3 Great Thrillers

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

“We know all about that,” Paull cut in. “It’s in her file. Her psychological profile was perfectly normal.”

  “Profiles, like Alli’s medical exam, can be faulty,” Jack pointed out. “Even more so with psych tests. Nina couldn’t bear the fact that her brother was a successful married man.”

  “Wait a minute.” Paull held up a hand. “Nina’s brother was killed twelve years ago in a drive-by in Richmond, Virginia. One shot through the head.”

  “Why would she lie to me about that?” Jack’s synapses began firing again. “Did the cops ever find out who the killer was?”

  Paull shook his head. “Apart from the bullet, there was no evidence—no motivation either. They gave up, said it was a case of mistaken identity.”

  “What if it wasn’t?” Jack said. “What if Nina met Brady twelve years ago? What if he proposed a plan: He murders her brother, and in return, she becomes his accomplice.”

  Paull began to sweat at the thought of the terrible mistakes he’d made professionally and personally.

  “Brady was like a chess master—he planned his moves far ahead of time,” Jack continued. “The night he went out the window, he told me he’d killed his parents. At the time, I thought he was simply goading me, but now I can see a pattern. He felt he was justified in killing his parents, for whatever reason. Taking a look at Nina’s file gave him his opportunity. My guess is he sought her out. Nina felt that there was a privilege in loneliness. She said it made her feel alive, introduced her to herself. People like her are split off from themselves. They’ll pass even the most stringent psychological testing because at the moment, they believe what they say.”

  Paull winced. He could feel Nina’s sweat-slicked body moving against him, her breath in his ear, her deep groans. He felt quite faint.

  Jack shifted to rid himself of a stab of pain. “In the course of my investigation, I met a young woman, tough and smart—in many ways a younger version of Nina. Brady got to her. She was a nihilist just like him. I’m betting he found the darkness in Nina and pried her open. He was a master at mentoring.”

  In his mind’s eye, Paull saw an image of himself walking into the bookshop where he’d ordered Summer Rain, Nina’s favorite novel. The dealer insisted he examine it before he bought it. It chronicled the struggle of an immigrant family, rootless and uneducated, marginalized by an indifferent society. He’d thought nothing of it then, but in light of what had happened since, he agreed with Jack. Nina’s love of the book was a reflection of her inner darkness. Why hadn’t he recognized it? But of course he knew. He’d blinded himself to the signs because her detachment, her rootlessness, her lack of desire for commitment or a family made her the perfect mistress.

  “Good God.” President Carson ran a hand through his hair. “This entire episode is monstrous.” He turned his telegenic eyes on Paull. “My Administration will have zero tolerance for psychopathic agents, Dennis. You and your brethren are going to have to devise an entirely different yardstick to measure your candidates.” He stood. “Excuse me, I’m going to deliver the same message to the new director of national security.”

  He leaned over the table, gave Jack’s hand a hearty shake. “Thank you, Jack. From the bottom of my heart.”

  After he’d gone, Jack and Paull sat across from each other in an uncomfortable silence.

  Jack leaned forward. “I’m only going to say this once: For the record, despite his best efforts, I didn’t kill him, he killed himself.”

  “I believe you.” Paull’s voice was weary. “What went wrong, Jack?”

  Jack rubbed the back of his head. “Brady—or whatever his name is—was no good to you anymore, sir. All he wanted was to impose a lasting legacy. He wanted to make a statement of the greatest magnitude. I imagine you’ll agree that obliterating virtually the entire U.S. government at a time when the reins of power were being exchanged, when the country was most vulnerable, more than qualifies.”

  “Are you saying he was making a political statement?”

  “I doubt it. Brady had moved beyond such considerations. He despised humankind, hated what he felt civilization had done to the world. He felt we were heading toward a dead end.”

  “You have my personal thanks.” Secretary Paull stared at Jack for a long time. At length, he cleared his throat. “On another note, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s no sign of the organization known as E-Two. Frankly, I suspect it never existed. The former Administration required a domestic bogeyman to go after its main objective—the missionary secularists. Maybe E-Two was fabricated by the former National Security Advisor.”

