An Affair of Deceit (3 page)

Riley believed that Mason’s sudden change of mission was simple: like so many other CIA operatives, Mason had been hunting the Soviets in Asia, and as the 1970s came to a close, he’d been needed in Europe.

But now that Mason had gone missing along with the world’s most notorious black-market weapons dealer, he looked guilty as sin, and Greene was frothing at the mouth to find him.

Riley didn’t think Mason was their mole—Lukas Kral was Czech, and their disappearance had occurred in France—but Greene was convinced that the older man was hiding something. Riley hadn’t been able to dissuade him. Greene was stubborn and paranoid, but such things were key to a counterintelligence agent’s success. Good CIs saw conspiracy in every coincidence and betrayal in every brotherhood. On more than one occasion, Riley had considered himself lucky to count Greene as a friend, because everyone else in the agency feared falling under Greene’s wide lens of suspicion.

As Peter Mason had. And if Riley had to wager, he’d put money down on the notion that Abigail Mason was next on Greene’s ever-lengthening list of suspects.

His self-imposed pause over, he continued down the street to a better vantage point, using a wide-shouldered man as a screen between himself and Abigail. Morning commuters in cars and on foot, plus a handful on bikes, created a constant roar of activity. A pending thunderstorm turned the sky an incandescent gray. He pulled out his aviator sunglasses. As he maintained a two-block distance from Abigail, he watched through shaded eyes as Weitz attempted to trail her.

Abruptly, she hopped on nimble feet into a recessed doorway. Weitz must have missed the movement, because he kept barreling forward.

“She stopped. Hold your position,” Riley warned.

“I got this, man.”

“Weitz, don’t run up on her.” The order came from Greene, who was probably two blocks east by now and would be looping back to the train soon.

“No worries,” Weitz said and then walked right past her hiding spot.

Riley groaned.

Abigail popped out, but she was now
behind
Weitz, which was exactly the wrong place for her to be. She continued down the street toward the courthouse.

“She’s behind you,” Riley said.

“I swear to God, if you don’t shut up—” Weitz began.

“Weitz, abort,” Greene commanded. “If Riley says she’s on to you, then she’s on to you.”

Weitz cursed, but he veered left and out of sight at the next intersection.

“She’s clever, Greene,” Riley said as he stepped into pace with the flow of bodies down Indiana Avenue. Abigail walked purposefully two blocks ahead.

“No shit. She’s hiding something,” Greene said.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Then tell me why anyone would have suspected Weitz in that situation? What made her think she needed to get behind him?”

“Who knows? Maybe she has her dad’s gift for tradecraft.”

“No one would be that evasive unless they’ve got something to hide.”

“She said she hasn’t talked to him in twenty years. I believe her.”

“Fine, but I think she knows more than she’s telling. Talk to her again. See if you can figure out why she eluded Weitz.”

“She didn’t elude me!” Weitz whined.

“Shut up, Weitz,” Riley and Greene said in unison.

Riley began walking more briskly down the street after Abigail. She proceeded straight down Indiana Avenue, but now she sipped from a steel travel mug. As she neared the intersection with Sixth Street, she encountered a crowd of five other pedestrians who’d stopped to wait for oncoming traffic to clear. She halted, standing silently behind the crowd. A few other walkers soon joined the group, and though Abigail was at least a head shorter than everyone else on the corner, she wasn’t jostled by those around her. No one got close enough to brush her arm or nudge her with an errant briefcase.

For as much interaction as she had with the humans around her, she might as well have been standing on the sidewalk in a plastic hamster ball.

He’d never seen a person look so alone in a crowd. Fascination compelled him to stare. Her stance remained rigid and her feet were immobile, neither shifting nor shuffling as she waited. Her head didn’t pivot or bob. She made no effort to engage anyone in casual conversation, or even exchange a friendly smile.

Riley had grown up in countries where few people spoke English, and fewer still were interested in treating the awkwardly tall white child like anything but an oddity. To better communicate with his peers, he’d learned how to read body language.
The skill had translated well at the CIA, and he still looked to a person’s body for cues into what they were feeling and trying to convey—or hide.

To his expert eye, Abigail was not a joyful person. When she couldn’t charge forward, she simply froze until she could hit play again. She wouldn’t see life as a journey to be savored. He doubted that she did much savoring at all. This all-or-nothing attitude revealed her to be supremely goal-oriented and focused, perhaps to a fault.

Yet she’d been aware enough of her surroundings to notice and shake Weitz off her tail. She knew she walked among other humans, but she apparently considered her fellow commuters as possible threats, not prospective friends.

A bus roared past the corner where Abigail waited, and waves of dusty air rolled after it like a wake following a boat. Her long black hair flew wildly about her head as the bus passed, but with one hand holding a coffee mug and the other gripping her tote bag, she had no way to tame her hair. It became unkempt and wild, folding in upon itself in an increasingly tangled web, but Abigail didn’t flinch. She didn’t toss her head or turn away from the street in disgust, as the other waiting walkers did. She didn’t even tap her toe. Her unflappability was almost inhuman.

Walkers surged forward as the pedestrian signal turned green. Abigail moved with them, momentarily lost to him in the sea of dark suits. In a short minute, he found himself at the same corner where he’d last seen her, the one where she’d been battered by the bus’s wake.

Puzzled, he looked around. She was gone. Not to the courthouse, the massive stone steps of which were now directly in front of him, but somewhere else on the street. She had lost him as simply as she’d evaded the other surveillance officer.

Riley smiled. She’d outsmarted him, but he liked a challenge.

A thick plop of something cool and wet landed on the tip of his nose. He looked up. Thick gray clouds hovered above his
head, and in the moment that it took him to realize that the approaching storm would be torrential, the sky unleashed a flood.

