Buried Secrets

102.



Dragomir Zhukov entered the back room, peering around at the filthy windowsills and the peeling yellow paint on the walls and the uneven floorboards.

A voice crackled from the small computer speaker. The girl was speaking.

“Nick!” she screamed. “Please don’t go away!”

The pistol was in his right hand even before he’d made the conscious decision to draw it.

* * *



ZHUKOV TURNED swiftly, holding a weapon, an enormous steel semiautomatic with a barrel like a cannon.

I recognized it at once. An Israeli-made .50 caliber Desert Eagle. Made by the same folks who gave the world the Uzi. It was the sort of thing you were far more likely to see in a movie or a video game than in reality. It was too large and unwieldy, so unnecessarily powerful. When Clint Eastwood declared, in Dirty Harry, that his .44 Magnum was “the most powerful handgun in the world,” he was right. In 1971. But since then, that title had been claimed by the Desert Eagle.

I saw his wide angry stare, his strong nose, a sharp jaw, a cauliflower ear.

“Nick, where’d you go? I thought you were here! When are the others coming? Nick, please, get me out of here, oh God, please, Nick, don’t leave me—”

Zhukov turned slowly.

He knew.





103.



Zhukov knew I was here somewhere.

Alexa’s voice, steadily more frantic: “Please, Nick, answer me! Don’t leave me stuck here. Don’t you goddamn go away!”

Zhukov moved with the taut, coiled grace of a cat. His eyes scanned the room, up and then down, ticking slowly and methodically in a grid.

I breathed noiselessly in and out on the other side of the heavy wooden door. Watching through the keyhole.

I’d come to rescue Alexa. But now it was a simple matter of survival.

The hollow-point ammo I was using might have had unequaled stopping power, but the rounds wouldn’t penetrate the thick old wooden door between us. The instant they hit wood they’d start to fragment. If they actually passed through the door, they’d be traveling at such a reduced velocity that they’d no longer kill.

I was all but defenseless.

Nor was my body armor meant to stop the .50 caliber Magnum rounds fired by the Desert Eagle. I didn’t know whether the rounds would penetrate the ballistic vest; they might. But even if they didn’t, the blunt-force trauma alone would probably kill me.

So I watched him through the keyhole and held my breath and waited for him to move on to another part of the house.

Zhukov scanned the room again. He seemed to be satisfied I wasn’t hiding here. I saw his eyes shift toward the kitchen. He took a few steps in that direction.

Slowly I let out my breath. As soon as I was sure he’d moved into the kitchen, I’d turn the knob silently, and step out as noiselessly as I could.

If I got the jump on him I might be able to drop him with one well-aimed shot.

Reaching out slowly, I placed my left hand on the doorknob. Ready to turn it once he was safely out of the room.

I continued watching.

Drew breath. Waited patiently. A few seconds more.

Then he swiveled around, back toward me. His gaze dropped to the floor, as if he’d just discovered something. I saw what he was looking at.

The railback chair I’d just moved out of the way of the basement door.

It was out of place. Not exactly where he’d left it.

His gaze rose slowly. He smiled, baring teeth that were brown and belonged in a beaver’s mouth.

He raised the Desert Eagle and pointed it right at the basement door, directly at me, as if he had X-ray vision and could see through the wood, and he squeezed the trigger—

blam blam blam

—and I lurched out of the way and everything was happening in slow motion, the thunderous explosions and the muzzle flash, fireballs that lit up the entire room, the splintering of the door, and as I let go of the doorknob and the banister and leaped backward I felt a bullet slam into my chest, the pain staggering, and everything went black.





104.



When I came to, a few seconds later, my body was wracked with excruciating pain. Like something had exploded inside my chest while my rib cage was being crushed in some enormous vise. The pain in my left leg was even worse, sharp and throbbing, the nerve endings shrieking and juddering. Everything moved in a sort of stroboscopic motion, like a rapid series of still images.

Where was I?

On my back, I knew, sprawled on a hard cold floor in the near darkness, surrounded by the dank odor of mold and old concrete and the stench of urine. As my eyes adjusted, I saw snowdrifts of what looked like shredded newspaper all around me, and a lot of rat droppings.

Something scurried by, made a scree sound, and I lurched.

A large shaggy Brown Norway rat, its long scaly tail writhing, stopped a few feet away. It gazed with beady brown eyes, maybe curious, or maybe resentful that I’d disturbed its den. It twitched its whiskers and scuttled away into the darkness.

Pale moonlight filtered in from above, through a gaping hole in the underside of a wooden staircase.

In an instant I realized what had just happened.

A bullet had struck me, slamming into the left side of my ballistic vest, but it hadn’t penetrated my body. I was alive only because two inches of solid oak had slowed the round’s velocity. But I’d been knocked off balance, shoved backward down the stairs. Then I’d crashed feet first through the termite-damaged, rotten planks and broken through, landing on the concrete floor below.

I tried to breathe, but each time I inhaled it felt like daggers piercing my lungs. I sensed warm blood seeping down my left leg. I reached down to feel the bullet wound.

But there wasn’t any.

Instead, the jagged end of a broken plank a foot long was sunk several inches into my left calf, through tough denim.

I grabbed the board and wrenched it out of my flesh. A couple of long rusty nails protruded from the wood. As painful as it had been lodged in my calf, it was far worse coming out.

I tried to recall the number of shots he’d fired at me. The .50 caliber Desert Eagle’s magazine held only seven rounds. Had he fired four or five? Maybe even six.

Maybe he didn’t have any rounds left. Maybe he had one.

I was short of breath and dazed and numb. A creak somewhere overhead, then heavy footsteps on the top steps. Zhukov was coming down the stairs.

Maybe he thought he’d killed me but wanted to make sure. Maybe he thought he could just finish me off. I had to move before he fired straight down as I lay here gasping.

