“Don’t listen to Paulo,” said the Dark. “You did the right thing, Shada. Chang was a blackmailer.”
Her aim was turning unsteady, even as her voice quaked. “You said it would only make him sick, not kill him.”
Jack felt chills at the thought of Shada disguising herself and jabbing Chang with the toxin. He suddenly grasped the degree of control the Dark exercised over her.
“Shada, I want you to do exactly as I say,” the Dark said. “Take it slow now. I want you to turn the gun away from me.”
“I . . . can’t.”
“Turn it away from me and aim it at Jack.”
She shook her head, but without much conviction. The Dark continued to work on her. “Shada, the police already know that two people went to Neil Goderich’s office the night he was shot.”
That was news to Jack, and he wasn’t sure if the police knew it, either. But Shada’s silence confirmed that it was true.
“Run with me,” said the Dark. “That’s all we can do, Shada.”
Tears were streaming down her face. Shada’s voice was barely audible, and even though she was staring at the Dark, Jack sensed that she was speaking to him.
“I was just the lookout,” she said. “Neil wasn’t supposed to get shot.”
“Aim the gun toward Jack,” said the Dark.
Her hand was shaking. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the barrel of the gun began to move.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Shada’s betrayal—and the pain of Neil’s death—caught in Jack’s throat. He could barely speak.
“Shada, don’t do this.”
The gun continued to move in Jack’s direction.
“Shada, please,” said Jack.
Slowly and steadily, the gun kept moving—and then it jerked toward Shada’s face.
“No!” shouted Jack, and his cry seemed to jar Vince into action. He catapulted up from the floor and knocked the barrel away from Shada’s mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Vince and Shada going down as the explosion of another gunshot rattled the room.
The next few seconds passed like minutes, as events suddenly seemed to unfold in slow motion. As the Dark’s fingers wrapped around the phone, a boot came down on his wrist, clamping it to the floor. Jack looked up to see the business end of a pistol that looked exactly like the one Reza had offered him. It was aimed straight at the Dark’s head. In a flash, Jack realized that Chuck had not called for help, and that he had never intended to involve the police under any circumstances. He realized that there was no outstanding arrest warrant for Chuck Mays that prevented him from traveling to the U.K., and that Chuck had been in London at least as long as Jack had.
And Jack totally understood that it was time for a father’s justice.
“This is for my McKenna,” he said, and the crack of his pistol shook the old hotel.
Chapter Eighty-two
Andie gasped for breath.
She was bent at the waist, essentially upside down in the back of the limo. Her head was hanging off the forward edge of the leather seat, and her hair splayed across the carpeted floor. Her knees were pointed at the ceiling, flexed over the headrest so that her feet dangled through the open partition and into the cockpit. Bahena held her legs still. Her arms were outstretched, each wrist tied to a door handle.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” said Littleton. “Who are you?”
Her lungs burned, and she could barely force out the words. “I told you,” she said. “My name is Lisa Horne.”
Again, Littleton covered her face with the wet cloth. Andie couldn’t see, but she heard the jangle of the crystal carafe as he pulled it from the slot in the liquor cabinet. The fact that it wasn’t liquor was of little consolation. A steady stream of water began to flow again, soaking the cloth. Andie tried to hold her breath, knowing how painful it would feel. The cloth became thicker and heavier on her face, absorbing more and more water. She needed air and finally drew a breath, but it was like trying to breathe through a wet sponge. The burning sensation was in her nose first, and then it shot down her throat and tore at her lungs. Her body lurched and twisted until she coughed up the water into the wet cloth. She wanted to scream—Stop!—but the flow of water from the carafe was seemingly without end, choking off all ability to speak. Again she struggled to hold her breath, but the lack of oxygen was making her dizzy and borderline delirious. She knew if she blacked out they would revive her, and then she would face the tough questions about her true identity. Her head seemed on the verge of explosion, but she tried to focus on who she was, who she was supposed to be. Her name was Willow, and she was part of a cult in the Cascade Mountains. No, she was Andrea, and her best friend Mallory was married to a high roller on Wall Street. Her past undercover rolls were bleeding into the present, and it was impossible to think straight.
Air! I need air!
She breathed in, but she only sucked water into her lungs. The pain this time was like a knife to her chest, a rope around her neck, and a hammer to her head—all at the same time. It was impossible to focus, and her thoughts ran wild—until everything stopped.
She was suddenly coughing and gasping for air again. She was sure she had blacked out, but she had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. The wet cloth was gone—Thank God!—but her pulse rate was off the charts, and she was breathing with the desperation of someone plucked from the ocean moments before drowning.
“This is the last chance,” she heard a man say. “Who are you?”
The question barely made sense to her. No answer came to mind, but she wasn’t physically capable of speaking yet anyway. Desperate for air, she drew in a series of short, noisy breaths.
“Who are you?” he said, shouting at her now.
Andie had no idea where she was. No clue who she was. But the man shouting from somewhere above was demanding an answer, and in a brief instant of lucidity, she heard another voice in her head. She heard her supervisor, Harley Abrams, telling her that he had a team on alert in case things went badly, and she knew that to stay alive, she would have to buy time.
