Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (2 page)

“We don’t think they kidnapped him.”

He was watching me as though he expected me to understand. And he had said “we.”

When you live with a man who has chosen the shadowy, truth-altering world of espionage, you commit to his secrets and duplicity. As far as I knew, no one besides me—not even Nick’s sister or Colin Crowne, his boss—was aware that Nick led a double life. His degrees in geology and physics led him to work for Crowne Energy, a small oil exploration company that had been searching for oil near the Caspian Sea. But it was his native fluency in Russian that caught the interest of the CIA, which believed his job was the perfect cover to report on a dangerous and politically unstable Russian republic that was a hub of arms and drug trafficking.

To be honest, even I didn’t know what my husband really did.

“If I don’t tell you anything, Sophie,” he used to say to me, “then you don’t have to lie.”

Now Baz was talking as if he
knew
. I played my role anyway.

“Sorry, I’m not following you. If the Shaika didn’t kidnap Nick, then what is he doing in Russia?”

We stopped in front of the starkly modern blue stained-glass window dedicated to the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain: heroes of a grateful nation, men who made the ultimate sacrifice for king and country.

Baz’s answer, dropped into the respectful silence, caught me off guard. “We wondered if you might know why he’s there?”

“Good God, what makes you think that?”

“Do you, Sophie?”

“No. Of course not. Until five minutes ago, I thought he was . . .”

“What?”

I moved out of Baz’s embrace. “I don’t know. Dead, I guess.”

“I thought you never gave up hope?”

“I didn’t. But with every day that passes, it gets harder.”

Especially because one of Nick’s people at the embassy had been keeping me informed of their search. They’d pinged the GPS on his phone and got nothing. No credit card movement, no e-mail use, no phone calls.

He was gone, completely gone.

Considering Nick’s line of work, I had to ask. “He’s not in prison, is he?”

“No.”

“Then where . . . ?”

“He was seen in Moscow by one of our operatives. It was Nick, all right, though he’s rather changed. A beard and different hair color. Thinner.” Baz paused. “He was getting on the metro. At Kuznetsky Most . . . Kuznetsky Bridge.”

Baz watched me absorb that information. Nick knew Moscow well since he often stopped there on business trips to Abadistan, the Russian republic where Crowne Energy had set up operations to drill a test well, searching for oil. And thanks to a grandmother who taught him the language as a child, as I said, Nick spoke Russian fluently and with a native accent.

“What’s he doing there?” I repeated Baz’s question.

His voice hardened. “Sophie, it’s become clear that Nick probably staged his kidnapping. It would explain a lot. He may even have had help because he did a bloody good job, no pun intended. Very thorough, very convincing. I mean, we know Colin required everyone to get basic medical training before departing for Abadistan since you can’t even get an aspirin there, much less a syringe, so Nick’s perfectly capable of drawing his own blood. Over a period of time he could have collected enough to create a realistic-looking crime scene.”

I started to protest, but Baz wasn’t done.

“The lads surmise that he must have had a boat ready to take him across the Channel once he got to the coast after leaving London. Though knowing Nick and his capacity for sheer gall, maybe he strolled onto the ferry, nice as you please, and no one noticed him.”

“No.” I didn’t want to believe any of this, but the “lads” he was talking about probably worked at Vauxhall Cross. The headquarters of MI6, also known as Legoland.

“I’m sorry, love. I hated to tell you, but I wanted you to hear it from someone who cares about you. No doubt Nick’s people at the embassy will be contacting you soon. I’m sure they’ll have questions as well.” He paused and said so softly that I had to lean closer to catch his words, “Under the circumstances, you must wonder who Nick’s working for these days. It rather looks as though he might be peddling information to the highest bidder.”

For a long moment, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. In all the time since Nick disappeared, those early harrowing nights trying not to imagine whether he’d been tortured or just mercilessly executed, followed by the unendurable loneliness as weeks dragged by after that car was found in the mountains, I had never—not a single time—considered this.

“You mean Nick betrayed Colin, sold out Crowne Energy?”

