CHAPTER 8

They sat in a corner of the 21 Club front lounge in two of the big red leather chairs beside the fireplace. A fire roared in it. The lounge was packed with people waiting for tables. From where McCall sat he could see a small diagonal section of the Bar Room restaurant with its myriad novelties hanging from the ceiling: the Good Year blimp, a jetliner, a football, a racing car with the number 24 on it, a construction worker’s hat, and an old 45 vinyl record encased in plastic. His favorite toy was a model of PT-109, given to the 21 Club as a gift by President John F. Kennedy.

McCall liked this restaurant. When he’d spent more time in New York, when he’d first been married to Cassie, he had come here a lot. He remembered one of the maître d’s, Harry, a good guy. He’d long since retired. But there were still familiar faces greeting patrons and McCall knew the bartender in the Bar Room would still be the same guy, serving drinks faster and with more accuracy than he could ever hope to have. McCall somehow found that comforting. Some things shouldn’t change. He remembered once being taken down to the wine cellar, where there was still the speakeasy steel door used during Prohibition. It was the most elaborately disguised vault in New York, and no feds had ever found the room behind it. To open the door you had to use an eighteen-inch meat skewer in one of the main cracks in the basement wall. Harry had shown it to McCall one night. He wondered if they still gave special customers the grand speakeasy tour.

McCall looked at the windows to his left, lashed with rain, seeing yellow cabs pull up, disgorging folks who still dressed up to go out to dinner. All of the beautifully painted jockeys stood on top of the wrought-iron first-floor railing and descended the stairs to greet the patrons at the entrance with its old-fashioned lamps. There weren’t many restaurants with this kind of history left in New York.

The ambiance in the lounge was noisy, as more people came in from the storm. But none of it touched their quiet oasis at the table in front of the fire. McCall was nursing a Glenfiddich, straight. Cassandra was drinking a vodka gimlet. She was in her late forties, but could pass for late thirties any day of the week. McCall remembered she used to work out at a gym five days a week before it was fashionable. Her body was lithe, the curve of her breasts tantalizing in her pale blue silk shirt, long tanned legs below the short dark blue skirt. Gray shoes, low heels. You walked miles in New York even if you weren’t really going anywhere. Her hair was blond and cut short. No gray yet. She was as beautiful in person as she always was in his mind. Her eyes were hazel and insouciant. Chips of green ice that could chill your blood when she interrogated you. She had been an assistant district attorney in New York City for ten years. Nobody intimidated her. She was forthright to a fault and had made a lot of enemies.

She was also sexy as hell.

“I need a cigarette,” Cassie said, and smiled. “Too bad you can’t smoke anywhere now. If Mayor Bloomberg had had his way, you’d have been busted for lighting up walking down Fifth Avenue. Are you still the ‘Keeper of the flame’?”

“The flame went out. I quit.”

“I wish I could.”

McCall remembered that she used to smoke a lot. Especially when she was nervous.

“What were you doing at Scott’s school so late?” he asked her.

“I had to pick up a math book he’d forgotten to bring home. It’s not something he can access on the Internet. He’s got a test tomorrow. They left it for him in the admin office.”

“How are things in the DA’s office?”

“Criminals, rapists, murderers, the usual suspects.”

“Still working for Jack McCoy?”

She smiled. “Sometimes the DA does remind me of him, except he’s got jet black hair and less of a sense of humor.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“He’s tough, but he’s very fair. He never liked you.”

“I only met him once.”

“First impression. He said you were like a stick of nitroglycerine. Colorless, but could explode at any moment.”

“But you never told him who I worked for.”

“Of course not. How long have you been back in New York?”

“Nine months.”

“And you’ve been stalking Scott that whole time?”

“I’ve watched him on occasion. From the Starbucks across the street from the school. He’s never seen me there and I’ve never approached him. I promised you I’d stay away and I have.”

“That was an easy promise for you to make. You were never home. Why are you here now? Terrorist in our backyard?”

“I’m not here to find any. I resigned from The Company.”

