140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  Over the years, both lines of work had progressed successfully. Some ground-breaking research into hearts grown from adult stem cells had eventually put him squarely back on the medical map. Padley had found a way to grow cells that were capable of maintaining a stable electrical charge, without which even the most perfect artificially grown heart simply wasn’t viable for use in a living human being. He resolutely failed to see the irony that someone with no sense of humor had spent his entire professional career to date working with what had been christened the “funny current”, that is, the current that spontaneously occurs in the sinoatrial and atrioventricular nodes of the heart. Or to put it more simply, as he did to his students with a tone as patronizing as it was lacking in self-awareness: the electrical current that provides life to everyone in the lecture theater unless they’re wearing a pacemaker.

  His discovery appeased the faculty that had sunk more over a million dollars into his earlier, “abandoned”, pharmacological research. More than appeased, in fact, since they stood to make many times their investment from patents covering Padley’s work.

  So everyone was happy, except that Padley was still the dour control freak he had always been and his third wife had, much like her predecessors, still failed to achieve a single orgasm with her husband. Given that he’d never been able to bless her with children either, he at least had the decency never to question her burgeoning credit card purchases. Their lack of reproduction, though no longer a point of argument, had left a deep hole in his wife’s soul—or so she put it—a hole that she filled with fundraising dinners and the aforementioned trysts with Boston’s foremost theatre critic.

  Less than a year before, however, everything changed. His whole world was upended by his test results.

  He didn’t have long to live.

  The unwelcome, uninvited guest that was metastatic pancreatic cancer was also a very brutal and unforgiving one.

  His emotive responses to it were unorthodox.

  A life at the cutting edge of medicine meant denial was never going to be an issue.

  The same applied to anger and bargaining—the very notions were beneath him.

  Acceptance was already well anchored inside him—so well anchored that he refused to go through the rounds of chemotherapy that might slightly prolong his life. He didn’t want to spend the time he had left either in hospitals or sick from the after-effects.

  A sense of depression, however, did take root very quickly, and from that depression something else emerged: a fear of what awaited him in the hereafter, and an urgent, rapidly growing need for atonement.

  Memories from years of covert operations and replays of hushed conversations were now vividly consuming his days and his nights. The faces of the dead, in photographs or newspapers or on television screens, accosted him at the most unexpected times, clamoring for attention and shouting out for retribution, while the disturbing, subconscious imagery of eternal damnation haunted his dreams.

  Much as he tried to shake off this unfamiliar onset of guilt and regret, he couldn’t escape it.

  He needed to do something about it. He had to seek out some kind of forgiveness. He feared that he was well past redemption, even though he’d always been taught it was always a possibility if the intent was honest and pure. His wasn’t necessarily so; it was driven by a very deep-seated, primal fear. But it was all he had.

  He thought long and hard about what he could do. He didn’t discuss it with anyone; not his wife, not his shrink, not even his priest. He would do this alone. If it wasn’t possible to change the past, perhaps he could, at least, affect the future. But doing it would be tricky—and dangerous. And although he didn’t have much time left to worry about in terms of losing it, he clung, like many people who were suddenly faced with their impending death, to every day he had left.

  No, he would need to be careful. And what he did had to be effective too, if he was going to have a chance at the redemption he sought.

  His first attempt had proved disastrous. He’d thought he’d chosen well. The man he’d selected had solid credentials. But despite all the meticulous planning, despite knowing what he was up against and being aware of the capabilities of the very people who were now his enemies, Padley had failed. The person he’d reached out to was now dead. That man’s death had, Padley was sure, come as a blessing after the torture he had no doubt been subjected to. But Padley’s planning had at least been successful at one thing: it had kept him safe. No one had come after him. He was still free, he was still breathing. Which meant his precautions had worked.

  He just needed to be even more selective in who he approached this time.

  Days and weeks of mulling had yielded a handful of possibilities, but one of them stood out more and more with each deliberation. It even had, he thought, an elegant symmetry to it, which pleased his overly ordered mind.

  He would make the call today, he decided. He’d be even more vigilant, more careful, than he had been the first time around. He’d use a different prepaid cell phone; one he’d also purchased for cash and that couldn’t be traced back to him. He’d still use the agency-level voice changer for the call, the one he’d used on his first attempt. Most importantly, he’d be very, very clear in warning the man about what not to do.

  After that, it would be out of his hands.

  He’d just need Special Agent Sean Reilly to be as effective at his job as Padley had been at both of his.

  WEDNESDAY

  3

  Mamaroneck, New York

  A gray-white union of sea, land and sky was barely worrying the drapes when consciousness seeped back into me. I twisted around and checked the time: noon. I know this sounds very decadent, but I’d only got back from Jersey just before six.

  Nick and I had handed over to Deutsch and Lendowski shortly after five, a move that generated the usual sardonic, if unmerited, quip from Lendowski. I had plenty of time for Annie Deutsch. She was in her early thirties and usually wore that earnest demeanor shared by many ex-cops during their first couple of years with the Bureau, her face locked in an expression that looked like its wearer has been told they weren’t allowed to smile ever again. She was attractive and single, two facts on which most of the discussions regarding her had quickly zeroed in. Lendowski, on the other hand, I could do without. Six foot two and pure muscle, he possessed a personality one would describe as belligerent—if one were being kind. He also had that holier-than-thou attitude that always made me suspicious, like it was a fine line between which side of the law he’d ended up on.