“For openers.”

“You are out of your mind.” My voice rose in a little bubble of hysteria. A woman walking by stopped and gave me a curious look. “He would never do something like that.”

Baz noticed the woman and touched a finger to his lips, gesturing silence. “I think the possibility has to be considered.”

“No, it does not.” I would not let him go there, not allow this horrible accusation to take root and flower.

“What about Colin?” he asked.

“You know as well as I do, Baz.” I took a shaky breath and continued. “Colin’s body was found in Vienna, in the Danube. The same people who kidnapped Nick went after Colin next.”

“And when we all believed Nick was dead, that theory made sense,” Baz said. “Sophie, love, I trust you understand why I can’t go into detail, but we believe Crowne Energy discovered oil reserves in the Caspian Sea off the Abadi coast when they drilled that test well. To say that discovery would radically alter the political situation in an unstable part of the world is an understatement. However, the only way to confirm what Colin and Nick found would be to review their well logs.” He paused and added, “Unfortunately, they’re missing.”

I wondered if Baz knew that piece of information through his contacts in MI6, or because his Foreign Office portfolio also included international energy policy. With London as the world’s second largest oil trading market and Britain as a declining but significant exporter of North Sea oil, Baz knew all the players.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“I’m saying that perhaps Nick has those logs and he’s selling information about what Crowne Energy discovered in Abadistan,” he said. “With Colin out of the picture, he’s the only person who knows what’s in them. As a geophysicist—or, to use your delightful old-fashioned American term, a doodlebugger—he also has the skills to interpret the seismic data.”

“Nick wouldn’t sell out anyone, Baz. Forget it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so either, but how do you explain his turning up suddenly in Russia?”

“Maybe someone made a mistake,” I said. “Nick is Russian, or half Russian, from his mother’s family. It could have been someone else at that metro station who looks just like him.”

Baz shook his head. “No.”

I wrapped my arms around my waist, suddenly bone chilled and weary. “It can’t be Nick.”

“Why are you so sure?”

I took a deep breath and fought to keep my voice rock steady. “Because he wouldn’t do this to me.”

“Oh, my poor darling—” Baz started to pull me into his arms again, but I backed away.

“Don’t pity me,” I said. “I can’t bear it.”

“There’s something else,” he said. “You may as well hear it all.”

I swallowed hard and nodded.

“Our people have gone back to Vienna,” he said. “In case we missed something in the first go round regarding the suspicious death of one of our citizens.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe Nick met up with Colin in Vienna,” he said. “Maybe Colin had the well logs and now Nick has them.”

“You mean, Colin gave Nick the logs before he was killed?”

But I knew that wasn’t where Baz was going.

“That’s one possibility. The other possibility they’re looking into is that Nick took them.” He gave me a worried look. “After he killed Colin.”

2

My husband is not a murderer. There are things you know in your heart, believe with all your soul, in spite of what anyone tells you or however convincing the “proof” to the contrary appears to be. I didn’t know the secrets Nick kept for the CIA because I couldn’t know them, but I will swear to you that these things are true: He is an honorable, trustworthy, and loyal friend; a patriot who would die for his country; and a loving husband who would hang the moon someplace different if that’s what I wanted.

How Nick metamorphosed from kidnapping victim to murder suspect who had killed his boss and good friend because of a set of technical documents, even if they were as priceless as an original copy of the Magna Carta, was something I didn’t understand that day in Westminster Abbey. Nor did I understand it in the three remaining weeks before I left London and moved home to Washington, D.C.

Baz had been right. Within twenty-four hours after he dropped that bombshell news, I got a call from one of Nick’s contacts at the embassy who said they had a few questions for me in light of “new developments.” When I showed up at their office on Grosvenor Square, the atmosphere was, to put the best face on it, tense. What became clear right away was that no one except me believed the man getting on the Moscow metro was a case of mistaken identity.

At any time during the past three months, Ms. Medina, did your husband contact you?

No, he did not.

Can the CIA count on your cooperation to let us know if he does reach out to you?

Of course.

