Panic

by Jeff Abbott

  Dad poured them both glasses of ice water. ‘Let me ask you a few questions.’

  This was worse than being interrogated with a gun at your head. Because this was reality given an awful twist. Acting normal, talking normal, when nothing was normal.

  ‘Do you know where the files your mother stole are?’

  ‘No. Dezz and Jargo erased them. So I went to the source.’

  ‘Khan. What did you actually take from him?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  Evan knocked the water glass out of his father’s hand. It shattered on the floor, sprayed cubes and liquid across the carpet. ‘I don’t even know you. I came here to rescue you, and you want to fucking grill me, Dad. We need to go out, get in the car, and get Carrie. Then we run. Forever. Jargo killed Mom. She wanted to protect me from this life, and you know it.’

  ‘Just tell me exactly what evidence you have against my brother.’

  A horrible thought occurred to him. ‘You told Bricklayer to stay away. You didn’t want to be rescued. If you couldn’t get me back… you want to stay with these people. You really do believe Jargo. Not me.’

  ‘Evan.’ Mitchell looked at his son as though his heart were an open wound. ‘It doesn’t matter now. We can both go. Both hide. I know how. We never have to worry again.’

  ‘You answer me, Dad. You were Arthur Smithson. Mom was Julie Phelps. Why did you have to vanish?’

  ‘None of that matters now. It won’t make a difference.’

  Evan gripped his father’s arm. ‘You can’t keep any more secrets from me.’

  ‘You won’t understand.’ Mitchell bent as though in physical pain.

  ‘I love you. You know that is true. Nothing you can say will make me not love you.’ Evan put his arm around his father. ‘We can’t run. We can’t let Jargo win. He killed Mom, he’ll kill Carrie. Doesn’t that matter?’ Evan’s voice rose. ‘You don’t even act like you miss Mom.’

  Mitchell stepped back in shock, grief twisting his face. ‘My heart is broken, Evan. Your mother was my world. If I lost you as well…’

  The cell phone in Evan’s pocket vibrated. Evan opened it. ‘Yes?’

  His father stared at him, looking as if he wanted to reach for the cell phone. But he didn’t.

  Razur had provided Evan with the phone, and only Razur had the number.

  ‘They really should name a computer after me,’ Razur said. ‘Or an entire programming language.’

  ‘You did it.’

  ‘I decoded the files. Bloody bitch of a job. The files even had passwords against them when decoded. One file was triple-locked, so it must be the grand prize. It’s just a list of names and pictures. It’s called CRADLE.’

  Probably a code name for the client list. That would be the file most carefully guarded. ‘How can you get it to me?’

  ‘I’m uploading copies to your remote server account. You can download the files and the encryption software all at once. Can I delete the originals or trash the laptop?’

  ‘No. I may need them. But I would suggest you hide them someplace very safe.’

  ‘And here I was all tempted to mount that laptop on my wall. Like a tiger I’d brought down.’ Razur was merry with his triumph.

  ‘Thank you,’ Evan said. ‘Enjoy the money.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘You just saved lives.’

  ‘That’s a bonus, then,’ Razur said. ‘Drop out of sight for a while.’

  ‘I’m going on holiday. But you know how to reach me.’

  Razur hung up and Evan erased the number from his call log. He folded up his phone. Time to decide if he could trust his dad.

  ‘Is there a computer and Internet access in this house?’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Never mind. Tell me.’

  Mitchell licked at his lips. ‘Yes. In the back bedroom.’

  Evan went to the bedroom, found a PC connected to broadband. He fired up the computer, accessed the remote server account Shadey had set up for him when he’d called Shadey in Goinsville. ‘Where will Jargo take Carrie?’

  ‘To a safe house. For questioning.’

  ‘Call them. Tell them to let her go. Or Jargo’s client list is on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning.’

  ‘If you hurt him, he’ll just go underground and he’ll hunt us.’

  ‘Is it that you’re afraid of him or that he’s your brother?’

  ‘Both,’ Mitchell said. ‘But listen to me. You release that list, we’ll be hunted by far more than the Deeps. Intelligence services, criminal rings around the world, will put bounties on our heads.’

