by Jeff Abbott
Mila stared at her hands, cuffed. You knew this day would come. You knew you might be caught. Here it is. Every day you dread, eventually that day comes. Life is just the days in between the dreadful times.
“I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to make you the offer of a lifetime.”
Mila looked up at the woman. “My husband already made me that offer.”
“Your husband.” She made it sound like the opening line of a curse. “You may call me Charity, Mila. Of course not my real name. But a virtue to which I subscribe, and one that you quite desperately need at the moment. Speaking of real names: Do you even know what your husband’s is?”
“Jimmy Court.”
Charity shook her head. “That is not his real name. He’s lied to you, Mila.”
“He has not lied to me,” Mila said.
“So. Mila Court. That’s your name, is it? Also not real. You traveled to the United Kingdom several years ago on an Australian passport as Mila Cebotari. Born in Sydney, the daughter of Romanian immigrants, educated at local schools, graduate of the University of Sydney with a degree in education. All that is a lie. But your papers are extremely good forgeries, and I’m so curious to know what helpful souls gave them to you. Tracking your movements two weeks ago in Australia, we’ve found your aunt and uncle, who appear to be the one aspect of your life that is not a complete lie. Regrettably, they also have been given fake documentation for Australian citizenship…and are therefore felons.”
Mila felt a thickness form in her throat.
Charity steepled fingers in front of her chin. “If you cooperate, we can shred and burn the file on your aunt and uncle. Your poor relatives will be left alone, both by MI-6 and by the Australian authorities, who don’t even realize these elderly illegals live among them. Otherwise…they won’t do jail well at their age. It will crush them.”
“Do you often threaten old people?” Her rage at threats against Aunt and Uncle felt hot and bright in her heart.
“I don’t discriminate based on age,” Charity said. “They get mail from an elderly relative in a small town in Moldova called Harpă. Our man in Moldova visited and learned that a few years ago, a couple matching their description suddenly left town, along with their niece, a schoolteacher named Mila.”
Mila felt her heart shrink. Her shock was slowly burning into anger. Good. She knew what to do with anger.
“I’m sure you told your aunt and uncle not to correspond with anyone back home, but the elderly are sometimes difficult, aren’t they? Especially when they’ve been pulled from a small town where they’ve spent their whole lives and then dumped in a massive city in a foreign culture thousands of miles away. And you’re not there much to keep them company. Your husband’s kept you so busy.”
Mila stared at the table.
“So, back to Moldova, this schoolteacher Mila, the local gossips told us her sister Nelly vanished a few months before Mila did. Took a job at a nice hotel in Israel, although the Israelis have no record of Nelly entering the country on a work permit.”
Mila looked again at the cuffs.
“Whispers that Nelly had been taken by one of those awful gangs that promise decent jobs to young women but are just traffickers who sell them into prostitution. Horrifying. You know, there I sympathize with you. If someone had done that to my sister…”
Mila, with a gaze of ice, met Charity’s smile.
Charity continued: “One of those gangs, well, their Moldovan contact vanished. Then one of the gang’s houses in Romania was blown up. Two young women who’d been trafficked there told the police that, and I quote, ‘an angel had gotten them out of the house and killed the gang members.’ Then days later, an Israeli brothel got shot up, and the girls were set free. Almost as if some brave, enterprising soul followed Nelly’s trail from Moldova to Romania to Israel, dealing out revenge.” Charity smiled.
Mila said nothing.
“Is that how you met the so-called James Court? Did he help you in dismantling a human smuggling chain? At least that’s a noble deed. Perhaps his only one.”
One of the men brought her water and she drank from the glass.
“Your husband—when not working under a false name like James Court—is supposed to work as an operative for the Secret Intelligence Service. He is a spy, sworn to protect his country. Did you know that?”
Mila shook her head.
“Jimmy, as you call him, has been running unsanctioned operations on the side, using the name James Court, using his resources as an intelligence agent to run an entirely separate organization that is highly illegal. And using you, an illegal alien with no standing, here under false pretenses.” Silence filled the room. The man she’d shot, who’d brought her water to drink, looked at her with a mix of pity and loathing.
Charity opened another file. “Your alleged husband was detained in Vienna several hours ago by his fellow operatives of the Secret Intelligence Service.”
And it gave Mila the barest sliver of hope. You didn’t take him here on British soil because it would raise too many questions from his colleagues. You couldn’t grab him here because you don’t want the rest of the service knowing about him.
“Are you familiar with the term the Round Table?”
“That is a large piece of furniture in the King Arthur stories,” Mila said.
“Ah, but there’s a modern one, a name for Jimmy’s little spy network. Selling our secrets to the highest bidder? To our enemies? What?”
“I swear to you,” Mila said. “We have never hurt Britain.”
“I’m afraid I’ll need more than your word. Your cooperation could offset the many penalties you are facing for being in our country as part of a huge fraud, Mrs. Court.”
