Wildcard

by Rachel Lee

  “Apparently this agent is on suspension,” the caller said. “He was reactivated, probably in a probationary capacity, then returned to suspension after that part of the investigation was terminated. Obviously he didn’t agree with that decision, as he flew to Idaho today.”

  At least that was some consolation. Morgan recognized assets for what they were, and all assets were ultimately disposable if need be. But this particular asset had been very useful over the years, and he would have regretted having to kill the man, if for no other reason than that it would have been difficult to cultivate an equal or better source.

  “So he’s a Don Quixote, tilting alone at windmills,” Morgan said. “Without official backing, what can he do?”

  The caller let out an impatient huff. “He may be a Don Quixote, as you say, but the word is that he’s a very gifted investigator. And a lucky one. That’s a dangerous combination to have running loose.”

  “So I’ll talk to my source,” Morgan said. “The FBI will rein him in. They’re big on loyalty and obedience. They don’t like agents going off on their own. I’m sure they can handle it.”

  “I’m not,” the caller said.

  There was obviously something else, Morgan thought. What he’d heard so far was a simple matter to resolve, and hardly an occasion for this sort of urgency. The FBI was both blessed and cursed by the inevitable product of any massive organization. It valued procedure and conformity over efficiency. Agents who broke procedure or who failed to conform—no matter how successful—were quickly and forcefully brought back in line or discharged. It would be a simple matter to arrange to have this agent’s leash jerked, unless something else was involved.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” Morgan asked. Now impatience crept into his voice. “I have to know what’s going on if I’m going to manage this. I’m exposed here.”

  “More than you realize,” the caller said.

  There was no mistaking the veiled threat. Just as Morgan was willing to sacrifice the operative in Atlanta, just as he was willing to sacrifice his source inside the investigation, this man was willing to sacrifice him if need be. He, too, was merely an asset.

  “If there’s something else,” Morgan said, trying to affect a conciliatory tone, “it would help if I knew. I don’t want to try to solve a problem, only to make a worse one because I’m acting on incomplete information.”

  “We think Bookworm has resurfaced,” the caller said.

  Shit, Morgan thought. This was beyond belief.

  “Bookworm is dead,” he replied. “We confirmed it.”

  The caller paused for a long moment, then finally spoke. “Do you want to stake your life on that?”

  12

  Guatemala City, Guatemala

  “How are you doing, angel?”

  Even through a long-distance connection, Terry’s voice was a salve to Miriam’s soul.

  She sighed. “I’m tired, darling. It’s been a long, depressing day.”

  “Bad airline food?” he asked.

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “Bad food, narrow seats, late connections. The usual Bureau accommodations here in steamy, rainy Guatemala.”

  “My international agent,” he said, “living a life of adventure.”

  Miriam let out a snort. “I guess that’s one way to put it. How are you doing?”

  “Eh, I’ve had better days,” he said. He, too, sounded tired. “They moved Grant from critical care to ICU today. He’s going to make it. Still not awake yet, though.”

  “That’s got to be killing Karen and the girls.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She’s at his side all day, talking to him, until the girls get out of school. Then she goes to his parents’ house and takes care of the girls, even though his parents would be happy to do it for her. She says it’s so they can have time to visit him, too. But I think she just wants to be with the children.”

  “I think I understand,” Miriam said. “At least he’s alive through them.”

  “That seems to be what it’s about,” he said. “Catherine Suzanne has done more therapy for Karen than vice versa. That girl is scary smart. But I worry about her. She was always the quiet one.”

  Miriam’s heart squeezed as she remembered the little girl’s face in the window of a cabin in Maryland, pressed to the window, somehow knowing Miriam’s team was out there, mouthing the word “help.” Miriam and Karen had freed the girl, and killed her kidnapper in the act of trying to kill Grant Lawrence. Miriam had spent a lot of time with Grant and Karen in the year since, and she’d watched Catherine deal with her grief and anger in her own silent way. Belle, the younger daughter, had been willing to talk. Catherine Suzanne kept it all inside.

  And now yet more grief had been piled onto her young shoulders. The fear of losing her father, as she had lost her mother. And dealing with Karen’s grief, too.

  “Life is fucking unfair,” Miriam said softly.

  “You’re right about that,” Terry said. “Those girls…geez, they’ll be in therapy for life. But they’re good kids. They’re strong. And so is Grant. Karen says the doctors predict that there’s no permanent brain damage. He curls his toes and grips her hand sometimes. If he’d just wake up…”

  “He will,” Miriam said. “I know he will. God is too loving to take him away from those girls. And Karen, too.”

  She took a breath, not wanting to get herself even more depressed. “So, any news on the case?”

  “Nothing much,” he replied. “They’re all crapping their pants about a ballistic match on a gun that was used in a shooting in St. Louis. But you know how guns move around.”

  “Like water in a river,” Miriam said.

  The sad truth was that Pablo’s commander hadn’t been far wrong in his sideways slight at the United States. She might shake her head at the two hundred thousand killed in the fifty-year Guatemalan civil war, but easily ten times that had been murdered in the U.S. over the same period. Her country was awash in guns and fear, a dangerous and too often deadly combination. She had no right to be looking down on her hosts.

