Blood Trust (54 page)

“All of what?”

“Everything that’s happened.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“On the contrary,” Annika said, appearing as if out of nowhere, “he knows precisely what he’s talking about.”

“You!” Carson goggled at her. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You don’t give a shit about your niece,” Annika said. “What you can’t forgive Jack for is meddling in your little scheme.”

“And I would’ve gotten away with it,” Carson snapped. He turned to Jack. “Your meddling cost me everything.”

“You’re the one who hired John Pawnhill,” Jack pointed out. “And Pawnhill was working with the Syrian, bringing over Xhafa’s girls and selling them at the Stem.”

This seemed to surprise Carson. He was silent for some time. He looked deflated. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, all the belligerence drained from it. “I was just trying to do the right thing.” He glanced away for a moment. “Just after Eddy was elected, I learned of a plot to assassinate him. The man behind the plot was the Syrian.

“In the absence of more information on the attempt itself, I decided that the best course of action was to go after the Syrian’s infrastructure. Someone at my bank suggested we look at other, smaller banks, to see if the Syrian was using them to move money around. I knew that if we could intervene there, we could shut down his financial system.

“I was directed to a company called Safe Banking Systems, because their antiterrorist software is the best in the business. They identified Middle Bay, but couldn’t get any farther because no one knows the Syrian’s real name or his aliases, so he isn’t on any PEP list. Then Eddy was killed and I was devastated. Directly after Arlen was sworn in, I went to him and told him about the plot. Together, we decided to go after the Syrian. I decided to buy Middle Bay. This way, I could find out just how the Syrian was using the bank, and once I knew that, I could control him.”

“So Crawford intervened and fast-tracked the buyout through the regulatory process.”

Carson nodded. “Time was of the essence.” His shoulders slumped. “But somehow the Syrian got wind of what I was doing. Pawnhill has a rep for being the best international forensic accountant in the business, but he must be working for the Syrian. Pawnhill destroyed all the records of the Syrian’s accounts and transactions.”

“Maybe not all. Billy Warren stumbled across the transactions and made copies.”

Paull frowned. “Pawnhill found his copy and destroyed it.”

“I think our clever little Billy made more than one copy.” Jack turned to Alli. “Remember when I asked you about Billy you said he was a closet neo-Luddite?”

Alli nodded. “Sure. He thought computer data was too insecure. He said, ‘Give me a pen and a sheet of paper any day.’”

Jack nodded. “That’s why I think he stashed a hard copy of the Syrian’s account data.”

*   *   *

J
ACK WENT
through Billy Warren’s apartment more or less as John Pawnhill had done earlier, except he knew what he was looking for. Alli, Annika, Carson, and Paull watched him, Carson still with a fair degree of skepticism.

At length, Jack returned to the living room and looked more closely at everything. Then he went to the lacquer cabinet that held the books, stereo, CDs, and the like, and took down the first of the two large albums. This one held photos of Billy’s life. After paging through it to the end, Jack put it back and took out the second. Writing on a page.

Jack calmed his mind, gradually stopped the spinning of the whirlpool, reducing it to lines of text. Haltingly at first, then more easily, he read the title page of Billy’s graduate school thesis. The first ten pages were more difficult because there were twenty-two lines of type filling each page. Jack skimmed, struggling.

Then he turned to the eleventh page. It was totally different, and so were the next fifty pages. Pages and pages of numbers, six columns to a page. These were the Syrian’s account transactions from Middle Bay Bancorp.

Jack looked up and handed the album to Carson. “I believe this belongs to you.”

EPILOGUE

A
LLI RETURNED
to Fearington Academy after dinnertime. She had spent the afternoon and early evening being debriefed by Paull, Alan Fraine, and Nona Heroe. Then she had dinner with Jack and Annika at her favorite restaurant in D.C. Liridona and Edon were still with Dennis Paull, recounting in incriminating detail all they knew about Arian Xhafa’s business. Paull had promised Alli that he would set the sisters up in an apartment and see they got jobs. Alli was determined to see them as often as she could.

She was sitting on her bed listening to Inbar Bakal’s gorgeous, ululating vocals when Vera walked in. The moment Vera saw her, she stood stock still. Alli took her earbuds out.

“No one told me you were back.”

Alli stared at her. “I know what you did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you dosed yourself with the roofies.”

Vera looked over her shoulder as if she expected the police to be coming out of the shadows in the hallway. Then she stepped into the room.

“I should report you.”

Vera seemed mesmerized by her as she sat down on her own bed. “Why haven’t you?”

Alli shrugged, put her earbuds in, and lay down on her bed, her iPod between her breasts.

Vera stayed that way for a very long time. Then she came and sat on the edge of Alli’s bed. After a moment, Alli stopped the music and freed her ears.

