Killer Instinct

by Patterson, James

  Meaning, I was as convinced as I could be that Foxx was telling me the truth. The CIA hadn’t had Darvish killed.

  Now I just had to convince him that it might not have been the Iranian government either.

  Once again, I swiped left on my phone. “Here,” I said. Instead of a picture, this time it was a video. I pressed Play.

  “What am I looking at?” Foxx asked.

  “That’s Sadira Yavari giving a lecture at NYU about six months ago. And that guy there in the third row, second from the right,” I said, pointing, “is the same guy who came to my apartment posing as Ahmed’s lawyer.”

  Foxx tapped my screen, pausing the video to take a better look at Benjamin Al-Kazaz, or whatever his real name was. “You’re telling me there’s a connection between Professor Darvish and the Times Square bombings?”

  “There’s at least something,” I said.

  “You mean, someone.”

  “Yes, and if you kill her, whatever she knows dies with her.”

  “So instead we bring Yavari in,” said Foxx. “Have a conversation.”

  “And if she doesn’t talk?”

  “Then you’re right. Whatever she knows dies with her,” he said, folding his arms. Foxx could be as cold-blooded as they come when need be. “Why, you’ve got a better idea, Reinhart?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” I said.

  BOOK THREE

  I SPY A KILLER LIE

  CHAPTER 45

  “SPREAD YOUR legs, honey,” said the Mudir.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “You heard me,” he said, stepping out from behind the concrete pillar.

  Sadira Yavari had followed the Mudir’s every instruction up until that point. She’d parked her car on level 3 of the underground garage in Tribeca and taken the stairs down one more flight to level 4 to meet him. She’d brought the passports mailed to her NYU office from Tehran. She’d also left any and all weapons at home.

  Still, he wanted to frisk her. Or was he testing her?

  “Why would I ever spread my legs for you?” she said.

  The Mudir walked straight at Sadira, the heels of his Bruno Magli shoes scraping hard against the pavement. Reaching into his suit jacket, he removed his pistol, an MP-443 Grach, and raised it out in front of himself with his elbow locked. He didn’t stop until the barrel was pressed firmly against her forehead.

  “Are you questioning me?” he asked.

  Sadira didn’t answer. Nor did she move. She just kept staring straight back into his black-as-tar eyes. Right up until he pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The Mudir smiled. He liked what he saw, which was nothing. This woman didn’t flinch. The chamber was empty and she was still alive, and yet she didn’t even let out a sigh of relief, not the slightest noise or peep. Her life was nothing. The cause was everything.

  “As-salāmu ‘alayki,” he said, lowering his pistol. Peace be upon you.

  “Wa ‘alaykumu s-salām,” Sadira replied.

  None of her contacts back in Iran had described the Mudir to her. So few people knew what he actually looked like. He wore disguises. He’d had plastic surgery. Multiple times. Most of all, he knew how to move in the shadows. This was how he’d evaded intelligence agencies around the world. He would show up on their radars, yes, but only as a blip here and there. The key was making sure the blips never connected. They never did.

  Sadira continued to stare back at the Mudir. He was taller than she’d expected. Leaner. And the more she looked at his eyes, the darker they seemed to get. They were soulless.

  “Do you have them?” he asked.

  Sadira removed the folded envelope from the pocket of her slacks, handing over the three British passports that would provide him with three new identities. He checked each one carefully. They were perfect forgeries. Satisfied, he tucked them away inside his suit jacket, followed by the pistol.

  “We have mutual friends,” said the Mudir.

  “We have mutual interests,” said Sadira.

  “How much have you been told?”

  “You were infiltrated,” she said. “He was Muslim.”

  “He was CIA. He learned of our attack an hour before it happened.”

  “Are there others?”

  “No,” he said.

  The Mudir looked confident. He sounded confident. But they both knew he couldn’t know with absolute certainty if any other cells had been infiltrated.

  “Do you need my assistance?” Sadira asked.

  He wasn’t expecting the professor to offer her help. “Maybe,” said the Mudir. “We had a setback this morning. You’ll see it on the news. A house in Pelham.”

  “Will this change your timetable?”

  “No, the next attack will happen as planned.”

  The Mudir waited for her to ask the location, but she didn’t. That was good. This woman was smart. She understood how things worked. “You know how to reach me,” she said instead.

  Sadira turned to leave. The Mudir wasn’t finished.

  “I saw you speak,” he said. “A lecture.”

  “When?”

  “Some months ago. The Great Thinkers Summit, it was called.” The title obviously amused him. He was shaking his head, smiling. “Americans,” he said. “All they do is think.”

  “Worse,” said Sadira. “They always think they know best.”

  The Mudir nodded his approval. “We will teach them otherwise, won’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Every last one of them.”

  CHAPTER 46

  IT WASN’T easy, but I got Foxx to buy into my plan. It wasn’t Foxx I was worried about, though.

