“We’re not having a dialogue.”
“You’ll come up with something. At the appropriate time, we’ll move in and take over. If you do that, no one you don’t want to will ever see this.”
He pointed at the screen. At that moment, Tatiana must have pulled the flash drive from the CPU in the back. On the screen, the system signaled its surprise by going to black and then announcing a fatal error.
24
IT WAS A LONG AND EXHAUSTING FLIGHT HOME. BY THE time I got back to Boston, I was jumping out of my skin. I called Harvey the minute I got to my car. When he didn’t answer either of his phones, I knew it was because of Rachel. She had upset the natural order of things and taken a blowtorch to the delicate balance we had achieved. For anything that was amiss, I blamed Rachel.
Then I got to the house, where I found the two of them, sitting on the couch in the front room, ensconced in blissful domesticity. They were listening to music, oblivious to the world in general and me in particular.
I dropped my backpack. It hit the floor with a thud. They both looked up. Harvey had a haircut, and I’d never seen that shirt before, and those…were those khaki pants he was wearing? They’d been shopping, too?
“You don’t answer phones around here anymore?”
Rachel raised a remote and pointed it at a stereo system that hadn’t been there when I’d left. She turned the music down. “Did you get my video back?”
I pulled the flash drive from my pocket and tossed it in her direction. It landed on the couch next to her. As I watched her scrambling for it, all I could see was the image of her on the video, pawing through the possessions of the man she had just killed. All I could think about was how she had lied. She had lied to me, and I just knew she had lied to Harvey to make him love her, to get whatever she needed, whatever she wanted to take from him.
Harvey took the remote from her and turned the music off. “My apologies,” he said. “We must have had the music playing too loudly. I should have been more careful.”
“Harvey, can I speak to Rachel alone, please?”
“Why?”
“Girl talk.”
Rachel looked at me as if I’d just slapped her. She knew what was coming. The defiance was already taking over her expression. Preemptive defensiveness, something any good liar needs in her toolbox.
“Harvey, baby, just give us a minute alone. It’s all right. I can handle myself.”
“Whether you can handle yourself is not the issue. It is more that-”
“Harvey, go.”
He started to move forward on the couch so he could transfer himself to his chair. He paused, seemingly teetering on the edge. “No.” He pushed back and planted himself firmly on the couch. “I am not leaving. I will not sit outside in my own house while the two of you discuss things that pertain to me as much as to either of you.” He turned to Rachel. “You will not speak to me in that tone.” He looked at me. “Carry on.”
It seemed that the haircut wasn’t all that was new about Harvey. I turned to Rachel. “You stole Vladi’s computer.”
She crossed her arms. “No, I did not.”
“You pulled his keys off his dead body, unlocked his briefcase, pulled out the laptop, and stuck it in your own bag. Then you called Harvey. Did she happen to mention, Harvey, that she had stolen computer files worth a billion dollars?”
“A billion dollars.” Rachel bolted out from behind the coffee table, stepping over Harvey’s legs to do it. “Are you crazy? I don’t know about any billion dollars.”
“You’re lying,” I said. “You’ve been lying from the start. If you don’t tell me the truth right now, I will take you to Drazen myself, and you can explain to him how you killed his brother and took his money.”
“No. You will not.” I ignored Harvey’s stern command and hoped Rachel would get close enough for me to wring her neck, but she stayed on her own side of the room.
“I didn’t know anything about any billion dollars. I swear-” She appealed to Harvey. “I swear to God, baby, I didn’t know.”
“Then why did you steal it? Why did you go straight for the laptop?”
“Because I knew it was worth something, but I didn’t know it was that much.”
“How did you know?”
“Roger told me. He said Vladi carried something around on his computer that was worth a lot of money. I didn’t think about it until I saw his briefcase there. Whatever it was, I thought I could trade it to Drazen to get out from under his thumb.”
“You didn’t think Drazen would wonder where you got it?”
“I wasn’t thinking about all that. I just…I had almost been raped. I had just killed a man. I wasn’t thinking. I was just doing.”
“That’s bullshit. I saw you. You were thinking just fine.”
She threw her hands up. “What do you want me to say? I figured if it was worth something, then Vladi owed it to me for making me shoot him. I knew it was going to screw up the rest of my life that I had to kill him, and it has.”
“Why were you there at the office in the middle of the night in the first place?”
She reached up and pulled at the hair behind her ear. “I told you what I was doing there. I was covering my ass with Drazen. Roger set me up. He planned right from the start to steal their dirty money. I couldn’t let Drazen think we were in it together.”
“You’re telling me you weren’t?”
“I might be a lot of things, but I’m not stupid enough to scam Drazen Tishchenko. Then Vladi showed up, and you obviously saw the rest.”
I went over to where the new stereo system sat. You didn’t find them much these days with turntables. They must have had to look for a long time to find it. “Here’s what I think happened.” I turned to watch Rachel’s face. “Roger tricked you into bringing Drazen into his company. Once Drazen was in, Roger stole his money. You went to the office that night to find proof. All of that was just as you said. But the proof wasn’t to protect yourself from Drazen, it was to blackmail Roger. You wanted some of Drazen’s money for yourself.”
She upped the intensity on her glare, but she didn’t deny it.
“Vladi showed up, you killed him, and everything went to hell, at least for you. For Roger, it was an incredible stroke of luck. He ended up with a video of you killing Vladi and the billion-dollar computer.”
“I don’t know how Vladi was carrying around a billion dollars. That doesn’t make any sense. You have to be wrong about that.”
“But right about everything else.”
She swallowed and looked at Harvey. Any second, I expected her to go over and rub herself against him like a Siamese cat. “I didn’t think any of it made any difference. Roger got what he wanted. He left with Vladi’s cash and his computer. I got nothing that I wanted. Well, I got a little something. I went to Drazen and told him Roger had killed Vladi.” She obviously enjoyed the memory.
“What kind of computer was it? What brand should I be looking for?”
“I don’t know. A Dell, I think. Yeah, a Dell.”
“What did Roger need to open the files on Vladi’s computer?”
“I don’t know. How should I know that?”
“Because you always know more than you’re saying. What’s on it that’s worth a billion dollars?”
“I don’t know. The brothers had cash stashed everywhere. It was probably some kind of access instructions. You know, where to look and how to get it. Vladi wasn’t exactly a Harvard man. He would need something like that.”
I looked down at Harvey, concerned about how all this might be sitting with him. He looked back. “Why is any of this important now?”
“What?”
“Regardless of its worth, why is the computer important if we have the video back?”
So much for his fragile psyche. “Cyrus Thorne has the video, or at least a copy of it.”