A Man Overboard (16 page)

“That’s the rumor.”

“Do you think there’s any chance this could be SVR?”

“A chance? I guess. But I don’t know why they’d care about Donny and Ivan.” Then looking at his watch, he mumbled, “I have to get back. I’ll call as soon as I can. I’m sorry about Donny. He was a good friend.” For a moment, it seemed Johnson might shed a tear.

Emotion grabbed Jack, too. “He was going to propose,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?” But there was a look of unbelief on the agent’s face that said he knew exactly what he’d meant.

“Yeah, I found a ring in one of his drawers while I was looking for clean clothes.” He pulled at the T-shirt.

Johnson swore under his breath, and a small smile tugged the corner of his mouth a couple of times as a tear did fall. “Donny married…” He laughed a sad laugh. “That I would’ve liked to see.”

Jack grew angrier at the unfairness of it all. “They’re going to get away with it, aren’t they? Whoever’s behind this?”

“They always do.”

“It’s not right.”

“Never is.”

Jack stared at the ground. “Do you think my son is alive?” Again, he pushed the looming questions surrounding his word choice away from him.

“If Stacey’s involved in some way, then yes, I’m sure he’s doing just fine.”

“And if she’s not?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

They stood silent for a while, listening to unseen birds whistle from their branches.

“If I don’t call by Saturday…” Johnson finally said. But he didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he shrugged and closed the trunk. “If this is CIA, and the attention on Vadim has compromised them, then it’s likely the whole thing might blow over.”

But even if it did blow over, Jack was unsure of where it would leave him and Stacey, Vadim and Viki. “So I’m just supposed to hide out here until things settle down and…”

“If you want me to drive you back, I will. But where are you going to stay? And what do you think you’d accomplish? You think maybe Joseph is going to call you one day, tell you where he is? We’re way past that now, Jack. People are dying. Someone is covering their tracks, and you’re the one exposing them. You need to stay out of the picture until I can figure out what’s really going on.” He walked to the driver’s side door and got in. Once seated behind the wheel, he told him, “It can get cold at night up here.” He handed him a long, black coat.

“Thanks.”

“I’ll call you.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he complained.

“I don’t know. Pray.” He shut the door.

“Yeah, thanks.” And he watched the taillights flicker on and off as Johnson navigated the car away from him.

Thirty seconds later, he was standing alone in the middle of nowhere, a prepaid cell phone in his pocket, a pistol down his pants, a coat hanging over the crook of his arm, and a shotgun and grocery bags lying at his feet. He took in the new environment and wondered how he’d ended up in this place.

* * * *

It was dark out, and with no watch on his wrist or working clock on the wall, it was the only thing in the world right now that Jack knew for certain. He was positioned by a window in the corner of the room, sitting in an old rocking chair—all its joints reinforced with webbing from some arachnid artist that hopefully died years ago. He had the loaded shotgun across his lap just in case.

A candle burned from atop the makeshift table beside him, its flickering light casting itself in a reflection against the dirty window he was facing. He could see nothing but the dark impression of night beyond it and his own ghostly silhouette doing some form of dance in rhythm to the flame. Scratching an itch on his head that may or may not be imagined, he was instantly bothered by the feel of the probing latex. Wearing the gloves reminded him of Jerry Fletcher keeping his coffee in combination-locked thermoses inside a padlocked refrigerator. But it was Johnson that had suggested it, and if the CIA was after him, he figured no precaution was too extreme.

Jack pushed gently off his toes, moving the chair back and forth and filling the empty house with the sound of creaking wood. On the floor next to his feet was the backpack, fully loaded with everything Johnson had left with him. He was ready to run. Beneath the dripping candle sat the phone, his eyes drawn to its blank face every two minutes or so, wondering when it might ring. Johnson hadn’t left a charger with him—though there was no electricity anyway—so Jack figured he had about three days, maybe four, until the phone died and he was left to concoct some plan of his own. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He wasn’t sure how much of this he could take, being alone in the middle of the mountains, while maintaining a grip on sanity. He’d already worn out a dozen scenarios of how Stacey might’ve disappeared, and he thought he might have a mental breakdown if he didn’t give it a rest. Some scenarios had Stacey laughing at him while making love to her KGB husband, while others saw her floating corpse reaching out in a frozen plea for help. Neither extreme had him clicking his heels across the cracked floorboards. He just wanted to go to sleep, to shut down the computer operating in his mind. He was so tired. But he was too scared to sleep. So he kept rocking, staring into the window as if an assassin couldn’t place a bullet through his eye from half a mile away with him sitting all candle-lit in front of the window like he was. And the questions, like buzzing gnats gunning for his eyeballs, kept coming.

