17
Sunday
T
HE EGYPTIAN almost had to drag Jackie into the Willard Hotel. He left her standing beneath the huge central chandelier as he approached the reception desk. When he returned, he said, “The congressman is not here. We must wait.”
“The guy has a suite here?” Jackie stumbled over her own feet as he led her to a sofa, the result of trying to look in six directions at once. “All the time?”
“I do not care for this.” Nabil Saad’s accent was much thicker now, from the strain of being pushed around a little too much. “One does not invite the cobra to sleep with the doves.”
“So Wynn Bryant is really the enemy?”
“I hear what you hear, Miss Havilland.”
“I thought we were going to be on a first-name basis.”
“Yes. You are right. Jackie. Esther Hutchings has named him an enemy. Bryant’s sister I have not seen since many years. You know Mrs. Wells?”
“Not a chance. Remember who you’re talking with here.”
“Of course. Forgive me. Tomorrow I fly to Cairo, where I will be forced to watch as Graham’s life work evaporates.” There were pale patches to either side of his nose and on his temples, brands of fatigue and strain. “I knew Wynn Bryant and his sister many years ago. I have not seen him since my childhood. This is not how I would wish to renew the acquaintance. Not here, and not in this manner, wondering whether the man who approaches is the friend we need or the enemy we dread. And not tonight.”
“I don’t think he’s an enemy.” Jackie tasted the air as Nabil slowly swiveled around to face her. Finding no wrongness to her observation. “He’s totally ignorant of everything.”
“Which means he still could be used by those who oppose us.” Nabil fastened upon something beyond her and rose to his feet. “He is here.”
The congressman entered with a phone attached to the side of his face. His gaze swept over Nabil without stopping, then fastened upon Jackie. He punched off the phone and walked over. “Mind telling me how you manage to show up at all the worst possible times?”
Jackie indicated the Egyptian. “I was asked to come and introduce someone.”
But his gaze remained upon her. “First in Esther’s living room, then in College Park. Now here. Your timing is exceptional.”
Wynn wore what Jackie classed as rich man’s casual attire. Suede jacket light enough for the balmy spring evening, gabardine slacks, shoes of woven leather so supple he could probably roll them like socks. She had a lifetime’s experience fending off guys like this. “Nabil is a friend of Esther’s.”
“And that’s supposed to mean something to me?” Wynn inspected Nabil. “We met in Kay Trilling’s office.”
“That is correct, Congressman.”
“Does this have anything to do with my sister’s vanishing act?”
Nabil cleared his throat, said formally, “I bring a message from Sybel.”
“I should have known.” Wynn crossed his arms. “So give.”
“She asks you to join her in Rome.”
“Not a chance in this world.”
“She asks that you treat this as the birthday wish you did not agree to earlier.”
Jackie watched as the bloom of pain she had seen back in Esther Hutchings’ living room returned to his features. Wynn surprised her then, by directing the question to her and not Nabil. “Do you know enough to know what to ask this man?”
The words were strong, but not the gaze. He was more than wounded. He was frightened. “I might.”
“Then ask the question for me, will you?” He turned back to the Egyptian. “Whether I go or not depends on how you answer her.”
Jackie was unsettled to suddenly become an ally of this man Esther called their enemy. Before she could speak, however, Nabil interrupted, “Your sister is a good and brave woman, Congressman. Go to Sant’Egidio in Rome. Ask for Father Libretto. She asks that you see and decide for yourself. If you are with us, all will be explained. If not, you can depart and be safe in your unknowing.”
“Does this have anything to do with the Jubilee thing?”
“Movement,” Jackie corrected. “Jubilee movement.”
“Whatever.” To Nabil. “How does this third-world debt issue tie into what Graham was talking about in his speech, the banking crisis and hedge funds and all that?”
But the Egyptian was stalking off. “Come to Rome or do not come, that is all I was sent to say.”
Wynn’s voice rose enough to attract the attention of others in the lobby. “Why is it I’ve got people crawling all over me about this thing?”
“Your sister has made her request. Respect it or not, that is your choice.” Nabil rammed through the revolving doors and was gone.
Wynn Bryant watched as the doors flapped ever slower, finally coming to a halt, empty and forlorn as his face. Jackie told him, “You should have added some names like Trastevere and Hayek to the mix. You might have really gotten him to dance.”
He remained defeated by whatever he saw painted there on the empty doorway. “He looked familiar.”
