Panic

by Jeff Abbott

  Gabriel’s eyes moistened in terror. ‘No. No.’

  Jargo smiled. Everyone, but him, had a weakness, and that made him feel so much better and secure in his place in the world.

  ‘Then let’s chat like the professionals we are so your family gets to enjoy their storybook life. Who are you working for?’

  Gabriel took two deep breaths before answering. ‘Donna Casher.’

  ‘What exactly were you supposed to do for her?’

  ‘Get fake IDs for them, get her and her kid to her husband. Then get all three of them out of the country. Protect them.’

  ‘And your payment was what?’ Jargo moved closer with the larger knife, brushed its edge along Gabriel’s jaw.

  ‘Hundred thousand dollars.’

  Jargo lowered the knife. ‘Ah. A cash basis. Would you like a drink to kill the pain? Kentucky bourbon? Mexican tequila?’

  ‘Sure.’ Gabriel closed his eyes.

  ‘And I heard you were off the sauce. Shame to backpedal. Well, you can’t have a drink. Not yet. I don’t believe that hundred thou was the whole payment, Mr. Gabriel.’

  ‘Jesus, please, don’t hurt my girls. They don’t know anything.’

  Jargo leaned close to Gabriel, studied Gabriel’s face as though admiring the deftness of a painting, and flicked out his hand. A shred of cheek parted from Gabriel’s face. Gabriel gritted his teeth but didn’t scream. Blood dripped from the cut, in a slow ooze.

  ‘I’m impressed.’ Jargo got up, went to the bar, opened a bottle of whiskey. Sniffed at it. ‘Glenfiddich. Mother’s milk, during your glory days at the Company. At least what I heard in the rare moments I gave you any thought.’ He tippled a stream onto Gabriel’s cut. ‘The drink you wanted. Enjoy.’

  Gabriel moaned.

  ‘Now. An old spook like you, a hundred thousand won’t keep you in Fritos and Ripple.’ He produced a piece of paper from his jacket, held it up. ‘We traced this e-mail from you to Donna Casher. Decode it for me.’

  The old training died hard. ‘I don’t know what it means.’

  Jargo flicked the blade along the ear’s surface, scored blood from the lobe. Gabriel jerked. ‘With two bullets in you, your mouth ruined, this doesn’t hurt much. You want me to dig the bullets out for you?’ Jargo grinned.

  Gabriel shuddered.

  ‘See, Donna Casher turning to an ex-CIA drunk is truly the million-dollar question. Why you? I believe you were willing to take a bigger chance. For more than money. Tell me. For your family’s sake.’ Jargo leaned down, whispered into the man’s devastated ear. ‘Buy their safety.’

  Gabriel’s chest heaved. He cried. Jargo restrained himself from cutting the man’s throat. He hated tears. They lessened a person so.

  Gabriel found his breath. ‘The message meant she was ready to run.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jargo said. ‘Running with what?’

  ‘Donna had a list.’

  Confirmation. ‘A list.’

  ‘Of a group of people. Inside the CIA… running illegal, unauthorized operations. Hiring out assassination and espionage work to a freelance group of spies she called the Deeps. She had your CIA clients’ names, she had account information on how they had paid for your services. Like I always suspected.’

  ‘And never proved,’ Jargo said. ‘Describe the data, please.’

  ‘This freelance group, the Deeps, she said they had clients inside the CIA. Inside the Pentagon. Inside the FBI. Inside MI5 and MI6 in England. Inside every intelligence agency in the world. Inside the Fortune 500. Inside governments, all high-ranking people. Any time someone needs a dirty job, forever off the books… they come to you.’

  ‘They do,’ Jargo said. ‘You can see why my clients wouldn’t appreciate you taking their names in vain.’ He brought the knife closer to Gabriel’s throat. ‘Did Mitchell Casher know about your arrangement to be his wife’s bodyguard?’

  ‘She said he didn’t know about her having this client list, or her wanting to run. He was on an assignment for the Deeps – for you – and she said we would meet him in Florida in three days. That was his reentry point after his assignment overseas. She wanted me with her when she talked to him. To convince Mitchell they had no choice but to run. I was to pose as a CIA liaison, tell him they were getting immunity and new identities in exchange for the data. Then they’d run, the whole family, together.’

