John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

She will call, he thought. Today. Perhaps tomorrow. This was inevitable. He had put forces into play that would ensnare her. She will be upset, he told himself. Angry. Filled with demands, none of which meant a thing to him. And, more critically, he reminded himself, this time she will be alone. Frantic and vulnerable.

He took a deep breath. For an instant he believed he could feel Ashley at his side, soft and warm. He closed his eyes and luxuriated in the sensation. When it faded, he smiled.

Michael O’Connell lay back on the floor, blankly staring up at the whitewashed ceiling and a single unshaded hundred-watt bulb. He had once read that certain monks in long-forgotten orders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had remained in that position for hours on end, in utter silence, ignoring heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and pain, hallucinating, experiencing visions, and contemplating the immutable heavens and the inexorable word of God. It made absolute sense to him.

The thing that troubled Sally was a single offshore bank account that had received several modest deposits from her client’s account. The sum in question was somewhere near $50,000.

When she had called the bank in Grand Bahama, they had been unhelpful, telling her that she would need an authorization from their own banking authority, implying that that was difficult to obtain, even for SEC or IRS investigators-and probably impossible for a single attorney operating alone, without subpoenas, or State Department threats.

What Sally could not fathom was why someone capable of raiding her client account had seemingly only stolen one-fifth of the amount. The other sums, arrayed through a near dizzying series of transfers back and forth through banks all over the nation, were still traceable, and, as best as she could tell, likely to be recovered. She had managed to have the sums frozen at nearly a dozen different institutions, where they rested untouched under different and transparently phony names. Why, she wondered, wouldn’t someone have merely transferred all of the cash into the offshore accounts, where it was in all likelihood completely untouchable? The majority of the money was simply hanging out there, not stolen, but waiting for her to undergo the immense difficulty in recovery. It troubled her deeply. She could not say with any precision what sort of crime she was the victim of. The one thing she knew was that her professional reputation was likely to take a blow, at the least, and more likely be crippled significantly.

She was equally uncertain who had attacked her.

Her first suspicion, of course, fell on the other side in the divorce case. But she did not understand why the opponents would make such serious trouble for her-it would significantly postpone matters and make things more difficult, in addition to dragging out the action in court, which would only cost everyone more money. In a divorce, she was accustomed to people behaving irrationally, of course, but this stumped her. People were usually more blatantly petty and obnoxious when they tried to make trouble. And, so far, this assault had a subtlety that she had yet to fully understand.

Her second suspicion, then, became some other opponent in some other case. Someone she had bested in some year past.

This unsettled her even more, the idea that someone would harbor a need for revenge over some time, waiting months, perhaps even years, before acting. It was Sicilian in nature, and seemed to her to be something right out of The Godfather.

Sally had exited her office early and walked through the center of town to a restaurant that sported a fake-Irish name and had a quiet and dark bar, where she nursed her second Scotch and water. In the background, she could hear the Grateful Dead singing “Friend of the Devil.”

Who hates me? she asked herself.

Whoever it was, she knew that she needed to tell Hope. She dreaded this. With all the tension between them, this was the last thing they needed. Sally took a long pull of the bitter liquid. Someone out there hates me and I’m a coward, she thought to herself. A friend of the devil is a friend of mine. She looked at the glass, decided that there wasn’t enough alcohol in the entire world to cover up how miserable she felt, pushed it away, and with what little remaining steadiness she had, started to make her way home.

Scott finished his letter to Professor Burris, then reread it carefully. The word that he’d chosen to describe what had taken place was hoax -he presented the allegation as if they had all been the subjects of some elaborate, yet mysterious, undergraduate prank.

Except, on this occasion, Scott wasn’t laughing much.

The only part of the cautiously worded letter that he’d felt comfortable with was the portion where he’d recommended that Burris take a long look at the academic accomplishments of Louis Smith. Scott thought that perhaps he could give the fellow a boost in his career.

He signed the e-mail and sent it. Then he went back to his house and sat in his old, tattered wing chair and wondered what had just happened to him. He wasn’t willing to believe that a single letter, even one as decisive as the one he’d just written, meant he was free from any problems. He still had the snooping campus reporter showing up at his office at the end of the week. The room grew dark around him as the day faded, and Scott knew that at some time in the future he would have to defend himself. That the charge had no substance, no credibility, was more or less irrelevant. Someone, somewhere, would believe it.

It all made Scott furious, and he sat clenching his fists, his head aching, wondering who had done this to him. He had no idea that many of the same questions were simultaneously plaguing Sally and Hope, and that if they all had known of one another’s struggles, the source of their problems would be far more obvious to all of them. But they were all, by circumstances and bad luck, in their own orbits.

Ashley was putting her few things together and getting ready to leave the museum for the evening when she looked up from her desk and saw the assistant director hovering uncomfortably a few feet away.

“Ashley,” he said, stilted, his eyes pivoting about the room, “I’d like a word with you.”

She put down her small satchel and dutifully followed the assistant director into his office. The quiet museum seemed suddenly cryptlike, and their footsteps echoed. Shadows seemed to mar the art on the walls, defacing the shapes, deforming the colors.

The assistant director motioned to a chair, while he sat down behind his desk. He paused, adjusted his tie, sighed, then looked directly at her. He had the nervous mannerism of rubbing his hands together at odd moments. “Ashley, we’ve had some complaints about you.”

“Complaints? What sort of complaints?”

He didn’t exactly answer. “Have you been going through some difficulty of late?”

She knew the answer was yes but she didn’t want to allow the assistant director into her private life any more than she had to. She thought him a wheedling, hollow man. She knew he had two young children at home in Somerville, a detail that rarely prevented him from hitting on every new, young female employee. “No. Nothing that unusual,” she said, lying. “Why do you ask?”

“So,” he said slowly, “you would say things were normal in your life? Nothing new?”

“I’m not sure what you’re driving at.”

“Your views, on the, ah, world at large, ah, haven’t recently changed in some radical direction?”

“My views are my views,” she said slowly.

He hesitated again. “I was afraid of that. I don’t know you very well, Ashley. So I suppose nothing should really surprise me. But I have to say…” He stopped. “Well, let me put it this way: You know, at this museum we try to be pretty tolerant of other people’s views and opinions and, well, lifestyles, I suppose you’d say. We don’t like to be, ah, judgmental. But there are some lines that can’t be crossed, wouldn’t you agree?”