Buried Secrets

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

– FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, DAYBREAK

27.

“It’s all gone,” Marcus said. He spoke without affect, like he’d been anaesthetized.

“You have ten billion dollars under management.”

“Had. It’s all gone.”

“Ten billion dollars is gone?”

He nodded.

“That’s not possible.” Then I had a terrible thought. “My God, you never had it in the first place, did you? Right? It was never real, was it?”

Marcus stiffened. “I’m no Bernie Madoff,” he said, offended.

I looked at him, cocked my head. He looked gutted, defeated. “So what happened?”

He looked down. For the first time I noticed the age spots mottling his face. The network of lines and wrinkles suddenly seemed to have gotten deeper and more pronounced. He looked pale and his eyes were sunken. “About six or seven months ago my CFO noticed something so bizarre he thought we’d accidentally gotten the wrong statements. He saw that all of our stock holdings had been sold. All the proceeds were wired out, along with all the rest of our cash on hand.”

“Wired where?”

“I don’t know.”

“By who?”

“If I knew, I’d have it back.”

“Well, you have a prime broker, don’t you, that does all your trading?”

“Sure.”

“So if they screwed up, they have to unwind it.”

Slowly he shook his head. “All the trades were authorized, using our codes and passwords. Our broker says they’re not responsible-there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“Isn’t there one guy there who’s in charge of your account?”

“Of course. But by the time we discovered what had happened, he’d left the bank. A few days later he was found in Venezuela. Dead. He and his entire family had been killed in a car accident in Caracas.”

“What brokerage firm do you use?” I was expecting to hear Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, one of the major players, and I was surprised when he answered, “Banco Transnacional de Panamá.”

“Panama?” I said. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Half of our funds are offshore, you know. Arabs and the like-those are the ones with the real money.”

But I was dubious. Panama was the Switzerland of Latin America: the land of bank secrecy, an excellent place to stash money with no questions asked. Even more secretive, actually.

Panama meant you had something to hide.

“Suddenly Marcus Capital Management had no capital to manage. We had nothing. Nothing.” A vein throbbed along the ridge of his forehead. I was afraid he might have a coronary right there in front of me.

“I think I see where this is going. You couldn’t tell your investors they’d lost all their money. Right?”

“Some of them had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with me. What was I going to tell them, I screwed up? I couldn’t face that. You know I never had a single losing quarter, all those decades? No one’s ever had a record like that. I mean, the sainted Warren Buffett lost almost ten percent a few years back.”

“So what’d you do, Marshall? Dummy up statements like Bernie Madoff?”

“No! I needed cash. Lots and lots of it. Massive infusions. And no bank in the world would lend me money.”

“Ah, gotcha. You took in new money. So you could make it look like you hadn’t lost anything.”

He nodded, shrugged.

“That’s still fraud,” I said.

“That wasn’t my intent!”

“No, of course not. So who’d you take money from?”

“You don’t want to know, Nickeleh. Believe me, you don’t want to know. The less you know, the better.”

“At this point I think you better tell me.”

“Let’s just say you’re not going to run into any of these guys at the Union League Club, okay? These are bad men, Nicky.” A twitch had started in his left eye.

“Let me hear some names.”

“You ever hear of Joost Van Zandt?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Van Zandt was a Dutch arms dealer whose private militia had supported Liberia’s murderous dictator, Charles Taylor.

“Desperate, more like,” he said. “How about Agim Grazdani? Or Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman?”

Agim Grazdani was the head of the Albanian mafia. His portfolio included gunrunning, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. When Italy’s top prosecutor issued a warrant for his arrest a couple of years ago, the prosecutor and his entire family turned up in the meat locker of the justice minister’s favorite restaurant in Rome, their bodies dismembered and frozen.

Since then Italian prosecutors have been too busy with other cases to go after him.

Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman, the leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, was one of the most violent narcotics traffickers in the world. He’d altered his appearance through repeated plastic surgeries, was believed to be living somewhere in Brazil, and basically made Pablo Escobar look like Mister Rogers.

“And the damned Russians,” he said. “Stanislav Luzhin and Roman Navrozov and Oleg Uspensky.”

“My God, Marshall, what the hell was the idea?” I said.

“I thought I could get the ship righted with all the new cash and I’d be back on my feet. But it wasn’t enough to meet all the margin calls. My whole firm went down the crapper anyway.”

“The new money with the old.”

He nodded.

“Guzman and Van Zandt and Grazdani and the Russians,” I said.

“Right.”

“You lost all their money too.”

He winced.

“You know, when Bernie Madoff’s investors lost everything the most they could do was cry in front of a judge. These guys aren’t the crying type. So which one of them took your daughter?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m going to need a list of all of your investors.”

“You’re not walking away? Thank you.” Tears sprang to Marcus’s eyes. He gripped my forearms in his bear paws. “Thank you, Nick.”

“A complete list,” I said. “Every single name. No omissions.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“I also want a list of all your employees, past and present. Including household staff, past and present. Personnel files too.”

There was a knock on the door.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dorothy said, “but the live feed’s back up.”

“The feed?” Marcus said, confused.

“It’s Alexa,” she said. “The video stream is back online.”

28.

We crowded around the monitor. Marcus hunched forward in his chair while Dorothy worked the keyboard.

“It just started up,” Dorothy said.

The same still photo of Alexa as a girl. Superimposed over it, in green letters: LIVE and ENTER CHAT. Dorothy moved the mouse and clicked.

Then Alexa’s face appeared again. That same extreme close-up. Eyes brimming with tears.

“Dad?” she said. She wasn’t looking straight at the camera but slightly off to the side, as if she didn’t know for sure where the lens was. “Dad?”

Marcus said, “Lexie? Daddy’s right here.”

“She still can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

“Daddy, they’re not going to let me go unless you give them something, okay?”

The picture was sort of stuttery and jittery. Not very high quality. Like TV reception used to be in the days before cable.

“Um… first, they say if you contact the police or anything they’re just going to…”

She blinked rapidly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shuddered.

“I’m so cold and I’m so afraid that I’m too weak and I can’t change,” she said suddenly, almost in a monotone. “I-I twist and turn in the darkest space and… I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy.”

“Oh, Lord,” Dorothy said.

“Shhh!” Marcus said. “Please!”

There was a low rumble, and suddenly the image pixelated: It froze, turned into thousands of tiny squares that broke apart, and then the screen went dark.

“No!” Marcus said. “Not again! Why is this happening?”

But then the video was back. Alexa was saying, “They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I-I don’t know what that means. They said you will. Please, Daddy, I don’t think I can hold out any longer.”

And the image went dark once again. We waited a few seconds, but this time it didn’t come back.

“Is that it?” Marcus said, looking wildly from me to Dorothy and back. “That’s the end of the video?”

“I’m sure it’s not the last,” I said.

“IR camera for sure,” Dorothy said. Infrared, she meant. The reason for the video’s monochrome, greenish cast. A video camera like that would have its own built-in infrared light source, invisible to the human eye.

“They’re holding her in total darkness,” I said.

Marcus shouted, “My little Lexie! What are they doing to her? Where is she?”

“They don’t want us to know yet,” I said. “It’s part of the pressure, the… cruelty. The not-knowing.”

Marcus put a hand over his eyes. His lower lip was trembling, his face was flushed. He was sobbing noiselessly.

“I really do think she’s lying down,” Dorothy said. “Just based on the appearance of her face.”

“So what happened to the image at the end?” I said. “What caused it to break up?”

“Some kind of transmission error, maybe.”

“I’m not so sure. You notice that low-pitched sound? Sounded like a car or a truck nearby.”

Dorothy nodded. “A big old truck, maybe. They’re probably near traffic. Probably right off a main road or a highway or something.”

“Nope,” I said. “Not a main road. Not a busy street. That was the first vehicle we heard. So that tells us she’s near a road but not a busy one.” I turned to Marcus. “What’s Mercury?”

He lifted his hand from his eyes. They were scrunched and red and flooded with tears. “No idea.”

“And what was all that about ‘I’m too weak and I can’t change’ and ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

“Who the hell knows,” he said, his voice phlegmy. He cleared his throat. “She’s scared out of her mind.”

“But it’s not the way she normally talks, is it?”

“She’s terrified. She was just… babbling!”

“Was she quoting a poem, maybe?”

Marcus looked blank.

“It sounds like a reference to something. Like she was reciting something. Doesn’t sound familiar at all?”

He shook his head.

“A book?” I suggested. “Maybe something you used to read to her when she was a little kid?”

“I, you know…” He faltered. “You know, her mother read to her. And your mother. I-I never did. I really wasn’t around very much.”

And he put a hand over his eyes again.

AS WE drove away from Marcus’s house into the gloom of a starless night-away from what I now thought of as Marshall Marcus’s compound, defended as it was by armed guards-I told Dorothy about how Marshall Marcus had lost it all.

She reacted with the same kind of slack-jawed disbelief that I had. “You telling me this guy lost ten billion dollars like it dropped behind the sofa cushions?”

“Basically.”

“That can happen?”

“Easy.”

She shook her head. “See, this is why I’m glad I never went into finance. I’m always losing my keys and my glasses. If you can lose something, I’ll lose it.”

She was multitasking, tapping away at her BlackBerry as she talked.

“Remind me not to give you any money to manage,” I said.

“You have any idea what Mercury is?”

“Marshall doesn’t know. Why should I?”

“Marshall says he doesn’t know.”

“True.”

“Maybe it’s, like, one of his offshore funds or something. Money he’s stashed somewhere.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If the kidnappers know they lost their whole investment, they also know he’s broke. So ‘Mercury’ can’t refer to money.”

“Maybe they figure he’s got something stashed away somewhere. All these guys hide chunky nuts of money away. They’re like squirrels. Evil squirrels.”

“But why not just say it straight? Why not just say, wire three hundred million dollars into such-and-such an offshore account or we kill the kid?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Well, what’s more valuable than money?”

“A virtuous woman.” Dorothy pursed her lips.

“Some proprietary trading algorithm, maybe. Some investment formula he invented.”

She shook her head, kept tapping away. “A trading algorithm? Guy’s busted flat. Whatever secret sauce the guy’s got I ain’t buying.”

I smiled.

“You think he knows but he’s not telling us?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Even if it gets his daughter killed?”

For a long time I said nothing. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“You know him,” she said. “I don’t.”

“No,” I said. “I thought I knew him. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Hmph,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh, man, this can’t be true.”

“What?”

“Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be true.”

“What are you talking about?”

For a quick second I took my eyes off the road to glance at Dorothy. She was staring at her BlackBerry. “That crazy stuff Alexa was saying? ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

“Yeah?”

“I Googled it. Nick, it’s a lyric from a song by a rock group called Alter Bridge.”

“Okay.”

“The song’s called ‘Buried Alive.’”

29.

By the time I’d dropped Dorothy off at her apartment in Mission Hill, it was almost nine at night.

My apartment was a loft in the leather district, which may sound kinky, but actually refers to the six-square-block area of downtown Boston between Chinatown and the financial district, where the old red-brick buildings used to be shoe factories and leather tanneries and warehouses.

I found a parking space a few blocks away, cut through the alley into the grim service entrance and up the steel-treaded back stairwell to the back door on the fifth floor.

The loft was one large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The bedroom was in an alcove, on the opposite side of the apartment from the bathroom. Bad design. In another alcove was a kitchen equipped with high-end appliances, none of which I’d ever used, except the refrigerator. There were a lot of cast-iron support columns and exposed brick and of course the obligatory exposed ductwork. The place was spare and functional and unadorned. Uncluttered.

I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that I was reacting against my upbringing in an immense mansion in Bedford, New York, stuffed with precious antiques. My brother and I couldn’t run around inside without knocking over some priceless Etruscan vase or a John Townsend highboy.

But maybe I just hate clutter.

The comedian George Carlin used to do a great routine about “stuff,” the crap we all go through life accumulating and shuffling around from place to place. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, he said, a place to put your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. I have as little stuff as possible, but what I have is simple and good.

I went straight to the bathroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower. For a long time I stood there, feeling the hot water pound my head, my neck, my back.

Unable to get the image of poor Alexa Marcus out of my head. The raccoon eyes, the abject terror. It reminded me of one of the most harrowing Web videos I’ve ever seen: the beheading of a brave Wall Street Journal reporter some years ago by monsters in black hoods.

And that association filled me with dread.

I wondered what she meant by “buried alive.” Maybe she was locked in an underground bunker or vault of some kind.

When I shut off the water and reached for the towel I thought I heard a noise.

A snap or a click.

Or nothing.

I stopped, listened a moment longer, then began toweling myself off.

And heard it again. Definitely something.

Inside the apartment.

30.

I stared out through the halfway-open bathroom door, saw nothing.

In such an old building in the middle of a city at night, there were all sorts of sounds. Delivery trucks and garbage compactors and screeching brakes and car doors slamming and buses belching diesel. Car alarms, night and day.

But this was coming from inside my apartment for sure.

A scritch scritch scritch from the front of the loft.

Naked, still wet, I let the towel drop and nudged the bathroom door open a bit wider. Stepped out, dripping on the hardwood floor.

Listened harder.

The scritch scritch scritch even more distinct. It was definitely inside the loft, at the front.

Both of my firearms were out of reach. The SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic pistol was under my bed. But to reach the bedroom alcove I’d have to pass them first. I cursed the idiotic layout of the place, putting the bathroom so far from the bedroom. The other weapon, a Smith & Wesson M &P nine-millimeter, was in a floor safe under the kitchen floor.

Closer to them than to me.

The wooden floors, once scarred and dented, had been recently refinished. They were solid and silky-smooth and they didn’t squeak when you walked on them. Barefoot, I was able to take a few noiseless steps into the room.

Two men in black ambush jackets. One was large and heavily muscled with a Neanderthal forehead and a black brush cut. He was sitting at my desk, doing something to my keyboard, even though he didn’t look like the computer-savvy type. The other was small and slender with short mouse-brown hair, sallow complexion, and cheeks deeply pitted with acne scars. He sat on the floor beneath my huge wall-mounted flat-screen TV. He was holding my cable modem and doing something with a screwdriver.

Both of them wore latex gloves. They were also wearing new-looking jeans and dark jackets. Most people wouldn’t notice anything special about the way they were dressed. But if you’ve ever worked undercover, their clothing was as conspicuous as an electronic Times Square billboard. It was carry-conceal attire, with hidden pistol pockets and magazine pouches.

I had no idea who they were or why they were here, but I knew immediately they were armed.

And I wasn’t.

I wasn’t even dressed.

31.

I wasn’t scared, either. I was pissed off, outraged at the audacity of these two intruding into my living space. Messing with my computer and my new flat-screen TV.

Most people feel a jolt of adrenaline and their heart starts to race. Mine slows. I breathe more deeply, see more clearly. My senses are heightened.

If I simply wanted them to leave, I’d only have to make a sound, and they’d abandon their black-bag job and slip out. But I didn’t want them gone.

I wanted them dead. After we’d had a conversation, of course. I wanted to know who’d sent them, and why.

So I backed into the bathroom and stood there for a moment, still dripping on the floor, considering my options, thinking.

Somehow they’d gotten in without setting off the alarm. They’d managed to defeat my security system, which wasn’t easy. The front door was ajar, I noticed, and one of the big old factory windows was open. I doubted they’d entered through the window, on that busy street. That would have attracted all kinds of attention, even at night: I was on the fifth floor. But to have gotten in through my front door meant knowing the code to disarm the system.

Obviously they hadn’t expected me to be home. Nor did they see or hear me come in through the service entrance at the back of the loft, which I seldom used. They hadn’t heard me showering at the other end of the apartment: In this old building, water constantly flowed through the pipes.

My only advantage was that they didn’t know I was here.

Looking down at my pants, heaped on the bathroom floor, I ran through a quick mental catalogue. Just the usual objects that can be used as improvised weapons, like keys or pens, but only at close range.

This was a time when a little clutter might have been useful. At first glance, I saw nothing promising. Toothbrush and toothpaste, water glass, mouthwash. Hand towels and shower towels.

A towel can be an effective makeshift weapon if you use it like a kusari-fundo, a Japanese weighted chain. But only if you’re close enough.

Then I saw my electric razor. I’m normally a blade guy, but in a rush, electric is faster. Its coil cord was about two feet long. Stretched to its full length it would probably reach six feet.

I slipped on my pants, unplugged the razor, then padded silently, stealthily, into the main room.

I had to go for the muscle first. The computer guy wasn’t likely to be much of a threat. Once Mongo was out of the way, I’d find out whatever I could from Gigabyte.

My bare feet were still damp and a little sticky and made a slight sucking noise as I lifted them off the floor. So I approached slowly, tried to minimize the sound.

In a few seconds I was ten feet away from the intruders, hidden behind a column. I inhaled slowly and deeply. Holding the shaver in my right hand and the plug in my left, I pulled my right hand back, stretching out the coiled cord like a slingshot.

Then hurled it, hard, at the side of the bigger man’s head.

It made an audible crack. His hands flew up to protect his face, a second too late. He screamed, tipped back in the chair, and crashed to the floor. I jerked at the cord, and the shaver ricocheted back to me.

Meanwhile the computer guy was scrambling to his feet. But I wanted to make sure the big one stayed down. I launched myself at the guy, landing on top of him, and jammed my right knee into his solar plexus. The wind came out of him. He tried to rear up, flinging his fists at me without much success. He gasped for breath. He did manage to land a few punches on my ears and one particularly hard one on my left jaw, painful but not disabling. I aimed a drive at his face with everything I had. It connected with a wet crunch. I felt something sharp and hard give way.

He screamed, writhed in agony. His nose was broken, maybe a few teeth as well. Blood spattered my face.

In my peripheral vision I noticed that the weedy computer guy had clambered to his feet and was pulling what appeared to be a weapon from his jacket.

During the brief struggle, I’d dropped the electric razor, so I reached for the heavy weighted Scotch-tape dispenser on my desk. In one smooth sharp arc, I hurled it at him. He ducked, and it clipped him on the shoulder, the roll of tape flying out as it thunked to the floor.

A miss, but it gave me a couple of seconds. The weapon in his right hand, I saw now, was a black pistol with a fat oblong barrel. A Taser.

Tasers are meant to incapacitate, not kill, but take my word for it, you don’t want to get zapped with one. Each Taser cartridge shoots out two barbed probes, tethered to the weapon by thin filaments. They send fifty thousand volts and a few amps coursing through your body, paralyzing you, disrupting your central nervous system.

He hunched forward, Taser extended, and took aim like an expert. He was less than fifteen feet from me, which indicated he knew what he was doing. Fired from twenty feet away, the electrical darts spread too far apart to hit the body and make a circuit.

I leaped to one side and something grabbed my ankle, causing me to stumble. It was the beefy guy. His face was a bloody mess. He was groaning and pawing the air, arms swarming, bellowing like a wounded boar.

The thin sallow-faced one smiled at me.

I heard the click of the Taser being armed.

Sweeping the big black Maglite flashlight from the edge of my desk, I swung it at his knees, but he was quick. He dodged just in time. The Maglite missed his kneecaps, struck his legs just below with a satisfying crack. He made an ooof sound, his knees buckling, and roared in pain and fury.

I reached up to grab the Taser from his hands, but instead I got hold of the black canvas tool bag on his shoulder. He spun away, aimed the Taser again, and fired.

The pain was unbelievable.

Every single muscle in my body cramped tighter and tighter, something I’d never experienced before and just about impossible to describe. I was no longer in control of my body. My muscles seemed to seize. My body went rigid as a board, and I toppled to the floor.

By the time I could move, two minutes or so later, both men were gone. Far too late to attempt to give chase, even if I were able to run. Which I certainly wasn’t.

I got up gingerly, forced myself to remain standing, though I wanted only to sink back to the floor. I surveyed the mess in my apartment, my anger building, wondering who had sent the two.

And then I realized they’d been considerate enough to leave some evidence behind.

32.

The SIG was still under the bed.

The Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter was locked away, as a precaution, in case someone found the SIG. Concealed beneath the bluestone tiles of the kitchen was a floor safe. I popped the touch latch to lift one of the tiles, dialed open the safe, found the contents-a lot of cash, various identity documents, some papers, and the pistol-intact.

They hadn’t found it.

They probably hadn’t even looked for it. That wasn’t what they were here for.

I gathered the things the intruders had left behind in their haste to leave, including a black canvas tool bag and my dismantled cable modem. And one thing more: a little white device connected between one of the USB ports on the back of my computer tower and the cable to my keyboard. The color matched exactly. It almost looked like it belonged there.

I’m no computer expert, by any means, but you don’t have to be an auto mechanic to know how to drive a car. This little doohickey was called a keylogger. It contained a miniature USB drive that captured every single keystroke you typed and stored it on a memory chip. Sure, you can grab the same data with a software package. But that’s a whole lot trickier now that most people use antivirus software. Had I not had reason to look for it, I’d never have found it.

Inside the case to my cable modem I found a little black device that I recognized as a flash drive. I had a feeling it didn’t belong there either.

I called Dorothy.

“They knew you were meeting with Marcus,” she said. “And they didn’t think you’d be home.”

“Well, if so, that means they weren’t watching us.”

“You’d have detected physical surveillance, Nick. They’re not stupid.”

“So who are they?”

“I want you to put that keylogger back in the USB drive, okay?”

I did.

“Do you know how to open a text editor?”

“I do if you tell me how.”

She did, and I opened a window on my computer and read off a long series of numbers. Then I took the keylogger out of the USB port and inserted the little device from the cable modem. And repeated the process, reading off more numbers.

“Hang on,” she said.

I waited. The two spots where the Taser prongs had sunk in, on my right shoulder and my left lower back, were still twitching and were starting to get itchy.

I heard keyboard tapping and mumbling and the occasional grunt.

“Huh,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, now, this is interesting.”

“Okay.”

“The electronic serial numbers you just gave me? That’s law-enforcement-grade equipment. Whoever broke in was working for the U.S. government.”

“Or using government equipment,” I pointed out. “They weren’t necessarily government operatives themselves.”

“Fair enough.”

Though now I had a fairly good idea who might have sent them.

Even before I arrived at the Boston field office of the FBI, Gordon Snyder had figured out who I was. He knew why I wanted to talk with him, and he knew I was working for Marshall Marcus.

Who was the target of a major high-level FBI investigation. And I, as someone employed by Marcus, was probably an accomplice.

Which made me a target too.

Snyder had flat-out told me that the FBI was tapping Marcus’s phones. They were probably monitoring his e-mail as well. Which meant he knew I’d driven up to Manchester. He knew I wasn’t home, that it was safe to send his black-bag boys.

I recalled Diana’s warning: Watch out for the guy. If he thinks you’re working against him, against his case, he’ll come gunning for you.

“Can you pull up the video for my home cameras?” I said. “I want to see how they got in.”

When I moved in, I’d had a security firm put in a couple of high-resolution digital surveillance cameras outside the doors to my loft. Two of them were hidden dummy smoke detectors, and a couple of Misumi ultra-mini snake IP cameras were concealed in dummy air vents. They were all motion-activated and networked into a video server at the office.

How this worked exactly, I had no idea. That wasn’t in my skill set. But the surveillance video was stored on the office network.

She said she’d get back to me. While I waited, I searched the apartment for more equipment, or even just traces, left by Gordon Snyder’s team.

When Dorothy called back, she said, “I’m afraid I don’t have the answer for you.”

“Why not?”

“Take a look at your computer.”

I walked back to my desk and saw what looked like four photographs on my screen, still photos of the stairwells outside the front and back doors to my loft. Each, I saw, was the video feed from a different camera. Beneath each window were date and time and a jumble of other numbers that didn’t seem important.

Somehow she’d put them on my computer remotely.

“How’d you do that?” I said.

“A good magician never reveals her secrets.” The cursor began moving on its own, circling the first two windows. “These first two didn’t get any action, so forget them.” They disappeared. “Now watch.”

The remaining two windows grew bigger so that they now took up most of the monitor. “They entered your apartment at 8:22 P.M.”

I glanced at my watch. “Okay.”

“So here we are, 8:21 and… thirty seconds.” Both windows advanced a few frames, and suddenly a red starburst appeared in the middle of each one, blooming into a red cloud that obliterated the entire image.

“Laser zapper,” I said.

“Exactly.”

After a minute the picture returned to normal.

Then there was nothing to see but an empty stairwell.

“So we still don’t know how they got in,” I said. “But this tells us something useful.”

“What, they knew how to dazzle the cameras? It’s all over the Internet.”

“No. They knew where the cameras were.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No fumbling around. Quick and efficient. You can’t blind the cameras if you can’t find them. They knew exactly where to look.”

“So?”

“The cameras are concealed,” I said. “One in a smoke detector, and one in an air vent. The smoke-detector camera isn’t all that original, if you’re familiar with what’s on the market. But the air-vent one-that’s custom. It’s a fiber-optic camera that’s like a quarter inch thick. Takes some serious skill to hit that one first time.”

“So what’s your point?”

“They got hold of the schematics. As well as my password.”

“Maybe from the security company that put them in.”

“Possibly. Or maybe from my own files. Right there in the office.”

“Not possible,” she said. “I’d have detected the intrusion, Nick.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” she said, defensive. “For sure.”

“Put it this way,” I said. “Not only did they know exactly where my cameras are, but they were able to disarm the system. Meaning they knew the code.”

“From your security company.”

“The company doesn’t know my code.”

“Who does?”

“Just me.”

“You don’t keep your code written down anywhere?”

“Just in my personal files at the office,” I said.

“In your file drawers?”

“On my computer. Stored on our server.”

“Oh.”

“You see?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and the other line rang. I saw from the caller ID it was Diana. “Someone’s gotten into the office network.”

“Or else we’ve got a leak,” I said. “Let me take this.”

I clicked over to Diana’s call.

“Nick,” she said, her voice tight. “I just heard from AT &T. I think we’ve found our girl.”

33.

Not until Alexa went away to boarding school did she learn that other kids, normal kids, didn’t have the kind of dreams she did. Others dreamed of flying, like she sometimes did, but they also dreamed about their teeth falling out. They dreamed of getting lost in mazes or realizing, with immense embarrassment, that they were walking around school naked. They all had anxiety dreams about having to take a final exam in a class they’d forgotten to attend.

Not Alexa.

She dreamed over and over about crawling on her belly through an endless network of caves and getting stuck in one of the narrow tunnels, thousands of feet underground. She’d always wake up sweating and trembling.

