Sidney Sheldon's Reckless

by Sidney Sheldon

  The last time she’d broken in anywhere was at Frank Dorrien’s house. Tracy remembered now how triumphant she’d felt that night, finding the hard drive from Prince Achileas’s computer, and the first images of Althea—Kate. Those pictures had proved that the general had lied, about Captain Bob Daley and his relationship with the dead prince, and about other things too. They were also still the only known images of Kate. The woman who had killed Nick, and claimed to know Tracy, but who remained as much of a mystery now as she had done when this all started.

  With luck, in a few short minutes, that mystery would be solved. Tracy would be talking to Hunter Drexel face-to-face, finally learning the truth. The whole truth.

  At last she approached the house itself. Crouching low beneath the height of the ground-floor windows, she flattened herself against a wall, scratching her legs badly on the rose bushes that clung to the villa like thorny limpets. Lights were on inside. Tracy listened. She could hear classical music—a sonata of some sort, coming from deeper within the house—but no voices. The whole place, in fact, was eerily quiet. Peaceful, but not in a good way. There was a faint smell of cooking, garlic and anchovies and lemon coming from a few yards away. Tracy saw that the French doors to the drawing room had been flung wide open to the garden, presumably to allow in the cool evening air.

  She approached them cautiously, gun drawn, stealing herself for battle. She didn’t want to kill Hunter, but she must overpower him. Hopefully he would talk to her of his own accord. He was a journalist, after all, in another life. A story teller. Not to mention a vain egotist. Those sorts of people invariably liked to talk. But Tracy wasn’t about to take any chances.

  With one last, deep breath, Tracy burst into the room.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE ROOM WAS EMPTY.

  At one end, a fire crackled gently in a vast Baronial fireplace. In front of it lay what looked like a recently discarded newspaper—today’s La Repubblica—and a half drunk glass of scotch.

  The music was coming from farther inside. Tracy followed it, keeping her back to the wall and her weapon drawn, inching her way along a long, parquet-floored corridor. Grand double doors at the end opened onto what looked to be a dining room. Tracy could see a long, rustic refectory table with a centerpiece of brilliant blue hydrangea flowers. Then suddenly, she froze.

  There he was.

  After all the reported sightings and grainy photographs, all the “what ifs” and near misses, Tracy was finally looking at Hunter Drexel. The blond hair was gone. He had reverted to his usual dark curls. And he looked stockier and healthier than he had in the pictures from Montmartre. Casually dressed in a sweater and jeans, with his back to Tracy, he was carrying a large bowl of salad over to the table like a man without a care in the world. He bore only the faintest traces of a limp and though he appeared to be alone, he was setting places for two.

  Just as Tracy wondered Who’s he expecting? Hunter’s voice rang out loudly, bouncing off the ancient walls.

  “Is that you, Miss Whitney?” He didn’t look up, but continued setting the table. “Please, don’t skulk around in the corridor. Come in.”

  Tracy moved forward, cocking the safety catch on her pistol with an audible click.

  “You won’t need that,” Hunter said blithely, turning around and looking at her for the first time. “I’m unarmed. As you can see.”

  He held both arms out wide and smiled guilelessly. Tracy could see at once what had drawn Sally Faiers to him. That fatal, boyish charm. Poor Sally.

  “I’ve been expecting you. I trust you’ll join me for dinner?” He gestured to the seat at the head of the table.

  Tracy played along. Lowering her gun, she placed it carefully beside her plate and sat down.

  “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, Mr. Drexel.”

  He gave a little bow. “I try.”

  “Will Kate be joining us?”

  Hunter’s eyebrow shot up momentarily.

  He’s surprised I know her name.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Is she here? In Italy?”

  Tracy threw out the question as if it were a casual inquiry about the weather. The whole situation was so surreal, she figured she might as well.

  Hunter opened a bottle of Château Mouton-Rothschild with a satisfying pop.

  “I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know where she is.”

  “But if you did, you wouldn’t tell me, right?”

