An Affair of Deceit (14 page)

“What is this place?”

“A storage facility belonging to Lukas Kral.”

Her eyes darted to his. “You mentioned him to my mother. What does he have to do with this?”

“I really wish you hadn’t decided to snoop on me when I talked with her.”

“I do not snoop. I investigate.”

“When a person creeps up to a house, crouches behind a garden gate, and listens while two people have a private conversation, it’s called snooping.”

“I could say the same about whoever watched me do those things.”

“We have your mother under surveillance—observation, let’s call it. Imagine our surprise when we saw you crawling across her front lawn like Tom Cruise in a
Mission: Impossible
movie.”

Her nose twitched. “Well, at least my mission was accomplished. I heard what you said. Every word. So what does Lukas Kral have to do with my father?”

“I gather you know who Kral is, then?”

“A Czech shipping magnate who specializes in black-market weapons smuggling.”

“Right. Watch your step.”

She looked down and jumped. She’d nearly stumbled over a tiny, bright-yellow tent, the kind that crime scene investigators used to mark locations of evidence. Dozens more were scattered around the room. “Has this room been evaluated?”

“Thoroughly. By the French, the British, and us. Twice. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t bring you here if I thought you’d do any harm. The men who took you earlier today were tasked to watch the alley for any suspicious activity. You were suspicious.”

She hardly seemed to hear him as her dark eyes gazed down at the bloodstained concrete floor. Despite the horrible brutality evidenced in the room, her expression remained calm. “Several men were gunned down.” She spun around, gauging the scene. Bloodstains clustered near the far wall by the garage door. She walked closer to the spot. A dark patch of blood covered the floor, but a large rectangular shape, perhaps four feet long by three feet wide, remained perfectly clean. “There was something heavy on the floor here by the wall, big enough to stop the blood from flowing beneath it. The men were clustered around it, perhaps looking into it or defending it.” She met his eyes. “What was inside?”

This clearly wasn’t her first crime scene. “A particular kind of shoulder-fired missile called a Stinger.”

For a second, she froze. He’d surprised her. Then she recovered, throwing him a quick nod. “A man-portable air-defense system popular with warlords and tribal resistance leaders alike.”

“And regular ol’ G. I. Joes, too. Damn good weapons. Hard to find, generally.”

“Except that the Libyans just lost a few thousand.”

He paused. Greene’s guilt-sensing antennae would have been quivering if he’d heard her say that. “You keep track of the state of high-powered weaponry in North Africa?”

She looked back sharply at him. “I’m in national security. It’s my job to stay abreast of international affairs, particularly when there’s a massive leak of missiles that could end up on my country’s soil.”

Fair enough. “We don’t know yet if these were Iglas or Stingers. Mason—your dad, sorry—”

“You can call him Mason. It probably makes more sense than
Dad
.”

“OK, Mason, then. What have you learned about him?”

The skin around her eyes tightened. “His State Department job in Taiwan was a ruse. He belongs to Langley, always has. So do you and Ethan Greene.”

Riley gave her one final, considering look. “You sure you want to know all this?”

She didn’t bother answering, only tapped her foot.

“OK,” he said. “Peter Mason is a spymaster. He’s very good at what he does. Lately, he’s been trying to get on the inside of Lukas Kral’s smuggling ring. He succeeded. One of his CIA operatives managed to hook up with a British agent who’d been undercover for a while with a London gang. He’d been functioning as their weapons buyer, trying to identify their supply chain so his team could dismantle it. He worked his way up to Kral by asking for twenty Stingers.”

“Not many people who can supply that kind of firepower.”

“Exactly. Kral is one of the few, and he took the bait. Five days ago, Kral led the British agent here to review the inventory before they completed the sale. Once the Brit confirmed the presence of the missiles, he called in the cavalry, led by Mason. His team took Kral into custody, and together with Mason they drove to Paris, where they were going to work out the details of Kral’s prosecution, but they were ambushed on the way. The agents
who remained here were attacked at the same time.” He gestured toward the bloodstains. “You see the result. The Stingers vanished, as did your father and Kral.”

