Death in the Cloud

by E. J. Simon

  “They don’t know yet. He’s lucky to be alive.”

  “It’s hard to believe that less than an hour ago he was joking around and bringing us drinks.” Samantha was tearing up.

  “I hate to leave him here tomorrow.” Michael said.

  Samantha looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “I have to be in Washington, remember?”

  “Oh, I know…but with all this—”

  “I’ve still got to go and you should still come with me.”

  “But what about Tiger?”

  “His family’s on their way. Right now, there’s nothing that can be done anyway. He’s out of it until he wakes up, which is probably better.”

  Michael wondered if Samantha also remembered what had preceded their exit from Mario’s. His thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice coming from down the hall.

  “Samantha, Michael.” It was Fletcher Fanelli, their close friend and the Westport chief of police. As soon as he approached, Samantha gave him a hug, “Oh, Fletcher, it was horrible.”

  “I heard you guys had just left when the explosion hit.”

  “Yeah, we were lucky,” Michael said, looking cautiously over at Samantha.

  A former semi-pro hockey player, Fletcher looked the part, built like a tank, ideal for his role as a small-town police chief in a wealthy suburban town with virtually no crime, except, on occasion, when someone was trying to kill Michael or Samantha. On the side, he had helped Michael in trying to track down his attackers, traveling with him in pursuit from North Carolina to Paris. Fletcher had little real crime to attend to in Westport so he was thrilled with the chance to do some real crime-fighting, even if it involved some of Michael’s more questionable activities, which Fletcher considered to be more or less victimless crimes. Twenty years as a New York City cop had cured him of such ethical distinctions.

  “Do you know how many people were…?” Michael asked.

  Fletcher looked down, “It looks like at least sixteen are dead and we’ve got another ten here in the hospital. Word is we might lose another two or three.”

  “Do they know what happened? Was it a gas explosion?” Samantha asked.

  Fletcher hesitated. “Keep this to yourselves for now but I don’t think so. It’s still premature but the fire chief’s already told me that it looks suspicious. Believe it or not, he thinks it was a bomb.”

  “A bomb? In Mario’s?” Samantha said, a little too loud.

  “Keep it low,” Fletcher said as he looked around. “Things’ll get crazy once word gets out. We’ve found what looks like bomb material blown into the street.”

  “Who would want to plant a bomb inside Mario’s?” Samantha said. Michael noticed that her eyes avoided his.

  “I don’t know. There’s so many nuts these days.” Shaking his head, he pointed to Tiger. “Let’s hope he pulls through…Anyway, I’m glad you two are okay. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  As soon as they were alone again, Samantha reached for Michael’s hand.

  “So it was Alex who told you to get us out of the restaurant? What in the world is going on?”

  Michael pulled out his cell phone to show Samantha the text he’d received from Alex just before the explosion. He scrolled through his contacts until he came to Alex.

  All of Alex’s previous texts, including the ones he’d received inside Mario’s, were gone. But as he continued to stare at his phone in disbelief, a new one appeared.

  Are you still alive?

  Chapter 24

  Whitestone, Queens, New York

  Donna Nicholas, formerly known as Donna Finkelstein, was the last of Alex Nicholas’s three wives. She was sure of that. What she wasn’t so sure of was whether she was his widow.

  Propped up by three pillows, she sat up in her bed, her perfect 36D silicone breasts—an engagement gift from Alex—peeking out of her black Victoria’s Secret nightgown. She snuggled under the crisp white Frette comforter and, after emptying her second glass of chardonnay and pouring a third from the bottle on her nightstand, opened up her laptop. She was ready once again to sign into the iJewishMingle dating site.

  Several weeks earlier—in what she was not entirely sure was a coincidence—she had been matched online with a potential date. They’d had several online chats. She had yet to meet him in person. His name was Alex.

  Finally feeling a good buzz from her wine, she navigated the site, hoping that Alex would be online tonight. He appeared in seconds.