“We know you are not Lisa Horne,” the man said.
Buy time, buy time.
“Tell me who you are!” he shouted.
The name “Andie Henning” came to mind, but she flushed it.
Littleton draped the wet cloth back on her face, and the mere sensation sent her into a panic. She was sure that her supervisory agent was on the way, and her only chance of survival was to stall until help arrived. She had to tell this interrogator something—anything but “Andie Henning, FBI.” She searched her mind for an alias, but none of the FBI covers rang true enough for her to beat another round of waterboarding.
The carafe rattled, and she knew that in seconds the water would again begin to flow.
“Tell me!” Littleton shouted.
For reasons she couldn’t comprehend, her mind was suddenly in another time period, decades before she was even born, and she could see herself walking in the shoes of a woman she’d never met. A woman she’d heard about only a day or two ago, but whose horrible story made her seem so much more real than any FBI cover.
“My name is Katrina Petrak,” she said.
He pulled away the cloth. “Petrak? You work for the Czech government?”
“No,” she said, barely aware of her own voice, her mind awhirl as she fought to remain conscious. “The resistance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The assassination,” she said. “Not everyone was to blame.”
“What assass—”
The explosion of a single gunshot cut his question short, and pellets of glass from the shattered window rained down on Andie. It came with another blast of wetness, but it was unlike the waterboarding, this time hot and thick as blood. She had nowhere near enough time to fear if the blood was her own. Almost instantly the dead weight was upon her, telling her it was Littleton’s.
From then on, the amount of time that
passed was impossible for her to gauge. Perhaps she’d even blacked out again. The next thing Andie knew, the rear door of the black limo was open, and she was sitting up in a normal position on the door sill. Blue lights from surrounding squad cars swirled in the snowy night sky. A few yards away, a pair of FBI agents in full tactical gear led Danilo Bahena to a SWAT van. Andie was looking into the warm eyes of her supervisory agent.
“Are you okay?” asked Harley.
Andie glanced over her shoulder. Littleton’s body was behind her, slumped over in the back of the limo. A shot to the side of the head had taken him out.
“Better than he is, I guess.”
“I just heard from London,” said Harley. “Jack’s fine. You can call him now.”
He handed her a phone, and the sense of relief almost made her smile.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like that.”
February
The Czech Republic
Epilogue
Snow was falling as Jack drove out of Prague. Andie was in the passenger seat. It was their first trip abroad together. It wasn’t exactly a vacation.
“Funny,” said Jack, “an entire branch of my family tree is from this area. And every road I turn down, I see Jamal Wakefield in the trunk of a car heading off to a black site.”
Andie glanced out the window. “That location will never be public information.” She was right, Jack realized. The only living person who knew the exact location was Danilo Bahena, and he was sitting in jail for the murder of Neil Goderich. The likelihood of his talking was almost nil.
“To be honest,” said Jack, “it doesn’t really seem that important anymore.”
Andie reached across the console and held his hand. Her touch had a way of reaffirming something that he was now more sure of than ever: Andie was on his side. She’d taken a huge risk by calling him in London to explain how his case and her investigation overlapped, and to warn him about what he was up against. It was not yet clear how that would play out for her professionally, but she wasn’t fired, and she had the support of her supervisor. But Jack had a feeling there was more to come.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Jack nodded, and they rode on in silence, his thoughts drifting back to the mission at hand.
Grandpa Swyteck had died in his sleep. As best Jack could piece events together, it was right around the time doctors at the Royal Hospital of London were assuring Vince that his stab wound wasn’t fatal. Jack flew home from London for the funeral. Ten days later, he was back in Europe with Andie—and with a handful of his grandfather’s ashes.
“Turn left in one hundred meters.”
It was the mechanical voice of the GPS. Hearing it made Jack think of fifty-pound notes wrapped in aluminum foil.
The fatal shooting of Habib Warsame Dhamac was ruled self-defense, even though it was clear to Jack that Chuck had his plan to avenge McKenna’s death, and Shada had hers. The fact that neither had known what the other was doing could have gotten everyone killed—which seemed like a metaphor for their marriage. Chuck was being held in the U.K. on weapons charges. Shada had much bigger problems with the law. Her attorney would surely build a classic “Patty Hearst” defense and argue that her involvement in the murders of Ethan Chang and Neil Goderich was carefully choreographed by the Dark to cement his control over her—more specifically, that she’d had no idea she was administering a lethal dose of anything to Chang, and that she’d played lookout for Bahena outside Neil’s office only because the Dark had brainwashed her into thinking that it was her last chance to learn the truth about Jamal Wakefield.
As for Chuck, he seemed more concerned that Shada get psychological counseling than legal help. A divorce was in the works, and his commitment remained Project Round Up. Nothing could have driven home the importance of that work more than seeing a teenage girl reunited with her family after months of the Dark’s psychological abuse. The bomb strapped to her body had been real, and she was still looking at long-term therapy, but one life had already been saved. Jamal’s uncle had played a big role in that rescue, even if her fears and brainwashing did drive her back to the Dark after Hassan had been hospitalized. Jack felt like he still owed him an apology for harboring those initial suspicions about him.
