15th Affair

by James Patterson

  Joe had prior knowledge of a plane crash that was shaping up to be one of the worst air disasters on record.

  Cindy and I got out of the backseat of her car. Jad told Cindy that his phone number was now a nonworking number, and that no offense, he would stand there and watch us leave so that we couldn’t follow him.

  We all shook hands, and Cindy wished Jad good luck. I wondered if Jad’s superiors actually believed his recording equipment had failed. Or if they were following him even now, watching Cindy and me as we climbed back into her car.

  Cindy was practically bug-eyed as she drove us away from the parking lot.

  “Check me on this,” she said to me. “The dead kids were taping Chan and Muller. They were told to hit the kill switch, and they did. During the blackout, someone came in and shot them and maybe killed Chan, too, right? That guy talking to them…?”

  “That was Joe.”

  “I know his name was Joe,” Cindy said. “Wait. Lindsay.” She turned to look at me. “You don’t mean that was your Joe?”

  “Off the record. That was him.”

  “Oh, no. Please don’t tell me that.”

  “Cindy. Watch the road. Yes. That was Joe Molinari.”

  “But what does Joe have to do with those people, Lindsay? I don’t get this at all.”

  “I’m thinking,” I said.

  My thoughts were scrambling for cover, but they couldn’t hide.

  What role had he played in the lives and deaths of Bud, Chrissy, Chan, and Maria Silva? Had he killed them? Were he and Muller working this operation together? And I had to know—what had Joe known about flight WW 888? And what, if anything, had he done with that information?

  I couldn’t share these thoughts with Cindy, not yet.

  “Lindsay, are you thinking Joe is the killer?” Cindy was staring at me again, her eyes as big as headlights.

  I said, “No—look, no. Joe’s a freelancer. It’s more like he was hired to monitor the action in Chan’s room. So what if, as Joe was going up to supervise those kids, someone heard him say he was going upstairs and sent a ‘go’ signal to the killer?”

  I was winging it, but I was imagining it, too. I kept talking. “And so the kids were expecting Joe, but the killer knocked on the door and they let him in.”

  Cindy said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m following you. The killer shoots them, shoots Chan—and Joe got there after the shootings?”

  “It’s a good theory,” I said, while wondering, Is it?

  “What happened to Joe? And what happened to Ali Muller?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said sincerely.

  “According to my calculations,” Cindy said, “the plane went down about sixty-two hours later. Right?”

  I nodded, remembering the run-up to that crash vividly.

  I’d worked the hotel crime scene with Conklin, Clapper, and Claire, and that night, Joe had come home very early on Tuesday morning, two days before the crash. We’d made love and had breakfast together and I’d told him about the hits at the hotel. We talked about it.

  Then I’d gone to work.

  That day, we got an ID on Michael Chan. Conklin and I had driven out to Palo Alto and notified Shirley Chan that her husband was dead.

  And except for the recording of Joe watching us at the Chan house, I hadn’t seen him again. As Cindy had said, two and a half days after the shootings in the hotel, WW 888 had blown apart.

  Cindy was doing her best to drive and process everything we had just seen on Jad’s fifteen-inch laptop.

  She said to me, “Look, I have a problem writing this story. Joe is pivotal. He talked about the plane from Beijing. That information, if it had been used properly, might have saved a few hundred lives. So how do I write about that? I have no fricking evidence. I can’t print this as a rumor.”

  “Can you sit on this for a day?” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to get some answers.”

  “From whom?”

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I can tell you.”

  “Lindsay.”

  “You don’t have to say it, Cindy. I promise. You get the exclusive. If I find out anything at all.”

  CHAPTER 75

  WHEN I WALKED through the front door to the apartment I once shared with my husband, the wonderful Mrs. Rose said to me, “Lindsay, I have to go. My son is waiting for me at Tommy’s and I have to dress. You’ll find some pasta salad in the fridge. Oh, Martha has to go for a walk and the baby hasn’t eaten or had her bath. She just wouldn’t play ball with me. Sorry, dear.”