  Alex: I knew you’d be back.

  Donna: My husband is dead. He was shot in a restaurant two years ago, in front of a bunch of people, including some cops who were at the bar. He was buried at Saint Michael’s Cemetery. So now you’re expecting me to believe that this is you—on a dating website, no less?

  Alex: If you’re so sure he’s dead, why did you have his body exhumed?

  Maybe, she thought, someone told him about all that and he decided to find her and try some type of scam. It was too bizarre to really be Alex, even if he did fake his death somehow. No, this couldn’t be real—although she’d always had her doubts—and Alex was certainly capable of anything…when he was alive.

  Donna: Maybe I thought you took some of your precious money with you. It’d be just like you to line your casket with hundred dollar bills. Or, maybe, I had your—his—grave dug up because there were too many odd things happening—

  Alex: You mean like Michael somehow being able to go from running a boring, legit corporation to running my old business, successfully?

  Donna: That’s one, definitely. But there’s been a lot more. Some of his friends have told me about e-mails or messages that appear to have come from Alex’s account. And then his closest friend—who now works supposedly for Michael—mentioned that Alex had spent a small fortune on some computer thing, something called—

  Alex: Artificial intelligence?

  Donna: Yeah, that’s it, so he supposedly could duplicate himself on a computer. I think it was so he could create a diversion or something so he could keep communicating and torturing me even though he was hiding in some nice condo in Las Vegas or Miami.

  Alex: Really, is that what you think? And what would he be doing there, all alone?

  Donna: Oh, he’s not alone. He’s got his cronies that would still be around him somehow and you can be sure he’s got a parade of good-looking twenty-one-year-old, big-busted bimbos coming in and out every day. Believe me, he’s not alone. The difference, though, is that when his ballgames come on TV, he can send them all away and sit back in one of those recliners with a drink in his hand and enjoy the game. “In fuckin peace,” as he always said.

  Alex: Yeah, well that does sound good. He must be a smart guy.

  Donna: Actually, Alex is—was—very smart. Not book smart, he hated that stuff, but very smart. That’s why he was so good at bookmaking.

  Alex: I’m curious, was he good in bed?

  Actually, he had been quite good in bed, the best she had ever had, and she’d had quite a few, before and during their marriage. She looked away from her laptop as memories of some of their best nights swept over her. If this was really Alex, it was the type of rhetorical yet provoking question he would ask.

  Maybe it was the wine, or just the thought or possibility that this really was Alex, but it was too much right now.

  Donna: I’ve got to go to sleep.

  Alex: Yeah, me too.

  She switched off her computer but, just before she did, she saw he had already signed off.

  Typical Alex.

  Chapter 25

  Washington, DC

  Michael knew Samantha enjoyed staying at the Four Seasons Hotel; she loved the indoor pool and Georgetown shopping. Even though the President of the United States had summoned Michael to the White House because of Alex, it was apparent that Samantha was still
skeptical that Michael’s brother was anything more than incredibly good software. So as soon as she left the room for her morning swim, Michael opened up his laptop, clicked onto the ancient gold cross and waited for Alex to appear.

  “I’ve got a letter I want to read to you’” Michael said as soon as Alex appeared on the screen.

  “A letter? Who sends letters anymore?”

  Michael looked back with a satisfied smile. “The Pope does.”

  He took the envelope out of his pocket and, after showing Alex the gold embossed Vatican seal on the envelope, removed the letter and read it aloud:

  Dear Mister Nicholas, on behalf of the Vatican family and as the spiritual leader of the holy Catholic community, I sincerely apologize to you and your family for the terrible events that were directed at you and your family by members of our clergy…

  He looked back up at Alex, “I love this new pope.”

  But he could see that Alex wasn’t impressed. After all, he’d never been a fan of the clergy—or of any religion. Not to mention that, even though they had been rogue priests, the Vatican had still protected Alex’s killer and, in trying to cover up the entire affair and silence anyone who could reveal what they’d done, had also tried to murder Michael.

