Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  I thought about the time line of his story. It seemed credible enough under the circumstances. It was still hard for me to believe that this was my life now, that I’d wound up with him here at all. And while I didn’t totally trust this man, I didn’t fear him, either. And these days, that was something.

  “Okay, so where’s the rest of the FBI? If you really do work for them, why isn’t there anyone to help us?”

  “Because—don’t you get it? I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be behind a desk listening to your phone calls. I’m not supposed to be out here with you.”

  “Unsupported?” I asked, using the word he’d used.

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “What now?”

  He pressed his mouth into a tight line, and glanced at the fire for a second, then back at me.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” he said.

  “Great.”

  “IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can’t imagine the places you’ll end up. But most people don’t do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy. They live in the same town they grew up in, go to the same schools their parents went to, get a job that makes a decent living, find someone they think they love, marry and have children, take the same vacation every year. Maybe they get restless, someone has an affair, there’s divorce. But it will just be the same boring life with the next person. Unless something awful happens—death, house fire, natural disaster. Then people start looking around, thinking, Is this all? Maybe there’s another way to live.”

  Max always ranted like this when he was drinking. He was hung up on the concept of “normal” people and how sad they were. He felt that most people were just zombies, sleepwalking through their lives, and would just die without ever leaving even a footprint on the planet. Max was a titan, a shooting star. In his lifetime he was responsible for the erection of thousands of buildings, countless charitable works in countries all over the world. He put at least ten kids that I knew of through college with the scholarship he established in his mother’s name in Detroit. He had to live a big life. That was his normal.

  I think most people are just trying to be happy, and that most of their actions, however misguided, are in line with that goal. Most people just want to feel they belong somewhere, want to be loved, and want to feel they’re important to someone. If you really examine all the wrongheaded and messed-up things they do, they can most often be traced back to that basic desire. The abusers, the addicted, the cruel and unpleasant, the manipulators—these are just people who started this quest for happiness in the basement of their lives. Someone communicated to them through word or deed that they were undeserving, so they think they have to claw their way there over the backs of others, leaving scars and creating damage. Of course, they only create more misery for themselves and others.

  Even the psychopaths and sociopaths in this world who commit the most heinous possible acts against innocent victims are in this quest for happiness. But their ideas are twisted and black; these people were wired wrong. Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it’s the absence of something.

  Was Max an evil man? I still didn’t know. If I’d looked closer, I might have seen signs that told me yes, as Ace did. But I was in his thrall completely. If the series of events that shook the foundation of my life hadn’t occurred, I may never have asked who he really was. I may have lived on in ignorance. A part of me—a big part of me—wishes I’d taken Nick Smiley’s advice; I should have let the dead lie.

  I looked down at the file in my lap, trying to reconcile the snapshots in front of me. They were of a man who looked different in every picture; they spanned decades. Max, maybe in his thirties at the time, slimmer than I’d known him, in a white shirt and khakis, exiting a black Mercedes near an abandoned stadium in Sierra Leone, flanked by two men armed with machine guns. Max sporting a full beard, sitting in a Paris café among a group of men, his hand resting on a fat manilla envelope, a wolfish grin on his face. Max shaking hands with a dark-skinned man wearing black robes and a turban. There were numerous shots like these, all vague, taken from a distance. Clandestine meetings around the world in empty fields and parking lots, boatyards and abandoned warehouses. Lots of guns and dangerous-looking men.

  The Max Smiley I knew was an internationally renowned real-estate developer, whose business called for international travel. He built luxury condos in Rio, hotels in Hawaii, high-rises in Singapore. He golfed with senators and went deep-sea fishing with Saudi princes. There were always shades of gray in Max’s business, yes, always whispers about whom exactly he conducted his business with. Then the Project Rescue scandal revealed that Max had dealings with organized crime, through his lawyer Alexander Harriman. The FBI starting digging deep into Max’s banking history, though he was legally dead.

  “We found hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts.” Dylan’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “And that’s just what we could trace. How much else is out there in accounts I couldn’t link to him or his business or his various ‘charities,’ I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

  I put the file on the table and lay down on the couch. I don’t know how long we’d been talking. I should have been resting but sleep didn’t seem like an option. My body was beyond fatigued but my mind was restless.

  “And I take it that this money didn’t come from real-estate development.”

  “No. Legitimately, Max Smiley was a rich man, making several million a year in pure personal profit. This money came from other dealings. We started watching some of the accounts. There was activity—withdrawals and deposits.”

  “That’s what made you think he might still be alive?”

  He nodded. “Then our investigation got blocked.”

  “By whom?”

  “By the CIA. ”

  “Why?”

  “They told us our surveillance conflicted with an ongoing investigation. We were asked to stand down. Or told to.”

  “These men in the photographs, these meetings—what kind of business was he conducting?”

  He came over and sat on the floor beside me, took the file from where I’d left it, and pulled a snapshot from the pile.

