Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway. I know you’d prefer to cut me out of his life—”

  “No, Althea, not at all. You’re welcome to visit him anytime you like. I did invite you for his birthday party last month.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t dream of invading your privacy, Carrie. Just so long as I can see him on Sunday and know he’s all right, I’ll have to be satisfied with that, I suppose. He will be properly dressed, I hope?” she added testily. “Just because he’s young doesn’t mean he shouldn’t show respect and dress accordingly on an important occasion like Bishop Merriam’s jubilee.”

  Like she was in the habit of sending him out in rags, Carrie thought irritably. Still, she’d tapped into her limited funds to buy him a suit, and she’d been sure to get his hair cut, as well, so that her mother-in-law would have no reason to find fault.

  For her own part, she’d dressed conservatively in a light wool suit. The Kelly-green jacket had Chanel-style black frog closures up the front and a matching straight black skirt that almost reached her knees. Her shoes and bag were likewise black and conservative, while her hair was twisted into a modest knot at the back of her head. She looked like her own mother, Carrie thought, but she was taking no chances.

  Jonah, surprisingly enough, had seemed genuinely delighted with his new suit that morning, proudly hooking his clip-on bow tie to his collar all by himself. Poor Jonah. Ever since Drum had gone MIA, he seemed to feel it was his job to play man of the house. A little boy should be a little boy, Carrie thought, anger rising in her once again. But then, at the sight of Jonah standing next to his godfather, who rarely wore anything but Brooks Brothers, she had to smile. They looked like a preppy Mutt and Jeff.

  “Tom, do you know Brianne Tengwall? She’s one of yours,” Carrie added quietly. Behind her dark glasses, Tengwall appeared to be casing the joint, as if she expected terrorist assassins—or the erstwhile Operations Deputy—to leap out from behind the flying buttresses.

  “I do believe we met on Elcott Road last month,” Tom said, a hint of a frown crossing his smooth, ruddy face. It vanished almost immediately, though, his natural charm winning out over whatever had sparked his disapproval—Tengwall herself or the knotty problem of which she was another reminder. “Welcome,” he added.

  Tengwall nodded, blushing nervously through her freckles as she stuck out her hand. “How are you, sir?” She’d dressed for the occasion in a conservative black business suit and wrestled her frizzled blond hair into a black plastic clip. But despite that and her sober vigilance, she still looked all of seventeen, Carrie thought. Far too young to be playing spy games.

  “I do just fine,” Tom said. “I hope you know, young lady, that this young fellow here is my godson. I take a very particular interest in knowing he’s being handled gently.”

  “Yes, sir. No worries there. Jonah and I are good friends, aren’t we?”

  “Yup,” Jonah said firmly. “You wanna go check out the garglers, Bree? Mom, can I show Bree the garglers?”

  Carrie glanced at her watch. There was still twenty minutes or so until the service. “I guess that would be all right, if you’re very quiet about it and don’t get in the way of people trying to get in. Just for a few minutes, though.

  Tengwall looked hesitant, as if she wasn’t sure she should let Carrie out of her sight, but Tom nodded to her. “You can meet us inside. I want to have a word with Mrs. MacNeil, anyway.” He turned to his godson. “Jonah, Aunt Lorraine’s inside the building with her mother. The three of us are going to be sitting in the first row of chairs, right in front of the pulpit, and there are places for you and your mom and Ms. Tengwall right behind us. Your names are on the seats. Do you think you can find them?”

  “Yup, I’ll find ’em,” Jonah said. “I can read now.”

  “You don’t say,” Tom exclaimed. “Well, you are just getting to be so grown-up, I can hardly keep track. You keep a close watch on your friend there, you hear?” He said it to Jonah, but from the raised eyebrow he directed at Tengwall, there was no doubt that he meant the reverse.

