by Jeanne Adams
“What have we got?” she heard Dav ask and had to stifle a gasp when she cleared the doors and saw the setup. Four computers hummed on the table, a world map hung on the wall with photos of the artwork tagged to their cities of origin and a secondary line running to the terminus city where the fraud was discovered. On a parallel board, there were pages taped together listing artwork sold at the same time that was authentic, untainted.
“Gates didn’t have much else to do, these last two days while I was in meetings,” Dav said at her elbow, as Alexia appeared as well, handing her the distinctive sleeved cup from Starbucks.
“Thanks. Yeah, I’ll say.”
“Pick a seat,” Dav said. “Alexia will order us some lunch, yes?”
Ana sat down. She chose a position at the nearest terminal, watching the data that was scrolling there. On the next laptop over, an algorithm sped equations across the screen. She recognized it as a variation of the search parameters she and Gates had worked out, but couldn’t decipher what data sets it was comparing.
She couldn’t see the third, but when she turned, she saw him. Gates stood in the doorway that led to the back of the suite. He hadn’t shaved this morning, she decided, but otherwise, he looked dramatically better than the last time she’d seen him. He was moving carefully, one hand trailing on the wall.
“Hello, Gates,” she said, staying in her seat for fear that her legs wouldn’t hold her if she tried to stand.
“Don’t spill that coffee on my keyboard,” he said, moving forward to grip the back of the chair nearest the door, four down from where she was sitting. “I hate it when that happens.”
Dav was right, he was cranky. At least he was trying for a smile.
“Thank you, everyone,” Dav said, motioning the others to leave. Once again, Ana envied his ability to command the room. “Get some sleep, Gates?” Dav continued, speaking to Gates now.
“Yeah, no thanks to you,” he growled.
“Sit down before you fall down, idiot,” Dav snapped, sitting down on the opposite side of the table from both Ana and Gates. “Enough of this posturing.”
Gates bared his teeth, looking for all the world like a wounded lion, but he complied, sinking into the chair he’d been holding. The three chairs separating them along the side of the table could have been an inch apart or a mile. Gates wasn’t giving anything away.
Dav muttered under his breath, something about fools and small children. She remembered her Greek nanny saying the same thing when she’d done something particularly dangerous or foolhardy.
“Gates.” She brought his full attention her way, though he was still shooting irritated looks at Dav. “You said you knew who instigated the deep search. Who did it?”
“I don’t know who, precisely, but I dug out the origin. Your building, then bounced to Oregon as a final destination.”
“Perkins,” she said, immediately. “And Hines. That bastard.”
“Agency?” Dav said, reading her fury right. It was bad enough to have to fight the bad guys, but to have to fight your own was torture.
“Yeah. I have to call this in, let my Special Agent know.”
“Pretzky? Isn’t she a little low-rank for that kind of intel?” Gates sniped.
Ana didn’t go for the bait. He was taunting her, trying to piss her off so she’d treat him like dirt. It would be his way of keeping her away from him.
Some time in the night, or on her trip from DC to New York, she’d figured it out. He’d sent her away. He’d decided it was too dangerous to have her with him.
Two could play that game.
“She ranks me,” Ana said, her phone already in hand. “Which is where I have to start. I overstepped my wingman once, and two people died for it. I won’t do it again.”
That shut him up. He and Dav exchanged troubled looks, but she ignored them both.
“Burton? What’s the sit-rep?” Pretzky asked.
“I’m with Mr. G and Gates Bromley. Did you get my text?”
“Got it. You need to check your e-mail. You’ve had incomings popping up every minute for the last twenty.”
Why had Pretzky been in her cubicle, or monitoring her e-mail?
“No time for that,” she said, yanking her yellow pad out of her briefcase, fumbling for a pen. Dav leaned across the table and handed her a gold fountain pen. “Efharisto,” she said. Thank you.
He nodded in answer, then braced his elbows on the table to try to follow her conversation.
