Sidney Sheldon's Reckless

by Sidney Sheldon

  “Why? You can’t possibly know anything about Nick’s death.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “No. Nick’s death was an accident.”

  Greg Walton thought, Is she trying to convince me, or herself?

  “It may have been. It may not have been. Either way, Miss Whitney, I’m not sure what you think is to be gained by shooting the messenger.”

  Tracy hesitated. Her head throbbed and her body ached. She hadn’t slept properly in two weeks and she’d barely eaten either. She’d come to Walton’s house in a fit of anger, convinced he was the enemy. In her grief-addled state, that had made sense. Walton and Buck had come to the ranch. Blake and Nick had been killed. Now Walton was trying to lure Tracy to Langley. In Tracy’s mind, those three events had merged into a sinister chain. But now that she was standing here, looking at Greg, doubts overwhelmed her. To her embarrassment, and intense surprise, she found herself starting to shake uncontrollably.

  “It’s OK.” Greg walked over and gently relieved her of the gun. Wrapping an arm around her shoulder to help her to the couch, he was horrified by how thin she was. He could feel every bone. “You’ve had a huge shock.” Tracy sat beside him, still shaking. “I’ll make you some tea.”

  A few minutes later, wrapped in a heavy blanket like a shipwreck survivor and sipping hot, very sweet tea, Tracy apologized.

  “I needed someone to lash out at. I needed to do something,” she told Greg.

  “I understand, really. No need to apologize. To be frank with you, Tracy, I’m just glad you’re here.”

  “What do you know about my son?” Tracy asked.

  “We don’t know anything,” Greg admitted. “But there are suspicious circumstances surrounding the accident.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “The FBI took a look at Blake Carter’s truck. It appeared that the steering may have been tampered with.”

  Tracy’s hand flew to her mouth. “No! That’s not possible. Who would want to hurt Blake? He didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  “I agree,” Greg Walton said. “He didn’t.”

  He paused a few moments for the import of his words to sink in.

  “We’ve had reports of a woman at the diner Blake and Nick went to that night. Tall, dark-haired, attractive. None of the locals knew her. She left the restaurant right after Mr. Carter did. She was driving a black Impala.”

  Tracy’s mind flashed back to her last conversation with Nick.

  “Blake thought someone was following us. A woman. He was kind of distracted.”

  “Nick said something,” she murmured, as much to herself as to Walton. “In the hospital. Before he . . . He said a woman was following them.”

  Greg Walton leaned forward earnestly. “Her physical description tallies with what we believe Althea looks like.”

  Tracy shook her head, disbelieving.

  “It’s only a theory,” Walton went on. “But we know this woman knows you, Tracy. That she wants to draw you into this whole mess with Group 99 and the hostages. Someone messed with Blake’s truck—Blake who, as you said yourself, has no enemies.”

  Tracy shook her head more vehemently.

  No. This can’t be because of me. Nick and Blake can’t be dead because of me.

  “An unknown woman, fitting Althea’s description, then followed Blake and your son, possibly driving them off the road.”

  With a huge effort of will, Tracy forced herself to be logical.

  “It doesn’t add up. For one thing, how would harming Blake or Nick help her?”

  “I don’t know,” Greg admitted. “Maybe she simply wanted to hurt you. Or maybe she thought, with your family out of the picture, you’d agree to come help us. To get involved.”

  There was a horrible, twisted plausibility to this that made Tracy’s heart race. Even so . . .

  “It’s so messy, though. A car accident,” she said. “What if they’d survived? I mean Nicholas almost did. When I saw him afterwards, at the hospital, he . . .”

  She stopped dead. All of a sudden she looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

  “What?” Greg Walton asked. “Tracy, what is it?”

  “At the hospital,” she whispered. “I saw someone go into his room.”

  “Who?”

  “A nurse. I thought it was a nurse. She was in uniform. But . . .”

  Greg took her hands in his. “Tell me, Tracy. What did she look like?”

  “I only saw her from behind. But I noticed her because she had mud all over her sneakers. Like she’d been out hiking or something.”

  “What else?”

  Tracy looked right at him. “She had long, dark hair. And she was really, really tall.”