  “Schlegelberger,” Alex growled. “That son of a bitch tried to penetrate my software. He was trying to get inside it and both duplicate it for his own purposes and eliminate me. It cost me over two million dollars before we made that breakthrough—and he thought he could just hack in and copy it.”

  “We don’t think the old—and certainly not the new—pope ever knew about what Schlegelberger and the other priests had done.”

  Alex shook his head, not buying it. “We don’t know anything for sure. But Schlegelberger was the right-hand man to the last pope, so you can make your own conclusion.”

  Michael was nervous about the upcoming meeting with the President. How much did the government know about him? Did they know that besides being a respectable corporate CEO, if there was such a thing, that he was also in charge of the major illegal gambling operation that he’d inherited from Alex?

  Worse, did they know that Michael’s former bodyguard, the beautiful but certifiably disturbed Sindy Steele, who was now quietly residing on a Greek island, had been hired by the rogue priests to kill Alex’s murderer, Joseph Sharkey, after he threatened to reveal what he knew? She had finished him off with a stiletto to the heart inside a Florence leather shop, just one of a string of dead bodies that accompanied Michael’s new life. Then there was the hit man the Vatican sent after Sindy Steele to silence her. She blew him away in a North Carolina hotel room.

  As Michael began recounting all the things that had happened over the past two years, he wondered how he’d gone from the straight-arrow suburban corporate life he and Samantha had lived, to what now appeared to be a character in a Stephen King novel. But when he looked back at the computer screen, it was clear. Once his brother had been murdered, Michael had wound up living Alex’s life, too. And that meant being anything but a straight arrow.

  Michael knew he was good, too good at times, at compartmentalizing aspects of his life. He had the ability to store his emotions, if not memories, on a shelf in the closet of his brain and close the door until he needed to revisit whatever he’d put there. It was an invaluable trait for someone living, as he now was, two different lives, one of them secretive and hidden from the world.

  Today, Michael would find out whether his secrets remained secret or whether they’d been uncovered by the federal government, of all things.

  “I’m meeting with President O’Brien in just a few hours—O’Brien told me on the phone that he knew about everything. Those were his words. Do you have any idea what that means, exactly, or what he wants with me?”

  “No, not really, I don’t. I just know there’s a lot of activity, like I said, someone’s been attacking, hacking into my…site, my cloud accounts, texts, everything. I haven’t been able to get on top of it yet except to fight them off.”

  “You’ve been able to hack into phone lines, video surveillance feeds, and e-mails, and you can’t figure this one out?”

  “There are 182 billion e-mails each day, I can’t read them all…yet.”

  Michael sat back, frustrated yet fascinated. “I just hate going into this meeting with the President, and probably all kinds of CIA people, blind.”

  Alex looked back, expressionless. “I don’t think they want much from you. It’s me they’re looking for. It’s funny how much more attention people pay to you when you’re dead.”

  Chapter 26

  Santorini, Greece

  She sat alone in the outdoor café, watching the local Greeks and the summer tourists in the square. In her mid-thirties, tall, long black hair, a slender yet athletic build, and mildly drunk, Sindy Steele was a male tourist’s dream. Or so they might think. Some of the locals knew better.

  She had been a promising medical student at Stanford until she was suddenly expelled as part of a sealed arrangement with prosecutors following the not-so-mysterious-but-impossible-to-prove poisoning death of the lover who’d just jilted her.

  Disgraced and shamed, banned from ever reentering medical school, she put her talents to work, first in the service of a Russian oligarch who approached her after reading about her case, and then other organizations. Murder for hire, it turns out, is a tight, close-knit community, in which an assassin capable of avoiding detection by forensic science is a valued commodity.

  After a few years, Sindy Steele had established a reputation and a loyal clientele, leaving a trail of dead bodies whose autopsies, if looked at together, would have indicated an epidemic of sleep apnea, alcoholic binge poisoning, opioid overdose, and heart attacks in upscale hotels, restaurants, and bars, her venues of choice.

