Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  “I haven’t claimed Hasul’s a villain,” Noriko said. “I never told you I’m convinced a crime’s been committed by his company, or that it would be on his shoulders if it has. What I’ve said is I’ve noticed some things that make me curious, and then noticed other things that raise questions and might or might not be related, and want to see how they fall into place. Or don’t fall into place. My office is working this. But the whole bit about an absent husband… I’ll keep my eyes open for dope on him. Anything turns up, you’ll know about it. If not, you’ll also know. Why let it sidetrack us, or worse, trigger alarms?”

  Megan laced her fingers together on the table.

  “Top executives. Members of the sales force. People at every level of every division,” she said. “Those are your words, Noriko. Describing the sort of employees who could lead a company into trouble, or be led into it. And Patrick Sullivan is a salesman in a major division at Armbright.”

  Noriko looked at her without answering, a stony expression on her face.

  Megan returned the stare, her hands still folded.

  “I’m making Sullivan a priority of your investigation,” she said. Then surprised herself, as well as everyone else, by adding, “We’ll be sending a team to help you cover it.”

  And that was when Sword’s operatives truly became involved, though Megan could never for a moment have imagined where her decision would lead them.

  * * *

  Avram emerged from beneath the neon glitz and computer animations of the marquee subway entrance at the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, walked a block north to 43rd past more flashing electronic graphics, and then turned west toward Eighth Avenue. Clinton, they called this section nowadays. Sparkling, tidy, swarmed with tourists. The MTV studios, ESPN Zone, they were all within a block or two of here. He felt as if he’d arrived at a giant outdoor theme park for out-of-towners. The corporate pitchman’s idea of urban redevelopment. But where had their giant broom swept reality in its mingled beauty and ugliness?

  When Avram was a boy the area had still commonly been known as Hell’s Kitchen, and he’d been warned to steer wide and clear of the shkotzim—a Yiddish word for non-Jews with derogatory connotations of a certain ruffianism — who lived in the neighborhood. And his family’s narrow prejudices aside, it truly had been a bad section of town, with its massage parlors, street-corner prostitutes, and adult bookshops, its Irish and Puerto Rican gang members hanging around outside now-demolished tenements.

  On a late spring day when he was seventeen, Avram and some friends had cut classes at school, drunk two six-packs of beer in Central Park, and gotten the idea to go to the peepshows. He didn’t recall who’d proposed it. One of the other boys had boasted of having done it before with an older friend or cousin, and had given graphic descriptions of his experience. Maybe the notion had arisen in all the rest as they’d listened. At any rate, it had exerted an irresistible pull on them, and they had hopped the train downtown, jittery and eager. Imagine what Rabbi Zeimann, the principal at their yeshiva, would say, somebody had commented. Hope we don’t run into him, another snorted. There had been a lot of nervous talk.

  The place was on Broadway or Seventh, and Avram had seen smut magazines on wall racks inside the entrance. A potbellied man sold him four tokens for a dollar. Then, in back, there were curtained booths where a slotted token played a minute-long snippet of some pornographic film reel on a small viewscreen. The air had smelled of Lysol and something sour the disinfectant couldn’t cover. Avram had parted ways with his friends as each went into a different booth. Farther toward the rear were more booths with doors instead of curtains. Two tokens made a metal partition rise from a window to offer a glimpse of a nude woman gyrating on a semicircular stage. The music was loud and throbbing. The woman would go around from window to window. The panel wouldn’t stay up long before it fell and you’d have to insert another couple of tokens. If a window panel stayed up longer than the others, she would spend some extra time in front of it.

  Avram had used up the tokens he’d bought, and then hurried back to the counter for more, spending the rest of the ten or twelve dollars he’d originally had with him. The woman had been black, with large pendulous breasts. She had smiled, licked her lips, run her hands over herself, a vulgar burlesque with a two-minute expiration, renewable with another trip to the fat man outside, the dropping in of more tokens. His arousal rising over his mixed embarrassment and disgust over the smell of the place, Avram hadn’t cared that she in all likelihood could not even see his face through the glass. Once, he’d noticed the hardened glaze in her eyes and quickly looked away from them, concentrating on her flesh, her body. Thinking it was beautiful, no matter what, beautiful.

