The Body of David Hayes

TWENTY

THE SATURDAY BEFORE THE GALA reception and the ceremonial switchover from WestCorp to MTK proved the longest day of Liz’s life. The waiting for the phone to ring; the surveillance/protection by both uniformed and plainclothes SPD officers, some of whom lingered in her living room; the temptation to call Kathy and the kids, versus Lou’s determination not to make any contact whatsoever for fear of Svengrad somehow tracking it.

The only break in the day arrived in the form of a briefing. Pahwan Riz, the director of Special Operations, asked for a meeting with Liz and Lou to discuss what was expected of her “in the event” she was contacted. Lou agreed to the meeting, in part because he had to, in part because she was looking to relieve the tedium and monotony of waiting for the phone to ring. But Lou’s primary reason for taking the meeting was to gather as much information about Riz’s plan as possible in order to thwart it. If the combined efforts of Seattle Police and BCI prevented Svengrad from getting his money wired out, then the video was certain to surface, damaging if not ending both their careers. Quite possibly Miles and Sarah would be put permanently at risk. Lou had to defeat his own people while figuring out a way to protect his family. If he could double-cross Svengrad in the process-so much the better. Whatever Riz planned played into that.

Lou briefed her before the others arrived. “I’m cooking something up.”

“I thought so.”

“It’s complicated.”

“It is, isn’t it?” She enjoyed the irony, though Lou seemed to miss it.

“It’s going against my own guys. You’ve got that, right?”

Her faced knotted in concern. “You can’t do that, Lou. Not for me. Not for anyone.”

“The kids?” he inquired, silencing her. “Going against the very people who are about to be in this room, which is why it’s important you go along with anything they tell you. It doesn’t mean you will go along with it, but for now you’ll tell them you will.”

She nodded, cringing at the idea of his turning against his own team.

“Danny Foreman is not to be trusted. The deeper I look into all this, Danny keeps showing up.”

“And he’ll be here?”

“I suspect he will.” “

I told you he seemed off when he paid me that visit,” she said.

“The point is, I don’t want us giving anything away, to Danny or any of the others, something they could use later on or something to tip them to my plan, so for now I’m keeping some things from you, and I just wanted to be up front about that.”

“So noted.”

Lou took in a lungful of air and held it, and she knew this to signal something important about to be said. She felt herself brighten with anticipation.

He said, “But you need to know that John and I took Hayes into custody last night.”

She felt faint, unable to speak.

“Private custody. Not downtown. We got him out of a difficult situation, and I’m hoping he’ll repay us by cooperating. That’s a work in progress.”

She clarified, “You got him out of a difficult situation. That’s what you’re saying?”

“However improbable, it’s true.”

“Private custody? What does that mean?”

“The point is, I’m working on something.”

“I never doubted that, Lou. I just regret-”

He interrupted. “It’s a long shot. In all honesty, it probably has only a faint chance of succeeding. But for right now, it’s all I’ve got. And it’s already in motion.”

“In all honesty.” She repeated his words with desperation in her voice. Her own lack of honesty had brought all of this upon him. She hated herself at that moment.

To her surprise, a man named Marc O’Brien ran the meeting. She didn’t recall having ever met the man, and his attendance reinstalled her sense of violation-that some stranger had, at least in his mind, taken control of her life, was here to dictate to her what had to be done and how to do it. Judging by looks, O’Brien belonged in an Irish pub with a pint in hand to fuel his glowing cheeks and bubble nose. His loud voice supported his demeanor of reckless overconfidence. Here was a man who, on a sinking boat, would announce to anyone who would listen what a great day it was for a swim. His next-in-command, Pahwan Riz, the dark-skinned Malaysian, tracked Liz’s every reaction, her every movement with his crisp green eyes, like a cat watching the family dog.

Lou, John LaMoia, and Daphne Matthews all sat stiffly on the same couch together, Matthews in the middle, lined up like Kewpie dolls at the county fair. Maggie, the infant child under Matthews’s legal guardianship, slept in a car seat propped up between two chairs in the kitchen, turning the new mother’s head that direction whenever an errant sound surfaced. Danny Foreman, looking worse for the wear, two fingers of his left hand bandaged, occupied a needlepoint bench against the wall that fronted the stairs leading to the home’s second floor. Unseen up there, a police officer sat near a window keeping watch. Another indignity she could not get used to: the castle keep. Foreman sat forward, resting on thick forearms that pressed into his thighs. He lifted his head every so often looking as if he might speak, but apparently not finding the strength to do so.

