Panic

by Jeff Abbott

  ‘She spied on me.’ He knew it was true. ‘My own mother spied on me.’

  She reached past their cold coffee cups to take his hand. ‘I’m so sorry, Evan.’

  The photo of Bast, scattered among the pictures of their parents and Jargo a lifetime ago, smiled up at them.

  They called Bedford from the plane and explained what they had found. ‘We want to go to London,’ Evan said. ‘My mother’s last travel photo assignment was there. Hadley Khan is there. And Bast died there. Can you get the CIA office in London to get us the complete files on Bast’s murder?’

  ‘There is no record in Bast’s file about this orphanage,’ Bedford said. ‘Are you sure it’s him in the photo?’

  ‘Yes. Could his record have been expunged if someone at the CIA wanted to hide his involvement?’

  ‘Anything is possible.’ Bedford’s voice sounded tight, as though the rules of engagement had just been rewritten. Evan could see the heightened tension on Carrie’s face: What the hell are we dealing with here?

  ‘London,’ Evan said. ‘Can we go?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bedford said. ‘If Carrie feels well enough to travel.’

  ‘I’m fine. Tired. I can sleep during the flight,’ Carrie said. ‘I’ll arrange a pickup for you in the London office. I’ll talk to our travel coordinator, but I believe you’ll have to have a fresh pilot. Change in Washington. And, Carrie, I’ll have a doctor check you before you leave for Britain, and another doctor for when you get to London.’

  ‘Thank you, Bricklayer.’

  Bedford hung up. Carrie went to the restroom. Evan closed his eyes to think.

  He heard Carrie return to her seat. He kept his eyes shut. The jet roared above Ohio, turning toward Virginia. Leaving a patch of ground that was the first step in the long lie of his family’s existence.

  He pretended to be back in the study in his Houston house, digital tape downloaded onto his computer and him threading his way through twenty hours of images, paring away all the extraneous gunk and talk from the heart of the story he wanted to tell the audience sitting in the quiet dark. He had read once that Michelangelo just took away the chunks of marble that didn’t belong and found the David hiding within the mass of stone. His David was the truth about his parents, the information that would free his father.

  So what was the true story, where was the subtle art under the block of marble?

  He opened his eyes. Carrie sat, staring ahead of her, hunched as though caught in a chill wind.

  Suddenly his heart filled with… what? He didn’t know. Pity, maybe, sadness, in that neither of them had asked to be born into this disaster. But she had chosen to stay in it. First for her parents, then for Bedford. And now for him.

  The weight of what he owed her, as opposed to the confusion and pain from her earlier lies, settled onto his heart. ‘What are you thinking of?’ he asked.

  ‘Your father,’ she said. ‘You look like him. In your smile. In those photos, your father had a very innocent smile. I was wondering if he is scared. For himself, for you.’

  ‘Jargo’s told him a thousand lies, I’m sure.’

  ‘He only has to tell one really good one.’

  ‘One wasn’t good enough to fool you,’ Evan said.

  ‘I wonder if our parents were ever afraid we would find out the truth and turn away from them.’

  ‘I’m sure they must have been. Even when they knew we loved them.’

  ‘But my father recruited me, he pulled me into this world, the same way Jargo did to Dezz. I still don’t understand why he did it.’ But she sounded tired, not angry.

  ‘We don’t know he had a choice, Carrie. Or maybe he hoped if you were involved in the business, you wouldn’t reject him.’

  ‘I would have loved him, no matter what. I thought he knew that.’

  ‘I’m sure he did.’

  She shook her head. ‘I just feel now, he had this whole life I never knew. A whole set of thoughts and worries and fears that he had to keep secret. It’s as if I didn’t know him at all. Probably that’s how you feel about your dad.’ Or me, he waited for her to say, but she didn’t.

  He cleared his throat. ‘I only know I love the dad that I know, and I have to believe that’s the truest part of my father, no matter what else he has done.’

