140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  I realized that the way things were going with my life, I might not be able to see her again, so this time I stood up and I hugged her tight. I held her for a few seconds—past the point when she instinctively tried to pull away, all the way through to the moment when she gave in and let herself feel my embrace.

  Finally, I let go and stepped back. There was the faintest smile on her face—a perfect memory.

  So I waved, turned and headed for my car.

  Eric followed me outside, holding a travel mug.

  “Figured you’d be on your way.”

  I took it. “Thanks.”

  Then that thought again, but louder.

  I knew Eric could keep his counsel; it was one of the things I respected about him. And, as if sensing my thoughts, he said, “It’s tough for her, talking about that time. You know, things weren’t great between them towards the end. And the last thing she’d want is to tarnish your memory of him.”

  The thought was now too loud to ignore.

  I asked, “Was there someone else?”

  He just looked at me for a moment, his expression neutral.

  “I can’t raise it with her, no matter the stakes. I just can’t, knowing how she’d react,” I added. “It’s where I draw the line. And if you knew anything about what I’ve been through these past few days—weeks, even—you’d appreciate what that means.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “I don’t need to know about it. You love her and you don’t want to hurt her. That’s where you and I climb the same tree.”

  He gestured for us to head over to the BMW, as far from the house as possible.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “But you know something?”

  He shrugged, the discomfort apparent in the deepening furrows across his face. “It was years ago. Your mom and I, we were just flicking through the channels one night. We came across the remake of the Thomas Crown Affair. As we started watching it, I made some comment about how Rene Russo couldn’t hold a candle to Faye Dunaway. I must have struck a nerve or something, cause your mom bristled at the mention of Dunaway and, after a while, she asked if we could watch something else. I didn’t press it, but I was curious. And when I asked her about it later, she just shrugged it off and asked me to drop it. I couldn’t help but want to know what was going on, and a few days later, I picked my moment and asked again. She just said she didn’t care for the name much, said it reminded her of someone and that it had to do with your dad, and asked me to leave it at that. I did.”

  “Was that all she said?”

  Eric hesitated, then added, “No. She did say it was an assistant of your dad’s. One of his grad students. Another Faye.” His look filled in any blanks I still had.

  A grad student. Christ. Talk about tarnishing a memory.

  I knew what I needed to do. “No last name?”

  “No, sorry.”

  We got to the car, and I thanked him for his candor.

  He held out his hand. “You’ll bring the kids next time? She’ll never tell you, you know how she can be, but she wishes she could see Kim more, meet Alex.”

  I shook his hand. “Sure. In the New Year. We’ll all drive up.”

  I climbed into the BMW, started the engine and drove away, leaving Eric wondering why, despite some considerable effort, my expression had so totally contradicted what I’d just said.

  I drove a bit, then pulled over and parked ten miles west of the house. I drank the coffee, then called Kurt and Gigi using a smartphone they’d given me. They were working on Rossetti and his editor’s digital trails, as Gigi had suggested. I asked them to find a psychiatrist named Orford who’d been practicing since at least 1981, probably in DC, and I told them to keep working their way out from there till they found him. I also asked them to track down a postgraduate research assistant in jurisprudence at George Washington University at around that time with the first name Faye.

  I then started making my way back to New York City, hovering just under the speed limit, with the radio turned up full blast to try and drown the armada of memories that had me under siege.

  41

  Miami, Florida

  An onshore breeze had cleared the night sky of any lingering clouds as the customized Lamborghini Aventador blew north along the A1A, its growl echoing up to the heavens and scaring off any remnants that were stubbornly clinging to the velvet dome high above it.

  As the supercar hit the Hillsboro Mile, its driver pressed down on the gas pedal, powering it past a hundred and forty miles per hour. The driver knew the route intimately. He knew this stretch of road was pretty much totally straight. He knew there were no traffic lights for three miles, and no speed traps either. He knew that at three in the morning, there would be no police cruisers or bikes around with uniforms that needed to be bribed, and that he could pass using the oncoming lane, though it was unlikely he would need to. There was nothing but empty road, a clear mind and a pleasantly aching groin from the award-worthy oral experience he’d enjoyed an hour earlier from the nineteen-year-old tattooed muscle-car babe, fringe benefits of owning one of Miami’s top custom car workshops.

  Whenever he and his guys finished work on a vehicle, he’d take it out for a drive in the small hours and really open it up, before the owner came in to collect it. The Aventador was a truly glorious piece of machinery. It handled like the muscle-car babe—no complaints, zero hang-ups, nothing fatigued from overuse. It just did exactly what you wanted it to do and performed it with pulse-spiking gusto.

  His team had taken the horsepower from the already monstrous seven hundred to seven fifty, reworked the rear apron completely around a new stainless steel exhaust tailpipe that was split into four, added a striking rear spoiler, changed the wheels into a light alloy that was forged and not cast, pimped the entertainment and communication system, then given the whole thing a matt black finish, which he wasn’t crazy about and was the only thing he would have done differently. Still, Siddle hadn’t argued and had kept his reservations to himself. In his customization business as well as in his work as an assassination contractor for the CIA, the client was always right.