“You have arrived at your destination.”
The tiny village of Lidice dates back to the fourteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century it was a busy mining village in the rolling hills of the Bohemia region. The old village was destroyed during World War II, and the new village sits near the original town site, about ten miles west of Prague. Much of the thirty-minute drive is on divided expressways, two lanes in each direction, a far cry from the roads traveled by the Nazis on their way to Prague.
Jack’s grandfather had few possessions at the time of his death, and the most important provisions of his will dealt with the disposition of his remains. The instructions—worded more like a request—were to find a woman named Eliška Sokol in Lidice, who would know exactly where to spread the ashes. She wasn’t hard to find. Lidice has fewer than five hundred residents, and Eliška had lived in the same house since the complete rebuilding of the village after the war.
Jack knocked on the door. He had phoned ahead so that Eliška would expect him, and she answered the door herself. She was as he had imagined her on the telephone, frail and walking with a cane, but she had a bright and determined look in her eyes. She had to be in her late eighties, perhaps ninety. Her English was passable.
“You look just like Joseph,” she said.
“I’ve heard that from others,” Jack said, and he appreciated hearing it again.
Eliška apologized for being out of coffee, but Jack wanted to get to the spot anyway. He helped her on with her coat, and Andie gave her the front seat of their little rental car. It was a short ride to the site of the original village—now a memorial.
Mention of Lidice in Grandpa’s will had naturally prompted Jack to research it. It was the same piece of history that Grandpa Swyteck had shared with Andie in one of the last lucid moments in his life, while Jack was in London. Andie hadn’t told him until after the funeral, and Jack was moved to hear that his grandfather’s words had come back to her in the depths of her own torture, maybe even helped her survive at a time when every second mattered. It made the trip as important to her as it was to Jack.
They both knew the horrific story, but Jack let Eliška tell it in the voice of someone who had been there.
“After Nazis invade our country,” she said, her English less than perfect, “the Reich Protector of Bohemia was SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Second in command to Himmler in the SS branch responsible for the Final Solution.”
“A worthy target for assassination,” said Jack.
“Yes,” said Eliška. “The resistance thought same. They organized in London and pulled it off. Then the nightmare comes. Nazis search everywhere for assassins. Finally, Berlin say the assassins were aided by two families in Lidice.” Eliška paused, and her gaze drifted toward the passenger’s-side window, toward the snow-covered acres of the memorial. “The punishment was decided by Adolf Hitler himself.”
She stopped and breathed deeply, and Jack wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue or not. When she seemed ready, Jack came around to help Eliška out of the car.
Theirs was the only vehicle in the parking lot. The snow had stopped falling, but the surrounding hills were covered with a fresh white blanket. Eliška walked to the far end of the lot. With Andie at his side, Jack guided Eliška by the arm, but he let her take the last few steps on her own, sensing that she wanted to be alone for a moment. She stopped in front of a large bronze memorial. It was covered with snow, and in the late-afternoon shadows Jack couldn’t tell exactly what it was from this distance. But in the cold breeze, he could almost feel the history.
Eliška continued in an old voice that shook.
“Nine June, 1942,” she said. “Close to midnight. Nazis close all roads to Li
dice. No way in or out of town. The Gestapo go house to house. They search everywhere. They push families out into streets and loot their homes. Men are taken to the Horak family barn. Biggest building in the village. Women and children are herded into the school building. Then, at five o’clock in the morning, the shooting starts.”
Eliška lowered her head, as if she’d said as much as she could say. Jack knew the rest from his research. All the men were shot dead by a firing squad. The children were taken from their mothers and, except for those selected for reeducation in German families and babies under one year of age, were poisoned by exhaust gas in specially adapted vehicles in the Nazi extermination camp at Chełmno upon Nerr in Poland. The women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, which usually meant quick or lingering death for the inmates. The town was burned to the ground. Even its cemeteries were destroyed.
“These are the children,” said Eliška.
Jack and Andie came to her side, and now he could see through the blanket of snow and shadows. Eighty-nine bronze children were looking back at him. Eliška’s hand was shaking as she handed him a card. It was a list of names and dates. Two names were circled for him. Petrak, Miloslav: 1931. Petrak, Zdenek: 1933.
“They were nine and eleven when they were gassed,” she said.
The thought sent chills down Jack’s spine. “Is that the same Petrak that runs in my family?”
“Petrak is common name,” said Eliška. “But in 1942, it was very dangerous name.”
“Why?” asked Jack. But the moment he said it, he remembered Andie’s research on General Petrak, the leader in exile of the Czech resistance.
“Nazis knew General Petrak helped with assassination. No need to prove relations to be guilty.”
Jack’s gaze swept the memorial. Children of all ages, from one to seventeen. He was drawn to two, in particular, that looked to be the figures of boys aged nine and eleven.
“That way,” said Eliška, “about two hundred meters. That is your grandfather’s spot.”
Afraid of the Dark Page 35
