Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  OMG two whole weeks vacay in the Med! Gonna soak up some sun Corfu style! Thanks Grams you rock LOL!!!!!

  Diana had told Lily that sharing your travel plans on a social networking site was tantamount to stenciling PLEASE ROB THIS HOUSE WHILE I’M GONE on your front door, so Lily deleted the status, but now Diana was grateful for her friend’s indiscretion. As of tonight Lily still had ten days to soak up her Corfu sun, and now Diana unlocked the gate to the front door and closed it behind her. Lily had given Diana a key when Lily was given the town house in the Marina District for graduating from Oregon (Lily finishing college had never been a Sure Thing) because Lily needed plants watered during her frequent Grams-funded holidays. Diana hadn’t thought of staying here earlier, simply because she didn’t want to get Lily involved. But it had all gotten much, much more dangerous, and she needed a shelter beyond the backseat of her mother’s car—an old, classic BMW that lacked GPS, which she was driving as it couldn’t be tracked—or a cheap motel room south of the city, which had been her previous night’s bed.

  She let herself in. Her heart jumped into her throat at the warning buzz of an alarm, and for a moment her mind went blank as to the correct code. She scurried toward the soft glow of the pad, studied the keyboard, remembered. She keyed in L-I-L-Y. The alarm went silent, the red light switching to green.

  Diana nearly doubled over in relief. The air tasted a bit warm and stale. She listened to the silence; it was as welcoming as a blanket on a cold night.

  If they knew she and Lily were friends…but they’d have no way to know that she was here. Maybe they could identify her friends, but even if they drove by—her mother’s car was parked four blocks away. Could they guess she was here?

  But she had no place else to go.

  She went into the kitchen, dropped her purse on the floor. She felt exhausted. She didn’t turn on a light. In the refrigerator she found orange juice, and she drank a glass, happy to feel the cool sting against her throat. Lily had a little flat-screen TV on the counter. Diana remembered the two of them trying to cook along with a Food Network show, a complete disaster; they’d laughed so hard, sipping wine—that seemed a thousand years ago. She turned on the television, finding the all-local news channel. She wanted to know what the police were saying. The news feed was talking about the weather. She huddled against the cabinets on the floor and drank her juice and closed her eyes.

  She’d been running for one day and it felt like forever. It was not like how it was in those innocent-person-on-the-run movies. No. Not at all. It was frightening and mind-numbing and she constantly felt like she was going to vomit.

  And her mother was gone and not returning her calls. Holistic retreat, right.

  Her mom’s whole life had been a lie. A lie of proportions so gigantic it made her bones hurt to think about it. She didn’t even know her mother and now maybe she shouldn’t even try. Her mother was a stranger. A liar.

  I did it all for you, baby, she’d said on the video. Please understand. It made everything so much…easier. I wanted you to have a better life. And he offered this to me. If I did things for him. To help him, and it helped us.

  And now she’d vanished on purpose, and these people were trying to find Diana. Either her own mother had told them that she’d called about what she’d found, or…they had bugged her phone. Or bugged her mother’s phone. Diana left increasingly panicked voice mails for her mother, and that’s when the two men began to show up at the Keene Global office, at her condo, at the places where she hung out. And finally showing up at The Select. They knew about her mother’s life. Maybe they’d killed Mom for telling about them in the video.

  You will think I did bad things. But I did them for good reasons. Every advantage you have had is because I made this choice. You need not fear him, Diana. The man in charge—his name is John Belias—he has made our wonderful lives possible. He can help you, too. I want you to have as easy a road as I did. Don’t judge me, and remember, I did it all for you, all for you.

  All for you? Why would her mother do this to her? Sure, parents sacrificed for their kids. But didn’t they work so they had a nice life as well? She was grateful to her mother, but…not for this. Not for living a lie.

