140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  Glancing over her shoulder to see if the cars immediately behind her were anywhere close, she slammed the Taurus into neutral and pulled the handbrake.

  The car fishtailed as it began to slow, noise and smoke filling her senses before it finally came to a stop about a hundred yards farther on.

  Tess screwed up her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief, then turned to Aparo. He wasn’t breathing. The driver’s door was wedged against the divider. A trail of damaged cars and trucks littered the highway behind her, and to her right was a now-slow stream of traffic, all of it trying to avoid the pile up that was now blocking the inside lane. There was no way for her to get out of the car safely.

  She reached over the prone agent and released the lever to throw his seat back, then clambered onto him and started CPR.

  “Nick! Wake up! Do you hear me? Wake up!”

  Aparo didn’t move.

  She tried again.

  Some air hissed from between his lips, but there was no gasp or cough to signal that he’d started breathing for himself again.

  She raised her right first and hammered it down onto Aparo’s chest. Then again.

  “Come on!” She pounded, again and again.

  With no result.

  20

  Tess’s heart broke as the deepest of all primal instincts told her that the man sitting beside her was now gone, and never coming back.

  She rolled off Aparo and fell back into her seat, her head throbbing from where it had slammed against something during the mayhem.

  Up ahead, a grey sedan had pulled into the lane in front of her. Its driver, a man with short hair and a thick coat, was already walking back toward the Taurus. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but her mind was too flooded with stimuli to be any clearer than that. Within seconds, he was near by her door and looking in.

  “Are you all right?”

  She stared at him, still shaken and dazed, and didn’t answer at first.

  “Miss? Are you all right?”

  He yanked against the door handle, but the door was locked. He pointed at the inside of the panel.

  “Can you unlock the door? Miss?” He was mouthing the words more clearly now, like he thought she couldn’t hear him. “You need to unlock the door.”

  His words sank in and she pulled the door handle. The door creaked open.

  The man helped her out. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” she stuttered. “He just—he just stopped breathing.” She was on the brink of tears.

  “Let me have a look,” he said, ushering her away from the door so he could climb inside the car.

  Tess didn’t move. She was still in shock and couldn’t peel her eyes off Aparo’s still body. Then a thought cut through the haze and she pulled out her phone to dial 911.

  “Miss,” the man was saying. “Can you step aside?”

  She raised her gaze at him, his words at the edge of her consciousness—and she nodded. As she moved aside to let him past and her finger was about to hit the call button, she heard a siren behind her. A Highway Patrol car speeding down the empty passing lane toward them and pulling up just behind the mangled sedan, the lights on its roof rack still flashing.

  She watched the uniform step out of his car, then noticed the man beside her step away from her and head back to his car. He turned to glance at her as he walked off, gave her a little knowing nod, then got in his car and drove off.

  “You OK, miss?” the patrolman was asking.

  She turned, nodded, and, still foggy-brained, called Federal Plaza.

  Deutsch was listening to Gallo and Lendowski argue about Reilly’s gun and the prints report that had come in from the DC Field Office when her desk phone lit up.

  It was the switchboard. “I’ve got a call here for Agent Reilly,” the operator said. “What are we doing with his calls?”

  “Put it through.”

  Deutsch didn’t recognize the voice at first. It was a woman, and her tone was urgent. “I need to speak to Sean. This is Tess. Tess Chaykin. Something terrible’s happened. Please.”

  Deutsch’s spine tightened. “Miss Chaykin, this is Agent Deutsch. What happened? Where are you?”

  “I’m . . . I’m somewhere on I-95. We were on our way down to Federal Plaza, Nick and me, and—there was an accident. Nick, he’s—he’s dead.”

  Deutsch felt the blood literally drain from her face and she just froze, the surreal words echoing inside her without finding purchase. After a moment, she barely managed to ask, “Nick’s dead?”

  She could hear Tess’s voice break as her weak reply came back. “He’s dead. I’m right here next to him. He’s—he’s gone.”

