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They showed Sovernhis room and gave him a key; Letty kept one key for herself without mentioning it. He set up his laptop, opened a file, and began making phone calls. They left him to it.
Baxter wanted to go back to his laptop and left for his own room. Letty said to Cartwright, “So you got a date tonight. You’re what, taking care of him? Making sure he’s not up to something?”
Cartwright said, “I’m pretty sure he’s up to something, but it doesn’t have anything to do with computers or the Russians. In the meantime, I gotta run out. I’d like at least one outfit that’s, you know, datable.”
“Ah, God. Barbara...”
“You know how long it’s been since I’ve been out with somebody who’s really good-looking and smart and who wasn’t carrying three guns and a switchblade? I’m gonna have a good time. You think he dances?”
“He’s a computer nerd, so probably not,” Letty said. “But you’ll take three guns and a knife with you?”
“Well, yeah.”
Delores Nowak arrivedin Washington and called Letty from the airport: “Progress report?”
“We have Sovern here in the hotel. He wants to bring in seven people in addition to Rod, to do the work.”
“Stay in touch,” Nowak said.
Cartwright talked Baxter into giving her a ride to where they’d left the Hertz rental. He did that, and she drove away to find something that didn’t come in camo or khaki, and shoes not made for running. Baxter returned to his laptop.
Letty spent the time worrying, then found out she could stream the oldJustifiedseries on the room television and sank into a chair and vegged until Sovern knocked on the door.
“I got all seven. I had to sell them a little, but we’ve got our Russian speaker and six more criminals willing to help.” He smiled. “Makes me happy, working together again. We can do this.”
And he looked around the room: “Where’s Barb?”
“She went to find something she called a ‘datable outfit,’ and isn’t back yet.”
“Great. Hope she dances,” Sovern said.
“She hopesyoudance,” Letty said. “It’s kinda disgusting.”
“Dancing, or dating?”
“Both, while I sit here and watch old TV shows,” Letty said.
“Well, you could come along,” he said. “We could all dance and then come back to the hotel and make a Sovern sandwich.”
“That’s disturbing,” Letty said. “Go back to your room. I don’t want to look at you.”
Sovern left. He really was disconcertingly good-looking, Letty thought.
As Cartwright was shopping,Baxter browsing the Internet, and Letty vegging on streamed TV shows, Tom Boyadjian wasworking on his putting stroke on an eight-foot-long practice green/rug at the back of his office in Century City.
Boyadjian was fully aware that a half-dozen of his best clients were criminals, Eastern European or Balkan. Another thirty or so were legitimate corporate accounts, where his operators looked into a variety of corporate-based mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance. He referred more complicated problems, like international corporate espionage, to a larger firm, for a modest kickback on the eventual fee.
When the FBI came through the door, late in the afternoon, and in unnecessary numbers, he was ready. The receptionist, to whom he was married, though she kept her maiden name, hit six keys and Enter on her computer as soon as she saw them at the locked glass doors, and was slow to open them.
As soon as the alarm came in, Boyadjian, whose office was at the back of a deliberate rat’s maze of smaller offices and rooms, went to his computer, called up an executable file, and executed it. Encrypted warnings were automatically sent out to clients who would not be calling him again unless he called them first, and their contact information was erased. The file then erased all connections to a specific subscription to the Microsoft cloud, which backed up everything in the computer.
By the time the feds reached his office, all signs of the executable file were gone and Boyadjian was back at the putting green. He didn’t have to worry about being trapped by forensic accountants, because his deals with the six off-the-book clients were cash-based. When the lead fed came through his office door, he looked up, surprised, and asked, “Who the hell are you?” and when he was told, he asked, “What do you want?”
They wanted his computers. They gave him a warrant and took them.
They were also looking for Lawrence and Martin, who, Boyadjian told them, had decided to take long-delayed trekking vacations and probably wouldn’t be back for weeks. They had, he told the feds, gone to Nunavut, where they hoped to spy the rock ptarmigan to add to their life lists as dedicated birders.
The feds didn’t believe him, and they were right not to.
