suitcase.
Taking files out of Anna’s leather portfolio.
Anna stopped abruptly. The maid looked up, saw Anna, and dropped the
files and portfolio back into the suitcase.
“What the hell are you doing?” Anna said, advancing on her.
The maid protested indignantly in Spanish, a mix of haughty denials.
Anna followed her out into the hall, demanding to know what she was
doing. “Eh, ^que haces? jVen para oca! jQu cuernos hdces revisando
tni valija?”
Anna tried to read the woman’s name tag, but the woman suddenly bolted,
running down the corridor at top speed.
The maid hadn’t been just pilfering. She had been going through Anna’s
papers. Whether she read English or not was beside the point; most
likely she had been hired to steal any documents, papers, files, notes.
But hired by whom?
Who could possibly know Anna was here, or what she was investigating?
She was being watched but by whom?
Who knows I’m here? Denneen, yes, but had he told someone, some
associate?
Had Peralta, the Interpol representative, figured out who she was? Was
that possible?
Just as she reached for the bedside phone, it rang. The manager,
calling to apologize? Or Ben?
She picked it up. “Hello?”
There was only dead air. No, not dead air: it was the familiar hiss of
a surveillance tape. Then the sounds of faint, indistinct voices,
becoming sharper, amplified.
A surge of adrenaline. “Who is this?”
She made out a voice: “What about immigration records? Records of
people who entered the country in the forties and fifties?” It was her
own voice. Then the voice of a male interlocutor. Peralta.
On the telephone, someone was playing back a tape recording of the
conversation between Peralta and herself.
They had heard everything, and they whoever “they” were knew precisely
where she was and what she was after.
She sat on the edge of the bed, stunned and terrified. Now there could
be no question her presence was known, despite all the precautions. The
pilfering maid was no isolated player.
The phone rang again.
Prickly all over with terror, she snatched up the receiver. “Yes?”
“We want to capture the new Argentina. A place where people like
yourself have been seeing that justice is done. A place with modern law
enforcement, yet respect for democracy…” Her own voice, tinnily but
crisply rendered through whatever eavesdropping equipment had been in
place.
A click.
In her haste, she had left the room door open; she ran to close it. No
one was in the corridor. She shut the door, double-locked it, seated
the slide bolt of the safety chain in its socket.
She ran to the window, its heavy drapes open, realizing she was exposed,
a target for a shooter stationed in a window of any of the tall
buildings across the street. She yanked the drapes closed to block the
line of sight.
The phone rang again.
She walked to it slowly, put the handset to her ear, said nothing.
“I didn’t get to be where I am today by being a pushover…”
“Keep calling,” she finally forced herself to say into the phone,
feigning calm. “We’re tracing the calls.”
But no one was listening. There was only the dull hiss of a
surveillance recording.
She depressed the phone’s plunger and, before it could ring again,
called down to the front desk. “I’ve been getting obscene calls,” she
said in English.
“Obscene … ?” the switchboard operator repeated, not comprehending.
“Amenazas,” she said. “Palabrotas.”
“Oh, I’m very sorry, senorita, would you like me to call the police?”
“I want you to hold all calls.”
“Yes, ma’am, certainly.”
She brooded for a minute, then retrieved a slip of paper from her purse,
torn from a notepad in the Schiphol departure lounge. On it she had
scrawled the phone number of a local private investigator that Denneen
had recommended. Someone reliable, highly skilled, well connected with
the authorities, but entirely honest, Denneen had assured her.
She punched out the number, let it ring and ring.
An answering machine came on. Sergio Machado identified himself and his
agency. After the beep, she left her name and number, mentioned
Denneen’s name. Then she called the hotel switchboard operator again
and told her she would accept a call only from a Sergio Machado.
She needed someone knowledgeable and resourceful and most of all
trustworthy. You couldn’t hope to get anywhere, learn anything, without
someone like that, unless you had a reliable contact in the governmental
bureaucracy, and that she did not have.
She went to the bathroom, splashed her face at the sink, first cold
water, then hot. The telephone rang.
Thickly, in a stupor, she walked to the bedside table.
The phone rang again, then again.
She stood over the phone, stared at it, considered what to do.
She picked it up.
Said nothing, waited.
There was silence.
“Hello?” a male voice said finally. “Is anyone there?”
Quietly, mouth dry, she said: “Yes?”
“Is this Anna Navarro?”
“Who’s this?” She tried to keep her tone neutral.
“It’s Sergio Machado you just called me? I went out to get the mail,
now I’m returning your call.”
Relieved, she sighed, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’ve just been getting a
bunch of obscene calls. I thought it might be the caller again.”
“What do you mean, obscene calls like heavy breathing, that sort of
thing?”
“No. Nothing like that. It’s too complicated to get into.”
“You in some kind of trouble?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know, probably. Anyway, listen, thanks for calling
back. David Denneen thought you might be able to help me.”
“Sure, you want to get a cup of coffee? Not like the shit you drink in
America. Real coffee,”
“Yeah, sure, I’d like that.” Already the anxiety was beginning to ebb.
They agreed to meet early that evening in front of a cafe restaurant not
too far from his office. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “I can’t
promise anything more than that.”
“That’s good enough for me,” she said.
She hung up and stood over the phone for a moment, looking at it as if
it were some alien life-form that had invaded the room.
Ben and she would have to change hotels. Perhaps she had been followed
from her visit with Peralta. Perhaps she had been followed from the
airport. But her location and her mission were known: that was the real
message of those calls. She knew better than to take them as anything
other than threats.
A knock at the door.
Adrenaline propelled her to a position beside it. The safety chain was
securely looped from the slide bolt in the door plate to the doorjamb.
The door could not be opened with just a key.
Could it?
There was no peephole.
“Who is it?” she said.
The voice that replied was male, familiar. She never would have thought
she’d be so glad to hear it.
“It’s Ben,” the voice said.
“Thank God,” she muttered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.
He was bedraggled, shirt and tie askew, hair wild.
“What’s with the door chain?” he said. “You used to live in East New
York, too?”
She stared. “What happened to you?”
After they’d each recounted the events of the last few hours, she said,
“We have to get out of here.”
“Damn right,” Ben said. “There’s a hotel downtown, in the centra-sort
of a fleabag, but supposed to be kind of charming. Run by British
expatriates. The Sphinx.” He’d bought a South America guide at the
airport. He thumbed through it, found the entry. “Here we go. We can
either show up or call from the street, on my cell phone. Not from
here.”
She nodded. “Maybe we should stay in the same room this time. Husband
and wife.”
“You’re the expert,” he said. Was there a glint of amusement in his
eyes?
She explained: “They’re going to call around looking for an American man
and woman traveling together but staying in separate rooms. How long do
you think it’ll take them to locate us?”
“You’re probably right. Listen–I have something.” He produced a
folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket.
“What’s that?”
“A fax.” “From?”
“My researcher in New York. It’s the names of the board of directors of
Armakon AG of Vienna. Owners of that little biotech startup in
Philadelphia that made the poison that killed the old men.”
He handed it to her. “Jorgen Lenz,” she breathed.
“One of the directors. Is that an intriguing coincidence or what?”
Once again, Arliss Dupree returned to the paperwork in front of him and
once again he found it impossible to focus. It was a long report
prepared by the deputy director of the Executive Officer for U.S.
Trustees, which oversees bankruptcy estates; the report detailed
allegations of corruption involving the federal bankruptcy courts.
Dupree read the same sentence three times before he set it aside and got
himself another cup of the near-rancid coffee produced by the sputtering
machine down the hall.