The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  She turned in time to see Foreman in his waiter’s garb, his bow tie crooked on his long neck, hurrying toward them. Liz’s left hand hesitated above the green screen of the palm reader, a book-sized device mounted by the door to the glass room, her own ID card ready in her right. She slipped the edge of the ID card into the card reader.

  The lights went out. The guests cooed and turned to face the candle-bright cake that appeared in the doorway at the opposite end of the room. Liz pressed her hand to the screen and watched a small red light turn to green. She heard the click of the electronic latch. Svengrad was now pressed up against her, physically contacting her.

  “Wait!” Foreman called, still a few steps off.

  The room was all ghostly shadows and cutout silhouettes, the only light from EXIT SIGNS and the distant glow of the cake visible in the reflection off the door’s security glass. A smaller image appeared behind Foreman’s tall silhouette. “Agent Foreman,” the female voice said, “Detective Gaynes, SPD. You’re interfering with a surveillance op.”

  Liz used the distraction to pop open the door and slip inside, but with Svengrad immediately behind her and coming through as well. She turned quickly and bumped the man out of the way and hurried to push the door shut. A satisfying click rang out just as Foreman turned from Gaynes and lunged for the door. The thick glass muted whatever Foreman said to the detective, but even in the limited light, Liz saw his fury.

  Liz hurried to the door of the neighboring server room, got it open, and turned to pull Svengrad through behind her just as the overhead lights switched back on. A dull electric hum filled the room. The server was a brushed, dark gray. It looked much bigger close up than she remembered. She went to work immediately, having no idea how much fuss Danny Foreman might make, how much trouble he might cause her. She dropped the manila envelope on the floor, slipping the optical disk it contained into the server, grateful that such operations required little of the operator. The disk auto-loaded. A few small lights on the server flashed, and Liz intently watched the screen, awaiting its instruction to input the wire information.

  INPUT

  USER ID:

  PASSWORD:

  This was her moment. Without her, the server would not permit access. Lou had been clear about how to play this moment, and she rose to what she considered the most important performance of her lifetime.

  “Without me, this doesn’t happen,” she told Svengrad.

  “You didn’t go to all this trouble just to change your mind.”

  “The video.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “Yes, I will,” she said. “And you will have your company back and your passport reauthorized when I do.”

  “What’s this?”

  “From my husband. Quid pro quo. You understand Latin, Mr. Svengrad? He said to tell you that he talked the government into releasing your product. But he also had INS make your passport invalid for travel outside the country. It all depends on the return of the tape.”

  “Enter your password,” he said.

  Lou had stepped her through this carefully, believing the conversation would take place over the phone. In person, she found it much more difficult to say it with conviction.

  “Your company and your freedom for that tape,” she said. “Your word on it.”

  “My word,” he said. She didn’t believe him.

  Lou had insisted she bargain with Svengrad, despite her repeated arguments that he held all the cards. “It’s complicated,” had been Lou’s reply, who went on to say he couldn’t tell her everything that was in play.

  She typed in her user ID, and then her password, which appeared as a series of asterisks.

  Svengrad pushed her out of the way and sat down in the chair, and Liz did not attempt to fight him. She told him, “I was going to use whatever account information you gave me. You could have trusted that.”

  Svengrad watched the screen as various commands were announced and small graphs, indicating loading time, moved like the mercury in a thermometer, marking progress. He said only, “This is better.”

  One of the loading instructions caught her eye-an account number she recognized-and for the first time she understood what David had done to hide the money. Brilliant, she almost said aloud.

  Finally the screen they had both awaited presented itself, a preprogrammed menu offering wire transfer options. Svengrad instructed her to stand back from him. He slipped out a piece of paper, pulled the keyboard into his lap, leaning over it, and carefully input the information into the machine. She wondered if he knew about the camera looking down from above, or if his instincts were nothing more than blind luck. Either way, she thought he’d probably used Hayes’s know-how to cut off the surveillance. The entire process passed quickly. Liz marveled that all these weeks of agony had culminated in a few keystrokes and no more than a couple minutes of time.

