The Secret Agent (2 page)

He had given her sushi, tempura prepared at the table, a fan of fresh vegetables and a glass of Screaming Eagle. When she had refused a passion-fruit flan, the head of the firm leaned across the table and ticked off his points in a voice that sounded pure BBC, though it was probably born in Brixton.

“Point the First: Stefani Fogg when she’s at home. Likes to describe herself as bright but shallow. Raised comfortably in Larchmont, Princeton, Menlo Park. Father a chemical researcher and large-animal veterinarian. Mother rather determinedly hip. She’s a clever girl, our Stef, but gun-shy where commitment is concerned. No lover, no child, not so much as a small white dog for messing the carpet with. Appears to choose men by their shirt size rather than their IQs—the odd fitness instructor or bartender, a hapless musician. In the past seven years, no relationship longer than four months.

“Frequently described by the admiring epithet of
bitch.
Roughly translated: she has committed all the sins available to a woman in a man’s world. Restless, impatient, ruthless, ambitious. Sole weakness a reckless streak you could drive a semi through. Two hundred years ago, she’d have been burned at the stake as a witch.

“Point the Second: Stefani Fogg rumored to have turned down the chairmanship of FundMarket International last year, when it was offered her on a plate. Pundits confused.

“Point the Third: Stefani Fogg supposedly in play for CFO of at least three major multinationals, none of which succeeded in bagging her. Pundits agog.

“Point the Fourth:
Galileo Emerging Tech—the
fund Stefani Fogg manages at FundMarket—has lost nearly sixty-seven percent of its high-market value over the past three weeks. Rumors flying within FundMarket and without: Fogg is slipping, Fogg is asleep at the wheel, Fogg will be out on her arse next Tuesday. Pundits immensely gratified.”

He sat back in his seat and stared at her with satisfaction. “Missed anything?”

“About
Galileo—”
She toyed with the Screaming Eagle. “The tech market’s volatile, Oliver. You want big returns,
you run major risk. Sometimes that means short-term loss.”

“And you’ve generally defied the odds, haven’t you? So what’s gone wrong this month?”

She didn’t reply.

“I have a theory, old thing. I won’t bother to ask whether you’d like to hear it.”

“Well, you
did
give me lunch. I can spare you a few more minutes.”

“Stefani Fogg is bored off her nut and desperate for fun,” he suggested.
“Galileo
is sinking because Stefani no longer gives a diddly. I could offer the girl a spot of larceny or a fast plane to a desert island, and she’d snatch them both out of my moist little palm. Any sort of diversion would do, provided it were dangerous enough. She’s toyed with electronic fraud, with faking her own death, with ripping off Tiffany’s in a cat suit at midnight—but the payoff is never quite worth the risk. Our Stef knows that crime, however
séduisante,
can rather get one’s hair mussed. Crime carries with it a measure of annoyance. There’s the enforcement chappies, of course; there are turf battles between kingpins she doesn’t even know, potentates she could easily offend. There’s the possibility of maiming or a sordid public death. Our Stef’s looking for bigger game. A challenge to match her peculiar wits. Am I right? Have I hit the target bang-on?”

She had gone quite still, watching him. He was a mild-looking man in his late forties: slim, loosely tailored in medium gray wool, his fair hair clipped short over the temples and rakishly long at the brow. The tortoise-shell glasses partially concealed caramel-colored eyes. Altogether a sleek kind of cat, his tail practically twitching as he surveyed her. He
had
done his homework.

“So you have the antidote to boredom, Oliver. What could you possibly offer that I need or want?”

“Fun, intrigue and high jinks on six continents,” he shot back promptly. “A floating bank account accessible at all times for expenses that will never be questioned. Counsel from the main office whenever you want it, but no handcuffs or second guesses or attempts to drive your car from the rear. An unwritten brief. A handful of clients. Stimulation. A direct line to my desk, night or day. Gut decisions. Unlimited spa time in exotic places.
Power.”

“To do what, exactly?”

