An Affair of Deceit (2 page)

She shook her head, chastising herself. This was a big city. It was dangerous to lose awareness of her surroundings, though she spent so much time at the courthouse she could probably get there blindfolded.

Now, as she descended into the damp underground, an approaching train rattled into the station. Irritation welled. She didn’t need to check her watch. That train was the one she wanted, but because of James Riley’s unexpected interrogation, her morning was off schedule.

It simply wouldn’t do.

She squeezed down the left side of the escalator, past the standing row of suited businessmen and a couple of college kids with backpacks. Her heels hit the concrete platform, and she jogged through the train’s open door without breaking stride. She found a seat facing forward and pulled her bag onto her lap. Food and drink were prohibited on Metro trains, so she left her coffee mug in her tote.

She’d made it. The steady rumbling of the train massaged her still-clenched muscles, letting her relax, at least as much as she could in public. Her mind drifted back to her father.

She stifled a black chuckle. She had no idea how to contact him, and if she ever did speak to him, there would be several other questions she would ask him before she got around to chatting about why he’d disappeared from the State Department’s radar.

Starting with,
What kind of coward abandons his wife and child?

A station whizzed into view with staccato flashes of fluorescent yellow. The train slowed to a stop, let passengers on board, and then continued onward into the black tunnel. Abigail stared out a window, but she could only see her reflection, her face
an ivory oval, her hair the stick-straight, blacker-than-night strands that announced her Asian ethnicity from any angle. The shape of her dark-brown eyes, too, was typical of her mother’s Chinese ancestry, with a small fold of skin covering their tear ducts, giving them a half-moon appearance. Her determinedly downward-pointing eyelashes required disciplined use of an eyelash curler—Shiseido made the best one—but if she didn’t go through the daily regimen, people would ask her all day if she’d had enough sleep.

Only in America could people be so kindly and yet so offensive at the same time.

She gave herself a wry smile in the mirrorlike glass of the train window. That probably wasn’t quite true. People could be obliviously offensive in any part of the world.

At any rate, she’d long ago come to terms with her appearance. What she saw now when she looked at herself was basically a younger version of her mother.

She looked nothing like her father. Hardly a whisper of his sharp-boned, European-origin features graced her face. The only sign that she wasn’t of pure Asian blood was in her nose, which was just as wide but longer than her mother’s flatter, almost button-like nasal protrusion.

Her father’s genes finally wrested some influence when it came to her nose, it seemed.

She sighed, confused for the first time in recent memory. Who was this James Riley, and what gave him the right to push her father back into her mind after all these years of forcibly forgetting him?

She reached in her bag and pulled out the business card he had given her. It was a thick, pure white piece of card stock. “James Riley, PhD” was embossed in rich black ink in the center of the card. Under his name was a phone number with a DC area code, but with no extension or explanation of which agency he worked for.

Odd. He’d referenced the State Department and then used the word “we” when saying that he’d lost track of her father, making her think that he was still referring to the State Department and including himself among their number. But his card was devoid of any affiliation, let alone a diplomatic one. Why?

Her thumb rubbed the slightly raised letters as she further considered the fact that the disarming, well-tanned man from a mystery government agency held a PhD.

Whomever he worked for, he was probably a desk-job guy. His long legs, from what little she could assess of them inside his suit pants, looked like they might be more comfortable on a long-distance run than in a street fight or jumping across rooftops. While he’d moved with the sure-footed grace of an athlete, everything in his easy, friendly manner told her that he wasn’t accustomed to living in hostile territory.

Desk jockey, for sure. She knew the type. They were as common as eager young interns around DC. Probably maintained his trim physique by rock-climbing at an indoor gym on the weekends and tackling triathlons four times a year. He looked like a go-getter, the sort of annoyingly optimistic and energetic guy who was forever peddling donation forms around his office for one walk-for-whatever or another.

But then there was that nose of his, wavy at the bridge like a boxer’s. If not for that telltale bend, she would never have thought of him as a man who’d taken a few hits. Do-gooders like him generally didn’t get punched. He
had
, though. Somewhere along the line, someone had thought James Riley, PhD, worth fighting, perhaps more than once.

Or maybe he was a martial artist, as she was. While most practitioners tried to avoid busting an opponent’s face open in a friendly spar, errant hits happened. People got hurt. Noses got broken. She’d once broken her arm defending a roundhouse kick. It happened.

An enigma had landed on her doorstep that morning. She wondered again exactly whom he worked for.

His beguiling manner must have been a calculated attempt to get her to trust him, of course, but the faint lines around his eyes and mouth were perfectly matched to his goofy smile. His face slid into a sly grin easily, as though it was his most common expression. A small but distinct vertical wrinkle between his brows had been fainter than his well-worn smile creases, so she could only conclude that he was a generally happy man who nonetheless had a few things in his life about which he fretted.

People may lie, but their faces tell the truth.

Abigail, by contrast, knew her own face to be perfectly unlined. She liked it that way, less for its appearance of youth than for the way it thwarted attempts to read her personality. Her face was a blank slate from which no information or advantage could be gained. She hadn’t planned on it; she’d simply been raised to avoid emotional outbursts. That her face bore no scars of expression was a by-product of a dispassionate upbringing. It was the Taoism of her mother’s Chinese culture, perhaps, that had kept extremes of emotion out of the Mason house even after her stoic American father had departed from it.

Anyway, she rarely found a need to smile. She was the youngest assistant district attorney in Washington, and she fought like a hyena every day for respect. She knew that most people only saw her attractive, mixed-race features, which were often read as “exotic,” or worse, as “cute.” In her experience, most Americans still seemed to think that women of Asian heritage were meek, servile creatures. Never mind the fact that living in Asia was, by and large, no picnic for women.

