The Deceivers

by Alex Berenson

  Even if an eternity in Hell awaited him, he didn’t care. Not as long as he could be with her now.

  He opened his eyes to find the tonneau rolling back. She’d pulled off the road at the Lewiston Hill Overlook, where the Bitterroots opened into the plains of western Idaho. The colors below were muted, a winding gray river cutting through brown-and-green hills. The sky was pure and blue, endless and ruthless.

  “You’re shivering, Tom. I thought you would tell me when you wanted out.”

  “Who said I wanted out?”

  They stopped for the night in Wyoming. The motel was called the Hilltop. Miller didn’t see any hills, but he was too tired to argue. He lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, as Allie washed up. She closed the bathroom door. He thought he heard her phone buzz, the back-and-forth of texts. But the faucet was running and he couldn’t be sure.

  “Can I borrow the truck?” she said when she emerged.

  He tossed her the keys. “You okay?”

  “Woman trouble. I need a drugstore.”

  He didn’t believe her. But before he could say anything, she was gone.

  After an hour, he started to worry. She didn’t trust him to do what she needed. She’d left for good—

  The door swung open.

  “Sorry, babe. Got lost.”

  Whatever power he thought he had over her was an illusion. He might be the soldier, but without her, he was nothing at all.

  He was afraid to ask where she’d really been.

  In the rickety neighborhoods north of downtown St. Louis, they found a no-name motel that took a five-hundred-dollar deposit instead of a credit card. Allie rented a Chevy Lumina, and they drove around St. Peters, tracing routes around the church. Terrain mapping, Miller’s captains in Afghanistan would have said. Unfortunately, the terrain wasn’t ideal.

  The Abundant Life campus included the church and four smaller buildings at the intersection of Eagle Rock Avenue and Oakhurst Drive. Eagle Rock was a six-lane boulevard that ran directly north to I-70. Along the way, it passed an intersection with red-light cameras, as well as two gas stations with surveillance cams.

  Oakhurst was a curving two-lane road that ran east–west through subdivisions. Worse yet, the entire area consisted of low rolling hills, not the pancake-flat prairie Miller had imagined. And the church was set behind a huge parking lot. On a busy Sunday, the lot’s cars might block his field of fire. Miller worried, too, that they had no obvious place to park the Ram while they waited. The Beltway snipers had operated with one huge advantage. They had picked victims at random. They hadn’t needed to wait more than a few minutes.

  “Maybe we do it at his house?” Hurley and his family lived a mile from the church.

  “No. Here. On Sunday. After the eleven a.m. service, the big one.”

  She was insistent. Almost pouting. “We can’t know he’ll come out through the main doors.”

  “He will.”

  “I thought you hadn’t seen him in all these years—”

  “I know him. He’ll shake hands and listen to these people telling him how wonderful he is while he thinks about what he wants to do to their daughters. If this is too hard for you, let’s go back to Colfax.” She left the rest of the sentence unsaid: . . . until I take off again.

  “We’ll figure it out, Allie.”

  She put her arms around him and wrapped him up. That fast, she was his again. For now.

  Finding the right hide came first. On the west side of Eagle Rock, three hundred yards north of the Abundant Life campus, was a more modest church, brick with a white cross in front. Past the church, a service road led off the avenue to an electrical substation that serviced the subdivisions to the west. The substation was a fenced, cleared area fifty feet in diameter, screened with trees so that the neighbors wouldn’t notice it. A razor wire fence protected the transformers inside. It had cameras, but they were focused only on the electrical equipment.

  Allie parked the Lumina in the brick church’s lot while Miller walked to the substation and scanned through the trees with binoculars. Behind him, electricity hummed through the transformers, the sound strangely alive. The spot wasn’t ideal. Miller would be forced to angle his shot through the big trees. The stoplights on Eagle Rock produced predictable traffic patterns, but Miller still had to worry a car would cross his field of fire as he pulled the trigger. And if utility workers showed up while Allie was parked, she’d have no good excuse for her presence. At least the service road was paved rather than dirt, presumably so that utility vehicles didn’t get bogged down when they came in. Paved meant no tire tracks, no treads for the police to chase down.

