government limousine.
Three weeks later, the German had made a mistake, possibly his first mistake in thirty years. The secure official telephone in the back of his government car failed an update causing it to be bricked. When his wife couldn’t get through to remind him that they had a party to attend she presumed he was in a meeting and called his driver to relay the message. That driver handed his cell phone though the open slider so the politician could speak with his wife directly. When the personal call concluded, the politician did the natural thing and continued to use the driver’s phone. Despite the rarity of meaningful information being broadcast by cellular phones, Lewis had an interceptor in place to record cellular chatter. The recordings were automatically compared against a digital data base of voice prints. The German’s voice was instantly matched and his conversations were forwarded by satellite to the Beige data center in Arizona for translation and follow up. One call had gone to a number in Mexico City.
Lewis had no previous record of any Mexican connection, but in the next hours Christine identified the recipient of the call, a second cousin in charge of the municipal accounts at the Banco Premerio in Mexico City. Unlike the hearty, long-winded telephone exchanges the German indulged in with the rest of his relatives, this call had consisted of three sentences. The Mexican asked if all went well. ‘No trouble,’ was the reply. ‘Everything is safe,’ the Mexican cousin said before terminating the connection.
Two days later Lewis had met again with his client, the cabinet minister. With at least three rival organizations attempting to catch the same fish, Lewis was prepared to terminate the job. Two of the groups were German and careful questioning revealed that the client was well aware of their involvement, which convinced Lewis that their target was also aware that he was being watched. The fact that the third group was connected to a Russian Bratva was the real deal-breaker. Lewis suspected his client had prior knowledge of their interest as well, and that, more than anything soured the job for him. The Russians had a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness; Lewis had no interest in exposing his team to their tactics. He even suspected the Germans might have turned to Beige in order to provide a distraction for the Russians while one of the German competitors broke the wall of secrets and recovered the ill-gotten gains. A German solution to a German problem had many advantages to offset the embarrassment.
The cabinet minister was apologetic about his failure to divulge the existence of the other contracted parties, but determined to retain Beige. Lewis emerged from the meeting with a new contract, a six-month extension, and a thirty-percent finder’s fee in place of the previously twenty. Three days later his team had terminated their Bonn existence.
Cars were returned, leases were vacated, hundreds of meters of coaxial cable were pulled and rewound, infrared satellite dishes were retrieved from attics, bank accounts closed. If it were possible for five people with containers of gear and all their personal effects to tiptoe out of a country, that was what they’d done. The entire operation had gone back together in Mexico City, minus a two-man team Lewis left in Germany—one working inside the air force base at Koln-Bonn, one living quietly as a student in the German’s upper-class residential neighborhood.
Lewis now knew that the German Luftwaffe routinely flew diplomatic couriers. Not everywhere, of course. France, England, Japan and the US were serviced by commercial flights but the entire African and South American continents and most of South East Asia were common Luftwaffe destinations, as was Mexico. And, infrequently, but regularly, the German good-naturedly filled in for his young friend, the diplomat. It would have seemed strange to anybody who had thought about the discomfort of a long flight on a military aircraft, piloted by young hot shots that enjoyed nothing more than keeping the G-forces at the upper levels of tolerance. For a seventy-three year-old with a bad heart, the most powerful of motivations had to be assumed.
Lewis was gambling that the motivation was in one of the three thousand commercial deposit boxes in the basement of the Banco Premerio. Not the small vaults that held birth certificates and copies of wills, but one of the hundreds of special, oversized vaults designed for antiques, municipal tax records, gold bullion, and art. His team had piggybacked their own video feed onto the bank’s security system, and established a link into the computerized vault authorization files. Both Lewis and Christine had accounts at the bank, complete with safety deposit boxes. Christine and her wife, Donna owned an eco-lodge in Belize where they displayed folk art. She made frequent visits to her vault to retrieve items for shipment to Belize, add new acquisitions and photograph pieces to be sold. She understood the bank’s security protocol very well.
A team member cleaned the Mexican banker’s pool and drove his wife to her appointments. Whenever the man used a telephone, whether from his house, his car or his office, whether he called his mistress, his stockbroker, or his business associates, every word was recorded.
