The Traitor's Story (24 page)

That was believable, and Finn realized that in Gibson he had someone keen to stay helpful and alive.

“Okay, you have a colleague and he gave Monsieur Grasset a business card with the name Harry Simons on it.”

“That was Perry’s idea. He said Simons was someone you betrayed.” That rankled but he let it go. “Look, if it helps, I think a lot of Perry’s determination to go after you, it was about revenge, maybe for Simons or for . . . I don’t know, something that happened between you guys in the past.”

“Was Perry here?”

“He flew out yesterday morning. I don’t know where to.”

“Where does he live?”

“He keeps a place in London, but I don’t think he’s there very much.”

“So your colleague, the one who visited Grasset—what’s his real name?”

“Liam Taylor.”

“And it was Liam who went with you to kill the boy?”

Gibson looked panicked. “What are you talking about? I’m a surveillance expert, that’s all, I don’t—”

“So you’re saying Liam did it on his own?” Gibson stared at him, wide-eyed, unable to formulate an answer. “Because I don’t believe that. Jonas—that’s the boy’s name—Jonas was tall and physically fit, so I think two people would need to be involved in faking his suicide. Liam must have been one, maybe he did most of the work, but you helped him, I’m certain of it.”

Gibson was shaking his head rapidly, recalculating everything, finally saying, “You’re gonna kill me, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna kill you, Steve, not least because he was a good kid, an amazing kid, but you know what, even if he’d been miserable and boring he wouldn’t have deserved that.”

“I didn’t want to. I didn’t kill him, I didn’t even want to help. I can’t stop thinking about it.” He started to cry, not out of self-pity, it seemed to Finn, but because the urgency of his own predicament had allowed him to express whatever emotions the murder had left him with. Finn felt a little sorry for him. “Please . . .” His eyes caught Finn’s and he stopped, realizing the pointlessness of it, then he panicked, kicking out, bucking his body, trying to get out of the bath, hindered by the buoyancy of the water, gently pushed back into place by Finn whenever he did make any progress.

Finn waited for him to wear himself out, then said, “Where does Liam Taylor live?”

“Why should I tell you now? You’re gonna kill me anyway.”

“That’s a good point.” He was angry with himself, for not asking for Taylor’s address before moving on to the subject of Jonas.

He thought through his options, and then he thought about the apartment he was in, about how different it seemed when compared with the apartment in Lausanne where not even a picture had been hung, and he thought about the books lining the study. Was this Taylor’s apartment, he wondered, doubting it only because the guest room had looked unlived in. “Who lives here with you, Steve?”

“No one.”

Finn thought back to the specific wording of Jonas’s note:
APARTMENT WHERE GIBSON IS STAYING
. It made more sense now—not a BGS apartment, but the place where Gibson was staying, an apartment that belonged to someone else. How on earth had Jonas found that information?

“Okay, I’ll just wait until no one comes home. I’m in no hurry.”

Urgently, Gibson said, “My partner. I live here with my partner.”

Finn thought of the unused guest room, discounting the idea of a business partner, and said, “Female, male?”

“Male.”

“You don’t want me to hurt him?”

Gibson shook his head. “Please, whatever you do to me, don’t hurt—” He stopped, a protective instinct preventing him from saying the name.

“Taylor’s address.”

“32, rue Cayenne, but you won’t find him there. He’s in Lausanne. He went back this morning. I don’t know where. He said he’d book into a hotel when he got there.”

“Lausanne? You have got to be kidding me—he’s gone back for Hailey? What do you people honestly think a couple of fifteen-year-olds were gonna do with that information? And, Jesus, it’s not like he can stage a second suicide.”

“We’re just following our orders, but Taylor . . . Look, all I know is he was told to go to Lausanne and await instructions. It might be nothing to do with the girl.”

Finn suspected it was everything to do with the girl. This sounded like Ed’s idea of total war, the two kids unwittingly making themselves part of the enemy army. It was just as likely that Perry had targeted them because he’d sensed it would undermine Finn in some way.

With guilty relief, Finn was glad that Adrienne had left, but then Perry wouldn’t have targeted her. The aim of this, as well as Ed’s paranoid views on security, was to unsettle Finn into making a mistake, not antagonize him into retaliation. It was unlucky for Ed that Finn had found his soul this last week.

“You shouldn’t have killed the boy, Steve.”

“I didn’t kill him, I just . . . I would never . . .”

“Then you should have stopped Taylor killing him, or you should have refused to be a part of it. You knew it was wrong.”

Gibson had tears running down his face, or perhaps it was just water from his recent outburst.

“Please, I’m not a bad person.”

