show that unfortunately won’t be coming to a movie theater near you. The hot part is that the Australians have him on unrelated charges.”
“We’re sure it’s him?”
“Pretty sure. The guy I saw matches Ward on seven points. Some physical, some circumstantial.”
“Only pretty sure?” asked David.
I hesitated. “There are a few things that are still holding me back,” I said. “He’s been calling himself Herbert Goldman.”
We talked over some procedural stuff, how the Australians would need to positively ID him before they’d extradite him.
“But that crap’s not the problem,” I said. “The Australian police can verify our ID information. Anyway, I’m after the money, not the body.” I paused. “Any word on the U.S. request for his provisional arrest? We only have twelve days to get that provisional arrest request here.”
He sighed. “Hold on. I need to take another call.”
A few minutes later, David came back on the line and told me that the FBI had just received a memo from the Australian Federal Police that the suspect hadn’t been fingerprinted yet, because he was in the hospital.
“They didn’t?” I said. “Well, I think I can solve that problem.”
I waited until evening visiting hours to return. The corridor and the nurses’ station were empty, so it wasn’t hard to borrow a plastic bag and a doctor’s white coat from a nearby closet. Ward was sound asleep and snoring. A policewoman read a newspaper beside him. Nonchalantly, I slid one hand into the bag and, with my fingers protected by the plastic, picked up the empty water cup from his side table. With my other hand I peeled the bag off and over the cup, enclosing it in the bag without adding prints of my own, and walked away, returning the coat to its place. The policewoman didn’t even blink.
Peter Maxwell was sitting at his desk, rubbing his eyes over a pile of papers, when I arrived. I held out the plastic bag. “Check the prints on the cup, and match it with the sample the FBI sent you. That’ll convince you.”
“Dan, I’m already convinced, but it may not be enough for the court. There could be an argument that this fingerprint evidence was compromised.”
“That’s not for the court,” I said. “It’s for law-enforcement purposes. I’m afraid if there’s any doubt about his identity, he’ll be let go even after the extradition request comes in. The prints on the cup will do for now.”
After a pause, Peter agreed. I’d liked him from the moment we’d met. He was a tall, brown-eyed, well-built man in his midthirties. He was always smiling, willing to help, and never put bureaucratic obstacles where none were necessary. He also had that quirky, uniquely Australian sense of humor that can inject levity even into the most serious circumstances. So can I. During one of our conversations, somehow the subject of Jewish holidays came up. “Sounds mighty complicated, mate,” he said.
I smiled. “Not really. It can be summed up easily: Our enemies tried to destroy us. They couldn’t. We survived. Let’s eat.”
When I’d seen his toothy grin, I knew that he got it.
Back to Albert C. Ward III, now claiming to be Herbert Goldman. He had all the reasons in the world to fight extradition to the United States. In fact, he had eleven good and solid reasons, each of them a case bundled neatly into an indictment. He was on the line for ninety-eight counts of bank fraud, money laundering, grand larceny, and more.
We were all lucky that con men who thought they could outsmart the world usually made one mistake too many. Albert C. Ward III’s mistake was trying to scam someone who didn’t deserve it. It was, indirectly, how I’d finally found him. I know I should never trade luck for skill, but there are exceptions.
Sheila Levi was forty-one, with no special attributes. She wasn’t very pretty, or rich, or smart. But she was a nice woman, and she’d had the misfortune to fall in love with Ward. Sheila had worked as a secretary in a small Sydney law firm and had never married. Ward had charmed her, wined and dined her, and soon moved in with her to the one-bedroom apartment she’d bought after years of saving every penny, taking a big mortgage.
The rest of the story was sadly predictable, as I realized when she met me for lunch the day after my frustrating hospital interview with Ward. At his suggestion, she had taken a second mortgage on her apartment and given him the money to “invest in their future.” She’d given him the jewelry she’d inherited from her grandmother, which he sold immediately. But Sheila still had faith in him. Why?
“I wanted so much to marry and have a family,” she said, sobbing, sitting opposite me in the dining room of my Sydney hotel. “He proposed marriage, and I believed him. My dream collapsed just a few hours before the wedding ceremony. How could I have known that he was already married?”
I nodded sympathetically.
“I know it makes me sound stupid, but I really loved him and believed what he told me. That’s where I went wrong. Now I don’t have him, and I don’t have my apartment. I couldn’t make the payments, and the bank foreclosed.”
“Where do you live now?”
“I share a rented room with a waitress I work with.”
“A waitress?”
“Yes,” she said faintly and apologetically, lowering her eyes. “I lost my job as well. My employers were sick of me being distracted, and the creditor phone calls got out of hand. I’m waitressing now in two different restaurants.” She dried her eyes. “Today is my day off.”
I felt mounting rage. Cheating banks out of their money was bad enough, but cheating a trusting woman who’d had almost nothing to begin with and was then left with even less was appalling. But more than just that, something didn’t make sense. If Ward had scammed millions from U.S. banks and investors over the years, why was it worth his while to scam a secretary out of something as modest as her grandmother’s jewelry? Where had all that money gone?
I flew back from Sydney to New York. After those three long days of travel, including a layover, I went to my office and read an e-mail from David that had just come in. Your report that you found Albert C. Ward III in Australia is apparently inaccurate. The FBI compared the finger-prints of Albert C. Ward III maintained in its database with prints lifted from the cup you gave the Australian Federal Police, and against subsequent prints obtained by the Australian police after you left. They told me an hour ago that the prints don’t match. The person you saw in the hospital bed is not Albert C. Ward III. The U.S. will not request his extradition. David.
The triumph I’d felt on the flight from Sydney had turned out to be fleeting, and was immediately replaced with bitter disappointment. How could this have happened? I’d followed my hunch as well as procedure, and still failed. I’d lost the round, but I didn’t lose the lesson. I thought of a phrase from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I wasn’t ready to wear my failure like an albatross around my neck. How come when I managed to pull off a task, there was nobody around, but hey, when I failed, there were plenty of witnesses? When I fucked up an exercise during my Mossad training, my instructor had told me sarcastically, “You have to learn from the past experiences of others, although I’m sure you’ll find new ways to err.” It had hurt.
I shut the office door and collapsed into my chair, trying to figure out what to do next. I was facing a brick wall. I’d tried to scale it and failed.
Should I throw in the towel? How long do you keep digging before you concede that the well is dry? Not here, buddy.
My father had taught me that while a defeat is sometimes just a temporary setback, surrender makes it permanent. I wasn’t there yet, far from it. I was determined to win, but how? I would have to start again from the beginning.
CHAPTER TWO
Manhattan, New York, November 2003
The sun wouldn’t shine that morning, and the skies would only lighten to pencil gray. Glancing at the glowing red digits of the clock, I could already feel it. It was six forty-five A.M., and only the slowly fading darkness told me it was already morning. When I finally got out of bed, I instantly regretted it. There had to be a better way to start
