Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  “They made the pact,” Roger said.

  “And how do you know I won’t betray you?” I thought of Holly, frightened to death for her children. “Or that someone else who works for you who doesn’t much like me”—I nodded at Roger—“won’t betray us both to the police?” I made my voice loud, whiny.

  Because I’d imagined hearing a noise at the front door. Wishful thinking.

  Belias considered me with a smile. “My anger is nothing compared to the anger of a network of extremely powerful people. I think you’ve already felt their sting a bit.”

  Access to Lucy. My CIA files. And if I went to the police and said, There’s this network of powerful people who help each other…a good old boy club taken to its worst and most violent extreme…where was my proof?

  The proof was the video Diana had. What her mother had left for her. I met her gaze. She stared into my eyes. No way she’d erased it. It was her only bargaining chip, her silver bullet, the only way out for her and her mother.

  “Who are these people, your…Fausts?”

  He laughed at the allusion. “That’s wonderful, Sam. I like that you’re well-read. Fausts. Of course, that’s not really the case. My little network of friends, we help each other. We build each other. It’s all for our mutual benefit.”

  “And you benefit how?”

  “As a broker of power, of information. I built the network. I’m its brain, its heart. I profit from it. I decide who rises, who falls. I hack human lives.” Belias’s phone pinged. He opened it. A photo of a New York driver’s license. The man’s name was Viktor Rostov.

  “There’s a sign of my positive intentions, Sam. I saved your life. They were sending a man after you, and he is now dead. And you’re welcome, Sam.”

  I stared at the phone’s screen. He’d killed a man to convince me, to win me over. And to protect himself as well, but it was best I focus on what he was selling.

  Belias said, “I keep my promises. And I keep my people safe.”

  “Thank you,” I said. What else do you say?

  “Now.” He glanced over at Diana. “You seem amenable to what I offer. She does not.”

  I stared at her. Please let her follow my lead. Please. But terror racked her face. “Diana, they’re offering us a good deal.”

  Diana didn’t retreat from her fighting stance. “I want to know where my mom is.”

  “She’s perfectly safe. She’s doing some work for me. Work she volunteered to do so I would take care of you, Diana, give you all the help you need,” Belias said.

  She shook her head. “I can’t kill people; I can’t do what they want me to do. I can’t. I can’t.” Kill people? Her mother was a killer? She was too rattled, and I thought of what her past days had been like: discovering her mother was part of this network; running for her life, unable to go to the police without incriminating her own mom, unable to ask for help or even shelter; facing a constant threat of kidnapping and possible death. “Just let me go. I won’t talk, I won’t talk.”

  “Diana, you and I…we can do this together.” I wet my lips. Please play along, I thought. Please.

  Belias looked at us. Both. “So. Moving forward. You both join Team Belias, so to speak. You’re going to be taken away to a house of mine I call the Nest. Far from here, private. Where we can discuss your futures, your usefulness, and I can start changing your lives for you. You have someone who’s in your way? Tell me. I can make them not be a problem for you.”

  “Right. By killing them.” Diana’s tone was harsh.

  “Oh, we kill very rarely. It’s much easier to derail someone. Killing invites attention.” He crinkled a smile at her. “But kill we will, if we must. Your mom excels at it.”

  Diana made a face of sheer agony and shock. And then I realized, He has no intention of recruiting her. She’s too unwilling. She’s failed the test. She’s on borrowed time until her mother kills whoever needs killing. Diana Keene is the walking dead.

  If I had a hope of saving her, of saving myself, he had to believe I could be bought. “You want to know what I want gone? The suspicion that I’m somehow connected to the Rostovs because I speak Russian. The police are batting me around like a cat does a mouse. That has to stop. Rostov’s death has to be seen as self-defense and it goes no further.”

  “Done.”

  Such a confident assertion. “You claim you own the police?”

  “Not here, no. But phone calls can be made. Let me handle it. No worries.”

  I nearly laughed. It was such a bold statement to make, that he could stop an investigation.

