She’s seen this picture before, albeit in a very different form.
It’s an official-looking black-and-white portrait from the military. Maggie would guess that it’s thirty or forty years old, maybe more. Oleg Ragoravich is in uniform. He stares straight into the camera, his expression blank, a stone.
Oh, no. It can’t be.
It’s then that Maggie feels her phone vibrate with a text. It’s from Nadia:
Ivan Brovski just landed. He’s in France.
Nadia included a screenshot of a map. Maggie zooms in with her fingers. When she sees Brovski’s exact location, Maggie’s head starts spinning anew.
Damn, Maggie thinks. I had it wrong the whole time.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maggie cannot believe what she is seeing.
For the first time in so long, her heart bursts with joy.
An hour later — an hour spent putting so much of it together — she lands at Heathrow Airport. If you are one of those people who want to make sure you get your ten thousand steps in every day, Maggie suggests you fly into Heathrow. You walk left and right. You go upstairs and down. You use escalators and moving walkways. It’s also a “tease” walk — every time you think it’s over, there is just one more turn, one more set of stairs, one escalator, one more moving walkway to go.
Several flights landed at the same time, the passengers disembarking and first flowing and then clogging up the main Terminal 3 artery that leads to the passport and immigration heart.
Maggie feels alone, adrift, and yet there is finally a real sense of purpose. She is putting it together. Not all of it. Not yet. But she thinks she has a big-time lead. Fatigue radiates from every pore in her body as she gets through passport control, bypasses the baggage carousel and customs, steps through the exit door...
She freezes when she sees him, half worried it’s just a mirage.
Cue the bursting heart.
There are a ton of people in the arrivals hall. Chauffeurs with various name signs — some handwritten, some on touchscreen pads — are scattered everywhere. There are loved ones with welcome balloons and friends standing on their tiptoes, craning their necks to see who exits next. There are tour representatives and airport staff — maybe a hundred, two hundred people in all — but Maggie sees him right away.
Porkchop!
When she looks his way, Porkchop lifts his sunglasses and wiggles his eyebrows. Maggie shouts — shouts out loud — “Porkchop!” and breaks into a run. She wonders whether she’s ever been so happy to see someone, and no answer comes to her. He spreads his thick arms, and Maggie jumps into them. Porkchop swallows her up in a bear hug. She welcomes the smell of Marlboro and leather, and then Maggie just lets everything go. She collapses into the bear hug. Her smile gives way to tears. She digs her face into the leather and for a few moments she just cries. Porkchop lets her, holds her up. He cups the back of her head with his big hand. His voice is uncharacteristically choked up as he mutters, “It’s okay now, Mags, it’s all okay.”
She manages to say, “How...?”
“I was flying to Dubai,” he says. “There was a change of planes in London so...”
“I’m so happy to see you.” She hugs him harder. Then: “I think I know where we have to go now.”
“Where?”
“Bordeaux. A vineyard called Château Haut-Bailly.”
“I did some research on the plane,” Maggie tells him, as they stroll out of the arrivals hall. “There are no nonstop flights from Heathrow to Bordeaux.”
“You don’t want to fly anyway,” Porkchop says, heading for the stairwell. “Too much scrutiny. Come on. Do you have anything that can track you?”
She thinks about it for a moment. “The phone Charles Lockwood gave me.”
Porkchop gestures toward a trash can. She dumps the phone in it and keeps on moving. A sign reads HEATHROW EXPRESS. They follow it, walking side by side.
“So why Bordeaux?” Porkchop asks.
She quickly explains how Steve had told her that the medical researchers had packed up from Apollo Longevity and moved to a secret location. When she finishes, Porkchop says, “And you think the secret location is on a Bordeaux vineyard.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me why.”
Maggie had spent a lot of the flight working out the angles. She is eager to try out her theory on the only person who might get it. “You remember the last time I called Trace?”
“Of course.”
“I know you remember. It wasn’t a question.”
The Heathrow Express arrives, and they hop on. Porkchop sits and waits. He isn’t the type to say I told you so, but he had warned her about making that call. She hadn’t listened. Porkchop had been against reaching out to Trace. “You don’t want to tip him off,” he’d told her.
And, of course, Porkchop had been right.
“Trace was in Dubai when I called him,” Maggie says.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve met his girlfriend. Fiancée, actually.”
“The Nadia who wanted you to do the surgeries?”
“Yes.”
“And you told her you called Trace?”
Maggie shakes her head. “She confronted me about it.”
“What did you say?”
“I denied it.” Denied it, Maggie thinks. A polite way of saying I straight-up lied to her face. “I said I never called him.”
“Does she believe you?”
“Hard to know.”
Porkchop nods. “Go on.”
“So after I called, we know Trace vanished. You figured he had something to hide and ran off.”
“Me?”
“Okay, I did too. But not like you.”
Porkchop’s face is set. “You know what we learned at the TriPoint refugee camp.”
She nods. “One witness — and only one witness — claims they saw Trace leaving the camp after Marc was killed. That’s it. And the witness could have gotten the timing wrong, whatever. Anyway, I called Trace because I wanted to hear his explanation. Not over the phone. Face-to-face.”
“And he ran instead,” Porkchop says, spreading his hands. “Gee, that doesn’t seem suspicious.”
“The point is, we figured he’d gone to Bangladesh or some other remote area.”
“Made the most sense. Easier for him to hide.”
“Either way,” Maggie says, “you’ve been searching for him ever since. And you’re good at this kind of thing, Porkchop.”
“Not that good.”
“No, you are. And you’re — shall we say — highly motivated. Yet you’ve come up with nothing.”
“The point being?”
“Maybe we got it wrong,” Maggie says.
“How so?”
She sits up and turns to him. “Okay, so right after I called Trace, he broke into Apollo Longevity and stole the THUMPR7, the DNA sequencing machine, all of it. At first, I figured his plan was to fly to America and hide that stuff in those safe deposit boxes.”
“Makes sense.”
“It did, yes.”
“It doesn’t anymore?”
“Let me try this theory on you,” Maggie says.
“I’m listening.”
“Suppose Trace never planned on coming to America.”
“Because he planned on running?”
“Not like we think.”
“I’m not following.”
“I think Trace flew that day from Dubai — not to the United States but to Bordeaux. I think that’s where Oleg Ragoravich built in secret his new ‘fountain of youth’ headquarters. Trace was fascinated by that vineyard. Château Haut-Bailly. His apartment has a ton of wine from it. He even sent Marc and I there on vacation.”
Porkchop allows himself a small nod.