Buried Secrets Read online

  An autopsy wasn’t likely. Mostly likely they’d see a police officer killed in a tragic car crash and it would end there. Anyway, by the time any autopsy was done, he’d be long gone. He only cared about what might be found in the next twenty-four hours.

  Before he pushed the car into the ravine he put it in drive. If the gear selector were in neutral when the crash was discovered, any skilled investigator would immediately figure out what had really happened.

  He didn’t make that kind of mistake.

  68.

  At a few minutes after nine at night, the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston, was an obsidian monolith. A few lighted windows scattered here and there like a corncob with not many kernels remaining. Some of the building’s tenants were open round the clock.

  But not the law offices of Batten Schechter, on the forty-eighth floor. No paralegals toiling frantically through the night to meet a filing deadline or a court date. Batten Schechter’s attorneys rarely soiled their hands with anything so vulgar as a public trial. This was a sedate, dignified firm that specialized in trusts and estates and the occasional litigation, always resolved in quietly vicious backroom negotiations, perhaps a word whispered in the ear of the right judge or official. It was like growing mushrooms: They preferred to work out of the light of day.

  I drove the white Ford panel truck down Trinity Place along the back of the Hancock Tower, and up to the loading dock. A row of five steel pylons blocked my way. I got out, saw the warning signs—DO NOT SOUND HORN FOR ENTRY and PUSH BUTTON & USE INTERCOM FOR ACCESS WHEN DOOR IS CLOSED—and I hit the big black button.

  The steel overhead door rolled up, and a little fireplug of a man stood there, looking annoyed at the interruption. It was 9:16 P.M. Stitched in script on his blue shirt, above the name of his company, was CARLOS. He glanced at the logo on the side of the van—DERDERIAN FINE ORIENTAL RUGS—nodded, hit a switch, and the steel columns sank into the pavement. He pointed to a space inside the loading dock where a few other service vehicles were parked.

  He insisted on guiding me in as if I couldn’t park by myself, waving me in closer and closer to the dock until the van’s front end nudged the black rubber bumpers.

  “You here for Batten Schechter?” Carlos said.

  I nodded, striking a balance between cordial and aloof.

  All he knew was that the law firm of Batten Schechter had called the Hancock’s property management office and told them that a carpet cleaner would be working in their offices some time after nine o’clock. He didn’t need to know that the “facilities manager” of Batten Schechter was actually Dorothy.

  Couldn’t have been easier. All I had to do was promise Mr. Derderian I’d buy one of his overpriced, though elegant, rugs for my office. In exchange he was happy to lend me one of his vans. None of them were in use at night anyway.

  “How’s it going there, Carlos?”

  He gave the standard Boston answer: “Doin’ good, doin’ good.” A Boston accent with a Latin flavor. “Got a lotta carpets to clean, up there?”

  “Just one.”

  He grunted.

  I pulled open the van’s rear doors and wrestled with the big bulky commercial carpet extractor/shampooer. He helped me lower it to the floor, even though it wasn’t his job, then pointed a thumb toward a bank of freight elevators.

  The elevator was slow to arrive. It had scuffed steel walls and aluminum diamond-tread-plate floors. I hit the button for forty-eight. As it rose, I adjusted Mauricio’s STI pistol in my waistband. I’d been storing it in the Defender’s glove box ever since I’d grabbed it from his apartment.

  I didn’t see any security cameras inside the elevator, but I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t take it out.

  A moment later, the steel doors opened slowly on a small fluorescent-lit service lobby on the forty-eighth floor. Obviously not where the firm’s clients or partners entered. I wheeled out the rug shampooer and saw four doors. Each was the service entrance to a different firm, each labeled with a black embossed plastic nameplate.

  The one for Batten Schechter had an electronic digital keypad mounted next to it. David Schechter’s firm probably had reason to take extra security measures.

  From my duffel bag I drew a long flexible metal rod, bent at a ninety-degree angle, a hook at one end. This was a special tool called a Leverlock, sold only to security professionals and government agencies.

