Father Night (22 page)

Caro, leaning in, peered at her. “This is about Alli, isn’t it?”

Vera said nothing, looked away, chewing her lower lip. Finally, she turned back. “What I can’t understand is how you don’t seem to care!”

“I am appalled by Waxman’s behavior. It’s wholly unexpected. What else do you want me to say?”

Vera wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “You really don’t know.”

“No,” Caro said. “I don’t.”

“It’s Alli. She—”

“Hold on a fucking minute,” Caro said with some force. “This is the woman who you’ve lied to.”

“We all lie,” Vera said dismissively.

“Not about something as fundamental as who you are. Vera, for Christ’s sake, she has no idea we’re sisters, that Henry Holt Carson is your father as well as mine. Why haven’t you told her?”

Vera turned away. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t give me that. Of course you know.” She waited patiently for her sister to turn back to her.

“I’m ashamed, all right? I’m ashamed to be his daughter, to be the child of one of his many affairs. Alli never knew me when we were growing up; he was careful about keeping me at arm’s length, out of his life. That’s the truth of it. And now it’s gone too far. She’ll never understand why I kept lying to her.”

“So?”

Vera wanted to hit Caro. “She and I are friends now. I like her. I don’t want to do something to fuck that up.”

Caro shook her head. The two women sat rigid with anger, daring each other to take the next step.

Caro finally took it. “We both deal with HH in such fucked-up ways.”

“I think he likes it that way—at least with me.”

Caro laughed until she realized that Vera wasn’t joking. “Say what?”

“I’m dead serious. I drive him crazy when I rub up against him or spread my legs while he’s looking.” A mischievous smile wreathed her lips. “Then I take it all away from him.”

“Honestly, Vera.” Caro was laughing in a wholly different way. “You’ve got a pair of brass balls.”

“It’s the only way I know to get back at him.”

Caro looked at her levelly. “But that’s not all of it, is it?” When Vera remained silent, she added, “You do his bidding from time to time. You’re still his daughter.”

“So are you.”

“But I’m not,” Caro said with a care that was palpable. “I’m entirely divorced from him. I no longer have any interest in what happens to him.”

“In whether he lives or dies.”

“He’s already dead to me.”

Vera rose and, without a word, padded to the bathroom. When she returned, she said, “You’ve got to find some way to get Alli back.”

“Me?”

“Yeah,” Vera said acidly, “you’re the brainiac who introduced her to Waxman.”

“You never said no.”

“Why should I have?” Vera sat down. “I trusted you.”

“And I trusted Waxman.” Caro frowned. “Something’s gone very wrong.”

Vera laughed harshly. “That’s the fucking understatement of the month!”

“Calm the fuck down.”

Vera jumped up. “You may be the world’s best hacker, but as a human being you really do have a couple of screws loose.”

Caro looked up at her calmly. “Well, aren’t you the pot calling the kettle black.”

Vera stared at her. “You are just so infuriating.”

Caro shrugged. “And I should care what you think why?”

“Because we’re family, damnit! And so is Alli.”

“Is there a point you’re trying to make?”

“Now you’re mocking me!”

“No. Truly, Vera, I’m not.”

Vera sat back down and took Caro’s hands in her own. “We’re
sisters
.”

“Half-sisters, technically. And, by the way, when do you propose to get me the notebook that’s in Father’s possession?”

“I don’t. That deal’s off.”

“What?”

“It didn’t go very well for Alli, did it?”

“How could I have known?”

“Yes,” Vera said acidly, “how could you have known?”

Caro’s eye narrowed. “Are you saying that I was in on it?”

“What would you think if you were in my shoes?”

“Please.” Caro shuddered. “To be in your shoes.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It’s beneath contempt.”

Vera struggled to keep her voice calm. She had been meaning to ask Caro to run the partial car tag number she had gotten off the Town Car, but now she changed her mind. She’d have to go a far more dangerous route. “Okay, let’s move on.

“Alli hates Henry, too.” All the childhood things—the selfishness, the enormous ego, the spiteful hatred that burned inside her—that she had forgotten about Caro came rushing back, slamming into her like a freight train.
Funny how we tend to remember the good things most clearly,
she thought. “It’s time to come clean, Caro. Who the hell is this creep Werner Waxman? How do you know him, and what the fuck is going on?”

