Inside Man

by Jeff Abbott

  Neither man answered; both glanced at Kent.

  “Professional discipline,” I said.

  “Obviously, Sam, we’re not going to answer your questions,” Kent said. “You’re going to leave, and we’ll let you know soon enough where Rey can be found.” And then he grabbed Rey as a shield and pulled a gun from his back and put the gun to the old man’s head.

  Foolish me. I didn’t have a straight shot; I didn’t dare fire.

  But Galo lost it. He shrieked and fired the gun I’d given him. The tall man toppled back, writhing, and Galo fired a second time and the writhing stopped. Then he shot dead the wounded man who was cowering in the corner.

  We all stared at Galo, Kent’s gun still on Rey’s head. Kent could have shot Rey, and he hadn’t.

  “Galo…” I said, seconds too late. “I need Kent, don’t shoot him.” I needed him to give to August and to Jimmy. He was the intelligence I had promised; he had the answers.

  “Well, I need a private conversation with Kent here,” Galo said. His voice was ragged, torn. “Let Papa go, now.” Rey seemed half the man I’d seen before. His eyes blinked, unsure, possibly drugged.

  “I could protect you, Kent,” I said. “Hide you, give you safety in exchange for information.” I was trying to be the adult in the room.

  “I’m not interested in being hidden by a bureaucracy,” Kent said.

  I glanced at Galo. “I’m not talking CIA. I’m not with them.”

  “Well, clearly not, since you have a murderer as your sidekick. Not that they’re always so picky.”

  “I can hide you, Kent. I can take care of you.”

  “No, Sam, none of that. He doesn’t walk away into a happy life. Not after what he did to us,” Galo said.

  “What exactly did I do to you, Galo?” Kent said. “I mean, to you specifically? You were always afraid Edwin would be the better businessman. Replace you in your father’s eyes.” The words were like a hot brand against skin. “Hey, Sam, here’s a good one: you know who told me Edwin was suspicious of our operations?”

  This is the death of a family, I thought. I could feel the hate and the confusion and resentment storming, like it was a force in the air.

  “Shut up!” Galo yelled. “That’s a lie, you’re a liar!”

  “Him. Mr. Perfect Son over there. He’s sold his brother out, he’s killed his own stepsister.” Kent’s voice grew cold. “And yet—I’m the family bad guy? I did everything for this family. I was just recruited to do a job, including one that made your family much wealthier, Galo. I didn’t even ask to be a son.”

  “Shut up.” Galo’s voice went lower.

  I decided to state the obvious. “You can’t do this alone, Kent, you can’t drive away.”

  He knew it, and I could see how anger at his need for help made him grit his teeth. But he spoke, trying to ensure I knew he was valuable for his information. “I’ll talk to you, Sam. Tell Galo to put the gun down. I feel certain he’s aiming it at me right now.”

  “No,” Galo said.

  Kent ignored him. “I was recruited to be a spy inside the family. To bring the proposal to Rey about the smuggling of prisoners. Rey made sure that the shipments went smoothly; I made sure that his resolve never wavered. That Rey and Sergei, and the wives, and then Galo kept their mouths shut.”

  “But Zhanna’s mom—”

  “Was my backup informant,” Kent said. “In case I was caught. In case Rey kept secrets from me.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve given my life to this, because we will do what the law is afraid to do. We will protect the world, no matter what it takes.”

  “And payback against your father, that was just a bonus.”

  He shrugged. “I like him fine. My siblings? Screw them.”

  “And who protects us from the protectors?” I asked.

  “You’re so naïve,” he said. Then he made his mistake. “Sam. I have a counterproposal. I have quite a bit of money here. Come work with me.”

  “He’ll kill you, too,” Galo said.

  Heat was in Kent’s voice now: “You’re a murderer, Galo. Say what you will about Zhanna, you committed the same sins she had. I’ve never killed anyone. You get to live with this forever.”

  I watched the cruel smile on Kent’s face.

  Galo swung at me. The punch caught me by surprise. Hard, on my jaw. It lifted me up and I was knocked over onto the chair and he was on top of me, seizing my gun and trying to press it into my back.

