“No,” she said. “I don’t, either. I’m just not always sure it’s really about us.”
“What are you saying?”
“I know you were in love with this job, and I know how much you miss it. Are you telling me that having had to leave it behind isn’t affecting your decision at all here?”
Morgan was surprised by her suggestion, even more so because he was worried that she might be right. He did love the excitement. He couldn’t deny that he felt more alive now than he had since his days in Black Ops. He had a purpose and a drive that had been missing in him for years since he had quit. And he couldn’t deny that that was what had attracted him to the life of espionage and what had first led him to become Cobra. Had the killer within him taken over? Was the excitement more important to him now than his own family?
“No,” he said. “I can’t deny that I always loved it. But I never forgot where my loyalties are. I never lost sight of my responsibility to you, to Alex, and to my country. I never did anything that I didn’t think would make the world a better place.”
Jenny nodded, but it was clear from her expression that she did not entirely believe him. “Just be careful you don’t end up losing your family while you’re off making a better world,” she said, and she turned away to prod at the smoldering fire.
C
HAPTER
25
A
lex walked down the dirt road, crushing the incipient undergrowth beneath her boots. She wept, and it made the afternoon light and everything around her misty, the whole world quivering through her tears. But she pressed forward without destination, doggedly refusing to look back.
Even though she was sixteen and entitled to some rebellion, she had never spoken to her dad like that before. It hurt her, like she had willfully broken something precious. And at the same time, her rage at his deception, at the details of his secret life, burned inside her.
It was like he was two different people, and she couldn’t join both conceptions of him in her mind. She loved her father. But a killer? Could that really be him? It seemed impossible to square this with the loving, doting, if often absent father she had always known. She couldn’t conceive of him being both.
And even if she did manage to, what was she supposed to do, anyway? On the one hand, he was her
father
. And he was a good father, a good man. She knew that. What right did she have to doubt him like this? How could she do anything but love him and trust him? But, on the other hand, what good were her political convictions if she didn’t stick by them now, when they mattered most?
She buried her face in her hands. It was too much. She was confused, hurt, angry, and
so tired
. She wished she was at home but at the same time felt that she wouldn’t be comfortable there, that it wouldn’t
feel
like home right now. Not after her father’s confession. Not now that she knew about the big lie.
She was so confused. She was so alone. She needed to talk to someone, someone who wasn’t her father or mother.
Her hand slipped into her pocket, and she fingered her cell phone. It had been off since they left the house. Could it really do that much harm if she used it? What if she just—
No. Her mother had warned her. Cell phones could be tracked, and she should only use hers in a dire emergency. It would stay right there, in her pocket. But what if she . . . Maybe that would be okay. Yes, it would do fine.
She trudged on, still not looking back. She was, however, no longer aimless.
C
HAPTER
26
T
he iron connected with the ball satisfyingly at the nadir of the swing. Edgar Nickerson raised a hand to shield his eyes from the setting sun as he watched the white dot follow its lazy parabola until it hit the grass in a narrow stretch between a sand trap and a grove of trees, a cool 250 feet away.
“What did you think of that swing, Vinson?” he said jovially, squinting against the sun at the pin on the green.
“Just peachy, Mr. Nickerson,” said Vinson, standing near the cart and looking at him with his piggy little eyes glazed over with blank impatience. Nickerson had a habit of making people wait on his whim. He put away his club and motioned for Vinson to put the bag on the white golf cart, which he did, grudgingly. Nickerson had done without a caddy so he could talk to Vinson, but he was damned if he was going to carry his own bag when there was help around.
“Come on,” he said, motioning for Vinson to get on the cart. The vehicle moved silently.
“I take it the affair with Miss Dillon is taken care of?” Nickerson asked, hands on the wheel.
“As usual,” said Vinson. “I’m here because I need to know what’s going on with the Cobra situation.”
“I’ll tell you what you need to know,” he said.
“Well, Hodges is on my ass. If you want to tell him yourself, I’m sure he’d appreciate it.”
“Tell him it’s being dealt with,” said Nickerson.
