Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“I can’t tell you what it is, but know this.” I hated people who said “know this.” “As an American citizen, you do not want Kraft walking around with this information. You do not want Hoffmeyer to get it.”

“Are you saying you’ll kill Kraft to keep from letting Hoffmeyer get to him first?”

“If I have to.”

“So, what you’re asking me to do is help you kill a man.”

“Yes.” He started searching around for something, eventually locating it in a pouch on the side of his club chair. It was a remote control.

“Why am I supposed to trust you? You’re a private contractor. You can’t even show me a badge.”

“No, but I can show you this.”

He opened a little cabinet in the wall next to us. A flat-screen TV monitor was inside. As he pressed buttons on the remote, an image fluttered onto the screen. It was black-and-white and very sharp. The point of view was from above, probably close to the ceiling. I moved closer to the screen, because I knew what this was. A man held a woman down on a desk. He was big enough that she was almost completely obscured. I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t have to.

I felt in my pocket for my flash drive. It was there. “Where did you get this?”

He hit pause. “From a translator who worked for Max Kraft.” He nodded toward the screen. “Go ahead. You should see this. It’s interesting stuff.”

He restarted, and the incident proceeded as I would have expected. Vladi reached down to try to undo his belt. He was wobbly and uncoordinated. Had he not been draped over the desk, it wasn’t clear to me he would have been able to stand. Rachel’s hands were wrapped around his broad back. As he continued to struggle with the buckle, she withdrew her hands, only to push them around again, but this time under his jacket, where it was plainly visible that she was searching for the weapon. It was also clearly evident when she’d found it. Vladi straightened up quickly, stumbled back, and stood like an animal up on its hind legs. When she pointed the gun at him, his shoulders shook, his arms whipped around, and it was clear he was roaring at her. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be no sound.

Rachel also spoke as she pushed herself up from the desk and wiped her lips with the back of one hand, keeping him covered the whole time. He stumbled backward, clearly not in control of all motor functions, but then he advanced on her again with intent to do her real harm. She shot him twice in the chest. He kept coming, but she was able to step out of his way and slip around the desk. The way he went after her, you never would have guessed he had two slugs lodged in his chest. She raised the gun and shot him again. This time, he fell to his knees and hung there for a few seconds. Then he rolled gently forward, laid his head on the floor, and didn’t move again.

It was a bit of a relief to see Rachel’s hands shake as she set the pistol on the desk. She walked over to the wall farthest from the body and slumped against it. She slid down slowly to the floor, put her hands over her face, and cried. But almost as quickly as she started, she stopped, and from there the story took an unexpected turn, but it was one I should have seen coming.

She crawled over to where Vladislav had left a large briefcase. She laid it down flat and tried to unlatch it. Having no success, she crept over to Vladi’s body and approached it as if it were electrified. She poked and pulled back and prodded and shied away. Getting no response, she pulled him over onto his back so she could rifle his pockets. She was fast and efficient. She never even looked at his face.

She extracted a set of keys and flipped through them until she found the one that worked. She opened the case and started pulling stuff out. Files, a flask, more files. When she found what she wanted, she demonstrated the universal sign for guilt, looking left and right. Apparently seeing that she was alone, save for the dead body behind her, she reached in and came out with a laptop. The billion-dollar machine. It had to be the one Roger had told Frank he’d stolen off a dead Russian-only Roger hadn’t been the one who stole it.

On the screen, Rachel did what I now understood Rachel always did: she took a grievous situation and made it work to her benefit. She carried the laptop to her own bag and slipped it in. In some ways, I had to admire such a keen sense of survival.

Finding nothing else she wanted from Vladi, she did the whole thing in reverse, including putting the keys back into the dead man’s pocket. Then she pulled out her cell phone and made a call. I imagined Harvey at the other end of that call, coming to the phone and rising about two feet off the ground when he heard Rachel’s voice.

“Baby, come quick,” she must have said. “I need your help.” The screen went to blue.

Thorne put his glasses back on and consulted his file. “That was Vladislav Tishchenko. Brother of Drazen.” He peered at me over the lenses. “You run with a dangerous crowd.”

“Not usually.”

“The woman is Rachel Ruffielo, your partner’s ex-wife.” He put the file aside. “From what I understand, Drazen is confused about the circumstances of his brother’s death. This would clear it up for him. Ready to continue?”

He used the remote and started the show again. The screen stayed blue. There was a jump cut, and then my heart jumped, because Harvey was there. He was standing over the body in his suit with one hand on his forehead. He looked as if he were taking his own temperature. Thorne reached down and hit the fast-forward. It showed Rachel and Harvey talking and gesturing to each other. It showed Rachel leaving and coming back with the plastic bags, and the two of them straightening the corpse, and rolling it up. They were going at Buster Keaton speed, but it wasn’t funny.

This time, Thorne hit the pause button and froze the two of them on the screen as they dragged Vladi’s body across the floor.

My throat was dry, and his cough drops were looking good to me. “Can I have one of those?”

He set one on the table and pushed it across. I unwrapped it and popped it in. There was nothing special about it-I wasn’t sure why he seemed so enamored of them-but it did the job. It got the saliva flowing again.

“That’s your partner, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He placed the remote control on the table between us. “Here’s how I think things will work. You continue your dialogue with Max Kraft. You get him to agree to meet you.”

“We’re not having a dialogue.”

“You’ll come up with something. At the appropriate time, we’ll move in and take over. If you do that, no one you don’t want to will ever see this.”

He pointed at the screen. At that moment, Tatiana must have pulled the flash drive from the CPU in the back. On the screen, the system signaled its surprise by going to black and then announcing a fatal error.

IT WAS A LONG AND EXHAUSTING FLIGHT HOME. BY THE time I got back to Boston, I was jumping out of my skin. I called Harvey the minute I got to my car. When he didn’t answer either of his phones, I knew it was because of Rachel. She had upset the natural order of things and taken a blowtorch to the delicate balance we had achieved. For anything that was amiss, I blamed Rachel.

Then I got to the house, where I found the two of them, sitting on the couch in the front room, ensconced in blissful domesticity. They were listening to music, oblivious to the world in general and me in particular.

I dropped my backpack. It hit the floor with a thud. They both looked up. Harvey had a haircut, and I’d never seen that shirt before, and those…were those khaki pants he was wearing? They’d been shopping, too?