by Lee Goldberg
Ludlow stepped out from underneath the escalator in front of Edney. The author was wearing soot-smeared camouflage army fatigues that did the opposite of what they were designed for—they made him stand out against the white walls around him.
“Are you sure you weren’t followed?” Ian said.
“Relax,” Edney said. “I couldn’t have led them here. The Chinese have no reason to be watching me.”
“You’re wrong. I’m not the only one who knows that Mei didn’t fool you,” he said. “She knows it, too.”
Edney hadn’t thought of that. “She thinks you’re dead and she isn’t going to know you’re not until she sees you on my show. Let’s get out of here.”
Edney and Ian started toward the Barnes & Noble when Wang Mei emerged from the darkness of a Restoration Hardware store in front of them. She was dressed in black and pointing a gun with a suppressor on it at them.
Edney let out an involuntary squeal of terror, which he knew wasn’t very manly or brave, but he’d never been in a situation like this.
Mei laughed. “Oh, Dwight, I wish America could see you now, exposed as the quivering coward you truly are.”
They were all out in the open, Edney thought, so why the fuck doesn’t Rachel shoot this snotty bitch?
“I risked my career and my life to help you and it was all a lie,” Ian said. “You were just using me to create your cover.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding? You only did it to sell books and get me into bed,” she said. “We used each other. But at least you didn’t have to fake your orgasms.”
“I just had to choke back my laughter at your terrible performances. You looked like you were trying not to sneeze,” Ian said. “I don’t know what you’re worse at, acting or spying.”
She shot him four times.
Ludlow jittered backward, spurting blood from his chest, and crumpled to the floor.
Edney squealed again, shocked by the violence, and looked up from the writer’s bleeding corpse into the black eye of Mei’s gun.
Where the fuck is Rachel?
Obviously, she was a no-show. He’d have to talk his way out of a bullet.
You can do it!
“Listen to me, Mei. Your mission has failed. But it isn’t too late to salvage something for yourself and your country out of this disaster.”
“How do you figure that?” Mei asked. That was a good sign. She was listening, not shooting.
Be calm. Be confident. Don’t squeal.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. It had to be the text. Rachel was here. All he had to do now was stall.
“Come on my show, reveal how you fooled the CIA and our government. It will humiliate America in the eyes of the world and erode the trust of foreign powers in our intelligence operations. You will have succeeded, at least in part, in your mission of undermining our country. But if you kill me, you will be wasting that golden opportunity for redemption.”
“But it will make me feel a lot better.” Mei aimed her gun at his head. “I want to see you die.”
That was when she jerked twice, her eyes went wide, and her hand went limp. Mei dropped the gun and seemed to melt onto the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West doused with a bucket of water. She toppled forward and Edney saw blood oozing from two holes between her shoulder blades.
Mei had been shot.
Finally.
But he didn’t want to be caught here with two dead bodies. He ran toward the Barnes & Noble, nearly colliding with Rachel as she emerged from the store wearing a dark hoodie.
She grabbed him by his lapels and slammed his back against a pillar. “You idiot. You should have waited for me to get here before you came inside. What the hell were you thinking?”
“The clock was ticking,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose Ludlow. But I lost him anyway, no thanks to you.”
She seemed confused. “What do you mean? Where’s Ludlow?”
This was why she was essentially a hired gun, Edney thought. She was too literal minded for any assignment more complex than delivering a package or shooting a target. Even the simplest form of abstract thinking was beyond her.
“I didn’t mean it literally,” he said. “I was talking about my news story. Ludlow is still on the floor where Mei shot him. You took your sweet time shooting her.”
She pulled a gun from inside her jacket. “I didn’t shoot anybody.”
Every sphincter in his body closed so tight he was hermetically sealed.
If she didn’t shoot Mei, then who did?
He pressed his back flat against the pillar and would have crawled inside of it if it was possible.
“Oh my God,” Edney said. “Ludlow was right. I led the Chinese assassins here.”
“Get out,” she said, scanning the second floor for snipers. “I’ll cover you.”
Edney dashed into the Barnes & Noble and didn’t look back.
He wasn’t doing a very good job of looking ahead, either, because he didn’t see the man in the Scream Halloween mask standing beside one of the black partitions.
But Edney definitely felt the blow to the back of his head and everything went dark. His last thought was:
So this is death.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Edney’s story about the shooting didn’t make any sense to Beth. If Wang Mei was killed by Chinese snipers, why didn’t they shoot Edney and Beth, too? They were out in the open, easy targets.
It was that question, and the need to confirm for herself that Ludlow was dead, that made her go deeper into the mall and investigate. She tried to use pillars for cover as she made her way to the two bodies, but it was pointless. By nature, shopping malls were big, open spaces, even more so when they were abandoned, and Ludlow and Mei were out in the middle. There weren’t many places for her to hide if she wanted to see the bodies and a sniper wanted to shoot her.
So why was she still alive?