I felt for my weapon but it wasn’t in the holster. I’d been holding it when the bullets struck me. Maybe I’d dropped it when I took a tumble. Now I felt for it on the cold floor, my hands sweeping over the concrete and the debris and the rat droppings. But it was nowhere within reach.

A light came on: a bare bulb mounted to one of the rafters about ten feet away. The ceiling was low. The basement was small: maybe thirty feet by twenty.

Wooden shelves were screwed on to the cinder-block walls, lined with old canning jars. Rickety children’s bookcases, painted with clowns and dancers, were heaped with newspapers and magazines that had been chewed through, cobwebbed, littered with rat droppings. In one corner, in a square hole cut into the concrete floor, a rusty sump pump was planted in gravel, collecting dust and cobwebs. Here and there were folding tables stacked with old toasters and kitchen implements and assorted junk.

He took another step. I lay absolutely still, held my breath. Lay flat, looking up.

If I made a sound, he’d locate me, and he’d get a direct, unimpeded shot straight down. The vest wouldn’t protect me.

He knew I was here. He’d heard me stumble down the steps. Surely he’d seen the broken boards, the gaping hole, the missing treads. But did he know I was directly below him?

As soon as he looked down, he’d know. Once he did, it was all over.

I looked over at the bare lightbulb again, and then I noticed the splintered two-by-four on the ground, the blood-spattered plank whose jagged end had sunk into my leg.

I grabbed it, and in one hard swift throw I hurled it, smashing the bare lightbulb, and everything went dark again.

In the dark I stood a chance.

But a few seconds later, a flashlight beam shone down the stairs. The cone of light swept slowly back and forth over the floor and the walls, into the dark corners. I could hear him coming down the stairs, slowly and deliberately.

Then the beam went off. The only light was the faint trapezoid cast by the open door above. Maybe he’d stuffed the flashlight in a pocket. He needed two hands to hold the Desert Eagle.

Now it was all a matter of seconds. I had to get to my feet to be ready to pounce, but do it silently. The slightest scrape would announce my location like a beacon.

The timing was crucial. I could move only when he did, when the sound of his tread and the creaking and groaning of the old wood masked whatever slight noise I made getting up.

Lying flat, I listened.

A dry whisking. The rat had come out of its hiding place, alarmed by yet another disturbance, maybe fearful that a second human being was about to come crashing down into its nest. It pattered across the floor toward me. Paused to make a decision, surveying the terrain with shrewd eyes.

Directly overhead another step creaked. Startled, the rat came at me, skittered across over my neck, the sharp nails of its paws scratching my skin, its dry hard tail whisking my face, tickling my ear canal. I shuddered.

Yet somehow I stayed absolutely still.

Abruptly clapping both hands over the thing, I grabbed its squirmy shaggy body … and hurled it across the room.

Suddenly there was a shot, followed by the clatter of metal objects crashing to the floor.

My ears rang.

Zhukov had heard the rat’s scuffling and assumed it was me.

But now he knew he hadn’t hit me. No one can get shot with a .50 caliber round without giving a scream or groan or cry.

So was that his last shot? Was that number six or seven? I couldn’t be sure.

Maybe he had one round left.

Or maybe he was on a new cartridge.

He took another step down, and I knew what I had to do.





105.



I had to grab his gun.

Through one of the missing risers in the decrepit staircase I could see the heels of his boots.

Then I heard the unmistakable metallic clackclack of the pistol’s magazine being ejected. The weapon was directly above me, close enough to seize, wrench out of his hands. If I moved fast enough, took him by surprise.

Now.

I shoved down against the floor with both hands, using the strength in my arms to rise into a high push-up. Favoring my right foot, I levered myself up until I was standing.

Then, reaching out both hands, I grabbed his right boot and yanked it toward me. He lost his footing, stumbled down the steps, yelled out in surprise and anger. The staircase groaned and creaked and scattered chunks of wood. Something heavy and metal clattered near my feet.

The Desert Eagle?

Go for the weapon, or launch myself at him, try to immobilize him before he could get back up?

I went for the gun on the floor.

But it wasn’t the gun. It was his flashlight: a long black Maglite. Heavy aircraft-grade aluminum with a knurled barrel, heavy as a police baton.

I leaned over and grabbed it, and when I spun around, he was standing maybe six feet away, pistol in a two-handed grip. Aiming two feet to my left.

In the dark, he couldn’t see me. I couldn’t see much either, but for the moment I could see more than he could.

I arced the Maglite at his head. He didn’t see it coming. It struck him on the bridge of his nose, and he roared in pain. Blood trickled from his eyes and gushed from his nostrils.

He staggered, and I lunged, knocking him to the floor, driving a knee into his stomach, my right fist aiming for his larynx, but he’d twisted his body so that I ended up delivering a powerhouse uppercut to the side of his jaw.

He dropped the weapon.

I landed on top of him, pinioned him to the floor with my right knee and my left hand. His blood was sticky on my fist. But he had unexpected reserves of strength, like an afterburner. As if the pain only provoked and enraged him and fueled him. As if he enjoyed the violence.

He levered his torso up off the floor and slammed a fist at my left ear. I turned my head but he still managed to cuff me hard just behind the ear. I swung for his face, but then something large and steel came at me and I whipped my head to one side though not quite in time, and I realized he’d retrieved his weapon.

Holding the Desert Eagle by its long barrel, he swung the butt against my temple, like a five-pound steel blackjack.

My head exploded.

For a second I saw only bright fireworks. I tasted coppery blood. My hands grabbed the air and I careened to one side and he was on top of me and cracked the butt of the gun on the center of my forehead.

I was woozy and out of breath. His face loomed over me. His eyes were an unnerving amber, like a wolf’s.

“Do you believe there is light at end of tunnel when you die?” he asked. His voice was higher pitched than I remembered from the videos and had the grit of sandpaper.

I didn’t reply. It was a rhetorical question anyway.

He flipped the gun around, then ground the barrel into the skin of my forehead, one-handed, twisting it back and forth as if putting out a cigarette.

