Viking (21 page)

“Man, you’re a tough one!” Chen hissed. “Do I have to pry this out of you?”

Rafa looked up, frustrated at her vehemence. “What else is there to say?”

“What else? You haven’t even started! What was the crime? How’d they decide you were
a suspect? What was your life before they picked you up? Where did you live? You have
any family? How’d they take it?”

“Not very well. It wasn’t a pretty picture they painted at the trial.”

“Go on.”

“The victim was an FBI agent, Samantha Oberling. I knew her well, once upon a time,
but we hadn’t talked in years. She was gunned down one night in an alley. They said I’d
been having an affair, trying to influence her to cover up some illicit money
laundering scheme. And when that didn’t work I killed her. They had all kinds of
evidence. Offshore bank accounts in my name, deleted email, phone records, DNA from my
skin cells on her sheets, case notes showing she was aware of my activities but had
delayed reporting at my urging. Not to mention the fact that I had her blood on some of
my clothes.”

“And?”

“And it was all fabricated.”

“What do you mean? You can’t pull that kind of stuff out of thin air.”

“Somebody did. Somebody with lots of money and connections.”

“Who?”

Rafa looked at Chen for a long time as if locked in some internal debate. Finally he
placed his spear on the ground and hugged his knees to his chest.

“Who indeed? There’s the rub. It might have been that Oberling got close to somebody
who actually did most of those things and fate just made me a convenient scapegoat at
the last minute. Or maybe there are deeper motives involved. I’ve wrestled with that
one like you would not believe.”

“Why?”

Rafa shrugged again. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. I worked with Oberling some, years
before. We graduated from the academy together.”

“Academy?”

“FBI.”

Chen was incredulous. “You’re a fed?”

“Was. Back when I was young and reckless and unattached. I was David Rosales back
then. Worked out of Miami. Almost seven years ago.”

“And?”

“And we were both pretty cocky. I got onto a corruption case with all sorts of juicy
scandal in far-reaching echelons of government. Some of it even touched the bureau
itself: bribery, conspiracy, layers and layers of cover-up—you name it. Pretty heady
stuff for rookies.

“My partner had already been on the case for a while when we were paired up. After I
got familiar with the details I started to wonder if he’d looked the other way on some
clues. Something was fishy. I told my boss.

“He assigned me to act crooked and report back. At first that sounded exciting, but
when I had some success and began to realize the scope of the plot, I was terrified. I
trusted my direct superior, but how about the people
he
reported to? I was in
way, way over my head, and by then I knew too much for either the good guys or the bad
guys to let me go.

“Meanwhile, Oberling was working from the outside with her partner. When I heard she
was about to bust a couple politicians, I turned in my own list and crossed my fingers.
It wasn’t complete; there were some faces I’d seen, people I’d met, that I didn’t know
well enough to identify. But she’d never get convictions unless I backed her play.

“The press had a field day when indictments began to fly. Oberling and her partner
got sound bites on national news. In a couple trials I was the mysterious star witness
that the DA hauled onto the stand to put nails in the defense’s coffin.”

There was a faraway, trancelike quality in Rafa’s expression now.

“We were out celebrating a conviction at a night club. Dancing. I was teaching
Oberling the cha-cha. When we went back to our table the waiter walked up and handed me
a phone instead of a champagne bottle. It was the Phoenix PD. Guess someone didn’t like
double agents; my dad and brother, Raul, had been found strangled in Raul’s
apartment.”

Chen looked pale. Rafa sucked in his breath tremulously and went on.

“I was so angry I could hardly think. Even when I was biting my fingernails under
cover, I only worried about retaliation against me. I thought my family was out of it.
I was ready to bust into jail, find the creeps we’d been prosecuting, and take another
eye for an eye until Samantha asked about Mamá. That scared some sense into me. She’d
been down in Mexico, visiting her sister, so whoever came after the family didn’t get
to her. I called to tell her what happened...”

Rafa’s voice broke. His head hung motionless, the only sound the crackling of the
fire. Finally he went on.

