140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

I could hear the desperation in her voice as she pleaded, “You could come back with me. I’ll sneak you in through the backyard, then you could go up into the loft space.”

  “What, and watch DVDs while you sneak me up some energy bars and a carton of milk?” I threw a weak smile at her. “Go home, Kim. It’s dangerously close to your curfew.”

  “How can you find them when everyone’s out looking for you?”

  “I’m going to even up the odds. Don’t worry. I’ve got an advantage here. I know how this game is played.”

  She threw her arms around my neck and pulled me in for a kiss. After a minute or so, I gently peeled off her. I reached into the backpack and gave her back the gun she’d brought me, along with the box of ammo. “Keep it near,” I told her as I put away the one she’d use on Lendowski. “I seem to be building up a collection of FBI Glocks.” Then I took a fresh burner phone from my jacket pocket and handed it to her. “I’ll call you on this. I dialed my number from it, so it’s stored in the call log. Call me if you don’t feel safe for any reason.”

  “I won’t feel safe till you’re in the clear and back home with us.”

  I nodded. There was nothing I would have liked more. “We’re going to get through this, Tess. I promise.”

  She looked at me for few seconds, then nodded back.

  I nodded back, then started to drag Lendowski’s body toward the tree line.

  31

  New York City, New York

  Across the street, I could see the nightclub that Kurt had designated as our latest meeting place. All manner of leather-garbed, tattooed and pierced night creatures were standing outside, smoking. It didn’t look like where I imagined Kurt would spend his Saturday nights. Maybe Gigi was broadening his horizons.

  After ensuring that Tess was safely ensconced in a cab and heading home, I’d left the stolen Caprice in a parking garage near White Plains station and taken a train into the city. Kurt had been out with his gal when I’d texted him, and he didn’t seem at all pleased that he had to interrupt their date for an urgent powwow.

  I’d changed into the clothes Tess had brought me, ditching Lendowski’s suit and parka in an alleyway dumpster beside an Italian restaurant. I’d given the discarded items a generous coating of week-old pasta sauce to dissuade anyone from reclaiming them while on a high-calorie dumpster dive. I’d also taken the holdall that now carried the three Glocks and the stuff Tess had brought me and shoved it into a dark, tight spot behind it, making sure no one saw me and figuring it stood a reasonable chance of still being there when we left the club.

  Satisfied as I could be that there was no one watching the place, I crossed the street and headed for the entrance, angling my face away from the CCTV cameras bolted to the building’s facade. I was well aware of our intel-gathering agencies’ capabilities when it came to finding a needle in a haystack, and I knew that, from here on, I’d need to avoid any kind of camera or even a phone call if I didn’t want the monster servers that picked through anything they could sink their claws into to get a lock on my trail.

  Before I could get through the door, two hundred and fifty pounds of bouncer blocked my way. “Wrong door, buddy.”

  I held up the denim backpack. “I need to change. The wife hates this side of me. Had to sneak out.”

  He thought about this for a moment then nodded me in, grudgingly. “Go on.” As I stepped past him, he called after me, “You’ll have to tell her eventually, you know. One way or another, secrets always find a way out.”

  Everyone’s a guru.

  I maneuvered myself through a murder of Goth girls—some of them looking no older than Kim—and went inside.

  Time to really screw up Kurt’s evening.

  Strobing lights and bizarre electronic music pummeled my senses as I made my way through the dark and sweaty catacomb-like space. I found Kurt and his new friend seated at a small table at the back, away from the frenetic dance-floor crush. They were both dressed in full costume, but the clientele was so freakish they fit right in. I was the one who looked way out of place.

  Kurt, dressed in a red tie, high-collared white jacket and blue cape, smiled weakly. “We were on our way to a Final Fantasy all-nighter at a pop-up cinema. No time to go change and not too many places we could go to dressed like this. Gigi suggested we meet here.”

  Gigi looked at him quizzically, then struck a coquettish pose—chin resting on the backs of her hands. “Not Gigi. Lumina.” She flashed me a grin. “From Final Fantasy Thirteen. And he’s Cid. Cid Raines.”

