The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Not under his own name.”

  “Could he have been Hoffmeyer, in which case he’d be dead, I assume?”

  “No. Stephen Hoffmeyer was not an embezzler from Boston.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know everything there is to know about that incident. You’re wrong about that. So is the FBI, but…” He stared at me with the obsessive look of a problem solver who had left the problem only half solved. He was taking this latest piece of data, putting it with everything else he already knew, trying new combinations, and hoping the answer would emerge. But as quickly as the desire had gripped him, it let him go. Or he threw it off. “I’ve got a different gig now,” he said finally. “I can’t help you. I’m sor—”

  “Wait a minute. You know something else. I can tell. What is it?”

  He let out a deeply troubled sigh. “Why are you asking about all this? It happened four years ago.”

  “The FBI told me that they found a bunch of money with Roger Fratello’s fingerprints on it in Brussels. Salanna 809 left from Brussels, didn’t it?”

  “It originated there.”

  “On top of that, I just left Susan Fratello. The FBI told her that her husband has turned up again. I don’t know where or what the circumstances were, but something is obviously going on. Then I saw these two guys checking out the house of my partner’s ex-wife. It turns out they’re from a company called Blackthorne. When I looked into it, it turned out you had reported on both Blackthorne and the hijacking. All I’m trying to do is find my partner. These happen to be the leads I’ve turned up, and they happen to lead to you.”

  Something about what I’d said took hold with him. He stuffed one hand into the pocket of his corduroy jeans and used the other hand to mash down that thick hedgerow on his head. “Let me think about this,” he said as he spun around the lobby talking to himself. “They know I’m here. If they saw you come here—”

  “I don’t have a tail. I’ve been aware of that, and I’ve been checking.”

  He didn’t even look at me. “You wouldn’t have seen them. If they know you’re here, and they know for sure I’m here, then that means—” He looked at me and let out a sharp and bitter laugh. “That means I’m fucked.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s already too late.” He turned and swooped one of his long arms toward the wall of windows that faced Soldiers Field Road. “They’re out there already, and they’re thinking I’m back in it.”

  I looked where he was looking. All I saw were dozens of cars speeding by in both directions. “Who’s out there?”

  He put one hand on his hip, hooked the other around his long neck, and dropped his head back. He almost looked as if a weight had been lifted. He cocked his head in the direction of the hallway. “Come on back,” he said as he started that way. He was no longer lunging. His gait was far more languid and relaxed. “You might as well get what you came for.”

  I followed him to the back offices. We had to pass the receptionist’s desk to get there. She gave me the fisheye on my way by. She didn’t like me. Lyle took us to a control room and closed the door behind us. The cramped space had panels and counters with lots of buttons and dials. It smelled like machines in there and looked like the inside of a cockpit. It also had thick soundproof tiles on the walls to absorb our conversation. He sat in one swivel chair, and I sat in the other.

  “What do you do here?” I asked him.

  “I host a sports call-in show with my partner.”

  “Why would an award-winning journalist leave his job at a prestigious newspaper to do sports call-in on the radio?”

  “Because I love sports.” He gave me a loopy smile. It made me think that some part of him had gone right over the edge.

  “Okay.”

  He checked his watch. “If you want information, ask me now. I’ll tell you what I can, but under one condition.”

  “What?”

  “After you leave here today, you will never try to contact me again. You won’t call me. You won’t come back here. You won’t come to my house. Do you agree?”

  “What if I have follow-up questions for you?”

  “You have to agree to my terms, or I won’t talk to you.”

  “All right. I agree.” What choice did I have?

  “Good.” He sat back and rested his left foot on his right knee. With his long arms and legs, he was all corners and angles. It made him look like the scaffolding on an unfinished building. “Tell me what you know so far.”

  I went through it all with him again. He listened carefully. When I was finished, he found a pad and pen. He wrote something on the top page, tore it off, and gave it to me. I read what he’d written out loud. “Gilbert Bernays? Who is this?”

  “He was one of the hostages. If Fratello was on that plane, it was probably as Bernays.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You know what happened, right? How the plane got redirected to Khartoum?”

  “I know they took a mechanical.”

  “The plane had a hydraulic leak. They made an emergency landing, and for all intents and purposes, the plane was dead. It was never going anywhere again until they got the leak fixed, and no one was going to fix it for them.”

  “They still had the hostages,” I said.

  “They did, but they had them in the wrong country. They had planned to be in Afghanistan, where they could get advice and counsel from the senior members of the Brigade. If you look at the hijackers who died, the oldest one was twenty-three. That’s part of why things spun so far out of control.”

  “Why did they do it in the first place? What were their demands?”

  “They wanted to force Pakistan to release a radical Muslim sheikh named Ali al-Badat. Pakistan wouldn’t do it. That’s why the thing dragged on the way it did. It was a standoff.”

  “Who is Ali al-Badat?”

