Girl of Lies (Rachel's Peril)

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  He scanned the street again. Across from them and slightly behind, two men were walking. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered Dylan, but one of them kept eyeing the sisters. Too many times for comfort. Both of them wore nondescript grey suits and one of them spoke on a telephone. Of course the street was crowded with other people: workers leaving their offices, a few scattered soldiers from Walter Reed, men and women headed to rendezvous and happy hours.

  He turned and walked backward for a second. He caught Leah Simpson’s eye and discreetly pointed toward the men across the street.

  She nodded. “Already on it,” she said in a conversational tone. “We need to get you guys inside. But slowly. Let’s not alert them, all right?”

  “Alert who?” Alexandra asked.

  The other sisters stalled, and Dylan spoke in a low, even and tense voice, “Keep walking, relax. Don’t. Panic. Andrea, can you tell us something funny? Have any good stories?”

  Andrea looked frightened for just a moment, and Dylan thought she wasn’t going to be able to hold up. But she clenched a fist and began speaking. Her voice started out shaky.

  “When I was fourteen, Uncle Luis took me to Rome. That week changed my life. Abuelita always took me to church. But it was different. Rome was different.”

  She paused for just a second. They kept walking as she tried to formulate her words. Dylan found himself scanning everyone on the street. A man in a t-shirt and jeans stood in the doorway of a shuttered Thai restaurant near the Starbucks. He was smoking a cigarette and talking on a phone, running his left hand across the stubble of a buzz cut. Was he a potential kidnapper? Who was it that went after Andrea in the first place? Why were the guys across the street following them? Or were they, even? Maybe they were just checking out the four Thompson sisters—all of them highly attractive—across the street. After all, they stood out. Andrea and Carrie were both six plus feet tall, and Sarah had those bizarre black markings outlining her scars. And Alex… Alex was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life.

  And right now, Alex and her sisters were potentially in danger. Without even realizing it, Dylan was walking and thinking like a soldier again. Despite his injuries more than two years before, despite the fact that he was long out of the military, now he walked along, his eyes scanning everywhere, ready to act, ready to move, when he saw it coming.

  Andrea was still speaking. “When I looked up at the ceiling in the chapel… you can’t believe how beautiful it is. This was the work… the work people built to raise up to God. To praise him.” As she spoke, the enthusiasm clearly shone through her words. This wasn’t just a story—she believed in what she was talking about.

  The two men across the street. One of them broke off, approaching the guy in the doorway with the buzz cut and the phone.

  Buzzcut dropped his phone. He didn’t close it, or switch it off—he just dropped it. And his hands kept moving.

  Without a moment’s thought, Dylan shouted, “Get down,” then grabbed Alex and Carrie’s arms, pulling them low behind a car parallel parked beside the street. Leah Simpson did the same with Sarah and Andrea. As Dylan lowered himself behind the car, Buzzcut appeared to drive something into the stomach of the approaching man.

  Gunshots rang out.

  1. Bear. April 29. 6:17 ppm

  BEAR WYDEN HUNG UP the phone. Tension filled his body, a need to get up and move. After Leah’s call, he’d immediately contacted the DSS offices and dispatched additional agents to Bethesda. But it was highly unlikely they would have anyone on site in time to affect the situation. Whatever the situation was.

  Right now he had to wait.

  He didn’t want to fucking wait. Bear was a cop, not a desk jockey. And that was his ex-wife out there. And whether he liked it or not, he had to sit here and wait. He needed to calm down and focus, not go charging into the situation.

  So he turned back to the Richard Thompson file, with new questions. Was Thompson CIA? Or had he been? Had his work at State somehow been cover for something else? He’d retired from the Foreign Service twelve years before. So it seemed likely that he was pursuing a dead end looking through ancient documents, when the most likely reason for all this attention was his appointment as Secretary of Defense.

  On the other hand… Secretary Perry had personally handed him these documents. And he wasn’t known for doing things on a whim.

