Kirby had started to doze, and when the Jerusalem car bomb had, at last, trumped Rick Finch, she had finally succumbed to sleep.
But, with morning light burning its way into the apartment, it was to Finch that she had awoken, to that image of him dropping flat on his face on the asphalt followed by somebody from the FBI dressed in a terrible suit saying, “We have to conclude that Finch was in some way complicit in the deaths of the two FBI agents outside his house.”
Kirby went to the bathroom and as she peed she knew she should be afraid. Knew that the people who had done what they had done to Rick Finch would do something equally bad to her. But she didn’t feel afraid, only numb.
And rather than packing her bags and getting on a bus to Scottsdale, she splashed her face and left the apartment, the TV still jabbering, and walked down to the diner on Hollywood Boulevard.
More TV, more Richard Finch, more Jerusalem—the Israeli army closing the border posts and moving into the West Bank. She ordered her usual vegan BLT and a coffee to go, even though she knew she would never eat the sandwich.
She had no recall of walking up the hill to her apartment building, found herself climbing the stairs and unlocking the door, carrying the brown bag and the Styrofoam cup.
As she entered the apartment Kirby looked straight at the TV, straight at Catherine Finch saying, “I am alive.”
THREE
How was it that when Ann Town thought back to her L.A. years she never remembered rain? Remembered only a world lit by that flat, bright light with its remorseless glare?
This realization came to her as she stood watching rivulets trickling down the derelict mansion’s windows, distorting the view of a sweep of Los Angeles stretching from downtown to the Pacific Ocean, the atmosphere so different without the sunlight that lent the city an air of unearned nostalgia.
Ann, in what had once been the mansion’s master bedroom, stood cradling her Leica in her right hand. She guessed that the house, an Italianate blancmange in the Hollywood Hills above Mulholland Drive, had been abandoned for two decades or more. Who it had belonged to and why it stood empty she did not know, and neither did the two silent, heavily armed men who were guarding her and Pete.
Her vague enquiries had been met with shrugs, and she hadn’t bothered asking why it was that she and her husband had been brought here, to this crumbling relic that sported boarded-up windows and gang tags, where power was supplied by a chugging diesel generator, where there was no city water, where they were obliged to use chemical toilets and camping showers.
Once they had stepped out of Mel’s Diner the night before and climbed aboard the brown minivan occupied by the lean driver she would come to know as Jim and the heavyset man in the back who had nodded and said “Danny,” squatting beside them holding a submachine gun as they drove onto Sunset, Ann had quit her familiar realm peopled by members of New York’s chattering class.
She had entered a world of monosyllabic exchanges, a world whose rule book was written by the two sentries who ghosted through the decaying house, aclank with weapons, seemingly without sleep or rest, although earlier she’d glimpsed Jim sitting in the kitchen listening to an iPod, his tanned fingers tapping out a rhythm on the ruined Formica table, a grease gun at his elbow.
Pete, never the most garrulous of men, had also reverted to a quieter state, and she was given a view of how he must’ve been when he’d been operational. A man built for silence, built for waiting.
Ann raised the Leica and framed a shot of the destroyed bedroom, using her favourite lens, an old Voigtlander 35mm. She’d always gone very basic, one camera and one lens. Even though it was gloomy, the Kodak Tri-X 400 film she’d loaded was sufficiently sensitive for an aperture of F8, which allowed a depth of field deep enough to keep the whole room in focus, from the ceiling—tongues of peeling paint dangling down—to the filthy, torn, stinking once-white shag carpet. A pair of French doors with rotting wooden shutters flanked the huge Rococo bed that lay upside down and broken, its mattress naked and exposed, its canopy in rags. The mattress and the carpet were littered with old vinyl LPs, many lying loose from their covers, buckled and warped amidst beer cans, crack pipes, and used condoms.