The thing about phobias, she’d learned, was that once you had one, some small part of your brain was always working to justify its existence. To show you why your phobia made perfect sense.

Wasn’t it logical to be afraid of snakes? Who could argue with that? Why wasn’t it logical to fear germs or spiders or flying in an airplane? You could die any of these ways, right? It wasn’t like your brain had to work very hard to justify any of these phobias.

Being in an enclosed space was the most deeply terrifying thing she could imagine. She didn’t require logic. She just knew.

Like a magpie forever gathering shiny little scraps, her mind collected the most horrifying tales, things she’d read about or heard from friends, stories that proved her fears were legitimate. Things most people barely noticed, she filed away obsessively.

Stories from history books of people who’d fallen ill during the Plague, gone into comas, declared dead. Stories she wished she could unread.

Coffin lids with scratch marks on the inside. Skeletons found with fistfuls of human hair clenched in their bony hands.

She’d never forget reading about the Ohio girl in the late nineteenth century who got sick and her doctor thought she’d died, and for some reason her body was placed in a temporary vault, maybe because the ground was too frozen to bury her, and when they opened the vault in the spring to put the body in the ground, they found that the girl’s hair had been pulled out. And that some of her fingers had been chewed off.

The girl had eaten her own fingers to stay alive.

Her English teacher at Exeter had made them read Poe. It was hard enough just trying to understand the guy’s writing, the strange words she’d never heard of. But his stories-she couldn’t bear to read them. Because he was one of the very few who actually got it. He understood the terror. Her classmates would say things like “That’s one sick dude,” but she knew that Edgar Allan Poe saw the truth. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”-all those stories about people being buried alive-she couldn’t bring herself to finish them. How could anyone?

Why was her fevered magpie mind dwelling on all those awful stories?

After all, she was living her own worst nightmare.

34.

“Her phone’s on and transmitting,” Diana said.

“Where is she?” I said.

“Leominster.” She said it wrong, like most people new to the state. It’s supposed to rhyme with “lemming,” almost.

“That’s an hour away.” I looked at my watch. “Maybe less, this time of night. How precise a location did they give you?”

“They’re e-mailing me lat-and-long coordinates, in degrees and minutes.”

“Okay,” I said. “That could be as big an area as a thousand square meters, the way these things work. But once I’m there I can start searching for likely locations.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Go back to bed. Otherwise, you’ll be a wreck tomorrow. I got this.”

“Technically, I put in the request. I’m not allowed to pass on the information to someone outside the Bureau.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll drive, you navigate.”

I QUICKLY gathered some equipment, including the Smith & Wesson and a handheld GPS unit, a ruggedized yellow Garmin eTrex.

As we drove, I told her what had happened in the hours since I’d seen her last: the surveillance tape at the Graybar Hotel, the guy who’d spiked Alexa’s drink and driven her away. Her “friend” Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter, who’d cooperated in the abduction for some reason I didn’t yet understand. The streaming video. Marshall Marcus’s admission that he’d taken money from some dangerous people in a last-ditch attempt to save his fund, though he lost it all anyway.

Diana furrowed her brow. “Let me check the phone detail records.” She began scrolling through her BlackBerry.

“Yeah, I’d like to know when the last phone call was, in or out.”

“The last outgoing call hit the tower in Leominster at two thirty-seven A.M.”

“Almost twenty-four hours ago,” I said. “How long did it last?”

More scrolling. “About ten seconds.”

“Ten seconds?” I said. “That’s pretty short.”

I heard her scroll some more, and then she said, “The last call was to nine-one-one. Emergency. But it doesn’t look like the call ever went through. It hit the tower, but it must have been cut off.”

“I’m impressed. She must have been pretty spaced-out from the drugs, but she had the wherewithal to try to call for help. What calls did she receive around then?”

“A bunch of incoming, between three in the morning to around noon today.”

“Can you see who they’re from?”

“Yeah. Four different numbers. Two landlines in Manchester-by-the-Sea.”

“Her dad.”

“One mobile phone, also Marcus’s. The fourth is another mobile phone registered to Taylor Armstrong.”

“So Taylor did try to call. Interesting.”

“Why?”

“If she was trying to reach Alexa, that may indicate she was actually worried about her friend. Which indicates she might not have known what happened to her.”

“Or that she was feeling guilty about what she’d done and wanted to make sure Alexa was okay.”

“Right,” I said. For a long time we didn’t talk. There was no quick way to Leominster. No shortcut. I had to take the Mass Turnpike to 95 North and then onto Route 2. Leominster is on Route 2, an east-west highway that winds through Lincoln and Concord and then keeps going west to New York State.

But I wasn’t too concerned about the speed limit. I had a federal law-enforcement officer in the front seat next to me. If ever I had a chance of beating a speeding ticket, this was it.

It had started to rain. I switched on the wipers. The only vehicles on the road at this time of night were trucks. An old tractor-trailer was just ahead of me, rubber mudguards flapping, sheeting water onto my windshield. I clicked the wipers faster and changed lanes.

I began to sense her looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“Why is there blood on your collar? And please don’t tell me you cut yourself shaving.”

I explained about the breakin at my loft. Gave her my theory that Gordon Snyder was behind it. As I talked, she shook her head slowly, and when I was done, she said, “That’s not FBI. That’s not how we work. We don’t do that kind of stuff.”

“Not officially.”

“If Snyder wanted to monitor your e-mail, he’d do it remotely. He wouldn’t send a couple of guys in to do a black-bag job.”

I thought for a moment. “You may have a point.”

We went quiet again. I was about to ask her about what had happened between us-or almost happened between us-earlier in the day, when she said abruptly, “Why is her phone still on?”

“Good question. They should have turned it off. Taken out the battery. Better yet, destroyed it. Anyone who watches crime shows on TV knows a cell phone can give up your location.”

“Maybe they didn’t find it on her.”

“Doubt it. She had it in the front pocket of her jacket.”

“Then maybe she hid it somewhere. Like in the vehicle she was abducted in.”

“Maybe.”

A black Silverado was weaving between lanes without signaling.

“I’m glad we reconnected,” I said. It came out a little stiff, a little formal.

She didn’t say anything.

I tried again. “Funny to think we’ve both been in Boston all these months.”

“I meant to call.”

“Nah, where’s the fun in that? Keep the guy guessing. That’s way more fun.” I wondered if that sounded resentful. I hoped not.

She was silent for a long moment. “Did I ever tell you about my dad?”

“A bit.” I knew he’d been killed while tracking down a fugitive, but I waited to see what she’d say.

“You know he was a U.S. Marshal, right? I remember how my mom always lived with that knot in her stomach, you know-when he left for work in the morning, would he come home safe?”

“Yet you risk your own safety every day,” I said gently, not sure what she was getting at.

“Well, that’s the life I signed up for. But always having to worry about someone else? That’s more than I can stand, Nico.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we had an understanding, and I knew I wasn’t abiding by it.”

“An understanding?”

“We were supposed to be casual, no strings, no pressure, no commitment, right? But I was starting to get in a little too deep, and I knew that wasn’t going to be good for either one of us.”

“Is that what you told yourself?”

“Do we really have to do this?”

I couldn’t help thinking about all that had been left unsaid between us, but all I managed was “You never said a word about it.”

She shrugged, went quiet.

We were driving along an endless, monotonous flat stretch of three-lane highway somewhere west of Chelmsford, through miles and miles of scraggly evergreen forest, steeply banked on either side. The broken white lane markers were worn. The only sound was the highway hum, a faint rhythmic thrumming.

“They didn’t ask me to go to Seattle,” she said softly. “I put in for a transfer.”

“Okay,” I said. It could have been a cool breeze from the window that was numbing my face.

“I had to pull myself out. I thought I saw my future and it scared me. Because I saw what my mom went through. I should probably marry a CPA, you know?”

For a long time no one spoke.

Now we were zooming along Route 12 North, which seemed to be the main commercial thoroughfare. On the other side of the street was a Staples and a Marshalls. A Bickford’s restaurant that advertised “breakfast any time,” except apparently at two in the morning. A Friendly’s restaurant, closed and dark too. I pulled over to the shoulder and put on the flashers.

She looked up from the GPS. “This is it,” she said. “We’re within a thousand feet of her phone right now.”

35.

“Right there.” Diana pointed. “That’s 482 North Main Street.”

Behind the Friendly’s was a four-story motel built of stucco and brick in the classic American architectural style best described as Motel Ugly. A tall pole-mounted road sign out front with a yellow-and-red Motel 12 logo brightly illuminated. It looked like the local kids had been using it for target practice, because there were a couple of holes and cracks in it where white light shone through. Mounted below that was a marquee sign board that said in black plastic letters COMPLEMENTARY HI SPED.

I pulled into the motel parking lot. There were maybe a dozen cars parked here. None of them was the Jaguar I’d seen on the surveillance video, not that I expected to see it here. On the other side of the motel loomed a tall self-storage building.

“Dammit,” I said, “we need more precise coordinates. Can you call AT &T back and ask them to ping the phone again? I want the GPS coordinates in decimal format.”

While she called, I walked back toward the road. A few cars passed. A sign across the street said SHERATON FOUR POINTS. No construction lots that I could see, no fields or private homes.

“Got it,” Diana called out, running toward me. She held the Garmin out, and I took it. She’d already programmed the new coordinates in. A flashing arrow represented us. A dot indicated Alexa’s iPhone, and it was quite near. I walked closer to the road and the flashing arrow moved with me.

Closer to Alexa’s iPhone.

I crossed the street, glancing at the GPS screen as I did, to a scrubby shoulder beside a guardrail. Now the arrow and the dot were almost aligned. Her phone had to be right around here.

I stepped over the guardrail and onto a steep downward grade that rolled into a drainage ditch, then rose sharply. I scrambled down the hill, lost my footing, and slid part of the way.

As I got to my feet at the bottom, I looked again at the GPS. The arrow was precisely on top of the dot. I looked up, then to my right, and to my left.

And there, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, I saw it. Lying in the ditch, a few feet away. An iPhone in a pink rubber case.

Alexa’s iPhone.

Discarded by the side of the road.

36.

“Alexa?”

The Owl’s voice startled her.

She’d been trying to remember the lyrics to “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. She’d been singing songs dredged up from memory, jingles from TV commercials, anything she could think of. Anything to keep her mind off where she was. She’d managed to recall all of the words to “American Pie.” That took a long time. She didn’t know how long, since she’d lost all sense of time.

“You deviated from the script, Alexa.”

She didn’t reply. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then she remembered. The way she’d sneaked in those song lyrics to tell her father what they’d done to her.

“Do you understand that your life is entirely in my hands?”

“Oh-God-kill me!” she screamed, though it came out as a strangled croak. “Just do it. I don’t care!”

“Why would I want to kill you, Alexa? It is much worse for you to be buried so deep under the ground in your coffin.”

“Oh God, kill me, please!”

“Oh, no,” said the voice. “I want you to stay alive for a very long time. Knowing that no one will ever find you. No one.”

She moaned, screamed, felt light-headed, nauseous.

“There you are, ten feet underground, and no one has any idea where you are. Maybe I go for a ride. Maybe I go for a trip for some days. I will keep the ventilation on, of course, so you won’t run out of air. You will scream and no one can hear you, and you will beat your fists and claw against the steel walls of your casket, and no one knows you are there.”

“Please, I’ll do anything,” she said. “Anything.” She paused, swallowed hard, thought she might be sick again. “You’re very strong. I think you’re a very attractive man.”

A chuckle came from the speaker overhead. “Nothing you can do to me can excite me more than watching you beg. This is very very exciting to me, Alexa.”

“My father will give you anything you want. Anything!”

“No. You are wrong. He gives nothing to free you.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what Mercury is.”

“Your father knows. He understands very well. Do you know why he doesn’t give what we ask?”

“He doesn’t know what you want!”

“You are not important to him, Alexa. He loves his wife and his money more than he loves you. Maybe he never loves you. You are trapped like a rat and your father knows you are there and he doesn’t even care.”

“That’s not true!”

No reply.

Just silence.

“It’s not true,” Alexa repeated. “Let me talk to him again. I’ll tell him he has to do it now.”

Nothing. Silence.

“Please, let me talk to him.”

Not a sound.

In the dreadful silence she began to hear distant sounds that at first she thought were just hallucinations, squeaking from the hamster wheel of her terrified mind.

But no, these really were voices. Murmured, indistinct, but definitely voices. The way she’d sometimes hear her parents’ voices coming through the heating grates in the floor of the big old house, even though they were two floors below.

There were people up there. Probably the Owl and the others he was working with. Their voices were coming through the tube or pipe or duct that let in the fresh air. Were they with him? What if they weren’t and they knew nothing about her?

She yelled as loudly as she could: “HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME I’M DOWN HERE HELP ME!”

Only silence in reply.

Then the distant murmuring started up again, and she was sure she could hear someone laughing.

37.

Instead of finding Alexa, we’d found her discarded phone.

A huge disappointment, sure. But the more I thought about it, the more it told us.

It told us she was probably within a hundred miles of Boston.

We knew from the hotel’s surveillance tape what time she’d been abducted. We knew from the 911 call that she’d passed through Leominster, north of Boston, less than an hour later.

Once Diana had made a few calls, we concluded that Alexa had probably been driven, not put on a plane. The only airfield nearby was the Fitchburg Municipal Airport, which had two runways and was used by a couple of small charter companies. But no flights had left between midnight the night before and six that morning.

Only fourteen hours had elapsed between her abduction and the first time her kidnappers had contacted Marshall Marcus. That included transporting her and then-if her clues were to be taken literally-burying her in some sort of crypt or vault. And setting up cameras that could broadcast over the Internet. An arrangement like that was complicated and time-intensive and must have taken several hours. So they couldn’t have gone too far.

But that didn’t narrow it down much.

I DROPPED Diana off at FBI headquarters. It was barely six in the morning, but she thought she might as well get a very early start on the day. She’d grab the techs as soon as they got in and ask them for a complete workup of Alexa’s phone.

After she got out I sat in the Defender for a while, idling in front of One Center Plaza, and thought about going home to catch a few hours’ sleep, since it was likely to be a very long day.

Until I checked my e-mail.

I found a long series of e-mails not from a name but from a number I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds to realize that they’d been sent automatically by the miniature GPS tracker concealed in Taylor Armstrong’s gold S. T. Dupont lighter.

Well, not her lighter, but the one I’d switched with hers when I’d “accidentally” dropped it on the cobblestones of Beacon Hill. I’d bought it at the tobacco shop in Park Square, the exact same S. T. Dupont Ligne 2 Gold Diamond Head lighter. A classic, and ridiculously expensive. But a lot cheaper, and more reliable, than hiring someone to tail her.

The tiny tracking device had been installed by an old Special Forces buddy of mine we used to call Romeo who had his own business in TSCM, or technical surveillance countermeasures. He complained bitterly about how small the lighter was. He wasn’t sure he had a tracker small enough. He wanted me to steal her cell phone: That would have been a breeze.

It would have been easier to remove one of her kidneys.

But Romeo figured out how to wedge a nano GPS device inside the lighter’s fluid reservoir. Complaining all the while, of course. Romeo, whose real name was George Devlin, was not an easy man to deal with, but he did great work.

He programmed the thing to start sending out location signals only when it was moved more than a thousand feet. Now I could see that, immediately after Taylor and I had our little talk on the corner of Charles and Beacon, she went home-or was driven home in David Schechter’s limousine-and then she drove to Medford, five miles northwest.

So who might she be meeting so urgently?

I had a pretty good idea.

38.

Twenty minutes later I was driving down Oldfield Road in Medford, a pleasant street lined with graceful old trees and clapboard houses. Some were two-family houses, some apartment buildings. Most of them were well maintained, regularly painted, their lawns neatly mowed and shrubs perfectly clipped, their driveways polished ebony. A few looked like they’d been all but abandoned by absentee landlords who’d thrown up their hands in despair at the squalor of their student tenants. The Tufts University campus was a short walk away.

The house where Taylor Armstrong had spent forty-three minutes last night was a white-painted three-story wooden house, one of the nicer ones. At six thirty in the morning, there wasn’t much going on in the neighborhood. A woman running in black-and-turquoise spandex. A car pulling out of a driveway at the other end of the block. I waited and watched the house.

Then I got out and walked past the house as if I were a neighbor out for a morning stroll. With a quick glance around, I climbed the front porch quietly, but casually, and saw a stack of five buzzers with a stack of matching names. Five apartments. One was probably the owner. Two apartments each on the upper two floors.

Five surnames. Schiff, Murdoch, Perreira, O’Connor, and Unger. I memorized them, went back to the car, hit a speed-dial button on my BlackBerry, and woke Dorothy up.

SHE CALLED back five minutes later.

“Margaret O’Connor is seventy-nine years old, a widow for fifteen years, and has owned the house since 1974. The other four rent. One’s a recent graduate of the college who works for Amnesty International. Two of them are Tufts graduate students. The fourth is our guy.”

“Which one?”

“Perreira. His full name is Mauricio da Silva Cordeiro-Perreira, and yes, I pulled up his pic. It’s the same guy from the hotel surveillance tape.”

“Taylor called him Lorenzo.”

“He gave her a fake name.”

“His surname’s on his doorbell. So even if she didn’t know his true first name, she knew his last name. What’s his connection to her?”

“Here’s what I found out: Thirty-two years old. Born in São Paulo, Brazil. Rich family-we’re talking major money. Daddy’s with the UN in New York.”

“Huh. What does his father do?”

“Probably not much. He’s a member of Brazil’s permanent mission, and those guys don’t do anything, far as I can tell. Mauricio grew up in a gated compound in Morumbi, on the outskirts of São Paulo. Our boy went to a bilingual school-Saint Paul’s, then Universidade de São Paulo. A member of the Harmonia tennis club and the Helvetia polo club-”

“So how’d a rich boy like that end up living in a crappy walk-up apartment in Medford?”

“Looks like he did a few lazy years as a grad student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. But he didn’t spend much time at Tisch Library. He’s a dealer-mostly coke and weed, some meth.”

“Now it gets interesting. What do you have on that?”

“A couple years ago there was this joint DEA/ICE investigation on the theory that the kid was using his father’s diplomatic pouch to bring in controlled substances.”

“Dad must not have been too pleased with that,” I said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if Daddy disowned him. He’s been busted a couple of times, but nothing sticks. Sounds like the kid knows how to game the system.”

“If his dad’s at the UN, he’s protected by diplomatic immunity.”

“That covers a diplomat’s grown kids?”

“All family,” I said.

“They can’t get arrested for drugs?”

“They can’t get arrested for murder,” I said.

“Man, I picked the wrong life. I shoulda been a diplomat. What I’d give for a loaded gun and ten minutes of diplomatic immunity.”

“Now this is starting to come together,” I said. “Taylor has a record of drug problems, and Mauricio is probably her dealer.” His wealthy family background gave him entrée to the right social circles. It probably lent him an air of panache, an ease with well-off college kids, who’d never be caught dead associating with some clocker from Revere.

Not just college students. Also prep school kids like Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter.

“Daddy disowns him, there goes the trust fund,” Dorothy said. “And the diplomatic pouch. Supply drops, money stops gushing in, it gets hard to pay the rent. Or keep up the car payments. Guy like that might get desperate for money. Take on a high-risk job like kidnapping a rich girl.”

“Or maybe he was hired because he was Taylor’s dealer,” I said. “Made it easy.”

“Hired by who?”

“Well, Mauricio is from Brazil, from a rich, well-connected family. One of Marcus Capital’s unhappy investors is Juan Carlos Guzman.”

“Who is…?”

“Colombian drug lord who lives in Brazil.”

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh, sweet Jesus. A drug cartel has that girl? And you think you’re gonna get her back?”

“With your help I have a chance.”

“Nick, there’s no way I or anyone else is gonna trace that video feed. I’ve talked to everyone I know, including some people who’ve been at this a whole lot longer.”

“You told people what we’re working on?”

“Of course not. We were talking IP traces and algorithms. Digital forensics. We’re not going to find them that way.”

“They went to a lot of trouble to send Marcus a ransom demand,” I said.

“You think our guy’s still in that apartment, or do you think he took off after Taylor warned him?”

“I don’t know. If he’s in there, he was just the courier-he just picked Alexa up and handed her off to someone else. He wouldn’t have driven her out to Leominster and back here.”

“Maybe he dumped her phone there to set up a fake trail. So people would think she’s out there instead of right near Boston.”

“That’s too complex. Much smarter to just destroy her phone and have no trail at all. Also, he was driving a stolen car. Not worth the risk of getting caught with a broken taillight or an out-of-date registration sticker. Or just having some ambitious local cop run the plates.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“I’ll ransack his apartment and see what I can find that might lead me to Alexa. Bills, scraps of papers, computer files, anything.”

“Well, if he is there? Don’t forget, rich boy or not, he’s a dealer. He’s gonna be armed. Please don’t get yourself killed before our ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“The governor? Hello? You wanted me around in case they had technical questions you couldn’t answer because you’re only the ‘big picture’ guy?”

She was talking about a long-scheduled meeting with a former governor of a large state who’d been forced to resign over a bribery scandal. Everyone on the inside knew he’d been set up.

“Tell Jillian to cancel it,” I said.

“Cancel it?” she said incredulously. “These lawyers flew up from New York for this meeting. You can’t just cancel it.”

“Last I checked, I’m still the boss. Tell Jillian to cancel it. And ask her to clear my calendar for the rest of the week. Everything. I’m not doing anything else until I get this girl home.”

“The rest of the week?” she said. “You think this is only gonna take you a couple of days, you got your head up your butt. Anyway-”

“Talk later,” I interrupted, and I clicked off and got out of the car. Walked around to the side of the apartment building where Mauricio Perreira lived.

Drug dealers tend to live in a state of permanent paranoia. He probably had a gun close to the bed. Not under the pillow, which isn’t very comfortable. But under the bed or behind the headboard.

The only workable plan was to take him by surprise.

39.

Unless you pick locks for a living, knowing how doesn’t mean doing it well. I once hired a professional locksmith to give me lessons, though I’d already learned the basics from a repo man I’d met as a teenager, hanging out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors in Malden.

I also kept an assortment of tools in my car’s glove box, including a professional locksmith’s set of lock picks and tension wrenches. But an old-fashioned lockpick set requires finesse, time, and patience. And I was short on all three. I grabbed my SouthOrd electric pick gun, a sleek stainless-steel instrument the size of an electric toothbrush, which is quicker and easier, though noisier, than any hand tool. But the batteries were dead. So I reached for the EZ snap gun, a good old manual lock pick, originally developed for police officers who didn’t have time to learn the fine, slow art of lockpicking.

Unfortunately, lockpick guns aren’t particularly quiet. They make a fairly loud snap. But they’re quick.

I mounted the apartment building’s side stairs, which provided exterior entry to the separate units. A short cement flight of steps led to a narrow porch with a gray-painted wooden railing. From there on up, the stairs were painted wood. Keeping my tread light, I ascended to the top level, sidled along the railing for a few feet, and assessed.

A small window, curtains drawn, next to the apartment door. A simple pin tumbler lock. Not Schlage or some high-security brand, which would have been a challenge. Some no-name brand. That was a relief.

And a pinpoint LED light: a security system.

But the light was dark. He probably disarmed the system when he was at home.

So maybe he was here. Good.

I didn’t even look around. In case one of the neighbors was up early and happened to see me, I wanted to look like I was supposed to be there.

I worked quickly but casually. First I inserted the tension tool, roughly the size of a straightened paper clip, into the keyhole and worked it a bit. Grasping the snap gun in my right hand, I poked its needle into the keyhole beside the tension tool, careful not to touch the pins, and squeezed the handle.

A loud snap.

I had to snap it ten or eleven more times. The sound echoed in the gulley between the houses. Unless Perreira was a sound sleeper, he must have heard it.

Finally I felt the lock turn.

And I was in.

40.

The air was cold. An air conditioner was on somewhere, in another room. I was hit at once by the fetid, festering-swamp stench of old bong water.

Someone was here.

All the curtains were closed. The front room was almost completely dark. In a few seconds, though, my eyes became accustomed, and I was able to make my way through the cluttered room, weaving between an enormous flat-screen TV and an outsize leather couch, the path strewn with discarded beer and wine bottles. Somehow managing not to knock anything over, I approached the loud snoring that came from an open bedroom door. At the threshold I stopped. A lump in the bed, I saw. No, two lumps.

Long blond hair lay atop a pillow as if a lion had coughed up a hairball. I saw the nape of a woman’s neck, her well-defined shoulders. Next to her, mouth gaping, snoring like a buzz saw, was the man I recognized as Lorenzo. The guy from the security video at Slammer. The guy who’d abducted Alexa. No question about it.

I thought for just a second. Ran through my options.

Decided on the simplest one.

I came around to the side of the bed where Perreira lay under the rumpled sheet, half under the blanket. My footsteps were muffled by the wall-to-wall carpet. An old air conditioner rattled and roared like a jet engine. The room was ice-cold and smelled of rancid sweat. His face was turned away, toward the blond girl, the sheet pulled up to his chin.

In my left fist I grabbed the end of the sheet. With a swift jerk I yanked it up and over his head, then under, trapping his head. He began to flail. He cursed and shouted and thrashed his arms and legs. But he was wrapped as tight as a mummy. My right hand gripped his throat and squeezed. His struggles grew more frenzied, his screams muffled by the sheet.

The blond girl in the bed next to him screamed too and scrambled out of the bed, the screams strangely deep and masculine. As I clambered on top of Mauricio’s writhing body, pinning him down with my knees, I saw that the long-haired blond was in fact a skinny, delicate-looking young man.

“I don’t have anything to do with anything!” the boy shouted. “Dude, I barely know this guy!”

He backed away, as if he expected me to lunge at him too, but I turned and let him go.

I was afraid Perreira might pass out, so I eased up a bit on his throat. He gasped, then said hoarsely: “O que você quer? O que diabos você quer?”

I had no idea what he was saying. I don’t speak Portuguese. “Where is she?” I said.

“Entreguei o pacote!”

“Where is she?”

“Eu entreguei a menina!”

“Speak English.”

“O pacote! Entreguei o pacote!”

One of the words sounded sort of familiar. “The package?”

“I deliver”-he gasped-“the package. I deliver the package!”

“Package?” A white-hot anger crackled in my blood like a live wire. It took great restraint to keep from crushing his windpipe.

