Girl of Rage Read online

  Bear looked across the room at her. Then he said, “I was up late last night reviewing files related to your case, when the call came about the attack. Unfortunately I left the file out on my kitchen table—and someone broke into my apartment while I was out. The files are gone.”

  Carrie frowned and met Julia’s eyes. Then she looked back at Bear.

  “What was in the file?”

  “Your father’s State Department personnel file.”

  Sarah muttered something under her breath. Carrie couldn’t hear it exactly, but it sounded suspiciously like she said motherfucker.

  “So what do we do now?” Carrie asked.

  “I want you to meet Anthony Walker,” Julia said to Carrie. “I think he can help.”

  “The reporter?” Bear said. “That’s a bad idea.”

  “I disagree,” Julia said. “It’s not like the government is helping us. Somebody is trying to destroy our family. We don’t have time to screw around.”

  Carrie stared at Julia aghast. She’d spent more than a year avoiding reporters, ever since the calls started coming in when charges were filed against Ray. They’d been hounded by the media, caricatured, and it hadn’t stopped after Ray’s murder.

  “I don’t know,” Carrie murmured.

  Julia leaned forward and took her hands. “Listen—I know you don’t want to, and I know why. I’ve been dealing with the press for years, I get it. But I’m telling you—this guy’s straight up. And if anyone can get to the bottom of it, he can.”

  “This is a bad idea,” Bear said.

  “I don’t know if I can trust a reporter,” Carrie said.

  “Look. Let’s meet with him. If you decide you don’t trust him, we don’t have to talk with him anymore.”

  Carrie sighed. Her mind kept going back to Ronald Lafferty, the reporter from the New York Post. He’d harassed Ray for weeks, then shown up at the hospital during their three-day vigil after the accident.

  Lafferty had penned a front page poison article attacking her and Ray less than a week after Ray’s death. All so he could get his damn story. The story was filled with lies and innuendo with lots of descriptive detail, but little or no truth. Julia had offered to sue, and briefly tangled with the lawyers at the Post, but it didn’t go to court.

  Carrie sighed. “I’ll talk with him. But I’m skeptical.”

  Bear frowned. Then he said, “It’s your call, I can’t stop you. But I think you’re making a mistake. You can’t trust some reporter.”

  “Can we trust you?” Carrie asked.

  Bear flushed. “That’s your call, too, now, isn’t it? I’ll tell you this much: I want to know who shot the mother of my children. You can cooperate or not, but I’m on this case until they shoot me.”

  Carrie turned to Julia, then to Alexandra, sitting quietly by herself. Alexandra gave a minute nod. Carrie nodded.

  “All right. I’ll meet with him. Bear—will you sit in on that too? We need all the help we can get.”

  George-Phillip. May 3.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful, just once, to do something without fourteen layers of scrutiny?

  The thought ran through George-Phillip’s mind as he looked over the statement the flight attendant handed him, detailing the extensive charges either he, or the agency, or possibly the royal travel budget, would have to pick up for this flight. Ninety-two thousand pounds sterling for the roundtrip to Washington and back.

  It seemed odd to him that Cabinet members—and, for that matter, members of the royal family, other than Her Majesty—often flew scheduled commercial flights. But increasingly the split personality of the British public meant restricted public resources. While the Queen always flew charter jets, or the shorter range jets of the 32nd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, all such flights came from the travel budget, which was limited.

  The rest of the family typically flew commercial, except for special circumstances. Prince Charles had seen that such circumstances were increasingly rare, after his six-hundred thousand pound roundtrip to South America had caused significant public scandal. And that trip for an environmental jaunt—irony indeed. Now, as a result, George-Phillip had to figure out how in hell he was going to possibly personally pay for a charter flight across the Atlantic, which was required for official business.

  Whatever. Let the newspapers bray. He wasn’t flying his daughter commercial—not two days after an assassination attempt—and he wasn’t leaving her alone in London.

  Right now, Jane was asleep, stretched across the row of seats across from George-Phillip. Her nanny, Adriana, was in the row across from her, reading a paperback novel with two cupcakes on the cover. She’d been wide eyed, watching out the windows as the flight took off four hours before, and silent since then. Jane, on the other hand, had taken to her first flight as if it were her twentieth. She’d barely paid attention as the flight took to the air, instead keeping her nose buried in Discovery Box, her favorite periodical. That was actually fairly typical for Jane—she would appear to not pay any attention at all to new experiences, until the next day. Tomorrow, she’d be able to talk about nothing else.

  That tendency worried him. Because on the way to the airport this morning, she’d talked and talked and talked about waking up to the sound of gunshots two night earlier.

  For the first time in the thirty years of his career, George-Phillip was considering retiring. Jane had already lost her mother.

  For just a second, George-Phillip felt a lump of unhappiness. He’d lost the love of his life years ago. Then he’d married a good woman, a kind woman, a woman who he’d imagined spending the rest of his life with. But their marriage had lasted just three years.

  He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He didn’t have time for such nonsense.

