Out in the hall, I lurched instinctively toward the basement, but Rachel dragged me in the opposite direction to another doorway that led to the garage. When she pulled the door open, I was staring at a monster, a huge black Humvee. Either she had planned for a quick exit, or someone didn’t like backing the thing out of the garage, because it was facing out. She circled around to the driver’s side. The passenger-side door was so close to the wall on my side I could have practically climbed in from inside the house. She started the engine and then must have stepped down on the accelerator by accident. The engine roared in that dark, close space.
“I’m putting up the door. Ready?”
“Wait until I get this thing loaded,” I said, struggling with the Mossberg. “There might be more of them.” My fingers were shaking so badly I kept dropping the big cartridges on the floor in front of me.
“Hurry up!”
It was a nine-shot. I got six in and pumped one into the chamber. Then I powered down the window and braced the barrel on the door ledge, facing forward.
“Go.”
She punched the opener. The door started to lift immediately, and an overhead light snapped on. She put both hands on the wheel and leaned forward. She could barely see over the dashboard, but she had the focus of a pointer ready to go get her bird.
We both watched as the door came up. My forehead was bleeding. I kept wiping the blood out of my eyes. We both had our necks bowed, looking for feet or legs to appear beneath that slowly rising curtain. The Humvee made a lot of noise in that cramped space, and the door was not quiet, either, which was probably why we didn’t hear the man coming through the side door from the house until he was right there.
I tried to swivel the shotgun around, but he was too close. He grabbed the barrel and pushed it straight up with one hand. With the other, he stuck a semiautomatic into the car. I let go of my weapon and went for his. He got a couple of rounds off just as I slammed his arm against the dashboard. The cabin filled with the smoke and the smell and the sound. Rachel was screaming something, and he was trying to pull his arm back. I was kicking at his arm with both feet and feeling around with one hand for the Taser. Out of the blue, his fingers slipped from the grip of the gun, and he started screaming. Rachel had powered up the window and pinned his arm to the ceiling.
“Drive!” I yelled. “Drive! Go!”
She hit the gas, and his masked head whipped around, because he could see what I had seen—that there was about three inches of clearance on his side between the Humvee and the side of the garage doorway. The machine roared out of the gate, and the jamb instantly peeled off our attacker. When he stopped and we kept going, his arm whipped past my head and then disappeared completely. Rachel skidded out into the street. She must have hit the remote again, because as we were pulling away, the garage door was coming down.
17
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO HARVEY’S, RACHEL NEARLY RAN me over going through the front door. I found her in the kitchen with Harvey, standing next to him with his face in her hands, staring soulfully into his eyes.
“Baby,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. Are you all right?” Then she kissed his forehead and smiled as she wiped a tear from her eye. If it was a performance, it was a good one. It might also have been a posttrauma realignment of priorities. It was hard to tell with Rachel.
As for Harvey, the way he blushed in her presence made him look more alive than I had seen in ages. He reached up, took her hands in his, and kissed each one. Then he looked at me.
“Oh, my God. What happened?” The alarm on his face told me I must have been a mess.
“I’m all right.” I had a skull-pounding headache, but everything else seemed to be working. “Where’s Bo?”
“After he got your call, he brought more men over. He is showing them the back.”
“Rachel can tell you what happened. I’m going to get cleaned up, and then the three of us have to sit down and talk.” I left the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes.
Bo came upstairs almost immediately. I had washed the blood out of my eyes, found a clean shirt, and just retrieved the first-aid kit from under the sink in the bathroom loosely designated as mine.
“What happened?” he asked, focusing immediately on my most obvious injury, the contusion on my forehead.
“I think I got whacked in the head with the butt of an assault rifle.”
“Let me see.” When he looked behind the damp, bloody washcloth, he seemed concerned but not alarmed. It was the sort of thing that qualified as routine in Bo’s line of work. But his jaw tightened. Violence against women was another of his deeply entrenched rage buttons, and no matter how hard I tried to change his view, he considered me a woman first and a professional colleague second. He put down the toilet seat cover.
“Sit.”
I did, happy to let someone else be in charge. He worked quickly and expertly, cleaning and dressing the wound.
“Drazen’s got some technical operators,” I said. “These guys were pros.”
“How many?”
“Two for sure. Maybe three.” I didn’t know if the one we had scraped off the Humvee in the garage had been a third man or the Taser man. “They had all the gear. Masks and night-vision goggles and armor. All kinds of firepower. Bat belts. They were definitely Velcro guys. Owwww.”
“Hold still.” He dabbed at the gash on my head, which had become the primary focus of all my nerve endings. “Voices?”
“I didn’t hear any. They weren’t talking, and there was too much other noise.”
He put the lid on the bottle of peroxide and found the trash can for the pile of bloody cotton balls that had accumulated from his ministering. “They were not Drazen’s men,” he said. “He knew nothing of what happened.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I spoke to him. He told me.”
“But they were looking for Rachel. I mean, I think they were. They were looking for someone, and they were ready to take me out, so it must have been her.” I started to stand up, but a wave of nausea put me right back down. “He must be lying to you, Bo.”
