The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “So, Mr. Dragović, how can we help you in Washington?” I asked. The little dinner party reacted like I’d just shit in the punch.

  Henry saved me by changing the subject. “So who’s making the best absinthe these days?” he asked Rado, and our host, after giving me a patronizing smile, took up the new subject.

  These fucking southern Europeans. They won’t discuss business at the dinner table. So after four hours, dinner became dessert became coffee became drinks. Rado pulled out a bottle of some nasty-looking black liquor with Asian characters on the label and started pouring. I couldn’t really tell you what it tasted like because after the tiniest sip, it was as if my whole mouth had been hit with a double shot of Novocain. I felt instantly unwell.

  Finally, Rado suggested that we men take our drinks and adjourn to the library. What a relief. Brass tacks at last.

  Rado refilled our glasses, and I thought I saw something floating in the bottle of Far East booze.

  Henry laid out the terms of the arrangement. He was strictly no bullshit. No lawyers. No retainers. A simple handshake deal. You give us twenty million, we write your law into the books: official American statute, passed through both houses and signed by the president himself. It would be tacked onto a larger bill, but law was law. If Davies Group didn’t deliver, Rado would owe us nothing.

  Rado seemed content to draw this whole thing out.

  “The more laws, the less justice,” he said, and took a sip of his drink.

  Here we go…fucking Cicero quotes. I might as well make myself comfortable.

  “This soju is from North Korea,” he said. “Very rare. Aged seven years and reserved for the Party elite.”

  He topped up our drinks once again, and yeah, there was no mistaking it: a dead black snake was floating in the bottle.

  “An adder,” he said, noticing my gaze. “The venom gives it a certain sweetness.”

  Cheers.

  “Twenty million American dollars,” he said, and started pacing, gazing off at a few lights bobbing on the Caribbean.

  That’s as far as he got. I guess it was part of some negotiating strategy, but on this occasion, it wasn’t going to work. Someone knocked on the door.

  A servant appeared with a note for Henry. He read it, consulted with Rado for a moment, and then the Serb said, “Of course, send him up.”

  Three minutes later Marcus appeared, all apologies, looking rumpled as hell and holding a digital recorder in his hand. He was supposed to have been on the trip, but something last-minute had kept him in DC. He whispered to Henry, and they both excused themselves.

  When he was discussing something weighty or confidential, Marcus had a habit of putting on music. I guess it was some old fear of being bugged. Sure enough, soon an aria came streaming from a little side room where he and Henry had secreted themselves.

  They returned about ten minutes later with dead-serious looks on their faces. Henry asked for a moment alone with Rado. I didn’t know what was happening but I was fairly certain of one thing: Rado should have jumped at the twenty million, because it seemed like the price had just gone up.

  Miroslav, Aleksandar, and I waited outside for twenty-five minutes as Henry and Rado consulted in the library. Despite the high-octane soju, I had been sobered up by the surprise appearance of Marcus. I wondered if they were pulling their own little con on Rado with some breaking news to jack the price up.

  If they were, I wasn’t in on it. When Henry and Rado emerged from the library, they didn’t say a word about what had gone down, just kept whispering by themselves in the corner. Marcus gave the tape recorder to Henry’s assistant, probably for transcription.

  I waited as patiently as I could, then finally approached Henry and Marcus. “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “We’re going to have to keep this compartmentalized,” Marcus said. In other words: Butt out.

  Fair enough. I didn’t have to know everything, though the last time I went into a situation with incomplete information, I nearly got plowed by a 280-pound dude named Squeak and ended up in jail. At the very least I needed to know how this affected my end of the Walker-Rado deal.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just let me know what the next play is with Walker.”

  Marcus and Henry exchanged a bad-news look for a moment. I guess Henry decided to take the bullet. He laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “We’re going to have to take you off this one, Mike.”

  I was stunned. I blinked at the two of them like an idiot. “What? I slip up with etiquette once at dinner and that’s it, I’m gone?”

  “That’s not it at all,” Marcus said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “This is no longer a simple matter of adding an amendment to a law,” Henry said. “Things have changed. We’re working an entirely different order of magnitude here. It would be too much too soon for you, Mike.”

  I could have whined about being dragged to South America when I had work piling up in DC, about wasting a week, about how sick I was of them keeping me in the dark, but it wouldn’t have done any good.

  “I earned this,” I said. “I took the risk. I hooked Walker. I’m ready for the responsibility. Bring me in. I won’t let you down.”

  “We’re trying to protect you here. You’re on track to be a player. Let this case go, for your own sake. It’s the kind of thing where you make one wrong move and you’re fucked. Irrevocably fucked.”

  I mulled it over for a minute, then let it go. “Message received,” I said. “Thanks for being straight with me.”

  I left them to their thing and took a stroll outside. I wondered if they’d bought it, my good-soldier routine. Because if they thought I could just drop this—turn off a lifetime of being a sneak as if I were throwing a switch and let them run me blind a second time—they knew a lot less about human behavior than they claimed to.