  Marcus Siddle looked about thirty-five, though he’d been on the planet exactly fifty-nine years and ten months, which he knew because in two months, to the day, it would be his sixtieth birthday. He had a tanned, clean-shaven face and a youthful body honed by thousands of hours in the gym. Contrary to what people thought when he removed his baseball hat to reveal hair cropped short enough to hide his almost total baldness, a state of denial about his age had not led him to try and look young, simply because he had never stopped feeling—and, in many cases, acting—like he was still in his mid-twenties.

  Unlike many men his age and with his more-than-healthy bank balance, he abhorred the idea of Botox, surgery, or even a hair transplant. He was totally comfortable in his own skin, so comfortable that the thought of screwing with it made him almost physically sick. He knew several guys—at least three at his golf club alone—who’d spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to make themselves look younger. The psychology of it made no sense to him. If you really loved yourself, why would you change yourself into someone else? And Marcus Siddle loved every single part of himself, without exception or reservation. He never experienced self-loathing about the amount of money he’d made from customizing cars for people richer and stupider than himself, never felt regret that, as the years passed, he hadn’t put his considerable talents to more constructive use, never felt sad that he’d never spent more than three months with a member of the opposite sex before becoming bored, and never felt guilt about the people he’d helped kill because his employers had told him to. It wasn’t that life was too short, but that life was simply too much fun for any of that negative bullshit. And he enjoyed it all, from the fortnight he’d spent with the twin girlfriends of a Russian mobster after he’d sent the fat fuck and his brand new Harley into the Chicago River, to the satisfaction he experienced bringing down a large twin-je
t helicopter en route to the Hamptons because he understood the on-board navigation systems better than the guys who built and designed them.

  Surprisingly, despite all the deaths he’d caused, there was nothing in Siddle’s past except love and kindness. His dad, an Air Force Colonel, had been supportive and often told him that he’d be proud of his son no matter what he did when he was older. His mom had often voiced how much she loved him. In high school, he’d excelled in math and science and been a social success. At college, he’d studied electrical engineering before joining the Air Force and training as a mechanical engineer.

  He’d been shipped to Vietnam in the last months of the war to maintain an assortment of fatigued Phantom, Crusader and Super Sabre fighter-bombers. When he returned to the US, he’d been recruited by the DoD, moving to the CIA a couple of years later after being personally selected by Edward Tomblin, who was only a few months older than him. Then, in the 1990s, he’d gone private, continuing to work for the CIA as a contractor, but also starting his car business after a move to Miami.

  He’d fallen in love with the city several years earlier after being dispatched there to sabotage a boat owned by an ex-agent of Cuba’s Direccíon de Inteligencia. The guy and his family had relocated to the US under new identities, but only enjoyed a few weeks in the land of plenty before they’d all died in a massive fireball when the ex-agent’s boat had exploded due to what was later assumed to be a faulty fuel line.

  Siddle had quickly built up the shop to the point where he could leave his team to run the place and use an auto show, vehicle auction or consultation as cover for his more lethal pursuits.

  He was watching the digital speed counter flicker higher when he felt a slight pull to the right.

  His senses were so highly tuned to the smallest reaction coming through from the car that even with that barely noticeable move, his pulse spiked.

  Just the new tires bedding down, he thought.

  As he passed a line of five-story apartment blocks, the car jerked to the left, halfway across the oncoming lane, then swerved back again just as quickly.

  Siddle lifted off, slowing the car right down. Perplexed, he turned the wheel carefully left and right, checking the steering’s response.

  Everything was fine.

  He made a mental note to tell his crew the car needed more testing before it could be delivered to the waiting client. He could do without one of his customizations killing its occupant, something that had never happened up to that point, even though he specialized in extreme cars that were usually far too powerful for the limited talents and experience of those who ordered them.

  He’d also have to bawl out the guys for letting him drive the car before it had been properly checked. Although his habit of taking out the finished vehicles had started as a way for him to personally check that everything was in order, it had become more than that—an opportunity to drive as many different cars as possible, to feel that while his clients might own that particular supercar, in a way he owned them all.

  Once he was through Deerfield Beach he’d throttle the car back up to over a hundred, shoot past Lake Boca Raton, take Linton Boulevard west over the water, then turn south and take US1 all the way back to the city, using the three-lane section through Boca to revel in some high-speed passing and lane changes.

  Siddle eased off the gas and shifted down into second gear as he approached East Hillsboro Boulevard. The lights were red and he had no reason to jump them. As a matter of fact, he enjoyed taking the engine right down through the gears, enjoying the gurgles of each downshift all the way to a growling idle. Then, as the lights turned green, he’d be flooring the gas and feeling the gees and the kick of each gear shift.

  Before the lights turned, the car lurched forward, hitting sixty in well under three seconds and continuing to accelerate.

  As he struggled with the controls, Siddle’s whole body iced over as he realized what was happening.

  He was no longer driving the vehicle.

  The vehicle hijack system he’d spent over a year developing was controlling the car.

