“I’ll make it worth your while.”
He was quiet for several seconds, so much so that I pulled the phone away from my ear and checked the screen to make sure he hadn’t hung up.
“What is in these files?” he said at last.
“I don’t know, that’s why I need you to open them for me, but it has to be quick because I’m pretty sure they’re being deleted as we speak.”
“Rick, I can’t just wave my fingers over a keyboard and hack into the encrypted databases of three major intelligence organizations. A job like that takes months of planning and resources to pull off.”
“I don’t need everything, Sergei, just whatever you can get.”
“And I’m telling you that what I can get is going to be nothing.”
“Please, Sergei. I’m grasping at straws here.”
He sighed. “I’ll do what I can, but it won’t be cheap.”
“Name your price.”
“Half a million, at least.”
I closed my eyes. “I can get you two hundred thousand now. It’s all I’ve got.”
“And the rest?”
“Will you take an IOU?”
“Given your current situation, unless you have a three hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy that names me as the sole beneficiary, I’m going to have to say no. I’m sorry, Rick. Goodbye.”
“No, Sergei, wait!” The line was silent but it didn’t go dead. “Look, I know it’s a big ask, but they’re coming after my fa-mily, man.”
Another sigh. “Two hundred thousand?”
“I’ll text you my account number. There’s a little over two hundred and change in there. I can’t transfer it to you without drawing attention but you can hack it. Clean it out, it’s all yours.”
“If I do manage to access any files, what do you want me to do with them?”
“Download everything and upload it to my secure dropbox, I’ll send you that info as well, along with the names of the Mossad and MI5 agents.”
“Okay,” he said. He didn’t sound happy, but if I could have reached through the phone and kissed him I would have. “No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, Sergei.”
He hung up. I quickly opened a new chat room, invited him and sent the relevant information.
“One of your clients?” Robert asked.
“A candidate.”
“He any good?”
“I hope so,” I said as I put my phone away. A tangible silence crept over me from behind, where Denise and the kids were digesting everything they had seen and heard so far that night. It couldn’t have been easy, watching a man you used to love transformed into something repugnant. If there was any way to make them understand how and why that transformation happened, I would have done it. But that wasn’t possible. Not tonight. Probably not ever. So instead I did my best to ignore that wave of silence, crawling over me like spiders, and said to Robert, “Tell me everything Jeff ever told you. Leave nothing out.”
“It’s not a lot, and none of it is terribly important.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
He was right, it wasn’t terribly important, and it only took him about twenty minutes to cover everything. The gist of it was no different than what I already knew:
Somebody opened a container on a ship at the Navy Yard. Inside was twenty thousand pounds of bagged rice and one dead girl, about twenty-two years old. Polish. Hanna Kaminski. Her family, from a small town outside of Warsaw, reported her missing after she ran away three years earlier. Hard to say when she got picked up by whatever trafficker found her. Probably not long afterward.
It was doubtful she was alone on the ship, but the others were likely picked up by an intermediary who then transported them to whatever sick son of a bitch still bought people like livestock in the twenty-first century. Whether the intermediary noticed the corpse and worried he’d get in trouble if he said anything or if he just fucked up the headcount no one knew for sure, but either way the dead girl got left behind for one of the dock workers to discover the next morning. She wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway. Packages are meant to be ripped open when they arrive at their destination.
Robert and Jimmy saw no outward signs of foul play, but realized a twenty-two-year-old Polish girl probably didn’t wind up dead in a sealed container full of rice due to natural causes, so they called in the usual teams. The crime scene guys did their CSI thing, Robert and Jimmy questioned the dock workers, and the dead girl was transported back to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy.
Omar Alpas, the coroner on duty, opened her up and quickly determined a cause of death: internal hemorrhaging caused by a small, lead box that had as much business being tucked in between the folds of her small intestine as the girl herself had being in the container.
Omar called Robert, who opened the box and saw it was filled with tiny gray pellets. He’d watched a 60 Minutes special recently about the nuclear black market and recognized the pellets as possibly enriched uranium, so he called his captain, who called the commissioner, who instructed them to call Homeland Security and the FBI. Enter Jeff, who, in Robert’s version of events, told Robert to hide the box about five seconds after saying, “Hello, my name is Jeff Dunbar.” So that’s what Robert did.
“Give it a rest, Ben,” he said, after I asked him for the third time where the box was stashed.
“Fine,” I said, knowing full well there would be a fourth time.
“So what’s our move?”
“Get to Irene’s, lay low, and wait to see what Sergei can turn up.”
