Deception (3 page)

Had the feeling about Frank been completely off base? Had it been only paranoia? Or had it been the opposite—too little, too late? Perhaps they would be waiting for her at the next port. And the following week her picture would be splashed across the front page of the
Tribune
, one of those grainy photos in which the criminal had a jacket draped over her head, trying to hide her face as men maneuvered her toward a waiting car.
FUGITIVE IN MEDICARE FRAUD CASE APPREHENDED
, the headline would read.
International manhunt ends in arrest.

But no—there was no international manhunt. As far as the company knew, there wasn't even any fraud. She'd picked up a feeling from Frank, nothing more. Just a feeling. It was probably all in her mind.

Until Vicky had left the message on her answering machine, however, Hannah had believed completely that her life was finished. She'd been sitting on her couch, head in her hands, trying to block the sinking sensation that had been coming on ever since her latest conversation with Frank. Then the phone had chimed, the machine had clicked on, and Vicky's voice had come streaming into the room:

Hannah, pick up.
The words tumbling over each other; Vicky bursting with pride and, below that, ripe self-satisfaction.
I know you're there. Pick up! Greg has received the most amazing honor. They're sending him to London to negotiate some multimillion-dollar contract. Maggie and I are going along. But it means we can't go on our vacation, and it's too late to get a refund
—
the flight leaves tomorrow. So how would you feel about a free trip to Venice? You've got some vacation days coming, don't you? And God knows you could stand to unwind a little. There's even an extra ticket, in case there's someone you want to bring along. Give me a call on my cell if you get this
—

Hannah had picked up.

Even then, she'd felt a trace of concern about the cruise. Run blindly to the other side of the planet? With almost no cash, with no prospects of anywhere to go after it was finished? Ridiculous. But the thought of just taking off, of leaving it all behind, had been too tempting to resist. Of course, it would be only temporary. Of course she intended to come back to her life …

So why are you traveling under Vicky's name
? the niggling part of her mind asked.
Why did you put a fresh tape in the answering machine before you left, and destroy the one with Vicky's message
?

Only to keep her options open, she answered. Only in case of the very worst.

Within twenty-four hours of Vicky's call, they'd been meeting at the airport, exchanging tickets and brochures, thanks and farewells.

She fingered the brochure thoughtfully, then set it down.

Next to the brochure was her address book. Next to the address book was the forged passport. And next to the passport, the paperback book she had borrowed from Renee Epstein—which wasn't even really hers. Suddenly, the overpacking seemed very far from indulgent. What if Frank was arrested, during the coming week, and she could never go back? What if this was all she had for the rest of her life?

Some collection, she thought dimly. Some collection for a Yale graduate who had once been the brightest rising young star at Associated Health Care of Illinois.

She reached for the passport and opened it. Her own face stared back from the glossy photo inside: pale, dark-eyed, unsmiling beneath a halo of dirty-blond hair. A very pretty young woman who could have been beautiful, as her mother had often said, if only she didn't look so serious. Looking at the photograph now, Hannah supposed she could see her mother's point. Her eyes were like black diamonds, hard and piercing.

But was this the face of an international fugitive? It was difficult to believe.

Even more difficult to believe was the fact that the passport had passed inspection. To Hannah's eyes, her work looked patently faked. The blue-and-red pattern behind the personal information was pixelated, the best she'd been able to do on her color printer at home in a rush. The signature
Vicky Ludlow
looked too tight, too carefully calculated, as if she had never signed it before—probably because she hadn't. Worst of all, she had chosen a date of issuance of April 2002; this should have been one of the new passports, the post—September 11th passports, with a digital image and secret enhancements. It wasn't. But the customs agent had been too busy looking at her legs to pay very close attention.

She wondered if evidence of the forged passport remained on the computer in her apartment. She had reformatted the entire hard drive. As far as she understood, any data on the drive would be impossible to recall. Yet she had the nagging feeling that traces remained, somewhere, and that a trained technician would be able to find them.

If, that was, worse came to worst.

There was always her father, of course. If worse did come to worst, then her father could possibly get this … little problem … taken care of.

Except she would rather die than swallow her pride and go begging to her father.

She set down the passport and picked up the address book. For a moment she was tempted to open it, to find Frank's number and demand some answers. But perhaps his phone was tapped and the FBI was sitting by it, waiting for her call. Or would it be U.S. Marshals? Or the Postal Inspection Service, or some office of the Inspector General?

She put down the address book, found two Xanax, and swallowed them. Her hand moved, without her realizing it, to stroke at the pale scars that crossed the inside of her left wrist. In times of stress, her hand tended to move toward those old scars unconsciously, instinctively.

Suddenly, she felt queasy again. A realization took her with almost physical force: Why, she was nearly penniless. Not since the days fresh out of college, following her first falling-out with her father, had she been nearly penniless. Even in the worst of her debt, she'd had credit on which to fall back. Now, if she truly had been caught, her credit would be as frozen as the stateside account. Now she needed to face reality: the prospect of going hungry, going cold.

No. Frank would not turn on her.

This was a vacation. Nothing more.

She lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes.

Then she thought of her plants, and her eyes opened. She hadn't made any allowances for the plants. It would have been an easy matter to ask Craig, the doorman at her building, to go up and water the plants once in a while. Craig did nothing all day except sit behind his desk and stare at a tremendous pile of books that he never quite got around to reading. He could have taken care of the plants easily. Yet she hadn't thought to ask. Now it was too late. By now, the plants were probably dying.

By now, they might even be dead.

At that moment, Hannah Gray almost envied them.

TWO

1.

Daisy smiled up from behind her desk, and held forth a small stack of message sheets.

