The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “Don’t make that call,” he said abruptly. “Not if you want to retain a shred of self-respect. I shared Krane’s report with the Board an hour ago. I’ve received full support for your resignation.”

  She stared at him, aghast.

  “And that’s what I’m demanding, Stefani.” His voice was suddenly clipped, the skin taut across the planes of his narrow face. “You’ve played the princess too long. You flaunt your money, you talk a crock of sunshine, but you’re not worth the desk space we give you, little girl. Resign within the hour or I fire your ass tonight.”

  He turned on his heel. The entire group of traders— twenty-three people in all—had risen from their seats and were gawking at Stefani’s face. She had gone pale with rage. She picked up a glass paperweight—a Steuben rock with a silver sword thrust through its middle—and hurled it at Hayes’s retreating form. Somebody in the outer room ducked.

  She collected the scattered Bergdorf’s bags, stepped over the paperweight lying like so much crushed ice on the industrial carpet, and went.

  It was inevitable that one of the traders would talk. Traders live for the few moments of high drama in each boredom-riven day; they snort gleefully over the bones and flesh scattered across the corporate field. By the time she had dumped her clothes at the co-op, squeezed in a workout, changed for the evening and swished some Scotch around her mouth, the buzz had hit the street.

  The party she planned to attend that night—a celebratory launch at the Plaza for some dot-com’s IPO—was filled with guys in business suits who’d done well at school and risen fast, the safe models patterned on Sterling Hayes. There were a few visionaries, too, in charcoal turtlenecks and wide pleated pants, flown in from the Pacific Northwest. A scattering of women correctly suited in jackets and skirts to the knee. Stefani wore a sleeveless sheath the color of paprika. It outlined every vertebra and muscle of her body.

  Half the heads turned as she appeared in the doorway; most eyes lingered. The hum of conversation faltered, then resurged more firmly than before. She scooped a drink from a passing tray and wove her way into the room.

  Some of them were polite and approached by the back door: How is FundMarket, Stefani? Tired of Galileo? Any thought of a change? She laughed uproariously and told them lies. She threw her arms around mere acquaintances, stepped on too many feet, spilled a drink down a currency trader’s blouse, slid her hand into a distinguished banker’s pocket. She swayed and guffawed and called Sterling Hayes every kind of insult, to anyone who would listen; and when enough time had passed and the room had cleared an arc around her tidal wake, she found herself face to face with the man himself.

  He was standing next to Oliver Krane.

  “Ah, Stefani,” Hayes said. “Enjoying your newfound freedom? Perhaps you should thank Mr. Krane.”

  Stefani tossed the last of her Scotch into Oliver’s face.

  She had no friend to take her by the arm and haul her into a bathroom. No man to carry her home in his polished black Audi. No one in the entire room who cared about her enough to protect her from herself, or from the Wall Street Journal reporter covering the event. By the time the management called a taxi and ladled her into the backseat, Stefani Fogg had committed suicide in public several times over. No one waved as the car pulled away.

  On her doorstep twelve minutes later, she found a pint of her favorite Italian gelato—hazelnut—misting gently in dry ice.

  Bravo, ducks, applauded Oliver’s note.

  He’d tucked it into a first-class ticket for Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic, with a connecting flight to Inverness. She glanced at her watch. She had barely fourteen hours before takeoff.

  And then, because she had paid a fortune for the coop and all the privileges that went with it—because she was free of Sterling Hayes and FundMarket and Galileo—she threw the terrace door wide open and screamed good riddance to Manhattan from the balcony’s ledge, forty-three stories above the street.

  She settled down in front of the VCR with a videotape Oliver had sent her—old Olympic footage of Max Roderick—and the pint of gelato. She felt like she was back in grad school; but homework had never been this much fun.

