15th Affair

CHAPTER 71

CINDY CALLED TO say, “Lindsay. I’ve got breaking news. Big-time. Can you meet me downstairs in five minutes? I’ll drive you home after.”

“Give me a hint,” I said, shutting down my computer and locking my desk drawer.

She was speed-talking. Warp speed.

“A tip came in twenty minutes ago. From a guy who saw the photos I’m running of the Four Seasons’ Jane and John Doe, and he says he’s got video of them. In the hotel. On a hidden camera. He’s going to show me the video. Is that enough hint for you?”

It certainly was.

“I’m on my way.”

Conklin had already left for the day. I asked Brenda to call off my ride while I phoned Mrs. Rose to say I’d be late. Then I zipped up my jacket and ran down the stairs.

Cindy had my attention for sure. Was the tipster solid? Would there really be a video of the kids in that room? And if so, would the video reveal their killer? Had Cindy cracked the case on four homicides? I was hoping. I guess I’m still an optimist after all these years.

Cindy was waiting for me in front of the Hall as traffic rushed and dusk fell. I got into her ’09 Honda Civic just two steps ahead of Traffic Control, who was about to shoo her away.

“Start talking,” I said as I buckled up. “Where are we going? You’ve got my undivided attention.”

The car lurched as Cindy put it in gear. “His code name is Jad,” she said. We were heading northeast on Bryant, Cindy turning her head every few words to pin me with her big blue eyes.

“‘Jad’ was doing surveillance for somebody. I took it to be a government agency, but he wouldn’t say who. He was, however, emphatic that what he caught on tape could get him killed. I could feel him sweating over the phone.”

“And so why did he contact you?”

“Because in my copy I begged anyone with information as to the identities of John and Jane to get in touch with me, confidentially. He also said that what he knew was eating him up inside. His voice was cracking up, Linds. He was freaked out.”

“Did you tell him you were bringing me?”

“Well, what I said was that I wasn’t going to meet a stranger alone. That I was bringing my associate. Like Woodward and Bernstein. You know?”

“Oh, man.”

I was shaking my head. This wouldn’t be the first or even the fifth time Cindy had waded into a highly flammable situation because she was onto a big story.

“Linds, he said it was OK to bring you. And there’s more,” said my crime reporter friend. “Along with the video of those two kids, Jad also has footage of what could be Chan and Muller. Yeah, Lindsay. Really. Asian guy. Blond woman. I’m thinking, Oh, my God. It’s now or never. Jad could take off. This time tomorrow he could be on another continent.”

“We should be going in with a tac team, Cindy.”

“I agreed to keep this confidential. And I believe him. He’s going to show us the video. He wants to. He called me. Look, we’re meeting him in the parking lot at Washington and the Embarcadero. It’s wide open. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

I told her, “We’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Wait a minute. Didn’t you just outwit three armed desperados with nothing more than a quick draw on your stick shift?”

I laughed. “You have a way with words.”

“And that’s why they pay me the OK bucks.”

Cindy grinned at me and threaded her car through a narrow opening in traffic. She maintained maximum possible acceleration from Bryant to the Embarcadero, where she smoothly entered the lot right across from the Ferry Building. She took one of the empty spots facing the street and left the motor running.

She fished her phone out of her bag and made a call. “Jad? It’s Cindy. I’m here.”

There was a pause.

“The blue Civic. Front row. OK.”

Cindy clicked off.

“Our date with destiny,” said my friend. “He’s on the way.”

CHAPTER 72

AN OLD BLACK Lincoln with a noisy muffler took the looping turn off the Embarcadero, crossed the wide roadway, and nosed into the parking lot where Cindy and I sat waiting.

The Lincoln’s driver braked at the back of the asphalt, plates up against the chain-link fencing and partially hidden from our view by a staggered row of parked vehicles.

I watched over my shoulder as he got out of his Town Car and headed toward us. The tipster was overweight. He wore a thin, gray knee-length coat and carried a nylon computer bag in his right hand. He came up behind us and knocked on Cindy’s window, which she buzzed down.

Cindy said hello and introduced me as “Lindsay, my partner on the crime desk.”

Jad took off his gloves, put them in his pocket, and said to me, “Pleased to meet you. Let’s sit in the back.”

Cindy and I disembarked from the front seat and arranged ourselves in back so that the big man was sitting between us. When I got a closer look at him, I saw that he was young, early to midtwenties, with pale hands and brown eyes that couldn’t quite meet mine.

I quashed a nervous impulse to laugh. Sitting in the shadows next to this stranger who was passing secret information made me feel like I was inside an old comedic spy movie. Was this improbable spy the real deal? Had he caught a professional killer on video and in the act?

I tuned back into the moment as Jad was saying, “I told my bosses that the equipment didn’t work. You know, shit happens. So, this is video, here. I’ve seen it and you’re going to see it, and then I’m gonna destroy it. This footage is never coming to a theater near you.”

Cindy said, “How am I going to report this if I don’t have the footage to back me up?”

Jad opened a very thin laptop and it lit up the backseat. He said, “Cindy, that’s your problem. I agreed to meet with you conditionally. After you see the video, you’re either going to get independent corroboration or you’re not. This is as far as I go.”

Jad tapped at his keyboard and said, “On your mark, get set.” And then he pressed Play.

I instantly recognized the image on the screen as room 1420 of the Four Seasons Hotel. Michael Chan was sitting at the end of the bed, flipping channels on the television. A doorbell sounded and Chan turned off the TV and walked toward the door, out of camera range. A moment later, I heard Chan saying, “You’re late.” And the door closed hard.

Chan and Muller entered the frame. Muller’s legs were clasped around Chan’s waist and he was holding her tightly as he walked her toward the bed. Her glasses were gone and I could almost see her eyes beneath the curtain of bangs.

They laughed and kissed deeply, and then Chan laid Muller down on the bed facing him. He removed her boots and tossed them aside, all of his movements confident as though he’d been through this ritual before.

I caught bits of their game play. Chan said that he was the Prince of Gorgonzola. She said her name was Renata and that he had paid her for sex once before in Rome.

The teasing continued as Chan unbuttoned and peeled off Muller’s clothes, then stripped off his own. She moved under his hands, and if she didn’t just love the hell out of how he was turning and touching her, she could have won the golden statue for best actress.

The two were nearly naked on the bed, their heavy breathing sucking in all the air in the room, when the computer screen went black. Dead black.

Cindy said, “Hey. What happened?”

Jad said, “Yeah, that’s a bitch, right? I thought it was my equipment that lost the connection. Well, that wasn’t it. The Wi-Fi in and around the hotel was blocked.

“Stay tuned,” said Jad. “There’s more.”

CHAPTER 73

JAD WAS CUEING up another video.

He clicked the arrow and the video rolled.

I recognized 1418, the room next to Chan’s. There were two single beds, a sofa, a desk, and a coffee table, and the two young people, a black male in cords and a sweater, and a white female in jeans and a pastel plaid shirt. They were sitting at their ad hoc computer stations, looking at their screens.

Jad said, “Nothing happens in here for a couple of hours.” He fast-forwarded the video and the time stamp sped from 4:30 to 6:20.

As Jad had said, there wasn’t much happening in 1418.

The boy sat at the desk, the girl hunched over the coffee table, both gravely watching their computer screens, which were turned away from the camera. I couldn’t see what they were watching, but presumably, it was Chan and Muller in the room next door.

They ate sandwiches, chugged from their water bottles, and wheeled the room service cart outside the room, all without incident. At the 6:20 marker, Jad slowed the film and said, “Don’t look away. Don’t even blink.”

The young man in the video poked a key on his laptop and spoke to someone on his screen.

“Hey, Joe. You on the way up?”

A voice came over the computer’s speakers.

“Bud, where’s Chrissy?”

I felt a shocking chill and a sensation of falling. I gripped the armrest and tried not to move or speak or cry out. That was Joe’s voice. I couldn’t be mistaken. My Joe.

“I’m here, Chief,” said the girl at the coffee table. She got up from her chair, leaned over her colleague’s shoulder, and waved her hand at his computer screen.

“OK. Good. I’m still in the lobby,” said the voice of the man I’d loved for years, the man who’d promised to love me through sickness and health, the father of my baby. He said, “What’s going on?”

“They’re both in there. We’ve got action,” said Bud.

“Any talk about that plane from Beijing?” Joe asked.

The girl said, “Nothing yet. They’re all about each other, Chief.”

“OK. I’m coming up.”

“Copy,” said Bud.

And then, at 6:23 on the nose, Jad’s picture dissolved into static.

I was falling again, but my mind stayed in gear.

Sometime between the time the Internet feed went down and when Liam Dugan, the head of hotel security, showed us the dead housekeeper in the closet, a total of four people had been murdered.

Jad was saying to Cindy, “The two dead kids. Bud and Chrissy could be their real nicknames. If you run their pictures again with those names, maybe someone will come forward. You heard ‘Joe’ ask about an airplane from Beijing?

“Three days later, an airplane from China was blown to hell over Route 101. Maybe Bud and Chrissy were killed because they knew about the plane. I wish I didn’t, but I know it, too. And now so do you,” Jad said.

He said to Cindy, “Someone should put it out there that there was foreknowledge of that plane crash, don’t you think? But it can’t be me.

“And now say good-bye to the video.”

“Wait,” Cindy said. “Play the last minute again.”

Jad sighed, then reversed the footage and ran it forward. I heard Joe ask about an airplane from Beijing. Joe knew about that plane. Joe knew.

Jad closed down the video and dragged the file to an icon labeled DESTROY. Software flames consumed the files.

The videos might be permanently destroyed, but they were part of me now.

I couldn’t forget them if I tried.

CHAPTER 74

THE WIND HAD picked up during our fifteen-minute meeting in the parking lot, whipping the young trees standing in their concrete planters on the sidewalk as traffic illuminated the six-lane Embarcadero.

It looked like any normal summer evening in San Francisco, but nothing would ever be normal for me again.

Joe had prior knowledge of a plane crash that was shaping up to be one of the worst air disasters on record.

Cindy and I got out of the backseat of her car. Jad told Cindy that his phone number was now a nonworking number, and that no offense, he would stand there and watch us leave so that we couldn’t follow him.

We all shook hands, and Cindy wished Jad good luck. I wondered if Jad’s superiors actually believed his recording equipment had failed. Or if they were following him even now, watching Cindy and me as we climbed back into her car.

Cindy was practically bug-eyed as she drove us away from the parking lot.

“Check me on this,” she said to me. “The dead kids were taping Chan and Muller. They were told to hit the kill switch, and they did. During the blackout, someone came in and shot them and maybe killed Chan, too, right? That guy talking to them…?”

“That was Joe.”

“I know his name was Joe,” Cindy said. “Wait. Lindsay.” She turned to look at me. “You don’t mean that was your Joe?”

“Off the record. That was him.”

“Oh, no. Please don’t tell me that.”

“Cindy. Watch the road. Yes. That was Joe Molinari.”

“But what does Joe have to do with those people, Lindsay? I don’t get this at all.”

“I’m thinking,” I said.

My thoughts were scrambling for cover, but they couldn’t hide.

What role had he played in the lives and deaths of Bud, Chrissy, Chan, and Maria Silva? Had he killed them? Were he and Muller working this operation together? And I had to know—what had Joe known about flight WW 888? And what, if anything, had he done with that information?

I couldn’t share these thoughts with Cindy, not yet.