Meanwhile, in Bonn, the German’s youngest daughter was expecting a baby. She was forty-six and the pregnancy had been difficult, but thanks to her many tests, it was known that it would be a boy, a first grandson. And Lewis believed, and indeed, had wagered a considerable amount of the group’s money, that when the baby was born, the German would retire. But first, Lewis was betting, he would maneuver himself onto one more diplomatic flight, the one flight that would make all the others worthwhile.
The team was ready and waiting in Mexico: Christine, Tomas and three others. They were ready but Lewis did not expect anything to happen until the German’s daughter delivered his grandson. They were fifteen months out and fully invested in this job. Both Beige and their cabinet minister client would be very disappointed if the old Kraut got hit by a bus or had a stroke before the baby was born and he took his critical final trip to Mexico to clean out his deposit box.
The due date was a month away but as usual, the last thing Christine asked Lewis before they hung up was when he would be back. Competent though she was, and despite having Tomas back in Mexico, he knew she was feeling the strain of running his job by herself.
When he’d wrapped up the call with Christine, he called the librarian and requested the files from Brazil. He wanted them complete with all the documents, not just the microfiche. He knew she would have to retrieve them from the archives.
“No problem,” she assured him. “I’ll have them for you today.”
Then, feeling restless and confined in the room, he decided breakfast might cure his headache. Having dinner with Marsha had been the right thing. Apart from the other satisfactions, the food at the Mirabel had restored his appetite despite the pervasive smell of whatever they used to scrub the hospital.
He’d finished eating and was on his second cup before he decided they cleaned the coffee makers with antiseptic, too. He grimaced at the taste but drank it anyway. Coffee was a habit; he drank it, good or bad. Only the enjoyment varied.
The cafeteria mug was heavy and hot against the pads of his fingers. He wrapped his hand around the steaming refill and inhaled, deliberately recreating the sensations from Suzanna’s kitchen. It didn’t bring back any incriminating details. He remembered her eyes and hair, the frozen, glassy expanse of the house, even the aroma of coffee beans. He was almost positive her coffee had been good, strong and black like her eyes. How could a woman have eyes like that?
He was staring into the murky liquid in his cup when he noticed Dr. Anderson’s lanky frame at the self-service percolators by the entrance.
Anderson glanced around, spotted Lewis and headed over. Lewis toed the chair opposite him away from the table to let Anderson know he wouldn’t mind the company. Anderson was always in demand, too busy to wear out his welcome. Lewis liked him, respected him, and, in the interests of self-preservation, was anxious to mend any tears in their doctor-patient relationship.
Anderson poured a stream of sugar into his coffee, stirred it vigorously and sampled it. “You look like something the lab screwed up,” he observed over the rim of his cup. “In fact, you shouldn’t be allowed in here. You haven’t looked this decrepit since . . . I can’t even remember. It’s embarrassing for me to have a patient of mine walking around in your condition.”
“Yeah, I know. Consider yourself lucky I’m not the first thing you see every morning.”
“How’s the lung?”
“Hurts when I run.”
“Well, I guess you know the proverbial answer to that.”
“Yeah,” Lewis gave him a rueful half-smile, “don’t run.”
“Actually, go ahead, it’ll keep things open. No soccer, though, no contact sports. The trick is use, not abuse. It’s going to give you some discomfort for a month or so anyway. You’ve been hurt before; you’ll know when it’s too much. I’ll definitely want to see how things look in about a month.”
“One of your people already gave me the steroid lecture.”
“Really? Scared you? No? Good. I’ve used these things for years, had good results. Uniformly. The FDA can find some damn fool screwing up penicillin when they put their mind to it.”
“Should I be noticing the steroids? I mean, do they have other effects?”
Anderson raised his eyebrows, “Side-effects?”
Lewis shrugged slightly. “If my tests are nearly clean, why do I still feel wired? My mind keeps jumping around, disconnected things, dreams, like that. How long is this going to last?”
“Trouble sleeping? Is it pain in the shoulder?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’ve slept through worse, but I can’t sleep this time.”
Anderson nodded soberly. “When you experience a major trauma, it affects you in more ways than the physical damage. Some people never recover. I’m not suggesting that, in your case. I’m just emphasizing the seriousness of the mental aspect. You got a double whammy. You had a very bad physical experience and then when you got here and should have been safe, we told you about Gerald. Give yourself some time.”
