THE BLUE ZONE

Andrew Gross

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Two

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Part Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Part Five

Chapter Seventy-Six

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-One

Chapter Eighty-Two

Chapter Eighty-Three

Chapter Eighty-Four

Chapter Eighty-Five

Chapter Eighty-Six

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The manual of WITSEC, the U.S. Marshals agency that oversees the Witness Protection Program, describes three stages of agency involvement.

The Red Zone—when a subject is held in protective custody, while in prison or on trial.

The Green Zone—when that subject, along with his or her family, has been placed in a new identity and location and is living securely in that identity, known only to his WITSEC case agent.

And the Blue Zone—the state most feared, when there is suspicion that a subject’s new identity has been penetrated or blown. When he or she is unaccounted for, is out of contact with the case agent, or has fled the safety of the program. When there is no official knowledge of whether that person is dead or alive.

PROLOGUE

It took just minutes for Dr. Emil Varga to reach the old man’s room. He had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of a woman from his days at the university a lifetime ago, but at the sound of the servant’s frantic knocking he quickly threw his wool jacket over his nightshirt and grabbed his bag.

“Please, Doctor,” she said, running upstairs ahead of him, “come quick!”

Varga knew the way. He had been staying in the hacienda for weeks. In fact, the stubborn, unyielding man who had held off death for so long was his only patient these days. Sometimes Varga mused over a brandy at night that his loyal service had hastened his departure from a lengthy and distinguished career.

Was it finally over …?

The doctor paused at the bedroom door. The room was dark, fetid; the arched, shuttered windows held back the onset of dawn. The smell told him all he needed to know. That and the old man’s chest—silent for the first time in weeks. His mouth was open, his head tilted slightly on the pillow. A trickle of yellow drool clotted on his lips.

Slowly Varga stepped up to the large mahogany bed and put his bag on the table. No need for instruments now. In life his patient had been a bull of a man. Varga thought of all the violence he had caused. But now the sharp Indian cheekbones were shrunken and pale. There was something about it that the doctor thought fitting. How could someone who had caused such fear and misery in his life look so frail and withered now?

Varga heard voices from down the hall, shattering the calm of the dawn. Bobi, the old man’s youngest son, ran into the room, still in his bedclothes. He stopped immediately and fixed on the lifeless shape, his eyes wide.

“Is he dead?”

The doctor nodded. “He finally gave up his grip on life. For eighty years he had it by the balls.”

Bobi’s wife, Marguerite, who was carrying the old man’s third grandchild, began to weep in the doorway. The son crept cautiously over to the bed, as if advancing on a slumbering mountain lion that at any moment might spring up in attack. He knelt down and brushed the old man’s face, his tightened, withered cheeks. Then he took his father’s hand, which even now was rough and coarse as a laborer’s hand, and gently kissed it on the knuckles.

“Todas apuestas se terminaron, Papa,” he whispered, gazing into the old man’s deadened eyes.

All bets are off, Father.

Then Bobi rose and nodded. “Thank you, Doctor, for all you’ve done. I’ll make sure word gets to my brothers.”

Varga tried to read what was in the son’s eyes. Grief. Disbelief. His father’s illness had gone on so long, and now the day had finally come.

No, it was more of a question that was written there: For years the old man had held everything together, through the force of his own will.

What would happen now?

Bobi led his wife by the arm and left the room. Varga stepped over to the window. He opened the shutters, letting in the morning light. The dawn had washed over the valley.

The old man owned it all for miles, far past the gates, the grazing lands, the glistening cordillera, three thousand meters high. Two black American SUVs were parked next to the stables. A couple of bodyguards, armed with machine pistols, were lounging on a fence, sipping their coffee, unaware.

“Yes,” Varga muttered, “get word to your brothers.” He turned back to the old man. See, you bastard, even in death you are a dangerous man.

The floodgates were open. The waters would be fierce. Blood never washes away blood.

Except here.

There was a painting over the bed of the Madonna and child in a hand-carved frame that Varga knew had been a gift from a church in Buenaventura, where the old man was born. The doctor wasn’t a religious man, but he crossed himself anyway, lifting up the damp bedsheet and placing it gently over the dead man’s face.

“I hope you are finally at peace, old man, wherever you are.… Because all hell is going to break loose here.”

I don’t know if it’s a dream or if it’s real.

I step off the Second Avenue bus. It’s only a couple of blocks to where I live. I know immediately something is wrong.

Maybe it’s the guy I see stepping away from the storefront, tossing his cigarette onto the sidewalk, following a short distance behind. Maybe it’s the steady clacking of his footsteps on the pavement behind me as I cross over to Twelfth Street.

Normally I wouldn’t turn. I wouldn’t think twice. It’s the East Village. It’s crowded. People are everywhere. It’s just a sound of the city. Happens all the time.

But this time I do turn. I have to. Just enough to glimpse the Hispanic man with his hands in his black leather jacket.

Jesus, Kate, try being a little paranoid, girl.…

Except this time I’m not being paranoid. This time the guy keeps following me.

I turn on Twelfth. It’s darker there, less traffic. A few people are talking out on their stoop. A young couple making out in the shadows. The guy’s still on me. I still hear his footsteps close behind.

Pick up your pace, I tell myself. You live only a few blocks away.

I tell myself that this can’t be happening. If you’re going to wake up, Kate, now’s the time! But I don’t wake up. This time it’s real. This time I’m holding a secret important enough to get myself killed.

I cross the street, quickening my pace. My heart’s starting to race. His footsteps are knifing through me now. I catch a glimpse of him in the reflection of a store window. The dark mustache and short, wiry hair.

My heart’s slamming back and forth off my ribs now.

There’s a market where I sometimes buy groceries. I run in. There are people there. For a second I feel safe. I take a basket, hide between the aisles, throw in things I pretend I need. But all the while I’m just waiting. Praying he’s passing by.

I pay. I smile a little nervously at Ingrid, the checkout girl, who knows me. I have this eerie premonition. What if she’s the last person to see me alive?

Back outside, I feel relief for a second. The guy must be gone. No sign. But then I freeze. He’s still there. Leaning aimlessly against a parked car on the other side of the street, talking into a phone. His eyes slowly drift to mine.…

Shit, Kate, what the hell do you do now?

Now I run. An indistinguishable pace at first, then faster. I hear the frantic rhythm of quickening footsteps on the pavement—but this time they’re mine.

I grope in my bag for my phone. Maybe I should call Greg. I want to tell him I love him. But I know the time—it’s the middle of his shift. All I’d get is his voice mail. He’s on rounds.

Maybe I should call 911 or stop and scream. Kate, do something—now!

My building’s just a half a block away. I can see it now. The green canopy. 445 East Seventh. I fumble for my keys. My hands are shaking. Please, just a few yards more …

The last few feet I take at a full-out run. I jam my key into the outer lock, praying it turns—and it does! I hurl open the heavy glass doors. I take one last glance behind. The man who was following me has pulled up a few doorways down. I hear the door to the building close behind me, the lock mercifully engaging.

I’m safe now. I feel my chest virtually implode with relief. It’s over now, Kate. Thank God.

For the first time, I feel my sweater clinging to me, drenched in a clammy sweat. This has got to end. You’ve got to go to someone, Kate. I’m so relieved I actually start to cry.

But go to whom?

The police? They’ve been lying to me from the beginning. My closest friend? She’s fighting for her life in Bellevue Hospital. That’s surely no dream.

My family? Your family is gone, Kate. Forever.

It was too late for any of that now.

I step into the elevator and press the button for my floor. Seven. It’s one of those heavy industrial types, clattering like a train as it passes every floor. All I want is just to get into my apartment and shut the door.

On seven the elevator rattles to a stop. It’s over now. I’m safe. I fling open the metal grating, grasp my keys, push open the heavy outer door.

There are two men standing in my way.

I try to scream, but for what? No one will hear me. I step back. My blood goes cold. All I can do is look silently into their eyes.

I know they’re here to kill me.

What I don’t know is if they’re from my father, the Colombians, or the FBI.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Gold was up 2 percent the morning Benjamin Raab’s life began to fall apart.

He was leaning back at his desk, looking down on Forty-seventh Street, in the lavish comfort of his office high above the Avenue of the Americas, the phone crooked in his neck.

“I’m waiting, Raj.…”

Raab had a spot gold contract he was holding for two thousand pounds. Over a million dollars. The Indians were his biggest customers, one of the largest exporters of jewelry in the world. Two percent. Raab checked the Quotron screen. That was thirty thousand dollars. Before lunch.

“Raj, c’mon,” Raab prodded. “My daughter’s getting married this afternoon. I’d like to make it if I can.…”

“Katie’s getting married?” The Indian seemed to be hurt. “Ben, you never said—”

“It’s just an expression, Raj. If Kate was getting married, you’d be there. But, Raj, c’mon … we’re talking gold here—not pastrami. It doesn’t go bad.”

This was what Raab did. He moved gold. He’d owned his own trading company near New York’s diamond district for twenty years. Years ago he had started out buying inventory from the mom-and-pop jewelers who were going out of business. Now he supplied gold to half the dealers on the Street. As well as to some of the largest exporters of jewelry across the globe.

Everyone in the trade knew him. He could hardly grab a turkey club at the Gotham Deli down the street without one of the pushy, heavyset Hasids squeezing next to him in the booth with the news of some dazzling new stone they were peddling. (Though they always chided that as a Sephardi he wasn’t even one of their own.) Or one of the young Puerto Rican runners who delivered the contracts, thanking him for the flowers he’d sent to their wedding. Or the Chinese, looking to hedge some dollars against a currency play. Or the Australians, tantalizing him with uncut blocks of industrial-quality stones.

I’ve been lucky, Raab always said. He had a wife who adored him, three beautiful children who made him proud. His house in Larchmont (a whole lot more than just a house) that overlooked the Long Island Sound, and the Ferrari 585, which Raab once raced at Lime Rock and had its own special place in the five-car garage. Not to mention the box at Yankee Stadium and the Knicks tickets, on the floor of the Garden, just behind the bench.

Betsy, his assistant for over twenty years, stepped in carrying a chef’s salad on a plate along with a cloth napkin, Raab’s best defense against his proclivity for leaving grease stains on his Hermès ties. She rolled her eyes. “Raji, still …?”

Benjamin shrugged, drawing her eye to his notepad where he had already written down the outcome: $648.50. He knew that his buyer was going to take it. Raj always did. They’d been doing this little dance for years. But did he always have to play out the drama so long?

“Okay, my friend.” The Indian buyer sighed at last in surrender. “We consider it a deal.”

“Whew, Raj.” Raab exhaled in mock relief. “The Financial Times is outside waiting on the exclusive.”

The Indian laughed, too, and they closed out the deal: $648.50, just as he’d written down.

Betsy smiled—“He says that every time, doesn’t he?”—trading the handwritten contract for two glossy travel brochures that she placed next to his plate.

