The oxenburg woman, p.40
The Oxenburg Woman, page 40
“Right. We specialize in breaking rules.”
“Not my rules.”
Lewis looked at her. “Which rules are we talking about now? According to your rules, innocent people deserve what they get if they’re in our way. We can justify anything by your rules. I’m sick of this business.”
“You thrive on this business. You’re a natural.”
“I have an aptitude for numbers, I’m a decent sailor and I’m still a pretty fair fullback on a good day. Those are my natural talents.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“You’re not going to lose me, not for a few years. By then Christine will be ready to take over my section. You’ll be fine. You’ll go right on skimming the fat off the leeches and lowlife of the world.”
“At least let me retire before you do.”
“You’ll never retire.”
“This organization needs you.”
“This organization doesn’t need anyone. You need money. That’s what I am: a profit center. It’s time I found something more important to need me.”
“At the risk of intruding in your personal life, Lewis, do you really believe this Oxenburg woman cares about you? She’s unstable, surely you can see that. She’s a classic victim; you fit a pattern in her life history. Look at the facts: her father shoots himself after killing a teen in a shootout, a perfect example of job burnout, and a year later her mother dies of cancer. Then Richard Oxenburg and that warped marriage. She’s a loser, living a pattern of abandonment. You’re just another dead end.”
“I’ll tell you what: You don’t explain Suzanna Oxenburg to me, and I won’t give you the facts on the Senator.”
The director sat very still. He saw the color come and go in her face. Her eyes flickered. “My personal life is off limits.”
“So is mine. Don’t push me. I’m working for you today; I may decide to take your job tomorrow. You should be happy I plan to retire.”
“You did this audit for Gerald. You don’t give a damn about this organization.”
“I think this organization serves a purpose. I wouldn’t go out of my way to harm it, but yes, I did the audit for Gerald. I cared for the man; he gave me this Walther and most of the other tools to keep this job from eating me alive. You used him up, and then you hid him out here because he was too valuable to just throw away.”
“Not true. He was brilliant, that never changed. I needed him and I trusted him.”
“He earned it. I’ve been thinking about his letter. He asked that we not do an autopsy. Did you do one anyway?”
“I couldn’t risk an autopsy, but Anderson examined him.”
“He find anything?”
“Nothing. He’d been cleaned up. There wasn’t a trace.”
“I guess now we know what MacIntyre was doing while I was lying in that ditch.”
“MacIntyre always considered Gerald his first priority.”
“Which is more than he was for me,” Lewis said bitterly, “or you.”
“I think you’ve made Gerald a rather high priority for the last couple of days. That was quite a speech last night from a man who’s never heard a eulogy.”
Lewis shrugged. He was impatient to be gone. “I did your audit. Gerald’s in the clear. We both got what we wanted.”
“You’re right.” She stood and held out her hand, “Congratulations.”
He took it reluctantly but her grip was warm and he found that he relished the feeling of being allied with her. When she released him, her face wore the composed, elegant expression he had come to think of as her monarch look. “When will you be back with your project?”
“In a couple of days. I’ll check in with Jamieson.”
“Don’t rush straight back. Christine has everything well in hand.”
They had both turned to study the rocky, shrub-covered ridges that stretched beyond the window. Without taking his attention off the view, Lewis asked, “What’s the status of Arnold’s review of my incident here? Is it finished and filed?”
She nodded. “The review is closed with a finding of accidental shooting. Arnold wanted to hold it open until you submitted your audit report but he was overruled. Both Singh and I have signed off.”
“What’s in the report about Mrs. Oxenburg?”
“Basically that she was investigated, surveillance was conducted but nothing incriminating came to light. Her involvement is accepted as unsolicited assistance from a bystander.”
“So the Group has no further interest in her?
She arched an eyebrow. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”
Lewis exhaled noisily. “This is how rumors get started. I meant official interest.”
“The Group has no official interest in her, correct.”