  There, in that darkened stall, taking rapid breaths of its sour air, Avram had first seen a naked woman. And he’d never forgotten it. How could he? It was one of those crossings a man remembered. The beauty of her body, her sham lust, they remained inseparable in his mind, bound together without contradiction. Granted, it had been many, many yesterdays ago. When Avram was a teenager. But he could not say that anything he’d learned since would make him believe they were mutually exclusive.

  Now Avram snapped from his thoughts to discover he’d come to the Charleston Hotel down the street from the Port Authority. Among the few welfare hotels left in this neighborhood, it was a tall old building with some closet-sized private rooms fixed up to lure budget travelers… and hurried couples whose only interest was immediate availability and a bed, Avram surmised. The long broom still had some work to do.

  He entered, crossed the lobby to the registration desk, set down his briefcase, and caught the attention of a drowsyeyed man seated behind it.

  “I’m Mr. Cartwright,” he said, giving the name Lathrop had told him to use. “You’ll have a reservation for me.”

  Barely looking at him, the clerk rolled his chair over to his computer, lifted his hands to its keyboard. It seemed a heavy task.

  “Here it is.” He tapped some keys and scanned what had come up on the monitor. “Cash payment made in full last night, I see?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you’re set.” The clerk parted ways with his chair, got Avram’s card key. “Room seven-oh-nine. ’Course that’s on the seventh floor.”

  “Of course.”

  “When you leave the elevator, hook a right, your door’s the last one at the end of the hall.”

  “Thank you.” Avram took the card key and hefted his briefcase from where he’d set it on the carpet beside him. “A visitor should be coming to see me any minute.”

  The clerk gave a sluggish nod without turning his eyes toward Avram’s face.

  “Sure, whatever,” he said. “Long as he, she, or it’s of legal age.”

  * * *

  Minutes after he entered the hotel room, Avram heard a knock at the door, opened its peephole, saw Lathrop outside, and let him in.

  The room was squarish with a double bed, a combination dresser/night stand, and a single straightbacked chair against the wall. Lathrop swept past Avram with a flap of his outback coat, going straight to a window above the dresser.

  “You’ve found some choice accommodations.” Avram said to his back. “Only the best for us, no?”

  “The staffers mind their business.”

  “Provided we’re consenting adults.”

  Lathrop said nothing. He reached over the dresser to part the curtains, opened the blinds, and glanced out through its slats, his eyes darting from side to side. After a moment he drew the curtains back across the window, leaving the blinds as they were.

  “You’ll be able to see okay in here,” he said, and turned toward Avram. “Plenty of sunlight.”

  Avram nodded.

  “Northern exposure,” he said. “Very considerate.”

  Lathrop moved the chair over to the nightstand, sat facing the bed, and produced a flat black gem case from inside his coat.

  “Come on, take a look,” he sai
d. “Neither of us has all day.”

  Avram settled onto the edge of the bed opposite him, hoping his anticipation wasn’t too close to the surface.

  “So,” he said. “I’d imagine what you have to show me must be very remarkable… worth your demanding this hasty tête-à-tête, and my wearing out a pair of shoes to make my way over here.”

  “Be glad I’m thorough,” Lathrop said.

  Avram looked at him. “Do you honestly think it’s possible I’m being watched?”

  “I’m saying if there’s somebody on your tail I don’t spot, you could wind up pacing a federal prison cell instead of the street.”

  Avram gave no response. Some things were better left uncontemplated.

  He turned his attention to the gem case as Lathrop opened it, focusing on its contents.

  Lathrop watched the avid expression spread across his features.

  “There you go,” he said. “I thought they might grab you.”

  Avram almost gaped. The case’s black foam insert tray held three rows of round, transparent jars, five to a row. Each of the lidded jars was in its own snug compartment and contained a stone of a silky violet-blue. There were radiants, round brilliants, ovals. But though they varied in size, cut, and finish, their smooth purity of color remained consistent.