  I had to find out what was happening with Rado’s case and what was on that tape. Simple curiosity was at play, sure, and some of it was ego: I’d put the hard work in and I deserved a part in whatever play they were mapping out. There was more to it than that, however. I’d been wary of Davies and Marcus ever since they’d gotten me mixed up in the Walker shakedown. I was the point man on the Walker-Rado deal so far, and I had to make sure that if this new plan of theirs fell apart, I wouldn’t be the one left holding the bag. If I happened to find some dirt, a little leverage to use against my bosses, insurance I could hide away in case of emergency, that wouldn’t hurt either. I knew Henry had hired me in part because I’m a sneaky bastard, and I certainly didn’t want to disappoint him.

  Henry and Marcus were going to stick around the house for a while and map out a response to whatever big news had changed the game plan with Rado. Margaret, Henry’s assistant, was heading back to our guesthouse in town with Marcus’s digital recorder, presumably to get to work on transcribing the tape.

  Of course I offered to walk her home. You never knew what unsavory characters might be lurking in a town like this.

  I took her just slightly out of the way, a block or two over toward the boatyards and auto shops, which meant we would have to walk along the beach for a few minutes to get back to our hotel.

  Henry’s assistant carried the recorder in her hand. She’d been Henry’s secretary for decades, both in and out of government. In her midfifties, hair always in a bun and wearing perfectly pressed clothes, she was the human equivalent of a safe. That tape was key to whatever big news Marcus and Henry had received, but she certainly wasn’t just going to let me give it a little listen. I knew that once that tape got back to Washington, it was going directly into Henry’s vault, and that was one formidable piece of hardware.

  I’d seen him come out of it one day. It was concealed behind a false panel in his office. Henry’s letting me get a glimpse might seem like a security misstep, but my knowing where that vault was didn’t even matter, because it was a monster, another Sargent and Greenleaf. It would take an expert twenty undisturbed hours to crack it. I
f I wanted to listen to that tape, I had to get it in Colombia.

  I kept up a patter as we walked, and soon enough we had company. Margaret glanced back over her shoulder, then took a second look. After that, she stared straight ahead and picked up the pace as her whole posture tightened up.

  “Someone’s following us,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just stay calm.” I looked back. A tall, wiry black-indigenous guy in his midforties was following us. He had unkempt hair and a beard streaked with gray.

  A palm grove blocked the moon.

  “It’s too dark for me to check,” I said. “Did you see what colors he was wearing back there in the light? It wasn’t green and white, was it?”

  Margaret hesitated for a moment as she thought about it. “Yes. What does that mean?”

  “Could be gang,” I said, and frowned. “We’ll probably be all right as long as we don’t flash anything valuable.”

  She showed me the digital recorder, shiny silver and $350 retail, in her palm. She was wearing a dress, so she had no pockets, and she had left her purse back in the guesthouse. “Can you hide this?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a money belt,” I said. She handed over the recorder. The guy following us sped up, and we tried to keep our distance. About fifty meters from the hotel, our new friend started mumbling something. Margaret nearly sprinted to the front door.

  Sting accomplished. Now for the blow-off.

  “Great,” I said, and pointed around the corner. “I think I see some Ejército guys.” The Colombian army was all over the coast. Seeing sixteen-year-olds walking around with mortars on their vests and live Galil assault rifles can be a little disconcerting when you first get to Colombia, but you realize quickly they’re only here to stop Yankees from getting kidnapped, and occasionally to shake down the locals.

  “I’ll tell them to keep an eye out,” I said. “You head upstairs.”

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Always the martyr, old Mike.

  She went inside.

  There were no soldiers around the corner. The dude in green and white was about fifteen feet away. He sidled up to me and whispered, “Ganja. Coke. Ganja. Coke.”

  “No, thanks, Ramón,” I said. I gave him about three dollars in pesos for his trouble, then went around to the rear stairwell of the guesthouse and up to my room.

  I didn’t feel great about conning Margaret. After all, it’s almost too easy when you’ve had months to gain people’s trust. But I needed to hear what was on that tape. You have to know your mark, and I knew that Margaret would follow Henry’s orders more or less to the death. Her task that evening was simple: protect that tape. That made my job difficult. I probably could have wrestled it away from her, but that didn’t really offer a graceful exit. I had to introduce some outside danger, something much scarier than me, so that for her to protect that tape she had to hand it over to the lesser threat: mild-mannered Mike.

  Ramón was a local character, always prowling the beach in a ratty green-and-white soccer jersey. I made up the bit about those being gang colors to fool Margaret; they were actually for the Boyacá Chicó Fútbol Club. In the afternoons Ramón sold counterfeit Cuban cigars. After nightfall he peddled drugs and tried to get his hands on the backpacker girls. If you caught him late enough (and Ramón was usually in some sort of drug fugue by 2:00 p.m. anyway), he’d give you a hard beg about his starving kids. He was scary-looking, but harmless. Perfect for my purposes. I’d led us around to the beach to run into Ramón and scare Margaret into handing over the tape.

  The memory card in the recorder was labeled SUBJECT 23: LANDLINE PHONE. It took thirty seconds to copy its contents onto my laptop, then I swung by Margaret’s room. “Don’t forget this,” I said, and handed over the recorder with the card inside.

