Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 1: The Dark Tide, Don’t Look Twice, Relentless

Karen typed out two words. She read them over and swallowed. Two words that would change her life a second time, reopen wounds that had barely healed.

She clicked send.

Hello, Charlie.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT (#ulink_8519d9e0-f3e4-52bc-8f3e-0da7f170c0be)

In a spot called Little Water Cay, near the islands of Turks and Caicos, Charles Friedman flicked on his laptop. The satellite broadband beamed in.

An unsettling dread deepened in him.

First it had been a week ago on Domenica. A teller he sometimes flirted with there mentioned how someone had been into the bank the week before, a short, mustached man, inquiring of one of the managers about an American who had wired in funds. Describing a person similar to him. The man had even showed a photo around.

Then there was the article that he now unfolded in his lap.

From the Caribbean Times. Regional News section. About a murder on the island of St. Maarten. An old-line diamond merchant had been shot in his car. Nothing had been broken into or stolen. The man’s name was Issa. He had been on the island for fifty years.

His diamond merchant. His contact. In the past year, he had made two transactions with Issa. Charles’s eyes drilled in on the headline. A crime of that nature hadn’t happened there in ten years.

Somehow they knew. It was getting too close. He’d have to change venues. They must have followed him through his network of banks, discovered that his fee account from Falcon had been drawn down. Now the death of this diamond merchant. It saddened Charles that he might be responsible for the old man’s fate. He had liked Issa. Soon Charles would need funds. But it was getting too dangerous to show his face right now. Even here.

He always knew that it was likely one day they would latch onto the trail of the money.

It had rained heavily during the night. A few puffy clouds still loitered in the crisp blue sky. He sat on the deck of his boat with a mug of coffee and fired up his Bloomberg account, his early-morning ritual. Checked his overnight positions, just as he’d been doing for twenty years, though now he traded only for himself. Soon he’d have to stop that as well. Maybe they could trace his activity—his investment signature was on every trade. Still, it was all he could do to keep sane. Now he would lose that, too.

His laptop came to life. His server announced that he had four new messages.

He didn’t receive many e-mails under his new account. Mostly just spam that managed to reach him—mortgage solicitations and Viagra ads. An occasional electronic trading update. He didn’t dare draw attention to his new identity. That’s the way it had to be.

And that’s what he was thinking, spam, as, sipping his coffee, he scanned the list of messages.

Until his eyes stopped.

Not stopped—crashed was more like it, his stomach seizing, into the address of the sender of the third one down.

KFried111.

Charles’s feet fell off the gunwales. His spine arched, as if a jolt of high voltage had been shot through it. He focused on the name again, blinking, as if his eyes were somehow playing tricks on him.

Karen.

Heart pounding, he double-checked, just to make sure he hadn’t managed to log on to his old e-mail address, which he knew was impossible. But what else could it be?

No, it was all correct. Oilman.

His throat went dry. Worse, then came the bowel-tightening realization that in a flash everything had just caught up with him. His past. His deceptions. What he had done. How was this possible? How could she have found his name? His address? No, he realized those weren’t even the right questions.

How was it possible she even knew he was alive?

A year had passed. He had covered his tracks perfectly. He had no connection to his old life. He had never once run into anyone they knew—always his greatest fear. Charles’s fingers were shaking. KFried111. Karen. How would she have been able to track him there?

A mix of emotions swept over him: panic, fear, longing. Memory. Seeing all their faces, missing them in this moment as much as he had missed them all so terribly those first months.

Finally Charles summoned the nerve. He clicked on the name. All that was there were two sparse words. He read them, the color draining from his face, his eyes welling up, stinging with guilt and shame.

Hello, Charlie.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE (#ulink_95d2ffab-15c3-5d86-991c-808cbe1b9161)

When the call found him, Saul Lennick had just climbed into bed in his silk Sulka pajamas. He was glancing over a financial prospectus for a meeting he had in the morning, his attention diverted by the late TV news.

Mimi, who was in the midst of an Alan Furst novel next to him, sighed crossly, glancing at the cell phone. “Saul, it’s after eleven.”

Lennick fumbled for his phone on the night table. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was from out of the country. Barbados. His heart picked up. “Sorry, dear.”

He removed his reading glasses and flipped it open. “Can’t this wait until the morning?”

“If it could, I would’ve,” the caller, Dietz, replied. “Relax, I’m on a phone card. It can’t be traced.”

Lennick sat up and put on his slippers. He uttered a guilty sigh to his wife, pretending that it was business. He took the phone into the bathroom and shut the door. “All right, go ahead.”

“We’ve got problems,” Dietz announced. “There’s a homicide detective in Greenwich who handled that thing we did up there. The one who interrogated me. I may have mentioned him before.”

“So …?”

“He knows.”

“He knows what?” Lennick stood in front of the mirror, picking at a pore on the side of his face.

“He knows about the accident. He also knows about that other thing in New Jersey. He somehow broke into my house. He’s linked me with one of the other witnesses. You beginning to get an idea what I’m talking about now?”

Under his breath Lennick gasped, “Jesus Christ!” He was no longer staring at the pore but at his face, which had turned white.

“Sit down. It gets worse.”

“How the hell can it get worse, Dietz?”

“You remember Hodges? One of my men.”

“Go on.”

“He’s been shot.”

Lennick’s chest began to feel like he was having a heart attack. Dietz told him how Hodges had gone to Dietz’s house and found the cop. Inside. How the two of them had tussled.

“Now, listen, before you bust an artery, Saul, there’s some good news.”

“What can be good about this?” Lennick sat down.