Did Stacey know about her cancer or not? Was Viktoriya working with the CIA to set her up or the FSB? Why would they set her up at all? There were more resourceful ways to make someone disappear. Unless it
was
a private matter, hired thugs helping put Stacey back together with Vadim. Was Stacey SVR like Vadim? Was Viktoriya KGB like her husband? What about the strange text message Stacey got the night it all started? And what about the books? Why had the guy taken them out of the house? If it was just a matter of Stacey hooking back up with her other husband, why the need to eliminate Donny and Ivan? Was the CIA really plotting an inside job with Vadim as their Russian flag? But why would Stacey be involved? And what about the thing she’d said about Joseph? Just who the hell had he married?

His mouth was dry, and he desperately wanted one of the six bottles of water Johnson put in the bag. But he didn’t know how long he was going to be here, so he would conserve them.

His eyes suddenly felt heavy, and the room around him began to fade. Before he could summon the willpower to stop the inevitable, he was asleep.

* * * *

He awoke with a start and knew right away that something had jettisoned him from his slumber. He moved his eyes back and forth, letting them adjust while trying to peer through the room’s eerie shadow.

Nothing.

He exhaled the breath he was holding and leaned forward in the chair. The old wood groaned loudly beneath him, but no dagger flew at him from another room, no smoke grenade rolled to a stop at his feet, and no masked men came rappelling down from the ceiling. Slowly, he rose to his feet, debating whether or not to blow out the melting candle beside him. He brought the shotgun up instead, slipping his finger over the double trigger, and stepped carefully toward the back of the cabin. He was sure that whatever had awakened him had come from that direction.

The darkness swarming in the kitchen made him pause before slipping into its embrace, moving softly to the back door.

And that’s when he heard it.

He swore under his breath as perspiration beaded across his forehead. He raised the shotgun.

There it was again. It was coming from outside.

He took a deep breath, worked the doorknob with his latex fingers, and stepped outside. He swung the gun to the left. To the right.

Nothing.

He continued stepping away from the cabin and closer to a pinch of moonlight that was lingering above the ground in the center of the back yard.

Snap
.

He jumped, almost squeezing the trigger, and spun around. Something was there, at the edge of the woods by an old tool shed… He was about to call out when a low, moan-like expression lifted from the ground behind him and brought all the hair on the back of his neck standing to attention. But just before turning to discover the source of the sound, the thing in front of him stumbled out into the moonlight.

Uh oh.

Jack knew what was behind him even as it exhaled a puff of air from its nostrils—so close that he felt its whispering surge stroke his skin. Forcing his feet to move, he turned around as slowly as he could.

Sniffing the air five yards away was a big black bear.

Jack moved the barrel of the shotgun around so that it was pointing at the beast, and with all the self-control he could muster, made himself take one small step backward at a time. If the cub, now behind him and playing in the silver spotlight, came any closer, then mamma bear might just feel the need to defend her family. Jack had seen footage of bear attacks and wanted no part in one of his own.

He made it to the door without the bear taking issue and slipped inside. Then he went and moved the rocking chair, candle, and backpack into the kitchen, settling down to keep an eye on the wildlife moving beneath the shimmering moonlight. He couldn’t avoid the symbology though and again was pestered by thoughts of dreaming.

A bear.
Russia
.

But he would stick with the theory that this was a normal occurrence, that bears lived in the mountains. At least until it stood on its hind legs, reached into its fur, and extracted an AK-47. Once that happened, he would have to face the more unpleasant theories of what was happening and where he truly was.