Ann left the bedroom and walked down a passageway, an open door at the end framing what must once have been an entertainment room: a giant TV from another age lying on the carpet, its tube smashed, Betamax tapes scattered around it.
Pete limped into view, a cell phone pressed like a limpet to his ear.
He didn’t see her. He disappeared from sight and then reappeared in the doorway, standing in profile, staring down at the befouled carpet, nodding as he listened.
Ann lifted her camera and took his picture, the little snicker of the Leica’s shutter muffled by the rain. She knew that if she ever got home and processed the negative it would reveal the image of a stranger.
- - -
Town ended the call on the burner phone given him by Jim. Earlier he’d reached out to an old Agency contact he could trust, and emailed him the photograph Ann had taken of the man who’d attacked them last night in the motel room. The call he’d just finished was by way of a report back and it had answered a few questions but raised many others.
Their assailant was Hunt Gidley, a shadowy off-the-books operative. A paid killer. Gidley, just a few days earlier, had mysteriously escaped being beheaded in South East Asia. Who had saved him and why nobody knew.
And nobody knew where he was or whether he was alive or dead. Equally mysteriously, the motel room on Lankershim had been cleaned of his presence.
Town had also asked for a status update on Kirby Chance and Joe Go. Of the girl he’d learned nothing, but he’d been told that Go had fallen to his death from a building in downtown L.A. yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t hard to put that together: Gidley had forced him to give up Town’s whereabouts and had killed him.
The iPad Go had given Town sat on a shelf, muted, tuned to CNN. Out the corner of his eye Town saw Rick Finch’s little death dance playing in tandem with the video they had conjured from the sour air of that sleazy motel room a lifetime ago but only yesterday.
The spectacular demise of Richard Finch coupled with the proof that his wife was still alive was hijacking all the available media bandwidth, and there was nowhere to look without seeing them, closer in death, Town guessed, than they had ever been in life.
Finch’s end—the sudden skid of a seemingly-ordinary existence into horror—had been picked clean by the media scavengers. The overwhelming consensus was that he’d been the target of the Islamic State strategy of inciting lone wolves through the internet. And that his wife, the radical, the ISIS apologist, had been the agent of his downfall.
When a face he recognized came onto the iPad, Town swiped the touchscreen, turning up the volume.
A French journalist who’d been held hostage in Syria before his government had paid a ransom to Islamic State, a man who had impressed Town with his dignity and self-effacement, was being interviewed from Paris. He was asked if he was certain the woman in the video was Catherine Finch.
“But of course it is her,” the journalist said. “I was with her for over one year. She was my friend. It is Catherine Finch and I am so pleased and relieved to see that she is still alive.”
Hearing the man’s heartfelt words personalized the deception Town had perpetrated. And what exactly had he achieved with the deception? The peace process was dead, as he’d expected. All he’d done was drive the approval rating of the president up a few notches, doing a favor for a man he loathed.
Town was brought out of his reverie by the arrival of his wife in the room, in her black jeans and top, her camera slung from her shoulder, looking every inch the Magnum heavyweight.
“So,” Ann said, “when do we blow this dump?”
“You’ve been in worse places, Annie, and you’ve got the pictures to prove it.”
“True. But then I could always just walk out and get on a plane and in a few hours I’d be ba
ck in my own life, drinking Frascati and taking a milk bath.”
Town lifted a hand in appeasement. “I’m sorry.”
“Sure you are, but how about giving me a heads up on when I’ll get my life back?”
“You want a risk assessment?”
“If that means you’ll tell me honestly whether we’re likely to be murdered in our beds if and when we ever get home then, yes, I want a risk assessment.”
“I think we’re okay. The video is out there and has been universally embraced as authentic.”
“Kudos,” she said, shaking her head.
“Anne.”
“Talk, Pete.”
“I think whoever Freddy Krueger was working for has now embraced a different story line: Catherine Finch has sold her soul to Islamic State, and her husband was a fifth columnist here at home.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that it’s in their interests to keep alive the notion that she’s alive.”