Raab tucked the napkin into the collar of his Thomas Pink striped shirt. “Fifteen years.”

All one had to do was step into Raab’s crowded office and it was impossible not to notice the walls and credenzas crammed with pictures of Sharon, his wife, and his children—Kate, the oldest, who had graduated from Brown; Emily, who was sixteen, and nationally ranked at squash; and Justin, two years younger—and all the fabulous family trips they’d taken over the years.

The villa in Tuscany. Kenya on safari. Skiing at Courchevel in the French Alps. Ben in his driver’s suit with Richard Petty at the Porsche rally school.

And that’s what he was doing over lunch, mapping out their next big trip—the best one yet. Machu Picchu. The Andes. Then on a fantastic walking tour of Patagonia. Their twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up. Patagonia had always been one of Sharon’s dreams.

“My next life”—Betsy grinned as she shut the office door—“I’m making sure I come back as one of your kids.”

“Next life,” Raab called after her, “I am, too.”

Suddenly a loud crash came from the outer office. At first Raab thought it was an explosion or a break-in. He thought about triggering the alarm. Sharp, unfamiliar voices were barking commands.

Betsy rushed back in, a look of panic on her face. A step behind, two men in suits and navy windbreakers pushed through the door.

“Benjamin Raab?”

“Yes …” He stood up and faced the tall, balding man who had addressed him, who seemed to be in charge. “You can’t just barge in here like this. What the hell’s going on …?”

“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”—the man tossed a folded document onto the desk—“is that we have a warrant from a federal judge for your arrest.”

“Arrest …?” Suddenly people in FBI jackets were everywhere. His staff was being rounded up and told to vacate. “What the hell for?”

“For money laundering, aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government,” the agent read off. “How’s that, Mr. Raab? The contents of this office are being impounded as material evidence in this case.”

“What?”

Before he could utter another word, the second agent, a young Hispanic, spun Raab around, forcing his arms roughly behind him, and slapped a set of handcuffs on his wrists, his whole office looking on.

“This is crazy!” Raab twisted, trying to look the agent in the face.

“Sure it is,” the Hispanic agent chortled. He lifted the travel brochures out of Raab’s hands. “Too bad.” He winked, tossing them back onto the desk. “Seemed like one helluva trip.”

CHAPTER TWO

“Check these babies out,” Kate Raab muttered, peering into the high-powered Siemens microscope.

Tina O’Hearn, her lab partner, leaned over the scope. “Whoa!”

In the gleaming luminescence of the high-resolution lens, two brightly magnified cells sharpened into view. One was the lymphocyte, the defective white blood cell with a ring of hairy particles protruding from its membrane. The other cell was thinner, squiggle-shaped, and had a large white dot in the center.

“That’s the Alpha-boy,” Kate said, slowly adjusting the magnification. “We call them Tristan and Isolde. Packer’s name for them.” She picked up a tiny metal probe off the counter. “Now check this out.…”

As Kate prodded, Tristan nudged its way toward the denser lymphocyte. The defective cell resisted, but the squiggle cell kept coming back, as if searching out a weakness in the lymphocyte’s membrane. As if attacking.

“Seems more like Nick and Jessica,” Tina giggled, bent over the lens.

“Watch.”

As if on cue, the squiggle cell seemed to probe the hairy borders of the white blood cell, until in front of their eyes the attacking membrane seemed to penetrate the border of its prey and they merged into a single, larger cell with a white dot in the center.

Tina looked up. “Ouch!”

“Love hurts, huh? That’s a progenitive stem-cell line,” Kate explained, looking up from the scope. “The white one’s a lymphoblast—what Packer calls the ‘killer leukocyte.’ It’s the pathogenic agent of leukemia. Next week, we see what happens in a plasma solution similar to the bloodstream. I get to record the results.”

“You do this all day?” Tina scrunched up her face.

Kate chuckled. Welcome to life in the petri dish. “All year.”

For the past eight months, Kate had been working as a lab researcher for Dr. Grant Packer, up at Albert Einstein Medical College in the Bronx, whose work in cytogenetic leukemia was starting to make noise in medical circles. She’d won a fellowship out of Brown, where she and Tina had been lab partners her senior year.

Kate was always smart—just not “geeky” smart, she always maintained. She was twenty-three. She liked to have fun—hit the new restaurants, go to clubs. Since she’d been twelve, she could beat most guys down the hill on a snowboard. She had a boyfriend, Greg, who was a second-year resident at NYU Medical School. She just spent the majority of her day leaning over a microscope, recording data or transcribing it onto digital files, but she and Greg always joked—when they actually saw each other—that one lab rat in their relationship was enough. Still, Kate loved the work. Packer was starting to turn some heads, and Kate had to admit it was the coolest option she’d had for a while.

Besides, her real claim to distinction, she figured, was no doubt being the only person she knew who could recite Cleary’s Ten Stages of Cellular Development and had a tattoo of a double helix on her butt.

“Leukoscopophy,” Kate explained. “Pretty cool the first time you see it. Try watching it a thousand times. Now check out what happens.”

They leaned back over the double scope. There was only one cell left—larger, squiggle-shaped Tristan. The defective lymphoblast had virtually disappeared.

Tina whistled, impressed. “If that happens in a living model, there’s got to be a Nobel Prize in this.”

“In ten years, maybe. Personally, I was just hoping for a graduate dissertation.” Kate grinned.

At that moment her cell phone started to vibrate. She thought it might be Greg, who loved to e-mail her funny photos from rounds, but when she checked out the screen, she shook her head and flipped the phone back into her lab coat.

“If it’s not one thing it’s a mother …” she sighed.

Kate led Tina into the library, with about a thousand recorded iterations of the stem-cell line on digital film. “My life’s work!” She introduced her to Max, Packer’s baby, the cytogenetic scope worth over $2 million, which separated chromosomes in the cells and made the whole thing possible. “You’ll feel like you’re dating it before the month is through.”

Tina looked it over with a shrug of mock approval. “I’ve done worse.”

That was when Kate’s cell phone sounded again. She flipped it out. Her mom again. This time there was a text message coming in.

KATE, SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. CALL HOME QUICK!

Kate stared. She’d never gotten a message like that before. She didn’t like the sound of those words. Her mind flashed through the possibilities—and all of them were bad.

“Tina, sorry, but I gotta call home.”

“No sweat. I’ll just start the small talk rolling with Max.”

With a jitter of nerves, Kate punched in the speed dial of her parents’ home in Larchmont. Her mom picked up on the first ring. Kate could hear the alarm in her voice.

“Kate, it’s your father.…”

Something bad had happened. A tremor of dread flashed through her. Her dad had never been sick. He was in perfect shape. He could probably take Em at squash on a good day.

“What’s happened, Mom? Is he okay?”

“I don’t know.… His secretary just called in. Your father’s been arrested, Kate. He’s been arrested by the FBI!”

CHAPTER THREE

They took the cuffs off Raab inside FBI headquarters at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, leading him into a stark, narrow room with a wooden table and metal chairs and a couple of dog-eared Wanted posters tacked to a bulletin board on the wall.

He sat there staring up at a small mirror that he knew was the two-way kind, like on some police drama on TV. He knew what he had to tell them. He’d rehearsed it over and over. That this was all some kind of crazy mistake. He was just a businessman. He’d never done anything wrong in his entire life.

After about twenty minutes, the door opened. Raab stood up. The same two agents who had arrested him stepped in, trailed by a thin young man in a gray suit and short, close-cropped hair, who placed a briefcase on the table.

“I’m Special Agent in Charge Booth,” announced the tall, balding agent. “You’ve already met Special Agent Ruiz. This is Mr. Nardozzi. He’s a U.S. Attorney with the Justice Department who’s familiar with your case.”

“My case …?” Raab forced a hesitant smile, eyeing their thick files a little warily, not believing he was hearing that word.

“What we’re going to do is ask you a few questions, Mr. Raab,” the Hispanic agent, Ruiz, began. “Please sit back down. I can assure you this will go a lot easier if we can count on your full cooperation and you simply answer truthfully and succinctly to the best of your knowledge.”

“Of course.” Raab nodded, sitting back down.

“And we’re going to be taping this, if that’s okay?” Ruiz said, placing a standard cassette recorder on the table, not even waiting for his response. “It’s for your own protection, too. At any time, if you like, you can request that a lawyer be present.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.” Raab shook his head. “I have nothing to hide.”

“That’s good, Mr. Raab.” Ruiz winked back affably. “These things have a way of always going best when people have nothing to hide.”

The agent removed a stack of papers from the file and ordered them in a certain way on the table. “You’ve heard of a Paz Export Enterprises, Mr. Raab?” he started in, turning the first page.

“Of course,” Raab confirmed. “They’re one of my biggest accounts.”

“And just what is it you do for them?” the FBI agent asked him.

“I purchase gold. On the open market. They’re in the novelty gift business or something. I ship it to an intermediary on their behalf.”

“Argot Manufacturing?” Ruiz interjected, turning over a page from his notes.

“Yes, Argot. Look, if that’s what this is about—”

“And Argot does what with all this gold you purchase?” Ruiz cut him off one more time.

“I don’t know. They’re manufacturers. They turn it into gold plate, or whatever Paz requests.”

“Novelty items,” Ruiz said, cynically, looking up from his notes.

Raab stared back. “What they do with it is their business. I just buy the gold for them.”

“And how long have you been supplying gold to Argot on Paz’s behalf?” Agent in Charge Booth took up the questioning.

“I’m not sure. I’d have to check. Maybe six, eight years …”

“Six to eight years.” The agents glanced at each other. “And in all that time, Mr. Raab, you have no idea what products they make once they receive your gold?”

It had the feel of a rhetorical question. But they seemed to be waiting for an answer. “They make a lot of things.” Raab shrugged. “For different customers. Jewelry. Gold-plated stuff, desk ornaments, paperweights …”

“They consume quite a lot of gold,” Booth said, running his eye down a column of numbers, “for a bunch of desk ornaments and paperweights, wouldn’t you say? Last year over thirty-one hundred pounds. At roughly six hundred forty dollars an ounce, that’s over thirty-one million dollars, Mr. Raab.”

The number took Raab by surprise. He felt a bead of sweat run down his temple. He wet his lips. “I told you, I’m in the transaction business. They give me a contract. All I do is supply the gold. Look, maybe if you tell me what this is about …”

Booth stared back, as if bemused, with a cynical smile, but a smile, it appeared to Raab, that had facts behind it. Ruiz opened his folder and removed some new sheets. Photographs. Black-and-white, eight-by-tens. The shots were all of mundane items. Bookends, paperweights, and some basic tools: hammers, screwdrivers, hoes.

“You recognize any of these items, Mr. Raab?”

For the first time, Raab felt his heart start to accelerate. He warily shook his head. “No.”

“You receive payments from Argot, don’t you, Mr. Raab?” Ruiz took him by surprise. “Kickbacks …”

“Commissions,” Raab corrected him, irritated at his tone.

