The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

23

A POLICE LIEUTENANT IN BOSTON, WHO HATED ME ANYWAY, once threw me in a holding cell, basically because I ticked him off. My first time behind bars had been a pretty frightening experience, mainly because I wasn’t in there alone. The second was in California, where the highway patrol picked me up on a warrant for check kiting, a charge that turned out to be totally false and a complete misunderstanding. The West Coast lockup was nicer, as were the officers. In neither case was I locked up for more than twenty-four hours, but it made being in jail not an entirely new experience for me. What was new was being tossed into a French jail.

The guys who had grabbed me were some kind of flying SWAT team. Once they had pulled me up from the wet ground, I had seen Gendarmerie written across their backs. Someone had heard the shots in the hotel and called the police. They’d spotted me running away, and they’d caught me with Frank’s gun in my pocket. I didn’t know much French, but I knew that was going to be a big problem.

At the station house, I had asked a lot of questions, but my jailers kept telling me they had to find a translator before anyone could speak to me, which was bullshit. It wasn’t as if I were a code talker.

I sat on the cot in my cell, isolated and waiting and trying to remember to breathe through my mouth. This jail had something in common with the other two I’d visited. It was my guess that jails all over the world had the same thing in common: the pungent smell of mold, greasy skin, body odor, and every variety of human discharge.

After several hours, an officer came and opened my cage. He took me through a series of gates and doors and elevators until we arrived at an open office area, not unlike the bullpens I’ve seen in the many different police departments I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. He handcuffed me to a chair next to an empty desk and told me to wait. That’s what he said. One word in English: “Wait.”

There was a lot of shouting going on behind the closed door of an office along one of the walls. It was muffled French that I couldn’t understand. What was easy to understand was the level of vitriol. When the arguing stopped, the door opened, and a man in a black raincoat came out. Right behind him was another man, somewhat younger, in shirtsleeves and tie. They stood in the bullpen speaking loudly and gesturing. When it was all over, the man in the black raincoat stalked out. The shirtsleeved man yelled at a uniform, pointed in my general direction, then retreated to his office and slammed the door. The officer came over and uncuffed me, then guided me through the procedure for release, talking to me the whole time in perfect English. He answered no questions about why I’d been released. I asked what would happen if I demanded an explanation. He advised against it.

On the way out, they returned my personal belongings. I went out to catch a cab, thinking how nice it would be to take it straight to Orly. I could still catch the evening flight to Boston if I hurried. But I had to go back to the Hyatt and get my things.

As it turned out, I didn’t need a cab. The man in the black raincoat was sitting in a car at the curb. He leaned over and popped open the passenger-side door.

“Get in.”

There was enough room between the car and the curb for me to step down. With one hand on the open door and one on the roof, I poked my head in so I could see his face. “Who are you?”

“Cyrus Thorne.”

Nothing screamed success like a private jet. Blackthorne’s looked rich without being ostentatious. The seats were big club chairs covered in glove-soft caramel-colored leather. There was carpet, subdued lighting, tables with polished wood-grain surfaces, and individual flip-up television monitors at every seat.

Thorne had taken a right turn into the cockpit after we’d boarded. I was trying to figure out which seat to flop into when a flight attendant approached and asked if I wanted anything.

“Water, please.”

I took a big swiveling chair that gave me a good view out one of the porthole windows. Apparently, we were the only passengers expected, because the stairs were up, the door was closed, and we were starting to taxi.

The flight attendant was back with a tall glass of ice, lime, and a bottle of San Pellegrino. She set the glass in front of me and poured. “I’m Tatiana. I’ll get you whatever you need.”

“Thank you.”

The pilot came on and asked everyone to strap in for takeoff. I looked out and saw we were at the end of the runway, about to blast off. He said our flying time to Boston’s Logan Airport would be approximately eight hours. At least I was going home.

