Panic

43

T oo late. Evan opened CRADLE. It held old photos – of children. Sixteen children. One of his father, with his wide smile. His mother was a blond wisp of a child, high-cheekboned, her hair twisted in a garish, girlish braid. Jargo at seven already had the flat, cold eyes of a killer. A sweet-faced girl looked like a childish version of the driver McNee. Names lay underneath each photo. He stared at his parents and Jargo. And Carrie’s father.

Arthur Smithson. Julie Phelps. John Cobham. Richard Allan.

‘Those were your real names,’ Evan said. ‘What happened to your parents?’

‘They all died. We never knew them.’

‘Where were you born?’

His dad didn’t answer. Instead he asked, ‘Did you download the encryption software?’

‘Yes.’

His father leaned over and clicked buttons. Dropped the CRADLE document on it again and the file reopened.

Not the CIA. Not an independent organization that Alexander Bast had started and Jargo had hijacked. New names lay beneath each schoolchild photo.

His mother. Julija Ivanovna Kuzhkina.

His father. Piotr Borisovich Matarov.

Jargo. Nikolai Borisovich Matarov.

‘No,’ Evan said.

‘We were a great, great secret,’ his father said behind him. In tears. ‘The seeds of the next wave of Soviet intelligence. The gulags were full of women, political dissidents, who were not allowed to keep their children. Our fathers were either other dissidents or prison guards who impregnated the women. Our mothers got to see us – once a month, for an hour – until we were two and then never got to see us again. Most of the children ended up in labor or re-education camps. Alexander Bast went through the camps. He found the female prisoners with the highest IQs – giving them legitimate tests, because the Soviets claimed dissidents were mentally damaged and had low IQs – and he tested their two-year-olds, and then he took a group of us away.’

‘Bast was CIA.’

‘And KGB. He was a KGB-dangled double agent. His loyalty was to the USSR. He played the CIA for fools.’

Evan touched the screen, the photo of his mother. ‘He transformed you into little Americans.’

‘In Ukraine, the Soviets built a replica of an American town. Called Clifton. Bast had another complex near it. We had the best English and French teachers, we spoke it like natives. We were even taught to mimic accents: Southern, New Englander, New Jersey.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘We even had American textbooks, although our instructors were quick to point out Western falsehoods in favor of Soviet truth. And from an early age, we were taught tradecraft. How to fight, if needed. How to kill. How to lie. How to spy. How to live a completely double life. We grew up in constant training, programmed for success, for fearlessness, to be the best.’

Evan put his arm around his father.

‘At the time, Soviet intelligence was in disarray,’ Mitchell said. ‘The FBI and the CIA kept rolling up and shutting down Soviet operations and agents in the States, because so many of the American-born agents had ties to the Communist Party before World War Two. And if you were a Soviet diplomat, the FBI and CIA knew you were also likely KGB – it tied the spies’ hands, constantly. The illegals – spies living under deep cover – were more successful. Or at least Bast sold the upper echelon of KGB on this idea. Very few knew of the program. It was identified under a training program called CRADLE on budgetary documents and reports, and given an extremely low profile. No one could know. The investment that would have been lost was too much, much more than training an adult agent.’

‘Then Bast brought you to the orphanage in Ohio.’

‘He bought it. Set us up in our new names and identities…’

‘And then promptly destroyed the orphanage and the courthouse. Giving you a fallback position if your identity papers were ever questioned. And a source for new identities when needed.’

Mitchell nodded.

‘To grow up and be spies.’ Evan pictured his parents as children, drilled, trained, groomed for a life of suspicion and deceit. In the photos they looked as if they just wanted to go outside and play.

Mitchell nodded again. ‘To be sleeper agents. But we were to attend college – our scholarships paid from an orphans’ fund run by a company that was a front for Bast – and then he, as a longtime trusted CIA operative, would smooth the road for recruitment.’

‘Into the CIA.’

‘Yes. Or land us jobs in defense, energy, aviation… wherever would be useful. We were to be flexible. To focus on operations. To wait for opportunities. To serve when summoned.’

‘And as the Smithsons, you got a job as a translator for military intelligence, Mom worked for the navy. You were perfectly placed. Why did you become Mitchell Casher?’