  AFTER TRACY CHECKED INTO a hotel, Greg Walton picked up the phone.

  “How is she mentally?” Milton Buck asked.

  “Shaky. She’s still in shock.”

  “And physically?”

  “Terrible. She looked like she’d aged twenty years. Her hair’s completely white.”

  “Jesus.” Buck whistled through his teeth. “But she’ll do it? She’s in?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Despite everything, Greg Walton couldn’t entirely keep the smile out of his voice. “Tracy Whitney won’t rest until she finds Althea now. She’s in all right. To the death.”

  MILTON BUCK HUNG UP, turned to his wife and hugged her tightly.

  “What was that for?” Lacey Buck giggled. Milton had been like a bear with a sore head these past few weeks. He was always this way when work was going badly.

  “Oh nothing.” Buck grinned. “Sorry I’ve been such a Grinch. Turns out it might just be a merry Christmas after all.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 10

  LAKE GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, ONE MONTH LATER . . .

  WHEN WILL YOU BE home, Henry? Remember we have dinner with the Alencons tonight.”

  Henry Cranston looked at his wife, Clotilde, and wished she were younger. And prettier. And less demanding. Had he ever been attracted to her? He couldn’t remember. Maybe, before the twins were born and her stomach got all saggy and wrinkly, like the skin on an overblown apple.

  “I’ll be home when I’m home,” he said rudely. “I have a lot on at work today.”

  Clotilde Cranston tried to pout but last week’s Botox injections had rendered her lower face almost immovable. She really must change dermatologists. Dr. Trouveau was supposedly the “top man” in Geneva, but that wasn’t saying much. Clotilde missed New York. At least there she had girlfriends to distract her from her loveless marriage. Girlfriends and a decent dermatologist. And Bergdorf’s.

  “I love you!” she called after Henry, desperately and untruthfully.

  “You too,” Henry Cranston lied back.

  Closing the door of his Bentley with a satisfyingly heavy thud, he immediately felt better. He did have a lot on at work today. He would spend the morning banging his new secretary, a perky little brunette barely out of her teens and wonderfully eager to please.

  Then he would sign off on the bribes to the Poles and nail down his latest deal, winning Cranston Energy Inc. the fracking rights to a vast swath of Polish countryside bursting at the seams with shale gas. It wasn’t quite as good a deal as the one he’d struck for exclusive fracking rights in Western Greece, on land still owned by the exiled royal family. Unfortunately, thanks to their stupid, faggot son hanging himself, that had all unraveled faster than a politician’s promises after the election. But the Polish deal was a decent consolation prize.

  After sewing that up, Henry would have a late lunch with his mistress, Claire. Claire was also becoming too demanding. He’d have to get rid of her soon, but not until he’d completed his home video collection and browbeaten her into having anal sex with him. I mean, really, what did the silly bitch think she was for? If he wanted boring, vanilla sex he could have it with his wife, without paying an extra half million euros a year on a rented penthouse apartment!

  Henry Cranston slipped h
is key into the ignition and started the engine.

  AT THE REUTERS OFFICE in Manhattan at that exact same moment, journalist Damon Peters watched his computer screen go blank, then fill with a familiar computer-generated image of red balloons.

  The same thing happened at the London Times, the New York Times, the China Post and the Sidney Morning Herald, along with hundreds of other newspapers and media organizations around the world.

  Except this time, the first balloon to reach the top of the screen popped. Tumbling out of it, in heavy, dark block letters, came the chilling message:

  VIVA GENEVA. HENRY CRANSTON R.I.P.

  In Manhattan, Damon Peters spun around in his chair. Looking at his colleague, Marian Janney, he asked, “Who’s Henry Cranston?”

  “No idea.”

  “And what the hell just happened in Geneva?”

  LOCALS REPORTED THE EXPLOSION could be heard up to two miles away.

  Clotilde Cranston was blown backwards through the front door of her house, shattering her pelvis and breaking four ribs.

  Miraculously, she lived.

  So did their dog, Wilbur.

  Henry Cranston was blasted into a million, lying, cheating, mean-spirited pieces.

