The Whole Truth (12 page)
“Your guys opened fire unprovoked.”
“Wow! Really?”
“Yeah, really. What happened to you have the right to remain silent
and
keep the blood in your veins?”
“So we took out some of the Tajiks, so what? You know how much those suckers can eat? And my budget is strained as it is.”
“And your guys were shooting at me.”
“Then maybe you should pay attention.”
“Pay attention to what?”
“We don’t like retirees, Shaw. You go when we say you can, if ever.”
“My deal—”
“Your deal is shit. Your deal has always been shit, but you never wanted to face up to it. Well, tonight was your wake-up call, my friend. Your only one. Next time maybe they don’t miss. And consider yourself lucky. Oh, by the way, your orders for Heidelberg are waiting at the airport. Chartered jet, wheels up in two hours. Man will meet you at the front entrance of the airport. Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your evening in lovely Scotland.”
Frank clicked off and Shaw simply stood there on Princes Street in the middle of the ancient city of Edinburgh with thousands of people all around him.
He had never felt more alone.
Katie took an empty notebook from her bag, inserted something in it, and walked into the lobby of the Balmoral. The receptionist on duty was a tall, thin young man. Katie strode up to him and held up the notebook.
“A man dropped this in the lobby. There’s no name in it, but he may be staying at the hotel. He got in a cab before I could stop him.” She described Shaw in detail.
“Yes, he is staying here, miss,” said the young Scotsman. “A Mr. Shaw. I’ll put it in his box here.”
She watched as he placed the notebook in the slot for room 505. When he turned back around she’d skittered away.
God bless the Scots
, she thought. If she’d tried that stunt in New York they would’ve thrown the book in her face, wrestled her to the floor, and then called the cops.
She waited for two hours in the lobby, her gaze flitting to the front desk from time to time as she sipped a Coke and chewed her nails till they bled. She stirred when the young Scot turned his position over to a middle-aged woman whom Katie had never seen before. As soon as the man was out of sight Katie approached the front desk.
“I’m staying in room 505 with my fiancé,” she began. “I gave him my key when he misplaced his, but he was supposed to put it in a notebook he left for me so I could get back in the room.”
The woman glanced at the wall of slots behind her. She reached into 505’s box and pulled out the notebook.
“This notebook?” she said.
Katie nodded and took it from her. She looked through the notebook and was careful to let the object she’d placed in there earlier fall out on the front desk. The woman picked it up for her. It was Katie’s American driver’s license. The woman looked at the photo and then at Katie, who said, “I’ve been looking all over for that. He must have found it in the room and put it in the notebook for me.”
“And where is your fiancé?” the woman asked pleasantly enough, but with the tone of someone who had a job to do and intended to do it.
“Glasgow.” She flipped through the pages. “He’ll be back tomorrow, but he didn’t leave the key. How can I get in the room?”
“Have you tried calling him?”
“Yes, he doesn’t answer. Service can be a bit spotty.”
“Don’t I know it,” the woman agreed heartily.
She glanced at the driver’s license again.
“Well, we can’t have our guests sleeping on the sidewalk, now can we?” She pulled a spare key from the slot and passed it and the license to Katie.
Katie glanced at the woman’s nametag. “Sara, I can’t thank you enough. I still can’t believe he forgot to leave the damn key.”
“I’ve been married to my Dennis for twenty-six years and the poor bloke can’t remember birthdays, anniversaries, or, on occasion, all the names of our five children. So if it’s just keys your man forgets to leave I’d go ahead with the marriage and count your blessings, ma’am.”
Katie headed to the elevator.
A minute later she was opening the door to 505. She had watched Shaw walk away from the Balmoral so she was reasonably sure he wasn’t in the building. But she still told herself she had just ten minutes to search the place.
Nine minutes later she’d gone over every square inch of the room and the few belongings he’d left behind and come up with a total zero. Well, not exactly. In the pocket of a jacket she’d found a sales receipt for a book purchase in Dublin. But that wasn’t terribly helpful.
