The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

6

BACK IN MY APARTMENT, I CHECKED MY PHONE MESSAGES on the home machine. Nothing but a recorded voice from the Red Cross saying it was time to give blood again. I called Harvey’s house and didn’t get him. Then I went through the same routine on his cell phone. I thought about calling my friend Bo but dismissed the idea, at least until I had a better sense of what was going on. I didn’t want to bring in the big guns until I knew for sure Harvey wasn’t at the Coolidge Corner theater catching a matinee with Rachel. I knew that wasn’t the case. I could feel in every part of me that Harvey had not left that house on his own. But my Bosnian enforcer friend and colleague was not a resource to be used lightly.

The speed of my DSL connection was liberating after Harvey’s poky dial-up service. I started punching the keys, doing searches and cross-references on names and phrases, looking for connections, and trying to find anything that would help me locate Rachel.

The first thing that came up was a piece in one of the smaller trade publications announcing that Rachel Ruffielo had joined a midsize local accounting firm as a partner. This was four, almost five, years ago, so it must have been shortly after she’d left Harvey.

There was a second, splashier announcement three years after that, when Rachel was named managing partner of the firm. The announcement listed several of the larger accounts she had managed during her tenure. Sure enough, one of them was Betelco. The final articles were all about the dissolution of Rachel’s firm in the wake of the Betelco scandal. When Betelco went down, it took its accountants with it.

I did a search for Betelco and got so many hits I cross-referenced with the name Fratello and words like indictment, embezzlement, and fraud. It seemed that Roger Fratello had inherited the controlling interest of a company founded by his father in 1944. The Lightway Company manufactured parts used to make lightbulbs. Roger found lightbulbs boring, so he used a good portion of the company’s substantial pile of cash to go on a spending spree. One of the companies he bought made semiconductors, and that put Roger right in the middle of the tech boom. He took on new investors to shore up his cash position and, when the technology sector went bust, took off with their money. In his wake, he left faked financial reports, fabricated customer lists, and a lot of very unhappy investors.

I searched hard for any reports on the Betelco fiasco that mentioned Rachel. Her company took a few direct hits in articles toward the end, but she was never mentioned by name. Inquiring minds wanted to know where the auditors had been throughout this ongoing fraud. Another good question to ask when I found her.

I hit the enter button several times, stacking up the Betelco articles for printing, then I went into Google Images to see what pictures I could find. Roger and his wife, Susan, had apparently been quite the presence on the Boston social scene, back before he had slithered out of town with other people’s money. The two of them had been regulars at fund-raisers, charity balls, and other excuses to wear black ties and gowns. Roger looked the same in all his pictures. More interesting were the pictures of his wife. I put the name Susan Fratello in and found several more recent photos of her. The difference in the images pre- and post-disgrace were startling. You could look into her eyes and see that she had suffered greatly for the sins of her husband. What better source of information could I hope to find?

I went back to the private databases to see if she was still in the area. She was not only still in the area, but she was in the same house in Newton she’d shared with her husband. I printed out the address. She would be my next stop.

When I could think of nothing else to search for, I checked my notebook. Ling had also mentioned the name Stephen Hoffmeyer as a possible alias for Roger. I put that into the Google box and got about a zillion hits. When I tried to cross-reference it with Fratello, I got nothing. I tried a few more combinations. Just when I was about to give up, I tried Stephen Hoffmeyer and Brussels, the city where Ling had found the cash. What I got in return might have been interesting to anyone, but for a former airline person, it was fascinating. A man named Stephen Gerald Hoffmeyer had been one of the passengers taken hostage in the Salanna 809 hijacking. Salanna Airlines was a small Belgian carrier that had gone out of business, driven there primarily by the bloody terrorist hijacking of Flight 809.

I started skimming the articles, refreshing my memory of the details. Seventy-nine passengers and crew had boarded their scheduled flight from Brussels to Johannesburg. One hour in, five members of the radical Armed Islamic Martyrs Brigade pulled out ice picks and took over the plane. Unfortunately for everyone, things began to go wrong almost immediately. The plane took a mechanical and ended up making an emergency landing in Sudan. The Belgians immediately ticked off the Sudanese by dispatching an elite military team to take charge. The Sudanese immediately invited in several high-profile terrorist groups, including Hamas, to help with the negotiations. This ticked off the Belgians.

Ten excruciating days later, with only the Western hostages still onboard, the Belgians stormed the plane without permission from the Sudanese government. In the conflagration that followed, seventeen people died-nine passengers and eight hijackers, the original gang of five, plus three that boarded later. The plane was destroyed.

I found a photo array of the storming and the aftermath. It had happened at night, so the pictures of the initial bombing and the fireball that followed were particularly vivid. The pictures shot in the cold and dreary light of dawn were quite a contrast. The grotesquely twisted hulk of what had once been an airplane was prominent. The debris field that surrounded it was blackened.

It was hard to believe anyone had walked away from that, but eight hostages had made it out. I searched several articles for the list of survivors. Once I found it, I checked the dates, then I sat back and tried to figure out what it all meant.

Salanna 809 had happened four years ago. If this was the same Stephen Hoffmeyer whom Ling had asked me about, and if it was an alias for Roger Fratello, then the embezzler had himself become the victim of a terrible crime. He had been caught on a hijacked aircraft, held hostage for ten days, and then killed in the fiery inferno that had resulted from a failed rescue attempt. He had not been one of the survivors.

Talk about karmic retribution.