A quarter of that money had then been wired to seven separate bank accounts belonging to the other members of the team. Alvarez assumed they would each have received the same amount again after the job, with Stevenson pocketing half the total for himself. Now the money was sitting gathering interest in the name of dead guys.
Who the hell had given Stevenson the cash in the first place? was what Alvarez wanted to know. Stevenson hadn’t been the shrewdest operator in the history of contract killings and had left several clues on the hard drive of his personal computer, a portable copy of which was now plugged into Alvarez’s laptop.
Stevenson liked to keep things organized, and he had details of each of the other members of the team in a spreadsheet, complete with e-mail addresses and phone numbers where appropriate. This information helped identify a couple of the more elusive corpses but didn’t help track down who had hired Stevenson.
He referred to the job itself as ParisJob, a rather unimaginative title in Alvarez’s opinion, but Alvarez supposed it hardly mattered what it was called. The private security firm in Brussels, through which Stevenson had done several protection jobs, had already been grilled and claimed they had nothing to do with Paris. Alvarez believed them. They made too much money hiring out mercenaries legitimately to have had a hand in a risky contract killing.
It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, though, to think that whoever had hired Stevenson had been a previous client for the security firm. The list of potential suspects was huge and spread worldwide: private businessmen, multinational corporations, Saudi oil barons, African governments. Stevenson himself had worked with all sorts of clients, any one of whom could be the person Alvarez was after, or maybe the individual had nothing to do with the firm. If so, the list of suspects had risen exponentially.
His gut told him that whoever had hired Ozols’s killer had also hired Stevenson and his crew to kill him after the job’s completion. Maybe he’d fucked up, maybe it was to tie off loose ends-it hardly mattered. But if Alvarez was right, and the killer had figured out that it was his own employer who’d tried to have him killed, there was a chance he still had the information. That meant, the missiles were still out there and still attainable.
The phone rang and he answered with a blunt, “Yeah.”
It was Noakes, one of the CIA officers who worked out of the embassy. Noakes worked in the basement along with all the other technophiles. He was an okay guy, if a little too hyperactive on caffeine and sugar for Alvarez to have much patience for.
“I’ve got something you might be interested in,” Noakes said with his usual hundred-mile-per-hour speak. “Stevenson tried to be sneaky with his hard drive and used a piece of software for deleting files securely. It’s the kind of thing my dad would use. I mean, for Christ-”
Alvarez jumped in. “Let me guess, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.”
“Not quite,” Noakes said. “Or at least it doesn’t do it as well as it’s supposed to. I’ve managed to extract some of the more recently deleted files, but the older ones are going to take longer, if they’re still there somewhere, which I don’t know. They could be. Or they might truly be gone for good.”
Alvarez held the phone a fraction farther away from his ear. “What did you find?”
“Oh yeah.” Noakes laughed. “Almost forgot to tell you. I’ve dug up some deleted e-mails between Stevenson and an unidentified person. We’ve only got the last few in what appears to be an ongoing conversation. They’re discussing payment for something called ParisJob.”
“Good,” Alvarez said. “Get those e-mails to me as soon as possible.”
“On it now.”
Alvarez put the phone down, pleased to be making some progress but aware of how little he really knew. He stood and walked to the window. Alvarez stared outward through the glass, through Paris, to the person out there who’d started this whole mess.
“Where are you?” he whispered.
TWENTY-THREE
Central Intelligence Agency, Virginia, U.S.A.
Wednesday
16:56 EST
He looked like a kindly old gentlemen, face craggy but tanned, thin but still strong, hair gray but thick. Kevin Sykes watched Ferguson pour himself a cup of coffee from the brushed steel pot and take a sip. It was bitter, tasteless crap, but the caffeine content should at least meet with Ferguson’s approval.
“Has the room been swept?” Ferguson asked. He looked at Sykes through the reflection in the office window.
Sykes nodded. “Just before you got here.”
Ferguson turned around and said, “Then please explain to me what the fucking hell has just happened.”
Sykes tensed visibly. “Tesseract showed up in Switzerland.”
“And?”
Sykes shook his head. “Swiss police found a body in the woods north of the village of Saint Maurice. My man.”
Ferguson sighed heavily and sat down. “What about Tesseract?”
“We don’t know for sure. The house was burned to the ground. I guess there’s a chance he was in it.”
“That sounds to me like a fool’s hope, Mr. Sykes. If he killed your man I doubt he would have managed to get himself cooked afterward.”
“I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree with you, sir.”
“So he’s gone then, with the flash drive?”
Sykes nodded.
“Unless it was lost in the explosion. Which would take this from disastrous to catastrophic,” Ferguson added. “When did all this happen?”
“A few hours ago,” Sykes replied, half to himself. “Look, this isn’t over yet. We have leads. We-”
“So why did you not inform me of this earlier?”
“This is my show, and I’ve been handling it. Telling you before I knew the facts would have achieved nothing except to inflame the situation. There isn’t anything you could have put in motion that I have not already done.”
Ferguson frowned. “And whom did you use this time?”
“Carl McClury. He was ex-Special Activities Division with a solid record in wet work, before that Special Forces. He wasn’t prone to asking questions either. He was freelance, did contract work for the company. His cover was as a security guard at the Zürich embassy, so he was the perfect choice for a cleanup op.”
“You have got to be joking.” Ferguson stepped forward angrily. “You used a CIA employee? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“A former employee. He’s not on the books.”
“Don’t get cute with me, Mr. Sykes. It amounts to the same thing. What do you think will happen when they find that out?”
“Nothing,” Sykes answered confidently. “McClury is an agency contract shooter, and everyone knows it’s not unheard of for our contractors to do work for other people. Who knows who McClury may also have been doing jobs for? Europe’s a hell of a big place. Lots of potential clients. His death will go down as an occupational hazard. Plus,” Sykes added, “there is nothing that connects McClury to Tesseract. There’ll be no evidence that the man who killed him was the same guy who shot up Paris. And let’s not forget that nothing connects us to McClury or Stevenson and his crew. We’re so clean we’re practically virgins.”
Ferguson ran slim fingers through his hair. “I’m afraid I don’t share your confidence.”
“There are at least two people between us and McClury, and neither know where their orders came from. McClury was payment on delivery, and he didn’t deliver. Before him, Stevenson was paid in advance in cash. Alvarez won’t be able to identify the man who paid him. And that money was shipped through the usual methods-intermediaries, offshore accounts, etcetera. No trail. We let Stevenson gather his own team, remember? We’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Yes, McClury’s death makes things awkward, but he was a shrewd operator. Meticulous. He won’t have left any tracks to follow like Stevenson. Besides, he was totally deniable alive, and he’s even more deniable dead.”