“Go ahead,” I panted. “Pull the trigger.”

His face showed no reaction. As if he hadn’t heard me.

I stared into his eyes. “Come on, are you weak?”

His pupils seemed to flash.

“Pull the trigger!” I said.

I saw the hesitation in his face. Annoyance. He was debating what to do next.

I knew then he had no more rounds left. And that he knew it too. He’d ejected the magazine but hadn’t had the chance to pop in a new one.

Blood from his nostrils seeped over his beaver teeth, dripping steadily onto my face. He grimaced, and with his left hand he pulled something from his boot.

A flash of steel: a five-inch blade, a black handle. A round steel button at the hilt. He whipped it at my face and its blade sliced my ear. It felt cold and then hot and extremely painful, and I swung at him with my right fist, but the tip of the blade was now under my left eye.

At the base of my eyeball, actually. Slicing into the delicate skin. He shoved the handle and the point of the blade pierced the tissue.

I wanted to close my eyes but I kept them open, staring at him defiantly.

“Do you know what this is?” he said.

My KGB friend had told me about the Wasp knife.

“Dusya,” I said.

A microsecond pause. His mother’s name seemed to jolt him.

“I spoke to her. Do you know what she said?”

He blinked, his eyes narrowed a bit, and his nostrils flared.

That second or so was enough.

I scissored my left leg over his right, behind his knee, pulling him toward me while I shoved my right knee into his abdomen. Two opposing forces twisted him around as I grabbed his left hand at the wrist.

In an instant I’d flipped him over onto the ground.

Jamming my right elbow into his right ear, I tucked my head in so it was protected by my right shoulder. My right knee trapped his leg. He pummeled me with his right fist, clipped the top of my head a few times, but I was guarding all the sensitive areas. I gripped his left wrist, pushing against his fingers, which were wrapped around the knife handle. I kept pushing at them, trying to break his grip and strip the knife from his hand.

But I had underestimated Zhukov’s endurance, his almost inhuman strength. As we grappled over the knife, he jammed his knee into my groin, sending shock waves of dull nauseating pain deep into my abdomen, and once again he was on me, the point of his knife inches from my left eyeball.

I gripped his hand, trying to shove the Wasp knife away, but all I managed to do was keep it where it was, poised to sink in. His hand trembled with exertion.

“If you kill me,” I gasped, “it won’t make any difference. The others are on their way.”

With a lopsided sneer, he said, “And it will be too late. The casket will be flooded. And I will be gone. By the time they dig her up, she will already be dead.”

The knife came in closer, and I tried to push it back. It shook but continued touching my eye.

“I think you know this girl,” he said.

“I do.”

“Let me tell you what she did to me,” he said. “She was a very dirty little girl.”

I roared in fury and gave one final, mighty shove with all the strength I had left. He flipped onto his side, but he still didn’t loosen his grip on the handle.

I drove my knee into his abdomen and shoved his right arm backward. The knife, still grasped tightly in his fist, sank into his throat, into the soft flesh underneath his chin.

Only later did I understand what happened in the next instant.

The palm of his hand must have slid inward a fraction of an inch, nudging the raised metal injector button.

Causing his Wasp knife to expel a large frozen ball of gas into his trachea.

There was a loud pop and a hissing explosion.

A terrible hot shower of blood and gobbets spat against my face, and in his bulging amber eyes I saw what looked like disbelief.





106.



I was able to hold out until shortly after the casket came out of the ground.

It took five members of the FBI’s SWAT team two hours of digging by hand, using shovels borrowed from the Pine Ridge police. The casket was almost ten feet down and the earth was sodden and heavy from the recent deluge. They hoisted it out on slings of black nylon webbing, two men on one side, three on the other. It lifted right up. The casket didn’t weigh more than a few hundred pounds.

It was dented in several places and had a half-inch yellow hose coming out of one end. The hose had been trenched into the ground for two hundred feet or so and was connected to the air compressor on the back porch. A much thicker, rigid PVC tube came out of the other end, the pipe sticking out of the ground.

The team didn’t believe my assurances that the casket wasn’t booby-trapped. I didn’t blame them, of course. They hadn’t looked into the monster’s eyes.

If Zhukov had placed a booby trap in the casket, he would not have denied himself the opportunity to taunt me with it.

But he hadn’t. There was none.

Two of their bomb techs inspected the compressor hose and the vent pipe and the exterior of the casket, looking for triggering mechanisms.

Somehow they were able to ignore all the thumping and pounding and muffled screams from within. I wasn’t.

Diana had her arm around me. She was supporting me, and I mean that in a physical sense. My legs had turned to rubber. Everything before my eyes was moving in and out of focus, though I didn’t understand why. The blood loss was minimal. True, the pain in my chest had grown steadily worse. The blunt-force trauma had been bad, but I’d thought the worst had passed.

I was wrong. The escalating pain should have been the first sign. But I was preoccupied with getting Alexa out of her coffin.

“Nico,” she said, “you weren’t wearing trauma plates.”

“Hey, I was lucky I had a plain old vest with me,” I said between sharp gasps. “Trauma plates aren’t exactly standard equipment.” Breathing was getting more difficult. I couldn’t fill my lungs. That should have been the second sign.

“You should have waited for us.”

I looked at her, tried to smile.

“Okay,” she conceded, nuzzling me on the neck. “I’m glad you didn’t wait. But do you always have to be the first one on the battlefield and the last one to leave?”

“No. I’ll leave as soon as I see her.”

The hollow thumps, the remote anguished cries that could have been half a mile away. I couldn’t stand listening to it. Yet the bomb techs continued their methodical inspection.

“There are no explosive devices,” I said. I staggered across the marshy field. “He would have boasted about it.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get her out of there.”

“You don’t know how.”

But I did. I knew something about caskets. The Department of Defense provided standard-issue metal or wooden caskets to the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty, if they were wanted. A few times I’d had the solemn and terrible duty of accompanying the body of a friend on the plane home.