She knew that if he’d had his way, Lou would have kept Foreman out of the meeting. But as he’d explained it to her, he couldn’t block BCI from sitting in on the briefing, and he didn’t have anything more than circumstantial evidence to bring against Foreman, not to mention that one cop charging another cop was fraught with bureaucratic red tape and could not be done without the inclusion of the very highest brass-and Lou wasn’t prepared to go that route, given that he was planning to end-run his own department himself.

Riz announced, “The purpose of this meeting is that at some point in the next twenty-four to thirty hours, we expect that the conversion of funds resulting from the merger will necessitate an attempt to move the embezzled seventeen million out of the bank. That will apparently require your participation,” he told Liz. “Your cooperation.”

O’Brien said, “We believe you will either be contacted or abducted.”

He said this loudly, and in a way that to her sounded grossly impersonal. She felt shivers ripple up her arms.

Riz clearly felt the man’s insensitivity as well. He lowered his voice, looked directly at Liz, and continued, “We don’t know where or when. We don’t know how. Our intel is basically nil on this case. All we have is you, Mrs. B., and it’s time we laid down some ground rules.”

Liz had hoped to sit around as a spectator, a listener, to avoid any direct participation in this meeting, to let Lou do the talking for her. But she felt her mouth move, and out came words. “Yes… well… I don’t know how many of you have ever been on the other end of this kind of surveillance, but I find it claustrophobic, invasive, and oppressive. So the sooner it’s over, the better.”

Riz and O’Brien ran down a number of possible scenarios for her abduction or participation.

Liz said, “You must be aware that there are at least four other people with security clearance to access the IBM AS/ 400s.”

Pahwan Riz said, “Detective Foreman?”

Danny Foreman came awake, like one of Miles’s toys that reacts to sound. Lou had mentioned that Danny had been tortured a second time, but there was no evidence of that. “Liz, BCI has had its eye on those of you with access since the day Hayes was paroled. You and LaRossa are the only two they’ve contacted, and LaRossa is now in ICU and not an option. That is not to say we aren’t paying attention to the others. Of course we are. But the bets are on you.” He sagged his head again, the doll back asleep. He sucked down his coffee as if it were juice.

O’Brien said, “Our play is that you’re their target. Keep in mind that we are substituting one of our people for you, so there is basically no situation in which we see you in any kind of trouble. But we must take precautions. Our primary concern is what actions we take as a group, and specifically you as an individual, if we in fact experience an ACL. To brief you on the various proactive responses at your disposal.”

All Contact Lost. Lou had coached her on some of the abbreviations, all of which she felt sounded childish and unnecessary. The secret codes made it more serious to them but more ludicrous to her-like a bunch of kids up in a tree fort planning a raid. O’Brien had begun the meeting laying out the difficulties of surveillance, of hostage situations, raising the possibility that her surveillance team might lose track of her at some point. The moment he said that, she realized a pawn had no choice but to move where and when the player dictated.

“If I carry one of those tracking boxes, they’ll search me and find it, right?” she asked. “I mean, assuming they realize they’ve got the wrong woman and then somehow get hold of me.”

Riz explained that there were other, smaller devices available that could be rigged inside her bra or in a hem, the toe of a shoe, or even her underwear or “on her person,” which she took to mean a body cavity, and she felt briefly ill.

Riz added, “With the smaller devices transmission distance is considerably reduced.” He made it sound like he was selling her a vacuum cleaner.

“So put one in my clothes. I’m okay with that.”

“Fine,” Riz said.

Lou met eyes with her, admiring her. She appreciated the gesture, but realized that at that moment he had little idea what she was going through.

“Your options include,” O’Brien listed, “your playing by their rules and waiting it out; your attempting to give us some way to locate you; or-”

“Escape,” LaMoia said, interrupting.

“Consideration of escape is not an option,” Matthews said, objecting. “Trying to outrun organized crime single-handedly is simply not an option.”

Again, husband and wife met eyes. Wasn’t this exactly what Lou was proposing to her? Wasn’t this the solution he had planned?

Again words left her mouth. “You’re saying it is not an option.” She made it a statement.

Matthews said delicately, “Thinking about it, focusing on it is not an option. They’ll pick up on it. Hostage situations require the abducted individual to loosen the hold of the keepers. One does this by playing into whatever it is they’ve asked of you. By cooperating, not disobeying. You surprise them by your willingness, your eagerness, to cooperate. This has been proven over and over again to be a hostage’s most effective way to gain enough physical freedom and emotional detachment to invoke a causal action that either reconnects with surveillance or provides an opportunity for intervention.”

“Taking a phone off the hook, for instance,” Riz said. “If we suspect a general area you’ve been taken to, we’ll look for that kind of thing: a phone line left open for a minute or more.”

