The Pandora Key (27 page)

“What’s this?”

“It’s from Lyle. He said you’d be back.”

She gave me a look of complete disdain, as though letting Lyle down meant letting her down, too.

“Thanks.” I took it from her. It was heavy. “Is he back there?”

“He’s gone.”

The finality in her tone suggested that she didn’t mean he had gone out for lunch. “Is he coming back?”

“No.”

“Why not? What happened?”

With both hands flat on the desk, she leaned forward and looked up at me. “He left the day you came here and never came back to work.”

The envelope in my hand suddenly seemed to have more heft to it. “Is he all right? Has anyone spoken to him?”

“He called in. He said everything was fine and thanks and all that, but he wouldn’t be back and not to look for him. He told us to donate his last check to the Jimmy Fund. He said he was leaving for good.” She went back to her magazine.

I thought back to what he’d said in the control room about being fucked, about having some decisions to make. Apparently, he had made them, but I still had to wonder what would prompt a man to quit his job and uproot his family that way.

“He didn’t leave any—”

“Forwarding information? No. He left that.” She nodded to the envelope. I had the sense from her reaction that she had somehow been bruised by Lyle’s departure.

“Were you friends?”

She had never taken her eyes from her magazine. “Good enough friends that I would never have expected him to leave town without so much as a goodbye.” She turned the page but must have decided that more needed to be said.

“I hope you’re happy with yourself. I hope it doesn’t bother you that just when he was getting settled and things were getting back to normal, you came along and stirred it all up again.”

I could tell she was one of those people who liked delivering bad news. It was right there on her face, and it made me uneasy. “Stirred up what?”

“His oldest son was run over by a truck and killed while his little brother watched.

I took a step back from the desk.

“That’s why Lyle left the paper to come here. He wanted to spend more time with Jeff. I guess now he’ll be out looking for another job, thanks to you.”

“Did they…was it an accident?”

“Hit and run. Never caught them.”

I took another step back. It felt as if she’d just splashed acid in my face.

“He said to be careful with that.”

“What?”

She nodded at the envelope that I was now hugging to my chest.

“And good luck.” She turned the page to a new article. “He said be careful and good luck.”

I sat in the car with the overstuffed envelope in my lap and both hands on the wheel, thinking about what she’d said and what it meant. I felt like one of those patients who wakes up in the middle of surgery—in pain and completely helpless. I tried breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, but I couldn’t catch my breath.

It was one thing to threaten an adult. Adults chose paths that sometimes went to scary places. But kids don’t make those choices. A kid never had anything to do with anything. The thought that Lyle’s son, trusting and vulnerable and feeling safe in his world, could have been run down and killed just for being his father’s son hurt beyond words and made me want to kill someone.

Good luck, and be careful. That was Lyle’s message. That was part of Lyle’s message. The rest of it was in the envelope. I had to dig in to know the rest, but I had the strongest feeling that if I did, something bad would happen to me, too. I was certain of it. I brushed my fingers across the outside. It was soft and worn and well used. He had traded his job and his family’s life in Boston for me to have it. Perhaps not by choice, but that’s how it had turned out. I had to look inside.

I slipped my fingers in and pulled out a couple of pages. They looked to be the middle pages in the draft of a story. I pulled out a few more and found the beginning of the article. It was called “The Private War of Cyrus Thorne.” With fewer pages stuffed inside, the envelope had a little more give. I looked down and spotted a tiny cassette tape. I pulled it out, and a second came tumbling behind it. There was nothing on the labels except “1” and “2.” I had no way to play microcassettes in the car and a suddenly burning desire to hear them right away, so I started up the engine and drove to a nearby Staples. I bought the cheapest microcassette player I could. I bought batteries. I went back to the car, assembled everything, and popped in tape number one. I didn’t even bother to rewind.

“—believe it was Pan Am 103?” That was Lyle’s voice, and I was immediately drawn in. Why was he talking about Lockerbie?