Maybe they were already gone, Beth thought. Or maybe they’d spared Edney because they didn’t care what he reported about what happened. They just couldn’t let Ludlow or Mei talk.
She kept her eyes on the upper level, trying to guess where the sniper was perched based on where Mei’s body fell. But the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she was alone with the two bodies.
Beth walked out into the open and approached Ludlow’s body.
At first, everything had gone according to Ian’s script. It was easier for Ian to act his part than he’d thought it would be, given that he wasn’t an actor, and Mei gave a better performance than any part he’d ever seen her play before. Perhaps that was because there was more truth to the dialogue he wrote for their scene than he’d intended or realized.
Even the timing of the special effects had worked as planned. Margo had been watching them from a storefront on the second floor. When Mei fired the prop gun, Margo used a remote control to explode the packs of red-dyed corn syrup under his shirt to coincide with each shot. Margo also activated the blood packs under Mei’s shirt, creating the illusion of Mei being shot with a silenced rifle.
Edney ran off and that was when Ian stole a peek and saw things had gone dangerously off script. The woman who’d tried to burn him alive had showed up. He’d thought her arrival was a possibility, of course, but now his eyes were squeezed tight again, and he was trying not to breathe, as she approached him with a loaded gun.
Ian could sense her getting closer. He could almost feel her body heat, but he knew it had to be his imagination.
If she thought he was dead, she would just walk away. But if she thought he was alive, he was a dead man.
Or she might shoot him in the head anyway just to be safe and he would die whether he took a breath or not.
No blanks and corn syrup this time.
His life was in Margo’s hands.
As Beth got closer and saw all the blood, she figured that Ludlow had died from bleeding out, if nothing else. There was no reason to complicate the story th
at the two bodies would tell by finishing him off with a bullet from a third gun. And yet something didn’t feel right about the tableau of death in front of her.
No, it wasn’t a feeling. It was something more tangible than that.
It was the smell.
There were two fresh corpses in front of her but she didn’t smell the copper scent of the blood, or the ammonia of urine or the sulfuric stench of shit from bladders and bowels expelling their loads in death.
It smelled like a candy store.
“Edney has no experience with killing, but I do.” Beth raised her gun and pointed it at Ian’s head. “Death doesn’t smell sweet.”
Margo pinned the crosshairs of her sniper’s scope on the woman’s head and was about to fire when she remembered Kelton’s rebuke.
We can’t interrogate a dead man.
Margo abruptly shifted the crosshairs to the woman’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet’s impact shattered the woman’s shoulder, broke her hold on her gun, and knocked her to the floor.
Ian heard the woman’s cry of pain, the heavy thud as she hit the ground, and the clatter of her gun skittering across the tile.
He opened his eyes and saw her facing him, her body curled on her left side, her right shoulder, chest, and arm covered with blood.
She was grimacing, not with pain but with murderous fury. Their eyes met, then her gaze shifted from Ian to the gun on the floor between them.
“Fuck you,” she said and lunged for the gun.
At that same instant, Mei sat up, blocking Margo’s view of the injured woman through the scope. Margo couldn’t take a shot without killing Mei.
Ian went for the gun, too, getting hold of the grip with his syrup-covered hand just as the woman clutched the barrel. She tried to tug the gun away from him and he squeezed the trigger.
The bullet tore through her hand and blasted into her face, blowing off the back of her skull.
Ian screamed and scrambled away from the dead woman and Mei vomited, covering the dead woman with puke. He almost threw up, too, out of sympathetic reflex, but he managed to contain the impulse.
Instead, he averted his gaze and got to his feet, careful not to slip in the puddle of corn syrup he’d left behind.
Mei wiped her mouth with her shirtsleeve and got to her feet. “Who was she?”
The second female assassin I’ve killed, he thought. But he didn’t say that.
“One of the killers who burned down my house.”
Mei glanced at the corpse. “She was right about the smell.”
And, he thought, she’d also given him a great title for his next Straker novel.
Death Isn’t Sweet.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
It felt to Edney like his skull had been cleaved with an ax. Of course, if that were true, he wouldn’t be alive to experience the pain, so he took it as a good sign. He wasn’t dead.
But what had happened? Where was he?
He opened his eyes. At first everything was out of focus. He blinked hard, fine-tuning his world, and saw that he was sitting in a small, luxuriously appointed private jet. It was dark outside his window, water streaking across the glass, and he could hear the low rumble of the engines.
A man who looked vaguely familiar sat directly in front of him, sipping a cocktail. He had curly brown hair, a bulbous nose, and bushy eyebrows, and he wore a blue, half-zippered, pullover cable-knit sweater, a dress shirt with a button-down collar, and tan corduroy slacks. There were two white AirPods in his ears as if they were jewelry.
“Teper’ vy v bezopasnosti, tovarishch, i idete domoy,” the man said with a friendly smile and the worst Russian accent Edney had ever heard. “Khotite vypit?”
“I don’t speak Russian,” Edney said, though if he did, his accent would probably be just as awful as this guy’s.
