When the Mirror Cracks

by Jan Coffey

  “Does Elizabeth know?” he asks after I send the email. “About us?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I don’t think it’s any of her business.”

  “I agree. Let’s keep it that way.” He stacks the papers next to his laptop. “Everything is a lot more complicated than I imagined it would be. We just want to keep things going forward, smooth and easy.”

  “What do you mean complicated?”

  “You and Elizabeth are hiding something from me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He sends me a look that says I should give him some credit. “All you had to do was mention something about emails today, and she agreed to call some old friend of hers from thirty years ago. You blackmailed her.”

  “My mother and I have a lot of baggage. But my private life is mine,” I remind him. “Especially now.”

  “I want this sale to go off without a hitch, Christina.”

  “So do I.” I meet his gaze, happy that our conversation is about business. “Whatever is going on between Elizabeth and me, it has nothing to do with Externus.”

  “Really? Nothing?” He turns in his chair until he’s facing me. “Then why Istanbul? Have you wondered why Jax planned to meet with buyers here?”

  “I don’t know. Because it’s closer to Moscow? Because it’s neutral ground for all three potential buyers?” I think of what I revealed to Jax after my first trip. It was after our talk that he picked Istanbul as the location for the sale. “Good airport? Nice hotels.”

  “He could have done this so easily in Osaka last week. All the companies that are coming this week were there. He could have even pushed the price up by luring other midsize companies into a bidding war. Everyone in the business was there in Japan.”

  “Did you suggest it to him?”

  “Yeah, I did. But he was dead set against it. He said we’d hold the auction here. Period.”

  My mind drifts back to my conversation with Jax again. His marriage with Elizabeth was a business transaction from the start. He wanted to start a company. She knew how to raise funds and make him look good with investors. Beyond the business side of things, they were a terrible match. Each of them lived their own lives, had their own friends, and did their own thing.

  “I don’t want to do all this work and have it shit the bed at the last minute.” He’s not giving up.

  Kyle is a perfectionist. Whatever my problems are with our personal relationship, I’ve never had any doubt about his ability to do his job.

  “With the exception of this change we just sent off to the lawyer,” I ask, “what can go wrong?”

  “Elizabeth is your mother. So you should know.” He plants his elbows on his knees, keeping his voice low. “After what you said to her, I was afraid she’d turn out to be a loose cannon, so I did some poking around into her background.”

  “You went through Jax’s emails?” I ask, knowing Kyle is capable of digging into those same files.

  “No. I did a search on the dark web, just to make sure.”

  Deep within the internet, where regular search engines don’t go, the dark web is a world with no borders and no boundaries. If the internet most people know is the Wild West, then the dark web is located in the Nine Circles of Hell. As a programmer in this line of business, I understand the importance of this largely hidden back alley off the information highway. Laws and regulations don’t apply here. Nations can’t censor you. Knowing how to navigate its paths is a powerful skill, and Kyle and I both have it. I already guessed that the information Jax collected about Elizabeth’s past and her involvement with illegal arms sales must have come from there.

  “It’s clear she was CIA,” he tells me.

  “I know.” I shrug noncommittally. “Jax was digging up old dirt. That’s where I found the stuff. In his back-and-forth emails with a hacker.”

  “She was involved in some dirty business,” he continues. “Looks like she made some money from it. Money that might have gone into Externus.”

  “I don’t know what she did with her money from her old job. She always worked when I was growing up. She needed a paycheck.” I tell him the rest of what I know. “Jax collected pages of declassified material before he died. But how does all of that affect what we need to do?”

  “Then you know about the kill list?”

  “What kill list?” Kyle knows something that I don’t. Now I’m worried.

  The dark web did not get its name or reputation without good cause. It’s where criminal elements across the planet buy and sell a plethora of illegal commodities. Identities. Weapons. Sex slaves. Drugs. It’s a clearinghouse where contract killers find murder-for-hire offers and other lucrative employment opportunities from governments and businesses that want lethal results and no repercussions. It’s a meeting place where hideous crimes originate.

  “The kill list that has Elizabeth’s name on it.”

  “Who wants her dead?”

  “Two years ago, a Kurdish group came up with names of people they hold responsible for war crimes. Some of them were sued.”

  “I know about the civil suits, but my mother wasn’t named in them.”

  “Yeah, well, she was on another list. A hit list.”

  This is getting worse and worse. “So someone is going to come after her?”

  “I don’t know.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “The list is long, and it’s more than two years old. But I think it’s a Salman Rushdie kind of thing.”

  Before I was old enough to understand anything about politics, I heard that the British Indian writer was on some list for disrespecting Islam and the Prophet in his work. As far as I know, nothing ever happened to him.

  “I think Jax knew about it,” Kyle says. “And coming to Istanbul was intentional.”

  “Jax wouldn’t do that.” As soon as I say it, I’m not really sure. I try to force down my doubts that he might have intentionally put her life in danger by bringing her to Istanbul. “Besides, couldn’t someone hurt her in LA or New York or anywhere?”

  “I suppose. But I don’t really know.”

