An Affair of Deceit (4 page)

They didn’t know the first thing about her if they thought that would work.

And yet, she’d chosen to linger outside, under that awning, wondering if he’d join her to wait out the rainstorm.

Maybe they knew her better than she’d like to believe.

Damn her curiosity. She closed her umbrella and tugged open the front door of the courthouse.

She exhaled hard through her nose, feeling unsettled for the first time in recent memory. This James Riley had no right to force thoughts of her father back into her head after all these years. She’d worked very hard to forget about Peter Mason, and she was determined to keep him where he belonged: in the past.

Unfortunately, her brain didn’t work that way. Even as she tried to push the questions out of her mind, they slipped back to the front of the line.

She nodded at the guard as she walked through security and into a waiting elevator.

What
had
her father done to attract the interest of the government? He was a terrible father, but he hadn’t been a criminal. He’d been a diplomat. He’d never do anything against his own country. Maybe he was in trouble.

So what? She wouldn’t care if he was. He wasn’t her father anymore, not after so many years of silence. Whatever kind of trouble he was in, he could stay there, as far as she was concerned.

The elevator came to a smooth stop, and its doors opened. She turned down the hallway, pulled open a thick door, and walked past her assistant’s empty desk and into her own office. After dropping her umbrella into a coatrack and her tote back by her chair, she sat. Behind her were four evenly spaced stacks of oak filing cabinets, stained dark from years of hard use. Normally, their solid presence comforted her, for like a good file system, her thoughts were neatly and rigorously organized. The cabinets were like a physical manifestation of her own mind.

Today, though, she struggled to structure the feelings that flew like sparrows in her head.

She rested her forehead in her hands, her thumbs on her temples, and stared at her blank desktop. These quiet mornings were usually used to complete paperwork and polish off research that she hadn’t had time for the previous evening. But even though she had a small mountain of files in her bag that still needed reviewing, she could do nothing but think about James Riley’s questions.

Already utterly derailed by the personal drama of the morning, and yet there was one more actor to involve.

Abigail grabbed her cell phone and scrolled down her contact list until she saw an entry for F. Li. She pushed the talk button and waited. Three rings later, a woman with a soft Taiwanese accent answered.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Mother.”

A sigh, and then her mother responded slowly, beatifically, “It is a beautiful morning, Daughter.”

Abigail clenched her jaw. Fei Li could wake up in hell and find beauty in the flames. “It’s hot, as always.”

“It is a gift to tai chi in nature’s steam room, otherwise known as my very own backyard.” Her mother laughed lightly. “Did you tai chi this morning?”

“No. I had a visitor.”

“Oh! Is that why you are calling? To tell me you have a young man? I could not be more delighted!”

Abigail rolled her eyes, already angry. “He was from the government. They’re looking for…Father.” The word
Father
rang false in her ears.

Her mother was silent for a long moment before commenting. “He has been gone for some time.”

“Not to them, apparently.”

“No matter. It is of no concern to us.”

“On that, I agree. But this man wanted information. He wanted to know if I’ve talked to Father recently, which of course I haven’t. Have you?”

“No.”

“Well, you can expect a visit from the government today, if they aren’t already there.”

“Thank you for the notice. I will make certain I have enough tea.”

Abigail paused. “Why aren’t you surprised that someone came looking for him?”

“Who said I wasn’t?”

“You never said you were.”

“Dear,” her mother said gently, “do not suppose that what is not said is not felt.”

“We’ve never been big on saying what we feel,” Abigail said, and instantly regretted rising to the emotional bait.

“English does not adequately convey feelings, and you refuse to speak your native tongue.” Her mother’s voice warmed as she spoke in Mandarin. “I am very proud of your achievements, Daughter.”

“Can we not do this?” Abigail replied in English, refusing to speak the Chinese dialect. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of it. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t speak her native language. She simply didn’t want to, particularly not when her mother insisted upon it.

“Not do what?” her mother said, reverting back to English. “I only wish for you to be happy.”

“Can we not turn every conversation into a soap opera?”

Her mother exhaled. “I have to go. I must clean the garden before this man visits. What is his name?”

“It may not be the same person, but his name was James Riley. PhD,” she added. Her mother liked to know a person’s formal title.

“A doctor? How interesting.”

“Not really. Why are they looking for Dad?” Again, she felt uncomfortable by her word choice.
Dad
definitely wasn’t the right term, either.

Her mother laughed. “He worked for the State Department. I’m sure it is just some official business.”

“Then why don’t they know where he is? Why come banging on my door to find him?”

“I’m sure there is a very good reason.”

“And I’m sure you know exactly what that reason is.”

Her mother sighed again. “When did you become such a suspicious woman? I don’t know a thing about this business with your father.”

Abigail tapped her fingers on her desk. “You never told me why he left.”

“I didn’t know why.”

“Didn’t? And now you do?”

“Please don’t treat me like one of your witnesses. This is my second language, after all. You must permit me the occasional error.”

“You don’t make errors. You know exactly what you’re saying. You always have.” Abigail wished, for once, that she was speaking face-to-face with her mother. People had a hard time lying to her face, and she knew her mother was being deceitful, or at least evading the truth. “You know more about him than I do. And I know that you don’t want me to look into it. But if he’s done something to damage my career…”

“Your father has no hold over you. Do as you wish, as you have always done.”

“I intend to.”

Her mother’s voice deepened. “Looking into the past will not bring happiness into your future. It is a futile endeavor.”

“What makes you think I give a damn about the past? Maybe I just want to make sure the bastard stays out of my future.” The epithet hung around like smoke in the air, uncivilized and nasty.
Bastard
was too harsh, even for him.

“Why did you call today? To warn me or to interrogate me?”

Abigail wasn’t sure.

