“Oh, and people hear FBI and can’t wait to get to know you.”
“Your late husband, what’d he think about you joining the bureau?”
“That wasn’t in my file? I’ve asked fewer personal questions in a criminal interrogation. You want to share personal information? Why’d your fiancée dump you after Cameroon?”
He turned his head. Glanced out the passenger window.
“I was in Leavenworth. She couldn’t see a future with a dishonorably discharged ex-con.”
His voice was sad, and for a second, she wished she’d not asked. But only for a second.
He checked the F-type’s center console navigation screen. They were approaching Delaware.
“Why’d you marry him? Your late husband,” he asked.
“I loved him. Why else?”
“What was he like?”
“Nothing like you.”
“Ha, I already guessed that. You’re not my type, Mayberry. You’d be a challenge to live with.”
“I’m sure your fiancée had lots of reasons besides you being an ex-con to leave.”
He ignored the slight.
“My husband was a voyeur. They all are—reporters. I intrigued him. My job intrigued him. He was writing a story about the FBI when we first met. I refused to talk to him. That was like blood in the water for a shark.”
“I’m guessing he married you for your money.”
“Why do you have to be so insulting?” she asked. “But no, that wasn’t a factor. Noah didn’t care about money. What attracted him was crawling into other people’s skins. The more complicated, the better. I used to say he was fascinated by others’ lives because it kept him from having to examine his own. And he was much better than you at asking questions so he could dodge answering them. What did Rose Kim give you?”
“Every man wants a rich wife. Only rich people say money doesn’t matter and the truth is, it usually matters most. Tell me, Mayberry, where does being rich, really rich, start nowadays—ten million, fifty million? Three hundred million?”
“The reason I find you irritating, Garrett, has nothing to do with your bank account.”
“We’re talking about your husband, not me. Or does asking questions about him make you uncomfortable?”
“Does me asking you about Rose Kim and what she gave you make you uncomfortable?”
She downshifted and pulled into the E-ZPass lane to enter the New Jersey Turnpike.
She said, “Noah made everyone feel as if they were the most fascinating person he’d ever met when he interviewed them, rather than verbally waterboarding them like you do. Are you going to answer my question or keep avoiding it?”
“I’ve never been accused of being a smooth talker,” Garrett said. “I’ll give you that.”
“Since we’re making comparisons, I used to wonder how he could get people to share their innermost secrets and then write a story using those secrets that totally eviscerated them.”
“Cold. But that’s what reporters do.”
“Like I said, a voyeur. Not a stayer. He met people, heard their stories, and moved on.”
“He married you, didn’t he? Stayed on?”
“Yes.”
But she didn’t elaborate, and he’d expected a more definitive reply. Indignant even.
“You did love him, right?” Garrett pried.
“Yes, but that is none of your business.”
For several moments, they watched the scenery in silence.
“When we got back to camp in Afghanistan,” Garrett said, “reporters would run up, stick a microphone in our faces. ‘What’s it like?’ I never commented.”
“Noah would have gotten you to comment.”
“No, he wouldn’t have. I’m sure he was as good as you claimed, but that’s not it. How do you describe what happens when you’re in the suck? What we did? What we saw? War is not something you can understand unless you experience it. Ever play craps? It’s the difference between watching someone gambling and being the guy who puts his entire paycheck on the line, knowing he’s not going to eat for a week or maybe a month. Only in war, it’s not money that’s at risk. It’s coming home in a body bag.”
“Noah was blown to bits in a helicopter that he never should have boarded,” she said angrily. “He understood war, even if he didn’t carry a gun.”
Her face was flush.
“With all your money, Mayberry,” he said quietly, “why aren’t you sitting on some island drinking piña coladas working on your tan and painting your toenails? Did your husband figure you out? Crawl into your skin?”
“I don’t drink piña coladas. I don’t want skin cancer. I pay someone else to give me a pedicure. And your last question is none of your business.”
