World of Trouble (9786167611136) (49 page)

“Your ghost was right on the money,” Nata
pointed out. “No useable fingerprints and the corpse’s face was too
badly smashed up to get an ID except with dental records.”

“Was there an autopsy?” Darcy asked Nata. I
had apparently been relegated to the roll of a silent observer.

“If there was,” Nata said consulting her
screens again. “there’s nothing about it here.”

“That manhole cover looks like a pretty big
loose end,” Darcy mused. “What do those suckers weigh? They’d have
to go at least seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds, wouldn’t
they?”

Nata nodded absentmindedly, still studying
one of the screens.

“Staggering around with a cast-iron manhole
cover, using barbed wire to tie it around your neck, and then
leaping into a swimming pool sounds looks to me like a pretty hard
way to commit suicide,” Darcy said. “At least, it is if you’re
doing the committing entirely on your own.”

“It sounds like the Russians,” Nata nodded.
“Those guys love stuff like that.”

Darcy bent forward, reading a
Dallas
Morning News
story over Nata’s shoulder. It concerned the
unexplained disappearance of another director of the Texas State
Bank about the same time Barry took the big swim, a guy named
Harold Wilkins. The stories about Wilkins were pretty sketchy since
Barry Gale’s drowning was so much sexier, but there was enough to
work out the gist of what had happened. Darcy pointed to the
monitor.

“Wilkins had been buying currency futures for
a year or more before he disappeared. He was running all the
positions himself using an account in the name of Westmoreland Oil
and Gas, which was apparently a real oil trader in Dallas.”

“How could he do that?” Nata asked. “Wouldn’t
somebody have started asking questions?”

“Not necessarily,” I offered.

Darcy and Nata both looked at me as if they
had just remembered that I was there.

“If Westmoreland had been reasonably active
in the foreign exchange markets hedging their exposure on future
deliveries like most oil traders do, it would have looked normal
enough. And I’m sure Wilkins would have been smart enough to route
all the dummy accounts to himself. If he was, Westmoreland would
never have noticed anything and there would have been nobody else
to blow the whistle.”

Darcy and Nata took that in, glancing at each
other, then all three of us went back to reading silently through
the rest of the story. As we read, the rest fell into place.
Wilkins had been using accounts he had set up in Westmoreland’s
name to conduct his trading operations all right. He was buying and
selling futures contracts in a half-dozen different currencies for
what on the surface appeared to be routine hedging of exposure on
crude oil deliveries that provided for payments in Japanese yen and
Singapore dollars. When the market turned on Wilkins, however, his
losses quickly began to pyramid.

He kept ahead of them for a while—mostly by
running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses—but
when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t
hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was
when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to
drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the
twilight zone.

Two weeks later, Barry Gale—or someone—was
found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His
suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between
Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale
could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency
futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced
Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other
missing, following up the speculation would have been
difficult.

In the end, apparently no one even bothered
to try.

LAUNDRY MAN

WHEN NATA FINISHED
reading the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really
is
still around,” she said.

“Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy
asked.

No one said anything since the answer was
pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the
prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened
the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with
arranging the casting.

“You think this guy might be indexed
somewhere with EDGAR?” Darcy asked Nata.

“Who’s—” I started to ask.

“Never mind,” Darcy interrupted, and
obediently I fell silent.

Nata typed briefly and then slid her hand
over a trackball sitting next to the keyboard. As she rolled the
cursor around one of the screens and clicked here and there, both
she and Darcy leaned in closer. After a moment I saw them exchange
a look and then Darcy leaned over Nata’s shoulder and typed a few
keystrokes. After that they both watched the other screen in
silence.

“That’s pretty amazing,” Nata finally said,
more to herself than to Darcy or me.

She clicked the left mouse button on the
trackball twice, looked at the screen for a long time in silence,
and finally rotated her chair until she was facing me.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.”

Up until then I thought we had been doing
just fine.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I found the name Barry Gale in a keyword
search of EDGAR’s primary data index,” Nata explained. “But when I
went to the locations referenced in the search, there was nothing
there. All the references came up as invalid entries.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

Darcy glanced at Nata for a moment and then
shook her head. “Never.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, looking from
one to the other.

“There are a couple of possibilities, I
guess,” Nata took over again. “Three, really. Mistakes in data
paths can occur. Maybe this is just the result of a simple input
error.”

“But you don’t think so.” I was sure, at
least, of that much. Nata’s face made it plain. “What else?” I
asked.

“The references may have been there once,
then deleted for some reason and the index entries were
overlooked.”

“I didn’t think database entries were ever
deleted, just updated.”

“Right. Usually they’re not.”

“So then what’s the third reason?” I
asked.

Nata hesitated, glancing at Darcy, who nodded
once.

