“Billy Moore was a bottom feeder. I don’t see how—”
“Exactly my point. Recovering that violin took resources. It took discipline, it took finesse, and it took skill. Qualities in which poor, faceless Billy was sorely lacking. Ah, but this time, when the Met paid its ‘finder’s fee’—a ransom, by any other name—we were waiting. I knew how he worked, had already zeroed in on an innocuous accounting firm called, yes, TLT Holdings. The $2.5 million was deposited into a time-release account and the stolen Stradivarius was returned, but just as the money was about to be transferred, we made our move, froze the account, recovered the ransom.”
Even the Brits were impressed—and Brits are impressed by very little. “So, you got back the violin and the money?”
“We did, but TLT was scrubbed off the face of the earth, for good this time. Must have realized we were tracking him. He wasn’t quite as invisible as he imagined himself to be. He must have panicked, gone dark. The entire network of companies he’d been using vanished overnight. But I wasn’t fooled, not for a moment. I sat, and I waited—and not for long. When news of a Gutenberg Bible from Nagasaki surfaced, I knew it was him. He was now operating in Asia, probably somewhere more lawless and less surveilled than Japan, at first anyway. Macao or Taipei perhaps. We recovered the Nagasaki Bible, retrieved the terra-cotta Buddha. Came within a heartbeat of catching him, as well. We were closing in.”
“Did you ever figure out what TLT stands for?” Brits were suckers for a good puzzle.
“Oh, that? Yes, I think so.” She skipped ahead a few images. A Chinese carving of a jade toad appeared. Elegantly ugly, a squat creature, sitting on its haunches, peering up at the world, looking like the sort of thing one found in thrift-store bargain bins and tacky aunt’s apartments.
“Not all of his finds are million-dollar deals,” said Rhodes. “The item you’re looking at was valued at $128,000. In this case, though, he appears to have changed his mind. This one, he kept for himself.”
“He kept it? Why?”
“Honestly? I think he just liked it. I think it spoke to him. He’d been hired by a realtor in Hong Kong to retrieve a family heirloom gone missing in British Columbia a hundred years before. Pure jade, carved by a master artisan. The realtor’s great-great-uncle had taken it with him when he went to seek his fortune in the New World. Ended up as a coolie on the railroad, dangling over granite cliffs, setting gunpowder charges as they blasted a line through the Rocky Mountains. Sold it at some point, probably for pennies. Died in a cave-in soon after, a common fate of Chinese workers in the 1880s, unfortunately. We believe this jade carving was recovered from a curio shop in Revelstoke, a small town in the interior that was on the original rail line. No description of the person who purchased it, but whoever it was paid five dollars for it.”
“We don’t know that this buyer is the same person,” Addario said. “Again, this is just conjecture on Agent Rhodes’s part.”
“So, what’re we lookin’ at?” asked Colonel McNair, peering with his small eyes at the image on the screen. “A frog of some sort?”
“A mythical creature. The elusive three-legged toad. Highly sought after, never found. In Chinese cosmology, it’s a symbol of the unattainable.” A fleshy tripod carved in jade.
The Japanese counted the legs. She was correct. There were only three.
The room was puzzled. Gaddy elaborated. “Don’t you see? It’s what he does. He obtains the unattainable. I think maybe it’s his emblem. I think that’s what the TLT stands for. Three-Legged Toads.”
“TLT could be anything,” Addario said, cutting in. “Random letters, obscure family initials. It could stand for Totally Legitimate Transactions. This is all conjecture, remember.”
Agent Rhodes might yet have swayed them—it was improbable, but fascinating, this idea that Billy Moore was just a shadow cast by a shadow. Who doesn’t love a good mystery? But when Rhodes brought up The Map, that was the end. She didn’t often show The Map to other people; it was a work in progress, after all, but she was so close to sealing the deal that she pushed on recklessly. This was a miscalculation, and at some level she sensed it, began speaking more and more rapidly, words tumbling into each other, almost out of breath, trying to tie everything together while Lieutenant Addario sat back, let her run with it. When your opponent is defeating themself, don’t get in their way. It was one of the first laws of Sun Tzu, or perhaps General Patton.
