The Confessor (9 page)

Harry scrolled down to a photo of two men. Beneath it was a copy of another e-mail, in a different font, below it. It read:

Harry finished reading. ‘“600 million for rights to oil and natural gas pipelines and refinement”?’

‘I guess.’

‘“If you reconsider pops we’re at nine”? What’s that?’

Matheson smiled faintly. ‘Poppy fields?’

‘And “S-P and G-R
shellcos
”?’

‘Shell companies. Spanish? Greek?’

Harry sat back. He finally nodded. ‘Argent Industries is buying Afghanistan. Wow.’

‘Sounds like it.’

Harry straightened up and cracked his knuckles. ‘This is gonna take some time, David. Pixel by pixel examination and comparison.’

Matheson put a cigarette in his lips. ‘Gonna have a smoke.’ He opened the door, stepped out and closed it behind him.

Harry’s fingers settled on the keys – and something made him stop. It was the click in his brain – a slow, rhythmic ticking – pleasing, familiar, long absent. He had the look of someone who’d remembered a favorite song he hadn’t heard in years. It was the sound he heard when he was a
Times
reporter – the click of his lens focusing, locking on to something whose meaning might outweigh the common and mundane. It felt good.

Matheson lit his fourth cigarette with the butt of his third and paced slowly, leaving a white, wafting tail in his wake. These days, if he was standing up he couldn’t stay in one place. A medically informed observer might have surmised he suffered from a moderate form of akathisia, or perhaps ADD – but the motor of Matheson’s restlessness was in his soul, not his brain or muscles, and it ran on a high-octane blend of zeal, outrage and remorse. The first two were ammunition for his online crusades . . . and the last a constant flow of melancholy – blood from an open wound, the severance from his son.

He’d grown up rich and rootless, dead-on aware of his lack of skills and desire for any. His sole passion, art, finally eased him into a profession – middle-man for the buying and selling of paintings and antiquities. It suited him – exotic travel, short episodes with people that didn’t require an effort at intimacy, and a modest sense of accomplishment – even though nothing was actually ever created or produced. Then, like so many others on the planet, the concussive waves of 9/11 swept him off his path, and he found himself on another.

Veritas Arcana was born, Matheson was reborn.

And the quest consumed him. His secret life casting shadows on his old one. A growing estrangement from his family, divorce, a creeping separateness and seclusion, Christmas and two summer weeks with his son – and then the Geiger incident and the break with Ezra. Matheson was not one for introspection, but he carried his son’s sense of betrayal with him, always. He had shattered the boy’s trust, and heart. He had no illusions about what he’d become – a slave to his obsession, ridden by it like a horse and master, waiting for the next secret to show itself . . .

‘David! C’mere!’

Matheson tossed his cigarette and swung the door open.

Harry watched the gold, pentagon-shaped icon blinking on the screen. ‘Done.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘Real. Probably.’

‘Probably? What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means the program found minimal anomalies – but this is
one shot
, David. So that’s why the “probably”. This software isn’t perfect. If you want closer to one hundred percent certain “it’s real” – you’ll need all the photos and docs.’

Matheson scowled. ‘What do you think?’

‘The right side of my brain says it sounds and reads legit. Non-American. Limited English – the misspellings, grammar, syntax . . .’

‘And putting the day before the month in the date . . .’

‘That too. But the left side of my brain says “setup”. This is tailor-made to burn your ass. Lots of people would like to do that.’

Matheson was nodding. ‘They certainly would.’ He took out his cigarette pack. It was empty. He crumpled it up, pulled a new pack out and started smacking it against his palm in the addict’s ritual.

Harry sighed. ‘And you’re gonna do it – aren’t you?’

‘I’ve been here before. This is what I do.’

‘If it’s a trap . . . Is it worth a bullet in your—’

‘Harry, when you were at the
Times
. . . Maybe you got a tip on a story, something that
mattered
– but it might be dangerous. Would that’ve made you walk away?’

