Truth or Die (27 page)

Key card in hand, I eyed the lipstick camera Owen had taped above the sign for the vending machines about twenty feet away.

Then came the last safeguard—the knocking sequence to ensure we were truly alone. I suppose I was fudging that one a bit.

Two knocks followed by one followed by two. The area code of Manhattan. There’s no place like home.

Less than a minute later, though, I was back down at the taxi. From the look on my face alone, Valerie knew we had problem. It was the kind no badge could solve.

“What is it?” she asked.

That was part of the problem.

I wasn’t sure.

OWEN WAS GONE.

That was the only thing I knew for sure. Both our rooms were empty. Empty of him, at least. Gone, too, was his backpack, his bag of tricks.

But my duffel was right where I’d left it in one of the closets, everything still inside. My guns, the extra cash. In fact, everything else in the room looked normal.

“Did they kidnap the maid, too?” asked Valerie, standing in the doorway.

Okay, I said normal, not clean. You put two guys in a hotel on the lam for a few days and it isn’t going to be pretty.

But that was the question, wasn’t it? Had Owen been taken or had he left on his own? There was a Mobil station with a convenience mart a half mile down the road where we’d been picking up some snacks, but the chances of his taking the walk at one o’clock in the morning seemed remote.

“Where are you going?” I asked Valerie. She was headed back out the door, her gun drawn.

“We start with the perimeter,” she said.

I understood. Standard police procedure. Start from the outside—in this case, literally—and work your way in.

“His name’s Owen,” I said.

“What about a last name?”

I must have looked like a stumped contestant on a game show. All this time together and I’d never found out his last name. “Huh” was all I managed.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, turning again to leave.

“Wait, don’t you want to know what he looks like?”

She stopped just long enough to make me realize that while trust was one thing, the whole truth was another.

“He’s tall, slender, with brown hair, shaggy. Does this with his hands from time to time,” she said, doing a perfect imitation of his dry wash routine. “Oh, and for the record, his last name is Lewis.”

She walked out.

I stood there in shock, wondering how Valerie knew all that, and equally confounding, why she hadn’t just told me in the first place. There were no quick answers. What there was, though, was something in my eye line. Owen’s laptop.

He had it linked to the lipstick camera outside, our makeshift surveillance system. Since the moment he’d first hooked it up, it had been sitting atop the crappy-looking credenza featuring the TV, plastic ice bucket, and the Yellow Pages.

Now the laptop was in the middle of the queen bed closer to the bathroom. I mean, right in the middle. As if the bed were its pedestal. The only thing missing was the neon sign over it that was blinking,
Look at me, Trevor!

I walked over and tapped the space bar, waking up the screen. I expected to see the same running image that had been there for days, the walkway outside both our rooms. Only, now there was something in front of it. A picture.

No, make that a message. But only for me.

In a pop-up window was an illustration off Google Images, one of those goofy clip-art signs that read
GONE FISHING
.

Now I just had to figure out what it was supposed to mean.
Fishing for what?

“What are you looking at?” came Valerie’s voice by the door. She was back.

I had a split second to make a decision. Given our track record, telling her it was nothing was off the table. It had to be something. But did it have to be the whole truth?

This trust thing was getting a bit tricky.

“Behind you,” I said. “That’s what I’m looking at.”

I spun the laptop around, but not before clicking the illustration closed. What remained was the feed from the outside camera.

“Clever,” she said, tracing the angle to the sign for the vending machines. “Owen’s doing, I assume?”

“It seems you’d know that even better than me,” I said.

That got me a smirk but nothing more. She was far more concerned with taking one more lap around both rooms to see if there was something she’d missed the first time. There wasn’t.

“All right, grab your stuff,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

“Going?”

“You didn’t still think you’d be staying here, did you?”

Actually, I hadn’t thought anything. But Valerie obviously had.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Someplace with inside doors,” she said.

“GOOD MORNING, Mr. Mann, how did you sleep?” asked Jeffrey Crespin, my human alarm clock. He’d taken it upon himself to shake me awake at six a.m.

