Stanley sat in a temporary Europe division office with one of the unit’s signature Union Jack-blue doors but otherwise as charismatic as a budget motel room minus the requisite nature print. His dream job commenced with gumshoe work about as rudimentary as it gets.
He spent much of the morning investigating PM00543MH4/7, the Science and Technology search system’s designation for one of the 29,655 groups of travelers matching his criteria. This group consisted of sixty-three-year-old investor Duncan Calloway, who five nights ago had taken his Learjet 45XR from Palm Beach to Paris, along with two of his junior associates-one male, one female, both purportedly twenty-eight. Their excursion employed no small amount of subterfuge, including an 0100 departure and a layover at New York’s Kennedy Airport for twenty minutes, though such a stop was unnecessary for refueling.
The subterfuge, Stanley learned, was intended to throw off a rival investment firm that had hired a Palm Beach-based private espionage outfit to track Calloway in order to determine whether he was negotiating the purchase of a French electronics conglomerate.
Stanley anticipated sitting in the temporary office for two or three more days just to wade through the computer-generated leads.
Then PM11304ZH4/9 caught his eye.
At 6:52 A.M. on December 29, thirteen days ago, a thirty-two-year-old Manhattan hedge fund manager named Roger Norton Traynor departed Newark airport for Innsbruck, Austria, aboard another Learjet 45XR, a seven-seater owned and operated by Newark-based Absolute Air Charter, LLC. Accompanying Traynor was his wife of three days, April Gail Hellinger, twenty-eight. The honeymooners checked into Innsbruck’s five-star Hotel Europa late that night.
Stanley telephoned the Hotel Europa, posing as one of the groom’s colleagues, needing to reach him on an urgent business matter. With even the most discreet hotels, striking the appropriate tone usually sufficed to elicit all information save the guest’s credit card number. And that, if needed, was available on Intelnet with a few clicks of a mouse.
“He was a, how you say, a Liebling der Gotter-a lucky guy,” night reception desk attendant Heinz Albrecht said of Traynor. Albrecht remembered April as a “schone junge Frau.”
At check-in, Albrecht recalled, Traynor paid for the entire stay in cash, which was not atypical of honeymooners, having been handed envelope after envelope of the stuff on their wedding night and eager to put it toward their hotel bill before it was lost or stolen. In the ensuing three days, Herr and Frau Traynor rarely left their mountain-view suite if at all, the Bitte Nicht Storen hanger fixed on their doorknob. Again, hardly unusual for honeymooners, according to Albrecht.
The rest of the staff had altogether forgotten the Traynors, although only a little over a week had passed since the couple checked out.
Stanley might have forgotten them too. But a 6:52 A.M. departure on December 29, 2009, would have allowed the Clarks and Alice Rutherford to bolt the United States shortly after blowing up much of the Cavalry and its Manhattan headquarters.
When a thorough search yielded no record of the Traynors’ departure from Austria, Stanley felt his pulse quicken. Sure, they might be legitimate Americans on an extended honeymoon in Innsbruck. Or they might have left the city, taken a cozy room in a country bed-and-breakfast, and were now currently playing gin rummy by the fire. There were oddities, though. First, records showed that Absolute Air’s proprietor and pilot, Richard Falzone, flew back from Austria to Newark, solo, the same day he’d deposited the Traynors. His copilot, sixty-seven-year-old Alvin Landsman of Jersey City, New Jersey, had remained in Innsbruck. Which might easily be explained. Or might not. Landsman’s pilot’s license had expired. Probably because a July 2008 traffic accident had left him an institutionalized quadriplegic.
The names Roger Norton Traynor and April Gail Hellinger Traynor proved equally bogus.
Stanley guessed that “Roger Traynor” had paid cash for the Hotel Europa honeymoon suite upon check-in, gone up with Alice Rutherford, and torn up the rooms so it would appear they’d enjoyed three days of romantic wildness. Then, or at least early the next morning, the couple had covertly departed the hotel. At some juncture they were joined by Drummond Clark, perhaps with a car rented under yet another alias. All three probably fled Austria after destroying their false documents, bringing Stanley’s trail to a dead end.
Unless Richard Falzone knew something.
Stanley could call the charter pilot and identify himself as a CIA officer. That could spook him, which might lead him to alert Alice and the Clarks. On the other hand, if Stanley phoned and said he was anything other than law enforcement, he impeded his chances of an immediate meeting. Posing as a Homeland Security agent, for example, he stood to gain access right away and, better, leverage. An offer to cut Falzone some slack in exchange for information ought to do the trick. However, it was illegal for a CIA officer to impersonate a law enforcement official. Even pretending to be a parking cop could mean the loss of his pension.
But Stanley was permitted to pose as a Treasury official. The title encompassed coin press workers in the mint, yet carried as much clout with civilians as did Homeland Security, maybe more, as everyone who watched prime-time television knew that Treasury also encompassed the Secret Service.