She picked up her coffee and took a sip before continuing. “Maybe if you hadn’t bought her that car there wouldn’t be quite so much unofficial interest. Last night’s event, bringing everyone out here to meet the center staff has been beneficial for the migration effort. I’m officially pleased with it as a kick-off for the center cut-over. Unofficially, it’s inevitable that when our people get together with alcohol, stories are shared. I’ve heard a few versions. I consider it beneath my level of oversight, but between you and me, that car was over the top. That being said, having an agent rescued by a member of the public has never happened before and it’s highly unlikely to happen again. If you think that car is the right thing, I’m not going to argue with you.” She turned from the window, “We can afford it, and your reputation can cover Mrs. Oxenburg and her sports car.”
“Right,” Lewis said. “Anything else we need to talk about?”
She shook her head, “No, just get some R&R.”
“I’ll take a day or two, catch up on some sleep.”
“Good. You’re still recovering. You need a longer break, an actual vacation.”
“As soon as the German job is wrapped.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
* * * *
Suzanna wasn’t in the house when he arrived. The Volvo and Jaguar were both there but the house was empty. He was examining the empty corral behind the barn when she came riding up the hill from the back of the property.
The gelding’s chest and shoulders gleamed with sweat. She opened the gate neatly without dismounting and rode directly across the corral to him.
“Look who was here waiting for me this morning,” she said, smiling down at him.
“Is he all right? Any damage done?”
“He’s just fine.” She studied him. “How did he get here?”
“Bliss.”
“Oh.” Her smile faded. He knew she wanted to know the when and the how and the why of all of it.
“I like him,” Lewis said. “Bliss. He’s a good man, competent, straight up. Lets you know where he stands.”
“I don’t think he likes you much.”
“No, he’s got no use for me.” He admired the picture she made on the horse with the mountains in the distance behind her. “I don’t blame him. I had a job to do and the quickest way to get it done was by leaning on Lily. That wouldn’t sit well with a man like Bliss.”
“Does it sit well with you?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m afraid to think about it.”
“I brought lunch,” he said. “We can talk while we eat.”
* * * *
“I’m impressed.” Suzanna eyed the enormous picnic basket he’d left on the kitchen island. She lifted the lid and examined the contents. “Yum, I’m starved.” She pulled off a grape and popped it into her mouth. “Where’s the champagne?”
“In the freezer.”
“Really? Now I am impressed.” She kissed him lightly. “Did you do all this?”
“My boss, actually.” He smiled mockingly. “She thinks I’m romantically incompetent.”
“And what do you think?”
“Oh, I know I am.”
She smiled back. “It’s noon and you just shaved. How long have you been up?”
“Long enough to shave. How about you?”
“Since five.”
“That’s when I went to bed.”
She leaned back against the counter. “This was a nice surprise, but I’m not sure I want to have lunch with you. Don’t you have someplace you have to be in fifteen minutes?”
“There’s somewhere I need to be in three days.”
“Three days? Three whole days? As in seventy-two hours?”
“I can leave any time, Suzanna. Now, if that’s what you want.”
“Well, supposing you don’t leave, what exactly did you have in mind?”
“A few days in the city with a certain woman I know. Early dinners, late breakfasts, long conversations, no work.”
“Who says you’re incompetent?”
He reached out to pull her against him. “Damn few people,” he confided, looking down at her. “Only the foolish and the exempt. And that goes for tying me up, too.”
“You took me prisoner first,” she said.
“So I did. Extenuating circumstances.”
“For me, too.”
“A matter of degree,” he observed drily. “I thought you were starving.”
* * * *
“What happened to your hand?”
They had passed up the wrought iron furniture in favor of the floor of the covered back deck. Lewis had his back against the glass doors while he watched Suzanna sample the contents of the picnic basket. He sat comfortably with his legs extended, ankles crossed. He still wore his sunglasses, only partly because of the glare.
He turned his hand over and glanced down at his swollen, discolored knuckles. “Exactly what you think. Somebody declared war. I let him know I heard him.”
“Where were you last night?” she persisted.
“At a company party.”
“Must have been quite a party,” she mused. “Did you wear your tux?”
He smiled and rested his head against the glass again. “Not the one you saw,” he said. “They cut that one off me.”
He looked like a big, lazy cat relaxing in the shade. “I want to ask you so many things,” she said. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I work for a group,” he offered. “I think you’d like to know something about them, something about what we do in general, and what I do specifically. Right?”
“For a start.”
