But it wasn’t going to be. Corky Hancock was the biggest lead we had, and the surveillance on him had been tightening. There was nowhere Hancock could go in the state of Idaho and not be watched, or at least listened to. There was surveillance on his house, the surrounding acreage, even the stand-alone barn. We had four mobile teams on him, with four more in the wings if needed. Since I’d left, aerial surveillance had been added to the mix.
In Idaho, I attended a meeting of more than two dozen agents assigned to the detail. The meeting was held in a small movie house in Sun Valley. The movie 21 Grams with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts was playing there in the evenings, but not during the day.
Senior Agent William Koch stood in front of us. Tall and gangly, impressive in his way, he wore a chambray shirt, jeans, scuffed black cowboy boots. He played the local guy to a T, but he was nobody’s fool and he wanted us to know it. The same was true for his CIA counterpart, Bridget Rooney, a confident, dark-haired woman who was smarter than a whip.
“I’ll make this pretty simple for everybody. Either Hancock knows we’re here or he’s just unbelievably careful by nature,” said Koch. “He hasn’t talked to anybody since we got here. He’s been online—eBay for fishing rods, a couple of porn sites, a fantasy baseball league. He has a girlfriend named Coral Lee, who lives nearby in Ketchum. Asian American girl. Coral is definitely a good looker. Corky isn’t. We figured he probably spends lots of money on her, and it turns out, he does. Slightly less than two hundred thousand so far this year. Trips, jewelry, one of those cute little Lexus convertibles the gals like.”
Koch paused and looked around the room. “That’s about it. Except we know that Hancock is connected to the Wolf and that he’s been paid a lot of money for his services. So at twelve hundred hours, we’re going in to take a look for ourselves inside the house. So tired,” Agent Koch said in a singsong. “Tired of waiting.”
There were smiles around the room, even from those who didn’t get the reference to the Kinks song. Somebody patted me on the shoulder, as though I had something to do with the decision that must have come down from Washington.
“Not me.” I turned and shrugged at the agent congratulating me. “I’m just a soldier here.”
The team going inside Hancock’s place was mostly FBI, but there was a handful of CIA agents, too, led by Rooney. The CIA was in Idaho as a courtesy, partly because of the new working relationship that existed between the two agencies, but mostly because Hancock was directly involved in the murder of Thomas Weir, one of theirs. But I doubted they wanted to take Hancock down any more than I did. I wanted the Wolf, and somehow, somewhere, I was going to get him. At least, that was what I needed to think.
Chapter 102
KOCH AND ROONEY were in charge, and they finally gave us the go. At the appointed hour, we swarmed all over the Hancock house. FBI-emblazoned shirts and windbreakers were everywhere. Probably scared off a few deer and jackrabbits, even though not a single shot was fired.
Hancock was in bed with his girlfriend. He was sixty-four years old; Coral was supposed to be twenty-six. Lustrous black hair, good figure, lots and lots of rings and things, slept in the nude, on her back. Hancock at least had the decency to wear a Utah Jazz sweatshirt and sleep in a fetal position.
He began to shout at us, which was actually kind of ironic and funny. “What the hell is this shit? Get out of my damn house!”
But he forgot to look surprised, or he just wasn’t a good actor. Either way, I got the feeling that he knew we were coming. How? Because he’d spotted us over the past few days? Or had Hancock been warned by someone in one of the cooperating agencies? Did the Wolf know we were onto Hancock?
During the first couple of hours of interviews, we tried Dr. O’Connell’s truth serum on Hancock. It didn’t work as well on him as it had with Joe Cahill. He got happy and high, but he just sat back and went with it. Didn’t tell us much, wouldn’t even confirm things that Cahill had already confessed.
Meanwhile, a search of the house, barn, and sixty acres of grounds was going on. Hancock owned an Aston Martin convertible—and the Wolf loved fast cars—but nothing else even vaguely suspicious turned up. Not for three whole days, during which nearly a hundred agents combed every square inch of the ranch. During that time, half a dozen computer experts—including loaners from Intel and IBM—tried to break into Hancock’s two computers. They finally concluded that he’d had experts put up extra security to protect whatever was inside.
