Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  “Ah, Sam. I am sorry.” And she sounded it. That was Mila. Tough as nails until you didn’t want her to be.

  “I’ll call you later.”

  “All right, Sam.” She put the phone down, and I could hear before she clicked off, her starting to say, “Darling, he said that…” and then silence.

  Darling? It felt strange to picture Mila romantically involved with Jimmy; I’d always assumed their relationship was strictly professional. Actually, it felt weird to picture Mila with anyone. She didn’t seem the relationship type at all. More a loner, like me, because we’d lost too much in life at too young an age.

  I ignored the ringing bar phone.

  Felix came up the stairs, having arrived already and fought the press gauntlet. He thoughtfully had a tray of breakfast food—eggs, toast, and coffee.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “You’re here early,”

  “I sleep like a gnat,” he said. “Sleep for one day, and then they’re up for a week. Sleeping Gnat would be a good rock band name.” Felix tried a smile, putting on a brave face in the aftermath of the night’s events.

  “I have a feeling I’m going to have the sleeping habits of a gnat this week.” I ate and turned on the television to a local station, and five minutes in they went to the reporter standing across the street from The Select. The account so far was that two men had opened fire in an altercation involving a woman, one man had been knifed and killed by “Sam Capra, who is allegedly the owner of the bar.”

  Great. My name was out there now. The dead man was not identified pending notification of family. Harder to do when the family died the same night.

  The next story was that a body had been discovered in a home in Outer Richmond by police. Shot to death. A police statement said that the dead man at the home was connected to the dead man at The Select, but didn’t provide more details.

  Which made it a lot less likely my involvement in the story would suddenly be forgotten. I felt sick. Yesterday I was so happy that I was living the new life I’d earned, running the bars, my biggest worry being that I would have to spend time away from Daniel.

  Now this. If there was evidence of my presence at the Rostov house, I’d be arrested. I couldn’t let that happen. I’d have to vanish again, with Mila’s help, and live elsewhere under a new name. I’d lose my identity. The bars. It wasn’t what I wanted for my son.

  I finished breakfast while the news moved onto the wider world. The pundits remained in full pontificating bloom about who the president would select as a new vice president, that no candidate had yet been selected had tongues wagging. I knew I should pay attention, but I had weightier concerns on my mind. An earthquake off the coast of New Zealand, but no injuries, no tsunami. A fire at the house of a famous author near Portland, the author missing and feared dead in the flames. So rarely is there good news. I could use some.

  “So. What now?” Felix said.

  “I go see the lady who owns the Audi,” I said. “That’s my one thread to pull.” I crossed my arms. “I don’t want you here alone in case the man in black comes to play.”

  “I’ve been working for the Round Table longer than you have. There are reporters outside. Right now this is the safest place in the city. I won’t let in anyone I don’t know.”

  “Felix…”

  Felix crossed his arms. “Look, the Round Table saved my life. And Janice and her kid are clearly in serious trouble. Now you go find the Audi, and I’m going to see if I can track down information on Janice and her daughter and this Rostov guy.”

  I went out the back door. The plank Diana had used to strike the suburban dad was gone. The police had taken it, no doubt for evidence. I knew the forensics people could summon fingerprints off untreated wood with a chemical process. I didn’t know if her prints were anywhere on record, but if she was identified by the security tape, it meant I might not have much time to find her.

  The press wasn’t lingering around the back alley of the bar, so I walked to my rental car and tapped the rental’s GPS with the Tiburon address of Vivienne Duchamp, who owned the Audi I’d seen racing away, and studied the map. Felix had found nothing useful on any Vivienne Duchamp in San Francisco or Tiburon via online engines last night.

  I drove carefully, cutting back and forth in San Francisco’s labyrinth of streets, heading north toward the Golden Gate Bridge, making sure no one was following me. The poor confused voice from the GPS, that of a famous British comedian, kept announcing he was recalculating and telling me a new route until I’d decided no one was following me.

  I thought about Diana Keene. Wondering where the young woman was. She was pretty, now that I thought about it in the silence of the car, and she was brave to take on the gunman the way she did.