Her words might hang her husband. But if she cooperated, then Aunt and Uncle would be spared. She had no choice. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “The Round Table is a kind of exchange, between intelligence agents in different countries. Favors were done for Jimmy, and he did favors in return. Sometimes in trade, sometimes in payment.”
“Information?”
She glared at her. “Yes, we worked outside the rules that bind you. But we broke up criminal rings. We ended terrorist threats. We…”
“But you were apparently paid for this so-noble work. Who were your clients?”
“I don’t know. He kept our funding from me.”
Charity stared at her and then closed her file folder, and it felt like the closing of a door. “We want all the information product he’s collected. We want all the funds. We want to know who his partners and his clients are. Considering the pull of his family…”
Mila blinked. “His family.”
“You don’t know his family?” Charity said. Her smile was, for the first time, cruel. “Well. We’ll let him tell you all about that. What a conversation it should be. Your husband was in Vienna; before that he was in Budapest. We lost him there before we found him again in Vienna. What was he doing in Budapest?”
Meeting Sam. But she said, “He did not tell me.”
“A few days before Budapest, he met briefly with a man in Copenhagen. Our trackers picked him up there.” She opened a laptop, slid it toward Mila, hit a button. A video played. Jimmy, walking across a square she soon recognized as Copenhagen’s Højbro Plads, stopping and talking briefly to another man. A man she’d only seen in pictures. The man looked like Danny Capra. Sam’s missing brother. The security video wasn’t totally clear—only because she’d seen Danny’s picture so recently did she recognize him. Jimmy knows Sam’s brother. Her stomach felt like it would fall through the floor.
“You know this man?” Charity asked.
“I don’t know his name. I saw his picture once…it’s hard to say…it’s blurry.”
“He’s a client?”
“I honestly do not know,” she said, and that was the truth.
“Your husband made a substantial deposit in a Swiss bank account ten minutes after this conversation with this man,�
� she said.
Why was Danny Capra giving Jimmy money? It had to be about Sam looking for his brother. But Danny didn’t want to be found…and Jimmy would make sure he wasn’t. She realized it all in a bolt of shock. “You say you have Jimmy. Ask him.”
“He’s not talking.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“Your husband is an embarrassment. We don’t plan on airing him as our dirty laundry. But we can make him vanish.” Charity leaned back in the chair. “The Americans have dark corners where you can lose someone. Forever.”
“Please…,” Mila said, and she hated herself for pleading.
“But we would be lenient if you would help us. We need one of his clients. Find him for us.” She tapped on the picture of Danny Capra.
“Bring him to you?” Shock inched through her chest. “What, you’re going to set me loose to find him?”
“Yes.”
“I could just run,” she said, like it was an option when she knew it wasn’t.
“You want to see your husband again, Mrs. Court. You want your aunt and uncle to keep their safe lives in Australia. Run and I promise you charges will be brought against them. You took down the scum who took your sister. You can find this man for me.”
“You don’t want to send your own people to hunt down this contact because you don’t want an official history,” Mila said.
“History, for you, is what I get to write,” Charity said in a cold, flat voice. “You two could be painted as heroes or traitors. I’m giving you a chance to be a heroine to your adopted country.” Her voice softened. “Have you been happy in Britain?”
“Yes.” The happiest she had ever been. It was all gone now.
“Do this and you’re safe. No prosecution. British citizenship, for real. A future, here.” And then her stare softened. “I know you love him, sweetheart, but he’s been a dreadful liar to you.”
“Jimmy…will tell you everything, if I ask him to.”
“He wouldn’t talk. Not even when I threatened to have your aunt and uncle arrested by the Australians.” She shrugged, as if helpless. “He’s not talking. You talk to him.”
She produced another phone, punched in a number. Held the phone up. “Put him on speaker,” she said to whoever was on the other side of the line.
“Darling.” Jimmy’s voice carried through the air. Mila closed her eyes. She remembered him walking up to her in Sydney, a month after she’d hidden herself and her aunt and uncle there, with a million-dollar bounty on her head. Jimmy offered her hope. A new life. A real way for Aunt and Uncle to stay in Australia. A sense of purpose when she’d failed to save her sister. One word. He’d cut through her steel, through her fear, to her heart.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”
“James,” Charity said. “Your so-called wife faces possible deportation if you do not cooperate with us. I assume the human traffickers she burned in Moldova will be thrilled to have her back in her homeland.”
He laughed. “You won’t send her back because then you’d have to explain. You don’t want the attention. Anything happens to Mila, you will never get a word from me. Ever.”
“I trust you,” Mila said. Because she had to say something to him. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Charity closed the line. Mila thought, Is that all he has to say to me? “If I were him, I’d be talking like mad to get you free,” said Charity.
“He and I understand each other,” Mila said. “We always have.”
“Do you really love him?”
Mila blinked. “Yes.”
“Get me this man, and I can write the history of Jimmy and Mila Court so that it was an undercover operation, sanctioned. If we know who the clients are, then we can deal with the problem. We can know the damage. But if we don’t…then you and Jimmy pay the price.”
Sam was searching for his brother. She could help him. But then she’d have to steal Danny from Sam to free Jimmy.
