Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “You’re right,” he said, his smile fading just a little. “I’m unsupported at the moment.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what to think about this man. “What does that even mean?”

  He held my eyes but didn’t say anything.

  “It means we’re on our own, right?”

  He shrugged again and gave a single nod of his head.

  “And your accent. You’re British?”

  “My father was American; my mother was British. My family lived in England from about a year after I was born until I was sixteen. Then I moved back to the States. The accent comes back when I’m stressed or drunk or exhausted.”

  I shook my head at him. “Why should I believe a word you say?”

  “I haven’t lied to you. Not once.”

  “You’ve just omitted significant details—is that more like it?”

  More of that pregnant silence he’d mastered.

  “God, you’re really despicable,” I said.

  He held up the file. “It’s all in here. Everything I know about Max—about your father.”

  He put the file on the couch beside me and left the room. I heard a door shut and I was alone with the fire. I was alone with Max. The Ghost.

  15

  We are not our parents. We’re not. You’ve probably heard all your life that the traits you’ve found so annoying in your mother or your father will eventually manifest themselves in your own personality. Maybe you even believe it. Personally, I think it’s bullshit. It’s a cop-out, something people tell themselves to feel better about not taking responsibility for their lives. Maybe if you go through your life without examining yourself, without dealing with your issues, without consciously deciding what to bring forward and what to leave behind, or if you can’t take responsibility for your own inner happiness, then perhaps it is likely that you become the drunk, the abuser, the cold and distant judge your mother or your father was. But I believe you have a choice. I believe we all choose our lives, that our existence is the sum of our choices—the little ones, the big ones. We don’t always choose what happens to us, and we don’t choose where we came from, but we do choose how we react to the events of our lives. We choose to be destroyed or to grow wiser. Nietzsche (whom I always thought was a bit of a psychopath) said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” I cling to this philosophy; I need to believe it.

  I have to believe now that I am not my father. That his DNA is not a contagion I carry in my body, a sleeper virus that might take hold of me one day and turn the blood in my veins to poison.

  I think Dylan gave me an hour with the file and then returned to the room, sat back beside me. The file was open in my lap. There was more to read but I’d lost my nerve. I couldn’t bring myself to turn the page. In my mind, I saw Max standing over his mother’s beaten body, smiling ghoulishly. I saw him waiting outside Nick’s window staring up with soulless eyes, his very presence a terrible threat. I saw him punching my brother in the face with his closed fist.

  “I’m sorry,” Dylan said.

  I stared at the flames, which were flickering low. The air around me was growing colder. I could hardly believe the things I’d read, the photographs I’d seen. I tried to fit my brain around them, tried to make it work, but I felt like I do when I see images of grinding poverty or war on the television. You know it’s real but part of you just can’t accept what you’re seeing, so removed are you from the actual experience.

  “I don’t know this man,” I said.

  He nodded; he understood what I meant.

  “Why did you show this to me?” I asked him mildly. It seemed as if someone was always handing me a file filled with bad news. I was starting to resent it.

  He was quiet for a moment, just stared at the floor between his feet.

  “We’ve talked about this before. I think you’re the only way to him.”

  I remembered then our conversation that first day.

  Do you know the number one reason why people in the witness protection program get found by their enemies and wind up dead?

  Why?

  Love.

  Love.

  They can’t stay away. They can’t help but make that call or show up incognito at a wedding or a funeral. I’ve seen his apartment. It’s practically a shrine to you. Max Smiley did some terrible things in his life, hurt a lot of people. But if he loved anyone, it was you.

  I knew it was true. It had always been true. Max and I were connected. We would always find each other.

  “You want to use me as bait,” I said without emotion.

  “The truth is, Ridley, you’ve been bait for a while. We just haven’t had any bites until recently.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Jake Jacobsen has been using you since before he met you,” he said softly.

  “It might have started out that way,” I admitted. “He wanted to get to Ben.”

  Dylan shook his head, lowered his eyes to the floor again. The conversation seemed to pain him.

  “He saw my picture in the Post,” I said, leaning forward. Something in my chest started to thump. “Same as Christian Luna did. It was a coincidence. He needed my help.”

  “You think that’s how he found you?”

  That day on the Brooklyn Bridge (it seemed like a lifetime ago) when Jake finally told me the truth (part of it, anyway), he admitted that he’d moved into my building to get close to me, to find a way to get closer to Ben. He needed to know more about Project Rescue and couldn’t think of another way. I’d forgiven him for that—a long time ago. I told Dylan as much.

  “Think about it, Ridley. When did Jake move into that building?”

  I searched my memory for something that might orient the event in the time line of my recent life. I thought of the morning I’d saved Justin Wheeler. Two things had delayed me in getting out of the building. First there was my mailbox overstuffed with bills and magazines and an angry note from my mailman. I’d retrieved the mail from my box and run it back up to my apartment. But before that, it had been my elderly neighbor Victoria. She stopped me to talk about the noisy man moving in upstairs. I felt my stomach bottom out as I remembered the conversation. It was a week later that Jake and I met face-to-face. As it came back to me, the present disappeared and all the events of our meeting and what followed swirled around me.