  Svengrad hit the ENTER key. The screen hesitated, then delivered a graphic announcing the transfer was complete. “Done,” he said, looking at Liz with a triumphant look.

  Lou had fed her several lines, making her repeat them carefully, on the off chance Svengrad left the phone line open as he gave her wiring instructions. She said them now. “Yes, well… I, for one, never trust David when it comes to his programming.” Svengrad’s triumph suffered a momentary twitch of concern. “You and I saw that money get wired. For your sake, I hope it goes where you think it’s going.”

  “David Hayes knows better than to cross me.”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  The screen indicated the drive was “REFORMATTING.” David had programmed the disk to erase itself and all traces of the transaction after the wire transfer was complete.

  “Looks like he thought of everything,” Liz said, moving to the door ahead of Svengrad, who took a moment too long to come out of the chair. She pushed through to the sister server room and quickly out the secure door back into the office area, Svengrad now right behind her.

  Danny Foreman and Gaynes watched them, Danny fuming, but to Liz’s surprise, he stepped aside and allowed room for them to pass. Gaynes, who held Danny by the elbow, never took her eyes off Foreman. Lou had explained to Liz that Danny’s motivations were in question, and it seemed possible that in these few minutes, Gaynes had given him a choice of options.

  Liz had nothing to say to Danny Foreman. She wanted her children back home and, at the very least, the semblance of an ordinary life returned. She wanted out of this party, out of this building, and nothing more than to be home in bed, though she knew it could not possibly be that simple for her.

  Gaynes said, “Whatever you did in there… Security crashed. Special Ops is on their way up. Foreman and I are going to try the stairs. You, Mr. Svengrad, I would suggest should return to the party. You try to leave now, they’ll question you. Mrs. B., it’s you they’re after, I’m afraid. It helps us all if you can delay them a little.”

  Liz nodded. The group broke up as Phillip approached.

  “Mr. Svengrad,” the CEO said in his best host voice. He didn’t look comfortable all of a sudden. “I see you’ve met Elizabeth!”

  “Yes,” Svengrad said. “She was just explaining some of the complications of the switchover to me,” he said, eyeing Liz. “Quite impressive.”

  Phillip eyed Liz and looked into the server room. There was no telling what might become of her when suspicions and the inevitable interviews began. Phillip stepped closer to Liz, throwing an arm around her. “Hell of a party, Liz. Well done.” He looked at Svengrad. “You have any more questions, Mr. Svengrad, why don’t you address them to me.”

  At that moment, four undercover detectives rushed from an elevator, turning the heads of many in attendance.

  Liz felt choked with emotion when she saw Lou among them, his eyes searching the room and finding her. He then registered Svengrad’s presence as well and a triumphant look overcame him. Proud. Defiant.

  “What’s this?” Phillip asked,
looking suspiciously at Liz.

  “This…,” Liz said. “This is my husband.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  LIZ AND BOLDT STOOD INSIDE the front door of their home, LaMoia’s Jetta parked and running at the curb. It was five in the morning, a pale hinting of the sunrise rimmed the horizon. They’d both been up all night, she in debriefings with Special Ops, Boldt writing a report that was mostly lies.

  “I told them exactly how David did it,” Liz explained. “He split the money into tens of thousands of tiny amounts-a few cents, a few dollars-and tacked those amounts onto trades as Securities and Exchange Commission fees. It worked because the SEC account is one of only a very few accounts that we don’t audit unless the government files a complaint. David kept the funds moving through the system, these tiny amounts charged as SEC trading fees, impossible for us to connect or follow. Only the software knew where that money was on any given day. My guess is that at the end of the quarter, just as the SEC fee funds were about to be wired to Washington, the seventeen million was collected into the SEC fee account we hold for the government, giving David a chance to ‘find’ it”-she drew the quotes-“and wire it out. It would be safe there for a few weeks, a few months, even years. He got locked up, and it just stayed in the system, looping around, impossible for our auditors to identify. The merger meant our SEC account would be closed, the balance paid-all this happens invisibly and automatically each quarter, the government being paid what it’s owed-but the merger forced him to wire the money out or lose it forever. The government would have eventually reported the overage, and maybe then we’d have finally figured it out.”