He rolled his head against the glass, looked at her and then gazed off into the distance beyond the distant river bed. “The Group was started by one man. I mean that literally. One man who got fed up with J. Edgar and went independent. He raised his own capital, recruited a few good people and got into the information business. His name was Ingraham, Bernard Edward Ingraham. He’s dead now, but the Group still uses his name and it still brings us contracts.”
“J. Edgar? As in . . .”
“Yes, as in. Leave that. Bernie was a very bright, impatient man, with his own politics. He spent a lot of time in Cuba in the days when Cuba was a hot spot. He even married a Cuban. Between his personality and his revolutionary wife, he wasn’t popular at the agency.”
“So he went into competition with them. As what? I’m trying to figure out those initials—B.E.I., is that it?”
“Suzanna,” he chided. “Why does the name matter?”
“It just does. I want to know. Is it a secret?”
He sighed. “Bernie caught a disease in Cuba. One of those tropical things, like malaria. He had a high fever for weeks, couldn’t get to a hospital. It killed all of his hair follicles. He was completely bald afterwards. He was still with the agency at that time. Still with them but pretty much on the outs. They looked at his initials and started calling him Bald Eagle Ingraham. It stuck. He got to be quite well known in certain circles and when he left to start his own company, the name went with him. I guess it was a natural: Bald Eagle Ingraham Group.
“I’m tempted to smile,” she said.
He saw she was more than tempted. “It’s not an uncommon reaction. We pretty much stick to the initials these days. People call us the Beige Group. It works two ways: keeps Bernie’s reputation alive and gives us that nice, colorless flavor our customers like.”
“Who are your customers?”
“Mostly government. Over fifty percent of our contracts are jobs for a government somewhere. Like you said, deep pockets, and nobody’s pockets are deeper than bureaucrats. But we’ll work for anybody and everybody. You could be a client.”
“What could I have you do?”
“You’ve got a good imagination, Suzanna, use it. Get as far out there as you like. I’ll pull you back.”
She thought for a moment. “What if I wanted you to remove somebody from my environment?”
“We get a lot of requests to make people disappear. It’s not my specialty you understand, but I do know how it works.” He paused. “All right. Who is it and how bad do you want him gone? What can you afford?”
“Hmmm . . . he’s a business rival. I want to take over his company. It’s worth millions to me.”
“If you’ve got millions, why don’t you buy him out?”
“Tried that. He won’t sell to me. It’s personal. He won’t sell and I’ve got to have his company.”
“Can’t you diversify? Go around him, wait him out? In six months he may be out of your way without you doing anything.”
“Oh no,” Suzanna insisted with theatrical emphasis. “I’ll pay whatever you want but I’m not going to wait. He’s got to go. Now what?”
“Now we tell you we’ll get back to you.”
“And then?”
“We don’t. We open a file on you and ignore you unless you contact us again. If you do, we move you up a notch on our evaluation scale and we research your family, employment history, personal life, criminal record, finances, etc. And we do the same thing for your target. The research is analyzed and you’re categorized as Pending or Discard. We don’t take further calls from the Discard list but if you qualify to engage a third time, we tell you we’re still evaluating your proposal and move you up another notch. That means our experts sit down with the research and decide whether your situation fits our business model.”
“Really? You have a business model for it?”
“You bet we do. Come on, Suzanna, play it out.”
“I assume we have to negotiate your price for murder?”
“Nope, no negotiation. We tell you we’re not interested and decline to bid.”
“What? After all that? What was the point of letting me believe you’d do it?”
“To gauge your level of intent. To encourage you to show your hand and prove that you have the will and the resources to go through with it.”
“But what is the point of all that if you turn everybody down?”
“Come on, smart lady. We’re in the information business and we’ve got a lot of it now. We know everything about you, including what you want and how bad you want it. We essentially own you. Hear the cash register ringing yet?”
“You go to my business rival? How much do you tell him? Once you warn him, how do you get paid?”
“Information management is our expertise. We’re pretty good at it. We tend to get paid — first for information, second for risk management if people want our help. Some do; some don’t.”
She frowned. “But I’m the client. What do I get?”
“You’re not our client. We turned you down. What you get is arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. Your rival, on the other hand, gets to buy you out, probably for pennies on the dollar. That’s the power of information in the right hands. That’s why it’s profitable.”
