Free Blood Money by Thomas Perry Page A

they’ll be strip-searched to be sure they take nothing with them, given brand-new clothes, and shipped home, where there’s nobody they could tell who would know what they were talking about. I figure probably when it comes down to it, these two are not going to make it all the way. Once the precautions get elaborate enough, one of the guards is going to say, ‘Oh, what the hell,’ and pull the trigger. The computer guy, I suspect, has problems too. These families are never again going to let themselves get into the position of having a big chunk of their money in one guy’s brain. There will be another disk that holds the program for decoding the encryption.”
    “And you?”
    “What do you think?” He smiled wearily. “Dead. I looked into their eyes, and I could see they didn’t know it yet. They didn’t know themselves well enough; these are not introspective people. They thought they were making a generous deal with me, and they would stick to it. I would stay on in Florida doing nothing forever. What they didn’t know was that theminute the money was on the disk, I would change. All of a sudden they would notice that I was so old and sick that it would be a favor to put me out of my misery.”
    “So she saved you.”
    He nodded. “She knew.”
    Jane took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she contemplated the old man. She was tired. She knew what was coming and she knew that she would have to let it come before she could move on. “You came here to make a proposal. You’ve taken half the night working your way up to it.”
    “I wanted to understand you first, and to let you know who it was making the proposal.”
    “You had better say it now, so I can say no and go to sleep.”
    “I’m a ruined person, used up. I didn’t get this way because I made the wrong decisions, but because I didn’t make any decisions. The woman I loved all my life just killed herself to show me that she cared. And I have our son on my mind now. He’s a problem.”
    “A problem … for you?”
    The old man looked at the carpet. “I don’t know what I expected. His mother … I’m sure she did what she knew, and couldn’t do anything else.”
    Jane felt sorry for him. Bernie might have been able to bring back a photographic image of Francesca Giannini’s lovely black hair and radiant skin, but he seemed never to have let himself think about who she was. The son must have made it impossible for him not to know. A child was what he learned to be at his mother’s knee, and from a distance, Vincent Ogliaro seemed to have grown up to be exactly like the men Bernie Lupus had worked for.
    Jane said carefully, “He makes you sad, doesn’t he?”
    “I want … ” He started again. “Vincent is like one of those lion cubs that stupid people bring home, and don’t know what to do with when they grow up. It’s not the lion’s fault. He is what he is. He can’t choose to be a canary. His mother trying to save me put him in a terrible position.”
    “I’ll bet,” said Jane. “Do they know his mother was the one who killed you?”
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “She was too smart for that. She set up one of those ‘shots from the crowd’ things. She was in a spot that the airport surveillance cameras couldn’t pick up. Vincent has been inside on that postal-fraud conviction for three years, and won’t get out for a couple more. Everybody knows he could have arranged something like a hit from a cell, but if he’s inside he can’t take the money and run. The fact that his mother died from it will make most people think it’s impossible he had anything to do with it. And why would he?”
    “Does anybody else know you’re his father?”
    Bernie winced. “I’m not his father. The one who was there every day was his father—Mickey Ogliaro. I’m a man he never met. The one who took his mother’s virginity in a hotel in Miami when she was too young to know any better, and got her to kill herself