Two Women

Nineteen

Alice squatted cross-legged on the cabin floor, her mind back in synch, surrounded by the accounts of John’s death, with the rest of the newspapers discarded unread. She’d been lucky, picking up Newsday at the Paterson mall. Its coverage was much fuller than that in the previous day’s New York Times or anything else she’d snatched up. The photographs were reproduced bigger, too, so that it was easier to identify the Citibank building. The amalgamated stories fitted what she’d been told by Hanlan – certainly about it unquestionably being an accident, with witnesses talking of a mystery car that drove away – with the addition of John appearing to run towards a police patrol car.

It was pitifully easy for Alice to work out the sequence. John had met them somehow – she’d never know whether he’d intended to call or been prevented from doing so – and handed over what they wanted. And then tried to confront them with the threat of producing his copies. What threat would they have made in return? Jeered at him, so arrogantly sure of themselves, of their power? The most likely would have been to hurt Jane. Kill her even. Maybe, accepted Alice, for her to be hurt as well. They knew about her existence, although maybe not yet that she was the hacker they were hunting. Perhaps they hadn’t even bothered with threats, mocking him, laughing at him. They wouldn’t have been able to torture him – it was a relief, to realize that – because they’d obviously been taking him back to the bank. But there must have been some threat, she thought, changing her mind. Otherwise how could they have known Citibank was his bank? And that he had a safe-deposit facility there? Which was obviously where he’d thought what he’d kept would be untouchable by anyone except himself. How frightened he must have been, poor, optimistically brave John: knotted inside, believing in miracles when he’d seen the police car. Yards away from safety and protection, prepared at last – if he’d thought about it, which he probably hadn’t in those few terrified moments – finally to sacrifice his precious inherited firm in exchange for his life. Which he hadn’t saved and which was the bitterest irony of all. It hadn’t even been necessary for the murdering motherfuckers to stage John’s killing as an accident, as they had the other two.

For some reason she couldn’t identify – didn’t need to identify – it made Alice even more determined to exact her revenge. Which brought her back in more detail – attempted total recall – to the conversation with Hanlan. He was playing hardball, with every good reason. She’d realized as they’d talked how bad – how unconvincing – she’d sounded. How many times had she said ‘I don’t know’? Without intending any pun, Alice thought, I don’t know, and didn’t think it funny. It was difficult to recall the last time she’d found anything funny: ever would again. What did she know, Alice asked herself, unknowingly echoing Gene Hanlan’s interrogation that morning. She knew how to get into IRS files with that unopened laptop over there on the desk. And how to download a paper trail of money-laundering tax returns for five Mafia-controlled companies, although she had no proof-nor way of obtaining proof – that they were Mafia-controlled. Incomplete though it was, would that be sufficient for the demanding Gene Hanlan, irrespective of it being obtained illegally? She wouldn’t know until she retrieved them and tried to negotiate.

And she had time now, hidden away up here in the mountains where no-one could find her. It was good, to feel safe.

The feeling lasted until she began gathering up the discarded newspapers and on impulse turned to the public notice sections and found Carver’s official death notice. The funeral was scheduled the day after tomorrow. She’d have to go, Alice decided. Whatever the danger, she had to go.

The return call from the telephone company came as they finished listening, for the fourth consecutive time, to the taped conversation between Alice and Hanlan. McKinnon took it, didn’t say anything apart from thanks and turned back into the room. ‘Paterson. She’s taken to the hills.’

‘The Catskills aren’t our territory,’ said Ginette at once and just as quickly wished she hadn’t.

‘I know what our – my – territory is,’ threw back Hanlan.

‘We could do a re-shoot of the Sound of Music,’ said McKinnon, trying to lessen the tension. ‘The hills are alive, to the sound of Martha, where are you, Martha?’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ said Hanlan.

