Numbered Account (15 page)

The man stared intently in his direction for several moments. When he realized that his subject was returning his gaze, his mouth turned upward in an insolent smile. His eyes narrowed, then he rushed from the store. The bastard was letting him know he’d been following him.

Nick remained where he was for perhaps five seconds. The realization had left him too shocked to move. Moments passed. Bewilderment was replaced by anger. Furious, he raced out the nearest exit to confront his stalker.

The Paradeplatz was jammed with hundreds of people. Nick dashed into a multitude of shoppers, commuters, and tourists. He darted through the crowd, raising himself on his tiptoes to see the people ahead. The evening gloom, the snow and mist, made it impossible to separate one group from the next. Still, he searched for the creased hat, the Holmesian cape. He circled the square twice, looking everywhere for the little man. He had to know why he was being followed. Was the man in the cape just some middle-aged freak with nothing better to do, or had someone put him up to it?

Fifteen minutes later, he decided that further search was futile. His stalker had vanished. Just as bad, sometime during his search, he’d dropped the box of pastries. Nick returned to the Bahnhofstrasse and continued south toward the lake. He noted that the crowds had thinned. Few stores were open. Every tenth step he turned and checked for the presence of his gentlemanly escort. The street was empty. Only the trail of his own footprints in the powdery snow followed him.

Nick heard the whine of an engine approaching behind him. This part of the Bahnhofstrasse was reserved for trams. Automobile traffic was limited to several blocks going north and south. He checked over his shoulder and confirmed the presence of a late-model Mercedes saloon car: black with smoked windows and consular plates. It appeared to have come from the Paradeplatz. The car gunned its motor and pulled up alongside him. The passenger window lowered and an ungoverned head of brown hair popped out.

“Mr. Nicholas Neumann,” called Sterling Thorne. “You’re an American, correct?”

Nick took a step back from the automobile. Wasn’t he popular tonight? “Yes, I am.
Swiss
and American.”

“We’ve been interested in meeting with you for a few weeks now. Did you know that you’re the only American working at the United Swiss Bank?”

“I don’t know all the members of the bank,” answered Nick.

“Take my word for it,” Thorne suggested affably. “You’re flying solo.” He was wrapped in a suede jacket, collar turned down to expose a lamb’s wool lining. His eyes were ringed with dark circles, his cheeks sunken, pocked with a hundred pinpricks.

“How do you like working in that nest of vipers?” he asked. “I mean being an American and all.”

“We’re a pretty benign group. Hardly vipers.” Nick matched Thorne’s cordial tone, wondering where this was leading, sure it was nowhere he wanted to go.

“Well, I will agree that you fellas don’t look like much, but looks can be deceiving, can they not, Mr. Neumann?”

Nick leaned down to look into the car. One look at Thorne brought back his aversion to agents of the United States government. He thought of the man in the cape with the mountain guide’s hat — his stalker. He couldn’t link the dignified clothing, the European headgear, the overall refined bearing with Sterling Thorne. The two were oil and water. “What can I do for you? It’s snowing. I have a dinner appointment. Mind if we get to the point?”

Thorne stared straight ahead and shook his head. He chuckled in disbelief as if to say “How about that boy’s manners?” “Bear with me, Nick. I think it would behoove you to listen to what a representative of Uncle Sam has to say. As I recall, we did pay your salary a few years back.”

“All right. But make it brief.”

“We’ve been keeping an eye on that bank for some time now.”

“I thought you were looking at all the banks.”

“Oh, we are. But yours is my personal favorite. I wasn’t kidding when I told you you’re working in a viper pit. Your associates are up to a lot of funny business. Unless you think it’s normal procedure to accept deposits of a million dollars in precounted packets of tens and twenties. Or if you think it’s standard operating procedure for a client to open accounts in Panama and Luxembourg without giving his name, rank, or serial number, and for you to say “Of course, sir, it’s our pleasure. What else can we help you with today?’ But it’s not. That’s what my daddy called doing the devil’s handiwork.”

Nick looked at Thorne’s partner, a chubby man in a charcoal suit. The man was sweating. His hands nervously tapped the steering wheel. He didn’t want to be there.

“What’s this got to do with me?” Nick asked. As if he didn’t know the answer.

