Sliver of Truth (27 page)

I shook my head. “I really doubt that. There must be backup somewhere.” I remembered his website, how he’d chastised people for not protecting and backing up sensitive data. He impressed me as a person who’d practiced what he preached.

“If there is, we haven’t found it.”

“He said I was walking into a trap, that ‘they’ thought I knew where Max was, that I could lead them to him.”

“Is that true?”

I gave him a look. “Um,
no.
You know, why don’t you believe me about this? You’ve been watching me for a long time now. If I was secretly communicating with Max, wouldn’t you know?”

“I didn’t know about the website. For all I know, you’ve been using the computer at your adopted parents’ house to communicate with him.”

I thought about what Grant had said about the government’s dislike of encrypted websites and steganographic software. I started thinking about that streaming video and how maybe it was just a way to hide a message. Again, I wondered what my father’s log-in might be. I was betting I could figure it out if I could get to a computer.

Dylan was watching me in that way that he had, as if he believed he could stare me into admitting all the many lies he’d thought I told. The sad part was I was just as clueless as he was. I sighed. What was obvious was that we didn’t trust each other. We could go around and around like this for hours. I didn’t bother repeating how I’d just found the website recently, that I had no way to log in.

“Anyway, the point is that we lost you,” he said. “I didn’t even know where to start looking. The fact that I’d taken you into custody when I really didn’t have the right to and then allowed you to escape caused me a lot of trouble. I was reprimanded and might have been suspended, except that I’m so entrenched in this investigation, I would be impossible to replace at this point.”

“So you do work for the FBI?”

He nodded slowly. “I work for the FBI Special Surveillance Group. We monitor foreign agents, spies, and others who are not specifically targets of criminal investigations.”

“Like me?”

He nodded. “And like Jake Jacobsen. The point is that I’m not exactly a field agent. I gather data, conduct surveillance, monitor communications and movement. If I see something suspicious, I raise the alarm. Jacobsen has been interesting to us because of his skills as an investigator. We’ve been on him for nearly two years. As a result, we’ve also been watching you.”

I thought about this for a second, the fact that I’d been under surveillance for I didn’t know how long. I looked at Dylan Grace, a man who’d likely heard every private conversation, read every e-mail, seen every move I made since I met Jake. The thought embarrassed and intrigued me. How well could you know a person, watching her live her life from a bird’s-eye view? You’d see all the faces she wore for the various people in her life. You’d hear the same stories and events repeated for different people, each version sounding a little bit different, tailored for the listener. You’d see her face when she thought no one was watching. You might hear her cry herself to sleep at night or make love to a man she cared for but couldn’t trust. For all of this, would you know her better, more intimately, than if you’d been her lover or her friend? Or did you know her not at all, never having been allowed entry into her heart?

He went on. “I watched your cell phone records, credit cards, ATM records, passport control. I didn’t find anything for two days. I feared the worst. I thought you’d disappeared like Myra Lyall.”

“Then?”

“Then a charge from the Covent Garden Hotel popped up on your Visa bill. I was on the next plane to London. I bribed the desk clerk for your room number, found you in the state you were in. Through my London contacts, I was able to get you some antibiotics and painkillers—that’s what I was jabbing into your arm. I went out to get some more bandages and antiseptic to take care of your wound. When I came back, you’d stumbled into the lobby. I watched as they took you away in an ambulance.”

I thought about the time line of his story. It seemed credible enough under the circumstances. It was still hard for me to believe that this was my life now, that I’d wound up with him here at all. And while I didn’t totally trust this man, I didn’t fear him, either. And these days, that was something.

“Okay, so where’s the rest of the FBI? If you really do work for them, why isn’t there anyone to help us?”

“Because—don’t you get it? I’m not supposed to
be
here. I’m supposed to be behind a desk listening to your phone calls. I’m not supposed to be out here
with
you.”

“Unsupported?” I asked, using the word he’d used.

He nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “What now?”

He pressed his mouth into a tight line, and glanced at the fire for a second, then back at me.

“I’m open to suggestions,” he said.

“Great.”

“If you really let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can’t imagine the places you’ll end up. But most people don’t do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy. They live in the same town they grew up in, go to the same schools their parents went to, get a job that makes a decent living, find someone they think they love, marry and have children, take the same vacation every year. Maybe they get restless, someone has an affair, there’s divorce. But it will just be the same boring life with the next person. Unless something awful happens—death, house fire, natural disaster. Then people start looking around, thinking, Is this all? Maybe there’s another way to live.”

Max always ranted like this when he was drinking. He was hung up on the concept of “normal” people and how sad they were. He felt that most people were just zombies, sleepwalking through their lives, and would just die without ever leaving even a footprint on the planet. Max was a titan, a shooting star. In his lifetime he was responsible for the erection of thousands of buildings, countless charitable works in countries all over the world. He put at least ten kids that I knew of through college with the scholarship he established in his mother’s name in Detroit. He
had
to live a big life. That was his normal.

I think most people are just trying to be happy, and that most of their actions, however misguided, are in line with that goal. Most people just want to feel they belong somewhere, want to be loved, and want to feel they’re important to someone. If you really examine all the wrongheaded and messed-up things they do, they can most often be traced back to that basic desire. The abusers, the addicted, the cruel and unpleasant, the manipulators—these are just people who started this quest for happiness in the basement of their lives. Someone communicated to them through word or deed that they were undeserving, so they think they have to claw their way there over the backs of others, leaving scars and creating damage. Of course, they only create more misery for themselves and others.

Even the psychopaths and sociopaths in this world who commit the most heinous possible acts against innocent victims are in this quest for happiness. But their ideas are twisted and black; these people were wired wrong. Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it’s the absence of something.

