by J. B. Turner
Stone said nothing. He knew all about dysfunctional parents. But this woman’s idea of dysfunctional and his were polar opposites. “Why are you beating yourself up? You didn’t abandon her.”
Beatrice shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“Did you beat her?”
“Never.” She sat partway up. “And neither did my ex, by the way. I’d never have left her with him if he had. But I did neglect her sometimes. She had to survive alone in our little apartment.”
“But at least she was close to the beach.”
“There are a lot of creeps hanging around. I should’ve looked out for her better. I was self-centered. Self-obsessed. Still am. Well, at least that’s what my ex says.”
Stone felt sorry for her in a way. He didn’t feel sorry for anyone usually. “Life’s tough.”
“He said I neglected her. Neglected? That was like a dagger through the heart.”
“Trust me, I know all about neglect. What your daughter experienced was not neglect.”
Beatrice sighed and shrugged. “Are you married?”
Stone shook his head.
“What about girlfriends?”
“None that I can remember.”
“Fuck. Ever?”
Stone said nothing.
“Have you ever been in therapy?”
“Do I look like I’ve been in therapy?”
“I guess not.”
Beatrice was staring at Stone as if examining his profile.
“What are you looking at?”
“You.”
“You wanna knock it off?”
“Why? You’ve got an interesting face.”
“Okay, enough talking about faces.”
“What’s the problem with talking about your face? Yeah, maybe you need a shave. But other than that, why the hell are you so touchy?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Beatrice yawned. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“Try and get some sleep, then. We’re on the move at first light.”
“You’re not going to kill me?”
Stone didn’t answer, just let himself drift away, the sound of her chattering like white noise in his head.
Fifteen
Berenger was floating on a dark river, feeling his head dip under the water, black skies above. He awoke on the Gulfstream bathed in cold sweat, his cell phone ringing. He took a moment to gather himself as he glanced at his phone beside the bed.
The caller ID said it was de Boer. The LCD showed it was 5:21 a.m. local time.
Berenger reached over and answered. “Kevin, just wanted to say again, I’m so sorry about Pieter. If you want to hand over the reins, I’ll understand.”
“Not a chance. Plenty of time to grieve.”
“I respect that.”
“Mark, I think we might have something.”
“What?”
“I’m just going to send you an encrypted message. Call me back when you’ve seen it.”
A beep signaled the end of the call.
Berenger navigated to his encrypted email and clicked on the message from de Boer. It opened, and footage immediately began to play. It had been taken with a night-vision camera, not high quality. The footage was slow and jerky. Then the clip ended. The image frozen on the screen showed what looked like Nathan Stone and the woman crouched amid a grove of mangroves, about to climb onto a small boat.
Berenger felt his heart rate quicken. He called de Boer. “Talk to me, Kevin. What the hell is this?”
“The cyberteam we brought in unearthed this. They’re unbelievable. We should have had them here from the start. They’ve been running their own facial recognition software, seemingly the most advanced there is, through every wireless surveillance camera in Florida.”
“Every one?”
“Every goddamn one.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And guess what? It’s picked them up.”
“You want to explain this to me in layman’s terms? How was this image captured exactly?”
“A motion-activated, ultraviolet, night-vision camera deep in the southern Everglades.”
“The Everglades? Who put the camera in place?”
“This is where it gets interesting. It was set up by a wildlife conservation charity, Everglades Evermore, and it captured this image of Stone and the woman just over eight hours ago, just after sunset.”
“Where was this image captured?”
“We have the coordinates. It’s an uninhabited key. Four nautical miles from the trail where we believe they entered the Everglades, then stole this boat.”
Berenger clenched his fist in triumph. He looked out the Gulfstream window at the clouds below. “That’s terrific work. I don’t want to waste any time. Let’s get our teams into place.”
“I’ve got a couple of tracking experts, survival experts too, on the way.”
“It’s not so straightforward to find them from here, I assume.”
“It’s gonna be tough. Stone is an expert. And he can survive just about any place in the world, any environment. Don’t get me wrong, he’ll find it hard going too.”
“I can’t understand why the woman is there. What is that all about?”
“I don’t know if he’s taken her hostage, thinking she might come in handy.”
“It’ll slow him down. I don’t understand why he didn’t leave her by the side of the road or just neutralize her.”
“Maybe he already has.”
“Fuck,” Berenger snapped. “Why the hell didn’t we just take him out in cold blood outside that bar?”
“Why indeed. A lesson for everyone, I guess.”
Berenger sighed. “Let’s get in there. Let’s find them. And this time no fuck-ups.”
Sixteen
Stone had barely slept. He popped a couple of steroid-and-amphetamine pills into his mouth and ground them with his teeth. He checked his watch. It was four a.m. Beatrice was sleeping. Breathing deep and gentle. He looked across at her. He needed to move now. Unhindered by someone who wasn’t used to living in such conditions.