“We agreed to meet in Phoenix. I booked a ticket from the restaurant and just about
collided with the fire trucks as I rushed home to pack. But when I got there, the whole
condo had been torched. A couple of my neighbors were headed to the hospital in
ambulances. My place burned to the ground.

“On the road to the shuttleport it really hit home that I was helpless. It was sweet
to nail the scumbags, and I wanted revenge so bad it was killing me, but there was no
way I could afford tit-for-tat. I knew too many innocent people. And obviously somebody
had escaped the roundup and was out to get me.

“My mom was all that was left family-wise, but Oberling had a whole quiver of little
brothers and these wonderful, fat, freckled parents who’d fed me Thanksgiving dinner
once. I couldn’t drag her in. And Mrs. Sandoval next door, who used to pinch my cheeks
and try to set me up with her daughter and talk for hours about Havana—she was going to
be lying in a burn unit for weeks.

“My mom and I stayed in a hotel long enough to watch the funeral on closed-circuit
television. Then we checked into the witness protection program and moved to L.A.”

Chen’s eyes were fixed on Rafa’s rigid features. “You think somehow they tracked you
down and set you up?”

“I didn’t know what to think. Still don’t. The night of the murder I ran into
Oberling on the street. Literally. It was the last thing I expected. She was supposed
to be clear across the country.

“I was out on a cool-down run with the team. She was hailing a cab and caught my eye
as I went past. I swerved and tripped and just about fell flat on my face, I was so
surprised.

“It took her a moment longer. Then we were laughing and clapping each other on the
back and catching up on each other’s lives. She was careful not to ask too much about
the new me, but I showed her a picture of Julie and the girls anyway. Samantha said she
was thinking about getting engaged, told me how her folks had found a miracle diet and
gotten skinny. She thought it was funny that I was a boring old professor.

“I asked what she was doing in L.A. She said she’d been transferred short-term a few
months earlier to work on an interesting case. No details, just that she was close to a
bust. We walked for a couple blocks.

“And that was really all. I said maybe I’d figure out a way to get in touch and she
said she didn’t think it was safe and we said goodbye. I had to catch up with my
runners, so I jogged off down the street and she took a shortcut back toward the main
beltway.

“I was only a minute away when I heard the shots.”

“And you ran back?”

“I found her lying in a puddle of dirty water and motor oil and garbage only a few
steps from the street. She was already dead.” Now Rafa’s voice was soft with sadness,
and he blinked fiercely.

“What did you do?”

Rafa shook his head angrily. “Like a fool I ran away. When I was an agent I used to
laugh at the stupidity of some of our suspects. But I was no better. After I checked
her pulse it suddenly occurred to me that maybe our meeting wasn’t a coincidence, and
someone had checked off another item on a preplanned agenda of revenge. And I was
terrified for my wife and daughters.”

“I dashed home in a frenzy with blood on my sweats, looking like a wild man. I heard
the sirens behind me as I left. All I could think about was fire trucks and the wire
cuts on my brother’s neck.

“When I saw that they were okay my mind went numb with relief. I hardly even mumbled
an answer when my wife asked about the blood. Then I went off to think and take a
shower.

“By the time the police showed up I realized that I might be
jumping to conclusions. Why would an enemy kill my old partner if they could go after
my wife and kids? Surely we had met by accident. Probably the target of Oberling’s
current investigation had simply killed her to cover his trail.

“I was afraid of anybody connecting me to Samantha. It would endanger the whole life
I’d built if they started asking why and how we’d met and whether we knew each other—no
matter how I might swear them to secrecy. I told Julie a cock-and-bull story about
stopping to help at a car accident and did my best to forget the whole thing. I didn’t
even send a card or flowers to Oberling’s parents, though I could have tracked them
down easily enough.

“Of course it was the worst possible thing. Flight is evidence of guilt, and it gave
the murderer plenty of opportunity to implicate the sap who’d run away from the body.
Maybe he’d been planning to, all along. Maybe he even followed me home, who knows?

“With some basic information about me, it would have been easy to borrow a towel
from my locker at school and rub it on Samantha’s bed to get the DNA traces. And I’m
sure it wasn’t difficult to open bank accounts in my name, transfer lots of money in
and out, hire some hot-shot computer whiz to fake emails and tamper with phone
records.

