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.
CHAPTER 99
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.”
“But it’s not,” I said.
“No, instead it hacks the hotel’s Internet service and then hacks the cleric’s cell phone. And, here’s the key, it does all of it wirelessly. Which means Claire didn’t really have to do a thing.”
“Except give her consent,” I said, unable to hold back my smirk.
Crespin nodded. “But this wasn’t just any cleric, was it?”
No, it wasn’t. This was a guy who’d been jailed repeatedly in London without ever receiving a trial. Over a bottle of Brunello one night, Claire had argued with me that he deserved one, and I’d argued back that according to the antiterrorism laws passed in Britain after 9/11, he didn’t. This was the night before she flew to London to interview him.
“Here,” said Valerie, giving me the laptop in her other hand. “You need to log on to your e-mail and cancel on Brennan.”
“Cancel?”
“Unless, of course, you’d prefer your last meal to be eggs Benedict. This is Karcher setting you up,” she said.
“Yes, the same Karcher responsible for Claire’s death,” I shot back. Forgive me for sounding a little testy.
“Listen, I get it,” said Valerie. “You want revenge, who wouldn’t? But this isn’t you pretending to be drunk with some jet-set, skirt-chasing international playboy. This is a guy who wants to kill you.”
“Which is exactly why I’ll be at the Mallard Café at eleven o’clock,” I said, as sure as I’d ever been about anything in my life. “Karcher wants to kill me, all right, but he can’t. He won’t. At least, not right away. And that’s an opportunity we can’t pass up.”
I was ready to explain, to argue my case. Yell and scream, if I had to.
But I didn’t have to. Valerie and Crespin both had that look on their faces, the kind I used to see on juries during the closing argument of every case I’d ever won. It was as if I knew exactly what they were thinking.
This guy might actually have a point.
Now all we needed was a plan.
CHAPTER 100
“CAN I get you anything while you’re waiting?” asked the waitress, a quick tilt of her head acknowledging the empty chair across from me. Her name tag read BETSY.
If there had been more time, more options, more everything, this young woman with rolled-up sleeves would’ve been Claire undercover, and in addition to having her hair tucked into a ponytail, she would’ve had a Beretta tucked behind the white apron with the big green M that all the servers at the Mallard Café wore.
But sometimes you just have to make do.
“I’m good for now,” I said. “Thanks, t
hough.”
This was clearly music to Betsy’s ears. One less thing she had to do. My very real waitress had that harried look of having a few too many tables in her section. As far as I could tell, she was the only one tending to all the outdoor seating that lined the front of the café.
Betsy shuffled off, while I kept waiting, not that I’d expected to be doing anything different. Karcher would absolutely make sure I arrived first. After that, it was anyone’s guess. Including whether it would even be Karcher who showed. The guy had a history of letting others do his dirty work.
“Stop fidgeting,” came a voice in my ear.
I mean, literally in my ear. Crespin had outfitted me with what had to be the world’s tiniest transmitter. Smaller than the head of a tack, it was fully out of sight inside my ear canal.
“Sorry,” I said, only to realize that I’d just broken one of his two rules.
“What did I tell you about talking to me?” came his voice again. “And don’t answer that.”
Rule #1? Don’t talk into the mike, otherwise known as the third button down on my new NSA-brand shirt. Fifty percent cotton/poly blend with a five-hundred-foot range. If Karcher—or whoever he might send—was scouting me, I could ill afford to be seen talking to myself. The wire was so Crespin could hear what I heard.
“It’s going to be fine, Mann,” he was now assuring me. “Everything’s going to be—”
The way his voice suddenly cut out, my first thought was that the transmitter in my ear had failed. But Crespin was just seeing what I couldn’t.
“Don’t turn around, don’t even flinch,” he said. “He’s approaching you from behind at twenty feet … fifteen … ten …”
A voice boomed over my shoulder. “Is this seat taken?”
It was now.
Frank Karcher sat down before I could even look up. Jesus, he had a big head. It was even bigger in person.
I feigned surprise as best I could. I was supposed to be waiting for Brennan, after all.
“Excuse me, I think you have the wrong table,” I said.
Karcher broke into a wide grin. “No, this is definitely the right table. You just picked the wrong fight,” he said, glancing at his watch. “The only question now is how long you’ll pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Said question hung in the air as I pretended to be thinking it over. But I already knew my answer. So far, we were right on script.
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I said finally. “I know who you are and what you’ve done. I also know it’s all about to end.”
Again with the grin. Those had to be veneers. “Interesting choice of words,” he said. “Do me a favor, though, will you, Mr. Mann? Take a good look under the table.”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “You’re not the first person this week to point a gun at me.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But I am the last.”
CHAPTER 101
IT WAS my turn to smile, forced and short-lived as the smile was. You can only pretend for so long that you don’t have a gun aimed at your crotch.
“If the only thing you wanted was me dead, you would’ve killed me by now,” I said. “We both know that.”
And there it was, the only way I’d been able to convince Valerie and Crespin that I wouldn’t be a complete sitting duck, if you will, at the Mallard Café. Karcher desperately wanted Owen—“the kid”—and I presumably knew where he was.
Fitting irony that I actually didn’t.
Not that Karcher was about to be told that. As long as he thought I knew Owen’s whereabouts, he believed there was the chance he could get it out of me.
That’s the folly of arrogant men, isn’t it? They always overestimate their talents.