“Occam’s Razor—the principle that the simplest solution is the correct one—would suggest that these are unrelated items and that Billy Moore died alone on a small island by his own hand, but if we look carefully, we can see patterns. Patterns connecting these various sites where the objects were uncovered, together with the probable locations of where they were lost and the financial conduits used to sell them.”
The Map was a mess. A cat’s cradle of such far-flung locales as Nagasaki and North Dakota, Mason City and the Congo. Lines everywhere, from Zanzibar to Zurich, Cancun to Istanbul, Helsinki to Hateruma. Several cities had been circled; others had been crossed out vigorously. Dotted lines represented possible flight paths; dashed lines represented bank transactions; wavy lines, ground transportation routes. None of it made much sense.
“Now, I know—I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking most conspiracies aren’t true, but this isn’t a conspiracy, this is a parallel world, and this map, this map is just a glimpse inside, a peek behind the curtain. We can be one-eyed kings in the Land of the Blind, if we just open our eye—our other eye—the one that isn’t blind, and see everything, because it’s all here in front of us, most of it anyway, the key parts. We just have to look, it’s like—it’s like one of those 3-D pictures that only becomes visible when you squint.”
She took a breath, looked around her. The Last Supper stared back with impatience, bemusement, concern. She’d lost them, and she knew it. The Americans were impatient, the Brits bemused, the Japanese clearly worried for her mental health. A collective realization had occurred; the entire room was suddenly aware that they were in the presence of a crazy person.
A long silence.
“Agent Rhodes? A word, if I may. Outside.”
* * *
IT WAS LIKE BEING SUMMONED into the hallway by the school principal. Rhodes could feel her anger swell like a blister, filling with blood. “You’re sabotaging me. Every step of the way.”
“You’re sabotaging yourself,” said Addario. “You don’t need any help from me.”
“What about the Buddha’s head, or the chess piece, or the shards of pottery or—or any of the other items we recovered?”
“Those will be returned to their rightful owners.”
“But we can use those, lure him in, set a trap.”
“Gaddy, this has to stop.”
She waved a contemptuous hand toward the meeting room door. “Don’t tell me you believe that BS. An open journal lying beside a staged suicide, a sob story about a gullible dupe seduced by the agents of a nefarious international organization. ‘A nefarious organization.’ Give me a break.”
“We’re Interpol. We deal with nefarious international organizations all the time. It’s kind of what we do.”
“There is no organization. He is the organization.”
“He is dead. We know his name, we know who he was, we even have his passport, for Christ’s sake. The British consul has confirmed his identity: William Moore, formerly of Belfast. Shankill Road. Single mother. It all lines up. DNA confirms it. As for those other fanciful thefts, the Nagasaki Bible and the Buddha’s head, we can’t find any connection between those and Mr. Moore whatsoever. You launched a trilateral raid, and for what? To recover a few pieces of broken pottery? Some shrink-wrapped blocks of US currency? There was no criminal network involved. Just a desperate man lugging a heavy bag.”
“And where do you think that money came from? There was nothing in those tombs to justify the amount of cash we recovered. You know that.”
“The only th
ing I know is that Mr. Moore is dead, the file is closed, and I have some serious explaining to do. Agent Rhodes, all you may have succeeded in doing is hounding a man to death.”
“I chased him into a corner. I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.”
“No one will miss Billy Moore. That much is true. He wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue. There was a warrant out for his arrest in Bangkok, did you know that, Agent Rhodes? Procuring underaged girls, meth, some penny-ante attempts at extortion. He was a low-level pimp and a small-time dealer. Hardly a criminal mastermind.”
