In the Company of Liars

by David Ellis

  “You made sure of that,” McCoy says to Allison.

  “We’ll get back to you tomorrow, when we see it in writing,” Allison says. “But as long as you accept my terms, I’m in.”

  Irv Shiels is fuming. The others have left, leaving McCoy and Harrick to bear the brunt of his frustration.

  “This woman,” Shiels says. “She’s well known?”

  “Yes, sir,” McCoy says. “I read one of her novels. I think it was a bestseller.”

  “That’s wonderful. Jesus H. So this will be a big story.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir.” Harrick clears his throat. “Sir,” he says, “we should bury this thing. Talk to the county attorney. Tell them to hold a press conference, say the murder of Sam Dillon is unsolved, and make Larry Evans feel safe. That makes more sense than going through with this whole charade.”

  Shiels looks at McCoy, not Harrick, holds a stare on her. McCoy figures it’s one of two things. One, the boss is wondering what the hell Harrick is still doing in the room. Shiels is the SAC, and McCoy is running this operation. This isn’t a roundtable discussion. But Harrick is McCoy’s partner, and she’s made him her right hand on this operation, too. Jane has been on the other side of this before and never appreciated being left out.

  Or two, Shiels is insulted. Don’t you think that occurred to us, Agent Harrick?

  “That doesn’t work.” Shiels flicks a hand like he’s swatting a fly. “One, we’d have to share a whole helluva lot with Elliot Raycroft to make him do that. This is an election year. A huge homicide in his jurisdiction, and he has a primary challenger, if you hadn’t noticed. And he’s a Republican, too, Agent Harrick, if you hadn’t noticed that, either, so it’s not exactly a waltz to reelection. He’ll be crucified if this comes back ‘unsolved.’ ”

  Harrick nods, too enthusiastically.

  “And at any rate, this thing would boil for a while no matter what. The county attorney has to investigate this somewhat—a lot—before he just walks up to a microphone and says, ‘We have no idea what happened. We’re folding up shop.’ And this whole time, Larry Evans is watching Allison Pagone, and he’s wondering, and if the CA is too eager in pronouncing this ‘unsolved,’ he’ll wonder even more.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you think”—Shiels’s face is hot now—“you think our friends in Virginia are going to let us confide in a local prosecutor about this?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “To say nothing of Allison Pagone,” Shiels adds. “She’s in danger now, I think you’d agree, Agent?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How do you think we are most effective keeping her safe, Agent? Do we whisk her away to federal protective custody right now?”

  Harrick, licking his wounds from the scolding, struggles for the answer that will be least offensive.

  “No, we can’t do that,” Shiels says, answering his own question, “because the operation dies if Allison Pagone dies—or if they think she dies. Doctor Lomas folds up shop, and there’s no formula, and there’s no chance to catch Muhsin al-Bakhari or whoever. So that’s not acceptable. You see that, Agent?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So her being charged with murder is the best way to do that. She’s a big news item. Anything happens to her now, it would receive tremendous scrutiny. Larry Evans is smart enough to recognize that. And if he’s not, Ram Haroon will remind him. A spotlight shining on Allison Pagone is the best way to keep her alive and help us do what we need to do.”

  Harrick, at this point, looks like one of those bobble-head dolls, he’s nodding so rapidly.

  “So you see, Agent Harrick, where just telling Raycroft that we’re fighting an international terrorist operation, and could he please take a pass on this high-profile murder, maybe isn’t such a hot idea.”

  “You made your point, sir,” McCoy says, hoping to interrupt the tantrum. “Several times over. It’s been a long day for everyone.”

  She waits a beat. On the scale of career moves, this one didn’t rate a perfect ten. No, this one would fall slightly above kicking the boss in the balls.

  “Okay.” Shiels runs a hand over his face. “Right.”

  “We have to talk to Haroon, sir,” McCoy says. “He has to be clear on this.”

  “I know. We need clearance.” Shiels sighs. “I have to call the director.”

  “I’ll meet with him, sir, if you’d like,” she says. “I’ll talk to Haroon.”

  “No,” says Shiels. “He’s my guy. I’m the reason we have this operation.”