“We need your eyes and ears.”

“Do you now?”

“If you cooperate with us,” said Thorne, “we’ll cut you some slack when we bring that house of cards down. I’ll put in a word to the federal prosecutor. Get you out of here on the next plane.”

“And if not?”

“Then I’ll be forced to bring you in with the rest of your buddies.” He extended an arm out the window and tapped Nick’s cheek twice. “Tell you the truth, it’d probably feel pretty good to corral an arrogant cocksucker like you. But that’s your choice.”

Nick brought his face closer to the American agent. “Are you trying to threaten me?”

Thorne threw his head back and snorted. “Why, Lieutenant Neumann, where did you get that idea? I’m only reminding you of your sworn duties. Did you think that oath you took to obey the President and protect your country stopped when you took off your uniform? I got the answer for you: No. It sure as hell did not. You’re a lifer. Just like me. You can’t hide behind your little red passport. That blue one you got is bigger and stronger.”

Nick felt his anger welling up inside of him. He ordered himself to control it. “If and when the time comes, that’s my decision.”

“I don’t think you fully grasp the picture here. We’ve got your number. We know what you and your pals are up to. This is not a request. It’s a standing order. Consider it as coming from the commander in chief himself. You are to keep your eyes wide open and report when ordered. You legally blind pricks at USB and every other fucking bank in this town are helping a lot of dangerous individuals clean up their profits.”

“And you’re here to save us from them?”

“Put it this way. Without you, Neumann, they wouldn’t be sitting in a sixty-foot cabin cruiser off of Boca Raton smoking cigars, getting laid, and planning their next score. You’re as guilty as they are.”

The accusation incensed Nick. Heat prickled the back of his neck. He clenched his jaw, telling himself to calm down, but it was too late.

“Let me make something clear to you, Thorne. First off, I served my country for four years. I’ll carry the oath I took every day for the rest of my life. It’s a two-inch piece of shrapnel sitting behind what’s left of my knee. Every day it cuts a little more of my tendon, but it’s so far in there no one even wants to try to get it out. Second, you want to go chasing bad guys around the world, be my guest. That’s your job. But if you can’t stop them, don’t go running around looking for fall guys. I take my job seriously and I try to do it to the best of my abilities. All I see are a bunch of papers, people putting money in, moving it around. We don’t have guys bringing in a million bucks over the counter. That’s a fairy tale.” Nick put his hands on the windowsill and brought his face close to Thorne’s. “And finally,” he whispered, “I don’t give a good goddamn who you work for. You ever touch me again, I’m gonna haul your skinny ass out of that car and bounce it around the street until there isn’t anything left of you but your belt, your boots, and your fucking badge. My leg is still strong enough to do that.”

Nick did not wait for a response. He backed away from the car, straightening, grimacing as his right knee gave a sour snap, then set off toward the lake.

The black Mercedes matched his speed.

“Zurich’s a small town, Neumann,” called Thorne. “Surprising how often you run into your friends. I imagine we’ll be seeing each other again.”

Nick kept his eyes focused in front of him, vowing not to be baited by this asshole.

“I wasn’t kidding about those vipers,” Thorne shouted. “Ask Mr. Kaiser about Cerruti. Keep your eyes open, Nick. Your country needs ’em. Semper fi!”

Nick watched the car accelerate down the Bahnhofstrasse and turn left toward the Quai Brucke. “Semper fi,” he repeated, shaking his head.

The last refuge for a scoundrel and the first for Sterling Thorne.

Nick curled his fingers around the railing of the dock and peered into the night. Red storm lamps flickered at the ports of Wollishofen and Kilchberg, and on the Gold Coast, at the Zurichhorn and Kusnacht. Snow swirled in unseen eddies while agitated currents slapped the ice extending from beneath the dock’s pilings. He turned his face into the wind, willing the nettly gusts to wash away the memory of Thorne’s last words.

Semper fidelis.

Three years had passed since Nick had signed his separation papers. Three years since he had shaken hands with Gunny Ortiga, delivered one last salute, then walked out of the barracks into a new life. A month later
he was searching for an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, buying textbooks, pens, and paper, and generally living in another universe. He recalled the looks he had attracted that first semester at business school.
Not many students walked across Harvard Yard with a marine crew cut, hair
trimmed high and tight, shiny whitewalls and half an inch of fuzz on top.

