FOREWORD Read online

  Lewis Stein was a man known among his few friends for an almost superhuman tolerance for alcohol. But he had sure knocked back a few tonight, and any trace of inebriation he might have felt a few moments’ earlier sharply evaporated. His wide-eyed expression made that clear enough.

  “You’re kidding,” he exclaimed. “So why isn’t the President making this call?”

  “He thought that, because of our relationship, it might be better…” Bishop left the rest unsaid.

  Lewis said it for him. “You mean because I might beunstable , right?”

  There was no point lying. Bishop respected Lewis too much for that. “Right.”

  “Well, fuck you very much, pal. If I’m so unbalanced, why the job offer? I’m quite happy…”

  Bishop cut him off sharply. “Bullshit you’re happy. Look at the state of you. I’ll level with you, Lewis. If I were the Pres, I wouldn’t offer you the job. But youare still one of the best at what you do. So it’s your call now.”

  Lewis and Bishop locked eyes for several long seconds. Finally, Lewis broke the tension by standing to pour himself another shot of Jack. “I’m out of the game, Tony. Have been for a couple of years.”

  “Look, man,” the DCI said. “I’m talking to you as a friend now, not as your boss or even as a government employee. I know the pressure of the job screwed you up. I watched it happen, for Chrissakes. Do you know what that did to me?”

  “You did nothing to help,” Lewis muttered sulkily.

  “There was nothing Icould do,” Bishop retorted. “You refused counseling, refused to talk about it. What did you say? I won’t waste my time with all that bullshit psychobabble. You know what you are? You’re a typical stiff upper-lipped Limey, repressing everything beneath that cold exterior you like to put on. You never expected that it would all come back on you one day. You never learned that every man has an emotional threshold. Even you.”

  Lewis’s expression contorted into a wry smile. “Finished yet?”

  “I haven’t even started, pal. Do you remember the Grosny mission?”

  How could he forget? That had been his last field operation in the employ of the CIA, and the first one he’d fucked up. Admittedly, he’d achieved his primary objective, the elimination of a Chechen Mafia boss suspected of flooding Western Europe with heroin. But, thanks to a combination of bad luck and poor planning, he’d also managed to kill two innocent children in the process. Yes, they may have been offspring of the Chechen gangster and therefore potential future gangsters themselves, but one of them might just have grown up to be an Einstein or a Kissinger. At least with adults who had gone bad, you knew that they’d had a chance to prove what they could be and wasted it, and therefore the death of a particularly bad adult could sometimes be justified, depending on one’s sensibilities. But how could one justify the death of a child thatmight grow up to be just like its parents? That was a question with which Lewis had wrestled for nearly three years, and he had yet to find a satisfactory answer.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I remember Grosny.”

  The DCI saw an implicit warning in Lewis’s eyes. Don’t push this one. Bishop knew he had to tread lightly. Few people had ever seen that dangerous look and lived to tell the tale.

  “Lewis, there’s something you don’t know about that. About two weeks after you came back, your wife called me.”

  Lewis’s eyes narrowed at the mention of his ex-wife. It had been almost two years to the day since she’d walked out on him. Even now, he still loved her as much as he had ever loved anybody – and knew that the feeling was probably mutual – but until he made some changes in his life, there was little hope of reconciliation. His current funk, he knew, was the reason she had left him. That was understandable, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t want to live with me either.

  “She mentioned that she was worried about you,” Bishop recalled. “She told me about the nightmares you were having, and the fact you wouldn’t talk about them. Lewis, she asked me to tell her - just that once - what you’d been involved in.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. You know I couldn’t. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have turned a blind eye had you decided to tell her. Anyway,” he went on, “I told her to try and talk you into seeing the Agency counselor.”

  “What good would that have done? What does a counselor know? Have they ever been out into the field? Have they ever killed a seven year old kid? If I’d wanted to talk to anybody, I would have talked to someone who’d been there and done that. Somebody like you. To tell you the truth, I wonder whether anything we ever did was worth a damn. The bad guys are still out there, aren’t they? Russia’s still a mess.”