“And yet,” said Rhodes, “he never mentioned any of that in his journal—Thailand, I mean. Odd, don’t you think? If it really was a confession, wouldn’t he want to come clean on everything, including the fact that he was a fugitive? So why didn’t he? I’ll tell you why. Because the person who wrote that journal didn’t know. He didn’t know, because Billy didn’t tell him. Billy was probably worried that being on a watch list would hurt his chance at whatever scheme he was being groomed for. Poor fucker. He thought it was a job interview, didn’t realize he was a sacrificial lamb. Further proof that the journal is a fraud.”
Lieutenant Addario sighed. “The British consul contacted one of Billy’s aunts in Ballymena. She provided a letter that Moore sent her a few years ago asking for money. It matches. That absolutely is Billy Moore’s handwriting.”
“Ha! Written under duress—or for money. You can buy a lot of diary entries for the kind of cash we found.”
“And the killer didn’t take Billy’s money, because…?”
“It had to look credible.”
She could feel a headache coming on. “You said yourself that the journal contained incongruities. Personal insults aimed specifically at you.”
“It was dictated. Billy just wrote it down. Make no mistake, that’s our man, speaking through the corpse of Billy Moore.”
“You’re shoehorning evidence, Gaddy. You’re forcing the pieces to fit, looking for patterns that aren’t there. Evidence should suggest a theory. Not the other way around. You can’t concoct an outlandish scenario and then go looking for evidence to support it. We don’t even know this other man’s name, or whether he even exists.”
Rhodes was becoming frustrated at repeating herself. “He isn’t in Japan anymore. I said that. He’s probably not even on the same continent, or even in the same hemisphere. You weren’t listening.”
“Billy Moore arrived on that island, alone. He bicycled to the cape, alone. He placed the barrel of that shotgun to his face, alone. It might as well have been a locked room. If there was a phantom-like companion with him, how did he get there?”
“An island like that? Easy to land a boat. I identified several possible sites. Satellite images can provide confirmation. We need to look for an unregistered vessel docking at one of the smaller coves on the night Billy Moore arrived.”
“You think I’m requisitioning a satellite review? I’m not requisitioning a satellite review.”
“It’s called due diligence, Ms. Addario.” They were friends; the use of “Ms.” was an intentional twist of the blade.
“It’s called operational overreach. This is confirmation bias run amok. And I would suggest you dial back the attitude, Ms. Rhodes.”
But Rhodes was no longer listening. “Confirmation bias. Of course! That’s what he was counting on. He did tell us something, after all. Not in that stupid journal with its fabrications and red herrings, but in his choice of patsy. He was looking for someone his size, a small man, petite even. But why? In case he’d already been spotted or had been caught on camera. The dead body had to resemble him, even after he erased the other man’s face, so that any accidental witnesses would confirm what they thought they saw.” Her eyes were bright now, as though lit from within. Addario knew that look. Rhodes was capable of remarkable alacrity, lightning strikes of insight that could leave you breathless. She was also capable of leaping headlong into folly. That, too, could leave you breathless. “Why?” asked Rhodes, beaming.
“Why what?”
“Why pick a man who was a mirror of himself? Because he knew he might very well have been captured on camera. Captured, but where? In a crowd? Who cares! That would prove nothing. No, it would have to be on or near the scene of the crime. Andrea, don’t you get it? He was on O-jina Island!”
“I don’t follow what you’re…” her voice trailed off. The migraine was getting worse.
“Billy Moore sacked the royal grave; that much is true. But our man sacked the other one. That was his real target all along!”
“There was nothing taken from the second grave.”
“Nothing that we know of. But if someone had seen him, a caretaker or a security cam, he would’ve been able to pass for Billy Moore. Don’t you see? I bet they were even dressed the same. See?”
But of course she didn’t. “Talking to you is like talking to a kangaroo with ADD. It’s exhausting.”