My own questions received similar terse replies except they were mostly
no comment
or
we can’t say
.

Wasn’t it possible Nick was on the run from the local Russian mafia, known as the Shaika, who had been pressuring Crowne Energy to turn their operations over to them?

No comment.

Did they honestly believe Nick would murder Colin Crowne, a man he liked and respected, in cold blood, and then dump his body in the Danube River?

We can’t say.

As they requested, I’d gotten Nick’s black diplomatic passport out of the safe at home and turned it in that afternoon. He never flashed it around since he always traveled on his blue passport; the dip passport was a last resort, a get-out-of-jail-free card that guaranteed a swift evacuation from anywhere in the world and no questions asked. I hadn’t been sorry to surrender it. In my line of work as a photographer for IPS, International Press Service, being a diplomatic spouse is a liability if you travel as I often do to war zones and places where it’s smarter to keep your nationality to yourself. Get hijacked or captured by the wrong people, and diplomats, U.S. government employees, and their dependents are the first to be singled out of the group and shot. If they’re lucky.

A few days after that first meeting, I was invited back to Grosvenor Square for another session—you don’t say no to the CIA, even if it sounds like a request rather than a demand—this time to go over the months leading up to Nick’s disappearance. Eventually the relentless probing, like picking a scab that will never heal, took its toll as I told my story. And then told it again.

Surely Nick’s behavior had changed in the weeks and months before he disappeared; some minor, telling details that, though they seemed insignificant at the time, could now be recognized as big, glaring clues? How could I not have noticed something? Anything? They say that the wife is the last to know, and you think,
Sure, what a lie: Of course she knew. She just turned a blind eye.

Was that what I did?

That evening after they were finished with me at the embassy, I went home and headed straight for the bottle of Scotch on the sideboard. I poured a drink, and another, and another as I sat for hours in the velvet darkness of our sitting room among the shadows and negative space, curled up in the nubby blue-and-green tweed settee by the hearth where Nick and I had spent so many nights together reading and talking. The CIA had painted a picture of a stranger, not the man I knew and loved.

Occasionally a car would drive by as I nursed my Scotch, the hum of the engine slowing as it turned off the main road into our cul-de-sac. Like clockwork, just after the
News at Ten
ended, my neighbor’s front door opened and closed and I heard his footfalls as he went out for a last smoke. Then the metallic click of his lighter followed by the jaunty firefly glow of a cigarette as he sauntered over to the green across the road with his pair of Westies. After a while he finished his fag and went back inside, leaving me alone with my thoughts, which kept coiling back to the night Nick vanished.

What if I’d caught an earlier flight? Paid for a cab all the way from Heathrow instead of first taking the train to Paddington? But mostly what I wondered was this: Was my husband of twelve years, the man I loved with all my heart and whom I believed—no, I
knew
—loved me so much he would die for me, capable of staging a scene of such blood and violence, knowing I would be the one to discover it? And so I racked my brain, going over and over it again, searching for the tiniest clue, the least little hint, to prove that Baz and the CIA and MI6 were all comprehensively wrong: that Nick was a victim, not a villain.

The official explanation for why I was leaving London was that I’d finally decided it was time to return home to the States to be near my family after a difficult and tumultuous period in my life, to grieve in private. The unofficial reason was that the media assault and attention had been overwhelming. From the beginning, the British tabloids had latched on to me as the story unfolded, inflating my life into a sympathetic sob-story drama of the brave, beautiful wife who courageously “soldiered on alone.” A press photo taken in Egypt when I was shooting an excavation site at the Valley of the Kings popped up everywhere. My head scarf had slipped onto my shoulders and I was completely sweat drenched, but the picture somehow made me look as sultry and exotic as an extra on the set of
Lawrence of Arabia.

So far the press hadn’t gotten hold of the ugly new rumor concerning Nicholas Canning, the missing-and-presumed-dead American businessman: that he was alive, well, and, apparently, hiding out in Russia. But sooner or later, word would leak out and public sympathy would turn to shock, and that would be followed by scorn. Then derision.