“So their attention shifts from you?”
“Yes. I’m no longer relevant. We’ll give it a day or two and then we’ll head on home.”
“So you’re out, Pete? For good this time?”
“Yes, I’m out. You have my word on that.”
Her eyes drifted to the iPad. The White House Press Secretary was talking about how pleased the presidency was that Catherine Finch had not died in the drone attack.
“Jesus,” Ann said, “they’ve come out and said she’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“Even though they know she’s not?”
“To paraphrase somebody somewhere: just because it never happened doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
FOUR
Call Kip Littlefield an incurable romantic, but here he was in a bombed-out industrial city in the war-torn eastern Ukraine in search of a bride.
The all-out combat between the Ukrainian army and Russian separatists had simmered down to sporadic skirmishes and shelling, and the black Mercedes 600 in which he was traveling, sandwiched between Jeeps and pickup trucks, was armored by Inkas of Ontario to a BR 6 rating, which meant that it could withstand Putin’s goons spraying it with Kalashnikovs or even tossing at it a RGN grenade or two. But if they used anything heavier—like, for instance, the shoulder-launched RPG-7 manufactured by one of his clients, JSC Bazalt at its Degtyarev Plant in Kovrov—he would be left looking like a can of minced spam under a tank track.
No matter. Sometimes there were risks that were worth taking.
Ever since the images of Aneta Shevchenko and her three-year-old daughter, Olha, had appeared yesterday in his inbox, Littlefield had felt feverish, obsessed.
Here was his family in waiting. Here were the replacements for the duds Gwen and Chloe, already disposed of by the trusty Señor and Señora Rivera.
Even the disappointing performance of the much-vaunted Hunt Gidley had been scaled back in importance, although he was forced to applaud the zeal with which Amy Branch had run with his idea for reframing the Catherine and Richard Finch saga.
Littlefield could simply have ordered the Ukrainian woman and her child scooped up from the blitzed streets of Slavyansk and flown to Washington, much as he had done when he’d procured Gwen in Slovenia a few years before.
But he was older and wiser now and, to make sure that he wasn’t to be plagued by a fit of buyer’s remorse in the future, he had decided to come and see Aneta Shevchenko in situ and make up his mind.
In the photographs Aneta had looked perfect. Blonde and beautiful, yes, if a little undernourished. And not in the feline way of pampered supermodels, hers was the gauntness that came of privation. He’d requested undraped photographs, too, to make sure that her body bore no tattoos or scars or lesions that would make it impossible for him to touch her. She was free of all those, but her belly was almost concave, and her thigh gap (she was a natural blonde he’d been pleased to confirm) while being undoubtedly attractive, was perhaps a little exaggerated. Her breasts, finely formed with roseate nipples, would be even more alluring if she were fattened up just a little.
He had a doctor with him, traveling in the convoy behind. If Littlefield liked Aneta, the medic would extract blood and take stool and urine samples that would be flown to a lab in Switzerland where they would be tested for AIDS and ZIKA and Ebola and every other disease and distemper
But first the meet and greet. It had been organized by the Ukrainian warlord who had acted as Littlefield’s intermediary, for a handsome fee and the promise of four dozen Carl-Gustav M4 bazookas, made by another client, Saab Bofors Dynamics in Sweden.
As he drove through the badly shelled city, staring out at bombed buildings and streets filled with debris, Littlefield couldn’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction. A sense of pride. This was his work. True, he had not squeezed triggers, or launched bombs, or lobbed mortars, but he had been the supplier of a substantial amount of the ordnance that had enabled men to fight other men who looked and spoke and thought much as they did, for bits of land that were dry, or fallow, or ice-burned.
