Panic

35

T he heat of the bullet passed Evan’s ear. He put all his weight and strength into twisting the barrel toward the floor. Khan jerked, trying to wrench the weapon free. The gun sang again.

Khan spasmed. Then went still. Evan yanked the gun away, staggering, clawing at his eyes.

He retreated to a corner of the room. He could barely see Khan, but he kept the gun trained on him. Evan moaned; the pain in his eyes was blinding.

No movement from Khan. He forced himself back toward the body, touched the throat. Nothing. No pulse.

Agony. Evan stumbled into the kitchen. Powered on the faucet, splashed handfuls of water on his face. The brown contact lenses Bedford had given him washed free. After the tenth handful the agony started to subside. No sound in the house but the water hissing into the sink. He rinsed his swollen eyes, again and again, the gun still in his other hand, until the pain lessened. He walked back into the den.

Khan stared up at him from the floor, three-eyed, the middle eye red. Evan checked again; the neck, the wrist, the chest, were all empty of a heartbeat.

I just killed a man.

He should be sick with fear, with horror. A week ago he would have been paralyzed with shock. Now simple relief flooded him that it was Khan lying dead on the floor and not him.

He went to the bathroom and studied his face in the mirror. His eyes hazel again and swollen almost shut. His lip was badly split and bloodied. He opened the cabinet under the sink and found a fully stocked first-aid kit. Of course there was one here; in this house was everything Khan needed.

This was Khan’s escape route.

He had not thought clearly in the chaos of the bomb blast, he was so focused on getting his hands on the man who could unfold the map to his parents’ lives.

Khan had screwed up in Jargo’s eyes, but maybe Jargo didn’t want him dead. Maybe Jargo wanted to dead-end any immediate investigation into the Deeps. Khan had walked out after Evan had said the name Jargo. Or maybe he already knew Evan’s face. Then Pettigrew walked in with the bomb, or Khan triggered the bomb once he was clear of the building. Khan, with his own business destroyed, would not run to a place that would only give him a few hours’ sanctuary. He would run for his escape hatch. If the Deeps had fallback identities, so did Khan, their moneyman. He’d brought Evan to a place where Khan could hide, clothe himself in a prepared identity, melt into the world. Even better, he would be assumed dead in the bookstore blast.

When Thomas Khan was assumed dead, then no one in the CIA would be looking for him.

It was no small thing to walk away from your life. And if this house was Khan’s hidey-hole, his first stop in the journey into a fresh and secret life, he would have resources here to shut down his operations, money and data to cover his tracks and to step into his new identity. But if Jargo knew this was where Khan would run – and Jargo might – then Evan didn’t have much time at all. Jargo could send an agent to ensure Khan had escaped the blast if Khan didn’t check in.

The ringing phone. Maybe it had been Jargo calling for Khan.

Evan might not have much time at all, but he had to risk it. The answers he needed could be inside the house.

Evan checked every window and door to be sure it was locked. He pulled down every window shade, closed every curtain. Two small bedrooms, a study, and a bath upstairs, a master bedroom and bath downstairs, with den, kitchen, dining room. A door off the kitchen led down to a small cellar; Evan ventured down steps, flicked on a light. Empty. Except for in the corner, a large, black, zippered bag. A body bag.

Evan eased down the zipper.

Hadley Khan. He recognized the face – what was left of it. He had been dead for a few days. Lime powder dusted his body, to minimize the burgeoning odor of decay. Shot once through the temple. He lay curled tight in the bag, naked; long, vicious welts marred his face and his chest. His hands were missing. His mouth gaped open; there was no tongue.

I forgave him, Khan had said.

Evan stood and walked to the opposite side of the cellar and pressed his forehead against the cool stone and took deep, shuddering breaths. Khan did it here, he tortured and killed his own son for betraying him. For betraying the family business.

What would his parents have done to him if he’d stumbled on the truth or threatened to expose them? He could not imagine this. No. Never.

Khan’s voice echoed in his ear: I know them much better than you do.

Evan closed the body bag. He went upstairs to the den. He dragged Thomas Khan’s body down the basement steps, placed him next to his son. He went back upstairs, found a folded sheet in a bedroom closet, and covered both corpses with it.

He drank four glasses of cold water, ate four aspirin that he found in the first-aid kit. His eyes hurt, his stomach ached.

He returned to the study and tested the desk and a credenza; both were locked. Evan went back to the basement and searched Khan’s pockets; no keys, but a wallet and a PDA. He powered it on; a screen appeared, asking for his fingerprint.

