Evan shifted on the bed, and his right shoulder let him know about it. “What about the stuff he left behind? There was a lot of shit in that chalet.”

“I talked to one of my hooks at the Bureau. The investigation is young, but he said everything in that chalet was pretty well end-stopped. Rare paintings, weird medical crap, advanced weaponry—there’s plenty to run down, but it’ll take time. Black market, dubious provenance, cash payments, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure something’ll yield, but you know how it is backtracing through the black markets. Like digging a hole with your face.”

Evan pictured René waving around that clear cylindrical bottle, misting the DNA privacy spray over every surface he touched. The empty drawers in the study. What is mine is hidden away down a rabbit hole.

“How’d he pay for the place?” Evan asked.

‘The money trail looks like a spiderweb. Ball bearings—”

“—within ball bearings,” Evan said with him.

Jack seemed amused. Evan was not. His neck was having trouble supporting his head.

“Every payment wired in from a different shell corp,” Jack said. “He’s got elaborate encryptions for movement between entities—”

“Van Sciver cracked his encryption.” The words came drowsily. Evan wondered what kinds of painkillers were in his system. There were too many questions spinning through his head for him to grab hold of.

Three days to get to Alison Siegler. Right now the Horizon Express would be doglegging around the eastern tip of Cuba, turning back for the mainland. And God only knew where the boy was.

Jack spoke, pulling Evan from his thoughts: “With the resources Van Sciver has at his disposal, he can crack anything.”

“Not anything,” Evan said. “He got through René’s wire encryptions. But never mine.”

“The point is—this wack-job René? The guy’s Teflon.” Jack shook his head. “We have no idea who he is. He’s a ghost.”

Evan moved his right arm, felt the muscle scream.

“Don’t,” Jack said. “What are you doing?”

Evan’s fingertips found the tape plastered to the inside of his left arm. Weakly, he peeled it free. His skin tugged up, a thousand tiny pinches. He held the length of tape to the light.

Trapped inside, René’s fingerprint.

Jack peeled it from the pad of Evan’s thumb.

At last Evan let his head tilt back onto the pillow. It felt like drifting into a cloud. “You’re welcome,” he mumbled, and fell asleep.

61. To Do Harm

61

To Do Harm

Evan woke up sometime in the night. Darkness crowded the windows, making the cabin feel small and inconsequential, a box drifting through outer space. At the square of the kitchen table, Jack slumped in a chair, breathing heavily, his sleeping face uplit with the dancing glow of a screen saver.