“We received this from the Metropolitan Police Department,” Liz said. “It won’t be available to the public or any of the media outlets. This is need-to-know and should not go any further than those of us in this room. One of the men has been positively identified as―” Here she hesitated, unwilling to speak the name that must not be said. She swallowed and resumed. “—identified as our former associate. The identity of the other man is unknown. Police are pursuing leads. They don’t want the public to panic, which is why they’re keeping this video under wraps. The opening frames where the men first meet will be released in hopes of identifying the other perpetrator. They’re both considered persons of interests.”
Liz hadn’t planned on being promoted. More than once she meant to resign and hightail it back to Georgia. Obstacles kept getting in her way. Obstacles like Neville Brandon. This video. And now, John Sessions. Something had to be done about Jack, and there was only one person who had the most at stake, both personally and professionally. The promotion was a vindication of sorts, but a hollow one, since she was the one who brought Jack into the Firm in the first place and was still answering for her ill-advised decision. Still, she had to muster enough courage to say his name.
“Jack Coyote,” she said in a steady voice, “must be permanently removed from the company of men, for the sake of the Firm and for our country. And I’m going to personally see to it.” It sounded theatrical. It sounded overblown. She meant every word. Up to a point.
One thing she didn’t mention. John had called her last night and given her a heads-up on the article. Their conversation was brief. She didn’t know what to think, what to say. How was she to know he would be gone an hour later. She felt guilty somehow. It wasn’t her fault, but she felt guilty all the same. There must have been something she could have said to allay his fears. Something she could have done to stop what happened.
After the meeting broke up, Liz located her new office, spic and span and sparse. Her things would be moved in tomorrow. To reach the windowed office, she had to pass John’s office, now barricaded with crime scene tape, a ghastly reminder of what happened to him just a few hours ago. Whether his death was fair or foul, suicide or murder, she didn’t really want to know. The result was the same. A man cut down in his prime, leaving behind a loving wife and family. The shock hadn’t worn off, and probably wouldn’t for weeks, months, and the rest of her life.
She closed the door. The latch clicked, sealing her inside muffled silence. The confines were large but felt constricted. She couldn’t catch her breath. Sunshine poured inside. She closed the blinds with a snap and wheeled around. Window panels bracketed the door. People passing by could see inside, but she still had some privacy, more than out there, where everyone had been casting stunned glances in her direction. She desperately needed to be alone; to bestill her thumping heart; to get a grip on her tangled emotions; and to examine the events of this morning and all the other mornings since Jack called her a little more than a month ago, incoherently babbling something about Milly not waking up. Twenty minutes later, after breaking speed limits and plowing through red lights in the predawn dark, she had arrived at his townhouse mere minutes ahead of the paramedics. He had given her a spare key for emergencies, but she didn’t have to use it. The garage door was open. Since the sun was only just coming up, a brief thought tore through her panicked mind. Leaving the house open wasn’t like Jack. When they lived together during college, he was always the one to make sure everything was locked down. Panic turned into terror as she raced through the house and frantically called out his name. When she found him in the upstairs bedroom, he was sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Milly’s shrunken corpse lay prostrate on the king-size bed. Both were Liz’s subordinates. Both were friends. Both were beyond any meager offerings of first aid. She had stumbled out of the bedroom, flown downstairs, burst into the outdoors, and vomited into the shrubbery just as the ambulance pulled up. She could only point inside and utter, “Upstairs.”
Taking a deep breath to whisk away the bad memories, Liz sank behind her spacious new desk. It was too big for her, too naked, too imposing, and too great a responsibility. She stared blankly at the shut door and blinked. She should have been elated. She should have been leaning back in the roomy executive chair, mentally toasting her success. Only dread consumed her scattered mind. She had been bucking for this position for how long? It was an empty victory. She was stepping on a dead man’s corpse and whistling past the dark grave of her own soul. For a fleeting moment, she considered quitting and walking away. In the next, she realized someone had to bring in Jack, and it might as well be her.
