by Taylor Smith
“Oh, operations were blown, all right, all over the world,” Drum said. “And somebody went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the common element in every single case was that I knew about them. There wasn’t much that doesn’t pass through the London station. But it all goes across the Director’s desk, too. And guess who had access to everything the Director saw? Our friend Tom, here. So what did you do, Tom? Copy every damn document that had my name on it?”
“Pretty much. A digital camera’s a wonderful thing. You photograph, you download it at an internet cafe and send it off to Zurich, and then you erase the disk by recording over it—say, a picture of a little boy with a piece of moon rock? What could be more innocent? Ain’t technology grand?”
“You set me up.”
“Oh, bull! You were looking for an excuse to run, Drummond. You weren’t cut out for this business and you know it. You’re a fraud and a coward. Even Carrie knows that, don’t you, darlin’?”
She shook her head. “Tom, I can’t believe it. You did this to us?”
“I did it to him, the smug bastard. Always got everything, did Drum—a beautiful wife—two beautiful wives, actually. A nice little boy, the best jobs. Did he appreciate ’em, though? No. Whereas I, who worked my tail off, at Yale, at Langley—well, I have to say, it just sticks in your craw after a while, you know? And there was all this valuable information passing across my desk every day. Worth a fortune, you know, if you understand the market and know where to find the right buyer. I knew that once the intelligence got out there and ops started being blown, somebody was going to trace it back. All I had to do was make it look like Drummond here was the source. And then, when I quietly warned him that MI-6 was making allegations about his nefarious activities and that the Director was appointing a special security committee to look into it, it was only a matter of time until he bolted like a jackrabbit with a stick o’ dynamite up his behind.”
Drum leapt across the hall at him, fury and arrogance combining to make him forget how outmatched he was, since Tom still held a gun. A single shot dropped him right next to Markov.
“Let this be a lesson,” Tom said, looking down into his fading blue eyes. “You act guilty, Drummond, people are going to believe you really are guilty.”
Carrie backed herself against the library doorframe, shaking with terror at the realization that there was only one way this could end. Tom couldn’t let her get out alive, not knowing what she did. If she could get away from the house and get him to come after her, though, then at least Jonah would be safe.
“Tom, you don’t want to do this,” she said.
“No, I know I don’t, Carrie, but unfortunately, I’ve got no choice.”
“This can’t possibly end well for you.”
Tom was patting his pockets, a frown of concentration on his face. “Actually, it can. I’ve put a lot of thought into it, and I think it can work out very well, indeed. Aha! This is the one,” he added, pulling Drum’s gun out of his pocket. “This is how it’s going to play out—Drum came back with Markov to finish you off. Markov took out your young bodyguard there, while ballistics will show that Drum shot you.” He waved the gun in his hand. “With this weapon here. Now, stay with me, because it gets a little more complicated. I happen to show up, bearing a Halloween gift for my godson. But sadly, I get here too late to save you. But when Drum pulls a gun on me, I defend myself and manage to take down him and Markov. It’s all very complicated, I know, but it will wash, believe me. I’ve thought it through very carefully.”
“You’ve always been a very meticulous person, Tom. And then what? You just carry on as if nothing happened?”
“Oh, no. This is a tragedy, after all. I had to shoot my oldest and dearest friend. Drummond and I have known each other since college days. And walking in on all this mayhem he caused here? Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if I came down with a bad case of post-traumatic stress syndrome and had to retire—on a full disability pension, of course. And then, after a short time, I’ll probably tell Lorraine she deserves better than to spend the rest of her days with an old mope like me, and I’ll take myself off somewhere to lick my wounds. The Bahamas, maybe, or Fiji.”
“And live well off the money you made selling out those intelligence operations.”
He nodded. “There you go.”
“And all that stands between you and this plan is me.” Carrie had let the brass pestle slip unobtrusively down her sleeve until it rested in the palm of her hand.