When I got to Alexa’s casket I shoved aside one of the guys in their bulky blast-resistant space suits. He protested, and the other one tried to block me. Someone yelled, “Back away!”

The other guys on the SWAT team stayed back as per standard procedure. I shouted to them, “One of you must have a hex key set, right?”

Someone threw me a folding tool with a bunch of Allen keys on it. I found the right one and inserted it in the hole at the foot of the casket and turned the crank counterclockwise four or five turns to unlock the lid.

The rubber gasket had been mashed in places where the steel casket had begun to cave in under ten feet of dirt, but I managed to pry it up.

A terrible odor escaped, like from an open sewer.

Alexa had been lying in her own excrement, or just a few inches above it. She stared up, but not at me. Her hair was matted, her face chalk white, her eyes sunken in deep pits.

She was wearing blue medical scrubs and was covered in vomit. Her hands were curled in loose fists that kept jerking outward. She couldn’t stop pounding the sides of her coffin. Her bare feet twitched.

She didn’t understand she was free.

I knelt over and kissed her forehead and said, “Hey.”

Her eyes searched the sky. She didn’t see me. Then she did. She looked directly at me, uncomprehendingly.

I smiled at her and she started to cry.

That was about the last thing I remembered for a long while.





107.



I hate hospitals.

Unfortunately I had to spend a few days at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where my FBI friends were kind enough to helicopter me from New Hampshire. The ER doc told me I’d developed a tension pneumothorax as a result of the blunt-force trauma. That my entire chest cavity had filled up with air, my lungs had collapsed, and I’d gone into respiratory distress. That it was a life-threatening condition and if one of the SWAT guys hadn’t done what he did, I’d surely be dead.

I asked him what had been done.

“I don’t think you want to know,” he said.

“Try me.”

“Someone with medic training stuck a large-bore needle in your chest to let the air out,” he said delicately.

“You mean like a Cook kit?”

He looked surprised.

“In the army we called that a needle thoracostomy. Every field medic carries a Cook pneumothorax kit in their aid bag.”

He looked relieved.

He ordered up a lot of X-rays and put a chest tube in me, had the wound in my calf cleaned out and bandaged, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me to another ward to recover. After three days they let me go.

Diana was there to give me a ride home.

* * *



EVEN THOUGH I could now walk just fine, the nurse insisted on rolling me to the hospital entrance in a wheelchair while Diana got the car.

She pulled up in my Defender. Nice and shiny and newly washed.

“Look familiar?” she said as I got in.

“Not really. It looks almost new. Someone find it in the woods up in New Hampshire?”

“One of the snipers. He drove it back to Boston and decided he liked it better than his Chevy Malibu. It wasn’t easy to pry it out of his sweaty little hands. But at least he washed it for you.”

“I want to see Alexa. Is she still in the hospital?”

“Actually, she got out a lot faster than you. She was treated for dehydration, they checked her out, and she’s fine.”

“I doubt that.”

“You’re right. I’ve dealt with plenty of kids who’ve gone through traumatic experiences. I know some good therapists. Maybe you can convince her to see one.”

“Is she at home?”

“Yeah. In Manchester. I don’t think she’s happy about it, but it’s home.” As we headed down Comm Ave toward Mass Ave, she said, “How about I cook dinner for you tonight? As a celebration.”

“A celebration of what?”

She gave me a sideways glance and pursed her lips. “I don’t know, maybe the fact you saved that girl’s life?”

“If anything was a team effort—”

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“Thing?”

“Where you give everyone else credit except yourself. You don’t have to do that with me.”

I was too tapped out to argue.

“Let’s make it my place,” she said. “I don’t want to be the first person to turn on your oven. Does it even work?”

“I’m not sure. Let me go home and get changed and take a shower. Or a sponge bath.”

“It’s just dinner, you know.”

“Not a date. Of course.”

“Like the thought never occurred to you.”

“Never,” I said.

“You know something, Nico? For a guy who’s so good at recognizing a lie, you’re a really bad liar.”

I just shrugged. She wasn’t so good at it either.





108.



ONE WEEK LATER



The waves crashed loudly on the rocks below, and the wind howled along the point. The sky looked heavy, a mournful gray, as if any moment it might begin to pour.

No more armed guards, I saw. The guardhouse was empty. I parked in the circular drive and crossed the porch, the floorboards creaking underfoot.

I rang the bell and waited almost a minute, then rang again. After another minute the door opened, and Marshall Marcus stood there.

He was wearing a gray cardigan and a rumpled white dress shirt that looked like it hadn’t been pressed.

“Nickeleh,” he said, and he smiled, but it was not a happy smile. He was weary and defeated. His face seemed to have sunk and his teeth seemed too big for his mouth and far too white. His face was creased and his reddish hair stuck out in crazy tufts. It looked like he’d been napping.

“Sorry to wake you,” I said. “Want me to come back?”

“No, no, don’t be silly, come on in.” He gave me a big hug. “Thank you for coming.”

I followed him to the front of the house where you could watch the sea. His shoulders slumped as he walked. The front room was gloomy, the only light coming from the fading late-afternoon sky. Crumpled on one of the couches was a cheap synthetic Red Sox blanket, the kind they sell at Fenway.

“She’s still not talking?” I said.

Marcus heaved a long sigh as he sank into a chair. “She hardly even comes out of her room. It’s like she’s not even here. She sleeps all the time.”

“After what she’s been through, she needs to see someone. It doesn’t have to be one of the trauma specialists Diana’s recommending. But someone, at least.”

“I know, Nick. I know. Maybe you can change her mind. Lexie always seems to listen to you. You feeling better?”

“Totally,” I said.

“Good thing you were wearing a vest, huh?”

“Yeah. Lucky break. You’re doing the right thing.”

He gave me a questioning look.

“Meeting with the FBI.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, only because Schecky says he can get me a deal.”

