"I'll call the police," Fisher told Isobella. "You rest."
She nodded wearily, then rolled over on the couch.
Fisher left.
They'd parked their gray compact two blocks away. He searched it, taking every pertinent scrap of paper he could find and dumping it into the grocery sack before locking the doors and tossing the keys down a nearby sewer drain.
20
MADRID, SPAIN
"IT'Spossible," Fisher told Grim, "but I've never been a big believer in coincidences."
"Me neither," she replied from the LCD screen. "With luck, I'll have something for you in a few hours."
The night before, after dumping the keys to the gray compact in the sewer, Fisher had walked back toward the center of town, stopping briefly to buy a newspaper, in which he wrapped his blood-speckled polo shirt. When he reached the bullring, the community party was in full swing and a huge bonfire was burning. He tossed the newspaper and shirt into the blaze, then spent fifteen minutes dancing and drinking and generally making a spectacle of himself before walking to another convenience store, this one close to his hotel. He used the pay phone to dial 112--Spain's version of 911--and told the dispatcher in hurried Spanish that he'd heard gunfire near the intersection of Cuesta de los Yeseros and Calle del Alamillo Bajo. He'd then hung up and returned to his hotel.
The choice to call the police and remain in town rather than simply driving away was a tactical gamble, Fisher knew, but given Chinchon's size a foreigner leaving town in the dead of the night following a brutal triple murder wouldn't go unnoticed.
Fisher completed the ruse by waking up before dawn the next day, dropping his packed duffel bag off the balcony, and stopping in the lobby to ask the clerk when the bullfight was to begin and how to reach Guadalupe and whether the monastery there was open to the public. Once out the door he picked up his duffel, walked to his car, and drove away, taking the M-404 west out of town before turning north at Ciempozuelos and heading for Madrid and the Third Echelon safe house, where he packaged up his take from van der Putten's killers and sent it via International Next Flight Out. Grim had the package sixteen hours later.
"One thing I can tell you is that the SD card you got from van der Putten's safe looks like bank account info," Grim now said. "As you'd expect, he had several--two of them hidden behind front companies. I'm working on it. If Ames paid him in anything other than cash, it should be there."
"Good."
"Back to our noncoincidental coincidence: It could mean either Noboru or Ames was lying about van der Putten."
"It's worse than that," Fisher replied. "It means one of them is the mole."
THEREwere a few seconds of silence as Grimsdottir absorbed this. On the screen, her brows furrowed and she let out a sigh. "It could be worse than that. If van der Putten wasn't the source of the lead that pointed Hansen and his team to Vianden, that leaves only three people who could've tipped off Ames: me, Moreau, and Kovac."
"You know who gets my vote," Fisher replied. "The question is, did he do it to make you look bad, or is it something else?"
"Such as?"
"Ernsdorff. When did you tell Kovac I was moving toward Vianden?"
"About four hours before Ames got his tip."
"As soon as he realized I was moving toward Vianden and Ernsdorff, he got nervous and ordered Ames to cut me off. Problem was, I'd already penetrated Ernsdorff's estate."
"If all that's true, why didn't Kovac simply call Ernsdorff and warn him?"
"Hard to say. Insulation, maybe. Maybe Kovac and Ernsdorff are separated by layers--if so, that means there're bigger fish out there."
"Big enough to pull the strings of a deputy director of the NSA and Europe's premier black-market banker. Scary thought."
THEYtalked for a few more minutes; then Fisher disconnected and made two more calls: one to Iberia to book an evening flight to Lisbon, and a second to DHL to arrange shipment of his gear. He then went out for a bite to eat, caught four hours of sleep, and then took a taxi to the airport. His flight departed at eight thirty. Owing to the time difference and distance, the seventy-minute flight put him in Lisbon ten "clock" minutes after he departed. By nine he was on the road, and an hour later he pulled into Setubal and checked into the Hotel Arangues.
Located on the Troia Peninsula and the Sado River estuary, Setubal was a town of 120,000 built around the sardine-fishing industry, which had been a booming business since the early 1900s. According to the plethora of well-crafted if melodramatic minibiographies and magazine profiles Fisher had found of Charles "Chucky Zee" Zahm, the former SAS commando turned novelist/master thief was himself a fan of fishing. Game fish, however--not sardines--were why he'd moved to Setubal. Accompanying many of the stories were in-action photos of Zahm straining at a fishing rod on the afterdeck of his hundred-foot Azimut Leonardo 98 yacht, standing at the wheel of his hundred-foot Azimut Leonardo 98 yacht, sitting in scuba gear on the gunwale of his hundred-foot Azimut Leonardo 98 yacht. . . . It took little imagination to guess Zahm's favorite pastime, nor his most prized possession. This was understandable, of course. The Azimut Leonardo 98 sold for 4.9 million euros, or roughly 6.8 million U.S. dollars. The pictures of Zahm's ocean-view villa, down the coast from Setubal in Portinho da Arrabida, further confirmed the man's love of the nautical life.
Fisher gave this some thought and decided the temptation was too great to resist. It was time to find out exactly how far Zahm's love of the ocean went.
FISHERwas up and out the door shortly after dawn the next day, and by the time the sun's upper rim rose over the ocean's surface he was out of the city and winding his way south along the coast road. He stopped at a small restaurant called the Bar Mar, on Figueirinha beach, then continued on, arriving in Portinho da Arrabida ten minutes later. Of the short list of possible retirement spots he'd accumulated, the village immediately jumped to the top.
Nestled at the foot of the Serra de Arrabida-- serratranslates as "saw," an apt term for the mountain range that rose behind the village--Portinho da Arrabida was a ready-made postcard, with red-roofed bungalow houses perched atop lush slopes, white-sand beaches, and crystalline blue-green waters enclosed by a crescent of rocky shoreline.
Following a series of screen captures he'd sent to his iPhone from Google Earth, he drove through the village, then followed a switchback road into the mountains until he found a scenic overlook that offered him the vantage point he needed. He got out and walked to the wooden railing, where a bank of pole-mounted binoculars had been installed. He dropped a fifty-cent euro piece into the slot and pressed his face to the viewer.
His first view of Zahm's home told Fisher two things: One, the term "villa" was a gross trivialization; and two, the pictures hadn't done the place justice.
At three-thousand-plus feet, the ranch-style structure clad in floor-to-ceiling windows sat atop a hillside in a saddle between the Serra de Arrabida escarpment and a cliff overlooking the ocean. A ten-foot-wide moat-like swimming pool encircled the rear two-thirds of the house, while in the front a set of stone steps spiraled down to terraces set into the cliff, one containing a negative-edge pool that seemed to hang in midair above the water a hundred feet below. The second deck was covered in lounges, chairs, and blue-and-white-striped umbrellas, plus a freestanding cedar shack Fisher guessed served as a changing room/bathroom. At the bottom of the steps a two-hundred-foot stone jetty led to a trio of skiffs equipped with outboard motors, but there was no sign of Zahm's yacht.