My four-year-old son.
Takes a particularly vile specimen of humanity to do something like that. Corliss was damaged, I’ll give him that. He was a living, breathing wreck of a human being. He’d been through a tragic, devastating nightmare while running the DEA’s operations in Southern California. Using my son, heinous as it was, came out of a twisted obsession he had for revenge. He’d paid the ultimate price for his misguided deed, but the depraved sicko who’d actually handled the dirty work-a CIA agent by the name of Reed Corrigan-was still out there.
Even by spook standards, this Corrigan had to be seriously depraved. And as a badged federal agent, it was my sworn duty to make sure his depravity never darkened anyone else’s life. Preferably by choking the life out of him with my bare hands. Slowly.
Not Bureau standard operating procedure, by the way.
Problem was, I couldn’t track him down. And the fact that my previous boss, Tom Janssen, was not the guy sitting here in his old office on the twenty-sixth floor of Federal Plaza and facing me from behind that big desk wasn’t helping either.
Janssen I could count on.
This guy-the new assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, Ron Gallo-well, let’s just say that in his case, the ADIC acronym that came with the job was a really nice fit.
“You need to drop this, Reilly,” my new boss was insisting. “Let it go. Move on.”
“‘Move on’?” I shot back. “After what they did?” I managed to avoid spewing out what I really wanted to say and, instead, settled for: “Would you?”
Gallo took in a stiff breath, then gave me an even more exasperated stare as he let it seep back out, slowly. “Let it go. You got Navarro. Corliss is dead. Case closed. You’re just wasting your time-and ours. If the Agency doesn’t want one of their own to be found, you’re not going to find him. Besides, even if you did-what then? Without Corliss around to back you up, what proof have you got?”
He gave me his signature deadpan, patronizing look, and much as I hated to admit it, the ADIC had a point. I didn’t have much to press my case. Sure, Corliss had told me he’d reached out to Corrigan to get it done. But Corliss was dead. As was Munro, his wingman in that whole sick affair. Which meant that even if I ever did manage to break through the CIA’s impenetrable omertà and actually get my hands on the spectral Mr. Corrigan, in strictly legal terms, it would be my word against his.
“Get back to work,” he ordered me. “The kind we pay you for. It’s not like you don’t have enough on your plate, is it?”
I tapped his desk hard with two fingers. “I’m not dropping this.”
He shrugged back. “Suit yourself-long as it’s on your own dime.”
Like I said re: the custom-tailored acronym.
I left his office in a funk and, given that it was almost eleven and I hadn’t yet had breakfast, I decided it would be a good time to get some fresh air and smother my frustrations in a sandwich and a coffee from my favorite four-wheeled restaurant. It was a crisp October morning in lower Manhattan, with a clear sky and a brisk little breeze whistling in through the concrete canyons all around me. Within ten minutes, I was sitting on a bench outside City Hall with a bacon-and-fontina omelet roll in one hand, a steaming cup in the other, and a whole lot of unanswered questions on my mind.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really worried about the legalities involved. I had to find him first, him and the shrink or shrinks who’d messed with Alex’s mind. It wasn’t just out of my need for justice and, yes, revenge. It was for Alex’s sake.
As we’d done earlier this morning, we’d been taking Alex to see a child psychologist once a week since we all got back from California. The shrink, Stacey Ross, was good. Tess-Tess Chaykin, my live-in paramour, the fearless archaeologist-turned-bestselling-novelist I’d been with for five years-had taken her daughter, Kim, to see Stacey after that notorious night at the Met, the night of the Templar raid that Tess and Kim had witnessed firsthand. Kim had been nine at the time, and what she’d seen there had, understandably, affected her. Stacey had, according to Tess, done wonders for Kim, and we needed those wonders now. But Stacey needed to know what they’d done to Alex to figure out how to undo it properly. She knew everything we knew-I hadn’t kept anything from her-but it wasn’t much. Alex was improving under her care, which was heartening. But the nightmares and the nervousness were still around. Worse, I felt some of the awful stuff they’d planted in his brain about me-like making him believe he had a cold-blooded killer for a dad, and that wasn’t even the worst part-was still lurking around in there. I could sometimes see it in his eyes when he looked at me. A hesitation, an unease. A fear. My own kid, looking at me like that, even for a second, when I would happily die for him. It just gutted me, every time.
I had to find these guys and get them to tell me exactly what they’d done to him and how best to flush it out of him. But it wasn’t going to be easy, not without the support of a Bureau heavy-hitter wielding a big, heavy bat. None of the monster databases I had fed Corrigan’s name into-the public, commercial, criminal, or governmental ones-had given up a hit that fit the profile of the kind of creep I was after. Not that there were that many Reed Corrigans out there, anyway, but the few the system did cough up were relatively easy to check out and dismiss. All, that is, but one. A certain Reed Corrigan was one of three directors of a corporation called Devon Holdings. The company had a P.O. box address in Middletown, Delaware, and little else on record. It had, though, leased a couple of Beechcraft King Airs, as well as a small Learjet, back in the early 1990s. When I took a closer look at Devon, it quickly became clear that the two other officers listed with Corrigan were also ghosts, shabbily crafted ones at that-their social-security numbers were registered in 1989, kind of unusually late in life for guys who were company directors two years later. Devon was a sham paper company that, upon further investigation, led me back to-quelle surprise-the CIA.
Peeling back the layers of such dummy corporations wasn’t too complicated. We used them a lot, as did other agencies, including the CIA. They were handy for establishing cover personas for agents and, beyond that, for all kinds of covert activities, like chartering and leasing planes for rendition flights of terrorist suspects or ferrying agents quietly across borders, which is what I suspected might have been going on here. Reed Corrigan was the fake identity my ghost agent had been using while working on whatever the Devon assignment involved, and it was an identity that he had evidently long ago discarded, which was standard practice once the assignment was completed or terminated.
No name. No face.
A ghost.
This didn’t come as a huge surprise to me. Corliss had only muttered the name grudgingly, and it was suddenly clear to me that he had been a pro right to the bitter end by not giving up his buddy’s real name. He had no reason to sink him, not when the guy had come through for him. And while the fake name gave me a bone to chew on, it also gave my ghost something far meatier: advance warning that I was coming after him. Somewhere, on some server in some basement at Langley, a flag would have inevitably come up as soon as I started digging into the Corrigan persona, and he’d have been alerted about that-and about me. Which meant it was safe to assume he already knew I was gunning for him, while I didn’t know the first thing about him.
Kudos to Hank Corliss for the posthumous flip-off.
It had all got me wondering about how Hank Corliss knew Corrigan’s fake name, and how he managed to dredge it up under pressure like that. He had to be real familiar with it. Then I wondered if maybe it was the only name by which he knew him. It had to be one of two scenarios: either he only knew him as Reed Corrigan, which meant that they’d met under shady circumstances while my ghost was using his cover identity and didn’t feel a need to share his real identity with Corliss; or-and this seemed more likely to me, given that Corliss had reached out to Corrigan for help with his dastardly, off-the-books deed-he knew his real name, but they’d both been part of some assignment, some task-force bonding experience where my ghost had been using the name Corrigan.