140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  The president, whose route to politics and the White House had begun in intelligence, where he ultimately ended up running the CIA, nodded calmly in agreement. “I’m sure whatever it is he’s doing, we’re probably lucky he’s doing it.” His expression turned a bit more serious and he seemed to be studying Tess more closely. “You know, a lot of people aren’t thrilled with his way of handling things—I’ve had more than a few calls about him—but I just tell them to back off. If anything, we need more guys like him. So whatever reason he can’t be here is fine with me. And at least, we got to meet you.”

  She and Reilly had been placed at a table by the gingerbread White House, which she was told was something they crafted every year. It wasn’t long before the hosts and their guests were all seated and enjoying a first course of chanterelle mushroom soup with goat cheese fritters, Reilly’s empty seat staring at her from across the table. By the end of the meal, she felt like a wreck. Three times, she’d suffered the chastising eyes of the table companions who’d noticed her sneaking a glance at her phone under the table, but her screen was clear of any notifications. Reilly hadn’t called or messaged her.

  A profound sense of worry was crippling her.

  Where the hell are you, Sean?

  14

  Lower East Side, Manhattan

  The cushioning on the armchair was about as soft as a bale of reclaimed metal, but I still felt like I was going to drift off any second.

  My head was pounding—as much from overexertion due to grinding over the events and my options at this point as from the blow from my gun.

  I checked my watch: five after two. My host was out late, even for a weekday, obviously enjoying having his life back after the circadian confusion of the past few weeks and no doubt busy converting the endless stream of Tinder matches into flesh-and-bone conquests. I just hoped he’d come back home instead of staying over with whatever buxom free spirit he’d graced with his fickle presence.

  I’d hot-wired a vintage Honda Accord and driven it into the city, where I’d left it in a parking garage. Coincidentally, and weirdly, I found a dead ringer for Nick’s fur hat on the dash, which I “borrowed” —the warmth it offered my still-fragile head trumping its questionable aesthetics.

  I’d walked the five blocks to the familiar apartment building. Imitating my partner’s gruff voice, I’d told a furious random resident via intercom that I’d had too much to drink and forgotten my house keys and after they’d reluctantly buzzed me in, I’d picked the lock of the rent-controlled sublet in which I was now squatting.

  It was unlikely my host would be feeling particularly hospitable when he arrived home. Being either sound asleep or unconscious would in all likelihood make things even worse, so I forced myself to yet again methodically to go through everything that had led up this night. Even in my addled state, I knew that something might land differently, trigger a new memory or provoke the kind of tangential thought process that could lead to fresh insight. Two hours later I was drifting on a thick cloud of despair, exhaustion, throbbing pain and borderline concussion when I heard the apartment door squeal open.

  I tried to stand, but my head felt like an anvil. I crashed back down into the armchair as Nick walked into the room and switched on the light.

  His jaw dropped as he spotted me—the beaver still on my head, a thick stream of dried blood plastered to the side of my face and a fine coating of rock salt down the length of one trouser leg.

  “What the fuck . . . Sean?”

  “So you don’t know already?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  My voice was weak. “No, I just thought . . . they would have called you by now.”

  He went to fish his work BlackBerry out of his pocket. “My phone’s on silent. It’s been a big night, I mean . . .” He hesitated a bit, like he was unsure about what to say, then added, “Tinder booty call, you know how it is—”

  Then he saw the screen.

  “Shit,” he grumbled. “Eleven missed calls.” He raised his eyes and studied me, then any remaining light dimmed right out of his expression. “What’s going on?”

  “Sit down, man. Just . . . sit down.”

  I finally told my partner everything.

  The whole messed-up story, starting with my first encounter with Kirby. I didn’t give out Kurt’s name, though. I figured I owed him his anonymity, and Nick didn’t pick at it. Instead, he just sat there and listened, shaking his head but holding back his unspoken disapproval and saying nothing until I was done. Then he just sat there in silence for what felt like a hell of a long time.

  He finally took a long, haggard breath, leaned forward, and looked me squarely in the eyes. “You need to hand yourself in, Sean. It’s the only way. Every second you’re not in custody just makes it look worse.”

  “No. No way.” I was too burnt out to elaborate.

  “It’s the only way. At least then, you have a chance they’ll believe you. You have to do it. Spill the whole story. The blackmail, the files. Everything. You know how it works. If everything you say is true, which we know it is, if it can all be verified, which I can make damn sure of, then maybe there’s something just north of a snowball’s chance in hell that your version of the past twenty-four hours will be believed as well. Or at least considered till evidence is found to support it.”

  In my mind, the chances of that weren’t even worth considering.

  “No,” I said. “Look, they’ve been protecting this Corrigan all along. For whatever reason, they don’t want him found. They’ll claim he never existed and bury me.” It sounded much worse now that I was voicing it. “I need to find him myself.”

  “Right, because you’ve been so stunningly successful at it so far?”

  I lost it. “What do you want from me, Nick? Look at me. I’m fucked. You want me to just serve them up my head on a platter?”

  “Jesus, Sean,” he shot back. “Listen to yourself. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “We were struggling for the gun when it went off,” I yelled. “My prints are all over it. His wife saw me. Me—no one else. Just me.”

