“Let me ask you this. Does HID have its own operatives?”
She didn’t respond, but she did blink. Vikki took this as confirmation.
“Does it run its own black sites?”
Again the voiceless blink.
“Does the President know what the Firm is up to?”
She shook her head and then said, “I wouldn’t know.”
“Does Congress?”
“We only collect data. That’s all we do.” She lowered her arm and backed away.
Vikki moved forward. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“I wonder if I could trouble you for a cup of coffee.”
The woman considered the request. Her eyes shot outside. Anybody could be watching her talk to a reporter. She licked her parched lips. “Off the record, right? My name won’t come out or anything like that?”
“If that’s what you want.” Vikki had one of those motherly personalities. It came easily to her. If she could wrangle secrets from her kids, she could wrangle secrets from just about anybody. She understood human nature, and understood how women would rather be nice than rude, which explained why Lindsey-Marie opened the door and why she hadn’t asked Vikki to go. “I understand your hesitance. You’re scared, aren’t you? In fact, you’re petrified.”
She weakly shook her head before saying, “Only ....” Her voice was quavering, unsure, on the defensive.
“Only what? Have they told you what to say? How you should say it? Have they assured you nothing is wrong? Convinced you foreign agents are at the heart of the assassinations?”
“Harrison isn’t dead. I won’t believe it.”
“But he was involved in a bad accident. And he’s still missing. What do you suppose happened to him?”
“Road rage?” She was grasping at straws. “Or money troubles?”
“He staged his own accident, is that it?”
“Harrison was a practical man. A careful man.”
“Then he just wandered off and disappeared into thin air? Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you believe?”
“I really don’t know what happened. That’s why, you see. Why I’m afraid.” She stood straighter.
“What about Milly Whitney? Do you think Jack could have killed her?”
“He could have.” She said it weakly, as if she didn’t believe it, as if she had never believed it. “How am I supposed to know what a man is capable of?”
“And John. Do you think he jumped? Or was he pushed?”
“He was a great guy.”
“Has anyone threatened you?”
“Nobody has to make threats.”
“Then you are scared. Scared you could be next. For what you know.”
“I don’t know anything. Now please go. I’ve already said too much.”
“When was the last time you saw Harry?”
“The day he disappeared. I left the office before he did. He always worked late.”
“How did he seem?”
“Like always. He was ...” She was on the edge of emotional collapse. The toy dog whimpered and stood on its paws. “He was a nice man. A good boss. He had integrity. Not many do.”
“I’ve been talking to Allison Dovecot. Off the record. She liaises with the NSA, am I right?” She hadn’t spoken with the woman. She only wanted Lindsey to believe she had, believe she wasn’t alone. “Maybe you have something to tell me, also off the record.”
She shook her head, pressed her lips together, and crossed her arms, her body language unequivocal. So were her words. “Please go. Before I call the police.”
Vikki nodded toward the business card still clutched in the woman’s hand. “You can always reach me. Day or night. Like you, I don’t sleep very well.”
9
Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman
Monday, August 11
WHEN JACK WAS shown into his room, the housekeeper was just finishing up, brisk and efficient as she went about her duties.
Petite, dark of hair, and sweet of face, she made fleeting eye contact with him before quickly dropping her eyelids and staring at the clunky white-as-white athletic shoes adorning her elfin feet. Her legs were like a ballerina’s, shapely and lengthy, toned and elegant, and moving airily. She wore a turquoise dress whose color matched the endless sea visible beyond the slider doors at her back. Faded by many washings, the dress was paired with a prim white collar laced about the rounded edges. The uniform made her seem prudish. She was anything but prudish. Her chest heaved with expectation. Despite her evident youth and her humble wariness, this unassuming island girl, her oval face dusted with a light sheen of perspiration, gave him a quick discerning glance before looking away. Cunning lay behind those eyes. Obedient as a child under his concentrated stare, she finished doing her small nitpicking tasks before curtseying and dashing from the room, the latch clicking whisper-quiet behind her. She left behind a distinctive fragrance of sweet femininity.
Jack stared at the sealed door without thought or feeling. Every door that sealed him inside a one-room enclosure of limited dimensions reduced him to a prisoner again. He closed the distance between himself and the door and threw it open just to make sure it wasn’t locked, an obsessive-compulsive behavior he was given to these days. The girl was gone and the corridor empty.
An express courier envelope had been waiting for him when he registered under the name John Fox. He opened it now. It contained important documents he would need later. He tucked it into his backpack.
He had begun to trust his instincts and to listen to his niggling suspicions. He had to. They were his custodians of the keep, standing guard against danger. Whether real or imagined, he heeded the warnings. He had become acutely alert to the dog whistles that sounded from time to time, and immediately dissected these transient moments with observation and deduction, thinking back to words said or not said, actions made or not made, even heeding the insubstantial sensations that came to him like the howling of a coyote on a cold winter’s night. He was used to analyzing facts and data. Now he was exercising a different part of his brain, the part that relied on feelings and emotions, the part he denied for most of his adult life. If a man’s mind cries wolf a hundred times and on the hundredth time, the wolf is real, then it’s worth getting out the bow and arrow and preparing for battle rather than dismissing the warning and thinking about what to eat for dinner.
