Sliver of Truth (33 page)

I thought about our last moments together at the Cuban place in the Bronx and at the Cloisters over the wall.

“Those things you said to me the last time we were together. Those promises you made. Why would you say those things?”

He shook his head and I saw his eyes go damp. He got up and walked over to a narrow window that was laced with wire mesh. I understood. It wasn’t all lies. There
was
something real between us. But it was irretrievable now. In those last moments, he must have known that the time was coming. In his way, he tried to save us. Somehow that just made it all worse.

“So it was the CIA that night. They sent the text message. They chased us at the Cloisters. They brought me to London.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said.

“Then who?”

“We think Max sent the message. If you’d gone alone that night, you might have seen him.”

I thought about the car that had slowly pulled up the drive, about the men in the trees. Had he been in the back of the sedan? Lurking in the woods?

“So those were your men that night? The CIA came to take Max in.”

He shook his head again. I wasn’t very good at this, I guess.

“There are a lot of people, a lot of very bad people, looking for Max. I don’t know if they were following you or if they intercepted the text message, but they got there before my men did.”

“Grant,” I said quietly. “I told Grant Webster where I was going and when I’d be there. That’s how they found out.”

“Maybe,” he said with a slow nod.

I hung my head, wondering if they had tortured him to find out. I remember how excited he’d been to be involved in all the intrigue.

“So who brought me to London?” I asked after a while. “How did my passport and all that cash get into my bag?”

“There are a number of suspects,” he said vaguely.

“Like who?” I pressed.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me hard. I got mad.

“They
tortured
me!” I yelled, standing and lifting my shirt so that he could see my wound, the bruises on my body. “I didn’t know anything about Max. I didn’t even know they called him the Ghost. I didn’t even know what they were asking me.”

He said sharply, “I had
nothing
to do with that. I tried to protect you, Ridley. And I failed.” He pulled at the neck of his sweater and exposed a thick bandage on his shoulder. I remembered watching him get shot. I remembered him falling. The memory made me dizzy. I looked into the green facets of his eyes for I don’t know how long. To his credit, he didn’t look away. I don’t know what I was looking for there, but I’ll tell you that I didn’t find it. I didn’t understand him or how he could have done what he did—or how I could have believed so totally the lie that he was. There we were, showing each other our wounds. I’m not sure what either one of us was trying to prove. I lowered my shirt and sat back down. He did the same.

“I never would have been a part of that,” he said.

“Oh, but you were. You were the biggest part of it.”

The silence that followed between us was a live wire.

“Why didn’t they kill me?” I asked him finally. “When they figured out I didn’t know where Max was, why would they let me live? How did I get to that hotel?”

He sighed. “Everyone wants the same thing from you, Ridley.”

He put his hand on a file that lay between us on the table. I’d been so distracted I hadn’t noticed it. He opened it and slid out a photograph, pushed it toward me. I recognized him right away. The man on the plane with the scars on his face. The same man who’d killed Sarah Duvall. He was ghoulishly ugly, with pale eyes that seemed lidless, a wide, thin mouth and oddly shaped nose. Those scars—burns, I think. He had the look of a man who’d suffered terrible agony, and it had made him evil. I shuddered. I didn’t think I’d ever forget the sound of his voice.

“Who is he?”

“His name is Boris Hammacher.”

I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. Why did I feel as if I was always trying to pull information out of people? Couldn’t anyone just ever tell me what I needed to know?

“And?” I said.

“And he’s an assassin, for lack of a better word. He’s the guy you call when you want someone found and killed.”

“He’s looking for Max?” I asked.

He nodded. “I think it’s safe to operate under that assumption.”

“He let me live because he thought Max would come for me.”

“That would be my guess.”

Notice how slippery he is, how he never confirms or denies anything? It’s possible he just didn’t know the answers to my questions, but more likely he just didn’t want to answer them.

“He’s the one I saw on the street,” I said, taking the photograph in my hand. I remembered chasing him, how fast he’d been. “He killed Sarah Duvall. Why? She didn’t know anything.”

Jake got up and paced the room. “I don’t know, Ridley. I don’t know if he was following her or following you. Maybe he thought she knew something about Myra’s disappearance, maybe he wasn’t sure what kind of clues Myra had left behind. Maybe he thought she was a loose end. Or maybe he was trying to terrorize you.”

“Did he kill Myra Lyall?” I asked.

“Myra Lyall got information she shouldn’t have. As you know, she was researching an article on some Project Rescue babies, and someone leaked information to her about the CIA belief that Max Smiley was still alive. She started asking a lot of questions at the agency. She paid Esme Gray a visit. She was just fishing, though. As far as we know, she didn’t have any real information. We believe Boris Hammacher thought she knew more than she did. When she didn’t, he killed her.”

“Who is he working for? Who’s trying to find Max?”

“It could be any number of people. Max had a lot of enemies.”

I thought about all of this for a second. I thought about how Myra, Sarah, and Grant were all dead because of Max and how the only reason I hadn’t joined them was because everyone was banking on the likelihood that Max would be coming for me someday.

“Who killed Esme Gray?”

“Esme Gray is alive.”

“But . . .”

He walked over to the table, sat back down.

“Didn’t you ever wonder how she escaped prosecution? Didn’t it seem strange to you that no one ever paid for Project Rescue? She came to us when Max tried to contact her. She brokered a deal for herself and for her son. She obtained immunity in exchange for her help in locating Max Smiley. Her son, Zack, will be out of prison within the next five years.”

This information was unpleasant. But in comparison to everything else, it didn’t seem like such a big deal that a man who’d tried to kill me and who still hated me might be out on the street fairly soon.

“So why fake her death?”