  Boldt said, “They could only grab the seventeen million four times a year.”

  “I’m guessing. Yes. He wouldn’t have wanted it to be lumped together for very long, nor very often. Auditors might have spotted that, though even that’s doubtful. The whole purpose was to keep it moving.”

  “And no one reported the incorrect SEC charges on their statements?”

  “How many investors are going to question a few cents more on an SEC trading fee that’s a charge they probably don’t pay attention to anyway? He did the smart thing: He hid that money out in the open.” She changed the subject, asking, “What do you do if he doesn’t give you the tape?”

  “John has one of his wild ideas. He’s been studying terrorist technologies for the past two weeks and, typical of him, has ‘borrowed’ a device.”

  “You’ll be careful.”

  It was a sentiment impossible for her not to express, but Boldt wished she hadn’t. He didn’t want to think of this upcoming meeting as dangerous, though he knew otherwise. Judging by Svengrad’s tone of voice, he had already been hit with the surprise. Boldt’s mission was to deflect and redirect the blame.

  “It’s more ridiculous than dangerous,” he said of LaMoia’s idea.

  “You’ll have backup?”

  “Speaking the lingo now?”

  “I’m a fast learner,” she said, “and don’t avoid the question.”

  “Not officially, no,” he told her honestly. “That would mean answering all sorts of questions at some point, questions you and I don’t want to answer.”

  “Forget that,” she said. “I’d rather answer questions, pay a fine, go to jail, than be stupid about this.”

  “John will be there. Outside. He’ll call for backup if needed. It’s a meeting is all,” he said, trying to reassure her. “We expected this.” He corrected himself, “I expected this.”

  “It’s not worth it, Lou.”

  “It is,” he said. “It’s very much worth it.”

  “Not if you’re at risk.”

  “It’s not like that. Honestly. If I thought it was, I wouldn’t do this. He’s not going to arrange a meeting if he plans on torturing me; his goons are going to bust in here and do it. He has questions. That’s all.”

  “We gave him his money. He should be happy.”

  “Absolutely,” Boldt said, trying to keep the lie out of his eyes. “Maybe he wants to thank me.”

  She leveled a look onto him, and he knew then that she knew. He saw the first twinges of realization sink into her. “What did you do?” She closed her eyes, then looked at him fiercely. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”

  The trouble with marriage was that all that familiarity, the years of arguments and discussions, of practical jokes and conspiracies, meant that one’s barriers became invisible to the spouse, easily penetrated. Liz looked through him and read his thoughts effortlessly.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “You conned a con man? Lou? Speak to me!”

  “I followed my conscience on this one.”

  “It was all done, Lou. We did it. Over! The children,” she pleaded, as either her concern or her anger glassed her eyes.

  “Exactly,” Boldt said. “I’m not saying I did anything, but if I did, I did it for the children. No lies, right?” This had been their mutual agreement going into parenthood, to lead by example. The comment struck deeper, as he knew it would. They’d been living nothing but lies for too long, and for him this was a fresh start instead of a continuation.

  He kissed her good-bye without saying anything more. He had no sense that he was heading into anything more dangerous than on any other day of work. A meeting was all. She accompanied him to the front door. An unmarked police car still watched the house. Boldt hoped this meeting with Svengrad might end the need for such precautions.

  She touched him once lightly on the arm as he opened the door. The tenderness of that gesture cut him to his core and he felt emotions ripple through him. He had explanations for everything he’d done, for what he was about to do, but they would have to go unspoken. He hoped they might go unspoken for a very long time. He smiled at her and let her shut the door behind him.

  “Drive,” he said, and LaMoia pulled the Jetta away from the curb and out onto the street.

