is no body.”
“I I can’t explain that,” Ben admitted, aware of how bizarre his account
sounded. “Obviously the body was removed and the area cleaned. That
just tells me that Cavanaugh was working with others.”
“To kill you.” Schmid regarded him with dark amusement.
“So it appears.”
“But you offer no motive. You say there was no grudge between the two
of you.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Ben said quietly. “I hadn’t seen the
guy in fifteen years.”
The phone on Schmid’s desk rang. He picked it up. “Schmid.” He
listened. In English, he said, “Yes, one minute, please,” and handed
the receiver to Ben.
It was Howie. “Ben, old buddy,” he said, his voice now as clear as if
he were calling from the next room. “You did say Jimmy Cavanaugh was
from Homer, New York, right?”
“Small town midway between Syracuse and Binghamton,” Ben said.
“Right,” Howie said. “And he was in your class at Princeton?”
“That’s the guy.”
“Well, here’s the thing. Your Jimmy Cavanaugh doesn’t exist.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Ben said. He’s dead as a doornail.
“No, Ben, listen to me. I’m saying your Jimmy Cavanaugh never existed.
I’m saving there is no Jimmy Cavanaugh. I checked with alumni records
at Princeton. No Cavanaugh, first or middle initial J, ever enrolled in
the school, at least not in the decade you attended. And there have
never been any Cavanaughs in Homer. Not anywhere in that county. Not
at Georgetown, either. Oh, and we checked with all sorts of hifalutin
databases, too. If there were a James Cavanaugh that came close to
matching your description, we’d have found him. Tried every spelling
variant, too. You have no idea how powerful the databases are they’ve
got these days. A person leaves tracks like a slug, we all do. Credit,
Social Security, military, you name it. This guy’s totally off the
grid. Weird, huh?”
“There’s got to be some mistake. I know he was enrolled at Princeton.”
“You think you know that. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
Ben felt sick to his stomach. “If this is true, it doesn’t help us.”
“No,” Howie agreed. “But I’ll keep trying. Meantime, you got my
cellular, right?”
Ben replaced the receiver, stunned. Schmid continued: “Mr. Hartman,
were you here on business or holiday?”
He forced himself to focus, and spoke as civilly as he could. “Ski
vacation, as I said. I had a couple of bank meetings, but only because
I was passing through Zurich.” Jimmy Cavanaugh never existed.
Schmid clasped his hands. “The last time you were in Switzerland was
four years ago, yes? To claim the body of your brother?”
Ben paused a moment, unable to stop the sudden flood of memories. The
phone call in the middle of the night: never good news. He’d been
asleep next to Karen, a fellow teacher, in his grubby apartment in East
New York. He grumbled, rolled over to answer the call that changed
everything.
A small rented plane Peter was flying solo had crashed a few days
earlier in a gorge near Lake Lucerne. Ben’s name was listed on the
rental papers as next-of-kin. It had taken time to identify the
deceased, but dental records made a definitive identification possible.
The Swiss authorities were ruling it an accident. Ben flew to Lake
Lucerne to claim the body and brought his brother home–what was left of
him after the fuselage had exploded–in a little cardboard carton not
much bigger than a cake box.
The entire plane flight home he didn’t cry. That would only come later,
when the numbness began to wear off. His father had collapsed, weeping,
upon hearing the news; his mother, already confined to bed because of
the cancer, had screamed with all of her strength.
“Yes,” Ben said quietly. “That was the last time I was here.”
“A striking fact. When you come to our country, death seems to
accompany you.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Mr. Hartman,” Schmid said, in a more neutral tone of voice, “do you
think there is any connection between your brother’s death and what
happened today?”
At the headquarters of the Swiss national police, the Stadtpolizei, in
Bern, a plump middle-aged woman with heavy black horn-rimmed glasses
glanced up at her computer screen and was surprised to see a line of
text begin to flash. After staring at it for a few seconds, she
remembered what she had long ago been instructed to do, and she jotted
down the name and the long series of numbers after the name. Then she
knocked at the glass-paned door of her immediate supervisor.
