The Coil

by Gayle Lynds

  He forced himself to sober up, or at least to feel more sober. There was no traffic here as they climbed the long hill that would dip down into Summerland. Off to his right, the ocean shone quietly in the moonlight. With a rush of air, he moved his car out of the left lane and into the right. He did not bother to signal, and he did not slow down. Let the bastard pass at supersonic speed.

  But the SUV did not pass; it followed him into the slower lane. Kirk’s heart thundered, and his mouth went dry. Almost paralyzed, he stared into his rearview mirror as the headlights loomed closer over his open Mustang, until with an abrupt motion the SUV bashed his car’s tail.

  Kirk jerked and yelled. He slammed the accelerator and tried to move left, but the SUV swung around and paced him, cutting him off. He had been too slow.

  As he shook his head, trying to clear the alcohol, the SUV abruptly crashed sideways into his convertible. Bellowing with outrage, he fought to control the steering wheel, but it ripped itself from his grasp.

  Terror filled him. As the car hurtled through the guardrail, he realized he was going to die. Screaming his lungs out, he gripped the steering wheel as the Mustang shot over the high hill and crashed across the railroad track and down through chaparral, small boulders, and native oaks. One collision after another hurled him back and forth against his seat belt. As the car flew over a final precipice and nose-dived toward the shadowy shoreline, he let out one last piercing shriek. He felt one more moment of blinding impact, and then nothing.

  Ten

  Aloft, heading over the North Pole

  Liz looked down at the pile of auburn hair in the bathroom sink. There was a lot of it, shorn like wool from a lamb. She gave herself a wry smile at the unfortunate comparison and combed her new cut around and out from her face so that it approximated the photos of Sarah—slightly wild, very modern.

  She peered into her eyes and touched the dramatic mole near her mouth. Hers had arrived with birth, while Sarah’s had been artificially given to her. She noticed the crooked little finger on her left hand, broken in a childhood skating accident. They had broken poor Sarah’s finger so it would duplicate hers. She and her mother and father owed Sarah, who had gone through hell because Liz persuaded her parents to come in. Or thought she had. In the end, only her mother kept the agreement. Remembering it all, she felt a familiar hollowness somewhere in her chest.

  She had wasted enough time. With a sigh, she left the bathroom and returned down the aisle. Mac was still in his chair, his head resting back, eyes closed, face relaxed. He had located a blanket somewhere. It covered his lap and legs.

  She thought he was asleep until he said, “We need to talk about your parents. There may be something you’ve forgotten that would give us a clue about the files.”

  “I told Langley everything I knew when I was debriefed. And don’t forget I was debriefed twice. No stone left unturned ad infinitum. Also ad nauseam.”

  He crossed his arms over his thick chest, and a smile touched his lips. Still he did not open his eyes. “Humor me. Think of it as small payment for this expensive private flight to Paris.”

  She fell into her chair. “Are there more blankets?”

  But he was already handing one across to her. It had been on the floor on the far side of his seat. “Trade you for my ID.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She dug the CIA identification out of her purse and gave it to him. It disappeared inside his jacket as she took the blanket and spread it over her legs. It was warm and comforting. Comfort had a lot of appeal right now.

  He opened his eyes. “Let’s start at the beginning. The inner man. How would you describe your father? A sociopath? Maybe a psychopath?”

  She felt herself stiffen. This was not a conversational path she liked. But Mac was right. By talking about him, she might recall something useful.

  “No, Papa didn’t fit either definition. He was remorseful, if you could get him to talk about it.” She turned her head to look at him. “Lack of remorse is the hallmark symptom for both psychopaths and sociopaths. They’re indifferent to—or they simply rationalize away—anything from thievery and inflicting pain to murder. Both pathologies are defined by a basic lack of empathy, which is something seen most often in people who chronically lie or ignore the rights or feelings of others.”

  Mac frowned. “If I understand you correctly, there’s no difference between a sociopath and a psychopath.”

