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“Okay.”
He checked his watch. “If you want information, ask me now. I’ll tell you what I can, but under one condition.”
“What?”
“After you leave here today, you will never try to contact me again. You won’t call me. You won’t come back here. You won’t come to my house. Do you agree?”
“What if I have follow-up questions for you?”
“You have to agree to my terms, or I won’t talk to you.”
“All right. I agree.” What choice did I have?
“Good.” He sat back and rested his left foot on his right knee. With his long arms and legs, he was all corners and angles. It made him look like the scaffolding on an unfinished building. “Tell me what you know so far.”
I went through it all with him again. He listened carefully. When I was finished, he found a pad and pen. He wrote something on the top page, tore it off, and gave it to me. I read what he’d written out loud. “Gilbert Bernays? Who is this?”
“He was one of the hostages. If Fratello was on that plane, it was probably as Bernays.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You know what happened, right? How the plane got redirected to Khartoum?”
“I know they took a mechanical.”
“The plane had a hydraulic leak. They made an emergency landing, and for all intents and purposes, the plane was dead. It was never going anywhere again until they got the leak fixed, and no one was going to fix it for them.”
“They still had the hostages,” I said.
“They did, but they had them in the wrong country. They had pla
“Why did they do it in the first place? What were their demands?”
“They wanted to force Pakistan to release a radical Muslim sheikh named Ali al-Badat. Pakistan wouldn’t do it. That’s why the thing dragged on the way it did. It was a standoff.”
“Who is Ali al-Badat?”
“ ‘The people’s sheikh’ is what Newsweek called him. He was very popular. The Pakistani army stumbled over him by accident in a Peshawar raid. They had to put him in jail, but they weren’t happy about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because he had far more support in Pakistan than President Musharraf did. They were afraid he would cause an uprising against the government. I’m still surprised they didn’t let him out. It would have been the perfect excuse, right?”
“I guess so.” At the moment, I was more concerned with problems closer to home than a geopolitical debate. “What about Gilbert Bernays?”
“Right. The hijackers needed food and water, so they started freeing hostages. They let the women and children go first. Then the Muslims, then a Frenchman. Eventually, it got down to seventeen Westerners and the eight hijackers. Seven of the hostages were Americans. One of them was this Bernays. I could never find anything on the guy. He was a ghost. No background or backstory. I always thought his identity had been manufactured. Now you’re saying he could be this embezzler.” He reached up and scratched his right cheek with his left hand. I could hear his nails scraping the stubs of his whiskers. “I think that could make some sense.”
“Why?”
“There were stories among the survivors of how he tried to ransom himself off the plane with a laptop computer.”
“A computer?”
“He claimed it was worth a billion dollars. They laughed at him, and they didn’t let him off.”
“How could his computer be worth a billion dollars?”
“I don’t know. No one has ever found him to ask him. He survived the storming of the aircraft, and no one ever saw him again. That’s why I think he could be your man. And that’s all I know.” He pushed away from the control counter and started to get up.
“Wait. What about Blackthorne?”
“I won’t talk to you about Blackthorne.”
“Why not?”
The receptionist knocked on the door and opened it. We both flinched. “Big Man is looking for you,” she said. “He wants to know if you resigned and didn’t tell him. He needs you on the air right now.”
“I’m coming.”
Lyle unfolded himself. I stood up, too.
“It’s Blackthorne, right? That’s who you’re afraid of. Did they come after you? Is that why you left the paper?”
“I dug too deep. That’s all you need to know. That’s all you want to know. But you should know this. If you start looking into Blackthorne in any kind of significant way, you will be at risk. People you love will be at risk. Don’t do it lightly.” He reached for the door. “And don’t ever come back here again.”
Back in the Durango, I sat quietly and looked at every car, trying to figure out if there were any I had seen before. If Lyle Burquart had been trying to scare me, he had succeeded, and more. I got out my notebook again. The pages were filling fast. I copied off the Gilbert Bernays name and then started writing in notes on the hijacking. Then I called Dan. When he didn’t answer the first time, I hung up and called him again. He was not happy when he finally picked up.
“What do you want, Shanahan? I’m in the middle of an arbitration hearing.”
“Let me just ask you something really quickly. What do you know about Sala
“Hijacking. Fucked up.”
“Have you heard anything about it lately?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure. It keeps coming up.”
“In what way? Wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t have time. I’ll see what I can find and call you later. Don’t call me again. Hey…”
“What?”
“What about Harvey?”
“Not yet.”
He hung up.
My phone was still in my hand when it started ringing. I checked the caller ID and answered.
“Felix?”
“Hey, Miss Shanahan, guess what?”
“What?”
“Someone just turned on Harvey’s phone. Do you want to know where he is?”
9
DJURO BULATOVIC HAD NEVER BEEN TO MY HOME, AND I had never been to his. I didn’t even know if he was domiciled in Boston. I knew we were friends, though, because only his friends got to call him Bo, and there hadn’t been a single time in three years that I had called for help that he didn’t either show up or send a very capable proxy. He was known for his pastel sport coats, but tonight he wore his work clothes-all black.
Bo was an enforcer, a gun for hire, a person who used every tool at his disposal to persuade individuals to adopt his clients’ point of view. The first time we’d met, he had wrapped his big hand around my throat and squeezed until I passed out. But that had been a case of mistaken identity. He had been deeply remorseful about strangling the wrong woman nearly to death, which is how I had apparently established my permanent marker with him.
Through me, he had also met Harvey. Harvey did his taxes for him, which provided me with one of the few interesting personal details I knew about Bo. He earned in the mid-six figures a
Actually, I knew a few more things. He was a big man who came from violence. It was obvious in the way he moved, in the way he always seemed to be looking ahead to the next problem or looking back to make sure the last one wasn’t catching up to him. Since he was Bosnian, I suspected he had fought the Serbs as a soldier or part of a militia and probably killed more than his share. He had a soldier’s reverence for duty, and he lived by a strict code of honor. Even if he hadn’t liked Harvey, he would have considered it bad form to kidnap a man in a wheelchair.
He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat next to me. He turned to the back and reported in to his two colleagues, um…Employees? Accomplices? I never knew who the men were that he brought along. I was sure Timon and Radik were as strong and fast and skilled at the task that lay ahead as the usual crew he brought.