Again, neither spoke. This time for several minutes and then she said quietly, “I’m not a rabbit.”
“A rabbit?”
“That’s how people the likes of Gromyko and Kalugin see our world. There are those who get eaten and those who eat them. And then there are those of us who protect the rabbits from being eaten. With all my money and flaws, that’s who I am. That’s what Noah finally understood when he got into my skin. I care about other people.”
She continued staring straight ahead.
“I see that,” he said. “Suboxone.” The word came out so quickly, his admission seemed to surprise even him. “That’s what Rose Kim gave me. I have an opioid addiction. Got hooked after being burned in Cameroon. The Navy, hell, it didn’t care when I was recovering. Didn’t care when I was in Leavenworth. Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet, Opana. At first it was for physical pain.”
“What about now?” she asked. “I have a right to know if we continue to work together.”
Her cell rang. She pushed a button on her car’s steering wheel answering it.
“Duwar’s rental car is parked at the Thirtieth Street Station in Philly,” Kim said over the Jaguar’s speakers. “I hacked into the rail station’s surveillance system. Footage of him boarding a northbound train.”
“No one ever inspects bags on a train,” Garrett said.
“Get the bureau to stop the train,” Mayberry said.
“Not so simple. New Jersey Transit. The train he boarded already has made several local stops. Most of those stops don’t have security cameras. I informed Marcus, and he relayed the information to Sally North, at the bureau. They’re all over this. Austin said that Harris wants both of you to turn around and come back. He wants to minimize your involvement.”
“I’m FBI,” Mayberry replied. “Where are they setting up?”
“Penn Station,” Kim said.
“They’ll need someone who has seen Duwar’s face to ID him,” Garrett said.
“My car’s GPS says we’ll get to Penn Station by—”
Kim interrupted her. “I’m tracking you on my computer. Actually, I’ve been listening to your conservation since you left.”
“What the—” Mayberry stammered.
“Intercepting conversations is an IEC specialty,” Kim replied. “And your little tête-à-tête has been most entertaining.” They heard a woman giggle. Rose must have been with Kim.
“Penn Station is the busiest rail hub in the country,” Mayberry said, ignoring his comments. Her memory bank of details was kicking in. “More than six hundred and fifty thousand passengers go through there every day. That’s more than all three major airports combined. A needle in a haystack.”
“What’s this Jag do?” Garrett asked. “Aren’t FBI agents immune to speeding tickets?”
Few trains were entering Penn Station when they arrived shortly before midnight. It was swarming with heavily armed law enforcement officers. Mayberry found Sally North at the bureau’s makeshift command center.
“What’s the latest on Duwar?” Mayberry asked.
“Who’s Duwar?” North replied. “Do you mean Mirzo Rakhmon?”
Mayberry realized that neither Director Harris nor Marcus Austin had disclosed Rakhmon’s actual
name or past.
North said, “We didn’t let the train Rakhmon boarded in Philly stop here. Kept it going north out of the city and then side-railed it. No sign of him when our teams boarded.”
“Any luck with surveillance cameras along the route?” Mayberry asked.
“No, we don’t know where or when he got off. Our people are walking the tracks right now in case he jumped when the train was pulling into this station. Twenty-one separate rail lines. Seven tunnels. It would help if the agency was sharing information. They won’t say a damn thing except that Rakhmon is a suspected terrorist who entered the country illegally and could have a bomb or some kind of poisonous gas with him.”
For the first time, North noticed Garrett standing a few steps behind Mayberry. “You’re the last person we need here,” North said, glaring at him.
Garrett didn’t reply.
North said, “Get him out of here. You, too. We don’t need the heat. Go back to Washington. I never saw either of you, and this conversation never happened.”
An hour outside Manhattan traveling South on the New Jersey Turnpike, Mayberry received a text. She was no longer on loan to the CIA.
“It’s over,” she said. “Kim, you, and me. Marcus Austin has been escorted from agency headquarters, put on indefinite leave pending a criminal investigation. I’ve already been reassigned.”
