Swindler & Son Read online

  My heart sinks. This is terrible. I can’t see a way out of this.

  “But—it’s dated just a couple of days ago,” Sara says. “Does that make any sense?”

  “Huh?”

  “They said the Rue Breguet bomb was huge. Wouldn’t somebody have noticed something that big being delivered all at once? Wouldn’t they have brought it in in bits and pieces over time?”

  “Maybe this was the biggest piece,” I say listlessly. “What’s the difference?”

  “No,” Diamante’s eyes are bright. “Doesn’t it make more sense—” He’s shaking his head—and pounding his keyboard again.

  “—if it’s the opposite?” Sara says.

  “What if the real paper cert is for the shipment on the Mercury Venture,” Diamante adds, “carrying construction equipment to Hong Kong?” He burrows through our records. “If it’s a real container of ours,” he says, “it’ll have a tracker.”

  As soon as he says ‘tracker’, the word begins ringing over and over in my head—and I finally remember why. “Diamante, didn’t you put a tracker on Harry?”

  “What?”

  “Last week, when you said he was getting wobbly, you said you put a tracker on Harry’s phone, in case he forgot who he was and wandered off. Did you—?”

  “Did I actually do it or just think about it?” He stops typing in mid-sentence and hands me his phone. “If I installed it, it’ll be on my desktop.” He goes back to searching. “The tracker will show us how far the ship is from Hong Kong. We can get them to stop at the nearest port to verify the shipment.”

  “None of this matters, really,” I whine. “Nobody’s going to buy this story even if the container’s real.”

  “Maybe Harry,” Sara says, “would know something about it—if we knew where he was.” She’s staring at me, expectant. And there is a tracker app on Diamante’s desktop, so I activate it.

  “I still say he could be kidnapped,” she repeats.

  “Like I said, no ransom demands, no kidnapping.”

  Diamante throws up his hands in frustration.

  “What?”

  “Stupid app. It confirms the container as listed on the cert and it confirms the ship.”

  “Isn’t that good news?” I can’t tell anymore.

  “Sure. The bad news is, it shows the Mercury Venture sailing south into the Persian Gulf out of Basra.”

  “Basra—Iraq?”

  “Yup.”

  “Pardon me, but if you’re on your way from Karachi to Hong Kong, isn’t that the total fucking wrong direction?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Is it a smokescreen?” Sara asks.

  “For what? It’s a ship carrying one of our containers. Why isn’t it where it’s supposed to be?”

  A long deadly pause now, as we all absorb this.

  “And where is Harry?” Sara asks, unable to stop beating the dead horse.

  The map is onscreen but I have to look twice, then zoom out for a better view, to understand what I’m seeing. “Oh!”

  “Where the fuck is he?”

  “According to this, he’s in Saudi Arabia.”

  Allies

  “What’s he doing in Saudi Arabia?”

  “Well, actually, no.” I zoom in on the map. “He’s in Qumradhi, actually. Just south of Saudi Arabia.”

  “And your ship,” Sara says, “is in the Persian Gulf?”

  “Steaming South out of Iraq,” Diamante says.

  “Heading straight for Qumradhi.”

  “Somebody’s kidnapped Harry,” Sara continues, the horse having risen miraculously from the dead, “and is delivering something to him in Qumradhi.”

  “You don’t kidnap somebody to deliver something to him,” I say. “They set up the shipment and kidnapped him to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

  “Shipment of what? What’s ‘Construction equipment’?”

  “It’s just a catch-all category we use.”

  “Covering what?”

  “Oh, a wide variety—”

  “How wide?”

  There’s no way to sugar-coat it. “The mind boggles.”

  Sara rolls her eyes. “Well, Harry’s phone didn’t go to Qumradhi without him. We have to go there, too.”

  And now my stomach sinks. I don’t like this one bit.

  I expected, when we got to this moment, that I’d find an angry partner at the other end of the chain, some arrogant weasel demanding revenge or compensation for whatever wrong we’d done him. Someone we’d already played, whose strengths and weaknesses would be familiar, maybe even predictable. I’d expected, at very least, to be able to estimate by now the cost of making the problem go away.