“Ah, that’s how all the research ties to the business model. It still feels like blood money.”
“We don’t solicit those jobs. We try to screen out the hotheads and time wasters, but we get all of that kind of work we can handle. Whether we’re involved in it or not, it goes on every day. It’s not what I do personally, but Beige contracts those jobs and I’m a partner. I make a percentage on every job.
“I’m sorry I started on this topic. Thank you but too much candor. I don’t know what to say.”
“Say what you’re thinking. Are you shocked?”
“By the human race.”
He nodded once. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“Are you trying to tell me the worst about you so I’ll stop asking and talk about the weather?”
“More like it was on your mind or you wouldn’t have started right out with hiring a hit. It’s automatic to think people walking around armed are nefarious but not always the case. We’re armed for protection.”
“Is it legal, what they do?”
“What I do, Suzanna. If we’re going to be honest, let’s keep it straight. What they do, I do. I’m part of the organization all the way.
“Is this what you want, Lewis? Do you like working for them?”
“I’m not the spectator type, Suzanna. The job suits me and I happen to be good at it — currency tracing, I mean. I’ve acquired other job skills as I went along. There are other employers but not many shots like this. These people are the best in the business. We excel in areas where competition is lean because the work is complicated and mistakes have real consequences. We work in minefields because nobody else wants to.”
He turned away to look at the view. “Do I like it? Well, yeah, I do, but I don’t spend a lot of time meditating on it. When I’m between jobs I don’t want to think about it, and when I’m working, I’m too busy to worry about it. I won’t be doing this forever, but I am now, and that’s what we’re talking about.”
Suzanna saw his mouth set in a firm line. She looked away and took a breath. Her voice was calm when she asked, “You can’t really do these things without breaking the law, can you?”
“Oh, the law,” he repeated ironically. He was still focused on the peaks of the Bradshaw range, off to his left. Finally he looked back at her. “Some places I’ve worked, we’re breaking the law right now.”
“How?”
“A married woman sitting alone with a man, eating in public. Not to mention consuming alcohol.” He turned back to the view. “And before the sun goes behind those hills, we’ll be doing something that would get you jailed and stoned to death with the full support of the law.”
“Not my rules.”
Lewis looked at her. “Which rules are we talking about now? According to your rules, innocent people deserve what they get if they’re in our way. We can justify anything by your rules. I’m sick of this business.”
“You thrive on this business. You’re a natural.”
“I have an aptitude for numbers, I’m a decent sailor and I’m still a pretty fair fullback on a good day. Those are my natural talents.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“You’re not going to lose me, not for a few years. By then Christine will be ready to take over my section. You’ll be fine. You’ll go right on skimming the fat off the leeches and lowlife of the world.”
“At least let me retire before you do.”
“You’ll never retire.”
“This organization needs you.”
“This organization doesn’t need anyone. You need money. That’s what I am: a profit center. It’s time I found something more important to need me.”
“At the risk of intruding in your personal life, Lewis, do you really believe this Oxenburg woman cares about you? She’s unstable, surely you can see that. She’s a classic victim; you fit a pattern in her life history. Look at the facts: her father shoots himself after killing a teen in a shootout, a perfect example of job burnout, and a year later her mother dies of cancer. Then Richard Oxenburg and that warped marriage. She’s a loser, living a pattern of abandonment. You’re just another dead end.”
“I’ll tell you what: You don’t explain Suzanna Oxenburg to me, and I won’t give you the facts on the Senator.”
The director sat very still. He saw the color come and go in her face. Her eyes flickered. “My personal life is off limits.”
“So is mine. Don’t push me. I’m working for you today; I may decide to take your job tomorrow. You should be happy I plan to retire.”
“You did this audit for Gerald. You don’t give a damn about this organization.”
“I think this organization serves a purpose. I wouldn’t go out of my way to harm it, but yes, I did the audit for Gerald. I cared for the man; he gave me this Walther and most of the other tools to keep this job from eating me alive. You used him up, and then you hid him out here because he was too valuable to just throw away.”
“Not true. He was brilliant, that never changed. I needed him and I trusted him.”
“He earned it. I’ve been thinking about his letter. He asked that we not do an autopsy. Did you do one anyway?”
