Sidney Sheldon's Reckless (40 page)

“And you think you can trust me?”

“What I think”—Hunter sipped his wine—“is that you're incorruptible. That sets you apart from just about everybody else in this sorry mess.”

Tracy knew she was being flattered, but she let it pass. “I'm honored.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Hunter said. “You think I'm a terrorist so I'd be surprised if my good opinion means much to you. But I'm going to talk to you anyway. I assume you're already recording?” He nodded knowingly at Tracy's knockoff Chanel purse.

Tracy dutifully pulled out the powder compact containing her tiny digital recording device and placed it on the table, next to her gun.

“Always one step ahead, aren't you Mr. Drexel?”

“In my line of work, if you're not one step ahead, you're dead,” Hunter drawled. “Let's get started, shall we?”

Tracy sat, frozen, while he spoke, inhaling every word.

“It all began with a story for the
New York Times
.” His deep, gravelly, smoker's voice echoed off the villa's vaulted ceilings. “That is, it was
my
story. I was writing it freelance. But my plan was to sell it to
The Times
. I'd been seeing a girl there.”

“Fiona Barron,” said Tracy. Two could play the one-step-ahead game.

Hunter looked impressed. “That's right. Fi. Anyway, Fi and I had a falling-out. And the editor wasn't my biggest fan either. To be fair to him, I guess I had been a bit of an ass. ”

Tracy didn't probe. She could imagine.

“I wanted to build bridges at the paper. And the only way I knew how to do that was by writing something off-the-hook amazing. This was going to be
the
story that got me back in everyone's good books.”

“So what was the story?”

“Back then, the story was fracking,” Hunter said. “Specifically, corruption in the fracking industry. But, appalling as it was, that soon turned out to be the tip of a giant iceberg of shit. A ‘shitberg' as I liked to call it.”

He smiled but Tracy wasn't laughing. “Go on.”

“Corporate corruption was being carried out on a massive scale, right across the globe. But it was the government involvement that really stank. Cash for contracts. Diplomatic bribes. Blind eyes turned to human rights abuses. There were CIA agents, sanctioned by Washington, showing up in China with suitcases literally stuffed with cash. Havers's administration were in it up to their dirty, white-collared necks. The president's obsessed with breaking the Saudis stranglehold on our economy. Jim Havers wants to go down in history as the man who broke America's oil addiction and he'll stop at nothing to do it. And I mean, nothing.”

“So you planned to expose Havers?” Tracy asked.

“Among other people.”

“You knew enough to end his presidency?”

“For sure. I noticed unmarked cars parked outside my apartment. All of a sudden I couldn't take a shit without the CIA knowing about it. Nobody had read my piece. It was all in my head at that point. But the government knew what questions I'd been asking and to whom. They wanted me dead.”

Tracy frowned. “That's a pretty wild accusation. This was the same government who tried to rescue you in Bratislava, let's not forget. If they wanted you dead so badly, why go to the trouble?”

“They wanted me dead,” Hunter repeated. “But they wanted it to look like an accident. So there were no shootings, no abductions. Instead there was a gas leak in my building.”

“Come on,” Tracy said. “Gas leaks happen all the time.”

“Exactly. Except this one happened only in my apartment—nowhere else in the building. Enough carbon monoxide to kill a man three times my body weight in under an hour. I know this because that's how much they found in my cat's bloodstream when he died that night instead of me. I stayed over at a girlfriend's place.”

Clearly Hunter was the one with the nine lives.

“A week later, I almost drove my car off the Atlantic City Expressway.”

“What happened?”

“My steering wheel jammed. Next thing I know I'm shooting up an exit ramp and into a tree. I was lucky. Broke my collarbone, got a few bangs on the head, that was it. But if I hadn't made that ramp I'd have been dead for sure. Probably taken out a bunch of others with me. Afterwards, the guy in the shop told me someone had messed with my steering column, and put a slow leak in my brake fluid. Deliberate sabotage.”

A nerve began to twitch in Tracy's jaw.

Deliberate sabotage. To the steering column.

