The Last Book. A Thriller

by Michael Collins

  The boy blushed instantly, looking ashamed. Annette’s eyes narrowed before she brayed with unpleasant laughter.

  ‘Well, I’ll be fucked. You have, haven’t you?

  The boy tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t move.

  ‘That makes it easy then, you fucking worm. Whether it’s true or not, if you show your face around here again I’ll be spreading a few tasty little morsels around the neighborhood. Now let’s see how much you think of her.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ the boy managed, although he thought he knew the answer.

  ‘Why? I’ll tell you fucking why, dickwad,’ Annette raged, ‘that bitch has had everything handed to her on a plate. Ever since my mother died she’s had it easy, looked after by yours truly and then by Brett, her night in shining armor. She owes me and I’m going to collect, believe me.’

  The boy looked at her, ramrod straight back, fists clenching and unclenching. She’d won and he knew there was no point in prolonging the discussion.

  ‘You’ve got an hour and then I want your keys,’ she said, stalking into the kitchen.

  14. Georgetown

  The name game

  Ben had managed three hours sleep after the cops had reluctantly let him go. In the end, exhausted from round after round of questions, he pulled a favor from the local FBI office to vouch for his integrity. He just hoped this Sam guy could provide some shortcuts from now on. And answer some questions. He had plenty of those.

  Alone in his booth, with a clear view of the door, he sipped his scalding coffee and checked out the diner’s other patrons. Mostly business people en route to work, they were engrossed in poring over their smartscreens. A few still lugged clunky, aging air-books and one or two of the younger folk, spurning the electronic wizardry surrounding them, sat reading a real book or newspaper rather than the ubiquitous flexi-pads and readers.

  He watched a group of yuppie types—did anyone still use that expression, he wondered—cross the street, heading for the diner door. There were four young men in their late twenties with a woman Ben could only describe as utterly stunning. Forgetting about his meeting for a good two seconds he watched, fascinated, at the way she seemed to glide through the door, playfully held open by one of her bowing admirers. Like Ben, they clearly couldn’t keep their eyes off her. He saw her eyes dance around the room with mischief as she laughed, and her body move with fluid grace among her more boisterous companions.

  As Ben sighed, shaking himself back from the brink of an unexpected fantasy, the group reached an unoccupied table close by.

  ‘No, no,’ he heard her say, ‘thanks anyway guys but I’m here to meet my husband.’

  With a start, Ben realized that she was smiling in his direction. The young men chorused a moan of disappointment and briefly glanced his way with expressions of naked envy. Ben’s mind raced. Obviously she needed to get rid of her acolytes and, under any other circumstances in the world, he would have jumped to satisfy her needs.

  His supposed wife said her cheery goodbyes and slipped into his booth, taking the seat opposite him. She stared at him candidly with a slightly embarrassed expression.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s better to hide behind a fuss.’

  Her voice was educated, well modulated and slightly musical, reaching across the narrow gap between them like a ribbon of invisible silk.

  Ben almost wept. This wasn’t going to be easy. For a moment he envisioned asking for her phone number and contacting her after his meeting with Sam. Stupid. Stupid.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted out, ‘I’m waiting to meet someone.’

  As he said it, he felt like kicking himself in the teeth.

  The woman smiled, enveloping him with an intimacy he hadn’t felt for years. As she slipped a hand into her bag, without taking her bottomless blue eyes from his face for a second, Ben felt like a trembling fifteen-year-old on his first real date. What was wrong with him?

  ‘I know,’ she said, holding out a laminated plastic, White House ID.

  For the first time in years, Ben found himself speechless.

  The ID disappeared, but not before Ben had registered the words Sam Hawke, LtCommander, US Navy.

  ‘Navy?’ was all Ben could say.

  ‘Well, yes, retired SEAL, actually,’ Sam said, smiling gently as she appraised his reaction. ‘I knew your wife, Ben. I’m sorry, she was a great lady. ’

  The diner seemed to concertina wildly as Ben’s vision jack-knifed in and out. He breathed deeply, focusing on the traffic outside. Slowly the walls stabilised and Ben shifted his gaze back to Sam. Her brow was now furrowed with concern.

