The Traitor's Story (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Debbie and Ethan looked as numb as they had earlier in the week, one crisis replacing the other. Finn couldn’t help but think, though, that their crisis had been resolved, and this one they would be able to leave behind—as upsetting as it might be, it was not their child.

Hailey sat on the sofa next to Debbie and nestled up against her, dropping her head onto Debbie’s shoulder, as if she wanted to undo her identity change and recast herself as a little girl. Finn sat on one of the armchairs.

Ethan paced up and down for a few moments, finally sitting on the other side of Hailey and taking her hand, which she gave willingly, as he said, “I always feared something like this would happen. Whether or not we were right about his condition, Jonas was—I don’t know—too special for the world.”

Hailey raised her head and looked at him. Finn thought she might challenge Ethan’s comment, but she stared hard at her father for a second and said, “That’s so right. He was too special, or the world was too ordinary for him.”

“What nonsense.” All three of them looked at Finn. “How special is too special? Einstein? Hawking? People kill themselves all the time, and you don’t help anyone by mythologizing them.”

Ethan looked confused and hurt as he said, “But Finn, we can’t help Jonas now, whatever we do. I certainly don’t see what good it does to disrespect his memory.”

Hailey and Debbie’s expressions suggested a solidarity with Ethan, a wall of unease that was accusatory in some way. It was as if they had suddenly been reminded who Finn really was, the person they’d known all along rather than the aberration of this last week.

He tried to look conciliatory as he said, “I’m not trying to disrespect him, and I know we can’t do anything to help him now, but . . .” He was reluctant to say any more of what he was thinking, and said finally, “What do we know?”

At first it didn’t look as if anyone would reply, but then Debbie cleared her throat and said, “Sam called this morning, that’s his father, because he thought Hailey would want to know—he knew about Hailey going missing but he knew she was due back. He was distraught, naturally.” Her voice caught a little and Finn noticed Hailey squeezing her mother’s hand. “Theirs is an old building and there are several rooms in the basement, one used as a laundry room. Jonas hadn’t come home for dinner. Then, last night, one of the residents went down to the laundry room and she had her dog with her, one of those little toy things. The dog ran off into one of the empty rooms, and when she went to look for it, she found Jonas hanging from one of the beams.”

Hailey started to sob quietly, burying her face farther into her mother’s shoulder.

“When was he last seen?”

“Not since getting out of school.”

“He didn’t leave a note?”

“Not that we know of. We didn’t ask.” Debbie thought about it and added, “But Sam said they couldn’t understand it, that there’d been nothing to suggest he was unhappy.”

Ethan said, “I guess all parents think that.”

Finn was once again aware of the parallels with the Portmans’ own situation a few days earlier, but he didn’t think Ethan had meant to make a comparison, and the other two didn’t appear to pick up on it.

Hailey said, “Mr. and Mrs. Frost are such cool people.”

“That’s Jonas’s surname,” said Debbie.

“He knows that, Mom.” Finn hadn’t known it, but then Hailey’s thoughts touched on something else and she looked newly upset as she said, “His poor sister! She’s so cute, how terrible for her.” Finn remembered Jonas saying how his little sister idolized Hailey.

“You should go and see them,” said Finn.

Hailey took a moment to realize he was talking to her and then said, “Oh, I couldn’t, and they wouldn’t want to see me, not now.”

“I have to go and see them,” said Finn. “Ethan, Debbie, I wonder if one of you could call them, ask them if it’s okay for me to go over there, tell them who I am.”

Before they could answer, Hailey said, “I don’t get it, why would you want to go see them? You hardly knew him.”

“I don’t want to go and see them, but I feel I have to, just to satisfy myself that he really did kill himself.”

Debbie said, “Finn, he hanged himself.”

Finn nodded, but Ethan joined up the dots rapidly and said, “Oh God, you think this might have something to do with you, with Gibson and the whole thing.”

“I don’t know. I hope not. But Jonas left a note under my door early on Thursday morning, saying he’d found out who Gibson worked for. I’d intended to tell him to forget about it as soon as I got back. It’s probably nothing more than a coincidence, but for my own peace of mind, and perhaps for his family’s, I’d rather be certain.”

Though he wasn’t sure what peace of mind would come to the family from finding out that Jonas had been a murder victim rather than a suicide. And if it proved to be the former, he didn’t expect them to feel too well-disposed to the person who’d inadvertently set Jonas on that path, but he still had to go.

He hadn’t voiced it, but there was another family’s peace of mind at stake here, and again it was Ethan who immediately saw the tangential but very real risk to his own daughter’s safety if Jonas had been murdered.

He stood up urgently and said, “I’ll make the call.” And he left the room.

Hailey looked astounded by her father’s sudden capitulation, but then the reality of the situation hit her, too, and she said, “If he was killed, then I could be in danger, too.”