O’Brien added, “You can ‘accidentally’ turn a stereo or television on too loudly. If they’ve got you in a car, you might bump the emergency flashers, might even turn them off yourself, apologizing.”

Riz said, “Activate the rear wiper if it’s not raining. Toss litter from a window. All these things are potential helpers.”

“But what you don’t do,” Matthews said, “is try anything too overt: dialing the lieutenant’s number, or 911 from a telephone or mobile phone. That would put you at risk, even if you see the opportunity.”

“Check that,” Riz said, interrupting Matthews. “If you dial 911 from a land line, even if you hang up immediately, we’ve got you, so don’t rule that one out completely. Same with a pay phone, a car phone-a cell phone,” he said, glancing at Matthews, “anything you can get your hands on.”

Liz took note of the contradiction and sided with Matthews. Riz and O’Brien sounded more like they wanted her to keep the game going than to protect herself.

“Try to stand out of the crowd whenever possible,” O’Brien said. “If they’ve got you moving, and they very well may, then cross on the red lights, jaywalk, use the stairs, avoid the crowds. It’s the simple little things that allow us to stay with you better.”

“The computers,” Foreman said suddenly from his bench. He glanced at Liz. He had told her his and Geiser’s intentions-that she wire the money to a government account regardless of what people like Riz told her to do. “Yes!” Riz said. “Should you find yourself logging on to the AS/400, about to gain access, first please type either Miles6 or Sarah4 as your password. The server won’t allow you access, but you’ll try again, using your correct password, and you’ll be in. By doing so, you drop a handkerchief for us to follow.”

“A handkerchief?” Liz inquired, not appreciating the analogy. It made her into a Victorian woman trying to garner attention.

“We could tell you more, but we’d have to kill you,” a smiling O’Brien joked before thinking. The comment sobered and silenced the room. O’Brien apologized and said, “We believe Hayes possesses some way to erase all record of whatever he has you do while inside the server. If you signal us ahead of time, using Miles6 or Sarah4, it greatly increases our chances of tracing whatever it is you initiate.” She fought herself to not look over at Lou. “It has to do with network IP addresses, and things I don’t even understand, but White Collar Crime made it clear that they need you to send us the smoke signal if they’re to have a chance.”

Riz said, “Miles6, Sarah4, spelled exactly as they sound with the numeral following. We thought they’d be easy to remember. You type in either password, and we’re piggy-backed with you as you go in.”

“It’s like uncoiling a ball of string as you walk through a maze,” Foreman said, lifting his head again and meeting eyes with her. He didn’t want her giving them that string to follow. He wanted her doing this his way. Message received.

Liz found herself in a staring contest with Danny.

Matthews broke in. “You need your rest. We’re done here.”

Not long thereafter, everyone left the house. She and Lou rounded up the coffee mugs.

“So?” he asked.

“Ugh,” she said.

Lou put on some music-plaintive jazz-and gently steered her by the elbow to a dead space in the room that offered no clear line of sight through a window, despite all the shades being drawn. He whispered, and it caused her shivers.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through. They mean well, for what it’s worth.”

“Not much,” she said.

“Is it possible, what they said about tracking you inside the bank servers?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “If key tracking is present, then every time I touch a key they’ll follow it.”

He considered this for a long moment. “Then whatever you do, you mustn’t enter those passwords they gave you. You mustn’t turn on the key tracking.”

“They don’t know David,” she said, immediately regretting the intimacy that implied on her part.

He glanced up into her eyes. She saw disguised hurt.

She explained, “He’s far too sophisticated a programmer to leave any of this up to human error. Yes, anyone using the AS/400 would have to log on to do so, and to move the money out will require routing information and an account number, and it’s possible, though not certain, that account data will have to be manually input. But would he allow a key-tracking program to run? Absolutely not. My value to him is that I can get past the physical security to reach the AS/400 and I have a password that will allow access into it. But do you think he would allow their software to record whatever account numbers are input? He’s smarter than that, Lou. Even if I type one of those passwords, David will have already thought of a way to defeat it. Trust me, they’re not in his league, Lou.” She added, “I don’t mean for that to be hurtful.”

“It’s good information,” he said, though his voice cracked, belying his true emotions.

“Danny gave me this look,” she said. “He’s still expecting me to transfer this money where he says to transfer it.”

“It’s not Danny I’m worried about. It’s the idea that whoever gives you an account number risks your remembering it. By phone, by note, it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered-it’s your recalling it later they can’t afford.”

“They are typically enormously long strings,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lou returned. “You’re a banker. They can’t rule out that you have a head for such numbers. And if you memorize the destination account, the money can then be traced and found, right?”

She nodded, understanding immediately the subtext and why her husband was reluctant to say it aloud. “If I’m around to repeat it,” she said.