I drank deeply from the glass, not realizing until I had consumed almost the whole thing how thirsty I had been and not caring much that gulping sparkling water would give me hiccups. I drained the glass, and Tatiana came over to pour the rest of the bottle. That’s when I looked at her closely for the first time and recognized her.

“I know you,” I said. “I saw you. You were at…you were…” She was the woman in the light raincoat from the ballroom and the sidewalk just before the cops had taken me down. “Who are you?”

“Cyrus will explain everything when he comes back.”

“Where is he?”

“Flying the plane.”

Of course. He not only owned the plane, he flew it. I watched Tatiana move around the cabin. She looked strong and toned, and something told me she was more than a flight attendant. A ninja flight attendant, perhaps, the kind of person we could have used more of back in my Majestic days.

“Put your seat belt on,” she said. She could have used a little brushing up on her customer-service skills.

As I buckled in, she threw a lever on the side of my chair and locked it so it wouldn’t swivel, which I assumed was required to keep the passengers from spinning like tops on liftoff. Then she strapped into the seat behind me.

The aircraft started to roll. I felt the g-forces climbing. The wheels left the ground, and we were flying. After about ten minutes, we were level and cruising. I heard Tatiana unhook herself. I needed a couple of moments alone to think, so I did what I always did when the seat-belt sign went off.

“Is the lav forward or aft?”

“It’s in the back.”

To get to it, I had to go through an office area and a small stateroom. The office had a TV, an exercise bike, a lot of stereo equipment, and a lit trophy case of some kind.

The bathroom was small but more than serviceable. I checked the mirror. Running for my life had generated a lot of sweat, which hadn’t been kind to the cut on my forehead. It was throbbing and ugly, but it hadn’t split open. I was going to have a nice scab for a while. I washed it and the rest of my face. The towels on the rack were all top quality. Each one had a small BT embroidered in the corner, and I had the absurd urge to steal one for Max Kraft, though it wasn’t likely I’d ever see him again. I hoped he was safely on his way to wherever he went to hide.

My bag from the hotel had materialized on the bed in the stateroom. My backpack was there, as was my computer case. These people might have been dangerous, but they were organized. I went straight to my backpack to check for the flash drive and felt more relieved than I would have expected to find it right where I’d left it. I’d worked hard to get it. I pulled it out and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans. I pulled out a sweatshirt, the only clean top I had left. My jeans weren’t exactly fresh, but my only other option was the pair of linen pants I had worn to the reunion.

While I pulled on the shirt, I tried to figure out what had just happened. I hadn’t been taken by force, but I hadn’t been given much choice, either. Thorne told me the gendarmes had picked me up in connection with the incident at the Novotel and that they considered me armed and dangerous. He had also told me he had gotten me out by claiming I was working for the CIA and taking me into his custody. Throughout this sequence of events, I had learned a few things: Cyrus Thorne had some kind of status with the Paris police, and possibly the CIA; he would have been happy to send me back to the gendarmerie, had I not agreed to go with him; and he wanted something from me. Knowing all that, my best option was to find out what it was and enjoy the ride home.

I started toward the main cabin, stopping on my way to notice some things I hadn’t seen the first time through. The display case was not for trophies. It was to display a single item: a large crystal sculpture of a screaming eagle. The sculpture itself was beautiful, but with its claws forward and wings fully extended, so was the bird, in a brutal sort of way. It was a pure specimen from a perfect world where the strong eat the weak and there is no other law but that. It reminded me of Drazen. I reached out and touched one of the claws.

“Magnificent, isn’t he?”

I whipped around to find Cyrus Thorne right behind me, squarely in my personal space. I hadn’t sensed his presence at all. I took a step away from him. He looked different from when he’d been next to me in the car. The lighting in the cabin made his hair look more ginger than gray. He had changed out of a suit and into khakis and a golf shirt. It gave him a trim silhouette and didn’t diminish in any way the attitude that the appropriate way to greet him was with a salute.

“It’s very impressive,” I said. “Where did it come from?”

