A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  A town cop was already keeping people away from the library entrance, but Cole stood in the growing crowd and watched, listening to the speculation of people around him—there had been a fistfight, a gunfight, a fire, a bomb threat. More cops arrived, two of them stringing police tape across the top end of the parking lot nearest the library entrance. Eventually a tight group of cops exited the library, surrounding a man in handcuffs. The crowd pressed forward, buzzing with excitement, two cops keeping them back. The man in handcuffs matched Dawes’s earlier description—midforties or so, dark hair, green Henley shirt, jeans. Following them were three other men, two in police uniforms on either side of a third in jeans and a blue chambray shirt, his head down. He was not in handcuffs, Cole noted, and then someone in the crowd moved out of the way and Cole saw that the man in the chambray shirt was wearing a badge on a chain around his neck. He was a cop too. Off duty, maybe? But the other cops were definitely escorting him. Cole raised his phone and took a picture of the man in handcuffs, then one of the off-duty cop. Something twisted savagely in his gut. Dawes had been planning to marry that girl—Mandy. Cole had heard over the radio the very last thing Dawes said in this life, about how he’d wanted to take Mandy to Malibu, where he’d planned to propose to her. I swear, Cole said silently to Dawes, I will get that man for you. Then he backed away through the crowd and walked around the block to the Suburban, and Zhang drove through town and turned left on 106, heading back down the mountains toward Dillard.

  Now Cole stared at the photo of the man in handcuffs while Zhang crossed the state line into Georgia, the road winding downhill. The photo’s resolution was crisp and clear and showed the man’s face in three-quarter profile, dark hair touched with silver, his expression calm.

  “You going to call Jonas?” Zhang said. “He ought to be in Dillard by now.”

  Cole stared at his phone, memorizing the man’s face. The man stirred something in his memory, a fleeting thought that vanished, like trying to grasp smoke.

  “Cole?” Zhang said.

  “Have to make another call first,” Cole said, still staring at his phone.

  Zhang shifted in his seat. “Okay, but we—”

  “I’ll call him when I’m goddamned ready,” Cole said, looking over at Zhang. “Clear?”

  Zhang kept his eyes on the road and just nodded, and Cole went back to staring at the photo. Engraving the man’s face in his brain. Then he checked to see what cell reception was like and made a phone call. Two rings on the other end and then it was picked up.

  “Mr. Cole,” Kobayashi said.

  “I’m sending you two pictures,” Cole said. “I need the men in them identified. The first one is in handcuffs. The second one is between two police officers and has a blue shirt and a badge around his neck. Probably an off-duty cop.”

  “Of course,” Kobayashi said, smooth and unruffled. “May I ask why?”

  Cole stifled an urge to scream obscenities into the phone to crack the other man’s calm. “The man in handcuffs is helping the girl somehow. We think he has the flash drive. Two of my men tried to stop him. The cop got involved somehow, and now both of my men are down.” This last was particularly hard for Cole to say. He glanced at Zhang, who continued to keep his eyes on the road but was now clenching his jaw.

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally Kobayashi said, “I trust you can contain this.” Meaning don’t fuck this up.

  “Affirmative.” Don’t fucking question me.

  “Very well,” Kobayashi said. “I’ll call you.” He hung up.

  Asshole, Cole thought. To Zhang he said, “When we get to the bottom of the mountain, turn left. There’s a diner just down the road. We’ll rendezvous with Jonas there.”

  And then, he thought, we are going back up into those mountains to kill that motherfucker.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Hi,” the older woman said, holding what Annalise now saw was a casserole dish wrapped in some kind of insulated carrying bag. “You must be Nick’s niece. I’m Lettie.”

  Annalise just stared. Some part of her wondered if it was the shock of surprise or the final straw that broke her sense of caution, but she just felt done with running, done with hiding, done with poking around her uncle’s cabin. A nice old lady showing up with a meal? She’d take it.

  “I’m Annalise,” she said.

  Lettie nodded her head. “Annalise. That’s a lovely name,” she said. “He’s not home, I take it?” Annalise shook her head. “Well,” Lettie said, “I brought this for him.” She held up the casserole dish. “A dinner date.”