  “… the determination to succeed is a constant spur to this young man who has survived the worst that life can deliver: the loss of his Navy pilot father to the Vietnam War when he was barely eight years old, and then the death of his mother, Anne, two years later—a victim of alcohol and drug abuse. If the young Max Roderick was scarred by loneliness, he hid it well—driving himself relentlessly down the toughest courses in the United States and Europe at an age when other boys are busy learning to drive …”

  The image was seductive: a slow-motion arc of body and steel gliding effortlessly along the fall line of a crystalline slope at Albertville. The 1992 Olympics. On this practice run staged for the American viewing audience, Max wore no helmet. His golden head glinted in the sunlight, and as he vaulted through the starting gate he seemed transported, as though this precipitous flight was all he needed of heaven and earth. The sonorous voice of the background narration struck just the right note: Max Roderick was noble, Max Roderick had survived unimaginable pain—Max Roderick was the supreme gift his generation could offer the world.

  Max Roderick, just possibly, was a killer.

  Stefani fast-forwarded to a section of the tape that showed Max at rest—munching on an apple in his coach’s kitchen, joking with the man the network called his surrogate father. He must then have been thirty years old; he looked like a fresh-faced kid, the eyes clear and light, the profile predatory as a hawk’s. Taut, honed, purposeful, ingenuous, in his fleece sweatshirt and jeans. Everybody’s All-American.

  “… Joe DiGuardia practically raised Max Roderick from the time the young ski phenomenon entered his Lake Tahoe program in 1966. DiGuardia, who took bronze at Lake Placid in the Men’s Downhill, is a tough and uncompromising master—but he loves Roderick like a son.”

  Cut to Joe DiGuardia swearing viciously at a figure half obscured by dense snowfall and a starting gate. DiGuardia carefully waxing a pair of skis. DiGuardia hugging Max at the Innsbruck finish.

  And then, replayed for all time on the eternal screen, the Men’s Downhill: Sarajevo.

  His frame was whipcord taut, powerfully muscled, bent into a punishing crouch as he hurtled over the ice-covered course in the red, white and blue Lycra racing suit. He caught air at the summit of one slope, took the most punishing curve at top speed, nearly lost an edge. The commentators gasped. Stefani gasped with them. She knew the end of this story—she knew the end of all Max’s famous races—but still, the pure drama held her. The single man plummeting down the sheet of ice as though intent on suicide. The precision. The control. The ruthlessness in every line of his body.

  “And that,” she breathed, as Roderick crossed the finish line and raised his arms in triumph, “is all that really matters. That’s what your body reveals. You’ll stop at nothing to get what you need.”

  * * *

  “It’s a minor problem in the scale of things,” Oliver Krane said thirty-six hours later, as he stood staring out at the rain sheeting down over Loch Lochy. “Max Roderick’s, I mean. A disputed inheritance. New will, old story; and the claim’s unlikelihood of success, given the Thai property laws.”

  He was studying the mist roiling off the lake. The brooding expression on his face was unexpected and thus unsettling. He was neat and compact in a cashmere polo and baggy flannel trousers, his hands thrust into the pockets. Heavy clouds had thrown a gloom over four o’clock tea; what Stefani hadn’t expected was the sudden blaze of sunlight that forked periodically through the leaden sky, firing the gorse and broom on the hills rising above the lake’s far shore. In those moments of illumination, every drop of water suspended in the molten air gleamed like an astral body.

  Oliver had met her at the airport that morning in the predictable Rover, a black one equipped with global positioning, a laptop with wireless e-mail and a sherry decanter. He had dri
ven south to Inverlaggan House, fed her smoked salmon and oat cakes, ordered her to rest for at least an hour and then had met her in the library. Her small frame was curled into a chesterfield, the brown suede boots discarded. She was suffused with well-being, exultant to the core; Oliver was still brooding.

  “Unless you’re born and bred a Thai, you can never really own anything in that country,” he told her. “Fixed assets, I mean. You only think you do. Just try carrying them across the border.”

  “So why did you take this matter on?”

  He shrugged.

  “Not good enough, ducks,” she mocked. “Put out or get out.”

  “Quoting the master already?” He glanced over his shoulder with the swift calculation she had come to think of as essentially Krane. “I should probably have passed, if you must know. But for the one thing.”

  “You wanted Roderick’s autograph?”

  Oliver snorted and moved away from the window. He fell into a chair drawn up near the fire, its leather worn to a temperate softness. Unlike the town house where they had eaten dinner or the corporate offices in the urban aerie, these rooms actually felt like they belonged to Oliver.