He dug Khan’s right hand from under the sheet, pressed the dead man’s forefinger against the screen. Denied. He grabbed Khan’s left hand, pressed Khan’s left forefinger against the screen. It accepted the print, opened to show a normal startup screen. He studied the applications and files. The PDA held only a few contacts and phone numbers: a few Zurich banks, a listing of London bookstores. There was an icon for a map application. He opened it. The last three maps accessed were London; Biloxi, Mississippi; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A notation on the Biloxi map, showing the location of a charter air service. Biloxi wasn’t that far from New Orleans. Maybe that was where Dezz and Jargo had fled after the New Orleans disaster.

But nothing that announced, X marks the spot where your father is.

Except maybe Fort Lauderdale. A specific place in Florida. And Gabriel had said Evan’s mother had claimed that they would meet his father in Florida. Carrie thought his father was in Florida.

Carrie. He could try to call her. Reach her through the London CIA office. Tell her he was alive. But, no. If Jargo’s agents or clients within the CIA thought he was dead… no one would be hunting him. And they had known he was in London, had nearly killed him. Bedford’s group had been compromised.

He wanted to know Carrie was safe; he wanted to tell her he was alive. But not now, not until he had his father back. She wouldn’t go back to the house Pettigrew had taken them to, he believed; if Pettigrew worked for Jargo, it was too dangerous. She would carefully reunite with Bedford.

Evan reconfigured the password program to delete Khan’s fingerprint and used his own thumbprint as the passkey. It might be useful later. He put the PDA in his pocket. Standing up, he spotted a toolbox in the corner and took it upstairs.

He jabbed a screwdriver into the desk lock with caution; after the trick pepper-spray lighter he could not take anything on face value. But there was only the click of the metal against metal.

He picked up a hammer and with four solid blows cracked open the locks on Thomas Khan’s desk. In one drawer he found papers relating to the ownership of the house. It had been bought last year by Boroch Investments. Boroch must be a front for Khan; if there was no obvious connection to Khan, the police wouldn’t come here. Thomas Khan wouldn’t show his face if he could help it in digging his escape tunnel.

In the desk drawer he found stationery and envelopes for Boroch Investments, a passport from New Zealand, one from Zimbabwe, both in false names with Thomas Khan’s pictures inside. There was a phone, in need of a charge but working. He dug out the charger from the back of the drawer and began to power the phone up. He checked the call log; the list was empty.

He forced the lock on another desk drawer. It held a metal box, containing bricks of British pounds and American dollars. Beneath that an automatic pistol and two clips. He counted the money. Six thousand British pounds, ten thousand in U.S. funds. He set the cash on the desk. The side desk drawers were empty.

He attacked the credenza with a hammer, a screwdriver, and then a crowbar. Dizziness oozed into his brain, from lack of eating, from exhaustion, from the pepper spray, but he knew that he was close, so close to getting what he needed. So close.

The door cracked under the crowbar. Empty.

No, it couldn’t be. Couldn’t. Khan would need data files, he would need to access new accounts, erase old ones. There had to be a computer in this house aside from the PDA. Unless the bastard kept it all in his head. Then Evan was back to zero.

He searched the room. The small closet held office supplies, old suits, a raincoat. He went through the guest bedrooms – practically bare – and the downstairs bedroom. He searched carefully, knowing he was no pro, but reminded himself to be disciplined and thorough. But he found nothing, and the chance to close his hands around Jargo’s throat started to turn to smoke.

In the darkened den, he risked a reading light. The bookcase. Khan had hidden his gun behind the volumes.

Evan searched the rest of the bookcase. Nearly every inch filled with good books, leftovers from Khan’s store. How could such a psychopathic bastard have such excellent taste in reading? But nothing else lay concealed behind the books. He rifled through the kitchen cabinets and pantry. He dumped canisters of salt and flour on the floor. Nothing. A freezer full of frozen dinners, but he ripped them open, dumped them in the sink, hoping a disk or CD might be hidden inside. Suddenly he was hungry and he microwaved a frozen chicken-and-noodle dinner, nauseated at eating a dead man’s food. He decided to get over it.

He sat down on the floor and forced himself to calm down as he ate. The food was tasteless but filling. His stomach settled. The jet lag and the fade of his adrenaline rush swamped him, and he fought the urge to just lie down on the floor and close his eyes, slip into sleep. Maybe there was nothing more to find.

The basement. The one room he hadn’t searched. He went down the darkened steps. Past the sheeted bodies. The basement was small. Square, with a stacked washer/dryer on one side and metal shelving on the other. The shelves held an assemblage of junk. More books, boxed. He went through them all. A television set with a cracked screen. A box of gardening tools, clean of mud, probably never used. A couple of cases of canned soups and vegetables and meats, in case Khan had to hide a fellow operative.

