Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  “Who the hell knows,” he said, his voice phlegmy. He cleared his throat. “She’s scared out of her mind.”

  “But it’s not the way she normally talks, is it?”

  “She’s terrified. She was just … babbling!”

  “Was she quoting a poem, maybe?”

  Marcus looked blank.

  “It sounds like a reference to something. Like she was reciting something. Doesn’t sound familiar at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “A book?” I suggested. “Maybe something you used to read to her when she was a little kid?”

  “I, you know…” He faltered. “You know, her mother read to her. And your mother. I—I never did. I really wasn’t around very much.”

  And he put a hand over his eyes again.

  AS WE drove away from Marcus’s house into the gloom of a starless night—away from what I now thought of as Marshall Marcus’s compound, defended as it was by armed guards—I told Dorothy about how Marshall Marcus had lost it all.

  She reacted with the same kind of slack-jawed disbelief that I had. “You telling me this guy lost ten billion dollars like it dropped behind the sofa cushions?”

  “Basically.”

  “That can happen?”

  “Easy.”

  She shook her head. “See, this is why I’m glad I never went into finance. I’m always losing my keys and my glasses. If you can lose something, I’ll lose it.”

  She was multitasking, tapping away at her BlackBerry as she talked.

  “Remind me not to give you any money to manage,” I said.

  “You have any idea what Mercury is?”

  “Marshall doesn’t know. Why should I?”

  “Marshall says he doesn’t know.”

  “True.”

  “Maybe it’s, like, one of his offshore funds or something. Money he’s stashed somewhere.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “If the kidnappers know they lost their whole investment, they also know he’s broke. So ‘Mercury’ can’t refer to money.”

  “Maybe they figure he’s got something stashed away somewhere. All these guys hide chunky nuts of money away. They’re like squirrels. Evil squirrels.”

  “But why not just say it straight? Why not just say, wire three hundred million dollars into such-and-such an offshore account or we kill the kid?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Well, what’s more valuable than money?”

  “A virtuous woman.” Dorothy pursed her lips.

  “Some proprietary trading algorithm, maybe. Some investment formula he invented.”

  She shook her head, kept tapping away. “A trading algorithm? Guy’s busted flat. Whatever secret sauce the guy’s got I ain’t buying.”

  I smiled.

  “You think he knows but he’s not telling us?” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “Even if it gets his daughter killed?”

  For a long time I said nothing. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “You know him,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “No,” I said. “I thought I knew him. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Hmph,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, man, this can’t be true.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be true.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  For a quick second I took my eyes off the road to glance at Dorothy. She was staring at her BlackBerry. “That crazy stuff Alexa was saying? ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I Googled it. Nick, it’s a lyric from a song by a rock group called Alter Bridge.”

  “Okay.”

  “The song’s called ‘Buried Alive.’”

  29.

  By the time I’d dropped Dorothy off at her apartment in Mission Hill, it was almost nine at night.

  My apartment was a loft in the leather district, which may sound kinky, but actually refers to the six-square-block area of downtown Boston between Chinatown and the financial district, where the old red-brick buildings used to be shoe factories and leather tanneries and warehouses.

  I found a parking space a few blocks away, cut through the alley into the grim service entrance and up the steel-treaded back stairwell to the back door on the fifth floor.

  The loft was one large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The bedroom was in an alcove, on the opposite side of the apartment from the bathroom. Bad design. In another alcove was a kitchen equipped with high-end appliances, none of which I’d ever used, except the refrigerator. There were a lot of cast-iron support columns and exposed brick and of course the obligatory exposed ductwork. The place was spare and functional and unadorned. Uncluttered.

  I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that I was reacting against my upbringing in an immense mansion in Bedford, New York, stuffed with precious antiques. My brother and I couldn’t run around inside without knocking over some priceless Etruscan vase or a John Townsend highboy.

  But maybe I just hate clutter.

  The comedian George Carlin used to do a great routine about “stuff,” the crap we all go through life accumulating and shuffling around from place to place. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, he said, a place to put your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. I have as little stuff as possible, but what I have is simple and good.

  I went straight to the bathroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower. For a long time I stood there, feeling the hot water pound my head, my neck, my back.

  Unable to get the image of poor Alexa Marcus out of my head. The raccoon eyes, the abject terror. It reminded me of one of the most harrowing Web videos I’ve ever seen: the beheading of a brave Wall Street Journal reporter some years ago by monsters in black hoods.

  And that association filled me with dread.

  I wondered what she meant by “buried alive.” Maybe she was locked in an underground bunker or vault of some kind.

  When I shut off the water and reached for the towel I thought I heard a noise.

  A snap or a click.

  Or nothing.

  I stopped, listened a moment longer, then began toweling myself off.

  And heard it again. Definitely something.

  Inside the apartment.

  30.

  I stared out through the halfway-open bathroom door, saw nothing.

  In such an old building in the middle of a city at night, there were all sorts of sounds. Delivery trucks and garbage compactors and screeching brakes and car doors slamming and buses belching diesel. Car alarms, night and day.

