Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  Nor were antemortem injuries she suffered ever adequately explained by the Lebanese authorities, who could only suggest she must have hit her head on some rocks while she was in the water. Another of Huxley’s operatives had stolen a copy of the Lebanese autopsy report. Huxley had taken it to MI-6’s own medical examiner, who’d scoffed at the official verdict on the cause of death.

  “Weren’t any rocks that gave her that bump on the noggin,” the ME said, peering at the X rays attached to the autopsy report. “Given the amount of bleeding and brain swelling, I’d say these head injuries happened six or eight hours before she actually drowned. Probably would have killed her eventually if the water hadn’t gotten her first.”

  “Maybe she hit her head and fell overboard?” Huxley suggested.

  “Well, if so, then it’s a miracle,” the examiner said wryly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “She had a fractured skull—and not just from one knock on the head, either. Several there were. She’d have been out cold, no doubt about it. But the cause of death was drowning. Plenty of salt water in the lungs, it says here. But you tell me: if she hit her head on entering the water, how did she manage to avoid drowning for the six or eight hours it took to produce this much intercranial bleeding? She was unconscious but still treading water? Oh, yeah…right. Like I said, a bleedin’ miracle.”

  The only credible conclusion was that Amina Habib had been attacked and beaten unconscious, then taken out to sea and dumped overboard. And the most logical motive for her murder, Huxley had to conclude, was that her jumpy customers had uncovered her connection to western intelligence.

  A couple of months after her unlikely accident, Huxley was contacted by another of his joes, an Iranian diplomat posted in Paris, who sent word that a broker in Zurich was offering timely information on allied anti-terrorist efforts, information that had been obtained from a pristine source high in the western intelligence net. Offering to sell this information to the highest bidder, of course. But when Huxley flew over to Paris to debrief the Iranian and try to winkle out who the western intelligence source might be, he found the man dead of an apparent suicide by hanging. The staging was just about perfect. The only question was why the knife with which he’d apparently cut the rope, the chair kicked out from under his feet, and the steel light fixture holding the rope and body had all been wiped meticulously clean of fingerprints.

  After the fact, Huxley discovered that the Iranian had sent an identical warning to a contact at the American Embassy in London.

  There’d been other losses, as well, including Alexandra Kim Lee in Hong Kong, and the talkative, helpful son of a mobbed-up Russian arms dealer, a young man who was very fond of the London night scene until the evening he was discovered drowned, his head in a loo at the Club Taj Mahal on Carnaby Street.

  Slowly, as MI-6 began to connect the dots, it became clear that, despite differences in regional focus and the mode of assassination, the common denominator to all these far-flung cases was the broker in Zurich and a history of contact, direct or indirect, with the CIA Station Chief in London, Drummond MacNeil.

  Huxley eyed the silver Jaguar XKE parked in the drive across Elcott Road. The car’s license plates said DRUMR.

  “He’s still home? Awfully late this morning, isn’t he?”

  Tengwall nodded. “He’s been taking his time, reading the paper, hanging with wifey and the kid.”

  “A change in routine. Something’s getting ready to go down. I can feel it in my aching bones.”

  “You’ve been saying that for weeks,” Tucker pointed out.

  “I know, but I’ve been watching this bloke for months now. He’s ready to make a move, I’m certain of it.”

  The surveillance had started back while MacNeil was still CIA Station Chief in London. His every movement had been tracked, his phones tapped. It had gotten trickier when he suddenly returned to Washington. After a hasty series of calls between the heads of MI-6 and the CIA, Huxley had been given permission to come over and continue his watch with limited Agency support. But outside of the three watchers in the van, apparently only a small handful of officials in the CIA knew what they were up to.

  Tucker had told Huxley that it was the Director himself, a family friend of the Kleins, who’d personally prevailed upon the couple to make their home available for a sensitive operation of national importance. The Director had authorized a secret Agency slush fund, impervious to Congressional oversight, to cover the costs of the Kleins’ stay in the Hamptons. He’d also hand-picked Tucker to ensure that their guest from MI-6 had what he needed. Rather than rescind MacNeil’s appointment and arouse his suspicion, however, the Director had decided to keep MacNeil on a very short leash until the allegations were resolved one way or the other.