  So she was also averse to using real names.

  Terrific.

  Lumina—pink hair, black bodice reining in her hard-to-ignore chest, pink-lined sweeper tailcoat, short feathery skirt and black mid-thigh stockings—looked me up and down. “So this is the Fed?”

  Kurt nodded, looking intensely uncomfortable. I assumed he had filled her in while they were waiting, and while I wasn’t massively comfortable with it, I didn’t really have time to worry about such subtleties.

  Even here, with the sound system at less than full tilt, no way was anyone going to hear what we were saying, so I decided to dive right in.

  “Kirby’s dead. And the evidence says I killed him.”

  Kurt’s face lit up. “Jesus. What happened?”

  I gave him and Lumina a brief overview—from my arrival at Kirby’s house to my escape from Federal Plaza. Keeping with my recent theme, I omitted the parts that featured Tess.

  Gigi listened intently, unfazed—which surprised me. Kurt, on the other hand, looked more and more uncomfortable.

  I got to the end and shrugged. “So here I am.”

  Gigi gave me the raised eyebrow. “To kill one government employee may be regarded as a misfortune; to kill two looks like carelessness.”

  I smiled. It was my fault. My own natural flippancy was obviously infectious. “Oscar Wilde. Nice.”

  Gigi smirked with unexpected appreciation.

  Kurt said, helpfully, “His wife’s a writer. She’s—”

  I shot him a withering look. “I did manage to read a book or two long before I met her.”

  Gigi grinned. “I have to admit I lost it myself with my adorable panda when he told me who you were, but this is all magnificently fucked-up. It’s like you guys are living some old-school ARG.”

  Kurt gave me the eye roll. “Alternate Reality Game, dude.”

  Gig swatted him and said, “He knows that.” Then she turned to me, all serious now. “What do you want us to do?”

  “I’m not sure. Anything new with our search?”

  Gigi said, “The CIA servers started running some kind of purge two hours after I started snooping around about the black ops you were interested in. I backtracked through the commands on the relevant server and it definitely wasn’t an automated systems procedure. Someone went in and told the archive to overwrite anything connected to those ops. From the way the instructions are configured, I’d say someone didn’t want their trail visible to the sys admins, which means the purge is outside standard data policy.”

  My head was spinning, and not just from the music. “OK, so you’re saying you’ve hit a wall?”

  Her mocking expression emasculated my question. “No wall’s impenetrable, G-boy. I’ve left some anonymous botnets running. They mimic multiple internal searches of the SCI database. I’ve asked them to trawl for anything connected to the files. They’ll come home to mama. But that might take a while.”

  “A luxury I don’t have.” I felt deflated. “I don’t have anyone else to turn to. And I need to start fighting back.”

  Kurt held his hands out, defensively. “Dude, seriously, we can’t—”

  “I don’t mean it like that, relax. But maybe there’s stuff you can help me with.”

  “Such as?” Gigi asked. I didn’t sense resistance in her tone or her expression. More like excitement.

  “Listen to the chatter. See if my name comes up. This is a CIA and FBI situation, and it seems like they’r
e keeping the whole thing hushed up—for now. I’m thinking neither agency wants to look inept, and it’ll be much easier for whoever’s after me if the cops aren’t in the way.”

  Still in something of a daze, Kurt nodded. “Sure. OK. I guess.”

  Gigi put a reassuring hand on Kurt’s arm. “We can do that. It’s this guy they want. Now go get us some drinks because you’ve heard all this before while I need vodka.”

  Kurt got up and headed for the bar, and I asked Gigi, “What about that reporter? The Portuguese one in the Corrigan file?”

  Gigi leaned in toward me. “Octavio Camacho. I looked into that.”

  “He died shortly after the meeting with Corrigan in which he was mentioned, right? Back in 1981?”

