Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  I looked over at him and saw that the nail marks Angel had left looked raw and painful. I didn’t know what to say. He was right, and it reminded me how inorganic this relationship was, how it had started under a veil of lies and existed in a crucible of danger and uncertainty. Our only social encounters consisted of a murder in a dark hospital room and the menacing of a prostitute in an after-hours club on the West End of London. I wondered if we had anything in common other than our shared obsession with my father. I wondered if we’d ever have a chance to find out.

  SOME OF US are lost and some of us are found. I think that’s really the difference Max had observed. Some people don’t have that many questions and lack that belly of fire when it comes to their encounters with the world. They’re content in their predictable lives, where everything that lies before them is like a rerun of Jeopardy. They already know the answers and how the game will end. They don’t have the urge to travel or to ask the questions that boggle the mind: Who am I? Why am I here? Is this all there is? Instead there’s a certainty about themselves and the world around them. They work. They go to church. They take care of their families. They know their beliefs are correct; they know that anything different is wrong or bad.

  Others of us are lost. We’re forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don’t recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might one day solve, if only we collect enough pieces. The idea that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread.

  I was filled with this dread as we hovered over the computer screen in the back of the twenty-four-hour Internet café. It was nearly four A.M. and I felt as if we were the only two people in London. We entered the address into the browser and the red screen popped up. I tabbed for the windows and entered Angel’s log-in and password. A small window opened in the center of the screen. I watched as the same streaming video piece I’d seen at Jake’s place started. It was broad daylight in the video, so I knew that it wasn’t a live feed. I found myself leaning in closer. Then, from the right of the screen, a man moved into the frame. He moved slowly, with the help of a cane. His motion was unsteady and the other people on the street seemed to race by him. He wore a long brown coat and a brimmed tweed cap. Then he stopped and turned.

  He was thin and ghostly pale, as if something was eating him alive inside. He was not the man I knew. He was someone shelled out and broken. He lifted his eyes to the camera, which must have been somewhere across the street. He moved his mouth but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, just like in my dreams. Even as changed as he was, there was no mistaking who I was looking at. It was Max. My father.

  I felt this terrible ache inside that I suppose had always been there, that had been driving me all this time. This ache was the reason for everything I had done, every mistake I had made, every reckless and careless action since Dylan first approached me on the street. I had wrecked my whole life to fill the empty space inside me that was the dark shadow of my father. I needed something that I still believed only he could give me. And I’d almost destroyed myself to get it.

  “What’s he saying?” Dylan asked.

  The video was on some kind of a loop. It came to an abrupt stop and then replayed Max walking slowly across the street, turning and saying something as he faced the camera. The whole thing lasted maybe ten seconds.

  I watched it replay several times, zooming in on his mouth. After the fourth time, I knew. I leaned back in my chair.

  “What?” Dylan asked me. “What is he saying?”

  I looked up at Dylan. “He’s saying, ‘Ridley, go home.’”

  THEY DESCENDED ON us then, maybe realizing that it was the end of the road, that my pathetic little leads had led me as far as I could go. They entered from the front of the café and from the back. They shined their lights in the windows beside us. They entered with guns drawn, wearing body armor and making lots of noise. Overkill, if you ask me. But I just sat staring at the screen, watching Max, put my hands on my head, felt the spiky strands of my strange hair. Dylan, standing beside me, did the same. Two men patted him down and took his gun.

  I wasn’t surprised to see Inspector Madeline Ellsinore when she came through the door. She had her eyes on me; in them I imagined I saw empathy.

  In fact, I wasn’t even surprised to see Jake or the black bulletproof vest he wore over his clothes, the gun in his hand.

  18

  Up until recently, my life has been pretty uneventful. Not to say that I was just plodding along until a single event turned my world on its axis. But now that you mention it, that’s not too far off. As I sat in a cold gray room, lit horribly with flickering fluorescent bulbs, I thought about that moment when I raced into the street to save Justin Wheeler. Dylan was right. Part of me would go back and change it all if I could. But I know now that all of this was set in motion long before that day. I had been laboring under the delusion that I had some control over my life. I was only beginning to understand that it wasn’t true.

  He walked into the room and closed the door. He didn’t say anything as he sat across the table from me. I couldn’t bring myself to raise my eyes. His betrayal was so profound, so incomprehensible, that in that moment I was afraid I’d burst into flames if I looked at him.

  “Ridley,” he said finally.

  “Was it all lies? Everything?”

  He didn’t answer for a second. Then: “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “I have cared for you, Ridley,” he said in a voice I didn’t recognize. There was something so cold and officious about him, especially in this place, in this setting. “I still do. You know that. But that wasn’t part of the plan. It was a contingency I never planned for, a complication.”

  “A mistake,” I said. Did he say “care for”? Like you care for the environment or care for an aging aunt? I thought of all the love I’d felt for this man, all the times I’d given him my body and my heart, my deepest trust; all the truths I’d revealed, all the painful confidences I’d shared. I’d sliced myself open and bared it all. I felt a deep sense of shame, a desire to cover my nakedness before him.