  “Oh,” Annalise said. She didn’t know how to process that. Her uncle was kind of old, but this lady looked like a grandmother in her red sweater set and pearls, a black quilted purse slung over one shoulder.

  Lettie smiled wryly. “Not that kind of date,” she said.

  “Oh,” Annalise said again. They stood there for a moment, looking at one another, and then Annalise said, “Come in? Please?”

  “Thank you,” Lettie said, and Annalise backed into the kitchen to allow Lettie to enter. The older woman put the bag with the casserole dish on the counter. “I invited your uncle to dinner when he came by my store yesterday, but I knew he would just sit here and brood, so I decided to invite myself over and not give him a choice. It’s pot roast. I’ve been letting it cook all day.” Lettie eyed Annalise briefly from head to foot. “I guessed your size well enough from what your uncle could tell me. Do your clothes fit?”

  “Yes,” Annalise said. “Yes, ma’am,” she corrected herself. “Thank you.” Annalise had so many questions but was distracted by the rich, beefy smell of the pot roast. Her stomach rumbled. Then she winced as a cramp rippled through her gut.

  “Honey, are you all right?” Lettie said.

  “Yes,” Annalise said, smiling through it.

  “Oh,” Lettie said. “Are you having your period?”

  Annalise gawped. In her experience, women of a certain age said things like your time of the month or lady business or moon time. Not period.

  Lettie laughed. “You should see your face. It’s like I just walked into church and farted.”

  Annalise laughed at that, a single loud ha! followed by a second of silence, followed in turn by peals of laughter that left her breathless. Lettie just smiled and let her laugh, then reached over and patted her shoulder. “The older I get, the more I just call things as they are,” she said. “Don’t have time to dance around what I mean to say.” She rummaged around in her purse, then pulled out a slim tube wrapped in crinkly paper and held it out to Annalise. A tampon.

  Annalise reached out and took it. “Thank you,” she said, and she meant it, but she hesitated. Lettie was the same age as her grandmother. Why would she—

  “Yes, I’m old,” Lettie said. “But I’m not dead. I have fibroids. Tumors in my uterus. They’re benign, but they make me bleed, so I still use those.” She nodded at the tampon in Annalise’s hand. “Go on. I’m not going anywhere.”

  When Annalise returned from the bathroom, she found Lettie in the kitchen, peering at the oven. “Can’t tell how to turn this on,” she said. “It’s like microwaves. Every single one is different. Ah.” She pressed a button, then another, and the oven fan whined to life. “Hey presto!” Lettie said. She got the casserole dish out of its bag and stuck it in the oven. “This is just to keep it warm,” she said. “Until your uncle gets home.” She cocked her head to one side. “Any idea when he’s coming back?”

  “No,” Annalise said. “But I’m sure it’ll be soon. He had to go to the library.” She didn’t want Lettie to leave.

  “Well,” Lettie said, looking at the oven and then back at Annalise. “Shall we sit down? I do a lot of standing in my shop, and right now my feet could use the rest.”

  Annalise led the way into the great room, uncertain whether to act like a host or a guest. Lettie solved that for her by getting each of them a glass of water before taking a seat on the sofa. Annalise
sat on the ottoman at the foot of her uncle’s armchair.

  “So,” Annalise said, perhaps a bit too cheerfully, “you’re, like, friends with my uncle?”

  “That’s right,” Lettie said. “I was one of the first people in town to meet your uncle. He walked into my shop with his wife Ellie—she was such a pretty thing—and wanted to buy a map of the area. This was years ago, before they bought this place. They came back to visit every summer, renting a house or staying in a B and B.” Lettie smiled. “Ellie loved it here. Loved the mountains, always asking me about hiking trails. She would drag Nick all over the place. I think they walked every path and trail within ten miles of here. Until she couldn’t anymore.” Lettie shook her head and took a sip of water. “Her passing was so sad. She was too young.”

  “Do you … do you know how my aunt died?” Annalise said, the words my aunt just as strange as the idea of asking how someone had died.

