Short of making true on their wish to move there for good, he and Angela had at least hoped to spend a year living in Mosman when the children were a little older. Sam would take a sabbatical from work and they would enroll the kids at a local public school to test-drive the lifestyle.
Then serendipity winked at them. Sam’s maternal uncle Massimiliano had escaped Sicily and immigrated to Australia in the fifties. When he passed away, Sam was his only surviving family member. He left him a farmhouse in the Blue Mountains on the borders of metropolitan Sydney. Not exactly glamorous Mosman, but a foot in the door. Maybe sell it one day and put the proceeds toward their big dream. One of many life plans cut short when Angela and the children were torn from him.
Sam found himself ambling on Myahgah Road, heading toward the heart and soul of Mosman, the Village.
He passed the local public school where the sound of rowdy children playing stabbed him in the heart. Not a day passed after their murder when Sam didn’t think of his kids, even holding entire conversations with them in his head.
Maya would have been twelve and Ryan nine. How would they have turned out? Ryan would have probably been athletic and adventurous, but a gentleman and protective of his sister. Maya would have been outgoing and sociable, the leader in her group of friends. Smart, confident and immune to peer pressure, and the one to knock sense in her brother whenever his instinct to show off got the best of him.
Sam only realized tears were streaking down his cheek when a whisper of air caressed his face. The vicious cycle of memories was kicking in and he knew he couldn’t ward them off. Sam blamed himself for their loss. They would have never ended up in Sharm El Sheikh in the first place if it wasn’t for him and the work he did.
A year and a half before the ruinous trip, Sam had been working on a secret project for a foreign client. He was being paid an obscene amount of money to build a real estate software application with dubious intent. The only time Sam had taken on a project that was wildly unrelated to his niche specialization, but he had been seduced. The client had targeted and recruited him aggressively, making it a proposition too attractive to refuse on the shaky grounds the project was out of his scope of interest.
Just one-off, never to be repeated, he had tried to justify to himself. The cash influx would allow Sam to pay off his mortgage and maybe even buy that house in Sydney, all cash. A big financial break to free him from the shackles of business debts holding back the company from moving to the next level. With the money, he would hire more full-time product developers. Rely less on flaky overseas contractors. Maybe even expand to the East Coast and launch an office in New York to target the music, theater and publishing industries.
As a token of gratitude for Sam’s successful completion of the project, the client offered him and his family an all-expenses-paid luxury holiday at the Spring Roy resort in Sharm El Sheikh.
Sam meandered on the pedestrian part of Myahgah Road past the school, by the Allan Border Oval. The freshly mowed circular lawn was lush, almost begging for a quick run with a spirited dog.
The delicious smell of the coffee wafting from the Fourth Village Providore in the heart of the Mosman Village was his cue he had reached his final destination.
A few attractive mothers with fashionable sunglasses and tight jeans sat at one of the two tables outside, sipping on frothy coffees as their designer toddlers played near the fountain in the courtyard.
The woman Sam had come to meet sat with her back to him at the other table, but he recognized her from her hair, although much shorter now.
Creeping up on her from behind, he placed a hand on her shoulder and whispered in her ears, “Do you have a light?”
She tossed her head around and her face lit up when their eyes met.
Julia Price got up and hugged him tight.
The last time they met, he had pushed her inside a van to make it look like she had been abducted. They had each played their parts masterfully, like seasoned performers. He the terrorist kidnapper and she the innocent victim.
She looked stunning now in a tiny pastel skirt and a white polo shirt. Her feet showed off varnished toes, a pair of expensive sandals masquerading as basic, and a sensual ankle bracelet. She smelled like an exotic, early blooming flower. What a difference from the version of Julia they had styled for the fake proof-of-life video they had produced to fool the world.
When the FBI had exchanged the Jordanian terrorists for her life, the bruises they would have found were all self-inflicted with Hollywood cunning and the medical guidance of the two doctors on their team. When the FBI would have rescued her, they would have found convincing evidence of emotional and sexual abuse and a battery of physical damage.
This was the last stop of a journey they’d started together many years before their staged encounter in Rome.
He sat across from her, took out an iPad and a thick leather envelope from his backpack, and placed both in front of him.
A young waitress with an apron came by and flashed them a smile. Julia ordered a slice of banana bread and a soy latte.
“I’ll have the same.” He handed the menu back to the waitress.
Julia drew her sunglasses off, and the delirium of a child in a secret candy empire erupted on her face.
“We did it.”
Sam dipped his head, bit his lips and glanced around to make sure no one was looking or listening.
That Sam had asked to meet her today was the coded message the final stage of the operation had kicked in.
The things he wanted to tell her were endless. Rivers of emotions flowed through him, and perhaps through her as well. But whatever they had to share would remain unspoken for the time being, maybe even for good.
He searched her delicate features for clues of the thoughts going through her mind. Surely she needed to know how he had felt after he had pulled off this hair-raising heist that could have ended with each member of their team dead or arrested. They had convinced their government, including her own father, Senator William Price, that her abduction was part of an elaborate terrorist plot to free convicted terrorists, when in fact it was intended to extract and execute them.
