Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  “It occurs to me this could be a trap,” Felix said. “Maybe Belias found Diana and forced her to call me.”

  It was an unsettling thought.

  “Go peek in the window,” Felix said.

  “I feel I’ve committed enough burglaries today. Now you want me to peer into windows?”

  “Weren’t you a spy once?”

  “And a neighbor notices and they call the cops.”

  “I thought you were a fast runner.”

  I didn’t answer and we headed for the gate. It was unlocked.

  Softly against the front door, Felix said, “Diana? It’s Felix.”

  The door opened. Diana Keene stood there. She started to smile at Felix, relief flooding her face, and then she saw me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She just kept staring.

  “I’m Sam.”

  “I said to come alone,” she said to Felix.

  “Sam can help us. Sam already saved you once.”

  She looked like she might slam the door and lock herself in.

  “I brought you something,” I said. “From your mother.”

  Her mouth thinned. She stuck her hand out, sure I would just hand it over. I saw her hand tremble.

  “Let’s talk inside,” I said.

  She gestured us inside and closed the door behind me. We followed her back to a small, elegant kitchen furnished with high-end appliances that looked barely used.

  “Is your friend here?” Felix asked.

  “No, she’s in Europe for another week.” She looked at me. “You brought me something from my mom?”

  “Yes, and I wanted to say thank you,” I said. “For saving my life.”

  Her face, lovely, twisted like she was going to laugh. “Thank you for saving mine. I guess I’ve forgotten my manners. But…this isn’t your problem. You should stay out of it. Just give me the…” she started to say as I pulled the package I’d taken from the safe from the back of my pants. She stopped and looked at the crumpled, thick manila envelope, with its FOR DIANA’S EYES ONLY scrawled across the front. She blinked, and I realized this wasn’t what she was expecting.

  So what had she thought I was bringing her?

  She bit her lip and her gaze met mine. “This is for me and you opened it,” she said.

  “I’m the guy who saved your life, so yeah, I opened it. Maybe you can explain to me what it means. It all ties into why Belias wants you dead and why he’s got a millionaire as his hired thug.”

  She flinched at the mention of Belias. “Where did you get this?”

  “I stole it from your mother’s office.”

  Her eyes widened. “What kind of a bartender are you?”

  “The kind that’s good at listening to people’s problems.”

  She seemed to weigh the envelope in her hands.

  “Diana, we can help you,” Felix said. “You just have to trust us. We have resources…We can hide you.”

  She turned and began to prep the coffeemaker. Her hands shook slightly. “Look. I just need to find my mom. If you don’t know where she is, Felix, then I don’t want you involved. I appreciate you want to help. But…”

  But this was a change from before when she was so eager to see Felix. Something had changed since we’d talked to her on the phone.

  Felix said, “Your mother is in trouble and you’re trying to shield her. Let us help you.”

  “Do you know where my mom is?”

  “No, I have no idea,” he answered.

  “Did she mention going to Santa Fe to you? To a retreat where you can’t be called or e-mailed?”

  “No.”

  “Did she…did she mention cancer?” Her voice wavered.

  Felix didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

  “Please. I know she has it. Bad,” Diana said.

  Felix closed his eyes. “I met her through a cancer support group. Sometimes after the meetings she’d come to the bar…so we could talk.”

  “I’m sorry. Are you as sick as my mom?”

  “No,” he said. “I wanted to help your mother. We…like each other.”

  “Yes, I know. But now she’s off working for this crazy man instead of getting treatment. I don’t understand it,” Diana said.

  “Working for Belias? Doing what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You stole something of Belias’s,” I said. “According to him.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Yes. More than once. He thinks I’m protecting you; he’s offering me deals to hand you over to him.”

  “What?” Shock colored her voice.

  “I won’t obviously.” I paused. “You have something that can expose whatever he’s doing. A video your mother made.”

  “No, I don’t have it,” she said.

