by Derek Haas
She has a career ahead of her when this is over, if she’s alive.
Matthew Boone ascends the stairs behind me. I have no guilt on my face for eavesdropping because I don’t feel guilty. I was meant to hear that.
He passes me, unconcerned, and moves into the room, holding a plate of sandwiches.
After a moment, Peyton emerges. She stops short when she sees me, then meets my eyes, taking ownership of the words she knows I overheard.
We travel to a cabin across the state line into Washington. The trip is short, and we ride in silence. I drive, Peyton rides shotgun, and Boone sits in the back with Liam. The sky is its usual gray, a flat, endless ceiling. The landscape along the highway is green and lush, the forest dense. Every direction seems to push in on you, a compactor closing around garbage.
The puzzle pieces are locking into place, but one piece doesn’t fit. Malek wanted Boone dead so he could deal with Donald Blake. Blake doesn’t have the encryption codes to unlock the software, so it wouldn’t make sense to kill Boone before he had them, hence the kidnapping.
Either Malek or Blake didn’t have all the information.
Archie meets us at the end of a dirt drive in a newly rented Range Rover. He unlocks a chain stretched across the throat of a side path, then secures the padlock after we drive onto the dirt road. Signs along the road on our way here warned us the path was closed and patrolled by armed security, ostensibly to keep out hikers and backpackers. We have the land to ourselves.
The cabin is a smaller, shabbier, no-frills affair tucked against the side of a hill back from the road. It only has two bedrooms with two sets of bunk beds in each so it sleeps eight. Peyton wrinkles her nose and chooses the left room.
“Y’all can sleep in there,” she says, and tosses her sack onto a bed. “This one’s mine.”
Archie looks at me and shrugs his shoulders.
“What’d you find?” I ask.
“A lot,” he says, and opens a file, spreading out pages on a long wooden table with scratches all over its surface.
Donald Blake’s résumé prior to working for Popinjay reads like a monument to the new millennium. Following his time at the University of Texas, he worked in the oil and gas business, with stints in IT and accounting at Shell and Exxon. He lived in Austin and Midland and Odessa and Houston and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Staid, traditional work wasn’t his ambition though, so in 1999, he leapt to the nascent Internet industry and landed an early executive post at Amazon, where he should’ve stayed. Instead, he made a poor decision to head up finance at Pets.com. It bankrupted him, and according to court papers, cost him his marriage as well.
On his ass for six months, contacted by a headhunter—great name for the job, by the way—he was tossed a lifeline by Matthew Boone. He’s been with the company since 2002, has never remarried, and rents a residence apartment in the heart of downtown Portland, on the fourteenth floor of the Yamhill Hotel overlooking Pioneer Square, about four blocks from the Morrison Bridge. He has no wife, no kids, but a bank account that says he likes to spend. I don’t have time to find out whether his money is in a bookie’s pockets or up his nose.
If I had to put my finger on his personality type, I’d say he’s one of those guys who feels owed, who feels the world gave him the short straw but he deserves more. He deserves the front page, the corner office, the mansion, the Bentley. The world has conspired to hold him back, hold him down, right?
Maybe this plot was his attempt to seize the crown.
Boone looks up from the file in disbelief. “I’ve sat at the conference table with Donald Blake countless times. We’d walk to the food trucks together. He helped me negotiate the first big sale Popinjay ever had. The man you’re describing here is not the man I know.”
“I pulled his cell records. He’s—”
“How could you do that? You’d have to have a warrant.”
Archie looks at Matthew Boone like he’s a child.
“Tell him,” he says to me.
“Archie is one of the best fences in the world. This is what he does.”
“Believe that,” Archie adds.
“But it’s impossible if you don’t have a judge who . . .”
“Motherfucker, you ever hear of a bribe? Everyone has a price. Everyone. And if you got a Fed you trust and a judge or two who like to buy lake houses or fly private or go on goddamn safaris, you think it’s hard to get phone records? Shiiiiit. Please.”
It’s always funny to watch Archie get worked up. Reminds me of the old days.
