Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5)

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “It seems to have led us here,” Emily said, eyeing the man with curious appreciation. “You maintained this all these years.”

  “Money gets lost in black programs all the time,” Sanders told her. “Sometimes that waste isn’t a waste at all. It pays for services to plow driveways in winter, and for a pickup truck that can make it through snow to town. Among other things.”

  “You knew he’d be threatened again,” she said.

  “That word implies certainty,” Sanders corrected her. “I feared he would. Now, he’ll be safe here.” He looked to Gant next. “You both will.”

  He reached inside his coat and retrieved a small envelope, passing it over to the aging hacker. “New identifications for both you and Simon. Driver’s licenses. Passports. You have complete histories stretching back decades. These were developed for deep cover operatives.”

  Emily felt a pang of sadness rise. She’d known that world. Known how crushing it could be to live a lie. This, though, was different. This was worth it. Wrapped around this lie was life. And a future.

  “Marcus Bolling,” Gant said, reading from his new identification. “Marcus. Maybe Mark.”

  “It’s up to you,” Sanders said. “You and your nephew can decide on what works best.”

  “My nephew?” Gant asked, chuckling. “How about that—instant family.”

  Emily reached into the envelope and took the other set of identification out.

  “Kyle North,” she read, smiling at Simon’s almost happy face on the Montana driver’s license. “There’s an ‘e’ in your first name. How ironic is—”

  When she looked to him, though, he wasn’t there. He’d followed them into the space, but was gone now.

  “Simon?” Emily said. She handed the documents back to Gant and hurried from the bedroom.

  * * *

  Simon Lynch stood in the yard behind the house and stared at the moonlit clouds. Snow was thick in spots, and the air hinted that more was on the way.

  “Simon…”

  Emily came out of the house, down the back steps, and approached him. Simon looked to her, noting that Gant and Sanders remained inside, watching through the dining room window.

  “Are you all right?” Emily asked.

  “I am,” Simon assured her. “I just wanted to be alone for a minute.”

  Emily nodded slowly. “It’s a lot, I know. To process.”

  He smiled at her. “Processing is what I do.”

  She sniffed a quiet laugh. “Not anymore. Not if you don’t want to.”

  “People won’t stop,” he said. “They’ll want things from me.”

  “They’ll have to find you first,” Emily reminded him. “This is a good place. A safe place. And the only people who know you’re here are looking at you right now.”

  Simon considered that for a long moment. “Kirby has to maintain secrecy, or he will be in danger. I trust you without hesitation. But him…”

  His gaze met Sanders’, fifty feet of snowy yard and a double pane window between them.

  “Men like him said they would protect me,” Simon said. “Even if his intentions are pure, that world he works in can change a person.”

  Emily joined Simon in looking to Sanders, the man’s eyes never breaking from their attention.

  “I trust him, Simon,” Emily said. “Without him…”

  Simon nodded. “I know.”

  Emily turned to face Simon, and he did the same to her.

  “I won’t be able to see you for a while, Simon. People will be watching me. I could lead them to you again if I’m not careful.”

  “I understand,” he said, glancing to the window and seeing that both Sanders and Gant had withdrawn. He and Emily were alone.

  “There may be a way with what Sanders has set up in there to get messages to each other,” Emily suggested.

  To that Simon shook his head. “This side of the system may be secure, but yours never will be.”

  She didn’t want to believe that he was right, but she had to. After all that they had gone through, doing anything to put him in jeopardy again, especially for selfish interests, was beyond foolish. And she knew very well what that meant.

  “This is goodbye, Emily,” Simon told her.

  A hint of tears began to skim her eyes, clouding her vision. She blinked them away and nodded, sniffing against the back of her hand.

  “I know it is,” Emily said.

  Simon didn’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t look away. That thing which had been so hard in the life he’d known for so long now seemed all that he wanted to do—to stare into her eyes. He reached out and put his hand to her cheek. She let her face lean against it.

  “Thank you, Emily. Thank you for my life.”

  She nodded against his touch.

  “Emily…”

  She looked behind. It was Sanders. He’d come out the front door and around the house.

  “You and I have to be going,” he said.

  “Right,” Emily said, understanding. There would be more to do to wrap up what had transpired. Neat bows were going to need to be put on packages to convince people that a lie was the truth. How that was supposed to happen, she had no idea.

  But she suspected that Sanders did.

  “I’m going to miss you, Simon,” Emily said.

  He eased his hand back from her face. He didn’t know what to say, and didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so he simply leaned toward her and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. Then he stepped back. Emily smiled and turned away, joining Sanders as he walked toward the car.

  “They’ll be fine,” the man told her once they were inside with the engine running. The headlights shone on both Simon and Gant as they stood in the shelter of the porch. “I’m fairly certain Kirby can figure out how to start a fire so they don’t freeze.”

  “You don’t think people will be suspicious?”

  “People here are suspicious of men like me,” Sanders said. “The government. Not some family that just wants to be left alone.”