  “Don’t,” I said. “I’m not going to take his offer.”

  “Stop this, why did you hurt Eddie?” Rey said, moaning.

  “I didn’t hurt Eddie. He did, Kent did!” Galo screamed, and then Rey tried to lurch toward his son, and Kent fired in the direction of the sound of Galo’s voice, still using the old man as cover. He missed. Galo fired back and the bullet caught Rey Varela in the forehead as he stumbled forward into its path. The old man fell.

  Galo screamed and fired again and Kent went down, his sunglasses shattering. A bloody hole where his eye had been.

  “Papa!” Galo screamed. He hurried to his father. I went to his side. I checked Rey’s pulse. Gone. His expression was oddly peaceful.

  “I’m sorry, Galo…”

  “I killed him…” Galo said. “Oh God, I killed him…”

  I put a hand on Galo’s shoulder. “No. This isn’t your fault. It’s not.”

  “It is…my dad…Zhanna…even the men I shot…” His hands shook. “What…what am I? How do I tell this to Cori and Eddie?” His fingertips touched the blood on his father’s face.

  I tried to soothe him. “Galo. Listen to me. We’ll get rid of Kent and these other guys, and then we’ll figure out—”

  “Figure out what? How? How do we figure out this, Sam?” His gaze locked on me. “You were going to give Kent a way out of this.”

  “Only to get your dad back.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “No, it’s not.” I moved away from him to check Kent’s pulse. Gone as well. I needed him alive. Maybe his laptop had valuable information.

  And then the world hammered in on me, hard. Stunned. Blood running into my eyes. I felt the handcuffs I’d brought snap on my wrist, felt Galo drag me to the room’s center. The other cuff clicked, attached to a crossbeam of the heavy table.

  “Galo…”

  “Shut up, I’m thinking. I have to fix this.”

  Through the blood—he’d struck me with his gun—I saw him pull the bodies of Kent and his associates out of the lighthouse. He grabbed their laptops and fired a bullet through each hard drive. Then he took them outside.

  He knelt by Rey, folding his arms peacefully, stroking his father’s hair, crying and then wiping away tears. Then he carried his father’s frail body outside as well.

  “Galo, what are you doing?” I called.

  “We have to fix this,” he said. “The family. The company. The company doesn’t have to be destroyed.” He gave me a weak little smile. “I was supposed to have everything, Sam, and now I’ve got nothing.”

  He shot off my handcuffs, not bothering with the key. Then he put the warm gun back against my head. “You are going to do as I tell you.”

  “All right.”

  “Get up,” he said. He kept the gun on my skull like it was screwed on.

  I slowly got up. I could barely see. I could feel what felt like a loose flap of skin against my temple; dark circles danced before my eyes.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Galo,” I said thickly. “You know I can.”

  He slammed the gun hard into the back of my head, and I collapsed. I was still stunned and he pulled me to my feet, put the gun on the back of my head again.

  “Outside.”

  I obeyed him. The trunk of the convertible sedan was open, two bodies of Kent’s men jammed inside. The destroyed laptops and the bodies of Kent and Rey lay in the back seat.

  “What are we doing?” I asked, my voice still thick with pain.

  “We have to fix it.
” His voice steadied. “We’ll drop them in the ocean.”

  “Okay. You can take the gun off me now.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not yet, Sam.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Eddie was in a prison. Papa was in a prison, of sorts. I’m in a prison now of my own making. There’s only one key to get out.”

  “Galo…this isn’t your fault.”

  “I killed my father,” he said, and his voice didn’t sound human. It sounded like every bit of grief and pain in his life dwelled in his throat. “I didn’t know Z was going to have a baby, and I killed it. I watched my mama walk into the ocean and I didn’t call out to anyone. If I had, and she lived…no Zhanna in our lives. No Kent, maybe. I could have made it all different.”

  “You didn’t understand.”

  “Maybe I did,” he said. “I’ve always wondered. Get in the car, Sam.” His voice was cold. He led me to the convertible and he kept the gun firmly on me. “Drive. Toward the cliffs. We’ll dump the bodies in the ocean. Even Papa.” His voice trembled, for just a moment. “And then we’ll talk, okay?”