  ‘Stop with the global guilt trip. You got us into this, I am getting us the hell out of it.’ Evan tapped on the keyboard, downloaded Razur’s uploads. There were several. He opened the first one. Account numbers, a good three dozen, in various Swiss and Cayman banks. He clicked open a folder called Logistics: a file inside, one of many, held the requirements for his mother’s last assignment in Britain. A third held arrangements to meet with the Israeli Mossad and hand them a Hamas accountant who had reneged on a deal to provide information to Jargo. Photos of the murder of Hadley Khan, his slow torture, taken by Thomas Khan to prove his fealty, to document his loyalty to Jargo over family. And so on. Every document a page in the diary of a secret world.

  A document that listed clients. For all the fear and death it had caused, the file was a simple spreadsheet. A few names at the CIA – including Pettigrew’s – at the FBI, at Mossad, at both Britain’s MI6 and MI5, at Russia’s SVR, at the Chinese Guoanbu, at the German and French and South African intelligence agencies. The Japanese. Both the Koreas. Fortune 500 companies. Military commanders. High-ranking government officials.

  ‘My God,’ his father said behind him.

  Evan clicked back to the folder file for logistics. He opened a sub-folder named travel. He read the last three entries. A chill rose on his skin.

  ‘Dad. How did Jargo grab you when you came back to the States?’

  ‘I flew into Miami on Wednesday night, he called me back from my job early. He said there was a problem, he had to hide me. They took me to the safe house and he locked me up.’

  ‘Wednesday. Then what?’

  ‘He and Dezz went to Washington to get a lead on Donna’s contact at the CIA.’

  ‘No. They went to Austin.’ He pointed at a listing in the logistics file. ‘Khan arranged for a charter flight for them, from Miami to Austin on Thursday. They went to see Mom. Or to watch her. Maybe she spotted Dezz or Jargo, knew she was being trailed. That’s what triggered her to run Friday morning.’

  His father stared at the screen.

  Evan clicked down to another spreadsheet. UK operations. Money funneled into an account in Switzerland, from one to another. ‘Dad. Look. This transfer. Who is Dundee?’

  His father had found his voice again. ‘An agent’s code name.’

  ‘Paid the day I arrived in London and Jargo tried to bomb me. Dundee is probably the bomb maker.’

  Mitchell sank to the floor, still staring at the computer.

  The final document – titled CRADLE – sat alone at the window’s bottom. Evan clicked it open as his father grabbed his hand and said, ‘Don’t, son, please, don’t.’

  43

  T oo late. Evan opened CRADLE. It held old photos – of children. Sixteen children. One of his father, with his wide smile. His mother was a blond wisp of a child, high-cheekboned, her hair twisted in a garish, girlish braid. Jargo at seven already had the flat, cold eyes of a killer. A sweet-faced girl looked like a childish version of the driver McNee. Names lay underneath each photo. He stared at his parents and Jargo. And Carrie’s father.

  Arthur Smithson. Julie Phelps. John Cobham. Richard Allan.

  ‘Those were your real names,’ Evan said. ‘What happened to your parents?’

  ‘They all died. We never knew them.’

  ‘Where were you born?’


  His dad didn’t answer. Instead he asked, ‘Did you download the encryption software?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His father leaned over and clicked buttons. Dropped the CRADLE document on it again and the file reopened.

  Not the CIA. Not an independent organization that Alexander Bast had started and Jargo had hijacked. New names lay beneath each schoolchild photo.

  His mother. Julija Ivanovna Kuzhkina.

  His father. Piotr Borisovich Matarov.

  Jargo. Nikolai Borisovich Matarov.

  ‘No,’ Evan said.

  ‘We were a great, great secret,’ his father said behind him. In tears. ‘The seeds of the next wave of Soviet intelligence. The gulags were full of women, political dissidents, who were not allowed to keep their children. Our fathers were either other dissidents or prison guards who impregnated the women. Our mothers got to see us – once a month, for an hour – until we were two and then never got to see us again. Most of the children ended up in labor or re-education camps. Alexander Bast went through the camps. He found the female prisoners with the highest IQs – giving them legitimate tests, because the Soviets claimed dissidents were mentally damaged and had low IQs – and he tested their two-year-olds, and then he took a group of us away.’