  ‘Donna made this a fait accompli.’

  ‘She didn’t want to give her husband a choice. She was burning their every bridge.’

  ‘Where was she running to?’

  ‘I just had to get the Cashers safely to Florida. They would run from there. Anywhere. I don’t know. Didn’t Donna tell you this before you killed her?’

  ‘Dezz killed her. In a rage. Because she would not speak. She was stronger than you. And she had better training.’ He wiped blood off the knife. ‘And so she summoned Evan to Austin.’

  ‘Donna planned to explain to him they had to run – tell him the entire truth. That she worked for your network, she wanted you brought down, that she would give me the data to bring down every one of your clients. Then we were driving to Florida. She wanted to avoid airports.’

  ‘Lucky for him you arrived.’ Jargo brought his face close to Gabriel’s. ‘This client list and some related files were on Evan’s computer. We saw it. We erased it. You’re telling me he didn’t know he had the files?’

  ‘I don’t know if he knew or not. I’m telling you what his mother knew. He… he doesn’t seem to know much.’

  ‘Does he know or not?’

  ‘I don’t… think so. He’s dumb as a stump.’

  ‘No, he’s not dumb.’ Jargo ran the tip of the blade along Gabriel’s chin. ‘I don’t believe you. Donna cleaned the files off her computer. She sent a backup to Evan’s computer. But she would need the files to convince Evan of the need for them to vanish. You don’t simply just go and run away from your life. So Evan must have seen the files. And taken the precaution of making a copy and hiding it.’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  Jargo jabbed the knife into the bullet wound in Gabriel’s shoulder, and Gabriel’s eyes bugged, the veins popped on his neck. Jargo clamped a hand over Gabriel’s mouth, twisted the knife, let the scream run its course under his fingers, removed the knife, flicked away the blood.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He knows,’ Gabriel gasped. ‘He knows. I told him. Please. He knows your name. He knows his mother worked for you.’

  ‘He fought you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Beat you.’

  ‘He’s thirty years younger than me.’

  ‘Given your reversal of fortune,’ Jargo said, ‘I think you’d like for Evan to bring me down.’

  Gabriel met Jargo’s stare. ‘You won’t live forever.’

  ‘True. Where were you supposed to meet Mitchell in Florida?’

  ‘Donna knew the location, I didn’t. He wasn’t expecting her. She was intercepting him on his way home.’

  ‘Where will Evan run? To the CIA?’

  ‘I warned him off the CIA. I didn’t want…’

  Jargo stood. ‘Ego, ego, ego. You wanted the files for yourself. To bring me down. Humiliate the CIA. It would ruin them, you know. Revenge. See where it’s gotten you?’

  ‘I’ve kept my promise.’

  ‘Tell me. Do you often respond to any crank who contacts you to help you in your vendetta against the CIA? She must have offered you proof of her credentials. A taste for what was to come.’

  Gabriel looked into Jargo’s face and said, ‘Smithson.’ Smiled as Jargo went pale. ‘I’ve told you everything I know.’

  Jargo struggled to keep his emotions from surfacing on his face. My God, how much had Donna told this man? Jargo pretended as if the name Smithson meant nothing to him. ‘Evan left a large amount of cash behind in your son-in-law’s Suburban. But no IDs. Presumably you didn’t plan on the Cashers flying out of Florida under their own names. I need to know the ident
ities on the documents you created for Evan.’

  Gabriel closed his eyes. As though steeling himself for the answer.

  Jargo sipped at the whiskey, leaned over close to Gabriel, and spat whiskey onto Gabriel’s facial gash.

  Gabriel spat back.

  Jargo wiped the string of saliva from his cheek with the back of his hand. ‘You’ll give me every name Evan’s got documentation for. And then we’ll go-’

  Nowhere. Gabriel whipped his head downward and to the right. Jargo still held the long silver blade of the knife in his hand, and Gabriel pounded his throat onto the point with one breathless blow.

  ‘No!’ Jargo jerked away, letting go of the knife. It wedged in Gabriel’s neck. Gabriel collapsed to the floor, eyes clenched shut, and then his breath and his piss and his life unfolded out of him.

