Downfall (21 page)

I
WOKE UP TO METAL CUFFS
lacing my wrists. I hadn’t been down long because the taste of my own blood in my mouth was salty, coppery fresh. I knew this from experience. The fact that I wasn’t out for hours was frightening; it meant Belias and his buddy were in a hurry, and they’d dosed me accordingly.

I looked up. Diana was in a chair facing me, terror lighting her eyes.

If you’ve never been under the complete power of another person, held against your will, you don’t know the fear. I knew a horror novel had to be playing through her brain. I’d been shackled and tortured in a prison in Poland, left bound and awaiting execution in a basement in Amsterdam. You are helpless. Your captor can do anything to you. It is a nightmare of surrender made real.

She wasn’t bound like I was, though. Belias stood by me, gently wiping my face with water. Beyond him was the bald man. Felix lay on the floor, unconscious. It was easy to forget he was sick with cancer, because he didn’t seem overly frail. But I didn’t know his condition, what medications he might be on, and I watched the shallow panting of his chest from the tranquilizer. Afraid he might stop breathing.

“Hello, Sam. Thank you for retrieving this for me.” Belias held the
DOWNFALL
file I’d taken from Janice Keene’s office. With a dramatic flick of the match he lit the papers on fire. The flame caught, coursed up, blackening the faces of the shamed and the fallen. “I’m impressed with your resourcefulness.”

I took his compliment in silence.

“This is really how much they mattered,” Belias said, as if to himself. He dropped the flaming clutch of papers into a metal trash can. Then he crooked a smile at me. “No one else has ever gotten close to me this way. Of course, you’ve been lucky…but no one has managed what you have, Sam. I respect you.”

“Mr. Capra,” the Englishman said. His eyes were bruised where I’d hit him with the action figure and his stare was seething. I’d made him look bad and I’d have to pay a price.

“I’d like to throw you out a window but that’s not on the schedule today.” The Englishman injected my arm with a syringe and the hazy dullness of the dart was gone, my heart pounding, every nerve surging, alive, hyperactive. Nothing so calming as not knowing what kind of drugs are tripping through your blood. My heart felt like it might dance past my ribs.

I looked up at the Englishman, water dripping from my face, blood from my lip and my ear. I hurt all over.

“We have questions,” the Englishman said. “You will answer. Otherwise, I will be forced to hurt you without any consideration of mercy. You think you’re tough but you’re not. I know how you’re stitched together, and I know how to pull you apart. Nod if you understand.”

I gave no sign. The Englishman showed me a scalpel and moved it toward my throat. But then he knelt and placed it against the back of my leg. “Your hamstring. I don’t think you’ll kick people through windows anymore if I slice this, Sam. Nod if you understand.”

I nodded. The Englishman stood, moving the knife away from me.

“We need to talk, Sam.” Belias’s voice was low and soft. “About your future.”

“You mean my lack of one,” I said.

“I thought you were an optimist.” Belias stepped away from me. “I don’t want to hurt either of you. I want us all to embrace reason.” Belias turned toward Diana. “Sweetheart, your mom and I are friends. We want to help you. You don’t need Sam to protect you.”

“I don’t know him,” Diana said. “I never saw him before I ran into the bar.”

“We don’t believe you,” the Englishman said. “Where is the video?”

“I erased it. I didn’t want anyone to see it and get my mom into trouble.” Her jaw quivered.

The Englishman and Belias exchanged a glance. “You love your mother very much, don’t you, Diana?”

“Yes…please. Just let me go. I promise I won’t talk about this. I just want to find my mom.”

“But you know about us. People can’t know about us…unless they’re one of us, so to speak.” Belias gave me a sideways glance. “I have to take it as a refusal to join us if you keep running from us.”

“Please…please…”

The Englishman turned to me. His fingers closed in hard on my throat. Against the arteries, carotid and jugular. A grip like I’d used on him in the Marchbankses’s house. The world hazed. Pain surged through my flesh and bones. I nearly levitated from my chair. The world went black.

He let go. “If I hold that long enough, I can destroy your brain functions,” he said. “Do you understand, Diana? I can make your friend Sam here into a vegetable.”

“None of us want that,” Belias said. “Please, Diana.”