  He tore his eyes from them with effort.

  “These gems,” he said. Staring at Lathrop. “They look like Kashmirs.”

  Lathrop shook head.

  “They are Kashmirs,” he said. “World class.”

  “By whose definition?”

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” he said. “You’re the connoisseur, Avram. You should be able to tell the real thing from a fake.”

  Avram’s gaze held on his face a moment, then returned to the stones, enraptured by their cool blue radiance. Whatever notions he’d held of feigning nonchalance had been laughable, but he would settle for a semblance of restraint.

  “Do you know about the Kashmir sapphire?” he said. “Its history?”

  “I know what I need to know.”

  “Then you must be aware that true Kashmirs… not the ones that come from Myanmar and have been given the name because of their similar color… true Kashmirs are the rarest in the world. The most prized.” Avram’s throat was tight. “Most of the cut, polished gems are bought from estates and collectors. And no rough has appeared on the legal market in a quarter of a century. Their only source is — was, I should say — a Himalayan mountain valley over fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Two miles in the clouds. Outside a Pakistani village called Soomjan, in the Padar region near the Indian border.”

  Lathrop was silent.

  “The British were meticulous about their journals, their chronicles,” Avram said. “There’s one I read from when India was under their rule. It says how, in 1880 or so, a pair of men from the village, game hunters, found the rough sapphires littered underfoot. Right beneath the surface of the ground, where a portion of a slope had given way in a landslide. The hunters had no idea of their value. But they thought the stones might be worth something to local traders who dealt with the colonials, and picked them out of the dirt to barter them at the market for grain.”

  Lathrop gave him another shrug.

  “You have some reason to believe I’m interested in any of this?”

  “I’ve already touched upon a very good one,” Avram said. “Kashmirs… those from the traditional source… aren’t often seen except in antique jewelry settings. Most date back to the Edwardian period, in Great Britain. The mines dug near the original find were depleted within forty years. And fewer and fewer stones have turned up since the 1920s. There’s been no new prospecting. The difficult terrain, its remoteness, accounts for this in part. But mostly it’s the border conflict in those hills. The unending violence. India, Pakistan… they both claim territorial rights to the frontier, India holding it with military troops. Local tribespeople allied with the Pakistanis fighting them from hidden rebel camps in the mountain passes.” Avram paused. “Once in a great while a rough will appear on the black market. Or so I’ve heard. It’s rumored the Kashmiri separatists search for them deep down in the old mines, finance their guerilla campaign… their acts of terrorism, some would say… with profits from the illegal sales.”

  Lathrop leaned forward and stared him dead in the eye.

  “Avram,” he said, “you sound afraid.”

  Avram shook his head with indignation.

  “I have certain well-warranted fears, and would think you might appreciate the distinction,” he said, and took a long breath. “Put it however you want, I know the risk of trying to pass these stones off as natural.”

  Lathrop stared at him.

  “You don’t need to take me at my word,” he said. “Things shouldn’t be any different than before.”

  Avram filled his lungs with air again, exhaled. Then he pointed to one of the small round jars in the open case, letting his finger hover just above its lid.

  “That oval in there… it’s polished but unfaceted. Known as a breadloaf cabochon, a style popular eighty years ago. I’d estimate it’s a ten or twelve carater. Imagine how skeptical a customer would be should I try to broker it without a certificate of authenticity. A provenance. Then compound that skepticism by the number of sapphires you’ve brought. Even if the mineral and crystal inclusions… the color zones… are what they should be for stones that came out of the Himalayas, my buyers would be more than a little curious about how I’ve managed to obtain one or two of them, forget a dozen. And unless your terms have changed, I expect you’ll want me to take all or nothing.”

  Lathrop leaned closer, gave him a fleeting smile.

  “Use your smarts, Avram, because I know you’ve got plenty,” he said. “We’re coming from different angles. I’m in for the quick kill. You need to take the long view. Don’t compare the terms of our deal to whatever you swing with your clients.”

