by Matthew Hart
“You know,” I said. “Girl stuff. Nails, hair. What’s your favorite color.”
We walked outside. Cedric got in the driver’s side and started the SUV. Luc climbed in and sat looking out the windshield.
“I knew it had to be something simple,” he said.
* * *
That night I ordered a trace on Mitzi. FinCEN would locate her bank accounts and log every movement in and out. I wanted to see if anything connected her to Lily.
Outside, the sky was closing like a steel lid. A slate-gray slab coasted in and crushed the frail day. No message from Lily since I got back.
I went out on the terrace and did some stretches and shadow-boxed, punching through a series of rapid combinations. Like Bruce Willis would do if he’d discovered his girlfriend was playing him. I punched and threw in a few kicks and breathed in the cold, pure air to drive out the confused thoughts and focus my mind into a hard, calculating instrument. Like Bruce. Then I went inside and lay in bed and stared at the digital clock while it counted down the night.
She got home late. I didn’t hear her key. I didn’t hear her steps because she was part cat. A puff of air told me the bedroom door had opened. Her clothes rustled to the floor. She slipped beneath the covers like a blade and pressed her cold body against me. She twined her fingers in my hair and whispered a Russian phrase. It sounded romantic, but I don’t speak Russian. It could have been, “Hey, Dumbo, you’ll never guess what I was doing.” She fell asleep like a stone dropped into a well, the way she always did. I lay there the rest of the night listening to the noises of the building and wondering what Bruce would do.
29
A t five A.M. I got out of bed and grabbed some clothes and went quietly out of the bedroom. I left the door ajar. In the living room I dressed in the dark, then stepped back to the bedroom door and listened. Nothing. I found her purse, took out her phone, and placed it flat on the counter. I pressed the little switch on the UFED and rested it on top of her phone. Twenty seconds later a tiny light flashed green. I pocketed the UFED and slipped the phone back in her purse. The keys to the F350 were on the coffee table. Lifting them carefully so they didn’t make a noise, I left the apartment and took the elevator down to the parking garage. I drove to the McDonald’s on Old Airport Road and had a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit with a side of hash browns and a large black coffee. Have that for breakfast and try feeling bad. Not possible.
When I was through, I got two large coffees and a baked apple pie to go and drove out of town. The highway wound through the forest until it left the last of the houses behind and snaked its way out into the lakes and the granite hills. A silver light came off the snow and shone into the spiky branches of the spruce trees. The turnoff to the Dogrib village of Dettah came up on the right, and then the Chinese depot. The parking lot was empty. The guard in the gatehouse was watching TV, the flicker of blue light splashing on his face.
I drove past and kept on through the forest until I came to the end of the road. I left the truck in a lot carved out of the forest and walked down to the shore of Tibbitt Lake, where I sipped my coffee and stared out at the dark water. The winter road would start right here when the ice was thick enough. Teams of huge plows would head out onto the lake and clear away the snow. It would take them six weeks to complete the road. When they were done, a four-hundred-mile-long highway would twist its way across the lakes and over land portages into the heart of the diamond field. When everything was ready, four trucks at a time, each with a forty-ton load, would head out onto the ice at thirty-minute intervals to begin the annual resupply of the diamond mines.
I got out of the truck, walked to the edge of the lake, and knelt down to inspect the thin plate of ice forming at the shore. The ice extended no more than a couple of feet. It would be months before the plows arrived and construction of the winter road began.
A blush of pink light was seeping into the eastern sky. The fringe of ice around the lake took on a rosy glow. I went back to the truck and ate the apple pie. I opened the second coffee and placed it in the cup holder on the console, settled back in the big leather seat, and dumped the contents of the UFED into my phone. The pink glow faded, and dawn broke on the forest. I tapped in my password and opened Lily’s email.