  I tried to enjoy the view as I went across the Golden Gate Bridge, because it’s incredible but the traffic is such that you don’t want to be distracted. I love the bridge. But I could not shake the instinct that I was driving straight into bad trouble.

  And yet I wanted to go. Risk it. Go back to my old life. When the Golden Gate Bridge was behind me, as the Redwood Highway began its climb into Marin, I felt like I’d truly passed through a gate that I couldn’t close.

  17

  Friday, November 5, morning

  I DROVE IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION of the commuter traffic toward Tiburon, the hills and trees a sudden shock from the packed citification of San Francisco proper, and the rental’s GPS informed me how to proceed.

  The hard truth I hadn’t said to Mila was I might need to give the police the man in black, not just to stop him but to save my future. If I was facing arrest, if I got physically tied to the Rostov house, then I needed leverage. The man in black was my only hope at the moment. If the police tied me to the murder there, I could argue that my CIA past made me afraid an old enemy had sent Rostov after me. And that was why I’d gone to his home. The problem would be convincing anyone that I was innocent of the Rostov brother’s death. And whether the CIA would back me—there was no guarantee.

  The GPS led me through Tiburon, a lovely small town with schools and a shopping center, a library, a police station that looked more like a home than a law enforcement hub. The cop cars here were Dodge Chargers. It’s good to know where the police station is when you’re contemplating breaking and entering. An actual Rolls-Royce went by me in the other lane.

  The houses started grand and kept getting grander as I followed the street’s labyrinthine turns and twists and climbed a hill. Ahead of me a Mercedes crept along and I tried not to crowd it; I didn’t want to be remembered. The cars parked along inlets of the road were high dollar. It felt like a slow drive up a tiered wedding cake, the road a spiral. Lots of people here, I figured, who had made their fortunes on the very real nonreality of the Internet. Or the banking or legal services required to make those on-fire companies function. At one house I saw a mom in a Volvo, backing out, a dad holding two well-scrubbed toddlers, waving good-bye for the day.

  American dreams. What I was supposed to have with Lucy and Daniel. This, or a more modest version of it, should have been my life. When me and my wife’s overseas tour of duty was done, we should have landed in a suburb—a Langley, an Alexandria—with the nice home and the quiet green lawn and tasteful flowers that stirred in the gentle breeze and the calm, resolute air of success and earned comfort. The cocoon woven to keep you safe. Now Lucy breathed because machines helped air push in and out of her lungs; wires were her wrapping. Now I was a single father to Daniel, and I sort of had Leonie, although we weren’t a couple and she was there solely because of her deep attachment to Daniel. Her attachment to me seemed a very uncertain thing. We didn’t have a suburban mansion; we had a small house with a pale red door and a porch, not too far from my New Orleans bar.

  This—the quiet, the calm, the comfort; wow, it made my chest hurt—could have been my life. Should have been. The life I was on track for when I was an unlikely undergrad at Harvard, before my brother Danny got slaughtered
on a terrorist’s video and I decided to join a secret group within the CIA.

  Because I was going to fix the world.

  I hadn’t. You might have noticed.

  The Mercedes ahead of me turned in at the address I wanted. Stone and iron fencing surrounded the house; a gate slid open for the sedan. I drove past as the gate closed. I couldn’t see the house except for a grand slate roof.

  I continued down the road, the British comedian’s voice chiding me that I had gone past my address. On the GPS I studied the curves and bulges of the surrounding streets. I traced my finger along the screen, looking for an access point—maybe the home behind the grand house that was the Vivienne Duchamp address. Then I switched off the system and the comedian’s lame joke about me missing my turn.

  I parked on the street the next over; a FOR SALE sign was mounted where you might normally see a DON’T PARK HERE sign. A risky but quick glance in the windows told me the house was empty of furniture and people. A heavy stone wall divided the property from the address for Vivienne Duchamp. The rocks looked plucked for their worn perfection from a riverbed. I vaulted over the wall and dropped onto the back driveway of the house.