There was a flicker of surprise in her eyes. “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. Why did Control let you walk away?”

“I didn’t give him a choice.”

“But he knows where you are?”

“Until forty-eight hours ago I would have said no.”

“Now you’re not sure?”

“I made a mistake. I stepped into a situation I shouldn’t have. It might have come back to haunt me.”

She took a sip of her vodka gimlet. “So nine months ago you just disappeared off the radar? That’s hard to do.”

“Not really. Take an intelligence agent and drop him somewhere no one knows him and no one needs his skills and he becomes anonymous.”

“So what are you going to do with your life now?”

McCall didn’t have an answer to that. He said nothing.

“Does sitting here at the 21 Club with your ex-wife put you in danger?”

“It’s not me I worry about.”

“No. People around you have a habit of dying.”

The words were said matter-of-factly, but they stung.

McCall said nothing.

She kept her voice casual. “Will The Company issue an order to kill you?”

“Control would have a say in that.”

“And he’s your friend. Probably the only one you’ve ever had. Do you trust him?”

“No.”

“But you think he’s got your back.”

“I think terminating me may not be the way he wants to go. He could have a different agenda.”

“He’d have to take it before a committee.”

“Yes. They might like the idea of terminating me.”

“You were never good with committees,” she said dryly. “They were wary of you. You weren’t predictable.”

“That’s how I stayed alive.”

“But you were never a Company man. You sometimes had your own agenda. I lived with you long enough to know that. You probably scared them. But as long as you were useful to the government, to your country, they tolerated you. Now you’ve defied them.”

“I just walked away,” McCall said. “What I do now and how I live my life is none of their business.”

“It becomes my business if you’re standing in the pouring rain in my son’s school yard. You know I remarried?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a criminal attorney. Tom Blake. But I’m sure you know that, too.”

“Only the name. Not the man.”

“He’s charming and compassionate and he laughs a lot. I never laughed much with you. I felt warm and happy. Sometimes. But there was always … I don’t know how to put it. A shadow over us. The Company, I guess. It darkened every night out and every birthday party at the carousel in Central Park with Scott and every intimate moment between us. It was like you were a coiled spring just walking into a room, or sitting on the porch at our Maine beach house while we sipped white wine and looked out at the ocean. I’m sure your colleagues were all laid-back, playing golf and going to barbecues, treating their dangerous lives as routine. But not you.”

“Tom doesn’t bring his work home?”

“Of course he does. But it’s not intrusive. He’s been a real father to Scott in the last eight years and I don’t want that relationship threatened.”

“I won’t threaten it.”

She nodded slowly. Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, but they just peeked out, like strangers in a place they weren’t supposed to be.

“That’s why you left,” she said. “To protect us. But that should have been our decision. Not yours.”

“Judgment call.”

“And now you wonder if it was the wrong one? Now that you’re a free man again?”

McCall didn’t answer.

“I know you loved me. And Scott. Something happened. Something that made you abandon us. What was it? And don’t give me that ‘it’s classified’ or ‘need to know’ crap.”

“Nothing specific. Just a lot of small things. They added up.”

She finished her Vodka Gimlet and stood up.

“I could take out a restraining order against you.”

Again, that matter-of-factness, as if she was suggesting a lunch date.

“You’d have to know the name I’m using. You don’t. You’d need to know where I live. You don’t. And you’re not going to. When we walk out of the 21 Club, you’ll go right back to where you were before you saw me in the rain in that school yard.”

“And where will you go?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll stay away.”

“That’s a promise you obviously haven’t been able to keep. Now it may be harder.”

“Because we’ve seen each other and talked?”

“Yes. Is it harder now?”

“Yes,” McCall said.

She put on her raincoat. “Stay out of our lives, Robert. Don’t come to the school again. Don’t sit at Starbucks and watch your son. It’s creepy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the same man who left us for the same reason. You’re too dangerous to be with.” Then, quieter: “But it was very good to see you again.”

She picked up her purse and walked out of the restaurant.

