Girl of Vengeance (27 page)

Julia said, “I thought he was captured. I didn’t hear anything about him being wounded in the news.”

“He wasn’t wounded by the police, he was knifed in the jail. I doubt it’s a coincidence. He’d already told us about Oz though. We’ll track down who he is.”

Carrie sucked in a breath. “So … I don’t get it.”

“Well, here’s my theory,” Anthony said.

“Your theory?” Julia asked.

He nodded. “You’ve got two sets of killers, operating with different but similar motives. One
was
trying to keep a lid on who is behind the massacre at Wakhan in the eighties. Whoever that was—and my working theory is that it’s Leslie Collins at the CIA, or possibly the head of the Saudi intelligence service—they moved to discredit your father and anything he might say as soon as his name was floated as Secretary of Defense.”

“Okay,” Carrie said. “And the second?”

“Oz. I’m guessing unrelated to the first set of killers. Whoever Oz is, he
twice
did everything short of killing your mother to keep her away from Prince George-Phillip. I’m guessing those attacks, and Andrea’s kidnapping, have something to do with hiding your parentage, Carrie, and Andrea’s.”

Carrie sat up straight, color appearing on her cheeks. “It’s not George-Phillip.”

He shook his head. “No. I’m certain it isn’t. For one thing, why would he have to threaten her to keep her away?”

“Richard, then,” she said. Apparently she’d settled on calling him that instead of
F
ather.

“That’s what your mother thinks,” Anthony said.

Julia started to speak, then stopped and seemed to reconsider whatever it was she was going to say. Finally, she said, “How does Jessica seem?”

Anthony raised his eyebrows. “Honestly?”

Julia bit her lip. Then nodded. “Yes.”

“She’s really sick. She’s way too thin, and looks … washed out. I think she’s going to be a long time recovering.”

“And Mother?” Carrie asked.

“My impression?” Anthony asked. “That’s a woman on a mission, and I wouldn’t want to be Richard Thompson right now.”

At his response, Julia pursed her lips a little. Her reaction seemed off, and Anthony didn’t understand it. He kept his mouth shut.

“So what’s next?” Carrie asked. He met her eyes. Blue-green. Large, framed by long eyelashes. No wonder her soldier had fallen for her.

“Well, part of it depends on you. I need to get in to see Prince George-Phillip. There are a bunch of points in Adelina’s story he can corroborate. I need at least two sources to run this stuff when it’s this sensitive. I’m going to try to track down your mother’s confessor from the 1980s. She gave me a letter for him with written permission to discuss her. And then I’m off to Kabul to see Vasily Karatygin, who may or may not be able to give me the information I need about what happened in Wakhan.”

“You’re going to Afghanistan?” Carrie asked, her tone a little shrill.

“Yeah. I need sources, I can’t run this story on speculation.”

She looked away, her lips tightly closed. When she turned back to him, her eyes had lost their warmth. Anthony frowned, suddenly feeling off balance. He said, “You’ve got a lot of bad associations with Afghanistan.”

She shook her head in disgust. “Afghanistan reached out and destroyed my life. It took my husband and broke his best friend. It’s still coming back. With all the news that’s been coming out, Ray’s back in the news cycle. Did he do it or didn’t he? CNN called me at
midnight
to ask if I’d comment on the special report they’re doing on war crimes in Afghanistan. They’re tying Ray in with Robert Bales, who killed all those civilians in 2012, and including a story about Wakhan. As if Ray could have been responsible for something that happened before he was even born.
I hate them!
”

She said the last few words with such ferocious intensity that Rachel’s eyes popped wide open beside her. The baby immediately began protesting with loud gurgling noises.

“I have to go.” Carrie’s voice cracked, as if she were on the verge of tears. She snatched up the baby and slipped inside the condo.

Anthony exhaled. He hadn’t realized that he’d stopped breathing during her brief monologue. He was shaken by the force of her emotion—and his own reaction to it.

Then Julia said in a low, threatening voice. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, Anthony. But if you mess with my sister, I’ll destroy you.” Then she stood too, leaving Anthony sitting alone on the balcony.

