Fake Truth (Ian Ludlow Thrillers)

by Lee Goldberg

  Edney stared at the camera to let that sink in.

  “We know Arturo Giron owns the Mexican government. Does he own ours now, too? What is his insidious endgame? And are we the suckers who are paying for it?”

  This wasn’t a conspiracy theory that Ian found compelling or creatively inspiring, so he switched over to the airline’s movie offerings. He was delighted to discover they had all the vintage Bond movies, from Sean Connery to Pierce Brosnan. They were his favorite movies and he couldn’t resist picking one to watch, even though he owned them all and he’d seen them maybe a hundred times each.

  He selected You Only Live Twice because it was the first 007 film that truly went over the top, more so than he’d ever dared with his fiction. The bad guy had a spaceship that he launched into orbit to swallow American and Soviet space capsules and bring them back down to his secret lair in a dormant volcano in Japan. The intention of the scheme was to provoke the Americans and Soviets into a nuclear war. Ian didn’t follow the logic, and wasn’t sure how the bad guy would benefit, but he didn’t care. It was just what he needed to see right now, a movie made in the good old days when it was still possible to separate fiction from reality.

  It comforted him to know that this was one spy thriller that would never come true.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Porto, Portugal. November 11. 8:08 p.m. Western European Time.

  The medieval center of Porto is a densely packed maze of stone buildings with red terra-cotta rooftops, theatrically baroque churches, and cobbled streets with limestone-mosaic sidewalks that ramble down the steep granite hills on the northern bank of the Rio Douro.

  Porto’s defining image, logo, and perhaps even its registered trademark is the Ponte Dom Luís I, a 146-foot-tall wrought iron bridge that spans the Douro with one quarter-mile-long deck atop its dramatic central arch and another 565-foot-long deck below it. The bridge joins Porto with Vila Nova de Gaia, where port, the sweet fortified wine that gave the city its name, ages in oak casks in the dozens of centuries-old stone wine cellars that line the southern riverbank.

  Ian and Margo took a taxi from the airport to their hotel on Rua do Almada in central Porto. The narrow cobblestone street was one way, with a single southbound lane and a long row of cars parked bumper to bumper on the east side. The stone buildings, none taller than four stories, were packed so tightly together that they formed an unbroken wall of rusting wrought iron, faded paint, dirt-caked glass, and grime-coated tiles.

  The Almada Regent Hotel was at the corner of Rua do Almada and Rua do Dr. Ricardo Jorge in a three-story building that had recently been completely gutted and renovated on the inside, while retaining the original yellow-tiled facade and wrought iron balconies.

  Ian and Margo wheeled their bags into the lobby, which was decorated with minimalist, almost industrial furniture amid wood paneling, polished concrete floors, and cleverly exposed sections of the original distressed stone archways and columns. They approached the marble check-in counter, where a young woman was helping an elderly couple. The desk clerk was olive skinned with doe eyes and long black hair pulled into a ponytail.

  While Ian waited, he imagined how he’d write what happened next if it were a Straker novel . . .

  The desk clerk had more dangerous curves than Nürburgring, but Straker had driven that course once blindfolded, at 100 miles per hour, with a lunatic in the passenger seat jamming a gun into his kidney, so he figured he could handle her just fine. He strode up to the counter with the lethal grace of a cougar. She greeted him with a warm smile and moist lips.

  “I’m Clint Straker,” he said. “I’m checking in for two nights. Room 302.”

  “May I see your passport and credit card?” she asked. He gave them to her and she typed something into her computer. “Are you in Porto for business or pleasure, Mr. Straker?”

  “I’m here for business, but I’m always hard up for pleasure.”

  Amusement flickered in her eyes. “I’m sure you are, Mr. Straker. Would you like one key or two?”

  “Two.”

  She put the card keys on the counter in front of him and then picked up a bottle of port from the table behind her. “May I offer you a glass of port?”

  The hotel was known for this courtesy and it was one of the incentives for tourists to book a room here.

  “Only if you join me,” he said. “I never drink alone.”

  “I’m not allowed to drink on the job.”

  Straker smiled and looked her in the eye. “I can wait.”

  “I get off at midnight,” she said, holding his gaze.

  “You’ll get off a lot later than that. I don’t like to rush.”

  He took one of the two keys and walked away.

  She came to his room shortly after midnight carrying a bottle of port. They never got to the wine. Sometime after her fourth orgasm, he asked her if she knew Rolfe and Clemens, the former occupants of his room.

  “It’s so sad what happened to them,” she said, still breathing hard, her skin glistening with sweat that tasted like salted caramel. “Were they friends of yours?”

  “Yes, they were. You must have been on duty when they checked in.”

  “I was. They seemed like a nice couple. I never spoke to them again.”

  “Did anyone ask about them before they fell?”

  “No.”

  “Did anything unusual happen in the neighborhood before or after their deaths?”

  “Like what?”

  “A bank robbery, a kidnapping, a murder . . .” Straker let his voice trail off.

  “You mean, did they see something they shouldn’t have and were they killed to keep them quiet?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Nothing that I know of,” she said. “You certainly have a vivid imagination.”

