3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  “The problem,” Paull said, his eyes half-closed against the wind, “is that despite all my high-tech efforts at security, I’ve been undone by a very low-tech methodology: lip-reading.”

  “Someone on your yacht?”

  He nodded. “The fucking captain, of all people.”

  “Wasn’t he properly vetted?”

  Paull shot her a pitying look. “We’re talking someone inside the White House, very high up. All the vetting in the world is useless against being turned by someone of that stature.”

  The car took M Street, then turned north on Rock Creek Parkway.

  “Surely you don’t believe that the president recruited him directly?”

  “I do not,” Paull said. The car pulled to the side of the road within Rock Creek Park. “Walk with me. The driver will pick us up at the food shack two miles on.”

  They climbed out of the car and began to walk. The police car was soon gone. Paull had left his ridiculous Stetson in the front seat. The sun was but a sheen behind the tissue of white clouds. Nina pulled the collar of her peacoat up around her neck; Paull jammed his hands in his pockets as they set off together, surrounded by trees and brush.

  “I’ve been thinking hard about your question,” Paull said. “No, the president is too wily to initiate anything against me on his own. I’m not even certain that he’s aware of the death of those two men who were following Jack to protect him. Therefore, he has to have a middle man.”

  “You mean a hatchet man.”

  “Call him what you will, Nina, we have a very potent enemy in the Administration.”

  “It’s imperative we know his identity, don’t you think?”

  Paull nodded. “I most certainly do. Because the president is involved, even if it’s on a nontactical level, our man has to be either the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor.”

  Nina shuddered. “I wouldn’t want either of them as an enemy.”

  “I hear you,” Paull acknowledged, “but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”

  They were nearing a fork in the road, and he directed them to the right, along a high embankment. A stream glimmered dully below. Apart from a smattering of passing cars, there was no one about.

  “The good news is that I’ve worked out which one it is,” Paull continued. “The message the captain sent was on the same day you and I met on the yacht. The time was a few minutes after you left. At that time, the president was on his way to Moscow to meet with President Yukin. He could have taken the call himself, of course, but that seems unlikely. The president maintains a high level of plausible deniability by using selected intermediaries he deems expendable.”

  “Both the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor were with him on Air Force One,” Nina said.

  “So they were, but only one of them has knowledge of—and therefore access to—a specific high-level asset. I’m this asset’s handler, that’s how important he is. He’s abruptly dropped off the grid, he hasn’t made his dead drops in months. However, I have reason to believe that as recently as last week, this particular asset has been in touch with someone else in the Administration. I am very much afraid this high-ranking official is using this asset—a murderer without a speck of conscience—for his own purposes.”

  “What purposes?”

  “That I’m not at liberty to disclose.” How about kidnapping Edward Carson’s daughter so the crime can be labeled an act of terrorism and laid at the missionary secularists’ door, Paull thought. “At first, I suspected it might be the president himself, but now I think it might be the only other person who knows of the asset’s existence: the National Security Advisor.”

  “So the National Security Advisor has been working, at the president’s behest, against us.”

  Paull nodded. “It seems most likely. But I’ve bought us some time. I told him that I’ve been running you with an eye to getting closer to Jack McClure.”

  “That’s too close to the truth.”

  Paull smiled thinly. “Have faith; that’s as far as the truth goes. I sold them the story that I’m going to find a way to poison Jack against Edward Carson. Jack then goes to Reverend Taske, gets him to turn the power of the RMC against Carson.”

  Nina shook her head. “What I wouldn’t give for fifteen minutes inside that brain of yours.”

  “Now that we know who we’re fighting,” Paull said, “we’d better rally the troops and man the ramparts.”

  “Good God, you’re not talking about an all-out war, are you?”

  “Not out in the open. But we’ve already felt the first shot across our bows—the turning of two of my men, plus my captain. Our first order of business is to root out any others. We can’t mount a reasonable response if the opposite side knows every move we make.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Nina said.

  “Use the Secret Service facilities, not Homeland Security’s.”

  “Gotcha.”

  They walked a bit farther, lost in their own thoughts.

  “Now tell me what’s new with our boy, Jack,” Paull said.

  “Sir, do you recall a double murder at McMillan Reservoir about twenty-five years ago?”

  “That would be Metro Police territory, wouldn’t it?”

  “Apparently not this one. I checked Metro’s records of the incident. There aren’t any. According to Jack, there was very little in the papers. I checked out his story, and he’s right. For that kind of crime, there was precious little ink spilled—not even the names of the victims. Everything was hushed up, so it must have been at a high government level.”

  “What’s McClure’s interest in the double murder?”

  “I don’t know, we haven’t had time to talk about it at length,” Nina said. “But he also has an intense interest in a local drug supplier working at the same time. Jack said no one knew who he was or where he came from, but that he had a tremendous amount of juice. No one could ever lay a hand on him, a man named Ian Brady.”