Clearly he thought I was connected to the kidnapping. Someone he worked for. So he was just the delivery boy. The first link in the chain. He’d been hired to abduct Alexa and hand her over to someone else.

And since he thought I was one of his employers, that meant he probably didn’t know them, hadn’t met them. This could be useful. I relaxed my grip on his throat, and he croaked, “Entreguei a cadela, qual é?”

Though I don’t speak Portuguese, I do know a few obscenities in several languages, and I was pretty sure he’d just used one in reference to Alexa. This displeased me. I squeezed his throat until I felt the soft cartilage start to give way, and then I made myself stop. Killing this cockroach was pointless. He was useful to me only alive.

“I’m going to let you go so you can answer a few questions,” I said. “If you lie about anything at all, no matter how trivial, I’m going to slice your ear off and send it to your father at the UN. For his office wall. The second lie, you lose the other ear. That one goes-”

“No! No! I tell you everything! What do you want? I do what you say! I do everything you say! I gave you this girl and I shut my mouth.”

“Where is she?”

“Why you asking me this? You tell me to pick the bitch up and drug her and bring her to you, I do it. What do you want, man? You got the girl. I got the money. I say nothing. We’re all done here. It’s all good.”

It’s all good. A phrase I really despise. He was slick and polished and used to dealing with high-end customers who’d never buy “party favors” from some slinger with prison ink and low riders. Most college kids and rich kids didn’t like thinking what they did was criminal, really. They considered the goods he sold them just another arbitrarily outlawed delicacy, like Iranian caviar or unpasteurized Camembert. A man like Mauricio made the drug trade seem not unlawful but exclusive.

“For you I’d say it’s pretty much all bad right now.”

On his bedside table was a Nokia cell phone. I grabbed it with my free hand and slipped it in my pocket.

Then I reached behind the headboard and found what felt a lot like a gun duct-taped back there. A very expensive STI pistol, I saw. I pocketed that too, then released my grip on his throat entirely. He drew a deep, rattling breath. His face was deep red, and he looked like he was on the verge of blacking out. Maybe I’d pushed it too far.

“All right,” I said, climbing off and standing beside the bed. “Get up.”

He struggled to sit up, tangled up in the sheets and weak from oxygen deprivation. He was wearing only red Speedos. Weakly, he shifted his legs over the side of the bed. His fingernails and toenails were manicured to a high gloss. “Jesus Cristo,” he gasped, “what you want from me, man?”

“You screwed up,” I said.

He shook his head, eyes terrified. “I gave you-I gave it to-the guy.”

“Which guy?”

“The guy who gave me the phone. You-you guys? What the hell, man? You work for them, too?”

“Which one?” I said.

“No one give me names. What is this? Who are you, man?”

“What was his name?” I shouted.

“I don’t know anyone’s name, man! I can’t talk. The guy got eyes on the back of his head!”

I was about to ask what he meant when I heard the thunder of footsteps on the stairs outside. He heard it too. His face was tight with fear. “Oh, Jesus Cristo, that’s them! That’s them! He said they kill me if I talk to anyone. I didn’t tell you nothing, man!”

Then came a crash and the splintering sound of his door being broken down with a metal ram.

The men who burst into the room were wearing green uniforms with green ballistic vests and black Kevlar helmets and goggles that made them look like giant insects from some bad science-fiction flick. Right behind the breachers came the assaulters with their H &K MP5 submachine guns. The ones with shields carried Glocks. They all had FBI patches on their shoulders and chests.

When he saw who they were, the expression on his face changed.

He looked relieved.

41.

The man was slowly crossing the bare earthen field toward the farmhouse when the sat phone on his belt began to trill. The morning was cold and brisk and the sky was blue glass.

He knew who it was, because only one person had this number, and he knew what the caller wanted.

As he answered the phone, he stopped at the exact center of the hump of earth and made a mental note to take another run at it with the pneumatic backfill tamper. Or just a few passes with the backhoe tires: That should do it.

Not that the girl was going anywhere, ten feet down.

But here in rural New Hampshire, neighbors sometimes got curious, or too friendly.

“Yes?” Dragomir said.

“Nothing yet,” said the man who called himself Kirill. They spoke in Russian.

Maybe that was his real name, maybe not. Dragomir didn’t care. Kirill was nothing more than an intermediary, an errand boy who passed messages back and forth between Dragomir and the very rich man Kirill called only the Client. Never a name. This was fine with Dragomir. The less he and the Client knew about each other, the better.

But Kirill fretted and hovered and yammered like a frightened old babushka. He worried that some detail might go awry. He seemed to think that his constant monitoring, the daily checkins, would keep everything running smoothly.

He didn’t know that Dragomir rarely made mistakes.

“It’s only been a few hours,” Dragomir said.

“What do you think, the father went back to sleep? He should have sent the file immediately. His daughter-”

“Patience,” Dragomir said.

A plane roared overhead, and the line went staticky. Jets flew by every hour or so, mostly at night, from the air base in Bangor, Maine. They had that big lumbering sound of military cargo transport planes. It reminded him of Afghanistan, the Ilyushin 76s that were always blasting by overhead.

“-hostage is in good health?” Kirill was saying when the static cleared.

The Iridium sat phone was encrypted, so Kirill spoke fairly openly, even though Dragomir never did. He never trusted technology. His reply was curt: “Is there anything else?”

“Nothing.”

He disconnected the call. The setting sun gave a golden cast to the freshly raked soil. His boots sank into the soft earth, the tread leaving precise impressions, like a plaster-of-Paris cast. Some of his footsteps crossed the deep tread of the backhoe loader’s tires.

He had a fleeting memory of the hard dirt prison yard, where sunlight never entered and no grass could grow. He’d liked lawns ever since.

Dragomir mounted the porch, past the air compressor on its long yellow extension cord, and pulled the screen door open. There were holes in the screen, so he opened and closed the wooden back door swiftly to keep out the bugs. The whole damned farmhouse was falling down. But he had no right to complain. The house and the land it sat on, nearly three hundred acres of forest in a remote part of New Hampshire, were owned by an old man who’d moved to Florida. The property hadn’t had a visitor in four years. Not even a caretaker.

So Dragomir had appointed himself the caretaker.

Even though the family trust had no idea.

As he went through the converted sunroom, he could hear the girl’s pathetic mewling over the computer speakers. On the monitor she twisted and clawed and screamed and writhed like some eerie green apparition.

The noise irritated him, so he hit a key to mute it.

42.

An hour later I was on the sixth floor of One Center Plaza with Diana, who looked exhausted, her eyes red-rimmed and bleary. The corkscrew tendrils of her hair were even more Medusan than usual. Yet she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

She waited for them to hand me my visitor badge, then escorted me in.

“So how’d that happen?” I said quietly as we walked.

Not until we’d passed the row of offices belonging to the assistant special agents in charge did she reply. Gordon Snyder’s door was open, I noticed, but it was angled in such a way that I couldn’t see whether he was there.

“All I was told was, a CI tipped them off.”

A confidential informant. “Whose?”

No reply. We reached a warren of cubicles, most of them empty. It was still early.

Her cubicle was unmistakable.

It was the grade-school photos taped to the cubicle walls that marked it as her workspace: sweet-looking kids who obviously weren’t relatives of hers. And the curling clips from the Stowe (Vermont) Reporter and the Biddeford (Maine) Journal Tribune and the Boston Herald with headlines like SEX OFFENDER CHARGED IN GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE. A close-up photo of a paisley-patterned bedspread. A photocopy of a note scrawled in block letters, a barely literate hand:

HI HONEY I BEEN WATCHING YOU I AM THE SAME PERSON THAT KIDNAPPED AN RAPE AN KILL ARDEN…

Things a normal person couldn’t bear to look at even once hung before her eyes every minute she sat at her desk.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I’m not cleared at that level.”

I could hear the annoying little snap of someone clipping fingernails at a nearby cubicle. “So who gave the order to roll the SWAT team?”

“The only person who can mobilize tactical is the SAC. But how did you know where to find Perreira?”

“I put a tracker on Taylor Armstrong.”

She smiled, nodded. “Nice.”

“Whoever did this just screwed up our best chance to find Alexa,” I said. “Where is he?”

“Downstairs in a locked interview room.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“You can’t.”

“Because I’m a private citizen?”

“That’s not the only reason. He’s not talking to anybody.”

“He’s lawyering up?”

“He’s invoking diplomatic immunity.”

“Who’s with him now?”

“Nobody. We’re in talks with Main Justice on how to handle this.”

“I know how to handle it.”

She smiled again. “No doubt.”

“Can you sneak me in there?”

“You serious?”

“Completely.”

“The answer is no. A legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate in Boston is on his way in. A man named…” She glanced at a scrawl on a Post-it pad next to her desk phone. “Cláudio Duarte Carvalho Barboza. Until he’s finished consulting with Perreira, no one can even enter the interview room.”

I stood up.

“Do me a favor and show me where he is,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just curious,” I said.

DIANA LED me down a flight of stairs to a closed, windowless room. A plain white door with a metal knob. No one standing around outside keeping watch.

“Any cameras or one-way mirrors?”

“Never. It’s against Bureau policy.”

“Huh. You know, I’d love a cup of coffee.”

“Don’t do anything to screw me up, Nick.”

“I won’t. Take your time with that coffee.”

Her face was impassive but there was a glint in her eyes. “I may need to brew a fresh pot. Might take me a while.”

MAURICIO WAS leaning back in a metal chair behind a Formica-topped table, looking bored. When he recognized me, he slowly grinned a broad smile of victory.

“I’m not talking, man. I got the… the imunidade diplomática.”

“So as soon as the legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate shows up, you’re a free man. You go home. That it?”

“That’s how it works, man. It’s all good.”

“Excellent,” I said. “I like that.”

He found this amusing. “You like that, huh?” He laughed.

I did too. “Oh, yeah. Definitely. Because out there, you don’t have any diplomatic immunity.”

His smile dimmed a few clicks.

“As soon as they let you go,” I said, “it’s going to be like tossing a handful of chum into a shark tank. Gonna be a feeding frenzy out there. The water’s going to be churning and the sharks are going to be circling.”

“Don’t try to threaten me.”

“Think about this. The guys that hired you? They’re going to assume you told us everything.”

A quick headshake. “I don’t cooperate with FBI.”

“You’re far too modest about all the help you’ve given us.”

“I don’t say nothing to the FBI. I don’t say nothing to nobody.”

“Sure you did.” I pulled out his Nokia mobile phone and showed it to him. “You gave us a phone number, for one. And the U.S. government is extremely grateful to you. In fact, I’m going to personally see to it that we issue you a commendation for all your help to U.S. law enforcement.”

“No one believe I talk,” he said. But he didn’t sound so confident anymore. He’d assumed I was with the FBI, and I didn’t plan to correct the impression.

“Yeah? I wonder what they’ll think when I leave a message on your voice mail giving you the name of your regular contact here at the Bureau. Telling you how to arrange our next meeting. Maybe talking about how you’ll be wearing a wire next time you meet with your Colombian friends.”

I could see the blood drain from his face.

“I hope you know they’ve got your line tapped,” I said. “They probably cloned your cell phone too.”

He shook his head, jutted his lower lip, feigning skepticism, but I could see I’d gotten to him.

“Ever hear what they do to people who betray them?”

“They not gonna kill me.”

“True,” I said. “They like to torture and mutilate first. They like to drag it out. You’ll wish they’d kill you, what I hear. They have a saying, ‘You can’t get a positive identification of a body from a torso.’” I paused for effect. “That’s why they like to cut off the hands and feet and head. Of course, they’re wrong. You can get a positive identification from a torso. It just takes a little longer.”

Mauricio’s brown eyes had gone flat and dull, and terror was contorting his facial muscles.

“Maybe your daddy can pull in some favors and get them to go easy on you, hmm?”

His larynx worked up and down. He was trying to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry. It looked like a sock was stuck in his throat.

“But you know what?” I said. “Today’s your lucky day. Because I’m prepared to offer you a special deal. Great terms too. You tell us what we want to know, and you’ll never hear from us again. No thank-you notes. No friendly calls. You might even live.” I waited a beat. “It’s all good.”

“What do you want?” he whispered, his voice cracking.

“A name. The name of the guy who hired you to pick up the girl.”

“I told you-”

“A full description. Height. Eye color. How he contacted you in the first place. Where you delivered the… ‘package’… to them.”

“I don’t know the name, man,” he whispered. “He was some big dude, real strong. Real scary.”

He was telling the truth now, I was convinced. His terror had yanked away his habitual scrim of dishonesty. He had just one objective, which was to stay alive. Not to protect his employers. He wasn’t going to hold anything back from me.

“Did he tell you why he wanted the girl?”

“He just told me to pick her up and give her this drug and hand her over-”

I heard what sounded like footsteps approaching, voices becoming louder. Mauricio heard it too. He froze, looked at the door.

“Where did he take her?” I said.

“The guy’s got eyes on the back of his head,” he whispered. “I can’t say nothing.”

“What do you mean, eyes on the back of his head?”

But then the door came open, and a squat, hulking man in a gray suit with a gleaming bald head stared in.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” came the rumbling voice of Gordon Snyder.

43.

“Hello, Spike,” I said.

“What’s your game, Heller?” Snyder said. “Trying to coach the witness? Or buy his silence?”

Before I could reply, a loud voice came from behind him: “No one is allowed to talk to my client! I made that eminently clear on the phone.”

Someone shoved his way past Snyder into the interview room: a large, elegant man, probably six foot two, broad shoulders. He had long gray hair almost to his shirt collar, deep-set eyes, and acne-gouged cheeks. He was wearing a dark nailhead suit and a burgundy foulard tie and an air of imperious authority. The fabric of his bespoke suit draped snugly along his broad shoulders.

The legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, of course. “Remove this person at once,” he said, his English impeccable, with barely a trace of an accent. “You may not question this man. And if there is any recording equipment in here, it must be switched off at once. My discussions with my client must be absolutely privileged.”

“Understood, Mr. Barboza,” Snyder said. His eyes flashed with fury at me, and he leveled a stubby finger, then swiveled it smoothly toward the doorway like a magician wielding a wand.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said.

44.

A dog was barking in the yard.

Dragomir’s first thought was of hunters. It wasn’t hunting season, but that didn’t deter some people. He’d posted NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs every fifty feet in the wooded part of the property, but not everyone could read, or chose to.

Hunters meant intruders, and intruders meant scrutiny.

People in rural areas were always getting involved in their neighbors’ business. Especially a stranger who showed up one day with no introduction.

Are you the new owner? Are you an Alderson?

What’s with the Caterpillar backhoe loader out back? Are you doing construction? All by yourself, no crew? Really? Huh. Whatcha building?

He’d bought all the equipment with cash. The backhoe came from a farm supply store in Biddeford, the air compressor from the Home Depot in Plaistow.

The casket he’d picked out at a wholesale casket company in Dover. He’d said something about the family burial plot, double deep, his sadly departed uncle the first one in. At a depth of twelve feet, he’d explained, he wanted to make absolute certain it was crushproof.

The sturdiest one they had was sixteen-gauge carbon steel, painted Triton Gray, in the Generous Dimensions line. Americans were increasingly obese, so oversized caskets were strong sellers, and he’d had to settle for a floor model.

Groundwater seepage was always a problem, even in the most well-made caskets, which might cause the girl to drown slowly, before they were done with her, and that wouldn’t do either. Fortunately, the model he’d purchased was equipped with a water-resistant gasket. You turned a crank at the end of the box to seal it tight. A steel bar rolled across the top to lock it down. All of this was standard equipment, as if grave robbers were still a problem in the twenty-first century.

The refitting was quick work, the sort of mechanical job he’d always enjoyed. Using a cobalt drill bit he drilled a hole through the carbon steel at the end where the girl’s head would be. There he welded a quarter-inch brass connector plug in place and attached it to a crushproof hose that ran several hundred feet to the air compressor on the porch. Air would flow in here every time the air compressor went on, which was a couple of minutes each hour, night and day, since it was on a timer switch. He trenched the hose into the ground along with the Ethernet cable.

At the other end of the casket he cut a much larger opening with a hole saw. There he welded the brass bushing to attach a four-inch exhaust line. Now the gray PVC pipe stuck out of the ground in the middle of the dirt field like a solitary sapling. Its end curved down like an umbrella handle. It was the sort of thing used at a landfill to vent the methane gas that built up underground.

So the girl would get a steady supply of fresh air, which was more than his father had when he’d been trapped in the coal mine in Tomsk.

As a young boy, Dragomir used to enjoy watching his father and the other miners ride backward in the mantrip, descending hundreds of meters into the depths. Dragomir was forever asking to ride too, but his father always refused.

Each night his father came home caked in black dust so thick you could see only his eyes. His coughing kept Dragomir up many a night. He spat black and left the sputum floating in the toilet bowl.

Coal mining, he told once told Dragomir, was the only job where you had to dig your own grave.

Dragomir listened, rapt, to his father’s grim tales. How he’d seen a roof bolter come down on a friend of his and crush his face. Or watched a guy cut in half by the coal car. Someone was once caught between the drums of the coal crusher and smashed into pieces between its teeth.

His mother, Dusya, raged at his father for filling a young boy’s head with such frightening stories. But Dragomir always wanted to hear more.

The bedtime stories stopped when Dragomir was almost ten.

A knock at the door to their communal apartment in the middle of the night. His mother’s high thin scream.

She brought him to the mine to join the crowds gathered there, pleading for any sort of news, even bad news.

He was fascinated. He wanted to know what had happened, but no one would tell him. He overheard only fragments. Something about how the miners had accidentally dug into an abandoned, flooded shaft. How the water rushed in and trapped them like rats.

But Dragomir wanted to know more. His thirst was unslakable. He wanted details.

He imagined his father and the other men, dozens or even hundreds of them, struggling to keep their heads above the rising black water, fighting over a few inches of air space that dwindled by the minute. He imagined them grappling in the black water, pushing each other’s heads down into the water, old friends and even brothers, trying to survive a few minutes longer, all the while knowing that none of them would ever come out.

He wanted to know what it felt like to realize with absolute certainty that you were about to die and to be powerless to do anything about it. His mind returned to this again and again, the way a child fingers a wound. He was fascinated by the unknown, lured to what repelled others, because it allowed him to draw close to his father, to know what his father knew in those last moments of his life.

He’d always felt cheated somehow not to have witnessed the last seconds of his father’s life.

All he had was his imagination.

THE DAMNED dog would not stop barking. Now he could hear it pawing at the screen door out back. He looked out a window and saw a dirt-covered mongrel, leaping and snarling at the screen. Feral, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure.

He opened the wooden door, his Wasp gas injection knife at the ready, his new toy. Just the screen between him and the cur.

Startled, the dog backed away, bared its teeth, gave a low snarl.

He called to it softly in Russian, “Here, pooch,” and opened the screen door. The dog lunged at him, and he plunged the blade into the beast’s abdomen.

With his thumb he slid the button to shoot out a frozen basketball of compressed air.

The explosion was instantaneous and satisfying, but he realized at once he’d done it wrong. He was spattered by the animal’s viscera, red and glistening, slimy scraps of skin and fur, a rainburst of offal.

Once in a while he did make mistakes. Next time he would make sure to plunge the knife in to the hilt before flicking the gas release.

It took him half an hour to sweep the ruined carcass into a trash bag and haul it into the woods to be buried later, and then hose down the blood-slick porch and screen door.

He took a shower in the small pre-fab fiberglass stall on the second floor and got into clean jeans and a flannel shirt, and then he heard the doorbell ring. He looked out the bedroom window, saw a Lexus SUV parked in the dirt road out front. He put on a baseball cap, backward, to conceal the tattoo, and casually came down the stairs and opened the front door.

“Sorry to disturb you,” said a middle-aged man with no chin and thick wire-rim glasses. “My dog ran off and I was wondering if you might have seen it.”

“Dog?” Dragomir said through the front screen.

“Oh, now, where’s my manners,” the man said. “I’m Sam Dupuis, from across the road.”

Then the man paused expectantly.

“Andros,” Dragomir said. “Caretaker.”

Andros was a Polish name, but it also sounded Greek.

“Good to know you, Andros,” the neighbor said. “I thought I saw Hercules run down your driveway, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Very sorry,” Dragomir said with a smile. “Wish I could help. Hope you find him soon.”

45.

I found Diana in a break room, sitting by herself, the Boston Globe spread out on a round table before her. It didn’t look like she’d cracked it, though. The sections were arrayed but unopened. She was just waiting.

“Your coffee,” she said, holding out a cup. “Walk with me.”

I followed her out. “They found Alexa’s purse under his bed,” she said. “He’d taken all her cash but was probably afraid to use her credit cards. The stolen Jaguar was found in a Tufts University garage.”

“That give up any location information?”

“It’s too old to have air bags let alone a nav system. But they did find trace quantities of a white powder.”

“Coke?”

“Burundanga powder. It’s an extract of the borrachio plant-also known as Colombian devil’s breath. A naturally occurring source of scopolamine.”

“An herbal date-rape drug.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard that half the admissions to Bogotá’s emergency rooms are caused by burundanga. Criminals spike their victims’ drinks with the stuff at nightclubs and brothels. It’s tasteless, odorless, and water-soluble. And it turns the victims into zombies, basically. Lucid, but totally submissive. A complete loss of will. So their victims will do what they’re told-they’ll withdraw cash from their ATMs and hand it over without arguing. And when it wears off, they have no recollection of what happened.”

On the way to the stairs we passed the legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, the guy with the long gray hair and the expensive suit. Black curly chest hair sprouted out of his open shirt collar. He was walking briskly but seemed lost in thought, his head down.

As we climbed the stairs, I said, “Any phone records in his apartment, cell phone records, any of that stuff?”

“They’ve collected everything and they’re working it. Nothing so far.”

As she opened the door to the seventh floor, I stopped. “Wasn’t that guy wearing a tie?”

She looked at me in the dim light of the stairwell, then whirled around, and we went back down the stairs at a fairly good clip.

When we reached the interview room where I’d talked to Perreira, Diana opened the door, and she gasped.

I can’t say I was entirely surprised by what I saw, but it was grotesque all the same.

Mauricio Perreira’s body was twisted unnaturally, his face horribly contorted, frozen in a silent, agonized shriek. His lips were blue and his eyes bulged, the sclera mottled with blood from the burst capillaries. The classic signs of petechial hemorrhaging.

Fastened tightly around his neck like a tourniquet, like some kinky fashion statement, was the legal attaché’s burgundy silk necktie. It was only slightly darker than the bruising on his throat above and below the ligature.

“He’s probably still in the building,” Diana said. “On his way out.”

“Check the tie,” I said. “I doubt it’s from Brooks Brothers.”

46.

I raced down the five flights of stairs to Cambridge Street, hoping I’d catch the Brazilian on his way out, but by the time I reached the street, there was no sign of him. There were at least a dozen ways he could have gone. I circled back to the lobby, hoping that he’d taken one of the glacially slow elevators, but he didn’t appear. I took the stairs down to the parking garage underneath One Center Plaza, but once I got down there I saw it was hopeless, far too big and mazelike. And since he’d obviously come here to kill a man in FBI custody, he must have planned his getaway in advance.

I’d failed at catching the man who’d just snuffed out my only lead to Alexa Marcus.

Diana greeted me in the sixth-floor lobby and didn’t even ask. “You never had a chance,” she said.

A loud, blatting alarm was sounding throughout the floor, clogging the aisles with a lot of confused FBI agents and clerical staff who didn’t know what they were supposed to do. Outside the interview room where Perreira had been detained, a small crowd had gathered. FBI crime-scene techs were already at work inside, gathering prints and hair and fiber. They’d probably never had to travel such a short distance to do a job. A couple of important-looking men and women in business suits stood outside the threshold of the room in tense conversation.

“You were wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“The tie. It was Brooks Brothers.”

“My bad.”

“Only it had something like fishing line stitched inside.”

“Probably eighty-pound high-tensile-strength, braided line. It makes a very effective garrote. Works like a cheese slicer. He could easily have decapitated Perreira if he chose to, only he probably didn’t want to get arterial blood all over his expensive suit.”

She looked horrified, said nothing.

“Who cleared him in?” I said.

“See, that’s the problem. There is no clearance procedure. Everyone assumed someone else had vetted him. He presented ID at the desk, claiming to be Cláudio Barboza from the Brazilian consulate, and who’s going to question him?”

“Someone should call the consulate to check whether there’s anyone there with that name.”

“I just did.”

“And?”

“They don’t even have a legal attaché in Boston.”

I just groaned. “It’s probably too much to expect that the guy left any prints.”

“Didn’t you notice those very expensive-looking black lambskin gloves he wore?”

“No,” I admitted. “But at least you guys have surveillance video.”

“That we do,” she said. “Cameras all over the place.”

“Except in the interview room, where it might have done us some good.”

“The video’s not going to tell us anything we don’t know.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope you have better facial recognition than the Pentagon had when I was there. Which was crap.” People sometimes forgot that facial recognition isn’t the same as facial identification. It works by matching a face with a photo of someone who’s already been identified. Unless you had a good high-resolution image to match it against, the software couldn’t tell the difference between Lillian Hellman and Scarlett Johansson.

“No better. The guy’s obviously a pro. He wouldn’t have been sloppy enough to show his face here unless he felt secure we wouldn’t catch him.”

“Right,” I said. “He knew he’d have no problem getting in-or out. So why was that?”

She shrugged. “Way above my pay grade.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone being killed in FBI custody before-inside an FBI field office?”

“Never.”

“A couple of guys break into my loft to put a local intercept on my Internet. The SWAT team shows up in Medford just minutes after I do. They grab a key witness, who’s later murdered in a secure interview room within FBI headquarters. Obviously someone didn’t want me talking to Perreira.”

“Don’t tell me you’re accusing Gordon Snyder.”

“I’d happily blame Gordon Snyder for the BP oil spill, cancer, and global warming if I could. But not this. He’s too obsessed with bringing Marshall Marcus down.”

She smiled. “Exactly.”

“But it’s someone in the government. Someone at a high level. Someone who doesn’t want me finding out who kidnapped Alexa.”

“Come on, Nico. That’s conspiracy theory stuff.”

“As the saying goes, not every conspiracy is a theory.”

“I guess that means you don’t trust me either.”

“I trust you absolutely. Totally. Without reservation. I just need to keep in mind that anything I tell you might end up in Gordon Snyder’s in-box.”

