After three days in the hospital, his wounds stitched up, inhalation therapy to soothe his lungs which were burned by the diesel oil fumes, Bill Lane was not only ready to break out, he insisted on it. He was still in pain, which he couldn't conceal as he pulled a Ris-catto Portofino soft beige summer sweater over his head, but it was manageable.
“I think you're dotty checking out so soon,” Tom Hughes told him disapprovingly. “Speyer's not that important.”
“Yes, he is,” Lane said, slipping into his hand-sewn Italian loafers. “He killed the innocent crew aboard the
Maria
, and you said yourself that he gunned down Otto Schaub at the chalet outside Neubrandenberg. They were friends.”
“Yes, and he won't hesitate to kill you the moment that you pop into view, dear boy.”
Lane grinned, pocketing his wallet, comb, handkerchief, and a few dollars, then putting on his Vacheron et Constantin watch. “That's the beauty of it, Tommy. They think that I went down with the ship. I'm dead.”
“You survived the deep dive into the bunker, the ambush when you surfaced, the gun battle aboard the ship, the sinking, and then twenty-four hours floating about in shark-infested waters. Even your luck will run out at some point.”
“Low blows, all of them, and from you of all people,” Lane said. “I'm a master diver, a good shot, an escape artist, a strong swimmer,
and you were waiting for me in Miami. What could possibly have gone wrong?”
“Plenty, unless you take off your clothes this instant and get back into bed,” Frances said from the doorway.
She wore a muted yellow silk suit, no blouse, a subdued print Hermes scarf, and low-heeled sandals. The sight of her attractive, warm face and bright green eyes, flashing now with barely suppressed anger, never failed to please Lane, and he smiled.
“It's the woman's primitive side that I love most,” he said to Hughes.
“I'm dead serious, William,” she said sternly. She came in, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and then gave him a critical once-over. “And where'd you get those clothes?”
“One of our bright people, whose name shall forever remain a secret, broke into our house while you were out and got them for me.” Lane took his 9mm Beretta from beneath his pillow, checked the action, and slipped it in the quick-draw holster beneath his sweater at the small of his back.
“Bloody hell.”
“Not now, Frannie,” Lane said seriously. “I'm a little sore and stiff, but we have work to do and I have a feeling that the clock is against us.”
“I worry about you,” Frances said, softening. She turned to Hughes. “He's a stubborn man.”
“Indeed he is, which makes the two of you the perfect pair,” Hughes told her.
They made it past the nurses' station and took the elevator down to the parking level. “Speyer and his wife and probably Ernst Baumann took the captain's gig before the ship went down. Have they been spotted in Havana?” Lane asked.
“They're back in Montana,” Hughes said.
The news was unexpected. Lane's eyes narrowed. “Why didn't you tell me?”
“They didn't get there until late last night, William,” Hughes said. “And I was about to tell you but you wouldn't listen.
“Did they fly in on the Gulfstream?”
“Direct from Miami.”
Lane thought about that for a moment. “They've been out of sight for a full three days. It's a safe bet that they didn't take the captain's gig ashore anywhere in Florida; there's too much Coast Guard and
DEA activity up and down the coast. They probably went to Cuba and flew from there to Mexico City and then into Miami.”
“If recovering the diamonds from the bunker was the whole mission, they would have stayed in Cuba,” Frances said. “Coming back to Montana means there's more.”
“Bingo,” Lane said, half to himself.
Â
They got over to the office a few minutes before six. The unit's secretary, Agnes Warhurst, was the only one who hadn't already left for the weekend. She was a large woman in her mid-seventies who'd been the executive secretary to four FBI directors before her mandatory retirement. She knew just about everybody in the Washington area who was involved in law enforcement and intelligence. Her manner was gruff, but her heart was solid gold. Everyone on the staff loved her.
“What are you still doing here?” Lane demanded.
She gave him a critical look. “I knew they weren't going to keep you over there much longer.” She handed him a dozen phone slips. “It looks as if someone is trying to stir the pot over in the Bureau and maybe at Justice. Do you know Tom Fletcher?”
“Espionage and Counter-Intelligence.”
“He's a little shit, but he does a pretty good job, at least he has until now. All of a sudden he's put the brakes on the Kalispell investigation. I'd say someone got to him.”
