Deception (9 page)

“Frank and I fell out of love a long time ago. We've only stayed together for the children. But that's a mistake, I'm coming to realize. It's better for the children to have divorced parents than parents stuck in an unhappy marriage. Don't you think?”

He made a loose, careless gesture with the hand holding his cigarette.

“So I agreed to come on this cruise with Lucas. Maybe I shouldn't have done that. But we're in love. You know how that is, don't you? It's such a good feeling. What can be wrong with something that feels so good? But oh, it was a mistake. I see that now. Lucas couldn't make it, at the last second, so I came alone—but now I'm going to get caught in a lie. Because my husband thinks I'm at a symposium in San Francisco. And now there's going to be an investigation and my husband will find out I lied to him and we're not even legally separated yet and he's going to get custody of the kids and it's going to be all my fault, because I was stupid enough to try to take a cruise with Lucas when I should have waited. I guess it's just … Oh, God,” she said. “I'm rambling, aren't I?”

Yildirim shrugged.

“I'm sorry. I'm a little tipsy. And to be honest, I think I'm in shock.”

“That's not surprising,” he said. “Considering what you've been through today. I think we're all a little … out of sorts.”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. It's just … well, you're a good listener.”

He shrugged again.

“Let's talk about you,” Hannah said. She straightened in her seat. “You have a very interesting accent.”

Yildirim smiled. He had the kind of smile that very serious men have when they occasionally loosen up: tight and reluctant, somehow boyish. “Do you think so?”

“Mm. Definitely. Is it Turkish?”

“By way of Ohio. I was born in Istanbul, but my parents moved to America when I was fourteen.”

“So you grew up there?”

“For four years, yes. Then back to Istanbul. And you come from Chicago, is that right?”

“Born in Washington, D.C.; raised in the windy city. But I'm going to move out west, I think, once the divorce comes through. The City of Angels. That's where Lucas lives. Have you ever been?”

He shook his head, and raised his drink.

“Chicago is the Midwest,” she said, “technically. But it feels more like the East than Ohio. People walk fast, and they look at their feet. In California, things are different. No baggage. People look up; they look ahead. A person can reinvent herself in California.”

He chased the drink with a drag from his cigarette, and nodded.

“One thing I never thought I'd do is get divorced. Once you get married, you stay married; that's what I thought. But I couldn't see how life would work out. People grow apart, you know. It's a clichè, but it's true. Many clichès are true, I find as I get older.”

As she spoke, she paid attention to Yildirim's body language, trying to gauge his interest in her. Would the path to pursue now be seduction or a dig for sympathy? Judging from the cant of his body, the latter approach seemed more promising. He faced away from her in the chair, his feet pointing toward the piano player.

She reached for tears. There were none waiting. She dug deeper. There—a trickle, in the corner of one eye. She wiped at it. “Oh, God damn it.”

“It's all right.”

“No, it's not. It's …” Her voice caught. She drew a shuddering breath, bravely controlling herself. “It was stupid and selfish of me. And now the kids will pay the price. It doesn't seem fair for them to have to pay the price, just because there's been some bad luck. I'm very sorry for the Epsteins, of course, but … who would have expected … it just all seems so …”

“I know.”

“What happened to them, do you think?”

Yildirim shook his head. “It's out of our hands now,” he said.

“I don't mean to sound selfish. I don't think I'll ever get over … that. But now I need to think of myself, and my children. If only there was some way for me to get off the ship, before we reach Istanbul—I might still be able to dodge this bullet.”

Yildirim stabbed out his cigarette. “Your presence on board,” he said, “is a matter of record.”

“No, it's not. I'm using an alias. It was Lucas's idea, just to be safe. If I could get off now, then I could still fix things. You don't know my husband, Mr. Yildirim. He drinks, and when he drinks, he loses his temper. Do you think …”

She trailed off. He waited, watching her.

“Do you think there's any way you might be able to … Oh, God.” She laughed shakily. “I don't even know what I'm saying.”