She took notes as she talked, following her own steps on paper as she spoke. “Hines is a mole.”
“Hines?” Pretzky repeated.
“One of the original agents on the case. You got the copy of my notes? Yeah. First page. The two original agents were McGuire and Hines, out of DC. You can call McGuire in New Orleans; he’s retired. He’s the righteously pissed member of the team, and he’s already had an attempted hit.” Ana waited out the storm of protest that came from Pretzky, noted the grim look Gates and Dav exchanged.
“Yes,” she continued. “Hines is the mole. McGuire’ll fill you in. Yes. I talked to him last night. That’s when he told me some bully-boys showed up to go for him.” She waited out Pretzky’s exclamation and complaint that Ana hadn’t put that in her e-mail. “The guy’s a tough nut. Took one out with a head shot. The other’s in the hospital, but not talking. McGuire wouldn’t rat his former partner, but when I told him I couldn’t get a hold of Hines, he indicated that I’d better find him. So, Hines is Oregon. Mr. Bromley tells me the data search origin is from our building with a bounce to Oregon. We’re running with the theory that Hines is the one who yanked my data chain, possibly using that dead guy from IT, Perkins.”
It was starting to come together.
Pretzky asked several questions, but the one Ana answered was about whether she’d begun hunting Hines’s sorry ass to prep it for a good whipping. “I figured I’d start that this morning, with gusto, but when I got to my meeting with Mr. G and Bromley, their data added fuel to the fire.”
“Wait, wait,” Pretzky said, and Ana heard her flipping notes. “Did you report that, the deep search?”
Crap. Had she? “I believe it’s in my notes, Special Agent, but I’m not sure how extensive my profile was. At the time, I never considered that it might be one of ours. Or how it might tie into the case. I considered it peripheral.”
Gates chuckled, and she glared at him. Dav was smiling as well. They knew she’d suspected Gates had done the search.
“Hell, I don’t think there are any coincidences at this point, Agent. We’ve got news on this end too.”
Ana waited for the other shoe to drop, and it did.
“Davis is compromised.”
“The files. My notes,” Ana snapped, now understanding the extent of the problem, why she’d been unable to get ahead of things.
“Exactly,” Pretzky replied, and her voice told Ana how pissed she was.
TJ typed as fast as he could, sending e-mail after e-mail. He wasn’t sure how much time he had left before D’Onofrio found him. He knew now that the man was hiding his identity in the families TJ had been watching. He’d been watching Ana on the West Coast, stalking her.
“I didn’t make the connection, damn it,” he cursed, wondering why. Someone on the inside, someone in the Agency had blocked information. He was afraid he’d missed something and knew now how Ana had felt in Rome. He realized how badly he’d fucked everything up. If he got out of this alive, he’d do time, but that was a small matter now.
“Doesn’t matter now,” he muttered, typing as fast as he could. If he could get everything out, everything on paper, so to speak, maybe Ana could sort it out. Using linked computers, he sent both Wi-Fi and hardwire in case anyone was smart enough to jam the wireless. He sent copies to every e-mail he had, every one he’d registered with the Agency, every one of Ana’s that he knew, both Agency and private. He hard-saved everything on the computer to a thumb drive with every stroke of the keys.
A,
this is the last thing. You were right about Colvos in Rome. He was getting inside data. It was from me. I didn’t know I was giving it to him. I thought I was giving it to Interpol Italia. He had IEC credentials, he checked out with our local contacts. When everything went down, he disappeared. It was as if he never existed.
I tracked him to the US, to White Plains, New York. He skirted around, but he’s here, pretending to be a family man, pretending to—
He heard them coming and hit SEND, jerking the small portable drive out of the machine as the door to the low-rent hotel burst inward. His laptop exploded in the hail of bullets, and his heart did too.
Dropping the miniscule USB device into his pants as he went down, he felt the cold hand of death sweep over him.
His last thought was of Ana.
Chapter Eighteen
“Pretzky’s on her way,” Ana said as she hung up. “They’re sending two additional agents up from DC as well.”
