Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5)

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  How many times in the two months since it all ended had she looked in the mirror, or at her reflection in a storefront window, and thought ‘You’re not Dana anymore.’

  You’re Emily LaGrange, twenty eight years and two months old. You were born on Thanksgiving day in nineteen eighty nine. Your mother is dead and your father…

  “The Bureau has a plan to help get you reintegrated,” Schur told her.

  She could only look at him for a moment after he said that. Just look. No smile, no scowl. No reaction of any kind that she would let show on the surface. But inside…

  Inside she was ticking off all that she’d done. All that she’d witnessed.

  ‘Dana, shoot him…’

  The recollection came unwanted, from the shadows of her psyche. A place she’d purposely constructed to hold the darkest moments of what she’d been party to. It had served her well while she was enmeshed in the world that gave birth to the incidents which would fill that mental space. But now, with no pressure from the outside world forcing the contents back into their hole, morsels from that time would make themselves known. In dreams. While she watched television.

  And while being fed a line of bullshit from a DOJ lackey.

  ‘If you don’t pull that trigger…’

  “Reintegrated,” she said, parroting the word for no other reason than to drag herself up from the memories. From that memory.

  “We’re going to get you back into the swing of things,” Schur told her. “It’s all been mapped out.”

  “I’m immensely thankful,” she reacted, deadpan.

  The DOJ bureaucrat didn’t take the bait. He was ten pay grades above her in seniority. Beyond that, he’d been given this assignment—he hadn’t asked for it. Considering the young agent’s…history, nothing about what he’d been tasked with was even remotely pleasant. The best he had hoped for was a decent breakfast.

  “I want you to talk to some people about an assignment,” Schur said, wiping his mouth, napkin bunched in one pudgy hand.

  “Some people?”

  “Yes.”

  Emily eyed him, the vagueness about him setting the skin at the back of her neck to tingle. It was a familiar sensation. A feeling of warning. An indicator that something, if not wrong, was somehow off.

  “Do these people have names?”

  “They do,” Schur said. “And I’m sure they’ll share that when you meet.”

  If she’d been in the mafia, and not the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Emily might have thought she was being dispatched to a place where people she trusted would put a bullet in the back of her head when she turned away. But this couldn’t be that, because she was a special agent of the FBI, and, more importantly, because she trusted no one.

  “What the fuck is this?” Emily asked, quiet rage about her. “I gave two years of my life for you people and now you’re doing what, sending me back down some rabbit hole?”

  “No, Emily,” Schur assured her.

  “No? Okay, then why this? Why do I get to meet you, a total fucking stranger, in this place, not at a Field Office? Why am I not given an assignment straight away? Why am I not sitting at a desk RIGHT FUCKING NOW?!”

  Heads swiveled. Eyes angled toward her. Toward the commotion. Schur, though, didn’t react. He’d been briefed not to by the Quantico headshrinkers.

  “I’m not the enemy,” Schur told her.

  Emily gave a brief, breathy chuckle in response to that assertion. She planted her hands on the table and leaned toward Schur.

  “No?” she challenged him. “Because I can’t tell you guys apart anymore.”

  She rose from the booth and left the man behind, half-stunned gazes tracking her as she left the diner.

  * * *

  Schur found her down the block, sitting on a bus bench, staring across the street at a park, patches of snow dotting the expanse of brown grass.

  “Do you need a ride?” Schur asked.

  Emily shook her head and watched a pair of bundled toddlers run circles around their mother near a swing set.

  “I walked here,” she told the man.

  She was a contradiction, Schur thought as he looked at her. Both hard and lost at the same time. Her Bureau handler had added to the psychiatrists’ insight on her. Or warnings, as it were. She could be volatile. Scattered. Even verging on paranoid. If she was some college graduate applying to the Bureau, she’d never even get an interview.

  Emily LaGrange was damaged. Worse still, she knew that she was. Schur wondered if she’d ever be ‘fixed’. If she’d ever get over what she’d been through on her undercover assignment.

