Andrew Gross - The Blue Zone

“Least now I guess we have an idea what Maggie Seymour may have divulged.” Booth rolled his eyes.

Cavetti knew these people. The woman’s husband was more than just an asset in an investigation. Cavetti had placed him in his current identity twenty years ago. He’d watched him build a new life. Get married.

He felt responsible.

“What makes it worse is, I’m pretty sure the poor woman didn’t even know.” Cavetti sighed disgustedly. “She had no idea who her husband really was.” He handed back the photos. “Any leads?”

“Dry-cleaning truck,” Booth replied. “A woman across the street said one was parked in front of the house around the TOD last night. We found it at a closed water-treatment plant down the hill. The delivery kid took two in the chest. He was thrown in with the dress shirts and sheets. That totals five. Not including the pooch. So tell me”-the FBI man looked around-“who kills like this?”

Cavetti didn’t reply. They both knew the answer. The Russian mob. The drug cartels. Colombians.

“This Raab fellow.” Booth shook his head. “You starting to get the feeling we may have been duped?”

This wasn’t just Raab. Cavetti was sure. Raab wasn’t a killer. At least, not like this. Still, Raab led to Margaret Seymour. Maggie led to Mercado. Mercado led here.

Raab and Mercado.

Cavetti suddenly had a premonition about who might be next.

He handed the photos back to Booth. “You know how to reach me. Let me know if anything turns up.”

The FBI man smiled. “Seen enough? Where you headed?” he called after him.

“Blue Zone,” Cavetti answered. “That’s where the hell everyone else seems to be, right?”

Kate listened to the whoosh of a late-night car driving in the rain on the street. The glow of the streetlamp outside her bedroom window had never seemed quite so bright. Her eyes were open. The clock on the table next to her bed read 3:10 A.M.

She couldn’t sleep.

Mercado’s question kept reverberating in her head. “ The gate is open, Kate. Do you want to walk through?”

How could she deny it any longer?

Her father had been part of the Mercados. It had been his family, not just his brotherhood but his family-his real family-from birth. Fraternidad. His own father had been the head of it. He had kept this concealed from those he loved. If he ever really did love us. Now he was free to go after his brother for betraying him. Kate’s mother was dead. Her brother and sister were in hiding.

This kind of truth didn’t set anyone free.

Her mind kept coming back to the picture of the dark European-looking woman holding her infant son. Kate’s grandmother. They had come here from Colombia, not Spain. “ For years, he has been my protector, ” Mercado had said of her grandfather. The grandfather she thought had died in Spain decades ago. Now he had died. The old commitments were gone. It had sent her father on a journey of vengeance and reprisal, so vile, so unbelievable, that every time she thought about it, it felt like a fist in her abdomen. Their family had been sacrificed so her father could get inside the program.

Where his brother had been in hiding for twenty years.

Kate turned away from the window. What was it Margaret Seymour had told them? “ I’m sort of a specialist in the Mercados. ”

They had the same case agent.

Mercado’s story was true, Kate understood, no matter how it hurt to accept it. No matter how it made the past twenty years of their lives seem like a flimsy façade.

She saw it in his face. He knew about Rosa. He knew Kate’s true name. He had the matching half of the broken sun. Her father was alive. It no longer made Kate feel elated; it made her feel sick. She knew that it all had to be true.

We’re your family, Ben, not them. You have to choose.

Now she knew the meaning of those words. Su deber. His duty. What hurt as much as anything was that he had been lying to her all these years. To them all.

Kate sat up, her nightshirt cold with sweat. Next to her, Greg stirred. She didn’t know anymore what was right to do. Take everything she knew to Cavetti. The haunting picture she’d found-Ben and Mercado. What Howard had divulged. How her father had brought himself down. All that the old man had told her in the park.

Why?

WITSEC had never played straight with her. All along, they’d been protecting Mercado. All along, they knew his secret.

It was her father they were desperate to find.

At some point Kate drifted off to sleep-brief, fitful. She had a dream. Her father was in the gazebo where she first told him she wouldn’t be coming into the program. He seemed so distant there, so beaten. So small. His touch was tremulous and afraid.

When he turned to her, there was a malevolent glimmer in his eyes.

Kate’s eyes flashed open. The clock read 4:20. Her pillow was drenched with sweat. Her heart was beating like mad.

She had misjudged it, his reaction.

All along, Kate had thought it was simply shame pouring out. That was why he couldn’t look at her. A shame he’d never had to bear before. But that wasn’t what was on his face.

It was the face of the man from her flashback on the train. A nightmare from her childhood. Someone she’d never seen before. With his hand gripping her mother’s arm. A foreign glimmer in his eye.

His fist raised!

Who shot up our house that night? Kate suddenly asked herself. Who killed Mom? Did Kate really want to walk through that gate?

Why are you in that picture, Dad?

Across the bed, Greg reached in the darkness, fumbling for her.

She wrapped herself in his arms and nestled close to him. He murmured, “Is everything all right?”

She shook her head in tears on the pillow. “ No .”

She didn’t know what to trust anymore . “You’ll always be there for me, Greg? Right? I can always trust you.”

“Of course you can, pooch.” He tightened his arms around her.

“No, I need to hear you say it, Greg. I know it’s dumb, but just this once, please. …”

“You can trust me, Kate,” he said softly.

She closed her eyes.

“Whatever happens, baby, you always have me.”

The next day Kate went back to work. It had been almost a month. With both her and Tina out of the lab, a lot of things had been put on hold. Kate deflected the inevitable questions as best she could. She said her mother had been sick. She’d dislocated her shoulder in a fall. But it was good to be back. It just felt a little strange.

Without Tina.

Packer had brought in a new researcher to fill Tina’s place. He was an Indian Ph.D. candidate named Sunil, who had studied cellular physics at Cambridge.

He seemed nice enough, though at first Kate knew she was probably a little cool to him. It was like saying that Tina was never coming back, and Kate didn’t want to feel that way. Packer put him on the project Tina had been working on. He wasn’t yet up to speed.

It was just a little weird, not having her around. Work had to go on, though.

Kate came back to a mountain of things to catch up on. There was tons of data to archive, an updated project-status report to complete, lots of government forms to fill out. Packer was applying to the National Science Foundation for a new grant.

Her shoulder was still too stiff to handle some of her old assignments. Kate could only imagine dropping a petri dish and sending a valuable systemic stem-cell line crashing onto the floor in a mess.

But at some point she couldn’t hold back. She put the paperwork aside.