The Pandora Key (36 page)

Kraft was on the couch, hands and feet still tied. He looked like a big cat with his face in a throw pillow, trying, no doubt, to keep his eyes from dripping out of his head.

Our anonymous rescuer was standing over Thorne, who was unconscious in a heap on the floor.

“Is he dead?”

He shook his head.

I raised the weapon and took aim. “Put your hands up and turn around.”

He didn’t say anything, but then he had a gas mask on.

“Do
it.”

He did. I stepped forward and took the semiautomatic sticking out of his waistband. I popped out the mag, and it dropped to the floor. I tossed the empty pistol onto a chair. I searched him and took away everything he had scavenged off Tatiana’s body and threw it onto the chair, hoping he didn’t notice my clammy, sweaty palms. Then I took a step back. “Take off your mask.”

He did that and turned around. He seemed familiar, though there was no reason he would. I had never seen his picture. No one had.

“Mr. Hoffmeyer, I presume?”

38

IT WAS BEGINNING TO DAWN ON ME THAT BLAND WAS THE look of choice for spies, and Stephen Hoffmeyer, or whatever his name was, was no exception. He had on a white open-collared shirt, tan pants, and a well-used black leather jacket. Everything else about him was average. Sandy hair, blue eyes, average build. I didn’t know if I could pick him out of a lineup, and I was looking right at him. He did have a nice tan.

“Stay cool,” he said. “I didn’t come here to do harm.”

“What did you come here to do?”

“You have something I need. I have something you need. I came to do business.”

“Take off your jacket.”

He shrugged the leather jacket from his shoulders and let it slide down his arms. In one smooth move, he caught it in his right hand and offered it to me.

“Drop it on the floor, get down on your knees, and put your hands back on your head.”

Harvey appeared in the doorway. He had made his way down the hall, using the kitchen chair as a walker.

“What is this?” He looked, as I probably did, as if he’d been weeping for a week. “What is happening? Who is this man?”

“This is Hoffmeyer.”

“How do you know?” With one arm, I helped him to his wheelchair.

“It’s the only person it could be. Isn’t that right, Kraft?”

Kraft didn’t bother to answer. He had managed to get himself to a sitting position. I had no reason to untie him. For the moment, I had enough balls in the air.

“Check this.” I picked up Hoffmeyer’s jacket and laid it across Harvey’s lap. Hoffmeyer didn’t move, but something told me he was humoring me, letting me keep him under control. I stepped back and positioned myself so I could watch both him and the doorway.

Harvey pulled a long, flat wallet from the pile of leather and opened it. Without his glasses, he had to hold it at arm’s length to head it. “Joseph Hildebrandt of Tucson, Arizona.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked him. “Don’t say Arizona.”

“Check my bag.” He nodded to a black gym bag on the floor near the door.

I went over and got it and put it on Harvey’s lap. “Take a look.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Take out the Mylar envelope,” he said, “and open it.”

Harvey reached in and pulled out a silver bag. It rustled and crinkled as he handled it. Then he opened it and pulled out a hard-drive unit that looked as if it would slide right into the computer Kraft had brought us.

“That’s the lock,” he said. “All I need is the key.”

Vladi’s laptop was still on the coffee table. It had been powered down and unplugged. Thorne or Red must have been packing it up to go.

I looked at Hoffmeyer, still on his knees in the center of the room. “What happened to Red?”

“Was he the second man down the stairs?”

“Yeah, he must have been.”

“I broke his neck.”

If he was psychologically scarred by having done it, he hid it well. That made two dead in the basement—Tatiana and Red—and Cyrus, still breathing but not moving, next to Hoffmeyer. Dead bodies…spies…tear gas…How would we explain all this? I couldn’t think about it. I had to think about what was right in front of me.

“Let me have the drive, Harvey.”

He gave it to me, and I went to the couch and sat down. Kraft must have felt the shift. “Cut these goddamn things off of me.” He was fighting the cuffs, which only made it worse for him. “My eyes are killing me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Hang on for just a few more minutes.”

“Goddammit. You are such an amateur.”

It was so tempting to reach over and smack him across the face, but it would have been bad form to do that to a man with his hands tied behind him.

