Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “Max Smiley is more than just a man,” said Jake. “He’s the linchpin in an international web of criminal activity. He has been for decades.”

  “What kind of criminal activity?”

  “It’s complicated, Ridley.”

  “We have time, don’t we?”

  He sighed, leaned back in his chair. “It started with Project Rescue. He and Esme Gray conceived of this way to get kids out of abusive homes and into the homes of the wealthy. Through Alexander Harriman, Max aligned himself with the Italian-American Mafia to get the dirty work done.”

  “I know all of this,” I said impatiently.

  He lifted a hand. “The enterprise became quite lucrative. It grew.”

  “But when things started to get ugly the night Teresa Stone was murdered, Max extracted himself, right?” I said. My heart started to race. I felt eager to cling to the story Alexander Harriman, Max’s late lawyer, had told me.

  Jake looked at me as though he pitied me. I must have seemed like a child to him, clinging to my fairy tales.

  “If he had, Ridley, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

  “Max Smiley was a businessman. There was money to be made and a lot of it. Project Rescue faded away, yes, but the connections Max had made led him into other arenas.”

  I remembered the articles about the sex slave trade from Albania I’d read in Jake’s file. And I knew. I wanted to cover my ears to keep from hearing the rest.

  “It’s not such a big leap from stealing babies and selling them to the rich to luring women and girls from clubs and selling them into slavery,” he said.

  I put my head in my hands. “What are you saying?” I asked through my fingers. “How was he involved with that? What did he do?”

  “We believe he financed the building of nightclubs in Europe that were run by Albanian gangs. In these clubs, mostly in places like the Balkans, the Ukraine, women were lured with the promise of good-paying jobs in the U.K. or the U.S., or they were simply drugged and abducted, then trafficked with false documents to other countries in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. One of the clubs you visited yourself, the Kiss.”

  He glanced over at me quickly, then away again.

  “He took a cut of the profits, both legal and illegal. Of course, there was the added benefit of having places to feed his appetites with no fear of discovery. These women are literally disappeared. False documents are created for them, they are injected with heroin to make them addicts, no one ever hears from them again. What particular monster they’ve fallen prey to matters not at all.”

  The room around me tilted unpleasantly.

  “Isn’t it possible that he didn’t know what was going on in those clubs?” I asked.

  I asked this though I already knew the answer. I was having a hard time understanding how a man who’d spent a great deal of his life raising money for abused women and children through his foundation could be involved with organizations that made their money selling young women and girls into sexual slavery. It didn’t compute …like so many things. I remembered what Dylan had said, screamed at me, rather, in the car. Wake up, Ridley. Wake the fuck up. Your father, your beloved Max, hated women. He murdered them.

  He didn’t answer my question, just went on.

  “In the commission of this business, Max Smiley dealt with some of the key players in the sex slave trade. If we manage to find and capture him, get him to talk, the CIA along with other international law enforcement agencies could cripple or severely damage some of their operations, save countless women, and possibly force principals to face charges in international courts. Do you understand, Ridley?”

  I thought about the photos I’d seen. Max with these men, smiling with mobsters and terrorists in Paris cafés. I started to get that feeling I get when everything is closing in on me and panic starts to set in. My breathing suddenly felt labored and white spots danced before my eyes.

  “Ridley,” said Jake, who, in spite of everything, knew me quite well, “don’t pass out.”

  He called out toward the door, “Get her some water, please.”

  He came and kneeled beside me. Another man entered with a small bottle of water and handed it to Jake. He cracked the lid and handed it to me. I sipped from it and focused on a spot on the wall. I had been humiliated enough for one lifetime to pass out when God knows how many people were staring at me on a closed-circuit screen. All I could think was, Do things like this happen to people?

  “Ridley, just hold it together, okay? It’s going to be okay.”

  I wasn’t sure how he could say such a ridiculous thing.

  “Why should I?” I wanted to know. “Why should I hold it together?”

  “Because, Ridley, I need your help.”

  “My help? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He didn’t say anything, just released a breath and looked at the floor, rested his hand on the back of my chair. I took a few more sips of the water he gave me, kept staring at the spot on the wall that was helping me hold on to consciousness.

  “My help with what?” I asked finally, curiosity getting the better of me.

  “I need you to help us bring Max Smiley in.”

  I almost laughed until I saw that he was deadly serious. I also saw that I had no choice. That, in fact, I never had.

  SINCE THE MOMENT Max found me in my fort in the woods behind my parents’ house, we’d been trekking toward this day. He’d said then, There’s a golden chain from my heart to yours. Trust me. I’ll always find you.

  Years later, I finally understood what he meant. We were bound by experience, by blood, by a fierce love for each other that transcended our personalities, our identities, our good or bad deeds. When I was lost, Max had always found me and brought me home, no questions asked, no judgments, no recriminations. He respected my need to disappear and he accepted that he was the one charged with bringing me back. I hadn’t realized until now that I was charged with the same. No matter what he’d done, no matter who he’d hurt or killed, no matter what kind of a monster Max Smiley was, he was my father. Whether he knew it or not, he was lost. It was my duty, and mine alone, to bring him home.