  “Haven’t finished yet. A psychopath has psychotic-like elements, too—usually paranoia or some kind of twisted, demented thinking, like believing people enjoy the pain he’s inflicting, or that his victims deserve it.”

  He pursed his lips, thinking. “So if a guy does a contract killing and just doesn’t care, he’s a sociopath. If another guy does it because he thinks someone’s out to get him, he’s a psychopath.”

  “That’s it. Adolf Hitler was probably a psychopath, while a businessman who ruins people for profit has touches of sociopathology.”

  “You just indicted capitalism.”

  “Did I? Well, at least you’re still smiling. I remember one of my professors claimed if everyone were well-adjusted, there’d never be war again, and we’d have plenty of food, clothing, shelter, and leisure time to go around. We’d also be productive and creative. Pleasant to imagine a world like that.”

  “I used to hear that would happen when women ran things.”

  “Maybe it will. At this point, I don’t care who’s in charge. I’m interested in results. But let’s get back to psychopaths and sociopaths. That will help you understand why Papa was different. They compartmentalize their lives. There’s a great example in the movie Analyze This. Remember, Robert De Niro plays a mob boss?”

  He nodded.

  “There’s a scene where his character’s getting a blow job from a prostitute. While she’s doing it, he’s telling her he loves his wife but he can’t let his wife give him a blow job, because it’d be with the same lips she kisses their children. De Niro delivers the line beautifully, and it’s hysterically funny. But it’s also revealing: His character has no idea how his wife feels about his seeing a prostitute, about fellatio, or about anything else. He’s a sociopath. Who she really is, apart from being his wife, is irrelevant to him. Her only function is to play out the script he’s created for her.”

  “Yeah, it’s also classic mafioso. All of them want marriage. It raises their status in the family. Everything’s about status in the mob.”

  “Exactly. Roles. In other words, more roles to be played that have nothing to do with the people themselves. That’s why the De Niro character can behave like a loving husband without being loving, without actually knowing who his wife is. For him, appearing properly tenderhearted is probably self-serving, not empathic. Sociopaths keep up the appearance of caring, but what do they actually feel?…Who knows?”

  “But your father wasn’t that way?”

  “I’m not sure.” She paused uneasily. “I felt as if he loved us. Even though he was a killer, it still felt to me as if he loved us. When Mom and I wanted to come in, he said he would, too. That it was the right thing to do. At the time, I wondered whether he was just trying to please us.” She shook her head. “His first kill was an act of passion. He was working in Las Vegas and was barely twenty years old, and he got away with it. But the Mafia figured it out. They identified him for his ‘natural talent.’ When the Mafia trains you as an assassin, the first people you’re assigned to whack are usually in the mob, too, or working for the mob. He figured he was killing bad people.”

  “Was he a vigilante?”

  “You like to put labels on things, don’t you? Well, yes and no. He killed for money, but the line he drew was that his targets had to be dirty, and he was the one who got to choose whether they were dirty enough to deserve being hit. After the mob let him go independent, he could make that call without someone looking over his shoulder or second-guessing him. He always liked to be in control.”

  “What about y
our mother? Did she discover the truth about what he was really doing, or did he finally volunteer it?”

  “She found out. She thought he had a mistress and started checking up on him.”

  In a flash, a painful old memory riveted her. Her mother, Melanie, was frantically searching through the clothes in her father’s closet, fear on her face, her cheeks wet with tears. She ran to Melanie, and Melanie knelt in front of her, adjusting her play dress. Don’t worry, sweetie. It’s nothing. Papa left a note, and I can’t find it. Really. It’s unimportant. Go outside and get your bike. We’ll ride over to the park. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

  Liz pulled herself back to the present. “But of course, even then he wouldn’t tell her the truth. He said he worked for MI6, which he knew would appeal to her. She started helping him with the planning and the scut work of setting up a hit. After a while, she did wet work herself.”

  He gazed at her curiously, then suspiciously. “How do you know all this?”

  “Years later, when I was living with them again, Mom told me everything.”