“Beat crooks at their own game. Much more exciting than joining them, I always think. Spy and seduce and manipulate empires—all in the name of defending commerce. With your talent and brains, Stef, you could write your dossier.”

“But why
me,
Oliver? Why the bitch with the lousy returns?”

“Because they’ll never see you coming, darling,” he answered softly. “You’re a bloody great gold mine. Smart and chic and too damn bored with your own wealth to be corruptible. You’ll have your teeth sunk into their jugulars before they even catch your scent.” His tawny eyes flicked across her face with brutal candor. “And there’s the added advantage that I can
deny
you, ducks. As far as the world of High Finance is concerned, we’ve never even traded so much as an air kiss. I’m not offering you a title and a desk with a plastic nameplate. I don’t want you on Wall Street. I want you bumming around the world on extended holiday.”

“Anonymity and carte blanche,” she mused. “A high-wire act without a safety net. If I fail, I fail alone.”

“Where would the challenge be, otherwise?”

A silence fell between them.

“Don’t refuse me before you’ve had ages to think,”
Oliver suggested. “It wouldn’t be the first time a woman’s done that, I admit—but for you, I’m willing to wait.”

“Until
Galileo
craters?”

He smiled, and pressed an invisible button under the table. A waiter appeared within seconds, on soundless feet.

“You’ve had the glamorous turn, old thing.” Oliver’s voice was like a croon. “You’ve had the usual stiffs in the Wall Street clubs with their fast cars and limp members. Now you want to run with the wolves. Don’t you?
Confess
it.”

Krane & Associates
was the foremost practitioner of a singular discipline known as risk management. The ignorant called it a security firm; the desperate called when any form of shit hit the most delicate type of fan. Krane offered all the usual security measures available to corporate clients—bodyguards, armored cars, internal surveillance and Internet monitoring. But these were mere party favors Oliver Krane tossed to the unwitting. Krane’s true worth—the commodity that had brought the Forbes Five Hundred to their knees—was that he knew more about everything than anybody on earth. He had ears to the ground in Jakarta and Shanghai and Hampstead and Miami, he sold information to the highest bidders in Hong Kong and Dubai. Oliver screened private jets for sophisticated bugs, gave drug tests and polygraphs to suspect employees, retrieved information from computer drives that were supposed to have been erased, found fraud in the ledgers of the most venerable corporations.

Oliver took pictures of remote deserts from private overhead platforms. Oliver tracked arms shipments
through gray networks. He could listen to lovemaking at a distance of two thousand miles, and sometimes did. Give him thirty-six hours, and Oliver Krane could detail every secret your competitors had purchased from your most loyal employees, and exactly how much they had paid for them.

His corporate motto was blunt:
Krane. Because what you don’t know
can
kill you.
What he ran, in essence, was a crackerjack intelligence organization publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

He was persistent in his patience, as Stefani learned over the next few weeks. He sent her birds-of-paradise in art-glass vases with smart-ass cards that were never signed. He sent her manila envelopes stuffed with newspaper clippings and transcripts of cellular communications and internal financial audits. He sent photographs of dubious personalities and a few cryptic leads in the research campaign she was conducting into his private life. Tidbits and come-ons and clues she couldn’t resist-but he never sent them directly. They appeared on the seat of a taxi she had just flagged down, or folded into her morning paper. Once she was handed a spreadsheet with her oysters in the old bar at Grand Central Station. She knew she was being followed—surveillance was child’s play for Oliver Krane—and the knowledge aroused her. She liked the thought of moving under a watcher’s eye. She began to dress each morning with Oliver in mind.

More important, she examined Krane’s stock as though it were under consideration for inclusion in
Galileo,
measuring its performance against those few risk-management competitors she could find in the marketplace. She researched Krane’s corporate hierarchy and its promotion record for female employees; gathered
press pieces from online databases that recounted Krane’s most sensational cases; and checked to see what litigation the company currently battled. Her final gesture was to invite an old friend from Wharton for dinner. She respected Darryl Bainbridge—he ran a private investment firm for elite clients worth billions. He’d hired Krane the previous year to find an electronic embezzler among his handful of brokers.

