140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  He changed, draining the final few drops of his latte as he placed his gym bag inside the locker, then headed straight for the basement pool, which was twenty-five meters long with three lap lanes. At this hour, on a weekday, there was plenty of space for him to swim a hundred lengths of the fluid, rhythmic crawl that had many younger men watching in admiration.

  He slipped into the water.

  He did a couple of lengths, enjoying the feel of the water sliding around him, feeling the adrenaline light up his body.

  Then he felt something else.

  A twanging sensation in his chest.

  Having self-administered every possible test for heart function many times over, he dismissed this and powered on toward the end of another length.

  As he came out of a perfectly executed flip turn, he felt a sharp pain in his left ventricle.

  His ability to self-diagnose offered him a brief, albeit illusory, moment of control. But as he passed the ten-meter line, he realized with no little surprise that he was in ventricular fibrillation.

  Impossible.

  He couldn’t breathe, and gasping for air only made him inhale a lungful of chlorinated water. He was helpless. His entire body, including his head, was now under the surface.

  At the edges of his perception, Padley felt the water being displaced as a lifeguard dived into the pool. Within seconds, he was being dragged toward the pool’s edge, where another lifeguard helped pull him out of the water.

  The first lifeguard began CPR, but Padley had by now retreated into his oxygen-starved brain and was entirely unaware of what was going on around him. He knew he was now asystolic, which triggered the thought—absurd though it seemed—that the research he had entrusted to the CIA all those years ago had somehow come back to him with interest.

  With his body now lost to him, his mind experienced a second moment of clarity as he at last realized that for several years now, his wife had been screwing his neighbor behind his back.

  As his heart became still forever, its current, or the dearth of such, only “funny” now to an absurdist, Ralph Padley smiled inside at how beautifully circular was the nature of his death.

  Indeed, if he had been able to tell anyone, he would have said he was quite convinced he saw his brother’s angelic face before everything went dark and he entirely forgot who he was and how he fitted into anything at all.

  10

  Times Square, New York City

  One o’clock came and went, and no one turned up.

  When I say no one, I don’t mean it literally. People were there. Tons of them. It seemed like nothing short of a serious hurricane could keep the hordes away from the chaotic maelstrom that was Times Square, anytime of day or night. But of all the people there, no one approached or made contact with me.

  Which surprised me.

  My instincts had been pulling for the guy to be real, either way: whether he was a deep throat, or bait. Either one could help me find out more about my dad and Corrigan. I’d somehow reached the conclusion that it was going to happen, and I was leaning toward him being the real deal and genuinely having some critical information to share with me. And if that was the case, and he hadn’t shown up, it would mean two things: either he got spooked, or someone got to him first.

  I mean, I was there. I got there early, scoped the place out. It was packed, as always—in fact, more so. This close to Christmas, it gets even crazier than normal. The square, particularly that part of it, the pedestrianized area by the TKTS tickets booth, was like a condensed mini-Vegas, heaving with people, music, car horns, monster LED screens and neon lights, a relentless assault on the senses, which pretty much summed up most of Manhattan these days. I ended up standing there for over half an hour, scanning the area while my eyes and ears suffered its total onslaught. And in the midst of all that chaos, between the daze of wide-eyed tourists, harried locals, gawkers, hawkers, Elmos and Captain Americas and guitar-playing rhinestone cowboys, it was almost impossible to tell if anyone was watching me. Which was one of the reasons why Times Square was a favorite for unorthodox meetings like this. That, and the multiple routes through which to slip away.

  I was annoyed. I wanted him to be here. I needed to hear what he had to say about my dad. Up until his call, all I’d had were my suspicions, based on seeing his initials in that file Corrigan was mentioned in, along with ‘Azorian’ on his desk. The coincidence was too big to ignore, but on the other hand, it would have been great to discover there was actually no connection between my dad and my bête noire.

  The phone call had kind of nuked that possibility.

  By one thirty, it was time to move on. I checked my phone yet again. Nothing. And it was a thirteen-block walk down to Penn Station, where Tess and our Acela fast train to DC were waiting for me.

  Seated on the bleachers above the TKTS booth while feigning to surf through an iPad, Sandman observed the federal agent who was waiting for the meeting that wouldn’t happen.

  The iPad was a great prop for this kind of surveillance. Despite the cold and despite the swarm of activity all around him, everyone there, it seemed, was lost in some kind of handheld device, teleported to some alternate social realm—even those who weren’t sitting alone. This new norm was actually quite a boon when it came to shadowing targets. It gave operatives like Sandman something to do with their hands, which, he knew, was something aspiring actors always worried about. Many years and many deaths ago, he’d taken an acting course. Not that he ever wanted to be an actor. He just knew it would help him be more convincing while in character. He’d inhabited many personas in the course of his work and, despite all those kills, he was still a faceless ghost that hadn’t appeared on a single police report or sketch artist’s portrait.