McCall drank the rest of his scotch. He left money on the table, picked up his coat, and shook some hands at the front desk as he walked out.

The figure on the last stool at the other end of the Bar Room restaurant watched McCall leave, quickly paid his bill, and followed. He was pretty confident he hadn’t been spotted.

*   *   *

McCall had spotted him as soon as he sat down in the 21 Club lounge with Cassie. He walked up Fifty-second Street, pulling up his collar against the biting rain. He figured the tail was probably a hundred or so yards back.

McCall mingled with the crowd outside the Winter Garden Theater in the Mamma Mia! intermission. He walked inside, through the lobby, into the theater, down the left-hand aisle, and through a door beside the stage. He was backstage in the chaos of the actors and out the stage door entrance before the old stage doorkeeper could even look up.

McCall jogged to the end of the alleyway behind the theater and only then turned around. No one came out of the stage door after him.

Misdirection.

Magicians did it all the time. They had you look in one place because the magic was happening somewhere else. I’m shuffling these cards in my right hand, so you don’t see me palming your card with my left.

McCall had been intent on losing the tail he’d picked up, on foot, from the 21 Club. He hadn’t noticed the ’65 Pontiac LeMans hardtop pull out of a parking space across the street from the 21 Club. He hadn’t seen it cruising down Broadway behind him. When he disappeared into the crowd of theatergoers smoking outside the Winter Garden, the men in the Pontiac had been closer to McCall than the shadower. They’d seen him duck into the auditorium. The driver figured he wouldn’t be coming out that way. He had thought, incorrectly, that McCall had spotted the Pontiac. He doubted whether McCall was actually going to sit down and watch the second act of the show, although he’d seen it a year ago and thought it was a blast. Folks enjoying themselves in some tropical place, not a care in the world while out on the street life was brutal, but the music was catchy and you couldn’t help humming those goddamned songs when you walked out of the theater.

No, he figured McCall was going to another exit, probably at the back of the theater. He’d swung the Pontiac over to a spot beside a fire hydrant. Had to keep a lookout for cops. He didn’t want to get a ticket or, worse, be hauled to a precinct because the beat cop recognized him. He had a healthy rap sheet and a rep, but not in this neighborhood.

They’d been rewarded five minutes later when he’d seen McCall on Eighth Avenue. He walked down Fiftieth Street to Seventh. A blessing. They could not have followed him down Eighth; traffic was going uptown. McCall was heading downtown. It was still pouring with rain, visibility seriously reduced, and the driver expected him to duck into a doorway until this monsoon got a little lighter, or take the subway, but he didn’t. He just kept walking. The Pontiac followed behind. The driver guided the wheel with a little difficulty, but he was managing just fine, thank you.

McCall cut over to Broadway at Forty-fourth Street and continued walking. Block after block, past the Village, until he crossed over Broome Street. They nearly lost him there, because a sanitation truck pulled out from an alleyway right in front of them. The driver swerved around it. What the fuck were they doing picking up garbage at this hour? It took him a moment to find his quarry again, but he was still on Broadway. He finally turned left onto Grand Street. Then almost immediately he turned right onto Crosby Street. The driver turned the corner. Ahead, he saw him stop in front of a three-story brownstone. The driver pulled over to the curb and double-parked. He didn’t need to stay long. Through the rain-streaked windshield he saw his quarry use his key to get into the building. It took him a few seconds to climb the stairs—he was sure there was no elevator in there—and a light went on in a third-floor window. Probably the living room. He knew the apartments in these old brownstones had been modernized. Some of them were really nice. He’d be seeing the inside of that third-floor apartment real soon.

Behind him the two brothers in the backseat shifted uncomfortably. Big Gertie was 350 pounds, folded into a cramped space, and he probably didn’t appreciate the tour of the city at a snail’s pace. But that was okay. The night had been a real success.

J.T. knew where Bobby Maclain worked.

Now he knew where he lived.