  For a moment, Paull thought that he’d been struck by a car that had jumped the curb. For certain he was having an out-of-body experience. When he was able to gather his scattered senses, he said, “Come again?”

  “Did I say something—?”

  “That name.” Paull snapped his fingers impatiently. “Give me that name again.”

  “What? Ian Brady?”

  “That’s the fucking one.”

  Beside her, Paull stared off into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing. Brady was the key, the lynchpin to events unfolding all too rapidly. A serial murderer, a schemer, most probably a psychopath—this was the asset Paull had inherited. The most important intelligence asset stretching back twenty-five years. This was the monster he was forced to protect, whose whereabouts he no longer knew. Who did, then? His mind snapped into perfect focus. “Get Jack McClure,” he said to Nina. “Bring him to me ASAP.”

  Nina took out her cell phone. “I’ll call him right now.”

  “No,” Paull said. “It’s all too likely that our cell conversations are being monitored. I don’t even want to use mine without prearranged coded signals.”

  “I’ll find another way,” Nina said.

  Paull nodded gravely. “I know you will.”

  40

  “Get it into your head, Jack,” Sharon had said in the ER. “We all have a secret life, not just you.” Now Jack knew the real truth of her words. His daughter was living a secret life right under his nose. It was as if he’d never known her at all—which was, of course, a deficiency that Sharon had accused him of repeatedly. But, given what she’d said to him, he determined that he had to know whether or not she knew about Emma’s radicalization, her secret life.

  “If she felt so strongly about the blurring of religion and government,” Jack said, “why didn’t she join a peaceful organization like the First American Secular Revivalists?”

  “Because she was Emma,” Alli said. “Because she never did things halfway, because she was strong and
sure of herself. Above all, because she felt that the pack of evangelicals who had invaded the federal government were warmongers, that the only way to get their attention, to attack them, to expose them was with a radical response.”

  “She hated the warmongers so she became one herself?” Jack shook his head. “Isn’t that counterintuitive?”

  “The philosophers say fighting fire with fire is a legitimate response as old as time.”

  They were walking in the tangle of trees and underbrush behind the house. The sky was turning black, as if with soot, and a cold wind shivered the tallest branches. Jack was turning over what Alli had said because there was something about it that stuck in his mind, that seemed to loom large on the playing field he’d been thrust onto.

  He stopped them at the bole of a gigantic oak. “Let’s back this up a minute. Emma knew that your father would win the election, or at least that this current administration was on its last legs. Why not simply wait until the new regime came in?”

  Alli shook her head. “I don’t know, but there was an urgency in what she had to do.”

  “All right, let’s put that aside for the moment. You said that she wanted to expose the Administration with a radical response.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she tell you what she meant by that?”

  “Sure. E-Two wants to provoke an extreme response from the Administration.”

  “But there’s sure to be bloodshed.”

  “That’s the whole point.” Alli licked her lips. “See, the bloodier, the more militant, the more brutal the response, the better. Because E-Two is out to show the entire country what this Administration really is. They won’t be able to round up the E-Two members easily. From what Emma said, they’re all young people our age—no one over thirty. When there’s blood on the streets, when America sees their own sons and daughters slaughtered, they’ll finally understand the nature of the people who are exporting war and death to the world.”

  Jack was rocked to his core. “They’re planning to be martyrs.”

  “They’re soldiers,” Alli said. “They’re laying down their lives for what they believe in.”

  “But what they’re planning is monstrous, insane.”

  “As our foreign policy has been for eight years.”

  “But this isn’t the way.”

  “Why not? Sitting on their hands hasn’t worked so well, has it? Anyone who has said or tried to do anything to protest faith-based initiatives has been ridiculed or, worse, branded a traitor by the talking heads controlled by the Administration. God, look at what wimps members of the opposite party have been through an illegal war, scandals, evidence that the government muzzles its scientists and specialists on the topics of WMDs and global warming. If the parties were reversed, you can bet this president would’ve been impeached by now.”

  Why was it, Jack thought, that he felt as if he were listening to Emma and not Alli? A strange thing was happening to him. It had begun when he and Alli entered the house and now had continued as they moved out into woods. There was the very curious sensation of the world finally starting to make sense to him—well, if not the whole world, then his world, the one he’d kept hidden from others and which kept him apart from them. Like his ability to sense Emma, though she was no longer in this world, at least by the limited understanding of man-made science, he felt as if his world and the one that had always been closed to him were beginning to overlap. Hope rose, completely unfamiliar to him, that one day he might even be able to straddle both, that he might live in one without giving up the other.

  This gift he very badly wanted to bestow on Alli. To this end, he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Alli regarded him with skepticism. “Not another shrink. I’ve had my fill of probing and prodding.”

  “Not another shrink,” Jack promised.

  Rather than return to the front of the house where he’d parked, he took her through the underbrush. On the other side was parked Gus’s white Continental, which Jack kept in pristine condition.

