The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  “That part, I believe,” Hazel said. “But why do it in Dubai…or even Canada? Why not make it easy and kill him here?”

  Rabbit thought for a moment. “Let’s assume Canada was for its tie to Benedict Arnold. That at least makes sense as a way to lure Nixon there. I mean, look around here. He was clearly on the paranoid side,” he said, motioning around the shed. “But for Dubai, maybe they knew we were watching you. Maybe it was to lure you out of the country.”

  “And instead, now Skip’s the one out of the country.” She went silent for a minute. “Or for all we know, Skip’s the real target.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “We still off the record?”

  “Hazel, if you know something—”

  “The first victim: Darren Nixon. Skip knew him.”

  “How well?”

  “Not too well,” Hazel said. “He figured you and your bosses knew it.”

  “I didn’t,” Rabbit said. Add it to the list, he thought.

  “Skip had heard about Nixon’s charts and graphs, said he would write these crazy letters, always rambling about my dad and his old shows. But Skip didn’t sell him Dad’s jacket. I’m telling you, I believe that.”

  “So you think your dad was the one who brought the jacket here? I saw the flight records myself. He was definitely here.”

  It was the one detail that still didn’t fit anywhere. Last month, her dad was in this house—maybe even this shed—dealing with a known criminal. Why would her dad make that trip? Did he come here on his own? Did Nixon figure something out? Or did someone else send Jack Nash here?

  “Rabbit, who do you work for?”

  “The taxpayers,” he said. “And an office in Bethesda.”

  “You have an actual boss? Someone you answer to?”

  Rabbit hesitated, but not for long. “His name is Louis Moten. That mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “From what I can tell, he was your father’s handler.”

  “Do you think he’d ever do anything to purposely hurt my father?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Look at the whiteboards. Even just the Libya one. I watched that episode. Skip was on that trip—at just seven years old. Does that make any logical sense? When the TV show went to dangerous places like Libya, that’s when we think Moten and my dad were doing their magic and searching for the bible. So if that’s the case, if Moten really cared about my father, considering how dangerous Libya was back then, why would he ever let my dad take Skip on that trip? Moten was in charge, right? Then why would he let a young kid like Skip walk into jeopardy like that?” She paused, and Rabbit could tell she was working up to something larger, something Rabbit had avoided.

  “That doesn’t mean Moten is now putting bibles in people’s chests.”

  “I didn’t say that. But whoever it is, it’s someone who knew what was happening during those covert Benedict Arnold trips my dad was taking. That narrows it to Moten, to Skip, who was seven years old, and to my dad’s assistant Ingrid Ludlow.”

  “Unless there’s another player we don’t know about.”

  Hazel looked at each of the whiteboards, at the shows with B.A.s next to them. Lebanon. Johannesburg. Iran. Moscow. “In those countries, my dad must’ve made enemies.”

  “Of course he made enemies. But as for bringing Skip into war zones, for all you know, that was your dad’s idea.”

  Hazel sat with that, though not for long. “Rabbit, is your father still alive?”

  “Last I heard. Why?”

  “What’s his job?”

  “Retired now. Used to fix cars,” Rabbit said. “Spent a lot of time screaming at people on the TV to either buy a vowel or solve the puzzle.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “Lives in Flagstaff, has a nice little place behind a gate that keeps my father out.”

  “Would they have let someone else put you in jeopardy? Would they have trained you for a job that might get you killed?”

  “No,” Rabbit said. “I did that all on my own.”

  “And my father would?”

  “Maybe he thought you’d be good at it.”

  “Or maybe he wanted me out of it,” Hazel said.

  Rabbit got up, pushed the door of the shed open. It was almost dinnertime. The neighbors would be coming home soon. Kids would be out. Two strange cars in the neighborhood would be noticed. If Darren Nixon was actually from Libya, if his mother was from Libya, if somehow he’d intersected with Jack Nash there, in the 1980s…then where the hell was new victim Arthur Kennedy from? And how did the three of them fold into each other?