  Normally, this operation would probably be handled by CIA or the NSA, or some combination. But Shiels knows Haroon, from way back—he’s the reason Haroon pushed for this city as a locale—so Shiels is the logical choice to communicate with Haroon.

  “God.” Shiels shakes his head. “I haven’t seen him for years.”

  “He doesn’t know, does he?” McCoy asks. “He doesn’t know everything?”

  Shiels closes his eyes, makes a face. “He doesn’t know, but he probably suspects.”

  That makes sense to McCoy. Haroon is basically the bagman. He gets the formula from Larry Evans, he pays Evans, and he delivers the formula for the poison to the Liberation Front. Surely, Haroon must suspect that if he delivers the formula directly to a high-ranking member of the Libbies, the U.S. Special Forces will be ready to pounce. And he must know that he could be caught in the crossfire. He must have known this the moment he was sent to this city by the Libbies, and he contacted the U.S. government to let them know he was coming.

  “All Ram Haroon knows,” says Shiels, “is that Doctor Lomas and Larry Evans will finish their formula, then give him a sample to verify the poison works. Haroon will pretend to sample it and will tell Evans that it’s acceptable. Then he’ll transfer the twenty-five million to an account that Evans specifies. Once the money transfer is made, Evans will deliver the formula for the poison to Haroon. Then Haroon will take the formula and modify it—change it, so that no matter what else happens, it’s not really a formula for poison—and he’ll deliver it to the Liberation Front. Haroon will be trusted enough to deliver it directly to one of the shura majlis. Directly to Muhsin al-Bakhari. We’ll nail Evans and put him away for life, we’ll catch Doctor Lomas, and we’ll catch the brains and spirit behind the Liberation Front.”

  Shiels works the kinks out of his neck. “So yeah, Haroon is probably smart enough to know that this could end in an ambush. He knows he could be giving up his life for this. He already has instructions, if he’s caught by U.S. Special Forces, to identify himself as ‘Zulfikar,’ his given name, so they know he’s a friend. But in the midst of a gunfight to catch al-Bakhari, all bets are off. I’m sure he’s figured that out.”

  “Haroon’s good,” McCoy says, more a request for confirmation than a statement.

  “He’s good.”

  “He’ll fool Larry Evans, no question?”

  “No question,” says Shiels. “He’s been fooling the Liberation Front for over a decade.”

  ONE DAY EARLIER

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  12:44 A.M.

  Jane McCoy, sitting in her car, looks at her watch. It is close to one in the morning, Sunday, only forty-five minutes into a new day, and she prays that it is not as eventful as the Saturday that just passed. Normally, she would be asleep now. Instead, she is parked one street over from the home where Sam Dillon lives—lived—and where he was murdered only several hours ago.

  She closes her eyes as she listens to her instructions through her cell phone. She still can’t believe that Dillon is dead. This is her fault. Her responsibility. She knew Dillon was at risk. She didn’t expect this, though.

  A fuck-up. A fuck-up times twelve. This thing has just gotten started, and already she’s lost a civilian.

  “I will, sir,” she says into her cell phone to Irving Shiels. “You’ll be the first. Okay.”

  She punches the cell phone off and looks at Harrick. �
��Jessica Pagone’s still at her mother’s house,” McCoy says. “I assume she’ll spend the night.”

  “So what do we do now?” Harrick asks.

  McCoy shrugs. This is her operation, she has to make the calls.

  “We wait,” she tells her partner. “Somebody else is going to have to find Dillon’s body.”

  “But what about Jessica?”

  “We can’t just drive over and chat with her, this time of night. Remember, he’s got Allison’s place wired up, too. It’s one in the morning. We might as well raise a red flag if we go there now.”

  “No, you’re right,” Harrick agrees. “Tomorrow.”

  McCoy’s phone rings again. “McCoy. What? Are you—what—hang on.” She moves the phone from her mouth and turns to her partner. “Someone just left Allison’s house,” she says. “Not Jessica’s car. Allison’s.”

