Simple Genius

by David Baldacci

  She turned to leave.

  “You killed Monk Turing. And Len Rivest. And you blew up the morgue? All in the name of serving your freaking country? Do you know how many laws you’ve broken?”

  Valerie said, “Monk Turing did what you did. Broke in here. He was shot for it. And we had every right to do it.”

  “Right. If that were the truth you wouldn’t have made it look like a suicide. So people would think it was like the others. He saw the people getting off the plane, didn’t he? He saw the drugs. So Turing had to die. But what you didn’t know was he’d been over here before and he put it all down in a code. Alicia took the code and despite what she told us I bet she actually did crack it. So Viggie disappears. Am I right? Come on, Val, tell me!”

  “You’re hardly in a position to demand answers.”

  Despite being weak Sean was just warming up. “And Rivest. He was going to tell me things about Babbage Town before he was killed. Maybe he found out the CIA was spying on the place. Maybe he confided in Alicia, who was pretending to have a thing for him. Only he didn’t know she was on your team. Bam, he’s dead. Later you blow up the morgue to cover up some incriminating evidence. How am I doing Val? Batting a thousand?”

  “You can speculate all you want.”

  “The FBI and the DEA know you have us here. There’s no way you’re going to get away with this.”

  Valerie looked at him condescendingly. “You just don’t understand how this whole thing works, do you? In the grand scheme of saving millions of lives, what’s a couple of deaths? I mean really? What’s a couple of deaths? You’re just a blip on the ass of history. Nobody will even remember you.” She told the guard, “Hit it hard.” And then she closed the cell door behind her.

  CHAPTER

  89

  TWO DAYS LATER SEAN KING could barely remember his own name. “Please stop,” he kept asking them. “Please stop.” They never listened.

  Instead they picked him up and carried him to another room. He was placed in a long box resembling a coffin. He was packed in so tightly he could barely move. Wires were attached to his chest and arm. When the cover was put on, it rested within two inches of his face. The feeling of claustrophobia was extreme. What Sean couldn’t see were the pipes attached to the chamber. At regular intervals the temperature in the chamber was lowered until Sean was pushed right to the edge of hypothermia. He struggled to catch his breath as the oxygen levels were reduced. Just as he was about pass out, they pumped more air in. For ten hours this process went on. And he grew weaker and weaker. Finally, thankfully, he lost consciousness.

  When he awoke later in his cell he noticed he had another visitor.

  “Hello, Sean,” Alicia said.

  “Come to gloat?” he answered weakly.

  “No. I take no pleasure in seeing you in here.”

  “Really? That’s sort of hard to believe.” Sean sat up and leaned his back against the wall. “Drug smuggling, murder, kidnapping, torture. Have I left anything out?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said calmly.

  “I mean you and Val are smuggling drugs in on planes.”

  “You may call it that. I don’t.”

  “And what do you call murdering Monk Turing and Len Rivest?”

  “Monk was shot for trespassing.”

  “But you did kill Len, didn’t you? And I thought you liked him.”

  “We all have a job to do.”

  “So you’re admitting you killed him?”

  “There’s a war going on. We all have a job to do,” she repeated more slowly.

  “And you almost killed me!”

  “We knew it was you who broke into the camp. You saw things. You and Michelle. Just like Monk Turing. That’s why you’re here.”

  “So you torture us, find out what we know and then what? Let us go?”

  “That’s not my responsibility.”

  “Oh, good, just pass the buck along to someone else. So what’ll it be? Gas explosion? Suicide? Will I die in my bathtub? By the way did you use the plunger or that metal leg of yours?”

  “I simply follow orders.”

  “From Valerie? Is that all it takes for you to kill somebody? Orders from a psychopath? What about the morgue doc? What the hell did he do to deserve getting blown up?”

  “There’s always collateral damage. It comes with the territory. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Sure there is. You can stop doing it.”

  “I don’t know what sort of world you want to live in, but it’s obviously not the one I’m envisioning.”

  “Does that world include killing Viggie?”

  Alicia quickly looked down. “Viggie will be fine.”

  He roared, “No she won’t be fine, Alicia. She’s going to be collateral damage too. She probably already is. You know that and I know that.”

  Alicia turned to leave.

  “What, you just came to see me before the hammer comes down? Is that it? Seeing another victim off to the great hereafter. I’m sure Len appreciated the gesture. Did he even know it was you? Did he think you came there to screw him? A little fun in the old tub?”

  “Shut up!” she said sharply.

