Face of Betrayal (33 page)

Our book agents were absolutely instrumental from inception to execution of this book . . . Wendy Schmalz of the Wendy Schmalz Agency and Todd Shuster and Lane Zachary of Zachary, Shuster, Harmsworth Literary & Entertainment Agency found the perfect home at Thomas Nelson for Allison, Nicole, and Cassidy. Allen Arnold, senior vice president and publisher, got the idea right away . . . as did Ami McConnell, senior acquisitions editor, who provided expert guidance. L.B. Norton helped us finetune the plot and the prose. And the enthusiasm of Jennifer Deshler, Natalie Hanemann, Becky Monds, Mark Ross, Katie Schroder, and the other good folks at Thomas Nelson is both infectious and inspiring. Thank you.

If you enjoyed
Face of Betrayal
, you’ll love the next novel in the
Triple Threat Series
:

HAND OF FATE

AVAILABLE APRIL 2010

Chapter 1

KNWS RADIO STUDIO

February 7

J
im Fate bounced on the toes of his black Salvatore Ferragamo loafers. He liked to work on his feet. Listeners could hear in your voice if you were sitting down, could detect the lack of energy. He leaned forward, his lips nearly touching the silver mesh of the mike.

“Global warming may well be real. But there’s no evidence that the main cause is carbon emissions. This is a natural cycle that’s been occurring long before mankind built the first combustion engine. Carbon dioxide emissions play, at most, a minor role. And we
need
energy, people. It’s what makes America great. Economies need energy to grow. How are people going to get to work if they can’t afford gasoline? We can’t all get to work by bicycle. For the past umpteen years, environmental extremists have driving energy policy in this country, saying no to everything. Well now the chickens have come to roost.”

“So what are you suggesting, Jim?” Victoria Hanawa asked. She sat on a high stool on the other side of the U-shaped table, her back to the glass wall that separated the radio studio from the screener’s booth. To Jim’s right was the control room, sometimes called the news tank, where the board operator worked his bank of equipment and then was joined at the top and the bottom of the hour by one or more local reporters. “Are you saying we can just drill our way out?”

“What I’m saying, Victoria, is that we’re in a situation now where we’re buying too much energy from foreign dictatorships. We ought to be producing a lot more energy here at home.”

While he spoke, Jim eyed one of the two screens in front of him. One displayed the show schedule. It was also hooked up to the Internet so he could look up points on the fly. The other screen showed listeners holding for their chance to talk. On it, Chris, the call screener, had listed the name, town, and point of view of each caller. Three people were still on the list, meaning they would hold over the upcoming break. As Jim spoke, he saw a fourth caller and then a fifth join the queue.

“What we need is to open up the coast to drilling, and open up the Rocky Mountains for shale oil. The Rocky Mountains have three times the amount of oil that the Saudis have in their entire reserve. And yet it’s currently illegal for Americans to get oil from American territory in the Atlantic, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, northern Alaska. We should have been drilling in ANWR fifteen, twenty years ago. I mean, it’s insane.”

“What about the wilderness?” Victoria said. “What about the caribou?”

“If the caribou don’t like it, we’ll relocate them.”

Victoria’s mouth started to form an answer, but it was time for the top of the hour break, and he pointed at the clock and then made a motion with his hands like he was snapping a stick.

Jim said, “And you’ve been listening to
The Hand of Fate.
We’re going to take a quick break for a news, traffic, and weather update. But before we go, I want to read you the email from The Nut of the Day: ‘Jim—you are a fat, ugly, liar who resembles the hind-end of a poodle. Signed, Mickey Mouse.’”

He laughed. “Fat? Maybe. Ugly? Well, I can’t help that. I can’t even help the hind-end of a poodle business, although I think that’s going a bit far. But a liar? No, my friend, that’s one thing I am not. Come on, all you listeners who just tune in because you can’t stand me, you are going to have to get a little more creative than that if you want to win the NOD award. And for the rest of you, when we come back, we’ll be opening up the lines for more of your calls.” He pushed back the mike on its black telescoping arm.

As the first notes of the newscast jingle sounded in his padded black headphones, he pulled them down around his neck. He and Victoria now had six minutes to themselves, before the second and final hour of
The Hand of Fate
was broadcast.

“I’m going to get some tea,” Victoria said without meeting his eyes. Jim nodded. In the last week, there had been a strained civility between them when they were off mike. On air, though, they still had chemistry. Even if lately it had been the kind of chemistry you got when you mixed together the wrong chemicals in your junior scientist kit.

Everything was different on air. Jim was more indignant and mocking than he ever was in real life. Victoria made vaguely dirty jokes that she wouldn’t tolerate hearing off mike. And on air, they usually got along great, bantering and feeding each other lines.

Victoria grabbed her mug and stood up. Even though she was half-Japanese, Victoria was five foot ten, with legs that went on forever. “Oh, this was in my box this morning, but it’s really yours,” she said, handing him a padded envelope from a publisher.

When she pushed open the heavy door to the screening room, the weather strip on the bottom made a sucking sound. For a minute, Jim could hear Chris talking to Willow and Aaron in the screener’s booth. Then the door closed with a snick—there were magnets on the door and frame—and Jim was left in the silent bubble of the radio studio. The walls and ceiling were covered with blue textured soundproofing material that resembled the loop side of Velcro.

Jim grabbed the first piece of mail from his inbox and slit it with a letter opener. He scanned the note inside.
Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday, would love to have a signed photo, yada yada.

Happy Birthday, Larry!
he scrawled on a black and white head shot he pulled from dozens kept in a file folder.
Your friend, Jim Fate.
Paper clipping the envelope and letter to the photo, he put them off to the side for Willow to deal with. Three more photo requests, each of which took about twenty seconds to deal with. Jim had signed his name so many times in the last couple of years that it should have been routine, but he still got a secret thrill each time he did it.