  “There wouldn’t have been a struggle if the guy in the beard wasn’t there,” he yelled back. “It was self-defense—”

  “Which is impossible to prove if I can’t wheel in the beard to back up my story.”

  “You think you’re in any fit state to be doing anything? I mean, look at you. It’s a miracle you’re not laid out on a sidewalk somewhere.” He took a breath, studied me some more, then his tone calmed. “It’s got to stop, Sean. You’ve got to stop with the lone vigilante shit. I need my partner back. I need my buddy back. I’ve watched you get totally obsessed by this Reed Corrigan, and . . . you’ve changed, man. All these secrets . . . And your focus isn’t there any more. Your mind used to be one hundred percent on the job, but ever since last summer . . . You’re always disappearing off on your own, doing Christ knows what.”

  “We got Daland, didn’t we?”

  “We got Daland because however much your attention is elsewhere, you’re still a damn good agent. Nothing will ever change that. But look where it’s got you. I mean . . . Christ!”

  I was too tired to argue, but I heard the edge of desperation in my own voice. “You think I’m enjoying it? You think I’m happy my partner is down on me the whole time? I can barely concentrate on anything without that bastard popping into my head? It’s the same thing at home. Alex may be OK—better, at any rate—but I’m still back there. Every time I look at him, I think about what they did to him, and it just . . . I can’t let go, Nick. And now there’s my dad, too . . .” I tailed off, took a couple of deep breaths. “I need to know what happened to him. And I have to do it alone. More than ever.”

  “What if you find something you don’t like, something you were better off not knowing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if your dad was in bed with these guys and really did kill himself out of guilt?” />
  “‘Guilt?’”

  “Maybe. Who knows. Maybe he was part of something nasty and he couldn’t live with that. I mean, what do you really know about him, Sean? Sometimes, some doors are best left unopened. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to know about everything my dad was up to after he left us.”

  I was too incensed to even begin to answer him, but even in my worked-up state, I couldn’t dismiss his words entirely. All I could bring myself to say was, “He wasn’t part of anything nasty. He was a good guy.”

  Nick shrugged, calmer now. “Yeah, well, I hope he was, buddy. I really do.” He sat there and just stared at me, nodding his head slowly, deep in thought.

  “OK,” he said. He nodded again, to himself, solemnly, then pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll go make us some coffee.”

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, eagerly anticipating the caffeine hit. I hadn’t been sure that Nick would see things my way, but I had to keep pushing. We were partners, after all.

  I must have dozed off because I woke as Nick walked back into the living room, a steaming mug of coffee in each hand.

  “Should have stayed the night with Rochelle.” He placed his mug—bearing the deeply ironic slogan “Husband of the Year”—on a low table in front of a battered sofa. “She offered, you know. But there I was thinking I needed a clean shirt for the morning. Big mistake, huh?”

  He turned to hand me one of the black-and-white FBI mugs from The White House gift shop, a gift from yours truly.

  “It’s been a night of big mistakes,” I muttered.

  Then, just as I took the mug, he grabbed my wrist, cuffed it and pulled the other end down toward the metal arm of the chair. The mug smashed against the hardwood floor, splashing scalding hot coffee across us both.

  Using his downward momentum against him, I tried to wrench his arm all the way toward the floor so I could lock my free arm around his neck and pull his gun with my cuffed hand, but he knew exactly what I would try and was already exerting counter pressure in an upward trajectory—enough to bring the open cuff level with the metal tube. He closed the cuff with his free hand and stepped back.

  “What the hell, Nick? What are you doing?”

  He looked straight at me—his expression tense and apprehensive as I did the obligatory struggling gesture with my cuffed hand. The cushioning may have been past its comfort date, but the metal frame was rock solid.

  “Nick,” I blurted. “Don’t do this.”

  “I’m sorry.” He was quite deliberately echoing my earlier reply.

  “I’m getting closer,” I rasped. “The shooter who followed me to Kirby’s house must be working for Corrigan. And they don’t want me to find out the truth about my father. Why else would they act now? They could have killed me anytime.”

  “Sean, listen to yourself. ‘CR’? That could be anyone.”

  “What about Azorian? I told you. I saw it on his desk—”

  Nick exploded. “That was a zillion years ago, for Christ’s sake! How can you possibly be sure you remember it right? And anyway, say there is this big conspiracy, say you find out something bad happened to your dad? What then? Then you have to find out who was involved. And why. And then you need to punish them. Just like with Alex. There’s no end to that journey, Sean. And you want to do it all by yourself. Without me, without the Bureau. On the sly. That’s just nuts, Sean. How in God’s name can you not see that?”

  I was about ready to explode myself, but I took a breath and looked my partner right in the eye. The whole set up was so absurd that I’d resolved not to share it with anyone, but the time had come for full disclosure.

  “Look, there’s . . . there’s something else. I didn’t tell you because he said not to tell anyone. So they don’t get killed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Some guy called me. I don’t know who. Electronic voice modulator, prepaid, the works. He told me he had information about my dad. He said he would tell me the truth. We arranged to meet but he didn’t show.”

