Dr. Knox (33 page)

Sutter told me not to force things, to take it easy—not to be overeager, or certainly not to appear that way. To be late, maybe, but above all
not
to be early.

“The problem is,” he'd said, shaking his head, “you don't really listen to people, and you have the worst poker face on the fucking planet.”

There was a Coffee Bean catty-corner across Wilshire from Bray Consolidated's headquarters, and I'd been sitting there for two hours, drinking coffee, watching cars push through the glare, watching their reflections slip across the Bray tower's black glass skin, checking the time, forcing myself to stay put. This meeting was three days in the making, I kept telling myself; I could wait another half-hour, another fifteen minutes, another ten minutes, another five. At three minutes before three, I stopped trying to convince myself, and tossed my coffee cup in the trash. I slipped on my blue blazer, took a deep breath, and walked out into the sun.

The lobby of the Bray Consolidated building was vast, cold, and dizzying, a marble shrine to gods of wealth and crushing power. I wasn't halfway across the polished expanse when Conti took my elbow. He wore a pale-gray suit, a white shirt, and a gray tie, and he smiled his shark smile. My pulse spiked.

“Your name's on the list, doc,” he said. “No need to wait behind the rope.” He guided me to the last security barrier on the left, which beeped softly and raised its steel arm in a robotic
heil
as we approached. Conti led me past the elevator banks, through double doors, and into a white corridor that smelled of car exhaust. There were more doors at the end, marked
PARKING LEVEL 1
. On the other side was another security desk and more turnstiles.

Parked beyond them were two Mercedes SUVs, attended by their drivers. I recognized Mandy's silver ride, but not the larger, black car. The drivers stood taller when they saw Conti, and he nodded at them and at the grunts manning the security desk. We didn't go through the barriers, but walked around a corner and stopped before an elevator door. There were no markings or buttons on it, just a card reader. Conti fished a key card from his suit jacket, along with a cell phone. He held the phone to his ear and waited.

“Comin' up, Cap,” he said finally. Another pause. “Nope, just the doc.” Then “Yessir.”

The phone disappeared, and Conti dipped the key card into the reader. The elevator door slid open, and he ushered me into a marble-and-glass crypt—a little room made of spares from the lobby, but even colder. There was one button, and when Conti pressed it we rose smoothly and without a sound.

“Cap doesn't much care for crowds,” Conti said.

I nodded. “Why am I not surprised?”

Conti showed me more teeth, and whistled tunelessly until we glided to a halt. The elevator door opened on a teakwood hallway, and Persian carpets over a hardwood floor.

“Hang a right,” Conti said. I did, and passed open doors to a paneled bedroom, a white marble bathroom, and a white kitchen, all empty and dim. There were old prints in the corridor—architectural, nautical, avian—and the scents of lemons and floor wax. A line of sweat snaked down my spine.

“Right again,” Conti said, which brought us to a small teak door. He stepped around me, opened it, and ushered me through.

Harris Bray's office suite was many floors higher than Mandy's, and its views made the city below even more abstract—streets and freeways no more than crosshatches; parks, fairways, and hillsides just patches of green and brown; the ocean a great, gray shoulder against the bleached sky; the people nonexistent. The walls that weren't windows were mahogany panels, broken by runs of built-in bookshelves; at the far end of the room, a pair of massive doors led, I guessed, to Harris Bray's reception area and more gatekeepers.

Bray's sofas and chairs were burgundy leather, and his desk was a massive block of elaborately worked ebony, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Bray sat behind it, in a black leather throne, beneath a broad, ancient-looking gilt-framed map of the world, all intricate coastlines and seas full of dragons. I took a slow, deep breath.

Bray was in charcoal today, with a white shirt and a crimson tie, and his brutal face was without expression as I came through the door. He took off his rimless glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and nodded at Conti, who produced a scanner like a truncated cricket bat.

“I'll be gentle, doc,” he said.

“It was supposed to be just the two of us,” I said to Bray.

