Killer Instinct

by Patterson, James

  I could practically read her mind as she was quickly deciding how to answer. On the one hand, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was like Las Vegas—what happens there, stays there. She couldn’t discuss anything specific involving her unit. Those were the rules.

  On the other hand, it was me who was doing the asking. I’d trusted her with my CIA past. The CIA was like Vegas even before Vegas was like Vegas. I’d even introduced her to the Byrdman—Julian Byrd—the J. D. Salinger of hackers in terms of reclusiveness. Vladimir Putin would kill to know how to find him. Literally. After all, Putin’s foreign bank accounts and cryptocurrency holdings didn’t magically disappear by themselves after the Russians meddled with our elections. Payback is a bitch. Huh, Vladdy?

  Of course, even if Elizabeth was fine telling me, there was still the issue of Tracy being at the table. Then again, Tracy had been the first to insist she stay with us while waiting out the news vans surrounding her apartment building. She was our guest. Plus, who was he really going to tell?

  “Ah, screw it,” said Elizabeth.

  After another swig of Johnnie Black, she told us about her trip up to Boston and the first case she’d been assigned to on the Task Force. Or rather, “this so-called case.” She clearly wasn’t happy about it.

  An Iranian-born professor at MIT, a nuclear physicist, had died accidentally during an act of self-love gone awry. That’s a very polite way of saying that he suffered a heart attack with a tiny liquor bottle inside him where the sun doesn’t shine.

  “So, what exactly are you investigating?” asked Tracy.

  “I’m not sure,” said Elizabeth. “My new boss—who hates me, by the way—said that no two words make him twitch more than Iranian and nuclear. So when an Iranian nuclear physicist suddenly turns up dead, he wants to look into it no matter how certain the police are that it was an accident.”

  “And you?” I asked. “How certain are you?”

  “This professor had been watching a porno in the hotel room and there was excessive Viagra in his system. He also was on prescription meds—OxyContin and an anti-inflammatory. It’s all embarrassing as hell, especially with his turning that liquor bottle into a sex toy, but it’s not exactly suspicious,” she said. “As for his colleagues and neighbors I interviewed up in Boston, they all said the same thing. Iran was his homeland, but this was his home. The guy loved America. Everything points to him being alone in that hotel room when he died, and given what he was doing, it makes complete sense.”

  “So, what’s changed?” I asked, motioning to her phone. “Why the huh?”

  “It’s the hotel where the professor was staying. Their surveillance cameras showed him leaving to meet some colleagues for dinner, but they didn’t have any footage of him returning that night. At least they didn’t until now,” she said. “Can I borrow your computer?”

  “Here, use mine,” said Tracy, getting up to grab his laptop from the living room. In the meantime, Elizabeth handed me her phone so I could see the text she got.

  “It’s from one of the detectives on the case,” she said.

  1 mystery solved. Another created.

  That was followed by a file number on what was the NYPD’s version of an encrypted Dropbox, a way for cops and detectives to share files securely. Sure, Julian could probably hack into the server with both eyes closed, but that was Julian. The Byrdman was one of a kind.

  Elizabeth logged into the site on Tracy’s laptop, glancing up at us before entering her JTTF password. Tracy and I jokingly made a show of covering our eyes to prove we weren’t looking, only to see that Annabelle thought we were playing peekaboo. She covered her eyes, too.

  “Here it is,” said Elizabeth, turning the screen so Tracy and I could see. She double-clicked the file. The footage flickered before smoothing out.

  “Is that the guy?” asked Tracy, pointing.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” said Elizabeth. “Dr. Jahan Darvish.”

  The recording was in color, albeit not very crisp. No surprise, as it came from a surveillance camera. Still, we could all clearly see the professor walking through the door of what looked to be a back entrance of the hotel.

  He wasn’t alone.

  There was a woman clutching his arm. She was wearing a white blouse with a scoop neck, a black skirt, and black high heels. That much we could see.