  But this was coming from inside my apartment for sure.

  A scritch scritch scritch from the front of the loft.

  Naked, still wet, I let the towel drop and nudged the bathroom door open a bit wider. Stepped out, dripping on the hardwood floor.

  Listened harder.

  The scritch scritch scritch even more distinct. It was definitely inside the loft, at the front.

  Both of my firearms were out of reach. The SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic pistol was under my bed. But to reach the bedroom alcove I’d have to pass them first. I cursed the idiotic layout of the place, putting the bathroom so far from the bedroom. The other weapon, a Smith & Wesson M&P nine-millimeter, was in a floor safe under the kitchen floor.

  Closer to them than to me.

  The wooden floors, once scarred and dented, had been recently refinished. They were solid and silky-smooth and they didn’t squeak when you walked on them. Barefoot, I was able to take a few noiseless steps into the room.

  Two men in black ambush jackets. One was large and heavily muscled with a Neanderthal forehead and a black brush cut. He was sitting at my desk, doing something to my keyboard, even though he didn’t look like the computer-savvy type. The other was small and slender with short mouse-brown hair, sallow complexion, and cheeks deeply pitted with acne scars
. He sat on the floor beneath my huge wall-mounted flat-screen TV. He was holding my cable modem and doing something with a screwdriver.

  Both of them wore latex gloves. They were also wearing new-looking jeans and dark jackets. Most people wouldn’t notice anything special about the way they were dressed. But if you’ve ever worked undercover, their clothing was as conspicuous as an electronic Times Square billboard. It was carry-conceal attire, with hidden pistol pockets and magazine pouches.

  I had no idea who they were or why they were here, but I knew immediately they were armed.

  And I wasn’t.

  I wasn’t even dressed.

  31.

  I wasn’t scared, either. I was pissed off, outraged at the audacity of these two intruding into my living space. Messing with my computer and my new flat-screen TV.

  Most people feel a jolt of adrenaline and their heart starts to race. Mine slows. I breathe more deeply, see more clearly. My senses are heightened.

  If I simply wanted them to leave, I’d only have to make a sound, and they’d abandon their black-bag job and slip out. But I didn’t want them gone.

  I wanted them dead. After we’d had a conversation, of course. I wanted to know who’d sent them, and why.

  So I backed into the bathroom and stood there for a moment, still dripping on the floor, considering my options, thinking.

  Somehow they’d gotten in without setting off the alarm. They’d managed to defeat my security system, which wasn’t easy. The front door was ajar, I noticed, and one of the big old factory windows was open. I doubted they’d entered through the window, on that busy street. That would have attracted all kinds of attention, even at night: I was on the fifth floor. But to have gotten in through my front door meant knowing the code to disarm the system.

  Obviously they hadn’t expected me to be home. Nor did they see or hear me come in through the service entrance at the back of the loft, which I seldom used. They hadn’t heard me showering at the other end of the apartment: In this old building, water constantly flowed through the pipes.

  My only advantage was that they didn’t know I was here.

  Looking down at my pants, heaped on the bathroom floor, I ran through a quick mental catalogue. Just the usual objects that can be used as improvised weapons, like keys or pens, but only at close range.

  This was a time when a little clutter might have been useful. At first glance, I saw nothing promising. Toothbrush and toothpaste, water glass, mouthwash. Hand towels and shower towels.

  A towel can be an effective makeshift weapon if you use it like a kusari-fundo, a Japanese weighted chain. But only if you’re close enough.

  Then I saw my electric razor. I’m normally a blade guy, but in a rush, electric is faster. Its coil cord was about two feet long. Stretched to its full length it would probably reach six feet.

  I slipped on my pants, unplugged the razor, then padded silently, stealthily, into the main room.

  I had to go for the muscle first. The computer guy wasn’t likely to be much of a threat. Once Mongo was out of the way, I’d find out whatever I could from Gigabyte.

  My bare feet were still damp and a little sticky and made a slight sucking noise as I lifted them off the floor. So I approached slowly, tried to minimize the sound.

  In a few seconds I was ten feet away from the intruders, hidden behind a column. I inhaled slowly and deeply. Holding the shaver in my right hand and the plug in my left, I pulled my right hand back, stretching out the coiled cord like a slingshot.

  Then hurled it, hard, at the side of the bigger man’s head.

  It made an audible crack. His hands flew up to protect his face, a second too late. He screamed, tipped back in the chair, and crashed to the floor. I jerked at the cord, and the shaver ricocheted back to me.

  Meanwhile the computer guy was scrambling to his feet. But I wanted to make sure the big one stayed down. I launched myself at the guy, landing on top of him, and jammed my right knee into his solar plexus. The wind came out of him. He tried to rear up, flinging his fists at me without much success. He gasped for breath. He did manage to land a few punches on my ears and one particularly hard one on my left jaw, painful but not disabling. I aimed a drive at his face with everything I had. It connected with a wet crunch. I felt something sharp and hard give way.

