Cries of the Lost (38 page)

I
FIRST
got to know Shelly Gross by filming his every move and following him around Rocky Hill and Wethersfield. I learned he was one of the most routinized people I ever knew. This methodical nature must have served him well when he led the FBI’s organized crime task force in Connecticut. And probably kept him in good mental and physical shape as a retired widower.

So catching him at the gym at four o’clock in the afternoon was a sure thing.

He knew at this point what I looked like without a disguise, but I wore one anyway, in case Eloise had him under surveillance. It was my favorite hippy look, with a long grey wig pulled into a ponytail, droopy moustache and wire-rim glasses.

The gym was called FutureFit, which I took as an unusually honest, yet aspirational name. I signed up for a trial membership at the desk, changed into workout clothes and went looking for Shelly.

I found him on the stationary bike, his eyes fixed on a bank of TVs high up on the opposite wall. I took the bike next to him and started to peddle.

“Hi, Shelly,” I said.

He looked over. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“You look like an old hippy.”

“I do?”

“I got your message. I’m going to need a lot more before going to Holt. I’m under strict orders to stay the fuck away.”

“I have the mole, and I can prove it.”

“Who?”

“I need a deal,” I said.

“Ah. The old catch-22. I need something substantial enough to bring to Holt, but anything of substance could give away your bargaining power.”

“Something like that.”

“Oh, well.”

“Isn’t the very fact that one of your people is colluding with a violent militant group good enough?”

“Good enough to go to people well below Holt’s pay grade. But not Holt.”

I noticed the peddling was bothering my bad leg, so I coasted for a while.

“What if we combine that with information which could lead to the destruction of an international terrorist organization?”

“There’s no ‘we,’ and they hear that crap every day. Goes to special agents in charge of routine investigations.”

Frustration began to percolate up from somewhere in my midsection.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Believe what?”

“That there’s nothing you can do. You’re a highly decorated former field agent. Nothing garners more respect at the Bureau. You got chased away only because the mole wanted you out of there. You’ve got a moral responsibility here.”

“If you want to invoke morality, tell me the name,” he said.

“I want to come in, but I can’t go to prison.”

“No way around that.”

“There is if you want there to be.”

“It’s not my call,” he said.

I got down off the bike and moved closer to him. “If you don’t help me now, you’ll never get another chance. I can’t afford the faint of heart.”

He stopped peddling and glowered at me. “I’ll talk to Holt, but don’t blame me if it blows up in your face.”

I left him to finish his regimented exercise routine.

A
N
EMAIL
was waiting for me when I got home.

El Timador:

Domingo has agreed to the meeting. He can be in New York anytime beginning two days from now. He tells me his men saved your life in Menaggio, Italy. Not on purpose. They didn’t know who you were. Now that they know, you will never have another day without the fear of death.

Joselito

Joselito:

This is why we’re meeting. Information in return for freedom from fear. A fair trade, I believe. Today is Tuesday. We will meet next Saturday at noon. I will send you the location at 9:00
A.M
.

El Timador

“So you’re inviting them here,” said Natsumi, when I showed her the exchange.

“I am. Should be quite a party.”

“A party. What should I wear?”

“Kevlar.”

I
WAS
usually so engrossed in my web searches, digital escapades and local surveillance that I often ignored the general news media. Not so Natsumi, who listened to public radio nearly ’round the clock. So it was she who told me to click over to
The New York Times
breaking news.

Eloise Harmon, Special Agent for Liaison Affairs with the International Operations Division of the FBI, was gunned down today in her driveway as she left for work at FBI headquarters from her home in Georgetown. The forty-three-year old mother of two, wife of Edward Harmon, a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, had spent the bulk of her career overseas as an FBI Legal Attaché stationed at U.S. embassies in Latin America and Europe. In these positions, and in recent times as liaison between attachés around the world and Washington, Ms. Harmon was frequently involved in investigations into organized crime, drug and sex trafficking, money laundering and international terrorism. Officials at the FBI, and the Metropolitan Police Department in DC, refused to speculate on possible suspects or motives in the case. The investigation, they said, would take place on a local, national and international level.

I grabbed my disposable cell phone and called Little Boy.

“Mr. G., long time no hear.”

“Write this on a piece of paper.” I waited for him to get ready. “Harmon was the mole. I know who killed her. The terms of the deal just tightened up.”