  19

  About fifteen hours later, I watched my father, Ben (not Max), on a closed-circuit television screen. He was being questioned by two CIA agents: a man, tall with dark buzz-cut hair, and a woman, Latino and small, with burning coals for eyes, both wearing conservative blue suits. I noticed that he didn’t look scared at all, that he leaned back in his chair and had his arms folded across his chest. That his face was stern, his eyes disdainful. He’d admitted to communicating with Max. But he didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that.

  “It’s not a crime to disappear from your life, is it?” he asked.

  “That’s not his crime, Mr. Jones,” said the female agent. She leaned against the wall.

  “You have no proof, no evidence, that your other allegations against him are true,” my father said with his signature huff. “If you had, you would have brought him in long ago.”

  I had to admit that I’d had the same thought. I’d brought it up with Jake, who’d told me that they’d never had enough solid evidence to scare him into giving up the men with whom he’d done business. They could have had him on hiding assets, possibly tax evasion, but they wanted him on charges that, if proven, might lead to the death penalty, which was the only way they figured they’d get him to bargain. Otherwise, a few years in a federal prison would be a cakewalk compared to what some of his associates might have done to him—or to the people he loved. They’d never get him to turn. So they watched and waited. But the longer it went on, the more ethereal he became, the less they saw of him, the more careful he was about his dealings. He turned to vapor before their eyes. And then he “died.” That’s why they started calling him the Ghost.

  They’d been at my father for hours. But all they’d managed to get from him was an admission that he’d received a c
ommunication from Max about a year and a half after his death with instructions on how to decode messages in the red website. My father told them that he checked the website nearly daily and received communications maybe once every few months. The communications were vague—questions about me, about the rest of the family. Max never once said where he was, and Ben knew better than to ask.

  “I didn’t understand why he’d do such a thing, cause us all so much grief,” my father said, “but I figured he had his reasons and I respected that.”

  The male agent shook his head, sat down across from my father, and leaned in. His face was a mask of disdain.

  “You respected that? Do you mean to tell us that in all your years of knowing Max Smiley, you never suspected what he might be capable of, that he might be a murderer, that his business dealings contributed to the destruction of human lives? That he disappeared because it was all starting to catch up with him? He left you and Esme Gray to take the rap for Project Rescue. He nearly destroyed your adopted daughter’s life—almost got her killed, in fact. And still you protected him.”

  My father turned away from the agent’s hard gaze.

  “I try to see the best in the people I love,” he said. “I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

  He sounded defensive, nearly delusional. I was embarrassed for him. I felt ashamed and angry. My cheeks were hot and I sat down in the chair. Jake, who’d been standing behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. I shook him off.

  “I told you not to touch me again,” I snapped. I felt him shift back from me. I hated him. I hated my father. I hated everyone.

  “What does he have on you, Mr. Jones?” the female agent asked with a shake of her head.

  My father flinched. “I have nothing left to say. I want an attorney.”

  She gave a little laugh and looked at him with mock sympathy. “We’re with the CIA, Mr. Jones. The usual rules don’t apply.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked. He started to look afraid for the first time. I saw a sheen of sweat on his brow; he gripped the edge of the table and sat forward.

  “It means that you don’t have the right to an attorney. It means that we can hold you indefinitely if we believe you are a risk to national security. Max Smiley was a known associate of terrorist organizations. You have had contact with him. That makes you at best a witness, at worst an accomplice.”

  My father was silent. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Was it loyalty or fear that kept him protecting Max? I didn’t know.

  I turned to Jake. I couldn’t look at my father anymore. “What happens to me now?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “We let you go. You live your life, go about your business.”

  I looked at him. “In the meantime, you watch every move I make, every phone call, every e-mail. I live in a fishbowl.”

  He gave me a grave nod. “Then,” he said, “after a few weeks, using the log-in you obtained from Angel, you try to reach Max. We’ll go from there.”

  “And Dylan?”

  Jake nodded again. “All charges and reprimands against him have been dropped,” he said, handing me a document. “As per the terms of your agreement.”

  “He goes back to work?” I asked, scanning the page. I’d read it and signed it a few hours earlier.

  Jake shook his head. “No. We weren’t able to arrange that. He’s been terminated from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The guy is a loaded gun.”

  I couldn’t help but stare at Jake. He didn’t seem that different to me. Weird, after everything. He still seemed like Jake. Though he wore a suit and had a cool professionalism to him, I could still see the man I’d known for the last year. I felt as if something in my chest was splitting in half.

  “And you?”

  “You never have to see me again.”

  The thought gave me a little jolt. I saw that he could do just that. He could walk away from me as if he’d never made love to me, never held my hand, never listened to all my secrets. Maybe he didn’t want to, maybe somewhere within him it would cause him pain, but he could do it. He would do it.

  “But you’ll be there, listening and watching,” I said, thinking about how strange and sad that would be.