  “And Holly and Glenn Marchbanks back off from us.”

  He nodded.

  “How do we trust you? You could take us to this Nest place and kill us,” Diana said.

  “I could kill you right now. A murder-suicide would be so easy. The police already think you’re connected; you die together, their suspicions are confirmed once they match your face to the security tape, Diana. Don’t be stupid, dear. I don’t like stupid.” He leaned down close to her, then glanced back at me. “Are you two a romantic pair? That would be extra convenient.”

  Like we could be the new Glenn and Holly. I started to answer, No, we’re not, like it mattered, and Diana said, “Don’t uncuff Sam. Don’t trust him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know him. I’m not trusting him to stay quiet about my mom.” Her voice went ragged. “He broke into her office to find that DOWNFALL file. Mom didn’t give it to me and I didn’t give it to him. He came here and questioned me about it. He wants to know what you are, not so he can get a job with you, so he can bring you down. Don’t trust him.”

  She’d decided to deal. Maybe she realized she had no room to breathe. She was scared to death. Scared and she didn’t know me, and I was now useless to her, a bargaining chip.

  “Well, Sam, there’s a dilemma,” Belias said. “Who’s more useful to me? Her or you? I have an extraordinary loyalty to her mom. But you. You’re the prize. I could use you both. Something big is coming.”

  The room was so silent, and then I heard a groan from Felix, an awakening moan of him shrugging off the tranquilizer dose.

  I started to speak and then the lights went out.

  33

  Friday, November 5, afternoon

  Las Vegas

  AFTER A SHOWER and a change into nicer cocktail clothes, Janice turned on the television in the hotel room and caught the national broadcast. Barbara Scott was story number five, after a profile of a new leading vice presidential contender (a senator from New Mexico, a woman primarily known as a policy wonk), her not-so-photogenic husband, and her three charming children; a suicide bombing in Moscow that killed three; an announcement of a major debt restructure for an Eastern European nation; and a congressman involved in a one-car accident who might have been drunk but was under investigation. The announcer glanced over into the camera.

  “Best-selling author Barbara Scott, known for her scathing exposés of corporate corruption and government malfeasance, was found dead inside her fire-ravaged home in rural Oregon today…”

  And then they cut to a reporter, hair blown by wind, standing up-valley from the devastation. Janice listened to the typical reporter clichés: “in a plot that could have been lifted from one of her books,” “a woman who made many enemies,” and “the twist at the end of Barbara Scott’s life.” It was arson; she’d been shot before the fire, no clues, no suspects. Then a retrospective of Barbara Scott’s life. She’d graduated from a small college with a journalism and English degree, then gotten a master’s and a doctorate and started teaching at another equally small college. She never indicated an ambition for a career beyond academia, but then she’d written a brutal account dismantling the legacy of a former president, backed by extraordinary research. Then she’d written a book exposing three prominent CEOs and how they’d mismanaged their apparently healthy companies—scooping every financial reporter in the country and again enjoying a huge publishi
ng success. She’d found the data to support her work, the interviews, the cold, raw facts apparently provided to her by insiders.

  Then she’d gone on, the massive best seller out of nowhere, and she’d done the same to the film industry, the investments industry. A book by Barbara Scott scorched lives like an avenging fire. People became afraid of her. The news report showed a film clip of Barbara Scott saying, “Oh, I’m just an everyday person who worked really hard and caught a lucky break or two.”

  Lucky. Like Lucky Lazard. It gave Janice a chill.

  Janice sat down. The reporter reappeared, said investigations were continuing and that according to Barbara Scott’s editor she’d been working on a book discounting the idea that certain businesses were too big to fail. Then a picture of Barbara Scott, with the years of her birth and death beneath. Then the TV went to a commercial for investment services.

  At least they hadn’t said that her laptop was missing. Only because they were still sifting through the rubble. Maybe she had more than one laptop. Some writers did, she was sure.