  Jargo slid the knife free. He tested for a pulse; gone.

  ‘You can’t know. You can’t know.’ In a fury, he started kicking the body. The face. The jaw. Bone and teeth snapped under his heel. Blood splattered across the calfskin. His leg started to get tired, his pants were ruined, and the rage drained out of him and he collapsed to the soiled carpet. Smithson. How much had Donna told Gabriel or told her son?

  ‘Did you lie to me?’ Jargo asked Gabriel’s body. ‘Do you know our names?’ He couldn’t risk it. Not at all. He had to assume the worst. Evan knew.

  He could never let his clients know they were in danger. That would start a panic. It would destroy his business, his credibility. His clients could never, ever know such a list existed. He had to bring Evan down now.

  He cleaned the blood from the knife and called Carrie’s cell phone. ‘Get back here. We’re leaving for Houston. Immediately.’

  No debate now. No discussion. Evan Casher was a dead man, and Jargo knew he had just the perfect bait to grace a trap.

  SUNDAY MARCH 13

  18

  S unday morning, shortly after midnight, Evan finally let himself weep for his murdered mother.

  Alone in the cheap Houston motel room, not far from the shadow of the old Astrodome and the distant hum of cars speeding along Loop 610, the lights off and the bed weathered with hourly use, he lay down, alone, and memories of his mother and his father flooded his mind. The tears came then, hot and harsh, and he curled into a ball and let them come.

  He hated to cry. But the moorings of his life had been shorn away, and the grief throbbed in his chest like a physical pain. His mother had been gentle, wry, careful as a craftsman about her photos. Shy with strangers but expansive and talkative with him and his father. When he was little and would beg to sit in her darkroom and watch her work, she would stand over her photo-developing equipment, a lock of hair dangling in her face, singing little songs under her breath that she composed on the spot to keep him entertained. His father was quiet, too, a reader, a computer geek, a man of few words but when he spoke every word mattered. Always supportive, insightful, quick to hug, quick to gently discipline. Evan could not have asked for kinder and better parents. They were quiet and a little closemouthed, and now that quirk loomed large in his head. Because now it meant more than computerish solitude or artistic introversion. Was it a veil for what lay beyond, their secret world?

  He’d believed he knew them. But the burden of a hidden life, lived just beyond his eyes, was unimaginable to him.

  Because they didn’t want you hurt. Or because they didn’t trust you.

  Ten minutes. Crying done. No more, he told himself. He was done with tears. He washed his face, wiping it dry with the paper-thin, worn towel.

  Exhaustion staggered him. He had driven straight into San Antonio, changed the license plates off the stolen pickup, trading with a decrepit-looking station wagon in a neighborhood where it seemed less than likely the police would get a prompt phone call. He drove the speed limit on I-10, heading east, winding through the coastal flat-lands and into the humid sprawl of Houston. He only stopped for gas, eating Slim Jims and guzzling coffee, paying with cash when he had to refill the tank. He found a cheap motel – cheap in that the hookers shook their moneymakers a block away – and booked a room for the night. The clerk seemed to resent him – Evan supposed they didn’t get much demand for more than an hour or two in the room. Evan palmed the room key and drove the truck – too nice for the lot – past an old woman smoking cigarettes in a doorway, past two whores chatting and laughing in the parking lot. He locked the door behind him. There was no furniture other than the bed and a worn TV stand, bolted to the floor. The TV brought a fuzzy picture and offered only the local Houston channels.

  All gone. The words spoken by one of the killers in the kitchen. The file they killed his mother for had been on his computer. Somehow.

  Gabriel said she’d e-mailed the files. Assume it was true, since she’d sent him a large e-mail late the night before she called him. So she must have hidden a program inside the songs, tucking these hidden files on his laptop in a place he would never look. He wasn’t a computer geek, he didn’t explore the innards of his laptop, he didn’t browse through his library or preference files. But the data would be there, a backup for his mother or insurance for Gabriel, and Evan would have never thought twice about receiving a set of music files.

  Music files.