“Able to what?”

“Help me … you know …”

His smile was gone.

“… disappear.”

He looked at her stonily.

“I'll make it worth your while,” she said. “I've got money. And it's for a good cause, you know. My children.”

A moment passed.

“I'm afraid you're not thinking straight,” he said then. “After what you've been through, it's no surprise. But Mrs. Ludlow …”

“That's not my name.”

He stopped.

“My husband broke Teddy's arm once, after he'd been drinking. Oh, I know I shouldn't have come on the cruise in the first place. It was stupid and selfish. But I fell in love, Mr. Yildirim. Haven't you ever fallen in love?”

He lit another cigarette, and didn't answer.

“How much would it take?” she said. “Two thousand dollars?”

His lips pressed together.

“Three thousand?” she said. “I could go higher—if that's what it would take. I don't have it on me, of course. But I could call my accountant. I could arrange something.”

“Mrs.… Even if …”

It was her turn to wait.

“Supposing it
was
for a good cause …”

“It is. Believe me.”

“It still wouldn't be possible. I'm sorry about your children, of course. But—”

“Four thousand,” she said. “I'm not sure you understand how much this means to me. And the fact is, Mr. Yildirim, that you might lose your job over this. Right? A little extra cash might come in handy, over the next few months.”

He said nothing. His eyes flickered.

“Five thousand dollars,” she said, and then added: “Please. Mr. Yildirim, I swear to God, I don't know where else to turn.”

3.

He promised to sleep on it.

This, Hannah suspected, meant he would do it. Had it been the tears or the money? Some combination, probably. And who really cared what it had been? As long as he helped her, two days hence, when they pulled into Istanbul …

Back in her cabin, she took another shower. But no matter how hard she scrubbed, a tickle of self-disgust remained. Some nice sob story she had come up with—that helping her get off the ship would help fictional children avoid an abusive father. Some nice person she had turned out to be.

Nobody's nice
, she thought, and then immediately:
Besides, he'll only really do it for the money.

And was it her fault that the Epsteins had been murdered? Not at all. It was a shame—a tragedy, as Jackie Burns had said—but it had nothing to do with her. Bad luck had put her in this position, and nothing else. So a little white lie was permissible.

After the shower, she collapsed naked across her bed. The effect of the single drink she'd had was fading, leaving her wanting another. Her right hand moved to the pale scars inside her left wrist. The scars were eight months old, but they still itched. The itching was in her mind, she realized—a variation on the itching of a phantom limb. She scratched them for a moment, idly, then took her hand back.

The scars belonged to the past. She would never be that person again. She had not even been that person at the time; that was why the attempt had been so halfhearted.
A cry for help
, they called it. What it really had been was an embarrassment.

She tried to turn the thoughts off. In the future, she would do better. If God would only see fit to help her get off the ship, undetected, at Istanbul …

Some nice person she had turned out to be.

She stood, found a Xanax, and threw a Valium on top. She collapsed across the bed again and then turned off the lamp and lay still, facedown, as the ship rocked her gently toward sleep.

Once she had been good. Hadn't she? As a child. Or maybe not. Maybe she had never been good.

But that wasn't true. Before Frank had gotten his claws into her, she had not been a criminal. Why, she had never so much as stolen a pack of gum from the corner store. She was not a thief.

Maybe a library book, once. But who hadn't stolen a library book?

You can do better than that
, the voice spoke up.
What about your mother's purse
?

Okay. So she had taken some money, once or twice, from her mother's purse. Everybody did that, she thought. That did not make her a thief.

But now that she thought about it in these terms, she couldn't get off the hook quite so easily. She had written off entire vacations as business expenses, using the thinnest rationalizations. She had bought carpets in London and arranged to charge half the price on her credit card and half C.O.D., thereby avoiding customs. A steady progression, she saw now, toward her larger crimes. And then a leap off the deep end, with Frank to show her the way … and one night the half-assed suicide attempt, sobbing at her own sorry reflection in the bathroom mirror.

