Girl of Lies (5 page)

She wanted to go back home. She shivered, looking out at the harbor on the right side of the helicopter as it sped toward its destination.

Damn it.
She didn’t even know Javier’s number. Or any of her friends from school. And if she got a replacement phone, it wouldn’t do any good, because her backup was on her laptop, in the trunk of the stupid car.

Who the hell were they? What did they want? It didn’t make any sense. Sure, her father had been nominated for some job with the US Defense ministry or whatever they called it. But that had nothing to do with her. And her attempt at negotiation wasn’t exactly honest. For all she knew, her parents wouldn’t lift a finger to ransom her. She barely knew them, and had been raised primarily by her grandmother. Her mother and father were remote figures on another continent.

The only one of her sisters she was close to was Julia, the oldest. At thirty-two, she was double Andrea’s age. But she’d also been the one sister who consistently visited her in Spain. She was the sister she could count on.

It had been eight months since she’d seen Julia. That was a long time. They’d sat in the park together near Carrie’s condo in Bethesda, Maryland, the day after Ray Sherman’s funeral.

“Why don’t they want me home, Julia?”

She had asked the question, not really expecting an answer. What possible answer could there be when your parents don’t want you there?

“Of course they want you, sis,” Julia said.

Andrea shook her head. “No…they don’t. When I told Mom I wasn’t coming home for Christmas last year, she didn’t even argue.”

Julia flinched. “Mother and I…I’ve never understood her.”

Andrea said, “There’s nothing to understand. They’re both awful. She’s crazy and he’s an icebox. I’m
glad
Abuelita raised me. At least I know I’m loved.”

Julia sniffed. “They love you…our parents are just screwed up. They don’t know how to show it. And…we love you. Your sisters.”

“You say that, but you know as well as I do that except for you, I barely know the others. Carrie might as well be a stranger.”

Julia shook her head. “That’s not true. She practically raised you.”

“
Until I was what…six?
 
I don’t even remember.”

“I feel like we failed you.”

Andrea sighed and sniffed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…I just…sometimes I’m so lonely, you know?”

She’d cried that day, and Julia held her. Two days later, she flew back to Spain. She and Julia talked on the phone twice a week, whether they had anything to say or not. She called once every two weeks to check on Sarah and Carrie. Sarah was recovering from her injuries and Carrie was going through her pregnancy.

Her mother rarely asked to speak to her during those calls. That loneliness pervaded her.

The helicopter circled the hospital, a low bass vibration rising up through the soles of her feet. Bright light sparked out in the harbor, sunlight reflecting off the waves.

The crew chief sat across from her. “We’re going to land in a minute…they’re going to want to do the full VIP work-up on you. Keep your chin up, okay? I know it’s going to suck, but they just want to cover their asses and look out for your best interests, okay?”

The unexpected kindness caught her off guard. Andrea nodded. The crew chief touched her shoulder and said, “Did you get any of
his
blood on you?”

“Yeah,” she said at a whisper. He couldn’t hear her, but he could see her shudder.

“You’re gonna be all right, kid. This is just about the best hospital in the country. They’re gonna do all the tests and make sure you’re good to go. You got nothing to be worried about.”

She sniffed. She wasn’t used to being called
kid
and having someone reassure her. She wasn’t used to needing other people. But something about the crew chief reminded her of her Uncle Luis, and before she could stop herself, she said it. “I’m scared.”

She hated herself for saying it. He smiled kindly then squeezed her shoulder.

“Here we go,” he said. He stretched up a little, wrapping his hand around a handle mounted above the door. The helicopter landed gently.

“You ready, kid?”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

“Daddy, I love you.”

“And I love you, darling.”

George-Phillip leaned close to his daughter and kissed her on the forehead, then tucked her in. Jane was six years old, raven haired with green eyes. Creative. Mischievous.

Trouble
.

His lips turned up in a half smile at the thought.

“I’m turning out the light, Jane.”

“No…” she said.

He said, “I’ll leave the door cracked?”