Debbie looked from her daughter to Finn with increasing levels of fearfulness.

Finn shook his head. “I don’t think so, and I hope I can rule it out even for Jonas.”

Debbie didn’t like his response and said, “But what will you do, Finn, if he was killed and it was these associates of yours? We can’t just go from day to day wondering if they might come after Hailey. If he was murdered, it would be the result of your mess—”

Hailey interrupted, full of self-reproach as she said, “No, it wouldn’t be Finn’s fault. It would be mine. If I hadn’t encouraged Jonas to hack Gibson’s network, if I hadn’t run away, none of this would have come out. Jonas wouldn’t have gone searching. I’d never have done it like this if I’d known, but we thought Gibson was just a nobody.”

Gibson
was
a nobody, thought Finn—that was the whole point.

“Look, I don’t think it helps anyone to start apportioning blame. Chances are, he killed himself, and that’s no less tragic, but I want to be sure.”

Ethan came back into the room and sighed heavily before saying, “You can go over whenever you want.” Debbie looked up at her husband, surprised. He looked back at her and said, “Sam thinks it’s suspicious, too.” Ethan glanced at Finn then, a look that seemed to warn him to tread carefully, to appreciate the fragile state of the people he was dealing with.

Finn said, “I’ll go over right away, if you could give me the address.”

“You won’t need it,” said Hailey. “I’ll come with you.”

Debbie looked disturbed by the change of heart and said tentatively, “Honey, I’m not sure that’s a wise thing to do.”

Hailey looked at her mother and said with conviction, “Mom, it’s the wisest thing I’ve done in a long time. I have to go.”

There was no further objection, just a lost look in Debbie’s eyes, as if she were wondering if their daughter had really returned, if that little girl of memory would ever truly return to them, or if this headstrong young woman was who they’d have to deal with from now on.

Finn stood up, glad that Hailey was coming along. It would offer a distraction from his business there. And Hailey might have as much of an idea on how to access Jonas’s computer as he’d had about cracking her virtual world. That was what it all came down to for Finn—what Jonas had been doing with his computer these last two days, and what that might suggest about the way he had died.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Once they were in the taxi, Hailey said, “I’ll never forgive myself. It was my fault.”

She sounded overly dramatic but he knew it was a front, a way of concentrating on some hypothetical tragedy as a way of not thinking about the simpler truth of Jonas being dead.

It occurred to him, too, that Hailey might well be able to blame herself whatever the truth of Jonas’s death. She’d already outlined her culpability if he’d been killed, but if they got into his computer and found that he’d looked at her Facebook page a hundred times in the hours before his death, she would feel equally responsible.

And she would be wrong on both counts, so Finn said, “Whatever happens, it’s not your fault and it’s not mine. If it was . . .” He hesitated, conscious of the taxi driver. “If it was suspicious, then the only people responsible are those who thought they had to silence a fifteen-year-old boy. We all make mistakes, we overlook things that could have prevented this or that, but that doesn’t make us responsible—other people have to take that guilt.”

Involuntarily, his mind skipped back to Tallinn, to Kaliningrad, Sparrowhawk, Harry Simons, to all the things he could never quite leave behind.

“What will you do?” He looked across at her as she spoke. “If you find out it was someone else, what will you do?”

He realized now that, in some way, too many loose threads had been left hanging six years ago, in the debacle of Sparrowhawk, in his own affairs. But what could really be done? In the real world, lone operators did occasionally try to run up against organizations like that, but they never achieved anything, except perhaps an anonymous death for themselves.

“Let’s just find out what happened first.”

“But . . .”

He looked at her and could see the desperation in her eyes, as if Finn’s actions could somehow undo all of this.

“Hailey, I don’t know what I’ll do, and it’s best you don’t ask, but you can give me some information. What do his parents do?”

“His dad’s a professor at the university, his mom’s a physicist.”

“Names?”

“Sam and Maria. His sister’s called Alice.”

“I don’t think I’ll need to talk to the sister.”

Her voice was laced with contempt as she said, “I just thought you might be interested in knowing her name, as they’ve just had a death in the family.”

“Of course, I’m sorry.” He looked at her. He felt uneasy with himself, fearing that not very much had changed in the last week after all. “Jonas said she was younger.”

“Eleven,” Hailey said, grudgingly allowing him back in. “I can’t imagine what they must be going through.”

Finn nodded. “What would be worse—knowing your son killed himself, or that he’d been murdered?”

She stared at him, helpless, and after a moment she said, “Each has to be devastating in its own way, I guess, but I think murder is worse.” Finn nodded and she added quickly, “But more than anything, I think you would want to know. Wouldn’t you?”

“I think I would.”

