She went to her little kitchen and filled one of her funky handblown drinking glasses with ice water. She handed it to me and sat down again.
Then I told her as much of what I’d just learned as I could. It wasn’t exactly a coherent presentation. My brain was much too fried. But I managed to set out the basic facts. “Now I’ve got Dorothy checking on every place in New Hampshire that rents excavation equipment, but she’s not going to find anything until nine or ten when the places open.”
“Okay,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ve looked at the case files on that Connecticut home invasion.”
“Already? But how did you know…?”
She smiled ruefully. “Nico, you need sleep. Badly. You told me about that last night.”
I shook my head, embarrassed.
“The husband survived. I wanted to see whether he might recall anything more about the attackers. But… well, he’s not going to be talking to anyone. Zhukov left him seriously brain damaged.”
I nodded.
“No latent prints were found at the scene. Neither Zhukov nor his associate. I was hoping that the locals might have submitted any unidentified fingerprints to the unsolved latent file at IAFIS. Maybe those same prints turned up somewhere else… But nothing.”
“And that’s it?” I stood up. I was exhausted and cranky and desperate to do something. I started pacing around her living room.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s the FBI’s budget again? Like almost ten billion dollars, right? And every single law-enforcement officer in the country on tap. More databases than you know what to do with. And you still haven’t found a damned thing more than me and Dorothy.”
“Oh, and what have you found? Last I heard, that girl is still in the ground.”
I turned away, headed toward the door. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”
“No,” she said, “you need sleep. You’re just about at the breaking point. There’s not a damned thing you can do right now until one of our leads comes in. Or one of your leads. Or until the business day starts. So go to sleep, Nick.”
“After.”
She came in close, put a hand on my shoulder. “If you don’t give your brain and your body a rest, you’re going to start screwing up, and then what?”
I whirled around. “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I don’t screw up.”
“Now I know you’re sleep deprived,” she said with a laugh.
And before I knew it, my lips were on hers.
Her mouth was warm and tasted of mint. I held her face in my hands and stroked her hair. Her eyes were closed. Her smooth hands slid underneath my shirt and pressed flat against my chest, her fingernails lightly raking my chest hair. Then I was caressing her breasts and kissing her throat, and I heard the clink of her fingers at my belt.
“Diana,” I said.
She silenced me with her mouth on mine, and her legs wrapped tightly around my waist.
“I KNOW we can’t go back to the way things were,” she said.
“I wasn’t thinking this was a do-over.”
She smiled, but her eyes were wet. She reached for me, and I held her for a long time. It felt wonderful. Almost enough.
My phone rang, and I glanced at it. Marshall Marcus.
“Nick,” he whispered, “I just got a message.”
A beep indicated a call coming in on the other line. Dorothy.
“Message from whom?”
“Them. I have until the end of the day and then they’ll-”
“Hold on.” I clicked on Dorothy’s call.
“Nick, Marcus just got an e-mail from the kidnappers.”
“I know, he’s on the other line, he was just telling me.”
“It’s not good,” she said.
I felt my mouth go dry.
“Are you near your computer?”
I hesitated. “I’m near a computer.”
“I’m going to send you an e-mail right now.”
I signaled to Diana, who brought her laptop over, and I signed on to my e-mail. Meanwhile, I clicked back to the other line. “Hold on, Marshall, I’m just opening it right now.”
“How can you do that?”
I didn’t reply. I was too busy reading the text on another anonymous e-mail.
The rules are all change now
Now demand is very simple for you to save your daughter
Five hundred 500 $ US mil must be wired into account listed below by close of business 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today
This is not open of negotiation
This is final offer.
If $$$ received satisfactory by 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today your daughter Alexa will be released. You will be notified of her public place location and can pick her up then.
No further negotiation possible.
If $$$ not received by 5:00 pm 1700 hours Boston time today you will get one last opportunity to watch your daughter Alexa on internet
You will watch when coffin is flood with water.
You will watch your daughter drown before your eyes
You will watch last minutes of your daughters life
Then followed the name and address of a bank in Belize, bank codes, and an account number.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Nicky,” Marshall Marcus said, his voice high, quavering. “Dear God in heaven, please, Nick, help.”
“That’s all we’re doing,” I said. “Round the clock.”
“Five hundred million dollars? I don’t have that kind of money anymore, thanks to those bastards, and they damned well know it.”
“Where’s Belinda?”
“Belinda? She’s right here beside me. Like always. Why?”
“Let me get off the phone,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way to pull this off.”
“How?”
But I just hung up.
I leaned over and gave Diana a kiss.
“Call me as soon as you know anything,” she said.
83.
I arrived at the office with a Box o’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts and a dozen assorted donuts.
Half an hour later, after repeated calls to Belize City, I was on the phone with the Honorable Oliver Lindo, minister of national security in Belize.
“Nick!” he said. “Have you been trying to call me? I’m so sorry. I was at the gym. I have a personal trainer now. Someday I may even look like you, my man.”
“And how’s Peter?”
“Did you know he’s in his second year at Oxford, Nick?”
“I had no idea. Congratulations. Have you remarried, by any chance?”
He chuckled. “We have a saying here: Why buy the cow if the milk is free?”
“I may have heard that before,” I said.
No need to get explicit with Oliver Lindo. When I was working at Stoddard Associates in D.C., I’d helped him out with a sticky problem involving a boat, a rum factory, one of his ex-wives, and a lot of angry Cubans. Later he asked me to extricate his son, who was then at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, from a situation involving gangbangers in Trenton.
“Do you happen to know anyone at the Belize Bank and Trust Limited?”
“It is a shady bank, my friend. If you are thinking about hiding money, well, I can recommend-actually, this is not a conversation we should be having on the mobile phone.”
“If I ever have enough money to hide away somewhere, you’ll be the first person I’ll call,” I said. “But I’m calling about something else. I need a favor.”
“Anything you want, Nick. You know that.”
84.
“You want to explain to me how this is going to work?” Dorothy said.
“Just before the bank in Belize closes, Dragomir Zhukov is going to get a confirmation that five hundred million dollars has been deposited into his account,” I said.