“Give Gordon Snyder what he wants,” I said, “and you’ll have the FBI on your side. They have a lot of influence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

“But what does that mean? They’re gonna put me in prison? My little girl, look what’s she’s already been through—now she has to lose her daddy?”

“Depending on how much you cooperate, you might even walk,” I said.

“You really think so?”

“It depends on how much you give them. You’re going to have to tell them about Mercury. They know a lot already.”

“Schecky says I have nothing to worry about if I just do what he says.”

“How well has that worked out for you?” I said.

He looked uneasy and said nothing for a long while.

Finally I broke the silence. “Where’s Belinda?”

“That’s why I asked you to come here,” Marcus said. “She’s gone.”





109.



He handed me a pale blue correspondence card with BELINDA JACKSON MARCUS on the top in small navy blue copperplate. The script was big and loopy and feminine, but a few of the letters—the H’s and the A’s and the W’s—looked Cyrillic. Like they’d come from the hand of someone who’d learned to write in Russian as a child. The note said:



Darling—



I think it’s better this way. Someday we’ll talk.



I’m so happy Alexa is home.



I really did love you.



Belinda



“She said she was going out to meet a girlfriend in the city, and when I got up I found this propped up against the coffeemaker. What does it mean?”

It meant she’d been warned the FBI was about to close in on her. Though in truth, it would have been difficult to prove Anya Afanasyeva guilty of any serious crime.

“Sometimes it takes a crisis to find out who a person really is,” I said.

I doubt he knew who I was really talking about.

Marcus shook his head, as if he were trying to dodge a pesky fly, or a thought. “Nick, I need you to find her for me.”

“I don’t think she wants to be found.”

“What are you talking about? She’s my wife. She loves me!”

“Maybe she loved your money more.”

“She knew I was broke for months. It never changed anything with us.”

“Well, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke, right?”

A long pause.

He then turned away.

“Come on, Marshall. Did you really think you could move forty-five million dollars offshore without anyone finding out? It’s not so easy anymore.”

Marcus flushed. “Okay, so there was a little nest egg,” he said. “Money I wasn’t going to touch. Money I’ll need if I’m ever going to get back in the game.” He sounded defensive, almost indignant. “Look, I’m not going to apologize for what I’ve got.”

“Apologize? What do you have to apologize for?” I said.

“Exactly.”

He didn’t notice my caustic tone. “I mean, you’ve been consistent from the beginning—you’ve never stopped lying to me. Even back when Alexa was kidnapped the first time and you told me you had no idea who was behind it. You knew it was David Schechter’s people, cracking the whip. Making sure you did what you were told. I’m guessing Annelise had her suspicions, though. Maybe it had something to do with why she couldn’t live with you anymore.”

He hesitated a few seconds, apparently deciding not to deny it. “Look, if this is about money, then fine. I’ll pay your bill in full.” The ends of his mouth twitched as if trying to conceal a tiny smile.

I laughed. “Like I said, Marcus, there’s broke and there’s broke. As of nine o’clock this morning, you’re wiped out for real. Check with the Royal Cayman Bank and Trust. The entire forty-five million dollars was withdrawn this morning.”

“It’s gone?” Marcus sank into the sofa and started to rock back and forth. Like he was either about to pray or about to weep. “How could this happen to me again?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to put it all in Belinda’s name.”





110.



David Schechter wanted to meet with me before the FBI arrived at his office. He said it was a matter of some urgency.

“I wanted to apologize to you,” he said. He sat in his rickety antique chair behind the tiny antique desk.

“For what?”

“I overreacted, I’ll be the first to admit it. I should have been up-front with you from the get-go. You’re a reasonable man. More than that, you’re a true American hero.”

He fixed me with a look of the deepest admiration, as if I were some great statesman, like Winston Churchill. Or maybe Bono.

“You’re too kind,” I said. “Apology accepted.”

“You of all people understand that our national security must never be compromised.”

“No question,” I said.

“I’ve already impressed upon Marshall the importance of not divulging to the FBI anything about Mercury that’s not germane to their investigation.”

“Why keep it secret from the FBI?”

“Nick, you know how Washington works. If it ever gets out that ten billion dollars in military black-budget funds has been lost because it was being privately invested—dear Lord, we’d be throwing buckets of chum upon the water. The sharks will come for miles. You were a soldier. Can you imagine what damage such a revelation would do to our nation’s defense?”

“Not really.”

He blinked owlishly behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “You don’t understand what a huge scandal would result?”

“Oh, sure. It’ll be huge, all right. Lots of people are going to wonder how you stole all that money from the Pentagon.”

He smiled uneasily.





111.



Because I’d finally learned the real story in a hotel suite at the Mandarin.

“You must realize,” Roman Navrozov had said, “how frustrating it is to sit on the sidelines with billions of dollars and billions of euros at my disposal, ready to invest in American industry, and yet every single one of my deals is blocked by the U.S. government. While America sells itself off to every country in the world. Including its sworn enemies.”

“I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” I’d said.

“Ten percent of America is owned by the Saudis, do you know this? And look what they did to your World Trade Center. The Communist Chinese own most of your Treasury bonds. Some of your biggest defense contractors are owned by foreign conglomerates. But when I try to buy an American steel company or an energy company or a computer company, your government refuses. Some anonymous bureaucrats in the Treasury Department say it would harm national security.”

“So you wanted the Mercury files for leverage? To force the U.S. government to rubber-stamp all of your deals?”

He shrugged.

“Then there must be something in the Mercury files that a lot of powerful people want kept secret.”

He shrugged.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

* * *



NOW, I leaned back in my fragile antique wooden chair. It creaked alarmingly. Schechter winced.

“Turning a slush fund into a hedge fund to funnel secret payments to some of the most powerful people in America for three decades,” I said. “That’s genius.”