Caro rose. “I need a drink. You?”

“Brandy.”

Caro nodded. “That seems appropriately bracing.” Crossing to a sidebar, she poured two long shots from a crystal decanter into low snifters and brought them back to the sofa. She handed one to Vera, then sat and sipped hers.

A long silence followed. Vera was just about to prompt her when she said, “I’ll come clean if you agree to tell Alli who you really are.”

“She’ll hate my guts.”

“Maybe she will, but that’s our quid pro quo.”

“Goddamnit.” Vera took a moment to agree to the inevitable. “Done.”

“Okay, then.” Vera nodded. “I was introduced to Waxman some time ago by a mutual friend.”

“Name?” Vera gestured with her snifter. “Come on, Sis. Give it up.”

“His name is Myles Oldham. I met him in London.”

“So.” Vera drained more brandy, her stomach already burning. “One of your lovers.”

“Ex, actually.”

“Everything’s ex with you, Caro, do you realize that?”

Caro stared at her for some time. “I realize everything. I’ve spent most of my life learning to be an island. My survival dictated that. And yet, now I’m beginning to see that no one is an island. I relied on Myles, I relied on Waxman. They’ve both let me down.”

Vera set down her glass. It was typical of her sister to be concerned solely with the repercussions to her own existence. But if that was the only way to get her to help Alli, so be it. “What I want to know is why Waxman wants Alli so badly that he used you and then betrayed you.”

“That,” Caro said, “is what I am determined to find out.”

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS
a time when Jack would have given just about anything to be away with a woman he cared deeply about, but he never could have imagined a nightmare like this.

“Where is she?” Gourdjiev said. “Where is Katya?”

Annika knelt beside him. She had recovered her equilibrium but had also acquired a rage that seemed to churn through her like a cloud of boiling vapor.

“Dyadya.” She put a hand on his forearm. “Katya was pinned inside the Lada.”

The old man stared straight ahead at the twisted, fiery wreck of the car.

“Jack and I tried, but we couldn’t get her out.”

A tear formed in the corner of one eye and spilled over, running down his seamed cheek. Others followed. No one said anything.

“What happened?” he said finally.

Jack, who had been talking quietly with the two men who had been waiting for them at the airstrip, crouched down beside him. “We were attacked with this.” He handed over what the man named Lev had retrieved from the high ground on the other side of the road. “It’s an M31 HEAT.”

“An antitank rifle grenade,” Gourdjiev said.

“The Lada was struck twice.” Jack took back the M31 and gave it to Lev. “The second provided the lethal blow.”

“The attackers?”

“Dead.”

“Jack killed them before they could finish us off,” Annika said.

“I want to see them.”

“They were caught in the explosion,” Jack said. “They’re charred beyond recognition.”

Tears rolled down the old man’s cheeks again.

“Dyadya,” Annika said softly. “It won’t be long before the explosion and fire draw unwanted interest. We need to get going.”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the burning car. “A hand.”

Lev and his partner lifted him. As soon as he was on his feet, he shook them off and walked unsteadily over to what was left of the Lada. Jack was about to go after him when Annika held him back, shaking her head.

Jack watched the old man standing at the edge of the scene of the crime, the toes of his shoes within the rough charcoal circle. Ash fluttered onto his head and shoulders, but he was too absorbed to brush them off. His head was bowed but his back was as straight as an arrow. He seemed both thinner and taller, though Jack could not think how that was possible.

Then Jack felt the brush of cool air on his cheek and knew Emma was close beside him.

“So much death,” he said softly. “So much tragedy.”

Everything changes here, Dad. There is no going back.

“There’s never any going back,” he said without a trace of sadness. “That’s what your death has taught me.”

Here I am in a place where past, present, and future run together, a place where time doesn’t exist. I’m here; I was always here.

“That can’t be true. You existed here. I held you in my arms, I fed you, changed you, rocked you to sleep. I peeked in at night and heard you breathing.”

Yes, I was there; I was always there, too.