The convoy drew up beside what had once been an ugly bunker-like apartment block and was now a listing pile of rubble and torn masonry. When Littlefield saw the young woman standing outside the destroyed building, wearing a grubby tan car coat that had been fashionable three years ago, a long-fingered hand moving away the tendrils of pale hair that blew into her face, he thought, yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
He stood up from the Mercedes, into the biting cold, and, flanked by heavily armed men in body armor, he walked across the gray slush on the sidewalk toward her. He extended his hand, and, even though she shrank from him in a reflex of fear, he smiled his most personable smile, and said in his studied Brahmin bray, “Aneta, I’m Kip Littlefield. What a very real pleasure it is to meet you.”
FIVE
Town sat on the bench of a bus shelter outside the West Hollywood Pavilions market on Santa Monica Boulevard, watching Golding walk down the sidewalk toward him. The rain had stopped and the sun was out and the bulky man was sweating in his gunmetal-gray flannel suit.
Town panned right to the brown van parked facing him half a block away. Knowing that Jim was in the van watching through the sights of a sniper’s rifle made him feel less exposed in the hard light, clear as stone-dry champagne, that lent the cars, the strip malls and the palms a hyperreal air.
Ann, who was up in the derelict mansion with Danny, had given him a flat, expressionless look when he’d told her he was rendezvousing with the man who had lured him from retirement and wound him up and let him blunder his way into this mess.
“It’s part of setting things right, Ann. Smoothing our passage home.”
“Or you could get yourself killed.”
“No. Jim will be my minder.”
She’d said nothing more, just turned and disappeared into the warren of destroyed rooms. Town hadn’t been able to shake the clichéd thought that the house was a metaphor for their marriage, and he sincerely wished that he could reverse time and go back to when he’d heard the phone chirping beside his bed in Park Slope and leave it to ring itself dead.
Contacting Golding had been surprisingly easy. He’d spoken to Jim, told him that he needed to make another call. That there was an element of risk to the call.
The lean man had given him a new burner phone and said, “Time yourself. No longer than thirty seconds. Yeah?”
Town had nodded and taken the phone into the one-time viewing room and dialed the number given him by Golding. A number he'd committed to memory.
He’d expected no reply or, at best, to reach a functionary acting as a firewall, but when he’d heard that flat Midwestern voice say, “Yes,” he’d lifted his left wrist and watched the sweep of the second hand of his Timex as he said, “We need to talk.”
“Are you in L.A.?”
Town hesitated for two seconds, then said, “Yes.”
“Likewise. Name your spot.”
Town conveyed the location for th
e meet and the terms as decided by Jim: Golding was to approach the bus shelter on foot from the east at exactly 15h00.
Golding had said, “Okay,” and Town had ended the call.
They had spoken for twenty-three seconds.
The heavy man, panting lightly, sat down beside Town and stared out at the traffic.
“So,” he said, “you couldn’t just leave well alone, could you?”
Town shrugged. “There was a certain momentum.”
“Momentum enough to get Richard Finch to do a little Elephant Flipping?” Town stared at him blankly. “The street name for the cocktail of PCP and MDMA that he was pumped to the gills with.”
“Any idea who did that?”
“Ready to start whistling your X Files theme?”
Town smiled without humor. “My wife and I need our lives back.”
“Sure. Sure you do. But this thing isn’t done.”
Town saw Golding’s watery blue eyes blinking at the California glare.
“What do you mean?”
“Islamic State has made it known that they’ll free Catherine Finch. For a substantial ransom.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No.”
Town watched a black Porsche barrel past with some semi-recognizable face at the wheel and he burst out laughing.
“It’s diabolical,” he said.
“Yes, it is.
“They know the White House can’t deny that Finch is alive,” Town said.
“Exactly.”
“But there’s an out, surely? We carry on insisting that we don’t pay ransoms.”
“But everybody knows that we do. Via intermediaries. And the First Freedom Foundation has already volunteered to put up the cash.”
“The Triple F?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re so far right they’re about to fall over the edge. They’d be no friends of Catherine Finch,” Town said.
Double Down Page 19