*   *   *

His office was in a nondescript building in a complex in Herndon, Virginia. It was not listed at Langley as an annex. It was not listed anywhere. Officially “The Company” did not exist. There were six eight-story buildings that all looked alike in carefully landscaped grounds. Control’s building was the last one in the industrial park, nearest the highway. You got to his office by being escorted up to the sixth floor, through cubbyholed small offices. His was one of the only offices on the floor that had a window. Near his office was a war room manned by forty analysts, sitting at computer consoles, two big screens in front of them, one showing hot spots in countries around the world, the other running constant news feeds from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, Al Jazeera, and other foreign news broadcasts.

The office was lit by one muted lamp. Otherwise it was in darkness. Control liked it that way. He was tired. They’d taken a 6:30 A.M. Turkish Airlines flight from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow and arrived at Dulles in D.C. at 7:30 P.M. He’d got to his building in Virginia around 8:30 P.M. He sat at his desk, the computer screen of his Mac glowing in the muted shadows. There was a discreet knock on his door and his executive assistant opened it. Her name was Emma Marshall; she was a Brit, late twenties, gorgeous, but chose to hide that fact behind tinted glasses, her blond hair swept back somewhat severely, conservative clothes, always a man’s white shirt and a long skirt to disguise a spectacular figure; she was spectacularly unsuccessful. She had a wicked sense of humor, but right now things were tense around the office.

“Mr. Kostmayer is here,” she said in her delicious British accent that Control loved.

“Send him in,” Control said.

She paused in the doorway. “You shouldn’t beat yourself up for what happened outside Moscow. Elena would hate that.” Control looked up at her. “If you ever want to talk, Brits are good listeners. Except when you talked to us before the Revolutionary War about no taxation without representation. By the way, how is life with no taxation working out for you?” Control smiled in spite of himself. “And if you need a shoulder to cry on, mine is well padded.”

Control involuntarily looked at her right breast and shoulder, at the mischievous smile that always seemed to be on her lips, and said, “Send Mr. Kostmayer in.”

Emma disappeared. Kostmayer walked into the shadowy room and closed the door behind him.

“Take a look at this,” Control said.

Kostmayer walked around the desk and leaned on it, looking over Control’s shoulder. On the computer screen was what they’d found on the flash drive that Elena had stolen from Alexei Berezovsky. It was a diagram of long, undulating snakes that intersected in places, several of them highlighted, a rectangle at the bottom, a square at the top. Some of the passageways—if that’s what they were—were shaded in blue. That was it. No numbers, no letters, no encrypted messages.

“It looks like a series of subterranean tunnels,” Kostmayer said.

“Which could be anywhere. Are we looking at a diagram of tunnels in a U.S. city, or one in Europe? In the Middle East? Somewhere in China? And what kind of tunnels? Passageways below ground? We don’t know that. They could be a maze in a cornfield above ground. They could be passageways in some large industrial warehouse. We’ve got a route traced through the labyrinth, leading from a rectangle to a square. Point A to Point B. I need to know what’s at Point A and what’s at Point B.”

“There was nothing else on the flash drive at all?”

“The computer techs are going through it, but so far this is all we’ve got.” Control sat back from the pale screen with its series of lines crisscrossing one another. “Not worth much for Elena’s life, is it?”

“She knew the risks.”

“I was her Control in the field. I took on the assignment personally because I believed in her. I also wanted to prove something to myself. That I still had the skill to run an agent and not from behind a desk. I screwed up. I didn’t calculate the odds correctly.”

“Sometimes the odds are just against you. No matter how prepared you are.”

“Then you need something to better those odds.”

“Berezovsky was one step ahead of us.”

“It was more than that. It was a test. He gave his new assassin a rushed assignment. He probably didn’t have more than twenty minutes to initiate a COA. The assassin didn’t retrieve the flash drive, that was the prize, although Berezovsky knew there was nothing on it that would mean anything to anyone but himself. But his killer did pass Berezovsky’s test. His target was eliminated.”

“Not cleanly.”

“No. Why didn’t the assassin go for the kill shot? Elena could have told us intel that compromised his boss. Why did he only wound her?”

