Truth or Die

by James Patterson

  Valerie, along with the rest of the table, looked at his 6♣ and 10♣. Sure enough, the first three cards on the board of 7♣ 9♥ 8♥ A♦ J♠ had given him a ten-high straight. It was a made hand, and the best hand, even after the ace of diamonds on the turn. But then came the river.

  Saying nothing, Valerie reached for her cards. Everyone else at the table—all the pros—knew what she was about to turn over. She was no fish, and neither were they.

  Al Dossari looked across the felt to see the 10♦ and Q♦ staring back at him. Valerie had a queen-high straight. It was the nuts, the best hand possible.

  The pot? Over four hundred thousand dollars.

  Al Dossari’s expression? Priceless.

  But not because he was upset. He couldn’t care less about the money. Nor did he care about losing to a woman.

  In fact, it was quite the opposite. And exactly what Valerie was betting on.

  Al Dossari was more than intrigued. He was aroused. The fish was on the hook, all right.

  Now it was time to reel him in.

  CHAPTER 61

  “DEALER, WHERE would I find the ladies’ room?” asked Valerie, calmly raking in the pot.

  The question wasn’t exactly the prototypical reaction after winning a big hand. In fact, a few of the pros around the table even let go with wry smiles. All in a day’s work, right, lady?

  If they only knew. Poker pros were awfully good at reading people. Not that good, though.

  Valerie knew exactly where to find the ladies’ room. She simply wanted to make sure the Saudi knew where he was going. After stacking her chips, she stood up from the table and walked away, not once looking back at Al Dossari to make sure he was watching. Hell, that would’ve been redundant.

  Right on cue, he was waiting for Valerie when she stepped out of the ladies’ room a couple of minutes later. He was pretending to be finishing a call on his cell. She was pretending to be surprised to see him.

  “Well played,” he said.

  “The right card fell for me, that’s all,” she answered. “But thank you.”

  He took a step toward her, extending his hand. “My name’s Shahid, by the way.”

  Valerie extended her hand in return, smiling when he held on to it for a split second longer after she let go. “I’m Beverly.”

  His black suit was clearly custom-made. The white shirt was silk, and the open collar showcased a gold chain that was gaudy but not quite rap star–esque. Some men will never learn that outside of a wedding band, jewelry is best left to the women.

  “Where are you from, Beverly? I’m assuming not from here.”

  “Back east,” she said. “DC.”

  “I know the town well. I actually do a little business there.”

  More than a little, Valerie was thinking. None of it legal, either. This charade, the entire operation, was all about proving it.

  “And what about here?” she asked. “Is Vegas business, too?”

  “Sometimes it is, yes,” he said. “This particular trip, though, is simply for pleasure.”

  “I hope I didn’t just ruin it for you.”

  He smiled. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not I can buy you a drink.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, we’re in a casino, Shahid,” she said. “The drinks are free.”

  His smile widened. “In that case, I’ll buy you two.”

  Valerie inched closer to him. It was subtle but unmistakable. “You’re quite the charmer, aren’t you?”

  “Is that bad?” he asked, playing along.

  “It may not be good.”

  “According to Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t matter,” said Al Dossari, flashing his Ivy League education. “It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

  Valerie tried to bite her tongue. The trickiest part of any undercover operation was forgetting who you were in light of who you were supposed to be.

  She knew the quote. She even knew the Oscar Wilde play it came from, Lady Windermere’s Fan. But between her and Beverly Sands, only one of them had been a drama major at Northwestern.

  Still, she couldn’t help herself. Besides, the goal was to beguile Al Dossari, wasn’t it?

  Valerie took another step toward him, this one far less subtle. They were close now, very close. Had it been a Catholic school dance, the nuns would’ve surely separated them. “We are all in the gutter,” she whispered. “But some of us are looking at the stars.”

  Immediately, Al Dossari took a step back. He was genuinely surprised. “You’re familiar with the play?”

