by Jeff Abbott
He saw the fire in my eyes and for a moment he glanced away.
“Where am I?” I said.
“You’re in New York City. I will be your liaison.”
“What do you mean, liaison?”
“You’re being released.” He flinched a smile at me.
I didn’t believe it. It must be a trick. I made myself breathe. “You found my wife?”
“No.”
“Then why…”
“Your innocence has been established.” Now Howell’s voice stiffened, and the words felt a shade rehearsed. “We regret the inconvenience.”
I could neither laugh nor howl at the four small words, their pitiful sentiment, their complete inadequacy to the hell I had endured. When I found my voice, it sounded cracked. “Established how?”
“It doesn’t matter, Sam. We know you’re innocent.”
I closed my eyes. “Then you’re lying to me. You must have found Lucy.”
“No,” he said. “I swear to you, we do not know where she is.”
The silence between us, broken by the comic’s rantings in the background. I reached for the remote and my fingers fumbled for a grip. Howell picked it up and turned off the television.
“I don’t believe you now.”
“This is no trick, Sam,” Howell said. “We know you’re innocent. Just be grateful for your freedom.”
Grateful. Freedom. The words sanded against each other in my brain. “You people tortured me. You held me prisoner, without a lawyer, without cause.”
“It didn’t happen, Sam.” Slowly, Howell unbuckled the straps binding my legs to the bed. He moved with caution, like he was removing the top of a basket holding a cobra. He looked up to catch my stare and swallowed, as though realizing he should not show fear. “You will be integrated back into civilian life, Sam. Think of me as a parole officer.”
“Innocent people aren’t on parole.”
“The Company asked me to serve in this role. I’m the only one who believed you, do you remember? I said I thought you were innocent. I was your only advocate, Sam.”
“You were a piss-poor one.”
Howell gave a long, low sigh and sat on the side of the bed. “I told the directors I thought you were telling the truth. Finally they believed me when…”
“When what?” I leaned forward.
“I can’t discuss it.”
“You owe me.”
“No, we don’t owe you a thing,” Howell said. “You were too blind to see what was in front of you.”
“You know Lucy is guilty? Tell me.” Oh, God, confirmation of the impossible, that my wife was a traitor.
“Do you want your freedom back, Sam?”
“Yes.”
“Then shut up. Swallow down every question and don’t ask me about Lucy.” He cleared his throat. “We need to talk about your immediate future, though.”
I sat up slowly. “My future is I’m going to find my wife. And my child.”
“You are not. She remains a national security matter. As do you. You will do as you’re told.”
And I would, until I did what I wanted. I could play the game. I swallowed my questions. “My parents—”
“Your parents think you want nothing to do with them, Sam. Let’s keep it that way.”
I was silent. This was my shame. Normal people had normal relations with their parents. Mine weren’t quite normal, at least where I was concerned.
“Of course your parents were thoroughly investigated. They are a bit… unconventional.”
“Stay away from them.”
“Oh, that would be a loss for me. I find them charming; we like to sit in the garden and drink tea. I’ve visited with them several times. Special Projects Branch at the Company bought the house next to theirs in New Orleans; I’m their manufacturing-representative neighbor who travels a great deal. We’ve had their house bugged for months, tapped their phones, watched them. Just in case their pregnant daughter-in-law contacted them or they attempted to make inquiries about you. But only silence. Since they didn’t hear from you at Christmas, they are a bit worried that the gulf between you cannot be bridged.” He shrugged. “Don’t take it hard. We sometimes don’t like the people we love.” He told me this like he was handing me a gift.
“My parents—just leave them alone.”
“Then do as I say and the surveillance, the investigation of them, will end.” He raised his hands, palms toward me. “I don’t want to involve your parents. They’re fine people, Sam.”
I was being bribed. Fine. I would protect my parents. “Deal.” I cleared my throat.
“It’s your lucky day. You were never technically fired. You are still under Company command. You have been assigned to my group. I am your boss.”
I wanted to say I resign, but: “Then let me help you look for her.”