  It was striking, lovely, two wings and a separate garage with a gray slate roof, charming with the look of a French Norman farmhouse. A range of toys lay scattered along the edge of the driveway, where the black Mercedes I’d followed stood parked. I never had many toys. Not complaining—my relief worker parents and I were often on the move every year, and toys were expensive to haul from Tanzania to Haiti to Suriname. My family kept it basic: trucks, little green soldiers, crayons, and sketchpads. My brother and I had to rely on our imaginations more than plastic. When we moved on to the next devastated region, my brother and I left our toys for the kids we’d left behind, who often had less than nothing. The kids at this house had toys to spare: bikes, balls, foam bullets scattered across the stones like a child’s battle had been waged and won. A soccer ball, caught by the breeze, rolled toward me and I stopped it with my foot.

  San Francisco’s not cheap. This house was worth millions.

  I thought, This has to be a stolen identity—why would a multimillionaire be the getaway driver for a hired thug? Who were these people? That kids were here made me uneasy; I’d have to be sure not to create a dangerous situation.

  I stayed out of the view of the windows as much as I could as I hurried to the edge of the garage. I tried the door. I went inside.

  In the garage was parked a silver Mercedes, a Range Rover. A sticker with a soccer ball with the name EMMA above it adorned the Rover’s back window; above it was another sticker for Blaircraft Academy. The third slot in the garage was empty. No sign of the Audi that I’d seen roaring away with the suburban dad in the night.

  I tried the door on the opposite side of the garage. It led to the back of the house, across a stone path and a large stone patio with a built-in grill and guarded with dozens of potted plants. A fountain quietly gurgled. It looked like an outdoor setting from an architectural magazine. I started thinking, I’ve made a huge mistake. But three years of undercover work with the CIA teaches you that things are often not as they seem.

  I carefully crept up to the windows on the patio. In the distance I could hear a television, the bright burble of a morning talk show.

  I leaned back from the window as a girl, around seven, walked into the large den, holding a bowl of cereal, screaming up at the stairs, “Peter Marchbanks please hurry up!”

  Marchbanks?

  I would be seen when they came out of the back of the house, presumably to drive to the Blaircraft Academy.

  “Mom? Nana? We have to leave in a minute!” I heard the girl bellow again.

  I heard a distant, indistinct answer.

  Emma—I presumed—vanished into what looked like a large kitchen. I heard feet against stone, and then a boy, a year or so younger than Emma, hurried across the room to the kitchen. He was dressed in a school uniform and making machine-gun noises.

  A noisy, argumentative breakfast was consumed. They talked, and I risked a hurried run across the patio (neither saw me) because kids say the most interesting things.

  Emma: Well, I don’t know why she’s here. She was crying. Maybe she and Dad are getting a divorce.

  Peter: Daddy will move home?

  Emma: Don’t get your hopes up. Why would Audrey cry to Mom?

  Peter (chewing): I cry to Mom.

  Emma: That is so different and don’t be dumb.

  Silence, I counted eight beats.

  Emma: So, maybe Mom and Dad will get back together.

  Silence, and I felt like I was eavesdropping on these children’s fondest wish. Not a proud moment.

  Peter: Or maybe Dad’s just being mean to Audrey.

  Emma: Dad’s not mean.

  (Peter chewing, making a noise of disagreement)

  Emma: Whatever. Nana! We’re ready.

  I heard the clang of a bowl hastily dropped into the steel sink. Then I heard another voice, a woman’s, older. Yelling toward another part of the house. “I’m going to bridge club and lunch with the ladies and then the grocery store after I drop the kids off, anything not on the list you want?”

  I could now see the older woman. Sixtyish. Trying to be stylish and trying too hard. The decor in the house was impeccable and the older woman was dressed in a look that didn’t match the elegance. Pink leggings, an oversized peacock-inspired tunic of sorts, gaudy earrings that hung past her shoulders. Nana looked like she’d be a lot of fun, frankly, as a grandmother, but she did not match the studied, cool formality of this house. If this house was money, Nana was a stranger in a strange land. Or she was a wealthy eccentric.