  ‘I know. I feel the same. You would have liked my father, Evan.’

  ‘You must miss him.’

  ‘My God, seeing him in those pictures, so young… it’s still getting to me.’ She wiped at her eyes. He moved into the seat next to hers. Put his arm around her. Brushed the tears from her cheek.

  ‘They didn’t trust us with the truth,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘They were trying to protect us.’

  ‘That was all I wanted to do with you. Protect you. I’m sorry I failed.’

  ‘Carrie. You didn’t fail me. Not once. I know you were in a terrible, terrible position. I know.’

  ‘But you hate me a little. For lying.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘If you hate me,’ she said, ‘I’d understand.’

  ‘I don’t hate you.’ He needed her. It was a subtle shock. The knit of tragedy forever linked them, the same way his parents and her father were linked. He did not want to be alone.

  He kissed her. It was as tentative and shy as a first kiss, a first real kiss, often is. He leaned back to study her, and she closed her eyes and found his mouth with her own, gently, once, twice, then he kissed her with passion. A need for tenderness mixed with a need to show her that he loved her.

  She broke the kiss, rested her forehead against his. ‘Our families lived false lives. I did it for a year, I don’t want to live a lie anymore. You cannot imagine how lonely it is. I don’t want you to do it. We can just be us. I love you, Evan.’

  He wanted to believe. He needed to love; he needed to believe the best in her. He needed to regain what he had lost, in some small measure. The awareness was sudden and bright, a firecracker in his head. He wanted to be alone with her – away from CIA bugs, away from their parents caught as strangers in old photos, away from death and fear.

  ‘I love you, too,’ he said quietly.

  She settled into his arms and he held her until she slept.

  We can just be us.

  Yes, he thought. When Jargo is dead. When I’ve killed him.

  As the jet screamed toward Virginia, Evan didn’t wonder if she was the same woman he loved. He wondered if he was still the same man she loved.

  30

  J argo lay half-awake, half-asleep, waiting for the phone call that would end this nightmare. He was a boy again, sitting in a darkened room, listening to the voice of God ringing in his ears. God was dead, he knew, but the idea of God was not, of a being so powerful he held absolute sway over you, whether you breathed, whether you died. The boy he was had not slept in three days.

  ‘The challenge,’ the voice said, soft, British, quiet, ‘is that you must make a failure into an opportunity.’

  Jargo-the-boy – his name had been John then, the name he liked best – said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If you create a situation, and you lose control of it, you must be able to reimagine that situation. Turn it to your advantage.’

  ‘So if I fall off a ten-story building… I can hardly reimagine that into victory.’ He was thirteen and he was starting to question the whole world he had always known.

  ‘I speak of salvageable situations,’ the voice said with no trace of impatience. ‘You live and breathe, you can manipulate people. You must construct every trap so that if the prey escape, they do not believe they were in a trap of your making.’

  ‘Why do I care,’ Jargo asked, ‘what an escaped victim thinks?’

  ‘Stupid, stupid boy,’ the voice said. ‘You don’t see it. The trap still has to be set. You have to remain unknown, no suspicion of you brought to light. I don’t really think that you’ll ever be ready to lead.’

  The phone rang.

  Jarg
o sat up, blinking, the frightened boy sitting in the dark lingering for just a moment, then gone. He groped for the phone, clicked it on.

  ‘I have the cellular records from your special chunk of Ohio.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘They’re uploaded to your system,’ Galadriel said.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. Calls to the D.C. metro area.’

  ‘Seven,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Get me addresses for all those numbers.’

  A pause. ‘Two residences. Five government offices, mostly congressional offices and Social Security.’

  ‘None to confirmed CIA addresses?’

  ‘None,’ she said after another moment. ‘But we don’t have a complete list of CIA numbers. You know that’s impossible.’

  ‘Get me calls from or to all of Virginia and Maryland.’

  Another pause. ‘Yes. Sixty-seven in the course of the day.’

