“This time she loses for good.” Hatred and that’s not all. “I won’t allow collateral damage. Not Janet, not a kid, not anyone.”
I lean forward in my chair and everything that’s happened crashes through my mind, charging right at me. The shootings, the tweets, the pennies, Patty Marsico, Gracie Smithers and the sailboat, the corrupted DNA profile and apparent planted evidence and now the beer.
“Carrie Grethen.” Lucy’s matter-of-factness is more terrifying than the name itself.
The beer. The beer. The beer, my inner voice isn’t quiet anymore. In this very bar. Lucy picked the Madison Hotel, not me, and she doesn’t see what’s happening. A buried plague like an ancient virus waking up in thawing permafrost, and she’s as bloodthirsty as she’s lustful. She’ll be infected and probably is and always was.
Hey DOC,
Tick Tock …
LUCY LUCY LUCY and we!
Another poem sent to me, this one from Wards Island, New York, the women’s ward of Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center where Carrie Grethen was committed because she was too dangerous to be contained in any other facility. Criminally insane, too mentally unfit to stand trial, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t have been more false. She was never crazy, was anything but crazy, and I remember what Benton said after she escaped from maximum security:
Carrie Grethen hasn’t finished ruining people’s lives.
“She’s dead.” I say it quietly, carefully, my hands cradling my drink as I hold Lucy’s stare. “We saw her helicopter blow up midair and crash into the ocean after you fired an A-R-fifteen at it through your open door.”
It was a white Schweizer that was no match for Lucy’s Jet Ranger or her skills. But we were low on fuel when its pilot, Carrie’s killing partner Newton Joyce, opened fire with a submachine gun, hitting our skids, our fuselage. Lucy didn’t want to crash over a crowded beach, over occupied buildings and busy streets. So she banked and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean where we could die without taking innocent people with us. That was thirteen years ago.
“She isn’t,” Lucy says. “Carrie’s not dead. You won’t prove it through fingerprints or DNA. Those files are never purged from IAFIS or CODIS and she knows all about it, is too smart to be caught that way, and not with trace evidence or ballistics either. Someone who helped me engineer and program the FBI computer system and you think for one minute any traditional means will stop her?”
Nothing was too violent, too monstrous for her. She picked a killing partner, a sexual sadist who had been disfigured, horribly scarred. He abducted objects of his obsession, people who were beautiful to him. He cut off their faces. He had a freezer full of them.
“To Carrie forensics is nothing more than Tinkertoys. Rudimentary and childish,” Lucy goes on and she could be describing herself.
I envision the tiny piston helicopter exploding into a ball of fire, breaking apart and raining down into the sea. There would have been no survivors. But I never actually saw Carrie Grethen. I saw the pilot, a glimpse of his scarred face. I assumed Carrie was in the other seat. Everyone assumed it. Her remains were never found, only part of Newton Joyce’s charred left leg.
“QUANTICO,” SHE SAYS. “The Board Room, the Globe and Laurel, our hangouts when we were developing CAIN. That’s what we drank together, our favorite German beer. She knows I’d think of it. Tick Tock … Watch the clock BIG DOC.”
Copperhead is Carrie Grethen.
“And the poem sent to you on Mother’s Day has the same language,” Lucy says. “Watch the clock Doc. Tick Tock. It was always you she hated. She was jealous of our relationship and couldn’t stand that you weren’t afraid of her.”
During one of our earliest encounters we almost came to blows, I disliked her instantly and that much. I remember lying in wait at a spy shop in a Northern Virginia shopping mall. Had there not been other customers present when Carrie walked in with coffee I’m sure she would have thrown it in my face. I see it. I hear it. As if it just happened, the way I led her to an empty bench by a fountain and spoke to her in a way she wouldn’t forget.
There’s no point in wasting your charm on me because I have you figured out.