  His attention focused on Reilly, he casually scrolled through the pages of The Huffington Post, his default site. It always gave him a perverse thrill to glance at the opinions of people who thought that what they expressed in blogs and comments had any impact on what actually happened. He knew the real power in the world was beyond the reach of these naïve souls. He had probably done more to affect the flow of recent history than all of the site’s bloggers combined.

  Another of Sandman’s targets was about to fall asleep forever.

  He’d altered his look for the occasion, as he frequently did. Today, he sported a short black beard, some thick-rimmed glasses, and a beige Gant cap over a thick navy blue reversible jacket and faded jeans. He knew how to pass unnoticed, how to keep changing positions while keeping an eye on his quarry. He was a master at surveillance, so much so that not even a well-trained, talented agent would spot him.

  Reilly, he was sure, hadn’t.

  No one had made contact with the FBI agent. No one slipped him anything, old-school style. There had been no dead drop, no manila envelope or memory stick passed to him by some slippery contact.

  Which was good.

  It meant Padley hadn’t reached out to Reilly from the grave. Not yet, anyway. From here on they’d need to make sure that if he did, whatever he’d intended to give Reilly wouldn’t see the light of day. Not that they had any reason to think Padley had anything to reach out with. Sandman had stuck around long enough to watch Padley’s wife hurry out of the house when the call about his drowning came in. He’d sneaked in and searched the doctor’s home office and come up empty-handed. He’d need to do the same at the doctor’s office, as soon as he got a chance. Their inside man at the NSA had already gone through Padley’s hard drives and found nothing.

  He watched as Reilly checked his watch and scanned the busy square again.

  Still nothing.

  As he studied Reilly, he wondered how he would ultimately choose to terminate the man. The agent was young, fit, outwardly healthy—and attuned to outside threats. It was an interesting and challenging assignment, to be sure. Unlike Padley. That had been a cakewalk. Sure, the doctor was being careful. But he was old, and although he didn’t look it or act it, at death’s door. And the cance
r would have killed him anyway. Not that he felt he needed any self-justification, but Sandman knew he was simply bringing forward the inevitable. Indeed, that was all he ever really did, for any of his victims—hasten the sleep from which one never wakes.

  A job description that, curiously, fitted his code name, even though it wasn’t how it had originated.

  His buddies had christened him Sandman when the heavy partying had kicked in back in junior high, which was when he first started putting his unusual characteristic to use: he hardly needed any sleep. Three or four hours a night were plenty for him, and he could easily stay awake for two or three days without flagging, all of which came in handy when it was time to juggle partying and exams. His ability to remain energetic and upbeat when all those around him were conking out amused and bewildered his friends, and so he became known as Sandman. It was a jokey, light-hearted nickname at first, and it stayed with him after he was recruited by the CIA and sent to their training facility at Camp Peary in Virginia, the place affectionately known as The Farm.

  An unusual side-effect of the estimated one- to three-percent of the population who can thrive on just a minimal amount of sleep per night is that they enjoy a high tolerance for physical and psychological pain. They’re also generally “behaviorally activated” due to subclinical hypomania, meaning they exhibit a mild form of manic behavior that is also characterised by euphoria, optimism and—useful for his chosen calling—disinhibition. Beyond his considerable talents, these innate qualities also contributed to his success at the Farm, and it was from there that he was handpicked by Roos and Tomblin for their unique assignments.

  It was after he demonstrated how effective he was as a killing machine out the field that his nickname took on an entirely different connotation. It was also a handy code name to have: it had many common associations in popular culture and parlance, which was useful in an age of ever-increasing keyword voice and data surveillance.

  Sandman watched Reilly walk off and tucked in behind him.

  It was time to find the right opportunity to execute the second part of his orders.

  11

  Arlington, Virginia

  I left the rental on North Highland, to the east of Lyon Village Park, just south of the tennis courts where the trees provided almost total cover. The temperature had hit zero, but there was no snow on the ground or forecast for the next few days. Which was lucky. Any snow and the drive from Union Station to Kirby’s neighborhood would have been a hellish nightmare of unintended donuts and stalled Priuses.

  I was as low-key as I could be without attracting undue attention in this upscale neighborhood. Underneath the wool cap and winter parka I could have been anyone as I followed the curve of Twentieth Street North and around Lyon Village Community House with its colonial-style bell tower. I could see the Lee Highway behind a low cluster of pristine apartment buildings. It was the tail end of the route I drove to get here.

  Passing a small, well-maintained parking lot before skirting a small cluster of trees and bushes, I turned left onto North Harvard Street.

  The houses were large here. Between four and six bedrooms, worth anything upward of one and a half million apiece, easy. But there was a strong atmosphere of tradition and neighborly feeling. Of course, there was as much moral compromise here as anywhere else. Had to be. It was just better concealed.

  As I turned in to Twenty-first Street North, I could see the gabled roof of the three-story house that I knew belonged to Kirby. A Stars and Stripes hung from the flagpole that stuck out from the central gable, same as it did on the Google Maps Street View when I’d checked out Kirby’s address that morning.