  He filled Tracy’s glass with a sigh, then sat down beside her. “It’s not Kate you want, Miss Whitney. She’s not the enemy. I’d rather hoped you might have figured that out by now, especially considering how much the two of you have in common. And what a fan she is of yours.”

  Tracy waited silently for him to continue.

  “Kate worked for the CIA for many years, as a computer expert back at Langley. She was part of the team that tried to track you and Jeff Stevens, back in your heyday. You didn’t know?”

  Tracy shook her head. She’d suspected that Althea might be an intelligence agency insider, but it hadn’t occurred to her that that might explain the link between the two of them. She felt like she knew me because she’d tracked me all those years. But I never knew her. It seemed so obvious now.

  “Did Sally Faiers figure it out?” Tracy asked. “Is that why she was killed?”

  A dangerous glint flashed in Hunter’s eyes.

  “I feel terrible about Sally. I loved her.”

  But even as he said the words, Tracy clocked him looking at her hooker dress appraisingly. She couldn’t figure the guy out.

  Seeing her confusion, Hunter said, “There’s a lot you don’t know, Miss Whitney.”

  “But you’re going to enlighten me. Right?”

  The smile was back, like sun breaking from behind the clouds.

  “Let’s eat.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE MEAL WAS DELICIOUS, some sort of chicken and onion stew with olives and anchovies. To her surprise, Tracy realized she was hungry. She waited for Hunter to eat first before tasting her own food—after all the death and destruction he’d caused, poisoning would not be beyond him—and did the same with her wine. But before long they were both eating and drinking, and despite the gun still resting beneath Tracy’s fingers, the tension between them had eased.

  “How did you know I would come here tonight?” Tracy asked eventually, being careful to drink water as well as her wine.

  “Because I invited you. Well, as good as invited you. Once I was sure you’d shaken off the CIA and the British, I let you know where I’d be. Made sure I was seen by a few of the right people. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

  Tracy thought, So Cameron was right. He did want me to find him.

  Aloud she said, “I could have shot you.”

  Hunter looked perplexed. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t now. Because of Neuilly? All those dead teenagers?”

  “I had nothing to do with Neuilly,” Hunter protested.

  “British intelligence placed you there. Ours too.”

  “Then British intelligence is wrong!” He sounded genuinely horrified. “They’ve been trying to throw you off the scent, Miss Whitney, and it looks like they’ve succeeded.”

  Tracy looked at him skeptically.

  “You didn’t come here to kill me,” Hunter said. “You came because you want to know the truth. And I let you come because I want to tell it.”

  “A confession?”

  He grinned. “You still have me down as the bad guy, don’t you?”

  Tracy looked away. The truth was, she didn’t know what she had him down as.

  “I’m a journalist,” Hunter said. “Telling the truth is my job. My problem has been finding somebody I trust enough to tell it to.”

  “And you think you can trust me?”

  “What I think”—Hunter sipped his wine—“is that you’re incorruptible. That sets you apart from just about everybody else in this sorry m
ess.”

  Tracy knew she was being flattered, but she let it pass. “I’m honored.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Hunter said. “You think I’m a terrorist so I’d be surprised if my good opinion means much to you. But I’m going to talk to you anyway. I assume you’re already recording?” He nodded knowingly at Tracy’s knockoff Chanel purse.

  Tracy dutifully pulled out the powder compact containing her tiny digital recording device and placed it on the table, next to her gun.

  “Always one step ahead, aren’t you Mr. Drexel?”

  “In my line of work, if you’re not one step ahead, you’re dead,” Hunter drawled. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  Tracy sat, frozen, while he spoke, inhaling every word.

  “It all began with a story for the New York Times.” His deep, gravelly, smoker’s voice echoed off the villa’s vaulted ceilings. “That is, it was my story. I was writing it freelance. But my plan was to sell it to The Times. I’d been seeing a girl there.”

  “Fiona Barron,” said Tracy. Two could play the one-step-ahead game.