He nodded again. “Fraid so, darlin’. You and my godson, unfortunately.”
“You bastard!” She pitched the brass hammer with all her strength, and it struck Tom in the forehead. As he stumbled, hand to his head, she turned and ran.
The front way was blocked, but if she could just get to the back door—
The first bullet passed so close that she felt hot air whiz by her temple. She ducked as wood splintered off the back door. A second shot took out the window. He had a clear sight line from where he stood in the front hall directly to the back door. She could hear his boots as he tore down the hall after her.
Carrie had no choice but to veer right, throwing open the cellar door and heading down the perilously narrow stairs. She could only hope that he would follow her and stumble in the dark. Anything to get him as far away as possible from Jonah.
She was able to make it to the bottom of the stairs by the light spilling from the kitchen, but down below, the cellar was pitch-black. She felt her way along the wall, stumbling on the uneven dirt floor, and managed to duck behind the big old cast iron coal furnace just as Tom found the switch at the top of the stairs and flicked on the overhead light. The stairs creaked as he moved slowly down one step at a time.
“Carrie,” he called softly, “there’s no way out. You might as well come up. I promise it’ll be quick and painless. You won’t feel a thing.”
Her body was shaking uncontrollably, despite her heavy sweater and the heat coming off the rumbling gas furnace near by. Carrie crouched deeper in the shadow of the big old coal unit, bracing her arms on the ground as her shaking knees threatened to topple her. A stone bit into the palm of her hand.
No, not a stone, she realized. A lump of coal. Her fingers closed around it.
“I know,” Tom said quietly, “it’s not fair. I tried to think of a way to avoid this, but it just can’t be done.”
Another step creaked, and then she heard his boots hit the dirt floor. He was circling around, looking.
“Oh, Carrie,” he crooned, “come out, come out, wherever you are!”
He’d moved away from the bottom of the stairs, she realized. If she could distract him long enough to get back up the staircase, she might be able to get the door shut and lock him down here.
Tom was circling slowly, apparently peering into every nook and cranny. “Maybe I could take Jonah with me, Carrie. That might be something good that comes out of this, hmm? I’m his godfather, after all, and with the bishop’s influence, I’m sure I could arrange for custody.”
Bastard! Carrie thought furiously. You’re not fit to be near my son!
She peered around the furnace and saw him on the far side of the cellar, looking under an old workbench. Her hand closed around the rock of coal and she waited for just the right moment…then lobbed it at one of the cellar windows. The glass shattered. As Tom leapt out of the way, ducking flying shards, he stumbled on the floor’s uneven cant and fell backward onto his butt.
Carrie took her chance. Scrambling out from behind the furnace, she charged for the stairs and started up. She was halfway to the top when she felt his hand shoot out from between two steps and grab her ankle, yanking hard. Her foot skidded on the tread, and she tipped, falling backward, her spine and skull striking the wooden steps painfully, knocking the wind out of her.
She lay there helplessly sprawled on the staircase, one foot caught between two treads. Tom came around from the underside. “Godammit, Carrie, you are not making this easy.”
“Girl, I would gladly shoot you where you lie, I am that annoyed, but I need you to be upstairs with Jonah, where it’ll look like Drum did the nasty, and I am not about to carry you and have you bleed all over me.”
“You bastard. You never had any intention of leaving Jonah alive.”
“I wanted to, but it just isn’t practical. Now, for heaven’s sake, get up, would you?”
She rolled over painfully and sat up, rubbing her ankle where it had gotten caught in the stairs. “If you think I’m going to walk up to help you stage your little scene, Tom, you’re nuts.”
He sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
He glanced around, then yanked at a piece of cloth-wrapped electrical conduit hanging from one of the ceiling joists overhead. A couple of feet of wire broke off in his hand. He planted a boot on her back and pushed her down on her stomach, then dropped himself on her back, pinning her in place. Carrie struggled mightily, but he was heavier and stronger. Grabbing her wrists, he wrapped the wire tightly around them, then rolled off of her and pulled her back up to a sitting position, and then onto her feet.