“That makes it worse.”

Finn grabbed the cuffs with one hand, pushing Gibson’s arms down against his body, grabbed his throat with the other, and pushed his head under the water. Gibson cried out, the words lost and turning into splutters and bubbles. He kicked out ineffectually, tried to raise his head, twisted his body as if trying to escape from a straitjacket. And all the time, he stared up at Finn and Finn kept staring back at him until the fight had gone out of him and the gaze had become meaningless.

He went into the bedroom and looked in the drawers of the bedside tables. One was full of sex toys, some of them exotic enough that Finn couldn’t even work out how they might be used. He took a couple of the more obvious ones and dropped them into the bath, together with the key from the cuffs.

He went into the kitchen and found a plastic bag, which he put over Gibson’s head, tearing a piece of the plastic free and placing it in one of his cuffed hands. Finn doubted the police would be encouraged to come looking for a killer, and certainly not for him, but this at least gave them an easy scenario—the sex game that had gone wrong.

He washed his hands, put his watch back on, and before leaving he did one more sweep of the apartment. He found Gibson’s phone among his clothes; there were only a couple of names in the contacts—one was probably the boyfriend, the other his parents—and he’d been scrupulous in keeping the phone clean.

He finished up in the study, searching for an address book before discovering Gibson’s one lapse, a scrap of paper with
LT
and a UK cell number written on it—so maybe Taylor was new to Gibson, flying in specifically for this current operation. Finn put the piece of paper in his pocket.

He noticed a picture on one of the shelves then, of Gibson and his partner, smiling broadly, somewhere up on the ski slopes by the look of it. They looked a happy couple, and looked, in the way a photograph could sometimes reveal, like good people.

But that good man had, at the very least, helped in coercing a fifteen-year-old boy into a basement, in attaching a rope to a beam, had perhaps helped hold the boy’s arms by his sides as Taylor kicked the stool away. Where had his goodness been then?

Chapter Thirty

He took a taxi back to the station and called the Portmans on the way. Debbie answered, and Finn said, “Debbie, it’s Finn. Are you all at home?”

“Yes, of course. Is something wrong?”

“No, I don’t think so, but I want you all to stay inside until I get back, and don’t open the door to anyone.”

“Finn, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m not intending to, Debbie, I’m sorry. I don’t want to say too much on the phone, but I’ll be back in an hour or so. Just do as I ask until then.”

He ended the call and looked out at the evening streets, wondering whether Gibson’s partner was one of those people heading home, blithely unaware that his world was about to implode almost as comprehensively as it had for the Frost family.

And as it still might for the Portman family. It was a nonsense to kill Hailey Portman, but it wouldn’t be the most ludicrous decision he’d ever been privy to, and without the constraints of government sanction, with only Perry and Karasek as guiding hands, it was all too believable.

Either Gibson had been replaced or, more likely, their plan for Hailey could be carried out solo. An outright murder was unlikely—they’d gone to great lengths to avoid the attention of the police until now, so they were hardly likely to throw the advantage away at this late stage.

He assumed they’d try to engineer an accident, which would probably involve waiting for Hailey to leave the apartment. An explosion within the building was possible, it was true, but he doubted even Perry would go to such extreme lengths to silence a schoolgirl.

His thoughts ran aground again, unable to make sense of the need to silence two teenagers in the first place. He’d thought Jonas’s death had been a response to his continued prying, but if they were targeting Hailey too, it was more fundamental than that. It begged the question of what Perry thought they’d stumbled across on Gibson’s network.

Finn thought back to the memory stick and its contents. The only thing he could think of that might give them reason to be nervous was the mention of Naumenko and those numbered bank accounts, but even Finn had only understood the significance of those numbers because his own account was among them.

More likely, there was something even more sensitive amidst the vast amount of coded material Jonas and Hailey had found, and in their paranoia, Perry and friends had feared the encryption being hacked. But then, from the little Finn had known of Jonas, maybe that hadn’t been such a paranoid notion.

As had often been the case back in the days when this had been his job, the possible explanations were less important than the very real situation he faced in the present. Despite all his assurances, he now had to assume that Hailey’s life was in danger, and keeping her alive took priority over explaining the reasons for that threat. Ironically, all he knew for sure was that she’d have been safer if they’d left her in Uppsala.

When he arrived back in Lausanne, he had the taxi drop him at the end of the street and walked casually toward his building, taking in the cars that were parked here and there. None had an occupant that he could see.

Once inside, he went down to the parking garage beneath the building. There was his own car under its dust sheet—he hadn’t driven it in six months. Nothing else looked out of place. The boiler room was locked, but now that he thought about the position, an explosion there would take out the back of the building, not the front, so he could probably discount the total war option.