“What, none in the Big Apple, twiddling their collective thumbs just waiting to help out?” Gates’s comment was snarky and mean. He seemed to regret it, adding, “Then again, nothing in this whole affair has been easy. Why would there be extra manpower here in the city where it’s needed?”
As peace offerings went, it sucked, but she’d take it. “Tell me about it,” she muttered and saw Gates smile. “NYC detail has their hands full with a bunch of other operations.” She waited a heartbeat for any further comments. When none came, she decided she should be asking some questions. “So what is all this?” She waved toward the walls.
“You mean my brainstorming?” Gates said with self-deprecating humor.
“Yeah,” Ana said, pivoting in her chair to look around the walls. “There’s a lot of it.”
“Start at the beginning, Gates,” Dav said, and it sounded more like an order than a request. A flush darkened Gates’s face, but he complied.
“The map was Dav’s idea. A graphic representation of all the pieces we knew about, as well as the two extras.”
“You’re missing the five from Florida,” she said, moving around the table to put markers on Miami, using the bright pink Post-it markers to point northward to New York. “They all came here, to Moroni.”
“Where’d they go from there?” Gates asked, hands poised over the keyboard in front of his chair.
“Berlin.”
“Pratch.” Gates and Dav said the name together. Gates entered the data in the first computer and scooted the chair down to add the list to the running program on the computer next to her. She was dying to know what that one was doing.
“Exactly,” Ana said, watching closely to see if she could decipher his program by his entry vectors. “Here’s the other bit of data you probably don’t have. They found Pratch’s remains.”
Dav made a low sound, and she saw his lips move, perhaps in prayer. She knew he was Greek Orthodox, when he practiced. “Rest his soul. I didn’t like him,” Dav added. “But the woman I mentioned—”
“Fraulein Messer.” Ana supplied the name of the woman he’d told her about early on, the one he’d returned one painting to.
“Liza,” Dav agreed. “She knew Pratch well. He was related by marriage, which was why she did business with him. Does she know?”
“I’m not sure, but in this case, I’d ask that you don’t contact her just yet. Obviously someone’s still monitoring a lot of the pieces of this puzzle, or people wouldn’t be shooting at us,” she said smiling, actually feeling the humor of the whole crazy situation. “One of the things Pretzky said,” she held up her phone, indicating her boss. “Was that an agent in the cold case office is compromised as well.”
“Wonder when you’ll find his body,” Gates muttered. He saw her quick frown, and realized how that might have sounded. “Sorry,” he apologized. “But this is getting ugly. There are already what, four bodies on this deal?”
“Officially, five. However, I think it’s at least seven.”
“Seven?” Gates paused, then tapped the keys on the third computer. “Let’s have it,” he said, his mouth set in a grim line.
“Put them up on the map,” Dav suggested. “Here—” He handed over more Post-its in a different color.
Using Dav’s elegant pen she wrote down the names. “There were two victims in New York. One was associated with the Moroni Gallery. A clerk, for all anyone could figure out. No one that important, in the scheme of things.” She wrote down the woman’s name, Colleen St. John, and posted it by the city. “She was tortured.”
She printed the second name. “The second body was Nathan Rikes, small-time thief, bag man, and general petty criminal. There was nothing to tie him to the crimes, nothing to tie him to Colleen, but he was found with her, dead the same way. Also tortured.”
She stuck the second name up and moved to the left side of the map. “The two here, in San Francisco, were killed execution style. Clean and simple. No torture.”
Posting the names of Keith Griffin and Rod Atwell, she continued near the Bay Area. Next, she wrote down both Kelly Dodd and Luke Gideon’s names, but didn’t put them up. She looked at Dav, trying to decide how to phrase her request.
“What?” Dav said, noticing her obvious pause.
“I need to ask you not to say anything about one of the next names I’m putting up. I have no proof that this is connected. Just a…hunch, a feeling.”