The word trauma triggered an errant reflex. Lewis considered the steady, intelligent face opposite him, “Trauma, huh?”
“We like the word. It has a medical and a psychological application so we throw it around a lot. Trauma is how our body and our mind react to alarming or very large events. We don’t control it. Does the word bother you?”
“I’m hearing it a lot lately. Somebody applied it to domestics the other day. How common is that these days? Still going on in the normal world?”
“If you believe what you read in the papers, it’s been going on forever. Probably always will. You think the thieves and murders you deal with are the only people who have the inclination to use violence?”
“I just don’t encounter women who’d put up with it in their personal lives. Why do they?”
“Depends. Domestic violence is a murky subject; the big drivers are probably fear of change, power imbalance, control but buried triggers, too. Men and women, pushing each other’s buttons. Look, therapists and experts who work in that area can’t really explain it or cure it and it’s way outside my area. If you want to get into this stuff, talk to Arnold. He’s the screwball expert.”
“Not that interested. Forget it.”
“All right, it’s forgotten.”
A server refilled their cups and Anderson reached for the sugar. Lewis observed the doctor’s preoccupation and hoped he wasn’t going to have to explain his sudden interest in domestic issues.
But Anderson had something else on his mind. “Gerald was my age, you know. Old Bernie recruited us together. We were pretty close once. Hell, I thought we still were.” He glanced at Lewis, then his gaze slid away. “It’s a damned ugly thing when you can’t get past being mad at somebody so you can grieve. I can’t figure out why he picked you. Why not me, for God’s sake? If it was that bad, I would have helped him even. I understand there was a letter. I guess he had nothing left to say to me.” He paused to look up at Lewis, “Just you.”
“Believe me, I wish he’d said it to you.”
Anderson waited.
After a moment, the doctor’s steady gaze eroded Lewis’s determination not to discuss Gerald’s suicide. “Why didn’t he call somebody? Why do it like that? Could being tied to a chair push a man over the edge?”
“Yes, for sure it could. But not Gerald. He was stronger than that, it wasn’t giving up for him, more like taking control. Don’t be shocked by it, I’m not. He’s been on borrowed time since you brought him out of Brazil. Those dogs really did a job on him; his spine was collapsed. I had to fuse the vertebra to steel rods to keep him upright. His body never should have lasted years like that.”
“He was always a glutton for work. I didn’t notice much change in him that way the last few years. Why didn’t he quit if he was in that bad a shape? He sure as hell didn’t need the money. He could have done anything he wanted, bought a place somewhere, retired or developed a specialty of his own, picked his clients.”
“We both know he loved this organization. He enjoyed being a heavyweight around here. I couldn’t keep him on medication. Said he couldn’t think when he took it. I saw his body after they brought him in. I don’t see how he was able to concentrate anyway in that condition. There wasn’t much left of him, he’d just abscessed away, must have known for months that he couldn’t go on.”
“So maybe he was unstable from the pain? I mean, the letter doesn’t make much sense.”
“Whatever he took the trouble to write, he meant every word. And I doubt he was unstable.” Anderson’s tone was frustrated, almost angry, “So maybe you could make an effort to figure it out. I would. If you don’t mind, I’d like to know what he said.”
Lewis hesitated, searching for a way to evade the question. Then decided Anderson deserved an answer. “Bottom line?” he said. “He missed getting laid.”
Anderson had his cup at his lips. His eyes widened and he slowly lowered the mug. One side of his mouth lifted and then he roared with laughter.
After a moment Lewis joined him, surprised by the naturalness of his own mirth.
“Son of a bitch,” Anderson choked, wiping his eyes. “Only Gerald.”
The laughter had already died in Lewis. He felt the familiar dryness in his throat, knew his own eyes were wet. “See what I mean?” He glared at Anderson, his expression serious and frustrated. “I’m a mess. As long as my blood was full of dope, I had a reason.”
“You’ve still got a reason. The man’s dead. Give yourself a break. Do something with it. Read that letter ‘til it makes sense, man.” Anderson paused, exhaled slowly. “I’m not trying to push you but I would guess it went a little deeper than that, knowing Gerald.”