“Thank you, Daddy.”

He smiled, switched the light out and stepped out into the hall, leaving the door open six inches.

Adriana Poole, Jane’s nanny, sat reading a book in the room down the hall. “She’s down,” he said.

“For now,” Adriana replied. “I’ll be here, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He sighed, walking down the hall. He left the overhead lamp off in the study, choosing to only turn on the small desk lamp that lit one spot in the center of his desk. He turned on his computer and looked out at Belgrave Square.

Department security had warned him repeatedly about the wisdom of having his study facing the square. But Dukes of Kent had occupied this home for more than a hundred years. Princess Alexandra had been born in this house in 1936. Grudgingly, SIS security had installed additional equipment, bulletproof glass and a twenty-four hour security detail on the premises. And George-Phillip kept his study where he could see into the square.

The Wakhan file had been troubling him ever since O’Leary brought him the news of Andrea Thompson’s travel to the United States. It was one of the oldest files he’d worked on. One of the most explosive, on a personal and international level.

It haunted him. He unlocked his desk and slid the top drawer open, taking out the file marked with seals labeled
CONFIDENTIAL
and
EYES ONLY.
He opened the file.

As always, it was the photos that caught him first. The bodies, laying where they’d fallen, twisted, bloated.

Many of them had been children.

He closed the file. He wouldn’t find any answers in there tonight, any more than he did ten years ago or twenty years ago.

Thirty years since the photos had been taken.
Thirty years.

He sighed then slid the folder back into his locked drawer. In the morning, he would instruct O’Leary to increase the surveillance on everyone related to the Wakhan file. But for now, he needed to get some sleep.

That, of course, was when the phone rang. Not his personal phone. The official phone.

He lifted it to his ear. “This is the Chief,” he said.

“O’Leary, sir.”

“What is it?”

“Wakhan file, sir. It’s heating up.”

“Tell me.”

“Andrea Thompson was abducted on arrival at Baltimore Washington airport.”

George-Phillip stood up, suddenly, his chair rolling back on its casters.

“What?” he cried.

“That’s right, sir. We didn’t have any assets on the scene, unfortunately. She was able to overpower her abductors, though. Both of them are dead, and she’s en route to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.”

“How serious were her injuries? Any idea who they were?”

“Not serious, sir, and we’ve got a lead on one from the surveillance video. This one’s getting massive attention from the Yanks though, so I’ve not put anyone too close to the investigation. One of the kidnappers looks like Tariq Koury. Saudi born, he’s been around ISI and CIA and a bunch of other three letter agencies for decades.”

“Three letter agencies… like SIS?”

“He did a couple jobs for us in the early 90s. Nothing since then that I can tell. He works for the highest bidder… not reliable. But he’s a killer. He spent most of the last five years working for Blackwater.”

George-Phillip shook his head. “And a sixteen-year-old girl
escaped
from him?”

“Not just escaped. As best as I can find out, she killed him. I’ll get more info as soon as I can.”

“We need to know who hired him, O’Leary.”

“Working on it, sir.”

“Put some serious assets on it. I want to know who was behind the abduction, O’Leary.”

They hung up, and he stared out the window. George-Phillip thought about what he knew of Andrea Thompson, which amounted to virtually nothing. The idea that a sixteen year old girl had fought—and killed—two trained intelligence agents simply defied credibility. But then, nothing about this case, from the very beginning, had made sense. Especially not the contents of the file, which he didn’t need to have open to see its contents. The twisted and darkened bodies. They haunted his every thought.

It was long past six o’clock when John “Bear” Wyden closed the briefing folder and walked it down the hall to the Classified Materials Officer, who signed for the documents and gave Bear a receipt. Temporarily, Bear occupied a desk on the sixth floor at Main State. For the last three years, he’d been assigned as the deputy Regional Security Officer in Pakistan for the Diplomatic Security Service. An insanely challenging job, where he’d supervised dozens of agents in one of the largest and most strategic field offices.

