“Mr. Hayes?” she said. She reached for the light. It snapped on to reveal Hayes struggling with the door, sopping wet, with arms full of boxes and briefcases. He managed to get a toe behind the door to shove it shut, then dumped the files down on the floor and sat beside them, breathing hard.
“God, that was a long ways,” he said.
She stood to help him. “What are you doing? What are those?”
He grinned, still breathing hard, and laid a hand on the stack with a flourish. “These? These are our keys, Sam. These are our tickets in. In to what, I’m not sure. That’s why I brought them to you.”
Samantha looked down at the files. Her eyes traced over the red tabs and the olive-green sheaths with black lettering stamped down the side. “Those are McNaughton files.”
“Yes indeed.”
“How did you get those?”
“It doesn’t matter how. I got them, that’s enough. They’re the financial records for Local Securities for the last sixteen months,” he said with a groan as he stood. “Local Securities being those who keep watch at home and pay single characters rather than companies. Shady people on the payroll. Informants.”
“Informants?”
“Yes. Are you surprised?”
“Well, no, honestly. I can’t believe we kept records for that sort of thing, though.”
“Oh, I can. Very easily. It’s a business, after all. The right hand may not want to know what the left hand is doing, but they do want to know how much they’re paying for it.”
“You want to blackmail McNaughton with that?”
“Not with that, no. I want you to look through these,” he said, fingering the files and briefcases, “and these,” and he touched the boxes.
“And what are those?”
“Those are prison records. From Savron Hill, and Garvey. You’re going to use that marvelous mind of yours to look there first.”
“Look for what?”
“Disappearances. And similarities.”
She rolled up her sleeves and began laying out the files on the floor, as there was no room on the desk in Hayes’s safe house. After glancing through the McNaughton files she saw that many of them were heavily coded, seeming to rely on the use of some sort of cipher, which Hayes concluded they didn’t have. Sighing, she set the files in order of simplicity, with the prison files close to her and the densest McNaughton files at the other end. Then she began reading, starting with prisoner records from three years back and looking for any gaps in the information, prisoners who had gone missing without any warning or notation at all. It was extremely difficult work, as the prisoner records were often either incompetent or incomprehensible. It was hard to discern if a gap was a mistake or an intended omission. Hayes was of no help at all; this sort of work bored him to tears. At first he hovered over her shoulder, asking questions and getting cigarette ash all over the papers. Then he gave up and passed the time bouncing around the room, wandering the corners and sometimes going out to the canal to watch the waterfall swell and shrink.
After three hours of work she felt she had found someone. A Mr. Gerald Crimley, once a prisoner of South Sector C, imprisoned there for land fraud. Apparently he got caught getting people to invest in properties that didn’t technically exist. Wound up stuck with a five-year sentence, and disappeared with less than a year of it served. Samantha checked and rechecked the death rolls, which were both long and appalling, but among all the names Crimley never appeared. He never reappeared, either, not anywhere else.
“Hm,” said Hayes once she told him this. He finally sat down on the bed, his eyes half-shut as though he were sleepy. “Well. We’ll need to find out where he went.”
“Am I looking for Crimley in the McNaughton files now?”
Hayes opened his eyes and smiled slightly. “Yes. If you would be so kind.”
Samantha then began the laborious job of digging through the cryptic budgetary records. They were conveniently arranged by date, but often referred to events or figures whose names were no more than letters and numbers, such as RD232 or WJR34-1-1. She guessed these were the names of other files, and if they had the cipher then she would have been able to make sense of them. Numerous code words were used as well, such as Seaworthy or Easterner or Pilgrim. After looking at all the entries and logs, she guessed that Seaworthy was almost certainly some sort of senatorial contact, while Pilgrim had to be a shipping contractor for a minor-league rival firm. Easterner was all over the records, yet she could see no pattern there. But exactly what they all did for McNaughton was never mentioned; just their costs and financial matters. Bank accounts and payment amounts and dates. It was just one long receipt.
One file name began appearing very often around the time Gerald Crimley disappeared: SP-0417. She noticed it because three weeks after Crimley disappeared from Savron a five-thousand-dollar payment was made to a bank account in San Francisco, referencing that file name as the owner of the account. Frowning, she made the tenuous leap that, provided Hayes’s vague hunch was not wrong and the two files were indeed connected, SP-0417 was Crimley.
“If he’s alive,” added Samantha. “And if Crimley is involved in McNaughton at all.”
To this Hayes said nothing. Just nodded again with sleepy, distant eyes.
She kept looking through the financial activity under SP-0417. For a long time there was nothing. No deposits or withdrawals whatsoever, not for nearly three months. Then, finally, another payment was made, this only one thousand, but to the same account. From then on one thousand dollars were paid monthly to the account, starting eleven months ago. Almost immediately after this SP-0417 began to be associated with something called Craftsman. Craftsman didn’t seem to be a person, as far as Samantha could see, but a project of some kind. The nature of Craftsman was never made clear, and the few details about it were carefully blacked out by some record auditor who had deemed them too explicit for the budgetary files. Eventually there was some sort of warning about financial deposits made to SP-0417 while Craftsman was underway, giving a number of other accounts and stocks to route the payments through before they arrived at the original account for SP-0417. It was some tricky financial math, but apparently whatever SP-0417 was doing necessitated dead secrecy and generous pay.
Until, finally, the payments were no longer made through an account or a series of cleaning fronts. This had happened abruptly, merely two months ago. From then on it was notated that the payments would go through a single person who would handle them himself on the behalf of SP-0417, that intermediary identified directly as one J. Colomb.
Samantha stared at this once she read it. Trembling, she read this aloud to Hayes, who shut his eyes fully.
“Colomb is the man who helped Mickey Tazz,” said Samantha softly. “Wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Hayes.
“And if I’m right, then… then he’s helping Crimley here.”
Hayes nodded.
“Then that means… That could mean that Crimley is Tazz, and…”
“And Tazz is company,” said Hayes. “Well done, Sam. Very well done indeed.”
“But why would they do that?” asked Samantha. “Why?”
“What better enemy to have than the one you own, lock and stock?” said Hayes. “What better foe to fight than the one you control with every move? They must have seen the union rising in the future and decided to act. They fabricated a union leader, from his past to his pamphlets, then found some poor bastard in prison and said, Hello, friend, we’ll happily give you a way out and pay you generously if you just wear this mask for a while and do what we say, whatever we say and whenever we say it.”
“How could that happen, though?” asked Samantha, still astounded.
“Through time,” said Hayes. “And money. My guess is they never intended Crimley to reach the very top. They probably just wanted him to be their agent in the unions, not their leader. But I guess fortune paved the way for him.”
“But what good would it all do? Haven’t people died because of this union business?”
“Yes, but there’s never been any big sabotage,” said Hayes. “Don’t you remember? Oh, a few have gotten killed, sure, but I bet it’s hard to control the hand of every man who pledges himself to the union, like Mickey himself said just a few days ago. But they’ve never done anything big, have they? Because someone at McNaughton
