An Affair of Deceit (20 page)

“M
Y FATHER’S NAME
is Peter,” Abigail blurted, quite unconsciously, before she considered the fact that she didn’t really want Beta to know her father’s name.

But now the two nearly identical names had been spoken aloud. They mingled in the air, merging until they became one. Then Abigail didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t do anything but consider the possibility that Kral’s cousin could be her father. It would mean that she was related to Kral, too. The man’s madness and corruption were in her blood.

Her stomach turned at the thought.

Riley’s hand slipped back over hers. She felt unclean and wanted to pull away, but his fingers clamped around hers as he asked Beta his next questions.

“Kral’s cousin was named Petr? What was his last name?”

Beta stared at Abigail with wide-eyed curiosity. “Both boys were named Kral. Their fathers were brothers. Petr’s father and mother died when he was a baby. Lukas’s parents looked after him. Is your father Japanese, like you?”

Abigail shook her head, still half-stunned.

Riley spoke to Beta, trying to keep the intelligence flowing. “Do you think Petr stayed on with the Soviets? Maybe he went to Russia when they left Prague?”

That got Beta’s full attention. She slapped the table with the palm of her hand. “Bah! If Petr went to Russia, it was to be put in gulag. He was a good boy at heart, but strong willed.” Beta chuckled. “I do not think even KGB could make him into Russian comrade. Nobody could ever tell Petr Kral what to do. He was a hard boy, even when very little. Hard and determined. Never laughed. Always serious.”

Just like my father,
Abigail thought. She had to know the truth. “Do you have a picture of Petr?”

Beta paused. “Tell me about your father, Slečna Abigail? He is not Japanese. He is some other Oriental?”

Abigail bristled at the offensive, colonial-era term. “My mother is Chinese. My father is not Asian.” She emphasized the proper term—and then realized that she’d given Beta more information than she’d needed to.

“And his name is Peter. Just like our Petr, but Americanized.”

Abigail straightened her spine, recovering some of her gravitas. She didn’t need Beta to become aware of the possibility that her father was Kral’s cousin. “It’s a common name, and not quite the same as Petr. A coincidence.”

“Certainly. Named for Saint Peter, the Rock of the Church. ‘Peter’ is from Greek for ‘rock.’” Beta leaned forward in her chair, and her arctic eyes were cast into shadow. “So you see, it is amusing to me that your surname is Mason, because in English, a mason is one who builds with rock. Your father’s name is like Rock Rockbuilder. It is…coincidence, you call it?”

For as much as Abigail generally didn’t believe in coincidences, she hated the woman’s smug tone. “My grandparents were undoubtedly aware of the etymology of our family name, and named my father appropriately.”

“Of course. Did you know them well?”

“I never met them,” she admitted.

“Because they lived far away?”

“Because they died before I was born.”

“Ah.” Beta clucked sympathetically. “I am sorry, my dear. A child should know her grandparents.”

“I know who they are. I just never met them.”

“Of course you know who they are. Who does not know her own family?”

The comment bordered on accusation and convinced Abigail that she could not stand one more second of the interview. She tugged her hand out of Riley’s and stood, thanking Beta for her time before she walked out the door without a second glance.

Back on the street, midday heat hit her like a hammer, and she was glad for it. She closed her eyes and let the sun warm her face as she waited for Riley, who was apparently more gracious in departing from Teta Beta’s house.

“You all right?” Riley asked when he finally joined her in the warm alley.

“Yes, perfectly. I’m wondering what we do next.”

“Beta gave me this.” He held out a ratty manila envelope.

“Oh? Let’s look, then.”

“Not here. We don’t know what it is.”

“You’re being ridiculous. Open the envelope.”

“No.” He tucked the envelope into his jacket’s breast pocket. “Let’s walk a little farther and find someplace to sit down.”

“I give you two minutes before I take it from you by force.”

“I’d like to see you try.” Riley laughed and took her hand as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

They walked together down the dusty street, and she was startled to realize that her shorter strides matched his longer ones. She wondered if he slowed for her sake or if she sped up for his. After walking several blocks in silent consideration, she still couldn’t decipher exactly what was happening, but she decided that it was very pleasant to walk in time with another human, especially Riley. He lived so deeply in the present, she nearly forgot that he held an envelope that could unlock her father’s mysterious past.

They rounded a corner and entered a small, quiet courtyard edged by narrow beige houses. A wrought-iron bench rested crookedly underneath a tree that grew from a patch of dirt in the center of the square.

“Voilà. Now we sit and examine,” Riley said as he led her to the bench.

She sat, and the metal was cool under her legs. “Let’s have it, then.”

Riley pulled the envelope from his jacket. He looked inside it and frowned. “It’s a picture.”

He removed a small, ragged, black-and-white photograph and held it up for Abigail to see. Impatient, she grabbed it and stared, hoping to see something other than what she feared it might be.

She saw a skinny, preteen boy standing in the middle of a brick-paved street. His white T-shirt looked dirty and his high-waisted pants were several sizes too big, but his black hair was stiffly side-parted in the style of the mid-1950s. His hands were balled into fists, and from the thin, hard set of his lips and the deep vertical furrows in his young brow, she understood that this boy’s life was not easy.

She tore herself away from his pale, unflinching eyes to turn over the photograph. Written on the back in a looping script were the words “Petr Kral, 1967.”

The words erased the last doubt from Abigail’s mind, for she already recognized the boy in the photograph as her father. Her shoulders fell as the full weight of the discovery bore down upon her. Petr Kral and Peter Mason were the same man, and as much as it hurt her to know it, she was relieved to finally have an answer.

“It’s my father. He was just a boy.” Her voice cracked, surprising her.