  Sanders put the car into gear and swung a slow turn. As he drove away from the house, Emily looked back a final time, Simon and Gant standing there in the fading red glow of the tail lights. Then, they were gone, the car taking a bend down the long driveway.

  “So why weren’t people suspicious of you before?” Emily asked, voicing a curiosity which had buddle to the surface.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Art Jefferson outed your group in his memo,” Emily said. “He called you an intelligence operation inside the government. I’d think that would make some people curious. Nervous.”

  “He was an old man making claims about something twenty years ago,” Sanders said. “My predecessor took care to craft Simon’s initial haven on the periphery of the NSA’s influence. Close enough to be considered inside without actually being so.”

  “Too close, it turned out,” Emily said.

  “Yes,” Sanders agreed. “Those in power who were privy to the memo were more concerned that Jefferson was revealing a current NSA operation involving Simon. No one was going to commit serious investigative time to some wild story that far in the past.”

  Just the rantings of a troubled old man. That many would still think that of Art Jefferson bothered Emily. But she knew the truth about him. Someday she hoped others would as well.

  “Where do we go now?” Emily asked.

  “East for a while,” Sanders said.

  “Do you want me to drive?” Emily asked. “When was the last time you slept?”

  “I’ll have plenty of time to rest,” he told her. “You catch up on sleep. I’ll wake you in a bit.”

  Emily nodded and leaned against the passenger window as Sanders turned onto the road. The clouds above had thinned, revealing the heavens above the wooded peaks.

  “I think I’ll just look at the stars for a while,” she said.

  Emily LaGrange did just that for five minutes, savoring the starry Montana sky until sleep dra
gged her down.

  Forty Nine

  Just shy of Wibaux, Montana, Ezekiel Sanders pulled off the interstate and stopped on a side road next to a farm, the morning sun well above the eastern horizon.

  “Emily…”

  She’d slept the entire way since leaving Simon and Gant but woke easily when hearing her name.

  “Where are we?” she asked, looking beyond the windows. To one side of the road the tawny landscape sloped down toward a river in the distance. To the other, beyond a length of barbed wire fencing that seemed to reach all the way to the horizon, a field of golden grass stretched out, a cluster of horses gathered beneath a lone tree.

  “Not quite to North Dakota,” Sanders explained.

  “What are we doing?” Emily asked.

  “There’s one person still in jeopardy from all this who doesn’t deserve to be,” Sanders said. “You, Emily.”

  “I knew what I was doing,” she told him, no regret at all about her. “I accepted the risks.”

  “Still, there is a way to minimize any consequences,” Sanders said.

  She’d expected that more would need to be done. Those bows to make packaged lies more palatable.

  “There’s a story I want you to tell,” Sanders said.

  He took a full thirty minutes to run through it with her, fielding questions and fleshing out necessary areas with the right amount of detail. When he was done, when they were both done, Emily agreed that she could manage exactly what he had laid out.

  “I might even enjoy some of this,” she said.

  “Good,” Sanders said. “Hop on out now.”

  Emily puzzled at his suggestion, but followed suit when he did that very thing, leaving the driver’s seat and waiting for her to join him near the front of the car.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Sanders tipped his head toward the driver’s side door. He’d left it open. “The keys are in there. You need to drive away.”

  “Are you joking? I’m not leaving you out here.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do, Emily. You’re going to get in that car and drive off and you’re going to forget about me. You’re not going to wonder about me, or seek me out, or act on anything you might hear about me.”

  She was instantly worried. “What am I going to hear about you?”

  “Go,” Sanders gently urged her. “This is the way it has to be. This is the way I’ve decided it’s going to be.”

  “I don’t…”

  “You don’t need to understand, Emily. You just need to keep trusting me. All right?”

  He had delivered on his promise. Simon’s best interest had truly been his overriding concern. There was no reason that she should doubt him now, after finally acquiescing to his wishes and accepting his plan.

  But something felt…wrong. She couldn’t put a finger on it. Just something in her gut was unsettled.

  But not enough to defy his wishes.

  “All right,” she said.

  She moved past him and stood near the open driver’s door, looking to him.

  “You did good, Emily,” Sanders said.

  “I know,” she told him. “This time, I know.”

  She sat behind the wheel and started the car. Sanders stepped aside and watched her pull back onto the road and drive toward the interstate. In less than a minute she was gone.

  He turned away from the road and looked past the fencing, to the lone tree in the distance. The horses were gone, now. All but one.

  Ezekiel Sanders walked to the fence and climbed over the barbed wire, using a post to maneuver past the pointed barrier. He walked through browning grass and past patches of snow that would soon be knee deep. For now, in this spot, winter was in waiting.

  He’d ridden a horse once when he was a boy but had been frightened when the animal bucked and snorted. It hadn’t thrown him, but that fear had persisted throughout his life. They were large, powerful beasts, he’d come to believe. Difficult to master.

  But they were magnificent creatures. In the morning light, the one that remained, taller than him by a full foot, shimmered. Why it remained while the others had moved on further into the pasture, he did not know.

  “Hello,” he said to the animal.

