Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“And you gave it to Roger when you helped him run. Is that it?”

They looked at each other. “Yes,” Rachel said quickly. “That’s exactly it.”

I made a mental note to come back to that point. Something wasn’t right.

“All right, Harvey. You had this body in the trunk. What then?”

“I drove Rachel home. I helped her clean up and dispose of her bloody clothes, and then I drove the body out of town and buried it.”

“You buried Vladi?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“I was not so feeble then as I am now. What else was I to do?”

I raised an eyebrow at Rachel. That was all it took to bring her back to her posture of snide self-defense. “I had blood on my clothes. We also had one car too many. We had to take my car home. But while I was there, Gary woke up. There was no way I could go out again.”

“That was convenient. Did you ever tell Gary what had happened?”

“I never did.”

“You just left Harvey to clean up your mess.”

Harvey cleared his throat and waded in. “Nothing she could have done would have changed what I did.”

I tried to picture the logistics. If they took her car home, that left them with Vladi’s, and Harvey’s still at Roger’s office in Cambridge. “You said you drove Vladi in his own car. What did you do with it?”

“I drove it to the Alewife Park-and-Ride. I wiped off the fingerprints and took the T into Cambridge. Then I walked to my car and drove it home.”

That meant the Cambridge police or the transit authority had found that car. “Neither of you was ever questioned in the investigation?”

Rachel shrugged. “As far as they wanted to know, Roger did it. Vladi disappeared, and then Roger disappeared. They didn’t look too far past him.”

“What did Drazen think?”

Rachel smiled. “He believed what they believed, and he believed me. I told him I had seen Roger kill Vladi. It was the least I could do to that bastard.”

Their story made sense. I couldn’t find any major holes. But then the two of them looked at each other, and I saw something pass between them. They no longer shared the same home, the same name, or the same monogrammed sheets, but Rachel and Harvey still had the ability to understand each other without words. It was one of the vestiges that endure after the end of an intimate relationship. There was more they hadn’t told me.

“What’s the rest?”

Rachel caught the inside of her cheek between her teeth but said nothing. I looked at Harvey. I did not want him to be hiding things from me. Finally, he spoke. “Roger had the incident on video.”

“Excuse me?” I sat forward. Perhaps I hadn’t heard right.

Rachel pulled her top hand off the pile and used it to straighten her blouse. “He had the whole thing. The shooting. The cleanup. He had it all.”

“How did he get it?”

She shrugged as if it should have been obvious. “Surveillance cameras in his office.”

“You were the auditor, and you didn’t know about them?”

“It was a secret camera. Roger put it in himself. No one knew. It was like that Nixon thing. Who cares how he got it? He came to my house that same night and showed me what he had. He told me he would give it to Drazen if we didn’t give him what he wanted.”

“Which was what?”

“To get out of the country with his head, his hands, and his money.”

I closed my eyes and pressed the heels of my hands against the bones just above them. “Let me guess. You called Harvey, who had probably just returned home from burying the body of the man you had killed.”

I opened my eyes. Harvey looked self-conscious. Rachel looked defiant. Maybe I was getting the hang of this silent communication thing. “Harvey, what did you do for Roger?”

“I alerted several banking contacts I had in Europe. I opened numbered accounts for him in Switzerland. I had several fake IDs made for him and set up credit-card accounts in those names. I did what I could to make sure he would have access to his money anonymously and from a distance.”

In short, everything Ling had accused him of, and Baltimore was not just a city in Maryland.

I got up and went to the refrigerator. It had been a while since my cold water had been cold. I grabbed one of the checked dish towels from the oven handle. As I made my own ice pack, I tried to distill the information to its essential elements. I needed to find Roger. If I found him and tried to bring him back, he would no doubt invoke the power of the video. That assumed he still had it after all this time or that it hadn’t burned up in Salanna 809. Or that Ling hadn’t also stumbled across it in a Brussels safety deposit box. If he had, he was keeping it awfully close to the vest. Too close, I decided. If he’d had that kind of leverage, he would have used it on Harvey by now. The safest thing was to assume Roger still had his deadly digital weapon and was still willing to wield it.

I checked my watch. What had Dan said about the hostage reunion? That it was on for another day and a half, which meant I had to get to Paris by tomorrow before noon. Dan’s next flight to Paris would get me there in time. I had no expectation that Roger Fratello would come to a hostage reunion, as Gilbert Bernays or anyone else, not if he was on the run from Drazen. But if he had been on that hijacked flight, then the last people I knew to have seen him would be there. I went back to the table and eased into my chair. The other aches and pains in the rest of my body were beginning to catch up with my head.

“We need to find Roger.”

“Excuse me.” Rachel waved her hand. “Are we forgetting what happens to me if we find Roger?”

“Think about it this way. When Roger tells Drazen that he didn’t kill Vladi but you did, Drazen has no reason to believe him unless he has the video to back it up. I think the first thing to do is find Roger and find out if he has the video. You can help me find him or not, but that’s what I intend to do. Harvey?”

“Yes?”

“You set Roger up for his life on the run. Is there any way you can track him that way? Through these accounts you set up, maybe?”

“I destroyed all my documentation.”

“Destroyed it?”

“I never wanted anyone to find him, nor did I envision any reason to find him myself. For him to come back would have meant a death sentence for Rachel.”

“All right, look. There’s some indication that Roger might have been hijacked.”

“Hijacked?” Rachel was incredulous. Harvey was intrigued.

“Do you remember Salanna 809 from four years ago?” It didn’t matter if they did. “A bunch of people got hijacked to Sudan by terrorists. Some were held onboard for ten days, and most of those were killed. Among the survivors was a man named Gilbert Bernays.”

Harvey’s eyes opened wide. “That’s him. That was one of the aliases we set up for Roger.”

“Good. That’s good to know.” I should have been excited, but I was too worn out. “Gilbert-slash-Roger was on his way to Johannesburg when he got hijacked. Does that give us any clues for how to find him?”

“Forget about all that.” Rachel sounded weary. “I know how to find him.”

“How?”

“Answer his e-mail.”

THE CAMBRIDGE CYBER CAFÉ LOOKED LIKE A SHOPPING bazaar in India. The plaster walls were painted the color of Georgia clay. On the floor were baskets full of magazines and throw pillows. If people hadn’t been there to use computers, they probably would have all been sitting cross-legged on the floor and drinking organic ginger beer.

I pulled up to the counter and signed in. The pierced, plaited, and tattooed desk jockey looked down at my name and asked to see a picture ID.