“Whatever it is, Trish, we can work it out.”
God that sounded desperate, but my already skimpy playbook was getting thinner by the minute.
“I’ll still be your fall guy,” I said. “Call off the hit on Robert, and I’ll be on the first flight back to London. Sign whatever confession you want. Whatever will make this all go away. Just leave my family alone.”
“Oh Rick, I wish I could,” she said, sounding very much the opposite of sympathetic. “But your little homecoming has forced us to activate our backup plan. And in that one, a simple confession by you just won’t be enough.”
“Why not?”
“Too many dead bodies, my dear. Too many loose threads we can’t afford to leave dangling. If you had just gotten on your plane to Mexico like you were supposed to, none of this would be necessary. You’d be busy poisoning your liver on a beach somewhere and your family would be safe.”
“Except Robert would be dead and I’d be in prison. Or worse.”
“Oh yes, you both would still have needed to be eliminated. But your ex-wife and children could have been spared. Now, because of you, I’m afraid that they’ve simply seen too much.”
My legs were weak and my hand was shaking but I fought to keep my voice steady. “Please,” I said. “Tell me what I need to do to make this right.”
For a moment, I allowed myself to believe that she would come back with an offer. At that point, I would have said yes to anything.
Instead what she said was, “You’re going to die, Rick. And so will they. All of them.”
Then the line went dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I stood with the phone against my ear for another minute or two, pretending to listen to the nothing coming out of it. When I turned, five sets of eyes stared back at me. The back door was still open, Robert standing sentry next to it.
“Turn this off,” I said, handing the phone back to him, “and don’t turn it on again. They have your number now, which means they have what they need to start tracking you.”
“Okay,” he said, his words flat. His gaze matched.
“No more bullshit. I need to know—”
“It’s a box,” he said.
“What?”
“The reason they want me dead. A tiny lead box Jimmy and I pulled from the stomach of a dead girl found inside a container on a ship at the Navy Yard. Caught the case about three weeks ago.”
“What’s inside the box?”
Robert sighed. Looked at Denise. Tucked his phone back in his pocket and said, “Uranium, the dangerous kind.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Twenty-two grams worth. Street value around two million. Enough to irradiate a few city blocks, or so Jeff told me in a conversation that still gives me nightmares.”
“Robert,” Denise said, putting her hand over her mouth.
“Omar found it while he was doing the autopsy.”
“Omar?” I asked.
“Medical examiner. Captain Edwards called Homeland Security as well as the Feds right after we filed our initial report. That’s when I first heard from Jeff.”
“How enriched was it?” I asked. Earlier in my career, when I had just arrived in Germany, I did a little work with uranium smugglers. They weren’t what you expected. Burned out, drunk Russian ex-military with mounds of debt and easy access to stockpiles of nuclear material. They were a lot of things, but professional wasn’t one of them. Too many headaches. Vicious business, too. Of all the ways to earn an illicit living, dealing in uranium was one of the ones most likely to get you chopped up into tiny pieces. I was happy to leave that business behind.
So what the hell were Trish and her Board of Directors doing involved with it?
“No idea,” Robert said. “I told Jeff we’d ship it to him so the Feds could test it in their lab, but he shot that down.”
“Why?” Denise asked. Robert gave me a long look.
“He was worried about someone getting a hold of it, wasn’t he?” I asked, trying not to be smug. “He thought someone in his office might be compromised.”
“I thought he was being paranoid,” Robert said. “Still did, up until you came along. Now Jeff is dead, and there are two bodies back at our house.”
It wasn’t an I told you so moment, so I resisted the urge. “Where is it now?”
“There’s a dummy one filled with twenty-two grams of worthless lead pellets in the FBI lockup down in DC. Jeff had me overnight that one right after our first call.”
“And the real one?”
“Somewhere only I know about. And that’s not about to change, so save yourself the trouble of asking. Even Jimmy doesn’t know the one I sent to the Feds was bogus. He just thinks I check in with Jeff from time to time to give him updates.”
“And he trusted you with this kind of responsibility after one phone call?”
“I get the sense he didn’t have much of a choice. He kept me in the dark about a lot, but it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out this was a big break in whatever he was working. I’m sure he checked me out after my captain called and before he and I spoke, but it’s like you said, Ben: What’s a homicide cop from Philly have to do with a multinational task force? I guess he just played the odds that whoever got to his people didn’t even know I existed.”