  I knelt down and pushed the rod underneath the door and twisted it around and up until it caught the lever handle on the inside, then yanked it down. Thirteen seconds later I was in.

  So much for the fancy digital keypad.

  Now I found myself in some back corridor where the firm stored office supplies and cleaning equipment and such. I pushed the rug shampooer against a wall and made my way by the dim emergency lighting.

  It was like going from steerage to a stateroom on the Queen Mary. Soft carpeting, mahogany doors with brass nameplates, antique furnishings.

  David Schechter, as a name partner, got the corner office. In an alcove before the mahogany double doors to his inner sanctum was a secretary’s desk and a small couch with coffee table. The double doors were locked.

  Then I saw another digital keypad, mounted unobtrusively by the doorframe at eye level. Strange. It meant that Schechter’s office probably wasn’t cleaned by the crew that did the rest of the building.

  It also meant there was something inside worth protecting.

  The odds were, the combination to the digital lock was scrawled on some Post-it pad in his secretary’s desk drawer. But faster than looking for it would be to use the Leverlock.

  The whole thing felt almost too easy.

  From the duffel bag I removed a black carrying case. Inside, a flexible fiberscope lay coiled in the form-fitted foam padding like a metallic snake. A tungsten-braided sheath encased a fiber-optic cable two meters long and less than six millimeters in diameter. Bomb-disposal teams used these in Iraq to look for concealed explosives.

  I bent the scope into an angle, screwed on the eyepiece, and attached an external metal-halide light source, then fished it under the door. A lever on the handle allowed me to move the probe around like an elephant’s trunk. Now I could see what was on the other side of the door. Angling it upward, I inspected the wall on the far side of the doorframe. Nothing appeared to be mounted there.

  When I swiveled the scope over to the other side of the door frame, I saw a red pinpoint light, steady and unblinking.

  A motion detector.

  A passive infrared sensor. It would detect minute changes in room temperature, caused by the heat given off by a human body. A common device, but not easy to defeat.

  A solid red light meant the sensor was armed and ready.

  I cursed aloud.

  There were ways to get by these things. I tried to recall the tricks I’d heard about, though this wasn’t my expertise. Not at all. The best I could do was guess. I considered abandoning the operation.

  But I’d come too far to turn back.

  69.

  So I gathered a few items from the Batten Schechter offices. The first was easy. Arrayed on the console behind Schechter’s assistant’s desk was an assortment of pictures. I slid the rectangle of glass out of a framed photograph of a panicked-looking little girl sitting on a shopping-mall Santa’s lap.

  In a storeroom among the shelves of packing and mailing supplies I found a carton of polystyrene sheets, used to line boxes or protect rolled documents, and a roll of packing tape.

  When I returned to Schechter’s office, I slid the Leverlock flat against the carpet under the double doors and had them open in ten seconds.

  Then came the tricky part.

  Holding the polystyrene square in front of me like a shield, I advanced toward the motion sensor, moving slowly through the eerie twilit interior, palely illuminated by the city lights below and the stars above. If I was remembering correctly, the foam would block my heat signature from being detected.
/>   It took an agonizingly long time to reach the wall where the sensor was mounted. I held the sheet of foam a few inches from the sensor’s lens. Not too close, though. If I blocked it entirely, that would set it off too.

  Like most state-of-the art infrared sensors, this one had a built-in flaw. It was equipped with what’s called “creep zone” coverage: If someone tried to slither on the floor underneath it, its lens would detect it right away.

  But it couldn’t see above.

  From behind the polystyrene scrim I took the small square of glass, taped to my belt, lifted it slowly, then placed it against the sensor’s lens. The strip of packing tape kept it securely in place.

  Then I let the foam sheet drop to the floor.

  The red light remained steady. I hadn’t triggered it.

  I exhaled slowly.

  Glass is opaque to infrared light. The sensor couldn’t see through it, yet didn’t perceive the glass as an obstruction.