He turned his attention to the ceiling and walls, searching for bugs, cameras, and wires, and detected nothing suspicious. The room was clean and tidy. The view from the windows enticing. The pool deck and distant shoreline beckoning.
He called the desk and spoke to the clerk, telling him there was a cockroach in the bathroom and the room would not do. He also wanted a suite. Fifteen minutes later he was shown into an upgraded room, one with a better ocean view, away from the pool, and including a ground-level veranda, perfect for quick egress but also subject to easier break-ins. It was a compromise but one worth taking. He checked out this room as he had the other, looking for surveillance devices, and again found nothing odd. Still, it felt safer. He went by his guts.
He gave into weariness, stretched out on the king-size bed, and stared at the ceiling, formulating plans.
He came to the Grand Caymans to pick up the money trail. Fifty million dollars had been stolen from four stateside brokerages, wired to the British-based Hertford’s bank in the name of John Jackson Finlay, and dispersed to several other offshore banks until nothing was left but the equivalent of a hundred thousand American dollars. He was here to put his hands on that money, but also to gather any information that might lead him to the conspirators who set him up for the fall.
If his theory was correct, four or five mercenaries united for a single operation and dispersed to the winds, each taking a cut of the fifty million and each planning to idle away the rest of their lives on wine, lovers, and song, something Jack would like to do, except for one thing. At any moment, he could be taken i
nto custody, extradited back to the States, and locked away for the rest of his life for a crime he did not commit. If he could not exonerate himself, restore the honor of his family name, and return to the company of righteous men, he might as well take a bullet to the brain.
He had been accused of killing his one-time girlfriend. Milly was a silly girl most of the time but was silly no longer since she was buried in the family plot back in Pennsylvania. Like Jack, she came to Washington with high ambitions and lofty goals. By working for a secretive government agency as a security analyst, she had a bright future ahead of her. Now she had no future except the darkness of a grave.
In jail, Jack wrote a letter to her folks. It was a difficult letter to write. It tore out his guts. How can you explain to grieving parents that the corpse of their beloved daughter was found in your bed, but you were not the one to bring her there nor do you recollect anything of her demise? It was just as inconceivable to him as it would have been to them. He showed it to his criminal defense attorney and asked for his advice. Devlin advised him to tear it up and flush it down the toilet. “Better yet, give it to me, and I’ll flush it down the toilet, just to make sure you don’t hang yourself in court.”
He gave it to him. But the words he had written were indelibly etched in his mind. I once loved Milly, and though our love died, I would never hurt your daughter. I don’t know who killed her, but I’m going to find out who did. Words of solace. Words that would give them little comfort. Empty words.
Yet he was responsible for her death. He hadn’t killed her with the garrote that snuffed out her life. But he had gotten her killed by snooping around and asking too many questions. Seeking to expose covert operations carried on by the Homeland Intelligence Division in partnership with other government agencies, and believing he could beat them at their own game, he acted like a comic book hero, here to save the day. For HID and its partners, nothing was off limits, from wholesale data collection all the way to assassination, kidnapping, rendition, brainwashing, terrorism, torture, and foreign insurgencies. If only he had been more careful, if only he hadn’t treated it like a game, Milly would still be alive today. And he would be a free man without a target on his back.
Life imprisonment for a crime he did not commit wasn’t a choice. Unless he could gaze at the sky and watch the graceful soaring of a hawk and hear its stirring cries, he would wither to a shell of man and die from the inside out. The blood of his Apache ancestors cried out for vengeance. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and blood for blood. If Jack could not get retribution in this life, he would have to get it in the next. His soul wouldn’t rest until he did.
Determined to track down the black ops cell who targeted him and Milly, he set before him the idea of picking them off one by one. Of getting even. Of making them pay. The idea turned into a plan. The plan turned into action. It was either him or them. If he was going to emerge on the other side a whole man, he had to put aside his innate goodness, his honorable upbringing, and the inbred moral core that put him on the side of virtue. He had to turn himself into a ruthless killing machine.
It wasn’t all about vigilante justice, though. It was about bringing out the truth. And finding the one man or one woman who put out the order, and then making them pay.
The hotel room was closing in on him. He escaped through the patio door and raced down to the beach, a man on fire. The water was cool, the sun scorching, the breezes strong, and the waves pounding. He arose from the sea renewed and strolled along the shore, plotting and scheming, and dreaming of plunging the knife of revenge into the backs of his enemies.
Calculation has a logic to it much like the Pythagorean theorem, or Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the coding of software. Cunning, though, had nothing to do with logic. Jack had to win ... they had to lose. A simple equation that came down to outfoxing, outflanking, and outmaneuvering every one of the bastards who did this to him. Then taking them down one by one. And finally, preparing himself for anything, including the possibility of his own death. It would be a risk worth taking and sacrifice worth making.
