“Ohhh, bullshit, Harry. He’s not going to-”
“I’ll let him know where to go. He plugs in there and gets another e-mail message.”
“This is stupid.”
“It’s the only way I’ll do it.”
“Okay, so you do a treasure hunt. Then what?”
“When I know he’s clean, I’ll give him the meeting place.”
“Then?”
“I’ll bring everything in a briefcase. The CDs with all the accounts, detailed instructions about transferring them…”
Howard started to laugh. “Jeee-zus. He said you’d do that, that you’d say you’d give him the instructions. Wow.” He took a drink. “Well, Schrade says go fuck yourself.”
Strand waited.
“You told me this morning that the transactions could be done in minutes. Schrade says, fine, then you do them in minutes, right there. The two of you. When his people tell him he’s got the money, then he’s got the money.”
Strand waited again. He couldn’t relent too easily, he couldn’t say, “Fine, it’s a deal,” just like that.
“I don’t know…”
“Okay, you’re so damn fond of giving ultimatums, here’s one for you to deal with: You do it right there, in front of Schrade, or you forget it. Period.”
Silence. Finally Strand said, “Okay. We’ll do it right there.”
Howard laughed again. “You really did a hard ass negotiation on that one, Harry. You drove me right down to the wire, up against the wall, made me sweat.”
Howard was feeling cocky.
“But this is going to cause a delay.”
Howard tried to hold his grin, as if Strand’s last remark were of no consequence. “Oh, a delay. Why’s that?”
“If I’m going to move that kind of money electronically, in just a few minutes, I’ll have to give written notification signed in the presence of a designated bank officer that on a certain date, at a certain hour, I’ll be making these transfers by wire. They’re not going to do it just because they get a computer message that says I want them to do it. Even if I give authorized code numbers. I’ll have to make arrangements ahead of time, and I’ll have to do it in person, face-to-face.”
“You told me minutes.”
“That was if I handed over everything to Schrade. I would’ve had time to do that. But if you want it done this way, you’ve got to give me time to arrange it.”
Howard studied him. He was trying hard not to let his exasperation show. “How long?”
“The money’s in six banks in six different countries. It’s going to take me a day and a half-minimum-to fly to each of them, get the authorization, and move on to the next. That’s nine days. Banks are closed weekends.” He fixed his eyes on Howard. “Two weeks.”
Howard couldn’t argue. He really had no choice. “I’ve got to go back to Schrade with this.”
“Fine.”
“Let’s agree, right now, when and where.”
Strand nodded. He let his eyes slip to the side as if making mental calculations.
“Okay. Zurich. Two weeks from today. I’ll use your e-mail address to notify you of the exact time and location.”
“That’s it, then,” Howard said.
“That’s it.”
Howard downed the last of his gin. He had to recover. Strand could see his mind working. Howard was over the hill, even worse than Strand. He screwed up as much testosterone as he could muster for one closing gesture of bravado. He smiled thinly.
“You know what, Harry?” Howard said, his voice low, his tone almost pensive. “All these years, I thought you were better than average as an officer. Not the best by a long shot, but a good bit better than average.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “But I would never have guessed that you had the brains-or the stomach-for something like this. Never.”
Strand had nothing to say to that. What Howard had or had not thought about him all those years was of no interest to him in the least. Everything he cared about now was in front of him. Everything behind him was dead and gone.
Strand looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and raised his hand to get the waiter’s attention.
CHAPTER 46
As Strand rounded the corner to Chesterfield Hill the drizzle had turned to a drenching mist intermingled with a light fog, a concoction so thick you could almost reach out and grab a handful of it. He had walked all the way from the Guinea Grill, his collar turned up uselessly against the moisture. Leaning into the incline, he looked toward their town house. There was a soft glow behind the sheets over the bay window.
By the time he had climbed the stairs to the reception, Mara had heard him and was standing in the middle of the room, waiting. She had been sitting on the bed, drawing: she had left her sketchpad there, and a lamp was sitting on the floor beside the mattress.
Strand had taken off his raincoat as he came up, and without speaking she came over and took it from him and laid it over one end of the scaffolding. Then she turned around and faced him.
“Well?”
“It looks like Schrade’s willing to deal,” he said.
Mara gasped as if she had been holding her breath.
“But I had to make a quick decision that I hope will look as good tomorrow as it did tonight.”
“What?”
Strand sat on one of the paint buckets and started untying the laces of his waterlogged shoes.
“Schrade’s totally focused on getting this money back,” Strand said, tugging at one of the shoes. “Maybe it’s the most important thing in his life right now. And that’s the problem. We’ve got two parallel plans going here, and the first one was getting in the way of the second. First, we’re holding out the prospect of giving him the money to keep him at arm’s length, to keep him from coming after us. On the other hand, we’re trying to lure him to London. With the money exchange imminent, I was afraid Schrade wasn’t going to give a damn about the drawings. They can’t compete with six hundred million dollars. So I changed the date when I said I could deliver the money-two weeks.”
He tossed one shoe on the floor and started on the second one as he told Mara about the proposition he had given Howard.
“And Howard seemed to have the authority to accept it,” he concluded, “which he did.” He tossed the second shoe on the floor, took out his handkerchief, and began wiping the rain off his face.
Mara had sat on the scaffolding. “So,” she said, “the idea is that with the money transfer not a possibility for another two weeks, if Schrade gets a call from Knight in a few days saying he’s got this spectacular small collection he needs to look at, he’s more likely to fly over and look at it.”
“That’s the idea.”
Mara thought a moment. “Then as soon as the drawings get to Paris, we’ve got to pick them up immediately and get to Carrington Knight.”
“That’s right. And I’ve got some ideas about that, too. We’re going to have to be very good at approaching Knight.”
Strand looked at the lower legs of his soaked trousers. “Damn.”
“Where did you go the first time, Harry?”
There was no use pretending about this any longer. He waited a second and then looked at her.
“I went to buy a gun,” he said. “A special kind of gun, to kill Schrade.”
They stared at each other.
“Well,” Mara said, her voice flat, without inflection, “it’s a relief not to have to call it ‘the meeting’ any longer. Lying about it to each other, talking around it with euphemisms, made it even nastier.”
He looked at her. With the pale light coming from behind her, he knew she could see his eyes. But for him, her face was shadowed in the lee side of the light, and he could see nothing of her expression. He didn’t need to see her eyes to know she was disturbed.
“Harry, unless you’re withholding something very serious from me,” Mara said, and he could tell she was trying to control her voice, “you don’t have any training in this stuff, in operations.”
“I’ve never murdered anyone, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well… God… what are you thinking, Harry?”