‘For you.’ Now his father seemed to draw strength from the moment. He stood before Evan, his hands folded in front of his waist like a penitent, his eyes moist with tears, his voice strong. Not trembling.

‘I don’t understand, Dad.’

‘We saw what America was. Freedom. Opportunity. Honesty. For all its warts, its problems – America is a paradise. We wanted to raise our children here, Evan, without fear. Without worry that we would be caught and killed or summoned back to Russia, where our parents had been in jail and we’d never been given a choice in our lives. Did you know at Clifton, we had to be taught how to make choices? How to deal with real independence?’ Mitchell shook his head. ‘We had freedom; we had interesting work; we had food in our stomachs and no lines to stand in. We knew we had been lied to. Completely lied to.’

Evan put his arm around his father once more.

‘The only thing that shielded us from the KGB was Bast. He was our sole handler, our sole contact. We were not listed in official KGB files. We were not acknowledged. We were not even given credit for the operations we ran that were successful. If I stole computer-networking technology, Bast invented a fictitious traitor or onetime agent who had stolen it. The KGB command never knew I existed. Otherwise those fools in the KGB – more like a black hole than a bureaucracy – would have gotten impossibly greedy; asked us for the moon and stars and destroyed us all by giving us impossible jobs. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan; Bast told Jargo that he might be reassigned to run the networks the Soviets were building in Kabul. If he was moved out of position, it would have exposed us all to the greed and incompetence that was rife in the KGB’s American operations.’

‘You would have had to work according to the KGB’s rules. Not Bast’s.’

‘In a strange way, we were like his children.’ Mitchell closed his eyes. ‘Your mother was pregnant with you, a few of the other Deeps had married, started having children. Building real lives.’ He swallowed again. ‘We were not supposed to be in contact with each other, but we were. My brother saw an opportunity. We would finally be real Americans. We’d be capitalists about our work.’

‘So the Deeps killed Bast. Two shots from two different guns. Jargo and another Deep.’

‘Me,’ Mitchell said in a soft voice. ‘Jargo and your mother and I went to London. Shot him. Jargo first, then me. It was like killing my own father. But I did what I had to do. For you. To give you a chance.’ Mitchell swallowed. ‘We killed him and the few we could reach in Russia who knew about CRADLE. It was less than ten men at that point. That file of us as children, it looks like a scanned paper I saw once of all of us, back in Russia. It belonged to Bast.’

‘And Khan kept it. For insurance, in case you all betrayed him the way Jargo did Bast,’ Evan said.

‘I think you’re right. We created the evidence and fed it to one of Bast’s KGB handlers, that he had been murdered by the CIA, his fictional agents eliminated by the CIA. We all vanished from the lives we had lived. You were only a few months old then.’

‘But once the Soviet Union fell… you could have stepped forward.’

‘We had been spying for years by then, Evan. For the CIA. Against the CIA. We were freelance and we were very good. We could hardly step forward and say, “Hey, we’re a very successful network of former KGB agents, we’ve been doing the jobs too dirty for your own budgets, for your own people.” We would have been seen as the ultimate loose cannons, hunted by every intelligence service. Some of our clients, they’ve been using us for twenty-five years. They’ve risen far in their careers. We couldn’t come forward. We had… built wonderful lives.’

‘So you did deals with everyone and their brother.’

‘We were the town whores of intelligence work. We stole from the Israelis for the Syrians. We kidnapped old Germans in Argentina for the Israelis. We stole from German scientists and sold to KGB agents who never knew we were once their colleagues. Corporate espionage because it’s fast and lucrative.’ Mitchell ran his hand along his face. ‘Espionage is illegal in every country. There is no clemency. Even ex-KGBers that are working as consultants now in the U.S., they had not done what we had. They had not committed murder. They had not lived under false names. They had not sold their services to the highest bidder.’

‘And this noble work was done for my sake.’

‘For you. For Carrie. For ourselves and all our children. We didn’t want you to never have choices. We didn’t want to take you away from everything you had ever known. We’ – here Mitchell’s voice broke, that of a boy torn from a mother’s arms – ‘we didn’t want you to be taken from us. We wanted to be alive and free.’

The shock of his statement made Evan’s bones feel like water. ‘This isn’t freedom, Dad. You haven’t been able to do what you wanted. Be what you wanted. You just traded one cage for another.’

