Panic

24

K eeping a man imprisoned was like buying a tour inside his soul. Jargo had seen men, locked in the cramped confines of his homemade jail, talk to people long dead and gone; cry and sob after days of complete silence; one unfortunate drowned himself in the toilet. Strength was often shallow; confidence was a ploy; bravery a mask.

He already knew Mitchell Casher’s soul. It was a soul incapable of betraying anyone he loved. It was a soul that trusted few, but that trust ran deep as gold veining through the earth.

Jargo went inside the room. Mitchell lay on the bed, a heavy chain bound around his waist and his ankles, long enough to permit him to reach the toilet. Mitchell was unshaven, unwashed, but dignified. The room smelled of the dried-food packets he’d left for Mitchell, since he and Dezz could not stay to serve as his jailer.

He stood watching Mitchell, who did not say hello. Jargo lit a cigarette. He had not smoked in fifteen years. He pulled hard on the smoke, breathed in, coughed like a tobacco virgin. He studied the glowing ember of the cigarette.

‘I’m afraid to ask,’ Mitchell Casher said.

‘I have a difficult question for you,’ Jargo said, ‘but I really must insist on honesty.’

‘I’ve always been honest with you.’ Mitchell’s voice was broken, worn with grief for his wife and fear for his son. He sounded like the dead Mr. Gabriel. Jargo offered him a cigarette and Mitchell shook his head. The imprisonment would take months, years, to break him; bad news about his son would shatter him at once, Jargo knew.

‘I appreciate your honesty, Mitch. Will Evan fight for you?’

‘“Fight for me”? I don’t know what you mean.’

Jargo sat down across from Mitchell Casher. The glow of the light, high above in the ceiling where no prisoner could reach it, was eye-achingly dim. No window graced the room; Jargo had bricked it years ago, after an unfortunate incident involving a shard of glass and the wrist of a stubborn informant within Castro’s regime. But Jargo considered Mitchell not to be missing a view. Outside, the night sky of southern Florida hung heavy with clouds that resembled cancers. ‘Will he fight for you? Will Evan try and get you back?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been thinking long and hard about Carrie and what she’s done. I don’t know for sure that she is CIA; at the least she’s freelance now, and she’s taken Evan to sell him and his information to the highest bidder. I suspect that bidder will be the CIA.’

Mitchell put his head in his hands. ‘Then let me go. Let me help you find him. Please, Steve.’

‘Find him? You and I can hardly stroll into Langley’s lobby and ask for him back now, can we?’

‘They’ll kill him.’

‘Yes. But not right away.’ Jargo took another drag on the cigarette, and this time the tobacco soothed his nerves. You never really forgot how to smoke, he thought. The way you never really forgot how to swim, to make love, to kill.

‘I don’t understand.’

This was the conversational equivalent of cutting a diamond. One had to be precise to get the intended effect, and there were no second chances. ‘Evan told me he has a list of our clients. He also knows my name, and he knows that Dezz is my son. So either he’s been in touch with the CIA, or he’s got even more information. Information about us. Who we are.’

Mitchell’s eyes went wide.

‘All our clients, Mitchell. Do you realize what this could do to us? It’s one thing if we all have to vanish and start over again. That’s almost impossible. But our clients? We could never rebuild if the CIA got that information.’ Jargo brought his gaze back to the burning ember.

‘I swear to you I never knew she was betraying us,’ Mitchell said in a hoarse voice.

‘I know. I know, Mitchell. Otherwise you would have run with her. I know.’

‘Then please let me help you.’

‘I want to let you go. But you’re hardly in fighting shape. You might take off and endanger the only chance I have’ – Jargo paused – ‘of getting Evan back safely for you.’

‘The only chance. Tell me.’

Jargo watched his cigarette burn. Waited. Let Mitchell squirm.

‘Oh, Christ. Evan.’ Mitchell put his face in his hands.

‘I haven’t seen you cry since we were boys.’

‘They killed Donna. Imagine your son in their hands.’

‘Dezz would never be taken alive. You know how he is.’ Jargo didn’t look at Mitchell. ‘I’m so sorry.’ His voice cracked. Jargo closed his hand on Mitchell’s arm.

‘So let me help you. Please.’

‘He said he had the client files, Mitchell.’

‘I bet he lied… Donna wouldn’t have shared information with him. His finding out about us, it was her worst nightmare.’

‘Reality check. They were on his computer. Donna had clothes packed for him to run. He took off without waiting for his girlfriend. I think he knew. And he might know what the files are worth.’

‘Evan… wouldn’t know how to sell the information. He wouldn’t know anyone to contact. And he wouldn’t hurt me.’

‘You never told him about your background? Not once?’

‘Never. I swear, he knows nothing.’

You don’t know what he knows, and I’m not taking the risk, Jargo thought, but instead he said, ‘I’m weighing whether to attempt to get Evan back at all. If he plans on fighting for you, he won’t simply hand the files over to the CIA. He’ll try and strike a deal. Which may give us a window of time. But that’s the risk I’m assessing.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Jargo leaned forward, whispered an inch from Mitchell’s face, ‘You know I have operatives working for me within the Agency.’

‘I suspected.’

‘And clients within the Agency. Those people are at huge risk if Evan turns over the files. They’re dead in the water.’ Jargo tasted the smoke again, stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. ‘My people inside the Agency have every reason to get Evan back for me. For us.’ He put a hand on Mitchell’s shoulder.

‘They won’t hurt him?’

‘Not if I tell them to bring him to me alive.’ The lie felt fine in his mouth. ‘But either way, we must get Evan and whatever information he has away from the Agency. Alive, so you can be together with him again.’