How did I sleep? It’s the crack of dawn.

“Sparingly,” I was tempted to answer. But it was too early and I was too tired for glibness. “Fine,” I said instead.

He was sitting on a folding metal chair at the end of my cot, wearing a blue blazer and jeans. I guess the jeans were how he unwound on a Sunday. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

I looked over his shoulder to see Valerie in the doorway, taking a sip from a mug, the string from a tea bag hanging over the edge. She was wearing the same Beverly Sands outfit she’d had on four hours ago, which answered the question of where she’d spent the night. It was here.

Wherever the hell that might be.

Not only didn’t I know, I was never supposed to know. Hence the Bruce Wayne and Batcave routine after leaving the motel in Arcola. Valerie’d had the taxi take us to an underground parking garage in Fort Meade, where we got into an unmarked van, but only after she put a sack over my head. For real.

Then again, I guess that’s why they call it a safe house.

“Yeah, some coffee would be good,” I said. “Cream, if you have it. No sugar.”

“I’ll see what they have,” said Valerie before disappearing into the hallway.

Crespin leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. “I suppose there’s also tea, but I figured you more for coffee,” he said.

“You figured right.”

“Funny thing, though. Do you know who
never
drinks coffee?”

“I give up.”

“Frank Karcher.”

I immediately liked where this was going, and Crespin could tell. For only the second time, I saw him smile.

“Al Dossari called him?”

“Late last night,” he said. “When he was finally feeling better, I presume.”

“What did he say?”

“Everything you told him at the bar.”

“But as soon as he heard my name …”

“That was the best part. You’d think Karcher would’ve told Al Dossari he’d been played by you, but he didn’t. He just thanked him for the heads-up.”

“It actually makes sense,” I said. “Karcher knows I don’t work for the
Times.
The paper doesn’t have the story.”

“And speaking of stories that aren’t real …”

Of course. “Al Dossari must have told Karcher how he first met me.”

“Exactly,” he said. “After Karcher hung up from Al Dossari, he immediately woke up Brennan. Naturally, Brennan made sure to call him right back from the secure line in his study.”

Only, thanks to Valerie’s handiwork, the NSA could listen in on that conversation, too.

“I can only imagine Brennan’s reaction,” I said.

“To tell you the truth, I think he was more upset about not actually being interviewed for the
Times
than he was at the prospect of spending the next ten to fifteen years folding laundry.”

“That’s a lawyer for you,” I said. “Prison is what happens to other people.”

“We’ll see. In the meantime, nice work last night. Valerie tells me you play an excellent drunk.”

“I’ve had some practice.”

“She also told me about Owen, that he’s suddenly gone missing.”

“First things first, if you don’t mind. Why didn’t you guys just tell me you knew who he was?”

Crespin didn’t hesitate. “When gauging an asset, it’s always good to know up front if what he’s telling you is true.”

“I take it I’m the so-called asset in that sentence?”

“It’s just the way we do things.”

“So you can probably guess my next question.”

“Yes,” he said. “But the answer to that one makes things a little trickier.”

A LITTLE trickier? Did he really just say that?

I’d spent the night, what was left of it, sleeping in the NSA’s version of inside doors. I was in a safe house somewhere in DC on the heels of a road trip taken with a boy genius from the CIA who thought he was curing Alzheimer’s, only to discover he was really helping to create what would’ve been the ultimate interrogation tool if it weren’t for the fact that it happened to have a fail rate of forty percent. And by
fail
, I mean fatally.

Which would explain why the men responsible for all this were going to such extreme lengths to ensure they were never found out. And by
extreme
, I also mean fatally.

But now, so I was being told, things were about to get … wait for it …
a little trickier.

I stared back at Crespin. “No, it’s actually simple,” I said. “You either can or can’t tell me how you know about Owen.”

“I admire that, I really do,” he said, once again without any hesitation. “Despite everything you’ve been through, you’re still capable of seeing the world in black and white.”