  Bishop failed to prevent himself from shouting. “I don’t fucking believe you, Stein. First of all, you wouldn’t talk to me or anybody else. That’s the whole fucking point. You insisted on maintaining that cold facade. Everybody saw right through it, do you know that? Me and your ex-wife, we both tried to stay patient with you, thinking that you would come through it eventually. But then you skulked off into self-pity. You didn’t resign from the Agency, yourana-fucking-way . You didn’t divorce your wife, youdrove her away. You ran away to Nowhereville, Connecticut to play teacher. You decided to play it safe, just so you could wallow in self-pity and a bottle of Jack, damn you. If there’s one thing that offends me, it’s a wasted talent. And you’ve got fucking talent, or at least you did. I don’t know what you are any more, to tell the truth. The fact of the matter is, the work that we did together saved more lives than it cost. A hell of a lot more. So don’t ever fucking tell me that it doesn’t matter, you hear me?”

  “If you think I screwed up, Tony, just tell me,” Lewis remarked dryly. “Don’t beat about the bush.”

  Bishop reproached himself for losing his temper. This wasn’t the way to get through to him. “It just saddens me. No,” he corrected himself, “it goddamnoffends me that a guy with your talent and intellect is willing to waste his life because he’s too damn proud to admit he’s hurting.”

  Lewis lowered his eyes. He felt a strange emotion. An emotion that didn’t feel very pleasant at all.

  He felt ashamed. But not for the reasons that he usually felt ashamed. Nothing quite so tangible as the death of a child or the loss of a good wife. The shame he felt was much more abstract than normal, something that penetrated the psychological barriers he’d put in place over the years. This type of shame was the type that rang in his conscience like an alarm bell. A wake up call, of sorts.

  “What are you saying?” he said meekly.

  Bishop put a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. The lecture was over. The look in Lewis’s eyes told him that, somehow, something he’d said had struck a chord. Now it was time to mend whatever damage had been done.

  “I’m saying, Lewis, that I remember when I first met you. You had that arrogant confidence of youth, yet you knew exactly when to be scared and, more importantly, you knew what you didn’t know. As an analyst, your instincts were always that much sharper than anyone else’s, but you had a thirst for knowledge. And, because of that, you saw things that nobody else did. As a field officer, hell, you were a legend. Still are, as a matter of fact. Okay, so you fucked up in Grosny, and you took it hard because you’d never fucked up before. So what? You learned the lesson that you’re only human, and that’s often the hardest lesson of all. So you took a couple of years out to sulk, feel sorry for yourself and punish your liver. Well, I hope you enjoyed your sabbatical, buddy, because your country needs you again. It needs you to be a man again.”

  Lewis looked up at the man who had once been his mentor in the intelligence business.

  “What’s the deal?” he snorted acquiescently after several moments of loaded silence.

  “Russia’s in deep shit. Nobody seriously thinks Pushkin will last long. Question is, what happens next? The President needs you to get a handle on things out there, figure out some of the issues. Maybe think of angles we haven’t already considered. How wil
l the change in government impact our relations? Who are the players? Who’s pulling the strings over there? That kind of thing.”

  Lewis had to admit to himself that there had been several occasions over the past two years of self-inflicted reclusion when he’d actively considered returning to government service. But, even though teaching wasn’t quite as rewarding as servitude to one’s country, it did allow him the freedom to feel sorry for himself. And it was far easier to do that than to confront one’s demons, wasn’t it?

  Onlyhe knew how much it rankled him to read the daily newspapers without knowing what wasreally going on behind the headlines. Being involved had its price, butnot being involved was often frustrating as hell. He missed not being on the inside, not being able to play a part in the making of the headlines he read. Lewis knew that this was perhaps his last chance to get back into the game. It was a game whose rules he had observed for most of his adult life; a game that had made him precisely what he was. Furthermore, it was a game that - deep in his heart - he knew he needed almost as much as the air he breathed. Without the challenge and a corresponding set of rules to provide a final checking balance on what he had become, he would never feel quite complete.

