Tailspin

  Was that Rachael yelling? At Laurel? “You bloody bitch! That’s it, I’ve had it with you, do you hear me?” She heard a door slam in the distance, fast footsteps, heard a struggle, then Rachael screaming, “I’ve got the gun! Quincy, Stefanos, don’t you two move! No, wait, move—I want to wipe you off the face of the earth! You murdering bastards, you murdered my father!”

  Even though she couldn’t move, Sherlock heard the sound of men’s voices, then Quincy yelling. Why? Maybe to save himself from Rachael?

  Sherlock smiled. One of the men’s voices was Dillon’s. He’d taken his time, but he was here now. Finally he was here. She heard Rachael shouting, heard Dillon’s voice, quiet and close. Everything was all right now.

  She felt cold suddenly, but it didn’t matter. Dillon would see to things. She closed her eyes and let her brain shut down.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Savich lightly rubbed his fingers along her palm. He hated that her beautiful hand was limp, the flesh flaccid. But he’d put cream on her hands and they were soft. Two days, two whole days since that crazy woman shot you. Two days, but at least you’ll live. I’ve prayed so much I’ll bet God has closed down the switchboard. Do you know how close Laurel came to killing you? Jack was squeezing your side so tight you’re still bruised.

  Savich looked up to see Mr. Maitland standing quietly in the doorway.

  “The pain was pretty sharp so they gave her some more morphine,” Savich said. “She’s out. Before she closed her eyes, she asked me if she’d gotten Stefanos’s ribs. I told her three of them were busted, that he was hurting pretty bad. She said her aim with her Swiss Army knife wasn’t what you’d call real accurate—small wonder since it isn’t made for throwing. I told her Laurel wasn’t feeling too hot, either, and wasn’t it better that she’d stand trial and lose everything?

  “Then she told me she really doesn’t need her spleen. I agreed. What was a spleen in the face of all the problems in the world? She was out again before she could laugh.”

  Both of them considered this.

  Maitland said, “We’ve got Brady Cullifer in a stylish orange jump-suit in a nice cell. He’s demanding to make a deal, ready and willing to roll big on Quincy, Stefanos, and Laurel because he claims he never killed anyone. The prosecutors—particularly Dickie—want him to sweat big-time before they offer him anything.”

  Savich said after a moment, “That shoot-up we had in the Barnes & Noble in Georgetown—Sherlock was so angry at me because Perky could have killed me. To preserve my marriage, I let her throw me around at the gym.”

  He sighed. “Now, look at her, flat on her back, minus her spleen, and I’m the wreck.”

  “It’s over now, everyone’s alive, and all your agents are working double to cover your cases for you. We’ve got auditors going over all the Abbott corporation books. Be interesting to see what we find.”

  Savich thought about it for a moment, then said, “There’s something I should tell you about the senator.” And Savich did, every detail of what happened eighteen months before.

  Maitland said, “Thank you for telling me, Savich.” He sighed. “I know none of us want it, but it’s going to come out anyway at the trial. Hell of a thing. I am sorry about all of it.”

  There was a light rap on the door. A nurse stuck her head in. “Agent Savich? Your mother-in-law begged me to come in and pull you out of here so she can see her daughter.”

  Savich kissed Sherlock’s mouth, straightened, and said, “Okay, she can have five minutes.”

  The nurse smiled at him.

  Maitland said, “They’re all here—your mom, your boy, your sister, your in-laws from San Francisco, half the unit. I wonder when Director Mueller will show up. We even have some media. No, don’t worry, we’ll deal with them when the time comes.”

  Maitland closed a big hand on Savich’s shoulder. “When Sherlock wakes up, you’ve got to bring Sean in to see her. He’s scared, but he’s doing okay.” He looked back at Sherlock. Her brilliant red hair spilled onto the white pillowcase, but her face was still pale, too pale.

  He wondered when Savich was going to tell her that Astro terrier had chewed up her best and only pair of fancy high heels, the ones she’d worn at the Jefferson Club.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Jamaica

  Four days later

  Savich and Jack made their way along the limestone cliffs to the narrow promontory where a man wearing baggy shorts, sneakers, and a Redskins T-shirt sat next to a mango tree, his arms around his knees, staring out over the water.

