Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  We went down a sleek hallway and then to another, where computers beeped and hummed with high-definition screens colorfully laying out the etches of life, heartbeats and brain activity and what have you.

  I thought of my ex, Lucy, in her CIA hospital, mired in wires, and I thought, Does everyone I care about have to suffer? Daniel, kept from me for those first few months of his life. I always worried it would mar him in some way, keep him from loving me.

  And now Mila. I’d followed the nurse to a room and she stepped aside and I saw Mila lying there. Tubes and wires, like Lucy in her forever bed. I felt sick. Her eyes were half-lidded in sleep. There had been multiple surgeries. A complication. A slow recovery.

  The well-dressed woman stepped away as I stepped inside. I could only stare at Mila. She was alive. She was breathing. But the bullet had nearly ended her. And there would be a long road ahead of her and would she ever be the same?

  She turned her head slightly toward me and I saw her smile. The ghost of a smile. “Sam,” she croaked.

  “Yes. I’m here. I’m sorry. And sorry it took me so long to come here.” Never mind that I’d been forbidden until today.

  “Is…Is…”

  “Belias is dead. It’s done.” Jimmy had no doubt told her all this but I wanted her to hear it from me. “His network is dismantled. And you’re going to be okay.”

  “My heart’s made of Moldovan steel,” Mila said. “I will be all right. It will just take a while.” She lifted a hand, weakly gestured at the tubing as if annoyed with it. Her voice was thick with painkillers.

  “How is Daniel?”

  “He is fine. He’ll be ready for you to play with him your next visit.”

  “I hope this clinic has good gift shop. I will bring him best toy.” She closed her eyes. “Sam. What about the woman who shot me…”

  “Woman? Not Felix?”

  “No. Holly Marchbanks shot me.” She opened her eyes.

  Holly had told me one lie too many now.

  “You need not worry,” I said. “Just concentrate on getting better.”

  “Better…I think I will go back to sleep now, Samuil.” The Slavic form of my name. She only used it when she was upset or worried.

  “Sleep, then,” I said, and as she closed her eyes, I became aware of the gun pressed into the back of my neck.

  “Sam Capra. At long last.” The voice was quiet, steely, English, upper-class.

  “You’ll make a mess if you shoot me in here,” I said. “Jimmy.”

  “You don’t get to call me that. We’re not friends. And as far as a mess goes, the nurses are competent. I’ll tell them to tidy up while you bleed out your last.”

  “I told you I didn’t know she was hurt. I didn’t even know she was in Las Vegas.”

  “Then you didn’t try.”

  I didn’t have an answer. The gun left the back of my head and I felt breath return to my lungs. The man stepped around to face me. He was a bit taller than me, black haired and blue eyed, casually handsome, dressed impeccably in a cashmere sweater and dark slacks. He must have been spending nights in the fold-out at the foot of her bed; blankets lay stacked next to it. “So what do I call you, Jimmy?”

  “Mr. Court will do.”

  Mister…My throat closed. “Court is one of Mila’s aliases.” DeSoto had said to me, Give my regards to Mrs. Court.

  “Not an alias. It’s her married name.”

  And this was…“Now that you’ve seen my wife, spoken to her, assured yourself that she will recover despite your abandonment, you may go.”

  I didn’t move. Mrs. Court. She really was…

  I found my voice. “She told me about you. Not that you were married. But that you recruited her into the Round Table. You found her, you trained her…”

  “And I trained her not to leave anyone behind.” Jimmy Court’s mouth curled in disdain. “It’s only because the Table wants you alive that you’re alive. I could kill you and tell her that you vanished. She’d think talking to you now was a dream, morphine-induced mental blather. But she would believe me.”

  “Then do it if you must.”

  “The Round Table wants you alive. They want you running the bars. Didn’t you ever wonder why she needed someone like you, Sam, to run the bars? She didn’t want to travel the world all the time. She wanted to be with me.”

  “So…who do I report to?”