  He dug his digital music player out of the duffel. Evan always synced his music files with his digital music player, and he had Friday morning, so he could listen to the music during the drive to Austin. So potentially he still had the file – still encoded, but not lost. If he could move the correct music file to a new computer, it might automatically re-create the files his mother had stolen.

  If it was in a digital photo – those he didn’t back up. It would be lost forever.

  He would need a computer. He didn’t have enough cash for one, and he did not dare use a credit card. Tomorrow’s problem.

  Outside, a woman cussed, a man laughed and asked her to love him until tomorrow, then the same woman laughed with him.

  He dug out the small, locked box he had taken from Gabriel’s house. A single wire hanger dangled in the closet; he tried to pick the lock with its bent end, feeling ridiculous. Got nowhere. He walked down to the motel office.

  ‘Do you have a screwdriver I can borrow?’ he asked the clerk.

  The clerk looked at him with empty eyes. ‘Maintenance’ll be here tomorrow.’

  Evan slid a five-dollar bill across the counter. ‘I just need a screwdriver for ten minutes.’

  The clerk shrugged, got up, returned with a screwdriver, took the bill. ‘Bring it back in ten or I’ll call the cops.’

  Customer service, alive and well. Evan headed back to his room, ignoring a ‘Hey, sweetheart, you need a date?’ from a prostitute at the edge of the parking lot.

  Evan broke the lock on the fifth try. Small, paper-wrapped packages spilled out, and Evan hurried back to the office in case the grumpy clerk made good on his threat. The clerk didn’t look over from his TV basketball game as Evan slid the tool back across the counter.

  The low groans of a couple sounded through the thin walls when he went back into the room. He didn’t want to hear them and he cranked on the TV. Evan opened the first package. Inside were passports from New Zealand, held together with a rubber band. He opened the top one: his own face stared back at him. He was David Edward Rendon, his birthplace listed as Auckland. The paper looked and felt appropriately high-grade government authentic; an exit stamp indicated he’d left New Zealand a scant three weeks ago.

  He picked up another New Zealand passport from the spill of papers. His mother’s picture inside, a false name of Margaret Beatrice Rendon, the paper worn as if it had flown a lot of miles. A South African passport in the name of Janine Petersen. Same last name as his African identity. A Belgian passport for his mother as well, her name now Solange Merteuil. He picked up another Belgian document. His picture again, but with the name of Jean-Marc Merteuil. He opened the second package: three passports for Gabriel, false names from Namibia, Belgium, C
osta Rica.

  The next package held four bound passports at the bottom of the pile, looped together by a rubber band. He flipped them over, freed them from the band. South Africa. New Zealand. Belgium. United States. Opened them. And inside each, his father’s face stared up at him. Four different names: Petersen, Rendon, Merteuil, Smithson.

  Odd. Three for him, three for his mother, but four for his dad. Why?

  In the final package were credit cards and other identity documentation, tied to his family’s new names. But he was afraid to use the cards. What if Jargo could find him if he charged gas or plane fare or a meal? He needed cash, but he knew if he made an ATM withdrawal from his accounts, the transaction would register in the bank’s database, the security tape would capture his image, and the police would know he was back in Houston. So what if they know you’re in Houston? You’re leaving for Florida. But he was still reluctant to go to a bank.

  He tucked the passports back into the bag.

  The awful question wormed in past his fatigue: Was Jargo waiting for you at Mom’s? If Jargo wasn’t expecting Evan, then they were after his mother and Evan had simply arrived at the wrong time. But if they were… how had they known he was coming? He had talked directly to no one but his mother. He could phone in an anonymous tip to the police, suggest they look for bugs on her phone. Or on his. He had called Carrie, left her a voice mail. They could have intercepted that message.

  You’re ignoring that Carrie quit her job that morning. She vanished without telling you. Did she know about this?

  The thought dried his throat. Don’t love me, she had said. But that couldn’t mean regret. That couldn’t mean she was preparing to betray him. He knew her, he knew her heart. He could not believe Carrie would have any voluntary involvement in this horror. It had to be a phone tap. Which was an entirely scary prospect of its own. Gabriel had called Jargo a freelance spy – assume that was true, then Jargo could tap phones. But if it wasn’t, then Jargo was working for a bigger fish. The CIA. The FBI.