I knew the name Azorian. As a ten-year-old, I’d seen it on a printout on my dad’s desk. It had sounded funny and caught my eye. When I’d asked him about it, he’d brushed it off as nothing important, and we’d joked about it being a good name for a comic book or sci-fi movie, à la The Mighty Azorian.
That wasn’t long before I’d found my dad slumped behind his desk shortly after he’d blown his brains out.
My dad-Colin Reilly.
CR.
Seeing his initials alongside a mention of Azorian in the same file that concerned Reed Corrigan had jolted me like few things I can remember. First, my son, and now, my dad too? I was now even more determined to find this Corrigan, not just out of a burning desire to make him pay for what he did to Alex, but to find out the truth about my dad’s suicide, if that’s what it really was. I didn’t know what to believe anymore, and I had a strong feeling there was more to it. I mean, given what this creep and his crew were capable of, and given their abilities when it came to manipulating people, I was imagining all kinds of dark scenarios surrounding my dad’s death.
It was all the more painful as I never really got a chance to know him. He was a tenure-track assistant professor at George Washington University, an expert in comparative law and jurisprudence, and he was consumed by his work. He wasn’t the most gregarious or emotive person I ever met, and he always seemed to have weightier things on his mind than hanging out with me. I don’t think he was ever able to fully park the issues that fired him up or kick back and enjoy the simple pleasures of a family life. When he was home, he spent a lot of time in that study of his, which was off limits to this ten-year-old, not an unreasonable rule given the books and paperwork that were stacked all around it and my propensity to sow havoc. I do know he was well respected, though. A lot of people turned up to his funeral, men and women who, to me at the time, seemed like a very dour bunch of people, even given the circumstances.
My mom didn’t talk about it much. Growing up, the subject of his suicide was off limits. Not that I asked much. At the time, all she’d told me was that, after his death, she’d discovered that he’d been depressed and was on medication. It was the most I’d ever got out of her on the subject. I don’t think she ever really dealt with the grief or the sadness that he’d never told her about it. She just bottled it up, same as he had, I guess. Then, when I moved out and went to study law at Notre Dame, she remarried, moved to Cape Cod, and threw herself into her new life. We never talked about my dad after that. It was like her first husband had never existed.
I learned later that it’s perfectly normal for a ten-year-old boy to repress the memory of his father’s blood splattered against a wall-indeed, the first time in decades I had recalled the memory so vividly was when reading the redacted file from my reluctant CIA source about the man who had brainwashed my son. Mothers, however, are generally expected to ensure that the memory doesn’t become buried too deep. On balance, maybe we both came out of it OK.
Thinking about my absent father also reminded me of how I wanted to always be there for Alex. My line of work, however, wasn’t the most risk-free of occupations. It was something I needed to figure out.
One thing I didn’t need to figure out, one thing I knew with absolute certainty, was that I would never forgive the man who subjected a four-year-old boy to treatment that was still beyond belief, even though I’d seen the results with my own eyes. Whatever it took, I was going to find him. Nothing would ever change when it came to Reed Corrigan and me.
I hadn’t shared any of this with Nick. I knew he could sense it. Ten years of sharing the line of fire with someone usually does that. If it didn’t, you were probably in the wrong business. But he knew better than to ask. He knew that if I wasn’t sharing something, I was probably doing it for his own good. To give him deniability, to let him keep his job and not face prosecution. Because to get to the bottom of the shark-infested sinkhole that had first sucked me in a few months ago, I’d probably need to break a law or two. Nick got that-but he wasn’t happy about it. Which was why we’d spent a lot of hours in strained silence outside Daland’s house while we avoided the whales/aliens/elephants in the room-well, the cabin of our Ford Expedition, anyway.
The big problem was, Corrigan was proving impossible to track down. The CIA was clearly protecting his identity, for reasons they weren’t about to share with me. He was obviously a valuable asset, and I’d run out of options in terms of flushing him out.
Project Azorian also turned out to be a blind alley, both regarding Corrigan and my dad. Also named “Project Jennifer,” it was the CIA’s code name for an eight hundred million dollar operation to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor back in 1974. Howard Hughes had lent his name to the project to help with the cover story that the vessel that would raise the sub, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was out mining manganese deposits. It had been one of the most expensive and technologically complex operations in CIA history-and one of their biggest successes-but the huge dossier about it was, in terms of what I was after, a dead end. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the sub project had to do with my dad, or what it or my dad had to do with the CIA op called Operation Cold Burn.
The link with my dad, though, could open up some fresh possibilities. I’d asked Kurt to take another peek inside the CIA’s servers to see if they had anything else on my dad. So far, he hadn’t had much luck on that front either.
All of which left me with two final angles of attack.
One was for me to bully Kirby, the CIA analyst/Lothario, once again. Get him to fish for files about my dad, this time, see if following that trail instead would lead me to Corrigan.
The other was to talk to my mother and see if she knew more about my dad’s death than she’d let on.
I really wasn’t looking forward to either of them.
4
Newark, New Jersey
I walked across to the north side of Riverbank Park and waited, glad to be out in the open air and, for that matter, anywhere other than the inside of a Ford Expedition. Out here, most of the snow had already melted, though more was apparently due later tonight.
On the other side of the Passaic stood the Red Bull Arena, home of New York’s MLS team and subject of one of the most protracted development tales in recent New Jersey history. I had promised to take Alex to watch the Red Bulls at some point after we’d enjoyed watching the US soccer team at last summer’s World Cup in Brazil, though I had a nagging concern that once bitten, he’d want to attend every single game. On the other hand, sports seemed to be turning into a genuine passion for him, and anything that promoted a healthy, distracting routine in him was positive.
I’d crossed paths with Kurt Jaegers for the first time a few years ago when he moved up to the seventh spot on the FBI’s cybercrime watch list after hacking into the UN’s server farm, using the same skill set I needed to track down Corrigan. He agreed to help me and hacked into the CIA’s databanks after I promised him a get-out-of-jail-free card should he ever get arrested for something reasonably defensible. Kurt soon embraced the project with gusto, which surprised me. I was supposed to be one of the bad guys, as far as he was concerned-you know, big brother and all that. But Kurt and I connected. He had a good heart. I liked him, and I enjoyed hearing about the fantasy idealist world he inhabited.
For our meetings, Kurt always insisted on different locations and times to ensure that I hadn’t been followed, even though I was pretty sure I was perfectly capable of doing this myself. His levels of paranoia weren’t too outrageous, though, considering the people we were up against, although time was tight, me being due to meet Nick at Federal Plaza at four for the Daland post-arrest briefing.