  “You got quiet,” Terry said. “Something wrong?”

  “Just thinking that there’s too much violence and death everywhere. Like I have to tell you that. You’re a homicide cop, for crying out loud. You see it day in and day out. And I see how it wears on you. You don’t need me getting all morose over it.”

  “Sweetheart,” Terry said, his voice suddenly soft. “When I let myself think about those things, it makes me crazy. People do bad things. You and I try to catch them and get them out of society. But there will always be more people doing more bad things. We just do our best.”

  “My interpreter said that today,” Miriam said. “He talked about the case. It’s going to get ugly, he thinks. He said we can do our best, but that it won’t be good enough.”

  “It never is,” Terry said. “Not for the victims. Not for their families. Not even for the perpetrators. But it’s all we can do.”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  He paused for a moment. “I hate to dump more on you, but do you have any idea where Tom is?”

  “He’s at home, I think,” Miriam said, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling.

  “Nope. I called there. Kevin Willis called me, asking if he’d come down here. I guess Willis had tried to contact him at our place.”

  “He didn’t say he was going anywhere,” Miriam said.

  “Maybe he just needed a vacation,” Terry said. “He’s on suspension, after all. No reason he can’t fly home, or go fishing, or whatever.”

  “Nope,” Miriam said. “No reason at all.”

  “So that’s what he’s done, then,” Terry said.

  The tone in his voice was clear. If Tom was doing something else, she and Terry would not be the ones to blow the whistle on him.

  “Yep, that’s what he’s done,” she said.

  “Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you, angel. I wish I could curl up with you. I mis
s your smell.”

  “I miss you, too, darling. And I love you, too. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Miriam hung up the phone, trying to imagine Terry’s arms around her.

  And trying to guess where Tom might be.

  Watermill, Long Island

  Bookworm has resurfaced, Edward Morgan thought, sipping his third—or was this the fourth?—tumbler of Scotch. He wasn’t so foolish as to think the whiskey would light up a path for him to follow out of this morass. But at least it could numb the shock of those three words.

  Bookworm.

  Has.

  Resurfaced.

  It was impossible, but then again, Bookworm had made a career of the impossible. It was, after all, equally impossible that an agent of the BKA—Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent of the FBI—acting alone, could upset the plans of a dozen of the most powerful men in Europe. They were untouchables, insulated by layers of loyal or ignorant underlings, with connections reaching up to the highest positions of their governments. No one could get at them. No one could stop them.

  And yet…Bookworm had. And what was more, she’d done it before any of them realized she existed.

  In a way, Morgan admired her. Step by step, layer by layer, she had peeled back the protective cloak of secrecy. An informant here. Disparate snippets of information put together there. A ninja of the information age, she had silently crept into their lives, careers, ferreted out their peccadilloes and, most damaging of all, their plans. All without revealing herself until she was ready to strike.

  Knowing what would happen if she pursued the case through official channels, she had instead grounded her plan of attack on the basest of societal impulses: the desire to see the powerful brought low. She had cultivated sources in the media and begun to leak information, tidbit by juicy, venomous tidbit, each independently verifiable, each laying the groundwork for the next, a toxic sequence of revelations calculated to elicit maximum public outrage.

  The first stories had emerged in gossip columns of the sort that propagated in modern culture like rabbits. Their targets had at first ignored the reports, considering them the usual, almost complimentary, smears that accompanied great wealth and power.

  Europeans were not like Americans; they did not expect their civic and business leaders to be paragons of moral virtue. An illicit affair with a well-known figure skater or actress was more likely to elicit admiration or, at worst, envy. Common men wished they, too, had the power to attract such beauty. Common women wished they, too, had the beauty to attract such power. It was part of the social contract. Lacking any exceptional qualities, the common man lived vicariously through the exploits of those who possessed those traits.

  And so Bookworm’s early attacks had gone unnoticed. But as the revelations began to shift from bedroom to boardroom, her targets began to sense a disturbing pattern. Moreover, it became apparent that someone had gained access to the kinds of information these men considered sacrosanct. She had burrowed into accounts, forecasts, plans and policies. She had crawled into their books. And thus they had named her Bookworm.

  They had called upon Morgan and his associates to track her down. He was, after all, accustomed to digging into the private affairs of those who sought financing, looking for indicators of risk and reward. This was not so very different. Morgan had thought it a privilege to be invited into their inner circle, and he’d gone about his investigation with his customary ruthless efficiency.

  Bookworm was good, and she’d had the resources of the BKA. But Morgan was also good, and he could call upon the resources of a more powerful and far-reaching organization. It had taken months to find her, but find her he had.

  And, having found her, acting on their orders, he had orchestrated her death with equally ruthless efficiency. He had watched through binoculars as her car hit the patch of ice and—the steering column and antilock brakes disabled—slewed off the road and down the side of the mountain. Two liters of aviation fuel in her trunk and a tiny charge triggered by remote control had ensured the fireball that had destroyed any evidence of tampering. A tragic but all too common auto accident.

  End of Bookworm.

