The Emperor's Revenge

TEN

The midnight transfer of the nuclear cases from the Oregon to the Navy destroyer Bainbridge went off without a hitch. After almost sixty years, the atomic weapon cores would be headed back to Norfolk, and a Broken Arrow nuclear event could be scratched off the list.

Once the handoff was complete, Juan ordered the Oregon to make a dash to Palermo, where they caught a midmorning flight to Nice, the Côte d’Azur airport that served the principality of Monaco. Thirty minutes after landing, four of them were in a rental car, taking the winding coast road for the short drive. In addition to Linda Ross, Juan had decided to bring two other crew members along with him, Mark Murphy and Eric Stone, the Corporation’s resident computer experts and research specialists. If their money was still in Credit Condamine’s computers somewhere, he wanted his own people on the job to find it.

Murph and Stoney were in their twenties, making them two of the youngest crew on the Oregon. They spent much of their downtime together, playing video games and complaining about the pitfalls of trying to date over the Internet. Their latest pastime during R & R was racing around on Jetlev-Flyers, water-powered packs that they’d somehow convinced Max to buy as a complement to the ship’s Jet Skis. Although Murph and Eric stuck with each other like conjoined twins separated at birth, their appearance and demeanor couldn’t have been more different.

Murph, the only Corporation employee who had never served in the military or intelligence services, had graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. at the age most kids were getting their first jobs out of college. He went on to use his incomparable computer and mathematics skills as a top weapons designer for a U.S. Navy contractor until he’d been recruited by the Corporation. His appearance would make him fit right in at a comic book convention, with uncombed dark hair, wispy chin stubble, and a scrawny frame typically clad in a T-shirt from his enormous collection. His idea of dressing up for the mission had been to put on a black jacket over a T-shirt that read Give me ambiguity or give me something else. Not only was he a whiz with anything electronic, he also served as the Oregon’s weapons officer.

Unlike Murph, Annapolis graduate Eric Stone had been a naval officer in research and development, which is where he’d first met Murph, brought together by their rare technical acumen. Although he was no longer in uniform, Eric preferred to dress in crisp white button-down shirts and chino slacks, adding a blue blazer to the ensemble for today. He chose to wear glasses instead of contacts over his soft brown eyes, and his short hair looked as if it were parted with a straightedge. Despite little experience on the high seas during his stint in the Navy, he had honed his skills as a helmsman to the point that he was the Oregon’s best ship driver other than Juan himself.

Overholt had made some phone calls during the night, which resulted in the four of them being brought onto the case under the guise of private insurance investigators assisting Interpol. Kevin Nixon, the Oregon’s special effects and prop master, provided them with flawless fake IDs crafted in the ship’s Magic Shop.

Murph, who sat next to Eric in the backseat, was grimacing at his ID. “I still think it was you who got Kevin to change my undercover name.”

Eric could barely contain a smirk. “You don’t like Christopher Bacon?”

“You mean Christopher Paul Bacon.”

Juan, who hadn’t heard the full name until now, looked at Linda and chuckled. She laughed and shrugged her shoulders as if to say Don’t blame me.

Juan glanced in the rearview mirror. “Your name is Chris P. Bacon?”

Murph groaned and nodded, then pointed a thumb at Eric. “And his name is Colt B. Patton. He might as well have called himself Hombre T. Rockpuncher.”

Eric put up his hands. “I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Right,” Murph grumbled as he put the ID away.

“I don’t know,” Linda said. “I think your name sizzles.” The three of them laughed, and Juan spotted the corner of Murph’s mouth turn up in a reluctant smile. He was proud that his crew could keep their sense of humor intact even in the face of losing a good portion of their savings. Facing adversity head-on instead of hanging their heads in despair was what they did best.

They arrived at Credit Condamine to find police cars swarming the block. Juan got out, flashed his ID, and asked an officer who was in charge. He was directed to a trim man in his fifties, arguing with a striking raven-haired woman. Heated French words were flying back and forth so quickly that neither of them noticed Juan’s approach.

The man was the chief detective, judging from the badge sticking out of his pocket. Graying at the temples and sporting a slim mustache, he kept shaking his head like it was attached to a paint mixer. He was the shorter of the two and had to look up at the woman as he spoke.