“In addition to your commissions.” Ruiz kept his eyes on him. He slid another sheet across the table. “Commissions in the commodities market run, what? One and a half, two percent? Yours go as high as six, eight percent, Mr. Raab, isn’t that right?”

Ruiz kept his gaze fixed on him. Raab’s throat suddenly went dry. He became aware he was fiddling with the gold Cartier cuff links Sharon had given him for his fiftieth birthday, and he stopped abruptly. His glance flicked back and forth among the three agents, trying to gauge what was in their minds.

“Like you said, they use a lot of gold,” he answered. “But what they do with it is their business. I just supply the gold.”

“What they do with it”—Agent Booth’s voice grew hard, losing patience—“is they export it, Mr. Raab. These novelty items, as you say, they aren’t made of steel or brass or gold plate. They’re solid bullion, Mr. Raab. They’re painted and anodized to make them look like ordinary items, as I suspect you know. Do you have any idea where these items end up, Mr. Raab?”

“Somewhere in South America, I think.” Raab reached for his voice, which clung deep in his throat. “I told you, I just buy it for them. I’m not sure I understand what’s going on.”

“What’s going on, Mr. Raab”—Booth leveled his eyes at him—“is that you’ve already got one foot in a very deep bucket of shit, and I guess we just want to know, regarding the other, if it’s in or out. You say you’ve worked with Argot for between six and eight years. Do you know who owns the company?”

“Harold Kornreich,” Raab answered more firmly. “I know Harold well.”

“Good. And what about Paz? Do you know who runs that?”

“I think his name is Spessa or something. Victor. I met him a few times.”

“Actually, Victor Spessa, whose real name is Victor Concerga”—Ruiz slid a photo forward—“is merely an operating partner in Paz. The articles of incorporation, which Agent Ruiz is laying out for you, are from a Cayman Islands corporation, BKA Investments, Limited.” Ruiz spread out a few more photos on the table. Surveillance shots. The men looked clearly Hispanic. “Are any of these faces familiar to you, Mr. Raab?”

Now Raab grew truly worried. A trickle of sweat cut a slow, cold path down his back. He picked up the photos, looked at them closely, one by one. He tremulously shook his head. “No.”

“Victor Concerga. Ramón Ramírez. Luis Trujillo,” the lead FBI man said. “These individuals are listed as the key officers of BKA, to whom the simple household products your gold is converted into are consigned. Trujillo,” Ruiz said, pushing across a surveillance shot of a stocky man in a fancy suit climbing into a Mercedes, “is one of the leading money managers for the Mercado family in the Colombian drug cartel.”

“Colombia!” Raab echoed. His eyes bulged wide.

“And just to be clear, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz winked. “We’re not talking the B-school here.”

Raab stared at them, his jaw in his lap.

“The gold you purchase, Mr. Raab, on behalf of Paz, is melted down and cast into ordinary household items, then plated over or painted and shipped back to Colombia, where it is reconstituted into bullion. Paz is just a sham operation. It is one hundred percent owned by the Mercado drug cartel. The money they pay you … for your ‘transactions,’ as you call them, is derived from the business of narcotics distribution. The gold you supply”—the agent widened his eyes—“is how they ship it home.”

“No!” Raab leaped up, this time eyes fiery, defiant. “I have nothing to do with that. I swear. I supply gold. That’s all. I have a contract. This Victor Concerga solicited me, like a lot of people do. If you’re trying to scare me, okay, you got my attention. It’s working! But Colombians … Mercados …” He shook his head. “No way. What the hell do you think is going on here?”

Booth just rubbed his jaw as if he hadn’t heard a word Raab had been saying. “When Mr. Concerga came to you, Mr. Raab, he said he wanted to do exactly what?”

“He said he needed to buy gold. He wanted to convert it into certain items.”

“And how was it that in order to do that he was first introduced to Argot Manufacturing?”

Raab recoiled. He saw it now. Clearly. Where this was starting to lead. Argot was owned by his friend. Harold. He had introduced them.

And for years Raab had been paid handsomely for having set up the deal.

That was when Nardozzi, the Justice Department lawyer, who had to this point remained silent, leaned forward, saying, “You understand the definition of money laundering, don’t you, Mr. Raab?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Raab felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. His face turned totally white.

“I didn’t know anything!” He shook his head. Sweat was suddenly soaking through the back of his shirt. “All right, I … I did take commissions from Argot,” he stammered. “But that was more like a kind of finder’s fee—not a kickback. I was just a go-between. People do it all the time. But I swear, I had no idea what they were doing with the gold. This is crazy.” He searched the agents’ faces for an understanding eye. “I’ve been in business twenty years.…”

“Twenty years.” Ruiz clasped his hands across his stomach, rocking backward. “That’s a number we’re going to be coming back to from time to time. But for now … you say Concerga came to you first?”

“Yes. He said he wanted to manufacture some items of gold.” Raab nodded. “That I would be the broker of record for him, if I could find someone. That it would be very lucrative. I put him in touch with Harold. I never even heard of BKA Investments. Or Trujillo. Harold’s a good man. I’ve known him since we first got into the business. He just needed work.”

“You’re familiar with the RICO statutes, aren’t you, Mr. Raab?” The U.S. Attorney unlatched his case. “Or the Patriot Act?”

“RICO …” The blood drained out of Raab’s face. “That’s for mobsters. The Patriot Act? What the hell do you think I am?”

“The RICO statutes state that all it takes is knowledge of a criminal enterprise or a pattern of involvement in one to constitute a felony, which your brokering of the arrangement between Paz and Argot—not to mention the stream of illicit payments you’ve received from them over a period of years—clearly represented.

“I might also draw your attention to the Patriot Act, Mr. Raab, which makes it illegal since 2001 not to report checks in excess of twenty thousand dollars from any foreign entity.”

“The Patriot Act?” Raab’s knee shot up and down like a jackhammer. “What the hell are you saying here?”

“What we’re saying,” Special Agent Booth cut in, casually scratching at the short orange hairs on the side of his head, “is that you’re pretty much fucked and fried here, Mr. Raab—pardon the French—and what you ought to start thinking about now is how to make this go your way.”

“My way?” Raab felt the heat of the room under his collar. He had a flash of Sharon and the kids. How would they possibly deal with this? How would he even begin to explain …? He felt his head start to spin.

“You don’t exactly look so good, Mr. Raab.” Agent Ruiz pretended to be concerned. He got up and poured him a cup of water.

Raab dropped his forehead into his hands. “I think I need my lawyer now.”

“Oh, you don’t need a lawyer.” Agent in Charge Booth stared wide-eyed. “You need the whole fucking Department of Justice to make this go your way.”

Ruiz came back to the table, pushing the water across to Raab. “Of course, there might be a way this could all work out for you.”

Raab ran his hands through his hair. He took a gulp of water, cooling his brow. “What way?”

“The way of keeping you out of a federal prison for the next twenty years,” Booth replied without a smile.

Raab felt a pain shoot through his stomach. He took another sip of water, sniffing back a mixture of mucus and hot tears. “How?”

“Concerga, Mr. Raab. Concerga leads to Ramirez and Trujillo. You’ve seen the movies. That’s the way it works here, too. You take us up the ladder, we find a way to make things disappear. Of course, you understand,” the FBI man added, rocking back with an indifferent shrug, “your buddy Harold Kornreich has to go, too.”

Raab stared at him blankly. Harold was a friend. He and Audrey had been to Justin’s bar mitzvah. Their son, Tim, had just been accepted to Middlebury. Raab shook his head. “I’ve known Harold Kornreich twenty years.”

“He’s already history, Mr. Raab,” Booth said with a roll of his eyes. “What you don’t want to happen is for us to pose the same questions to him about you.”

Ruiz maneuvered his chair around the table and pulled it up close to Raab in a chummy sort of way. “You have a nice life, Mr. Raab. What you’ve got to think about now is how you can keep it that way. I saw those pictures in your office. I’m not sure how twenty years in a federal penitentiary would go over with that pretty family of yours.”

“Twenty years!”

Ruiz chuckled. “See, I told you we’d come around to that number again.”

A surge of anger rose in Raab’s chest. He jumped up. This time they let him. He went over to the wall. He started to slam his fist against it, then stopped. He spun back around.

“Why are you doing this to me? All I did was get two people together. Half the people on the fucking Street would have done the same thing. You throw the Patriot Act in my face. You want me to turn on my friends. All I did was buy the gold. What the hell do you think I am?”

They didn’t say anything. They just let Raab slowly come back to the table. His eyes were burning, and he sank into the chair and wiped them with the palms of his hands.

“I need to speak with my lawyer now.”

“You want representation, that’s your decision,” Ruiz replied. “You’re a cooked goose, Mr. Raab, whichever way. Your best bet is to talk to us, try and make this go away. But before you make that call, there’s one last thing you might want to pass along.”

“And what is that?” Raab glared, frustration pulsing through his veins.

The FBI man removed another photo from his file and slid it across the table. “What about this face, Mr. Raab? Does it look familiar to you?”

Raab picked it up. He stared at it, almost deferentially, as the color drained from his face.

Ruiz started laying out a series of photos. Surveillance shots, like before. Except this time they were of him. Along with a short, stocky man with a thin mustache, bald on top. One was through the window of his own office, taken from across the street. Another of the two of them at the China Grill, over lunch. Raab’s heart fell off a cliff.

“Ivan Berroa,” he muttered, staring numbly at the photograph.

“Ivan Berroa.” The FBI man nodded, holding back a smile.

As if on cue, the door to the interrogation room opened and someone new stepped in.

Raab’s eyes stretched wide.

It was the man in the photo. Berroa. Dressed differently from how Raab had ever seen him. Not in a leather jacket and jeans, but in a suit.

Wearing a badge.

“I think you already know Special Agent Esposito, don’t you, Mr. Raab? But should your memory need refreshing, we can always play back the voice recordings of your meetings if you like.”

Raab looked up, his face white. They had him. He was fucked.

“Like we told you at the beginning”—Agent Ruiz started picking up the photos with a coy smile—“these things seem to go best when the person has nothing to hide.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Kate barely caught the 12:10 train at Fordham Road to get back to her parents’ home in Larchmont, squeezing into the last car just as the doors were about to close.

All she’d had time to do was grab a few personal things and leave a cryptic message for Greg on the way: “Something’s happened with Ben. I’m heading up to the house. I’ll let you know when I know more.”

It took until the train pulled away from the station and Kate found herself in the midday emptiness of the car for it to hit her—body-slam her, was more like it—just what her mother had said.

Her father had been arrested by the FBI.

If she hadn’t heard the panic in her voice she would have thought it was some kind of joke. Money laundering. Conspiracy. That was crazy.… Her dad was one of the straightest shooters she knew.

Sure, maybe he might finagle a commission here or there. Or put a family meal on the company tab once in a while. Or fudge his taxes.… Everyone did that.

