Deception (17 page)

Ten million
, she thought.
Fifty-fifty.

And that's conservative.

How far would five million dollars take her? Far enough to make none of this matter. Far enough to buy a second chance, for real.

Yet she had nothing to sell. Until a few moments before, she hadn't even seen the chicken-scratch in the back of the book. If she tried to play the role that this man had assigned her, whatever it was, she would surely be caught in a lie.

No
, she thought.
He doesn't know what it is, either.

But he thinks
I
know.

The man exhaled a feather of smoke. He reached for his window, cracked it open, and then looked back at her.

“A shower,” she said. “Fresh clothes. And a drink. Then we'll talk.”

3.

Keyes opened the folder on his blotter, then lifted his glass of scotch as he considered it.

According to the clock on his desk, it was not quite five o'clock. Usually he wouldn't be drinking so early. But his sense of time was utterly skewed—the flight out, the flight back, chasing the sun and running from it; hell, it was past midnight on his internal clock. And his hip, beneath the bandages, was throbbing. In three hours, he would need to meet Dick Bierman, to fend the man off, to bargain for more time. Lord knew he could use a little self-medication.

He took a sip, set the glass down, rubbed at his eyes, and focused on the file.

The file concerned a woman named Victoria Ludlow. It was in her name that passage had been booked aboard the ship by the mysterious woman who had been in league with Epstein. Someone would need to enter the woman's apartment in Chicago, he thought—assuming that the address under which she was listed did indeed exist. The agent would pick up prints to be sent to IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, in Clarksburg. At the same time, a lock-in trace would be put on the apartment's telephone. The device would plug extra voltage into the phone line; once a trace on an incoming call had started, severing the connection would not derail it. Listening devices would be planted, computer surveillance software installed.

Yet he didn't
have
an agent to send to Chicago. His resources at ADS already were stretched to the breaking point. And he was reluctant to call in yet another favor from Roger Ford. Instead of chasing down every lead separately, he needed to achieve some sort of synthesis—some understanding of what had really happened, and who had been involved, and why.

He closed the first file, moved it aside, and reached for the second. This dossier concerned Francis Dietz. Keyes did not know who had been responsible for the massacre they had found in the Western suburbs of Istanbul. It could have been the woman, or Dietz, or both. Perhaps they were working together. Perhaps this was much larger than he had assumed, and Epstein had been countless steps ahead …

… no. At worst, there were a few people involved. A few bad apples in the barrel. He would figure it out, and handle it, and put a stop to it. And that would be that.

His hip pulsed. He took more scotch into his mouth, rolled it around, and swallowed.

From the file, it was hard to know what to make of the man.

Six years in New York City, working with the Russians as part of COURTSHIP. Had he turned over, there? It seemed possible. Yet in the years since, he'd hardly lived an extravagant lifestyle. An unexceptional farm in Pennsylvania, biannual jobs for Roger Ford, and—according to the file—an ongoing affair with a married woman named Elizabeth Webster. If Dietz had turned over, he had not made a very profitable time of it.

Keyes took another sip of whiskey, and read the page again.

Perhaps there was no conspiracy, he thought. Perhaps Dietz had simply sensed an opportunity, when he'd found himself alone with the mysterious woman. This was the chance, he may have thought, to make his fortune. And then he would whisk away Elizabeth Webster—a lovely woman in her early forties, nice smile, dirty-blond hair, photographed here with her husband at a charity event in Washington—and they would start somewhere fresh. Fresh, and rich. Dietz probably already had cover identities done up for the both of them, ready to go at a moment's notice.

It was a possibility. Dietz had run an entire network in New York, engaging in a years-long dance with agents and double agents, diplomats and ambassadors. He had contacts there who might have been able to find a buyer for Epstein's calculations.

But where did the woman fit in?

