The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

8

LYLE BURQUART WAS AT LEAST SIX-FOOT-FOUR, WITH dark, wiry hair that sat on his head like derelict shrubbery. His stooped shoulders were a perfect complement to his sad, aching eyes. With a gait that was more like a series of connected lunges, he made his way across the WBRS-we-do-sports-better-than-anyone lobby to greet me.

“Who are you?” It wasn’t a warm greeting.

“Alex Shanahan. Thank you for seeing me. Can we-”

“What do you want?”

“I’m a local private investigator. I’m working on a case, and I saw in the paper you wrote-”

“What kind of case?”

“Missing person. It’s my partner. Can you-”

“Who is your partner?”

“Harvey Baltimore.” I stopped there, grateful to get through a whole sentence, even if it was a short one. When he said nothing, I pressed on. “I called the newspaper, and they said you had left and to try you over here. I was hoping I could get a few minutes to talk with you.”

“About what?”

“Salanna 809 and a company called Blackthorne. I understand you reported on both.”

He took a step back. It put him directly under one of the overhead fluorescent tubes. The unflattering light caught the bags under his eyes and made them look absolutely huge.

“I can’t talk to you,” he said.

The receptionist was not bothering to hide her interest. I reached out, as if to gather Lyle in, and made a move for a couple of chairs in the lobby, a good distance from prying ears. “Could we just move over here where we can be a little more comfortable?”

There were lots of things going on with him. His jaw was working, and I could hear his teeth grinding. With his elbows locked, he was bouncing the heels of his hands against his thighs. I watched his chest rise and fall at least ten times before he finally agreed to take five steps to his right.

I turned us so that our backs were to the receptionist. “Look, my partner is missing. He’s sick. He’s got multiple sclerosis, and I’m worried about him. The FBI came to the house and asked all kinds of questions about a man named Roger Fratello. Do you know that name?”

“No.”

“What about Stephen Hoffmeyer? Do you know that name?”

I could see in his eyes that he did. He knew it from the hijacking story. I could also see a spark of interest in his pale face. It wasn’t much, but I was hoping it could be the thread that unraveled his resistance. I started to pull on it. “Roger Fratello is an embezzler. He ran a company called Betelco. It sounds as if he got into trouble with a bunch of Russian investors and stole some money and disappeared. This was four years ago, right around the time of Salanna 809.”

“There was no one named Fratello on Salanna.” His voice was tense but controlled.

“The FBI says Fratello might have been going by the name of Stephen Hoffmeyer.”

“Why do they think that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They were the ones asking all the questions. Do you think that’s true? Do you think Fratello might have been on Salanna?”

“Not under his own name.”

“Could he have been Hoffmeyer, in which case he’d be dead, I assume?”

“No. Stephen Hoffmeyer was not an embezzler from Boston.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know everything there is to know about that incident. You’re wrong about that. So is the FBI, but…” He stared at me with the obsessive look of a problem solver who had left the problem only half solved. He was taking this latest piece of data, putting it with everything else he already knew, trying new combinations, and hoping the answer would emerge. But as quickly as the desire had gripped him, it let him go. Or he threw it off. “I’ve got a different gig now,” he said finally. “I can’t help you. I’m sor-”

“Wait a minute. You know something else. I can tell. What is it?”

He let out a deeply troubled sigh. “Why are you asking about all this? It happened four years ago.”

“The FBI told me that they found a bunch of money with Roger Fratello’s fingerprints on it in Brussels. Salanna 809 left from Brussels, didn’t it?”

“It originated there.”

“On top of that, I just left Susan Fratello. The FBI told her that her husband has turned up again. I don’t know where or what the circumstances were, but something is obviously going on. Then I saw these two guys checking out the house of my partner’s ex-wife. It turns out they’re from a company called Blackthorne. When I looked into it, it turned out you had reported on both Blackthorne and the hijacking. All I’m trying to do is find my partner. These happen to be the leads I’ve turned up, and they happen to lead to you.”

Something about what I’d said took hold with him. He stuffed one hand into the pocket of his corduroy jeans and used the other hand to mash down that thick hedgerow on his head. “Let me think about this,” he said as he spun around the lobby talking to himself. “They know I’m here. If they saw you come here-”

“I don’t have a tail. I’ve been aware of that, and I’ve been checking.”

He didn’t even look at me. “You wouldn’t have seen them. If they know you’re here, and they know for sure I’m here, then that means-” He looked at me and let out a sharp and bitter laugh. “That means I’m fucked.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s already too late.” He turned and swooped one of his long arms toward the wall of windows that faced Soldiers Field Road. “They’re out there already, and they’re thinking I’m back in it.”

I looked where he was looking. All I saw were dozens of cars speeding by in both directions. “Who’s out there?”

He put one hand on his hip, hooked the other around his long neck, and dropped his head back. He almost looked as if a weight had been lifted. He cocked his head in the direction of the hallway. “Come on back,” he said as he started that way. He was no longer lunging. His gait was far more languid and relaxed. “You might as well get what you came for.”

I followed him to the back offices. We had to pass the receptionist’s desk to get there. She gave me the fisheye on my way by. She didn’t like me. Lyle took us to a control room and closed the door behind us. The cramped space had panels and counters with lots of buttons and dials. It smelled like machines in there and looked like the inside of a cockpit. It also had thick soundproof tiles on the walls to absorb our conversation. He sat in one swivel chair, and I sat in the other.