  Avram looked at him. And kept looking.

  “What are you saying?” he said.

  “My source is tapped out. After this last fire sale, I’m done. There’ll be no more wearing down your heels to humor me. But your business is in this city. Going to the big club every morning. Showing, bargaining. You sell a couple of these sapphires, make a handsome profit, lock the rest away in a vault. Five, ten, maybe twenty years down the line, whenever you’re ready to retire, they’re going to make some kind of nest egg. You can set yourself up. Your kids, their kids. Clinch your family fortune—”

  “Onward unto all generations forevermore,” Avram said dryly. “Now it’s you who’s sounding biblical, my friend.”

  Lathrop grinned, full out. This time it took its time leaving his face.

  Avram realized his fingertip was still floating perhaps a half inch over the jar that held the large cabochon.

  “May I?” he said.

  Lathrop gave a nod.

  Avram lowered his hand to the gem case, carefully lifted out the jar, removed its lid, plucked the sapphire from inside with two fingers, and rose from his chair. At the window, he laid the stone flat in the middle of his palm and stood admiring its even depth of color, thinking it might have been a bead of frozen blue mist against his flesh, hard as ice, yet somehow at the verge of evaporating into the air, swirling away from him at any moment. Finally he got his loupe out of his pocket and examined the sapphire in the sunlight, the ten-power magnifying lens about an inch from his eye.

  What he saw left him stunned. No, more than that. Awed. Lathrop’s other parcels had been lab-cultured marvels, indistinguishable from authentic goods. But this appeared to be on a level of its own. For a laboratory to accurately replicate the visual and gemological properties of Kashmirs would require a technology — a combination of synthesizing technologies — so advanced it boggled his mind.

  Lathrop watched him quietly for several seconds after he’d returned to the dresser.

  “So, A
vram,” he said. “Approve of what you see?”

  Avram sat in the chair, his mouth dry.

  The sapphire back in his palm, gleaming softly.

  “On first glance… it’s quite a specimen,” he said, and moistened his lips with his tongue. “Unbelievably convincing. I’d need to give it a proper look to be sure, study its characteristics thoroughly…”

  “No obstacle,” Lathrop said. “You’ve got a setup at home. All kinds of precision instruments, right?”

  Avram nodded.

  “Go ahead and take that stone, or any other one from the case,” Lathrop said. “Pick it out at random. I’ve got some things to keep me busy over the next few days, and that should give you time to run your tests. Be as thorough as you want before making your decision.”

  Avram looked at him.

  “An authenticated cabochon of this size could be worth three-quarters of a million dollars,” he said. “What you propose, we’d call it lending on memo at the Exchange. A slip is written up, a record of the stone passing hands…”

  “And you’re curious why I don’t worry about you maybe having evil inclinations, disappearing with that little beauty.”

  Another slow nod from Avram.

  Lathrop met his gaze, held it steadily.

  “Avram, you’re a family man.”

  “The dazzle of wealth has tempted family men to run off before. Leave everything behind and choose lives of freedom and luxury.”

  Lathrop nodded. Then he reached out, put his hand over Avram’s open fingers, and pressed them shut around the stone in his palm.

  “Between us,” he said, “you ever feel that temptation creeping up, remember I know where your wife and children sleep at night.”

  * * *

  Cold, she thought, it was so cold. And dark outside.

  It hit her the instant she left her apartment condominium, smacked her hard in the face, this spiteful winter gloom. Still shy of five-thirty P.M., and you’d think it was the middle of the night — exactly what could push her to feel more depressed and heartsick than was already the case. But she had to maintain some semblance of normalcy for the sake of her daughter. The poor kid needed to keep socializing with other children. Needed some distraction from the automatic routine of school, homework, and hanging around the cheerless atmosphere of their apartment until bedtime. Waiting for her father, watching her mother wait. The two of them just hoping to hear from him, wishing Pat would call as he so often would late in the day… or better, so much better, imagining he’d surprise them and come walking right in the front door.