“That’s not going to be enough to shut him up,” said Vinson.
“Then you can tell him that we have the full extent of the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency backing him. I thought the reason you were here was so I wouldn’t have to—”
“Mr. Nickerson,” Vinson interrupted, urgently, and motioned toward where his ball had landed. There stood a woman, dressed in tight black pants, with short, light blond hair and a deadly beauty that was obvious even from far away. She had picked up his ball and was tossing it lazily upward and catching it as it fell. “Do I take care of this?” Vinson asked.
Nickerson looked around to make sure there was no one else in sight. One paparazzo looking for a senatorial scandal was all it would take for pictures of him standing with a CIA assassin to be plastered on the front page of every major newspaper.
“No,” said Nickerson, agreeably. “I’m the one who asked her to meet me here.”
“I don’t think I like this bitch too much.”
“Then it’s a good thing that’s not what I pay you for,” said Nickerson. He brought the cart to a stop a few yards from Natasha “My, they do let anyone into this place these days,” he said, loudly enough for her to hear.
She had caught him off guard last time, and he had acted like a schoolboy afraid for his lunch money. She wouldn’t get that pleasure this time.
“I am here,” she said curtly. “What do you want?”
“Would you believe me if I said I enjoy our little talks?” he said jovially, motioning for Vinson to pull his clubs from the cart. She remained impassive. Vinson sighed and picked up the bag, setting it on the ground. “Would you mind?” said Nickerson, and he took the golf ball from her. “I don’t think anyone will mind if I
don’t
take a penalty over your interference.” He dropped the ball and positioned himself to swing . “Vinson,” he said. “why don’t you take a little walk?”
Vinson practically snarled at that. He shot Natasha a homicidal look, then walked away.
Natasha stood silently until he was out of earshot and said, “I hear Marwat is dead.”
“Yes. Drowned in his own tub,” said Nickerson flatly. “How tragic.”
“Was that your doing?”
“Marwat was greedy and predictable. That made him a good associate. I had no reason to get rid of him.” He practiced his stroke, brushing the grass with the sole of his club.
“What will happen now to our business in Afghanistan?” she asked him.
“I’m not too worried,” said Nickerson, switching out his club for a five iron. “Another will take his place. Nature abhors a vacuum.” He cleared his throat. “Meanwhile, you have again failed to kill Morgan, and those photographs are still at large. I thought you were a professional. What is it you said last time? ‘Dead by morning’? Tell me,” he taunted, interrupting his practice swings to look at her with a derisive smile, “are you
trying
to fail?”
He savored her seething silence and, after a calculated pause, said, “Well, it’s no matter now. I’m not the only one who grew impatient with your ineptitude. I’m told that the CIA has sent an operative after Cobra. This time, he
will
be dead by morning.”
“
What?
” she spat in venomous indignation.
“You are reassigned to focus on your primary task,” he told her. “Which, by the way, you should have been doing to begin with.”
“That is unacceptable.” she fumed. “
I
kill Cobra!”
“Ah, yes,” he said, as if he had forgotten. “Your little. . .
vendetta
.” He packed the last word with contempt. “How very old-world of you.”
“I do not expect a man like you to understand,” she said. “Nor do I care. You will not deprive me of my revenge.”
“Think of it as outsourcing, my dear.” He swung, punctuating his statement with a
thwack,
sending the ball into a smooth arc. The ball bounced three times on the green and came to rest a few feet from the hole.
“You pathetic little man,” she said in white-knuckled anger. “What stops me from killing you where you stand?”
“We both know why you haven’t killed me already, and why I’m quite sure you won’t,” he said, sounding unperturbed. “But I’ll humor you. What stops you is that, while at my side, you will become fabulously rich and powerful.”
She looked at him with restrained contempt. She had enormous pride. It made her irrational, but Nickerson understood that it also made her formidable.
“You will do what I tell you. At the rally, in five days,” he said, like a schoolteacher giving homework instructions.
“Cutting it a bit close,” she grumbled.