‘Gene!’ soothed McKinnon, jerking a nail-bitten finger towards the latest tape, still in the player. ‘You really want to hear it for the fifth time, hear nothing for the fifth time? I don’t know what this gal thinks she’s got…’ He shrugged. ‘Circumstantially, maybe a lot. Evidentially, we don’t have diddly squat. Until she arrives outside here with a U-Haul packed with evidence – or points us the way – we’re wasting our time.’

Now Hanlan indicated the tape. ‘We almost had her real name there at the beginning.’

The other two regarded him solemnly, neither speaking, as if a mist distanced them from Hanlan.

Hanlan said: ‘I’m not becoming paranoid about this.’

‘Good,’ said McKinnon. He thought that was exactly what Hanlan was becoming and didn’t want any foul-ups, even by association, between now and his retirement.

‘But there’s something here! I’ve got a gut feeling.’

‘You keep telling us that,’ reminded Ginette, as concerned as McKinnon.

The smoothly efficient burglary of Alice Belling’s apartment in Princes Street did not produce as much as John Burcher had hoped, although the inscription on the back of the two photographs of Carver outside the cabin – ‘Bearsfort. July’ – gave them a possible although too wide-ranging direction in which to look. He was disappointed at Alice Belling’s apparent modesty. Nowhere among any of the other photographs – all copied to hide any evidence of the entry – was there the sort of proud-parent studio portrait from which Carver’s mistress could be positively identified. The best, ironically, was a thumbnail image that had accompanied her profile of George Northcote in her cuttings book, every clip of which had also been copied.

He picked his way painstakingly through the trawl, aware as he did so that the total, seemingly snatched-up disorder in which Petrie had personally handed over the package an hour earlier in the downstairs lounge wasn’t snatched-up disorder at all. It would have been gone through – still be under examination, right now – by several people, each more than once, to ensure nothing was missed. But the responsibility for anything missed was his.

There was a substantial amount of business correspondence, none of it relevant, two letters confirming assignments that were still on her telephone answering machine, Burcher’s attempts to make contact having now been erased. There were bank statements up to the previous month showing a comfortable balance and all the woman’s utility bills were receipted as being paid in full before their due date. He was surprised at the total absence of any personal correspondence, not even a note that could have been construed to be a love message from Carver. Imagining themselves to be discreet, he supposed.

It was crumpled when he found it, crushed in such a way between two of the bank statements he was re-examining that Burcher didn’t think it had been extracted for copying. It was a paid-in-cash receipt for access time upon a computer at a cybercafe named Space for Space.

Despite the well-remembered rehearsal of her first hacking expedition it still took Alice most of that day and well into the night to duplicate her IRS evidence, herding her Trojan Horses through the computer system of a Hertz car-hire outlet in Des Moines, Iowa. By the time the physical tiredness of unremitting concentration forced her to stop, just before nine, Alice was still short of her original trove and unsure if she might need any more.

Not a decision that needed to be made tonight, Alice thought, carrying her drink, more gin than tonic, to their once-shared chair. Time enough tomorrow. The following day. No hurry, now that she was safe. The refusal came at once. She wasn’t safe, she was hiding: curling up like a baby, trying to make herself too small to be seen. To be found. There was more than enough in what she’d already downloaded to illustrate how accounts had been padded from subsidiary to subsidiary and from state to state and country to country. All she’d achieve by obtaining more – apart from postponing her committing, physical approach to the FBI – would be unnecessary repetition.

What if it wasn’t enough, evidentially? Sufficient, maybe, for an IRS investigation but not for one by the FBI? It was an income-tax prosecution that nailed Al Capone, she reminded herself. But that had been in the 1930s, not now. Now she needed a Witness Protection Programme and only the FBI provided that. If only she’d had… Alice didn’t complete the thought, her mind racing beyond it.

She hadn’t been thinking properly, completely. Just selfishly, knowing that she was being pursued for her computer intrusion and desperate only to save herself. What about Jane? Jane was the one – the only one – who could get to whatever John had in the safe deposit at Citibank. And therefore the one at risk, as Northcote and John and Janice Snow had been at risk. All of whom were now dead.