“It doesn’t work that way. The common bond between people like Schrade and the intelligence agencies who use them is secrecy. He needs it to do what he does, they need it to do what they do. They use each other, knowing that if there’s ever a falling-out between them, neither side will expose the other, because the relationship itself is illicit.”
“What about this guy Howard? What’s going to happen when he finds out Ariana is dead? Won’t that change things? Are you going to let him know she’s dead? How will this change what you were wanting him to do?”
“I’m not going to let him know anything,” Strand said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Ariana’s death will affect anything one way or the other. A sad fact. Right now I don’t want a goddamned thing from Bill Howard. He and I had a rocky career together. We didn’t like each other much, and I didn’t see anything in Vienna to change my opinion of him.”
Mara said nothing. Through the balcony doors they could hear the faint voices of people walking along the promenade. Strand envied them. He knew it was irrational to do so. It was a human weakness in dire times to see others’ lives as richer, more fortunate, than your own. At this moment the voices he heard were the voices of careless people, those fortunate strangers who did not have your cares, or your tragedies, or your bad luck. Strand always wondered about them. Who were they? What brought them to this village, to this promenade, at this moment? How incredible that they had no idea that only a few meters away from them a man and a woman were sitting in darkness, afraid, confused, desperate even to understand what they should do at the end of the night.
Without speaking Mara stood in the near darkness of the room and walked to the balcony doors and stepped outside. He watched her silhouette against the blue light of the night sky. He could not tell whether she was staring across to the black hills on the opposite shore of the lake or whether she was looking down toward the promenade.
He got up and followed her. She was leaning on the stone balustrade, looking out toward the dark water. He put his arm around her waist, and she took his hand.
“You can’t imagine, really, how terrified I am, Harry,” she said. Her voice quavered, and the sound of it broke his heart.
“This bears no resemblance to any reality I know,” she went on. “I’m not a stupid woman. I know what I’m involved in here. It’s bizarre, but it’s happening and… I have to deal with it.” There was a pause. “I’m going to tell you exactly the way it is, Harry. I’m on the verge of panic.”
They were both looking out into the various darkness. He waited for her to go on, and then suddenly he was aware that she was crying. He would have given ten years of his life to be able to comfort her.
“It’s going to take every bit of our concentration,” Strand said. “There’s a balance here. We have to find it, and very carefully make it work for us.”
She leaned into him, burying her face against his shoulder. He could feel the small shudders of her weeping.
“Do you understand what I’m talking about?” he asked.
There were a few moments while she gained control. Then she said, “Yes.”
She didn’t understand, of course, and they both knew it.
CHAPTER 25
They went to bed late, and Strand slept the dead, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. He woke early the next morning with a start, heavy headed yet wide awake. He carefully crawled out from under the covers, dressed, and went straight to the sitting room, closing the bedroom doors behind him.
He threw open the balcony doors to the cool morning, called room service for coffee, sat down at his laptop, and flipped on the switch.
Using the information that he had gotten from Alain Darras, he began the complex series of contacts over the Internet that would eventually lead him to a face-to-face interview with the first of the four crime lords.
He had no idea how long the process would take, but the procedures he had obtained from Darras were supposed to cut through the red tape that the new, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations put into place. As in all corporate structures, illicit or legal, the men at the top isolated themselves with multiple layers of intermediaries.
He had been working for nearly an hour when Mara came out of the bedroom.
They walked up the hill to a little cafe near the center of the village and had a quiet cup of coffee with pastries. When they started back through the narrow, cobbled streets that fell steeply to the waterfront, Mara laced her arm through Strand’s and they meandered down, catching glimpses of the lake through the linden trees as they turned corners on their descent.
“Okay, Harry,” she said, “why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”
He hardly knew where to begin.
“Not a lot yet,” he said. “This morning I started the process of contacting the first of the four men Schrade was betraying to the FIS. My first thought was to approach all of them at the same time, just turn them loose on Schrade all at once. But then, considering all that I don’t know about the details of Schrade’s involvements with each of them, I was afraid that I might trigger a bloodbath. That’s not the way this needs to be done.”
“Who are you contacting first?”
“A Taiwan Chinese named Lu Kee. Lu is our best first meeting because he’s the most civilized of the four. Talking to him will give us a less jarring sample of the meetings to come. He’ll be like a wise old uncle. He personally dislikes harshness. He pays people to be harsh for him.
“I’ve given Lu three crucial bits of information. First, proof that I have inside knowledge of one of his failed enterprises, a scheme that cost him hundreds of millions of dollars when it fell apart. He never found out why it happened. Second, the fact that I’m a former U.S. intelligence officer. Third, a promise that I’ll reveal a traitor.
“The first of these three is going to shock him. That probably would be enough to get me the interview. The third bit of information will seem like a scam without the first. The second bit of information will be expected to be proven at the meeting.”
“This could take days, couldn’t it?” Mara asked.
“Could. But I doubt if it will. I suspect it’ll happen very quickly.”
“If he’s in Taiwan…”
“He’s not. Darras’s information puts him in Zurich now. He has a home there.”
They stopped at a turn of the street that gave them a wide view of the lake. The sun was well into the eastern sky, throwing shadows to the west along the shoreline and strewing a shatter of brilliance across the surface of the water. Farther to their left, on the western leg of the lake, a single sailboat was tacking back toward the villas of Tremezzo. Down on the waterfront a tour boat pulled away from the quay and headed out across the lake.
“We just have to wait.”
The back-and-forth with Lu’s intermediaries dragged on past lunch. Strand had received from them three e- mail messages that, through a series of precise questions, were intended to determine the legitimacy of his request. He was patient with this, having expected nothing less. He answered the queries as fully as possible, while being careful not to reveal more than the circumstances required. Midafternoon brought another delay, another long wait.
“He’s not going to do it,” Mara said. She had tried to sketch but couldn’t concentrate. She had stared at the glistening lake, but even the incredible beauty of Como could not distract her. Strand watched her and worried. The waiting, the slow pace of negotiations, was wearing on both of them. Time dragged.
“He’s just cautious.” Strand rubbed his face. “He’ll do it.” He looked out through the balcony doors at the sailboats on the lake, the geometric shapes of their white sails passing smoothly back and forth within the view framed by the French doors.
By four o’clock in the afternoon, as the light on the lake began to soften, Lu Kee was still silent.
Shortly after five o’clock, four beeps signaled a message, and the words appeared like magic writing on the screen.