* * *
Lily was an orderly person. Files and emails spic and span. Everything neatly placed in clearly labeled folders. However, she was also deceitful, so the labels didn’t mean a thing to anyone but her. Lily wasn’t about transparency. You don’t run a long-term theft operation against a state mining company and its gangster bosses by leaving a trail through your data. I had the advantage of knowing a fair amount about her finances already, just from tracking the millions she was trying to hide from me. The problem was that Lily had been a large-scale diamond thief long before I met her. For sure she had money in places I didn’t know about.
What did I really suspect? I asked myself. Start there. I suspected that she had a plan, formed before we got here, and was now executing it under my nose. I’d never find it by rummaging haphazardly through her documents. I needed a system. As I sat there in the truck, I tried to put myself in Lily’s mind. An organized and tidy mind. What would she need before engaging in an enterprise that would certainly have a large sum of money at its heart? What did she need before she could move that money? One thing for sure. A lawyer.
Lily was obsessed with the minutiae of the law. She wanted to keep what she had, and that meant scrupulous observance of the rules. She broke the rules to get the money, obeyed them to keep it. That meant she would want advice. When a banker or a lawyer gives advice, there are two people they need to protect. The client and themselves. That doesn’t happen with a phone call. So now I knew what to look for. An attachment.
I searched her emails for files with a PDF identifier and soon had a list of about twenty. I clicked on the latest, and there it was.
Leclerc, Goldberg, and MacTavish
Lawyers, Notaries
1 Place Ville Marie
Montréal, Québec H3B 2B6, Canada
June 29, 2020
Dear Lily,
In reply to your query of June 21, the numbered company 86043 Compagnie Limitée is a duly incorporated private company under the laws of the Province of Québec and domiciled at this office. As I confirmed when we spoke, you may buy, sell, trade, and dispose of investments in any Canadian property or properties at your sole discretion as provided in the articles of incorporation. There are no restrictions on such activities.
Please find enclosed as directed by you a certified cheque drawn on the company’s account and payable to you in the amount of $2.5 million (two million five hundred thousand dollars).
Please do not hesitate to call if I can assist you in any other way.
I remain as always,
Yours sincerely,
(Auguste Leclerc)
Managing Partner
He’d signed the letter Gus and added the scribbled line: Adrienne sends her best.
The letter told me several things. For one, Lily had a company I hadn’t known about. For another, she’d had it long enough that she was on a first-name basis with the top dog at a high-end law firm. Adrienne must be Leclerc’s wife, so they were on close enough terms that Lily had met her. My guess was that she’d had the company from her first days in Antwerp, before I’d turned her.
Most people know Canada as a first-world country with free health care and a reputation as one of the world’s good guys. That’s not the Canada everybody knows. People who don’t need the free health care like another thing about it—its 24/7 money laundry. The dirty cash moves through discreet law firms with toney offices in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. And it moves quietly. I’d lived in Montreal with Lily for six months and never met Leclerc. Not to mention Adrienne.
The certified check meant that Lily was walking around with a two-and-a-half-million-dollar piece of paper she could turn into cash with a signature. And whatever it was she had in m
ind, she had the jump on me. The letter with the check was dated before I’d even learned about Jimmy Angel.
What explained it? Lily must have known about an investment opportunity, or she wouldn’t have even come to Yellowknife. Had Jimmy approached her himself, then changed his mind and done a deal with the twins instead? Or had she developed a relationship with Mitzi? A deal with either of them would account for Lily’s obsession with the garnets, because the garnets were the evidence of what they had to sell—a diamond pipe.
But where did Mei come in? That sudden rush to Vancouver. I didn’t for a second believe Lily’s nonsense about Mei needing a sisterly chat about diamonds. Mei didn’t need that, and certainly not from Lily. She and Fan had their own experts. But Mei had needed something—something she either couldn’t get from Fan or was afraid to ask for—and Lily had brought it to her.
I forwarded the letter to Tommy. He would give Leclerc’s bank accounts a shake, and see what fell out. Then I drove back to Yellowknife. There was another job to do. An urgent one. And a lot more dangerous than rifling Lily’s mail.