  “‘The people’s sheikh’ is what Newsweek called him. He was very popular. The Pakistani army stumbled over him by accident in a Peshawar raid. They had to put him in jail, but they weren’t happy about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he had far more support in Pakistan than President Musharraf did. They were afraid he would cause an uprising against the government. I’m still surprised they didn’t let him out. It would have been the perfect excuse, right?”

  “I guess so.” At the moment, I was more concerned with problems closer to home than a geopolitical debate. “What about Gilbert Bernays?”

  “Right. The hijackers needed food and water, so they started freeing hostages. They let the women and children go first. Then the Muslims, then a Frenchman. Eventually, it got down to seventeen Westerners and the eight hijackers. Seven of the hostages were Americans. One of them was this Bernays. I could never find anything on the guy. He was a ghost. No background or backstory. I always thought his identity had been manufactured. Now you’re saying he could be this embezzler.” He reached up and scratched his right cheek with his left hand. I could hear his nails scraping the stubs of his whiskers. “I think that could make some sense.”

  “Why?”

  “There were stories among the survivors of how he tried to ransom himself off the plane with a laptop computer.”

  “A computer?”

  “He claimed it was worth a billion dollars. They laughed at him, and they didn’t let him off.”

  “How could his computer be worth a billion dollars?”

  “I don’t know. No one has ever found him to ask him. He survived the storming of the aircraft, and no one ever saw him again. That’s why I think he could be your man. And that’s all I know.” He pushed away from the control counter and started to get up.

  “Wait. What about Blackthorne?”

  “I won’t talk to you about Blackthorne.”

  “Why not?”

  The receptionist knocked on the door and opened it. We both flinched. “Big Man is looking for you,” she said. “He wants to know if you resigned a
nd didn’t tell him. He needs you on the air right now.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Lyle unfolded himself. I stood up, too.

  “It’s Blackthorne, right? That’s who you’re afraid of. Did they come after you? Is that why you left the paper?”

  “I dug too deep. That’s all you need to know. That’s all you want to know. But you should know this. If you start looking into Blackthorne in any kind of significant way, you will be at risk. People you love will be at risk. Don’t do it lightly.” He reached for the door. “And don’t ever come back here again.”

  Back in the Durango, I sat quietly and looked at every car, trying to figure out if there were any I had seen before. If Lyle Burquart had been trying to scare me, he had succeeded, and more. I got out my notebook again. The pages were filling fast. I copied off the Gilbert Bernays name and then started writing in notes on the hijacking. Then I called Dan. When he didn’t answer the first time, I hung up and called him again. He was not happy when he finally picked up.

  “What do you want, Shanahan? I’m in the middle of an arbitration hearing.”

  “Let me just ask you something really quickly. What do you know about Salanna 809?”

  “Hijacking. Fucked up.”

  “Have you heard anything about it lately?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. It keeps coming up.”

  “In what way? Wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t have time. I’ll see what I can find and call you later. Don’t call me again. Hey…”

  “What?”

  “What about Harvey?”

  “Not yet.”

  He hung up.

  My phone was still in my hand when it started ringing. I checked the caller ID and answered.

  “Felix?”

  “Hey, Miss Shanahan, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Someone just turned on Harvey’s phone. Do you want to know where he is?”

  Chapter Nine

  Djuro Bulatovic had never been to my home, and I had never been to his. I didn’t even know if he was domiciled in Boston. I knew we were friends, though, because only his friends got to call him Bo, and there hadn’t been a single time in three years that I had called for help that he didn’t either show up or send a very capable proxy. He was known for his pastel sport coats, but tonight he wore his work clothes—all black.

  Bo was an enforcer, a gun for hire, a person who used every tool at his disposal to persuade individuals to adopt his clients’ point of view. The first time we’d met, he had wrapped his big hand around my throat and squeezed until I passed out. But that had been a case of mistaken identity. He had been deeply remorseful about strangling the wrong woman nearly to death, which is how I had apparently established my permanent marker with him.

  Through me, he had also met Harvey. Harvey did his taxes for him, which provided me with one of the few interesting personal details I knew about Bo. He earned in the mid-six figures annually from Djuro Bulatovic, LLC, which he described as a “consulting company.”

  Actually, I knew a few more things. He was a big man who came from violence. It was obvious in the way he moved, in the way he always seemed to be looking ahead to the next problem or looking back to make sure the last one wasn’t catching up to him. Since he was Bosnian, I suspected he had fought the Serbs as a soldier or part of a militia and probably killed more than his share. He had a soldier’s reverence for duty, and he lived by a strict code of honor. Even if he hadn’t liked Harvey, he would have considered it bad form to kidnap a man in a wheelchair.

  He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat next to me. He turned to the back and reported in to his two colleagues, um…Employees? Accomplices? I never knew who the men were that he brought along. I was sure Timon and Radik were as strong and fast and skilled at the task that lay ahead as the usual crew he brought.

  Bo spoke to his guys in either Bosnian or Croat or Serbian. I had asked him one time which he spoke. He said everyone in his country spoke all three, sometimes at the same time. When he was done, he turned to brief me.

  “All three are in the kitchen. They just brought food, so they’re eating together. No one is standing post.” He shook his head. “Stupid.”

