The Coil (30 page)

She stared at him, thinking, seeing another possibility. “Maybe we haven't taken this far enough. What if we're wrong? What if there's no mole among the kidnappers?”

“What do you mean?”

She sat up straight. “The blackmailer himself could be the mole—the traitor—as well as one of the kidnappers. They could be looking for one of themselves!”

Simon's face was hard granite. Car lights flashed across it as he said, “I'd be amused, if Sarah and Asher's lives weren't at stake. And if the blackmailer hadn't driven my father to suicide. The only good thing is that now, with luck, all of them have lost track of both of us.”

Thinking about the power of the two groups infuriated and frightened her. She could still hear Sarah's voice in the warehouse, calling excitedly to her. She closed her eyes, about to relive again the pain of losing Sarah and Asher, then snapped them open. Thinking about the past and allowing herself to feel outmatched would not help. She must focus on the future. That was where the solution lay.

“What about you?” she asked. “Did you learn anything from the baron?”

He peered at her, surprised. “You haven't heard?”

“Heard what? Remember, I've been a little busy. Haven't had time for newspapers or telly.”

“De Darmond's dead. Murdered today at his château. I was outside on the balcony—no, I'll explain that later. Just listen. This is what's interesting right now: The baron threatened to hold up some business deal the killer wanted, unless the killer turned over the Carnivore's records.”

She sat up fast. “The baron's murderer has the records?”

“I think we can assume so, considering everything that's happened. I'm hoping his name is somewhere in the documents and pictures I photographed. The problem is, I have no way to figure out which name is his—yet.” He described the files on Baron de Darmond's desk and the photo wall in his office.

“That's my cousin. Clever fellow. I want those documents. Maybe I can see the answer.”

He glanced at her and then away. His mouth was set in a thin line. “We're not really cousins, you know. At least not blood cousins.”

There it was again, that feeling deep inside her. “Maybe, but we've known each other so long, we might as well be. Where are the photos?”

“In the portfolio on the backseat.”

She reached back. He caught himself eyeing her long waist. Her arm brushed against his shoulder as she returned to her seat, placing the portfolio onto her lap and opening it. She thumbed through the thick stack of photos and focused on the oversize three that showed the photo wall.

“Good Lord,” she said in awe, “this is a who's who of celebrities, politicians, military leaders, and corporate legends. We need good light and a place to work. Someplace private.”

“Everything's closed now. We could get a hotel room, but you'd have to show a passport.” Which would make locating them easy for anyone with the right connections. Every Paris hotel, motel, rooming house, or guest residence was required by law to report guests' names.

She frowned. “Considering how thorough these people are, and the amount of muscle they're able to muster, they've probably got my friends and everyone I've worked with in Paris under surveillance.”

“True. There's another problem, too. I studied those photos for quite a while, and I made endless lists. I tried to correlate and cross-reference but got nowhere. The data's worthless without someone who can interpret it or see a pattern, or who simply knows a lot more about the multinational world than I do. What about you? Are you an expert in any of those fields?”

“No. You're right—we could use some help. But because of Sarah and Asher, time's of the essence. What's your suggestion?”

“I'm going to phone MI6 and report on the level. After Barry hands me back my head, I should think he'd send us to a safe house.”

She considered. The power and resources of MI6 were just what they needed, especially now that they knew firsthand how large, brutal, and relentless the organizations were that they were challenging.

“I like the idea,” she told him. “Actually, it's comforting.”

“Know what you mean.” Simon jerked the steering wheel, shot across traffic, and pulled into an alley. He parked and picked up his cell to phone London.

Even at MI6 London, the hour was late, long past the regular working day. Simon knew that unless Barry was on a big project, he was probably home. If so, Simon's call would be forwarded to the suburb where he lived. Few people had private lives more ordinary than HQ bodies.

As it turned out, he was right about Barry's being gone. The call was forwarded, and soon a slurred, drunken voice answered. When he heard it was Simon, Barry snapped, “I don' know you. Don' call again!”

