Contents

Plan B

Preview: Buried Secrets

There’s nothing more dangerous than stealing a powerful man’s most prized possession.

But I had no choice.

I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an ambulance in a very wealthy neighborhood in Barcelona. It was two in the morning on a moonless night, and since there were no streetlights in this very upscale part of town, we were shrouded in darkness. The ambulance was a boxy white Nissan van whose black vinyl seats were cracked and sprung. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke. The medical equipment did not inspire confidence. But I wasn’t complaining: The ambulance was borrowed.

“What I don’t get,” said the man behind the wheel, “is why.”

The man was named Benito, and he was a private investigator, formerly an officer with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía. He was small and scrappy, with dyed black hair and a soul patch and an ugly white scar on his right jaw. He had the small dark button eyes of a rag doll. His teeth were tobacco stained. He smoked almost constantly, but out of deference to me, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over an hour. I’m not one of those antismoking fascists; that’s not why I don’t like being around lighted cigarettes. The problem was that, even though I hadn’t smoked in years, since the army, I was always on the verge of backsliding.

“Why what?” I finally asked.

“Why you do this.”

“I thought I explained.”

“Not what we doing now,” Benito said, “but why.” Benito’s accent was heavy, but his English was almost fluent. His British mother had moved to Barcelona to teach English and ended up marrying a Basque.

“Like I said, a guy hired me.”

“But you don’t need the money. This is risky. Really dangerous. Why would you do this if you don’t have to?”

I didn’t answer. Most people assumed I was loaded because my father was this famous Wall Street financier. “Infamous” was maybe more accurate. The only reason anyone had heard of him was because of all the news stories: how he went fugitive before he was arrested for a massive insider-trading scam, how they caught up with him and put him on trial and locked him up. People assumed he’d left his family a lot of money, hidden somewhere offshore. They didn’t realize that he’d left us with nothing.

“How much this guy pay you, anyway?”

“It’s never enough,” I said. “Not why I do it.”

“Hope it’s good reason, that’s all I say.”

I shrugged. “When it’s a dad trying to get back his daughter, I figure that’s a pretty good reason.”

“Yeah? He must be good friend.”

“I barely know him,” I said.

I’d been hired by a rich Ukrainian I’d met in London. His name was Vadim Kuzma, and he lived in a big white stucco house in South Kensington. He was obviously mega-wealthy. A mutual friend had introduced us at some boring client dinner party at J Sheekey in Covent Garden.

Vadim asked for my card. I told him I didn’t have one, but I gave him my e-mail. A few weeks later he sent me a desperate message that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, had been kidnapped in Barcelona. I called him for more details. He was frantic. He never should have let her travel on her own, he said. She was far too young. He’d heard about a big kidnapping case in Boston I’d been involved in, and he offered me a lot of money to get her back, far more than I would have asked for.

“How much is the ransom demand?” I asked.

“I wish this was ransom,” Vadim said, his voice cracking. “Money I can pay.”

“Then what is it?” I asked.

“My intelligence network tells me she’s being held prisoner by José María Soler.”

“I’m sorry to hear this.” José María Soler was one of the wealthiest men in Spain, a billionaire who’d made his fortune in telecommunications. He also owned one of Spain’s most successful football clubs. He was immensely powerful, a man used to getting his own way. A man who probably had half the police in Barcelona on his payroll.

I grabbed the first flight out of Boston.

Benito drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “This thing’s a piece of crap,” he said. He had a friend who ran an ambulance company and had agreed, for a wad of cash, to leave his vehicle yard unsecured for an hour earlier that day.

“If I’m ever hit by a car in Barcelona, remind me to walk to the hospital,” I said. “I think I’d get there faster.”

He looked at his watch. “Let’s just hope we don’t need this ambulance as an ambulance,” he said. “You’re not going to kill nobody, yes?”

“I’m a man of peace.”

“Yeah? You never kill people?”

I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling.

“I was in the Special Forces,” I said.

“I don’t mean in combat.”

“Never.” I paused for a moment. “Hardly ever.”

“Hardly ever,” he repeated, thinking it over.

“Sometimes you have no choice.”

“It’s the, how you say, self-defense.”

“Sometimes.”

“And other than that?”

“Never,” I said. I was staring out the window, but I could feel his doll-button eyes on me. “Hardly ever,” I amended.

“Hardly ever,” he repeated, and snorted.

“It’s always something you want to avoid. If possible.”

Benito grunted. “So it’s a fallback. A Plan B.”

“It’s not going to come to that tonight.”

“You never know what might happen.” Benito was chewing the skin on the side of his left index finger. “The Spanish, they have a saying. ‘Cuando menos piensa el galgo, salta la liebre.’ It means like, just when the hunting dog least expects it, the jackrabbit jumps out.”

“I’m not worried about rabbits,” I said.

“It means—”

“I get what it means. But don’t worry. You and I and the girl are going to get out safe and sound. Anybody gets in the way of that—well, I didn’t bring a Havahart trap.”

He didn’t seem reassured. “We ready?”

“Five minutes,” I said, glancing at my watch. “That’s when the guards’ shift changes.”

Carrer de la Font del Lleó was a narrow street at the foot of a steep, scrubby incline, its sandy soil overgrown with stunted, windswept trees and tangled vines. On one side was a narrow sidewalk bordered by a neatly manicured hedgerow into which were cut driveways fortified by gates and guard booths, the entrances to humbler residences, and the occasional utility pole.

Carved into the steep slope of the Collserola mountain overlooking downtown Barcelona was a vast estate: a sprawling villa with a red barrel-tile roof, an Olympic-size swimming pool and a clay tennis court, a lot of terraces and a manicured lawn and ornamental trees and shrubs and all that.

Between the terrain and the foliage and the high stone wall surrounding the property, you couldn’t see much of the house from the street. But Benito had obtained the architect’s blueprints from the city registry. And for the last two days I’d been conducting surveillance of the house from various vantage points in the area, using a high-powered scope and a good camera with a telephoto lens. I’d borrowed Benito’s Labrador and taken a couple of leisurely strolls around the property. Once I even let him slip the leash and watched him scramble up the slope bordering the southwestern wall. I was a frustrated neighbor with an unruly pet. I followed him through the spiny gorse and the dry, thorny brolla shrubs, nearly losing my footing as the sandy soil gave way, grabbing on to the branch of a gnarled almond tree. Geckos scuttled by.

Soon I knew the make and model of the thirty-six CCTV cameras that ringed the property. I knew that anyone who came within twelve feet of the wall would appear on a monitor inside. I’d noticed the five strands of high-tensile wire atop the eight-foot stone wall through which ten thousand volts pulsed at one-second intervals. If you touched it, you fried. If you tried to cut it, you’d trigger the alarm. Also, I saw the taut steel wire threaded through the anchor posts: an electromechanical anticlimb sensor. Grab it, tug at it, and you’d set off the strain gauge, kicking off the alarm.

Not bad. Not bad at all. But it made for quite a challenge.

As far as perimeter security went, an electric fence was pretty good. Not as ugly as coils of razor wire, and more effective. Of course, any security measure could be defeated, given enough lead time and intelligence and preparation. And Soler’s system wasn’t perfect. A utility pole, for instance, was less than six feet from the southwest corner wall. Theoretically you could climb the pole and vault over the fence, but as long as the electric fence was powered up, you risked hitting the wires on the way down and turning into a churro. Even if you did make it over the wall intact, all of the house’s doors and windows were wired into an alarm system, with video cameras trained on every entrance.

Then there were the armed guards inside the residence. Benito’s police sources had told him that fifteen firearms licenses had been issued for the household security staff, but that didn’t tell us how many guards would be on-site at any one time. My observations told me that while he was in residence, Soler normally had four. I also took note of when the guards’ shift changed. I saw Soler leave the property several times in his armored Maybach limousine, accompanied by a duo of bodyguards.