  “Not a mistake,” he said softly, more like the man I knew. I felt his hand on mine and I pulled it back quickly. I mustered my strength and looked up. He seemed tired and sad, with dark circles under his eyes, the line of his mouth straight and firm.

  “Don’t ever put your hands on me again,” I said.

  He hung his head. I couldn’t have hated him more.

  “I just need to be clear,” I said. “Everything about you—your personal history as a Project Rescue baby, our relationship, your sculpture, everything I know about you as a person—all of it just lies? Just a cover story?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  I felt a wave of nausea so strong, I swear I thought I was going to puke right there. But I managed to hold it in. I tasted that dark beer I’d had a while ago. It tasted like the truth, bitter and acidic on the back of my throat.

  “Why?” I asked, hearing the desperation in my own voice.

  “You know why.”

  I shook my head. “No. You didn’t need to deceive me so personally to find Max. You could have had me under surveillance, watched me from a distance. I never would have known.”

  He didn’t answer me, let me think about it. And then I understood.

  “You needed to be able to manipulate me. Keep the issues alive for me, plant little seeds here and there, show me that file. You got to know me well enough to push my buttons, to get me chasing when the time was right.”

  I was happy to see shame and regret on his face, but it didn’t even come close to being enough. So many things that had never made sense to me were so obvious to me now:
Jake’s obsession with Max, how he always found me wherever I was, how he always seemed to know what I was thinking, how he managed to stoke the flames of my curiosity, always keeping the past alive. Nearly two years of this. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad about sleeping with Dylan.

  I thought about our last moments together at the Cuban place in the Bronx and at the Cloisters over the wall.

  “Those things you said to me the last time we were together. Those promises you made. Why would you say those things?”

  He shook his head and I saw his eyes go damp. He got up and walked over to a narrow window that was laced with wire mesh. I understood. It wasn’t all lies. There was something real between us. But it was irretrievable now. In those last moments, he must have known that the time was coming. In his way, he tried to save us. Somehow that just made it all worse.

  “So it was the CIA that night. They sent the text message. They chased us at the Cloisters. They brought me to London.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Then who?”

  “We think Max sent the message. If you’d gone alone that night, you might have seen him.”

  I thought about the car that had slowly pulled up the drive, about the men in the trees. Had he been in the back of the sedan? Lurking in the woods?

  “So those were your men that night? The CIA came to take Max in.”

  He shook his head again. I wasn’t very good at this, I guess.

  “There are a lot of people, a lot of very bad people, looking for Max. I don’t know if they were following you or if they intercepted the text message, but they got there before my men did.”

  “Grant,” I said quietly. “I told Grant Webster where I was going and when I’d be there. That’s how they found out.”

  “Maybe,” he said with a slow nod.

  I hung my head, wondering if they had tortured him to find out. I remember how excited he’d been to be involved in all the intrigue.

  “So who brought me to London?” I asked after a while. “How did my passport and all that cash get into my bag?”

  “There are a number of suspects,” he said vaguely.

  “Like who?” I pressed.

  He didn’t say anything, just looked at me hard. I got mad.

  “They tortured me!” I yelled, standing and lifting my shirt so that he could see my wound, the bruises on my body. “I didn’t know anything about Max. I didn’t even know they called him the Ghost. I didn’t even know what they were asking me.”

  He said sharply, “I had nothing to do with that. I tried to protect you, Ridley. And I failed.” He pulled at the neck of his sweater and exposed a thick bandage on his shoulder. I remembered watching him get shot. I remembered him falling. The memory made me dizzy. I looked into the green facets of his eyes for I don’t know how long. To his credit, he didn’t look away. I don’t know what I was looking for there, but I’ll tell you that I didn’t find it. I didn’t understand him or how he could have done what he did—or how I could have believed so totally the lie that he was. There we were, showing each other our wounds. I’m not sure what either one of us was trying to prove. I lowered my shirt and sat back down. He did the same.

  “I never would have been a part of that,” he said.

  “Oh, but you were. You were the biggest part of it.”

  The silence that followed between us was a live wire.

  “Why didn’t they kill me?” I asked him finally. “When they figured out I didn’t know where Max was, why would they let me live? How did I get to that hotel?”

  He sighed. “Everyone wants the same thing from you, Ridley.”

  He put his hand on a file that lay between us on the table. I’d been so distracted I hadn’t noticed it. He opened it and slid out a photograph, pushed it toward me. I recognized him right away. The man on the plane with the scars on his face. The same man who’d killed Sarah Duvall. He was ghoulishly ugly, with pale eyes that seemed lidless, a wide, thin mouth and oddly shaped nose. Those scars—burns, I think. He had the look of a man who’d suffered terrible agony, and it had made him evil. I shuddered. I didn’t think I’d ever forget the sound of his voice.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Boris Hammacher.”