“I had a bet with my partner.”

“Who won?”

“I lost the bet, but Tony died winning.”

“That must have been some bet.”

He didn’t seem to hear. “This is my tribute to him.”

I looked down at the inscription plate. “For Tony Blackmon.” Below the name, all it said was “Get some.”

It reminded me of what someone, probably Felix, had told me about Blackmon. I looked at Thorne. “Your partner was a marine.”

“The best who ever lived…a good partner.” He didn’t exactly get misty-eyed, but there was sadness in his face as he looked at that eagle. It made him seem gentler.

“Let’s go up front and talk.” He turned and moved forward to the main cabin. We settled in at one of the tables, across from each other.

Thorne had a bag of cough drops sitting on the table next to him. He unsheathed one, popped it into his mouth, and peered at my head. “Do you need medical attention? Tatiana can help if you do. I have some experience as a field medic. I can do some things in a pinch.”

He had a tinge of the South in his voice. If he were a car, he would have been a pickup truck, only tricked out with all the best military gear, especially battle armor. He seemed very well defended.

“I’ve already taken care of it, thank you.” Something had occurred to me. “Who’s flying the plane?”

“My copilot. Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Cyrus Thorne, cofounder of Blackthorne and king of a vigilante army.”

He seemed to like that. “That’s very colorful. But I am no king, and we are not a vigilante army. I am a humble servant of the great and glorious country of the United States of America.”

“Weren’t those your fellow patriots firing on us at the Novotel?”

“They were overenthusiastic, I’ll agree, and flawed in their tactical approach. We’ll have to do some work on that.” He looked around for Tatiana and nodded. She pulled an electronic organizer from her pocket, got out the stylus, and started tapping away. Turned out she was a ninja flight attendant and personal assistant. Cyrus turned back to our conversation.

“You did a good job handling a bad situation. I’m impressed.”

“That was my goal, to impress the people who were trying to kill me.”

He popped another cough drop. They were cherry, and he didn’t suck them. He crunched them. Even sitting between two aircraft engines, I could hear him grind them to dust with his molars. “If they had been trying to kill you, you would be dead. Unfortunately, the target got away. That’s why we’re talking now.”

“The target?”

“You know that I’m talking about Max Kraft.” He put his arms on the table and leaned forward. “Let’s be a little more direct in our communication.”

“Sure.” I sank a little deeper into my club chair. “Because we only have eight hours ahead of us.”

“We should be able to get our business resolved well before we land in Boston, and I enjoy flying the plane.”

“All right, let’s do it. What do you want from me, and what happens if I don’t give it to you?”

His gaze settled on me in a way that said he wasn’t used to being the one answering the questions, but he would humor me. “Blackthorne is a preferred contractor to the U.S. government. We’ve worked for every branch of the military and multiple other departments and agencies. Most of the work we’ve done lately has been for the intelligence community.”

“I guess that makes you a spy for hire.”

“That’s simplistic.”

“I thought we were doing simple and direct.”

“You do have a mouth, don’t you?”

I just looked at him. I was locked up with him in an aircraft at 35,000 feet. There were at least three of them onboard to one of me. I was unarmed-Kraft’s Baretta was one item that had not been returned-and something told me the captain and Tatiana weren’t. If they wanted to hurt me, there wasn’t much I could do. My attitude was about the only thing in the situation I could control.

He pulled a worn leather attaché onto the table and dug out a pair of utilitarian reading glasses and a file. He opened the file and perused it. “You’re a private investigator from Boston, Massachusetts. You flew to Paris last night on Majestic Airlines. You sat in seat 4B. You were staying at the Hyatt in room 1200. Your partner is Harvey Baltimore, also of Boston. You’ve been partners for three”-he turned the page-“almost four years. Before that, you worked for Majestic.”

“You checked me out.”

“I’m in the information-gathering business.” He took off the glasses and leaned back. “Your partner seems quite taken with his ex-wife. I find that to be charming. It says here that he’s ill.”