“Imagine you live in a house like this one?” Benito said.

I was quiet for a moment. “Yeah.”

“Oh, right,” he said, embarrassed. “You did, yes? When you were a kid?”

“It can be like living in a prison.”

“I wouldn’t mind living in a prison like this one.”

“A security system this elaborate is sometimes just as much about keeping people inside as keeping them out.”

“Huh.”

“How solid is your intel on Soler?”

Benito turned to look at me. His eyes blazed: indignation, but also a little defensiveness. “Come on, Nick. I myself saw him get into his Maybach and leave here at four o’clock this afternoon. I followed him to El Prat. His private helicopter filed a flight plan with a five o’clock departure. His chopper left right on time. My guy in Madrid observed him arriving at his flat on Calle de Alcalá at six twenty this evening in one of his other Maybachs. He’s not here.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “Nice work.”

He drummed on the steering wheel some more. “We don’t know how many guards he keeps here when he’s out of town. That’s what I don’t like.”

“Agreed. But if we do this right, it won’t make any difference if he has an entire battalion.”

“If,” Benito said.

“I like to think positive.”

“A guy like this, he always takes measures.”

“Sure.”

“He’s a billionaire. He makes a lot of enemies. He spares nothing for his protection. He gives his guards every weapon he can buy.”

“He’s also not here. Which means his guards aren’t going to be on high alert.”

“I am not so sure,” Benito said. Anxiety had begun to seep into his voice, and I didn’t like that. Anxiety often leads to mistakes. “Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean he doesn’t have something to protect.”

We both knew what he meant: his valuables. His possessions, as he saw it. Which included a fifteen-year-old girl named Svetlana, his latest acquisition, who was being held prisoner inside.

The night she disappeared, her father told me, he got a brief, panicked call from her cell phone. The call was cut short after a few seconds, and she never called back. Nor did she answer his repeated calls and texts.

The next day, Kuzma had hired an attorney in Madrid to put pressure on the Spanish legal authorities. They’d made perfunctory inquiries, Vadim said. Soler not only denied she was there, he denied ever having met the girl. But when I checked with Svetlana’s wireless provider, I was able to confirm that her mobile phone was indeed inside Soler’s house.

So there was really only one way to get her back. Sometimes the best way to deal with criminals is by committing a crime. That’s the only language they understand.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go test his security.”

*   *   *

Benito started up the ambulance and let out the emergency brake, and we drove a few blocks downhill in tense silence. I could tell he was starting to regret getting involved. It had begun to sink in how dangerous this job was. Up until now it had been routine, low-risk stuff: Dig up some background on Spain’s richest man, help me figure out a plan. Borrow an ambulance.

Now he was thinking about the guards with their submachine guns and his eight-year-old son being left without a father.

I said, “I can handle this myself, you know. You don’t have to go with me.”

I really didn’t want to work with someone who was going to go all wobbly on me.

He just stared.

“You don’t need to go through with this,” I said.

He scowled, looked insulted, didn’t reply. He switched on the light bar and the flashers and the red strobe light. He flicked a switch on the dashboard and the siren began to whoop. We looped around a couple of blocks, taking the long way, so it looked as though we’d come up from downtown. By the time we reached the entrance to Soler’s estate on Carrer de la Font del Lleó, we were speeding like an ambulance is supposed to.

Benito shut down the siren and lowered the window, and a voice crackled over the intercom. Benito replied in rapid-fire Spanish. I could make out only “emergencia” and “Soler” and “Consulado Americano.” A video camera hummed and swiveled and looked right at his face.

There was a pause. I assumed the guards were consulting with one another. Soler was not in residence, and they had to make an executive decision.

We were idling in front of a pair of tall, wrought-iron, motor-driven double-swing gates, controlled by an electronic keypad and video intercom and topped with spikes. But the spikes were as ornamental as the ironwork scrolls. Between the anticlimb sensors and the CCTV and the ground-loop vehicle detector embedded in the pavement surface, no one was going to climb over the gate, or the fence, without being noticed.

A minute later the guard’s voice came over the intercom again. Benito said something and the guard replied.

Benito muttered, “This idiot says no one called for an ambulance.”

“Translate for me,” I said. I leaned across him and said out the window, “Look, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care, but the American ambassador himself just got me out of bed because José María Soler demanded an American doctor for some foreign guest he’s got staying in his house. He said it was an emergency.”

I waited for Benito to translate. Then I went on, “Believe me, I’m perfectly happy to turn right around. I don’t mind at all. Fortunately, your boss has video evidence that you denied us entry.” I pointed to the swiveling CCTV. “So whatever happens to this girl, it’s on your head. Not mine. Or the ambassador’s.” I paused a beat for Benito to translate, then I said loudly to him, “Vamos.”

A flurry of Spanish exploded from the intercom. I don’t know much Spanish, but it sounded like the guard had changed his mind. Now he was pleading with us to enter. With a buzz and a mechanical hum, the gates began to swing open.

A tiny smile played on Benito’s lips.

I could see his mental tumblers click into place. Now he understood why I timed this for exactly two in the morning, just after the shift change. When Soler was out of town.

The master of the house was gone, and no one was in charge. A fresh set of guards had taken charge. No one had told them that an English-speaking doctor had been called in. No one had told them that Soler’s American “guest” was ill. No one had told them anything.

And in an information vacuum, they’d default to the safest move.

Calling their boss in Madrid to check would not be a wise idea. Not at two in the morning. No one wanted to wake him up and risk his fury. Yet turning away an ambulance could be a serious misstep. What if something really was wrong with the girl and Soler really had called for an ambulance? Refusing entry to the ambulance would end not only their careers but possibly their lives, too.

Self-preservation. That’s what really makes the world go around. The mass of humanity cares about nothing so much as protecting their paychecks. I’d never forget what some cockney night watchman at a London office building once told me as he refused to admit me after hours even though I claimed I’d left my laptop at my desk. “Sorry, guv,” he’d said. “More’n my job’s worf, it is.”

Benito accelerated along a cobblestone drive lined with cypress trees. It snaked past terraced gardens and the stone columns of a cloister and then ended in a semicircle in front of the mansion. As we pulled up, the wooden front door swung open. It was a massive slab of ancient oak with dark iron escutcheons and knobs and nailheads that looked like it had been salvaged from one of Torquemada’s inquisition chambers.

“Benito,” I said.

For a few seconds he didn’t reply. I heard him swallow. I could sense his nerves. “Yes.”

“You can do this.”

“Of course I can do this. It’s just…”

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“I am not liking this at all.”

“Remember,” I said, “we always have plan B.”

“And what is this plan B?”

“I’ll let you know when the time comes.”

He groaned.

A guard emerged, dressed in navy blue slacks and a long-sleeved light blue shirt with a badge of some sort. A black nylon holster on his right hip. A pistol, I noted. Easily accessible but not quite at the ready.

He hustled out to help us. Meanwhile Benito and I raced around to the back of the ambulance, opened the doors, and pulled a gurney from its rack. We unfolded it and set it up on the cobblestones. Then we took out all the standard equipment, the heavy bags that held the meds and the airway supplies and oxygen. Heaping everything onto the gurney, as we’d rehearsed, we wheeled it, rattling and jangling, over the cobblestones, then lifted it up to the porch. The guard rushed ahead of us and held the door open. We left the gurney on the porch, as per standard protocol, and put the equipment bags on our backs.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

The guard said something in Spanish and pointed toward an immense curving marble staircase. I didn’t need Benito to translate for me. She was upstairs.

But I was surprised at his deferential tone. I heard the word “doctor,” which sounds the same in Spanish and English. Apparently the white coat and tie and the stethoscope dangling from my neck really did lend me an air of authority. It works for real doctors, after all. It didn’t seem to bother him that a doctor was lugging EMT equipment around himself. Maybe he’d never seen an ambulance team in operation. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to spot the anomalies.

