The Whole Truth (20 page)

But that wasn’t the whole story. The thing was, when she was sober she saw Behnam in her dreams. The little Afghan boy who had died so that she could win her second Pulitzer always came to her when she slept. He seemed very much alive, his curly hair being lifted by a stifling desert wind. The smile on his face would melt the hardest heart, light the darkest night. But the dream always ended with him lying dead in her arms. Always dead was Behnam.

It was only when she was drunk that she didn’t see him. It was only when she was wasted that he stayed away. And that meant she had seen him pretty much every night over the last six months. He had died hundreds of times after being resurrected in her dreams three or four times a night. She was tired of the spectacle. She wanted a drink. No, she wanted to be drunk. She didn’t want to see Behnam alive and then dead.

As she sat back on her bare haunches, a ratty old sweatshirt her only clothing, she stared out the window. There was a rally going on in Central Park today. It was a protest against the Russian government. Tens of thousands of people were marching and waving “Remember Konstantin” flags. Katie couldn’t know the flags had been secretly delivered to the rally organizers by a firm working for a shell corporation with an untraceable connection to Pender & Associates. Twenty million of the flags had been manufactured and distributed throughout the world for rallies just like this one.

Katie had decided not attend the protest. She had other things on her mind.

She glanced away from the window and happened to stare through the blue glass of the gin bottle to the TV beyond.

Breaking news. Right. There was always breaking news. The next big story. In the recent past she’d already be on a plane, hurtling five hundred miles an hour right to the epicenter of the storm. And loving it. Loving every second of it until it was over and the next big story came along. And then the one after that in a psychotically charged, adrenaline-burning race that had no finish line.

London again. Well, London had its share of breaking news, though nothing bad had happened while Katie had been there. Just her luck. She took a deep breath and idly looked at the building with police tape all around it. It looked familiar. She sat up straighter and forgot about the gin.

What was the woman saying? Westminster? What group? Katie jumped to her feet, jogged into the living room, and turned up the sound.

The newsperson was standing in the rain while police and people in white uniforms raced here and there. A curious, neck-craning crowd was being held back by portable barriers. TV film crews were arrayed up and down the street, their satellite masts flinging the story electronically around the world one frantic byte and pixel at a time.

“The Phoenix Group would be the last place most people would expect something like this to happen,” the reporter was saying. “Situated on a quiet London street, it has been described as a think tank conducting research on global policies covering myriad social and scientific subjects. Virtually all the people who worked here were scholars and scientists, many of them former academics that one would hardly expect to be the target of a brutal murder rampage. An official list of the dead has not been released pending notification of family. While details remain sketchy it appears that the massacre—”

Massacre? Did the woman say massacre?
Katie slumped down on the carpet, her heart thudding against her chest. Her limbs felt dead.

The reporter continued, “As of right now, the authorities are only saying that there are nearly thirty victims inside the building. There has been no indication of any survivors.”

No indication of any survivors?
Katie glanced at her watch and did a quick time zone calculation as her reporter mentality kicked in despite her rising panic. It was evening in London now. A few hours for the bodies to be discovered, the police called, and the news people and crowds to get there. It might have happened around three or four that afternoon. Then the panic resumed.

No survivors.

She bolted up, raced to her phone, grabbed the business card Anna had given her, and made the call. It went immediately to voice mail. Katie choked back a sob as Anna’s precise voice came on the line asking her to please leave a message. Katie hung up without saying anything.

Her next thought hit her like a lightning bolt. “Shaw!” she exclaimed.

She called the number he had given her. It rang four times and she thought it too was about to go to voice mail when someone answered.

“
Allo?
” a woman’s voice said in French.

Confused for a moment Katie said, “Um . . . can I speak to Shaw?”

The woman at the other end spoke to her again in French.

Katie thought quickly, trying to conjure up her college French and the little she had learned while overseas. She asked the woman if she spoke English and she said a bit. Katie asked her where Shaw was.

The woman did not know that name.

“You’ve got his phone.”

Now the woman sounded confused but asked her if she was family.

That didn’t sound too good, thought Katie. For a surreal moment she wondered if Shaw had been with Anna at The Phoenix Group and been killed too. Yet why would a Frenchwoman have his phone if the massacre had taken place in London? “Yes,” she told the woman. “I’m family. His sister. Who are you?”

The woman said that she was a nurse and her name was Marguerite.

“A nurse? I don’t understand.”

“This man, this Shaw is in hospital,” Marguerite said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He has been injured. He is in surgery.”

“Where?”

“In Paris.”

“Which hospital?”

The woman told her.

“Will he be okay?”

Marguerite said she didn’t know the answer to that.

Katie ran to pack. Using her millions of frequent flyer miles, she booked a seat on an Air France flight leaving JFK that night.

She tried to sleep on the flight over, but couldn’t. As other passengers dozed all around her, Katie’s eyes were glued to the news channel on her personal monitor. There was a bit more information about the Phoenix Group massacre, as the media had initially termed it, but nothing really enlightening. Katie had tried to call Anna before boarding the plane, but it still went to voice mail.

As the jet zoomed across the ocean, Katie asked herself why she was doing this. She barely knew Anna or Shaw. And as Shaw had made quite clear, and quite correctly too, she had no right butting into their lives.

So why are you doing this, Katie? Why?

Perhaps the answer was as simple as she had nothing else in her life. And while she didn’t know Anna and Shaw very well, the very dramatic way in which she had met them both made the pair seem far more than mere acquaintances. She cared about them. She wanted them to be happy. And now? And now she felt as though a very close friend had died.

She landed at seven in the morning local time, passed through customs, and grabbed a taxi to the hospital, which was near the center of Paris.