  He nodded. “Makes sense. I imagine the military background in her family helped.”

  She shot him a look, but his face was expressionless. Of course, Langley would have sent him all her personnel records, which included a complete—and now accurate—family history. While Melanie’s father advanced in rank and her mother tended to the social and charitable demands made on an officer’s wife, Melanie raised her three younger brothers. When Melanie’s grandfather died, her father resigned his commission, and they returned home to Childs Hall in London, and he became Sir John Childs. After his death, Melanie’s brother Robert inherited the title. When Sir Robert killed himself, the title and lands passed to his older son, her cousin Michael.

  “Yes,” Liz said, “she knew how to use weapons, and she’d grown up in an atmosphere where violence and death were woven into everyday life. Later on, when she finally discovered Papa was really independent and killed for all sides, she was in so deep she couldn’t stop, although she never worked against her country. But then, neither did he. When I found out what they were doing, she was able to quit completely, and he did, too.”

  She closed her eyes, leaned back in the seat. What came into her mind was a dark tenement in Madrid, one of their safe houses, where they had fled after his last job, in Lisbon. Her mother’s face was white with shame and fury. I hate you, Hal. You bastard. Look what you’ve made of us. Now Liz knows. You’ll ruin her, too!

  Liz inhaled, refusing the memories. Hardening herself, because Melanie could have said no at any time. “Papa was tenderhearted when it came to us. He paid a lot of attention to me when I was growing up.”

  “You’ve hinted he was scarred psychologically. Injured. How did that happen?”

  “It’s complicated. Papa’s father was a corporate lawyer, at the top of the West Coast pack. Apparently, he was such a ruthless SOB that not even his partners liked him. Sarah knew him. Her mother told me Grandpa was cold, distant, and particularly nasty to Papa. By the time he was a teenager, Papa was running with a wild crowd and getting into serious trouble. So his father sent him to an uncle in Las Vegas who was connected. What an appalling—and revealing—choice. He thought a mafioso was just the right kind of adult to control his son and act as a role model.”

  “I’m getting the picture.”

  Liz nodded. “That’s where it gets even more strange. At first, Papa turned himself around. He got a job in a casino, fell in love, and married. But then his wife was murdered, and Papa went nuts. He was so trained to dominate a situation that he went into action, found out who did it, and killed him.”

  Mac’s gaze darkened. “So that was his first hit. Of course, the mob found out. He was too close for them not to. That’s when they would’ve enlisted him, and that’s how he ended up like his father, a hired gun.”

  “You see that, too.” She studied him. “You know the rest.”

  “Yeah,” Mac nodded. “I know the rest.”

  For the next two hours, Mac continued to question her about the details of her father’s and mother’s activities, and she answered patiently. She had loved Hal Sansborough as a father but had despised him as the assassin, the Carnivore. She was torn between anger and love, between duty to country and guilt that she had set in motion the events that led to his suicide.

  It was her unresolved war, and none of her scholarly understanding of the mind gave her peace with it. It was one more reason she had focused her study on the psychology of violence. In the end, she gave Mac explanations and insights but no new elements to help determine whether assassination records existed, and if they did, their location.

  Santa Barbara, California

  Shortly after midnight, a black Dodge SUV pulled into the driveway of Derrick and Dolores Quentin’s white Victorian house in the sparsely settled foothills above the city. The driver was prepared for witnesses, just as he had been when he eliminated Professor Kirk Tedesco, but the isolation made his work easier.

  The driver was alone. He stepped out of the SUV, carrying a flashlight and a 9-mm Browning with a noise suppressor. The house was dark. He had been e-mailed a floor plan and committed it to memory.

  At the kitchen door, the driver broke a windowpane with the butt of his pistol, put his gloved hand in through the hole, and unlocked the door. He entered, listening. There was the sound of movement upstairs. It was important only in that it might make his job more interesting. He rolled up his ski mask so he could see better, turned on his flashlight, and padded through the kitchen, passing the messy remains of the night’s party. The staircase was in the front hallway. He climbed it.