  ‘Any to Houston?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Get me all those addresses, for every call.’ His other line rang. ‘Hold on a minute.’ He answered the other phone. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think they’re flying to Britain,’ the voice said.

  Jargo closed his eyes. Down the hall he could hear the barest zoom-zoom of Dezz’s Game Boy, the quiet of Mitchell’s voice. They’d had a long day and accomplished little in trying to devise a way to draw Evan back to them. But now everything had just changed.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘I suspect from an Agency medical clinic in southwest Virginia. It’s called North Hill Clinic. There’s a private airstrip close by and the requisition is for that airstrip.’

  ‘They flew there from New Orleans?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve only seen the requisition for a plane to go from D.C. airspace to the U.K. Not even sure it’s them. A doctor requisitioned to meet the plane before departure, another doctor requisitioned for meeting the flight in London. If your former agent is injured… it could be her. Of course it could be an ancient Agency fart traveling with a medical condition.’

  ‘You said meet the plane. Where else has it been?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘You can’t find another requisition for today’s travel?’

  ‘No. But it must be domestic. A tight lid is kept on domestic data, and I’m not cleared for it.’

  ‘What’s the ID on the case for the flight to the U.K.?’

  ‘Also classified, but joint ops with British intelligence. That’s all I know.’ The voice started getting nervous. ‘You better get this under control, Jargo…’

  ‘It’s under control. Hold on.’ He got back on the phone with Galadriel. ‘I want to know if there were any cellular calls placed today from jet phones in our Ohio territory to southwestern Virginia. Cross-reference it with any known CIA or federal numbers in that area.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can trace aviation calls,’ Galadriel said. ‘I don’t know if the calls are handled differently.’

  ‘Just do it. Search for satellite calls as well.’

  He heard the hammer of keystrokes. He waited long minutes, listening to fingers dance on a keyboard as she wormed her way into databases. Galadriel hummed tunelessly as she worked. ‘Yes. Just one, if I’m reading the data correctly. Went through a transmitter near Goinsville, Ohio. To a number keyed to North Hill Clinic, due east of Roanoke, at two forty-seven this afternoon.’

  They had been to Goinsville.

  Jargo closed his eyes, considered his narrowing options. You must construct every trap so that if the prey escape, they do not believe they were in a trap of your making. The hardest lesson he had ever learned, but the philosophy had kept the Deeps in the shadows, kept them alive, made them rich. He’d racked his brains all night and day today, trying to construct a way to lure Evan out into the open, lure him back into their world to simplify killing him while making Mitchell believe they were rescuing Evan.

  But perhaps this wasn’t a disaster. Rather, his best chance yet to rid himself of every headache, every threat.

  Goinsville. They might have found nothing; what was there to find? Nothing. His life there was a past no one remembered. But they’d found something. London was the next stop in the thread. He could not ignore the possibility that Evan knew far more than his father thought he did.

  Certain times called for a slow cut; other times required a final slash across the throat.

  It was time to be brutal.

  He got back on the other phone. ‘I still need your help.’

  ‘What do you want?’ the voice asked.

  ‘Want. What a concept, want.’ Jargo knew the pain it would cause Mitchell. He wasn’t blind to suffering; pain was irrelevant. Jargo would suffer his own setback as well. But he had no choice. ‘I want a bomb.’

  THURSDAY MARCH 17

  31

  T he London-based CIA field officer – his name was Pettigrew, he didn’t offer a first name – picked them up at a private airstrip in Hampshire. He carried himself with an impatient air. Pettigrew was closemouthed as he hurried them to a car, driving them himself to a safe house in the London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood. He took his time, circling in roundabout routes, and Evan, who only knew London well enough to find Soho and the London Film School, got lost along the drive.

  Pettigrew didn’t speak a word to them on the way.

  It was early afternoon in London, and they had, to Evan’s surprise, left the rain in Ohio. The sky was clear, the few clouds thin cotton. Pettigrew shut a wrought-iron gate behind them as they went up the house’s front stairs.