  “Now this is what I’m talking about,” said Tracy, cutting into a twenty-four-ounce bone-in rib eye that was literally bigger than his plate. Native Iowans don’t do fillets. “This was such a great idea, Dylan. Thank you.”

  Don’t thank me yet …

  We were at the Palm on West 50th Street, one of our favorite steak houses in the city. I’d made the reservation and called Tracy to meet me for an early dinner, but not before making sure Lucinda was available. She’s Annabelle’s babysitter, although we hardly ever use her.

  That’s what I was leveraging with Tracy. We needed a night out together, just the two of us.

  “I’m glad you were good with this,” I said. “I wasn’t sure you would be.”

  Tracy smiled knowingly at the subtext. A baby changes everything.

  He and I had caught the homebody bug after Annabelle’s arrival. Going out on a Sunday night—or any night—was tantamount to abandoning her. We both felt it, although Tracy felt it more. He knew it, too.

  “Our friends with kids are always telling us, right? How important it is to still make time for each other? But for some reason—”

  “Not just some reason,” I said. “The best reason in the world.”

  “I know. Annabelle is the greatest thing that ever happened in our lives, but we can’t forget about us. You and me.”

  “I agree.”

  “I know you do,” said Tracy. “That was my way of saying I’m the one who needs to do a better job of it.”

  “Hey, you’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Only because you got me here.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “That’s true,” he said. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

  Good point. So why the hell am I still stalling?

  “Speaking of you and me,” I said. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’d requested a quiet table and was planning to tell Tracy before we ordered. Then I was going to tell him before our steaks came. At this rate, it was never going to happen.

  I had to tell him. Now.

  “Uh-oh, that sounds a bit ominous,” said Tracy, tongue in cheek. “At least I’m already sitting down for this.”

  How do you tell someone who thinks he knows everything about you the one thing that
changes everything he thought?

  The answer is, I don’t know. For better or worse, after nearly a decade of keeping it a secret, I simply blurted it out.

  “I used to work for the CIA,” I said.

  Tracy didn’t even look up from his rib eye. “Ha-ha, very funny,” he said. “Can you pass the creamed spinach?”

  I didn’t pass the creamed spinach. I didn’t do anything except wait for Tracy to realize that I wasn’t kidding around.

  Finally he looked up at me. “Wait, what?”

  There was no turning back now.

  CHAPTER 47

  “IT’S TRUE,” I said.

  Tracy still didn’t believe me. Or was it shock?

  “Did you really just say that? You actually used to work for …” He couldn’t even finish the sentence.

  “The CIA, yes.”

  “Like, as an analyst? Behind a desk?”

  “I was an operative,” I said. “I was in the field.”

  Tracy couldn’t stop blinking. “How? Where? When?”

  He thought he had me with the timing. He’d known me since college. We hadn’t always been together, though.

  “It was after I was at MIT and before we started seeing each other again,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed. He was running it through his mind. “That’s when you were at Cambridge. Your fellowship.”

  “The fellowship was actually my cover.”

  “Your cover? You mean, you lied to me?”

  “Technically, I lied to everybody.”

  “I’m not everybody, Dylan.”

  He was right. This isn’t going so well, is it?

  “I’m truly sorry,” I said. “The last thing I wanted to do was keep this from you. But it was really for your—”

  “Don’t say it!” He laid down his fork and knife, and folded his arms angrily. “Don’t give me the bullshit line about it being for my protection.”

  “It’s not a bullshit line. It’s what it is,” I said. “Leaving the CIA didn’t erase my past with the Agency. There were risks. There still are risks.”

  This was the only part of my confession that I had specifically worked out in my head beforehand. It was my pivot. The segue. The point at which I would put it all out on the table and tell him that I was about to get involved again, after all these years, with another CIA operation—one of my own making, no less.

  But Tracy had a pivot of his own.

  “You say you wanted to protect me, but what I want to know is what you were required to do,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  Again, he was right. Tracy, the Yale Law School grad, had shot a giant hole in my defense. I was simply procrastinating with my answer. I didn’t want to lie to him again. Not ever. I couldn’t.

  “Just hear me out, okay? Let me explain.”

  The scenario I feared most when I left the Agency had happened. My past had caught up with me. In fact, he’d literally shown up at my front door. Our front door, I told Tracy.

  The man who called himself Benjamin Al-Kazaz was a threat to our family and God knew how many others. One way or another he was linked to the death of Professor Darvish. He had to be—I was convinced. His being in the audience at Sadira Yavari’s lecture was no coincidence.

  I explained it all to Tracy, including how everything started. My old friend and fellow operative, Ahmed, who had saved my life in London, had died while trying to prevent the Times Square bombings.

  “You and Annabelle were supposed to be there in that Disney Store,” I said. That had to help him understand.

  Eventually, though, there was nothing more for me to tell him. I’d done all the talking. It was Tracy’s turn.

  “Say something,” I implored him. “Please.”

