Girl of Lies (9 page)

Carrie took the baby without hesitation. “Are you all right?” she asked. Her eyes dropped to Andrea’s shaking hands.

Andrea nodded. In her peripheral vision, she saw Leah Simpson stand.

“I’ll be going. For the time being, until we have more permanent arrangements made, two uniformed officers are stationed in the lobby and one at your door twenty-four hours a day. If you need to go anywhere, please talk with the officer outside so you’ll have an escort.”

Andrea nodded, desperately wanting to get out of that room.

“Here’s my card,” Simpson said. Andrea reached out and wordlessly snatched it. She needed this woman to leave. She needed to step out of this room.

Sarah was staring at her frankly now, eyes filled with curiosity.

“I… I need to… I’ll be back.”

Clutching the card in her hand, she ran down the hallway to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. She barely made it to the toilet before the nausea forced her to her knees.

Leslie Collins looked around the relative darkness of Assaggi’s on Bethesda Avenue and took a bite of his tortelli di zucca. Organic whole grain fresh pasta filled with pumpkin and glazed with a butter sage sauce, it was surprisingly good. Despite the fact that his job frequently forced him to eat in sometimes inconvenient and occasionally downright awful locations, Collins preferred to eat at home, with his wife.

Today that wasn’t an option. For one thing, the planned topic of discussion would ruin her appetite.

Filner was late. Again. Collins would have preferred to have met somewhere more discreet, or not at all. Or that he’d never been forced into his uneasy business relationship with Mitch Filner in the first place. He often wished none of this had ever happened.

But since it had, he had no choice but to see it to the bitter end. He took a sip of his Dewar’s and Soda, breaking yet another of his own informal rules. He didn’t drink in the middle of the day. But then again, he’d never ordered the kidnap and murder of a teenage girl before, either. No matter what most Americans thought—especially the liberals and conspiracy theorists—his agency was scrupulous about law virtually all of the time. Unfortunately, this was one of those times when extraordinary measures became necessary.

Filner seethed as he scanned the headlines on his tablet.
Daughter of Secretary of Defense escapes abduction attempt.
That was the front page of the Washington Post. The New York Times said
Police Identify Suspect in Kidnap Attempt.
This was a real shit-show, one that had been turning Collins’s stomach all morning. It took the feds no more than an hour to identify Tariq Koury. One hour. His identification was bound to lead to plenty of uncomfortable questions to several agencies in Washington Koury had freelanced for at one time or another. Not to mention the private military contractor where he’d found a home.

Collins was relatively sure nothing would find its way back to him. But relatively sure wasn’t good enough. Too much rested on Wakhan staying buried forever. Anything threatening to bring it out in the open needed to be dealt with.

Mitch Filner arrived fifteen minutes late. Collins spotted him walking up the street from the direction of the Apple Store, then crossing Bethesda Avenue behind a gaggle of mothers with drooling and bubbling children in their strollers. When Filner crossed the street, he was hidden from view for a moment, but Collins knew he would reappear.

Collins mentally catalogued once again the people who knew about Wakhan. Thompson… soon to be Secretary of Defense. Roshan al Saud, the head of the Saudi Arabian Intelligence Agency and brother to the King. George-Phillip Windsor, the appallingly nosy busybody who saw himself as an intelligence professional and found himself in a game he couldn’t have imagined. Windsor was a dilettante, a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth who owed his position as Chief of the Special Intelligence Service to his family name. Senator Chuck Rainsley, retired Marine Corps Colonel and now Senior Senator from Texas. Before the Marines had their heads handed to them in Beirut in 1983, he’d been a nobody, an obscure man assigned to an obscure position. Somehow he’d turned the massacre of his own troops into political capital that fueled his powerful career in Washington. Finally, there was Vasily Karatygin, who had disappeared for much of the 90s, only to turn up as a prominent “businessman” after the Northern Alliance swept the Taliban out of Kabul.

Karatygin could be eliminated without anyone knowing or caring. But the rest were prominent in their own countries and agencies. With the exception of George-Phillip, they all owed their careers to maintaining their secrecy. And Windsor knew the consequences of letting the secret out would be especially dire.

Another variable he couldn’t control was Thompson’s children. The moment Collins received the report that all of the children were getting genetic testing to find a match for the baby, he scrambled. The results of those genetic tests were going to raise questions that might fuck everything up. If Collins could have gone back in time and retroactively sterilized Thompson’s slut of a wife, he would have done so without hesitation.

Filner appeared in the doorway and made his way through the restaurant, scanning everyone in the crowd. An Army veteran, he’d been with the CIA Directorate of Operations through most of the 90s and into the early part of the 2000s. Filner was a bit of a roughneck and didn’t fit in well with the buttoned-down Ivy League culture at CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But he’d been an ace at some of the ugliest operations, until a rape accusation in Singapore ended his agency career.

Collins had been forced to personally break the news in 2008. Filner had been quietly booted from the agency. Since then, Filner had transitioned into a world even more shadowy than the Agency. He was a private contractor, sometimes providing services via contacting outfits like Blackwater, but sometimes directly.

Right now he was on a private assignment. Off the books.

“Collins.”

“Filner.”

Filner’s eyes scanned the room again then looked at Collins’s half-finished plate. “Sorry I’m late.”

Collins’s eyebrows pulled together. He leaned forward and said, “I’m not concerned that you’re late, Filner. I’m concerned about the situation with Richard Thompson.”

Filner shrugged. “It was unexpected.”

“It’s a disaster. I give you the job of quietly making that girl disappear. Instead, we’ve got a massive media fiasco. How the hell did Koury end up dead?”

“Dumb luck, Collins. You know that happens sometimes. The cops saw something they didn’t like and pursued them.”