“Are you suggesting that you can’t do it?” he said airily. “I thought you were supposed to be the best.” She scowled at him in response. “Excellent. That’s the kind of spunk I expected from you. And I understand you found yourself a way to get close?”
“You understand correctly,” she said acerbically.
“I have something for you,” he said. “Look in the large pocket of my golf bag.”
She unzipped it and found a cardboard tube. She popped the top and slid out the schematics from inside.
“You called me here just to deliver these? You could not have sent your trained monkey to do it?” She pointed at Vinson, watching them from the tree line and looking surly.
“Since you were kind enough to make your introduction before, I thought it best to conduct our affairs face-to-face when possible. Now tell me this is going to go off without a hitch,” he said.
“There will be no problem,” she said.
“Then that’s that, isn’t it?” he said, satisfied, and he motioned for Vinson to come over. “I knew I could count on you,
partner
. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a ball to sink.”
He hopped onto the golf cart, let Vinson get into the passenger’s seat, and drove away, watching in the rearview mirror as Natasha receded from his sight and disappeared into the wood.
“She’s trouble, sir,” said Vinson. “You won’t be able to keep her on her leash much longer.”
“Not like you, eh, Vinson?” said Nickerson. “Faithful as a dog.” The man scowled at the comparison, but kept quiet. “But you’re right. She’s becoming a liability. We will have to dispose of her in good time. But for now, she is still useful.”
“Yes,” hissed Vinson. “For now.”
C
HAPTER
27
M
organ sat at the rough wooden table in the hunting cabin, perusing Plante’s documents by the light of a single, flickering, lightbulb that hung from a wire from the ceiling. Alex had been gone for several hours now, and the sun was close to setting.
He had been staring at the same piece of paper for the past half hour, unable to concentrate—not because of the bloodstains along the corner of the page but because his eyes were anxiously drawn to the door every few seconds. His ears caught every rustle he heard, over the low rumble of the generator, wondering if this time it might be the sound of his daughter returning. He had taken the old hunting rifle from its rack on the wall, loaded it, and shot at a few squirrels outside to see how it handled. It had one hell of a recoil and was so unpredictable, he couldn’t count on hitting a stationary target twenty feet away. Still, he left it on the table within reach, just in case.
Neika, meanwhile, sat underfoot, relaxed and oblivious. Jenny was keeping busy adding the first woman’s touch the cabin had known, rearranging the sparse furniture, throwing out a chair that had rotted through, and confining a large deer-antler lamp with its long-ago-burned-out bulb to a corner of the room. Morgan knew this was Jenny’s way of coping with her daughter’s absence. He had half a mind himself to get into the car, find Alex, and bring her back, but Jenny had been right. Alex needed her space.
Meanwhile, the file that his old handler had compiled was plenty to keep him occupied. It was thick with papers, printouts that, Morgan presumed, Plante had prepared to give to him when they met. It seemed that Plante had been conducting his own investigation into Acevedo International. He must have had reams of documents to compile this kind of data. Clearly, he had been at this for months. There were copies of flight manifests for supposedly empty Acevedo cargo planes flying out of Kandahar, and yet there were fueling logs showing they couldn’t possibly have been empty. Another packet of papers was devoted to the connection between Acevedo and the CIA, but the evidence Plante had dug up linking the two was nebulous and uncertain. It consisted mainly of suspiciously convenient occurrences, like investigations that had been called off, inquiries that had led to dead ends, informants who had wound up dead. But there was nothing definite to tie Acevedo to any of it.
Morgan waded through stacks of financial documents. A calculation in the margin of one of the last pages added up all the money unaccounted for and still came up short of the billion-dollar profits Acevedo should be making from the drug trade. Plante had scribbled, in a hasty, frustrated hand,
Where is the money going?
Morgan turned the page to find a profile of Lester Hodges, head of something called the Special Projects division at Acevedo. The attached head shot showed a tough-looking man with the square face of a bulldog. Morgan recognized him as the man who had been talking to T in Zalmay’s photos. Behind the profile page was a single document, signed by Hodges, authorizing transportation of materials to Kandahar. In a corporation shrouded in secrecy, this seemed to be Plante’s only solid lead.