  And why hadn’t Moten told him anything?

  It was, Rabbit considered, a full-blown international conspiracy…or, as Hazel said, a simple trick. From the very start, if the authorities needed a suspect, they had easy ones in Hazel and Skip Nash.

  Or, he realized, now that his fingerprints were all over this place, maybe even himself. The new guy in the office, brought in for reasons never explained.

  “We should get you out of here,” Rabbit said, letting the door close.

  “No,” Hazel said, “what we should do is get you in a sit-down with your boss Moten.”

  “That’s exactly where I’m headed. And no offense, you’re not invited.”

  “I didn’t plan on joining. I’m calling my brother, then going to Connecticut.”

  “To find Ingrid?”

  Hazel nodded once. As Dad’s assistant, Ingrid Ludlow was on the payroll back then. She should know things no one else did. But this wasn’t just about Ingrid. “Someone wanted me to find Arthur Kennedy. I’m going to do that too. And you should know, if I find something important, Butchie will know. He needs to be protected, and the only way that’s going to happen is if he has something to bargain with too.”

  Rabbit pulled out his phone, took his own pictures of the whiteboards, then promised Hazel, “I can get a security detail put on your brother. He won’t be hard to find in Dubai.”

  “I appreciate that.” She shoved open the door, light again flooding the room. “One last question,” she said. “If Ingrid really does know something from back then, why isn’t she dead?”

  “Maybe no one cares what she knows anymore,” Rabbit said. “You said you looked where she lived, right? No kids. Never married. No siblings. You kill someone that no one cares about, what’s the use?” It was, Rabbit realized, a sad, honest truth. He needed to make some changes in his life, fast.

  60

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  Marco shows up to The Bear’s rental house right on time. He’s got four ziplock bags, just as The Bear requested, stuffed inside a sack from the Al Qasr spa.

  “Any issues?” The Bear asks.

  “No problems,” Marco says, because Marco, The Bear has learned, is a man who can make things happen. He is also a man with friends in the housekeeping department, the only ones in every hotel who have access to even the most secure corners, people always happy to let someone clean up their refuse.

  The Bear examines the contents of the bags.

  There are two straws, well chewed, probably all the genetic material The Bear needs.

  Clumps of hair, matted together. “From the shower and his hairbrush,” Marco says, “just like you asked.” Another bag, with another two dozen or so hairs, roots and all. “His pillow.”

  Fingernails. Or maybe they’re toenails. Nails, regardless. “Side of the bed,” Marco says.

  The Bear wasn’t expecting such an excellent DNA haul. He figured he’d be lucky to get a few strands of hair, which wasn’t optimal. He wanted nuclear DNA, which meant he’d need to get complete follicles. Just the hair itself, he’d only have mitochondrial DNA, which was less useful. To make a full profile, he’d need everything. Now he had saliva, a bit of skin from the nails, the nails themselves, and hair. Scientists were cloning humans with less.

  The Bear slipped the bags into his suitcase. He’d
be on a flight in two hours. Right after he took care of this.

  “Do you smell that?” Marco asks. He starts sniffing, going to every corner of The Bear’s living room. “Ammonia? Do you smell that?”

  The Bear doesn’t like to cut people’s throats, thinks it’s an uncivilized way to kill a person. There’s the issue of the mess, and then there’s the issue of knowledge, the person aware—at least for a moment—that they are about to expire. Barbaric. Only actual psychopaths took any joy in that. It’s why he much preferred poison.

  But alas, sometimes there’s no time for that. So he steps behind Marco, who has his head thrown back, nose to the air like a dog, and slices his carotid and internal jugular. The blood supply to the brain is cut immediately, making it much less painful, much more clean, theoretically.

  The Bear goes through Marco’s pockets after making certain he’s dead, finds that Marco has spent only a few hundred dollars of The Bear’s money, probably given to his friends in housekeeping. He takes the cash out of Marco’s wallet, plus a voter ID card. His name is not Marco, The Bear sees.

  His name is Mahfuz Radawi.