“Probably Thomas Mann,” Lane said. The slips were phone messages from a dozen different sources that Agnes had approached around town. The Bureau had lost interest in the shooting. Their investigation was parallel to the Room's, and had been conducted along more conventional channels. But for them to have backed down meant somebody had gotten to somebody ⦠as a personal favor.
“Mann is quite the bon vivant about town,” Hughes said. “He knows a couple dozen senators and twice that many congressmen. Charities, boards of directors of a half-dozen major corporations, Kennedy Center advisory committee, some well-placed investments. And, interestingly enough, he makes and receives several encrypted telephone calls each day.”
“Any luck breaking the program?”
“Not yet,” Frances said. “It's a very good one. I asked Tony Bosons to lend a hand, but so far he's come up with nothing.” Bosons was Britain's leading cryptographer.
“If and when he manages to break the program we might learn something from Mann's phone calls,” Lane said. “In the meantime, have you come up with anything new on Reichsamt Seventeen?”
“Nothing,” Hughes admitted. “But I'll tell you one thing, William, the Germans know what's down there. I'd bet the farm on it.”
“Why aren't they talking? They want us to bust Speyer for them.”
“I can't get a straight answer out of them. It seems as if there's a big mystery surrounding the place.” Hughes shook his head. “One thing's for sure, diamonds were not used as a catalyst for anything they might have been doing down there. Whatever you brought up in that sealed box wasn't engagement rings.”
“The
Deep Sound II
just happened to be in Sarasota,” Frances said. “She should be about where you think the
Maria
went down by now. The ocean is terribly deep out there, perhaps five or six hundred fathoms, but if any ship is capable of finding the downed ship it'll be the
Deep Sound
.”
“The box should still be down there,” Lane said. “I stashed it in a fire equipment locker. But at the end when I asked Baumann if they had found it, he said they'd fished it out of the bilge.”
“It could be the reason Speyer returned to Kalispell,” Frances suggested. “He failed and he came home to lick his wounds.”
“In that case, I think that we should go out there and see for ourselves just what kind of a mood Herr Speyer is in,” Lane said. “Bad, he's lost; good, he knows something.”
“I can't believe what I'm hearing,” Hughes protested. “The moment that you're spotted they'll kill you, no questions asked.”
“That's why I'm taking Frannie with me. She'll provide the needed diversion,” Lane said. “In the meantime, I want to have a word with the FBI agent in Helena.”
Agnes had listened to everything. “That's plain crazy,” she opined.
Hughes shook his head in defeat. “Welcome to the nut house, my dear.”
Tommy's wife, Moira, and the girls were fixing a big welcome-home dinner for Lane, and since he wasn't flying to Montana until morning he couldn't refuse. He and Frances had just enough time to get home, change clothes and drive back.
“They're going to dote on you all night, and you're going to let
them,” Frances warned. “Knowing Tom he's probably told them everything so they'll have plenty to say. And you'll take it.”
“Yes, dear,” Lane said.
Frances started to laugh at his long face, but stopped herself. She became serious. “Speyer's a very bad man, isn't he.”
“I don't know if that's the right word. Maybe indifferent.”
“If he didn't hesitate to kill his friend in Germany, or the crew aboard the
Maria
, one wonders what's next on his agenda.”
Lane gave his wife a sharp look. When they got married he knew that she would not give up her intelligence service career. She was a strong, bright, capable, independent woman. He knew that from the start. It was one of the many reasons he fell in love with her. And one of the first set of reasons that the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain had agreed to include her in the creation of the special trouble-shooting unit called “The Room.” That did not, however, stop him from worrying about her going into harm's way.
“A ha'penny, love,” she said.
“Just what you wondered,” he answered. “What's next on Speyer's agenda.”
“Come on, there's more than that.”
“No matter what happens, we have enough on Speyer and Baumann already to turn them over to the BKA, and be done with them.”
“That wouldn't be very sporting, would it?”
“What do you mean?”
“We were asked to do a job. We're not finished yet. Arresting Speyer and deporting him is only half the business.”
“It would take him out of circulation.”
“That's all it would do, William. In the meantime we might never know what he was planning.” She smiled her secret smile, which meant that she wasn't happy but she would bear up. “I'm to go out there and play goo-goo eyes with the monster, while all the while you want to put a bullet in his brain. That frightens me.”
“Scares me silly, too,” Lane admitted.