The roar under her seat slowed to a rumble, signaling her approaching stop. She gathered her bag and stood, gripping a cold stainless-steel handrail to brace herself against the momentum of the train.

When the doors swooshed open, Abigail stepped out of the train and onto the platform along with dozens of other commuters. Heads straight, feet purposeful, they strode in concert toward the escalators to head up the tunnel and out onto the street.

Thick, almost oily air grew more oppressive with every inch as she ascended to ground level. This particular Metro exit deposited commuters near the Navy Memorial Plaza, where a haunting statue of a sailor with his collar turned up against the wind guarded two curved fountains spouting opaque turquoise water.

Men and women in dark suits crisscrossed the sidewalks in straight, purposeful strides. The commute was a ballet dance now, not a cattle drive. All was normal—except one burly man sitting on the stone bench that surrounded one of the memorial fountains.

Abigail didn’t recognize him, and she thought she should. People generally didn’t vary from their routines, and if he sat on that bench every morning, she’d have noticed him before today. In a black suit with a tan trench coat draped over his knees, he looked like the sort of conservative man who should be rushing to his job as a lawyer or upper-level bureaucrat, but he wasn’t. He calmly read a newspaper as though he had nowhere to be.

But this was Washington.
Everyone
had somewhere to be.

She tried to think of a few reasonable explanations. Perhaps he’d just moved to town. Perhaps he was waiting for a friend. Or perhaps she shouldn’t be so suspicious.

Yes, probably that last one.

She averted her eyes from the fountain and walked through a stand of trees toward Indiana Avenue. When she reached the intersection with Seventh, pedestrians had a green walk signal, but she glanced far to her left to check for traffic—and despite her desire to forget all about him, she checked to see if the man on the bench had moved.

He hadn’t, but he wasn’t reading his paper anymore, either. His head had lifted, and though his eyes were invisible beneath dark sunglasses, the prickle on her neck convinced her that his attention was directed firmly at her.

“T
ARGET HAS SPOTTED
the eye,” James Riley warned softly through a wireless communicator concealed within the small American flag pin secured to the lapel of his jacket.

“Negative. Target is continuing as expected,” said Weitz, the irritated man on the other end of Riley’s radio.

“Target is not an idiot. She looked right at you. You’ve been made.”

“No, she didn’t. Proceeding as planned.”

Weitz showed no particular skill at surveillance, but Riley wasn’t on the surveillance team and wasn’t supposed to give Weitz any guidance right now. Their team leader, Ethan Greene, had personally accompanied the target on the train, but he had departed in the opposite direction once Weitz established a visual on her. Weitz just had to follow her until she reached the courthouse and note if she made contact with anybody.

Unless she’d already spotted Weitz, in which case they needed to immediately abandon the mission to avoid alerting her to the surveillance. Or, more technically, “observation.” Maybe even “protection.” No matter how it was worded, though, Americans didn’t take kindly to being monitored on their own turf by the CIA. Greene’s team walked a hell of a fine line in
pursuing Abigail Mason this morning, and they couldn’t afford to slip up.

“You’ve been made,” Riley repeated. “Abort.”

“Proceeding!”

Riley cursed softly, but he knew that his opinion on fieldwork held little weight with the guys who’d spent time gathering primary intelligence in the field. Although Riley had gone through the Central Intelligence Agency’s field operations training at the Farm, he wasn’t a case officer. He’d never run a live surveillance route on a target, although he’d practiced doing so dozens of times. He was a psychologist by education and a behavioral consultant by profession. The CIA called him an “operational psychologist.” Greene called him a human lie detector, but Riley brushed it off as bullshit. Mostly. His job this morning had been merely to flush the quarry—and capture any intelligence she might leak in the process. Once she was “flushed,” he’d driven to her subway stop so he could monitor her behavior and determine her level of anxiety over the revelation that her father was missing…again. Observation was key to his understanding of a person, and it was quite frankly his favorite thing to do.

Riley pulled out his cell phone and lingered near the Metro exit, pretending to type a text message as he counted to ten, forcing himself not to stare at their target. He wanted to observe, not alert.

She’d been under steady surveillance since her father, the iconic spymaster Peter Mason, had disappeared while assisting British and French law enforcement in arresting a weapons smuggler four days ago. All of the British and French agents escorting the smuggler, a notorious Czech kingpin named Lukas Kral, had been killed, but Mason vanished along with Kral—and twenty antiaircraft missiles.

Abigail hadn’t done anything suspicious yet, nor had she shown the slightest variation in her daily routine that might indicate something momentous had occurred. That’s why their
team leader, Greene, had decided to try something new this morning. Riley didn’t think she knew anything relevant to finding her father, but Greene was leaving no stone unturned in the hunt for the legendary spook.

Riley had lately wondered if Greene’s obsession with Peter Mason would be their team’s downfall. As a counterintelligence squad focused on China, their team had been hunting a suspected mole who was passing sensitive information to the Chinese government. In the past few months, Greene had become increasingly convinced that Peter Mason had a hand in the leak. Although Mason hadn’t been in China for years, Greene didn’t understand why Mason had left Asia so abruptly, and he didn’t believe he’d maintained no further contacts there. That there was no hard evidence connecting Mason to the leak mattered little to Greene. All he saw was a man who’d once been at the forefront of the CIA’s anticommunism unit in South Asia who vacated his post—and his family—for a new duty station in Europe, and he’d never adequately explained why.