  That sudden realization both shocked and relieved him. Shocked him because he had never considered himself totally reliant upon anything before; relieved him because he had just found a valid justification for swallowing his pride and retracing a path that might allow him in some small way to redeem himself for the death of those two young children in Chechnya, not to mention a young Irish Catholic girl who might have still been alive had she not made the mistake of falling in love with him so many years ago. Another story…

  War had always been a second home to Lewis, and he had learned through bitter experience that war often begot heroes. But the same rule also applied to peace, for those who prevented loss of life were also heroes, weren’t they? Henceforth, Lewis’s objective would be the pursuit of the latter. Enough lives had ended at his hands for the sake of what had been deemed The Greater Good. Now he had a part to play, a past for which to compensate.

  But most importantly, he still had a place where he belonged and a purpose in which he believed.

  That entire thought process took a fraction of a second.

  Now the decision had been made, he smiled mischievously.

  “Sounds like it could be fun.”

  “Good. Then you’d better clean up and have a black coffee.”

  “And then what?”

  Bishop raised an eyebrow. “My private jet is waiting for us at Bradley International. And there’ll be a limo waiting at Andrews to take us straight to the White House. Ever been there?”

  Lewis blinked, suddenly wishing he had abstained from alcohol that day.

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Tabatha Canning’s fifteenth birthday was one she would remember for the rest of her life. Three months’ pregnant and at least $100,000 richer after selling her story to a supermarket tabloid, the teenager whose claim to fame was being impregnated by the former National Security Advisor was about to make a decision that would change her life even more significantly still.

  Tabatha was laying in bed listening to the angry exchange taking place downstairs between her mother Louise and Tabatha’s latest stepfather. Dick was at least the third one in as many years; a local car dealer with a drink problem almost as bad as Louise’s. He wasn’t as bad as some of the other losers with whom she had lived, but his drinking binges often ended in a violent rage, the main victim of which tended to be Louise. The only saving grace was that Louise was usually too coked-up to know about it.

  More often than not, the onset of sobriety would coincide with a fortuitous memory loss that prevented Dick from ever recalling punching Louise or banging her head against the wall or throwing her down the stairs. But Tabatha didn’t forget anything. She certainly would never forget crying herself to sleep at night, terrified that Dick might enter the room at any moment in search of a new target for his unspent rage. Her concern was not so much for herself as for her three younger siblings. All four children shared a room no bigger than many peoples’ closets, and Tabatha felt wholly responsible for their welfare. After all, who else was going to look after them? Their drunken, junkie whore of a mother? Yeah, right.

  She flinched as athud echoed through the house. That would be Dick throwing Louise onto the floor. She heard her mother yelp in pain; a sound as familiar to the teenager as that of her own voice. Even in the darkness, she could hear the youngest of her siblings, four-year-old Garry, sobbing into his pillow.

  “Shut up, Garry,” twelve-year-old Nina hissed. Not because the crying particularly bothered her, but because she was scared that it might attract Dick’s unwanted attention.

  Tabatha sat upright in her bed. She’d often fantasized about taking a kitchen knife and plunging it into Dick’s ample gut, but she knew that it would always remain just a fantasy. Even though Louise was her mother, she didn’t respect her. As far as Tabatha was concerned, Louise was a drunken, weak whore who thought nothing of the impact on her kids whenever she found a new loser willing to keep her in liquor and drugs.

  So it’s all down to me, Tabatha thought. She knew that Dick could snap her in half should he so choose. And she wasn’t enough of a martyr not to be scared. But, for her little brother, three sisters and the child yet unborn, she sure as hell had to be strong. With that in mind, she decided that the biggest test of her strength would take place tonight. Tonight was the night when her patience had finally expired. Tonight was the night when she’d made the decision to leave.