  I switched on the overhead lights. Two walls were paneled in mahogany. The other two were glass, nearly floor to ceiling, with breathtaking views of Boston: the Back Bay, the Charles River, Bunker Hill, the harbor. The lights twinkled like a starlit canopy fallen to earth. If this was the view from your office every day, you might start to believe you ruled the land below.

  His desk was a small, delicate antique: honeyed mahogany, tooled bottle-green leather top, fluted legs. The only object on it was a phone.

  There was a time once when the more powerful an executive was, the bigger his desk. You’d see CEOs with desks big as tramp steamers. But now the more important you were, the smaller and more fragile your work surface. As if to show the world you exerted power by mind control. Paperwork was for peons. There was no computer anywhere in sight. How someone could conduct business these days without a computer baffled me. Clearly it was good to be king.

  Priceless-looking antiques were everywhere—spindly Regency chairs, dusky mirrors, parchment waste cans and credenzas and pedestal tables. A finely knotted antique silk rug in pale olive green flecked with muted yellows and reds that Mr. Derderian would drool over.

  I knew bank CEOs who’d been fired for spending this kind of money on their office décor. They’d forgotten that if you decorated like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, you were likely to die like one, at the guillotine. The smart CEOs ordered from Office Liquidators.

  But David Schechter had no shareholders to answer to. His clients didn’t care that their billable hours paid for expensive furniture. A rich lawyer is a successful one.

  Then I noticed a second set of mahogany double doors.

  They were unlocked. As I pulled them open the overhead lights came on.

  Schechter’s personal filing cabinets. The ones that held documents too sensitive to be kept in his firm’s central files where anyone could access them.

  Each steel file cabinet was secured with a Kaba Mas high-security lock. An X-09, electromechanical, developed to meet the U.S. government’s most stringent security standards and generally considered unpickable.

  The locks were unpickable, but not the cabinets themselves. These were commercial steel four-drawer file cabinets, not GSA-approved Class 6 Security file cabinets. It was like putting a thousand-dollar lockset on a hollow-core door a kid could kick in.

  I chose the one marked H–O, hoping to find Marshall Marcus’s file. Kneeling, I inserted a metal shim between the bottom drawer and the frame, and sure enough, the locking bar slid up.

  Then I pulled open the top drawer and scanned the file tabs. At first they looked like client files, past and present.

  But these were no ordinary clients. It was a Who’s Who of the Rich and Powerful. There were files here for some of the most influential public officials in the U.S. in the last three or four decades. The names of the men (mostly, and a few women) who ran America. Not all of them were famous. Some—former directors of the NSA and the CIA, secretaries of State and Treasury, certain Supreme Court justices, White House chiefs of staff, senators and congressmen—were dimly remembered if at all.

  But it wasn’t possible that David Schechter could have represented even a fraction of them. And what kind of legal service could he have provided anyway? So why were these files here?

  As I tried to puzzle out the connection among them, one name caught my eye.

  MARK WARREN HOOD, LTG, USA.

  Lieutenant General Mark Hood. The man who’d run the covert operations unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency I once worked for.

  I pulled out the brown file folder. It was an inch thick. For some reason my heart began to thud, as if I had a premonition.

  Most of the documents were tawny with age. I rifled through quickly, not sure what these papers were doing here.

  Until I noticed one word stamped in blue ink at the top of each page: MERCURY.

  So here it was.

  And somehow it was connected, through my old boss, to me.

  The explanation was here, if only I could make sense of the columns of figures, the cryptic abbreviations or maybe codes. I kept turning the pages, trying to find a phrase or a word that might bring it all into focus.

  I stopped at a photograph clipped to a page of card stock. At the top of the card were the words CERTIFICATE OF RELEASE OR DISCHARGE FROM ACTIVE DUTY. A military discharge form, DD-214. The man in the photograph had a buzz cut and was a few pounds lighter than he was now.