“That’s a pretty thorough report.” Tatiana, leaning against the bulkhead behind Thorne, shifted. I looked at her, and she offered a half-smile. Was there no end to this woman’s talents?

“It’s what we do,” Thorne said.

It was what he planned to do with it that concerned me. “What do you want?”

“You like simple.” He closed the file and took off his glasses. “Here it is. Max Kraft is a dangerous man. It is my job to find him. I want you to do it for me. Arrange a meeting with him so that we can intercept him. We’ll take it from there.”

“Kraft didn’t strike me as particularly formidable.”

“He has classified information. He’s threatening to declassify it in the New York Times.”

“You would kill him for that?”

“No one will print his story. We’ll see to that.” He waved his hand, as if the New York Times were some insignificant fly to be swatted away. The idea that he might really be able to do it was disturbing.

“If you can squash his story, then what are you so worried about?”

“Hoffmeyer.”

“Stephen Hoffmeyer? From Salanna 809?”

“Yes.”

I sat back and did a couple of small side-to-side swivels. Hoffmeyer, the dead guy who wasn’t dead, which made Frank the crazy guy who wasn’t crazy. Now I really had to focus. “Was Hoffmeyer CIA?”

“Hoffmeyer was with the Agency. Four years ago, he stole highly classified documents. He had them with him when the flight was hijacked. When we found out he was on the plane, beepers went off all over the world. At that point, we had a bunch of hostiles in possession of some of the country’s most sensitive information. We don’t know exactly what happened in the course of that hijacking, but we thought Hoffmeyer had gone down in the final assault. We thought the files had died with him. There are indications now that both the files and Hoffmeyer survived.”

“Kraft has the files?”

“Max Kraft has those files. Our primary objective is to get them back. Our secondary objective is to make sure Hoffmeyer and the files never meet again.”

“What would Hoffmeyer do with them if he got them back?”

“Sell them to the highest bidder, which will certainly include enemies of the United States. I’ll tell you right now that will not happen. I won’t let that happen.”

“Is this more of that need-to-know information that I don’t get to know? Because right now, I’m not taking anyone at his word.”

“I can’t tell you what it is, but know this.” I hated people who said “know this.” “As an American citizen, you do not want Kraft walking around with this information. You do not want Hoffmeyer to get it.”

“Are you saying you’ll kill Kraft to keep from letting Hoffmeyer get to him first?”

“If I have to.”

“So, what you’re asking me to do is help you kill a man.”

“Yes.” He started searching around for something, eventually locating it in a pouch on the side of his club chair. It was a remote control.

“Why am I supposed to trust you? You’re a private contractor. You can’t even show me a badge.”

“No, but I can show you this.”

He opened a little cabinet in the wall next to us. A flat-screen TV monitor was inside. As he pressed buttons on the remote, an image fluttered onto the screen. It was black-and-white and very sharp. The point of view was from above, probably close to the ceiling. I moved closer to the screen, because I knew what this was. A man held a woman down on a desk. He was big enough that she was almost completely obscured. I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t have to.

I felt in my pocket for my flash drive. It was there. “Where did you get this?”

He hit pause. “From a translator who worked for Max Kraft.” He nodded toward the screen. “Go ahead. You should see this. It’s interesting stuff.”

He restarted, and the incident proceeded as I would have expected. Vladi reached down to try to undo his belt. He was wobbly and uncoordinated. Had he not been draped over the desk, it wasn’t clear to me he would have been able to stand. Rachel’s hands were wrapped around his broad back. As he continued to struggle with the buckle, she withdrew her hands, only to push them around again, but this time under his jacket, where it was plainly visible that she was searching for the weapon. It was also clearly evident when she’d found it. Vladi straightened up quickly, stumbled back, and stood like an animal up on its hind legs. When she pointed the gun at him, his shoulders shook, his arms whipped around, and it was clear he was roaring at her. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be no sound.