  “Me for now. And my first order to you is to go. Just go. But not to New York and not to London. Not where she likes to go, not where I’ll take her to heal. Go home to your child in New Orleans if you like. But just go.”

  I could take my marching orders. Turn around and leave. But I didn’t.

  “I know what you did.”

  Jimmy cocked his head, a slight smile.

  “You. Felix. You knew about Belias’s network before Diana Keene ever ran into The Select and asked me for help.”

  “I hardly see how.”

  “Dalton Monroe. Janice didn’t use Felix to get close enough to poison him. Felix used Janice. Brought her to the event, but he poisoned Monroe. Not her. And he put Monroe’s name in the DOWNFALL file.”

  “Belias easily could have targeted Dalton. Janice had a file on him at her home…”

  “That Felix planted when he and I were there. That was the clincher for me that we had to go after Belias, with me leading the charge. And he planted that article from that first file we found in her house into the one I took from her office; he would have had time when we were heading over to find Diana. But Dalton was the only name in that file that wasn’t dead or ruined, it didn’t make sense. What the faked poisoning, and then Felix improvising and sneaking that article into the DOWNFALL file was supposed to do was to make it look like a Round Table member was under attack. So we could respond to a threat quietly without you telling the rest of the Round Table. You and Felix had been working this, but Mila didn’t know about it. There’s only one reason for that.”

  Jimmy glanced at Mila, as if to confirm she was asleep. “I didn’t know you’d suffered an injury to common sense. Why would I do such a thing?”

  “Maybe Vasili Borodin was a member of the Round Table—I’m pretty sure a Russian billionaire would have been an attractive target—and you’d been looking for Belias and Roger for the past several years. The Round Table worries about and deals with the threats that no one else quite sees yet. And the Table’s backed by very wealthy people. If any organization was in place to notice the patterns of success and downfall created by Belias, it’s us.”

  Jimmy’s expression gave away nothing. “Theoretically, I suppose that could happen.”

  “And when you found Belias and Roger, found one of their people in Janice Keene, well, look what they’d done. Duplicated the advantages Belias had given Borodin many times over. A new network with great wealth and influence—and you wanted to take them over. But here’s the kicker, no one else in the Round Table would know. You never told Mila.”

  “These are baseless charges, Sam, and I think reflective of my problem with you being a person who leaps before he looks.”

  I wanted to reach across her bed and snap his neck. “You weren’t going to share Belias’s network with the Round Table. Mila or they would have had you shut it down. You were going to run it. Just like Belias. What did you promise Felix if he helped you?”

  He said nothing.

  “Janice had cancer, Felix knew how to get close to her. You even moved him to San Francisco—he had only been there a few months. He was your way to charm past a weak point in Belias’s network.”

  “Sadly, reason is on my side. Felix betrayed us all. He attacked Mila.”

  “He was supposed to kill me in Vegas, along with everyone else, but he balked. He even told me to call my old bosses and beg for help. He was trying to get me out of the way without killing me or me ending up in jail. But it would have been your order to kill me.”

  “One of the many reasons I find you unappealing, Sam, is that you think the
worst of people. Felix loved Janice; he was trying to free her from that network.”

  “Maybe Felix didn’t realize you had no intention of turning over Belias’s network or dismantling it.” I crossed my arms. “The Round Table saves people from lifetimes in prison and gives them meaningful work. Like me. And sometimes the gratitude can be overwhelming. In Felix’s case, blinding. You took advantage of his loyalty, his belief he was doing right. Every manager has been wronged, it wouldn’t be hard to aim someone like Felix at a group of people who routinely wrong others in unfair ways.”

  We stood on either side of Mila’s bed, her sleeping.

  “I wish you would apply this imagination of yours to running the bars at a higher profit,” he said.

  “I know you did it. You tried to keep Mila away from San Francisco. And I bet if I ask her, she’ll say Felix tried to keep her from going to Vegas with him. Felix never would have hurt Mila, except the only way to keep her out of that penthouse was to knock her out of the fight. A fight you didn’t want her in. If Mila’s in this hospital bed, it’s your fault, not mine.”

