The Coil (11 page)

Conference call from Brussels, Belgium

“Hyperion here. Is there news about the operation, Cronus?”

“This is Atlas.”

“Prometheus. I'm on.”

“Themis. Christ, what an ungodly hour!”

“Ocean here. Let's have it, Cronus.”

“Very good. Then we're all assembled. This is Cronus. Atlas asked to be brought up-to-date. I should think you can blame him for the invigorating hour. The answer is that we've passed successfully through this critical stage. Sansborough was attacked a second time. Mac was there and witnessed it. She handled herself well. Her tradecraft is adequate for what we need. Afterward, he made contact. She's agreed to help….”

Aloft, en route to Paris

The jet was a Gulfstream V, debugged and fully fueled, the luxury aircraft of choice for global high rollers. The eight passenger seats were individual chairs that swiveled, each equipped with a multichannel telephone and an outlet for data services via satellite. Of course, there was a powerful onboard PC with wireless Internet connections, too, in a communications center aft. Since the pilot and copilot were busy in the cockpit, Liz and Mac had the rest of the sleek, fast jet to themselves.

At the miniature bar, Mac made a martini in a tall-stemmed glass and poured himself a Red Tail ale. “Belvedere vodka, just as you requested,” he announced, pleased with himself. He gave it to her and settled into the chair beside hers, his hand wrapped around his beer glass. His sigh had the sound of relief in it.

She drank, grateful for the good alcohol and the simple concoction. It would be a long journey, close to eleven hours from takeoff to touchdown, although they were going over the North Pole, the fastest route. The pilot figured they would arrive in Paris no later than 2:55
P.M
. local time, perhaps earlier, depending on conditions.

Mac was looking at her. “You're going to be a big help. You'll buy us time.”

She was surprised by his earnestness. There was something about him she liked. Maybe it was all that experience that seemed to have tainted him in his own eyes but made him more palatable in hers. Still, he worked for Langley, was a veteran of that duplicitous world. In fact, she realized suddenly as she drank again that something he had said earlier was not quite right…did not fit in with what she knew. But hard as she concentrated, she could not place what it could have been and when he had said it.

Then it was pushed from her mind by another disquieting thought. “What makes you think Sarah's still alive?”

“If they've killed her, there's a good chance we'd have heard. Corpses have a way of surfacing.” He glanced at her and then away. “You're right. We don't know. But we're going to act as if she's alive until we damn well find out different. Look at it this way: Alive, they're working to keep the kidnapping buttoned down, too. That'd help account for the utter silence in the underground.”

“Of course, even if you deliver the files, the odds are they'll kill her.”

He shrugged and stared down into his ale. “We've got to work as if she's alive and as if the Carnivore kept files.”

“Good.”

Liz tried to settle back, to relax, but her mind kept fixing first on Sarah and Asher, and then on her responsibility for the trouble they were in now. Without a second of suspicion, she had jumped at the Aylesworth Foundation's invitation to apply. It had arrived less than a week after Mellencamp's death. That had launched her sham existence, and she never questioned the coincidence. It was her fault, her weakness, because she had so desperately wanted to be free of her past and find some way to live in an unfamiliar world. Perhaps even to be happy. Now Sarah and Asher were paying.

Mac pushed his table aside and stood up and reached into the overhead bin. “I've got something for you.”

He lifted down a metal lockbox, tapped a numerical code, and removed a Sig Sauer like his, 9-mm and compact, much favored by U.S. intelligence operatives. A beautiful weapon, or so she would have thought back when a lethal machine was something she could call beautiful.

He held it out. “It's untraceable. I was going to bring your Walther—”

Her brows raised. She looked down at the pistol without touching it and then up at him again. “On top of everything else, you cracked my safe?”

“Couldn't find your gun anywhere else. You may need a weapon. Since I was already there, I figured I'd bring yours. But then I realized it could be used to identify you if anything happened in Paris, God forbid. That wouldn't be good for Sarah either. So I had Langley arrange for something untraceable to be waiting for us at the plane. This is it.”

“Where's my Walther?”

“I left it in your glove compartment.”

She sighed. “I don't want a gun.”

“You almost got killed twice today. Don't be an idiot.”

“Idiocy is thinking a gun can actually solve problems.”

“In the right hands, a gun can save lives.”

“That's a tempting appeal,” she told him soberly. “If violence is for something good, then it's good. If it's for something bad, then it's bad. That's what Mussolini thought—‘There's a violence that's moral, and a violence that's immoral.' And we know how he turned that philosophy into dictatorship and a partnership with Hitler. The problem is, violence isn't some kind of impartial raw material like butter or steel. It's not ethically and politically neutral. Just because someone thinks a cause is worthy, that doesn't mean the violence that's ‘necessary' for the cause is worthy.”

