The Delicate Storm

13

CARDINAL CAUGHT A FLIGHT OUT of Algonquin Bay that morning. He had an hour wait between planes in Toronto, and landed in New York City a couple of hours later. On the cab ride into town from LaGuardia he dimly registered the immensity of the city, the brutal grandeur of its skyline, the alarming habits of its drivers. But he kept his mind fixed on what he had to do, resolving to take no more notice of New York than was strictly necessary.

Howard Matlock—the real Howard Matlock—had never heard of Loon Lodge. For that matter, Howard Matlock had never heard of Algonquin Bay. In fact, Howard Matlock had not so much as set foot in Canadian territory since 1996, when he had spent a weekend in Quebec City (so charming! so European! so cheap for Americans!), and Howard Matlock had no interest whatever in ice fishing. The only thing Cardinal had had right about Howard Matlock was his name, address and occupation.

Matlock lived on the second floor of a small apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Far too upper to be classy,” he informed Cardinal at the door, “but until I make my first million, it will have to do.”

He was a slim man in his mid-fifties with hair very close-cropped to hide its scarcity. His first million did not appear imminent. The apartment was a two-room affair sparsely furnished with chrome and glass. It looked more like an office than a home.

“Obviously, your peculiar quest calls for a coffee,” Matlock said. “Will you have some?”

Cardinal said yes. Then, as Matlock busied himself at a tiny kitchenette, he put in a call to Malcolm Musgrave. He had filled the sergeant in on Squier’s bogus investigation the night before.

Musgrave had responded with characteristic eloquence. “That little shit. Let’s nail him to the floor.”

Cardinal had asked Musgrave to make use of his contacts with the Mountie dinosaurs at CSIS and find out “Matlock’s” real name and address. Obviously, CSIS was hiding this information for reasons known only to them.

“I’ve had a guy working on it since last night,” Musgrave told him now. “Give me another hour or so.”

As Cardinal hung up, Matlock presented him with a steaming cup of coffee and a small plate of cookies, a napkin tucked neatly under a spoon.

“I don’t suppose you’re a Mountie by any chance?”

“No. I’m with the city police in Algonquin Bay.”

“I have a friend who would just die with envy if I could tell him I’d met a Mountie. Try one of those, I made them myself.”

The cookie was oatmeal raisin. “You make a mean cookie. There may be a chain store in these.”

“You know, I’ve actually considered it. Except I hate chain stores.”

“Listen, Howard. Can you check your wallet and see if you’re missing any credit cards or ID?”

“I checked while you were on the phone. Nothing’s missing. I might not notice the licence—I mean, nobody drives in Manhattan. But my credit cards? Oh, no, no, no. My credit cards and I have a very close relationship.”

So, either the dead man had ordered up new ID using Matlock’s basic information or he had access to fakes. Very good fakes.

“The man who used your identity picked you because you’re roughly his age. Can you think of anyone who might have had access to your personal information within the past year?”

“Well, anyone who has me do their taxes has my social security number at the bottom of their tax return. But I have a lot of clients.”

“You have their birthdates, right? Can you check your records for males who are within three years of your age?”

“Sit tight and I’ll take a peek at my database. Help yourself to more cookies.”

A few minutes later Howard Matlock was standing in the doorway with a computer printout in one hand, a cookie in the other. “I have three male clients in their late fifties—names, addresses and phone numbers—but I really shouldn’t give them to you. It would be very unseemly.”

“I have no jurisdiction in New York; I can’t force you to give them to me. And in any case, it’s very unlikely whoever stole your ID would give you his real name and address. Are any of the three well known to you—clients of long standing?”

“Two of them, yes. One’s a documentary filmmaker, the other is a location scout—my practice is mostly people in the performing arts. Both of these fellows have been coming to me for over ten years.”

“And the third?”

“Well, that depends,” Matlock said with a smile. “Do you have any plans for dinner?”

Cardinal didn’t know what to say. He felt a blush creeping up the line of his jaw.

“Honestly, you Canadians. Here you are, you don’t know a soul in town, and I offer you a chance to have dinner at a lovely restaurant with a charming professional like myself. Good Lord, man, I’m fifty-eight, I’m completely harmless.”

“It’s very kind of you,” Cardinal managed. “But I’m on an extremely tight schedule just now.”

“Oh, well. It was worth a shot.”

“Are you going to give me that third name?”

“Just a pathetic ploy, I’m afraid. There were only two.”

Cardinal stopped in at a Starbucks by the 86th Street subway and called Musgrave on the cellphone.

“I’ve got an old friend at CSIS Ottawa,” Musgrave told him. “Must be sixty-five or close to. Been in the security game forever. Frog, name of Tourelle. If it wasn’t for the McDonald Commission, he’d have made inspector years ago. Instead, he’s flying a cubbyhole in the mother of all bureaucracies.