  She nodded soberly. Young as she was, Carrie thought, this was a girl who knew on which side her bread was buttered. Tom’s position near the top of the CIA organization chart made him a figure she shouldn’t cross if she valued her career. Although Tom and Drum had risen together through the Agency’s ranks, in the case of the coal miner’s son from West Virginia, it was hard grinding work and not just fortuitous birth and connections that had gotten Tom into Yale and onto that escalator to the top of the D.C. power structure. Drum had told Carrie once that the current Director, an outside political appointee, never made a move without Tom Bent’s advice, relying on Tom to serve as his personal tugboat through the Capital’s dangerous shoals. It was entirely conceivable, Carrie thought, that Tom himself could end up being named to some top post one of these days. Tengwall would do well not to alienate him.

  They watched Jonah take her by the hand as he pointed out some of his favorite garglers. “There’s a robot, see? And a computer? And that one’s a hamster.” He laughed. “Did you ever see a hamster and a computer on a church before?”

  Tengwall shook her head as they walked off, hand in hand.

  “He’s really grown,” Tom murmured. “How’s he been since the move? Settled in?”

  “Surprisingly well, actually,” Carrie said. “It’s one advantage of having been a foreign service baby, I guess. He’s so used to moving around and to housekeepers, nannies and au paires that he seems to have taken it for granted that we move from time to time and that our household should include a few strangers. The fact that these people occasionally pick him up from school or attend his soccer games if I’m tied up in FBI interviews only seems to confirm his general impression that they’re hired help.”

  “He’s liking his school?”

  Carrie nodded. “He was going to be in a new school, anyway, so he handled the last-minute switch to Georgetown better than I could have hoped. Of course, it helped that when Tracy took us over to the house for the first time, we discovered a little boy just his age living right next door. They’ve ended up in the same class, and he’s Jonah’s new best bud. The two of them are going out together for Halloween later this week. Jonah’s going as Spider-Man, of course.”

  “What about the business with Drum? You said on the phone that you’d told Jonah about it? How did he handle that?”

  “I soft-pedaled what really happened. I just said Drum had gone away and forgot to tell anybody where he was going and for how long, so people were a little upset with him—including me, by the by, which Jonah had already figured out, since he’d overheard me arguing with Althea.” She slapped her forehead lightly. “Idiot that I am. I could have handled that better.”

  “This has been hard on all of you.”

  “Have you heard anything, Tom? Nobody’s telling me a thing, but surely they must have picked up Drum’s trail by now?”

  Tom glanced around, then took her by the elbow and led her over to a wrought iron bench in the shade of a locust tree. “So far,” he said as they settled on the bench, “they’ve discovered there were at least two other non-sanctioned sets of identification he’d had done up for himself, but there’s no trace of travel under those names. Who knows how many others he had, though? He’d also been setting assets aside for at least a year. Your money was the least of it, Carrie. You know they caught most of that before it could be transferred out of the country?”

  She nodded. “Agent Andrews told me. Not that it does me any good. They’ve gotten a court order to freeze it.”

  “You’ll get it back, Carrie, I’m sure, just as soon as they’ve cleared you, which they’re bound to very soon now.”

  “I sure hope so. That money was my insurance policy.”

  “I know I’ve said this before, but I want you to know the offer still stands. If you need a loan—”

  “No, Tom, thanks,” she said. He was a kind, gen
erous soul, but Tom, she knew, had only his CIA salary and very little else by way of financial resources. Nor did his wife come from major money, however well-connected the Merriams might be through the bishop’s high-profile position in Washington. “Drum did leave a little money in our household account that the feds are letting me tap into for living expenses. And the Overturfs are letting Jonah and me stay in their house rent-free, so that helps.”

  “They’re good people.”

  “They sure are. This isn’t the first time they’ve been there for me. Anyway, now that Jonah’s at school, I’ve been thinking about getting a part-time job. I’ve met with the manager of the Oxfam Gallery in Georgetown in connection with my poor, neglected thesis, and they might have something for me there. So really, Tom, I thank you for your offer, but we’re all right for the moment. I wasn’t planning to take any round-the-world cruises in the near future, anyway.”

  “Well, just so you know we’re here.”

  “I just wish this had never happened. Would you ever have believed Drum would take off like this?”