There were less than three minutes left, so he decided to open the package from the publisher. He liked books about true crime, politics, or culture—with authors he might be able to book on the show.

Fans also liked to send him things. All kinds of things. Party invitations. A bikini, once. Death threats. Naked Polaroids of themselves. Marriage proposals. T-shirts. In honor of the show’s name, he had gotten more than a dozen hands made of wood, plastic, and metal. Poems. Pressed flowers. Brownies. He had made enough enemies that he never ate any food from a fan, even if was still sealed in a package. He figured that a determined person might still be able to inject something toxic through layers of plastic and cardboard. But Jim also liked to handle his own mail, just in case it contained items of a more, say,
personal
nature.

Jim pulled the red string tab on the envelope. It got stuck half way through and he had to give it an extra hard tug. There was an odd hissing sound as a paperback—
Talk Radio—
fell onto his lap
.
A book of a play turned into a movie—both based on the true-life killing of talk show host Alan Berg, gunned down in his own driveway.

What the?

Jim never got to finish the thought. Because the red string had been connected to a small canister of gas hidden in the envelope—and it sprayed directly into his face.

He gasped in surprise. With just that first breath, Jim knew something was terribly wrong. He couldn’t see the gas, couldn’t smell it, but he could feel the damp fog coat the inside of his nose and throat. His eyelids sank to half-mast. With an effort, he opened them wider.

He swept the package away. It landed behind him, in the far corner of the studio.

Whatever it was, it was in the air. So he shouldn’t breathe. He clamped his lips together and scrambled to his feet, yanking off the headphones. The whole time, Jim was thinking about what had happened in Seattle. Three weeks earlier, someone had spilled liquid sarin on the third floor of a 15-story downtown office building. Fifty-eight people had died, including an unidentified, Middle Eastern-looking male dressed in a janitor’s uniform. Was he a terrorist? Had he been in the process of putting the sarin into the ventilation system and then literally taken a wrong step? No one knew. Authorities had still not identified the culprit, and no one had claimed responsibility. But up and down the west coast and across the nation, people were on a heightened state of alert.

And now it was happening again.

His chest already started to ache. Jim looked out through the thick glass wall into the control room on his right. Greg, the board operator, was turned away from the glass, gobbling a Payday bar, watching his banks of equipment, ready to press the buttons for commercials and national feeds. Bob, the reporter, had his back to Jim, his head down as he reviewed his copy for the local segment of the news. In the call screener’s room directly in front of Jim, Aaron, the program director, talked rapidly to Chris and Willow, waving his hands for emphasis. None of them had seen what was happening. Jim was unnoticed, sealed away in his bubble.

He forced himself to concentrate. He had to get some air, some fresh air. But if he staggered out to the screener’s room, would the air there be enough to dilute what he had already breathed in? Would it be enough to clear the sarin from his lungs, from his body?

Would it be enough to save him?

But once the door was open, what would happen to the people out there? Chris, Willow, Aaron and the rest? He thought of the firefighters who had died when they responded to the Seattle attack. Would invisible tendrils of poison snake out to the dozens of people who worked at the station, the hundreds who worked in the building? The people in the control room, with its own soundproofing, might be safe if they kept their door closed. For a while, anyway. Until it got into the air ducts. Some of the people who died in Seattle had been nowhere near the original release of the gas. If Jim tried to escape, then everyone out there might die, too.

Die too.
The words echoed in his head. Jim realized that he
was
dying, that he had been dying from the moment he first sucked in his breath in surprise. He had the innate sense of timing that you developed working in radio. It had been, he thought, somewhere between fifteen and twenty seconds since the gas sprayed into his face. No more.

Every morning, Jim swam two miles at the MAC club. He could hold his breath for more than two minutes. The magician on Oprah had done it for, what? Seventeen minutes, wasn’t that it? Jim couldn’t hold his breath for that long, but now that he had to, he was sure he could hold it longer than two minutes. Maybe a lot longer. The first responders could surely get him some oxygen. The line might be thin enough to snake under the closed door.

Jim pressed the talk button and spoke in a slurred, breathy voice. “Sarin gas! Call 911 and get out! Don’t open the door!”

They all swung around to look at him in surprise. Without getting any closer, he pointed to the book and wrapper that now lay in a corner of the room.

Chris sprang into action. He had the catlike reflexes of someone who worked in live radio, dealing with the crazies and the obscenity spouters before their words got out on the airwaves and brought down a big fine from the FCC. He punched numbers into the phone and began shouting their address to the 9-1-1 operator. At the same time, he pressed the talk button, so Jim heard every word. “It’s sarin gas. Yes, sarin! In the KNWS studio! Hurry! It’s killing him! It’s killing Jim Fate!” Behind Chris, Willow took one look at Jim, her face a mask of fear, and turned and ran.

In the news tank, Greg and Bob backed away from the window. But in the screener’s booth, Aaron moved toward the door with an out- stretched hand. Jim staggered forward and held the door closed with his foot. His eyes met Aaron’s through the small rectangle of glass set in the door.

“Are you sure? Jim, come out of there!”

Jim knew Aaron was yelling, but the door filtered it into a low murmur, stripped of all urgency.

He couldn’t afford the breath it would take to speak, couldn’t afford to open his mouth in case he accidentally sucked in air again. His body was already demanding that he stop this nonsense and breathe. All he could do was shake his head, his lips clamped together.

Chris pressed the talk button again. “9-1-1 says they’re sending a special hazmat team. They should be here any second. They said they’re bringing oxygen.”