The Shadow Artist

by James Grayson

  Call her practical.

  As she drove, Alex couldn’t help wondering what other cities Jack had been to these last months, after he’d disappeared. The thought still stung, but was no longer acute, and she was pretty sure it would disappear entirely in another couple of months. Pretend to feel nothing for long enough, and eventually it became true. For example, she’d already stopped wishing to see his face long enough to punch it. That was progress.

  Of course, she’d done a background check on Pope after he stopped returning her calls. Actually, she’d also ordered one as soon as they’d met; spies did things like that. The Company almost required it. In any case, both checks were identical: empty files, criminal or otherwise. Only a birth certificate, the UK passport she’d already seen, and verification that he had, in fact, grown up New Cross, south London. Unlike Alex, he was who he said he was: a high-level microchip salesman assigned to territories in Europe.

  With most of her assignments also in Europe, they could meet at a moment’s notice and had even found themselves in the same city twice last year. Then he declined to meet up in Prague three months ago. When Alex asked him to the Cayman Islands a few weeks after that, he declined again, and that was it.

  Two yellow cards and you’re ejected.

  Anyway, who was Alex to judge duplicitous behavior? She’d told him she was a private security consultant and that her job was confidential and sometimes dangerous. Even if she’d been allowed to tell him she was CIA, she wouldn’t have.

  Do you think you have trust issues, Alex?

  No, doctor.

  Then why won’t you let anyone get close to you.

  Because it’s worked out so well for me before?

  She didn’t even want to know what the CIA psychoanalyst would say about the impact of learning about her father.

  I fear you are currently experiencing the initial phases of the feminine Oedipus attitude. We call it the Electra complex.

  You fear I’m becoming a superhero?

  I fear you’re blaming your mother for your father’s death … and for the fact that neither of you have a penis.

  But doctor, I can have a penis anytime I want.

  Alex pulled into the lot at the Ukrainian Catholic cathedral and silenced the car before navigating to the phone’s browser to check the news at The Times and The Guardian. Both papers were running an identical, single-paragraph article that described the explosion at the restaurant as a result of faulty natural-gas pipe fittings.

  Damage Control 101. She just wondered which agency had gotten to the media first.

  Beyond that, still no messages or voicemails for her. No revised assignment or new directives. That meant one thing and one thing only: Finish the original assignment. She thought of her father leaping over that river railing, never looking back, not once meeting her eye, and she pointed the car in the direction of the hotel.

  Finishing this was exactly what she intended to do.

  After wiping down the car and locking it, Alex placed the keys above the rear tire, leaving it in the Cathedral’s parking lot. Investigators would notice it missing from the restaurant sooner or later, and she didn’t want it to be too easy to trace back to her, but she still wanted to keep it near for emergency use.

  Alex hurried down Duke Street, shivering but thankful for the short days of winter. The sun didn’t rise until after eight and it disappeared again by four. It would make it easier for her to move around unnoticed.

  When she entered the empty hotel lobby, the sleepy, mid-twenties front desk clerk raised her head, but gave Alex only a single raised brow. Alex countered her insouciant British reserve with a wave as she disappeared into the lift, as if it were perfectly normal to wander in after five a.m., shoeless and wearing a tattered black dress.

  Arriving at the fifth floor, Alex slipped the key card from her satchel and stood before the door to the room for a moment and listened. She stared at the card insert, frozen by an image of her inserting the key, turning the knob, and being blown backward. Clearly still shaken from the evening, Alex brushed the image aside, and slipped the card into and out of the lock. The green light blinked, the door clicked, and she entered.

  And stopped a single step into the room.

  None of Alex’s belongings remained. No suitcase, no clothes, not even her toothbrush. Whoever had taken it all had even swiped the novel from the nightstand. The Charm School by Nelson DeMille. The helicopter had just landed and they were about to escape Cold War Russia.

  “Bastards,” Alex muttered as she shut the door.

  The only items left in the room were in the closet: a dry-cleaning bag holding a single dark pantsuit she’d have never chosen for herself, a pair of heels unsuited for running, and hose that lay atop a folded scarf. No coat.