Was anyone at the Agency aware of any of this? It seemed unlikely. If any of the higher-ups knew, the investigation wouldn’t have fallen to Eric Plante alone. Maybe, like Morgan, Plante had suspected a mole. He again lamented his old friend’s death, and especially now that he knew that, if Eric were still alive, he would have had a faithful ally in all this. As it was, he couldn’t trust anyone.
He had to decide what his next move was going to be. Careful consideration wasn’t usually his style. He would rather throw a wrench into the works and see what happened. But he wasn’t going to gamble where Alex and Jenny were involved. He needed to be cautious.
He couldn’t go to the CIA, of course. Any other government agency might help him, but they would be all too happy to screw the CIA, along with him, in the process. What about the media? He could expose the whole thing to the world—but he couldn’t go to the press without exposing himself and, along with that, revealing a dozen state secrets. He felt that shining the light of public scrutiny on this would do far more harm than good.
No. He would have to find out who was behind this, and he had to do it alone. He would go after Lester Hodges and follow the evidence all the way to the top, wherever it led him.
He waited for Jenny to move into the bedroom, then gathered up Plante’s documents and placed them, along with the memory card Zalmay had given him, in a white shopping bag, which he hid discreetly under a loose floorboard in a corner of the cabin.
He sat back down on the hard wooden chair and stared at the wall, and as the first outlines of a plan formed in his mind, he heard light footsteps outside, approaching the door. His hand automatically moved to rest on the rifle. The door opened. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Alex at the door, standing against the encroaching darkness outside. Jenny rushed past him to hug her.
“Where were you?” said Jenny. “We were worried sick!”
“Around. I needed to think, so I just walked along the road until I reached the highway.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re back,” said Jenny.
Morgan looked at his child with relief, but it was still painful to be reminded of the things she had said.
Hesitantly, she spoke. “Look, Dad . . . I took some time to think and . . . I’m not saying everything’s okay, or that I forgive you. But I don’t want to do this right now. I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want to be angry.” She was picking up steam, speaking louder and faster. “Maybe we can fight later, have it out and everything. But not right now. Right now I need things to be okay, at least until this is all over.” He began to speak, but she interrupted. “I’m not done yet, so let me finish. So we don’t fight for now, okay? And even when we do fight . . . Damn it, you’re my dad, you know? Even if I’m compromising my ground just by saying this . . . I don’t know. I love you, and nothing, not even this, is going to change that.” She finished, nearly breathless, as if getting it all out had been an enormous effort.
Morgan’s lips turned up in a smile of restrained relief. “I know I shouldn’t presume too much here,” he said, “but I’m really thankful for the benefit of the doubt.”
Jenny hugged her daughter. “That’s my girl. Twice as thoughtful and caring as any adult I know.”
“I just had some time to think, is all,” Alex said, holding her mother. “And I can’t take all the credit. Dylan said some things that really got me to see things a different way.”
Morgan’s heart sank as he heard these words. It was as if a black cloud had suddenly obscured the silver lining. “‘Dylan said’? You mean, you talked to him?”
Alex stepped back nervously. “I gave him a call, and we talked for a while,” she said, faltering at the change in his expression. “It helped a lot. Don’t worry,” she added quickly, “I didn’t tell him any of the specifics, about you or everything that’s going on.”
“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” he said, going through all the implications in his mind.
“Dan, come on,” said Jenny. “She just wanted to hear a friendly voice. Maybe you could cut her some slack this once.”
“Look, Dad, I knew you wouldn’t like it,” Alex said apologetically. “But I didn’t tell him what’s going on or where we are. Not even a hint.”
“When?” he said urgently. “When did you make the call?”
“I don’t know. I-I . . .” she stammered. “It must have been hours ago. I was venting to him for a while, and then I walked some more. I had to think some things through.” Her tone changed from defensive to self-assured. “I didn’t use my cell phone. I’m not stupid, Dad. I’m not a spy, but I know
something
about this electronic-surveillance stuff. I called from a pay phone in the gas station down the road.”