As she struggled to get blood back into her legs after being painfully folded under him, he pulled a drop cloth off the metal canning shelves, shook it out and threw it over her head. Carrie felt his arms go around her, and the next thing she knew, he had picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder.
“Now don’t wriggle, girl, or we’re both going to crack our skulls on these damn rickety stairs,” he said, starting up.
One, two… She counted as he made his way up the steps, thinking, calculating. Four, five… She’d been up and down those steps dozens of times, but how many were there? Six, seven… She had to time it just right. If she could kick just as he reached the top step, with luck, her feet might find the landing while he went backward. Eight, nine…
There couldn’t be more than ten, she decided. She stiffened her knees, then brought them up hard into his groin. He bellowed and his grip loosened. Carrie felt him start to go back, and at the last minute, her feet found the kitchen floor. She heard the thump as he went down, but then, she knew there was no way she wasn’t going right after him. The tarp was still over her head. She couldn’t see, and with her hands tied, she couldn’t regain her balance. Her feet scrambled for purchase, tangling in the cloth, tripping over the top step. Helpless, she was going down.
And then something shot out in front of her and blocked her fall. She felt herself yanked back from the precipice. As the drop cloth was ripped off her head, she lost what felt like a handful of hair. When a hand brushed it out of her watering eyes, she found herself looking into the worried, weathered face of Mark Huxley.
He pulled her farther away from the cellar door, then shouted past her, “Clear!”
Carrie turned to see Tucker straddled across the cellar opening, his arms outstretched and holding a gun in a two-handed grip aimed down the stairs. They all stood absolutely still. And then, after a moment, Tucker stood down, his fierce scowl relaxing.
Huxley steadied her and they moved next to Tucker, following the direction of his downward gaze. Tom Bent lay at the bottom of the stairs, his head flattened awkwardly against the foundation, smashed against bloodied two-hundred-year-old Georgetown bricks.
From the front hall came more footsteps, and Carrie looked up to see FBI Agent Andrews coming through to the kitchen, followed by several other men in black FBI windbreakers.
“My son?” she asked anxiously.
“Sound asleep in his bed upstairs,” Andrews said. “He must have had a great Halloween.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
McLean, Virginia
November 8, 2002
It was a freezing, windswept November morning, the kind of dark and gloomy day that seemed fitting for nothing else but a funeral. The sky was a roil of blue-black clouds rimmed in shades of purple—an angry, unforgiving sky.
In spite of her heavy black woolen coat and the cashmere scarf bundled around her neck, Carrie felt the damp cold slice through to her bones the moment she stepped out of the black limousine in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in McLean, home parish to six generations of MacNeils. High overhead, a single bell in the church tower pealed somberly.
Pushing a wind-tossed strand of hair out of her eyes, Carrie reached a leather-gloved hand back behind her. Her mother-in-law gripped her hand tightly for support as she climbed awkwardly out of the back seat. Then, she dropped Carrie’s hand and took the arm of her daughter, Eleanor, who emerged from the limo behind her. Eleanor sighed and nodded to Carrie, then turned and led her mother forward toward the entrance.
Althea was still angry, Carrie knew, convinced her daughter-in-law was somehow to blame for Drum’s downfall. But nothing would prevent her from putting on a show of family solidarity for her son’s funeral.
It was going to be a small service, unlike his father’s. Eighteen hundred people had filed through the National Cathedral’s triple set of pierced bronze gates to pay their respects when General Naughton MacNeil had passed away in 1990, including the President of the United States, several cabinet ministers, and all the Joint Chiefs. Drum’s service, by contrast, would be primarily a family affair. The CIA Director had sent flowers on behalf of the Agency, as well as condolences, but was unable to attend due to heightened security concerns, his office reported.
