“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry that happened to you.” He shrugged. “It sounds pretty chaotic. As Tim said, a lot going on. You’re absolutely sure Roger didn’t make it?”
“Are you talking about Gilbert?”
“Yes, sorry.”
“I stepped on him. We all did. He was on the floor, and we trampled over him like a bunch of crazed bulls. His head was split open. There was no way he got off that plane alive.”
“What about bodies? Dead bodies don’t get mixed up these days.”
“You can’t believe how hot that fire burned. Instant cremation. And I guess our government had some issues with Sudan getting back the remains. Besides that, if Hoffmeyer was CIA and they extracted him, do you think they would admit to that? Hell no. Blood, beards, bullets, smoke. I must have been confused, right? How could I know?”
He certainly sounded convincing, but so did many in the grassy-knoll set. It was because they believed so passionately. “Seven other men survived. Did anyone else identify Hoffmeyer?”
“No. Well, Timmy, but he won’t cop to it. He doesn’t want to think he’s crazy. He already thinks he’s crazy because he never sleeps. It just goes to show you, don’t it?”
“Show me what?”
“We all burn the same, even the ones with a fortune.”
He said it with half a smile that suggested the tiniest bit of schadenfreude. “You’re saying one of the hostages had a fortune?”
“Gil said his laptop was worth a billion dollars. He tried to ransom his way off with it. They laughed at him.”
“Gilbert Bernays said he had a computer worth a billion dollars?”
“Look, I’m not giving away any secrets here. We all got down and dirty with each other. We thought we were going to die. He told us he stole it off a dead Russian. He just didn’t have what he needed to get to the money.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“A password?”
“Maybe.”
I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until the answer came out. There was only one dead Russian Roger could have been talking about, the one Rachel had killed, and so far, she had failed to mention anything about Vladi having a computer worth a billion dollars.
“To my way of thinking, a billion dollars wouldn’t have made a difference. Whatever those boys were doing, whyever they were doing it, it wasn’t about money.”
“What was it about?”
“Who knows? I don’t think the baby terrorists even knew. They started with this sheikh demand but dropped that pretty fast, so that wasn’t the ultimate goal.”
“Maybe it was planned as a martyr operation from the beginning. The sheikh would have been a bonus.”
“The whole point of a martyr operation is to wreak havoc and spread terror. If these boys were interested in publicizing their cause, why did they insist on a media blackout?”
“There was a media blackout?”
“They gave no interviews and didn’t want any cameras around. The whole thing was a debacle from beginning to end. I’m telling you, we don’t know the whole story of what happened on that plane.”
Something over my shoulder caught his attention. “I think there’s someone in there watching us.”
“Is it the woman again?”
“No. It’s a man this time. I think they’ve put some people on me, if you want to know the truth. It pisses me off. What about my rights? I’m a citizen. I didn’t do anything. Nobody ever told me not to talk about what I saw. I’m going in there and—”
“Let’s go in and have another drink, Frank. We don’t need a scene here with all these good people, do we? Besides, I need to talk to Tim.”
He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and crushed it under his loafer. It was only half gone, but it was the third one he’d lit since we’d been out there.
Frank was the one who found Tim. It wasn’t hard. They were seated at the same table, and brunch was about to begin.
“Excuse me, Tim?” I pulled him away from the table and from Helene, who seemed determined not to let anything go on without her. “I was wondering if you had a contact number for that reporter Max Kraft.”
“He asked me not to give it to anyone.”
“I’m sure he did, but he’ll want to talk to me.” I pulled out the manifest Dan had given me. It had updated contact information for probably seventy-five percent of the survivors. “I’ve got something he’s looking for.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Max Kraft looked like a scrapper. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t particularly big. His arms seemed a little long for his body, and he definitely spent more time in front of his computer than working out. From the looks of him, though, you would want him on your side when a fight broke out. He had the look of a man who knew how to fight dirty, and would. He wore his brown-going-gray hair just long enough to prove he didn’t have to go to work in an office every day. He probably owned lots of safari shirts and no neckties.
I had no idea how long he’d been holed up in room 5 at the Novotel, a twelve-room motel on the Left Bank, but when he opened the door and let me into his room, it looked as if he’d lived there half his life. The smell of warm beer and greasy hamburgers lingered. Torn bags of vending-machine pretzels littered the premises, and carefully arranged light blue Post-it notes festooned the dresser mirror.
He closed the door behind me and went immediately to the window, where he had to move the heavy curtains to peek out. “How did you get here?”
“Cab. I switched twice. There was no one on me.”
“Good.” He turned and held out his hand. “Where is it?”
“Slow down.” I walked over to the dresser mirror and glanced at his notes, mostly names and phone numbers. They looked like contacts. When he saw me perusing them, he scurried over and barged in between the mirror and me.
“How did you get my name?” he asked, snatching the contacts off the mirror, one by one.
“I’m an investigator. I investigated. Do you have the video?”
He pulled a flash drive from his pocket and held it up. “Here’s what you want. Where’s mine?”