  “Or maybe Brady came up with the idea,” Jack said. “After all, misdirection was his forte, and those FASR defectors had to go somewhere.”

  “A bogus revolutionary cell? Could be.” The secretary shrugged. “Either way, I’ve ordered the members of the First American Secular Revivalists released and reinstated. And, by the way, I protected them while they were in custody. No one interrogated them or harmed them in any way.”

  “I know you did what you could.”

  Paull rose, walked to the door.

  “What was his name?” Jack said. “His real name?”

  Paull hesitated only a moment. “Morgan Herr,” he said. “Truth be told, I know precious little about him. I’d like to know more, but for that I’d require you and your particular expertise. If you’re interested, come see me.”

  February 1

  Under the buttermilk sky of an early dusk, Jack stood at the front window of his living room, staring fixedly at the bleak view of his driveway. All the crispy leaves were gone. Overnight, a bitter front out of the Midwest had nailed shut the coffin of the January thaw. All day long, the District, home to mild winters, had been shivering.

  Earlier in the day, he’d driven the white Lincoln Continental down Kansas Avenue NE. Parking outside the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center, he hurried across the pavement and through the door. There, he collected the month’s rent, minus an amount for the time Chris Armitage and Peter Link occupied the back room. The leaders wanted to pay the full month’s rent, but Jack said no. He drank a cup of dark, rich African hot chocolate with them, thanked them, and left.

  Trashy wind, full of cinders and yesterday’s newspapers, followed him down the block to the FASR office. Inside, everything looked more or less back to normal, except that Calla Myers’s desk was unoccupied, wreathed in black ribbon. A number of lit candles clustered on the desktop in front of a framed photo of her with some of her coworkers. They were all smiling. Calla was waving at the camera.

  Peter Link was out on assignment, but Jack spent a few minutes chatting with Armitage. He knew he’d made a friend there.

  Jack abandoned the window and its bleak view to put a Rolling Stones record on the stereo. “Gimme Shelter” began, simmered to a slow boil. “War, children,” he sang in a melancholy voice along with Mick and Merry Clayton, “it’s just a shot away.”

  He returned to the window, waiting. Tonight, he had a date with Sharon. He had no idea how that was going to go, but at last she had agreed to come to the house, Gus’s house, the house of Jack’s adolescence. If he and Sharon didn’t kill each other, then next Saturday the two of them would spend the afternoon with Alli. It was Alli’s idea; maybe she wanted to play matchmaker—or peacemaker, anyway.

  He thought about Alli and her effect on him. There was a time when he didn’t know himself or the world. Worse, he couldn’t accept that he didn’t know himself, so he kept pushing everyone away. Without intimate mirrors, you have no hope of knowing yourself. So he kept Sharon and Emma—the two people best equipped to be his intimate mirrors—at arm’s length, while he deluded himself into thinking his job came first, that saving strangers was more important than allowing anyone to know him.

  He recalled his first encounter with Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. He hadn’t liked the book, because he was too young to fully appreciate it. But with living comes wisdom. Now a line from the book surfaced in his mind. T
here’s a moment when Steppenwolf is struck by a revelation. In order to understand himself, and therefore the world, he needs to “traverse, not once more but often, the hell of his inner being.” This, Jack understood, was the most difficult thing a human being could attempt. Simply to try was heroic. To succeed, well …

  He heard the soft crunch of the gravel, and then Sharon’s car nosed into the driveway. She pulled in to the right, parked the car, and got out. She was wearing a black ankle-length wool coat, black boots, and a tomato-red scarf wrapped around her throat. Aching to see her long legs, he leaned forward until his nose made an imprint on the glass and his breath turned to fog.

  She stood for a moment, as if uncertain which way to go. Jack held his next breath, wondering if she was contemplating getting back in her car and driving off. That would be just like her—or at least just like the woman he had known.

  Low, cool sunlight came through the branches, speckling her face. It shone off her hair, made the color of her eyes clear and rich. She looked young, very much as she had when he’d first met her. From this distance, the lines of worry and grief weren’t visible, as if time itself had been obliterated.