“Lindsay, are you thinking Joe is the killer?” Cindy was staring at me again, her eyes as big as headlights.

I said, “No—look, no. Joe’s a freelancer. It’s more like he was hired to monitor the action in Chan’s room. So what if, as Joe was going up to supervise those kids, someone heard him say he was going upstairs and sent a ‘go’ signal to the killer?”

I was winging it, but I was imagining it, too. I kept talking. “And so the kids were expecting Joe, but the killer knocked on the door and they let him in.”

Cindy said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m following you. The killer shoots them, shoots Chan—and Joe got there after the shootings?”

“It’s a good theory,” I said, while wondering, Is it?

“What happened to Joe? And what happened to Ali Muller?”

“I wish I knew,” I said sincerely.

“According to my calculations,” Cindy said, “the plane went down about sixty-two hours later. Right?”

I nodded, remembering the run-up to that crash vividly.

I’d worked the hotel crime scene with Conklin, Clapper, and Claire, and that night, Joe had come home very early on Tuesday morning, two days before the crash. We’d made love and had breakfast together and I’d told him about the hits at the hotel. We talked about it.

Then I’d gone to work.

That day, we got an ID on Michael Chan. Conklin and I had driven out to Palo Alto and notified Shirley Chan that her husband was dead.

And except for the recording of Joe watching us at the Chan house, I hadn’t seen him again. As Cindy had said, two and a half days after the shootings in the hotel, WW 888 had blown apart.

Cindy was doing her best to drive and process everything we had just seen on Jad’s fifteen-inch laptop.

She said to me, “Look, I have a problem writing this story. Joe is pivotal. He talked about the plane from Beijing. That information, if it had been used properly, might have saved a few hundred lives. So how do I write about that? I have no fricking evidence. I can’t print this as a rumor.”

“Can you sit on this for a day?” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I have to get some answers.”

“From whom?”

“I’ll tell you as soon as I can tell you.”

“Lindsay.”

“You don’t have to say it, Cindy. I promise. You get the exclusive. If I find out anything at all.”

CHAPTER 75

WHEN I WALKED through the front door to the apartment I once shared with my husband, the wonderful Mrs. Rose said to me, “Lindsay, I have to go. My son is waiting for me at Tommy’s and I have to dress. You’ll find some pasta salad in the fridge. Oh, Martha has to go for a walk and the baby hasn’t eaten or had her bath. She just wouldn’t play ball with me. Sorry, dear.”

I told Mrs. Rose thanks for everything and have a good time and stood at the open door until she was gone. Then I closed the door and leaned against it, exhausted by the meeting with Cindy and Jad, thinking, No more. Please, I can’t take any more.

I was a mess.

I was the primary investigator on a quadruple homicide without witnesses or forensic evidence, and it was further compounded by a tangle of international players, a terrorist attack, and intelligence agencies working on the sly.

My husband was party to some or all of this, and he’d sucker-punched me, kneecapped me, and left me alone in a blind alley.

I was grateful to Cindy for including me in her meeting with Jad, and also thankful that she had agreed to sit on the story until I had answers.

But she wouldn’t sit on it forever.

I’d fed her the only theory of the murders I could think of, which presumed that Joe was not guilty of murder.

But he might well have had foreknowledge, if not his actual hand on a trigger. And for all I knew, he was a killer, many times over.

I became aware of Martha, who was whining and pushing at my legs. I said, “OK, OK, I hear you.”

We went to Julie’s room. I woke my daughter up very gently, and of course, she started to cry. I talked nonsense while dressing her in fleece and a hat. Then I awkwardly opened her stroller and strapped her in.

Martha was ebullient, and I hated to disappoint, but this was going to be a short, short walk.

I wheeled Julie into the elevator, keeping Martha on a tight leash, and somehow, Martha’s business was quickly done. She was desperate to go for a run. She pulled and barked at me when I turned to go back into the building.

“You don’t always get what you want,” I said to Jules and Martha. “And that goes for me, too.”

I then proceeded to do what single mothers all over the world do—that is, everything at once.

I fed the baby and I fed Martha, and after drinking the dregs of the opened bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, I dished up some pasta salad and wolfed it down.

On the way to the dishwasher, I grabbed a basket that I keep on the counter near the microwave. It’s eight inches square, four inches high, a catch-all for receipts and the odd paper clip, marking pen, and business card.

Two men from the CIA had paid me a call last week, the point of which was to tell me to stop looking for Alison Muller. They had left their business cards on the counter. I couldn’t remember seeing those cards again.

I hoped Mrs. Rose had put them in the receipt basket.

I upended the basket and pawed through the contents, and yes, I found the cards. Michael J. Dixon. Christopher Knightly. Case officers, Central Intelligence Agency. Phone numbers were in the lower left corner.

I remembered that Dixon, the dark-haired one, had seemed to be the one in charge.

It was nearly 8 p.m. Would he answer his phone?

I had to try.

I dialed the number and he answered on the third ring.

“Agent Dixon, this is Lindsay Boxer. You visited me a couple of days ago to talk about Alison Muller.”

“I remember, Mrs. Molinari. How can I help you?”

“I need to see you. I have information that concerns national security. It also concerns my husband, and I think you’ll want to hear all about it.”

Dixon gave me an address and told me to come in the next morning at nine. I didn’t know what I was going to say when I met with him, but I had all night to figure it out.

The whole minute-by-minute sleepless night.

CHAPTER 76

I GOT OUT of bed before my baby girl woke up. I showered to get my blood running, and while Mrs. Rose buttoned down the corners of my household, I called in sick, asked Brenda to tell Conklin that I would talk to him after lunch, and then ordered a taxi to drive me to the CIA office on Montgomery Street.

I dressed to impress, meaning I put on my best blue gabardine pantsuit, just cleaned, a good-looking tailored shirt, and my smart Freda Salvador shoes, which I’d last worn to meet in DC with FBI honcho June Freundorfer.

Mrs. Rose topped up my coffee mug while I Googled the address Dixon had given me and found that it was the location of a CIA division called the National Resources Program, or NR.

I read and clicked and read some more.

And what I learned was that the NR was to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, what schoolyard pickup hoops were to the NBA.

The NR recruited largely untrained people with access to information: foreign nationals living in the United States who were willing to gather intel for cash and probably a feeling of self-importance. The NR also hired on Americans with overseas access to government workers, aircraft manufacturing plants, newspapers, and the like.

These part-time operatives came with a variety of backgrounds. Some were college students, some were corporate executives, entertainers, and young techies—like Jad. And like Bud and Chrissy, who had been secretly filming Michael Chan and Alison Muller.

And while these geeks had been spying on spies, Joe Molinari had been right in the thick of it.

My taxi driver buzzed the intercom.

I told Mrs. Rose I would call her in a few hours and hugged everyone at the door.

My driver asked, “Alexander Building, right?”

I said, “Right,” as the cab lunged from the curb and out into traffic.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was on the street in front of an early-1900s neo-Gothic, tan brick office building. I entered the lobby, stopped at the desk, and showed my credentials to the security guard.

He called upstairs to Agent Dixon’s office, then wrote my name on a peel-and-stick tag, handed it to me, and said, “Fourth floor. You can go on up.”

I followed his pointing finger to the elevator bank.

CHAPTER 77

I WAS ALONE in the elevator that whisked me smoothly to the fourth floor. The doors slid open and I stepped out onto a granite floor leading to a pair of glass doors etched with the eagle-centric, round blue logo of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The reception area was thickly carpeted in blue, and a cluster of upholstered chairs gathered around a circular glass coffee table. A gallery of gold-framed portraits lined the long wall behind the reception desk: all former heads of the CIA, including President G. H.W. Bush and our current CIA chief.

I gave my name to the woman behind the desk, signed a log, and took a seat. There were no magazines on the table, but I didn’t have to wait long.

Agent Michael Dixon entered the room through a door to the left of the receptionist, greeted me as Mrs. Molinari, and asked me to follow him. We walked past many open cubicles with young staffers inside and other offices with closed doors.

At the end of the hallway, Dixon opened the door to a wood-paneled conference room and showed me in. Christopher Knightly, the second of the two agents I’d met in my apartment, was standing at the windows, looking out over the city with his back to the door.

He turned and said, “Morning, Sergeant Boxer. Please have a seat.” And to the man I had assumed was his senior partner, “Thanks, Dixon. I’ll take it from here.”

I sat in one of the eight swivel chairs around the smallish mahogany conference table. I refused an offer of coffee or bottled water, although my mouth was dry. I was wondering if I’d made a monumental mistake in coming here.

Knightly pulled out a chair across from me and lowered his football player heft down into it.

He said, “You told Dixon you have information that may be of importance. That you know something about Worldwide Flight 888. What do you want to tell us?”

The inference was plain and almost laughable. This was the CIA, an arm of a huge intelligence-gathering agency with fingers in pies I couldn’t even imagine.

I was a cop. Just a cop. But if I’d had Christopher Knightly in the box, I could have fired questions at him for hours. So I assumed that attitude.

I said, “I’m working a quadruple homicide, and I’m fairly certain that this isn’t news to you. I want to know why Michael Chan was murdered and by whom. I want to know who killed the housekeeper and the two CIA computer techs in the room next to Chan’s at around the same time. I want to know why I was followed and beaten by four Asian men who had a Stinger missile launcher in an apartment they were renting in Chinatown. And I want to know what my husband, Joe Molinari, had to do with all or any of that.

“If you can’t give me answers and compelling reasons why I should keep what I know to myself, I’m going to let the press know that the CIA knew about WW 888 before it went down and may even have had something to do with that disaster.”

I was suddenly afraid that I’d said too much; that like a little terrier on the street going after a pit bull, I’d taken a bigger bite than I could chew.

If I was seen as a danger to national security, I might be taken into government custody. Or worse. I thought of the sweaty young man with the clandestine videos on his laptop, afraid for his life. I thought of Bud and Chrissy dead on a hotel room floor.

Knight gave me a patronizing smile and said, “We’re not going to hurt you, Sergeant. I’m not the bad guy.”

I exploded.

“So who is the bad guy? That’s what I want to know. Who’s the bad guy in all this?”

The door opened behind me. I swiveled my chair and saw a man who looked a lot like my husband come into the room.

My God. It was really him.

“I guess I’m the bad guy,” Joe said, dragging a chair out from the table and dropping down into it.

My mouth had fallen open, but the rest of me was paralyzed. Joe looked terrible. He had a beard, there were bags under his eyes, and his clothes were filthy.

What the hell had happened to him?

Why didn’t he look glad to see me?

I managed to croak, “Joe?”

He looked at me with an expression I can only call sadness.

“What do you want to know, Lindsay? I’ll try to tell you what you want to know.”

CHAPTER 78

I’D BEEN SHOCKED into silence.

This was my husband. My husband.

I looked across the table at Knightly and back at Joe. Joe said, “Chris, give us a moment. And kill the cameras.”

“Got it,” Knightly said. When he’d left and the door was closed, Joe moved over to the chair next to mine and reached for my hands.

I pulled away.

It was pure instinct. This man resembled the man I had loved and married, but I no longer knew who he was.

He said, “Lindsay, I know you’re upset. I would be, too.”

“Upset?”

“Wrong word. I know you’re furious at me and I…and that I deserve it. I know I’ve hurt you, and I can’t tell you how sad that makes me. I know what I’m saying isn’t working, but please, if you can, trust me.”

Trust him? How? Why?

“Where have you been?”