“As I was saying,” and he pauses to give Boone the stink eye to see if he wants to interrupt again. When he doesn’t, Archie waits a little longer to make him pay for challenging him. Finally, he continues, “I got a hold of his phone records. He made fifteen calls to London last month. I don’t need to tell you who he called ’cause you already know. If we’d’ve had more time, we would’ve drawn the line to him sooner.”
Boone’s face reddens and he focuses on a spot behind me, a thousand yards away. “Where is Donald now?”
“Apparently he’s skipped work this week, since the day after the kidnapping. Again, something that would’ve raised a red flag if we were looking in that direction, but . . .” and Archie lets the sentence die.
We’re both out of our element here. We’re used to acquiring a target, researching the mark, and then putting the man into the ground. We’re not accustomed to discovering targets as we go, although it feels good to home in on one now. I have yet to lay eyes on Donald Blake, but I can feel the seed of hatred start to sprout, take root, bloom. A man who couldn’t find a legitimate path to success so he tried to force a different route? A Trojan horse, sitting back, smiling, waiting for another man’s murder to propel him into the CEO’s chair. Yes, he isn’t going to be hard to hate.
The way I die is consumed by righteous fire.
“I want to talk to him,” Boone says. “Let me talk to him.”
Archie shakes his head. “We’re past that.”
“I have to see his face. He has to look me in the eye.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Dammit! He came at me, Archie! He came at me! I’ve been sitting in a cage for weeks and I want to look him in the eye and tell him I know what he’s done. And I want to ask him why. He was at Meredith’s funeral for Chrissake. I took him in because I believed in him. I want to ask him Why? How? How he could do this to me?”
“Do you want your son back?” I interrupt.
His eyes find me. “Yes,” he growls.
“I’ll get him back.” I feel Archie and Peyton’s eyes on each side of my head, boring holes there, entry and exit wounds.
“How?” he asks hoarsely.
“I won’t be asking Donald Blake why, I can promise you that.”
Matthew Boone looks more at peace than I’ve seen him. He asks what the plan is and I tell him. He tells me it’s okay to leave him alone now . . . no one can possibly know this new safe house, and he understands what we have to do. After reading the file on Blake, he’s wrapped his head around the betrayal.
I leave him Archie’s keys to the Range Rover in case he needs to get away in a hurry, and he takes them with steady hands.
Archie believes Donald Blake is holed up in his apartment on the fourteenth floor of the Yamhill Hotel but he isn’t sure. Not one hundred percent. Blake could’ve run while I was across the pond, but run to where, we don’t know.
Peyton knows a woman, Shelly Davis, who works at Popinjay. They occasionally eat lunch together at a sandwich shop down the street. Shelly did some sort of coding on the twenty-fourth floor and reported directly to Donald Blake, held meetings with him two or three times a week. Peyton calls her and she agrees to meet for a cup of coffee. Archie and I occupy the adjacent booth.
“The place is in total disarray. Total disarray. Everyone is walking around like a land mine is going to go off at any minute. Matthew has been gone for weeks . . . now D
onald is missing. Louis Newman was murdered in the parking lot of Forest Park, did you know that?”
Peyton tells her she didn’t.
“Some kind of a mugging spree. Some Portland police detectives questioned a bunch of people on twenty-five and twenty-six but left without telling anyone anything. No one knows if we’re still getting paychecks. Remember Kinsey in accounting? She bailed. So did Phil. I don’t even know if the company is still a company.
“Jessica Chen called a meeting to tell everyone she didn’t know what the hell was happening either, but she has a cousin who works for the Seattle PD and she was going to see if he knew anyone in Portland PD she could talk to and maybe get some answers. I have kids, Peyton. I can’t afford to have this job vaporize.”
“I didn’t know any of this. I’ve been out of the loop.”
“Well it didn’t help that everyone from security up and quit at the same time. Sure didn’t make anyone feel safe. A couple of coders in the cubicles next to mine play video games all day now.”
“Has Donald checked in at all?”
“I heard him on a conference call with Jessica Chen, telling her not to worry, everything would be explained soon. So they were in contact, but it’s all so weird, weird, weird. What do you know? Why’d you quit?”