We trotted up the stairs as quickly as we could, the guard following right behind. At the top of the stairs he pointed to the left and moved ahead to guide us there. When we’d gone a few feet down the hall, I suddenly said, “The defibrillator.”

“Excuse me, Doctor?” Benito said.

“We’re going to need the defibrillator. Go on ahead without me. I’ll be right back.”

I set down my equipment bags, and Benito quickly translated for the guard. I could see him warily sizing up the situation, trying to figure out what to do. He didn’t want me walking through the house unescorted, but he also didn’t want to leave Benito up here unaccompanied. And he wasn’t going to make us lug the equipment back downstairs.

It didn’t occur to him to question why we didn’t have a cardiac defibrillator with us, nor why I’d suddenly decided we needed one.

Nor why we were willing, in a medical emergency, to keep the patient waiting while I fetched a piece of equipment we might not need. He was a guard, not an MD.

He nodded, and I raced down the staircase.

I returned in a little over two minutes. The hallway was wide and went on forever. A long antique runner, bare in places and probably priceless, slipped underfoot against the highly polished hardwood floor. He stopped at a closed door on the left, knocked once, turned the knob, and opened it. The door wasn’t locked, I was surprised to see. Maybe, with the guards and the electric fence and all, Soler wasn’t worried about Svetlana Kuzma trying to escape.

A muffled female voice from within: “Hey!”

The guard switched on an overhead light, illuminating a spacious bedroom suite. An elaborately carved four-poster bed with barley twist posts and a canopy made out of some kind of antique tapestry. A chaise longue. A mirrored vanity dressing table.

I was half expecting a dank concrete torture chamber out of the movie Hostel. Not a royal suite at Sandringham, which was what this looked like.

“La ambulancia llega,” the guard said. He was being too helpful. I’d expected him to point us upstairs and remain at his post. This was a problem I didn’t anticipate. We’d have to deal with him.

A young girl bolted upright in bed, her hand outstretched as if to shield her eyes from the light.

Svetlana.

She was wearing a white A-shirt, which in politically incorrect circles is sometimes called a “wife beater.” Her eyes were wide with fear. There was panic in her face.

We set down our equipment.

In the photos her father had e-mailed me, she was an exotic, raven-haired beauty. She could have been a supermodel. Up close and personal, she looked much younger and smaller and more fragile, though no less stunning. She didn’t appear to have been beaten or abused. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, I knew. The kind of abuse she’d probably endured wouldn’t be visible.

“Khto vi?” she gasped. “Shcho vi khochetye?”

I don’t speak Ukrainian, if that was what she was speaking. But she sounded desperate.

The guard looked from her to us, suspicion furrowing his brow. He’d just figured out that the girl didn’t seem to be in any medical distress. Benito, quick-thinking, said something to the guard in Spanish. I didn’t understand much of it, but his tone was indignant. The gist seemed to be So what the hell did you call us here for? Or How dare you waste our time! Or something along those lines.

Now the guard was arguing with Benito, and I didn’t need to know Spanish to see that he’d finally tumbled to the realization that no one had called for a doctor. As we say in Boston, light dawns over Marblehead.

He reached for his two-way radio and held it up with his thumb near the transmission button, about to call for backup.

I’d expected this, of course. Actually, I was surprised we’d gotten this far without the other guard, or guards, showing up.

While Benito was diverting the guard with his display of pique, I’d slowly come up behind him, as we’d rehearsed, and pincered his neck in the crook of my elbow, squeezing it hard between my bicep on one side and the bone of my forearm on the other. He gave a sharp yelp. I tightened the vise by grabbing my left hand with my right, compressing both carotid arteries. The good old naked rear choke, beloved of action heroes and teenage boys—but the best thing in a situation like this, and the quickest. He thrashed and shuffled his feet and took a feeble swing at my torso, but he didn’t have much strength left.

Then I stomp-kicked him at the back of his left knee. He lost his balance, fell backward toward me. In less than ten seconds, I felt him go limp, and I eased him to the floor.

The girl, meanwhile, had scrambled out of the bed and leaped to the floor. She screamed, “Dopomozhit’ meni!”

But then she tried to sprint past me. And I understood why she was so terrified.

She didn’t know who we were nor why we were here. She’d seen me subdue a guard; for all she knew, we were stealing her away and taking her someplace even worse. Her mind was probably clouded by the trauma of her captivity. I’d seen it before.

I grabbed her. “Svetlana, it’s okay. You’re safe now.”

“No!” she screamed, trying to wriggle free. “No!”

“Svetlana, listen to me.” I spoke calmly and quietly. “My name is Nick Heller. Your father asked me to come get you out of here.”

“No!” she screamed, even louder and shriller. “Get away from me!” she said in accented English. “Leave me alone!”

She twisted one way, then another, and then raked her nails across my face. It felt like she’d drawn blood. It hurt. I grabbed her by the wrist to prevent a repeat performance. She screamed even louder and went for me with her other hand, this time aiming for my eyes. A tough girl.

“Svetlana,” I said, grabbing that wrist, too. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”

She struggled mightily to free her hands. Her face had gone red, her mouth contorted in an ugly, animal-like snarl. Spittle flew from her mouth. Svetlana Kuzma, poor thing, had obviously lost it. Maybe Soler had drugged her. Maybe her confinement had disoriented her, made her paranoid, afraid of all intruders. Or maybe she’d come to think of Soler’s security guards as her protectors, and anyone else as a threat. Some version of the Stockholm Syndrome. I didn’t know what she thought. I only knew that she was deeply confused.

“Svetlana, please listen to me. We have to move quickly.”

Her eyes searched my face, scanning back and forth. She seemed to have calmed down a bit, so I let go of her wrists.

A mistake. Suddenly she kneed me hard in the crotch. That I wasn’t prepared for. I felt a starburst of pain and expelled a lungful of air. She was tough, wiry, and strong. The girl must have taken self-defense classes.

She was also complicating things considerably. We had expected any number of contingencies except having to fight the girl we’d come to rescue. I gestured to Benito, who grabbed her by the shoulders.

Then I produced a syringe from my pocket, grabbed her right hand, and jabbed the needle into the large vein at the front of her arm. I depressed the plunger, releasing a small quantity of a rapid-onset opioid sedative called remifentanil.

Benito’s mouth gaped. “Why you do this?” he said furiously.

“We didn’t exactly have a choice.”

“This is not our plan! Now we have to carry her out!”

“A lot easier to carry an unconscious body than someone who’s fighting you all the way.”

In a matter of seconds she slumped in Benito’s arms. Together we set her down gently on the carpet.

I grabbed the guard’s pistol, a 9 mm Astra, from the floor. As the two of us dragged his inert body into the suite’s bathroom to get him out of sight, his two-way radio crackled.

“What are they saying?”

“They’re—they’re responding to a panic call,” Benito said, his eyes widening.

“Panic call?”

“It comes from inside this room.”

“But how? He didn’t even have a chance to call for help.” I glanced around, then saw the wireless panic button fob on Svetlana’s bedside table, which I hadn’t noticed before. She must have hit it when she jumped out of bed, calling for help.

Why had Soler provided her with a panic button?

But there wasn’t time to ponder this or anything else: A loud electronic Klaxon had begun to sound in the hall outside the bedroom, and probably throughout the mansion. “They’re on their way,” Benito said, his voice shaking.

“From where?”

“I think they said the east wing.”

I glanced at my watch. “We can make it. I figure we have about a hundred and twenty seconds before they get here.”

He shook his head, his face grim. “Less. It won’t take them that long.”

“It will if they stop to get weapons. Which they will.”

“What do you mean? They all carry guns.”

“No. The heavy-duty stuff. Standard protocol when there’s a major intrusion, I bet.”

“Heavy duty…?”