“His name is Nabil Saad.” When that did not illicit a response, she added, “He says he knew you when you were kids.”
The news deflated him even further. Wynn turned toward the back hall, carrying himself with the shuffling gait of one old and infirm. “Tell them I’ll go.”
“I’m supposed to tag along,” she said, trying to hold the thrill from her voice. But Wynn just continued down the hall and out of sight. Leaving her to venture alone into whatever strange journeys tomorrow held.
Rome.
J
ACKIE WAITED to call Esther until she was safely back in her room at the Howard Johnson’s. She found the freeway traffic rumbling beyond her window a welcome reality-check after the glitz and polish of the Willard fantasyland. “How is your husband?”
Esther sounded happy, in the quiet way of the eternally spent. “When he woke up this afternoon, he held my hand. He tried to speak.” Forcefully she drew herself away from the room down the hall. “What did Wynn tell Nabil?”
“He’s going.”
“I suppose that’s to be expected. Do you have a passport?”
Excitement fizzed Jackie’s blood until she was up and carrying the hotel phone around in tight little circles, unable to hold down the thrill or the words. “Preston made me get one. You know about Preston?”
“Your brother.”
“We were always talking about going someplace far away. We took the occasional weekend trip, once even to the Bahamas. But I kept holding off on the bigger journeys until we had more time.”
“You still miss him.”
“Preston was the only real family I ever had.” Saying it without pain. Almost. “So what do I do now that Wynn is going?”
“I’ll have a staffer meet you at the airport tomorrow with your travel documents.”
A shiver ran the entire length of her frame. Rome. “I mean, when I get there.”
“Sybel said Wynn should contact her through the church of Sant’Egidio. It is in a place called—wait, I have the paper in my pocket. Piazza Trastevere. Do I need to spell that?”
“No.”
Esther caught the change. “You have more questions.”
“Thousands.” But the woman sounded so tired, and the night’s excitement was so great, all she wanted to ask at that moment was “How do I get for myself what you have with Graham?”
“That’s not the question for this moment. You want to ask what I didn’t fully answer earlier. About why you were hired.”
Jackie took the phone over to the bed and sat down.
“After you left I did some very hard thinking. You were right to ask what you did. The trust between us needs to be based upon genuine honesty. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Jackie slipped from the bed to the floor. Gathered her feet up beneath her. Leaned against the bed. “Yes.”
Esther waited as the hospital intercom rattled out some message, then said, “I hired a private detective and instructed him to locate an employee of Hayek’s with an ax to grind. Someone so embittered he or she would be more than happy to risk everything and search for what we could not find.”
“You found Shane.” The word was a dreg so bitter it caulked up her throat and left her spirit choking.
“We found you. And despite what Kay Trilling might think, I am convinced God’s hand was upon this act.”
The noose eased enough for Jackie to breathe and speak and turn the subject away. “I have to tell you, I don’t think Wynn is an enemy. He’s walking through this like a blind man.”
Esther was silent through another pair of announcements. “Wynn Bryant will sacrifice anybody and anything on the altar of his own ambitions. His wife was sick for more than a year and he was too blind to see it. I was the one who held her hand at the doctor’s, gave her a shoulder to cry on, then had to go and tell him . . .” She was interrupted by another voice over the intercom, or perhaps she just used it as an excuse to stop talking. When all was quiet once more, Esther merely said, “Watch him.”
18
Monday
P
AVEL HAYEK stood at his window and saw not his current domain but the suzerainties of his past and the one yet to come. His Orlando organization, though small compared to the sprawling Schwab campus farther north, had been featured in countless magazines, including the cover of
Architectural Digest.
The main building was a modern rendition of his family’s former castle, a secret known only to himself. The architect had merely been given a photograph of what was now a museum and told to find a way to meld Hayek’s Czech heritage with Wall Street. There were no turrets to this financial manor, nor lines of liveried servants to welcome his carriage at the start of each new day. But the sweeping grandeur had been well captured, and the sense of power.
In truth, he had never known the servants, but they lived for him still, branded in his mind by his mother’s embittered ramblings.
The rumors were indeed true. Pavel Hayek was that rarest of creatures in the contemporary world, a prince. A blue blood. His lineage was linked through his mother’s mother to the Romanovs, and through various other relatives to six reigning European monarchs. His fiefdom had stood east of Prague, an estate larger than Rhode Island. But his family had lost everything when the Nazis swallowed the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s tattered remains.