He frowned. “Let me get this straight. All violence is bad. Period.”

“Now you're getting it.”

“Even when it's used to stop worse violence? Mob violence, despots, genocide?”

“Look, the only reason the world has such a problem with violence is because we let it. We romanticize it by creating myths about killers like Bonnie and Clyde. We institutionalize it by forming military and police forces and intelligence agencies. You can see this mythologizing in all kinds of small ways. One of the saddest examples I found was the dying soldiers in Vietnam who used to ask medics for a last cigarette, although they'd never smoked. They were reenacting heroic scenes they'd heard about happening in World War Two and seen in Hollywood movies. Romanticizing their own deaths. Heartbreaking.”

“Thank you, Professor Sansborough.”

“It's unimportant to me whether you think I'm reality-challenged. I'm not going to carry a gun. I know about violence. Been there, done that. Now I'm a scholar in the subject, too. I'll be damned if I perpetuate it.”

He shrugged. “It's your funeral. Literally.”

He studied her, but when her expression did not relent, he returned the Sig Sauer to the lockbox. The jet gave a shudder and small bounce as he pulled out a Nokia cell.

“This can't kill anyone.” He held out the phone.

She took it. “Tell me about it.”

“It's got special scrambler capacity hard-wired into it, and no numbers are ever recorded. I have one just like it. I'll be watching you in Paris, following whenever possible in case you run into trouble. If you won't carry a gun, you'll make my job harder, but my shoulders are broad. Since it'd be stupid to be seen together, we'll have our secure cells to stay in touch.”

“I don't expect you'll have to rescue me. I was a pretty fair operative in my time. But you're right: There may be other reasons to talk. What's your number?”

He told her, and she memorized it. She would not program it into the phone, in case it fell into someone else's hands.

“One last thing,” he said. “Asher told us you and Sarah hadn't seen each other in several months. Did you know she'd cut her hair?”

“No.”

He handed her color photos that had been printed off a computer. In the first, Asher and Sarah were smiling widely, their arms wrapped around each other, standing ankle-deep in surf on a golden beach. In the next, they were chasing down the sandy shore, and in the third, Asher was tossing her into the ocean. Their delight in each other shone in each picture. A lump formed in Liz's throat.

“These give you different angles of her hair,” he continued. “Think you can duplicate the cut?” He held out scissors.

She took the scissors. “Where'd you get the photos? From their house?” They lived in Malibu, about seventy miles south of Santa Barbara. Close, but distant enough that she and Sarah had not seen each other as often as they had intended.

He nodded. “One of my people broke in. They sent the pictures digitally.”

“Figures.”

To the Company, nothing was sacred, even the Constitution. One director once explained to Congress that the agency could not always honor it. That was another problem with violent men and institutions: They tended to destroy what they were created to preserve, the shell more important than the substance.

She headed back to the bathroom, where there was a mirror and good lighting.

Santa Barbara, California

It was nearly ten
P.M
., and Kirk Tedesco was angry, worried, and drunk as he sped toward home in his Mustang convertible.
Where was Liz?
They'd had a date, but she had disappeared.

After he and the dean finished their consultation in the garden, he looked everywhere. She was too damn skittish, always had been. He had not admitted to the dean that she thought their relationship was more about friendship than sex, and the sex was far from frequent enough. When he discovered her car was gone, he called her house, but only her answering machine responded. With luck, she was waiting at his condo.

Disgusted, he drank three stiff bourbons, a big improvement over the watered-down affairs he had been nursing all night. Terrible to disrespect Jack Daniel's that way. Still angry, he had stumbled out of the dean's house to his Mustang, lowered the convertible top, and, with a burst of acceleration from the big V-8 engine, took off down the dark foothill street.

Now he was cruising the 101, heading south to his beach place near Summerland. Traffic was light. More cars were going in his direction than north, which was the way it usually was at this hour. People were heading home to L.A., or planning to get there in time for a few hours of hotel sleep before morning meetings.

He was just thinking about that when he realized he had a faithful follower. He liked that—another driver who wanted to go the same speed as he. Both on cruise control, each watching for the Highway Patrol. The other car looked like an SUV, because its headlights were high. He glanced at his speedometer. He was locked in at seventy-eight miles an hour, just where he wanted to be, and so apparently was the other guy.