Lucy was a teenager when she began her internship with the FBI, working out of Quantico’s classified Engineering Research Facility, the ERF. Carrie was her mentor and I can see her clearly from back then, her eyes a dark blue that would turn violet on their way to steely hard, and she had a rare beauty, fine featured, a brunette, and I envision the person driving Rand Bloom’s gray pickup truck.
Short hair possibly dyed light blond, big glasses and a cap pulled low, and it could have been Carrie and then I’m sure it was. When I first met her at the ERF I couldn’t tell her age but she’s older than Lucy, well into her forties now. Carrie is vain. She would have taken impeccable care of herself. She’d look younger than her years and be extremely fit, the two of them, Lucy and Carrie. They’re each other’s good and evil other half.
“Okay I’m listening. I’m open-minded and reasonable. I’m listening carefully.” My voice doesn’t begin to convey what I feel. “She didn’t die.”
“I’ve always wondered about it.” Lucy’s attention is all around us as if Carrie Grethen might be here. “I must have known at some level that she wasn’t inside the helicopter.”
“Then who was?” I ask and the nausea has completely passed.
“The glare on the windscreen and Newton Joyce started shooting at us,” Lucy says. “It could be that no one else was in it. I don’t know. But Carrie wasn’t and she’s not dead.”
“That was a long time ago. Where’s she been and why now?” I want to argue it away but I know better, and my focus couldn’t be keener.
“She used to tell me how much she hated America. God knows she hated the FBI and only went to work for them so she could steal technology.” Lucy has lost interest in her beer and her eyes are everywhere. “She used to talk about moving to Russia and working with military intelligence. She was an admirer of the old Soviet Union the same way Putin is and felt that the demise of the USSR was a tragedy.”
“And you didn’t think it was unusual for an American who worked at Quantico to talk like that?” I’m careful not to sound like I’m blaming her. I notice our waitress gathering her belongings from behind the bar. I motion for her to bring the check.
“I was in college,” Lucy says. “She was very persuasive and manipulative and I admit it. I thought she was really cool. Maybe I just didn’t think period. And I was a rebel. I hated rules.”
Some things never change. What I say is, “Let’s focus on what happened after we assumed she died in a helicopter crash.”
Then silence as the waitress leaves the check in front of me and walks off swiftly.
“Carrie may not have gone to Russia immediately.” Lucy resumes talking quietly, intensely. “But she was there for at least the past decade and probably longer, part of a Russian intelligence service notorious for its expert marksmen who wear hoods and have no identifying insignias on their camouflage. Until early last fall Carrie was in Kiev.”
“How can you possibly …?”
“When you began having the problem with credit card fraud I became suspicious that our server was compromised,” Lucy says. “The breach happened through your bank. Specifically a hacker exploited the Heartbleed Bug in OpenSSL encryption software that’s widely used to secure websites and Internet transactions.”
“Such as making purchases online.”
“Bryce,” she says. “It began after he used your personal bank card to purchase a new laptop in March and Carrie captured his password. Only at first I didn’t know who it was. But I knew it was someone sophisticated.”
“And the ongoing fraudulent charges on my card?” They weren’t for large amounts, not as much as they could have been, and I found it odd.
“Bait,” she says. “Carrie wanted to see if I’d change Bryce’s password and as long as I didn’t she assumed I wasn’t aware that the CFC
security had been breached. I continued to suggest openly that you were using your physical card and someone was getting the information that way to commit fraud. I said it to Bryce in emails. I said it to Benton.”
“Because you wanted her to see them. Because you know how she thinks.”
“It works both ways.”
“Someone who once was your teacher,” I say.
“I had to be very careful she didn’t realize I was on to her, that every time she was in our server, I was tracking her.”
“And you let it continue. You didn’t change Bryce’s password until today.”
“I couldn’t. Not if I was going to figure out who was doing it.”
“But you knew it before now, Lucy.”
“I had to track her and pretty soon I was in Carrie’s email, in everything,” she says and I don’t believe her.