  Miller thought the spot was viable. Barely. It did have one big advantage. It wasn’t visible from Abundant Life. No one would immediately connect it with the shot.

  He walked Allie over, showed her where to park. She brought the Lumina around, and Miller lay on the roof, which was roughly as high as the Ram bed would be, and made sure the angle was right. Start to finish, he was at the substation for forty minutes, longer than he would have liked. He waited for a nosy cop to come by, ask what they were doing. No one did.

  Next step, finding a clean way out. By the end of the afternoon, they had one. Left—north—on Eagle Rock, left again on Hillside Drive. Four other roads followed, all with equally bland names. Finally, they reached Bryan Road, a big north–south boulevard about two miles west.

  The route was tricky, but it reduced their risk of passing a police cruiser responding to the shooting. The cops would stick to the avenues, where they could speed. And Bryan Road was far enough from the church that the cops probably wouldn’t check its cameras, busy enough that the Ram shouldn’t stand out if they did. They’d head south on Bryan to Missouri 364, a state highway that merged quickly into I-64. Two miles westbound on I-64 and they’d hit I-70 at Wentzville.

  By then, the cops would need more than camera readers to find them. They would need a psychic.

  Friday. Miller and Allie had two days to fill. Miller couldn’t even give himself another round of target practice. He had to assume that after the shooting, the cops and FBI would check every range within a hundred miles.

  Allie was even more impatient. At lunch, she pushed for them to go to Abundant Life and meet Hurley.

  “I want to see him, see if he remembers me.”

  “No.”

  “Because you’re afraid.”

  “Because the police will know this isn’t random. The first question they’ll ask: Did anyone new want to meet Pastor Hurley recently? We just spent a whole day trying to beat surveillance. Now you want to show up and wave.”

  “Fine, we’ll go to the service Saturday night. We’ll blend in.”

  As if beautiful twenty-something women filled the Abundant Life congregation. “Forget it.”

  “If you won’t do it, then go home.”

  “This guy’s only the first on your list. You want to get to the others or not?”

  She registered his seriousness. She pouted for an hour, but this time he knew he had her. Again, he would only see what she’d done later. How she’d made him own the killing.

  On Saturday an ugly midwestern wind kicked up, twenty miles an hour, gusts to forty. Wind this strong deflected shots by feet, not inches. If it didn’t drop overnight, they’d have to wait a week. The Weather Channel and the local forecasters said this front would pass sometime Sunday, but no one knew exactly when.

  He didn’t say anything to Allie. He wasn’t sure her nerves could take another week of waiting. They stayed inside for most of Saturday, eating cheap pizza and clawing at each other. Until now, their sex had been respectful, even loving. Now Miller saw another side of her. She demanded he slap her, put his hands around her throat.

  Miller stopped moving. “No way, Allie.”

  “Sissy.”

  “I can’t hurt y
ou. I love you.” The first time he’d ever spoken those words. The worst possible time.

  She pushed him off her as if he’d been hurting her against her will, the very opposite of the truth. She sobbed—big, silent heaves. Miller listened to the wind howl against the door and prayed to himself that Sunday would dawn sunny and windless.

  It did. The front passed sooner than the forecasters had predicted. In the motel parking lot, Miller felt only a hint of a breeze. They ate breakfast and checked out. At 11:30 a.m., Allie parked behind a dumpster in a deserted downtown alley. Miller kissed her cheek, slid into the bed of the Ram. She pulled the tonneau down. If the mission went as planned, he wouldn’t see her again until Luke Hurley was dead. His headache was returning. With the pain came the sense that he was about to do something wrong. Something unforgivable. What did he know about Luke Hurley? Nothing. He hadn’t even googled the guy.

  Miller dry-swallowed a half-dozen Advil and Tylenol. If he could beat his headache, maybe his doomed feeling would disappear, too.