Morgan wasn’t reassured. “There are pictures of you two together online, aren’t there? Connections in social networking sites and whatnot? Meaning that anyone with an Internet connection could easily find out that he’s your boyfriend?”
“I . . . I guess . . .”
“Dan, don’t hound her,” said Jenny.
“We need to go right now,” Morgan said with adamant resolution. “Take only what you can’t live without.”
“Again?” exclaimed Alex.
“Could you just stop for a minute and explain?” demanded Jenny.
“There’s no time! We need to get moving right now.”
“No,” said Jenny, firmly. “I need you to tell me what’s going on before we pick up and leave again.”
He looked at her, ready to argue; but he was incapable of speaking harshly to her, even in this situation. Instead, he took a deep breath. “I know how the Agency works,” he said, hurriedly but methodically gathering up items that were strewn around the cabin. “They won’t be just tapping our phones. They’ll be monitoring the people we’re likely to call. Family. Friends. And, unfortunately, that includes boyfriends.”
“But I called him from a pay phone, Dad! How will they know it was me? How are they going to find us here?”
“You mean even if they weren’t listening in to the call?” he said, without looking up from packing. “They would still check out the number and send someone out here regardless. And this place is registered under a known alias of mine. If we hadn’t called their attention to this area, they never would have found us. But now it won’t take them long to put two and two together. We need to go. Now.”
He walked toward the loose floorboard to retrieve the hidden items, when he noticed Neika scratching at the door. “Quiet!” he mouthed, holding up his hand and perking his ear to listen over the low rumble of the generator. “There’s someone out there,” he whispered. “Get under the table.”
An ashen Jenny ushered Alex below and then huddled underneath it, as well. “Dan, what are you going to do?”
He picked up the rifle from the table and switched off the light, immersing the cabin in darkness. “Stay put. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He patted Neika, who was still clawing frantically at the door. “Sorry, girl, but you’re taking the lead on this one.”
“Dad, no! What if she—”
“She could save our lives, honey. Sit tight.”
He opened the door, and Neika shot out of the cabin, her syncopated gallop rustling the undergrowth. He followed her into the darkness, treading as lightly as possible, the sound of her footsteps and her intermittent grunts leading him through the dim, branch-filtered moonlight. She ran off ahead of him into the blackness. He continued to run after her until he heard her yelp and then tumble to the ground. Someone was out there. Someone had gotten her. He raised his rifle, but it was no use. There was nothing to see or target.
He stepped behind a tree and listened intently until he heard footsteps. Someone was running around him on his left. He stepped out from behind the tree and, aiming to the extent that he could, fired. The boom of the rifle echoed in the silent woods and left Morgan’s ears ringing. He tried and failed to listen for the footsteps, until he heard, behind him, the click of a flashlight. The sudden light projected his own shadow, huge and ominous, onto the trees in front of him.
“Drop the rifle,” said a harsh, accented male voice from behind him, “or I will make you drop it. And I promise that if I do, you will be dead before it hits the ground.”
The man could have been lying for all Morgan knew, but this wasn’t a time for taking chances. Not when he was the last line of defense for his wife and daughter. He tossed the rifle aside, and it made only the slightest noise when it fell on the soft forest ground.
“Cobra,” the man said. “How nice to make your acquaintance.” Morgan turned around. In the pale reflection of the flashlight, he could just make out that the man’s face had a crooked ugliness, and its cause was a diagonal scar that ran from his cheek to his forehead. It was a face he knew from photographs, and he also knew the reputation that went with it.
“You’re Wagner, aren’t you?”
The man only offered him a lurid grin in response. “That is your family in there, is it not? Your wife and daughter?”
Morgan didn’t respond. But of course, he didn’t have to.
“Come on,” the man said, motioning toward the cabin. “Let’s have a chat together, all of us, shall we?”
Having no choice, Morgan started walking toward the door. It felt like marching to his own execution.