  Two fucking years…

  He wasn’t expressing any outward sympathy toward her. Doing so might be read as patronizing, the doctors had told him. But he felt it.

  A bus pulled up and the door hissed opened. Schur shook his head at the driver and waved the vehicle on. It pulled away, blending into the traffic passing the park.

  “Here,” Schur said, holding out a folded piece of note paper.

  Emily eyed the note in his hand for a moment, then looked to Schur.

  “There’s a time and place written on this,” he said. “Consider being there an official directive.”

  She reached out and took the piece of paper, pocketing it without ever looking at the contents.

  “Good luck, Emily.”

  Schur turned and left. Emily watched him walk away and turn into the small parking lot next to the diner. A minute later he pulled out in his grey government sedan and was gone.

  She looked back to the park across the street. It was still fall in Minneapolis, but felt like winter. The chill was already deep, icy breeze stinging her cheeks after only a few minutes outdoors. But she didn’t move. Didn’t seek shelter.

  ‘Pull that fucking trigger!’

  Emily closed her eyes and turned her head. Traffic slid by. She let its noise fill her thoughts. Engines revving. Brakes squeaking. Tires screeching. Anything but that sound. Anything but his voice.

  ‘…pull it…’

  After a moment she’d calmed enough to open her eyes again. She stood and timed her move through traffic, dodging cars as she crossed the street. The park was just ahead of her, giddy children romping, their mother recording them on her phone’s camera. Making a memory.

  Emily turned away from the scene and walked up the street, wanting, hoping, that, someday, she would be able to outrun hers.

  * * *

  One hundred miles south of Moscow, two men parked in front of a house overlooking the Upa River on the outskirts of the city of Tula and walked to the door. One of them knocked, and a moment later a woman wearing black peeked past the curtains of a window before opening the door.

  “I remember you,” Natalia Venn said as she looked between the men. They were young and solid, as one would expect of those who’d been introduced as bodyguards. “You came with the other man.”

  One of the men, with a scar denting his left cheek, nodded and reached fast to the woman’s throat, seizing it to stop any scream as he and his partner pushed her into the house and closed the door. Natalia, at nearly twice the age and half the size of her attackers, tried to resist, swinging her arms wildly until the one who did not have a hold on her produced a slender spike with a T handle from under his coat and slipped the pointed end deep into the base of her skull, aiming upward. The widow of Stanislaw Venn shuddered once and dropped to the floor like a discarded marionette.

  “Check the rooms,” the scarred man told his partner. “I’ll get it.”

  As the premises was checked for any unexpected inhabitants, the scarred man made his way to the study he’d visited months earlier with his employer. A wide window overlooked the icy river and the bleak landscape surrounding it, but he had not come for the view. He had come for the item.

  The physicist had retrieved it from a compartment at the back of a desk drawer. Would it still be there? Or would he have secreted it somewhere else? Regardless of where it was, they were
here to retrieve the item. Before anyone else even realized that it existed.

  “The house is clear,” the partner, a ruddy-faced man reported.

  The scarred man simply nodded and went to the desk, opening the same drawer the physicist had. He reached in, past a low stack of papers, and felt at the back of it, his fingers finding a simple latch. It clicked as he turned it.

  A moment later he looked to his partner, a thin grin rising as he eased his hand out, a small velvety bag with a drawstring in it. It was no larger than a large cell phone, but size, in this instance, might not be determinate of the item’s importance at all.

  “Let’s go,” the scarred man said.

  Ten minutes later they were on the M2 Highway, speeding north toward Moscow. In three hours they would be on a plane, jetting west, leaving their beloved Mother Russia behind.

  Three

  He was not a businessman. Nor was he a politician. He existed in the netherworld of power between those two stations.

  “A door closes,” Damian Traeger said. He sat at his desk, chair pushed back from it, fingers steepled beneath his chin as he considered the man standing before him. “We need another door.”