But by the time he dozed off again, the bear hadn’t yet whispered any Russian codes to the cub, pulled out a Pearson novel, or waltzed with his wife through the clearing.

23

The cabin had become too claustrophobic for him, and upon waking and finding the bear family gone, Jack took to strolling through the sunlit paths in the woods. He found that the cool morning air, carrying the fresh scent of nature bathed in dew, actually relieved the tension mounting in his gut. But the scene couldn’t transport him completely from his trouble, and he kept checking and rechecking the cell phone, making sure he had two bars of reception at all times while also making sure a call hadn’t been missed against the wild orchestra sounding around him.

He came to a wide lake that was entertaining a lonely picnic table and bench along its side, their limbs strangled by long weeds. He set the shotgun and backpack down across its warped surface and sat down, casting his gaze out over the lake. The sun was sparkling off the smooth water, and there was a mysterious serenity to it all. Until sudden thoughts of Donny came rowing toward him, his high school friend now dead. He tried dodging the painful realization, but the light breeze that was pushing ripples into the lake also seemed to fill the sails of his mind, nudging it into the greater depths of memory’s disjointed sea. And it was there that he sank into an odd, incoherent interpretation—death and loss the two lenses of his goggles translating his submerged memories.

An eagle appeared gliding over the water’s surface, its talons dipping beneath the lake and snatching itself a wiggling snack. Just like that. The fish swimming along with its fish-family one second and impaled by razor-sharp claws and flying through the air without the ability to breathe the next…never to see his gilled kind again, destined only to suffocate and bleed in its unfortunate role in the food chain. And then nothing. Non-existence. Because fish didn’t go to heaven, right? Wasn’t there something in Revelations about there being no sea in heaven? That would mean no fish, then, right? Unless their resurrected bodies came with wings and all eternal fish were flying fish. But the mental image of fish fins strumming golden harps in the clouds just didn’t sit right. The fish—destined to a pointless existence and then doomed to an excruciating departure into nothingness… But then, if Stacey was right in her theology-absent worldview,
he
wasn’t much better off than that fish, was he? The powerful bird disappearing over the tree line summoned a recent beach memory. A washed-up fish struggling to breathe, a seagull stabbing at it with its beak and dropping it back into the water, it washing ashore again just to be pissed on by a curious dog, poked at by stick-wielding kids, and finally escaping back into the ocean only to be caught again by the seagull and ultimately shared with its friends as an afternoon snack. Nature was cruel, indeed. And so was humanity. He felt like life was pissing on him now, while he was out of water and couldn’t catch his breath, hungry CIA seagulls searching for him.

Unzipping the bag, he took out a bottle of water and a can of tuna fish. Tuna fish. He laughed at the irony of it. There was a can-opener and some plastic utensils that Johnson had included, and once Jack had the lid off the can and its water drained into the dirt at his feet, he began shoveling mouthfuls of warm fish past his lips. As he forced it down, eyes still captured by the light show over the water, he considered the fact that people wanted
him
dead. It was a sobering thought, and he wished he knew who these people were and why they needed him to be fish food. Fish food. The thought made him look down at the meat on his plastic fork. What was happening here? Was tuna fish going to be the tipping point of his sanity? He shook the thought away, returning to the people trying to kill him. It was true that certain of his views would’ve gotten him a secret file with the FBI back in Hoover’s day, but while he was vocal about his beliefs and most of his friends knew he was a “conspiracy nut,” he wasn’t any type of activist. He wasn’t holding rallies and signing petitions. There was no reason the government of the United States, even the corrupt shadow figures sitting behind the scenes, would think of him as any type of threat. Right? Even if the “threat of terrorism” that was actually threatening the Constitution, allowing intelligence agencies to spy on everyone, did land him on someone’s list, there was no way the government would go through all this trouble just because he questioned the official story of…well, everything. Whoever was after him now was trying to tie off a loose end, but why the initial trouble of tossing him overboard? The answer depended on who “they” were. The cruise would be a convenient way for anyone to get rid of him, but then Stacey’s suicide note…
that
would ensure
her
a new life somewhere. Maybe with Vadim.