  She stared down the Strip from her window. She was at the Mystik, which was Lazard’s newest and grandest property, but from here she could see more of his casinos: the Viking-themed Baltik, the Ekcitment (all glass and curves), the circus-themed Antik. All huge, all prosperous. He was not a loner like Barbara Scott, tucked away in a quiet, witness-free wilderness. Lazard was always in a crowd, always playing the amenable host. And there was casino security. Maybe his own personal detail.

  This would be the hardest job of her life. The most challenging to do, the most difficult to survive.

  She let herself think of Diana for a bare moment. She swallowed the medication the doctor had given her last week. It would only help mitigate the pain, nothing more. She felt tired. She couldn’t afford tired.

  Janice went downstairs to the casino. She shoved Barbara Scott and her memory of the woman’s momentarily terrified face to the back of her mind. She needed to find her target and figure out how to kill a man who was very well protected.

  34

  Friday, November 5, afternoon

  THE CURTAINS WERE DRAWN, closed at some point after I’d been knocked out, so any neighbors didn’t see Belias’s fun and games through the windows. Light bled along the edges but it wasn’t much, the darkness soft and gray.

  I threw myself backward, yelled at Diana to hit the floor.

  Diana screamed.

  And then Roger fell back, collapsing against a table. I heard the spitting sound of a silenced gun firing. I saw a form in the thin dark—petite, a flash of blondish hair under a dark cap, black clothes—land on Roger, wrench him around, levering an arm around his throat.

  Belias jumping for cover behind the couch, aiming at the thin form. I tried to rip my hands out of the cuffs. I couldn’t.

  Sudden light from the window. Curtains yanked, door opened, a momentary view of the covered hills of San Francisco, the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts in the distance, then darkness again. Diana ran onto the patio and over the back fence of the shared yard.

  I vaulted up to my feet, shackled to the chair by my hands. Parkour teaches you a lot but mostly how to move, even when the world is not perfectly aligned for you to be graceful. I powered my leg muscles, more of a mad dash than a jump, and launched myself over the couch, and in the dim light I saw Belias’s surprised face before I crashed down on him. I tried to headbutt him—my forehead was my only weapon—but he writhed free from under me and my head hit the hardwood floor.

  Black blobs swam before my eyes. Another shot rang out and Belias yelled, either in pain or terror, but he grabbed the back of the chair, yanked me up in front of him. Suddenly I was his shield.

  “Stop it!” Belias yelled, and the dark figure now stood behind Roger, a gun to his head.

  “I’m hurt,” Roger said as though surprised.

  Belias ignored him. He dragged the chair and me to the door, the gun leveled past my shoulder, aiming at the table.

  “Sam,” he whispered in my ear. “Sam, Sam, Sam, I did not want us parting this way.”

  Roger staggered, staring at the red wet patch on his chest—I could see it in a slash of light between the closed curtains. “John,” he said to Belias. “John, don’t leave me…”

  And Belias put a bullet in his head. Roger dropped, only held up by the figure behind him.

  “I’ll shoot the cuff off you,” he whispered from behind me, in my ear. “Come with me.”

  “No. We walk away from each other.”

  “I saved you from the Rostovs. Don’t forget that.” He yanked the chair into the open doorway, jamming me between door and frame. “I saved him!” he yelled back into the house.

  Belias ran.

  The figure bolted from the table and ran past, yanking me out of the way. Mila. She lost valuable seconds making sure I wasn’t hurt. Then she ran through the gate, out into the street. I struggled and waited to hear gunfire from the street. But I heard nothing. The house was at a corner. If she turned wrong, she could lose him.

  I tried to move the chair, scooting back into the town house, and I fell over onto Roger. Odd thing to lie and wait in someone else’s blood and wonder which way the pendulum will swing. Live or die. Belias could kill Mila and come back for me. I always figured if I died cuffed to a chair I’d still be drawing a CIA paycheck.

  I tried to kick toward Felix, who was stirring, moaning, trying to push himself up onto his knees.

  “Sam,” a voice said above me.

  Mila.

  “Diana…”

  “She’s gone. The man in black got away.”