Jack shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

I’m trying to tell you in the only way I know how. Pastpresentfuture are all one, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t branches, where everything changes. This is one.

“Tell me.”

Ask the old man. He knows. He understands.

Jack turned to her, but she was already gone, not even a wisp of mist to mark that she had ever appeared to him.

He felt his heart pounding, his pulse racing in the aftermath of his dead daughter’s visitation.

“Jack?” Annika touched him at the small of his back. “You’ve gone white. Are you all right?”

He said nothing, feeling paralyzed and mute, as if he were in an alternate universe somewhere or inside his own dream; he felt detached from everyone and everything, as if some essential cord had been cut, sending him whirling free without gravity or any sense of how to return to where he had been before Emma appeared.

“Jack? Jack!”

Annika was standing in front of him, he was quite certain of that, but was it really Annika calling to him, or was it Emma? Emma never called him Jack, even when she was thoroughly pissed at him, so it must be Annika.

“What is it?” His voice sounded in his ears like a frog’s croak.

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Something’s happened.” He cleared his throat. “Something … significant.”

“I have no idea what—”

Walking past her, he picked his way through the rubble to where the old man stood silent and stiff. “Dyadya Gourdjiev.”

He was surprised when the old man responded. “I’m listening.”

“Something has happened.”

“Yes.”

“Something significant.”

“Yes.”

Jack sensed Annika standing at his shoulder, silent, observing. “What has happened?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to him. By all rights he should have looked older, shrunken into himself. Instead, he seemed to have shed a decade or two.

“Look at what is left. Ash and bone, that’s all we are, in the end. But she didn’t deserve this.”

“She must have known the risks when she agreed to come with you,” Jack said.

Annika stirred and he scented her. “She knew the risks when she fell in love with my grandfather.” She took a step out of Jack’s shadow and kissed the old man on his papery cheek. “You promised to hold her in your heart and in exchange she emerged from the safety of anonymity.”

“We spoke about this,” Gourdjiev said, as if picking up an epic narrative. “At the beginning, I grew angry—my anger masked my fear for her safety. I wanted to push her away, and for some years I managed to keep my distance. But she persevered; she stayed close, refusing to ignore me. And she was wise. She knew my heart better than I did myself. I had imagined myself incapable of that kind of love again, I thought my time had passed. She showed me that I was wrong.
‘Love comes in all shapes and sizes, and at all ages,’
she said.
‘It’s not just for the young.’
Well, she was right. In that, she was a constant.”

He sighed. “All these years and I still haven’t learned humility. My arrogance prevented me from learning to bow down and accept my fate.” He took a deep breath; his eyes were pools of raw emotion. “I was a fool to think I could retire, that there would be a place for me in some beautiful spot in the world where I could live out the rest of my days with Katya in peace and happiness. I have lived my life in a certain way to make peace impossible. I fought against it, with the result that Katya is dead.”

“Not because of you,” Jack said. “Because of your enemies.”

Gourdjiev grabbed Jack’s elbow. “My enemies are part of the life I made for myself. They will not allow me to walk away. And now I do not want to. Retirement was a foolish pipe dream, a doorway to death.” His eyes had become like coals into which someone had introduced a spark. Flames reared up, as they had to engulf the Lada and those inside. His hands curled into fists. “My enemies caused this—caused you and Annika to be hurt, caused Katya’s death. Now everything changes, now the war begins in earnest. Payment will be rendered. Payment in fear, pain, and blood.”

T
HIRTEEN

“T
HE PRESIDENT
is worried that Three-thirteen has overstepped its bounds,” Carson said.

Waxman shook his head. “We have done so since day one.”

“Luckily, no one knows that. Still. According to Crawford there are individuals within the cabinet we’re making nervous.”

“The clockwork mechanism was set in motion weeks ago. You know that as well as I do. Now it’s beyond even the president’s power to stop.”

The two men stood facing each other in a section of Rock Creek Park so remote even the daily joggers didn’t venture into it. They were on a path that snaked its way alongside Rock Creek. Above their heads trees stretched their bare branches toward the buttermilk sky, tinged orange and dark red by the oblique light of the bloody semicircle of the setting sun.