  He is twenty-three.

  A good liar, The Bear thinks. Admirable.

  He stuffs the cash—plus another five hundred—and Mahfuz’s ID into an envelope. He’ll drop them into the mail on his way out of town, in case Mahfuz has a wife or children at home. Or a mother and father.

  They won’t need to worry about burial costs. The tub full of lye he dumps Mahfuz’s body in should take care of that issue.

  Now, thanks to the phone call he just received, The Bear is off to the airport. To Connecticut. Lovely this time of year.

  61

  Hazel spent the entire red-eye from Spokane to Philadelphia reading the Arthur Kennedy file that Rabbit had copied for her. Tomorrow, she’d get a connecting flight to New Haven, but for now, in the back of this plane, as she was trying to draw an anthropological portrait of the man, all she saw was a picture of absence.

  How was it possible that a man of forty-six, with a bank account of substance, of seeming normal desires and abilities, was also the sort that not a single soul missed once he’d died? No wife, no husband. No girlfriend, no boyfriend. No lover, no friends. No social media. Just his dating profile, which was full of lies, and his fantasy baseball league, which he was still winning. Nothing that distinguished an entire life…and yet, he was on a plane to Dubai to meet a woman he’d met online?

  Over Omaha, with a grid of lights beneath her and then nothing but darkness to the edge of the world, she thought about it. It was, she realized, a choice.

  A choice made by a person with nothing to fear. Which meant he was comfortable in who he was—he could fly to another country without setting off any alarms.

  A choice made by a person with nothing to lose. Which meant he’d experienced enough in this life to leave a little skin behind. Maybe it was a lark, just for the sex. So what?

  A choice made by a person who could afford not to come back. Which meant the life he had was one that didn’t find its value in a place.

  A person like the first victim, Darren Nixon.

  A person a lot like herself.

  Or the herself she used to be.

  Things seemed more permanent now. Dr. Morrison had killed himself to protect his own secrets, but maybe to help keep hers too. Had tried to steer her mind toward a better version of herself.

  Butchie had put himself out for her, had proven to need little more than her word to believe the most preposterous series of events.

  Skip loved her, needed her, wanted her beside him at the moment when life might turn upside down for them both.

  Even Agent Rabkin—Rabbit—had trusted her enough to put his career, maybe his life, in her hands too.

  And here was Arthur Kennedy, another life devoted to hers, if after the fact. A person who lived—and was killed—in a way that maybe only Hazel was supposed to recognize.

  If that was true, if he was a message to Hazel, what was she meant to see?

  His dead body? An obvious warning: This is what can happen to you.

  The Revolutionary outfit? An exclamation point. What were Benedict Arnold’s purported final words? She’d looked them up. “Let me die in this old uniform in which I fought my battles. May God forgive me for ever putting on another,” though here was Kennedy, dressed in a cheap imitation.

  An impossibility.

  A person trying to fool you. To get you to make a dumb mistake, to go somewhere you shouldn’t.

  Hazel shook out a handful of pills. Examined each of them, imagining what they were doing in her body: the Morovin righting her balance, half of a Norco, smoothing out the sharp edges of her pain, Xanax for lowering her anxiety—a complex cocktail of avoidance. Was she in pain? Yes. Had her balance ever been off? At first. But now, no. She didn’t think so. She’d never felt like the world was actually tipping over, just metaphorically.

  Had she felt anxious? She had, but recognized that she used to be the kind of person for whom anxiety was just a mouse in the corner of the room, not the elephant in the middle. Which was healthy. It was the people who lived absurdly happy lives, the eternal optimists, who never saw the monster waiting for them under the bed, whereas those with at least a tad of healthy fear admitted the possibility existed.

  Which meant, as the monster came closer, they could prepare to fight.

  Hazel wanted to be prepared to fight. She tossed the pills on the floor, crushed them under her shoe.