Jack was more than a subordinate. Once they had fallen madly in love. Ever since, their relationship was complicated. They remained friends whose paths crossed and re-crossed and sometimes came together in brief interludes of intimacy, the most recent mere days ago. Milly was dead. Jack had been charged with her murder. And Liz blamed herself for bringing him into the Firm. In weakness and uncertainty, they reached out to each other for comfort. In the aftermath, neither took away what they desperately needed. Sanctuary. And safety. They parted following bitter words. She didn’t hear from him again. He jumped bail, conspired with a journalist to expose HID, and disappeared. In her eyes and in everyone else’s eyes, Jack was a killer, a traitor, and a fugitive from justice. His fate was sealed. So was hers. As of today, her new position demanded that she take on the case of John Jackson Coyote, track him down, and neutralize him. He was an embarrassment to the Firm. More than an embarrassment. His actions had already undermined the activities of other agencies and made a mockery of the FBI, CIA, and NSA. The White House was under attack. Drums were beating in both houses of Congress for investigative committees and subcommittees with the powers to issue subpoenas and administer oaths. Everyone was protecting their backs.
Jack once said something that had always stayed with her. She forgot the context. He had been rambling on about the instincts of men, particularly of heroes who didn’t think of themselves as heroes until death faced them. Military men, to be sure. Also, ordinary men. Men like Jack. You have no idea how hard a man will fight when he knows he’s fighting for his life. The remembrance sent chills through her.
Her thoughts returned to her immediate task. Jack had to be brought in. And Liz Langdon was the one to do it. Maybe then, he wouldn’t have to stand alone.
11
Near Rockville, Virginia
Monday, August 11
VIKKI WOULD NEVER remember those last few seconds when everything turned black.
Her last memories were of tooling down a four-lane road and thinking about Lindsey-Marie Moffat, how scared, how pale, and how nervous she was. Based on the interview — and fearing the lady was in peril — she decided to contact someone of authority. Not just anyone someone. A certain someone. A homicide detective whose lyrical name could not easily be forgotten and whose demeanor gave little away. Irrespective of his stated belief in Coyote’s guilt, he must have deduced the man could not have kidnapped both of his associates on the same night. Nor could he have pushed John Sessions off the roof of HID headquarters since he skipped town more than a week earlier.
It was during this thought that a jolt came from out of the blue. A cliché, to be sure, and a trite cliché at that. Out of the blue. Out of nowhere. Conjuring something mystical and otherworldly. The brain can play tricks on you. It can tell you that whatever you think is happening cannot really be happening.
The circumstances would have been ludicrous, almost laughable, if it weren’t so fiendish. A monstrous truck with a dark-as-midnight paint job, engine growling, bore down on her little red sports car like a shark going after a minnow. The impact was vicious and purposeful, arriving at high speed and with a roaring jolt. The collision careened the car across the median and straight towards an oncoming car. Vikki experienced a brief glimpse of running lights just before impact. She saw her life flash before her eyes, yet another cliché, and with a swift, ins
tinctual spin of the steering wheel executed in the space of a split second ... one more cliché, her mind told her ... the sports car headed straight for the shoulder, struck the concrete curbing, rocketed like a turbojet, and became airborne.
Suspended halfway between here and there, past and present, being and nonbeing, she rose like an eagle on takeoff, hovered inside a thunderclap, and came crashing down. Her body careened forward and snapped back. The airbag exploded against her face, cushioning the blow but suffocating her. Time halted. Everything became eerily quiet, as quiet as the stillness of a warm summer night with only crickets for company. Then the crickets silenced. With a slow tender care, she drifted into another world, floating between reality and fantasy, lightness and darkness, knowing and unknowing. She blinked out. In the next second, she was flung back, whether from shock or pain or fighting spirit, she couldn’t guess. In the deafening implosion, her essence fragmented into millions of subatomic particles. A violent gyration spiraled her toward forgetfulness. Glass shattered all around her. Blackness interceded. A raven cawed and took wing.
She was utterly alone. The aloneness was worse than anything she had ever experienced in any of her nightmares. This is what death is like, she thought. Ergo, she must be dead. Too late, she thought. Too late to say goodbye. Too late to say I love you. Too late to say I’m sorry. With those thoughts came awareness. Only a sentient being, she realized, could experience a thought about a thought. Which meant she wasn’t dead. Perhaps close to it, but not yet. Not yet, dear God, she repeated in the silence of her mind.
