Panacea (39 page)

She'd seen him kill, and do so with cool efficiency. And even though they'd been questioned in Israel, they seemed to have been sent on their way rather quickly, considering the dead bodies he'd left behind. Could that have been a little payback for passing off U.S. secrets in the past?

Okay. Enough pussyfooting around. She'd kept her mouth shut about the SEAL thing and the name change. No more. Time to beard the lion, and she knew the location of his den.

Rebuttoning her blouse, she strode down the hall and rapped on his door. She wondered for an instant if this was wise. He was a killer, after all. But oddly enough, she didn't fear him.

He opened the door and stood there in his jeans and white undershirt.

“Hey. Something wrong?”

“Yeah,” she said, thrusting the phone at him. “This. Read it.”

Frowning, he took the phone and checked out the screen. His frown deepened. Finally he looked up at her.

“Who sent you this?”

“A friend who's been looking into your background.”

“My background? Why?”

Why? Good question. Was finding him off-putting at first a good reason?

“I made it clear that I didn't want you along, but when Stahlman insisted, I wanted to find out why he was so stuck on you.”

“Did you find out? Because I'd like to know too.”

There. He was doing it again. That disarming attitude that he was in the woods too.

“No, but I found out everything else.”

“Sure as hell did.”

That took her aback. “You mean it's true?”

“Most of it.”

“The traitor part too?”

“Not that part.” He leaned out and looked up and down the hall. “Look, um, could we talk about this inside?”

Alone in a hotel room with him. Was she crazy not to be afraid of him—
still
not afraid of him?

“Will I be safe?”

“You really have to ask that?”

She saw the hurt that flickered across his face, but she couldn't help that. He hadn't been straight with her.

“How about we step outside and talk—just until I get the truth from you.”

He sighed. “Fair enough, I guess. Let me put on a shirt.”

He handed back her phone and didn't close the door all the way. He returned half a minute later in the shirt he'd worn earlier and a heavy bottle dripping ice.

“Champagne?”

“Hey, it's France, and Stahlman's paying.” He held up a pair of flutes. “They sent two glasses. Want some?”

“No.” She immediately reconsidered. “Yes. I could use something.”

They went downstairs and stood on the sidewalk as the traffic on Rue Lazare Carnot sped by. He filled the two flutes, handed her one, then clinked his against hers.

“To setting the record straight.”

“I'll drink to that.” She sipped her Champagne. A bit tart, but she liked the bubbles. “So far you've been anything but straight with me.”

“As straight as I could be.”

“Come on. That whole SEAL thing? You weren't even in the navy.”

He put the bottle on a window ledge and leaned back against the wall. He kept his voice low.

“No. I was a CIA field agent. But I took the full SEAL course and qualified.”

“So that's why you're not listed with any team?”

“Right. I'm an unofficial SEAL. If I
had
been in the navy, I would have been on a team.”

“But why take SEAL training?”

“Because I was going under—deep under—and no one was going to have my back. You learn a lot of deadly stuff as a SEAL. I wanted the skills to get myself out of a jam should the need arise.”

“Did it?”

His eyes went flat as he took a sip of Champagne. “It did.”

“What about selling secrets to the Israelis?”

He shook his head. “Never happened.”

“Then what—?”

“Framed—very cleverly framed. I'll capsulize a long, torturous story. I was assigned to go under in Germany. A bunch of native-born Germans, total Aryan types who would have made Hitler proud, adopted Islam as their religion. A very radical form of Islam. Sounds crazy, I know, but they had their reasons. I was to infiltrate them. My way in, believe it or not, was through Israel.”

“Now
there's
a back door if I ever heard one.”

“Not so crazy when you realize that Mossad—that's Israel's CIA—has had quite a presence in Germany since the Munich Olympics. They keep watch on the Islamist groups there. They had connections with these Aryan Muslims and got me into places where I could bump into them. I speak perfect German with a very slight Swiss accent. We hit it off and I was in. But it turned out they'd discarded radical Islam by that time and were into something else, something way-way out.”

“Like?”

“That's not part of the Israeli story. I wanted you to know how I got connected with them. When my Germany assignment was over, I was debriefed by Mossad and I kept in touch with a couple of their people after I returned to the States. Didn't know it then but keeping in touch would lead to my downfall. Some documents wound up in their hands and all the evidence pointed to me.”

“Aren't we allies?”

Rick grabbed the bottle and refilled her glass. She hadn't realized she'd emptied it. Where did it go?

“We have intelligence that we don't share with them. They have intelligence that they don't share with us.”

“They stole it and framed you?”

“The Israelis stole it but someone on our side framed me. Don't ask me why, I don't know. My friends in Mossad couldn't say anything without risking their guy who'd done the real stealing, so they zipped their lips.”

“And left you twisting in the wind.”

He shrugged. “I don't blame them. They had to choose one of us to protect. They chose their own.”

“Is that why we got off so easy in Israel?”

He nodded. “That's my guess. Chayat said word had come down from on high to go easy.”

Laura didn't know if she believed that. The reason could be because they owed him for the stolen intelligence. But what of all that stuff about that Sausalito cop?

“Were you ever in San Francisco?”

“Absolutely. Spent some time there after Germany.”

“Posing as Ramiz Haddad?”

He smiled. “No.
Watching
Haddad. One of my jobs was tracing his international contacts. He was a member of the Sausalito Police but also attached to a jihadist cell in Frisco. He changed his name to Rick Hayden and used his runs in the Sausalito Marine Patrol to check out the supports on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“Oh, no. He wasn't thinking of…”

“Oh, yes he was. Took retirement and applied for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Rangers. Message intercepts concerned a plan to blow up the bridge and he was to learn the best places to set the charges. Then the Israeli problem broke and things got messy for me. Ramiz/Hayden disappeared about the time the Company and I parted ways, so I decided to assume his identity.”

