a key.
Could it?
There was no peephole.
"Who is it?" she said.
The voice that replied was male, familiar. She never would have thought she'd be so glad to hear it.
"It's Ben," the voice said.
"Thank God," she muttered.
Chapter Thirty-Six
He was bedraggled, shirt and tie askew, hair wild.
"What's with the door chain?" he said. "You used to live in East New York, too?"
She stared. "What happened to you?"
After they'd each recounted the events of the last few hours, she said, "We have to get out of here."
"Damn right," Ben said. "There's a hotel downtown, in the centra-sort of a fleabag, but supposed to be kind of charming. Run by British expatriates. The Sphinx." He'd bought a South America guide at the airport. He thumbed through it, found the entry. "Here we go. We can either show up or call from the street, on my cell phone. Not from here."
She nodded. "Maybe we should stay in the same room this time. Husband and wife."
"You're the expert," he said. Was there a glint of amusement in his eyes?
She explained: "They're going to call around looking for an American man and woman traveling together but staying in separate rooms. How long do you think it'll take them to locate us?"
"You're probably right. Listen-I have something." He produced a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket.
"What's that?"
"A fax." "From?"
"My researcher in New York. It's the names of the board of directors of Armakon AG of Vienna. Owners of that little biotech startup in Philadelphia that made the poison that killed the old men."
He handed it to her. "Jorgen Lenz," she breathed.
"One of the directors. Is that an intriguing coincidence or what?"
Once again, Arliss Dupree returned to the paperwork in front of him and once again he found it impossible to focus. It was a long report prepared by the deputy director of the Executive Officer for U.S. Trustees, which oversees bankruptcy estates; the report detailed allegations of corruption involving the federal bankruptcy courts. Dupree read the same sentence three times before he set it aside and got himself another cup of the near-rancid coffee produced by the sputtering machine down the hall.
He had other things on his mind that was the trouble. The developments involving Agent Navarro were annoying. Worse than annoying. They spelled major aggravation. He didn't give a damn what happened to her. But if she'd been guilty of security breaches, it reflected badly on him. Which was totally unfair. And he couldn't help thinking that it all started with that goddamn liver-spotted spook at the Internal Compliance Unit, Alan Bartlett. Whatever the hell that was about. Several times he'd made inquiries proper, interdepartmental inquiries and each time he had been rebuffed. As if he had some lowly custodial capacity at the Office of Special Investigations. As if the OSI itself weren't worthy of a civil word. Whenever Dupree thought about it for too long, he had to loosen his tie. It was galling.
First that bitch Navarro was cherry-picked from his team to go gallivanting off God only knew where. Next thing, word came down that she was rotten, had been selling off information to traffickers and hostiles and whoever else. If so, she was Typhoid Mary, which he kept coming back to it was bad news for the person she'd reported to, namely, Arliss Dupree. If Dupree had any sense of which way the wind was blowing and his career was based on his having that sense a shit storm was coming his way.
And he was damned if his career was going to be dented by Navarro's misconduct or since the charges mostly sounded like bullshit to him by Bartlett's double-dealing. Dupree was, above all, a survivor.
Sometimes surviving meant that you took the bull by the goddamn horns. Dupree had friends of his own friends who would tell him stuff he needed to know. And maybe paying a visit on the Ghost might help concentrate the old guy's mind. Bartlett looked like a god damned vapor trail, but he was a major power in the department, a mini J. Edgar Hoover. Dupree would have to deal with him carefully. Even so, Bartlett had to learn that Dupree wasn't somebody to mess with. The Ghost spent his days directing investigations into his colleagues; when was the last time anybody looked into what he was up to?
Dupree tore open a couple of envelopes of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. It still tasted foul, but he slurped it down anyway. He had a lot