The Searcher (4 page)

I
n a tiny, shabby room in the heavy stone headquarters of the City of London police Sander had been joined by one of her officers from the raid, a flushed young man in a gray suit who looked no more at home here than he had in Ikertu's offices. He was awkward; he couldn't look Hammer in the eye for longer than a moment. Perhaps he felt the absurdity of the charge. His shirt was a fraction too small, and he had the tree-trunk neck of someone who lifted weights, but next to Sander his manner was meek, making notes and saying little. She had confidence enough for both of them.

Since the raid, the look of fanaticism in her eyes had calmed to a sort of excited certainty—the eagerness of a fisherman who has landed a catch and is looking forward to gutting it. Hammer understood what she was feeling: the faintly sadistic thrill of knowing. You interrogated someone to catch them out, not to gather information, and he wouldn't be here if she wasn't sure she already had enough to make him squirm. Or worse. She could see her cards; his hadn't yet been dealt. It was possible that he would spend the night in this place, perhaps many nights. And while he talked, outside he would have no voice. Days might pass before he could explain himself, and tonight everyone in his office would go home without the least idea of what had just happened to them. The thought sat in his head like a canker.

Sander started the tape, gave the time, announced the people in the room. Her colleague was called Gibbons, apparently, but a gibbon was a quick, elegant creature and the name didn't suit him. From a folder of loose papers he took the first document and handed it to Sander, who slid it across
the table to Hammer, describing the action and the document number for the recording. Hibbert leaned in to look.

“Have you seen that document before, Mr. Hammer?”

Hammer glanced at Hibbert, who nodded.

“I have.”

“Would you describe it?”

“It's an invoice from Saber Risk Management to my company, Ikertu Limited.”

Risk management. The idea was laughable.

“In the amount of?”

“In the amount of ten thousand pounds.”

What an absurd English phrase that was.

“Is there any description on the invoice?”

“‘Payment for information services.' That's all it says.”

“And the date?”

“June the thirteenth.”

“Of this year?”

“Of this year.”

“Is there a reference on there?”

There was. And there really needn't have been. How could these idiots be so clever about some things and so stupid about others?

“Project Pearl.”

“Tell me about Project Pearl.”

If there were two cases Hammer would rather had never existed, this was one of them; the other was the marital surveillance he'd described to Rapp. His mistake had been different in each case, however. The first he shouldn't have taken. Project Pearl he should never have given to Ben.

He checked with Hibbert, and went ahead.

“Project Pearl was a dispute between Canadian Gold, our client, and a mining company called Mistral. Nasty outfit. They were having a fight.”

“A fight?”

“A lawsuit. Over a mine near Tashkent.”

“What was your job?”

“To understand Mistral. Put pressure on them.”

“To dig dirt.”

“No.” Hammer was firm. “More subtle than that. To see what they'd done before, if there was a pattern. Work out what would make them negotiate.”

“To dig dirt.”

Hammer knew she was trying to rile him, and that he shouldn't react. But at the same time it would be quicker and simpler for everyone if she stopped.

“Ms. Sander, if someone took something from you, would you just let them?”

“I'd leave it to the law.”

“This was Uzbekistan. There is no law.”

“Of course. You must like it there.”

He paused, watched her carefully, trying to work out where this animus was coming from. Chances were it was one of two things: she knew of colleagues who passed information to private eyes for cash, something Hammer liked as much as she did, or she resented the money to be made doing what he did. Or perhaps she was simply taking out a bad day on a reasonably substantial, reasonably rich suspect—a decent scalp. Probably he would have done the same.

“And Saber? What were these information services?”

“I don't know. I didn't engage them.”

Sander took a deep breath, eyebrow raised.

“Really? Who did?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you run the case?”

“Ben was the case manager.”

“Ben Webster?”

“Yes.”

“Who has left the company?”

“Yes.”

“But this was your case.”

“It's normal for me to delegate projects.”

“Is it normal for you to delegate responsibility as well?”

Hammer didn't answer, and for a moment he and Sander simply looked
at each other. He could feel pride rising in him, and outrage, and enclosing everything a keen frustration. She had him, and it was his fault.

“Why don't I tell you what Saber does, Mr. Hammer? Seeing as you don't know what your company's been paying them for.”

Sander sat back, crossed her legs, jutted her chin in readiness, eyes on his all the time.