  It can’t be, Deutsch thought. It can’t—and yet, it was true. Just like that. It had to be. Tess was not a flake.

  Aparo was gone.

  “Jesus,” Deutsch managed, “but—how? I don’t—”

  “He just—I don’t know, it’s like he had a heart attack or an embolism or something. He just went. Just like that. He was driving, and—we hit the barrier.”

  “What about you—are you OK?”

  “I’m all right. I wasn’t hurt. But I need to speak to Sean. Oh my God, Nick’s son. We need to tell Lisa.”

  “Hang on.”

  She looked up, and through eyes that seemed resolutely unwilling to focus clearly, she saw that Gallo and Lendowski were still locked in heavy discussion. She cupped the phone’s mouthpiece.

  “Hey,” she called out to them, then shouted, angrily, “Hey.”

  They both turned, visibly surprised by her outburst.

  She sat there in silence for a moment, still processing it and not quite sure how to say it. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet it was almost inaudible.

  “It’s about Aparo. He’s . . . he’s dead.”

  She saw their expressions cloud up, gave them a second to let it sink in, then added, quickly, as she held up the phone, “I’ve got Tess Chaykin on the line. Reilly’s wife—his partner,” she corrected herself. “She was with him. They were in a car crash. She’s in shock and she needs to talk to Reilly.” She focused on Gallo. “OK if I take him the call?”

  Gallo looked at her, confusion lining his face, as he steadied himself against Lendowski’s desk. Then he said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

  She nodded, told the operator to transfer the call to her cell phone, and rushed toward the interview room.

  She was at the keypad when her cell phone rang. She took the call as she keyed in the code, trying to keep her voice even, to stay professional. “Miss Chaykin? I’m passing him over to you, hang on.”

  The doors slid open. Reilly—she still couldn’t get used to calling him Sean—was in his chair, scowling at the wall.

  “I’ve got Tess. Something awful’s happened.”

  Reilly rose to his feet and grabbed her cell phone. “Tess?”

  Deutsch watched as he listened, his eyes filling with disbelief, then horror, then the unmistakable glistening of tears.

  21

  I felt like every muscle in my body was trying to rip its way out through my skin.

  A raging, boiling centrifuge of blistering anger, bottomless grief and creeping dread had me unable to form a coherent thought beyond that brutal, soul-crushing realization, much less decide what to do next.

  The doors slid open and Lendowski came in with a coffee and a sandwich.

  “Gallo told me to bring you this,” he said. Because, of course, he’d never have done it without clear instruction from a superior. Like I didn’t know that.

  He placed the coffee mug and sandwich down on the table.

  I asked, “Any news on Nick?”

  I could see him adjusting his attitude—partners were sacred, even if you had good reason to hate one half of said partnership. Plus he and Nick were gym buddies.

  “Were”—not “are.”

  Surreal.

  “Still waiting on the postmortem,” he said, “but it sounds like he had
a heart attack.”

  I pulled the coffee toward me, tore off the lid and took a gulp, the burning sensation at the back of my throat dulling the deeper, more intractable pain, which had needle-sharp tentacles smothering every nerve ending.

  I took another sip, fuming at the idea of his pointless death.

  “He treats his body like a dumpster all these years, then, what, six months into this new gym routine and being more careful with his food, this happens?”

  Lendowski shrugged. “When your time’s up, it’s up, right?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. I’d heard about guys dropping dead after over-exerting themselves after years of doing nothing and it had always struck me as somewhat absurdly ironic. This was beyond absurd—it was just cruel.

  Lendowski scratched his head. “You knew him much better than I did, but like you said, all that junk food, zero exercise and chasing tail, not to mention a high-stress job and a dick for a partner . . . It’ll catch up to you.”

  He couldn’t resist the dig, and he smiled as he said it, unwilling to fight over Aparo’s corpse.

  I wasn’t willing to do that either. “Not now, Len. All right?”