Sam wanted to know how she had kept up the role of a kidnap victim coping with fake post-traumatic stress, and gradually reassimilated into society. To look her father and mother in the eye, knowing she had put them through every parent’s worst nightmare.
Had she slipped up somehow or done something to raise suspicion? He was curious if Monica Vlasic had debriefed her, or if the FBI had decided to skip all those procedures, thanks to some more strings pulled by Deputy Director Benny Marino, the man Julia considered her second father.
And he wanted to know if she had met Alex Blackwell.
The most pressing question on his mind was whether Julia was ready to sever ties with her old life and disappear forever.
But none of these questions would be answered. This had always been part of the deal. There would be no gloating or acknowledgment of the roles each member of the team had played to pull this off. No self-lauding to achieve catharsis after years of iron-fisted discipline and absolute secrecy.
Sam had been their spiritual lighting rod and strategic commander, from the operation’s conception to its fanatical implementation. He’d hand-picked and recruited every member of his team through complex character profiling, and a six-degrees-of-separation software he had developed to plough through the list of surviving family members.
Each person on the team came with an indispensable skill or role to play. And each with a huge sacrifice to make. But it was Julia who had agreed to pay the heftiest price, no one doubted that. Finding her had been a stroke of luck. Her relationship to Mark Price made her the best leverage they needed to get into the building. And being the daughter of a US senator with deep links to the FBI brought the plan full circle.
As strong as his urge was t
o express his gratitude to her today, he knew he couldn’t. But he hoped she would see it in his eyes. They had in the past exchanged silent conversations.
The waitress placed the steaming coffees on the table, then deposited two plates of toasted banana bread with a small bowl of honey and a sculpture of butter. Julia drizzled the honey on her slice like strands of golden silk. The rich butter melted on impact and was absorbed in the fluffy, russet-brown surface of the toasted bread.
As they sipped their coffees, she seemed hesitant to speak. The rules about what they could and couldn’t say in public had been clearly laid out in the past. She must have been actively filtering whatever was on her mind.
Finally, she spoke.
“What’s next for you, Sam?”
The team had agreed once the building siege was over, there would be a waiting period while he cashed out the money. When he had accumulated enough to pay each member their designated share, he would meet up with them individually. He’d already paid the other five men, and Julia was his last stop.
After that, there was one final stage of the operation, but it had been agreed that Sam finish it on his own.
“A trip to Europe, and based on what I find there, perhaps I’ll need to go somewhere else. I think I’ve got about another year left. Maybe less.”
“I meant what next after all of this is over.”
“Oh...” Sam sighed and dropped his head for a brief while, looking straight at the foam of his hot beverage. For the last six years, his only focus was the mission and the end game. He hadn’t yet pondered life after.
“A new start, I guess.” He raised his head and sank deep in her eyes.
“It’s been a long time holding on to this one thing. We all need to let go. We won.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I need to cleanse myself first—” He stopped before saying too much and glanced at the children playing in the courtyard.
Julia kept her eyes fixed on him, the warmth of her gaze touching his skin. Before the operation had started in Rome, she had told him there were two things about him she knew for certain. The first was that she could trust him with her life, and the second, which contradicted the first, was that no matter how hard she tried, Julia had never been able to understand how Sam’s mind functioned.
He extended his hand to touch hers and rubbed her soft fingers gently, then spoke in a low voice.
“We all lost something precious and we all sacrificed a part of our humanity to get to where we are today. I am not claiming I suffered or gave more, but I started this, so only I can end it.”
Sam moved his plate aside and handed her the leather envelope. Inside it was everything she needed to reboot her life. A new identity, prepared by Albert, the Greek crew-member who had worked for Interpol before his own family was massacred in the attack. An Irish passport, birth certificate and driver’s license. The keys to a condo purchased in her new name, in the town of Freiburg in the southwest of Germany. A safe house to lie low until she decided where on earth she wanted to vanish for good.
She gasped and put her hand on her mouth to mask whatever emotions were rippling through her.
He picked up his iPad and switched it on. Julia’s face betrayed a symphony of emotions from which Sam struggled to look away. He wanted to absorb her features and her seductive eyes. This could be the last time he would look at them.
In a few minutes, he would pay the bill and they’d each go their separate ways. That had been the plan all along. Contingency protocols to contact one another had been devised of course, especially to warn of imminent danger. But barring that, their relationships were meant to end permanently. Now sitting across from her, he questioned this decision with every fiber of his body.
There had been a point during the long years of planning this operation when Sam felt things for Julia he knew were dangerous and could undermine everything. They were both burned-out souls, no longer capable of loving or being loved, he’d thought. Every single person on that operation had been living on borrowed time. Somewhere in the midst of all that darkness, he felt emotions for her that he had never thought would vibrate through his beating heart again.