I took the drive, slung my backpack around, unzipped it, and pulled out my laptop.
“What are you doing?”
“Do you expect me to just believe you?” I sat on the unmade bed and turned on the computer. “I’m going to watch it.”
He put his hands on his hips, apparently incensed that I didn’t just take the word of an investigative journalist. “Are you sure that unit will even read this drive?”
“If it doesn’t, we have a problem. You’re not getting the 809 list until I’m convinced I’m getting what I need.”
His mouth crimped around the edges. It actually made him look prim, which I knew he wasn’t. He went over and flung himself into the hotel’s one seating surface that wasn’t a bed—a chair in the corner.
“Tell me where you got this,” I said, waiting for my programs to load.
“I told you, I copied it from the laptop that belonged to Roger Fratello, then erased it from the hard drive. As long as that was the only one, this is now the only one.”
“Where is the laptop?”
“I’m not saying.”
That was a problem. I had been around Felix long enough to know that just erasing a file didn’t really kill it. But I was hoping that Roger being dead might buy me some time on full eradication. Theoretically, no one would be looking for the video but me.
I pulled up Explorer while he bounced up and down…checked the window…wound his watch…went to the sink to throw cold water on his face…He had a point about the software thing. If my machine couldn’t recognize the drive, I had problems. I opened the small device, inserted it into the USB port, held my breath, and…nothing happened.
Shit.
I sat for a moment, considering the options. I could go online and search for the necessary software and download i
t, but I had never tried to access the Internet in France. I got out my cell phone and started to dial my best option.
Kraft rushed over. “What are you doing?”
“It doesn’t work. I’ll have to go to plan B.”
“Forget that.” He ripped the drive from the port. Arrogant prick. Time for a bluff. I signed off, closed down, and started packing to go.
“Wait a minute. I delivered. You owe me that contact list.”
“If I can’t verify that you delivered, I can’t give you the list. Sorry.”
“Just…just slow the fuck down here.” He put his hands on either side of his head as he paced around the small room, eyes to the ceiling. He looked as if steam might start issuing from his ears at any second. “Okay, stop. Let’s just stop right here.” I hadn’t even moved off the bed. He had a way of saying things to me that mostly applied to him. “What can I do to convince you?”
I thought about that. Maybe he was onto something. I spied an unopened bag of pretzels on the dresser. Except for breakfast a few hours earlier, I hadn’t eaten much in the past few days. “Can I have those?”
“They’re stale. Here…” Suddenly very accommodating, he went over to a Styrofoam cooler on the floor, pulled out a full-size bag, the kind you get at the grocery store, and tossed it over. His generosity, though, seemed to go only as far as snack goods, because, when he went in again, he came out with only one bottle of beer. I would have berated him, but I didn’t need to be drinking anyway.
The plastic wrapping on the pretzels was still cold from being stored in the cooler. I opened the bag and stuffed a few of the salty delights into my mouth.
“Where did you get Roger’s laptop?”
“Bought it from a kid with a goat.”
“Where?”
“Afghanistan. What is this? Twenty questions?”
“This is plan C. I need to know more about Blackthorne. You seem to know about them, so let’s talk for a while and see if we can find some common ground.” If I was right about Max Kraft, Investigative Journalist, he was itching to tell someone his story.
He twisted the cap off the bottle and took a swig, then moved back to the chair, set the bottle on the little, round, fake-wood-grain table next to it, and seemed to settle in.
“The story of a lifetime cost me fifty bucks and an Elton John CD.” He savored the thought, much like he savored his cold beer.
“What’s the story?”
“I won’t tell you that.”
“It’s Blackthorne, isn’t it? Something about the private army? The CIA? Stephen Hoffmeyer.” I threw everything out there. Something had to stick, and I knew I was on the right track. The last guy I’d seen nervous enough to be peeking through the curtains was Lyle Burquart.
“I don’t think you need to know. You don’t want to know.”
“How did you know the computers were in Zormat?”
He squeezed one eye shut and looked at me with the other. “I never said Zormat.”
“You haven’t mentioned Salanna 809, either. But I know that’s where you got the machine, from the hijacking victims’ stuff in Zormat. Roger Fratello was on that flight as Gilbert Bernays, who seems to be dead. That’s how his computer got into the closet.”
He stared at me, seemingly confused about whether to view me as a threat or a source. “The locals got into the house before the CIA ever showed up. They stripped it clean. My contacts got word to me. I have a lot of contacts. I went there, I checked out the merchandise, and I bought it.”
“Just Roger’s?”
“No comment.”
That meant there were more, and he had them. “One of the hostages said Roger claimed to have a billion dollars on his laptop.”
“A billion dollars? What, are you kidding?”
“It’s what I heard.” I got out my notebook and flipped to the Frank pages. “He said Roger used the machine to try to ransom himself off, but he couldn’t access the money. Something was missing. Maybe a password?”