  Lettie’s eyebrows rose in astonishment. “You don’t know?” she said. Then she closed her eyes briefly, her mouth a firm line of disappointment. “I’m sorry, Annalise. That wasn’t appropriate of me to say.”

  Annalise shrugged. “It’s all right. I never even met my uncle until a couple of nights ago.”

  “Well,” Lettie said. “It was cancer. Pancreatic. Nothing they could really do except make Ellie as comfortable as they could. Your uncle was a saint to her. Took care of her right here in this house. He was a professor at Western Carolina then, they’d been planning to retire here, but when Ellie got sick, he took a leave of absence. She worked for the World Bank and was still trying to work from home, right up until the end.” Lettie sighed and looked into her glass. “Some people are just a light, a presence that lifts others. Ellie was like that. When she died, your uncle …” Lettie paused, motionless, then set her water glass down. “He was devastated. Lost. He buried her at the Episcopal church just down the road, same place my husband and parents are buried, and then he shut himself up here, cut off his phone. Cut himself off from everyone. Our rector tried to reach out a few times, but Nick refused. Politely, of course, but he said he preferred to be alone. Truth to tell, I’ve been worried about him.” Lettie let her hands fall on her knees and smiled. “But now you’re visiting, and it’s my guess that’ll do him a world of good. Not to put any pressure on you, of course.”

  Pressure on her? Annalise laughed. No, no pressure. Her laughter wasn’t like earlier—this was hard-edged, closer to crying. Her parents had been killed and she was essentially homeless except for the hospitality of her uncle, a virtual stranger with multiple secret identities, but what pressure? She doubled up, still laughing, her stomach hurting. Dimly she understood that if she kept laughing like this, she would end up shrieking. She could see concern in Lettie’s eyes, maybe even the beginnings of fear, and she made an effort to get herself under control. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say.

  Lettie got up from the sofa and came to stand by Annalise, putting an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, honey,” Lettie said, and her kindness and empathy made Annalise cry harder, but it felt cleaner, like she was purging herself of something rather than spiraling out of control. Lettie just stood there, murmuring to her and keeping her arm around Annalise’s shoulders, and eventually Annalise’s grief ebbed enough that she stopped crying and could concentrate on breathing slowly, in and out. Lettie handed her a tissue and she wiped her face and blew her nose—God, how much Kleenex was she going to go through?—and just sat there, leaning against the kind older woman, breathing in her scent of powder and roses and something like carnations. She smelled like a cool grandmother. The thought almost made her laugh with embarrassment, and then she gasped. Her grandparents on Hilton Head—she had almost forgotten about them. What would they be thinking? Were they looking for her? Did they think she was dead? Or worse, that she had something to do with her parents’ deaths?

  She felt Lettie shift next to her, probably worried she was going to freak out again. She took a shuddering breath. “I’m okay,” Annalise said. “I’m okay.”

  Lettie squeezed her shoulders. “In that case,” she said, “we should go ahead and start on that pot roast before it dries out. Your uncle can just eat the leftovers.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Nick’s memories had finally run him to ground.

  After he lost Ellie, he’d been frozen in a limbo that had allowed him neither the comfort of memory nor the relief of action. The shock of Jay’s death and the subsequent arrival of Annalise had thawed him, forced him to act, kept him churning forward and precluded him from stopping to think. But now, stranded alone in a jail cell with nothing but time and his own thoughts, he fell into his own past like a man falling backward, arms wide, into a deep lake.

  “BOTTLECAP,” BHANDARI HAD said.

  They were in the US embassy in Beirut, in one of the bunker-like conference rooms below ground. Nick hated these airless rooms, felt the claustrophobic weight of the embassy above him. He’d have much preferred an outdoor café. But the embassy was routinely swept for listening devices and deemed a safer location for such meetings. And recently Hezbollah had rolled up a CIA network in Beirut, crowing on television how they had seen and identified ten CIA officers meeting with their Lebanese agents in fast-food restaurants.

  Joe Martoglio snorted and rotated his thick neck, the vertebrae cracking. “Bottlecap? Christ, the names they come up with.”

  “I came up with it,” Bhandari said. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, giving her the appearance of a hawk with kohl-rimmed eyes. “So shut your fat Italian mouth and listen for once.”