  She nodded. “Yes. In a rock climbing accident. On top of being a hotshot investigative reporter, he was also an avid mountaineer. The coroner’s report found death by misadventure.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, that and some scattered references about him on the DI’s servers, but they’re heavily redacted. He was definitely someone of interest for a brief period of time. Before he died.”

  She gave me a knowing look. I didn’t disagree.

  “No other hits on Corrigan or Corrigam or any other obvious misspellings?” I asked.

  “Nope. And nothing else in any CIA or DI files—or at least not in the ones I could get into before the purge started.”

  Kurt placed a White Russian and a couple of beers on the table and sat down. I was so bummed out I picked up my beer and almost downed the whole thing in one chug.

  Gigi gestured to Kurt, who handed me his beer as a chaser.

  I was warming to her.

  She crossed her legs, flashing me way more thigh than a happily monogamous man should ever catch sight of. “Where are you going to stay?”

  I was already halfway through Kurt’s beer. “I don’t know. Some crappy motel somewhere.”

  “No way. You’re coming home with me. I’ve got plenty of space.”

  Kurt looked utterly crestfallen. “Hang on, hang on. Serious?”

  “The man needs a pad, Snake.”

  I looked at them, totally lost.

  They caught it. Kurt said, “Snake Plissken?” Still nothing. “Kurt Russell’s character? Escape from New York? No?”

  Clearly, I was going to need a translator around these two.

  Kurt turned back to her and said, “I haven’t even stayed over yet.” There was a clear whine in both his expression and his tone.

  Gigi laughed. “Hey, can’t have Mommy getting too lonely, right?”

  His face fell even further.

  She elbowed him in the side. “Chillax, Snake, I’m only messing with you. You can come too. And who knows . . . Maybe—”

  I threw up my hands. “Stop. Please.”

  Kurt’s expression went back to the guileless smile I had always found so appealing. It was clear my appreciation of Kurt’s many qualities had company, though there were certain qualities that would need to stay silent in my presence for this to work.

  Gigi downed her White Russian and stood up. While she was taller than I expected her to be, her feathery skirt was so short I had to look away. My eyes caught sight of five guys and what looked like a drug sale going down in a dark recess of the club, away from the bustle. The negotiations seemed heated and for a second it looked like it was going to get nasty, then they settled down and got back to business. I had to remind myself to stay cool and can my instincts since I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, so I looked away, trying to find something less burdensome on which to settle my gaze, only to be drawn back to my freaky friends and the micro skirt.

  Gigi grabbed Kurt’s arm, pushing him toward the door. “Come on, Cid. Lumina’s feeling frisky.”

  As I trailed in their wake, the idea of being someone other than who I really was seemed immensely appealing.

  SUNDAY

  32

  Federal Plaza, Lower Manhattan

  Seated at the conference table, Deutsch didn’t think it was possible to feel angrier, sadder, more tired or more frustrated that she did at that precise moment. It was twenty-hours since she’d last sat in that same chair, twenty-four hours since her boss had chewed her out publicly in front of the same collection of grim faces. Déjà vu all over again, except for the fact that Lendowski wasn’t at the table—or anywhere to be found, for that matter.

  They’d found his car parked by a gas station a few yards away from the thruway’s overpass. There was no sign of foul play. His work cell phone was missing and turned off, its battery pulled—meaning there was no way to track him. There was no one at his home, either.

  Gallo had driven into town again and was chairing the emergency proceedings for the second day running, and on a Sunday morning at that. The two CIA liaisons, Henriksson and his silent partner, were also back in the room, as were four other agents from the New York field office that Deutsch barely knew.

  “We know Reilly left the city in a car he stole from a parking lot on Fulton Street shortly after he escaped custody,” one of the agents said. “A 1994 Caprice Classic. We’ve got the car heading north on the I-95 at around two thirty in the afternoon yesterday, so around twelve hours after his escape. We don’t know what he did in the meantime.”

  Deutsch noticed Henriksson studying her impassively and knew her face must have looked like thunder at the renewed mention of Reilly’s escape. She tried to shrink into herself in a vain attempt to disappear from the room.

