Honeymoon

Chapter 91

HE WANTED ANSWERS; he needed to make the right connection. He had to make sense out of the puzzle pieces.

Suddenly this was very personal with O’Hara—the Tourist.

The mysterious file he’d rescued outside Grand Central Station.

The list of names, addresses, bank accounts, amounts.

A pizza delivery guy who had tried to kill him.

But who was behind that? The original seller, the blackmailer?

His own people?

What did they want? Did they know he’d copied the file? Did they only suspect it? Or were they simply taking out insurance in case he had?

They don’t trust me. I don’t trust them.

Isn’t that cozy and nice.

Way of the world these days.

So anyway, every free moment he got—like after his big day with the boys in Yankee Stadium—he worked with the names on the file, trying to figure it out. The truth, though, was that he wasn’t exactly a genius at this sort of thing.

He’d gotten this far, though.

All the individuals in the file were keeping money illegally in offshore bank accounts.

Over a billion dollars.

He had contacted a few of the banks on the list, but that probably wasn’t the way in.

He’d called the homes of a few of the tainted individuals. But that was a bad way to go, too. What did he expect them to admit to?

Then late on Sunday night, he was reading the New York Times, the Style section. For other reasons, actually. Nora Sinclair reasons. Things he could talk to her about.

And there it was!

Pow!

Bingo!

Three, four, five, nine, eleven names from “the list,” all of them at the same bigwig party held at the Waldorf-Astoria.

And he finally got it—the blackmail, the scam, the panic about it, even why he’d been called in to make sure everything went just right. And then, why somebody might want to kill him, just because he might know something.

Which, as it turned out now, he definitely did.

O’Hara knew a lot more than he wanted to.

About both of his undercover cases.