Make Them Sorry

by Sam Hawken

  Camaro returned to him. “He was a watcher. But he had skills. Those guns are for real.”

  “Yeah. I don’t recognize them. European?”

  “The rifle’s an APS-95. It’s Croatian. The pistol comes from Turkey.”

  “Croatian, huh? Don’t know if that fits what I got so far. Serafian has Armenian tattoos on him, and he has an Armenian name. He spoke another language during the attack.”

  “People who knew him say he had an accent,” Camaro said.

  Ignacio stood. He looked at her. “‘People’? You’ve been talking to people?”

  “There’s a guy in Liberty City who day-hires to pass out flyers and phone books…things like that. It’s how Serafian moved around without anybody noticing him. Once they got used to seeing him, he stopped even bothering.”

  “Oh, man, I really want to know about this guy. Maybe I would have let it go before, but there’s something happening. I talked to the FBI and DEA today. They’re both all over this.”

  “Why?”

  Ignacio’s face pinched. “I’m not sure how much I ought to tell you, what with you breaking and entering and God knows what else. This is the kind of thing that ends careers. You don’t make friends with people on the other side.”

  “Hey,” Camaro said. “I’m not on the other side. I’m on this side, with you. The same side Faith is on. This guy didn’t drop out of the sky, not with all this gear. If you’re talking to the feds, I know it’s something I need to hear about. For her.”

  He searched her face. He sighed. “I think Faith Glazer is in some serious shit, pardon my language. Money laundering at least. Maybe more. And before you get up in my business about it, I don’t know a lot. They told me some, but it’s not enough for me to build a solid case, if that’s the way I want to take it. The way these federal guys go, they’ll pull rank and before you know it you’re on something else because the old case is gone. I mean gone. It goes down a hole and never comes back up again.”

  “She’s a crook?”

  “I didn’t say that. But she has information, and the feds are gonna want to get it out of her. I’d like to get my piece, because I don’t like loose ends. Which means I can’t have you playing cowgirl and busting down doors and interrogating witnesses. That’s not how it’s done. You understand me?”

  Camaro bit back the first word that came to mind. “What do you want me to do?”

  “For right now? Go home and get back to doing whatever you were doing before. Visit Faith. Cheer her up. If I need you, I’ll ask for you.”

  “You’ll tell me what’s going on?”

  “How much do you really need to know?”

  “I put the gun in her hand,” Camaro said. “I’m the one she came to when no one else would help. This guy is dead, but if there’s another guy behind him, I want to know she’s safe from him, too.”

  Ignacio considered. She saw the thoughts play on his face. “All right, all right. I’ll keep you in the loop. But this is off the books. Way, way off the books. I don’t want to be pulling slugs out of people, okay? If somebody’s going to do any shooting, it’s gonna be me. I’m the law around here. You’re a civilian.”

  “Whatever you say, Detective.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  FAITH KNEW THEY were outside the door before they made a sound. She woke in her bed at the hospital, alert. It took a moment to orient herself in the half-light of the room. They’d removed the bandage from her left eye. It was still swollen, but she could see enough to know this was not her home. She was away from what had happened. The man was dead.

  A shadow passed over the slender window in the door. Bodies moving. She heard the murmur of voices. The door opened and an older man stepped through, followed by a black woman in a suit almost identical to her companion’s. Both of them wore sober expressions. She didn’t know them by sight, but she knew who they had to be.

  “Ms. Glazer,” said the man, “I’m Special Agent John Mansfield with the Miami field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is my colleague, Special Agent Pope of the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  “Hello,” Faith said. Her voice caught on the word.

  “Do you know why we’re here?”

  “Yes.”

  Mansfield stepped closer. Pope was his shadow. Her face was stone. Mansfield continued, “I’m not the agent you contacted originally, but your information came into my possession and it’s now my case. Everything you sent from the first piece of information onward, I and my people have been working on.”

  “Okay.”