“What does that mean exactly—he ‘disappeared'?”

“You know—vanished.”

“I don't—”

“Look. He stopped being a jihadist. What else do you need to know? I didn't want to be bothered by the CIA or anybody else, so I became Rick Hayden. The high-ups knew what I was up to and they buried it. I didn't want contact with anyone from my CIA life and they didn't want anyone contacting me, so it was a good solution for all concerned.”

“If you say so.”

Once again her glass was empty and once again she let him refill it. Good stuff.

“Who's your source, by the way?”

She smiled. “If I tell you, I'll have to kill you.”

Now why the
hell
did she say
that
?

He shook his head. “Not funny.”

“Okay, he's with the local sheriff's department.”

He looked shocked. “Really? You're not kidding?”

“Why would I be?”

“Because when I say the high-ups ‘buried' my identity switch, I mean they entombed it. I don't believe someone from the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department, even with the help of a friendly fed, could gain access to my file. Someone's feeding him.”

She didn't like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”

“Someone wants you thinking bad thoughts about me.”

“Why?”

“So you won't trust me—that pops first to mind.”

“I don't under—”

“You know we're not alone in this, right? That 536 has had its eye on us the whole time? The guys at Gan Yosaif had 536 tats, someone tailed us from the observatory, someone was watching us in the Internet caf
é
.”

“You're paranoid.”

He pointed to her phone. “That last text was meant to drive a wedge between us. If we split up, they've got you all to themselves.”

She liked the sound of that even less.

“Did it work?” he said.

“You mean, are we split? It depends.”

“On what?”

“On this mass murder he mentioned. What about that?”

He paused, took a deep breath. “That crazy German cult I told you about. They had this old book and they were doing unspeakable things in an effort to raise someone or something called ‘the Dark Man.' They all died in a fire—men, women, children, all burned to death. Nowhere near as many as Waco, but a good number. No question about arson, either. The fire had been deliberately set. I survived so I was suspect.”

She couldn't imagine him hurting a child, especially after the way he reacted to the little Mayan girl who'd been tortured.

“That was the night I saw something … something I'll never be able to explain.”

“You mentioned that before. What was it?”

“A man, or rather a shape—oblong and upright—moving through the flames. I could hear the screams of the dying but he or it seemed impervious to the flames, seemed to be wallowing in the screams.”

“Was he wearing PPE?”

“You mean firefighter gear?”

She nodded. She'd once had to perform a post on a firefighter who'd been trapped in a blaze so hot even his gear hadn't been able to protect him.

“No. He … it was black. The blackest black I've ever seen. Surrounded by fire but it didn't reflect the light from the flames. Seemed to absorb it.”

“The Dark Man you mentioned?”

“I don't know. That was their thing, not mine. I never read the book. I'm glad I didn't.”

She didn't know what to say. He seemed genuinely disturbed by it. It must have been an awful experience to still affect him this way.

“Dark matter.”

“What? I've heard of that.”

“The thought just hit me. It's the stuff between the stars that's supposed to make up most of the mass of the universe. They say it doesn't emit or absorb or reflect energy. It's just there.”

“I'm supposed to believe dark matter was walking through the flames?”

Put that way, it did sound ridiculous. But she was just trying to help.

“Or it could it have been some sort of illusion, a trick of the heat and flames.”

He drained his glass. “Sure. That sounds good. Let's hope so, okay?”

“But—”

“Enough of me. I'm tired of talking about me. In fact I hate talking about me.”

“Okay, fair enough. But one more thing about you: What am I supposed to start calling you? Garrick? Or Gar?”

“Oh, please no. Neither. Garrick Somers is gone. I've been Rick Hayden long enough to think of myself as Rick. So leave it Rick.”

“But if you were framed, don't you want to clear your name?”

“Nope. Don't care. And which name? Rick Hayden's name is clean. That's all I have to care about.”

“Well, don't you at least want to know who framed you?”

“Oh, I know who. This Company guy I used to butt heads with all the time. He hated my guts and I'm sure he was behind it. Name was Nelson Fife.”

 

LEANDER

 

1

Laura awoke with a name running through her head.

Fife … Nelson Fife. It hadn't clicked until after she'd left Rick. No relation, she was sure, but the same last name as James Fife, the man she'd run down as a teen.

She hadn't thought about him in years and wondered if he was still alive. Hearing the name had awakened that awful memory.

Driving along, two weeks with her driver license, applying mascara in the rearview mirror when she blew through a stop sign and hit a man. She could still hear the sound of his head smashing against the windshield.

She'd been a basket case. She visited him in the hospital every day until he was transferred back east. He still hadn't regained the use of the left side of his body when he was released. The prospects of his ever recovering that were virtually nil.

The relentless guilt over James Fife was why she had gone to medical school, why she had originally wanted to be a neurologist—to help people like the man she had crippled.

And look at her now: a pathologist traipsing around her third continent in four days, chasing a wild goose. How far she'd wandered from her goal.

She was glad Rick had mentioned that name. She'd forgotten about James Fife, and she couldn't allow that. Ever.

 

2

“They've chartered a helicopter to Midi-Pyrenees,” Bradsher said as he entered Nelson's makeshift office in the farmhouse.

“‘They'?”

“Doctor Fanning and Hayden or Somers or—”

“Call him by the name on his passport—for the sake of consistency if nothing else.” He rubbed his temples. “She's still with Hayden?”

“Most definitely.”

He slammed a fist on the table and the noise shot a bolt of pain through his brain. He had another blinding headache but he'd lasted through the night without suffering another seizure.