  “He told his wife he had a meeting over at FBI headquarters this morning,” Tucker said.

  Huxley frowned. “We didn’t know anything about that, did we?”

  Tucker and Tengwall both shook their heads.

  “So maybe that’s bogus. How did he sound?”

  “Totally relaxed,” Tucker said. “We’ll see soon enough what he’s up to this morning, but our boy is smooth.”

  “Wifey’s not so relaxed, though,” Tengwall noted.

  “Well, we know she’s off to see a divorce lawyer this morning,” Huxley said. “Did she tell him?”

  “Not that we heard. She seems to be walking on eggshells, though.”

  Huxley sipped his coffee as he peered at the monitor showing a wide-angle view of the kitchen across the road. He and Tucker had placed the camera over the range hood in the course of that Sunday morning black bag job. MacNeil’s wife could be seen on the screen, picking up dishes and wiping down countertops. She was lithe and supple in shorts and a sleeveless top. The black-and-white monitor didn’t do justice to that long, coppery hair, Huxley thought. There was no question this was a very attractive woman. When he’d first started surveillance on her husband and began to watch her, as well, Huxley had put her down as the typical vacuous gold digger that older men with egos like MacNeil’s generally hooked up with. But as time went on, he’d had to concede that Carrie MacNeil seemed brighter than most trophy wives. She was also a genuinely loving mother to her little boy, who was better behaved than most diplobrats Huxley had run across in his day.

  Had he encountered Carrie MacNeil under other circumstances, Huxley thought, he might even have found her appealing. But like attracts like. If this woman had hooked up with an operator like MacNeil, what did that make her? A woman willing to turn a blind eye to some pretty grievous character traits just so she could live an easy life in comfortable digs? Well, a bad call that turned out to be. She didn’t look so comfortable now.

  “I think we established back in London that the MacNeil marriage is not the model it seems to be,” he told Tucker and Tengwall. “We’ve never actually seen them scrap, but there’s not much evidence of warmth there.”

  As they watched the screen, Drummond MacNeil, who’d risen from the table on the far side of the room, approached his wife from behind and planted his hand on her shoulder. She seemed to freeze as he leaned down and whispered into her ear.

  “Turn up the volume,” Huxley said, gesturing rapidly. Tengwall dived for the volume control on the console, but it was too late. MacNeil was already stepping away. His wife turned and stared at him, a look of shock on her face as he made his way out the door of the kitchen, heading for the front hall.

  Tengwall frowned at the image on the screen. “Now what was that all about? You ask me, these people are just weird.”

  “Weird and up to no good,” Huxley said.

  The camera in the entry hall chandelier provided a bird’s eye perspective on MacNeil picking up his briefcase.

  Huxley placed his coffee cup on the console and bent low to withdraw a motorcycle helmet parked underneath it. “All right then, boys and girls. It’s show time.”

  “Why don’t I tail him this morning?” Tucker
said. “You’ve been up all night. You can hang back and review the tapes of his conversation in the kitchen with his wife. There’s not a lot there, so it won’t take long, but you might want to take a look, see if anything strikes you. Tengwall can tail the wife when she leaves. Once she gets back, you can go inside and catch a few more hours shut-eye.”

  Huxley shook his head. “Thanks, mate, but I’m fine. I’ll take him this morning. Once I’m awake, I won’t sleep again and I could use the fresh air.”

  Just then, MacNeil emerged from the front door across the road. Tengwall had her thumb on the camera’s shutter cable. It clicked and the film advance whirred as their target pulled the door shut behind him, squinted up into the sky, then pulled a pair of opaque black designer sunglasses from the breast pocket of his suit. He put them on, raked back his hair, then took the red brick steps two at a time down to the silver-gray Jag on the gravel drive. The headlights flashed twice as he aimed a key fob at the car. MacNeil opened the driver’s side door and tossed his briefcase across to the passenger’s seat, then dropped into his own side. A muffled thwump sounded across the road as he climbed in and pulled the door closed behind him.

