Enemies Within

by J. S. Chapman

Jack guessed who that someone else was. Someone working for the CIA.

  “I’ll tell them you left before I could track you down.” She brought up the screen and showed him a spreadsheet. “MonCom found the money. Where it came from and where it went. Belize, Isle of Man, Cyprus, and Switzerland. Sound familiar?”

  They sounded familiar. She was quite proud of herself. Quite cheerful to violate agency protocols. Quite pleased with the intrigue she immersed herself in. Quite ignorant of the consequences that could blow back on her, and might already have. He wanted to keep her out of it, but she kept banging on the door. And now she had let herself in, looked around, and liked what she saw. To her, this was fun and games. For him, it was life and death.

  “I’m not showing you anything you don’t already know, right? That’s why you’re down here. You’re counting on the money leading you to the people who did this to you. This,” she said, indicating the monitor, “is the reason I came. Not because they sent me. To show you this. Everybody always underestimates me. They think I’m an airhead. Even you.”

  “Never again.” He commandeered the laptop and ran his eyes down the list of banks and account numbers.

  “MonCom couldn’t track down the money,” she said. “The initial accounts were closed and the trail sort of vanished. Then they ran algorithms and picked up the scent. They found these. Same countries but different banks and new account numbers. Same amounts, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Close enough,” he said. Exchange rates and commissions shaved the numbers, but the funds were intact and the amounts comparable.

  “Who do you think they belong to?” She waited for an answer that didn’t come. Clever girl that she was, she had already guessed. “They belong to the people who set you up. Five accounts. Meaning five operatives.” Again she waited for a response from him. “The woman at Club Seven. The one you took home. Was she one of them?”

  He didn’t say anything. She was already in too deep.

  “They had to be spying on you. Casing you. Hacking you. Listening into your phone conversations. Who do you think hired them?” She pondered him with an air of curiosity. It was still a game to her. “Someone inside the Firm? Or maybe CIA.”

  With a shake of his head, he stopped her from speculating more. But then he invited bedlam to knock on her door. “Someone you should contact when you get back. I don’t want you to be in this alone.” He entered keystrokes on the file and saved it, afterwards returning the jump drive into the palm of her hand and closing her fingers around it.

  She lifted her other hand to his face and cupped his cheek, her fingers tremulous, her eyes probing. “Assassins. Black helicopters. Special ops. Conspiracy theories. It can’t be real, can it?”

  What could he say? There was nothing he could say. And nothing he could do to protect her. Hell, he couldn’t even protect himself.

  She let her hands slip from his face. She didn’t stir. She stopped breathing. She turned into a statue. Marble white, immobile, stiff. She ruminated over what little he said, and more ominously, what he hadn’t said. “Come on, Jack. You’re delusional. You’ve been reading too many spy novels.”

  “And you’re a babe in the woods.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” Her eyes narrowed. The gentle planes of her face tensed. “I’m not a little girl anymore. I’ve grown up in the last couple months. From here on out, I’m not going to be nervous and shy and retiring. There’s no going back to the way things used to be. Or I used to be. Everything has changed. There are no rewrites. No revisions. No second chances. Besides, if there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s boredom.

  “I’m only trying to―”

  “—Warn me? Put me off. Tell me to go to my room?” again she grabbed his face between her hands, forcing him to look into her eyes. “Now tell me everything you know and everything you suspect.”

  The conspiracy theory he uncovered almost seemed laughable. When he discovered the first round of data and communiqués, indicting men and women at the highest levels of government, he thought his hypothesis too far-fetched and too overreaching. Every instinct told him not to confide in her. He told her anyway.

