“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Isobella.”
“Isobella, does Heinzie have a safe? Someplace he keeps important information? Maybe a hiding place?”
“What?” Fisher repeated the question, and Isobella shook her head. “He just has a watch and some rings. No jewelry—”
“I’m talking about documents. Important papers.”
“Why do you need that?” For the first time since sitting down, Isobella lifted her head and seemed to truly focus on Fisher. Seeing his balaclava-covered face, she withdrew and her eyes went wide.
“I’m a friend,” Fisher said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time to save Heinzie. Those men were after information.” This was likely untrue, but the woman wasn’t coherent enough to dissect the argument. “If I don’t find it and get it out of here, more men will come. Do you understand?”
“More? More men?”
“That’s right. Where did Heinz keep his important documents?”
“There’s a safe. Upstairs. Under the sink…”
“Do you know the combination?”
“My birthday.”
Fisher felt a fleeting pang of sadness. Clearly, Isobella had meant more to van der Putten than Fisher had guessed. “What’s your birthday?”
Isobella blinked a few times and her head lolled. The Ambien/Scotch cocktail was taking hold. “What?”
“What’s your birthday?”
“June 9, 1961.”
Fisher laid her down on the couch, then went back upstairs. As advertised, he found a safe built into the floor of the bathroom vanity. He pushed aside the rolls of toilet paper and bottles of cleaning solution and spun the dial to 6-9-61. Nothing. He tried different combinations and sequences until 61-19-6-9 produced a click. Inside the shoebox-sized safe Fisher found nothing except a 2 GB SD memory card. He pocked it and went downstairs.
“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
“It’s possible,” 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 Chinchón’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.”
There were a few seconds of silence as Grimsdóttir 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.”
They talked 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 Setúbal and checked into the Hotel Aranguês.
Located on the Tróia Peninsula and the Sado River estuary, Setúbal 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 Setúbal. 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 Setúbal in Portinho da Arrábida, 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.