Howell raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want your job with us, Sam?”
“Yes.” It was the first rational lie I’d told in months. I didn’t count any lies I had screamed during the waterboarding. Apparently none of my false information worked out for the Company.
“Then here are your orders. You stay put here in New York. There is an account at a bank that has been opened in your name, with a sizeable initial deposit. Enough to live on, although I suggest you find work. If only to keep your mind and hands occupied.”
“Work. But you said—”
“You remain on our payroll. But your clearances are gone, Sam. So find a job to keep you busy. One that requires no travel and is not demanding.”
“I can’t sit still. Not with my family in trouble.”
Howell rode right over that speed bump. “You want to help find Lucy? Then do what you’re told. Sit tight. Get a job. A simple one.”
“I’ve only ever worked for the Company. I started straight out of college.”
“You tended bar in college, though. Pour beers, mix martinis. The jobs are easy to find.” He shrugged. As though all my training, all my field experience in Company work meant nothing.
I steadied my voice. I was caught between rage and knowing that if I throttled Howell I’d be back in the cell. Slowly, unbound now, I got off the bed. Howell steadied me. I felt woozy from the drugs, from inactivity. “I cannot put this more plainly. I am going to find my wife. My child.”
“You are going to follow orders, or you will regret it, Mr. Capra.”
“You can’t keep me—”
“If you break parole you will be back in prison, facing charges ranging from money laundering to treason. Any proof of your innocence will be eliminated and you will be prosecuted.” It was a nasty bit of leverage. Anger colored his voice and I shut up so I could hear the deal.
The rest of my life hinged on what he offered.
“You hunker down, you don’t let yourself get bored, and you don’t go to the press, you don’t go to your friends in the Company—not that you have any left. Not everyone knows that your name has been cleared. You let us look for Lucy and you don’t get in our way.”
“So what am I now? Worthless?”
For the first time I saw in that horrible flinch in his eyes what I had never seen in the past months: pity. “How are you worth anything to us, Sam? You either knew she was a traitor, and did nothing, which makes you pure evil in the Company’s eyes; or you didn’t know she was a traitor. And that makes you a pure fool.”
I looked at him and then I looked at the spotless tile floor. We were back to his original question to me. After all my pain.
“You’ll recuperate here, gain your strength before we send you out into the world. You lost a bit too much weight,” Howell said. “Let’s go see what clothes we have to fit you. Then I’ll take you downstairs.” He got up and opened the cold beer for me. He handed me the icy bottle. “We’ve made all your favorites. Spicy corn soup, salad with blue cheese, roast beef with horseradish, mashed potatoes, asparagus, key lime pie, coffee. Doesn’t that dinner sound good?”
My mouth watered, to my
shame. I hoped the food would taste like ashes. “It sounds like a last supper.”
Now Howell risked another very slight smile. “Just do as we ask.”
“And forgive the months you made me suffer?”
“Let’s all just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“It didn’t happen? God.”
They needed me out in the world. Why?
“There are clothes for you in the closet. I’ll ask the nurse to get you all disconnected, if you like, and I’ll let you get dressed.”
I started to pull off the medical sensor glued to my chest.
“I do have one question for you, Sam,” he said.
I left the sensors alone. “What?”
“Novem Soles.” He said the words so softly I wasn’t sure I heard.
“What?”
“Have you heard that term before?”
“Novem Soles? Sounds Latin. Novem is ‘nine,’ what is Soles?”
“Suns. Nine suns. Did Lucy ever use those words with you, ever mention them?”
This wasn’t a casual question. I stopped and I considered. He watched me. “No. What does it mean?” It sounded silly. But the Company gave computer-selected codes to every job, operation, or project, and this sounded like one of those code names. Nine suns? It meant nothing to me.
He studied me, and I wondered if the sensors on my chest were being monitored to see if I was lying. Howell smiled. “It means let’s go eat that good dinner.”