  Hunter looked impressed. “That’s right. Fi. Anyway, Fi and I had a falling-out. And the editor wasn’t my biggest fan either. To be fair to him, I guess I had been a bit of an ass. ”

  Tracy didn’t probe. She could imagine.

  “I wanted to build bridges at the paper. And the only way I knew how to do that was by writing something off-the-hook amazing. This was going to be the story that got me back in everyone’s good books.”

  “So what was the story?”

  “Back then, the story was fracking,” Hunter said. “Specifically, corruption in the fracking industry. But, appalling as it was, that soon turned out to be the tip of a giant iceberg of shit. A ‘shitberg’ as I liked to call it.”

  He smiled but Tracy wasn’t laughing. “Go on.”

  “Corporate corruption was being carried out on a massive scale, right across the globe. But it was the government involvement that really stank. Cash for contracts. Diplomatic bribes. Blind eyes turned to human rights abuses. There were CIA agents, sanctioned by Washington, showing up in China with suitcases literally stuffed with cash. Havers’s administration were in it up to their dirty, white-collared necks. The president’s obsessed with breaking the Saudis stranglehold on our economy. Jim Havers wants to go down in history as the man who broke America’s oil addiction and he’ll stop at nothing to do it. And I mean, nothing.”

  “So you planned to expose Havers?” Tracy asked.

  “Among other people.”

  “You knew enough to end his presidency?”

  “For sure. I noticed unmarked cars parked outside my apartment. All of a sudden I couldn’t take a shit without the CIA knowing about it. Nobody had read my piece. It was all in my head at that point. But the government knew what questions I’d been asking and to whom. They wanted me dead.”

  Tracy frowned. “That’s a pretty wild accusation. This was the same government who tried to rescue you in Bratislava, let’s not forget. If they wanted you dead so badly, why go to the trouble?”

  “They wanted me dead,” Hunter repeated. “But they wanted it to look like an accident. So there were no shootings, no abductions. Instead there was a gas leak in my building.”

  “Come on,” Tracy said. “Gas leaks happen all the time.”

  “Exactly. Except this one happened only in my apartment—nowhere else in the building. Enough carbon monoxide to kill a man three times my body weight in under an hour. I know this because that’s how much they found in my cat’s bloodstream when he died that night instead of me. I stayed over at a girlfriend’s place.”

  Clearly Hunter was the one with the nine lives.

  “A week later, I almost drove my car off the Atlantic City Expressway.”

  “What happened?”

  “My steering wheel jammed. Next thing I know I’m shooting up an exit ramp and into a tree. I was lucky. Broke my collarbone, got a few bangs on the head, that was it. But if I hadn’t made that ramp I’d have been dead for sure. Probably taken out a bunch of others with me. Afterwards, the guy in the shop told me someone had messed with my steering column, and put a slow leak in my brake fluid. Deliberate sabotage.”

  A nerve began to twitch in Tracy’s jaw.

  Deliberate sabotage. To the steering column.

  It was exactly what Greg Walton told her had happened to Blake Carter’s truck, the night of the accident. The night Nicholas died.

  “The Americans weren’t the only Western government playing dirty in the Shale Gas Wars,” Hunter went on. “Everyone was at it. The British, the French, the Germans, the Russians. Opponents were silenced, taxes waived, and all the while the rich at the top of the industry grew richer, like fat mosquitoes gorging on the blood of some hapless animal. It was the sheer scale of the corruption that really shocked me. That and the fact that no one was reporting on it.”

  “Why do you think that was?” asked Tracy.

  “I have no idea.” Hunter refilled his wineglass. “Maybe no one else was looking. Or maybe people were looking, but someone was shutting those people up.”

  “Killing them, you mean?”

  “Sometimes,” Hunter said. “I’m sure that’s what happened to Sally, by the way. She’d worked out a lot of this on her own, while I was on the run. Somebody decided it was time to stop the questions. Somebody with less concern for appearances than your masters at the CIA. But sometimes people were paid off. Which leads me to the next chapter in all this: Group 99.”