‘Don’t judge me.’

Evan stood. ‘I’m not staying in the cage you built for yourself.’

Mitchell shook Evan’s shoulders. ‘It wasn’t a cage. Your mother got to be a photographer. I got to work with computers. Our choices. And you got to grow up free, not afraid, not with us rotting in a prison, just like our mothers.’ Mitchell’s mouth contorted in fury and grief; rage fired his eyes.

‘Dad…’

‘You don’t know the evil you were saved from, Evan. I don’t mean the evil of murder. I mean the evil of oppression. Of your soul suffocating. Of constant fear.’

‘I know you think you did the right thing for me.’

‘There’s no think about it, I did, your mother and I did!’

‘Yes. Dad.’ Evan drew his father into a long embrace, and Mitchell Casher shuddered. ‘It’s okay. I will always love you.’

His father hugged back, fiercely.

‘You did the right thing at the time,’ Evan said. ‘But this life killed Mom, and it has nearly killed me and you both. Please. We have a chance to end it. We can go anywhere else. I’ll dig ditches, I’ll learn a new language. I just want what’s left of my family to stay together.’

Mitchell sank down in the chair in front of the computer and put his face in his hands. Then he sat up, quickly, as though he’d assumed an unnatural posture.

He has to be ready all the time. Every moment that he’s awake. Then Evan realized he had moved to that same edge of life, in just a week. He went to the computer, studied the faces of the lost children. He took Khan’s PDA from his pocket, wirelessly moved all the client names and agent names from the files on the computer onto the PDA.

‘What are you doing?’ Mitchell said.

‘Insurance.’ Evan erased the downloaded files from the PC. Erased the browser history so it wouldn’t point back at the remote server. He shut down the laptop and closed the lid. He could re-download the files from the Internet again. If he lived.

‘The files paint a target on our backs. You should destroy them,’ Mitchell said. Evan wondered which face his father wore now: the protective dad, the frightened agent, the resolute killer. Evan’s skin went cold with shock and with fear.

‘I’m afraid of you,’ he said.

Piotr Matarov, Arthur Smithson, Mitchell Casher, looked up at him.

Evan walked out of the bedroom. In the small breakfast nook, his father’s raincoat lay over the back of a chair. Evan dug around in it, pulled out a satellite phone. Clicked it on, paged through the few numbers listed. One for J. He carried the phone back to his father.

‘You did what you did to have your life. I have to stop Jargo to have mine. I cannot let him kill Carrie, and I cannot let him get away with killing Mom. He gets stopped in his tracks. Now. You can either help me, or not. But before you walk away, I need you to make this phone call.’ Evan put his hand on his father’s arm. ‘Call. Find out if Carrie’s all right. You haven’t seen me. I got away.’

Mitchell clicked, rang. ‘Steve.’ A pause. ‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘No. No, he got away from me. He has a friend or two in Miami. I might try them.’ A pause. ‘Don’t kill her. She might know where Evan would go. Or if I find him, she could be useful in bringing him in. We still need to know how large Bricklayer’s group is.’ Mitchell spoke with a soldier’s brisk tone. Weighing options, offering countermoves, speaking like a man comfortable in shadows. ‘All right.’ He clicked off. ‘They’re at the safe house. Our final stop on our escape route. She’s still alive. He’s… questioning her. He wants the password to the laptop.’

What had she said in the car? He’ll give me to Dezz. I’d rather be dead.

‘She doesn’t know the password. That computer’s empty, anyway.’ Except for my fallback, my poker bluff for Jargo, if he ever cracks it.

‘I bought her time,’ Mitchell said. ‘But it won’t be pleasant for her.’

‘Where is she?’

Mitchell shook his head. ‘You can’t save her.’

‘I can. If you help me. Just tell me where Jargo has her.’

‘No. We’re running. Just you and me. Never mind Carrie. You and me.’

Evan took the Beretta from his coat pocket. He didn’t raise it. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Evan, for God’s sake, put that away.’

‘You made the tough choices, Dad, for me. Because you loved me. But I’m not leaving Carrie. Tell me where she is. If you don’t want to go, it’s your choice.’

His father shook his head. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘I absolutely do. Your choice.’

Mitchell closed his eyes.