The wind whistled past, a warm night wind that tasted of the Pacific. The moon was shining out on the ocean, casting a silver funnel across the dark water and fading at the edges into gray. He liked that, too. Nothing should be black and white. It was too damn dull. He turned on KCLU, his favorite jazz station. But instead of music, a National Public Radio report was on, so he tried KLTE, his favorite rock station. Ah, yes. That was more like it.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time to Head Shear and again checked his rearview mirror. He did a double take. The SUV's headlights were closing in, bombarding his car with light. There was something unnerving about his follower—not just the sudden blazing speed but also the headlights, which were so close and high now that they seemed predatory.

He touched his accelerator, pushing out. As he passed eighty-five miles an hour, he checked his rearview mirror again. The SUV was even closer.
Unbelievable.
What in God's name was the guy smoking?

He forced himself to sober up, or at least to feel more sober. There was no traffic here as they climbed the long hill that would dip down into Summerland. Off to his right, the ocean shone quietly in the moonlight. With a rush of air, he moved his car out of the left lane and into the right. He did not bother to signal, and he did not slow down. Let the bastard pass at supersonic speed.

But the SUV did not pass; it followed him into the slower lane. Kirk's heart thundered, and his mouth went dry. Almost paralyzed, he stared into his rearview mirror as the headlights loomed closer over his open Mustang, until with an abrupt motion the SUV bashed his car's tail.

Kirk jerked and yelled. He slammed the accelerator and tried to move left, but the SUV swung around and paced him, cutting him off. He had been too slow.

As he shook his head, trying to clear the alcohol, the SUV abruptly crashed sideways into his convertible. Bellowing with outrage, he fought to control the steering wheel, but it ripped itself from his grasp.

Terror filled him. As the car hurtled through the guardrail, he realized he was going to die. Screaming his lungs out, he gripped the steering wheel as the Mustang shot over the high hill and crashed across the railroad track and down through chaparral, small boulders, and native oaks. One collision after another hurled him back and forth against his seat belt. As the car flew over a final precipice and nose-dived toward the shadowy shoreline, he let out one last piercing shriek. He felt one more moment of blinding impact, and then nothing.

Aloft, heading over the North Pole

Liz looked down at the pile of auburn hair in the bathroom sink. There was a lot of it, shorn like wool from a lamb. She gave herself a wry smile at the unfortunate comparison and combed her new cut around and out from her face so that it approximated the photos of Sarah—slightly wild, very modern.

She peered into her eyes and touched the dramatic mole near her mouth. Hers had arrived with birth, while Sarah's had been artificially given to her. She noticed the crooked little finger on her left hand, broken in a childhood skating accident. They had broken poor Sarah's finger so it would duplicate hers. She and her mother and father owed Sarah, who had gone through hell because Liz persuaded her parents to come in. Or thought she had. In the end, only her mother kept the agreement. Remembering it all, she felt a familiar hollowness somewhere in her chest.

She had wasted enough time. With a sigh, she left the bathroom and returned down the aisle. Mac was still in his chair, his head resting back, eyes closed, face relaxed. He had located a blanket somewhere. It covered his lap and legs.

She thought he was asleep until he said, “We need to talk about your parents. There may be something you've forgotten that would give us a clue about the files.”

“I told Langley everything I knew when I was debriefed. And don't forget I was debriefed twice. No stone left unturned ad infinitum. Also ad nauseam.”

He crossed his arms over his thick chest, and a smile touched his lips. Still he did not open his eyes. “Humor me. Think of it as small payment for this expensive private flight to Paris.”

She fell into her chair. “Are there more blankets?”

But he was already handing one across to her. It had been on the floor on the far side of his seat. “Trade you for my ID.”

“Fair enough.”

She dug the CIA identification out of her purse and gave it to him. It disappeared inside his jacket as she took the blanket and spread it over her legs. It was warm and comforting. Comfort had a lot of appeal right now.

He opened his eyes. “Let's start at the beginning. The inner man. How would you describe your father? A sociopath? Maybe a psychopath?”

She felt herself stiffen. This was not a conversational path she liked. But Mac was right. By talking about him, she might recall something useful.

“No, Papa didn't fit either definition. He was remorseful, if you could get him to talk about it.” She turned her head to look at him. “Lack of remorse is the hallmark symptom for both psychopaths and sociopaths. They're indifferent to—or they simply rationalize away—anything from thievery and inflicting pain to murder. Both pathologies are defined by a basic lack of empathy, which is something seen most often in people who chronically lie or ignore the rights or feelings of others.”

Mac frowned. “If I understand you correctly, there's no difference between a sociopath and a psychopath.”

“Haven't finished yet. A psychopath has psychotic-like elements, too—usually paranoia or some kind of twisted, demented thinking, like believing people enjoy the pain he's inflicting, or that his victims deserve it.”