“I can’t say. Not yet.”

I shouted, “I’ve been thinking you’re dead!”

“I know.”

“And sometimes I wished you were.”

That was a lie, but I said it with vehemence. And Joe didn’t take his eyes away from me.

I kept going. “You didn’t call me or leave a message or send me a lousy text to say you were OK.”

He sighed and looked down at his hands. Was he remorseful? Was he thinking what to say to me? I didn’t care.

“You walked out on me and on Julie. In the last ten days, I’ve been viciously attacked. I’ve been beaten, shot at, outnumbered, and outgunned. And what have you been doing? Playing I Spy games with Alison Muller?”

He was looking me with sad eyes and I was doing second-by-second gut checks. Was he lying? Was he in trouble? What or who was Joe Molinari?

“Oh, God, Lindsay. I didn’t know you were attacked. Were you hurt? Are you OK?”

“Talk to me, Joe. Tell me everything and I’ll let you know if I’m OK after I’ve heard you out.”

He tried to take my hands again, and again I pulled away. This was pure reflex. I didn’t know if I still loved Joe, or if he had ever actually loved me.

CHAPTER 79

“BE RIGHT BACK,” Joe said.

He got up and left the room. I watched his empty chair spin lazily in his absence. I wondered what he could possibly say to me that would make me trust him—or if he would even try.

A few long minutes later, Joe came back into the room with two bottles of water, put one down in front of me, and uncapped the other. He drank half of it down.

Then he said, “Ali Muller used to work for me, I don’t know, eighteen years ago. We were both pretty young, idealistic, and she had a gift for intelligence gathering.”

“What kind of gift?” I asked.

“More than one, actually. Her IQ was off the charts. She was beautiful. People trusted her. She spoke a couple of languages. And she was pretty fearless.”

I had heard enough about Ali Muller from June Freundorfer, her CIA friend John Carroll, and her husband, Khalid Khan, and now Joe was singing her praises.

I didn’t want to know more. But I wasn’t letting myself off easily. Alison Muller was central to this sickening amalgam of secrets. And I was pretty sure she’d killed Shirley Chan.

Joe was saying, “She volunteered to set honey traps. You know?”

“She seduced men, slept with them, beguiled them into giving her information.”

“Right. That’s right.”

“And she slept with you, isn’t that also right, Joe?”

“We were in our twenties. It was kid stuff and it’s long over, Lindsay. What is relevant is that she was successful, well regarded in the Company, but eventually, she hated that kind of work. By then I was with the FBI and had lost touch with her.”

“Joe, come on. You’ve seen her recently.”

“I’m getting to that. When I was with Homeland Security, we knew Michael Chan was a spy for the Chinese, but we thought it was better to leave him in place. And I learned that Ali Muller, who was still with the CIA, had asked to get involved.

“Not long after, I moved here to be with you. Ali lived down the coast, had a good high-level day job that enabled her to travel without scrutiny. She was married with kids. It was a perfect setup for her real job. And as I came to find out recently, Chan fell for Muller. Very hard.

“I was in the Four Seasons the day Chan was taken out.”

“I know that.”

Joe arched his eyebrows.

“I have you on tape. I also have you on tape out at Chan’s house the next day.”

Joe nodded, and sighed deeply. “That surveillance van.”

I searched his face, looking for tells or twitches. But Joe was a trained liar, government grade. Triple threat.

“It was getting very complicated then,” Joe said. “We’d lost track of Muller. Chan and those two tech kids had been gunned down right under our noses. And we were aware that a big operation was in the wings.”

“Like the take-down of a passenger jet?”

“Yes, yes. We were aware of a possible threat. We didn’t know details. We thought Chan might know. That’s why Muller was with him. We didn’t know who his contacts were or if our information was any good at all. We didn’t have dates or times.”

Joe looked—heartbroken. Because the plane had gone down? Because the techies had been killed? Because Muller was missing?

I kept my hands in my lap and said, “What are your plans?”

“I have to locate Muller.”

“Were you planning to come home?”

I didn’t mean to say that. It just jumped out of my mouth and into the room.

Joe looked into my eyes and reached for me again, and this time, I let him wrap his big mitts around my hands. I wanted to believe in him. I wanted life to go back to the way it had been only a couple of weeks ago.

Was that possible?

He said, “I can’t make a plan, Lindsay. Country first. This is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. I’m sorry.”

CHAPTER 80

I WAS SIMMERING. But I didn’t want to boil over, not here, not now. I said to Joe, “I can find my way out.”

He said, “Let me walk with you.”

We walked silently down the carpeted hallway to the reception room. Joe held the glass door for me and waited with me at the elevator. I didn’t look at him, and when the elevator came, I got in without saying good-bye.

I called Cindy as soon as I got to the street. I told her I had learned absolutely nothing, but—off the record—I had seen Joe.

She shrieked into my earpiece. She wanted to know what Joe had said, where he was now, when she could talk to him.

“Cindy, he’s in an ongoing operation with the CIA. That’s all I can tell you, and don’t blow his cover. Please. But if you want to run Bud and Chrissy’s pictures with their names and a request for information, you should do it.”

She said, “Consider it done. Talk to you later.”

I called a cab, and as my mind churned, I waited on the corner of Bush and Montgomery Streets.

I was thinking I owed it to Conklin to tell him everything I knew. I envisioned a very serious meeting in Jacobi’s office: me and Conklin and Brady and, by special permission, Cindy. I had a duty to report criminal activities. I had professional ethics that required me to get clean with my partners. I also wanted their advice and, with it, relief from the pressure that was like none I’d ever experienced.

But as soon as I imagined that collegial scene, new thoughts powered through. Where did my true loyalties lie?

With my husband, who until ten days ago, I had loved entirely?

Or with my coworkers and friends, who had trusted me with their lives as I had trusted them?

The taxi arrived. I had to give the driver a destination, and I heard myself say, “Take me to Lake and Twelfth.”

The driver got on the phone with his girlfriend, and I put my head back and closed my eyes. I woke up when the driver said, “Lady. Here you are.”

Ten minutes later, I was in my jeans and a T-shirt in Joe’s office, going through his things again. I talked to Julie as she bounced in her jumper seat.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Jules,” I cooed. “I don’t know what I could possibly find that would trump what Daddy told me an hour ago. He’s a spy on active duty. Yes. Active duty.”

Julie let loose with a peal of laughter.

I got up from Joe’s desk and went over and kissed her.

I said, “I want to make sure I haven’t missed something, little girl. I just want to know what he was doing all those months when he was here with you playing Mr. Mom.”

There was a box of Joe’s stationery in the top drawer, right-hand side. I’d opened it before, frisked it with my fingertips, but this time, I took out the note cards and envelopes and found a stubby little key Scotch-taped to the bottom.

The key had a number.

It could be to a safe-deposit box.

For all I knew, it could be to a safe-deposit box belonging to us, a fireproof lock box with life insurance policies and the deed to our condo.

Or it could be a secret trove of love letters and boarding passes and locks of Muller’s hair.

I put the key in my pocket and lifted Julie out of her chair. I took her into the bedroom, pulled the curtains closed, and got into bed with my baby. Martha curled up on the rug beside us.

It was completely still. We were alone. Maybe we’d always been alone. I had had to accept the depth of Joe’s deceit. That I’d been betrayed by my husband, my best friend.

“Country first,” he’d told me. “This is what I do.”

That son of a bitch.

CHAPTER 81

I SET UP a conference call with Rich and Cindy, and after some back-and-forth, we reached agreement on my plan.

I called Brady, saying, “I need to see you out of the office. It’s important.”

He said, “You sound—terrible.”

Brady had called me out. It was as if barbed wire were coiled around my chest and forehead. My breathing was shallow, and pressure was building behind my eyes.

He said, “Are you home? I can stop by after work.”

“Great. Buzz me and I’ll come down.”

Maybe I’m paranoid, but last week two spooks had dropped by my apartment to warn me off my search for Alison Muller. It was possible, even probable, that a mic or two had been planted in my apartment.

At 7:20 Brady texted me to say he was on the way, and twenty minutes later, he buzzed up from the intercom. I grabbed the baby and ran down the stairs.

I found Brady leaning against his Buick with his arms crossed over his chest and his hair blowing across his face. He opened the car door and I got in with Julie in my arms.

“How sick are you?” he asked. “Or was this a mental health day? You should take a couple days—”

“Thanks, Brady, but I’m not sick and I’m not falling apart. I have news on the hotel murders, and my place could be bugged.”

I held Julie against my shoulder as I caught Brady up on Cindy’s tipster, who’d gone by the name of Jad. I told him what Jad’s video had revealed: that our murdered Jane and John Doe had been working for the CIA and that now, thanks to Cindy, we had their nicknames: Chrissy and Bud.

“Cindy’s running their pictures today with those names.”

Brady said, “Good. A positive ID could come out of that.”

I nodded, cleared my throat, and kept going.

“Brady. I heard something while I was watching Jad’s tapes. It was Joe’s voice. He was talking to those kids over the computer. He asked them if they’d picked up anything on a plane from Beijing. They said they hadn’t. But still, the CIA knew something about a plane, maybe WW 888, before the crash.”

Brady voiced some colorful curses that I was pretty sure Julie wouldn’t understand, and after the stream of disbelief and fury subsided, I continued.

“So this morning, I went to the CIA office on Montgomery. Joe was there,” I said. “I saw him.”

Brady is a pretty good listener, and although he said, “You shittin’ me?” he let me speak without further interruption. I described my visit to the NR office, saying that while Joe hadn’t told me much, he had confirmed that Michael Chan was a spy for the Chinese. And that Alison Muller was a CIA operative, now missing in action.

“The CIA will deny knowing anything about that plane, right, Brady? But they can’t stop us from working our case. And I think, but cannot prove, that Alison Muller either did the shooting or saw it go down.”

Brady raked his hair back, stared out the window for a long minute, and said, “What do you want to do?”

I told him.

He said, “Boxer. Do you really want to take on the CIA?”

“I don’t see any other way to close this case.”

“OK,” he said. “I’m on board.”

CHAPTER 82

BRADY PUT OUT a BOLO for the driver of a black Lincoln Town Car with a dragging muffler before I got out of his car, and by three the next afternoon, a young man named Jeffrey Alan Downey, aka Jad, was in our interrogation room.

According to his driver license and the answers he gave to the uniformed officers who brought him in, Downey was twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of a computer sciences program at Berkeley. He worked as a freelance computer tech and lived with his grandmother in Oakland.

He did not volunteer who he worked for, but from the sketchy knowledge I’d gathered, he perfectly fit the profile for a low-level recruit for our local branch of the CIA.

Brady and I watched through the glass as Conklin went into the interrogation room with Jad. The young, sweaty owner of a beat-up Lincoln in violation of the city’s noise ordinance told my partner that he’d pay the fine, but there was no way, no reason to hold him. He knew his rights.

Conklin asked mildly, “Where were you last night, Mr. Downey?”

The young man who called himself Jad said, “Really? I don’t have to tell you that.” He looked mad and scared enough to pull his I’m-under-the-protection-of-the-CIA card. But he hadn’t played it yet.

Brady said to me, “If he says the L-word, let him go.”

“No problem, boss.”

Downey looked up when I entered the box. “You.

You’re the reporter from the Chronicle. What is this?”