In the room she’d once shared with Ray Sherman, Carrie sat on the edge of her bed looking down at her daughter. Carrie had tears in her eyes, unbidden tears that did nothing but infuriate her.

Rachel lay on her back on the bed. She was still hot this morning and seemed listless. Carrie sighed. She’d take Rachel’s temperature in a few minutes. She leaned forward and cooed at her baby, then kissed her on the cheek.

Rachel gave her a big toothless smile. Carrie smiled back, ignoring the tears that were threatening to spill over, and kissed Rachel’s other cheek. Rachel gave a small laugh. That escalated to a shower of kisses and loud, happy laughing and gurgling.

Carrie sighed. She was frustrated and confused and more than a little bit angry. Angry because she shouldn’t have reacted that way to Anthony’s announcement he was going to Afghanistan. He was a journalist, and she barely knew him, and it wasn’t really any of her business anyway. But her instant reaction to his news was—fear. Anxiety that he would be hurt.

She sighed a little as she lifted her daughter’s arms, evoking more baby laughs.

Anthony Walker.

She shook her head. He was a foreign correspondent for Christ’s sake, which was just about as dangerous—or even more—as being a soldier. She’d
read
Anthony’s dispatches from Iraq when he was embedded with a US Army platoon. His life was dangerous, no life for someone with a family, and on top of that, he wasn’t even that good looking. Ray hadn’t even been dead a year and she felt
incredibly
disloyal to even be thinking of Anthony that way.

Ray hadn’t even been dead for a year! What was wrong with her?

She lifted Rachel to her chest and let the tears spill over. She knew exactly what was wrong with her. She was hideously lonely. She’d met her soulmate and married him and lost him all in the course of nine months. And nothing would ever be the same.

Bear grumbled to himself as he crept forward twenty feet then stopped again. I-66 out of Washington was a parking lot. As far as he could see there was no accident—these were just normal traffic conditions for this early in the morning, just another day in Washington.

Bear
hated
Washington. But he also knew he was never leaving, because this was where his kids lived. He was going to be here for the indefinite future anyway. His appointment to the Joint Terrorism Task Force hadn’t been endangered yet by his supposed suspension, or the loss of classified documents—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t coming soon.

Ten more feet. Stop. At this rate he wouldn’t get to Leah’s place until ten or ten-thirty. He was exhausted and wore rumpled clothes, eyelids heavy after taking the red-eye back to Washington. But what else could he do? After their arrival at Washington Reagan National Airport at six am, he and Anthony went their separate ways—Bear had gone back to his apartment just long enough to shower and change then get back out on the road.

His phone rang. He fumbled for it.

Scott Kelly.

He answered. “Kelly, what’s up?”

Kelly’s Boston Irish accented voice sounded out of the car speakers. “I hear you had a run-in with the IRS yesterday.”

Bear chuckled. “Yeah, you could say that. Schmidt is not happy that I’m on the case. Not happy at all. What’s up at your end?”

“Small breakthrough actually. Or a big one, maybe.”

“Tell me.”

In the right lane just ahead of him, a rusted red pickup pulled ahead. The driver to Bear’s right—driving a Prius no less—was staring at his phone, probably watching porn or reading a Russian novel. Either way he didn’t move fast enough. Bear launched his car into the opening, achieving nearly forty feet in one stretch.

Kelly continued yammering on, unaware of the deadly combat Bear was engaged in.

“All right. First, you remember kidnapper two? The one Andrea Thompson said was American?”

“Yeah. She said he called himself Dan.”

“Right. We couldn’t get a match on his prints, nothing. Nothing in the FBI database, nothing anywhere. Anyway, on Thursday the Pocatello, Idaho police put out a missing persons report. Thirty-one year old Army veteran missing. His mother called it in, but the local police took forty-eight hours to put out an alert. They must have figured he went hunting or something.”

“Yeah?” Bear asked. His reply was laced with sarcasm. “That’s our guy? Some guy who used to be in the Army just randomly hooks up with one of the most dangerous mercenaries in the world to kidnap Andrea Thompson? I need more, Kelly.”

Kelly lashed back. “Let me finish the story, Bear.”