“I couldn’t risk an autopsy, but Anderson examined him.”
“He find anything?”
“Nothing. He’d been cleaned up. There wasn’t a trace.”
“I guess now we know what MacIntyre was doing while I was lying in that ditch.”
“MacIntyre always considered Gerald his first priority.”
“Which is more than he was for me,” Lewis said bitterly, “or you.”
“I think you’ve made Gerald a rather high priority for the last couple of days. That was quite a speech last night from a man who’s never heard a eulogy.”
Lewis shrugged. He was impatient to be gone. “I did your audit. Gerald’s in the clear. We both got what we wanted.”
“You’re right.” She stood and held out her hand, “Congratulations.”
He took it reluctantly but her grip was warm and he found that he relished the feeling of being allied with her. When she released him, her face wore the composed, elegant expression he had come to think of as her monarch look. “When will you be back with your project?”
“In a couple of days. I’ll check in with Jamieson.”
“Don’t rush straight back. Christine has everything well in hand.”
They had both turned to study the rocky, shrub-covered ridges that stretched beyond the window. Without taking his attention off the view, Lewis asked, “What’s the status of Arnold’s review of my incident here? Is it finished and filed?”
She nodded. “The review is closed with a finding of accidental shooting. Arnold wanted to hold it open until you submitted your audit report but he was overruled. Both Singh and I have signed off.”
“What’s in the report about Mrs. Oxenburg?”
“Basically that she was investigated, surveillance was conducted but nothing incriminating came to light. Her involvement is accepted as unsolicited assistance from a bystander.”
“So the Group has no further interest in her?
She arched an eyebrow. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”
Lewis exhaled noisily. “This is how rumors get started. I meant official interest.”
“The Group has no official interest in her, correct.”
She picked up her coffee and took a sip before continuing. “Maybe if you hadn’t bought her that car there wouldn’t be quite so much unofficial interest. Last night’s event, bringing everyone out here to meet the center staff has been beneficial for the migration effort. I’m officially pleased with it as a kick-off for the center cut-over. Unofficially, it’s inevitable that when our people get together with alcohol, stories are shared. I’ve heard a few versions. I consider it beneath my level of oversight, but between you and me, that car was over the top. That being said, having an agent rescued by a member of the public has never happened before and it’s highly unlikely to happen again. If you think that car is the right thing, I’m not going to argue with you.” She turned from the window, “We can afford it, and your reputation can cover Mrs. Oxenburg and her sports car.”
“Right,” Lewis said. “Anything else we need to talk about?”
She shook her head, “No, just get some R&R.”
“I’ll take a day or two, catch up on some sleep.”
“Good. You’re still recovering. You need a longer break, an actual vacation.”
“As soon as the German job is wrapped.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
* * * *
Suzanna wasn’t in the house when he arrived. The Volvo and Jaguar were both there but the house was empty. He was examining the empty corral behind the barn when she came riding up the hill from the back of the property.
The gelding’s chest and shoulders gleamed with sweat. She opened the gate neatly without dismounting and rode directly across the corral to him.
“Look who was here waiting for me this morning,” she said, smiling down at him.
“Is he all right? Any damage done?”
“He’s just fine.” She studied him. “How did he get here?”
“Bliss.”
“Oh.” Her smile faded. He knew she wanted to know the when and the how and the why of all of it.
“I like him,” Lewis said. “Bliss. He’s a good man, competent, straight up. Lets you know where he stands.”
“I don’t think he likes you much.”
“No, he’s got no use for me.” He admired the picture she made on the horse with the mountains in the distance behind her. “I don’t blame him. I had a job to do and the quickest way to get it done was by leaning on Lily. That wouldn’t sit well with a man like Bliss.”
“Does it sit well with you?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m afraid to think about it.”
“I brought lunch,” he said. “We can talk while we eat.”
* * * *
“I’m impressed.” Suzanna eyed the enormous picnic basket he’d left on the kitchen island. She lifted the lid and examined the contents. “Yum, I’m starved.” She pulled off a grape and popped it into her mouth. “Where’s the champagne?”
“In the freezer.”
“Really? Now I am impressed.” She kissed him lightly. “Did you do all this?”
“My boss, actually.” He smiled mockingly. “She thinks I’m romantically incompetent.”