The tall woman had a few more lines around her eyes than Juan remembered, but otherwise Gretchen Wagner looked exactly the same as she did when they had served in the CIA together. Wearing a tailored Armani suit, she still had a lithe, athletic figure sculpted by a daily routine of martial arts. Light makeup dusted her high cheekbones, and her sparkling green eyes had lost none of their fire. Even though she had a face that would stand out at a fashion show, Juan admired the fact that she wouldn’t think twice about cloaking it in the grubby likeness of a homeless person when the mission called for it. She was all about getting the job done, and the chief detective was, apparently, finding that out the hard way.

“Excuse me,” Juan said, interrupting their repartee. “I am looking for Gretchen Wagner.”

They stopped speaking, and Juan and Gretchen held each other’s eyes for a few moments. She kept her face expressionless, and he couldn’t tell if that was for his benefit or the detective’s.

The detective sneered at Juan as if he’d been handed a used handkerchief.

“This is he?” the detective asked Gretchen, jutting his index finger at Juan.

She nodded. “Blake Charles, from Columbia Mutual Insurance, this is Chief Inspector Rivard of Monaco’s Sûreté Publique. I was just explaining to the inspector that you are to be given full cooperation during this investigation at Interpol’s request.”

Rivard didn’t offer his hand but spent a good amount of time inspecting Juan’s identification. He sniffed disdainfully when he couldn’t find anything amiss. “My government may be able to order me to give you access, but I don’t have to like it.”

“As you are aware, Inspector, this security breach affects bank customers from dozens of countries,” Gretchen said with a steely cadence. “If you have a problem including them in the investigation, I can contact your commissioner for more guidance.”

Rivard’s nostrils flared in fury. This would probably be the biggest case he’d ever get in the sleepy principality and jeopardizing his position as the lead inspector by protesting a decision from his superiors wasn’t going to get him off to a good start.

“Fine,” he said finally. “But you brief them. And if I find that they are hindering or obstructing the investigation in any way, they will be gone.” He stormed off, shouting at some uniformed officers for letting gawkers get too close.

“For some reason,” Juan said, “I get the feeling that he has some objection to us being here.”

Gretchen gave him a faint smile. “Yes, he shouldn’t keep his emotions bottled up like that.”

Juan could tell that she had the urge to give him a hug, but she merely shook his hand with a strong grip. The skin was smooth on the back of her hand but calloused on her palm. Two of her knuckles were bruised.

“Still throwing people around the karate mat?” he asked.

She rubbed her hand. “I’ve moved on to Krav Maga. I find it relaxes me.” Juan had never heard that benefit of the lethal Israeli self-defense system, a combination of street-fighting tactics and skills from boxing, wrestling, and numerous types of martial arts.

“White-collar crime does seem to be getting deadlier,” Juan said, looking pointedly at the bank.

“Seven dead, including the bank president. It’s the first time I’ve worked on something like this. Most of my job entails tracking fraudulent transactions from the comfort of my office in Paris.”

“Do you miss the field?” Juan asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Why’d you leave ops?”

Gretchen huffed a derisive breath. “My identity was outed by an idiot congressman, which is a redundant description of him, I know. Ironically, he was on the intelligence subcommittee and blabbed about my covert status to a mistress who happened to be a Russian agent. My career in fieldwork was over after that.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know.”

She shrugged. “It was after you left. If it had happened during our marriage, you probably would have been caught in the mess, too.”

Juan surreptitiously glanced at her left hand and didn’t see a ring, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He then said, “It’s good to see you again.”

She gave him a cockeyed smile. “Is it?”

He hesitated a bit too long. Before he could respond, she looked over his shoulder. “Is that your team?”

He followed her gaze and saw that Linda, Murph, and Eric were watching him intently. Linda must have filled the team in on the conversation with Overholt the previous night, but he didn’t know whether Max had told them anything further. He waved them over.

Juan introduced them using their fake names. Because Rivard was still watching, Gretchen made a show of checking their IDs.

She snickered when she read Mark Murphy’s card. “Are you the lean and smoky variety?” she said, handing it back.

Murph turned red and glowered at Eric, who chewed his lip to keep from laughing.

“So you must be Eggs?” she said, indicating Eric, who gave her a quizzical look. She pointed at his ID. “You know, Colt Benedict Patton?”

Murph snatched it away, letting out a huge guffaw when he read it. “As in eggs Benedict?” It was Eric who blushed this time. They both turned to Linda.

She grinned at them coyly. “Guilty. I thought we needed to lighten the mood.” She turned to Gretchen. “Have your computer techs found out anything?”