It was one of the last places Harry cared to go. ‘That was another lifetime.’

‘Look at the way I live, Harry.
My
choices, yes – but all I’ve got left is the job . . . this is it – so it wouldn’t make much sense if I just hid down here and waited for things to happen. That would make me a pretty ridiculous man, wouldn’t it?’

He lit up again, stepped out and closed the door – and Harry stared at the letter-size paper taped to it. It had a quote printed on it in large, italic font:
TRUTH IS LIKE THE SUN. YOU CAN SHUT IT OUT FOR A TIME, BUT IT AIN’T GOIN’ AWAY – ELVIS PRESLEY
.

Harry grinned. He had written off God and his faithful stooge, fate, seventeen years ago, leaning against a wall in an emergency room – but he’d accepted that life had a chaotic but causal flow – and that a random event did, at times, push others into motion.

‘Elvis?!’ he hollered. ‘The King said that?!’

‘According to Google, yeah!’

The world had become a reality-show version of itself, where truth and lies and spin all mingled around the prizes like ruthless contestants – and he could feel mayhem’s finger tapping him on his shoulder again –
Psst . . . Take a look at this
. The click in his brain wouldn’t stop, and when he’d read ‘Paris’ in the e-mail his insides had tightened.

‘David . . .!’

‘Yeah?!’

‘I want to come with you!’

The door opened. Matheson’s lips were tangled up between a faint smile and a curious frown. ‘Why?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Isn’t that reason enough?’

Geiger was deciding where his run would take him tonight. As he jogged out of the alley to the sidewalk he slowed to a stop, running in place, watching an antsy man in baggy jeans and a North Face coat stride back and forth in front of the bodega, stalking his own shadow, sharing his message as fast as his tongue would let him.

‘I am the agent of the Lord God Almighty –
Whoa!
– but I don’t take no ten percent!
Whoa!
’ Each punctuative
whoa
fell somewhere between an Otis Redding grunt and a Tourette’s bark. ‘I’ll get paid in full later – when I’m done!
Whoa!
’ He shook his head back and forth without pause, like a wind-up toy whose mechanism had gone awry.

Geiger wasn’t listening. He wasn’t looking at him, either. He was looking at the pane glass of the bodega behind the man that held the reflection of the laundromat across the street – and the figure standing inside at the window. When Geiger came down the alley he’d seen the figure, in a long overcoat, drinking from a coffee container – and lowering it the moment Geiger came out of the shadows. It was an ordinary gesture but the timing caught his eye – meaningless coincidence, or a signal to someone on the street.

God’s messenger wagged a bony finger at the world’s inexcusable ignorance.

‘Don’t matter to the Lord if you’re scumbag or saint –
Whoa! –
rich man or smack-shooter . . . I am here to tell you – you are
his
! He owns your miserable ass . . .’

In tiny increments, Geiger drifted two feet to his left, where the angle endowed the reflection in the glass with greater dimension. The figure in the window was still.

‘. . . and he will call you home when it goddamn suits him!
Whoa!
One by one – or by the trainload – or a million at a time.’ He eyed Geiger. ‘You hear me, brother?!’ The apostle came up to Geiger, close enough that he smelled the whiskey on the man’s breath.

‘Do you hear me, brother?’

Geiger took his earbuds out. His gaze stayed on the reflection. ‘Yes. I hear you.’

‘No, brother – not like that. I know you can hear me – but do you
hear
me?’

Geiger met the man’s bright, dark eyes. ‘Step back. You’re too close.’

The man smiled. ‘You can never be too close to the Lord, brother.’

Geiger’s focus shifted back. The figure in the glass was gone – and Geiger kicked into a slow jog. The preacher’s call chased after him.

‘Remember that, brother! You can never be too close to God!
Whoa!
’

Geiger checked out the block with casual glances. Despite the late, cold hour Avenue X still had diehards, drunks and late-shifters walking about, and hopeful lights shone in the pizzeria, the Hunan restaurant, the video store, the organic café.