  “Until we find Smiley. Then I disappear.” He was frowning, looked stiff around the shoulders. I hoped it meant that he was in pain.

  “Fine,” I said, standing.

  “Do you want to hear the rest of Ben’s interview?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve heard enough. From everyone. I want to go home.”

  We’d been back in the States since late the night before. After I agreed to help them, Jake and I got on a commercial flight with a couple of other agents and returned to New York. I’d been with the CIA ever since. I wasn’t sure where in the city we were. I’d come to this location in the back of an unmarked white van with no windows. I hadn’t seen Dylan since the Internet café in London.

  I’d spent a few hours in a clinic where a doctor cleaned and dressed my wound and gave me some kind of antibiotic shot. He also gave me a course of antibiotics for the road. And some painkillers, which I hadn’t taken yet. I wanted to be clearheaded.

  Jake walked me down long white corridors lined with gray doors. We exited from the building into an underground garage and climbed into another van. Or the same van, who knows. There was a driver at the wheel, and as soon as Jake slammed the door, the van started moving. Sitting in the back beside me, he handed me a cell phone equipped with instant messaging and e-mail access. It was pretty cool looking, slick and flat. He told me how everything was preprogrammed for me to reach them.

  “Keep this on you at all times. You’ll have five minutes to return calls, e-mails, or instant messages from us. If you exceed that time, someone will come for you.”

  “To protect me or take me into custody?”

  “Well, that depends upon the reason for your delay in responding.”

  I nodded my understanding.

  “Remember, Ridley,” he said after he’d finished with his various instructions—don’t play my music too loud, don’t expose the phone to moisture, don’t loiter in cell phone dead zones, use stairs instead of elevators whenever possible (I didn’t ask why)—“we may not be the only people watching you. You won’t see us, you won’t hear us, you won’t know we’re there. If you do suspect that someone might be following you, if you hear strange clicks or static on your phone, even if the screen on your computer monitor starts to act up, you need to let us know.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was struck again with how bizarre this whole thing was. I thought that Grant would have gotten a kick out of it all. I personally had never been so depressed in all my life. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d listen to me going to the bathroom. This was a weird thing to wonder, I know.

  I must have dozed off a little because the next thing I knew, we were coming to a stop. I sat there for a second, then looked at Jake. The look on his face communicated the gravity of my situation. He was worried—whether it was because he thought I couldn’t handle it, or he was afraid, even with all their surveillance, that he might not be able to keep any harm from coming to me, or he just grieved for all that was lost between us, I didn’t know.

  “Ridley,” he said as he swung the door open for me. “Be careful.”

  I waited until I climbed over him and out of the van and came to stand on the sidewalk before I responded.

  “This is never going to work, you know.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. We locked eyes for a second. I’m not sure what he saw there, but it caused him to shift closer to me.

  “Ridley,” he said, his voice a warning, “just follow the program, okay?”

  “What choice do I have?” I said, and walked toward my building. He closed the door without another word and the van sped off. I moved quickly inside and was glad not to see anyone in the lobby or in the elevator. I’d barely made it into my apartment before I started sobbing. I knew they could hea
r me and I didn’t care; I just let it all out, all the pain and fear and anxiety, into the cushions on my couch. When I felt better I ordered enough Chinese food for four people from Young Chow on Fourth Avenue and took the hottest shower I could take without scalding myself.

  When the food came, I ate it in front of the television set, flipping mindlessly through the channels. I didn’t see a thing on the screen in front of me as I wolfed down egg rolls and wonton soup and sesame chicken. I was starving, absolutely ravenous. When I was totally stuffed, I took my antibiotics and three of the pain pills the doctor had given me. I ignored the message machine blinking beside the phone. I got into bed and slept for nearly twelve hours.

  When I woke in the bright light of late morning, I expected to feel better. But I didn’t. I felt utterly lost. Those black fingers of depression that had been pulling and tugging closed around me like a shroud. I spent the better part of the morning staring at a water stain on the ceiling over my couch.

  THEY SAY THAT it’s the first three years of a child’s life that are the most critical, that if in those years a child is not cared for and loved, then the damage cannot be undone. If in those years, a child does not have the opportunity to see and learn, to develop empathy, compassion, and trust, he will never have the opportunity to learn those things again.

  I don’t know what happened to Max in the early years of his life, but I can imagine now. Max was a damaged person. I know I’ve said this before, but I’m asking you now to really understand, to have true compassion. Imagine if you can an infant, fragile and pure, who instead of being the object of adoration was the object of anger, who instead of being stroked and cuddled was slapped and shaken. Imagine that instead of learning love, that child learned only fear. Imagine that all he knew was that fear and pain, and that somehow he would use these things to survive. What would such a person be capable of later in his life? I’m not making excuses. I’m just asking you to think about it.

  BEN HAD ASKED to meet me at the fountain in Washington Square. I didn’t answer his call when I saw his number blinking on my caller ID. I had halfway decided that I might never speak with him and Grace again. He left a message.