Lane took a cab from the municipal airport to the federal building downtown. The late morning was bright, which was opposite his mood. Returning this close to Speyer's operation was like plunging
headlong into a dark maelstrom. Frannie had been right last night. He did want to put a bullet in the bastard's brain and leave it at that. Very simple, very tidy, and very complete. But not very sporting.
His hanging bag was at the airport, but he had retrieved his gun from inside his laptop computer.
Linda Boulton was just coming out of the front door for an early lunch when Lane came up the long walk from the fountain. She looked just as angry as she did in her Bureau photograph.
“Special Agent Boulton?” he asked, coming up to her.
She stopped, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What can I do for you?”
“I know who shot Meyer Goldstein up in Kalispell on the Fourth. Interested?”
She nonchalantly unbuttoned her blue blazer. “I'd say that it was one of my priorities. May I have your name?”
“I'm Bill Lane and I work in Washington. Are you carrying a cell phone?”
“Let's see some identification.”
“If you have a cell phone, I want you to call the White House switchboard, identify yourself, and ask to speak to twenty-seven blue ranger.” He took out his wallet and handed it to her.
Keeping a careful eye on him, she checked his ID, then got out her cell phone and got the White House number from information. The call went through, she spoke the code, and he watched as her eyes widened.
“Yes, Mr. President, I recognize your voice. My name is Linda Boulton. I'm the special agent in charge of the FBI's Helena, Montana office.” She gave Lane a sharp look, then nodded. “Yes, Mr. President, he says that his name is William Lane.”
She was silent for several seconds. The president was telling her something. She nodded again. “Yes, Mr. President, I understand.” She broke the connection, and hesitated for a few seconds, as if she was trying to come to a difficult decision. She seemed to be even more suspicious and angry than before the call. Something was eating at her, but she seemed to be resigned. “Okay, what the hell is this all about?”
“The name I used in Kalispell was John Clark. But believe me, no one was actually killed. In fact, the man posing as Goldstein is a friend of mine and is at this moment very much alive in Washington.”
“That's just great,” Special Agent Boulton said disgustedly. “Obviously
I don't know what the hell I'm doing out here. Leastways that's the way I'm being treated.”
“Take it easy. We're on the same side. It's Helmut Speyer who's the bad guy, and he's why I came out to talk to you.” Lane took his wallet from her and they went over to the fountain, where they sat down. He offered her a cigarette, but she angrily declined.
“A simple email would have worked wonders,” she said bitterly. “Somebody could have told me and I would have backed off.”
“It's not that easy. Speyer has a lot of friends in Washington, and out here, I suspect.”
“Yeah, Carl Mattoon, the chief of police up there. How'd you get this one by him?”
“No one expected a corpse to get up and walk out of the morgue,” Lane said. “You sure about Mattoon's connection with Speyer?”
“Pretty sure. Along with an attorney right here in town. Konrad Aden.”
“We'll check on him. In the meantime, you were asked to investigate Speyer as a routine request from the German Federal Police about three months ago, right?”
She nodded. “But we didn't find much, not until the shooting, and then what we did have started to make some kind of sense.”
“That's why we engineered the operation, so that I could get close to him. We didn't think that you were going to get very far.”
“And?”
“We're still in the middle of our investigation. Now Tom Fletcher has told you to back off.”
“Is he one of yours?”
“No. But he could be working with Speyer, or with people who are protecting Speyer.”
This last news seemed to deflate her. When she looked up her anger was all but gone. “I'm not even going to ask what agency you work for, because you probably wouldn't tell me. But what am I supposed to do?”
“Do you have enough evidence to prove the man is really Helmut Speyer? DNA, maybe?”
“We've been trying to get a hair sample or something, but without Mattoon's cooperation it's been impossible.”
“Okay, keep trying. Just do your job.”
“Do you want us to continue investigating Mattoon as well?” she asked.
“Wherever your police work takes you. But I don't want you to make any arrests just yet. Put some pressure on them, but that's all. In the meantime I'll be going through the back door.”
“I hope you know what you're doing. If this guy is who I think he is, he's bad news. The Germans didn't have anything good to say about him.”
Lane gave her a sympathetic look. She was caught between a rock and a hard place. Her boss wanted her to back off, and yet her boss might be one of the bad guys. “He's all of that and more,” Lane said. “So watch your own back.”