  TRACY WHITNEY STUDIED THE pictures of the Geneva bomb scene again.

  There wasn’t much to see. Twisted lumps of metal. Fragments of rubble from what had once been a garden wall. A single, severed finger.

  Greg Walton asked, “How soon can you be out there?”

  Tracy was in Gregory Walton’s office at Langley, being briefed on the latest development in the fight against Group 99. It was February, three days since Henry Cranston’s murder. Tracy had spent the last month in Washington, regaining her strength physically and mentally. At Greg Walton’s insistence, she’d been placed on a strict, high-calorie diet and although she remained extremely slim, she was no longer the skeletal waif who had shown up on Greg’s doorstep. Her white hair had been dyed back to its original chestnut brown, and she’d been prescribed strong sleeping pills, which seemed to be working.

  The only part of the CIA’s treatment program that wasn’t working was the therapy. Tracy had answered all of the therapist’s questions politely and cooperatively. But she refused to even begin the work of processing Nick’s death.

  “If I open that door,” she explained simply, “I won’t survive.”

  Her certainty on that point was unshakable, so much so that even the CIA therapist had begun to think Tracy might be right. Instead of talking, Tracy had made work her therapy, immersing herself psychologically in the classified files on Althea.

  After multiple briefings and hours spent poring over every thread of evidence, both electronic and physical, Tracy now knew as much about Althea as anybody in the world.

  Except who she is.

  Or how she knows me.

  Or why she’s involved with Group 99.

  Or whether she really did murder my son.

  Tracy was itching to get out there and look for her. But until the Geneva bombing there had been no new leads.

  Now, however, suspicious e-traffic intercepts strongly suggested that Althea was physically in Switzerland when the Cranston bombing took place. She may even have attended a meeting at a Private Bank in Zurich two days prior to the attack. The CIA were still trying to get their hands on CCTV footage from that meeting, as well as permission to interview the banker in question, although so far with no success.

  “Trying to get information out of the Swiss is like trying to get a straight answer from a lawyer,” Greg Walton had complained yesterday. “Seriously, you’d think we were the enemy.”

  Tracy raised an eyebrow. “Imagine that.”

  Greg Walton grinned. “What happened to the trust, eh, Tracy?”

  The two of them had developed a good working relationship, friendly and respectful. This was partly because Milton Buck had been too immersed in the hunt for Hunter Drexel—who at this point appeared to have disappeared off the face of the earth entirely—to show up to meetings. And partly because the only thing on earth that mattered to Tracy Whitney was finding out the truth about what happened to her son. For that she needed Greg Walton, just as much as he needed her.

  “I can fly tonight if you need me to,” she told Greg now.

  “I think it would be a good idea. If you’re up to it.”

  “I am.” Tracy smiled.

  “Good.” Greg smiled back.

  In a classic white silk blouse and black cigarette pants, with her newly dark hair tied back and her skin glowing from a combination of drug-induced sleep and enforced healthy eating, Tracy looked terrific today. Poised. Beautiful. Well.

  “You can pick up your ticket at the airport,” Walton told her. “Remember, you don’t officially work for us. That may give you more wriggle room with the Swiss.”

  “Got it.”

  “See if you can charm them. Failing that, see what . . . alternative channels . . . you can come up with to find Althea.”

  Tracy nodded. This she could do. “Alternative channels” was her specialty. At least, it had been once.

  “I know you’ll be resourceful.” Greg Walton handed her a written file with the word “Classified” printed on the cover. “Some light reading for the plane. Good luck, Tracy.”

  “YOU SET ME UP!”

  Alexis Argyros, aka Apollo, held the phone away from his ear. Althea was screaming at him, hissing and spitting with impotent fury like a snake beneath his foot. How the tables had turned!

  It felt wonderful.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he answered, when she finally fell silent. “Our Swiss brothers organized this. I had nothing to do with it. I’m too busy hunting our friend, Hunter. Or had you forgotten about him?”

  “You had everything to do with it! Are you saying it’s just coincidence that this happened here, while I’m in the country?”

  “Not everything revolves around you, Althea.”