  I told Mrs. Rose thanks for everything and have a good time and stood at the open door until she was gone. Then I closed the door and leaned against it, exhausted by the meeting with Cindy and Jad, thinking, No more. Please, I can’t take any more.

  I was a mess.

  I was the primary investigator on a quadruple homicide without witnesses or forensic evidence, and it was further compounded by a tangle of international players, a terrorist attack, and intelligence agencies working on the sly.

  My husband was party to some or all of this, and he’d sucker-punched me, kneecapped me, and left me alone in a blind alley.

  I was grateful to Cindy for including me in her meeting with Jad, and also thankful that she had agreed to sit on the story until I had answers.

  But she wouldn’t sit on it forever.

  I’d fed her the only theory of the murders I could think of, which presumed that Joe was not guilty of murder.

  But he might well have had foreknowledge, if not his actual hand on a trigger. And for all I knew, he was a killer, many times over.

  I became aware of Martha, who was whining and pushing at my legs. I said, “OK, OK, I hear you.”

  We went to Julie’s room. I woke my daughter up very gently, and of course, she started to cry. I talked nonsense while dressing her in fleece and a hat. Then I awkwardly opened her stroller and strapped her in.

  Martha was ebullient, and I hated to disappoint, but this was going to be a short, short walk.

  I wheeled Julie into the elevator, keeping Martha on a tight leash, and somehow, Martha’s business was quickly done. She was desperate to go for a run. She pulled and barked at me when I turned to go back into the building.

  “You don’t always get what you want,” I said to Jules and Martha. “And that goes for me, too.”

  I then proceeded to do what single mothers all over the world do—that is, everything at once.

  I fed the baby and I fed Martha, and after drinking the dregs of the opened bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, I dished up some pasta salad and wolfed it down.

  On the way to the dishwasher, I grabbed a basket that I keep on the counter near the microwave. It’s eight inches square, four inches high, a catch-all for receipts and the odd paper clip, marking pen, and business card.

  Two men from the CIA had paid me a call last week, the point of which was to tell me to stop looking for Alison Muller. They had left their business cards on the counter. I couldn’t remember seeing those cards again.

  I hoped Mrs. Rose had put them in the receipt basket.

  I upended the basket and pawed through the contents, and yes, I found the cards. Michael J. Dixon. Christopher Knightly. Case officers, Central Intelligence Agency. Phone numbers were in the lower left corner.

  I remembered that Dixon, the dark-haired one, had seemed to be the one in charge.

  It was nearly 8 p.m. Would he answer his phone?

  I had to try.

  I dialed the number and he answered on the third ring.

  “Agent Dixon, this is Lindsay Boxer. You visited me a couple of days ago to talk about Alison Muller.”

  “I remember, Mrs. Molinari. How can I help you?”

  “I need to see you. I have information that concerns national security. It also concerns my husband, and I think you’ll want to hear all about it.”

  Dixon gave me an address and told me to come in the next morning at nine. I didn’t know wh
at I was going to say when I met with him, but I had all night to figure it out.

  The whole minute-by-minute sleepless night.

  CHAPTER 76

  I GOT OUT of bed before my baby girl woke up. I showered to get my blood running, and while Mrs. Rose buttoned down the corners of my household, I called in sick, asked Brenda to tell Conklin that I would talk to him after lunch, and then ordered a taxi to drive me to the CIA office on Montgomery Street.

  I dressed to impress, meaning I put on my best blue gabardine pantsuit, just cleaned, a good-looking tailored shirt, and my smart Freda Salvador shoes, which I’d last worn to meet in DC with FBI honcho June Freundorfer.

  Mrs. Rose topped up my coffee mug while I Googled the address Dixon had given me and found that it was the location of a CIA division called the National Resources Program, or NR.

  I read and clicked and read some more.

  And what I learned was that the NR was to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, what schoolyard pickup hoops were to the NBA.

