I’d also missed out on most of my own son’s young life, given that his mom-someone I had a brief, but intense, fling with a few years ago-had neglected to tell me about him until she and I had reconnected last summer. Not exactly your classic Hallmark family, but these days, I guess, few families are.
Kim was a great girl, more a fine testimony to Tess’s single-parenting skills than to anything I had contributed since we’d all started living together. She and I got along really well. Much like her mom, she was impossibly headstrong and as sharp as The Bride’s samurai blade, by turns delighting us with her growing independence and infuriating us with her dismissal of entirely reasonable boundaries. After the mortal risks I’d seen her mother take, survive, then thrive upon, I really shouldn’t have been at all surprised. I even liked her boyfriend, Giorgio, a year older than her and a junior who already had Yale in his sights, despite their current sub-seven-percent admission rate. I’d once pictured myself pulling the Bad Boys routine on my daughter’s boyfriend’s ass, shotgun, wife-beater, and bottle of whiskey included, but the darned kid, clever and yet cool and sporty, had cruelly deprived me of any such pleasure.
Alex, on the other hand, still hadn’t shaken off his demons. But at least he and Kim had bonded pretty much instantly. To her credit, she had happily embraced the big sister role that had been thrust upon her, and seeing them together was a source of solace in the bittersweet world I seemed doomed to inhabit.
I threw on a T-shirt and some sweatpants and lumbered down to the kitchen. Despite still feeling groggy, it didn’t take long for the Daland/Maxiplenty case to recede into inconsequence, shoved aside by the resurgent and aforementioned white whales that were crowding my mind. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My globetrotting adventures with Tess had served to reinforce the notion that we’re never done with the past. Or rather, the past is never done with us. It’s just a matter of the correct key being turned in the right lock and all the secrets come tumbling out. And we can never know how we’re going to deal with them until they’re staring us in the face.
Shuffling into the kitchen, I could hear Tess in her home office, tapping away at her desk with the usual deft precision. It still took me twice as long as it should to file a simple report. I poured myself some coffee, glanced at the front page of the New York Times on Tess’s charging iPad, then wandered, mug in hand, into the study, where my very own bestselling novelist/paramour was busy knocking out yet another page-turner.
She sat behind a very cool, huge aluminum desk that had been crafted from the tip of an old aircraft’s wing; a gift from yours truly after her first novel hit the New York Times bestsellers list. Her eyes lingered on her screen as I sat down in an armchair facing her, coffee cradled in both hands. My attention was drawn to the rear of the house. The deck and small garden were, I now noticed, dotted with strands of miniature red and green lights. I gazed through the French doors, transfixed for a moment, then Tess looked up and smiled that radiant smile that always makes me give a conflicted and perverse thanks for the violent night when we first met.
She swung her long legs out from behind the desk. “Christmas lights and two thousand words already. Not a bad morning’s work, huh?”
I smiled. “You’re such a slacker. No lunch break for you.”
She tilted her head and pursed her lips. “Actually, I figured we’d skip lunch and just head upstairs and you could help me choose which dress to wear Thursday night. Unless you have other plans?”
I was about to voice an objection-I mean, sure, we were going to be having dinner with the president. The president. At the White House. The dress choice was, I guess, important-and then, the look on her face as she’d said it hit a certain sweet spot inside my skull and I realized that this was code for something else entirely.
Jeez, I love this woman.
I titled my head, mock-studying her. “I did, but I know how much the holiday season means to you and the last thing I’d want is to disappoint you.”
She flashed me a grin. “Hang on to that thought, cowboy.”
I did have plans. I’d arranged to meet Kurt Jaegers in Jersey. Kurt was a white-hat hacker, a tech wizard who was helping me out privately, totally off the books. He’d asked for a meet, which could mean he had news for me, good news. I wasn’t holding my breath, but I also had some new ideas on how he could help me with the white whales I was hunting.
Right now, all that could wait.
I needed to live a little first.
So, about those white whales I mentioned earlier, the ones preoccupying me during the stake-out at Daland’s house. The ones Nick and the Bureau couldn’t know about.
Not one, but two things eating away at me, chewing me up from the inside.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure whale is the best metaphor here. Something like the alien from, well, Alien, the one that burst out of John Hurt’s chest in the first movie, is probably a better fit.
It all had to do with my son Alex, and my dad.
For starters, I was still trying to track down the elusive “Reed Corrigan.” Corrigan-real name, unknown-is the ex-CIA spook who had orchestrated the brainwashing of Alex earlier this year. A son I never knew I had, up until then. His mom, Michelle, an ex-DEA agent I’d dated while on assignment in Mexico, before I met Tess, had never told me she got pregnant. While living out in California, Michelle and Alex had got caught up in a sick plan to flush out a psycho Mexican drug baron nicknamed “El Brujo”-the sorcerer. The plan involved brainwashing Alex and using him as bait. Corrigan had worked on the CIA’s mind control programs and had arranged to have some pretty disturbing things dumped into Alex’s brain. The plan had gone seriously wrong and I’d got sucked into it. It had ended up causing Michelle’s death and left me and Tess to pick up the pieces with Alex while Corrigan, whoever he was, was still out there somewhere.
I wasn’t going to stop until I found the bastard.
Alex was now doing better, thanks to a shrink we’d been taking him to see every week. His nightmares had subsided, but they were still there, off and on. Moreover, the nasty things they’d planted in his mind about me were, I felt-maybe more out of hope than out of anything concrete-starting to subside. I didn’t get the feeling that he was looking at me as apprehensively and fearfully as he often used to. We were tiptoeing our way into doing some normal father-and-son stuff, like me taking him to Teeball practice on Saturday mornings, but we still had a long ways to go.
To find Corrigan, I’d recruited Kurt to help me get into the CIA’s files. When that didn’t work, I’d resorted to blackmailing a CIA analyst Kurt had identified for me, a sleazeball called Stan Kirby who’d been having an affair with his wife’s sister. That exercise had mixed results. On the one hand, and totally unexpectedly, it turned out to be key in saving the president’s life-hence our forthcoming dinner at the White House with the Yorkes themselves in a couple of days’ time. On the other hand, it hadn’t been much use in helping me get my hands on Reed Corrigan.
Kirby had dug up three case files that mentioned Corrigan, but they were all highly redacted and weren’t much use.
One of them, though, kicked up the second whale, or alien, or whatever metaphor you feel works best here. That file, which concerned an operation called “Cold Burn” that Corrigan and Fullerton had been part of, also mentioned something called “Project Azorian.” Not particularly ominous in itself, except that it then mentioned someone with the initials CR.