He flipped to the next page: Dietz's psychological profile. Here were more possible clues, and no hard answers. Dietz was what the author of the report described as a “remote personality.” He had trouble creating and sustaining strong interpersonal relationships. Yet he had refused to seek treatment for this condition, because in Dietz's mind, his problems were not problems at all …

The intercom buzzed. Keyes reached out and found the button without raising his eyes. “Yes.”

“Dick Bierman is here.”

He looked up sharply. Bierman. Stopping by early. The man was playing games, he thought. God damn him. His timing couldn't have been worse.

Before answering, he raised his glass and took a long draft. His stomach was empty; the whiskey went straight to his head. Better.

“Send him in,” he said.

4.

Five hours later, Keyes came back into the darkened office.

He set down a stack of message sheets, leaned his cane against the wall, fell into the chair behind the desk, and poured himself another drink. Then he stared into space without lifting the glass. Whiskey couldn't do the trick anymore, he feared. To take off this edge, he would need something stronger. Angel dust. Heroin.

Bierman was playing for keeps.

Did the man know something about Epstein? Was that why he was making his move now—he had sensed vulnerability? Or was it just dumb luck?

Keyes had found himself making promises that he knew very well he couldn't keep. Bierman's timing, he'd lied, couldn't have been better. In one week a test would be staged at gamma site, and any fears about ADS's effectiveness—and, by extension, about Keyes—would be put to rest. Representatives from INFOSEC, DARPA, and LANL all would be included. And they would be pleased by what they saw, Keyes had promised. It would exceed their grandest expectations. For what they would see would be nothing less than Critical Achievement Three.

Bierman had looked disappointed at the news. Here he'd thought he was within days of ousting Keyes, of grabbing the reins for himself. On the surface, of course, he had not betrayed his disappointment. He had expressed his genuine pleasure at the good news. Maybe he had realized that Keyes was making promises he couldn't keep. Maybe the pleasure had not been entirely feigned.

Acronyms swirled through his head. ADS, DIA, DARPA. IAFIS, INFOSEC. LANL.

FUBAR.

He raised the glass, drained it, and reached for the bottle.

One week, he thought. What were the chances that Greenwich and his banks of computers would reproduce the formula before then? Slim to none.

He was fucked.

The fault was Epstein's. And Dietz's. And the woman's—Victoria Ludlow's. It could not have been chance, he thought. They were all in it together, somehow. A conspiracy was allied against him. All these forces arrayed against one man—really, against half a man. He was far out of his league.

He could envision the forces that threatened him: entwined, impenetrably knotted. All at once, he found himself remembering a report Jeremy had done for his biology class perhaps a year before his death. The report had horrified Rachel to no end. But Jeremy had been pleased by it—by the clear plastic binder, by the fancy cover page, and most of all by the grisly subject matter. And so Keyes had been pleased by it as well. For he and Jeremy had understood each other, always, in a way that Rachel could never quite get.

The report had concerned a natural phenomenon called a rat king.

Keyes remembered reading it in his living room chair, with Jeremy squirming in his lap. Jeremy had been too big to sit in his lap by then, but on that evening he had done it, so that he could appreciate the report along with his father. Since the fourteenth century, according to the report, sixty rat kings had been reported across Europe and America, most recently in 1963. Science was unable to provide an explanation for the occurrence, which involved groups of rats—in one authenticated case, as many as thirty-two—becoming tangled up together. The rats' tails were not only knotted together but actually
grew
together, because the rats broke the bones in their tails before entwining themselves. When the bones healed, the rats had become subsumed by a organism larger than themselves. The rat king.

Was that what he faced now? Something so foul, so formidable?

The rat king
, Jeremy had concluded,
is as much a mystery to modern scientists as it was to medieval alchemists.

Of course it was. Science could go only so far. There were deeper truths than those honored by science.

But Keyes hadn't the heart to follow that thought to its conclusion. He had been fooling himself, that he could keep on top of all of this. The truth was, he was fucked. The game was over.

Simplify
, he thought.
Make it manageable.