He had been gung ho from the day he arrived at Officer Candidate School until the day he got out. Loyalty to the Corps went beyond politics and beyond mission. It sat in your gut forever like an unexploded grenade, and even now three years since he last wore a uniform, just hearing another’s call of
Semper fi
triggered an unwanted flood of memories.

Nick stared into the snow and cloud that lay on top of the lake like a fleecy blanket. He mulled over the timing of Thorne’s contact. Why today? Did Thorne know about the Pasha’s biweekly calls? Did he know that Nick handled the Pasha’s account? If not, why had he mentioned Cerruti? Or had Nick been contacted only because he was an American?

Nick didn’t know the answer to those questions. But the timing of the visit aroused his distrust of coincidence — a distrust bred from experience. The gameboard was extending its field.

“Semper fidelis,” Thorne had bidden.
Always faithful
.

Nick closed his eyes, no longer able to fight back the torrent of memories that cascaded before him.
Always faithful
. Those words would belong forever to Johnny Burke. They would belong forever to a steaming swamp on the forgotten corner of a secret battlefield.

First Lieutenant Nicholas Neumann USMCR is sitting in the forward operations center of the assault ship USS
Guam
. The room is hot and cramped and rancid with the sweat of too many sailors. The
Guam
, commissioned from the San Diego Naval Shipyard twenty-seven years before, is moving at flank speed through the calm waters of the Sulu Sea off the coast of Mindanao, southernmost island in the Philippine archipelago. It is five minutes before midnight.

“When is the fuckin’ air con gonna be restored on this goddamn boat?” Colonel Sigurd “Big Sig” Andersen yells into a black phone swallowed by his meaty palm.

Outside the air temperature is a mild eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the steel hull of the
Guam
, the temperature has not descended below ninety-five for the past twenty-seven hours, when the central air-conditioning unit quit in a spasm of fits and coughs.

“I am giving you until 0600 to fix that unit or else there is going to be a goddamned mutiny and I am going to lead it! Is that clear?” Andersen slams the phone down onto the wall-mounted cradle. He is commander of the two thousand United States Marines aboard ship. Nick has never witnessed a senior officer so completely lose his cool. He wonders if it’s the heat that has precipitated the violent discharge. Or if it’s the presence of a shifty “civilian analyst” who boarded the
Guam
at their last port of call in Hong Kong, and who has spent the last eighteen hours holed up in the radio room engaging in a top-secret tete-a-tete with company unknown.

Jack Keely sits three paces from Nick. He is smoking a cigarette and nervously pinching the copious rolls of fat that fall over the belt of his trousers. He is waiting to begin his briefing on a clandestine operation Nick has been chosen to lead. A “black op,” in the parlance of spooks and their obedient surrogates.

Andersen collapses into a beat-up leather recliner and motions for Keely to get up and begin speaking.

Keely is nervous. His audience numbers only seven, yet he fidgets constantly, transferring his weight from one foot to the other. He avoids eye contact and stares at some fixed point on the wall behind Nick and his fellow marines. Between draws on his cigarette, he provides sketchy details of their assignment.

A Filipino, one Arturo de la Cruz Enrile, has been speaking out against the government in Manila, demanding the usual reforms: honest vote counts, redistribution of land, better medical care. Here on the southwestern corner of Mindanao, Enrile has built a following of between five hundred and two thousand guerrillas. They are armed with AK-47s, RPGs, and RPKs: leftover weaponry from the Russkies’ vacation fifteen years ago.

But Enrile’s a communist. And he’s popular. Not a bad guy, really, but he has Manila worried. Recovery is finally picking up steam. Subic Bay and Olongapo are booming. The P.I. are back from the dead. There is even talk about re-leasing Subic Bay and Clark Airfield to the Americans, says Keely. And
that
is the clincher. The President will do anything to get back that naval base. One brand spanking new naval installation that will save him five hundred million dollars from this year’s defense budget. Big wampum in Washington.

Keely pauses and takes a long drag on his cigarette. He wipes away the rivers of sweat rolling down his forehead, then continues his briefing.