She paid off the cabbie and ran through the front doors. Using her broken French she quickly found someone who spoke English and asked for the location of Shaw’s room. There was no one here under that name, she was told.

Damn it!
She mentally kicked herself for not asking the nurse on the phone the name Shaw had been admitted under.

“He was badly injured. He was in surgery yesterday. He’s a big man, six-five or so, dark hair, really blue eyes.”

The woman looked at her blankly. “It is a large hospital, madame.”

“I spoke to a nurse here about him. Her name was Marguerite.”

“Ah, Marguerite,
bon
, that is helpful,” said the woman. She made a call, spoke for a minute, and then nodded at Katie. “Monsieur Ramsey is in room 805.”

As Katie ran to the elevator bank, her small carry-on rolling behind her, the woman started speaking into the phone again, her worried gaze on Katie’s back.

CHAPTER 43

A
N HOUR AFTER ANNA FISCHER WAS KILLED,
Nicolas Creel’s BlackBerry buzzed. He rolled over in bed, picked it up, hit a key, and five words appeared on the screen: “All’s well that ends well.” It was from Caesar. Who would have thought such a man would have been a fan of the Bard? Creel checked his watch. Afternoon in London, right on schedule. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

Later that evening, Creel smoothed down his tuxedo jacket, adjusted his French cuffs, and rose from his seat to thunderous applause. As he strode to the lectern, he shook the hand of the governor who’d just introduced him to an elite crowd that had paid five thousand dollars a pop for the privilege of seeing Nicolas Creel named man of the year for his philanthropy, the latest of which had been a donation of eighty million dollars for a state-of-the art cancer wing for children at a major hospital. The wing was not named after Creel, though. He had enough buildings named after him. He’d christened it in his late mother’s honor.

The governor of California had been effusive in his introductory remarks, calling the billionaire arms manufacturer a man for the ages with unsurpassed vision and unbridled compassion for others. Had Creel’s mother been alive, she no doubt would have shed many tears over that description. Creel’s eyes never even grew moist. It was just not his way. As with everything else in his life, every action had multiple motivations. Tonight’s event was no exception. Indeed it was money well spent. He had no problem helping kids who were sick. He’d nearly lost his oldest son to leukemia, which had spurred his interest in cancer research and treatments. He might be more greedy and ambitious than most, but he was far more successful than most too.

He actually had a generous heart. And better still, he had plenty of money. Over the decades Creel had given away billions to charity, far more than most of his fellow super-rich. And spreading the wealth made you feel good, made others feel good, and did some good all at the same time. It was also a fine way to honor his mother, to give her the immortality she deserved. But doing good works gave you friends in high places when you needed them. He had a feeling the governor of California and the state in general would be his friend for life. It was a win-win, a classic no-brainer. At eighty million bucks it was actually cheap.

He drew his speech from his pocket and looked out over the adoring crowd, suddenly wondering if there was a brand-new Miss Hottie out there. There was a good reason he’d left his wife at home. It was definitely time for a change there. She was bored with him and the only asset she possessed of interest to him had long since lost its appeal. He figured he’d opt more for brains this time so long as the lady had an exceptional exterior. He was a man who loved beautiful things around him.

He started off his remarks with a reference to what the media were now callously terming the London Massacre. He then asked for a few moments of silence in respect for those killed. He thought it a nice touch. He bowed his head and even thought of the dead and their families. With this his eyes did grow moist. It really was horrible. He was sorry he’d had to do it. If there had been any other way. What a tragedy. The world had grown so damn complicated and with it good and bad lines blurred to near extinction.

He looked back up and saw a sea of glistening eyes staring back at him. It was a magical moment, it really was. In those few precious moments, he and the audience had bonded. They were in this together. The world had grown a bit closer with this calamity, just as it did when other disasters had occurred. From adversity, from catastrophe come astonishing things. It was no coincidence that the greatest American presidents had all served during wartime. Armed conflict did that to you. Or rather
for
you. You either soared or crashed. There was no in-between, there was nowhere to hide. It was the most perfect scorecard in all of history. It was only with loss, Creel believed, that people fully realized the potential of life.

As he finished his remarks about ten minutes later and returned to his seat, humbly playing down the lengthy standing ovation he received, he reflected for a moment on Caesar’s message.

It really had been a remarkable evening, even for him!

Caesar and Pender no doubt thought that this was all about money, about bringing Ares back from the corporate dead. That certainly was one of the reasons, but only one and not the major motivation at that. Only he, Nicolas Creel, realized why he was doing this. And if people had known his reasons, he was certain many would applaud them. Sometimes the ends really did justify the means. In that old cliché, so abused and discredited over the years, existed a gem of wisdom that Creel believed others were finally starting to comprehend.

The ends did justify the means, but only if the ends were truly critical enough.
Yet few were. In every endeavor humanity undertook there was an evaluation done. Whether it was to give expensive medical treatment to a ninety-year-old who had little time left anyway, or to stop oil fields from being exploited so that a certain owl could survive, or to spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to establish a beachhead of democracy in Muslim lands in the hope that freedom would spread. Those decisions were made every day. And no matter which way they were decided someone was hurt, often many died, many more lives were destroyed, but the decision had to be made. And that was exactly what Creel had done. Indeed, he had executed it with far more planning and thought than most governments exercised when contemplating something as monumental. Above all, Creel had an exit strategy, whether his plan worked or not.

In the reception that followed the awards ceremony, he did meet several women who might make the cut as future companions, not wives: he’d made up his mind on that. They were always at these types of events, even the ones with brains and degrees from fancy schools. He was just too damn rich and socially well connected to ignore.

Later, as the tall, elegant woman he’d selected to take out for a drink stepped into his limo, Creel had a sense that nothing would ever go wrong in his life again. It was a vitally empowering and—even for men like him—rare moment.