“Wow. He’s kind of a legend around the Bureau. No one I know has ever met him, though.”
“A legend in a good way or a bad way?”
“Good way. I don’t know much about his company, but Thorne was the best analyzer of intelligence anyone has ever known. All this stuff that’s happening now, the terrorism, attacks on the U.S., he saw it coming. What’s he like?”
“Commanding. Listen, I’ll do what I can to help you, but things are very complicated.”
He hooked an index finger over the inside curve at six o’clock position on the steering wheel. “Can you say where the money is?”
I had to think about that. I assumed Kraft had it, but I didn’t know for sure. I also didn’t want to give Kraft up to the FBI, even if we were off the record…if that’s what we were. After making such an issue out of protecting Lyle, I owed him that much. “I’m not sure where it is. I’m working on that.”
Ling was smart. He knew I was lying, but I was determined not to feel guilty about it.
“All right.” He straightened up, did as much of a stretch as the car would allow, and yawned. He put his cup back in the holder. He had downed two strong cups of Dunkin’ Donuts brew, and he still looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed. “I have no leverage over you,” he said. “I probably never did. But if you have his money, then you have leverage over Drazen, probably more than you know. All I’m asking you to do is to use it to help me get Drazen. He’s a bad man. I think you know that.”
He didn’t wait for an answer before firing up the engine.
“Is that it?”
He put on his shades and turned to face me. With his dark glasses on, it was hard to read his expression. “I don’t want you talking to anyone at Blackthorne again without letting me know, even if it’s the man himself.”
“Why not?”
“Because if they’re working for the CIA, they could be playing you, and I’m not getting this close to Drazen just to have the goddamn Agency run in again and take my score.”
“I see nine-eleven has done a lot to bring you guys together.”
“Not really.”
Ling dropped me off at my place. My running clothes were just sweaty enough to have to wash, which didn’t seem fair given how far I hadn’t run. I tossed them into the hamper, showered, and was getting into jeans when my cell phone rang. I followed the sound to my backpack and dug it out.
“Hello?”
“You are one lying, scheming bitch.” Nothing like a friendly greeting from Max Kraft first thing in the morning.
“I guess you got my message. It’s good to hear that you made it out of France.”
“From what I hear, so did you. On the Blackthorne private jet.” This wasn’t how I’d envisioned our conversation starting off. It seemed he had spies of his own. “That whole thing in Paris where you pretended to save my life, what was that? A way to gain my trust?”
“Yeah. Also getting arrested and thrown in jail. Look, you’re the one who dragged me into the Blackthorne portion of the program. I had my own problems to deal with, and now, because of you, I have to deal with Cyrus Thorne, and I have to deal with him because he has a copy of the video, the one you promised I had the only copy of.”
“You asked for the video, I gave it to you. If you let it get away, that’s your problem.”
“I didn’t let it get away. He got it from your translator. He knows you and I have talked, and he’s willing to trade it back if I set you up. If I don’t, I’m pretty sure he’ll give it to Drazen. For a whole lot of reasons too tedious to go into, I can’t have that.”
“Is that—is that what this is?” He certainly wasn’t in Paris anymore, but that’s where I pictured Kraft, in his hotel on the Left Bank, peering out from behind closed curtains. That was what his voice sounded like. “Are they listening now? Are you setting me up right now?”
“I didn’t call to set you up. I called to talk about a way I think we can all get through this, but you have to help.”
“I’ll help you. Sure. Why wouldn’t I? You’re working for the organization that wants me dead. Do you even hear yourself? What do you take me for?”
“It costs you nothing to listen.”
“Unless Cyrus Thorne has someone triangulating the signal.” I heard the sound of him sucking on a bottle and wondered if he was having beer for breakfast. Then I realized I had no idea if it was breakfast time where he was. He didn’t hang up, so I forged ahead.
“We were right about Roger’s computer—Roger’s other computer, the one that belonged to Vladi. Rachel stole it. Roger took it from her because he knew there were files on it worth a billion dollars. The files are like a…” What was the term Ling had used? “A financial map. Directions to the money.” I waited for some sign that he was there. Talking on the phone to Kraft was a lot like talking to him over the Internet. He gave nothing away. “Grunt if you’re still alive.”
“You’re saying there really is a billion dollars that has just been sitting out there for four years because, what…the account numbers have been lost? I thought that story was bullshit when you told me. You’re saying it’s true?”
“The moral of the story is, always back up your files. Do you have the Dell or not?”
“What if I do? What would a billion dollars buy me?”
“Your life, for one thing. I might be able to swing it so that Drazen forgets about who killed Vladi in exchange for his money. That way, the video means nothing, and Thorne loses his leverage, and I don’t have to do what he says, and you can go on doing whatever it is you do.”
Measured pauses were not part of his speech pattern, so when I heard one, it felt significant. I knew the wheels were turning. “Let’s just say for the hell of it that I have a Dell. We can’t really know if it’s the right one—”
“We can if you open it up and find a game of Russian Solitaire on it.”
“Let me finish. The reason these laptops have value to me is not because John or Joe or Mary’s four-year-old grocery list is still on it.”