“It will be,” he answered, “as soon as Tiger makes certain.”

Conti swept the scanner up and down, then frisked me thoroughly. He took a phone from my back pocket and looked at Bray. “He's clean.”

“No signals?”

“No, sir.”

“Then, if you'll excuse us,” Bray said.

Conti nodded. “Sure thing, Cap,” he said, and left the way we'd come. The door disappeared into the mahogany woodwork. Bray opened a narrow drawer in his desk, examined something inside, and closed it again. Then he folded his tailored arms, stared at me, and let silence settle. Eventually, he looked at his watch.

“You said that you were ready to resolve this situation, doctor. I'd hoped that meant you would have Alex with you. It's the only reason I agreed to meet with you. But I see that my hope was misplaced. So, unless this is some needlessly theatrical prelude to telling me where I can pick him up, there's no reason why we should spend more time together.”

“Then I'll see if I can give you one. I had them tested. Both of them.”

Bray looked at me impassively. “By
testing
I assume you mean DNA testing. You went through this in my niece's office. I heard then what you had to say about mother and child and DNA, and told you that the issue was largely moot. It remains so, and I remain unimpressed.”

“I'm not talking about Elena and Alex.”

Another blank look, another elaborate glance at his watch. “Then I don't know what you're talking about. In any event, we're done here. I wish I could say that it's been useful seeing you.”

“Now who's wasting time?” I said. “You know what I'm talking about, Mr. Bray. I'm pretty certain you had them tested yourself.”

Bray unfolded his glasses, perched them on his nose, pursed his narrow lips, and squinted at me. “I don't know—”

“Alex and Kyle. Their DNA match is a shade under twenty-five percent. That and the Y-chromosome analysis tell the story.”

Bray turned to the windows and looked out at the white sky for a while. “This means nothing to me,” he said, but his voice was lower.

I shook my head. “If Kyle was Alex's father, their DNA match would be fifty percent; if they were unrelated, there'd be no match. But there is a match, of roughly twenty-five percent, and their Y-chromosomes line up. The Y-chromosome comes down the paternal line: sons get it from their fathers. Your son—both of your sons—got theirs from you. Kyle and Alex aren't father and son; they're brothers—half brothers, actually.”

Bray looked at his suit jacket and swept something off his lapel. He looked at his hands as if he'd never seen them before. Then his big shoulders sagged, and he seemed suddenly to occupy less space behind his massive black desk. He said nothing.

“I assume Kyle doesn't know,” I said.

Bray looked around the room, then walked to a window and leaned against the glass, looking out. He sighed heavily and turned to me. “Why should I discuss anything with you? More to the point, why should I let you discuss any of this with anyone?”

I shrugged. “I'm happy to keep the test results to myself, if I think it's in Alex's best interests. But the only one who can convince me of that is you.”

“You think I'm going to justify myself—to
you
? I don't plead, doctor. And I don't think even you believe that Alex would have a better life with
her
than he would here, with me. He'd want for nothing here.”

“It's not just a matter of money.”

Bray squinted. “You have no children, yes?” he asked. I shook my head. “Then you can't understand.”

“Understand what?”

“What a parent would do.”

For an instant I was back in the C.A.R., at the aid station, and Merry and Mathieu were there. It was a morning after yet another endless night. Merry's hand was on Mathieu's head, which rested against her hip. He was smiling.

Bray turned to gaze out the window again, or at his reflection in it. “My father was an idealistic man. But he prided himself on being a realist—on seeing the world as it was. And that clarity extended to his family. Especially to his family. He had no illusions about his children, about our strengths and weaknesses, and where we needed to be…built up. Where we needed callus. I learned that from him, I suppose—seeing my child as he is. So I've never had any illusions about Kyle. I know that there has always been…less there than meets the eye.”

