couple when she’d stopped in Kramerbooks, on Connecticut Avenue, and saw
them shopping together. Ramon was a small, open-faced man with an easy
smile, his white teeth dazzling against his dark complexion.
He worked as an administrator for the local Meals on Wheels program. He
and Anna warmed to each other immediately; Ramon insisted that she dine
with them that evening, as a spur-of-the-moment thing, and she agreed.
It was a magical occasion, partly because of the excellence of Ramon’s
paella, partly because of the relaxed conversation and easy banter, none
of which ever touched upon office matters; she envied them their easy
intimacy and affection.
David, with his square jaw and sandy hair, was a tall, ruggedly handsome
man, and Ramon noticed the way she looked at him. “I know what you’re
thinking,” he confided to her at one point, when David was across the
room with his back to them, fixing drinks. “You’re thinking, “What a
waste.” ”
Anna laughed. “It’s crossed my mind,” she said.
“All the girls say that.” Ramon grinned. “Well, he ain’t wasted on
me.”
A few weeks later, Anna had lunch with David and explained to him why he
hadn’t received a promotion from E-3 grade. On paper, he reported to
Anna, but Anna reported to Dupree. “What would you like me to do?” Anna
asked.
Denneen responded quietly, with less outrage than Anna felt on his
behalf. “I don’t want to make a big deal of this. I just want to do my
work.” He looked at her. “Truth? I want to get the hell out of
Dupree’s division. I happen to be interested in operations and
strategy. I’m only E-3, so I can’t arrange it. But you might be able
to.”
Anna pulled a few strings. It meant doing an end-run around Dupree,
which didn’t exactly endear her to OSI management. But it worked, and
Denneen never forgot it.
Now she filled in Denneen about what had happened at her apartment, and
between Ramon’s chicken mole and a bottle of a velvety Rioja, she felt
some of her tension ebb. Soon she found herself joking grimly about
having been “trounced by a member of the Back Street Boys.”
“You could have been killed,” Denneen said solemnly, not for the first
time.
“But I wasn’t. Which proves that wasn’t what he was after.”
“And what might that have been?”
Anna just shook her head.
“Listen, Anna. I know you probably can’t talk about it, but do you
think there’s any chance it has to do with your new assignment at
I.C.U?
Old Alan Bartlett has kept so many secrets over the years, there’s no
telling what he’s got you up against.”
“El diablo sake mas par viejo que par diablo,” Ramon muttered. It was
one of his mother’s proverbs: The devil knows more because he is old
than because he is the devil.
“Is it a coincidence?” Denneen persisted.
Anna looked at her wineglass and shrugged, wordlessly. Were others
interested in the death of the people in the Sigma files? She couldn’t
think about this right now, and didn’t want to.
“Have some more camitas,” Ramon said helpfully.
The following morning at the M Street building, Anna was summoned to
Bartlett’s office the instant she arrived.
“What did you learn in Nova Scotia?” Bartlett asked, not wasting any
time on social niceties this time.
She’d earlier decided against mentioning the intruder in her apartment;
there was no reason to think it was related, and she worried, vaguely,
that the episode would undermine his confidence in her. She told him
about what was clearly relevant: the puncture mark in the old man’s
hand.
Bartlett nodded slowly. “What kind of poison did they use?”
“Haven’t gotten the toxicology results back yet. It takes time. Always
does. If they find something, they call you right away. If they don’t,
they keep testing and testing.”
“But you really believe Mailhot might have been poisoned.” Bartlett
sounded nervous, as if uncertain whether this was good news or bad.
“I do,” she said. “Then there’s the money question. Four months ago
the guy got a wire transfer of a million bucks.”
Bartlett knit his brows. “From?”
“No idea. An account in the Cayman Islands. Then the trail disappears.
Laundered.”
Bartlett listened in perplexed silence.
She went on. “So I got the bank records going back ten years, and there
it is, regular as clockwork. Every year Mailhot got a chunk of money,
wired into his account. Steadily increasing amounts.”
“A business partnership, perhaps?”