“Okay,” said Little Boy. “Where to?”

I gave him a description of Shelly and when to find him at the Powder Keg Restaurant in Wethersfield, which was only about ten minutes from Little Boy’s house in the South End of Hartford.

“Powder Keg? You’re kidding. I go there all the time. Like all those guns.”

“Send someone who’s never been. Have him drop the note on the table and get out of there quick. Shelly’s ex-FBI with a dossier on you probably six inches thick. Don’t screw with him.”

“Screwing with cops another specialty. But I hear you.”

I got off the phone and realized that Natsumi was still standing in the room. Never an insistent person, her presence alone told me she needed to talk.

“Hi,” I said to her. “What’s up?”

“I like being with you. The life that comes with that is not terribly easy. Do you think it will always be like this?”

“Not sure.”

She nodded.

“Okay.”

“I’m trying to make it better,” I said.

“You are?”

“The only way out is through.”

“With me.”

“With you,” I said.

“I know. I just like to hear it once in a while.”

“Your wisdom sustains us. Propels us forward.”

“I thought it was my cooking,” she said.

“That, too.”

“Are we going to live through the next thing?”

“Not sure.”

“Less honesty, please,” she said.

“Then definitely,” I said. “Without a scratch.”

I
SPENT
the time leading up to Saturday sitting on a side porch drinking iced tea and watching birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and at dusk, the occasional fox, deer and raccoon move through the wilderness before me.

“You’re not on your computer,” said Natsumi, after the first day.

“I’m not.”

“How come?”

“No need.”

“You have the answers?”

“Most of them.”

I spent the next hour telling her what I thought I knew, and what I thought should happen. She listened without comment, until I was done, then said, “No wonder you’re out here sitting with the world.” She joined me and we looked at the colorless moonlit landscape until we both fell asleep, struck senseless by the deep and restless New England night.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
at 9:00
A
.
M
., I gave Joselito directions to the Empire house in Canaan and he acknowledged receipt.

Natsumi and I sat on the side porch where we’d spent the night and waited.

“Is there anywhere particular you’d like to live?” I asked her. “I mean for a longer duration. Not just a few weeks in a hotel or rented house.”

“What are the parameters? City, country, developed, remote?”

“Has to have broadband access and decent coffee,” I said.

“That narrows things considerably. Why do you ask?”

“We could be going there in a hurry.”

“And we can stay for a while?” she asked.

“As long as we want.”

“Long enough to get a dog?”

“I thought dogs led inexorably to water buffalos.”

“They enforce a settled life,” said Natsumi. “And I’m thinking warm. Do you know how to sail?”

“No.”

“Jimmy Fitzgerald had me on Long Island Sound every weekend in a rattle-trap, twenty-four-foot, wooden sloop. I can sail better than I can walk. I say we get a heavy-displacement, blue water cruiser and bop around the Caribbean. Blend in with the snow birds and beach bums.”

“With a dog?”

“Jimmy sailed with a scruffy little mutt. Shit on a piece of Astroturf. Eminently doable.”

“Okay.”

“Unless we die in the next few hours,” she said.

“Yeah. Then all bets are off.”

Around eleven thirty, the motion detector alarm went off on my cell phone. It was tied to one of the cameras on a distant edge of the property. I ran to the computer room as alarms went off at five more locations. The cameras showed men in rough hiking clothes moving through the woods and crossing into the fields holding assault rifles and lugging backpacks, presumably filled with ammunition.

We went back down to the front entrance of the house and waited, glancing compulsively at my smartphone as it fed video images of paramilitary ground troops encroaching on the property from all sides.

“I don’t think we have enough cold cuts,” said Natsumi, looking over my shoulder. “I was prepared for two.”

“No one RSVPs anymore.”

“Will they shoot us outright?” she asked.

“We’re good until they have the information.”

“And how do they get that?”

“They don’t.”

Another alarm on the smartphone drew my eye to a black Range Rover pulling into the main driveway and rumbling up toward the house. I put my arm around Natsumi’s waist and waited.

The Range Rover stopped a few feet away and a tall, thin man, somewhere in his seventies, stepped out. His hair, well receded from his forehead, was dyed black, and his nose was long and sharply defined. He wore sunglasses and a photographer’s vest over a red flannel shirt. He looked around the property like a potential buyer assessing the opportunity.