The Right Hand (19 page)

Their spirit worked wonders on Laura. She believed that what Michael did for a living was important. Her own sense of adventure had been the reason he had courted her in the first place. She had not lost it; she was excited.

Adams draped his arm over her shoulder. “It was a good house.”

“It was.”

Most of their belongings would go into storage, but they would still fill a couple of containers with furniture and ship them across the sea.

The last of their boxes was loaded into the moving truck as their real estate agent approached. “Well—”

“I think we’re all out.”

“I’ll let you know when we get a bite.”

Adams shook hands with the woman, and he and Laura headed for the car. They’d pick up their daughters from school, spend one night in a hotel, and fly out of Burbank in the morning.

At some point, he did want to check into the LA district office before he left and see what progress Clay had made.

Clay returned to the windowless office he’d been using all week. Adams’s assistant, a man named Warren Sumner, had helped facilitate the arrival of a crate of Fourticq’s things, every single item from his office, from his desk, from his files. A second crate covered the small apartment he’d kept, but if the contents indicated the entirety of the Snow Wolf’s possessions, the man had either rid himself of his things to cover his tracks or had lived the life of an ascetic. Neither option was encouraging.

Clay rubbed his eyes. The forensic work was usually a job for a handler, but Adams was busy preparing to take over EurOps, so Clay had volunteered to tackle it and get a head start. Truth be told, he’d rather shake the bushes and get information directly from the horse’s mouth. But which horse?

Fourticq’s computer had been scrubbed…there were no files that indicated anything beyond standard operations under his command. Clay read through them anyway, looking for any kind of flag. A couple of hours later, he had nothing.

“Want some coffee?”

Warren smiled from the doorway, holding a mug. Clay accepted gratefully.

“Anything?”

Clay shook his head. “He was careful.”

Warren nodded at that. “It’s bred into us.” The younger man looked over his shoulder and smiled as his boss approached.

“He wasn’t careful…he was cocky,” Adams amended as he poked his head into the office. “He made a mistake somewhere. You’ll find it.”

Clay nodded. He was reminded how much he liked Adams’s style.

“I have access to every personnel file within the Agency. If you sense he had inside help, I’ll let you look at anything and anyone you need.”

“I’m probably going to travel to Russia again. See if I can poke into finding out who Fourticq’s contact was at FSB.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Warren interjected.

Adams nodded at his protégé. “Warren’s going to step into a case officer’s shoes as soon as I get my ducks in a row,” he said, and watched Clay’s face.

Clay gave him nothing. He’d need a new handler soon, but he certainly wasn’t going to commit to anyone so green. Instead, he changed the subject back to where it had been.

“I’d much rather get inside the china shop and toss my horns around than sit in this room looking at a computer screen.”

“We’re opposites, you and me,” Adams said. “I’d rather look at a spreadsheet than the wrong end of a pistol.”

“Well, now you know I’ll never be after your job.”

Adams grinned, but Warren didn’t. Adams said, “There aren’t too many lines of work where office politics involve drafting the Russian service to eliminate your replacement.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Work for the Agency?”

“Yeah. Someone asked me that, and I told her how I got recruited, without really answering the question.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. Because the answer is I do it because I’m good at it. I belong. I spent a great portion of my life adrift, and this job grounded me. I get an assignment and I don’t quit until it’s completed. I’ve been around long enough to know my success rate is…”

“Unmatched.”

“I was going to say ‘pretty good.’”

Adams nodded, started to head out, then stopped in the doorway. “Maybe we’re not such opposites.” Warren followed him out.

It wasn’t until he was alone again that Clay realized Adams hadn’t answered his question.

Clay couldn’t sleep.

Something was nagging at him, like a fly buzzing his ear. Adams had said that Fourticq was cocky and had made a mistake. But the mistake was obvious: Adams was alive and would run EurOps, while Fourticq was exposed and on the run. The mistake couldn’t be more glaring.