Pavel had been born in the waning days of World War II, in what had formerly been the groundskeeper’s cottage behind the palace stables. His family had managed to escape west in the frenetic period between the Nazis’ defeat and the Russians’ arrival. His earliest memory was of his mother standing in front of the gutted palace, shrieking invectives at the men who had bombed her world into antiquity. Then his father had hustled them into a stolen truck laden with their few remaining possessions and trainloads of shattered pride. Pavel had knelt on the seat beside his weeping mother, watching through the back portal as the moon filled in the gaping wounds and made the palace whole once more.
They had landed in Paris with a generation of ragged nobility. Pavel’s father became an expert at using his tattered titles to mask the fact that he was nothing more than a beggar with an attitude. When their welcome wore out, they had shifted first to London and finally to New York. There the last of his mother’s jewelry had purchased a neighborhood grocery in the Bronx.
From his shamed and embittered mother, Pavel inherited a desperate hunger for all he had never known, and mannerisms as empty as his titles. From his father he learned the grim reality of poverty, and an unyielding determination to make it in this new world where money was king.
Isolated by his dedicated arrogance, Pavel had grown ever more confident that he was born to a ruler’s mantle and a monarch’s loneliness. He had excelled in school because it was the means to an end. Afterward he had accepted a job with Lehman Brothers for the same reason. In the late eighties, when hedge funds began to grow in popularity among the rich and mighty, Pavel went on his own. Fourteen years and some good guesses and lucky breaks later, he was ready to breach the final barrier, to finally arrive at his destiny.
The main building was crafted of glass and cream-colored stone. To either side swept halfmoons of outbuildings—research to his left, legal to his right—both fronted by Corinthian pillars of Brazilian marble. A smaller rendition of the main building stood opposite Hayek’s penthouse window, its three floors given over to sales and administration. The internal pathways were of the same stone as the buildings, surrounding an oval plaza emblazoned with an immense
H
in polished onyx. Semitropical flowers bloomed in carefully tended profusion. At the ring’s center stood a lake whose placid surface was marred by fountains and the passage of six swans. When the occasional visitor arrived from Wall Street and asked why he had moved so far south, Hayek always showed off this spread. In truth, however, he had left New York because secrets were too hard to hide there, as he had learned from bitter experience. No, his Florida fiefdom was intended to do little more than house his mercenaries and prepare in secret for the battle ahead.
This Monday, however, Hayek railed silently at the unseen flaw to his realm. The crystal clarity of his plans was blurred by ripples of uncontrolled risk. And from the most dreaded of sources.
Behind him there was a knock on the door. When he did not respond, the door opened and feet marked a measured tread to stand before his desk. Only one man was permitted entry day or night. Jim Burke knew his boss well enough to realize that whatever he carried, however urgent, it would wait until Hayek’s musings were done. For an American, the man was not too poorly trained.
Finally Hayek turned from the window and his future. “Well?”
“Our man has just confirmed that Bank of America is going ahead as rumored.”
Hayek slid into his seat. “He is certain?”
Burke remained standing because he had not been invited to sit. “He’s already received his notice. His plane should be arriving in three hours. Apparently B.
of A. is canning their entire San Francisco trading staff and consolidating operations in Chicago and New York.”
“Will the market absorb them without our intervention?”
“No way. I’ve checked. Wall Street is already shedding its own dead wood. Chicago is stagnant.”
“So their traders should be panicking about now.”
Burke showed momentary unease. He was paid to arrive with all the answers already in place. “I didn’t ask anything specific. But it sounded that way to me.”
“The twenty-five traders and support staff have been selected?”
“Ready to roll.”
“Bring them in. Today. Remind them of their primary restriction.”
“Total secrecy,” Burke confirmed.
“More than that. They are a covert cadre. They must remain a tight-knit clan, isolated and apart. Any association whatsoever with the other traders and they will be instantly dismissed. All of them. Make sure they understand that.” He pointed Burke into a chair opposite his desk, reached for his phone, and instructed his secretary, “Have Mr. Ready come up.”
Burke watched him replace the receiver. “I don’t trust Colin Ready. Not an inch.”
“I am well aware of your feelings toward Mr. Ready.”
“He’s got access almost everywhere in our system. Not to mention the warped areas in his background. He’s a hacker in corporate sheep’s clothing.”
Hayek inspected his number two. The man was really quite repulsive. Hair cut so short his scalp was visible, eyes as tight and manic as fiery pellets, clothes of unerringly bad taste. But highly intelligent. And extremely loyal. “You realize, of course, that our guests in gray are spies.”