Keyes glanced through them as he moved into his office.
WHILE YOU WERE OUT
, the sheets read. First was a message from Rachel. He crumpled it into a ball without reading any further. Let her talk to the goddamned lawyer, if she needed to talk to somebody. He was in no mood for her today.

The next few messages would demand his attention, but there was no great urgency. He set the sheets on the corner of his desk. The last, however, made him pause. It reported a phone call from Leonard. The time of the call was illegible. Below the time, Daisy had scrawled a single word:
Negative.

Negative
, Keyes thought.

His eyes, already swollen from fatigue, crinkled into thin slits.

He fell into the chair behind his desk, reached for the phone, and stabbed a button. Through the cracked-open door, he could hear the buzz from the next room. “Yes?” Daisy said, through the intercom.

“When did Leonard call? I can't read your handwriting.”

He heard the edge in his own voice, and tried to press it down. A moment passed. Paper rustled. Everything at Applied Data Systems was done in old-fashioned triplicate. Until he had started on this goddamned diet, that had never seemed quite so irritating.

“Three-fifty,” Daisy said. She had injected a hint of solemnity into her tone, sensing his mood. “He'll call back.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Just ‘
negative
.'”

“When he calls, put it through. No matter what.”

“All right,” she said.

He pressed the button again, and the speaker went dead.

Negative.

What in hell was that supposed to mean?

He touched an index finger to either temple, made small circles for a few moments—tight circles, circles within circles—then knuckled at his eyes, reached for the messages, and went to work.

Dick Bierman had called from INFOSEC with a question about Applied Data Systems's network's “ping response time,” whatever that was. Keyes scrawled an evasive answer on a Post-it note—Bierman was eternally digging, coming up with stupid questions in an effort to learn details about ADS's computer setup—then affixed it to the message sheet. The message sheet with the Post-it note attached went into the Out basket. Let Daisy handle Dick Bierman. Next was a message from Alex Petrov, in charge of the screen house at gamma site in Nevada. Petrov needed more water pumps, which meant he needed more money; yet the man was too impatient to go through the regular routine of paperwork. He would rather waste Keyes's valuable time. Keyes read the figure Petrov suggested, cut it in half, and slapped another Post-it with the new figure onto the sheet. Into the Out basket. Let Daisy handle all of it. He was too hungry to think straight. He was in no goddamned mood for any of it.

He stared at the next note for a full minute before his mind switched gears and he was able to comprehend it. The caterer's quote for his daughter's wedding—criminal, but they could get away with it, he supposed, thanks to their reputation. And they had cleverly waited until the last minute to provide the quote, leaving him in the lurch. Nothing but the best, he thought sourly, and crumpled the note into a ball.

Negative.

What the hell was that?

Perhaps he had made a mistake, in leaving Epstein up to Leonard. Perhaps he should have followed official channels …

No. This wasn't brain surgery. It was one elderly scientist who had run on the spur of the moment. According to Roger Ford, Leonard was more than capable of handling it.

Lunch would make him feel better.

“If Leonard calls,” he told Daisy on his way out, “patch it through to my cell.”

2.

There was a blackboard in the elevator.

In the goddamned
elevator
, Keyes thought; for Christ's sake. Did the eggheads truly need that? Was it really probable that inspiration would strike during the five or ten seconds they spent traveling between floors, and if they couldn't scrawl down some figures at that very moment they would lose the inspiration forever? Well, perhaps it was. The truth was that he didn't understand how their minds worked. Half of them couldn't drive a car, program a VCR, or do their own laundry—but those same men could recite
pi
to two hundred decimal places, right off the top of their heads.

The doors hissed open onto the compound's ground floor.

Through wide picture windows, the government-subsidized green of the lawn sloped off to distant chain-link fences. Guard posts were placed at regular intervals around the compound's fencing. To the naked eye, they looked fairly benign, like security checkpoints at any other major corporation. The local Vermonters could never know that each guard post contained three sentries armed with Ml34 machine guns—just as they could never know that Applied Data Systems's compound spread out underground for a half mile in every direction, buried a thousand yards beneath their houses, their woodsheds, and the graves they dug for their daughters' hamsters.

Keyes moved toward the cafeteria, nodding to various acquaintances, turning over possibilities for lunch in his mind. According to the diet, he was allowed only salad for lunch. But he had skipped breakfast, so perhaps he could cheat a little. And he had fit into his tuxedo just that morning, in preparation for the wedding; he felt as if he deserved some kind of reward. As long as he kept it to fifteen hundred calories a day—

The cell burred against his leg.

He immediately detoured in the direction of the nearest door and stepped out into a Japanese-style garden, where secretaries were sitting on benches and eating tuna-fish sandwiches under the midday sunshine. He moved past them, finding a quiet corner before bringing the phone to his ear.

“It's Leonard,” Daisy said. “I'm putting him through.”

Keyes listened to the hollow, underwater beeping of the long-distance connection being made; then to the hollow, underwater beeping of the encryption system kicking in. A gardener was doing something to a nearby fish pond, crouching and crab-walking around the perimeter. At last, something clicked. “Keyes?” piped a voice.

“Yes,” Keyes said, and then took the phone away from his ear as Leonard launched into a string of epithets.

It was always strange to hear that squeaking, little-boy voice delivering obscenities. Leonard was nearly thirty years old, but thanks to his condition—hypopituitarism, he had explained, with what had struck Keyes as an admirable lack of self-pity—he looked and sounded no older than a boy of twelve or thirteen.

Or perhaps Leonard had no reason for self-pity. If he hadn't “suffered” from his condition, after all, he would not have excelled at his current profession. Before Roger Ford had found him, Leonard had been part of a freak show with a traveling circus. The CIA was a definite step up.

Presently he wound down. Keyes put the phone back to his ear. “What happened?” he asked.

“I had the wrong cocksucking room. That's what happened.”