She looked at a loss, as if there were too many things here to contemplate, not only the death of Jonas but the question of how he’d died, the equally intractable puzzle of what his family had to be going through. Finn sympathized—it was a puzzle even Jonas might have struggled with.

The car pulled to the side of the road, and he paid and they got out. It was an old building, grand, and inside it had the feel of discreet money, even by Swiss standards.

Sam Frost was quick to open the door when they reached the apartment. Finn had never seen him before, not quite as striking as his son, though there was a resemblance, and a look in his eyes that suggested the life had gone out of them.

Hailey hugged him immediately and then stepped back, grinding her words through a clenched throat as she said, “This is Finn.”

“Thanks for coming over, Finn.” Even though he’d known it in advance, he was surprised by the easy Australian accent.

Finn shook his hand and said, “I’m sorry for your loss—he was an amazing boy.”

Sam nodded, holding the muscles of his face rigid, as if he feared what might happen if he lost control of them.

“Come in.” They stepped into a large entrance hall. It looked like a big apartment. “Maria’s sedated. Her mother came in from Salzburg first thing this morning—she’s looking after Alice.”

Hailey said, “How is she?”

Sam shook his head.

“Go in and see her if you want—she’s in the living room.”

Finn said, “Sam, we’re here—”

“I know, Ethan told me. You don’t think he killed himself.”

“I think that’s a possibility.”

“So do I. I know Jonas was different, the way he thought and all that, but he wouldn’t kill himself. Someone did this to him. It’s the only explanation.”

Finn felt queasy. Far from having to persuade Sam Frost, he sensed how impossible it would be to convince him if it looked as if Jonas
had
killed himself.

“I need to see his room.”

“This way.” They followed him to a bedroom that once again was large when compared with the apartments Finn and the Portmans lived in. The walls were covered with posters of Escher prints, startling optical illusions that somehow seemed to sum up the boy and the riddle in front of them now. Sam saw him looking and said, “He loved Escher. They’re mostly copies, of course, but some of them are original.”

“Originals?”

“I mean he thought them up himself.” Then, understanding Finn’s confusion, he said, “Jonas drew all of these. He copied most from prints in books, but some are his own designs.”

“That’s amazing,” said Finn, and stepped closer to look at some of the drawings, seeing afresh what a remarkable kid had been lost to the world here.

The room was scrupulously tidy, but he noticed one of his distinctive hats on a chair and was caught unawares by the memory of Jonas’s last words to him, about how he had seven hats but one didn’t fit anymore. The thought of him standing there in the street, calling out an explanation of the hats, ambushed him with emotion.

He put it quickly out of his mind, and turned to a large desktop computer on the other side of the room.

“We need to turn this on.”

Sam switched it on as he said, “It’s not as if we haven’t tried, but it’s password protected.”

Finn noticed Hailey, staring across the room and yet into space, her thoughts elsewhere, and he needed her to hold it together for the time being, so he said, “Hailey, do you have any idea what his password might have been?”

She jumped a little, her attention focused again. “He changed it all the time . . . random things, the kind of stuff I’d never remember.”

Sam had taken a step back and was looking at the screen, which was already asking for a password. Finn sat down in the chair in front of the desk and looked up at the monitor, and at a yellow Post-it note stuck to the side of it:

DISREGARD

Sam saw him looking and said, “We’ve tried that, and been through the thesaurus—nothing.”

Finn studied the note, understanding immediately that Jonas hadn’t written it to himself. It was in block capitals, and Finn felt a slight chill as he realized it had perhaps been written specifically for him. A word came to mind, the thing that Gibson had been told to disregard, and he typed
Albigensian
into the box, hoping for some reason that it proved incorrect.

The password was accepted, the computer completing its boot-up, and Sam Frost said, “I don’t get it, what did you type?”

“Albigensian. It’s just something the note brought to mind.”

Sam’s voice was a dangerous mix of hope and confusion as he said, “So he wrote that note for you—he knew you’d look at it.”

“Clearly he hoped I would.”

Hailey said, “Albigensian? That was something we found on Gibson’s network. Something about a crusade.”

Sam looked from Finn to Hailey, and with a hint of dread, Finn realized before he spoke what he was about to say.

“Whose network? Gibson? Who’s Gibson?”

“We hacked my neighbor’s network, or at least Jonas did, on my computer, just to prove to me that it could be done.” She stopped there, for which Finn was grateful.

Finn opened the Internet browser and clicked to look at the history, hoping that Jonas hadn’t deleted it, a hope based on the fact that Jonas wouldn’t have given him a clue to the password if there was nothing of interest on here.

At the same time, he hoped there would be nothing in that history that the boy’s father or the girl Jonas had loved wouldn’t want to see. He needn’t have worried, and nor should he have feared that Jonas might have spent the last day of his life looking at Hailey’s Facebook page.