  As the Greek ouzos warmed their way down her to her stomach, her mind flashed back again to each assignment, the ones she was paid to do, and paid well. Her favorite weapons were both silent ones: exotic, impossible-to-detect poisons—a result of her excellent pharmacology training at Stanford—and her stiletto.

  She preferred the intimacy of the stiletto, which felt much like sex…in that other place…where you know it hurts but you want it deeper. Except this time, she was the one doing the thrusting, the gentle piercing. She remembered each face as they looked into her eyes, their mouths always slightly open, searching for clues. Who was she? Did they know her? Who sent her? Why was she doing this? Their eyes pleading for answers, their voices already stunned into silence.

  And then, after the initial shock and after they’d gotten used to the pain, they’d plead silently: Put it in again, deeper…please. Once more.

  Tonight, Sindy Steele was growing increasingly restless. Her anxiety had been building for months.

  The tourists sitting near and far in the café, a mix mostly of Brits, Germans, and Americans, seemed to focus on her, the men trying to catch her attention, perhaps dreaming of a liaison with a stunning Greek woman—they had no way of knowing she was an American in exile, in voluntary retirement, compliments of her last employer. Instead of having her eliminated because of what she’d done for them and what she knew, those dirty priests had paid her a lot of money, as long as she went away, forever, far away. Like Santorini.

  The locals here were still talking about what she said to the Greek Orthodox priest, Father Changaris. He accosted her one night at another outdoor café when she was drunk, telling her she should come to church on Sunday and get on her knees to ask for forgiveness for her sins. She took another swig of her ouzo and said, loud enough for all of Santorini to hear, “Father, when I’m on my knees, I’m not praying.”

  There was trouble coming. She wasn’t sure what it was but, like the dogs who instinctively know when to flee before anyone else sees the tsunami arriving at the shore, she knew the signs, those feelings when the drugs the doctors
prescribed were no longer keeping her impulses in check. That dangerous combination of restlessness mixed with loneliness.

  She had a dark history with her lovers. Of the two in her life of any consequence, one was in a cemetery not far from Stanford. The other was in Connecticut, very much alive. She’d been his bodyguard, then his mistress, and, when he’d abandoned her for his wife, she’d nearly murdered him, too. But they’d reconciled, speaking occasionally; she’d even helped him once since then, an incident in Paris where he’d gotten in trouble. Fortunately, she’d been stalking him and rushed to his rescue when some combination of old Nazis and corrupt Vatican priests had tried to kill him. In her mind, she remained, in a sense, his bodyguard. She knew that he still thought of her and that, deep down, when he put his wife aside, he would still want her. She had not given up.

  She missed Michael Nicholas.

  Chapter 27

  Berlin, Germany

  Claus Dietrich went down the elevator and out of the modern glass building that housed his office. He headed toward the Brandenburg Gate but, just before he reached it, he turned left onto a series of quiet streets and then reached Wilhelmstrasse. He paused when he reached the site of Hitler’s bunker, where the Fuhrer and Dietrich’s uncle had spent their last moments, marked now by a simple information placard for tourists.

  He kept walking and in just a few minutes arrived at the shop, a relic of old Berlin, virtually untouched since the war. The painted wooden sign above the window read Heinrich’s Mannequin Shop.

  It was long past closing time, so the store windows were dark. Despite being rarely open, the strangely life-like appearance of the mannequins visible through the shop window always seemed to attract the attention of passersby. Mothers could be seen pulling away their children—whose faces were glued to the window—as they themselves sneaked a curious look back.

  Although Dietrich was technically one of the owners of the Heinrich Mannequin Shop, he rarely entered it and wasn’t active in the mannequin business that was transacted in the store. In fact, Dietrich found it disconcerting to be there alone. The latest, electronically enhanced mannequins put him particularly ill at ease. In fact, his stomach knotted as he anticipated entering the building.