“What do you do here?” I asked him.

“I host a sports call-in show with my partner.”

“Why would an award-winning journalist leave his job at a prestigious newspaper to do sports call-in on the radio?”

“Because I love sports.” He gave me a loopy smile. It made me think that some part of him had gone right over the edge.

“Okay.”

He checked his watch. “If you want information, ask me now. I’ll tell you what I can, but under one condition.”

“What?”

“After you leave here today, you will never try to contact me again. You won’t call me. You won’t come back here. You won’t come to my house. Do you agree?”

“What if I have follow-up questions for you?”

“You have to agree to my terms, or I won’t talk to you.”

“All right. I agree.” What choice did I have?

“Good.” He sat back and rested his left foot on his right knee. With his long arms and legs, he was all corners and angles. It made him look like the scaffolding on an unfinished building. “Tell me what you know so far.”

I went through it all with him again. He listened carefully. When I was finished, he found a pad and pen. He wrote something on the top page, tore it off, and gave it to me. I read what he’d written out loud. “Gilbert Bernays? Who is this?”

“He was one of the hostages. If Fratello was on that plane, it was probably as Bernays.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You know what happened, right? How the plane got redirected to Khartoum?”

“I know they took a mechanical.”

“The plane had a hydraulic leak. They made an emergency landing, and for all intents and purposes, the plane was dead. It was never going anywhere again until they got the leak fixed, and no one was going to fix it for them.”

“They still had the hostages,” I said.

“They did, but they had them in the wrong country. They had planned to be in Afghanistan, where they could get advice and counsel from the senior members of the Brigade. If you look at the hijackers who died, the oldest one was twenty-three. That’s part of why things spun so far out of control.”

“Why did they do it in the first place? What were their demands?”

“They wanted to force Pakistan to release a radical Muslim sheikh named Ali al-Badat. Pakistan wouldn’t do it. That’s why the thing dragged on the way it did. It was a standoff.”

“Who is Ali al-Badat?”

“ ‘The people’s sheikh’ is what Newsweek called him. He was very popular. The Pakistani army stumbled over him by accident in a Peshawar raid. They had to put him in jail, but they weren’t happy about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he had far more support in Pakistan than President Musharraf did. They were afraid he would cause an uprising against the government. I’m still surprised they didn’t let him out. It would have been the perfect excuse, right?”

“I guess so.” At the moment, I was more concerned with problems closer to home than a geopolitical debate. “What about Gilbert Bernays?”

“Right. The hijackers needed food and water, so they started freeing hostages. They let the women and children go first. Then the Muslims, then a Frenchman. Eventually, it got down to seventeen Westerners and the eight hijackers. Seven of the hostages were Americans. One of them was this Bernays. I could never find anything on the guy. He was a ghost. No background or backstory. I always thought his identity had been manufactured. Now you’re saying he could be this embezzler.” He reached up and scratched his right cheek with his left hand. I could hear his nails scraping the stubs of his whiskers. “I think that could make some sense.”

“Why?”

“There were stories among the survivors of how he tried to ransom himself off the plane with a laptop computer.”

“A computer?”

“He claimed it was worth a billion dollars. They laughed at him, and they didn’t let him off.”

“How could his computer be worth a billion dollars?”

“I don’t know. No one has ever found him to ask him. He survived the storming of the aircraft, and no one ever saw him again. That’s why I think he could be your man. And that’s all I know.” He pushed away from the control counter and started to get up.

“Wait. What about Blackthorne?”

“I won’t talk to you about Blackthorne.”

“Why not?”

The receptionist knocked on the door and opened it. We both flinched. “Big Man is looking for you,” she said. “He wants to know if you resigned and didn’t tell him. He needs you on the air right now.”

“I’m coming.”

Lyle unfolded himself. I stood up, too.

“It’s Blackthorne, right? That’s who you’re afraid of. Did they come after you? Is that why you left the paper?”

“I dug too deep. That’s all you need to know. That’s all you want to know. But you should know this. If you start looking into Blackthorne in any kind of significant way, you will be at risk. People you love will be at risk. Don’t do it lightly.” He reached for the door. “And don’t ever come back here again.”

Back in the Durango, I sat quietly and looked at every car, trying to figure out if there were any I had seen before. If Lyle Burquart had been trying to scare me, he had succeeded, and more. I got out my notebook again. The pages were filling fast. I copied off the Gilbert Bernays name and then started writing in notes on the hijacking. Then I called Dan. When he didn’t answer the first time, I hung up and called him again. He was not happy when he finally picked up.

“What do you want, Shanahan? I’m in the middle of an arbitration hearing.”

“Let me just ask you something really quickly. What do you know about Salanna 809?”

“Hijacking. Fucked up.”

“Have you heard anything about it lately?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. It keeps coming up.”

“In what way? Wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t have time. I’ll see what I can find and call you later. Don’t call me again. Hey…”

“What?”

“What about Harvey?”

“Not yet.”

He hung up.

My phone was still in my hand when it started ringing. I checked the caller ID and answered.

“Felix?”

“Hey, Miss Shanahan, guess what?”

“What?”

“Someone just turned on Harvey’s phone. Do you want to know where he is?”