A cold, damp breeze whistled through the sparse Sardinian forest. The man took a deep breath and kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. “I worked at the US embassy in Caracas,” he said. “Economics. I spun economic data into propaganda. I drank. I got involved in things I shouldn’t have.”
Sam closed her eyes and nodded. Familiar story. She had a hunch about where it was headed. “What things?”
A long pause. “I sold things.”
“Sold things,” Sam said. “Like nutrition shakes? Water filters? Girl Scout cookies?”
He smiled. Lines grew around his eyes, adding a decade to his face. “Other things,” he said.
“I need specifics,” Sam said.
“I sold embassy data to a third party.”
“Why did you do that?”
He chuckled, shook his head. “To this day, I don’t really know. I was bored, I guess. Plus my boyfriend kind of eased me into it.”
“Boyfriend?”
The man looked at her. “Yes, I’m one of those.”
“I don’t care who you sleep with. I’m just trying to put the pieces together.”
“Charley Arlinghaus was his name. CIA agent. But I didn’t know it at the time.”
Sam scrunched her face. “Your CIA agent boyfriend nudged you toward selling state secrets?”
He snorted. “It gets better. As it turned out, my customers weren’t who I thought they were.”
Sam arched her eyebrows, urging him on.
“Exel Oil, not a real oil company.”
“What were they?”
“An Agency front.”
Sam laughed out loud and Hayward looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a new level of cynicism.”
He nodded. “They had me by the balls. They kidnapped me while I was back in DC. A giant knee-capper named Quinn ran a belt sander across my back until I signed the papers, which was all unnecessary because they knew everything already. I was selling US secrets to the CIA. The whole thing was a setup.”
“For little old you? To snare Peter Kittredge, economic genius? Why didn’t they just approach you the usual way? God and country, all of that crap.”
He shook his head. “These are really bad people. They do godawful things. There’s just too big a gap between the mom-and-apple-pie sales pitch and the disgusting shit these guys are involved in.”
“So they went for the hard sell,” Sam said. “You were their door opener?”
“In Venezuela, the VSS approached me, trying to get at the CIA. I sort of bounced between the two agencies, but the CIA managed to use me to get at the VSS. Quinn showed me pictures of what the Agency had done to the Venezuelans. The whole thing really shook me up. After Caracas, I ran. I wound up in Cologne.”
Sam eyed him. She saw guilt in his eyes and sorrow on his face. “But they found you,” she said.
He nodded. “I was trying to drink away the Venezuela thing, and I wasn’t making great decisions. They engineered another bloodbath and I ended up accidentally killing a girl. I wound up more trapped than ever. They shipped me back to the States to make me into what they called a ‘real’ asset. They spent a bunch of time and money on me. Some of it sunk in, but . . .”
“You weren’t a true believer,” Sam said.
“Exactly,” he said. “But they had all this . . . history hanging over my head, and I was stuck.”
“You mean the secrets you sold in Venezuela?”
He nodded. “After a year of training, they sent me into the field. My job was to weasel my way into a situation. Make friends, maybe sleep with the right people.”
Sam smiled. “Doesn’t sound so bad.”
She saw a weak smile on his face that quickly faded. “A lot of lives will never be the same because of me,” he said.
The silence lengthened. Sam pondered what to do with him. She glanced at his eyes. They were watching something that happened a long time ago, something terrible.
“Tell me about right now,” Sam said after a while. “What were you doing in that safe house?”
He shrugged. “Trying to be the fucking hero.”
“How so?”
“Joao Ferdinand-Xavier is his name. Chemist. Big brain. Spaniard of Portuguese descent. Runs a company with offices in Spain and Singapore.”
Sam nodded, prodding him on.
“He invented something special, something Big Brother covets.”
“Let me guess,” Sam said. “Joao doesn’t have a price. He has a conscience.”
He nodded. “And a daughter.”
“Which was where you came in.”
He turned pale, and Sam thought he was going to be sick.
“Didn’t you say you were living with a man in Venezuela?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” he said. “My personal life has always been . . . complicated.”
“I’m not judging. I’m confused, though. Why the beef with your employer?”
He shrugged, squinted his eyes a bit. “Because you can never force a man’s loyalty, and you can never fully destroy his morality.”
Sam frowned. “What do you mean? Did you do something? Sabotage an op?”
The beginnings of a smile caused those lines to appear around his eyes again. “I had never thought to use that word,” he said, “but that’s about the size of it.”
“So you blew the Agency op on purpose.”
He nodded. “I warned Katrin and her family about the CIA’s interest in Joao’s company.”
“Why would you do that?”
No answer, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math. “She means something to you,” Sam said.
He met her eyes. He looked hurt and conflicted. “Yes,” he said. “I love her. But I wasn’t quite thorough enough with my bug search.”
“Ouch,” Sam said.
He nodded but said nothing more. Sam didn’t press him for details about what happened next, because there wasn’t any need. She knew enough about the CIA to know that whatever they had done was bound to be horrific.
Sam let another long moment pass. She digested what she’d learned about the Agency’s connection to the Cagliari safe house. It struck her that there was a lot more she needed to understand. “I assume you found what the Agency is after,” she said.
“That’s right. They murdered Katrin’s mother. They set me up to be the one to find her. I found an RFID tag buried under the skin of her leg. It led me to a database.”
Sam shook her head. “Nice guys.”
“You have no idea.”
He fell silent.
She pursed her lips. “Are you sure the data tag wasn’t a setup?”
He stood up, kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. “I’m not sure of anything at all. They promised to kill me, and they’ve had plenty of opportunities to put a bullet in me since this thing went sideways. But so far, they haven’t tried very hard.”
Sam connected the dots. “Which makes you think maybe you found the real thing, and they’re still looking for it.”
He nodded. “Why else would they keep me in play? Plus, Maria’s scar wasn’t new. The tag had been embedded in her leg for weeks. Months maybe.”
“Because Joao knew what he’d stumbled on,” Sam surmised.
“And he knew what kind of people would want to take it from him.”
“And you don’t think your Agency friends found it, too?”
He shook his head. “Impossible to say. You don’t have to remove the tag to read the data, but my guess is they just missed it. Otherwise, why waste time messing around with me?”
“Why indeed.”
The wind kicked up. Sam’s chill deepened. She turned and walked toward the car.
He called after her. “You’re not going to shoot me in the throat?”
She shook her head. “Not at this juncture.”
“Are you going to leave me here?”
She looked around at the dark, desolate forest, then looked at him. “No,” she said.
She opened the car door, then stopped. “But I’m going to need to know what to call you.”
He thought for a long moment. “Hayward is fine.”