the deck, in only the short nightdress she couldn’t remember taking from her bag but which was all she’d often worn with Carver for their breakfast coffee, and she’d taken hers on the bench they’d always sat on looking over the narrow river and she didn’t choke up at that memory, which she was glad about. The river would be cold, as it was always cold, because it fed from the Bearfort mountain tributaries, which they’d discovered when they’d tried, the first time they’d used the cabin, to skinny dip – and had never tried again.
Alice felt safe, alone, and wanted to feel that way forever. Never wanted to see Manhattan – any city – again: hear its sirens and its jostling people and their noise. Stay here, with the birds and the scurrying in the undergrowth, and hide forever, live in the past forever. This past, this very special past only she and John had shared – intruded upon by no one else. Could they find her, all alone up here? The cabin wasn’t in her name. Or John’s. John rented it, paying cash for an entire year, from a distracted bookshop owner in West Milford: there had to be at least six months left on the rental. The phone was in the bookshop owner’s name. So were all the other utilities. She’d be safe forever here: lost forever here.
Alice forced herself out of the fantasy, refusing its cocoon. There was only one way she could ever be safe – lost forever – and that was by becoming an entirely new person, with a new name and a new – but sustainable background and a new passport and all the other new official documentation that said who you were, to those who felt it their business to know.
And who better than she to become a new person? Alice asked herself. She had no one. No family. No ties. And she no longer had John. No one. At the flick of a pen or a computer command Alice Belling could disappear forever – vaporize – to be reborn a new, ready-made, unknown person. Nothing to look back for. Nothing, either, to which to look forward. But there was something in the middle, something between what she was leaving behind – fleeing from – and the reborn future. Revenge. Alice wanted revenge. Each and every possible retribution upon whoever it was who had done what they had done to John. She was more determined totally to achieve that than she’d ever been to achieve anything in her so far totally achieving life.
And she’d opened the way: knew the way. That’s why she was hidden up here, not to gaze out over a river and a forest, soon to become another memory, but to ensure she didn’t make any mistakes guiding the FBI towards those who had to be punished. So what did she have to guide them? Not as much as she’d hoped: less in fact than she’d once had, because John had taken all her computer printouts. Could she risk trying to duplicate them, as she’d told herself she could? Not the companies. They’d have built stronger firewalls: almost inevitably set traps and snares to identify her more quickly, even if she tried to piggyback internationally as she had before. And caused the deaths of three innocent people, she reminded herself, unnecessarily. She was going to have to admit that, at some stage. And all the hacking. Not her immediate focus. Her immediate focus was upon convincing an unconvinced FBI agent in his Broadway office that she had evidence of a crime. Which she didn’t actually have, Alice admitted to herself objectively. She had knowledge of crime but no way of proving it. Yes there was! Those local IRS offices – in which lay the proof of the step-by-step money laundering – didn’t know they’d been accessed. No one was looking for her there, setting traps and snares. She could access them again and download everything she’d given to John. It wouldn’t matter that illegally obtained material wasn’t admissible in a court. She wouldn’t be offering court evidence. She’d be handing it over as her proof, for the Bureau to confirm independently. And legally.
Alice felt a surge of confidence, a welcome difference from the hollow nausea it replaced. Because the IRS were unsuspecting, she wouldn’t need the protection of a cybercafe, either. She could work from the cabin, although she’d take her usual precaution of making her Trojan Horse entry through someone else’s system. All she needed was a laptop to replace the one she’d left in Princes Street in her panic to get away.
The thought of calling the Bureau’s New York office came as she was driving back down into Paterson, to distance herself from the cabin before buying the computer. It was sensible, necessary, to keep in touch. She was going to need them very soon: need them to accept her the moment she made the request, which made it vitally important to convince them she was genuine.
It took Alice less than fifteen minutes to buy the computer system she wanted, a duplicate of the laptop and printer she’d abandoned in New York, and she stored both in the Volkswagen boot before re-entering the mall for the already isolated telephones. Once more she leaned so that her calibrated watch was in front of her, counting off the seconds.
Alice recognized the receptionist’s voice from her first approach. She said: ‘This is A…’ and just stopped herself in time. ‘… Martha. I want to speak…’ but before she could finish the line went dead and then she heard the other recognizable voice.
‘I’ve been waiting for you, Martha,’ said Hanlan. ‘How come you haven’t got back before now?’
‘John didn’t call, to tell me where they were meeting. That was our arrangement. That’s what I was going to tell you, where the handover was going to be.’
‘Where is it, the stuff that was going to be handed over?’
A minute, Alice saw. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What about Citibank?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Martha! I think you know it’s John’s bank and that he was in the securities division earlier that day. And that you changed your mind about telling us.’
The photograph in the New York Times! That’s what she’d failed to recognize, Citibank in the background! ‘No, that’s not how it was! He didn’t tell me. That’s what I was waiting for, for him to tell me.’
‘Why’d he go back, with the others?’
A minute and a half. ‘I don’t know anything about any others.’
‘I asked you this before and I’m going to ask you it again. What is it you do know? I don’t want to go on screwing around like this. It’s made me look stupid and I don’t like being made to look stupid. I want you – with a proper name – and I want all this evidence that John had. That clear?’
‘I’m going to get some of it. But I need to come into the protection programme. They know what I’ve done.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘I don’t know names, not yet.’ It sounded bad, ridiculous, Alice recognized.
‘What have you done?’
‘Things.’ On her way in from the cabin she’d thought she had everything worked out but it was all swirling in the wind again. They’d been talking just over two minutes. She shouldn’t hang on much longer.
‘You want to deal, we’ll deal. But you’ve got to give me a lot before we even start. At the moment we’re going around in circles and for most of it you’re not making sense.’
‘You’ve got John’s murder as proof, for Christ’s sake!’
‘What I’ve got are five witnesses each of whom say John ran in front of a truck and died in a complete accident.’
Alice slammed the phone down, chest tight, feeling sick again. But she was sufficiently in control to see the newsstand.
Stanley Burcher tried to analyse the significance of the meeting being with the consiglieri of the five Families, not their Dons, but couldn’t, not instantly. Perhaps, he thought, he’d get a guide during the discussion. They were in the park-view penthouse suite of an hotel on Central Park South in which the Genovese clan had a concealed investment, the six of them grouped around a table. There was an array of liquor and mixes on a smaller side table but no one was drinking. It would have been presumptuous for Burcher to have helped himself. Perhaps, he thought, it was presumptuous of him to have expected to meet the Dons.
Charlie Petrie said: ‘It’s a hell of a mess to clean up.’
‘But it’s got to be cleaned up,’ insisted Vito Craxi, the Bonanno counsel. ‘There isn’t a Family who haven’t used the system and paid well for the facility. It’s got to be kept intact.’
‘Who’s going to run it?’ asked Burcher. There was still the opportunity of enormous power, being the liaison between these five and whichever accountancy firm was suborned into co-operating.
‘It’s being taken care of,’ said Petrie.
‘You asked for the meeting,’ reminded Bobby Gallo, representing the Gambino clan. ‘What have you got in mind?’ He spoke as he got up to go to the drinks table. He did so without gesturing an invitation to Burcher.
‘The only way in to Citibank security is through the wife,’ said Burcher, discomfited at stating the obvious. ‘She’s the only one with the legal right. I might be able to use the severance with the firm’s lawyer. And there could be an advantage in the girlfriend. Sure, Carver gave every indication of having everything at the bank but he could
