Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“Hold on.” Rachel dispensed with the flitting around and plopped down on the couch next to Harvey. “You’re saying Roger was on that plane. He died, and somehow this reporter, this Max Kraft, got his laptop? How does that work?”

“The hijackers collected all the computers from the passengers. Sometime during the ten days, all that stuff found its way off the plane and back to the hijackers’ headquarters in Afghanistan. That’s where Kraft got it. When the marines got there and the terrorists abandoned their house, the townspeople got in and scavenged the laptops. Kraft found out. He went there and bought at least some of them.”

Harvey nodded. “I understand. This Kraft must have been looking for a story.”

“Which it seems that he got. According to him, it’s a good one. I tend to believe him, since people are trying to kill him. He was attacked in Paris while I was there. He got away. I got picked up by Cyrus Thorne.”

“Oh, dear.” Harvey had managed to move himself to the edge of the couch, which slightly wrinkled his new slacks. He blinked at me with as much concern as he could comfortably show. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. No. I mean, I’ll be okay. It’s just-”

“Hello?” Rachel called for our attention. “She’s right here, Harvey. She’s obviously fine. Can we talk about the video? Why does this Thorne person have the video? What does he have to do with it?”

I turned my attention back to Harvey. “Kraft wouldn’t tell me what he was writing about, but he implied that Thorne is a bad guy and that his story will expose him. But Thorne says he’s working for the U.S. government, that Kraft is in possession of classified files, and that it’s his job to get them back. He wants me to contact Kraft again. He’ll trade Kraft for the video.”

“Why is that a bad thing?” Rachel asked. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? We find this Kraft, turn him over to Blackthorne, they give us their copy of the video, and we totally destroy it forever. Then you tell Drazen that Roger killed Vladi. Roger is dead. He died in the hijacking, so justice has been served. We all go back to our lives of quiet desperation.”

I was more conscious than ever of how much I disliked Rachel and this whole mess she had pulled us into. Also, she had yet to express one ounce of gratitude, but before I could pounce on her, Harvey took care of it.

“Rachel, please. You are not the only one involved in this.” There was an edge in Harvey’s tone. I loved the new Harvey. I just wondered where he’d been and why I had never seen him. Perhaps sensing that she was pushing her luck with the one person who could still stomach her, Rachel closed her mouth.

“First of all,” I said, “Thorne told me a lot of things I’m not sure I believe. I’m not sure whether to believe Kraft. But I believe this: it is Thorne’s intention to kill Kraft. I won’t turn anyone over to be killed.”

“Of course not,” Harvey agreed.

“Second, we now have a new billion-dollar variable in the equation. Now we have to wonder if Drazen is looking for Roger because he wants revenge, or because he wants his money, or both. Something tells me he wants his money back.”

“But we do not have it.”

“That’s true. At the moment, we don’t have anything to give Drazen to make him happy-except the name of Vladi’s real killer.” I resisted the urge to wink at Rachel. “But maybe if we can find him his money, it will turn out he’s not that concerned about revenge, and then we can all go back to our lives of quiet desperation.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who will get your ovaries ripped out if you’re wrong. How are we supposed to find the money?”

“If anyone has it, it’s Kraft. He has the computers from Zormat.”

“Can you call him?”

“He’s a little hard to find.” I tried to think of what I would say to him if I did. Then I remembered our conversation at the hotel just before the bullets started flying. “But I still have something he wants.” The only question was whether or not I had it in me to betray Lyle Burquart.

I OPENED MY EYES THE NEXT MORNING AND DECIDED THE world wouldn’t end while I went for a run. I hadn’t been out in days, and the muscles in my back and shoulders felt as if they’d baked in a kiln. I got up and dressed and spent a good fifteen seconds stretching my hamstrings. When I got outside, I was pleased to find one of the first warm mornings of spring. I was not pleased to find that I had the lung capacity of a small bird. That’s what happened when I slacked off.

Just past the turn to Memorial Drive, I noticed a car lingering off my left shoulder. It was easy to spot, keeping pace with me and not the rest of the vehicle traffic. No one trying to be stealthy would be caught dead following at that range. When the driver pulled up alongside and I saw who it was, I was annoyed more than anything. I couldn’t even go running in peace. I was also on the verge of fainting, so I stopped and went over to lean in the window and see what Special Agent Eric Ling wanted.

“Hi there,” he said. “How’s it going?” He offered a steaming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

“Never touch the stuff. Thanks anyway.”

He shrugged and fit the cup into a holder in the console between the seats. Government vehicles had all the snazzy features. He dropped his cool surfer shades and looked at me over the rims. “Get in. I’ll drive you back.”

“That kind of defeats the purpose.”

“Maybe, but you weren’t exactly burning up the course. I just wanted to ask you about this.”

He pulled a photo from an envelope and held it up. It was a picture of Bo, ever the gentleman, holding the door for me at Grigorii’s, the morning we had gone to meet Drazen Tishchenko.

He pointed at Bo. “Who’s your friend?”

“Who says he’s my friend?”

“We’ve been trying to identify him. We ran his plates, but that was a dead end.”

That helped me feel marginally better. There was no end to the tricks Bo knew. It also explained why he was feeling so much heat.

Ling put the picture back into the envelope, then reached over and popped the door open. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

I looked down the path I wouldn’t be running that morning and felt…relief. I opened the door and climbed in. He waited until I was buckled in, checked his side mirror, and pulled away from the curb. He turned at the next side street. There was no place to park, so he pulled up to a hydrant and killed the engine.

“Government plates,” he said, not seeming all that bashful about it.

“I knew you had a team on me,” I said.

“Sure.” He twisted around in his seat so he was more or less facing me. “The Bureau has unlimited funds and manpower to spend following around a private investigator. That would be an easy sell.”

He didn’t actually say “two-bit private investigator,” but it was implied. I knew they weren’t up on Bo, and there had been only three people in the meeting. “Are you set up on Tishchenko?”

“We’re up on Grigorii’s. We have been for months. I got a call that an unknown female had wandered into the picture, which is pretty unusual for that place. I thought it must be Rachel, but it was you, and I asked myself, ‘What would she be doing there?’ I thought about it. Want to know what I came up with?”

“I’m all ears.”

“It all comes back to Betelco. Everyone is connected through Betelco, including your partner. Harvey is connected through his ex-wife. His ex-wife is connected personally through Roger and professionally as the company’s auditor. Tishchenko is connected because he was running dirty money through there. Right?”