I had never swapped out a hard drive before, though I had watched Felix do it once. To get to it, I would have to take apart the laptop’s housing.

“Harvey, I need you to go to your desk and get a—”

“Phillips-head screwdriver?” Hoffmeyer was still down on his knees with his hands on his head. “I’ve got everything you need in my gear.”

“Where’s your gear?”

He pointed to a corner, where a black backpack was nestled in a basket of magazines. He must have tossed it there in the heat of the moment. Harvey had maneuvered his chair closer to the couch. I checked with him for his input. “He did save us,” he said. “In rather dramatic fashion.”

He had also killed two people in rather dramatic fashion. Had he wanted us dead, though, he could have waited five more minutes, and Tatiana would have done the job for him.

“Okay. Go ahead.”

Hoffmeyer stood up and took a moment to shake out his left shoulder. He kept rotating it as he stepped over Thorne. He brought the pack over and dug around until he found something that looked like a manicure case. He unzipped it, and it turned out to be a case full of small tools, one of which was exactly the one I needed. He extracted it and handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. What do you want to do about Cy?” Thorne had begun to stir.

My nose and my eyes were still running, causing the scene to go blurry every few minutes. I used the sleeve of my shirt to dry my eyes.

“How about if I cuff him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s good.”

He went off to do that, and Kraft started agitating again, albeit with his eyes squeezed shut. “What about me? You trust him and not me? He wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me.”

I watched Hoffmeyer tie up Thorne. He was efficient but almost deferential as he lifted him to a sitting position against the side chair where I had been tied up. He was a hard guy to figure out. I didn’t want to use my last brain cells trying. He dragged over a chair and sat, letting out a big sigh as he did.

“I’m getting too old for this.”

I wasn’t afraid of him. I wasn’t really afraid of Kraft, either. Hoffmeyer had a lock blade in his pack. I borrowed it and cut Kraft’s restraints. He got up and stumbled out of the room, presumably in search of water for his face.

Hoffmeyer sat across from me, staring coolly back. The laptop was on the low table between us. I had that feeling again that I was in charge only because he permitted it. “Who are you, really? Why are you here?”

“You can call me Hoffmeyer. I’m here for the money.”

“Drazen’s money?”

“I think of it more as my money.”

That was the straightest answer I’d gotten from anyone since the whole thing had begun. “Where did you get the hard drive?”

“From Kraft. We’ve spent a lot of time together. We’re collaborating on a book about Blackthorne. Political exposés are hot now. I think we have a shot at getting published.”

“So I heard.” I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely excited or being ironic. Either way, things just kept getting more surreal.

“Anyway, I swapped it out one night when Max was asleep.”

“You did what?” Kraft had found his way back. He was standing in the doorway, dabbing at his eyes with the same damp towel I’d given Harvey. I knew it was the tear gas, but he looked as though he were crying over the betrayal.

“I’m sorry, man. I couldn’t let you carry that thing around with you. It wasn’t safe. I knew Cy was around. Then you told me about the Russian. I copied over all your stuff.”

“You told me you didn’t know what was on it.”

“Yeah, I lied. Roger told me what was on it while we were on the plane.”

“Roger Fratello?” I asked. “You knew him as Roger and not Gilbert Bernays?”

“He told me his real name. He told me everything.” He sat back and rubbed his left shoulder, which was clearly bothering him. “Those are the kinds of things you share when you’re hostages together. No matter how positive you try to be, you don’t really know how much time you have left. Lies become meaningless. Artifice slips away.” He shook his head. “Roger caught a bad break.”

“Roger made his own bad breaks.” I had no sympathy for him. “He was an embezzler. According to the FBI, he was also responsible for the murder of an FBI agent. He told Drazen the guy was working undercover, and Drazen murdered him.”

Hoffmeyer nodded. “I believe that he did feel some remorse over that. He said the Russian scared him. He was looking for a way out of town. That was the biggest chip he had to bargain with.” He nodded and smiled at Kraft, who had reclaimed his spot on the couch next to me. “This is going to be a great story, man.”

“Pulitzer Prize, baby. I’m telling you.
Oprah, Larry King, Today
show…well, me, not you. But we can’t miss with this.”