  And the kids answered, a litany of asking for certain breakfast cereals, chips, sodas, a red pepper hummus. What adventurous eaters.

  “Hummus, gag me. Go kiss your mom good-bye,” Nana instructed, and the two kids vanished toward the front of the house and were back within thirty seconds. They pulled backpacks onto their thin little shoulders.

  “What’s wrong with Audrey and Mom?” I heard Peter ask. “Why is Audrey even here?”

  “Ah,” Nana said, “I shouldn’t say anything.” Clearly Nana was dying to say something.

  “Tell us if we guess right,” Emma said.

  Nana’s voice went lower. “It’s grown-up business.”

  “I am more grown-up today than I was yesterday,” Emma said, negotiating.

  “We’ll talk in the car,” Nana said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  I moved away from the window, easing between the brick wall facing the garage and a dense growth of box hedges that needed trimming. I heard a door ten feet away shut, and Nana and the two children walked to the SUV.

  Nana and the children got into the Range Rover. Nana backed out, coming perilously close to the Mercedes I’d followed, as though considering putting a dent into it. The wooden gate slid back automatically for them and they drove off. After a moment the gate slid closed. I pulled myself free of the bushes and went to the back door.

  Emma and Peter hadn’t locked it. Either because they were forgetful or because their mother (I assumed that was Vivienne Duchamp or that was possibly Nana’s name; I couldn’t know yet) and this woman named Audrey were here, and Audrey would be leaving soon.

  I stood in the doorway. Listened. I could still hear the television’s newsy drone in the next room, and beyond that, in a front room, raised voices. Two of them, female.

  I stepped inside. The back den that looked out onto the patio was beautiful: old brick walls; stone floors; wooden, lofty ceilings. I moved into the huge kitchen. On the marble island was a high-end coffee brewer. The air was heavy with the sharp, delicious aroma of French roast.

  I moved quietly back into the large den, which might have been larger than my first apartment. It was elegantly furnished—leather couches; fancy, dark, rich fabrics; tables and chairs that looked expensive. I’d never lived this way, not with nomadic parents wandering the
world or with my and Lucy’s agency salaries.

  Photos—all in silver frames—covered one table and lined the fireplace mantel. Emma and Peter at a kaleidoscope of ages. In more recent photos of the kids, they were posed with a tall, attractive woman in her early thirties with ash-blonde hair and a warm, strong face. I picked up one photo that was propped against a tall, heavy iron candlestick.

  One picture with the dad. It was the man from the bar. Suburban dad. I’d been right.

  Still holding the framed picture, I crept toward the end of the den, toward a stone hallway that carried voices from an entryway. I could hear their words clearly now.

  “Holly, can we stop dancing around this?” A younger woman’s voice, closer to the front windows. “You can tell me the truth.”

  Holly? Uh, excuse me ladies, I thought, I’m looking for Vivienne.

  The second woman’s voice—Holly’s, I presumed—was smokier, tired, like she hadn’t slept well. “I do not know where Glenn is and he’s not here. Do you think I’d let him spend the night here? He’s your problem now, not mine.”

  “Don’t pretend that you don’t want him back.”

  “I truly don’t.” Holly made a heavy sighing sound of cracking impatience. “He texted you that he had meetings and then, what, an emergency trip? There’s your answer. Business trumps all. Don’t act like you didn’t know what you were getting, Audrey.”

  So, Audrey and Holly. I appeared to have misplaced a Vivienne.

  “But what if something has happened to him? He hasn’t called in hours. I thought he’d have to be here…with the kids maybe. I know he misses them…”

  For a moment Holly sounded sympathetic. “I know you are worried. But coming over here and making a scene in front of my kids…his kids. No.”

  “I wouldn’t ever worry the kids.” Now Audrey sounded a bit pouty, slightly wounded. “I’m just shocked at how cavalier you are about him vanishing.”

  “If he tells you he has to leave town, that does not count as vanishing,” Holly said, and she sounded weary of this drama. “You knew when you married him his work matters more than your feelings.”