His gaze went back to the TV with its cracked eye. Why would anyone keep a small broken TV? TVs were cheap now. To repair the screen, you might as well buy a new one. Maybe Khan was driven by a sense of waste not, want not. But he had been well-to-do. A broken TV was nothing.

Evan took the TV down from the shelf. He retrieved a screwdriver and unfastened the back.

The television had been stripped of its guts. Inside was a small notebook computer and charger. Evan powered on the laptop; it presented a dialog box prompting him for a password.

He entered DEEPS.

Wrong. He entered JARGO.

Wrong. He entered HADLEY. Wrong. The CIA could crack this, but he couldn’t. Even if he deduced a password, Khan might have encrypted and passworded the files on the system. He would be a fool not to take that precaution.

Evan stared at the screen. Maybe he should just take the computer and go to Langley, the CIA’s headquarters. Turn himself in…

… and not save his father.

His father’s face floated before him in the darkened basement, and he stared at the father-and-son bodies of the Khans. If he believed the past few days, his father was a professional killer who had stamped out lives the way others stamped out ants. But that wasn’t the father he knew. It could not be, the truth could not be that harsh or that simple. He had to have the data to rescue his father.

Or, he thought, he had to create the illusion that he had the data.

The laptop. He didn’t need the data, he just needed the laptop itself to barter for his father. It might hold the exact same files his mother had stolen. At the least it was a negotiating point: he could always threaten to turn over the laptop to the CIA unless his father was released. Jargo couldn’t know with certainty that the files were, or weren’t, on Khan’s machine. Even if this didn’t hold the client list, it might hold enough data – financial, logistical, personal – to destroy the Deeps.

His mother might have stolen the files from this very laptop. He tried to imagine how she had done it. She’d snapped pictures in Dover, stolen the military data. Delivered the goods to Khan. But probably not here, not in his safe spot. She’d probably handed him the stolen data and photos on a CD, in a park, in a theater, in a cafe. But maybe she follows Khan here after they part ways. Then… what? Khan loads the data she stole on the computer to send to Jargo. He leaves. She breaks into the house, finds the laptop. She must have software to bypass the passwords – a necessity if she routinely stole information.

If she did it – it could be done. He could steal the same files.

He tried the laptop once more. Entered BAST. Nothing.

OHIO, because of the orphanage. No.

GOINSVILLE. Refused.

He found Khan’s car keys on the kitchen counter, put the laptop and the money in the car’s trunk. He went back inside and put Khan’s PDA, gun, and phone into his jacket pocket. He wanted to sleep, and he wanted to believe that Khan’s hiding place could be his hiding place. But it wasn’t safe to stay here.

Fort Lauderdale. His mother’s mention of Florida to Gabriel. It was his best bet.

He got into the borrowed Jaguar. Realized he had never driven a car designed for the left side of the road and, for the first time in days, really laughed. This would be an adventure.

Nerves on edge, Evan drove into the darkness. A cold rain began to fall. He had to concentrate entirely on retraining his driving reflexes. He headed slowly, like a rookie driver, back toward London and found a decent hotel in Lewisham. He treated himself to a real meal of steak and fries in a small pub, drank down a pint of ale, watched a couple and their grown son laugh over lagers. He paid and went back to the hotel, lay down on the bed.

He turned Thomas Khan’s cell phone back on and it chimed that there was a message. He didn’t know Khan’s voice-mail password. But he found a call log, listing a recently missed number.

He opened Khan’s PDA and activated the Voice Memo application. Then he dialed the number on the new call log.

He could not negotiate if they all thought he was dead.

It was answered on the first ring. ‘Yes?’ He knew the voice, his soft psychotic purr. Dezz.

‘Let me speak to Jargo.’ Evan held the PDA close enough to record every word.

‘No one here by that name.’

‘Shut up, Dezz. Let me talk to Jargo. Now.’

Three beats of silence. ‘Put ourselves back together, have we?’

‘Tell your father I have all of Mr. Khan’s files relating to the Deeps. All of them. I’d like to negotiate a trade for my father.’

‘How’s Carrie? Blown to bits? I’m sorry I wasn’t in London to help you pick up the pieces.’ He stifled a giggle.

‘You say another word to me, freak, and I e-mail the client list to the CIA, to the FBI, to Scotland Yard. You’re not calling the shots. I am.’

Silence for a long moment, and Dezz said with icy politeness, ‘Hold, please.’

He imagined Dezz and Jargo, seeing Khan’s number on a cell phone screen, knowing now about the explosion and weighing if Evan was telling the truth.

