From then on, the amount of time that passed was impossible for her to gauge. Perhaps she’d even blacked out again. The next thing Andie knew, the rear door of the black limo was open, and she was sitting up in a normal position on the door sill. Blue lights from surrounding squad cars swirled in the snowy night sky. A few yards away, a pair of FBI agents in full tactical gear led Danilo Bahena to a SWAT van. Andie was looking into the warm eyes of her supervisory agent.
“Are you okay?” asked Harley.
Andie glanced over her shoulder. Littleton’s body was behind her, slumped over in the back of the limo. A shot to the side of the head had taken him out.
“Better than he is, I guess.”
“I just heard from London,” said Harley. “Jack’s fine. You can call him now.”
He handed her a phone, and the sense of relief almost made her smile.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like that.”
February
The Czech Republic
Epilogue
Snow was falling as Jack drove out of Prague. Andie was in the passenger seat. It was their first trip abroad together. It wasn’t exactly a vacation.
“Funny,” said Jack, “an entire branch of my family tree is from this area. And every road I turn down, I see Jamal Wakefield in the trunk of a car heading off to a black site.”
Andie glanced out the window. “That location will never be public information.” She was right, Jack realized. The only living person who knew the exact location was Danilo Bahena, and he was sitting in jail for the murder of Neil Goderich. The likelihood of his talking was almost nil.
“To be honest,” said Jack, “it doesn’t really seem that important anymore.”
Andie reached across the console and held his hand. Her touch had a way of reaffirming something that he was now more sure of than ever: Andie was on his side. She’d taken a huge risk by calling him in London to explain how his case and her investigation overlapped, and to warn him about what he was up against. It was not yet clear how that would play out for her professionally, but she wasn’t fired, and she had the support of her supervisor. But Jack had a feeling there was more to come.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Jack nodded, and they rode on in silence, his thoughts drifting back to the mission at hand.
Grandpa Swyteck had died in his sleep. As best Jack could piece events together, it was right around the time doctors at the Royal Hospital of London were assuring Vince that his stab wound wasn’t fatal. Jack flew home from London for the funeral. Ten days later, he was back in Europe with Andie-and with a handful of his grandfather’s ashes.
“Turn left in one hundred meters.”
It was the mechanical voice of the GPS. Hearing it made Jack think of fifty-pound notes wrapped in aluminum foil.
The fatal shooting of Habib Warsame Dhamac was ruled self-defense, even though it was clear to Jack that Chuck had his plan to avenge McKenna’s death, and Shada had hers. The fact that neither had known what the other was doing could have gotten everyone killed-which seemed like a metaphor for their marriage. Chuck was being held in the U.K. on weapons charges. Shada had much bigger problems with the law. Her attorney would surely build a classic “Patty Hearst” defense and argue that her involvement in the murders of Ethan Chang and Neil Goderich was carefully choreographed by the Dark to cement his control over her-more specifically, that she’d had no idea she was administering a lethal dose of anything to Chang, and that she’d played lookout for Bahena outside Neil’s office only because the Dark had brainwashed her into thinking that it was her last chance to learn the truth about Jamal Wakefield.
As for Chuck, he seemed more concerned that Shada get psychological counseling than legal help. A divorce was in the works, and his commitment remained Project Round Up. Nothing could have driven home the importance of that work more than seeing a teenage girl reunited with her family after months of the Dark’s psychological abuse. The bomb strapped to her body had been real, and she was still looking at long-term therapy, but one life had already been saved. Jamal’s uncle had played a big role in that rescue, even if her fears and brainwashing did drive her back to the Dark after Hassan had been hospitalized. Jack felt like he still owed him an apology for harboring those initial suspicions about him.
“You have arrived at your destination.”
The tiny village of Lidice dates back to the fourteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century it was a busy mining village in the rolling hills of the Bohemia region. The old village was destroyed during World War II, and the new village sits near the original town site, about ten miles west of Prague. Much of the thirty-minute drive is on divided expressways, two lanes in each direction, a far cry from the roads traveled by the Nazis on their way to Prague.
Jack’s grandfather had few possessions at the time of his death, and the most important provisions of his will dealt with the disposition of his remains. The instructions-worded more like a request-were to find a woman named Eliska Sokol in Lidice, who would know exactly where to spread the ashes. She wasn’t hard to find. Lidice has fewer than five hundred residents, and Eliska had lived in the same house since the complete rebuilding of the village after the war.
Jack knocked on the door. He had phoned ahead so that Eliska would expect him, and she answered the door herself. She was as he had imagined her on the telephone, frail and walking with a cane, but she had a bright and determined look in her eyes. She had to be in her late eighties, perhaps ninety. Her English was passable.
“You look just like Joseph,” she said.
“I’ve heard that from others,” Jack said, and he appreciated hearing it again.
Eliska apologized for being out of coffee, but Jack wanted to get to the spot anyway. He helped her on with her coat, and Andie gave her the front seat of their little rental car. It was a short ride to the site of the original village-now a memorial.
Mention of Lidice in Grandpa’s will had naturally prompted Jack to research it. It was the same piece of history that Grandpa Swyteck had shared with Andie in one of the last lucid moments in his life, while Jack was in London. Andie hadn’t told him until after the funeral, and Jack was moved to hear that his grandfather’s words had come back to her in the depths of her own torture, maybe even helped her survive at a time when every second mattered. It made the trip as important to her as it was to Jack.
They both knew the horrific story, but Jack let Eliska tell it in the voice of someone who had been there.
“After Nazis invade our country,” she said, her English less than perfect, “the Reich Protector of Bohemia was SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich. Second in command to Himmler in the SS branch responsible for the Final Solution.”
“A worthy target for assassination,” said Jack.
“Yes,” said Eliska. “The resistance thought same. They organized in London and pulled it off. Then the nightmare comes. Nazis search everywhere for assassins. Finally, Berlin say the assassins were aided by two families in Lidice.” Eliska paused, and her gaze drifted toward the passenger’s-side window, toward the snow- covered acres of the memorial. “The punishment was decided by Adolf Hitler himself.”
She stopped and breathed deeply, and Jack wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue or not. When she seemed ready, Jack came around to help Eliska out of the car.
Theirs was the only vehicle in the parking lot. The snow had stopped falling, but the surrounding hills were covered with a fresh white blanket. Eliska walked to the far end of the lot. With Andie at his side, Jack guided Eliska by the arm, but he let her take the last few steps on her own, sensing that she wanted to be alone for a moment. She stopped in front of a large bronze memorial. It was covered with snow, and in the late-afternoon shadows Jack couldn’t tell exactly what it was from this distance. But in the cold breeze, he could almost feel the history.
Eliska continued in an old voice that shook.
