Viking Bay (21 page)

33
|
The
honey
Callahan had been speaking to when Anna Mercer entered his office was Kay Hamilton. As promised, he met her at seven p.m. in the bar of a hotel called One Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom. The bar was so dark that Callahan could barely see the olives in his martini; it just
looked
like a place where people in Washington would meet to hatch conspiracies.

Hamilton arrived right on time, dressed in a T-shirt, tight jeans, running shoes, and a brown leather bomber jacket. He was certain the jacket concealed a weapon. As she walked across the room toward his table, hips swaying, Callahan was impressed, as always, with how damn good-looking she was and he couldn't help but regret that he was old and fat.

When the waitress asked what Hamilton wanted, Callahan said, “No booze for you, Missy. I want you to go see the computer guy tonight.”

“You know who he is?”

“Well, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure.” Callahan sipped his drink. “There are only about a thousand people on this planet who could have downloaded the program onto Dolan's computer that was used to snatch the money. About half of these people live overseas in places like China, Russia, Israel, and Iran. We don't know a lot of these foreigners by name, but we know they exist because of shit they've pulled hacking into American systems. But I don't think Anna or Sylvia—and I'm about ninety-nine percent sure it's Anna—would
have worked with some hacker in Russia or China. So I think the guy is here in the U.S.

“I've also eliminated anyone that's not within a fairly easy commute of Washington, because she'd want this person close enough to be able to talk face-to-face. Anyway, I've got half a dozen names that for one reason or another fit the bill. Like this one guy up at MIT who has to be the world's oldest grad student. He hacked JPMorgan Chase one time just to prove he could steal their money if he really wanted to, and then called Jamie Dimon's unlisted number to let him know what he did just to rattle Jamie.

“There's another guy at Princeton who's basically trying to extort the New York Stock Exchange into buying a security upgrade from him. He says he's found a flaw in one of their programs and could make the Dow drop three thousand points anytime he wants to, and he's good enough that they believe him. There's also a whack job in Baltimore who the NSA says is the most brilliant guy they ever hired when it came to cracking encrypted messages, but they fired him when he insisted on publishing a paper to show how smart he is. He didn't like the fact that everything he worked on was classified.

“Anyway, I found half a dozen people who fit the bill, all of them on the East Coast, but the guy I really like has a connection to Eli.”

“I thought you thought Dolan was clean,” Kay said.

“I do think he's clean. But I also think that Mercer wants me to think that he
isn't
clean, and if she could, she'd find somebody that has some link to him, somebody he went to school with or worked with in the past.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Rodger Finley. He was a quant at Goldman Sachs the same time Eli worked there, but Goldman fired him a couple of years ago because he's a fruitcake. Since Goldman fired him, as near as anybody can tell, Finley's been sitting in his apartment in New York
playing video games and screwing around with math problems that nobody can solve. He's a fucking nut. He's also almost broke, because he hasn't drawn a paycheck in two years. So I think he might be the guy.”

“How would Anna or Sylvia have found him?”

“The same way I did. The NSA, Homeland, the FBI, and the Pentagon all have files on dangerous hackers. They have the files, of course, because they're worried about these people screwing up all kinds of things—defense networks, power grids, financial systems—and Mercer would have talked with her contacts in these agencies. You gotta remember, Anna Mercer has been around this town for a long time, almost as long as me, and she's ex-CIA. Anyway, I found out that the Pentagon had a file on Finley.”

“The Pentagon? Sylvia was the one who worked at the Pentagon.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I'm giving Mercer too much credit for being devious, but I think that's another reason she picked Finley. What I'm saying is if she'd picked someone in a CIA database, the evidence would—”

“We have no evidence.”

“—the evidence would have pointed at her. I think she picked someone off a Pentagon database because that would point to Sylvia.”

All the wheels-within-wheels shit was too much for Kay. She wanted something concrete, something more than Callahan's guesses. “What do you want me to do?” she said.