She looked wounded. “So you don’t trust me?”

“Put it this way: If you learned something germane to your investigation and you didn’t pass it along to him, you wouldn’t be doing your job, would you?”

After a moment, she nodded slowly. “True.”

“So you see, I’d never lie to you, but I can’t tell you everything.”

“Okay. Fair enough. So if someone’s really trying to stop you from finding Alexa, what’s the reason?”

I shrugged. “No idea. But I feel like they’re sending me a message.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m on the right track.”

47.

My old friend George Devlin-Romeo, as we called him in the Special Forces-was the handsomest man you ever saw.

Not only was he the best-looking, most popular guy in his high school class, as well as the class president, but he was also the star of the school’s hockey team. In a hockey-crazed town like Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was saying something. He had a great voice too and starred in his high school musical senior year. He was a whiz at computers and an avid gamer.

He could have done anything, but the Devlins had no money to send him to college, so he enlisted in the army. There he qualified for the Special Forces, of course, because he was just that kind of guy. After some specialized computer training he was made a communications sergeant. That’s how I first got to know George: He was the comms sergeant in my detachment. I don’t know who first came up with the nickname “Romeo,” but it stuck.

After he was wounded in Afghanistan, and his VA therapy ended, however, he told us to stop calling him Romeo and start calling him George.

I MET him in the enormous white RV, bristling with antennas, that served as his combination home and mobile office. He’d parked it in an underground garage in a Holiday Inn in Dedham. That was typical for him. He preferred to meet in out-of-the-way locations. He seemed to live his life on the lam. As if someone were out to get him.

I opened the van door and entered the dimly lit interior.

“Heller.” His voice came out of the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could see him sitting on a stool, his back to me, before a bank of computer monitors and such.

“Hey, George. Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

“I take it the GPS tracker was successful.”

“Absolutely. It was brilliant. Thank you.”

“Next time please remember to check your e-mail.”

I nodded, held out the Nokia cell phone I’d taken from Mauricio’s apartment. He swiveled and turned his face toward me.

What was left of his face.

I’d never gotten used to seeing it, so each time it gave me a jolt. It was a horrible welter of ropy scar tissue, some strands paste-white, others an inflamed red. He had nostrils and a slash of a mouth, and eyelids the army surgeons had crafted from patches of skin taken from his inner thigh. The stitch marks were still prominent.

Fortunately, Devlin was able to breathe without too much pain now. He was able to see out of one eye.

But he was not easy to look at. He’d become a monster. I suppose there was some sort of irony in the fact that his physical appearance, which had defined him for so long, defined him still.

“I assume you know how to retrieve numbers from the call log,” he said. He spoke in a raspy whisper, his vocal cords ruined, and his mouth often made a wet clicking noise, the sound of tissue in the wrong place.

“Even I know how to do that.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“The only phone number on here, dialed or retrieved, is for a mobile phone. That’s probably his contact-whoever hired him to abduct the girl. If anyone can locate the bad guy from his phone, it’s you.”

“Why didn’t you ask the FBI for help?”

“Because I’m not sure who I can trust there.”

“The answer is no one. Why are you working with them, anyway? I thought you left all that government crap behind.”

“Because I need them. Whatever it takes to get Alexa back.”

He breathed in and out noisily. “No comment.”

He despised all government agencies and viewed them with extreme paranoia. They were the enemy. They were all too powerful and malevolent and I think he blamed every one of them for the Iraqi IED that had detonated his Humvee’s gas tank. He didn’t seem to credit the heroic army plastic surgeons who’d saved his life and given him at least some semblance of a face, grotesque though it was. But who could blame him for being angry?

He tilted his head in a funny way to inspect the phone. He preferred to work in low light, even near-darkness, because his eye had become hypersensitive to the light. “Ah, a Nokla 8800. This is no ordinary burner.”

“You mean Nokia.”

He showed it to me. “Can you read, Nick? It says NOKLA.”

He was right. It said NOKLA. “A knockoff?”

He punched out a few numbers on the phone. “Yep, the IMEI confirms it.”

“The what?”

“The serial number.” He slid off the back cover and popped the battery out. “A Shenzhen Special,” he said, holding it up. I leaned close. The battery had Chinese characters all over it. “Ever look on eBay and see a special sale on Nokia phones-brand-new, half price? They’re all made in China.”

I nodded. “If you order mobile phones over the Internet, you don’t have to risk going into Walmart or Target and having your face show up on a surveillance camera,” I said. I immediately regretted the choice of words. What he’d give to be able to walk into a Walmart without encountering the averted looks, the squeamishness, the screams of children.

Devlin abruptly turned to look at one of his screens. A green dot was flashing.

“Speaking of tracking devices, do you have one on you?”

“None that I know of.”

“Didn’t I tell you to take precautions coming here?”

“I did.”

“May I see your handheld?”

I handed him my BlackBerry. He peered at it, set it down on the narrow counter, popped open its battery compartment. Lifted out the battery, then wriggled something loose with a pair of tweezers. Held it up and looked at it aslant. Devlin was no longer capable of facial expressions, but if he were, he’d probably have displayed triumph.

“Someone’s been tracking your every move, Heller,” he said. “Any idea how long?”

48.

I had no idea, of course, how long I’d been followed. But at least now I knew how they were able to track me to Mauricio Perreira’s apartment in Medford. Some “confidential informant.”

“Looks like the FBI put a tail on you. And I thought you were cooperating. Did anyone have an opportunity to meddle with your BlackBerry without you noticing?”

I nodded. I remembered checking my BlackBerry at the FBI’s reception desk in Boston, not once but twice.

“Now even I’m starting to get paranoid,” I said.

He turned to look at me. Instinctively I wanted to look away from that face, so I made a point of meeting his eyes.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” he said. In the dark still interior of his van, his whisper gave me goose bumps. “I believe I’m quoting Nick Heller.”

“Not original to me.”

“In any case, you’re absolutely correct about the Chinese knockoffs. Buying them over the Internet reduces their risk of exposure, yes. But there’s an even better reason. Something only the best bad guys know about.”

“Okay.”

“The IMEI. The electronic serial number. Every mobile phone has one, even the cheapest disposables.”

“Even Noklas?”

“Yes, even Noklas. But by using Shenzhen Specials, your bad guys make it much, much harder to be caught by traditional means.”

“How so?”

“Put it this way. If the FBI has the serial number of a real Nokia phone, all they have to do is call Finland and Nokia’s going to tell them where the phone was sold. Bad guys don’t want that. But this baby, on the other hand-who’re you gonna call, some factory in Shenzhen? They won’t speak English and they sure as hell don’t keep records and they probably don’t even answer the phone. Good luck with that.”

“So these guys are pros,” I said.

He didn’t reply. He was leaning over the shallow ledge with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers trying to pry something out of the back of the phone. Finally he succeeded and held up a little orange cardboard rectangle.

“The SIM card,” I said. “Chinese too?”

“Uzbek. These guys are really smart.”

“The SIM card’s from Uzbekistan?”

“They probably buy ’em in bulk online, get them shipped to some drop box, end of the trail. Wow. A Chinese knockoff phone with an untraceable serial number and an untraceable SIM card. Know any FBI agents who speak Uzbek?”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“Some deep digging.”

“Of what sort?”

“Why don’t you leave that part to me,” he said.

“Because my puny mortal mind cannot possibly hope to comprehend?”

“Here’s your BlackBerry. Clean as a whistle.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “But I’d like you to put the GPS bug back in.”

“That’s… foolish.”

“No doubt,” I said. “But first I’d like you to drain the battery on the tracking bug. Can you do that?”

“It doesn’t draw from your BlackBerry’s battery, so sure, that’s not a problem.”

“Good. I want it to die a natural death in about, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.”

He nodded. “So they’ll never know that you discovered it.”

“Right. I much prefer being underestimated.”

If he could have smiled, he would have. But I heard it in his voice. “You know something, Heller?” he said. “I think I’ve underestimated you. You’re really quite an impressive guy.”

“Do me a favor,” I said, “and keep it to yourself.”

As I returned to the Defender, my BlackBerry was ringing.

“I thought I’d have heard from you by now,” Diana said.

“My BlackBerry was temporarily offline.”

“You didn’t see what I sent you?”

“What did you send me?”

“A photograph of our kidnapper,” she said.

49.

The town of Pine Ridge, New Hampshire, (population 1,260) had a police force that consisted of two full-time officers, two part-time officers, and one police chief.

Walter Nowitzki had been the police chief in Pine Ridge for twelve years. He’d been on the force in Concord before that and grabbed the chief’s job when it opened up. He and Delia wanted to move to a small town, and he wanted more time to hunt. The work here was routine and uneventful, and when it wasn’t hunting season, it was downright slow.

Jason Kent, the rookie, entered his office hesitantly. His cheeks and his jug ears were red, as they always got when he was nervous.

“Chief?” Jason said.

“Sam Dupuis keeps calling,” Chief Nowitzki said. “Got a bug up his ass about the Alderson property.”

“What’s the deal? No one lives there.”

Nowitzki shook his head. “Something about how his dog ran off, I didn’t quite get it. But now he says he thinks they’re doing work without a permit and who knows what else.”

“You want me to drive out and talk to Mr. Dupuis?”

“Just head on over to the Alderson property, would you? Go out there and introduce yourself and see what’s up.”

“I didn’t know any of the Aldersons even came here anymore. I thought the old man was just, like, an absentee owner.”

“Sam says it’s a caretaker or a contractor or something, works for the family.”

“Okay.” Jason rose and was out the door when Chief Nowitzki said, “But keep it polite, would you? Don’t go ruffling any feathers.”

50.

I clicked on Diana’s e-mail and waited impatiently as the attachment opened.

A photograph, muddy and low-contrast. The back of a man’s head and shoulders. The picture looked like it had been taken at night. A surveillance photo, maybe?

So why was Diana so sure this was the guy?

I studied it more closely, though on the BlackBerry’s screen it wasn’t easy. I saw what might have been the headrest of a car. The photo had been taken from the back seat.

The man’s shoulders rose well above the headrest. He was tall. His head appeared to be shaved. But something was obscuring a large area of his head and neck: a shirt with a high collar? No, maybe it was just a dark blotch, a flaw in the photo. As I looked closer, it seemed like the entire back of his head and neck was covered with some sort of hideous birthmark.

But then, as I continued to study it, I realized it wasn’t a birthmark at all. It was a design, an illustration. It looked like a tattoo, but no one got tattoos on their scalp, did they?

Wrong.

It was a tattoo of the head of a large bird, maybe an eagle or a vulture. A line drawing in black or dark blue, highly detailed if crudely executed. Stylized feathers, a sharp beak, erect ears. An owl, maybe, with large, fierce staring eyes. Huge blank circles with much smaller circles at their center, representing the irises.

They stared at you. They stared at whoever had taken the picture.

The guy got eyes on the back of his head.

When Mauricio Perreira had babbled that to me, I’d paid it no attention. It was a figure of speech, part of a long desperate rant by a terrified man, nothing more. I assumed he meant to say, in his broken English, He’s got eyes in the back of his head. Meaning: This man hears and sees everything, has sources everywhere, I can’t give you his name, I’m scared of him.

He was scared. But it wasn’t a metaphor. He meant it literally, almost. There were eyes on the back of the man’s head.

DIANA ANSWERED on the first ring.

“Who took the picture?” I said.

“Alexandra Marcus. This came from her iPhone, taken the night she disappeared.”

“When?”

“At 2:36 A.M. Apparently all iPhone photos are encoded with metadata that tell you the date and time. And something called a geotag, which gives you the GPS coordinates of the phone at the time the picture was taken.”

“Leominster?”

“Straight down the road about a mile from where you found it.”

“That’s an owl.”

“Right. I wasn’t sure whether you’d be able to make it out on your BlackBerry. But if you enlarge the photo it appears that the tattoo covers his head and neck and probably a good portion of his upper back as well.”

“You already searched NCIC?”

“Sure. One of the fields in the database is for scars and marks and tattoos. No hits.”

“Did you send it to your Gang Intelligence Center?”

“Sure. But no luck.”

“Isn’t there some central database of criminal tattoos?”

“There should be, but there isn’t.”

I thought a moment. “Ever see the Latin Kings tattoos?” The Latin Kings were the biggest Hispanic street gang in the country.

“It’s a five-pointed crown or something?”

“That’s one of them. There’s also a tattoo of a lion wearing a crown. Sharp teeth, big eyes. Some gang members get it tattooed on their backs. It’s huge.”

“You think he’s part of a Latino gang?”

“Some kind of gang, anyway.”

“I’ve sent the photo to our seventy-five legal attachés around the world. Asking them to run it by local law enforcement. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said dubiously. “You’d think a guy with an owl on his head and neck would be fairly memorable. People aren’t likely to forget a sight like that.”

“That’s not smart. Owls are supposed to be smart.”

“Your average street pigeon is ten times smarter than the smartest owl. It’s not about smart. It’s about scary. In some cultures, an owl is a symbol of death,” I said. “A bad omen. A prophecy of death.”

“Where? Which countries?”

I thought for a moment. “Mexico. Japan. Romania, I think. Maybe Russia. Ever see an owl hunt?” I said.

“Oddly enough, I haven’t.”

“It moves its head side to side and up and down, looking and listening, triangulating on its prey. You really can’t find a more perfect, more ruthless killer.”

51.

“Hi, Mr. Heller,” Jillian Alperin said as I entered the office. “Dorothy’s looking for you.”

“You’re allowed to call me Nick,” I said, for what must have been the twentieth time since she’d started working for me.

“Thank you, Mr. Heller, but I’m not comfortable with that.”

“Right,” I said. “Then just call me El Jefe.”

“Excuse me?”

I noticed the butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder. She was wearing some kind of lacy tank top that bared a few inches of her midriff. Her navel was pierced. “What does that mean, the butterfly?” I asked.

“It’s a symbol of freedom and metamorphosis. I got it when I stopped eating flesh.”

“You used to be a cannibal? I didn’t see that on your job application.”

“What? I mean, I used to eat meat. I have a ‘meat is murder’ tattoo on my lower back, want to see it?” She stood up and turned around.

Dorothy’s voice rang out as she approached. “Jillian, you can show your tramp stamps after work and on your own time. Also, you and I need to have a talk about appropriate office attire.”

“You said I didn’t have to wear high heels.”

Dorothy shook her head. “I got that picture you sent,” she said to me. “I’ve been Googling tattoos, but no luck so far.”

“My brother worked in a tattoo parlor in Saugus,” Jillian said.

“How about you replace the toner cartridge like I asked,” Dorothy said.

IN MY office, I said, “Remind me why you hired Jillian again.”

“She’s a very, very smart young woman.”

“That escaped me.”

“I admit she’s taking a little longer to catch on to the clerical stuff than I expected-”

“Isn’t her job all about the clerical stuff?”

“Give her a chance,” she told me sternly, “or you can hire her replacement. Now, if we can please move on. I found spyware on our network.”

“What kind of spyware?”

“Well, a molar virus. It burrowed into our intranet, injected code, and opened a back door. For a couple of days now it’s been scanning all volumes for protected files and then sending them out.”

“That’s how they got my security system codes,” I said. “Where did it send to?”

She shook her head. “Proxy servers so many times removed that it’s just about impossible to find. But I rooted it out. It should be gone.”

“How did it get onto our system in the first place?”

“I’m working on that. I-”

My intercom buzzed, and Jillian said, “You have a visitor.”

I looked at Dorothy, who shrugged. “Name?” I said.

“Belinda Marcus,” Jillian said.

52.

“I’m worried sick about Marshall,” Belinda said. “I think he’s going to have a heart attack.” She was wearing a light brown scoop-neck linen top with sequins around the neckline. It sort of belled out at the midriff. She threw out her thin arms and embraced me. Her perfume smelled like bathroom deodorizer.

“I’m sorry, Belinda, did we have an appointment?”

She sat and folded her legs. “No, we did not, Nick, but we need to talk.”

“Give me one quick second.” I turned my chair and typed out an instant message to Dorothy:

Need bkgd on Belinda Marcus ASAP.

How soon?

Immediately. Whatever you can get.

“I’m all yours,” I said. “Can I get you a Coke?”

“The only soda I drink is Diet Pepsi, but I don’t need the caffeine. Nick, I know I should have called first, but Marshall had to go in to the office, and I got a ride with him. I told him I wanted to meet a girlfriend for coffee in the Back Bay.”

“Why did he have to go to the office?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure it’s about Alexa. It has to be. Nick, I’ve been wanting to talk to y’all privately, without Marshall, since this whole nightmare began.”

I nodded.

“I feel like I’m being disloyal, and he’d probably kill me if he knew I was telling y’all this. But I-I’m just at my wit’s end, and someone needs to say something. I know Marshall’s your old and dear friend, and you barely know me, I understand that, but can you please promise me Marshall will never find out we spoke?” She bit her lower lip and held her breath and waited for my response.

I paused a moment. “Okay.”

She let out a sigh. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Nick, you need to know that Marshall is… he’s under a great deal of pressure. All he wants is to get his beloved daughter back, but they… they won’t let him hand over what they want, and it’s tearing him up inside.”

“Who won’t let him?”

She looked at me anxiously. “David Schechter.”

“How do you know this? Does he talk to you about it?”

“Never. I’ve… just heard them arguing. I’ve heard Marshall pleading with him, it would break your heart.”

“So you must know what Mercury is?”

She shook her head violently. “I don’t. I really don’t. I mean, it’s a file of some sort, but I have no idea what it’s about. I don’t care if it’s the answers to next Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle or the nuclear codes. We’ve got to give it to them. We’ve got to get that girl free.”

“So why are you telling me?”

She studied her fingernails. It looked like a brand-new manicure. The polish matched her blouse. “Marshall is so deep in some kind of trouble, and I don’t know who to turn to.”

I looked at my computer screen. An instant message had popped up from Dorothy. A few lines of text.

“I’m sure he trusts you,” I said. “You’ve been married for, what, three years, right?”

She nodded.

“You were a flight attendant when you met Marshall?”

She nodded, smiled. Her smile was abashed and ruefully embarrassed and pleased, all at once. “He saved me,” she said. “I’ve always hated flying.”

“That’s got to be a Georgia accent.”

“Very good,” she said. “A little town called Barnesville.”

“Are you serious? Barnesville, Georgia? I love Barnesville!”

“Have you been there? Really?”

“Are you kidding, I dated a girl from Barnesville. Went down there a bunch, met her parents and her brothers and sisters.”

Belinda didn’t look terribly interested. “What’s her name? Everyone knows everyone down there.”

“Purcell. Cindy Purcell?”

Belinda shook her head. “She must be a lot younger.”

“But I’m sure you’ve eaten at her parents’ restaurant, Brownie’s.”

“Oh, sure. But Nick-”

“I’ve never had anything like their low-country boil.”

“Never had that dish, but I’m sure it’s good. Southern cooking is the best, isn’t it? I miss it so.”

“Well,” I said, standing. “I’m glad you came in. I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but it sure was helpful.”

She remained seated. “I know what people call me. I know some people think I’m a gold digger because I happened to marry a wealthy man. But I didn’t marry Marshall for his money. I just want what’s best for him. And I want that girl back, Nick. Whatever it takes.”

AFTER SHE’D left, I called Dorothy in.

“You ever meet a Georgian who preferred Pepsi to Coke?” I said.

“I’m sure they exist. But no, I haven’t. And I’ve certainly never met a Georgian who uses the word ‘soda.’ Every soft drink is always ‘Coke.’ You didn’t really date a woman from Barnesville, did you?”

“No. And there’s no Brownie’s.”

“A good one about the low-country boil, Nick. If you’ve never had that, you’re not from Georgia. What tipped you off in the first place?”

“Her accent’s wrong. Words like ‘square’ and ‘here,’ she drops her R’s. Georgians don’t talk like that. And then there’s the way she keeps calling me ‘y’all.’”

“Good point. ‘Y’all’ is always plural. She’s not from Georgia, is she?”

“I don’t even think she’s southern.”

“Then why’s she faking it?”

“That’s what I want to find out. Can you do a little digging-?”

“Already started,” Dorothy said. “As soon as she said ‘Pepsi.’”

53.

Unlike Belinda Marcus, Francine Heller never wanted to be a rich man’s wife.

My mother had gone to the same small-town high school in upstate New York as my father. She was the class beauty. In her old photos she looked like Grace Kelly. Whereas my father, to put it delicately, was no Gregory Peck.

From the moment Victor Heller saw her, he launched an all-out campaign to win her over. My father was a live wire, a charmer, a wheedler. He was a force of nature. And when he wanted something he invariably got it.

Eventually he got Francine, of course, then kept her in a gilded cage for decades.

It was pretty clear what he saw in her-that sylphlike grace and almost regal presence, accompanied by an appealing frankness-but it was less clear what she saw in him besides the fact that he wanted her with a relentless, outsize ambition. Maybe that was all it took to win over an insecure girl. She needed to be needed. Her parents were divorced-her mother had moved to the Boston area, and the girls stayed behind with Dad, not wanting to change schools. They shuttled between parents. Maybe she craved stability.

Money certainly wasn’t part of the bargain, and I don’t think she ever fully understood Victor’s hunger for it. Her father, a lawyer for the State of New York, would reuse teabags to save a dime.

It was hardly a match made in heaven. Being married to the Dark Prince of Wall Street turned out to be a full-time job. She had to attend endless galas and cocktail parties. At every charity event the names of Mr. and Mrs. Heller invariably appeared in the printed program, in the shortest list of the biggest donors. Not merely the Patrons or Sponsors or, God forbid, the coupon-clipping Friends. Always the Benefactors, the President’s Circle, the Chairman’s Council, the Century Society.

When all she really wanted to do was stay home with her two little boys, me and Roger.

My father vanished when I was thirteen, a fugitive from justice with thirty-seven charges of financial misconduct trailing him like a pack of hounds. He traveled around Europe, eventually landing in Switzerland. All of his assets were frozen, and our family went from high-living to hardscrabble. The loss of security, combined with the humiliation, was traumatic for her, as it was for the rest of us. But I always wondered whether, on some level, she wasn’t relieved.

Relieved to be out of the golden bubble. Relieved to be free of command-performance hostess duties. Relieved to be away from his soul-destroying, oxygen-depleting narcissism.

When she’d found work as a personal assistant to Marshall Marcus, it was a lifesaver for her and for all of us. I guess it could have been demeaning-one day the guy’s a guest at your dinner table, the next you’re keeping his call list-but Marshall somehow made sure the situation didn’t feel that way. He didn’t make it feel like charity, either, though I suppose that’s what it was. Instead, she once explained to me, he made it seem like he was running a family business, and she was family.

Eventually she moved on, got a job teaching in a local elementary school. Now she was ostensibly retired, but she kept busy as a volunteer school librarian. She also took care of the old ladies in her condo complex. Need a ride to your eye doctor’s appointment? Call Frankie. Confused by the fine print of your prescription-drug benefit? Ask Frankie. She knew everything or knew how to find it out. I don’t know why she pretended to be retired, when she was busier than any medical resident.

And ever since she’d been liberated from the gilded cage, she spoke her mind. She took no crap from anybody. My sweet, soft-spoken mom had evolved into a plainspoken, peppery older woman.

It was delightful.

She lived on the bottom half of a “townhome” in a retirement community in Newton overlooking the reservoir. All the townhomes, set among winding paths and landscaped gardens, were identical. I could never tell them apart; I always got lost. It was like the Village in that old TV show The Prisoner, only with bingo.

The door flew open almost as soon as I pushed the buzzer. My mother was wearing turquoise pants and a white top under a flowing knitted caftan of rainbow hues and a necklace of big jade-colored glass beads. A few minimum touches of makeup, but she’d never needed much. In her sixties she was a gorgeous woman, with sapphire blue eyes and dark eyelashes and a milky complexion, which she really shouldn’t have had, given how much she smoked. When my father first met her she must have been a knockout.

She was holding a cigarette, as always. A nimbus of smoke swirled around her. Even before she had a chance to say hello, a large dark projectile launched itself at me from behind her like a cruise missile.

I tried to sidestep, but her dog was on me, baring its glistening fangs, snarling and barking in a rabid frenzy, its sharp toenails raking my chest and arms through my pullover. I tried to knee it down, but the hound from hell was far too wiry and nimble and that only made it come at me more furiously.

“Down, Lilly,” my mother said in a matter-of-fact tone. Her voice had gotten lower and huskier from decades of smoking. The beast promptly dropped to the tiled entry hall, head resting on its paws. But it continued staring at me menacingly, growling softly.

“I’m glad she obeys you,” I said. “I think I was about to lose an eye.”

“Nah, she’s a love pooch, aren’t you, Lilly-willie? Come here.” She reached out one arm to hug me. The other one she kept splayed backward, daintily holding her cigarette away from me in two long curved fingers as if she were channeling Bette Davis.

As I entered, the beast got up to follow us, nails clacking on the wooden floor. It stayed so close it kept bumping against my legs. This seemed deliberate, a warning: It could rip out my throat at any time. It was just waiting for its Master to leave the room for a few seconds.

“Gabe here?” I said.

“In his room playing some computer game where you’re a soldier and you kill a lot of people. There’s a lot of bombs and explosions. I told him to put on his headphones. The noise was starting to bug me.”

That was just as well. I didn’t want him overhearing what I had to say. “Do you really want Gabe breathing all this secondhand smoke?” I said.

She squinted at me through slitted eyes as a plume of smoke snaked around between us. “Have you ever seen Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? I think cigarette smoke is the least of his problems.”

“Fair enough.” I tried never to argue with my mother.

“Listen, honey, I know you’re awfully busy, but do you think you could make some time to teach him to drive?”

“He wants to drive?”

“He just got his learner’s permit.”

“What about driving school?”

She scowled at me. “Oh, for God’s sake, Nick, you’re the only father figure in the kid’s life. You’re his godfather. Don’t you remember how disappointed you were when you had to learn from me because your father was gone?”

“I wasn’t disappointed.”

“Lord knows he doesn’t want me to teach him.”

“You’re absolutely right. I’ll do it. Though the thought of Gabe on the Beltway…”

“And what kind of foolishness are you putting in his head about how he shouldn’t look in Lilly’s eyes or he’ll drop dead?”

I shrugged. “Busted. You can also blame me for that vegetarian kick he’s on now. He picked that up from my new office manager.” I smiled, shook my head. “I think he’s trying to impress her.”