The official Agency line on the deaths of Drummond MacNeil and Tom Bent was that they had fallen in the line of duty, felled by the same terrorist assassin who had attacked the U.S. Embassy in London the previous April. Some of the press reports mentioned in passing that a junior CIA official had also been seriously wounded in the Georgetown attack. Tengwall would be in hospital for several weeks, it seemed. The FBI wanted to bring criminal charges against her for her part in helping Drum, but Carrie suspected that the young woman would end up being fired and told that a whopping load of legal grief would come down on her like a ton of bricks if she ever breathed a word about what had happened that Halloween night in Georgetown.
The national security community didn’t wash its dirty linen in public. There was nothing to be gained by revealing the seamier side of the story, the powers that be had decided. The Agency had a job to do, America had a war on terror to fight. The British cousins were satisfied that the leak in the western intelligence net had been closed. End of story.
Carrie turned back to the car as Jonah’s tousled head emerged. He leapt from the jump seat to the curb, then seemed to remember the solemnity of the occasion. He stood patiently while Carrie tugged down his parka.
“You can take your jacket off inside,” she told him.
He nodded. His Brooks Brothers suit was getting its second workout in a couple of weeks. It had almost done triple service, but in the end, Carrie had decided not to take him to his godfather’s funeral, although she had gone herself, in memory of the friend he’d once been to her. She’d stood quietly at the back of the almost empty National Cathedral and slipped away as soon as the service was over, but the sad smile Bishop Merriam had sent in her direction on the recessional expressed the family’s gratitude that she’d even come. Althea, not surprisingly, had refused to attend.
Hand in hand, Carrie and Jonah followed his grandmother and aunt up the steps and into the church. Carrie felt eyes on her as she went through the charade of playing the grieving widow. Only for Jonah, she told herself. And for his sake, she did genuinely grieve, too. Whatever his faults—and they had been calamitous—Drum had loved his son, and he’d died trying to hold on to him.
CIA and FBI security had quickly set up a protective cordon around the Overturfs’ Georgetown home that Halloween night, holding back both inquiring press and the curious crowds, who’d soon figured out th
at there was something beyond the usual Halloween madness happening on O Street that night. Sequestered inside the house, keeping watch over her sleeping son while the carnage downstairs was photographed, then cleared out, Carrie could only imagine the tense all-night meetings that had gone on while senior government officials on both sides of the Potomac tried to work out what, if anything, to say about what had happened.
Tucker, it turned out, had begun to become suspicious of Tengwall weeks ago, and had followed her the night that Huxley had stayed with Carrie. When he realized that she was working with MacNeil, he’d convinced Huxley to stay on long enough to let MacNeil’s scenario play out so they could determine who else was in on the conspiracy. They’d bugged Tengwall’s Virginia apartment and overheard the two of them planning to meet there on Halloween night, after Tengwall had drugged Carrie and kidnapped Jonah.
Only at the last minute had Tucker and Huxley realized that the escape was going down from the Georgetown house instead of Tengwall’s apartment. They’d called in Andrews’s FBI team for backup as they’d fought their way through the crowded streets of Georgetown, only narrowly arriving in time to avert total disaster—although by then, Carrie had managed on her own to bring Tom Bent’s treachery to an end.
It was fair to say that absolutely no one on the American side had guessed Tom’s role in the betrayal—not the CIA, not the FBI, not even the Russian assassin Tom had engaged the previous April when he’d supposedly gone to Harrod’s in London to buy Oxford marmalade for his wife. Only the British “cousins,” studying security tapes from Harrod’s tearoom months later, had spotted the Russian assassin meeting with an American from the CIA Director’s staff. At that point, Sir Roger Cambridge had decided to pull Huxley off the case, no longer knowing who their allies were.
Only the paranoid survive, Drum used to say. So how had he fallen so far, so fast? Carrie wondered. Had he left his paranoia at home like a forgotten umbrella? A little less paranoia, a little more loyalty would have taken him much further, she thought grimly.