  Opening his eyes, George-Phillip flagged down the flight attendant. “Bring me a Pimm’s iced tea, please, and a telephone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The phone came quicker than the drink, which was unfortunate. But he would have to settle for what he could. He leaned toward the window, looking out at the glare. Far below were the clouds, and below that, ocean in all directions. He looked back toward his daughter and his decision was made. When this crisis with the Thompson family was over, he was resigning from the government. He’d given thirty years of his life to the Queen. The remainder would belong to Jane.

  Lifting the phone to his ear, he dialed.

  “Aye,” said the gruff voice of Oswald O’Leary.

  “It’s C,” said George-Phillip. “Any updates?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. One of our agents in California has a lead on Mrs. Thompson, sir. I’m told she’s running south toward Mexico, and fast.”

  Damn it, George-Phillip thought. He’d have some influence if she were able to get to the Canadian border. Trying to cross into Mexico, however, would be hazardous. Security on the American border with Mexico was far more aggressive than the Canadian border—not to mention the dangers of drug wars and corruption, which had rocked the northern cities of Mexico in recent years. What was she thinking?

  He sighed. He hadn’t actually seen or spoken with her, other than a few short words, in sixteen years, and even then she’d changed a lot, twisted by anxiety and fear.

  For the hundred-millionth time, George-Phillip found himself wishing Richard Thompson were dead.

  “All right. Keep tracking her. I don’t even know who all is after her at this point, but I want Adelina Thompson and her daughters protected.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll do the best I can.”

  They disconnected, and George-Phillip looked out the window at the clouds below. O’Leary would be on a flight to Washington the next day, but his role had become so important that George-Phillip insisted they take separate flights so one of them was on the ground at all times.

  His affair with Adelina had been doomed from the beginning. He remembered those intense months in 1984 so clearly. She’d been terrified of Richard—terrified he would hurt her, even more t
errified that she would lose Julia if they separated. They’d had the conversation too many times to count.

  You should leave him.

  I can’t. You don’t understand.

  But he did. He understood she was terrified. But sometimes he wondered if her fear was warranted, or if it was all in her head.

  He had stopped wondering after his investigation of Wakhan began to make real progress.

  George-Phillip shook his head as he looked out at the clouds and the ocean far below. That had been the one and only time he’d ever broken the classification rules. In fact he’d violated the Official Secrets Act and every principle of his profession.

  It had been an early-March day and the sun was dazzling over Washington, DC. Adelina had gotten away with an excuse of a nonexistent bridge game with equally nonexistent church friends. Instead, they met at an overlook high over the Potomac River on the George Washington Parkway. There, surrounded by forest overlooking Washington, DC, they could talk in private even as cars raced by on the parkway behind them.

  “Before we go any further, there’s something you must know,” he had said.

  “Are we going further?” she asked, raising one achingly beautiful eyebrow.

  He said, “Regardless. You need to know that while my interest in you is purely personal, I do have a professional interest in your husband.”

  “Don’t call him that. Not in private. Publicly he may be my husband, but privately, he is my jailor. My rapist. Don’t you ever call him a husband.”

  George-Phillip had sighed. “Nevertheless, he is my target.”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you saying that you started seeing me in order to get to him?”

  George-Phillip shook his head. “No. The two things happened independently of each other. But the bottom line is, something terrible happened in Afghanistan last year, and I believe Richard was involved in it.”

  “Nothing he did would surprise me.”

  “Did you expect him back from his tour so soon?”

  She shook her head. “No, in fact, he originally said he would be in Pakistan for three years, and that I could expect to see him only occasionally for vacations.” Her mouth curled into a bitter smile. “I’d looked forward to having him gone. But it turned out to be less than two years.”

  “When did you learn he would be coming back to the United States?”

  “He called in mid-December to let me know he wouldn’t be taking leave for Christmas. And that I needed to have the house packed and ready to move to Washington by the end of January.”

  George-Phillip had felt his heart sink then. The massacre in Badakhshan province had taken place on December 12. There was no question—someone at the U.S. State Department, or more likely the CIA, had ordered Thompson out of there following the massacre.

  “Does that change anything?” Adelina asked him.

  “Nothing could change what is between us,” he had said. And he meant it. But it turned out to not be true. The next few weeks had been the most intense in his life. Was the affair sweetened by the fact that it was forbidden? He didn’t know for sure. But he did know that in the nearly thirty years since then, he’d experienced nothing so emotionally intense as those weeks in the Spring of 1984 when he fell in love with Adelina.

  Thirty years may have passed, but the intensity of the emotion never faded—it merely became a dull ache, one that was occasionally improved and even appeared to occasionally be in complete remission, but always returned. That was partly because he’d never known why it ended. The end came suddenly, without warning, and without explanation. On an afternoon in late May 1984, he’d called her and she didn’t call back. Not that day, or the next.

  Up until that point they hadn’t gone more than a day without talking. George-Phillip worried, but didn’t panic. Until the next day, when she didn’t return his call for the third day in a row.

  On the fourth day, George-Phillip was recalled to London for several days of meetings as a result of his report on the Wakhan massacre, and it was two weeks before he returned to Washington.