  The oceanside cliffs. Okay. My every muscle was singing. I drove toward them.

  He will jump and I won’t be able to stop him, I thought. “Galo. You just got your brother back. Your sister is safe now. You’re free of Zhanna and Kent. Don’t do this.”

  The cliffs lay ahead. Two hundred feet away. Beyond them, a long horizon of blue water. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”

  The blows to my head had me not thinking clearly. He could have just left me handcuffed. He hadn’t.

  “I’ll fix it,” he said. He jammed his foot atop of mine, on the accelerator. The convertible exploded forward.

  I couldn’t talk about what I knew. No one could ever know he’d killed his father.

  The perfect solution.

  I am strong. I tried to tear my foot out from under his, trapped on the accelerator. I couldn’t.

  A hundred feet. The speedometer climbing, the sea wind a strong, awakening gust in my face. I tried to rip the key out of the ignition.

  He jammed the gun against my head. “I’ll shoot!” he screamed.

  67

  PUT THE GUN down!” I screamed. “Down. Now. You don’t want this.”

  I slammed a fist into Galo’s face. He fired the gun, past my shoulder, deafening me.

  So it was all silent as the car roared off the cliff, hurtling toward the distant blue shimmer of the water.

  The first, instinctive reaction is to brace yourself, to try to cope with the impact. Cope with, never mind survive, the impact.

  He let up off my foot, the job done, instinctively drawing his leg and arms back to brace himself for the crash.

  Next reaction was mine, the peculiar itch in my daredevil’s rattled brain, figuring gravity’s pull at 9.8 meters per second squared, thinking, We have five seconds before we hit.

  In the second of those seconds I felt the gun’s cool barrel go back against my temple and realized Galo was aiming right at my head in case the crash or the water didn’t end me.

  That is attention to detail. That is commitment. He sure loves his family.

  Three: The water rushed toward us. I moved forward, reaching, the cool steel barrel staying on me, my fingers along the floorboard groping for my one chance.

  I pulled the hood release.

  The sky, the water, my last breath, everything blue.

  The car’s hood popped back, slamming toward us, shattering the windshield as the car cartwheeled, and he gasped, his arms going up to protect himself.

  I pushed myself out.

  Four: The gun fired.

  68

  THE BULLET MISSED me, tearing through my wind-billowing shirt, but the water did not. I slammed into it, thrown free of the car, and for one awful moment I thought, It’ll be too shallow, it’ll break my back. But it was deep—the blue was a sign—and the car bobbed once, upside down, and then sank.

  I surfaced, grabbed a lungful of air, then dove downward, trying to reach Galo. I saw the car, drifting off the shallow cut, dropping into deeper water. I saw him, caught in the car, arms and hands spread in a final surrender, his head lolling at a wrong angle, and then the car tumbled again, off the shelf, into the deeper blue. The same blue that had once claimed his mother.

  I shot back to the surface.

  The tide yanked at me, like an insistent child, me spinning in its grasp. I saw a wave break on a rock very close to shore and aimed myself at it, letting the water carry me closer. I hit the rock, it hurt, the water receded, and I grabbed at wet stone. Water washed over me again. My head pounded in agony.

  I studied the incoming tide. The rocks at the base of the cliff were large, flat, glistening. But where the old lighthouse stood like a neglectful soldier, steps had been cut out of the stone, going down to a platform of rock halfway down, with an old weathered, rusted railing. I was a good climber; if I could survive the swim I could scale the rocks up to the platform. I watched the tide to avoid being dashed against the rocks.

  I swam. I climbed. And then I walked up the stairs.

  At the lighthouse I lay there for a moment, spent, shocked to be alive. I got up and walked back to the gate. I climbed over the fence and went back to the rental car and found the keys under the mat and drove to the closest town, imagining a story for how I could explain my head injury to an ER doctor—I fell by the cliffs, easy enough, shivering, shaking, but the wind and the sun dried my clothes, a heartbreakingly beautiful day, and I wondered how I would tell Cori.