  Alli laughed in delight as she climbed into it. Behind the wheel, Jack turned the key in the ignition, and the huge engine purred to life. With the lights extinguished, he rolled away without the Secret Service detail parked on Westmoreland being any the wiser.

  He turned on the tape player, and James Brown took up “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in midsong.

  “Wow!” Alli said.

  Yeah, thought Jack. Wow.

  Ten minutes later, when they arrived at Kansas Avenue NE, they couldn’t get near the old Renaissance Mission Church building. Barriers had been erected on the street and sidewalks on either side of it. There must have been more than a dozen unmarked cars and anti-terrorist vans drawn up on the street within the barriers.

  Jack’s heart seemed to plummet in his chest. Telling Alli to wait in the car, he got out, flashed his credentials to one of the twenty or so suits milling around. Then he saw Hugh Garner, who was spearheading the operation, and put away his ID.

  “Hello, McClure,” Garner said. “What brings you here?”

  “I have an appointment with Chris Armitage of FASR,” Jack lied.

  Garner pulled a face. “So do we, McClure. Trouble is, we can’t find him, or his pal Peter Link.” Garner inclined his head. “You wouldn’t know where they’ve got to?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” Jack said. “I’d like to speak to someone else in the FASR offices.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible.” Garner looked smug. Hailed by one of his detail, he turned, gave a couple of orders, turned back to Jack. “No one’s here. This office has been shut down.”

  Jack thought of all the busy, dedicated men and women he’d seen on his way into Armitage’s office. “Where is everyone else?”

  “In federal custody.” Garner grinned. “They’ve forfeited their rights to due process. They’ll be held as long as necessary. Neither you nor anyone else can see them without a written order signed by the National Security Advisor himself.”

  Jack rocked back on his heels as if struck a blow. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The president went on the air an hour ago with evidence supplied by the Russian president himself that the FASR and E-Two are being funded by Beijing.” Garner’s grin widened. “Under the Anti-Terrorism Act of December 2001, they’ve all been charged with treason.”

  Just south of where the sawhorses blocked off the avenue was an alleyway. Jack drove the car around to Chillum Place, parked in a deserted lot. Alli said nothing; he knew she understood perfectly well what had happened.

  “Why are we here?” Alli said at last. “Sitting in the dark with the lights out and the engine off?”

  “We’re moving to the edge of the world,” Jack said quite seriously. “We’re heading off the grid.”

  “What’ll happen when we get there?”

  “Tell me more about Emma.”

  Alli felt a familiar terror clutch her heart. Ever since Jack and Nina had rescued her, she had felt as if she had a fever, racked by bouts of anxiety, cold sweats, dreams of menacing shadows whispering horrible things to her. She saw Kray everywhere, as if he were stalking her, monitoring her every move, every word she said, every breath she took. Often, alone, she shook, chilled to her bones. Kray had become the sun, the moon, the clouds in the sky, moving as she moved, the wind rattling through the trees. He was always with her, his threats mingling with his ideas, the strange and powerful openness and freedom she had felt with him. These contradictory feelings confused and terrified her all the more. She no longer knew who she was, or more accurately, she no longer felt in control of herself. Something eerie and horribly frightening had happened to her in that room with him. Truth to tell, there were moments she couldn’t recall, which was a relief. She so didn’t want to probe beneath the unfamiliar surface of that vague unease at not remembering. Something had slipped away from her, she felt, and something else
had been slipped into its place. She no longer was the Alli Carson who had lain sleeping in her dormitory room.

  On the other hand, there was now, there was Jack. She liked him immensely, and this led to a certain sense of trust. He made her feel safe as no other human being—armed or otherwise—ever had. She envied Emma now, having this man for a father and then, realizing all over again that Emma was dead, shook a little, felt ill with shame for even having the thought. Even so, the thought of talking to him about Kray, about what had happened, set off a panicky feeling she was unable to understand, never mind try to control.

  “Emma once said to me that we never really see ourselves,” she said in an attempt to calm herself as well as to answer him. She felt that as long as she continued to speak about Emma, her friend wasn’t truly dead, that a part of her—the part of Emma they saw and heard—would remain. “She said all we ever see of ourselves is our reflection—in mirrors, in water. But that isn’t how we appear at all. So we had this game we played at night. We’d sit on the bed facing each other and we’d take turns describing each other’s faces in the most minute detail—first the forehead and brow, then the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth. And Emma was right. We got to know ourselves in a different way.”

  “And each other,” Jack said.

  Alli stared out the windshield into the emptiness of the lot. “We already knew each other better than if we’d been sisters. We’d found each other; we loved each other. We shared the night with all its loneliness, its subversiveness, its secrets.”

  All at once, it was as if Emma were sitting there beside her, and with a sob, she began to cry. She should be here, Alli thought. She’d understand what happened to me, she’d be able to tell me why I’m feeling so strange, why everything feels threatening. Everything except Jack.