Authors: James Twining
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
21 July—4:40
P.M.
C
indy and Pete Roscoe were enjoying themselves. London had been impressive, Paris beautiful, but Amsterdam was fun. The coffee shops, the girls in the windows, the canals. It was as different from Tulsa, Oklahoma, as it was possible to be. Hell, the concierge at their hotel had even tried to sell them some pot. They’d both pretended to be shocked but secretly they were pleased. It had made their trip seem somehow more authentic.
Amsterdam was also a special place for Cindy, whose grandparents had fled from Holland in the 1930s. She had endured an emotional visit to Anne Frank’s house the day before.
“That poor, sweet girl,” she had sobbed into Pete’s strong arms, her mascara dissolving into spidery streaks across her face as the other tourists thronged around them.
Today was their last day and after a fortnight of trekking through museums and across cities, they had agreed that a relaxing guided tour around the canals was the perfect way to round off their trip before the long flight home. Ten minutes in, clad in matching Dallas Cowboys jackets with the open-topped canal boat slicing through the city and the tour guide pointing out the various sights, they knew that it had been a great idea.
Cindy, as usual, was armed with a guidebook of biblical proportions, a parting gift from her emotional mother at the airport that she now believed to be the gospel on all things European. Such was her faith in its pronouncements that she had developed an annoying habit of matching any guide’s commentary to that of her book and then whispering to Pete if they got something wrong or, even worse, omitted some crucial fact.
Pete, meanwhile, had mastered a knack of nodding and making the appropriate noises while only half listening to his wife. His priority, instead, was to capture as much of their trip as possible on film. So while Cindy had her nose buried in a book, Pete had his eye firmly glued to the viewfinder of the tiny digital video camera that nestled in his broad hands.
Since they had been in Europe, Pete had developed his own dizzying cinematic style as his camera swooped up and down buildings, or suddenly panned in or out, the image uncertain and jumpy. This time, as they went under a bridge, Pete attempted a particularly ambitious shot, zooming out from the detail at the top of a building down to a wide-angle shot of the canal. He then tracked slowly across, until he had framed the rows of seats ahead of him and the tour guide standing right at the front of the canal boat. He smiled. She was cute.
Suddenly, something at the edge of the viewfinder caught his eye. An ex-cop, Pete had learned to recognize when things did not look quite right and instinctively he moved the camera to the right so that the tour guide’s face now only took up half the screen.
It was not the agitated man with the tanned face and the shaved head in the phone booth just before the next bridge who looked out of place, but rather the two men in dark suits that had just stepped out of the large black Range Rover and were walking toward him. There was a repressed energy in their walk, an assured confidence in their manner that reminded Pete of a dog walking at the very limit of its leash, tugging on its owner’s arm. These two were about to cut themselves loose.
He zoomed in on the phone booth, past the tour guide’s face, just as the man in it saw the two approaching figures. The phone instantly fell out of his hand and his head jerked from side to side, as he weighed his options. But Pete could see that he’d noticed them too late. Hemmed in by the phone booth on one side and the men on the other, he clearly had nowhere to go.
The two men approached the phone booth and their backs came together like heavy black curtains as they reached the man, blocking Pete’s view. He kept the camera trained on them, hardly daring to blink in case he missed something. Suddenly their shoulders parted and Pete got a glimpse of the man, his eyes wide with terror, a hand pressed over his mouth to stifle his screams. An arm was raised and a long serrated blade flashed in the sun, hovering for a few seconds, its shiny surface silhouetted against the cobalt sky, before swooping down and diving into the man’s chest. He collapsed, lifeless.
The boat was almost level with the two men now and Pete widened his shot as they hunched over the body and went through his pockets. But just then, at the very moment that he was going to get slightly ahead of them and catch their actual faces, the boat went under a low brick bridge and they were lost from view. When Pete emerged on the other side, his camera poised, the two men and the car were gone.
“Holy shit. D’ya see that?” Pete whispered to his wife, his mouth dry with fear and excitement. He kept the camera trained on the receding image of the corpse that lay slumped in the embrace of the phone box’s shadow.
“Oh, I know, honey, isn’t it bad?” Cindy said, shaking her head disapprovingly. Her hooped earrings bounced merrily against her orange cheeks. “That was where Van Gogh used to live and she didn’t say a thing!”
Plate sin with gold And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it.
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE,
King Lear
, act 4, scene 6
J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
22 July—2:07
P.M.
T
he desk fan was on its highest setting. The vibrations had caused it to skip across the conference table’s slippery surface until it was balancing against the thin rim of metal that ran around its edge and threatening to throw itself over the side.
“Okay, let’s just go through them one more time,” Jennifer suggested, slurping the dregs of the now warm and flat Coke. She dropped the empty cup into the overflowing trash can that sat on the floor between them. Special Agent Paul Viggiano raised his dark eyebrows wearily.
“What for? We’ve been through every single guy like, a hundred times. Cross-checked them with the CIA and the NCIC databases. Been through their bank records. Checked their wives, their parents, even their kids, for Chrissake. There’s nothing here. They’re all clean.”
Jennifer got up and moved around the conference table, the overhead halogens reflecting here and there in the polished walnut.
“Because we’re not leaving here till we find something,” she said firmly, her eyes flicking between the piles of paper and files and boxes that had been strewn along the table’s length, the rubble of her two-day investigation so far.
