Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  When Max is finally close enough to see, I gaze upon his face. And he’s someone I don’t recognize at all. I draw in a gasp as a wide, cruel smile spreads across his face. And then I get it. He is the man they say he is.

  “Oh, God,” I say, lowering my gun. “Oh, no.”

  Then for a second I see him. I look into his eyes and I see my uncle Max, the man who always found me and brought me home. He still resides in the eyes of this stranger. His face momentarily loses its cruelty and the little girl in me aches for him, wants nothing more than to run to him. Without thinking, I lower my gun and lift my hand to him. Our eyes lock briefly. Then night comes alive with sound and light, and he turns and runs.

  Suddenly there are men all around me. Clad in body armor, guns drawn, they chase after Max’s fleeing form. His cane has been discarded and he runs faster than I would have ever imagined he could. Jake grabs my arm hard. His face is pale and strained in anger.

  “Stay here!” he yells at me. I can see that he’s beyond furious. “Goddamn it, Ridley, don’t fucking move.”

  He’s gone then, too. They’re all chasing Max. Dylan comes up behind me and I turn to him.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I say. It’s only as the words pass my lips that I realize the reason for all of this was not because I wanted to find my father, but because I wanted to kill him. I didn’t want him alive in custody somewhere, helping the CIA end the sex slave trade. I wanted to cut him out of this world like a cancer, as if in doing so I could rid myself of every part of him that lived in me, good and bad. I guess I thought because I was his daughter, I had it in me to do that. Wrong again.

  “Of course not,” he answers. He takes my face in both his hands. “You’re not him. You’ll never be anything like him.”

  I hear the blades of a helicopter then and the sound of guns firing. We move quickly through the building toward the sound and come outside to find a black helicopter rising into the night. I see Max through the window and remember his wolfish smile. He lifts a hand and points to his heart, then he points to me. I know then that I’ll never see him again. As the helicopter grows smaller, I wonder what happened to the man I loved, if he ever existed at all.

  Jake and the men with him continue to fire pointlessly at the helicopter long after it is out of range. Jake is screaming something into a cell phone as his eyes fall on me. He runs over to me.

  “We’re going to get him tonight, Ridley. He can’t get far.”

  I can’t tell if he thinks he’s issuing a threat or making a promise to me. Either way, I find I don’t care. I turn from him and into Dylan. I don’t want to look at Jake’s face ever again.

  “The two of you are so fucked,” says Jake, moving closer to us. He’s in Dylan’s face. “How could you do this?”

  Dylan pushes him back. “Step off, man.”

  For a second, I think they’ll come to blows. In both their voices I can hear anger and frustration. But the heat between them fizzles out. It hurts to be so close to the thing you’ve been chasing and then have it snatched away. There’s nothing you can do about it. No one understands that better than me.

  But as I look around me at the flat, dead island and into the sky at the fading lights of Max’s helicopter, I don’t feel their anger or their sadness. For the first time since I learned that I was Max’s daughter, I feel free.

  23

  Who was Max Smiley? Even now, I don’t know for sure. He was a shape shifter, he was whoever he had to be to control the situation. He was Nick Smiley’s worst nightmare, Ben Jones’s best friend, my beloved uncle. He was a murderer, a philanthropist, a real-estate magnate, a criminal directly and indirectly responsible for the enslavement and death of countless women. He was a man I loved and a man I hated. He was a man I feared and someone I’d never known at all. He was all these things equally and truly. He was my father.

  The idea that we would sit and talk and he would answer for the things he’d done to me, to so many others, and that he’d show remorse, accept justice, do some kind of penance—it had been a child’s dream. A child who’s been injured by a parent waits her whole life for some acknowledgment of the wrong that’s been done, some validation from him that her pain is real, that he’s sorry and will make amends. The child will wait forever, unable to move forward, unable to forgive, without someone to acknowledge the past. In that powerlessness comes a terrible rage.

  From that rage a darker, but equally childish, dream blossomed—one I didn’t even acknowledge until the gun was in my hand. But of course, Dylan was right: I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t have enough of Max in me. I couldn’t have lived with myself. I was the good girl with my homework done and my pajamas on. Besides, killing him wouldn’t have made him any less my father; it wouldn’t have killed the pieces of him that live inside me. What I needed was an exorcism.

  I was thinking this as I sat alone in yet another interrogation room. They all seemed the same, these rooms with their harsh fluorescents and faux wood tables, hard metal and vinyl chairs. I was remarkably calm considering I had no idea what was going to happen to me now. I supposed it was possible that I’d be arrested—highly possible. I didn’t even have a lawyer. I remembered what they’d told my father about being able to hold him indefinitely, how the usual rights didn’t apply when it came to national security. I had a vivid fantasy of myself dressed in a gray jumpsuit and being moved through a network of secret CIA prisons around the world. Still, I felt an odd stillness. Probably just denial.

  The door opened and Jake entered. He looked like hell, his face drawn. There were blue smudges of fatigue beneath his eyes. I felt my stomach twist at the sight of him. What did I feel? It’s so complicated. Such anger; such a deep sense of betrayal; and, yes, still love, too.