“Could we hold off on the victory parade for a few minutes?” I said. I looked at Hoffmeyer, who seemed far more interested in the money than in Oprah. “How did you know the drive needed a key? Did Roger know about that?”

“Roger couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get to the files. He didn’t know anything about hardware encryption, but I did. I told him he needed a token. That was disappointing for him.”

“I’m sure it was.”

Harvey weighed in from the wheelchair. “Can we please begin at the beginning? I am deeply confused.”

Hoffmeyer leaned forward and tapped the laptop’s monitor. “Find the money. Nothing happens here until you do.” He was perfectly polite, but with a titanium edge underneath. Maybe that impression came from having watched him kill Tatiana.

“You can’t take this money.” I was confused about a lot of things as well, but not about that. “Drazen will kill us if we don’t return it to him.”

“Find it first. Then we’ll talk about how to handle Drazen.”

He seemed so confident and reasonable and in charge, it was hard not to just follow along. Again, I looked to Harvey.

“One way or another,” he said, “we need to know what is on the drive, do we not?”

39

I SWAPPED THE TWO HARD DRIVES WITHOUT ANY COMPLICATIONS. Harvey, Hoffmeyer, and Kraft watched closely as I did it. Kraft plugged in the auxiliary battery Tatiana had bought, and they all continued the vigil as I turned it on. When it got to the point where the operating system was supposed to load, everything stopped. The token was still on the table. I fit it into the slot and pushed. When it engaged, the system began to load. It was so quiet in the room, all I could hear was the low whistle in Harvey’s breathing and the sound of the computer at work.

The system loaded, and when it got to the next screen, I looked over at Harvey and smiled. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Harvey never lied, and Rachel had, in fact, held back one last secret. “What’s the password?”

“Yaryna.” He spelled it for me.

“Who is that, Vladi’s girlfriend?”

“His mother.” An idea that carried its own special meaning, given that his brother had shot her to death.

When the computer was ready to go, it looked like any other used by every other schlub in the world who used Windows. This one ran Windows 2000. It had a desktop screen with icons and not a single clue to what might lie beneath its bland exterior.

I started working through the directory. All the files had cryptic names like 104bkl2sign. There were columns of them, one after another. I didn’t know what I was looking for, so it would be hard to know if I’d found it. What would the financial files look like? Would the information be in code? I scavenged around in the cyber-haystack, clicking files randomly, hoping one would be the needle. I gave up and went to the search function.

“Harvey, if you were putting together a map to a financial fortune, what would it look like?”

“It would have the names of banks, the addresses, the names and numbers of contacts at those banks. It would have account numbers and passwords. Unless the money is all in cash, it would have a list of investment interests and investment vehicles.”

“Bearer bonds? Like that?” I typed in “bearer bonds” and hit enter. Nothing. I tried “serial number.” A list of files came up. That was a hopeful sign. I started opening them. They were Excel documents, spreadsheets with exactly the information Harvey had described. Locations, account numbers, passwords, and, best of all, balances.

“I found it.” Everyone knew that, because they were clustered around behind me watching the screen, but I had to say it anyway. I couldn’t help but feel excited.

“Well done,” Harvey said.

Hoffmeyer tapped me on the shoulder. He wanted to cut in. We switched places. He emptied a bag on the desk next to the machine and went to work. There was a three-and-a-half-inch disk, what felt like a relic now. There were a couple of jewel boxes for CDs and what looked like a load of different kinds of adapters and batteries. He had come prepared to attack that machine in whatever way necessary. As it turned out, it had a USB port, so all he needed was a flash drive. He had several and the software to make the computer recognize it. I could have used it in Paris.

He started to close all the files I’d opened but paused on the last one. He produced a notepad and a pencil and copied down three random account numbers with passwords and contact information. He tore off the page and passed it to Harvey.

“Would you mind checking these accounts? I’d like to make sure it’s all there.”

I found the cordless phone and gave it to Harvey. God only knew where all the cell phones had gone to. Hoffmeyer was copying the files to the flash drive. About ten minutes passed as he worked through all the files. He typed quickly and clearly knew his way around a computer.