“And what do you think?”
“Oh, I know I am.”
She smiled back. “It’s noon and you just shaved. How long have you been up?”
“Long enough to shave. How about you?”
“Since five.”
“That’s when I went to bed.”
She leaned back against the counter. “This was a nice surprise, but I’m not sure I want to have lunch with you. Don’t you have someplace you have to be in fifteen minutes?”
“There’s somewhere I need to be in three days.”
“Three days? Three whole days? As in seventy-two hours?”
“I can leave any time, Suzanna. Now, if that’s what you want.”
“Well, supposing you don’t leave, what exactly did you have in mind?”
“A few days in the city with a certain woman I know. Early dinners, late breakfasts, long conversations, no work.”
“Who says you’re incompetent?”
He reached out to pull her against him. “Damn few people,” he confided, looking down at her. “Only the foolish and the exempt. And that goes for tying me up, too.”
“You took me prisoner first,” she said.
“So I did. Extenuating circumstances.”
“For me, too.”
“A matter of degree,” he observed drily. “I thought you were starving.”
* * * *
“What happened to your hand?”
They had passed up the wrought iron furniture in favor of the floor of the covered back deck. Lewis had his back against the glass doors while he watched Suzanna sample the contents of the picnic basket. He sat comfortably with his legs extended, ankles crossed. He still wore his sunglasses, only partly because of the glare.
He turned his hand over and glanced down at his swollen, discolored knuckles. “Exactly what you think. Somebody declared war. I let him know I heard him.”
“Where were you last night?” she persisted.
“At a company party.”
“Must have been quite a party,” she mused. “Did you wear your tux?”
He smiled and rested his head against the glass again. “Not the one you saw,” he said. “They cut that one off me.”
He looked like a big, lazy cat relaxing in the shade. “I want to ask you so many things,” she said. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I work for a group,” he offered. “I think you’d like to know something about them, something about what we do in general, and what I do specifically. Right?”
“For a start.”
He rolled his head against the glass, looked at her and then gazed off into the distance beyond the distant river bed. “The Group was started by one man. I mean that literally. One man who got fed up with J. Edgar and went independent. He raised his own capital, recruited a few good people and got into the information business. His name was Ingraham, Bernard Edward Ingraham. He’s dead now, but the Group still uses his name and it still brings us contracts.”
“J. Edgar? As in . . .”
“Yes, as in. Leave that. Bernie was a very bright, impatient man, with his own politics. He spent a lot of time in Cuba in the days when Cuba was a hot spot. He even married a Cuban. Between his personality and his revolutionary wife, he wasn’t popular at the agency.”
“So he went into competition with them. As what? I’m trying to figure out those initials—B.E.I., is that it?”
“Suzanna,” he chided. “Why does the name matter?”
“It just does. I want to know. Is it a secret?”
He sighed. “Bernie caught a disease in Cuba. One of those tropical things, like malaria. He had a high fever for weeks, couldn’t get to a hospital. It killed all of his hair follicles. He was completely bald afterwards. He was still with the agency at that time. Still with them but pretty much on the outs. They looked at his initials and started calling him Bald Eagle Ingraham. It stuck. He got to be quite well known in certain circles and when he left to start his own company, the name went with him. I guess it was a natural: Bald Eagle Ingraham Group.
“I’m tempted to smile,” she said.
He saw she was more than tempted. “It’s not an uncommon reaction. We pretty much stick to the initials these days. People call us the Beige Group. It works two ways: keeps Bernie’s reputation alive and gives us that nice, colorless flavor our customers like.”
“Who are your customers?”
“Mostly government. Over fifty percent of our contracts are jobs for a government somewhere. Like you said, deep pockets, and nobody’s pockets are deeper than bureaucrats. But we’ll work for anybody and everybody. You could be a client.”
“What could I have you do?”
“You’ve got a good imagination, Suzanna, use it. Get as far out there as you like. I’ll pull you back.”
She thought for a moment. “What if I wanted you to remove somebody from my environment?”
“We get a lot of requests to make people disappear. It’s not my specialty you understand, but I do know how it works.” He paused. “All right. Who is it and how bad do you want him gone? What can you afford?”