  I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. Why did I feel as if I was always trying to pull information out of people? Couldn’t anyone just ever tell me what I needed to know?

  “And?” I said.

  “And he’s an assassin, for lack of a better word. He’s the guy you call when you want someone found and killed.”

  “He’s looking for Max?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I think it’s safe to operate under that assumption.”

  “He let me live because he thought Max would come for me.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  Notice how slippery he is, how he never confirms or denies anything? It’s possible he just didn’t know the answers to my questions, but more likely he just didn’t want to answer them.

  “He’s the one I saw on the street,” I said, taking the photograph in my hand. I remembered chasing him, how fast he’d been. “He killed Sarah Duvall. Why? She didn’t know anything.”

  Jake got up and paced the room. “I don’t know, Ridley. I don’t know if he was following her or following you. Maybe he thought she knew something about Myra’s disappearance, maybe he wasn’t sure what kind of clues Myra had left behind. Maybe he thought she was a loose end. Or maybe he was trying to terrorize you.”

  “Did he kill Myra Lyall?” I asked.

  “Myra Lyall got information she shouldn’t have. As you know, she was researching an article on some Project Rescue babies, and someone leaked information to her about the CIA belief that Max Smiley was still alive. She started asking a lot of questions at the agency. She paid Esme Gray a visit. She was just fishing, though. As far as we know, she didn’t have any real information. We believe Boris Hammacher thought she knew more than she did. When she didn’t, he killed her.”

  “Who is he working for? Who’s trying to find Max?”

  “It could be any number of people. Max had a lot of enemies.”

  I thought about all of this for a second. I thought about how Myra, Sarah, and Grant were all dead because of Max and how the only reason I hadn’t joined them was because everyone was banking on the likelihood that Max would be coming for me someday.

  “Who killed Esme Gray?”

  “Esme Gray is alive.”

  “But …”

  He walked over to the table, sat back down.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder how she escaped prosecution? Didn’t it seem strange to you that no one ever paid for Project Rescue? She came to us when Max tried to contact her. She brokered a deal for herself and for her son. She obtained immunity in exchange for her help in locating Max Smiley. Her son, Zack, will be out of prison within the next five years.”

  This information was unpleasant. But in comparison to everything else, it didn’t seem like such a big deal that a man who’d tried to kill me and who still hated me might be out on the street fairly soon.

  “So why fake her death?”

  “She made mistakes in her dealings with you. She’d let you have too much information by mentioning Myra Lyall. Dylan Grace was harassing her. She’d been working with us since we realized she’d falsely identified Max Smiley’s body, and so she knew a lot about the investigation. She was showing signs of stress at all the deception. She had a paranoia that Max would discover her betrayal and come for her. We were afraid she was a weak link, that she might snap if pulled too hard. So we removed her from the field.”

  “Was it on purpose that you chose a beating death for her? That’s the way the FBI claims Max killed people.”

  He shrugged. “We just needed her face to be unrecognizable.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just gave him a look that I hope communicated how much he disgusted me on so many levels.

  “What about DNA and fingerprints,
dental records? You can’t just mash up someone’s face and call it a day anymore.”

  “The CIA took over the investigation so that we could handle all of that. Happens for witness protection all the time.”

  We were both quiet for a while. There were so many questions. Some of them I wanted the answers to, some of them I didn’t. I didn’t even know where to go next. Finally: “Okay, so where is he?”

  “We know now that he’s not in London. He probably hasn’t been in years. That image you saw had been superimposed on that street scene. Computer graphics. He could be anywhere in the world.”

  He could be anywhere in the world but he was alive. I was filled with dread and fury and, yes, the slightest glimmer of hope.

  “Then why are we all here?”

  “Like us, Boris Hammacher thought that Max was here. We suspect that’s why he brought you here. And we followed Dylan Grace to you.”

  “Because everybody wants the same thing from me.”

  I thought of all these people circling like vultures the rotting carrion that was my life, all of them waiting for Max to make his move so that they could make theirs. But Max never came. I’d been shot, abducted, tortured, left to suffer alone in a foreign hotel room, brought to a hospital where another attempt was made on my life, abducted again, run all over London, and finally arrested. But Max never came. I guess the joke was on them. Or me.

  I knew that even this conversation was probably fraught with lies and half-truths, but I also knew that it was the first nearly honest conversation I’d ever had with the man before me. It made me sad. I felt so tired suddenly, as if I could sleep for days. I was envious of Rip van Winkle. I wanted a hundred-year nap, where I woke and everything I hated and loved had turned to dust.

  “So what is it? Why does everyone want Max Smiley so badly? Why is everyone looking for the Ghost?”

  Jake’s face was as still as stone.

  “The murders he’s suspected of committing?”

  No answer.

  “No,” I said into the silence. “No one cares about a few prostitutes. Though I imagine a couple of dead Interpol agents might cause some international difficulties. Still, it has to be more than that. It has to be more than just one man.”