House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

  “Bingo,” Maggie said abruptly, startling me. She pulled a thick file from the top drawer. “His kids will not be happy. But Natalya’s gonna be one rich widow.” She closed the file drawer. “Revised ten days ago. And that’s . . . as long as I’m staying in this claustrophobic box.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m out of here. And, Heller, you should get out of here soon too. We can’t risk staying longer.”

  “Soon as I find my file. Wanna help me?”

  “Just for a minute or two, but then we should leave. I’ll start with the bottom drawer. Wait.” She put up a hand and cocked her head. I listened too. I heard nothing.

  She shook her head. “Okay, sorry.”

  She pulled out the bottom drawer of the Oxydone cabinet and knelt on the floor as she flicked through the files.

  I was not having any luck. I found a section on Development, but it was just a lot of chemical formulas and back-and-forth between scientists. A section on Investors. One drawer did contain just drug trial results. But here there appeared to be a gap, missing files about an inch thick.

  As I searched the files on either side of the gap, Maggie got to her feet. A few seconds later, she whispered, “Heller?”

  I turned, looked.

  “You see this?”

  She was pointing at a safe bolted onto the floor at the back of the little steel room.

  “Check this out.”

  There it was. There had to be a safe somewhere in his office. Probably others, elsewhere in the house, too. I’d come prepared for this, at least.

  I stopped what I was doing, sidled over to the safe, squatted down. It was made of dull gray steel. A round digital keypad in the center of the front face, attached to a handle. This was the sort of inexpensive safe you might pick up at Home Depot. A lot of rich people are cheap when it comes to home security. This one had an electronic lock, pry-resistant hinges, one-inch-thick bolts to keep the door in place, and you could drop it from fifteen feet, no problem. But the manufacturers had put a cheap nickel solenoid in the locking mechanism.

  Its Achilles’ heel.

  “I’ll do the honors,” she said. She punched in four digits—“the month and date Conrad met Natalya,” she said—and it beeped without unlocking.

  “As I remember, this brand uses five digits, not four.”

  She punched in several other numbers. I let her try, while I pulled something out of my shaving kit. It looked like a white tube sock with something round and heavy in it.

  “Keep your phone away,” I said. “This thing will wipe it clean.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a rare-earth magnet.”

  These things were extremely powerful. They wiped out phones and credit cards and computer hard drives instantly.

  “What do you—” she began. But then she fell silent, watching me position the magnet, in the white sock, against the top of the safe, just above the keypad. The magnet clamped right on, through the sock. I twisted the leg of the sock, fashioning a sort of handle. The magnet did as expected; then I jerked the handle and the safe came right open.

  “Heller!” she whispered in astonishment.

  I pulled at the sock and managed to slide the magnet off the front of the safe. That’s what the sock is for; otherwise, it’s fiendishly difficult to pull the magnet off.

  I don’t know what I expected to find: More jewelry? Computer disks? Inside was just a thick Kraft-paper envelope, the old-fashioned kind that closes with a button and string.

  She slipped her hand in and pulled out the envelope. Now I saw what she’d just seen. On the front of the envelope were two strips of white label tape with black lettering, all caps. They read:

  TO BE DESTROYED

  UPON MY DEATH

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I got dibs, Heller,” she said.

  24

  I don’t think so,” I replied. “We wouldn’t have these if it weren’t for me and my magnet. You came here to find his will, and you got it.”

  “We wouldn’t be in this office if it weren’t for me shutting off that alarm.”

  “True,” I admitted. “Where’d you get the key to the study?”

  “From my client. Who thought the alarm would be off.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  She shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell me. “Let me take this first,” she said, “take some pictures, hand it back to you.”

  “What’s inside?” I said, ignoring her suggestion.

  She was already unwinding the string from the paper button on the back of the envelope. Then she pulled out a small pile of brown folders, maybe an inch thick.

  “That’s it?” I said. “Just paper?”

  “Some photographs. Who’s Eric Sidney Tucker?”

  “Megan’s ex-husband.”

  “If Eric Sidney Tucker has a mustache, this must be photos of him in bed with some woman. Who is clearly not his wife, Megan Kimball.”

  Kompromat, I thought. The Russians were famously great at collecting blackmail on people and exerting it to get their way. So was Conrad Kimball.

  “He must not want his daughter to know he hired a PI on her husband,” I said. “That he has evidence against him.”

  “But Megan’s divorced. Maybe she knows already.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. What else is there?”

  “Here’s a folder on Cameron Kimball.”

  I took a look. “Jesus,” I whispered. I scanned through the folder, saw the police report, the court documents. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. “What else?”

  “You mean something like this?”

  She held up a thick brown file folder. Its label, in a clear plastic tab, typewritten, read, OXYDONE/PHOENICIA. That referred to the contract research organization that had done the tests whose explosive results they had buried. Phoenicia Health Sciences.