  And now she was back?

  He had no doubt that she had indeed been in her car on that frosty day in the Black Forest. He had seen her face as she walked to the car, as she opened the door, again as she glanced at him as she was pulling out of the parking lot. Her car had been under continuous observation for the rest of her final journey. His team was good. They would not have missed her switching cars, nor would she have had any reason to do so.

  Between the rumbling plunge down the mountain and the explosion, there was no way she could have survived. While neither he nor anyone on his team had approached the scene to confirm the presence of a body, he clearly remembered having looked back up the mountainside in case she’d been thrown clear. He’d seen no one, moving or otherwise.

  Morgan took another sip of whiskey as he replayed the scene in his mind again and again, and every time he came to the same inevitable conclusion: Bookworm was dead.

  That left two possibilities. Either his superiors did not trust him, or they were testing him. The former seemed unlikely. While he knew only snippets, he certainly knew enough to be dangerous. If they didn’t trust him, he would be dead already.

  Which meant this was yet another test, like so many he’d undergone in the past fifteen years. No one simply walked into their world. Candidates were scouted, watched, carefully groomed and protected, without even knowing they had been chosen.

  Looking back over his career, he could see their fingerprints. Early on, he’d been transferred out of municipal fund analysis right before the savings and loan scandal exploded and left many cities and counties grasping at air, their bonds all but worthless. Most of Morgan’s early colleagues had gone down with that ship, but he had been safely ashore. Or, more precisely, he had been offshore, learning the details of Caribbean banking laws to better help clients avoid the clutches of the IRS in the wake of Reagan’s tax reforms.

  And so his career had gone, each move a step out of a static or declining field and into an emerging one. At the time it had seemed like a miraculous ride, a series of fortuitous coincidences and opportunities. Now he realized he had been chosen, groomed and shepherded.

  Moreover, each step in his career had presented increasingly gray ethical choices, from tax avoidance to dot-com speculation to creative accounting to invasions of privacy in the guise of background research. And, finally, to murder.

  He hadn’t begun his career as someone who could kill. Instead, his moral qualms had been eroded step by step as his superiors had guided his career. They had molded him, testing him along the way, and he had passed each test.

  Now they were testing him again. But how? Midway through his fifth tumbler of Scotch, the answer came.

  Tom Lawton was another Bookworm. They weren’t saying the Bookworm he’d killed had returned from the dead. They were warning him that Lawton had the same skills, the same resources and, most dangerous of all, the same attitude.

  As his eyes grew heavy, Morgan knew he could pass this test. Tom Lawton would be eliminated.

  By whatever means necessary.

  13

  Boise, Idaho

  Tom’s cell phone started vibrating with an insistence that felt almost like a warning. He hardly needed to pull it out and scan the caller ID to know he was in trouble. Again.

  Kevin’s voice demanded, “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m on suspension,” Tom reminded him. “I’m calling it a vacation.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve run off to pursue some lead on your own. I’m sure I told Miriam to tell you not to do any such thing.”

  Tom wondered why Kevin was even calling him, but even more, he wondered why Kevin would be wondering so quickly what he was up to. His gut tightened with suspicion.

  But lying had become a lot easier for him since they’d sent him undercover. In fact, it had becom
e a far-too-natural way to protect his skin.

  “It’s a personal problem, Kevin.”

  “Yeah? What kind?” Kevin’s tone couldn’t have been more suspicious.

  “I just had to get out of D.C. Sitting around there was reminding me of all the things I’m not being allowed to do. So I packed up my rod and reel, and I’m heading for the mountains for some angling. Rainbow trout, I hope, but right now I’ll settle for any fresh fish cooked in butter over a campfire, okay? And once I get into the mountains, you won’t be able to reach me on my cell anymore, so don’t panic. If you’re lucky, a grizzly will eat me.”

  Kevin was silent for long moments. “Just don’t do anything stupid, Tom. I value your skin more than you seem to think. But if I discover you’re lying, you’ve just used up your last chance.”

  “I hear you.”

  Tom disconnected and looked at the cell phone in his hand. Then, with deliberation, he turned it off. If anyone else wanted to give him a hard time, they could yell at his voice mail.

  He looked at the “personal problem” sitting across from him. Miss Cool, he thought. Or maybe Ms. Ice. Certainly Ms. Crazy. “I’m not buying into Armageddon. Are you some kind of religious nut?”

  “Quite the contrary. I have no religion. If the word Armageddon makes you uneasy, then focus on terrorism. Because terrorism is the stepping stone.”

  His skin was starting to crawl, not so much because he believed she was a nut who was trying to take him in with her delusions, but because he was beginning to fear she wasn’t. “Are you saying the assassination attempt was a terrorist act?”

  She sipped her wine again. “You need to expand your world view.”

  “How so?”

  “Not all terrorists are Islamic, or religious zealots of any kind. Not all terrorist acts claim multiple victims. In fact, not all terrorist acts are designed to create terror. The point is to move the pawns on the board in a certain direction.”

  “So who’s doing the pushing?”

  She shrugged, such a European shrug. “I have ideas—in this case, at least. But little proof.”