  Andrew Wyland absorbed what Traeger had just said. The man could rightfully be termed his employer, but, when the totality of his station was considered, calling him his master was not far from the truth. There was no contract that existed between them. No handshake, even. Two years earlier it had simply come to his attention that Traeger ‘needed’ someone. To fill that need, Wyland knew, one would have to surrender themselves to the man’s visions. And his whims. But the payoff…

  “We can find another way,” Wyland assured his boss. He’d campaigned for the position to serve the man, inasmuch as one could in the realm of what Traeger trafficked in. That very realm, where few dared to tread, and which Damian Traeger inhabited with ease, was where lucrative associations were made. Where the filthy lucre changed hands without those hands ever touching. Arms sales. Assassinations. Sabotage. Smuggling. Age old endeavors perfected for the modern era. For the digital age. No competitor even approached the mastery with which Traeger had made himself invaluable to those on both sides.

  That didn’t mean, though, that others could not fail him.

  “I hope that Venn suffered,” Traeger said, bringing his hands down now, folding them properly upon his lap. “Unlikely as that is.”

  Venn had been right. And the fool had proved that by getting himself killed. His presence, while it would have made matters more expeditious to exploit, was not entirely necessary. Not as long as the savant could be located. And secured.

  “Do you know how much Hezbollah will pay for this?” Wyland asked. “Al Qaeda? Isis?”

  Traeger, though, shook his head at the man who served him loyally, but who could not grasp the enormity of what Venn had conceived, and which they would soon possess.

  “They seek destruction,” Traeger said. “I seek control.”

  Wyland puzzled at the man’s statement.

  “A weapon has two separate values, Mr. Wyland,” Traeger said. “What people are willing to pay for it, and what people are willing to pay for it to never be used.”

  He stood from his desk and walked to the window that looked out over London. The city at night was beautiful. Then again, most were. It was only in the daylight that the blemishes became apparent. Darkness, Traeger had learned, could conceal all manner of activities.

  He counted on that in his endeavors. That people willing to pass secrets would consider themselves hidden by shadows they imagined were total. If they felt secure, and well compensated, their willingness to skirt the laws of conventional society was all the more complete.

  “Jefferson would have been a prize,” Traeger said. His breath fogged the window, and he brought a hand up and rubbed it slowly away with the cuff of his jacket. “But that door closed.”

  In the man’s head would have been clues to the location of the savant. Details on the security which surrounded him.

  “We could press the source,” Wyland suggested.

  Traeger thought for a moment, then faced his assistant once more and shook his head. The source had given up Jefferson as a conduit to the savant’s whereabouts, but that had taken nearly a year. From afar they’d groomed the anonymous individual who, through intermittent dead drops, had referred to themselves as ‘American Bob’. To a degree, Traeger admired the man he’d never met. In many ways he was an equal, successfully concealing his identity to this very day. If that had not been the case, then Wyland’s suggestion might not have been so easy to dismiss. Pressure could have been applied. Threats made to family and friends. The source could have been made to give up the savant himself.

  As it was, that avenue was not possible, and, as Traeger had already decided, it was an unnecessary path to consider.

  “Jefferson served a purpose,” Traeger told his assistant. “His absence leaves an opening.”

  “They’ll replace him,” Wyland said.

  Traeger nodded. The savant, Simon Lynch, was important to many, as he had been to Jefferson, for disparate reasons, it was clear. The man’s afflicted mind had confirmed what Stanislaw Venn had theorized, and proven with fatal efficiency. Months before he’d ever mentioned Jefferson, the source had facilitated access to the savant—for a price. The Russian had not possessed the kind of means necessary to seal such a transaction, so he had reached out, and Traeger had obliged. For his own price—access to what would come of this meeting of minds, so to speak.