“Data’s data,” Gates said, looking puzzled. “Put it up, we’ll sort out whether it belongs.”
“Why do you hesitate, Ana-aki?” Dav asked. His tone was all business, but she saw that his hands were clenched on the arms of the chair.
“It’s Luke Gideon,” Ana said, slowly. Watching Dav. “Carrie McCray’s husband.”
“You think he was involved?” Gates stopped keyboarding and looked over.
“I don’t know, but there were only two fraudulent deliveries from Prometheus after his death. Six prior to that, two of which were to you,” she reminded Dav.
“Poor Carrie,” Dav said, showing where his allegiance lay. “Do you think she knew?”
Ana wanted to say no, but at this point, no avenue was closed and she said so. “I hope not, but,” she shrugged. “It’s not off the table.”
“It is, for me.” Dav was firm on that point, but he looked her way, managed a less belligerent demeanor. “I understand why you need to keep it in mind, however.”
Gates said nothing, but he looked thoughtful. When he wasn’t snarking, or asking questions, he was watching her with an intensity that was beginning to make her twitchy.
“The seventh?” Dav asked, obviously wanting to move on.
“Pratch, of course,” Ana said, sticking up another Post-it. “When he went missing, and was presumed dead, his connection to most of the paintings was thrust into the forefront. While he’s a prime suspect in the whole thing, I think someone went to a lot of trouble to make Pratch look more guilty, more involved than he was. I’ll know more when we can get the report from our German counterparts, find out if they can tell how he died, when, and more importantly where he was found and how.”
“What about the Moroni people?” Gates asked.
“I don’t know, Gates,” she admitted. “Part of me thinks I should add Nils Lundgren, one of the Moroni buyers, to the list of possible bodies; part of me wonders if he’s the mastermind.
“Add him for now to the body count,” Gates said, decisively. “Let’s see what falls out. He’s missing, so that’s a data point.”
“True. He didn’t go missing till weeks later, though,” she pointed out, sticking Lundgren’s name on the wall. “Neither did Shelby Waters, his gallery manager.”
“Did they disappear at the same time?”
Ana didn’t remember and said so. “Hang on, I’ll look it up.” She unpacked her laptop, booted it up. When the data came up, she read off the info. “Nils was reported missing by his landlord six weeks after the gallery closed, which was two weeks after the investigation turned up their involvement. He
hadn’t paid his rent.”
“Date?” Gates demanded.
She rattled it off and continued. “Shelby Waters was reported missing sooner, only three weeks after the investigation, one week after the gallery closed.”
“Six confirmed, two more suspected,” Gates said. “Whoever this is, they’re not afraid to get their hands dirty. Hang on a sec,” he said, and his fingers flew over the keys. “There’s a gap in the pattern on the dates,” he declared. Gates plugged the laptop he was using into a projector, displaying the data on the cream-colored wall. “See? The dates for the two torture murders in New York are the first, then the Moroni people disappear. If Luke Gideon’s a factor, he’s next, see?” He pointed toward the screen, where the dates now appeared on a calendar page, the graphic lending credence to his theory. “The other California killings don’t take place for at least a month after the New York murders, and there isn’t any torture.”
“Different killer? Different hire?” she offered. “I’ve been wondering that for a while. Such different styles.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they got the information they needed from the tortures. They just needed to get rid of the other people who knew about the con.”
An idea occurred to her, and she rounded the table to her laptop to do some key-punching of her own. Icons at the bottom of her screen flashed a fast green. She had incoming e-mail on four different addresses. Probably Jen, she decided, setting it aside for a minute as she brought up more info. She needed to look at those. If what she suspected about D’Onofrio was correct, he might be involved in all this mess. She hated to burst Jen’s bubble about Millionaire Jack, but she was afraid he wasn’t really named Jack, or a magazine mogul.
The thought that it might be TJ, finally answering her e-mails, also crossed her mind, but Gates was asking a question and it distracted her.
“Got another idea?” he asked. “What are we factoring in?”