When she asked Bainbridge what he thought of Krane & Associates, he cocked his head at her before replying. “Best-kept secret in the United States, but not for long. Buy all the stock you can—and keep it for yourself.”

Oliver Krane’s approach was unorthodox, and in a calmer frame of mind, she might have questioned why. Krane pursued her in the only way guaranteed to catch her interest: he titillated and teased, feinted and attacked. She began to test the city streets four times a day, smoking cigarettes she didn’t really want in the vast granite doorway of FundMarket International. Nothing she could find in the office was half so intriguing as what might appear in the hands of a street vendor.

On the eleventh
day following their private lunch, contact came in the form of an issue of
Ski
magazine and the Michelin guide to the French Alps. The section on Courchevel had been marked with a hot pink Post-it note.

This one has your name all over it, ducks.

Oliver’s cramped scrawl.

A downhill racer tore across the glossy magazine cover, body crouched into the fall line. Above him rose a sheer headwall of black granite dusted with a filigree of white. Stefani frowned. She had skied enough—at Deer
Valley and Gstaad and Kicking Horse—to know she was looking at a professional, and a rather famous one at that.

Max Roderick.

He’d won gold and acclaim at three different Olympics during the past two decades. He was known for hurling himself down World Cup courses with what looked like total disregard for his own neck and was in fact a calculated assault with a hairsbreadth margin of error. The press loved the way he clipped slalom gates so deliberately with his rigid shoulders and set his edges in a curve that would snap a lesser man in half. The media played up his effortless grace and tried to crown him king. But Roderick made it politely clear he didn’t give a damn whether the cameras followed him or not. He abandoned Beaver Creek and the U.S. Ski Team for Austria; he trained alone. He granted few interviews. If he chased any women on either continent, he did it in places the press couldn’t reach. He rarely drank and he went to bed early. Eventually the press got tired of Max Roderick—of a silence and a discipline they could not understand—and Roderick went on winning.

Stefani flipped through the magazine.
A skier’s skier brings his knowledge to bear on the tools of the downhill trade….
Roderick was retired, now, and living in Courchevel, where he’d won Olympic gold at Albertville in ’92. He designed high-performance boards for a famed French manufacturer.

She glanced for a moment at the shot of his face, taken in the flat gray light of February, all color leached to monochrome and the angle of bone and landscape sharper for it. A palpable impression of intensity: eyes piercing and clear, with deep creases at the corners from years of staring at the sun. White-blond hair tousled by a
ski helmet. The skin tanned and tough. It was a handsome face—one that had known pain, found it irrelevant, and pushed on.

Of course the press loved him. But he was not her usual type, Max Roderick. Loners made her nervous.

… appears to choose men by their shirt size rather than their IQs …

She tossed the magazine into the trash.

Two hours later, she called Oliver Krane on his private line and demanded dinner.

Alone now in her elegant room at the Oriental, Stefani Fogg slid her filthy body into water so hot she winced. The first bath in nearly a week. She closed her eyes against the steam and the sharp bite of eucalyptus. And allowed herself, all her careful defenses down, to remember.

S
o what’s wrong with Max Roderick, Oliver?” Dinner that early spring evening six months ago was Indonesian takeout served on a linen-draped wrought-iron table in the walled garden of a five-story town house somewhere in the East Sixties. Stefani doubted that Oliver actually lived there—the place was devoid of such personal betrayals as photographs or magazines with address labels—but he moved from kitchen to terrace with such confident ease that it was clear he knew the house well. She imagined he kept a shifting roster of private haunts, visiting them as a lesser man might visit a series of mistresses; and indeed, wives and entire families could furnish the most obvious of them, without having any clear connection to Oliver at all.

In the past five days, she had determined that Oliver Krane’s life was deliberately elusive and all but indistinguishable from his attractive camouflage. The background checks and financial histories she’d run had
turned up conflicting story lines. One suggested he had been born in London and educated at a lesser British public school before reading law at Oxford; another, that he had once been named Czenowski and was pursued in his salad days by KGB recruiters; her favorite, that he was a foundling left at a Catholic orphanage who graduated from picking pockets in Bombay to dealing heroin in Hong Kong. In Oliver’s fiction Stefani caught the scent of his fears and dreams.