“Anyway,” Musgrave went on, “Uncle Tourelle has a nice little tale to tell. CSIS, as you may or may not know, keeps a close eye on the major airports. They have a full-time office at Pearson, same as Customs and Immigration.”

“What, a couple of guys?”

“Try six. Tourelle doesn’t know if they were tipped off or not. Probably were. Would have to be a hell of a coincidence otherwise. Anyway, they were taking a gander at the happy passengers disembarking from this New York flight. They have Immigration hold this so-called Matlock up for a minute. He’s protesting the whole time, he’s gotta catch a connector flight, the whole deal. To make a long story short, they basically ignore the driver’s licence they’re looking at, but they don’t ignore the prints on it.”

“CSIS has their own records?”

“Criminal records they get through us or locals, same as you. But they have their own files—they’re not records because they’re usually about suspicions, not actual crimes. We’re talking security here, we’re talking paranoia, we’re talking deep murk, all right?”

“And they got a match.”

“Oh boy, did they get a match. Name: Miles Shackley. Current occupation: Unknown. Former occupation—get this: CIA operative in Quebec.”

“Where in Quebec? When? How long ago was this?”

“Tourelle says thirty years ago. Well, 1970, actually. Montreal.”

“Thirty-three years ago. So his former occupation probably has nothing to do with his murder in Algonquin Bay, right?”

“Probably not.”

“When did he leave the CIA?”

“Nineteen seventy-one, according to his jacket.”

Cardinal had a sudden sensation of defeat. “This has all the earmarks of a dead end.”

“I agree. Thirty years is a long time. You’re due for a change of luck on this one.”

“So why did Squier lie about who he was? Why did CSIS want to keep Shackley’s identity a big secret?”

“Because Calvin Squier is a pretentious little twerp with a laptop. Because he works for the most useless agency on the planet. I don’t know. All Tourelle told me was what he pulled off the header—he didn’t have access to the actual file. It tells you affiliation, location, last known date of activity and what Tourelle called a temperature level. Miles Shackley was coded Red. That’s why they watched the guy’s every move. Why Shackley is Code Red, Tourelle doesn’t know, nor does he have the clearance to find out. He’s working on that, though. Believe me, he’d love to bust one of these palmtop pinheads.”

“So you think CSIS killed our guy?”

“CSIS is in the incompetence business, not the murder business. Even if they did want someone killed, they aren’t going to put an agent like Squier onto it, an actual employee. They’d want at least three levels of removal. No, I think they tracked Shackley up here and, being who they are, he got killed under their noses by someone else and fed to the bears.”

“Then why wouldn’t CSIS make use of people like us who are investigating his murder? Why would they actively mislead us?”

“That’s a very good question, and I suggest we put it to Laptop Larry at your earliest convenience.”

“What about a record on Shackley? Criminal or otherwise.”

“Cardinal, what do you think I do for a living? I’ve got calls in to my U.S. contacts. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.”

“Thanks.”

“Also, while you’re broadening your cultural horizons in the capital of global degeneration, I’ve managed to procure a useful piece of information.”

“Shackley’s real address?”

“Bingo. New York City, 514 East Sixth Street.”

Cardinal scribbled it down. “That’s great. I already spoke to the NYPD. They don’t seem to care what I do.”

“Gotta be careful how you deal with those guys. They can be touchy about turf.”

“Naturally, I was completely charming.”

“Cardinal, I’ve worked with you. You’re not charming.”

Hector Robles, the superintendent of 514 East Sixth Street, was a pleasant, fortyish Hispanic man who seemed to know remarkably little about Mr. Shackley. He spoke to Cardinal as they walked up a dizzying stairwell, pausing every so often to emphasize a point with a jab of the finger, a chop of the hand.

“He never complain, you know, not like some guys. I mean, he complain all the time—about the neighbourhood, the punks, the noise, the housing project. He complain about the city, but he never complain about the building, you know. He was not a problem for me, so I didn’t pay him a lotta attention. Other people, man, I’m telling you, every five minutes they got a problem—the tap, the toilet, the plaster—like I’m their personal servant or something.”

“How’d he get along with his neighbours? Anybody ever complain about him?”

“Not complain exactly. But he had a couple of fights—not with neighbours, with delivery people. You know, every time they make a delivery, they push menus under every door in the building. Nobody likes it, but Shackley, he gets really crazy out of his mind about it. He have a sign on his door says No Menu, but a lotta the delivery guys don’t speak any English. And the restaurants they work for make them do it. Anyway, twice he comes charging out of his apartment, really pissed off—red in the face, face all crazy—yelling at these little Chinese guys. Shoving them hard, you know. I told him I didn’t go for that. I don’t like violence in my building.”

“What’d he say to that?”

“He told me to mind my own business. I was very angry. But next day he come and apologize. He say he just gets so sick of the menus on the floor and littering up the streets. They are a problem, everybody knows that, but still, he overreact.