  “Thank you, Mike,” she said. “You couldn’t imagine the trouble if I let this out of my sight.”

  I waited until the other guests were asleep then plugged earbuds into my laptop and listened to the recording.

  “I’m close to getting the information I need,” a voice said. “I just hope I have enough time.”

  The speaker was male, probably middle-aged, troubled now, but he also seemed confident, eloquent, used to speaking in public.

  “Enough time?” the second speaker asked.

  “They may know something about what I’m after. I don’t know how much. I think they’re watching me. Who knows what they’re capable of. Others have disappeared when they got this close to the truth.”

  The second speaker sighed. “Who’s this they?”

  “You’re the only one I trust, but I can’t tell you everything. Too many bad things have happened. If I tell you, I would be putting you in the same danger. I can’t put this burden on you.”

  “Do you know how nuts you sound?”

  “I do. I wish it were all paranoia. It’s not. The man with the information: I think I found him. I have to get him before they do. They’d do anything for the evidence. If they had it, I know, I just know, it would be the end of me.”

  “You need to report this to your security. You could get killed—”

  “Not a word, you understand? You have no idea what’s at stake.”

  The second speaker hesitated, then finally said, “Yes.”

  The first speaker took a deep breath. “If they come for me,” he said, “I’ll be ready.”

  I was so wrapped up in the conversation on that tape, I didn’t register the knocking on my door the first time. It came again, three loud raps, followed by Marcus’s voice: “You in there, Mike?”

  I scrambled, put my laptop and earbuds on a set of shelves on the side of the room, then opened the door.

  “How’s it going?” I said, a bad attempt at playing it cool.

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay with what happened back at Radomir’s.”

  “Yeah. I understand.” I could feel my pulse in my throat. I hoped he wouldn’t notice.

  “If you play your cards right, you’re going to be a partner someday, a big office up on three with me and Henry. But this case has too many moving pieces. It’s not right for a guy starting out. It’s just too dangerous.”

  “I get it. You’re looking out for me.”

  “Good.” He looked across the room at the laptop with the earbuds plugged in. The guy was a hawk.

  “What are you listening to?”

  “New Johnny Cash album,” I said.

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “Yeah, but they trot out some old recordings every year.”

  “Like, uh, Tupac,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. Marcus wasn’t normally one for chitchat. Standing there with him watching me was excruciating. I couldn’t tell if he was onto me or if this was just his usual spy weirdness, poring over every detail, dragging out the conversation to see if he could sniff out anything on me.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Change of plans. We’re heading back to DC tomorrow. The car will be downstairs at ten. Don’t be late.”

  “Sure thing.”

  He walked away, and I shut the door, threw the deadbolt, and slumped down on the bed like a sack of sand.

  After I calmed down, I played the tape a second and a third time. The questions grew with each listen. Who was this man, Subject 23? Would Henry and Marcus really go so far as to tap his phones? Of course. I’d just listened to the results.

  But what was the evidence he was so close to finding? The secret dangerous enough to kill for? It must have had something to do with Radomir’s case, with me being pulled off it and told it was too dangerous for a rookie.

  As I turned it over in my mind, I wondered if Subject 23 was just worried that some of his sins would be discovered and that he would be another Davies blackmail victim. Or was his life truly in danger? Was he paranoid? Violent? Crazy enough to attack anyone who got close to the information he was hiding?

  This went way past business as usual, pas
t hardball. I had to find out who this man was, what he knew, and what my bosses wanted with him. Part of it was professional pride: this was my case and I’d earned my part in it the hard way. But there was also something deeper. Dirty tricks were one thing, but I didn’t want blood on my hands.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I LOVE HEIST MOVIES, especially the old stuff, anything with guys in turtlenecks, diamonds, Cary Grant. It’s all so smooth, so classy, so inevitable that they’ll get the goods, then wrap up each job with a little champagne on the French Riviera and a roll in the hay with Grace Kelly.

  In reality, however, turtlenecks are a supremely bad idea; you wouldn’t believe the amount of sweating that goes on when you’re trying to steal something. And nothing ever goes your way. Usually you come out of a job with a smashed finger or two, a couple nice gashes from a screen or broken window, maybe some dog bites, and for all your efforts, half the time you head home with a grand total of twenty-seven bucks or a jar of quarters. You reek of terror sweat (even without the turtleneck), and the hourly wage, adjusted for prep and fencing and the number of times the whole thing falls apart, comes out to such a pitiful rate that you might as well work at McDonald’s.

  My attempts to find out what Marcus and Henry Davies wanted with that tape were similarly ill-fated. I didn’t know what those two were up to, but they were doing it with such tight lips it might as well have been the Manhattan Project. Marcus was always out of the office for long lunches, and casual inquiries to his assistant—“Hey, you know where Marcus is? I need him to take a look at a write-up”—never got me anywhere. Peeking into his office? Nope. The door was always locked, not that it mattered. Marcus kept up the old security habits from his government days. Every lunch and every night his desk was bare. He locked up every paper, and even pulled his hard drive and put it in the safe. Trash went in the shredder or the incinerator. And nothing of substance was ever discussed in the open where someone might have a chance to eavesdrop.