“When the bureau knocked on the door, they were interrogating, not investigating.
For a few minutes I debated telling them everything. But I knew it would be a mistake.
They were playing their cards pretty close to the chest, but I could tell they wanted
to give me enough rope to hang myself on evidence they already had.

“Even if I had told the whole truth, even if they’d take a coincidental meeting
seriously, and even if my connection to the bureau impressed them enough to rethink the
evidence, it would take time to prove my past. Time when I’d be in custody and they’d
be asking careless questions and the bureau would be leaking information like a sieve
and my family would be unprotected.

“So I clammed up and let my lawyer argue the case on its merits and prayed like
crazy that I was doing the right thing.”

“And you lost.”

“I lost.”

“Think you guessed right?”

“About what?”

“Why you were framed.”

“I was on pins and needles about that during the trial. If I wasn’t just a
convenient fall-guy, my family was in danger. I begged Julie to stay away and maybe
take the kids on vacation. I couldn’t tell her why, though. Not without scaring her to
death and possibly blowing her cover even more.

“I guess she took it as another sign of guilt. The first day my wife didn’t show up
at the trial I nearly had a heart attack. Had my lawyer call her mom. She said Julie
had finally accepted that I was guilty, and I actually cried with relief that nothing
more sinister had happened.”

Rafa lapsed into silence, and for once Chen did not prod him further. Through the
slant of tree trunks rings glittered gold and remote in the cooling air. Behind them, a
pair of meteors flared into brilliance near the horizon and then snuffed out again.

“Tell me about your daughters,” Chen said at last. “How many?”

Rafa smiled hopelessly. “Two. Twins, in fact. They’re going to be in kindergarten
soon. Probably won’t remember me much when they grow up. Maybe when Julie remarries
they’ll call somebody else Dad.”

“Talk about a fatalist! I thought I was bad. You’re not dead yet!” There was a
pitiful heartiness in Chen’s tone that deceived neither of them.

“Doesn’t matter if I survive or not. This mission will pay the mortgage, and college
tuition in a few years, and maybe buy a wedding dress or two. Or three. But my checks
will come as child support. Julie filed for divorce before I left. It’s final in a
couple weeks.”

Chen’s eyes were filling with tears now, and the bitter set of her mouth had long
since dissolved. “Oh,” she whispered softly.

Rafa climbed to his feet and walked toward the edge of the trees, swinging his spear
like a blind man’s cane through the darkness in front. After a moment the trunks
thinned and vanished, and he waded out into the grass, gazing up at the lonely
stars.

Things were quiet for so long that he felt certain the others had dropped off to
sleep. The galactic cloud rotated sedately across the sky, its speckled blue and red
and white contrasting against the gently waving sea of black all around.

Leaves rustled behind him with the breeze.

The plodding thunder of a hexapod herd on the move surged and faded in the distance.
A yip echoed faintly to the north.

Where was Julie now? He could almost taste her hair, feel the softness as fingertips
caressed the nape of her neck. How long since he’d even held her hand?

The faint touch on his shoulder nearly stopped his heart. Instantly he was whirling
into a crouch, his survival knife flashing in the starlight.

Chen stepped back in alarm and let out a little gasp.

For a moment they eyed each other silently. Then Rafa sheathed the weapon with an
apologetic shrug. “Sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

“You weren’t really here at all, were you?” Chen’s posture relaxed as she moved
closer.

“Guess not.”

“What is she like?”

“Julie?”

Chen nodded awkwardly.

Rafa opened his mouth, then closed it again. When Chen continued to wait
expectantly, he shrugged. “I can’t say.”

Chen looked puzzled.

“It’s not the sort of topic that lends itself to a few choice adjectives. At least,
not any I know about.”

“You angry?”

“No.” There was a long pause, so long that Chen wondered if it was all the response
she was going to get. But finally he shrugged his shoulders and continued, his voice
extremely low. “Of course I’m angry. Wouldn’t you be?”