She walked along the perimeter of the room and stopped by the desk, her gaze running over the items there, all hotel-issued. That’s when she saw it. She sat and pulled the blotter toward her, took a pencil off the holder, and carefully brushed the pencil point across it. A name slowly emerged from the white paper where Shaw had carved it with such pressure that it had been imprinted on the page underneath the one he’d written on, an amateurish mistake. Katie had no way of knowing he’d committed this blunder while distressed about Anna.
“Anna Fischer,” Katie said. The name was not uncommon, but for some reason Katie thought she recognized it.
And then something clicked in her memory. She looked at the sales receipt she’d found in his jacket pocket.
“
An Historical Examination of Police States
,” she read. Again, something was percolating in her mind.
She left the room and called the phone number of the bookshop on the receipt. She didn’t expect anyone to answer at this hour, but a woman’s voice came on. Katie asked if they carried that book. They did, she was told, but they only had one copy left. “And the author’s name?” she said. “I can’t remember.”
“Anna Fischer,” answered the woman.
A
NNA FISCHER WALKED SLOWLY
along the streets of Westminster in London. Many tourists tended to congregate in this area of the city, craning to catch a glimpse of the Queen or other royal at Buckingham Palace or visiting the graves of long-dead monarchs at the famous abbey. The West End theater district was also here, as well as Lord Nelson looking pensive in Trafalgar Square on the giant granite shaft even as the birds crapped all over him.
She entered St. James’s Park, passing foreign nannies and British moms pushing trams and enjoying an evening jaunt under clear skies. Weather such as this was not particularly plentiful on the little isle in the middle of big water, so Londoners leapt to take advantage of the sun when they had the chance.
Anna kept trudging along, passing the King Charles Steps, and then stopped and stared over at Duck Island in the middle of St. James’s Park Lake. Here she chose to sit down, her skirt gathered around her long legs.
Had she been too hard on Shaw? Part of her said yes but the other part held forth with a resounding
No!
Marriage, at least for Anna, was a commitment for life. Yes, she should have pressed this point before, but now that Shaw had officially proposed, the matter had taken on a greater urgency. He had to see that, and if he didn’t, well, perhaps it would be best if they didn’t stay together.
She’d had other suitors over the years, educated, articulate men who held important positions in the world or had obtained considerable wealth. None of them, she had to admit, not a single one, had stirred in her the tender, far-reaching emotions that Shaw did. Yet would he even go to Wisbach to see her parents?
She rose and sat on a park bench. Next to her was a discarded newspaper. She picked it up. The
Guardian
was having a good run with the evil Russia story. The headline indeed said it all: “Return of the Red Menace?”
And something called the “Tablet of Tragedies” had just been received by select major news outlets and world leaders. The rudimentary packaging and grainy photos of allegedly murdered Russians, their tragic stories written in simple language, carried a potency a million-copy glossy release could never have inspired. Anna’s brow wrinkled as she skipped across the story’s contents. It regurgitated much that was already known and then built on that. It was like the game of whispering a story in one ear in a group of people and seeing how much the tale had changed when it came out of the last person’s mouth. And yet the murder of Sergei Petrov, the Russian word for traitor inked on his forehead, had been pretty much conclusive proof of Gorshkov’s guilt, at least in the minds of the Western press.
The Russian president had put his military force on full alert as mass demonstrations were breaking out across the country. It seemed like the place was imploding. Anna had even heard scuttlebutt from her old colleagues at the UN that if the Red Menace was not explained soon in a way favorable to Gorshkov, Russia’s seat on the Security Council might be in jeopardy. Whatever had happened to Konstantin and his family, the man was certainly getting his revenge now.
Yet had anyone bothered to verify any of it? Unlike some other people who might have these same questions, Anna had the means to try and get answers. Perhaps to take her mind off her personal troubles, she decided to do something about it right now.
She walked to her office, a 175-year-old row house nestled in a quiet dead-end street near Buckingham Gate. The buildings on either side of hers were empty, but scheduled to be renovated in about six months. She would cherish her peace and solitude for now until it was destroyed by jackhammers and the sounds of sawing. The smell of fresh paint was in the air. Her building had just gotten a face-lift, including a fresh coat on all the windows and doors.
