STILL SHAKING, MICHEL closed up his shop and left shortly after. He locked the rear entrance to the store. That’s where he kept his small Renault, in a little private lot.
He opened the car door. He didn’t like what he’d just done. These rules had kept his family in business for generations. He had broken them. If word got out, everything they’d worked for all these years was shot.
As he stepped into the car and was about to shut the door, Michel felt a powerful force push at him from behind. He was thrown into the passenger seat. A strong hand pressed his face sharply into the leather.
“I gave you his name,” Michel whimpered, heart racing. “I told you what you wanted to know. You said you wouldn’t bother me anymore.”
A hard metal object pressed to the back of Issa’s head. The merchant heard the double click of a gun being cocked, and in his panic, his thoughts flashed to Marte, waiting for him at dinner. He shut his eyes.
“Please, I beg you, no…”
“Sorry, old man.” The pop of the gun going off was muffled by the Renault’s chugging engine. “Changed our minds.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
The first thing that came back was the data from Mustang World. The list of new subscribers Hauck had asked for.
Back at home, he glanced over the long list of names. One thousand six hundred and seventy-five of them. Several pages long. It was organized by mailing zip code, starting with Alabama. Mustang enthusiasts from every part of the globe.
From the bank trail he’d found at Dietz’s, it seemed a valid assumption Charles might be in the Caribbean or Central America. Karen told him they’d sailed around there. The bank manager on St. Kitts had told Hauck someone else had been looking for Charles. He’d also have to have access to these banks at some point.
But as he flipped through the long list, Hauck realized Charles could be anywhere. If he was even in here…
Slowly, he started to scan through.
THE NEXT THING that he got was a call from Joe Velko.
The Joint Inter-Agency Task Force agent caught Hauck on a Saturday morning just as he had put on a batch of pancakes for Jessie, who was up with him that weekend. When she asked about the red marks on his neck and the stiffness in his gait, Hauck told her he’d slipped on the boat.
“I pulled up some hits for you on that search,” Joe informed him. “Nothing great. I’ll fax it out to you if you want.”
Hauck went over to his desk. He sat in his shorts and T-shirt, holding a spatula as twelve pages of data came rolling in.
“Listen,” Joe told him, “no promises. Generally we might get a thousand positive hits for any one that could actually lead somewhere-and that means merely something we can pass along to an analyst’s desk. We call any correlations to key input ‘alerts’ and rank them by magnitude. From low to moderate to high. Most classify in the lower bracket. I’ve spared you most of the boilerplate and methodology. Why don’t you flip over to the third page?”
Hauck picked up a pen and found the spot. There was a shadowed box with the heading “Search AF12987543. ALERT.”
Joe explained, “These are random hits from some online newsletter the computer picked up. From something called the Carlyle Antique Car Auction in Pennsylvania.” He chuckled. “Real cloak-and-dagger stuff, Ty. You see how it says, ‘1966 Emberglow Mustang. Condition: Excellent. Low Mileage, 81.5. Shines! Frank Bottomly, Westport, Ct.’”
“I see it.”
“The computer picked up the car and the connection to Connecticut. This communication took place last year-basically just someone making a random query into buying one. You can see the program assigned a rating of LOW against it. There’s a bunch of other stuff like that. Idle chatter. You can go on.”
Hauck flipped through the next few pages. Several e-mails. The program was monitoring private interactions. Tons of back-and-forth chatter on classic-car sites, blogs, eBay, Yahoo.com. Whatever it picked up using the reference points Hauck had provided. A few hits on the Web site of the Concours d’Elegance in Greenwich. All were assessed as LOW. There was even a rock group in Texas called Ember Glow that opened for the singer Kinky Friedman. The priority against that hit was labeled “ZERO.”
There were twelve whole pages of this. One e-mail was literally a guy talking about a girl named Amber, with the comment, “She glows like an angel.”
No Charles Friedman. Nothing from the Caribbean.
Hauck felt frustrated. Nothing to add to the list from Mustang World.
“Dad?” An acrid smell penetrated Hauck’s nostrils. Jessie was standing by the stove in the open kitchen, her pancakes going up in smoke.
“Oh shit! Joe, hold on.”
Hauck ran back into the open kitchen and flipped the black pancakes off the skillet and onto a plate. His daughter’s nose turned up in disappointment. “Thanks.”
“I’ll make more.”
“Emergency?” Joe inquired on the line.
“Yeah, a thirteen-year-old emergency. Dad screwed up breakfast.”
“That takes precedence. Look, go through it. It’s only a first pass. I just wanted you to know I was on it. I’ll call if anything else comes in.”
“Appreciate it, Joe.”
CHAPTERER SIXTY-ONE
Karen pulled her Lexus into the driveway. She stopped at the mailbox and rolled down her window to pick up the mail. Samantha was home. Her Acura MPV was parked in front of the garage.
Sam was in the last days of school, graduating in a week. Then she and Alex were heading to Africa on safari with Karen’s folks. Karen would have loved to be going along as well, but when the plans were made, months earlier, she had just started at the real-estate agency, and now, with all that was happening, how could she just walk away and abandon Ty? Anyhow, she rationalized, what was better than the kids going on that kind of adventure with their grandparents?
As the commercials said, Priceless!
Karen reached through the car window and pulled out the mail. The usual deadweight of publications and bills, credit-card solicitations. A couple of charity mailings. An invitation from the Bruce Museum was one of them. It had a fabulous collection of American and European paintings and was right in Greenwich. The year before, Charlie had been appointed to the board.
Staring at the envelope, Karen drifted back to an event there last year. She realized it was just two months before Charlie disappeared. It was black-tie, a carnival theme, and Charlie had gotten a table. They had invited Rick and Paula. Charlie’s mother, up from Pennsylvania. Saul and Mimi Lennick. (Charlie had harangued Saul into a considerable pledge.) Karen remembered he’d had to get up in his tux and make a speech that night. She’d been so very proud of him.
Someone else invaded her thoughts from that night, too. Some Russian guy from town, whom she’d never met before, but Charlie seemed to know well. Charles had gotten him to donate fifty thousand dollars.
A real charmer, Karen recalled, swarthy and bull-like with thick, dark hair. He patted Charlie on the face as if they were old friends, though Karen had never even heard his name. The man had remarked that if he’d known that Charles had such an attractive wife, he would have been happy to donate more. On the dance floor, Charlie mentioned that the guy owned the largest private sailboat in the world. A financial guy, of course, he said-a biggie-friend of Saul’s. The man’s wife had on a diamond the size of Karen’s watch. He had invited them all out to his house-in the backcountry. More of a palace, Charlie said, which struck Karen as strange. “You’ve been there?” she asked. “Just what I’ve heard.” He shrugged and kept dancing. Karen remembered thinking she didn’t even know where in the world he had known the guy from.