Assume that there was no conspiracy. Push aside the panic; push aside the anxiety; focus. Assume that his earlier idea had been correct, and Dietz was only seizing a chance that had suddenly, unexpectedly, presented itself. If that theory was right, it might mean that Epstein had provided the woman—whoever she was—with a material copy of his work. That would be what had tempted Dietz; something concrete, substantial.

He seized on this thought. Something concrete would be just what the doctor ordered.

Keyes needed it for himself. And he needed it now.

Presently he reached for the message sheets and browsed through them. Rachel had called again. His lawyer had called. And there was a bit of sad news, scrawled in Daisy's semilegible handwriting. Henry Chen, it seemed, had suffered an unfortunate accident. His brakes had failed and his Subaru had gone off an embankment, not thirty miles from the spot where Keyes sat right now. Chen was in critical condition at a local hospital. His prognosis was not good.

He moved the sheets aside.

One week
, he thought.

In the back of his mind was the beginning of an idea.

As he turned the idea over, he brightened a bit. It was not a bad idea at all. In fact, it might have been the best idea he'd had in some time.

Dietz had stolen the equations for himself—working with or without the woman. And so perhaps Keyes could find a reason to call in the DIA, even at this late stage in the game. If not for Dietz's betrayal, he would suggest, there would be no problem. But Dietz had gone bad, and now DIA needed to help him clean up the mess. In all likelihood Dietz would go to New York, trying to sell his secrets to an old associate. And Keyes had, in the file sitting on the desk, information concerning all the contacts Dietz had made during his days with COURTSHIP. What he didn't have was the manpower to follow through, to place them all under surveillance.

So he would go to the DIA, after all. And the DIA would help him press the investigation. He would not ask too much; he would not attract undue attention. A small handful of agents, to keep Dietz's contacts under watch. For the rest of it, Keyes would make do with himself and Leonard. Leonard would remain stationed in Istanbul, ready to follow the man's trail if they caught it. Keyes himself would visit the woman's apartment in Chicago and conduct an inspection.

You'll snap
, something inside him warned.

If you try to juggle all this, you'll snap. Throw in the towel. Go to Bierman. Tell the truth.

No. They would find Dietz's trail; they would retrieve Epstein's work. And the experiment would go ahead, in one week's time. The barbarians at the gate would be silenced once and for all.

It was too bad about Chen. The man had a wife, a family. But he had not been a team player.

Epstein didn't think you'd listen
, Chen had said,
if he tried to put the brakes on.

He'd been right about that. Because Keyes had vision. Keyes was a risk taker.
The rat king is as much a mystery to modern scientists as it was to medieval alchemists.
Science, of course, could only take them so far.

In one week, they would move ahead to Critical Achievement Three. Then Keyes would be vindicated, if nothing went wrong.

And if something
did
go wrong, he supposed he wouldn't be around for very long to see it. If Epstein's fears turned out to be justified, then the gravitational singularity would sink through the floor of the lab, fall to the center of the earth, and commence absorbing matter. Before it was finished, the orbit now followed by earth would be occupied by only a black hole.

But there would be a bright side, he thought sourly. There would be an end to pain.

His eyes moved to the photograph of Jeremy on the desk. An end to pain, he thought again.

He lifted the glass, then lowered it. He needed to get himself to Chicago. Before doing that, he would visit Casper and outfit himself with the necessary equipment. Despite everything, he could handle it. He would not snap.

He pushed the glass aside and reached for the intercom.

SIXTEEN

1.

When Hannah came out of the bathroom, the man was nowhere to be seen.

Her mouth made a funny little shape. She turned in a slow circle, standing in the center of the well-appointed suite and holding the towel closed at her breasts with one hand. There was no sign of the man, no note—and nothing on the door or the window that would prevent her from getting out of there.

But her purse, she noticed, also was gone.

For a few seconds, she considered leaving anyway. It would be an easy matter to find the American embassy, turn herself in, and give up on second chances. But the suite was fifteen stories up; the window offered no help. And if she was to take the elevator, she might run into the man in the hallway or the lobby.