  ‘How much sleep have you had?’ she asked.

  Ben felt a glow of anger in his gut.

  ‘Not enough, and that’s all the questions you get until you answer some of mine Lieutenant Commander, or should I call you, ma’am?’

  ‘Sam will do,’ she said to him evenly, ‘and that’s what I’m here for, to answer your questions and then maybe you can help me in return.’

  Ben’s shoulders slumped as the tension poured out of him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ he said, quietly, ‘you blind-sided me there, being a woman. I was expecting a guy. And then mentioning my wife …’

  Sam touched his fingers. The contact was brief but oddly comforting.’

  ‘Yes, we got off to a false start there. Julie and I worked together a hell of a lot and I assumed she would have mentioned me.’

  Ben smiled ruefully. He remembered the times Jules would come home covered in bruises. As he ran her a hot bath and gently sponged her down, she would tell him it had been a rough training exercise, and he knew better than to pursue the matter.

  ‘We had a rule not to talk about work at home, whenever we both managed to be there at the same time that is. She had her Special Forces missions and I was the fed. How do you handle it?’ he added, watching her face.

  Sam sighed.

  ‘I could give the stock-standard reply,’ she said, sipping her coffee and sweeping her gaze quickly and professionally around the diner, ‘but you’ve been around the traps so you wouldn’t wear it. How do you find someone who’s not in this line of work and can handle the secrecy, long separations, and unsociable hours?’

  ‘You don’t,’ Ben replied, shaking his head. ‘And it wouldn’t be fair to ask anyone to try. This work is mistress and master—for life.’

  ‘Exactly, so what do you do, wait for the Christmas party and fight off everyone who gets pissed and wants a grope in the broom cupboard? Thanks God I’m not on that playing field any more. Every now and again rank does have its privileges.’

  ‘Working the White House has to help,’ he said, not unkindly.

  As Sam shook her head, Ben watched the light playing across the highlights in her hair. Nice.

  ‘There’s too much to do, Ben,’ she said. ‘Keeping tabs on all this increasing civil unrest for the President means our resources are stretched beyond belief.’

  Ben watched as Sam’s composure faltered for a second. For a moment, lines of exhaustion etched across her face.

  ‘And then we have Chicago?’ Ben asked. ‘What the hell happened there?’

  Sam took in Ben’s strained, angry look. Her relationship with this man’s wife would only cut her so much slack. He wanted answers, and the truth, or she knew he’d be walking right out the door. Against all protocol and the need-to-know bullshit she’d lived with all her covert life, she had to decide if she could take this man into the President’s absolute confidence. It was her call. The boss had given her that.

  ‘Chicago was a clusterfuck,’ she said, her face reflecting the dismay she felt. More than anything, right then, she just wanted to crumble into a heap and then be picked up and held.

  ‘All this honesty is tough going for a secret sort of squirrel like myself,’ she admitted, ‘and verbalizing it only makes it more real.

  Ben stared at her as long repressed feelings surged around his st
omach. How often he’d heard Jules utter that word, “Clusterfuck,” usually accompanied by a bitter laugh. When nothing she could have done would have helped. He felt an overwhelming need to ask his wife’s former colleague about their work together. What did they do? How was she in the field? Did she ever talk about him?

  ‘Why was I asked to be there, Sam? Juan was my friend—probably my best buddy—if there was anything dodgy about that gig, he would have let me know. Did someone pull a fast one on him too?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that at all,’ Sam responded quickly. ‘Admittedly, Juan wasn’t given all the facts—you know how it is,’ she said, shrugging. ‘And it wasn’t necessary. It was straightforward intel gathering and knowing more wouldn’t have changed the situation. We simply wanted to know who was leading the protest and who else was pulling strings from the bleachers. We didn’t have the resources to cover it ourselves without drawing attention to our interest.’