  Jack saw her gazing at the house, taking in its shape and dimensions. She took a step toward him, then another. As she moved, she seemed to gain momentum, as if her intent had focused down. She looked like someone who had made up her mind, who knew what she wanted.

  Jack understood that completely, and his heart swelled. His love for her was palpable, as if he’d never loved her before, or even knew what love was. Perhaps he never had. It was all too likely that the consequences of pain and loss had driven love from his heart. But not, it seemed, from him altogether. This was Emma’s gift to him. She had taught him not only to recognize love but to seize it as well.

  Sharon mounted the steps. He left the window and never again thought the view through it was bleak.

  He felt Emma all around him, like the collective shimmer of stars on a moonless night.

  There are many paths to redemption, he thought. This is mine.

  He heard the knock on the door, and opened it.

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  Jack McClure now has a role as a special advisor to the president. When he’s asked by his new boss to investigate the mysterious death of a U.S. senator on a diplomatic mission to Ukraine, McClure can’t say no. His comrades on the investigation include a rogue Russian agent… and the president's daughter.

  1

  Moscow | April 5

  Jack McClure, cell phone to his ear, stood in his hotel suite, staring out at the arc-lit onion domes of Red Square. It was snowing. The last snow, it was predicted, of a protracted and, even for Russia, frigid winter. Red Square was nearly deserted. The swirling black wind swept the last of the tourists, shoulders hunched, digital cameras stuffed inside their long coats to protect them, back to their hotels where steaming cups of coffee waited, spiked with vodka or slivovitz. Jack had arrived here a week ago with the presidential entourage on a trip that was both politically necessary and culturally important, which was why the First Lady and the First Daughter had been invited along. The trip had been arranged—brokered might be a more accurate term—by General Atcheson Brandt, who had commanded a wing in the Gulf War. He was both a decorated veteran and, now that he’d retired, a revered military analyst for both CNN and ABC. He knew everyone in Washington who mattered. When he spoke, senior politicians of both parties listened. Though the former administration’s mini cold war with Russia, and President Yukin in particular, had raged for eight years, General Brandt had made it his business to keep the private lines of communication with Yukin open. His public criticism of the former administration’s hard line against Russia had led to a brief summit between Yukin and the former president. Though nothing of substance had come of it, General Brandt had been praised on both sides of the Senate aisles for his efforts.

  However, at the moment General Brandt was far from Jack’s mind. Jack hadn’t said a word for the past three minutes and neither had Sharon. Rather, they were listening to each other breathe, as they often did when they lay in bed together in Jack’s house in D.C. While Jack listened through the phone, he thought of her coming home after work, shedding her clothes layer by layer, until she was in her bra and the bikini underpants she always wore. He imagined her sliding into bed, pushing backward, feeling with her buttocks for that shallow indentation his absent body had left behind like a memory. He imagined her eyes closing as she drifted off to sleep. And then imagined she descended further. What did she dream of when all the artifice and layers demanded by civilization melted away, when she reverted to who she had been as a child, when she was certain no one was watching or, at least, able to pierce the veil of her sleep? He liked to imagine that she dreamed of him, but he had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing who she really was, even though he knew her body almost as well as he knew his own, even though he’d observed over and over her every tiny motion, day and night.

  He knew these questions assailed him because he was so far from home—traveling with the newly elected president of the United States, his longtime friend, Edward Harrison Carson, as Carson’s strategic advisor.

  “What does that title mean exactly?” he’d asked Carson, when the two had met the week following the inauguration.

  The president had laughed. “Just like you, Jack, cutting to the quick of everything. I pulled you out of the ATF to find my daughter. You brought Alli back to me when no one else could. I and my family feel safest with you close.”

  “With all due respect, Edward, you have a platoon of perfectly competent Secret Service operatives better suited than I am to guard you and your family.”

  “You misunderstand me, Jack. I have far too much respect for you to offer you a babysitting job, even though nothing would please Alli more. Besides, on a practical level, your special abilities would be wasted in that capacity. I have no illusions about how difficult and perilous the next four years are going to be. As you can imagine, there are already no end of people who are clamoring to whisper advice in my ear. Part of my job is to allow them this access, but you’re one person I’m inclined to listen to, because you’re the one I trust absolutely.