“He wants Roger Fratello. He wants you to find him. Why would he kill you?”
I looked into his face, trying to detect whether he believed what he was saying or whether he believed it because Drazen had told him to. All I saw was a lot of stress in his eyes and deep creases in his thick forehead.
“If they weren’t Drazen’s men, then who were those guys?”
“I don’t know. When my men got to the address you gave me, there were no bodies.”
“No bodies? It’s been, like, an hour. Are you sure they were at the right place?”
“As you said, technical operators. There were no shells or weapons or bodies. They cleaned up.”
I leaned back against the tank and thought about it. If it wasn’t Russians, there was only one other possibility. “Blackthorne.”
Bo had found a large adhesive bandage. He peeled off the back and centered it over the cut. “Who is Blackthorne?”
“It’s a what, not a who. A private military firm. Army for hire.”
“Yes, yes. We had many such groups in my country. That is how the Croats beat the Serbs.” He perked up at the memory. “Their militia was trained by one of your American companies.”
“Blackthorne had a car parked outside Rachel’s house. They’re all ex-military and intelligence. These guys must have been from Blackthorne.”
“What did they want?”
“Rachel.” This time when I got up, I managed to stay on my feet. “And she’s about to tell me why.”
Harvey and Rachel were still in the kitchen when we went downstairs. I settled in at the table with them with a big glass of cold water and a bunch of ibuprofen. Bo went off to make calls. He was still working his way off the Boston PD’s “person of interest” list. Looking across the table at the newly constituted couple, I was almost afraid to begin.
“Rachel, why is Blackthorne aft
er you?”
“Who’s Blackthorne?”
“A private military firm.”
“Mercenaries?” She looked at Harvey. “French Foreign Legion? That kind of thing?”
“No,” Harvey said. “These are private firms that provide military services for profit.”
“They can do that?”
“It is sometimes appropriate for governments to transfer some of their public responsibilities to the private sector.” Harvey’s measured tone was a nice balance to Rachel’s increasing shrillness. “It can be more efficient on many fronts, including cost.” Harvey looked at me. “Why do you ask?”
“I think that’s who came after us at the house.”
“That’s terrific,” Rachel said. “That’s just great. First the Russians, and now I get to have a bunch of mercenaries on my ass.”
“You have no idea why?”
“Not a clue.”
I could have pushed harder, but there was so much to cover. I moved on. “You killed Vladislav Tishchenko.”
“In self-defense.” They said it in stereo.
“We’ll talk about that in a second. Let me just get all the facts out first. You killed him, but Drazen thinks Roger Fratello did it. He’s looking for Roger to, I don’t know, exact his revenge, and he thinks Harvey can tell him where to find him. It’s possible he thinks this because some mole inside the FBI tipped him off. That’s pure speculation, but it could make some sense, because we know the FBI also thinks that Harvey can help them find Roger.” I pulled out the only unoccupied chair at the table and put my feet up. “The FBI wants Roger because he tipped off his Russian—actually, Ukrainian—business partner, who I assume is Drazen Tishchenko, that there was an FBI agent undercover at Betelco. Drazen then either killed this agent or had him killed. Is that true, Rachel?”
I looked at her, hoping that our fracas in Acton would have convinced her the time for bullshit had passed.
“Drazen was in Betelco,” she said. “That part is true, but I don’t know anything about the FBI agent except that he died.”
“It wasn’t natural causes, Rachel. He was missing his head and his hands when they found him, which, according to the FBI, scared off any other potential witnesses in the Betelco case. That sounds like Drazen to me. What do you think?” Her neck stiffened. Either she was surprised by the news, or she just didn’t like being reminded.
“Yes.” She spoke precisely. “It sounds like something Drazen would do, but I had nothing to do with it. And I wouldn’t.”
“Even if it meant you would have gone to jail?”
“I wouldn’t have done anything like that no matter what.” Harvey put his hand on the table next to hers, and the two of them entwined fingers. She did sound convincing.
“Okay, so everyone is looking for Roger. As a way to protect Harvey, I have committed to Drazen that I would find Roger for him. At the time, I had no idea that doing that would put your life, Rachel’s life, at risk. Your life would be at risk because Roger didn’t really kill Vladi. He knows that you did and would presumably use that tidbit as a way to save his own life, if forced to choose. Is all of that right?”
Neither raised an objection. “Good. That means we have a conundrum. Find Roger and save Harvey, or leave him lost and save Rachel. My goal is to save you both…and me, of course.”
“How do you expect to do that?”
“First, I need all the facts, starting with Betelco. I want to understand your relationship, Rachel, with the Tishchenkos. Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
She hesitated, so I rephrased. “Susan Fratello says you brought the Tishchenkos into Betelco. She said you talked Roger into killing a pending deal to sell Betelco at a fair price in order to do it. Is that true?”
I thought one of Harvey’s almost useless legs would pop up and bang the table. “I beg your pardon?”
He looked at me, I looked at Rachel, and then we both looked at Rachel.
“All right, here it is. The cold, hard truth. It’s true. I did bring Drazen in.”