  The spot wasn’t civilized and touristy like Negril, the closest town. The air smelled wild, the winds blew fiercely, the land baked hot and dry, and the cliffs rose a good seventy feet above the blue blue water that dashed against black rocks below, spewing white foam upward, the sound mesmerizing.

  He didn’t move, didn’t say anything, didn’t acknowledge them when Savich sat down on one side of him, Jack on the other next to an ackee tree, although they both knew he’d heard them coming over the loose rubble that crumbled toward the cliff.

  He said, “I wondered when someone would come. Are you CIA or what?”

  “I’m Special Agent Savich, FBI, and this is Special Agent Jack Crowne.”

  The man still didn’t move. He said, “Tourists dive off the cliffs at Negril, but not here. All those rocks below, sticking up like black teeth, and there are more hidden below the surface. They’d tear the flesh off your bones even if you managed to miss the others.”

  Savich looked at the young man’s profile, dark complexion, thick straight black hair, a nice, wholesome-looking man who resembled his father, but he couldn’t be completely sure because they hadn’t yet seen him full face.

  Savich said, “We haven’t told your father and mother that you’re alive and well and living in Jamaica.”

  Jean David Barbeau finally turned to face him. He did indeed look a great deal like his father, but, unlike his father, he didn’t look ghastly pale from grief, his dark eyes weren’t desolate and empty. He looked calm, almost indifferent, as if he didn’t care they were there, and it was all over for him. He said, “How did you find me?”

  Jack said, “Since your body was never found, I started thinking about the speedboat that rammed the boat you and your father were in, and why was it there exactly. The reports stated the boat’s name was River Beast. I checked into it and discovered the owner had a nephew who attended Harvard with you. Don’t think he rolled on you easily. We brought young financial analyst Tyler Benson to the fifth floor of the FBI building, scared the crap out of him, and he finally admitted that he’d helped you stage your suicide.”

  Jean David said, “Ty called me last night, told me how you threatened him, his parents, said he had to, no choice. He was sorry.”

  “I know,” Jack said. “We gave him the phone.”

  Jean David’s head whipped up at that. “Why?”

  Savich said, “To triangulate your location. We wanted to know if you really were where Benson said you were.”

  Jack said, “We found out you have a passport under your mother’s maiden name. You used it to come here, the day after you tried to kill Dr. MacLean in Washington Memorial Hospital.”

  “I was afraid you’d accuse my father of that.”

  “Didn’t fit,” Savich said. “You’re a young man, you move like a young man, and your father isn’t a young man and no way could he move the way you did on the hospital security video. You had us chasing our tails there for a while, but then again, you’re quite the student of strategy, aren’t you, Jean David?”

  His laugh was ironic. “Yeah, that’s me, the strategic expert. I always was smart; people used to tell me so in school and at the CIA. My bosses were grooming me because of my brain, but I’ll tell you, when it came to what was really important to me, my brain didn’t count a damn.”

  “You’re talking about Anna Radcliff,” Savich said.

  “Yes, Anna.”

  “Her real name is Halimah
Rahman, not Anna,” Savich said.

  “No, damn you, her name is Anna. That bastard MacLean told you her name, didn’t he? And that’s how you got her.”

  Savich said, “Dr. MacLean said your father had mentioned an Anna. It wasn’t difficult to find her and a half dozen of her terrorist friends.”

  Jean David’s voice shook a bit. “If only she’d listened to me. I told her Dr. MacLean was blabbing about us. I told her she had to leave the country. I swore I’d join her, but she didn’t leave.”

  He looked off into the distance, but Jack didn’t think he was admiring the Caribbean. Jean David said, “You know, I still think of her as Anna. That’s how she introduced herself to me in that coffeehouse in Cambridge.” He gave a sharp laugh, pointed to the single petrel swooping down to the surface of the water. “I know her real name is Halimah, but to me she will always be Anna. She confided in me, praised me, was interested in me, interested in what I thought. And she was so damned beautiful. I fell for her, fell hard. The sex was great, but you know, it was how she spoke to me, how she listened to me, laughed with me, admired everything I said. I fell completely in love with her.”

