Steal, page 24
Von Oehson’s door suddenly opened. He was stepping out of the car. That silhouette, the other person, wasn’t anyone who wanted to kill him.
“It’s fine,” von Oehson shouted back to me. “It’s my neighbor. It’s okay.”
My relief lasted for roughly another split second.
“GET BACK IN THE CAR!” I yelled. Von Oehson was dead wrong. It wasn’t okay. He wasn’t okay.
He also wasn’t listening to me. “It’s my neighbor!” he shouted again.
Now I pulled the trigger. I aimed straight in the air over my head without breaking stride, an extra exclamation point on the fact that I didn’t care if it was Jesus himself he was talking to. The gunman trying to kill von Oehson wasn’t lying dead or dying in the other Ferrari. He’d either run off or taken cover nearby. If it was the latter, he was about to have another chance to get the job done.
My shot echoed up and down the street, scattering any and all neighbors—including the one with von Oehson—who had ventured outside their multimillion-dollar homes after the sound of the crash to see what the hell had happened. I was fine hearing their panicked screams so long as what I didn’t hear was another shot in the wake of mine. Amid all the chaos, von Oehson had basically frozen. Confused. Bewildered.
But worst of all, a sitting duck.
I closed the gap between us, slowing down only enough so I wouldn’t completely knock von Oehson over while shoving him back in his car. Slamming the door shut behind him, I nearly clipped a few of his fingers.
Now I was the sitting duck. Only it didn’t feel like it.
You ran off, didn’t you? Or, more like, limped off. There’s no way you survived that crash unscathed.
I did a quick three-sixty, taking one last look around before jumping into the shotgun seat.
“What the fuck?” said von Oehson.
“DRIVE!”
He was finally listening to me. He popped the engine start and gunned it, shifting from first to third in a matter of seconds. By fourth gear, when we were at least a mile safely away, I told him to pull over. Then I enlightened him.
The guy who wanted him dead was alive. Maybe not alive and well, but alive. What’s more, we had to get out of there before the police showed up. Von Oehson nodded. Never did a simple nod convey so much understanding. The man who never wanted to involve the police in the first place didn’t need any further explanation.
“What did you tell your neighbor?” I asked.
“That I came home, heard a noise in the garage. Someone was stealing one of my cars so I was chasing him. Not bad, right?”
In my mind I gave him an A for effort and an F for relevance. As in, at this point it didn’t matter what the ef he told his neighbor. “Perfect,” I said. “Nicely done.”
“Of course, he’s no doubt wondering right now who the hell you were, why you were with me, and why you had a gun. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain that.” Von Oehson blinked a few times as if rebooting his brain. “Shit. That’s the least of our problems, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“So I take it we’re not heading back to my house?”
“Nope.”
“What if we just made a quick stop so I could—”
“Whatever you think you need or want to do there, you don’t,” I said.
“Where to, then?” he asked.
“You know that highway you wanted to get to so badly?”
“Are we heading south or north?”
“South,” I said. Just like this entire night so far. “Also, you’re done driving.”
“Why?”
“Because you won’t be able to reach the steering wheel.”
He, of course, had no idea what I meant by that. I stepped out of the car and walked back to the trunk, waiting a few seconds for him to get the hint and meet me there. Once he did, all it took from me was the slightest tilt of my head.
“Oh, hell, no,” he said.
“Hell, yes. And this isn’t a negotiation.”
“I’ll freeze to death.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “Your own carbon dioxide will keep you nice and cozy.”
“You mean, if it doesn’t kill me first.”
“Nah, that would take at least ninety minutes. Where we’re heading, it should take only an hour.”
Von Oehson hemmed and hawed but knew he had absolutely zero leverage in the moment. He climbed in his trunk, curling up to the size of a Ferrari 812 Superfast’s maximum storage capacity. Roughly two golf bags.
“An hour. That’s what you said, right?”
“Yep. One hour. That’s what I said.” I reached up, grabbing the lip of the trunk lid with both hands. “Now you just have to pray we don’t hit any traffic.”
Slam.
CHAPTER 98
It wasn’t much warmer for me driving ninety on the highway with a shot-up windshield. The feeling was like being in an Arctic wind tunnel. So much for visibility, too. With the heat cranking I kept having to crane my neck to see around the shattered glass and bullet holes. Every oncoming headlight was like a blinding kaleidoscope.
As he’d done many times before, Julian greeted me at his “office” entrance, a.k.a. the steel door that was ten feet behind another steel door that was past the security gate to a warehouse for a medical supply company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that didn’t actually exist.
“Here you go,” he said, tossing me the pillowcase that I’d asked for via text.
“And here you go,” I said, tossing him the car keys.
“What’s this?”
“Remember what you asked for when you met Annabelle and me at the zoo? How I could one day repay you for all your help?”
I watched as Julian stared at the iconic logo on the keys, the black stallion up on its hind legs against a bright-yellow backdrop. “A Ferrari?”
“Follow me,” I said. We walked to the abandoned parking lot in front of the warehouse. “She’s going to need a new windshield, as you can see. Other than that she’s in great shape. Runs like a dream.”