  He seemed taken aback, then just said, “Sure.”

  He turned to go, then turned back. “He was a good agent. The Bureau was built on guys like him.”

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  “There but for the grace of God, you know what I’m saying?”

  I just shrugged and Lendowski keyed in the code and left the room.

  I was hungry, not having eaten since the train ride down to DC, which was—how many hours ago? I’d lost track. Still, I couldn’t face that sandwich. Nick and I had been partners for more than ten years. Apart from all the life-and-death situations we’d been in, the times we’d saved each other’s lives, I’d also lived through some great times with him, lots of laughs, lots of long late-night chats, as well as suffering with him through his personal hardships—the problems in his marriage, the women, the divorce . . . and now it was all over, just like that. A friend, a partner, a vibrant man with a hearty appetite for life, a father, an eleven-year-old son’s dad, gone in the blink of an eye. Snuffed out.

  Hard to accept.

  I know, we’re all heading that way. The only question is when. I thought of Nick’s son, Lorenzo. Eleven years old. A year older than I was when my dad died. I knew what he’d be going through. I’d need to try to be there for him, when—if—I ever managed to get my life back on track. Lisa, his ex-wife, would need our help too. Despite everything, they’d still spent fifteen years together, twelve as husband and wife, eleven as parents, and that doesn’t go away, not unless there was a major hurt involved, and there wasn’t. She’d be hurting now, I was sure. It just made me angrier that I was in here, not there, with them, helping them through this.

  Selfishly perhaps, it also made me think about Tess again. About our life together. About Alex and Kim. About whether or not I was really living the life I wanted.

  The twister spinning inside me was throwing out all kinds of wild thoughts. What I couldn’t still get my head around was the timing of the shooter appearing in Arlington, as in: why kill me now? That had been their plan after all. Kirby was just collateral damage—fortunate collateral damage, at that. I mean, I’d been chasing after Corrigan for months, so why had it taken him this long to deal with me? Kurt and I had been treading water. No, something else must have forced Corrigan’s hand, and if that thing was mission critical enough to decide to send me to an early grave, it was unlikely anything would be allowed to screw with the plan—meaning they still needed me dead.

  Even with Corrigan’s reach, his design was beyond the resource of one man. He had to have help beyond feet on the ground, someone inside the CIA. The question was, how many of them was I up against?

  When it came to colleagues, the preference among spooks seemed to be either long-term allegiances or selling them out for short-term advantage, with nothing much in between. Corrigan’s inside man at the CIA could even be “Frank Fullerton,” his partner back in the day, according to the files Kirby had given me—or whatever his name really is. Kurt and I had got nowhere with Fullerton either. Maybe it was worth putting Gigi on his trail.

  And then, something that had tugged at the back of my head since Deutsch had handed me her cell almost an hour earlier, started to crystallize more fully.

  My “Deep Throat” not showing up at Times Square. The bearded man at Kirby’s. The CIA at Defcon One over an analyst, meaning they knew he leaked the files. And yet they’d waited until now to do something about it. What had changed?

  The call from my “Deep Throat.”

  That had to be what had them spooked. But he hadn’t yet given me anything.

  Maybe they thought he had.

  And then Nick dies. Just after he swore he was going to leave no stone unturned and push the Bureau into doing everything it can to help me. This made him more dangerous to them than I was, and two questions were clawing at me: one, could Corrigan have known just how dedicated Nick now was—I closed my eyes, had been—to tracking him down, and two, could they have killed him?

  Impossible.

  But the coincidence in the timing was hard to ignore.

  I mean, if they’d poisoned him somehow, it would show up in the postmortem. But if they did, if they could kill Nick that easily, what was to stop them killing me where I sat? Especially without having him to look out for me?

  I stared at the coffee, then at the sandwich, and decided to leave them where they sat.

  I had to get out of here.

  Deutsch could see the accident scene up ahead.