Was Max an evil man? I still didn’t know. If I’d looked closer, I might have seen signs that told me yes, as Ace did. But I was in his thrall completely. If the series of events that shook the foundation of my life hadn’t occurred, I may never have asked who he really was. I may have lived on in ignorance. A part of me—a big part of me—wishes I’d taken Nick Smiley’s advice; I should have let the dead lie.

I looked down at the file in my lap, trying to reconcile the snapshots in front of me. They were of a man who looked different in every picture; they spanned decades. Max, maybe in his thirties at the time, slimmer than I’d known him, in a white shirt and khakis, exiting a black Mercedes near an abandoned stadium in Sierra Leone, flanked by two men armed with machine guns. Max sporting a full beard, sitting in a Paris café among a group of men, his hand resting on a fat manilla envelope, a wolfish grin on his face. Max shaking hands with a dark-skinned man wearing black robes and a turban. There were numerous shots like these, all vague, taken from a distance. Clandestine meetings around the world in empty fields and parking lots, boatyards and abandoned warehouses. Lots of guns and dangerous-looking men.

The Max Smiley I knew was an internationally renowned real-estate developer, whose business called for international travel. He built luxury condos in Rio, hotels in Hawaii, high-rises in Singapore. He golfed with senators and went deep-sea fishing with Saudi princes. There were always shades of gray in Max’s business, yes, always whispers about whom exactly he conducted his business with. Then the Project Rescue scandal revealed that Max had dealings with organized crime, through his lawyer Alexander Harriman. The FBI started digging deep into Max’s banking history, though he was legally dead.

“We found hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts.” Dylan’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “And that’s just what we could trace. How much else is out there in accounts I couldn’t link to him or his business or his various ‘charities,’ I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

I put the file on the table and lay down on the couch. I don’t know how long we’d been talking. I should have been resting but sleep didn’t seem like an option. My body was beyond fatigued but my mind was restless.

“And I take it that this money didn’t come from real-estate development.”

“No. Legitimately, Max Smiley was a rich man, making several million a year in pure personal profit. This money came from other dealings. We started watching some of the accounts. There was activity—withdrawals and deposits.”

“That’s what made you think he might still be alive?”

He nodded. “Then our investigation got blocked.”

“By whom?”

“By the CIA.”

“Why?”

“They told us our surveillance conflicted with an ongoing investigation. We were asked to stand down. Or told to.”

“These men in the photographs, these meetings—what kind of business was he conducting?”

He came over and sat on the floor beside me, took the file from where I’d left it, and pulled a snapshot from the pile.

“These men are affiliated with the Albanian Mafia.”

“How did he know them?” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. It was thin and distant. Black thoughts were blooming in my mind. I thought of the Project Rescue babies. I had to wonder how much more there was to it all than I had even imagined. Dylan ran down the list of other men in the photographs. Known terrorists, men associated with the Russian, Italian, and Italian-American Mafia.

“So whatever his dealings were with these people, this is why the CIA is still looking for him.”

“I think so.”

I wondered if he was being vague on purpose, if he was stalling. I asked him as much.

“Like I told you, my investigation was blocked. I still don’t know what Max was doing with these men. Here,” he said, pulling out another snapshot that seemed more recent. “These men are CIA opera-tives. This meeting took place just a month before he died.”

“CIA,” I repeated.

“They could have been undercover. He most likely didn’t know who he was really with. Their investigation started long before ours did.”

“So Myra Lyall could have stumbled onto any of these dealings—whatever they were. Any one of these people could be responsible for her death. For Sarah Duvall, for Grant Webster. Any one of them could have taken me in the park, come after me in the hospital.”

He nodded. “Any one of them. Including the CIA.”

I let the information sink in. “Now you’re just being paranoid.”

He looked at me as if I was slow. I was about to ask him about his mother when he rose suddenly.

“I think that’s enough for tonight. We can’t stay here for long, and you need to rest before we start moving again.”

I didn’t argue. There was so much more to say and countless questions to ask, but I had too much to deal with already. I was in brain overload; if I took on any more information, I’d lose something crucial like my ability to add and subtract. I let him lead me to a small bedroom off the main room. There was a rocker and a queen-size bed with a wrought-iron headboard and a patchwork quilt. He helped me beneath the musty sheets, then started another fire. I lay there watching him, thinking that my father had killed his mother and that such a thing did not bode well for our relationship—whatever that was. I wondered if I’d ever meet a man whom Max had not totally destroyed on a deep emotional level. That was the last thought I had before I drifted into a light and troubled slumber.

Twice during the night, Dylan brought me pills, which I took without protest. The second time, I saw him linger in the doorway. I couldn’t see his expression. I waited for him to say something, but after a minute or two, he left, closed the door softly behind him. I thought about calling him back and asking what he was thinking, but then I wondered if I really wanted to know.

The morning dawned to rain. It tapped at my window, and for a second before I opened my eyes, I could almost imagine that I was back in the East Village just an hour or so before I saved Justin Wheeler and set this nightmare in motion. I imagined the myriad choices that lay before me, beginning with sleep in or hop up and race to the dental appointment that I’d canceled instead. Anything I’d done differently that morning might have saved me from waking in this strange place, a stranger to myself.

My sinuses were swollen but my side hurt much less. I slipped out of bed, put my feet on the frigid wood floor and walked over to the six-pane window, and peered out into a thick glade of trees. There was a doe and her tiny foal nibbling on grass in the misting morning rain. I held my breath and watched them. They were perfect and peaceful, oblivious to me and my chaos. It soothed me to watch as they meandered back into the woods until I could no longer see them. I felt safe, as if nothing could hurt me here.