Black Skies (10 page)

L
incoln Shepard’s eyes flitted from monitor to monitor as he typed feverishly, constantly taking sips of an energy drink. He was running several different programs at the same time, searching databases, analyzing data and testing electronic security for weak spots. He worked best when his attention was divided, and he alternated between tasks about every thirty seconds, whenever some process took more than a few seconds to complete.

He was in the zone, which is where he liked to be. Computers were the air he breathed, and had been ever since he was a young teen. He hadn’t ever been a good student, never been popular, and, though he might fit the
nerd chic
mold that had come into vogue of late, had not been particularly attractive to the opposite sex in his formative years. But he had had computers, and he sank hours into them.

He got into hacking young, at thirteen. At first he was what the community called a
script kiddie,
a term for someone who uses pre-made hacking programs to do general vandalism on the Web, by changing the content of sites and stealing passwords. He soon graduated to more advanced hacking, joining a group who did online stunts as a form of protest. Having gotten in too deep, he got a visit from the FBI, and Diana Bloch offered him a choice. She could make the criminal charges go away if he came to work for her.

“What
are
you doing?” asked Karen O’Neal, still sitting at the same desk across the office from him behind her far more modest laptop computer. “You’re typing like a maniac.”

Diana Bloch walked into the room, cool and composed as always. “Updates,” she demanded.

“Someone made a transfer of one hundred thousand euros from a Swiss bank account into Ali’s,” said Shepard. “That was early last year. It’s the only thing that seems out of the ordinary.”

“A recent lump sum?” she asked. “That doesn’t square with the theory that he’s been in someone’s pocket for a long time. He’s in drug enforcement. The natural supposition is that someone is paying him to look the other way on drug trafficking. If that’s right, then this doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe,” said O’Neal. “But a lot of that money was cashed out almost immediately. And if we look at his previous statements, we see that money was slowly draining out of his account, and would have reached zero in short order.”

“What does that mean?” asked Bloch, crossing her arms.

“Think about it,” said O’Neal. “He got that much money, right when he needed it. He was gushing money on something—drugs, gambling, whatever. Suddenly he saw that he had run through his savings, and he had racked up serious debt.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“What I think is that the money was
his
to begin with,” said Shepard, leaning back in his chair, gloating. “That’s his Swiss bank account, money that was deposited by whoever is bribing him. He kept it there to avoid getting caught or having to pay taxes on it. Maybe he was thinking of retiring as soon as he’d amassed enough. But when he ran up those debts, he had to dip into that fund.”

Bloch touched a finger to her chin. “That makes sense.”

“Now we’re working on finding whoever put the money into that Swiss account,” said Shepard. “On the assumption that that’s the person behind the abduction.”

“Good work,” said Bloch. “I want reports whenever you find anything. I want you to nail this bastard.”

“Will do, boss,” said Shepard, whose attention had already shifted back to his computer. The clicks of Bloch’s heels on the wooden floor receded as she walked away.

“I think I have a way to figure out who was paying off Ali,” said O’Neal.

“I do too,” said Shepard. “It’s called ‘hacking into a Swiss bank’s customer database.’ ”

“Good luck with
that,
” she said.

“Watch me,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to sift the data and find relevant trends,” she said. “That should tell us everything we need to know.

“Oh, please,” he said.

“Care to make it interesting?” she asked with a sly grin.

 

“Shepard, wake up,” said O’Neal.

Lincoln Shepard babbled, and then opened his eyes to Clapton blaring on the stereo. He grumbled—that would not have been his choice, nor was it what was playing before he had fallen asleep in his chair, in front of his computer. His neck hurt like a bitch, and his mouth was dry. He took a sip of lukewarm energy drink—breakfast of champions—and yawned. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Who knows,” said O’Neal. “It’s always night down here. But you’ve been out for like two hours. You always have too much caffeine and then crash. You should know by now that it’s all about the endurance, bud.”