“Honey, as long as he’s eating, what do I care. You want me to remind you of some of the things you did to impress girls? How about when you tried to grow a goatee when you were fourteen so Jennie Watson would think you were manly?”

I groaned.

“Are you getting any sleep?”

“I had to work late last night.”

Her condo was very IKEA: comfortable but unstylish. Plexiglas stools around the apartment’s “kitchen nook.” An armchair in some sort of maroon chintz floral pattern next to a matching couch. On the counter was a Boston Globe folded to the crossword puzzle, and a copy of Modern Maturity that looked like she’d actually read it.

I sat in the chintz armchair and she sat at the end of the couch, put out her cigarette in an immaculate stone ashtray.

“Nicky, my book group is meeting in a few minutes, so can we make this quick?”

“Just a couple of questions. When was the last time you talked to Alexa?”

She lighted another cigarette with a cheap Bic lighter and inhaled deeply. “Couple, three days ago. Yesterday Marshall called me to ask if she was here. She’s acting up again, isn’t she?”

I shook my head.

“Gabe tells me she spent the night at her friend Taylor’s house on Beacon Hill-you know her father’s Dick Armstrong, the senator?-but I think we know what that really means. She’s a beautiful girl, and-”

“It’s nothing like that.”

She looked up. “Did she run away?”

“No.”

She studied my face. “Something happened to her,” she said.

I hesitated.

“Tell me what happened to her, Nick.”

I did.

54.

I expected her to be upset.

But I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of her reaction.

She seemed to crumple, to collapse in on herself in a way I’d never seen before. She gave a terrible anguished cry, and tears spilled from her eyes. I hugged her, and it was several minutes before she was able to talk.

“I know you care for her-”

“Care for her? Oh, honey, I love that girl.” Her voice trembled.

“I know.”

She couldn’t talk for a while. Then she said, “How much are they demanding?”

“They must have given her a script. She said they want something called Mercury. Marshall says he has no idea what that referred to.”

“Mercury?”

“You worked for him for years. You must have come across that name in a file or a letter or something.”

“My memory’s still sharp, thank God. That doesn’t ring any bells. But if Marshall has the slightest idea what Mercury is, he’ll give it to them in a heartbeat. He’d give up his fortune to get his daughter back.”

“If he had a fortune left.”

“I never heard anything about this. He didn’t mention his troubles at all. But he and I don’t talk much anymore. How widely known is it that he’s… what?”

“Ruined. So far he’s somehow managed to contain it. But I’m sure the word will get out any day now. He doesn’t confide in you?”

“Not since Belinda moved in.”

“That’s quite a change.”

“Honey, Marshall used to check in with me before he used the john. That’s the difference between him and your father. One of the many differences. Marshall actually respected my judgment.” This was painful to hear, but my mother was always allergic to self-pity, and she said it lightly.

“You think she’s deliberately cutting you off from him?”

She inhaled deeply. The red ember at the tip of the cigarette flared and crackled and hissed. “They’ve had me over to dinner twice, and she’s always hugging me and telling me in that Georgia peach accent that ‘We just have to go shopping on Newbury Street, me and you,’ and ‘Why don’t we see more of you?’ But whenever I call Marshall at home, she answers the phone and says she’ll pass along a message, and I doubt he ever gets it.”

“What about e-mail?”

“She changed his e-mail address, and I never got the new one. She says he has to be much more careful, much less accessible. So I have to e-mail Belinda, and she actually answers for him.”

“Well, Alexa doesn’t get along with her either.”

She shook her head, blew out a lungful of smoke. “Oh, that woman is toxic. Alexa was always complaining about her, and I kept urging her to give Belinda a chance, it’s not easy being a stepmother. Until I met the woman and understood. I think Belinda actually hates her stepdaughter. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“She talks about how much she adores Alexa.”

“In front of others. With Alexa, she doesn’t bother concealing it.”

“Maybe that’s not the only thing she’s concealing. You haven’t complained to Marshall about being cut off?”

“Sure I did. At the beginning. He’d just shrug and say, ‘I’ve learned not to argue.’”

“Strange.”

“I see this sort of thing happen to a lot of married men as they get older. Their wives start taking charge of their social lives, then their friendships. The husbands abdicate all responsibility because they’re too busy or they’d just as soon not take the initiative, and before you know it they’re wholly owned subsidiaries of their ladies. Even rich and powerful men like Marshall… used to be. I think the only person he sees outside the office besides Belinda is David Schechter.”

“How long has Schechter been his lawyer?”

“Schecky? He’s not Marshall’s lawyer.”

“Then what is he?”

“You know how Mafia dons always have an adviser?”

“A consigliere?”

“That’s it. Schecky is Marshall’s consigliere.”

“Advising him on what?”

“I just think he’s someone whose judgment Marshall trusts.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know him. But Marshall once told me he has the most extensive files he’s ever seen. Reminded him of J. Edgar Hoover.”

I nodded, thought for a moment. “Why did Marshall hire you in the first place?”

She smiled. “You mean, why would he hire a woman with no particular skills to run his office?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is,” she said kindly. “You don’t want to hurt my feelings. That’s all right.” She smiled. “Marshall is a good man. A good person. He saw what had happened to us after your father left. How the government took everything. Was there a part of him that thought, There but for the grace of God go I? Sure, probably.”

“You always said that he was a friend of Dad’s, and that’s why he wanted to help.”

“That’s right.”

“But he didn’t know you, did he?”

“Not really. He knew your father much better. But that’s Marshall. He’s the most generous person I know. He just loves to help people. And that was a time when I needed help, desperately. I was a mother with two teenage sons and no house and no money. We’d gone from that house in Bedford to sharing Mom’s split-level ranch in Malden. I had no income and no foreseeable income. Imagine how I must have felt.”

In the scale of human misery, that barely registered, I knew. But at the same time I truly couldn’t conceive of what it must have been like to be Francine Heller, ripped untimely from her chrysalis of immense gilded wealth, naked and shivering, lost and vulnerable, not knowing who to turn to.

“I can’t,” I admitted. “But you were a hero. That much I do know.”

She gripped my hand in her small soft warm one. “Oh, for God’s sake, not even close. But you need to understand how much it meant to me to have this man step in, someone I barely knew, and offer me not just an income, a way to keep food on the table, but an actual job. A way for me to do something useful.”

She looked so uncomfortable that I felt bad I’d raised the subject. She shifted in her seat, blew out a puff of smoke, stubbed out her cigarette, her face turned away.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Marshall secretly cooperated with the SEC when they were building their case against Dad. In effect helped turn Dad in.” If they were true, though, then Marcus would have hired my mother for one very simple reason: guilt.

“Never. Not Marshall.”

“Well, you know him as well as anyone.”

“I did, anyway. So let me ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think these kidnappers will let her go if they get what they want?” She asked this with such hushed desperation that I had no choice but to give her, dishonestly, the assurance that she, like Marcus, seemed to crave so badly.

“Yes.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“Why? Because the typical pattern in a kidnap-for-ransom situation-”

“That’s not what I’m asking. I mean, why do you think I can’t hear the truth? I know when you’re not being honest, Nick. I’m your mother.”

I’d always thought that I’d gotten my talent at reading people from her. She was, like me, what Sigmund Freud called a Menschenkenner. Loosely translated, that meant a “good judge of character.” But it went beyond that. She and I both had an unusual ability to read faces and expressions and intuit whether people were telling us the truth. It’s certainly not foolproof, and it’s not at all like being a human polygraph. It’s merely an innate talent, the way some people are natural painters or can tell stories or have perfect pitch. We were good at detecting lies. Though not perfect.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think they’re going to let her go.”

55.

She was crying again, and I immediately regretted my candor.

“I’ll do everything in my power to find her,” I said. “I promise you.”

She held my right hand in both of hers. Her hands were bony yet soft. She leaned close, her eyes pleading. “Get her back, Nick. Please? Will you please get her back?”

“All I can do is promise I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I ask,” she said, and she squeezed my hand again.

As I got up, the hound from hell growled at me without even bothering to move. As if to remind me that if I disappointed its Master, I’d be facing the wrath of the beast.

ON THE way out I stopped at Gabe’s room. Stacked in tall heaps everywhere were his favorite graphic novels, including multiple copies of Watchmen, the collected comics of Will Eisner, Brian Azzarello’s Joker.

It was remarkable how much his temporary quarters here had acquired exactly the same funky odor as his room back home in Washington. It smelled like a monkey house: that teenage-boy smell of sweat and dirty laundry and who knows what else.

He sat on his bed, headphones on, drawing in his sketchbook. He was wearing a red T-shirt-a rare departure from his habitual black “emo” attire-with a drawing on the front of a stylized, boxy computer exploding and the word KABLAAM! superimposed over it in a comic font. I took a chair next to his desk, which was dwarfed by a big monitor-probably a gift from my mother-and an Xbox 360 video game module and wireless controller. When he felt the bed move he took off his headphones. I could hear some loud, repetitive electric guitar riff and a screaming vocal.

“Nice,” I said. “What are you listening to?”

“It’s an old band called Rage Against the Machine. They were totally awesome and brilliant. They were all about Western cultural imperialism and the abuses of corporate America.”

“Huh. Sounds fun. Let me guess. Did Jillian turn you on to this?”

He gave me an evasive look. “Yeah.”

“Which song is this?”

“‘Killing in the Name.’ I don’t think you’d like it.”

“No?”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Is that the song that uses the F-word twenty times in, let’s see, five lines of lyrics?”

He looked at me, startled.

“You’re right,” I said. “Not my kind of thing.”

“There you go.”

“I’m not a big fan of drop D tuning. But see what your Nana thinks.”

“Nana’s a lot cooler than you give her credit for.”

“I’ve known her longer,” I teased.

He hesitated. “Nick, I-I heard what you were saying to her.”

“You shouldn’t have been listening.”

“She was screaming, Uncle Nick. I could hear her through my headphones, okay? I mean, what am I supposed to do, ignore that? Why’d you have to make her cry?”

I doubted he could actually hear anything through that music. He was eavesdropping, plain and simple.

“Okay,” I said. “Listen.”

But he interrupted: “Where’s Alexa?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“She got kidnapped, right?”

I nodded. “Listen to me, Gabe. You have a special role here. You need to be strong. Okay? This is going to be really hard on your Nana.”

He compressed his lips, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Yeah? How about me?”

“It’s hard on all of us.”

“So who’s behind it?”

“We’re not sure yet.”

“Do you know she once got kidnapped for a couple hours?”

I nodded.

“You think it’s the same people?”

“I don’t know, Gabe. We just found out. We still don’t know anything. We’ve seen a video of her talking, but that’s pretty much all we have so far.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“Not yet. I’m working on it.”

“Can I see the video?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I gave him the answer that has infuriated teenagers since the beginning of time: “Just because.”

He reacted exactly the way I expected, with a tight-lipped glower.

“Hey, how about when this is over I teach you to drive.”

He shrugged. “I guess,” he said glumly. But I could see he was trying not to show how pleased he was.

My phone rang. I glanced at it: Dorothy.

I picked up. “Hey, hold on a second.”

“Who’s that?” Gabe said. “Is that about Alexa?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it is.”

I gave him a quick hug and walked out toward my car. “What do you have?” I said.

“I talked to Delta Air Lines. Belinda never worked for them.”

I stopped in the middle of the parking lot. “Why would she lie about that?”

“Because Marshall Marcus would never have married her if he knew her real employment background.”

“Which is?”

She paused. “She was a call girl.”

56.

“Why does that not surprise me?” I said.

“I ran her Social Security number. She’s a failed actress, looks like. Took acting classes for a while in Lincoln Park, but dropped out. Employed as an escort”-I could hear the scare quotes-“with VIP Exxxecutive Service, based out of Trenton. That’s three X’s in Exxxecutive.”

“Let me guess. A high-priced escort service.”

“Are there any other kinds?”

“Well, she did good for herself. Married up. She’s not southern, is she?”

“Southern Jersey. Woodbine.”

My BlackBerry emitted two beeps, its text-message alert sound. I glanced at it.

A brief text message. It said only, “15 minutes,” and gave the precise polar coordinates of what looked like a 7-Eleven parking lot.73 miles away.

The message was sent by “18E.” No name, no phone number.

But he didn’t need to use his name. An 18E was a U.S. Army occupation code for a communications sergeant in the Special Forces.

George Devlin was an 18E.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to see an old friend.”

“HOW DID you know I was close enough to make it here in fifteen minutes?” I said. “You knew where I was?”

George Devlin ignored my question. Like it was either too complicated or too obvious to explain. He had his ways, leave it at that. He was preoccupied with angling a computer monitor so I could see it. The screen glowed in the dim interior of his mobile home/office and momentarily illuminated the canyons and rivulets and dimpling of his scarred face, the striated muscle fibers and the train-track stitches. There was a vinegary smell in there, probably from the salve he regularly applied.

A greenish topographical map of Massachusetts appeared on the screen. A flashing red circle appeared, about fifteen miles northwest of Boston. Then three squiggly lines popped up-white, blue, and orange-each emanating from the flashing red circle. One from Boston, two from the north.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“If you look closely,” he said, “you’ll see each line is made up of dots. The dots represent cell tower hits from the three mobile phones belonging to Alexa Marcus, Mauricio Perreira, and an unknown person we’ll call Mr. X.”

“Who’s what color?”

“Blue is for Mauricio, as we’ll call him. White is for Alexa. Orange is for Mr. X.”

“So Mr. X came down from close to the New Hampshire border, it looks like.”

“Right.”

“Mind if I ask where you got this data?”

He inhaled slowly, making a rattling sound. “You can ask all you want.”

I leaned forward. “So they all met fifteen miles northwest of Boston in… is it Lincoln?”

“That’s right.”

“Were they all there at the same time?”

“Yes. For only five minutes. Mauricio and the abducted girl arrived together, of course. They were there for seventeen minutes. Mr. X stayed for only four or five minutes.”

They’d met in a wooded area, I saw. Near Sandy Pond, which was marked as conservation land. Remote, isolated after midnight: a good place for a rendezvous. So Alexa’s iPhone went from Boston to Lincoln and then north to Leominster. Which was where it was discarded.

Now I could see the pattern. Mauricio took her from the hotel to Lincoln, twenty minutes from Boston, where he handed her off to “Mr. X.”

While Mauricio went back to Boston-actually, to his apartment in Medford, just north of Boston-Mr. X was driving Alexa north. He tossed her phone out as they passed through Leominster. Presumably she stayed in the vehicle with him.

Then they crossed the border into New Hampshire.

“So the route stops in southern New Hampshire,” I said. “Nashua.”

“No, Mr. X’s mobile phone goes off the grid in Nashua. That could mean that he shut it off. Or it lost reception, and then he shut it off. Whatever, he hasn’t used it since.”

“Sloppy for him to keep his cell phone on,” I said.

“Well, to be fair, he assumed it was untraceable.”

“Is it?”

“No, actually. But there’s a difference between untraceable and untrackable. It’s like following a black box on the back of a truck. We don’t know what’s inside the box, but we know where it is. So we can’t determine his identity, but maybe we can find his location. Understand?”

“He’s in New Hampshire. Which means she probably is too. Maybe in or near Nashua.”

“I wouldn’t assume that. Mr. X might have passed through New Hampshire on his way to Canada.”

“That’s not a logical route if you’re driving all the way to Canada.”

He nodded in agreement.

“They’re in New Hampshire,” I said.

57.

The offices of Marcus Capital Management were on the sixth floor of Rowes Wharf. I gave the receptionist my name and waited in the luxuriously appointed lobby, on a gray suede couch. The floors were chocolate-brown hardwood and the walls were mahogany. An enormous flat-screen monitor on the wall showed the weather on one half of a split screen and financial news on the other, with a stock crawl at the bottom.

I didn’t have to wait even a minute before Marcus’s personal assistant appeared. She was a willowy redhead named Smoki Bacon, a stunningly beautiful, elegant young woman. This didn’t surprise me. Marcus had a reputation for hiring only beautiful women as admins, beauty contest winners, former Miss Whatevers. My mother, who’d been lovely and attractive in her prime, was the sole exception. She never looked like a runway model. She was more beautiful than that.

The curvaceous Smoki gave me a dazzling smile and asked if I wanted coffee or water. I said no.

“Marshall’s in a meeting right now, but he wants to see you as soon as it’s over. It might be a while, though. Would you like to come back a little later?”

“I’ll wait.”

“At least let me take you to a conference room, where you can use the phone and the computer.”

She showed me down a corridor. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said as we rounded a bend and passed by what was once the trading floor. There were thirty or forty workstations, all empty. All the computers were off. The place was as quiet as a tomb. “I just can’t tell you how worried sick we’ve all been about Alexa.”

“Well,” I said, not knowing how to reply, “keep the faith.”

“Your mom used to babysit for her sometimes, you know. She told me that.”

“I know.”

“Frankie’s the best.”

“I agree.”

“She calls me every once in a while just to check up on things. She really cares about Mr. Marcus.”

At the threshold to an empty conference room she put a hand on my shoulder. She leaned close and said through gritted teeth, “Please get that girl back, Mr. Heller.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

BUT INSTEAD of waiting, I decided to wander down to Marcus’s office.

His assistant, Smoki, sat guard at her desk outside his office, I remembered. I also remembered that Marcus had a private dining room next to his office. When I’d had lunch with him there once, the waitstaff came and went through a back hallway.

It didn’t take long to find the service hallway. One entrance was next to the men’s room. It connected a small prep kitchen to the boardroom and Marcus’s dining room.

His dining room was dark and tidy and bare. It looked like it hadn’t seen much use in quite a while.

The door to his office was closed. But when I stood next to it I could hear voices raised in argument.

At first I could make out only fragments. Two men speaking, I was sure. One, of course, was Marcus. His voice was the louder, more emotional one. Easier to make out.

The other was soft-spoken and calm and barely audible.

VISITOR: “… to go all soft now.”

MARCUS: “Wasn’t that the point?”

VISITOR: “… pretty much to be expected…”

MARCUS: “If she dies, it’ll be your doing, you understand me? It’ll be on your conscience! You used to have one of those, didn’t you?”

VISITOR: “… damnedest to keep you alive.”

MARCUS: “I don’t care what you people do to me now. My life is over. My daughter is the only-”

VISITOR: (a lot of mumbling) “… years you’ve been the guy with all the solutions… they decide now you’re the problem?… what their solution will be.”

MARCUS: “… on my side!”

VISITOR: “… want to be on your side. But I can’t be unless you’re on mine…”

MARCUS: (voice growing steadily louder) “… you wanted, I did. Everything!”

VISITOR: “… have to spell this out for you, Marshall? ‘Grieving financier kills self at Manchester residence’?”

I pushed the door open and entered the office. Marcus was sitting behind a long glass desk heaped with papers.

Leaning back in the visitor chair was David Schechter.

58.

“Nickeleh!” Marcus exclaimed. “What are you-didn’t Smoki take you to a conference room to-”

“He was eavesdropping,” Schechter said. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Heller?”

“Absolutely. I heard everything you said.”

Schechter blinked at me. “As of this moment, your services are no longer required.”

“You didn’t hire me,” I said.

“Schecky, let me talk to him,” Marcus said. “He’s a mensch, he really is.”

Schechter rose, straightened his tweed blazer, and said to Marcus, “I’ll expect your call.”

I watched him leave, then sat in the chair he had just vacated. It was still warm.

Behind Marcus was a glittering picture-postcard view of the Atlantic, red ochre in the dying light.

“What kind of hold does he have over you?” I said.

“Hold…?”

I nodded. “You hired me to find Alexa, and I can’t do that unless you level with me. If you don’t, you know what’s going to happen to her.”

His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, with heavy pouches beneath them.

“Nicky, you need to stay out of this. It’s… personal business.”

“I know how much you love Alexa-”

“That girl means everything in the world to me.” Tears came to his eyes.

“It took me a while to understand why in the world you’d withhold the one thing that could get her back. Schechter is blackmailing you. He’s keeping you from cooperating with the kidnappers. And I think I know why you hired me.”

He turned around in his chair and stared out the window, as if he were looking to the sea for answers. Or at least avoiding my eyes.

“I hired you because I thought you were the only one who could find her.”

“No,” I said quietly. “You hired me because that was the only way you could get her back without giving in to their demands. Right?”

He wheeled slowly back around. “Does that offend you?”

“I’ve been offended worse. But that’s not the point. From the beginning you’ve been sandbagging me. You lied about calling the police. You didn’t tell me how you were forced to take money from criminals, and you didn’t tell me you’d lost it all. Now they want the Mercury files-they are files, aren’t they?-and you pretend you don’t know what they are. So let me ask you this: Do you think David Schechter really cares if Alexa dies?”

He looked stricken, but he didn’t reply.

“Whatever he has on you, is it worth your daughter’s life?”

His face crumpled, and he covered his eyes like a child as he wept silently.

“You need to tell me what Mercury is,” I went on. “Then we’ll figure something out. We’ll come up with a way for you to give these kidnappers what they want without facing… whatever it is you’re afraid of.”

He kept sobbing.

I got up and walked toward the door, but then I stopped and turned back. “Did you ever do a background check on Belinda before you married her?”

He lowered his hands. His face was red and wet with tears. “Belinda? What does Belinda have to do with anything?”

“I’ve come across some information in the course of my investigation, and I’m not sure how much you want to know.”

“Like… what?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” I said. “But she was never a flight attendant. She never worked for Delta.”

“Oh, Nickeleh.”

“She’s not from Georgia either. She’s from New Jersey.”

He sighed. Shook his head slowly. Was it disbelief? An unwillingness to accept so painful a truth, that he’d been deceived by the woman he loved?

“She was a call girl, Marshall. An escort. Whether that makes a difference to you or not, I think you should know.”

But Marcus rolled his eyes. “Nickeleh, boychik. Grow up.” He shrugged, his palms open. “She’s a sensitive girl. For some meshugge reason she’s kinda touchy about people knowing too much about our first date.”

A smile slowly spread across my face as I headed again for the door. The old bastard.

From behind me I heard him call out, “Please don’t quit.”

I kept going and didn’t look back. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t get rid of me. Though you might wish you had.”

59.

Dragomir was sitting at the computer in the musty sunroom at the back of the house when he heard the girl’s cries.

Strange. He’d muted the computer’s speakers. The screams were remote and barely audible, but they were definitely hers. He didn’t understand how he could be hearing them. She was ten feet underground. He wondered whether the solitude was making him imagine things.

He rose and scraped the old railback dining chair along the floorboards and went to the back door. There he listened some more. The cries were coming from outside. Faint and distant and small, like the buzz of a greenhead fly.

On the porch he cocked his head. The sounds were coming from the yard, maybe the woods beyond. Maybe it wasn’t the girl at all. Then he saw the gray PVC pipe standing in the middle of the field. That was where it was coming from. The vent pipe carried not just the girl’s exhalations but her cries as well.

She had a set of lungs on her. By now you’d think she would have given up.

He was grateful she was buried so deep.

When Dragomir had first come up with the idea of putting her in the ground, it seemed a stroke of pure genius. After all, the Client’s intelligence had turned up a psychiatrist’s file indicating the target was afflicted with a debilitating claustrophobia.

Of course, the terror of being buried alive was deep-seated and universal and held a coercive power far beyond any conventional kidnapping technique.

But that wasn’t his real reason.

Buried ten feet down she was safely beyond his reach.

If the girl had been under his direct control and easily accessible, like some irresistible pastry in the refrigerator, he wouldn’t have been able to restrain himself from doing things to her. He would rape her and kill her as he’d done to so many other pretty young women. He’d never have been able to stop the impulse. That wouldn’t do at all.

He recalled the puppy he’d been given as a boy, how much he loved its softness, its fragility. But how could you truly appreciate such fragility without crushing its tiny bones? Very nearly impossible to resist.

Burying her deep was like putting a lock on the refrigerator.

He was listening so hard, with such fascination, to the mewling, faint as a radio station that hadn’t been fully tuned in, that he almost didn’t hear the far louder crunch of a car’s tires on the dirt road out front. If that was the neighbor again, still looking for his damned mongrel, he would have to do something about it finally.

Back in the house, he strode to the front and looked out the window. A police cruiser, dark blue with white lettering: PINE RIDGE POLICE.

He didn’t know the town even had its own police force.

A gawky young man got out and gazed at the house with apprehension. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He was tall and scrawny with ears that stuck out like jug handles.

By the time the policeman rang the door buzzer, Dragomir was wearing a long brown mullet wig.

He suspected the policeman was here about the dog. He stood on the front porch, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his long spindly arms hanging awkwardly at his side.

“How’re you doing?” he said. “I’m Officer Kent. Could I ask you a few questions?”

60.

In the late afternoon, when I returned to the office, Jillian was on the floor packing boxes for some reason. I didn’t want to get involved. She looked up as I entered. Her face was red and sticky with tears.

“Good-bye, Mr. Heller.”

It took me a moment. I had my mind on other things. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Before I leave, I wanted to apologize.”

“About the clothing? Don’t be silly.”

“That e-card.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone e-mailed me a greeting card and I opened it at work.”

“That’s why you’re leaving?”

“Dorothy didn’t tell you?”

“Did she fire you?”

“No, I’m leaving.” She lifted her chin in pride, or maybe defiance. “And I was even starting to think that, like, for corporate America, this really wasn’t too sucky a job.”

“Nice of you to say. Now you want to tell me what happened?”

“I guess that e-card had some kind of software bug in it, like spyware or something? Dorothy says that’s how people got into our server and your personal files and got the codes to your home security system?”

“It was you?”

“I… thought she told you,” Jillian stammered.

“Well, Jillian, I’m sorry, but you picked a bad time to quit, so you can’t. Unpack your boxes and get back to answering phones, please.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Back to work.”

As I was headed over to Dorothy’s office, she called after me. “Um, Mr. Heller?”

“Yes?”

“I heard you guys talking about that owl tattoo?”

“Yeah?”

“I might be able to help. My brother used to work-”

“In a tattoo parlor,” I said. “Yes, I remember. You know what would be a really big help?”

She looked at me eagerly.

“How about reading the office phone system manual?”

61.

The more I thought about Marshall and Belinda Marcus, the more I was sure something wasn’t right.

I knew a cyber-investigator in New Jersey named Mo Gandle who was very good-when I was with Stoddard Associates in D.C., I had used him on a couple of cases-and I gave him a call.