  I’d given Nick a lift to Federal Plaza so he could retrieve his own car from the parking garage. Neither of us had much energy left for conversation. The city had looked coldly beautiful as dawn forced its way across Manhattan’s skyline. A few Christmas lights shone in pockets of synchronized color, and it was enough to remind anyone who had forgotten that New York was still the greatest city in the world.

  These overnights were actually a killer. As Nick climbed out of the Expedition, he reminded me to try and stay awake on the final leg. A couple of nights back, I’d very nearly fallen asleep at the wheel and had needed to pull over and grab an hour’s shut-eye before driving home. Then I’d woken with a jolt at two in the afternoon, convinced that my alarm had sounded only moments before. Throw the body clock out of whack and the mind can do strange things. I was now looking forward to doing away with the Nosferatu schedule and getting back to a more normal, mortal routine.

  Tess had driven my five-year-old son Alex to school and left me to finish off my fitful six hours. Miss Chaykin—we’re not married—is my partner in everything but law enforcement, although that last bit was debatable, given our various adventures these last few years. I’ve never slept easy alone, and the past few weeks of night shifts and disrupted schedules had only served to underline how addicted I was to having Tess’s warm body beside me.

  We joked that, as a couple, this could be the closest we’d ever get to the sleepless nights and constant
demands of caring for a baby, given that we hadn’t had one together and were still debating whether having one now would be a good move. I was in two minds about that. It wasn’t something I’d ever experienced. I’d missed the first decade or so of Tess’s daughter Kim, who was now fifteen, given that Tess and I only met a few years ago.

  I’d also missed out on most of my own son’s young life, given that his mom—someone I had a brief, but intense, fling with a few years ago—had neglected to tell me about him until she and I had reconnected last summer. Not exactly your classic Hallmark family, but these days, I guess, few families are.

  Kim was a great girl, more a fine testimony to Tess’s single-parenting skills than to anything I had contributed since we’d all started living together. She and I got along really well. Much like her mom, she was impossibly headstrong and as sharp as The Bride’s samurai blade, by turns delighting us with her growing independence and infuriating us with her dismissal of entirely reasonable boundaries. After the mortal risks I’d seen her mother take, survive, then thrive upon, I really shouldn’t have been at all surprised. I even liked her boyfriend, Giorgio, a year older than her and a junior who already had Yale in his sights, despite their current sub-seven-percent admission rate. I’d once pictured myself pulling the Bad Boys routine on my daughter’s boyfriend’s ass, shotgun, wife-beater, and bottle of whiskey included, but the darned kid, clever and yet cool and sporty, had cruelly deprived me of any such pleasure.

  Alex, on the other hand, still hadn’t shaken off his demons. But at least he and Kim had bonded pretty much instantly. To her credit, she had happily embraced the big sister role that had been thrust upon her, and seeing them together was a source of solace in the bittersweet world I seemed doomed to inhabit.

  I threw on a T-shirt and some sweatpants and lumbered down to the kitchen. Despite still feeling groggy, it didn’t take long for the Daland/Maxiplenty case to recede into inconsequence, shoved aside by the resurgent and aforementioned white whales that were crowding my mind. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My globetrotting adventures with Tess had served to reinforce the notion that we’re never done with the past. Or rather, the past is never done with us. It’s just a matter of the correct key being turned in the right lock and all the secrets come tumbling out. And we can never know how we’re going to deal with them until they’re staring us in the face.

  Shuffling into the kitchen, I could hear Tess in her home office, tapping away at her desk with the usual deft precision. It still took me twice as long as it should to file a simple report. I poured myself some coffee, glanced at the front page of the New York Times on Tess’s charging iPad, then wandered, mug in hand, into the study, where my very own bestselling novelist/paramour was busy knocking out yet another page-turner.

  She sat behind a very cool, huge aluminum desk that had been crafted from the tip of an old aircraft’s wing; a gift from yours truly after her first novel hit the New York Times bestsellers list. Her eyes lingered on her screen as I sat down in an armchair facing her, coffee cradled in both hands. My attention was drawn to the rear of the house. The deck and small garden were, I now noticed, dotted with strands of miniature red and green lights. I gazed through the French doors, transfixed for a moment, then Tess looked up and smiled that radiant smile that always makes me give a conflicted and perverse thanks for the violent night when we first met.

  She swung her long legs out from behind the desk. “Christmas lights and two thousand words already. Not a bad morning’s work, huh?”

  I smiled. “You’re such a slacker. No lunch break for you.”

  She tilted her head and pursed her lips. “Actually, I figured we’d skip lunch and just head upstairs and you could help me choose which dress to wear Thursday night. Unless you have other plans?”

  I was about to voice an objection—I mean, sure, we were going to be having dinner with the president. The president. At the White House. The dress choice was, I guess, important—and then, the look on her face as she’d said it hit a certain sweet spot inside my skull and I realized that this was code for something else entirely.