“I deleted the video,” she said in a rush. “Mom had it on a hidden drive. A little one. I deleted it, wiped the drive, threw it away.”

“You might be lying. You might hold on to it until your mom’s dead from the cancer and then go to the police,” Belias said.

“No, I wouldn’t do that.”

Belias tapped a finger against his chin. “You could carry on your mother’s work, Diana. Be like her. That’s what she wants for you. A world with fewer worries for you. I’m impressed you’ve hidden from us for three whole days. You’re your mother’s daughter.”

“If you could let me talk to my mom…”

“No. Where is the video?”

“I deleted it!” Diana screamed.

“Digital files aren’t like paper, obviously. I burn the paper, you know it’s gone. The file—well, how many copies could you make and hide, in e-mail accounts, on friends’ computers, in the hidden vastness of the Internet?”

“I didn’t copy it, I swear; I wouldn’t.”

The Englishman said, “Did you know how much pressure the average set of testicles can take?” And his hands began to roam down my chest, toward my lap. “They can actually be crushed by a human fist. This was common in the Bosnian war and…”

“He doesn’t know anything!” Diana screamed.

“Maybe I should ask
him
,” the Englishman said. “Maybe he’ll tell me the truth when he watches you suffer.” The Englishman straightened me up in the chair.

“Now, Roger,” Belias chided, “I don’t want you hurting Diana. She’s on our side. She’s going to be family. If she wants to keep her mother’s PR firm.”

“Please don’t,” Diana said. “Please.”

I found my breath again.

“And Sam, I want you on our side. I so wish we’d met over a drink rather than at that Russian’s house. If we could have a serious talk, we could understand each other.” Belias’s voice was cool like water on a hot day. “I know you were a CIA castoff, a brave boy they didn’t appreciate enough. You have a son now, don’t you? His name is Daniel…”

He leaned close to me, smiling, and I slammed my head into his mouth. He fell back, although I couldn’t have hit him that hard.

Roger didn’t look at me or at Belias. He kicked Diana in the chest, hard, and Diana didn’t scream since the air was driven out of her lungs. She fell backward in the chair, in astonishment, her unbound hands covering her face. She moaned.

“Behave,” Roger said to me.

“You behave,” I said.

“Defiance from you equals pain for her,” Roger said.

“Pain for her,” I said, “means death for you.”

He laughed. “Oh, very grand and brave. You’re cuffed. You don’t deal any grief to anyone.”

“Window,” I said and his face reddened.

Belias said quietly, wiping a trace of blood from his lips, “Where is the video, Sam?”

“She said she erased it. I believe her. She had no reason to keep it around. It puts her mother in prison. She doesn’t want that.”

Belias studied us both. Weighing what she said. Weighing what I’d done to him in the past twenty-four hours. Finally he smiled, and I thought it cold and unsettling.

“I need both of you,” Belias said. “Diana, I can give you the world, same as your mother. Design your life, the one you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

“For free?” I heard myself ask.

“No,” Belias said quietly. “Nothing is free. Especially not my particular genius.”

I said nothing.

“Diana?”

“I swear, I promise, I deleted the video. I won’t say anything…” Diana wasn’t crying now, just gasping from the pain of the hood’s kick. “No.”

“Do you think you’ll prosper on your own?” Belias said. “You’re not the sharpest pencil in the cup. You need help. You need our help to shine.”

His words rattled in my head.

Belias knelt before me, but far enough back where my kick couldn’t reach him. “Sam, you are exactly what I’m looking for. What do you want? I can give it to you.”

“Really? I doubt that.”

“A better life for your son Daniel, perhaps. One free of financial worry.”

My breath stopped.

“Your brother, Danny Capra, was murdered. What if I could give you the people who killed him? It would take a bit of time, but I can do it. Would you like that, Sam? You could cut their own throats in turn, just as his was cut.”

I clenched my eyes shut. I could see the jerky video again: my brother, a relief worker in Afghanistan, him and his best friend, who was his translator, kneeling before a camera. Then the blades across their throats when the kidnappers’ speeches were done. The horror of it.

“You have no way to give those men to me,” I said.

“Never sell me short. And wouldn’t you like your CIA career in Special Projects back? It’s a matter of getting the right people to back you. And getting the wrong people out of the way.”

