PART I COLD CASE
PART I
COLD CASE
The Four Seasons Hotel, Houston
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
– Sherlock Holmes
I’m not really sure how to do this.
I’ve never recounted one of my cases before.
I mean, I don’t even know where to start.
With the shootout in the swamp?
Or when I had my fingers broken?
Or how I was connected in the first place to the doll that was found in that flooded river?
I guess the best place to begin is probably before all that, when the Saudi Arabian government was trying to assassinate a client of mine at a luxury hotel in Houston.
Yeah, that’ll work.
The Four Seasons Hotel
Houston, Texas
The next morning, 2 October, 0700 hours
Emergency lights flashed and sirens wailed all over the Four Seasons Hotel as I raced up the fire stairwell, hurriedly pushing a very unathletic scientist in front of me, while frantically checking the stairs below us for the Saudi Arabian hit-team that wanted to kill him.
My feet were bare and as I ran I gripped my Sig Sauer P226 pistol in one hand.
I wore a white Four Seasons bathrobe, an Astros ball cap and an Avon M50 tactical gas mask.
For the record, I don’t usually dress like this.
When you’re a self-employed private detective, it’s usually not a good idea to go up against an ultra-wealthy sovereign nation with a reputation for chopping its enemies into tiny pieces and disposing of the body parts.
The Saudis even had a name for this practice: liquidation.
Yet here I was.
‘Hurry! Don’t stop!’ I urged as I shoved Dr Eric Cartright upward.
I glimpsed our pursuers a few floors below us.
‘Why aren’t we running down?’ Dr Cartright asked anxiously as we climbed the stairs.
‘We can’t get out that way. They have the lobby covered and all the exits locked. It’s their hotel.’
‘How are we gonna get out by going up, then?’
‘Because it’s Wednesday,’ I said.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Just trust me,’ I said between puffing breaths.
‘And why are you wearing a bathrobe?’ he asked. ‘And a gas mask?’
Damn, he asked a lot of questions.
‘They’ve got security cameras all over this building, sir. They know who you are, but they don’t know me. If they manage to make out my face or clothes or anything that can reveal my identity, I’ll be liquidated later, too.’
‘How did you know to come here?’ he asked.
I banged open the door to the roof.
‘I’ve been on your case for a while now, Doctor,’ I said. ‘I’ve been staying here at the hotel for three weeks.’
Okay, now, just to clarify, I don’t normally stay in super--expensive luxury hotels.
(My suite on the 19th floor of the Four Seasons was costing a whopping $2,700 a night.)
You’re more likely to find me in a Motel 6. The extravagances of high-end hotels are wasted on me.
Let me back up a bit as I have a habit of getting ahead of myself.
My name’s Sam Speedman and I’m a private investigator. I’m 37 years old, I live in Houston, I’m of slightly below-average height and pretty skinny.
I wear glasses with a prescription of -6.25 dioptres, which is a strong prescription, so the lenses are thick.
I’m very good at math and computers.
I don’t really care for professional sports but I watch SportsCenter so I can engage in conversations with people. For some reason they like talking about professional sports and I like to seem normal.
I can’t say I’m very good at sports myself—well, ball sports like football and baseball—but I can swim and run pretty well. I can hold my breath for five minutes which is something, I suppose, but not really a sport.
I’ve never had a girlfriend. This bothers me a little but not too much.
I enjoy reading novels like The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series and listening to audiobooks and podcasts about computer coding, hacking and the mathematics of complex numbers like the square root of minus 1.
Easy stuff like that. It helps me go to sleep at night.
I also enjoy tinkering with old cars.
This is a hobby that suits me because I was born with an unusual ability to focus on things for very long periods of time.
Some people call this weird.
Dr Lucy calls it ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 with aspects of Level 2’. That’s what she wrote in my file.
But in my business, where you’re often required to surveil locations for sustained stretches, it helps.
I have degrees in pure mathematics and industrial chemistry which I got at Rice University. I worked for a short time at a petrochemical refinery on the Gulf, but I got fired because I kept making my boss angry. He was doing things wrong and I told him so. He didn’t like that.
Seeking a career change, I did a doctorate in criminology at Rice so I’m technically ‘Dr Speedman’ but I never tell anybody that. After I got my doctorate, I applied to the FBI, but was rejected. So I went into business for myself.