  Tracy leaned forward. This was what she’d waited for. This was where it all came together, where the pieces of the puzzle began to fit.

  “So I’m writing my piece, uncovering all this dirty money and dirty politics around fracking, trying not to get killed. And as I’m doing my research I run into a bunch of different anti-industry groups. Most of them are environmentalists—well meaning, badly organized—doing their best to be a thorn in the side of the shale gas giants and the governments helping them to line their pockets. But then all of a sudden this one group pops up, and they’re different from all the others.”

  “Group 99,” said Tracy.

  Hunter nodded. “Group 99 got interested once shale gas fields were discovered in Greece. Rumors were flying around that some former Greek royals had signed a vast, private deal to sell swaths of land for fracking. The family stood to make a mint, as did one or two corrupt government officials, and the frackers themselves of course. But there was to be no public benefit from exploiting this natural resource. Things were pretty bad in Greece at that time. The poor were at breaking point. That’s when I first started hearing about Apollo—Alexis Argyros—and Althea, a Western woman, supposedly an American, who was raising money for this group, and maybe even running the show.

  “Group 99 were a game changer. They had a totally different agenda from all the other antifracking groups. They didn’t care about the environment. They wanted wealth equality, and to punish the greedy at the top of the tree. They also had a totally different MO. Remember, they were nonviolent at that time. They were smart, super smart, and tech savvy. They were well funded. They were highly organized but non-hierarchical. And they had global reach. The way I saw it, that put them in a unique position to attack the fracking industry, maybe even to bring it down, but at a minimum to end corruption at least in Greece.”

  Hunter drew breath for the first time in minutes. Tracy noticed for the first time how tired he looked. He’d waited a long time to tell his story, but now that it was finally happening, the effort seemed to drain all the energy out of him.

  “Tell me more about Althea,” Tracy said. “About Kate. You knew her identity all along?”

  Hunter rubbed his eyes. “No. Not at the beginning. I knew Althea had been to visit Prince Achileas at Sandhurst. The Prince knew about his family’s deal with Cranston and it clearly pricked his conscience. Althea got him interested in Group 99. I think the idea was that he was going to help them expose
or sabotage the arrangement in some way. But he got cold feet. Anyway, I went to England. To meet him.”

  “You met Prince Achileas?” It was the first time Tracy had openly expressed surprise.

  Hunter nodded. “Sure. I interviewed him for my piece.”

  “Did you meet Bob Daley then too?”

  “Nope. Just the prince.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “Not much, as far as fracking was concerned. He was very depressed by then. He hated Sandhurst. The boy was obviously gay, and having a tough time with that. Plus he was estranged from his father. And his commanding officer hated his guts.”

  “Frank Dorrien . . .” Tracy murmured under her breath.

  “I was sad when I heard Achileas had topped himself,” Hunter said, staring down at the wine dregs in the bottom of his glass. “Sad but not surprised. Bob Daley said the same thing about him, when we met later in the camp in Bratislava. The kid was a tortured soul. They were friends, believe it or not.”

  “I know,” said Tracy.

  “Anyway, Achileas never did tell me much about that Greek fracking deal. But he did talk to me about Group 99. He was quite fascinating on that subject, as it happened. And he showed me a picture while I was there, of the handler whom he’d met with: Althea. Not the greatest picture as you know. Grainy and her face is half in profile. But it was enough to shock the hell out of me.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I realized then that I knew her. And that my story was about to get bigger than I’d ever imagined.”

  CHAPTER 30

  HER REAL NAME IS Katherine Evans.” Hunter looked at Tracy, propping his elbows on the table. “Kate. As soon as I saw Achileas’s picture of her I knew. We were at school together.”

  “At school?” Tracy frowned. “But I thought you said she was CIA?”

  “She was. But I knew her before that, at Columbia,” Hunter explained. “We were in the same graduating class.”

  “So you were friends?”