  ‘I know how it is, so what are not telling me?’

  Sam took a file from her bag and slid a photograph across the table.

  ‘I’m telling you everything that we know when we know it, Ben. Do you recognize this face?’

  Ben’s mouth went dry and he stared at the grainy image. It had been taken two, maybe three years back and he’d seen it only once, before he was tossed out of the feds.

  ‘How did you …?’

  ‘Ben,’ Sam said, interrupting him, ‘after your wife died, your one man investigation was watched with increasing interest. You have an analyst’s mind, but it works in a unique way and you were beginning to get results from right out of left field. And then the directives started—slowly at first. Someone upstairs was uncomfortable with what you were doing and wanted you stopped.

  ‘This man,’ Sam said, tapping the photograph, ‘killed your wife, but you know that.’

  Ben flinched as Sam’s words hit home. He looked around the diner and then flicked the photo back towards her.

  ‘I wanted to kill him then,’ he said, evenly, ‘and still do. But, he’s probably long gone or dead by now. It’s been two years. Have you got a name?’

  ‘As a matter of fact we do and I’ll get to that shortly.’

  Sam stared at Ben until she saw that he believed her.

  ‘Did you ever work out why she died?’ she asked.

  ‘Coincidence,’ he muttered flatly, ‘wrong place, wrong time.’

  ‘It seemed like that at the time, didn’t it?’ Sam said, putting the photo to one side. Ben noticed that she’d turned it over but hadn’t returned it to the file.

  ‘Julie was a creature of habit and she wasn’t jogging along her normal route that morning, did you know that?’

  Ben smiled inwardly. In the early days, he often teased her about some of the near-perfect rituals she performed on a daily basis. Her breakfast had to be exactly so—special home-made muesli with yoghurt, banana and milk. It was his job to stock up on milk and heaven help him if he’d forgotten. It wouldn’t matter how dark or cold it was, as Jules powered out the door he’d be slipping from their warm bed to buy the essentials before she returned. He soon learnt.

  Ben thought hard, realizing that Julie’s running directions had always been a complete anathema to him. He wasn’t into it himself, preferring the gym to keep himself in shape. He’d just assumed that she was running a variation on any number of timed routes when the blast had taken her out of his life.

  Sam felt Ben’s eyes boring into her.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Julie was almost five miles from your home, and the explosion originated from a vehicle which happened to be parked outside a Special Forces safe house.

  Ben felt the sour taste of acid in the back of his throat.

  ‘How could that be, you guys check all vehicles within fifty metres of any sensitive target, same as we do?’

  ‘Exactly, Ben,’ Sam said, quietly, ‘the vehicle had been left there and declared safe by someone within the organization. Not only was your wife murdered, it was arranged with the help of one of her own.’

  ‘What the hell was she working on?’ Ben asked, almost shouting. He looked around, quickly lowering his voice.

  ‘Ben, we now believe that whatever was going on in the safe house wasn’t relevant to her death. The asset in there was important but fairly low-level. At first we went in a thousand directions from the house, assuming the person in there was the target, but we were completely wrong. Only in the last few months did we discover that it was Julie they were really after. When we rechecked her cell with up-to-date software, we found an encrypted message asking that she swing by the house that morning and check the perimeters.’

  Ben’s mind was reeling.

  ‘Who sent the message?’

  ‘That’s something we haven’t been able work out yet, although we know it could only have been one or more of five or six people. None of them are aware that the investigation has been kept open because it was quietly moved to presidential level. We think that outside the White House, you’re the only person who knows we have a mole.’

  ‘But you’re not sure?’ Ben asked, looking into Sam’s eyes. They suddenly appeared tired. She was obviously more distressed than she was letting on.

  ‘We never can be, Ben, you know that. We only trust who we can and pray to whichever God does it for us.’

  ‘What about Juan? Was that an accident?’ Ben’s mind was jumping around all over the place.