  “No. And to pull a stunt like that on his mother, at her age—”

  “Disappearing, you mean?”

  “Well, that, too, but the business about the house,” Tom said. When she shook her head, confused, he added, “You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The house on Elcott Road. It turns out that in addition to forging your signature on that letter of instruction to your broker, Drum had also mortgaged the family home last spring, then transferred the money out to offshore accounts in the Caymans and the Isle of Man.”

  “Oh, my God, Tom! Does Althea know?”

  “Turns out that she’d known about it since shortly before he disappeared. She’d intercepted a statement from the bank. It was addressed to her and Drum both because her name’s also on the title deed. She said she thought he must be in some sort of financial trouble to have done that behind her back. Then, when he vanished, she didn’t say anything about it because it looked so suspicious and she didn’t want him in any more trouble than he already was. She’s been quietly making the payments, though, because the bank was threatening to seize the place.”

  “Poor Althea. She never breathed a word to me. That explains a couple of things, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, cracks she’s made about me spending Drum’s money, that sort of thing. She probably thought I was driving him to the poor house and that’s the reason he did what he did. She’s convinced herself this is all my fault. I tried calling and offering to drive her here this morning, but she wasn’t giving an inch.”

  “You have to forgive her, I suppose. She’s old, and Drum is her son, after all. She doesn’t want to believe ill of him, so who’s she going to lash out at?”

  Carrie shivered. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come today. What if she makes a scene? I’d hate to ruin the bishop’s special day.”

  Tom shook his head. “Not going to happen. Althea phoned first thing this morning to send her regrets. She said she’d come down with a cold, but my guess is she decided discretion was the better part of valor.”

  Carrie nodded. “Well, I could say I’m sorry to hear it, but honestly, I was terrified at the thought of seeing her.” A leaf fell on her skirt and she brushed it away. “Have you heard anything else about the investigation?”

  “Not a whole lot, no. You didn’t see this coming, either, Carrie?”

  She sighed and glanced around as a couple of choir members stepped out the cathedral’s side door for a quick cigarette. “No, but maybe I should have. He hasn’t really been right since Dar es Salaam.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Since the bombing.” Carrie frowned and watched a squirrel run across the lawn. “Something happened that morning, Tom. I never said anything about it before this happened, but that day the bomb went off, it destroyed more than real estate. It killed several people and, frankly, it killed my marriage, I think.”

  “How so?”

  “Because Drum panicked that day. I was in the building when the bomb went off, as you know. Afterward, I found Drum out in the parking lot, hysterical. It passed, but I think he was humiliated that I’d seen him that way. He never really got over it. It was all that ‘son of General MacNeil’ nonsense he always had to deal with, you know.”

  “You never knew the General, did you, Carrie?”

  “No, he died long before Drum and I ever met. From what Drum tells me, though, I gather he was quite a tough customer.”

  “Actually, I don’t think he was.”

  “Really?”

  Tom shrugged. “Oh, he was all Army, that’s for sure, but he wasn’t just some hard-ass character strutting around and showing off his chest candy. He was a leader, and a really good man. I think you would have liked him. Drum idolized him, I think. You know, just between you and me, Carrie,” Tom added, “Drum’s problem was he really wasn’t the man his father was, and deep down, he knew it and worried that everyone else knew it, too. But for a while, there, it was possible to get away with being a fake hero—for all of us, I guess. Unlike the General, we didn’t have a real battleground we had to prove ourselves on. We were the post-Vietnam, post–Cold War generation. We could play our spy games and not worry about the fact that we were untested. Then the bombs started going off and September 11 happened, and suddenly the ground had shifted under us. Before that, there was a brief time we could strut around playing king of the world and hope nobody noticed we were buck naked. Didn’t last, though.” He looked around sadly, rubbing his hands together as if trying to ward off a chilly wind. “It’s a new world we’re living in now, Carrie, and a dangerous one. There’s no more getting by on charm and a name. It’s time to put up or shut up.”

