Andrew Gross - Reckless

Then hammer it home.

It was what she was still doing. At Treasury. She just happened to be the only one doing it with the five-note opening progression of Glass’s “Music in the Shape of a Square” tattooed on her butt.

Naomi looked again at the FBI security transcript. She sipped her smoothie. She didn’t know the caller, but she damn well knew the person he was caught speaking to.

And it wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

The conversation had taken place about a month ago. Since then the world financial markets had fallen apart. The Dow was down 20 percent. One of the largest institutions brought down by a rogue trader.

And here was one of the most influential financial managers in the world, who oversaw one of the largest pools of investment capital anywhere, in contact with a suspected terrorist money mover.

And the cryptic words uttered in Arabic that had been passed along to her. That scared her. That left her wondering what this was all about.

The planes are in the air.

Monday afternoon, Hauck sat in his car across the street from the Lake Avenue Lower School in Greenwich.

Three weeks had passed since the Glassman murders. Still no link to their killers had been found.

At a little after two forty in the afternoon, a stream of kids began to emerge from the gray concrete building. Moms, in capri pants and yoga outfits, chatting with other moms or on their cells, pulling up their SUVs. Some of the kids carted stuff from school, brightly colored presentation boards or artwork, knapsacks slung over their shoulders. Others carried baseball gloves or lacrosse sticks, shouting excitedly about the Rangers’ playoff game tonight or American Idol. The cars pulled up; the kids climbed in; the moms waved good-bye to one another and drove away.

The entrance quieted down.

A couple of minutes later, Hauck saw the small, sandy-haired boy in jeans and a Derek Jeter jersey come out, holding on to the hand of an older man. His grandfather. He carried a piece of paper all rolled up, a red knapsack slung over on his back.

Hauck remembered him as he saw him three or four years ago. In April’s car.

Evan.

It was his first day back at school after the incident. The local papers had picked it up. A couple of school officials came out and watched as he and his granddad made their way to the parking lot, making sure there were no reporters badgering them.

Hauck wanted to make sure too.

The boy had done well. He had snapped a couple of photos that might one day be used as evidence. He was a chip off the old block. His mom would have been proud.

Hauck didn’t know what had made him come here. Other than it made him feel close. Still attached. Mindful of his promise. He hadn’t forgotten. He wouldn’t.

See, I wasn’t just passing through, he said.

The boy climbed into a silver Volvo wagon and his granddad drove away.

Hauck had an urge to follow him. But he just put the car in gear and remained there.

It took some time for the picture of Dani Thibault to begin to come together.

Merrill had hoped it might all just be a big waste of his time. A bit of overcaution on her part that would calm a few fears but ultimately lead nowhere.

It wasn’t.

Hauck tapped on the office phone, deciding whether to call her.

Thibault had lied about where he had gone to school. He had lied about having served in the Dutch army, assigned to a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He had lied about his connection to the Belgian royal family too. The truth was he had dated a party-happy cousin of the queen for a couple of weeks and maybe attended a family outing or two with her where the photos that hung on his office walls were taken. The relationship fizzled out, except for the requisite gossip-column snapshots of the two of them in posh clubs that Richard Snell had located on the Internet.

For the most part Thibault’s career consisted of a few progressively more senior positions in various shady banks, managing wealthy clients’ money and setting up hard-to-pierce financial trusts. He had taken his name and part of his background from a man who had been killed fifteen years ago in France.

Who does that, Hauck wondered, but a person with something very important to hide?

These last two weeks, Hauck had learned everything he could about Thibault’s personal affairs. He knew where he got his suits in London-at Kilgour on Savile Row. He knew where he stayed while in Dubai-at the Burj, seven stars. He knew what restaurants he frequented when he was in New York-Veritas, Daniel, Spartina. He paid his bills. There were no liens or judgments against him. His e-mail traffic showed a variety of normal business and personal contacts. Nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe a bit of a kinky side when it came to Merrill. He didn’t even seem to have anyone else on the side.

And he hadn’t committed any crimes.

All Hauck found was a shadowy past that surely covered up something that the man had gone to great lengths to conceal. Even from Merrill. Why was it up to Hauck to destroy him? He wasn’t with the police any longer.

We don’t do this kind of work, he had said to Foley. Mess with people’s lives.

This time we do.

He opened a thick folder filled with photos he had compiled of Dani. Some were from Greenwich Magazine at charity events. He and Merrill. A few were from the Shiny Sheet in Palm Beach. The Garden Club Ball. Page Six in the New York Post. He didn’t exactly shy away from publicity.

He thumbed through a few contact sheets a friend of his who worked for Fairfield Style had sent over. A gathering for the state’s attorney general on Ron Tillerson’s yacht. “Merrill Simon and financier Dani Thibault.” Saturday polo matches at Conyers Farm. Thibault had some horses. The two of them looked happy, in love. Holding hands.

It was her choice, what to do with what they had found. Her call.

This wasn’t exactly the kind of work he had signed up for when he changed careers.

He picked up the phone and dialed Tom Foley to let him know what information they had. Let his boss decide how to take it to Merrill. Her ex-husband was still a very important account. It was still a new job for Hauck, and the whole thing was a bit uncomfortably politically charged. The receptionist at Talon’s New York office put him on hold.

He opened the folder and slid the photos back in.

One, near the bottom, caught his eye.

It was at the Conyers Farm polo gathering. A Patrons of Greenwich Library literacy thing. A bunch of the usual types Hauck had dealt with over the years: men in blazers and green pants, the women in expensive sundresses and large hats.

Thibault, wearing a white linen blazer and open white shirt, was caught in conversation with someone who seemed slightly familiar, behind dark sunglasses, his back turned to the camera but his profile clearly visible. It was an outtake, cropped from a larger shot. The two of them never even knew it was being snapped.

Hauck was about to stuff it back in the file when it hit him with a jolt just who the man Thibault was talking to was.

He put down the phone.

It made the next step with Thibault no longer Merrill Simons’s call.

It was a face Hauck had seen in the papers and on TV. Very much in the news. He flipped it over, his antennae buzzing like crazy, looked for the date. June, last year.

It would have been meaningless back then, the two of them talking.

But now, with the Dow dropping a couple of thousand points, with one of Wall Street’s biggest firms toppled, a close friend from his past brutally killed, Hauck fixed numbly on the forgotten photo, his blood on fire.

The man caught with Dani Thibault, looking away, was April Glassman’s husband, Marc.