“Assault rifles. Submachine guns. AR-15s and M-16s.” They were listed on the firearms registration Soler had filed with the Barcelona police. And they were kept in a secure storage cabinet off the butler’s pantry downstairs. Obviously the guards wouldn’t carry submachine guns around, not in a private home. In the event of a major intrusion, they’d grab their weapons from the tactical rack.

“Madre de Dios.” Droplets of sweat had begun to appear on his face. “We have to run. Leave her here! We don’t have time to take her with us.”

“Wrong,” I said. “She’s why we’re here. Come on. We have plenty of time. Grab the equipment. I’ll take her.”

I turned her over on her stomach, then kneeled in front of her head. Her shallow breathing told me she was unconscious but okay. No respiratory distress. I hooked my elbows under her shoulders and hoisted her in a sort of fireman’s carry. She was small and slight and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. She smelled good: Her hair gave off a sweet, faintly floral, scent. She still had the delicate skin of an innocent young girl. In repose she seemed fragile and vulnerable, which brought out my protective instincts.

Out in the hall the alarm was earsplittingly loud.

We made it downstairs and out the door, got her into the back of the ambulance—we left the gurney on the porch, to save a few precious seconds—and jumped into the front.

Benito, his face now streaming sweat, pulled the ambulance away from the house. We seemed safely on our way out when he yelled something and slammed on the brakes.

Three guards had us surrounded. Two in front and one on the driver’s side. Pointing assault rifles at us. Ready to fire.

Maybe Benito had stopped because he didn’t want to run anyone over. Maybe he stopped because he didn’t want them to fire at us. Whatever his reasoning, he’d just made a serious miscalculation. I would have kept going, force them to get out of my way and thereby hope to mess up their aim.

But there was nothing to be done about that now. I saw that he was panicking, on the verge of giving up.

Each of the guards held a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military infantry rifle. This was a reliable and accurate weapon, high velocity, fast handling, with not much recoil. Probably thirty rounds in the magazine. It had a range of almost two thousand feet.

Four very ugly barrels were pointed at us, swaying back and forth. One of the guards was shouting something.

“They want us to get out,” Benito said. “What we do?”

“We get out.”

“You have the gun.”

“Ever hear the expression ‘bringing a knife to a gunfight’?”

“Madre de Dios. They going to kill us. Now what we do?”

“Just watch me,” I said. “And stay calm.”

We got out, hands in the air. The alarm Klaxon was still going, amplified by loudspeakers out here. The front of the house blazed with emergency lights. Another guard yelled something at me, and Benito translated: “He wants our hands on our heads. He wants us to, er, interlock?—interlace—our fingers.”

We obeyed his orders. We had no choice.

The same guard, obviously in charge, shouted something else.

“He sees the pistol tucked into your belt. He says if you lower your hands even a millimeter they will pump you full of lead.”

“Understood,” I said.

Benito translated, but he didn’t have to. They knew I wasn’t stupid enough to reach for my weapon in a situation like this. Not with four semiautomatic rifles pointed at me. The guy in charge barked an order, and another one of the guards strode up to me, the matte black muzzle right in my face. I could see the selector lever, on the left side of the receiver, pointed up to Fire.

I kept the fingers of my hands interlaced on top of my head. Benito was looking at me, eyes wild, trying to communicate without words. A warning, perhaps. Maybe he was afraid I’d do something foolish.

He didn’t know me well enough.

The guard circled around and stopped behind me. The lead guard shouted something, and Benito translated: “Keep your hands on your head. Keep your fingers interlaced.”

The three other guards slowly raised the barrels of their rifles to take aim at my head and chest. I could hear the slight scrape of the guard’s boots on the pavement behind me. Then I felt his hand brush against my side as he reached for the pistol.

But I reached for it first.

*   *   *

What happened next probably took only four seconds, but it seemed to go in slow motion.

I dropped my hands and yanked the Astra from my waistband. I pulled the slide and spun around and pointed the pistol at the guy. He obviously hadn’t expected that—a handgun versus an assault rifle? sheer lunacy—so it took him a beat to raise his rifle into position. I heard the guard in charge shout, “Fuego!” and they all squeezed their triggers almost in unison.

And nothing happened.

They kept trying to squeeze the triggers, but their weapons wouldn’t fire. There were loud, confused shouts, curses. But no gunfire.

Then I shouted, “Hands up! Hold your rifles up over your heads, all of you! Now!”

Benito, stunned, didn’t translate, but he didn’t need to. The guard nearest me squeezed the trigger again, tried to pull back on the charging handle, but that was frozen, too.

Meanwhile, I yanked the second pistol from my belt and tossed it to Benito, who caught it in midair, looking stunned.

“I said, hold your rifles in the air!”

Two of them, understanding their predicament though not exactly how it had happened, raised their rifles in both hands over their heads. Benito racked the slide on the pistol I’d just thrown him, pointed it at each guard in succession. The man I’d identified as the lead guard, quicker-thinking than the others, reached for his sidearm with his right hand. I shouted, “Freeze!”

He kept going for the pistol.

I took aim and fired.

The round hit the target neatly, creasing the outside of the leather holster, sending chunks of leather everywhere. He screamed, jerking his right hand away reflexively. Startled, he dropped his rifle.

The remaining holdout gave up any thought of reaching for his pistol. Instead, he held his rifle up in the air like the others. Benito wagged his gun like some desperado in an old western and shouted at the lead guy, “Arriba las manos!”

“Get the cuffs,” I told Benito. “I’ll cover these guys.”

Swiftly he opened the ambulance driver’s side door with his left hand, reached inside, and grabbed a fistful of flexi-cuffs.

“On your knees!” I yelled to the guards.

They promptly obeyed.

“Cross your feet,” I said. “Keep your rifles above your heads.”

We worked quickly. I kept the Astra trained on the guards, moving it from one to another, while Benito quickly and efficiently cuffed them. He was good at it. He’d done this plenty of times before, in his previous career. He had them slowly place their rifles on the ground and put their hands back up. Both of us had our pistols pointed. When you’re on your knees with your feet crossed, your balance is extremely unsteady. It’s hard to make any sudden moves. He took each guy’s pistol from its holster, making sure their hands remained on top of their heads, fingers interlaced. Then he handcuffed them.

We returned to the ambulance and drove in silence to the front entrance. We could still hear the alarm sounding from the house, but this far away the sound was more muted. As we approached the closed gates, Benito groaned. We were both thinking the same thing: The guards had put Soler’s estate into lockdown, and now here was one more obstacle to getting out of the place alive.

But to our surprise, the gates swung open as we drove up to them. The ground-loop sensor embedded in the pavement, which automatically triggered the gates’ activation, hadn’t been shut off. Maybe the guards were expecting others to arrive and didn’t want to impede access. Or maybe they’d gotten cocky and didn’t think we’d get this far.

Whatever the explanation, we reached the street ten seconds later, the sirens bleating and the flashers going. Benito didn’t speak until we reached the Avinguda Diagonal.

“What happened back there?” he finally asked.

“I took precautions.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We were almost killed!”

“Not even close,” I said. I reached into the pocket of my white doctor’s coat and fished out a handful of metal spindle-like objects. I held open my palm for him to see. Each one was about three or four inches long and looked like a very thick knitting needle but with the flanged head of a pushpin. I jingled them for a few seconds. “These little jackrabbits won’t be spooking any dogs today.”

Slowly he began chuckling, his laugh growing steadily louder. “You bastard,” he said. “You removed the firing pins. When you said you were going to get the ‘defibrillator.’ But wasn’t the weapons cabinet locked?”

“Of course,” I said, and I produced the battery-powered lock pick from my medical bag.

Breaking down a rifle, removing the firing pin, and reassembling it takes a few seconds if you’ve done it before. And I have. Better, I figured, to leave the rifles there but hobbled than to hide them someplace and force the guards to resort to their fully functioning semiautomatic pistols. That way, their hands were occupied holding eight pounds of useless metal.

“You could have told me, you know. When I saw those rifles I almost wet my pants.”

“I would have enjoyed that.”

