Carla Neggers: The Mist

At first, Lizzie had believed he was hanging out with major drug traffickers because he was naïve, but she’d learned otherwise. She now suspected that, all along, Norman had calculated that if he were caught, prosecutors would want his friends in the drug cartels more than they wanted him, the financial genius who’d helped them with their money. He was rarely impulsive, and he knew how to leverage himself and manage risk.

Lizzie had been at his ranch in Montana in late June when he’d realized federal agents were about to arrest him. He was a portly, bland-looking forty-year-old man who’d never married, and never would marry. Shocked and livid, he’d turned to her. “I’ve been betrayed.”

He’d meant Simon Cahill, not her. Norman had hired Simon the previous summer to help him plan and execute his high-risk adventures. He’d known Simon had just left the FBI and therefore might not be willing to look the other way if he discovered his client was involved in illegal activities, especially with major drug traffickers.

Turned out there was nothing “ex” FBI about Simon.

In those tense hours before his arrest, Norman hadn’t looked at himself and acknowledged he’d at least been unwise to cozy up to criminals. Instead, he’d railed against those who had wronged him. Other than a few members of his household staff, Lizzie had been the only one with him. He had never had a serious romantic relationship that she knew of-and certainly not with her. The people in his life-family, friends, staff, colleagues-were planets circling his sun.

The rules just didn’t apply to Norman Estabrook. He’d gone to Harvard on scholarship, started working at a respected, established hedge fund right after graduating, then launched his own fund at twenty-seven. By forty, he was worth several billion dollars and able to take a less active role in his funds.

Lizzie had paced with him in front of the tall windows overlooking his sprawling ranch and the big western sky and tried to talk him into calling his attorneys and cooperating with authorities. But if she’d learned anything about Norman in the past year, it was that he did what he wanted to do. Most people about to be handcuffed and read their rights wouldn’t get on the phone and threaten an FBI agent and his boss, but Norman, as he’d often pointed out, wasn’t most people.

She’d watched his hatred and determination mount as he’d confronted the reality that Simon-the man he’d entrusted with his life-was actually an undercover federal agent.

That John March had won.

Retreating from the magnificent view, he had picked up the phone.

“Don’t, Norman,” Lizzie had said.

She wasn’t even sure he’d heard her. Spittle at the corners of his mouth, his eyes gleaming with rage, he’d called Simon in Boston and delivered his threat.

“You’re dead. Dead, dead, dead. First I kill John March. Then I kill you.”

Lizzie remembered staring out at the aspens, so green against the clear blue sky, and thinking she, too, would be dead, dead, dead if Norman figured out that for the better part of a year she’d been passing information about him anonymously to the FBI. Until his arrest, she hadn’t known if the FBI was taking her information seriously and had Norman ’s activities under investigation. She certainly hadn’t known they had an undercover agent in position.

They didn’t know about her, either. No one did.

Even with FBI agents spilling onto Norman ’s ranch-even when they’d interviewed her-Lizzie had kept quiet about her role. When she decided to head to Ireland, she’d taken steps to maintain her secret. Hence, the backpack, walking shoes and tale about hiking the Beara Way. Let Simon think she was stopping in on him and Keira while she was in the area. Get him talking about Norman, their mutual ex-friend, and her belief that he already had people in position to help him when he’d called Simon from his ranch that day. That he was serious and had at least the beginnings of a plan in place, and the FBI should get it out of him. For the past two months, she’d expected “conspiracy to commit murder” to be added to the list of charges against him. The FBI had his threat against its director and one of its agents on tape. Surely they’d be investigating whether he could carry it out.

Maybe they were, but here she was, her jacket flapping in the stubborn Irish wind and Simon Cahill and John March across the Atlantic in Boston. Lizzie hoped they were consulting on how to keep Norman in custody.

She came to a track that wound up into the hills and noticed fresh paw prints in the soft, wet dirt. Assuming they belonged to the springer spaniel, she followed them up the steep track. She’d go a little ways, then head back to her car. She couldn’t fly to Boston tonight. She could go back to Dublin or find a local bed-and-breakfast. She needed sleep, food and information on Norman in Montana and Simon and March in Boston.

The dirt track curved and leveled off brief ly at a hand-painted Beware of Bull sign nailed to a gate post. Lizzie paused and gazed out across the open pasture, where the distinctive silhouette of a prehistoric stone circle was outlined against the dark clouds.

Eddie’s dog leaped from behind a large boulder, startling her. “There you are,” she called to him, laughing at her reaction. “Hold on. I’m coming.”

Not waiting this time, the dog pivoted and bounded up past scrubby junipers and over clumps of gray rocks toward the circle.

He obviously knew he had her.

Lizzie climbed over the barbed-wire fence and dropped onto the wet grass on the other side, dodging a sodden cow patty. Carefully avoiding more cow manure, she made her way across the rough, uneven ground of the pasture. In a sudden blur, the dog streaked back toward the fence and the dirt track, deserting her. She shrugged and decided to continue on to the stone circle, one of more than a hundred of the megalithic monuments in West Cork and south Kerry alone. As she came closer, she jumped from one rock to another, skirting a patch of mud. She entered the circle between two of the tall, gray boulders that had occupied their spots for thousands of years.

A breeze whistled softly up from the bay.

Lizzie counted eight heavy standing stones of different heights that formed the outer edge of the circle. A ninth had toppled over, and there was a spot for a missing tenth stone. A low, flat-topped slab that looked as if it had been turned on its side-the axis stone-made a total of eleven.

Below her, past green, rolling fields, the harbor was gray and churning with the last of the storm. She stood very still, absorbing the atmosphere. She had never been to a place so eerie, so strangely quiet. The ancients had chosen an alluring location for their stone circle, whatever its original purpose.

“I can understand how people see fairies here,” she whispered to herself.

A shuffling sound drew her attention, and she turned just as a fat, brown cow edged slowly along the thick junipers outside the circle.

She felt uneasy, nervous even, and didn’t know why.

A presence, she decided.

Another cow? The dog?

Was the old farmer out there in the shadows and fog? She remembered his strange words.

“You’ll be wanting to go to the stone circle.”

“For what?”

“For what you’re looking for, dearie.”

Lizzie noticed a movement in a small cluster of trees and took a shallow breath, listening, squinting toward the hills as she eased her pack off her shoulder.

Something-someone-was out there.

She wasn’t alone.

Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland

7:10 p.m., IST

August 25

As she eased back between the two tall boulders, Lizzie felt her right foot sink deep into a low spot. She ignored the shock of water and mud oozing into her socks and placed a palm on one of the cool, wet stones.