“Without question, it was Pan Am 103.” That was a voice I didn’t recognize. “There was a CIA team on that flight. Five agents, including McKee. One of the best I ever knew got blown out of the sky that day, and that was the beginning of the end of it for Cyrus. He hung in with the agency a few more years, but he never got over what happened with Pan Am.”

Best
I
ever knew. Was he CIA? The voice was not deep yet had plenty of gravity. There was a bulldog quality about the way he powered forward, but strategic pauses insinuated a wry sense of humor, even if he didn’t give it voice. I started glancing over the article as I listened.

“What happened?” Lyle asked.

“Cy was part of a team that investigated the incident. He came to believe 103 was targeted because McKee and his people were onboard.”

“Why?”

“They had found out about a Syrian drug trafficker. He was swapping information for protection with the DEA and another CIA team in Germany. They were allowing him to bring drugs into the States. McKee found out. He thought it was bullshit. The Syrian heard, probably from other agents, that McKee was about to blow the whistle on his sweet deal. He blew up McKee instead.”

“You’re saying that, indirectly, the CIA and the DEA were responsible for Pan Am 103?”

“That’s what Cyrus thought. To him, those agents were heroes, betrayed by their country, swept aside in some high-level cover-up. It drove him nuts. Then he got into counterterrorism, and that was the last straw.”

“Any particular incident?”

“Everything taken together. He was one of the first to see the threat of the radical Muslims. He understood the socioeconomic drivers in third world countries, and he thought you could apply the domino theory to Muslim nations.”

“Domino theory? Like LBJ’s excuse for escalating Vietnam?”

“Exactly. But in Cy’s nightmare, the first thing that happens is Pakistan falls to extremists. Then the princes in Saudi Arabia lose control, and the House of Saud falls. Osama comes out of the caves to lead his people. He has Saudi oil, and he has the bomb, and now the dominoes start to fall. Indonesia, the largest Muslim population in the world, the Philippines, Turkey, Syria, Somalia, and other African Muslim nations. Afghanistan goes back to the Taliban. The Palestinians get the muscle they need to plow Israel under. The ayatollahs in Iran are already developing their own bomb, and who the hell knows what Saddam really has in his backyard?”

I had to keep reminding myself that this was an old recording. It just made me realize how much the world had changed in a relatively short time.

“In Cy’s world, what you end up with is a radical Islamic alliance with nuclear weapons lined up against Western nations with nuclear weapons.”

“Armageddon.”

“Yes, because, unlike the Soviets, religious jihadists are not afraid to die. There is nothing keeping their fingers off the buttons. Mass mutual destruction becomes a real possibility.”

“But LBJ’s theory never proved out.” That was Lyle, arguing on behalf of sanity. “We pulled out of Vietnam, and the balance of power never shifted.”

“True believers are not swayed by facts or historical precedents, and Cyrus is a true believer. He always was. Always will be. The more he learned about the threat, the louder he yelled. The louder he yelled, the more the powers that be wanted to shut him down. Eventually, they pushed him out.”

“Then he didn’t resign from the CIA.” Lyle’s tone suggested he’d suspected as much all along.

“That’s why he started the business. He needed to regain control. Cyrus is big on control, and he had no problem finding fellow travelers to go with him. We had military officers, intelligence officers, special-ops types, force protection, people from some of these other security companies.”

“Is that why you did it?”

“I was tired of the military. Cy was my best friend and my mentor, and I wanted to make some money.”

I reached over and paused the tape, because a light had gone on in my brain, and I needed to look at what it was showing me. The voice on this tape was Tony Blackmon’s. It was a tape of Lyle interviewing Cyrus’s dead partner, the man who had started Blackthorne with him. The man who had probably known him best. Whatever he said had instant credibility, and what he’d said on this tape must have been what Thorne was so intent on keeping a secret. He had killed Lyle’s son to keep it that way. Now he wanted to kill Kraft.

I pressed play. Blackmon continued.

“For a long time, it was just about getting the company up and running, but once we got going, for Cy it became all about the ideology. Everything that happened in the escalating pattern of violence and aggression—Khobar Towers, the
Cole
, the embassies in Africa—he took each one as evidence that the country was defended by morons, and if he, Cyrus Thorne, didn’t do something, we were going to have the big fireball.”

