Jeff Abbott - Panic

‘No one can tell you what to do. I learned that early on.’

‘But Jargo knows you’ve turned on him, and you have me. He’ll just kill my father.’

‘No. He doesn’t want to kill your dad, I don’t understand why. Your father is Jargo’s weakness. We have to use it against him.’

Airport. Hospital. He had to choose. Trust the stranger beside him or trust the woman he loved. He started the car, eased out of the lot. No sign of Jargo. Evan drove, finally turning back onto St. Charles. He drove through Lee Circle and fed onto the highway that would merge onto Interstate 10. Traffic was light. He steadied his hands.

‘So. You knew me before I knew you,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘So our relationship was a trick. A show.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t, I don’t understand how you could lie to me.’

‘It was to protect you.’ Her voice rose in half-hysteria. ‘Would you have believed me? If I’d said, “Hey, Evan, both a freelance spy network and the CIA are interested in you, want to go see a movie?”’

‘You answer one question for me.’

‘Anything.’

‘My mother. Did you tell Jargo that I was going to Austin?’ His voice strained for control.

‘No, baby. No. Jargo picked up my voice mail. He got the message.’

If I hadn’t left Carrie the message, my mom would be alive. Grief and horror rose in him like a tide. ‘No. Why did you have to leave that morning?’

She covered her face with her hands.

‘Goddamn it, Carrie, you answer me!’ he screamed.

Her voice sounded broken. ‘I wanted permission from Bricklayer… to end the surveillance on you. To pull you and your mom out, get you both to safety. To forget trying to draw Jargo into the open. I had to talk to Bricklayer alone. That’s where I was. When I got back, you were gone.’

‘And so you told Jargo.’

‘No. No. I acted like I didn’t know where you were. I told him I hadn’t checked my voice mails, I hadn’t gone back to your house.’

‘You told him I loved you, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ She closed her eyes.

‘You must have all had a laugh.’

‘No. No.’

‘Did you send the CIA to my house?’

‘No. Bricklayer’s team is very small. We’re not set up for big operations. We can’t reveal our existence to any possible traitors inside the Agency, because they’re our targets, along with Jargo. We’re not supposed to operate on American soil.’

‘Wow, so my family and I, we’re really freaking special,’ Evan said. ‘I don’t know why I should believe you now.’

‘Because I’m still the same woman you met a few months ago. I’m still Carrie.’ She spoke after long seconds of silence. ‘I love you. I told you not to love me, I didn’t want you to say it, but I wanted it to be true. I didn’t want you hurt. That’s why I wanted to pull out. I’m sorry.’ She leaned forward, watching the rearview, watching for the police. ‘Oh, Jesus, this hurts.’

Did you ever love me?

He made his choice. He followed her directions, stopping at a quiet aviation office near Louis Armstrong International with two cars parked in front.

‘Inside. People who work for Bricklayer. Bricklayer’s real name is Bedford. There’s trust for you. Only three people inside the CIA know his real name.’

He looked at her. He could just run. Leave her, her colleagues would find her, and he could vanish and never see her again. Never hear another lie from her lips.

He thought of that morning three days ago, waking up, loving her with both dreaminess and certainty. And she was gone. Thought of how beautiful she had been the first time he’d seen her in the coffee shop, reading that bad book on film with intense concentration. Lying in wait for him. Thought of her in his bed, the softness of her kisses on his lips. Looking at him as though her heart would burst. Maybe her loving him was a lie, but he loved her. She was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. She was the best chance to get his father home. And she had saved him now, saved him from certain death.

Evan carried her out of the car and kicked four times on the office door.

K eeping a man imprisoned was like buying a tour inside his soul. Jargo had seen men, locked in the cramped confines of his homemade jail, talk to people long dead and gone; cry and sob after days of complete silence; one unfortunate drowned himself in the toilet. Strength was often shallow; confidence was a ploy; bravery a mask.

He already knew Mitchell Casher’s soul. It was a soul incapable of betraying anyone he loved. It was a soul that trusted few, but that trust ran deep as gold veining through the earth.

Jargo went inside the room. Mitchell lay on the bed, a heavy chain bound around his waist and his ankles, long enough to permit him to reach the toilet. Mitchell was unshaven, unwashed, but dignified. The room smelled of the dried-food packets he’d left for Mitchell, since he and Dezz could not stay to serve as his jailer.

He stood watching Mitchell, who did not say hello. Jargo lit a cigarette. He had not smoked in fifteen years. He pulled hard on the smoke, breathed in, coughed like a tobacco virgin. He studied the glowing ember of the cigarette.

‘I’m afraid to ask,’ Mitchell Casher said.

‘I have a difficult question for you,’ Jargo said, ‘but I really must insist on honesty.’

‘I’ve always been honest with you.’ Mitchell’s voice was broken, worn with grief for his wife and fear for his son. He sounded like the dead Mr. Gabriel. Jargo offered him a cigarette and Mitchell shook his head. The imprisonment would take months, years, to break him; bad news about his son would shatter him at once, Jargo knew.

‘I appreciate your honesty, Mitch. Will Evan fight for you?’

‘“Fight for me”? I don’t know what you mean.’

Jargo sat down across from Mitchell Casher. The glow of the light, high above in the ceiling where no prisoner could reach it, was eye-achingly dim. No window graced the room; Jargo had bricked it years ago, after an unfortunate incident involving a shard of glass and the wrist of a stubborn informant within Castro’s regime. But Jargo considered Mitchell not to be missing a view. Outside, the night sky of southern Florida hung heavy with clouds that resembled cancers. ‘Will he fight for you? Will Evan try and get you back?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been thinking long and hard about Carrie and what she’s done. I don’t know for sure that she is CIA; at the least she’s freelance now, and she’s taken Evan to sell him and his information to the highest bidder. I suspect that bidder will be the CIA.’

Mitchell put his head in his hands. ‘Then let me go. Let me help you find him. Please, Steve.’

‘Find him? You and I can hardly stroll into Langley’s lobby and ask for him back now, can we?’

‘They’ll kill him.’

‘Yes. But not right away.’ Jargo took another drag on the cigarette, and this time the tobacco soothed his nerves. You never really forgot how to smoke, he thought. The way you never really forgot how to swim, to make love, to kill.

‘I don’t understand.’

This was the conversational equivalent of cutting a diamond. One had to be precise to get the intended effect, and there were no second chances. ‘Evan told me he has a list of our clients. He also knows my name, and he knows that Dezz is my son. So either he’s been in touch with the CIA, or he’s got even more information. Information about us. Who we are.’

Mitchell’s eyes went wide.

‘All our clients, Mitchell. Do you realize what this could do to us? It’s one thing if we all have to vanish and start over again. That’s almost impossible. But our clients? We could never rebuild if the CIA got that information.’ Jargo brought his gaze back to the burning ember.