Jeff Abbott - Panic

‘Carrie. You didn’t fail me. Not once. I know you were in a terrible, terrible position. I know.’

‘But you hate me a little. For lying.’

‘I don’t.’

‘If you hate me,’ she said, ‘I’d understand.’

‘I don’t hate you.’ He needed her. It was a subtle shock. The knit of tragedy forever linked them, the same way his parents and her father were linked. He did not want to be alone.

He kissed her. It was as tentative and shy as a first kiss, a first real kiss, often is. He leaned back to study her, and she closed her eyes and found his mouth with her own, gently, once, twice, then he kissed her with passion. A need for tenderness mixed with a need to show her that he loved her.

She broke the kiss, rested her forehead against his. ‘Our families lived false lives. I did it for a year, I don’t want to live a lie anymore. You cannot imagine how lonely it is. I don’t want you to do it. We can just be us. I love you, Evan.’

He wanted to believe. He needed to love; he needed to believe the best in her. He needed to regain what he had lost, in some small measure. The awareness was sudden and bright, a firecracker in his head. He wanted to be alone with her – away from CIA bugs, away from their parents caught as strangers in old photos, away from death and fear.

‘I love you, too,’ he said quietly.

She settled into his arms and he held her until she slept.

We can just be us.

Yes, he thought. When Jargo is dead. When I’ve killed him.

As the jet screamed toward Virginia, Evan didn’t wonder if she was the same woman he loved. He wondered if he was still the same man she loved.

J argo lay half-awake, half-asleep, waiting for the phone call that would end this nightmare. He was a boy again, sitting in a darkened room, listening to the voice of God ringing in his ears. God was dead, he knew, but the idea of God was not, of a being so powerful he held absolute sway over you, whether you breathed, whether you died. The boy he was had not slept in three days.

‘The challenge,’ the voice said, soft, British, quiet, ‘is that you must make a failure into an opportunity.’

Jargo-the-boy – his name had been John then, the name he liked best – said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘If you create a situation, and you lose control of it, you must be able to reimagine that situation. Turn it to your advantage.’

‘So if I fall off a ten-story building… I can hardly reimagine that into victory.’ He was thirteen and he was starting to question the whole world he had always known.

‘I speak of salvageable situations,’ the voice said with no trace of impatience. ‘You live and breathe, you can manipulate people. You must construct every trap so that if the prey escape, they do not believe they were in a trap of your making.’

‘Why do I care,’ Jargo asked, ‘what an escaped victim thinks?’

‘Stupid, stupid boy,’ the voice said. ‘You don’t see it. The trap still has to be set. You have to remain unknown, no suspicion of you brought to light. I don’t really think that you’ll ever be ready to lead.’

The phone rang.

Jargo sat up, blinking, the frightened boy sitting in the dark lingering for just a moment, then gone. He groped for the phone, clicked it on.

‘I have the cellular records from your special chunk of Ohio.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘They’re uploaded to your system,’ Galadriel said.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. Calls to the D.C. metro area.’

‘Seven,’ she said after a moment.

‘Get me addresses for all those numbers.’

A pause. ‘Two residences. Five government offices, mostly congressional offices and Social Security.’

‘None to confirmed CIA addresses?’

‘None,’ she said after another moment. ‘But we don’t have a complete list of CIA numbers. You know that’s impossible.’

‘Get me calls from or to all of Virginia and Maryland.’

Another pause. ‘Yes. Sixty-seven in the course of the day.’

‘Any to Houston?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Get me all those addresses, for every call.’ His other line rang. ‘Hold on a minute.’ He answered the other phone. ‘Yes?’

‘I think they’re flying to Britain,’ the voice said.

Jargo closed his eyes. Down the hall he could hear the barest zoom-zoom of Dezz’s Game Boy, the quiet of Mitchell’s voice. They’d had a long day and accomplished little in trying to devise a way to draw Evan back to them. But now everything had just changed.

‘From where?’

‘I suspect from an Agency medical clinic in southwest Virginia. It’s called North Hill Clinic. There’s a private airstrip close by and the requisition is for that airstrip.’

‘They flew there from New Orleans?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only seen the requisition for a plane to go from D.C. airspace to the U.K. Not even sure it’s them. A doctor requisitioned to meet the plane before departure, another doctor requisitioned for meeting the flight in London. If your former agent is injured… it could be her. Of course it could be an ancient Agency fart traveling with a medical condition.’

‘You said meet the plane. Where else has it been?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘You can’t find another requisition for today’s travel?’

‘No. But it must be domestic. A tight lid is kept on domestic data, and I’m not cleared for it.’

‘What’s the ID on the case for the flight to the U.K.?’

‘Also classified, but joint ops with British intelligence. That’s all I know.’ The voice started getting nervous. ‘You better get this under control, Jargo…’

‘It’s under control. Hold on.’ He got back on the phone with Galadriel. ‘I want to know if there were any cellular calls placed today from jet phones in our Ohio territory to southwestern Virginia. Cross-reference it with any known CIA or federal numbers in that area.’

‘I’m not sure I can trace aviation calls,’ Galadriel said. ‘I don’t know if the calls are handled differently.’

‘Just do it. Search for satellite calls as well.’

He heard the hammer of keystrokes. He waited long minutes, listening to fingers dance on a keyboard as she wormed her way into databases. Galadriel hummed tunelessly as she worked. ‘Yes. Just one, if I’m reading the data correctly. Went through a transmitter near Goinsville, Ohio. To a number keyed to North Hill Clinic, due east of Roanoke, at two forty-seven this afternoon.’

They had been to Goinsville.

Jargo closed his eyes, considered his narrowing options. You must construct every trap so that if the prey escape, they do not believe they were in a trap of your making. The hardest lesson he had ever learned, but the philosophy had kept the Deeps in the shadows, kept them alive, made them rich. He’d racked his brains all night and day today, trying to construct a way to lure Evan out into the open, lure him back into their world to simplify killing him while making Mitchell believe they were rescuing Evan.

But perhaps this wasn’t a disaster. Rather, his best chance yet to rid himself of every headache, every threat.

Goinsville. They might have found nothing; what was there to find? Nothing. His life there was a past no one remembered. But they’d found something. London was the next stop in the thread. He could not ignore the possibility that Evan knew far more than his father thought he did.

Certain times called for a slow cut; other times required a final slash across the throat.

It was time to be brutal.

He got back on the other phone. ‘I still need your help.’

‘What do you want?’ the voice asked.

‘Want. What a concept, want.’ Jargo knew the pain it would cause Mitchell. He wasn’t blind to suffering; pain was irrelevant. Jargo would suffer his own setback as well. But he had no choice. ‘I want a bomb.’