There was nothing to do but wait around some more. I read every magazine and newspaper in Hancock’s house, including several back issues of the Idaho Mountain Express. I went for long walks and tried to figure out a direction for my life that made some sense to me. I didn’t do real well, but the fresh mountain air was a nice treat for my lungs.
When a computer breakthrough finally came, there wasn’t much to go on. No direct link to the Wolf or to anyone else who seemed suspicious to us, at least not at first.
The next day, though, a hacker from our offices in Austin, Texas, found a file inside an encrypted file. It contained regular communication with a bank in Zurich. Actually, with a couple of banks in Switzerland.
And suddenly we didn’t just suspect, we knew that Hancock had a lot of money. Over six million. At least that much. Which was the best news we’d had in a long while.
So off to Zurich we went, at least for a day or two. I didn’t expect to find the Wolf there. But you never know. And I’d never been to Switzerland. Jannie begged me to bring back chocolate, a suitcase full of the stuff, and I promised I would. A whole suitcase full of Swiss chocolate, sweetheart. Least I can do for missing most of your ninth year.
Chapter 103
IF I WERE the Wolf, this would be a good place to live. Zurich is a beautiful, amazingly clean city on the lake—the Zürichsee—with lovely fragrant shade trees and wide, winding sidewalks along the water, and fresh mountain air meant to be breathed in deeply. When I arrived, a storm was imminent and the air smelled like brass. The exterior of a majority of the buildings were in light shades, sand and white, and several were adorned with Swiss flags twisting in the blustery wind off the lake.
As I drove into the city I noticed trolley tracks everywhere with heavy-looking wires hanging overhead. The power of the old. Also several life-size fiberglass cows painted with Alpine scenes, which reminded me of Little Alex’s favorite toy, Moo. What was I going to do about Alex? What could I do?
The Zurich Bank was a sixties-looking building, glass-and-steel front, situated very close to the lake. Sandy Greenberg met me outside. She was wearing a gray suit, had a black handbag slung over her shoulder, and looked as though maybe she worked inside the bank instead of for Interpol.
“You ever been to Zurich, Alex?” Sandy asked as she gave me a hug and kiss on both cheeks.
“Never. Had one of their multipurpose knives once when I was ten or eleven.”
“Alex, we have to eat a meal here. Promise me. Let’s go inside now. They’re waiting for us, and they don’t like to wait in Zurich. Especially the bankers.”
The inside of the Zurich Bank was expensive-looking, highly polished, wood paneling everywhere, as spotless as a hospital operating room. The teller area was natural stone, with more wood paneling. The tellers were efficient and professional-looking, and they whispered to one another. The bank’s branding was understated, but there was a great deal of modern art on the wall. I thought that I understood: the art was the bank’s branding.
“Zurich has always been a haven for avant-garde intellectuals, cultured types,” Sandy said, and didn’t whisper. “The Dada movement was born here. Wagner, Strauss, Jung all lived here.”
“James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Zurich,” I said, and winked at her.
Sandy laughed. “I forgot, you’re a closet intellectual.”
We were escorted to the bank president’s office, which had a serious look. Neat as a pin, too. Only one transaction on the desk blotter, everything else filed away.
/> Sandy handed Mr. Delmar Pomeroy an envelope. “A signed warrant,” she said. “The account number is 616479Q.”
“Everything has been promptly arranged,” Herr Pomeroy said to us. That was all. Then his warrant officer took us to look at the transactions in and out of account number 616479Q. So much for the secrecy and security of Swiss banks. Everything has been promptly arranged.
Chapter 104
THIS WAS FEELING more like an efficient, orderly police investigation now. Even though I knew it really wasn’t. Sandy, two of her agents from Interpol, and I got to look through all of Corky Hancock’s transactions in a small, windowless room somewhere deep in the basement of the Zurich Bank. The former CIA agent’s account had grown from two hundred thousand U.S. dollars to slightly over six million. Youza.
The latest, and largest, deposits totaled three and a half million and had come in four installments this year.