  Chitrita Bhandari was on a fast track to a leadership position in Analysis. All the women Nick had worked with in the Agency were outstanding professionals with spines of steel who delivered the goods quietly while some of their male counterparts postured and argued. Rita Bhandari stood out by openly challenging the Agency’s old boys’ network, standing toe-to-toe with senior colleagues and always producing results. Even her wardrobe was a provocation—she favored elaborate saris and upswept hairdos. Today she wore a magenta-and-gold sari that looked like stylized samurai armor.

  Nick didn’t know how deliberate her clothing choice was, but it was fitting. The Syrian civil war was a disaster in the making. At least sixty thousand people had died in the conflict so far. The Lebanese border was closed, but that wasn’t stopping Hezbollah fighters from crossing into Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad. Syrian opposition forces couldn’t agree on anything other than fighting Assad. And now rockets carrying chemical weapons had allegedly been used near Aleppo. Langley wanted intel, which was why Bhandari had flown in from a NATO intelligence summit in Brussels.

  “Dr. Anthony,” Bhandari said, turning those hawklike eyes on him. “How reliable is your source?”

  She meant Tariq Nasser, a Syrian professor and a friend of Nick’s. He was passionate about both chemistry and teaching, with a sense of humor that always livened up a seminar or conference session. When eventually Nick had made overtures to Tariq about potentially sharing intelligence on the regime, Tariq had eagerly accepted. He loathed Assad and had gleefully recounted how Assad’s wife Asma apparently referred to her husband affectionately as duck, which had led to protestors in Damascus holding up squeaking yellow ducks.

  “How reliable? I’d say fifty-fifty,” Nick said. “Tariq is a good man. But he’s never asked to meet like this before.”

  Bhandari shrugged. “Dr. Nasser is a chemistry professor who’s outraged at the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people. He can’t meet you at a conference and pass you information, not now.”

  “Tariq wouldn’t condone any use of chemical weapons,” Nick said. “And I agree that if he had any intel, he would do his best to get it to us. But he’s a teacher, not a spy.”

  “Says the history professor,” Martoglio said, his beefy arms folded across his chest. An Agency veteran, Martoglio was the senior CIA officer in Beirut.

&nb
sp; Nick ignored Martoglio’s gibe. “A clandestine meeting at night at the Syrian border? That’s not Tariq.”

  Bhandari raised an eyebrow. “And yet that’s what he asked for.”

  “That’s what I received,” Nick said. “A coded message in an online forum. We can’t be sure Tariq wrote it freely.”

  “He didn’t use the duress code, right?” Martoglio said. “Look, Rita said it herself. Nasser can’t meet you at a conference in Rome and hand you some documents in the men’s room. And we need any intel we can get out of Syria. If Assad is using chemical weapons—”

  “He is,” Bhandari said.

  “—and we can get proof of it, that’s a game changer,” Martoglio said. “We could end the war.”

  “Which is what everybody wants,” Bhandari said. “So let’s make it happen.”

  “Nick and I will drive up to Arsal tomorrow afternoon,” Martoglio said. “That’s like ten, twelve klicks from the border. Around 2100, we’ll head up to the rendezvous point. With an armed escort, of course.”

  Bhandari quirked her mouth. “Security contractors,” she said disdainfully. The CIA preferred using their own PMOOs, or paramilitary operations officers, for this kind of covert action.

  Now it was Martoglio’s turn to shrug. “The PMOOs in-region are already committed to other missions or injured,” he said. “And you can’t trust the locals. You got Hezbollah, Syrian security agents, pro-Assad militias, al-Qaeda, take your pick. I’ve hired a good team. Mountains are full of smuggling routes; it’ll be easy to get in and out. We meet Nasser, he talks to Nick and passes along whatever he has to offer, and we leave. We’ll be back here by morning.”

  “I’ll leave the operational details to you,” Bhandari said, then stood. Nick and Martoglio stood as well. Although both men were taller than Bhandari, she commanded the room. Nick realized he and Martoglio both leaned in toward her, out of deference. “Good luck, gentlemen,” she said, shaking each of their hands before she left, her sari trailing gloriously behind her.