Bray turned toward me, but seemed to look right through me. “He was a handsome child. Tall, athletic, aggressive. He looked like a leader, and people—other children, even adults—were drawn to him, at least at first. As they got to know him, other traits became apparent. An intellectual mediocrity. A laziness. A tendency to lie. A tendency to bully. A lack of impulse control. As he got older, that last manifested itself in his indulgence of all sorts of appetites, along with an unfortunate inclination to violence.

“I saw all that in Kyle from the start, and for a long while I tried to…correct him. He was tutored; he was supervised closely; he was disciplined without hesitation or equivocation. I sent him away to school—many schools—back east, abroad, aboard a sailboat, to a work camp in the Arizona desert. Eventually, they all asked him to leave.”

Bray sighed again and shook his head. “As he got older, I arranged positions for him in the company. I had some of my best managers train him, or try to. It was for naught. He was unfortunately quite…dependable. Consistent. The more responsibility I gave him, the more negligent he would ultimately prove himself to be. Oh, he could behave for brief periods of time—he did it in Romania—but whenever circumstances required more than simply posturing, more than just looking the part of a leader, he never failed to disappoint. Often in spectacular ways.” Bray straightened, but still looked slumped and shrunken. He brushed off his trousers.

Another line of sweat slid down my spine. “So Kyle is a disappointment, and that makes Alex what—a second chance? A do-over? Setting aside how incredibly wrongheaded that is, how can it possibly justify kidnapping him, and killing his uncle and his great-grandmother? How can anything justify—”

“None of
that
was my doing,” Bray said, scowling. “By the time I found out about it, it was another of Kyle's messes to be cleaned up.”

“A
mess
? I doubt Elena or her brother or grandmother would characterize it quite that way.”

At the mention of Elena's name a look of disgust, and something else, twisted Bray's face, and a shudder passed through him. “It was
not
my doing,” he said. “It was Kyle, and several PRP assets who were…too eager to please.”

“But you helped Kyle cover it up. That makes you an accomplice to kidnap and murder—maybe a co-conspirator.”

“Kyle had the boy on one of our planes, on the runway in Bucharest, when I first learned of his existence.”

“And you didn't think to stop him from running off with Alex? Or maybe calling the authorities?”

Some of the hardness came back into Bray's face. “You don't have children.”

I sighed. “When did you find out that Alex was your son?”

He crossed to the leather sofa, sat, rose again, and walked to a row of bookshelves. He ran his fingers along the edge of a shelf and studied the leather-bound volumes.

“When did you find out?” I asked again.

“I had him tested a month after he got here, but I suspected before then. He had…
something
—an intelligence, a spark. The way he watched things, the way he played, how he went from just a few words of English to fluency in no time—I knew he couldn't be Kyle's. And his age…The timing was consistent.”

“And your relationship with Elena—when did that begin?”

Bray recoiled, as if I'd pissed on his leg. “
Relationship?
I had no…There was no relationship.”

“You had something.”

“I met her once. One time only. The day I came to Bucharest to sort out all the problems Kyle had caused.”

“She told me you burst in on them in Kyle's hotel suite, that they were still in bed.”

Bray nodded slowly. “I'd given him a chance with that subsidiary. We had a substantial, steady revenue stream there, and the potential for much more, and all Kyle did was waste his time and our money on entertaining the locals and himself. He was picking up tabs at every nightclub and whorehouse in Bucharest, for people who had no decision-making authority—who were barely middle management. He'd become a local joke, and worse—he'd turned Bray Consolidated into a joke.”

“Elena told me that you had her thrown out. I guess she left out some parts.”

Bray turned back to the window. The light was getting longer on the city, and even from up here the shadows were darker and more strange. Bray sighed again. “I'm not discussing this with you. In fact, I'm not discussing anything until I know how Alex is.”

“He's safe. I want to keep him that way.”

“It's the one thing we agree on, doctor. Where is he?”

“I thought we understood each other, Mr. Bray. I haven't shared what I know with anyone, but I will unless you talk to me.”

“How do I know that you've kept this private?”

“Because I'm telling you.”