He squinted his eyes, unamused.

“Actually, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Until it was too late, of course, I saw no reason to tell him. Then I didn’t have the opportunity. “I like to plan for the worst.”

“This is plan B?”

“No,” I said. “Plan A. Turns out we didn’t need plan B.”

“Remind me never to make an enemy out of you.”

“Never a good idea,” I said.

“You didn’t kill no one.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“No. It’s better.”

“But if we’d had to…?”

He was silent for a long time. He looked back at the unconscious or maybe semiconscious girl on the stretcher in the back. “She’s fifteen?”

I nodded.

“It is good thing Soler was not in the house.”

“How so?”

“Any man who can take away the innocence of a fifteen-year-old girl…” I was surprised by the quiet ferocity in his voice. “This is a man who needs killing.”

*   *   *

Benito had hired a private medical evacuation flight, an air ambulance run by a jet charter company in Barcelona. They made all the arrangements, preclearing passports with the Guardia Civil at El Prat Airport, in order to expedite matters. When there’s a medical emergency, the Guardia Civil can be extremely cooperative.

Benito helped us board the converted Learjet 35, which was equipped with a flight stretcher and IV equipment and was staffed by a small medical team, a paramedic and a nurse, even though I didn’t need them. The nurse, a young man, and the paramedic, a young woman, were both Spanish. Benito explained to them that I had the patient stabilized and would supervise her care. They seemed a little put off that their services weren’t required, but they obediently took seats in the aft section of the plane and watched sullenly, with nothing to do, clearly wishing they’d brought something to read or a Sudoku book or a deck of cards or something.

Benito gave me a quick embrace and a backslap. “You have my mobile number,” he said. “If you ever need my help again…”

I nodded and thanked him.

We were airborne twenty-five minutes later, en route to London. I sat next to the stretcher, where Svetlana was strapped in, face up. Her A-shirt had come up, exposing her belly, and I couldn’t help glancing.

What I saw sickened me.

Her abdomen was crisscrossed with raised red welts that looked like they’d been made by a rawhide whip or maybe an electrical cord. I could see that the long welts extended to her lower back, and probably to her buttocks as well.

She’d been beaten, savagely and repeatedly.

But the beatings weren’t recent. Some of the welts were deep red and had begun to fade. Some of them had turned into angry new scars. There were also bruises that had gone yellow and blue and purple, indicating that they were several days old, probably more than a week.

She’d barely been a prisoner at Soler’s house for forty-eight hours. These beatings had been administered long before that.

After a while Svetlana began to stir and make little noises. Her eyes came open briefly, then closed. Her face went through a series of expressions. She wrinkled her nose, frowned. Then she made a heaving, retching sound. I was there just in time with a kidney-shaped vomit bowl and a cool washcloth.

“Hey,” I said softly a few minutes later as I released her from the gurney’s restraining straps. “Feel any better?”

She sat up and glared at me. Her eyes looked a little out of focus.

“That’s probably just a reaction to the sedative,” I said. “I’m sorry we had to do that, but you weren’t exactly cooperating. You were scared. I can’t blame you.”

“Where…where am I?” she asked in English with a strong Ukrainian accent.

I told her my name again. “Your father hired me to get you out of Soler’s house.”

“You say you work for my…father?”

“I don’t work for him. I was hired by him to do this one job. In about two hours we’ll be landing at Gatwick Airport. You’ll be home. Not a prisoner anymore.”

“A prisoner?” she said. “I wasn’t a prisoner. I was finally safe!”

I spoke very softly. “I’m sure that’s what Soler wanted you to think.”

“Goddamn you!” Then she uttered a profanity that I hadn’t heard since the Special Forces. Not something I expected out of the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Was his name Vadim Kuzma?”

I looked at her.

“This man isn’t my father! Vadim Kuzma hired you to kidnap me!”

*   *   *

She must have suddenly gotten self-conscious about her thin cotton A-shirt and her welts and bruises, because she folded her arms across her chest. I handed her my ancient, well-worn commando sweater. Army issue. You couldn’t buy those anymore. Now they were made of acrylic and way too scratchy. She looked at the coarse ribbed wool, the shoulder and elbow patches, with distaste, as if it were some filthy rag I’d picked up off the street, but she pulled it over her head anyway. It pooled around her, made her look like a little girl playing dress-up on the floor of her daddy’s closet.

Except for her face. There was, I now saw, a cynicism, a jadedness in her eyes that she was far too young to have.

It took a good half an hour before I was able to convince her that it was safe to talk. She clearly lived in fear of Kuzma. I assured her that I had friends in the U.S. embassy in London who could arrange for her to return to Ukraine immediately.

“I ran away from home almost two years ago,” she said. “We lived in a village in Ukraine called Povvysoke, my mother and me, but I had to leave. I was…drowning. Suffocating. I found a job in Odessa as a waitress, dancing on tables at a bar, and then a man came one day and said I was beautiful and asked if I wanted to be a model. I could make thousands of pounds a day. What should I say?”

“It was a prostitution ring,” I said. Odessa, Ukraine’s port city, had become one of the world’s hot spots for the international sex trade. The police there were underfunded and overbribed. Organized crime rings dispatched scouts there to recruit vulnerable young girls with bogus offers of glamorous jobs in foreign cities, as dancers or models or actresses, with promises that they could make a fortune. Russian and Ukrainian girls were particularly in demand.

She nodded. “They sell you to rich men in Turkey and Italy and the Emirates. But I was sold to this Ukrainian bastard who lives in London. Because he likes girls from his home country.”

“How much money did you make from the deal?”

She looked down and didn’t answer. After a long moment, she said, “I was his sex slave. Sometimes there are as many as six of us living in his house. But I think I must be his prize possession, because he takes me with him when he traveled to show me off.”

“He trusted you not to run?”

“He kept my passport. So where can I run?”

“He beat you.” A statement, not a question.

Her nostrils flared. Her face flushed. At last she nodded. “Only where others could not see. My back and my stomach and my thighs. I have to wear one-piece swimming suit.”

“Why?”

“Why he beats me?” She fell silent again. Then, in a whisper that was barely audible: “Because he can. Because it excites him.”

I felt something cold and hard in my stomach.

“How did you get to José María Soler?

“Kuzma took me with him to Barcelona. At this party I meet Soler. Later, when Kuzma is talking his business in another room, I give Soler a note. I say I am prisoner and I need to escape and I do anything he wants if he will save me from this monster. Later that night a man comes up to me and takes me out a side door without anyone notice and put me in car and drives me to Soler’s house.”

“And what did you have to do for Soler?”

“Nothing.”

I looked skeptical.

“Nothing at all. For what I should lie about this? Soler was negotiating with the Ukrainian government to get me back home to my mother. He said it would take a week or two.”

“And you think he was telling you the truth?”

“I talked to people from the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid. Soler was not lying to me. And now, you take me back to this monster!”

She looked like she was about to cry. I could see that the vulnerable little girl had just broken through the hard shell. She said in a small voice, “Help me.”

I nodded. Put a hand on her forehead and said, “I will.”

*   *   *

About three hours later I was driving a rented, up-armored Range Rover along Kensington Palace Gardens, talking to Benito on my cell phone. Hands-free, because it’s safer.

“Yes,” Benito said, “I spoke with the consulate in Madrid. It all checks out, what the girl said.”

“Excellent.” I’d come to a traffic light. I glanced down at the Heckler & Koch MP5K on the passenger seat and picked up the long curved magazine. It was full. Thirty rounds.

“So what you gonna do now, my friend?” Benito asked.

I inserted the magazine into its well and slapped the cocking lever forward. Something final about that well-oiled click.

“Plan B,” I said as the light turned green.

READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF

BURIED SECRETS

JOSEPH FINDER

Available June 2011 From St. Martin’s Press

For info about special offers & Joe’s other novels,

Visit www.JosephFinder.com

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Part One

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes, die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE,

“THE MAN OF THE CROWD” (1840)

1.

