Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

Hoffmeyer leaned forward and tapped the laptop’s monitor. “Find the money. Nothing happens here until you do.” He was perfectly polite, but with a titanium edge underneath. Maybe that impression came from having watched him kill Tatiana.

“You can’t take this money.” I was confused about a lot of things as well, but not about that. “Drazen will kill us if we don’t return it to him.”

“Find it first. Then we’ll talk about how to handle Drazen.”

He seemed so confident and reasonable and in charge, it was hard not to just follow along. Again, I looked to Harvey.

“One way or another,” he said, “we need to know what is on the drive, do we not?”

I SWAPPED THE TWO HARD DRIVES WITHOUT ANY COMPLICATIONS. Harvey, Hoffmeyer, and Kraft watched closely as I did it. Kraft plugged in the auxiliary battery Tatiana had bought, and they all continued the vigil as I turned it on. When it got to the point where the operating system was supposed to load, everything stopped. The token was still on the table. I fit it into the slot and pushed. When it engaged, the system began to load. It was so quiet in the room, all I could hear was the low whistle in Harvey’s breathing and the sound of the computer at work.

The system loaded, and when it got to the next screen, I looked over at Harvey and smiled. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Harvey never lied, and Rachel had, in fact, held back one last secret. “What’s the password?”

“Yaryna.” He spelled it for me.

“Who is that, Vladi’s girlfriend?”

“His mother.” An idea that carried its own special meaning, given that his brother had shot her to death.

When the computer was ready to go, it looked like any other used by every other schlub in the world who used Windows. This one ran Windows 2000. It had a desktop screen with icons and not a single clue to what might lie beneath its bland exterior.

I started working through the directory. All the files had cryptic names like 104bkl2sign. There were columns of them, one after another. I didn’t know what I was looking for, so it would be hard to know if I’d found it. What would the financial files look like? Would the information be in code? I scavenged around in the cyber-haystack, clicking files randomly, hoping one would be the needle. I gave up and went to the search function.

“Harvey, if you were putting together a map to a financial fortune, what would it look like?”

“It would have the names of banks, the addresses, the names and numbers of contacts at those banks. It would have account numbers and passwords. Unless the money is all in cash, it would have a list of investment interests and investment vehicles.”

“Bearer bonds? Like that?” I typed in “bearer bonds” and hit enter. Nothing. I tried “serial number.” A list of files came up. That was a hopeful sign. I started opening them. They were Excel documents, spreadsheets with exactly the information Harvey had described. Locations, account numbers, passwords, and, best of all, balances.

“I found it.” Everyone knew that, because they were clustered around behind me watching the screen, but I had to say it anyway. I couldn’t help but feel excited.

“Well done,” Harvey said.

Hoffmeyer tapped me on the shoulder. He wanted to cut in. We switched places. He emptied a bag on the desk next to the machine and went to work. There was a three-and-a-half-inch disk, what felt like a relic now. There were a couple of jewel boxes for CDs and what looked like a load of different kinds of adapters and batteries. He had come prepared to attack that machine in whatever way necessary. As it turned out, it had a USB port, so all he needed was a flash drive. He had several and the software to make the computer recognize it. I could have used it in Paris.

He started to close all the files I’d opened but paused on the last one. He produced a notepad and a pencil and copied down three random account numbers with passwords and contact information. He tore off the page and passed it to Harvey.

“Would you mind checking these accounts? I’d like to make sure it’s all there.”

I found the cordless phone and gave it to Harvey. God only knew where all the cell phones had gone to. Hoffmeyer was copying the files to the flash drive. About ten minutes passed as he worked through all the files. He typed quickly and clearly knew his way around a computer.

Harvey finished his call. “It is all there and more. The money has compounded quite nicely over the past four years. I have written the new balances here. I think you can expect the same from all the investments.”

He passed the paper back to Hoffmeyer, who folded it in half and slipped it into his front breast pocket.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“Were you a hostage, or were you part of it?”

“Buy the book,” Kraft said. He had found the bag Thorne had taken from him, pulled out his reporter’s notebook, and started scribbling. He was no longer tied up, and it did cross my mind that it would not have been out of line to smack him.

“I was both,” Hoffmeyer said.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“The whole thing was a bad idea from the start, a low-percentage play.” He nodded in Thorne’s direction. “I told him that. But he was doing it no matter what I thought. He liked the intricacy of the plan, the elegance of the solution. He was going to send someone else, but I decided to go. I went to make sure no citizens got hurt.”

“The hijackers didn’t know you were part of it?”

“I had my reasons for not identifying myself to the Martyrs Brigade. Isn’t that right, Cy?”

He had been the first to notice that Thorne’s eyes were fluttering open. It took two tries before he could get his chin off his chest and was in a position to take in what was going on around him. He saw Hoffmeyer and blinked a few times. A sly smile broke across his face. “Am I looking at a ghost?”

“Hello, Cy. I wish I could say it was good to see you.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Thinking about it.”

Thorne didn’t seem too worked up by the concept. He adjusted his weight from one side to the other and winced as he did it.

Hoffmeyer was keeping one eye on his files and one on Thorne. “Still having problems with that hip?”

“No more than I ever did. What are you calling yourself these days?”

“The consensus in the room is Hoffmeyer.”

Thorne let his head loll back and roll around until his neck cracked like a big knuckle. Then he straightened up and yawned. “Where have you been keeping yourself?”

“I was surprised that you never came looking.”

“You were officially dead. We sent Carmopolis to check. Remember him?”

“He was a fuckup.”

“Yeah, he’s dead. He told us he had a positive ID on you. I found out later he spent that week in Thailand shacked up with a hooker and never even checked. It’s hard to find good people.” His expression turned almost wistful. “Somehow, I knew you were alive. All those years it nagged at me. When the Zormat thing hit, it opened everything up again. I got a little misty.”

“You missed me?”

“I didn’t think I would, but we were friends for twenty years. I did miss you. I made a nice tribute to your memory. I hope you get to see it sometime.”

I looked at Hoffmeyer, and I realized what had been familiar about him. It wasn’t his face. It was his voice. I had heard it before-on Lyle’s interview tapes. “You’re Tony Blackmon.”

“Not for a long, long time now.”

“I thought-” Back to Thorne. “You said-”

“He was dead? He was supposed to be.” He looked at Hoffmeyer. “But I have to admit, it is good to see you.”