  The NR recruited largely untrained people with access to information: foreign nationals living in the United States who were willing to gather intel for cash and probably a feeling of self-importance. The NR also hired on Americans with overseas access to government workers, aircraft manufacturing plants, newspapers, and the like.

  These part-time operatives came with a variety of backgrounds. Some were college students, some were corporate executives, entertainers, and young techies—like Jad. And like Bud and Chrissy, who had been secretly filming Michael Chan and Alison Muller.

  And while these geeks had been spying on spies, Joe Molinari had been right in the thick of it.

  My taxi driver buzzed the intercom.

  I told Mrs. Rose I would call her in a few hours and hugged everyone at the door.

  My driver asked, “Alexander Building, right?”

  I said, “Right,” as the cab lunged from the curb and out into traffic.

  Twenty-five minutes later, I was on the street in front of an early-1900s neo-Gothic, tan brick office building. I entered the lobby, stopped at the desk, and showed my credentials to the security guard.

  He called upstairs to Agent Dixon’s office, then wrote my name on a peel-and-stick tag, handed it to me, and said, “Fourth floor. You can go on up.”

  I followed his pointing finger to the elevator bank.

  CHAPTER 77

  I WAS ALONE in the elevator that whisked me smoothly to the fourth floor. The doors slid open and I stepped out onto a granite floor leading to a pair of glass doors etched with the eagle-centric, round blue logo of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The reception area was thickly carpeted in blue, and a cluster of upholstered chairs gathered around a circular glass coffee table. A gallery of gold-framed portraits lined the long wall behind the reception desk: all former heads of the CIA, including President G. H.W. Bush and our current CIA chief.

  I gave my name to the woman behind the desk, signed a log, and took a seat. There were no magazines on the table, but I didn’t have to wait long.

  Agent Michael Dixon entered the room through a door to the left of the receptionist, greeted me as Mrs. Molinari, and asked me to follow him. We walked past many open cubicles with young staffers inside and other offices with closed doors.

  At the end of the hallway, Dixon opened the door to a wood-paneled conference room and showed me in. Christopher Knightly, the second of the two agents I’d met in my apartment, was standing at the windows, looking out over the city with his back to the door.

  He turned and said, “Morning, Sergeant Boxer. Please have a seat.” And to the man I had assumed was his senior partner, “Thanks, Dixon. I’ll take it from here.”

  I sat in one of the eight swivel chairs around the smallish mahogany conference table. I refused an offer of coffee or bottled water, although my mouth was dry. I was wondering if I’d made a monumental mistake in coming here.

  Knightly pulled out a chair across from me and lowered his football player heft down into it.

  He said, “You told Dixon you have information that may be of importance. That you know something about Worldwide Flight 888. What do you want to tell us?”

  The inference was plain and almost laughable. This was the CIA, an arm of a huge intelligence-gathering agency with fingers in pies I couldn’t even imagine.

  I was a cop. Just a cop. But if I’d had Christopher Knightly in the box, I could have fired questions at him for hours. So I assumed that attitude.

  I said, “I’m working a quadruple homicide, and I’m fairly certain that this isn’t news to you. I want to know why Michael Chan was murdered and by whom. I want to know who killed the housekeeper and the two CIA computer techs in the room next to Chan’s at around the same time. I want to know why I was followed and beaten by four Asian men who had a Stinger missile launcher in an apartment they were renting in Chinatown. And I want to know what my husband, Joe Molinari, had to do with all or any of that.

  “If you can’t give me answers and compelling reasons why I should keep what I know to myself, I’m going to let the press know that the CIA knew about WW 888 before it went down and may even have had something to do with that disaster.”

  I was suddenly afraid that I’d said too much; that like a little terrier on the street going after a pit bull, I’d taken a bigger bite than I could chew.

  If I was seen as a danger to national security, I might be taken into government custody. Or worse. I thought of the sweaty young man with the clandestine videos on his laptop, afraid for his life. I thought of Bud and Chrissy dead on a hotel room floor.