Other sensations came. The beam of a penlight sweeping across her eyes. A soothing voice. Cool air. And a sustained groan that came ... my God ... it came from her.
Nothing can happen so quickly that the mind cannot process the depravation of breath or the acuteness of pain. Like a computer, the brain is filled with a network of neurons connected with millions of other neurons, firing off information and aligning the bits and bytes of information in the form of sight, sound, smell, touch, and primal presence. She had enough faculties left to ask mindful questions, a succession of them. What had happened? Where had it happened? How had it happened? She had been hit from behind. She had been shot forward like a cannonball. She had become airborne for mere seconds before landing with a grinding crunch. There was something else, something she had to piece together. The nearness of tragedy. There had been a third vehicle speeding towards her, or she to it. She saw, or believed she saw, a mother behind the wheel and a teenaged daughter at her side. Better she should die than someone else should die from her inaction. She would go to her grave in a way that gave her life meaning, not in riches or glory or plaudits, but in a life well lived. Her obituary would proclaim it so even if her heart told her she had made mistakes. Monumental mistakes. But not this time, dear Lord, please not this time.
Everything went away, along with any misgivings of a wasted life.
Consciousness returned. She opened her eyes to bright lights. Heard voices speak in her ear. Took a bottomless breath and expelled it like a devotional prayer. Thoughts swept through her mind, most of them whispers and echoes telling her she was different from everyone, a rebel, a seeker of truth, a troublemaker, a woman on a mission. All around her, people lived and played and loved while she strived and worked hard and stirred the pot. Always reaching for that indefinable moment that could throw light onto darkness, like when you dig in the dirt and uncover a nest of fire ants, all scurrying about, mad as well, and stinging ankles and wrists. She would often walk past cheery, laughing folks, and think how lucky they were to be them and not to be her. All those smiling, smug people who hugged themselves, took pictures, stored them in albums, and remembered those moments of joy while she possessed few albums and little joy, just heartache and pain and drive. It wasn’t all bad, of course. Every now and then she experienced something wonderful. She danced and sang songs and transcended troubles. In the next instant, she remembered her workaholic father, her disillusioned mother, her former lovers, her estranged husband, the miscarriage that took her first daughter, the grandmother who succumbed to senility. Wherever she was, whomever she was with, whatever she was doing, she carried with her a profound separateness of being, as if she were lingering at the edge of the crowd, somewhere in the rear, unable to see what was happening up front, experiencing everything indirectly through secondhand accounts and whispers of whispers. It was this wanting to know that drove her to seek the truth and be a journalist.
Her eyes flashed open. Bright fluorescent lights blinded her. She lifted an arm to block out the glare. She was in a cavernous room. The people hovering above her wore hospital green. Not green, she thought in brilliant clarity. Aqua. One of them said, “She’s coming around.” Another said, “What’s your name?”
She took in details. A breathing tube was hooked around her ears. Her arm was streaked with dried blood. Intravenous tubing was taped to her other arm. Her head pounded. She was nauseous.
“Vikki.” She fingered the bandage covering the center of her forehead. “Victoria Kidd.”
“You might need stitches for that.” The authoritative woman who wore the white coat of a physician asked, “What’s your birthdate?”
“None of your damned business.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“A truck bearing down on me. You’ll think I’m crazy ... but the driver ... he meant to kill me.”
“He failed.”
A policeman pushed himself to the fore. Not a policeman, her mind instructed her. A sergeant with the sheriff’s office. A big man with a rugged face, imposing bearing, and permanent scowl. The very man she was thinking of just before the accident. The mustachioed man who arrested Jack Coyote. Was it serendipity? Or had she conjured him up like an angel from the netherworld.
“Were ...?” She ran her tongue around a cotton mouth before words formed on her lips. “Were you following me?”
He appeared embarrassed, as if a macho man like him could truly be embarrassed. But he was embarrassed. Her accusation had touched a nerve. He had the presence of mind to blush, a very slight blush under his toast-hued skin made darker by the summer sun.
