The Color of Night

CHAPTER 21

GENEVA

Strand flew to Geneva as early as he could the next morning, chartering a private plane out of Schwechat to avoid the paper trail of the commercial airlines. When he arrived he checked into the Beau-Rivage on the Quai du Mont-Blanc on Lake Geneva.

He called Mara. She was not happy to hear of his delay. He tried to be reassuring, but it was obvious she was not convinced. He couldn’t blame her. Her situation was horrible, and she had very few options for extricating herself. She was largely dependent on him at this point, and he feared that sooner or later she would either find some other options or create some of her own. He was eager to get back to her to dispel the obscurities that were accumulating between them.

He told her to go to Milan and buy a specific kind of laptop. He gave her the e-mail address he wanted her to use and said that all further communication should be through the Internet. Once they made contact, he would give her information about the encryption key he wanted to use.

They talked a few minutes longer. Neither was satisfied with the way the conversation ended.

That afternoon he went to a computer store near the Place Bel-Air and bought the same computer he had told Mara to buy. Then he returned to his room and set it up.

He left the hotel well after dark and walked toward the Rhone on the Quai des Bergues, to Parain’s, a restaurant on the quay overlooking the water with a clear, sparkling view of the lights on the left bank across the Rhone.

He gave the maitre d’ his name, and they started toward the tables next to the windows looking onto the lake. When Strand spotted her, sitting with her back to him, he touched the maitre d’ on the arm. The man retreated immediately. Strand approached the table and bent down and kissed her neck.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, turning and taking his face with both hands and returning his kiss. “I don’t believe we did it. I don’t believe it!”

Strand sat down and looked across the table at Ariana Kiriasis, who had put her hand flat on her chest as if to still her pounding heart. He grinned at her. She still smelled of her own seductive mixture of smoke and perfume.

“You’ve got a hell of a memory,” he said. “It’s been five years at least since we’ve used that. I thought it was a long shot.”

Ariana was still shaking her head, smiling in relief and disbelief. “I wasn’t sure I’d got all the signals straight. When you mentioned Madame Sosotris, the ‘famous clairvoyant,’ my God, I almost fell over.”

“I saw the recognition in your face. I just wasn’t sure you’d remember the details.”

“My God, yes, of course I remembered, I just hadn’t expected it.” She was laughing.

When they’d first begun working together they had devised a method of secretly arranging meetings when they were in the presence of others. Strand would mention Madame Sosotris, a Greek character from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Ariana would confirm that she was ready for him to go ahead by referring to the woman’s illness, also mentioned in the poem. The city, place, and time of their next meeting would be the next city, place, and time mentioned by Strand in the subsequent conversation, though these details would be interwoven into varying contexts.

“I didn’t know if you were free to leave Vienna,” he said. “I didn’t know your arrangements with Howard.”

She told him again, this time in more detail, of her failure to hear from Corsier and of her subsequent approach to Howard, and then of her debriefing.

“I was getting depressed,” she said, reaching for her cigarette pack on the table, “and afraid. Howard wasn’t inspiring much confidence.” She offered one to Strand, who shook his head. She lighted her cigarette and went on. “When Bill dropped me off after our meeting at the Central, we made arrangements to meet again tomorrow morning. But I went straight inside, packed my things, and took a late train out of Vienna.”

“You’re ruined with them now, you know.”

“I don’t give a damn. I don’t trust them,” she said, blowing smoke up into the darkness of the restaurant. “I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I didn’t even know you were alive. He didn’t tell me whom we were going to meet-I was stunned to see you. I was so damned relieved. To tell you the truth, I thought they would protect me, but I thought they would seize my accounts, and I would end up serving some time in prison. Harry, I don’t know what you have on your mind, but whatever it is I’m going to take my chances with you.”

“You didn’t think you could hide from Schrade?”

“I did, but I didn’t think I could stand the strain of having to live that way for the rest of my life.”

Strand understood that. He had done his share of thinking about that, too.

“How did Howard take our conversation?”

“He was angry. Very angry.”

“They’re in a messy spot. It’s not the first time.”