  Which is to say, I’d expected this to be just another episode in our closed little game. All this time, I’ve qualified and vetted every person who entered our circle, limited our professional contacts to a narrow sequence of tightly controlled interactions, all guided by HARRY’S RULES. Anyone in our game danced our dance and whenever things began to diverge from plan, I had a contingency to pull us out, but quick.

  The benefit of a tightly controlled game is, you limit risk. We’ve managed to stay safe, in a uniquely unsafe profession.

  Clearly, that safety is all gone now. Dragging Harry off to the Middle East? Hacking our records? Forging certs? I feel totally out of my league. Whoever thought this one up has imagination a whole order of magnitude larger than anything I’ve ever possessed.

  There’s no signpost here for me to lean on. I feel like someone just woke me up standing on a 98th floor balcony rail and yelled, “Dance!”

  Diamante and Sara are staring at me, awaiting direction. That’s my job, it’s who I’ve always been. All I can think to say at the moment is, “Yeah, I guess we have to go.”

  “The trip requires a passport,” Diamante reminds me. “You don’t have yours on you, do you?”

  “I don’t have a wallet at the moment.”

  “Going home to pick it up would be a bad idea,” Sara says, leading to a long silence.

  I stare out the round window, across the tile roof and the smoke rising from the chimneys. My mind’s churning in low gear but my history is to solve problems—it’s the way I think. If I can’t solve big ones, I’ll go one step at a time, because what else is there?

  “Call Nassir, Sonya’s son,” I tell Diamante. “Get him to run her by the office.”

  “If GGIN is staking it out—”

  “We’ll have to take the chance. She’s just dropping by, she left her sweater behind. If there’s cops, pick up the sweater and get the hell out. If they haven’t locked it off, have her pick up the folder we got from the Hastings meeting. Take several other folders—in case they catch her on the way out, she can say—”

  “I’ve got the folder,” Diamante says. He sees my surprise. “I wasn’t leaving it around the office while the flics searched. I dumped the bag with it down the laundry chute.” He hands me the manila envelope.

  “Okay, we need a car—”

  “I’ve got a car.” Who knew the man had a car? You think you know a person and then you find out they can drive!

  “You don’t happen to have any large plastic shipping containers on you?” I ask.

  “No—you’ve got me there,” he smiles.

