The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  “Ingrid Ludlow is going to be in a padded cell for the rest of her life,” Moten says. “Keep that in mind.”

  “I know what you did all those years ago. I know the bible is just a code name for those sick kids. I know about all the deals you made with our enemies. You saved their sick children, but only if they gave you information. And to keep it all quiet, you grew at least one of them—The Bear—into your own personal assassin.”

  “I’m just a bureaucrat. Those decisions were above me.”

  “Bullshit,” Hazel says. “In those countries, that’s what I was searching for, wasn’t it? Did Skip tell me, or did I find it myself? Either way, I realized there was something behind the TV show…I found my dad’s old missions. That’s what I was looking for.”

  “Personally, I thought you were looking for ways to kill yourself. But wait until you find out what you’ve left behind.”

  “I’ve left myself behind. I don’t worry about that person anymore.”

  Moten pours himself another inch of rum. Stands at the foot of the bed, touches his wife’s foot. She doesn’t move. “I’ve got one last mission if you’re interested. Y’know, the family business.”

  “We’re out of that business.”

  “Skip had two men killed. So don’t tell me the shop is closed.”

  “My brother didn’t touch those men.”

  “No, he hired a monster to do his work. Bringing The Bear in, that’s still Skip’s doing. You get that, darling, right? Truth comes out, Skip’ll be lucky to live through the night. He doesn’t know who he’s in bed with.”

  “Skip doesn’t need to worry about that monster. I took care of that problem for him.”

  Moten registers something that looks like honest surprise. “When was that?”

  “I can still taste his blood in my mouth.”

  “Just like your mother,” Moten says.

  Hazel knows it’s bait, something to get her offtrack. “I also know about the Polosis 5. No one poisoned my father, did they?” she says. “Just like no one put bibles in Nixon’s or Kennedy’s chests.”

  A small grin lights Moten’s face.

  “That’s where you saw an opening, didn’t you?” Hazel asked. “Skip hires The Bear, who does the dirty work, but since Nixon and Kennedy were under your watch, now you’ve got your own opportunity. Once Nixon’s dead, you step in and dress him up in that old red coat.”

  “You’ve truly got a terrific imagination.”

  “Don’t treat me like my brother. There’s a reason why their deaths never made the news, and why Dubai didn’t let word get out. It’s because you were keeping it quiet; you jumped in and shut Nixon’s crime scene down, quickly dressing him up in a Revolutionary coat. Did you steal that coat from my father’s house? You knew what that would do. You knew who would come running.”

  “You.”

  “And I did. It was the perfect bread crumb, wasn’t it—the one way to bring me in and make sure I got involved. Even when Rabbit came to the hospital: You gave him just enough to ensure I’d come sniffing. The only thing I can’t figure out is why?”

  “And now I’m supposed to reveal it all to you? Grow the hell up, Hazel. When you were a child, your father told you that story for a reason.”

  “You know nothing about my father. He told me that story so I would leave this life!”

  “And did you leave it? Or did you go hunting to see what your dad was up to? Look around, Hazel. Did you walk away from your father’s world, or are you standing here with me right now? Whatever timid and safe life your father hoped to scare you into by telling you that story, the story is still a primer. Just as it was when Cyrus told it to your father—and when your father told it to Skip and you, even if he tried to convince himself otherwise. So let me share my own personal belief. If your father was forced to choose, he wasn’t letting the family business go to your brother. And neither was I.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Hazel asks.

  Moten moves around the bed, rests his hand on his wife’s cheek. She stirs. Good. Hazel was worried she was already dead.

  “The doctors are done. They won’t do anything else for her,” Moten says.

  “I’m sorry for that.” Hazel means those words. It’s a memory that will never leave her. She’s seen this before, her mother there one day, gone the next.

  “You don’t have to be,” Moten says, staring down at his wife. “There’s a treatment being done in North Korea,” he explains, and Hazel can hear the utter delusion in his voice, can see that the world is cracking around this man, that Jack’s death was just one of many dominos falling at once.

