Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  You’re in a world of trouble and I don’t have much time. The site we discussed originates out of London. Where exactly and who set it up, I won’t have time to find out. I’ll tell you this, the code is very sophisticated. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a CIA communication hub. I attempted to log in and I might have set off some alarms. The site went dead. And my system alerted me that someone was trying to hack into my network. To be cautious, I’m going to have to get out of here. I’ve sent my backups someplace where they’ll be secure. If anything happens to me, people are going to know why.

  I’ll contact you when I’m safe. In the meantime, don’t attempt to log into that site unless you’re in a public place …and even then I don’t advise it. Be careful. And don’t forget you still owe me that interview.

  The e-mail was sent at 7:03 P.M. Dylan and I both knew that an hour later Grant was dead. It was my fault and I felt the full weight of that as I read and reread his note. Part of me hoped that there would be a message encrypted within his words, but even if there was, I’d have no way to decipher it. I fought off tears, ate a piece of the pizza that had been delivered to our table while I reread Grant’s e-mail yet another time.

  “Everybody who has attempted to log into that site is either dead or missing,” said Dylan. “Myra Lyall, Sarah Duvall, Grant Webster, and Jake Jacobsen.”

  I nodded. “Everyone except for Ben,” I said.

  I remembered the address of the website and typed it into the browser. The red screen popped up seconds later.

  “What are you doing?” asked Dylan, pulling my hand gently from the keyboard.

  “I’m going to log in,” I said, turning to look at him. “What choice do I have?”

  “You have the choice not to log in.”

  “Don’t you want to know? I mean, how long have you been pursing this obsession of yours?”

  “Long enough to know it’s going to kill me one day. I’m just not sure that I want it to be today.” His answer startled me.

  “For years after my mother died, I thought she’d been killed in a car accident. Like I told you, I didn’t know they were agents with Interpol. After her death, my father turned into a ghost of a man. He went from this powerful, high-energy person to a walking corpse. He lost over twenty pounds, and he was quite slim already. All the color seemed to drain from him. He was never home. I felt like I’d lost them both.

  “Nearly three years to the day that my mother died, my father was killed. I was sixteen. My uncle, my father’s brother, brought me to the U.S. to live with his family. He told me the truth about my parents and how they had both died in the pursuit of Max Smiley.”

  “How did your father die?”

  He took a sip from a tall glass of ice water that sat in front of him, and I could see that his hand was shaking slightly. “The official story was suicide, that he was unable to get over my mother’s death. But according to classified files I’ve been able to access since I joined the FBI, I learned that he was executed, his body found in a whorehouse in Istanbul. They think he followed Smiley there and was killed before he could do what he’d clearly gone to do.”

  “Kill Max?”

  He nodded. “I made a promise to myself that I would be the one to make Smiley pay for the things he’d done, that I’d be the one to bring him to justice. I’ve never wanted revenge. I’ve never wanted to hurt or to kill him. I just want him to answer for the deaths of my parents …and for the women he killed. But part of me has always believed that this would be my undoing and possibly my end. I feel like I’m not far from that day.”

  His words were grim and there was a terrible sadness on his face. I wanted to reach for him, to comfort him, but something stopped me. I was quiet for a second. Then: “How did you ever get a job with the FBI with such a history?”

  He shrugged. “I passed a number of psych evaluations. And honestly, I don’t think they considered my motivation a bad thing. But they did keep me out of the field. That’s why I’m in surveillance and information gathering and not out on the streets bringing in the bad guys.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at the glowing red screen.

  “This has been everything for me, you know—for a long time. Lately I’ve been wondering if I’ve made the right choices. I don’t have much to show for my life except this quest, and I’m not getting any younger.”

  His voice had taken on a faraway quality, as if he was thinking aloud.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  He looked away. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

  “Because I can’t walk away now. If you want to, I understand. I really do. But I have to find him.”

  He regarded me for a second, then: “Why?”

  “You know why. You said it yourself.”

  “But what if it’s not true? What if knowing Max Smiley doesn’t bring you any closer to yourself? What if the closer you get to him, the further you get from who you really are?”

  I shook my head, then rested it in my hands.

  “Look at Jacobsen, look at me. Look at what it’s done to us.”

  I shifted away from him.

  “But he’s not your father,” I said, my voicing rising, even though I hadn’t meant to yell. “You and Jake are looking for justice, maybe even revenge, though neither of you wants to admit it. They’re artificial goals—that’s why they’re destroying you. Even if you get what you want, it’s going to leave you cold.”

  He nodded, as if it was already something he’d considered. “And if you get what you want? Say you find him, literally or figuratively, or both. Then what, Ridley?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  We both turned to the red screen. I gazed back at him and he nodded. I tabbed like Grant had shown me until two small white rectangles opened in the red. I entered a log-in I knew Ben used often: thegooddoctor. And then I entered the password I knew he used for everything: lullaby.

  I felt smugly confident. But I was wrong. After a few minutes of sitting there, waiting for something to happen, the red screen disappeared. An error page popped up in its place.

  “Oh, shit,” said Dylan quietly.