  Considering she’d just quoted another line from it, it was a rhetorical question. But Valerie wasn’t about to point that out. Neither was Beverly Sands.

  “The girl can do more than just play poker,” she quipped.

  He stepped toward her again, his crocodile loafers barely touching the ground. “I’d like to learn more about you, Beverly.”

  Valerie smiled, the kind of smile that suggested the feeling was mutual. She’d practiced it many times in front of a mirror.

  I want to learn more about you, too, Shahid. And I intend to. Far more than you could ever imagine, far more than you ever thought possible….

  CHAPTER 62

  IT WAS more like a pit in the brain, as opposed to the stomach. I’m going to miss Claire’s funeral.

  The thought had been lodged in the back of my head, if only because the rest of me was still grappling with the fact that there was going to be a funeral in the first place.

  Maybe, just maybe, I’d thought, the fact that I couldn’t be there—or even, for the time being, explain why to her sister—would get easier to bear as the days pressed on. Instead, it was only getting more difficult. Especially after Owen and I left the city.

  Every man has his price. For the driver of the livery cab who took Owen and me all the way from Manhattan to Washington, DC, it was nine hundred dollars. The guy made a big stink about having to get it all in cash. Little did he know that was the only way we could pay him.

  Our credit cards, each and every one, had been canceled before we even crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. A few attempts at some online purchases in an open Wi-Fi hot spot were all it took to find out. Presumably, our ATM cards were shut down, too.

  So that was the game now. They—whoever “they” were—knew there was no point trying to find us courtesy of Amex, Visa, or MasterCard, or any bank withdrawal. That left the flip side, cutting off our funding and hoping it would limit our options travel-wise. It’s always harder to hit a moving target.

  All the more reason why Owen and I were on the move.

  Our first stop after the five-and-half-hour drive was the part of DC you never see in the brochure. It was a used-car dealership on the Anacostia side of the city in the Southeast quadrant. The owner, who looked like a walking mug shot, didn’t have a showroom. He didn’t even have an office. It was basically a dirt lot behind an abandoned warehouse with about a dozen beat-up cars, half of which had had their VIN numbers altered or filed away altogether.

  “How the hell did you know about this place?” I asked Owen.

  “I overheard some Georgetown frat boys talking about it in a Dean & Deluca,” he said. “Apparently, driving Daddy’s Mercedes around campus has fallen out of vogue. Junk is the new black.”

  In that case, Owen and I were now the trendiest guys around. We drove away in an old Toyota Corolla that was dinged up so much you would’ve thought it had been parked out in the middle of a golf driving range. But it ran okay and came with plates, our two requirements.

  As for the paperwork, that consisted only of the money that changed hands. Seven hundred dollars, cash. Needless to say, we didn’t ask to see the CARFAX.

  “What a steal,” said Owen.

  “Yeah, that’s because it probably was,” I said. “Stolen.”

  From Anacostia we drove into Georgetown, heading straight to Biltmore
Street and the town house of Dr. Douglas Wittmer, last seen—on camera, at least—deep inside the CIA black site at Stare Kiejkuty outside Warsaw. That was one hell of a house call, Doc. Care to tell us who hired you? Yes? No?

  According to Google, Wittmer had been a thoracic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan for eleven years, followed by a four-year stint at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Then he apparently quit the operating room, joining a medical research company, BioNext Laboratories, in Bethesda, Maryland, as its CEO. That was five years ago.

  The website for BioNext looked legit, although that wasn’t really saying much. A tenth grader these days can build a believable website in less time than it takes to watch a rerun of The Simpsons. So, too, can the CIA.

  “Do you think it’s a front?” I asked Owen.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “The guy might simply be pulling double duty. It’s more common than you’d think among certain doctors, whether it be for the FBI or the CIA.”