  Moten tries to straighten up, and Hazel sees a glimmer of the man he used to be, not this cooked-down version before her. “There is a Gulfstream cleared for international travel in San Francisco. Your friend Butchie can fly you. The North Koreans are excited to have Jack Nash’s daughter in their country.”

  “Do you hear yourself? Your wife is going to die.”

  “We’re all going to die,” Moten says. “Take your brother to North Korea. I’m sure he’ll be happy to join you on this mission. Keep all of this mess quiet.”

  It was insane. It had always been insane.

  “You dressed that corpse up, you made it happen,” Hazel says. “And for what? For this? To keep the program going? To pull one last mission and get your wife treatment? She doesn’t want to die in North Korea. Or in this shitty hotel. Let her go. Let everyone go.”

  “Your father was an opportunist. You’d be smart to learn that. Make the best of a bad situation, darling. Save a life. Maybe four. Maybe even your brother’s.”

  “My name isn’t darling,” Hazel says. “You call me that one more time, I’m going to break your neck, starting with the little bones first.”

  Moten smiles. “That’s the girl I want working for me. That’s the girl who’s going to watch my Elizabeth.”

  “Or what?” Hazel says. “You’ll shoot me in front of your wife? Then where would you be?”

  Hazel hears the click of the door lock a second before the door opens, enough time to see Rabbit as he enters the hotel room.

  Hazel expects Rabbit to pull out his gun, but he just stands there for a moment, staring, like he’s trying to make sense of the situation: Hazel at the foot of the bed, Moten on the side of it, Elizabeth between them.

  “Sir?” Rabbit asks, barely even getting out the single syllable.

  Moten says nothing. He raises his arm, points the gun at Rabbit, and pulls the trigger.

  Then Moten turns the gun at Hazel. And fires again.

  94

  Rabbit’s blood sprays the wall, but he doesn’t scream. Doesn’t even make a noise. He holds his chest, his arm…he’s bent over. Hazel can’t see where he’s hit.

  Moten’s gun is sliding toward Hazel. His finger squeezes the trigger.

  Hazel sees herself moving before she’s even in motion.

  She pounces toward Moten, sees the barrel of the gun train on her face.

  Behind her, she hears a thud as Rabbit crashes backward into the wall.

  Moten pulls the trigger. Hazel hears a click.

  She grabs Moten’s forearm, slams the gun up toward his face just as he fires, under his chin.

  The slug passes straight up through Moten’s chin, and then out the back of his head.

  The bullet ricochets, burrowing into the back wall, missing Hazel’s own head by a fraction of an inch as she feels its burst.

  She drops Moten’s arm, and he slumps like a hand puppet, collapses across the bed, then onto the floor. His wife doesn’t move an inch.

  Rabbit is across the room in a second, his shoulder bleeding as he pulls Hazel away.

  “Hazel, don’t touch him!” Rabbit screams, though she can’t hear anything he’s saying.

  He’s still yelling, holding Hazel back with his good arm, screaming at her to stay clear. It’s the hole in Rabbit’s shoulder that finally makes her take a breath. There’s barely
any blood. Just a black burn mark near his collarbone. If Rabbit’s in pain, he still doesn’t know it.

  “You’re hit,” she tells him.

  Rabbit grips his clavicle like he’s swatting a mosquito. Still in motion, he kicks the gun away from Moten’s body.

  Without a word, he flips Moten over onto his back, starts to apply pressure, mouth-to-mouth, but it’s useless. Hazel knows, because she’s seen this before too.

  “He’s dead,” Hazel says. There’s a hole in the wall where the slug is buried, the wallpaper scorched. “And I should be too. I should be dead.”

  “You need to get out of here,” Rabbit says, now tending to his own wound. He pulls off his tie, twisting it into a quick figure eight, sliding it on like a backpack, to immobilize his broken clavicle.

  “Where?”

  “You have a plane ticket to Dubai. Use it.”

  A low moan comes from Moten’s wife.