Simon frowned. “What do you mean? What the devil's going on?”

“Goddammit, Simon! You're
detached without recourse.
I don' know what the hell you're up to.
Don'
tell me! Don' explain! Stay away from me, from Ada Jackson, and for God's sakes stay away from MI6. I hope like hell you
are
Simon Childs, because this is the only warning you're getting!” The line went dead.

Simon sat motionless, stunned. He lowered the phone, looked at Liz, and repeated what Barry had said. “I've worked with him for years,” he concluded, his voice tight. “This is no joke.”

“You said he sounded drunk. Maybe he's confused or hallucinating.”

Simon's blue eyes were dark and stormy. “There's a way I can check.”

He redialed MI6 headquarters. This time, a machine answered: “The number from which you're dialing is no longer accepted by this agency. Do not try to call again.”

Simon's chest tightened. His breathing grew shallow. As he hit the
OFF
button, he replayed the two calls in his mind, working to absorb that MI6 had been conned, bribed, or used. MI6 suffered from the usual office politics, occasional jealousies, and scattering of incompetents, as did any large organization. Which meant it could be damned annoying. But at the same time, it was vital to Britain's security, and it was the one stable element in his life. He did not like to think what it meant that even MI6 could be penetrated. He liked even less parsing what it meant to his and Liz's safety.

She was growing alarmed. “What's happened?”

“The blackmailer's compromised MI6. It's the only answer. My God! How could he?
MI6.
Christ!” He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. “They let me talk to Barry once, so he could warn me. They won't let me in again, not if I use this cell or my real name. If I try to trick them or go around the rules, they'll declare me unsalvageable.”

“A death sentence! Why? You haven't done anything to make them sanction you without recourse!”

“Who
is
this blackmailer? Who has so much power!”

Liz hugged herself, chilled. It was time to tell him about the movie: “The people who manipulated me for five years and kidnapped Sarah and Asher have that power.”

“Manipulated?” He frowned.

“Tricked. Controlled. Handled. A beautifully constructed, impeccably orchestrated movie on me.” Angrily, she described the half-decade marionette show in which she had lived, right up to the death of her fake CIA handler, Mac, and her cell call to her door at Langley.

“Christ,” Simon breathed. “You're telling me the CIA
didn't
run your show?”

“That's exactly what I'm telling you. These people have the influence to make a prominent foundation award me an academic chair, one that probably several dozen scholars were more qualified to win. They forced my TV series to be canceled on the instant. And then they had the resources and knowledge to mimic Langley tradecraft and customs so perfectly that they fooled not only me but Asher.”

The vastness of the power of the two groups took his breath away. No wonder she had been reluctant to reveal any of it. With his MI6 background, he could easily have been part of her nightmare.

He said, “Sarah, Asher, you, me…they're trying to trap us like flies in a spiderweb.”

In the alley, they sat quietly in the dark car as the engine idled. She tried to shake off the sense of being hunted, the fear that in seconds someone would jump out with an Uzi and rake bullets across the Peugeot. She looked across at him. He was sitting upright, his hands knotted on his knees, his eyes staring straight ahead at garbage cans and brick walls, his expression grave.

He turned, and they exchanged a long look of understanding. For a few seconds, the car became a cocoon against the noises of the city and the ceaseless threat of their pursuers.

“What about Langley?” he asked.

Liz was already considering it. After all, it had not been Langley that debriefed her the second time. It had not been Langley that created the obscene movie in Santa Barbara. At worst, Langley was guilty of active disinterest; at best, benign neglect. And Langley's experts were among the best in the world. She and Simon could get all the analytical help they needed for the photos and documents.

“All right, then,” she said briskly. “Langley it is. They maintain several safe houses in Paris.”

“You're sure? When you talked to your door earlier, he acted as if you were unbalanced.”