  Mansfield smiled a warm smile, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “The things you gave us are tantalizing. And I don’t think I need to explain why we want more. The presence of Special Agent Pope should give you some idea of the scope of what we’re talking about. This is not about dollars and cents. It’s about serious crimes committed by serious people. You got a little taste of how serious they can be.”

  Faith shuddered. “The police say he was crazy.”

  “He was definitely crazy, but that’s not why he was there. The coincidence is too strong. I’ve been to your apartment and I saw how he turned it over. He was looking for something, and the people who sent him know you took it and they want it back or destroyed. Right now the only option I see is for you to hand it over to us before things get any worse.”

  Faith took a deep breath, held it, let it out. Her eyes closed and she did it again. She opened them. “I can’t help you,” she said, and this time her voice was steady.

  Mansfield’s smile vanished. “Excuse me?”

  “I said I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about what you’re telling me and I don’t have any information to give you.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pope spoke up. “You know lying to a federal agent is a crime, don’t you?”

  Faith let her gaze drift to Pope. She felt light. She was calm. In the theater of her mind, she saw her wrapped hands pounding the heavy bag on the patio behind Camaro’s house. The slap of the leather, followed by the thud of the bag absorbing the impact. The jolt in her arms and shoulders. Breathe, Camaro said in her ear. Keep breathing.

  “Ms. Glazer, are you listening to me?” Pope asked.

  “I hear you. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I don’t know either of you, and I don’t know how I can help you. I’m an accountant. That’s all I do. I don’t have anything to do with criminals or anything like that. So I’m sorry if you got me confused with someone else.”

  Mansfield stepped closer. “Ms. Glazer. Faith. We know it was you. And we know you know. It’s the first thing you said when we came in the room. This was inevitable, from the first file you sent us. Narrowing it down was easy. We have hundreds of people whose only job is to track down information like this. It came from you. It couldn’t have come from anyone else. You’re not that good at covering your tracks.”

  Faith did not reply.

  “Ms. Glazer, this is in the interest of the American people and their allies,” Pope said. “Do you understand that? I gathered you did, based on what you passed to the FBI. Now, I don’t know why you would suddenly deny you’re involved, but if it has to do with security, I can assure you it’s safe. We’ve already made arrangements for you to receive a twenty-four-hour guard.”

  Faith’s gaze flicked toward the door. “There’s someone out there?”

  “Not yet,” Mansfield replied, “but there will be. We’ll be on you every minute of every day. Nothing like what happened to you is going to happen again. We won’t allow it. So there’s no reason not to tell us what we want to know.”

  “We need the complete files,” Pope said. “Everything you have. We need to illuminate this situation from the inside. Where the money comes from, where it goes, and whose hands it touches along the way. We can take the whole thing down, but it starts with you. If it’s not your safety that’s the problem, is it something else? Do you want to be paid? Because that’s not out of the ques
tion.”

  Faith’s shoulders drooped. She rested her hands on her stomach and looked down at them. She felt their eyes on her. When she looked up again, they still stared. Breathe, Faith, Camaro said.

  “Please,” Mansfield said.

  “I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

  The two federal agents stepped away from the bed. They conferred in whispers. Pope abruptly left the room. Mansfield remained. His face was neutral. “Faith, I’m going to go now. And I understand you’re going to be discharged soon. So what we’re going to do is give you two days. Over the next forty-eight hours, I want you to really think about where you’re going next. Because I can guarantee if we have to put pressure on you to get what we need, there will be damage. The question then becomes whether you go on with your life, or whether you go to prison. Those are your options. Think about it.”

  He left. Faith was alone. She cried.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  THE PHONE RANG by Lawrence Kaur’s bedside at ten past one in the morning. He started from sleep, and cast around wildly with one arm before he laid a hand on the receiver. He yanked it free of the cradle and pressed it to his ear. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “This business never sleeps,” said the man on the other end of the line.