  But with Venn died what the savant had affirmed for him—numbers. A series of numbers. Calculations of angles. Velocities. All those bits of vital data had been wiped out in a flash in the icy hell of Novosibirsk.

  “The replacement will give us the savant,” Traeger said. “And the savant will give us what he gave Venn. So, I need you, Mr. Wyland, to give me the replacement.”

  Wyland gave a single nod. His marching orders had been issued. He turned and walked across the sleek 30th floor office to the door.

  “Mr. Wyland…”

  He turned and faced Traeger. The man was sitting again, regarding him from behind his spartan desk.

  “Happy Birthday to little Charles,” Traeger said.

  Wyland managed to smile. With difficulty. There were no well wishes in the statement which, on the surface, seemed an innocuous reference to his three-year-old son’s upcoming birthday celebration. There was, however, a reminder.

  The people you chose missed Jefferson…

  “Absolutely, sir,” Wyland said. “I’ll let you know when we have the replacement.”

  Traeger nodded and watched Wyland leave. He wondered how long this one would last. Two years was a lifetime, he knew. The man Andrew Wyland had replaced was in his service for just under eight months until he’d stumbled managing a uranium transfer in Chad. Kohl was the man’s name. Graham Kohl. Traeger remembered that from the headstone he’d furnished to the man’s family after the tragic accident.

  One shouldn’t drink and sit on balcony ledges…

  Damian Traeger smiled. He imagined Wyland might be around for another month or so. Maybe six if he dazzled him with the production of the replacement, and a swift acquisition of the savant after that. But failure was inevitable. And punishment must be swift.

  He reminded himself to find out if Wyland and his wife had already secured a burial plot.

  * * *

  He poured the gin into the glass, ignoring the ice available a short reach away.

  He wouldn’t…

  Wyland had no way of knowing whether Traeger was capable of carrying out anything he hinted at. So much about the man was lore. Enemies vanquished. Adversaries disappeared. All that one saw on the exterior was a mogul with dozens of legitimate business interests.

  Front companies…

  He drank, finishing the generous pour in one swallow.

  “Take it easy,” Wyland cautioned himself.

  There was nothing to gain by bec
oming a registrar of the man’s deceit. He was party to that now, willingly. His reach for a better life, a rich man’s life, was on the cusp of succeeding. But he had to deliver.

  A knock sounded at his office door and it opened, his secretary catching sight of him, bottle and empty glass in hand.

  “What do you need, Sandra?”

  Sandra held a thin file folder out toward him. “I need signatures on the gas exploration license applications for the Ministry.”

  “Leave them,” Wyland said.

  Sandra entered and left the documents on his desk, then withdrew. When she was gone, Wyland poured another splash into the glass and left the bottle atop the credenza and went to his desk. He sat and sipped at the drink this time, giving the contents of the folder a quick look. It was all so proper, this side of everything. And profitable. Damian Traeger had accumulated enough wealth from the legitimate side of his empire that he hardly needed what came from his other dealings.

  Yet he thrived in those dealings. The danger, and the reward, seemed innate in his DNA. His malevolence was microscopically controlled, Wyland thought. Evil brilliance, in equal parts.

  Wyland finished the drink in a second swallow and pushed the folder aside. He had to think. The operators he’d contracted to snatch Jefferson had been highly recommended and skilled. They were warriors, hardened through battles which had produced many of their kind. Consultants. Mercenaries. Whatever label was applied to them, they’d delivered for him before.

  This time, though, the objective had taken an extraordinary step to ensure their mission failed.

  For now.

  Traeger was right—there would be a replacement. A monitor was necessary to watch over Simon Lynch. That had long ago been agreed upon. With Jefferson gone, someone would step into that role.

  But who?

  Wyland slid his keyboard close and faced the monitor on his desk. He blinked through the sudden buzz he was feeling and entered his password. The one that would take him not into the corporate side of his daily duties, but the other side. Some would call it the dark side. That it could be, Wyland knew.