  Carrie nodded. “Drum couldn’t assume anymore that people would give him a pass just because he was General MacNeil’s son.”

  “That’s a fact. You know, when he came back to testify before the intelligence committee after September 11, I think it shocked him to realize there were senators there who’d barely even heard of his father. Nobody was going to cut him any slack on that score.”

  “It was more than that, though,” Carrie said. “It wasn’t just that he was afraid of taking the blame for what was going on, Tom. I think he was genuinely afraid of being killed.”

  “Rightly so. Look, the Israelis have the best intelligence in the world and the tightest security net, but they’re losing people all the time. That’s what happens when you make implacable enemies. They may be unsophisticated, their methods may be low-tech, but that just makes ’em more dangerous. They find a way to get under the radar. Not every time, maybe, but even if they only succeed one time out of ten, people are still going to die. America’s at war now, and there are going to be losses. But Drum and I—well, we cut our baby teeth on the Cold War and we thought we were pretty tough, but that was just pretend. Now, we’re in it for real.”

  Carrie nodded. “He’s not a brave man, Tom. I guess I realized that after the bombing in Dar. No wonder he decided to pack it in. The game got too dangerous. Maybe the only surprise is that he waited until now to do it.”

  “You may be right. I think that last attack in London finally did it. The one where that young girl was shot outside the embassy? Must have struck too close to home.”

  “Do you think I really was the target?”

  “That seems to be the conclusion. Maybe it was a way to strike at the CIA Station Chief. Either that, or…” Tom hesitated.

  “Or what, Tom?”

  “Oh, Carrie, what does it matter now?”

  “It matters to me. What’s the other theory about the attack in London?”

  “Well, given the fact that it looks like Drum had been thinking about taking Jonah—”

  “You think he arranged the shooting. He wanted me dead, is that it?”

  “I don’t know that for sure. But somebody hired that hit man, Carrie. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe
Drum was afraid he was being targeted. Or maybe he thought the blame was going to come back to him. One way or another, I think he decided after that the game was over and it was time to get out.”

  “God, Tom! I knew he was cheating on me with other women, but how dumb have I really been?”

  “You weren’t dumb, Carrie. Drum wasn’t cut out for constancy. I guess I’ve always known that about him. He’s been one of my closest friends for a long time, but let’s face it, he’s a party animal, looking for the good time and the easy way. He’s a charmer, and that was always enough to get him by. Except once you get to a certain level, charm’s not enough. You’ve got to step up to the plate and accept responsibility. Drum liked the glory, but he didn’t like the heavy load that came with it. I guess I’ve sensed for a while that he was looking for a way out, but I never expected this. When the Brits came to the Director and said they suspected him of selling out, I was the first one to shout ’em down. Said they were just trying to cover their own butts, that the leaks could just as easily have come from someone on MI-6.”

  Tom’s shoulders slumped and he looked as unhappy as Carrie had ever seen him. “I don’t know, Carrie. Maybe if I’d confronted Drum right back then, things wouldn’t have gone this far.”

  Carrie shook her head. “You can’t blame yourself, Tom. I lived with him and I didn’t see this coming.”

  Just then, the cathedral’s carillon began to peal in the central tower high overhead, ringing out a celebratory chorus that must have echoed all the way over to poor Althea sitting alone in her beautiful, mortgaged home on Elcott Road, Carrie thought sadly.

  “I guess we should go in,” she said.

  “I guess so,” Tom said wearily. “Just one more thing, darlin’. So far, we’ve been lucky the press hasn’t gotten wind of this. The whole affair’s being played very close to the chest. The Director’s terrified of publicity. The last thing the country needs is a security scandal right now, with the President and Cabinet running around telling other governments how to clean up their acts.” Tom rose and held out a hand to her. “There’s going to be a fairly large crowd in there, though, including one or two from the upper levels of the intelligence community who’ve heard Drum’s run into a spot of trouble. Don’t be surprised if you get a few odd looks. Just keep your chin up and don’t give ’em the satisfaction of looking whipped.”