Chris Mooney - World Without End

Last night, before going to the hotel, Conway had stopped by Booker's condo in Beacon Hill to see the kids. He scanned the photographs hung on the various walls and asked if Renee Kaufmann was in any of them.

Booker had pointed to a woman with straight, long-blond hair and a magnetic Julia Roberts kind of smile.

Conway didn't see her on the first floor, so he moved past a surly Boston cop who was watching a group of teenagers inside the gift shop.

Conway walked up the ramp, the panels glowing with color pictures and facts about the various fish inside the tank, the air dark and warm and packed with the close, humid smell of salt and dead seaweed. When the ramp ended at a stairwell with a sign that said Caribbean Coral Reef, he walked up the last set of steps. At the top, he saw a mother holding a boy of about five in her arms, so he could look down into the tank. An enormous turtle broke against the surface and submerged in a cone of bubbles. Against the far wall was a blue neon strip molded into several waves or shark fins, Conway couldn't tell which.

"Mommy, where are the sharks?" the boy asked, excited.

"They're swimming with the other fishes, see?" The woman held the boy slightly over the tank.

"The man will be upstairs in twenty minutes and he'll tell you all about them. Then maybe we can watch the diver feed them."

"Stephen?" a woman whispered.

Conway turned around. Renee Kaufmann stood on the steps that led up to an employee's-only area. With her arms wrapped around her body as if chilled, she walked over to him. She was petite, about five-five, and thin, one of those girls who probably had a naturally high metabolism and never had to diet. She wore a long tan-colored winter coat and blue knit hat that covered her ears and hair.

"I recognized you from John's pictures." Renee licked her cracked lips, her throat working as she swallowed. The skin beneath her round blue eyes was puffed and bruised from lack of sleep. She leaned in closer, and Conway could smell an unwashed odor rise up from her clothes.

"Did you come here alone?" she whispered.

"I did. No one followed me. How did you get in here?"

"A friend who works here. You didn't tell anyone about me, did you? I mean, I know Booker has a background in this sort of thing, but I figured I don't know what I figured. Maybe I should have called him first. I don't know."

"Relax. It's okay."

Renee crimped her lips. She took a deep breath and then said, "Did you go to the funeral?"

"Yes. Yes, I did. Booker handled everything."

"He always does." She looked exhausted and angry and terrified all at once.

"I wanted to call Book he's the best one to handle this sort of thing, he's in the business and he knows people, he helped John when he got busted on that DWI, but after what I saw, what they did to John…"

Renee's voice broke, her eyes growing wet as she covered her mouth with her gloved hand to stifle her cries.

"I didn't want to put Book in danger. He has a wife and kids, and if something happened to them I couldn't live with that. But you're involved. They're after you."

"Let's go over here and talk." Conway touched her arm and ushered her over to the corner, away from the mother who was watching them.

"Who's after me?"

Renee looked over her shoulder, her eyes scanning the area for the enemies who could at any moment now descend on her, and then looked back at him.

"One of them was called Owen," she said.

"Owen what?"

"Just Owen. I was in Amsterdam on business, at a conference, and John wanted to test out this video conferencing software he just bought. He thought it would be a good way to keep in touch." Renee dabbed at her eyes.

"I was in my hotel room, on my laptop, talking to him when the doorbell rang. John went to answer it and when he came back, the video went fuzzy. I couldn't see or hear anything."

"Tell me what you saw."

"After John…" The words came out in a sputter, wet, clogged by her grief.

"After he collapsed, the man reached down and picked something up off the floor. After that I could see and hear everything."

A jamming unit.

"They wanted to talk to John about some phone call you made to him from inside some lab," Renee said.

"Is that true?"

Conway nodded and felt the sadness and guilt he had experienced at the grave site earlier this morning return, blossoming again inside his heart.

"What did this man look like?" he asked.

"Tall, with gray hair and blue eyes. Nice clothes."

"Was his name Raymond Bouchard?"

"They never said."

Could be Raymond, could be Angel Eyes. Conway placed his elbows against the guardrail and leaned forward so he could watch the front entrance. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the tears running down Renee's cheeks.

"What did John tell him?" Conway asked.

"Something about a friend of yours saying the words mittens and cat food."

If that was true if Angel Eyes was the one inside the condo then he already knew the decryption code. Unless those -words didn't -work.

Conway turned his head back to Renee.

"You're sure about all of this?"

"I've watched the video over and over again, those were the words John said you used."

"Wait. What do you mean you watched the video?"

"I recorded it."

"That's the evidence you were talking about?"

Renee nodded. Conway couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"It was an accident," she said.

"I didn't know how to use the software. It was defaulted to record."

"You're telling me you have the whole thing taped?"

"I packed up my laptop and luckily grabbed a flight leaving Amsterdam a hour later. A friend drove me to the airport. I had her buy me the ticket. I flew under her name."

"You have the tape on you now?"

"I burned it onto a CD. John has a safety deposit box at the Eastern Bank, on Broadway in Lynn. Last year, when my apartment got broken into, he put me on the list so I could use it. I have all my mother's jewelry stored inside there."

Renee Kaufmann had recorded everything and now it was waiting inside a safety deposit box in Lynn.

"I feel like I'm living inside a nightmare," she said, her voice quiet, racked with sobs.

"Every person who looks at me, I think they're going to grab me right there and I feel like screaming. I can't go to my apartment. That's the first place they think I'll go, and I don't want to stay with friends, I'm sure they're being watched. I've been living on the street for days, using what cash I have left to check in and out of cheap motels. I can't sleep and I'm running out of money and I don't know who to turn to."

"You don't have to run anymore. I can protect you."

"How? How are you going to protect me?"

"I have people waiting for you outside."

"Boston cops? The FBI? I won't be safe with any of them, Stephen, and neither will you."

"These people are from the CIA."

She looked at him, dumbfounded.

"You can trust them," Conway said.

Renee's puffy eyes narrowed, her mouth hanging open.

"You're with the CIA?"

"I'll explain this to you later, but right now we need to get you out of here," Conway said. He reached out and grabbed her arm.

She looked over his shoulder and her eyes grew wide. She stumbled backward and fell against the floor. Conway turned around and stood face to face with the man from Dixon's torture video, the animal who had raped Pasha Romanov as a young girl: the massive, intimidating figure of Misha Ronkil.

"Don't try and be a fucking hero," Misha said, and raised a nine-millimeter Beretta with an attached silencer and pointed it at Con-way's face.

"Keep your mouth shut and your voice down and everyone's going to come out of this golden."

Behind Misha, on the steps leading up to the tank, Conway saw two hulking figures dressed as Boston cops. Only they weren't cops; one of them came toward Misha while the other remained on the steps, telling people who wanted to come up to the tank that it was closed for the moment. The advancing cop was bloated with steroids and had a crewcut.