But RICO statutes … abetting a criminal enterprise … the FBI … This was nuts. She knew her father. She knew what kind of man he was. There was absolutely no possible way.…

Kate bought a ticket from the conductor, then leaned her head against the window, trying to catch her breath.

Reputation was everything to her dad, he always said. His business was based on it. He didn’t have salesmen or some fancy arbitrage program or a back room filled with hustling traders. He had himself. He had his contacts, his years in business. He had his reputation. What else was there beyond his word?

Once, Kate recalled, he had refused to handle a large estate sale—it was well into seven figures—just because the executor had shopped it to a friendly competitor on the Street and Dad didn’t like the appearance that he’d been bidding for the job against his friend.

And another time he’d taken back an eight-carat diamond he’d brokered in a private sale after two years. Just because some shyster appraiser the buyer had found later insisted that the stone was a little hazy. A six-figure sale. Hazy? Even Em and Justin told him he was nuts to do it. The stone hadn’t changed! The woman just didn’t want it anymore.

The Metro-North train rattled past the housing projects in the Bronx. Kate sank back in her seat. She was worried for him, what he must be feeling. She closed her eyes.

She was the oldest—by six years. How many times had her father told her what a special bond that created between them? It’s our little secret, pumpkin. They even had their own little private greeting. They had seen it in some movie and it just stuck: a one-fingered wave.

She looked a bit different from the rest of them. She was wide-eyed and pretty, kind of like Natalie Portman, everybody always said. Her hair was shoulder-length and light brown. Everyone else’s was thicker and darker. And those sharp green eyes—where did those come from? Flipped chromosomes, Kate always explained. You know, the dominant-recessive Y … how it skips a generation.

“Pretty,” her dad would tease her. “I just can’t figure out how she got to be so smart.”

Leaning against the glass, Kate thought of how many times he had come through for her.

For all of them.

How he’d leave work early to come home and catch her soccer games in high school, once even hopping a plane a day early from the Orient when her team had made the district finals. Or drive all over the Northeast to Emily’s squash tournaments—she was one of the top-ranked juniors in Westchester County—and coax her back to earth when that famous temper got the best of her after she lost a tough match.

Or how at Brown, after Kate had gotten sick, when she took up crew, he’d drive up on weekends and sit there on the shore and watch her row.

Kate always figured that her dad was such a committed family guy because, truth was, growing up, he’d never had much of one of his own. His mother, Rosa, had come over from Spain when he was a boy. His father had died there, a streetcar accident or something. Kate actually never knew that much about him. And his mother had died young as well, while he was putting himself through NYU. Everyone admired her father. At the club, in his business, their friends—that’s why this didn’t make any sense.

What the hell did you do, Daddy?

Suddenly Kate’s head started to throb. She felt the familiar pressure digging into her eyes, the dryness in her throat, followed by the wave of fatigue.

Shit …

She knew that this might happen. It always came on with stress. It didn’t take but a second to recognize the signs.

She dug through her bag and found her Accu-Chek—her blood monitor. She’d been diagnosed when she was seventeen, her senior year.

Diabetes. Type 1. The real deal.

Kate had gotten a little depressed at first. Her life underwent a radical change. She’d had to drop soccer. She didn’t take her SATs. She had to watch her diet strictly when everyone else was going out for pizza or partying on Saturday nights.

And once she had even fallen into a hypoglycemic coma. She was cramming for a test in the school cafeteria when her fingers began to grow numb and the pen slipped out of her hand. Kate didn’t know what was happening. The dizziness took over. Her body wouldn’t respond. Faces started to look a little gauzy. She tried to scream—What the hell is going on!

Next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital two days later, attached to about a dozen monitors and tubes. It had been six years now. In that time she had learned to manage things. She still had to give herself two shots a day.

Kate pressed the Accu-Chek needle into her forefinger. The digital meter read 282. Her norm was around 90. Jesus, she was off the charts.

She dug into her purse and came out with her kit. She always kept a spare in the fridge at the lab. She took out a syringe and the bottle of Humulin. The train car was not crowded; no reason she couldn’t do this right here. She lifted the syringe and pressed it into the insulin, forcing out the air: 18 units. Kate lifted her sweater. It was routine for her. Twice a day for the past six years.

She pressed the needle into the soft part of her belly underneath her rib cage. She gently squeezed.

Those initial worries about what it meant to live with diabetes all seemed like a long time ago now. She had gotten into Brown. She had changed her focus, started thinking about biology. And she started rowing there. Just for exercise at first. Then it created a new sense of discipline in her life. In her junior year—though she was only five feet four and barely 115 pounds—she had placed second in the All-Ivy single sculls.

That’s what their little wave was about. The sign between them. Em’s got that temper, her Dad would always wink and tell her, but you’re the one with the real fight inside.

Kate took a swig of water from a bottle and felt her strength start to return.

The train was approaching Larchmont. It started to slow into the redbrick station.

Kate stuffed her kit back in her bag. She pulled herself up, looped her satchel around her shoulder, and waited at the doors.

She never forgot. Not a single day. Not for an instant:

When she opened her eyes in the hospital after two days in the coma, her father’s had been the first face she saw.

Ben will fix this, Kate knew. Like he always did. He’d handle it. Whatever the hell he had done. She was sure.

Now, her mother … She sighed, spotting the silver Lexus waiting in the turnabout as the train pulled into the station.

That was a totally different deal.

CHAPTER SIX

It was a long, difficult drive back to Westchester that afternoon for Raab, in the back of the black Lincoln limo his lawyer, Mel Kipstein, had arranged.

An hour before, he’d been brought in front of Judge Muriel Saperstein in the United States courthouse at Foley Square for arraignment, the most humiliating moment of his life.

The frosty government lawyer who’d been in on his interrogation referred to him as a “criminal kingpin” who was the architect of an illicit scheme by which Colombian drug lords were able to divert money out of the country. That he had knowingly profited from this enterprise for years. That he had ties to known drug traffickers.

No, Raab had to hold himself back from shouting, that’s not how it was at all.

Every time he heard the judge read off a charge, it cut through him like a serrated blade.

Money laundering. Aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise. Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

After some negotiation, during which Raab grew alarmed he might not even be freed, bail was set at $2 million.

“I see you own a fancy home in Westchester, Mr. Raab?” The judged peered over her glasses.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Benjamin shrugged. “I guess.”

She scribbled something on an official-looking document. “Not anymore, I’m afraid.”

An hour later he and Mel were heading up Interstate 95 toward Westchester. All he told Sharon was that he was okay and that he’d explain everything when he got home.

Mel thought they definitely had some wiggle room. He figured there was a reasonable case for entrapment. Up to now he had represented Raab on matters like contract disputes, the office lease, and setting up a trust for his kids. Just two weeks before, the two of them had come in second in the Member/Guest golf tourney at Century.

“The law says you had to assist them, knowingly, Ben. This Concerga never declared to you what he intended to do with the gold, did he?”

Raab shook his head. “No.”

“He never explicitly told you the money he was giving you was derived from illicit means?”

Raab shook his head again. He took a long gulp from a bottle of water.

“So if you didn’t know, you didn’t know, right, Ben? What you’re telling me is good. The RICO statutes say you have to conspire with ‘knowing’ or ‘intent.’ You can’t be a participant, nonetheless aid or abet, if you didn’t know.”

It somehow sounded good when Mel said it. He could almost believe it himself. He had made some critical mistakes of judgment. That was what he had to get across. He had acted blindly, stupidly—out of greed. But he never knew whom he was dealing with or what they were doing with the gold. Tomorrow morning they had a follow-up meeting with the government that would likely determine the next twenty years of his life.

“But this last thing, Ben, this Berroa guy … this complicates matters. It’s bad. I mean, they have your voice on tape. Discussing the same arrangements with an FBI agent.” Mel looked at him closely. “Look, this is important, Ben. We’ve been friends a lot of years. Is there anything you’re not telling me that could have an impact on this case? Anything the government might know? Now’s the time.”

Raab stared Mel in the eye. Mel had been his friend for more than ten years. “No.”

“Well, one thing’s lucky.” The lawyer looked relieved and jotted a few notes on his pad. “You’re lucky you’re not the one they really want here. Otherwise there’d be nothing to discuss.” Mel kept his gaze on him awhile, then just shook his head. “What the hell were you possibly thinking, Ben?”

Raab dropped his head back and closed his eyes. Twenty years of his life, gone … “I don’t know.”

What he did know was that the hardest part was yet to come. That would take place when he arrived home. When he walked in the door and had to explain to his family, who had trusted and respected him, how the smoothly climbing arc that had been their lives the past two decades had basically been blown from the sky. How everything they counted on and took for granted was gone.

He’d always been the rock, the provider. He always talked about pride and family. His handshake was his bond. Now everything was about to change.

Raab felt his stomach churn. What would they think of him? How would they understand?

The car pulled off the thruway at Exit 16, traveled north along Palmer into the town of Larchmont. These were the streets, stores, and markets he saw every day.

By tomorrow this would all be public. It would be in the papers. It would be all over the club, the local shops, Em and Justin’s school.

Raab’s stomach started to grind.

One day they’ll understand, he told himself. One day, they will have to see me the same way. As a husband and a provider. As a father. As the person he’d always been. And forgive me.

He had been a coach to Emily. He had given Kate her insulin shots when she was ill. He had been a good husband to Sharon. All these years.

That was no lie.

The limo turned down Larchmont Avenue, heading toward the water. Raab tensed. The houses grew familiar. These were the people he knew. People his kids went to school with.

On Sea Wall the Lincoln turned right, and then it was only a short block with the sound directly in front of them, to the large fieldstone pillars, and then on to the spacious Tudor house at the end of the landscaped drive.

Raab let out a measured breath.

He knew he had let them down—their faith, their trust. But there was no turning back now. And he knew that what happened today would not be the end of it.

When the truth came out, he would let them down a whole lot more.

“You want me to come in with you?” Mel asked, squeezing Raab’s arm as the car pulled into the pebbled driveway.

“No.” Raab shook his head.

It was only a house. What’s important is the people in it. Whatever he’d had to do, his family hadn’t been a lie.

“This I have to do alone.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kate was in the kitchen with her mother and Em when the black limo turned down the drive.

“It’s Dad!” Emily shouted, still in her squash clothes. She made a beeline for the front door.

Kate saw her mother’s hesitation. It was as if she couldn’t move, or was afraid to. As if she were afraid what opening that door would reveal.

“It’s going to be okay.” Kate took her arm and led her to the door. “Whatever it is, you know, Dad’ll make it okay.”

Sharon nodded.

They watched him climb out of the car, accompanied by Mel Kipstein, whom Kate knew from the club. Emily bolted down the flagstone steps and straight into her father’s arms. “Daddy!”

Raab just stood there for a moment, hugging her, staring up at Kate and her mom over his younger daughter’s shoulder as they stood on the landing. He had an ashen shadow on his face. He could barely look at them.