Sam had resisted back then, but whatever self-restraint he had been able to practice was impossible to summon now with the prospect of never seeing her again seeming to matter. The lump in his throat was like a cork capping intense emotions swimming through his body.
Who the hell am I kidding?
This faint hope radiating through his heart was cruel and misleading. His future was a massive black hole of unknowns. The final and most dangerous chapter of the operation was next, and he didn’t want to drag Julia down with him. He had taken her far enough.
“The transfer was processed this morning,” he said.
She took out a small security token from her purse, with the logo of a private bank in the Cayman Islands that Sam recognized. Kenji, the Japanese financial expert on the team, had helped set up the accounts for each one of them.
She navigated on the iPad to the bank’s website, then logged in and entered her security details, including the unique access code from her token. He studied her face as she stared at the life-changing figure of twenty-five million dollars in her name.
Her eyes puffed, then tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Thank you.”
Sam had imagined this moment many times before. The intoxicating knowledge of how her life as about to change. Money had never been the principal motivation for any of them. He wouldn’t have picked them otherwise. But the wealth each of them now possessed was the only safe way they could restart their lives. The build-up had been six years in the making, and had required immeasurable patience.
The waitress placed the bill on the table.
Sam paid in cash and both he and Julia stood up.
Time stood still as he absorbed every bit of her for one last time.
Her deep caramel eyes always spoke volume, well before her lips uttered a single word. That hadn’t changed.
The things she knew about him and accepted without judgment. Julia was just as wounded, just as tainted. If there was one woman in the world who could share the rest of his life with him, he was staring at her.
And he was about to let her go.
“This is it, Julia. We need to start living again. To be alive again.”
He hugged her for a few sweet seconds, inhaled her deeply, touched her cheeks with his, wrapped his hands tight around her waist and whispered something in her ear before they let go of each other. Something he had sworn never to utter.
Her eyes widened and her lips parted, but he placed a finger on them and stopped her from speaking.
They turned and walked away in opposite directions.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tuesday, October 10, 2012—1:00 p.m.
Washington, District of Columbia
To the general public, the Chastleton was a historic apartment block at the corner of Sixteenth and R. But for people in the know, it was speckled with discreet units used as meeting facilities for the federal security agencies. Perfect for off-the-books matters that could not take place on official US government property.
Like the Church of the Holy City at the corner of Corcoran and Sixteenth that he had just passed, Blackwell stopped to admire the similar Gothic facade of the Chastleton. All those years working in the DC area, he had never once noticed any of the interesting buildings in the Sixteenth Street Historic District.
Robert Slant had given him precise instructions on what to do and where to go for the meeting he had set up for him. Yet another favor to satiate Blackwell’s obsession with Sam Morgan.
He strode into the lobby of the building and brushed past an older blind woman with a service dog who had just stepped out of the elevator. Her old-world perfume reminded him of a history teacher he once had a crush on. Then he remembered wh
at he knew of this building and wondered if this woman was blind at all.
Blackwell rode the elevator to the second floor and stepped out in a freshly carpeted corridor. The door of the apartment he was coming to had been left open. He stuck his head in. Inside was pitch dark with the shutters all rolled down. When he shut the door behind him, a floor-level lamp switched on.
With the benefit of some light, he saw the furniture was the sort purchased in bulk by the federal government—cheap and without style or imagination. As his eyes adjusted more, he narrowed in on a figure of a man sunk in an armchair across from an identical one where Blackwell assumed he should sit.
“Come in.”
The casual voice threw Blackwell off. It didn’t seem to come from the direction of the seated man, like a ventriloquist who could yo-yo his voice around the room. Even the texture didn’t match the austere energy of the space and secretive conditions of the meeting.
Danny Zimmerman was a rogue hacker who had turned mainstream. In Blackwell’s mind, hackers were awkward types, low on charisma with little attention to their appearance. This guy seemed different. Angular dark glasses matched his jet-black hair, and his sharp-tailored business suit and necktie made him out to be more like a banker, not a hacker. Not your typical NSA operative.
Zimmerman had been arrested a few times in the past for hacking into government facilities in Israel. The Israelis figured locking him up was a waste of talent, so they recruited him instead to channel his code-breaking skills to the service of the Mossad.
For five years he worked as a Mossad freelancer until he was lured by the NSA to serve his other country. Dual nationals like Zimmerman were a rarity in the intelligence community, but rules were made to be bent for those whose skills surpassed exceptional.
This wasn’t going to be a long meeting.
Danny Zimmerman’s expertise as a cryptanalyst was why the US had struck the deal with the Egyptians in return for Nabulsi and Madi. As part of the agreement to release the convicted terrorists, the NSA had bowed to pressure from the White House and loaned Zimmerman to the Egyptians to help them break into Leviathan, a software application developed to conceal the illegally acquired real estate assets accrued by a member of the Mubarak family. Leviathan and the dirty laundered money it cloaked were orchestrated under the shady cover of an offshore corporation called the Aswan Group.
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