Chapter 7

Phythian’s phone rang ten minutes after he settled into the back of the taxi he’d hired to take him to Paphos International. By no means was it the largest airport serving passengers traveling in or out of the island of Cyprus, nor did it have as varied a selection of departures as the one in the capital city of Nicosia. However, it was much closer and more convenient to the Phoenician Resort and, as a second-tier facility serving mostly cut-rate airlines, it meant fewer cameras mapping and identifying every face in a crowd.

Same with Paris Beauvais Aéroport, where his non-stop was scheduled to land shortly before noon local time. Its location ninety minutes outside the city in the Hauts-de-France region of France made it a bit inconvenient for impatient travelers itching to join the queue at the Eiffel Tower or see the Louvre, but its size and status as a hub for cut-rate air carriers made it more attractive to him than De Gaulle and Orly. Again, there would be fewer cameras and AI algorithms and facial recognition programs to deal with.

He dug his cell out of his jacket pocket, recognized the +376 country code for Andorra, even though the device was a cheap burner.

“I trust you met with Mlle Lamoines?” he asked, getting right to the point. There were no subtleties, no pleasantries.

“Yes, but we did not make our acquaintance quite the way you or I anticipated, sir,” was Martin Beaudin’s restrained reply.

“What does that mean?”

Beaudin had been dreading this conversation from the moment he’d found Gabrielle Lamoines’ body. Phythian could be capricious and arbitrary and, as his deadly reputation suggested, overly punitive to those he suspected of crossing him—or who yielded results less than desired. He cleared his throat, and said, “What it means, sir, is that she’s dead.”

This was not the response Phythian was expecting, although it did not surprise him. His previous line of work had taught him never to be shocked by an unexpected turn of events, which often led to an unscripted change of plans. Yet Beaudin’s words hit him hard, for personal reasons he had not shared with the locksmith from Andorra, and did not intend to.

“Fuck,” he said, his words followed by a brief silence, maybe five seconds. Then: “How the hell did this happen?”

“Someone got to her before I did.” Beaudin took a short breath, then offered a thumbnail sketch of what he’d found and what he’d done. “What do you want me to do?” he asked when he finished.

Phythian took a second to process what Beaudin had just told him, then said, “Where are you now?”

“Still in Paris, at a place I know.”

“Have you been seen?”

“I took deep cover precautions, but you know security these days. There’s cameras just about fucking everywhere.”

“What about witnesses? This place where you say you are…could anyone have seen you when you arrived?”

“Not likely. It’s an old G3 safe house, from before. No one knows it exists.”

Phythian interpreted before to mean predating the events of two years ago, when he’d put the Greenwich Global Group out of his misery and initiated the regime change he’d mentioned just hours ago to Declan Russell. “Still, I suggest you get yourself anywhere else but there, and as soon as you can.”

“I’m catching the first train from Montparnasse,” Beaudin replied. “Should be home by mid-afternoon. Meanwhile, what do we do about Ms. Lamoines?”

Good question, to which Phythian had several answers, and none of which Martin Beaudin need concern himself with. “You leave that to me,” he said. “And Martin?”

Addressing him by his first name? That was a first, and not necessarily a good sign. “Yes, sir?”

“In no way was this your fault, and I don’t hold you to blame. You had no way to know any of this would happen.”

“No, sir, but it doesn’t erase the fact that it did,” Beaudin said, exhaling a minimalist sigh of relief. “Who would want her dead, Mr. Phythian? She seemed like such a bright, beautiful woman, even in death.”

“You leave that to me, as well.” Phythian closed his eyes, tried to settle the sense of helplessness and complicity that was roiling inside him. He couldn’t help but think Gabrielle’s death somehow was his fault, that if he had not been directly responsible for ending her father’s life, she very likely would still be alive. “Meanwhile, lose the phone and get a new one.”

“Consider it done, sir,” Beaudin replied, and ended the call.