I asked Conklin if I could have a private word with Mr. Downey. After Conklin left the room, I took a chair, introduced myself, and said, “Sorry we had to pull you in, Mr. Downey. But if you answer my questions truthfully, you’ll be free within the hour. No one will ever know you spoke with the police.”

“Am I under arrest? Because either way, I’m not telling you anything,” he sputtered. “You played me, lady. I think you violated some code or something.”

I got up from the chair, opened the door, and shouted, “Everyone, take a walk. And no cameras. I mean it.”

I winked at Conklin; then I slammed the door. I went back to my seat across from Downey and leaned over the table so that we were nose to nose.

“Mr. Downey, please pay close attention. You have held back information about the WW 888 disaster that cost over four hundred people their lives. You will either tell me what you know and when you knew it, or I will turn you over to Homeland Security. I don’t care who you think has your back, you are a coconspirator in a hellacious act of terrorism. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a federal prison?”

Downey’s face turned red and tears flew out of his eyes.

He said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You think I know something about that airplane? I don’t. I called Cindy Thomas because I was sick about those dead people in the hotel room. But I had nothing to do with them, or that airplane—which hadn’t gone down when I made those surveillance videos. You don’t know if that guy, Joe, was talking about that particular plane. How could I know? I’m a geek. I signed on to do surveillance, period. I’m not even cleared for this stuff.”

He put his hands over his eyes and sobbed noisily.

I slapped the table and snapped, “Look at me.”

He jerked his head up.

“Mr. Downey, the CIA is going to walk away from you. They didn’t see the video. But I did. And Ms. Thomas did. And if you don’t convince me otherwise, I’m going to turn you in and we’re going to testify against you.”

He snuffled, used the tissues I handed him to mop his face, then sputtered weakly, “You’re giving me too much credit. I’m just a kid. And I don’t work for the CIA.”

Oh. Now I got it. June Freundorfer had said the FBI was interested in Chan. I guess they were interested in Muller, too.

“Who, then? The FBI?”

Downey nodded and his chest heaved. It was apparent that he was verging on another meltdown. I reached across the table and patted his hands.

“OK, Jeffrey. Tell me what you know. Don’t leave anything out. If I believe you, you can walk out of here today.”

Downey honked into the wad of tissues. He was still agitated and frightened, but he had moved in my direction.

He said, “All I know about the plane was that guy Joe asking the kids if they’d heard anything about a plane from Beijing. They hadn’t. I wasn’t even sent to learn about that. My peeps are all about crushing a Chinese spy ring.”

“What do you mean, ‘spy ring’?”

“I was paid to watch and listen, that’s all. If Chan was a spy, you know more than I do. Same for Muller. Is ‘the Prince of Gorgonzola’ a secret code? I don’t know. I just record what happens, and what happened is that those two got it on.”

“What do you know about Alison Muller?”

“For God’s sake. That’s what you want? I’ve got tape on her. Give me my laptop, I’ll show you what I’ve got.”

CHAPTER 83

DOWNEY HAD VIDEO of Alison Muller. He had video.

The barbed wire restraints around my chest dissolved and my heart did a happy dance, but I wasn’t about to let Jad know it. I asked him if he’d like something to drink while I got his computer, and shaking his head like a wet dog, he said no.

I left Interview 2, closed the door behind me, and asked Conklin, “What did you think?”

“He’s a foot soldier. I think he’s telling the truth.”

Conklin disappeared down the hall, and a long couple of minutes later he returned with Downey’s computer bag. I got two bottles of Voss out of the vending machine and went back into the interview room.

Downey opened his case and took out the laptop. Then he got up heavily from his chair, plugged the cord into a socket, scraped his chair this way and that, settled in, and booted up. It took a lifetime for him to cue up the video.

He said, “If you see something, say something, OK? Because I have followed this bitch a lot and nothing ever happens.”

Downey moved the laptop over to me, saying, “Usually, after I shoot the videos, I forward them same day to my boss. And then I delete them from my hard drive. Destroy them. I still have this one because it’s from the day when I told them my camera failed.”

“Gotcha,” I said, watching the blank screen expectantly.

“Here she is leaving her office at four-thirty,” Downey said. “She drove straight to the Four Seasons.”

I watched Ali Muller leave the office building with the Aptec logo over the door. She was wearing the Gucci glasses, the swingy black leather coat, and her spike-heeled boots. She was speaking on her phone as she walked to her car in the underground garage.

Once she was in her car, Downey clicked on the icon for the next video in the playlist. When I saw the opening frames, it appeared to me that it had been shot by a dash cam in a car following Muller’s, which was exiting the garage.

Downey said, “Now, here comes one hour and ten minutes of drive time.”

“Go ahead and fast-forward,” I said.

From my seat in the interrogation room, I watched Muller’s BMW negotiate traffic from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, where she got out of the car on Stevenson, a small alley parallel to Market Street.

She gave the valet several bills, and although Jad’s camera was out of audio range, I knew she was saying something like “Don’t bury my car. I’m going to need it fast.”

The video ended—no doubt Downey shutting it down in order to park his own vehicle. As we already knew, bugs had been planted in Chan’s room prior to his planned assignation with Muller.

Downey said to me, “That’s all. You saw the video from fourteen-twenty. Muller gets naked with Chan and the network goes down. End of story.”

“You mind making me a copy of that footage?”

Downey grabbed the laptop away from me and closed the lid.

“Look. I showed you what you asked for. I’ve put my life in danger for this bullshit. I haven’t committed a crime. Now, let me out of here, or I’m getting a serious, no-shit lawyer to sue you in federal court for violating my constitutional rights. Why don’t you think about that?”

There it was. The man had said “lawyer.”

“Thanks for your help, Mr. Downey. You’re free to go. I’ll walk you out.”

CHAPTER 84

BACK AT MY desk, I contacted Monterey PD and spoke with the squad commander, asking if he had new information on Muller. I said, “I’m hoping she’s been seen.”

“No sightings and not a clue,” he said. “The husband calls every day, and every day we have to tell him we’ve got nothing.”

I relayed this subzero news to Brady, who told me that a guy from the forensics lab would be at my apartment at eight the next morning to sweep it for bugs.

I said, “Could you get him to come tonight?”

As usual, our lab was overworked and overwhelmed. And now I was pleading for a tech to check my apartment for spy cams. It was just too freaking sad.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Brady.

At the end of the day, Conklin drove me home and stood watch as I went inside the building. Mrs. Rose brought me up to the last burp in Julie’s day, and after she’d gone home to her apartment across the hall, I ate dinner in front of the TV and had some quality time with my little family.

In the relative quiet, now that I had time to think, something about Jad’s recordings of the action in the hotel rooms started to bother me.

What was wrong with those pictures?

Was it something I’d seen or heard? Or was it something I’d missed? I thought about the two tech kids. I thought about Chan and Muller playing on the hotel sheets. I tried to home in on the nagging feeling and get it to come to Mama.

And then, just as America’s Got Talent was starting, the intercom buzzed and I let Dale Culver, our lab’s top bug-buster, into the apartment.

Julie and I sat in Joe’s big chair while Dale dismantled my phones and passed wands over the light fixtures and under the furniture. When he had finished and packed away his gear, he said, “Sergeant, you are certifiably bug-free.” I thanked the earnest young man for working overtime and put the baby to bed.

I was vigorously scrubbing a pot when my cell phone rang. I stripped off my wet rubber gloves and snatched up the phone without checking the caller ID. I wouldn’t have recognized the number anyway.

I just barely recognized the voice that said, “Lindsay. It’s me.”

“Lindsay’s not here,” I said.

I jabbed the Decline button and tossed my phone onto the counter, where it bounced and clattered. It rang again. After three rings, just before the call went to voice mail, I grabbed the phone and said, “What do you want?”

“I want you to listen to me. Please.”

I walked to the sink and turned off the faucet. “I’m listening,” I said with all the warmth of a frozen bag of peas.

“I found Muller. She’s hiding out north of Vancouver,” Joe said. “I’m flying up there tonight. You should come with me.”

“Why, Joe? Why should I do that?”

He said, “We’ve always worked well together. And I know how much the hotel case means to you.”

“I see,” I said.

“I thought you’d like to be there.”

I called Mrs. Rose. I showered and dressed. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing or why, but surely curiosity was prodding me on. Curiosity is both a strength and a weakness.

Same could be said for loving Joe.

CHAPTER 85

A BLACK SEDAN was idling at the curb downstairs. Joe got out of the driver’s seat and said, “Lindsay. Hi. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a quick look in on Julie.”

I said, “No, Joe. Just—no.”

He said, “OK, OK. I understand.”

He opened the passenger-side door for me and I got in.

When he was in the driver’s seat, I asked again, “Why, Joe? Why do you want me to come with you?”

Joe put the car in gear and said, “I don’t want things to be this way between us.”

I scrutinized Joe as he made filler talk about traffic and weather conditions. He had shaved and was wearing new jeans and a new shirt. He didn’t avoid my gaze. But he did seem removed. Was he remorseful? Ashamed? When he asked me questions, I answered with a similar degree of formality. Julie is fine. Mrs. Rose is a miracle. We’re working some leads on the case, but we’re still scratching away at the surface.

Then I turned on the radio.

We arrived at San Rafael Airport in Marin County, where a Gulfstream jet was warmed up and ready to go. We boarded the plane at just about eleven.

Our seats were separated by an aisle, which seemed appropriate. Joe and I were like strangers. How had such a wide chasm opened between us in only two weeks? I saw him in my mind, having breakfast with Julie. Now I wondered if that sweet domestic scene might have been a little show he’d put on just for me. I slammed the door on the memory.

The pilot made an announcement. An attendant checked our seat belts and overhead compartments. Jets roared, and we were thrown back in our seats as the plane lifted off.

Once we leveled out, I sipped Perrier and watched beads of moisture sliding off the edge of my window. Then I put on a headset, dialed up some jazz, and reclined my seat.

Questions flew up behind my closed eyelids like shorebirds on the beach.

I thought about Joe sitting across the aisle from me, a virtual stranger who had, by the way, shared a significant part of my life. I wondered if a few months from now we’d be divorced and I’d be living in a new place, or if it would be me and Julie in Joe’s apartment, surrounded by the memories of happier times.

I thought about Ali Muller: her marriage, her children, her still-undefined role in the hotel murders; and I revisited the images of her with Michael Chan—and that was when those pictures in my mind collided with my experience at the actual crime scene. Something didn’t jibe.

And then I grabbed that nagging notion by the toe and didn’t let go until it took form.

Michael Chan was shot in the face and chest and he dropped with his feet facing the door. How could Ali Muller have shot him from the doorway when she was behind him in the room?

Had she been working with an accomplice? Had someone else shot the housekeeper, knocked on the door, and shot Chan? Had this unknown killer then shot the two techs in the room next door?

I knew for sure that Joe had told Bud he was coming upstairs. The murders had gone down after that.

Had Joe shot the two kids who’d been expecting him to knock on the door? Was he Alison Muller’s partner in these gruesome crimes? After the killings, had it been Joe who had gotten her out of the hotel unseen?

But why? If Joe was partnered with Muller, why would he ask me to come with him to bring her in?

Was I walking into a trap?

My eyelids flew open as my mind violently rejected this idea. No, no, Joe wouldn’t, couldn’t, set me up in order to kill me. Could he? I turned to look at my husband, who was five feet away, sleeping like a lamb. Who was the real Joe?

It was a short flight. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. When the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light flickered on, I gripped the armrests and braced myself for violence.

The landing was smooth.