‘Please, Steve. Let me help. Let me help you find my son.’

Jargo stood. Made his decision. Dug in his pocket and unlocked the chain, slipped it free of Mitchell. The links made a pool of silver on the hardwood floor.

Mitchell stood. ‘Thank you, Steve.’

‘Go get showered. I’ll cook you dinner.’ He gave Mitchell Casher a rough hug. ‘How’s an omelet sound?’

Mitchell seized him by the throat, shoved him hard against the wall, relieved him of his gun, angled it under his chin. ‘An omelet sounds great. But just so you and I are clear. Your agents. They don’t hurt or kill my son. Make them understand we need him alive.’

‘I’m glad that’s out of your system. You can let me go now.’

‘If they kill my son, I will kill yours.’

‘Let go.’

Mitchell released his hold on Jargo; Jargo gently pushed his hand away. ‘This is what our enemies want. Us at each other’s throats.’

Mitchell handed him his gun. ‘Evan. Safe. That’s nonnegotiable. I can control my son once we’ve got him back.’

‘I will do everything I can to bring him home. You realize he’ll be the best-kept secret in the Agency. Resources, people, will be diverted from their normal work to help hide him and to rally against us. My eyes inside the Agency will be looking for those signs. A well-meaning idiot in the Agency will mass for a secret war against us, and we’ll stop them with our own Pearl Harbor.’

‘Getting him back will be almost impossible.’

‘In a way,’ Jargo said, ‘I think it might be easy. What we need to do is convince him to come back to us.’

He went downstairs to make the omelet. The curving cypress staircase was full of shadow; he did not like lights burning brightly in the lodge, even with every window carefully sealed and covered. Too much light would glow like a beacon in the vast dark and might attract unwanted attention.

The kitchen in the empty lodge was large, dimly lit. Dezz sat on a stool eating a candy bar, sullen, morose. CNN was on the TV.

‘Any details of note?’ Jargo asked.

‘No. A few people suffered minor injuries in the rush to get out of the zoo. No arrests. No suspects. But no mention of videotape of us.’ Dezz chewed his candy. ‘When we catch them, I get the bitch. She’s all mine. Ask her your questions, then give her to me. Christmas comes early this year.’

‘If Evan has the client list and hands it over to the CIA, then they’ll up the surveillance on those targets. Not just on our clients inside the CIA, but elsewhere. But slowly. They can’t commit too many resources suddenly to us without incredibly uncomfortable questions being asked.’

‘Your point?’

He could share with Dezz what he didn’t dare share with Mitchell. ‘Very few in the CIA know about us. There is a man, code-named Bricklayer, but I have not been able to determine who he is. Bricklayer is supposed to root out any internal problems in the CIA: problems such as using freelance assassins, selling secrets, committing unapproved kills, stealing from American corporations. Basically, Bricklayer wants to put us out of business.’

‘Bricklayer.’

‘Carrie’s a resource Bricklayer will have to use. That may be a blessing to us.’

‘How?’

‘How the CIA uses Carrie will tell us how much they really know about us.’ He gathered the makings of an omelet from the fridge. Cooking would calm him. He chopped vegetables and he thought of a lifetime ago, a child, watching the girl who became Donna Casher standing across a sun-drenched kitchen table from him, cutting vegetables with a calm precision. She had always wanted everything exact, just so. The sun had always caught her hair in a way that transfixed Jargo, and a tinge of sadness and regret touched his heart. He wished, just once, he had told her how much he liked her photographs.

‘You know, Mitchell and Donna and I, the first job we had together when we went freelance, it was in London. A hit. Really simple, it didn’t require all three of us, but there was a sense of power in the three of us doing the kill together. A sense of liberation.’

‘Who killed whom?’ Dezz asked.

‘Victim doesn’t matter. Mitchell and I both did the kill, although my shot hit first. Donna handled logistics.’ Jargo cracked eggs in a bowl, stirred in milk, dumped in the broccoli and peppers. ‘Because it was our first job, we were cutting the bonds of our old life. We were so conscious in making our decisions. Before we were never encouraged to be so deliberative. We were more point and shoot, don’t ask questions. I fingered the bullets I was using for the longest time, like they were worry beads. Or the last shackles of a chain that we were all breaking.’

Dezz ate a piece of candy.

‘I just traded one set of chains for another, Dezz.’

Dezz had no mind for reflection. He said, ‘So how are you getting Evan and Carrie back? Or at least shutting them up?’

‘Carrie will tell the CIA what she knows, which isn’t much. She can’t betray enough to hurt us. She can give them descriptions, the apartment in Austin, but not much in terms of usable evidence.’

‘Get real,’ Dezz said. ‘If she’s double, she might have information, files… she could skin you.’

‘She had no access.’

‘You don’t know what she had, Dad.’

Jargo kept his voice low. ‘You missed a prime chance to kill them both. Shut up.’ He dumped butter in the sizzling skillet, poured in the eggs. ‘I intend to cover every base. Including bases you don’t even know are on the field, Dezz.’

‘We need to pack and run. Set up shop elsewhere. England. Germany. Greece. Let’s go to Greece.’

‘No. I’m not dismantling years of sweat and work. My chains are still ones of my own choice, Dezz.’ The failure dimmed in Jargo. He was ready to roll.

‘You’re not going to be able to get Evan back.’

Jargo finished cooking the eggs and slid them on a plate. ‘Take this plate and a cup of strong coffee up to Mitchell. Be nice; he threatened to kill you a few minutes ago if I don’t get Evan back safe and sound.’

Dezz frowned.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jargo said in a low voice. ‘Soon Evan will be dead, but Mitchell won’t be able to blame us.’