The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

24

IT WAS A LONG AND EXHAUSTING FLIGHT HOME. BY THE time I got back to Boston, I was jumping out of my skin. I called Harvey the minute I got to my car. When he didn’t answer either of his phones, I knew it was because of Rachel. She had upset the natural order of things and taken a blowtorch to the delicate balance we had achieved. For anything that was amiss, I blamed Rachel.

Then I got to the house, where I found the two of them, sitting on the couch in the front room, ensconced in blissful domesticity. They were listening to music, oblivious to the world in general and me in particular.

I dropped my backpack. It hit the floor with a thud. They both looked up. Harvey had a haircut, and I’d never seen that shirt before, and those…were those khaki pants he was wearing? They’d been shopping, too?

“You don’t answer phones around here anymore?”

Rachel raised a remote and pointed it at a stereo system that hadn’t been there when I’d left. She turned the music down. “Did you get my video back?”

I pulled the flash drive from my pocket and tossed it in her direction. It landed on the couch next to her. As I watched her scrambling for it, all I could see was the image of her on the video, pawing through the possessions of the man she had just killed. All I could think about was how she had lied. She had lied to me, and I just knew she had lied to Harvey to make him love her, to get whatever she needed, whatever she wanted to take from him.

Harvey took the remote from her and turned the music off. “My apologies,” he said. “We must have had the music playing too loudly. I should have been more careful.”

“Harvey, can I speak to Rachel alone, please?”

“Why?”

“Girl talk.”

Rachel looked at me as if I’d just slapped her. She knew what was coming. The defiance was already taking over her expression. Preemptive defensiveness, something any good liar needs in her toolbox.

“Harvey, baby, just give us a minute alone. It’s all right. I can handle myself.”

“Whether you can handle yourself is not the issue. It is more that-”

“Harvey, go.”

He started to move forward on the couch so he could transfer himself to his chair. He paused, seemingly teetering on the edge. “No.” He pushed back and planted himself firmly on the couch. “I am not leaving. I will not sit outside in my own house while the two of you discuss things that pertain to me as much as to either of you.” He turned to Rachel. “You will not speak to me in that tone.” He looked at me. “Carry on.”

It seemed that the haircut wasn’t all that was new about Harvey. I turned to Rachel. “You stole Vladi’s computer.”

She crossed her arms. “No, I did not.”

“You pulled his keys off his dead body, unlocked his briefcase, pulled out the laptop, and stuck it in your own bag. Then you called Harvey. Did she happen to mention, Harvey, that she had stolen computer files worth a billion dollars?”

“A billion dollars.” Rachel bolted out from behind the coffee table, stepping over Harvey’s legs to do it. “Are you crazy? I don’t know about any billion dollars.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “You’ve been lying from the start. If you don’t tell me the truth right now, I will take you to Drazen myself, and you can explain to him how you killed his brother and took his money.”

“No. You will not.” I ignored Harvey’s stern command and hoped Rachel would get close enough for me to wring her neck, but she stayed on her own side of the room.

“I didn’t know anything about any billion dollars. I swear-” She appealed to Harvey. “I swear to God, baby, I didn’t know.”

“Then why did you steal it? Why did you go straight for the laptop?”

“Because I knew it was worth something, but I didn’t know it was that much.”

“How did you know?”

“Roger told me. He said Vladi carried something around on his computer that was worth a lot of money. I didn’t think about it until I saw his briefcase there. Whatever it was, I thought I could trade it to Drazen to get out from under his thumb.”

“You didn’t think Drazen would wonder where you got it?”

“I wasn’t thinking about all that. I just…I had almost been raped. I had just killed a man. I wasn’t thinking. I was just doing.”

“That’s bullshit. I saw you. You were thinking just fine.”

She threw her hands up. “What do you want me to say? I figured if it was worth something, then Vladi owed it to me for making me shoot him. I knew it was going to screw up the rest of my life that I had to kill him, and it has.”

“Why were you there at the office in the middle of the night in the first place?”

She reached up and pulled at the hair behind her ear. “I told you what I was doing there. I was covering my ass with Drazen. Roger set me up. He planned right from the start to steal their dirty money. I couldn’t let Drazen think we were in it together.”

“You’re telling me you weren’t?”

“I might be a lot of things, but I’m not stupid enough to scam Drazen Tishchenko. Then Vladi showed up, and you obviously saw the rest.”

I went over to where the new stereo system sat. You didn’t find them much these days with turntables. They must have had to look for a long time to find it. “Here’s what I think happened.” I turned to watch Rachel’s face. “Roger tricked you into bringing Drazen into his company. Once Drazen was in, Roger stole his money. You went to the office that night to find proof. All of that was just as you said. But the proof wasn’t to protect yourself from Drazen, it was to blackmail Roger. You wanted some of Drazen’s money for yourself.”

She upped the intensity on her glare, but she didn’t deny it.

“Vladi showed up, you killed him, and everything went to hell, at least for you. For Roger, it was an incredible stroke of luck. He ended up with a video of you killing Vladi and the billion-dollar computer.”

“I don’t know how Vladi was carrying around a billion dollars. That doesn’t make any sense. You have to be wrong about that.”

“But right about everything else.”

She swallowed and looked at Harvey. Any second, I expected her to go over and rub herself against him like a Siamese cat. “I didn’t think any of it made any difference. Roger got what he wanted. He left with Vladi’s cash and his computer. I got nothing that I wanted. Well, I got a little something. I went to Drazen and told him Roger had killed Vladi.” She obviously enjoyed the memory.