Viggiano stood up, a trim, muscular figure, his dark hair slicked back, his chin covered in a seemingly permanent five o’clock shadow. Shaking his head angrily, he tucked his white shirt back into his dark blue suit trousers—a shiny fabric with a faint red thread running through it—as he spoke.
“You know what? This whole thing stinks. It’s a goddamned mess.” He slammed his fist down in front of him, the fan wobbling unsteadily before finally toppling off and plunging helplessly to the floor, the cord trailing behind it like a bungee rope that had been tied too long.
Jennifer had to agree. The whole thing was a mess. She knew that Corbett had fought to control the number of people in the loop over the last two days, but cases like this wouldn’t stay quiet for long. It was too good an opportunity for a fund-raiser—a chance to put the boot in on some of the other departments and agencies and grab a bigger slice of the federal budget in the process. It was the sort of story Washington lived and prayed for.
“Yeah, it’s a mess, but it’s our mess,” she retorted. “So you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
She replaced the fan on the table while Viggiano shook his head again and loosened his military-looking tie a little more. Jennifer knew that he was finding this harder going than she was. He was about ten years older than she and two years ago she’d worked on a case for him for a few months. He’d even made a clumsy pass in a bar that she’d brushed off as politely as she could. Now she was in charge and it clearly hurt, although his feelings were the last thing on her mind. She’d worked too hard for this opportunity to let Paul Viggiano screw it up for her. And although she hated to admit it to herself, she’d had to put up with so much crap over the last few years, it actually felt good to be on the other end for a change.
“Look, I’ve been there, okay. I’ve seen the place,” she continued, her voice hard and urgent. “We’re not talking about Macy’s here. You don’t just walk in and help yourself. Whoever did this had detailed knowledge of the vault’s layout and security systems. Very detailed.”
Viggiano snorted.
“Big deal. Everything’s for sale at the right price. If someone wanted the plans for Fort Knox they could have got them. Money talks.” Viggiano rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and held it up to Jennifer’s face with a thin smile.
“You think they keep the details down at the local planning department? Layout, alarm systems, access codes?” Jennifer asked sarcastically. “Everything about that place is classified. Jesus, they probably incinerate the grass clippings. It’s wrapped tight. I’m telling you, someone on the inside must have been involved. So we’re going to go through all of them again. Now.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Viggiano ran his hand through his thick forelock of dark hair in frustration and picked up the file where he’d thrown it down on the table earlier. “Where do you want to start?” His eyes flashed at her, brimming with resentment.
“Right at the beginning. With how many people have had access or actually been into the vault in the last twelve months. If we need to go back further we will, but let’s focus there first.” Viggiano muttered under his breath as he counted the numbers again, consulting various sheets of paper that he picked up from in front of him.
“Like I said before. Forty-seven people.”
“Plus me. That makes forty-eight.”
“What, you think I’m an idiot? You’re in the forty-seven,” he said, his chin jutting in indignation.
“I am? How do you work that out?” Jennifer flicked through her hieroglyphic notes, adding numbers in her head.
“Twenty-five guards from the Mint Police, fifteen military personnel, five Treasury officials, and two federal agents, one of which was you. Not that many people get down there.” Viggiano held up the sheet of paper on which he’d done his sums and waved it in the air as if to prove his point.
“That’s strange. Rigby told me there were twenty-six guards. That’s why I made it forty-eight,” said Jennifer, her smooth brown forehead momentarily creased by a slight frown.
“Who?”
“Rigby. The officer in charge, remember?” she said impatiently, although the corners of her mouth twitched at the memory of Sheppard’s pink trousers and Rigby’s ashen face.
“Well, according to the Treasury it’s twenty-five. I got all the names here.” He held up several sheets of paper by their corners between his thumb and forefinger. “They faxed them over this morning.”
“Let me see those,” she demanded. Viggiano shrugged and passed them over to Jennifer, who scanned through the names carefully. She paused on the final sheet and then, frowning, held it up to the light.
“What?” Viggiano’s tone was immediately defensive. Jennifer didn’t say anything but just gripped the sheet between her thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together. A second sheet peeled away from the first with a faint sucking noise. Viggiano went white.
“Like I said, twenty-six guards,” she said quietly, inspecting the single name at the top of the newly revealed sheet with a grim look on her face.
“I don’t understand,” Viggiano spluttered.
“I guess the ink must have stuck them together.” She knew that if their roles had been reversed, Viggiano would have come down on her hard for that sort of oversight, but that wasn’t her style. They both knew he had screwed up and as far as she was concerned that was that. There was certainly no point in rubbing his nose in it. What was important was seeing whether this new piece of information led them somewhere.
“Tony Short,” she read from the piece of paper. “DOB March eighteenth, 1965. Deceased.”
“Deceased? So he’s irrelevant,” said Viggiano with relief.
“He had access to the vault.”
“But he’s dead.”
“Only just.” She laid the sheet on the table and pushed it over to Viggiano so he could read what it said for himself. “Four days ago.”
“A coincidence.” Viggiano sounded like he was trying to convince himself as well as her.
“Maybe. But he’s the only one we haven’t checked out. What do we know about him?” Viggiano turned to the laptop to his left and typed in the name. A file flashed up a few seconds later.
“Ex-NYPD. Medal of Honor. Transferred to the Mint Police five years ago. Married with kids. Usual boy scout shit. It’s all here. Deceased*.” He looked up. “What’s the asterisk for?”
“Suicide,” Jennifer replied. “The asterisk means suicide.”