  She stood up and quietly got dressed.

  “What are you doin’?” Rhonda whispered. Rhonda was nine.

  “Listen up,” Tabatha said to her siblings. “We’re gettin’ outa here. I want you to put on your clothes, very quietly, and then do what I tell you.”

  “Dick’ll kill us,” Nina pointed out.

  “Dick couldn’t give a fuck,” Tabatha told her. “Now do what I say. Right fucking now.”

  There was some reluctance among the children to leave the sanctuary of their beds. Nina was the first to move. Then Rhonda, and finally Garry. They began to get dressed, confusing quietness with moving very slowly. It took five minutes for all of them to get dressed, by which time Louise’s shrieks were reverberating through the house as Dick’s onslaught intensified.

  “How we gonna get out then?” Rhonda inquired. “He’ll see us.”

  Tabatha had already thought of that. She opened the window, careful not to make any noise. It was a dry, balmy night, full of the promise of summer. The childrens’ room was at the back of the house, facing out onto a small, overgrown yard. Tabatha climbed up onto the window ledge and looked down onto the roof of a dilapidated gazebo. The drop was about ten feet. She hoped that the gazebo would take her weight.

  “What you doin’?” Nina exclaimed, almost forgetting to stay quiet.

  “Stay here until I call you,” Tabatha ordered. She contemplated the drop, for once thankful for her gym training (she was captain of the school gymnastics team). It occurred to her that the fall might carry some risks for her unborn child, but she calculated that the end probably justified the means.

  Tabatha crouched low on the window ledge, holding her breath, and dropped off feet first. This was where her gym training came in. She controlled the fall to perfection, landing on the tips of her toes, arms outstretched to maintain balance. Realizing with some gratitude that the roof of the gazebo was sturdy enough to hold her, she exhaled a sigh of relief. Then she looked back up at the bedroom window, through which her three siblings were craning their necks.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I want all of you to drop down, just like I did.” Noting the reticence in their faces, she extended her arms out in front of her. “Don’t worry. I’ll catch you. Now move it, before Dick finds out.”

  Nina was the eldest of the remaining three and therefore considered it her duty to set an example to the
others. Although not quite as lithe as her older sister, she did well to reproduce Tabatha’s drop. The fifteen-year-old struggled to hold her, but just about managed to do so.

  “Right, now climb down and head for the pick-up,” Tabatha instructed her. “Wait for us there.”

  Nina looked hesitant, but the hard determination in her older sister’s eyes dissuaded her from putting up an argument. Tabatha watched as the twelve-year-old climbed down the gazebo’s wooden siding and disappeared down an alleyway at the side of the house, which led to the main street.

  Rhonda was next to make the drop. Her confidence buoyed by having watched her two older sisters make it, she wasn’t anywhere near as reluctant as Nina had been. This was becoming something of an adventure for her. It was the most exciting thing she’d ever done. And that was her way of coping with what her racing heart told her was actually quite a dangerous moment in her young life.

  “Come on, Garry,” Tabatha whispered. Garry was sitting on the ledge, his legs dangling outside. The drop looked immense to the tiny four-year-old. He was trying to muster the courage to fall off and entrust Tabatha to catch him. But he couldn’t, and was sobbing for that reason. He didn’t want to disappoint his big sis. He didn’t want to be left behind. But neither did he want to take that jump.

  Tabatha was aware that the longer this took, the greater the chances of Dick finding out what was going on. This situation called for a new approach.

  “If you don’t fall down,” she warned the little boy, “the boogieman will catch you and eat you all up. You’re a big boy now. You can do it. Now come on. You don’t think I’d do anything to hurt you, do you?”

  Garry shook his head vigorously. He loved his big sister. She took care of him. She wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him, would she? He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched his nose, just as Tabatha had taught him at the swimming pool. Then he pushed himself off the ledge. When he opened his eyes, he was in Tabatha’s arms. And then he really started sobbing.