Jeff Abbott - Panic

Shadey cracked knuckles, cussed under his breath. Leaned in close to the window. ‘I don’t like gettin’ played. By either them or you.’

‘I’m the one being straight with you. I’ve always been straight with you, no matter what you think. Please help me.’

Shadey gave Evan a hard stare. ‘You remember where my stepbrother’s house is, over in Montrose?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Meet me there in two hours. You ain’t there when I arrive, I ain’t waiting, and we never saw each other, we never talked, and you never come look for me again.’ He got back into his car, waited for Evan to back out, then peeled out of the parking lot.

Evan drove in the opposite direction, watching for cars that were watching him.

The next theft: a computer.

He couldn’t go to Joe’s Java, where he’d met Carrie – too many people there knew him. He remembered an independent coffee shop called Caf-fiend near Bissonnet and Kirby, usually with a big Rice University undergrad clientele. As a visual-arts student just a few years ago, he’d edit film on his laptop, leaving it at the table because there were always nice folks around and he was just up at the counter getting coffee, he could keep an eye on it. But he’d turned his back on it plenty. Laptop users could be complacent.

Shadey might not show with the money, much less with a computer. He had already stolen a truck that was someone’s pride and joy; he could steal a computer. Shame welled in him. He needed something, he’d steal it. It would hurt an innocent person to steal and he still cared about that. But his survival was at stake.

He wondered as he walked into the coffee shop, Who am I becoming?

He put on the sunglasses he had found in the stolen pickup, ran a hand over his shortened black hair. The shop was busy, nearly every table taken, and a steady business of people buying coffee drinks to go.

A new line of computers stood on a counter running along one wall, Internet-ready. He wouldn’t have to steal one – at least not to do half of what he needed. His next serious crime could wait.

He got a large coffee, surveyed the crowd. No one paid him any attention. He was anonymous. He put his back to the room, the sweat dampening his ribs. He opened a browser on one of the computers. He was the only one using the store-provided systems; most people had brought their own.

He went to Google and searched on Joaquin Gabriel. No clear match; there were quite a few men named Joaquin Gabriel in the world. Then he added CIA to the search terms and got a list of links. Headlines from the Washington Post and the Associated Press.

VETERAN SPY’S CLAIMS ARE ‘DELUSIONAL,’ CIA SAYS. And so on. Most of the articles were five years old. Evan read them all.

Joaquin Gabriel had been CIA. Before the bourbon and paranoia got hold of him. He was charged to identify and run internal operations to lure out CIA personnel who had gone bad – a man known as a traitor-baiter. Gabriel launched a series of increasingly outrageous accusations, condemning CIA colleagues for collaborating with imaginary mercenary intelligence groups, of running illegal operations both in America and abroad. Gabriel accused the wrong people, including a few of the most senior and honored operatives in the Agency, but his claims were hard to swallow given his alcoholism. And complete lack of evidence. He left, abruptly, with a government pension and no comment. He had moved back to his hometown of Dallas and set up a corporate security service.

Why would his mother trust this man – a drunken disgrace – with their lives?

It made no sense. Unless Gabriel had been dead right in theory. Mercenary intelligence groups. Freelance spies. Consultants. What he claimed Jargo was.

That’s why Mom went to Gabriel. She knew he would believe her; this was the evidence that would vindicate Gabriel, redeem his career.

He had another idea. The names on his father’s passports. Petersen. Rendon. Merteuil. Smithson. You also don’t know shit about your parents. Gabriel meant more than the usual unimaginable life of his parents before he was born or their hidden dreams and thoughts. More than regrets of youth or unfulfilled hopes or an ambition never mentioned to him but allowed to die in isolation. Something bad.

Petersen. Rendon. Merteuil. Smithson.

First he did searches on Merteuil. Most of the links referenced Merteuil as the surname of the vicious aristocratic schemer from the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, variously played in film adaptations by Glenn Close, Annette Bening, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. He wondered if that meant anything, an alias based on a deceitful character. But then he found a reference to a Belgian family with that surname, killed five years ago in a Meuse River flood. The dead Merteuils had the same names as those on his family’s Belgian passports: Solange, Jean-Marc, Alexandre.

Rendon produced a bunch of results, and he specified the search more carefully on the name in his alias: David Edward Rendon. He got a Web site rallying against drunk driving in New Zealand and listing a long history of people killed in accidents as meat for the argument for stiffer penalties. A family had been killed in a horrific crash in the Coromandel mountains east of Auckland, back in the early 1970s. James Stephen Rendon, Margaret Beatrice Rendon, David Edward Rendon. The three names on the passports.

He searched on the Petersen names. Same story. A family lost in a house fire in Pretoria, blamed on smoking in bed.

Dead families hijacked, he and his parents readied to step into their identities.

The coffee in his gut rose up like bile.

It was the nature of a good lie to hug the truth. He was Evan Casher. He was supposed to be, in addition, Jean-Marc Merteuil, David Rendon, Erik Petersen. Every name was a lie waiting to be lived by his whole family.

Except the one name that didn’t have a match in his mother’s or his fake passports. Arthur Smithson.

Searching the name produced only a scattering of links. An Arthur Smithson who was an insurance agent in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. An Arthur Smithson who taught English at a college in California. An Arthur Smithson who had vanished from Washington, D.C.

He clicked on the link to a story in the Washington Post.

It was a report on unsolved disappearances in the D.C. area. Arthur Smithson’s name was mentioned, as well as several others: runaway teens, vanished children, missing fathers. Links offered the original stories in the Post archives. He clicked on the one for Smithson and found a story from twenty-four years ago:

SEARCH FOR ‘MISSING’ FAMILY SUSPENDED

by Federico Moreno, Staff Reporter A search for a young Arlington couple and their infant son was called off today, despite a neighbor’s insistence that the couple would not simply pull up stakes without saying goodbye. Freelance translator Arthur Smithson, 26; his wife, Julie, 25; and their two-month-old son, Robert, vanished from their Arlington home three weeks ago. A concerned neighbor phoned Arlington police after not seeing Mrs. Smithson and the baby play in the yard for several days. Police entered the house and found no signs of struggle, but did find that the Smithsons’ luggage and clothing appeared to be missing. Both the Smithsons’ cars were in the garage. ‘We have no reason to suspect foul play,’ Arlington Police Department spokesman Ken Kinnard said. ‘We’ve run into a brick wall. We don’t have an explanation as to where they are. Until we receive more information, we have no leads to pursue.’ ‘The police need to try harder,’ said neighbor Bernita Briggs. Mrs. Briggs said she routinely babysat for Mrs. Smithson since Robert was born and that the young mother treated her as a confidant and gave no indication that the family planned on leaving the area. ‘They had money, good jobs,’ Mrs. Briggs said. ‘Julie never said one word about leaving. She was just asking me about what curtains to pick out, what patterns to get for the nursery. They also wouldn’t leave without telling me, because Julie always teased me as being a worrywart, and if they just took off and left, I’d be worried sick, and she wouldn’t put me through grief. She’s a kind young woman.’ Mrs. Briggs told police that Smithson was fluent in French, German, and Russian and that he did translation work for various government branches and academic presses. According to Georgetown University records, Mr. Smithson graduated five years ago with degrees in French and Russian. Mrs. Smithson worked as a civilian employee of the navy until she became pregnant, at which point she resigned. The navy did not return calls for this story. ‘I wish the police would tell me what they know,’ Mrs. Briggs said. ‘A wonderful family. I pray they’re safe and in touch with me soon.’