“Max Roderick found himself smack in the middle of a sordid little murder a few weeks ago,” Oliver informed her over a slice of pickled mango. “Our Max trotted off to Geneva to talk up the Swiss on the matter of skis, and damn if he doesn’t find a pretty young thing sprawled in his bed one morning, strangled and no mistake. She was a Thai bar girl from the red-light district and all of fifteen. Max maintains that he had never set eyes on the girl and has no idea how her corpse ended up in his room.”

“But she was in his
bed.”

“In a sequined thong, no less,” Krane agreed complacently as he set out satay skewers like burnt offerings on a celadon plate. “When Roderick stepped into the bath at six-ten that morning, no strangled young thing where she ought not to be. When he appeared in his towel nine minutes later, there was the dead girl in the altogether. Superb skin and hair. I’ve seen the photos. Tragic.”

“So he’s claiming he was framed? That someone else murdered her? Do you believe his story?”

“I believe nothing I have not proved for myself. And yes, that includes the existence of God—Pascal notwithstanding.”

“But is Roderick the sort of guy who’d hire a whore? Much less kill her?”

Oliver shrugged. “I know quite little about the man
beyond the usual paparazzi pap. Max lives alone—the last woman in his life left him abruptly two years ago and sued for damages. No one has taken her place. Rumor also has it that Max took a mental dive when he failed to qualify for the ’98 Olympics—and that he’s been searching for his soul ever since. Physically, he’s capable of strangling an adolescent. Whether he’s
emotionally
likely to do so …”

“Have you met him?”

“Once.”

“And?”

“He’s attractive enough, though rather guarded-used to keeping people at arm’s length. Difficult to read, as a result. But—”

“What?”

“He struck me … as a man in the grip of an obsession.”

“About …?”

Oliver shook his head. “That’s just it, heart. I’m not entirely sure.”

“Was he charged with murder in Geneva?”

“No. His personal lawyer—an old chum from the World Cup Circuit named Jeffrey Knetsch—ensured that the business was tidied up and presented by the Swiss police as a gross misunderstanding. Max was allowed to toddle home in all the sanctity of innocence. What are friends for?”

“I can’t believe the Swiss police are pushovers.”

“Nor are they,” Oliver admitted judiciously. “They confessed that the case presented certain … irregularities. Even Max insists that the door to his bedroom was locked when he entered the shower that morning, which contradicts his protestations of innocence; but anybody possessed of ingenuity might have found a way to circumvent the electronic code.”

“Is that what Max suggested?”

“His lawyer did. I shan’t weary you with a recital of the hotel uproar and the subsequent investigation. Suffice it to say that the Swiss police applied latex lifts to the girl’s neck and found not a single fingerprint. Her murderer wore gloves. No gloves anywhere in Roderick’s room. Police reckon that if Max got rid of the gloves, he might as well have got rid of the body. Never mind that one’s a trifle larger than the other; the elevator shaft adjacent would have done in a pinch. And why go to the trouble to suggest a crime of passion and then premeditate it down to the gloves? If Max was coldhearted enough to plan the whore’s demise, he would hardly lose his head and discover the body next morning in his own room. Disordered thinking, what? Swiss can’t abide that.” “A hotel employee ought to have seen her enter.” “Service lift,” he supplied promptly. “Employees paid off. Wee hours of the morning. Probably already dead when she rolled down the hall on a breakfast tray.” “Can they trace Roderick to the girl’s bar?” “Of course. Roderick’s Swiss clients took him there for a spot of fun after the day’s meetings. An hour into the show, Max got bored and went back to his hotel. End of story—or Max’s version of it.”

“Oliver—if Max didn’t kill the girl, who did?” He gazed at her owlishly. “Don’t admit, old thing, that you’re jumping ship! You’re never going to sell FundMarket down the river and throw in your lot with Krane?”