Callahan drained his martini glass, then raised it to signal the waitress he was ready for another.

“Don't you think you've had enough to drink? You look like the walking dead.”

Callahan laughed. “I'm Irish, Hamilton. There's no such thing as enough.”

“What do you want me to do?” she said again, not in the mood for humor.

“I want you to go to New York and confront Finley. I want you to
scare the shit out of him and see if you can get him to admit he was working for Mercer. In other words, do what you used to do when you were a cop. Tell him you
know
he's guilty and if he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in a cement room in a supermax, he'd better give up Mercer. If he tries to contact Mercer after you talk to him, I'll know.”

“How will you know?”

“Because a certain agency will be monitoring any calls or e-mails he sends.”

“Which agency?”

“Never mind which agency.”

“What if Finley's not the one?”

“Then you move on to the next-best guy on my list, the guy at MIT.”

Hamilton shook her head, not enamored with his plan.

“Hey, if you got a better idea,” Callahan said, “I'm all ears.”

—

KAY CALLED JESSICA
and told her she had to take a trip out of town and had to leave immediately. “I'm not sure when I'll be back. And, hey! You and Brian behave yourselves. And make sure you set the alarm when you're in the apartment and, well, you know, be careful.”

“Have a nice trip, Kay,” her daughter said. “And
you
be careful. You're the one who keeps coming home with black-and-blue marks on your face.”

34
|
At 7:45 p.m., Anna Mercer stepped off the Amtrak train in Penn Station. She had no idea that Kay Hamilton was in a jet on her way to New York.

She went to the restroom, stepped into one of the stalls, and removed the Heckler & Koch P30 from her suitcase. She screwed on the silencer and placed the pistol in the right-hand pocket of her trench coat. Twenty minutes later, a cab dropped her off in front of Finley's apartment building in Brooklyn.

Finley was surprised to see her, of course.

“What are you doing here?” he shrieked. “Once I moved the money, you said we were finished. You said you'd never contact me again. Go away.”

“I need to talk to you, Rodger. It's important. And I promise that after tonight you'll never see me again.”

“Fine. Come in. But make it quick. I'm busy.”

Mercer sat down in the red recliner where Finley sat when he played his video games. Finley looked annoyed that she'd sat there. The recliner was
his
chair. He pulled over one of the armless rolling chairs near all his computers, took a seat, then raised his hands in a dramatic
So what are we doing here?
gesture.

“I need to know something, Rodger. I need to know if there's anything in this apartment—in any of your machines, on a flash drive, on a disc—that can be tied to the money we took. I need to know if there's even a
fragment
of the program you downloaded onto Dolan's computer.”

“That's why you came here? That's why you're wasting my time?
I've told you about six times that I got rid of everything. There's nothing here.”

As if she hadn't heard him, she said, “The most important thing, Rodger, is I need to be one hundred percent certain that no one can trace any part of the money to
my
account.”

“No! No one can! And it pisses me off that you keep asking this. There's nobody on this planet that will be able to follow the money, and there's nothing in this room that will lead them to it. Why are you asking me this again?”

“I just need to be sure, Rodger.” She studied his face as he glared at her, trying to tell if he was lying, knowing it was hopeless. “Okay,” she said. “I believe you, Rodger. And I want to thank you again for everything you've done for me.”

Then she took the silenced P30 from the pocket of her trench coat and shot Finley in the heart, and then shot him a second time in the forehead as he sat there in the rolling chair. She didn't know why he didn't fall off the chair, but he didn't. That was odd.

It had been mandatory to kill Finley; she had no choice. Finley was the one person who, if he talked, could ruin everything, because he would tell Callahan, under duress, where her money was. And the only way Callahan would be able to find her after she disappeared would be to follow the money to her hideaway.

She was going to take care of Nathan Sterling, too, but Sterling didn't concern her as much as Rodger Finley. Sterling had no idea where her money was.