Kostmayer ticked them off on his fingers. “Wind factor. Low visibility in the storm. Heard us coming and rushed the shot.”

“Not if he’s a pro. There’s something else. Something personal. Do we have any intel on this guy?”

“Could be a code name. Diablo. There was chatter about him from the Bosnia station.”

“I’m not familiar with the name.”

“No one is. We’re going through Interpol data banks. Might not even be the same guy. But if he’s passed Berezovsky’s test, what happens next?”

“An assassination. That’s the business Berezovsky is in.”

“Do we have any idea who?”

“A high-level politician. Could be the president, or someone in his cabinet, could be an ambassador at one of our foreign embassies. Our intel says it’s an American target. And Berezovsky is one-stop shopping. You’re running a terrorist cell or planning a coup in your country or you’re the CEO of a major corporation with competition you want to see go away. Berezovsky supplies the high-powered rifle, or the bomb components, he hires the assassin or the suicide bombers, the mission is accomplished on schedule, and he ties up all the loose ends.”

“Do we have a time frame?”

“Not yet.”

“Too bad we don’t have McCall. He and Berezovsky have a history.”

“I want McCall back.”

“He’s going to stay off the grid.”

Control got up and walked to the dark window. There was no moonlight. He looked out at the rain sweeping across the sparkling highway and the parkway. The branches of the trees were black shapes bending in the wind.

“My daughter Lindsay will be twenty-four in June. That’s four years younger than Elena. Lindsay’s working for the French embassy here in D.C. As far as anyone knows, her old man works in some low-level government bureaucratic office, plays a lot of golf, and drinks forty-year-old Strathisla single malt whiskey at the Capitol Grill. But what if there’s intel out there that linked her to a spymaster? How could I sleep at night knowing I had put her life in danger?”

“McCall’s been estranged from his family for years. No one knows they even exist.”

Control took out his iPhone, hit a couple of buttons, and tossed it to Kostmayer. On the LED screen was a photograph of a man sitting at the 21 Club with an attractive blonde in her mid-forties. The man had his back to the camera.

“That was taken on a smartphone at the 21 Club in New York City tonight. You can’t see the man’s face from this angle. The woman he’s sitting with is an ADA named Cassandra Blake. She’s McCall’s ex-wife.”

“So she’s having cocktails with her new husband.”

“Her husband is a criminal attorney named Tom Blake who’s deposing a wise guy informant in Philadelphia. Comes home at the weekend.”

“Okay, it’s a colleague from work.”

“Or it’s Robert McCall.”

“Reaching out for what he’s lost all these years? I don’t see McCall doing that.”

“You don’t know what he’d do or wouldn’t do. You think you got close to McCall? Think again. No one does. I want you to fly to New York tomorrow morning. If he’s starting to reach out to people, I don’t want him finding out about Elena Petrov from someone else. You gave her your word.”

“He’s not involved in this life any longer.”

Control turned from the window. “You don’t walk away. The past is never over. It harmonizes with the present. It becomes part of your future.”

“So he finds out. From me or from someone else. There’s nothing he can do about it.”

“This is Robert McCall.”

There was silence, then Kostmayer nodded.

“Okay.”

“If we have found McCall, I want you to reach out to him. Bring him in from the cold. Before he goes after this assassin, or the killer sets up his sniper rifle on a roof overlooking McCall’s New York apartment. Wherever the hell that is.”

“Why would the shooter go after McCall?”

“Elena Petrov had a relationship with him. Berezovsky ties up loose ends. And he knows what McCall is capable of.”

Kostmayer nodded and walked to the door.

“And Mickey…”

Kostmayer opened the door, turning back. It was late, only a couple of analysts working in their cubicles outside Control’s office. It felt hushed and expectant. Like when you smell thunder in the air, but the storm hasn’t hit yet.

“Tell him I’m very sorry she died in my arms,” Control said, and sat back down at his desk, staring at the labyrinth of tunnels or passageways that led nowhere.

Kostmayer gently closed the door.