  “I’ll take that one.”

  “How about you let me have it until breakfast? Which is when this birthday party is over, right? That’s when I’m leaving.”

  “How about you take your pictures right here?”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you. It’s a matter of speed.”

  “The light will be better in the room I’m staying in.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. “But let me take a quick look.” She handed it to me, and I flipped through the file. Correspondence, but I didn’t find any clinical trial. I handed it back to her.

  Then we both heard a high-pitched beeping, three beeps in a row, coming from the study. The alarm. We looked at each other. If the door to the safe room had been closed, we wouldn’t have heard it.

  “Shit, Heller,” she said.

  “Did it just rearm?”

  “The batteries in my jammer must have died.”

  “We’re stuck,” I said.

  Not necessarily in the file room, but in the study. It was now alarmed. We couldn’t open the study door from the inside without setting off the alarm.

  She bowed her head, which was what she always did when she wanted to think hard. Then she said, “No motion sensor inside the study. But we can’t open the door.”

  “Right,” I said, impatiently.

  “Windows are all alarmed.”

  “Not all,” I said, thinking of the narrow bathroom window. “We can get out through the bathroom,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “No contacts on the windows. I noticed earlier.”

  “Fantastic, Heller.”

  Envelope in hand, she left the safe room and went to retrieve her dead Wi-Fi jammer from where she’d left it standing, on the wooden floor by the door to the hallway. The room was still mostly dark. I could smell the faint cigar, the lemon oil. The highly polished surface
of his desk now gleamed in the moonlight. It was a few minutes after three in the morning. I pushed the safe room door closed. It clicked smoothly into place. A fairly recent installation, I thought, very high-end. That he hadn’t cheaped out on.

  Maggie opened the bathroom door, saw the narrow window I was talking about. “I can fit through it no problem, but you’re a big guy, Heller.”

  “But lithe,” I pointed out. Which was an overstatement. She opened the window—double-hung and heavy—and swung her feet around, and in a neat maneuver she slid through the open window and thumped onto the grass outside.

  I followed, though it took an extra bit of maneuvering, given the tight space between the toilet and the sink. But a moment later I landed on the grass below. It was chilly fall weather out there, with a strong breeze and a few drops of rain.

  Maggie put a finger to her lips. I nodded, and I followed her across the lawn until we reached a manicured chess garden enclosed almost entirely by tall hedges. From here you couldn’t see the house, which made it a good place to talk.

  In the center of the garden was a gazebo, and inside that was a small stone table topped with a black marble chessboard.

  “Nick Heller saves the day again,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Just lucky I noticed the window,” I said.

  “Man, I really fucked up. I should have put that jammer through a field test. Good thing Nick Heller was here.”

  It was sort of strange, the way she kept using my full name, like I was a brand, or maybe a superhero. She’d called me Heller when we were seeing each other, so I was used to her just saying my last name. But full name? That was new.

  “You’re not actually with Sukie Kimball, are you?” she said as I sat down.

  “No. Hired by her. You were hired by Cameron?”

  She paused, looked at me. “Can I trust you?”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  She nodded. We had to trust each other, and she knew it. She was grateful to me for pointing out the unalarmed bathroom window. “I was hired by Megan, but Cameron’s cooperating.”

  “Megan wanted to see her father’s latest will?”

  “That’s part of it. They’re all afraid Natalya’s going to cheat them out of their inheritance. They have reason to believe Daddy revised his will again, but he’ll never talk about it. So she didn’t just want the will. She wanted to find out where he stashes his secret assets. So I was also looking for records on shell companies, that sort of thing.”

  “How long have you been private?”

  “Four years.”

  “You’re out of the army?”

  “Seven years. Since—us.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “You mean, have I been dating?”

  “No, that’s not what I said.”

  “Isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve been staying busy, got a lot of work, building this private-eye business. Staying in trouble.” She grinned.

  “Am I forgiven?” I said after a pause.

  She was silent for a long time. “You know, what happened before, we don’t need to get into that, Heller.”

  “Maybe we should.”

  “The way we left things between us maybe was a good place to leave things.”

  “Now I get it,” I said. “It took me a long time, I’ll admit. But I understand now why you were so angry.”

  “Why are women always described as angry?”

  I didn’t want to get into it with her. “Remember when you made that bouncer at the bar in Fort Bragg back down?”

  She laughed. I’d forgotten how much I loved this woman’s laugh.

  “You scared the shit out of him,” I went on. She laughed even more. “Talk about female anger.”

  She took my hand in hers. “You could always make me laugh, Heller.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You have to get back to your room and take some pictures. Then get the envelope back to me by eight, okay? Put it in a bag so it’s not recognizable. Break’s over.”

  25

  The mansion was completely dark. Dawn would come soon. The wind still whipped, but it didn’t rain, just spattered a bit. We made our way back to the house. Her room was in the other wing, and we decided it made the most sense for her to enter at the back door.