“Oh, Ben …” Sharon slowly came down the steps, tears in her eyes. They hugged. A hug aching with worry and uncertainty, deeper than Kate could remember seeing in years.

“Pumpkin.” Her father’s face brightened as his eyes met Kate’s. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Of course I’m here, Daddy.” Kate ran down to the driveway and put her arms around him, too. She placed her head on his shoulder. She could never remember seeing shame on her father’s face before.

“And you too, champ.” He reached out for Justin, who had just come up behind them, mussing his son’s shaggy brown hair.

“Hey, Dad.” Justin leaned against him. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” He did his best to smile. “I am now.”

Together they went inside.

For Kate, the huge stone house by the water had never really felt like home. “Home” had been the more modest, fifties ranch where she’d grown up in Harrison, a couple of towns away. With her cramped corner room covered in posters of U-2 and Gwyneth Paltrow, the marshy little pond in back, and the constant whoosh of traffic off the back deck from the Hutchinson Parkway.

But Raab had bought this place in her senior year. His dream house—with its large Palladian windows overlooking the Sound, the gargantuan kitchen with two of everything—Sub-Zeros, dishwashers—the flashy basement theater some Wall Street guy had decked out to the nines, the five-car garage.

They all took a seat in the tall, beamed living room. Kate, with her mother, in front of the fireplace. Emily plopped herself on her father’s lap in the high-backed leather chair. Justin pulled up the tufted ottoman.

There was a weird, uncomfortable silence.

“So we gonna start with your day,” Kate quipped, trying to cut the tension, “or would you like to hear about mine?”

That made her dad smile. “First, I don’t want any of you to be afraid,” he said. “You’re going to hear some terrible things about me. The most important thing is that you understand I’m innocent. Mel says we’ve got a solid case.”

“Of course we know you’re innocent, Ben,” said Sharon. “But innocent of what?”

Kate’s dad let out a nervous breath and gently moved Emily to an adjacent chair.

“Money laundering. Conspiracy to commit fraud. Aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise—that enough?”

“Conspiracy …” Sharon’s jaw dropped open. “Conspiracy with whom, Ben?”

“Basically, what they’re saying”—he locked his fingers together—“is that I provided some merchandise to people who ultimately did some bad things with it.”

“Merchandise?” Emily echoed, not understanding.

“Gold, honey.” Ben exhaled.

“So what’s wrong with that?” Kate shrugged. “You’re in the trading business, aren’t you? That’s what you do.”

“Believe me, I tried to make that point—but in this case I may have made some mistakes.”

Sharon stared at him. “You provided this gold to whom, Ben? What kind of people are we talking about?”

Raab swallowed. He moved his chair a little closer to her and wrapped his fingers around her hand.

“Drug traffickers, Sharon. Colombians.”

Sharon let out a gasp—half laughing, half incredulous. “You must be kidding, Ben.”

“Now, I didn’t know who they were, and all I did was provide the gold, Sharon, you have to believe that. But there’s more. I introduced them to someone. Someone who altered what I sold them. In an illegal way. Into things like tools, bookends, desk ornaments—and painted them over. So they could ship them back home.”

“Home?” Sharon squinted. She looked over to Kate. “I don’t understand.”

“Out of the country, Sharon. Back to Colombia.”

Kate’s mother’s hand flew to her cheek. “Oh, my God, Ben, what have you done?”

“Look, these people came to me.” Raab squeezed his hand around hers. “I didn’t know what they were doing or who they were. They were some export company. I did what I always do. I sold them gold.”

“Then I don’t understand,” Kate cut in. “How can they arrest you for that?”

“Unfortunately, it’s slightly more complicated, pumpkin,” her father said, shifting back. “I set them up with someone, in order to accomplish what they wanted. And I also took some payments, which makes it seem like I was a party to what was going on.”

“Were you?”

“Was I what, Sharon?”

“Were you a party to what was going on?”

“Of course not, Sharon. I just—”

“So who the hell did you introduce them to, Ben?” Sharon’s voice rose, tense and alarmed.

Raab cleared his throat and looked down. “Harold Kornreich. He’s been arrested, too.”

“Jesus Christ, Ben, what have the two of you done?”

Kate felt her own stomach tie into a knot. Harold Kornreich was one of her dad’s business buddies. They went to trade shows together. He and Audrey had come to her bat mitzvah. It was like they were two stupid white guys who had walked into a scam. Except her dad wasn’t exactly stupid. And he had taken money—from criminals. Drug dealers. You didn’t exactly have to be a constitutional scholar to see that this wasn’t about to just go away.

“Now, there’s no grounds to prove I knew exactly what was going on,” her father said. “I’m not even sure they really want to focus on me.”

“Then what do they want?” Sharon asked, her gaze troubled and wide.

“What they want is for me to roll.”

“Roll …?”

“Testify, Sharon. Against Harold. The Colombians, too.”

“At a trial?”

“Yes.” He swallowed resignedly. “At a trial.”

“No!” Sharon stood up. Tears of anger and bewilderment flashed in her eyes. “That’s how we get to keep our life? By turning state’s evidence against one of your closest friends? You’re not going to do that, are you, Ben? It would be like admitting you were guilty. Harold and Audrey are our friends. You sold these people gold. What they did with it is their business. We’re going to fight this, aren’t we, Ben? Isn’t that right?”

“Of course we’re going to fight this, Sharon. It’s just that—”

“It’s just that what, Ben?” Sharon kept her gaze on him, razor sharp.

“It’s just that the payments I took from these guys all these years don’t exactly make me look innocent, Sharon.”

His voice had elevated, and there was something in it Kate had never heard in her dad before. That he was afraid, and not entirely blameless. That maybe he wasn’t going to be able to make this come out okay. They all sat there looking at him, trying to figure out just what that meant.

“You’re not going to go to jail, are you, Dad?”

It was Justin, in a voice that was halting and tight. The question that was suddenly front and center in everyone’s mind.

“Of course not, champ.” His father pulled him close and stroked his bushy brown hair and looked past him. At Kate.

“No one in this family’s going to jail.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Luis Prado didn’t ask too many questions.

He’d been in the United States for four years now. His papers said he was here to visit a sister, but that was a lie. He had no family here.

He’d come here to do work. He was handpicked because of the way he handled himself back home. And what he did, Luis did very well.

He did jobs for the Mercados. Dirty jobs. The kind you did because of the oath you had sworn. You didn’t look into someone’s face. You looked through them. You didn’t ask why.

That’s what had gotten him out of the slums of Carmenes. What enabled him to send money back home to his wife and child—more money than he could ever dream of there. What paid for the fancy suits he wore and the private tables at the salsa clubs—and the occasional woman he met there who looked at him with pride.

It’s what separated him from the desesperados back home. A man with no worth. No significance. Nothing.

The driver, a cocky kid named Tomás, played with the radio in the customized Cadillac Escalade while he drove. “Ha!” He tapped his hands against the wheel to the steady salsa beat. “José Alberto. El Canario.”

The kid was probably no more than twenty-one, but he had already cut his cherry and would drive through a fucking building if he had to get out the other side. He was fearless and good, if maybe a little reckless, but that was just what was needed now. Luis had worked with him before.

They drove north out of the Bronx. Through the kinds of neighborhoods they had never seen before. Places that when Luis was just a kid back home were only hidden behind high fences, with guards at the gates. Maybe, Luis thought as they passed by, if he did his jobs and played his cards right, one day he might have such a home.

They followed the route from the highway carefully. They retraced it, making sure they knew the lights, the turns. They had to be able to retrace it, fast, on the way out.

It went back a long way, Luis thought. Cousins, brothers. Whole families. They all made the same oath. Fraternidad. If he died for his work, so be it. It was a lifelong tie. However long or short that was.

They drove down a dark, shaded street and pulled up outside a large house. They cut the lights. Someone was walking a dog down by the water. They waited until the person was well out of sight, checking their watches.

“Let’s go, hermano.” Tomás drummed against the wheel. “It’s salsa time!”

Luis opened the satchel under his feet. His boss had been very specific about this job. Precisely what had to be done. Luis didn’t care. He had never met the person. He wasn’t even a name to him. All he was told was that they could do harm to the family—and that was enough.

That was everything.

Luis never thought too much about details when it came to work. In fact, only one word ran through his brain as he stepped out of the car in front of the fancy, well-lit house and drew back the TEC-9 automatic machine pistol with an extra clip.

You do the family harm, this is what you get.

Maricón.

CHAPTER NINE

Kate decided to stay on at the house that night. Her mother was a mess and closed the door to her room. Emily and Justin just seemed shell-shocked. Kate tried her best to calm them. Dad had never let them down, not ever, had he? This time, she wasn’t sure if they believed it. Around nine, Em put on her iPod and Justin went back to a video game. Kate went downstairs.

There was a light on in the den. Her father was there, a magazine on his lap, watching CNN on the oversize plasma TV.

Kate knocked, quietly. Her father looked up.

“This a good time to talk about my rent allowance?” She hung in the doorway with a crooked grin.

That brought a smile to her dad’s face. “If it’s you, it’s always a good time, pumpkin.” He turned down the volume on the TV. “Did you do your shot?”

“Yes.” Kate nodded with a roll of her eyes. “I took care of my shot. I’ve been to college, Dad. I basically live with a doctor. I’m twenty-three.”

“Okay, okay …” Her father sighed. “I hear ya—it’s just reflex.”

Kate curled up next to him on the couch. For a moment they just avoided the obvious. He asked about Greg. How things were going at the office. “With the leuskophy …”

“Leukoscopophy, Dad. And it’s called a lab. Not an office. And one day you’ll be proud of me for what we’re doing. You just won’t ever be able to pronounce it.”

He chuckled again and put the magazine aside. “I’m always proud of you, Kate.”

Kate looked around the room. Their den was filled with pictures from all the trips they’d taken. There was a Northwest Indian mask on the wall they had picked up skiing in Vancouver. An African basket they’d brought back from Botswana, where they’d been on safari. This room had always been a friendly place for Kate, filled with the warmest memories. All those memories seemed threatened now.

Kate met his eyes. “You’d tell me, Daddy, wouldn’t you?”

“Tell you what, sweetheart?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. If you really did something wrong?”

“I did tell you, Kate. Mel thinks we have a good shot at fighting this thing. He claims that the RICO statutes—”

“I don’t mean legally, Daddy. I mean if you really did something wrong. Something we should know about.”

He shifted toward her. “What are you asking, Kate?”

“I’m not sure.” The words stuck in her throat. “If you knew …”

He nodded, keeping his eyes on her, and clasped his hands together. He didn’t answer.

“Because it’s important to me, Daddy—who you are. All this stuff, these trips, how we’ve always talked about family—it’s not just words or pictures and mementos to me. All of us need to believe in something right now—to get through this—and the thing I choose to believe in is you. Because it’s what I’ve always believed in.” Kate shook her head. “I don’t really want to start looking for someone else right now.”