  There were lights on inside and I assumed his wife and kids were already back home. Kirby himself was due to arrive back in the next half hour, or so Kurt had concluded after a thorough trawl of the Kirby family’s recent credit card statements.

  I stepped off the sidewalk and walked over to a group of trees at the edge of a large lawn. Standing within them, I was pretty much completely camouflaged. The lawn rolled up toward a large, Dutch-style house, which stood across the street and a couple of houses down from the gabled house.

  My watch showed twenty after six. Not long now.

  I did a quick three-sixty sweep.

  The street was quiet apart from a young couple pushing a baby buggy back home after a bracing walk around the block—probably with the intention of sending the buggy’s inhabitant to sleep.

  No security lights that I could see. No cameras either. The residents obviously trusted their neighbors to be vigilant.

  It wasn’t long before a dark blue Lexus sedan pulled around the corner. As it turned right onto the driveway of the gabled house, the garage door started to swing open, its mechanism activated from inside the car.

  The driver remained inside his vehicle for a moment.

  I broke from behind the trees and started to walk briskly toward the open garage door.

  Kirby finally climbed out of the Lexus, a shopping bag clutched in his left hand, his keys held between thumb and forefinger.

  The garage door started to close.

  Kirby opened the rear passenger door and leant in to retrieve something with his right hand.

  I sprinted quietly to close the final few yards, ducked under the open garage door and dragged the first thing I saw, a plastic box of rollerblades, level with the frame, blocking the safety beam and ensuring the door could not close.

  Kirby, his head inside the car, hadn’t heard me enter the garage. He ducked out of the passenger door and straightened, a bouquet of roses in his right hand.

  When he saw me facing him all the blood drained from his face. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I gestured toward the flowers. “Making amends?”

  I could see him wrestling with his instinct to blow up in my face. After a moment he seemed to relax, choosing level-headedness over righteous indignation.

  “What are you doing here?” he hissed. “I told you I never wanted to see you again.”

  The garage door had already tried to swing shut then opened again.

  “I need you to do something else for me.”

  From inside a navy blue Chevy Malibu parked less than twenty yards farther along the street, Sandman was listening through a long-range directional pipe microphone. Accompanying visuals were provided courtesy of a sniper’s scope.

  He had been surveilling Reilly ever since the agent’s aborted meeting with Padley. The train journey from New York City to DC had been uneventful. As advised, there had been a car waiting for him at Union Station, its key in a magnetized case stuck to the underside of the chassis. The car had been parked in such a position as to allow Sandman to tail his target as he left the station.

  The moment it was clear which house Reilly was interested in, he sent the address via encrypted email to one of his employers’ data geeks. The surprising response, less than a minute later, told him the house belonged to one of their co-workers, a career analyst at the CIA named Stan Kirby. The man had spent twenty-five years at Langley and was currently a senior intelligence analyst with Level 2-B clearance. Despite two disciplinary warnings for timekeeping, he still had full benefits and was due the company’s top-tier pension package.

  Sandman focused on the sound coming through his earbuds as Kirby gave his reply.

  “Something else? No. Fuck you. You said we were done last time.”

  “I know, and that was what I’d hoped,” he heard Reilly say. “But something new came up, and I have no choice.”

  “No choice, no choice,” the analyst mocked. “Don’t give me that crap again. You love doing this.”

  I tensed up. This wasn’t going well. “I don’t. But I’m willing to do what I need to do to get answers.”

  “Yeah, well, screw you. Screw. You. I’m done with this bullshit. You wanna tell my wife, go ahead. Hell, her sister was the best thing that happened to me—until you ruined it.”

  I held his scowl, then shru
gged and pulled out my phone. “Fine. That’s the way you want to play it.”

  I feigned dialing a number, then brought the phone up to my ear.

  Kirby’s face sank. “What are you doing?”

  “Calling your wife. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  He dropped the flowers and shopping bag and leapt at me, his hands swatting at the phone. “Are you fucking nuts? Hang up. Kill the God damn call.”

  I brought the phone down and stared him down.

  “What is it this time?” he asked, beaten down and angry.

  “My father. I want to know what the agency has on him.”

  Sandman had already guessed at the history here. The agent had blackmailed someone inside the CIA. He had his own personal mole there. And that presented his superiors with a problem. If Reilly had been fed classified information relating to anything that involved them, he was a direct threat. Especially seeing as the call from Padley would have confirmed for the agent that there were layers he had yet to peel back.

  “Your father?” Kirby said. “Who the hell is your father?”

  “Colin Reilly. He’s dead. He died in 1980. There’s a mention of him in one of the Corrigan files you got me.”

  Sandman shook his head at Reilly’s impetuous nature. In the morning, he fails to get hold of information he thinks might unlock an impenetrable mystery, and by the evening he’s attempting to reactivate a relationship of coercion from which he’d already got out completely clean. It was exactly the kind of reckless behavior that was liable to get you killed.

  The reckless behavior that presented Sandman with an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.