“I want you to check on the dates of her employment by VIP Exxxecutive Service in Trenton,” I said. “And I want you to trace her back as far as you can.”

I FOUND Dorothy sitting at her desk, chin resting on the palms of her hands, staring at her computer screen.

On the monitor, Alexa was speaking, her eyes sunken, her hair matted. “I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy!”

The image froze, then broke up into thousands of tiny colored squares, like a Chuck Close painting. They scattered and clumped irregularly.

And then as the image redrew, she went on: “… They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I-I don’t know what that means. They said-”

“I unfired Jillian,” I said.

She hit a key without glancing at the keyboard, and the same few seconds of video played again: Alexa speaking, the picture freezing and then breaking up into jagged geometric detritus, and then reforming into a coherent image.

Dorothy murmured distractedly, “I didn’t fire her.”

“Well, I told her she can’t quit. What are you doing?”

“Cracking my head against a brick wall, that’s what I’m doing.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Yeah. Fire my ass.”

“You too? Nope.”

“Then I quit.”

“You’re not allowed to quit either. No one’s allowed to quit. Now tell me what’s up.”

Dorothy replied quietly and slowly, and I saw she was baring a part of herself she’d never shown before. “I’m not going to quit, you know that. I never quit. But I’m not earning my salary. I’m not doing what you pay me to do. I’m failing at the most important job anyone’s ever given me.”

Tears gleamed in her eyes.

Placing my hand on top of hers, I said, “Oh, come on. Whatever happened to the good old arrogant Dorothy I know and love?”

“She saw the light.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “You’re frustrated. I get that. But I need you on this full throttle. And I thought you never give up. Remind me what your father says about you?”

“Stubborn as a mule on ice,” she said in a small voice.

“Why ‘on ice’ anyway?”

“How the hell do I know? Nick, do you know how often I think of that girl and what she must be going through? I pray for her, and I keep asking myself who would do something like this to an innocent girl, and I just feel… powerless.”

“It’s not your job to save her.”

Her eyes shone, fierce and haunted. “In the Gospel of John it says, ‘We know that we are children of God and the whole world is under the control of the evil one.’ I never got that before. Like, what’s that supposed to mean? That Satan’s in charge of the whole show? But now I’m starting to get it. Maybe there’s just… evil in the world that even God is powerless to do anything about. And that’s the real point.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” I said softly. “I’ve stopped asking the big questions like that. I just keep my head down and do my job.”

“I’m sorry, Nick. I promised myself never to bring my religion to the office.”

“I never expected you to leave it at home. So tell me what you’re stuck on.”

She hesitated only briefly. “Okay, listen to this.”

She tapped a key, moved the mouse and clicked it, and we were back to that same loop of Alexa speaking. Dorothy raised the volume. Under Alexa’s words a hum grew steadily louder. Then the image froze and broke up into tiny bits.

“You hear the noise, right?”

“A car or truck, like we said. So?”

She shook her head. “Notice the noise is always followed by the picture breaking up? Every single time.”

“Okay.”

“Thing is, a car or a truck or a train, they’re not going to interrupt the video transmission like that.”

“So?”

She gave me the Look: she widened her eyes, lowered her brows, and glowered. The Look could turn a lesser being into stone or a pillar of salt. Our old boss, Jay Stoddard, found the Look so unsettling that he refused to deal with her directly unless forced to. Staring back was pointless. It was like a staring contest with the sun. One of you was going to go blind, and it wasn’t likely to be the sun.

“‘So’?” she said. “It’s going to tell us where Alexa Marcus is.”

62.

“There is some problem, Officer?”

Dragomir had learned that American policemen liked it when you used the honorific “Officer.” They craved respect and so rarely got it.

“Well, no big deal, sir. We just like to introduce ourselves, just so’s you know who to call in case you ever need any help.”

The young man’s ears and cheeks had gone crimson. When he smiled, his gums showed.

“Is good to know.” Exaggerating his bad English was disarming to most people. It made him seem more hapless. Dragomir had made a habit of studying other people as a butterfly collector examines a specimen.

The policeman shifted his weight from foot to foot again. The porch floorboards creaked. He drummed his fingertips against his thighs and said, “So you, ah, work for the Aldersons?”

Dragomir shook his head, a modest grin. “Just caretaker. I do work for family. Fix up.”

“Oh, okay, right. So I guess one of your neighbors kinda noticed some construction equipment?”

“Yes?”

“Just want to make sure there’s no, um, infractions of the building code? You know, like, if you’re building an extension without a permit?”

The youngster projected no authority whatsoever. He was almost apologetic for being here. Not like the police in Russia, who treated everyone like a criminal.

“Just landscape.”

“Is that-you’re not doing construction here, or…?”

“No construction,” Dragomir said. “Owner wants terraced gardens.”

“Mind if I take a quick look out back?”

This was going too far. If Dragomir insisted on a search warrant, the boy would be back in an hour with two other policemen and a court order, and they’d search the house too, just to show they could.

He shrugged, said hospitably, “Please.”

Officer Kent seemed relieved. “You know, just so I can tell the chief I did my job, right?”

“We all have to do our jobs.”

He followed the policeman around the back, onto the field of bare earth. The officer seemed to be looking at the tracks in the hard soil, then the gray vent pipe in the middle of the field, and he approached it.

“That a septic tank, um, Andros?”

Dragomir went still. He hadn’t told the cop his name. Obviously the neighbor had.

This concerned him.

“Is to vent the soil,” Dragomir said as they stood next to the pipe. “From the landfill, the… compost pile.” An improvisation, the best he could do.

“Like for methane buildup or something?”

Dragomir shrugged. He didn’t understand English. He just did what he was told. He was a simple laborer.

“Because you do need a permit if you’re putting in a septic tank, you know.”

The cop’s cheeks and ears were the color of cold borscht.

Dragomir smiled. “No septic tank.”

Tiny muffled cries from the vent pipe.

The policeman cocked his head. His ridiculous ears seemed to twitch. “You hear something?” he said.

Dragomir shook his head slowly. “No…”

The girl’s cries had become louder and more distinct.

“HELP GOD HELP SAVE ME PLEASE OH GOD…”

“That sounds like it’s coming from down there,” the policeman said. “How weird is that?”

63.

“I’m listening,” I said.

Dorothy sighed. “Let’s start with the basic question: How are they getting on the Internet, okay? And I don’t think it’s your standard high-speed connection.”

“Why not?”

She leaned back, folded her arms. “My parents live in North Carolina, right? So a couple of years ago they decided they wanted to get cable TV so they could watch all those movies. Only there wasn’t any cable available, so they had to put one of those satellite dishes on their roof.”

I nodded.

“Once I tried to watch a movie at their house, and the picture kept fuzzing out. Drove me crazy. So I asked them what the problem was, you know, was it always like this, did they call the satellite company to get it fixed, right? And Momma said, oh, that happens a lot, every time a plane flies by overhead. You get used to it. Nothing to do about it. See, they live close to the Charlotte/Douglas airport. Right in the flight path. I mean, the planes are loud. And then I began to notice that, yeah, every time I heard a plane overhead the TV would crap out.”

“Okay,” I said. “If our kidnappers are deep in the woods somewhere, or in some rural area where they don’t even have high-speed Internet, satellite is probably their only way to get online. And you think a plane can break up the signal?”

“Easy. A bad rainstorm can do it too. Satellite works by line-of-sight, so if something gets between the dish and the big old satellite up there in the sky, the signal’s gonna break up. You got a big enough plane, flying low enough, that thing can interrupt the signal. Might only be a fraction of a second, but that’ll screw up the video stream.”

“This is good,” I said. “That noise we’re hearing could well come from a jet engine. So let’s say they’re near an airport. How near, do you think?”

“Hard to calculate. But close enough so when a plane lands or takes off, it’s low enough to the ground to block the path to the satellite. So it depends on how big the plane is and how fast it’s going and all that.”

“There are a hell of a lot of airports in the U.S.,” I pointed out.

“That right?” she said dryly. “Hadn’t thought about that. But if we can narrow down the search, it gets a whole lot easier.”

“I think we can.”

“You do?”

“New Hampshire.” I explained about George Devlin’s cell phone mapping. How we knew that “Mr. X” took Alexa across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire.

She listened, staring into space. After twenty seconds of silence, she said, “That helps a lot. I don’t know how many airports there are in New Hampshire, but we’ve just narrowed it down to a manageable number.”

“Maybe we can narrow it down more than that,” I said. “Does that creepy website CamFriendz stream in real time?”

“They claim to. I’d say yes, within a few seconds. You have to account for slow connections and server lag time and so on. Maybe the times are five seconds off.”

“So we match up those times with the exact flight times in the FAA’s flight database.”

“They have such a thing?”

“Of course they do. We’re looking for airports in New Hampshire-hell, let’s broaden the search, make it Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire, just to be safe-with a flight schedule matching the times of our four interruptions.”

She nodded vigorously.

“And we can narrow it down a lot more,” I said. “Aren’t there two separate interruptions during one of those broadcasts?”

“You’re right.”

“So we have an exact interval between two flights.”

Her smile widened slowly. “Not bad, boss.”

I shrugged. “Your idea.” One of the few things I’ve learned since going into business for myself: The boss should never take credit for anything. “Can you hack into the Federal Aviation Administration’s secure electronic database?”

“No.”

“Well, the FBI will be able to get it through channels. I’ll give Diana a call.”

“Excuse me?”

Jillian Alperin was standing there hesitantly.

“We’re in a meeting,” Dorothy said. “Is there a problem?”

“I forgot to take this out of the printer.” She held up a large glossy color photograph. It was an enlargement of the photograph from Alexa’s iPhone of her kidnapper’s tattoo.

“Thank you,” Dorothy said, taking it from her.

“I think I know what it is,” Jillian said.

“That’s an owl,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

Then she held up something else, which she’d been holding in her other hand. A slim white paperback. On the front cover was a black-and-white line drawing of an owl.

It was identical to the owl tattoo in the photo.

“What’s that?” I said.

“It’s a book of tattoos my brother found?”

She handed me the book. It was titled Criminal Tattoos of Russia.

“Dorothy,” I said. “What time is it in Russia right now?”

64.

One of my best sources in Russia was a former KGB major general. Anatoly Vasilenko was a whippet-thin man in his late sixties with an aquiline profile and the demeanor of a Cambridge don. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he was already cashing in on his access and connections.

I couldn’t say I liked him very much-he was one of the most mercenary men I’d ever met-but he could be affable and charming, and he did have an amazing Rolodex. For the right price he could get you almost any piece of intelligence you wanted.

Tolya always knew who to call, who to bribe, and who to throw a scare into. If a client of mine suspected the local manager of their Moscow plant was embezzling, Tolya could take care of the problem with one quick phone call. He’d have the guy hauled in and interrogated and so terrified he’d be scared to steal a paper clip from his own desk.

I reached him at dinner. From the background noise I could tell he wasn’t at home.

“Have I never taken you to Turandot, Nicholas?” he said. “Hold on, let me move someplace quieter.”

“Twice,” I said. “Shark-fin soup, I think.”

Turandot was a restaurant a few blocks from the Kremlin, on Tverskoy Boulevard, which was the favored dining spot of oligarchs and criminals and high government officials (many of them all three). It was a vast gilded reproduction of a Baroque palace with a Venetian marble courtyard and statues of Roman gods and Aubusson tapestries and an enormous crystal chandelier. Burly security guards gathered out front to smoke and keep a watch over their employers’ Bentleys.

When he got back on the phone, the background clamor gone, he said, “There, that’s much better. Nothing worse than a table full of drunken Tatars.” His English was better than that of most Americans. I didn’t know where he’d acquired his plummy British accent, unless they taught it at KGB school. “That’s quite a picture you sent.”

“Tell me.”

“That tattoo? It’s Sova.”

“Who?”

“Not ‘who.’ Sova is-well, sova means owl, of course. It’s a criminal gang, you might say.”

“Russian mafia?”

“Mafia? No, nothing that organized,” he said. “Sova is more like a loose confederation of men who’ve all done time at the same prison.”

“Which one?”

“Prison Number One, in Kopeisk. Quite the nasty place.”

“Do you have a list of all known Sova members?”

“Of all Sova members?” He gave a low chortle. “If only I had such a list. I would be either very rich or very dead.”

“You must have some names.”

“Why is this of interest to you?”

I told him.

Then he said, “This is not a good situation for you. Or for your client’s daughter, more to the point.”

“Why’s that?”

“These are very bad people, Nicholas. Hardened criminals of the very worst sort.”

“So I understand.”

“No, I’m not so sure you do. They don’t operate by normal rules. They’re… untroubled, shall we say, by conventional standards of morality.”

“How bad?”

“I think you had a very unpleasant incident in the States not so long ago. Do you remember a brutal home invasion in Connecticut?”

He pronounced the hard C in the middle of “Connecticut.” A rare slip.

“Not offhand.”

“Oh, dear. Some wealthy bedroom community in Connecticut-Darien, maybe? Truly a nightmare. A doctor and his wife and three daughters were at home one night when a couple of burglars broke in. They beat the doctor with a baseball bat, tied him up, and tossed him down the basement stairs. Then they tied the girls to their beds and proceeded to rape them for seven hours. After which, they poured gasoline on the women and lit them afire-”

“All right,” I said, unable to hear any more. “These were Sova members?”

“Correct. One of them was killed during an attempted arrest, I seem to recall. The other one escaped.”

“A burglary?”

“Entertainment.”

“Excuse me?” I felt something cold and hard form in my stomach.

“You heard me. Just fun and games. These Sova people will do things a normal person cannot begin to imagine. You couldn’t ask for better enforcers.”

“Enforcers?”

“They hire themselves out. If you need outside talent for a really dirty job, something violent and extremely bloody, you might hire a couple of Sova gang members.”

“Who hires them? Russian mafia groups?”

“Usually not. The mafia have some pretty brutal talent of their own.”

“Then who?”

“Certain oligarchs. Our newly minted Russian billionaires. They’re often in need of hard men. A few in particular are known to use Sova members.”

“Which ones?”

He laughed. “Nicholas, we haven’t even discussed a fee yet! First things first.”

He told me his fee, and after I stifled the impulse to tell him where to stuff his hard currency, I agreed to his usurious terms.

Then he said, “Excellent. Let me make some calls.”

65.

Dragomir was a fast learner.

This time he used the Wasp knife correctly. The young police officer didn’t even have time to turn around before the blade went into his side, lightning-fast, right up to the hilt.

He thumbed the button and heard the hiss and the pop.

Officer Kent sagged to the ground. It looked like he’d suddenly decided to sit right there in the middle of the yard, except that his legs sprawled awkwardly in a way that would be unbearably painful if he were alive.

But he died instantly, or close to it. His internal organs had expanded and frozen at the same time. His abdomen was swollen as if he’d suddenly developed a beer belly.

As Dragomir hoisted the body over his shoulders, he could hear the crackle of Officer Kent’s handheld radio.

66.

Diana and I met at the Sheep’s Head Tavern, a sorta-kinda Irish pub in Government Center right next to FBI headquarters. She’d told me she had to grab a quick dinner and then get back up to work. That was fine with me: I had a very long night ahead.

The outside tables were all full, so we sat in a booth inside. I saw a lot of old-looking wood, or new wood made to look old with random gouges and a lot of dark varnish. There were old pub signs on the wall and a carved wooden bar with Celtic lettering on the front and reproductions of old Guinness ads. There were a lot of fancy beers on tap, mostly American microbrews, some German. She was wearing a turquoise silk top and black jeans that somehow managed to emphasize her curves without looking totally unprofessional.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “We didn’t turn up anything in the FAA’s flight log database.”

“How often is it updated?”

“Constantly. In real time.”

“And it’s complete?”

She nodded. “Private airports as well as public ones.”

“Well, it was a brilliant idea,” I said. “But not all brilliant ideas work out. Thanks for trying. Now I have something for you.”

“Bad news?”

“No. But I don’t think you’re going to like it.” I handed her Mauricio’s mobile phone in a ziplock bag.

“I don’t understand,” she said after looking at it for a few seconds. “What is it?”

I told her.

“You took that from his apartment?”

I nodded.

“Without telling me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t trust Snyder.”

Her mouth tightened and her nostrils flared.

“It was wrong to withhold it from you,” I said. “I know that.”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked down at the table, face flushed.

“Talk to me,” I said.

Finally she looked up. “So was it worth it, Nick? You know we can never use that as evidence in court, right? Since you disrupted the chain of custody?”

“I don’t think the Bureau is going to be prosecuting a dead guy.”

“I’m talking about whoever’s behind this thing. There’s a reason we have procedures.”

“You always colored within the lines.”

“I’m a rules girl, Nico. Whereas you were never big on the chain of command, as I recall. You’re not an organization man.”

“The last organization I joined sent me to Iraq.”

“We both want the same thing. We just have different ways to get there. But as long as you’re working with me and the FBI, you have to respect the rules we play by.”

“I understand.”

She looked at me hard. “Don’t ever do this to me again.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. Now, at least tell me you got something useful out of it.”

I nodded. “His phone number and the only number on his call log, presumably the guy who hired him to abduct Alexa. One of my sources plotted those numbers along with Alexa’s phone number on a map of cell phone towers and was able to chart the route they traveled.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did he get a map of cell phone towers?”

“Don’t ask. Bottom line, the path seems to point up north to New Hampshire.”

“Meaning what? The kidnapper came down from New Hampshire?”

“Yes, but more important, it means he’s probably got her up there now.”

“Where, specifically?”

“That’s all we know-New Hampshire. Somewhere in New Hampshire.”

“Well, that helps, I guess,” Diana said. “But we’re going to need more data points than that. Otherwise it’s a lost cause.”

“How about the tattoo?”

She shook her head. “Nothing came back on that from any of our legats.”

“Well, I’ve got an excellent source in Moscow who’s making some calls for me right now.”

“Moscow?”

“That owl is Russian prison ink.”

“Who’s your source on that?”

“Actually, my twenty-four-year-old militant-vegan office manager.”

She gave me a look.

“I’m serious. It’s complicated. That owl tattoo identifies members of Sova, a gang of former Russian prison inmates.”

She took out a small notepad and jotted something down. “If Alexa’s kidnapper is Russian, does that mean he’s working for Russians?”

“Not for sure. But I’d put money on it. My source in Moscow says Sova members are often hired by Russian oligarchs to do dirty work when they need plausible deniability. He’s helping me narrow down the pool of suspects. Meanwhile, I want to find out what David Schechter’s role in all this really is.”

“How’s that going to help find Alexa?”

I told her about the exchange I’d overheard between David Schechter and Marshall Marcus.

“You think Schechter is controlling Marcus?” she said.

“Clearly.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe his wife’s shady past has something to do with it.”

She cocked a brow, and I explained what I’d found out about Belinda Marcus’s last profession. “I have a PI digging into it right now,” I said. “To see what else he can find. But I don’t think that’s it. It’s too recent and too trivial.”

“Then what’s the hold Schechter has over him?”

“That’s what I plan to find out.”

“How?”

I told her.

“That’s illegal,” she said.

“Then you didn’t hear it from me.”

“It doesn’t bother you that you’d be committing a crime?”

I shrugged. “As a great man once said, in certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law.”

“Martin Luther King?”

“Close. The Punisher.”

She looked confused.

“I guess you don’t read comic books,” I said.

67.

Dragomir drove out to the main road, relieved to pass only a lumber truck. Not someone from the town who might notice a police squad car coming out of the Alderson property and gossip about it later, maybe ask questions.

He knew where to go. Earlier, he’d driven around the area, scouting escape routes in case it came to that, until he’d discovered a deserted stretch of narrow road that would do well. A place where the road curved sharply on the lip of a ravine.

Of course there was a guardrail. But not on the long straight stretch leading into it, where the plunge was just as steep.

He pulled over at a point where he could see the traffic in both directions. There wasn’t any. Then he drove a bit farther down the road until he was about twenty feet or so from an edge where there was no guardrail.

Glancing around again, he opened the trunk of the police cruiser, lifted Officer Kent’s body out, and quickly carried it around to the open driver’s door. There he carefully positioned the body. Then he lifted the black plastic trash bags from the floor of the trunk.

An autopsy wasn’t likely. Mostly likely they’d see a police officer killed in a tragic car crash and it would end there. Anyway, by the time any autopsy was done, he’d be long gone. He only cared about what might be found in the next twenty-four hours.

Before he pushed the car into the ravine he put it in drive. If the gear selector were in neutral when the crash was discovered, any skilled investigator would immediately figure out what had really happened.

He didn’t make that kind of mistake.

68.

At a few minutes after nine at night, the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston, was an obsidian monolith. A few lighted windows scattered here and there like a corncob with not many kernels remaining. Some of the building’s tenants were open round the clock.

But not the law offices of Batten Schechter, on the forty-eighth floor. No paralegals toiling frantically through the night to meet a filing deadline or a court date. Batten Schechter’s attorneys rarely soiled their hands with anything so vulgar as a public trial. This was a sedate, dignified firm that specialized in trusts and estates and the occasional litigation, always resolved in quietly vicious backroom negotiations, perhaps a word whispered in the ear of the right judge or official. It was like growing mushrooms: They preferred to work out of the light of day.

I drove the white Ford panel truck down Trinity Place along the back of the Hancock Tower, and up to the loading dock. A row of five steel pylons blocked my way. I got out, saw the warning signs-DO NOT SOUND HORN FOR ENTRY and PUSH BUTTON & USE INTERCOM FOR ACCESS WHEN DOOR IS CLOSED-and I hit the big black button.

The steel overhead door rolled up, and a little fireplug of a man stood there, looking annoyed at the interruption. It was 9:16 P.M. Stitched in script on his blue shirt, above the name of his company, was CARLOS. He glanced at the logo on the side of the van-DERDERIANFINEORIENTALRUGS-nodded, hit a switch, and the steel columns sank into the pavement. He pointed to a space inside the loading dock where a few other service vehicles were parked.

He insisted on guiding me in as if I couldn’t park by myself, waving me in closer and closer to the dock until the van’s front end nudged the black rubber bumpers.

“You here for Batten Schechter?” Carlos said.

I nodded, striking a balance between cordial and aloof.

All he knew was that the law firm of Batten Schechter had called the Hancock’s property management office and told them that a carpet cleaner would be working in their offices some time after nine o’clock. He didn’t need to know that the “facilities manager” of Batten Schechter was actually Dorothy.

Couldn’t have been easier. All I had to do was promise Mr. Derderian I’d buy one of his overpriced, though elegant, rugs for my office. In exchange he was happy to lend me one of his vans. None of them were in use at night anyway.

“How’s it going there, Carlos?”

He gave the standard Boston answer: “Doin’ good, doin’ good.” A Boston accent with a Latin flavor. “Got a lotta carpets to clean, up there?”

“Just one.”

He grunted.

I pulled open the van’s rear doors and wrestled with the big bulky commercial carpet extractor/shampooer. He helped me lower it to the floor, even though it wasn’t his job, then pointed a thumb toward a bank of freight elevators.

The elevator was slow to arrive. It had scuffed steel walls and aluminum diamond-tread-plate floors. I hit the button for forty-eight. As it rose, I adjusted Mauricio’s STI pistol in my waistband. I’d been storing it in the Defender’s glove box ever since I’d grabbed it from his apartment.

I didn’t see any security cameras inside the elevator, but I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t take it out.

A moment later, the steel doors opened slowly on a small fluorescent-lit service lobby on the forty-eighth floor. Obviously not where the firm’s clients or partners entered. I wheeled out the rug shampooer and saw four doors. Each was the service entrance to a different firm, each labeled with a black embossed plastic nameplate.

The one for Batten Schechter had an electronic digital keypad mounted next to it. David Schechter’s firm probably had reason to take extra security measures.

From my duffel bag I drew a long flexible metal rod, bent at a ninety-degree angle, a hook at one end. This was a special tool called a Leverlock, sold only to security professionals and government agencies.

I knelt down and pushed the rod underneath the door and twisted it around and up until it caught the lever handle on the inside, then yanked it down. Thirteen seconds later I was in.

So much for the fancy digital keypad.

Now I found myself in some back corridor where the firm stored office supplies and cleaning equipment and such. I pushed the rug shampooer against a wall and made my way by the dim emergency lighting.

It was like going from steerage to a stateroom on the Queen Mary. Soft carpeting, mahogany doors with brass nameplates, antique furnishings.

David Schechter, as a name partner, got the corner office. In an alcove before the mahogany double doors to his inner sanctum was a secretary’s desk and a small couch with coffee table. The double doors were locked.

Then I saw another digital keypad, mounted unobtrusively by the doorframe at eye level. Strange. It meant that Schechter’s office probably wasn’t cleaned by the crew that did the rest of the building.

It also meant there was something inside worth protecting.

The odds were, the combination to the digital lock was scrawled on some Post-it pad in his secretary’s desk drawer. But faster than looking for it would be to use the Leverlock.

The whole thing felt almost too easy.

From the duffel bag I removed a black carrying case. Inside, a flexible fiberscope lay coiled in the form-fitted foam padding like a metallic snake. A tungsten-braided sheath encased a fiber-optic cable two meters long and less than six millimeters in diameter. Bomb-disposal teams used these in Iraq to look for concealed explosives.

I bent the scope into an angle, screwed on the eyepiece, and attached an external metal-halide light source, then fished it under the door. A lever on the handle allowed me to move the probe around like an elephant’s trunk. Now I could see what was on the other side of the door. Angling it upward, I inspected the wall on the far side of the doorframe. Nothing appeared to be mounted there.

When I swiveled the scope over to the other side of the door frame, I saw a red pinpoint light, steady and unblinking.

A motion detector.

A passive infrared sensor. It would detect minute changes in room temperature, caused by the heat given off by a human body. A common device, but not easy to defeat.

A solid red light meant the sensor was armed and ready.

I cursed aloud.

There were ways to get by these things. I tried to recall the tricks I’d heard about, though this wasn’t my expertise. Not at all. The best I could do was guess. I considered abandoning the operation.

But I’d come too far to turn back.

69.

So I gathered a few items from the Batten Schechter offices. The first was easy. Arrayed on the console behind Schechter’s assistant’s desk was an assortment of pictures. I slid the rectangle of glass out of a framed photograph of a panicked-looking little girl sitting on a shopping-mall Santa’s lap.