The word
cocky
gave him pause. A cocky person, one as narcissistic as Fourticq, would not acknowledge such a mistake, because a cocky person would place blame elsewhere.
It’s not my fault; I got screwed over.

Clay rose from the sofa and went back to the desk containing Fourticq’s belongings. He had stared at files until three in the morning and had finally submitted to sleep. Now the sun was turning the sky orange and the shadows were receding.

A thought struck him. There were two people the Snow Wolf would blame. Adams, definitely. But in his mind, Adams would have lucked out.

No, the person who’d proactively broken open his plot was Clay. Clay, who had found the girl and discovered what she knew and smoked out the leader of EurOps as the conspirator.

Adams had offered to let Clay look at anyone’s personnel file within the Agency, and that meant access to every officer profile, both analyst and field. Fourticq would have had that same privilege when he held the position. Clay snatched up the desk phone and dialed a number at Langley.

“As head of EurOps, Fourticq had access to everyone’s personnel files, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you tell me whose files he accessed the most?”

“You got his laptop open now?”

“Yep.”

“Hold on. Don’t click on anything.”

Clay could see the cursor move on the computer as the analyst in Virginia operated it remotely. The screen turned to coded gibberish. Clay could speak a number of languages, but programming wasn’t one of them. He was thankful the Agency hired tech-heads out of MIT to run computer operations, and thankful he didn’t have to rub shoulders with them very often.

“Checking…checking…you want it sorted by…”

“Most to least.”

“Just their names?”

“Yeah. The people he most often checked out.”

“Okay…here you go.”

Names filled the screen. The one at the top surprised him.

The town car carrying Adams and his family pulled around to the back of the Burbank airport, through the security shack, and stopped at the private hangar used by the superwealthy and by high-ranking officials in the government. Adams had once seen a popular British action star waiting for his G5 to finish refueling, and he had been mystified at how small the man was in real life. If the actor spent five minutes with Austin Clay, he might rethink his portrayal of a spy.

The driver unloaded their suitcases and took them to a rack near the jet.
The greatest advantage of flying private,
Adams thought,
no security lines, no check-in bullshit, no waiting around a crowded terminal
.
The pilot comes to get you in the hangar and off you go.

His phone chirped, and he excused himself.

“Are you in the air yet?” Warren asked, sounding breathless.

“No, what is it?”

“There’s been an Echelon hit on Fourticq.”

Echelon
referred to the most advanced domestic surveillance technology the CIA had at its disposal. A hit would mean that tracking satellites had picked up chatter with prechosen buzzwords, either on cell phones, pay phones, email, or websites where terrorists might attempt to communicate. It wasn’t an infallible system; a majority of data managed to slip past it every second of every day, but analysts worked to improve Echelon continuously and it had contributed to the prevention of major disasters on a number of occasions.

“What’d he say?”

“I think it was said
to
him. It’s encoded within an obscure website that Snow Wolf—that Alan Fourticq—was using to communicate with his Russian counterparts prior to…well. He covered most of his tracks but wasn’t aware we knew about this one.”

“Get on with it,” Adams said, annoyed. He looked at his family, standing on the tarmac near the jet, chatting with the pilot. They were happy, excited about the future. They would do well in Europe, and he was eager to get into the air and get started on the rest of their lives.

“Yes, sir. Sorry. It seems an address was passed on to Fourticq. An address in Los Angeles.”

“Whose address?”

The girls were now tugging on their mother’s sleeves. Laura looked at Adams again and started walking toward the plane with the pilot.

“55 Park La Brea.”

Adams’s face registered his surprise. That address meant Fourticq knew…but why would he…

“All right…I’m on it.” He clicked off the phone and hurried over to his family and the pilot, catching them halfway across the tarmac.

“Laura!” he said as he reached them. “Why don’t you and the girls head back to the waiting room for a bit?”

The pilot was a young guy with an aquiline nose jutting from a wide face. “We’re ready to board, Mr. Adams.”

“I understand, but I have to make a phone call.”