  “God, he’s a real smoothie, ain’t he?” Tengwall said to no one in particular.

  Huxley pulled on the helmet and headed out the door of the van. “Later then, mates.”

  A modified police edition Harley-Davidson was parked off to one side of the Kleins’ garage, hidden behind a high, fragrant juniper bush. Straddling the motorcycle, Huxley stuck the key in the ignition, then finished buckling the helmet, waiting to hit the start switch until the radio message from Tucker told him the target was on the move.

  Tapping the side of the helmet, he adjusted the microphone set into the mouthpiece. “Leapfrog here, Auntie. You reading? Over.”

  “Loud and clear. Hang tight for a second. There’s a garbage truck coming up the street.”

  Huxley heard it before he saw it, the strain of the big engines and the grating, mechanical whine of its bin lifters as it paused at the end of the next drive down from the MacNeils’. Huxley peered through the juniper bush at the target. Between the motorcycle helmet, the radio static and the roar of the garbage truck, he hadn’t heard the Jag’s ignition come to life, but it had already rolled to the bottom of the drive when the garbage truck pulled forward and blocked it from view.

  Huxley lifted the kickstand on the bike and waited, but the truck seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to pick up the MacNeils’ bin. Maybe it was just fatigue making his nerve ends bristle like this. “Auntie, what’s going on over there? Can you see the target? Over.”

  “Negative. The truck’s in the way.”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “Don’t know. It’s just sitting there. I can see the Jag’s tires behind it, but that’s about it.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Hang on, something’s happening…okay, looks like trouble with the lift arm, that’s all. It’s picking up the trash can now.”

  A loud, grating whir sounded as the blue bin rose high in the air and was tipped over the open back of the garbage truck, releasing a torrent of the cartons, plastic junk and loose paper that Huxley and Tengwall had sifted through just a couple of hours earlier. The mechanical arms ground again and the bin reversed direction, landing back on the drive with a thud.

  Then, nothing. Instead of moving on to the next drive, the truck just sat there.

  Huxley didn’t like it. He knocked the kickstand back to the ground and leaned the bike over to rest on it. He was just about to climb off and sprint out to the road to see what the hell MacNeil was up to when Tucker called a warning in his ear.

  “Hold tight, Leapfrog. The truck’s moving now. It’s okay. The target’s in sight.”

  Huxley saw MacNeil now, too, at the edge of the roadway, ready to pull out. He ducked back out of sight just as the Jag peeled away from the drive and headed up the street. Huxley raised the bike’s kickstand once more and switched the key to the “on” position. Between the roar of the Jaguar and the racket of the next garbage pick-up, he felt confident no one would notice the deep-throated hum of the bike purring to life when he pressed the electronic ignition button.

  “Okay, you’re clear to go, Leapfrog.”

  “Right-o. I’m off then,” Huxley said.

  “Roger. Keep me posted. Oh! By the way…”

  “What?”

  “We drive on the right side of the road here. You’ll keep that in mind, won’t you?”

  “Bugger off,” Huxley replied, grinning as he rolled the Harley down Bernice and Morrie Klein’s driveway. “Over and out.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  McLean, Virginia

  8:29 a.m.

  After Drum left, Carrie flew through the kitchen, wiping down surface, putting dishes in the machine, tidying for the housekeeper. As she took one last glance around to see that everything was shipshape, she tried to quell the butterflies in her stomach—and, just maybe, muster up some nostalgia for the place. But it didn’t feel like home and probably never would.

  Except for the third floor nursery she’d done over for Jonah, every single room in this house had been fitted out by others who came before her. Most of the current decor had been chosen by Althea. The apple-green-and-white-checked wallpaper above the oak wainscoting, the eclectic international pottery collection on the display shelves, the Depression glass dishes in the glass-fronted cabinets—they all reflected someone else’s tastes and experiences. There was nothing of Carrie here, and if she were to move out tomorrow, there would be no hint she’d ever passed this way. Even the flower beds beyond the solarium windows had rejected her efforts to put down a few fragile roots of her own.

  What had she done wrong?