  All fogginess left him. Kaur sat up in the bed, hand clutching the receiver. His heart thudded. He realized he couldn’t speak. He forced himself to. “Señor Lorca.”

  “Don’t use my name. Your NSA is able to pick a name out of all the calls being made all over the world. I don’t want them monitoring this conversation.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. My home line is completely secure. Mr. Roche, my security director, sees to that personally.”

  Carlos Lorca said, “If only Mr. Roche was better at resolving other problems.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but—”

  “Please, don’t do me the disservice of lying. I already know more than you think, and I am unhappy with everything I hear. First you allow this woman to have access to critical records. Then you allow her to leak these records to the authorities. And then, despite everything, you didn’t eliminate the threat before it got worse.”

  Kaur got out of bed. He walked to the bedroom window. It was twice as tall as he was, and encompassed the entire wall. The ocean lay beyond, perfectly black under the moonlight, highlighted only by the occasional ripple turned faintly silver. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but it’s not entirely accurate. The woman, Faith Glazer, was only a temp. We brought her on to do some auditing for another client entirely. How she got access to these accounts we can’t say for sure, but I can say that it wasn’t something we did deliberately or out of carelessness. You are a valued client, and your father was before you. We have always done what we had to do to maintain your anonymity and your security. We want your business.”

  “Your business and my business are not always the same.”

  “I understand that. But we respect everything you do.”

  Lorca grunted. “Where is the woman now?”

  “My understanding is that she’s in the hospital.”

  “Is she talking to anyone?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “That’s not good enough! I want information on her, and I want it all the time. Everything you know, I want to know. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Lawrence? Daily. And if your Mr. Roche doesn’t like that arrangement, then he can take it up with my people in person.”

  Kaur took a step back from the window. “You have people here?”

  “It can be arranged.”

  “That’s not necessary. We have everything we need. You don’t have to expose yourself.”

  “I am already exposed. The moment this woman gained access to my accounts, I was exposed. And you…you did nothing to prevent it. It’s a disappointment it will be difficult for you to assuage, Lawrence. Very difficult.”

  “Give us time,” Kaur said, and he hated the note of pleading in his voice.

  “I’ve already given you too much time. You wasted months when you could have put a stop to it immediately.”

  “We had to know it was her. And we had to know who she was sharing information with. It’s all part of containment.”

  “And now? How will it be contained?”

  “She’ll be eliminated, of course. But we still don’t know if she has backups, or where those backups might be located. There are a lot of moving parts, Señor Lorca. You have to understand—”

  “No excuses! Solve the problem.”

  “I swear to you, it’s already in hand. Your accounts have been moved and all trace of them was erased. It’s like nothing ever happened. Once we have the files she copied, there will be absolutely no evidence of any kind. Even if she were alive to tell the story, no one would believe her without proof. I believe in Mr. Roche. He can bring this to a firm conclusion.”

  “Don’t try to sell me, Lawrence.”

  “It’s not a sell. It will be done.”

  The line went dead. Kaur called for Lorca, but he was gone. Kaur’s hand shook as he held the silent phone.

  He didn’t go back to sleep. He put on a robe and crossed the bedroom to the wet bar. He poured himself two fingers of sixty-year-old Macallan whiskey and downed it without sipping. He poured another but this time made himself take nips from the tumbler. The impact of the drink was astringent, almost too much to bear, while oaky tones followed in a cloud.

  His bedroom had a desk and an Aeron chair. He sat and brought his computer to life. The monitor glowed painfully in the darkness. Kaur accessed his secure e-mail and addressed a message to Brandon Roche. Without specifics as to who called and from where, he laid out the urgent message of Carlos Lorca. He made no admonition in closing. The information in the e-mail stood for itself.

  When he was done, he took up his whiskey and walked back to the window. He decided to go out onto the deck, and from there he felt the cooler breeze of early fall coming off the Atlantic. The weather in Miami never truly turned cold, but it was possible to feel the difference in the seasons carried on the wind.