“Saber Risk Management, Mr. Hammer, is two former Special Branch officers, one of whom specializes in computer crime. He used to investigate it, and now he commits it. What Saber did for you was hack into Mistral's network and suck out of it every e-mail they could find. Information from which ended up in the lawsuit your client filed a month later in a Toronto court. That's the kind of work Saber does. That's what they did for you.”

“My client can't be expected to comment on work done by another company,” said Hibbert.

“He can comment on what his company asked them to do.” Sander smiled her non-smile. “Mr. Hammer, if you help me now, maybe I'll feel more inclined to help you later on. If you decide to be clever, it makes it marginally harder for me and a lot harder for you. Do you understand?”

Hammer nodded, more in recognition than anything else. He had been waiting for the line. Sander went on.

“Your lawyer will tell you to say as little as possible. Not to give us anything to work with . . .”

“But at some point I have to cooperate and it might as well be now. I'll be helping myself. It always ends up in the same place. I know how it goes, Inspector. I've sat on that side of the desk. And you're right. It never does anyone any good to hold out. So I won't.”

Sander, registering the change in tone with the smallest of nods, pressed on.

“Ben Webster. Why did he leave?”

She was good, he had to concede. Hammer breathed deeply, thrummed his fingers on his leg. He'd been in his suit for far too long, and in this windowless, featureless room it felt as if the air was running out. With no hurry he took off his tie, rolled it neatly, placed it on the table, and undid the first button on his shirt. A small act of control.

“He'd run his course. Have you spoken to him?”

“You're telling me you wouldn't know?”

“We no longer speak. And for all I know he might be in the next cell.”

“This isn't a cell. Why don't you speak?”

“We agreed about less and less. He left to set up his own company, do his own thing.”

“So you didn't get rid of him when you discovered the hacking he'd been doing behind your back?”

Hibbert started to speak but Hammer raised his arm to check him.

“He resigned, all on his own.”

“Had he been with you long?”

“Ten years, give or take.”

“Really? He's here and happy for ten years and then this happens,” she laid a hand on the documents on the table, “and within a couple of months he's gone?”

Hammer smiled, shook his head. Sander watched him, her eyes wide open and waiting for an explanation.

“Ben doesn't really do happy. Not consistently.”

“No?”

“He's a complicated guy.”

“You mean he's a liability.”

“I don't employ liabilities. I've worked with a lot of good people and he's one of the best.”

“Then it must have been a blow to lose him. You didn't fight for him to stay?”

Sander was beginning to piss him off. What was all this about, anyway? Why the fuss, the sham gravity? Somebody had hacked some people who were, any sane person would agree, scum. Polluters, corrupters, chiselers away at anything good. Whoever had done this work had made the world a little healthier, and to treat it as a more terrible crime than the ones it had exposed was absurd. A very modern neurosis, wrongheaded, hysterical, trivial. And here he was, caught squarely by it.

“You need to understand something, Inspector—people don't pay me to
go round the law. Or Ben. They pay me to supplement it. If you spent a week in my company you'd know I take that very seriously.”

Throughout the conversation Sander had been enjoying herself; now she turned stern.

“This isn't a conversation about your ethics, Mr. Hammer. You're a big man, you have money, you have friends. Things have gone your way for a long time. Trouble's new to you. But understand, this is trouble. You of all people ought to recognize it. We know that hacking happened here. That's five years, straightaway. Your case. Your name on the engagement letter, your client, your company. Five for starters, let's say. And that's just the hacking. Then there's the other work Saber was doing for you. That information about the FBI investigation into Mistral? There was nothing about that in the e-mails. It comes out Saber bribed someone for that, your trouble just got a whole lot worse, because your countrymen are going to want to be involved. They're already interested. Bribing a public official, you can say good-bye to another decade. At least. I have it down here you're fifty-eight. Is that correct, Mr. Hammer?”

“That's correct.”

“Seventy-three. There's not much living to be done after that. Is that how you imagined your last good years playing out?”

She's trying to make you scared, he told himself. First she makes you uncomfortable, now she makes you scared. It's all just technique.

Fight them as he might, though, no logic was equal to the thoughts that started pressing into his head. For a moment, he saw himself in rooms like this for the rest of his life, without color, without humanity, where living was suspended. No more being in the world. No more Ikertu. No more variety, influence, control. Five years was unimaginable; fifteen a black pit with no bottom. The person sitting across the table from him, he realized—as she wanted him to—had the power to end his life.

Sander had leaned forward again, her hands clasped on the table.

