The Lie
Authors: Michael Weaver
Other books by Michael Weaver
Deceptions
Impulse
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Weaver
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56948-4
Contents
For Dorothy Kaiser… simply a lovely lady.
A special thanks to my editor, Susan Sandler.
Warm. Gracious. Intelligent.
I
T WAS WELL PAST MIDNIGHT
when she saw the light in the upstairs bedroom go out, leaving the house dark.
By that time she had been waiting almost two hours in the deeper part of the surrounding woods, and she would probably wait
another hour before going in. Since she had been waiting eighteen years for what lay just ahead, these last few hours only
added to the anticipation, to the excitement, and to the fear and trembling.
She sat with her back to a tree, feeling the damp earth beneath her and the roughness of the bark through the fabric of her
shirt. The night was warm, with little wind. Patches of mist drifted from the Bay of Salerno off to the west. In the distance,
she saw the lights of a late plane starting its final descent toward Naples.
When the lights disappeared, her hand went to the automatic she carried inside the belt of her slacks. She fingered its butt,
trigger guard, and safety for perhaps the fifth time in the past half hour. It was the only visible sign of her nervousness.
Then she just sat holding the gun in both hands like a supplicant making an offering to a god she could not see but, she knew
with absolute certainty, was out there someplace.
Her name was Kate Dinneson.
Kate made her move at a quarter to two, rising up out of the woods and silently approaching the rear of the house. As she
walked, the slender, delicately put together young woman
in dark shirt, slacks, and gloves slipped on an equally dark ski mask.
The mask was her tacit admission of uncertainty. It was the only sign she gave, even to herself, that she wasn’t totally committed
to any single course of action.
She had done a dry run earlier, while it was still light, so she knew exactly where the wires, alarm, and points of entry
were. Now, working deftly, she neutralized the system in five minutes. Still, when she had finished her face was damp under
the mask and her throat was stiflingly dry.
The few tools she needed were in a small canvas belt bag. She used a glass cutter and rubber suction cup to let herself in
through a basement window.
Inside, she used a pinpoint flash to find the smooth stone stairs and reached the first floor without a sound.
Turning off her light, she stood in the translucent dark of the entrance hall, letting her eyes pick out the shape and placement
of things. She drew the automatic from her belt, flicked off the safety, and climbed the curving flight of steps to the second-floor
landing.
Their bedroom was directly ahead, the door open. They slept curled together in a wash of blue starlight. A nightgown was tossed
across a chair. The sheet lay partly on the floor. A pistol lay on the night table near Peter Walters’s side of the bed. She
knew it would have to be taken care of at once. Walters’s first move on waking would be pure reflex, and she didn’t want to
have to shoot him in response.
Kate reached the gun in two silent steps, slipped it into her belt, and backed off. Then she switched on a small lamp and
waited.
Peter Walters’s eyelids stirred, fluttered briefly, and opened. They were the only part of him that moved.
He looked at the slender, masked figure pointing an automatic at his head. Shifting his glance, he did not see the gun that
he always kept on the table beside him.
Still watching the girl, he reached for and found his wife’s hand. He pressed it to wake her as gently as possible.
“Peg?” he said. “We have company.”
His voice, too, was gentle. He spoke in unaccented English. Although he and his wife had been living in Positano for twenty-seven
years, they were American.
Peggy Walters came awake. Her eyes blinked against the light and she gasped as she saw the masked, dark-clothed figure pointing
a gun. Then she just lay there, gripping her husband’s hand.
“Who are you?” Walters asked in Italian.
Kate Dinneson swallowed twice. “I’m the daughter of Angelo and Patty Falanga.”
Her answer, also in Italian, contained the exact words she had imagined herself saying for as long as she could remember.
Walters stared at the knitted fabric of her mask.
“In case it’s slipped your mind,” Kate said, “eighteen years ago last month you killed them.”
“Who told you I was the one who did it?” Walters asked.
“Someone who obviously knew.”
Walters was silent.
“Do you deny it?”
“Would you believe me if I did?”
“No.”
He sighed and slowly shook his head. “It took you eighteen years to get here?”
“I found out it was you only ten days ago.”
“And now all you want is to kill me?”
“If that was all I wanted, you would be dead right now.”