Didn’t matter. Gaddy Rhodes was already pursuing this latest notion down fresh corridors of the mind. “Here’s what we do: we obtain access to the security cameras leading in and out of O-Jina Island, see if we can prove that Billy Moore had to have been in two places at the same time.”
At which point the door to the meeting room opened and the young sad-eyed corporal stuck his head out. “Ma’am? The colonel was wondering if we’re done in here.”
“Oh, we’re done,” said Lieutenant Addario. We’re done.
Three days later, Agent Rhodes was removed from active duty and transferred to an administrative position stateside. Their friendship did not survive this.
THE BOY IN THE TREE
COLONEL MCNAIR HAD TAKEN THE high ground. He did this out of habit more than anything, one acquired over the course of thirtysome years of military service, where one learned to see the world primarily as terrain, as a series of contour maps offering various degrees of advantage. Not that there were any ambushes waiting for him—although, he had to admit, that was the nature of ambushes: you didn’t see them coming.
He wiped sweat from his eyes. His small eyes. Waited. If you see it coming, it’s not an ambush. The colonel was now off duty, but even in a Hawaiian shirt and Cardinals baseball cap, he carried the gravitas of his rank with him. Even when he wasn’t in uniform, he was in uniform. A nimbus of power surrounded the colonel; it was like his own personal brand of cologne. (His wife always said he was the only man she knew who could strut sitting down.)
A shrill summer. Cicadas singing themselves in and out of existence. The lackluster flutter of trees on humid winds. The kii-cry of hawks tracing circles in the sky. Sea and sun and jungle, all distant, all oppressively near at hand.
Any trace of morning mist had burned away and a haze of heat was slowly removing the horizon; it had become little more than a blur between planes. Colonel McNair stood, legs apart, arms at ease behind his back, at a point where the path narrowed, giving the colonel a clear view of the stone-cut stairs that ran up the escarpment toward him. The very stairs he had just climbed. Frond-like leaves moved on the permanent updraft at Cape Kyan. Somewhere, out at sea, a typhoon was brewing; weather stations were tracking its landfall. But up here, there was only the stultifying heat of a barometer rising. The storm was still days away.
Blocks of stone, netted with vines. A jumble they called Gushikawa Castle, ruins by any other name. Twelfth-century ruins, so at least this one they couldn’t blame on us. It was already broken when we got here.
It was at Cape Kyan that the US bombardment of Okinawa had finally ended, if only because they’d run out of island to bomb. A rolling barrage had pushed the Japanese Imperial Army to the very edge, and with them a population of the dispossessed. Families. Children. Seniors. Students. All fleeing in terror to the cliffs at Cape Kyan. Stories of the war referred to Cape Kyan as the “point of no return.” The castle itself had fallen centuries before. The Americans were shelling debris at that point.
Colonel McNair took off his cap, ra
n a palm across his head. Bristle-cut hair, crisscrossed with trails of sweat. He could see a small figure below, coming up the steps toward him in a slow but deliberate gait. A slight man, but not unimposing. When he reached the viewing platform, he smiled at the colonel.
“Brave day,” he said.
The colonel nodded, not entirely sure what that meant.
There was a faintly feline cast to the other man’s face, the way a fox seems more catlike than canine. Other than that, the small man remained nondescript, memorable only in his lack of memorability. Even the suit he was wearing, trim and well tailored, was tasteful to the point of being utterly forgettable. If someone had asked the colonel about it later, he would have been unable to swear for certain what color the suit was, or even what type. Not so much a man as the outline of a man. There was an absence there, inhaling all the light.
The colonel picked up the briefcase on the ground next to him. “Shall we?” he said, stepping aside to let the other man pass.
But the outline didn’t move. It carefully retrieved its handkerchief from its inside jacket pocket, folded the cloth neatly, dabbed perspiration from its brow. Every move was deliberate, precise, gave evidence of energy held in reserve, the way a spring might. Or a bullet. Or a ballet.
The small man smiled at the colonel, but not with his eyes. “After you,” he said. “I insist.”
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