“Nuclear attack?”

“Right. It’s the Thorne Mushroom-Cloud Defense. He can justify any behavior at all by invoking the image of that mushroom rising up over Washington or Manhattan. It’s handy, because there’s hardly anything Americans wouldn’t do to stop that from happening.”

I put the article and everything else aside to give my full attention to the tape.

“What sorts of things did he do?”

“He started sourcing bigger and riskier jobs. High-risk protection stuff that gave us access to diplomats and heads of state in the Middle East. Cy had contacts all over the world from his CIA officer days, so it wasn’t hard. He also jumped on assignments in hot spots like Kosovo. It was great for business, but he was pushing the envelope more and more.”

“In what way?”

“If we got called in on a kidnapping case down in Colombia, we’d get the victim released, but the kidnappers would all end up dead at the scene. Then we had to start finding ways to bury expenses, because we were going out on our own missions.”

“You’re saying Blackthorne initiated missions without being hired by a client.”

“That’s right. Isn’t that what I just said?”

“I’m just being clear for the recording. You’re saying Blackthorne became a vigilante organization disguised as a legitimate contractor.” Blackmon didn’t respond, so he went on. “Did you participate?”

“I can tell you right now, a lot of the things we were doing, they were things that needed to be done. People who needed to be dead. A Syrian gun runner selling weapons used against our troops. An Afghan war lord who sells drugs and on the side buys little boys to fondle and rape. A Palestinian telling a bunch of kids they’ve been chosen by Allah to have the great honor of strapping on some C4 and blowing themselves up.”

Blackmon had to stop and take a rest here. I pictured him walking away from Lyle, trying to gather himself, and then coming back.

“The world is better off without these people, and if we had more of that kind of clear thinking in government, we wouldn’t have half the problems we have today.”

“You don’t consider it murder?”

“It was murder. I am a murderer. But it was murder that needed to be done.”

I didn’t know if the long pause here meant Lyle was taking notes or trying to form a question. “If you believe in what he’s doing, why are you talking to me?”

“Because the more we did, the more Cy wanted to do. He wanted more influence. He started taking money under the table from donors with foreign business interests, and those interests had to be protected. There were certain countries and governments that were more favorable to what we were doing, and their interests had to be considered. The decisions got more complicated, and pretty soon it wasn’t about right and wrong.” There was a real sense of loss in Blackmon’s voice. Whether it was for his friend’s loss of purpose or because he would miss going out and killing people once the article was published, it was hard to say. “Cy had created the thing he hated most.”

“Thorne created his own politically driven bureaucracy.”

Blackmon must have nodded, because Lyle told him he had to speak for the tape.

“That’s what happened. I was ready to bail, but then nine-eleven happened.” The silence that followed went on so long I checked to see if we’d come to the end of the tape. We hadn’t, and eventually Blackmon began again. “Watching those towers fall…it did something to him.”

“It did something to a lot of us.”

“Cy felt responsible.”

“Why?”

“Because he saw it coming, and he wasn’t able to convince anyone. Because he felt like part of the failure, part of the useless and fucked-up government that had let things get to that point. He started taking a lot of black-bag jobs. Covert stuff. Illegal.”

“Like what?”

“Political assassinations, kidnappings, torture—various other forms of violent persuasion aimed at targets of his choosing. Encouraging coups, training and arming insurgents, passing along classified information to where it’s most needed.”

“Where does he get access to classified intelligence?”

“You have to remember the core of the company was all ex-military, ex-CIA or DIA or NSA. We all had high-level clearance, and we all have friends who still do. There are a lot of people inside the intelligence community who believe the U.S. intelligence machine is inadequate to the job of defending the country.”

“You have moles?”

“We get help here and there. Don’t ask me for names. I’m not compromising those people. They’re trying to do right. Most of us are trying to do right. But the jobs got bigger and riskier and harder to manage, and civilians started getting in the way. Cy’s view is that everyone is a soldier in this war.”