  He turned to look at a huge cormorant that had entered the scene, not six feet from the petrel, hovering a dozen feet above the water, lazily scouting lunch. He spotted a surface fish and dove clean and straight. “I’ve watched him before,” Jean David said. “He’s really good. He’s smart. See, that’s a wrasse he’s got. He never misses.”

  “Your parents are a mess,” Savich said. “As Agent Crowne said, we haven’t told them you’re alive.”

  “Yes, well, I did what I could, now didn’t I? My father was planning to send me into hiding, God only knows where. He kept making excuses for me, saying it wasn’t my fault, it was this evil woman’s fault, and what did it matter anyway since it was only a bit of American intelligence gone awry. I’m French, he said, who cares?

  “But I know my parents, particularly my mother. The disgrace would have been more than she could bear. Hell, I couldn’t deal with it, either.” He shrugged.

  Jack said, “You’re saying you tried to kill Dr. MacLean to keep him from talking about Anna?”

  Jean David laughed. “Finally, something you’ve got all wrong. Those two attempted hit-and-runs, and the bomb on his plane, I didn’t do those things, I wouldn’t know how. It was Anna’s associates, as she called them. Like I said, Anna didn’t leave the country. She and her friends were doing well here. They believed they could contain any fallout, and so they started off by killing that friend of Dr. MacLean’s. They found out about him because they were already following Dr. MacLean.”

  “Anna told you that?” Savich asked.

  “She told me everything. Then you arrested her, and she was gone from me, forever. I guess I went nuts. Those guys had three chances to get MacLean and failed. I wasn’t going to fail. But I did. You know, I couldn’t believe that nurse shot me.

  “By then I’d already staged my own suicide, of course, to solve the CIA’s problem, my parents’ problem, my problem. Everyone would be happy. Using Ty’s speedboat was the only weak point in the plan, but I had no choice. I had to hope the authorities wouldn’t doubt what had happened and dig too deep. They didn’t. But you did.”

  Savich said, “Telling your father you were going to kill yourself, that was an excellent touch. You were gone, your parents were safe.”

  There was surprise on Jean David’s face. “You got my father to admit I killed myself? I thought he’d go to the grave with that.”

  Savich nodded. “He was devastated, he no longer cared about much of anything because his only son was dead. He saw no reason not to tell me. Your mother, however, didn’t want him to.”

  Jean David shrugged. “It was better with me dead than standing trial as a traitor. Trust me on that.

  “As for my life, it was over once you took Anna. She is the only woman I have ever loved. I’ll bet you’ve got her jailed and being interrogated as a terrorist in some place like Guan tanamo.”

  “She is a terrorist,” Jack said. “What’s even better is we got her group along with her.”

  “Yeah, well, I love her. All I wanted to do was kill the man responsible but I even failed at that. I saved myself but I couldn’t save her.” Jean David fell silent, watching two pelicans follow in the cormorant’s trail. He said finally, “I understand that if it wasn’t for you, Agent Crowne, MacLean would already have died, scattered in a hundred pieces in the Appalachians.”

  “Both of us would be,” Jack said.

  Jean David whirled around to face him. “Dammit, my parents were his friends! He betrayed all of us.” He gave a harsh laugh and threw a pebble over the cliff. “I should have been the one to execute him, but I didn’t. I even told Anna I wanted to kill him, but she said I wasn’t trained, I’d fail. As if training made a bit of difference when her friends tried to kill him.

  “But she was right. And would you look what happened—that corrupt bastard killed himself. I wonder if he saw any irony in that. After all, he believed that I’d killed myself.”

  Jean David spat onto the rock just beyond his toe. “He knew me nearly all my life. Damn him, I was fond of him. Do you know he even visited me at college when I was a fresh-man? Just to see how I was doing, he said.” He struck his fist against his thigh. “I tell you, he deserved to die, deserved it. That trip to the hospital to kill him, I knew that was crazy. I knew it even as I was doing it, tried to talk myself out of it even as I walked up the stairs to his floor. But there was An na’s face in my mind, and I knew I’d do it anyway.” He kicked a rock with his foot. “It turns out vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Savich said, “Do you know why Dr. MacLean killed himself ?”