In a storeroom among the shelves of packing and mailing supplies I found a carton of polystyrene sheets, used to line boxes or protect rolled documents, and a roll of packing tape.

When I returned to Schechter’s office, I slid the Leverlock flat against the carpet under the double doors and had them open in ten seconds.

Then came the tricky part.

Holding the polystyrene square in front of me like a shield, I advanced toward the motion sensor, moving slowly through the eerie twilit interior, palely illuminated by the city lights below and the stars above. If I was remembering correctly, the foam would block my heat signature from being detected.

It took an agonizingly long time to reach the wall where the sensor was mounted. I held the sheet of foam a few inches from the sensor’s lens. Not too close, though. If I blocked it entirely, that would set it off too.

Like most state-of-the art infrared sensors, this one had a built-in flaw. It was equipped with what’s called “creep zone” coverage: If someone tried to slither on the floor underneath it, its lens would detect it right away.

But it couldn’t see above.

From behind the polystyrene scrim I took the small square of glass, taped to my belt, lifted it slowly, then placed it against the sensor’s lens. The strip of packing tape kept it securely in place.

Then I let the foam sheet drop to the floor.

The red light remained steady. I hadn’t triggered it.

I exhaled slowly.

Glass is opaque to infrared light. The sensor couldn’t see through it, yet didn’t perceive the glass as an obstruction.

I switched on the overhead lights. Two walls were paneled in mahogany. The other two were glass, nearly floor to ceiling, with breathtaking views of Boston: the Back Bay, the Charles River, Bunker Hill, the harbor. The lights twinkled like a starlit canopy fallen to earth. If this was the view from your office every day, you might start to believe you ruled the land below.

His desk was a small, delicate antique: honeyed mahogany, tooled bottle-green leather top, fluted legs. The only object on it was a phone.

There was a time once when the more powerful an executive was, the bigger his desk. You’d see CEOs with desks big as tramp steamers. But now the more important you were, the smaller and more fragile your work surface. As if to show the world you exerted power by mind control. Paperwork was for peons. There was no computer anywhere in sight. How someone could conduct business these days without a computer baffled me. Clearly it was good to be king.

Priceless-looking antiques were everywhere-spindly Regency chairs, dusky mirrors, parchment waste cans and credenzas and pedestal tables. A finely knotted antique silk rug in pale olive green flecked with muted yellows and reds that Mr. Derderian would drool over.

I knew bank CEOs who’d been fired for spending this kind of money on their office décor. They’d forgotten that if you decorated like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, you were likely to die like one, at the guillotine. The smart CEOs ordered from Office Liquidators.

But David Schechter had no shareholders to answer to. His clients didn’t care that their billable hours paid for expensive furniture. A rich lawyer is a successful one.

Then I noticed a second set of mahogany double doors.

They were unlocked. As I pulled them open the overhead lights came on.

Schechter’s personal filing cabinets. The ones that held documents too sensitive to be kept in his firm’s central files where anyone could access them.

Each steel file cabinet was secured with a Kaba Mas high-security lock. An X-09, electromechanical, developed to meet the U.S. government’s most stringent security standards and generally considered unpickable.

The locks were unpickable, but not the cabinets themselves. These were commercial steel four-drawer file cabinets, not GSA-approved Class 6 Security file cabinets. It was like putting a thousand-dollar lockset on a hollow-core door a kid could kick in.

I chose the one marked H-O, hoping to find Marshall Marcus’s file. Kneeling, I inserted a metal shim between the bottom drawer and the frame, and sure enough, the locking bar slid up.

Then I pulled open the top drawer and scanned the file tabs. At first they looked like client files, past and present.

But these were no ordinary clients. It was a Who’s Who of the Rich and Powerful. There were files here for some of the most influential public officials in the U.S. in the last three or four decades. The names of the men (mostly, and a few women) who ran America. Not all of them were famous. Some-former directors of the NSA and the CIA, secretaries of State and Treasury, certain Supreme Court justices, White House chiefs of staff, senators and congressmen-were dimly remembered if at all.

But it wasn’t possible that David Schechter could have represented even a fraction of them. And what kind of legal service could he have provided anyway? So why were these files here?

As I tried to puzzle out the connection among them, one name caught my eye.

MARK WARREN HOOD, LTG, USA.

Lieutenant General Mark Hood. The man who’d run the covert operations unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency I once worked for.

I pulled out the brown file folder. It was an inch thick. For some reason my heart began to thud, as if I had a premonition.

Most of the documents were tawny with age. I rifled through quickly, not sure what these papers were doing here.

Until I noticed one word stamped in blue ink at the top of each page: MERCURY.

So here it was.

And somehow it was connected, through my old boss, to me.

The explanation was here, if only I could make sense of the columns of figures, the cryptic abbreviations or maybe codes. I kept turning the pages, trying to find a phrase or a word that might bring it all into focus.

I stopped at a photograph clipped to a page of card stock. At the top of the card were the words CERTIFICATE OF RELEASE OR DISCHARGE FROM ACTIVE DUTY. A military discharge form, DD-214. The man in the photograph had a buzz cut and was a few pounds lighter than he was now.

It actually took a second before I recognized myself.

The shock was so profound that I didn’t hear the tiny scuffling on the carpet behind me until it was too late, and then I felt a hard crack against the side of my head. A sharp, crippling pain shot through my cranium, and in the moment before everything went black I tasted blood.

70.

When I came to and my eyes were finally able to focus, I found myself in a paneled conference room, seated at one end of an immense coffin-shaped conference table.

My head throbbed painfully, especially my right temple. When I tried to move my hands, I realized my wrists were secured with flex-cuffs to the steel arms of a high-end office chair. The nylon straps cut into the skin. My ankles were bound to the center stem of the chair.

I had a dim memory of being dragged somewhere, trussed upright, cursed at. Hell, maybe waterboarded for good measure. I wondered how long I’d been slumped in this chair.

At the far end of the table, peering at me curiously, was David Schechter. He was wearing a bright yellow V-neck sweater and gave me an owlish look behind his round horn-rimmed glasses. I half expected him to start speaking in the voice of Dr. Evil, pinkie extended, demanding one million dollars for my release.

But I spoke first. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today.”

Schechter gave what was apparently his rendition of a smile. The corners of his nearly lipless mouth turned down into a perfect inverted arch, like a frog’s, tugged downward by dozens of vertical wrinkles. It looked like smiling was hard work for him and something he rarely practiced.

“Did you know,” he said, “that breaking and entering at night with intent to commit felony can land you in prison for twenty years?”

“I knew I should have gone to law school.”

“And that doing so with an unregistered dangerous weapon can get you life behind bars? There’s not a judge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who wouldn’t give you at least ten years. Oh, and there’s the matter of your private investigator’s license. That’s as good as revoked.”

“I assume the police are on the way.”

“I see no reason why we can’t settle this man to man without the police.”

I couldn’t help but smile. He wasn’t going to call the police. “I find it hard to think clearly when I’m losing circulation in my lower extremities.”

A slight motion in my peripheral vision. Skulking on either side of me were a couple of wide-bodied thugs. Security guards, probably. Or bodyguards. Each held a Glock at his side. One of them was blond with no neck and a vacant face with a steroid-ravaged complexion.

The other one I recognized.

He had a black crew cut and a muscle-bound physique even more extreme than the blond guy’s. It was one of the two men who’d broken into my loft. Over his left eye just below the brow was a thin white bandage. A much bigger one was plastered next to his left ear. I remembered throwing an electric shaver into his face and drawing blood.

Schechter looked at me for a few seconds, blinked slowly like an old iguana, and nodded. “Cut the man free.”

Mongo threw his employer a look of protest but fished a yellow-handled strap cutter from a pocket of his ambush jacket. He approached me cautiously like he was a bomb disposal expert, I was an armed nuclear weapon, and he was about ten seconds too late.

Silently, sullenly, he jabbed his cutters at the nylon loop that held my wrist to the chair’s right arm, while his moon-faced colleague fixed me with a beady vacant stare, his pistol leveled.

As Mongo worked, he leaned close and muttered under his breath, through clenched teeth, “How’s George Devlin doing?”

I stayed very still.

He took his time. He was enjoying the chance to taunt me. Almost inaudibly, he went on, “I caught a glimpse of Scarface on one of our surveillance cams. Broke the lens.”

He gave me a furtive smile, met my cold stare.

“Gotta be tough looking like a monster.” He snipped the other loop, freeing my hands from the arms of the chair but still leaving them cuffed together. “One day every girl you meet wants to get into your pants, next day you couldn’t pay a skank to get near y-”

With one quick upward thrust I slammed my fists under his chin, shutting his jaw so violently I could hear his molars crack. Then, as he reeled, I smashed down on the bridge of his nose. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, but I put a lot of force into it.

Something snapped loudly. The gout of blood from his nostrils indicated I’d probably broken his nose. He roared in pain and rage.

Schechter rose from his chair and said something quick and sharp to the other guard, who racked the slide on his pistol to chamber a round. Bad form. His weapon should have been loaded already.

“Heller, for God’s sake,” Schechter said, exasperated.

Mongo reared back and took a wild swing at me, which I easily dodged. When Schechter shouted, “That’s enough, Garrett,” he stopped short like a well-trained Doberman.

“Now, please finish cutting him loose,” Schechter said. “And keep your mouth shut while you’re doing it.”

Garrett, or Mongo, as I preferred to think of him, snipped the remaining cuffs, his eyes boring holes into mine. Twin rivulets of blood trickled down the lower half of his face. When he was done, he wiped the blood off with his sleeve.

“Much better,” I said to Schechter. “Now, if we’re going to have a candid conversation, please tell these two amateur muscleheads to leave.”

Schechter nodded. “Semashko, Garrett, please.”

The guards looked at him.

“You can stand right outside. There won’t be a problem, I’m sure. Mr. Heller and I need to speak privately.”

On his way out, Mongo brandished his pistol at me threateningly as he once again wiped his bloody nose with his sleeve.

When the door closed, Schechter said, “Now, was there something you wanted to find out?”

“Yes,” I said. “Does Marshall Marcus know you arranged the kidnapping of his daughter?”

71.

He expelled a puff of air, a scoff. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Given your association with both Marcus and Senator Armstrong-the father of the kidnapped girl and the father of a girl who assisted in that kidnapping-don’t try to pretend it’s a coincidence.”

“Did it ever occur to you that we’re all on the same side?”

“When you ordered me to stay away from the senator and his daughter, and when you announced that my services were no longer needed, it kinda made me wonder. Me, I’m on the side that wants to get Alexa Marcus released.”

“And you think I don’t?”

I shrugged.

“Look at it statistically,” he said. “What are the odds, truly, of Alexa coming home alive? She’s as good as dead, and I think Marshall already understands this.”

“I’d say you tilted the odds against her considerably by refusing to let Marcus hand over the Mercury files.”

Schechter went silent.

“Are they really worth two lives?” I said.

“You have no idea.”

“Why don’t you enlighten me.”

“They are worth far, far more. They are worth the lives of the one million Americans who have died defending our country. But I think you already know that. Isn’t that why you had to leave the Defense Department?”

“I left because of a disagreement.”

“A disagreement with General Hood, your boss.”

I nodded.

“Because you refused to call a halt to an investigation that you were explicitly ordered to drop. An investigation that would have warned off certain parties who were unaware they were targets of the greatest corruption probe in history.”

“Is that right,” I said sardonically. “Funny no one said anything about that back then.”

“No one could. Not then. But now we have to trust your discretion and your judgment and your patriotism. And I know we can.”

“You know nothing about me,” I said.

“I know plenty about you. I know all about your remarkable record of service to this country. Not just on the battlefield, but the clandestine work you did for DOD. General Hood says you were probably the brightest, and certainly the most fearless, operative he ever had the good fortune to work with.”

“I’m flattered,” I said sourly. “And what got you so interested in my military record?”

He folded his arms, leaned forward, and said heatedly, “Because if you had been in charge of Marshall’s security, this would never have happened.”

“There’s no guarantee of that.”

“You know damned well I’m right. You are an extraordinary talent. Yes, of course I have your file. Yes, of course I’ve checked you out.”

“For what?” I said.

He paused for ten, fifteen seconds. “I’m sure you know about that ‘missing’ two-point-six trillion dollars that an auditor discovered at the Pentagon a few years ago?”

I nodded. I remembered reading about it, then kicking it around with some friends. The story didn’t get the kind of play in the so-called mainstream media you’d have expected. Maybe Americans had gotten blasé about corruption, but it’s not like we’re Somalia. Maybe such a sum of money was just too big to conceive of, like the weight of planet Earth.

“That’s what happens when you have a government agency with a budget of three-quarters of a trillion dollars and barely any internal controls,” he said.

“The money was never found, right?”

He shrugged. “Not my concern, and not my point. I’m just saying that the Pentagon is a black hole. Everyone inside the intelligence community knows that.”

“How would you know? You’re not on the inside.”

He tipped his head to one side. “It’s all in how you define the term. A half century of CIA proprietaries might argue with you.”

“What, so Batten Schechter is a CIA front?”

He shook his head. “CIA? Please. Have you seen how far down they are on the org chart these days? Somewhere just below the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CIA used to run the intelligence community. Now they report to the director of national intelligence, and the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone-”

“All right, then what the hell are you?”

“A middleman, nothing more. A conduit. Just a lawyer who’s helping make sure that no one ‘misplaces’ three trillion dollars again.”

“Could you possibly be any more vague?”

“Let me get a bit more specific. Who paid your salary when you worked for the DOD in Washington?”

“Black budget,” I said. That was the top-secret funding, buried in the U.S. government budget, for clandestine operations and classified research and weapons research, and so on. All the stuff that officially doesn’t exist. It’s so well hidden in the tangled mess of a budget that no one’s ever sure how much there is or what it’s paying for.

“Bingo.”

“‘Mercury’ refers to U.S. black-budget funding?”

“Close enough for government work, as they say. Any idea how big the black budget is?”

“Sixty billion dollars or so.”

He snorted. “Sure. If you believe what you read in the Washington Post. Let’s just say that’s the figure that’s leaked for public consumption.”

“So you’re…” and I stopped.

Suddenly it all seemed clear. “You’re telling me that Marshall Marcus has been investing and managing the black budget of the United States? Sorry, I don’t buy it.”

“Not all of it, by any means. But a good healthy chunk.”

“How much are we talking?”

“It’s not important how much. Quite a few years ago some very wise men took a look at the ebbs and flows of defense spending and realized that we were putting our national security at the mercy of public whims and political fads. One year it’s ‘kill all the terrorists,’ the next it’s ‘why are we violating civil liberties?’ We lurch from Cold War to ‘peace dividend.’ Look at how the CIA was gutted in the 1990s-by both Republican and Democratic presidents. Then 9/11 happens, and everyone’s outraged-Where was the CIA? How could this have happened? Well, you eviscerated the CIA, folks, that’s what happened.”

“And…?”

“So the decision was reached at a very high level to set aside funds from the fat years to take care of the lean years.”

“And give it to Marshall Marcus to invest.”

He nodded. “A few hundred million here, a billion or two there, and pretty soon Marshall had quadrupled our covert funds.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “And now it’s all gone. Talk about a black hole. Doesn’t sound like you did a whole lot better than the green eyeshades at the Pentagon.”

“Fair enough. But no one expected Marshall to be targeted the way he was.”

“So Alexa’s kidnappers aren’t after money at all, are they? ‘Mercury in the raw’-that refers to the investment records?”

“Let’s be clear. They want some of our most sensitive operational secrets. This is a direct assault on American national security protocols. And frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin’s people have a hand in this.”

“So you think it’s the Russians?”

“Absolutely.”

That would explain why the kidnapper was Russian. Tolya had said members of the Sova gang were often hired by Russian oligarchs. But now I wondered whether the Russian government might instead be behind it all.

“You’re given access to security-classified information above top secret?”

“Look, it’s no longer possible for the Pentagon to sluice money directly into false-front entities like they used to. You know all those anti-money-laundering laws aimed at global terror-they just give far too many bureaucrats in too many countries around the world the ability to do track-backs. Private funding has to originate in the private sector or else it’s going to be unearthed by some corporate auditor running the financials.”

“I get that. So what?”

“If the wrong people got hold of the transfer codes, they’d be able to identify all sorts of cutaways and shell companies-and figure out who’s doing what for us where. To hand all that over would be nothing less than a body blow to our national security. I can’t allow it. And if Marshall were in his right mind, he wouldn’t either.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“Believe me,” Schechter said, “nothing would make me happier than if you could find Alexa Marcus and somehow free her. But that’s just about impossible now, from everything I’m told. We don’t have the names of her captors. We don’t have the slightest idea where she is.”

I didn’t correct him. “Are we done here?”

“Not quite. You’ve seen some highly classified files, and I want your assurance that it goes no further. Do we have an understanding?”

“I really don’t care what’s in your files. My only interest is in finding Marshall Marcus’s daughter. And as long as you stay out of my way, then yes, we have an understanding.”

My head began thudding again as I got to my feet. I turned and walked out the door. His goons attempted to block my way, but I pushed past them. They scowled at me menacingly. I smiled back.

“Nick,” Schechter called out.

I stopped. “Yes?”

“I know you’ll do the right thing.”

“Oh,” I said, “you can count on it.”

72.

It was almost ten thirty by the time I returned to Mr. Derderian’s van. I powered on my BlackBerry and it began to load up e-mails and emitted a voice-mail-alert sound.

One of the calls was from Mo Gandle, the PI in New Jersey looking into Belinda Marcus’s past.

I listened to his message with astonishment. Her employment as a call girl was by far the least interesting part of her history.

I was about to call him back when I noticed that four of the calls I’d received were from Moscow. I checked my watch. It was twenty minutes past six in the morning, Moscow time. Far too early to call. He would certainly be asleep.

So I called and woke him up.

“I’ve been leaving messages for you,” he said.

“I was temporarily offline,” I said. “Do you have names for me?”

“Yes, Nicholas, I do. I didn’t think it prudent to leave this information on your voice mail.”

“Let me pull over and get something to write with.”

“Surely you can remember one name.”

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

Then he told me.

IT WAS too late to catch a shuttle flight from Boston to New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

But there was always a way. An old friend flew cargo planes for FedEx. He was based out of Memphis, but he got me on the eleven o’clock run from Boston to New York. In a little over an hour I was walking into an “adult entertainment club” called Gentry on West Forty-fifth street in Manhattan.

This was what used to be known as a strip club. Or a jiggle joint. But in polite circles it was called a “gentleman’s club” until that term became politically incorrect too.

I guess the tittie-bar owners didn’t want to offend feminists.

The mirrored lobby was lined with the requisite bouncers from New Jersey in black blazers too short at the sleeves over black shirts with white pinstripes. The carpeting inside was garish red. The railings and banisters were so shiny they didn’t even try to look like brass. The music was bad and loud. There were swoopy red vinyl lounge chairs, red vinyl banquettes and booths, half of them empty. The other half were filled with conventioneers and mid-level executives entertaining clients. Bachelor parties from Connecticut. Japanese businessmen on expense accounts. Spotlights swiveled and disco strobe lights spun overhead and there were mirrors everywhere.

The girls-excuse me, “entertainers”-were pretty and stacked and spray-tanned. Most of them looked cosmetically enhanced. When they danced, nothing jiggled. There was enough silicone in the place to grout every hotel bathroom in Manhattan. They wore thongs and garters, skimpy black brassieres and heels so high I was amazed they could keep their balance without pitching forward head first.

On the main stage, a shallow half-moon with a brass railing, an embarrassed-looking young guy with bad skin was getting a “stage dance” in the bright spotlights with a slinky black woman doing acrobatic moves an Ashtanga yoga master wouldn’t attempt.

A collage of huge “art” photos of selected female body parts lined the stairs. I found the “VIP Room,” according to the red neon sign on the door, upstairs just past the cigar bar and a line of private “rooms” with red velvet curtains that served as walls. A generously proportioned woman with pasties on her nipples held the door open for me.

Here the music was more traditional. Justin Timberlake was singing about bringing sexy back, which segued into Katy Perry confessing she’d kissed a girl and liked it. The walls were lined with white drapes illuminated from below with purple spotlights. A slightly higher class of clientele sat here, in tan suede clamshell banquettes that faced the stage. More scantily clad fembots tottered around with trays of drinks. A Brazilian-looking beauty was giving a lap dance to a corpulent Middle Eastern businessman.

The guy I was looking for was sitting at a banquette with burly bodyguards on either side of him. Each wore a cheap black leather jacket and was as big as a linebacker. One had a crew cut; the other had black Julius Caesar bangs. You could tell they were Russian a mile away.

The boy was tall and skinny, with a pasty complexion and a patchy goatee. He wore a foppish black velvet jacket with skinny, beaded lapels that would have looked fruity on Liberace. Under it he wore a black shirt with a tiny collar and a skinny black tie. He was drinking a glass of brown liquid and holding court for five or six equally scruffy-looking guys his age who were doing shots and ogling the entertainers and laughing too loudly and generally acting obnoxious.

Arkady Navrozov looked fourteen, though he was almost twenty. Even if you didn’t know that his father, Roman Navrozov, was obscenely rich, you could tell by the kid’s entitled demeanor.

Roman Navrozov was said to be worth over twenty-five billion dollars. He was an exile from Russia, where he’d amassed a fortune as one of the newly minted oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin by seizing control of a few state-owned oil and gas companies and then taking them private. When Vladimir Putin took over, he threw Navrozov in jail on grounds of corruption.

He served five years in the notorious prison Kopeisk.

But he must have struck a deal with Putin, because he was quietly released from prison and went into exile, much of his fortune still intact. He had homes in Moscow, London, New York, Paris, Monaco, St. Bart’s… he’d probably lost track himself. He owned a football club in west London. His yacht, the biggest and most expensive in the world, was usually docked off the French Riviera. It was equipped with a French-made missile defense system.

Because Roman Navrozov lived in fear. He’d survived two publicly reported assassination attempts and probably countless others, thanks to his private army of some fifty bodyguards. He’d made the mistake of speaking out against Putin and the “kleptocracy” and apparently Putin was thin-skinned.

His only son, Arkady, had been thrown out of Switzerland the year before for raping a sixteen-year-old Latvian chambermaid at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne. His father had spread around quite a bit of money to make the charges go away.

He feared his son might be kidnapped and made sure that Arkady never went anywhere without his own matched set of bodyguards.

But Arkady was a modern kid, and he posted things on Facebook and some social-media site called Foursquare where apparently you tell all your friends your whereabouts every moment of the day.

Earlier in the day he’d posted:

Arkady N. in New York, NY:

wrote a tip @ Gentry: Rocking VIP Rm tonight!

When he arrived, he posted:

Arkady N. @ Gentry

w. 45^th St.

Not long afterward, I arrived at Gentry too, only I wasn’t rocking it and I didn’t post it anywhere.

I don’t like people to know where I’m going before I get there. It spoils the surprise.

MY TABLE was across the room but within view. I glanced at my watch.

Exactly on time the best-looking woman in the room sidled up to Arkady. His bodyguards shifted in their seats but didn’t consider Cristal to be a mortal threat. She whispered something in the kid’s ear and slithered onto his lap. One hand stroked his crotch.

His friends sniggered. He got up bashfully and followed her through the purple-lighted drapes to one of the private areas on the other side.

Arkady’s bodyguards hustled over, but he waved them away.

As I’d expected.

Before they returned to the banquette I was gone.

THE CURTAINED-OFF private-dance area where Cristal had led Arkady looked like a fake Victorian boudoir in a Nevada brothel. It had red velvet tufted walls, a shaggy red carpet, and a large red velvet bed with gold fringe. The lights were low.

From behind the red curtains I could see the two of them enter.

“-to make yourself nice and comfortable while I fetch us some champagne, all righty? You like Dom?”

She settled him down on the bed and put her tongue in his ear and whispered, “I’ll be back in two shakes.”

“Hey, where the hell you going?” the kid said. He had a flat, over-Americanized Russian accent.

“Honey, when I get back I’m gonna take the top of your head off,” she said, slipping out through the curtains. Then I handed her a wad of bills, the second half of what I’d promised her.

Arkady smiled contentedly, stretched like a cat, and called after her, “That a promise?”

He didn’t notice me sidling up to the bed from the other side. I lunged, quick as a cobra, clapped a hand over his mouth and jammed my revolver against the side of his head. I cocked the trigger.

“You ever see the top of a man’s head come off, Arkady?” I whispered. “I have. You never forget it.”

73.

Roman Navrozov owned the penthouse condominium in the Mandarin Oriental, with one of the great views of the city. He had been spending a lot of time in the city recently. He was trying to buy the New York Mets, whose owner had been hit pretty hard by the Bernard Madoff fraud.

He felt safe in the Mandarin, according to my KGB friend Tolya. There were multiple layers of protection and several entrances and egresses. The vigilant staff were only his first line of defense.

I was met in the lobby of the Residences by a slim, elegant, silver-haired man of around sixty. He wore an expensive navy pinstriped suit with a gold pocket square, perfectly folded.

He introduced himself as Eugene, no last name: an “associate” of Mr. Navrozov.

He reminded me of an English butler. Even though it was after midnight, and he knew I had just kidnapped his boss’s son, his demeanor was cordial. He knew I was here to transact business.

As he led me toward Navrozov’s private elevator, I said, “I’m afraid there’s been a slight change in plans.”

He turned around, arched his brows.

“We won’t be meeting in his condo. I’ve reserved a room in the hotel, a few floors below.”

“I’m quite sure Mr. Navrozov will not agree to that…”

“If he ever wants to see his son again, he might want to be flexible,” I said. “But it’s up to him.”

74.

Fifteen minutes later, the elevator on the thirty-eighth floor opened, and five men emerged.

Roman Navrozov and his small army of bodyguards moved with a military precision: one in front, one behind, and two on either side. These bodyguards seemed to be of a higher caliber than the cretins he assigned to his son. They wore good suits and curly earpieces like Secret Service agents wear. They were all armed and appeared to be wearing body armor. Their eyes briskly surveyed all angles of approach as they escorted their boss down the hallway.

Roman Navrozov was a portly man, not tall, but he exuded authority. He could have been a Vatican cardinal emerging on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to proclaim, “Habemus papam.” He had hawkish eyebrows and an unnaturally black fringe of hair around a great bald dome. He reminded me a little of the actor who played Hercule Poirot on the British TV series.