“What about Harris?”
“He’s still hanging on. The Senate votes later this morning on whether to censure him.”
She smacked the top of the steering wheel and cursed.
“We should stop in Baltimore for pancakes,” Garrett said.
“What?”
“I know a place.”
Thirty-Eight
Pancakes.
Brett Garrett lifted one and slid two sunny-side-up eggs between the top cake and the one underneath it, creating his own sandwich. He stabbed the center of the short stack with a fork, piercing the trapped yokes until yellow oozed out.
Mayberry watched. She’d separated her cheese omelet so no part of it was touching the mixed fruit that she’d ordered with it.
“It all ends up in the same place,” he said, taking his first bite. “And it’s better than MREs.”
He’d realized during their return ride that he’d not eaten since his flight from Finland. There’d been no time. Besides being hungry, Garrett wanted time to think. Duwar. Gromyko. Makayla Jones. Devil’s Breath. Its deadly variant. Potential targets. New York’s Penn Station. It was a lot to process, and for some reason, something didn’t feel right.
Mayberry had followed his directions to a local eatery only because she was in no rush to report back to the FBI for debriefing. She’d turned off Interstate 95 and traveled down side streets until they’d reached a building with a weathered exterior and billboard that proclaimed it served Baltimore’s best breakfast. A hand-printed sign inside read: “Cash Tip’s Pleas.”
“They misspelled please and don’t need an apostrophe” Mayberry noted from her seat opposite him in a well-worn booth. “Someone should tell them.”
“It’s been that way since this place opened.” He took another bite.
Mayberry’s eyes took inventory. Tired 1970s décor. Every booth filled. Customers hurrying in to pick up takeout orders. A silver bell above the door that dinged each time it opened—something Garrett appeared to block out but that was irritating her.
“I don’t like being reassigned,” she said. “Duwar, Makayla—they are still out there. No one is going after Antifa.”
A seventy-something, white-haired woman armed with a coffeepot appeared.
“How’s life treating you, Della?” Garrett asked.
“You mean ‘mistreating me,’” she answered. “My arthritis is killing me, and Joe is getting harder to live with, but we can’t close this dump and move to Florida because people like you keep coming in. Hey, sweetie, you wanna run off to Daytona with me? I’m a pretty nice catch, you got to admit.”
“Yes, you are, Della. Maybe tomorrow,” he replied. “My colleague here says you misspelled please on your sign.”
“Is that right?” She turned and hollered toward an opening where prepared food from the kitchen was placed under heat lamps until it was picked up. “Joe, got a gal here says we can’t spell right.”
“R-I-G-H-T,” a man wearing a paper chef’s hat yelled through the opening.
Mayberry heard chuckles from the regulars perched on the counter stools and seated in booths.
Refilling their cups, Della said to Mayberry, “This one with you, he’s not too clever, but he is damn easy on the eyes.” She winked at Garrett and sauntered off to another booth.
“How come you know so much about this place?” she asked.
“I like pancakes.”
The television screen positioned above and behind his head caught her eye.
“You need to see this,” she said in a quiet but alarmed voice, glancing upward. He turned and read the moving caption. Deadly shootout. Suspected terrorist fatally shot by police.
The volume was set too low for them to hear, but the video showed everything. A SWAT team approached a suspect in the early-morning darkness outside a tiny brick rail station in Morristown, New Jersey, west of New York City. A commuter line. The man pulled a pistol, fired, was shot dead on the train platform. Two men in hazmat suits carefully removed a briefcase from his grasp.
“That’s Krishma Duwar!” she said. “Now I have a good reason to get to headquarters.” She pushed her plate aside. “To hell with Harris. I’m telling them about Makayla Jones, Antifa, the bombing, and Rivera’s murder. If I have to go down, then so be it.”
“Why?” Garrett asked, returning to his pancakes. “If Duwar has the gas, it’s over.”