“That was before I told him the CIA had a pointed interest in all this—Asher. One of their own, and he's missing. You drive. I'll call. We don't want to stay anywhere too long.”

He threw the car into reverse, zoomed out of the alley, shifted again, and darted the sports car into traffic, the flow pulling and pushing with them. At the same time she dug in her purse until she located the cell she had found in the jacket. Next to it was the light jacket from the alley and a crumpled piece of paper that had also been in the jacket. Someone's note. She would have to tell Simon about that later, too.

She dialed. Frank Edmunds was in his office. “It's me again, Frank,” she told him, resigned.

“Yeah? I'll be damned. You finally gonna let me help you?”

CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia

Frank Edmunds was disturbed. As soon as the conversation with Sansborough ended, he severed the connection and sat motionless in his gray office. Mr. Jaffa had ordered him to have a safe house ready in case she called, and now she had. Obviously, Jaffa knew more than he did and had anticipated what she would do. Yet Sansborough had sounded so damned normal this time, so convincing.

Outside his window, the tree-studded green hills of Virginia spread into the distance. Inside his office, stacks of files and papers testified to his never-ending work. On his computer screen, three windows were open, showing personnel inventories he was tidying, readying for changes in assignment.

He had never liked Sansborough. How could you trust someone raised by assassins, especially when they crossed over to them? And then when they strong-armed their way back in from the cold, pledging intel that was never delivered? At the same time, he was a professional. He treated all his bodies, even her, with respect. In the covert world, one never knew whom Langley would need, if only to deceive.

He paused to mull what the director had told him she would say, and yet she had not said the worst of it—the ridiculous lie that the Carnivore kept files. He had been thinking about it off and on since the director warned him. If it were true, what a bombshell. But, of course, that would be just another of her fantasies.

Still…Asher Flores was a different matter. If he really had been kidnapped—

He dialed Walter Jaffa.

“Yes, Frank,” Jaffa's secretary said immediately. “He hoped to hear from you.”

Two clicks later, he was again talking to the chief. He told Walter Jaffa what Sansborough had said.

“Those two professors in Santa Barbara that she's talking about are the ones
she
arranged to have killed,” Jaffa reminded him. “And don't forget the woman in London she personally eliminated. As for Flores being snatched, that's another of her creations. He's undercover, so deep I can't tell you where. She must know that, don't you see?
Damn.
She's even penetrated us! She has to be stopped, Frank.
Right now.
”

“I…” Frank Edmunds let out a long stream of air. “She sounded so sure.”

“You
believed
her?” Jaffa sounded exasperated. “That should tell you how good she is. She obviously needs a place to hide, so she's come up with a fairy tale to appeal to your sympathy. She knows you can get her a safe house on your own initiative. She figures by the time you check out everything she's said, she'll have thrown off whoever's after her, and then she can be on her way, clean as soap.”

Frank silently cursed himself. He was just another of her marks. Was he going soft? Missing all the signs? He said firmly, “We'll make it look like an accident, just like you said.”

Paris, France

Gino Malko slowed his Citroën as two gendarmes left a corner bistro and headed toward their squad car, smiling. He swore and pressed his gas pedal. Looking in his rearview mirror, he watched them climb inside, completely ignorant of the GPS device planted on their vehicle, no doubt by that bastard Simon Childs.

Malko raced the Citroën around the corner, studying his GPS screen. Simon Childs thought he was clever, but Gino Malko knew how to hunt both a Florida fox and a man on the run. No good tracker ever went out without backup. Which was why Malko had slipped a second device inside the Peugeot's rear bumper, where it was less likely to be spotted. It had been easy enough, when Childs parked for a long time a few blocks from the Champs-Elysées. Simon Childs was good, but not good enough, or he would have examined his car more closely.

Allowing himself a moment of optimism, Malko checked his electronic map. The police car was the stationary signal. Therefore, he would follow the moving one. That was the Peugeot. Simon Childs was going down.