  “We need to help this woman,” Hazel says. “You can’t just leave her here. Plus your shoulder…”

  Rabbit dials 911.

  “I found Benedict Arnold’s bible,” Hazel says.

  “I don’t want to know,” Rabbit says, sliding his other arm into the figure eight and pulling tight to straighten his shoulder. “Don’t tell me a single thing. Nothing more.” His hands are covered in Moten’s blood, in his own blood too.

  “I ripped out a man’s jugular today. And Trevor? The sickening part? I think I used to enjoy it.”

  “Hazel, whoever you used to be, whatever you’ve done, that doesn’t matter anymore. Okay? Benedict Arnold dies here, like he should’ve two hundred years ago.” There’s another moan from Moten’s wife. “We need to get this woman to a hospital, so she can die in peace.”

  “What do we do about Skip?”

  “I’m going to guess he’s in the wind, Hazel. He knows what he’s done. I think you’ll be lucky to ever see him again.”

  Right, Hazel thinks. I’m so lucky.

  95

  Hazel waits until she’s finally over international waters—after sitting on the tarmac in New Haven for hours, then being delayed out of New York too—before she digs into her carry-on and pulls out the bag from the Al Qasr that had been left in her room.

  Rabbit hadn’t seen it, maybe he didn’t want to see it, not with Moten’s corpse on the floor. She’d been expecting someone to haul her off the flight since the moment she boarded, spent the hours on the tarmac constantly peering out the window, waiting for a tactical team to rush the plane, which would have been a problem, because she wouldn’t go quietly. She knows that now.

  Complicating matters is that she’s in the last row of a 747, the middle seat, jammed between a teenage boy with giant headphones, and a sweating cowboy, white hat and all, who keeps adjusting the AC, not that it ever gets cool.

  She puts the bag on her lap, looks inside. There’s a folded piece of white paper, her name written on it. She opens it: Something for your trip —Karl.

  He knew I’d be coming back alone, Hazel thinks.

  Inside the bag, there are handfuls of Smarties, Nestlé Crunch bars, and Peanut Butter Cups…and then two ziplock bags, one containing a few clumps of hair, another holding what appeared to be nail clippings, along with a short note written in cursive. Hazel thinks no one writes in cursive anymore, but here she can see the pressure of Karl’s hand, feels it on her hip, tries to line up her past with him, tries to figure out how this all happened, how what happened years ago brought her to this very moment. The note says: All the evidence you’ll ever need. All is history.

  Such a precise orchestration, but it still makes no sense. Why would Skip hire someone to frame himself?

  A flight attendant comes down the aisle, a piece of paper squeezed between her fingers. She’s staring directly at Hazel. Here it comes. She should have packed a parachute. Except, she thinks, it might be hard to find land in the middle of the Atlantic.

  “Ma’am?” the attendant says, and Hazel can tell right away that she has that weird tic where every sentence she utters sounds like a question. “I’m sorry? But a gentleman in first class wanted me to give this to you? Is that okay?”

  Hazel cranes her head up, but all she sees are the backs of several hundred heads and the darkened cabin lit by the blue glow of their laptops and iPads. She smiles at the attendant and takes the note.

  COME TO THE FRONT OF THE CABIN, HAZE. YOU’VE BEEN UPGRADED.

  Hazel practically climbs over the teenager, not bothering to wait for him to move. Still, she moves slowly through the cabin with her head down, until she’s through the curtains into first class.

  There, sitting next to the window, cloaked in the half-light cast by the bulb above him, is her brother.

  96

  Skip’s hair is dyed black and combed forward, so he has bangs.

  He’s got a growth of beard and is wearing transition glasses, the kind that turn orange, so his eyes look almost alien. With a blue sport coat, red tie, and gray slacks, he looks like a small-town weatherman.

  Hazel sits down beside him, tries to collect herself. There are only two other people sitting in first class, both asleep.

  “I’m sorry,” Skip says. “I told you not to go to Spokane.”

  “You did,” Hazel says. “I didn’t listen.”

  “I knew you’d make it out.”