“How can you sit here and say that based on everything you know, everything I know?”
“Think about it. No one wants to hear what we got to say.” He forked another piece of pancake and rubbed it on the bleeding egg yolk smeared on his plate.
“That’s not true. You need to tell the bureau what happened in Russia.”
He put down his fork. “No, I don’t,” he said sternly. “The CIA doesn’t want anyone to know I failed to smuggle a diplomat out of Russia. That’s hardly an inducement for others to defect and not something I’m proud of. The Russians will deny Kamera exists anyway, which is what they have been doing since Stalin. And the White House doesn’t want to admit its CIA director went off the grid and hid information from the president and Congress. It’s easier for everyone to think that Duwar was a lone Pakistani terrorist. It’s over, Mayberry, and you shooting off your mouth is just going to make everything worse—for all of us.”
“You saw Gromyko murder Pavel. You can prove the Russians are involved. I know about Antifa and Makayla Jones. I know she blew up the shrine, murdered Rivera.”
“The entire reason Harris chose me was so if things went bad in Russia, he’d have a scapegoat. You talk, and he’ll paint me as some crazed lone wolf. You talk, and he’ll find a way to blame you, too. Listen to me. I know Harris, and he will crucify us both if you talk.”
“Kim will back us up. He’ll go against Harris. He’ll tell the truth, and he’s not done anything wrong.”
“You don’t know that. Listen, Kim is my best friend, actually my only real friend, but his entire company depends on government contracts, and you don’t know what he might have done for Harris in the past. I’m not going to destroy what he’s built by telling everyone about Kamera. The same is true about Peter: he’s had enough misery in his life and mentioning him will only make him a target. President Kalugin will hunt him down and kill him. Do you want his blood on your hands?”
She slid from the booth. “We have to tell the truth even if the White House, Harris, and the Kremlin don’t want us to—even if you don’t want me to. Because it’s the truth and Makayla Jones and Antifa are still out there.”
She looked down at him. “I thought more of you, Garrett.”
<
br /> She was walking toward the door when her phone rang. She answered, listened, and spun around, hurrying to the booth. “Kim has found something we need to see. We need to go right now.”
Neither spoke until Mayberry turned off the Capital Beltway and entered the District.
“I thought we were going to Kim’s Tysons Corner office,” Garrett said suspiciously. “This isn’t some stupid scheme by you to take me to agency headquarters, is it?”
“No,” she replied. “He’s meeting us at the Capitol Visitor Center.”
When they reached it, she said, “They won’t let us inside with our guns. We’ll have to leave them in the trunk.”
Kim was waiting in the lower-level restaurant. His right knee bounced up and down nervously. He waved as soon as he spotted them entering Emancipation Hall.
Opening a file folder, he said, “While you two were chasing Duwar, I’ve been digging into his past. We already knew that he and Makayla Jones were at Stanford together—which I overlooked because she was enrolled as a French exchange student under the name Adalene Petit.”
He put a photo from the Stanford Daily—the university’s student-run newspaper—on the table. It showed an academic dean presenting an award to six students. Krishma Duwar was in the photograph, but Makayla Jones aka Adalene Petit wasn’t.
“Duwar was a member of the college’s honors fraternity,” Kim said as he removed a second photo from his file. It was another university newspaper photograph, only it showed masked demonstrators vandalizing a campus police car.
Kim pointed at a masked man standing on the car’s roof, waving an Antifa flag—a red, white, and black banner with the German words ANTIFASCHISTISCHE AKTION printed on it.
“What are you seeing that I’m not?” Mayberry asked. “Duwar isn’t in this second photo.”
“How can you be certain?” Garrett asked. “The protestors are all wearing masks.”
“Because everyone has white hands. Duwar is Pakistani,” she said.
“That’s exactly right,” Kim said, obviously pleased. “Now look at the fingers of the man waving the Antifa flag.”
Mayberry and Garrett did, and still didn’t understand Kim’s point.
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