  The whole southbound freeway was closed and would be for at least another hour. Surprisingly, it seemed that Aparo was the only fatality, though she’d heard that occupants of a few of the other vehicles involved had suffered some superficial injuries and one broken leg.

  She left her car at the cordon, flashed her badge and hurried toward a cluster of smashed-up vehicles, Highway Patrol cars and ambulances, one of which headed off noisily as she approached, ferrying more injured to the ER at White Plains Hospital.

  A striking woman with curly blond hair was sitting on the tailgate of a Westchester EMS ambulance, an ice pack against her head. An EMT had just finished checking her over and a state trooper stood a few feet away, talking into his radio. It looked like he was waiting to take the woman’s statement.

  From the author photographs on the dust jackets of her books, Deutsch knew this was Tess Chaykin—and she could see why Reilly had fallen for her. Even after living through the past couple of hours, there was a poise and self-possession about her that seemed almost otherworldly. A poise she needed to regain herself.

  She showed her badge to the state trooper. “Give me a couple minutes, will you?” The trooper nodded, and Deutsch walked over to the woman. “Miss Chaykin?

  Tess looked up, and Deutsch immediately noticed her warm green eyes. She pictured her and Reilly and felt a quiver of jealousy, then chastised herself as she remembered that the woman’s partner was languishing in a holding cell and suspected of murder.

  “Tess,” the woman replied.

  Deutsch held out her hand.

  “I’m Annie Deutsch. We talked on the phone.”

  Tess shook her hand. “You’re the agent with the jackass for a partner, right? At a bar the other night.”

  Deutsch found the stirring of a smile. “Yes. Reilly was very . . . chivalrous. How’s your head?”

  “Sore, but the EMT says it’s not a concussion.”

  “That’s something.”

  An uncomfortable silence settled over them for a moment, then Deutsch asked, “Where have they taken Nick?”

  “He’s on his way to White Plains,” Tess told her.

  Deutsch nodded, staring into the distance, following the ambulance’s ghostly wake. “They’ll need to do a postmortem.”

  Tess looked crushed, the finality of Aparo’s death clearly sti
ll hitting her hard.

  Deutsch asked, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. One second he was fine, then he just . . . went.” She paused, then said, “I need to see Sean.”

  “I’m here to drive you back, but before we go,” Deutsch said as she gestured at the waiting patrolman, “they need you to give a statement.”

  Tess nodded, then repositioned the ice pack on her head. “I’ll make it quick.”

  It wasn’t the best plan I’d ever come up with, or the safest.

  In fact, it was definitively one of the craziest, borderline demented ideas I’d ever thought up.

  Right now, I had nothing else.

  So I took a deep breath and called out for Gallo.

  Two minutes later, a junior agent who’s name I couldn’t remember brought me a phone and sat across the table from me to wait till I was done.

  I called Tess’s cell. She answered immediately.

  “Sean?”

  “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine. Sean . . . God, it was horrible. I can’t believe he’s—” I heard the dam burst and she started to sob.

  I let her feel it for a few seconds.

  “Tess, I’ll see you soon. Annie’s going to bring you over. OK?”

  “Lisa . . .’ she said, referring to Nick’s ex-wife. “Someone needs to tell her. And Lorenzo . . . my God.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I told her. “I’ll call her. You’ve been through enough for now.”

  “OK,” she said, her breath catching.

  I gave her a moment to regroup. I needed her to get what I was going to say.

  “It’s all just,” I finally said, “crazy. It’s like the stars are aligned against me lately. Like what you were saying, the other night. About karma and our past lives. Remember?”

  I heard Tess hesitate and was silently willing her to get it—given that we hadn’t talked about anything like that anytime recently.

  Please, Tess. Focus. Be my wingman on this.

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  Good girl. Great girl.

  “Maybe I did something in the past that I’m paying for now. I mean, how else can you explain all the crap that’s been happening to us?” I paused, more to add a bit of drama for the junior agent’s benefit than out of need. “I wish I could go back and find out. You know what I’m saying?”