From his perspective, his steady glide down the street had the effect of slowing those around him, almost to stillness, as if he ran through a photograph. He would always be defined by his separateness. He was a sailor navigating treacherous waters, but without desire or need to find land. His solitude was his home. Still – his sensors’ messages were clear: someone had found him, and was near. At the light, he turned left and used the moment to look down the street. Most likely, it would be the spooks who had employed Hall. Deep Red. They had discovered his survival and decided to reverse it. One of the tenets of their mindset was the ‘clean slate’ concept – a job was stamped ‘completed’ only when there was no reason to consider any element of it again. They hated loose ends. The fact that Geiger, in his own mind, posed no threat to them was irrelevant.

His brain’s mode clicked a few degrees, like the chambers of a gun, and took aim. He was never far from the Inquisitor’s methodology, and this scenario was a first cousin to an ‘asap’ gig – a ticking clock, little or no knowledge of the Jones, working more on instinct and reaction than preparation. He was keeping his pace to a moderate speed. He didn’t know what kind of shape his pursuer was in, and he wanted to be sure to stay in his view, for now. He needed a destination that would provide privacy – a session room, of sorts. Two blocks away they’d gutted a building for renovation and a scaffold’s canopy spanned its sidewalk like an eight-foot-high tunnel. He’d turn right at the light so he’d be coming at it from the east and be going round a corner – and that would take him out of his tail’s sight for a few moments. It would be all the time he’d need. And the last consideration . . . What to do with the Jones after the capture. Much as it went against his grain, he’d have to be reactive: ride the moment and use what it gave him.

The three-story reno was up ahead at the end of the block, with a few bare bulbs on inside to discourage the homeless and scavengers. Geiger increased his pace slightly, and as soon as he turned the corner, leaving the view of anyone behind him, he dashed into a full run beneath the scaffolding. On his right, at a break in the criss-cross of support piping, he darted through into the building’s dark, six-by-six entry. The door-frame had a steel-barred gate in it. A faint wash of light from an interior ceiling bulb came through it. Geiger pressed up against a wall, dissolving into the shadows, and began to count. If someone was following, he estimated twelve to fifteen seconds till arrival.

Three . . . four . . . five . . .
His fingers were flicking to the faint whisper of a beat hissing out of the earbuds dangling at his waist.
Eight . . . nine . . .
He moved a foot closer to the gap in the scaffolding. Step all the way out when the time came – or try and make a grab from where he was?
Thirteen . . . fourteen . . .
He’d wait till the last second to decide, depending on the runner’s speed.
Eighteen . . . nineteen . . . twenty . . .
The dance of his fingers slowed. He stopped counting. He was a stranger to inaccuracy and this was a new, unsettling sensation. He considered the rare possibility of his instincts failing him . . .

Then he heard the huffs of a finely tuned body . . . rubber soles touching lightly on asphalt – and as the runner reached the opening Geiger’s hand shot out, snared a wrist and pulled, using the body’s momentum to swing it round into the space and shove it up against the wall, chest first. Flesh and bone meeting concrete produced a purging
ooof
.

Geiger spread his legs for balance, anchoring all his weight against the stunned figure while one hand held the back of the knit-capped skull and his other slid around the throat and jammed up under the jaw in a tight C-clamp grip.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘My name is Rosanna Soames. I’m not armed.’

Geiger pulled the cap off and Zanni’s sandy hair fell to her shoulders. Geiger patted down the sides and back of her thin Gortex jacket, then the stomach, then the chest. The body was lean, the stomach flat and hard, the breasts small and round.

‘Who do you work for?’

‘The government.’

Geiger’s grip tightened round the soft flesh beneath her jaw. ‘The ones who sent Hall out for Matheson and the disks?’

‘Yes. Deep Red.’

He smelled a faint hint of flowers in the air.