It was exactly what Greg Walton told her had happened to Blake Carter's truck, the night of the accident. The night Nicholas died.

“The Americans weren't the only Western government playing dirty in the Shale Gas Wars,” Hunter went on. “Everyone was at it. The British, the French, the Germans, the Russians. Opponents were silenced, taxes waived, and all the while the rich at the top of the industry grew richer, like fat mosquitoes gorging on the blood of some hapless animal. It was the sheer scale of the corruption that really shocked me. That and the fact that
no one
was reporting on it.”

“Why do you think that was?” asked Tracy.

“I have no idea.” Hunter refilled his wineglass. “Maybe no one else was looking. Or maybe people were looking, but someone was shutting those people up.”

“Killing them, you mean?”

“Sometimes,” Hunter said. “I'm sure that's what happened to Sally, by the way. She'd worked out a lot of this on her own, while I was on the run. Somebody decided it was time to stop the questions. Somebody with less concern for appearances than your masters at the CIA. But sometimes people were paid off. Which leads me to the next chapter in all this: Group 99.”

Tracy leaned forward. This was what she'd waited for. This was where it all came together, where the pieces of the puzzle began to fit.

“So I'm writing my piece, uncovering all this dirty money and dirty politics around fracking, trying not to get killed. And as I'm doing my research I run into a bunch of different anti-industry groups. Most of them are environmentalists—well meaning, badly organized—doing their best to be a thorn in the side of the shale gas giants and the governments helping them to line their pockets. But then all of a sudden this one group pops up, and they're different from all the others.”

“Group 99,” said Tracy.

Hunter nodded. “Group 99 got interested once shale gas fields were discovered in Greece. Rumors were flying around that some former Greek royals had signed a vast, private deal to sell swaths of land for fracking. The family stood to make a mint, as did one or two corrupt government officials, and the frackers themselves of course. But there was to be no public benefit from exploiting this natural resource. Things were pretty bad in Greece at that time. The poor were at breaking point. That's when I first started hearing about Apollo—Alexis Argyros—and Althea, a Western woman, supposedly an American, who was raising money for this group, and maybe even running the show.

“Group 99 were a game changer. They had a totally different agenda from all the other antifracking groups. They didn't care about the environment. They wanted wealth equality, and to punish the greedy at the top of the tree. They also had a totally different MO. Remember, they were nonviolent at that time. They were smart, super smart, and tech savvy. They were well funded. They were highly organized but non-hierarchical. And they had global reach. The way I saw it, that put them in a unique position to attack the fracking industry, maybe even to bring it down, but at a minimum to end corruption at least in Greece.”

Hunter drew breath for the first time in minutes. Tracy noticed for the first time how tired he looked. He'd waited a long time to tell his story, but now that it was finally happening, the effort seemed to drain all the energy out of him.

“Tell me more about Althea,” Tracy said. “About Kate. You knew her identity all along?”

Hunter rubbed his eyes. “No. Not at the beginning. I knew Althea had been to visit Prince Achileas at Sandhurst. The Prince knew about his family's deal with Cranston and it clearly pricked his conscience. Althea got him interested in Group 99. I think the idea was that he was going to help them expose or sabotage the arrangement in some way. But he got cold feet. Anyway, I went to England. To meet him.”

“You met Prince Achileas?” It was the first time Tracy had openly expressed surprise.

Hunter nodded. “Sure. I interviewed him for my piece.”

“Did you meet Bob Daley then too?”

“Nope. Just the prince.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“Not much, as far as fracking was concerned. He was very depressed by then. He hated Sandhurst. The boy was obviously gay, and having a tough time with that. Plus he was estranged from his father. And his commanding officer hated his guts.”

“Frank Dorrien . . .” Tracy murmured under her breath.

“I was sad when I heard Achileas had topped himself,” Hunter said, staring down at the wine dregs in the bottom of his glass. “Sad but not surprised. Bob Daley said the same thing about him, when we met later in the camp in Bratislava. The kid was a tortured soul. They were friends, believe it or not.”

“I know,” said Tracy.