“Me? I got a job offer at a cabin chain in Washington. Sounds like I left in the nick of time. I was just thinking of you and wanted to get a bite.”
They split up after that and we meet down the street at Peyton’s Ford SUV.
“You catch all that?”
“Yeah. I agree with Archie. Donald Blake is holed up here, waiting to see what kind of deal he can make. It’s time to knock on his door and offer him one.”
We skirt Pioneer Square and walk into the Yamhill Hotel and Residences lobby, Archie in front, Peyton behind him, and I bring up the rear. The space is warm, arty, with a white check-in counter along one wall and a sleepy bar on the other side of the lobby. A bank of elevators await travelers around the counter from the concierge desk, and a secure door in the corner has a key fob pad hanging on to the wall above a small sign that reads, “Residents Only.”
Archie and I peel away from Peyton as she approaches the Registration desk and asks whom she can speak to regarding renting an apartment. We enter the elevator alcove and I push the up button. Doors spring open and I press the top floor; we keep both our chins down to avoid security cameras as the elevator elevates.
It dings open on the mezzanine, and a maid hops on, presses a middle floor, and hops off, all the while talking on her cell phone in an Eastern European language that sounds Slovenian. She never looked up from her pushcart.
On the tenth floor, the doors open again and Archie passes me, glances quickly at the fire escape route, and nods to his left. “Getting my bearings,” he says, more to himself than me.
There is no one in this hallway and we hit the stairwell at the end of the hall and ascend, our footfalls echoing softly, and I feel like an engine revving, like wheels smoking, like a throttle opening. Archie, ahead of me, turns around and gives me his toothy half smile, like he senses it, too. We get to the fourteenth floor and wait.
“You ever hear the parable of the mirror?” he asks, and lights up a cigarette right here in the stairwell, cocking one eye at me as the smoke frames his head like a Renaissance savior.
“The what?”
“The parable of the mirror. It’s a story that tells you—”
“I know what a goddamn parable is.”
Archie takes another drag, unfazed. He points at me with the cigarette between his fingers, using it to punctuate his story. “Man buys a mirror, looks into it, doesn’t like what he sees. Hair is messed up, tie isn’t straight, there’s lint on his shoulder, that type of thing. He reaches at the mirror, tries to fix his hair, knock the fuzz off his jacket, straighten his tie, but his fingers keep hitting the glass. He starts to yell at the reflection. ‘Let me fix this! C’mon! Let me fix this!’ His friend stops by and says, ‘Whatchoo yelling at, brother?’ The man points at the mirror, pissed. ‘It won’t let me fix anything,’ he cries. The friend says, ‘Son, you can’t change the reflection, you can only change you.’” Archie taps his finger to his head and takes another lungful of smoke.
“The moral of the story is the guy’s an idiot?”
Archie shakes his head. “Maybe. Maybe that is the moral.”
Just then, the door to the fourteenth-floor stairwell opens and Peyton stands there, waiting for us.
“All clear,” she says. “He’s in 1414.”
“What’d you do with the person showing you around?”
“Took his keycard and gave him the slip.”
I would’ve liked to have seen that.
We move down the residence hallway briskly, heads down. No one steps out from a room or an elevator to note our way.
We hit the wall on either side of 1414. A security peephole looks out from the center of the door, so I knock and get ready by positioning my body directly in front of the door, one leg behind the other, balanced, low center of gravity, like a man bracing to stop a heavy boulder rolling down a hill. I would handle this differently if I were here to kill Donald Blake, but for now, I just want him to talk.
I wait, wait, engine idling. The peephole darkens and I launch a kick into the door with everything I have, aiming for the vulnerable spot right next to the handle. The door explodes, banging into Donald Blake before he has a chance to prepare himself. He caroms into a wall, rattling his head coming and going, like a pool ball ricocheting off the rails. Peepholes are great for letting intruders know exactly where you’re standing.
