“Cab. I switched twice. There was no one on me.”
“Good.” He turned and held out his hand. “Where is it?”
“Slow down.” I walked over to the dresser mirror and glanced at his notes, mostly names and phone numbers. They looked like contacts. When he saw me perusing them, he scurried over and barged in between the mirror and me.
“How did you get my name?” he asked, snatching the contacts off the mirror, one by one.
“I’m an investigator. I investigated. Do you have the video?”
He pulled a flash drive from his pocket and held it up. “Here’s what you want. Where’s mine?”
I took the drive, slung my backpack around, unzipped it, and pulled out my laptop.
“What are you doing?”
“Do you expect me to just believe you?” I sat on the unmade bed and turned on the computer. “I’m going to watch it.”
He put his hands on his hips, apparently incensed that I didn’t just take the word of an investigative journalist. “Are you sure that unit will even read this drive?”
“If it doesn’t, we have a problem. You’re not getting the 809 list until I’m convinced I’m getting what I need.”
His mouth crimped around the edges. It actually made him look prim, which I knew he wasn’t. He went over and flung himself into the hotel’s one seating surface that wasn’t a bed-a chair in the corner.
“Tell me where you got this,” I said, waiting for my programs to load.
“I told you, I copied it from the laptop that belonged to Roger Fratello, then erased it from the hard drive. As long as that was the only one, this is now the only one.”
“Where is the laptop?”
“I’m not saying.”
That was a problem. I had been around Felix long enough to know that just erasing a file didn’t really kill it. But I was hoping that Roger being dead might buy me some time on full eradication. Theoretically, no one would be looking for the video but me.
I pulled up Explorer while he bounced up and down…checked the window…wound his watch…went to the sink to throw cold water on his face… He had a point about the software thing. If my machine couldn’t recognize the drive, I had problems. I opened the small device, inserted it into the USB port, held my breath, and…nothing happened.
Shit.
I sat for a moment, considering the options. I could go online and search for the necessary software and download it, but I had never tried to access the Internet in France. I got out my cell phone and started to dial my best option.
Kraft rushed over. “What are you doing?”
“It doesn’t work. I’ll have to go to plan B.”
“Forget that.” He ripped the drive from the port. Arrogant prick. Time for a bluff. I signed off, closed down, and started packing to go.
“Wait a minute. I delivered. You owe me that contact list.”
“If I can’t verify that you delivered, I can’t give you the list. Sorry.”
“Just…just slow the fuck down here.” He put his hands on either side of his head as he paced around the small room, eyes to the ceiling. He looked as if steam might start issuing from his ears at any second. “Okay, stop. Let’s just stop right here.” I hadn’t even moved off the bed. He had a way of saying things to me that mostly applied to him. “What can I do to convince you?”
I thought about that. Maybe he was onto something. I spied an unopened bag of pretzels on the dresser. Except for breakfast a few hours earlier, I hadn’t eaten much in the past few days. “Can I have those?”
“They’re stale. Here…” Suddenly very accommodating, he went over to a Styrofoam cooler on the floor, pulled out a full-size bag, the kind you get at the grocery store, and tossed it over. His generosity, though, seemed to go only as far as snack goods, because, when he went in again, he came out with only one bottle of beer. I would have berated him, but I didn’t need to be drinking anyway.
The plastic wrapping on the pretzels was still cold from being stored in the cooler. I opened the bag and stuffed a few of the salty delights into my mouth.
“Where did you get Roger’s laptop?”
“Bought it from a kid with a goat.”
“Where?”
“Afghanistan. What is this? Twenty questions?”
“This is plan C. I need to know more about Blackthorne. You seem to know about them, so let’s talk for a while and see if we can find some common ground.” If I was right about Max Kraft, Investigative Journalist, he was itching to tell someone his story.
He twisted the cap off the bottle and took a swig, then moved back to the chair, set the bottle on the little, round, fake-wood-grain table next to it, and seemed to settle in.
“The story of a lifetime cost me fifty bucks and an Elton John CD.” He savored the thought, much like he savored his cold beer.
“What’s the story?”
“I won’t tell you that.”
“It’s Blackthorne, isn’t it? Something about the private army? The CIA? Stephen Hoffmeyer.” I threw everything out there. Something had to stick, and I knew I was on the right track. The last guy I’d seen nervous enough to be peeking through the curtains was Lyle Burquart.
“I don’t think you need to know. You don’t want to know.”
“How did you know the computers were in Zormat?”
He squeezed one eye shut and looked at me with the other. “I never said Zormat.”
“You haven’t mentioned Salanna 809, either. But I know that’s where you got the machine, from the hijacking victims’ stuff in Zormat. Roger Fratello was on that flight as Gilbert Bernays, who seems to be dead. That’s how his computer got into the closet.”
He stared at me, seemingly confused about whether to view me as a threat or a source. “The locals got into the house before the CIA ever showed up. They stripped it clean. My contacts got word to me. I have a lot of contacts. I went there, I checked out the merchandise, and I bought it.”
“Just Roger’s?”
“No comment.”
That meant there were more, and he had them. “One of the hostages said Roger claimed to have a billion dollars on his laptop.”
“A billion dollars? What, are you kidding?”
“It’s what I heard.” I got out my notebook and flipped to the Frank pages. “He said Roger used the machine to try to ransom himself off, but he couldn’t access the money. Something was missing. Maybe a password?”
I looked up at him. This didn’t seem to be something he already knew about, which meant he was interested. “Where would he get a billion dollars? Is that what he embezzled from that…that-”
“Betelco. I don’t think so. Roger told this other hostage he’d stolen it off a dead Russian, the one on the video.” I pointed to the drive he’d ripped from my machine. It was still in his fist. He looked at it.
“The one Rachel killed.”
“Yeah. I know that she took cash belonging to Vladi.” She and Harvey had pulled it from the trunk of the car. “It ended up in a safety deposit box in Brussels. So far, she hasn’t mentioned any billion-dollar computer.” That she hadn’t mentioned it, of course, did not preclude the fact that she knew about it.
He held up the drive. “This video came off a machine belonging to Roger Fratello. It had an e-mail program, a bunch of files with memos and business-related stuff he wrote. I didn’t see anything that looked like a billion dollars, and I looked all through it. It was one of the few I didn’t need a translator for.”
I leaned back on the bed, bracing myself with my arms behind me. “I wonder what it would look like. What do you think? Secret accounts? Treasure map?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably it. A treasure map. Yo-ho-ho.”
“Whatever it was,” I said, “I don’t think Roger could get to it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Think about it. A computer has something on it worth a billion dollars. Wouldn’t you encrypt it or protect it somehow, just in case someone boosted it? And whatever that protection was-the password or the code or the key-wouldn’t you be likely to keep that on you?”