  I quickly deleted the page and the page from which I’d accessed my e-mail from the computer’s history file, then I took some money out of my bag and dropped it on the table and got to my feet. Dylan followed and took my hand. We moved slowly, careful not to seem panicked, toward an exit sign we saw at the rear of the long narrow space. We exited into a back alley through a green metal door. It let out onto the street behind the restaurant. Then we ran.

  BUT OF COURSE running was pointless. If I’d been paying attention, I would have realized that. We weren’t in hiding; we weren’t on the run. We were already twisted in the sticky silken threads of an elaborate web. We just didn’t know it yet. Or I didn’t.

  I should have been dead. Everyone else—Myra Lyall, Sarah Duvall, Grant Webster, and Esme Gray—had met their ends because of this mess, whatever it was. Why not me? Because no one wants the bait to die until the catch is on the line. But this hadn’t occurred to me yet. I was running blind, scared, and was out of my league in every way.

  A lack of good alternatives led us back to the hotel. I was ill and exhausted when we returned to the room, my side throbbing. I felt feverish and wondered if my infection was getting worse. There was nothing to do but wait. The after-hours club we were interested in, the Kiss, didn’t even open until midnight. I sat on the bed and watched the room swim unpleasantly. Dylan sat beside me, put a hand to my forehead.

  “You’re sweating.”

  “I don’t feel well.”

  He took some pills from a vial in his pocket and handed them to me. I dry-swallowed them and waited as they moved slowly down my throat. I lay down on my good side and looked up at Dylan.

  “Who do you think killed Esme Gray?” I asked him.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “The last time I saw her,” I went on, “she told me to be careful
or I’d end up like ‘that New York Times reporter.’ Don’t you think that was a weird thing to say? Doesn’t that imply that she knew something about Myra Lyall’s death?”

  “It could,” he said.

  “Do you think she had something to do with all of this?”

  He shrugged. “She was intimately involved in Project Rescue. She identified Max’s body.”

  “She was in love with him once, a long time ago.”

  “The way she died, beaten to death like that …That’s how he kills.”

  His words chilled me; I shuddered. It wasn’t only what he said but that he referred to Max in the present tense. It was something I still couldn’t actually accept.

  “If she was his ally, why would he kill her? Maybe someone was just trying to make it look like Max had killed her. Trying to make it seem like he might still be alive.”

  “My next best guess is your boyfriend, Jake Jacobsen.”

  I shook my head. “No way.”

  “Did you ask him about it? About the blood in his studio?”

  It seemed like so long ago. “He said he hadn’t been anywhere near Esme’s and that he had no idea what had happened in his studio, that he hadn’t been back there for hours.”

  “Then where was he all day?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

  “And he didn’t say.”

  “No,” I answered, closing my eyes, wondering what I’d really meant to Jake, wondering where he was now. I kept hearing the words he’d said to me, seeing him falling. He seemed so far away. I didn’t know if we’d ever find each other again.

  “Try to rest now. We’re going to figure this all out. I promise.”

  “It’s just that everyone else—Myra, Sarah, Grant—all these people stumbled into this mess. Maybe they found out things that someone didn’t want them to know and they died for it. But Esme seemed like she might have been in on it. How did she wind up dead?”

  I felt him put his hand on my forehead but he didn’t answer me. After a while, I started to drift off. As I entered the twilight of sleep, I remembered.

  I WAS AWARE that I wasn’t alone as I came to on a hard, rough carpeted floor. I had the sense of movement, and the sounds and smells I quickly became aware of told me that I was on a plane. And there was pain, pain in my side from the fresh gunshot wound, pain in my jaw, in my leg. I slowly tried to move myself and cried out from the sheer agony of the effort.

  He sat still in a leather seat nearby, watching me struggle. He didn’t move to help me. The light was dim but I knew it was the man I had seen on the street, the one I had chased after Sarah Duvall was shot. I couldn’t see his face, not really, but I could tell that at least part of it was badly scarred. He wore the same black felt hat and pair of dark glasses.

  “Where am I?” I asked him. “Who are you?”

  Somehow I managed to pull myself to my feet, using the armrest of the seat beside me. It was a small, obviously private plane. It had a bar and five wide leather seats. There was something rundown about it. A strange odor in the air made my stomach turn. I started to lose my legs again, so I sat.

  “Where’s the ghost?” he asked me, his accent heavy. I’d say Eastern European if I had to guess.

  “Who?”

  “The ghost,” he said again. “Your father, Maxwell Smiley.”

  “He’s dead,” I said. I felt an odd calm wash over me. My circumstances were bizarre, almost incomprehensible. I think I was in shock. I’m sure I was.

  “We’ve seen the photos,” he said patiently. I kept my eyes off of him. I didn’t want to see his face, somehow figuring that if I never looked at him, maybe I wouldn’t die here with him. I stared at my lap and wondered whose blood was all over my legs. Probably mine, maybe Jake’s.

  “If you lead us to him,” he said, “we can forget each other, you see what I mean?”

  Yeah, right, I thought. Sure.