The guy in the Prius was honking his horn. Bear didn’t flip him off, even though he wanted to. But he did goose the car forward. Morning commutes were only won with guts of steel and the instincts of a hunter. Bear laughed at his own idiocy.

“All right,” Kelly said. “So we went to the Army. It was a match. Picture matched. But the Army’s pissed, because kidnapper Dan’s fingerprints don’t show up in their database. And his DNA didn’t match up either.”

“He wasn’t actually in the Army?”

“No, he was. That’s where it gets interesting. His name’s Tyler Coleman. I went and talked to his company commander. Someone deleted the records, Bear. They deleted the computer records, but there are still paper records of his enlistment. This was our guy for sure. He was Special Forces for one enlistment, 2001 to 2005. Then he disappeared, apparently taking his permanent military record with him.”

Bear squeezed the steering wheel. “Fucking CIA.”

“That’s it. Emma Smith—she’s the IRS second-in-command—pulled his social security and tax records. From 2006 until 2011, he supposedly worked as a technical specialist for an outfit called Brennan Holdings in Northern Virginia.”

“Bullshit,” Bear said.

“Yeah, exactly. Brennan Holdings is a CIA front company. We’re trying to find out what he did for them, but during that five-year period Customs and Immigration shows two
dozen
times he left and entered the United States. And then nothing. In 2001 he paid cash for a big house in Idaho, bought some vicious dogs and basically retired.”

Bear grunted. He was driving at least four miles an hour now—maybe even five. “At twenty-something years old? I must be in the wrong line of work.”

He thought through the implications. Tyler Coleman “retired” from the CIA in 2011. Something stank. “What did the IRS say about his income since 2011?”

Kelly replied, “He reported less than thirty thousand in income in 2012 and 2013. The IRS might have never noticed—we’re talking about rural Idaho, the median income out there is pretty low. But here’s the kicker, Bear. I talked with the Sheriff out there. Coleman’s been arrested for disorderly conduct, public drunkenness and assault in the last three years. He beat up some guy in a bar and did three months in the county jail. His fingerprints should have come up in the National Crime Information Center, Bear. But his record was wiped from there too. And that was
after
he left the Agency.”

Bear gripped the steering wheel with both hands. He was moving at a good clip now, almost as fast as a bicyclist. Uphill. With a flat tire.

Maybe not. Brake lights came on in front of him again. Bear sighed as he came to a stop. He was a tenth of a mile from the exit. He could walk faster than this.

“Okay. So the CIA was somehow involved in kidnapping Andrea. Or maybe a rogue element inside CIA. What else?”

Kelly said, “You won’t like the next part.”

“I didn’t like the last part. What is it?”

“The guy Leah tagged the other day, before—” Kelly didn’t finish the sentence.
Before she got shot.

“Yeah,” Bear said. “Go on.” Kelly was talking about the bizarre melee that had happened in the street in Bethesda the day before the condominium was attacked. A British tourist had been shot, and one of the shooters killed. The other one was tackled by Dylan Paris and then arrested by Diplomatic Security.

Kelly said. “Two things. First, the British tourist? He wasn’t a tourist.”

“Who was he?”

“Name is Charlie Frazier. We’re certain he’s MI6.”

Bear let out a curse. “What the hell?”

“Yeah, exactly. And here’s where it gets really strange, Bear.”

“It’s not strange yet?”

“The shooter was Saudi Mukhabarat.”

Bear didn’t answer. He just sat breathing. In his mind, he thought back to the photograph. 1983. Leslie Collins, Prince Roshan, Richard Thompson. All three were in Afghanistan together.

“Kelly. Listen to me. I got it. I know what’s happening now.”

“Well don’t keep it to yourself.”

“It’s not one group of bad guys here, Kelly. It’s two. Or more. One side is Collins and Roshan and Thompson. They were involved in the Wakhan massacre, Kelly. I bet they engineered it. And now, their mutual paranoia is taking them down. Collins thought if Andrea Thompson’s parentage came out, it would be enough of a scandal to bust the whole story open. But his actions precipitated that instead of preventing it.”