The Darkness Gathers (29 page)

The two men looked at each other, and Lydia could see a battle being waged within each of them. They were men who used to trust each other, rely on each other, but the currents of their lives had swept them so far apart somehow that they were practically strangers.

“Trust me when I tell you that literally nothing is what you think,” said Jacob slowly and softly. He didn’t look at either one of them, staring instead at some distant space between them. Lydia and Jeffrey both waited, looking at Jacob as he stood and pulled his coat back on.

“Nathan Quinn has grown very powerful, too powerful. Steps are being taken to change that.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jeffrey.

“That’s already more than you should know,” he answered. “Just take my advice and stay out of this. Forget about Albania. Forget about Tatiana.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lydia shouted, “I am so sick of all this crap. I feel like I’m in a rerun of
The X-Files
.”

“Let me put it in plain English. You fucked around with Nathan Quinn and now he’s fucking around with you. It’s gone too far now and it’s beyond my powers to help either of you. I tried. Now, like I said before, you’re on your own.”

He stood up to leave.

Jeffrey frowned. “How do you know we’re going to Albania?”

Jacob hesitated before saying, “If you don’t want me to know your travel plans, then don’t make your reservations via our Expedia account.”

“I want you out, Jacob,” said Jeffrey.

“I’m leaving.”

“No, I mean out of the firm. You can’t be trusted anymore. Name your price. I’ll buy you out.”

“Fuck you.”

“Were you a part of this? A part of Jed McIntyre being released?”

He laughed with disdain. “Do you think I have that kind of power?”

“How did you know what happened? How did you get here so fast?”

“While you were ripping the director of the mental hospital a new asshole, he was sending me an E-mail to call you off. It wasn’t his fault. It all happened above his head.”

“I don’t give a shit whose fault it was. Jed McIntyre’s out there now and he’s after Lydia.”

“And now you have two psychos on your hands. That was some ‘vacation’ you took to Miami. Was Tatiana worth all of this?”

Jeffrey and Jacob were standing inches from each other; Lydia was bracing herself for the conflict to come to blows. But Jeffrey backed away, his fists clenching. When he spoke again, his tone was quiet but lethal.

“Get out, Jacob. Get the fuck out. And get a business lawyer, because I’m going to have you out on the street so fast, you won’t know what hit you. That’s my firm and don’t you forget it.”

“We’ll see.”

They were silent after Jacob had disappeared into the elevator. Lydia felt like their life was unraveling and she only had herself to blame. She wished that brown envelope had never dropped to the floor, that she’d never broken the seal. Was Tatiana worth all of this? Worth the reanimation of her worst nightmare?

“Next time,” he said, sitting next to her on the couch, “I get to pick where we go on vacation.”

chapter twenty-eight

J
effrey was smart enough to know that Lydia had a few things about herself that she kept from him. It didn’t bother him. He didn’t need to be inside her skin, inside her head every second … as long as he knew he was in her heart. And of that, he was sure. He had a few things that he kept to himself as well, though they were strictly professional.

There was quite a bit, in fact, about the private investigation firm of Mark, Hanley and Striker that Lydia wasn’t privy to. She knew, for example, that the firm worked on cases with the FBI and the NYPD. But she didn’t know what those cases were and that people from the firm very often were brought in to go places where men carrying shields were not permitted to go. He’d shared a lot with her, probably some things that he shouldn’t have, but not everything. Just as she had sources and contacts that she had never revealed, so did Jeffrey.

Sometimes the law imposed more shackles on its enforcers than it did on its offenders. Anyone on the job knew that. The price of living in a “free” society dictated that, as of a day ago, Jed McIntyre was a man who had served his debt to society. Obviously, something dirty, something evil had been behind his release. The police were not going to be of any help to them. But he knew someone who would.

He listened as Lydia moved around upstairs, packing for the trip they still had every intention of taking. He was surprised and relieved that she still wanted to go to Albania after hearing the news that Jed McIntyre was on the loose. A trip that had seemed pretty risky last night was probably the safest option for them right now. But Jed McIntyre could not be allowed to roam the streets.