  “Fifteen years ago, a white paper was drawn up, setting out the possibility of a silent coup that could bring down the nation. It outlined preventative measures that would stop it. Important people became intrigued. Tepidly at first. Then with increased interest. They asked about the upsides and downsides, who would be the winners and who would be the losers. A top-down theory emerged. Casual curiosity turned into fixation. Studies were ordered. Possible scenarios, probable successes, likely outcomes, that sort of thing. Discussions shifted. How could it be pulled off and what measures would be necessary to quell discontent. Abolishing the Constitution was discussed. Muzzling the press. Militarizing the police. Silencing dissent. It wasn’t a theory anymore. It became real. The plan assumed a life of its own and solidified. No one brave enough to stop it spoke up.”

  “You don’t mean―?”

  “That’s when Spinnaker was developed. That’s why it was developed.” Then he told her about the Russian intercept.

  “You’d be delusional if you thought―”

  “That we face dangers from enemies within and without? You bet I do.”

  They had risen off the bed and were standing together, as close as a breath. To believe in the reality of a shadow government was to point a finger at himself and everyone he knew for being trusting and gullible in a corrupt world. “The tipping point is near enough that nothing, not even an armed revolution, can stop it. I won’t try to convince you. Call me mad. Call me anything you like.”

  “The article in the Washington Gazette ....” She didn’t go any further, becoming still as winter snow, and just as white. “Who would dream up something as nutty as this?”

  “Men who want to run our lives from a boardroom.”

  She shivered, perhaps with fear but more likely with unutterable despair. Just like Jack, she was overwhelmed by the pure evilness of the plot. And the innocence of it. A secret government undermining the will of the people, their elected representatives, the authority of the President, and the power of the military.

  “But why?” she asked, her words nearly inaudible.

  “You know why.”

  “To rule the many for the benefit of the few,” she said. “Through a dictatorship.”

  He nodded.

  “Leading to what?”

  “Read your history books, and you’ll know the answer to that.”

  “Am I crazy?” she asked. “Or has the world gone mad?”

  He pulled her against him. She smelled like dawn. He wanted to whisk her away, walk toward the horizon, and never look back.

  “Maybe it’s not true. Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe it’s only on paper. Maybe someone will stop it.”

  He said nothing.

  “Go after the operatives first. The people who did this to you. After that, the masterminds will be left out in the open for you to pick off.” She was too smart for her own damned good. And too reckless.

  Jack grabbed her elbow and guided her unwillingly toward the door. “I want you out of here. Don’t try to contact me again.”

  Aneila crossed the threshold and spun around. “Ever have dealings with Allison Dovecot?”

  “Liaison with the NSA?”

  “She might be able to help.”

  “Why? What are you thinking?”

  “Just trust me on this. And send me a postcard every once in a while, just so I know you’re still alive.” She gave him a shy smile, turned her back on him, and walked away, not once looking back.

  After she left, Jack went online and left an encrypted message. Vikki Kidd got back to him inside fifteen minutes through VoIP. She asked him how he was. He told her he was still alive and kicking. He asked her the same. Her reply was similar.

  “Sam Soderberg,” he said. “Know him?”

  “Know of him. State Department, right?”

  “Tell him Bird
watcher sent you.”

  26

  Paris, France

  Tuesday, August 12

  AT THE TWILIGHT of evening, Katerine Cécile Arnaud Madoc climbed the rocky steps and rough cobblestones to the top of Montmartre.

  Though the sun was low in the sky, crowds choked the sidewalks, everyone chattering in every tongue imaginable even if there was only one language of significance, la langue française of her nation, but more precisely, the patois of Montmartre, edgier and quicker and filled with the muck and dirt of the tenements of her youth. She wasn’t offended by the flashing neon signs. Or the prostitutes lingering on every corner. Or the pimps leaning in doorways. Or the sex shops selling a man’s wildest imaginings and a woman’s disdainful pruderies. Though Montmartre had become gentrified, the families who lived here for generations resisted change and clung to the old ways as abandoned mutts cling to their hiding places. They could not see past their streets and their houses and their squalid ways of surviving, try as they might. It was all they had ever known. All she had ever known, but with a difference.