A pack of dogs, Archie, Peyton, and I whip into the room and close the door behind us. Before Donald Blake has a chance to recover, I frog march him to a chair in the living room, away from the door. Archie turns up the TV to wash out Blake’s moans, and Peyton sweeps and clears the other rooms using the training she learned when she was a cop.
Donald Blake is alone, evidence enough he’s in way over his head. Rooms cleared, Peyton stands behind him while I open the door once more to see if our battering-ram entry raised any eyebrows from nosy neighbors, but the hallway is silent. Good.
Archie finds a dishrag and tosses it across the room so it smacks Blake in the face. Our victim takes his hand from where it is clamped over his left eye—the place the door caught him—and pulls back a bloody palm, then replaces it with the towel.
“The hell is this,” he puffs. But he knows, it’s all over his face, the way his shoulders sag. Playing dumb is the default position of anyone caught in a lie. Huh? What? What do you mean?
I move in front of Blake, pull him to his feet, and he hangs limply in front of me while I pat him down for a weapon. He’s a businessman, though, not a killer, so I don’t find anything.
I drop him back in the chair, slide over a glass coffee table, and sit down in front of him, so we’re eye to eye. Archie hangs back in his blind spot, which will drive any man crazy, and Peyton slides to the door, the three of us moving in a triangle like we’ve done this a thousand times.
“I need your eyes on me, Donald.”
Miserable, Donald Blake keeps his eyes cast down, that dishtowel held to his head by a shaky hand. I slap him in the wounded spot hard enough to rattle his teeth.
He reels back and makes a howling noise that sounds oddly like a cow’s moo.
“You’re gonna do what I say, Donald. The sooner you do, the less severe I’m gonna be.”
This gets him to raise his eyes. Hatred has replaced pain.
“Good. That’s step one. Where’s Josh?”
“You’re the one who took the place of Max Finnerich, right?” He twists around so he can see Peyton. “Yeah, she was on his team. That how you got inside with Boone? Pay her off or what?” He turns back to me, sneering now. “Or maybe you put the wood to her and got her to betray—”
I slap him again, hard. This time he stamps his foot on the ground and huffs for a mom
ent like he’s having trouble breathing, like a dragon blowing smoke out of its nose. His face has gone the color of rust. “Stop it! Stop it!” he demands.
“I asked you where Josh Boone is.”
“I’m trying to tell you,” he chokes. “Max Finnerich. It was all him. All his idea. He made the deal with Piotr Malek. He brought me into all this. I told him no, no way, no chance, but he said he had it all under control. He was in charge of security and security wouldn’t be a problem. He was gonna see to it and I knew then what he had in mind, that he was going to kill Matthew, I knew it and I wanted to say something but he threatened my life!”
He punctuates these last three words by punching the air like a boxer on shaky knees trying to hook his opponent but coming up empty. Snot and spittle fly from his mouth as he works himself up and his words shoot out like cannon fire. “Max Finnerich thought he had it all figured out, but he didn’t count on two things. He didn’t count on Matthew hiring freelance security—you—and he certainly didn’t think Matthew would change the encryption key and not tell anyone. None of us knew!”
My face is hot. I can feel my cheeks smarting as though he had punched me instead of the air.
Finnerich.
It’s all snapping into place and so damn obvious I can’t believe I missed it. Finnerich was head of security for Matthew Boone’s company before there was a price on Matthew Boone’s head. He realized quickly a dead Matthew Boone would be a boon for his enemies and competitors. He just didn’t know who would benefit most or how to make contact. So he does his research, either on his own or through Donald Blake, and he lands on Piotr Malek. Malek would hire the assassin, and Finnerich, for a fee, would loosen the defenses, make the hit a cakewalk. That was their deal.
There was a flaw, however. Finnerich didn’t expect his boss to reach out to someone like me who might expose his bullshit security. Once Finnerich’s half of the bargain went belly-up, he sent his nephews to turn the tables. Except now I don’t even believe they were his nephews. That bastard’s tears and moans and sobs were all a goddamned act. And I let him walk. I felt sorry for him. I thought he was small time, out of his league, punching above his weight class, but oh, no . . . I was the sucker. He played me like a child’s drum.