  She opened her eyes as a car commercial ended and the newscaster said, “Violence erupted at a bar in the Haight this evening, claiming one life.” Diana crept close to the TV, crawling across the kitchen floor. One man dead, killed by a bar employee during an attempted robbery of another customer. Is that what people thought this was? She’d said, Help me, to the bartender—because Mom’s friend Felix was nowhere to be seen and Felix was over forty, you know, old. There was something about the young bartender—he was cute, but beyond the nice face he had a…solidity about him. He was in a suit so he looked like he was in charge. Intelligence and power together. He just looked like the kind of guy who could and would help. This had gone through her mind in two seconds, because she’d sensed from most people those invisible shields that say, Don’t ask me for help; I don’t want to get involved, this is not my problem. It was an awareness that had come into her head the moment she needed help. She knew most people were good. But if she asked for help, people would want to know why, and if she said why, her mother would go to prison.

  She listened to the news reporter and it didn’t sound like the bartender had been arrested; it sounded like self-defense. The dead man had not been identified. Witnesses said both the woman who was the alleged target (to Diana the word felt like a prod in her spine every time the reporter used it) and the second alleged attacker had escaped.

  Escaped? That meant he was still out there, looking for her.

  So now what would they do? She’d gotten one of her pursuers killed. These people owned her mother, and if she could never find Mom again—a possibility that kept creeping around her brain and she kept shoving away—then what? She couldn’t run much farther. She could hide here at Lily’s, and if the neighbors asked, she was house-sitting; they knew she was Lily’s friend. But then Lily would be home, in the bubble of her perfect life, in ten days and then what would she do? Where would she go?

  She couldn’t join this…little private Mafia Mom was part of. No, not an option. She wasn’t going to sell her soul like her mother had.

  Maybe she should go to the police. Explain. Show them the video.

  And watch them arrest her mother.

  Then the solution hit her. She could edit the video. Mom’s confession meant only for her eyes after Mom’s passing. Lily had a nice computer, the latest Apple laptop, because she remembered Lily didn’t know squat about buying a computer and she’d gone along to help her pick out a model. Lily had pointed to the most expensive one and said, Ooh, that one. Of course.

  Take out the parts where Mom confessed to doing such terrible crimes, all in the interest of giving Diana a perfect life. Where she explained to Diana that the man who had made her life simpler and easier would perform the same miracle for Diana now. Just leave in the parts about the bad guys, make it sound like Mom had found out about them but wasn’t part of them. She played the video in her head; maybe it would work. At least it would give her another option. If someone questioned the herky-jerky nature of the video—well, they could probably tell the digital file had been edited. That was a worry for later. She’d think of an explanation.

  This could be her weapon, a way to fight back, to get them to leave her alone…

  She dug in the purse.

  Her mother’s silver lipstick case wasn’t there.

  No.

  She emptied the purse. The small gun Mom usually kept in the BMW’s glove compartment, supposedly for protection. Diana’s own cell phone, turned off in case they were tracking her. Her own lipstick. Her wallet with its thinning amount of money. Her compact red notebook. Old ticket stubs to a movie from last week.

  But not the silver lipstick case.

  No. She turned the purse inside out, inspected the pockets. It wasn’t there. She hurried back to h
er car. She searched the seats, the floor, her breath growing raspy. It wasn’t there. The ragged hole the bullet had torn in the purse…the lipstick case must have fallen out as she fled the bar.

  She nearly cried. What if the police had found it? It would be all over the news.

  Diana replayed the scene in her head. The bar had turned into a battlefield. What if…it was still there? In the mess. In her mind’s eye she’d seen people running, leaving behind coats and purses and cell phones left beside their beers…Gunfire tended to prompt a stampede. She hadn’t made a copy of the video—to her it was like copying a nuclear bomb, or scanning and saving a murder confession. No, she didn’t know a great deal about computers; she used them at work and to surf the Web, like everyone else. How could she be sure people who could hack her phone, listen to her mother’s phone messages and delete them—how could she be sure any copy she made on any computer she could easily access was safe from her pursuers or from an accidental discovery?

  And how exactly was she going to get back into The Select? She would hardly be welcome. Mom’s friend Felix hadn’t been there, but would he realize she was the young woman in trouble? He could call the police. The bar would surely be closed for a couple of days. It was just a lipstick case on the outside. What if it got thrown away? Then it might be in the trash bin. Just waiting for her.