Lou did not look at her, nor did he speak directly to her comment. Instead, he backed away and mumbled something about needing a cup of tea.

This, she realized, had been his fear all along.

“Are we going to talk about this plan of yours?” she asked, the two of them eating ham sandwiches at the kitchen table. Lou had stayed at the house following the meeting, something she hadn’t expected but found comforting. At first she’d thought him exhausted and in need of the rest, but she amended that opinion as he then spent two hours working over a yellow legal pad.

He said, “It’s occurred to everyone that you’d be at extreme risk. We know for a fact that my guys will expect me to insist you use a stand-in. I will demand it, of course. I have already. They will never, in a million years, believe I would arrange for you to double-cross them.”

“So they’ll expect an undercover woman to play my part, and we’ll go along with that.”

“We’ll go along with it on the surface. Anything else would be out of character.”

“So it’s kind of a race,” she said.

“If we play it right, that’s exactly what it comes down to, yes. The real Liz beats the fake Liz to the AS/400s.”

“And we accomplish that, how?” she added.

“We beat them off the starting line. We deliver the unexpected-something they didn’t plan for. It’s not easy to fool the fooler. Not when they have as many as a dozen undercover officers watching our every move. But I know their training. I know the contingencies they plan for. Our bigger concern is Svengrad. He lost Hayes and the software; he lost everything. He knows that you are needed to accomplish this. It’s inevitable that he comes after you. Remember that none of the people here this afternoon, except LaMoia, knows I have Hayes locked away.”

“Gaynes does,” she said, playing devil’s advocate and immediately regretting it, for she saw the consternation it caused.

“She wasn’t here for the meeting, and she’s on our side anyway.”

She wasn’t sure why she corrected him this way, as she so often did. To gain the upper hand? To show him who the clearer thinker was? To be noticed? In the short term it felt good to correct him, but within a few seconds she typically wanted to crawl and hide, knowing her timing was terrible. She apologized to him, saying, “I do that all the time and I’m not sure why.”

Lou winced, stung perhaps by her sincerity. “We’re going to make it through this.”

“You think?”

“Taking him into custody humanized him for me.” There was no asking about whom he was speaking. He went on for a moment, talking himself out of any feelings of superiority that his abducting Hayes accounted for, discrediting any moral supremacy-that he worked the side of good and David the side of evil. He was telling her that he’d overcome some hurdle, and she was listening.

She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t risk his career by pulling a sting on his own people, but in many ways it seemed too late for that. If the tape was released, his career and his family would suffer; but if he were caught tricking his own people, he might lose his pension as well. With her actions she had put him squarely into unworkable options, and now she forced him to look for some way out. She told him as much, expressing her remorse as sincerely as possible. She said, “I don’t think this kind of thing can be undone using legal pads.”

“You’d be surprised. Legal pads come in very handy.”

“We’re going to joke about this?”

“What choice do we have?”

“A woman is going to take my place out there. You realize the danger we put her in?” she asked, allowing her real anger to surface now. “Never mind all the secret codes that I can use to leave crumbs for your people to follow. What about her? What codes is she going to use when these people-very nasty people according to you and yours-realize they’ve got the wrong Liz Boldt?”

Lou held up the pad of legal paper. She saw inked handwriting and boxes and arrows-a complicated diagram resulting from a conflicted mind. He said, “The best defense is a good offense.”

“You can’t be oblique right now. I’m not up to it.”

“It never gets that far.”

“Never gets how far?”

“Your surrogate. I agree. We can’t let that happen.”

“You can stop it?”

“Timing,” he said.

“But they’re ready right now. They’ve got some stand-in ready around the clock to take my place. That’s what they said, right? Did I miss something?”

“They’re expecting you to receive a call. Everything hinges on them listening in to our land line and both our mobiles. You get the call and a clock starts. A substitution is planned-here at the house, if possible; in the field, if not.”

“But how has that changed?” she asked, still puzzled.

“You arranged for the costume to be delivered to my office, did you not?”

“I did.” It took her a moment to realize he intended that as his explanation, not a question for her to answer. “The costume,” she said.

Lou pointed to the top of his yellow pad and a box there so heavily outlined the ink had smeared. “It all starts with the costume.”

She didn’t know what that meant, not exactly, but resolved herself to the fact he was now calling the shots. He saw some way out of this, however dim. No matter that she struggled to have faith in him and his yellow pad, she was bound to him body and soul. He ran the early part of the show, and she committed herself to doing exactly as he instructed, even if it struck her as an exercise in futility, which it currently did. The later part of the show, inside the bank, was all hers.

“I’m never going to sleep tonight,” she said.

“Yeah,” Lou agreed. “I know.”