Isaac Melancon, the very rich and very powerful chairman-slash-chief executive officer of the Clear Bank of Luxembourg, awoke to the unmistakable blast of a train in the distance. He blinked his eyes open, glanced over at his nightstand, and saw the screen of his cell was lit up in the darkness of his bedroom.

Goddamned locomotive ringtone. Never should have let his young nephew download it into his phone.

He recognized the name on the screen and hit the “talk” button. “Is there any remote possibility you have any Goddamned idea what Goddamned time it is?”

“In fact, I do, sir,” the man on the other end said, having already anticipated Melancon’s sharp rebuke. His name was Noah Wenner, the CEO’s executive assistant, and he’d experienced the full wrath of his boss more than once. He glanced at his Rolex—a gift from Melancon for twenty years of faithful service—and ignored the fury on the other end of the call. “In fact, it is five-fourteen in the morning, sir. Eleven-fourteen in New York. Eight-fourteen in L.A.”

“Do you place any value whatsoever on your job?” Melancon demanded.

“That’s why I’m calling, sir,” Wenner explained. “The day you hired me you made it very clear about contacting you at any time, no matter what hour of day or night it is.”

“What I believe I told you is you’d better have a damned good reason to call me in the middle of the night—”

“Precisely,” Wenner said in a calm and indifferent tone. “And the fact that it’s almost five and one-quarter hours after midnight on most of the European continent tells you what?”

Isaac Melancon exhaled a deep, exasperated breath and closed his eyes. Wenner could be such a tedious and annoying prick; he should have fired the asshole years ago. “It tells me you have what you think is a good reason to be risking your employment while I could be trying to rid myself of this God-awful headache.”

“They have medications for that, sir.”

There was a weary silence on the other end, then Melancon said, “Out with it, Wenner. What’s the problem?”

“The problem, sir, is that we’ve experienced a breach.”

“What do you mean, breach?” Melancon turned his head and studied what he could see of his wife, who was gently snuffling on her side of the king-sized bed, curled up in a cave built of pillows and blankets. She usually was a heavy sleeper, but he didn’t want to run the risk of waking her with an early morning business issue, so he gently pivoted to an upright position. His toes found their slippers, right and left, and he eased out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him. “You mean a break-in, as in burglary?”

Wenner had always believed that, by the time he hit forty-eight years of age, he would be running his own bank somewhere, not serving as an executive toady to a dreadfully rich and pompous asshole like Isaac Melancon—so much for aspirations and ambition. Some men have the entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to make their dreams come alive, while others seek the security of a comfort zone. In Wenner’s case that comfort came with a six-figure salary, profit-sharing plan, and eight weeks holiday each year—and the forfeiture of any sense of initiative he may once have had.

“Not in the strictest sense of the word,” he replied. “Security is much too tight for that sort of thing to occur. But it appears that the bank’s digital defense system has been compromised, in a major way.”

“What do you define as major?”

Wenner mentally braced himself for the tirade he knew was coming. It was part of his job description, something to which he had grown accustomed during his years at the venerable financial institution, particularly when he’d been promoted to his current position. At first, he had believed Melancon’s anger and rage were directed at him personally, and that his employment and all those precious benefits were in constant jeopardy; day by day, week to week, and paycheck to paycheck. Over time, however, he came to realize it was just the intractable nature of the imperious dick who occupied the three-thousand square-foot office suite at the top of the steel and glass structure located on Boulevard Royal in the city center.

“Well, sir, I received a phone call about a half hour ago from Gustave Duprel, our chief of information technology here at headquarters. Seems he was performing some routine server maintenance on the storage drives down in D2 when he noticed…well, he found an irregularity that, in his words, defied explanation.”

“What kind of fucking irregularity?” Melancon barked into the phone.

“The thing is, sir, he was replacing a board in one of the computers, and noticed an empty slot that shouldn’t have been empty.”

“And I presume this isn’t just some regular slot?”

“No, sir. It’s for a high-capacity memory appliance on which highly confidential information is stored in a proprietary way such that it cannot be accessed via any means of interactive or networked communication without our detection.”

“I assume what you just told me has a translation—”

Breathe in, breathe out, Wenner told himself. Repeat.