  “Let me show you how vivid,” he said and rolled her on her side.

  She staggered out of Straker’s room at dawn, more spent than she ever imagined it was possible to be without losing consciousness. But she was still clearheaded enough to know that he’d leave in two days and she’d still have to live here. She had to consider her future. She took out her cell phone and made a call, whispering in Portuguese.

  “You told me to tell you if anyone ever came asking about the dead Americans. Someone just did. His name is Clint Straker.”

  The elderly couple left the counter and the clerk greeted Ian and Margo with a big customer service smile. Not quite as alluring as the sensual smile that Ian had imagined, but he could live with it.

  “Welcome to the Almada Regent,” she said in English. Her name tag read BEATRIZ. “Do you have a reservation?”

  “Yes, for Ian Ludlow,” he said, wondering if her sweat really did taste like salted caramel. “I’ve reserved room 302 for me and 304 for my associate, Margo French.” He tipped his head toward Margo, who stood beside him.

  “Yes, you have, and they are available. You’re lucky it’s off-season for us. I rarely see guests succeed in reserving specific rooms. May I see your passports and credit card, please?” Beatriz asked. Ian and Margo complied and she entered some information in her computer. “I see you will be with us for two nights.”

  “Possibly longer. It depends on what we learn,” Ian said. “We’re investigating what happened to Stan Rolfe and Briana Clemens, your two American guests who fell to their deaths at Miradouro da Vitória while taking a selfie.”

  Beatriz glanced at her computer screen, then back to Ian, her customer service smile vanishing, her expression turning cold. “You’ve booked the same room they were in.”

  “I want to experience Porto the same way they did,” Ian said, immediately regretting his choice of words.

  “By sleeping in the same bed?”

  “It’s not as creepy as it sounds,” Ian said, knowing that it absolutely was. “I’m a writer doing a story about them and Margo is my research assistant. I’m following in their footsteps to understand how and why they died.”

  He look
ed to Margo for some support, since it was her fault he was here, but she was busy pretending to check her email on her phone.

  “The police said it was an accident,” Beatriz said.

  “The police aren’t always right,” he said. “Did anything unusual happen during their stay?”

  She handed Ian his credit card and their passports. “Not until they died.”

  “How about afterward?”

  “Not until a writer showed up and asked to stay in their room so he could experience what they did.”

  Margo laughed hard and it brought back Beatriz’s smile, a real one this time, and she started laughing, too. Ian felt left out.

  “You’re sassy,” Margo said, matching Beatriz’s smile with her own. “I love it.”

  “That’s a relief,” Beatriz said. “Sometimes my mouth gets me in trouble.”

  “Mine too,” Margo said. “I wonder what else we have in common.”

  Beatriz’s smile didn’t waver. Were they flirting with each other, Ian wondered, or was the clerk just being polite? Regardless, this wasn’t going the way he’d imagined it at all, which wasn’t saying much for the awesome predictive powers of his creativity.

  “Did you ever talk with the couple?” he asked Beatriz.

  “I checked them in the night they arrived,” Beatriz said, which seemed to remind her that she still had work to do. She passed their card keys over to them. “They asked me about a good place to eat, so I recommended éLeBê, right up the street.”

  “We’re going there tonight, too,” Ian said. He knew they’d eaten there from their credit card receipts, which had also been supplied to him by the CIA.

  “Do you have time for a complimentary glass of port?” Beatriz asked.

  “Hell yes,” Margo said, and that made the clerk smile again.

  Beatriz placed two small, crystal port glasses on the counter and filled them up from a Graham’s bottle that she had under the counter.

  Ian took a sip. It was strong and sweet with a woodsy taste. He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. Margo tossed hers back like it was a shot of Redheaded Slut.

  “That’s nice,” Margo said, though Ian didn’t see how she could have tasted anything. The wine must have flown right over her tongue and straight down her throat. “I’ve never been offered a drink at check-in before. I think I’m going to like Porto.”

  “I hope so,” Beatriz said. “You two aren’t planning to take a selfie on the same wall the couple did, are you?”

  Margo shook her head. “We aren’t going to follow every step they took.”

  “That’s good,” Beatriz said, taking their empty glasses. “I’d hate for you to suffer the same fate.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  éLeBê was a small, upscale restaurant a couple of blocks west of the hotel. Ian chose their table based on the photos that Rolfe and Clemens had taken during their dinner. Instead of asking for a menu, Ian showed their waiter the couple’s pictures of their entrées and asked him what they were.

  The baffled waiter, who had a nose so large it looked like he’d grown a thick mustache to help support its weight, identified the dishes as codfish prawn risotto and grouper with clams, so that was what they ordered, along with a pitcher of cold sangria, which he brought for them while they were waiting for their entrées. The sangria wasn’t what Rolfe and Clemens ordered, but Ian couldn’t resist.

  Their table was beside a saltwater tank where two enormous lobsters, their claws banded shut, were engaged in an epic battle, stepping on sluggish crabs and startling the anxious fish. It was hard for Ian to tear his eyes away from the bout as he nursed his sangria.