  The pickup stuttered through downtown, accelerated up a ramp. Half an hour passed before finally it slowed. It stopped for a light, and Miller knew they were on Eagle Rock. Very soon, Allie would turn onto the service road. They’d aimed to be in position about twenty past noon. Miller’s watch said they were going to be right on schedule.

  His heart raced. He’d never felt this way, not even on the mid-summer patrols that he and everyone else knew were headed for Taliban ambushes. Not even when he woke up in those clean white sheets at Kandahar Airfield and couldn’t remember his own name. He was about to kill a man because he couldn’t say no to his girlfriend.

  You are whipped, he heard Willie Coole, his old platoon sergeant, say. Whipped as whipped can be. Out loud. So real that Miller looked around, wondering if Coole had somehow snuck into the pickup with him.

  I’m protecting her.

  How can you protect her when you don’t know nothing about her, Miller? Call me a hick if you like, but I know when a man’s thinking with his—

  The pickup swung right, rumbled over the pebbled asphalt of the service road. Angled back and forth and stopped. The engine cut. The driver’s door swung open. Miller flicked on the lantern, pulled out the Remington and the scope, just as he had in Colfax. Moving automatically now. Focus on the details. Let the mission take care of itself.

  Too late to change his mind, anyway.

  Outside, Allie peeled off the bumper stickers. Sunday light flooded inside. Miller slid the muzzle through, until the scope was flush with the higher hole. Everything happening with the fluid logic of a dream. Seeing a dragon through the scope wouldn’t have surprised him.

  But instead: trees, parking lot, road. The Abundant Church lot and the white façade of the central church building. It looked more like an arena than a traditional church. Allie had parked a couple degrees off-line, but Miller wriggled the muzzle of the rifle, focused the scope on a pair of smoked-glass doors, tall white crosses painted on them. The main entrance. He had a clear field of fire.

  He scanned the lot, looking for security guards or cops. He saw one police cruiser parked at the south end of the lot, but it was empty. Maybe the officer was inside. A bald, beefy man in a white dress shirt and jeans stood at the front door. Miller guessed he was an off-duty cop who watched the parking lot during services.

  The doors swung open. A trickle of people emerged, then more and more. The service must just have ended. Husbands and wives walked hand in hand. A white teenager pushed an old black woman in a wheelchair. A handsome young Hispanic man whose legs stopped mid-thigh swung himself ahead on crutches. Miller would have bet his life the guy was a vet. The folks walking out seemed happy. Could they all be so wrong?

  Then Miller remembered all those Catholic priests who’d raped little boys. You couldn’t trust anyone. Just because Hurley had followers didn’t mean anything. Miller trusted Allie or he didn’t. That simple.

  Don’t have to do this, Specialist. Coole again.

  Willie—

  It’s Platoon Sergeant Coole to you. And you know somewhere in that shook-up head of yours that this whole thing is FUBAR. This girl is trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for—

  Miller’s head was hurting, he’d been looking through the scope too long. He closed his eyes, tried to think.

  Abort the mission, Specialist. Turn around, go home.

  Coole couldn’t know, but he’d made exactly the wrong play. Home was nowhere. Colfax was an empty trailer. Allie’s scent on every sheet.

  Miller came back to the scope. The talk with Coole had taken only a few seconds in his head, but minutes seemed to have passed. The flood of parishioners had thinned. Miller wondered if he’d missed Hurley already.

  The doors opened, and the minister stepped out. Tall and handsome, blue suit, white shirt, red tie. A blonde in a modest flowered dress walked beside him. Two kids followed. Hurley stopped outside the doors, as Allie had promised he would, and chatted with a knot of men and women. His arm rested on his wife’s shoulder.

  Miller tapped his walkie-talkie. “Clear?”

  He didn’t know what he was hoping to hear, but after a few seconds, his receiver squawked. “Clear.”