  Montmartre had been the arrondissement of her birth, her childhood playground, the place where she begged in the streets and beat up all the other boys and girls with her clutched fists and sharp knuckles while holding dominion over a small turf of wealthy foreigners who didn’t know any better than to coddle the pretty little girl with dark begging eyes and a mouth like a sewer. The tourists, especially the Americans, found her charming even if shocking to their sensibilities. She fed her dear maman—often sick in bed of wine and cocaine and abusive lovers—with the francs she squandered off those benevolent Américains and rich Europeans who didn’t seem to care whether they had been swindled by the adoring eyes and pleading postures of a charming child.

  Le Petit Train de Montmartre—the little white train that resembled the fictional Little Engine of storybooks—clanked past her. She smiled at the riders waving at her and remembered another time, a time when her hair was dirty and snarled, the clothes she wore were hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs, and her ambitions were grander than the pyramids of Egypt. Back then, she dreamt of someday leaving Montmartre a rich lady and never coming back. She became that rich lady. But no matter how far she traveled, she always came back, inevitably returning to the streets of her childhood and the memories living there still, some unhappy but most filled with squealing delight. A child can grow up in poverty, live off scraps others leave behind, and still harbor nostalgia for the innocence ... yes, the innocence! ... of her humble beginnings.

  Still, every now and then, a woman of twenty-six must look into the cavernous recesses of her old soul and reflect on how far she has come, and how she never left anything behind. The streets stayed with her wherever she went. She could never be at home anywhere else. She longed for those halcyon days when laughter filled her wakefulness and gardens occupied her sleep. Sadly, they would never return, forcing her to live off the crumbs of distant memories and savor them as a child savors a piece of candy.

  As always, street musicians and sidewalk artists were in abundance, busy at their trades. After purchasing a croissant and coffee, she strolled to the overlook of La Basilique du Sacré Cœur de Montmartre. The church rose at her back and the manicured gardens lay below while the breathtaking view of Paris stretched straight ahead and La Tour Eiffel soared in the distance.

  A man stepped beside her. He was handsome to behold, possessed of intense eyes, inky hair, and a debonair posture, sophisticated, urbane, and quite naughty, though none would guess how naughty unless they had been the recipient of his special talents.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “I’ve been right behind you for a quarter hour. You’re losing your touch.”

  “Au contraire. I saw you speaking with la petite Américaine, the gamine with the butch brown hair and watery eyes.”

  He laughed. His laughter was enchanting, filled with mischief as well as cruelty. Most women heard only the mischief and the promise of romance and flattery. She heard only the cruelty.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Tell me all. Leave nothing out.” A chance breeze came along and swirled her hair into a fan. She smoothed it casually, introspectively, imagining how the gesture might appear to this man or that man but mostly to the man standing at her side, possessed of eyes that pierced the layers of her protective shell and entered her soul. Michel, her lover and cohort. Michel, who looked very much like her with his dark eyes and dark hair, but unlike her, had a lean and hungry look. Michel, who possessed the same artfulness, artifice, and ambitions as she, so much so that it was often unnerving. Yet even with their alikeness and their affinity to each other, he kept to himself like a ship at sea, yearning for secret harbors he dared not speak of, even to her. While Cat could be harsh, Michel could be mean. Where Cat might be aggressive, he would be heartless. When Cat could be calculating, he would choose malice. Theirs could have been a perfect relationship but for his proclivities. There were times when she wanted to severe their relationship, but the pull of this man could never be denied. It would endure forever, until one or the other was dead, possibly not even then.