Rain bounced off his shoulders like hail. People on the street scattered, some inside buildings, others simply running with their briefcases held over their heads. Nowhere did he see Abigail.

Feeling silly wearing sunglasses in a storm, he took them off as he hustled toward the courthouse, weaving under awnings and overhanging rooflines to avoid the rain as best as he could.

A flicker of movement ahead caught his attention. He peered through the sheeting rain. Abigail huddled under the bright red canopy of a small news-and-smoke shop. She wasn’t looking at him. Rather, she seemed to be glaring at the clouds.

He dashed to her hiding spot and ducked under the shelter, joining her as she waited out the storm. Rain draped like a solid velvet curtain over the sides of the awning, protecting and secluding them in the small space.

“I asked you to leave me alone,” she said, her voice low.

The air was thick, and as she spoke, he smelled the sweetness of her breath under the hint of fresh coffee. Without thinking, he inhaled deeply through his mouth. With the taste of her on his tongue, his mouth began to water.

Uncomfortable, he looked at the blanket of rain that veiled them from the street.

“I wanted to,” he finally answered.

“Then why persist?”

“They seem to think that you know something.”

She didn’t ask the obvious question—
who thinks I know something?
—but instead turned, her eyes as black and shiny as obsidian under the dark slashes of her brows. “I know many things, Dr. Riley, but nothing that will help you find my father.”

“I agree. I’m sorry. If I’d known you were under this awning, I’d never have run over here.”

“Now you’re lying.”

He laughed. “OK. But you should be glad you shook those other guys. They would have been far less pleasant to talk to while stranded in a rainstorm.” He nodded at the rain. “When I left Asia, I’d thought I’d left these monsoons behind.”

Her mouth twitched.

Confused? Intrigued?
Good. He wanted her something other than angry.

“Turns out East Asia doesn’t have an exclusive on these kinds of squalls,” he continued. “Africa, India, South America, Australia, and North America all have their own monsoon seasons, too.”

“This isn’t a monsoon,” she said. “It’s just a rainstorm.”

“Yeah. It’s just your average Mid-Atlantic rainstorm. One that can peel your skin from your bones while it’s ninety-five degrees outside.”

She wrinkled her nose, and her features went from stern to cute. He forgot why he’d started talking about the weather. Riley strained to breathe in her scent again, but all he smelled now was the wet-dog odor of rain on warm asphalt.

“Where have you traveled in East Asia?” she asked.

“Almost everywhere,” he said, surprised but pleased at her curiosity. “My parents did development for the Peace Corps, and they never put down roots. Thailand, Taiwan, Cambodia, Vietnam. It’s all home to me.”

“Is that supposed to intrigue me? Did they send you to establish a rapport to make the interrogation go more smoothly?”

“Something like that.” He smiled. “What about you? Where’s your home?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You surely already know the answer to that.”

“I know where you were born, but that doesn’t answer the question of where you consider your home to be.” He inclined his head toward her. “The secrets of your heart are not written in your file.”

She laughed, but it was a hard sound. She turned to face him. The glint of anger in her eyes pushed him back.

“I don’t like the fact that you know all there is to know about me. I could tell you that I was born in Taipei, but you already know that. I could tell you that I speak fluent Mandarin, but I’m sure you know that, too. I could tell you that I moved here when I was eight, but obviously, my file covers that detail. Altogether, there is very little about me that you do not know, and it gives you a significant and unpleasant advantage in our discussions.”

“It’s not how I would have it. But that’s the way it goes when your dad is Peter Mason.”

Her jaw pulsed once. “Peter Mason hasn’t been my dad for a long time.”

“I know that, too,” he said quietly.

A silence settled between them. Wordless, they stared out at the rain that still pounded the street like a billion tiny jackhammers.

“Tell me something about yourself. Something important,” she clarified quickly, “to even the playing field.”

He was not surprised to be questioned. She was a renowned prosecutor and would look for advantages. He decided to give her something truthful. The truth was always easier to remember than a lie. “My father died when I was eleven. My mother and I moved to America after that.”

She tipped her coffee to her mouth.

“Good enough?” he said.

“Hardly. How did he die?”

Riley inhaled deeply. The question struck a little close to the bone, and she knew it. “I don’t know the details. It wasn’t a natural death.”

“Didn’t you look into it when you joined whichever agency you work for?”

His lungs tightened, his body still aching with the unresolved pain of not knowing exactly how his father had died.
He had wanted to look into it, but his mother had asked him to leave the past alone. They’d been through too much together for him to disregard her wishes. “It wasn’t important. I’d buried him years before that.”

She nodded. “Then you understand, Dr. Riley, why I don’t want to talk about my father. I buried him years ago, too.”

He grimaced, but the thing was, he
did
understand. He sympathized with this sad, lonely woman who wanted nothing to do with her estranged father. But he also had a job to do. “I do understand. Let me just get a few facts straight, and then I’ll leave you alone forever. Can I assume that you’ve had absolutely no contact with him over the past week?”

“You can assume anything you like.” She broke her stare and pulled something out of her tote bag. “I’m going to work. You surely know where that is, so stop this irritating, ineffective, and possibly illegal spying business. If you must speak with me in the future, I expect you to make an appointment.”

A
BIGAIL STRODE THROUGH
the rain.

What a ridiculous waste of time that had been. Why Dr. Riley and his crew of bumbling fools had come to
her
to find her father, she had no idea. She had to presume they were at the end of their investigative rope to get so desperate as to go to a man’s long-estranged daughter for clues to his whereabouts. Whoever they worked for had surely stuck one of their most amiable officers on her, though. Did they think she’d fall under the spell of twinkling green eyes and a crooked grin?