  “These men are affiliated with the Albanian Mafia.”

  “How did he know them?” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. It was thin and distant. Black thoughts were blooming in my mind. I thought of the Project Rescue babies. I had to wonder how much more there was to it all than I had even imagined. Dylan ran down the list of other men in the photographs. Known terrorists, men associated with the Russian, Italian, and Italian-American Mafia.

  “So whatever his dealings were with these people, this is why the CIA is still looking for him.”

  “I think so.”

  I wondered if he was being vague on purpose, if he was stalling. I asked him as much.

  “Like I told you, my investigation was blocked. I still don’t know what Max was doing with these men. Here,” he said, pulling out another snapshot that seemed more recent. “These men are CIA operatives. This meeting took place just a month before he died.”

  “CIA,” I repeated.

  “They could have been undercover. He most likely didn’t know who he was really with. Their investigation started long before ours did.”

  “So Myra Lyall could have stumbled onto any of these dealings—whatever they were. Any one of these people could be responsible for her death. For Sarah Duvall, for Grant Webster. Any one of them could have taken me in the park, come after me in the hospital.”

  He nodded. “Any one of them. Including the CIA.”

  I let the information sink in. “Now you’re just being paranoid.”

  He looked at me as if I was slow. I was about to ask him about his mother when he rose suddenly.

  “I think that’s enough for tonight. We can’t st
ay here for long, and you need to rest before we start moving again.”

  I didn’t argue. There was so much more to say and countless questions to ask, but I had too much to deal with already. I was in brain overload; if I took on any more information, I’d lose something crucial like my ability to add and subtract. I let him lead me to a small bedroom off the main room. There was a rocker and a queen-size bed with a wrought-iron headboard and a patchwork quilt. He helped me beneath the musty sheets, then started another fire. I lay there watching him, thinking that my father had killed his mother and that such a thing did not bode well for our relationship—whatever that was. I wondered if I’d ever meet a man whom Max had not totally destroyed on a deep emotional level. That was the last thought I had before I drifted into a light and troubled slumber.

  Twice during the night, Dylan brought me pills, which I took without protest. The second time, I saw him linger in the doorway. I couldn’t see his expression. I waited for him to say something, but after a minute or two, he left, closed the door softly behind him. I thought about calling him back and asking what he was thinking, but then I wondered if I really wanted to know.

  THE MORNING DAWNED to rain. It tapped at my window, and for a second before I opened my eyes, I could almost imagine that I was back in the East Village just an hour or so before I saved Justin Wheeler and set this nightmare in motion. I imagined the myriad choices that lay before me, beginning with sleep in or hop up and race to the dental appointment that I’d canceled instead. Anything I’d done differently that morning might have saved me from waking in this strange place, a stranger to myself.

  My sinuses were swollen but my side hurt much less. I slipped out of bed, put my feet on the frigid wood floor and walked over to the six-pane window, and peered out into a thick glade of trees. There was a doe and her tiny foal nibbling on grass in the misting morning rain. I held my breath and watched them. They were perfect and peaceful, oblivious to me and my chaos. It soothed me to watch as they meandered back into the woods until I could no longer see them. I felt safe, as if nothing could hurt me here.

  I saw some clothes neatly piled on the rocker by the door. A blue wool sweater, a pair of beat-up jeans, and some Nikes in halfway decent shape that looked like they might fit. No socks. No underwear. But what did I expect?

  There was a small bathroom off the room to the side of the fireplace. The fire burned well, as if it had recently been stoked. I entered the bathroom and mopped myself off in cold water from the sink, spent a few minutes staring in dismay at my hair. I checked the bandage on my side and saw that it was clean and decided to leave well enough alone.

  The sweater was huge; I rolled up the sleeves. The jeans were a tad tight in the rump and the sneakers pinched my little toe. But okay.

  When I walked into the living room, I expected to see Dylan standing sentry by the door, but he was dozing on the couch.

  “Some watchdog,” I said.

  “I’m not sleeping, just resting my eyes.”

  I saw the gun in his hand then and realized he probably hadn’t slept at all. I should have felt bad for him but I didn’t. Part of me blamed him for all of this, though I couldn’t say why. I walked past him toward the door. He’d left my bag there and I bent down gingerly to pick it up and bring it over to the small dining table. I heard him sit up and felt his eyes on me as I rummaged through the contents, hoping I’d find what I was looking for. Near the bottom I did. I took the matchbook I’d found at Max’s apartment a couple of lifetimes ago and handed it to Dylan.

  I told him where I’d found it, how I’d sensed that someone else had been there that day. “Does it mean anything to you?”

  He held it up to the light of the fire. After a second, he nodded slowly. “I think this is from an after-hours club in London called the Kiss. This symbol is part of Descartes’s tangent-circle configuration. The Kiss is from a poem called ‘The Kiss Precise,’ which explains how each of the four circles touch the other three. Though Decartes’s ideas were pretty much confined to circles, I think the club owner kind of sees it as a symbol of how all things are connected.”