  “At least we have live entertainment,” Margo said. “You can’t watch your dinner kick ass before you eat it at Denny’s.”

  “The true measure of fine dining,” Ian said.

  The waiter dropped off some hot bread and butter, topped off their glasses from the pitcher of sangria, and walked away.

  “What’s our game plan?” Margo asked.

  “What we’re doing right now. Using the GPS info and photos from the couple’s phones to go to the same places at the same times and do the same things that they did.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. We’ll look around, compare what we see to what’s in their photos, and maybe we’ll notice something that’s changed or is out of place. Then we can find out if anything happened in Porto, like a kidnapping or a car bombing, since they were killed that might be related in some way to what they saw, what they did, or who they met.”

  “Then we follow the clue trail to the bigger plot.”

  “That’s what Straker would do,” Ian said.

  “There’s just one problem,” she said. “There haven’t been any assassinations, kidnappings, or major heists since the couple died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I asked the Agency to check on that before we left Los Angeles,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “I’m not stupid,” she said. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I was afraid you’d cancel the trip,” she said.

  “You were right, because now this whole exercise is pointless.”

  “No, it’s not. Just because there wasn’t some major crime that happened after they died doesn’t mean they weren’t murdered,” she said. “What if what they stumbled upon wasn’t quite so obvious? It would make a better story, wouldn’t it?”

  Yes, it would, and a new approach occurred to him that he immediately liked better. “What if whatever it is hasn’t happened yet?”

  That would add a ticking clock, he thought, something that was always good for a thriller.

  “That could be your bad guy plot,” Margo said. “Straker would have to figure out what it is and then prevent it. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done that. Or that we have.”

  She was right, but there was another way to go. “What if nothing happened or is going to happen? What if they unknowingly took a picture of a wanted fugitive, or a missing person, or someone who is supposed to be dead but isn’t and that is what got them killed?”

  “Good idea. I’ll have the Agency run a facial recognition scan of all the people in the couple’s photos and cross-check them against our facial databases of known terrorists and major criminals, alive or dead.”

  “Can the Agency really do that?”

  Margo shrugged. “How the hell would I know?”

  “Because you’re a CIA agent.”

  Margo leaned across the table to him. “A little louder, Ian. I don’t think the other diners or the kitchen staff heard you.”

  “As if they care,” he said.

  “Maybe they do. Maybe one of them is the terrorist who killed Rolfe and Clemens. Maybe it’s even our waiter. Maybe he killed them for taking his picture and endangering his plot to . . .” She looked around, as if the answer was in the fish tank, or out on the street, or hanging on the wall, but then she found it and faced Ian again. “. . . to poison the world’s supply of port wine.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t know what resources the CIA has for you to use. Didn’t they give you any training before they put you in the field?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I was trained how to use anything on this table as a weapon.”

  “Oh really.” Ian gestured to the pat of butter. “Can you kill me with that?”

  “I’m really tempted to try,” she said.

  The waiter arrived with their dinner, saving Ian from immediate death by butter. After the waiter set down the plates and asked them if he could get them anything else, Ian held up his phone with a picture of Rolfe and Clemens on the screen.

  “Do you remember our friends Stan and Briana? They told us we had to eat here. They sat at this table a few nights ago.”

  “Yes, very nice couple,” the waiter said. “It’s so sad what happened to them.”
r />   “Yes, it is,” Ian said. “Do you remember anything else about them?”

  “They asked me why the lobsters were fighting.”

  Ian glanced at the tank, then back at the waiter. “What did you tell them?”

  The waiter stared at him for a moment. “They are lobsters. It is what lobsters do. It’s why they have claws.”

  “Of course,” Ian said. “Thank you.”

  The waiter walked away. Margo leaned toward Ian.

  “He’s definitely a terrorist,” she whispered. “A real waiter would have known the psychological motivations of all the crustaceans on the menu.”

  They finished their dinner at 9:45 p.m., the same time Rolfe and Clemens did, and took the same short walk down Rua do Dr. Ricardo Jorge, a high stone embankment on one side of the street and empty storefronts along the other, back to the hotel.

  Before Ian unpacked, he thoroughly searched his room, opening drawers, lifting the mattress and box spring, and checking behind the framed photographs of Porto street life, though he had no idea what he was looking for and felt stupid for even making the effort.

  Rolfe and Clemens weren’t spies, detectives, or reporters. He knew that they weren’t killed because they had stolen gems, or a thumb drive containing North Korean launch codes, or a vial of a deadly virus, or anything else that they might have hidden somewhere in the room. They were just a couple of tourists who fell taking a selfie, that was it.

  But Ian was here in Porto, and as long as he was, he would go through the motions of pretending the couple was killed for some nefarious reason and see if it led to a Straker plot, though he didn’t believe it would expose a real plot in the real world. That was Margo’s delusion, not his.

  It was also one of the reasons why he went right to bed and didn’t stay up until midnight to see if Beatriz would knock at his door with a bottle of tawny port to claim her four orgasms.