“Yessir,” he said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that someone took a memory drive on which several trillion bytes of privileged, restricted information are stored. It was so secure that not even the best hackers in the world could access it without physically removing the thing from the mother board.”

“Which you’re telling me has been done.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Wenner conceded. “And to make matters worse, if that memory card were to fall into the wrong hands…well, it could be exceptionally damaging to this institution and some of our very best depositors.”

“What kind of damage, Wenner?”

“We’re talking about detailed, encrypted financial data for thousands of numbered accounts. People, companies, even governments that trust us to keep their banking activities private. That’s why we made a point of isolating it from any sort of online network.”

Melancon fell silent for what seemed like forever, punctuated by the flushing of a toilet. Then he said, “You’re telling me that this memory device with all this proprietary information on it has inexplicably gone missing?”

“Not inexplicably, sir. Someone physically entered the computer vault and pulled it.”

“You’re certain of this?” Melancon demanded, his voice more of a growl now.

“Absolutely. And what’s more, we know who did it.”

“Tell me.”

Wenner arranged his hastily scribbled notes on the desk in front of him. Every evening Isaac Melancon was driven home in a bulletproof Rolls Royce Spectre to his luxury two-story penthouse on the edge of Limpertsberg, with all its gilded antiques and Oriental rugs, while Wenner practically lived in his office at the bank. It even had a couch that folded out, with sheets and blankets and two reasonably comfortable pillows.

“At exactly one minute after midnight yesterday—Saturday morning—someone with a top-level security clearance gained entry to the room housing the central servers,” he explained. “This individual removed the memory card from the motherboard, then exited the area the same way he entered. If the maintenance tech hadn’t been running a random back-up tonight, the card’s disappearance would have gone undetected until the next routine security check.”

“That means it’s been missing for over twenty-four hours—”

“To be precise, twenty-nine—” he checked his watch “—and four minutes.”

“And you said we have a suspect?”

“We do, sir. A video camera recorded the unauthorized entry to the computer room, and the ocular scanners confirmed the break-in. The only person to go into that room during the time in question is a programmer in the cybercurrency department at our Paris branch. A young Polish man named Xenon Gorski, twenty-eight years old.”

“Xenon? Isn’t that some sort of inert gas or something?” Melancon asked.

“Yessir,” Wenner confirmed. “It’s one of the elements on the periodic table. But this one is from Gdansk. Graduated from the University of Warsaw with degrees in biochemistry and computer science. Plus, he’s fluent in at least five languages. According to his recruitment file, he passed all of his security clearances without a hint of a problem, and he’s been a model employee ever since he came on board.”

There was a distinct silence on the other end of the phone as Isaac Melancon sorted this out. Eventually he said, “Do we know if anything else is missing?”

“Nothing, sir. Just that one memory card, it appears.”

“Good. This Xenon Gorski…if he lives in Paris, why was he here in Luxembourg?”

Wenner again glanced out the window at the lights of the street six floors below; not much to see down there at this hour except the occasional drunks and prostitutes making their way home. “Our records show he was up here last week to serve as a translator for a meeting of Turkish businessmen interested in establishing a corporate account for a holding company. He lives in a flat in a suburb outside Paris, commutes into a branch of the bank Monday through Friday. Rarely late, never sick.”

“And he’s there now?” Melancon wanted to know.

“Well, that’s the thing, sir,” Wenner replied, anticipating the wrath of Kahn. “As soon as we learned of his involvement in this…incident…we sent someone to look for him. He hasn’t shown up since his expected train arrived back in Paris early last evening.”

“Jesus God, man…you have to find him. And that Goddamned card.”

“I’m aware, sir. And we will. I’ve sent one of our top corporate security agents to track him down. Sergei Djokovic. I believe you know him.”

“The Bosnia thing,” was all Melancon said.

“That is correct, sir.”

“Good choice,” Melancon said. “Djokovic is a highly persuasive man, and he employs highly persuasive measures. If anyone can take care of this Gorski shit and get that data back, he’s our guy.”