Their dinner came, and they ate for a few minutes.

“He said you were with a woman.” Ariana wiped her mouth with her napkin, a slight smile remaining on her lips.

Strand nodded.

“You know her… well?”

“She’s not involved.”

“And she’s beautiful.”

“I think so.”

“You, of all men, would know. You have her tucked away?”

“Yeah.”

“How is she taking all this?”

“She knows that Schrade knows about her. She’s afraid, but she’ll deal with it. She’s gutsy.”

“Then she’s in for the duration.”

Strand nodded. Ariana couldn’t wait any longer.

“Okay, Harry, what was Bill talking about?”

He told her. Everything. In detail, from the strange appearance of the videotape of Romy’s death up to the present moment. She listened, stunned, mesmerized, her own anguish rekindled and intensified as she grasped a new understanding of the dimension of hatred they were dealing with and of the immediacy of its threat.

Without speaking, she reached for the bottle of wine and poured some more into both their glasses. Her hand trembled. Her face was drawn. As she sipped her wine her eyes remained on him across the rim of the glass. When she spoke she had to clear her throat.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “What do we have to do?”

“Okay,” he said, pushing aside his plate and pulling his glass over in front of him. “I have some ideas. First, we know the FIS isn’t going to walk away from this. Bill’s talk about this being a stalemate was standard FIS bullshit. They don’t see this as a stalemate at all. They see themselves as having lost. They can’t, and won’t, tolerate that. This is by no means the end of it for them. Plus, as long as Schrade’s alive he’ll be trying to find us. The FIS can’t do anything about him. That’s it. It’s as much a fact as gravity.”

“Harry, before you go any further…” She was hesitant. “Have you considered trading the money for our lives?”

“Who are you going to trust with that kind of arrangement? Wolf? The FIS? The money’s our only protection. Take it away, we’re dead.”

“How in the hell are we going to keep it and live any kind of normal life?”

“We can’t make the money go away, but maybe we can make Schrade and the FIS go away.”

Ariana stared at him blankly. “Oh, I see. You are grasping at straws.”

“No, we can do it.”

Ariana shook her head. “Maybe you can, but I’m not going to be able to help you.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe in magic.” She smiled ruefully. “I’m too practical. I told you, Madame Sosotris never made anything happen for me.”

“Magic hasn’t got anything to do with it,” Strand said. “Cold, hard reality will make him disappear.”

“Disappear. You make it sound easy.”

“No, it sure as hell won’t be easy. Let me give you some additional background. After we broke up our operation and we all scattered in different directions, Schrade continued working with the FIS for another three and a half years. Then he abruptly cut it off. The FIS claims it doesn’t know why.”

“That’s right. Howard wouldn’t talk about it.”

“Here’s what I think happened. About eighteen months ago Schrade discovered the money was missing. I can’t imagine what must have gone wrong. I don’t know. But he went crazy, thought the FIS was in on the scam, and broke off his longtime arrangement with them. I don’t have any doubt that he probably went to work with someone else, the Germans, the British, the French. Maybe all three of them. In the meantime, he put his best computer and accounting brains to work trying to find out where it all went. They discovered who before they discovered how. The first thing he did was find Romy and me. He killed her.

“No one else died. Why did he wait another year before coming after the rest of us?” He stopped. “I didn’t even suspect Schrade in Romy’s death. That’s incredible, I know. I just didn’t.”

Ariana hadn’t moved. She didn’t respond.

“After killing Romy in an initial burst of anger,” Strand went on, “Schrade realized it was a terrible mistake. He may never get the money if he kills all of us. In fact, he probably killed his best prospect for ever getting it all back. He spent the next year trying to track it all down.”

Strand stopped and sipped his wine.

Ariana slowly shook her head. “You lost me,” she said.

“The fact of the matter is, he can’t get it back. Any of it. It’s impossible. When Schrade finally realized that, he turned his attention to dealing with the rest of us. He’s swinging his scythe in a wider arc. Anyone near me, he kills. Anything I own, he destroys.”

“Is that true? The money can’t be recovered?”

“In a sense, yes,” he said. “It’s gone.”