  He told her about the women. Each demanded her own price. The Brit—too smart, too white, and too polished by half—wanted to expose the American for duty’s sake but also for ambitious reasons. No longer did she want to subsist on a lowly salary at an equally lowly job. She wanted to get ahead. A big promotion and a transfer to her bank’s London headquarters were her goal. She could not be left alive since eventually she would have spoken to someone of authority and identified him. “It was a pleasure watching her die, though not as much of a pleasure as it might have been had she been a spitfire. She barely put up a fight. In a way, it was a disappointment, snuffing out her life. Her eyes,” he said as his own eyes regarded the violet sky of dusk, “beheld me with something that cannot be described. With loathing and fear, naturally. Also with something else. Betrayal. She didn’t think it possible for a handsome man to also be untrustworthy. In the end, I was kind. I would like to have given her more pain. Had we been somewhere private, I could have made her final moments divinely uncomfortable. She would have liked it, too, I think. Her days were bland and monotonous, and she was looking for excitement. This was what she had been searching for her entire life. Alors, it was destined to last mere seconds.”

  The local girl was different. Her dreams were much more modest. She sold herself short. He told her so. She only wanted to splurge on small things, clothes and makeup and perhaps a holiday. She was cheap, as cheap as they came, but she was also clever. He would have killed her given the chance, but she was too nimble. It wasn’t that great a loss in the end. Who would believe a girl of no account?

  Then there was the third woman, the one who recognized him as a thief recognizes another thief. He didn’t know who she was or why she was interested in Coyote. But he had to do away with her as well. This, he said with a satisfying sigh, made up for the other two since her death was pleasurable for them both.

  Cat listened to his confession as a priest might. With detachment. But unlike a priest, she couldn’t absolve him of his many sins and send him on his way. He touched her then, covering her hand momentarily before lifting it to his lips and licking the palm like a dog licks its master. Her lover could be so smooth and so endearing. The ease with which he seduced her at every turn made her shudder with a dread she dared not articulate, even to herself.

  “Coyote will be more careful now,” she said. “Always he will be looking over his shoulder. It will make the hunt more dangerous for you.”

  “And for you, my sweet. But also more interesting, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Still there. Under suspicion. The authorities have questioned him. They may do us a favor and charge him with murder.”

  “He’ll get out of it. Always does.” She thought for a while. Listening to the buzzing conversation around them. Taking in the glorious scenery of a clear day in P
aris. Projecting her vision far into the future. “I want to know whom he meets, what he knows, and what he finds out.”

  “Shall we turn him into a martyr, my love?”

  “We shall turn him into the most loathed, most notorious, and most feared of men. Americans never forget and they never forgive. They believe the worst of each other. They are irrational. So we will play with him the way a cat plays with a mouse. We will incapacitate him, leave a bloody trail at his back, and destroy his believability. He is useful to us only if he stays alive. And free.”

  And with this, she pushed her face up toward his. He gave her what she sought, a savage kiss that promised an equally savage night. For now, they would have to do it the Parisian way, displaying their passion in the brazen light of day, leaving both unsatisfied and panting for more.

  27

  Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman

  Wednesday, August 13

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR COLLINGSWORTH paid a call on Jack while he was taking his morning coffee.

  Having awoken early and unable to get back to sleep, he was a solitary figure on the beach, seated at a wobbly table positioned beneath an overspreading palm whose fronds diffused the long rays of a rising sun. Jack was one of a handful of early-morning worshippers, giving him a special kind of peacefulness in the post-dawn quiet. No, he amended. Not so much peacefulness as hollowness. It wasn’t a bad thing, he thought with a mental shrug. It was a welcome state of being, one that gave him a chance to make plans without the constant interruptions of overriding fears and turbulent confusions that usually gripped him by the throat and intruded on his thoughts. Except he found himself incapable of making plans. His mind had become a blank slate. He always relied on his logic, his reasoning. They abandoned him as luck had abandoned him. The clock was running out, and now he was adrift, a swimmer floating on a vast ocean with no compass to steer by. He might as well be floundering out there in the blue sea, directionless and lost. Somehow he had to swim back to shore and find the true path he was supposed to follow, whatever that was and wherever it led. Events beyond his control had led him down an endless path with no end in sight. And though the pattern of the hours had not altered, the seconds kept ticking, passing neither faster nor slower than they had before. They just seemed slower, as if the Earth had stopped rotating on its axis.