  Jeez, I love this woman.

  I titled my head, mock-studying her. “I did, but I know how much the holiday season means to you and the last thing I’d want is to disappoint you.”

  She flashed me a grin. “Hang on to that thought, cowboy.”

  I did have plans. I’d arranged to meet Kurt Jaegers in Jersey. Kurt was a white-hat hacker, a tech wizard who was helping me out privately, totally off the books. He’d asked for a meet, which could mean he had news for me, good news. I wasn’t holding my breath, but I also had some new ideas on how he could help me with the white whales I was hunting.

  Right now, all that could wait.

  I needed to live a little first.

  So, about those white whales I mentioned earlier, the ones preoccupying me during the stake-out at Daland’s house. The ones Nick and the Bureau couldn’t know about.

  Not one, but two things eating away at me, chewing me up from the inside.

  Come to think of it, I’m not sure whale is the best metaphor here. Something like the alien from, well, Alien, the one that burst out of John Hurt’s chest in the first movie, is probably a better fit.

  It all had to do with my son Alex, and my dad.

  For starters, I was still trying to track down the elusive “Reed Corrigan.” Corrigan—real name, unknown—is the ex-CIA spook who had orchestrated the brainwashing of Alex earlier this year. A son I never knew I had, up until then. His mom, Michelle, an ex-DEA agent I’d dated while on assignment in Mexico, before I met Tess, had never told me she got pregnant. While living out in California, Michelle and Alex had got caught up in a sick plan to flush out a psycho Mexican drug baron nicknamed “El Brujo”—the sorcerer. The plan involved brainwashing Alex and using him as bait. Corrigan had worked on the CIA’s mind control programs and had arranged to have some pretty disturbing things dumped into Alex’s brain. The plan had gone seriously wrong and I’d got sucked into it. It had ended up causing Michelle’s death and left me and Tess to pick up the pieces with Alex while Corrigan, whoever he was, was still out there somewhere.

  I wasn’t going to stop until I found the bastard.

  Alex was now doing better, thanks to a shrink we’d been taking him to see every week. His nightmares had subsided, but they were still there, off and on. Moreover, the nasty things they’d planted in his mind about me were, I felt—maybe more out of hope than out of anything concrete—starting to subside. I didn’t get the feeling that he was looking at me as apprehensively and fearfully as he often used to. We were tiptoeing our way into doing some normal father-and-son stuff, like me taking him to Teeball practice on Saturday mornings, but we still had a long ways to go.

  To find Corrigan, I’d recruited Kurt to help me get into the CIA’s files. When that didn’t work, I’d resorted to blackmailing a CIA analyst Kurt had identified for me, a sleazeball called Stan Kirby who’d been having an affair with his wife’s sister. That exercise had mixed results. On the one hand, and totally unexpectedly, it turned out to be key in saving the president’s life—hence our forthcoming dinner at the White House with the Yorkes themselves in a couple of days’ time. On the other hand, it hadn’t been much use in helping me get my hands on Reed Corrigan.

  Kirby had dug up three case files that mentioned Corrigan, but they were all highly redacted and weren’t much use.

  One of them, though, kicked up the second whale, or alien, or whatever metaphor you feel works best here. That file, which concerned an operation called “Cold Burn” that Corrigan and Fullerton had been part of, also mentioned something called “Project Azorian.” Not particularly ominous in itself, except that it then mentioned someone with the initials CR.

  I knew the name Azorian. As a ten-year-old, I’d seen it on a printout on my dad’s desk. It had sounded funny and caught my eye. When I’d asked him about it, he’d brushed it off as nothing important, and we’d joked
about it being a good name for a comic book or sci-fi movie, à la The Mighty Azorian.

  That wasn’t long before I’d found my dad slumped behind his desk shortly after he’d blown his brains out.

  My dad—Colin Reilly.

  CR.

  Seeing his initials alongside a mention of Azorian in the same file that concerned Reed Corrigan had jolted me like few things I can remember. First, my son, and now, my dad too? I was now even more determined to find this Corrigan, not just out of a burning desire to make him pay for what he did to Alex, but to find out the truth about my dad’s suicide, if that’s what it really was. I didn’t know what to believe anymore, and I had a strong feeling there was more to it. I mean, given what this creep and his crew were capable of, and given their abilities when it came to manipulating people, I was imagining all kinds of dark scenarios surrounding my dad’s death.

  It was all the more painful as I never really got a chance to know him. He was a tenure-track assistant professor at George Washington University, an expert in comparative law and jurisprudence, and he was consumed by his work. He wasn’t the most gregarious or emotive person I ever met, and he always seemed to have weightier things on his mind than hanging out with me. I don’t think he was ever able to fully park the issues that fired him up or kick back and enjoy the simple pleasures of a family life. When he was home, he spent a lot of time in that study of his, which was off limits to this ten-year-old, not an unreasonable rule given the books and paperwork that were stacked all around it and my propensity to sow havoc. I do know he was well respected, though. A lot of people turned up to his funeral, men and women who, to me at the time, seemed like a very dour bunch of people, even given the circumstances.