She’s obsessed. She’s addicted to a game that only Carrie knows how to play with her.
“And she was in everything of ours.” I point out what Lucy doesn’t seem to see. “She was able to access extremely confidential documents that might include Social Security numbers, social media accounts, personal effects and addresses that would make it simple for her to show up after a death and steal something the person won’t need anymore, such as a license plate or a Twitter account.”
Pieces fit together just like that. The tweets I’ve gotten from the hijacked account of someone who died, the stolen tag of another deceased person on a truck that was spotted at the Edgewater Ferry Landing the day before Julie Eastman was murdered and now possibly recovered at a marina in Marblehead Neck. Things stolen from dead people with Massachusetts ties.
“How could you allow her into our server? Why would you even chance her corrupting information?” It would be an incomprehensible disaster, enough to shut me down.
“Bryce doesn’t have the level of user privileges that allows him to alter anything on our server,” she says. “He can view certain data but he can’t change or delete them and I’ve kept our server backed up. I’ve made sure we’re safe.”
“Your DNA profile was changed. That required more than view-only privileges.”
“Carrie’s locked out now and I’ve restored the database to what it was.”
“So she found a way in that could have been massively destructive. It sounds like you got so caught up in your cyber war that you underestimated her.”
Lucy meets my eyes. She doesn’t answer because she can’t.
“And where was she when all this started?” I ask. “The mutual spying. The game of tag in cloud computing that let her into our back door.”
“She was in Kiev until last fall.”
“What prompted her after all these years?” I repeat.
“She knew it was time to leave, that Yanukovych would flee Kiev and Ukraine and she wouldn’t want to be around when he did. That’s what Carrie does. She plays whatever side of the net suits her at the moment. She allies herself with powerful males. Powerful patriarchs, powerful predators, powerful politicians.”
“Like Congressman Rosado?” I ask.
“Money laundering, drugs,” she says. “Hundreds of millions out of Russia that he launders mainly through real estate. Carrie didn’t connect with him in the U.S. She connected with him over there three years ago. Rosado’s got quite the crisis manager in her. Someone with a tremendous ability to manipulate the Internet and take care of problems, to do whatever’s required but she has her same flaw. She’s not independent. She’s a parasite. She always has been. She’s weak and eventually breaks her own rules.”
No matter Lucy’s disparagements it sounds like she’s bragging. It sounds like she’s impressed all over again.
“I assume she’s changed her name.” I study Lucy’s face for visible signs of what I suspect.
“No one’s looking for her anymore and hasn’t been. But she has plenty of aliases and I’ve given all of them to Benton.”
“Then he’s aware.”
“Now he is.”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s the first I’ve heard about any of this and that shouldn’t be the case.”
“Before she murdered Jamal Nari and Gracie Smithers it never entered my mind she was the shooter who took out Julie Eastman and Jack Segal,” Lucy explains. “Then you got the tweet on Mother’s Day and I traced it to this hotel.”
TICK TOCK DOC. The same language in the poem Carrie Grethen mailed to me from Kirby thirteen years ago.
“Troy Rosado took Gracie Smithers to his family house in Marblehead Neck after she sneaked out a window.” Lucy goes on to give me details she didn’t get honestly. “He picked her up using a car service he charged to his credit card. It’s in emails Carrie deleted but as you know nothing’s ever really gone.”
“And she knows that too, doesn’t she. Carrie knows all of the same things you do.”
“Gracie had no idea what a little shit Troy really is until things got out of hand when she was alone with him on the deserted estate, and then Carrie stepped in as she always does.” Lucy is much too animated and much too sure of details she can’t know for a fact.
“She killed Gracie. And then she killed Rand Bloom and abducted Joe Henderson.” Carrie’s the monster she’s always been, only I’m deciding that now she’s much worse, and Lucy is more vulnerable to her than ever.
“As you probably know the sailboat was stolen,” she says.
