The Fixer

13

With the notched side of one of his house keys, he was finally able to saw through the plastic flex-cuffs binding his ankles. He stumbled into his car, found the keyless remote, which had been left on the driver’s seat. He felt his left wrist, noticed that the bleeding had stopped.

He drove back to the Charles Hotel, but he knew he had to move. He’d been abducted in its parking garage, after all, which meant he’d been followed, which was how they knew he was staying there. And they’d be back. In forty-eight hours, if the Irishman was telling the truth.

If he’d been followed to the hotel, they’d probably follow him from the hotel, too. He had to be mindful of that. He had to find someplace else to stay but take care not to be followed, to the best of his ability.

He bought some bandages at the hotel gift shop and, back in the room, applied a few to his cut wrist. Then he took the elevator down to the lobby, then switched to the separate bank of elevators down to the parking garage.

That brief moment, those twenty seconds when he was changing elevator banks was a time of potential exposure. He assumed there were people watching him at the hotel. How else could they have known that he’d parked in the underground garage? He had to assume there was still someone, or several someones, watching him. Probably watching the front desk. He hadn’t noticed anyone, but then again, he hadn’t been looking for anyone.

As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been followed into the garage. No one had jumped into the elevator cab after him. Just to be safe, he’d pushed the buttons for both garage levels. In case someone was watching the lobby elevator banks to see which level he chose.

He remembered there was an Avis desk inside the hotel. But it was in the lobby. If anyone was waiting in the lobby to watch his comings and goings, they’d see him talking to the Avis desk and immediately figure out what he was up to. So he left the hotel through the garage exit and took a roundabout path to the nearby Hertz. There he rented a gray Ford Focus, the most anonymous-looking vehicle in their fleet. Then he drove through Harvard Square and up and down Mass Ave in Cambridge, looking for a place to stay, and soon found a bed-and-breakfast on Mass Ave a few blocks out of Harvard Square called the Eustace House. It was an old gray Victorian converted into jaggedly shaped guest rooms; it had creaky floors and the pervasive sweet floral smell, lilies and chrysanthemums, of a funeral home. He checked in under a false name: Jacob Clayton. He wasn’t sure why he used an alias. Maybe because it made him feel safer. He had no luggage.

Then he took a taxi back to the Charles Hotel and asked the cab driver to enter the garage. He returned to his room, retrieved the packets of cash from the safe, and packed it in his suitcase. He called for the bellhop and asked him to take the suitcase down to garage level 2, where the taxi was waiting, while he checked out. Then he headed back to the B &B. Once in his room, he took off all his clothes and climbed into the creaky bed and fell asleep for hours, a clammy, feverish sleep. His nerves were jangled. In his sleep he relived the abduction, over and over, in jolting fragments, a grim slideshow. He awoke at around midnight, then again at four in the morning, at which point he couldn’t sleep anymore. He switched on the bedside lamp.

He ached all over. His knees were bruised and tender. The bleeding from the gash on his wrist had stopped. Only the psychological terror had remained, the feeling of powerlessness. Of not knowing whether he was about to be dismembered, or killed, at any moment. The hood over his head. The icy charm of his unseen interrogator, the poetry-loving man with the Irish accent.

He knew he was in this thing deep and that now everything had changed for him. His abductors had somehow found out about the money. But how?

All he knew for certain was that he was no longer safe, and what had happened to him in that warehouse or butcher shop or whatever it was could easily happen again, but with a much worse outcome. It seemed more important than ever to find out where the cash had come from, whom it actually belonged to.

And that search started with the money itself.

He took the packets of banknotes from his suitcase and set them down on the quilted coverlet of the bed. Some of the bills were old, a few were new. He slid one of the new hundred-dollar bills from a packet and for the first time looked at it closely. Printed to the left of Ben Franklin’s big head were the words SERIES 1996.

He pulled out his MacBook Air and searched for a wireless signal. Eventually he connected with a fairly weak Eustace House Guest signal, which got stronger the closer he got to the door of his room. He sat on the edge of the bed and Googled US currency redesigns. In 1996, he discovered, the hundred-dollar bill was redesigned for the first time since 1929. Various anticounterfeiting measures were added: a watermark of Franklin, a security thread that glowed red under ultraviolet light, color-shifting ink.

The newest of the bills in the stash was dated 1996. The redesigned hundred-dollar bill had come out in March of 1996. Lenny had had his stroke in May. Which meant that the money could have been stashed in the house any time after March, and as late as May 27, the day of his stroke. That was a window of three months. So who was his father doing business with between March and May 1996? Who were his clients?

His secretary would know that. Twenty years later she might not remember all the names, but she’d know some. He’d have to push her to recall whatever she could.

When the sun came up and he began to hear creaks and low mumbling from the floor above, he went downstairs and got coffee from a thermal carafe in the front sitting room, near where an elderly couple were eating breakfast and reading tourist guides to Boston. He half expected to see someone waiting for him in the sitting room, someone muscular and formidable. But there were only the elderly couple and another old codger reading a Lee Child novel in a wing chair.

Rick hadn’t been followed to the B &B, he was still sure. Then he went back to his room and called Joan Breslin. He left the B &B, down the front steps, saw a few passersby, but no one seemed to be looking in his direction. The rented Ford was parked halfway down the block.

An hour later he was pulling into the driveway of Joan Breslin’s house in Melrose.