An Affair of Deceit (28 page)

Slowly, she pivoted to face them again. “Excuse me?”

“I’m so
damned
tired of everyone hiding behind someone else.” Abigail seemed to struggle to cool the passion in her voice. “No, Mrs. Riley. You cannot call Donald Wheeler. You cannot devise some strategy to rid yourself of me and my questions. You cannot pretend that I don’t already know that my father was CIA. And you can’t pretend that you weren’t, too.”

Riley’s thoughts wrenched to a grinding halt.

What had Abigail said?

His mom was in the CIA?

His mother walked back to the leather chair and slowly exhaled again, deeply, as though ridding herself of the bonds that had held her tongue all these years. “I suppose it’s time for the truth to come out. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Son. It’s not like you didn’t already suspect it.”

“I didn’t. You told me you were in the Peace Corps.”

“Oh, we were in the Corps, all right. But we were also paramilitary.” She smiled shyly, surely proud of her long-held secret affiliation. “CIA, if you must put a name to it. Just like your father, Abigail. But not your mother. Fei was outside the business, and I think that’s one of the thousands of reasons your father fell in love with her.”

“Hold on a hot second, Mom. You’re…
paramilitary
?”

“Tell me why my father left,” Abigail demanded, ignoring his deep and sudden confusion.

“It all happened so quickly,” his mother began. “We were all living in Taipei when Riley’s father and I got a message from Donald Wheeler. He told us that there was going to be an attack in your district, Abigail, and that your daddy was too far away to help. He was away on a mission—I honestly don’t know where, but it was probably deep in mainland China—when the attack was to take place.”

His mother reached out to take Abigail’s hand.

“Honey, but the attack wasn’t just in your district. Wheeler said it was going to be specifically directed at you and your mother.”

“Us? Why?”

“That’s something I never found out,” his mother said, her eyes wide, and Riley believed her. “All we knew was that Peter was far away and your mother couldn’t defend against the kind of assailant that Wheeler expected to show up. Behind all her love for that tai chi, Fei was a very good fighter—and so were you, if her stories were true—but this person was coming with guns. No one can deflect a bullet. Not even your dad.

“So we left James with a neighbor and drove as fast as our little scooters would take us to your house, where we hadn’t been in years. After you kids began to grow up, we all thought it might be better to cut ties, to isolate ourselves from fellow operatives. It was so silent when we arrived, I could hear my own heartbeat. Nothing moved in the trees; nothing called from the river. It was as though every living thing in the entire village had died.”

“I don’t remember this,” Abigail said.

“No, you wouldn’t. You weren’t home when it happened, and I used to thank God for that blessing. When we got to your house, your mother’s scooter was gone. You were probably picking up groceries. But there was someone inside your house waiting for you to walk through the door.”

She squared her shoulders, seeming to need a moment to prepare for the next segment of her story. Riley wondered why she
was showing so much emotion. Abigail and her mother clearly escaped the attack.

Then he realized that not
everyone
had escaped the assailant’s wrath. “Dad went in first, didn’t he?”

His mother looked up, and the pain in her eyes confirmed his suspicion.

“The assassin killed him instead of Abigail and her mother?” He didn’t look at Abigail as he spoke. He stared straight at his mother, whose eyes were unwavering and dry.

“Yes. They killed each other. Your daddy died saving Peter Mason’s family, Abigail included.”

Riley felt like her words had knocked the wind out of him, but whether it was a good feeling or bad, he couldn’t yet decipher.

“Why couldn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked.

“What would have been the point, Son? For a long time, it was all classified, and hell if I know whether it still is. But it seems to me that you’ve got clearance, and Abigail has the right to know what drove her father away.”

Abigail said, “But you haven’t explained that. My father was on a trip when this all happened.”

“When your daddy heard about the attack, he sent you and your mother into hiding, or close to it. You both came to live in America while your daddy hunted down the man who had sent the assassin.”

“Jesus,” Riley whispered, and stood up. “Abigail, it must have been…”

His mother interrupted him. “There’s no need to guess. The man who wanted you and your mama dead was a crazy son of a bitch named Lukas Kral.”

Riley cursed.

His mother continued. “Abigail, before she left the country, your mother told me that Kral had some kind of old connection to your father, and he wanted to…I don’t know, take over the world with him or something insane like that. He wasn’t right in the head.”

“Obviously,” Abigail said. “But why come after us, if he felt such a strong connection to my father? Even madmen have reasons for their crimes, even if they seem illogical to the rest of us.”

“We talked about that, but we couldn’t come to a firm conclusion. We ended up deciding that Kral saw you and Fei as obstacles that your father needed to be rid of. That, or he wanted to punish your father for not accepting his offer.”

“He still might,” Riley pointed out.

Abigail shook her head. “Then why wait twenty years to come back for us?”

Riley racked his brain, trying to fit the pieces together. “I have no idea. Mom?”

His mother’s eyebrows rose. “You’re saying Lukas Kral is coming for you again?”

“Abigail’s father arrested him a week ago in France, but Kral’s men ambushed the team escorting him to jail. Mason disappeared during the assault, and we’ve been looking for him ever since. He reappeared along with Kral yesterday in Detroit. It seems that they flew into Canada and are driving south, destination unknown.”