He went to the door and the nurse came in. She removed the catheter and the sensors and put the IV on a trolley. She helped me into a robe. I was weak and now starving, and I shuddered at the thought of accepting these bastards’ kindnesses. Food on a plate. Edible food, not the slop they’d given me. I’d eat it. I needed my strength.
I stood up from the bed. Howell offered a steadying arm and I shook it away. Fine, I would take their food and their clothes and their false solicitude and I would get back on my feet. But I had no illusions. I was not Howell’s friend, or someone that he wanted to help, who might ever get his life or his job back. His words it didn’t happen rankled in my ear.
They hadn’t found Lucy in these long months, or the man with the question-mark scar. So they still needed me. Howell and his superiors had found something called Novem Soles, whatever that was, and they thought putting me back out in the real world might lead them to it.
I knew the truth: I was bait. Bait for whoever set up me and Lucy.
9
AUGUST HOLDWINE DRAINED the trace of whisky from the glass in front of him, centered the glass back on the napkin on the oaken bar, and studied me. “I’m not here to spy on you,” he said. “In case I need to state the obvious.”
“I know,” I said. “Howell has people to follow me and make sure I look both ways before I cross the street. They have a van and I think they call their moms three times a day. You want another?”
“No. I have to work tomorrow.” But he didn’t stand up to rise. August was a big guy, about six-six, old college muscle that hadn’t morphed all the way into fat but was considering the option. He had blondish hair and apple cheeks and heavy muscles under the shirt. He said, “Uh, maybe I shouldn’t say anything about work.”
“I’m not bothered that you still have a job and I’m serving drinks,” I said. “Bartending is honorable.”
“I think I would rather be serving drinks. Less stress.”
“Want to trade?”
August and I had gone through training together at the Company, me straight from Harvard, him fresh from the University of Minnesota. He was my opposite: a farm boy who’d spent most of his life in one place, on land that had been in his family for seven generations. I couldn’t imagine such stability. He had a broad, open face, the kind decent people trusted, and a gravelly baritone voice. He worked stateside, in a satellite office in Manhattan. He’d landed me the bartending job at Ollie’s. The Company manufactured a résumé for me, as a bartender who’d worked at decent joints in Chicago and New Orleans. I hadn’t lost my bartending skills from working through college, and I liked being back with the glasses and the taps: I could be around people but the bar separated us. I was grateful. None of my other friends in the Company had bothered to call or express condolences. I was tainted. Like Howell said, conventional wisdom dictates the spouse always knows treason is under the roof. So I was beyond hope, as Howell put it, suspect, irreparably damaged goods. Except to August. But that was fine; August was the perfect friend to sit with in a bar. You could talk to him about your darkest secret and know he wouldn’t judge you, or you could be silent with him and just watch sports and never share a thought. Either was cool with August.
I wanted to trust August. But I couldn’t. Either he was under orders to be Howell’s tool or he wasn’t, and if he knew anything he would get in trouble once I put my plan into motion.
“So. Early morning tomorrow,” he said. “I should go.”
“You got cows to milk?” I enjoyed teasing him about his farming past.
He didn’t stand up from the bar.
“Do you want another drink?” I waited.
He looked up at me with his watery blue eyes. “What are you doing, Sam?”
“Pouring beer, mostly.” I glanced down the bar: no other customers. It was a Monday night, always the slowest at Ollie’s. Odd, because Mondays sucked so bad that you’d think most people would want a drink to wash the beginning of the week out of their mouths.
“You’re very quiet.”
“I don’t have a lot to say, August.”
“I don’t know what you were told, but not everyone at the Company believes you turned. Most of your friends are still your friends.”
“Most? That warms the heart.”
He shrugged. He meant well, but I guess he just didn’t know what to say. Thousands upon thousands of people work for the Company; the traitors in its history are very, very few, and rightly unforgiven.
“And yet there’s no crowd here tonight, what with my many friends.” I wiped down the already clean bar.
August picked up his glass and set it down when he remembered it was empty.
“Are you being brave in staying my friend, August, or are you just doing your job?” I’d intended not to push the subject but my patience was thinning.
