15th Affair (24 page)

“Where were you the last two and a half weeks, damn it? Why didn’t you call me?”

He shook his head. He pounded the steering wheel with his palms. He was strapped into his seat. We were moving at sixty miles an hour. There was no getting away without answering me. I was sitting right there.

“Linds, I’ve always been committed to doing what needed to be done. For the country and ultimately for us. But you have to believe this.”

He stopped talking. We were crossing over a bridge with the Salish Sea to the left and the cliffs of the highway rising high on our right. But I didn’t know if there was a bridge strong enough to bridge the gulf between Joe and me.

“What, Joe? What do I have to believe?”

“That I love you. I love you and Julie so much. More than I ever thought possible. You have every reason to doubt me, but don’t. Because I swear to you, I’m telling you the truth.”

I’D ALWAYS FOUND
Joe open, accessible, honest— and
real
. My God, it was why I loved him. And now the
truth
was out. He’d lied deliberately and constantly all the time that I’d known him.

So why, when he told me he loved me, did I lean toward him? The answer was as simple as three little words. Despite the lies and deceit, I
wanted
to trust my husband. I loved him.

I said, “Don’t stop now, Joe. Tell me about Alison Muller. From the beginning.”

There were no other cars on the road at all. It was as if we were in a tunnel chasing two cones of light at high speed toward the edge of the world.

Joe was talking, telling me again that he’d lost touch with Alison until he’d come back to the CIA nine months before. He said it was around that time that the CIA became aware of Michael Chan, a naturalized American citizen who was spying for the Chinese. They’d learned about Chan: that he’d been born in China, had come to the USA as a student, had lived and worked in Palo Alto for the last eight years, and was now teaching history at Stanford.

Joe told me that just a few months ago, Muller volunteered to work a honey trap on Chan to learn what he was passing on to Chinese intelligence and to flip him to our side if she could. And according to Joe, because of his work history with Muller, he was asked to run the operation.

Joe said now, “I told you I thought Chan had fallen hard for Alison. Of course, he didn’t know that Ali was CIA and that he was her target. He believed her cover, her job, and the business trips that enabled them to get together. But Chan was going through a stressful time, and finally, he told Muller all about it.”

“And she reported this back to you.”

“Exactly. About a month ago. Chan told Muller that a Chinese intelligence honcho was about to defect to the United States. He said this defector had powerful and deep information that could take down the Chinese government.

“Muller told me that what was driving Chan crazy was that the defector was his
father
. Chan Senior was planning to come to California to be with his son. He’d gotten false documents using Michael Chan’s name and address and so on, and Chan was very worried. He’d heard that some Chinese-American men living in San Francisco had been assigned to kill his father as soon as his plane arrived in the States.

“Chan was just talking to his lover, you know, Linds? He was questioning his own loyalty to the Chinese government. He was desperately concerned for his father. And he had no idea that Muller was feeding this information to us.

“And still, the information was incomplete. Chan didn’t know what plane his father would be taking to the States. Muller was going to try to get this critical detail from Chan that evening in the Four Seasons—and then, as you well know, it all hit the fan.”

My mind reeled. Chan Senior had been traveling as Michael Chan on WW 888. It was
his
body that had disappeared. Even as I was having this breakthrough, Joe was unwinding the story as he knew it.

Joe said, “Michael Chan was killed. Bud and Chrissy were killed. Muller disappeared, and then, the worst thing imaginable. That passenger jet went down. I’m pretty sure that the men you and your SWAT took down in Chinatown were the ones who were supposed to kill the
defector:
one high-profile government man.

“So what happened?” Joe asked rhetorically. “Were they cocky? Were they stupid? Did they have a shiny new toy? I don’t know
why
they decided to hit the plane—with a god-damned missile—but they did it.”

“My God. You think they did that on their own?”