“This is the thing. You're a clever man and no doubt you understood this the moment I arrived in your office, but let's spell it out. Unlike half the people I interview in here you have a lot to lose. If you built that up by
sailing close to the wind, then you deserve a fall, a long one, and I'll make it happen. But if you took your eye off the ball for a minute, trusted someone too much, made a mistake, then it makes no sense to throw everything away just to cover that up. In short, Mr. Hammer, you have options. I don't like what you do but if you're more or less blameless in this you should say so.”

Hibbert was saying some words that Hammer heard but didn't catch. His mind had settled on a single, determined point.

It wasn't his place to give anyone up. Ben would have to do that himself.

A
Georgian policeman in a peaked cap took Hammer from the interview room down to the cells, which were clean enough—white walls, bright under two rows of untiring bluish lights—but decidedly solid, and full of men whose evenings, like his, had been brought firmly to an end. There were perhaps thirty of them in a cell the size of the smallest meeting room in his office back in London. A few looked round when he was pushed through the door; three or four continued to stare at him as he looked about for some space to occupy between all the bodies. As a matter of policy, Hammer returned the stares, just enough, and tried to communicate that he wasn't as small or as puny as he might look. At least his hands were free now, should he need them.

The best places were on the four low bunks, the next best against the wall, and in every inch someone lay slumped. Most had their legs pulled up to allow others to sit cross-legged in the middle, but some stretched out in comfort, and Hammer approached the smallest of these and gestured for him to make room. He was a scrawny man, with sparse hair and one eye half closed and a wispy, uneven growth of beard, and he looked up at Hammer with idle contempt, holding all the power. As if to confirm it, he crossed his legs at the ankles, and then his arms. Others watched the impasse.

Tired, and in no mood for games, Hammer thought. There was a certain purity to this. There was nowhere else to sit. He needed something, and this ratty character didn't want him to have it. A neat conflict with no obvious solution, not least because he was missing his usual tools. He couldn't talk to the man, to reason with him or threaten him or humiliate him, as you
might a cocky schoolboy in front of his friends. He had no money to buy him off, and no leverage: he didn't know him, what he wanted, what secrets he needed to keep. An expert opponent in his own world, Hammer found himself in a different arena. And if he didn't find a way round, others would sense his weakness.

Force seemed disproportionate. It was only somewhere to sit, after all. Then his memory jogged him with an idea, and from his shirt pocket he took the driver's cigarette.

“Here,” he said, offering it to the man with a friendly hint of a smile. “Something to save face.”

The rat considered it, then reached out a hand. Hammer looked down, and when he finally drew up his legs, gave him the cigarette.

“Obliged to you,” said Hammer, and sat carefully down in the space.

The air was warm with the smell of old alcohol and tobacco smoke and sweat accumulated over days. Some men slept; some talked and smoked; some stared ahead. Over everyone there was a settled lethargy, as if no one expected anything to happen for a good while yet.

In among them, Hammer's thoughts raced. If the Georgians weren't about to deport him they might leave him in here for a few days while they dealt with more pressing problems. How to get out? Feign illness? Surely that didn't actually work? Bribe a guard. That was more like it. Except without actual cash he had no means of explaining his offer. There wasn't a prison guard anywhere who'd free a prisoner at the sight of him grinning meaningfully and rubbing his fingers together. His watch might do it. But that would be a gross overpayment, and chances were would only see him out of this cell.

Hammer looked around at all his new companions—impassive, contained, unknowably Georgian—and wondered how in the world he was ever going to make himself understood.

 • • • 

I
t was late now, air was in short supply, and despite the bright lights most slept, heads bobbing on their chests. No one took any notice of Hammer, except for a new arrival who perched on the end of a bunk next to him. He
had a shaved head and a dry trickle of blood from a gash on his temple, and every so often he lazily switched his gaze to Hammer, kept it on him for a while, then turned his head again. He had forced someone further down the natural order from his precious spot. Hammer did his best to ignore him.

It wasn't the best environment in which to think. Apart from the heat, and the stale air, all the shifting and sighing, his neighbor was making him feel conspicuous. It didn't take a detective to see that Hammer stood out. Ten years since he had last been in the field, fourteen since his last stay in a cell, and in that time he had become respectable. And rich, by anyone's standards, least of all those of a Tbilisi police station. The fine leather shoes said it, and the linen jacket, bloodied though it was, and the neatly rounded nails that hadn't ever seen manual work. He wasn't so much from a foreign country as from a foreign world. Fourteen years ago he had felt, if not at home, then at least as if he and the jail occupied the same universe. Not now.

