Need You Now

31

C lose to midnight, the BOS limo dropped Joe Barber at his estate in Greenwich. To him, the fresh blanket of snow on the wooded acre made his house atop the hill look like a Norman Rockwell painting, though he had to concede that there was little nostalgia in a twelve-thousand-square-foot mansion with seven bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, two swimming pools, a clay tennis court, and a bowling alley built on a special “floating” foundation to keep the subterranean vibrations from disturbing the priceless bounty of the wine cellar. His wife was asleep in bed when he got home. Miraculously, she wasn’t on the treadmill. Metaphorically speaking, though, he sure was.

A management position with a troubled Swiss bank was not the capstone career move that Barber had hoped for after his tenure at Treasury as deputy secretary. BOS had barely survived the subprime crisis, its reputation forever tarnished. Its standing as the premier bank in Switzerland was in question, and in America, it was undeniably second tier. As his wife had so often reminded him, friends at firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had offered Barber dazzling compensation packages. When he told them he was joining BOS, they had been shocked. When the journal reported that he was going there for less money, they feared that he had lost his mind. No one knew the real reason for his decision. No one could know that he was just following orders.

Most important, no one could ever know who was telling him what to do.

“Did you give them the data, Joe baby?”

Barber wondered why the question even needed to be asked, and he was getting fed up with the condescending tone and insulting nicknames like “Joe baby.”

“Exactly the way you told me,” said Barber.

They were in the first-floor study, just Barber and a man he knew only as Mongoose. He didn’t have any of the weasel-like features of an actual mongoose, but, of course, it was the point of any good cryptonym to bear no resemblance to its subject. This Mongoose had short blond hair and the rugged good looks of a movie star, with broad shoulders and muscles so thick that his neck bulged.

“So you called them into your office and…”

“And I delivered the packages. End of story.”

Barber shifted uncomfortably. He was seated in a chair that, tongue in cheek, he had always called “the hot seat,” a boxy Chinese antique made of rosewood that had an upright back and no cushion. Another pair from the same set of four had once graced his office at Treasury, and they were so uncomfortable that no meeting had ever lasted more than twenty minutes-the intended effect. Mongoose was seated in the leather chair behind Barber’s desk. Only Barber and the retired CEO of Saxton Silvers, who had passed it on to him, had ever sat at that desk. Until tonight.

“That’s my boy,” said Mongoose.

“You need to stop calling me ‘boy,’ ‘Joe baby,’ or whatever the insult of the day is. I’m tired of that shit.”

“This isn’t supposed to be fun, Joey. At least not for you.”

“Killing innocent people? That’s your idea of fun?”

Mongoose leaned back, put his feet up on Barber’s leather-top desk.

“The park ranger was a regrettable piece of collateral damage. I needed to know what she and Patrick Lloyd talked about.”

“What could she have possibly passed along to you that was of any value?”

“Exactly what your inept security experts couldn’t: Patrick Lloyd is Peter Mandretti. Tony Mandretti’s son.”

The news didn’t shock him. Barber’s own intelligence was not as inept as Mongoose thought. But in some situations it was best to play dumb. “What do you want me to do with that information?”

“I want you to be very nervous. I want you to think about what could happen if I made a copy of the memo you wrote at Treasury and gave it to Tony Mandretti’s son.”

That thought chilled him. Mongoose laughed, clearly enjoying that Barber had gone cold.

Barber said, “I’ve done everything you’ve told me to do. You don’t have to kill innocent park rangers. You don’t have to bring Mandretti and his son into this. It’s enough that you have the memo.”

Mongoose smiled with his eyes. “You wish you had never written it, don’t you?”

Barber didn’t answer. But it was true: of all his regrets from his service at Treasury, the biggest was the classified internal memorandum he’d written about the Cushman Ponzi scheme.

Mongoose said, “That’s one tough spot you put yourself in, Joey. You talk about me killing innocent people. What about you? Letting all those investors lose their money to a thief like Abe Cushman. Someone the government knew was a fraud. How do you justify that?”

Barber had no answer.

“It’s the same old line, isn’t it?” said Mongoose. “Every war has collateral damage-even a financial war, like this one. The investors who lost their money to Cushman are collateral damage. Pawns like Lilly Scanlon, who don’t even know they’re pawns, are collateral damage. A dedicated undercover agent whom you hang out to dry and who ends up with a bullet in his spine from Manu Robledo is collateral damage.”

The antique chair was becoming more uncomfortable. Barber did not deny any of it.

Mongoose said, “It all comes back to you, Little Joe. Your name is on the classified memo. And it’s crystal clear that Operation BAQ was your idea.”

Again, no denial. Barber had even come up with the abbreviation, BAQ.

“Let’s get on with it,” said Barber.

“I’m tired,” Mongoose said, rising. “We’ve covered enough ground for one night. I’ll let myself out.” He started for the door, then stopped. “Oh, by the way. I’m sure you don’t have any delusions of stabbing me in the back or, more your style, hiring someone else to do it. But just in case, I wanted you to know: I have a safety valve.”

“Meaning what?”

“Every blackmailer needs one. It’s a way to make sure that if something happens to me, the trigger gets pulled. Everything I’ve threatened to do to you will come to pass.”

Barber showed no reaction, not sure if he was bluffing or not.

Mongoose studied his expression, then said, “I’m not sure you believe me. But it’s real. Your memo on Operation BAQ is mixed in with the BOS files you handed over today.”

That was more than Barber could take quietly. “You son of bitch, if Patrick doesn’t know enough to connect the dots, his father sure does.”

“Relax,” said Mongoose. “It’s still encrypted. They don’t have the key, and they don’t have the resources to crack the code. But here’s how my safety valve works. If I don’t log on to my computer every day and deactivate my safety valve, an e-mail will automatically go to Patrick and Lilly. The decryption key is in the e-mail.”

There was no gun to his head, literally speaking, but Barber suddenly felt as if there were.

Mongoose said, “So unless you want your memo decrypted, unless you want the world to know about Operation BAQ and the role you played in it, then you need to be very concerned about my health. Understood?”

Powerlessness was a foreign feeling to him, but Barber knew who was holding all the aces. “Understood.”

“Good. Now, stay on top of those two jokers,” he said, meaning Patrick and Lilly.

“I will let you know as soon as I hear back from them.”

“No. Don’t wait. Follow up in the morning. Mandretti’s son is going to crack. I can feel it. Even though Lilly doesn’t know enough to make heads or tails of his data, Patrick has to be nervous that she might be able to make some sense of it. That’s your leverage. I want a complete road map to the money.”

“He isn’t going to just knuckle under overnight.”

“He will if you push the right buttons. That would make me very happy. In fact, if you get me an answer by tomorrow night, I might make you a partner. Wouldn’t that make you happy, Joey?”

Barber was silent.

“Good night, partner.” Mongoose laughed to himself. Then he turned, opened the door, and left the room. Barber listened as the footfalls of a blackmailer echoed in his own hallway. He heard the front door open, then close.

Mongoose was gone.