“Destination presumed to be DC,” Abigail supplied. “Riley’s squad seems to think that Kral and my father are coming for me and my mother.”

“As he did long ago.” His mother bit her lip. “Is someone with your mother, Abigail?”

“Yes.”

“Someone good?”

Riley’s ears burned. “Mom, I know what you’re thinking, and no. You stay here. For God’s sake, I don’t need you involved. Heck, if I’d had any idea that you were connected to all this, I’d never have come.”

She smiled tightly. “I’m glad you did. This needed to come out someday.”

His cell buzzed in his pocket. He reached for it out of reflex. “Riley,” he answered.

“It’s over,” Greene said on the other end. “We got ’em.”

“W
HAT DO YOU
mean, you got ’em?” Riley asked. “Both of them?”

Abigail’s eyes widened.

“Yeah, they’re both in custody. FBI nabbed them just outside the Beltway. Turns out they were following them, too. I need you to get your ass down to the Hoover room,” Greene said, referencing an interrogation cell they occasionally used downtown when coordinating with other federal agencies. “Lots of questions to be answered, and FBI’s taking primary on it. Like fucking usual, we’re out in the cold. I need you to get here and start jamming your foot up some federal ass ASAP.”

“I might have half of our questions answered already,” he said, and offered his mother and Abigail a relieved smile. “But don’t worry. I want a piece of this. I’ll be there as soon as humanly possible.” He tapped the phone off.

“Well?” Abigail said.

“It’s…over.” He ran a hand through his hair, astonishment and relief slowly easing the bands of tension that had been wrapped around his chest for the past week. Now, a sharp hit of adrenaline spiked in his veins. His job was just getting started. “They’ve both been taken into custody. FBI
custody, for better or for worse. I need to get downtown immediately.”

Not long after dropping Abigail off at her office, Riley walked down the wide, well-lit hallway of an office building two blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, passing law offices and accounting firms. He opened a door at the end of the hall and entered a stairwell. Jogging down three flights of stairs took little time. At the bottom of the stairwell, he pulled open the heavy basement door. Cool air chilled his face as he entered another hallway, this one dim and silent. A few yards down, he knocked on a door.

It opened. A black-suited man inside asked him for identification, and once inspected, he was allowed to pass through. At a word from someone inside, the guard went outside and shut the door.

Inside the small room, a handful of suited men and a woman stood in a small group, talking in low voices. Riley recognized none of them, but then he spotted Greene sitting in a corner, reading from a manila folder.

“You found us,” Greene said, rising to shake hands as Riley neared. Then his brown eyes widened. “Shit, what happened to your nose?”

Oh, right. “Abigail is not a woman to sneak up on.”

“She popped you?”

“Yeah. Big time.” He breathed in and caught the scent of her on his skin.
Lilacs
. He’d never be able to smell them again without thinking of her. He coughed. Now was not the time to update Greene on his love life. “Good spot. Never been to this one before.”

The CIA owned several such safe rooms throughout the city. They were useful neutral locations for coordinating interrogations with other federal agencies, in this case the FBI.

“Yeah. The Bureau likes it. Got a couple of interrogation rooms in back. Even our own bathroom. And it’s close to FBI headquarters. I think they’ve got an underground access point, but naturally they won’t confirm.”

“So we’re coordinating with them?”

Greene growled. “That’s how the Justice Department wants us to handle it.”

Riley tried to keep his voice neutral, but they both knew it wasn’t an ideal situation. Having the FBI involved meant they were tracking Kral and Mason for their own reasons—possibly because they’d sniffed Mason out as a mole to the PRC. They ran their own counterintelligence program, and information on active investigations wasn’t generally shared—especially if they suspected that the traitor was a CIA agent. “Do we know why the Bureau has their hands in this?”

“Not that I’ve heard.” He pulled Riley closer. “But this guy, Battersley, he’s in charge of their China desk. CI, just like us.”

“No kidding,” Riley breathed. “They’re looking at Mason for the mole. How in the hell do they even know about it?”

“They have their own channels. But with them on our case…shit, man. This just got a whole lot more complicated. They think it’s one of us.”

“So do you.”

“Yeah, but it’s one thing to talk shit about your own family. I don’t exactly want some outsider sticking his nose into our dirty laundry.”

“Agreed. Just get me in with Mason, and I can start figuring this out.”

“I’m trying to get us in, but the FBI’s got first right to interrogate, since they made the apprehension, and there’s no overlook area. We’re out in the cold until they open the door.”

“I can’t believe we’re playing second fiddle to them. This was our case.”

“We’ll get in, don’t worry.” Greene turned around as the FBI agents in the room shuffled their paperwork and headed toward a door at the back of the room. “All right, they’re going in now. Kral’s in the left room. Mason’s on the right. They’re questioning Mason first, at my request. They use the whole team and do one at a time, from what they tell me.”

“That’s ridiculous. They should pick one interrogator per suspect, and let that person take lead.”

“They might do that, ultimately. I didn’t discuss technique with them. Maybe they’re training up some new interrogators. How the hell do I know?”

Riley watched them go into the room. Metal flashed at one man’s hip. “They’re armed? That’s dangerous. Too easy for a suspect to grab and go.”

“That’s how they roll. Try not to get your panties in a bunch, man. They do what they do, and then we do what we do. We just gotta give them some space.”