  69

  I KNOW YOU could have saved him,” Cori said. Stormy’s wasn’t open, but we sat in the cool at the bar, the checkers game between us. Maybe the same one from the night of Steve’s murder; maybe no one had ever bothered to finish it. A game should be played until there’s a winner, I’d told Cori.

  But no winners here.

  “I could save him only if he let me,” I said. “He wouldn’t listen. He thought he was doing the right thing.”

  She didn’t touch her wine. It had been five days since I returned from San Juan. I had gone first to give Cori the awful news, then to New Orleans to see my son for a blissful two days and then returned to Miami. I’d decided Stormy’s would be sold. I didn’t want anyone looking for Sam Chevalier to find me through it. In a few months I’d buy another Miami bar, elsewhere in the city, under another front company, and Paige had agreed to come to work for me as the new bar’s manager. I figured she already knew enough of my dirty secrets. She had the Mila stamp of approval.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “This is all my fault. If I’d left well enough alone…”

  “Then Edwin would still be in a prison.”

  She rubbed at her temples. “I know. But Papa…and Galo…”

  “They knew what they were getting into, and it was never going to end well.” I had not told her about Kent’s vicious hints about being Rey’s son. There was no proof; there was no point.

  “Sam, please don’t judge them.”

  Sometimes when we lose our loved ones they take on a gloss they didn’t always have in life. She was trapped in a Shakespearean tragedy and it was over and she was one of the blinking, stunned survivors.

  And I was nothing but a reminder of her family’s losses and mistakes. I’d been cautious of an entanglement with Cordelia, but now…her turning away from me, I did that typical male thing where all her virtues were magnified. I wanted to see her. I liked her. But I was the guy from the worst time in her life. No one wants to be that guy.

  She saw it in my face, the touch of my fingers against hers. “If things were different…” she said. “I brought this on us. I kissed you and said I was saving your life…and I was setting my family’s ruin in motion.”

  “No. This isn’t your fault.”

  The good deed of saving Edwin didn’t seem to count for much. It would, I thought, in time, as Edwin came back to being himself. Mila had helped him, in return for te
lling her everything about his time at the prison, crafting a believable story that he’d been held, moved from remote location to location, by drug dealers who used him to ensure FastFlex helped them with their smuggling. Rey, Galo, and Kent were missing, presumed victims of the same drug dealers, silenced after Edwin escaped his captors. In light of Zhanna’s recent death and Ricky’s disappearance, the press was having a field day about the once-lauded and respected Varelas. FastFlex would probably have to shut down, sell off its assets. That would have been a horror for Galo, but Edwin and Cori just seemed relieved.

  “You made your choices,” I said. “But so did they. Every one of them.” It wasn’t a comfort she was ready to hear.

  She drank her wine and I drank mine and then she kissed me good-bye, on the cheek, and went to mend her brother and her world.

  I had to go write a report for August. I was standing firm in my commitment to share information with him, although Jimmy didn’t like it. But all I had, really, were some names and bank accounts and locations, and it would be up to August to figure out if he wanted to chase a dark corner. It might be beyond his job description, or his bosses might not want him to shine a light there. But I’d passed along one bit of information no one else could share: the bank account numbers that I’d gotten from Magali. If there were still funds in them, and August went after them, I’d ask him to give some of the money to the burnt man, if he was still alive. His advice had saved me.

  Mila came downstairs, her eyes measuring me, not wanting to ask if I was okay.

  “You care about her.”

  “I do. But that’s that. Let’s shut this place up and go see my boy,” I said. “I’m ready for New Orleans again.”

  “No, Sam,” she said. “Something Edwin told me. We have someplace to go first.”

  70

  I REALLY DID not want to be here.

  The prison’s interior had burned and the walls tumbled into rubble, far more than the riot could have done, and I figured its owners had come out of their dark corners and razed it to the ground. Mila and I walked through the wreckage. A pile of bodies lay in the exercise yard, burnt in a heap. It was hard to tell how many there were. Guards, prisoners, both. I felt sick.