“What else do you want?”
“To hear your side. If you have one.”
“You mean and
then
you’ll kill me?”
Kate Dinneson said nothing.
Walters glanced at his wife, who lay white-faced yet composed under the sheet beside him. He was still holding her hand. Then
he looked once more at Kate’s eyes. “May I take my cigarettes and lighter?”
“Very carefully.”
He lifted them from the night table and lit up.
Watching, her gun leveled, Kate pulled over a straight-backed chair and eased into it. Despite herself, her legs were
trembling. She was working hard to remain calm, cool, controlled, wishing she could be dispassionate and afraid she never
would be.
“So what did this person, this someone who supposedly knew, tell you about me?” Peter Walters asked.
He was sitting up in bed now, smoking. The sheet had slipped away from his naked upper body, and Kate saw an incredible number
of welted puncture scars scattered across his chest, abdomen, sides, and arms. Some were from bullets and shrapnel. Others
were from cutting blades. His life history, she thought.
“He told me you had been a contract killer for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. That you did work for them all
over Europe. Do you deny that?”
“No. That’s true.”
“He told me you shot my mother and father in cold blood. He said you killed them as they were coming out to surrender, unarmed,
with their hands over their heads.”
Kate Dinneson felt oddly numb. She wondered what had become of all the anger she had been storing up and carrying for so many
years. This man had robbed her of a lifetime of love. He had stolen her mother and father. He had murdered them, along with
all the good things that were supposed to come to her from them. Yet looking at him now, all she saw was a battered, aging
man, the force in him long faded and gone. Beside him, his aging wife, who had yet to say a word, waited in silence for whatever
was going to happen next.
Peter Walters slowly shook his head. “That part is a lie. It wasn’t like that at all. I’m sure you’ve been told about your
parents,” he said. “You must know who and what they were.”
“I’ve been told and I’ve known all my life. Now I’m waiting to hear what
you
have to tell me about them.”
Peggy Walters spoke for the first time. “You said all this was eighteen years ago. I can’t see your face but you must have
been just a child. Whatever you’ve heard had to have come from others. Please. This isn’t fair.”
Kate ignored her. “Go ahead,” she told Walters. “Talk to me.”
“Your mother and father were the most deadly terrorists of their day,” said Walters. “They killed hundreds. Innocents. Is
that what you knew about them?”
“They fought for a cause. Sadly, there were sacrifices.”
Walters looked at the ceiling and the walls. “I saw some of those sacrifices. Have you ever seen
pieces
of children? And as for my killing your parents in cold blood, that just wasn’t so. They came out shooting from behind a
white flag after promising to give themselves up. Three of my scars are from their bullets.”
This was the version Kate had grown up with, this legend of her mother and father choosing a martyr’s death over a prison
cell. She had heard the new story from the one man who had finally been able to name Peter Walters as her parents’ killer.
The romantic in her preferred the original. She preferred it, too, because if she did accept it, she would not feel so compelled
to make payment.
“Why should I believe you?” she said. “Staring into the muzzle of a gun, you would say anything.”
“I wasn’t alone when it happened. I had two men as backup. One of them used a camera to record what was supposed to be a peaceful
surrender. They were both killed when your parents came out blazing at us with machine pistols. But I do have a couple of
pictures of how it was.”
Kate was silent. Peggy Walters stirred in bed, pulling her attention.
“She’s not here to look at your pictures,” Peggy told her husband. “She’s just here to shoot you.”
“Where are they?” Kate asked.
“In a wall safe behind that mirror. If you let my wife out of bed she’ll open it for you.”
Kate saw the mirror hanging over a dresser on Peter Walters’s side of the bed. The pictures might or might not be in the safe,
but there would certainly be a gun waiting there.
“What’s the combination?” she asked.
“Twice around to the right to four… left to ten… right to six.”
“Here’s what I want you to do,” said Kate. “I want you to
carefully get out of bed, take the mirror off the wall, and open the safe without putting a hand inside. All right?”
“Yes.”
“Then I want you back in bed with your hands on your head while I look at the pictures.” Kate paused. “If there
are
any pictures.”
Peter Walters was silent.
“Are they the only pictures in the safe?” Kate Dinneson asked him.