“Yeah,” she said, looking around. “Okay.” She straightened up. “I’ll throw some things in a suitcase. I’ll pack some things.” She turned away from him and started across the room.
U.S. EMBASSY, VIENNA
“Well, for openers, it’s a hell of a lot more money than Schrade told us they’d taken,” Howard said. Today the air conditioning was freezing, even for him. He was drumming the eraser end of the pencil on the notepad. “Well, hell, Gene, it’s got to be hundreds of millions. I don’t even believe this. No wonder Schrade didn’t tell us the whole truth on this. I mean, there’s a difference between being embezzled and being buggered. Schrade was buggered.”
Howard listened and shrugged against the frigid air. Shit, he was going to get pneumonia.
“Yeah, damn right,” he said. “That woman was not only a financial genius, but gutsy to the point of insanity. She must’ve been damn sure of herself. You just don’t do something like this unless you think you’ve got it sewed up-tight. Hell, she knew everything from the inside. I mean, it was like stealing from your mother. Schrade wasn’t double-checking on her, of all people.”
He listened. He nodded.
“Yeah, and listen, I’ve got to admit, Gene, Harry might’ve been hard to handle, might’ve been a wild card sometimes, but he was always careful, methodical. He could throw in some surprises, but he never did anything half-assed. When he set up something you knew it was going to work. He was brilliant in that way. I’ll give him that. Hell, maybe we can’t get the money.”
Howard suddenly picked up the notepad and threw it at the plate-glass window. When the engineers looked around at the noise, he hugged himself and scowled at them and pointed his thumb upward and jacked it up and down. One of the engineers got up from his chair as though it were a big chore and walked to the wall and diddled with the thermostat. Howard didn’t believe it. The guy just pretended to diddle with it. Shit.
“Yeah, well, she’d heard that Schrade had left us, but she obviously doesn’t know why.”
He listened.
“I don’t know. It’s discouraging as hell. I mean, it took us four months to get you people over there to agree to do this, a couple of months to agree on how, and then eight months for training and planning, and just when we get ready to put it into gear Schrade decides to wade in and start killing off everybody.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why the hell he waited so long. It’s been eighteen months, you’d’ve thought he would’ve gone on a rampage when he discovered it. I guess he didn’t want to do anything until his accountants had picked the bones of this thing clean.”
He listened.
“You know what, to tell you the truth, now that we’ve got a better idea of how much money was involved in that scheme, I’m surprised that Schrade didn’t do more than just accuse us of double-crossing him and break off our deal. I’m thinking maybe he decided, Don’t get mad, get even.”
He listened.
“What I’m saying is, we know he’s working with the French, the Germans.” He hesitated a beat. “Gene, I’m convinced every operation he was involved in with us has been compromised. He’s spilled his guts about us to his new partners. I know, I fought that theory myself”-he shook his head-“but that was before I had a grip on how much money was involved here. Look, we’ve had our own financial people looking into this from the first day Schrade came to us boiling mad. After all this time they hadn’t figured out that the numbers were this big. Even so, we thought they were big enough to justify this operation if the end results ended in a forfeiture situation. But now we know that this is an incredible amount of money. And I think Schrade will go to incredible lengths to get even for having had it stolen from him.”
CHAPTER 18
They threw some clothes into a few suitcases and left Sallustiano in a cab that took them to Piazza Esquilino, where Strand rented a car using one of the forged passports. Since the car was leased on the spur of the moment, it would be clean of any electronic surveillance. As for human surveillance, Strand had not stopped watching for it for a second from the moment they stepped out of Mara’s villa.
They drove west out of the city and then headed north along the coastal autostrada, driving mostly in silence, their preoccupation with their own closely held thoughts diverted now and then by occasional glimpses of the breathtaking views of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
After a while the autostrada turned inland for a while and then fell back to the coast. The angle of the sun, which was now well on its downward way to the horizon, had caused the color of the water to deepen, the bright blue now tempered with tones of brooding gray.
Strand was the first to break the silence.
“I know this is a shock to you…”
“A shock,” she said, her elbow propped on the windowsill, her hand holding her forehead as she stared straight ahead. “It’s goddamned grotesque, Harry.” Her voice cracked with anger and alarm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You might’ve said something.” She turned and looked hard at him. Her voice seethed. “I mean, you were a spy, for God’s sake! Would it have made a difference to me? I don’t know. But I could have had a choice, couldn’t I, Harry? Only you never gave me a choice. Now I’m involved in this… this mess, and it’s scary. It’s frightening. I can’t even… really, I can’t even get my mind around this, it’s so… so incredibly unreal.”
She turned away from him and rested her head in her hand again, once more turning her attention to the autostrada. She started to say something else and then checked herself.
“I’m not going to make excuses, Mara. Not going to try to justify any of it, but I need to tell you that I didn’t deliberately deceive you, if that makes any sense. It had been behind me for nearly five years. It wasn’t deception, it was silence. We’ve talked about our pasts. Haven’t there been things about your life you haven’t told me? Is it because you’re not ready to share it with me yet, or is it because you want to deceive me? There’s a difference, and it’s not that subtle. I didn’t keep this from you. I keep it from everyone. In time it probably would have come out.”
Mara did not respond. Strand glanced at her several times, but she remained silent. He thought he detected a change in her, a disturbance of another kind, but it was such a nebulous thing that he couldn’t define it.
“Look,” he said after a while. “We’ve got to talk this through at some point.”
“Jesus,” she snapped, “I’ve just got to think some more. That’s all. I just need to think…”
They drove on in silence again.
By dusk, as the sea changed colors and the lights along the coast threw down their glitter against the darkening water, they reached Genoa. They ate a quick, tasteless dinner at a gasoline-and-quick-food stop on the autostrada and then continued north, turning inland.
In another hour they were skirting Milan, still headed north, and in another half hour they were in Como. By the time they started up the torturous eastern shoreline of the western leg of Lake Como, it was well after dark. Even in the blue night the famed beauty of the lake and its shores was plainly evident as the dark, forested shoulders of the hills rose steeply from the cobalt water, bespangled with the tiny lights of villas and villages.
Bellagio was a small village on a lake that had many villages more chic than this where the haute monde preferred to amuse themselves in one another’s company. The little town was out of the way, which was the reason Strand had often retreated here, vanishing deliberately, his whereabouts unknown to anyone, whenever he had craved isolation from time to time over the years.
Perched on a heavily wooded promontory where the western and eastern legs of the lake met like the two branches of an inverted Y, Bellagio had stunning views of both sections of the lake, a visual perspective that rivaled any that Strand had ever seen for sheer beauty.
They checked into a suite of large rooms that Strand had reserved earlier-using yet another passport-at the old Hotel Villa Cosima.
In uncomfortable silence they put away their clothes and then took turns freshening up in the bathroom. When Strand came out, his hair slightly wet from throwing cold water on his aching neck, the suite was dark, but the doors were open to the balcony.