“The entries may be encrypted with a unique
key that we don’t have,” she said. “That’s never happened before
either, but theoretically I suppose it’s possible.”

“And what would that mean?”

“There’s generally a turf battle of some kind
going on in Washington, Jack. It might just be that one agency has
something going and it’s taking particular care to make sure that
another agency can’t find out about it. It could be that sort of
thing.”

“Could
be?”

“Look, Jack, we’re good, but we’re not
perfect. Some of the really big hitters can bury stuff so deep we
can’t get to it. To tell you the absolute truth, it hasn’t happened
before, but it
is
possible.”

“Really big hitters? What are you telling me?
What kind of database is this anyway?”

Nata felt silent, then glanced toward Darcy
again. Darcy sighed and folded her arms.

“Don’t put me in a bad spot here, Jack. Let’s
just say that it is a comprehensive summary of…” Darcy paused,
weighing her words, “nonpublic U.S. intelligence data concerning
foreign organized crime activity. If there was any real connection
between your man, the Texas State Bank, and the Russian mob, it
would be in here.”

“In other words,” I said, “you’ve hacked the
FBI.”

“If we had, you wouldn’t want us to tell you,
would you?”

I had always thought the expression about
someone’s eyes twinkling was pure poetic exaggeration, but right at
that moment Darcy’s actually did.

“So what
can
you tell me that won’t
get me twenty to life?”

“My gut says you’re about to step into it
here, Jack,” Darcy said. “I’d back off and let it go if I were
you.”

That wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting
to hear.

“Don’t you think that’s sensationalizing this
thing a little, Darcy? How can it hurt just to meet a guy at
Foodland and talk to him?”

“He may tell you something you’re better off
not hearing,” she said.

What the hell was
that
supposed to
mean?

“Do you want some help?” Nata asked.

“Help? Doing what?”

“If you’re really going to meet this guy, it
might be a good idea to have somebody throw a loose net over you.
That way you’d pick up on any surveillance that might be on you or
any other funny business that might be going on.”

“I don’t like the sound of this very
much.”

“You asked for our advice and I’m giving it
to you.”

“Look, if there’s really something nasty
going on here, the last thing I want is to get you two
involved.”

“Oh, not us,” Darcy jumped back in. “You know
my policy about avoiding operations. But we could find somebody to
cover you without much trouble.”

“How about Mango Manny?” Nata asked, looking
at Darcy.

“That’s a good thought,” she answered. “You
know him, Jack?”

“I don’t think so. I imagine I’d remember
meeting anybody with a name like Mango Manny.”

“His real name is Emmanuel Marcus. He’s a
Brit. Used to be a top hitter in London, but he made a couple of
silly mistakes and had to relocate on short notice.”

“Mistakes?”

“Oh, you know. Hit the wrong people a couple
of times. That sort of thing.”

Darcy made it sound like the fellow had done
nothing worse than misdirect a few Federal Express packages.

“Manny’s been in Bangkok… oh, four or five
years now, I think. He owns Q Bar, that place on Soi 11 where the
hipper-than-thou crowd hangs out. You’ve been there, haven’t
you?”

“Nope. Too expensive for me. I’m more a Cheap
Charlie’s kind of guy.”

“Manny’s very well connected. Plays golf with
all the right generals and government ministers. But the important
thing is that he’s got a really first-class organization.”

“You mean at his bar?”

“No, not that. Manny brought the marijuana
business here into the twenty-first century. Really made it fly, so
to speak.”

“He’s a
drug dealer?”

Darcy looked down and kicked her toe at the
carpet. “He’s more of a… management consultant. Besides, he won’t
touch anything but grass. The man’s not a criminal, Jack.”

I took a deep breath.

“Just let me be sure I understand what you’re
telling me here,” I said. “Just because you can’t find a couple of
references to Barry Gale in your magic machine, you’re seriously
proposing that I get some screw-up cockney hit man turned godfather
to the Thai marijuana trade to work security for me when I go to
the Foodland tonight to meet a dead guy. Have I pretty much got
it?”

“Manny’s not a cockney,” Darcy said. “He went
to Cambridge.”

“Oh well, that changes everything.”

“He’s really a pretty good guy,” Nata put in.
“I think he just watched too many Bob Hoskins movies when he was
young and never got over it.”

There was a little silence then and Darcy and
Nata both watched me expressionlessly. In the quiet, I thought I
could feel something stirring around me. I didn’t know what it was,
but it felt large and unpleasant.

“What do you think I should do, Darcy?” I
finally asked.

Darcy placed one hand gently on my back. She
had the sort of look on her face I imagined a mother might give a
son who was going off to war, a look that said there wasn’t a thing
she could do but wish him luck and hope for the best.

“Be careful, Jack. Be very, very
careful.”

The book that introduced Jack Shepherd

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The Jack Shepherd Legal Thrillers

JACK SHEPHERD #1