  “Allison Pagone? Jesus Christ.” Harrick jumps in his seat. More action. What a night it’s been. A good part of an FBI agent’s job is watching, listening, waiting. Not so much this stuff, what they’ve seen tonight.

  “Follow her,” McCoy says into the phone. “But for God’s sake, be invisible.”

  She clicks the phone off and turns to Harrick. “None of our people are in Dillon’s house right now, right?”

  “No, they’re out,” Harrick says. “I’ll confirm that. Why?” He turns to her. “You think Allison is coming here?”

  McCoy smiles. “Hell yes, she is.”

  1:06 A.M.

  Allison brakes her Lexus SUV gently on Sam’s driveway and checks her watch. It is just after one in the morning. The front door was unlocked, Jessica said, so she should have no problem getting in.

  The door is not even closed all the way. She pushes it open slowly, takes a breath, and walks in. With her shirt, she wipes the doorknob on both sides. Jessica swore that the doorknob was the only thing she touched.

  She tells herself that she will not look at him—not directly—at least not until she is finished. But her instincts betray her, and she almost swoons as she sees him, lying motionless, face down, across the carpet. Her eyes move directly to the wound on the back of his head, to the statuette caked with blood and hair lying near him.

  “Oh, Sam,” she whispers, but hearing her voice snaps her to attention. Do your job first. She walks past his body stoically, searching the carpet, until she finds it. The single platinum earring. She places it in her jeans pocket.

  There. She is done.

  But she thinks of her daughter. She remembers the phone call that she forced Sam to make on Friday—Sam’s call to Jessica, firing her from her position, shutting her out of his life, over an impersonal telephone line.

  All I wanted to do was talk to him, Jessica told her, only hours ago.

  Allison looks out the window. Most people don’t live up here by the lake year-round. Sam did, loved the tranquillity. Maybe, what, three or four people live up here right now on this street.

  Meaning three or four potential eyewitnesses, at a minimum, who may have seen Jessica come here—including the widower next door, whose light was on in the front room when she passed it driving up here.

  And who knows who may have heard Jessica’s reaction when she was at Dillon & Becker’s offices in the city while Sam fired her from his office in the capital. Allison could hear, over the phone and sitting at a distance, Jessica’s protests; did anyone at Dillon & Becker hear her?

  Jessica was here, in this house, on the night of the murder. She was upset the day before, after a phone call from Sam. Not a good combination.

  And all of this is Allison’s fault.

  Allison removes the single earring from her pocket and places it back near Sam’s body. She yanks a strand of hair from her head and lets it fall to the carpet near Sam. She writes crime fiction; she knows that a strand of hair must have the follicle attached to provide DNA.

  What else?

  Allison grabs her finger, painted with red polish, and breaks off a substantial piece of her nail. She makes the motion in the air of swinging something, trying to figure where a fingernail might break off. Oh, who knows? She lets the fingernail drop to the carpet as well.

  She can’t be too obvious. It can’t look staged. Maybe this is enough, to draw their attention to her.

  What else?

  Allison looks at the statuette, on the carpet near Sam’s body. Plenty of blood on it, almost dried now. She touches it with her finger, thick like syrup now, and wipes a stain across her maroon sweatshirt. A trace of Sam’s blood, on her sweatshirt.

  What else?

  The Alibi. She remembers it, from the novel she is writing. The novel she hates. Best Served Cold.

  She knows where his computer is, upstairs. She takes the stairs carefully, lest she lose her balance and fall on her wobbly legs, and goes to his office.

  She is lucky, she thinks, though lucky hardly seems the word, that Sam does not use a password to protect the screen saver on his computer. The screen is black with asteroids and stars moving about. With one push of the computer mouse, the screen returns to his e-mail’s in-box. She hits the “compose” icon and pulls up a new mail message. She types in the words—murky, fuzzy words, that she comes up with off the top of her head—and addresses the message to her own web address, allison@allison-pagone.com:

  A:

  NEED TO DISCUSS FURTHER. GETTING WORRIED. MANY WOULD BE UNHAPPY WITH MY INFO. NEED ADVICE ASAP.