  “I didn’t know I’d make it out,” Hazel says. Skip smiles, but there’s not much there, not the luminosity she’s used to. “Skip,” she starts to say, but he raises a finger to stop her.

  “No. Not that name anymore.”

  “Nicholas,” Hazel says, and he nods, “you could have told me. About Libya. You could’ve told me later, when I was old enough to help you.”

  “I didn’t want to know what was real,” he says. “And by the time I figured it out—what I had done that day…what Dad continued doing, helping sick children in exchange for inside information on our enemies—it was too late. They were coming for us. Sure, Kennedy just wanted to know his own past. But once he found Nixon, that was the end. Nixon was a thug, a complete vengeful ghoul. With that crap life he had, when he heard what I did in Libya, all he saw were dollar signs. And he roped Kennedy in too. They started writing me these crazy letters. I thought I could handle it myself, even met with Nixon out in his conspiracy shed. You should’ve heard what they wanted, the threats they made. They said they’d tell the world I was a killer. I had no choice but to get Dad involved. Everything I did, I did to protect you. To protect us. Our family. They would’ve ruined us.”

  “You should’ve let them,” Hazel says. “You’d be in the same position you are right now.”

  “That’s what you’ll never understand. You were—” He leans close to Hazel. “You weren’t the one on TV. My entire life, all I’ve ever wanted was to go unnoticed. To disappear. But there was always someone coming, Hazel. I could feel them coming. So if I stayed up all night in a club or a casino, always on camera? No one would come for me, not anyone smart.”

  Hazel nods once. “Karl was smart.”

  “Not so smart that he knew who he was working for,” Skip says.

  “I still don’t understand how you could hire him.”

  Skip smiles at her, something approaching his old smile. “Me? I didn’t hire him,” Skip says.

  “But Moten said—”

  “I didn’t hire him,” Skip says.

  Hazel cocks her head. “But if you didn’t—”

  Skip shoots her a look. It’s a look she knows. One she’s seen before, somewhere. The one thing that every brother and sister share.

  Dad? Hazel asks with just a glance.

  Skip nods. The one who always fixed their problems, and created them too, even from beyond the grave. Dad.

  “He hired Karl to protect us,” Skip says. “It’s like when we were little. He told us the story with the bible to protect us too. I think he was trying to prepare us for this life.”

  “No, that’s what you always had wrong
. However Dad got into this, or even Grandpa got into it with his old radio show, Dad wanted to break the pattern for us. The story was a warning. The only thing he was preparing us for was to walk away and leave this life behind.”

  “Dad could tell himself whatever he wanted. He knew who we were. Each of us. You got something to leave this life, but I took it as something different.”

  Hazel considers that, and what Moten had said. Had she really left this life behind? With her brain kicked sideways, those memories were gone. “Tell me the truth…These past few years,” she finally says, “did I walk away from Dad’s world? Or were we both secretly working on the show and its missions?”

  “We? After what happened in Libya, Dad wouldn’t let me near any of those missions, though that didn’t stop him from keeping me on the show. And you…? You wouldn’t come near the show. Not ever. You hated that life. Dad taught you to run far away from it, and you did. But even so, you found your own danger. There was Butchie and his shipping business. And then, somewhere along the way, you started getting suspicious of the show. You knew Dad was up to something bad. That’s what started you searching.”

  “But what made me so suspicious? Did Moten ever show up and make either of us an offer?”

  “Not me, though who knows with you. Either way, deep down, Dad knew what the future held. If Moten tried to rope us in like they roped him in—or if Nixon and Kennedy tried to take us all apart by going public—” Skip cut himself off. “Dad would do anything to keep us safe. Even if it meant—to close all the old loops and shut everyone down—that he had to bring in a Bear. Once Dad hired Karl, the Nash family secrets could go back to being secrets, and you and I would always have alibis.”

  “Well, that at least explains this,” Hazel says. She opens her carry-on, takes out the bag from the Al Qasr, sets it between them. “Karl left that for me in my hotel room. Before I killed him.”