The source of the payment was an account in the name of Y. Jikhomirov. It took us a couple of hours to track down all of the records. There were more than a hundred pages going all the way back to ’91. The year the Wolf had been brought out of Russia. Coincidence? I didn’t believe in them. Not anymore.
We carefully examined withdrawals from the Jikhomirov account. They included payments to a company that leased private jets; regular air travel with British Airways and Air France; hotels: Claridge’s, the Bel-Air in L.A., the Sherry-Netherland in New York, the Four Seasons in Chicago and Maui. There were wire transfers to America, South Africa, Australia, Paris, Tel Aviv. The trail of a Wolf?
And an entry that particularly caught my interest—the purchase of four expensive sports cars in France, all from a dealership in Nice, Riviera Motors. A Lotus, a special-edition Jaguar, and two Aston Martins.
“The Wolf is supposed to be a sports car enthusiast,” I said to Sandy. “Maybe the cars mean something. Maybe we’re closer than we suspect. What do you think?”
She nodded agreement. “Yes, I think we should visit Riviera Motors in Nice. Nice is nice. But first, Alex, lunch in Zurich. I made you a promise.”
“No, I think you made me promise. After my bad Swiss Army knife joke.”
I was hungry anyway, so it seemed a good idea. Sandy chose the Veltliner Keller, one of her favorites—a restaurant she thought I would appreciate.
As we entered, she explained that Veltliner Keller had been a restaurant since 1551, a long time for any business to survive. So we forgot about police work for an hour and a half. We dined on barley soup, zuppe engadinese; a casserole, veltliner topf; and very good wine. Everything was just so: crisp white linens and napkins, roses in sterling vases, crystal salt and pepper shakers.
“This is one of your better ideas,” I told Sandy near the end of the meal. “A nice break in the action.”
“It’s called lunch, Alex. You have to try it more. You should come to Europe with your friend, Jamilla. You’re working too hard.”
“It shows, I guess.”
“No, actually you look as good as ever. You’re holding up better than Denzel—in his latest movies, anyway. Somehow you persevere. I don’t know how, but you do. But I can tell that you’re twisted up inside. Eat, relax, then we’ll go to Nice and check out some sports cars. It will be like a holiday. Maybe we’ll even catch a killer. Finish your wine, Alex.”
“Right,” I said, “and then I have to buy some chocolate for Jannie. A suitcase full. I made another promise.”
“Didn’t you promise to catch the Wolf?” Sandy asked.
“Yeah, that too.”
Chapter 105
NEXT STOP, a luxury-car dealership in Nice. I felt as if I were in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
The owner of Riviera Motors, the “concessionnaire exclusif Jaguar, Aston Martin, Lotus,” appeared to like drama, too, at least in a design sense. To that effect, a long row of gleaming black cars was displayed in the showroom. The cars were clearly visible from the street through monumental bay windows. The shiny black machines cut a startling contrast to a spotless white floor.
“What do you think?” Sandy asked as we climbed out of our rented Peugeot, which we had parked across the street from the dealership.
“I think I need a new car,” I said to her. “And I know the Wolf likes fancy sports cars.”
We went inside and stopped at the reception desk in front. Behind it was an elegant reception person, well tanned with a bleached and ironed ponytail. She was checking Sandy and me out: Both over six feet; ebony and ivory. Who are these people?
“We’re here to see Monsieur Garnier,” Sandy said to the woman in French.
“You have an appointment with Monsieur, madame?”
“We do indeed. Interpol and the FBI, respectively—and respectfully, I might add. Monsieur Garnier is expecting us, I believe. We’re here on important business.”
While we waited, I continued to take in the place. The expensive cars were precisely parked in a herringbone pattern, interspersed with voluminous potted plants. In an adjacent service atelier, mechanics in matching Jaguar-green jumpsuits worked with pristine tools.
The manager of the car dealership appeared after a couple of minutes’ wait. He was dressed in a fashionable gray suit, but not too flashy, just clearly expensive and right.
“You’ve come about a couple of Aston Martins, a Jaguar, a Lotus?” he asked.