  S

  She wipes down the keyboard and mouse after she sends the e-mail. She will wipe down the banister, too, and the front doorknob. No, she is not looking to guarantee herself a conviction. She is not going to write her name in blood on his bathroom mirror. What she has done is insurance, nothing more. They won’t necessarily be able to make a case against Allison, or even suspect her. But after her work here, they certainly won’t be able to make a case against Jessica, either, and that is her principal goal. If it ever gets close to Jessica, Allison will be able to hold herself out, plausibly, as the suspect. After her work here, her daughter will never be accused of this crime.

  She checks her watch. It is close to twenty after one. Having sat down for even a minute, she feels intense exhaustion sweep over her. But she resists. Now is no time to get weary. She only has to get back home now.

  She will retrieve that novel she’s working on and delete it from her computer. If they come looking for her, they will undoubtedly seize the laptop. Another benefit of writing crime fiction—she knows, at least generally speaking, of the government’s powers to retrieve deleted material from a computer’s hard drive. They will find it. And they will find it very interesting that she deleted this document from her computer only minutes after returning from Sam’s house.

  Now for the hard part. She will see him one last time. She thinks of what she wants to say. Yes, she knows it’s foolish, she knows he can’t hear her now any more than he would be able to hear her later, in the privacy of her home.

  She comes back down the stairs and moves to Sam, gets on her knees and begins to cry.

  At this moment, she is sure that she loves him. At this moment, her feelings for Sam have crystallized, have moved from an intense passion, from a reawakening of feelings dormant for so many years, to love.

  “I love you,” she says to him through a full throat. She reaches for him but it seems inappropriate. Her hand is only inches from his head. She wants him to see her one more time, even if he can’t. She wants to look into his eyes, but she will not move him. His face is surprisingly peaceful, if defeated, his eyes closed but his mouth open ever so slightly.

  “I’m so very—Sam, I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

  But he is dead, and she has Jessica to protect. She rises to her feet and heads to the kitchen, removes a freezer bag from a drawer and grabs a paper towel off the roll. She returns to the living room and picks up the award from the manufacturers’ association, wipes it down as well as she can, grips it firmly with her own hand, then puts it in the fre
ezer bag. She turns her head away as she does so, avoiding the blood and hair caked against the marble base, stifling her tears because so much of the night remains.

  1:31 A.M.

  “Talk to me,” McCoy says into her collar, as she keeps a safe distance from Allison’s SUV, heading south now, away from Sam Dillon’s house. McCoy left Harrick at Dillon’s house to work with the team, now that Allison is gone.

  “I don’t know,” Harrick says through her earpiece. “I’m looking. What—hang on.”

  McCoy can hear muffled voices now. A team of federal agents are back in Dillon’s home, trying to figure out what the hell Allison Pagone did while she was there.

  Maybe, McCoy thinks, she just came to say good-bye. To see for herself. But probably not.

  “The award is gone,” Harrick says. “She took the fucking murder weapon!”

  “The earring, too?” McCoy asks.

  “Hang on.” More muffled noise. “No, no, but it’s closer to Dillon’s body.”

  “Okay. Okay. You know what she’s doing.”

  “Hang on,” Harrick says. “There’s gotta be more.”

  “Get back to me when you know everything. I’ll see where she goes.”

  “She’s going home, Jane.”

  “I’m not so sure,” McCoy says. “Let’s see.”

  1:47 A.M.

  Yellow like lemon. She remembers it like it was yesterday, her utter relief when she found her five-year-old daughter outside the back of the Countryside Grocery Store, pointing at the yellow pole in the ground. She no longer shops at this store on Apple and Riordan; it was the place she shopped way back when, back when she and Mat lived around the corner. Now she lives several miles away, but she always smiles when she passes this particular store.

  It’s still here, the post, and still yellow. But her daughter is no longer five years old.

  Allison has a shovel that she keeps in her SUV for snow removal, so it takes her little time to dig up the earth. She pushes the statuette into the ground. Now for the hard part, returning the earth to its previous form. She does the majority of the work with the shovel, but she is finally forced to bend down and use her hands to smooth the ground over. When she is finished, she wipes her forehead with her hands.