“You sent two seasoned killers to pick up a sixteen-year-old girl, and somehow she not only gets away, but also kills both of them.”

“She didn’t kill them. The cops did.”

Collins waved his hand. “Semantics. And here’s the thing. She’s under the eye of the media now, and Diplomatic Security is lining up to give protection to the entire family. You fucked up, Filner. You blew it.”

“We can still take her out.”

Collins shook his head. “Too late. It was one thing for her to disappear. It’s another thing for something to happen now with the entire world watching. We’re going to have to wait and see. I expect you to pull together whatever assets you need. Every member of that family needs to be watched. Where the fuck is the mother?”

Filner shrugged. “Don’t know. Nobody seems to. Wherever she is, she hasn’t used her credit cards in the last few days.”

Collins muttered. “And the other twin is with her?”

“We assume so.”

“Has MI-6 moved on this?”

“Not that I’m aware of. My source there says there’s nothing he knows of related to this. But you know how it is. It’s all compartmentalized. England probably has more spies in the U.S. than Russia.”

“We need someone closer to Windsor. He’s the one person who could blow everything.”

Filner nodded. “Normal rates still apply?”

Collins leaned forward, spearing another fork of pasta and turning it over, examining it before he placed it in his mouth. He chewed for a few seconds before answering. “Emergency. I don’t care what assets. I don’t care how many hours. Your mission in life is to make sure Richard Thompson’s secrets never come to light, Filner. At all costs. This was all supposed to be nice and quiet, and now it’s not, and it’s your fault. I want it fixed. I want it to go away. Am I clear? If this problem doesn’t go away, then
you
will.”

“You’re clear, Collins. But let
me
be clear. You better have some contingency plans in place. If you’d taken care of this problem fifteen years ago, no one would have noticed. A simple house fire would have wiped them all out. Now you’ve got Thompson up as the next Secretary of Defense and one of his daughters is married to a rock star. Anything happens to them and it’s visible.”

Collins shook his head. “I can manage Thompson. And rock stars die in plane crashes all the time. You worry about the rest.”

I
T TOOK ANDREA several minutes to compose herself, rinse her mouth and wash her face. Her heart was racing, and she felt tension in her chest, but she forced herself to calm down and focus.

Once she was calm, she opened the medicine chest in hopes of finding a hairbrush. Instead, she was faced with a shelf of medications. Zoloft. Andrea felt a morbid fascination and didn’t want to touch it or look, because it was none of her business. But she couldn’t stop herself, and she turned the bottle. The prescription was two weeks old and was written for her sister Carrie.

She tried to imagine what it must be like for Carrie. Andrea hadn’t known Ray well, but she’d been impressed with him. A handsome and tall soldier, he’d been brave, incredibly brave, and that courage had directly resulted in his death. When Andrea flew into Washington last summer, she’d had little opportunity to speak with the devastated Carrie, lost in the debris of a life Andrea knew nothing about. They’d barely spoken half a dozen words, Carrie overwhelmed by the stress of the accident and the court martial. It was all just too much. Way too much.

Was this stuff even safe to take during a pregnancy? Andrea didn’t know, but presumably the doctor did.

Whatever the answer was, Andrea wasn’t going to second-guess or judge. She took out the hairbrush and carefully brushed her hair, then put it away, the brush and the medicine now out of sight.

Finally composed, she stepped out of the bathroom and walked back toward the family room. As she walked down the hall, she heard a phone ringing in the kitchen. She stopped in place and sagged against the wall, overcome by a wave of exhaustion. It hadn’t even been a day since she landed in the United States. Not even twenty-four hours since two men had attempted to kidnap and possibly murder her. She didn’t know why. But, despite the presence of federal security guards at the door, she felt afraid like she’d never felt before.

The phone stopped ringing, and she heard Carrie’s voice. Quiet. Words, then more words, unclear, out of focus. Then, “Andrea! Phone!”

Andrea swallowed. Was it one of her sisters? Her mother? Julia and Crank were in Los Angeles this week, she knew that. Crank’s band,
Morbid Obesity
, was recording a new album. She had no idea what was going on with Alexandra or Jessica.

She walked into the kitchen and promised herself one thing. She was going to get to know all of her sisters. She was fed up with secrets and isolation.

Carrie had the baby on one shoulder and the phone at her ear. “Sí,” she said nodding. “Sí.” Then in terribly accented Spanish, she said, “Adios.” Grinning, she passed the phone to Andrea.

“Hello?”

“Andrea! Como estas?”

“Luis!” she replied, delighted. Uncle Luis owned a growing marketing design firm in Barcelona, and often visited with his mother, and therefore Andrea. Over the last three years he’d become a trusted figure in her life. A father in many ways.

“Andrea, why didn’t you call me? I wake up this morning to the news that thugs kidnapped you? Mother will have a heart attack when she watches the news.”

Andrea whispered, “Does she know yet?”

“No,” he said. “She thinks her television is broken, no thanks to your resourceful uncle. I should be at work today, but the minute I saw the news I got on the road to Calella.”

Andrea breathed a sigh of relief. Then she said, “It was scary, Luis. But it’s over. I’m all right. There’s no need to tell Abuelita.”

“I see how it is, Andrea. You want the old women at Church to tell her, and then she’ll say,
Luis, why do you keep secrets from me?
No. No. Who were these thugs?”

“The police here are investigating. And they’ve given me bodyguards.”

“It’s because of your father? I saw in the paper he’s to be the new Defense Minister.”

“It might be that,” Andrea said. “I don’t know.”

“You should come home,” he said.

Andrea swallowed. “I will soon, Uncle, I promise.”

“Okay. And next time you tell me when you’re leaving the country, and if you’re planning to mix it up with kidnappers. You understand?”