He pursed his lips, thinking. “So if a guy does a contract killing and just doesn't care, he's a sociopath. If another guy does it because he thinks someone's out to get him, he's a psychopath.”

“That's it. Adolf Hitler was probably a psychopath, while a businessman who ruins people for profit has touches of sociopathology.”

“You just indicted capitalism.”

“Did I? Well, at least you're still smiling. I remember one of my professors claimed if everyone were well-adjusted, there'd never be war again, and we'd have plenty of food, clothing, shelter, and leisure time to go around. We'd also be productive and creative. Pleasant to imagine a world like that.”

“I used to hear that would happen when women ran things.”

“Maybe it will. At this point, I don't care who's in charge. I'm interested in results. But let's get back to psychopaths and sociopaths. That will help you understand why Papa was different. They compartmentalize their lives. There's a great example in the movie
Analyze This.
Remember, Robert De Niro plays a mob boss?”

He nodded.

“There's a scene where his character's getting a blow job from a prostitute. While she's doing it, he's telling her he loves his wife but he can't let his wife give him a blow job, because it'd be with the same lips she kisses their children. De Niro delivers the line beautifully, and it's hysterically funny. But it's also revealing: His character has no idea how his wife feels about his seeing a prostitute, about fellatio, or about anything else. He's a sociopath. Who she really is, apart from being his wife, is irrelevant to him. Her only function is to play out the script he's created for her.”

“Yeah, it's also classic mafioso. All of them want marriage. It raises their status in the family. Everything's about status in the mob.”

“Exactly. Roles. In other words, more roles to be played that have nothing to do with the people themselves. That's why the De Niro character can behave like a loving husband without being loving, without actually knowing who his wife is. For him, appearing properly tenderhearted is probably self-serving, not empathic. Sociopaths keep up the appearance of caring, but what do they actually feel?…Who knows?”

“But your father wasn't that way?”

“I'm not sure.” She paused uneasily. “I felt as if he loved us. Even though he was a killer, it still felt to me as if he loved us. When Mom and I wanted to come in, he said he would, too. That it was the right thing to do. At the time, I wondered whether he was just trying to please us.” She shook her head. “His first kill was an act of passion. He was working in Las Vegas and was barely twenty years old, and he got away with it. But the Mafia figured it out. They identified him for his ‘natural talent.' When the Mafia trains you as an assassin, the first people you're assigned to whack are usually in the mob, too, or working for the mob. He figured he was killing bad people.”

“Was he a vigilante?”

“You like to put labels on things, don't you? Well, yes and no. He killed for money, but the line he drew was that his targets had to be dirty, and he was the one who got to choose whether they were dirty enough to deserve being hit. After the mob let him go independent, he could make that call without someone looking over his shoulder or second-guessing him. He always liked to be in control.”

“What about your mother? Did she discover the truth about what he was really doing, or did he finally volunteer it?”

“She found out. She thought he had a mistress and started checking up on him.”

In a flash, a painful old memory riveted her. Her mother, Melanie, was frantically searching through the clothes in her father's closet, fear on her face, her cheeks wet with tears. She ran to Melanie, and Melanie knelt in front of her, adjusting her play dress.
Don't worry, sweetie. It's nothing. Papa left a note, and I can't find it. Really. It's unimportant. Go outside and get your bike. We'll ride over to the park. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Liz pulled herself back to the present. “But of course, even then he wouldn't tell her the truth. He said he worked for MI6, which he knew would appeal to her. She started helping him with the planning and the scut work of setting up a hit. After a while, she did wet work herself.”

He gazed at her curiously, then suspiciously. “How do you know all this?”

“Years later, when I was living with them again, Mom told me everything.”

He nodded. “Makes sense. I imagine the military background in her family helped.”

She shot him a look, but his face was expressionless. Of course, Langley would have sent him all her personnel records, which included a complete—and now accurate—family history. While Melanie's father advanced in rank and her mother tended to the social and charitable demands made on an officer's wife, Melanie raised her three younger brothers. When Melanie's grandfather died, her father resigned his commission, and they returned home to Childs Hall in London, and he became Sir John Childs. After his death, Melanie's brother Robert inherited the title. When Sir Robert killed himself, the title and lands passed to his older son, her cousin Michael.

“Yes,” Liz said, “she knew how to use weapons, and she'd grown up in an atmosphere where violence and death were woven into everyday life. Later on, when she finally discovered Papa was really independent and killed for all sides, she was in so deep she couldn't stop, although she never worked against her country. But then, neither did he. When I found out what they were doing, she was able to quit completely, and he did, too.”