  So he reviewed the file and immediately saw an unusual pattern.

  In Indonesia, Richard Thompson was detailed as a protocol officer for five years—an exceptionally long assignment. Then he was back at Main State for three years, followed by an assignment to Spain that barely lasted eleven months. That was highly unusual, but might be related to the fact that he’d apparently met and married a woman there.

  A quick review of her file from 1981 revealed nothing terribly interesting. Adelina Ramos was young when they got married, the daughter of a florist in Madrid.

  Thompson had no performance evaluation for his posting to Spain. The next move in his career was a surprise, given that he had a new wife and child. In 1982 he was posted to Pakistan. For… slightly less than two years.

  Bear rubbed his forehead. He’d reviewed a lot of personnel files over the years. And he’d almost never seen a pattern like this. Foreign Service assignments were typically three years, exactly. But it fit the theory that Thompson was CIA. During the early 80s, the US Embassy in Pakistan had more intelligence officers than diplomats. Which meant he probably spent most of his time off doing classified work in Afghanistan or God only knew where else. Those years were some of the bloodiest following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

  He thought back to the early 90s, when he knew the Thompson family. Ironic that Richard Thompson hadn’t recognized Bear, but not that surprising given what he knew about the character of the man. In 1992 Richard Thompson had been a remote figure: arrogant and dismissive. He’d been argumentative too, insisting he knew more about the security arrangements than was normal for diplomats. His wife had been a pain in the ass too, but in a different way, demanding to know intimate details of the security operation. She struck Bear as anxiety prone, worried unnecessarily about details far beyond her purview.

  He remembered the oldest daughter, Julia. At the time she was ten years old. Curly brown hair. The loneliest little girl he’d ever seen. When he made the security arrangements, he’d assigned the youngest Marine in the detail to her. The two became fiercely attached, and Bear remembered all too well seeing her tagging along around the Embassy with him, usually in the garage where he’d somehow wrangled the space for three classic cars that he was always working on when off duty. It was an embarrassing waste of manpower to have a US Marine effectively babysitting a ten-year-old girl, but it was also important. The younger daughter, Carrie, also had her own guard.

  When the assignment started, Adelina Thompson had insisted on interviewing the personal guards, an hour long ordeal for each of them that left the Marines sweating. She might have been a tiny, young and inexperienced woman, but she’d been fiercely protective of her daughters and made sure the bodyguards knew it.

  In retrospect, it was interesting. The order to provide a protective detail to Thompson’s family had come from Main State, but Bear couldn’t recall the circumstances. It wasn’t exactly normal, and Leah had asked him about it. Years before their marriage, she’d been assigned to the protective detail. It was unusual enough she’d asked about it. Orders from Washington.

  She’d been right to wonder. Security details were routine, but dedicated security details for a specific family? That was unusual indeed. He made a note to look into it.

  The phone rang. Bear snatched it up. “Bear.”

  “Bear, it’s Leah!” The words came at a fast-pitched shout and he shot out of his seat. “Shots fired here. We’re moving the family back to the condo now.”

  “Wait. What happened?”

  2. Carrie. April 29. 6:17 pm

  Carrie didn’t, at first, pay
much attention to Dylan when he suddenly became alert, walking backwards, scanning the street.

  At the time, she was too busy. Too busy listening very closely to her sister Andrea, who was describing her experience in Rome, and specifically the awakening of her faith, in a way that Carrie found almost shocking. Shocking and… attractive?

  Carrie was not quite thirty. She was a mother and a widow. She was a scientist. A pragmatist. She’d grown up attending Roman Catholic services when necessity or family obligations required, but that was it. But Andrea… her youngest sister, barely half her age, had a glow in her eyes when she described how she found herself in awe and wonder in the cathedrals of Rome.

  So she paid only the barest attention when Dylan said, “Keep walking, don’t panic.”

  But that oblivious stance came to a sudden crashing halt when Dylan shouted, “Get down!” and yanked at her arm, pulling her to the ground behind a car.