  It actually took a second before I recognized myself.

  The shock was so profound that I didn’t hear the tiny scuffling on the carpet behind me until it was too late, and then I felt a hard crack against the side of my head. A sharp, crippling pain shot through my cranium, and in the moment before everything went black I tasted blood.

  70.

  When I came to and my eyes were finally able to focus, I found myself in a paneled conference room, seated at one end of an immense coffin-shaped conference table.

  My head throbbed painfully, especially my right temple. When I tried to move my hands, I realized my wrists were secured with flex-cuffs to the steel arms of a high-end office chair. The nylon straps cut into the skin. My ankles were bound to the center stem of the chair.

  I had a dim memory of being dragged somewhere, trussed upright, cursed at. Hell, maybe waterboarded for good measure. I wondered how long I’d been slumped in this chair.

  At the far end of the table, peering at me curiously, was David Schechter. He was wearing a bright yellow V-neck sweater and gave me an owlish look behind his round horn-rimmed glasses. I half expected him to start speaking in the voice of Dr. Evil, pinkie extended, demanding one million dollars for my release.

  But I spoke first. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today.”

  Schechter gave what was apparently his rendition of a smile. The corners of his nearly lipless mouth turned down into a perfect inverted arch, like a frog’s, tugged downward by dozens of vertical wrinkles. It looked like smiling was hard work for him and something he rarely practiced.

  “Did you know,” he said, “that breaking and entering at night with intent to commit felony can land you in prison for twenty years?”

  “I knew I should have gone to law school.”

  “And that doing so with an unregistered dangerous weapon can get you life behind bars? There’s not a judge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who wouldn’t give you at least ten years. Oh, and there’s the matter of your private investigator’s license. That’s as good as revoked.”

  “I assume the police are on the way.”

  “I see no reason why we can’t settle this man to man without the police.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. He wasn’t going to call the police. “I find it hard to think clearly when I’m losing circulation in my lower extremities.”

  A slight motion in my peripheral vision. Skulking on either side of me were a couple of wide-bodied thugs. Security guards, probably. Or bodyguards. Each held a Glock at his side. One of them was blond wit
h no neck and a vacant face with a steroid-ravaged complexion.

  The other one I recognized.

  He had a black crew cut and a muscle-bound physique even more extreme than the blond guy’s. It was one of the two men who’d broken into my loft. Over his left eye just below the brow was a thin white bandage. A much bigger one was plastered next to his left ear. I remembered throwing an electric shaver into his face and drawing blood.

  Schechter looked at me for a few seconds, blinked slowly like an old iguana, and nodded. “Cut the man free.”

  Mongo threw his employer a look of protest but fished a yellow-handled strap cutter from a pocket of his ambush jacket. He approached me cautiously like he was a bomb disposal expert, I was an armed nuclear weapon, and he was about ten seconds too late.

  Silently, sullenly, he jabbed his cutters at the nylon loop that held my wrist to the chair’s right arm, while his moon-faced colleague fixed me with a beady vacant stare, his pistol leveled.

  As Mongo worked, he leaned close and muttered under his breath, through clenched teeth, “How’s George Devlin doing?”

  I stayed very still.

  He took his time. He was enjoying the chance to taunt me. Almost inaudibly, he went on, “I caught a glimpse of Scarface on one of our surveillance cams. Broke the lens.”

  He gave me a furtive smile, met my cold stare.

  “Gotta be tough looking like a monster.” He snipped the other loop, freeing my hands from the arms of the chair but still leaving them cuffed together. “One day every girl you meet wants to get into your pants, next day you couldn’t pay a skank to get near y—”

  With one quick upward thrust I slammed my fists under his chin, shutting his jaw so violently I could hear his molars crack. Then, as he reeled, I smashed down on the bridge of his nose. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, but I put a lot of force into it.

  Something snapped loudly. The gout of blood from his nostrils indicated I’d probably broken his nose. He roared in pain and rage.