  She put her face in her hands, torn with indecision. She had to have the video. She had to have it, because if anyone else had it, then Mom was done. Going to jail and maybe dying there instead of being someplace where they could cure her.

  Maybe the young bartender and Felix would help her.

  Or maybe they’d call the cops the moment they laid eyes on her.

  The bartender had killed the big man. He probably wasn’t going to thank her for putting that burden on his heart. Did bars have security cameras? With a shiver, she realized they must. Would the police put up film of her on TV now? Her friends, who would start to wonder where she was—no social networking updates, no calling anyone, no e-mails, and phoning in sick at work—they would see her. Had the camera caught her face clearly enough to recognize? She shared every detail of her life online, but no, she didn’t want this known. That her mother, her idol, her shining example was a Bad Person. A criminal.

  She had to get back inside that bar. She started to think it through and the exhaustion crept into her brain, and she knew she needed sleep. She needed a plan. To simply show up there would never work.

  She crawled into Lily’s bed and she pulled the covers over her head. She wondered if the bartender was managing to sleep, and she wished she could tell him she was sorry. And she wished she could tell him thank you. He was her ray of hope after her bank accounts had been locked, her e-mails hacked, her GPS in her beloved Jaguar a beacon for them to find her. She was running, and she was running out of time. Her last thought before welcome, merciful sleep took her, heavy and hard, was Mom, where are you and what are you doing?

  15

  Friday, November 5, morning

  One hundred miles east of Portland, Oregon

  THE BEST-SELLING BOOKS had paid for the quiet, big house in the woods, for the horse idling in the sunshine, for the privacy. Janice Keene parked the rental car a half mile away, in the heavy, thick shade of the pines, and started to hike through the woods. She kept the backpack squarely on her shoulders.

  She’d worn jeans, boots with the imprints sanded so any lifted prints would confuse the brand identification by the forensics people, and a heavy shirt and sleeveless vest. The backpack carried the eyedropper bottle of poison, her suppressor-capped Glock, a bottle of water. She kept the water bottle in a separate compartment in the backpack; she didn’t want it near the poison.

  The best-selling books. Janice had read them all. She could see the woman’s house now, nestled in a curve of creek, sentinel pines standing tall. The air felt fresh and cool against her skin. Diana would like a walk in these woods, she thought, as long as she had her designer pants and her fancy boots and a cute guy and a hot latte at the end of the hike.

  Janice shoved Diana out of her thoughts; there was no room for her daughter in her brain right now. She stopped a quarter mile away from the house. She felt winded and sick. When she got home, she’d have to rest more. She could feel the snake of the cancer in her, she imagined, twining around muscles and nerves and bones, settling into its dark roost. Two serpents in her life: Belias and this cancer. She leaned against rough bark.

  The stone house, a thin curl of smoke rising from its chimney. The house that truth built, Barbara Scott had claimed in a cover interview in Vanity Fair.

  Janice headed down the hill toward the house.

  There were no visitors as of late yesterday evening, no one else living at the house. She’d watched the famous author entertaining a pair of old college friends for the past two days, hoping they’d be gone by the weekend. But now Barbara Scott was alone. She’d even seen the woman come out a half hour ago in the dark of the predawn, tend to the horse, walk it for exercise, her lips moving through the lenses of Janice’s binoculars, either chatting to herself or to her horse.

  Barbara Scott was one of those authors who looked exactly like their photos on the book jackets or in the electronic end pages: long black hair, a narrow face, toffee-brown eyes. She looked taller than Janice; she wore a plaid shirt, untucked, and faded jeans. On her book jackets she wore a suit that made her look intimidating, like she might fire you ten seconds after she hired you because you were already lagging. She’d written on her blog that she was behind schedule on her next book, and Janice thought an author running late on a book would probably tend to isolate herself so she could finish the project and get it to impatient editors.

  So she would be alone. That would make this so much easier. She wondered what the new book was about. She wondered if the new book was why Barbara Scott had come to Belias’s attention.