  “What?” she started to ask then froze in place, at the sound of gunshots. First one, a low intense sound, so loud she felt it in her chest. That was followed by a succession of shots, two, then four, then more.

  Dylan, her brother-in-law, Alex’s husband, Ray’s best friend… kneeled behind the car, one hand on her back and one on Alex’s, holding them down. He muttered, “Motherfuckers!”

  A knife shaped icicle pressed in Carrie’s chest, as her mind circled around her daughter, Rachel. What if something happened to Carrie? Who would take care of her daughter? She’d promised Ray. She promised him. But he died anyway, and now there was no one, and who the hell was shooting and what did they want and pleasekeepmydaughtersafe and she felt herself begin to hyperventilate.

  “Stay down,” Dylan commanded. His eyes scanned the street as he spoke, his face a rictus, a savage mask. For just a second Carrie expected war paint. Ray Sherman—who had, after all, been Dylan’s sergeant—was the love of her life. But she’d never seen him with a warlike expression, she’d never seen him threatened in a physical way like going into battle, and the sight of Dylan with that expression raised a clamor of loss and rage of grief all over again.

  And then he was gone.

  “Dylan!” Alexandra shouted as he stepped, suddenly, out from behind the car and ran. Across the street. Toward the shooting.

  Alexandra cried out after her husband, and her legs started to straighten, as if she’d lost her mind too and was about to run out into the street after him. Carrie grabbed her arm and said, “No!” and a moment later Leah Simpson had her arm on Alexandra.

  “Stay the fuck down,” the woman said, an expression of rage on her face.

  Another gunshot, and Alexandra screamed, and then there was a scuffle followed by a loud thud, and Leah Simpson was up and running too.

  “Just stay,” Carrie said to her sister, wrapping her arms around her. But for once, Carrie wasn’t protecting anyone else but her and her daughter. She grabbed Alexandra selfishly, urgently, because no matter what happened, they needed to take care of each other, no matter what happened. Rachel was going to need them both, and Alexandra running after her fool of a husband to protect him from gunshots wasn’t going to do any good at all.

  Carrie had lost all the family she was willing to lose.

  Alexandra struggled more, until finally Leah was standing over them again a minute or a hundred years later, her dirty blonde hair bedraggled and slick with sweat.

  “You can let her up,” Leah said, but Carrie didn’t believe her, and she held on, and then Dylan was back. His face was a mask of concern, but Carrie couldn’t see it. What she saw was the violence underneath. The violence they’d committed in Afghanistan, the violence that kept going and going, destroying more lives, the violence that killed her husband.

  For the first time in her life, for just a second, Carrie hated soldiers and everything they stood for.

  “Carrie, it’s okay,” Dylan said. “Let her go.”

  Just the sound of his voice was enough to set Leah Simpson off.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Paris?”

  Dylan did a double take. Carrie eased her arms off of Alexandra, who finally got to her feet and threw her arms around him.

  “You heard me,” Leah said. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  Dylan only half paid attention to Alexandra’s stranglehold as he turned toward the Diplomatic Security office. “What I was thinking,” he said, “was that I saw a threat to my family, and no one was doing anything about it.”

  Leah’s mouth dropped open. “So you just charge someone with a gun?”

  Dylan shrugged. “He’s down, isn’t he?”

  Leah’s nostrils were flared, her eyes two pinholes of fury, as she said, “My job is to protect you. We had DSS agents to take care of that.”

  “Yeah, well I wasn’t waiting around for them to get their act together.”

  At this point Alexandra broke off from Dylan, growing confusion and anger on her face.

  Leah pointed at Dylan. “You interfere with anything like that ever again and I’ll see to it you spend the night in a jail cell.”

  He shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time, lady. Threaten me with something worthwhile, why don’t you?”

  Leah’s shoulders slumped. Then she marched off, her only parting word, “Stay right here.”