“Not everything is gray.”

He cocked his head. “Look around you, Mr. Mann.”

I was surrounded by cinder-block walls and concrete floors. There was the metal chair Crespin was sitting in, as well as my metal cot. Even the blanket I’d been given. All gray.

And Crespin wasn’t even being literal.

“Are you trying to change the subject?” I asked.

“No, I’m only giving it perspective,” he said. “I know about Owen Lewis because of your friend Claire Parker.”

He looked at me as if he’d just thrown a verbal grenade into our conversation. But I wasn’t sure why. After all, “I also know about Owen Lewis because of Claire Parker,” I said.

“Yes, I realize that. So now comes that trickier part I promised you.” He uncrossed his legs, his back straightening. “Claire worked for the NSA.”

Ka-boom.

It was as if all the blood had been suddenly flushed from my head. I felt dizzy, the room spinning. A big, gray blur.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I don’t think I need to say it again.” No, he didn’t. “To be very clear, Claire was everything you thought she was, a national affairs reporter for the
New York Times.
She was a gifted journalist who only wrote the truth. But as I’m sure you’re aware, doing that—especially doing it at her level—takes sources.”

“You were one of her sources?”

“No, not me personally. Someone else within the NSA. The division is called Tailored Access Operations, if that means anything.”

“And in return?”

“You mean, what did she do for them?”

“Give something, get something … right?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “At least, not in the way you’re worried about. I think you know that Claire would never burn any of her sources. That’s not what she did for us.”

“Then what exactly did she do?”

Before Crespin could answer, though, we were both looking at Valerie leaning against the doorway again. She was back.

In one hand was a piece of paper, in the other a laptop.

So much for a cup of coffee.

“You need to see something,” she said.

I ASSUMED she was talking only to Crespin, especially when she walked right past me to hand him the piece of paper. He read it, glanced up at Valerie, and read it again.

Instead of handing it back to her, however, he handed it to me.

The reason was as clear as the e-mail address in the upper left-hand corner. It was mine. I was looking at a printout of an e-mail sent to me by Brennan, except I’d never seen it before.

That was when I noticed the time stamp: 5:34 a.m. Brennan had only sent it a half hour earlier.

Trevor, change of venue for our interview today if that’s ok. Too many distractions here at house. Mallard Café at 33rd and Prospect at 11? They do a mean Sun brunch.—JB

“There’s your answer, by the way,” said Crespin.

Answer to what?
“What was the question?” I asked.

“What Claire did for us,” he said. “You’re looking at it.”

That hardly cleared up anything, and he knew it. The guy had coy down to a science.

Valerie to the rescue. “Josiah Brennan didn’t send the e-mail,” she explained.

I looked down again at the paper. There was Brennan’s e-mail address underneath mine, the same address he’d been using since first confirming our supposed interview.

“If he didn’t send it, who did?” I asked. But I already knew the answer before the words had even left my mouth. “Karcher?”

“Yes,” said Crespin. “And Brennan has no idea.”

“How do you know?”

“Karcher used a certain spyware virus. As soon as you read an e-mail from him, he can then assume your identity, basically controlling your entire e-mail account. The reason we know this is because we use the same virus.”

“I still don’t get the connection to Claire,” I said.

Valerie looked over at Crespin as if to say
Go ahead, boss, you’re the one who brought it up.

Crespin thought for a moment. Finally, “Imagine you’re in London to interview a certain cleric before he’s deported from the UK to Jordan,” he said. “The cleric has little trust in an American journalist—or any American, for that matter—but he’s eager to speak his mind. The international stage can be intoxicating, and no one serves up the limelight better than the
New York Times
. A neutral location is agreed upon, almost always a hotel, and the cleric has one of his body men search you even though they’re not quite sure what they’re looking for. A recording device? It’s an interview. Of course you have a recorder. And as far as they can tell, it looks exactly like any other recorder they’ve ever seen.”