FISCHER WAS WAITING on the curb outside the main terminal at SFO. While he brought them back into the city on 101, he told her about his meetings with Susan Fennimore and the man from Special Branch.
“The guys in Washington lied to me,” Fischer said when Cain was finished. “They didn’t call me up there to look at a budget ledger. They wanted to tell me something about Castelli. Not the mayor, but his father. The ambassador.”
“He was under investigation?”
She nodded.
“Short of the secretary of state, he had the highest position in U.S. diplomacy. Yet he was a wildcard. The Counterintelligence Division thought something was wrong, that he was selling secrets. But they could never prove anything.”
“Did they know about the temporary passports?”
“If they did, they didn’t tell me.”
“Then they didn’t know about the girls, either.”
“I don’t think so. But they might not have been telling me everything—counterintelligence guys are cagey. They sit in their dark offices and collect information, but they never share it.”
“Why did they tell you?”
“Maybe to nudge us to look at London connections—they didn’t know how far ahead of them you already were,” Fisher said.
“We’re close now,” Cain said. “We need one or two more pieces, and then it’ll all make sense.”
Cain parked at the valet stand at the Palace Hotel and they went inside to meet Officer Combs in the lobby. He led them down the long marble hallway, past the empty ballroom and to the Market Street doors. The bar was to the left, and Cain saw Mona Castelli sitting there, her back to the entrance.
“She went out two hours ago,” Combs said. “She took a cab, but I called Officer Renton, and he beat her to the bank. He bumped into her going up the steps. Very casual, but then he acted like he just recognized her. ‘Aren’t you Mona Castelli?’ She turned around and got back in the cab—”
“She’d asked it to wait?” Cain asked.
“Yeah—and she got in, and had the driver take her back to the hotel.”
“What was she carrying?” Fischer asked.
“Just her handbag. The small one.”
“Is Officer Aguilar still watching Alexa?”
“That’s right.”
“Anything going on there?”
“She’s been staying in her studio. No visitors.”
They left Combs and went out to the street. Curtains of mist blew down the street toward the bay, and there were clusters of smokers and homeless men huddled under all of the awnings.
“What do you think?” Fischer asked.
“It’s got to be a safe deposit box,” Cain said. “She’s got something in there and she wants to get it out. But she doesn’t want anyone to see her with it.”
“What is it?”
“We’ll need to find out,” Cain said. “You had that kid at the U.S. attorney’s office draft a receipt for Castelli’s cash. How good is he at writing search warrants?”
“You want it coming from us?”
“If it lands in front of a judge who’ll sign it, I’ll take it from anyone.”
“It has to say what we expect to find,” Fischer said. “Even a friendly judge won’t sign an open-ended warrant.”
“We’ll explain the note we found in Castelli’s safe. It had bank addresses, and dates. We’ll explain what Combs and Renton saw, the two times she tried to get to her box.”
“Castelli’s note—you think he knew something about Mona. Knew that she was keeping something in a safe deposit box.”
“I think he suspected. I think he wanted to find out. He wasn’t telling us anything about the blackmail notes because he wanted to do his own homework first. But he was nervous enough that he was withdrawing cash and stashing it in his office.”
Fischer’s car was around the corner. Cain checked behind him for traffic, then stepped out into New Montgomery. From there he could see the brickwork side of Alexa’s building. He counted up the floors until he saw her windows. They were lit up, three bright panes above the latticework of an iron fire escape.
Alexa stepped into view.
She was nude, and she was tying her hair into a loose knot at the top of her head. When she finished, she cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed against the glass to look out. Cain turned his face away and stepped back to the sidewalk.
Fischer’s kid at the U.S. attorney’s office was as fast as he was good. They met him at eight p.m. outside the district court. He came running down the front steps, tie flipped over his shoulder, and got into the backseat. He loosened his tie, opened his briefcase, and handed a signed and sealed search warrant up to Cain.
“Ryan Harding,” he said. “You’re Cain? Inspector Cain?”
Cain reached around and shook the kid’s hand.
“This is good to go?”
“Tonight,” the kid said. “This second. I called the general counsel at Cathay Orient Bank and told her what I had. I said we’d come in the morning with fifty guys. SWAT jackets and rifles—scare the shit out of her customers, if that’s what she wants. Or she could let us in right now, after hours.”
“All right,” Cain said. “I like it. Let’s go.”