30
It’s a cinch, darling,” she said, turning to me with sparkling eyes. “We’ll come back tonight.”
Lily loved a crime.
We were sitting in the F350 on a dirt road that squiggled through the bush and came out on a rocky hill behind the Chinese depot. On that side, the forest ran right up to the fence. Even in the flat gray light I could see the coiled razor wire glinting along the top. Between the fence and a rear fire door lay an open strip of ten or twelve feet. I had my binoculars aimed at the corner of the building.
“Mark,” I said when the guard appeared. Lily tapped her phone to stop the timer. “How long this time?”
“Thirty minutes,” she said. “Same as last time. Like clockwork. They make the circuit every half hour.”
We timed him as he made his way along the back of the building, stopped to check the fire door, and disappeared around the next corner. Two minutes. We’d have twenty-eight minutes to breach the fence, disarm the fire-door alarm, find out what kind of machinery, or even electronics, was inside, and get back through the fence before he appeared again.
I turned around and drove slowly back down the narrow track. Lily was aglow with anticipation. In her excitement she looked so fresh and alive—I don’t know, so open—that I had a sudden urge to stop the truck right there in the trees, tell her what I knew, and ask her straight out what she was up to. But then I remembered who we were.
* * *
Father Louis was waiting in his car when we got back. He followed us into the garage and parked beside us. He hauled a bulging hockey bag from his trunk, and we rode upstairs. Lily made him a double espresso and put it beside him while he laid out the contents of the bag.
“Where do you get all this stuff?” I said.
He tossed back the espresso, put the cup back down, and turned his bright blue eyes to me. “People hear the word of God. They change,” he said, picking up a sawed-off Beretta twelve-gauge and examining it. He racked the pump and hefted the gun. “In their new lives, they don’t need these. I help them understand that.”
I didn’t doubt it. I’d run him through the computer. Yellowknife had been struggling with a wave of drug crime, and some kids had got hurt. That had stopped when Father Louis arrived to take up his new duties as the parish priest. He had a skill set over and above what you’d pick up in the seminary.
He was what Catholics call a “late vocation,” the term for someone who comes to the priesthood after trying some other line of work. In his case, bedlam. He’d been an enforcer for a Quebec City biker gang. One afternoon, in an RV park on the St. Lawrence River, the gang had torched a motor home owned by the head of a rival outfit. As it turned out, the target wasn’t there. But his six-year-old daughter was.
When the priest heard what happened, he got on his bike, rode to the clubhouse, went inside without a word and blew the leader’s head off with a shotgun. I don’t know what make. It wasn’t in the file. He took a few bullets but got away. The bikers hunted him until, a few days later, a thumb drive arrived in the mail at the Sûreté du Québec gang unit in Montreal. The cops rolled up the club in a week.
The Mounties had taken our weapons as part of their investigation of the attack in the Barrens. It didn’t seem like a good idea to ask for them back. Canadian law doesn’t take the same broad-minded view about the possession of assault rifles and submachine guns as we do.
I put the Beretta back but kept a really nice Heckler & Koch submachine pistol with a suppressor. I loaded it with dum-dums. With the silencer, it would make no more sound than a light cough, and the dum-dums would turn whatever they hit into mush. He had some flash-bang grenades too, so I took a couple. He’d also got hold of some Fiocchi Extrema, Lily’s favorite ammunition. She still had her little Glock.
Last, I grabbed the wire snips. He’d brought those too.
* * *
Lily and I left the garage at midnight. I drove around Yellowknife for twenty minutes checking for a tail. Then I took the highway that led out of town. The streetlights ended and the last house slipped by and the highway wound into the forest. Five minutes later, a bloom of light appeared in the trees. We rounded a bend, passed the Dettah road, and the main gate to the Chinese depot came into view. Banks of floodlights on steel pylons poured an intense illumination onto the sprawling installation. A steel barrier with a red stop sign blocked the entry lane. A quarter mile past the gate, I turned off the headlights and slipped onto the track that led through the woods.