  Two weeks during which she’d neither answered the phone nor returned his calls.

  Frantic on his return to the United States, George-Phillip rented a car and drove directly from National Airport to the Thompson condominium in Bethesda.

  It was hellishly risky. But after three weeks without a response, he’d thought nothing but the worst. Was she dead? Had Richard finally done away with her? On his arrival at the building, he walked past the concierge as if he belonged there and stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the penthouse.

  Sixty seconds later he was knocking on the door of the condo in unison with the beating of his heart. He felt his pulse in his neck as he waited.

  An unfamiliar woman opened the door—not Jenny Sullivan, Julia’s nanny. This woman was young—probably eighteen or nineteen, with long blonde hair.

  “Can I help you?”

  George-Phillip had coughed and said, “Is Mrs. Thompson in?”

  The woman at the door said, “Wait right here.” Then closed the door in his face.

  He cooled his heels in the hallway. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

  Finally Adelina opened the door. A ridge of tension ran down the center of her forehead like a furrow through the plowed field, the strain evident in her posture and in the flash of her eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” she hissed.

  “I just returned from London, and since you aren’t returning my calls, I felt it necessary to come in person.”

  “I’m not returning your calls because I don’t want to talk with you.”

  “Why?”

  She rolled her eyes. She rolled her eyes. He’d spent weeks feeling shut out, frustrated. Concerned about her safety. Wondering if she was even alive. He’d felt … angry. Afraid. Worried. And she rolled her eyes?

  His face must have shown some of what he was thinking, because she stepped away from him, her face suddenly closed and wary.

  “Why?” he asked. “Did I offend you somehow? Did I hurt you? Did your husband suddenly become the man of your dreams?”

  Adelina’s response was instantaneous; a loud ringing slap that stung his face. “How dare you?” she asked. “You know what he did to me.”

  George-Phillip staggered back. “And I know what you’ve done to me, Adelina. You’ve broken my heart.”

  “I never want to see you again,” she said.

  He closed his eyes, forcing himself to contain the overwhelming pain her statement brought on. “I don’t understand you, Adelina.”

  She sobbed. “Please, George. Just go. Leave me.”

  She stepped back inside and closed the door. Twelve years would pass before he saw Adelina Thompson again.

  Alexandra. May 3.

  “Excuse me a moment,” Alexandra said, stepping away from her sisters. They had just arrived at the Crowne Plaza in Arlington, where Julia had rented a suite.

  “Hey,” Carrie said, catching her eyes. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Alexandra replied. “I’m good.”

  She stepped into the bedroom at the end of the hall and dropped her bag on the bed, then took out her phone, urgently checking to see if he’d contacted her. Nothing from Dylan, but she had a friend request on Facebook from a Sherman Roberts. The name tore at her heart. Roberts and Sherman were Dylan’s two best friends from the Army—both of them dead now.

  She accepted the request then checked her messages.

  His was obscure.

  SHERMAN ROBERTS: Hey you. I was browsing profiles and saw yours and thought we should get to know each other. If you get my message, let me know.

  She wondered if he was online right then. Maybe? She tapped in her response:

  ALEXANDRA PARIS: Hi there. I don’t usually talk to strangers.

  His response was immediate. Her phone rang, but there was no caller ID.

  She scrambled to answer it.

  “Dylan?”

  “Hey, bab
e. Where are you?”

  “We’ve moved to the Crowne Plaza in Arlington, Virginia. The DSS isn’t giving us protection anymore.”

  “Son of a bitch, are you serious? Why not?”

  “They’re not in charge of the investigation anymore. It sounds like that’s the Justice Department and IRS. They’re after my father. But Julia’s working on hiring private security.”

  Silence at the other end of the line. Breathing. Finally, Dylan said, “I want you to make sure you’ve got a retreat. Fire escape. Anything. Make sure you’ve got a way out. And you need to buy a gun.”

  “Dylan, I’ve never fired a gun—”

  “Alex. These people are serious.”

  She closed her eyes. Less than forty-eight hours before he’d killed two armed attackers while protecting her sister.

  “Okay. Okay. I hear you, Dylan.”

  “Me and Sherman taught you how to protect yourself in a fight. What’s the most important weapon you have?”

  Jesus Christ, she thought. His voice was intense. “My brain,” she whispered.

  “That’s right. You have to stay one step ahead. What’s the plan from here?”

  “We’re meeting with Bear in a little while, and some guy from the Washington Post who Julia knows. She says she thinks he might be able to help us. Right now we need information.”

  “Right. We especially need to know who Carrie and Andrea’s father is.”

  Alexandra sniffed. “Yes. You’re right.”

  “I’m tossing this SIM card when we’re finished talking. But I’ll keep watching the Facebook account. Drop me a message and I’ll call within a couple of hours. All right?”

  “Dylan…” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will,” he replied. His voice was sober. “I love you.”

  Julia. May 3.

  The hotel telephone was loud and jarring, unsettling in a world where 99 percent of phone calls had a pleasing ring tone. Julia stood and walked to the phone and lifted it to her ear.