“Are you really that much of a hero, Mr. Mann?” he asked. “I don’t know what the kid told you, but it’s not what you think.”
“No, it’s exactly what I think,” I said. “Somewhere along the line, you convinced yourself that you’re above the law, that you get to decide who lives and who dies. But the biggest lie of them all? It’s when you claim you’re simply protecting freedom.”
“Freedom? Just where the hell have you been this century? We should be so damn lucky,” he said. “That’s what you self-righteous pricks have never understood, not ever.”
“Then why don’t you enlighten me?”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
“Easy now …” came Crespin’s voice in my ear.
Crespin was right. On a risk scale of one to ten, I was already pushing eleven. My letting Karcher lose his temper was upward of just plain dumb. Sure, maybe he’d slip up and admit everything. Or maybe he’d just get pissed off and kill me right there at the table.
I leaned back in my chair, hoping to let a little air out of the moment. Diffuse the tension. But it was too late. Karcher was revved up, and like a pit bull, he wasn’t about to let the point go.
“Do you know what I remember most about that day? It’s not the image of the towers coming down. Not even close. What’s seared into my brain, what will stick forever, are the people on the street watching it happen,” he said. “And do you know what they were all doing as they were looking up in horror? They were all mouthing the same three words. Oh, my God.”
“I was one of those people,” I said. “I was there.”
It was as if he didn’t hear me. “Now, I’m a devout Christian, but I know for a fact that the God they were all invoking that day wasn’t there. And for those who say he was, and that his job is not to intervene, I ask … whose job is it? If God won’t prevent the next time, who will? And trust me, there will be a next time.”
“So that’s it, then?” I said. “You’re now God’s understudy? It doesn’t matter who you kill—a reporter for the Times, a doctor with a guilty conscience, or even other people from your company picnic—because it’s all part of a bigger plan, one that the rest of us couldn’t possibly understand?”
“Every war has casualties, Mr. Mann. But I’m guessing you’ve never fought in one, have you?”
“That makes me lucky, not brain-dead,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”
Damn. Wrong button.
Karcher’s face flushed red in an instant, the veins in his stumplike neck bulging out above his collar.
“You know what? Fuck the kid,” he said. “I don’t care if you know where he is, you can take that to your goddamn grave.”
But all I really heard was Crespin’s panicked voice in my ear. “Quick, tell him you know where Owen is!”
Crespin didn’t need to see the deranged look in Karcher’s eyes. He could hear the craziness in his voice, the way he referred to my grave as if it were imminent.
I needed to stall.
But again, it was too late. With the slightest flinch—small but telling—I’d just broken Crespin’s second rule. Whatever you do, don’t look like you’ve got someone talking in your ear.
“Jesus Christ,” said Karcher. “You’re not alone, are you?”
CHAPTER 102
“NO, HE’S definitely not alone,” she said.
I turned to see Valerie pulling up a chair to our table. She couldn’t play the waitress, but her being seated nearby was the next best thing. And with her mirrored sunglasses and jet-black wig, there was no way Karcher would’ve recognized her.
He still didn’t.
The Beretta in her lap, however, he spotted instantly, and it sure as hell wasn’t pointed at me.
Give the prick some credit, though. Karcher barely blinked. “Friend of yours, Mr. Mann?” he asked coolly.
“One of many,” said Valerie. “Which is why you need to wrap your weapon in that napkin and place it slowly on the table.”
Karcher looked down at the napkin in front of him like it was a piece of enriched plutonium. He had no intention of touching it.
“Thank you for the suggestion, young lady, but I think I’ll pass,” he said. “It might be a good idea for
you to do it, though.”
Those should’ve been the words of a madman, a last-ditch effort to buy some time in this chess match, using little more than misdirection and a touch of outright confusion. Call it Karcher’s Gambit.
But the tone was more cocky than confused. He was too sure of himself. He knew something we didn’t, and I couldn’t stop the feeling of pure dread that was suddenly spreading from the pit of my stomach.
I looked at Valerie, and for the first time, she took her eyes off Karcher to look back at me, if only for a split second. But that was all the time it took.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Karcher smiled. “Looks like I’ve got some friends, too,” he said.
“Show him,” came Crespin’s voice in my ear, only he wasn’t talking to me. Valerie was wearing the same transmitter. With her eyes locked back on Karcher, she removed her sunglasses so I could see what the hell was going on.
“Shit,” I muttered.
Staring back at me in the mirrored lenses was a new addition to my forehead. The small red dot of a laser sight. I was one squeeze of a trigger away from having my brains blown out, which somehow managed to trump getting shot in the crotch. Either way, it was suddenly a lose-lose.
We were definitely off script now….
“I know you, don’t I?” asked Karcher, staring straight back into Valerie’s naked eyes.
“Maybe,” she answered. “Or maybe not. But I definitely know you.”
“What about Mr. Mann here?” he said. “How much do you really know about him?”
“Enough to be sitting here,” she said.
“Keep stalling him,” came Crespin’s voice in our ears.
“I suppose you know more, though?” Valerie tacked on.
“He shot a federal agent in Manhattan, for starters, and got a detective up there killed as well.”
Karcher looked at me to see if I’d take the bait and try to argue otherwise. All along, he’d been defending himself without admitting to anything. Now he was hoping I’d trip myself up in the heat of the moment so he could build some semblance of reasonable doubt.