“The British agent asked Lukas Kral to supply a London gang with twenty Stingers?”

“That’s right.”

“And Kral fell for it?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

Abigail crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t care how ‘major’ this London gang is, no one in England is shooting down planes. There’s no need for any London buyer to ask Kral for such an outlandish number of surface-to-air missiles. It’s absurd.”

“It’s…a little bit absurd. We haven’t thought of it that way yet.”

“Have you talked to this supposed undercover buyer? Do you know how he pulled this charade off?”

“No.” His face felt hot. “That’s next on my list of things to do.”

Her mouth flattened. “It’s been five days since this all went down, and you still haven’t talked to the last person to see my father alive?”

“People—there were two people who escaped. The other is Mason’s CIA operative. They left together a few minutes after the team escorting Kral did.”

“They left just late enough to not get caught in the crossfire on the highway, but not so late that they were trapped here when the Stingers were taken?”

“Right.” Riley held up a hand. “I know, it’s suspicious. Trust me, we’re looking into it.”

Her eyebrows lifted just the tiniest bit, barely a flicker. But it served to make him feel admonished.

She waved a hand around the empty room. “Was this all cleared out when your investigatory teams arrived?”

“No. Several thousand pounds of small weapons and ammunition in the wooden crates were stored on these shelves. It
appeared that only the Stingers had been removed. His men probably didn’t have time to take everything. None of it had been legally obtained, and if we had Kral in custody, there’d be enough evidence against him to put him in jail and keep him there.”

“How many assailants combated the two teams?”

“Hard to say. Here, it looked like a surprise attack from the alley. Two French officers were killed outside; we washed their blood away already. McCrea saw them alive as he was leaving. He thought they’d been posted as guards. Guess they didn’t see whatever was coming for them.”

“Kral’s men were probably in plainclothes.” She walked deeper into the room.

“Very likely. We guess that a half-dozen or so men arrived via the alley, but left through the garage door after loading the Stingers up.”

“Why didn’t they come sooner? Why did they wait until after Kral had already been taken away to come to his rescue? It forced them to split their team in half.”

“They were on the scene pretty quickly, but Kral was removed from this room almost immediately. The French and the British agents knew he’d have people coming for him. They didn’t want to get stuck in a firefight here.”

“They did anyway.”

Riley nodded. “Kral’s security detail was on their heels, and likely saw him taken into the van by our guys. When they saw that, they probably split their team—one came here to get the missiles, and another followed the van until it seemed like a good spot for an ambush. That, or they called in a second squad to handle the caravan, while they killed our guys here and took the Stingers.”

“Why not just kill my father along with the rest of the team on the road?”

“I don’t know. Frankly, we’re not even sure that he was taken.”

“You mean he could be fine, and just not checking in?”

“He’s a tough man. His record shows that he’s a survivor. Maybe he got away and is lying low for a while. Maybe he’s tracking Kral. Maybe he was smacked on the head and has temporary amnesia. We’ve been combing the area for him, but so far, no luck. He just vanished.”

“None of this makes any sense.” She paced the room, careful to avoid kicking over any evidence markers, even though they’d already been accounted for. “My father was with Kral when this went down. Everyone else on our side was killed in that ambush. Why was he allowed to live?”

“Again, we just don’t know.”

“That’s become a common refrain. What
do
you know, Dr. Riley?”

He hesitated. “Your father seems to have been pursuing Kral for twenty years. It bordered on obsession. The fact that your father wasn’t killed may suggest that Kral wanted him alive.”

She looked up, her expression unreadable. “Kral and my father have a history?”

“In a manner of speaking. Your father seems to have made it his life’s work to catch Kral.”

“Why?”