  “Fine,” I say, ignoring the questions on both their faces. “We can pick them up on the way to the airport.”

  ~~~

  “I’m just saying, you can’t use the airport. This is the first place they’ll be watching,” Sara repeats.

  “My job is to know where opportunity lies,” I say. She doesn’t seem impressed.

  Diamante’s car is an ancient Deux Chevaux. We couldn’t outrun a Vespa, but no one’s likely to consider this clapped-out relic a getaway car.

  “You’re not listening to me,” she complains.

  “I’m listening—I just don’t have time to explain my brilliant plan.”

  “Your brilliant plan, which consists of three s
uitcases filled with socks.”

  “Socks in boxes, that are solid and won’t shift around very much. They’re props. The plan is—” I check the Parker Meridien passports and ID’s that I’m completing with our new drug store photos. “The plan is, you are Chris Dale, Parker Meridien sales manager and you’re accompanying us on a preview of the new spring initiative.”

  “What’s Parker Meridien selling this spring?”

  “Let’s say, a new infrared targeting system for your drones, improved bluetooth communications for your security guards and a radiation detector app for your smartphone. Okay?”

  “And what if I’m recognized?”

  I pull a plastic case out of the shopping bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “A jean jacket with sequins and lots of cheap makeup. Slather it on. Make yourself Clown Barbie.”

  “Ooh! Do we have ten minutes? Can I tease my hair into a bouffant?”

  “You can do that in ten minutes?”

  “There’s the terminal,” she points helpfully as we drive past.

  “That’s not where we’re going,” I say, enjoying her confusion.

  Diamante assured me the makeup alone would do the job and I’ve got to admit, I wouldn’t recognize Sara when she steps out of the car. This is a woman with very little money and even less taste and at least one of those would have made me reconsider marrying her.

  We drive past all the usual entrances to the airport and finally come around the back way, where Diamante’s Sandler & Son shipper’s ID card gets us through the unmanned gate. Then we take the internal roads to the rear entrance of our terminal.

  We enter through the shipping area, a freeway cloverleaf of conveyor belts and motorized carriages rapidly filling and rushing out to flights waiting to be released.

  “Bonsoir, Abdul.”

  “Nicky! What do you have for me?”

  Abdul runs the baggage service for this terminal. From experience, I know that this day and hour is traditionally one of his worst and everything we see confirms that. The place is jam-packed and frenzied, staff trying desperately to yell over the never-ending din of equipment. As we barrel up to his counter, wheeling our big suitcases, it’s beyond chaos and Abdul is totally out of his depth—my favorite kind of baggage manager and worth every penny we’ve spent over the years bribing him.

  “Three to be personally delivered on Flight 323. We have to see them on and see them off.”

  “323? The gate’s probably closed already. Where are your couriers?”

  -What is this about, please? What does ‘Personally delivered’ mean?

  There’s a huge high-end business sending couriers around the world personally accompanying items that are too precious to be shipped. The personal touch and personal—bonded—responsibility. When expensive items are too big to be carried in hand luggage, the couriers can be given permission to witness the luggage compartment of the plane being locked on the outbound leg with their bags inside and unlocked when they arrive at the other end, with the chain of personal custody undisturbed. So now, we’re asking Abdul to get us—and our personally-supervised parcels—onto a flight that’s almost finished boarding, at the very last minute.

  “We’re the couriers. Can’t get anybody on short notice.”

  “This is crazy timing, Nicky.”

  “Yeah, I know. Listen, Abdul, couldn’t you—”

  “Nicky, you know I can’t—if somebody asks questions—”

  “Who’s going to ask about us? C’mon, just this once. I haven’t asked for a favor in weeks!” And I’ve been paying you for them for years, I think but don’t say.

  -What favor?

  We have tickets for the flight (in our cover names) but clearly, we haven’t gone through boarding and security like we should have. I’m asking Abdul to skip that step and send us directly to watch the cargo load and then directly to the jetramp, which he’s not supposed to do, of course. However, I know he’s done it before, with couriers he knows and I’ve shipped probably two thousand packages with him over the years, so I’m hoping—really hoping—he’ll help me slip through the system this one time.

  But he’s uncertain. This is a man who never stops moving and now he’s slumped, immobile, in place as the parcels fly into bins all around him.

  “Abdul—I’ll give you the Aeroflot.”

  He remains slumped over the counter but somehow his body rises, as though levitating in place. “Don’t toy with me, Nicky,” he says.

  “It’s a big client and neither of us has time. Just help me out. I’ll give you the whole set.”