Julian scratched his beard, chuckling. “Okay, whose car is this really?”
“I told you, it’s yours. But since you asked, allow me to introduce you to its previous owner,” I said, popping the trunk. “Julian, meet Mathias von Oehson.”
Von Oehson was curled up in the fetal position, shivering. This was the worst night of his life, and my job was to make him feel it to the bone. There was a lot to do and very little time to do it, which meant we needed his full cooperation. Sometimes you have to get mean to get someone else to play nice.
“Good to meet you,” said Julian, extending a helping hand to hoist him out of the trunk.
“Mathias, this is Julian. Julian is the man who’s not only going to keep you alive, but also keep you out of jail,” I said. “In return, you’re graciously giving him this Ferrari. Deal?”
“Deal,” von Oehson answered, rather humbly.
He was out of the trunk but still shivering. Before he could look around I threw the pillowcase over his head. “It’s only until we get inside,” I assured him.
“What is this?” he asked. “Where are we?”
“We’re nowhere,” I said. “This place doesn’t exist. Understand?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Good answer. Because until this whole shit show of yours is finally resolved, nowhere is your new home.”
CHAPTER 99
The strategy, once inside Julian’s office, was divide and conquer. There’s a reason why it’s the most dog-eared chapter in Machiavelli’s Art of War.
Julian was in charge of banking. He needed von Oehson for that. I was in charge of damage control. For that, I needed Landon Foxx.
“Call him on the blender,” said Julian, pointing me toward his communications room.
The blender was how you reach the CIA’s New York section chief on his personal cell in the middle of the night without ever having to worry that anyone was listening in. The dedicated satellite phone digitized the conversation on both ends, scrambling every word in transit more than a thousand times a second. Can’t be hacked, Julian has always maintained. He ought to know. He invented it.
So the good news was that I was talking to Foxx on the most secure line in the world. The bad news was what I had to tell him: the bad news.
No one likes a cover-up, but at least the agency is uniquely qualified to do the job. Only this couldn’t be the agency. Not officially. It had to be Foxx. He had to convince a local police chief in Darien that the Ferrari SF90 Stradale that was lying flipped over and totaled on one of his residents’ front lawns was a matter of national security and should be treated as if it never happened. This in a town where everybody knows everybody’s business. Also, never mind the report of gunshots. As for the neighbor—probably plural—who saw von Oehson on the scene, best if we stay with the stolen-car story that von Oehson already told. Planting an item in the police blotter of the local paper ought to do the trick.
You got all that? Good. Because that’s the easy part…
I needed Foxx to move on from a small town in Connecticut to an entire European country. Hungary, clearly bent on revenge in the aftermath, had taken out a contract on both von Oehson and Frank Brunetti. They were currently batting one for two, and surely looking for another crack at von Oehson. That is, unless Foxx could convince our NATO ally that such a move was seriously not in their best interest. Giving him a better chance to do that was what Julian was working on in the next room.
“When will he be done?” asked Foxx.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I’ll call you back as soon as he is, though.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll already know by then,” he said.
Of course. I’d originally gone to von Oehson’s house to bring him in, but Foxx was hardly waiting for that to happen. Time was of the essence, and as much as it made sense for me to be the go-between, Foxx knew there was no scenario in which von Oehson could keep the fifty billion. Any negotiating with Hungarian intelligence was predicated on the country’s getting its money back. Then, and only then, could Foxx focus on the only thing that mattered to him—keeping this whole clusterfuck from going public.
One way or the other, Landon Foxx was going to get Mathias von Oehson to cooperate. I was one way, and the other was any host of possibilities, although Foxx ultimately putting a gun to von Oehson’s head was undoubtedly near the top of the list.
In short, Foxx was already neck-deep in talks with Hungarian intelligence. He’d just told me as much without having to say the words. Classic Foxx.
“I understand,” I said.
“You always do, Reinhart.”
I never liked when Foxx paid me a compliment, few and far between as they were. It almost always meant he was hiding something from me.
Sure enough, he was.
CHAPTER 100
Maybe the only thing harder than stealing fifty billion dollars by way of a thousand different simultaneous transactions involving at least two dozen different currency conversions across five continents and a multitude of shell corporations is trying to do it all in reverse in one night. Even the man who masterminded the idea was at a loss.
“This is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube,” said von Oehson.
Of course, being called a genius on the cover of Fortune magazine is one thing. Actually being a genius is another.
“You cut the tail end of the tube open, put the toothpaste in from there, and fold it back over a few times,” said Julian, not even bothering to look up from his keyboard. He truly was one of a kind.
My laughing at Julian’s response was the only sound I’d made in the hour since I took a seat on the couch along the wall in his office next to the wing of the old Fokker Eindecker airplane wing that doubled as his desk. Even von Oehson, a man who owned almost every toy imaginable, was in awe of it. Sitting in an armchair in front of it, he kept staring at the rows of rivets against the chrome-molybdenum steel with sheer envy.