  But the mystery was what we couldn’t see.

  “Huh,” I said.

  CHAPTER 11

  I WAS sure of two things before going to bed. One, the sun would rise in the morning. Two, life would go on.

  We had watched the news coverage of the attacks into the night, and there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to dull the pain and heartache as some of the victims became known.

  There was the story of a mother and her twin nine-year-old sons visiting from Lincoln, Nebraska. The father had stayed behind at their midtown hotel for a work call while they toured the wax statues at Madame Tussauds New York, a Times Square favorite. In the blink of an eye, the man was now a widower and childless.

  There was the drama club from a high school in Flushing that was on a field trip to see a musical at the Lyric Theatre. Every student except two was killed by the explosions. One of the four chaperones, the vice principal of the school, survived only because she went back to the bus to get her sweater. She’s the one who spoke to the media, or at least tried to. The poor woman couldn’t stop crying.

  It was too soon for any official list of the dead to be released. The police were neither confirming nor denying any particular name. Eventually they would all be known, and all I could do was breathe in deeply and exhale at the thought of how close Tracy and Annabelle had come to being among them.

  “Are you okay?” asked Elizabeth.

  I was staring out the living room window early the next morning. I’d just changed Annabelle’s diaper, and Tracy was now dressing her.

  The sun had come up and life—no matter how cruel at times—would indeed go on.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “More importantly, how are you?”

  “I still feel like s-h-i-t, but I’ll be fine,” she said. She couldn’t shower because of all her bandages, but she was dressed and ready to go. “Thanks again for the change of clothes.”

  She had on one of my old gray hoodies and a pair of “mom” jeans left behind by Tracy’s sister when she last visited from Providence. While it ranked among the top ten of unflattering ensembles, leave it to Elizabeth to somehow look good in it.

  “Are you heading straight to work?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  I knew how anxious she was to get to her office and see what she could learn about that mysterious white glow obscuring the face of the woman in the hotel with the nuclear physicist. Elizabeth assumed either there was a technical glitch with the footage or someone had tampered with it. She had asked me what I thought, and I had told her I didn’t know.

  I hated lying to her.

  The glow was neither a glitch nor the result of tampering. Something else had caused it, but I couldn’t tell her what it was. Not yet.

  Or maybe not ever.

  What’s done is done, wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth. Were that only true for me.

  My past won’t leave me alone.

  In fact, it was about to come after me in more ways than I could’ve ever imagined.

  CHAPTER 12

  “YOU’RE GOING to be late,” I told Tracy after Elizabeth left.

  “So I’m a little late,” he said, continuing to shower kisses on Annabelle, who was playing with her Baby Stella doll in his lap on the living room couch. “I’m jealous. You get to be with our beautiful girl all day. And I have to …” His voice trailed off into a sigh.

  Sometimes the only thing worse than not booking an acting gig for a while is booking one that you dread. In Tracy’s case, it was a 3-D motion capture shoot. He was half doing a favor for a friend, Doug Chadwick, a programming engineer with a gaming company base
d in Hell’s Kitchen. It wasn’t a full favor for one simple reason. The gig paid pretty well. At least as well as one can imagine for jumping around all day wearing a green leotard covered with ping-pong balls.

  Doug had already called to apologize. He wanted to cancel the session in light of the attacks, but the studio was already paid for. He couldn’t postpone or get a refund.

  Tracy finally handed Annabelle to me and headed for the door. “Okay,” he said with a wave, “I’m off to win an Oscar.”

  Two minutes later, he was back. Or so I assumed when I heard the knock on the door. Tracy had a habit of forgetting his keys.

  I lifted Annabelle and carried her to the door with me. The previous owners of our apartment had been a little fanatical about security. In addition to motion-activated sensors in every room, they had installed a self-locking front door. It wasn’t the worst feature to have in a big Manhattan apartment building, so we didn’t change it.