  “If any of this fable of yours was true, then I could have threatened your child to corral you. I didn’t.”

  “Because Mila would have never forgiven you if harm came to Daniel. You took responsibility for keeping my son hidden and safe. If you failed, you’d risk losing Mila. Or maybe even you draw the line at murdering an infant.”

  Jimmy’s handsome face didn’t lose its composure. “If you care to accuse me in front of my wife, Sam, I hope you have hard evidence.”

  “Felix sure did track down Belias’s start as Borodin’s private hacker years ago very quickly. I thought Felix was brilliant. But his speed of discovery was because he and you already knew that history. Long before Diana Keene asked me for help in the bar, you’d already done that research. But you’re a careful guy, Jimmy, and Felix’s computer at The Select has been wiped clean, the data destroyed and overwritten. Now, why would anyone bother to do that, given everything that’s happened?”

  “Felix would have done it before leaving for Vegas, obviously. Your imagination, when it takes flight, it’s supersonic.”

  “Mila even recognized the I Ching symbol for the network, because she’d seen it with you in London. Coincidence? Or maybe you’d realized that symbol was a visual password for them and took her along when you wanted to find out what it meant.”

  I had him, but I couldn’t prove it. And he knew it. I shrugged.

  “Here’s the funny thing. If Diana had come in when Felix was downstairs and I was up, this might have ended all differently. But it didn’t. Twist of fate.”

  “Life is full of such twists.” Jimmy glanced down at the sleeping Mila, and for the first time I saw tenderness in his gaze.

  “But I’d like to know why I was your cannon fodder. Felix was the one who played on my fears of getting involved, claiming I had to do this to protect my son. But I wasn’t supposed to survive for long, even if I won, was I? You needed someone to do the dangerous work and then be lost in the line of duty. But after Mila was shot, Felix kept on his mission you’d sent him on. You tried to send me home, but when you saw I wasn’t giving up you switched gears and told me to kill Felix for you. If he’d killed me, you’d have Belias’s people under your thumb. If I killed him—well, then you figured your secret was safe, because a dead Felix couldn’t rat on you.”

  Ten ticks of the quiet clock above Mila’s bed. His gaze was steel. “My wife enjoys your company a bit too much,” he said simply. “I don’t like you.”

  Jealousy. The same poison that had been the black seed to grow Belias’s network. In this case, unfounded. “You’ll have to explain to her why you kicked me out of the Round Table.”

  “I’m doing no such thing. You still own the bars. You still have a job. That’s what Mila and the Round Table want.” He smiled. “It’s a very dangerous job.”

  “And now so is yours,” I said, and his smile shifted ever so slightly.

  I looked at Mila a final time, and then I left, out into the gray day.

  80

  The Bahamas

  IT DIDN’T WORK.” A man, tall, muscled, with darkish blond hair and eyeglasses, stood at a window and watched the surf slide in over the flat of an empty beach.

  “As hostile takeovers go,” said the woman standing next to him, “I suppose we could have been more hostile. Gone in with guns blazing. I’m not sure that would have worked.”

  “Encouraging Glenn Marchbanks to take over didn’t work, either,” the man in glasses said. “But that network would have been a nice acquisition for us.”

  “Very hard to maintain without its creator. Successful people are so much more demanding than those that are hungry. I still don’t think this Belias would have ever worked for us. We gave him that CIA file and he didn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Belias was at heart a hacker, not a leader. He kept that network together through fear and guilt, not inspiration. And they were showing their hand to anyone who looked. I don’t think we were the only group aware of Belias’s little collection of modern-day Fausts. I think there was another interested party sniffing around them.”

  “We could try to duplicate Belias’s approach.”

  “We could.” The man in glasses sighed. “But it’s an investment of many years to own so many successful people.”