  ‘Bast was CIA.’

  ‘And KGB. He was a KGB-dangled double agent. His loyalty was to the USSR. He played the CIA for fools.’

  Evan touched the screen, the photo of his mother. ‘He transformed you into little Americans.’

  ‘In Ukraine, the Soviets built a replica of an American town. Called Clifton. Bast had another complex near it. We had the best English and French teachers, we spoke it like natives. We were even taught to mimic accents: Southern, New Englander, New Jersey.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘We even had American textbooks, although our instructors were quick to point out Western falsehoods in favor of Soviet truth. And from an early age, we were taught tradecraft. How to fight, if needed. How to kill. How to lie. How to spy. How to live a completely double life. We grew up in constant training, programmed for success, for fearlessness, to be the best.’

  Evan put his arm around his father.

  ‘At the time, Soviet intelligence was in disarray,’ Mitchell said. ‘The FBI and the CIA kept rolling up and shutting down Soviet operations and agents in the States, because so many of the American-born agents had ties to the Communist Party before World War Two. And if you were a Soviet diplomat, the FBI and CIA knew you were also likely KGB – it tied the spies’ hands, constantly. The illegals – spies living under deep cover – were more successful. Or at least Bast sold the upper echelon of KGB on this idea. Very few knew of the program. It was identified under a training program called CRADLE on budgetary documents and reports, and given an extremely low profile. No one could know. The investment that would have been lost was too much, much more than training an adult agent.’

  ‘Then Bast brought you to the orphanage in Ohio.’

  ‘He bought it. Set us up in our new names and identities…’

  ‘And then promptly destroyed the orphanage and the courthouse. Giving you a fallback position if your identity papers were ever questioned. And a source for new identities when needed.’

  Mitchell nodded.

  ‘To grow up and be spies.’ Evan pictured his parents as children, drilled, trained, groomed for a life of suspicion and deceit. In the photos they looked as if they just wanted to go outside and play.

  Mitchell nodded again. ‘To be sleeper agents. But we were to attend college – our scholarships paid from an orphans’ fund run by a company that was a front for Bast – and then he, as a longtime trusted CIA operative, would smooth the road for recruitment.’

  ‘Into the CIA.’

  ‘Yes. Or land us jobs in defense, energy, aviation… wherever would be useful. We were to be flexible. To focus on operations. To wait for opportunities. To serve when summoned.’

  ‘And as the Smithsons, you got a job as a translator for military intelligence, Mom worked for the navy. You were perfectly placed. Why did you become Mitchell Casher?’

  ‘For you.’ Now his father seemed to draw strength from the moment. He stood before Evan, his hands folded in front of his waist like a penitent, his eyes moist with tears, his voice strong. Not trembling.

  ‘I don’t understand, Dad.’

  ‘We saw what America was. Freedom. Opportunity. Honesty. For all its warts, its problems – America is a paradise. We wanted to raise our children here, Evan, without fear. Without worry that we would be caught and killed or summoned back to Russia, where our parents had been in jail and we’d never been given a choice in our lives. Did you know at Clifton, we had to be taught how to make choices? How to deal with real independence?’ Mitchell shook his head. ‘We had freedom; we had interesting work; we had food in our stomachs and no lines to stand in. We knew we had been lied to. Completely lied to.’

  Evan put his arm around his father once more.

  ‘The only thing that shielded us from the KGB was Bast. He was our sole handler, our sole contact. We were not listed in official KGB files. We were not acknowledged. We were not even given credit for the operations we ran that were successful. If I stole computer-networking technology, Bast invented a fictitious traitor or onetime agent who had stolen it. The KGB command never knew I existed. Otherwise those fools in the KGB – more like a black hole than a bureaucracy – would have gotten impossibly greedy; asked us for the moon and stars and destroyed us all by giving us impossible jobs. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan; Bast told Jargo that he might be reassigned to run the networks the Soviets were building in Kabul. If he was moved out of position, it would have exposed us all to the greed and incompetence that was rife in the KGB’s American operations.’