If this was what a prison was like, Alexa Marcus thought, I could totally live here. Like, forever.

She and Taylor Armstrong, her best friend, were standing in a long line to get into the hottest bar in Boston. The bar was called Slammer, and it was in a luxury hotel that used to be a jail. They’d even kept the bars in the windows and the huge central rotunda ringed with catwalks, that whole cell-block effect.

She was checking out this bunch of guys behind her who looked like MIT frat boys trying too hard to be cool: the untucked shirts, the cheap blazers, all that product in their hair, the toxic fumes of their Axe body spray. They’d stumble home at two in the morning, puking on the bridge to Cambridge, bitching about how all the girls at Slammer were skanks.

“I’m loving the smoky eye,” Taylor said, studying Alexa’s eye makeup. “See? It looks amazing on you!”

“It took me like an hour,” Alexa said. The fake eyelashes, the black gel eyeliner and charcoal eye shadow: She looked like a hooker who’d been beat up by her pimp.

“Takes me like thirty seconds,” Taylor said. “Now look at you—you’re this totally hot babe instead of a suburban prepster.”

“I’m so not suburban,” Alexa protested. She glanced over at a couple of skinny Euro-looking guys smoking and talking on their mobile phones. Cute but maybe gay? “Dad lives in Manchester.” She’d almost said, “I live in Manchester,” but she no longer thought of the great rambling house she grew up in as her home, not since Dad had married that gold-digger flight attendant, Belinda. She hadn’t lived at home in almost four years, since going away to Exeter.

“Yeah, okay,” Taylor said. Alexa caught her tone. Taylor always had to let you know she was a city kid. She’d grown up in a townhouse on Beacon Hill, in Louisburg Square—her dad was a United States senator—and considered herself urban and therefore cooler and more street-smart than anyone else. Plus, the last three years she’d been in rehab, attending the Marston-Lee Academy, the tough-love “therapeutic boarding school” in Colorado where the senator had sent her to get cleaned up.

Good luck with that.

Every time Taylor came back to Boston on break, she was rocking some different Girls Gone Wild look. Last year she’d dyed her hair jet black and had bangs. Tonight it was the skintight black liquid leggings, the oversized gray sheer tee over the black lace bra, the studded booties. Whereas Alexa, less adventurous, was wearing her ink skinny jeans and her tan Tory Burch leather jacket over a tank top. Okay, not as fashion-forward as Taylor, but no way was it suburban.

“Oh God,” Alexa murmured as the line drew closer to the bouncer.

“Just relax, okay, Lucia?” Taylor said.

“Lucia—?” Alexa began, and then she remembered that “Lucia” was the name on her fake ID. Actually, it was a real ID, just not hers—she was seventeen, and Taylor had just turned eighteen, and the drinking age was twenty-one, which was way stupid. Taylor had bought Alexa’s fake ID off an older girl.

“Just look the bouncer in the eye and be casual,” Taylor said. “You’re totally fine.”

Taylor was right, of course.

The bouncer didn’t even ask to see their IDs. When they entered the hotel lobby, Alexa followed Taylor to the old-fashioned elevator, the kind that had an arrow that pointed to the floor it was on. The elevator door opened, and an iron accordion gate slid aside. Taylor got in along with a bunch of others. Alexa hesitated, slipped in, shuddered—God, she hated elevators!—and just as the accordion gate was knifing closed, she blurted out, “I’ll take the stairs.”

They met up on the fourth floor and managed to snag a couple of big cushy chairs. A waitress in a halter top so skimpy you could see the flower tattoo below her armpit took their order: a couple of Ketel One vodka sodas.

“Check out the girls on the bar,” Taylor shouted. Models in black leather butt-baring shorts and black leather vests were parading around on top of the bar like it was a catwalk.

One of the MIT frat boys tried to mack on them, but Taylor blew the guy off: “Yeah, I’ll give you a call—next time I need tutoring in like differential calculus.”

Alexa felt Taylor’s eyes on her.

“Hey, what’s wrong, kid? You’ve been acting all depressed since you got here.”

“I’m fine.”

“You think maybe you need to change meds or something?”

Alexa shook her head. “Dad’s just, I don’t know, being all weird.”

“Nothing new about that.”

“But like he’s all paranoid all of a sudden? He just had these surveillance cameras put in, all around the house?”

“Well, he is like the richest guy in Boston. Or one of the richest—”

“I know, I know,” Alexa interrupted, not wanting to hear it. She’d spent her entire life dealing with being a rich kid: having to play down the money so her friends didn’t feel jealous. “But it’s not his normal control-freak mode, you know? It’s more like he’s scared something’s going to happen.”

“Try living with a father who’s a friggin’ United States senator.”

Taylor had started to look uncomfortable. She rolled her eyes, shook her head dismissively, looked around the now-crowded bar. “I need another drink,” she said. She called the waitress over and asked for a dirty martini. “How about you?” she asked Alexa.

“I’m good.” The truth was, she hated hard liquor, especially vodka. And gin was the worst. How could anyone voluntarily drink that stuff? It was like chugging turpentine.

Alexa’s iPhone vibrated, so she took it out and read the text. A friend at some rager in Allston, telling her it was epic and she should come over. Alexa texted back sorry. Then, abruptly, she said, “Oh my God, oh my God, did I ever show you this?” She flicked through her iPhone applications until she came to one she’d just downloaded, launched it, held the iPhone to her mouth. When she talked into it, her words came out high pitched and weird, like one of the Chipmunks: “Hey, babe, wanna come back to my dorm and take off our clothes and do some algebra?”

Taylor squealed. “What is that?” She tried to grab the phone, but Alexa yanked it away, swiped the screen and started speaking in the creepy voice of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings: “Must have preciousssss!”

Taylor shrieked, and they both laughed so hard that tears came to their eyes. “See—you’re feeling better already, right?” said Taylor.

“May I join you?” A male voice.

Alexa looked up, saw a guy standing there. Not one of the frat boys, though. De nitely not. This one had dark hair and brown eyes, a day’s growth of beard, and he was totally a babe. Black shirt with white pinstripes, narrow waist, broad shoulders.

Alexa smiled, blushed—she couldn’t help it—and looked at Taylor.

“Do we know you?” Taylor said.

“Not yet,” the guy said, flashing a dazzling smile. Late twenties, early thirties, maybe? Hard to tell. “My friends ditched me. They went to a party in the South End I don’t feel like going to.” He had some kind of Spanish accent.

“There’s only two chairs,” Taylor said.

He said something to a couple seated next to them, slid a vacant chair over. Extended a hand to shake Taylor’s, then Alexa’s.

“I’m Lorenzo,” he said.

2

The bathroom had Molton Brown hand soap (Thai Vert) and real towels, folded into perfect squares. Alexa reapplied her lip gloss while Taylor touched up her eyes.

“He’s totally into you,” Taylor said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Like you don’t know it.” Taylor was outlining her eyes with a kohl pencil.

“How old do you think he is?”

“I don’t know, thirties?”

“Thirties? I thought maybe thirty at the oldest. Do you think he knows we’re only…” but another couple of girls entered the bathroom, and she let her sentence trail off.

“Go for it,” Taylor said. “It’s totally cool. I promise.”

When they finally succeeded in elbowing their way back to their chairs, the Black Eyed Peas blasting so loud her ears hurt, Alexa half-expected Lorenzo to be gone.

But he was still there, slouching a little in his chair, sipping his vodka. Alexa reached for her drink—a Peartini, at Lorenzo’s suggestion—and was surprised it was half gone. Man, she thought, I am truly wasted.

Lorenzo smiled that awesome smile. His eyes weren’t just brown, she noticed. They were light brown. Tiger’s eye, she thought. She had a tiger’s eye choker her mom had given her a couple months before she died. She couldn’t bring herself to wear it, but she loved looking at the stones.