  Hazel looked out the oval window of the plane, found the moon in the darkened sky. It wasn’t full, wouldn’t be for another few days, she thought, but she felt the claws lengthening in her fingers, pressing through her skin, could feel the sharp tips of her incisors against her tongue, the muscles across her shoulders relaxing, stretching, coiling, the world around her turning slow while she sped up, her vision so sharp now, it was as if she could see through the roof of the plane, could see ancient stars collapsing, could see the folds of time and space.

  The werewolf was coming.

  62

  Louis Moten lived in a large whitewashed brick Colonial just off East-West Highway in upscale Chevy Chase, Maryland. Like two other houses on the block, his home had black shutters and a red door. Classic.

  What’s a house like this cost? Rabbit wondered, parked in the long driveway, which wrapped around the front of the house in a half circle like a moat. Two million? Three million?

  Not a bad life for Louis Moten, Rabbit thought. Yet when Moten came walking out at 8 a.m. to pick up the morning’s Washington Post, a cup of coffee in his hand, a brown terrycloth robe from the previous century hanging off him, he didn’t look happy. He spotted Rabbit’s car and headed straight for it.

  “What are you doing here?” Moten hissed.

  “I was looking up some files,” Rabbit said. “But so many of them were classified. Especially the ones on Darren Nixon and Arthur Kennedy.”

  “Son, I’m warning you. This is where I live.”

  “I called you last night,” Rabbit said. “You didn’t answer.”

  In fact, Rabbit had called him a dozen times at work. The phone rang and rang and rang; Moten wasn’t the kind of guy who used voicemail. Rabbit imagined the janitor who cleaned the office in Bethesda—there’s always a janitor, someone getting paid fifteen bucks an hour to clean up the top-secret world—walking through, a phone ringing in an empty office, middle of the night, just thinking, Man, you’re never going to get anybody at this hour.

  “My wife was sick,” Moten said. “I took the night off.”

  “I didn’t know there were time-outs.”

  “Family first,” Moten said. He looked up and down his street. “You need to get out of here, Agent. Everyone on this street can see you.”

  “Am I in hiding?”

  “You’re not. No. Not yet.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Rabbit said.

  “I don’t pick up the phone, you fly across the countr
y?”

  “I need to know what Jack Nash was doing in these places.” He handed Moten a list of all the B.A. episodes from Darren Nixon’s wipe-off boards: Lebanon, Iran, Moscow, Libya…

  Moten’s front door opened and a bald woman walked out. “Everything okay?” she called.

  “Fine, fine, honey,” Moten said. “This gentleman is lost. Just giving him some directions. I’ll be right back in.”

  Moten’s wife smiled wanly, then went back inside.

  “I’m sorry,” Rabbit said. “I didn’t know.”

  “She’s got a couple months,” Moten said. “Maybe longer, but I’m not banking on it. It’s in her pancreas.”

  “Is she in pain?”

  “What do you think?” Moten shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe Rabbit had even asked the question. “You start to die, in my experience? It hurts.” He looked at the list of episodes, then crumpled it up, tossed it back into Rabbit’s car. “You’ll need to be elected President for answers to those.”

  “I know about Benedict Arnold’s bible.”

  “Do you?”

  Rabbit thought about that. “Why am I on this job?” he finally asked.

  “Do you think Skip or Hazel killed their father?”

  “I don’t know if anyone did,” Rabbit said.

  “You think that poison just ended up in his system by magic?”

  “No,” Rabbit said. “I think it might have been planted.”

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know,” Rabbit said. “Maybe Skip. Maybe Hazel. Maybe you. Maybe the President. Maybe it was me. I was there too, when they brought back the body.”

  Moten nodded. “Do you know who killed Darren Nixon?”

  “No,” Rabbit said.

  “You think it was twenty different people from those twenty different countries, all holding a grudge against Jack Nash, each injecting Nixon with a little bit of poison to keep him quiet about something?”

  “No,” Rabbit said.

  “Then what makes you think this is about something from decades ago? Sure, Jack used to help us on missions—I told you that from the start. But whoever killed Jack was searching for that bible in the present, not thirty years ago.”