  Whoever left this didn’t want Alex very mobile.

  She tossed the dry-cleaning bag onto the bed, checked the tag—Palace Gates Dry Cleaning—and unsheathed the suit. In the jacket’s pocket, she discovered a leather fold. Tucked inside, a dark blue passport with gold lettering and a crown with two flags on the front. Opening it, Alex saw her current passport photo staring back at her. Apparently she was now Canadian.

  The name was Amanda Carr, not a legend she’d ever used, or any of those that the CIA had given her upon entering the National Clandestine Service. According to the stamps, she, Amanda, had traveled to the south of France, Australia, and Hawaii this last year.

  “A recreational surfer, Amanda enjoys a good Bordeaux while drawing ocean sunsets,” Alex murmured, closing the passport.

  Behind it, she found a commercial plane ticket, complete with the thin perforated edge on one side. Heathrow to Dulles. Someone was trying to send her back home to DC, and fast. The flight was set to leave in four hours.

  Alex shuffled through a few receipts from local shops and restaurants, all folded behind the ticket, along with a nominal amount of cash, both in euros and pound sterling. Pocket litter.

  But was it from Langley? The Company had never delivered her a legend on a job before; it would be too risky. Plus, Moss had made it ultra clear that Alex was to see this assignment through without any contact until finished. This didn’t mesh with that instruction or the complete blackout in communication thus far.

  No, there was only one explanation, and it was as clear as the chalk-stream water of that long ago day. Her father had cleared out this room. He sent all this, set it up.

  He wanted Alex gone again.

  “Damn.” Alex threw the passport and ticket fluttering across the room. “Damn you.” She yanked the fabric of her dress, causing the side seam to tear wide open and expose the black tattoo on her ribs. The two eagles, talons outstretched, tumbling over each other in a circle of infinity, were the mark of a self-inflicted honor.

  Talonstrike.

  The sight of it in the dresser mirror stilled her, calmed her. Only two candidates from the CIA’s Farm—one male, one female—along with the top team of Navy SEALs each year, were selected for a chance to earn it.

  “I earned it,” she said aloud, like he was still there to hear.

  She’d driven vehicles at speeds of over a hundred miles per hour, in reverse. She’d learned to overtake and pilot commercial and military helicopters, mid-fucking-flight. She could pilot US, British, and Israeli fighter jets, both Soviet and North Korean MIGs. Alex could land any of them, wheels up on grass strips, gravel runs, desert soil, beach sand. And yes, even water.

  “Sui cadere dulcis,” Alex said loudly, defiantly. That was what the instructors had called piloting along white-capped waves in the middle of a thunderstorm, three-hundred miles offshore…in the middle of an engine stall. Roughly translated, it meant sweet suicide—as more than one candidate had signed their life away attempting it.

  Well, she’d passed all their tests, beat almost every single Navy SEAL in scoring, too.

  Pulling the dress over her head and off, Alex balled it up and threw it into the trashcan. “Patterns, Daddy. Everyone h
as patterns.”

  Five

  Jackson Hole, Wyoming

  CIA Deputy Director of Operations, William Moss—Bill to his handful of family and friends—eased toward the edge of a sage thicket and stopped four feet behind Georgia, his favorite German shorthaired pointer. Stiff as a morning pecker, her lean muscles were strung taut beneath the long brown spots and dirty white coat. She must have come up on a whole covey of birds. Maybe even a couple of pheasants, if she was lucky.

  Moss ticked off the safety and nestled the stock of the side-by-side shotgun into his shoulder. A bit lighter than the Beretta he was used to, the Holland & Holland twenty-gauge felt balanced and would swing easy with the target. He contemplated doing the old shoot-from-the-hip move, but thought better of it. Georgia was new at the game and he couldn’t be sure she’d find many more. And having bagged only one lousy grouse thus far, he wasn’t about to risk his best opportunity of the day.

  Besides, Moss was ready to roast his feet and have a lunchtime sip of the old tonic.