  “No, I’m not shutting up. You’re going to hear me out, lady.”

  As Alicia fled the cell, his screams of outrage followed her. “Are you gonna pull the trigger on Viggie? Are you?”

  Alicia broke into a run, but she couldn’t outrun the screams. The stone floor was slick and she stumbled. As she fell, her prosthetic leg hit her good leg, cutting into her skin. She slumped to the floor sobbing quietly as Sean’s shouts thundered down the bleak hall.

  “I’m so sorry, Viggie,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  CHAPTER

  90

  FOR THREE MORE DAYS Sean was forced to stand at attention or squat. He was barely fed and a cup of water a day was his sole allotment, enough only to keep him alive. He was returned to the coffin three times. He was poked or hit with a water jet whenever he tried to doze off. Deafening music was piped into his cell without warning and stayed on for hours. They had rigged his cell with electricity that would give him a mild shock when he touched his bed or the wall, or certain spots on the floor. It got so he simply huddled in one corner afraid to move. His belly was empty, his skin was raw; his spirit was cracking in half.

  After his last trip to the coffin he awoke two hours later in his cell and looked around. He didn’t know how long he’d been in here. It could be days, weeks or years. His brain had simply shut down on him. As the cell door opened, he started sobbing, terrified of what they were going to do to him next.

  “Hello, Sean, are we ready to be a good boy now?” Valerie asked.

  He couldn’t even raise his head.

  “Your friend’s made of tougher stuff. We never got her to cry.”

  Now he looked up. “Where is Michelle?”

  “That’s really none of your concern, now is it, little man?”

  As Sean stared at Valerie Messaline, at the arrogant features of her face, at the confident tilt of her body, rage replaced his fear. He pushed his hand against the wall to steady himself. And then before anyone could react he pushed off the wall, lunged and was on top of her, his hands around her throat. He wanted to kill her, squeeze every molecule of arrogance, of superiority out of her ugly, filthy being.

  Guards pulled him off and threw Sean back into a corner. When Sean sat up he looked at her. Valerie was standing against the far wall trying to appear composed yet he could see the fear in her eyes. And that small triumph was all he needed right now.

  He stood on trembling legs, holding on to the wall for support, and said, “That’s a nasty bruise, Val. You might want to take a session in the coffin. They say oxygen deprivation is good for strangulation marks, if you don’t suffocate that is.”

  “You think it’s been bad up till now,” she hissed. “Just wait.”

  “Where’s Michelle?”

&n
bsp; “Like I said you should be concerned about yourself.”

  “She’s my partner and my friend. But I guess you don’t understand those concepts.” He glanced at one of the guards, a young man with short blond hair and a muscular physique. “Hey, kid, you better hope to hell you don’t do anything to piss this lady off. She might just decide to label you a spy, torture your ass, and apparently there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it.”

  The guard said nothing, but Sean could see just the tiniest bit of doubt creep into his eyes as he shot a sideways glance at his boss.

  He turned back to Valerie. “Where is Michelle?” he screamed, finding lung power he didn’t know he had left.

  “I can see we have some more work to do with you.”

  “I have friends who work at the CIA. There’s no way in hell the Agency has authorized what you’re doing. You’ll rot in jail for this.”

  She stared at him coldly. “I’m doing my job. You’re the one trying to bring this country down. You’re the enemy. You broke in here. You are a spy. You are a traitor.”

  “And you are full of shit.”

  “We even have evidence of your participating in a drug smuggling scheme.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one coming from you.”

  “By the time we’re done with you, you’ll tell us everything we want to know.”

  “You may torture me into saying what you want, but that won’t change the real truth.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That you’re insane,” he snapped.

  She turned to the guard. “Take him to the next level. And take him hard.”

  Before the guard could react the cell door opened and another man wearing a suit came in followed by two other armed men.

  “What are you doing here?” Valerie snapped.

  The suit said, “Ian Whitfield sent me to deliver instructions to you.”

  “Instructions from Whitfield? He has no authority over me.”

  “Perhaps not, but this person does.” He handed a piece of paper to Valerie. As she scanned the contents Sean, who was watching her closely, knew exactly what had just happened: The woman had been left as the scapegoat in a classic Washington power move that would be instantly recognizable to everyone operating within the Beltway and totally foreign to the normal population.

  Valerie folded the paper and put it in her pocket.