“Why were you following me?”
“The only reason there is,” he said. “To see where you would go.”
12
Vienna, Virginia
Monday, August 11
“YOU’RE LATE,” TAGGERT said with a scowl. Cordelia arrived in the corner office at 1:01 PM, a short minute after her boss. “When Ms. Burke eventually gets settled, we can begin our briefing.”
The office belonged to Frances Hynes, deputy director of the Global & Terrorist Financial Crimes department inside the agency officially known as the Monetary Compliance Network but usually referred to as MonCom. She had earned the exalted privilege of occupying the southeast corner of the top floor of their low-rise building in Langley. The plate-glass windows afforded a smoggy view of the main complex, parking lots intervening, greenery encircling the campus. Frances had her hands full, and much fuller these days than at any time during her tenure. Prior to coming to MonCom, she had been with the FBI. She was no amateur. She could handle whatever came along and did so diplomatically, showing grace under fire and never breaking a sweat. Despite her diminutive stature and her mid-cropped blond curls framing a pink face of sobriety, she was a formidable force.
The conference table had space for up to six key players. All but two chairs were occupied.
Cordelia felt an unexpected queasiness in her gut. She blamed it on Taggert. He was going to pay. For now, all eyes were upon her. After she shut the door on a soft click, distant hallway noise evaporated, closing off a government conclave of conspirators and secret keepers gathered in the name of national service. The queasiness leapt into her throat. She took the fifth chair.
Breaking the tension, Frances imparted a kindly smile towards Cordelia, settled back, and with a patient gesture, gave her leave to set up her laptop, bring up essential
files, and assume an air of undivided attention paired with feigned confidence.
Cordelia understood why she had been invited to this high-level meeting and what was expected of her. Simply to state the facts as she knew them, unembellished by opinion, and afterwards, nod in agreement to whatever the others decided.
“Eric,” suggested Frances, “why don’t you start off.”
Everyone at MonCom was on a first-name basis, no formalities here. Although she had never been in a meeting with the head of her section, Cordelia understood that whenever Eric Sinclair spoke, subordinates listened, and whatever actions he took, proceeded quickly and efficiently, no questions asked or concerns voiced. “Jon has already briefed us on your findings,” he said, acknowledging Cordelia. “And we’re in accord with his conclusions.”
She briefly looked at her boss before asking, “Which are?”
“Simply that you chanced upon something significant.” His eyes went to Taggert. “Or have we missed anything?”
Taggert came to her defense. “The reason Ms. Burke is confused is because she hasn’t been included in any of our previous meetings.”
“Ah yes, the Russian infiltration.”
The information stunned Cordelia as nothing else could have. Russia never figured into her assessment, making her wonder what they knew that she didn’t. She forced a smile and said nothing. Panic replaced queasiness. Gone was her eagerness, vanished her pride, deflated her excitement.
Eric Sinclair was a hulk of a man with a cherubic face that belied the taskmaster beneath. Known for celebrating the invention of wine, he was generally a cheery man, the grandfatherly type, even if sometimes vulgar, also exacting and scrupulous. “We do keep a tight ship, don’t we? Too tight.” He paused as if searching for correct wording and deliberate phrasing. “Without giving away too much, at least at this stage, allow me to rephrase. Do you have anything to add to your vanilla name wrapped inside the manila envelope? Jon has brought us up to speed, but perhaps you have more to add. Something ... I don’t know ... dramatic,” he said, waving his hand. His smile was pleasant enough but his attitude was brusque, almost insulting. Sitting back and folding pudgy hands over his considerable belly, he cleared phlegm from his throat. “Perhaps I put it badly. Well, yes ... come to think ... yes, I did. The request shouldn’t have been asked as a question. Of course, you have more to add. That’s why you’re here, aren’t you? We could have invited a puppet, but a puppet you’re not. Give us your perspective, Ms. Burke. Don’t be shy. And don’t leave anything out. Apologies, excuses, and slanting are unnecessary. We’re a cozy little group here, and you’re invited in. Tell us what you know. Not just what you know. But what you think about what you know.”
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