I glanced pointedly at his ego wall. At all those photographs of him doing the grip-and-grin with former secretaries of Defense and secretaries of State and four former vice presidents and even a few former presidents. “But what was the point? Your own self-aggrandizement? What could you possibly have wanted? How much influence did you need to buy? For what?”

“You don’t have the slightest idea, do you?”

“About what?”

He paused for a long time, examined his immaculate desktop, looked back up. “You’re probably too young to remember that there once was a time when the best and the brightest went into government work because it was the right thing to do.”

“Camelot, right?”

“Now where do the graduates of our top colleges end up? Law schools and investment banks. They go where the money is.”

“Can you blame them?”

“Precisely. The CEO of Merrill Lynch pockets a hundred million dollars for driving his company into the ground. The guy who almost destroyed Home Depot gets two hundred and ten million dollars just to go away. Yet a hardworking public servant who helps run the fifteen-trillion-dollar enterprise called the United States of America can’t afford to send his kids to college? A general who’s fought all his life to keep our country safe and strong spends his retirement in tract housing in Rockville, Maryland, scraping by on a pension of a hundred thousand bucks a year?”

“This is good,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better rationalization for graft.”

“Graft?” Schechter said, red-faced, eyes glittering. “You call it graft? How about calling it retention pay? Stock options in America? The whole point of Mercury is to make sure that the best and the brightest aren’t punished for being patriots. Yes, Nick, we diverted the money and built a goddamn moat. We guaranteed that our greatest public servants would never have to worry about money. So they could lead lives of genuine public service. This sure as hell is about national security. It’s about rewarding heroes and statesmen and patriots—instead of bankers and swindlers who’d sell out their country for two basis points.”

I could see the veins on his neck pulsing.

“Well,” I said softly, “you make a good argument. And I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to make it before a jury of your peers.”

“I’ll deny we ever spoke about it,” he said with a cruel smile.

“Don’t bother,” I said. I got up and opened the door to his office. Gordon Snyder and Diana Madigan were standing there, flanking Marshall Marcus. Behind them were six guys in FBI Windbreakers. “Marshall is cooperating.”

He shook his head. “You son of a bitch.” He pulled open his desk drawer and one of the FBI guys shouted, “Freeze!”

But it wasn’t a gun Schechter was after. It was a breath mint, which he popped in his mouth.

“Gentlemen,” he said with a beatific smile. “Please enter.”

He didn’t rise, though, which wasn’t like him.

“David, I’m sorry,” Marcus said.

I turned and saw that Schechter was staring at me, his eyes fixed. His mouth was foaming. I could smell almonds.

I shouted, “Anyone have a medical kit?”

A couple of the FBI agents rushed in. One of them checked Schechter’s pulse, at his wrist and on his neck. Then he shook his head.

David Schechter liked to brag that he always had all the angles figured out.

I guess he was right after all.





112.



Early in the fall I took Diana out for a drive. She wanted to see the New England foliage. I’ve never cared much about foliage, though the fiery red maples were impressive.

She had no itinerary in mind; she just wanted to drive. I suggested New Hampshire, where the leaves were further along.

Neither one of us spoke about the last time we’d been in New Hampshire together.

After we were on the road a while, I said, “I have something for you.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Look in the glove box.”

She gave me a puzzled look, then popped open the glove compartment and took out a small box, badly gift-wrapped.

She held it up and pretended to admire the wrapping job. “Aren’t you a regular Martha Stewart,” she teased.

“Not my skill set,” I said. “Obviously.”

She tore it open, gasped.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, staring at the octagonal black perfume bottle. “Where the hell did you get Nombre Noir? And a full ounce? And sealed? Are you out of your mind?”

“I meant to give it to you years ago,” I said.

She reached over and gave me a kiss. “I’m almost out, too. I thought I’d never have it again. Last time I checked eBay, a half-ounce of Nombre Noir was selling for more than seven hundred dollars. Where’d you get this?”

“Remember my friend the Jordanian arms dealer?”

“Samir?”

“Right. Sammy found it for me. One of his clients is a sheikh in Abu Dhabi who had a stockpile in an air-conditioned storeroom.”

“Thank Samir for me.”

“Oh, I did. Believe me, I did. You’d have thought I asked him for a nuclear warhead. But by the time he handed it to me, you were gone.”

“You could have sent it.”

“I don’t trust the mail,” I lied.

Diana once explained to me that Nombre Noir was one of the greatest perfumes ever created. But it was impossible to find now. Apparently the company that made it ended up losing money on each bottle. Then the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, decided to ban one of its main ingredients, something called damascone, because it causes sun sensitivity in some tiny percentage of people. The company recalled every bottle they could and then destroyed each one by running a steamroller over them.

As soon as she told me it was impossible to find, of course, I made a point of tracking some down.

“Well, that serves me right for leaving without letting you know,” she said.

“Yeah, so there.”

“So, um, speaking of which? They’ve offered me a supervisory special agent job in Miami,” she said.

“Hey, that’s a big deal,” I said with all the enthusiasm I could muster. “Congratulations. Miami could be great.”

“Thanks.”

“Hard to turn down a job like that,” I said.

The awkward silence seemed to go on forever.

“What about Gordon Snyder’s job?”

Snyder’s superiors weren’t so happy about his planting an unapproved, off-the-books tracking device in my BlackBerry and then trying to cover his tracks by claiming that a confidential informant had tipped him off to Mauricio Perreira’s location. He’d been demoted and transferred to Anchorage.

I’d heard he could see Russia from his desk.

“Nah, they’re looking for an organized crime specialist for that slot. So, Nico. Mind if I ask you something about Roman Navrozov?”

“Okay.”

“That helicopter crash in Marbella? A bit too convenient, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. A deal was a deal.

“Let me guess. Putin’s guys have been trying to get him for years. But he never made it easy for them. So you struck a bargain with one of your ex-KGB sources. Some sort of trade for information. It isn’t like what happened to Navrozov was a tragedy. Some might even call it justice. You probably figured it was win-win.”