“You’re more than welcome to do it from the plane.”

“I’m afraid I need to make it from a secure phone.”

“I understand, sir,” the pilot said warmly. His smile seemed awkward under that nose, as if it were spreading out solely to support its foundation. “But I’ve already filed a flight plan, and the tower’s waiting….”

“Talk to the tower and hold until I say otherwise.”

The pilot eyed him cautiously, as if he were contemplating his next move. Then the smile reappeared. “Yes, sir. Of course.” He walked back toward the G5.

Laura gave her husband a concerned look. “What is it?”

“Probably nothing, but I need to call—”

The plane exploded, knocking Adams to the unforgiving tarmac.

A man with scars snaking across the back of his shaved head sat on a bench near the jogging trail of Pan Pacific Park, adjacent to the Grove, in the middle of Los Angeles. An elderly Asian couple passed him, doing that half-run, half-walk thing that old people like to do, and he watched them truck on by, indifferent.

In a shoulder holster concealed beneath his sports jacket rested a .40-caliber Glock 27, a gun he had carried for the better part of twenty-five years. He had not been carrying it, however, on a night in Colombia in 1993 when he had been closing in on Pablo Escobar and had walked into an ambush. He had taken not one but two knives to the back of the head, and in a true case of “you should have seen the other guys,” he had emerged from the scene wounded but alive. He might have died on the side of the road if his friend and partner, Alan Fourticq, hadn’t dragged him out of the dirt and into a doctor’s house. The bald man would never be caught without his gun within arm’s reach again.

Through his sunglasses, he watched the entrance of the apartment complex across the street, a sprawling expanse of compact domiciles named Park La Brea. Soon enough, a young Hungarian woman with dark hair and a carefree smile, a young woman who knew how to speak Russian even though she had once lied about that ability to land a nannying job, emerged from the entrance and pressed the crosswalk button so she could walk over to the shopping center.

The bald man with the faded knife scars on the back of his head stood up and followed her.

Adams tasted blood, and his face felt as though the sun were resting on top of it. He opened his eyes to find that he could see as through a tunnel; dark smudges blurred the edges of his vision.
Laura!

He saw her already climbing to her hands and knees, quelling the horror in his mind. His girls were also rising from the pavement; they had been behind their parents and had been shielded from the brunt of the blast. Adams had been looking at the jet, and that side of his face had not been spared.

He hurried to his family. “Is everyone okay?”

The girls were crying, but he checked them over and found only a couple of scraped elbows. “Your face, Daddy!” the younger one, Grace, squeaked. Her voice sounded muffled, as though she were speaking underwater.

He felt his face, and the heat seemed to be emanating from it, but his fingers didn’t come away bloody. “Just a sunburn, I promise.” It hurt like hell, but he was determined to keep up a solid front for Laura and the girls. His wife had a burn on the side of her cheek that gave him a sense of what his own face must look like, but she seemed to be fine.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, but we need to get off this tarmac.”

The sun was beating down on them, which made the whole thing more surreal. It was an otherwise sparkly Southern California morning, the kind that appeared almost every day of the year, except this one was marred by the column of smoke rising straight up from the burning jet like a black finger trying to scratch the sky.

Adams tried to keep himself calm and resolute. It was the second attempt on his life in the same month, and the incident in Prague had forged a new mettle inside him.

He shepherded his family toward the private hangar, away from the jet’s carcass. Where were the emergency vehicles? Who could have infiltrated a goddamn airport and put a bomb on a government plane,
his
plane? These questions jockeyed for position in his mind. He finally heard sirens as he opened the glass door of the hangar—it had been far enough away from the explosion to escape damage.

What was he doing before the blast? He had just received a call.

He looked down at his hand and saw his cell phone clutched in it, undamaged. He’d been about to call someone.

Yellow-and-green trucks raced their way. They looked like fire trucks, but he wasn’t sure. Things were jumbled in his mind, as if a telephone operator had failed to connect the wires.