  Boldt looked into the empty backseat.

  “It’s in the trunk,” LaMoia said. “Thing’s about the size of a microwave oven.”

  Boldt shook his head.

  LaMoia said, “I’m telling you, Sarge, it works great.”

  “Forget it, okay?”

  “No way! You gotta let me do this. If nothing else we put this guy back into the Stone Age. Every computer, every phone, every disk, every tape, zeroed.”

  He’d explained it to Boldt in trying to sell him on the idea. The box in the car’s trunk emitted an electromagnetic pulse, essentially a blast of radio waves that rearranged any magnetic charge. The military had been developing the technology for years-first discovered as a side effect of an atomic blast, a pulse of energy that, while not radioactive, interrupted and defeated anything with a memory chip. The technology remained fairly bulky and heavy, still too conspicuous to be smuggled onto an airplane, though this and other uses were believed possible prospects for terrorists down the road.

  “I think we’ll do this the old-fashioned way,” Boldt said. “Leave James Bond for the movies.” He added, “I’m going to talk to him. That’s all.”

  “He’ll never give you back that tape.”

  “Probably not.”

  “All I do is plug the thing in and turn it on. It uses the wiring in the building like a huge antenna. The pulse-a radio wave-goes down that wiring, and like an antenna, anything within fifteen to twenty feet of any wall, that means anything plugged in or not, is zapped. Bam! Erased. Zeroed. It’s fucking phenomenal. Cell phones, pagers, calculators. In your pocket. In a chair. Even inside a safe. Refrigerators have memory chips in them. Did you know that?”

  “I think we’ll leave his refrigerators alone this time.”

  “No matter what he tells you, he’s going to keep a copy of the tape. You said so yourself. Then he’s got his finger on you. He owns you, Sarge.”

  Boldt shot his sergeant a look. He didn’t like this talked about in that way.

  “This thing will erase it. It’s magnetic. Anything and everything
in that building gets erased. Doesn’t matter where it is. Zap! Fried tomatoes.”

  “We’ll do this my way,” Boldt said.

  “That’s fine, Sarge. But if I find an outside outlet, I’m popping the trunk and plugging this thing in. My suggestion is: Leave your cell phone in the car.”

  Boldt knew he meant well, and initially he’d even supported the idea because the effectiveness of the technology sounded convincing. But if the contraption worked-and he was beginning to think it might-he thought it unwise to be meeting with Svengrad when tragedy struck. He explained this to LaMoia and saw the man’s enthusiasm sink.

  LaMoia dropped Boldt off outside the corrugated steel warehouse and wished him luck. Boldt did, in fact, carry his cell phone, and it was set to dial LaMoia’s phone with two pushes of the same button. Boldt would hold his hand on that phone in his coat pocket, ready to call the cavalry if needed. Although LaMoia’s instructions were to call for backup and to wait until it arrived, Boldt knew he’d never wait. That was fine with him.

  Yasmani Svengrad sat behind his desk in the office area built into the refrigerated warehouse space. Boldt saw two other guys, one of them Alekseevich, who looked a shade paler than when Boldt had last seen him. Neither man made so much as a gesture that might telegraph their prior introduction. Boldt had been searched, his weapon and his cell phone temporarily confiscated, his plan to signal LaMoia disrupted. The magazine had been removed from his weapon, which now sat useless next to his phone at the far corner of the large desk. Boldt kept his eye on the phone. If he dived for it, he might be able to get the signal off.

  Boldt sat down in a chair this time, not waiting for an invitation.

  “Where is it?” Svengrad asked. He’d trimmed his beard recently, possibly for the reception, now less than twenty-four hours behind them.

  “Where is what?” One of any cop’s most practiced skills was the art of lying. Interrogations required hours of playing straight-faced to the most challenging situation. Boldt knew he excelled at such subterfuge, confident that he could go one-on-one with the most heinous murderer. For all his experience as a military man, Yasmani Svengrad was out of his league.