Page 81 of The Picasso Heist
“The hell we did,” says Elise Joyce.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“You know exactly what it means. You could’ve gotten more from him. A lot more.”
The fact that the chief of the criminal division of a US attorney’s office is taking part in a field mission—that she’s holed up in a surveillance van, no less—tells you all you need to know about howmuch Elise Joyce wants Dominick Lugieri’s head on a platter. I can understand her impatience.
I just can’t give in to it.
“More?More?You now have Bergamo on record saying he cleans money for Lugieri,” I say. “He even said how much the next drop will be, eighty million.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know when and we don’t know where,” says Joyce.
“That’s right, we don’t.Not yet.That’s what comes next.”
“It could’ve come today.”
“Bergamo’s a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot,” I say. “All it takes is me asking one too many questions.”
Devin, the tech, had outfitted me with a blazer that had a mic hidden in a button and the transmitter sewn into the lining. I take off the blazer and hand it to him while Joyce watches me with a suspicious eye. Already she’s revved up her PR machine—a little tidbit of an online story here and a profile in theTimeslined up there, an attempt to catch a massive media wave of attention that will propel her to the governor’s mansion once she finally brings down Lugieri.
Female crime fighters make the best political candidates. Just ask any focus group. Elise Joyce sure has.
“If I didn’t know better, Halston, I’d think you were stalling,” she says.
“Thankfully, you do know better.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I,” I say. “Believe me, no one wants this to happen more than I do. You understand that, right?”
It’s not my words that linger in the air, it’s what I don’t say. The subtext. The reason I came to Elise Joyce in the first place. This is a quid pro quo. I’m giving her what she wants in order to get whatI want. It’s Dominick Lugieri’s imprisonment in exchange for my father’s release. The sooner the better.
But if Bergamo’s no idiot, neither is Joyce. She’s right, I am stalling. Just a little.
When you have only one shot at doing what should be impossible, the timing has to be perfect.
CHAPTER70
JOYCE WANTS TOtalk more, strategize, plan my next encounter with Bergamo. She has ideas, thoughts, everything short of a stack of color-coded index cards crammed with bullet points. Her entire focus is on recording as much dirt on Lugieri as possible.
But I tell her I have to go, that I need to be at work. It’s the truth. What I don’t tell her is why.
Smarmy’s latest voicemail was waiting for me hours earlier when I woke up. You can ghost a guy like him for only so long. Eventually he figured out a way to get me in the office. Charles Waxman ain’t the CEO of Echelon for nothing.
“I’ve been looking through your file,” he announced after the beep. He spoke slowly, ominously, to ensure I paid attention to every word of his message. “Apparently our head of HR has been keeping a few secrets about you, Halston Graham. I mean Greer.”
Really, Jacinda? In my file? You couldn’t leave my past alone, or at least keep it inside your head? You had to put everything down in writing?
Apparently.
So off I go to meet Smarmy face to face. His office at noon, he told me. He ended his message with “Don’t be late.”
I’m not. I’m standing in his doorway at noon on the dot. He smiles broadly at the sight of me because that’s what men like him do when they have the illusion of leverage.
“I want to apologize,” I say after he motions me in. I close the door to his office even though he doesn’t tell me to.
“Sorry for what, exactly?” he asks. “Not showing up to work? Not returning any of my calls? Or not being who you say you are?”
