The Rook (47 page)

Tessa and I would be flying back to Denver tomorrow morning, so after the funeral we decided to visit the beach one last time to watch the sun set over the ocean.

With my crutches, I couldn’t walk on the sand, so we found a paved path that led to a park bench beside the beach at Mission Bay.

It seemed like there was so much to talk about, but that it was OK, too, if we didn’t say anything at all.

Knowing how much Tessa hated dead bodies, I was surprised she’d decided to attend the funeral earlier in the afternoon. “You didn’t have to go today, you know,” I told her as we sat down.

“I was right there when it happened. I wanted to go.” She toed at the sand. “So did you ever meet a living person named John Doe?”

“Not yet. Only dead ones.”

A moment passed. “Jose Lopez,” she said. “It’s good to know his name.”

I thought back to the funeral. I was glad the ME had been wrong; Jose did have a family. Fifteen transient men and seven women lined up with us to walk past the closed coffin. Some were crying.

Some were quiet and reflective. Some were drunk. Some high. But all of them thanked us for coming and then either hugged us or shook our hands. I thought maybe they would ask us for money, especially since Ralph was wearing the new suit Tessa had helped him pick out, but none of them did.

I slipped my hand into my windbreaker and felt the tooth I
still carried with me. “Yes.” I couldn’t keep the sadness out of my voice, the thoughts of the case out of my head. “It is good to know his name.”

She must have noticed that my thoughts were beginning to distract me again. “You OK?”

“Yeah. And I’m being a dad right now, really I am. But it’s just that there’s another part of me, the FBI part, that’s still—”

“That’s OK. I know you can’t turn it off.”

“I’m trying to, Tessa—”

“No-no-no-no,” she said. “Not that part. Not the FBI part. The dad part. That’s the part you can’t turn off. I didn’t understand before. But I do now. I think I finally get it.”

Tessa doesn’t always say the right thing, but when she does, she really nails it. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Thank you for saying that, Raven.”

“I meant it.”

“I know.”

Silence then, as we gazed at the ocean stretching before us and watched the sun wander toward the horizon. Finally I said, “Tessa, remember when we were talking about me and Agent Jiang?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“And I said I’d let you know if we decided to move to anything that’s a little more than nothing?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Well, I think we decided.”

“It’s about time.”

I stared at her. “But I wasn’t sure you liked her?”

“She’s growing on me,” she said. “And besides, she’s good for you. A stabilizing influence.” The sky began to turn grayish pink above us. “Sometimes,” she added, “she even reminds me of Mom.”

We watched the waves rush in and then ease back into the ocean.

The steady, rippling heartbeat of the world, with all of its deadly
currents and its soft ripples. The gentleness is as much a part of the ocean as the ferocity is.

The ocean is both terrible and calm.

Both at peace with itself and at war.

Eerie and beautiful.

And so is our world.

So are we all.

“Patrick?” Tessa said, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yes?”

“It’s been almost exactly one year since Mom died.”

“I know.”

The sun rested hesitantly on the horizon, straddling the moment between day and night. “Sometimes it hurts when I think of her,”

Tessa whispered. “And sometimes it feels just right.”

“It’s the same for me.”

A pause, as she turned to look at me. “Does it ever get easier?”

I watched a gull circle and dive, circle and dive toward the inky water. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But it gets different.”

A couple of soft moments passed, then Tessa looked away from me, toward the sky and the sea and the thin line between them.

“Can I lean on you?” she asked quietly.

“Always.” I put my arm around her shoulder, and she rested her head against my chest, and together we watched the sun disappear into the ocean.

So that it could rise again a moment later, on the far side of the sea.

The true Shade, the mastermind of everything, snapped another instant photo of Patrick Bowers sitting beside his stepdaughter and then smiled.

Yes, Terry was in a coma.

Yes, Cassandra was in custody.

Yes, the device had been destroyed, but still Shade smiled. After all, no one except the daughter from his first rather ill-fated marriage knew about him, so no one would come after him. And his daughter would never give him up; after all, she knew he would pay her bail and help her escape, just like he’d done with Melice.

His camera spit out the photograph. He snapped another.

Then Shade, the one who’d shot the bottle out of Melice’s hand … the one who’d identified Agent Bowers’s voice on the phone … the one who’d stood still and invisible as his daughter stepped out of the shadows beside him to make Melice think she was Shade … the one who’d first introduced her to the compromised NSA agent, Terry Manoji … the one who’d told Terry to shoot Bowers at the base of the neck … the one who’d planned everything from the beginning, and so carefully coordinated the work of his two proteges, now he claimed a new enemy, set his sites on a new target: Special Agent Patrick Bowers.

Shade pulled the photo from the camera.

Click. Another picture.

He could have killed Bowers at any time. Yes of course. Even right now. But over the last four months, Terry had been very helpful
filling him in on Bowers’s past, and Shade believed he had a better punishment than death for Agent Bowers: fear.

Make him live in fear.

As the last photo printed, he scrawled a note, “I’m still here.—

Shade.” Then he opened the envelope, slipped the note and the photos inside, and sealed it shut.

Yes. Let Bowers live in fear. And Shade already knew the best way to do that. Terry had told him the secret last month.

Let Bowers face his past. Let him face the mirror image of himself—Richard Devin Basque.

Shade double-checked the Denver address and dropped the letter into the mailbox beside the Mission Bay parking lot. It wouldn’t be difficult to get Basque declared “not guilty” at that fiasco of a trial in Chicago. Buy off a few jurors. Hardly a challenge at all.

Then he’d deliver Agent Bowers to Basque and let him do what he did best.

“Bring it on,” huh, Bowers?

All right. If you insist.

Then the ex-CIA assassin Sebastian Taylor smiled, lit a cigarette, and strolled through the cryptic moonlight to his car, thinking of fear.

The best punishment of all.