  Carrie watched as she stomped off, veering toward the far side of the street. There, two men were lying in a growing puddle of blood. A third had his hands tied behind his back with zip ties. He muttered and cursed. Two armed men stood over him, their pistols out as they scanned the street for threats.

  Less than a minute later, she was back at their side. “We’ve got more officers on the way. In the meantime, I want you all back at the condo.”

  Carrie looked at her sisters. Andrea had her eyes closed, her lips moving. Was she praying? Impossible to tell, but that’s what it looked like. Sarah was sitting on the ground, leaning against the car. Her eyes stared off into space, expression not that different from the way she’d looked in the hospital those weeks after she was injured and Ray killed.

  Alexandra was saying something urgently to Dylan, her eyes boring into him.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t. I did exactly what needed to be done.”

  “You could have been killed.”

  “I could have been killed anyway, Alex. I could have been run over on the way here. I could have been killed in Afghanistan. It’s my job to protect you, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Her response had an edge of hysteria. “Even if I end up a widow like Carrie?”

  Carrie took a step back from the two of them, feeling as if she’d been punched in the gut. A hard, ruthless punch, delivered cold and with precision by someone who loved her.

  Dylan’s expression said much the same thing. But Carrie didn’t wait around to find out what his response was. She turned to her youngest sisters, Andrea and Sarah, and said, “Come on.”

  She knew they followed her. Because that’s what happened when Carrie gave orders. And because seconds later, she heard Sarah’s voice, in a hiss. “That was a shitty thing to say, Alex.”

  Armed escort at their flanks with pistols out, Carrie led her family back toward the condominium.

  3. George-Phillip. April 29

  It was 11:54 pm, but a low buzz still filled the card room of White’s on St. James’ Street in London.

  White’s was a gentlemen’s club. Not the modern definition of the word, with women swinging on poles, though George-Phillip had been given to understand that a similarly named White’s Gentlemen’s Club in London was exactly that. This White’s, however, was considerably more reserved. Founded in 1693, it was an extremely exclusive club. For more than three centuries it had been men only, a private reserve for the extremely powerful and wealthy. One did not just request membership in the club: White’s was invitation only, and often the only way onto its membership roles was proximity to royalty.

  George-Phillip, at last count 46th in line for the t
hrone, was still close enough to rate membership in the club. George-Phillip had been sponsored for club membership by the Prince of Wales in 1983. That sponsorship was a result of his father’s death in a car accident when George-Phillip was seventeen, leaving him the Duke of Kent at far too young an age.

  Sadly, it was an issue of membership that was on everyone’s lips right now. In 2008 the Prime Minister had publicly resigned from the club. Others had actually turned down their offers of membership. All because of the fact that White’s—a gentlemen’s club, after all—did not count women among its members.

  George-Phillip, egalitarian though he was about most issues, saw no difficulty with a men’s only club. Nor would he have concerns with a women’s only club. Sometimes one needed a place to be undisturbed by members of the opposite sex.

  “The problem is the liberal newspapers,” said Rory Wheeler, the gentleman currently sitting across the table from George-Phillip. “They print these libelous stories about the club and it generates hostility. I shouldn’t be surprised if it were sponsored by foreign spies, George-Phillip. You really should have your MI-6 people look into it.”

  George-Phillip didn’t bother to correct that his agency was no longer known as MI-6. He also never discussed his work as head of the Secret Intelligence Service with anyone, especially newspaper owners such as Rory. He felt a moment of pain as profound as midnight. Anne, his wife, would have appreciated this story. He and Anne had never been passionate—that was reserved for George-Phillip’s first love—but they’d been partners. They had enjoyed each other’s company, they had loved, and they had laughed. She would have spent an unreasonable amount of time chuckling over Rory Wheeler’s bizarre opinions.

  It was a blessing, really. Jane was only 13 months old when Anne passed away on Christmas Eve of 2008 after a very short, painful battle with pancreatic cancer. Jane had no memory of her mother.