  Althea had also come into this veritable institution of a family as a callow young bride, but frankly, Carrie thought, her mother-in-law had done a better job of finding a way to fit in. Althea was strong-willed and opinionated, but she made her wants known and didn’t allow people to take advantage of her.

  Maybe she’d been luckier, too. She and Drum’s father had spent the first half of their marriage living in a succession of base houses as the Army moved him around the country and around the world. By the time he was posted back to the Pentagon and they moved into the house on Elcott Road, the General’s mother was already deceased and his father was in a rest home suffering from galloping dementia. There’d been nothing to stop Althea from making this place over in her own image.

  Carrie had brought little into her marriage by way of experience or material goods—certainly no furniture or old photos or other family items, all of which had been destroyed in the fire that had claimed her parents and twin sister. Nor had she felt comfortable making changes to a household that had obviously been running smoothly for years. Fixing up the dusty, long unused space on the third floor was as much as she’d dared attempt. That, and her laughable attempts at gardening.

  “I don’t know what your problem is,” Drum had said when she’d suggested they get a place of their own after returning home from London. “Anyone would thing you were being forced to live in a grass hut.”

  I wouldn’t mind, Carrie thought. At least, it would be my grass hut. As far as she was concerned, she might as well be living in a hotel.

  It sounded ridiculous, she knew, the notion that she should be disgruntled because she couldn’t mark her territory like some restless cat. In any case, it was only symbolic of what was really wrong in the marriage. Drum didn’t notice the faded drapes in the dining room or the sagging sofa springs in the gloomy living room, much less the sense of defeat that gripped Carrie’s heart and mind whenever she looked into the future.

  She’d once had ambition and plans. She’d double-majored in business and art history at Georgetown University, planning to get into curatorial work, maybe open up a gallery of her own one day. But three years after losing her family, still trying to come to terms with the grief
and anger she’d been swallowing since it happened, going forward because there was no way to go back, she’d finally given up on grad school and joined the Peace Corps.

  But even if she’d run away from her problems, she’d still done a creditable job of managing the artists’ cooperative in Tanzania, she reminded herself. For a while, she’d even dreamed about introducing Americans to the work of some of the more talented sculptors and painters she’d met over there. Except that the longer she was away, the more terrified she became at the notion of stepping alone off a plane back in the States. She had no home anymore, and no idea what she was if not a daughter and a sister and a twin.

  The guilt was almost unbearable, being the only one to have escaped the fate that had destroyed the other members of her family—a blaze that should never have happened. And wouldn’t have, Carrie knew, if only she’d been there.

  She should have seen it coming when she’d gone home for Christmas that December. It was her freshman year at Georgetown University. Isabel had seemed fine at first, thrilled to have her back, but it didn’t take long before Carrie realized that her twin sister was depressed—clinically depressed, her father confided in a quiet moment alone with her.

  What she didn’t guess at first was how much of Izzie’s depression was her doing—how much her sister resented the fact that Carrie had run off and abandoned her. And why shouldn’t Isabel be resentful? After all, Carrie was the lucky twin. The twin who got to go away. Who got it all, even in their mother’s womb, where the doctors said Isabel had been crowded and blood-starved, as sometimes happens in twin pregnancies, so that one fetus is deprived while the other one thrives.

  In this case, oxygen deprivation had damaged the motor centers of Isabel’s brain while Carrie claimed the lion’s share of the placental blood supply. The damage wasn’t obvious at birth, except for a ten ounce weight difference between the babies. Isabel’s weight soon caught up and as infants, the twins seemed virtually interchangeable. Within a few months, though, it became apparent that Isabel wasn’t meeting the physical development mileposts expected of healthy babies. At eighteen months of age, cerebral palsy had been diagnosed. With each year that passed, she fell further and further behind, while Carrie—the healthy twin, the greedy twin—crawled and chattered and walked and ran on schedule and with an ease her sister would never possess, her own body stiff and un-cooperative. At ten, Isabel began suffering seizures that stole many of the limited physical abilities left to her. By fourteen, she was confined almost full-time to a wheelchair and near-total dependence on others.