  “But you’re saying she’s in more danger here in Istanbul?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. She’s been here how many days now?”

  “Four.”

  “Has she left the hotel?”

  “We went to a hamam together, and she went to the consulate by herself. She’s been out in public. We went to the Spice Market.”

  “And nothing happened to her.” He frowns. “Maybe the best thing for all of us would be to keep her in the hotel, watch her, finish the sale, and get her on a plane home.”

  “She still has to go to the police station and the consulate for her passport.”

  “I told her I’m going with her tomorrow. But maybe your dinner plans for tonight are a bad idea.”

  “I already postponed them.”

  “Your mother asked me to make a dinner reservation for your birthday tomorrow night. I’ll change it to the restaurant here in the hotel.”

  “That sounds good.”

  He hesitates a moment and looks directly at me. “I suggest that we not mention any of this to her.”

  There’s no doubt in my mind that Elizabeth will be on the next flight out of Istanbul if she hears anything about a kill list, regardless of how old it is. She values her life way more than any money from this sale.

  26

  Elizabeth

  The people going down the city street swept Elizabeth along. The mask she was wearing pinched her face. The shoving, heaving stream surrounded her, crowded her, lifted her. It was difficult to breathe, and she couldn’t move right or left. She was one with this surging mass of humanity.

  With every step, pain shot upward from the soles of her feet. She’d lost her shoes somewhere. Her clothes hung on her body like a sack. The crowd jostled her, and the mask slipped. She managed to jerk a hand free of the crush and push it back in place.

  A sudden pop and a hissing soun
d, and she inhaled a sickening sweet smell, like rotting apples and chlorine. She knew what it was, and panic gripped her.

  On either side of the street, apartment buildings exploded and collapsed as she passed by them. They crumbled with deafening booms, sending up plumes of smoke. Dust and debris filled the sky and descended like a shroud on the crowds behind her.

  The rushing human current became frantic and turned into a stampede. Shouts and cries competed with the sound of buildings crashing and falling like dominoes.

  Elizabeth ran with the rest, but she knew she couldn’t let them in on her secret. She was the force causing the destruction around them. She was death.

  Another blast, and she tripped over something in the road. She went down hard.

  A body. A child’s body. She reared back on her knees. It was a thin, dirty bundle of rag and bone. She stared at the pale face. Elizabeth recognized her. She’d seen her in the Kurdish neighborhood and had imagined her running in the restaurant. She was everywhere.

  The crowd separated and veered around Elizabeth. Bodies became a blur, but they were a fortress, protecting her. They guarded the hand that had come to destroy them. They thought she was one of them, a victim, an innocent. They didn’t see beneath the mask.

  Smoke and dust formed a swirling maelstrom around her, muffling the sounds from above. It was just her now and this child.

  Against her will, she touched the emaciated cheek. The flesh was cold and lifeless. The Kurdish girl was dead.

  The child’s eyes slowly opened. Thin fingers reached up and pulled away the mask from Elizabeth’s face. Bloodless lips moved, and two words were whispered.

  Shaitan. Devil.

  * * *

  Elizabeth sat bolt upright in the bed, gasping. Grabbing her chest, she tried to breathe, but she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.

  Everything around her was dark, swirling, alive. Smoke filled the room, burning her eyes. The cloying odor of rotten fruit and chlorine was overwhelming. The hissing sound was coming from somewhere in the darkness.

  She had to be still sleeping. She was trapped in her nightmare. Wake up, Elizabeth.

  “Wake up.”

  Her scream echoed in the room. Tearing off the duvet, she leaped out of bed, landing on her hands and knees on the carpeted floor. She couldn’t think, but her instincts told her one thing. She had to get out.

  “Get out.”

  She scrambled on all fours toward the smudged shape of the door. Her fingers climbed the wood and found the knob. It slid out of her grasp, and she fell flat on her face. She pulled herself up again and yanked at the knob, but the door wouldn’t open. She pounded on it and screamed for help.

  She stopped as she realized the hissing was right beneath her. The smoke was coming in from under the door. Understanding ripped through her.

  Nerve gas.

  They had taken her to Kurdistan. The poison was swirling around her. Smoke filled the air. But Saddam was dead. She’d played her part in those attacks, but that war was over.

  Halabja had been the worst. She’d reported the eye-witness accounts in her memos to Langley. She’d seen and studied the photographs. There were so many.

  The streets had been littered with the Kurdish dead—men, women, children. So many young ones died, a grayish-green slime oozing from their mouths, their frames contorted, fingers grotesquely twisted in pain.

  The lucky ones died within minutes. As the shells exploded and the gases spread and settled, death was everywhere. First, the birds began falling, then animals, then humans. Once it reached the lungs and entered the blood stream, breathing stopped so abruptly that people simply dropped as if frozen. It was all there, recorded for posterity in the photographs.

  All across Halabja, apocalyptic horror spread with lightning speed. A woman in her kitchen, cutting beets, was found dead, still holding the knife in her hand. A father stretched across a doorway, his face forever petrified in a scream. In his arms lay a lifeless infant. Five thousand or more breathed in the chemicals and were dead within minutes.