  “That’s what ‘strategic advisor’ means.”

  Sharon had begun whispering, which meant, according to the routine their calls had fallen into over the week Jack had been in Moscow, it was time for them to talk. Jack turned and padded in bare feet past the table with the photos of her and Emma he took everywhere he went, across the carpet to the bathroom. He was about to turn on the water, in order to defeat the listening devices planted in every room. No fewer than four representatives of the Russian government swore there were no such listening devices. But ever since the first night when Secret Service personnel had discovered one, he and everyone in the president’s service were warned to take precautions when speaking to anyone while in the rooms, even if the conversation seemed innocuous.

  He heard voices rising up from the hot water pipes behind the toilet. Over the course of the week, he’d occasionally heard a drift of voices from the room on the floor below, but had never before been able to make out a single word. This time, a man’s and a woman’s voice were raised in altercation.

  “I hate you!” the woman said, her raw emotion vibrating through the pipe. “I’ve always hated you.”

  “You told me you loved me,” the man said, not plaintively, which might be expected, but with the guttural growl of a stalking male.

  “Even then I hated you, I always hated you.”

  “When I was pinning you to the mattress?”

  “Especially then.”

  “When I made you come?”

  “And what was I screaming in my own language, do you think? ‘I hate you, I’ll see you in hell, I’ll kill you!’”

  “Jack?”

  Sharon’s voice in his ear caused him to twist on the water full force. He was
n’t one to eavesdrop, but there was a vengeful, knife-edged sharpness to both voices that not only compelled listening, but made it almost impossible to stop.

  “Jack, are you at a party?”

  “In my room,” he said. “The people downstairs are going at it tooth and nail. How are you?” An innocuous enough question, but not when you were forty-six hundred miles apart. When so much distance separated you, there was always a question in your mind: What is she doing, or, its more far-reaching corollary, what has she been doing? It was possible to tell himself that her day proceeded precisely as it did when he was there: She got up in the morning, showered, ate a quick breakfast standing at the kitchen counter, stacked the dishes in the sink because there was time to either wash them or put on her makeup but not do both, went to work, shopped for food, came home, put on Muddy Waters or Steve Earle while she prepared dinner and ate it, read an Anne Tyler or Richard Price novel or watched 30 Rock if it was on, and went to bed.

  But he couldn’t help wondering if her day differed in some significant way, that it had been added to, that someone else might have inserted himself into her day or, far worse, her night, someone handsome, understanding, and available. Now he couldn’t help wondering whether this fantasy was jealousy or wish fulfillment. When, three months ago, Sharon had moved back into his house, he was certain they had reconciled the differences that had driven them apart in the first place. The intense physical desire for her that had first drawn him to her had never truly been entirely extinguished. But the fact was, they were still the same people. Jack was dedicated to his work, which Sharon resented, because she had no such dedication. She’d tried several different careers, all without feeling the slightest attachment to them. At first, she’d set herself up as a painter, but though technically accomplished she lacked passion—and nothing good, or at least worthwhile, can be created without it. Typical of her, she’d then drifted into dealing art, figuring to make easy money, but again her lack of conviction, or even interest, predetermined her failure. Finally, she was hired by a friend who worked at the Corcoran but was let go after less than a year. As a result, she now toiled joylessly in real estate, work that was tied to the vagaries of the economy, which, he imagined, could only further stir the pot of her simmering anger—at him, at the world, at her life without their daughter. He couldn’t help but think that she wanted him home for dinner every evening as a kind of revenge, for enjoying his job when she clearly didn’t. This was a desire that made him feel as if he were being strangled. He had always been an outsider—from his dyslexia to his unorthodox upbringing he’d never fit in and, as he’d finally been able to admit to himself if not to anyone else besides Alli Carson, he didn’t want to. One of the things that had bonded him with Alli was that they were both Outsiders. Sharon was conventional in most things; in all the others she was regressive. In the beginning, he’d loved her despite their differences, loved the smell of her, the sight of her both naked and clothed, the intense way she made love. Now Emma, or, more accurately, Emma’s memory, stood between them like an immense, immovable shadow that limned their differences with a cutting edge that was painful.