More than anything, though, if you really want to understand me, you have to know that I believe in being prepared.
Before the LaToya Martyn case, I’d shot seven people as part of my job, five of whom I killed. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but since they were trying to kill me, I figure it’s okay.
Then came the LaToya Martyn case.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Back to the Four Seasons.
I was staying there as part of a corporate job.
Not many people are aware of this, but the Four Seasons Hotel chain is owned by Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud—a member of the Saudi royal family—and Bill Gates.
Whenever Saudi intelligence agents come to Houston they almost always stay at the Four Seasons and always on the 20th floor.
The place is practically a second embassy for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the United States.
Anyway, I was working for an American oil company based in Houston that had been experiencing unusual computer -mishaps over the previous few months: some of their newest and best digital topographical maps of Gulf oilfields were fritzing—or to use the technical term, redigitising—making them useless.
This suggested some kind of hacking.
The man behind those maps was Dr Cartright, a brilliant petroleum geologist who had created complex ‘substratum subsidence models’ that found underground oil and shale fields where regular models didn’t.
His models were game changers for the oil business.
Revolutionary.
Of course, it all sounded like garden-variety industrial espio-nage—a rival company was pissed that Cartright’s innovative models were better than theirs.
So I laid a trap.
I planted a tracing program inside a new digital map made by Dr Cartright.
Sure enough, very quickly someone hacked it and my tracing program led me to the culprits. They were not, however, a rival corporation but a rival nation.
Saudi Arabia.
Working out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston.
Most of the time, I love corporate gigs.
This is because they usually don’t involve obsessed stalkers -trying to kill me or cheating husbands trying to punch me.
On most corporate jobs, you usually track down a disgruntled former employee or a hacker to their home or office (or their mom’s basement) and you collect a big fee.
Seriously, they pay really well and especially so when the client is an oil company.
For this job, the company had been perfectly happy to shell out $2,700 per night for a suite on the 19th floor of the Four Seasons for me to use—for three weeks and counting.
In that suite, I’d set up a bunch of computers and listening devices that allowed me to watch the hotel’s security feeds and listen in on phone conversations in the suites directly above mine on the Saudis-only 20th floor.
That was how I’d learned that a Saudi hit-team had landed before dawn at George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport on a private jet from Riyadh.
Once they’d landed, I’d eavesdropped on another call that informed me they were going to kidnap Dr Eric Cartright from his home in River Oaks right away and bring him to the hotel for liquidation.
It all happened very quickly from there.
At 6:30 a.m. the hit-team nabbed Cartright at his home. They arrived with him at the Four Seasons just before 7:00 a.m. having whisked him there in a plain white GMC Savana van.
(The GMC Savana is almost identical to the cheaper Chevrolet Express van but it is sold as a ‘premium’ model. If the Saudis have an Achilles heel, it’s that they always have to have the best. They can’t help themselves, so even when it came to a basic city van, they had to go premium.)
When they arrived at the hotel’s loading dock, I watched them on the security monitors as they unloaded the flex-cuffed and hooded figure of Cartright from their van and shoved him toward the freight elevator.
(Like they did with Jamal Khashoggi at their consulate in Istanbul, the Saudis wanted a secure location that they controlled to liquidate Dr Cartright.)
Now, at that point, some private investigators wouldn’t have done anything since, strictly speaking, my assigned task was surveillance not protection.
Not me.
At this juncture, I should mention that over the course of my three-week stay at the Four Seasons, I’d noticed another group of people taking a keen interest in the hotel.
They were set up in a couple of ‘plumbing’ and ‘flower delivery’ vans parked in a weed-strewn lot across the street (not premium models, just basic Fords). They’d alternate between the plumbing van and the flower van each day, I saw.
This just screamed FBI.
As I came and went from my suite on the 19th floor, I always kept an eye on those vans.
Whoever was stationed inside them had a truly crappy job.
Houston is super-humid in the summer and super-cold in the winter. You don’t want to be camped inside a surveillance van during either.
(This is actually why downtown Houston has a unique maze of elevated glass pedestrian tunnels that connect the second floors of many buildings. You can almost walk from one end of the city to the other without touching the ground—out of the sweltering heat or icy cold.)