  It looked to him, holding him in its gaze for a long moment before turning and trotting off to join its kind several hundred yards away. That was all right, Sanders thought. All he’d wanted was a moment. A memory.

  A last memory.

  He walked to the tree and stood beneath it. The shoulder holster he wore was empty, its contents left to be disposed of lest any connection be made between it and the only operator to survive the detonation near West Hickory. He was not unarmed, however.

  From his coat pocket he retrieved a slightly smaller pistol, though no less deadly than the one he’d discarded. He checked that a round was chambered and then brought the weapon up, placing the muzzle against his temple. In six months he would be dead from the cancer eating away at him. Ezekiel Sanders knew that. In the interim, he was a point of connection to where Simon Lynch had now found refuge. All bills for the property were taken care of. A trust in the name of the man’s new identity disbursed funds as needed. Instruction on how to manage the financial side of their new life had been left with Kirby Gant.

  The bottom line was, he was no longer necessary to the process that would keep Simon Lynch safe. Alive, he had become a potential liability.

  “It’s a pretty day,” Ezekiel Sanders said as he fixed his gaze on the gathering of beasts in the distance. “A lovely day.”

  He pulled the trigger and dropped to the ground, the second man in less than a month to take his own life so that Simon Lynch might know a lasting peace.

  Fifty

  Frankie sat with FBI Director Miriam Chase in the back seat of a Bureau SUV and watched with her as agents came out of the house down the street with the Attorney General of the United States in handcuffs. The media was held back by local police, not far enough, though, that their cameras could not capture Angelo Breem weeping like a child as he was placed in the back seat of a grey Bureau sedan.

  “It’s not technically a perp walk,” Chase said. “But it will do.”

  “Yes, it will,” Frankie said.

  “I imagine the thought of his simpering face plastered on every news station is more terrifying that what lies ahead for him,” Chase suggested. “But he’s not going to any Club Fed.”

  The implication was clear to Frankie—Breem was going to do real time. He wasn’t going to skate through any sentence with white collar corporate criminals and petty embezzlers. An extended stay in some SuperMax prison was in his future.

  “You’ll have to testify,” Chase told Frankie.

  “I know.”

  “Probably a grand jury first,” Chase said. “They’ll be curious why Gant chose you to disseminate the incriminating audio. As am I.”

  “He was close to Art,” Frankie said. “He knew Art trusted me. I guess it was about trust to him.”

  “Trust,” Chase parroted. “Trust.”

  The recording she’d handed over, directly to Chase because of its sensitivity, had led to a months long investigation of the Attorney General. A myriad of financial crimes and treasonous contacts had been uncovered—all thanks to her. And to the man she could not name.

  “What are you going to do with yourself now, Francine?”

  Frankie looked to the director as the car carrying Breem drove away, a convoy of similar vehicles ahead of and behind it.

  “I’m going to watch my son grow up,” Frankie said. “And get to know my husband a little better.”

  Miriam Chase smiled. “Good answer. But you still have something to do for us.”

  “Yes,” Frankie acknowledged. “I do.”

  Chase tapped the driver on the shoulder and the man got them moving. “The Capitol, Michael.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  * * *

  “Art Jefferson was a hero,” E
mily LaGrange said, looking up to the congressional panel from her typed statement. “He gave his life for what was right.”

  There were no spectators in the gallery behind her. No camera shutters clicked. The hearing was not being broadcast to millions. The doors to the wood-paneled room were locked and armed guards stood outside. This was a scream in the wilderness, she knew. The carefully crafted statement, and the lies woven through it, would be heard by just the fifteen men and women staring down at her from the wood dais where giants had once loomed over meetings of great importance.

  This was of great importance, but Emily knew that the elected senators and representatives she faced, members of an ad hoc select committee appointed to ‘get to the bottom of the Lynch affair’, were not giants. They were purveyors of disdain. Seekers of renown. Once the hearing was over and the doors unlocked, they would parade themselves before cameras and reporters waiting in the marbled halls of power to claim that this catastrophic failure of intelligence and law enforcement would never be allowed to happen again.

  But it would. That was the nature of things. Of government. Of the powerful. Of people.

  “Miss LaGrange,” the committee chairman said. “We’re not interested in what a dead man did or didn’t do. We’re interested in what you did.”

  She knew clearly what they wanted. An accounting of her last moments with Simon Lynch. Fortunately, she had a story to tell.

  “Soon after reaching the house near West Hickory, an armed man came through the back door,” Emily said. “I didn’t recognize him, but now know him to be Damian Traeger.”

  “You’re certain,” the committee chairman pressed.

  “He had altered his appearance, but from the debriefings I’ve been through, the photographic evidence convinces me that it was him.”

  “All right.”

  “I was actually in the cellar at the time Traeger made entrance, but I heard the gunshot.”

  “Your previous statements indicate he shot Mr. Gant almost immediately.”

  “That’s what I learned when I made my way upstairs,” Emily said. “Mr. Gant told me that himself after I shot and killed Damian Traeger.”