  In her office in Ankara, she and the others pored over pictures taken by a journalist who arrived just after the assault. The Agency would point the finger at Iran, but she knew who was responsible. Elizabeth knew. She was the one wearing the mask.

  She stared at the tube spewing smoke and gas into the room from beneath the door. They were coming after her. It was her time to die.

  Panic obliterated all thought now. Crying for help, she threw herself at the door. Clawing at it, she twisted the knob, and it slammed open against the latch bar. She tore at it and stumbled out, gasping for air.

  The hallway was empty, silent as the grave, and she ran.

  27

  Christina

  A sharp knock at the door drags me up from the depths of sleep. I hear my name. It comes again, and I sit up with a start. My heart is racing, and I try to clear away the clinging dreamworld clouding my brain. The knocking becomes louder.

  “Christina!”

  Throwing back the covers, I jump out of bed. I open the door to Kyle’s room. He’s standing on the other side.

  “Let me in, Christina.” It’s Elizabeth’s voice, muffled by the banging.

  He sends me a curious look. “What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He walks in, and I close the adjoining door before hurrying to let her in. Everyone up and down the hall must be awake from this ruckus.

  The three of us had a late supper in the restaurant. Elizabeth was tipsy before we sat down, and she was totally wasted before we were done. I helped her up to her room. That was at ten thirty. I check the clock. It’s almost four in the morning.

  I open the door, and Elizabeth rushes in, pushing me back and yanking the door shut behind her. She’s wearing no shoes, no robe. She’s in her nightgown, and her eyes are wild.

  “Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re up! They’re after me.”

  “Who’s after you?”

  I try to go out and look out in the hall, but she puts her hand on the latch, stopping me.

  “I had a nightmare. Then I woke up. And there’s gas everywhere. Someone was pumping it into my room. I didn’t know where it’s coming from.” She grabs her chest. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”

  “Let me call for help.”

  She grabs my arm, stopping me. Behind me, Kyle switches on a light.

  “No. I’m fine. Terrified…but fine.” The moment she spots him, I’m forgotten. “Thank God you’re here!”

  Elizabeth walks right into his arm and starts crying. My mother is crying. He’s whispering some nonsense in her ear. And she holds onto him, her face pressed against his naked chest, her bare arms wrapped around him.

  Watching her is more than a little awkward. I’ve been relegated to the background. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying about her.

  “Did you see anyone?” I ask her. “Did someone break in?”

  “No. The door was latched.”

  “Was there gas? Did you really smell it?” Kyle asks.

  “I think so, but I’m not sure.”

  “Did you see anyone in the hallway?”

  “No one was outside.”

  “Wouldn’t the other guests smell it if it was coming from the hall?” I ask.

  “How do I know? I woke up and it was there.”

  Kyle is looking at me over her head with raised eyebrows. He doesn’t believe it either. This is a five-star hotel with security personnel that are on high alert, as it’s been just days since a room burglary. And the likelihood of a gas attack only in her room? A gas attack? Impossible. I wonder how many more drinks Elizabeth had after I helped her back to her room. And then there’s the sleeping pill that I know she takes every night when she travels. I decide it probably wouldn’t be wise to bring up any of those things.

  He tries to extricate himself, but she’s not letting him. Kyle is dressed only in his boxers. She’s in a thin nightgown. Every time I see
her like this, I get impressed all over again how good she looks for her age.

  Remembering that I’m only wearing a T-shirt and underwear, I grab the hotel robe off the end of my bed and stuff my arms into the sleeves.

  “There was a tube,” she tells Kyle. “Someone fed it under my door.”

  “What, a pipe bomb sort of thing?”

  “No. No. A plastic tube. The gas came through it.”

  “How do you feel now? Are you okay?” he asks, obviously trying to calm her down.

  “I can breathe. But I’m scared. I’m definitely not okay!”

  Kyle’s eyes meet mine over her head again. His expression is apologetic, and I shrug. In all the years I’ve watched men go in and out of Elizabeth’s life, I know she’s never excluded anyone based on his age, looks, wealth, or nationality. Before Jax, Elizabeth was an equal opportunity serial dater. Maybe if we were still together, I’d be pissed off at her for clinging to Kyle, but I no longer have any right to be.

  “Are you sure something did happen?” I say, loud enough to get her attention. “You said you had a nightmare.”

  She finally pulls away from Kyle and glares at me, saying nothing.

  “Did you call the front desk?” I get the second robe out of the closet and hand it to her.

  “No, I came here.”

  I want to crawl back into my bed and pretend none of this happened, but Elizabeth isn’t going anywhere.

  “How about if you and I go back to your room and check things out?”

  She turns to Kyle. “Would you come with me?”

  We are facing a minor dilemma. Kyle’s clothes are in the next room, and right now there’s no way we want to explain our breakup to Elizabeth. He sends me a pleading look.

  “No, I’ll go with you,” I pick up my room key, my phone, and the second key I have for Elizabeth’s room.