“Sir,” she said. “A name on the RIPOL watch list was just activated.”
RIPOL was an acronym for Recherche Informations Policier, the national
criminal and police database that contained names, fingerprints, license
plate numbers–a vast range of law-enforcement data used by the federal,
canton, and local police.
Her boss, a priggish man in his mid-forties who was known to be on the
fast track at the Stadtpolizei, took the slip of paper, thanked his
loyal secretary, and dismissed her. Once she had closed his office
door, he picked up a secure phone that was not routed through the main
switchboard, and dialed a number he rarely ever called.
A battered old gray sedan of indeterminate make idled down the block
from Kantonspolizei headquarters on Zeughausstrasse. Inside, two men
smoked and said nothing, weary from the long wait. The sudden ringing
of the cellular phone mounted on the center console startled them. The
passenger picked it up, listened, said, “Ja, danke,”* and hung up.
“The American is leaving the building,” he said.
A few minutes later they saw the American emerge from the side entrance
and get into a taxi. When it was halfway down the block, the driver
pulled the car into the early-evening traffic.
CHAPTER FIVE.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
When the Air Canada pilot announced they were about to land, Anna
Navarro removed her files from the tray table, lifted it closed, and
tried to focus her mind on the case ahead of her. Flying terrified her,
and the only thing worse than landing was taking off. Her stomach
flip-flopped. As usual she fought an irrational conviction that the
plane would crash and she would end her life in a fiery inferno.
Her favorite uncle, Manuel, had been killed when the clattering old crop
duster he worked in dropped an engine and plummeted. But that was so
long ago, she’d been ten or eleven, and a deathtrap crop duster had no
resemblance to the sleek 747 she was in now.
She’d never told any of her OSI colleagues about her anxiety, on the
general principle that you should never let them see your
vulnerabilities. But she was convinced that somehow Arliss Dupree knew,
the way a dog smells fear. In the last six months he’d forced her to
practically live on planes, flying from one lousy assignment to another.
The only thing that allowed her to keep her composure was to spend the
flight immersed in her case files. They always absorbed her, fascinated
her. The dry-as-dust autopsy and pathology reports beckoned to her to
solve their mysteries.
As a child she’d loved doing the intricate five-hundred-piece puzzles
her mother brought home, the gifts from a woman whose house her mother
cleaned and whose kids had no patience for puzzles. Far more than
seeing the glossy image emerge, she loved the sound and feel of the
puzzle pieces snapping into place. Often the old puzzles were missing
pieces, lost by their careless original owners, and that had always
irritated her. Even as a kid she’d been a perfectionist.
On some level, this case was a thousand-piece puzzle spilled on the
carpet before her.
During this Washington-Halifax flight she had pored over a folder of
documents faxed from the RCMP in Ottawa. The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, Canada’s equivalent of the FBI, was, despite its archaic
name, a top-notch investigative agency. The working relationship
between DOJ and RCMP was good.
Who are you? she wondered, staring at a photograph of the old man.
Robert Mailhot of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the kindly retiree, devout
member of the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. Not the sort of person you’d
expect to have a CIA clearance file, deep-storage or no.
What could have connected him to the vaporous machinations of long-dead
spy masters and businessmen that Bartlett had stumbled on? She was
certain that Bartlett had a file on him, but had chosen not to give her
access to it. She was certain, too, that he wanted her to find out the
relevant details for herself.
A provincial judge in Nova Scotia agreed to issue a search warrant. The
documents she wanted–telephone and credit-card records–had been faxed
to her in D.C. in a matter of hours. She was OSI; nobody thought to
question her vague cover story about an ongoing investigation into
fraudulent international transfer of funds.
Still, the file told her nothing. The cause of death, recorded on the