“I run on a strict regimen of highs and crashes.” He munched on stale tortilla chips from an open bag, wiping his hands on his shirt. “Keeps my body working like a well-oiled machine.”

“Shut up and look here, will you? I think I found something.”

“Can you just tell me?” he drawled, stretching out his arms above his head. He looked back at her, hair frizzled and messy, but sitting on the edge of her seat.

“Get your ass over here, Linc.”

He stood up out of his chair and made a show of dragging it next to her, all of which she ignored, because, as he knew, she was used to it. “Okay,” he said. I’m all eyes and ears. Tell me what you have.”

She turned sideways in her chair to face him. Her makeup was smudged around the eyes, but there was an enthusiastic glow about them. “So, we know that at some point in the past, this guy Ali started to get bribes. Big bribes, probably regular.”

“Yes. I was the one who told you that, remember?”

“Well,” she continued, “what would you do if you suddenly started receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in offshore accounts? You can’t spend that money now, okay, but one thing you’re definitely
not
doing is saving for retirement. Is that fair to say?”

“I suppose it is,” Shepard said, yawning. “What of it?”

“Look.” She brought onto her screen a graph that showed a line, ascending in relatively small increments with a sudden drop within the past two years, after which the graph remained near zero. “This is his savings. Up until about three years ago, he was putting money in the bank pretty regularly, at least a little every month. We see a few dips in the graph, where he made some big purchases, but overall, he was a pretty steady saver.” She moved her mouse cursor to the highest peak in the graph. “Now, at this point, he stops, completely, and starts spending it. Precipitously, I might add.”

“Okay,” said Shepard, frowning. There was something to it, but he couldn’t quite figure it out. It always peeved him when O’Neal outsmarted him, and he had to admit to himself that it happened far more often than he’d like. “What does it mean?”

“Well, why do you start spending all the money you saved for retirement?” She was speaking fast, almost euphorically.

“Well,” he said, thinking to himself. “Maybe he didn’t expect to live that long—”

“Which would mean medical bills,” she said.

“Would explain the depletion of the savings,” he said.

“It could, but I checked. No hospital bills. What we have is a nice car, electronics and a whole lot of cash withdrawals. How do you explain that?”

He racked his brain. “Okay, I give,” he said. “Tell me.”

“When do you spend your whole retirement fund?” she asked. “When you have a whole other,
bigger
one stashed away in a Swiss bank account. I think he started spending that money when he started receiving bribes.”

Shepard thought. It made sense. “Okay, let’s say that explains it. How does that help us? We still have no idea where that money’s coming from.”

“Correlation, correlation, correlation,” she said. God, she could be smug sometimes. “We look at other data sets, news reports contemporary with that time, specifically those pertaining to foreign trade. And what do we find?”

She hit enter again, and a news story popped up—a small note from the
Wall Street Journal.
“This article says that, during this very period, a certain company, a German shipping company called the Himmel Corporation, seriously expanded its operations in Pakistan, nearly doubling its business there.”

“Come on, Karen,” said Shepard. “I know you believe in this stuff, but you have to admit, it’s pretty thin.”

“That’s just the beginning,” she said, her voice sounding more breathless. “Ali has been to Zurich three times in this time. Now, who do you think was staying at the same hotel, every single one of those times?”

“The pope?” said Shepard. She could tell he was trying hard to act nonchalant now.

“The goddamn president of Himmel Corp!”
she exclaimed, with a snap of her fingers. “Tell me, who cracked this now?”

He shrugged. “I suppose there’s a possibility—”

She punched him in the shoulder. “Tell me I beat you. Tell me I’m better than you.” She punched him again. “Say it, nerd!”

“Ow! All right, all right. You won this time.”

“Damn right,” she gloated.

“Ow,” he repeated, clutching his shoulder.