  For a few moments, I thought about my primary care physician back in New York, who once dropped my urine sample all over his suede shoes. Great guy and a good doctor, but somehow I just couldn’t picture him doing a secret gig for the government.

  Dr. Douglas Wittmer was a different story, and as Owen and I walked up the steps of his faded brick town house, we couldn’t wait to hear it.

  But that was exactly what we had to do. Wait.

  We rang the bell, knocked on the door, and even peeked through the windows. No one was home. Wittmer’s phone number was unlisted, and for all we knew, he could’ve been back in Poland or at any one of a number of other black sites. Seeing the day’s mail waiting for him in his mailbox, however, gave us some hope.

  Now all we could do was park our shiny new Corolla a little way down the street and keep watch. If only we’d known.

  We were being watched as well.

  CHAPTER 63

  “GO AHEAD and ask,” said Owen.

  “Ask what?”

  He looked at me across the front seat like I was an idiot for trying to play dumb. “You want to know why I keep doing this thing with my hands, right?”

  We’d been waiting for Wittmer for close to an hour, and half the time the kid was doing his dry wash routine.

  “Sort of hard not to notice,” I said.

  “You can blame my aunt Eleanor.” He rested both palms on his knees and explained. “My parents, both professors, weren’t terribly religious, but they thought it was important for me at a young age to experience church. So my aunt Eleanor was enlisted one Sunday to bring me to a service. I was five and doing complex algebra, but I also still believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. So the minister is giving this sermon about temptation and sin and he’s all fired up, and I’m sitting there in the pew listening and hanging on his every word. And that’s when he quotes an old proverb, only I don’t know it’s a proverb; I take it literally. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. That’s how it started,” he said. “Problem is, I haven’t been able to stop ever since.” He laughed. “You know, I’ve never told anyone that before.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “You’ve got far bigger secrets these days.”

  As if on cue, a black Jaguar XK Coupe pulled into the short driveway at the base of Wittmer’s town house. It had to be him. The wait was over.

  Quickly, Owen and I stepped out of our slightly less expensive Corolla and approached him as he was getting his mail. By the time he looked up and saw us, we were practically in his face. No exaggeration, he must have jumped back at least three feet. We’d scared the shit out of him. Good.

  Next up, with any luck, was getting the truth out of him.

  “Dr. Wittmer?” I asked.

  He was still catching his breath. Who the hell wants to know? said his look. But no normal person outside the Bronx actually says that in real life, and Douglas Wittmer appeared as normal as they come. With his glasses and neatly trimmed dark hair that was gray around the temples, he was a doctor who looked like the stock photo of a doctor.

  “Yes, that’s me,” he said finally.

  I introduced myself and was about to introduce Owen when I saw Wittmer’s eyes beat me to it with a squint of recognition. His jaw then literally dropped.

  “Jesus … you’re the kid, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Alive and in the flesh,” said Owen. “Of course, you probably thought I’d be dead by now.”

  Wittmer nodded almost sheepishly.

  “Rest assured, it hasn’t been for lack of trying.” Owen turned to me and my beat-up face, the bruises just beginning to settle into a nice shade of eggplant. “And that’s to put it mildly.”

  “Wait, what’s going on?” I asked. “How does he know who you are?”

  To say the kid was quick on the uptake didn’t do him justice. “Because he’s been shown a picture of me,” said Owen. “And if I were ever to pay him a visit, he was supposed to let them know.”

  “I wouldn’t, though,” said Wittmer. “I mean, I won’t.”

  “Of course you won’t,” said Owen facetiously. “What possible motivation could you have?”

  Now I was all caught up. If these weren’t their exact words, they had to be damn close. Help us find the kid before he brings us all down, Dr. Wittmer … including you.

  “I don’t care that I’m in the recordings,” said Wittmer. “It was a mistake, and I can live with the consequences.”

  “Actually, I don’t care that you’re in the recordings, either,” said Owen. “All I care about is who put you there. That’s what we need to know.”