She closed her eyes, leaned back in the seat. What came into her mind was a dark tenement in Madrid, one of their safe houses, where they had fled after his last job, in Lisbon. Her mother's face was white with shame and fury.
I hate you, Hal. You bastard. Look what you've made of us. Now Liz knows. You'll ruin her, too!

Liz inhaled, refusing the memories. Hardening herself, because Melanie could have said no at any time. “Papa was tenderhearted when it came to us. He paid a lot of attention to me when I was growing up.”

“You've hinted he was scarred psychologically. Injured. How did that happen?”

“It's complicated. Papa's father was a corporate lawyer, at the top of the West Coast pack. Apparently, he was such a ruthless SOB that not even his partners liked him. Sarah knew him. Her mother told me Grandpa was cold, distant, and particularly nasty to Papa. By the time he was a teenager, Papa was running with a wild crowd and getting into serious trouble. So his father sent him to an uncle in Las Vegas who was connected. What an appalling—and revealing—choice. He thought a mafioso was just the right kind of adult to control his son and act as a role model.”

“I'm getting the picture.”

Liz nodded. “That's where it gets even more strange. At first, Papa turned himself around. He got a job in a casino, fell in love, and married. But then his wife was murdered, and Papa went nuts. He was so trained to dominate a situation that he went into action, found out who did it, and killed him.”

Mac's gaze darkened. “So that was his first hit. Of course, the mob found out. He was too close for them not to. That's when they would've enlisted him, and that's how he ended up like his father, a hired gun.”

“You see that, too.” She studied him. “You know the rest.”

“Yeah,” Mac nodded. “I know the rest.”

For the next two hours, Mac continued to question her about the details of her father's and mother's activities, and she answered patiently. She had loved Hal Sansborough as a father but had despised him as the assassin, the Carnivore. She was torn between anger and love, between duty to country and guilt that she had set in motion the events that led to his suicide.

It was her unresolved war, and none of her scholarly understanding of the mind gave her peace with it. It was one more reason she had focused her study on the psychology of violence. In the end, she gave Mac explanations and insights but no new elements to help determine whether assassination records existed, and if they did, their location.

Santa Barbara, California

Shortly after midnight, a black Dodge SUV pulled into the driveway of Derrick and Dolores Quentin's white Victorian house in the sparsely settled foothills above the city. The driver was prepared for witnesses, just as he had been when he eliminated Professor Kirk Tedesco, but the isolation made his work easier.

The driver was alone. He stepped out of the SUV, carrying a flashlight and a 9-mm Browning with a noise suppressor. The house was dark. He had been e-mailed a floor plan and committed it to memory.

At the kitchen door, the driver broke a windowpane with the butt of his pistol, put his gloved hand in through the hole, and unlocked the door. He entered, listening. There was the sound of movement upstairs. It was important only in that it might make his job more interesting. He rolled up his ski mask so he could see better, turned on his flashlight, and padded through the kitchen, passing the messy remains of the night's party. The staircase was in the front hallway. He climbed it.

Upstairs, the dean was stepping from his bedroom, his sleepy face confused. The driver waited for eye contact. His target looked up and focused. Horror stretched his features, and he grabbed the doorway for support.

The janitor smiled and put a silenced shot into the target's forehead. There was a faint
pop,
and blood sprayed. The target reeled backward, hands reaching out helplessly as he slammed against a bureau and sank to the floor, blood pouring from his wound.

The driver watched longer, then went into the wife's bedroom. She was stirring under the quilt. He hoped the sound of the gunshot had penetrated her sleep. He waited, staring down at the face. Plastic surgery, he decided. She was nearly sixty but had been cosmetically adjusted to forty-five. Made herself beautiful for this moment.

Suddenly, as if she sensed his presence, her eyes snapped open. With satisfaction, he noted the terror. Her face twisted, and her mouth opened to scream. He fired into her mouth.

The killer checked all the other rooms. As expected, no one else was in the house. Next, he went into the den, where he located the floor safe. He shot a bullet into the lock, opened it, and cleaned out the jewelry and cash. After making certain both targets were dead, he strolled out to his SUV and drove away.

Aloft, heading south from the North Pole

Liz watched Mac sleep. Something was still bothering her, something he had said that did not jibe with what she knew. She went back over their conversations, trying to figure it out. When the answer came, it was with a burst of fresh anger. It had all started with her phone conversation with Shay Babcock, her producer. When he was describing the postponement of their series, he had said:
The word was sent to me from Bruce Fontana, the network entertainment director, that they'd decided last night.