Now he had money, and a reputation, and people he hadn't met knew his name. A hundred and ninety-three people relied on him for work. Private bankers competed in vain to look after his fortune, invited him to days of golf in the countryside, persisted in the face of his increasingly impolite refusals. As he had once called important men, journalists now called him for comments and tips and leads, some of which he was happy to give. People listened to him. And though he never spoke of it, nor really thought of it, the money he gave away—to his faith, to protect journalists, to the boxing gym that he wouldn't allow to bear his name—was enough to accomplish good things. He was a big man. A “big macher,” his mother would have said, with pride, though she hadn't lived to see him become it.

That was at home. And there not for much longer, perhaps. Here, all she would have seen was a Jew without papers, in a police cell somewhere very close to Russia, doing his best not to catch the eye of a thug who looked like a neo-Nazi and seemed to want for entertainment. I predicted this, she would have said. You court this sort of thing, always have. This once, she would have been right.

The staring had become continuous, he could feel it. Maybe this man had been put here to scare him, or worse. A thought that he should have had
long before came and rattled him: if neither Ben nor I make it back, who will look after Elsa?

So absurd, this situation. To be arrested for being beaten up, on a quest to avoid prison.

A strong hand gripped his upper arm. Hammer looked down at it and then up into the eyes of the man with the shaved head. The whites were a filmy red in a face of deadened gray that looked as if it hadn't seen the light in months; a waxen scar stretching back an inch from the corner of his mouth was the only relief. He seemed at once barely alive and animated by some terrible energy. Strengthening his grip, he reached for Hammer's wrist with his free hand and roughly pulled at the cuff, revealing the gold watch underneath. In this place it seemed pointedly flawless. He said something slowly in Georgian, a question, looking into Hammer's eyes.

It was important not to show fear, no matter how much he might feel it. This just wasn't in the normal realm of his experience. Other people fought with their fists; Hammer did his fighting from behind a desk, and until recently on others' behalf. This guy could do him some damage, no question, and if he had a knife in his pocket it could be worse than that. But he didn't want to give up his watch. It was a nice watch, fancy by the standards of a Georgian jail, pretty modest for a man of Hammer's wealth, that he had bought for himself twenty years before at the conclusion of a favorite case, which had also been his first and only real murder investigation. And the thought of this punk pawning it for a few lari and spending the proceeds on junk just didn't sit with him.

With the hand of his free arm he took the man's little finger and firmly bent it up and back, until he felt the tendons tighten and the resistance grow. Hammer was strong, under his jacket, and fit; every day he exercised hard to allow his body to take all the running he put it through. Small he might be, but he was not without power. Sinewy is the word a lazy journalist would use.

He kept the finger just on the edge of pain and held his cell mate's eye.

“I'd like you to let go of my arm,” he said, glancing down at the hand on his sleeve.

Confusion and then anger registered in the man's face. He kept his hand
where it was and with the other reached for Hammer's neck, driving his thumb up into the soft flesh under the jaw. Hammer felt his throat tighten and his breath weaken, and in among the pain was aware that his opponent had the advantage not only of size but of position: he was a foot above him on the bunk, and his weight pressed down. Calmly and swiftly Hammer wrenched the little finger back as far as it would go; felt something give inside. The man roared and jerked backward, releasing Hammer and clutching his hand.

“Shevetsi!” he shouted. “Shevetsi!”

Hammer was up instantly, his feet set like a boxer in among the bodies and his hands in fists, prepared for a knife or a piece of broken glass.

Wrong-footed, in pain and in shock, Hammer's opponent looked up at him, his expression curiously empty, as if he had no idea what to do next. He scanned the room, saw the drowsy faces taking in his humiliation, brought his eyes back to Hammer, and arranged his brow into an exaggerated frown, continuing to cradle his bad hand. Hammer saw a broader fear in him, and wondered whether it had afflicted him his whole life. The man turned his shoulder to Hammer and brought his fists up, purpose returning to his eyes.

A key clattered in the lock and two police officers, roused no doubt by the noise, stood in the doorway and took in the scene. Then one of them addressed Hammer.

“You. American. Here.”

Blood coursing, every sense alert, Hammer unclenched his fists, smoothed down his hair at the sides, and went, with a final look at his adversary that was not without a strange sympathy.