  Our meeting and the passion and the drama that had followed had been so intense, so all-consuming. Maybe that’s why I never made the connection. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. I realized now the point Dylan was trying to make: Jake moved into my building the night before the single event that forever altered my world.

  Was it possible? What did it mean? I’m not sure how long I sat there, analyzing the time line, trying to figure out a way that I might be wrong. A thick fog moved into my brain.

  I had to force the words out. “Are you saying that he knew who I was …before I did?”

  Dylan hung his head.

  “How is that possible?” I felt so ashamed suddenly, like the kid who’d been the butt of a terrible joke at school, around whom everyone had gathered to laugh. I felt my face grow hot.

  Acceptance was slow. Then, when I realized that it was true, I tried to think of something to make it all right that he’d lied to me about how he’d found me, a reason he would have to make up a false scenario as he did. Pathetic, I know. Anyway, I couldn’t think of anything. Then I started to wonder: If he’d lied about how he found me, what else had he lied about? I thought about the things Jake had told me. How he’d tracked Max to a bar in Jersey and confronted him about Project Rescue. How just a few weeks later Max was dead.

  I’d come to believe that it had been Max’s realization of how much harm he’d done that led him to drink so much the night he died—that in a sense Max had killed himself by drinking and driving off that bridge. But the man in the dossier was not a man to die over the grief of others. The man in the dossier didn’t have a conscience at all. Did that mean Jake had so
mething more to do with his death than I’d believed? Or something more to do with Max than he’d revealed? The possibilities were chilling.

  “A lot of what you know about Jake is true, I think,” Dylan said kindly. “He didn’t make up the stuff about his childhood, about his quest to find out who he really is and where he came from.”

  “How do you know?” I said angrily. “How do you know all this about Jake?”

  “Because I’ve been watching him for years.”

  I looked at him sitting there.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  He smiled at me sadly. The answer was clear. I spoke for him.

  “Because he’s been watching me, waiting for Max to approach me. He never believed Max died that night, and he believed that one day Max would reach out for me, try to contact me. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “And when Max did, Jake would be sleeping beside you,” said Dylan. “He knew he’d be the first person you told.”

  I felt as if someone was stepping on my chest. I thought of all my nights with Jake and all the love I’d had for him. The idea that it had all been a part of some design, or something to do to pass the time as he waited for Max to make contact, sliced me open.

  “And you’d be listening when I did.”

  He shrugged again. “Max Smiley is a man with the means, the resources, and the motives to drop off the face of the earth forever. As far as we know, he only has one weakness, one place in his heart that feels.”

  I didn’t have to ask who or what that was. I thought about the patience it must have taken to wait day after day for Max to contact me, how badly Jake must have wanted it.

  “I’ve never understood Jake’s obsession. All this time, I thought it was just his needing to know what happened to him, his wanting to bring Max and the other people responsible for Project Rescue to justice. I thought he just wanted some closure. But there has to be more to it than that.”

  “That’s probably how it started.”

  “Then?”

  “My guess is that the more he learned about Max, the more obsessed he became with finding him. I think his obsession grew beyond his personal quest for answers. I think the search for Max became his whole reason for living. Eventually it started to define him.”

  I could see how that might happen; in fact, I could feel it happening to me. But at the same time, Dylan’s answer didn’t quite work for me. I realized then that Jake’s obsession had seemed out-sized for months; it had grown in a way that had felt incongruous. Early in our relationship, I’d believed that it would lessen over time, but the opposite had happened. It was one thing for me to be obsessed; the man was my father.

  “I guess you know a thing or two about obsession,” I said.

  I thought about the crime-scene photos I’d seen in the dossier. I’d seen what Max did to Dylan’s mother. I understood Dylan better now.

  “I guess I do.”

  “You turned yours into a career.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a living.” He tried for a smile but it died on his face. I, for one, wondered if I’d ever smile again.

  “How did Jake know I was Max’s daughter?”

  “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just knew that Max had loved you.”

  “Then why would he lie about how he found me?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  There was so much more to ask, so many questions about the last couple of years and the last couple of weeks. We hadn’t scratched the surface. But I sat there for a minute before launching into all that. I wanted to ask about the men at the Cloisters, how I’d wound up in London, and whom he had killed in the hospital. I was afraid that once I started, the answers would only lead to more questions.

  “Myra Lyall is dead,” I said. “They found her body floating in a trunk in a canal.”

  Dylan nodded. “I know.”

  “What did she find out? The people who took her—are they the same people who took me?”

  “I’m not sure, Ridley. I don’t know what happened to either one of you. I was hoping you could answer some of those questions.”

  I frowned at him. I guess I kind of had the idea that the only reason I didn’t end up in a trunk floating is that Dylan Grace had saved my ass, as he so eloquently put it. Wrong again.