Her mother sighed again. “Regardless. Those listening to this conversation will be interested to know that I advise you to cooperate with them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t have us wiretapped. These men couldn’t rip their way out of a paper bag. They couldn’t even follow me to work without being spotted.”

“They know where you work, my dear. If they wanted to speak with you, they hardly needed to follow you. They must have had some other aim in mind. I suspect that your friend Dr. Riley is flushing the quail to see where it flies.”

“I’m not flying anywhere.” Abigail ground her teeth in irritation. “And I’ve got nothing to hide, though that only makes one of us. Anyway, I have to go.”

“As do I. I will call you later, after this doctor from the government visits me. I do not doubt that he will.”

“She’s talking to her mother.” Ethan Greene’s smoothly modulated voice on the phone was as familiar to Riley as his own. “Our guy outside her mom’s house in Virginia says she does tai chi at dawn every morning and just picked up the phone. He’s listening with a parabolic mic. Also eating his way through a dozen donuts. Says there’s a Boston crème for you if you want to hit him up with a coffee refill on your way in.”

“Interesting.”

“Boston crèmes
are
delightful. Me, I’m more of a jelly-fill kind of guy. Raspberry over cherry, though. And leave strawberry for the women.”

“No, it’s interesting that Abigail is talking to her mother.” The rain had stopped and Riley now paced on the steaming, hissing street in front of the DC courthouse. He’d let Abigail walk into her office alone. “This is the first time they’ve talked in six months.”

“Right. Not since her mom’s birthday. Not even on Mother’s Day.” Greene whistled. “That girl is stone cold.”

“It happens. They’re estranged.”

“What kind of person doesn’t call their mother on Mother’s Day?”

“Someone from a country where they don’t celebrate Hallmark holidays. It’s a made-up holiday, anyway.”

“Really? When’s the last time you ignored it, mama’s boy?”

Riley rolled his eyes. Of course Greene knew he never neglected his mother on a holiday. Hell, Greene had spent most
of the last few holidays with Riley and his mother, including Christmas. Greene’s own mother and father, long divorced, had each been too busy with their own lives to bother speaking much with Greene this year. Or last year.

“What are they saying?” Riley asked, impatient to keep momentum on the case.

“Not much. Abigail wants to know why people from the government are looking for her father. Her mother said she has no idea. Then they bitched at each other about their feelings. You know—typical mother/daughter shit. But nothing good. Not yet. I’ll get you a rough transcript in a few minutes.”

“We’re lucky she took the call outside. Is the NSA still stalling on wiretaps?”

“They’re not so much stalling as they are refusing to engage,” Greene explained. “They say that since Mason disappeared in France, he isn’t a threat to our national security and is therefore not of their concern. He won’t be a priority until—
if
—he shows up inside the US.”

“They don’t care that he was last seen in the company of a”—Riley glanced around to be sure that no one was listening, but he still lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper—“a man known to supply heavy weaponry to terrorists, and they had twenty antiaircraft missiles between them?”

Greene laughed again. “That’s entirely Langley’s problem, man. The NSA threw it back in our laps. They have much more pressing stuff to worry about. A rogue CIA agent, a black-market weapons dealer gone bat-shit crazy, and twenty operational Stinger missiles lost somewhere in the South of France are low on their list of priorities.”

“And top on ours.”

“Of course.” Greene was serious now. “Nothing matters to me more than taking Peter Mason down.”

“You mean securing the missiles, rearresting Kral, and finding out if Mason’s our China mole.”

“I mean tossing Peter Mason in a federal penitentiary for the rest of his natural life. He’s been a traitor for decades, and he’s screwed America for the last time.”

“We have no proof that he’s a traitor. As far as we know, Kral kidnapped Mason and is holding him hostage.”

“Then why just take him? Why kill the British and French agents but take the American alive?”

Riley had no idea, but he could proffer a reasonable hypothesis. “The British and French agents were paramilitary guys brought in to arrest Kral. Their sole mission objective was to take Kral into custody, so when they were ambushed, they must have fought to the last man. If I know Mason, he likely hunkered down once the shooting started.”

“He
is
a fucking coward.”

“He’s a survivor, and he’s not stupid,” Riley insisted. He’d pored over Mason’s file—the small part of it that was open to them for review, at least—and had come to the conclusion that Mason was one of the agency’s best men. Terrible father and husband, but an awfully good intelligence officer, one who’d procured more well-placed spies over the course of his long career than any other officer on record. Mason had a cockroach’s talent for staying alive in dangerous situations, too. “I’m sure he was armed, but he was outgunned. They took him alive because he was the only one on our side still breathing when the bullets stopped flying. Then maybe Kral decided to interrogate him before killing him. It could be that simple.”

“Nothing is that simple with Mason. We still don’t know why he abandoned his China post. That was a good gig—he had to start from scratch when he got to Europe. No contacts. Nothing.”

“He didn’t abandon it. He was reassigned.”

“He abandoned his family.”

That much was true. Mason could have taken his wife and child with him on his post to Europe. He’d been stationed in Prague for a while; families were welcome in the Czech Republic
capital’s embassy, where Mason had been quartered under diplomatic cover. “We can’t be sure of anything. We still don’t have access to his whole file.”

“And we never will. But I don’t need to see a full file to know when something’s suspicious.”

“Everything’s suspicious to you.” Riley had known Greene since college, and he was used to having this sort of discussion with him by now. He seemed like a conspiracy crackpot sometimes, but the crazy thing was that he was often right. He wouldn’t be under thirty-five and running his own counterintelligence team otherwise. Because Greene was the best in the world at ferreting out moles and leaks, Riley had learned to tolerate a certain amount of nuttiness from his best friend. “Have you made any progress with getting his older records opened?”