He went back to the room the man had been guarding and opened the door. Volkov walked fast, like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why he was there.
Diamant was sitting at a desk, listening to Rachmaninoff. Volkov couldn’t help but silently approve of the choice and almost — almost — felt bad to kill a man of such surpassing good taste. The composer represented all that was great about the culture of Volkov’s motherland.
Diamant’s gaze lifted as Volkov drew near.
“Mr. Diamant, I’m Officer Gregor Volkov,” he said, not bothering to come up with a different name. At least it would help explain the Russian accent.
“What can I do for you, Officer?” Diamant asked. He looked weary, confused. This was to Volkov’s advantage. So was Volkov’s own obvious disfigurement. He saw Diamant fixate briefly on his eye patch and facial scars, but then Diamant quickly looked away. Like many people, Diamant was too polite to stare.
“We’ve set up our temporary morgue about a mile down the road,” he said. “We’ve got the first of the assailants down there now. It would help us a lot if you would come down and take a look at him.”
“But the inspector already showed me pictures. I told him: I don’t know any of them.”
“I’m aware of that,” Volkov lied smoothly. “But sometimes seeing a body in the flesh can change that. Maybe you’ll notice a tattoo that looks familiar.”
“Can’t… can’t it wait? I’m not sure I—”
“The inspector says time is important,” Volkov said. “Maybe you know the perps, maybe you don’t. To be honest, sir, I’m just trying to follow orders. And the inspector said to bring you down to the temporary morgue.”
Diamant shook his head but said, “Very well.”
The banker obediently followed Volkov out of the main house and into the driveway. This was the last part Volkov worried about — he had car keys in his pocket, but he didn’t know which vehicle they belonged to. He slid them out, pressed the unlock button on the key fob, and hoped it made something happen. He didn’t want to have to hit the alarm button.
After a brief delay, the lights on one of the patrol cars quickly flashed. Volkov allowed himself a quick, smug smile as he opened the back door for Diamant. Once inside, the man would have no way of escaping. Cop cars were good that way.
“I greatly appreciate your cooperation, sir,” Volkov said.
“Oh, and I must say, that’s a nice manicure you have.”
He closed the door. The fifth MonEx code would soon be his. Then he would hire a new team — which was never hard for a man with Volkov’s connections — and go after the final name on his list.
In some ways, it was the most important. It was the one in New York, after all.
It was to the consternation of the South African Police Service inspector approximately two hours later when someone finally realized that the young constable who had been sent to the northwest corner of the property had not reported back in some time.
The inspector tried to reach the constable on the radio and failed. Then someone noticed his patrol car was missing.
They put out a bulletin for the car, thinking it was a weird act of insubordination on the part of a young officer who had inexplicably bailed on an important crime scene. Didn’t he know better?
Then a member of Diamant’s security forces went to relieve the man standing guard outside of the banker’s office and found only an empty chair. He knocked on the door and got no answer. He went inside the office. Diamant was not there.
Nor was he in the bedroom. Nor the kitchen. Nor, seemingly, anywhere else inside the house or on the grounds.
The private security guard took the news of Diamant’s disappearance to the inspector, who was already trying to make sense of his officer going AWOL.
Sometime later, off a little-used road, the rear bumper of a police patrol car was spotted half-sunk in a swamp. Sometime after that, around sunrise, the officer’s body was encountered slumped against the tree trunk on Diamant’s property. The security guard with the snapped neck was found in the closet within the hour.
And then, the terrible discovery by a child on his way to schooclass="underline" a corpse that had been secured with police handcuffs to a jackalberry tree. The body was missing all the fingernails on its right hand. It was quickly identified as the body of Jeff Diamant of Standard Rand Bank.
It took another hour or so for the authorities to unravel the whole mystery, and another hour or so beyond that for the thing to be put in the Interpol computer. From there, the flags went up. Interpol performed its notification protocol quickly.
Jedediah Jones got the call around 5 A.M. East Coast time, just as he was coming in from his daily run. Jones waited until a slightly more decent hour to call Derrick Storm and tell him the fifth banker was now dead. They had already put out the necessary bulletins for Gregor Volkov, but it was redundant. He was already on every Do Not Fly and Most Wanted list across the world. And yet he had once again disappeared into the mist.
CHAPTER 18
AMES, Iowa
he circles under his puffy eyes were dark enough to stand out under the John Lennon glasses. The coffee cup next to him practically had scorch marks from being refilled so often. There was a slight shake to his mouse hand.
If Rodney Click looked like he had been up all night, it was no accident. He had been.
Derrick Storm had not slept much either, albeit for a different reason. But eventually he got that reason — Ling Xi Bang — on the first flight out of Ames, heading for Des Moines and ultimately Washington, D.C. It was around 9 A.M. when Storm walked into Click’s tiny office.
Storm wasn’t sure he had ever seen such a large man so close to tears. He was mumbling to himself, making little sense to Storm, whose mathematical education ended with Mrs. Beauregard’s twelfth-grade calculus class. Click’s speech was spiked with phrases like “inputs are just too variable” and “not enough firm data points” and “can’t determine the effective calculability” and a whole lot of other things Storm couldn’t even parse. It sounded like a mathematician’s brain had been split open and was now randomly spilling nonsense.
Storm went around behind the distraught man, put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke in the calm tone of a first-grade teacher.
“Doctor,” Storm said. “Could you maybe tell me what the problem is… in English?”
“I just can’t… I can’t get the algorithm to give me anything,” Click said. “Or at least not anything that I would consider reliable. Put simply, the ISSMDM is designed to only go one direction. You tell it what trades you’ve made, where you’ve made them and by whom, and it predicts the result of that trade on relative currency values. I’ve spent four years perfecting its function, but I’ve never once tried to make it go the other way — taking a result and then backtracking to the potential source. I thought yesterday I could do it with a few simple modifications, but now…”
And then he launched on a long description of what he had tried to do, the vast majority of which was totally inexplicable. Storm listened — sometimes, he had learned, it was important to make people feel heard, whether you actually understood them or not. He made all the right active listening sounds. When he was sure Click was done, Storm patted the man’s shoulder again. He walked around to the other side of the desk, then sat down. An idea was coming to him. He looked at the books lining the walls, out the narrow window to the campus below, then back at the man-mountain of an assistant professor.
“What if we started in a different place?” Storm said. “You’re asking your model to do a lot of hard work, but in this case, there’s a bad guy who has already done a lot of the work for us. Five-sixths of it, to be exact. We already know who five of the victims are.”