  One of the guards stepped forward, spun Valerie around and handcuffed her. As she was being led away Valerie glanced at Sean. Their positions had just been neatly reversed and he didn’t intend to waste the opportunity. In a voice strained but clear, he said, “Better get yourself one fucking great lawyer, lady, because you’re gonna need it.”

  CHAPTER

  91

  THE NEXT DAY SEAN AND MICHELLE were flown separately to a private hospital where it seemed they were the only patients. They had no idea where the facility was and no one there would answer any of their questions. However, they were given top-notch care. After several days of IVs, and long, uninterrupted periods of sleep, followed by two weeks of solid food and limited exercise, they both were nearly back to normal.

  The doctors had kept Sean and Michelle segregated, refusing to tell them anything about the other. Finally Sean would have no more of it. Wielding a chair before a cowering nurse and attendant, he demanded to see Michelle. “Now!” he screamed.

  When Sean walked into her room, she was sitting over by the window looking out at a depressing gray sky. As though sensing his presence, she turned around, cried out, “Sean,” and raced to him. They stood there in the middle of the room clinging to each other, trembling.

  “They… they wouldn’t tell me anything about you,” she began as tears welled in her eyes.

  “I didn’t even know if you were alive,” he stammered. “But it’s all over, Michelle,” he said. “We’re safe. And they arrested Valerie.”

  “Did they put you in the coffin?” she asked.

  “More than once. They said you never cried.”

  “I cried, Sean. Trust me. I cried a lot.” She looked out the window. There was a bed of flowers below her window. Their blooms were done for the season; their stems drooping. “A lot,” she added.

  “I’m sorry, Michelle.”

  “For what? You got the same treatment in there that I did.”

  “It was my idea to go over the fence.”

  “I’m a big girl, Sean. I could have let you go it alone,” she added quietly.

  “I know why you didn’t,” he said. “I know.” They sat in the window seat looking at the dead flowers.

  After Sean and Michelle were sufficiently recovered they were flown by private jet to another location, driven by car with blacked-out windows to an underground parking garage and taken by secure elevator to an enormous office suite that had nothing in it except three chairs. While two muscular men with guns inside their suit coats waited outside they sat down across from a small, thin, impeccably dressed man with thick white hair and slender wire rim glasses. This gentleman put his fingertips together and gazed at them with a sympathetic expression.

  “First, I want to extend to both of you the official apologies of your government for what happened.”

  Sean spoke up angrily. “Funny, I thought it was our government that was trying to kill us.”

  “Government can be an unwieldy thing, Mr. King, with certain parts of it overstepping boundaries of authority from time to time,” the man replied evenly. “That doesn’t make the rest of government evil. However, you did break into a CIA facility.”

  Sean was not in a conciliatory mood. “Prove it!”

  Before he could answer Michelle said, “Do you understand what was going on there? Do you blame us for trying to do what we did?”

  The man shrugged. “My job is not to assign blame, Ms. Maxwell. My task is to move forward from this point in a way that benefits us all.”

  “How exactly do we do that?” Sean demanded. “Our government kicked the shit out of us. A girl named Viggie Turing has been taken by our government. People have been murdered by our government. How do we move forward in a way that benefits us all from that!”

  The man leaned forward. “Here’s how. We have viewed the video that was used to issue the search warrant for Camp Peary. As you know it shows certain… compromising activity. Our technical people tell us that the video has been copied.”

  “You want the video that shows our government breaking about a hundred laws.”

  “It wasn’t our government, Mr. King,” the man snapped. “As I said, sometimes people overstep their boundaries of authority.”

  “In our case they didn’t step, they stomped.” Sean studied the man. “So that’s why they sent you with your nice manners and white hair and glasses looking like an old Cold War warrior right out of a damn John le Carré novel to give us the pitch.”

  “I’m glad you understand the situation. And the fact that we need any and all copies of that video, Mr. King,” the man added quietly.

  “I bet you do. But I’m a lawyer and I need to see the quid pro quo and let me tell you it better be ten times bigger than whatever you might be thinking of right now if you really want to do a deal.”

  “I have authority to make certain concessions—”

  “Screw that. Here’re our terms. First, we want Viggie back safe and sound and if you tell me that’s not possible the tape goes straight to a journalist friend of mine who’ll take it and win the Pulitzer he so desperately wants. Next, Valerie Messaline, or whatever the hell her name really is, gets everything she has coming to her and I’m not talking a promotion. Third, Alicia Chadwick with the one leg gets the same treatment. And the shit that they’re doing over at Camp Peary has to stop. I mean really stop. No more drugs. No torture. And consider yourself lucky.”