She picked up the shell casings ejected when she shot Finley. Her plan was to walk a couple of blocks before she caught a cab to the airport, and drop the gun and the casings into a sewer drain or a trash can someplace along the way.

She took one last look around Finley's smelly loft.

Finley, to her amazement, was still sitting upright in his chair. That was
so
weird.

35
|
Had Kay arrived at Rodger Finley's apartment building nineteen minutes earlier, she would have run into Anna Mercer, stepping out of the elevator, pulling her roll-along suitcase behind her. But she didn't.

Kay didn't bother to buzz Finley's apartment; she let herself in. She put on thin leather gloves and picked the lock on the front door of Finley's building with an electric lock picker that made as much noise as ice being crushed in a blender. Not a tool she would have chosen had she been a cat burglar. She walked up the stairs to Finley's third-floor apartment and knocked softly on the door. When no one answered, she knocked louder.

Before she left D.C., Callahan had given her a file on Finley. The most salient fact in the file, as it related to Kay's current mission, was that Finley rarely left his apartment. The file said he spent an inordinate amount of time playing a fantasy role-playing game that only geniuses played. The other thing Finley had been doing the last three months was arguing with a mathematician in China.

The Chinaman and Finley, according to the file, disagreed about something related to string theory. Kay had no idea what string theory was, but the file informed her that it was a theory attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity, and the only people who understood what that meant were physicists and mathematicians and other folk with oversized brains. The funny thing was—or at least Kay thought it was funny—was that Finley and the Chinaman had no common language and they were “arguing” by
exchanging mathematical formulas. At any rate, Finley should have been at home, playing games, playing with numbers, playing with himself.

Kay tried Finley's doorknob and the door was locked, so she used the noisy lock picker to open the door. She then pulled out her Glock and pushed open the door with her foot. All the lights were on in the apartment, and she could see Finley from the doorway, sitting upright in a chair. He had blood running down the front of his shirt and a red-black hole in the center of his forehead. She walked over to him, and although she knew she was wasting her time, she touched his throat to feel for a pulse—and Finley fell out of the chair.

—

KAY WOKE UP
Callahan in D.C. She didn't know if he'd just gone to bed early or passed out from all the booze he'd consumed. “Finley's dead,” she said.

“Goddamnit,” Callahan muttered.

“He was shot. His body is still warm, so this didn't happen very long ago. What do you want me to do?”

“Give me a minute,” Callahan said. “I gotta wake up.” She heard Callahan set the phone down, then heard disgusting noises as he hawked up whatever was in his throat. The next thing she thought she heard was water running as Callahan most likely splashed water on his face.

Callahan picked up the phone again, and she heard a cigarette lighter click. “Do you see a computer in the place?”

“Are you kidding me?” Kay said. “There are a dozen computers, and I have no idea what some of the other electronic shit in here does.”

“Okay. I'm going to get some guys over there and have them box up all the machines. They'll take them someplace and see if they can find anything useful, although I doubt they'll find anything. While you're waiting for the computer guys to get there, play detective. You know, look around and see if you can find a fuckin' clue, anything that ties
Finley to Mercer or Sterling or the op in Afghanistan. I don't think you'll find anything, but we gotta look. While you're doing that, I'm going to have the guys I have following Mercer pick her up.”

“Where is she right now?” Kay asked. Kay knew that Mercer had claimed her sister was having some sort of mental health problem and she was on her way to see her in Wilmington, North Carolina. When she saw Finley's body, her first thought had been that Mercer was creating an alibi.

In answer to Kay's question, Callahan said, “She's about fifty miles south of Raleigh. She's been driving like an old lady. I told the guys following her to stick with her and to see if she's really going to visit her schizoid sister like she said, but now I'm going to have them pull her over.” Callahan paused and said, “I have this horrible feeling that Mercer's not going to be in the car they're following. I'll call you back.”