‘Yes? Evan? You’re well?’ Jargo. Sounding concerned.

‘I’m fine. I have a proposal for you.’

‘Your father is worried sick about you. Where are you?’

‘Deep in the rabbit hole. And I have Thomas Khan’s laptop. From his hiding place in Bromley. With all his files.’

A long pause. ‘Congratulations. I for one find spreadsheets boring.’

‘Give me back my father, and I’ll give you your laptop, and then we’re walking away from each other.’

‘But files can be duplicated. I don’t know that I can trust you.’

‘You have no room to question my integrity, Mr. Jargo. None. I know about Goinsville, I know about Alexander Bast, I know he set up the original Deep network.’ All bluff; he wasn’t sure how any of this fit together, but he had to pretend that he knew. ‘I have Khan’s laptop and I’m giving it to you. Not to the police. Not to the press. All I want is my dad. You either take the deal or you don’t. I can tear the Deeps apart in five minutes with what I’ve got.’

‘May I speak to Mr. Khan?’ Jargo asked.

‘No, you may not.’

‘Is he alive?’

‘No.’

‘Well. Did you kill him or did the CIA?’

‘I’m not playing twenty questions with you. Do we have a deal or do I go to the CIA?’

‘Evan. I understand you’re upset. But I didn’t want Khan dead. I didn’t want you dead.’ A pause. ‘If you’ve got Internet access, I’d like to show you a tape. To prove my point.’

‘A tape.’

‘Khan had a digital camera in his business. Did a constant feed to a remote server. We take a lot of precautions in our line of work, you understand. I just accessed the server. I can prove to you it was a known CIA operative who set off the blast. His name was Marcus Pettigrew. I suspect the CIA saw a way to get rid of you and Khan all at once, nice and neat.’

Evan remembered seeing a set of small cameras mounted in the corners near the bookstore’s ceiling. He said what he thought Jargo would expect him to say, ‘So what? So I can’t trust the CIA. It doesn’t mean that I can trust you.’

‘Watch the tape,’ Jargo said, ‘before you make up your mind.’

‘Hold on.’ Staying on the phone, Evan walked down the stairs from his room to the hotel’s business center. It was empty. He fired up a gleaming new PC, set up a new e-mail account at Yahoo! under an invented name, and gave Jargo the new e-mail account’s address. After a minute the attached film clip appeared in the in-box. Evan clicked it. Saw himself, from above and to the left, come in and talk to Khan. Khan and then Evan went offscreen, and here came Pettigrew. Flipping the CLOSED sign. Murdering two people. Leaning down to touch his briefcase. Then nothing.

‘I’m not really into eviscerating my own network,’ Jargo said. ‘The CIA would be, however.’

‘You could have doctored that tape.’

‘Evan. Please. First Gabriel, now Pettigrew. Your friend Bricklayer sent you right into that death trap. Kill two birds with one stone, you and Khan. I’m not your enemy, Evan. Far from it. You’ve fallen in with the wrong crowd, to put it mildly, and I’ve been trying to save your ass.’

Bricklayer… he knows Bedford’s code name. He hated the oily concern that failed to hide the arrogance in Jargo’s voice.

‘That tape doesn’t lie. Now who do you believe?’ Jargo asked.

‘I want to talk to my dad.’ Evan put a calculated quaver of doubt in his voice.

‘That’s an excellent idea, Evan.’

Silence. And then his father’s voice: ‘Evan?’ He sounded tired, weak. Beaten.

Alive. His father was truly alive. ‘Dad. Oh, Jesus, Dad, are you okay?’

‘Yes. I’m all right. I love you, Evan.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘Evan… I’m sorry. Your mother. You. I never meant for you to get dragged into this mess. It was always my worst nightmare.’ Mitchell’s voice sounded near tears. ‘You don’t understand the whole story.’

He knew Jargo was listening. Pretend you believe him. It’s the only way Jargo will give you Dad. But not too fast, or Jargo won’t buy it. He had to play his own father. He tried hard to keep his voice steady. ‘No, Dad, I sure as hell don’t understand.’

‘What counts is that I can keep you safe, Evan. I need you to trust Jargo.’

‘Dad, even if Jargo didn’t kill Mom, he kidnapped you. How can I trust this guy?’

‘Evan. Listen carefully to me. Your mother went to the CIA, and the CIA killed her. I don’t know why she did it, but she did, thinking they would hide her, hide you. But they killed her,’ his voice broke, then steadied, ‘and now they’ve used you to try to draw me and Jargo out.’

‘Dad…’

‘Jargo and Dezz weren’t at our house. It was the CIA. Anything else you’ve been told is a lie. Believe your eyes. That CIA agent in London tried to kill you. There’s no plainer evidence. I want you to do what Jargo says. Please.’