  He glanced down at Georgia—poor thing was beginning to quiver—and whispered, “Get it.”

  Georgia pounced into the thicket and the bush exploded, four birds rocketing into the sky.

  Moss took a single beat to make his decision, then swung right. The trajectory was a better line, and the grouse moving in that direction looked fatter. Two sharp pops later, he’d struck both birds, sending them tumbling to the frozen ground.

  Georgia, having sat up straight from the flush to watch for prizes, bounded into the field to fetch them, her head down and tail swinging in violent spasms.

  Moss cracked the smoking gun open and laid it across his forearm, savoring the smell of gun smoke as he waited for Georgia to complete her task.

  Prancing back, she smiled as she approached.

  That’s when Moss realized why she was so smug.

  The damn bitch had picked up both birds in one fetch.

  “Out.”

  She dropped the birds, then panted, still smiling.

  “Idiot,” he said, leaning over and inspecting the take. The two blue grouse were now mangled from the grip. After slipping them into his vest, he poked Georgia’s head with the butt of his gun and said, “Find ’em.”

  He’d have to go back to the training grounds with this one. Georgia seemed to have a stubborn streak in her, and Moss would have to break it.

  As she began to circle the field in a wide arc again, nose to the ground and tail back up in the air, Moss’s cell phone chirped twice.

  He dug it out of his chest pocket and checked the message. The texted code, Tempest O33, meant it was a secure packet sent from a European CIA-controlled satellite dubbed Oslo. It could have come from only one person, a man who, for all purposes, didn’t even exist.

  As Moss braced for the report, he couldn’t help but chuckle to himself. “Tempest” was a throwback to the mysterious NSA telephonic security acronym from the late sixties. It meant nothing in reality, just a middle finger to the competing intelligence group. Even more tickling to Moss, the satellite orbiting the Earth at seven thousand miles per hour had been designed and launched by the Central Intelligence Agency. In an internal test for “security robustness,” the CIA had challenged the NSA to hack in and listen. The NSA failed, of course, seven times. A fact that the president himself both admired and disliked.

  Too fucking bad. When the CIA needed privacy, it got it. Period.

  Moss entered his own corresponding code and waited. Two minutes on the dot, and the phone chirped again.

  He said, “Should I be worried?”

  “You’ve seen the news, I assume.” Edgar sounded weary for once.

  “This isn’t North Korea. Of course I have.”

  Edgar didn’t answer.

  Moss pinched his nose. “I wish you had neutralized the blast first.”

  “How long has it been since you were in the field?”

  Moss looked at the long stretch of icy brush before him, Georgia still working her concentric circles, and contemplated a sly response, but instead said, “What’s your point?”

  “Things happen.”

  “Define things.”

  A long pause, then Edgar said, “I was made.”

  Moss sputtered, “By whom?”

  “I think you damned well know, Bill.”

  Moss didn’t have to answer to Edgar. Hell, he didn’t have to answer to anyone short of the president himself. Edgar had been in the cold for the better part of the last two decades, and he would stay there for the next two, as far as Moss was concerned.

  “Never mind that. Did you get it?”

  “Of course.”

  Moss dug a toe of his boot into the frozen turf. “And?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  Moss stopped. “Tell me.”

  “Not on these damn megaphones.”

  A drop of sweat trickled down his forehead. Moss calmed himself. He knew all along it’d be like this with Edgar Winter. Moss had been a fool to accept carrying the torch of this fantasy operation. He should have cut Edgar loose the moment he’d gotten him. He said, “Then dead drop it.”

  “Not acceptable,” Edgar said. “And I’ll need to go black for a bit.”

  “I’ll cut you off!”

  “One more thing,” Edgar said, unfazed by the threat. “The Brits know about the account.”

  Moss closed his eyes as the words sank in. He had the sense he would remember this moment for the entirety of his life. The day his world had begun to unravel. Playing dumb, he said, “What account?”

  A chuckle from the other end. The bastard was taunting him. “Zoran Draganic’s. My intelligence says he’s known in the money-laundering world as the Serbian Whale.”