“Second time it happen, I didn’t see it. One of the other tenants told me he chased a guy right outside and then started punching him and choking him, until the tenant pull him off. If I had seen that, I would have call the police. Anyway, what happen to Mr. Shackley?”

“He got eaten by bears.”

“You kidding me. In New York?”

“In Canada. Don’t worry, you’re safe.”

“Bears. Madre, I thought cockroaches were bad.”

“How long did Shackley live here?”

“He was here when I took the job, and I been here twelve years.”

They had reached the third floor. Cardinal followed Robles to the end of the hall. The super was pulling keys out of his pocket as he walked and peering at them nearsightedly. The door to 3B had a two-foot-square hand-lettered sign on it that said No Menus. Robles found the right key and opened the door. “You need anything else, you know where to find me.”

Cardinal pushed the door open and stood just inside. The air smelled of dirty carpet. All places abandoned by the recently dead have a sad, despairing feel to them. Cardinal had been in many, and none of them made you feel good. But Shackley’s one-room apartment was one of the most depressing places he’d ever seen.

He examined the cheap, painted pine desk on which stood a phone, a cracked mug full of pens and pencils, and a calendar with the previous Thursday circled—the day Shackley had flown to Toronto. The desk, indeed the entire room, was neat but dirty; grit crunched underfoot. There was a clean patch by the desk lamp about the size of a laptop. Either Shackley had taken it with him and it was now missing or Squier had got here first.

Cardinal opened the middle drawer of the desk: more pens and pencils, bits and pieces of office supplies. He opened a side drawer, finding nothing but cheap envelopes and a roll of stamps, a half-empty pad of paper. He held the pad up to the light, but there were no traces of writing on the top sheet. The wastebasket under the desk was empty. He lifted the desk lamp, lifted the phone, lifted the mug full of pens. Nothing. A search of the underside of the desk and its drawer also yielded nothing.

A quick search of the bathroom also yielded nothing, as did the cupboard in the kitchenette. Shackley appeared to live primarily on cereal. The cupboard contained four different boxes, the corners nibbled and frayed by mice.

Cardinal had rarely come across a life so colourless. Of course, it could have been intentional—the kind of deep cover one reads about in spy novels—but he didn’t really think so; the despair was too convincing. He stood still and listened. Footsteps from an upstairs neighbour, high heels it sounded like. Down the hall, Van Morrison was singing hysterically. Farther off, a small dog yapped.

Cardinal went to the file cabinet. Two drawers, mostly empty. There were a few hanging files—taxes (not done by Howard Matlock, he noted), social security forms, banking. Shackley’s only income seemed to be from social security—a few hundred dollars a month. Bills: cable TV, electricity, telephone. Cardinal pulled out the last three months’ phone bills. There were calls to three different numbers in the Montreal area code, Shackley’s old stomping ground. Cardinal put the phone bills in his briefcase.

Cardinal spent the next hour going through every book, note and piece of mail he could find. Nothing. He opened the back of the television, the back of a radio and even checked the freezer. Then he stood in the middle of the room and tried to spot the one thing that didn’t belong. It took a while, but eventually his gaze fell on the grille of the ventilator shaft. It was a small rectangle just above the stove and, unlike everything else in the place it was spotlessly clean. Old building like this, Cardinal thought, you’d expect the ventilator shaft to be pretty grungy.

He found a screwdriver, removed several screws and lifted the grille from the wall. As it came away, a clear plastic envelope trailed after it, attached by a short length of fishing line. It contained a smaller envelope. Cardinal opened it and extracted a curling photographic negative. He switched on the desk lamp and held the negative up to the light. He couldn’t discern much other than that it showed a group of people, three men and one woman. He put it into his briefcase along with the phone bills.

Afterward, he stood outside on Sixth Street. He had finished what he had come here to do much quicker than he had anticipated. He thought about calling Kelly; he even held the phone in his hand, ready to dial. But he had hurt his daughter so much with his crisis of conscience the previous year. He had thought he was doing the right thing, deciding not to keep the rest of the Bouchard money, but Kelly had paid the price. The thought of sitting across from her in a heavy silence made his heart ache.

He called Catherine instead. He had been operating in hunter mode all day, but the sound of her voice awoke in him something more tender. And tenderness evoked fear.

“Catherine, I don’t want you to be scared, but it might be good if you keep a close eye on things around the house. And on our street. Has there been anything unusual that you’ve noticed?”

“What do you mean? Like what?”

“I don’t know. Strange phone calls. Hang-ups, maybe.”

“No. Nothing at all. Why?”

“Nothing. Old business that keeps resurfacing. We just need to be careful for the next little while.”

“John, there’s something else we have to worry about. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“Why? What’s up?”

“I’ve just come back from the hospital. Your father’s in intensive care.”