Stolen Prey

and Pat raised a hand, then held up a finger—one minute?—and went back inside.
    A minute or two later, a tall, well-dressed man came out with Pat, looked across the street at them, and then started toward them. He could be a police officer, she thought, but he didn’t look the part. She’d known a number of plainclothes cops, and even dated one. They generally wore jackets and pants thatwould not be a great loss should they get torn, vomited on, or grass-stained.
    This man wore a suit that was in an entirely different league; he looked like a banker, she thought, and an athlete. One of the bankers from the top floor, with a particularly well-developed mean streak. He said, “Hello, Miz Sanderson? I’m Lucas Davenport.”
    They moved away from the crowd to talk, and Davenport asked her about Kline, about whether she’d seen him doing unauthorized programming while working in the secure area. She denied seeing anything like it, and internally, she fought down the rising panic. They were, she thought, really and truly fucked. She was going to prison.
    S ANDERSON WAS a guilty woman, Lucas thought, more scared and less curious than she should have been. She knew what was going on: she knew about the theft, and what the Mexicans had wanted.
    Lucas said to her, finally, “I have no idea whether you had any part in the transfer of funds out of the Polaris bank accounts—”
    “That’s ridiculous,” she sputtered, “I don’t even get traffic tickets.”
    She was lying, Lucas thought. He plied on. “If you do know about it, there’s no way we can protect you against these drug people. They have very good intelligence about what’s going on with the bank, and if they think you have their money … you’ve seen what happened to that family out in Wayzata,mother, father, both kids. Kristina, you’ve got to talk to me. You really do. This is your life we’re talking about.”
    “I don’t know anything,” she wailed, and she thought about the pile of gold at Mom’s, and Lucas saw it in her eyes.
    E DIE A LBITIS overnighted the last of the packages and walked away from the FedEx store, got a cab to EWR—said to the driver, “EWR,” and he said, “Okay”—and not until she’d settled back in the cab did she consider how much of her life had come to be dominated by three-letter airport designations: LAX, MIA, ORD, MSP, PHX, DEN, SFO, ATL, LGA, MCO, DFW.
    Yesterday she’d gone from LAX to ORD to LGA, and now from EWR to MSP; that is, from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York’s LaGuardia airport, and now she’d be traveling from EWR in New Jersey to Minneapolis-St. Paul.
    With any luck, from there it’d be from MSP to CDG, Charles de Gaulle outside Paris, or AMS, Schiphol International at Amsterdam, and from there into the apartments of any of a number of eastern European cities. Once she was there, once she was moving by train and car, it’d take the Stasi to sniff her out, and there was no Stasi, not anymore, not since East Germany ran off the rails.
    She was not a sentimental woman, and she shed no tears for the Stasi, the East German State Security.
    The ride from Manhattan to EWR took the best part of an hour, traffic stacked up around some kind of a strike, with honking car horns and screaming cops, a strike leader with a bullhorn leading chants that had something to do with hotel rooms andbedbugs. All the time her Somali driver chanted along with unusual tunes from the car radio.
    Ten minutes out of the airport, she took a call from Turicek, who said, “Edie, the cops are all over us. They’ve been asking about me, they’ve interviewed Jacob, and they’ll get to Kristina sooner or later.”
    “How? How’d they do this?” she asked.
    “Jacob. We think they just asked around Polaris, who did it, and the Polaris people blamed Jacob,” Turicek said.
    “They got that right,” Albitis said.
    “Yeah, but … we think they might be watching all of us, and we can’t get to the office. You’ve got to go over there as soon as you get in. The day’s packages are gonna start piling up at the door. If somebody steals one of them…”
    “Ah shit, I’m five hours out, if the plane’s on time, and I don’t miss it.”
    “That’s gonna have to do,” Turicek said. “You’re the only one we got. The rest of the stuff is stashed. There’s no way they know about the office, but we can’t go there.”
    “We’re so close.”
    “What’s that crazy sound I’m hearing?”
    “Radio.