C
hapman opened the door to his home to find no one there. Rose would be at work for several hours, and baby Ella would be at Rose’s mother’s. The silence and stillness in the middle of the afternoon were ominous to him, and being alone with his thoughts was probably not a good idea. The extent to which he craved a drink frightened him, and he wished that Rose were there to give him some comfort and restraint. But whenever he thought of Rose, he remembered Cynthia, and what had happened—that kiss—and all he could feel was terrible, crippling guilt.

Ah, but he felt fear, too. And anger.

“I’m not going down for this,” Bill Schroeder had told him in a phone. “If this comes back to bite anyone, it’s going to be your ass. You and your anonymous source.”

“You’re a real goddamn piece of work,” Chapman had told him back. It hadn’t been Chapman’s decision alone—in fact, Chapman didn’t have any decision-making authority at all. Still, he knew that if he tried to make a stink, there’d be a probe that would investigate his source, and the possibility that they might uncover where he got his information . . .

He plodded upstairs and fell forward into his bed without taking off his shirt or shoes. Tired as he was, he couldn’t fall asleep. He tossed and turned, and the sliver of light filtering through the curtains felt like a flashlight shining right at his face. He couldn’t get that one thing out of his mind. He shook his head against the pillow to get rid of the thought.

Back downstairs, he poured himself a glass of whiskey and collapsed onto the armchair that cramped the corner of the living room—“cozy,” they insisted on calling it after the manner of the real estate agent, without irony when they were on good terms and with bitter sarcasm otherwise. He took a long draught from the glass, trying to forget the current state of his marriage.

It did no good to think like that. Nor about the kiss. It had been a fluke, a moment of weakness. A confluence of events and circumstance, never to happen again. He had no reason to feel bad about it, then. Because that was all it had been—nothing, really. He was going to get some rest, resist drinking himself into a stupor, and wait for Rose to get home. He’d get a good night’s sleep, and then the next day—

He heard the door open, and saw Rose carrying baby Ella in one arm and a brown bag of groceries in the other, her keys held awkwardly in her left hand. She gestured with her head until he took the cue and rushed to help her by relieving her of the groceries and taking them into the kitchen.

“I got you those corn muffins you like,” she said, with the half-hurt but tentatively cheerful tone she took after a fight.

“Thanks.”

His cell rang. It was Smith. Chapman resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room. Instead, he just turned off the ringer and vibrate function, and put it in the pocket of his jacket, hanging on a coatrack by the door.

“Could you take her for a second?” she said, bouncing Ella gently in her arms. He did. The baby’s face was cold, with a red nose, but her eyes were wide and curious, and she seemed happy to be in his arms. “Thanks. My back is killing me. Who was that just now?”

“Just work,” he said. He couldn’t deal with giving her answers longer than a couple syllables. The whiskey sat uncomfortably in his stomach. He played with his daughter, dangling his keys in front of her mostly to avoid having to make eye contact with his wife.

He walked upstairs and put Ella in her crib. He heard Rose coming up the stairs as he tucked Ella in, and turned to see her standing at the door. Her face was all tenderness, and was that the glimmer of a tear in her eye?

“Hey,” he said softly, trying not to be cold or distant, and failing. She walked over to him and kissed him anyway.

“I love you for who you are and what you do,” she said. She always knew how to cut right to the heart—to his.

“I love you, too,” he said, and knew that the utterance was not nearly up to the task that was assigned to it. She hid her disappointment in a wan smile and he told her he probably should go pick up his phone and see what that call was about.

He walked back downstairs and reached into his coat pocket. Unlocking the phone screen, he dismissed the several missed calls and found one message. He went into the kitchen and closed the door before looking at it.

“Shit,” Chapman said out loud, and then said it again. Then he called Smith.

“I was concerned about you,” said Smith. “You didn’t pick up.”

“Screw you. You come in, cause trouble, and act like nothing happened.”

“I gave you information,” said Smith. “Good information, as far as it went. I did not tell you to act immediately on it.”

“So you wash your hands of it, you smug, serene bastard?”