  “Where is it?”

  “I saw it on her computer and I erased it. It was like a confession. I couldn’t risk someone else seeing it.” She turned away and watched the coffee burble and drip into the pot.

  I tapped the package, ran a finger along the paper that said DOWNFALL. “Is this what was in the video? Information about what she and Belias did to these people?”

  “No—the video was her talking about how bad Belias was.” Her gaze was steady on mine; then she looked away to the package.

  “So is this her proof? They’re just press clippings about people screwing up. It’s not exactly hard evidence.”

  “I appreciate you want to help. Felix…” She glanced at him. “I just…I want to trust you, but I can’t. I can’t put my mom’s fate in the hands of strangers. I barely know you and I don’t know him.”

  “I killed a man for you,” I said. It came out sounding harsher than I intended, and she looked like she might break under the tension. I made my voice quieter. “You don’t want to expose your mom’s involvement. I understand. You’re trying to protect her. I’m not sure you can.”

  “Destroy Belias and you think you destroy your mom,” Felix said. “Not necessarily. She could cut a deal with the police.”

  “My mom is not a bad person. She hasn’t committed any crimes.” Now Diana’s voice rose. “Look, I understand you want to help me, but you can’t.”

  “Where’s the video?” I asked.

  “I deleted it from her computer. And then I wiped the hard drive so it couldn’t be recovered.”

  “She left you a package in her home office,” I said. “That was the video, I think. Where is it?”

  “You were in my mother’s house?”

  “Clearly you think we’re going about it the wrong way, but we’re trying to help her. And help you.” I raised my hand, put finger and thumb an inch apart. “But I am this close to calling the police, Diana, if you don’t talk straight with us.”

  She sat at the dining room table. She hugged the envelope to her in her lap. The fire in her I’d seen in the bar seemed dimmed.

  “This Belias guy…he’s forced Mom to do things for him. Betray confidences of her clients. He has leverage over her.”

  “So he’s a blackmailer.”

  “My mother…is a really wonderful person,” Diana said. “She built her company from nothing after my dad died. She’s amazing. No one works harder or smarter.”

  “But he has dirt on her, enough to get her to skip cancer treatments and do his bidding.” I wondered how she would react to the suggestion her mother was a willing participant in Belias’s work. I can give you the world. But that might send her over the edge. “Do you know Glenn Marchbanks or Holly Marchbanks? Are they clients of your mom’s?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  “So. He wants you and me. He thinks I’m protecting you. He thinks we have a history, that it’s not just coincidence you came into the bar—he doesn’t know about your mom being friends with Felix.”

  Diana’s glance slid to Felix, held, looked away.

  “So what does it take for you to go to the police?” I asked.

  “I have to talk to my mom b
efore I’ll talk to the police. That’s not negotiable.”

  “He knows where we can find your mother, I suspect,” I said. “Your mother would turn against him if he hurt you. He said he wants you unharmed. So we tell him we want to talk. Draw him in. Capture him.”

  “I have no intention of being bait.” Diana’s lovely face set in a stubborn frown. “The coffee’s ready.” She got up and we went into the kitchen. Lily’s refrigerator was covered with photos of herself at parties, and Diana was in many of the pictures. Laughing, posing for the camera with an I’m cool stance and smile.

  She handed me the coffee.

  “The people in those clippings that your mom left you,” I said.

  “I don’t know them.”

  “DOWNFALL. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I set the coffee down and went back into the living room, and I picked up the envelope. Dumped out the papers, spread them across the table. The names, the faces, I didn’t know. The names. Nathan Horst. Patricia Gustavo. Jared Crosston. Mike and Cassie Muller-Prynne. Felix began to pick them up, study them, read them, a frown on his face. He held up a solitary article, pulled from the bottom of the pile: the newspaper account of Dalton Monroe’s celebratory reception, where he fell ill. Our gaze met.