I walked shakily down a flight of metal steps, and Joe took my arm as, with our heads lowered, we crossed the chilly, breeze-whipped tarmac at Vancouver International.

I liked the feel of his hand enclosing my upper arm. Tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes. They were from the wind and so slight that I didn’t even have to wipe them away.

We waited inside Avis for the paperwork to chug out of the printer. I tapped my fingers on the counter.

Joe said, “Lindsay. I can’t prove it, but I believe that Ali Muller killed those four people in the hotel, and if she did, I have to take her down.

“If you aren’t up for this, tell me now, and I’ll leave you at a hotel. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

“I want to catch her as much as you do,” I said, keeping my expression and my tone neutral. Actually, I was telling the truth. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I’m a cop. Job first.”

CHAPTER 86

JOE TOLD ME that our route from the airport would take us up the Sea to Sky Highway to Brackendale, about an hour-and-twenty-minute drive.

I strapped in and watched as the lighted roadways took us north through Vancouver’s downtown, over the fork of the Fraser River, and north along Granville Street, where the beautifully lit glass skyline unfurled before our car as we crossed the bridge to downtown Vancouver.

We turned left onto Georgia Street and into the tree-lined Stanley Park, and about then, my eyes closed. When I woke up, the dazzling nighttime cityscape was gone and we were driving through the darkest night.

Joe said, “Everything’s OK.”

He used to say that when I bolted awake, startled by a terrible dream.

“How much longer?” I asked him.

“A while yet,” Joe said, and then, as if he’d been bracing himself for whatever would happen next, he inhaled and exhaled loudly. Then he said, “Lindsay, I couldn’t tell you where I was or what I was doing. I shouldn’t tell you now.”

It was a heavy preamble, and although I wanted to know everything, I was afraid of what he was going to say: that he was in love with Alison Muller, that he had never loved me, that his move to San Francisco was an assignment, that our marriage was a cover story and a sham.

I said, “Look. Don’t tell me anything out of obligation.”

“I want you to know because you’re my wife.”

I said, “OK.”

Joe said, “I joined the CIA right out of school.”

“June Freundorfer told me.”

He looked surprised, but after a moment, he said, “I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t talk about that with anyone. It was an omission, Lindsay, but talking about what I did during those wars wouldn’t have done either of us any good.”

And then Joe began to stitch the pieces of his past together. He talked about working at the FBI, touched on the case we had worked across agency lines three years ago, the intensity of that time we’d spent together having thrown us into crazy-hot feelings and falling in love.

He talked about moving to San Francisco so that we could be together for real. And then he said, “The part I didn’t tell you, couldn’t tell you, is that around the time Julie was born, the CIA asked me to come back on an ‘as-needed basis.’ I didn’t know they would need me so soon.”

We were driving north in the pitch bloody dark. Joe was telling me about his life as if we were on a date. Oh, my God. We’d had so many years between us, a full life, or so I thought. I was struck with memories of the night I gave birth to Julie. Joe was away on “business,” a consulting gig, he’d told me.

A ferocious storm had been beating the hell out of San Francisco when major contractions came on in force. From my bedroom windows, I could see trees and electric lines down on the roads. Cars had been wrecked and abandoned; 911 operators told me emergency responders were working without pause, and at last, the fire department answered my call for help. A gang of firefighters in full turnout gear had stood in a semicircle around my bed, telling me to breathe and push. That was the setting for Julie’s entrance into the world.

Where had Joe really been that night?

“Lindsay?”

“I’m listening. And I want to say that hearing about your secret life makes me feel like a complete idiot.”

“I know. I’m sorry. And I still haven’t told you everything.”

The tension in the car sparked like a downed electric line in the rain. I wanted to grab him and shake him and say, Come on Joe, cut the crap. It’s me. This is US.

If only.

If only he hadn’t kept so much from me.

I looked at him really hard. I wanted to see through the deep lies and casual disinformation. How could I know who he was? The man was a spy. Triple threat. Hard-core.

How could I believe anything he told me?

Still, the unasked question shot out of my mouth.

“Where were you the last two and a half weeks, damn it? Why didn’t you call me?”

He shook his head. He pounded the steering wheel with his palms. He was strapped into his seat. We were moving at sixty miles an hour. There was no getting away without answering me. I was sitting right there.

“Linds, I’ve always been committed to doing what needed to be done. For the country and ultimately for us. But you have to believe this.”

He stopped talking. We were crossing over a bridge with the Salish Sea to the left and the cliffs of the highway rising high on our right. But I didn’t know if there was a bridge strong enough to bridge the gulf between Joe and me.

“What, Joe? What do I have to believe?”

“That I love you. I love you and Julie so much. More than I ever thought possible. You have every reason to doubt me, but don’t. Because I swear to you, I’m telling you the truth.”

CHAPTER 87

I’D ALWAYS FOUND Joe open, accessible, honest— and real. My God, it was why I loved him. And now the truth was out. He’d lied deliberately and constantly all the time that I’d known him.

So why, when he told me he loved me, did I lean toward him? The answer was as simple as three little words. Despite the lies and deceit, I wanted to trust my husband. I loved him.

I said, “Don’t stop now, Joe. Tell me about Alison Muller. From the beginning.”

There were no other cars on the road at all. It was as if we were in a tunnel chasing two cones of light at high speed toward the edge of the world.

Joe was talking, telling me again that he’d lost touch with Alison until he’d come back to the CIA nine months before. He said it was around that time that the CIA became aware of Michael Chan, a naturalized American citizen who was spying for the Chinese. They’d learned about Chan: that he’d been born in China, had come to the USA as a student, had lived and worked in Palo Alto for the last eight years, and was now teaching history at Stanford.

Joe told me that just a few months ago, Muller volunteered to work a honey trap on Chan to learn what he was passing on to Chinese intelligence and to flip him to our side if she could. And according to Joe, because of his work history with Muller, he was asked to run the operation.

Joe said now, “I told you I thought Chan had fallen hard for Alison. Of course, he didn’t know that Ali was CIA and that he was her target. He believed her cover, her job, and the business trips that enabled them to get together. But Chan was going through a stressful time, and finally, he told Muller all about it.”

“And she reported this back to you.”

“Exactly. About a month ago. Chan told Muller that a Chinese intelligence honcho was about to defect to the United States. He said this defector had powerful and deep information that could take down the Chinese government.

“Muller told me that what was driving Chan crazy was that the defector was his father. Chan Senior was planning to come to California to be with his son. He’d gotten false documents using Michael Chan’s name and address and so on, and Chan was very worried. He’d heard that some Chinese-American men living in San Francisco had been assigned to kill his father as soon as his plane arrived in the States.

“Chan was just talking to his lover, you know, Linds? He was questioning his own loyalty to the Chinese government. He was desperately concerned for his father. And he had no idea that Muller was feeding this information to us.

“And still, the information was incomplete. Chan didn’t know what plane his father would be taking to the States. Muller was going to try to get this critical detail from Chan that evening in the Four Seasons—and then, as you well know, it all hit the fan.”

My mind reeled. Chan Senior had been traveling as Michael Chan on WW 888. It was his body that had disappeared. Even as I was having this breakthrough, Joe was unwinding the story as he knew it.

Joe said, “Michael Chan was killed. Bud and Chrissy were killed. Muller disappeared, and then, the worst thing imaginable. That passenger jet went down. I’m pretty sure that the men you and your SWAT took down in Chinatown were the ones who were supposed to kill the defector: one high-profile government man.

“So what happened?” Joe asked rhetorically. “Were they cocky? Were they stupid? Did they have a shiny new toy? I don’t know why they decided to hit the plane—with a god-damned missile—but they did it.”

“My God. You think they did that on their own?”

Joe said, “I think so. Chinese intelligence was apparently stunned by the crash. They did a slick pivot and tried to blame it on the CIA. And we blamed ourselves—for not getting the intel in time to prevent the crash. The head of our internal affairs unit had to find out if I was involved. Who could blame him? After all, I was running the Muller-Chan operation.

“I was locked up and interrogated, seriously—that’s why I couldn’t call you, Linds. I was in an underground location, I don’t even know where.”

He sighed deeply, then said, “I don’t know if I have everything exactly right—but that’s pretty much what I know or have reasonable theories about.

“The Chinese made a lot of mistakes. They’re amateurs at the intelligence game. Maybe Ali Muller made mistakes as well.”

I asked Joe, “Do you think she killed Chan?”

CHAPTER 88

JOE GRIPPED THE wheel and gunned the car along the asphalt straightaway for long minutes before saying, “I’ve asked myself if Alison was the shooter a couple hundred times. Friendship aside, just bearing down on the facts, I think she’s been playing both sides—working for us, and working for the Chinese, and doing a pretty seamless job of it.”

I heard what Joe had said, but his answer was so off the hook, I had to ask him to say it again.

“Are you telling me that Muller is a double agent? That she is actually spying on us for the Chinese?”

“I’m speculating, Lindsay, but it makes sense. If she’s working for MSS, then she’s behind the murders in the hotel. Chan was betraying the Chinese by leaking classified information to her. He was an enemy and had to be eliminated. It’s almost as if they switched loyalties with each other, Chan wanting to get off the train that Muller had just gotten on.”

“You’re saying she would have shot Chan because he was a traitor?”

“So my theory goes. She knew that Chrissy and Bud had eyes on her from the adjacent room. So if in fact Ali is the shooter, she had to take them out and take their laptops at the same time.”

It was as if I were back in that room, looking at those two young people bloodied and dead on the floor, their power cords still plugged to the wall.

Joe said, “Chrissy and Bud hadn’t overheard any information about the defector’s travel plans. I was on the way up to check in with them, maybe wrap it up for the day— but the elevator took a long time to get down to the lobby floor. When it arrived, everyone standing around piled in. That car must have stopped on every floor.”

Joe ran a hand over his face and seemed to be back in the moment when his operation had come crashing down.

“It was all over by the time I got to the fourteenth floor. The kids were dead in 1418. Alison didn’t answer the door to 1420. I must’ve missed her by minutes, or seconds. Otherwise, she probably would have killed me, too. I learned later that Chan was dead. If my theory is right, she was shutting down her undercover job for us and cauterizing loose ends.”

“But why would she have changed sides, Joe?”

He shrugged. “I can think of a dozen maybes: payback for some long-held grudge, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’s crazy enough to have done it for the thrill.”

“She might have killed Shirley Chan,” I said.

“OK, yeah. It makes sense if she was mopping up. She wouldn’t take the chance that Chan was playing her and telling everything to his wife. Another sickening theory.”

Joe stopped talking. He turned up the heat, adjusted the airflow, and took a pull from his bottle of water.

My head was throbbing from all this information. I was trying to process it all, thinking that if Muller was a double agent—if it was true—then Joe felt responsible for everything Muller had done. Or maybe Joe, too, was readying himself to cauterize loose ends of his own.

Christ. No one knew where I was. Was I putting my trust in a man I didn’t really know? I shook my head, trying to dislodge that terrifying thought.

Joe said, “I know. It’s unbelievable, and I haven’t confronted her. Maybe I’ve got her all wrong.”

I said, “So why did she come all the way out here?”

“If she’s gone over to the Chinese, BC is not a bad jumping-off point to China. And that’s all I’ve got.”

Joe’s theory had the ring of truth, but was it true?

I asked him—actually, I blurted it out.

“Joe, are you trying to catch Muller, or save her?”

“What do you think?” he said.