Rachel also spoke as she pushed herself up from the desk and wiped her lips with the back of one hand, keeping him covered the whole time. He stumbled backward, clearly not in control of all motor functions, but then he advanced on her again with intent to do her real harm. She shot him twice in the chest. He kept coming, but she was able to step out of his way and slip around the desk. The way he went after her, you never would have guessed he had two slugs lodged in his chest. She raised the gun and shot him again. This time, he fell to his knees and hung there for a few seconds. Then he rolled gently forward, laid his head on the floor, and didn’t move again.

It was a bit of a relief to see Rachel’s hands shake as she set the pistol on the desk. She walked over to the wall farthest from the body and slumped against it. She slid down slowly to the floor, put her hands over her face, and cried. But almost as quickly as she started, she stopped, and from there the story took an unexpected turn, but it was one I should have seen coming.

She crawled over to where Vladislav had left a large briefcase. She laid it down flat and tried to unlatch it. Having no success, she crept over to Vladi’s body and approached it as if it were electrified. She poked and pulled back and prodded and shied away. Getting no response, she pulled him over onto his back so she could rifle his pockets. She was fast and efficient. She never even looked at his face.

She extracted a set of keys and flipped through them until she found the one that worked. She opened the case and started pulling stuff out. Files, a flask, more files. When she found what she wanted, she demonstrated the universal sign for guilt, looking left and right. Apparently seeing that she was alone, save for the dead body behind her, she reached in and came out with a laptop. The billion-dollar machine. It had to be the one Roger had told Frank he’d stolen off a dead Russian-only Roger hadn’t been the one who stole it.

On the screen, Rachel did what I now understood Rachel always did: she took a grievous situation and made it work to her benefit. She carried the laptop to her own bag and slipped it in. In some ways, I had to admire such a keen sense of survival.

Finding nothing else she wanted from Vladi, she did the whole thing in reverse, including putting the keys back into the dead man’s pocket. Then she pulled out her cell phone and made a call. I imagined Harvey at the other end of that call, coming to the phone and rising about two feet off the ground when he heard Rachel’s voice.

“Baby, come quick,” she must have said. “I need your help.” The screen went to blue.

Thorne put his glasses back on and consulted his file. “That was Vladislav Tishchenko. Brother of Drazen.” He peered at me over the lenses. “You run with a dangerous crowd.”

“Not usually.”

“The woman is Rachel Ruffielo, your partner’s ex-wife.” He put the file aside. “From what I understand, Drazen is confused about the circumstances of his brother’s death. This would clear it up for him. Ready to continue?”

He used the remote and started the show again. The screen stayed blue. There was a jump cut, and then my heart jumped, because Harvey was there. He was standing over the body in his suit with one hand on his forehead. He looked as if he were taking his own temperature. Thorne reached down and hit the fast-forward. It showed Rachel and Harvey talking and gesturing to each other. It showed Rachel leaving and coming back with the plastic bags, and the two of them straightening the corpse, and rolling it up. They were going at Buster Keaton speed, but it wasn’t funny.

This time, Thorne hit the pause button and froze the two of them on the screen as they dragged Vladi’s body across the floor.

My throat was dry, and his cough drops were looking good to me. “Can I have one of those?”

He set one on the table and pushed it across. I unwrapped it and popped it in. There was nothing special about it-I wasn’t sure why he seemed so enamored of them-but it did the job. It got the saliva flowing again.

“That’s your partner, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He placed the remote control on the table between us. “Here’s how I think things will work. You continue your dialogue with Max Kraft. You get him to agree to meet you.”

“We’re not having a dialogue.”

“You’ll come up with something. At the appropriate time, we’ll move in and take over. If you do that, no one you don’t want to will ever see this.”

He pointed at the screen. At that moment, Tatiana must have pulled the flash drive from the CPU in the back. On the screen, the system signaled its surprise by going to black and then announcing a fatal error.