  I turned back to Diana and tapped the articles. “You do know,” I said quietly. “These are all stories of failure. Prominent people brought suddenly low or dead. Why does your mom have this?”

  “Cui bono?” Felix said.

  “What?” Diana said.

  “Cui bono? Latin for ‘who benefits?’ It’s a useful question to ask when trying to discern a motive.” He looked at me. “I read that in a mystery novel.”

  I looked at Diana. “Fair enough. Who benefits from these downfalls? Your mother? Glenn Marchbanks? How?”

  “You brought this to me, I don’t know.” She made a dismissive gesture toward the clippings.

  “Is that what your mother knows? Who benefits? Is that what’s on the video?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Felix said, “Ask yourself what your mom would tell you to do. We want to help you.”

  She looked at the floor and shook her head.

  “Diana, let me make this clear to you. You have your secrets and I have mine. But Belias believes that either we join him or he has to kill us.”

  “You make it sound like a war,” she said.

  “It is. Us versus him.”

  “Then treat it like a war and kill him.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “I made you into a guy who has killed someone. Why would you even want to talk to me?”

  “I can handle it.” There was no sense in telling her I’d killed before. It’s not the sort of thing you bring up in conversation. It makes people very uneasy. I held up the folder of clippings. “You cannot have it both ways. Either help us or I call the police, right now. Who are these people and why do they matter?”

  She bit on my bluff, took the file, glanced through it slowly.

  “Josh Honeycutt. Rising film director, he was supposed to direct The Manager.” I remembered the movie; it had won a bevy of Oscars a few years ago. “He got canned from the project and basically everything else in Hollywood after child porn was found on his computer.” She dropped the file, paged over to another one. “Deanna Shaw. Was supposed to become CEO of a major oil company. Rising star but she was implicated in an insider stock-trading schedule. She resigned and ended up being radioactive on the CEO search committee lists. She teaches now at a university. Nice job, but not the same as being head of a billion-dollar firm.” She dropped another at my feet. “Mauricio Lopez. Freelance journalist in Los Angeles. He started a blog devoted to whistle-blowers in government. He was going to get a book out of it; found shot with two bullets in the head, in the back of a sleazy bar. Robbery gone wrong. No one wanted to carry on the blog, though.” She looked up at me. “Are you seeing a pattern?”

  “No,” I said, “but I might be jumping to a conclusion.”

  She waited. I paged through more of the articles. The heir to a manufacturing concern who committed suicide after being accused of embezzlement, a young politician derailed by a scandal with a prostitute, a young physicist who’d been a leader in nanotechnology research and his wife dead in a car crash off a cliff. “People on an upward rise cut down in their prime. Either by scandal that they can’t easily recover from or murder. This one, from just days ago, a billionaire falling ill at a party. Did your mom ever mention Dalton Monroe?”

  “No.” Resolve filled her face. “Maybe…my mother discovered an ongoing pattern in some of the clients she worked with. That bad luck befell their competition.” Monroe wasn’t a client, but Felix shook his head at me. Better to let Diana talk; she might say more than she realized.

  “Belias said he hacks lives. You think their falls from fortune were engineered. Cui bono? Who benefits? The people like the Marchbankses? Your mother?”

  She was so lovely and bright, and I thought if she’d come into the bar under any other circumstances, maybe we could have been friends. But she was never going to talk, never going to say a word that could compromise her mother.

  Anger rose in my chest. “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to save you from this guy. But I’m not going to fight this war on your terms. I’ll fight them on mine.”

  She started to argue, like that was going to work, and looked at me. But past me to Felix. The door to the house opened. And Belias stepped through, followed by the thick-necked man. He raised a gun and fired and the gun made an odd puffing noise.

  Felix, closest to them, dropped.

  I shoved Diana behind me and felt a short, sharp pain in my throat. I pulled it away. A dart. Like the kind you would use to tranquilize an animal. And then my face sagged, my body sagged, and I didn’t even feel myself hit the concrete, Diana’s screams exploding in my ears.