  “And to own Sam Capra.”

  The man in glasses watched the sea.

  “Because you didn’t want him dead. You wanted to own him.”

  The man in glasses watched the sky.

  “If you’ll excuse me, you seem slightly obsessed with him, and I’m afraid his charms are lost on me. A CIA agent who was only there for three years and let go. They only toss out the bad apples, you know that. And perhaps if you’d just ordered him killed straightaway, he wouldn’t have ruined our takeover attempt.” The woman didn’t bother to hide the disappointment in her voice. “We’d own the vice president now if it wasn’t for your sentimentality. And, darling, you are not normally sentimental.”

  The man in glasses watched the beach.

  “What makes Sam Capra so special?” the woman finally said.

  “Someday I’ll tell you,” the man in glasses said, and he turned to look out at the surf.

  The woman leaned against him and rubbed his arm in the cool of the night breeze. Every few seconds her moving hand covered the small tattoo below his elbow, a nine with a sunburst in its center.

  81

  Goa, India

  THE KIDS FINALLY ANSWERED to their new names. They liked Goa; it was full of Europeans and a few Americans—hippies, students, people wanting a break from the incessant rat race of the West. There were more children than you would think and the beaches were beautiful, and for the first time in a long while, Holly felt like she wasn’t trapped, chirping in a golden cage. She read good books from the library (there were plenty in English), she went for long walks along the ocean as the surf called its gentle song, she listened to the polite gossip of her landlady who enjoyed practicing her English and was trying to minimize her accent.

  Her name was Rosie now, Peter was Paul, Emma was Ellie. Their last name was Grayson. She had managed to get out a lot of her money, transferring it to a Caymans bank, then on to a Swiss numbered account that steadily fed a small, discreet account in Goa. Enough to stay for a while. And then, in six months, they would go to Thailand, with new Canadian passports she would arrange, and then maybe New Zealand once they had a history established. She might get a job as a teacher. Something where she could do good.

  She walked back into the cottage from the beach, the sky blue as an eye, the wind a kiss off the sea, and when she came into her dining room, Sam Capra sat at the table.

  He held a gun in his hand.

  She froze. She knew her new life might collapse but she thought it would be the police. She had seen that weeks ago Marjorie Henderson had resigned the vice presidency, and there had been news in the
English-language papers about a spate of top business leaders resigning under sudden and surprising clouds.

  “Hello, Holly,” he said. “This house is much smaller than the one in Tiburon.”

  “Yet I like it much better.” She wet her lips. “Come uninvited into my house twice and it’s a habit.”

  “You have this habit of being a liar.”

  She set her bags down on the small tile counter.

  “You shot Mila. Not Felix.”

  “Yes.”

  Sam raised the gun toward her.

  “Are you going to kill me in front of my kids?”

  “Your kids aren’t here.”

  “They’ll be home in a few minutes. The school lets them come home for lunch.”

  Sam looked at her like he was trying to decide whether or not to leave her body for the kids to find. She braced herself against the counter.

  “I was surprised there are no weapons in the house, Holly. I checked.”

  “No. I’m done with that.”

  “If I let you go, I let a murderer go.”

  Her voice was calm. “I didn’t mean to kill Diana. It was an accident. And Janice was self-defense.”

  “But I’m not here for Diana or Janice.”

  Holly nodded. “I panicked. You’d lied to us that Mila was dead. You’d gone to the trouble to fake it. I was sure she was springing a trap.” Holly hesitated. “Did she die?”

  “No. I don’t think I’ll ever get to see her again. All the time Belias asked me what I wanted…” Sam steadied his voice. “And it turns out you took from me the one thing I wanted, other than my son.”

  “Do what you must.” She held his gaze steady.

  Sam Capra’s expression didn’t change. Slowly he lowered the gun. “Your kids are innocent, the way Diana was. I’m not going to make things harder for your children. But if you ever breathe a word about me to anyone, if you ever come near me or Mila again, I’ll kill you.”