Ben smiled. “You don’t have to, pumpkin.”

“Because I can give Mom pep talks,” Kate said, eyes glistening, “and remind Emily and Justin how you never let us down—because you haven’t! But I’ve got to know, above everything, Dad, that the person who walked through that door tonight, who’s going in there tomorrow to fight this as I know you will, is the same one I’ve known all my life. The person I always thought I knew.”

Her father looked at her, then took her hand and massaged it, like she remembered from when she was sick.

“I am that man, pumpkin.”

Kate’s eyes welled up. She nodded.

“C’mere.…” He pulled her close, and Kate rested her head against him. It made her feel the way she always did in his arms. Safe. Special. A thousand miles away from harm. She wiped the tears off her cheek and tilted her face up to him.

“Money laundering, conspiracy …” She shook her head. “It just doesn’t fit you, Dad.”

He nodded wistfully. “I’m sorry. I know.”

“Now, tax felon.” Kate shrugged. “Or jewel thief. That would be a different story.”

Her father smiled. “I’ll try to do better next time.”

Suddenly she couldn’t hold back. Kate squeezed his hand and felt a rush of tears streaming down her cheeks—stupid and like a little girl, but impossible to hold back. It hurt her, how her father had always been so in control—how everything had always been so in control—and now, she knew, she couldn’t fight it, their life was about to change. No matter how he tried to pretend it would go away. This wouldn’t go away. This was going to hang over them. This was bad.

“You know, they’re talking fifteen to twenty years,” her father said in a low voice as he held her. “That’s federal prison, Kate. No plasma TV there. You’ll be married then. With kids—maybe the same age Em is now.…”

“You’ll do what you have to do, Daddy,” Kate said, squeezing him tighter. “We’re behind you, whatever that is.”

There was a shuffling of feet. Sharon looked in at the door. She was in her bathrobe, holding a cup of tea. She stared at Ben a little blankly. “I’m going to bed.”

That was when they heard the click of a car door being opened out front. Footsteps coming up the drive.

“Who’s that?” Kate’s mother turned.

Her father exhaled. “Probably the fucking New York Times.”

Suddenly the windows exploded in gunfire.

CHAPTER TEN

There was an ear-shattering barrage—glass splintering everywhere, bullets shrieking over their heads, flashing in the night.

Raab hurled himself on top of Kate. For a second, Sharon just stood there, paralyzed, until he reached over and grabbed her by the robe, dragging her onto the floor, and pressed his body tightly over both of them.

“Stay down! Stay down!” he screamed.

“Jesus Christ, Ben, what’s going on?”

The noise was terrifying—deafening. Bullets ricocheted everywhere, thudding into the cabinets and walls. The large Palladian window was gone. The house alarm was blaring. Everyone was screaming, faces pressed into the floor. The noise was so frightening and seemed so close, directly over them, Kate had the terrifying sense whoever was shooting had climbed into the room.

She was certain she was about to die.

Then suddenly she heard voices. Yelling. The same paralyzing thought occurred to everyone at once:

The kids. Upstairs.

Kate’s father arched up and shouted above the frenzy, “Em, Justin, don’t come down! Get on the floor!”

The barrage continued. Maybe twenty, thirty seconds, but it seemed like an eternity to Kate, huddled with her hands over her ears, her heart pounding out of control.

“Hold on, hold on,” Kate’s father kept repeating, blanketing them. She heard screaming, crying. She didn’t even know if it was hers. The window was wide open. Bullets were still flying in every direction. Kate just prayed: Whoever you are, whatever you want, please, God, please, just don’t come inside.

And then there was silence. As quickly as it had begun.

Kate heard footsteps retreating, an engine starting up, and a vehicle lurching away.

For a long time, they just clung to the floor. Too afraid to even look up. The silence was just as terrifying as the attack. Sharon was whimpering. Kate was too frozen to speak. There was a steady pounding very close by, loud, above the shrieking of the alarm.

Gradually, almost joyously, Kate realized that it was the sound of her own heart.

“They’re gone. They’re gone.” Her father finally exhaled, rolling off of them. “Sharon, Kate, are you all right?”

“I think so,” Kate’s mother muttered. Kate just nodded. She couldn’t believe it. There were bullet holes everywhere. Shattered glass all over the floor. The place looked like a war zone.

“Oh, my God, Ben, what the hell is going on?”

Then they heard voices coming down the stairs. “Mom … Dad …?”

Justin and Emily. They ran into the study. “Oh, thank God …” Sharon literally leaped up, throwing her arms around them, smothering them with kisses. Then Kate, too. Everyone was crying, sobbing, hugging each other in tearful relief. “Thank God you’re all all right.”

Slowly the panic began to recede, and in its place was the horrifying sight of what had happened. Sharon looked around at the devastation of their once-beautiful home. Everything was shattered. They were lucky to be alive.

Her eyes came back to her husband. There was no longer terror in them. There was something else—accusation.

“What the hell have you done to us, Ben?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“The purpose of this meeting”—James Nardozzi, the U.S. Attorney, stared across the table, focusing on Mel—“is for you and your client to fully understand the seriousness of the charges facing him. And to determine a path of action that would be in his best interest. As well as the best interest of his family.”

The conference room in the U.S. Attorney’s office at Foley Square in lower Manhattan was glass-paneled and narrow, its white walls decorated with photos of George W. Bush and the attorney general. Booth and Ruiz were seated across from Mel and Raab. There was a stenographer at the far end of the table, who looked like a prim schoolteacher, taking everything down. Raab’s family was sequestered at the house, which was now cordoned off and being guarded by the FBI.

“First, Mr. Raab believes he has done nothing wrong,” Mel was quick to reply.

“Nothing wrong?” The U.S. Attorney ruffled his brow as if he hadn’t heard correctly.

“Yes. He denies ever knowingly being part of any scheme to launder money or defraud the U.S. government. He’s never once concealed any monies he’s made from these transactions. He’s even up-to-date in his taxes on them. Whatever business took place between Mr. Kornreich and Mr. Concerga was totally without my client’s consent.”

Special Agent Booth looked back at Mel, surprised. “Your client denies knowing that Paz Export Enterprises was a company set up to receive altered merchandise intended to launder money for the Mercado drug cartel? And that his actions did not serve to aid and abet these felonies when he introduced Paz to Argot Manufacturing?”

Raab stared nervously at Booth and Ruiz. Mel nodded at him.

“Yes.”

The U.S. Attorney sighed impatiently, as if this were wasting his time.

“What my client does admit to,” Mel explained, “is that he may have been foolish, if not even a bit misguided, not to suspect that something was afoot given the regular and generally lucrative result of Mr. Concerga’s business. But the mere acceptance of payment doesn’t constitute knowledge of who the end user was or what the finished product was being utilized for.”

Special Agent Booth scratched his head for a second and nodded patiently. “As Mr. Nardozzi explained, Mr. Raab, what we’re trying to do is give you a chance to keep your family together—before we go at this another way.”

“The RICO statutes very specifically state,” Mel said, “that a suspect must willfully and knowingly contrive—”

“Mr. Kipstein,” Agent Ruiz cut Raab’s lawyer off in midsentence, “we know what the RICO statutes state. The man we introduced your client to yesterday is a special agent of the FBI. Agent Esposito identified himself as a business acquaintance of Luis Trujillo. Your client offered to do business with him in the same manner he assisted in the altering of gold for Paz. That’s money laundering, Mr. Kipstein. And conspiracy to commit fraud.”

“You set my client up,” Mel was quick to charge. “You lured him into an illicit act. You put his life, and the life of his family, in danger. That’s entrapment. It’s more than entrapment. It’s reckless endangerment in my view!”

Booth leaned back. “All I can say is, maybe your view’s a little cloudy over there, Counselor.” He had a face like someone concealing a winning poker hand.

Booth nodded to Ruiz, who reached inside his folder and came out with a cassette. “We have his voice on tape, Mr. Kipstein. Your client has made six visits to Colombia in the past eight years. Do you want me to play what was said?” He slid the tape across the table. “Or can we just get down to the business we came here for today, which is saving your client’s life?”

“Be my guest,” Mel Kipstein said.

The agent shrugged and reached forward for the recorder.

Raab put his hand on his lawyer’s arm. “Mel …”

The lawyer stared at him.

Raab always knew that one day this would happen. Even when he pretended every day that it would never come. That it would go on forever.

They had his relationship to Argot, the monies he’d received. They had his voice on tape. The RICO statutes only needed to establish a pattern of racketeering. Just the knowledge alone of such activity would be enough to get a conviction. Under the kingpin statute, they could put him away for twenty years.

He knew. He always knew. He just wasn’t prepared to feel so empty inside. He wasn’t prepared to have it hurt so much.

“What is it you want from me?” He nodded dully.

“You know what we want from you, Mr. Raab,” Booth replied. “We want you to testify. We want Trujillo. We want your friend. You tell us everything you know about Paz and Argot. We’ll see what Mr. Nardozzi is willing to do.”

They laid out in a very matter-of-fact way to Raab how they were going to seize his assets. The house. The bank accounts. The cars. They wanted him to turn on everyone—including his friend—otherwise they’d toss him in jail.

“Of course, if that bothers you, we could just do nothing.” Ruiz shrugged with a gloating smile. “Let you hang out on the street. Go about your business. Tell me, Mr. Raab, after what happened last night, how long do you think you’d last like that?”

Raab pushed away from the table. “All I did was buy the gold!” He glared at them. “I didn’t steal anything. I didn’t hurt anybody. I put two people together. All I did was what a thousand people would have done.”

“Look,” Mel said, his voice betraying a tone of desperation, “my client’s a well-respected member of the business and social community. He’s never been implicated in any crime before. Surely, even if his actions inadvertently assisted in the commission of a crime, it’s a stretch at best, these charges. He has no information you’re seeking. He’s not even the person you really want. That ought to count for something.”

“It does count for something, Mr. Kipstein,” Agent Booth replied. “It accounts for why we’re talking to you, Mr. Raab, and not to Harold Kornreich.”

Raab stared at him and touched Mel’s shoulder. It was over. No more. He suddenly saw all the consequences crashing in on him like the girders of a building caving in.

“You’re cutting out my heart, you know.” He stared at Booth. “My life, my family. You’ve killed it. It’s all gone.”

The FBI man crossed his legs and looked at Raab. “Frankly, Mr. Raab, considering last night, I think you’ve got even bigger things to worry about than that.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“We’re talking about the matter of your personal safety,” Agent Ruiz cut in.

“My safety …” Raab suddenly turned white, flashing back to the events of the previous night.

“Yeah, and that of your family, Mr. Raab.” The agent nodded.

“I think it’s time we explain a few things.” Booth opened a file. “There’s a war going on right now, Mr. Raab. A war of control—between factions of the Colombian drug cartels. Between those operating in this country and those back home in South America. You’ve heard of Oscar Mercado—”

“Of course I’ve heard of Oscar Mercado.” Raab blanched. Everyone had.