  31

  Friday, November 5, afternoon

  Denver

  IN AN AIRPORT, no one wonders why you’re carrying an umbrella.

  Viktor Rostov didn’t as he walked past the man with the umbrella, hurrying toward his gate. He glanced at the monitor. His flight was now delayed an hour. He hated flying through Denver. But at least the delay meant he had time for the fancy coffee. He never could drink it at home in front of his brothers. His siblings liked their coffee black. He liked his with a bakery added to it.

  Viktor walked the curve of the terminal row and he got in line at a coffee stand. He wanted the biggest cup they had, with hot mocha-flavored coffee, topped with whipped cream and every sugary option. Comfort food, he told himself, although the one time he’d gone into a Starbucks with his brothers and his cousins and ordered a Frappuccino they’d laughed at him. He hated to be laughed at. Grigori and Vladimir had laughed the hardest, before they’d gotten shamed by their incompetence and left for the West Coast to start their own operation.

  Where they were now dead, both of them in a single night.

  Their poor mother had gotten the phone call at 4:00 a.m. New York time and the family had rallied. They had contacts in the San Francisco police department, and an inquiry had produced the name of the man who had struck down Grigori: Sam Capra. Viktor was to go there and exact a quick revenge.

  Viktor placed his order, loving the long Italian words on his tongue, and then he was jostled from behind, a sharp point hitting his leg. He glanced back, irritated, and saw a well-dressed man in his late thirties, sandy haired, an umbrella in his hand, a raincoat over his arm, a small satchel. “Sorry!” the man said. “You okay?”

  Viktor just said, “No worries,” like an American would, and he moved over to the counter to await his coffee with the whipped cream and hazelnut and chocolate shavings.

  The American nodded and stepped up and gave the barista his order.

  Viktor collected his coffee and started to head down to the gate. The first sip was sugarc
oated heaven, whipped cream and chocolate and coffee. The second sip was richer, more satisfying. He felt the indulgent smile creep onto his face.

  The third sip made him want to throw up.

  His mouth felt numb and nausea churned up, like the breakfast he’d eaten in New York didn’t agree with him. No, he thought. I don’t want to get sick now. I want my coffee. But the feeling of illness washed over him hard and sudden, and he hurried into the men’s room.

  He thought, Maybe I just need to splash water on my face. It was not crowded, a lull of quiet between planes at nearby gates taking off and landing, and he jabbed his hand under the automatic faucet and flicked water into his face. He felt worse. He needed to sit down.

  “Are you all right, mister?” a teenager said at the next sink.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just a headache.”

  The teenager turned away and left.

  He regretfully left the perfect coffee on the counter and staggered into the toilet stall at the end of the row, away from everyone. He was going to be sick. He shut the door and then pain rumbled through him. He collapsed onto the toilet as his muscles felt soggy and loose, his heart slowing, and as he died his thoughts splintered and the taste of the coffee was the last thing he knew.

  A moment later the stall next to him was occupied by a man carrying an umbrella.

  Barton Craig sat and waited for another lull between boardings and arrivals, and then he shoved his bag, umbrella, and raincoat under the divider and he wriggled under the stall wall, neat and fast as a snake, pulling himself up next to Viktor. It took all of five seconds. He tucked up Viktor’s legs so it didn’t look like there were two men in the stall. He put on gloves and he removed the tiny pellet in Viktor’s leg that was just under the skin. This he put in his pocket.

  From his own bag he pulled an airport maintenance uniform, too baggy, that he put on over his own suit. He pulled a cap low over his face. He waited until a flight arrived and a number of men herded through to use the facilities, and when the next lull came, he inched back into the next stall, leaving Viktor’s door locked, and he walked out of the men’s room.

  Barton Craig walked to another bathroom, went inside, removed the camouflaging uniform, and stuck it back into his bag.