  There was no point him trying to do anything. His design was flawless. He knew all the car’s safety features would already be disabled—no airbags, no emergency brakes, no pre-tensioned seatbelt.

  And he knew that the inevitable outcome would be.

  He’d watched it enough times before, never imagining that he’d ever experience it from the driving seat.

  Sandman had waited until the Lamborghini he was trailing powered away down the Hillsboro Mile, checked the 3G signal for the final time and keyed in the passcode to make the system go live.

  These days, most functions in most cars, from a mid-sized Toyota to a Bentley and beyond, were controlled by an onboard computer. Hack that computer using either a physical device connected to the on-board diagnostics port—the one car technicians use to investigate a fault in a car by plugging in a laptop computer under the dashboard—or wirelessly via a phone signal dialed into the car’s telematics system, and you could control anything that the computer controlled, from the windscreen wipers to the cruise control, from headlights to steering and braking. Not only that, but such an attack code could also be programmed to erase any evidence of its existence on the device, complicating, or even preventing, a forensic examination of a crash scene.

  And with each year, as the embedded systems in cars became more and more sophisticated, the opportunities for automotive cyberattacks grew.

  The hack Sandman was using required nothing more in the field than a Netbook with a 3G SIM card. Siddle had designed it to bypass the car’s firewall along with any proprietary security features specific to the target make and model. Although the list was certainly not exhaustive, Siddle had focused on expensive cars all the way through development, his argument being that not only would they have better security and therefore represent a sterner test of his expertise, but that it made sound operational sense seeing as many of their future targets would drive high-end vehicles.

  Due to his personal taste, Lamborghini Aventadors were on that list.

  Siddle was almost half a mile ahead of him when Sandman heard the collision.

  He couldn't see the crash site clearly, but he didn't need to.

  At that speed, there was simply no way that Siddle could have possibly survived the impact.

  Helpless and only able to watch as the Lamborghini’s speed increased, Siddle thoughts darted across scattered memories of some of the people he’d already killed using the system: the Saudi diplomat and his gay lover; the congressman who kept refusing to do what he was being asked to do; the female college grad who was already one of China’s top corporate spies. They would all have thought their cars had simply malfunctioned.

  Siddle knew there was no malfunction in the Aventador.

  It was simply that, right now, someone else was driving the car.

  He saw the speedometer streak past one-twenty and keep climbing, and as the purple streak veered slightly to the right, Siddle swallowed hard as a large, sand-colored building in the distance grew very big, very quickly.

  Hitting it at that speed would be like falling thirty stories onto the sidewalk. And although its creator had just been killed by unstoppable force meeting immovable object, he would have been proud that yet again, his system had worked perfectly. And, because of the way the system was designed, there would be no evidence of anything other than driver error, with every rogue command being logged as coming from the driver’s own actions.

  For the press, it would be yet another story about an entitled star or a reckless speed freak with no respect for the law—unless it was somebody everyone loved, in which case it would be a genuine tragedy that that person was taken from us all so young.

  The only people who would miss Marcus Siddle, though, were the people who had ordered his death.

  TUESDAY

  42

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  After a troubled night tossing arou
nd Gigi’s sofa bed I decided to make a very early start and it wasn’t even eight o’clock by the time I found myself standing outside the Criminal Justice Center on Filbert Street, waiting for Faye Devane, hoping she’d be willing to talk about someone who died more than thirty years ago, someone she may not want to think about, let alone discuss.

  Courtesy of Kurt and Gigi, I had a recent photo of her and a solid idea of where she’d be at this time of morning. I didn’t feel great about Kurt having hacked her email account and credit card statements, but I couldn’t risk either the delay or the point-blank rejection that would, in all likelihood, accompany a polite request.

  Faye Devane was a Philly native. She’d grown up in Glenwood and won a scholarship to George Washington where she’d spent nine years that culminated in a doctorate in Juridical Science. After that, she’d moved back home and joined the Philadelphia Bar. She lived alone in a Brewerytown apartment, having never married nor had children. Her persona appeared to be reflected totally in her professional life as an assistant defender working exclusively for the Philadelphia Defenders Association, a non-profit organization whose members are barred from both private practice and partisan politics. From the snapshot of her that my indefatigable, if quirky, support staff had put together, I suspected she’d be a formidable opponent, both in court and as an interview subject.

  Kurt had been tracking her cell phone since she’d left her apartment at six forty-five and had messaged me that she’d be arriving at some point within the next five minutes, her routine being to get in at least an hour before she was due in court.

  After several minutes scanning the pedestrian traffic in both directions, I saw her approaching, briefcase in hand. She looked much younger than her fifty-six years. She wore a navy blue pants suit, which I assumed would highlight the blue eyes I’d already seen in her photos, and polished black loafers. Her raven-dark hair was short—almost boyish—and it didn’t look like her slim figure had changed much over the past thirty years: easier to maintain given she’d never been at the mercy of pregnancy and childbirth and the hormones and physical changes that accompany them. It was still easy to guess how she would have looked when she knew my dad and just as easy to see why any man would have fallen for her. She had an agile grace and moved with total confidence—both regarding her professional status and her appearance.