The more he thought about it, the more he realized he needed to leave her there. He could move on. No ties. It made sense. Someone would find her. Eventually. But it could be days. Weeks. No one would hear her scream out there.
The easiest thing to do would be to just leave the hut, head down to the boat, and push off. The Nathan Stone of old wouldn’t have batted an eye. He would have been gone. Without a word. Then again, the Nathan Stone of old could just as easily have put a bullet in her head.
So why the hell wasn’t he doing that now?
It was like he had changed in the last year. It was like something had been rekindled within him. Deep within his soul, a part of him that he thought was gone, a part of him that he thought had been destroyed was alive. The part that still retained a semblance of what it was like to be a human being. A man. Slowly it was beginning to dawn on him that he cared about the woman sleeping a few feet from him.
The people who were after him would certainly kill her. They didn’t fuck around.
Stone reflected on his position and what he could intuit about the current management of the Commission. He thought about the psychiatrist who had examined him. Evaluated him. In Scotland. And in Canada. Berenger had examined Helen too when they’d kidnapped her. He knew the buttons that could be pressed. Had Beatrice, a woman who looked so much like Helen, been chosen by Berenger to approach Nathan in the bar simply because of her striking similarity to his sister? Did Berenger believe the resemblance would allow Nathan, perhaps subconsciously, to drop his guard?
Stone thought back to his numerous sessions with Berenger. He’d sensed the psychologist’s innate fear of him. He’d observed how Berenger’s gaze dropped if Stone gave him a long, cold stare. But he’d also noticed how fascinated Berenger was with him. The psychiatrist had liked to linger over the telling of brutal episodes in Stone’s life. Perhaps most of all, he’d fixate
d on Stone’s upbringing. His mother. His father. He’d wanted to know what triggered Stone. Berenger seemed to savor Stone’s stories about his father’s beatings. He wanted to know how Stone had evolved from being bullied on the streets and at home to being able to fight back. To no longer feeling the fear.
Beatrice stirred for a moment, snapping Stone out of his thoughts.
Stone watched her, bathed in the glow from the candles. Her breathing was shallow. His gut told him to move. Leave now. The men working for the Commission were smart people. Dangerous. They would have picked up his trail by now. And there was too much at stake for them to allow Stone or the girl to live.
Stone had the ability to disappear. She didn’t. She would die if he didn’t help her. Was that his problem? He didn’t want to abandon her to her fate. But then again, what about his sister? His sister’s fate depended on him making it out of this alive. It might not be safe for him to return to Florida to see her for a while, but he could still keep in touch from afar. And eventually, when it was safe, he could move her to somewhere they’d never find her.
Stone looked at the woman’s reddened face, seared by the sun and mottled with insect bites. He saw the way her hair was matted to her face with sweat, flushed just the way Helen’s face was when she got angry. He closed his eyes. His life was all about compartmentalization. He lived alone. He didn’t rely on anyone. He didn’t need anyone. He didn’t want anyone in his life. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d truly felt anything. It was only Helen he cared about. And even that was in a state of total detachment. He still didn’t feel a real connection. To her. To anyone.
The boy he’d been had grown not into a man but a monster. A cold killing machine, trained and deployed first by the American army, then by the CIA. But now, faced with abandoning a woman he didn’t really know and to whom he owed nothing, he was hesitant, indecisive. Stricken by doubt. That had never been a problem in the past. He was asked to kill, then he killed. He tasted blood each and every day. And felt no remorse at what he had become.
So what was stopping him now from disappearing into the night?
Stone rubbed his face. He felt strange. It was almost like something deep within him, something that had lain buried, dormant since it had been beaten out of him as a boy, was beginning to stir. The ability to feel. To understand. To care. An essential part of being a human being. It was like the walls he had built around himself for protection were now allowing a small ray of light into his dark soul.
Beatrice stirred again and bolted upright, bathed in sweat. Her eyes found the glow of Stone’s in the waning candlelight. “Were you watching me?”
Stone nodded. “Watching over you.”
“I see. How long was I asleep for?”
“A couple of hours, I think.”
“Did you sleep?”
“For a little while,” he lied.
“Feel like I’m burning up,” she said.
Stone got up and handed her a bottle of the cloudy vine water. “Drink it.”
“Thanks.” She winced as she swallowed, then handed the bottle to Stone. He finished the rest. “So,” she said, looking around, “you weren’t tempted to kill me?”
“Not yet,” he said, cracking a smile.
Beatrice closed her eyes. “Gimme strength.” She picked up her bag and reached inside. “I must be a mess.”
“You look okay to me.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, using a perfumed wipe to take her mascara and makeup off. “I’m alive. It’s something.”
“Are you still scared of me?”
“A little bit. Feel like I’ve been sucked into my own personal hell.”
“Know what Churchill said?”
Beatrice shrugged.
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
She nodded. “Makes sense.”
“You’ve got a choice. You can still go back.”