  Pettigrew escorted them to tidy, unadorned rooms, with private baths, and they both showered. A doctor waited to change Carrie’s bandage and inspect her healing wound. When they were done, they followed Pettigrew into a small dining room where an elderly woman brewed strong tea and coffee and served a lunch of cold meats, salad, cheese, pickles, and bread. Evan drank down coffee with gratitude.

  Pettigrew sat down, waited until the elderly lady had bustled back into the kitchen. ‘This is all damned odd. Being ordered to dig up Scotland Yard files with cobwebs on them. Taking orders from a man with a code name.’

  ‘My apologies,’ Carrie said.

  ‘I have top clearance,’ he said. Almost peevishly. ‘But I live to serve. We didn’t have much notice’ – his tone held the acid of the long-suffering – ‘but here’s what we found.’

  He handed them the first file, squiring the remaining two close to his chest. ‘Alexander Bast was murdered, two shots, one to the head, one to the throat. What makes it interesting is that the bullets came from two different guns.’

  ‘Why would the killer need two weapons?’ Carrie said.

  ‘No. Two killers,’ Evan said.

  Pettigrew nodded. ‘Vengeance killing. To me it speaks of an emotional component to the killing. Each killer wanting to put his imprint on the act.’ He slid them a picture of the sprawled body. ‘He was killed in his home twenty-four years ago, middle of the night, no signs of a struggle. Entire house wiped down for prints.’ Pettigrew paused. ‘He worked for us for twenty-three years before he died.’

  ‘Can you give me more details about his work here?’ Carrie asked. She and Evan agreed that she, being a CIA employee, would drive the questioning. An ID Bedford had provided named Evan as a CIA analyst, but he stayed quiet.

  ‘Well, among Bast’s many creative sidelines, he dabbled in art, he dabbled in sleeping with celebrities who frequented his nightclubs. Drug arrests at one of his clubs lost him his cachet, and he burned thousands of pounds trying to keep them afloat. We looked hard at him then, we don’t want agents involved with illegal narcotics, but the drug dealing was simply a few of his regular customers abusing his hospitality. After the clubs closed, he focused all his energies on his publishing firm, which he owned for quite a while but had been his most neglected business. He published literature in translation, especially Spanish, Russian, and Turkish. Imported permitted books bac
k into the Soviet Union, translated underground Russian literature into English, German, and French. So he was a valuable contact, given that he could reach into the dissident community in the Soviet Union and that he could travel somewhat freely back and forth. At first his handlers suspected he might be a KGB agent, but he checked out clean and got cleared on every follow-up. We watched him closely during his financial troubles; that’s a time when an operative might be bought. But he always came out clean. He was popular with the dissident Russian community here in London.’

  ‘So what exactly did he do for the CIA?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘Couriered data from his contacts’ contacts in and out of Berlin, Moscow, and Leningrad. He was handled by American embassy officers under diplomatic cover. But he was low-level. He didn’t have access to Soviet state secrets. And the dissident community was not particularly useful to the Agency at that point in time – they might give us names of people who had critical access and would spy for us, but dissidents were too closely watched by the KGB. Too easy, frankly, for the KGB to infiltrate.’

  Evan studied the picture of Bast, murdered. Bast’s eyes were wide in horrified surprise. This man had known Evan’s parents. Played an unseen role in their lives. ‘No suspects?’

  ‘Bast lived a high life, even after his fall. A few husbands were rather unhappy with him. He owed money. He broke business deals. Any number of people might have wanted him out of their lives. Of course, Scotland Yard didn’t know about Bast working for the CIA, and we didn’t tell them.’

  ‘Rather important information to withhold,’ Carrie said.

  ‘I didn’t personally. You needn’t sound peevish.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Carrie said with a laugh, trying to defuse the sudden tension. ‘You’re not even forty, right? It just surprises me.’