Andrew Gross - The Dark Tide

THE NEXT THING that he got was a call from Joe Velko.

The Joint Inter-Agency Task Force agent caught Hauck on a Saturday morning just as he had put on a batch of pancakes for Jessie, who was up with him that weekend. When she asked about the red marks on his neck and the stiffness in his gait, Hauck told her he’d slipped on the boat.

“I pulled up some hits for you on that search,” Joe informed him. “Nothing great. I’ll fax it out to you if you want.”

Hauck went over to his desk. He sat in his shorts and T-shirt, holding a spatula as twelve pages of data came rolling in.

“Listen,” Joe told him, “no promises. Generally we might get a thousand positive hits for any one that could actually lead somewhere-and that means merely something we can pass along to an analyst’s desk. We call any correlations to key input ‘alerts’ and rank them by magnitude. From low to moderate to high. Most classify in the lower bracket. I’ve spared you most of the boilerplate and methodology. Why don’t you flip over to the third page?”

Hauck picked up a pen and found the spot. There was a shadowed box with the heading “Search AF12987543. ALERT.”

Joe explained, “These are random hits from some online newsletter the computer picked up. From something called the Carlyle Antique Car Auction in Pennsylvania.” He chuckled. “Real cloak-and-dagger stuff, Ty. You see how it says, ‘1966 Emberglow Mustang. Condition: Excellent. Low Mileage, 81.5. Shines! Frank Bottomly, Westport, Ct.’”

“I see it.”

“The computer picked up the car and the connection to Connecticut. This communication took place last year-basically just someone making a random query into buying one. You can see the program assigned a rating of LOW against it. There’s a bunch of other stuff like that. Idle chatter. You can go on.”

Hauck flipped through the next few pages. Several e-mails. The program was monitoring private interactions. Tons of back-and-forth chatter on classic-car sites, blogs, eBay, Yahoo.com. Whatever it picked up using the reference points Hauck had provided. A few hits on the Web site of the Concours d’Elegance in Greenwich. All were assessed as LOW. There was even a rock group in Texas called Ember Glow that opened for the singer Kinky Friedman. The priority against that hit was labeled “ZERO.”

There were twelve whole pages of this. One e-mail was literally a guy talking about a girl named Amber, with the comment, “She glows like an angel.”

No Charles Friedman. Nothing from the Caribbean.

Hauck felt frustrated. Nothing to add to the list from Mustang World.

“Dad?” An acrid smell penetrated Hauck’s nostrils. Jessie was standing by the stove in the open kitchen, her pancakes going up in smoke.

“Oh shit! Joe, hold on.”

Hauck ran back into the open kitchen and flipped the black pancakes off the skillet and onto a plate. His daughter’s nose turned up in disappointment. “Thanks.”

“I’ll make more.”

“Emergency?” Joe inquired on the line.

“Yeah, a thirteen-year-old emergency. Dad screwed up breakfast.”

“That takes precedence. Look, go through it. It’s only a first pass. I just wanted you to know I was on it. I’ll call if anything else comes in.”

“Appreciate it, Joe.”

Karen pulled her Lexus into the driveway. She stopped at the mailbox and rolled down her window to pick up the mail. Samantha was home. Her Acura MPV was parked in front of the garage.

Sam was in the last days of school, graduating in a week. Then she and Alex were heading to Africa on safari with Karen’s folks. Karen would have loved to be going along as well, but when the plans were made, months earlier, she had just started at the real-estate agency, and now, with all that was happening, how could she just walk away and abandon Ty? Anyhow, she rationalized, what was better than the kids going on that kind of adventure with their grandparents?

As the commercials said, Priceless!

Karen reached through the car window and pulled out the mail. The usual deadweight of publications and bills, credit-card solicitations. A couple of charity mailings. An invitation from the Bruce Museum was one of them. It had a fabulous collection of American and European paintings and was right in Greenwich. The year before, Charlie had been appointed to the board.

Staring at the envelope, Karen drifted back to an event there last year. She realized it was just two months before Charlie disappeared. It was black-tie, a carnival theme, and Charlie had gotten a table. They had invited Rick and Paula. Charlie’s mother, up from Pennsylvania. Saul and Mimi Lennick. (Charlie had harangued Saul into a considerable pledge.) Karen remembered he’d had to get up in his tux and make a speech that night. She’d been so very proud of him.

Someone else invaded her thoughts from that night, too. Some Russian guy from town, whom she’d never met before, but Charlie seemed to know well. Charles had gotten him to donate fifty thousand dollars.

A real charmer, Karen recalled, swarthy and bull-like with thick, dark hair. He patted Charlie on the face as if they were old friends, though Karen had never even heard his name. The man had remarked that if he’d known that Charles had such an attractive wife, he would have been happy to donate more. On the dance floor, Charlie mentioned that the guy owned the largest private sailboat in the world. A financial guy, of course, he said-a biggie-friend of Saul’s. The man’s wife had on a diamond the size of Karen’s watch. He had invited them all out to his house-in the backcountry. More of a palace, Charlie said, which struck Karen as strange. “You’ve been there?” she asked. “Just what I’ve heard.” He shrugged and kept dancing. Karen remembered thinking she didn’t even know where in the world he had known the guy from.

Afterward, at home, they took a walk down to the beach at around midnight, still in their tuxedo and gown. They brought along a half-filled bottle of champagne they’d taken from the table. Trading swigs like a couple of teenagers, they took off their shoes and Charles rolled up his pant legs, and they sat on the rocks, peering out at the faraway lights of Long Island, across the sound.

“Honey, I’m so proud of you,” Karen had said, a little tipsy from all the champagne and wine, but clearheaded on this. She placed her arm around his neck and gave him a deep, loving kiss, their bare feet touching in the sand.

“Another year or two, I can get out of this,” he replied, his tie hanging open. “We can go somewhere.”

“I’ll believe that when it happens,” Karen said laughingly. “C’mon, Charlie, you love this shit. Besides…”

“No, I mean it,” he said. When he turned, his face was suddenly drawn and haggard. A submission in his eyes Karen had never seen before. “You don’t understand…”

She moved close to him and brushed his hair off his forehead. “Understand what, Charlie?” She kissed him again.

A month later he was gone in the blast.

Karen put the car into park and sat there in front of her house, suddenly trying to hold back an inexplicable rush of tears.

Understand what, Charlie?

That you withheld things from me all our lives, who you really were? That while you went in to the office every day, drove to Costco with me on weekends, rooted for Alex and Sam at their games, you were always planning a way to leave? That you may have even had a hand in killing innocent people? For what, Charlie? When did it start? When did the person I devoted myself to, slept next to all those years, made love with, loved with all my heart-when did I have to become afraid of you, Charlie? When did it change?

Understand what?