Labyrinth (47 page)

Dogan arrived and limped toward the table. Chris pushed himself from his chair to greet him. The two men almost laughed at each other.

“Look at us,” Chris quipped, “a couple of cripples.” He took his seat again gingerly. “You know, it all started for me in a restaurant. But that day it was Brian who made sure we got a corner table. Today it was me.”

Dogan eased his chair forward. “You're safe, Chris. Nobody's going to touch you.”

“That's what I keep telling myself, but I still hate turning my back on anybody. It never stops either. They used my family once. They might again. I won't let my kids take the bus home from school, you know.”

“The paranoia will subside. You'll see.”

“If you were talking to the man I was two months ago, I'd probably say you were right. But he's gone and here I am sitting in his place trying to live his life.”

“Things aren't going well,” Dogan concluded.

“That's just it, Ross, they
are
going well. L.A.'s only a bus ride away for my oldest son, and my daughter is being overwhelmed with boys as beautiful as she is. Your people set my wife up in a fantastic real estate job and well, the California life style, as they say, agrees with her. As for Greg, he's had the best medical care available. That man Roy arranged for one-on-one sessions between him and some professional ballplayers. They're showing Greg he can still play baseball even with a finger missing from his glove hand, and if he buys that he just might be able to adjust. But his childhood's gone, and they can't give that back to him, not even Roy.”

“That covers all the members of your family except one.”

Locke shrugged. “I just can't seem to put everything behind me. I lived in an academic fantasyland for fifteen years and all of a sudden I saw how violent and ugly the world can be. I met up with a mother I never knew and found out I didn't want to.”

“She kept you alive, Chris, and in the end it cost her.”

“She kept me alive because it suited her needs. And she sent Nikki out as my bodyguard, Nikki, who at Whitney's age was entering terrorist training school. What kind of world are we making for ourselves, Ross?”

“One a shitload better than the one the Committee envisioned.”

“Maybe.” Locke had to search for words. “You know what it comes down to in the end, Ross? The running. When you're running, everything you pass is a blur. I ran myself out in Europe. I can't run anymore and there's nothing left to run away from. So I've slowed down and everything's so damn clear. But I think I liked it better before. The blur made it easy to endure.”

“Then it comes down to pretending, not running, doesn't it?” Dogan challenged. “In Europe you said it felt like you were trapped in a labyrinth. Well, you made it out of that one only to land in another with just as many passages that lead nowhere. But this time the only way to escape is to accept that it's you that's changed, not your wife or your kids or even your job. It's not the world you've got to get used to again, it's yourself.”

Locke found himself smiling. “You ever get tired of spy work, we could use you in the philosophy department out here.”

“Let's just say I've been where you're finding yourself now. Trouble is, in my business do too much thinking and somebody will have your brains for breakfast.”

Locke tensed. “Now you've come to the real problem, Ross, 'cause how do I know that won't happen to me … and my family … tomorrow morning? I can't handle the fear, the doubt, the cringing every time the doorbell rings or a stranger meets my eye. We fucked with a lot of people out there who aren't used to being fucked with. You told me about that Division of yours. Eliminate the two of us and they walk away from this clean.”

Dogan stood up without ordering. “It's time I went back to work.”

The Commander sat in the shade at his usual table on the Champs-Élysées, sipping warm tea and toying with a basket of croissants. His ever-present newspaper was spread out and he read it mindlessly while awaiting the appearance of the two agents he had ordered to meet him. Division Six had to remain immune from standard government checks and balances. He had weathered worse storms than this, though. It was simply a matter of filling in certain holes now that the time had finally become right. Patience was everything, rashness a quality of the shortsighted.

The Commander heard the blind beggar's cup being rattled before him and fished in his pocket for some change to drop in. Damn nuisance. Such human lice had no business ruining the scenery along the Champs-Élysées.

Glancing briefly up at the cup, he slipped a piece of change in and heard it jingle among the rest. Then he shooed the man away with his hand.

The blind beggar shook his cup again.

The Commander looked up from his paper to search for the café manager when he caught the blind man's face.

“Grendel …”

Ross Dogan winked once. Then he fired two bullets from the silenced Heckler and Koch held beneath his bulky brown rags. They entered the Commander's stomach, the impact pitching the older man backward and toppling him over. Waiters rushed over followed by the manager. When they saw the blood and the Commander's sightless eyes, they screamed for help. The Commander's men converged on the area, searching for the assassins, but they found only startled tourists, distracted shoppers …

And a blind beggar tapping his cane down the avenue.

A Biography of Jon Land

Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-nine novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He began writing technothrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.

Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel,
The Doomsday Spiral
, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain US security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman's tact.

In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent,
The Last Prophecy
, was released in 2004.

RT Book Reviews
honored Land with a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction and included in 2010's
The Best American Mystery Stories
. He is also the author of the Caitlin Strong series, starring the eponymous Texas Ranger, a female character in a genre that Land has said has too few. The second book in the Caitlin Strong series,
Strong Justice
(2010), was named a Top Thriller of the Year by
Library Journal
and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book,
Betrayal
, written with Robert Fitzpatrick, tells the behind-the-scenes story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and was published to acclaim in 2011. The Blaine McCracken novel
Pandora's Temple
won the 2013 International Book Award for Best Thriller/Adventure, and was nominated for a 2013 Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original Novel.

Land currently lives in Providence, not far from his alma mater.

Land (left) interviewing then–teen idol Leif Garrett (center) in April of 1978 at the dawn of Land's writing career.

Land (second from left) at Maine's Ogunquit Beach during the summer of 1984, while he was a counselor at Camp Samoset II. He spent a total of twenty-six summers at the camp.

Land with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which he visited in 1987 as part of his research for
The Omicron Legion
(1991).

Land on the beach in Matunuck, Rhode Island, in 2003.

In front of the “process trailer” on the set of
Dirty Deeds
, the first movie that he scripted, which was released in 2005. The film starred Milo Ventimiglia and Lacey Chabert.