  “Remember, I’m Hildy,” she said.

  Turned out that we both knew the code to the main house alarm—it was the month, day, and year that Conrad Kimball had first met his Natalya. That code his kids knew. The alarm was still on by the time I got to the front door, which just meant that I’d beat Maggie to it. I punched in the code, and it instantly disarmed.

  The grand stone staircase was right before me. I padded up the staircase to the second floor, to the wing where I was staying. In the dark hall someone passed by quickly. I saw that it was Cameron, presumably going into his own room. Maybe he was too drunk to recognize me. I hoped so.

  I located my bedroom and collapsed on the bed. I was exhausted. I glanced at my watch. Four in the morning.

  I’d catch a few hours of sleep. My alarm clock would be Maggie Benson knocking on my door at eight A.M.

  * * *

  • • •

  I dozed fitfully, had troubled dreams.

  I still dream about things that happened to me in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can’t avoid it. If you don’t dream it, something’s wrong; you’re suppressing bad stuff. Sometimes I’ll dream about people dying. Friends dying. Or I’m exposed in a combat situation and suddenly my rifle jams. Regular people have anxiety dreams about, like, discovering they’re about to take a final exam in a course they forgot they had signed up for.

  But if they’ve served in combat, they might dream that they’re ten shots into a guy, an enemy, and he won’t go down, he just keeps advancing.

  I dream, sometimes, of combat situations I’ve been in. Probably because on some level my brain needs to keep processing these moments of high anxiety, to keep me sane. That’s my theory, anyway.

  That night I dreamed of the time Sean Lenehan saved my life.

  We were based in Asadabad, in Kunar province, in the northeastern part of Afghanistan. Our mission was to advise three hundred or so soldiers in an Afghan National Army kandak, which is their word for battalion.

  One day one of our two interpreters, Abdul Rahim, rushed in to the team house and told us that the other interpreter, Khalid, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. He was being held in a house in a village in the Pech Valley, one of the most violent and dangerous areas in Afghanistan.

  Abdul Rahim said he’d received a desperate call from a member of Khalid’s family. He wasn’t being held for ransom. They were going to lop off his head in the village square in the morning, to make an example of him.

  Khalid was a slight man in his twenties who stammered a little in English but was a super-fast interpreter and a dear person. Everyone liked him. We needed him. There was no debate about whether to attempt a hostage rescue to get Khalid back. We all loved the guy and wanted to try to save him. We were all in agreement.

  Our team leader, Captain McShane, called the company commander at Jalalabad and secured permission for a limited rescue operation. But how to carry it off? Normally we’d have a few days for mission prep, a few days to gather intelligence by whatever means possible. Then a day or two to rehearse. But if we were going to save Khalid’s life, we had to move that very night.

  All we knew was that he was being held hostage in some compound in this small village. If we were going to move at midnight, we had maybe twelve hours to gather all available intel on the house where Khalid was imprisoned.

  And since I was the intel sergeant, that was my job.

  I begged Jalalabad to lend us a drone, a UAV, to fly and circle over the village for five hours and collect whatever info we could. We needed to develop a pattern of life, as it
’s called. The company commander said okay.

  That allowed us to locate the right house. It turned out to be fairly obvious: the only house in the village that kept a sentry on the roof. I estimated there were six to eight men inside the house.

  The team leaders and I met in the Op Cen, the team conference room, sitting in metal folding chairs around a four-by-eight plywood table. It was a chilly afternoon. People don’t know how cold it can get in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It snowed several inches every week.

  When it was my turn to speak, I let everyone on the team know that this was going to be riskier than normal. There were far too many unknowns.

  “So noted,” said Captain McShane, and everyone fell quiet for an uncomfortable few seconds. “Moving on.”

  We came up with our CONOPS, or concept of the operation. Then all the fallback plans, the PACE plans—the primary plan, the alternate, the contingency, and the emergency. (The military loves its acronyms.) Our ops sergeant had put in a call to his higher-ups at Jalalabad for permission to use a couple of Black Hawks. He decided we’d infil via helicopter a few terrain features away. This would reduce the sound of the choppers.

  Then we’d move on foot to the target area. Once we’d set up the observation and support positions, the stack would move toward the compound and position itself for entry through the front door.

  Meanwhile, I got to work on the operational preparation of the battlefield, the OPE. That meant I checked on the weather, terrain, enemy situation, and so on. It was a cold, dry night, which was good. I requested overhead imagery. I did a terrain study using maps and photos, to help determine the infil and exfil routes. And where the choppers should land.

  This was all on me, which just jacked up my stress level.

  We rehearsed the mission a few times. Did a few walk-throughs. The warrant officer announced that I was going to be the first guy in the stack, since I was most familiar with Khalid. Sean was fourth. The hostage rescue was scheduled for midnight. Zero hundred hours.

  And I had a bad feeling about this mission.