He picked up the phone, keeping his eyes on the staircase, and dialed. Dax Chicago didn’t so much answer the phone as groan into the receiver.

“Dax?”

“Yeah,” he answered, his heavy Australian accent dragging the word out to three syllables.

“It’s Jeff Mark.”

“Wuzup, mate?”

“I have a job for you.”

L
ydia could hear Jeffrey talking on the phone downstairs, the authoritative rise and fall of his voice, his quick, hard sentences, and wondered to whom he was speaking. She had pulled down the shades again in the bedroom, conscious now of who might be watching her, and tried to shake the feeling that the happy life she and Jeffrey had constructed was shaking at its foundation and that she was to blame.

She wasn’t exactly chastising herself; after all, she’d only done what she’d always done—followed her instincts, tried to help someone who had reached out to her. She wondered now if being herself meant that her life with Jeffrey would unravel, wondered how true a home they had made together. Or maybe she just wasn’t meant to be happy and safe; maybe that wasn’t her fate. Was she being forced to make a choice between the thing that drove her, her purpose, and their life together? No, that wasn’t fair. She could have both. She wasn’t sure she could live without either.

“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” Jeffrey asked, walking into the room and startling her from her thoughts.

“We’re looking for Tatiana Quinn,” she answered, keeping her eyes lowered.

“That’s why we’re going to Albania?”

“Detective Ignacio said to go where the money led. The money is in Albania, so is American Equities, so is Sasa Fitore … so that’s where we’re going.”

She walked back and forth between the closet and the bed, shoving clothes into two backpacks. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched her. She moved stiffly but quickly, as if she was in a hurry to go someplace she didn’t want to be. She hadn’t looked at him since she’d received the news about Jed McIntyre. Her face was pale, her eyes unreachable.

“So how do you want to play this?” he asked, more anger in his tone than he had intended. “Do you just want to pretend this isn’t happening? Or are we going to pretend that it isn’t having an effect on you, that you’re too tough to care that the man who murdered your mother is on the loose and somewhere close by.”

“Jeffrey …”

“What? I’m serious. I just want to know how I’m supposed to act.”

“Jesus, give me a second to process it. I don’t know how to feel,” she snapped, shoving a sweater hard into one of the bags. “I never thought I’d have to deal with this. I thought he was going to be locked away forever. That’s why I kept all those letters. Every month, it was like confirmation that he was locked away, that he could never reach me, that my nightmares were just that … nightmares. I need a little time to figure out how to handle this. Would you feel better if I broke down in your arms and begged you to protect me? You know me better than that, don’t you?”

He lowered his head. She was right, of course. He was angry with her for not reacting in a way that would allow him to comfort her.

“I’m sorry, Lydia. I guess I just don’t know what to do. I only want to fix this somehow.”

She sat down next to him. “You don’t have to fix everything, Jeffrey. We’re a team. We’ll handle this together. When we get back.”

“It seems weird to be rushing off when we know Jed McIntyre is running around New York City.”

“The farther away the better. Besides, if Jacob is right, and Nathan Quinn arranged Jed McIntyre’s release to keep us from going to Albania, I’m certainly not willing to comply. Besides, what are we going to do? Wait around for Jed to come after me? There’s no reason not to go.”

He shuddered to hear her use his first name so casually, like he was an acquaintance they met for the occasional cocktail. It implied an intimacy in her mind, communicated that Jed McIntyre was in her thoughts more than he knew.

“Flawless logic, as usual.”

“In the meantime, why don’t you call one of your secret Rambo contacts and see if they can’t get a handle on him?”

“What secret Rambo contacts?” he asked with a smile that managed to be at once innocent and sly.

chapter twenty-nine

“H
ow do we know we can even trust this guy?” asked Jeffrey as they followed the rail-thin, shabbily dressed man through the nearly empty Rinas airport. Like most of the buildings in Albania, it had suffered from the 1997 riots and looting; it was run-down and filthy, reeking of urine. There were more people armed and in ragtag uniforms than there were travelers. They stood about smoking, machine guns draped casually over their shoulders. She wondered what laws they were willing to enforce with those guns in a relative state of anarchy.