Ruiz pushed a black-and-white photo across the table. The face was gaunt and hardened, the hair long, the eyes callous and empty. The chin was covered in a thick goatee. It brought to mind images of murdered judges and families who got in their way.

“Mercado’s been thought to be in hiding in the United States or Mexico now for several years,” Agent Booth started to explain. “No one knows. The people you were doing business with are part of the finance arm of his organization. These people are cold-blooded killers, Mr. Raab, and they protect to the death what they think of as theirs. In the past few years, their organization’s been rocked by some key defections from within. The family patriarch has died. There’s a war for control going on. They’re not going to let some ‘white-collar, Jewish, business-school type’ who’s been living high off their proceeds for several years take down the rest of it in a trial.”

“You’ve seen what these people do, Mr. Raab,” Ruiz put in. “They don’t just go after you, like in those Mafia movies. This is fraternidad, Mr. Raab. Mercado’s brotherhood. They kill your family. Your wife, your lovely kids. They’ll kill the fucking dog if it barks. You heard in the news about that whole family that was murdered in Bensonhurst last month? They left a six-month-old kid in a baby chair with a bullet through its head. Are you prepared for that? Is your wife prepared for that? Your kids? Let me ask you, Mr. Raab: Are you prepared not to have an easy night’s sleep for the rest of your life?”

Raab turned toward Mel, an ache widening in his gut. “We can fight this, right? We’ll take our chances in court.”

Booth’s tone intensified. “You’re not hearing us, Mr. Raab. You’re in danger. Your whole family’s in danger. Just by your being here.”

“And even if you choose to fight this,” Ruiz added, coyly, “they’re never really going to be entirely sure just what you might say, are they, Mr. Raab? Are you prepared to take that chance?”

The ache in Raab’s gut intensified, accompanied by a wave of nausea.

“You’re in bed with them, Mr. Raab,” the Hispanic agent chuckled. “I’m surprised you never thought about this stuff when you were driving around town in that fancy Ferrari of yours up there.”

Raab felt as if his insides were slowly sliding off a cliff. He was finished. No point in keeping up his defense. He had to do what had to be done now. He couldn’t stop the ball from rolling. From rolling over him. Twenty years of his life ripped away …

He looked forlornly at Mel.

“You have to take care of your family, Ben,” the lawyer advised, grasping his arm.

Raab closed his eyes and let out a painful breath. “I can give you Concerga,” he said to Booth when they opened again. “Trujillo, too. But I need you to protect my family.”

Booth nodded, glancing toward Ruiz and the U.S. Attorney with a triumphant stare.

“In return for your testimony,” Nardozzi said, “we can arrange for you to receive protective custody and move you and your family to a secure place. We can work it out so you’ll get to keep a percentage of your assets, so you can live in a manner not dissimilar to how you live now. You’ll serve about ten months someplace—until the trial. After that, you and your family will just disappear.”

“Disappear?” Raab gaped at him. “You mean like the Witness Protection Program? That’s for mobsters, criminals.…”

“The WITSEC Program has all kinds of people in it,” Booth corrected him. “The one thing they’ve got in common is a fear of reprisal as a result of their testimony. You’ll be safe there. And, more important, so will your family. It’s never been penetrated if you live by the rules. You can even pick an area of the country you want to live in.”

“It’s your only bet, Mr. Raab,” Ruiz urged. “Your life’s not worth a dime, on the street or in jail, whether you challenge these indictments or not. You dug this hole for yourself the day you took up with these people. Since then you’ve just been transferring the dirt.”

How are we going to deal with this? Raab thought, the agent’s words hitting him like hollow-point slugs. Sharon and the kids? Their life—everything they knew, counted on, gone! What could he possibly say to make them understand?

“When?” Raab nodded, defeated, eyes glazed. “When does all this begin?”

Nardozzi drew out some papers and slid them across the table in front of Raab. An official-looking sheet headed “U.S. Department of Justice. Form 5-K. Cooperating Witness Agreement.” He flicked the cap of a ballpoint pen.

“Today, Mr. Raab. As soon as you sign.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Everyone was gathered at the house. Kate and Sharon were trimming some hydrangeas in the kitchen, trying to keep their nerves at bay, when a dark blue sedan accompanied by a black Jeep turned into the drive.

Ben had called an hour earlier. He told them he had something very important to discuss. He wouldn’t say how the meeting with the FBI had gone. No one had left the house all day. The kids hadn’t gone to school. Cops and FBI agents had been all around their house constantly.

A man and a woman dressed in suits stepped out of the sedan, then Raab. The Jeep pulled around in the circle and blocked the head of the drive.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Sharon put down her shears.

Kate nodded back, holding her breath. This time neither did she.

Her father stepped into the house and took off his coat, ashen. He gave Kate a halfhearted wink, then Sharon a stiff hug.

“Who are those people, Ben?”

He merely shrugged. “We’ve got some things to talk over as a family, Sharon.”

They sat around the dining room table, which didn’t exactly make anyone feel relaxed, because they never sat in the dining room. Ben asked for a glass of water. He could barely look any of them in the eyes. A day before, they’d been thinking about Em’s SATs and planning their winter trip. Kate had never felt such tension in the house.

Sharon looked at him, uneasily. “Ben, I think you’re scaring everyone a bit.”

He nodded. “There was something I didn’t quite go into last night,” he said. “There was someone else who came to me at the office, who I introduced to Harold as well. Someone who was looking for the same arrangement as the guy I told you about, from Paz. Convert some cash into gold. Get it out of the country.…”

Sharon shook her head. “Who?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anyway. Maybe he proposed a few things I shouldn’t have agreed to.” He took a sip of water. “Maybe they got some things I said on tape.”

“On tape …?” Sharon’s eyes widened. “What kinds of things are you talking about, Ben?”

“I don’t know.…” He stared ahead blankly, still avoiding everybody’s gaze. “Nothing very specific. But just enough that, combined with the payments I received, it really complicates things. It makes it all look pretty bad.”

“Bad …?” Sharon was growing alarmed. Kate, too. They’d been shot at the night before! Just the fact that the conversations had been recorded was insane.

“What are you saying, Ben?”

He cleared his throat. “This other guy …” He finally looked up, pallid. “He was FBI, Sharon.”

It was like a deadweight had crashed into the center of the room. At first no one spoke, only looked in horror.

“Oh my God, Ben, what have you done?”

He started to unravel it in front of them, in a low, cracking monotone. How all the money in the past few years—the money that paid for the house, their trips, the cars—was all dirty. Drug money. How he knew it but just kept doing it. Getting deeper. He couldn’t pull out. Now they had him. They had his voice on tape offering the same arrangements to an undercover agent. They had the monies he’d received, the fact that he’d set up the connection.

Kate couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her father was going to jail.

“We can fight this, can’t we?” her mother said. “I mean, Mel’s a good lawyer. My friend Maryanne, at the club, she knows someone who’s defended people for securities fraud. Those Logotech people. He got them a deal.”

“No, we can’t fight this, Sharon.” Ben shook his head. “This isn’t securities fraud. They have me dead to rights. I had to cut a deal. I may have to go to jail for a while.”

“Jail!”

He nodded. “Then I’ll have to testify. But that’s not even it. It’s deeper than that. A lot deeper.”

“Deeper?” Sharon stood up. She still had her apron on. “What could be deeper than that, Ben? We were almost killed! My husband just told me he’s going to jail! Deeper …? You plead. You pay a fine. You give back whatever you took unfairly. What the hell do these people want from you, Ben—your life …?”

Raab jumped up. “You’re not seeing it, Sharon.” He went over to the window. “This isn’t a bad stock trade. These are Colombians, Sharon! I can hurt them. You saw what they did last night. These are bad people. Killers! They’re never going to let me go to trial.”

He threw back the curtains. Two agents were leaning on the Jeep at the head of the driveway. A police car blocked the entrance up by the pillars. “These people, Sharon … they’re not here to drive me home. They’re federal agents. They’re here to protect us. That’s exactly what these bastards want from me.” His eyes filled with tears and his voice rose to a harried pitch.

“They want my life!”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sharon sank back into her chair, her glassy gaze remote and uncomprehending. A heavy silence settled over the room.

Kate stared at her dad. He looked different to her suddenly. She saw it now. There was no hiding it anymore. He knew. Every night when he walked through the door. Every wonderful trip they took together. Even when he held her last night, and promised her he would never go to jail …

He was lying.

He knew.

“What are you saying, Dad?” Justin gaped. “These people want to kill you?”

“You saw it, Just! You saw it last night. I can unravel part of their organization. I can expose them in a trial. These are dangerous people, son.” He sat back down. “The FBI … they don’t think we can go back to a regular life.”

“We …?” Emily leaped up, straining to understand. “You mean all of us? We’re all in danger?”

“You saw what happened last night, honey. I don’t see how any of us can take that chance.”

“So by ‘a regular life,’ you’re saying what, Dad? That these guards’ll be with us when we go to school for a while? Or into town? That we’re basically, like, going to be prisoners …?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Raab sat, shaking his head. “I’m afraid it’s a whole lot more than that, Em.”

There was a pause, as if an earthquake had shaken the roof and they were sitting there watching it about to collapse. Except it wasn’t the roof but their lives that were suddenly imploding. Everyone stared at him, trying to figure out just what that meant.

“We’re going to have to move away, Ben,” Sharon uttered somberly. “Aren’t we?”

It wasn’t even a question. A glaze of tears filled her eyes. “We’re going to have to hide, like criminals. Those people out there, that’s what they’re here for, isn’t it, Ben? They’re going to take us from our home.”

Kate’s father pressed his lips flat and nodded. “I think so, Shar.”

Tears ran down her face freely now.

“Take us where, Dad?” Emily shouted in frustration. “You mean like somewhere else around here? Another school, nearby?” This was her life that was suddenly being ripped from under her. School, friends. Her squash. Everything she knew.

“I don’t think so, Em. And I’m afraid you won’t be able to let anyone know where you are.”

“Move away!” She turned to her mother, then Kate, waiting for someone to say this was all some kind of joke. “When?”

“Soon.” Her father shrugged. “Tomorrow, the day after …”

“This is fucking crazy!” Emily screamed. “Oh, my God!”

It was as though he’d come home and told them that all the people they knew, all the things they did, had been wiped out in some terrible accident. Except it was more like they were the ones wiped out. Everyone they knew. Their history. Their life up to this point would be blank, dead.

Left behind.

“I’m not going anywhere!” Emily shouted. “I’m staying. You go. You’re the one who did this to us. What the hell have you done, Daddy …?”

She tore out of the dining room, footsteps pounding on the stairs. The door to her room slammed.

“She’s right.” Kate stared at her father. “What have you done, Daddy?”