  Kaur nursed his whiskey for most of an hour. He thought of Faith Glazer only once, and his stomach soured when he did. He flung his empty tumbler over the rail. It caught moonlight, a tiny glint lost immediately in the greater darkness. The tumbler fell somewhere into the sand below. Kaur didn’t hear it strike the ground.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  IGNACIO WAS BACK at his desk early. He logged in to the computer and saw all the evidence from Eduard Serafian’s home had been checked in overnight. Each piece had its own digital photograph, sharp and flatly lit. Someone from the technical section had taken a look at the things Ignacio thought were bugs and confirmed that this was exactly what they were.

  The pages of Serafian’s notebook had also been scanned in, the notebook itself messengered to the FBI care of Special Agent John Mansfield. Ignacio scrolled through the scanned images, looking at the strange alphabet the Armenian language used. It was like hieroglyphs, though at least hieroglyphs looked like something and not squiggles on paper.

  He picked two dozen pages at random and ran off copies. He collected them from the printer and left the bullpen. In fifteen minutes he was in his car, headed north toward Boca Raton. The drive was forty-five minutes, depending on the traffic, and Ignacio played Viva on the satellite radio. He missed the between-songs chatter of the local Miami stations, but not the commercials.

  His phone led him directly to Saint David Armenian Church, set beside a busy roadway bustling with traffic. The parking lot outside the church was mostly empty. Ignacio parked and got out. The sun bore down on him like a hot rock wrapped in wet burlap.

  Inside it was comfortable. He stood in the lobby, taking in the icons on the wall, framed in gold leaf, and smelling the strong odor of incense. A rack displayed church literature, almost all of it in Armenian. By the door was a box for donations,
the label in Armenian and English.

  He stepped inside the sanctuary. The ceiling was high and the space suffused with a gold color from hanging chandeliers. At the far end an arch stood over what looked like a smaller replica of the church itself, a painting of Mary and Jesus inside. Fresh-cut flowers were everywhere.

  He moved farther in until a voice called out from behind him, “May I help you, sir?”

  Ignacio turned. He realized he was still wearing his hat. He took it off. A man in a dark suit with a clerical collar stood in the doorway to the lobby. His beard was salted with gray, but he was younger than Ignacio expected. “Father Hayrapetyan?”

  “Are you Detective Montellano?”

  “That’s right,” Ignacio said, and he showed his identification. “You are Father Hayrapetyan, right?”

  “I am. But please, you can call me Stepan if you want.”

  “Okay, but only if you call me Nacho.”

  “Nacho?”

  “It’s what my friends call me.”

  Hayrapetyan nodded and smiled. He came closer. “Then Nacho it is. I see you’re interested in the church.”

  “I’ve never been inside an Armenian church before.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s not too different from any other church.”

  “Yeah. Listen, is there somewhere we can sit down?”

  “You said you have something for me to read?”

  Ignacio produced the printed pages from inside his jacket. “These are scans of a notebook kept by a suspect who stalked and assaulted a woman. I don’t have anyone who can read it.”

  The priest took the papers. “I understand this man is dead?”

  “He was killed.”

  “That’s a shame. He may have been a criminal, but the Lord says all men can be redeemed.”

  “Not this one, I don’t think.”

  “Let’s go to my office and have a look at these.”

  In the administrative area, the only sign of religiosity was the occasional piece of art depicting Christ or his mother. Away from the exotic scent of the sanctuary, the air had the clean blandness of a commercial park. Father Hayrapetyan looked over the pages as he walked, leading Ignacio deeper into the building until they came to an office filled with books. Books overflowed from the shelves behind the desk and took residence on the floor, on the corners of the desk, and even against the door, preventing it from being opened all the way. Father Hayrapetyan had two chairs for visitors, but one was completely given over to more books. “Please sit,” the priest told Ignacio.