She unlocked the thick front door on which a gold-plated plaque announced the firm’s name: The Phoenix Group Limited. When she’d first starting working here, Anna had been told that the firm was bankrolled by a very reclusive and wealthy gentleman who’d been born in the United States, Arizona specifically. So private was he that no one who worked at The Phoenix Group even knew their benefactor’s name. Nor did he ever visit them. Yet they did receive communiqués from him from time to time and encouraging words about their important work. And representatives of the man had visited from America to meet with them and answer questions. The owner had been described to her as an intellectual interested in the vast questions that continued to befuddle mankind. And he paid people like Anna to figure them out. Whoever he was, he gave Anna and the others free rein to follow their passions. There were few jobs anymore that had such latitude. It was the most stimulating work Anna had ever done. Now if she could only get her personal life in such shape.
She locked the door behind her and headed up the stairs. Her cluttered office was at the end of the hall on the top floor. She passed other rooms, all empty save one near hers where a coworker, Avery Chisholm, a crusty old academic, toiled away on a project, his circle of white hair barely topping the piles of books in front of him. He lifted a hand in response to her greeting and she hurried on.
Anna settled behind her large desk crammed with books and stacks of papers. Her job was to try and make sense of the world, one complex factor at a time. She and her colleagues wrote paper after paper, published book after book, gave talk after talk in which they laid out precise, detailed analyses that should have proved a treasure trove for government and business leadership from the United States to Japan. Yet she was painfully aware that hardly anyone in power bothered to read them.
She went online and entered some chat rooms. Whenever she raised any questions about the culpability of the Russians, or the “real” origins of the Red Menace, she was attacked by all sides with people questioning her religious faith and her patriotism, though they didn’t know if she even had a religion or what country she was from. She was also labeled a Gorshkov ass-kisser, a traitor to humanity, and a royal bitch.
She retreated from that world and expanded her search until she focused on one obscure blogger in a far-off galaxy of the cyberworld. He was raising some of the same questions and doubts that Anna had. She sent him a detailed e-mail and hoped she would get an answer back soon.
She would, but not in any way she could have possibly imagined.
A
NNA FISCHER WAS
a remarkably intelligent woman with multiple degrees from world-class universities. Yet she had just committed a critical mistake. In her defense, the woman would have had no way of knowing it was a mistake. Which are often precisely the sort of errors that come back to haunt you.
The blogger she had e-mailed with her own misgivings was not who he seemed to be. It wasn’t even a person. It was essentially digital smoke and mirrors.
Dick Pender and his people had been monitoring the goings-on within several thousand chat rooms spread across the world. The rapid-fire repartee bounding kilobyte by kilobyte across his massive computer screens rivaled anything the agony columns of late-nineteenth-century British newspapers had ever inspired. The Red Menace was of course the topic on everyone’s mind, and Pender smiled as he toted up those convinced the Russians were behind it as opposed to those who weren’t sure. The tally ran nearly ninety-eight percent in his favor.
He noted with glee that as soon as anyone said something against the “truth” he had established they were electronically “piled on” by armies of chatters. Across thousands of discussion sites, Pender posted prewritten responses spouting fact after fact, which actually had no basis in fact, and grinned as he was hailed as a hero and a speaker of supreme wisdom by the chat hordes.
God, Pender thought, it was so easy to support a popular—if completely wrong—position. It required not a scintilla of courage.
A minute later his smile grew even wider. He had just checked what he termed his online bear traps. One of them was the blogger Anna had sent her query to. Pender’s people had set it up, along with several others, to gauge the interest of anyone who might believe the whole Red Menace campaign was a sham. It was critical to know if there was a reverse wave of doubt about the horrors perpetrated by the Russians.
If Pender detected any such movements he had numerous strategies he could employ to dispel this belief. One of his favorites was crafting an outrageous event that drew everyone’s attention from a problem area. He’d been retained on short notice to do this for administrations in Washington, London, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo over the years. Such things were usually needed around elections, scandals, wars, and budget fights.