  The back of his throat beginning to burn, Moss was unable to respond before Edgar said, “I’ll be in touch,” then hung up.

  Dammit.

  Moss squeezed the phone until he heard a crack. He’d put Alex Winter there for one damned reason and one only. Hell, he’d had her trained for this mission from her first goddamned day at The Farm. With Talonstrike, she should have been prepped for anything that went wrong. And as for Edgar, well, he had less of a conscience than Moss had even figured. The man should have locked up with a coronary when his own daughter appeared in the middle of a mission. As his opposition.

  Instead, it sounded like the bastard was enjoying himself.

  If you want something done…

  Staring far into the horizon, where the sun played with the clouds, he saw Georgia’s silhouette. She had stiffened again.

  Fuck it, Moss said to himself, fetching two more shells and jamming them into the chambers.

  Looks like I’ll have to dig out my old legends one last time.

  Chester, UK

  Four hours west of London

  Zoran Draganic dug the heel of a boot into the horse and swatted him across the nape again. The creature named Alabaster snorted and turned hard on the near-frozen turf. So hard that Draganic was taken off the line and he missed the ball with his mallet.

  Again.

  Draganic turned back around the goal and entered the play in full view of the stadium. Chester Racecourse was about four hours west of London, and Draganic understood why the English trekked all the way to it, even for a private polo match. Rich green grass stretched to the white grandstands and red stone walls. A placard stated it was established in 1539 making it older than most countries.

  He kicked Alabaster and crossed back over the line of the ball, a clear violation of gentlemen’s rules, but Draganic was no gentleman. Without an umpire present, it was a self-policing match, and since there was no real harm, there was no real foul, in Draganic’s mind.

  He raced back up to the ball, bumping the youngest of his opponents’ thighs with one of his own. Being larger than the boy, Draganic almost knocked over him and his horse.

  But the aspiring duke showed some spine and elbowed Draganic, causing him to lean too far and lose control
. Alabaster pulled up and turned on him.

  Then the boy gained the line alone and smacked the ball right into the goal.

  Just as Alabaster dumped a pile of shit on the field.

  The three opponents’ wives—the lone attendees—cheered with loud claps and calls of the soon-to-be-duke’s name.

  Draganic was tempted to pull out his Katran knife and slit the animal’s neck right there, let him bleed out on the pitch. Designed for Russian Navy combat divers and therefore nicknamed the Black Sea Shark, the Katran was long, thick, and constructed of carbon steel. The blade could slice right through the animal’s spine.

  Lucky for Alabaster, Dragonic was too determined to score by the end of this chukker, the last period of the match.

  Draganic figured the Brits had fed the horse double to spite him, the lone Eastern European of the group. Financial envy ran deep in England, and it wouldn’t surprise him in the least. Though his teammates weren’t envious, they were just interested. Former bankers for Draganic, they had gotten word that he’d come into another sum of cash.

  Of course they’d see none of it this time.

  In his own little fuck you to the shameless trolls, Draganic showed up in a bright orange checkered shirt and lime green helmet; it must have embarrassed them to the limit. As usual, the lot of them looked like they’d been painted with the British boring brush—all khaki and brown.

  As Draganic made his way back to his teammates, his cell phone rang.

  All three of the men stopped their horses as Draganic fished the phone from his jacket and checked the caller. It was Pachai Randeep. A call he would take.

  Draganic could hear the groans and whispers that included “uncivilized” and “Croat,” as he turned the horse and trotted off to talk with some privacy.

  Annoyed, Draganic used Pachai’s despised nickname as he answered. “Poshdeep,” he said, “you make me wait for your call.”

  After a pause, Randeep said, “I am sorry, Zoran. I was working on the model.”

  Draganic kept trotting away until he was near the edge of the racetrack. Then he unstrapped his helmet and flipped it off to hear better. The wives must have caught sight of his scarred neck because one of them gasped, and he could hear her even at this distance. His beard did little to hide the roped skin. Ignoring the reaction, Draganic said, “Always you are with these computers. This is why you never married.”