  Airlines used to use actual china cups and plates and real silver cutlery on long-distance flights—this is back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, of course. So naturally, now the old service sets are cult items on Ebay and Etsy, especially if you can find them in the original boxes. And especially if we’re talking Soviet-era Aeroflot, where the boxes have nice pictures of Lenin and Brezhnev and an entire flight full of passengers was once forced to search the floor of the cabin on their hands and knees because a real silver fork-and-knife set was lost and the crew were not willing to find themselves permanently relocated to Irkutsk.

  “It’s at the office,” I assure him. “I’ll get it for you as soon as I get back.”

  “You swear this to me. On your honor as a man.”

  “I’ll throw in a Gorbachev flight pin. But get us on this plane.”

  “I’ll do it!” Abdul almost snaps to attention. “Kwame! Three for the 323 to Heathrow. Nicky, take that tractor directly to the ramp, I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

  “Thanks. And they’ll let us off to see them unlock on the other side—you’ll tell the crew, okay?”

  “You’ll throw in the salt and pepper shakers?”

  “They’re no good to me if I’m giving away the rest of the set.”

  “Fly well, my friend.”

  A moment later, we’re on a luggage tram, hurtling across the tarmac to the underside of Flight 323, the next plane to Heathrow. We watch our bags swallowed by the luggage compartment and locked for flight. Then we walk around to the jetramp, up the steps to the front hatch of the plane, the crew check our seat assignments—but nothing else—and we’re off.

  “And at the other end?” Sara asks once we’re seated.

  “They’ll take us off the flight ahead of everyone else, down the steps to the runway, we’ll see the luggage compartment unloaded. And, since I know Martin Fosgate at Heathrow, we’ll take one of the luggage trolleys to the freight receiving area and walk directly out of there to the taxi row. No security at either end.”

  “So why don’t we just fly to Qumrahdi—why Heathrow?”

  “Because that’s an international flight—Customs. Abdul won’t fuck with Customs, even for Aeroflot salt shakers.”

  “So how will we get around them?” she asks.

  “In England, we’ll wrangle ourselves an invisible plane.”

  Diversion

  France’s snow was delightful next to England’s fog and wind-driven hail. The mist cuts off the hills mid-chest, sky and earth a watercolor merge through windshield splatter.

  “Where is this place?” Sara asks.

  “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  On the seat between us is a London tabloid. The headline reads:

  MYSTERY MAN!

  “They don’t have your name yet,” Diamante reads. “Just ‘French authorities are seeking a Paris resident of ten years, accused of material support to the Rue Breguet bombing.’ We have to get to Harry immediately.”

  “‘Immediately’ is whatever’s most inconspicuous,” I say.

  “You call a flat-bed truck inconspicuous?” Sara hasn’t been comfortable since the rental counter.

  “It’ll be worse once we fill it. We don’t have a choice. The invisible plane requires cargo.”

  We crest the hill and come to a stop in front of the two-story shiny-black wrought-iron gate separating the Linden estate f
rom the mouth-breathers.

  I punch the intercom button on the gate. “It’s Nicky Marsh for the Duke, please. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  A couple of minutes pass, followed by, “Compliments from the Duke, Mr. Marsh, but he wishes me to ask, what precisely is the emergency?”

  “The emergency is, I have his money!”

  The gate opens.

  The long driveway reveals the estate in stages, a green copper dome rising above a circular valley and a peek-a-boo eighteenth-century manor house placed carefully between rows of ancient oaks.

  Daniel Fortescu Gael Winthrop Davis-Giddle, the 14th Duke of Linden, steps onto the pebbled drive as we approach, under a voluminous umbrella held by a manservant his grandfather’s age. It was actually safe to assume he’d be home—being a Duke these days means hustling tour groups, weddings and movie shoots through the estate almost daily, to keep the roof from leaking and the walls from collapsing. At least, that’s how he tells it. He shakes my hand unconvincingly, like an inbred English lord should.

  “Which money is this, Nicky?”

  “Your ship has come in, Larry (with all his names, everyone calls him Larry—real aristocracy is the only possible explanation for this). I’ve come for the 917.”

  “I’ve told you before, I can’t give it away. It’s wearing a hole in my pocket but…”

  “Buy yourself two pair of slacks. This buyer will meet your price.” Larry and I have buzzed around this subject five times in as many years, with three different suitors.

  “You’re aware of my new price, are you?” Good Lord, without dropping a beat! What a fucker! We reached an impasse a month ago over a couple of thousand. He had his price and my client was an ass—I respected Larry for that. But not this!

  “How much more?” I ask and he tells me—almost 10%. “Why?”

  “Inflation.”

  “There’s no inflation.”

  “There’s bound to be eventually.”

  Tick tick tick. It takes me just that long to realize I’m an idiot—I’m worrying about the price! We need to get to Harry and the 917 is the only way I can think to rig it. And, not insignificantly, it’s not my money anyway.