It was one thing to see him like this. Not the strong, respected person she always thought he was but someone who was weak, beaten. She could deal with that. People cheat on their wife or lose their bearings, steal from their company. Some even go to jail.

But this … That he had put them all at risk. Made them all targets. All the people he supposedly loved. Kate couldn’t believe it. Her family was being torn apart in front of her eyes.

“What about Ruthie, Ben?” Sharon looked at him glassily. Her mother. “We can’t just leave her. She’s not well.”

Raab just shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, Shar.…”

“I don’t understand,” Justin said. “Why can’t we just live here? Why can’t they just protect us? This is our house.”

“Our house …” His father blew out a breath. “It won’t belong to us anymore. The government’s going to take it. I may have to go to prison until the trial. They think they can get my sentence commuted to time served. Then, afterward, I’ll join you—”

“Join us …?” Kate’s mother gasped. Her eyes stretched wide, and there was a trembling, unforgiving look in them. “Join us exactly where, Ben?”

He shook his head. His face was blank. “I don’t know, Shar.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Upstairs, Emily was freaking out. Kate tried her best to calm her. Her sister was lying spread-eagled on her bed, punching the mattress in tears.

She had her tournaments, her coach, her eastern ranking. This was the season all her friends were having their sweet sixteens. She was taking the SATs next Saturday.

“This is our home, Kate. How can we just uproot our lives and leave?”

“I know, Em.…”

Kate lay next to her and gave her sister a hug, like when they were kids and shared their favorite music. Em had her ceiling painted sky blue, with a canopy of Day-Glo stars that illuminated when you turned off the lights.

Kate looked up at them. “You remember when we were at the old house and gold was in the dumps? We didn’t go anywhere that year, and Dad was having a hard time. I was at the high school but you were at Tamblin. He kept you there, Em. Even when it was hard for him. He did it so you could keep playing squash.”

“That doesn’t make it okay, Kate.” Emily glared, wiping away tears. “What he’s done. You’re gone. You’re out of here. What are we supposed to say to people? My daddy’s a drug dealer. He’s in jail. We have to take off now for a few years. See you in college. This is our life, Kate …”

“And it doesn’t erase it, Em.… I know. It just …”

Em sat up and stared at her. “It just what, Kate?”

“You’re right.” Kate squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t make it okay.”

Justin was at his desk at the computer, leaning back with his feet up, like someone in a trance, playing a video game. Kate asked how he was doing. He just looked blankly at her and muttered back, in his usual way, “I’m okay.”

She went down to her old room at the far end of the hallway.

They pretty much kept it just as it had been when she lived there. Sometimes she still slept over on weekends or holidays. Kate stared up at the red bookshelves which still had a lot of her old textbooks and folders. The walls were plastered with her old posters. Bono of U-2. Brandi Chastain—the famous soccer shot of her on her knees when the U.S. team won the Olympic gold. Kate was always into Brandi more than Mia Hamm. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeremy Bloom, the mogul snowboarder. It always felt warm coming back here.

But not tonight. Em was right. It didn’t make it okay.

Kate rolled onto her bed and took out her cell. She hit the speed dial and checked the time. She needed someone now. Thank God, he picked up.

“Greg?”

They had met at Beth Shalom, her family’s Sephardic temple in the city. He just walked right up to her, at the kiddush after Rosh Hashanah services. She’d noticed him across the sanctuary.

Greg was great. He was a sort of Wandering Jew himself, from Mexico City. He didn’t have family here. He’d been in his last year of medical school at Columbia when they met. Now he was a second-year resident in children’s orthopedics. He was tall, thin, lanky, and he reminded her a bit of Ashton Kutcher with his mop of thick, brown hair. They’d basically been living together for the past year in her Lower East Side apartment. Now that they were getting serious, the big question was where he would end up in practice. What would happen to them if he had to leave New York?

“Kate! God, I’ve been really worried. You’ve been leaving these cryptic messages. Is everything all right up there?”

“No,” Kate said. She held back the tears. “Everything’s not all right, Greg.”

“Is it Ben? Tell me what’s happened? Is he okay? Is there anything I can do?”

“No, it’s not medical, Greg. I can’t go into it. I’ll tell you soon, I promise. There’s just something I need to know.”

“What, pooch?” That was what he called her. His pet. He seemed very worried about her. She could hear it in his voice.

Kate sniffed back the tears and asked, “Do you love me, Greg?”

There was a pause. She knew she’d surprised him. Like some stupid kid. “I know we say it all the time. But now it’s important to me. I just need to hear it, Greg.…”

“Of course I love you, Kate. You know that.”

“I know,” Kate said. “I don’t mean just that way.… What I mean is, I can trust you, Greg, can’t I? I mean, with everything? With me …?”

“Kate, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right. I just need to hear you say it, Greg. I know it sounds weird.”

This time he didn’t hesitate. “You can trust me, Kate. I promise you, you can. Just tell me what the hell’s going on up there. Let me come up. Maybe I can help.”

“Thanks, but you can’t. I just needed to hear that, Greg. Everything’s okay now.”

She had made up her mind.

“I love you, too.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Kate found him on the back porch, sitting in an Adirondack chair in the chilly late-September air, overlooking the Sound.

She already felt that something was different about him. His fingers were locked in front of his face, and he was staring out onto the water, a glass of bourbon on the chair arm beside him.

He didn’t even turn.

Kate sat on the swinging bench across from him. Finally he looked at her, a brooding darkness in his eyes.

“Who are you, Daddy?”

“Kate …” He turned and reached for her hand.

“No, I need to hear it from you, Daddy. Because all of a sudden, I don’t know. All of a sudden, I’m trying to figure out which part of you—which part of all this—isn’t some kind of crazy lie. All that preaching about what made us strong, our family … How could you, Dad?”

“I’m your father, Kate,” he said, hunching deeper in the chair. “That’s not a lie.”

“No.” She shook her head. “My father was this honest, stand-up man. He taught us how to be strong and make a difference. He didn’t look in my eye and tell me to trust him one day and then the next say that everything about his life is a lie. You knew, Daddy. You knew what you were doing all along. You knew every goddamn day you came home to us. Every day of our lives …”

He nodded. “What isn’t a lie is that I love you, pumpkin.”

“Don’t call me that!” Kate said. “You don’t get to call me that ever again. That’s gone. That’s the price you pay for this. Look around you, Dad—look at the hurt you’ve caused.”

Her father flinched. He suddenly looked small to Kate, weakened.

“You can’t just build this wall down the center of your life and say, ‘On this side I’m a good person—a good father—but on the other side I’m a liar and a thief.’ I know you’re sorry, Dad. I’m sure this hurts. I wish I could stand behind you, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at you quite the same way.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, Kate. We’re all going to need one another more than ever now, to get through this.”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Kate shook her head. “I won’t be going with you, Daddy. I’m staying here.”

He turned—his pupils fixed and widening. Alarmed. “You have to, Kate. You could be in danger. I know how angry you are. But if I testify, anyone who might possibly lead back to me—”

“No,” she stopped him, “I don’t. I don’t have to, Daddy. I’m over twenty-one. I have my life here. My work. Greg. Maybe Em and Justin, you can drag them along, and somehow I hope to God you can repair the hurt you’ve caused. But I won’t be going. Don’t you see, you’ve ruined lives, Daddy. And not just your own. People you love. You’ve robbed them of someone they loved and looked up to. I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t let you ruin mine, too.”

He stared at her, stunned at what he was hearing. Then he looked down. “If you don’t,” he said, “you know it might be a very long time before you can see any of us again.”

“I know,” Kate said. “And it’s breaking my heart, Daddy. About as much as it’s breaking my heart to look at you now.”

He sucked in a breath and reached out a hand toward her, as if looking for some kind of forgiveness.

“All I did was buy the gold,” he said. “I’ve never even seen a bag of cocaine.”

“No, you don’t get to think that, Dad,” Kate said angrily. She took his hand, but his fingers had changed from the ones that she felt yesterday—now foreign and unfamiliar and cold.

“Look around you, Dad. This was our family. You’ve done a whole lot more than that.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The following afternoon two people from the U.S. Marshals Service showed up at the house.

One was a tall, heavyset man with salt-and-pepper hair, named Phil Cavetti. The other, a pleasant, attractive woman of about forty named Margaret Seymour, whom they all immediately liked, said she’d be their case handler. She told them to call her “Maggie.”

They were from WITSEC. The Witness Protection Program.

At first Kate assumed they were merely there to explain the program to everybody. What lay ahead. But after talking to them for a few minutes, it became clear what was actually going on.

They were here to take her family into custody today.

They told everyone to pack a single suitcase. The rest, they said, including the furniture and personal belongings, would come along in a few weeks. Come along where?

Justin stuffed his iPod and his Sony PlayStation into a knapsack. Em mechanically collected her squash racquets and goggles, a poster of Third Eye Blind, and some snapshots of her closest friends.

Sharon was a wreck. She couldn’t believe the parts of her life she couldn’t take, that she was having to leave behind. Her mother. Her family albums. Her wedding china. All her precious things.

Their lives.

Kate tried her best to help. “Take these,” Sharon said, pressing folders filled with old photos into Kate’s hands. “They’re of my mother and father, and their families.…” Sharon picked up a small vase that contained the ashes of their old schnauzer, Fritz. She looked at Kate, her composure starting to fracture. How can I just leave these behind?

When their bags were packed, everyone came down to the living room. Ben was in a blazer and an open plaid shirt, not saying much to anyone. Sharon was dressed in jeans and a blazer, her hair pulled back. Like she was headed on a trip or something. They all sat down silently.

Phil Cavetti started to lay out what would take place.

“Your husband will be delivered to the U.S. Attorney later today,” he said to Sharon. “He’ll begin serving a prison sentence in a secure location until the trial. That could be eight, ten months. Under his agreement, he will have to be a witness at additional trials as they come up.

“The rest of you will be in protective custody until a final location is determined. Under no circumstance can you divulge to anyone where that location is.” He looked at Em and Justin. “That means not even an e-mail to your best friend. Or a text message. This is only for your own protection—do you understand?”

They nodded tentatively. “Not even to Kate?” Em looked over at her sister.

“Not even to Kate, I’m afraid.” Phil Cavetti shook his head. “Once you’re settled, we can arrange a few calls and you’ll be able to e-mail through a WITSEC clearing site. A couple of times a year, we can arrange visits with family at a neutral location under our supervision.”

“A couple of times a year,” Sharon gasped, taking hold of Kate’s hand.

“That’s it. You’ll be given new identities. New drivers’ licenses, Social Security numbers. As far as anyone will be concerned, all this did not exist. You understand that this is only for your own protection? Your father is doing something that will make him very unpopular with the people he’s testifying against. And you’ve already seen firsthand what these people will do. Agent Seymour and I have handled several similar cases. Even people within the Mercado family itself. If you follow the rules, you’ll be okay. We’ve never had a case that was detected yet.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.