“According to his wife, these were payouts from a grateful employer.”
“A very generous employer.”
“A very rich one. And a very dead one. The old man spent most of his
life working as a personal assistant to a wealthy press baron. A
bodyguard, a factotum, a lifelong gofer, best I can figure it.”
“To whom?”
“Charles Highsmith.” Anna watched Bartlett’s reaction carefully. He
nodded briskly; he’d already known this.
“The question, of course, is why the offshore payments,” he said. “Why
not a straightforward transfer from Highsmith’s estate?”
Anna shrugged. “That’s just one of many questions. I suppose one way
to answer it is to trace the funds, see if they really did originate
with Charles Highsmith’s estate. I’ve done work before on laundered
drug money. But I can’t be optimistic.”
Bartlett nodded. “What about the widow… ?”
“No help. She may be covering something up, but as far as I can tell,
she didn’t know much about her husband’s business. Seemed to think he
was in the grip of paranoia. Apparently, he was one of those who
thought Highsmith’s death might not have been an accident.”
“Is that right?” Bartlett said, with a tincture of irony.
“And you’re another one, aren’t you? Obviously you knew about
Highsmith’s connection to Mailhot. Was there a Sigma file on him, too?”
“That’s immaterial.”
“Forgive me, but you’ll have to let me be the judge of that. I have a
sense that not much I’m reporting comes as news to you.”
Bartlett nodded. “Highsmith was Sigma, yes. Both master and servant
were, in this case. Highsmith seems to have placed great trust in
Mailhot.”
“And now the two are inseparable,” Anna said grimly.
“You did superb work in Halifax,” Bartlett said. “I hope you know that.
I also hope you didn’t unpack. It appears that we’ve got a fresh one.”
“Where?”
“Paraguay. Asuncion.”
A fresh one. The words were, she had to admit, intriguing as well as
chilling. At the same time, the Ghost’s high-handed way with
information filled her with frustration and a deep sense of unease. She
studied the man’s face, half-admiring its complete opacity. What
precisely did he know? What wasn’t he telling her?
And why?
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
St. Gallen, Switzerland
Ben Hartman had spent the last two days traveling. From New York to
Paris. From Paris to Strasbourg. At Strasbourg he had taken a short
commuter flight to Mulhouse, France, near the borders of Germany and
Switzerland. There he had hired a car to drive him to the regional Aero
port Basel-Mulhouse, very close to Basel.
But instead of crossing into Switzerland, which was the logical point of
entry, he instead chartered a small plane to take him to Liechtenstein.
Neither the charter operator nor the pilot had asked him any questions.
Why would an apparently prosperous-looking international businessman be
seeking to enter the duchy of Liechtenstein, one of the world’s centers
of money-laundering, in a manner that was undetectable, and frankly
irregular, avoiding official border crossings? The code among them was
understood: don’t ask.
By the time he had arrived in Liechtenstein, it was almost one in the
morning. He spent the night in a small pension outside Vaduz, and then
set off in the morning to find a pilot who would be willing to cross the
Swiss border, in such a way that his name would appear on no manifests
or passenger lists.
In Liechtenstein, the plumage of an international businessman–the Kiton
double-breasted suit, the Hermes tie, and the Charvet shirt–was
protective coloration, nothing more. The duchy distinguished sharply
among insiders and outsiders, among those who had something of value to
offer and those who had not, among those who belonged and those who did
not. It was emblematic of its clannishness that foreigners who sought
to become citizens had to be approved by both the parliament and the
prince.
Ben Hartman knew his way around places like these. In the past, that
fact had filled him with moral unease, his permanent, ineradicable air
of privilege burning like the mark of Cain. Now it was merely a
tactical advantage to be exploited. Twenty kilometers south of Vaduz
was an airstrip where businessmen with private jets and helicopters
sometimes disembarked. There he had a conversation with a gruff, older
member of the ground maintenance crew, referring to his requirements in
terms that were both vague and unmistakable. A man of few words, he
looked Ben over and scrawled a phone number on the back of a manifest