He took the elevator back up and called the Portmans’ number from the corridor outside their apartment.

He heard Ethan say, “Hello?” both through the phone and beyond the door.

“Ethan, it’s Finn. I’m outside your front door.”

“Do you want to come in?”

Finn couldn’t help but be amused, hoping it didn’t show in his voice as he said, “Yes, I’m calling because I told Debbie not to answer the door to anyone.”

“Of course.”

A few moments later, he was back in their living room. It was just him and the parents to begin with, but then Hailey came through and sat on the arm of the sofa next to her mother, putting an arm around her, looking for all the world like the protective parent rather than the endangered child.

Finn looked at Hailey as he said, “I’ve told you repeatedly that you’re not in danger. I spoke to someone in Geneva earlier this evening, and I no longer think that’s true.”

He noticed Hailey respond to the mention of his meeting more than to the change in her status, sensing that she wanted to ask who he’d met, whether it had been one of the people who’d killed Jonas, whether that person was himself still alive. Finn continued to meet her gaze but gave nothing away.

“How can you be so sure?”

It was Ethan, and Finn turned to him and said, “One of the people who killed Jonas returned to Lausanne this morning. If it weren’t for the two people behind this whole business I wouldn’t be sure, I’d think it nonsensical, but the people concerned are dangerous and ruthless and they seem to think that Jonas and Hailey, in hacking Gibson’s network, got hold of incredibly sensitive information.”

Hailey said, “But we didn’t.” She laughed. “It was all garbage.”

“I’m inclined to agree. I’ve looked through it, and some of it makes sense to me, but I still don’t know what they’re about or why any of it would be worth killing for.”

Except for the mention of Naumenko, he thought. He’d considered it earlier and put it aside, but Naumenko was one of those people whose power and ruthlessness disturbed the trajectory of anything that came too close. Was Naumenko their target, and fear of him the reason they were overreacting now?

Of course, Finn’s trajectory had been pulled into Naumenko’s orbit, too. There had been a genuine bond between them, fostered by their mutual interest in history, but it was the nature of Naumenko the man that even his friendship could be destructive, and so it had proved for Finn.

Debbie looked up at her daughter and said dolefully, “Honey, see what you’ve done?”

Hailey nodded, suggesting she was all too aware of the unintended consequences of the deception she’d set in place that day when she’d asked Jonas about hacking networks.

Finn said, “Debbie, what Hailey did was wrong for a lot of different reasons, but nobody in their right mind could have foreseen this. The important thing now is to deal with the situation at hand.”

Ethan sounded dismissive as he said, “And how do you propose to do that? You sit here and tell us that one of the people who killed Jonas has come back to kill Hailey, but presumably you have no idea how or when he’ll try to do it. So what’s the plan, Finn?”

“I’ll stay here tonight, that’s the first thing. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“Stay in the guest room,” said Debbie.

“No, thanks all the same. I don’t want to be too comfortable.”

Ethan looked at his wife in consternation, and then back to Finn. “I’ve said it before and you talked me out of it, but the situation has changed, Finn, you have to admit that. I think we should go to the police.”

“And tell them what?”

“About this conversation you had, for one thing. You know, before there was no evidence, but now they can speak to this person, whoever he is, and get the information from him.”

Hailey had looked remarkably relaxed considering her safety and possible attempted murder were under discussion, but as her father spoke she became more uncomfortable, her eyes skittering between him and Finn. She did not want it to be true, and Finn was touched in some way that she had that emotional investment in him as a person—but she knew it to be true nevertheless.

“Dad, I think maybe the person Finn spoke to this evening—well, I don’t think he’ll be speaking to the police, or to anyone else.”

Finn avoided making eye contact with her, staring at Ethan instead as confusion washed over him and finally ebbed away.

“What? You mean you—”

Finn brushed it aside, interrupting Ethan, saying, “Look, even if we could give the police the addresses of the two people who are behind this, it wouldn’t do any good. These are not the kind of people who get arrested and brought to trial.”

“So you’re saying Hailey’s always going to be in danger?”

Calmly, Finn said, “No, because I’m dealing with the situation. I’ll deal with the two people behind this, but the imminent threat comes first.”

Hailey was relaxed again as she said, “What if he doesn’t come tonight? I can’t stay in the apartment forever. You know, I have to go back to school at some point.”

Finn smiled, thinking how far school had been from her mind during her brief stay in Sweden.

“He probably won’t come tonight, and I don’t know what his plan of attack is, only that he’ll almost certainly try to make it look like an accident.”