“Something like that, monsieur,” Sandy told him. “Let’s go up to your office. We wouldn’t want to hurt business by talking down here in the showroom.”
The manager smiled. “Oh, believe me, madame, our business is bulletproof.”
“We’ll see about that,” I told him in French. “Or maybe a better way of putting it: let’s try and keep it that way. This is a murder investigation.”
Chapter 106
THE MANAGER SUDDENLY BECAME extremely polite and cooperative. The four luxury cars in question had been purchased by an M. Aglionby, who apparently had a home nearby on the beautiful peninsula, Cap-Ferrat, just east of Nice. Monsieur Garnier told us it was “off the Basse Corniche, the main coastal road to Monaco. You can’t miss it. And you won’t miss the Aglionby estate.”
“To Catch a Thief,” Sandy said as we sped along toward Cap-Ferrat about two hours later. We had lost a little time calling in backup.
“Actually, the most memorable shots in the Hitchcock movie were filmed up there,” Sandy went on. She pointed toward a parallel road winding along the cliffs; it was at least a hundred yards higher than the one we were driving on. In other words, very high up, and dangerous-looking.
“Also, we’re here to catch a mass murderer without any conscience,” I said, “not a witty and charming cat burglar like Cary Grant was in the flick.”
“This is true, too. Keep me focused, Alex. I could easily get distracted here,” Sandy said. But I knew she was focused—always. That’s why we got along so well.
The Aglionby estate was located on the west side of Cap-Ferrat, in Villefranche-sur-Mer. There were glimpses of villas and gardens hidden behind high stucco and rock walls as we rode along D125, also known as boulevard Circulaire. Half a dozen cars and vans followed us, also catching the sights, no doubt: a shiny blue Rolls-Royce convertible easing out of one of the estates, with a blonde in sunglasses and a kerchief behind the wheel; dark-glassed tourists catching rays on the terrace of the Grand Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat; a bathing pool dug into solid rock at Piscine de Sun beach.
“You think this is a fool’s errand, Alex?” Sandy asked.
“It’s what we do. Hit and miss, hunt and peck. I feel good about this one. It has to be something. Monsieur Aglionby has to be connected somehow.”
I was hopeful. We had found an awful lot of money in the account of Corky Hancock, and most of it had come in recently. But how much did he really know about the Wolf? How much did anyone know?
Then we saw the estate we were looking for—and Sandy drove past. “Got you, you bastard,” she said. “Aglionby? The Wolf? Why not?”
“Whoe
ver lives back there is certainly loaded. Jesus, how much is enough?”
“When you have a billion dollars or so, this is rather modest, Alex. It’s not a question of a house—it’s houses. The Riviera, London, Paris, Aspen.”
“If you say so. I’ve never had a billion myself. Or a villa on the Riviera.”
The place in question was a sun-drenched, Mediterranean-style mansion, creamy yellow with white detailing; it had gleaming balustrades and porticos, shutters that the staff apparently closed to the midday sun. Or maybe the people inside just didn’t want to be seen? Four stories, thirty-plus rooms—as cozy as Versailles.
But for now all we were interested in was a peek. As we had planned earlier, we reconnoitered at a small hotel just up the coast. The decision was made by local police officials to use the estate bordering the Aglionby place on the south side. It was vacant now, except for a large staff. We would dress and pose as gardeners and household help, starting tomorrow morning.
Sandy and I listened to the plan as it was laid out, step by step. We looked at each other, shook our heads. Not this time.
I spoke. “We’re going in tonight,” I announced. “With or without your help.”
Chapter 107
THE DECISION TO GO right away was backed enthusiastically by Interpol, and even by the French in Paris, who were in close contact with Washington and wanted the murderous Wolf as badly as the rest of the world did, maybe more. For a change, everything happened very quickly that afternoon and through the early evening. I was going to be part of the assault, and so was Sandy.
The attack was planned as if the Wolf was definitely inside the villa. Seven two-person teams of snipers were deployed on all sides of the estate, which were designated as white (north), red (east), black (south), and green (west). Every door and window was covered, and each of the snipers had a specific number of targets. They were closest to the estate. Our eyes and ears.