  He sat across from me. “He’s gone. We lost him.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t surprised.

  “We weren’t able to mobilize the satellite cameras in time. He put the chopper down somewhere and took off in another vehicle …we assume.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I realized that I had a white-knuckled grip on the table in front of me; I forced myself to relax. However complicated my feelings were for Jake, they were about a million times more complicated when it came to Max.

  “How could you do this, Ridley? What were you trying to prove?”

  “I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I …” I said, letting the sentence trail off.

  “You wanted to kill him,” said Jake blandly.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know,” I said. “I thought so.”

  He shook his head at me. He had such a look of disapproval on his face, I wanted to smack him.

  “Don’t you look at me like that,” I said to him, all the heat of my anger rising to my face. “You’re the king of liars. The things you’ve done are a hundred times worse than anything I’ve done. How do you live with yourself?”

  “I was doing my job,” he said weakly.

  We sat there looking at each other in some kind of a sad standoff where he dropped his eyes first but we both lost. Then he reached under the table and I heard him flip two switches. The lights came on in the room behind the mirror and I saw that it was empty.

  “It’s just you and me in here, Ridley. I turned the audio surveillance off.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

  “What? Are you going to beat me up? Try to torture information out of me?”

  “No,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I just need you to know that there was more between us than lies.”

  “I’m not sure it matters now, Jake.”

  “It does matter. It matters to me. I loved you, Ridley. That was the truth. I just need you to understand that. I still love you.”

  I looked into his face and saw that he needed me to believe him. I was reminded strangely of my encounter with Christian Luna, a man who believed he was my father. I remember how he pleaded his case to me, how desperate he was for me to understand the
man he was and why he’d done the things he had. He wanted my forgiveness. But it was all about him—what he wanted, what he needed in order to find peace with himself.

  “Is that why you started distancing yourself toward the end?”

  He nodded.

  “You knew things were coming to a head and you backed away so that when I finally understood what had happened, it would hurt less. You drifted far enough away to distance yourself but stayed close enough to keep manipulating me.”

  He hung his head here.

  “Close enough to keep making love to me.”

  He looked up quickly. “Every time I touched you it was real. Every time, Ridley.”

  I heard a slight shake in his voice. And I believed that when we made love there was truth in it. But it just didn’t matter. The terrible lie that ran beneath our life together was a dark river that washed everything else away. I could never forgive him …maybe especially because I believed he did love me in the way that he could. I told him as much.

  He nodded, leaned back a little in his chair. His face was grim and I could see his pain in the tight line of his mouth, in the corners of his eyes. I was sorry for every lie that had passed between us. We could have been together for a long time, maybe forever. But that was another life, another universe of possibility that didn’t even exist anymore.

  “Look,” I said, wanting to get down to business. “Whatever happens to me now, I need someone to know that Dylan Grace had nothing to do with this. He got dragged along because I was stubborn and he was trying to save my ass.”

  He looked at me and gave me a smile.

  “Funny,” he said. “He said just the opposite—that he’d dragged you into this, convinced you to dump the phone and to help him find Max.”

  “Well, he’s just trying to protect me. It was my fault. I deserve to take all the fire for this.”

  He released a sigh and stood up. He walked over to the window and stared into the empty room across from us. I could see his reflection in the dark glass. “The truth is that I deserve to take all the fire for this.”

  “You do? Why?”

  “Because if I hadn’t given you this defective piece of equipment,” he said, pulling the cell phone I’d dumped in the tunnel beneath Five Roses from his pocket, “then we never would have lost you. And you wouldn’t have been vulnerable to abduction by Dutch Warren.”

  “It wasn’t …,” I said. The look on his face caused me to clamp my mouth shut. I got it.

  “It was my job to protect you and I failed at that. I’m sorry you almost wound up a permanent resident of Potter’s Field.”

  I cringed at the thought.

  “You’ve held up your end of the deal,” he said. “It’s not your fault things played out like they did.”

  “And Dylan?”

  “The terms of your agreement stand.”

  He still had his back to me but I could see him watching me in the glass.

  “Who was he working for?” I asked.

  “Dutch Warren? We think he was working for a man named Hans Carmichael. He’s just one of the people looking for Max. The rumor is that Carmichael’s daughter was a drug addict and a prostitute, that Max killed her in London about ten years ago. He’s been seeking revenge ever since.”

  I nodded, wondering if there was any end to the havoc Max had wrought. “Was Boris Hammacher working for the same man?”

  “We think so.”

  “And the man who tried to kill me in the hospital in London?”

  “I’m not sure they would have killed you right away,” he said. “But the man Dylan killed in London was another known associate of Carmichael’s, so it’s a safe bet that they tried to abduct you in London and failed, thanks to Dylan Grace.” I thought I heard jealousy in his voice, but that might have just been wishful thinking on my part.

  He came back to the table and sat down across from me. I found myself looking at his hands, thinking about all the places on my body they’d visited, how strong and tender they’d always been. That’s the weirdest thing about the end of love: All the physical intimacy is immediately revoked. I’d never hold those hands again, they’d never have a right to roam my skin. He was a stranger physically and emotionally, though I’d loved him just a short time ago.

