The Discarded

CHAPTER 5

Eli Becker would have never answered the call if he had checked his calendar ahead of time.

Same day every year.

“Have you heard anything?” Abraham had asked.

Of course Eli hadn’t, mainly because he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d poked around for any news.

There had never been any news. Not a squeak, not a peep. Nothing.

“No,” he had replied. “And I won’t. You know I won’t.”

He could hear the man’s breaths over the line, every exhale a near sigh. A dozen seconds or so of this, and then, like always, a whispered “Thank you” and a click as the call went dead.

Eli tried to refocus on his job. As an analyst for the CIA, his workload was never ending, but every time he received this particular call, his mind would wander afterward. There was guilt for not having checked like he long ago promised he would, anger that the calls had not stopped, and, as much as he hated to admit it, curiosity. Why had he been unable to learn anything? Of all the people in the world, he was one of those best placed to uncover any information he might want.

He’d known before he pushed back from his desk that he would give it another go.

Just one more time, he’d told himself. I owe him that much.

Now, forty-eight hours later, he wished he’d left it alone. The unfamiliar woman’s voice on the phone moments before had said they knew what he’d been looking into and would come after him. She said she could buy him a little time, an hour or two at most, but if he valued his life, he had to leave as soon as he could. She didn’t have to tell him who “they” were. He may not have known their names, but he knew what they were capable of. He believed the woman, and had never been so scared in his life.

The photograph he’d been looking at when she called was still on his screen. He stared at it, knowing he should purge it from his system, burn his hard drive, and dump the ashes in the Chesapeake Bay, but he couldn’t. Despite the trouble he was now in, he had made a promise.

So instead, he spent ten minutes recording a video message and then copied the pic, the message, and the other information he had discovered onto a micro disk. Once that was done, he stashed his computer in its hidey-hole, made a quick call to his office to say he wouldn’t be in that evening, and took a shuttle bus to Dulles International Airport.

There, he rented a car using a false ID and a valid but equally bogus credit card, and headed into the streets of Herndon around the airport, turning randomly left and right until he was sure no one was following him. At a convenience store just off the tollway, he purchased a disposable phone and a twenty-five-dollar phone card, then continued east to the Tyson Galleria at Tysons Corner, where he parked in a lower level of the garage, tucked the keys under the rental’s front seat, and got out.

The mall was busy but not packed, so he was able to make his way across it to the attached Ritz-Carlton Hotel without any problems. At the concierge desk, he arranged for a 2:00 p.m. cab to the airport, and then used a computer in the business center to purchase a ticket on the 3:50 p.m. flight to Tampa for Charles Young, the name on the false ID he was carrying.

With twenty minutes to wait until the cab arrived, he found a chair in a quiet corner of the lobby and nervously pulled out the new phone.

The line rang four times before—

“Hello?”

“It’s…it’s Eli.”

Nothing, not even the sound of breathing. Finally, Abraham said, “You have heard something.”

A voice in the back of Eli’s mind screamed Hang up now! but he ignored it and said, “Yes, I have.”