had alighted at the station-one who had sat in Edmund’s car, another from the car behind his. Edmund left the station, walked down to the street, and stood by the exit. He checked his phone, and crossed and recrossed the street, looking for some sign of life.
Suddenly, a dark blue panel van drew up, and the back doors opened. A voice from within told Edmund to get in, and he did. The van drove away, and immediately Edmund’s arms were seized, tape was secured over his mouth, and a cloth bag was roughly forced over his head. His body was patted down, hands thrust into his armpits and groin. Then his clothes were removed, all of them, and he was left naked, bound, and gagged on the floor of the van, first as it rattled along the street and then, for what seemed like an age, parked someplace.
“Okay, Mr. Edmund Mathews, rich banker man from Greenwich, how did you get that phone number?” The voice came from the front of the van somewhere.
Edmund tried to talk but his mouth was taped shut. He mumbled and the voice said, “How rude of me. Let the man speak.”
The tape was ripped away crudely, and Edmund reeled from the shock.
“A friend of mine gave it to me. He wouldn’t say where he got it.”
“We’ll see. So what you want?”
Edmund laid out what he wanted. It didn’t take long, but he had to explain a couple of times the need for using polonium to effect the killings.
“Okay, this is what we do. You come to Middletown Road subway station, eleven tomorrow. Bring a deposit for me. As a gesture of goodwill. Say, fifty thousand dollars in Ben Franklin notes. Nonrefundable. Give the man back his clothes.”
Edmund’s arms and legs were freed, and he dressed quickly. The van moved again and stopped after a few minutes, and the doors opened. Edmund got out in a bleak parking lot behind an abandoned building. He figured out where he was, less than a half-mile from where he had been picked up, and he took the subway back to Manhattan.
More than at any point throughout the whole ordeal, Edmund’s flight reflex was strongest that night. If he called the FBI, surely he could give them Jerry and this guy, whoever he was, and at least he would be free from this crazy plot. But he wouldn’t be free of LifeDeals and Gloria Croft and his own imminent destruction. The Statistical Solutions data had finally come in, and merely underscored what Russell and Edmund already knew. Their model was shot to pieces the moment regenerative medicine became a reality. His need to stand and fight kicked in.
Edmund traveled again to the Bronx, and was again driven away in a van, this time of a different color. Again, he was bound and stripped, but his clothes were returned more quickly this time and his mouth wasn’t taped, a small mercy for which Edmund was grateful. He could feel that the envelope with the $50,000 was no longer in his jacket pocket.
“Thank you for the money,” the same voice said. “A more cautious man would throw you out of the van now and be happy with good takings for one day’s work. But I read about you, Mr. Mathews, and I am intrigued. Then I read about the people you say you want to die and I think,
“How much, then?”
“Two. And a half.”
“Jesus.”
“Mr. money guy, I see where you live, how much money you make. You are not doing a trade, here, on Wall Street. I don’t negotiate-that is the price. And tomorrow, the price is more.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry, speak up, please.”
“Okay,” said Edmund.
The two men met once more, three days later. Edmund told Russell he needed a huge amount of cash but not what it was for. Russell asked once, and Edmund bit his head off so Russell just did what he was told. It took Russell two and a half days to assemble one and a half million dollars from various business and personal accounts. Edmund packed it into a large baseball equipment bag and drove to the address he had been given on the phone. It was the same parking lot where he had been let out the first day. Once more, Edmund got in the van and went through the same degrading procedure.
“I guess you trust me,” the voice said. “I now have one-point-five-five million dollars from you and I haven’t done shit. But I am a businessman, and I will fulfill my end of the deal.”
The man gave instructions for paying the rest of the money once the job was finished. The job would be done sometime in the next month. Edmund said nothing.
“But one more thing first. Something I need to know, otherwise I am afraid I won’t be able to go ahead.”
Edmund said nothing.
“Who gave you my phone number? Was it your partner, Mr. Russell Lefevre?”
“No.”
“So, who was it?”
Edmund was silent.
“I really want to know.”
So Edmund told him.
“Okay, thank you. Now release Mr. Mathews.”
From the front seat of the van, a man turned back toward Edmund. He was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap but Edmund could see a livid scar on the man’s forehead running up toward his scalp. The man was holding out his right hand.
“Shake my hand, then we have a deal.”
The men shook hands, and Edmund heard nothing more, until March 25.
Aleksander Buda thought some more about the information he’d just received, and with his phone still in his hand, he called Edmund Mathews.
“Yesterday we followed to the letter the course of action you recommended, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would. Someone I have on-site tells me he saw her going around today with a Geiger counter, her and that guy she hangs out with. You know what that means? It means someone’s seen through your brilliant plan.”
“Shit.”
“Yes, shit. As in what we are standing in up to our knees. Unless we do something right now, it’s going over our heads.”
The conversation was much too specific for Buda’s liking. But he felt he had to get the okay from the banker and make sure Edmund realized the price had gone up. The job itself shouldn’t be difficult, the girl was hardly being discreet, but he had a troublesome task to take care of. When he heard the girl’s name was Grazdani, he paused. It sounded Albanian to him, and he wanted to be very sure that killing an Albanian girl wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes. He didn’t want to be the cause of a blood feud like there’d been in the 1990s. He’d have to snatch her, hold her, and put feelers out to see if there were any Grazdanis in the crews in the neighboring areas. But what were the odds?
“Okay,” Edmund said finally, feeling the same numbness he had felt when he agreed to the deal in the first place.
“There are two of them, actually,” Buda was saying. “It will be another ten percent.”
“Ten percent of the total or the balance?”
“Ah, ever the money guy,” said Buda. “The total.”
Buda ended the call and summoned Prek Vllasi and Genti Hajdini to his office in a trailer parked inside a low-ceilinged warehouse. Buda dressed his senior lieutenants down severely in Albanian.
“You were useless last night. She wasn’t put off at all. Didn’t you do anything to her?”
