The Color of Night

CHAPTER 25

They went to bed late, and Strand slept the dead, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. He woke early the next morning with a start, heavy headed yet wide awake. He carefully crawled out from under the covers, dressed, and went straight to the sitting room, closing the bedroom doors behind him.

He threw open the balcony doors to the cool morning, called room service for coffee, sat down at his laptop, and flipped on the switch.

Using the information that he had gotten from Alain Darras, he began the complex series of contacts over the Internet that would eventually lead him to a face-to-face interview with the first of the four crime lords.

He had no idea how long the process would take, but the procedures he had obtained from Darras were supposed to cut through the red tape that the new, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations put into place. As in all corporate structures, illicit or legal, the men at the top isolated themselves with multiple layers of intermediaries.

He had been working for nearly an hour when Mara came out of the bedroom.

They walked up the hill to a little cafe near the center of the village and had a quiet cup of coffee with pastries. When they started back through the narrow, cobbled streets that fell steeply to the waterfront, Mara laced her arm through Strand’s and they meandered down, catching glimpses of the lake through the linden trees as they turned corners on their descent.

“Okay, Harry,” she said, “why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

He hardly knew where to begin.

“Not a lot yet,” he said. “This morning I started the process of contacting the first of the four men Schrade was betraying to the FIS. My first thought was to approach all of them at the same time, just turn them loose on Schrade all at once. But then, considering all that I don’t know about the details of Schrade’s involvements with each of them, I was afraid that I might trigger a bloodbath. That’s not the way this needs to be done.”

“Who are you contacting first?”

“A Taiwan Chinese named Lu Kee. Lu is our best first meeting because he’s the most civilized of the four. Talking to him will give us a less jarring sample of the meetings to come. He’ll be like a wise old uncle. He personally dislikes harshness. He pays people to be harsh for him.

“I’ve given Lu three crucial bits of information. First, proof that I have inside knowledge of one of his failed enterprises, a scheme that cost him hundreds of millions of dollars when it fell apart. He never found out why it happened. Second, the fact that I’m a former U.S. intelligence officer. Third, a promise that I’ll reveal a traitor.

“The first of these three is going to shock him. That probably would be enough to get me the interview. The third bit of information will seem like a scam without the first. The second bit of information will be expected to be proven at the meeting.”

“This could take days, couldn’t it?” Mara asked.

“Could. But I doubt if it will. I suspect it’ll happen very quickly.”

“If he’s in Taiwan…”

“He’s not. Darras’s information puts him in Zurich now. He has a home there.”

They stopped at a turn of the street that gave them a wide view of the lake. The sun was well into the eastern sky, throwing shadows to the west along the shoreline and strewing a shatter of brilliance across the surface of the water. Farther to their left, on the western leg of the lake, a single sailboat was tacking back toward the villas of Tremezzo. Down on the waterfront a tour boat pulled away from the quay and headed out across the lake.

“We just have to wait.”

The back-and-forth with Lu’s intermediaries dragged on past lunch. Strand had received from them three e-mail messages that, through a series of precise questions, were intended to determine the legitimacy of his request. He was patient with this, having expected nothing less. He answered the queries as fully as possible, while being careful not to reveal more than the circumstances required. Midafternoon brought another delay, another long wait.

“He’s not going to do it,” Mara said. She had tried to sketch but couldn’t concentrate. She had stared at the glistening lake, but even the incredible beauty of Como could not distract her. Strand watched her and worried. The waiting, the slow pace of negotiations, was wearing on both of them. Time dragged.

“He’s just cautious.” Strand rubbed his face. “He’ll do it.” He looked out through the balcony doors at the sailboats on the lake, the geometric shapes of their white sails passing smoothly back and forth within the view framed by the French doors.

By four o’clock in the afternoon, as the light on the lake began to soften, Lu Kee was still silent.

Shortly after five o’clock, four beeps signaled a message, and the words appeared like magic writing on the screen.

JL wishes to speak to HS.

This is HS.

Sir, I would like to arrange a meeting. Where are you?

Europe.

I am in Zurich. Is that near you?

Relatively.

I would like to meet tomorrow night. Is that possible?

Strand quickly flipped through Lu’s file. He had a large French-made LaSalle jet. Strand hesitated and looked at Mara. He began typing.

May I suggest Lake Como. I can be there by eight o’clock in the evening.

Do you know Villa d’Este? I can arrange a suite there. Will you be alone?

Strand stared at the screen. He turned and looked at Mara. “I think it could help if you went along. How would you feel about it?”

Mara swallowed. “Well, you don’t think that’ll be just a little obvious? You bringing along your token Chinese to show him how simpatico you’ll be.”

“Maybe. But something tells me that a token Chinese is better than no Chinese at all.”

“I’ll do it if you want.” She hesitated. “I’m going to assume I don’t have to be ‘prepped’ for this. I go along; I look good, follow my instincts on the light conversation, and keep my mouth shut when the serious stuff starts.”

“That’s about it.”

“I can do that.”

Strand turned back to the computer screen.

No, there will be two of us.

Then I will see you both at eight o’clock.

Agreed.

Strand stood up from the computer. “That’s it,” he said. He turned his stiff neck to one side and then to the other and rolled his shoulders foreward. He stopped. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.

She shrugged and cocked her head. “Isn’t that just an extraordinary… coincidence, him being, of all the places on the globe, just a couple of hours away?”

Strand nodded. “You’re right to be suspicious,” he said, “but it’s not unusual for Lu to be in Zurich. He has a lot of money there. He keeps tabs on it. And he likes the city. It’s clean. It’s orderly. Sometimes Latin Europe frustrates him. I doubt if he’d ever set foot in Italy at all if he didn’t need Lodato’s organization to move his China white.”

“How do you know all this? Have you met him?”

“No. How about you? You feel okay about this?”

Mara swung around in the chair, holding her sketchpad in her lap. She thought a moment before answering.

“This is your business, Harry. You know what you’re doing. You know what I can do and can’t do. If you’re willing to have me do this, I’ll do it.”

“I honestly think it would help to have you with me,” Strand said. “You’ll be all right.”

He put one hand in his trousers pocket and walked toward the balcony but stopped before he got there. He looked out a moment, then turned and came back and reached for the chair sitting in front of the computer. He turned it around to face her and sat down.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll make arrangements for getting us there tomorrow night. Lu’s people may try to follow us afterward. I don’t want to take a car to the hotel because they’ll tag it while we’re talking. And we’re going to need it.” He paused. “Tomorrow night when we leave here for the Villa d’Este we have to leave here packed. Three days is long enough to stay in one spot.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’m still thinking about that.”

Mara frowned. “And this moving, we’re going to have to keep it up until… something happens, with Schrade.”

“We’ll know more after we talk to Lu.”