‘I don’t think I can do that, Dad. He killed Mom. Do you understand that? He killed her!’ He gave his father an abbreviated account of his arrival at home.

‘But you never saw their faces.’

‘No… I never saw their faces.’ He let three seconds tick by, thought, Make Jargo think you want to believe Dad, you want to believe worse than anything, so this horror will all be over. ‘I saw Mom, and then I freaked, and they put a bag over my head.’

Mitchell’s voice was patient. ‘I can tell you it was not Dezz and Jargo, it wasn’t.’

‘How can you be sure, Dad?’

‘I am. I am absolutely sure they didn’t kill your mom.’

Start acting dumb. ‘I just heard voices.’

‘In the most horrifying moment of your life, you might make a mistake, Evan. Jargo might threaten you to get cooperation, but it’s easier than explaining to you. But he really wouldn’t hurt you. They shot at Carrie at the zoo. Not you.’

Not true, but Jargo had fed his father a matched set of lies. He didn’t argue the point. Now for confusion. ‘But Carrie said-’

‘Carrie betrayed your trust. She played you, son. I’m sorry.’

He let the silence build before he spoke. ‘You’re right.’ Forgive me, Carrie, he thought. ‘She wasn’t honest with me, Dad. Not from day one.’

Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘Never mind her. All that matters is getting you here with me. Are you safe from the CIA right now?’

‘To them, I’m dead.’

‘Then bring Jargo the files. We’ll be together. Jargo will let you and me talk, work out what happens next.’

Evan lowered his voice. ‘Say nothing. I have the laptop, but I can’t get past its password. I’ve never seen these files Jargo wants. I’m not a threat to him.’ He knew Jargo was drinking in every word.

‘It’ll all be fine as soon as we’re together.’

‘Dad… is it all true? What I found out about you and Mom, about the Deeps? Because I don’t understand…’

‘You have been very sheltered, Evan, and you are about to do more harm, ever, than good if you expose us. Do what Jargo says. We’ll have lots of time, and I can make you understand.’

‘Why aren’t you Arthur Smithson anymore?’

A pause. ‘You don’t know what your mother and I did for you. You have no conception of the sacrifices we made. You’ve never made a difficult choice. You have no idea.’ Then Mitchell’s words came in a rush, as though his time ran short: ‘You remember when I gave you all the Graham Greene novels, and I told you the most important line in all of them was “if one loved, one feared”? It’s true, one hundred percent true. I was afraid you wouldn’t have a good life, and I wanted a good life for you. The best life. You are everything to me. I love you, Evan.’

‘I remember. Dad, I love you, too.’ No matter what he had done. Evan remembered his father giving him a bunch of Greene novels his senior year in high school for Christmas, but he didn’t understand the quote. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Dad was alive and he was getting him back.

‘Listen closely.’ His father’s voice was gone, replaced by Dezz’s. ‘I’m in charge of you, now. Where are you?’

‘Just tell me where I’m supposed to be to exchange Khan’s computer for my father.’

‘Miami. Tomorrow morning.’

‘I can’t get to Miami that fast. Tomorrow night.’

‘We’ll arrange tickets for you,’ Dezz said. ‘We don’t want the CIA scooping you back up.’

‘I’ll handle my own travel. I’ll call you from Miami. I’m picking the time and place for our exchange.’

‘All right.’ Dezz gave a giggle. ‘Don’t run away from me this time. Now that we’ll all be like family.’ And he hung up.

Like family. Evan didn’t like the dig in Dezz’s tone, and he thought of the faded pictures of the two boys in Goinsville, their similar smiles and squints. Seeing now what he didn’t want to see then, the possibility that the connection between his father – a man he loved and admired – and Jargo, a brutal and vicious killer, could be a thread of blood.

Evan had decided to play dumb, to let Jargo think he would blindly rush to save his father, but now he felt dense. Graham Greene quotes that had burned up the precious time talking with his father. Digs from Dezz. It didn’t make sense.

Evan erased the downloaded movie from the PC and walked back to his room. He sprawled on his bed and stared at Khan’s laptop, still hiding its secrets like a willful child.

If he walked this laptop back to Jargo for his father, he’d get his dad back, he hoped, but Jargo would not be stopped. No. Unacceptable. So he had to do both. Get his father back and bring Jargo down, with no room for error.

He sat and considered the tools at his disposal, the ways tomorrow might play out.

It was a matter, he decided, of simply being the best storyteller. He needed to outdo a veritable king of lies. His first prop was this uncooperative laptop. It was time for sleight of hand.