Lewis took a scalding swallow of fresh coffee. He realized that he’d want the same in Anderson’s place, if Gerald had died without a word to him. Could he accept it or would he, like Anderson want to know?
Okay, yes, he’d want to know.
But while admitting that, Lewis knew he’d told Jamieson the truth. He would never willingly reveal Gerald’s inability to cut out his weakness for the beautiful, treacherous woman who had engineered the deaths of her own team. Tortured by guilt and anger and driven to attempt some final advice to Lewis; some half-baked life philosophy. And what good were all those connections in the end, anyway, Gerald?
Lewis sat back. “He’d had some contractor on site and the man made a remark about women. Probably didn’t mean much but it set him off. He rambled, he’d already taken the pills, was washing them down with Canadian Club. He was lonely, I guess, feeling alone anyway. Eventually he got around to Angel.
“God damn that miserable bitch. If anybody was immune to her brand of poison it shoulda been Gerald.”
Anderson smiled slightly. “Nobody, as I recall, was ever immune to her. Certainly not Gerald.”
Lewis frowned, remembering. “Gerald was living with a Peruvian girl. And Angel was doing what she did best. If they had something going, I never saw it. Did he ever talk to you about her?”
“In all the months we had him here Gerald only ever talked to me about you, never about Angel. The other thing on his mind was something about the orders.”
“What orders?”
Anderson studied Lewis across the table. His shoulders lifted slightly. “You tell me. I know it was after your review was finished and he’d testified and couldn’t change their mind about fining you that he said he should have paid more attention to the orders.”
“Yeah, well, I learned my lesson.”
“You were green, Gerald was running things.”
“He was always running things. I just can’t figure this. I keep coming back to it. He went crazy out there alone in that useless desert.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I have to,” Lewis replied soberly.
Anderson shook his head. “Take some time off. Go away somewhere. Come by my office, I’ll give you something so you can sleep. This is all going to catch up with you and when it does, you’ll crash and burn.”
“Right, just what I need, more dope. No thanks. I’ll crash my way.”
“Most of us do.” Dr. Anderson sighed. He raised his cup and drank. His gaze took in the half-empty cafeteria. His brow was furrowed when his attention returned to Lewis. “Gerald mentioned something a couple of years back, something about you and him breaking away, starting something of your own. That true?”
“We talked about a lot of things,” Lewis admitted cautiously. This wasn’t a topic for the cafeteria.
“It occurred to me that would have been a pretty big disappointment if you changed your mind.”
“No, nothing like that. It was never anything definite, at least it wasn’t for me. Gerald had the bucks to go independent, I don’t. I wasn’t going in on anything where I’d be some kind of junior partner. Not even with Gerald.”
“How long were you planning to wait?”
“Until I was ready,” Lewis snapped. Then he realized Anderson was only looking for Gerald in the equation, not accusing him of anything. “We were both busy, it was something to talk about but that’s all it was, talk.”
“Well, if he’d been serious, he would have pursued it. It took me by surprise when he told me, I can tell you. I always figured Gerald for the next director. When I told him he’d be walking away from the top job he just kind of smiled. Said it wasn’t in the cards for him.”
“He never thought they’d offer it to him after Brazil,” Lewis said.
“Everybody in this business has a Brazil in their file somewhere. Blow-outs go with the territory.”
“Tell me about it.”
Anderson’s face was carefully neutral again. “No, I guess there’s nothing I could tell you about this business. You ever think about retiring?”
Lewis shrugged. “You?”
Anderson stroked the silver hair at his temples with fine-boned surgeon’s fingers. “Yeah. Bernie’s gone. Now Gerald, too. It’s time.”
“Don’t leave before I do. Who’ll I get to put me back together next time?”
“I’ve got my own replacement lined up, just like you do. It’s policy. There’ll always be a top flight medical team here for you guys.”
“We tend to produce more revenue alive.”
“Ah, ever the cynic. That sounded more like the old Lewis. I guess it’s time I told you your blood tests are clean. You can move off my medical floor and let my people get some sleep at night.” Anderson drained his mug and stood. “I meant what I said. Come see me for something to help you sleep.”