We don’t know.
But Riley knew better than to use that phrase on her again. “Kral is a madman. That much is an established fact. He’s mentally unstable and armed to the teeth. But he’s also smart. For years now, he’s been playing for both teams—he flies humanitarian supplies for the UN at the same time that he flouts arms embargoes.”

“I heard he flew those antitank missiles into Libya for Gaddafi’s troops on behalf of China.”

Riley was impressed. “That’s the intel we have, too. It’s the first deal he’s made with China, as far as we know. Before this, he’s mostly run goods from Eastern Europe to Africa and the Americas. He’s Czech, of course, so he has contacts behind the old Iron Curtain. We think he used to be pretty cozy with the Russians, but solid intel on his earliest days is hard to come by.”

“You think he’s former KGB?”

“We know he was born in the late 1950s, which meant he lived under the Communists in Czechoslovakia for a good thirty years. He came out of the Velvet Revolution with way too much cash for a guy who had no connections to the Soviet authorities.”

“Nobody made any money in the Eastern bloc without kowtowing to the Soviets.”

“Exactly.”

“Fine. So he’s well connected. But the Soviets haven’t existed since 1991. I don’t understand why no one has gone after him. He’s a sanctions buster who needs to be stopped, or else the UN’s resolutions have no teeth.”

“Well, your father
has
been going after him. That’s the thing. Your father never trusted Kral.”

“No one trusts Kral.”

“True, but we have had to live with him, nonetheless. He’s a necessary evil, one of many.”

She eyed him from across the room. “Kral works for us, doesn’t he?”

“He may have, on occasion, run a few shipments of arms or supplies that we couldn’t.”

“Where we don’t have the ability, or don’t have the diplomatic backbone?”

“A little of both. Let’s just say that he’s helped us with certain delicate…
operations
…in the past.”

She snorted a laugh. “So Kral has the CIA in his lap.”

“He keeps our hands clean.”

“And earns himself a free pass to sell whatever he pleases to whoever has the money.”

“Bingo.”

She walked closer to where he stood. He scented her perfume, or whatever it was that made the air around her smell like his mother’s garden when the lilacs were blooming.

“My father pursued Kral against the CIA’s directives?”

“Case officers like your father are notorious for having strong differences of opinion with Langley. Mason was no different. But he’s savvy—he continued gathering assets that had nothing to do with Kral. That kept HQ happy enough.”

“So Mason spends twenty years—all of the time since he left my mother and me—chasing Lukas Kral, and only five days ago did he manage to get close enough to arrest him.”

“That’s right.”

“And it’s because of the deal for twenty Stingers that the undercover British agent brokered for a London gang that has no business needing antiaircraft missiles.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds ridiculous.”

“It sounds like we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s really happening between my father and Lukas Kral.” She took another step closer. “My father pursued one man for twenty years. What was he doing before that?”

“He worked all over Asia. The details remain classified, but whatever it was, you can be sure that he did it well.”

She swept her arm wide to indicate the empty chamber. “This obsession with Kral began when he left Asia?”

“Looks that way.”

“Why? What spawned his burning desire to take down an Eastern European smuggler?”

“I don’t—”

She didn’t give him the chance to answer. “Let me guess: you don’t know. Do you know if your people ordered him to leave Asia and pursue Kral twenty years ago? Or did he do it of his own accord?”

“He didn’t violate any orders. Langley sent him to Europe.” Or, he privately amended, Mason made sure he was restationed. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. You’re asking questions I shouldn’t answer.”

“Too late for that.” She took two quick steps closer to him, her dark eyes sparkling like polished onyx. “There’s a hell of a
lot more going on here than any of you realize. My father left Taiwan to pursue Lukas Kral, and when he finally has the man in custody, he finds that the tables have turned. Now he’s the one in chains.”

She stood near enough for him to sense the warmth of her breath. A kiss would keep her from saying anything more. But he didn’t have the nerve, and she continued speaking, her voice firm and confident.

“The question we need to answer is”—she paused and lifted an eyebrow in a rare show of expression—“who was chasing who?”