  Wittmer’s eyes shifted between Owen and me for a few moments, the latest issue of Car and Driver and the rest of his mail pressed hard against his chest.

  It was one thing for him not to rat us out. It was another for him to rat out whomever he was working for. There would need to be a reason. A damn good one.

  Wittmer looked up at the sky. We all did. The sun was beginning to set behind a mass of charcoal-colored clouds that seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. Much like Owen and me.

  “I think we should go inside,” said the doctor. “It looks like rain.”

  CHAPTER 64

  IT WAS a home for a guy who basically wasn’t home all that much. That, or he just didn’t care.

  Not to say it was messy. Rather, it was sparse. In the few rooms we walked past before settling in the kitchen, the furnishings consisted of the bare minimum, or in the case of the empty dining room, even less.

  I wasn’t much for metaphors, but Claire always was. For her, this would’ve been a lay-up. Dr. Douglas Wittmer clearly had money, but to see where he lived—how he lived—was to see a man defined by what he didn’t have. There were things missing in his life.

  “You want coffee?” he asked, pointing to the Keurig machine on the counter near the stove.

  Owen and I both declined. We were anxious enough as it was.

  The three of us headed over to a small cherrywood table in the corner underneath a small clock, the kind you’d more likely see hanging in an office or waiting room. After we all sat down, Wittmer immediately stood up to remove his blue blazer, hanging it on the back of his chair. He wasn’t stalling, but he wasn’t exactly rushing, either.

  Finally, after sitting down again, he took a deep breath and began.

  “I was targeted,” he said, his tone straight as a ruler. To his credit, there wasn’t a hint of his trying to make an excuse for himself. He was stating the facts, or really just one fact. “They knew my wife was on Flight Ninety-Three.”

  Owen and I both dropped our heads a bit. It spoke volumes about the events of 9/11 that a particular flight number could be so ingrained in the collective memory of a nation.

  “I’m sorry,” said Owen.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “The thing is,” Wittmer continued, “grief and anger can help you rationalize almo
st any behavior in the name of revenge. I know that’s what he was banking on with me.”

  It was so clear what we were witnessing. This was a man who needed to explain himself. Bare his soul a little, if not a lot. I was sure that Owen, even at his relatively young age, was thinking the same thing.

  Perhaps it was that same youth, though, that had Owen wishing the doctor would explain things just a tad bit faster. Fittingly, the only sound in the kitchen other than us was the measured tick … tick … tick of the wall clock above us.

  “He?” Owen asked impatiently. In other words, Please, for the love of Pete, start naming names. …

  “I don’t know if he’s the only ringmaster, but it’s certainly his circus,” said Wittmer. He drew another deep breath. “Frank Karcher is the one who first approached me.”

  I didn’t recognize the name, nor, apparently, was I supposed to, given the way Wittmer was looking directly at Owen. And given the way Owen was nodding back at him, I guess it made sense. “The kid” absolutely recognized the name.

  “Frank Karcher is the National Clandestine Service chief of the CIA,” said Owen, turning to me. “Basically, we’re talking the kind of guy who likes to kick puppies.”

  “So human torture wasn’t much of a leap,” I said.

  It was a quip, completely off the cuff. Still, the second the words left my mouth, I regretted them. I didn’t know Karcher, but I did know that Wittmer was sitting right in front of me. He was also on the recordings. At best, the doctor was an accomplice. At worst? That was between him and his God.

  And that was the point. Owen and I were there in his kitchen to get information, not to pass judgment on him. And I just had. A bit unfairly, no less. I wasn’t the one who’d lost his wife on 9/11.

  “I apologize,” I said to Wittmer. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s all right,” he said. He drew another deep breath. “At the beginning, I knew exactly what I was doing and why. Those recordings you have? As bad as they may look to a whole lot of people, there are just as many people these days—the Machiavellians in our so-called war on terror—who would believe the end justifies the means.”