“This skinny little kid is the great Peter Mason?”

“Petr Kral, I suppose. He must have changed his name at some point after he left the KGB.” She struggled to identify what she was feeling. “He never even gave me a chance.”

“Chance to what?”

“To understand him. He changed his name, lied about his past, and left without explaining one damn bit of it. Now I know who he is, but I have no idea what’s motivating him. In this picture I see a sad, angry little boy, but now I don’t know what kind of man he became. I don’t even know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy.”

“He’s a good guy, Abigail. I believe that.”

“You do? Why? What evidence do you have to attest to my father’s innocence?”

“What matters more is that we don’t have any evidence that attests to his guilt. Not with regard to his disappearance with Kral, nor for anything else.”

“What do you mean?” She caught his eye. “He’s suspected of something else? Not just of being in cahoots with Kral?”

Riley bit his lower lip. “Yes. But there’s no evidence, nothing real, at least. Greene has him pegged as a leak to the Chinese, but there’s literally nothing connecting him to the PRC in the last twenty years.”

“Except Kral—he’s connected to them. He sold their weapons to the Libyans.”

“True, but that’s a bit of a stretch.”

“What is Greene basing his accusations on? He must have something on my father.”

Riley frowned and flicked his hand through the air. “Nothing. A few reports that don’t perfectly match with his itineraries. The occasional fudged timeline. The sort of thing that every intelligence officer does when he’s in the field and trying to get something accomplished. Langley is a behemoth, and if field agents waited until they had approval for every contact, they’d never get anything done. I promise you that if we looked closely enough, we’d find the same sort of thing in everyone’s file.”

“Why did Greene look closely at my father, then?”

“Because of his history. He used to be the China expert, and then he flitted off to Europe without a backward glance. Greene thinks it’s suspicious.”

“I’m starting to like Greene.”

“No, Abigail.” Riley smiled. “Well, you can like Greene—I do; he’s my best friend—but don’t throw your father under the bus just yet. Wait until we know more about him.”

“How much more information do you need before you can start seeing the dark side of him? Look at what we do know. My father spent time in a KGB-run orphanage, and then he turns up several years later with a new identity and a CIA affiliation. It sounds too much like he’s a double agent.”

“But the KGB doesn’t exist anymore. Who’s he a double for?”

“Maybe for himself, or for Lukas Kral. Maybe all these years, they’ve had some sort of plan to infiltrate the CIA, and now they’re finally acting out their endgame.”

Riley frowned. “What sort of endgame could they possibly have planned? They were kids, and it was a hell of a long time ago.”

“Look at the facts at hand. Maybe they planned to meet up and achieve some sort of revenge. That’s exactly the sort of thing two angry boys could have dreamed up back then.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’s been decades. There’s no one left to blame for the trauma of their childhoods. There’s no revenge to exact.”

“You’re wrong. Don’t you know your World War II history?” Abigail kicked at the dirt. She’d studied this in depth in college, where she’d majored in international affairs with a focus on twentieth-century European history. The end of the Second World War, and all of its repercussions, was permanently seared into her memory banks by this point. “At the end of the war, the Americans and Russians divvied up liberation rights. Russia got Czechoslovakia. A formerly sovereign state was handed over to the Russians without any consultation with the exiled
Czechoslovakian government. If the Russians hadn’t been given control, who knows where Czechoslovakia would be today? Could they have kept pace with Western Europe if they hadn’t been under the yoke of Communism? Either way, they weren’t given a choice. I’d say Czechs and Slovaks have plenty to complain about.”

“It’s possible that some of them could blame America for handing their nation off to the Russians without so much as a talk with the rightful Czechoslovakian government,” Riley said. “But we couldn’t have done any more than we did. We were busy liberating Western Europe from the Nazis. We couldn’t have managed Eastern Europe, too.”

Abigail shook her head. “No, we had the opportunity to liberate Czechoslovakia. We just didn’t take it. In the last days of the war, the citizens of Prague attempted to free themselves from Nazi occupation. Patton’s army was within forty miles of Prague, but the citizens’ calls for aid to the Americans went unanswered. The relatively unarmed Czechs were no match for Nazi tanks and air raids. They were forced to sign a cease-fire with the Nazis, but not before thousands of Czechs were killed.
Thousands
, Riley. And they wouldn’t all have died if the Americans had stepped up to help.”

“I know that. I also know that the Russians forced the Americans to stay behind that line of demarcation. The Soviets were just as close, and if they’d arrived more quickly, the Czech uprising would have been a success. The Russians were responsible for providing aid, not the Americans.”

“Isn’t it everyone’s responsibility to provide aid to innocents fighting against evil? But this argument is academic. The fact remains that the Americans didn’t step up to liberate Czechoslovakia, and as a result, thousands of people died needlessly, and the nation was given to the Soviets at the end of the war. It’s not such a leap to suggest that some people might blame the United States for forty years of brutal
Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Lukas Kral and my father weren’t even alive when it happened, but perhaps they lost older relatives in the World War II uprising. Or maybe they remember the violence the Soviets wreaked in putting down the Prague Spring in ’68. Their parents died around then. Perhaps they’ve been plotting revenge against the Americans all these years.”

Riley started to argue but was interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He answered, and his face hardened.

“We’ll be there,” he said into his phone and flipped it shut. He grabbed her hand and pulled her off the bench. “We have a plane to catch.”

“What’s happening?” she asked as she joined Riley in walking quickly out of the square.

“Your father and Kral have been spotted. They’re in Detroit.”

“They’re in Detroit?” Riley asked Greene once they’d situated themselves on the private plane that would take the CIA team back to America.

“Motor City, baby.”