“Oh, yes, you do. You’re the smartest of the bunch, no matter what you pretend. You understand perfectly well.”
“But you—you were—I saw you—”
“Quite.”
And suddenly everything was clear. The wisp. Jericho’s wisp. Dak said there had to be one, but, oh, she had never expected it to be so titanic. The only one in the house with medical training had been Audrey. The only one who could verify his symptoms. Oh, Audrey!
“You’re a bastard,” she said, backing away.
“Are you afraid of me, honey?” He seemed irritated. “I only did what had to be done. I had to know.”
“People are dead, Jericho.”
“And if I hadn’t shown up just now, one of them would have been you.” He coughed, still cradling the shotgun. “You haven’t thanked me yet, Becky-Bear.”
“Thanked you! This is all your doing, you sick bastard.” She pointed to the body. “And you didn’t have to kill him. I think I could have talked him—”
She stopped, cocked her head. A sound, somewhere in the distance—a sound that had become all too familiar—
“Jericho!” she cried. “Get back in the house!”
He glanced her way, the old half-smile on his face, the shotgun still cradled beneath his arm. “I’m doing okay, Becky-Bear. Don’t worry.”
“No. No. Listen to me. You’re sick.”
“I thought you’d worked it out. Things aren’t always—”
The sounds were louder. Didn’t he hear? “Jericho, no! You’re a sick man! On the verge of death! You need to be in bed with the oxygen mask on!”
“I’m fine, honey. Really. I feel great.”
She wanted to shake him, to slap him, to make him listen. “There’s no time to argue, Jericho. I’m serious. You can’t be out here like this! You have to lie down!”
He laughed, coughed a little, laughed again. “Come on, Rebecca. You’re the smartest of the bunch. My health’s not great, but I’ve got some years left in me. I can’t believe you haven’t—”
He stopped and looked up, the sounds at last too loud for even his aging ears to ignore. He lifted the shotgun instinctively, then dropped it on the ground, because two black-clad figures had his arms, and then his throat, and another was pulling Beck away as she screamed, because the night was full of a thousand floodlights and a million men. Somebody was cradling the wounded Pamela, somebody was checking Deputy Mundy and deciding to leave him, somebody was scooping up the pouch Pete had been ready to kill her to obtain, and then the commandos and the two surviving Ainsleys were soaring into the darkness, drawn upward by some kind of magic, Stone Heights suddenly empty of everyone but Rebecca, who knelt weeping on the frozen ground, flames dancing at her back, as the helicopters whirled away, the former DCI, former SecDef, Former Everything their captive.
FRIDAY: FIRST LIGHT
CHAPTER 39
The Wisp
After a while, Rebecca struggled to her feet. She looked up at the house but could not imagine going back for her things. She looked at her car but could not take the chance that it was, like Audrey’s, booby-trapped. She supposed she would have to walk down the hill, and then walk to town, thirty-two bone-chilling miles through the Rocky Mountain night.
A hard trek, but a mother does what a mother has to do.
She began trudging down the driveway, the same route she had taken on Monday morning when she found the dead dog. But it had not been nearly so cold, and she had not been nearly so tired. She walked with a single goal: to get home to Nina. She would never leave her daughter alone this long again.
As a matter of fact, she would never leave Nina alone, period.
Now that she could, in a sense, look up the answers in the back of the book, Beck was pretty sure she had most of the story. Whether Jericho was dying or whether his illness was exaggerated to prevent his interrogation, she would never know. But the rest fell into place. Jack Notting had indeed robbed the investors of Scondell Bloom, and Jericho evidently worried that his knowledge of Jack’s activities would put him—or, knowing how Jack operated, his family at risk. So he swept the information about what had really happened
at Scondell Bloom beneath the capacious umbrella already created by his threats to expose government secrets. Poor Dak. He had been telling the truth. He had not wanted to harm his friend, but he had not believed the stories that Jericho was out to expose Jack Notting.
Dak might not even have known that Jack was a crook, or that Scondell Bloom was a fraud.