“Anyway, Achileas never did tell me much about that Greek fracking deal. But he did talk to me about Group 99. He was quite fascinating on that subject, as it happened. And he showed me a picture while I was there, of the handler whom he'd met with: Althea. Not the greatest picture as you know. Grainy and her face is half in profile. But it was enough to shock the hell out of me.”

“Because?”

“Because I realized then that I knew her. And that my story was about to get bigger than I'd ever imagined.”

CHAPTER 30

H
ER REAL NAME IS
Katherine Evans.” Hunter looked at Tracy, propping his elbows on the table. “Kate. As soon as I saw Achileas's picture of her I knew. We were at school together.”

“At
school
?” Tracy frowned. “But I thought you said she was CIA?”

“She was. But I knew her before that, at Columbia,” Hunter explained. “We were in the same graduating class.”

“So you were friends?”

Hunter took on a nostalgic expression. “More than friends. Kate was probably my first really big love.”

Tracy was fascinated. “What was her background? Was she a radical in college?”

Hunter laughed. “Radical? Hell, no. If you could have picked one girl out of the yearbook least likely to get involved with an organization like Group 99, it would have been her. Kate's family were from Ohio. Good people, Christian, Republican. And rich. Her dad owned a local newspaper, but he'd made most of his money on Wall Street. Needless to say, he didn't approve of me one bit.”

Tracy asked the obvious question. “So how does a nice, rich, Midwestern girl end up on the CIA's Most Wanted list?”

Hunter's face suddenly darkened. “She loses everything,” he said bitterly. “That's how. The CIA destroyed Kate's life, so she figured she'd return the favor.”

Tracy waited for him to explain.

“After Kate and I broke up she started dating a guy called Daniel Herschowitz. About a year later, she married him. I didn't know the guy well, but everybody said Dan was a great person. Solid, reliable. Everything I wasn't, basically.” He smiled briefly. “He was also crazy smart, just like Kate. She was brilliant with computers—that's why they brought her in to track you—and Dan was some kind of math prodigy. They both got recruited into Langley before they even finished grad school.”

The way he told it, it sounded like such a happy story. Gilded, gifted American couple fall in love and dedicate their lives to their country. Yet somehow, somewhere along the road between then and now, it had ended in tragedy. In terror and murder and misery.

Fighting to control her emotions, Tracy asked Hunter, “What happened? What went wrong?”

“I don't know all the details. But the summary is Dan was in Iraq, embedded on some deep cover mission for the agency. Something went wrong back home—some kind of security leak—and his identity was compromised. He managed to make contact with his handler and arranged to meet at a safe house in Basra. He got there expecting to be smuggled out of the country. Instead he was met by three Al Qaeda operatives, horribly tortured, and eventually beaten to death.”

Tracy put a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. But how did Al Qaeda know about the safe house?”

Hunter shrugged. “That's an open question. Kate's always been convinced it was an inside job. That the CIA sold Daniel out. She was still working at Langley at the time. She claims she hacked into files, right up to the director's office, that prove her husband was betrayed and murdered. But it was all covered up. The doctors said she was deranged with grief and she spent the next year in a secure mental facility in upstate Virginia.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. It was bad. She was tortured by grief, destroyed by it. And everybody she trusted had betrayed her. That's what she believed anyway. What she still believes.”

Tracy wasn't sure why, but she believed what Hunter was telling her. From the little she already knew about the CIA and the FBI and the way the intelligence community closed ranks when they felt under threat, Kate Evans's story sounded horribly plausible.

“When she finally got out of the hospital she was on a mission. The only thing she cared about was destroying the CIA. Getting payback on everyone who had conspired in Daniel's murder and what followed. That's what led her to Group 99 and everything that happened next. Kate never bought into their whole communist, punish the wealthy ideology. She's always been rich. She liked them because they were running rings around the CIA and costing the U.S. government millions of dollars. Plus she was a gifted hacker, with invaluable inside information on how the agency worked. Kate was the one who transformed Group 99 into a global force. She took a ramshackle bunch of angry kids from the slums of Athens and Paris and Caracas and got them organized, funded and ruthlessly focused.”