“I’m not here because anyone told me to be. Howell said you were cleared but you couldn’t go back to work, not yet.”
“I’m a lure to draw out whoever took Lucy. The idea being that I wasn’t supposed to survive the explosion and she messed up that plan.”
August said, “I know all that. Be bait, then. But don’t think you’re alone. You’re not.”
“We stirred up a pot, August, the office in London. On this Money Czar guy, on a bunch of criminal networks. If you could help me… find out if there’s been any new evidence come to light on who was behind the bombing.”
“Sam, I can’t. I don’t have that clearance.”
“But you could access the files…”
He held up a hand. “I cannot. End of discussion. Let them investigate. Be glad they’ve cleared your name.”
“If they have.”
He cleared his throat. “You have to consider the possibility Lucy set you up.”
“For three years? No.”
“Maybe she wasn’t dirty three years ago. Maybe she turned much more recently.”
It’s very Twilight Zone to have a talk with your oldest friend from work that revolves around the theme my wife is not a traitor. “Because pregnant women are notable for wanting to put themselves at risk of arrest and imprisonment.”
August turned the glass in his hands. “I’m just saying.”
“Then why save me?” I couldn’t let the argument go.
“Don’t be an idiot, Sam. You’re alive, the sole survivor, the Company focuses on you. Not her. You’re in their grip. It gave her a chance to run.”
“I can’t think that.”
“Because you’re being a good
husband?”
I stared into his watery blue eyes. “Because if she was dirty, she still lived with me for three years, and she knows that if she betrayed me and killed our friends and I’m alive to come after her, I will. So if she was dirty, she’d want me dead.” I kept my voice steady and calm.
“So all this energy, and you’re still sitting here in Brooklyn?”
“If I run, they grab me and I’m back in a jail cell.”
“Unless you’re smart about how you run.”
“August. I just got out of a Company prison. I’m not risking a return ticket. We are not having this conversation.”
August put his money on the table and said, “Don’t worry about the change.”
“Okay.” I watched him leave. It’s awkward to tip a friend and I didn’t want him to, but I slid the change into the tip jar. I got back to work, which involved making a pot of decaf for Ollie and serving a group of wannabe artists who came in five minutes later for a round of Pabst Blue Ribbon beers.
Most people at Ollie’s Bar drank beer and wine. But at least six times a day I made vodka martinis; five times a day I poured whisky; and now and then I made a margarita on the rocks. There wasn’t a frozen margarita machine; it wasn’t that kind of bar. Usually a couple of early customers at the lunchtime opening wanted Bloody Marys, and I made them extra spicy and got bigger tips. I made drinks and kept quiet and gained back weight I’d lost and slept a lot. August came and drank during my evening shifts. A few questions to my fellow barkeeps told me that he didn’t come in on my days off. I felt myself getting stronger but I was only running very basic parkour, vaults onto railings and low walls, because I was too out of practice and I didn’t want to risk an injury. I pretended not to notice the surveillance Howell had put on me. Three rookies, two on foot, one in a van, were nearly constant whenever I left the bar or my apartment. They were testing me, seeing what I might do, how close to their orders I would stay.
Or, conversely, waiting for someone to kill me.
10
I LIKE BARS. I don’t drink a lot but I like the air of a good bar—the ripe wisdom of animated conversation, the cutting smell of fine liquor, the sound of laughter among friends. Ollie’s was a good, simple bar. Quiet most nights, a wide, oaken bar surface, stools topped with leather that bore the imprints of loyal and regular customers, not a lot of kitsch on the walls—just mirrors from the beer companies and framed photos of Ollie’s father, the original owner, with many of his longtime customers. The regulars were a bit of a mix, older folks who’d been in the neighborhood a long while, younger folks with a bohemian bent who might be borrowing money from parents to pursue art or internships. Now and then the Manhattan-commuting professionals would slum at Ollie’s, and they tipped well and drank imports and more lavish cocktails. But the people, most of them, were nice. No one asked me questions. I just served the drinks, made idle talk when required, and no one knew my hell.