“I’m just interested in the story, that’s all.” “Not good enough, ducks. Put out or get out.” She crushed a leaf of cilantro between her thumb and forefinger. A pungent scent, half pepper, half rain-wet asphalt. “Say I was considering a move …”

“That’s why we’re dining in this chummy fashion, I presume.”

“Would I be working on Roderick?”

He rolled his eyes. “Have I said anything to suggest that the man is of interest to my firm? Krane’s
never
deals in murder. Not the personal kind, at least.”

“But is murder really the point?”

“Got it in one, Stef. Ever been to a shooting box in the Central Highlands? Walks along the loch? Salmon fishing? A round of bagging pheasant?”

“No. Why?”

“Thought you might look jolly well in oilskins, that’s all.”

“Oliver—”

His gaze turned bland, suggestive of the angelic.

“You sent me
Ski
magazine, Oliver. My name’s written all over it, your note said.”

“Something decorative to stick in your loo, darling, nothing more.” He thrust his hand into the depths of the takeout bag and withdrew a sheaf of paper and a black pen. “Now, if you were to sign on the dotted
line…
”

Stefani frowned. “A contract? Somehow that seems …”

“… Overly binding? Touchingly archaic?”

“I expected an electronic print of my voice pattern. A computer chip embedded in my scalp.”

“We’ll come to those,” he said soothingly. “I
like
contracts, darling. Paper suggests history, somehow—the Inns of Court, the Magna Carta. The English bourgeois
will
rear his leonine head, despite all the money spent on Italian suiting. And besides—the payroll department insists. Something to do with the Internal Revenue Service. Your Social Security number, if you please.”

“You’ve known it for ages,” she said dryly.

“But I want it
in your
handwriting.” He exited to the kitchen with a tray full of food. Whistling.

She scanned the contract. From its idiosyncrasies, she
judged that Oliver had drafted the language himself. She was afforded full access (through Oliver) to Krane’s staggering array of security resources without the slightest public affiliation, until such time as she and Oliver mutually agreed to disclose her employment. Her salary, a modest 1.5 million dollars per annum, was to be wired monthly to bank accounts of her naming. Oliver had elected to pay her exactly half a million more than her pre-bonus salary at FundMarket, she noted wryly. She could be terminated immediately at his discretion, with the benefit of a year’s pay. True to his word, he had given her enough freedom and rope to hang herself several times over.

“You want a secret agent,” she murmured, as he reappeared with a glass of wine. “Don’t you?”

“I find, heart, that the cost of excellence is a certain amount of fame. I do my job too well. Any number of nasties and ghoulies can track my people coming and going. For this job, I need someone who’s clean.”

“Because a hooker died on Max Roderick?”

He did not reply.

“Who hired you, Oliver? The Swiss? Or Roderick himself?”

“Use the pen, old thing,” he said gently. “The
paper.”

“You think I’m going to turn my back on all the security I’ve forged at FundMarket in the past four years? Walk away, just like that?” She snapped her fingers under Oliver’s nose.

“No,” he admitted. “I think you’ll
run.”

“You flatter yourself.”

He was whistling again, a hiss of air between his teeth. “I notice your pet
Galileo
is sinking further into the NASDAQ swamp.”

Galileo.
God, she was bored with
Galileo.

Stefani uncapped the pen and scrawled her name on the contract. Boredom was the one sin she never forgave herself. “Now tell me who hired you.”

“The Thai government, I think.” Oliver said it doubtfully. “Though with the Thais, one can never be sure. Devious little beasts, behind their smiles.”

“Surely they’re not concerned about a prostitute murdered on a different continent.”

“Particularly when they or their assigns might be responsible for killing her,” he added pensively.

Her head came up at that. “Your clients? You think the Thai government may have set Roderick up? But what does an American skier resident in France have to do with Thailand?”

“Precisely what I asked Max when he rang me two days ago. He’s also decided to hire Krane’s, you see. Or rather, he’s
hired you.”