“We definitely can’t trust him,” said Lydia. “But he’ll have to do. There’s no other way to get around.”

Their guide had been the youngest of a crowd of men waiting at the baggage claim with signs that read
DRIVER
or
GUIDE
. His startling blue eyes and riot of red freckles gave him the look of innocence, and there was a sparkle there that communicated a depth and resourcefulness that appealed to Lydia. Lydia picked him on instinct from the throng of men vying for their American dollars.

“Can you take us to Vlorë?”

He’d looked temporarily taken aback. “Very far,” he said. “Very dangerous.”

“You take us there, stay with us, and then bring us back. We’ll pay you in American dollars … fifty dollars a day.”

Lydia knew that this was more than many Albanians saw in a month. His attitude changed considerably.

“Of course, of course … Vlorë beautiful place. This way, please.” They followed him out of doors that were held open with garbage cans overflowing with rubbish. Lydia was surprised to see him open the door of a Mercedes sedan that looked in reasonable shape and get into the driver’s seat. She remembered something she had read about most drivers in Albania having learned to operate a motor vehicle only since 1991; it had been illegal during Communist rule, and, as a result, there was now a high incidence of spectacular car wrecks. She said a silent prayer as their driver spun away from the terminal and roared out of the airport.

“What’s your name?” asked Lydia, looking in vain for a seat belt and finding frayed stubs where they should have been. Inexplicably, the seat belts had been cut out of the car.

“Gabriel is my name, miss,” he said. Then he added, “My English is good.”

“Yes, it is. I’m Lydia, and this is Jeffrey.”

“Why do you come here? To Albania?”

“I’m a writer. I’m doing an article.”

“Oh,” he said, impressed. “You write about Albania. Maybe someone will come to help us.”

“I hope so,” she said, and meant it.

It was dark, and the countryside between Tirana, Albania’s capital, and Vlorë passed by in the shadow of clouds drifting in front of the moon, occasionally revealing abandoned villages, burned-out cars and tractors by the side of the road, and piles of garbage. Twice, Lydia heard the unmistakable sound of automatic-weapon fire. Albania looked like other Third World countries she had seen, but without the energy, without the hustle, as if it had given up. The road was less a road than it was a mass of churned gravel and dirt, and seemed to hinder rather than facilitate their forward progress. According to the map she had, Vlorë was a little more than sixty miles from the airport, but she figured it would take two or maybe three hours to get there because of the bad condition of the road. After major delays in New York, a seemingly endless layover in Zurich, not to mention the slow line for a visa stamp upon arriving at Rinas airport, they were on their way to Vlorë significantly later than Lydia had hoped. The ride that stretched before them now seemed nothing short of interminable.

She wondered what would happen to them if the car broke down. That was the thing that always made Lydia the most uneasy about the Third World—the
what ifs
. In the United States, if something broke down or you found yourself in trouble, help was just a phone call away—police, hospitals, AAA. Here, if you got a flat tire or got into an accident, you were out of luck. She wondered what it must be like to live like that, always on the edge of disaster, no formal network of people and organizations created for the sole purpose of saving your ass. She hoped they wouldn’t have to find out.

“The Communists never repaired the roads,” said Gabriel in an apologetic tone. “They did not like for people to travel. They had helicopters. I am lucky to have this car. It’s very strong.”

“Where did you get it?” Jeffrey asked.

“After the Communists left, things were better for a while. We voted; there was a democracy. New things came from the West—cars, computers, televisions. But then after the collapse and the riots, things got very bad. Worse than communism. There was no fuel for cars, so people left them by the road. I found this one. When we got gasoline again, I became a taxi driver.”

Lydia thought of what Marianna had said about Americans being like children, thinking Santa Claus leaves presents under the tree. The concept of the government collapsing, the country descending into chaos and anarchy, not being able to buy gasoline would be inconceivable to most people in the United States. It was amazing that half a day on an airplane had transported them to another universe.