  The rules of engagement haven’t been met, the risk of civilian casualties is too high—

  Miller pushed in his earplugs, but Coole kept talking. Miller didn’t know if he could do this with Coole yapping at him. He watched through the scope as Hurley’s wife raised her hands in a Can you believe this guy? gesture. She stepped close to him and kissed his cheek.

  Miller cursed softly, waited. Hurley’s wife reached into her purse and came up with what looked like car keys. She held them over her head, jingled them. Hurley laughed again. Then their son grabbed them and tossed them to his sister. Hurley raised a hand, and father and son high-fived. Somehow, Miller had stumbled into an episode of America’s Happiest Family. Seeing them like this infuriated him. He couldn’t blame Allie—he hated them. No one got to be this happy.

  Who did this kid think he was to have a father—

  Miller’s pulse pounded in his throat. He made himself breathe deep. The shot comes if you’re ready, the instructors at Fort Benning liked to say. If you’re in place, zeroed, your breathing is right. It always comes. Patience, grasshopper.

  Hurley’s wife kissed him once more, stepped away. The kids followed. Hurley turned to the parishioners. He was in three-quarter profile to Miller, not perfect, but at this range, on a windless day, Miller knew he could land the round. Anyway, he was sure Hurley was going to turn, sure as he’d ever been of anything.

  Don’t, I’m ordering you, Specialist—

  A last yelp from Coole. Miller ignored him. Hurley turned to his right, offering his chest to Miller, a perfect target—

  17

  MEXICO CITY

  For generations, Mexico City had been called the DF, short for Distrito Federal. Now, to establish its independence from Mexico’s corrupt central government, it was busily rebranding itself as CDMX. The boldface initials popped up on billboards, buses, park benches. But by any name, the city was tough. Exciting and vibrant, sure, but traffic-choked, crime-riddled, earthquake-prone, and, as an added bonus, running out of water.

  Then there was Polanco.

  The neighborhood lay just north of Chapultepec Park, a seventeen-hundred-acre park that offered an oasis of green in the center of the twenty-million-person metropolis. Mexico City had hundreds of thousands of residents who were rich by any standard. Many of the wealthiest lived in Polanco, whose central boulevard, Avenida Presidente Masaryk, could have passed with a squint for Rodeo Drive. Chanel? Check. Louis Vuitton? Check and double-check. Porsche? Vroom!

  Wells and Coyle walked down Masaryk now, 1 p.m. on Sunday, skies blue and sun warm. Pale-skinned women in two-hundred-dollar sneakers jogged past.

 
“Don’t look like the Mexicans I know,” Coyle said. “These people are white.”

  “The Mexicans you know snuck over the border to get away from these people.”

  “Mowing lawns in the land of the free.”

  Wells’s phone buzzed before he could answer. He tipped the screen to Coyle.

  “Tarnes?”

  “The one and only.”

  Wells had called her thirty-six hours before from the airport in Quito while Coyle stood at the United counter booking them on a flight to Houston. Though it was almost midnight on a Friday, Tarnes answered within two rings, ready to work. No need to explain she was in a bar or to ask someone in the background to turn off the television. In her ability to focus, she reminded Wells of Exley. But where the job had nearly overwhelmed Exley, Tarnes seemed more careerist. Wells sensed she would have worked just as hard at a law firm or a software company.

  Wells told Tarnes what Graciela Frietas had said about her husband’s money laundering and the mysterious banker named Z. Plus the mobile phone, the list of names, the FBI badge, and the paperback he and Coyle had found.

  “FBI badge?”

  “We think it’s fake.”

  “You hope it’s fake. What about Frietas?”

  “Gone. Permanently.”

  She didn’t ask. “And the wife’s given us what we’re going to get?”

  “Correct.”

  “So the Russians are running an op with the Islamic State.”

  Wells wondered if he heard sarcasm in her voice, decided he didn’t. Shafer had always been preoccupied with motive. And Shafer would push back hard if he thought Wells was following the wrong trail. Not Tarnes. At least not yet. Wells realized he wouldn’t have minded more resistance. A little more.