  “Let me guess,” I said as I opened the door.

  Guess again, Dylan …

  The man standing in front of me seemed as startled as I was. “I’m sorry—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Are you Dylan Reinhart?” he asked.

  The average adult brain has anywhere from 100 to 500 trillion synapses. All of mine, no matter what the count, were firing at once. Something wasn’t right.

  A well-dressed Arab with a British accent had just shown up out of the blue on my doorstep. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I was fairly certain his question was a formality. He knew damn well that I was Dylan Reinhart.

  No point in my being coy. “That’s me,” I said. “I’m Dylan. And this here is Annabelle.”

  “She’s beautiful,” he said. His somewhat stoic demeanor softened. “Hello, Annabelle.”

  Annabelle buried her face in my shoulder. “As you can see she’s not terribly good with strangers,” I said. I didn’t actually punch the word strangers, nor did I have to. The word itself did the trick.

  “Oh, yes, of course. My apologies,” he said, reaching inside his suit jacket, which was clearly custom-tailored. He handed me his card. “I’m Benjamin Al-Kazaz.”

  Different cultures have different etiquette when it comes to giving someone a business card. The Chinese always use two hands. In India, you use the right hand and only the right hand to extend a card.

  But what we all do once we get the card is universal. It’s human nature. We all look at the card.

  BENJAMIN AL-KAZAZ, ATTORNEY AT LAW. No address, just a phone number.

  I looked back up at him, catching his stare. He was around my age, maybe a few years older. Clean-cut, no beard.

  What I noticed most, though, was the furrowed brow above his very dark eyes. It spoke volumes. He was not the bearer of good news.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

  “I’m here regarding an old friend of yours. Ahmed Al-Hamdah?”

  He could’ve stopped right there. I knew what was coming. The only question in my mind was When did it happen? But I couldn’t ask that because that would be revealing too much. About me. About my past.

  So instead I said what I was supposed to say. I said what Ahmed would say if a stranger had asked him about me.

  “I’m sorry, who?” I asked.

  Al-Kazaz nodded with a hint of a smile. “He told me that’s what you’d say.” The smile then disappeared. “I’m afraid your friend, Mr. Al-Hamdah, is dead.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “COME IN,” I said, stepping back from the doorway.

  “Thank you,” said Al-Kazaz.

  I led him into the living room, offering him a seat in one of the armchairs opposite the sofa. Annabelle was still playing shy, so I put her down beside her pink pop-up tent, which she absolutely adores, and then grabbed her Baby Stella doll. She smiled wide as I handed it to her. All was good in her world.

  My world was less so. A lot less.

  I’d first met Ahmed Al-Hamdah as a field operative in London. My cover was a research fellowship at Cambridge. His was as a ThM candidate at Oxford—a master of theology. He’d been recruited by MI6 to be their eyes and ears in the Baitul Futuh Mosque in South London, the largest mosque in Great Britain. Our paths crossed during a joint CIA and MI6 operation to foil a bombing at Westminster Abbey. We foiled it, all right, but it nearly got me killed. One chilly night in November, when my cover was blown, Ahmed saved my life.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” I asked Al-Kazaz. “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  I sat down on the sofa, grabbed a knee with each hand, and stared for a moment at the stranger I’d just invited into my home. The only things I knew about him were what he’d told me. In other words, I knew nothing about him.

  He, however, knew my name and where I lived. He also knew that Ahmed was at the very least a friend of mine. I couldn’t help but wonder: did this stranger know my past?

  “It’s been years since I’ve seen or talked to Ahmed,” I said. “Was there an accident? Had he been sick?”

  Fat chance. Ahmed had still been an operative, although now with the CIA. The Agency doesn’t exactly promote this fact in their recruiting pamphlets, but the probability of an operative dying in the line of duty is 28 percent. If you happen to be a Muslim operative, it jumps to 44 percent.

  Al-Kazaz shook his head. “Ahmed was killed in the Times Square bombings yesterday.”