“What kind of computer was it? What brand should I be looking for?”

“I don’t know. A Dell, I think. Yeah, a Dell.”

“What did Roger need to open the files on Vladi’s computer?”

“I don’t know. How should I know that?”

“Because you always know more than you’re saying. What’s on it that’s worth a billion dollars?”

“I don’t know. The brothers had cash stashed everywhere. It was probably some kind of access instructions. You know, where to look and how to get it. Vladi wasn’t exactly a Harvard man. He would need something like that.”

I looked down at Harvey, concerned about how all this might be sitting with him. He looked back. “Why is any of this important now?”

“What?”

“Regardless of its worth, why is the computer important if we have the video back?”

So much for his fragile psyche. “Cyrus Thorne has the video, or at least a copy of it.”

“Who is Cyrus Thorne?”

“Remember Blackthorne? The private military guys who attacked Rachel and me up in Acton? That’s his company. He’s looking for Kraft. Because of Roger’s e-mail, he thought Rachel knew where Kraft was. That’s why he’s been having her followed.”

Harvey looked perplexed. I pulled over the ottoman so I could sit next to him. “The video came from a reporter I met in Paris named Max Kraft. He has a bunch of laptops that were taken from the 809 passengers, including Roger’s. The e-mail Rachel got was from him, sort of. He hooked up Roger’s computer and a message that had been sitting in Roger’s out-box for four years was delivered.”

“What?” Rachel was hovering.

“Apparently Roger’s Internet account is still active. His wife probably kept it that way. She says she’s over him, but I’m not buying it. She also thinks he’s alive, which he’s not.”

“Roger is dead?” More eavesdropping from Rachel. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“He was hijacked and trapped in a burning aircraft. It makes all kinds of sense. The survivors of the hijacking knew Roger as Gilbert Bernays. He was on the plane all the way to the end. Frank Plume was another hostage. He told me he witnessed Roger’s death. I believe him.”

“Hold on.” Rachel dispensed with the flitting around and plopped down on the couch next to Harvey. “You’re saying Roger was on that plane. He died, and somehow this reporter, this Max Kraft, got his laptop? How does that work?”

“The hijackers collected all the computers from the passengers. Sometime during the ten days, all that stuff found its way off the plane and back to the hijackers’ headquarters in Afghanistan. That’s where Kraft got it. When the marines got there and the terrorists abandoned their house, the townspeople got in and scavenged the laptops. Kraft found out. He went there and bought at least some of them.”

Harvey nodded. “I understand. This Kraft must have been looking for a story.”

“Which it seems that he got. According to him, it’s a good one. I tend to believe him, since people are trying to kill him. He was attacked in Paris while I was there. He got away. I got picked up by Cyrus Thorne.”

“Oh, dear.” Harvey had managed to move himself to the edge of the couch, which slightly wrinkled his new slacks. He blinked at me with as much concern as he could comfortably show. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. No. I mean, I’ll be okay. It’s just-”

“Hello?” Rachel called for our attention. “She’s right here, Harvey. She’s obviously fine. Can we talk about the video? Why does this Thorne person have the video? What does he have to do with it?”

I turned my attention back to Harvey. “Kraft wouldn’t tell me what he was writing about, but he implied that Thorne is a bad guy and that his story will expose him. But Thorne says he’s working for the U.S. government, that Kraft is in possession of classified files, and that it’s his job to get them back. He wants me to contact Kraft again. He’ll trade Kraft for the video.”

“Why is that a bad thing?” Rachel asked. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? We find this Kraft, turn him over to Blackthorne, they give us their copy of the video, and we totally destroy it forever. Then you tell Drazen that Roger killed Vladi. Roger is dead. He died in the hijacking, so justice has been served. We all go back to our lives of quiet desperation.”

I was more conscious than ever of how much I disliked Rachel and this whole mess she had pulled us into. Also, she had yet to express one ounce of gratitude, but before I could pounce on her, Harvey took care of it.

“Rachel, please. You are not the only one involved in this.” There was an edge in Harvey’s tone. I loved the new Harvey. I just wondered where he’d been and why I had never seen him. Perhaps sensing that she was pushing her luck with the one person who could still stomach her, Rachel closed her mouth.

“First of all,” I said, “Thorne told me a lot of things I’m not sure I believe. I’m not sure whether to believe Kraft. But I believe this: it is Thorne’s intention to kill Kraft. I won’t turn anyone over to be killed.”

“Of course not,” Harvey agreed.

“Second, we now have a new billion-dollar variable in the equation. Now we have to wonder if Drazen is looking for Roger because he wants revenge, or because he wants his money, or both. Something tells me he wants his money back.”

“But we do not have it.”

“That’s true. At the moment, we don’t have anything to give Drazen to make him happy-except the name of Vladi’s real killer.” I resisted the urge to wink at Rachel. “But maybe if we can find him his money, it will turn out he’s not that concerned about revenge, and then we can all go back to our lives of quiet desperation.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who will get your ovaries ripped out if you’re wrong. How are we supposed to find the money?”

“If anyone has it, it’s Kraft. He has the computers from Zormat.”

“Can you call him?”

“He’s a little hard to find.” I tried to think of what I would say to him if I did. Then I remembered our conversation at the hotel just before the bullets started flying. “But I still have something he wants.” The only question was whether or not I had it in me to betray Lyle Burquart.