A jolt of feeling shot through her like an arrow. Excitement? Fear? “—I being not
precisely
Krane?”

“Not yet,” Oliver agreed cheerfully, “and not so’s the Thais will ever notice, God willing.”

“What am I expected to do?”

“Recover a fortune. Max believes he’s owed one. The Thais disagree.”

“And you’ve been hired to establish the truth of their claim?”

“Precisely. Spot of forensic accounting. Old hat.”

Her shrewd brown eyes swept his face. “Are you also being paid to discourage Roderick?”

Oliver adjusted his spectacles with an air of distaste. “I am not a
thug,
my sweet, although on occasion I have employed them. At the moment, I’ve decided to employ
you.”

“You think I can get Roderick to take his ski boots and go home to France?”

“On the contrary! I hope you’ll follow him right down into the crevasse.”

She allowed Oliver
to consume a remarkable quantity of Indonesian curry—to talk of Venice and the art trade in Stockholm and his favorite anchorage at Bitter End-while the sky overhead blackened to navy and the first warm wind of spring stirred the dead leaves. The roar of traffic throbbed beyond the enclosed terrace like a massive bloodstream. Stefani pulled a silk sweater about her shoulders and warmed her fingers at the candle flame. Oliver poured her a third glass of wine.

“What kind of fortune is the ski champ hunting?”

“A priceless Southeast Asian art collection, presently housed in Bangkok’s most elegant little museum. The museum itself is at issue, I might add.”

“And why does Roderick care?”

“Something to do with blood, I imagine.” The cool eyes were locked on hers. “Know anything about friend Max? Beyond the ski-circuit chatter, I mean?”

“You would hardly have hired me if I came with predispositions toward the case.”

Oliver sighed. “Too bloody smart for your own good. Of course I knew you weren’t acquainted with the man. He’s not your type.”

She shrugged.

“And yet … curiously compelling. So austere and shining in his self-isolated perfection, he’s like the north face of the Eiger to an Aryan Youth: something to be scaled. Smashing muscle tone. You want to strap on your crampons and climb all over him, Stef. Admit it.”

“The fortune, Oliver.”

“Max Roderick is the last of a line of rather daring chaps who suffered difficult ends. His father, Rory, flew
bombing runs over North Vietnam and died in the Hanoi Hilton. His grandfather was a true legend in Southeast Asia—an adventurer, a potentate, a glamorous rogue. Jack Roderick. He trained with the OSS during the Second World War then settled permanently in Bangkok in ’45.”

Stefani’s eyes narrowed. “To do what?”

“Run agents for the CIA,” Oliver replied carelessly. “Jack Roderick was Bangkok intelligence chief right after the war. Took to the people, the food, the khlongs like a duck. Found God a few years later and abandoned spies for Thai silk—he’s credited with reviving the craft there. Started a company called Jack Roderick Silk, still famous the world over. Made a great deal of money. Bought or stole every Khmer antiquity on offer during the course of twenty-odd years. Stored them in his house—an antique itself, shipped down-river from the ancient capital of Ayutthaya—and when he disappeared one day without a trace, the Thai government seized the lot.”

“Disappeared?”

“Like so much smoke,” Oliver assured her. “Jack Roderick went on holiday to the Cameron Highlands-old British hill station in Malaysia—and took a stroll around cocktail time, all by himself. Never came back. Body never found.”

The same surge of feeling—fear? excitement?—knifed through her again. “When was this?”

“Easter Sunday, 1967.”

“The height of the Vietnam War.”

“Hanoi declared son Rory dead two weeks after Roderick disappeared. No obvious connection.”

“And his entire fortune was—seized?”

“The Thai government claims Roderick always meant
to leave his personal collection to the people of Thailand. He’d burbled on about it quite often, apparently. His will—or should I say, his
first
will—provided for just that.” Oliver smiled. “They’re quite proud in Bangkok of having preserved the Roderick house and gardens—the whole kit and caboodle, including books on a bedside table—just as it was when he vanished in ’67. Jack Roderick’s House is now a major tourist attraction.”