  ‘You would have had to work according to the KGB’s rules. Not Bast’s.’

  ‘In a strange way, we were like his children.’ Mitchell closed his eyes. ‘Your mother was pregnant with you, a few of the other Deeps had married, started having children. Building real lives.’ He swallowed again. ‘We were not supposed to be in contact with each other, but we were. My brother saw an opportunity. We would finally be real Americans. We’d be capitalists about our work.’

  ‘So the Deeps killed Bast. Two shots from two different guns. Jargo and another Deep.’

  ‘Me,’ Mitchell said in a soft voice. ‘Jargo and your mother and I went to London. Shot him. Jargo first, then me. It was like killing my own father. But I did what I had to do. For you. To give you a chance.’ Mitchell swallowed. ‘We killed him and the few we could reach in Russia who knew about CRADLE. It was less than ten men at that point. That file of us as children, it looks like a scanned paper I saw once of all of us, back in Russia. It belonged to Bast.’

  ‘And Khan kept it. For insurance, in case you all betrayed him the way Jargo did Bast,’ Evan said.

  ‘I think you’re right. We created the evidence and fed it to one of Bast’s KGB handlers, that he had been murdered by the CIA, his fictional agents eliminated by the CIA. We all vanished from the lives we had lived. You were only a few months old then.’

  ‘But once the Soviet Union fell… you could have stepped forward.’

  ‘We had been spying for years by then, Evan. For the CIA. Against the CIA. We were freelance and we were very good. We could hardly step forward and say, “Hey, we’re a very successful network of former KGB agents, we’ve been doing the jobs too dirty for your own budgets, for your own people.” We would have been seen as the ultimate loose cannons, hunted by every intelligence service. Some of our clients, they’ve been using us for twenty-five years. They’ve risen far in their careers. We couldn’t come forward. We had… built wonderful lives.’

  ‘So you did deals with everyone and their brother.’

  ‘We were the town whores of intelligence work. We stole from the Israelis for the Syrians. We kidnapped old Germans in Argentina for the Israelis. We stole from German scientists and sold to KGB agent
s who never knew we were once their colleagues. Corporate espionage because it’s fast and lucrative.’ Mitchell ran his hand along his face. ‘Espionage is illegal in every country. There is no clemency. Even ex-KGBers that are working as consultants now in the U.S., they had not done what we had. They had not committed murder. They had not lived under false names. They had not sold their services to the highest bidder.’

  ‘And this noble work was done for my sake.’

  ‘For you. For Carrie. For ourselves and all our children. We didn’t want you to never have choices. We didn’t want to take you away from everything you had ever known. We’ – here Mitchell’s voice broke, that of a boy torn from a mother’s arms – ‘we didn’t want you to be taken from us. We wanted to be alive and free.’

  The shock of his statement made Evan’s bones feel like water. ‘This isn’t freedom, Dad. You haven’t been able to do what you wanted. Be what you wanted. You just traded one cage for another.’

  ‘Don’t judge me.’

  Evan stood. ‘I’m not staying in the cage you built for yourself.’

  Mitchell shook Evan’s shoulders. ‘It wasn’t a cage. Your mother got to be a photographer. I got to work with computers. Our choices. And you got to grow up free, not afraid, not with us rotting in a prison, just like our mothers.’ Mitchell’s mouth contorted in fury and grief; rage fired his eyes.

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘You don’t know the evil you were saved from, Evan. I don’t mean the evil of murder. I mean the evil of oppression. Of your soul suffocating. Of constant fear.’

  ‘I know you think you did the right thing for me.’

  ‘There’s no think about it, I did, your mother and I did!’

  ‘Yes. Dad.’ Evan drew his father into a long embrace, and Mitchell Casher shuddered. ‘It’s okay. I will always love you.’

  His father hugged back, fiercely.

  ‘You did the right thing at the time,’ Evan said. ‘But this life killed Mom, and it has nearly killed me and you both. Please. We have a chance to end it. We can go anywhere else. I’ll dig ditches, I’ll learn a new language. I just want what’s left of my family to stay together.’