“In other words, when these people saw what Schrade had been doing to them, they would kill him. You’d be serving his death warrant.”
“That’s what I was hoping.”
“Oh, Harry…” Mara shook her head but said nothing more.
“After I found Ariana’s body this morning, I knew he was all over me. If he didn’t know I was in Geneva… I don’t know… maybe she’d been careless leaving Vienna. But she was in an FIS safe house there. She should have been clean. I think if he’d known I was there, he would’ve let me know about it.”
“He did.”
“No, not like that. I mean directly. He’d want to let me know he knew, just like he did with the tape in Rome.” He drank the last of his Scotch. The ice had melted, watering down its smoky flavor. “I don’t think he knew. It was just a fluke that I wasn’t around when it happened.”
“I don’t understand this. Why wouldn’t it still work, telling them… those people?” The urgency in her voice pained him. Her situation was unbelievable. At least he had spent a lifetime getting to this point.
“It’s not that it won’t work. It will. They’ll kill him.” He paused. “I just don’t know how quickly they’ll move.”
Mara was still with him. “You mean,” she said, “if they’ll get him before he can get us.”
Strand just looked at her.
“Oh, God. What are we talking about?” Her voice was soft with dismay. “I don’t believe this is happening.”
It was an awful moment for Strand, watching and listening to Mara gradually come to the realization of her appalling position. He felt the full weight and distress of his guilt. For all his audacity, for all his planning and good intentions and moments of hubris when he thought he could do the impossible, practically nothing of it was left except Mara.
“What about the FIS?” Mara’s voice was edged with urgency. “They’re not going to do anything?”
“They can’t. Schrade thinks they’re part of the embezzlement scheme. They don’t have any leverage with the guy. I hadn’t realized what was going on with Howard and Schrade until I was driving back from Vienna. Then it occurred to me that Schrade was holding the FIS responsible for the embezzlement, too. That’s why Howard was telling me he couldn’t call off Schrade. He was telling the truth about that. I just didn’t see it at the time.”
“Oh, come on. They could expose him. They could tell the whole world about him.”
“It doesn’t work that way. The common bond between people like Schrade and the intelligence agencies who use them is secrecy. He needs it to do what he does, they need it to do what they do. They use each other, knowing that if there’s ever a falling-out between them, neither side will expose the other, because the relationship itself is illicit.”
“What about this guy Howard? What’s going to happen when he finds out Ariana is dead? Won’t that change things? Are you going to let him know she’s dead? How will this change what you were wanting him to do?”
“I’m not going to let him know anything,” Strand said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Ariana’s death will affect anything one way or the other. A sad fact. Right now I don’t want a goddamned thing from Bill Howard. He and I had a rocky career together. We didn’t like each other much, and I didn’t see anything in Vienna to change my opinion of him.”
Mara said nothing. Through the balcony doors they could hear the faint voices of people walking along the promenade. Strand envied them. He knew it was irrational to do so. It was a human weakness in dire times to see others’ lives as richer, more fortunate, than your own. At this moment the voices he heard were the voices of careless people, those fortunate strangers who did not have your cares, or your tragedies, or your bad luck. Strand always wondered about them. Who were they? What brought them to this village, to this promenade, at this moment? How incredible that they had no idea that only a few meters away from them a man and a woman were sitting in darkness, afraid, confused, desperate even to understand what they should do at the end of the night.
Without speaking Mara stood in the near darkness of the room and walked to the balcony doors and stepped outside. He watched her silhouette against the blue light of the night sky. He could not tell whether she was staring across to the black hills on the opposite shore of the lake or whether she was looking down toward the promenade.
He got up and followed her. She was leaning on the stone balustrade, looking out toward the dark water. He put his arm around her waist, and she took his hand.
“You can’t imagine, really, how terrified I am, Harry,” she said. Her voice quavered, and the sound of it broke his heart.
“This bears no resemblance to any reality I know,” she went on. “I’m not a stupid woman. I know what I’m involved in here. It’s bizarre, but it’s happening and… I have to deal with it.” There was a pause. “I’m going to tell you exactly the way it is, Harry. I’m on the verge of panic.”
They were both looking out into the various darkness. He waited for her to go on, and then suddenly he was aware that she was crying. He would have given ten years of his life to be able to comfort her.
“It’s going to take every bit of our concentration,” Strand said. “There’s a balance here. We have to find it, and very carefully make it work for us.”
She leaned into him, burying her face against his shoulder. He could feel the small shudders of her weeping.
“Do you understand what I’m talking about?” he asked.
There were a few moments while she gained control. Then she said, “Yes.”
She didn’t understand, of course, and they both knew it.
CHAPTER 25
They went to bed late, and Strand slept the dead, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. He woke early the next morning with a start, heavy headed yet wide awake. He carefully crawled out from under the covers, dressed, and went straight to the sitting room, closing the bedroom doors behind him.
He threw open the balcony doors to the cool morning, called room service for coffee, sat down at his laptop, and flipped on the switch.
Using the information that he had gotten from Alain Darras, he began the complex series of contacts over the Internet that would eventually lead him to a face-to-face interview with the first of the four crime lords.
He had no idea how long the process would take, but the procedures he had obtained from Darras were supposed to cut through the red tape that the new, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations put into place. As in all corporate structures, illicit or legal, the men at the top isolated themselves with multiple layers of intermediaries.
He had been working for nearly an hour when Mara came out of the bedroom.
They walked up the hill to a little cafe near the center of the village and had a quiet cup of coffee with pastries. When they started back through the narrow, cobbled streets that fell steeply to the waterfront, Mara laced her arm through Strand’s and they meandered down, catching glimpses of the lake through the linden trees as they turned corners on their descent.
“Okay, Harry,” she said, “why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”
He hardly knew where to begin.
“Not a lot yet,” he said. “This morning I started the process of contacting the first of the four men Schrade was betraying to the FIS. My first thought was to approach all of them at the same time, just turn them loose on Schrade all at once. But then, considering all that I don’t know about the details of Schrade’s involvements with each of them, I was afraid that I might trigger a bloodbath. That’s not the way this needs to be done.”
“Who are you contacting first?”
“A Taiwan Chinese named Lu Kee. Lu is our best first meeting because he’s the most civilized of the four. Talking to him will give us a less jarring sample of the meetings to come. He’ll be like a wise old uncle. He personally dislikes harshness. He pays people to be harsh for him.