CHAPTER 89

THE SIGN AT the side of the road read SQUAMISH.

What little I knew about this town came from an article I’d read in the Chron’s travel section a few years ago about the annual Bald Eagle Festival. I remembered that the area was spread out over a grid of mini-malls and woodsy homes with gorgeous scenery tucked between mountains. Heavily wooded roads connected neighborhoods, and tumbling rivers bisected them, but right now, the scenery was beside the point.

It was lights out in Squamish and there was near zero visibility at oh-dark-hundred.

As we sped through the town, I glanced at Joe’s face, lit by the dashboard lights. I wished I could read his mind, but going by what he’d said, at the center of the crisscrossing facts, suppositions, and violent deaths was Alison Muller. She was clever, manipulative, and, in my opinion, psychopathic.

Was I was finally going to see her for myself? What would happen? Who would still be standing when the sun came up in three hours? Would I see my daughter again?

I had to. I had to stay alive for Julie.

Joe drove the Audi along a two-lane road flanked by forests of black evergreens. There was a bit of a clearing up ahead on our right, and as we approached, he dropped his high beams down to parking lights. I saw a wood-shingled house with a sagging roof and the flash of our lights reflecting off taillights at the end of the driveway.

Joe said, “She’s staying there.”

He continued past the house, and fifty yards down the road, I glimpsed two vehicles parked on either side in deep shadow: a metallic Japanese two-door and a rusty Ford pickup.

“Those are ours,” he said.

Joe tapped the GPS and a new address popped up on the screen. He took a right turn down a dirt road and another right onto a highway through Brackendale. A half mile later, a lighted VACANCY sign flashed outside a Best Western to our right.

Joe turned into the motor court, pulled the car around to the back, and parked between two cars in front of the rooms.

He switched the engine off and used his phone.

“Slade, it’s Molinari. I’m outside.”

The suite was on the ground floor and looked modern and fairly new. Three men were sitting around a TV watching CBC News without sound. They were regular-looking guys of medium height and weight, one balding, another with coarse red hair, the third pale with glasses; he looked like a guy with a desk job.

Christopher Knightly, the big straw-haired man I’d met for the first time in my apartment, was in the kitchenette, popping the tab on a beer can.

He was surprised to see me and not in a good way.

Joe said, “Knightly, you’ve met Lindsay. Everyone else, this is my wife, Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD, Homicide Squad. I asked her to come because she’s intimately involved in the Four Seasons murders. She was at the crime scene. She’s also the lead investigator in that takedown op on Stockton. So this is her case, too.”

Knightly put the can down hard on the counter and said, “Christ, Joe, talk about breaking protocol. No offense, Sergeant. This isn’t San Francisco and this isn’t your homicide case. Muller’s not just a killer. She could well be a traitor, not just to us, but to the country, for God’s sake.”

“Chris. It’s my decision,” Joe told him, “and my ass if things go wrong.”

The man wearing the glasses got up to shake my hand, introduced himself as Agent Fred Munder, while the redhead got into Joe’s face, saying, “Are you serious? It’s not just about you. Our butts are on the line, too.”

“It’s done, Geary,” Joe snapped. “Let’s get on with it.”

I used the bathroom, and when I came back Agent Munder was saying to the others, “There’s been no activity for three hours. Muller is still at the house. Looks like she’s in for the night.”

“She was always a little too sure of herself,” said Knightly. “Smart, yes, I’ll give her that. But she’s arrogant and, I’m gonna say, twisted. She just loves all the attention she gets from men. Did you ever ask yourself, Joe, why she’s so eager to climb into bed with the enemy?”

It was a dig at Joe, and if he was meant to answer this question, he didn’t get a chance. Knightly’s phone chirped. He grabbed it from his shirt pocket and said, “Yeah?” He listened for a second or two, then said, “Got it. Stay with her.”

He clicked off and announced, “Muller’s on the move. Something’s gone wrong. She’s in one of three cars heading north. Was she tipped off? Who did she get to this time?”

Knightly was looking at Joe, and because I was standing next to Joe, he was also staring at me.

CHAPTER 90

THERE WAS A quick shorthand discussion between Joe and the other men in the team. Routes and a timetable were roughed out. Then the motel room emptied. Knightly and a partner drove out of the lot first. Munder and his wingman took the second car, and Joe and I took the third position out to the Sea to Sky Highway.

I could imagine that this roadway must be gorgeous in daylight, but the empty two-lane highway was unlit, and the impenetrable woods to the left and the steep, treed cliffs rising a hundred feet straight up on our right seemed menacing.

Joe’s phone was in a holder attached to the vents in the dash, and he was in ongoing communication with Knightly. Knightly was also on the phone with the two CIA cars ahead of us, the truck and the sedan that had been following Muller’s convoy from the moment they left her safe house.

Word came down the line that Muller’s three cars had split up. Knightly’s voice crackled over the speaker.

“They made us, goddamn it. We don’t know which god-damned car she’s in.”

New plans were hatched, and Knightly reported to Joe that our team had now also been split, assigned different routes with hopes that someone would locate Alison Muller’s car.

Joe punched coordinates into the GPS and stepped on the gas. The car leapt forward, and Joe drove fearlessly, hugging curves and speeding at eighty through blackness and dark shades of gray.

I was frankly scared out of my mind, watching the needle bounce around the dial as we shot through the wilderness. Joe was gunning it over ninety when our headlights flashed on a sign for Whistler Resort.

Joe spoke over the phone to Knightly. “We’re passing Whistler now. On track to that airfield in Pemberton.”

More conversation ensued, Knightly saying, “I’ve notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. If we don’t catch up with her shortly, we’ll see you at the airfield.”

Joe slowed to a steady seventy miles per hour, and when an intersection came up on our right, he whipped around to make the turn too fast. The car fishtailed on the empty roadway, then regained traction, and we headed east and picked up speed. Starlight and a sliver of a crescent moon revealed the ghostly shapes of trees looming alongside the road and a glimpse of the Lillooet River.

Joe glanced at the GPS map, said to me, “Hold on,” and took the turnoff to Airport Road at near sixty.

I was holding on, but the Audi’s wheels hit a rut. The steering wheel bucked under Joe’s hands and the car slewed hard to one side, then the other. I may have screamed.

Knightly was on speaker and he was saying, “We’ve lost her.”

The word her was just out of his mouth when the connection shattered into squawks and static hissing.

Joe yelled, “Knightly! Knightly, can you hear me?”

No, he couldn’t. We had lost our connection with our lead car and had no idea where in the world Alison Muller was.

“Well, this is just perfect,” said Joe.

And then, just ahead of us, another turn branched out under overhead lines. Joe took the turn at way too fast and our tires slid on gravel. The car rocked onto two wheels; then, as before, the tires grabbed and we shot on ahead under an endless, gunmetal-gray sky.

CHAPTER 91

AS WE TURNED onto the airport road, the Coast Mountains, which had formed a forested and impenetrable wall off to our right, were now dead ahead. In front of us and as far as we could see was flat meadowland, rectangular in shape, like five football fields placed side by side and divided by a ten-foot-wide rut of a road.

As we took that dirt road, our headlights hit a cluster of lightweight aluminum sailplane trailers parked haphazardly up ahead and to our left. Peering into the dark, I could just see a small airplane hangar at the far end of the road and off to the right. I could make out several cars to the right side of that hangar, their headlights illuminating a pair of small, stationary airplanes on a landing strip. The runway appeared to be at an angle to the hangar, heading east-west and parallel to the mountains.

Joe doused our lights, eased his foot off the gas, and slowed the car to a crawl.

“That’s got to be her,” he said. “See if you can raise Knightly.”

I reached over to the phone and pressed the Redial button, but as before, there was only static.

I clicked off, then tried again.

I heard bursts of Knightly’s voice, and I shouted, “We’re at the airfield. They’re here.”

Only crackling came over the speaker.

“You’re breaking up. Please repeat,” I said, but the connection failed again.

Joe muttered, “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

As I understood it, the original plan was to surround Muller’s safe house, call her out, and bring her in. This situation had no boundaries. Not even the sky was the limit.

Joe slowed the Audi, and a handful of people exited the cars parked by the hangar. For a moment, they were frozen in our high beams: four Asian men, a hulking white man, and the woman who had to be Alison Muller. She and the hulk ran toward one of the planes, which looked to be a de Havilland Beaver. I knew it to be a sturdy bush plane.

At the same time, the Asians, now positioned behind their vehicles, opened fire.

Joe wrenched the wheel hard to the left and stepped on the brakes, and the Audi skidded in the grass before coming to a stop in the midst of the small trailers. I had my 9mm Glock in my hand, a solid and dependable service gun but no match for the automatic-weapon fire ripping across the meadow, pinging like a hailstorm into the trailers’ aluminum hulls.

It was riskier to turn and run than it was to stand our ground and fight. I’m a good shot, even under pressure.

I was ready.

CHAPTER 92

I FELT UNREASONABLY invincible.

Even then, I knew that what felt like courage was an adrenaline surge fueled by present danger and all of the fear, confusion, and rage I’d repressed over the last weeks.

Joe yelled at me, “Stay in the car!”

Too late for that. My loaded gun was in my hand and my feet were on the ground. I crouched behind a trailer, which was all that stood between me and the people who were strafing us with automatic-weapon fire.

I didn’t have a death wish. I just didn’t expect to die. I was rationalizing. We were thirty yards from the shooters. Everyone was firing into the dark.

Joe said, “I don’t like our odds.”

Then he bounded out of his side of the car and took a position at the butt end of the trailer I was using as a barrier at the front. We aimed and fired on the shooters and reloaded.

When there was a momentary break in the gunfire, Joe yelled, “Alison, give it up! The cops are on the way. No one needs to die. Put down your gun.”

Muller laughed. It was a lovely laugh, both throaty and merry.

“You’re too funny,” she called back.

I saw the flash of Muller’s blond hair as she sprang out from behind a car in a crouch. Her bodyguard followed, the two of them running for the open hatch of the closest plane. My attention was on Muller, but there was something about that bodyguard that rang a tinny bell. I knew him, but I couldn’t place him at all.

And I didn’t have time to think about it.

We had to stop Muller from boarding that plane.

Joe fired into the narrowing space between Muller and the aircraft, and her bodyguard pulled her back into cover behind a car. Joe yelled, “This is a mistake, Alison!”

And then the leading character in this long-running nightmare leaned over the top of her vehicle and fired a long burst of bullets, spraying left, then right across the trailers.

There was a split-second pause in the gunfire, and Muller and the big man made another dash toward the plane. Sighting her, I took aim, followed her with my muzzle, and fired.

Muller jerked and flailed before she fell to the ground.

Her bodyguard called her name and went to her, frantically trying to help her up. But she got to her knees and shook him off as she struggled to her feet.

My shot had gotten her in the back. She could only be alive if she was wearing a vest, and even then, given the angle of my shot, she was lucky to have survived.

Part of me was relieved that I hadn’t killed her.

I wanted to talk to her, and I wanted to throw her in jail. But at the moment, Muller was armed and at large and bullets were flying at us again from her direction.

CHAPTER 93

JOE WAS RELOADING his gun when I saw four sets of headlights bumping over the rutted road toward the hangar. The cars drove past us and formed into a rough semicircle twenty-five yards away from the building and Muller’s crew. I heard Knightly shouting, ordering people to drop their weapons, and he had plenty of gunpower to back him up.

And then Alison Muller stepped out from between two cars with her hands in the air.