God
, she thought.
Help me out here and I swear I'll do better. I swear I'll make it up to You.

The prayer—if that was what it was—only deepened the feeling of self-disgust. Here was Hannah Gray, facile to the end. Promising God that she would reform if only He would deign to help her one more time. She hadn't changed, after all.

But she meant it. She was not evil. At worst, she'd been a bit … spoiled.

She rolled over, sleepy. It was not too late for her, she thought. If things worked out, then it would not be too late.

She hoped it wasn't too late.

The rocking of the boat felt comforting; her body had adjusted to the rhythm of the waves. When she fell asleep, she slept surprisingly well—very nearly the sleep of the innocent.

EIGHT

1.

They turned off the road, onto gravel, and the tires began to crunch.

In the backseat of the Town Car, Keyes stirred. He yawned, stretched, and peered out through his window. The reactor wasn't on line yet, which meant that the only visible man-made light came from the guard towers and the four wooden houses that existed above-ground. In comparison to the brilliant Nevada night sky, gamma site seemed positively inconsequential.

Despite the summer, the desert air was cold; he shivered as he was searched. Then he accepted his credentials back from the guard and entered the largest of the four buildings. He stepped into a game room that featured a pool table, a pinball machine, two low couches, and a darkened TV. Set into the center of the wall opposite the front door was an empty bookshelf. He placed his right eye against the retinal scanner disguised as a knot in the wood. He could hear the mechanisms of the lock tumbling; then the bookshelf split open.

Behind the bookshelf was an elevator. Inside the elevator was a blackboard. As the elevator hummed down, Keyes eyed the blackboard darkly.

Ed Greenwich was waiting for him.

Greenwich was an eccentric Frankenstein of a man, six feet four inches tall, with febrile green eyes and a prominent Adam's apple beneath sagging dewlaps. He began to speak as soon as Keyes stepped off the elevator, as if they'd been in the midst of a conversation that had been only momentarily interrupted. Greenwich, Keyes thought, was in a manic phase. His hands were in constant motion: rotating incessantly at the wrists, the fingers twiddling against nothing.

“Seventeen TeV isn't necessary after all,” Greenwich said. He immediately turned and began to lead Keyes down a polished steel corridor, heels rapping. “Oh, I knew it already. I think I've always known it. But yesterday—beautiful; beautiful; beautiful. But of course, Three is an entirely different ball game.”

Keyes nodded. He was noticing the vast amount of electricity being consumed around them. Noticing this made him feel like a parent who scolded his children for leaving on too many lights; yet he couldn't help himself. There was nobody else here to keep an eye on the bottom line. Until the reactor came on, they were siphoning their power from the main grid. If they got too greedy, it could create problems.

Greenwich kept talking, eager to demonstrate that even he was not willing to move farther without Epstein's results to guide him. It was a preemptive strike, Keyes thought, against any possible official reproof for what he had done.

“—subnanometer realm displays exactly the predicted values. That means, thanks to the inverse cube law, that it's possible. And possible, in this case, means inevitable. Yes, yes, yes. In fact it
was
done—yesterday—on the smallest possible scale.”

Now they were stepping into the detector room on the main particle ring. The superconducting magnets, kept by liquid nitrogen at a temperature of two hundred degrees below zero, let off billowing icy clouds of condensation. Cranes moved three-ton equipment with the offhanded casualness of a man picking up a Styrofoam cup. Cables as thick as elephant legs snaked under the feet of men who stepped over them to consult computer monitors, yell to each other over the din, and make notations on clipboards.

“… as of yesterday, we're ahead of everyone else. There's no doubt of that anymore. Hadron won't be on line until two thousand and six; and we have every reason to expect success within three months, if my computer time isn't diminished. Yes. Every reason.”

It took Keyes a moment to realize that Greenwich had stopped talking. He looked up from the floor and saw the man watching him expectantly. “Good,” Keyes said simply.