The trees slashed the moonlight into patterns on the snow. We got out where the road ended on the rocky hill and picked our way down through the pine and spruce until we came to the fence. Fifteen minutes later we heard the crackle of the foot patrol’s radio. He came around the corner of the warehouse and trudged along the fence until he reached the fire door. He checked it, turned his key in the security box, continued along the back of the warehouse, and disappeared around the far corner.
“When we’re in,” I whispered, “you take the right. I’ll go left. Maximum time inside: ten minutes.”
I cut through the fence, and we ran across the open strip to the fire door. We stood in the shadows and listened. I disarmed the alarm. The lock took two minutes to pick. I opened the door, and we stepped in.
The smell was overpowering. Dense and damp. It stung my eyes. My nose filled with the odor. It wasn’t what I’d expected. Mining equipment would have smelled of oil and steel and the strong smell of huge rubber tires. There was none of that. The pungent odor—it was wood. The warehouse was filled with the almost dizzying smell of sawn wood.
I peered into the huge interior. Pitch black. A warning went off inside my head. Too dark. I tried to think of a single industrial building I’d ever been inside that didn’t have night-lights. I was going to signal Lily to go back, but she’d already melted into the darkness.
As my eyes adjusted I could just distinguish massive black shapes. They towered to the ceiling. Narrow aisles separated one immense cube from the next. The smell was so thick it was choking.
I touched the side of a block and felt the coarse texture. At the end of a stack, I stepped into the narrow space that separated it from the next. As I eased into the slot I felt a sharp stab against my chest. I froze, then very slowly raised my hand and examined the spear-like tip. That’s when I realized what they were. Staking posts. The whole warehouse was filled with staking posts. I was about to step from the crevice when I heard a muffled sound from the other side of the room, followed by the squeak of shoes on concrete. The sounds of a silent struggle. Someone had caught Lily. They’d been waiting.
I eased the HK from my jacket and screwed on the silencer. Then I heard another sound, this one closer. I listened and heard it again. The careful, slow intake of a man controlling his breath. He was approaching along the side of the posts.
I reached into my pocket and drew out one of the flash-bangs.
I stood stock-still. He breathed again. I couldn’t hear him move, but he was closer. He must be waiting too, not sure where I was. When he took another breath, I ripped off the detonator and flipped the grenade into the aisle. In the confined space it made a deafening boom and emitted a blinding flash of light. I stepped from cover with the HK ready, and a hand like a steel glove clamped onto my wrist and twisted hard. The pistol clattered to the floor. I looked up to see a beatific smile and a cocked fist the size of an anvil.
“Tinkerbell,” I said, and the world went black.
31
A freight train went charging through my head, slammed into my skull, and headed around for another run. Needles of hard white light pierced my eyes. The left side of my face felt caved in. My chin rested on my collarbone. I heard a light drumming sound, like rain pattering on metal. I struggled to lift my head, and opened my eyes enough to see a face glowering across a desk. The light from a desk lamp stabbed through my eyes into my brain. I let my head fall forward.
The drumming resumed. A huge hand covered my head, grasped my hair, and yanked my face up. The man staring at me across the desk trembled with malevolence. His breath came in white puffs in the cold air. My teeth chattered. I realized I was naked and handcuffed to the chair. The man opened his rosebud lips as his eyes strayed over me.
A languid waif with blonde hair and enormous glassy eyes sat on the edge of the desk and goggled at me. She sniffed loudly. She had rosebud lips too, like the man’s, and the same shade of lipstick.
“Fan,” I croaked. The left side of my mouth was swollen shut.
“You are in some total shit, guy,” he said. “Some very big total shit.”
That didn’t call for a reply, so I gave in to the shadows swarming in my head. I felt my chin hit my chest and blacked out.