So this was the banking side of things. I’d covered damage control with Foxx, including protection for Carter up at Yale. I figured von Oehson’s wife was well out of harm’s way down in Palm Beach. Foxx came through for Carter via an operative who happened to be at Naval Submarine Base New London for a training exercise. He was promptly dispatched to nearby New Haven and the Old Campus dorm where Carter lived on the second floor.
As for keeping Mathias alive, returning all the money didn’t guarantee anything. The only thing for sure was that not returning the money meant Foxx would have no chance of getting Hungarian intelligence to call off the hit. If there was a perverse irony, it was that Foxx and the agency would be all too willing to overlook Frank Brunetti’s assassination. The multiple attempts by the FBI and IRS to take out Brunetti legally in court for more than a decade had been a waste of time and human resources. No one with a badge was ever going to shed a tear for the guy.
The proposition boiled down to this. You got your money back, Hungary, as well as your Monet (or, at least, you think you do). We’ll forgive you for Brunetti if you let things slide with von Oehson. Let the man and his family be. Do we have a deal, Budapest?
After going four pods deep on Julian’s Keurig, and with the sun beginning to rise, I watched as the very last of the fifty billion made its way back to the balance sheet of the central bank of Hungary.
“Done and dusted,” announced Julian.
“I’ll let Foxx know,” I said, standing.
I was about to head into the next room to call him on the blender. Von Oehson had long since fallen asleep in his chair. I knew Foxx had told me that he’d find out courtesy of the Hungarians, but letting him know personally still felt like the right thing to do.
“No need to call him,” said Julian.
I knew that, but how did he know that?
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because he’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”
CHAPTER 101
I didn’t need to ask why. I knew why. I was sure of it.
Foxx couldn’t yet guarantee von Oehson’s safety. The Hungarians were getting their money back, but they weren’t fully ready to give a pass to the man who so brazenly stole it from them. Maybe they were trying to leverage the situation, bargain for some other concession. Maybe the hard feelings needed a little more time to soften. Whatever the exact reason, they weren’t officially calling off the hit just yet. International diplomacy always happens at the cross section of power and patience.
That was the reason for Foxx’s visit. It was all about von Oehson. Like it or not—and for sure Foxx didn’t like it—he’d inherited a billionaire for a day or two. This still wasn’t official agency business. He wasn’t about to arrange a pickup. There’d be no delegating in the dark of night. He would see to this personally. That’s how Foxx rolled. That’s why he was coming. Yep. I was sure of it, all right.
And I was wrong.
“Where is he?” asked Foxx, the second he walked through the last of Julian’s security doors. Of course he’d been there before.
“He’s in my office,” answered Julian. At least, I think that’s what he said. I was too busy staring at the folder in Foxx’s hand. Immediately I had a bad feeling. His folders hadn’t been boding well for me.
“Let’s talk anywhere but there, then,” said Foxx. Whatever this was, it wasn’t for von Oehson’s ears.
We ended up in Julian’s communications room, if for no other reason than the walls were lined with sound dampeners. Julian closed the door behind us.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “They still want von Oehson dead?”
“I’m sure they still do, but it’s not going to happen,” said Foxx. “Contract halted.”
The hit was off. “That’s good news,” I said.
“It is. Unfortunately, there’s a hitch.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s you,” said Foxx.
Of all things, Julian laughed. He couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t blame him. It sounded crazy. It was crazy. It didn’t make sense.
“You’re saying the Hungarians have a contract out on me?”
“No, that’s not it,” said Foxx. “They’re cooperating. In fact, they claimed they offered the hit man the back-end payment on von Oehson even though the job was botched.”
Now it was starting to make sense. Contract killers can get a little touchy when someone tries to kill them. “So you’re telling me it’s personal,” I said.
“Apparently very personal,” answered Foxx. “This guy wants you dead. That’s the prevailing theory.”
“Based on?”
“He initially went dark, didn’t respond to his handler. When he finally did, he turned down the back-end offer. A significant sum, I was told.”
“You said it yourself, he botched the hit. He’s a pro,” I said. “He’s not going to take the money.”
“Exactly.”
“So why the theory about me?”
“This is why,” said Foxx, reaching into the folder.
The picture was a screen capture from a security camera. Black and white, a little grainy, but it was clear enough. The time stamp was only a couple of hours earlier. I didn’t recognize the man, but I sure knew where he was standing. It was the lobby of my apartment building. As if I needed any more proof, there were cuts and bruises on his face. The car wreck variety. “How did you ID him?” I asked.
“I told you,” said Foxx. “The Hungarians are cooperating.”
“They sold the guy out?”
“They provided a photo but not a name. I ran him with facial rec through every intel file we have. Nothing. The guy’s a ghost.”
I stared again at the picture. “But at least with his face—”
“Right,” said Foxx. Big Brother’s always watching. “I was able to track most of his movements since he arrived in the country. He landed at JFK a couple of days ago, is staying at the Dominick downtown, and took a quick field trip upstate to procure the rifle and scope that killed Brunetti, as well as a few Glocks.”