“Not much so far,” Gretchen said. “The virus that was installed is so complex that they’re stumped at how to pull up any of the files at all.”

Juan nodded at Murph and Eric. “Why don’t you see if you can give them a hand?” The two of them took a last look at Gretchen and went through the bank’s front entrance.

“I’d like to take a look at the Grand Prix garage explosion and fire,” Linda said. “I’ll see if I can spot anything that might have been missed.” She had watched the TV recording of the car chase and crash repeatedly during the flight to Nice.

“Good,” Juan said. “Gretchen and I will go over the video from inside the bank. Let’s get together for lunch in two hours to go over our findings.”

Linda went back to the car and drove off toward the harbor, leaving Juan and Gretchen alone again.

“Come on,” she said, and led him toward the security office.

As they walked, Juan said, “Gretchen, where’s our money?”

“As far as we know, it’s still in the bank. It’s simply frozen. We’ve detected no unusual transactions from this location since the virus was installed. Besides, it would have been nearly impossible to transfer the money without authorization from the depositors because of two-factor authentication. Someone from your side would have needed to give permission for any transactions.”

“So we haven’t lost our money—”

She held up a hand. “I can’t promise the accounts are still intact until I can look at the data, and they’re currently locked up. Let’s hope Bacon and Eggs have more success opening up the computers than Monaco’s finest.”

When they reached the security office, she pulled up the video of Henri Munier stepping off the elevator into the bank lobby.

Juan gave Gretchen a questioning look. “Is this the first video we have of him? Nothing from the garage?”

She nodded. “Except for a couple of minutes, it’s all been wiped clean.”

On the video, Munier spent a minute talking to the guard, who then walked off and reappeared a moment later with the second guard. They all entered the elevator, and the video ended. There was no audio.

“Why would he miss these two minutes?” Juan wondered aloud.

“Rivard thinks Munier was being careless or that the alarm was tripped before he could finish erasing the videos.”

“Munier is sophisticated enough to plan all this out, plant a computer virus, and kill three men, but he forgets to erase his own face?”

“I didn’t say I agreed.”

“How did the alarm go off?”

“Rivard thinks one of the guards did it before he died. They carried remote activators in case of a robbery.”

“And what’s Munier’s motive?”

“Embezzlement is the first thought in cases like this,” Gretchen said. “He could have been covering his tracks but then got caught and had no other options.”

“What do you think?”

She tilted her head at the screen. “Take another look at the video.”

Juan watched it three more times before he saw it.

Munier moved his lips twice while the guard was away, like a whisper. At first, Juan thought he was speaking to himself, but it seemed too deliberate, on third glance, as if he were responding to something being said to him.

Juan looked back at Gretchen. “Someone’s talking to him. He could be wearing an earpiece that we can’t see.”

“That’s my thought. Rivard thinks he hired a hacker to build the computer virus for him, but I think someone forced him to do this. I’ve studied Munier’s dossier and he was a family man, made a lot of money, and didn’t have a gambling problem.”

“Some people think they never have enough money.”

“True,” Gretchen said, “but he wasn’t the violent type. Assassinating three men, including his vice president? No, Munier is the type to take his chances with a lawyer, not try to cover his tracks with this killing spree. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty of bankers get away with crimes you’d think would send them to prison for years.”

“But that doesn’t explain why he made a mad getaway from the police and killed himself when he got cornered.”

With no more answers from the video, they went down to the garage.

They spent an hour trying to reenact how Munier might have killed two guards and stuffed them into the back of his vehicle. They concluded the middle-aged banker could have accomplished it, but it would have been a physically draining experience.

“Where was he before he came to the bank?” Juan asked.

“Many witnesses saw him get on a yacht called the Achilles to attend a party during the Grand Prix. Rivard concluded that was intended to be Munier’s alibi.”

“No one saw him leave?”

“If anyone did, they haven’t come forward yet.”

“I’d like to talk to the crew.”

“You can’t,” Gretchen said. “The Achilles is gone, along with a dozen other yachts. Few of them wanted to stick around after the Grand Prix was called off.”

“Without witnesses, it’ll be impossible to retrace his steps and find out if anyone was coercing him.”

“The police are talking to his wife, but she seems to be as shocked as everyone else.”

“Maybe Linda will be able to shed some light on the situation when she gets back.”

Juan’s phone rang. It was Eric.

“Did you find something?” Juan answered.

“You could say that,” Eric said with excitement. “It’s a message from the hacker.”