Joe said, “I think so. Chinese intelligence was apparently stunned by the crash. They did a slick pivot and tried to blame it on the CIA. And we blamed
ourselves
—for not getting the intel in time to prevent the crash. The head of our internal affairs unit had to find out if I was involved. Who could blame him? After all, I was running the Muller-Chan operation.

“I was locked up and interrogated,
seriously
—that’s why I couldn’t call you, Linds. I was in an underground location, I don’t even know where.”

He sighed deeply, then said, “I don’t know if I have everything exactly right—but that’s pretty much what I know or have reasonable theories about.

“The Chinese made a lot of mistakes. They’re amateurs at the intelligence game. Maybe Ali Muller made mistakes as well.”

I asked Joe, “Do you think she killed Chan?”

JOE GRIPPED THE
wheel and gunned the car along the asphalt straightaway for long minutes before saying, “I’ve asked myself if Alison was the shooter a couple hundred times. Friendship aside, just bearing down on the facts, I think she’s been playing
both
sides—working for us, and working for the Chinese, and doing a pretty seamless job of it.”

I heard what Joe had said, but his answer was so off the hook, I had to ask him to say it again.

“Are you telling me that Muller is a
double agent
? That she is actually spying on
us
for the
Chinese
?”

“I’m speculating, Lindsay, but it makes sense. If she’s working for MSS, then she’s behind the murders in the hotel. Chan was betraying the Chinese by leaking classified information to
her
. He was an enemy and had to be eliminated. It’s almost as if they switched loyalties with each other, Chan wanting to get
off
the train that Muller had just gotten
on
.”

“You’re saying she would have shot Chan because he was a traitor?”

“So my theory goes. She knew that Chrissy and Bud had eyes on her from the adjacent room. So if in fact Ali is the shooter, she had to take them out and take their laptops at the same time.”

It was as if I were back in that room, looking at those two young people bloodied and dead on the floor, their power cords still plugged to the wall.

Joe said, “Chrissy and Bud hadn’t overheard any information about the defector’s travel plans. I was on the way up to check in with them, maybe wrap it up for the day— but the elevator took a long time to get down to the lobby floor. When it arrived, everyone standing around piled in. That car must have stopped on every floor.”

Joe ran a hand over his face and seemed to be back in the moment when his operation had come crashing down.

“It was all over by the time I got to the fourteenth floor. The kids were dead in 1418. Alison didn’t answer the door to 1420. I must’ve missed her by minutes, or seconds. Otherwise, she probably would have killed me, too. I learned later that Chan was dead. If my theory is right, she was shutting down her undercover job for us and cauterizing loose ends.”

“But why would she have changed sides, Joe?”

He shrugged. “I can think of a dozen maybes: payback for some long-held grudge, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’s crazy enough to have done it for the thrill.”

“She might have killed Shirley Chan,” I said.

“OK, yeah. It makes sense if she was mopping up. She wouldn’t take the chance that Chan was playing
her
and telling everything to his wife. Another sickening theory.”

Joe stopped talking. He turned up the heat, adjusted the airflow, and took a pull from his bottle of water.

My head was throbbing from all this information. I was trying to process it all, thinking that if Muller was a double agent—
if
it was true—then Joe felt responsible for everything Muller had done. Or maybe Joe, too, was readying himself to cauterize loose ends of his own.

Christ
. No one knew where I
was
. Was I putting my trust in a man I didn’t really know? I shook my head, trying to dislodge that terrifying thought.

Joe said, “I know. It’s unbelievable, and I haven’t confronted her. Maybe I’ve got her all wrong.”

I said, “So why did she come all the way out here?”

“If she’s gone over to the Chinese, BC is not a bad jumping-off point to China. And that’s all I’ve got.”

Joe’s theory had the ring of truth, but was it
true
?

I asked him—actually, I blurted it out.

“Joe, are you trying to
catch
Muller, or
save
her?”

“What do you think?” he said.

THE SIGN AT
the side of the road read
SQUAMISH
.