“Hold your fire. I’m unarmed!” she shouted.

She was walking toward the headlights in surrender pose, her bodyguard beside her, when one of the Asian men in Muller’s crew aimed his gun—at her. Her bodyguard yelled, shoved, and threw himself between Muller and the shooter in one movement. They both dropped to the ground.

In that moment, I recognized the bodyguard. But I didn’t have even a second to process the thought because the man who had fired on Muller and missed aimed at her again.

Before he could get off his second shot, Knightly fired and dropped him, and in the same moment, Muller got up off the ground.

Seeing Joe, she called, “Joe, Joe! Don’t shoot!”

She ran toward him and he lowered his gun.

Just then, I became aware of the waffling sound of helicopters coming in from under the lee of the mountain range, flying across the meadow toward the hangar, two choppers beaming light down on the airfield.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrived. The odds had decidedly shifted in our favor. My heart lifted as one of the choppers hovered near the de Havilland and landed in front of it, blocking the runway. There was more engine racket as the second helicopter cut off the Cessna’s escape path as well.

The din was deafening and the rotor wash swept the field, blowing up dust. I turned away from the choppers, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Joe and Alison in a stunning tableau.

I hadn’t heard what Joe had said to her, but clearly Muller had gotten the message. His gun was aimed at her head. And Alison, her blond hair whipping across her face, stood absolutely still with her hands in the air.

CHAPTER 94

DAWN WAS CASTING a cinematic glow over the remains of the firefight. Airplane and chopper pilots were getting out of their aircraft. Munder and Knightly took the three men left standing into custody and stepped around the dead bodyguard. But all of that was in the background.

I was watching Joe, listening as he said to Muller, “It’s over, Alison. Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.”

She looked at Joe and asked, “How could you do this to me? How in God’s name can you humiliate me like this?”

I was standing only ten feet from Ali Muller, and even though she’d been caught moments away from her great escape and had been shot at by her own people, she looked composed. If there was the slightest trace of vulnerability in her face, it was that of hurt feelings. And the way she looked at Joe made me think she was taking her arrest personally.

She said, “Are you kidding me, Joseph? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing and why?”

Joseph?

His smile was a grimace. He used Flex-Cuffs to pin her wrists together behind her back, after which he encircled her biceps with his hand. She twisted away, but it was halfhearted. She kept looking up into his face—I have to say, adoringly. I followed them across the grass, between the trailers and toward the shot-up Audi.

I listened as Muller tried to make her point.

“Joseph, have you lost sight of the truth? I’m still working for you. Don’t you get that? This was part of our plan.”

“What plan? You left the country. You were on the run. You’re a traitor, Ali. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about this, but not now.”

“I’m a traitor? You knew I was going to work for us once I got to China. I told you. Didn’t you understand that? Weren’t you paying attention?”

Joe scoffed, but what I could see of his face was clouded.

Alison kept selling, working hard. Was she working Joe into giving her an alibi? Or was she telling the truth? How could I possibly know?

“You’ve told me you loved me,” she said. “And now, what? You don’t love me anymore?”

Joe loved her? Hearing that hurt worse than the beating I’d taken on Lake Street. Far worse. The left rear door of the Audi creaked as Joe opened it. He put one hand on Muller’s head and angled her into the backseat. He closed the door hard and opened the driver’s side door for me, and I got in.

“I have to talk to Knightly,” he said through the open window. “I’ll only be about ten minutes. Watch her, Lindsay. And don’t believe anything she says. She has an advanced degree in making shit up.”

Muller called out, “Joseph. Joseph, don’t leave me with her. She shot at me.” She almost sounded panicky. “She’ll kill me. Is that what you want?”

Joe reached into the car and threw the door locks. He said, “Lindsay, don’t shoot her unless you have to. But if you have to, do it. Do not let her leave.”

“Copy that.”

Did he want me to shoot her?

Would that solve a lot of problems for Joe?

Well, I had my own agenda.

Out on the rosy airfield, Knightly was speaking with the helicopter pilots from the RCMP. Joe said a few words, then headed over to the hangar, joining the agents who were loading the survivors of the shootout into vehicles.

I was alone with Alison Muller, the modern-day Mata Hari who had just sucker-punched my heart, then jumped on it and set it on fire. Oh, yeah, I was throbbing from the pain of that, but I had to push it all aside.

If the City of San Francisco was ever to have the chance to prosecute Muller for the Four Seasons murders, I had to get her to talk to me. I couldn’t let my injured feelings compromise a case against her.

This meeting with Muller was why I was here.

I sat with my legs across the length of the front seat, my feet under the steering wheel, my face turned toward the honey-trap beauty. I showed her my gun.

“I’m Lindsay,” I said. “Joe is my husband.”

CHAPTER 95

MULLER SLID DOWN in the backseat catercorner from me. She stuck the soles of her boots up against the back of the driver’s seat and got as comfortable as I imagine she could with her wrists bound behind her back.

I reached up to where Joe’s phone was still clamped in its holder, below Ali’s line of sight. I pressed the On button. And I pressed Record.

Then I turned around to face her.

I took a good long look at Muller’s strong, almost mesmerizing features: her gorgeous skin, the shimmering blond hair with the signature bangs, her large eyes, which were almost all pupils at the moment. No matter the bravado she was exuding with her feet cocked up on the backseat, she’d been through a shit-storm and she was feeling the effects of it.

She spoke. “So you’re his wife, huh?”

“That’s right. I’m also a cop. SFPD. Just so you know, you don’t have to say anything, but anything you do say can be used against you in court. Do you understand?”

Her merry laughter filled the car.

Then she said, “You can’t touch me, babe. I’m in federal custody and that trumps the SFPD any day, every day. Do you have any idea who I am? Do you have any idea who your husband is? Don’t bother to answer. You don’t know jack. You don’t know Joe.”

“You may be right,” I said, channeling the benign manner and patience of Rich Conklin. “So fill me in, why don’t you?”

“What do you want to know?” she said. “You’ve got questions about Joe, I suppose. Like, how close are we, exactly? How often do we see each other? How tight are we after knowing each other for twenty-five years? How good we are together in bed? Yeah, I’ll bet you’d like to know all that, but why don’t you ask your husband? And good luck getting the truth out of him, Lindsay. Lying is one of the top two traits required of a CIA operative. Number two is not giving a shit.”

I, too, was still pumping adrenaline. My fight-or-flight instinct had powered my blood into overdrive and my left hand had balled up into a fist. I wanted to lean over the seat back and punch Alison Muller in the mouth. I also wanted to get out of the car and run screaming into the foothills.

I kept it all down. It was the performance of my life.

“Actually, I want to know how you pulled off the killings at the hotel. It seems almost impossible that you got away.”

“Hmmm. I had nothing to do with that.”

“Well, humor me. Let’s just play hypotheticals, OK?”

“Sure, Lindsay. Hypothetically and actually, I had nothing to do with whatever you’re referring to. I was getting laid. Next thing I know, a masked man shot up the room and killed my boyfriend. I locked myself in the bathroom, and when the shooting stopped, I put on my clothes and got out. Once I was outside, I decided to leave the country and carry on my work for the Agency by pretending to flip to the Chinese side. That way, I could continue to serve my country from China. At great personal sacrifice, I might add. I was going to leave my family, and oh, yeah, stop seeing your husband, my lover, who is also the greatest guy in the world. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Geez, you’re good.”

“Thanks. I’d like a cigarette.”

“I’ll see what I can do for you. But first.”

“Aw, Christ.”

“The one thing I really admire is how, while you were getting, uh, laid, all the Wi-Fi went down. Your room, the room next door, the common spaces—but not down on Market Street, where a kid who was working for the FBI was remotely taping you and Chan and Bud and Chrissy and everything that went down.”

I was watching her closely. Her face stayed composed, but I could see the flash of alarm in her eyes.

She said, “What?”

“Try to keep up, Alison. An FBI surveillance tech had been following you for weeks, and he taped your highly enjoyable tryst in room fourteen-twenty at the Four Seasons from his car. He taped all of the passion and the tragedy of Renata and the Prince of Cheese. Every minute. I’ll run your whole afternoon for you. Just speak up if I get something wrong, OK?”

I’d rocked her, caught her off guard and planted more than a little doubt in her shady mind. She didn’t know the truth: that the FBI kid had also lost his video hookup, and that after their tryst, all we had of Chan and Muller was static and snow.

I might not be as good a liar as she was, but I was dancing on the balls of my feet, jabbing, and sticking to my story.

We were still in the early rounds, and I had to punch above my weight. But I was determined to win the bout.

CHAPTER 96

I WAS HOPING that Joe’s phone was charged and recording, but I didn’t dare look at it. I didn’t blink. Either way, I had Alison’s attention. I wanted all of that and more.

I said, “See, here’s where it really got interesting for me, Alison. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Not really. And you’re not going to get me a cigarette, are you?”

“Not yet,” I said. “So, as I was saying, this part fascinates me. Michael Chan didn’t know when his father was coming over from China…”

Her eyebrows shot up. I kept going.

“But your partner in this operation was listening to you and Chan on the coms he’d set up in fourteen-twenty, and he was also listening in on Bud and Chrissy in the next room.”

“Maybe in your overheated imagination.”

“He heard Joe tell Bud that he was coming up to the room, and that’s when your partner pulled the plug on the entire wireless system, as only the hotel’s head of security could do.”

Alison’s face had stiffened.

“Nice story for total bullshit.”

“I met him, Alison. I spent almost a day and a half with Liam Dugan watching video of the lobby, the hallway, the elevators. He told me it was a mystery why and how the Internet had gone down, but that’s life, right?”

My gun hand was sweating. I switched hands, dried my right hand on my jeans, and switched back again. Muller was watching me like a cat at the window that’s spotted a bird. I kept going.

“Honestly, Alison, and this is no bull, I didn’t put it together until a half hour ago when I saw Dugan get shot to death. Right. Out. There. He caught a bullet—meant for you.”

“Lindsay. You’re delusional.”

“Am I? I said I’d run the story for you, and look, I’m not done. So, back to the hotel. Liam Dugan was watching the feeds. He hears Joe saying he’s coming up to fourteen-eighteen, so Dugan shuts down the Wi-Fi, maybe knocks out a guest elevator at the same time so he can slow Joe down. He takes the service elevator to fourteen, where he kills the housekeeper, a potential witness, and stuffs her body into the supply closet.

“Then he takes the cart and knocks on the door to fourteen-twenty. Maybe he yells ‘Maintenance,’ something like that, and uses the passkey. Chan gets up to go to the door and Dugan shoots him twice in the face. Gives him another shot in the chest for good measure. And he says to you, ‘Get dressed, Alison. Hurry up.’”

“Entertaining, yes, but pure make-believe—”

“And you do get dressed. You step over Michael Chan’s dead body, and you tell Dugan to let you into the room next door. Again, he uses the key card he took from the dead housekeeper, which is registered with the security system. That was smart.”

“Even brilliant.”

“I agree,” I said. “So now you’re in fourteen-eighteen and the two kids are looking up at you, like ‘What just happened?’ One minute they’re watching you party with Michael Chan on their laptops, waiting for Joe to arrive— then the Wi-Fi goes down and now you’re inside their room with a gun in your hand.

“Alison, you killed those two unarmed kids and then, I’m thinking, Dugan got you out of the hotel by way of the fire stairs. And then he calls the police, says shots have been heard on the fourteenth floor.