“If you kids’ll excuse me,” Taylor said, “I really need to get going.”

“Taylor!” Alexa said.

“Why?” said Lorenzo. “Please stay.”

“Can’t,” Taylor said. “My dad’s waiting up for me.” With a conspiratorial sparkle in her eye, Taylor gave a little wave and disappeared into the crowd.

Lorenzo moved to Taylor’s chair, next to Alexa’s. “That’s okay. Tell me about you, Lucia. How come I never see you here before?”

For a moment she forgot who “Lucia” was.

Now she was definitely drunk.

She felt like she was floating above the clouds, singing along to Rihanna, smiling like an idiot, while Lorenzo was saying something to her. The room swam. She was finding it hard to separate his voice from everyone else’s, a cacophony of a thousand individual conversations, little snatches, layer upon layer upon layer, none of them making any sense. Her mouth was dry. She reached for her glass of Pellegrino, knocked it over. Smiled sheepishly. She just stared at the spill open-mouthed, amazed that the water glass hadn’t broken, gave Lorenzo a goofy smile, and he gave that spectacular smile back, his brown eyes soft and sexy. He reached over and dropped his napkin over the puddle to blot it up.

She said, “I think I need to go home.”

“I take you,” he said.

He tossed a bunch of twenties on the table, stood, reached for her hand. She tried to stand but it felt like her knees were hinged. He took her hand again, his other hand around her waist, half-lifted her up.

“My car…”

“You shouldn’t drive,” he said. “I drive you home. You can get your car back tomorrow.”

“But…”

“It’s not a problem. Come, Lucia.” He steered her through the crowd, his arms strong. People were staring at her, leering, laughter echoing, the lights streaky rainbow and glittery, like being underwater and looking up at the sky, everything so distant.

Now she felt the pleasant clear coolness of the late-night air on her face.

Traffic noise, the bleat of car horns, smearing by.

She was lying down on the back seat of a strange car, her cheek pressed against the cold hard cracked leather. The car smelled like stale cigarette smoke and beer. A few beer bottles rolled around on the floor. A Porsche, she was pretty sure, but old and skeezy and filthy inside. Definitely not what she imagined a guy like Lorenzo driving.

“Do you know how to get there?” she tried to say. But the words came out slurred.

She felt seasick, hoped she wasn’t going to vomit in the back seat of Lorenzo’s Porsche. That would be nasty.

She wondered: How did he know where to go?

Now she heard the car door open and close. The engine had been shut off. Why was he stopping so soon?

When she opened her eyes, she noticed it was dark. No streetlights. No traffic sounds, either. Her sluggish brain registered a faint, distant alarm. Was he leaving her here? Where were they? What was he doing?

Someone was walking toward the Porsche. It was too dark to make out his face. A lean, powerful build, that was all she could see.

The door opened, and the light came on, illuminating the man’s face. Shaved head, piercing blue eyes, sharp jaw, unshaven. Handsome, until he smiled and showed brown rodent’s teeth.

“Come with me, please,” the new man said.

*   *   *

She awoke in the back seat of a big new SUV. An Escalade, maybe, or a Navigator.

Very warm in here, almost hot. A smell like cheap air freshener.

She looked at the back of the driver’s head. He had shaved black hair. On the back of his neck, a strange tattoo crawled up from beneath his sweatshirt. Her first thought was: angry eyes. A bird?

“What happened to Lorenzo?” she tried to say, but she wasn’t sure what came out.

“Just stretch out and have yourself a nice rest, Alexa,” the man said. He had an accent too, but harsher, more guttural.

That sounded like a good idea. She felt herself drifting off, but then her heart started to race, as if her body realized even before her mind did.

He knew her real name.

3

“Here’s the thing,” the short guy said. “I always like to know who I’m doing business with.”

I nodded, smiled.

What a jerk.

If Short Man’s Disease were recognized by modern medicine as the serious syndrome it is, all the textbooks would use Philip Curtis’s picture, along with those of Mussolini, Stalin, Attila the Hun, and of course the patron saint of all miniature tyrants, Napoléon Bonaparte. Granted, I’m over six feet, but I know tall guys with Short Man’s Disease too.

Philip Curtis, as he called himself, was so small and compact that I was convinced I could pick him up in one hand and hurl him through my office window, and by now I was sorely tempted to. He was maybe an inch or two above five feet, shiny bald, and wore enormous black-framed glasses, which he probably thought made him look more imposing, instead of like a turtle who’d lost his shell and was pissed off about it.

The vintage Patek Philippe watch on his wrist had to be sixty years old. That told me a lot. It was the only flashy object he wore, and it said “inherited money.” His Patek Philippe had been passed down, probably from his dad.

“I checked you out.” His brow arched significantly. “Did the whole due-diligence thing. Gotta say, you don’t leave a lot of tracks.”

“So I’m told.”

“You don’t have a website.”

“Don’t need one.”

“You’re not on Facebook.”

“My teenage nephew’s on it. Does that count?”

“Barely anything turned up on Google. So I asked around. Seems you’ve got an unusual background. Went to Yale but never graduated. Did a couple of summer internships at McKinsey, huh?”

“I was young. I didn’t know any better.”

His smile was reptilian. But a small reptile. A gecko, maybe. “I worked there myself.”

“And I was almost starting to respect you,” I said.

“The part I don’t get is, you dropped out of Yale to join the army. What was that all about? Guys like us don’t do that.”

“Go to Yale?”

He shook his head, annoyed. “You know, I thought the name ‘Heller’ sounded familiar. Your dad’s Victor Heller, right?”

I shrugged as if to say, You got me.

“Your father was a true legend.”

“Is,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Is,” I repeated. “He’s still alive. Doing twenty-some years in prison.”

“Right, right. Well, he sure got the shaft, didn’t he?”

“So he tells people.” My father, Victor Heller, the so-called Dark Prince of Wall Street, was currently serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for securities fraud. “Legend” was a polite way of referring to him.

“I was always a big admirer of your dad’s. He was a real pioneer. Then again, I bet some potential clients, they hear you’re Victor Heller’s son, they’re gonna think twice about hiring you, huh?”

“You think?”

“You know what I mean, the whole…” He faltered, then probably decided he didn’t have to. He figured he’d made his point.

But I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “You mean the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? Like father, like son?”

“Well, yeah, sort of. That might bother some guys, but not me. Uh-uh. Way I figure it, that means you’re probably not going to be too finicky about the gray areas.”

“The gray areas.”

“All the fussy legal stuff, know what I’m saying?”

“Ah, gotcha,” I said. For a long moment I found myself looking out the window. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I liked the view. You could see right down High Street to the ocean, the waterfront at Rowes Wharf framed by a grand Italianate marble arch.

I’d moved to Boston from Washington a few months ago and was lucky enough to find an office in an old brick-and-beam building in the financial district, a rehabbed nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory. From the outside it looked like a Victorian poorhouse out of Dickens. But on the inside, with its bare brick walls and tall arched windows and exposed ductwork and factory-floor open spaces, you couldn’t forget it was a place where they used to actually make stuff. And I liked that. It had a sort of steampunk vibe. The other tenants in the building were consulting firms, an accounting firm, and several small real-estate offices. On the first floor was an “exotic sushi and tapas” place that had gone out of business, and the showroom for Derderian Fine Oriental Rugs.

My office had belonged to some high-flying dot-com that made nothing, including money. They’d gone bust suddenly, so I caught a nice break on the price. They’d absconded so quickly they left all their fancy hanging metal-and-glass light fixtures and even some very expensive office chairs.

“So you say someone on your board of directors is leaking derogatory information about your company,” I said, turning around slowly, “and you want us to—how’d you put it?—‘plug the leak.’ Right?”

“Exactly.”

I gave him my finest conspiratorial grin. “Meaning you want their phones tapped and their e-mails accessed.”

“Hey, you’re a pro,” he said with a quick, smarmy wink. “I’d never tell you how to do your job.”