  Jean David picked up a pebble and tossed it from hand to hand. More cormorants flew in and swooped down to the water for lunch. He said absently, “These guys prefer the bigger fish, like snapper, but they’ll take wrasse. I guess Dr. MacLean killed himself because he finally realized he was to blame for all this misery, realized he didn’t deserve to live.”

  That was close enough, Jack thought. Why bother to waste his breath explaining about the disease that had robbed MacLean of himself? Jean David undoubtedly already knew about it, and didn’t believe it, or didn’t care.

  Savich reached out and grabbed Jean David’s arm.

  He winced. Savich dropped his arm. “It got infected, didn’t it, but it’s better now. You saw a Dr. Rodrigo in Montego Bay. He said you left it until it was nearly too late.”

  “Yes, it’s better, but who cares?”

  Jack said, “Did you know Dr. MacLean was also a longtime friend of my family?”

  Jean David said, “I don’t suppose he tried to ruin you and your family, too?”

  “Well, you see, I didn’t betray my country and refuse to take responsibility for it.”

  Jean David twisted around to face him. “Look, I know you’re thinking I’m a selfish asshole. I’m not sorry about Dr. MacLean, but believe me, I regret passing secure information on to Anna because of what she did with it, sorry about all of it. But I did it, so anything I say comes across as a pitiful excuse, as self-serving, as meaningless to anyone who counts.”

  Jack said, his voice emotionless, “It seems you were ready and willing to risk the lives of any number of people. I wonder how many more CIA operatives have died and will die because of the information you passed to your girlfriend.

  “This woman you claim you love—she is a terrorist. She kills people. Her name isn’t Anna, it’s Halimah. She’s a Syrian fundamentalist. She’s been trained to seduce young men, to use them. She used you, played you to perfection. What she gave you was a fantasy, and you bought into it. Love? It wasn’t ever about love, and you should know that by now.

  “You’re not only an asshole, Jean David, you’re pretty stupid. Talk about letting a woman lead you around by your dick. Aren’t you done with that?”

  After a moment of acid
silence, Savich said, “But you’ll always be smart to your parents, Jean David—their beloved, precious son who was seduced into making a few bad judgments. I don’t think they’ll ever allow themselves to accept that their son is responsible for the loss of countless innocent people.”

  Jean David said, “One of the excuses my father made for me was that I couldn’t be a traitor to this country—I was only born here by accident, after all. No, France is my country, and I owe my allegiance only to France.

  “The thing is, he’s dead wrong. Hell, I’m a Redskins fan. America is my country. I would never have done what I did on purpose.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose it matters now. You want to take me back, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “We do.”

  He was fast. Savich managed to grab his Redskins shirt, but it was so old, it ripped off him. He saw the white bandage on his arm as Jean David Barbeau leaped off the high limestone cliffs on the far west coast of Jamaica. He didn’t make a sound.

  Savich was breathing hard, shocked and furious that he’d let him get away from him. He and Jack stood at the edge of the cliff. They saw him floating facedown seventy feet below.

  “Do you think he hit those hidden rocks?”

  Savich said, “I don’t think it matters.”

  “His parents,” Jack said. “They’re going to be destroyed all over again.”

  “Only if they find out about it. Let’s retrieve his body, see how we can get him buried here in Jamaica, and try to keep what happened here from getting back to them.”

  He heard a loud squawk. Savich looked at the group of cormorants hovering some fifty feet above Jean David’s body. They hovered a moment, then winged their way out over the Caribbean.

  Savich turned to Jack. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how both these cases involved obsessions with family honor and family shame. So much needless tragedy.”

  “No, not in this case,” Jack said slowly, looking down at Jean David’s body, waves pushing it back and forth against the black rocks. His body would be torn to shreds, he knew, and he didn’t care. “I think it’s about a spoiled young man who found out he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.”