“I hated you from the moment we became roommates.”

“You didn’t hate me,” Alli said, “you envied me.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

Alli laughed softly. “Maybe for you it is.”

It seemed to Alli that Vera’s ultrahard shell had begun to crack. She watched curiously as Vera stared down at her hands.

“The truth is…”

Vera wiped her palms down her thighs. Could she be nervous? Alli wondered. That would be a first. She concentrated all her energy on this woman.

“The truth is,” Vera began again, “except for hate, or maybe, like you said, envy, I don’t feel much of anything.”

“Join the club.”

Vera’s head snapped up and she scrutinized Alli’s face, possibly to see if Alli was making fun of her. But quite quickly she saw that Alli was serious.

Vera gave a little cry that was a half sob. “How I hate being numb!”

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“But what can we do about it?”

Alli sat up. “The only thing we can do, I guess. Talk about it.”

*   *   *

A
NNIKA
,
NAKED
, her long, heart-stopping legs dangling over the side, sat on the bed in Jack’s old, rambling house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue. She was bent over while he traced his fingertips gently down the vertical scars on her back.

Jack thought about Edon’s ordeal at Arian Xhafa’s hands, and then immediately turned his mind away from gruesome matters.

“That’s important only to you.”

She sighed deeply and, turning around, slipped into his arms. “Do you think it will ever be possible for us to be a real family?”

“If we want it, Annika, then we’ll have it.”

The question he left unsaid was: Do both of us really want it?

“Until I met Alli, I never thought about having children,” Annika said.

“You wish Alli was your daughter.”

She pulled back a little to peer into his eyes. “Is that so terrible a desire?”

“Not at all.” He ran a hand down her cheek. “On the other hand, I don’t see you changing diapers.”

She put her head down, resting her forehead on his shoulder. “That’s not so terrible, either.”

“What’s wonderful is the love Alli has awakened in you.”

“My mother loved very deeply—and you know what happened to her.”

Jack did. She had taken her life after Annika’s exceedingly powerful father had kidnapped Annika at the age of four.

“You’re not your mother, Annika. She was weak; you are anything but.”

She was silent for some time. He could feel her heart beating in her chest, could imagine her blood coursing through her veins and arteries.

“Annika,” he said softly, “this isn’t what you want to be talking about.”

She remained silent, but connected to him in the most intimate, visceral way.

“What is it you want to ask me?”

She stirred at last, as if from a dream. “Nothing.” She kissed him warmly on the lips. “Nothing at all.”

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

Safe Banking Systems does, in fact, exist. Located in Mineola, New York, SBS provides the financial services industry with software solutions that combat money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, and other criminal activity. SBS has the unique capability to find the “bad guys” by uncovering hidden risk and identifying the “six degrees of separation” between disparate individuals and entities.

SBS’s public service report, issued in June 2009, identified terrorists and drug kingpins with valid FAA licenses, including the infamous PanAm Lockerbie bombers. When this story broke in
The New York Times,
six FAA licenses were revoked within twenty-four hours, but not without some embarrassment in Washington, D.C. The story resonated in the halls of Congress and received national media attention. How this relatively small, privately owned company could find a serious threat to U.S. national security that went undetected by the government agencies mandated to do so generated much interest. David and Mark Schiffer, the principals of SBS, were invited to meet with the chief counsels and their investigative teams at both the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee and U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. As a result, there was an official mandate for improvements to the vetting process and interagency cooperation between the FAA and TSA. The inspector general’s office also contacted SBS during its investigation of the vetting process. The IG’s report has not been made public yet.

In October 2010,
The Enterprise Report
published a three-part exclusive article on Viktor Bout, the alleged notorious worldwide arms dealer currently under arrest in Thailand. SBS’s data mining and analysis determined that Bout may hold a private pilot’s license issued to him by the FAA in 1993. SBS also identified seven key associates and participants in Bout’s aviation cargo transportation businesses.

B
Y
E
RIC
V
AN
L
USTBADER

THE
JACK
M
C
CLURE
/
ALLI
CARSON
NOVELS

First Daughter
(2008)

Last Snow
(2010)

Blood Trust
(2011)

THE
PEARL
SAGA

The Ring of Five Dragons
(2001)

The Veil of a Thousand Tears
(2002)

Mistress of the Pearl
(2004)

THE
SUNSET
WARRIOR
CYCLE

The Sunset Warrior
(1977)

Shallows of Night
(1978)

Dai-San
(1978)

Beneath an Opal Moon
(1980)

Dragons on the Sea of Night
(1997)

THE
CHINA
MAROC
SERIES

Jian
(1986)

Shan
(1988)

THE
NICHOLAS
LINNEAR
/
NINJA
CYCLE

The Ninja
(1980)

The Miko
(1984)

White Ninja
(1990)