  He put the cell phone on the table.

  “These things cost a fortune and they never work when you need them to,” he said with a smile that made my heart hurt.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll debrief you and then you’re free to go.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked him. It was pretty surprising since I’d single-handedly destroyed everything he’d been working toward for years.

  That smile again. “For old times’ sake, Ridley. You know?”

  I didn’t answer him, just held his eyes a second longer, then gave a slow nod.

  He flipped a switch under the table, to turn on the audio, I guessed. I told him everything that had happened in Max’s apartment and on Potter’s Field. He asked some questions here and there but it all went pretty quickly. When we were done, he stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Ridley,” he said. I could see that he was. I was, too.

  “Jake,” I said as he moved toward the door, “did you find the envelope?” I had told him I thought they left it on the boat.

  He nodded, paused with his hand on the doorknob. I felt my heart flutter a little even as my stomach churned. As usual, I wanted to know as much as I didn’t. Part of me hoped there was something in there for me. I know. I’m screwed up.

  “What was in it?” I asked finally.

  “It’s confidential, Ridley.”

  “I need to know, Jake.”

  “Files,” he said. “Computer files.”

  “Containing?”

  “He basically betrayed everyone with whom he’s ever had illegal dealings. He gave up names, bank transactions, photographs. It would have taken a team of agents months, maybe a year, to compile so much data.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “It’s genius, actually. Everything that we wanted him for is right at our fingertips now—names, dates, potential witnesses. We’ll be able to make real cases against some very bad people.”

  “And the search for Max becomes less urgent.”

  “He’s still one of our most-wanted fugitives. But, yes, likely some funding will be diverted to follow up these leads.”

  I was silent. I didn’t know what to say.

  “It was never just about him. I told you that,” Jake said.

  “Was there information about Project Rescue?”

  He hesitated, then gave a quick nod. “I can’t tell you anything about that, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. I wasn’t even sure I needed to know anything else about Project Rescue. Did the logistics of who did the dirty work really mean anything to me? I wondered how many of those children had wound up in good homes and how many of them wound up in hell. It was too much for me to consider. I felt a familiar numbness wash over me, a familiar fog move into my brain. What could I do?

  I thought about my father, Ben. Why had he given me that key? Hadn’t he, in a sense, used me to help Max escape? Had it been intentional or was he trying to show me what Max really was? Or was he just following instructions from Max? I filed this away to be dealt with later.

  “Was there anything for me?”

  Jake shook his head. The expression on his face told me he couldn’t believe, after all of this, that part of me still wanted to hear from Max.

  “Go home, Ridley,” said Jake, echoing Max’s final message to me. I didn’t know if it was intentional or not. But I took his advice.

  24

  The woods behind my parents’ house were just as I remembered them. It was cold, and as usual I wasn’t dressed for it. Another hour and the sun would be rising. Already I could see a silvery lightening of the horizon. As a child, I’d been frightened by these woods at night, my imagination turning slim black trees into witche
s, rocks into goblins, bushes into bogeymen. Tonight nothing scared me as I made my way through the thin tree cover. I could see the lights from the neighbor’s porch as I stepped over the creek bed, which was always dry in winter.

  It was still there, just as we left it a lifetime ago, when it was the center of all our imaginary play. The fort that Ace and I had built seemed so small as I came to stand beside it. I was surprised at how tiny it was; I always remembered it large, as big as a car. Instead it was more like the size of a refrigerator box, maybe a little bigger. But for its size, the unstable little structure seemed solid and righteous. It had a place in these woods and in my memory; it would always be there.

  Ridley, go home.

  I climbed inside and sat on the cool dirt of the ground. It was just barely big enough for me. I had to scrunch up a little to fit. Outside, I could almost hear the sounds of my childhood summers: crickets chirping, the sparrows waking with the rising sun, off in the distance the sound of the trains going to and from the city. But this winter night was silent. And I felt profoundly how far I was from my childhood, from the girl who hid herself so that she could be sought after, found, and brought home.

  It glowed, the whiteness of the envelope stuck between the rotting slats of wood. The paper was still clean and fresh; it hadn’t been there long. On its surface my name had been scrawled. I plucked it from its place, ripped the seal, and pulled out a single sheet of paper.

  Hey, kid,

  What a mess, huh? I wonder what you think of me as you read this …Do you hate me? Do you fear me? I guess I don’t know. I like to think your memories of me are enough to keep you from despising me. But maybe not.

  All I’m going to say is: Don’t believe everything you hear.

  I should have done better by you. I know that. Though I’m sure you agree that you would have been better off never knowing I was your father. Ben is the better man, by far. A better man and father than I could ever be. I stand by that decision. You come from ugly, kid. Ugly people, an ugly past. I tried to spare you the knowledge of that. And I was right …because you’re a bright light, Ridley. I’ve told you that before. Don’t let what you know about me and your grandparents change that about you. It doesn’t have to.