His browsing history still didn’t provide any comfort, though. There were pages on Cayman Island government websites, company searches, links to news sites, and others on varying subjects, including Karasek and Helsinki. Most disturbingly, he’d searched on incidents in Estonia and Kaliningrad, suggesting he’d dug further in twenty-four hours than Finn could ever have imagined. A smart intelligence organization would have recruited him, not killed him.

Not that Finn believed his old outfit could have been involved in something like this. Part of it might have been, in the way that parts of it had always operated outside the rules and without official sanction. Louisa Whitman would never have been part of something like this, but there were plenty of others who would.

He turned to Hailey and said, “Which word-processing soft
ware did he use?”

“Word—it was about the only Microsoft program he could tolerate.”

Finn nodded and searched for documents, but found none. He looked around the desk and opened a drawer, hoping to find disks or memory sticks, then stopped, remembering in a startling moment of clarity that Jonas liked to write things down.

Sam was looking over Finn’s shoulder at the history still visible on the browser, and said, “I don’t understand—what is all this?”

“He was researching.” Finn pushed the chair back and stood up. “The network Hailey mentioned, it belonged to a guy called Gibson who was spying on me.”

Hailey looked uneasy and said, “I’ll go see Alice.”

Finn turned to look at her, but she was already heading out of the door.

He turned back to Sam and said, “When he found out, he seemed keen to find out more. I tried to warn him off. It goes without saying that I didn’t think it would lead to this, and I certainly didn’t think he’d dig as far as he seems to have done.”

“What are you talking about? Someone was
spying
on you? Why? Who are you?” He didn’t leave time for Finn to answer, saying, “And you let Jonas get involved? Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t let him get involved. If they hadn’t hacked Gibson’s network, if Hailey hadn’t run away, I never would have known about it. Jonas helped me to find Hailey—the very nature of that help meant that he learned about the surveillance operation.” Finn thought about it and said, “If I’d known him better, or even a little longer . . . but you’re right, I should have realized.”

Sam Frost put his hands to his bowed head and stood like that for a second, then let them drop again and said, “Let me get this straight, you’re saying this proves that he was murdered?”

“I think so. I’ll need to look into it in more detail, but it seems plausible, even likely.”

Sam’s anger was shifting visibly, from an amorphous sense of suspicion that his son hadn’t killed himself, to something more specific, a single person he could blame—Finn.

“You’re saying he was murdered by people who had you under surveillance—and, mate, now that I think about it, I don’t even wanna know why you’re under surveillance—and that’s because, what, you told him stuff and got him curious?”

“No, it was information he—”

Sam swung for him, his fist flying up hard toward Finn’s face. Finn surprised both of them by deflecting Sam’s arm and grabbing it by the wrist, putting his other hand against Sam’s throat. They made eye contact, expressing that mutual surprise, Sam wondering who Finn really was, Finn wondering how those instincts had stayed so fresh, and then Finn let go.

Sam let his hand drop and looked from left to right, as if looking for a way out, the thoughts and the anger stacking up again behind his eyes. Finn saw it coming again even before Sam himself knew he would throw another punch. This time he didn’t deflect it, knowing he had to let Sam land that punch, knowing that he probably deserved it.

He felt the fist meet his cheek with a dull thud, was knocked back a step. Sam hurt his hand in the process and shook it afterward, wincing, and swiveled the chair around and fell into it, his head sunk onto his chest.

He was silent through a few deep breaths, then said, “Sorry.”

Finn looked down at him. “You don’t owe me an apology. I owe you one, but I swear I had no idea this would happen. I wouldn’t have let it happen if I had.”

At first it looked as though Sam might not respond, but then,
without looking up, he said, “He was murdered.” Though he’d sus
pected it all along, he seemed hollowed out by even a partial confirmation of that possibility.

“I think so.”

“So we should call the police . . .” He sounded doubtful.

Finn thought through that process, adding it up in seconds—the difficulty in persuading them of what had happened, the way their investigation would be hampered at every turn, the certainty that no one would ever be charged with the crime.

And he knew instantly what he needed to do, not only for Jonas, but for himself. Because this was about him first and foremost, and now that these people had broken cover he doubted they would ever leave him alone, not until they’d got whatever it was they were after.

“We could go to the police. It’s one of your options, Sam. I think your son was murdered, I’m certain of it, his death made to look like suicide. I’d have to give the police information about myself, which I’m more than willing to do, to convince them that this was indeed a murder. They’ll investigate, but I can tell you now that they won’t find anybody.” Sam looked up, tears in his eyes. “They won’t find anybody, or if they do, strings will be pulled, and for diplomatic reasons no one will be brought to justice, not in any way that would satisfy you.”