Ten minutes later, Callahan called Kay back. “She wasn't in the car. A Russian hooker who works for an escort service was driving. Mercer contacted her a month ago. She found her on the Internet and she looks a lot like Mercer, same height, same short hair, and Mercer paid her five grand to drive to North Carolina. The guys I had following Mercer said they saw Mercer's Mercedes pull out of her garage about three, and since it was Mercer's car and somebody who looked like Mercer was driving, they assumed it was her. I spoke to Mercer in my office about one this afternoon, and she stayed in her office until two. What she must have done was call the hooker and told her to go to her house, and as soon as Mercer got home, she had the gal get in her car and head south.

“I've got people headed to Mercer's place right now, but I know she won't be there. I think while my guys were following the hooker, Mercer took a plane or a train to New York and killed Finley so we wouldn't be able to question him. And now she's going to disappear and it's going to be almost impossible to find her.”

“Callahan, can you think of anything to say—just one single thing—that might sound the tiniest bit optimistic?”

“No. I think we're fucked.”

Kay didn't say anything for a moment, thinking about the possibility of Anna Mercer getting away with what she'd done. “Are you sure Dolan is clean?”

“Yeah. How many times do I have to tell you?” Callahan said.

“Well, if you're sure, then call him and tell him to get his ass over here. He can help me search. He knows a lot more about the Afghan operation than I do.”

“I told you, he quit.”

“Well,
un
quit him. Tell him to stop acting like a spoiled rich kid.”

Callahan hesitated. “All right.”

“What do I do about Finley?”

“I don't know. I gotta think about that,” Callahan said.

—

KAY, STILL WEARING GLOVES,
wandered through Finley's apartment, poking into those places she used to poke into when she was working for the DEA and looking for drugs. She probed the dark corners of closets, checked the pockets of coats and jackets, looked inside toilet bowl tanks, under mattresses, and inside the freezer for anything that wasn't food. She tried not to make too much of a mess, because she knew at some point the NYPD was going to show up and do their own search. That is, the NYPD would show up if Callahan wanted Finley's body to be discovered.

She found very little paper in the place: no bills, no checkbook, no tax returns, no books, no newspapers. Finley apparently was one of those people who truly believed in a paperless world and did everything online. She assumed his iPad contained his library and his personal files were in one of his many computers—and she wasn't about to touch any
of the electronics. She could imagine steam hissing out of the computers if she touched a keyboard. She did find his passport, and as near as she could tell, Finley hadn't left the country in five years. He made one trip to London when he was working for Goldman Sachs. She was thinking about removing the covers on the electrical outlets, when someone rapped softly on the door. She looked through the peephole. It was Eli Dolan.

He was dressed similar to her—in jeans, a T-shirt, and a lightweight jacket. On his feet were battered Top-Siders, probably what he wore when he went yachting with his rich friends. He looked good, she had to admit, although he needed a shave. In fact, he looked fantastic, and she could feel the heat being generated someplace south of her heart.

He looked over at Finley's body, then looked at her, a grim set to his mouth.

“Look, I'm . . .” Kay had been about to say she was sorry for having doubted him, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, Dolan said, “So I guess you finally decided I'm innocent.” Before she could respond, he continued. “You can't even
imagine
how angry I was that you and Callahan suspected me of killing Ara Khan. I've worked for Callahan for years, and as for you . . . I thought we meant something to each other.”

Then she couldn't help herself, probably because he was acting so pissy and petulant. “Oh, grow up,” she said. “Fifty million bucks was stolen and five—”

“What do you mean fifty million was stolen?”

Judging by the look on his face, he apparently, genuinely, didn't know the fifty million never made it to Khan's account. Kay wondered what Callahan had told him. She continued.

“—and five people were killed. You were a viable suspect and we treated you like one. What else could we do?”

“You could have trusted me,” Dolan said.