The wrong people out of the way. Downfalls.

I glanced at Felix, who panted shallowly under the influence of the tranquilizer. His words:
Cui bono
? Who benefits?

“You saved the CIA from an embarrassment, twice, that could have crippled them. You exposed a traitor; you stopped a threat that would have destroyed our government.”

“Shut up.” How could he know? In less than twenty-four hours he’d managed to access my classified CIA file. He
couldn’t
. His reach could not be that deep, that secret. I felt like vomiting into my lap.

“Now this is why you fascinate me, Sam. You have power, real leverage, over the CIA, over some of the most powerful people in this government…and you walked away from that power. You still have it. They still owe you. You know it and they know it.” He smiled. “Honestly, Sam, how can you have such power and not use it?”

“Shut up,” I said again.

“Use it. Go ahead and use it. I can help you. I can make it so…easy. And then you can help me.”

“You’d like to own a CIA agent the way you own Glenn and Holly and Janice Keene.”

“Oh, Sam, I wouldn’t own you. We’d be partners. I think given your history, albeit one unappreciated, you could rise quite high. Very high. Director Samuel Capra. It does roll off the tongue.”

Now I smiled at him, at his stupidity. “Would never happen. My wife was a traitor.”

“Your wife’s files, I understand, have been wiped from the CIA’s records. She will never present a political problem to the agency. They can rewrite her history as a heroine, as an undercover agent who was grievously injured in the line of duty.”

He held a computer tablet in front of me. Opened a browser. In it was a video, a live camera image. Lucy, my ex-wife, lying in her bed. Comatose, as she had been since an assassin’s bullet meant for me struck her in the head. I never knew if she took the bullet for me or if it had just missed. But traitor or not, twice she had saved my life when it would have benefited her to kill me. She could have left me when she discovered she was pregnant. She hadn’t.

Was that love? I didn’t know.

I made a noise in my throat. A camera feed monitored her and it was available via browser. I wasn’t allowed to visit her because she was in a secure location; this was the compromise. I had not looked at her in a long while.

“I watched her earlier today. See, it tells you at the bottom her name, and her stats, her respiration, her heartbeat. Very informative. If I can reach the CIA’s servers to display your lovely ex—and you know, they really should be more careful—I can reach the networked medical equipment that keeps her breathing.”

“No,” I gasped.

Belias’s finger hovered above the screen’s keyboard. “If I press Delete, then Lucy is…deleted. Don’t you want her dead after the nightmare she put you through?”

“Don’t,” I said. Lucy—I didn’t love her anymore. But she was Daniel’s mother. There remained a slim hope that she might emerge from the coma one day. I could not let her be killed by this man.

“I don’t want to hurt her. Or Daniel. Or his babysitter, the former forger. Or anyone, really,” Belias said. “You’re alone in the world, Sam; wouldn’t you rather be part of something greater?” He knelt close to me again. “Tell me what you want. What you really want. And I’ll give it to you.”

How often are we asked this? It seems to me that most of the time we push our deepest desires down, for the sake of conventionality or fear. We do what is often safe, not what we want.

“I want you to leave me alone and leave my family alone.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Revenge on the secret group you worked for at the CIA, perhaps? They cast you out, called you traitor, did nothing to help you find your son or wife. They left you to die, in a way.”

I would never forget how the Special Projects division at the CIA had treated me, but I had moved on. I don’t hold on to anger longer than I need to. What is the point?

But Belias wanted me in his club—and if I was in, maybe I could bring him down. I loved undercover work. This wasn’t the same, but I’d have to sell him on a lie. Sell it like my life depended on it. That was truth.

I stared at the floor, as though ashamed to meet his gaze. “I…I…I want them to pay.”

“Pay how?”

“My whole life I dreamed of working for them, and I was only there for a few years,” I said. “I knew I could go far. Now…I sling drinks. They made me untouchable. I can’t explain my job history over the past few years to anyone else. My uncle left me some money and I own these bars. I’m not really good at it.” I raised my gaze to match Belias’s. His eyes shone with delight. “When Rostov tried to pick the fight with me, it opened up something inside of me…that I’d been smothering.”