“That’s sad,” the man said. “The CIA was there tonight. We had to get you out fast before you were exposed. Sorry it had to be this way. But you’re safe now.”
Now Edney knew who’d shot Mei. It had been the CIA.
But who was this guy? And why was he speaking Russian?
“Who are you and where are we going?”
“I am an American-born Russian spy, just like you, and we are finally going home.” The man raised his glass to Edney and took a sip. “Pozdravlyayu.”
Edney’s vision had cleared but his mind was still fuzzy, clouded by pain and disorientation. The man wasn’t making any sense.
“You’re taking me back to New York?”
The man shook his head. “Tonight, the United States bombed the Vibora base in Mexico. War is imminent between the two countries and so is our invasion of Belarus and Georgia. Your fake news and my efforts on the ground in San Diego and Texas staging everything all paid off. Our work here is done. We’re going to Moscow.”
Moscow?
That single word cleared Edney’s mind fast and the adrenaline spike of anger it provoked dulled much of his pain.
“I’m not going to Moscow,” he said.
“You’re already on the way.”
“Turn the fucking plane around,” Edney said. “I can’t go there.”
“After what happened tonight, our bosses believe the CIA will start digging and discover who you really are,” he said. “So I was ordered to exfiltrate you, forcibly if necessary, before that could happen.”
“The Kitchen is overreacting,” Edney said. “There’s no reason to believe my cover will be blown.”
“You don’t realize how lucky you are. You’re returning to the homeland as a hero of the Russian Federation,” the man said. “There’s a Gold Star medal waiting for you. After your years of fighting the good fight, you’ve earned your freedom.”
Freedom? In Russia? What the hell was this guy talking about?
“I’m a cable television superstar,” Edney said. “I’ve got an apartment overlooking Central Park. I’ve got millions of dollars in the bank. I’m not leaving all of that behind.”
“We’re both free and alive. I’m going back to a one-bedroom apartment, a subsistence pension, and an arranged marriage. But you’ll get a dacha on the Black Sea, a fortune in rubles, and your own show on Russia One if you want it. What do you have to whine about?”
Was he joking? What he was suggesting was outrageous. No, it was worse than that. It was unconscionable.
“I didn’t claw my way to the top of American television and become stinking rich to throw it all away for obscurity, exile, and poverty. I’m at the height of my global power and influence. I’m Dwight fucking Edney!”
The man set his drink aside and leaned toward Edney. “I know who you are, but apparently you’ve forgotten. You’re a servant of the Communist Party. You will do whatever they think is best for the cause, and if that means going home, that’s what you will do.”
“I belong in the United States,” Edney said. “That is my home and that’s where I can do the most good for Russia.”
“It’s not my decision. I’m just following orders. You can take it up with our bosses when we get home.” The man stood up. “Make yourself a drink and relax. It’s going to be a long flight.”
The man walked past him to the back of the plane and went into the bathroom.
Edney couldn’t believe what was happening. Going to Russia wasn’t a reward for him. It was punishment.
What was he going to do there? What kind of life would he have?
Pure shit, that was what.
He’d rather take his chances in America than flee to Moscow.
Besides, the Kitchen was wrong. They didn’t understand how the media worked or what constituted truth in the United States. His cover wasn’t blown. If anything, it was burnished. He was an intrepid journalist meeting with two sources, one of whom the CIA had murdered to keep her quiet. That was a great news story and it showcased him doing his job.
If the CIA accused him later of being a Russian spy, he could say it was fake news, laughably ma
nufactured by a desperate intelligence agency to distract people from their assassination of a double agent who’d humiliated them. It was a story he was confident he could sell on camera and that his millions of viewers would believe.
And if he couldn’t pull it off, so be it. He’d rather end up in federal prison than on Russian television.
Edney stood up, marched to the cockpit, and banged on the door. “This is Dwight Edney. You need to turn this plane around.”
There was no answer. He yanked open the door.
The cockpit was empty.
Out the window, dead ahead, he could see a giant fan blowing against four sprinkler heads mounted on upright pipes. Behind the fan was something familiar to him that he saw every day, but seeing it now horrified him to the bone.
He saw the walls of a studio soundstage.
The fan shut off and so did the water. They weren’t necessary anymore. The show was over.
He stepped out of the cockpit, his dizziness returning, but it wasn’t from the blow to his head. It was from the blur of cascading realizations and what they meant.
Edney walked to the rear of the plane and opened the bathroom door. But there was no bathroom. He stepped out onto the soundstage.
He looked over his shoulder. The airplane fuselage was surrounded by a black backdrop that hung like a shower curtain from a track on the ceiling.
Ahead of him, he saw a director’s chair and a table with four laptops open on top of it. He stepped up to the computers and looked at the screens.
They all showed angles on the now-empty interior of the plane and each computer was livestreaming its feed to a different site: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and his own page on the Fox site.
Just as the full impact of what that meant hit him, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He took out his phone and brought it to his ear. His hand was shaking.
