The Shield of Darius

by Allen Kent

  He reached again into his inside pocket, drew out another sheet of paper and spread it on top of the first. It was a photocopy of Amy’s bank statement.

  “Maybe this will help,” Mr. Falen said in a tone that wavered between patience and irritation. “Some months ago you started getting a nice little salary supplement. From what I can tell from some of your friends, you haven’t taken on another job. Do you want to tell me about this?”

  The icy fist that held Amy’s stomach gave it another twist and reached up into her mind to pull out even colder thoughts.

  “Am I being investigated, Mr. Falen?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, exactly. But I’ve got a situation here that I think you can help me with.”

  She sat erect and swallowed hard. “Why don’t you just come to the point? Tell me why you want to know about these people.”

  “Let me ask, and you answer,” he said coolly.

  She turned to him, feeling thin and homely and afraid.

  “I don’t know if I have the answers you want. If you tell me why you’re interested in these people, I might better understand how I can help.”

  Mr. Falen’s pale eyes studied her carefully for a long moment, looking beyond her own and back into her thoughts to watch her struggle. He reached over and lifted the list of names back onto the bank statement.

  “These people all disappeared without a trace while they were traveling overseas,” he said simply.

  Amy closed her eyes slowly and let the questions all rush forward. Could the names have come from some place other than her lists? Could someone else be getting them from Javad without him knowing? Could she have allowed herself to be…? She knew that she could and her insides turned to gelatin as she leaned forward onto her hands.

  “Somebody’s caught you in something here, haven’t they Ms. Trossen?” Mr. Falen said quietly. She nodded slightly.

  “This probably isn’t the best place to talk about it. Get what you need from your desk and let’s go somewhere.”

  Without knowing how, Amy found her desk and collected her purse, following Christopher Falen out of the building. He drove south to the west end of the Capitol Mall where they walked beside the reflecting pool while she told him about Javad Esfarjahni, the carpet shop in Philadelphia, and his plan to expand the business by marketing to travel-minded people nationwide. She finished with his phone call of the evening before.

  “You got screwed over,” he said. “I know how you must feel.”

  She stopped abruptly and turned on him, her face pale and drawn. “You can’t have any idea how I feel. You can’t even begin to…” She found herself shaking a tight fist in his face, wanting to chase him from her life and memory and return to the delicious, lusty warmth she’d basked in as she’d driven to work eight hours earlier. She wanted Javad to be with her. To tell her it wasn’t true. To slap across the face until he bled while she screamed that she hated him. To wrap her in his arms and make her forget that anything else mattered.

  Falen looked into her quivering fist without expression. “I know this doesn’t help much, but you aren’t the first person to fall for this kind of thing. The meeting at the Kennedy Center wasn’t an accident. You were singled out because of what you know.”

  “And because of who I am,” she whispered. “A silly, ugly, lonely old maid who just wanted…” Tears stung her eyes and a lump choked her words into a moaning sob.

  She turned her face away from him and they walked in silence.

  “Are these names the only ones you’ve given him?” Falen asked after a few moments.

  She shook her head. “I gave him four or five each time. Your list only has one or two from each group.”

  “Have you given him any names since Ramirez?”

  Amy stopped again and took the new list from her purse.

  “I’m supposed to give these to him tonight.”

  He opened the paper and scanned the list quickly. “Would you still be willing to take it?”

  She shook her head violently. Mr. Falen looked down the reflecting pool toward the Washington Monument, then back at the names.

  “I’m the only one who knows about this, Ms. Trossen. The State Department gave me permission to talk to you because they knew I was working on something important, but they don’t have any idea what. You screwed up. But you were a victim. Not the first. Not the last. It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened in this town and I could probably forget about it. But I’d need some help from you.”

  “I won’t go see him,” she said emphatically. “If I did, I’d start crying and would probably ruin everything anyway. You do to me what you have to, but I won’t go see him”.

  “Would you call him? Tell him you’re sick and you’ll send him the list.”

  “If I say I’m sick, he’ll come. He’s very good that way. What is it exactly you’re trying to get done?”

  “I want to know what happened to these twenty-nine people.”

  “Why don’t you just go pick him up and ask him?” Her voice snapped bitterly, partly at Falen, partly at her betraying lover.

  “Because I suspect he won’t tell me. I need to watch him work one of these through. How about calling to say your mother in New Hampshire’s been in an accident and you need to go up there to be with her. If you have trouble controlling your voice, that would explain it.”

  “My mother? She’s in St. Louis - or dead by now. Javad knows I haven’t heard from her in years.

  “She’s in New Hampshire,” Falen said. “She married seven years ago and lives in Keene.”

  Amy turned to him again, surprised and disgusted at this man who knew so much about her.

  “Javad still wouldn’t believe the story. Why would I go see her

  now?”

  “If she was in a wreck and someone called to tell you, wouldn’t you go see her?”

  Amy remembered the late nights in the yellow house on Taylor Avenue. She had often thought since that she had grown up with a woman much like herself. Someone who needed to be loved and didn’t know how to go about it.