  ‘In a word—no. A witness saw a pickup leaving the scene at speed. He’s an ex cop and he swears that there were no rear plates. That was a hit.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Ben said, ‘and now they’ve got Cara.’

  ‘It looks like it, Ben. Did your guys find anything before the cops got there?’

  Ben bristled and then allowed his shoulders to relax.

  There was a ghost of a smile on Sam’s lips.

  ‘I know how thoroughly you operate, Ben. You wouldn’t be taking any chances that the flatfoots would screw the scene up.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Ben said, slightly impressed with his own reputation, ‘they left nothing, even the notepaper was stock standard office stuff. But the blood wasn’t hers—not even human—probably pig’s. I get the feeling that was also part of the message, because whoever left it knew it wouldn’t be hard to analyze.’

  Sam looked thoughtful.

  ‘Only if they knew that someone would be interested enough to check. Cops are too busy to check DNA in an abduction case. They’d just assume it was from the victim.’

  Sam took a breath.

  ‘Can I ask you something personal?’ Her voice seemed a little strained.

  Ben looked up sharply. He’d been watching her perfectly manicured nails as they moved gently back and forth across the flipped over photo. He still had to ask her about him.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Was there anything between you and Cara?’ she asked.

  Ben felt his mouth slacken in surprise.

  Sam frowned.

  ‘I’m sorry, I had to ask. It was late. You’d just survived a bad bomb attack, been seriously injured and Cara had lost her husband the night before. She prepares a meal and you pop out for a couple of bottles of wine …’

  If Ben had expected Sam to wither under his venomous look, he was mistaken. With her insides in a turmoil she sat looking at him, watching his anger boil. What was this man doing to her? It some respects she knew all about him—through Julie, through their surveillance. And yet she knew nothing. In the flesh, he was far better looking than any of his photos suggested. But she wasn’t into looks—never had been. It was his raw honesty and decency she found irresistible. And the way those emerald eyes seemed to look into her soul made her knees wobble beneath her very sensible skirt. She watched him fighting for control, knowing he had no idea that she was doing precisely the same.

  ‘We were very good friends,’ he said through a tight jaw, ‘and I really loved her, if you can understand that. Not that it’s any of your busin
ess.’

  Sam’s face remained unmoved but the barb went deep.

  Ben let out a long sigh.

  ‘I’m sorry—again. I know you have to ask. I’d do the same in your place.’

  Ben felt her hand touch his briefly. He was surprised how quickly his anger subsided.

  ‘I was tired and overwrought last night and would have happily gone home, ripped into a bottle of bourbon and slept until midday, but I knew that Cara had something on her mind—something about emails. I owed her a listen. I should have quizzed her about them before I went out, but I had no idea she wouldn’t be there when I got back.’

  He looked at Sam.

  ‘And we were being eavesdropped—very simple stuff, almost crying to be found. Not you guys I take it? No, don’t answer that.’

  Sam shook her head anyway.

  ‘What were the emails about?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. They were from a friend in Sydney and really freaked her out. I’ve met her a few times. She and Cara are lunatics when they get together. She’s Zachery Corsfield’s wife.’

  Ben saw Sam’s face go pale.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  She stared down at the back of the photo and then turned it over. Ben could see her elegant fingers trembling slightly.

  ‘We know this bastard put the Chicago bomb together. He didn’t detonate it, he left that for someone else to do and blow themselves up in the process. He was too busy elsewhere.’

  ‘Where?’ Ben asked, thinking about Cara’s abduction.

  ‘Sydney as it happens, trying very hard to kill Kristen Corsfield. We think he also torched their home. We didn’t find Zachary’s body, but it looks like he was tortured at his desk.

  ‘God,’ she said, banging her fist down on the photo. ‘This is so convoluted. What’s going down with that prick?’

  Ben looked at the cruel, raptor-like face staring slightly to the side of the covert camera’s lens, the burn mark showing as a livid slash covering the man’s left cheek. That was his mark, Ben’s mark. When he inflicted that wound, it was the closest he’d ever been to running down his wife’s killer.