“Hmmm . . . he’s a business rival. I want to take over his company. It’s worth millions to me.”
“If you’ve got millions, why don’t you buy him out?”
“Tried that. He won’t sell to me. It’s personal. He won’t sell and I’ve got to have his company.”
“Can’t you diversify? Go around him, wait him out? In six months he may be out of your way without you doing anything.”
“Oh no,” Suzanna insisted with theatrical emphasis. “I’ll pay whatever you want but I’m not going to wait. He’s got to go. Now what?”
“Now we tell you we’ll get back to you.”
“And then?”
“We don’t. We open a file on you and ignore you unless you contact us again. If you do, we move you up a notch on our evaluation scale and we research your family, employment history, personal life, criminal record, finances, etc. And we do the same thing for your target. The research is analyzed and you’re categorized as Pending or Discard. We don’t take further calls from the Discard list but if you qualify to engage a third time, we tell you we’re still evaluating your proposal and move you up another notch. That means our experts sit down with the research and decide whether your situation fits our business model.”
“Really? You have a business model for it?”
“You bet we do. Come on, Suzanna, play it out.”
“I assume we have to negotiate your price for murder?”
“Nope, no negotiation. We tell you we’re not interested and decline to bid.”
“What? After all that? What was the point of letting me believe you’d do it?”
“To gauge your level of intent. To encourage you to show your hand and prove that you have the will and the resources to go through with it.”
“But what is the point of all that if you turn everybody down?”
“Come on, smart lady. We’re in the information business and we’ve got a lot of it now. We know everything about you, including what you want and how bad you want it. We essentially own you. Hear the cash register ringing yet?”
“You go to my business rival? How much do you tell him? Once you warn him, how do you get paid?”
“Information management is our expertise. We’re pretty good at it. We tend to get paid — first for information, second for risk management if people want our help. Some do; some don’t.”
She frowned. “But I’m the client. What do I get?”
“You’re not our client. We turned you down. What you get is arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. Your rival, on the other hand, gets to buy you out, probably for pennies on the dollar. That’s the power of information in the right hands. That’s why it’s profitable.”
“Ah, that’s how all the research ties to the business model. It still feels like blood money.”
“We don’t solicit those jobs. We try to screen out the hotheads and time wasters, but we get all of that kind of work we can handle. Whether we’re involved in it or not, it goes on every day. It’s not what I do personally, but Beige contracts those jobs and I’m a partner. I make a percentage on every job.
“I’m sorry I started on this topic. Thank you but too much candor. I don’t know what to say.”
“Say what you’re thinking. Are you shocked?”
“By the human race.”
He nodded once. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“Are you trying to tell me the worst about you so I’ll stop asking and talk about the weather?”
“More like it was on your mind or you wouldn’t have started right out with hiring a hit. It’s automatic to think people walking around armed are nefarious but not always the case. We’re armed for protection.”
“Is it legal, what they do?”
“What I do, Suzanna. If we’re going to be honest, let’s keep it straight. What they do, I do. I’m part of the organization all the way.
“Is this what you want, Lewis? Do you like working for them?”
“I’m not the spectator type, Suzanna. The job suits me and I happen to be good at it — currency tracing, I mean. I’ve acquired other job skills as I went along. There are other employers but not many shots like this. These people are the best in the business. We excel in areas where competition is lean because the work is complicated and mistakes have real consequences. We work in minefields because nobody else wants to.”
He turned away to look at the view. “Do I like it? Well, yeah, I do, but I don’t spend a lot of time meditating on it. When I’m between jobs I don’t want to think about it, and when I’m working, I’m too busy to worry about it. I won’t be doing this forever, but I am now, and that’s what we’re talking about.”
Suzanna saw his mouth set in a firm line. She looked away and took a breath. Her voice was calm when she asked, “You can’t really do these things without breaking the law, can you?”
“Oh, the law,” he repeated ironically. He was still focused on the peaks of the Bradshaw range, off to his left. Finally he looked back at her. “Some places I’ve worked, we’re breaking the law right now.”
“How?”
“A married woman sitting alone with a man, eating in public. Not to mention consuming alcohol.” He turned back to the view. “And before the sun goes behind those hills, we’ll be doing something that would get you jailed and stoned to death with the full support of the law.”