  “He’s dead. I scattered his ashes off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  The man released a sigh, and almost on cue, two men entered the cabin. They spun my chair around, and when I looked up I saw they both wore black ski masks. It’s an awful sight to see; I hope you never experience it. Whoever invented ski masks couldn’t have been thinking about skiing. They’re absolutely ghoulish, purposely designed to fill a person with terror. I tried to struggle, even though I knew it was pointless. One of them held me down easily with his two hands on my arms and his knee on my lap, while the other slowly applied pressure to my wound with his fist. I let out a terrible, inhuman sound that I almost didn’t recognize as my own voice. Even now I don’t really remember the pain. They say that your mind doesn’t have the capacity to remember physical pain. I wish the same was true of fear.

  “Where’s the ghost?” the man in black asked patiently, over and over until I lost consciousness again.

  The space between those events and my first waking in the Covent Garden Hotel is irretrievable to this day. It’s not a memory that I’m interested in reclaiming. Sometimes the unconscious knows best. When it lets the sleeping dogs lie, better not to go kicking them.

  I AWOKE WITH a start, causing Dylan, who’d been dozing in the chair beside me, to jump.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  “Why didn’t they kill me?” I asked him, sitting up. “When they realized I didn’t know where he was, why didn’t they kill me?”

  “They tried in the hospital,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Okay, but why wait? They could have killed me much more easily while I was still in their control.”

  “You got away from them. You must have.”

  “How? I was trapped on a plane being tortured by men in ski masks.”

  He looked at me hard. There was something odd on his face: concern, anger, I wasn’t sure what.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I told him about the memory I’d just had, or was it a dream? He came to sit beside me. He put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Are you sure it happened like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. I thought about it. My memory had a gauzy, nebulous quality to it. But I didn’t think it was a dream. It didn’t have that nonreality to it, that impressionism that dreams do. “No. I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember anything else?” His gaze was intense. But then again, he was a pretty intense guy.

  I shook my head. “Why didn’t they kill me?” I asked again. I wanted to know. It seemed so important and it was. I just didn’t know why.

  “Just be glad they didn’t,” he said, looking away from me. He seemed angry and I didn’t understand why. I looked at the clock. It was after midnight.

  Even as I sat there, the memory was fading a little. I wondered who that man was. Was there something familiar about him? Had I seen him even before he shot Sarah? I scanned my memory of people I’d met in connection to Max. But I couldn’t place him. Maybe it was just my mind playing tricks due to posttraumatic stress.

  “Dylan?” I asked. He had risen and walked over to the window. He put his hand on the pane and stared outside.

  “Yeah, Ridley?” The British accent again. Stress? Fatigue? Probably both.

  “How much do you know about me?” I wasn’t sure why I asked him that right then. I’m still not.

  “What?” he said, but didn’t turn to look at me.

  “I mean all this time watching me. How much do you know?”

  He didn’t answer me for a bit and I figured he wasn’t going to. Then: “I know you still listen to Duran Duran. That you sing in the shower. That you snore.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt both surprised and violated. I was suddenly sorry I’d asked the question.

  “I know you like to eat ice cream after you make love to Jake. I know you cry yourself to sleep sometimes. That you cry when you’re stressed out or mad or just really tired. I know you’re angrier with your parents than you’d ever admit. I know that you have an investigative mind, a terrible itch to know th
e truth about things and people, and that you’re stubborn as hell.”

  I felt a powerful wash of anger then. “Shut up,” I said.

  He turned around to look at me, then walked over to stand near me. “I know that you miss the way your life used to be, that maybe you’d even turn the clock back if you could.”

  “Shut up,” I said again, rising from my seat on the bed. Anger was constricting my airways. He put his hands on my forearms. I struggled against him but he held on hard.

  “I know you hate everything about this. But most of all you hate what you know about Maxwell Smiley now. You hate that he’s a part of you.”

  A sob escaped me and I fought his grip, but it only grew tighter. I wanted to put my hands to my ears and run away from him.

  “But I also know that it doesn’t matter, Ridley. That within you is a true, deep well of goodness. You’re one of the few truly honest, kind, and loving people I have ever known. It doesn’t matter who you came from. Nothing can ever change that.” His voice had lowered almost to a whisper. He let go of my arms and used his thumbs to carefully wipe the tears from my face. Then he placed his hand at the base of my neck and pulled me to him. He pressed his whole body against mine as he kissed me. I found myself clinging to him, feeling the strength and power of his arms and chest, his thighs. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to pull away from him. And I know he wouldn’t have let me go easily, even if I’d asked, even if I’d struggled. I told you before that he held me as if he knew me. I guess maybe he did.

  I felt how badly he wanted me, and it surprised me. He was a man who held a lot back, who’d always seemed so distant even as he trampled all over my boundaries. What surprised me more was how badly I wanted him. Even with the specter of Jake over my shoulder—or maybe because of it—I wanted Dylan Grace. I still belonged to Jake in so many ways that the act of making love to Dylan was a betrayal to us all. In a weird way, I found that appealing. I was all about burning down the house these days.