  “You know a lot about me, don’t you, Mr. Falen?”

  ”I think I know enough to believe you can pull this off. Will you?”

  Amy again started to walk. She felt Javad’s hands touching her face. His body pressed against her as he kissed her neck and whispered that she was beautiful. She wondered what he thought when she left him; if he laughed at her thin, shapeless body and joked about her obsessive affection for him. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll call him. What do I need to say?”

  “Tell him you just got the call and you’re leaving tonight, will mail the list on your way out of town, and will call as soon as you know something.”

  “What if he asks about the marriage plans and the trip to Europe?”

  “If he’s playing the considerate role you say he is, he won’t. He’ll tell you everything will be fine.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “You play him for a change. Tell him that if he really loves you he’ll understand how important this is. He won’t give you any trouble. Do you have a cell phone with you?”

  They found a quiet place north of the Vietnam Memorial and Falen stood beside her as she made the call.

  “If he asks about the traffic, tell him you just left your building,” he suggested.

  She didn’t cry. In fact, it had been easy. And Falen was right about Javad’s response. He consoled her gently and told her she was doing the right thing and to take what time she needed.

  “How will I make it through a week without you?” he murmured. She closed her eyes, and worked to relax her clenched jaw.

  “I’ll call as soon as I can. It may not be long. She’s in very serious condition.”

  “I am so sorry. I love you, my little angel,” he whispered as she said good-bye. She felt Falen’s hand squeeze her shoulder firmly.

  “I love you too,” she said and hung up.

  Falen drove her to the 19
th Street lot and stopped beside her car.

  “You’re not afraid I’ll call and tell him you’re on to him?”

  Falen shook his head. “You’re not a stupid woman. And I think you know what’ll happen if you stay with him. He can’t afford to have anyone know as much as you do. If I were you, I’d go visit your mother and stay out of the way for awhile.” He handed her a half sheet of paper. “Jot a little note down on this to go with the list and I’ll mail it and take care of things for you with Rose. We’ll tell him you’ve been pulled off to work on this with me. As far as I’m concerned, in a few weeks, you can go back to your job and no one will be the wiser. You’ve learned your lesson.”

  “What about Javad?”

  “He’ll be out of the picture by then.”

  Amy leaned against the side of her Taurus and covered her eyes with her hand.

  “But why was he going to have me stop? Leave my job and marry him?”

  Falen shrugged. “We can only guess. As I said, he can’t have you loose knowing what you know. And they may be planning on working you into whatever they’re doing with these other people. Paris seems to figure into this somehow. Do yourself a favor and go to New Hampshire, Ms. Trossen. Here’s your mother’s address.”

  Amy had driven to work rather than taking the Metro, with every intention of leaving early and driving directly to Philadelphia. Instead she drove back to the apartment in Arlington, unable to concentrate long enough on a single thought to make any use of it. She sat in her parking spot behind the rectangular brick buildings looking vacantly at the dash, wishing she could cry and relieve the pressure that was boiling inside with nowhere to go. She finally forced herself from the car and climbed the steps to her flat. In the shadows of late afternoon she stood in front of the mirror on the back of her closet door, looking at her gaunt reflection. Slowly she peeled away her clothes. She was still thin to the point of looking unhealthy. Still breastless and still had eyes too prominent and a protruding nose. Her hair was still coarse and unruly and she was still forty and unmarried. But she was no longer a virgin. He had raped her. Not physically. She’d given her body to him willingly. But he’d ravaged the rest of her. Violated her heart and soul and left her empty. Amy knew that she would never be loved again.

  She pulled on a baggy sweat suit and without packing a bag, walked back down the stairs to her car. At the Memorial Parkway she turned west to the Dulles Access, then north toward the 495 Loop that circles Washington. As she approached the interchange where the expressway meets highway 123 from McLean, she accelerated to 70 and released her seat belt, thought for a final time of Javad Esfarjahni, pointed the nose of her blue Taurus at the concrete pillars that support the overpass and closed her eyes.

  THIRTEEN

  Christopher Falen heard the report of Amy Trossen’s death on the ten o’clock news with the first twinge of remorse he had felt since before Vietnam. The feeling bothered him. Early in his work with Fisher he had learned the world was full of people who survived by either taking advantage of others or by being taken advantage of. Both types eventually paid a price and he’d occasionally been involved in exacting it. The choices had been theirs, and he couldn’t feel responsible for them. But Amy was a victim. A sucker, but still a victim.

  He wondered fleetingly if his growing desire to seduce Kate Sager was affecting his judgment. Making him careless. He’d set up another lunch meeting with her on the pretext of telling her that the RPA connection didn’t seem to be panning out, but mainly to see her again and try to score some points. Or just score. He wasn’t sure.

  The points had been hers. She arrived at the restaurant in a tailored blue suit and black stockings that accentuated her trim hips and legs and as she entered, she looked at him so directly with her deep green eyes that he felt transparent. The look was more penetrating than seductive and peeled him open in such a way that he felt very vulnerable. Falen was not accustomed to the sensation.