“She made mistakes in her dealings with you. She’d let you have too much information by mentioning Myra Lyall. Dylan Grace was harassing her. She’d been working with us since we realized she’d falsely identified Max Smiley’s body, and so she knew a lot about the investigation. She was showing signs of stress at all the deception. She had a paranoia that Max would discover her betrayal and come for her. We were afraid she was a weak link, that she might snap if pulled too hard. So we removed her from the field.”

“Was it on purpose that you chose a beating death for her? That’s the way the FBI claims Max killed people.”

He shrugged. “We just needed her face to be unrecognizable.”

I didn’t say anything. I just gave him a look that I hope communicated how much he disgusted me on so many levels.

“What about DNA and fingerprints, dental records? You can’t just mash up someone’s face and call it a day anymore.”

“The CIA took over the investigation so that we could handle all of that. Happens for witness protection all the time.”

We were both quiet for a while. There were so many questions. Some of them I wanted the answers to, some of them I didn’t. I didn’t even know where to go next. Finally: “Okay, so where is he?”

“We know now that he’s not in London. He probably hasn’t been in years. That image you saw had been superimposed on that street scene. Computer graphics. He could be anywhere in the world.”

He could be anywhere in the world but he was alive. I was filled with dread and fury and, yes, the slightest glimmer of hope.

“Then why are we all here?”

“Like us, Boris Hammacher thought that Max was here. We suspect that’s why he brought you here. And we followed Dylan Grace to you.”

“Because everybody wants the same thing from me.”

I thought of all these people circling like vultures the rotting carrion that was my life, all of them waiting for Max to make his move so that they could make theirs. But Max never came. I’d been shot, abducted, tortured, left to suffer alone in a foreign hotel room, brought to a hospital where another attempt was made on my life, abducted again, run all over London, and finally arrested. But Max never came. I guess the joke was on them. Or me.

I knew that even this conversation was probably fraught with lies and half-truths, but I also knew that it was the first nearly honest conversation I’d ever had with the man before me. It made me sad. I felt so tired suddenly, as if I could sleep for days. I was envious of Rip van Winkle. I wanted a hundred-year nap, where I woke and everything I hated and loved had turned to dust.

“So what is it? Why does everyone want Max Smiley so badly? Why is everyone looking for the Ghost?”

Jake’s face was as still as stone.

“The murders he’s suspected of committing?”

No answer.

“No,” I said into the silence. “No one cares about a few prostitutes. Though I imagine a couple of dead Interpol agents might cause some international difficulties. Still, it has to be more than that. It has to be more than just one man.”

“Max Smiley is more than just a man,” said Jake. “He’s the linchpin in an international web of criminal activity. He has been for decades.”

“What kind of criminal activity?”

“It’s complicated, Ridley.”

“We have time, don’t we?”

He sighed, leaned back in his chair. “It started with Project Rescue. He and Esme Gray conceived of this way to get kids out of abusive homes and into the homes of the wealthy. Through Alexander Harriman, Max aligned himself with the Italian-American Mafia to get the dirty work done.”

“I know all of this,” I said impatiently.

He lifted a hand. “The enterprise became quite lucrative. It grew.”

“But when things started to get ugly the night Teresa Stone was murdered, Max extracted himself, right?” I said. My heart started to race. I felt eager to cling to the story Alexander Harriman, Max’s late lawyer, had told me.

Jake looked at me as though he pitied me. I must have seemed like a child to him, clinging to my fairy tales.

“If he had, Ridley, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

“Max Smiley was a businessman. There was money to be made and a lot of it. Project Rescue faded away, yes, but the connections Max had made led him into other arenas.”

I remembered the articles about the sex slave trade from Albania I’d read in Jake’s file. And I knew. I wanted to cover my ears to keep from hearing the rest.

“It’s not such a big leap from stealing babies and selling them to the rich to luring women and girls from clubs and selling them into slavery,” he said.

I put my head in my hands. “What are you saying?” I asked through my fingers. “How was he involved with that? What did he do?”

“We believe he financed the building of nightclubs in Europe that were run by Albanian gangs. In these clubs, mostly in places like the Balkans, the Ukraine, women were lured with the promise of good-paying jobs in the U.K. or the U.S., or they were simply drugged and abducted, then trafficked with false documents to other countries in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. One of the clubs you visited yourself, the Kiss.”

He glanced over at me quickly, then away again.

“He took a cut of the profits, both legal and illegal. Of course, there was the added benefit of having places to feed his appetites with no fear of discovery. These women are literally disappeared. False documents are created for them, they are injected with heroin to make them addicts, no one ever hears from them again. What particular monster they’ve fallen prey to matters not at all.”

The room around me tilted unpleasantly.

“Isn’t it possible that he didn’t know what was going on in those clubs?” I asked.

I asked this though I already knew the answer. I was having a hard time understanding how a man who’d spent a great deal of his life raising money for abused women and children through his foundation could be involved with organizations that made their money selling young women and girls into sexual slavery. It didn’t compute . . . like so many things. I remembered what Dylan had said, screamed at me, rather, in the car.
Wake up, Ridley. Wake the
fuck
up. Your father, your beloved Max,
hated
women. He
murdered
them.

He didn’t answer my question, just went on.

“In the commission of this business, Max Smiley dealt with some of the key players in the sex slave trade. If we manage to find and capture him, get him to talk, the CIA along with other international law enforcement agencies could cripple or severely damage some of their operations, save countless women, and possibly force principals to face charges in international courts. Do you understand, Ridley?”

I thought about the photos I’d seen. Max with these men, smiling with mobsters and terrorists in Paris cafés. I started to get that feeling I get when everything is closing in on me and panic starts to set in. My breathing suddenly felt labored and white spots danced before my eyes.

“Ridley,” said Jake, who, in spite of everything, knew me quite well, “don’t pass out.”