“A billion dollars that will save someone’s life is not a grocery list.”
“That’s not my point. It’s because they were taken to Afghanistan and used by the Martyr’s Brigade for years after the hijacking.”
“So?”
“So there are hundreds of e-mails on those machines, and those e-mails are the foundation of my story. There is no way I’m giving this stuff up to you.”
“I thought your story was on Blackthorne. Why would e-mails from the Martyrs be important?”
“If you knew that, you would have my story.”
“I’m not trying to steal your story, Max. I’m trying to help you with it and I have a proposal.”
“What?”
“You give me Vladi’s Dell, and I’ll give you the name of my Blackthorne source.”
There was another long silence. “I’ll think about it.” Click.
I sat for a long time with the phone in my hand, trying to figure out what to do. The good news was that he had the Dell. At least a Dell. The bad news was that Lyle Burquart had made it clear he never wanted to see me again, and I had made him that promise. But it had been just as clear to me that the Salanna 809 survivors did not want Max Kraft to have their contact data. I had given it to him anyway. Why had I done that? I went into the bathroom and thought about it while I brushed my teeth. While I was flossing, I figured it out. It was because of what was at stake. The Salanna 809 survivors were trying to protect their privacy. I was trying to save Rachel’s life. There had been too much at stake not to have used the manifest to get the video, just as there was too much at stake not to at least ask Lyle if he would speak to Kraft. It sounded as if Kraft and he were both after the same thing anyway. Besides, what was one more betrayal?
26
THE SAME RECEPTIONIST WAS AT HER DESK AT THE WBRS radio station, thumbing through what could very well have been the same magazine. When she saw me coming, she opened a desk drawer and
reached down into it with both hands. She came out with a goldenrod envelope. She hefted it up and offered it across the desk to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s from Lyle. He said you’d be back.”
She gave me a look of complete disdain, as though letting Lyle down meant letting her down, too.
“Thanks.” I took it from her. It was heavy. “Is he back there?”
“He’s gone.”
The finality in her tone suggested that she didn’t mean he had gone out for lunch. “Is he coming back?”
“No.”
“Why not? What happened?”
With both hands flat on the desk, she leaned forward and looked up at me. “He left the day you came here and never came back to work.”
The envelope in my hand suddenly seemed to have more heft to it. “Is he all right? Has anyone spoken to him?”
“He called in. He said everything was fine and thanks and all that, but he wouldn’t be back and not to look for him. He told us to donate his last check to the Jimmy Fund. He said he was leaving for good.” She went back to her magazine.
I thought back to what he’d said in the control room about being fucked, about having some decisions to make. Apparently, he had made them, but I still had to wonder what would prompt a man to quit his job and uproot his family that way.
“He didn’t leave any—”
“Forwarding information? No. He left that.” She nodded to the envelope. I had the sense from her reaction that she had somehow been bruised by Lyle’s departure.
“Were you friends?”
She had never taken her eyes from her magazine. “Good enough friends that I would never have expected him to leave town without so much as a goodbye.” She turned the page but must have decided that more needed to be said.
“I hope you’re happy with yourself. I hope it doesn’t bother you that just when he was getting settled and things were getting back to normal, you came along and stirred it all up again.”
I could tell she was one of those people who liked delivering bad news. It was right there on her face, and it made me uneasy. “Stirred up what?”
“His oldest son was run over by a truck and killed while his little brother watched.
I took a step back from the desk.
“That’s why Lyle left the paper to come here. He wanted to spend more time with Jeff. I guess now he’ll be out looking for another job, thanks to you.”
“Did they…was it an accident?”
“Hit and run. Never caught them.”
I took another step back. It felt as if she’d just splashed acid in my face.
“He said to be careful with that.”
“What?”
She nodded at the envelope that I was now hugging to my chest.
“And good luck.” She turned the page to a new article. “He said be careful and good luck.”
I sat in the car with the overstuffed envelope in my lap and both hands on the wheel, thinking about what she’d said and what it meant. I felt like one of those patients who wakes up in the middle of surgery—in pain and completely helpless. I tried breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, but I couldn’t catch my breath.
It was one thing to threaten an adult. Adults chose paths that sometimes went to scary places. But kids don’t make those choices. A kid never had anything to do with anything. The thought that Lyle’s son, trusting and vulnerable and feeling safe in his world, could have been run down and killed just for being his father’s son hurt beyond words and made me want to kill someone.
Good luck, and be careful. That was Lyle’s message. That was part of Lyle’s message. The rest of it was in the envelope. I had to dig in to know the rest, but I had the strongest feeling that if I did, something bad would happen to me, too. I was certain of it. I brushed my fingers across the outside. It was soft and worn and well used. He had traded his job and his family’s life in Boston for me to have it. Perhaps not by choice, but that’s how it had turned out. I had to look inside.