  “We have another couple of street camera sightings in and around Mamaroneck last night. Nothing after that. So either he dumped the car or—”

  Henriksson seemed to lose patience and interrupted. “We’re wasting time. We all know what happened. Reilly drove up there to see Chaykin. They met somewhere, Lendowski stepped in and Reilly got the jump on him. Whether Agent Lendowski is still alive or not is the only question here, although given we haven’t heard from him yet, my guess is he’s no longer around to tell his side of the story.”

  Deutsch jolted to life. “Hang on a second—that’s a pretty big assumption to make with no evidence.”

  “Oh?” the CIA agent asked, his tone chillingly calm. “You have a more likely scenario about where your missing partner is?” His sardonic emphasis on “missing partner” was hard to miss.

  Deutsch tried her best not to look like a jackrabbit trying to stare down an eighteen-wheeler. “No, but—why didn’t he call in his position or ask for backup?”

  The robotic Scandinavian wasn’t going to be deterred that easily. “Maybe he didn’t get the chance. Maybe Reilly jumped him before he had a chance to call it in.”

  “But why didn’t he—”

  “What?” He cut her off firmly. “Reilly already assaulted you and Lendowski once. It’s not like he has an aversion to using force. And if I may offer some advice here, Agent Deutsch—I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend an agent who escaped while under your expert custody. It might make people wonder.” Without giving her a chance for an indignant rebuttal, the CIA agent turned to Gallo. “We need to bring in Chaykin. She knows what happened. We need to question her.”

  Gallo glanced at Deutsch, frowning, then swung his gaze back on Henriksson. “I agree, Chaykin’s lying to us. I mean, that whole story she gave Agent Deutsch about her feeling trapped and needed to clear her head—it’s total bullshit. No question. But we can’t prove otherwise and we can’t just wheel her in here based on conjecture. Her lawyer would have a field day.”

  “Then don’t give her a chance to lawyer up. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a national security matter. In fact, we wouldn’t be sitting here today if you’d handed Reilly over when we asked you to instead of giving in to his Fifth Amendment bullshit.”

  Gallo adjusted his position in his seat, visibly uneasy with where this was going.

  “Reilly’s history here might be checkered, but it’s only checkered in terms of his unswerving commitment to getting the
job done. And I don’t appreciate your coming in here and—”

  Deutsch slammed her hand down on the table, harder than she had meant. The noise succeeded in gaining her the attention of everyone present. “He’s not a killer,” she said.

  Henriksson looked at her like she’d sprouted a second pair of eyes. “You do realize he’s wanted for murder?”

  “This isn’t some crazy psycho we’re talking about, OK?” She glanced around the table. “You know this guy. You’ve worked with him for years. I mean, Christ. Doesn’t that count for anything around here?”

  She looked around the table. She seemed to have struck a nerve.

  “Look, I agree,” she continued. “Tess Chaykin probably did give us the slip to see him. I can’t see any other reason for it. But I don’t think Reilly is a cold-blooded murderer. There’s more going on here. You must know that.”

  She hazarded a glance at Henriksson and felt like slapping that narrow-eyed, immutable expression off his face.

  He ignored her outburst and turned to Gallo. “I don’t think it’s advisable to keep Agent Deutsch on this case. I think her perspective is, at the very least, skewed by her—”

  It was Gallo’s turn to interrupt. “You know what? It’s not your decision, is it? The last time I checked, the FBI wasn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA. So how about you rendition your ass out of my bureau and leave this case to us, given that this is a domestic situation which, I think, just happens to be outside your agency’s remit?”

  Deutsch sat back and breathed out, zoning out of the tail end of the confrontation.

  33

  Richmond, Virginia

  Roos guided his Cessna Skyhawk through the low-lying clouds and landed at Chesterfield County Airport without difficulty. The bad weather that currently had the East Coast in its grip was giving Virginia a break, and his time in the air was only marginally longer than the two-hour flight to which he had become accustomed.

  Ten minutes later he was in a rental car on his way up the Richmond Beltway toward Midlothian.