“We don't have time for this right now. Callahan is convinced Anna
Mercer is the one who orchestrated the Khans' deaths and stole the money.” Seeing again that he was confused, she quickly explained everything to him: how the money never made it to Sahid Khan's bank account, Callahan's logic for concluding Mercer and Sterling were the guilty parties, and how Callahan had locked in on Finley as Mercer's helper.

When she finished, he said, “I can't believe Anna would do this.”

“Well, Callahan's sure she did, but he'd still like some proof. Some guys are going to be here soon to pick up all the computer equipment, but I thought, since you knew Finley and were intimately involved in the Afghan op, that maybe you'd be able to spot something searching the place.”

“I didn't know Finley,” Dolan said, and she could see him tightening up, thinking he was being accused of something else. God, he was sensitive.

“He worked at Goldman Sachs the same time you were there,” Kay said. “He was a quant.”

“Goldman employed more than thirty thousand people, worldwide, when I was there. I didn't work with all of them.”

“He was in the New York office,” Kay said.

“I didn't know him,” Dolan said with an edge to his voice.

“Okay. Fine. I believe you,” Kay said. “But Callahan thinks that one of the reasons Mercer picked Finley to help her was because there was a connection between you and him—namely, that you both had the same employer. That wouldn't be proof that you worked with Finley to steal the money, but it would be another brick in the wall.”

“All right,” Dolan said, but Kay wasn't sure what that meant:
All right, all is forgiven
or
All right, I'll work with you for now
?

They searched together for another thirty minutes but had no more luck than Kay did searching alone. They were interrupted by a knock on the door, and Kay was praying it was the computer movers and not the police. It was.

Two burly guys and one not-so-burly guy entered the loft carrying stacks of collapsed cardboard boxes. The not-so-burly one acted as if Kay and Dolan weren't even in the room and started unhooking the cables and power cords from all the machines; when he was finished, his teammates loaded the boxes. After all the big items were loaded, he walked around picking up smaller things: flash drives, standalone hard drives, and discs. When those were collected, he did a lap around the apartment holding a black box in his hand.

“What's that?” Kay asked.

“I'm looking for electronic noise signatures to see if there's something not in plain sight.” Two minutes later, he said, “There's nothing else. You're to call Callahan when we're gone.”

Kay did. “We're done here,” she told Callahan. “Dolan and I didn't find anything, and all the machines are gone. What's next?”

“I don't know,” Callahan said.

“Did Mercer split like you thought?”

“Yeah. She's gone. She wasn't at her house, and we can't find her via the GPS chip in her cell phone, which means she's ditched the phone. And there's something else we found in her house, and I gotta tell you, this really freaked me out. We found Scarlett.”

“I don't understand,” Kay said. “So what if she left the cat?”

“She didn't
leave
it, she killed it. Mercer gave her an injection of pentobarbital, the same thing vets use to euthanize pets. I mean, talk about cold-blooded. I always thought she loved that animal. I guess she figured it would be too much of a hassle to take it with her if she was on the run, but instead of letting it go . . .”

Kay had to admit she was shocked by what Mercer had done, but she didn't have time to think about Scarlett. She wanted to get out of Finley's apartment. “What do we do about Finley?” she asked.

“Call the cops. An anonymous call. Do it on the way to the airport. I want you and Eli back here in D.C. I need you to help me figure out how to find Anna.”

“What if he won't come?”

“Just ask him, Hamilton. If he says no, then tell him thanks for his help and come back by yourself. I'm not expecting you to kidnap the guy.”

—

EARLIER THAT EVENING—
while Kay Hamilton and Eli Dolan were searching Rodger Finley's apartment—a chubby-faced blond woman wearing red-framed glasses and sturdy shoes boarded an Air Canada flight to Geneva.

She took a seat in first class, and as they were waiting for the lemmings in coach to board, a flight attendant asked, “Would you care for a glass of champagne, Ms. Murdock?”

In an upper-class British accent, Ms. Murdock replied, “Yes, that would be lovely, dear.”