  He screamed, writhed in agony. His nose was broken, maybe a few teeth as well. Blood spattered my face.

  In my peripheral vision I noticed that the weedy computer guy had clambered to his feet and was pulling what appeared to be a weapon from his jacket.

  During the brief struggle, I’d dropped the electric razor, so I reached for the heavy weighted Scotch-tape dispenser on my desk. In one smooth sharp arc, I hurled it at him. He ducked, and it clipped him on the shoulder, the roll of tape flying out as it thunked to the floor.

  A miss, but it gave me a couple of seconds. The weapon in his right hand, I saw now, was a black pistol with a fat oblong barrel. A Taser.

  Tasers are meant to incapacitate, not kill, but take my word for it, you don’t want to get zapped with one. Each Taser cartridge shoots out two barbed probes, tethered to the weapon by thin filaments. They send fifty thousand volts and a few amps coursing through your body, paralyzing you, disrupting your central nervous system.

  He hunched forward, Taser extended, and took aim like an expert. He was less than fifteen feet from me, which indicated he knew what he was doing. Fired from twenty feet away, the electrical darts spread too far apart to hit the body and make a circuit.

  I leaped to one side and something grabbed my ankle, causing me to stumble. It was the beefy guy. His face was a bloody mess. He was groaning and pawing the air, arms swarming, bellowing like a wounded boar.

  The thin sallow-faced one smiled at me.

  I heard the click of the Taser being armed.

  Sweeping the big black Maglite flashlight from the edge of my desk, I swung it at his knees, but he was quick. He dodged just in time. The Maglite missed his kneecaps, struck his legs just below with a satisfying crack. He made an ooof sound, his knees buckling, and roared in pain and fury.

  I reached up to grab the Taser from his hands, but instead I got hold of the black canvas tool bag on his shoulder. He spun away, aimed the Taser again, and fired.

  The pain was unbelievable.

  Every single muscle in my body cramped tighter and tighter, something I’d never experienced before and just about impossible to describe. I was no longer in control of my body. My muscles seemed to seize. My body went rigid as a board, and I toppled to the floor.

  By the time I could move, two minutes or so later, both men were gone. Far too late to attempt to give chase, even if I were able to run. Which I certainly wasn’t.

  I got up gingerly, forced myself to remain standing, though I wanted only to sink back to the floor. I surveyed the mess in my apartment, my anger building, wondering who had sent the two.

  And then I realized they’d been considerate enough to leave some evidence behind.

  32.

  The SIG was still under the bed.

  The Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter was locked away, as a precaution, in case someone found the SIG. Concealed beneath the bluestone tiles of the kitchen was a floor safe. I popped the touch latch to lift one of the tiles, dialed open the safe, found the contents—a lot of cash, various identity documents, some papers, and the pistol—intact.

  They hadn’t found it.

  They probably hadn’t even looked for it. That wasn’t what they were here for.

  I gathered the things the intruders had left behind in their haste to leave, including a black canvas tool bag and my dismantled cable modem. And one thing more: a little white device connected between one of the USB ports on the back of my computer tower and the cable to my keyboard. The color matched exactly. It almost looked like it belonged there.

  I’m no computer expert, by any means, but you don’t have to be an auto mechanic to know how to drive a car. This little doohick
ey was called a keylogger. It contained a miniature USB drive that captured every single keystroke you typed and stored it on a memory chip. Sure, you can grab the same data with a software package. But that’s a whole lot trickier now that most people use antivirus software. Had I not had reason to look for it, I’d never have found it.

  Inside the case to my cable modem I found a little black device that I recognized as a flash drive. I had a feeling it didn’t belong there either.

  I called Dorothy.

  “They knew you were meeting with Marcus,” she said. “And they didn’t think you’d be home.”

  “Well, if so, that means they weren’t watching us.”

  “You’d have detected physical surveillance, Nick. They’re not stupid.”

  “So who are they?”

  “I want you to put that keylogger back in the USB drive, okay?”

  I did.

  “Do you know how to open a text editor?”

  “I do if you tell me how.”

  She did, and I opened a window on my computer and read off a long series of numbers. Then I took the keylogger out of the USB port and inserted the little device from the cable modem. And repeated the process, reading off more numbers.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  I waited. The two spots where the Taser prongs had sunk in, on my right shoulder and my left lower back, were still twitching and were starting to get itchy.

  I heard keyboard tapping and mumbling and the occasional grunt.

  “Huh,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, now, this is interesting.”

  “Okay.”

  “The electronic serial numbers you just gave me? That’s law-enforcement-grade equipment. Whoever broke in was working for the U.S. government.”

  “Or using government equipment,” I pointed out. “They weren’t necessarily government operatives themselves.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Though now I had a fairly good idea who might have sent them.

  Even before I arrived at the Boston field office of the FBI, Gordon Snyder had figured out who I was. He knew why I wanted to talk with him, and he knew I was working for Marshall Marcus.