  Knight gave me a patronizing smile and said, “We’re not going to hurt you, Sergeant. I’m not the bad guy.”

  I exploded.

  “So who is the bad guy? That’s what I want to know. Who’s the bad guy in all this?”

  The door opened behind me. I swiveled my chair and saw a man who looked a lot like my husband come into the room.

  My God. It was really him.

  “I guess I’m the bad guy,” Joe said, dragging a chair out from the table and dropping down into it.

  My mouth had fallen open, but the rest of me was paralyzed. Joe looked terrible. He had a beard, there were bags under his eyes, and his clothes were filthy.

  What the hell had happened to him?

  Why didn’t he look glad to see me?

  I managed to croak, “Joe?”

  He looked at me with an expression I can only call sadness.

  “What do you want to know, Lindsay? I’ll try to tell you what you want to know.”

  CHAPTER 78

  I’D BEEN SHOCKED into silence.

  This was my husband. My husband.

  I looked across the table at Knightly and back at Joe. Joe said, “Chris, give us a moment. And kill the cameras.”

  “Got it,” Knightly said. When he’d left and the door was closed, Joe moved over to the chair next to mine and reached for my hands.

  I pulled away.

  It was pure instinct. This man resembled the man I had loved and married, but I no longer knew who he was.

  He said, “Lindsay, I know you’re upset. I would be, too.”

  “Upset?”

  “Wrong word. I know you’re furious at me and I…and that I deserve it. I know I’ve hurt you, and I can’t tell you how sad that makes me. I know what I’m saying isn’t working, but please, if you can, trust me.”

  Trust him? How? Why?

  “Where have you been?”

  “I can’t say. Not yet.”

  I shouted, “I’ve been thinking you’re dead!”

  “I know.”

  “And sometimes I wished you were.”

  That was a lie, but I said it with vehemence. And Joe didn’t take his eyes away from me.

  I kept going. “You didn’t call me or leave a message or send me a lousy text to say you were OK.”

  He sighed and looked down at his hands. Was he remorseful? Was he thinking what to sa
y to me? I didn’t care.

  “You walked out on me and on Julie. In the last ten days, I’ve been viciously attacked. I’ve been beaten, shot at, outnumbered, and outgunned. And what have you been doing? Playing I Spy games with Alison Muller?”

  He was looking me with sad eyes and I was doing second-by-second gut checks. Was he lying? Was he in trouble? What or who was Joe Molinari?

  “Oh, God, Lindsay. I didn’t know you were attacked. Were you hurt? Are you OK?”

  “Talk to me, Joe. Tell me everything and I’ll let you know if I’m OK after I’ve heard you out.”

  He tried to take my hands again, and again I pulled away. This was pure reflex. I didn’t know if I still loved Joe, or if he had ever actually loved me.

  CHAPTER 79

  “BE RIGHT BACK,” Joe said.

  He got up and left the room. I watched his empty chair spin lazily in his absence. I wondered what he could possibly say to me that would make me trust him—or if he would even try.

  A few long minutes later, Joe came back into the room with two bottles of water, put one down in front of me, and uncapped the other. He drank half of it down.

  Then he said, “Ali Muller used to work for me, I don’t know, eighteen years ago. We were both pretty young, idealistic, and she had a gift for intelligence gathering.”

  “What kind of gift?” I asked.

  “More than one, actually. Her IQ was off the charts. She was beautiful. People trusted her. She spoke a couple of languages. And she was pretty fearless.”

  I had heard enough about Ali Muller from June Freundorfer, her CIA friend John Carroll, and her husband, Khalid Khan, and now Joe was singing her praises.

  I didn’t want to know more. But I wasn’t letting myself off easily. Alison Muller was central to this sickening amalgam of secrets. And I was pretty sure she’d killed Shirley Chan.

  Joe was saying, “She volunteered to set honey traps. You know?”

  “She seduced men, slept with them, beguiled them into giving her information.”