His thin lips were cruelly pursed in a regal glower. He wore a black blazer with one tail of his crisp white shirt untucked, as if he’d just thrown it on and was annoyed to be skulking around the halls of the hotel in the middle of the night.

When they were halfway down the corridor, the lead guard made a quick hand gesture, and Navrozov stopped, flanked by the rest of his entourage. Meanwhile, the first guard approached the door, weapon out.

He saw at once that the door was ajar, propped open on the latch of the security lock.

He flicked his hand again, and a second guard joined him, then the two moved swiftly into position on either side of the door. The first one kicked the door open, and they burst in, weapons drawn, in classic “slicing the pie” formation.

Maybe they were expecting an ambush. But since I was watching through the peephole in the room across the hall, they didn’t find anyone inside.

Then I hit a number on my phone. “Moving into position one,” I said when it was picked up.

“Roger that,” a voice replied.

The voice belonged to a member of my Special Forces detachment named Darryl Amos. While I was in flight, Darryl had driven into the city from Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he worked as a convoy operations instructor. He’d checked into a true fleabag on West Forty-third called the Hotel Conroy. If you look it up on one of the travel websites, you’ll find it described as the filthiest hotel in the city. Not long ago a maid had discovered a body under a bed wrapped in a bedsheet. The sheet was reused, though they did launder it first.

Then he waited for me, and Arkady Navrozov, in the alley behind the strip club.

Right now Darryl was babysitting Roman Navrozov’s son at the Hotel Conroy. I was fairly certain the oligarch’s son had never seen its likes before.

Satisfied that Navrozov’s men were simply doing their job-making sure their boss didn’t walk into a trap and not attempting anything more-I opened the door and crossed the hall.

75.

A minute later I was standing at the window a few feet away from the man who had masterminded Alexa Marcus’s kidnapping.

We were alone in the room. He sat in a chair, legs crossed, looking imperious. “You’re a very trusting man,” he said.

“Because I’m unarmed?”

We both were. He rarely carried a weapon, and I’d surrendered mine. His guards were stationed in the hall right outside the door, which had been left propped open, by mutual agreement. I was sure they were prepared to burst in if their boss so much as coughed.

He replied without even looking at me. “You say you have my son. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. In any case, now we have you.” He shrugged. Very matter-of-fact; very casual. “Now we have all the leverage we need.” He grinned. “So you see: You haven’t played this very well.”

“You see that building?” I said.

Directly across the street, looming like a great gleaming black monolith, was the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

“A fine hotel, the Trump Tower,” Navrozov said. “I wanted to invest in Mr. Trump’s SoHo project, but your government blocked me.”

“See that row of rooms right there?”

I pointed again, this time to a line of dark windows. Offices, not hotel rooms, though he probably didn’t know that.

Then I raised my hand, as if to wave, and a single window in the long dark row lit up.

“Hello,” I said. “We’re right here.”

I raised my hand again, and the window across the street went dark.

“My friend over there is a world-class sniper,” I said.

Navrozov shifted his body to one side, away from what he probably thought was the line of fire.

“An army buddy?”

“Actually, no. He’s from Newfoundland. Did you know some of the best sharpshooters in the world are Canadian?”

“Perhaps, but at this distance-”

“My Canadian friend holds the record for the longest confirmed combat sniper-shot kill. He hit a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan from two and a half kilometers away. Now, do you think we’re even one kilometer away from the Trump Tower?”

He smiled uncomfortably.

“Try four hundred feet. You might as well have a bull’s-eye painted on your forehead. To my Canadian friend, you’re such a big fat easy target it’s not even fun.”

His smile faded.

“He’s using an American Tac-50 sniper rifle made in Phoenix. And fifty-caliber rounds made in Nebraska. It’s a hot round-ultra-low-drag tip and a flat trajectory.”

“Your point?” he snapped.

“The second any of your men approaches me, my friend across the street will drop you without a second’s hesitation. And did you know that this room connects with the two on either side? Yep. The doors between them are unlocked. The hotel management really couldn’t have been more accommodating to a group of old college buddies in town for a reunion.”

He just stared. His eyelids drooped.

“So am I trusting?” I said. “Not so much.”

To my surprise, Navrozov laughed. “Well done, Mr. Heller.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you ever read O. Henry?”

“It’s been a while.”

“O. Henry was very popular in the Soviet Union when I was a child. My favorite was his story ‘The Ransom of Red Chief.’”

“And I thought we were here to discuss your son.”

“We are. In O. Henry’s story, a rich man’s son is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the boy is such a little terror that the kidnappers, who can’t stand him, keep dropping their ransom price. Until finally the father offers to take him off their hands if they pay him.”

“Maybe you’d like to tell your son you don’t care what happens to him.” I turned to the laptop I’d set up on the desk and tapped at the keys to open a video chat window.

“Here’s Red Chief,” I said.

On the laptop screen was a live video feed of Arkady Navrozov, hair matted, against a grimy white plaster wall, a wide strip of duct tape over his mouth.

He wasn’t wearing his black velvet jacket anymore.

Instead, Darryl had put him in a medical restraint garment borrowed from the hospital at Fort Dix, used to immobilize and transport violent prisoners. It was an off-white cotton duck Posey straitjacket, with long sleeves that crossed in front and buckled in the back.

The Posey wasn’t strictly necessary-Darryl probably could have duct-taped him to the chair-but it was an effective restraint. More important, it had its effect on Roman Navrozov. In the bad old days, Soviet “psychiatric prison hospitals” used them on political dissidents.

I knew the sight would strike fear into Navrozov’s granite heart.

His son was cowering. You could see the corner of a bed next to him, its coverlet a hideous shade of orange.

Then you could see the barrel of a gun, with a long sound suppressor screwed onto the end, move into the frame and touch the side of the guy’s head. His eyes started moving wildly. He was trying to shout, but nothing was coming out except high, screeching, muffled sounds.

His father glanced at the screen, then away, as if someone tiresome were trying to show him an unfunny YouTube clip.

He sighed. “What do you want?” he said.

76.

“Simple,” I said. “I want Alexa Marcus released immediately.”

Navrozov breathed softly in and out a few times. His eyes had gone hard.

A few minutes ago he’d regarded me with something approaching admiration. Now he recognized me as a threat. I could see the predator instinct come out. He looked at me the way a wolf stalks his prey by staring it down, his body rigid.

“Is this a name I should recognize?”

I sighed, disappointed. “Neither one of us has time for games.”

He smiled mirthlessly, a flash of long sharp teeth.

“Where is she?” I said. “I want exact coordinates.”

“When I hire a man to do a job, I don’t look over his shoulder.”

“Somehow I doubt that. Guy like you, I bet you know exactly where she is and what they’re doing to her.”

“They don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who they are. Much safer this way.”

“Then how do you communicate with them?”

“Through an intermediary. A cutout, I think is the term, yes?”

“But you have some idea where they are.”

A shrug. “I think New Hampshire. This is all I know.”

“And where is your cutout located? Don’t tell me you don’t know that.”

“In Maine.”

“And how do you reach him?”

He replied by pulling out his mobile phone. Wagged it at me. Put it back in his pocket.

“Call him, please,” I said, “and tell him the operation is over.”

His nostrils flared and his mouth tightened. It rankled him, I could see, to be spoken to that way. He wasn’t used to it.

“It’s far too late for that,” he said.

“Tell your men to close the door,” I said. “Tell them you want privacy.”

He blinked, didn’t move.

“Now,” I said.

Maybe he saw something in my eyes. Whatever the reason, he gave me a dour glance and rose from the chair. He walked to the door, spoke in Russian, quickly and quietly. Then, pulling the security latch back, he let the door shut and returned to his chair.

“Cancel the operation,” I said.

He smiled. “You are wasting my time,” he said.

Now I tapped a few keys on the laptop, and the video image began to move. Then, hitting another key to turn on the computer’s built-in microphone, I said, “Shoot him.”

NAVROZOV LOOKED at me, blinked. A slight furrow of the brow, a tentative smile.

He didn’t believe me.

On the laptop screen there was sudden movement. A scuffle.

The camera jerked as if someone had bumped against the laptop on the other end. Now you could see only half of the kid’s body, his shoulder and arm in the white duck fabric of his Posey straitjacket.

And the black cylinder of the sound suppressor screwed onto the end of Darryl’s Heckler & Koch.45.

Navrozov was staring now. “You don’t think I will possibly believe-”

Darryl’s hand gripped the pistol. His forefinger slipped into the trigger guard.

Navrozov’s eyes widened, raptly watching the image on the screen.

Darryl’s finger squeezed the trigger.

The loud pop of a silenced round. A slight muzzle flash as the pistol recoiled.

Navrozov made a strange, strangled shout.

His son’s scream was muted by the duct tape. His right arm jerked and a hole opened in his upper arm, a spray of blood, a blotch of red on the white canvas.

Arkady Navrozov’s arm twisted back and forth, his agony apparent, the chair rocking, and then I clicked off the feed.

“Svoloch!” Navrozov thundered, his fist slamming the desk. “Proklyaty sukin syn!”

A pounding at the door. His guards.

“Tell them to stand down,” I said, “if you’d like to discuss how to save your son’s life.”

Enraged, face purpling, he staggered out of his chair and over to the door and gasped, “Vsyo v poryadke.”

He came back, stood with folded arms. Just stared at me.

“All right,” I said. “Call your cutout and tell him the operation is over.”

He stared for a few seconds. Then he took out his mobile phone, punched a single button, and put it to his ear.

After a few seconds, he spoke in Russian, quickly and softly.

“Izmeneniya v planakh.” He paused, and then: “Nyet, ya ochen’ seryozno. Seichas. Osvobodit’ dyevushku. Da, konyeshno, svyazat’ vsye kontsy.”

He punched another button to end the call.

He lowered the phone to his side, then sank down in the chair. The power and menace seemed to have seeped out of the man, leaving a mere Madame Tussaud waxwork: a lifelike model of a once terrifying figure.

In a monotone, he said, “It is done.”

“And how long after he makes the call before Alexa is free?”

“He must do this in person.”

“You haven’t heard of encrypted phones?”

“There are loose ends to tie up. This can only be done in person.”

“You mean, he’s going to eliminate the contractor.”

“Operational security,” Navrozov said.

“But he has to drive from Maine?”

He glowered at me. “It will take thirty minutes, no more. So. We are done here.”

“Not until I speak to Alexa.”

“This will take time.”

“I’m sure.”

“My son needs immediate medical treatment.”

“The sooner she’s free, the sooner your son will be treated.”

He exhaled, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s. “Fine. We have concluded our business here. Marcus will get his daughter, and I will get my son.”

“Actually, no.”

“No… what?”

“No, we’re not done here.”

“Oh?”

“We have more to talk about.”

He squinted at me.

“Just a few questions about Anya Afanasyeva.”

He drew breath. I knew then I had him.

“Where did she pick up such a lousy Georgia accent?”

77.

Roman Navrozov took from his breast pocket a slim black box with a gold eagle on the front. Sobranie Black Russians. He carefully withdrew a black cigarette with a gold filter and put it in his mouth.

“This is a no-smoking room, yes?”

I nodded.

He pulled a box of matches from his front jacket pocket. He took out a match and lit it with his thumbnail. He put the match to the end of the cigarette and inhaled. Then he let out a long, luxuriant plume of smoke between his rounded lips.

Navrozov didn’t just smoke Russian cigarettes; he smoked like a Russian too. Russians, especially older Russians, hold cigarettes the way Westerners hold a joint: between the thumb and forefinger. Habits like that never go away.

“Anya Ivanovna really was not a bad actress at all,” he said. “But she was not, shall we say, Meryl Streep. Clearly she needed to do more research into the State of Georgia.”

I had no reason to think that Marshall Marcus was lying about how he met the woman who called herself Belinda Jackson. He was the victim, after all. And when he’d met her at the Ritz-Carlton bar in Atlanta, he must have known she was an escort. A horny old goat like Marcus could tell, the way a spaniel can smell game.

He just didn’t know that she was no longer employed in that capacity by VIP Exxxecutive Service.

She was employed by Roman Navrozov.

My cyber-investigator had checked on the dates of her employment by the escort service and confirmed my gut instinct. Then, as he traced her background, he was able to dig much deeper than Dorothy ever could, since he had access to certain archives and records in New Jersey that she didn’t.

The woman who changed her name to Belinda Jackson, who’d dropped out of the School for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, had in fact enrolled under her real name. The name on her birth certificate: Anya Ivanovna Afanasyeva. She’d grown up in a Russian enclave in Woodbine, New Jersey, the daughter of Russian émigrés. Her father had been an engineer in the Soviet Union but could only get some low-level desk job at an insurance company here.

That was about the sum total of the facts I knew. Everything else was informed guesswork. I imagined that Anya sought work as a call girl only when she couldn’t get work as an actress. Or maybe out of some sort of rebellion against her old-fashioned émigré parents.

“I assume you provided Anya with a complete dossier on Marshall Marcus,” I said. “His likes and dislikes, his tastes in movies and music. Maybe even his sexual peccadilloes.”

Navrozov burst out laughing. “Do you really think an attractive and sexually talented woman like Anya needs a dossier to capture the heart of such a foolish old man? It takes very little. Most men have very simple needs. And Anya more than met those needs.”

“Your needs were simple too,” I said. “His account numbers and passwords, the way his fund was structured, where the critical vulnerabilities were.”

He gave a snort of derision that I assumed was meant to be a denial.

“Look, I’m familiar with the history of your career. The way you secretly seized control of the second-largest bank in Russia, then used it to take over the aluminum industry. It was clever.”

He blinked, nodded, unwilling to show me how much he enjoyed the blandishment. But men like that were unusually susceptible to flattery. It was often their greatest vulnerability. And I could see that it was working.

“The way you stole Marcus Capital Management was nothing short of brilliant. You seized control of the bank that handled all of Marcus’s trades. You actually bought the Banco Transnacional de Panamá. Their broker-dealer. It was… genius.”

I waited a few seconds.

Strategic deception, in war or in espionage, is just another form of applied psychology. The thing is, you never actually deceive your target-you induce him to deceive himself. You reinforce beliefs he already has.

Roman Navrozov lived in a state of paranoia and suspicion. So he was automatically inclined to believe that I actually had a shooter positioned in an empty office across the street-not just a remote-controlled light switch that I could turn on and off by hitting a pre-programmed key on my cell phone. George Devlin, of course, had designed it for me and had a colleague in New York set it up: That kind of technology was far beyond my capabilities.

And he had no reason to doubt that I had people in the adjoining rooms. Why not? He’d do it too.

Same for the staged video that Darryl had taped earlier, with the help of a buddy of his who’d agreed to wear a straitjacket wired with a squib and a condom full of blood. A buddy who trusted Darryl’s assurance that his H &K was loaded with blanks, not real rounds.

Roman Navrozov believed the whole charade was real. After all, he’d done far worse to the spouses and children of his opponents; such cruelty came naturally to him.

But what I was attempting now-to pull information out of him by convincing him I knew more than I did-was much riskier. Because at any moment I might slip and say something that would tip him off that I was just plain lying.

He watched me for a few seconds through the haze of his cigarette smoke. I saw the subtle change in his eyes, a softening of his features, a relaxing of his facial muscles.

“Well,” he said, and there it was, the proud smile that I’d been hoping to provoke.

In truth, it was sort of genius, in a twisted way.

If there’s some hedge fund you want to loot, all you have to do is buy the bank that controls its portfolio. Obviously that’s not going to happen with most normal hedge funds, which use the big investment banks in the U.S. But Marcus Capital wasn’t a normal hedge fund.

“So tell me something,” I said. “Why did you need to kidnap Marshall’s daughter?”

“It was a salvage operation. A desperation move. Because the original plan didn’t work at all.”

“And the original plan…?”

He sucked in a lungful of smoke, let it out even more slowly. Then fell silent.

“You wanted the Mercury files,” I said.

“Obviously.”

It made sense. Roman Navrozov was a businessman, and certain businessmen at the highest levels traffic in the most valuable commodities. And was there any commodity rare than the deepest darkest intelligence secrets of the world’s sole remaining superpower?

“So were you planning on selling the black-budget files to the Russian government?”

“Black budget?”

“Maybe that’s a term you’re not familiar with.”

“Please. I know what black budget is. But you think the Mercury files have something to do with America’s secret military budget? I am a businessman, not an information broker.”

“They contain the operational details of our most classified intelligence operations.”

He looked at me in surprise. “Is that what you were told? Next you will tell me you believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as well.”

Then his mobile phone rang, emitting that annoying default Nokia ringtone you used to hear everywhere until people figured out how to select a different one.

He glanced at the display. “The cutout,” he said.

My heart began to thud.

78.

Kirill Aleksandrovich Chuzhoi drove up the long dirt road, chest tight with anticipation.

He didn’t enjoy wet work, but sometimes he had no choice, and he did it efficiently and without hesitation. Roman Navrozov paid him extremely well, and if he wanted loose ends tied up, Chuzhoi would do whatever it took. For God’s sake, he’d even gone down to Boston to take out a low-level drug dealer inside FBI headquarters! He had attracted too much attention and would very soon have to leave the country. He could work for Navrozov elsewhere in the world.

No, he didn’t much enjoy that kind of job. Whereas the contractor-the zek, the convict who’d done time in Kopeisk, was reputed to enjoy killing so much that he preferred to draw out the process, in order to make it last.

In this man’s line of work, such a disturbing streak of sadism was a qualification. Maybe even necessary. He was capable of doing anything.

He made Chuzhoi extremely uncomfortable.

Chuzhoi knew very little about the zek beyond this. And of course the owl tattoo that disfigured the back of his head and neck. He knew that the Sova gang recruited the most brutal inmates at Kopeisk.

Chuzhoi, who had trained in the old KGB and later climbed the greasy rungs of its main successor, the FSB, had encountered this type on a few occasions and had put a few in prison. The most successful serial killers were like that, but they rarely got caught.

With his shaved head and his staring eyes and his grotesque tattoo and his bad teeth, the contractor knew he frightened people, and he surely enjoyed that. He viewed all others with contempt. He considered himself a more highly evolved species.

So he would never imagine that a washed-up old silovik, a former KGB agent, a lousy petty bureaucrat, could possibly attempt what Chuzhoi was about to do.

The element of surprise was Chuzhoi’s only advantage against this sociopathic monster.

An overgrown lawn came into view: wild, almost jungle-like. In the midst sat a small clapboard house. He parked his black Audi on the gravel driveway and approached the front door. It had started to rain.

Chuzhoi wore the same nailhead suit he’d worn in Boston, tailored to fit his broad physique. He moved with his accustomed air of authority. His long gray hair spilled over his shirt collar.

His trusty Makarov.380 was concealed in a holster at the small of his back.

The green-painted door swung open suddenly, and a face came out of the darkness. The shaved head, the intense stare, the deeply etched forehead: Chuzhoi had forgotten how fearsome the man was.

Something about his amber eyes: the eyes of a wolf, wild and feral and ruthless. Yet at the same time the eyes were cold and disciplined and ever calculating. They studied his acne-pitted cheeks.

“The rain has started,” Chuzhoi said. “It’s supposed to be a bad storm.”

The zek said nothing. He glared and turned around, and Chuzhoi followed him into the shadowed recesses. The house had the stale smell of a place long closed up.

Was the girl here?

“You have no electricity?” Chuzhoi said.

“Sit.” The zek pointed to an armchair with a high back. It was upholstered in little flowers and looked like something chosen by an old lady.

Of course, the zek had no right to speak to him this way, but Chuzhoi allowed him his impertinence. “The girl is here?” he said, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. It was so dark he could barely see the sociopath’s face.

“No.” The zek remained standing. “Why is this meeting necessary?”

Chuzhoi decided to meet brevity with brevity.

“The operation has been terminated,” he said. “The girl is to be released at once.”

“It’s too late,” the zek said.

Chuzhoi pulled a sheaf of papers from his breast pocket. “I will see to it that you are wired your completion fee immediately. All you have to do is sign these forms, as we’ve already discussed. Also, in consideration of your excellent service, you will receive a bonus of one hundred thousand dollars in cash as soon as the girl is handed over.”

“But ‘terminated’ is not the same as ‘concluded,’” the zek said. “Was the ransom not paid? Or were other arrangements made?”

Chuzhoi shrugged. “I am only a messenger. I pass along what the Client tells me. But I believe other arrangements have been reached.”

The zek stared at him, and Chuzhoi, hardly a delicate man, felt a sudden chill. “Do you need a pen?” he said.

The zek came near. Chuzhoi could smell the cigarettes on his breath.

The zek gave a hideous grimace. “You know, we can go into business for ourselves,” he said. “The girl’s father is a billionaire. We can demand a ransom that will set us up for life.”

“The father has nothing anymore.”

“Men like that are never without money.”

A sudden gust of wind lashed the small window with rain. There was a rumble of distant thunder.

But why not offer him whatever he asked? It was all irrelevant anyway. He’d never get a cent.

The zek put his arm around Chuzhoi’s shoulder in a comradely fashion. “We could be partners. Think of how much we can make, you and I.”

His hand ran smoothly down Chuzhoi’s back until it lightly grasped the butt of his pistol. As if he knew precisely what he would find and where.

“Last time you came unarmed.”

“The weapon is for my protection.”

“Do you know what this is?” the zek said.

Chuzhoi saw the wink of a steel blade, a thick black handle.

Of course he knew what the thing was.

In the calmest voice he could muster, he said, “I am always happy to discuss new business opportunities.”

He felt the nip of the blade against his side.

The zek’s left hand slid back up his spine to his left shoulder, the long fingers gripping the shoulder blade at the front. Suddenly he felt a deep twinge and his left arm went dead. Chuzhoi sensed the man’s hot breath on his neck.

“I know the Client’s ransom demands have still not been met,” the zek said. “I also know he has made a deal to give me up.”

Chuzhoi opened his mouth to deny it, but the blade penetrated a little more, then pulled back. The pain was so intense it made him gasp.

“If we are to do business together, we need to trust each other,” the monster said.

“Of course,” Chuzhoi whispered, eyes closed.

“You need to earn my trust.”

“Yes. Of course. Please.”

A tear rolled down his cheek. He wasn’t sure if it was from the physical pain of the zek’s pressure point or simple fear.

“I think you have some idea where the girl is located,” the zek said.

Chuzhoi hesitated, not wanting to admit he’d had the man followed after their last meeting. That would only enrage him.

Chuzhoi had ordered the follower to keep the surveillance discreet. In fact, he’d stayed back so far he’d lost him.

But… was it possible the zek had detected the surveillance?

Even so, Chuzhoi had only an approximate location of the burial site. He didn’t know the name of the town. The county, yes. Hundreds of square miles. So what? That was as good as nothing.

Before he could think how to reply, the zek spoke. “A man with your experience should hire better eyes.”

Chuzhoi felt the blade again, white hot, but this time the zek didn’t pull back, and the pain shot up to the top of his head and down to the very soles of his feet. Heat spread throughout his body, or so he thought, until he realized that in fact his sphincter had given way.

In desperation he cried, “Think of the money-!”

But the knife had gone in deep into his stomach. He struggled against the zek’s iron embrace, retched something hot, which burned his throat.

Outside the wind whistled. Rain spattered the clapboard sides of the house. It had become a downpour.

“I am,” the zek said.

“What do you want?” he screamed. “My God, what do you want from me?”

“May I borrow your mobile?” the zek said. “I’d like to make a phone call.”

79.

“Put it on speaker,” I told Navrozov.

This was it. The call that told us either that the kidnapping had been successfully called off, or…

Navrozov answered it abruptly: “Da?”

“Speaker,” I said again.

To me he said, “I don’t know how to do this.”

I took it from him and punched the speaker button, and I heard something strange, something unexpected.

A scream.

AND THEN a man’s voice, speaking in Russian.

I could make out only intonation and cadence, of course, but the man sounded calm and professional.

In the background was a continuous whimpering, a rush of words that sounded like pleading. I set the phone down on the desk, looked at Navrozov, whose face registered puzzlement.

He leaned over the phone, not fully understanding the concept of a speakerphone, and said, “Kto eto?”

The calm voice on the other end: “Vy menya nye znayete.”

“Shto proiskhodit?” Navrozov said.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“He says the contractor is not available to speak but he can pass along a message-”

The whimpering in the background abruptly got louder, turned into a high, almost feminine shriek that prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. A peculiar gargling sound, then a rush of words: “Ostanovitye!… Ya proshu… pazhaluista prekratitye! Shto ty khochish?… Bozhe moi!”

Navrozov looked stricken. His face was flushed, his features gone slack as he listened.

“Nye magu… nye… magu…”

The pleading voice in the background grew fainter.

“Who is it?” I demanded.

Then the calm voice was back on speaker. “Someone is there with you?” the man said, this time in English. “Tell Mr. Navrozov that his employee will no longer be reporting back to him. Good-bye.”

A few seconds of silence passed before I realized that the connection had been severed.

I had a sick feeling. I knew the worst had happened. So did Navrozov. He hurled the phone across the room. It hit a bedside lamp, knocking it to the carpeted floor. His face was dark, mottled. He let loose a string of Russian obscenities.

“The bastard thinks he can defy me!” Navrozov said, spittle flying.

The door to the room came open, and his security guards burst in. The one in front had a weapon in his right hand, a keycard in his left. They’d managed to get one from the front desk.

“This bastard murders my employee!”

The security men did a quick assessment, assured themselves that I wasn’t doing harm to their boss. They muttered hasty apologies, I guessed, and retreated from the room.

“Who was that?” I said.

“This is the whole point of cutouts!” he shouted. “I don’t know who it is.”

“Where is he, then?”

“I told you, somewhere in New Hampshire!”

“Within a thirty-minute drive from the Maine border,” I said. “Right? We know that much. But do you know if he was based in the north part of the state, or the south, or what? You have no idea?”

He didn’t answer, and I could tell that he didn’t know. That he was experiencing something he rarely felt: defeat.

“Wait,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I do have something. A photograph.”

I looked at him, waited.

“The cutout was able to take a covert photograph of the contractor. For insurance purposes.”

“A face?”

He nodded. “But no name.”

“I want it.”

“But this man’s face is not in any of your law-enforcement databases. It will not be easy to find him.”

“I want it,” I repeated. “And I want one more thing.”

Navrozov just looked at me.

“I want to know what Mercury really is.”

He told me.

Thirty minutes later, still numb with shock, I found my way to the street and into a cab.