She wondered who had taken Jericho, whether the commandos had been sent by the federal government or Jack Notting’s people. She hoped it was the feds. At least they would tend to Pamela’s wounds. And if the government had Pamela, the combination of Sean pulling and Senator Ainsley pushing would sooner or later pry her from their grip. As for Jericho, well, once he started talking, Jack Notting would not long survive.
She stopped, and closed her eyes. With Jack Notting out of the way, Nina would be safe. That was the most important thing. Nina would be safe. Almost smiling, Beck opened her eyes again. And then she realized that she was not, one might say, out of the woods yet. Because blocking the path was Miss Kelly, the librarian: the retired assassin known as Max.
“Hi, Beck,” Miss Kelly said, voice casual. There was no weapon in evidence. Her eyes were on the mountain sky, where pink was rising in the east. “I told you they’d be coming soon.”
Rebecca, too, was gazing at the heavens. “Where are they going? Where are they taking them?”
“It’s better not to ask. The important thing is, the terrorists were thwarted.”
“Terrorists?”
The librarian nodded. “Sure. A vicious attack on the home of a long-retired member of the national-security establishment. These people know no limits, Beck. They have to be stopped.”
Beck took a moment. “Were there any survivors?”
“Only one.”
A shiver. “You?”
“No. I’m not even here. I’m in my apartment in town, fast asleep.” She reached into the holster on her belt but withdrew only a PDA. Like Dak’s, it worked fine up here. She scrolled down a few lines. “It’s time to get moving.”
But Beck refused to budge. She pictured Jericho, in an undisclosed location, being induced to—what was Dak’s phrase?—vomit his knowledge onto the floor. He should have stayed in bed. Had he maintained the fiction, maybe they would have maintained their distance. On the other hand, Beck herself might be dead. She looked up at the burning house again, and, with a shudder, recalled the final act of
Don Giovanni
, Jericho’s favorite opera, the unrepentant sinner being dragged physically down into the fires of hell. She glanced at the burnt-out van, and found herself aching: so much of life was spent counting your losses.
“Why didn’t they take me?” she asked.
“They don’t need you.”
“And you?”
Flames seemed to leap in the dark eyes. “I don’t need them,” she said.
“You betrayed him.”
“No.”
“He trusted you, and you betrayed him.”
“Jericho didn’t trust me. I didn’t work for him. As far as he knew, I was a librarian named Kelly.” A shadow of humor flickered across her handsome features. “He even helped me get my job.”
“Dak. Dak hired you, and then asked Jericho to find you a job.” Again Beck looked into the brightening sky. “Six months. You were in town six months, waiting for tonight?”
“I’m good at my job, Beck. I’m very patient.”
“But what were you doing for Dak?”
“Sorry. I can’t tell you that. But if you think it over, I’m sure you’ll figure it all out.”
And she could. Now that she knew how the story ended, she could guess how it must have begun. Maxine had come to the house in
response to Beck’s call for help on the cell phone. But who had been listening? It had to be Dak’s people. Putting aside the technological wizardry necessary to break into her phone, there was a glaring bit of evidence she had overlooked.
Jericho’s voice.
Eight hundred acres. The middle of nowhere
.
Dak had told her that the Agency listened to her with Jericho. Who else would have the recordings? And armed with the tapes, all they had to do was follow Audrey’s playbook, disorienting her, breaking her world down until her only choice was to do what they wanted.
She had found what Jericho had hidden, and they didn’t even have to ask her. And, all along, Maxine had watched and waited.
“You’re a considerable bitch,” said Rebecca. “I hope you know that.”
The ghost of a smile. “It’s been said.”
Rebecca wondered if Maxine had another gun. “Why did they take him? They had the packet. I pulled it up.”
The assassin’s smile was grim. “It could have been a wisp. The real guarantee against Jericho’s fall could be somewhere else. Or there could be more than one. Like the one he sent down the mountain. Those weren’t lawyers, Beck. They were from a private security firm.”
“Did they survive?”
“Of course. But I’m afraid they double-crossed Mr. Ainsley. They didn’t take his papers for safekeeping. They delivered them to another client.”
Another client. Sean or his Aunt Maggie. Beck remembered Sheriff Garvey a couple of days ago, standing in the great room at Stone Heights, barking his cryptic message for Jericho, that he had talked to his friend, who was taking every precaution. Perhaps Jericho had hired the private firm at the sheriff’s suggestion, thinking Garvey his man.