  A few months ago he would never have dared to speak so boldly. But now? Now he had the power.

  Sensing his enjoyment, Althea fired back. “You’re sick, Apollo. Everybody knows it. You had Henry Cranston murdered because it aroused you to see him die.”

  “And watching Bob Daley’s brains explode didn’t arouse you?” Apollo scoffed.

  To his delight, Althea sounded shaken when she answered. “Of course not. Bob Daley was different. You know why he had to die.”

  “Do I?” Apollo teased, like a cat toying with a mouse.

  “There were never meant to be others!”

  “Oh, but there will be others, my dear. Many, many others. One percent of the world’s population is a big number, you know. The righteous oppressed have tasted vengeance at last. And they want more!” His voice quivered with excitement. “Greedy, grasping, earth-raping bastards like Cranston deserve to die.”

  Earth-raping. It was an expression that Group 99’s eco-warriors had long used to describe fracking. Althea had always found it laughable in the past, immature and melodramatic, something only a self-righteous student could have coined. There were sides to Group 99 that had always bothered her, but she’d stuck with them, for Daniel’s sake. But hearing the term from Apollo’s lips now, hijacked as a cause in which he could wrap his sadism and blood lust, chilled her to the bone.

  Apollo started to laugh. “Just remember, Althea,” he sneered. “You opened the gates of hell. Not me.”

  Is that what I did? she thought, once the phone went dead, gazing out across the lake to the mighty Alps in the distance. Did I open the gates of hell?

  She pulled out her suitcase and hurriedly started to pack.

  “SOMETHING TO DRINK, MA’AM?”

  The flight attendant’s voice jolted Tracy back to the present.

  “Coffee, please. Black.”

  She was going to need it. The file Greg Walton had given her—his idea of “light reading”—had turned out to be a practically impenetrable analysis, not only of Henry Cranston’s bu
siness, but of the fracking industry in general. Group 99 had long been opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, believing the new techniques for extracting shale gas by pumping vast amounts of pressurized water deep underground to be deeply harmful to the environment. Was this why Cranston had been murdered?

  If so, it marked a departure from Group 99’s prior MO. Prior attacks aimed at the fracking industry had all been both cyber and financial in nature. And indeed, only hours before Cranston’s death, four million dollars were mysteriously siphoned out of two of his corporate accounts; accounts held at the same private bank in Zurich where Althea was believed to have had meetings. It was all suspiciously incestuous, especially as Tracy now knew that Hunter Drexel had been working on a story about the fracking business at the time of his kidnap. Drexel’s past stories had all been very much of the exposé variety, as explosively controversial as they were riveting. In his checkered journalistic career, he’d tackled such taboo topics as child abuse in the Catholic Church, police brutality and rampant corruption in the world of international humanitarian aid.

  So why would Group 99 kidnap a man who was about to write the equivalent of an op-ed piece on their behalf, taking down the fracking industry?

  And why would they murder Henry Cranston when they’d already gone to the trouble of carrying out a brilliant and successful economic attack?

  Captain Daley’s brutal execution certainly seemed to have been a watershed moment in terms of Group 99’s willingness to embrace violence. Overnight, it seemed, they’d made the leap from activists to terrorists.

  Why? Tracy wondered, as she worked her way through the material. How does killing people advance their cause?

  The last third of Greg Walton’s file was devoted to a man he wanted her to meet on her return from Switzerland, an American billionaire oil and gas magnate by the name of Cameron Crewe.

  Tracy had seen profiles of Crewe from time to time. There’d been something in the New York Times a few years back, and a piece in Newsweek more recently, about his extensive charity work. If fracking had an “acceptable face,” Cameron Crewe was it. Crewe Oil was well known for its ecologically sensitive drilling practices, at least versus others in the industry, and for plowing back millions of dollars in aid and grants to the communities in which they worked. Crewe Oil had built schools in China, medical centers in Africa, and affordable housing projects in Greece, Poland and a number of impoverished former soviet republics, including Bratislava. They had created jobs, planted trees and endowed hospitals around the globe. Perhaps for this reason, uniquely among the big five fracking companies, they had never been targeted by Group 99.