  Upstairs, the dean was stepping from his bedroom, his sleepy face confused. The driver waited for eye contact. His target looked up and focused. Horror stretched his features, and he grabbed the doorway for support.

  The janitor smiled and put a silenced shot into the target’s forehead. There was a faint pop, and blood sprayed. The target reeled backward, hands reaching out helplessly as he slammed against a bureau and sank to the floor, blood pouring from his wound.

  The driver watched longer, then went into the wife’s bedroom. She was stirring under the quilt. He hoped the sound of the gunshot had penetrated her sleep. He waited, staring down at the face. Plastic surgery, he decided. She was nearly sixty but had been cosmetically adjusted to forty-five. Made herself beautiful for this moment.

  Suddenly, as if she sensed his presence, her eyes snapped open. With satisfaction, he noted the terror. Her face twisted, and her mouth opened to scream. He fired into her mouth.

  The killer checked all the other rooms. As expected, no one else was in the house. Next, he went into the den, where he located the floor safe. He shot a bullet into the lock, opened it, and cleaned out the jewelry and cash. After making certain both targets were dead, he strolled out to his SUV and drove away.

  Aloft, heading south from the North Pole

  Liz watched Mac sleep. Something was still bothering her, something he had said that did not jibe with what she knew. She went back over their conversations, trying to figure it out. When the answer came, it was with a burst of fresh anger. It had all started with her phone conversation with Shay Babcock, her producer. When he was describing the postponement of their series, he had said: The word was sent to me from Bruce Fontana, the network entertainment director, that they’d decided last night.

  Last night. And Shay had left a message on her machine with the news while she was out jogging and was attacked. At about the same time, Sarah was kidnapped.

  Still, according to Mac, Langley had applied pressure to make the network postpone the series, but after Sarah had been kidnapped. We applied pressure. Now that it’s off the public stage, the threat against you may lessen. We want nothing to compromise our search for Sarah.

  Someone was lying, and she doubted it was Shay. He had nothing to gain. But why would Mac lie? Or had Langley lied to him? She considered the awful possibility La
ngley had known in advance Sarah was going to be kidnapped.

  Her throat tight, she studied him. He was breathing evenly, eyes closed, face smoothed in slumber. She waited patiently. After a half hour, she saw no sign he was faking. She crept to her feet, padded back to the business center, and quietly used the computer to log on to the Internet with the secure code Shay had arranged for her research. With it, she could erase her cyber trail.

  In the unearthly glow of the monitor, she researched media baron Nicholas Inglethorpe, the man who had the ultimate power to postpone or give new life to her series. Born in Houston, Texas, he was self-made, starting with one broken-down radio station that he parlayed into a string of stations and ultimately an international empire of newspapers, books, video and music stores, a film studio, and, of course, Compass Broadcasting.

  As she read the details of his methodical rise, his business slugfests, and the feelers he was putting out for a possible run for governor of California, she gave a grim smile. A man who not only craved power but knew how to use it.

  A Business Week article mentioned charitable works. She stared, shaken. Inglethorpe was the current chairman of the Aylesworth Foundation’s board of directors. The bastard. Her fingers again flew over the keyboard, and she searched until she found lists of past board members. She focused on February 1998, when Grey Mellencamp had questioned her. She swore under her breath. Mellencamp was chairman of the board then, and at his death Inglethorpe succeeded him—just before the foundation solicited her to apply for the chair she ultimately won. Fighting fear and anger, she searched again, easily finding more boards and organizations to which both men had belonged, often at the same time.

  At last, she sat back and crossed her arms to consider coolly what she knew. On the Aylesworth board, the line was unbroken between Mellencamp and Inglethorpe. It would be no great leap to assume Inglethorpe cooperated with the CIA in business—not unknown among tycoons who sought the occasional government perk. He did their bidding on the foundation board, and he cooperated again by canceling her TV series. Perhaps he, too, reported to this Themis, whoever he was.