Burke showed surprise at Hayek’s sudden change of direction. “Yes.”
“Someone with the paranoid tendencies of our Brazilian investors,” Hayek went on, “would not be content with mere muscle.”
Burke’s eyes widened. “You think Colin Ready is a mole?”
“You may look into that, but discreetly,” Hayek replied. “And in the meantime, I am meeting with our Brazilians to complain about their gorillas. We can’t have infiltrators rambling about, sticking their noses into everything. They must be identified and controlled. Otherwise they could destroy us.”
C
OLIN SET DOWN HIS PHONE, took a deep breath, and muttered to the empty cubicle, “This could grow very bad very quickly.”
He slipped into the jacket he kept on hand for visits to the royal chambers. He then checked his reflection in the
feng shui
mirror hanging from the back wall, the one Lisa had hated so much he had removed from his apartment and claimed he had thrown away. Overhead hung Lisa’s final gift, a plaque reading “Destiny is reprogrammable, if seen from a higher perspective.” The words mocked him as he headed upstairs.
Only Lisa had assuaged the soul-eating loneliness that wrenched him whenever he turned off his machines and entered loathesome reality. So long as she had remained alongside, the lonelies had never managed to strike. Now that she was forever gone, they never departed. Even the myth of her presence, and the one-sided futility of arguing with someone who had abandoned him for good, was better than staring the void straight in the face.
The number of gray-jacketed goons in the front reception area had multiplied like malignant spoor. The one who had slammed Colin into the upstairs window burned him with a look as he stepped into the elevator.
Once more Colin was shown directly into Hayek’s inner sanctum. The Unabomber was there, today clothed from neck to ankles in shades of brown—shirt, tie, pants, belt—anchored at both ends by equally bizarre black, his eyeglasses almost as heavy as his shoes. Burke was definitely the group’s most deviant relic from the twentieth century.
Hayek directed him to the chair beside Burke. “Curiosity is not always an excusable offense, Mr. Ready.”
“Pardon me?”
Burke rapped out, “Stay away from the upstairs balcony.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.”
Hayek continued, “Now update us on this hunter.”
“I’m sorry, who—”
Burke snapped at him again. “The Havilland female.”
“She is hardly that. A huntress, I mean.” His chair’s angle was terrible. Colin could feel Burke’s death rays drilling into the side of his skull. “This weekend she has done nothing more than cash a check, fly to Washington, and attend a conference in Maryland. To be frank, I regret bringing her to your attention at all. I thought she would be a stronger quarry.”
“And yet she attended this conference in College Park.”
“Well, yes. But I hardly see—”
“Perhaps you are not aware that Congressman Bryant was also in attendance?”
“I’ve not been instructed to follow the movements of, sorry, who did you say?”
“Bryant. Wynn Bryant.” This from the Unabomber.
“What if I told you there was information,” Hayek added, “that ties her closely to the congressman?”
Colin forced a laugh. “I would suggest it was a new hit for conspiracy theorists and paranoids everywhere.”
“Then why is it,” Hayek demanded, his accent etching the words with soft menace. “That Havilland is currently preparing to fly to Rome?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“With Bryant,” Burke added.
Hayek said, “It seems your data is not as complete as you suggest.”
Colin stared across the desk, at an utter loss for words. At this proximity it was easy to see why in earlier ages men worshipped their kings as gods. Hayek’s power was that strong. “I don’t understand.”
“That much is perfectly clear.”
“No, I mean, when she first appeared on-screen, and afterward when it became evident Esther Hutchings had hired her, I thought she might prove a genuine peril. A card-carrying menace, given your warning about any connection to Congressman Hutchings.” He realized he was babbling, yet could not help himself. “But her findings have been paltry. I’ve uncovered nothing to indicate any sign of progress. I was certain Hutchings had brought her to Washington to criticize her lack of progress.”
“And you were wrong,” Hayek said. “Dangerously incorrect.”
“Apparently so.” Colin risked a single glance toward Burke. The man continued his unblinkingly hostile glare. “I am at an utter loss.”
“That is unacceptable. I must know whether this woman is a growing tempest or merely a passing storm. There is nothing I despise more than the unknown risk.” Hayek pointed him toward the door. “Go out there and determine precisely what is going on.”
Colin bolted to his feet. “Right. Certainly. Of course.”
“Answers.” Hayek’s bark chased him to the door. “All of them. Now.”