  “Wow,” I said after a beat. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a math geek.”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’m just full of surprises.”

  That’s what I was afraid of.

  “There’s a note inside,” I said. He opened the matchbook and read it, didn’t say anything.

  “Who do you think Angel might be?”

  He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “We need to go there. And we need a computer to try our luck getting into that website. I’d like to check my e-mail, too, in case Grant sent me anything before he—” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence. These were the things I’d been thinking about as I’d washed and dressed. I wanted to somehow take back control of my trashed existence. I didn’t like the broken person with the bleached blond hair, Max’s daughter injured and in hiding from various threats. I wanted to be me again.

  “Are you up to it?” he asked skeptically.

  “Not really. But what are our choices, sit around here waiting for the cops or for one of Max’s enemies to come after us? Better to be proactive, don’t you think?”

  “I was thinking we should turn ourselves in,” he said, coming to stand beside me.

  “No,” I said quickly, certainly. “Not yet.”

  The thought of being trapped somewhere filled me with dread. A window was closing. If I didn’t find Max soon, he’d be gone for good like the ghost that he was. There’d be time to pay for whatever mistakes I’d made. But later.

  I turned to Dylan and was surprised to find him so close.

  “I fucked up, Ridley. You were right—we’re out of our league here.” It was a simple admission of error, nothing dramatic or even regretful about it. I liked the ease with which he could admit that he’d made mistakes. I think it’s a good quality in a person.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t like being so close to him, didn’t like his scent, the warmth of his body. I wanted to move away but found that I couldn’t, and moved in closer instead. He pulled me to him and then his lips were on mine. I felt heat travel through my body. It was in a desperate seeking of comfort that I let him kiss me, that I kissed him back. I felt his arms enfold me. He held me with conviction but also with care, with tenderness. Jake always kissed me with a kind of reverence, a painful gentleness. Dylan kissed me as if he owned me, as if he knew me. I pulled away from him, pushed him back, then slapped him hard. The sound my hand made against his face was a satisfying smack. It felt good. Almost as good as it had felt to kiss him.

  “Asshole,” I said, hating my pulse for racing and hating the mutinous heat on my face.

  “That’s three,” he said with a big smile. He put his hand lovingly to his face as though I’d kissed him there.

  “You think because you’ve read a few of my e-mails, listened in on my conversations, that you know something about me.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and cast his eyes to the floor.

  “Well, you don’t. Okay?”

  He nodded. I couldn’t see if he’d stopped smiling but I didn’t think so. I put my bag over my shoulder and walked toward the door.

  “Are we going or what?”

  I COULD TELL you that it was cool, that the sky was a flat, dead concrete gray, and that the sun was trapped hopelessly behind thick cloud cover. But it was England and late autumn, so yeah. We drove in silence toward the city. I kept my eyes closed or turned out the window, so as not to invite any conversation from Dylan. I had a million questions but I wished I could get my answers from somewhere else.

  For a while, I tried to retrieve some of the missing fragments of my memory: how I’d gotten to England, what had happened to me, how I’d come to check myself in to the Covent Garden Hotel, whose voice I heard in my head, asking the same question over and over. But I was overcome with a terrible foreboding that discouraged me from mentally exploring my recent
past. Maybe some things were better off forgotten.

  Eventually I got bored ignoring Dylan and turned to him.

  “I was a shit to kiss you like that,” he said as soon as I did. “You’ve got enough going on. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. I just …”

  He didn’t finish and the sentence hung between us.

  “Will you tell me about your mother?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to hear my sad story.”

  “I do,” I said. I felt the urge to reach out to him, to touch him where I’d slapped him or to put my hand on his arm. But I didn’t. “I really want to know.”

  There’d been crime-scene photographs in the file. Alice Grace was beaten to death and left to die in an alley behind the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris in 1985.

  He released a sigh. Then: “I always thought, growing up, that my parents were in the hotel business, that they traveled the world buying struggling hotels and turning them into five-star properties. That had been my mother’s family business and I never questioned it. It wasn’t until long after my mother was killed that I learned the truth. That my parents were both former intelligence officers with British Special Forces and that upon their retirement from military service before I was born, they were recruited by Interpol.”

  He watched the road and didn’t even glance at me. I could see that he had a white-knuckled grip on the wheel.

  “Interpol’s primary function is intelligence gathering and acting as a global police communication system. Agents are not law enforcement personnel; they have no rights of arrest or of search and seizure. My mother was really an analyst, specializing in the gathering and analyzing of intelligence in the form of clandestine communications and surveillance.”

  “Your mom was a spy?” I asked, staring at him. I wondered if he was a bit crazy. I was actually starting to feel a little sorry for him. I knew all about trying to find explanations for your family, trying to understand the things they’d done and coming up with a way to make it okay.