“Or another suicide,” said Hailey. And before Finn could counter she said, “You know, they run in clusters—one friend does it, then others follow suit.”

Debbie was horrified, looking up at her daughter to ask if that was true. Hailey nodded nonchalantly.

Finn said, “It’s possible, but I don’t want you to worry. Chances are, nothing will happen tonight, but I’ll be here anyway. Tomorrow, I’ll go looking for him.” He thought about the phone number in his pocket, acknowledging to himself that it wasn’t much to go on.

Once again, on the subject of Hailey’s safety Ethan ceded control to Finn, saying, “I guess we have to put our trust in you, Finn. I only hope it’s well placed.”

“I haven’t let you down yet.” Ethan acknowledged the fact, even as Finn countered in his own mind that he couldn’t say the same for Jonas. He checked his watch and said, “I’ll just go back up to my apartment. I’ll be back in half an hour or so.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Debbie said, and produced a brittle laugh that seemed to surprise her.

Finn left, and made a point of turning on the lights in his apartment when he got inside. If Taylor was out there somewhere, Finn wanted him to know he was home.

He checked his answering machine, disappointed that Adrienne hadn’t called, unsure what he expected from her, feeling a brief wave of despair at the possibility of her never coming back. Until now, he’d still seen it as temporary, something that would be overcome, a wake-up call for him to change, but perhaps, far from being in a state of flux, it was already settled.

For all he knew, their one-night stop in Paris had been a final unexpected and unwelcome meeting for Adrienne, and she’d breathed a sigh of relief as he’d walked out the door. He went into the bedroom and looked again at her clothes, trying in vain to see some sign in what had been left there.

He’d promised to call her.
Do what you have to do first
, she’d said. It wasn’t much to hold on to, but it wasn’t a closed door. And he was doing what he had to do, and was glad that she wasn’t here now, just as a part of him wished that Hailey wasn’t here, that he’d failed to find her at Domtrappkällaren.

He walked through the apartment and turned off the living room light, then after a few moments, edged back into the darkened
living room and toward the window. It brought back a bittersweet memory of first seeing the lovelorn Jonas on his lonely vigil.

This time there was no one on the street, no new cars parked below. He tried to think, desperate to see how this threat would manifest itself. And as he stared down at the streetlights and the shadows between the streetlights, he had a terrible sense that he’d missed something, that he’d been missing something all along.

He headed back downstairs and found the Portmans preparing for bed. Hailey was already in her room. Debbie brought him a duvet and a pillow, asked him if he needed anything else, then left him alone.

He put the bedding to one side, arranged things on the coffee table in front of the sofa, took his boots off, and lay back. It reminded him of the night spent on the sofa in Mathieu’s apartment, something that already seemed a distant memory, and one that was surprisingly happy.

The only light on in the room was a small lamp on a table behind his head. He was just about to reach back and turn it off when he heard movement and Hailey came in, wearing her pajamas.

He sat up. “You should try to sleep—everything’s okay.”

“I know,” she said, and was distracted then, looking at the gun sitting on the coffee table, a density about it that pulled her thoughts away from her. “You have a gun.”

“This is Switzerland—a lot of people have guns. I haven’t used it in a very long time, and I’m sure I won’t use it anytime soon.”

She nodded, finally pulling her eyes away and back to him, and then remembering why she’d come in she said, “I just wanted to say, about earlier. I don’t need to know the details, I don’t want to know them, but I’m glad you did what you did. If it was one of the men who hurt Jonas . . .” Her throat tightened up, as if she’d been wanting to say this for the last hour or so and yet was still surprised by the emotion of it. After a brief pause, she said, “I’m just glad, that’s all.”

“Thank you. That means a lot.” It was a stock response, nothing more, but no sooner had he said it than he realized it was true—it did mean a lot to Finn that she thought no less of him for killing a man.

She went back to bed and Finn lay down, and after a few minutes he turned off the lamp. He stared up into the darkness, lying awake for a long time, thinking of Jonas and Hailey and what they’d lost without ever knowing they’d had it; thinking of Adrienne, thinking of Mathieu’s happy and chaotic household.

He slept then. He woke once when a car drove past on the street, and slept again. He woke a second time, and wasn’t sure how long he’d slept or what had woken him. He lay for a second, not moving, and then he felt his body tense, an automatic response that seemed a step ahead of his senses and thoughts, operating at a purely instinctive level.

He wasn’t aware of having heard anything, and still now the apartment was silent. Yet his body was ready, pumping with adrenaline, his muscles tightly coiled—he didn’t know how he knew, but he knew without doubt that someone else was in the apartment.