Take Sam’s brother from him, just when he’d found him.
She stared at this woman she felt was destroying her life, by inches, with this soul-crushing choice. “Once a man sat across from me in a schoolroom and told me that my sister had been forced into prostitution, and if I wanted her back I had to find and deceive three innocent young women, to be sent to replace her.”
Charity waited.
“It was in that moment I decided to kill him. And I did. I killed them all. That’s what happens to people who carry out threats against those I love. I’ll do as you ask. You will do as you promise.”
Charity smiled and slid a bag across the table. Mila opened it. Cash. Clothes, from her own closet here. Credit cards and a genuine UK passport in the name of Mila Cebotari. Her car keys. Four burner phones, a laptop that no doubt would report back to them where she was and what she researched and where she went.
She didn’t stand up. She wanted to ask So who is my husband, really, and why do you want to spare him the publicity? But she was ashamed she didn’t know. The humiliation burned like a fever, a wound.
“Report in twice a day. Call the number preprogrammed into the phones. When you have the client you’ll tell me where and when to come apprehend him. You have ten days, because my patience doesn’t extend further. Beyond that, it will be out of your hands. Vanish and the Australians arrest your family. You may go.”
She got up and left the house. She walked out, without another look at these people.
Find and bring them Danny Capra and everything will be all right. Well, hardly anything. But Jimmy will be free. She owed him. He had saved her life, her family. The choice was clear.
She got in her Audi. She didn’t search it; of course they’d put a tracer on it. But she realized she had one advantage. She was unofficial. She was secret. Charity was keeping her that way. Which meant Charity did not have limitless resources. Charity would rely on digital traces, not on warm bodies following Mila.
She had to make her one advantage work. First she had to find Sam and convince him to help her. Of course they would listen in on the phone. So she wouldn’t use it. She and Jimmy had hidden gear and cash in several spots around London. She would call Sam using a burner phone.
I’m sorry, Sam, she thought as she drove back toward London. I must take away what you want most in the world right now.
10
Paris
SAM LANDED IN Paris and spent a day there tending to his bar and making phone calls. He had not heard from Jimmy and that made him uneasy. Jimmy might not look very hard for Danny. Sam had not heard from Seaforth. His need to maintain momentum drove him. He wasn’t going to wait, so he called Jack Ming.
In his bar in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, he sipped a coffee and waited at a back booth. Five minutes later Jack Ming arrived and slid into the booth opposite him. Jack was one of the top hackers on the planet, a young American who had helped Sam bring down the Nine Suns criminal syndicate—the same people who had gotten Sam’s wife to turn traitor and had kidnapped his baby. The syndicate had told Sam he could have his child back if he hunted down and murdered Jack Ming, the one man who could expose their inner workings. Instead Sam rescued his child, spared Jack’s life, and turned him into an ally, and the two of them, with Mila, burned Nine Suns to the ground. Afterward, Jack had to drop out of sight, for his own protection and that of his wife, Frédérique, a Senegalese student. They’d thought of settling in New Zealand, but Frédérique preferred a Francophone country. They’d decided to hide in Paris, under new, legitimate identities that a French intelligence agency had provided them, in exchange for occasional hacking work from Jack.
Paris and marriage, Sam thought, looked like they agreed with Jack. He’d gained some needed weight, looked happy and healthy. He wore a well-fitted dark suit, no tie. This was a serious upgrade from his sloppy graduate student attire.
“You’re a dapper man,” Sam said with a smile. “How’s your lovely wife?”
&
nbsp; “Great. Better than great. Ricki’s pregnant.” Jack’s normally serious face broke into a wide smile. Sam thought, After all the hell they went through, Jack and Ricki are happy. Maybe I can get there, too.
“That’s fantastic, Jack. Congratulations.” He remembered the immediate excitement he’d felt when Lucy told him they were going to have a baby. Lucy. He made sure not to let his smile at Jack dim.
“How’s your son?” Jack asked.
Too far away and is he even wondering where I am? I need to call him, to hear his voice. “Talking, walking, just being awesome. I’ll see him…soon. But I have a job for you.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“I need to know what it would cost, first,” Sam said.
“For you, free.”
“No, Jack, no more. You already did free work for me. We’re even. I insist on paying you.”
“We’ll never be even. I am alive, and I have a wonderful life because of you, Sam.”
“And you have a child on the way. I’m paying. I insist.”
“We’ll see. Tell me the work, first.”
Sam described his hunt for the woman who collected his brother in Buenos Aires. Jack took no notes; he would, Sam knew, remember every detail. “It will take some time. Credit card charges of that vintage are kept in an archive database. Usually for seven years. I could also try to access the record through the airline’s database, if she got frequent-flier miles from her purchase. But they may not keep that record for years.”
“Do your best. Question number two. The eavesdropping app you gave me? I forced it onto a man’s phone a couple of days ago. How easily will it be detected?”
“It’s masked as part of the e-mail program, so you should be fine.”
“He’s CIA Special Projects.”