“Better not to know the details, right? How we work our magic?”

He nodded, a couple of sharp up-and-downs. “Plausible deniability and all that. You got it.”

“Of course. Obviously you know that what you’re asking me to do is basically illegal.”

“We’re both big boys,” he said.

I had to bite my lip. One of us was, anyway.

Just then my phone buzzed—an internal line—and I picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Okay, you were right.” The smoky voice of my forensic data tech, Dorothy Duval. “His name isn’t Philip Curtis.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t rub it in.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s a teachable moment. You should know by now not to question me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m stuck. If you have any ideas, just IM me, and I’ll check them out.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I hung up.

The man who wasn’t Philip Curtis had a strong Chicago accent. Wherever he lived now, he was raised in Chicago. He had a rich dad: The hand-me-down Patek Philippe confirmed that.

Then there was the black luggage tag on his Louis Vuitton briefcase. A fractional jet card. He leased a private jet for some limited number of hours per year. Which meant he wanted a private jet but couldn’t afford one.

I had a vague recollection of an item I’d seen on BizWire about troubles in a family-held business in Chicago. “Will you excuse me for just one more minute?” I said. “I have to put out a fire.” Then I typed out an instant message and sent it to Dorothy.

The answer came back less than a minute later: a Wall Street Journal article she’d pulled up on ProQuest. I skimmed it, and I knew I’d guessed right. I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not too long ago.

Then I leaned back in my chair. “So here’s the problem,” I said.

“Problem?”

“I’m not interested in your business.”

Stunned, he whirled around to look at me. “What did you just say?”

“If you really did your homework, you know that I do intelligence work for private clients. I’m not a private investigator, I don’t tap phones, and I don’t do divorces. And I’m sure as hell not a family therapist.”

“Family…?”

“This is clearly a family squabble, Sam.”

Small round pink spots had formed high on his cheeks. “I told you my name is—”

“Don’t even bother,” I said wearily. “This has nothing to do with plugging a leak. Your family troubles aren’t exactly a secret. You were supposed to take over Daddy’s company until he heard you were talking to the private equity guys about taking Richter private and cashing out.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

His father, Jacob Richter, had gone from owning a parking lot in Chicago to creating the largest luxury hotel chain in the world. Over a hundred five-star hotels in forty countries, plus a couple of cruise lines, shopping malls, office buildings, and a hell of a lot of real estate. A company valued at ten billion dollars.

“So Dad gets pissed off,” I went on, “and squeezes you out and appoints Big Sis chief executive officer and heir apparent instead of you. Didn’t expect that, did you? You figured you were a shoo-in. But you’re not gonna put up with that, are you? Since you know all of Dad’s dirty laundry, you figure you’ll get him on tape making one of his shady real estate deals, offering kickbacks and bribes, and you’ll be able to blackmail your way back in. I guess that’s called winning ugly, right?”

Sam Richter’s face had gone dark red, almost purple. A couple of bulging veins on top of his scalp were throbbing so hard I thought he was going to have a coronary right in the middle of my office. “Who did you talk to?” he demanded.

“Nobody. Just did the whole due-diligence thing. I always like to know who I’m doing business with. And I really don’t like being lied to.”

As Richter lurched to his feet, he shoved the chair—one of the expensive Humanscale office chairs left by the dot-com—and it crashed to the floor, leaving a visible dent in the old wood. From the doorway, he said, “You know, for a guy whose father’s in prison for fraud, you sure act all high and mighty.”

“You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “Sorry to waste your time. Mind showing yourself out?” Behind him Dorothy was standing, arms folded.

“Victor Heller was…the scum of the earth!” he sputtered.

“Is,” I corrected him.

4

“You don’t tap phones,” Dorothy said, arms folded, moving into my office.

I smiled, shrugged. “I always forget you can hear. Someday that’s gonna get me in trouble.” Our standard arrangement was for her to listen in on all client meetings via the IP video camera built into the huge desktop monitor on my desk.

“You don’t tap phones,” she said again. Her lips were pressed into a smirk. “Mm-hmm.”

“As a general rule,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “You hire guys to do it.”

“Exactly.”

“What the hell was that all about?” she snapped with a fierce glare. Dorothy and I had worked together at Stoddard Associates in D.C. before I moved to Boston and stole her away. She wasn’t really a computer genius—there were certainly more knowledgeable ones around—but she knew digital forensics inside and out. She’d worked at the National Security Agency for nine years, and they don’t hire just anyone. As much as she detested working there, they’d trained her well. More important, no one was as stubborn as Dorothy. She simply did not give up. And there was no one more loyal.

She was feisty and blunt-spoken and didn’t play well with others, which was why she and the NSA were a lousy fit, but it was one of the things I liked about her. She never held back. She loved telling me off and showing me up and proving me wrong, and I enjoyed that too. You did not want to mess with her.

“You heard me. I don’t like liars.”

“Get over it. We need the business, and you’ve turned down more work than you’ve taken on.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said, “but you don’t need to worry about the firm’s cash flow. Your salary’s guaranteed.”

“Until Heller Associates goes bust because the overhead’s too high and you got no income. I am not slinking back to Jay Stoddard, and I am not moving back to Washington.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I’d worked closely with Dorothy, even intimately, but I knew almost nothing about her. She never talked about her love life, and I never asked. I wasn’t even sure whether she preferred men or women. Everyone’s entitled to their zone of privacy.

She was an attractive, striking woman with mocha skin, liquid brown eyes, and an incandescent smile. She always dressed elegantly, even though she didn’t need to, since she rarely met with clients. Today she was wearing a shimmering lilac silk blouse and a black pencil skirt and some kind of strappy heels. She wore her hair extremely short—almost bald, in fact. On most women that might look bizarre, but on her it somehow worked. Attached to her earlobes were turquoise copper-enamel discs the size of Frisbees.

Dorothy was a mass of contradictions, which was another thing I liked about her. She was a regular churchgoer—even before she’d found an apartment, she’d joined an AME Zion church in the South End—but she was no church lady. The opposite, in fact: She had an almost profane sense of humor about her faith. She’d put a plaque on her cubicle wall that said JESUS LOVES YOU—EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, RIGHT NEXT TO ONE THAT SAID I LOVE MARY’S BABYDADDY.

“I think we need to have regular status-update meetings like we used to do at Stoddard,” she said. “I want to go over the Entronics case and the Garrison case.”

“I need coffee first,” I said. “And not that swill that Jillian makes.”

Jillian Alperin, our receptionist and of ce manager, was a strict vegan. (Veganism is apparently the paramilitary wing of vegetarianism.) She had multiple piercings, including one on her lip, and several tattoos. One was of a butterfly, on her right shoulder. I’d caught a glimpse of another one on her lower back too one day.

She was also a “green” fanatic who had banned all foam and paper cups in the office. Everything had to be organic, ethical, free-range, fair-trade, and cruelty-free. The coffee she ordered for the office machine was organic fair-trade ethical beans shade-grown using sustainable cultivation methods by a small co-op of indigenous peasant farmers in resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. It cost as much as Bolivian cocaine and probably would have been rejected by a death-row inmate.

“Well, aren’t you fussy,” Dorothy said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down the block,” I said.

“That better not be a hint. I don’t do coffee.”

“I know better than to ask,” I said, getting up.

The phone rang: the muted internal ringtone. Jillian’s voice came over the intercom: “A Marshall Marcus for you?”

“The Marshall Marcus?” Dorothy said. “As in the richest guy in Boston?”

I nodded.

“You turn this one down, Nick, and I’m gonna whip your butt.”

“I doubt it’s a job,” I said. “Probably personal.” I picked up and said, “Marshall. Long time.”

“Nick,” he said. “I need your help. Alexa’s gone.”

St. Martin’s Press

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.

“Plan B.”

Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Finder.

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ISBN: 978-1-4299-4185-3