  “Then how did you find me?”

  REMEMBER HOW EASY it was for me to get away from Dylan in Riverside Park? It turns out he expected me to try to run from him. In fact, he wanted me to run.

  “I thought you were hiding something. I figured I’d let you run and I’d follow, see where you led me. We were listening to your cell phone calls and were able to track your movements to the Internet café, the SRO on Forty-second Street. Then we lost you. Actually, you walked right by my partner. Nice job with your hair, by the way. You’ve got a whole Sex Pistols thing going there.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a narrowing of my eyes. “You don’t look that great, either.”

  “You made some calls from Inwood, so we headed up there. The last call we picked up was your conversation with Grant Webster. By the time we figured out where you were and got up there, you were gone. NYPD had already arrived—they’d been called about gunshots and a helicopter, but they didn’t know what happened. They were searching the area, picked up some shell casings from automatic and semiautomatic fire. That was it.”

  “No sign of Jake.”

  He shook his head. “No, Ridley. I’d tell you if I knew something. I promise.”

  I nodded.

  “We went to Grant Webster’s apartment in the Village.”

  “Was he …?” I couldn’t stand to finish the question.

  “Dead? Yes,” answered Dylan softly. I felt that sick guilty feeling that was becoming so familiar to me. I held some culpability for the things that had happened to Sarah, to Grant, to Jake, even to myself. I wasn’t sure how to deal with that. So I just blocked it out. Dylan went on.

  “From his phone call, we knew you were in trouble, that he’d found something and tried to warn you. But Grant has some kind of kill button on his network. He managed to wipe all his data before he died. Anything he knew was gone.”

  I shook my head. “I really doubt that. There must be backup somewhere.” I remembered his website, how he’d chastised people for not protecting and backing up sensitive data. He impressed me as a person who’d practiced what he preached.

  “If there is, we haven’t found it.”

  “He said I was walking into a trap, that ‘they’ thought I knew where Max was, that I could lead them to him.”

  “Is that true?”

  I gave him a look. “Um, no. You know, why don’t you believe me about this? You’ve been watching me for a long time now. If I was secretly communicating with Max, wouldn’t you know?”

  “I didn’t know about the website. For all I know, you’ve been using the computer at your adopted parents’ house to communicate with him.”

  I thought about what Grant had said about the government’s dislike of encrypted websites and steganographic software. I started thinking about that streaming video and how maybe it was just a way to hide a message. Again, I wondered what my father’s log-in might be. I was betting I could figure it out if I could get to a computer.

  Dylan was watching me in that way that he had, as if he believed he could stare me into admitting all the many lies he’d thought I told. The sad part was I was just as clueless as he was. I sighed. What was obvious was that we didn’t trust each other. We could go around and around like this for hours. I didn’t bother repeating how I’d just found the website recently, that I had no way to log in.

  “Anyway, the point is that we lost you,” he said. “I didn’t even know where to start looking. The fact that I’d taken you into custody when I really didn’t have the right to and then allowed you to escape caused me a lot of trouble. I was reprimanded and might have been suspended, except that I’m so entrenched in this investigation, I would be impossible to replace at this po
int.”

  “So you do work for the FBI?”

  He nodded slowly. “I work for the FBI Special Surveillance Group. We monitor foreign agents, spies, and others who are not specifically targets of criminal investigations.”

  “Like me?”

  He nodded. “And like Jake Jacobsen. The point is that I’m not exactly a field agent. I gather data, conduct surveillance, monitor communications and movement. If I see something suspicious, I raise the alarm. Jacobsen has been interesting to us because of his skills as an investigator. We’ve been on him for nearly two years. As a result, we’ve also been watching you.”

  I thought about this for a second, the fact that I’d been under surveillance for I didn’t know how long. I looked at Dylan Grace, a man who’d likely heard every private conversation, read every e-mail, seen every move I made since I met Jake. The thought embarrassed and intrigued me. How well could you know a person, watching her live her life from a bird’s-eye view? You’d see all the faces she wore for the various people in her life. You’d hear the same stories and events repeated for different people, each version sounding a little bit different, tailored for the listener. You’d see her face when she thought no one was watching. You might hear her cry herself to sleep at night or make love to a man she cared for but couldn’t trust. For all of this, would you know her better, more intimately, than if you’d been her lover or her friend? Or did you know her not at all, never having been allowed entry into her heart?

  He went on. “I watched your cell phone records, credit cards, ATM records, passport control. I didn’t find anything for two days. I feared the worst. I thought you’d disappeared like Myra Lyall.”

  “Then?”

  “Then a charge from the Covent Garden Hotel popped up on your Visa bill. I was on the next plane to London. I bribed the desk clerk for your room number, found you in the state you were in. Through my London contacts, I was able to get you some antibiotics and painkillers—that’s what I was jabbing into your arm. I went out to get some more bandages and antiseptic to take care of your wound. When I came back, you’d stumbled into the lobby. I watched as they took you away in an ambulance.”