  He’d sat there stone-faced the entire time while listening. The usual glint in his eyes was gone. This man didn’t look at all like Tracy. It was as if he were a total stranger.

  I could only imagine how I looked to him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Tracy had pushed back from the table and stood up. “I’m leaving,” he said.

  “I understand. It’s a lot to process,” I said. I motioned to the waiter for the check. “We can talk more about it at home.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

  It hit me. He didn’t just mean the restaurant. “Tracy, please don’t …”

  But he was done listening to me. He was done with me, period. “Don’t come back to the apartment for at least an hour. I need to pack.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I’m taking Annabelle with me.”

  CHAPTER 48

  MY GOD, what have I done?

  Tracy wanted an hour to pack. He could’ve taken all night, or at least until they kicked me out of the Palm. Even if I wanted to move from my chair, I couldn’t. It wasn’t numbness or paralysis. That’s when you can’t feel anything. I was feeling everything. And it hurt like hell.

  “Would you like another, sir?” asked the waiter.

  I was staring down at the only thing remaining on my table, every dish and plate having long since been cleared. It was a Macallan 18. My third. Or was it my fourth?

  “Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not?”

  “My sentiments exactly,” came Elizabeth’s voice over my shoulder. “Make it two, and make ’em doubles.”

  I looked up to see her loop around the waiter and sit down across from me. There was no need to ask how she knew where I was. Tracy had surely told her when she arrived at our apartment.

  “Is he really packing?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so. He was actually just about to leave when I got there,” she said. We both knew my next question, but I couldn’t even get the words out. She answered me anyway. “Yes. He had Annabelle with him.”

  I reached for the Macallan and downed whatever was left in the glass, every last drop. “Did I make a mistake?” I asked. “Should I have not told him?”

  “Not telling him in the first place was the mistake, Dylan. That’s why he’s so upset. Tonight, though, you did the right thing.”

  “Really? Because it sure doesn’t seem that way.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I also know Tracy. He’ll eventually understand.”

  I wanted to believe her. I needed to believe her. The alternative was too hard to imagine. Still, even if she was right … “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” I asked.

  I would’ve bet a gazillion dollars on Elizabeth’s answer as the waiter returned with our double Macallans. She was going to tell me two words. Be patient.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have a gazillion dollars on me.

  “The first thing you’re going to do is enjoy your drink,” said Elizabeth. “Because I fully intend to enjoy mine.”

  “Is there a second thing?” I asked. It definitely felt like it.

  “As a matter of fact there is,” she said. “But first, cheers.”

  The overall lighting in the Palm could best be described as an indoor solar eclipse, but as Elizabeth leaned forward out of the shadows to clink my glass I got a much better look at her face. “What are those from?” I asked, pointing.

  There were two butterfly bandages along her hairline. As opposed to the other bandages from her heroics in Times Square, these were new.

  “Oh, this,” she said, pointing up at her forehead. “I think it was from one of the shingles.”

  “Shingles?”

  “Yeah, from when the house blew up.”

  “What house?”

  “The one where a bearded guy with an AK-47 tried to kill me this afternoon.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Elizabeth stopped deadpanning and started to explain, beginning with the man who approached her in Starbucks, which ultimately led her out to Pelham to meet a young Muslim named Gorgin, who was going to help her until the be
arded man with the AK-47 showed up. Now Gorgin was dead and the house was leveled, blown to smithereens by a one-two punch of C-4 and piped-in gas, which she managed to escape with only seconds to spare.

  “And I thought I was having a bad day,” I said.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot. That mystery man in Starbucks? He’s a friend of the mayor.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I made a stop at City Hall before heading out to Pelham,” she said. “Deacon admitted the guy was an informant for him.”

  “Did he give you a name?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Which brings me to the second thing you’re going to do after we enjoy our drinks. You’re coming with me tonight to find Deacon.”

  “To do what?”

  “Hold him steady while I punch him in the face.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “His informant nearly got me blown up today,” she said. “You should’ve seen the flames.”

  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorched. Still, “Deacon’s never going to tell you who the guy is,” I said.

  Elizabeth let out a defeated sigh. “You’re right.”

  Whoever said Misery loves company never saw anything like the look on her face. As bad as I was feeling, I felt even worse for her.

  “C’mon,” I said, signaling for the check. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “And go where?”

  “You’ll see,” I said.

  CHAPTER 49

  ELIZABETH KEPT asking me where I was taking her, and I kept answering that she’d find out soon enough. It was hardly helping her mood, but I knew what I was doing. Had I actually told her where we were going, she would’ve turned right around.

  “For the last time, who lives here?” she asked.

  We were standing outside a townhouse on East 84th Street, off Third Avenue. It was a decent building but nothing out of the ordinary. At least from the outside.

  “Just do me a favor, will you? Stand right over here,” I said, pulling her arm.

  I’d positioned her in front of the door and directly in line with the overhead security camera.