  She assumed there was an alarm system in the house. Probably, with a wealthy and somewhat famous woman living out here alone (she’d researched her target; Barbara Scott’s kids were grown, the husband long buried, and no steady boyfriend in the picture).

  She reached the porch. She’d come in on the south side of the house, as Barbara Scott had posted pictures on her blog of her view from her writing office, and Janice therefore knew it was on the north side of the house. Amazing what little details people shared with the world, without ever realizing their importance.

  She stepped onto the porch. She moved to the front door, and the wind rose and a rocking chair, caught in the gust, creaked. Janice felt her heart jump into her mouth.

  This never got easier. Never. Do it for Diana. Do it for a good life for your child.

  She tried the door. Locked. She knelt and she slipped two lockpicks into the knob. Forty seconds later the lock gave. Then she worked on the dead bolt’s lock, adding a long hook to the picking arsenal. Three more minutes and she heard the bolt slide back into its unlocked position.

  Deep breath. Her hand closed on the gun’s grip. She would only use the gun if forced. She needed to make it look like natural causes; the poison would take care of that. She didn’t know where Barbara Scott was in the house, and she didn’t know if she was armed. Surely, with the enemies the woman had made in her writing career, she was prepared for trouble. Janice had heard of crime fiction authors who kept guns in their offices. Always best to assume the worst.

  She opened the door, she slipped inside. No pinging noise of an alarm system, but she could see a system’s keypad. So Barbara Scott didn’t keep it activated when she was home.

  The entrance foyer had a rich hardwood floor. The left side opened into a large den, with a stunning river rock fireplace, walls lined with bookshelves, the shelves full of hardbacks. Their even rows were broken by photographs: Barbara Scott with her grown kids or with famous people. Not the ones she’d made her fortunes savaging, of course.

  Gun out and leveled, Janice stepped into the den. She heard nothin
g in the house, but she knew Barbara Scott was here. The car was still in the parkway, a grand red Suburban.

  The photos of Barbara Scott with movie stars, with senators, with leaders of industry. They all looked slightly frightened, their smiles forced, as if hoping Barbara Scott wasn’t going to turn the force of her pen against them. Like having a photo with her was a totem of protection.

  Janice thought, There’s only one protection in this world, and his name’s Belias.

  She stopped, listened. She could still hear the calm whisper of the wind; windows were open somewhere. It was a clear and pleasant morning and no reason not to let in the fresh air.

  But she didn’t hear Barbara Scott.

  Silently, on her sanded boots, she moved through the den, into a small hallway that led to a guest room, empty, and then to a kitchen. The kitchen was large, granite countertops, a high-end steel refrigerator. Remains of breakfast in the sink. A coffeemaker, with the warming light lit red, the pot empty and cooling on the counter. Next to it a saucer filled with torn pink packets of artificial sweetener, a stained spoon, little dried puddles of coffee. Looked like the coffee setup of a writer blasting toward a deadline.

  The view out the kitchen window was very similar to the view Barbara Scott posted on her blog of the inspiring view from her office. Janice glanced upward toward the ceiling. She almost imagined she could hear fingers striking a keyboard, the clicking march of words appearing on a screen.

  She turned and she went up the stairs. The stairs were steep; a fall down them would be a suitable accident. If not, then the poison. If there was still coffee in the pot, she could have dosed it and hid in the house and waited for the woman to drink the fatal cup. She had to be sure the job was done. You did not fail Belias, since he did not fail you.

  On the staircase were framed jackets, blown up, of Barbara Scott’s brutal best sellers. The Unmaking of a President, the book that had elevated her from an academic at a small liberal arts college and rocketed her into the national spotlight. The Hollow Men, her incisive follow-up that dissected the incompetency of three American business leaders, leading to their downfall. Unkind, her correctly titled exposé of the country’s foremost tabloid publisher and online gossip site owner, who had to face his own mortifying embarrassments when Barbara Scott was through with him. And more. Six books in eight years—all lauded, all huge best sellers, all using research and dirt that went far deeper than what most writers could manage.