 

Ten minutes after she said good-bye to Frank Edmunds, Liz dialed again. He was waiting with the address of a CIA safe house in the sixth arrondissement.

“It's a good one,” he assured her. “I'll call you there to make sure you're okay. Where are you now, so I can give them an idea of when to expect you?”

They were passing through an intersection in Montmartre, and she read the street names to him.

“Be careful,” Frank continued, his voice concerned. “I hope you're armed.”

“Of course.”

“Good. The MI6 guy, too?”

“You know he is.”

“Okay, what are you driving, and what's the plate number? I'll need to alert our people so they can scope you fast if anyone's pursuing.”

Frowning, she said, “I can lose a tail, Frank, and it's a Peugeot.” She asked Simon for the license number and repeated it into the cell. “Why do you need all this?”

“The safe house has a courtyard. The gates are huge—solid wood. They'll need to be open for you to drive in, so the faster they recognize you, the better. Anything special I should have waiting for you?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

Edmunds laughed. “That's what my wife always says—‘nothing.' Then she remembers when I'm in bed. It's ‘Frank, will you go down and check the doors?' ‘Frank, will you let the dog in?' Frank this and Frank that. And if I don't want to go, she reminds me of when I didn't and the ‘terrible consequences.' You'd think she was keeping files on me of all my mistakes. Maybe she plans to blackmail me. But after you've been married twenty years, I guess it's not so unusual….”

Liz's breath froze in her chest. She instantly cut the connection and stared at Simon, shocked. “
He knows about the Carnivore's files.
” Fear turned her throat dry as tinder. “I can't believe it. He
knows.
He was keeping me on the line with all those stupid questions. Langley's been compromised. Now
they're
after us, too. Worst of all, I gave them the ammo to find us!”

There are times when betrayal made sense, when it arose from human emotions like jealousy or lust. Sometimes it came from weaknesses like greed or malevolence. Institutional betrayal was something else—so large as to be beyond one's grasp, and far more offensive when the institution represented something bigger than the individual. Something that was supposed to be greater, better, wiser than its parts.

Somewhere deep inside, Liz's anger at Langley had seethed for years. Now it exploded in a tidal wave of fiery outrage. She trembled with the force of it. In her mind, she saw clearly the first time she walked through Langley's doors. She had stood there in the lobby and stared at the high walls, the carved stars, the expansiveness of light and space that seemed to promise nothing was impossible to achieve for the good of humanity. She had been awed and full of hope.

Simon's jaw was set hard as he drove. “You're certain he knows?”

“I didn't tell Frank the Carnivore kept records. Someone else did. It's a trap. He—Langley—they've set a trap for us at that safe house. And the bastard has this cell number now, too.” She shook the phone. “They'll be looking for us within minutes.”

“Damn! We've got to get rid of the car. What exactly did he say?”

She repeated the conversation. “The final clue was his bad joke about his wife's keeping a file and using it against him. The unconscious is like an underground cauldron, full of the unspoken. Percolating with Freudian slips. Plus, there was the inanity of the rest of his talk. It made no sense, unless he was keeping me on the line to trace the call. He was free-associating, thinking about files that could be used for blackmail, and it slipped out. Now Langley can zero in on us.”

Simon whistled. “You've got another problem—the Paris gendarmes. The
Herald Tribune
published your photo today in connection with Tish's murder.”

“Oh, no! If they have, other French papers probably have, too. Any more bad news?”

“What we have is quite enough, I should say.”

More than enough. All cell phones were registered in the databases of the wireless companies that serviced them. The companies had the authority to use satellite and ground mobile positioning to figure out the exact latitudes and longitudes of where a call originated and where it was received, so they could bill for minutes and roaming charges. At the same time, Langley could either access that information or calculate themselves where mobile-phone users were, based on their position relative to a service's base station. Even if she turned off her cell, it might still emit a homing signal, and there was no way she could find that out without proper equipment.