  “I’ve had a spot of trouble in Asia recently,” he replied. “An accidental death. Or perhaps I should call it unexplained.”

  “Someone you knew?” Stefani asked. A spate of rain dashed against the narrow windows.

  “A rogue, a deceiver, a friend and a silent partner. Harry Leeds. We were at school together, Harry and I. I won’t tell you which. We started Krane’s together: my brains—Harry’s bucks. There was a rough patch in the early days, when Harry was too much of a barrister and I, too much a beggar man thief; but by the time we were both thirty-five we’d settled our differences and pooled our winnings. Harry played godfather to my Hong Kong office, kept a string of polo ponies, clamped most of Asia under a network of spies and electronic surveillance for which he was exceedingly well paid, and asked nothing further from life. I stalked the rest of the world by turns, hired proxies in places I couldn’t be.”

  “Is Asia important to Krane’s?”

  The tawny gaze flicked over to hers. “It’s our bread and butter, darling. Every likely lad with tuppence in his pocket wants a piece of mainland China. Without Krane’s, they’d all be rooked inside of a fortnight. You can sell anything these days in Tiananmen Square-wireless phones, soda pop, a fresh-killed chicken or your youngest sister. Commerce thrives, there’s no police force to speak of and the law is entirely theoretical. But I stray from the point.”

  “Harry Leeds,” Stefani said gently.

  Oliver sighed. “When I first learned of Max Roderick’s problem—the dead whore ’twixt the bedsheets—it was through one of my clients, Piste Ski, the French company for whom Roderick designs his pricey little boards. Piste Ski was keen to learn whether Max Roderick was framed for murder. They suspected blackmail—debts-some sort of extortion. Although Max was never charged, Piste Ski was afraid of bad press and wanted the truth about our Olympic boy before his golden touch turned to lead.”

  “—Trust being a virtue the French hold in low esteem.” Stefani uncurled her legs from the chesterfield and crossed to the fruitwood commode where Oliver kept his single malts. “What did you discover?”

  “I nosed around Geneva first. Put my Swiss ears to the ground and loosed my trained dogs. I covered the police’s tracks and searched for anyone who might have seen Roderick with the dead girl. It never occurred to me, I will confess, that the entire hit was Thai. But inside of twenty-four hours, I heard the faintest whisper that someone might have financed the job out of Bangkok. So I contacted Harry.”

  Stefani turned and studied him intently. There was something in Oliver’s manner that suggested the confessional, as though all the blithe spirits and giddy talk of the past several weeks had been a type of mania designed to hold him back from the abyss. She remembered the elusive Catholic orphanage that had popped up in his background story. Had he often needed to invent a priest?

  “Of course you called Harry,” she said evenly. “It was the obvious thing to do.”

  Oliver was studying the flames with an absorption he usually reserved for golf magazines. “I sent Harry a report of the killing and subsequent investigation—mine, not the Swiss police’s—via secure fax. I know from the office logs that Harry received it. Four hours later he was lying dead under the front tires of a Kowloon taxi.”

  “Jaywalking?”

  Oliver’s caramel eyes skittered away from hers. “Harry never walked anywhere. His bloody great Jaguar was a point of pride. Symbol of Harry’s prestige. He was a Hong Kong taipan of the old order.”

  The Scotch felt like crushed velvet on her tongue. “And what did the police say?”

  “Something bland and polite and regretful and obscene,” Oliver muttered. “I do not accept it. I do not accept accident in my part of the world.”

  She set down the glass. The rain had settled in over the gorse and the milling sheep; rain spat and fizzled in the darting hearth. The early northern dark was falling.

  “You believe Harry was murdered because you queried him about Max Roderick? But he might have died for any number of reasons, Oliver. Gambling. Drugs. A man he shouldn’t have crossed. Or a woman. There must be things you didn’t know about him. There always are.”