“Or maybe it was just a cracked rotor blade, like they say.”

She gave me a look. “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

After a long moment, I said, “Sometimes, stuff just happens.”

“Hmph.”

“You see that story in the Globe a couple days ago about the accountant who was crushed to death by a falling filing cabinet? There’s no safe place. No guarantees.”

“I didn’t mean what I said about marrying a CPA.”

“No?”

“No. I’d settle for a database administrator.”

“I mean it. You can swathe yourself in five layers of security, but your luxury helicopter is still going to come down over Marbella. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather see the bullet that’s coming for me.”

We both stared straight ahead for a while.

“You know,” she said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we’re about to make an arrest in the Mercury case.”

“I was wondering if that would ever happen.”

The weeks had turned into months, and not a single one of Marshall Marcus’s “investors” had even been brought in for questioning. None of their names had surfaced in the press.

Marshall Marcus remained at liberty, since he’d cooperated fully with the FBI—and his new lawyers were still negotiating with the SEC. There were a lot of investors out there howling for his head. He’d certainly face some kind of prison time.

But apart from that, it was like nothing had happened.

Call me cynical, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether a quiet call had been placed to the attorney general. Maybe a whispered aside over steaks at Charlie Palmer’s in D.C.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “We’re talking about some extremely prominent individuals—senior government officials, elder statesmen. As the saying goes, if you shoot at a king, you must kill him.”

“But you have names and account numbers…”

“Suddenly there are a whole lot of very nervous people at the top of the Justice Department who insist on signing off on everything. They want us to cross every t and dot every i. They want everything completely nailed down before they’ll go ahead with such a high-profile corruption sweep. Something like this will destroy careers and reputations and, you know, shake the faith of the country in our elected officials.”

“Sure wouldn’t want to do that,” I said dryly.

“The Criminal Division is insisting on all sorts of bank records from around the world, including from offshore banks that won’t cooperate in a hundred years.”

“In other words, nothing’s going to happen.”

She was silent. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“You don’t find this frustrating?”

“I just keep my head down and do the best job I can.”

“So who are you about to arrest?”

“General Mark Hood.”

I gave her a sideways glance, then looked back at the road. “On what grounds?”

“Embezzlement, fraud … It’s a long charge sheet. He was the one who supervised the illegal transfer of covert funds out of the Pentagon’s black budget.”

I nodded. “I figured as much.”

“You were on to him, weren’t you? Before he fired you?”

“I guess so. Though I didn’t know it at the time.”

For several miles neither of us spoke.

Maybe, I thought, the only true justice was karma.

Take Taylor Armstrong. She claimed that when Mauricio Perreira pressured her into setting him up with her BFF, Alexa, she really had no idea what was going to happen. I believed her. Not that it made her any less narcissistic, sleazy, and underhanded.

Shortly after we last talked, Taylor was pulled out of school and sent to a place in western Massachusetts that specialized in “novel treatments” for students with severe behavioral problems, controversial for its use of electric shock as an “aversive.” It made the Marston-Lee Academy look like the Canyon Ranch Spa.

The place also required weekly counseling sessions with parents, which wasn’t going to be a problem, since her father, Senator Armstrong, had announced he was leaving public service in order to spend more time with his family.

I saw the exit sign and hit the turn signal.

“Where are we going?”

“Ever seen the Exeter campus?”

“No. Why would I…” Then, realizing, she said, “You think she’s ready to see you?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

* * *



DIANA WAITED for me in the car. She thought it was best for me to have some time alone with Alexa.

The girls’ field hockey team was practicing on the dazzling green artificial turf field in the football stadium at the far end of the campus. I knew nothing about field hockey, but it looked like a scrimmage. It was a cluttery game, hard to understand at first. The whistle was constantly sounding. A few of the girls really stood out, one in particular, and when she turned I saw it was Alexa.

She was wearing a headband, her hair tied back. Her arms were tan and muscular, her legs long and lean.

Her blue mouth guard gave her a fierce appearance, but she looked healthy and happy.

The coach blew her whistle and shouted, “Let’s get some water,” and the girls all popped out their mouth guards: a precise, automatic gesture. Some tucked the mouthpieces under the tops of their sports bras; some slipped them into their shin guards. They shouted and talked loudly and squealed as they straggled toward the drinking fountain. A couple of them hugged Alexa—I’d forgotten how much more affectionate girls are than guys at that age—and laughed about something.

Then she turned, as if she’d sensed my presence, and caught my eye. She spoke quickly to one of her teammates and approached reluctantly.

“Hey, Nick.”

“You’re really good, you know that?”

“I’m okay. I like it. That’s the main thing.”

“You play hard. You’re tough. Fearless, even.”

She gave a quick, nervous laugh. “Gift of fear, right?”

“Right. So I just wanted to say hi and make sure everything’s okay.”

“Oh, um, okay, thanks. Yeah, everything’s cool. It’s good. I’m…” She looked longingly over at her teammates. “It’s kinda not the best time, is that … that okay?”

“No problem.”

“I mean, like, you didn’t drive all the way up here just to see me or anything, right? Like, I hope not.”

“Not at all. I was in the area.”

“Business or something?”

“Yeah.”

“So, yeah. Um…” She gave me a little wave. “I gotta go. Thanks for coming by. Nice to see you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You too.”

I understood: Just seeing me brought on all kinds of dark and troubling emotions. I’d forever be associated with a nightmare. I made her uncomfortable. There were things in the subbasement of her mind she couldn’t yet deal with. Her way of recovering was to try to forget.

We all have our ways of coping.

As she returned to the field, her stride got looser. I could see the tension leave her body. One of her friends made a crack, and she gave a quick grin, and the coach blew her whistle again.