I looked up at him. This didn’t seem to be something he already knew about, which meant he was interested. “Where would he get a billion dollars? Is that what he embezzled from that…that—”
“Betelco. I don’t think so. Roger told this other hostage he’d stolen it off a dead Russian, the one on the video.” I pointed to the drive he’d ripped from my machine. It was still in his fist. He looked at it.
“The one Rachel killed.”
“Yeah. I know that she took cash belonging to Vladi.” She and Harvey had pulled it from the trunk of the car. “It ended up in a safety deposit box in Brussels. So far, she hasn’t mentioned any billion-dollar computer.” That she hadn’t mentioned it, of course, did not preclude the fact that she knew about it.
He held up the drive. “This video came off a machine belonging to Roger Fratello. It had an e-mail program, a bunch of files with memos and business-related stuff he wrote. I didn’t see anything that looked like a billion dollars, and I looked all through it. It was one of the few I didn’t need a translator for.”
I leaned back on the bed, bracing myself with my arms behind me. “I wonder what it would look like. What do you think? Secret accounts? Treasure map?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably it. A treasure map. Yo-ho-ho.”
“Whatever it was,” I said, “I don’t think Roger could get to it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Think about it. A computer has something on it worth a billion dollars. Wouldn’t you encrypt it or protect it somehow, just in case someone boosted it? And whatever that protection was—the password or the code or the key—wouldn’t you be likely to keep that on you?”
“Yes on both counts. So what?”
I had a few pretzels. They were good and fresh. “This e-mail that accidentally fell out of Rogers out-box when you signed on, it was to Rachel, and it was asking for the location of Vladi’s grave.”
“Vladi, the dead Russian?”
“Yep.”
“What, you’re thinking the dead Russian still has this…this code or key or whatever it is on him?”
“Well, it would have been more viable four years ago, I would think, when Roger actually intended to send the message.”
“Hey,” he said. “Here’s what I want to know. How the hell is this guy’s account still active if he’s dead?”
I thought about that. If it was a business account, it would have been paid for through Betelco. Since he’d been on the lam at the time he sent it, that wasn’t likely. “His wife,” I said, remembering the look on Susan Fratello’s face when I’d asked her if she would want to know if Roger were alive. “His wife might have kept it open all these years.”
He smiled for the first time and pointed the longneck at me. “Grave robbing. I like it. A little creepy but a good angle. Too bad I’m not doing that story.” Then he shrugged. “But who gives a shit? Russians…obscene amounts of money. It’s been done.”
“Was Vladi’s one of the computers you bought from the kid with the goat? Do you have the billion-dollar treasure map?”
He sat back and stretched with his hands over his head. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
I did want to know. I wasn’t sure I needed to know, because I had no plans to dig up Vladi, not even for a billion dollars. But when I didn’t jump all over his idea, he got agitated.
“You do, don’t you? Don’t you want to know if I have a computer worth a billion clams?”
Kraft was a unique personality, to be sure. He was either flush with confidence to the point of overbearing arrogance or anxious and needy to the point of mewling. He didn’t seem afraid to be either.
“Why? Are you interested in a trade?”
“You told me you had information to give me on Blackthorne. I need to know what you have and where you got it.”
“Yeah, I made that up.” I rolled up out of my tilt and pulled my notebook from my backpack. “I don’t have much. I heard something about them from another
guy who is also scared to death of them.” I glanced up at Kraft. “Same as you, right? Isn’t that who has you peeking out from behind the curtains? Mr. Black and Mr. Thorne?”
“Tony Blackmon is dead, Cyrus Thorne is running the show, and I have good reason to be careful.”
Kraft stood up and started pacing around the room again. He forgot his beer, went back for it, looked in the mirror, then finally turned and sat sidesaddle with one foot on the floor and one dangling. “This guy you talked to, who is he? What’s his name?”
“He was a reporter. He said he dug too deep into Blackthorne. Now he’s a—” Kraft was about to fall off his perch waiting for my answer. “Now he’s not.”
“What’s his name? I’ll bet I’ve already talked to him.”
Max Kraft was a tricky guy, but Lyle had made it pretty clear he wanted nothing to do with Blackthorne. It wasn’t for me to be throwing his name around. “All I can tell you is he was doing a story on the 809 hijacking. Somehow he ran into Blackthorne. He told me to steer clear of them. I’m trying to take his advice.”
He wet his lips. “I can tell you what he wouldn’t.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I want to talk to him. I want his name.”
“I won’t give it to you.”
“If he dropped the story, he doesn’t deserve your protection.” He took another swig of beer. Judging from the face he made, either the beer was flat, or he had a deep and genuine contempt for Lyle. “No journalist worth his ink would or should ever drop a story like this. People need to know. But it’s his loss. This is Pulitzer time, baby. You watch. My story will blow the doors off.”
“Good for you.” I stood.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t need a billion dollars, if it even exists. I’m not giving you the name of my Blackthorne source. But I do have this.” I pulled out the 809 manifest and held it up. “The names and contacts of most of those people from Salanna 809 are on here. I’m violating all kinds of confidences by giving it to you, and I’m taking your word on the video, but I’ll still make the trade.”
The Alex Shanahan Series Page 123