“I don’t think you called me for recriminations,” said Smith, evenly as ever. “You called because you want to know.”

“It’s Haider Raza,” he said. “We know that already.”

“Haider planned and executed the attack, but he was not behind it.”

Chapman paced back and forth in his
cozy
kitchen, which was really not built for pacing. “Not behind it? Raza is the one who calls the shots in the Martyr’s Brigade. He’s masterminded plenty of complex, coordinated attacks.”

“He didn’t mastermind this one.”

Chapman took out a knife and played with it, twirling it. “Just tell me. What did you find?”

“Gunther Weinberg.”

The knife clattered onto the kitchen counter. “S-say that again, I think I must have heard you wrong.”

“You heard me correctly,” said Smith. “German tycoon Gunther Weinberg.”

“You’re
kidding
me,” said Chapman.

“I don’t
kid,
Mr. Chapman.”

That really went without saying. “What do you have to back it up?”

“Circumstantial evidence, so far,” said Smith. “All I intend is to bring him to your attention. It will be your job to prove the link.”

“My
job
is to find the Secretary of State.”

“Weinberg may be the key,” said Smith. “Our goals are the same, Mr. Chapman. Don’t forget that.”

Smith hung up and Chapman was left standing, without knowing what to do. He yelled out an obscenity and grabbed his coat. Duty called, and as little as he wanted to, he had to obey. He ran up to the bedroom. Rose was in bed, lying as she did when she was about to take a nap.

“I gotta go,” he said. “All this craziness.” He gestured at the air, as if it was present right there in the room.

She pulled a blanket over herself. “Should I expect you later?”

“I really don’t know.”

She shut her eyes. He walked over to her and kissed her forehead, and she smiled without opening her eyes.

 

He arrived at the office after 7
P.M.
, secretly hoping that Cynthia Gillespie had already left, but it was hard to win a bet against her dedication to her work. He found her at her computer, scrolling through photos of the house in Zhob over a box of
yakisoba,
the whites of her big, beautiful eyes standing out starkly in the darkness of the room, with a green sweater draper over her shoulders. She turned around, startled, when she heard the door shut behind him. When she saw that it was him, she quickly set down the box of food and stood up, wiping her hands on a napkin.

“Hi,” she said, obviously trying to suppress her discomfit. “I, uh, thought you had gone for the day.” Her eyes wouldn’t meet his as she spoke.

He had to say something. They had to address what had happened. “Look, uh . . .” There was a pause during which she looked at him expectantly. Chapman lost his nerve. “I got a tip. I don’t know if it’s really something, but I want whatever we have on file for Gunther Weinberg, the German billionaire.”

Surprise offset whatever awkwardness had existed. “Weinberg? Where the hell did you hear that?”

“Let’s call it an anonymous tip,” said Chapman.

“I get it, your goose that lays the golden eggs is shy. But if you ever get promoted to upper management or quit the business, I get dibs on your assets. So what’s the deal?”

“Just that he might have ordered the abduction,” he said.

“Sounds sketchy,” she said. “Should we check out the trilateral conspiracy, too? Maybe the Fed’s in on it, or the Rothschilds.”

He felt embarrassed for bringing it up, and chuckled hollowly. “It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a lead from a solid source.”

“Still, a German billionaire contracting with a Pakistani terrorist to kidnap the American Secretary of State?”

“I know how it sounds.” He couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity as he laid it all out. “But stranger things have happened.”

“You’re the boss,” she said. “Do you want the team on it?”

“Let’s keep the focus on Raza,” he said. “But keep tabs on Weinberg. Anything that shows up. Financial transactions, travel. I want this on the DL. You and, let’s say, Les set this up and get me what you know when you know it.”

“I’m going to need you to sign off on some of that intelligence gathering.”

“Will do,” he said. “I’m going to make some phone calls and look over whatever we have in the database on Weinberg already. Talk to you in, oh, forty and we’ll compare notes?”

“You got it.”