“Then somebody else has a copy of what was in the packet.”
“I don’t think so, Beck. Mr. Ainsley would have been a step or two ahead of them. Those papers were probably another wisp.” A curt nod, one professional acknowledging another. “This was war for him. Never forget that.”
“What was it for you?”
Maxine touched the gash on her forehead. “Well, it wasn’t fun. I’ll tell you that. Next time I need to remember to stay retired.” She glanced at Rebecca. “You were never in any danger, Beck. I don’t think Pete was going to pull the trigger. In any case, I wouldn’t have let him.”
“You were there?”
She nodded. “Getting out of your trap wasn’t easy, but I managed. Then I had to take care of a couple of problems in the woods—you don’t want to know—but, yes, the whole time you were talking to Pete Mundy, I was watching. Jericho saved me the trouble.”
Even through the mists of fear and exhaustion, Rebecca caught the lie. “No. That’s not it. You weren’t sitting in Bethel for six months on the off chance that I’d show up and you’d have to protect me. You were here to keep an eye on Jericho. Sure, you were listening when I called for help, and you came running, but it wasn’t to save my life. It was to make sure Jericho didn’t fall into the wrong hands. The reason you knew that the helicopter was on the way was that you called Dak and told them to come. The reason you saw me with Pete was that you followed Jericho when he left the house. The reason you had to take care of a couple of problems in the woods was that there were other people out there, and you had to be sure they didn’t get to him before your friends did.”
Maxine studied her PDA. “We should get moving.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that people ever act out of only a single motive.” That sudden smile. “And don’t worry about your Nina. Or about Jack Notting. Everything’s being taken care of.”
“What do you—”
“Some friends of mine are watching out for your daughter and your mother. And as for Jack—well, Jack is going to have to fend for himself. I think the feds will turn him loose soon, and he’s going to have to start worrying.”
“About you?”
“Audrey was a good friend. Jack killed her just to make a point.”
“That was your job, wasn’t it? Waiting and watching, just in case
somebody solved the mystery, then cleaning up the mess. And I played right into your hands, didn’t I?”
“Right now, my job is to get you out of here.”
“Dak told you to protect me?” said Rebecca, very surprised. “Why would he care?”
Max grimaced. For a second the mask slipped, and Beck glimpsed the woman inside the assassin. The professional smirk at once closed down again, and Rebecca would never know for sure, but she suspected that the decision by the commandos to leave her behind was an alteration to the original deal, that Maxine had demanded as additional compensation for her own services that Jericho’s ex-lover be spared.
A trade-off, maybe, for Audrey.
“My car is just around the bend,” said Max, pointing.
Beck stared at the inferno, the house Jericho had bought for the two of them; and where he had presided over his lonely, miserable kingdom. Evidently, her capacity for guilt was undiminished. She still felt she had wrecked his career.
She missed him.
“I won’t get a chance to see him, will I? Jericho.”
“I don’t know.” Maxine took her hand. “This is how life works, Rebecca. You do what you can to protect the people you love. First rule of living. Second rule? Same as the first. It’s a biological imperative.” She was leading Beck away from the carnage. “You did great.”
“Huh.”
“You did,” said the taller woman, hand gentle on her back.
Rebecca shook her head, still watching the house, her past burning. The helicopter was long gone, and Jericho Ainsley with it. In the end, somebody was willing to risk doing to the old man whatever it was that they did to discover the truth.
“I want to call my daughter,” she said.
“We have to get going. You can call her from the car. I can’t let you use my mobile, but I have a sat phone. Now, we really have to get moving.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“The bad guys are on the way.”
Beck looked up at the sky, her imagination tracking the invisible helicopter. Another part of her was counting the cost: Audrey and Pete Mundy and Mr. Lobb all dead, Pamela wounded, Jericho a prisoner. The enemy was secrecy, she realized. Secrecy, and the risks that secrets carried. She pointed toward the heavens. “Those were the good guys?”
Maxine grinned. “Not the great guys. But the good-enough guys. Put it that way.”
“And you? Are you one of the good guys?”
“I’m just a librarian.”