  “Did you see Harvey? Is he in there?”

  “He is in a back room on the floor. I saw him through the window.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I do not believe that three men with an arsenal would be guarding a corpse.”

  The reference to Harvey as a corpse was disturbing, but, as usual, he had a point. I had to calm down or at least find a way to channel the energy. I looked through the dark toward the house. Knowing Harvey was in there got me mentally mobilized. My body followed suit. Everything sped up—pulse, respiration, knuckle cracking.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “We take them.”

  I looked at Bo. “Take them how?”

  “Shoot the guards. Find Harvey. Bring him out.”

  Shoot. Find. Bring. It sounded so simple. “Why do we have to shoot them? Maybe we should just try to—”

  “Hit them over the head and render them unconscious?”

  I had been about to say “subdue them,” but that worked, too. I felt the ridiculousness of that idea, the complete, television-informed naïveté. But Bo didn’t treat me as ridiculous. It was one of the things I liked about him.

  “To subdue them,” he said, “would require that we get close enough to be killed ourselves. Or it might give them the chance to kill Harvey before we can get to him.”

  “But we don’t even know who they are or why they took him. What if they’re, I don’t know, police? Or some other good guys?”

  “They are not the good guys. This much I know.” He angled his head and studied me. “You have killed before, killed with your hands.”

  “The only person I ever killed was trying hard to kill me back.”

  He nodded sagely. “Then you will have no problem. These men will kill you if you do not kill them first.”

  “I think I have to know that for sure, Bo. I think we have to give them a warning.”

  He sighed deeply. I knew he was the expert, but I didn’t want him to count on me to shoot a man in cold blood if I didn’t think I could.

  “We will give them a chance,” he said. “It will be up to them. Only if they shoot at us will we shoot back.”

  “Yeah, but you have to tell them they have a choice.”

  “Don’t worry.” He turned and said something to Timon and Radik. Of course, he could have been saying, “Bust in and blow their fucking heads off,” for all I knew. I didn’t know what else to do. The situation was what it was.

  He laid out his plan, first in English for me, then for the guys in back. It didn’t seem to take as much explaining for them.

  “What about the noise?” I said. “There are people in these other buildings.”

  “The police will not show up in this neighborhood unless called, and no one will call them over a few gunshots.”

  He reached back, and Radik passed him a black gym bag. I could tell it was the weapons bag from the heavy, metallic clank it made when Bo set it on the seat between us. He unzipped it, plunged in, and came out with what I knew were a couple of clean semiautomatics with suppressors. He offered them both to me. One was a Glock 30, like mine. I took it.

  “Be sure to give it back,” he said. “Don’t take it home.”

  “What about stray shots?” I looked through the windshield up and down the street. We were in a neighborhood. A very bad one, but a neighborhood nonetheless. Our target was in the middle of the block. The house on one side looked like a boarded-up crack den, but there were lights on in the one on the other side. “We could kill someone in the next house over if we’re not careful.”

  “We must shoot them before they can return fire. You are a good shot. You will not miss. Aim for the—”

  “Center of mass.” I knew that. I knew how to
kill a paper target.

  He waited for me to think up still more objections. I couldn’t, so I took a breath, adjusted my vest, and gave him the nod. We did a quick radio check. Then the four of us got out and started toward the house. I split off and went toward the back, where I was supposed to watch through the window and make sure they were in the kitchen where Bo’s reconnaissance had left them. I was also supposed to cover the door in case any of them got flushed out that way. It was the easiest assignment, which was fine by me. Timon and Radik were going in through the garage entrance. Bo was going through the front door, right up the middle.

  I slipped around and started creeping along the side of the house. I had to go slowly, because it was so dark and I didn’t dare risk using the flashlight. The stink of garbage wafted up as I maneuvered around the trash cans. Where there was garbage there were rats, so I tried to prepare myself for any unexpected movement at foot level. I got to the backyard and cruised along the fence line until I got as far in as the crumbling brick planter Bo had told me about. It marked the far boundary of a cracked and pocked patio, which meant it wasn’t too far out from the back of the house. I had to be careful. I moved in behind it and made myself as small as I could. Then I peeked over the top to look through the back window.

  The blinds were closed. Damn. They must have just closed them.

  “Blinds closed,” I whispered into the radio. “Moving closer. Hold on.”

  I turned the radio down and crawled on my belly back to the fence and toward the house. When I got there, I flattened against the back wall. As I inched toward the window, I could hear them. There were two distinct voices. They were speaking something besides English. It sounded Slavic and guttural. There was a sliver of space between the sill and the lowest blind. I crept close enough to get my eyeball to the window to look inside the house.

  There were two in the kitchen, not three. The one closest to me was balding. He wore the long and greasy strands of his remaining hair in a mutant ponytail that sat too high on the back of his head. The bigger man had on a black Judas Priest T-shirt. He was Bo-sized, if not larger. He was talking on his cell phone, holding the tiny silver device against his massive head. Bo had declared him the priority. I could see why.