“The Net is back up and hell, I’ll bet he wasn’t even winded when he showed us cops the crime scene. Very cool guy. I can see why you liked him. So here’s a question, Alison.”

She said, “Where the hell is Joseph? Oh. You remember I said I’m a federal employee, don’t you?”

“Of course. I can’t touch you, right? So here’s my question. Why would Dugan do that for you? Why would he kill for you? And why would he die for you?”

“This is your story, not mine,” said Alison Muller, exhaling like her breath was smoke.

“Well, here’s my theory. He did it because he knew you. And as a world-class femme fatale to his former cop turned security chief, I think he would have been an easy score for you. You were beyond his wildest dreams. And—I’ll admit this part is hypothetical—I think you told Dugan that you’d run away with him to the People’s Republic of China and start a new and exciting life together. Am I warm, Alison?”

She was staring past me through the windshield, considering her options.

I knew it. I wasn’t just warm. I was red-smoking-hot.

“Look,” she said, “I’m going to get disappeared for a while. I want you to tell my daughters that I’m OK. That I love them. There are a few things I want them to have and there are some things I have to tell Khalid.”

I understood what she was saying. She didn’t know when she’d see them again. Or if.

“Happy to help. Tell me you killed Shirley Chan and it’s a deal.”

Alison sighed, shook her head, and said, “What a bitch.” She was referring to me.

Then she said, “OK. I didn’t know if or what Michael had told her about me. She was smart and she could have turned people against me. I went into her house and I put her down. OK? I killed her. Now shut the hell up. I can’t stand the sound of your voice.”

“Back at you, babe. You kind of make me sick.”

I took the phone out of the holder, showed Alison the big icon of a microphone on the faceplate, rewound it a touch, and played back “You kind of make me sick.” Then I said, “We’re still rolling. Let’s have the message for your family.”

While she talked to her kids, I was thinking, Gotcha. Shirley Chan’s death wasn’t a government-ordered hit. Killing a mother of two small children was Muller’s own personal cover-up to protect herself.

If the CIA spat Muller out, we could charge her for Shirley Chan’s murder and do our best to build a case. I thought I could do it starting with her confession.

When Muller finished talking into the recorder, I pressed Stop and said, “That’s a wrap.”

She smiled—a hat-tip to me for making the deal. And then she started to laugh. Man, it was catching. I laughed, too. This hilarity was more about relief and hysteria than it was about humor, but we were both into it, chortling and giggling like high school girls.

Technically, I laughed last.

And of course, best.

CHAPTER 97

CHRIS KNIGHTLY’S BIG face filled the open car window.

“You girls having fun?” he said.

I didn’t like the guy, but screw him. I had what I wanted, on the record. Knightly unlocked and opened the creaking back door and said, “Let me help you out, Ali. Watch your head.”

Joe opened the front door, and as Knightly and Muller walked toward a chopper, he got in behind the wheel, reached over, pushed my gun muzzle toward the floor, and peeled my fingers off the butt one by one.

“It’s OK, Linds. It’s all OK.”

He opened his arms and I went into them. He held me and kissed the top of my head, and I just gave myself over to the pleasure of that hug—but not for long. I disengaged, sat back in the passenger seat, and said, “What happens now?”

Joe said, “I’m going with Knightly, taking Muller in for interrogation. Munder is a good guy. He and a few others are taking a chopper to the Vancouver airport. You’ll go with them. I’ll call you when I can.”

I nodded. There was no point asking him, “Where are you taking her? How long will you be gone?” I took back my gun and holstered it. I let Joe open the door for me and I got out, looking around at this little airfield that had been a shooting gallery a short while ago.

Agent Munder came over and told me there was a bathroom in the hangar if I needed it and that a coffee urn and some rolls had been set out earlier for the crew.

“Help yourself.”

A little while later, he gave me a hand up into the helicopter, which was too loud for conversation. I was glad. The flight to the airport was short. I waited in the lounge with Agent Munder for the flight to San Francisco, which was also short.

Conklin and Cindy met me at SFO, and they both hugged me to pieces. I sat in the backseat on the drive into the city, leaning toward them over the seat back so I could tell them about my fifteen hours with the CIA.

I fell asleep while I was talking.

Cindy walked with me upstairs to the apartment and sat with Mrs. Rose and Julie until I’d finished taking the best shower of my entire life. And then everyone left us alone.

I sat in Joe’s chair holding our child, and then I sobbed deeply until she started crying, too. Poor Martha was dumbfounded. She barked and yipped and circled until I was all cried out.

We napped. Then we went to the park, my girls and me.

We sat by the lake and watched ducks and people. I made small talk with Martha and Julie. But my mind was working hard.

As usual, I still had questions.

CHAPTER 98

THE PHONE RANG at seven the next morning while I was brushing my teeth. It was Brady.

“Hah-wo,” I said.

“Are you all right?”

I spat and rinsed. “Good as new.”

“Fine. There’s a car downstairs for you. Go to Mission and Cortland. Two officers are at the scene. They’ll fill you in. Conklin’s on the way.”

Brady hung up. I sang to my reflection, “It’s gonna be another bright, bright, sunshiny day.”

I finished my morning ablutions and welcomed Mrs. Rose, who asked, “How are you?”

Everyone wanted to know how I was. I must look like I’d been dragged up and down Filbert Street behind a garbage truck.

“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“A little tense. My daughter’s due anytime. She’s packed to go to the hospital. Do you think you’ll be home after work?”

“I’ll be home by six. Or call me and I will relieve you as speedily as the law allows.”

“That’s good enough for me,” she said.

I kissed Julie, ruffled Martha’s ears, tossed her a tennis ball, and grabbed a bottle of tea from the fridge. Then I ran down the stairs.

There was a fire-engine-red Camaro in front of my apartment building with gold hubcaps and matching chains around the plate guards. The envelope taped to the window had my name on it, and there was a set of keys inside, along with a note written in Brady’s block-letter handwriting.

“Merry Christmas from the motor pool.”

It was not Christmas, and this car’s previous owner had clearly been convicted of possession of narcotics with intent to sell. I hated the car on sight. But until Nationwide paid out for my deceased Explorer, it would have to do.

My drive to the Mission would have been a laugh riot if I’d been in a laughing mood. I got suggestive gestures and horn toots and more than one offer to race, but on the positive side, the car went from zero to sixty in a heartbeat, handled beautifully around curves, and braked on a bottle cap. The motor pool had tooled this crass beast into a first-class cop car.

When I got to the intersection of Mission and Cortland, Conklin was waiting outside a cheap variety store near the corner. He was not alone. Three squad cars were at the curb and a load of interested citizens stood behind the yellow tape. Broken glass glittered on the sidewalk.

Conklin met me at the car and took me over to talk to the first officer, saying, “Officer Dow spoke with the lady a few minutes ago. Dow, tell the sergeant what you told me.”

The uniformed cop was young and keyed up and clearly wanted to make his report.

He said, “Girl in there says she’s had enough of her old man. She shot him and yelled out to me that she doesn’t trust men at all and won’t be taken alive.”

“Father? Or husband?” I asked.

“Husband.”

“SWAT is on the way?”

Dow said, “She says if she sees men in black, she’s just going to blow her brains out. But she’ll talk to you, Sergeant. She saw your picture on the news after the Chinatown bust.”

I was back on the job, working a case that didn’t involve spies or orphaned children or multiple homicides. It wasn’t exactly blue skies with a side of roses, but it wasn’t bad. There was even a chance that I could do some good.

My vest was in the back of my Explorer, which was still undergoing a forensic postmortem at the crime lab, but I was wearing my lucky socks.

I asked Officer Dow, “What’s her name?”

CHAPTER 99

BY 2 P.M., I was home again with my shoes and cell phone off.

Mrs. Rose was at her daughter’s bedside. The victim of the variety store shooting was in stable condition, and the young female shooter had a lawyer and was under suicide watch.

Joe was with Alison Muller at some black site in DC or on foreign soil, and I didn’t know when he was coming back or if I would let him into my life again.

I could make a good case for moving on.

I thought of Alison Muller’s taunts about the closeness of her relationship with Joe, and although she was a five-star liar, he had an equal number of stars on his chest, maybe more, and they made a pretty good pair.

Mrs. Rose liked to say, “When feeling pathetic, make tea.”

I boiled water and took a look at the big pile of mail that had been accumulating for weeks on the kitchen counter. Joe had been paying the bills for a while, but I still knew how to balance a checkbook.

I blew on my tea, switched the radio to Radio Alice, 97.3, for their adult contemporary sound, and put the mail and my computer on the coffee table. I tossed the flyers and catalogs to the floor, separating out the utilities and condo maintenance and the bank statement.

I was going through the statement when I saw a charge for a safe-deposit box that I didn’t know we had. I’m not saying it was a secret. Only that I hadn’t noticed it before.

The time was now 2:35. Our bank was at Ninth Avenue and Clement, five blocks away. If the baby would cooperate, I could get there before closing time.

I went to the drawer in Joe’s office and removed the key I’d found days ago at the bottom of a stationery box. I put on my shoes, strapped Julie into the baby sling, and arrived at the bank five minutes before closing. I told the woman in charge of the vault that I wouldn’t take long. I just had to get into the box before the weekend. It was urgent.

Was it urgent? I asked myself, even as she opened the doors. Was I setting myself up for one more hideous disappointment?

“Please, Mrs. Molinari,” said the vault keeper. “I have an appointment with the coach at my son’s school. I promised.”

Joe’s key had the number 26 engraved on the shaft. The vault lady put her key into one of the locks and I put my key into the corresponding lock. After the tumblers clicked into place, I slid the long metal box out of the cabinet and took it into the tiny viewing room next to the vault.

I fumbled with the hasp and finally got the box open. I stared in at the contents. There were several unsealed envelopes inside. One of them held our condo lease. I found our marriage license, Julie’s birth certificate, and Joe’s father’s death certificate. Under those envelopes was a long flat candy box with gold edging and a stylized drawing of a bow on top.

As I bridged the lid of the candy box with my fingers, preparing to open it, I reflected on the fact that I was snooping—again, but screw it. I was entitled to whatever truth I could find in this haystack of lies a.k.a. my marriage to Joe.

If there were mementos of Joe’s secret life with Alison Muller, I absolutely needed to know.

I removed the lid. Up came the smell of chocolate and cherries, but Alison Muller wasn’t inside the candy box.

Julie was there. And so was I.

On top, a sprig of Julie’s fine, dark baby hair tied with a slender pink ribbon. There was a photograph a stranger had taken of Joe and me on the ferry to Catalina, both of us grinning, the wake foaming behind us as we stood embracing at the rail. That was the first time we’d told each other, “I love you.”

Under that photo was a copy of the marriage vows we’d exchanged in a gazebo lapped by the ocean in Half Moon Bay, and there was a candid snapshot of Joe and me and Cat and the little girls, all of us laughing and walking barefoot down the beach in our wedding clothes. And there was a printout of an e-mail from me to Joe telling him that I missed him so much, asking, “When are you coming home?”

I was struck by the congruence of having similar thoughts now at this very different place and time in our lives.

My musings were interrupted by the vault lady tapping on the glass, pointing to her watch.

“I’m coming,” I said.

I put everything back in the box and returned it to its sleeve in the cabinet behind the locked doors, and Julie and I left the bank.

“What now?” I said to my precious little girl as we crossed Lake Street toward the Molinari family home.

“What’s going to happen now?”