  “We have to find Diana. She’s got the evidence to destroy him.”

  “The only thing we have to do,” Mila said, “is get you free and get you cleaned up and get out of here. What a mess you’ve made, Sam.”

  “Get me unhooked.”

  She turned on a light.

  “Sam in cuffs. I should leave you like this. You leap before you look.”

  “No, I didn’t. Get me out of this, please.”

  “And you are welcome for the saving of the life.”

  “Thank you.”

  She stood on one leg and pulled the heel off one of her boots. Wedged in the heel was a lockpick. She knelt and worked the pick into the cuffs, and in seconds I was free. I stood. Blood from Roger was on my shirt collar. I checked his pockets while she threw water in Felix’s face, got him to his feet. Found a wallet, took it. The longer the police took to identify him, it might be an advantage for me.

  I stood. “Do you hear police sirens?”

  “Yes. Perhaps a neighbor does not care for the sounds of shooting.”

  “Or maybe Belias found Diana and killed her on the streets. He wants a video she has.”

  “Hidden here?”

  “I don’t know.” Where? And we weren’t exactly friends now. She’d thrown me to Belias. Where would she go? Maybe Felix would know. “We better go.” I straightened up. My face was bruised from the beating; it ached, my arms hurt.

  “Back to the bar,” she said. “We’ll get you cleaned up.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “Felix texted me where you were.”

  “Diana…” Felix said. He stumbled. He’d gotten a heavier dose than I had or he’d had a worse reaction to the tranquilizers.

  We headed through the shared yard, over the fence, squeezing past two buildings on a corner. The sirens were getting louder. I followed Mila to her car, Felix in between us, walking a bit like he was drunk.

  A police car shot past us, sirens going. They would get a surprise, a dead man in the house. Maybe he’d knock me off the front page of the press. It seemed only fair.

  “Thank you,” I said as we reached Felix’s van.

  “You are welcome, Sam. We need to know who this man is.”

  I checked the wallet. Roger Metcalfe. Belias had killed his own man. And now he wanted me on his side.

  35

  Friday, Nov
ember 5, afternoon

  DIANA WAS GONE.

  He’d overreached, trying to get Sam on his side, which seemed as necessary as recruiting Diana. You’d think a disaffected spy would be easier to convert, to buy—bars ran on narrow margins. But if he’d concentrated on Diana, perhaps he’d have that video now as well.

  A mistake I must not make again, he told himself.

  She’d fled the town house, and he’d seen Diana as he ran out onto the street, already driving an old BMW, and she turned onto Gough and headed south, and still on foot he couldn’t give chase. He hurried toward his own car, hearing the first hint of sirens crying on the clear air. Sam’s rescuer hadn’t appeared—he thought in the dim light that it was a woman, and he’d eluded her on the street—she must have turned the wrong way. It had been a final bit of luck for him.

  And how exactly did Sam have a helper there at the town house and a rescuer? Sam had a team. This was a surprise.

  This was a costly day.

  Glenn and now Roger, bad, bad, bad. Roger was special—they’d been together for so long—and he felt a knot of grief tighten in his chest. But Roger wouldn’t have wanted to be captured. He knew Roger well enough, he told himself, that shooting him had been a mercy. It was the fault of that woman, the one who’d come to Sam’s aid.

  He stumbled to his car and got in and willed himself not to be sick. He felt weak, but the grief for Roger would come soon enough, then the mad, red rage of frustration. He had to be ready for it, prepare for it, steel for it. That was when he might make a mistake and there were no mistakes to spare.

  He drove. Aimlessly. The safe house in the Mission District, off Valencia; he should go there. Figure out a way to fight back.

  The decision calmed him, and he started to think again.

  Possibilities. One was that someone with Sam Capra now had come to his rescue. A very competent someone who did not balk at attacking two armed men in an unfamiliar, darkened space, who had accessed the house without him noticing, in silence and stealth. But Sam Capra was ex-CIA. He did not have colleagues with agency skill sets; he had bartenders and waitresses and bouncers.