“I didn’t know,” I reply as something else occurs to me.
“Carrie can’t be traced through it and Gracie won’t be talking,” Lucy says and the question looms large.
“Why are we here? Why really?” I ask. “Were you hoping you would find her here?”
“Why would she be here?”
“Because we are. Because you are. You want to see her.”
Lucy takes the bill, covers it with cash and I push back my chair.
“Don’t you see what you’re doing …?” I start to ask but she’s staring at the TV over the bar, transfixed by it.
“Jesus Christ,” she says. “Are you believing this?”
I can’t hear what the news correspondent is saying but I see the aerial footage of a sleek white super yacht before a backdrop of what I recognize as the South Florida shoreline. Then quick clips of Bob Rosado in the Oval Office, the Rose Garden, at his congressional desk in D.C. and the soaring iron gates of his estate in West Palm Beach. He’s a smarmy man, balding and heavyset in handmade suits that are too shiny and a gold watch that’s gaudy.
Congressman Bob Rosado has died, the crawl slowly goes by at the bottom of the screen. He was scuba diving with family in Fort Lauderdale late afternoon. Officials haven’t released cause of death but a source has suggested possible equipment failure.
CHAPTER 44
INSIDE MY ROOM I sit on the bed and call Benton again. He doesn’t answer our home phone and his cell phone goes straight to voice mail. I write an email and decide against it.
Lucy claims Carrie has been locked out of the CFC server but I can’t help it. I don’t trust anything right now. I send an email that simply says call me please, and then I worry that the IP will come back to this hotel. But Carrie could already know we’re here. Emails were exchanged about it. Next I text Benton and there’s no reply. Marino obviously is in a loud bar when I finally try him, and I suspect he’s with Jack Kuster.
“Have you seen the news?” I ask.
“I was going to call you. It happened at around six and we’re just now hearing about it at midnight? Weird right?”
“Considering who it is, no it’s not weird. But his death is too coincidental.”
“He might have had a heart attack.” Marino isn’t in great shape. “It’s the leading cause of scuba deaths.”
It’s not true but I’m not going to argue.
“Sure hit me with another one,” he says to someone else. “Sorry.” He’s back to me. “You should be here with us. They got this karaoke thing going and the prize is up to five hundred dollars.
”
“I hope you’re not going to sing.”
“You never heard me in the shower.” He’s drunk. “Another theory? His tank. It may have been accidentally filled with too high a blend of oxygen, which is combustible.”
“Baseless theories are worthless. I’m tired of theories. I’m damn tired of them, Marino.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I can’t get hold of Benton.”
“I haven’t talked to him.”
I start to say why would you. Marino can’t stand Benton and I feel alone.
“You sound upset. You want me to come back to the hotel now?” he says above the din.
“You don’t think this is too coincidental?” I repeat.
“What?” He’s very loud and I turn down the volume on my phone.
“Rosado dying now? In light of everything else? He was probably well on his way to getting arrested as is his son.”
“I don’t know …”
“Well I do.”
“Someone like him? Politicians like him are bulletproof and freaky timing happens, maybe it’s poetic justice,” he says and I can tell he’s walking outside where it’s quieter. “You don’t sound so good.”
“I’m fine.”
“Like you’re pissed. What a fucking long day sweating our brains out.”
I ask if Lucy has told him about Carrie.
“Shit.” A pause and he says brusquely, impatiently, “Yeah I talked to her earlier before you two went down to the bar. She said she was going to talk to a waitress or something and it went on from there, and I hate to say it but it’s not a hundred percent new. I’ve heard rumblings before that’s made me think Carrie was back inside her head. You know what I mean by that?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“I remember like it was yesterday. I don’t have the right word for it. Some hypnotic thing like Sengali.”
Svengali but I don’t correct him.
“Yeah this addictive thing. These people who get so deep under your skin you can’t pull them out. Like Doris.”