  “Harry was no fool. He’d lived in Asia most of his life and he understood the risks of our job. At Krane’s we’re paid a hell of a lot of money to walk around with bull’s-eyes on our backs. We’ve got the world’s nasties in our sights, and they mean to take us out before we take them down. But in thirteen years of adventure and high jinks, old thing, Harry never once faltered the course. He was sublime.”

  And now the wind is whistling over your grave, Oliver Krane, and what worries you is your own fear.

  But instead she asked: “Did Harry know Max Roderick? Or anyone in the Roderick family?”

  “I have no idea. Harry’s lips, regrettably, are sealed.”

  “Have you told Roderick about Harry’s death?”

  “I chose,” Oliver replied with heavy emphasis, “to keep my cards close to my vest. The connection between the strangled whore and Harry’s hit-and-run exists, for the moment, only in my head.”

  So Oliver did not quite trust Max Roderick either.

  “Why was Harry in Kowloon that day?”

  He ran a hand over the back of his sleek head—a restless, futile gesture. “God alone knows. Presumably there was someone he wanted to collar—an informant, a friend. I imagine he was asked to meet there, on foot— and that’s the sort of mistake a novice would make, never Harry. Harry knew that when someone hands you a meeting, first thing you do is turn it inside out.”

  “But instead Harry went to Kowloon,” Stefani mused, “which means he was off-guard. He didn’t see trouble coming. He believed in the friend he was meeting.”

  “Right again.”

  “And you heard no more whispers out of Thailand?”

  “The trail, as they say in the best spaghetti westerns, has unaccountably gone cold.”

  “Except that Max has come to Krane’s for help, and you’re sending me to France. Where all the trails begin?”

  For the first time, Oliver smiled. “Bloody brilliant, Ms. Fogg. See why I wanted you for this job?”

  4

  They said nothing more about Max Roderick that evening and avoided the subject of him entirely the next day, because time was short and Oliver had a great deal to teach. There were the obvious things, like Krane & Associates’ operations worldwide, which Oliver summarized between brisk gallops through the fields of Inverlaggan House that first misty, exhilarating morning. He sat his mount with the incalculable air of having been born to a life of privilege that Stefani admired and deeply suspected was chicanery. He talked incessantly but to the purpose—imparting so much information, in fact, that she was glad she had tucked a voice-activated tape recorder in the pocket of her field jacket. She made no mention of
the device and had almost forgot it when, at the end of nearly two hours’ ramble amid the rowan-berries and the spear thistle, Oliver told her gently, “I’ll have that tape now, old thing, if you don’t mind. What you can’t remember don’t matter a fig; and homework never was your style.” He tossed the tape, recorder and all, far out into the lake and led her back to the house for breakfast.

  By lunch, she was swimming in detail. There were all the subtleties of forensic accounting and of hard-drive analysis and file retrieval—which she gathered were pet topics of Oliver’s and far too complex to master in a matter of hours. He threw them at her while they hunted for trout, adjusting the angle of her pole and advising her alternately on coarse fishing and sheltering assets.

  “If you’re in debt to the world and the world wants payment,” he advised, “have your best friend sue for a shocking amount. Better yet, have your ex-husband throw the book at you. Fail to answer the suit, and he’ll get a healthy default judgment. Then you file bankruptcy and the bulk of your liquidated estate goes to your detested former spouse. A few weeks later he’ll hand it all back as per your previous arrangement—minus a bagatelle of a handling fee. You shelter the remainder offshore. Brilliant little game, because it’s simple and goes almost unnoticed—except by those of us who think like the crooks do.”

  In between riding and fishing lay all the small matters Oliver was determined to teach her: how to search a room for bugs, a car for explosives or the exterior of a building for video surveillance. How to fire a handgun, which Stefani had never done in her life and hardly expected to enjoy so much; how to shoot a camera disguised as a cellular phone while poring over suspect documents. How to detect infrared barriers and circumvent the more predictable forms of electronic security systems. Over a smoky single malt in the fire-lit library one rainy afternoon, Oliver showed her how a hostile handshake could steal her identity across the Internet waves, and how to prevent it from happening in the future. He gave her phone numbers, security numbers and names in code: mental keys to a whole series of Krane’s rooms she might never unlock, with no notion of what lay behind their doors.