I stood there watching for a few minutes longer. She played with a fluid grace, almost balletic. Once I began to understand how the game worked, it was sort of exciting. She charged down the field, dished it off to another player in a give-and-go, and kept on going. Suddenly everything was happening too fast to follow. Just as she entered the striking circle she somehow got the ball back, and then I could see what all of her teammates saw: that the goalkeeper had been fooled and Alexa had a clear shot, and she smiled as she flicked the ball up in the air and it soared toward the goal.

She’d take it from here.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I wish I could quote the late Spike Milligan: “I am not going to thank anybody—because I did it all myself.” Unfortunately, in my case, this is not accurate.

I just did the hard part.

But I did turn repeatedly to a small group of victims—er, technical advisers. My varsity squad of sources: Jeff Fischbach, amazing forensic technologist and real-life character out of The Matrix who knows a scary amount about electronic evidence and cell-phone tracking; Stuart Allen, preeminent forensic audio expert who shares my taste in good wine and bad jokes; and, again, Dick Rogers, founder of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Squad and fount of wisdom about kidnapping and rescue strategy, field ops, and weaponry.

A lot of people in the FBI’s Boston Field Office helped me get the details right, particularly Supervisory Special Agent Randy Jarvis, a real-life action hero who runs the violent crimes task force; Kevin Swindon in digital forensics; Ed Kappler in firearms; Steve Vienneau in crimes against children; and S.A. Tamara Harty of the CARD team in Providence. Thanks especially to Special Agent Gail Marcinkiewicz, for introductions and guidance.

A few hedge-fund titans generously took time with me to explain the intricacies of their business—time they could have spent trading and making millions. Yes, I feel guilty about that. But also grateful, to Jon Jacobson of Highfields Capital Management, Richard Leibovitch of Gottex Funds (whose son, Jeremy, demonstrated Call of Duty), Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Seth Klarman of the Baupost Group. Kristin Marcus at Highfields explained how funds are structured, as did Steve Alperin of the Harvard Management Company.

Once again, Nick Heller was backstopped by a team of “private spies”: Skip Brandon and Gene Smith of Smith Brandon International, Terry Lenzner of the Investigative Group International, and Jack Devine of the Arkin Group.

Lawyers, guns, and money: deepest thanks to Jay Shapiro for legal advice; Dr. Ed Nawotka, Jr., on guns and ammo; Jack Blum, expert in offshore banking, shell companies, and money laundering, for help figuring out the big swindle; and to my old friend and unindicted co-conspirator, Giles McNamee, owner of Nick’s Land Rover Defender 110, Coniston green.

For background on computer forensics, thanks to Anish Dhanda and Rich Person of DNS Enterprise, Inc., Simson Garfinkel, Mark Spencer of Arsenal Consulting, and Larry Daniel of Guardian Digital Forensics. For eavesdropping detection, Kevin D. Murray of Murray Associates; for satellite communications, Wolf Vogel; and for covert entry and security, Marc W. Tobias, Michael Huebler, and Jeffrey Dingle of Lockmasters Security Institute. Thanks as well to Randy Milch, general counsel at Verizon; Michael Sielicki, chief of police, Rindge, New Hampshire; Maj. Greg Heilshorn of the New Hampshire Air National Guard; Kevin O’Brien; Justin Sullivan of RegentJet; Mercy Carbonell of Phillips Exeter Academy; and Kevin Roche of the U.S. Marshals Service. Raja Ramani of Pennsylvania State University, Brian Prosser of Mine Ventilation Services, and Kray Luxbacher of Virginia Tech all provided important logistical details about Alexa Marcus’s underground ordeal. And Dennis Sweeney of Dennis Sweeney Funeral Home in Quincy, Massachusetts, kindly gave me a taste of what Alexa Marcus went through. I really hope never to do it again as long as I’m alive.

Domo arigato to Nick Heller’s personal trainer, Jack Hoban, ethical warrior and musician. Christopher Rogers of Grubb & Ellis found me Nick Heller’s “steampunk” office in downtown Boston, and Diane Kaneb graciously let me move Marshall and Belinda Marcus into her family’s graceful waterfront house in Manchester. Hilary Gabrieli and Beth Ketterson told me a bit about Louisburg Square. Lucy Baldwin was Alexa Marcus’s fashion consultant. Vivian Wyler and Anna Buarque of my Brazilian publisher, Rocco, helped with the Portuguese. Liz Berry gave me some wonderful tips on how to tell a real Georgia native. Thanks to Sean Reardon of the Liberty Hotel, Ali Khalid of the Four Seasons Hotel, and Mike Arnett of the Mandarin Oriental, for hotel security details; and to my brother, Dr. Jonathan Finder, and Dr. Tom Workman, for medical information.

The perfume that Nick gives Diana, Nombre Noir, is real (though discontinued and almost impossible to find). It was suggested to me by two remarkable perfume experts, the biophysicist (and “emperor of scent”) Luca Turin, and his wife, the writer Tania Sanchez.

With all these experts in my corner, if I’ve made any mistakes, obviously one of them must have left something out.

There’s no better literary agent than Molly Friedrich. At the Friedrich Agency, thanks as well to Paul Cirone, and—for some extremely astute editorial insight—Lucy Carson. I’ve got a terrific web manager, Karen Louie-Joyce, and a top-notch editor and researcher in Clair Lamb.

Without Claire Baldwin, my assistant, I wouldn’t get a damned thing done. You’re the best.

To my brilliant editor, Keith Kahla: I know I drove you crazy writing this book … but you got me back good.

Henry Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker, was an invaluable contributor at every stage, and yes, he’s my younger brother.

Since the age of two, when she poured a sippy cup of water over the keyboard of my laptop, my daughter, Emma, has been an astute critic of my work. With Buried Secrets she turned her acute editorial eye to some crucial scenes and saved me from some embarrassing gaffes. I’d say you rock, Em, but then you’d say I’m just some pathetic old guy trying to sound cool.

My wife, Michele Souda, had the hardest job of all: being married to a writer. Thanks for standing by me all this time. I know it ain’t easy to keep dancing.

—Joseph Finder

Boston, Massachusetts