  Kate Sager was much less restrained than she had been during their first visit. She talked freely about the holes he’d supposedly uncovered in his Kosovo support group theory and offered thoughts of her own.

  “From all we’ve been able to tell, your husband wasn’t a member of the RPA,” he offered. “In fact, none of the others seems to have unusual connections with groups, and some aren’t even East European, let alone Roma. Some guy in the State Department pulled that early list together to try to force connections that just weren’t there.”

  She hadn’t been surprised, confessing that there were things she didn’t know about Ben, but didn’t think he could be tied up in something like that without her knowing. She had asked if Falen had any new leads and he offered his latest plan to keep her occupied – out of the way, but still in touch.

  “A piece of information seems to support one of your early suspicions and leads off in another direction,” he told her. “Orly Airport in Paris has a camera system as a security measure that videotapes deplaning passengers as they come through the gate. We looked over film from the flight your husband supposedly took from Manchester to Paris and although there’s one man who looks a good deal like him, Ben wasn’t on the flight.”

  “I’m not surprised... but what do you think that means?”

  “One of two things. Neither’s good. Either he was abducted like you thought, and the kidnappers had someone use the passport to misdirect an investigation, or he was taken specifically to get that passport. We see a lot of that. Someone is abducted overseas by groups that deal in black market documents.”

  Kate fingered the stem of her wine glass and frowned down at the table.

  “If it’s the latter – this black market thing – are you suggesting Ben might have been killed?”

  Falen tried to look uncomfortable. “I hate to say it, but if the passport was the target, that’s not a good sign.”

  She fixed him with that green, stripping gaze.

  “But this is all still conjecture, isn’t it? You don’t really know the passport was the target.”

  He agreed.

  “And how will you find out?”

  “We think there’s a good chance of finding the man who used it. We ought to learn something from him.”

  “I want to know as soon as you learn anything.”

  . . .

  Javad Esfarjahni was Falen’s first real breakthrough and he hoped the Arab would give him that ‘call if you get anything’ information that meant getting back in touch with Kate Sager. Hell, maybe the black market passport theory was right and Ben wouldn’t turn up again at all.

  He called Fisher the night of Amy’s death.

  “I need phone taps on two addresses in Philly, and someone to monitor cell phone calls. Can you get it done over the weekend?”

  “When do you need them?”

  “Tonight would be best. I need them in place by the time a letter gets there, and the post office might surprise me and deliver tomorrow.”

  “Are the locations residences?”

  “One residence and one retail business. My guess is that the residence is usually empty during the day and the store vacant at night, though there may be alarm systems on both.”

  “We’ll get them in by tonight. Where are the places?”

  Falen gave Fisher Javad’s cell phone number and addresses for his apartment on Quince Street and the import store on 18th.

  “Call me in four hours and I’ll have a location for the listening station, if you want one,” Fisher said. “Or we can patch calls directly to your cell. Do you want someone monitoring the apartment and store phones, or should I record them to your laptop?”

  “I’ll cover the store, and I’d like to be close. Find a place nearby, but patch the store and office taps to my cell with ‘Javad’ as the identifier. You can send conversations from his home to the computer. I think he’ll call from the shop. And monitor conversation inside the entire store. He may meet with someone, and my guess is he’ll use cell phones rather than wired system
s. If he has a phone other than the one I have a number for, we may need someone following him.”

  “Need anything else?”

  “Yes. Surveillance on four people.” He gave Fisher the names of the four on Amy’s latest list. “They will all be going overseas in the next few months – some pretty quickly. I think I can narrow the list to one or two before then. Tell me where they go, who they talk to, who they call, and what they do. Can you get that done?”

  “Get it narrowed down as soon as you can. I’ve got a couple of things going and can’t tie people up any longer than necessary.”

  “Done,” Falen said, packed a bag, stopped at an all night convenience store to pick up a can of shaving cream, and started for Philadelphia. Ten minutes before his four hour call to Fisher, he pulled off the interstate and found a convenient place to park to make his call.

  “We have the apartment above the shop just north of the import store. We’ve patched you directly to the office phone and to listening devices around the shop. We’ll send recorded conversations from the house directly to your laptop. The stairs to the apartment go up between the shops and the key’s taped under the overhang of the first step, against the wall on the right. Let me know when you’re through with the service.”

  Within an hour of Monday morning’s mail delivery, the call went out over Javad’s cell phone from the office at the Persian Garden. Falen was stretched on the bed in the second floor apartment next to the carpet store, studying a smaller version of his wall map and trying to anticipate who the carpet merchant would pick from the four names on his list. There had been no conversation for the previous half hour, just rustling about in the office, and Falen was alerted by the dialing tones as Esfarjahni punched in the numbers. He glanced over at the lights on the recording equipment to be certain the number would be saved, but had been listening to routine business calls earlier in the morning and paid only casual attention until he heard the caller speak.

  “Salaam ‘aleikom.”

  “Aileikom salaam.”