10
Annapolis, Maryland
Monday, August 11
AFTER THE POLICE cleared out of HID headquarters; after the reporters packed up their cameras and vans; after the helicopters stopped circling the skies; and after employees wiped away their tears, the senior management of the Homeland Intelligence Division held an invitation-only meeting in Angela Browne’s office. As deputy director of the Signals Intelligence Bureau—which afforded her a voice with every major federal agency along with the White House and the Pentagon—she assumed the burden of taking on the Coyote scandal and resultant kickback. Her petite though resilient shoulders could bear the weight.
It was standing-room-only in her otherwise roomy office on executive row. Everyone gathered around, some standing against the plate-glass window, others sitting at the circular conference table, or the leather sofa, or on extra chairs wheeled in from the bullpen. The door was hermetically sealed on a whisper. For several minutes, no one spoke. The impromptu meeting was filled with expectant breaths and silent thoughts. Heads were bowed in prayer. Everyone knew John Sessions, worked with him, respected him, and were sickened by what happened to him. Given how four members of their staff had already been picked off like ducks in an arcade, each was thinking the same thing: Could I be next?
Angie Browne said a few words of condolence. The Firm had already reached out to the Sessions family with prayers and support. Whatever they needed or wanted, they would get. John’s wife was in shock and didn’t believe for a minute her husband jumped. Clearly, she was distraught and in denial. Angie went on with platitudes and hosannas. John was one their best and brightest. He would be missed. Only a day ago, she spoke with him at length over recent events. He was of the opinion HID had been targeted for reasons yet unknown, and she concurred.
“This we do know. Another member of our family has been cut down. Whether it was suicide or something else, I really don’t give a damn. I blame Coyote. I know, I know, the jury’s still out, but I’m entitled to my opinion. I won’t go into my opinion about his legal guilt or innocence when it comes to Milly’s death or even of Harry’s disappearance. I’ll leave those details to the courts. But now that he’s leaked classified information and broken his oath, implicit or otherwise with these ...” She waved around the front section of the Washington Gazette. “... these scurrilous lies, I really don’t give a damn whether he’s a sexual pervert, a serial killer, or a traitor. For me, this is personal.”
She nodded her head, a self-confirmation of her shocking statement, her blazing eyes laser focused, her expression grim. This wasn’t the usual Angie Browne. The smiley, affable, rosy-cheeked woman was gone, replaced with a woman of tougher stuff. She was mad as hell and ready to bite off heads.
“Reports have come in. He’s been spotted in the Caribbean. He must be found and brought in. If he can’t be brought in, he must be silenced by whatever means available. You heard me. I don’t care what it takes. Who knows what else he’ll say to this reporter. Victoria Kidd.” She spit out the name like venom, her mouth thin and tense, her lips rigid. In an almost apologetic tone, she said, “On a brighter note, we asked Liz Langdon to take over John’s duties, and she has graciously accepted.”
All heads turned toward Elizabeth Marie Langdon. Daughter of Harold Langdon and Bette Johnson Langdon of Smyrna, Georgia. Earned her bachelor and master’s degrees from M.I.T. with high honors. Recruited by the NSA as a data analyst straight out of graduate school. Within two years, moved to the State Department. Eventually landed at the Homeland Intelligence Division, rising quickly in the ranks until being promoted to deputy director of the Technical Bureau, done by the age of thirty-one, a sign of greater achievements to come, who knew how high. Except for the fact that she was already ankle-deep in quicksand and sinking fast.
Braced on a chair pulled into the darkest corner she could find, Liz was glancing down, eyes focused on hands
ferociously clutched in her lap. Her emotions were mixed. On the one hand she was thrilled. On the other, she was petrified. The long plaits of her hair hid many of her misgivings, but the set of her tense body and the dour expression on her downcast face must have communicated more than she wanted. This was the promotion she had coveted since joining the Firm. She never pictured it coming to her in this way, dumped on her lap like a dead cat. John’s death was too horrible to imagine, and stepping into his bloody shoes, mortifying. When the position was offered to her thirty minutes ago, she accepted, nodding her head like a marionette, having no gumption to tell them where they could stick it.
“We will of course give Liz all the support she needs as she takes on this arduous task,” Angie said. “In addition to her other duties, she’ll work with Chris in a joint effort to flush out Coyote.”
As deputy director of Security Methodologies, Cameron oversaw the unit listening into world leaders via hacked phone communications and emails among other infiltrations. He did it efficiently and without bluster or boasting. Though a good man to work with, he could never replace John.
There was one more thing to cover, and Liz had the dubious distinction of making the presentation. After queuing in a video on her laptop, she ported it to the media projector. Taken from a security camera in the Chinatown Metrorail Station, the videotape showed two men in a standoff. A woman interceded. One of the men grabbed her, using her as a shield. The argument escalated. The other man edged closer, trying to talk down the assailant. The altercation came to a head. The men squared off, their actions partially hidden by passing pedestrians. In the struggle, the woman was thrown onto the train tracks just ahead of a commuter train barreling into the station. The aftermath was grainy but horrifying. A final altercation between the men ended with one of them flattened on the pavement and the other meandering away, hands plunged into his pants pocket. A surging crowd obscured the rest. The video ended.
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