  I didn’t have to fake my surprise. “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have to be honest with you, Dr. Reinhart. I’m not privy to what Ahmed really did for a living. I have my suspicions, but it wasn’t my place to ask,” said Al-Kazaz. “Ahmed told me he was an insurance executive when he hired me years ago, although I haven’t known many insurance executives who wanted to exchange a text every day in order to confirm they’re still alive.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “It was an unusual arrangement, and it’s what ultimately led me to you,” said Al-Kazaz. “Every day, precisely at noon, I sent Ahmed a one-word text. If he responded in a certain way, I knew it was him and that he was alive.”

  “May I ask what the one word was?”

  “It was actually a name. Gary.”

  “Gary?”

  “Yes. And every day for the last three years, without fail, Ahmed texted back the same response within sixty seconds.”

  “Cooper,” I said. It was pure reflex. Ahmed loved westerns. His favorite movie was High Noon. He used to talk my ear off over pints of Guinness about how cool Gary Cooper was.

  Al-Kazaz nodded. “Only yesterday, there was no Cooper,” he said. “I immediately had a bad feeling given what happened in Times Square. I called a friend of mine with the police. Ahmed’s wallet had been found on one of the bodies.”

  “I’m confused,” I said, which wasn’t entirely a lie. “Was my name in his wallet or something?”

  I knew that wasn’t a possibility, but the dots still weren’t connected. How did this attorney get to me via Ahmed?

  “I had one other responsibility besides texting Ahmed every day at noon,” said Al-Kazaz. “He gave me your name and your address. If he were to die, I was immediately supposed to come see you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He reached into his pocket. “To give you this,” he said.

  CHAPTER 14

  “WHAT IS that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Al-Kazaz, holding up the envelope. “I don’t think I’m ever supposed to know. But you are.”

  He leaned over the coffee table, handing it to me. It was your typical number 10 white envelope. No writing on either side. Sealed.

  “How long did you say you’ve been holding on to this?” I asked.

  “A total of three years, although Ahmed asked for it back a few times. I figured it was to make some changes. Updates, perhaps. He’d always r
eturn a new envelope to me within a day or two.”

  “Do you remember the last time Ahmed asked for it back?”

  Al-Kazaz thought for a second. “Maybe six weeks ago?”

  “And he never told you what was inside?” I asked. “Not even a hint?”

  “No, nothing,” he said. “I was curious, of course, but there was also a part of me that wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sure, I understand,” I said. “You’re an attorney. What you don’t know can’t be used against you, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ahmed obviously trusted you, though. You were good friends?”

  “Actually, no,” said Al-Kazaz. “We weren’t friends at all.”

  “I suppose that makes sense. A friend might ask too many questions. Besides, sometimes it’s easier to trust a stranger.”

  “You might be right.”

  “Still, it’s not like you two didn’t have anything in common,” I said. “Saudis with British accents? I can’t imagine that’s a coincidence.”

  “How did you know I was Saudi?”

  “I’m assuming based on your last name.”

  “Huh,” said Al-Kazaz. He looked impressed. “Most Americans wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “Most Americans have never traveled outside the United States,” I said. Something like half, in fact. Accordingly, most don’t know the definition of xenophobia.

  “Is that where you first met Ahmed?” he asked. “Overseas?”

  “Yes, we were both students in England. Some years ago we made plans to meet up in Saudi Arabia, but they fell through. I think Ahmed had to attend some insurance conference in Geneva,” I said. “What about you? Have you been back there recently?”

  “To Saudi Arabia? No, it’s been many years.”

  “Of course, who could blame you, right? Your country hasn’t exactly put out the welcome mat for Benjamins, have they?”

  He gave me a blank stare.

  “Oh, my goodness, do you smell that? Actually, I hope you don’t,” I said suddenly, turning to Annabelle. “I’m sorry, it seems someone is in desperate need of a diaper change.”