What little I knew about this town came from an article I’d read in the
Chron
’s travel section a few years ago about the annual Bald Eagle Festival. I remembered that the area was spread out over a grid of mini-malls and woodsy homes with gorgeous scenery tucked between mountains. Heavily wooded roads connected neighborhoods, and tumbling rivers bisected them, but right now, the scenery was beside the point.

It was lights out in Squamish and there was near zero visibility at oh-dark-hundred.

As we sped through the town, I glanced at Joe’s face, lit by the dashboard lights. I wished I could read his mind, but going by what he’d
said
, at the center of the crisscrossing facts, suppositions, and violent deaths was Alison Muller. She was clever, manipulative, and, in my opinion, psychopathic.

Was I was finally going to see her for myself? What would happen? Who would still be standing when the sun came up in three hours? Would I see my daughter again?

I had to. I had to stay alive for Julie.

Joe drove the Audi along a two-lane road flanked by forests of black evergreens. There was a bit of a clearing up ahead on our right, and as we approached, he dropped his high beams down to parking lights. I saw a wood-shingled house with a sagging roof and the flash of our lights reflecting off taillights at the end of the driveway.

Joe said, “She’s staying there.”

He continued past the house, and fifty yards down the road, I glimpsed two vehicles parked on either side in deep shadow: a metallic Japanese two-door and a rusty Ford pickup.

“Those are ours,” he said.

Joe tapped the GPS and a new address popped up on the screen. He took a right turn down a dirt road and another right onto a highway through Brackendale. A half mile later, a lighted
VACANCY
sign flashed outside a Best Western to our right.

Joe turned into the motor court, pulled the car around to the back, and parked between two cars in front of the rooms.

He switched the engine off and used his phone.

“Slade, it’s Molinari. I’m outside.”

The suite was on the ground floor and looked modern and fairly new. Three men were sitting around a TV watching CBC News without sound. They were regular-looking guys of medium height and weight, one balding, another with coarse red hair, the third pale with glasses; he looked like a guy with a desk job.

Christopher Knightly, the big straw-haired man I’d met for the first time in my apartment, was in the kitchenette, popping the tab on a beer can.

He was surprised to see me and not in a good way.

Joe said, “Knightly, you’ve met Lindsay. Everyone else, this is my wife, Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD, Homicide Squad. I asked her to come because she’s intimately involved in the Four Seasons murders. She was at the crime scene. She’s also the lead investigator in that takedown op on Stockton. So this is her case, too.”

Knightly put the can down hard on the counter and said, “Christ, Joe, talk about breaking protocol. No offense, Sergeant. This isn’t San Francisco and this isn’t your homicide case. Muller’s not just a killer. She could well be a traitor, not just to us, but to the country, for God’s sake.”

“Chris. It’s my decision,” Joe told him, “and my ass if things go wrong.”

The man wearing the glasses got up to shake my hand, introduced himself as Agent Fred Munder, while the redhead got into Joe’s face, saying, “Are you serious? It’s not just about you. Our butts are on the line, too.”

“It’s done, Geary,” Joe snapped. “Let’s get on with it.”

I used the bathroom, and when I came back Agent Munder was saying to the others, “There’s been no activity for three hours. Muller is still at the house. Looks like she’s in for the night.”

“She was always a little too sure of herself,” said Knightly. “Smart, yes, I’ll give her that. But she’s arrogant and, I’m gonna say, twisted. She just loves all the attention she gets from men. Did you ever ask yourself, Joe, why she’s so eager to climb into bed with the enemy?”

It was a dig at Joe, and if he was meant to answer this question, he didn’t get a chance. Knightly’s phone chirped. He grabbed it from his shirt pocket and said, “Yeah?” He listened for a second or two, then said, “Got it. Stay with her.”

He clicked off and announced, “Muller’s on the move. Something’s gone wrong. She’s in one of three cars heading north. Was she tipped off? Who did she get to this time?”

Knightly was looking at Joe, and because I was standing next to Joe, he was also staring at
me
.