I slipped my fingers in and pulled out a couple of pages. They looked to be the middle pages in the draft of a story. I pulled out a few more and found the beginning of the article. It was called “The Private War of Cyrus Thorne.” With fewer pages stuffed inside, the envelope had a little more give. I looked down and spotted a tiny cassette tape. I pulled it out, and a second came tumbling behind it. There was nothing on the labels except “1” and “2.” I had no way to play microcassettes in the car and a suddenly burning desire to hear them right away, so I started up the engine and drove to a nearby Staples. I bought the cheapest microcassette player I could. I bought batteries. I went back to the car, assembled everything, and popped in tape number one. I didn’t even bother to rewind.
“—believe it was Pan Am 103?” That was Lyle’s voice, and I was immediately drawn in. Why was he talking about Lockerbie?
“Without question, it was Pan Am 103.” That was a voice I didn’t recognize. “There was a CIA team on that flight. Five agents, including McKee. One of the best I ever knew got blown out of the sky that day, and that was the beginning of the end of it for Cyrus. He hung in with the agency a few more years, but he never got over what happened with Pan Am.”
Best I ever knew. Was he CIA? The voice was not deep yet had plenty of gravity. There was a bulldog quality about the way he powered forward, but strategic pauses insinuated a wry sense of humor, even if he didn’t give it voice. I started glancing over the article as I listened.
“What happened?” Lyle asked.
“Cy was part of a team that investigated the incident. He came to believe 103 was targeted because McKee and his people were onboard.”
“Why?”
“They had found out about a Syrian drug trafficker. He was swapping information for protection with the DEA and another CIA team in Germany. They were allowing him to bring drugs into the States. McKee found out. He thought it was bullshit. The Syrian heard, probably from other agents, that McKee was about to blow the whistle on his sweet deal. He blew up McKee instead.”
“You’re saying that, indirectly, the CIA and the DEA were responsible for Pan Am 103?”
“That’s what Cyrus thought. To him, those agents were heroes, betrayed by their country, swept aside in some high-level cover-up. It drove him nuts. Then he got into counterterrorism, and that was the last straw.”
“Any particular incident?”
“Everything taken together. He was one of the first to see the threat of the radical Muslims. He understood the socioeconomic drivers in third world countries, and he thought you could apply the domino theory to Muslim nations.”
“Domino theory? Like LBJ’s excuse for escalating Vietnam?”
“Exactly. But in Cy’s nightmare, the first thing that happens is Pakistan falls to extremists. Then the princes in Saudi Arabia lose control, and the House of Saud falls. Osama comes out of the caves to lead his people. He has Saudi oil, and he has the bomb, and now the dominoes start to fall. Indonesia, the largest Muslim population in the world, the Philippines, Turkey, Syria, Somalia, and other African Muslim nations. Afghanistan goes back to the Taliban. The Palestinians get the muscle they need to plow Israel under. The ayatollahs in Iran are already developing their own bomb, and who the hell knows what Saddam really has in his backyard?”
I had to keep reminding myself that this was an old recording. It just made me realize how much the world had changed in a relatively short time.
“In Cy’s world, what you end up with is a radical Islamic alliance with nuclear weapons lined up against Western nations with nuclear weapons.”
“Armageddon.”
“Yes, because, unlike the Soviets, religious jihadists are not afraid to die. There is nothing keeping their fingers off the buttons. Mass mutual destruction becomes a real possibility.”
“But LBJ’s theory never proved out.” That was Lyle, arguing on behalf of sanity. “We pulled out of Vietnam, and the balance of power never s
hifted.”
“True believers are not swayed by facts or historical precedents, and Cyrus is a true believer. He always was. Always will be. The more he learned about the threat, the louder he yelled. The louder he yelled, the more the powers that be wanted to shut him down. Eventually, they pushed him out.”
“Then he didn’t resign from the CIA.” Lyle’s tone suggested he’d suspected as much all along.
“That’s why he started the business. He needed to regain control. Cyrus is big on control, and he had no problem finding fellow travelers to go with him. We had military officers, intelligence officers, special-ops types, force protection, people from some of these other security companies.”
“Is that why you did it?”
“I was tired of the military. Cy was my best friend and my mentor, and I wanted to make some money.”
I reached over and paused the tape, because a light had gone on in my brain, and I needed to look at what it was showing me. The voice on this tape was Tony Blackmon’s. It was a tape of Lyle interviewing Cyrus’s dead partner, the man who had started Blackthorne with him. The man who had probably known him best. Whatever he said had instant credibility, and what he’d said on this tape must have been what Thorne was so intent on keeping a secret. He had killed Lyle’s son to keep it that way. Now he wanted to kill Kraft.
I pressed play. Blackmon continued.
“For a long time, it was just about getting the company up and running, but once we got going, for Cy it became all about the ideology. Everything that happened in the escalating pattern of violence and aggression—Khobar Towers, the Cole, the embassies in Africa—he took each one as evidence that the country was defended by morons, and if he, Cyrus Thorne, didn’t do something, we were going to have the big fireball.”
“Nuclear attack?”
“Right. It’s the Thorne Mushroom-Cloud Defense. He can justify any behavior at all by invoking the image of that mushroom rising up over Washington or Manhattan. It’s handy, because there’s hardly anything Americans wouldn’t do to stop that from happening.”
I put the article and everything else aside to give my full attention to the tape.
The Pandora Key Page 21