Harvey’s chin dropped about half an inch as he turned away. It wasn’t much, but enough to convey his disappointment. She brought her other hand up so that she was holding his hand with both of hers. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to get him to look at her. “I had no choice.”
Gee, that was a shocker.
“It was my husband. My sweet, stupid, degenerate gambler husband. Gorgeous to look at, but…” She couldn’t suppress a wistful smile before she must have realized it was Harvey’s hand she was holding. “I never should have left you, baby. I didn’t know what a good thing I had.”
“What about Gary?” We needed to stay on point.
“Drazen likes to buy gambling debts. He looks for anyone he considers to be useful to him, like lawyers and accountants and cops. People on the inside of successful companies. Gary had a big debt we couldn’t pay. Drazen bought it and then told us he would kill him if I didn’t do what he said.”
“What did he ask you to do?”
She tried again to make eye contact with Harvey. He didn’t seem to be able to look at her, but he also hadn’t pulled his hand out of the knot of interlocking fingers and thumbs where she had tied herself to him. “Identify targets of opportunity for him. He had a lot of money coming into the country, and he needed legitimate places to wash it. He wanted it where no one would look for it.”
“You did this with other companies?”
“I had no choice.”
It made sense. As an auditor for midsize firms, she would have been in the perfect position to know who was vulnerable to a Drazen pillaging. “You figured out how badly Roger needed cash and brought the Russians in. Is that right?”
“Roger begged me to bring them in. He was all upset about the company going down, his father’s business and the family legacy and all that crap. At least, that was what he said at the time. He knew I had…connections. He asked me to hook him up. I told him he was better off with the deal he had, but he wouldn’t listen, and he wouldn’t leave me alone, so I did what he asked. I introduced him to Drazen’s people. Drazen came in and recapitalized him.”
“What did Drazen get in exchange?”
“He got to use the company for various things.”
“Such as?”
“What you’d expect. Laundering money. Shipping stuff around the world using Betelco as cover.”
“How much did Roger know?”
“Turns out good old Roger knew exactly what he was getting into. Not too long after they came in, he started giving me the cold shoulder. I didn’t see him much anymore. If you want to know the truth, I think he used me to get them in there, because once they were in with all their dirty cash, he started stealing it.”
“Stealing Drazen’s cash sounds like a risky strategy.”
“It put me in a very bad position, because if Drazen found out, he would have blamed me.”
“Let’s see, you screwed your lover, Roger, over by bringing in your Russian investors, then got worried that Roger was about to screw you back?”
“Exactly. I got the feeling he was about to take his dough and disappear and leave me holding the bag. I couldn’t let that happen. Drazen would have thought I was in it with him from the start. I had to know what he was up to, so I went through the books and…the books, if you know what I mean. I figured out where he was hiding the money. That night that it all came down, Roger and I were supposed to meet at the offices to talk about it.” She glanced again at Harvey and pitched her voice to him and him only. “That’s why I was there. I didn’t have any choice, baby. They would have killed Gary.”
The implications of doing what she had done to protect the man for whom she’d left Harvey, while she was sleeping with another man, seemed to elude her. “Anyway, he never came, but Vladi did. That’s the night it all went down.”
“That’s the night Vladi died?”
“Yes.”
“Keep going.”
&nbs
p; “Vladi was like Drazen’s puppy dog. He followed him around and did errands for him. From what I heard, he was his bodyguard back wherever they came from. Vladi took a bullet for him more than once. Anyway, I was there at the offices working late that night when Vladi showed up. I was by myself, and all of a sudden, this big, hairy, smelly piece of crap whacked out on coke and God knows what else walks in, sees me, and starts drooling. I knew I was in trouble. He’d been up for days drinking and snorting and gambling and whoring. He thought I was just part of the package, a cute young thing sitting right there for the picking. I tried to talk to him, but those people—Russians, Ukrainians, whatever—to them, a woman is for screwing or beating or maybe both at the same time. He was on me before I had time to scream. He bent me backward over Roger’s desk and put his tongue down my throat.”
Harvey was listening closely. The healthy coloring in his face had been temporary. He was as pale as ever.
“There were so many different ways I thought I would die that night.” Rachel’s voice had softened. She was sounding as exposed as she must have felt lying across that desk. Harvey patted her on the arm. “I was scared out of my mind, so while he was groping me, I started looking for his gun. I knew he’d be carrying. He was so far gone when I found it, he didn’t notice. I shot him.”
“What kind of gun?” I asked her.
Her eyes flashed. “What difference does that make?”
“Do you know how to disengage the safety on an automatic? Can you do it while you’re bent over a desk being raped?”
“You do a lot of things you didn’t think you could when you’re about to die. I found the gun, and I stood him up, and I shot him.” Her voice had turned brittle, but it wasn’t strong. Even though she was angry, there was still something vulnerable about her, and I couldn’t tell whether it was harder to feel for her or not to feel for her.
“How many times?”
“Three.”
“Was he dead?”
“Oh, yes.”
I turned to Harvey. “This is where you came in.”
The Pandora Key Page 13