In two weeks he’d be taking over as an assistant deputy at the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force. Bear was forty-three years old, with dark hair starting to turn grey. But he was fit, weighing in at little more than the one hundred eighty pounds he’d carried the day he entered Diplomatic Security twenty years ago. Back then he’d been called Bear because of the thick hair covering his arms, legs and chest, a fact which had embarrassed him for years.

For now, he had a couple of weeks to kill, and Tom Cantwell, the head of Diplomatic Security, had given him several ongoing files to work with. Busy-work, really, reviewing findings of existing investigations and raising questions and holes. He didn’t mind. Bear Wyden liked to stay busy.

For now, though, it was time to go home.

Bear had rented a studio apartment not far from DuPont Circle and walking distance from the office. He didn’t have many needs these days. Leah left with their two dogs and three kids and everything he’d owned two years before. He couldn’t blame her. They’d often worked together, and as colleagues, they were good to go. Not so much as husband and wife. So now he had his apartment and his books, a laptop computer, and way too much time on his hands, and she had a new husband, a new house, and had cut back her hours.

He locked his temporary desk, and put on his jacket, preparing to leave the office. There were no personal touches—no point, considering he’d be leaving soon anyway.

The phone rang, and for five seconds he considered ignoring it.

It was Cantwell.

“Bear Wyden,” he answered.

“Cantwell. Can you come up for a few minutes, Wyden? We’ve got a hot one.”

Bear raised his eyebrows. Cantwell was normally dull, tired, uninterested. He described potential crises as “synergistic opportunities,” not as “hot ones.”
 
Something was definitely odd here.

“I’ll be right there.”

Five minutes later he’d ridden the temperamental old elevators up to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum. Secretary Kerry had his office here, as had predecessors throughout his career: Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice. It might be a little old fashioned and hokey, but Bear was a believer. He was a believer in democracy. He was a believer in his country. And sometimes he was a little bit in awe of the stature of the place he worked, when he wasn’t overwhelmed by the bullshit. Whenever his work took him to the seventh floor at Main State—not very often—he felt that sense of awe.

Cantwell did not awe him. A political functionary, appointed to the job after the shakeup following the Benghazi attack, Cantwell did little to offend and little to inspire. He occupied his desk, let the department work underneath him, and periodically testified on Capitol Hill.

Bear supposed there could be worse people sitting in this chair.

“Bear. Good, I’m glad you were still in the building. I need to brief you in on a case, and it’s one with potentially serious implications.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Do you happen to know Ambassador Richard Thompson?”

“The new Sec Def? Of course. I ran the security detail for the Embassy in Brussels when he was there. We had to provide protection for the entire family, along with some of the other high profile people, if I remember correctly.”

“What’s your impression?”

Bear tilted his head. His impression had always been that Richard Thompson was a cold fish, and a dangerous one, and that his wife…
what was her name?
Something Spanish, he thought. She was way too young for Thompson, way too passionate. It was a bad match, he thought. But Diplomatic Security agents weren’t paid to have personal opinions about their charges.

“I can’t really give one, sir. That was more than twenty years ago. I knew the Ambassador and his wife, and I arranged for their security detail.”

“Anything unusual?”

Bear shrugged his shoulders. “Not really. There were some specific threats against his family, if I remember correctly. They had two… no, three little girls. I think the oldest was ten or so at the time.”

“What sort of threats against the family?”

Bear shrugged. “The usual. It was all stuff out of the Middle East… remember this was about a year after the Gulf War. What’s all this about?”

Cantwell sat back in his seat. “Ambassador Thompson ended up having six daughters. The youngest was abducted this afternoon.”

“Son of a bitch,” Bear muttered.

“Exactly. Sixteen years old. She escaped. But we’ve already got indications there may have been a foreign power involved.”

“What? Who?”

“Tariq Koury was one of the kidnappers. We’ve got a positive ID, though he came through with fake papers. He flew to the States right next to her in first class, and then they grabbed her plain as day. It was dumb luck and quick thinking on her part that got her free.”