  “Are you actually hearing yourself? And this ‘deep throat’ . . . you’re saying he didn’t show up. Meaning you went to the meet alone. Without me to back you up. And maybe grab the guy and bitch-slap the truth out of him. That’s just—that’s great, Sean. Just real clear thinking there.”

  “I didn’t want to get you sucked into this.”

  Nick raised his hands and shook the air with them. “So you decide to head down to DC to blackmail Kirby into getting you that information. Just like that. You see what I’m talking about, right? This isn’t an investigation, Sean. It’s one burnt-out, revenge-obsessed agent on a mission to self-destruct.” The veins popped on his neck as he yelled it. “So this is my intervention, OK? I’m not going to let you do it. Not for my sake—I mean, forget me. I’m irredeemable. But for Tess and Kim. And Alex. Hell, and for you, ’cause I love you, you dumb fuck.” He held my gaze, then plunked himself back down heavily on the sofa across the room from my armchair.

  He pulled out his phone. “You’re going to hand yourself in.”

  I shook my head. “No, Nick. Don’t . . .”

  “You’re giving yourself up. Right now.”

  I watched him unlock his phone. “No. Listen to me. You think I’ll be safe with the cops? These guys want me dead. Put me in some holding cell and they’ll get to me.”

  “We’re not going to the cops. We’re keeping this in house. I’ll take you down to Federal Plaza. We’ll go over the whole thing with Gallo, step by step. Then we’ll decide what the hell we’re going to do.”

  “They’ll get to me. Anywhere in the system and they’ll get to me.”

  “Not on my watch.”

  He took out his phone and hit dial. He waited for several seconds, then said, “Boss? Sorry to wake you. Yeah, it’s about Reilly.” A beat, then he rolled his eyes. “Let me get a God damn word in and I’ll tell you.”

  I could hear his teeth grinding as he listened to the Assistant Director in Charge ream him out.

  “He’s here, with me,” he finally put in. “He wants to hand himself in, but only if you can guarantee FBI custody.” A pause, then, “OK. We’ll be waiting.”

  He ended the call.

  I felt like someone had unloaded a cement mixer in the pit of my stomach. “What have you done, man?”

  “I’m saving your life.”

  I shook my head with despair. “You think Gallo, of all people, will honor that?”

  “You’re one of his. I think the ADIC will do whatever it takes to give the Bureau a chance of containing this cluster fuck. And I’ll be here to make sure of it.”

  “They won’t give us Corrigan. Without him, we’ve got nothing.”

  “You saved the president’s life, Sean. Maybe it’s time we called in the big guns.”

  “Even then, you’ll come up empty handed, trust me.”

  “You should have a little faith, Sean.”

  “I’m all out.”

  There was nothing left to say. We just sat there in silence and waited for the callback from Gallo. We were both clearly running different scenarios through our rattled brains, because Nick then broke the silence and said, “If the Bureau doesn’t get anywhere, we go to the press.”

  I shrugged. “If I’m not dead by then.”

  “Let me worry about keeping you alive. You think about what you’re going to tell Tess.”

  Her name hit me even harder than the pistol whipping. Everything frittered away as my head filled with images of my family. Maybe Nick was right. Maybe my resolve to find out what happened to my dad so I could let go of the past was stopping me from seeing what effect the present was having on Tess and our kids and putting our future at risk.

  Either way, I’d be dealing with it from inside an FBI interview room.

  Nick’s phone rang. He picked up, listened, then said, “OK. We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

  He turned to me. “Gallo’s coming in.” He then reached over and handed me his phon
e. “You need to call Tess. Then you need to find yourself a good lawyer.”

  15

  Washington, DC

  “Sean, what the hell’s going on? The FBI says you’re wanted for—”

  I heard some shuffling movement on the other end of the line, like someone was taking the phone from her, then a male voice said, “Agent Reilly? This is Tom Murray. DC field office. Where are you?”

  So they were there already.

  I was fully expecting it, but still. It was an easy trail. My gun. My prints. My rental car, in my name. Train tickets bought together. A quick call, maybe to the house or to the office, would have shown us being in DC for the big dinner. A hotel check would have kicked up our reservation.

  The dinner. I wondered when they’d got to Tess. Before, after or—ouch—during.

  “I’m in FBI custody in New York. I’ve handed myself in to Special Agent Aparo. Can you please put Tess back on the phone?”

  Saying it there and then—it felt odd that I couldn’t say what my instinct would have made me say, which was, “put my wife back on the phone.” I felt a small tug at the pit of my stomach about that. Maybe it was something I ought to fix. Assuming she wanted it. Assuming it would be still be relevant. Assuming we still had a life together to look forward to.

  “You’ll pardon my being a bit of a stickler about this, but I’ll need some confirmation of that first.”

  “Hang on.”

  I passed the phone to Nick, told him what he needed to do. He spoke to Murray for a minute or so, explained the situation. Gave him the reassurance he needed. Then he handed it back to me.

  “Sean?” It was Tess’s voice. “What’s going on?”

  Hearing her like that, weary and worried—not easy.