“Or head out with you?”
“Exactly.”
Beatrice wiped her hands with the cloth. “You haven’t killed me, so that’s a point in your favor.”
“I think we should leave now.”
“Now? At this hour? Why?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling I have that these people will be closing in soon.”
“Why would you think that?”
“They’re very good at finding people. I know that from personal experience.”
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
Stone nodded, keeping his own counsel.
“When are we going to get out of here?”
“Maybe not today.”
“Why not?”
“It’s highly unlikely we will be able to paddle our way back to the mid-Keys or thereabouts, at least without getting spotted.”
“So how are we going to get back?”
“I’m working on it. But right now we need to move.”
“Now?”
Stone nodded. “We keep moving, we stay alive.”
Seventeen
Catherine Hudson’s cell phone vibrated on her bedside table, rousing her from a light sleep. She peered at the luminous text message from an old college friend, Becky McFarlane. The message read:
Hi, just saw your profile on LinkedIn and thought it would be nice to catch up sometime.
Hudson’s foggy brain tried to process. She reread the short message two more times. She hadn’t given out her cell number to anyone outside of work. She would have expected any contact to come through the LinkedIn messaging service, where her fake profile as a management consultant was public. The profile was to ensure her cover was in place across social media. But the approach had come via her cell phone.
Only a handful of people had that number.
Hudson felt something wasn’t quite right. She hadn’t seen Becky, a fellow economics graduate of Colby College, for almost twenty years. Her gut was telling her something was wrong.
She slipped out of bed so as not to disturb her husband and tiptoed downstairs. Hudson made herself a coffee. She opened up her MacBook on the kitchen table, logged on, and almost immediately pulled up Becky’s LinkedIn profile. Her college friend, according to the profile, was working in consular affairs at the US embassy in London.
Hudson sipped some coffee and scrolled through the profile. She saw that Becky’s previous employment was at the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs in the State Department. Before that, she’d worked for the Diplomatic Security Service at the US embassy in Pakistan.
Alarm bells were beginning to ring. Big-time. Something felt wrong. Seriously wrong. Hudson knew the DSS wasn’t only concerned with protecting diplomatic missions around the world. It was also involved in counterintelligence and counterterrorism.
Hudson had been recruited by the CIA straight out of Colby; the secrecy involved meant she had immediately lost touch with her college friends. She wondered why Becky suddenly wanted to get in touch.
If there was an ulterior reason for Becky’s sudden approach, why now?
Catherine considered what she knew about the DSS. They were also involved in tracking down fugitives who had fled America to escape justice. In 1995, DSS special agents, along with local police and intelligence services in Pakistan, had arrested Ramzi Yousef, who had been wanted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Diplomatic Security investigators had also been involved in a case involving a CIA station chief in Algeria, who eventually pled guilty to abusive sexual contact and unlawful use of cocaine.
She wondered if Becky worked in such a capacity. Then again, it might be something more mundane. But at the State Department, tasked with securing American interests and security, economic and political, around the globe, nothing was really mundane.
Of course, maybe a position in consular affairs was just a cover for more sensitive work. Hudson knew better than anyone that embassies were brilliant covers for intelligence-gathering operations. The CIA would have a presence, especially in a major worl
d city like London.
Hudson took another sip of coffee as she stared at the pale-blue MacBook screen.
Hudson had always been taught that, in the world she inhabited, nothing was what it seemed. Friends could actually be enemies. Becky’s LinkedIn profile was likely as full of bullshit as her own—Becky could be CIA, DSS, or something else entirely.
When Catherine thought back to their days at Colby, her lasting impression of Becky was that she was always the one who didn’t want to go out, didn’t want to socialize, didn’t want to take part. She’d never initiated drinks, never suggested a double date. It just never happened with her.
But maybe she had changed after all these years.
Hudson figured she had four options. She could ignore the text. She could respond to the text and suggest they meet up sometime. She could respond to the text and say she wasn’t available. Finally, she could call Becky and chat, without having any firm game plan in mind. Exchanging banalities. But then she thought, That’s exactly how it begins. How to curry favor.
There was a possibility Becky was being used by others within US intelligence to reach out to her. Knowledge of her work, like most covert operations, was strictly confined to a handful of people. Few outside of that handful even knew about the Commission’s existence, and none of them were supposed to know about her role in setting it up.
The CIA was very good at establishing privately funded entities to pursue their aims. A favorite tactic was sponsoring academic conferences that would attract, say, nuclear scientists from around the world. Invitations would be specifically extended to Iran’s top experts on uranium enrichment. Then, covert CIA operatives would get to work, trying to approach the scientists without their Revolutionary Guard minders noticing.
Was Becky trying to set up something that was more than just a meeting of old friends? She imagined that Becky, working in the State Department, might be able to figure out what she really did. Maybe not the covert part, but she’d know Catherine was employed by the Agency.
